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[Music] you understanding relativism part 1 welcome to this multi-part series on relativism or relativity there's probably gonna be two parts maybe a third part we'll see because there's so much material to cover here and it's quite complex but also I should tell you right off the bat that if you're looking for an in-depth look at the physics of Einstein's general relativity theory that's not what we're gonna be talking about here today we're talking about relativism as a sort of a as a philosophical topic and even though of course Einstein's general relativity theory is one instance of relativism and it's an important one and we will be touching upon it it's not going to be a deep dive into the physics of Einstein that's that's something maybe we'll do in the future at some point but what you have to understand about relativism and relativity is that goes far beyond just physics there's many different kinds of relativity and we'll be discussing many of those here today so actually this topic is more foundational than any kind of individual physical theory we're gonna be talking about many different theories within science and philosophy and morality and ethics so I'm really excited about this topic I've actually been wanting to talk about it for for probably over a year now I've been preparing my notes I've been preparing my thoughts because this this is tricky to explain it's very easy to misunderstand relativism really easy and this makes this this this series complicated and really very advanced so I just want to warn you to keep an open mind as usual with these very foundational topics this is tricky stuff easy to misunderstand and that's because it's threatening two worldviews no matter what kind of world you you have it's gonna be threatened by some of the things that relativity reveals so just keep an open mind think about this stuff critically for yourself don't just believe me don't just accept it and hold on to your objections I know you're gonna have a lot of objections to the various things that I'll be saying that's natural and normal and don't worry I got you covered at the very end of this video there's gonna be a lot of objections which we cover and we're probably gonna cover some more in part two so let's begin a one one more word of warning the argument somebody making here are not going to be merely a rehashing of post-modernism or cultural relativism as you find in many universities and modern academia this goes way deeper than that and there are important differences between the way that I'll be presenting relativity versus post-modernism in fact there are some very important points that post-modernism misses and doesn't understand and we'll be touching upon those and especially in part one we'll be talking about various limitations of post-modernism so let's begin with sort of a foundation here we need a foundation to work off of what is relativism how is it understood within philosophy I'm gonna be reading you some quotes here from various sources to get us just grounded in what relativism is so here's the first one by Wilhelm Krug he says relativism is quote the assumption that everything which we experience and think including the self the idea of reason truth morality religion etc is only something relative and therefore has no essential endurance and no universal validity and quote so that's a very good encapsulation of what it is but let's go deeper a little bit deeper if we turn to the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy which is a great resource for philosophy topics it's sort of like the wikipedia of philosophy it says relativism and they have a very good by the way they have a very good page on relativism which has tons and tons of stuff that i can't possibly cover all of it they say the following quote relativism is the doctrine that knowledge truth and morality exist in relation to culture society or historical contact and are not absolute it goes on to say quote relativism roughly put is the view that truth and falsity right and wrong standards of reasoning and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them relativists characteristically insist that if something is only relatively so then there can be no framework independent vantage point from which the matter of the thing in question can be established end quote and it goes on to say that relativism means quote that some phenomena X whether its values epistemic aesthetic and ethical norms experiences judgments and even the world itself is somehow dependent upon some underlying variable Y for example paradigms cultures conceptual schemes belief systems and language such that for example justice is relative to local norms truth is relative to a language game temperature is relative to the scale that we use there are no universal criteria for adjudicating between differing worldviews there could be more than one right way of describing what there is and quote and lastly it says quote one main traction of relativism is that it offers a way of settling or explaining away what appear to be profound disagreements on questions of value knowledge and ontology and the relativizing parameter often involves people their beliefs cultures and languages end quote and I should also add to that list the biggest relativizing parameter which is states of consciousness which this article on the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy on relativism doesn't even address at all the biggest thing so even though there's a lot of good points within this article ultimately the things that we're going to be considering he go away deeper than anything that modern Western philosophy or post-modernism really understands about relativity it's tricky because on the one hand we want to say we need to say that everything that human beings know and believe and understand about the world is absolutely relative all of it is relative but on the other hand we also need to leave room for the absolute absolute truth that is not relative and this interplay between relativity and the absolute truth whatever that is and I'm not explaining yet here what that is because that's that's a whole big can of worms that we're gonna be focusing on in other episodes in fact I've discussed it in other episodes it's not really important for the for the purposes of this discussion but you need to leave room open for the absolute so just keep that in mind now there are different kinds of relativism there's social and cultural moral and ethical epistemic and then the deepest version which is the ontological and the physical so for example social and cultural relativism would be things like you know different societies and countries have different cuisines and different laws of course and ethical and moral relativism would mean that depending on which which era you live in there are different moral standards different ethical standards and so you can't just say there's one right one it depends on which era era becomes a relativizing parameter see epistatic relativism is all about knowledge differences in how we see the world how we understand the world how we know the world so for example there are different epistemologies science is one epistemology and other epistemology might be religion or mysticism or voodoo or witchcraft and and so on so there are different ways of knowing the world which one is the best one well who knows is there even a best one a lot of people assume that there is a best one a lot of people assume that there is a best culture or a best ethical system or one absolute one one that's absolutely true and all the other ones of course are wrong this view I call absolutism absolutism is sort of the opposite of relativism if relativism says that everything is just up for grabs and is socially constructed so to speak and is just subjective absolutism says that no is just the opposite there's a hard external objective physical reality there's a set of facts that's true for everybody and then sure people can have different opinions about it but they're just wrong if they don't got the facts that's absolutism there's a lot of problems with absolutism and also you need to distinguish between absolutism versus the absolute or absolute truth this is true the capital T these are two very distinct almost opposite things so when I say absolutism I do not mean absolute truth I mean a world view in which you think that good and bad are objectively determined within reality and that you believe that there's a hard set of common facts objective facts that we all share and and then there's ontological relativism or metaphysical relativism which actually goes to the physical substrate of reality and what it says is that there actually is not a physical world that's the same for everybody and a lot of people have difficulty buying that so so usually if you accept relativity you accept some degree of it but you don't want to go too far so the question for many philosophers is where do you draw the line you draw it at social and cultural relativism like do you accept that most people these days would accept that different cultures have different cuisines and customs and that there is no one best culture now of course many people even struggle with that admitting that there absolutists and they tend to be dogmas very closed-minded so that's not a it's not a very sophisticated position to to deny social and cultural relativism but still many people manage to do that many conservatives and right-wingers take that position then of course there's those who admit of moral and ethical relativism that good and bad is just a matter of perspective and of course the Conservatives and right-wingers tend to reject that so you know people draw that line I different places then then some people go even further and they admit of epistemic relativism they say well science is not the only way to understand the world there's other epistemologies and science is not necessarily the best one nor is logic and rationality necessarily the best one maybe there's certain advantages to science but then certain disadvantages as well maybe we'll discover some new epistemology in the future so some people are as open-minded as admitting that but then oftentimes and this that by this point it's but almost everybody they draw a firm boundary between all of those relative isms that I just mentioned and then ontological and physical relativism so when it comes to the actual physical world for example the earth do you believe that the earth is a real object that is objectively true for all beings or is it only true for you or like only true for human beings or only true if you believe in it so to speak see most people would say no Leo the earth I mean now you're getting crazy the earth you know that's just hard facts man that's just reality I mean you can't you can't say it the earth is just a belief I mean maybe you might say that the earth is flat around that might be a belief but but that there is an earth you can't dispute that right or can you see ontological relativism actually challenges that notion that there is an objective world an objective earth that you're sitting on right now is there some merit to that you well we'll explore that in a minute so which of these are true and which are false the problem is that when they teach all of this to you on in a philosophy classroom in some university or when you read it online at the on a Wikipedia philosophy page or on this Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy they don't actually give you a clear answer they just kind of like leave it open and then you're you're on your own to figure it out well I'm gonna give you a clear answer and the answer is that all of them are true but not in the way that you think so there's wrinkles here that are tricky to explain and so we're going to be explaining here in some detail so not only are all of those true it actually goes way deeper than you can possibly imagine the relativity way deeper the relativity in fact goes so deep that it goes full circle and turns into the pure absolute truth but you have to distinguish that from your ideas being absolutely true so when I say absolute truth I'm not talking about relativism as a worldview so I'm not saying that relativism as a worldview is absolutely true nor am I even saying that what I'm saying here to you is absolutely true none of that is the absolute the absolute is something beyond all of that that grounds this entire conversation we're having and that grounds all of human experience so what that is is is mysterious and for now we're just gonna leave it as a sort of a unknown variable just keep in mind that it's there how do you know that it's there well of course unless you directly become conscious of it you don't know so you're just taking my word for it for now but my claim is that you can become directly conscious of the absolute and and you can know it absolutely but of course until you do become conscious of it you don't really know so as far as you know from your position maybe I'm full of [ __ ] maybe I'm deluded maybe I'm maybe there is no such thing as absolute but then again maybe there is so just keep your mind open relativity means that you only know things compared to other things that's the essence of relativity you can't know something as if you were just an impartial objective observer looking down upon the cosmos from God's point of view so to speak that is not our position as humans here on earth we are intimately involved with the process of understanding the world we are not unbiased objective observers even when we're being scientific even when we're being mathematical and hyper logical we're still participating in this whole process of understanding things of making sense of our life and we do this process of making sense of life by comparing different parts of life to other parts of life and this is how we get a handle on what life is and this is relativity so here are some basic examples of relativity an elephant is large relative to a mouse how do you know what large and small are other than through comparing different parts of reality to each other see that's how you did it when you were born you didn't know what's small and large were you learn that through experience by comparing different parts of reality now of course this seems so obvious but you don't overlook the obvious it's in the obvious where we really get tricked this stuff is not obvious at all it's easy to accept for most people that yeah they are I understand that an elephant is large only relative to a mouse and that actually is tiny relative to the entire planet that's so obvious but just notice that as much as you might hate relativism you will admit to this basic example so you're already a relativist it's just a question of where do you draw the line and what I'm going to show you here as we keep going is that the line itself that you draw is relative so where you draw the line depends upon you depends upon your worldview depends upon your experiences and your beliefs and that actually there is no such line within reality some more examples for you a triangle as we know from geometry class adds up to 180 degrees if you add up all three angles but this is only relatively true if we are talking about geometry done on a flat plane which is Euclidean standard geometry the kind you learned in high school but then there are other kinds of geometries if you do geometry on a curved surface depending on how it curves the triangle will not add up to 180 degrees C so we have to admit of relativism within geometry or even let's take an even more basic example you'd take a look at a glass that's