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[Music] you it's quite unfortunate that there's lots of confusion today about Islam what Islam fundamentally is about people in the West don't understand this very well and actually a lot of Islamic people don't understand this very well either it's kind of funny there's lots of ideological positions and political debates which take place which you see in the media which you can see videos of on YouTube and so forth and you can read about and people write about Islam and the problems of radical Islam and all this sort of stuff and what this turns into is this turns into a sort of like a mirror of the the silly one-dimensional debate between science and religion it's like you got science on one side religion on the other side and then you pick one side then you fight with the other side it's this sort of situation which is going on between the East and the Middle East and it turns into this culture war and it's very unfortunate because the core of what Islam is is lost on 99.9% of people it's heartbreaking for me to see this which is why I wanted to shoot this episode because we're just not taught about this you're not taught about this in school if you grew up in the West and this of course stems from a couple of factors it stems from xenophobia it stems from fear of foreigners it it stems from this sort of tribalist mentality that also goes on in the West just as it does in the Middle East but fundamentally it stems from the problem of not really understanding religion not understanding the roots of religion and mysticism and it's actually very simple to understand Islam literally in the Arabic language means submission that's what Islam means that tells you what it's about but submission - what is it submission to the ideology of Islam you might think that that's what that means but no that's not what it means it means the total surrender of oneself to the truth or reality or God the surrender of one's ego of one's sense of identity to the larger thing that's going on here this this is God right here this is reality right here that's what you're submitting yourself to other synonyms for the translation of Islam from the Arabic into the English include words like obedience peace and purity and those are all what come with submission of your ego to God what we're talking about here is we're talking about self transcendence the same as is the goal and objective of Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and yoga and Zen and every other tradition it's no different it's just framed in the style of the Middle East it's framed from their cultural point of view based on their values and their traditions and their history the word Muslim to be a Muslim translates as one who submits to God what many Westerners don't understand about Islam is that Islam is not some separate religion from Christianity or Judaism Islam recognizes Christian and Jewish prophets like Jesus Moses Noah David Abraham and others it also recognizes the validity of Christian and Jewish sacred texts like the Bible and the Torah and others so it doesn't reject these Islam builds on top of them Islam is really just like the third incarnation of judeo-christianity so you had Judaism which was like the earliest incarnation then with Jesus you had the Christian incarnation which is the second incarnation was sort of an innovation on Judaism and then you had the third innovation which came with Muhammad and Muhammad's era was around 600 AD so six hundred years after Jesus and so the the additional extra little twist that Islam adds on top of the judeo-christian philosophy is that Mohammed was the final or the last prophet which ends up being a big problem because of course like most religious traditions they try to get a monopoly over the truth which of course is completely antithetical to the truth there's no such thing as the last prophet there will never be a last prophet you can become enlightened right now and you can be a prophet there are millions of well not millions but hundreds and maybe thousands even prophets that are alive right now who you can go speak to and visit and they are as equally spiritually awakened as Mohammed was at the very least so by no means was Mohammed actually the last prophet but in their tradition that's how they frame it and also what Westerners don't understand is that Allah Allah is just another name for the Christian God it's not some other God that that Muslims worship it's the same Christian God Allah the one God so there's there's a lot you can learn just by studying the history of Islam sort of its origin story and the biography of Muhammad and just the historical developments of this tradition which again is not taught very well in the West which is why there's a lot of this sort of xenophobic reaction against it because you're really not taught it unless you go out specifically and you educate yourself or maybe you took some more advanced classes or some broad ranging classes in university it's like if you were studying comparative religion or some like that then maybe you learn something about it but generally Westerners have a very poor understanding of this topic I know I did even though I got a pretty good education just because this is not part of the core curriculum what I want to talk about here is I want to talk about several aspects of Islam which can be illuminating for those of us who are into self development and into self-actualization and spirituality there's something to be gleaned from most every mystical tradition and every religion if you know how to see the truth and ignore the corruption and the minutiae to be sure there's plenty of corruption within Islam just as there is with every single religious tradition just as there is even with science even in academia and everywhere else corruption is not a problem exclusive to Islam corruption is a problem that runs rampant throughout every facet of human life so don't make the mistake of thinking that all just because there's corruption here that there's nothing valuable to be gleaned no let's cover some of the different facets that are valuable for our purposes here so perhaps the most important one of which is jihad jihad literally translates from the Arabic to the English as struggle jihad is struggle now there's what's known as the lesser jihad and the greater jihad but really there's no distinction there's only one jihad so jihad means the struggle for what is it the struggle to kill your enemies is it the struggle to fight over oppression or evil no it's the struggle with yourself it's the struggle with your own ego it's the struggle with the evil inside of you there is only one form of evil there is only one devil and he is you the ego that's it that's the only struggle that exists in the world all external struggles the lesser jihad as it's known so the distinction between the lesser and the greater is that the greater jihad is supposed to be the spiritual inner journey to self-realization okay but then they're supposed to be like the lesser jihad which is what the terrorists and the Muslim radicals are accused of doing they're accused of engaging in the lesser jihad which is fighting enemies abroad fighting enemies who are the infidel or fighting enemies who are the enemies of of Islam or who are the non-believers