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[Music] understanding war and conflict part one so war has been in the news lately as you might have heard and i thought this would be a great opportunity for us to think about and contemplate the existential roots of war uh i'm not going to be talking about specific wars here we're going to be taking a very meta perspective as we like to do here with this work so this will help you to make sense of all wars not just the current one that's going on and there's always going to be some new war going on so we might as well look at war more generally than getting lost in the the forest i mean like getting lost in the trees and not seeing the forest so that's what we're going to do here and actually it's really profound to think about what war is and why it exists like i remember when i was a kid maybe 7 10 years old i would see war on television in the movies and stuff like that and it always baffled me why do people go to war i could understand why would somebody knowingly risk his life uh and go into the trenches uh into impossible odds and fight for what like what is the point of it uh it seemed nonsensical and uh i think for a lot of people they struggle making sense of war and because of this they get naive child like black and white ideas of war being good or evil this sort of stuff or taking sides within a war one side being good one side being evil and this is just really not appropriate for understanding what war is and really more fundamentally what conflict is because war as i'm defining it here is just a a subset of a larger category called conflict and that's really what we're going to help you to understand here with this episode so um it baffled me and i think war if you're honest with yourself war should baffle you too and rather than just saying that one side is good and one side is evil this gives you an opportunity to enter a kind of a not knowing and a kind of a wonder of like why is reality constructed this way and if you've had some mystical experiences and you've had experiences of god and you understand that god exists for example and that god is love and god is goodness you might wonder well why would god create war and so it's very important for you to contemplate these questions and then to gain understanding and insight into the whys of it because otherwise you're never going to be at peace with war and that's the whole point here so in this episode we will explore the existential route of not just war but all conflict of any kind conflict actually has a profound metaphysical and spiritual root to it which is not discussed or understood by almost anyone in society you don't hear on the news people talking about the metaphysical spiritual roots of some war that's going on mostly what you see on the news is people taking sides people blaming and demonizing others and talking about atrocities and so forth and while that's happening like the real gold is being lost in the conflict and human conflict is made much worse by people not understanding these metaphysical and spiritual roots the existential nature of conflict and so the conflict just keeps building on top of itself keeps escalating keeps perpetuating in these cycles over and over again it never really occurs for people to even wonder why why conflict at all and nobody in school or university taught you the true source of all conflict in the world sure your history teacher might have taught you about wars over oil or resources or for certain nationalistic causes or ideological causes or border disputes things like that but these these are still just like surface level understandings of really what conflict is about and what source is it so existentially why does conflict occur within reality at all why isn't reality peaceful you might wonder if you're a spiritual person you might wonder you know like why didn't god structure reality in such a way that everything is just paradise in heaven after all if god is all-powerful and god exists couldn't god create a peaceful world what kind of [ __ ] up god is this well we're going to answer that for you but first i want to broaden this idea of war to include all conflict and so here i want to give you an example of a list of examples of different kinds of conflict beyond just war uh so war is maybe perhaps the biggest and the worst of it but also think about think about how how broad of a category conflict really is so we've got war we've got all forms of violence included in that we've got genocide we've got racism as conflict think of all the violence that comes with racism we've got physical abuse we've got bullying we've got rape this is all conflict uh very sort of a very primordial form of conflict is you can look at the animal kingdom look at animals fighting look at birds when you go outside you can see sometimes birds fighting with each other attacking each other sometimes you'll see like small two smaller birds flying and attacking a larger bird to chase it away or if you go outside i remember i would i would go meditate outside my apartment where i used to live in vegas i'd i would meditate outside my apartment on the lawn there's like a big grassy lawn and then i would just observe the birds there and i the more i meditated the more i saw how these birds were interacting with each other and a lot of times they were fighting and they were fighting over mates i guess maybe food stuff like that um think of conflict when you have two animals locking horns with each other two rams or two elk budding heads you see this all over the animal kingdom if you watch some of those discovery channel documentaries and of course humans do the same thing over mates as well a lot of what that is is about conflict over mates humans do that too in their own way think about power struggles political battles political parties and how they fight with each other coups revolutions assassinations think about