exactly 50% full but at the same time it's also 50% empty so which is it well it's both of course in fact to say that a glass is half full or half empty is actually identical but also at the same time it's not quite identical because it gives you a different flavor a different interpretation it means something different in your mind whether you think of your bank account for example as being half full or half empty it'll give you different emotions it'll give you different motivations about what you should do about that see and notice what's interesting about relativism is that it opens us up to the possibility that the what we might call the quote unquote facts of the situation don't have to change for our perspective on it to change significantly so how the facts of the facts affect us how the world affects us may not so much depend upon what the world factually is but rather upon how you look at it what perspective you take the Eiffel Tower is 1060 3 feet tall but this is not absolutely true this is a relative truth depending upon the velocity at which you're you're moving at when you're looking at the Eiffel Tower so one thing that Einstein showed is that actually the length of physical objects will change depending on how fast you're moving and if you're moving close to the speed of light as you're approaching an object let's say you're flying towards the Eiffel Tower straight from the top like from outer space down and the tower is standing like this and you're flying down towards it but of course you're very far away and maybe you're looking at it through a telescope or some binoculars then actually what you'll what you'll see is that the the length of the tower will change and be different and so literally according to Einstein the tower does not have a fixed length there is no way that the eiffel tower is it only is how it looks to you given your frame of reference that you're moving at given your velocity and given your relative position to the tower of course given the towers velocity relative to you that's a very twisted relativistic counterintuitive notion which we'll be talking more about as we go here that's general relativity in a nutshell another example is with science is science true many people today would say yes Leo science is true it's proven ah but not so simple you see science is true relative to what it's relative to the past 21st century science appears true it's more true than 15th century science that's correct but today's science is gonna look so faulty and wrong a thousand years from now in the 30th century see so this is very important to keep in mind because otherwise you fall into the trap of thinking that science is just true all the time no sciences is not true all the time science has many inaccuracies and errors in it as we know from the past if you've studied the history of science science has gotten reality very wrong in the past and more so science is still getting reality very wrong today it's just that it's very hard for us to see cuz we're we're sort of on the bleeding edge of the future it's hard for us to see where science is misunderstanding reality because if we knew where it was misunderstanding reality than we would have advanced science by a whole generation but of course that is what science is doing is it's advancing itself every single day but it does so slowly it creeps along so you can't tell where science will go a thousand years from now or at least most people can't some of us can so in this sense science is very relativistic and also it's relativistic in a sense that science is not the only way to study and understand the world there are other methods which are different from science and sometimes even superior to science a lot of people are not even aware of this possibility they think size is the only way they think science has a monopoly on truth which of course it doesn't so these are just some basic examples to start to get you to understand what we mean by relativity of course you can look around you in the world and you can see thousands of examples of relativity for example even when you just like go to a restaurant and you sit down with your family some members of your family will enjoy the food other members of the family will hate the food it's the exact same food so what change well of course individual tastes how people perceive it changes and so that's what makes reality actually so interesting is that there's so many different points of view and perspectives that we can take on it it's so relativistic that it really stretches credulity a lot of people they deny this relativism by saying at all well at those people are just wrong they're just stupid they're just crazy or they they're just ignorant but that itself actually is the ignorant and the deluded position so what you really need to do to start to understand relativism is you need to open your mind and really be willing to to give credence to other people's points of view such that you don't dismiss them too quickly otherwise what happens is you become an absolutist and you think that your position is the only right one and that all other people are just deluded and of course this is how you create a sense of reality that becomes very important later but before we get into all that let's let's go through some of the history of relatively a relative it relativism especially within Western intellectual tradition Western culture so let's rewind the clock two and a half thousand years and go back all the way to the ancient Greeks to the ancient Greek philosopher known as Anaximander whose dates were 610 to 546 BC he was one of the very very very earliest philosophers in the West really thus a philosophy sort of began with him and his contemporaries and he resolved a very interesting philosophical and at that time scientific problem because remember back then philosophy and science were the same field there was no distinction between them so what did what was the problem he resolved well it was a problem of the floating earth contrary to what some people think the ancient Greeks actually knew that the earth was globe that it was round and for them though the tricky question wasn't whether the earth was round or flat they understood that it was round what puzzled them was how could around earth suspended in empty space almost all ancient cultures assumed that the earth rested on some support that it couldn't just float in empty space because the assumption was that if it was sitting in empty space it would fall down and of course the earth isn't falling down because we don't feel it falling down so that means it must be supported by something this was the the way people thought back then now look what you have to understand is that this might seem silly to you that people thought this way but you have to really put yourself in their shoes and really look at it from their epistemic perspective from their sort of veil of ignorance they didn't have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants and visionaries and and great scientists and philosophers that we have today you know we have two and a half thousand years of hindsight and standing on the shoulders of giants so so this was a real puzzle back then in acts of manners time and he came up with the solution for it and here was his argument here was his great brilliant insight this was an insight equivalent to Newton's insight about the Apple falling and being pulled down by gravity this was an insight equivalent to Einsteins insight about the nature of light and space and time and his insight was very simple he said the following the earth can sit unsupported in an empty void because it is falling and it is pulled equally in all directions and the only way he could have come up with that line of reasoning is by realizing that up and down are actually relative so something as simple as up and down being relative which we all understand today at least I hope so this was not obvious at all to early humans because our direct experience is that there is an up and there is a Down and all our lives we live within this field this polarized field of up and down and it just seems that objects just intrinsically fall down and staying up is inherently difficult and up is always that way and down as always this way and no matter where you are where you are on the earth that's true for you but then of course if you think about a little bit deeper you realize that well wait a minute if I'm on the North Pole and up is this way and down is that way and then if I'm on the South Pole it has to be reversed see relativity that's the only way the earth could be round is if that relativity was true you could see how a lot of people could refuse to accept that the earth is round simply on the grounds that that means that up and down are relative and their direct experience clearly shows them and they have decades of this experience because you know most people have not flown flown to different poles of the earth especially back then there was no such possibility so your direct experience was simply that up is that way and down is this way and it can't be otherwise you see the mind was locked into that paradigm and Anaximander is great insight was that in a sense earth is falling but it's falling in all directions at once therefore it's sitting still see how it kind of goes full circle very clever very clever bit of thinking and of course that's exactly how it is and now for us it's easy to accept this because we we have watched a bunch of science-fiction movies and we know we've had astronauts in space we've seen footage of those floating around and true enough if you have a droplet of water in outer space it just hovers like in this very eerie way it has nowhere to go where can it go see and that's very counterintuitive to us and it's kind of spooky and eerie like if if if I just snap my fingers and you found yourself right now floating in the vacuum of outer space on the International Space Station you would be really creeped out by that because it would be so different than what you've been used to your entire life and yet actually that is the more true more general way of looking at reality not this way that we live on the planet because this is a very local portion of the universe which hasn't up and down but most of the universe does not have an up and a down you see so up and down are only relative to this context of being on this planet so that's an exome and er one of the earliest examples of relativity and really what I want to show you here is that mankind's greatest developments scientifically philosophically and culturally over the last two thousand years have often been discoveries huge landmark discoveries of relativity and each time one of these discoveries was made it was made by some genius brilliant visionary thinker and then it was opposed by the majority of people who were not visionary genius thinkers and then what happened is that after many centuries of debate and controversy and rejection finally people came around and accepted the truth of relativity so here's other example is with Copernicus this is exactly what happened with Copernicus when he proposed that the earth is not at the center of the universe this was a brilliant bit of relativistic thinking because at that point the religious dogma and orthodoxy simply said that the planet must be at the center of the universe and everything else revolves around the planet of course this is a very self-centered literally self entered way of looking at the universe and of course that's part of the problem is that every time that we're looking and making sense of the universe is that we're looking at it very self-centred Li and so we have to kind of step outside of our own selfish agenda and selfish perspective to see how it really is and so of course Copernicus proposed this idea that the Sun was really more central than the earth and and then later we found out that even the Sun is not really the center of the universe but just one one out of out of millions of other Suns that exist and so that really dislocated us from from taking any kind of central position within the universe and this was opposed by the church by the orthodoxy even by many scientists at the time because it certainly doesn't feel to us in our direct experience that the earth is moving it seems like everything else is moving it seems like the stars are moving planets around us are moving the Sun is moving but the earth is not moving it's stationary from our point of view but of course if you went and stood on the moon for example you would feel the opposite you would see the earth rotating around you would not see the moon rotating to you the moon would feel like it's at the center of the universe you see and that's the essence of relativity is that it's actually it's very difficult to notice the relativity because you're enmeshed in the very thing that you're investigating it's precisely because you're standing on the earth that it's difficult for you to realize that the earth is moving see it's precisely because you take a stance within your moral framework whatever it is that is difficult for you to see that your moral framework is relative and then moving on through history there was the discovery of the Americas with Columbus and other explorers and just try to imagine how big of a relativistic shock this was to Europeans because of course Europeans had other cultures like African culture and Islamic culture and even Far East Asian culture from the Orient and all that but generally European culture was sort of monolithic and then imagine that somebody goes and discovers a whole new continent a whole new set of continents a whole new half of the planet that was basically missing from our maps and from our understanding from our awareness and think of what that must have been like during that time to live through that it must have been as radical as if we discovered that Mars was filled with aliens and life and plants and we went over there and started exploring it all it would be crazy unbelievable stuff that would be making the headline news every day and it would really disturb our sense of reality because the kind of things that you would find there you'd find new types of human beings practicing new types of religions praying to new types of gods consuming new types of food riding different types of animals having a totally different cuisine different clothing different weaponry like so much different languages think of how unsettling that must have been because your whole life you grew up as like a Catholic and you believe in a certain set of moral codes and you you believed that you should eat certain types of food and all this and then you let's say you take a ship and then you you go over to the Americas and they're just like you're in an alien world see and are you going to be open-minded enough to accept that their customs and and their religion and their God that they pray to is no better than your own that is just another one an alternative one or are you gonna insist that actually well yeah Leo I admit of course that there that there are people and plants and animals living on the new continent in the Americas but but my religion is a superior one of course that's exactly what happened and so there were religious wars and conquista doors and all of this and Mission I work trying to to civilize the heathens and savages of the Americas and then of course you know in retrospect we look at that and we see how myopic and closed-minded that was how ignorant that was but this was just par for the course this is how the human mind works if you were alive at that time you would have fallen prey to those