the enemies of Allah but there's no such thing because the inner and the outer the lesser and the greater this is these are dualities all these dualities will collapse and break down and so really there's only one jihad it's to struggle with the self any enemies that you have out there infidels whatever they are you without you being conscious of it so if you actually completed the greater jihad you would become conscious that there is no difference between the greater and the lesser jihad and that actually you're fighting enemies out there somewhere is you really just fighting with yourself you're always fighting with yourself there is nothing but Allah Allah is the only thing there is Allah is fighting with itself Allah can be ignorant or Allah can be awake when Allah is awake he stops fighting with himself when Allah is ignorant and stuck inside of Maya or illusion then he thinks that there's separation and boundaries and there's us-versus-them and there's the believers and the disbelievers and we got to punish the disbelievers and fight the disbelievers because they threatened the believers the fully awakened Allah is not frightened by anything his faith is unshakable because it's not faith anymore it's being its direct consciousness Allah is Allah you can't shake Allah when you realize that you are Allah so it's all about overcoming your own inner self deceptions to ultimately transcend the ego and to realize the self the true self the infinite self which is what Allah is and this is self-actualization jihad is nothing other than what actualize that org is about jihad is not some some radical Islamic philosophy I mean it is radical but it's the the essence of every single spiritual path it's the essence of self-help and personal development and self-actualization actualized gorg is jihad it's a modern version of jihad framed in a culture and in a way that is suited to the 21st century materialistic rationalist secular Western mind that's what actualizado his tada that's also what Zen is Zen is jihad neo-advaita is jihad advised Vedanta is jihad Yoga is jihad self-help is jihad jedd McKenna's work if you're familiar with with his writings is a very potent form of jihad what's interesting about Jen McKenna's work is that unlike a lot of other spiritual work which tends to be very indirect and sort of loosey-goosey and has a lot of fantasies about improving the self and about being spiritual and lovey and dovey and all this sort of stuff his work is very directed cuz the [ __ ] it's very much about the jihad part he really emphasizes the jihad part it's a self annihilation it's so it's a waging of a war with yourself and that's very direct and it's very radical it is very radical which is why McKenna's work is polarizing people either love it or they hate it because either you're at the point where you can do a direct jihad or you're at the point where you can't and 99% of people in the world can't they're not ready to surrender their ego they're not even ready to hear about it or to even read about that possibility but then those who are are and that's a very direct path if you can just go and straight straight up wage a full-on war with yourself and burn yourself alive in the spiritual fires so if you resonate with jedd McKenna's work well then you understand jihad very well the other spiritual traditions tend to emphasize the jihad component less because what does the what does the ego hate the most the ego hates the most it so empower being threatened so most spiritual traditions what they actually do is they try to trick the ego into doing spiritual work they don't tell the ego that you're outright gonna kill yourself they don't tell you that because if they tell you that then no one's gonna listen no one wants that no one's gonna buy into your spirituality if you tell them that so instead what you do is you tell them the opposite you tell them oh you're gonna you're gonna grow your yourself life is gonna become more beautiful and this and more loving and and you're gonna have more power and more of this and so you tell the ego all the stuff it wants to hear because as the ego then gets going into the into the practices as it starts doing yoga and meditation and self acquiring all this then it slowly starts to realize like holy [ __ ] I am I'm actually gonna kill myself but by that point it's sort of already like well I've already been doing this for a couple of years I'm already sort of bought into it fine [ __ ] I'll just I'll just carry but it still doesn't really understand the ego will only understand what it really means to die after it's dead and that's such a radical thing that if the ego knew about it beforehand it would never go there it can't go there so many spiritual paths would they do because most people are not ready for a true jihad what they do is they have to do a gradual ramp up so most spiritual teachings are weaksauce they're not strong sauce it's weak sauce for the ego it's a little bit of like I'll just meditate to relax to melt away your stress or do this technique this breathing technique it'll help to to calm your monkey mind that's sort of like how it starts right it's the ego looking to improve itself thinking that oh I can do spirituality but still stay fundamentally in power I can still stay alive I can improve my self-image I can become this enlightened master or this this spiritual guru type person and and that all that's that's a nice image to aspire to but of course what's not realize is that in the end you will lose absolutely everything you'll surrender everything there will be nothing of you left all self images will be broken and completely shattered and your entire notion of reality will collapse and you will die and then that will be your awakening is your death but that doesn't compute for the selfish mind and even self-help even stuff like what Tony Robbins teaches and just you know lots of self-help is just about giving you career advice business advice relationship advice this sort of flimsy type of advice that's all good but ultimately that is also jihad it's just a very gradual form of jihad such that most people who are even teaching self-help kind of basic self-help they don't even realize what they're really teaching they think they're teaching self-improvement and in the sense they are but ultimately that self-improvement is leading you up Maslow's hierarchy ultimately to self transcendence and that's in our current culture and era that's what most all that most people can handle they can't he'll an Emer than that now of course if you can't handle more than that then go for the direct jihad approach and actualize that or just kind of somewhere in the middle I don't try to beat you over the head with jihad too much because I know that most people aren't gonna aren't gonna buy into it the more you stress the jihad the smaller your spiritual audience will grow I mean will shrink it'll shrink down smaller and smaller and smaller and basically you're gonna have a very hardcore teaching for a very small number of people who are extremely serious about this work that's sort of what happens with Jed McKenna and then the less you emphasize jihad the more people will be attracted to you because their egos come flocking to spirituality because they want to have a spiritual eyes Diigo now of course the