sports competition that's a form of conflict boxing mma martial arts think about business the domain of business various kinds of business battles that go on legal disputes that's also conflict uh i read about how these large companies like google or apple or microsoft they buy up smaller companies just to acquire their patents so that they have a a portfolio of patents that they can use to sort of pummel and bludgeon the other company with to threaten them with lawsuits so all these companies basically infringe on each other's patents um shamelessly and then it's a question of you know how many patents do i have in my portfolio versus how many patents do you have in your portfolio and who's infringed on how many of those patents right so if i infringe on one of your patents the best thing i can do is shore up my portfolio of patents so that i can then claim that you infringe on one of my patents and so my infringement why my one infringement cancels out one of your infringements right and these these patent disputes can be in the billions of dollars so um actually google's biggest acquisition was the acquisition of motorola for like 12 billion dollars and the reason they acquired you might wonder like why would google acquire motorola motorola is this sort of like lame old cell phone company they don't make very good phones you probably nobody nobody you know probably owns a motorola phone so why would google pay 12 billion dollars for motorola well it's because motorola had a giant portfolio of patents that google needed in their fight against apple and uh qualcomm and other sorts of um big players in the you know telecom smartphone sector so just you know interesting to observe how that works and of course that's just one example of legal disputes there's so many other kinds of legal disputes that you see in the news how about within relationships relationship disputes fights within relationships divorces uh fights within families a lot of family conflict maybe you've been unfortunate to have some of that most of us have to some degree how about ideological battles ideological disputes and arguments how about all the conflict we see online these days online debates online battles twitter wars flame wars on forums and reddit and elsewhere there's so much that going on even war in the media now different forms of media are attacking each other in conflict with each other there's mainstream media now there's the rise of sort of alternative social online media independent media and then they they they fight with each other interesting how that works or different mainstream media channels fight over each other you know fox news blames msnbc msnbc blames fox news and cnn and they're all fighting with each other battle over resources geopolitical posturing religious battles religious conflicts think about how much of that there has been in history culture wars those have been really popular lately the weaponization of sort of cultural divisions bar room brawls gang rivalry tribal feuding and warfare border disputes issues like israel-palestine for example military campaigns of course terrorism business negotiations are filled with conflict predator prey relationships in the animal kingdom of course enslavement exploitation academic rivalries there's conflict within academia conflict on college campuses conflict between corporations and unions negotiating for workers rights billing disputes have you ever had a conflict over a bill with your insurance company or with some debt collector who thinks you owe them something that you don't actually own them owe them or maybe you do owe them you don't want to pay children fighting with each other of course that's very common on in school and on playgrounds competition over mates of course is huge um gender wars genders in conflict with each other men and women not understanding each other cyber warfare now is common and popular hacking every day i read the news and i hear of new hacks just like hacking hacking hack every day there's a new hack of somebody some giant company or some some government gets hacked theft of course is a form of conflict and then there's even internal conflict you have conflict within your own mind within your own self you're conflicted and sometimes it feels like you're within battling yourself over you know one party who says don't eat the chocolate cake because you want to lose weight to look good in front of all your friends and then the other party who says you want that chocolate cake you're conflicted uh there's even conflict interesting um psycholo like within abnormal psychology and various kinds of neurological disorders there's interesting conflict that results there for example with people with split personalities sometimes there's like a severing of connection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and then what that results in is that literally one half of your body um starts to act at odds with the other half of your body so one half of your body might want that chocolate cake and you're like for example let's say your your left hemisphere wants the chocolate cake so it tells your right arm to reach for it and then your right hemisphere says no i don't want the chocolate cake i want to look good in the mirror and it tells your left arm to to to take the fork away out of your hand and so there's funny examples where it literally works like that where one hand will reach for the cake the other hand will grab that hand and pull it away and then it'll be like a tug of war between the two hands and then how do you know which one wins out see this is why it's so important to integrate your mind and to be acting as a whole person and not just as a split you know a collection of split agendas and personalities because then you get disorder and absurdity and a lot of times it feels like our society has this sort of split personality disorder especially within american politics lately