same delusions and that that closed mindedness because hey you know when you grow up your whole life in Europe you don't know anything else you don't want to know anything else you're scared of anything else because you know if you have to go to the Americas and maybe seriously consider that there God might be more true than your God you see that relativize is your own religion on which your entire identity is based that's very threatening so of course you're not even going to want to study their God because you're just automatically a student there God is [ __ ] that's the problem with absolutism that's also why relativism is so important because if you take a relativistic perspective towards the whole world then you don't get so wrapped up in your own personal dogmas and beliefs your mind opens which allows you to explore reality more accurately than you could otherwise during the same time roughly speaking Magellan circumnavigate of the entire Earth actually Magellan died before he succeeded in doing so but his crew many of whom also were killed some of them succeeded in actually making it all the way around the earth it was a terrible journey very gruesome very actually interesting to read about it I have a whole book about Magellan's journey on my book list check it out describes the whole ordeal eventually Magellan was butchered in the Philippines he was actually a really cruel and evil person and he was butchered for it by the by the Filipino people by the natives probably rightly deserved because he tried to convert them all with his absolutist ik catholic stance but anyway is I digress my point about bringing up Magellan is that when his crew went around the whole earth they kept meticulous logs of every day of their whole journey it took them years to sort of navigate the whole thing finally when they got back to Europe they realized that they were missing a day and at first they thought well we must have like kept our records wrong but later they realized no actually that's because what day it is is relative to where you are on the planet and actually if you take an airplane and you fly all around the the earth you're gonna either gain a day or lose a day depending on which direction you fly around in it's kind of a weird counterintuitive result that you think couldn't happen cuz you would think like just common sense or it just tells you that everyone on the planet he's experiencing the same day like today is Friday I'm shooting this on a Friday so today is Friday but not for everybody on the planet it's Friday relative to me and people who live near me in my country but on the other side of the earth it ain't Friday it's already Saturday or it's not even Friday yet see so it's relative then of course after all this exploration around the world started to happen we had to invent a new system of time zones Greenwich Mean Time which means that you know it's noon the notion of what noon is is relative because it's noon at different times of the day for different people around the planet depends on your on your position around the earth so if it's if it's noon here right now for me it's not for many of you it's the opposite of that see relativism noon is a relative notion but for many people like you go back 2,000 years and try to convince somebody back then that noon is a relative notion that would be a tough sell to most people now some philosophers might understand because they understand the earth is round but your average person wouldn't understand this because their direct experience contradicts that for them noon is the same for all people you know Leo how come I'm able to meet my friend for lunch at noon if noon is relative well of course of course you're able to meet your friend because you guys live so close to each other that you can't tell the little differences but of course if you're trying to coordinate lunch between you and someone who lives in Africa or in Asia well good luck doing that and you're not gonna be able to do that with your with your simple absolutist ik notions of what noon is so this actually becomes very practical this is not just philosophy this affects how we live our lives think about also cultural and religious relativity which sprawled during this time because as the planet globalized and communication and travel became easier and people were able to not just live in one little town their whole life or little village but are able to travel around and do tourism and all of this you experience so many cultures and different religions that you start to really question which culture which religion is the right one it can be freaky there's actually a phenomenon called culture shock where you travel to a different culture and it's so radically foreign and alien and weird to you that like it makes you question whether like you almost feel like you're in some surreal dream when you travel to some far-off country because it's so different the customs are so different the norms are so different the way people even say hello or the way they bow to each other or the way they eat their food like very simple little things like you know in Asia they don't they don't have Forks or they don't have table salt you know these are just very things that you just take for granted as a European or as an American it's so different there you know go go to Japan and see what that's like you're gonna be in for some serious culture shock see so all of this makes you question your reality you come back home and you start to wonder hey you know is it really right that we don't bow to each other maybe why don't we bow maybe that's the better way to live life is where people bow to each other or maybe you think it's the opposite you know certain cultures eat certain animals that other cultures would be horrified at eating whether it's insects or cows or giraffes or whatever see all of that I want you to understand it's not merely that it's like oh yeah it's kind of weird and alien it's kind of doesn't feel comfortable it goes way beyond that really what's happening when you're experiencing these different cultures cuisines and religions and so forth you're experiencing different perspectives and you're actually coming face to face with the relativity of reality and this is a threatening notion to you because your entire way of life and survival is based upon a certain environment you've been living in and it can be difficult to admit that survival is very different in different parts of the world people survive in very different ways you see and then you come back home and you realize that wait a minute what am I even doing why am I even going to this diner five job while I am ieaving sitting in this cubicle working for this person doing the things that I'm doing why am I even going to school right it really makes you start to question not just your life but if you take this deep enough you'll actually start to question your reality what's real and that's when this stuff gets really serious and of course that's precisely why people are so against and so reactive to relativism because they don't want to go down that slippery slope because it's it's a slippery slope and watch out because you might slide off you might slide off the entire world if you go deep enough think about the development of the US Constitution that was a radical achievement for mankind because it guaranteed religious pluralism freedom of religion nowadays we think oh well what's the big deal that's so obvious it wasn't obvious back then it wasn't obvious when 99% of people were out salutis and they were either Catholics or Protestants and that's all they were and they knew that they were right and everybody else was wrong it was extremely counterintuitive to create a new society and enshrined to its very fabric freedom of religion because this opened the floodgates to relativity and back then people were theocrats the governments of that time they were ruled by some Pope or some divinely anointed monarch who justified his rule because he was some son of God or even literally God himself or came from some divine lineage like the Egyptian pharaohs and so forth and so there was no possibility of another religion this was this was crazy this was insanity to say that there could be two religions and that they could both be equally right this was insane see but nowadays this is rather normal now of course many people still reject this a lot of people actually and especially it was ironic about it is that many conservatives and right-wingers if they are religiously oriented then they tend to be absolutist ik about their religion and so even though they defend the constitution and they say that they love the Second Amendment and they love the free speech and all of this and they want to preserve that as traditionalists but actually they don't understand religious pluralism that the Constitution enshrined they actually want a theocracy they want America to be a Christian nation of judeo-christian nation and then they come up with arguments for why why it was that way at the founding right because they don't understand the value of religious pluralism and even if they do even if they admit and they say well Lee okay fine let's allow the Muslims to to go to their mosques and let's allow the Hindus to do their Hindu stuff but Leo that I mean they're still deluded everybody knows Christianity is their one true one so we're only allowing those other people to believe what they want to believe simply because we just want to like humor them and we don't want to piss them off but really we know we all know that judeo-christian values are the right ones right you see it still hasn't sunk in what religious pluralism and relativity really means when you really understand that your own religion is not absolute this is a this is a huge paradigm shift for human beings in their cognitive development this is where you shift from Spile dynamic stage blue to orange and the constitution was a stage orange revolutionary invention it wasn't a stage blue invention the way that theocrats and fundamentalists and evangelicals sometimes want it to be it was a very radical evolutionary development at that time and many people opposed it because they were absolutist a little bit later in our history we have the development of Euclidean geometry or actually maybe it was a rough roughly around the same time as the Constitution was written roughly speaking non Euclidean geometry was discovered by Carl Gauss and others at that time and what they discovered is of course that the classical geometry of Euclid from ancient Greece as brilliant as it was you know Euclid outlined all the postulates and axioms of geometry and he was very rigorous in outlining all these and it was just assumed that geometry was done set in stone geometry just is absolute until of course we started questioning a little bit further than we realized that all of Euclid's proofs and axioms and and conclusions they're all true relative to a flat plane but on a sphere it ain't true anymore on some saddle-shaped surface that ain't true if we're talking about a four or five or 10 dimensional gmh object it doesn't behave according to Euclid postulates and ideas so entirely new geometries had to be invented and that led to huge scientific and philosophical revolutions and then of course a little bit later in the early 20th century we had the development of quantum mechanics and this was a huge relativistic breakthrough many people still don't understand the significance of quantum mechanics and what it really means as far as relativity goes so the reason that quantum mechanics was relativistic was because what it showed is that measurement is not an absolute but that measurement is entangled with the actual measuring instrument so before quantum mechanics what we assumed is that if I just take some physical object and I start measuring it I'm measuring the actual physical object and there it is and my measurements are just objectively true but what happened was when you started to bore deeper and deeper and deeper into reality itself the very guts and fabric of it you started to reach the point where it became impossible to distinguish the measuring instrument that you're using and the thing that you're measuring and that they are actually at at all times entangled because you cannot divide the subject from the object you're not some impartial observer so when you're taking a microscope and you're looking at some molecule in that microscope the actual photons of the microscope are affecting the molecule you're looking at and it's changing your measurement so you can never say how an object actually is what you must say is you might say this is how object X appears when viewed through method or object Y and there is no such thing as a particle a particle is something you see when you look at an object a certain way so it's not that there's a particle over here and then some measuring instrument over here no no no what a particle is is entangled with any measuring instrument that you're using which is what generates the particle otherwise what you have is you just have sort of a quantum soup an indefinite indistinct quantum soup a sort of infinity from which the particle must be drawn out using some method of observation so this was very counterintuitive spooky and paradoxical and a lot of people didn't want to accept it a lot of people still don't want to accept it a lot of scientists still don't accept this even quantum physicists who are working in advanced universities today still do not accept the epistemic and metaphysical implications sure they accept the results but they don't like the lab results they accept that but they don't accept the metaphysical and epistemic implications of what I'm saying here and of what the early founding fathers of quantum mechanics realized what Niels Bohr and others like him realized and if you want some more details on that I have a multi-part series two part series called quantum mechanics debunks materialism where we go into this in a lot of depth and I actually dissect and give you quotations it's very in-depth so go check that out if you're really interested a lot of people still argue with me tell me that I don't understand quantum mechanics because that I'm presenting it in a relativistic fashion and then in fact Leo quantum mechanics never really demonstrated relativism that's simply because you you don't really understand the metaphysics and the epistemology of quantum me you haven't thought about it deeply enough yet it's extremely radical stuff and even though some scientists do understand it by and large the implications the metaphysical and epistemic implications of quantum mechanics have not percolated through into mainstream culture people still generally believe that the world is man of particles that particles exist independently of humans and measuring instruments and then we can just talk about particles you can't just talk about particles this has been debunked for over a hundred years yet most people go around and keep talking this way why is that because it makes no practical difference within the very limited context that they're living in but actually it does make a practical difference you're just not aware of how the way it makes a practical difference is that it solidifies your worldview into some materialistic worldview some sort of absolutist ik worldview and this actually affects your ability to investigate reality and to discover who you are and to self-actualize which is why we're talking about this all this connects directly back to your own personal development you're not able to go deep enough in personal development unless you understand relativity