way that the devil works is that it turns everything backwards and inside-out 180 degrees so when you hear jihad in the news or in mainstream culture you hear it as the exact opposite is what I'm describing you hear it as selfishness you hear it as people engaging in violence in warfare and in hatred and in condemnation of other groups and in judging others and waging jihad against them that's what the devil does see my video what is the devil to explain the tricks of the devil but the devil works through illusion self-deception and so the devil does is he will take the truth he will take the most potent forms of spirituality and he will corrupt them inside out which is exactly what happens with Christianity Islam Judaism Hinduism and all the other isms that are out there because the greatest threat to the devil is the truth so he has to take control over any mechanisms which might reveal the truth too directly it's too direct so why is there this corruption and this misunderstanding of what Islam is it's because there's there's um well when a spiritual teaching is too direct it gets corrupted the more mainstream it gets it becomes the enemy of its own success they are supposed to be like two billion Muslims in the world right now and it's a quickly growing religion so anything that appeals to 2 billion people has to be very very diluted and watered down and actually it has to be very materialistic which is why the lesser jihad is a materialistic form of the greater jihad you see materialism is about fighting in this physical world whereas the greater jihad is fighting within yourself and attaining the spiritual world the spiritual realms the word Allah means God of course but it also means really absolute infinity not God is a man in the clouds with a beard but Allah has this thing right here what science calls reality that's what Islam calls Allah what the atheist calls the Big Bang or reality this very present moment that's happening right now objective physical reality that's what the atheist refers to as Allah but the atheist isn't conscious the scientist isn't conscious of of the full significance of what the word reality really means and what it really is it's absolute infinity that's what I lie is in Islam they have what's called the 99 names of Allah these are titles that are given to Allah which describe the various properties and characteristics of Allah and this can be quite illuminating you can go to Wikipedia type in 99 names of Allah and you will get this list I want to read you some of the names from this list because this describes exactly what Allah is the king the peace the holy of the controller the supreme the Creator the all-knowing the all-seeing the all aware the magnificent the sublime the vast the wise the witness the truth the reality the one the perceiver the indivisible the all-powerful the beginning 'less the endless the hidden the good the light the beautiful the patient the guide the giver of life and the taker of life and the infinite this is just a partial listing you can find the full list on Wikipedia if you're curious so all of these accurately describe the properties of Allah these are the properties of reality when you have a direct consciousness of what reality is as a whole and not just some fragment in the way that science for example studies it or the way the atheists understand it when you actually experience Allah and it's possible to have a direct experience of Allah because that's exactly what you are you are Allah you will understand that all of these perfectly describe Allah perfectly when I was reading this list it actually brought me to tears because when I was reading it online because I'm reading it and I it's my direct experience that is being described here it's a perfect description a perfect description and the reason I'm telling you this because people think at all-but but Islam is so corrupt yes it's corrupt in many ways but don't lose the core that's there the core there contains some deep truth which is why Islam is so entrenched which is why people don't give up Islam see a lot of atheists and scientifically minded Western people secular people they look at Islamic people and Islamic countries and say well why don't they just give all this up it's just it's just silly ideas and myths and and stories and it's all just nonsense and it's filled with corruption and it promotes violence and all of this no that's that's because you're not seeing through to the truth they're all you're seeing is just the pure corruption and of course when you're just seeing the pure corruption then you're gonna have the opinion that all is just nonsense you should just throw it all away better to do with it away with it but the people who see the truth in it and who've had these direct experiences they're never gonna give it up never because they know the power of the truth that's there now of course what a lot of them don't know is that that truth is equally there in many other traditions through many of the forms including in Christianity Judaism Hinduism yoga Zen I mean does this do you name it there's so many shamanism psychedelics just a plain old-fashioned contemplation or meditation can get you there there's so many ways to get there is LOM is certainly not the way not the best way not the only way another interesting concept that I love in Islam is this notion of the 72 virgins have you heard of this you heard of terrorists expecting 72 virgins after they blow themselves up in this sort of stuff and I might see my koalas just some silly nonsense how could anybody believe that and and and then blow them selves up over that but actually after you experience Allah directly for yourself you will understand that the 72 virgins is a very accurate metaphor for the that magnificence of Allah what you have to understand it have to understand where Islam came from its cultural context its historical context this metaphor of the 72 virgins is perfect for the context in which Allah was developed when was a lot of elip t' where was it developed not in America not in the 21st century with the internet and with television and with video games okay this was developed in 600 AD in Arabia do you know have you studied the history of 600 AD Arabia do you know the kind of things that went on there do you know the kind of mindsets that that culture had what their values were take a hypothetical Arabian man in 680 a wealthy man he's probably a Caravan trader let's say and he delivers spices along the Silk Road and other places through the Middle East maybe he trades with people in Africa and Europe and in India and so he's you know he's he's a business person he's a trader he has a caravan he has a big family has to take care of he probably has multiple wives as was the custom of that time he has to take care of all of them he has to take care of his his thriving Caravan trade and he's interested in what what is what is he interested in he's interested in acquiring more wives he's interested in beautiful horses he's interested in in finding new spices and new trade routes and and acquiring gold and trading you know he's he's he's engaged in the in the pragmatics of living back then that's how people lived he's also concerned about tribal warfare because the region he lived in and at that time tribal warfare was rampant there were