um and and also within global international affairs there's also the sort of split personality disorder where you know different parts of the world are aligning with each other and then acting against each other so a lot of disagreement discord and conflict and just even sometimes you can find conflict on very on a very mundane level in your own personal life like disagreement about which restaurant to go to with your friends or family or disagreement about who gets to keep the dog after a divorce that could lead to conflict so those are just some examples of conflict beyond just war and so now when we're going to be answering this question of why does conflict occur we're really addressing all of that at once and also war so why isn't life peaceful well i would like to suggest to you that the existential reason for this is because conflict occurs because of finitude so we have the infinite and we have the finite the finite is the ordinary world in which humans live and survive most of the time this is what we call life right it's your friends it's your work it's your family it's international affairs it's governments it's societies it's business it's law this is the fight the world of the finite then there's the infinite the infinite is god the infinite is what spirituality is about and many people have never become conscious of the infinite but let me assure you it exists and you can become conscious of it so there's infinite consciousness that's like the highest level of reality infinite consciousness creates divisions within itself and imagines boundaries these boundaries or forms are what create the physical world the thing we call the physical material world if there's no division if there's no difference if there's no boundary then there's no creation and there's no form so division is form and form is difference we've talked about this in the past so i won't recapitulate that here but just think of form as difference so what that means is that like a cat is different from a dog literally what a cat is is the difference between it and everything else that it is not likewise for a dog so it's a specific finite set of differences that creates a cat versus a dog and then they fight with each other so even though reality as a whole we've talked about many times is infinite and it's one it's one whole thing it's indivisible at the same time it also contains divisions within itself it has parts and those parts even though they're always part of a unity those parts are finite and so then what happens is that these parts come into contact with each other and because they're finite the nature of the finite is that it conflicts with itself because fundamentally what we're talking about is we're talking about division we're talking about divisions within oneness division then creates conflict see you have different parts of reality these subparts we might call them of reality they must struggle with each other for survival and if they don't then they cease to exist as that particular form they become infinite they merge back into infinity right so for an object to be born it has to be born out of infinite indiscriminate oneness into something specific and finite and then it has to you know if it wants to stick around for any significant amount of time it has to defend itself and its boundary to be that thing otherwise it deteriorates and collapses this is true not only of living organisms like cells and animals and humans but it's true even if static inanimate physical objects like a chair or your computer it all degrades your chair degrades your computer degrades it's going to collapse it's going to lose its form and eventually it's going to turn to dust and that dust eventually will get absorbed into some black hole or into the sun or whatever and literally merge into into oneness so this is the fate of all things not just living things but um inanimate objects as well and so what's important to realize is that there is a fundamental existential trade-off between finite things uh most fundamentally for you to exist something else has to not exist do you understand this for example for you to exist as that human that you are right now you had to not be a kangaroo you had to not be a coffee table you had to not be a taco you had to not be your mother you had to not be your nemesis or your enemy you had to not be black or not be white or not be asian or not be russian or not be american or not be japanese or whatever there's a lot of things you're not which define what you are see what you are is interconnected existentially with what you're not that's what makes you the finite thing you think you are this is true not just of humans but of all objects for a rock to exist as a rock it must not be a plank of wood it must not be a taco it must not be a kangaroo or anything else it has to be exactly what it is that specific rock the way that you see it and what a rock really is it's not an object per se it's a division within an infinite field of consciousness and so it's a set of imaginary boundaries with an infinite mind which is the mind of god which is your mind of course your mind is the mind of god imagining you to be a human creating a human boundary that is what you call you so the question then arises which imaginary boundaries will survive all boundaries are imaginary if you stop imagining them they all collapse back down into uh pure indiscriminate infinity so which of these forms and boundaries will survive and who gets to say which forms will overpower other forms and so fundamentally conflict is equal to incompatibility or a lack of harmony and coherence because if you have a bunch of parts and those parts move around without siphoning energy from other parts then you might say you have harmony and coherence the energy is kind of being passed along in a smooth way but a lot of what we see in reality and in nature is where one part is leeching off of some other