because you get stuck in some absolutist worldview perspective like you start to believe that you are a physical body and you never question that it never occurs to you that that could be a relativistic notion but we're getting there let's not get ahead of ourselves continuing on with the history of course we had soon after quantum mechanics or even roughly at the same time Einstein's general relativity where Einstein showed and proved and this was borne out by many different experiments that time space motion and length are all relative so literally like I said with that Eiffel Tower example the length of an object depends on your speed and your frame of reference to that object there is no such thing as absolute space in the way that Isaac Newton fought there is no absolute motion think about house if acanthus is people still don't understand how significant and how radical Einstein's discoveries were sometimes people argue and they say well Leo Cole relatives what are you talking about relatives relativism good and bad morality can't be relative man but even time and space and distance and length and motion have already been proven to be relative for over a hundred years this has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt and yet you still cling to some absolutist version of your culture as being superior or your religion as being superior or your morality your your notion of good and bad is being absolute like you're not thinking about this at all are you time does not exist space motion distance does not exist but see it doesn't matter it doesn't matter because in your everyday experience which is the thing that drives your whole worldview it doesn't matter you don't care about the truth you don't care about what's real you don't care about facts what you care about is your perspective and how it allows you to survive that's what you care about you care about your ego and your entire sense of physics and reality is completely serving your survival you get this almost nobody gets this even scientists who should know better they still don't get it they get it theoretically but they don't actually get it in their own life they don't get how significant it is they haven't allowed it they haven't allowed this knowledge to really transform their everyday consciousness so in this sense science is very stuck even still today people are in denial about it and notice that all throughout history the name of the game is denial every time some new relativistic development happens whether it's a discovery of the Americas or non Euclidean geometry there's always a large contingent of people which deny it demonize it attack it reject it ridicule it and even harm an attack violently attack those people who are putting forth these discoveries right because your worldview is at stake and not just your worldview but your very life is at stake because your life in your world you are inseparable you and your world you are inseparable you are your worldview you don't just have a worldview you are your worldview I want to read you a quote from Leonard Susskind who is a modern world-renowned scientist who understands relativity and of course quantum mechanics he said quote Einstein in the special theory of relativity proved that different observers in different states of motion see different realities and quote yeah do you understand the significance of that quote that's a huge thing to admit a huge thing to admit and by the way even though Leonard Susskind it's a great scientist otherwise and of course understands many of these things and he said this quote he still doesn't understand the full extent of relativity that's how deep this stuff goes so be very very careful alright I'd be very very careful I want to warn you about thinking of relativity in overly simplistic terms it's very easy to strawman relativity it's very easy to come up with some childish notion of relativity which then just you know breaks apart upon just considering a few examples relativity is very twisted and complicated and it's not easy to understand it's not easy to explain and you're not going to understand it simply by listening to me talk for a couple of hours this is a good start but you're very far from really understanding what relativity truly means so let's keep going let's complete our history here around the same time as quantum mechanics and general relativity there was also the discovery of multiple different types of logic for millennia and for centuries it was assumed that Aristotelian logic is the only kind of logic it's a very binary linear form of logic and then it was discovered that actually there are an infinite number of different types of logic so of course that relativized logic there was no longer one true logic there was also the development of Quinn's ontological relativism roughly around the same time as Einstein a philosopher analytic Western philosopher by the name of Willard Klein who I talked about in the past some of my epistemic oriented episodes he came up with several papers which outlined and explained ontological relativism literally what he said is that if you have two human beings from radically different cultures trying to communicate with each other or let's say a human and an alien and we're trying to communicate with each other our language in our world view is so entangled with our ontology and what we think of as our physics that it becomes inseparable and it becomes impossible to actually discover what the ontology of the other person is without fully becoming that person because our language is infested with ontological assumptions and so when an animal is running by let's say you can point to that animal and you could say well that's a cat and you might say well but that alien could also point to the animal and also say well that that's a cat and so we can agree on that you know I might say cat the alien might say Boop that's the word he uses let's say for cat and bye-bye that we both mean cats so what's Leo what's the problem I mean we can agree on this stuff this is not complicated but actually it doesn't work this way what Klein showed is that it's much more twisted because how are you gonna determine what Boop refers to within the aliens paradigm just because he points at that thing that you call a cat and says Boop does not mean that you can say that he has the same notion of a cat as you do because for you when you point at and you say cat you mean well it's a it's this creature with four legs and it's runnings got a tail it's got fur it's got all this sorts of stuff and it's an object and it exists that's what you mean by cat but to him what he points that and he says Boop what he might mean is the the motion of fur through space for example so you might be thinking of that cat as an object that exists permanently within space the alien might be thinking of that cat as a verb for example as fur through space as a process not as an object and that's a that's a significant metaphysical ontological difference and what what Quine basically showed is that there's never gonna be a way for you two to reconcile that and to fully understand each other the only way you can really understand what this alien means is if you grew up in his culture and learned all of the norms and ways in which these aliens think about cats and animals in the world and so in this sense literally we've got a version of ontological relativism where the actual physicality of things changes then in the middle of the twentieth century there was an enormous development within science based on the work of Thomas Kuhn who came up with the notion of a paradigm I've talked about this in my episode called I believe it's called how paradigms work Google actualized our own paradigms and and you'll find it is a very important video where I talk about Thomas Kuhns word and basically what he discovered from studying the history of Sciences he discovered that science the way it works is it works through paradigms there is no such thing as one objective science there are different paradigms within science different competing worldviews so to speak these paradigms are actually on two on two logically different and epistemic ly different they're just like different world worldviews different ways of looking at the world and doing science in different ways and so there's always competing paradigms within science happening at all times and there's always like a prevailing paradigm and those paradigms need to be subverted and then challenged and the new paradigms are introduced and so this is a whole process by which science evolves it's much more messy and complicated than people think and it's much more relativistic and in fact Thomas Kuhn introduced the notion of what's called incommensurability which means that if I have my worldview and you have your worldview we're never gonna be able to fully reconcile our two worldviews which is just sort of basically what I was explaining with the cat example it's like that now of course Thomas Kuhn later was was shocked that his work was used in order to defend various radical versions of relativism and he he distanced himself from that but actually Thomas Kuhn did not understand his own discovery of paradigms he didn't understand how radical paradigms really are he didn't fully understand what relativism is and so in this sense he rejected it prematurely that's because how that's how tricky this stuff is right so world class philosophers and scientists and thinkers and intellectuals they still misunderstand this stuff so I can be very very very careful here so literally what Thomas Kuhn was saying was that depending on which scientific paradigm you're using to look at a problem and out the world he wasn't just saying that we have different world views he was actually saying that the things out of which the world is made actually change when a scientific paradigm changes that's pretty radical and a lot of scientists they don't want to admit this because they believe in a material objective external world that's independent of them but as quantum mechanics show there is no such a world you're always interfacing with the world so really there isn't a world and a scientist or a world in a world view the scientist is the world the world view is the world then relativism went full bore in the second half of the 20th century with developments within linguistics structuralism post-structuralism and post-modernism this is a deep topic that I don't have time to get into I have an older episode about Jacques Derrida and deconstruction and about post-modernism and about language go check it out it's a it's a pretty good episode very in depth about what post-modernism is about and I'll be talking more about post-modernism in the future and various limitations of post-modernism but basically what happened was in in that late 20th century relativity became so obvious to academics because the world became so globalised and so interconnected that we could no longer seriously as an academic you could no longer seriously maintain that one culture was superior to some other culture or that one worldview was superior to all other worldviews it just became untenable for social scientists to think this way they had to adopt a position of of relativism and then of course that that was easier to do in the social sciences and the softer Sciences and the humanities and it was in the hard physical sciences so a lot of hard physical scientists still rigidly cling to a materialist reductionistic worldview where they insist that everything can be just boiled down to hard physics into particles but as we've seen there are no such thing as particles so what are you boiling it down to you can't even do that you can't even do that and then there was of course relativism acknowledged within sexuality and within gender which is what we're seeing now and of course a lot of people react against this negatively traditionally oriented people they react very negatively when you tell them that sexuality or gender is relativistic they don't want to admit that male and female is relative they don't want to admit that homosexuality is just as normal and is just as naturalness heterosexuality that there's different different things even just beyond male and female and and all this right so this is all this is all sort of the history of relativism and of course there's many examples I'm leaving out because it's long enough as it is but what we can see here is that really the 20th century the last century was the century of relativism there were so many relativistic discoveries within quantum mechanics logic linguistics philosophy history of science the humanities the social sciences like man you had the psychedelic revolution which just poured gasoline on top of all that sexual relativism gender relativism religious relativism Wow that's a lot of stuff it's a lot of stuff so sometimes conservatives rail against academics and colleges and universities for teaching relativism and that this is destroying the fabric of society the you know good old Christian values yeah of course it is of course it is relativism is like an is like acid hydrochloric acid poured upon one's worldview it's it's deconstructive destructive and people of course react very negatively against this but what you discover the deeper you study reality is that more and more of the thought the stuff you thought was absolute you discover is actually relative and this is very unnerving and of course this is why universities have led these relativistic revolutions and movements and they are a force they are a cultural force which is relativizing culture which a lot of people find frightening and threatening but it has to happen in universities because universities are sort of at the forefront of human knowledge and they are dealing with like the cutting edge of discovering new stuff the cutting edge of science the cutting edge of understanding and so for them it's untenable to take an absolutist position really on anything because you will simply be proven wrong and eventually you're gonna lose your professorship if you take an absolutist position because eventually your ideas and theories will simply be debunked or disproven you won't be able to write good research papers you need to be very careful and relativistic as an academic a to qualify everything you say you got it confine it within a context you can't just say that such and such is true absolutely you got to say it's it's true in such in such a situation under such and such conditions when measured in such and such a way to such and such people from such and such a perspective this would be very nuanced academic way of conveying a truth and even then that often doesn't go far enough so relativism is necessary to explain the diversity of perspectives cultures social norms epistemic schemes and ontology and paradigms that are found throughout human history and all around the world so relativism is inevitable you can't keep this thing bottled up because it's actually coming deep from within science science in a way is actually undermining itself because science began as a sort of absolutist ik project but then the more and more you did science the more you discover that no this isn't right it doesn't hold our experiments don't support this whether it's experiments within quantum mechanics or within cosmology or within astrophysics or within biology or sociology or psychology anthropology history it doesn't hold and Western culture has been very absolute istic for for 2,000 years and and then you know the that dam was slowly eroded eroded roted until now is starting to burst and of course would that come a lot of challenges but now