feuds between neighboring tribes and even large families because Arabian culture is a strongly familial culture family is very very important it's one of the most important values but then of course they have family feud's they have these long ascended families so they're battling with you to sooth that's what his mind is focused upon now let's say that I am some Arabian prophet who has experienced Allah and now I come to this Arabian businessman this caravan trader and I tell him hey there's this magnificent thing called Allah you've got to experience this come come with me start meditating here some practices start to do this and you will experience Allah the most magnificent thing and the Arabia man will look at me and say the caravan trader will say but but but I mean how is this gonna improve my life how is this practical this isn't practical at all is this gonna get me more camels is it gonna get any better horses is this gonna get me more more women for my harem is this gonna get me more spices is this gonna help how's this gonna help me with with the fuse that I'm fighting with I need warriors for my for my feuding and that's where I will come up with a metaphor to help to explain to him the magnificence of the absolute and I will say ah you know what it's like Allah is like 72 virgins it's like having 72 virgins in your harem and now the caravan trader will get it that's a metaphor he can relate to in his time in his culture in the stuff that he's engaged in at the time now of course today in the West in the 21st century this doesn't make any sense but back then in that context it make perfect sense and if you ever happen to have the the glory of experiencing Allah for yourself you will actually see that it's more magnificent than having 72 virgins in a harem I'm telling you that's a dead accurate metaphor and actually it will be way better than that experience it for yourself and then you will see how appropriate that metaphor is the mistake that people make when they are thinking about religion and spiritual mystical traditions is that they take them out of the historical and cultural context especially today because we have a global world and it might seem because our world is global and and you can watch youtube videos from around the world and the internet connects us all that oh now we sort of understand each other globally but no we don't we really don't because first of all you don't understand even a fraction not even one percent of the cultures that exist around the world today in the 21st century you don't understand you have no experience with them at all and they would completely blow your mind and shatter your reality if you were exposed to them but and that's not even taking into account the historical evolution of cultures that happened over over centuries and millennia like we're talking about here so you have to understand where the tradition is coming from what his origins were and then it starts to make a lot more sense another interesting facet of Islam is that there are no images of Allah or Muhammad within Islam this is very different from the Christian tradition where we actually have art going back for centuries and for millennia depictions of Christ and Mary and and even God you know Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel where you have David and God or adamant God and all this and they have depictions of God as the as the white in the white flowing robes and the white beard sitting up in the heavens with angels and all this sort of stuff you don't get that in Islam and actually Islam is very sensitive to that which you might have heard of about in the news you know people fighting with violence over cartoon drawings of Muhammad and and all this sort of stuff but but what's the deeper what's the deeper truth there why is Allah and Muhammad not allowed to be depicted why is there taboo against imagery in Islam because the map is not the territory because the mind gets hooked on images and icons and then starts to worship those images and those icons but Allah is not any particular image or icon or form Allah is the formless Allah is nothingness infinity is nothingness so in a sense to maintain the purity of the teaching you don't want to corrupt the teaching by putting pictures of Allah everywhere or Muhammad his people and start to worship that rather than seeing Allah as what's here right now in the present moment and that's been a big problem for Christianity the iconography within Christianity arguably all the European art that's been done over the last thousand years around Christianity has done a great disservice to Christianity because most people today most Christians when you ask them what is God they have an image of God as this this man sitting up in the clouds and that's a delusion and they don't understand that's a delusion so you can see that actually there's a there's a good intention behind this idea of not depicting Allah or Muhammad because all symbols are not the absolute and we've talked about that a lot before so you can appreciate that you can appreciate how all these am I talking about the map is not the tour tour territory and girdles and completeness theorem and and all this how it all starts to connect together what they do have an Islam though for art is they have geometric patterns these sort of tessellations or these fractals interesting and various geometric patterns that in a sense is one way to depict Allah without creating a human image of it without anthropomorphizing el allah the way that Christians do it it's actually a pretty ingenious solution to this problem these geometric patterns actually are aligned very well with what you see on psychedelics and also they represent infinity because once you have a checkerboard some of the kind of pattern hexagonal pattern it just kind of goes on in all directions infinitely and that's that is a symbol a pointer towards Allah another feature of Islam is that they pray five times a day why five times a day why so much well it's because of this important other concept within Islam which is called forgetfulness Islam recognizes as basically all spiritual traditions do the fact that we fall back asleep so easily the human mind falls back asleep into complacency and lent to materialism and so what needs to be happening is you need to be waking up all the time you don't just have one enlightenment experience and that's it it's like you got to be awake all the time five times a day 20 times a day keep waking yourself up keep being mindful because you forget and if you had a mystical experience of your maybe take a psychedelic trip or maybe you've had some awakening experience during a meditation retreat or something like that great but then you know what the problem is the problem is you come back the next day and you've forgotten where did it go where did my mystical experience go how come I'm not in Union anymore how come I don't see out loud right now how come I'm out of touch with it because you've forgotten not forgotten in the sense that you can't remember but you've you've you've lost touch with the awareness right now you've gone from mindfulness into mindlessness and now you're in mindlessness and so the point of prayer five times a day is so that you don't get so wrapped up in your day doing practical stuff materialistic