part and in fact this is sort of necessary this is how all organisms survive every organism has to feast on some other organism and you might say well what about the ones that are just like photosynthesizing and getting their energy directly from the sun they don't they don't feast on anything well still even those who are just photosynthesizing they still have to convert for example molecules they have to destroy molecules they have to take oxygen atoms split them apart they have to take water water atoms molecules split them apart they have to take carbon dioxide split that apart carbon oxygen combine them together right so even within a plant an innocent plant you might say a peaceful plant that peaceful plant is still it's taking up space in the environment its roots are still they need to ground themselves into the ground so they're literally shaping the earth as they're doing that sometimes they will actually break through rocks and concrete have you ever seen like the roots of a tree breaking through a slab of concrete on the sidewalk right well what is that fun i mean that's conflict the roots of that tree are in conflict with that rock or that concrete um and so you might look at that and actually might see that there's a sort of a lack of harmony there and so this is happening all across all across reality not just with living organisms but even inanimate objects uh for example for for a river to maintain its course through the land the river has a certain form to it a certain shape and then the land has its own shape the land ship reshapes the river and then the re the river simultaneously reshapes the land right they're both acting on each other at the same time and sometimes the river will cut through rock over years and decades and centuries and then sometimes the rock will be too strong and it will divert the river causing the river to overflow or to flow in different directions and to change its shape see so even when it comes to a river and just the terrain there's a conflict happening there that's pretty profound huh see i bet you you never thought of war as something that like is common to rivers and trees and concrete and rocks and the earth itself you tend to think of of war just as very limited narrow thing that only humans do but when you really broaden your idea of war to something like conflict and then you start to look around you start to look at nature you start to see just how much conflict there is going on around you like a lot of times we tend to think of like nature oh nature is so peaceful really nature is so peaceful have you actually looked at nature nature is pretty brutal a lot of things are happening in nature that are quite violent not just of course within the animal kingdom which is obvious to see but even just within uh earth itself you have volcanoes erupting and exploding uh like a a giant volcano can release more uh ash than a nuclear bomb a super volcano exploding can cause a like a nuclear-like winter on the planet [Music] trees you know trees seem like such peaceful beings right but trees are not very peaceful trees are always fighting with each other go look at the at a rainforest and you'll see all the trees you'll see vines that are growing on top of trees leaching nutrients from trees different trees growing to different heights competing with each other for sunlight occupying and stealing sunlight from other trees right the taller the tree the more sunlight it absorbs and then anything growing under it is going to die that's that's war for you right there that's an arms race for who is the tallest tree in the forest similar to like who's the biggest gorilla who's going to get all the best mates so if you're a living organism you need things to survive because a living organism feasts and sucks energy from its environment in one way or another so you always have a list of things you need for survival every organism does so you might need x to survive but the problem is there's some other organism within reality because see by definition an organism is not the totality of of reality an organism is a subpart of reality every organism is only a part of the whole so by definition if you have one organism you're gonna have multiple organisms and these organisms by virtue of the fact that they're different from each other they're not all the same organism they're going to have different survival requirements because every form has a different need to maintain its different shape you see and so if i need x to survive you might need the opposite of x to survive you see and therein lies the fundamental incompatibility and conflict so there are zero sum dynamics baked into finite things all finite things all forms exist as trade-offs with other forms if you want to think of it very abstractly you can think of it as like concave versus convex if you take an object like a rectangular object and you want to make it you want to cut it into two you can either cut it straight down the middle then you'll have two equal parts or you can do sort of a circular section cut then you're going to have one that's concave and one that's convex but when you're making that circular cut through this rectangular single solid object you're going to cut it into two parts two subparts but you see how the concave and the convex are just they're interdefined you can't really have one without the other so this is the nature of how consciousness works in these dualities this is just the existential nature of form so then what happens is that you you draw these boundaries and you have these forms and then they enter into a competition with each other and in a sense what's happening is that god is playing a tug of war with itself because god is the entire thing it's all the subparts but then the question arises which subpart is stronger than the other because they're not all equally strong each form has its own pros and cons as to what it's able to do for