let's contrast that was all Western tradition now let's contrast that with Eastern culture in the East actually they were not absolute istic for as long as the west relativism was a important feature of Eastern philosophy for a very long time for thousands of years in fact I want to introduce you to one very important piece of that which is the concept of on account Avada it's a bit of a long word on a cantata it's the Jain notion of many sidedness and I love this notion this is such a powerful concept I almost wish I could shoot a video just on this notion alone literally it means no one perspective ISM no one perspectivism that's on account of and I want to now quote to you what this means from Wikipedia it says quote the origins of anekantavada are traceable to the teachings of Mahavira who used it effectively to show the relativity of truth and reality let me pause there a Mahavira was an early enlightened sage I think he actually predated the Buddha but just think of him as a-- basically has another buddha so going on quote according to Jainism and of course Jainism was founded upon mahavira's teachings no single specific statement can describe the nature of existence and the absolute truth all knowledge claims must be qualified in many ways including being affirmed and denied reality can be experienced but it is not possible to totally express it with language human attempts to communicate is called nya the word nya which translates as partial expression of truth language is not the truth of the capital T but it's a means and an attempt to express truth spiritual truths are complex they have multiple aspects language cannot express their plurality and yet through effort and appropriate karma they can be experienced no philosophic or metaphysical proposition can be true if it is asserted without a condition or limitation all knowledge claims must be qualified in many ways because reality is many sided and it goes on to say quote all of the following 7 predicates must be accepted as true for a cooking pot so imagine an ordinary household cooking pot usually we would say well that's just a physical object it's obvious what it is so what can be relativistic about it well here's how Jainism and Mahavira would look at it they would say firstly quote from a certain point of view it can be said that the pod exists from a certain point of view the pot does not exist from a certain point of view the pot both exists and does not exist from a certain point of view the pot is inexpressible from a certain point of view the pot both exists and is inexpressible from a certain point of view the pot both does not exist and is inexpressible and finally from a certain point of view the pot exists the pot does not exist and also it's inexpressible & quot I absolutely love this to me this is this this notion of anekantavada is one of the most important notions in your entire attempts to understand reality and there's a reason for that of course and the reason that Mahavira understood this is because he was enlightened and that's really the only time that you'll fully appreciate what relativity means is when you become enlightened but nevertheless you know you got to start somewhere so let's start here can you see how on account Avada works can you see how important it is and can you see how different it is from the way that most people treat life most people in life what are they doing they're debating they're arguing they're trying to advance their position they take absolutist stances and they say no reality is this way and then somebody else says no it's that way and then they argue and they debate whether it's science or morality or ethics or even spirituality this happens what people don't see is the meta point the meta point is when you zoom up from all that and you look upon what's really going on why do people have such radically different perspectives of the world like totally different not just a little bit different totally different how is this possible and the ultimate answer is on account of odda many sidedness because the nature of reality itself is that perspectival and relativistic it's not one way as we tend to assume of course the other great contribution from Hinduism and perhaps from Jainism is the the parable of the five blind men and the elephant which is a really beautiful metaphor for explaining a lot of conflict and contradiction between different human paradigms this is an ancient story from from India which basically goes like this there were five blind men and one giant elephant and they all were feeling it one blind man was feeling the the tail another one was feeling the leg another was feeling the side and other was feeling the ear and those feeling that the snout and and each one started to explain what an elephant is to the other ones and they all started to explain it from their own direct experience you know so the one holding and feeling the tail he said it's like a rope the one feeling the leg he said it's like a tree trunk the one feeling the side says it's like a wall the one feeling but ear said it's like a curtain the one feeling the snout said that it's like a snake and then they all started arguing and fighting with each other and they could never agree about what an elephant is and of course the elephant in this case represents reality itself and each blind man represents just a person and so every time we start to have a conversation about what reality is every one of us because we're only experiencing a tiny tiny portion of the whole because reality is so huge and fast and actually it's literally infinite because reality is literally infinite you never have the whole even if you did have the whole you couldn't communicate the whole because the whole is the whole how do you communicate the whole to the part you see and so this becomes a very deep epistemic problem how do we teach and discuss what reality is when each one of us is like one of these blind men feeling this giant elephant and this in a nutshell explains so much it's such a simple metaphor but explain so many deep problems that you see within life it helps you make sense of reality so much that's why I love these concepts of anekantavada and this parable of the elephant and the blind men so what you got to understand is that each side of a debate is always part right part wrong and also always incomplete to every metaphysical question there are many right answers reflecting many facets and degrees of the one absolute truth which is the whole of reality the absolute truth is the whole of reality it's the elephant so the elephant is there but what the elephant is is the sum total of all the views and so really the blind man they're not really separate from the elephant they are part of the elephant so all really maybe even a better metaphor would be that like the elephant's tail was trying to communicate with the elephant's leg was trying to communicate with the elephant's ear and its snout and each part would try to argue with each other and fight with each other and tear itself apart the elephant will just literally kill itself tearing itself apart not understanding itself one part trying to outdo the other parts without realizing that it just is the entire thing see made out of different parts so that's why this stuff is so tricky and of course specifically this metaphor explains why there's so much controversy within spirituality within religion and even within non duality even within Buddhism even if you take one sect of Buddhism you'll discover so many different perspectives and world views on that sect of Buddhism people still don't agree have you ever wondered why this is the case have you noticed this is a deep universal problem across all human endeavors is that people disagree with each other so much and they they hold different world views even if people have the same worldview they still disagree with each other because in the end their world views might be similar but they're not identical so who's right and who's wrong well the mistake is thinking that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong that's the mistake the correct way to look at it is that each one of them is pointing out some part of reality misunderstanding it deeply and then reporting it in an incomplete fashion and that's why we have this crazy mess and it's so difficult to understand reality going on I have another quote for you this one is now from Paul Bogosian and he says quote the relativist about a given domain D purports to have discovered the truths of D involved an unexpected relation to a parameter and quote so for example it is wrong to enslave people we might say that and many people would look at that and say okay that's that's true that's true but actually it's not true it is wrong to enslave people relative to 21st century norms that's more true because it's also true is that it's okay to enslave people relative to ancient Roman norms so who is correct are we correct in the 21st century or where the ancient Romans correct the mistake people make is they say well the clearly ancient Romans were uh neva l've dand they were barbarians and we've had time to think it through and Leo we finally come to the true conclusion which is that everyone knows that slavery is actually wrong that's incorrect not everyone knows that and even if everyone agrees with you even if you took a poll of the entire planet and seven billion people agreed with you that slavery is wrong the reality is is that all that you really have is you have a consensus of seven billion people in the 21st century saying that slavery is wrong that doesn't actually make it wrong that just means that that's what it is that's what people think that happens to be the current situation who knows what it'll be like in three thousand years you don't know you don't know this of course offends and threatens many people slavery is a nasty business and people want slavery to be objectively wrong now of course don't misunderstand me and please don't get offended I'm not saying that we should bring back slavery a normai in favor of racism nor nor am i nor am i making arguments for for some sort of white nationalism anything like this we're just trying to accurately understand what it really means to say that something is wrong or to say that something is true to not understand this simply because you're offended by it or because it threatens you I mean I understand where you're coming from as part of your survival agenda is to look out and not to get enslaved and that's that's that's fine and I support a government that doesn't enslave people but it's relativistic see it's wrong precisely because you are the one who might be enslaved that's precisely why you want to say that it's wrong it's wrong relative to you why is slavery bad because it makes you feel bad if slavery made you feel good it would be right according to you you see so it's relative to to your emotional system it's not wrong in any absolute sense it's wrong in the sense that it creates a lot of suffering for people so relative to that it's not good then again still furthermore it's only wrong if you don't want to suffer you see you're assuming that everyone doesn't want to suffer but again you have to go deeper you have to ask well is suffering really wrong what's wrong with suffering most people never get to question this deeply of course of course there is nothing wrong with suffering and you could even imagine a scenario in which someone who wants to suffer for him being a slave is right now of course you're not gonna find many of these people but again there's a there's a deeper point here that's being made there's a deeper metaphysical epistemic point that's being made there is no truth of the matter of whether it is wrong to sell people of slaves independently of one's frame of reference as harsh as that sounds as heartless as that might sound to you it's true and it's actually very important that you understand why it's true otherwise you're gonna be deluded in how you think about reality and you better understand that it's gonna affect how you live your life for the worse you're actually gonna suffer by not understanding this so here's one lesson I want you to take away from this episode is that I want you to get very good at asking the question what is the frame of reference here what is the frame of reference here so usually what happens that when human beings are discussing something or they're trying to understand something they forget the frame of reference it's almost always ignored it's almost always taken for granted in debates and discussions and even within scientific inquiry this creates a false sense of absolutism and solidity so for example from now on if you understand relativity I want you to think this way if someone comes to you and says so-and-so is bad I want you to ask the question from what frame of reference if someone says to you so-and-so is crazy I want you to ask them from what frame of reference what's your frame of reference if someone says so-and-so is true or such and such as false I want you to ask from what frame of reference and find the reference frame make it explicit do it about your own views as well so like if you believe that Hitler is evil ask yourself what's my frame of reference if you believe slavery is bad ask yourself what's my frame of reference and what you'll discover is that oh yeah my frame of reference is that I am assuming that suffering is bad ok is that true could suffering be good again what's my frame of reference for assuming that suffering is bad well because I don't like to feel bad I don't like the feeling of suffering but then question that further you know what's the frame of reference is it true that's the feeling of suffering is actually bad and you might reach a point where you actually discover that the suffering isn't objectively bad it's only bad relative to you because of course suffering is a subjective mechanism that your mind uses to help you to survive now you might say Oh leo but I got to survive survival is good question that as well what's your frame of reference to say that survival is good or that it's even necessary and so on you get the idea and also when you hear people talking sloppily I want you to to translate what they're really saying or yeah translate what they're saying into what they really mean so for example if someone says the following is true what they actually mean translate that what they actually mean is the following is true relative to blank and if someone says the following is rational it's not actually rational what they mean is it's rational relative to blank or someone says so-and-so is good actually what that means is so-and-so is good relative to blank or someone says the following thing is meaningful what they actually mean is it's meaningful relative to who or relative to what and when someone says so-and-so is real such-and-such is real what they really mean is such-and-such is real relative to blank for example we're sitting here right now I'm sitting here you're sitting over there we're having this discussion this seems like it's real it's real relative to dreaming but for example you take some psychedelics or you have a Samadhi experience or an awakening experience and you realize that actually this what we call reality this here it was only real relative to dreams but you go one step higher you realize that this itself as a dream you awaken from it and you realize like oh that wasn't real this thing we call real isn't real Awakening is real that's what's really real this thing here this was just a dream see in that case what you did is you discovered the hidden conscious frame of reference that