stuff the way that most Westerners do think of a typical Western or stockbroker on Wall Street what's he's doing this whole day he's chasing money and sex and drugs that's what he's doing all day and power and political influence so the intention behind Islam is like well what if we interrupted his day five times and got him to actually focus on the the more subtle the more spiritual aspects of life like for example what if we just took a stockbroker and we forced him to stop five times a day because we had a clock that just rang for everybody so all of Wall Street would just stop five times a day for ten minutes and every single stock broker on Wall Street they thought about their own death they thought about the suffering of humanity they thought about what they're doing with their life and whether they're their pursuit of of materialistic goods and pleasures is is leading them towards actual happiness and they calm their mind down and they step outside of their cravings and all this stuff they're chasing the hustle and bustle of everyday life of all the practical stuff and they just basked in the beingness of the present moment what would happen then well of course then all of Wall Street would collapse after a few years of that so that's no good so we can't have that on Wall Street but you understand the intention now a little bit about Mohammed Muhammad is the Prophet he's supposed to have written the Quran but he didn't write it himself he's supposed to have channeled it from a higher source the question is was Muhammad enlightened and I think almost certainly he was the only question is to what degree there are various degrees of enlightenment various degrees of realization various facets of realization that you can that you can become conscious of I I don't know it's hard to it's hard to judge but since he spoke about the absolute so eloquently and since it seems like he had an understanding of the absolute from direct experience I don't I don't see otherwise how he could have spoken it with with such passion and such a commitment that it seems like he was enlightened he he did go and meditate in a cave by himself that's part of his his origin story and it seems like he had mystical experiences throughout his whole life not just once or twice but later into his later years he basically composed the Quran and other writings for like 20 or 30 or 40 years of his life he lived a pretty long life after his initial awake will I would consider an awakening he's also supposed to have communicator channeled the angel Gabriel and you might say well that's surely nonsense Lee and that's just stories that's just fiction don't be so sure about that as you get deeper into these mystical experiences you start to discover that you can you can channel entities I've got I've got books on my bookshelf that teach you how to channel if you want to learn how to channel you can you can go spend 3060 days doing these practices you can learn how to channel you can connect with different entities and this sort of stuff you can take DMT and you can see alien entities and and they will be more lifelike than human beings that you see right here right now and you could find YouTube videos of people who channel like you got Bashar and and other folks like that who are into channeling so channeling is a real phenomenon you can you can go learn it experience it for yourself it's definitely possible it's common it's a common ability that gets developed by people who do serious hardcore spirits practices so totally plausible that that that's how the quran came about I encourage you to actually go study the the origin story of Muhammad not per se the myths of it but like the historical the historical like what are the historical facts that we know just to kind of like get inside his head to see where where he was coming from and also to learn about the culture in the context that he was dealing with at that time it's very eye-opening I want to stress that you don't get lost in the minutia of debating about the niggly little details about Islam that's very easy to do it's very easy to do that with almost anything you can always find fine points to criticize here and there and different things that are corrupt here and there all I don't like this I don't like that is this really true is this an embellishment is this an elaboration is this a thing a lie yeah there's probably plenty of that in Islam but you want to go to the big picture because what happens otherwise is that you're lost in the minutiae the people most of the people most of the Westerners who like to debate and criticize Islam do so without ever having a direct experience of Allah which is utterly absurd because you can't criticize this thing you can't really understand what this thing is about without having a direct experience of Allah first so first go experience that then start leveling your criticisms so people like Bill Maher Sam Harris Christopher Hitchens and others like that they love to criticize and rag on on Islam but they've never actually experienced Allah so they don't really understand the depth of what they're criticizing which is not to say that all their criticisms are invalid some of their criticism totally valid it's completely correct that modern-day Islam and countries and people who subscribe to Islam that those people do all sorts of violations of human rights and civil rights and and can form dictatorial regimes and they and they can do all sorts of nasty stuff of course of course but that's not exclusive just to them that happens everywhere all around the world there's corruption all around the world every single government is basically corrupt especially the US government is extremely corrupt and we do all sorts of heinous things against all sorts of people in the name of of American patriotism in the name of Christianity in the name of Judaism in the name of anything because that's ego that's how ego functions that's not that's not a problem of Islam that's the problem of ego it's a problem of dogma in fundamentalism now you might ask well leo why is Islam so corrupt why is it so archaic you have to understand that every spirit for teaching has to be suited to the era the culture and the geography from which it came about this spiritual teaching as I've said is suited to 600 AD Arabia if Islam was invented today it would look like actualized org it would not look like traditional Islam and conversely if actualizado org was invented in 600 AD Arabia for that era for that geography for that culture it would look something like Islam because if I try to say the things that I'm trying to say now there in that era it would completely not resonate and I would get killed and also because I would have grown up in that culture so I would have a totally different set of values than I do as an American in the 21st century and also of course because we knew a lot less about the world than we know now the load lived the world was a lot less globalized the problem is that people cling to spiritual tradition they try to take a spiritual tradition that are that is thousands of years old they try to maintain it it's worth as an orthodoxy they try to maintain it and apply it to today but today is different in a thousand years a lot of stuff changes we learn more stuff we get new developments in science we