example the form of a screwdriver is different from the form of a hammer is different from the form of a knife and they all do different things and they can excel at different things but they also have their own weaknesses there's things that a knife is weak at that a hammer is strong at and vice versa and same of course for all living organisms and you see so the problem for god then is um you have all these parts and all of these parts are not infinitely powerful they all have weaknesses there's always a trade-off and so because of this no one part is able to monopolize and gain a stranglehold over all the other parts you can't have one part of god rule over all of god this is the interesting aspect of god's design every part must must have a weakness because god itself the totality is the highest power you see the highest power in the universe is not to be a finite thing it's to be infinite and by being infinite you include all the finite sub components within yourself right so wholeness we've talked about this in my episodes about wholeness and holism uh it is the highest power oneness is the highest power and so then that leaves god observing its finite subparts wrestling with its with themselves you see and then because god is indiscriminate and a lack of bias and infinite love it can't choose favorites it can't love one part more than another part see it's only the parts that have biases and that prefer one part over some other part so you might think that like well leo surely god loves um the defending side in a war more than god loves the attacking side of the war like the invading army like surely god loved the polish people more than he loved the german people in world war ii more than he loved hitler who attacked and you know invaded poland surely right no that's your bias because you're a human and you have a certain allegiance an agenda maybe an anti-german agenda or a pro-polish agenda or whatever or maybe your agenda is that you want world peace that's still your agenda see god can't have such a bias in such an agenda so for god it just observes and loves all of it equally that it has to because that's what god god is it's oneness it's love oneness means it incorporates everything that means it has to love hitler it has to love the invader as much as the defender and so god can't choose sides it has to remain totally neutral now for a very selfish and biased organism this seems like there's something wrong with god it's like leo this is this is very wrong god can't just be neutral about hitler god has to hate him hitler and punish hitler the way that the way that i want the way my ego wants the way my survival demands but that's precisely what god cannot do you see because you're selfish and god is selfless and your selfishness is preventing you from realizing the power of god's infinite selflessness and infinite love and so when you are asking god to hate on your behalf you're actually infecting and corrupting god with your own ego so the dilemma for god is how does god divide up its power well it's not really a dilemma for god because god doesn't really care but we as if you're identified as some subpart of god then you really care see you're attached to having power given to you by god you want as much power given to you by the universe see you want the strongest army you want the strongest country you want the strongest family you want the biggest bank account you want the most sex you want you want all the most favorable conditions for your survival that's your selfishness talking um but you see the problem is that you're not the only one you're not the only subpart of god there's an infinite number of subparts of god so why would god give you more of that power than it would give to others see you want all of these goodies but so does hitler so do your enemies see and you feel that you deserve it more than hitler and your enemies but god doesn't see it that way reality doesn't see it that way because it's truly unbiased so god cannot create a peaceful world because peace is actually only possible under total unity and indifference that's literally what peace is to be at peace you have to be completely indifferent so indifferent that you don't care about which forms survive or not but this is unacceptable to you because you're so attached to maintaining your particular form and surviving as that particular human thing that you've identified yourself to be and total unity this is not what you want you want to dominate you want to monopolize you want your country to be the strongest you want your company to be the best you want your family and your children to have more than others you don't want an equal distribution of resources within reality you don't want uh well i guess it depends on your position for example if you're living in a affluent part of the world you don't want an equal distribution of resources in the world because that means that for example poor people in africa the millions of them that there are they're gonna they're gonna have to take some of your resources you have to share your resources with them you don't want to do that because that will take resources away from your children every dollar you send to africa for some charity to help some poor hungry child is a dollar you take away from your own child because there's only a finite number of dollars in the world and in your bank account and the reason there's a finite number of dollars in your bank account because there's only a finite number of days you have to live as a finite human organism and there's only so much money you can earn given those finite number of days there's so much so so much value you can generate for the world even if you generate billions of dollars that's still a finite amount and even you might say well but leah what about those really wealthy people like jeff bezos who have a hundred billion dollars elon musk and so forth um it seems like they have