was there it was laying there the whole time but you weren't aware of it and that's what that's what you discover what you sort of do some serious consciousness work so science is not better than witchcraft monogamy is not better than polygamy Buddhism is not better than Islam logic is not better than emotions meditation is not better than psychedelics each has its unique pros and cons this is difficult for many people to accept also make sure you don't make the mistake the common mistake of thinking that what I'm doing here is I'm setting a false equivalencies between for example science and witchcraft so listen to what I carefully to what I'm saying here science is not better than witchcraft that is true but this does not mean that science and witchcraft are equally suitable for any given situation or goal so for example if you want to send a man to the moon science is better than witchcraft relative to that objective if on the other hand for example you want to do some deep soul-searching and you want to visit the astral spirit realms science is terrible for that you better use witchcraft or something along those lines to do that so you know witchcraft usually involves serious psychedelic herbs that are used potions and point mints and so forth those can actually be effective for sending you to the astral realm and doing shadow work and facing your own inner demons and spiritually growing yourself science it's not very effective for that so they have pros and cons and so this requires care here I'm not saying that size is equivalent to witchcraft and I'm not saying that Buddhism is equivalent to Islam it's just not better is what I'm saying and I'm saying it has unique pros and cons you might say Allah leo but but Buddhism is less violent than Islam Buddhism is a more true religion it's easier to achieve enlightenment through Buddhism but again that assumes that enlightenment is your highest goal that's a relative matter there's no reason why you should want enlightenment or something else maybe what you want is you want to pray and worship Allah in which case Islam is of course obviously the preferred way also you have to understand that it's relative to context and environment so for example if you're living in the middle in the Middle East then even though Buddhism might technically be let's say better for achieving enlightenment maybe it has better techniques or so so you might think if you're living in the Middle East and you have to consider other factors like political factors family ties friendships that you have these are all important to you so in this sense you might actually convert to Islam simply because you're gonna fit better into your culture whereas if you were gonna be a Buddhist in the Middle East in certain areas you know that might that might actually be threatening to your life go try being a Buddhist in Saudi Arabia it's not gonna work out so well for you you ain't gonna get enlightened you're gonna get your head chopped off see so you say oh yeah but that but isn't that proof that that Buddhism is better because look in Saudi Arabia the Muslims ilda chop your head off the Buddhists oh do that again it's all relative depends on what you want do you care about getting your head chopped off that's your frame of reference you don't have to care you know just because it's your survival just cuz it's your ass doesn't mean that now it's the truth it just means it's your ass so be careful about that sort of self-centered way of looking at the world another way to think about relativity which I really like is is as this as follows reality can't tell which way is up or down reality can't tell which object is big or small reality can't tell the speed at which an object is moving at reality can't tell the difference between an inch and a mile reality can't tell what time it is right now reality can't tell you what the XYZ coordinates of an object are and reality can't tell if Hitler is a bad person reality doesn't know these things you as a human can know these things and by knowing them you don't find them in the outer world you actually create them a lot of scientifically minded people mathematically minded people they somehow assume that every object in the universe has an X Y Z coordinate of course this is painte ly absurd this is a human projection objects in the universe do not have an X Y Z coordinate God so to speak does not know the XYZ coordinates of my body right now there is no such thing because this is a relative notion that had to be constructed by humans likewise God does not know what time it is right now and I'm not saying that you should believe in God I'm just I'm just using that as a sort of a metaphor for taking the universal perspective this is what you have to do stepping outside of your perspective to take the universal perspective likewise God can't tell the difference whether Hitler is a good or bad person you can now here's the trick here's a wrinkle is that you are part of reality so reality actually can tell that Hitler is a bad person but only through you you see so when you judge Hiller to be a bad person that is reality determining at that very moment that Hitler is a bad of course you have to understand that some other person might determine that Hitler is a good person so there's gonna be your determination as reality determining Hitler's bad and then reality will determine that Hitler is good you know it's like a neo-nazi would probably think Hitler is good so who is right you might say well of course I'm right but of course that's only from your perspective if you realize that you weren't just this part of reality but also this part of reality and all parts of reality because reality is one if you realize you were the whole elephant then you would realize that neither one is right all of it just is a perspective and all of that is what reality is that is the whole elephant and this is what gets you a sort of a meta perspective and a distance from your personal little judgments of Hitler or anybody else get that again I'm not saying that well actually I sort of am prove it this is too controversial so I'm not saying that Hitler is good what I'm saying is that it's undefined Hitler is neither good or bad but also using that principle of anekantavada we also have to say that to be totally rigorous we have to say Hitler is neither good nor bad Hitler is undefined Hitler is good because some people think he's good Hitler is also bad because many people think he's bad and so Hitler is both good and bad and all of that at the same time and also none of it at the same time and beyond all of that Hitler transcends all of that at the same time as well that's anekantavada and that's as close to the truth is you're gonna get within language within thought without within concepts you can go beyond all of that but now we're getting into a realm that's we're going into Samadhi now and and then that that's beyond anything that can be spoken or communicated so I can't teach it to you that would be the actual absolute so what kinds of things are relative I got a list for you all aesthetics tastes and opinions of course should be obvious enough right all beliefs in all worldviews science and mathematics and that's a difficult one for people to swallow but all scientific models and descriptions are relative all scales and measurements are relative counting and units are relative so this is why mathematics is relative you see because what counts as 1 or s 2 or as 3 years 4 as what 5 whatever is relative is this one object or is this 5 objects it depends on how you counted see you could look at the hand as being 1 or you could look at it as 5 5 things but it's actually both are sort of true at the same time the hand is 1 but also it's got 5 it's got 5 parts to it but of course how many parses that really have well I mean it's got billions of cells so is this hand really 1 is it 5 or is it a billion cells it's all of that and it's none of that and it's beyond all of that as well because of course it's got molecules in there and atoms and quarks and how many quarks are in here trillions upon trillions and trillions so how many is this hand this hand is actually infinite it goes on forever there's an infinite number of structure to this hand it has no end it has no bottom it has no beginning and it has no end of course continuing on with the list patterns within nature and significant relationships that you pull out of nature so if you say that X is related to Y which is a lot of what science does science is basically just finding patterns and relationships within nature every relationship you find is relative every pattern you find is relative it's just a question of which patterns will you focus on and of course the patterns you focus on are the ones that help you to build the worldview that will help you to survive so see all science is very selfish in the sense rationality and logic are relative all analysis and critique is relative knowledge all knowledge and understanding is relative all language symbols thoughts and concepts are relative all paradigms models theories and epistemologies and relative all physical objects and what counts as a physical object to even say that this is a hand that's relative perception all perception is relative mm-hmm all of history is relative all culture is relative survival of course is relative go check out my a two-part series called understanding survival where we talk about the relativity of survival in a lot of detail meaning significance value purpose and goals and motivations these are all relative morality ethics norms right and wrong and good and bad these are all relative all judgments are relative all religions are relative all spiritual teachings and explanations including all of my own are relative justice law criminality and good government what counts as good government this is relative so there's no such thing as an absolutely good government there's good government relative to what your survival needs are what's good government to one person will be terrible government to another person because they have different survival needs of course this is why creating a good government is so notoriously difficult and so contentious what counts as that the best is of course relative all problems are relative health is relative success and failure are relative happiness suffering difficulty pain and pleasure our relative sanity and insanity are relative birth now here's where it gets really tricky your own birth life and death and sense of self are relative and your notion of other human beings is relative drawing of all categories is relative and all dualities are relative as I discussed in my three-part series called understanding duality so what's left what is it relative that's exactly the point see that's exactly the point so let's take a quick intermission and then we'll come back and talk about objections to relativism okay let's talk about some common objections to relativism you have to be very very careful because it's so easy to come up with simplistic and stupid notions of relativism which of course are obviously false so let me help you to avoid some of those very obvious foolish versions of relativism so first of all Leo if relativism is true how is it that snow is white is relative it's relative in more than one way so first of all snow is white you would have to actually analyze the words in that proposition snow is white all of those words first of all are heavily laden with ontology and various metaphysical assumptions just to get two people to agree on what snow means is not as easy as you think or what white means is not as easy as you think but even if we put all those linguistic issues and ontological sort of semantic issues to the side and we just take that word simplistically the way that most people mean it even in that case snow is white like in which universe under your normal waking consciousness what if you're in a dream is snow white in a dream what if you're on a psychedelic what if you're hallucinating what if you have some visual problem in your nervous system you know with your visual system you have some tic in your nervous system is it still gonna appear white or some other color you see so snow is white is relative to many factors including your nervous system your perceptual system how you use language even just to say snow is white that's it that's a very gross abstraction which snow are you talking about snow is white as an abstraction I mean there's no such thing you can point to a particular piece of snow and you can say that thing is white maybe but then you know there's different things you could point to and then how do you know the thing you're pointing to is really what you mean or what you meant when you said snow is white so there's there's also a further problem between sort of like the correspondence between specific phenomena in the world and and then your abstraction of it so just say that snow is white that's not actually an empirical a purely empirical statement that's an abstraction and then of course it's it's white to you as a human being but is it white to a snake to a cow to a dog to a cat to an alien you see so it's utterly relative next objection Leo if I get cancer how is that relative of course you got to be very careful here with relative relative does not just mean that well anything goes like you can just think up of any random thing and then it like it poof it materializes into existence or like if you have some problem then you can just say oh well it's a relative problem so it's like poof I can just think it out of existence like I broke my leg for example and then Leo you're saying that's relative so I can just now imagine that my leg is is not and suddenly it's healed no it doesn't work like that see that's not what relativism means relativism doesn't mean you just get to think [ __ ] up and then it materializes instantly that ain't relativism that's your foolish straw man of relativism but even in this case of cancer right so cancer is still relativistic in the sense that you say Leo I got cancer well what do you mean by I exactly you mean your body so you're attached to your body yeah you've identified yourself with the body that's not a scientific fact that you are your body in fact you know a famous sage Raman of Maharshi he actually died of cancer he was deeply enlightened very awake died of cancer but before he died I think it was cancer on his arm or something he got cancer on his arm in his old age and his followers you know they get got very concerned because they were they worshiped him they looked up to him as though he was God well he was God but anyways they looked up to him and of course they wanted to cure him of this cancer because you know his teeth didn't want to let his their teacher die so they got all sorts of doctors to come in there and try to help put herbs on it and whatever to cure it nothing worked but as they were like putting medicine on the cancer on the arm and trying to fix it Raman supposedly he just sat there and he just looked at it he said ah don't worry about it just leave it all died doesn't matter the body will die this body is just mud is just earth and mud it doesn't matter the real I won't die because of course he transcended the whole notion of of being a body so so so so literally you know literally you want to become immune to cancer well change who you think you are if you change your identification to something which can't get cancer then you can't get cancer even though of course the body can get cancer and the body can die but that doesn't mean you're the body so in this sense there you go it's relative next objection Leo how can