get a globalization happening we get new technologies we get changes in morality we get changes in values and culture changes in government radical radical radical changes we get changes even in our DNA in our genetics in the functioning of our brains our brain chemistry we get changes in the food that we eat the air that we like so many changes almost everything has changed we also have a much deeper historical context into which to put these spiritual traditions so in a sense society has evolved so what really needs to happen is that these spiritual traditions also need to evolve they need to be fresh because spirituality is about the present moment the truth the truth is only happening in the present how do you connect yourself with the truth to answer that question you must ask first the question what are the obstacles that are preventing me from connecting to the truth and what are the obstacles the obstacles are usually the social ones the cultural ones it's your social upbringing your culture your education that gets in the way so the obstacles that existed a thousand five hundred years ago in Arabia are different obstacles that exist today in 21st century America for example where people are jerking off to porn and watching YouTube videos non-stop and playing video games that [ __ ] those obstacles did not exist back then so a lot of the corruption stems from the mind being ideological wanting to cling to tradition and not letting these traditions evolve as they need to this is a problem that's not just exclusive to Islam it's also their Christianity in Judaism it's even there in science you think science and atheism is immune to this not at all it suffers from exactly the same problem atheists cling to their to their dogmas and scientists cling to their paradigms just as much and a lot of problems get created because of that you have to understand that 600 AD Arabia was very conservative very traditional it was extremely tribal it was very combative there was no unifying element at that time within Arabia and so Islam was actually a huge innovation at that time it brought peace and stability to the region that otherwise was slitting each other's throats over family feud's that went back hundreds and and maybe thousands of years that you you were killing and slaughtering your your family members in these feuds in that era without even know why you're slaughtering them you're just slaughtering them just because that's what your culture what's the time and people were worshipping different deities in that in that region there was no unifying force and there was no notion of peace and compassion and love and you might think well but Islam doesn't teach about peace and compassion love because today we know Islam is this sort of violent tradition but back then you have to understand that it's all relative so back then the violence was so extreme that what Islam actually brought was a stabilizing and peaceful influence it actually taught that there's something larger that's connecting all of these tribes together and so under this banner Muhammad was actually able to unify the region and that was a huge technological innovation at the time see we tend to forget we think of technology as machines and cars and computers and internet and smartphones that's today's technology but some of the biggest innovations of technology weren't machines they were social innovations they were cultural innovations they were spiritual religious innovations and Islam was one of those at that time now of course today when you bring that when you bring that technology into today without adjusting it without knowing how to read its its intent how to take the truth out of it but leave behind the the old antiquated things in the Quran for example which don't make sense today if you're a literalist if you're too literal about following the Quran if you're too Orthodox about it then what's going to happen is you're going to bring that culture and the problems of 60 of 600 AD Arabia into today's world and that doesn't work so the problem is that you have to let these traditions evolve and the mind has a big problem with evolution because the whole point of the ego is to prevent evolution what is ego ego is just a structure that's trying to maintain itself as it is so by definition any change that comes to this structure the ego is gonna reject and it's gonna bristle at it's gonna feel afraid of and it's gonna want to be Orthodox it so we're gonna want to stay the same but then of course all of life is always changing so you don't really have an option to stay the same everything is gonna change everything is going to evolve you're not gonna maintain your orthodoxies and the more you try to maintain your orthodoxies the more it actually backfires on you which much which is much smarter is to be proactive about evolving along with the times and also if you want to maintain the the spirit of your orthodoxies and your traditions you can do that but to do that you have to read between the lines and see what the what the intent of spiritual heart and corn the intent was of the teaching which is what this episode is about if you've got the heart of Islam you don't need to follow the Quran to the letter it doesn't matter at all you can throw the Quran away when you've got the heart when you become Allah it doesn't matter you don't need to read the Quran anymore ever now to many Muslims that will sound like like sacrilege like heresy that's because that's what orthodoxy is that's what happens when you take spiritual scriptures too literally that's always been the problem Christians have taken spiritual scriptures too literally Hindus have and Jews and everybody else it's just a common problem because the egoic mind the selfish mind it's materialistic it wants to find authority figures that it can latch on to because that's how it gets a sense of its reality and stability whereas to awaken is to realize that there is no stability at all that Allah is infinitely groundless that there's no beginning or end to it and that there's no foundation to anything and therefore you're completely liberated and ironically that's what many religious people are afraid of because remember how the religion was sold in the first place it was sold to billions and millions of people by watering it down by making it palatable to the ego and in a sense the devil has co-opted the teaching precisely so that it leads you in the exact opposite direction of awakening and that's why you see so much hypocrisy within religion it's because it's not because the religion is false it's actually because the religion is true it's precisely because it's so true it's precisely because the techniques are so powerful that they need to be corrupted they're too powerful that's the that's the delicious irony of how the devil works now you might say but Leo aren't you defending Islamic fundamentalism here and of course the answer is no what I'm talking about is developing a higher understanding what we need is not to start attacking people or attacking traditions what we need to be more common understanding to see that all religions and all traditions and even secular foundations and organizations they all basically have one common goal when you truly understand that you soften with compassion you no longer snipe at the other side