science be relative doesn't science deliver us the truth it sure seems that way no science is very deceptive in that we use it to create all this fancy technology and then we think like well it must be true and therefore nothing more needs to be said about it no not that's not at all the case science is relative in in many ways I've already talked about how science is relative to the era that it's being done in very much so the science that will happen in a thousand years will be so radically different from today's science that we will look back and look at today's science 21st century science as the equivalent of doctors bleeding their patients with leeches or some other form of quackery that's how modern physics will look in a thousand years science is also relative in that it's a very specific epistemic system with various standards premises methods and techniques that it uses and the very notion of what counts as science is fluid science itself changes by doing more science you change how you understand what science is because science most generally speaking is simply the investigation of reality and as you investigate reality of course science itself is what a part of reality so as you're investigating reality you're also investigating science and you're learning how to do science better and actually the boundaries of what qualifies the science will change such that for example in a thousand years many spiritual techniques meditative and yogic techniques that today are not counted as science will be admitted and accepted as legitimate science so what counts as legitimate science this very much depends on how we think of science culturally and bureaucratically in our institutions and you better believe that's gonna change and in fact science in the next thousand years will change more than science did in the first thousand years the last thousand years there's many changes and reforms that are needed to science and then of course science is actually literally done differently people assume that well science is just universal science it's not universal science is how humans understand the world if there are aliens out there one day we meet them they will have a different version of science than what we have radically different perhaps in some ways might be similar but also radically different even there's even differences between the way men and women do science next objection leo but how come scientists agree on the same factual data if you're saying that physics and the actual physical substrate of reality is relative this is a very good question first of all I want you to notice that a lot of scientists do not agree on the data there's a lot of debate about this and what science is about is is gathering consensus and a lot of what that is about is about convincing others of your way of looking at the world and how you look at the world of course affects the kind of data that you see and a lot of times one scientist looks at the world this way gets one kind of data another sign just looks at the world using a different set of paradigms and premises gets a different set of data and this data in a sense is in commensurable it can't be directly correlated and compared now of course in very simple cases scientists do often agree on the data you know you can get a ruler give it to one scientist give a ruler to another scientist they can measure an elephant from nose to tail and discover you know some common number although even that is not always as easy as it seems so you know cuz rulers are different measuring instruments are different it's hard to calibrate them but let's say they do come up with the same data you have to understand that there's different levels and layers to relativity so for example the data scientists agree upon is highly contingent upon which states of consciousness both of these scientists are in and also the fact that they're both humans and they share a similar educational background similar culture they work for similar types of institutions they both grew up in the same era of course they have the same similar brains similar neurology similar perceptual systems virtually identical DNA so all of that is necessary for scientists to be able to agree on data try getting to scientists who have even a 1% difference in their DNA to both agree on the same data that would be very difficult to do so see part of the problem is because really humans are like the only intelligent species that we know of on this planet and in this physical universe and so the problem becomes is that we're so isolated that we tend to think that were so good and so smart and this lets us get away with not acknowledging the relativity of our own deepest held assumptions and world views because even though we do have lots of different cultures around the planet still most of the humans who have all these different cultures still have 99% the same DNA very similar brains very similar perceptual organs and neurology and so therefore of course we all tend to think alike and we told him to agree but you know try getting a scientist to agree with some alien scientists from another planet that would be very very difficult different and you could imagine that they would disagree about what the data really is also the notion of data or facts is itself a relative notion you see because it's completely contingent upon which state of consciousness you're in different states of consciousness produce different data so when you're dreaming and sleeping that's one set of data when you're awake here in the world that's another set of data and so on so yeah just because like we can both look at a physical object and agree that that that's a tree or a cat or stuff like that we can have this with the same raw physical data understand that that's deeply entangled with our entire nervous system but also I want to address an even deeper point here which is a point about the absolute so here and we're gonna also address on an additional objection to relativism a lot of people have a sort of just intuitive almost knee-jerk reaction against relativism especially a lot of scientifically minded people because they tend to just Intuit that there must be something about reality which is not subjective which is an absolute and it's that which they want to call the data or the facts and in a certain sense this intuition is actually correct because there is the absolute there is being and in fact the only thing there is is the absolute the only thing there is is being and so being is literally the very substrate of everything but this being that I'm talking about here this is not the same thing as what you when you as a scientist or as a normal person have your facts and your data that is not being that is a conceptual projection that you're adding on to being so in a sense what I'm saying here is that if you are able to completely overcome your self agenda your sense of self in various kinds of conceptual categories and schemes and paradigms and worldviews and self deceptions and even your entire perceptual system if you're able to overcome all of that ultimately you will arrive at the absolute truth or at being that is the thing which grounds everything but this is so radical and so alien to what any ordinary human person has ever experienced that it's almost pointless to talk about it here because it is not nearly the same thing as data or facts the way that scientists think about it data and facts are relative absolute being is absolute but what that is you're not conscious of it yet you might think that I'm talking about some sort of other universe that's not it absolute being the irony of it and the difficulty of it is that it's right here right now everything is absolute being but it is not what you conventionally think of as data or facts or even perceptions even though it's not different from perception it is still not the same thing as human perception so you can only arrive at being through a state of Samadhi or a union between subject and object which I've talked about in past episodes so in a sense the reason that scientists can agree to some data or facts is also because there is that absolute and that absolute is not somewhere else that absolute is right here right now it's just that they're not and you're not fully conscious of what that is and you're missing her per ting it with your projections and your your world view you're kind of lumping it all together and then you're calling that data in facts another objection Leo if relativism is true how come people can still be factually wrong cuz doesn't relativism mean that whatever I believe is just true again that's a very silly notion of relativism that's not what I'm arguing for here it's much more nuanced than that so yes you can still be factually again factually wrong factually here is a relative matter and even wrong is a relative matter so again remember that all of our facts as human beings stem from our neurology and our psychology our common DNA our common ancestry our common culture so of course because of this this unifies a lot of us together and guess what's thinking along the same page but you can still be factually wrong because again your own perspective is relative to past perspectives that you've had so what it means for you to be factually wrong is that at at some point in the future you recognize that something you said in the past you know no longer holds true and that's because you know you're exploring more of reality you're you're exploring your own psyche and your own mind and you're realizing how you might have been deluding yourself tricking yourself fooling yourself misconstruing something misinterpreting something or even just simply not observing something carefully enough so of course because of this you can correct your own worldview and you can admit to yourself that you're wrong of course and somebody could even convince you that you're wrong by / presenting a persuasive argument that's because you're able to to compare what you believed before to what you are being proposed by this other person and then you're gonna put them side-by-side again relativistically you can compare them and you can decide that oh well maybe the thing I held before really didn't make much and again why why do you change your belief you change your belief precisely because you're comparing various perspectives in your own mind you're kind of juxtaposing them and you're trying to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle so the reason you accept some new theory or idea is because it fits better with your total picture of reality than some other part that you used to have and it helps you in some way so in this sense it's it's a very relativistic manner another objection so Leo does relativism mean that for flat-earthers the earth actually is flat is that what you're saying or is the earth actually round and then the flat earthers are deluded which one is it again it's a little bit tricky here we need to think about this in multiple ways from a certain perspective it actually is sort of the case that for a flat earth earth the earth actually is flat from their point of view that sort of is true which is exactly why these flat earthers can be so radical and they can be like so fully bought in to their worldview that literally what a flat earther gets on an airplane and he's flying he could look at the horizon of the earth and he could say left low look it's flat it's gonna look flat to him because you see you don't just experience the earth largely how you experience the earth is not just by simply observing it it's all the stuff that you also project onto it see so your expectations and your metaphysics actually colors your perceptions such that for example if you if you look at somebody that you hate you'll actually look at them and you'll see them you'll perceive them as being more ugly than they really are because your your eyes are actually being colored by that hatred and judgment that you had you're not able to see them properly and clearly now of course if the flat earther eventually you know flew into outer space and look down on the earth maybe he would see a globe and then this would this would be a problem for him but again this is still relative still relative because this is happening within his own consciousness this round earth that he's seeing or not seeing it's happening within his own consciousness and in this sense it's relative so what I'm saying is that for example when the flat earther dies the earth will disappear for him there will not be an earth it won't be flat and it won't be round and in a sense even as we're sitting here talking about the earth it sounds as though we're talking about some real object actually you have only an image in your mind of the earth it's purely a concept for you you have very little direct experience of the actual earth so keep that in mind I am NOT saying of course that just by thinking the earth is flat that when you fly into outer space and you look down it'll actually be flat for that person and for another person who believes the earth is round and he flies into outer space he'll see it as round I'm not saying that right it's a much more subtle thing that's being said here but I am also saying that the actual physical earth is relative for example when you're dreaming the earth doesn't exist before you were burned before you were born the earth didn't exist at all and after you die it won't exist for you and from your point of view that's all that matters you might say all Leo but but the earth will still exist I'll just be dead but the earth will still continue to exist no it won't the only reason you can think that is because right now you're alive so when you're dead the earth will not continue to exist because what it means to say that the earth exists is that it exists for you from your perspective not independently of you you're imagining that the earth can exist independent of you but that's you imagining it as long as you're alive see it's twisted here it's tricky another objection Leo how can history be relative well this objection is very easy to answer should really be obvious all history is highly partial you never see a complete history of mankind or a civilization or even though an individual person you're always cherry-picking elements and piecing stuff together and interpolating and interpreting it you don't really know the true history of Rome or of Egypt or of even individual people you don't know the true history or biography of Hitler or any or any other person throughout history really this is highly relative and then your the way you see history is is highly shaped by by how you want to see it and it can't colors your whole worldview and then your worldview colors how you interpret history as well see do you see history as as a constant progression towards freedom or maybe you see history as as various power dynamic and power struggles or maybe you see history is just like an evolution a fractal evolution or advances in technology or maybe you see it as advances in biology or whatever and there's different ways of looking at it each one of those is highly highly relative true history you might say is this infinite thing out of which you're plucking out individual strands and then you're you're highlighting and emphasizing those of course a very common objection is well Leo how can good and evil be relative this is such an obvious one that I don't even want to go into it in depth I've covered the relativity of good and evil many times in Prior episodes go check out my episode called what is the devil that explains the mechanics of good and evil and how relative it is basically what good