you no longer play these tribal ideological games that are played between science and religion between Christianity and Islam and the West in the east this is all silly this is all just part of the problem for example the West will criticize the Middle East for fighting with each other don't say oh well there's the Sunnis and the Shiites why are they fighting and slaughtering each other so silly it's just tribal warfare stop that why do they do that why don't they just stop I mean after all they're both Muslims Sunnis and Shiites are both Muslims they just have slight different interpretations of the chronology and then the historical developments of you know whose ancestor was who and who was closer to Mohammed and all this was it the uncle or the father the son in law and all this like yeah there's these technicalities but see when you get lost in those technicalities then that's what happens you develop this kind of tribal conflict but then that happens still with the west and the East that happens the West and the Middle East same thing happens when you zoom out you take a larger perspective you wonder but why is the West in the Middle East fighting they're both they're both talking about exactly the same thing they're both trying to realize truth just in different ways they're confused about what they're doing now you might say Billy oh isn't Islam dangerous well this question of danger is really interesting because a lot of people think that the world is gonna come to an end through terrorism or through religious radicals and fundamentalists but consider that actually the greatest danger to the world is not Islamic radicals or religion but actually it's the opposite it's materialism if the world comes to an end in next hundred years most likely it will be because of materialism run amok it will be because of rampant secularism rampant rationalism rampant corporate greed which is fueled by those nuclear war which is again fueled by the technology and the rationalism the corporate greed that is infecting our government by global warming which is also fueled by by the same and maybe perhaps by some new technological development like artificial intelligences which take over and then all hell breaks loose these will not get developed or triggered by Islamic radicals these are gonna come from Western culture not from Middle Eastern culture Middle Eastern culture is not going to develop an AI is gonna kill us all but Western culture might Middle Eastern culture doesn't have that many news Western culture has a lot more nukes and we look actually especially lately what you see in the news I mean we look very trigger-happy to use them much more so than than many Middle Eastern countries global warming corporate greed the deep irony is that the thing that the radical Islamic terrorists are concerned about he's actually legitimate they what are they concerned about they are concerned about the West's influence over the world and specifically the Middle East they are concerned about the the spread of rampant materialism and secularism and how that's having a corrupting influence on their local culture but also culture at large and they are seeing that their culture and their religion is getting swamped over by this by this toxic form of materialism now of course their reaction to it is also materialistic and therefore problematic it's contributing to the problem but they are quite right that materialism is a problem so in a sense the West is worried that the Islamics will take over and they will end the world but the the islamics are worried that it's the West that's taking over and it's gonna destroy the world who's more right you might think that well of course the West what's the problem with the West but that's because you haven't studied really deeply the the evils of the West the West is extremely evil this corporate greed it's not merely greed it's not merely people who are after making millions and billions of dollars it goes way deeper than that the evil of the the greed that we see especially running rampant in America is a huge huge huge corrupting factor huge it corrupts everything corrupts education crumbs health care it corrupts marketing it corrupts food it corrupts your health like I mean there's almost no end in sight to the corruption that comes with this we have record numbers of depressed people record numbers of suicidal people record numbers with PTSD suffering from all these problems all relationship problems marriage problems all this what's this coming from it's coming from materialism it's coming from a lack of self actualization and it seems to only be getting worse because for example Western society is becoming more and more secular more and more materialistic so in a sense these Islamic radicals have a reason to be concerned because what they're concerned about is that that will come and take over their region their village their of their city their country and I didn't even start mentioning all the ways in which the Western powers metal in Middle Eastern affairs and geopolitics and screwing and manipulating their elections and all of that so that's like kicking the hornet's nest you know adding insult to injury now you might still say but Leo shouldn't we still fight radical fundamental what do you want me to do do you want us to just do nothing sit back and do nothing and let the terrorists run amok no what we need is we need a variant L and approach to this problem we need to understand the roots of the problem and we to understand that art are superficial solutions our knee-jerk reactions to go bomb somebody to attack somebody to criticize somebody that that actually could be backfiring on us and contributing to the problem what you need to do is you first need to understand why fundamentalism exists in the first place at a very deep level this is a epistemic question this is a question of all the stuff that I've been talking about concepts like webs of belief and paradigms and and and dogma and ideology and how the mind works a self-deceptive characteristics of the mind and then what you need to see to see that this fundamentalism actually is it it's a condition of the egoic mind materialistic egoic minds are fundamentalist we have a lot of fundamentalism here in the West it just takes a different form and style for example most the most prevalent form of fundamentalism in the West is capitalism this blind belief that capitalism will solve all problems that's fundamentalism and at least a lot of it'll at least do a lot of evil you think communism leads to evil yes it does and I'm not saying communism is a solution but what we need to see is also the capitalism eat leads to also a lot of evil a lot of the evil of capitalism is hidden and buried under the surface you have to research it to really see just how much evil there is there the solution isn't to wage a battle over communism capitalism or Christianity or Islam or or science versus religion the solutions charged to start to see that it's the ego-mind that's responsible and to start to see that it's all happening within yourself and that it's not separate from you that you are contributing to the problem you you the American taxpayer or the European taxpayer you're contributing to the problem the ideas and opinions you hold how you understand yourself and how you