and evil really are in the way that most people mean them is it's simply that which aids your survival what aids our survival you call good what hinders our survival you call evil and of course your survival is completely relative to who you are such that every person generally has vastly different survival strategies and therefore they have very vastly different notions of good and evil and that's why people disagree about good and evil so much all throughout history and up to this day another objection is well Leo does this mean that Hitler was actually good and that he was as good as Jesus because you're saying that good and evil are just relative so our Hitler and Jesus equivalent again remember I'm not saying that things are totally equal so I'm not saying Hitler was equal to Jesus they were very different they love different different lives they communicated differently and they interacted with people differently and Hitler ended up killing a lot more people than Jesus did so so those are important differences now is it good is it bad this all depends on your perspective is killing good or bad in your mind killing is not objectively good or bad it just depends on again what you're what you want what your goals are who you are so Hitler is not as good as Jesus it just is what it is and then you are attaching these labels to it another objection Leo how can we build a society if all values are relative as you're saying again relativism does not mean that we can't cooperate together that we can't build a consensus we can't come to some agreements we can of course we can largely because we share the same DNA we shame share the same brains the same neurology the same perceptions we are in the same environment for the most part we are all humans we basically have very similar needs for our survival of course there's minor differences but we have we have certain basic requirements and based on that which all of that is not absolute that's all relative because you know you could have been born an orangutan rather than human in which case you would you would not be able to build a society with you is you know orangutangs and humans can't build a society together it don't work orangutan don't even understand what a society is and they probably don't even need one so so so because we have so much commonality we're the same species basically that's why we have common needs and common values now of course in practice it's so difficult for cisely because even though we're all humans there's so much disagreement that it's very difficult to get a consensus about how to build a good society and what it means to build a good society our values are very different depending on our culture and what part of the world we live in and and even within that still so many disagreements even within the same family you've got so many disagreements between what is right and what is wrong and what is good and when it's bad and what is needed and what's not needed next objection but Leo Einstein said that the speed of light isn't relative it's a constant so doesn't that contradict you know her relativity here well two points about that first of all speed of light is not truly a constant because it varies depending on the medium that it's in so it's relative to the medium now you could say well but Leo I'm specifically talking about the speed of light in a vacuum well first of all there's no such thing as a vacuum a perfect vacuum doesn't exist so you're talking about some idealization but even if we grant you that and we say okay the speed of light in vacuum is totally constant first of all understand that right now scientists are actually debating this point it's not clear that the speed of light is actually a constant some scientists have actually proposed that there are tiny minut you know down to the thousands and millions of a decimal point fluctuations within the speed of light and that that that is not just because our instruments are not good enough to measure it accurately but they're actually saying that this is inherent to sort of the background noise of of space-time itself so that's a interesting theory it hasn't been proven or disproven yet it's just you know they're they're still working this stuff out so that's a possibility and of course that would mean that it's relative also the speed of light could change with the history of the universe we don't actually know if the speed of light has been constant throughout the entire birth of the whole universe that we're in there could be other universes in which the speed of light is a different speed it could also be the case that for example the speed of light is actually relative to the universe that we're in and the rate at which the universe is expanding and of course if you've studied the expansion of the university especially universe is not actually a constant it's accelerating and actually it's been said that the universe accelerates either is accelerating now or has accelerated in in the past at speeds faster than the speed of light see so maybe inside of the universe the speed of light is whatever it is and it's a constant but then that doesn't really determine what can happen outside of it outside the universe alright so there's there's a lot of potentially nested contexts here in various frames of reference that you have to take into account so it may not be as constant as we tell ourselves another objection so Leo does this mean that enlightenment is also relative because you talk about enlightenment don't you have to be consistent here and admit that enlightenment can be false and the answer is no enlightenment is we might say the one thing which is not relative it is the absolute enlightenment is awakening to that absolute that I've been alluding to throughout this episode that's the whole beauty and radical nature of enlightenment is that it's it's precisely the thing which gets you out of relativity and what that is you can't possibly imagine until you experience it for yourself and you actually awaken another objection but Leo aren't you contradicting yourself here because it sounds like you want me to accept everything that you say and what you're saying is that everything is relative but you want me to accept it as an absolute isn't it the case leo that everything you're saying here is relative so isn't your own theory eating itself alive because you're saying everything is relative but you want to say that that's true which is precisely what we can't say if we want to say that everything is relative this is a very good point and this is a common mistake that many post modernists make is they try to say for example that everything is relative all for example all morals are relative and they go one step further and this is their mistake is they say yes all value systems and morals are relative and therefore we shouldn't prefer one over the other we shouldn't marginalize anyone we should treat them all equally but of course there is no such should just because all value systems are relative doesn't mean that some value systems aren't more useful in certain situations than others again depends on your goals but let's return back to this point more directly about me contradicting myself the nature of the absolute is that when you speak about it it contradicts itself because language is dualistic and relative you can't speak about the absolute without contradicting yourself this is not a mistake or an error or an oversight on my own my part I'm actually deeply aware of this and you need to become deeply aware of it too so even though there is the absolute nothing I'm saying here is the absolute so if I said that this video and everything I'm saying here I want you to take as the absolute and that this is the absolute truth if I said that mm-hmm then you'd be right I'd be a hypocrite but I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that everything I'm saying here is also relative so I'm actually in accordance with what I'm saying I'm saying everything is relative including language and this is part of language and these are thoughts these are concepts it's all relative but there is an absolute me saying there is an absolute is not the absolute that's still relative don't make that mistake but if we go beyond all the words to that which cannot be pointed to or spoken or communicated or thought or imagined that is the absolute and me saying that is still relative so the point you have to get here is that there's just absolutely no way to communicate the absolute but it's there so this is the finger pointing at the moon and you need to go beyond focusing on the finger and actually go to the moon and so if you keep insisting that I contradict myself that's you looking at the finger because you're looking at my words and my thoughts and concepts and my teachings which of course are relative I'm not saying my teachings are absolute I'm saying that my teachings can perhaps if you do the work one day get you to realize that there's something beyond the teachings beyond the relative that which cannot be spoken that which is read between the lines which cannot be explicated in any way and that will be the absolute truth and you will know it for yourself but you yourself will also not be able to think it or communicate it to anybody else that's the very radical and paradoxical nature of the absolute so are all my teachings relative of course they are none of my teachings can capture all of reality my teachings cannot capture the whole elephant all they are are just maps and models little tiny photographs of the elephant's ass not the whole elephant you got to go and experience the whole elephant for yourself all I'm doing is I'm telling you that there is an elephant that you can go explore and you can discover all of its nooks and crannies and various aspects in in detail and I will never be able to speak them all to you so my teachings are not a substitute for you realizing the entire elephant in fact really for you realizing that you are the entire elephant so when I'm talking about the elephant I'm really just talking about you so those are all the objections now we're wrapping up here I just want to conclude by saying that understanding relativity I hope you can start to see is absolutely crucial for understanding reality and for going deep into your own personal development work that's why we're covering this topic this is not just philosophy if you want to know more about the absolute and you're curious go check out my many videos about the absolute check out my video about ask techno do ality check out my two-part series on understanding absolute infinity part 1 and part 2 check out my video about what is god Part one and Part two that all explains the absolute and I have many more episodes that explain the absolute so search for those I've talked about it many many many times so I don't want to rehash all of that here that's it for part 1 make sure you stay tuned for part 2 believe it or not we still have a lot to say about relativity and that's it we're done here for today please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll find my blog with various insights that I post exclusive videos I recently posted a deep awakening experience that I had exclusively on my blog in video form go check that out might be interesting to you check out my book list check out the life purpose course check out the forum where you can discuss the stuff and ask your questions and finally I never want you to ever just take the things that I say on faith the point of these videos is to get you to start thinking for yourself to contemplate all of these points carefully this is very advanced stuff and you're not going to be able to understand it if all you do is you just sit there and passively listen and just nod your head and accept it all and then move on to the next video that's not gonna work I expect you to think about this stuff question it challenge it play devil's advocate but again not so much towards me because that just becomes a projection but rather with yourself sit down and think through these various points I made various objections to come up with your own objections and then try to defeat them try to answer them try to really understand what is relativity rather than just being a skeptic or a cynic and just telling me all Leo relativity's all horseshit here's why you're wrong rather than doing that instead make the counterintuitive move and actually just start from the point of saying okay relativity if relativity is true how can it be true and then actually think through it as though it were true that's a much better way to explore and try to understand what something is by assuming it to be true rather than to by assuming it to be false you know like if you want to understand for example what Christianity is you need to enter Christianity assuming that it's true not that it's false because if you assume that it's false you're not gonna understand Christianity likewise with any other worldview for example if you really want to understand Nazism start reading Nazi books assuming that they're all true not that they're false now that doesn't mean that I want you to accept Nazism as true this is just a sort of a mental exercise you're doing you know an intelligent person can assume something is true look at the world from that perspective for a while sometimes for days for months for years even and then switch it off and say okay well that was just a thought experiment now let me look at it this other way let me assume that it was false or let me assume something else was true that contradicted that other thing that I was holding it's true you got to be cognitively flexible enough to be able to jump back and forth between different perspectives like this this is one of the keys to this work and lastly I want you to notice if you get emotionally triggered or reactive against relative anyway and I want you to pinpoint those exact places are you triggered by moral relativism epistemic relativism ontological relativism are you triggered that time and space are relative or that Hitler being bad and evil is relative or about slavery or whatever notice those and watch those very carefully in and then question those and ask yourself why am I getting triggered by this there is something very valuable for you to discover there because really the only reason you ever get triggered about anything is because it threatens your survival and sense of self and your world view which is very integral to your sense of self and to your entire life and to your survival strategy so that is where the real work is done here is by observing your emotional reactions anytime you get emotionally reacted by anything that I say turn inwards and find that thing within yourself which is the cause of you being triggered that's how you'll really grow not by ranting at me with your objections and your opinions and telling me how wrong I am this doesn't help grow you this is a complete distraction and of course this doesn't mean that I can't be wrong of course I can be wrong I'm fallible which is precisely why I want you to contemplate this stuff just in case I make an error somewhere or I delude myself you can catch me on that error the way you catch me on an error is not by being cynical and skeptical about the things I say but rather by taking the things I say seriously and contemplating them for yourself and then actually discovering what's really true that's how you debunked me not by creating stupid reaction debunking videos that that's that's all just ego it's all just a waste of time which is why I don't really even like to respond to that sort of stuff so there you go stay tuned for part two you