understand the world this is all contributing to the problem this corrupting force it's within you it's not in some other tribe or some other nation it's within you you are the source of the corruption you are the source of the evil and that is not gonna stop no matter what you do externally until you take care of your ego which is what Islam is trying to get you to do you must slay the fundamentalism inside of yourself and fundamentalism is a lot more tricky of a problem than most people think because a lot of Westerners secular rational scientifically minded people think that they are immune to the problem of fundamentalism and of course that just makes them all the more susceptible because now there's the additional hurdle of convincing these people who think they're immune they are believing that fundamentally they think that they are not fundamentalists but they're fundamental about thinking that they're not fundamentalist and then I have to convince them that they actually are fundamentalists and of course they are gonna be fundamentalists and deny that they're fundamentalists the whole point of fundamentalism is that you deny that you're fundamentalist regardless of what the content of your fundamentalism is whether it's science religion and rationality or capitalism communism or anything else so again very ironically the West is committing the very same problem that the Middle East is committing they are waging a lesser jihad the United States government is waging a lesser jihad against the jihadis in the Middle East and the the jihadis in the Middle East are waging a lesser jihad against Western powers and that's not going to fly it doesn't work it just create it just keeps the cycle going that's a feud that's a family feud is what that's known as that's not gonna fix it you need to now rise to the higher level to see the commonalities in the same way that Mohammad injured used Islam in in 600 AD in Arabia and that elevated them to see commonality were there was just in fighting and tribalism the same thing now needs to happen between Islam in the Middle East and in the West east and west needs to come together you need to recognize that all external fighting is really just a distraction from the greater jihad of turning inwards if every US president engaged in the greater jihad within himself there would be no Middle Eastern Wars there would be no lesser jihad the lesser jihad are precisely because these people do not engage in the greater jihad and likewise the same thing with the leaders in the Middle East leaders who are who are organizing these these campaigns to fight in to kill people and to blow people up and all the sorts of stuff it's the same problem they're fighting the problem externally when really the devil is inside of you you are the devil so when are you going to wake up to that and take control of the real problem I highly encourage you to study the history of Muhammad and Islam and towards that end what I would recommend for you is a Teaching Company lecture series called Confucius Buddha Jesus and Muhammad that's title go to Google type in the teaching company type in Confucius Buddha Jesus Muhammad and this thing will pop up you can buy this course from them it's not very expensive it's a really good course it's this like 40 40 hour long lecture series covering these these four religious leaders but specifically I want you to start and to focus on Muhammad it's especially there's about 10 videos that they have there which described the origin story of Muhammad and how he founded Islam his trials and tribulations it's really fascinating it's very eye-opening and it'll put all of this into context in a way that will probably blow your mind if you're like the typical Western person who is just ignorant of this history it'll really help you to understand but that's it for now I hope this has changed your mind a little bit shifted your perspective on how to view Islam please click like button for me and come check out actualize that org I got some exclusive content there for you to check out check out my blog check out the life purpose scores check out the book list check out the forum where you can discuss these topics with like-minded people and lastly just stay tuned with me because as actualized Audra continues we're going to be building more bridges between different traditions religious traditions mystical traditions but also secular traditions what we need more and more of in today's world as we're becoming more globalized and we can't stop the globalization from happening any more than we can stop the internet from happening or that we can stop driving cars from happening cars will be driving themselves in the next 20 to 50 years and we all will be here we all need to get along with each other we all need to start to understand each other and that comes from building bridges between these different traditions that's in a sense what gets me the most excited is shooting topics where we interconnect stuff that usually people never interconnect like we interconnect mathematics and non-duality or logic and religion or science and Islam you know you can interconnect all these things they are connected everything is connected in some way and what you'll find actually is that studying all these different religious traditions it might seem like it's irrelevant it's unnecessary sure you don't strictly need if you want to go get it like if you want to go do the great jihad and you're ready for it and you know you don't want any distractions by all means go do it but there's still something valuable that you'll miss from studying all these different traditions all these different perspectives there's something of value not everything not everything there's perfect there's a lot of [ __ ] a lot of nonsense a lot of corruption you have to learn how to pick out the gold and leave behind the [ __ ] you have to get good at that because if if your criteria is that you're only gonna read a book if it's pure gold and it's completely factually true and there's no nonsense in it at all well you're gonna rob yourself of a lot of a lot of learnings and lessons it's rare to find a book where you can agree with everything written in the book and it's perfectly correct and true under that definition you shouldn't read most science books alright people like the thing at all but but science is the gold standard no it's not it's full of so much dogma and fundamentalism and inaccuracies that don't even get me started on that [ __ ] alright you have to be very careful with how you read scientific studies how you read scientific textbooks how you interpret them how you think about the ramifications of what that means for life and for society and for government and for technology and for lots of other stuff just like you have to do with reading spiritual books you can't be literalist you have to learn how to read between the lines think for yourself think outside the box you have to be very creative and very open you have to be fluid and fresh that's the essence of spirituality its consciousness you have to be conscious if you're doing spirituality or you're doing science or you're doing anything else without consciousness you're gonna create a mess so if you stick around with me I will help you to draw more of those interconnections as we go along you