an infinite supply of money but actually they don't they don't uh every billion dollars that one of these billionaires could give to a charity he has to decide whether he's going to give it to save the animals save the children in africa save the children in ukraine save the uh you know uh something else in some other place save the world from global warming how do you decide think about if you had a billion dollars to give away who would you give it to how would you decide that says that's an interesting interesting problem notice that your biases your personal biases and your selfishness would inform that decision like maybe you have a real like soft heart for animals you know cute cuddly animals and you want to give a billion dollars to save all the animals okay i mean that's your bias you see but as you're doing that and saving all the cute kittens and and dogs and so forth from getting euthanized let's say you do that okay but what about the the starving children in africa or even the homeless people in your own hometown forget about africa just in your own hometown there's homeless people who are starving and hungry you might say okay so so what's more important is it more important to save the animals or is it more important to save the the starving people in your hometown because they're closer to you or is it more important to save the children in africa because they suffer even worse than the the people in your hometown because the people in your hometown they might be for example homeless but at least maybe there's like a uh they can get free food or something but people in africa they don't even get free food or maybe even the people in africa you might say i don't have it so bad um because they can like forage for stuff in the forest for example but maybe you got to send it to like a place where there's war to a city that's just bombed to hell they don't even have water supply maybe they need it there because they're going to get bombed out of existence where do you send your money you see how challenging this is existentially you can't help everybody the nature of finite things is they can they can only exist at the cost of other finite things this is basically the principle of conservation of energy so you've been taught about conservation of energy as a sort of a physical property of the universe of the physical universe and physicists usually talk about it in terms of like inanimate objects or sometimes biologists might talk about it in terms of like you know animals siphoning energy from other animals and species and so forth but but it goes so much deeper than that really conservation of energy is this the nature of all finite things because when you have one thing reality as a whole one consciousness the only way to create parts or objects within it is to create forms by subdividing this one object every subdivision you see every cut through a single object creates two objects at the same time in a sense this is duality when you make that slice you're creating two parts at the same time we've talked about this in my episode called understanding duality part one part two part three go check that out we go deep there on how duality works i give you a list of a hundred or more different dualities that are important for you to contemplate but like fundamentally you can't have a north without a south you create both the same time north and south are interdefined see that so if what you really want is peace you can only get that with formlessness and indifference by realizing the unity that unifies all differences all forms forms or differences and as long as you're interested in survival and you're attached to survival then you cannot have peace and the degree to which you're struggling to survive is the degree to which you don't have peace and so one definition of what god is is god is peace absolute peace infinite peace how do you get infinite peace through complete indifference to everything and another word for complete indifference to anything is love love is indifference love is a lack of distinction love is a lack of bias or preference for one thing over another thing you might say well you know that's that's not what love is leo love is is some some human emotion uh i've discussed this elsewhere go check out my episodes about what is love part one and part two and i've i've covered love a lot i'm talking about here a much deeper love than human emotions i'm talking about platonic love metaphysical love so survival cannot be peaceful and you are attached to survival now so am i so i'm not blaming you here so it's interesting to observe that no part of reality can monopolize all the other parts and yet almost every part of reality tries to monopolize all the other parts have you noticed this these monopolies don't just pertain to businesses gobbling up smaller businesses although of course that is the quintessential example of that but um even something like a black hole what is a black hole a black hole is an object a form that is sucking up all the other objects next to it in a certain sense the black hole is like the perfect uh physical manifestation of monopolization this is what all um corporations aspire to they they basically turn into black holes trying to gobble up everything nearby it's also what countries and empires aspire to a a country grows so big it turns into like a sort of a black hole sucking up smaller satellite countries around itself until it creates a giant empire and then the empire grows larger and larger and larger and larger and where does it end well what ends up happening is see what you would think like well why wouldn't a black hole just suck up everything in the universe at some point well actually it doesn't and it can't first of all because there's not just one black hole there's many black holes so which black hole is going to suck up other black holes you see if you have two black holes next to each other let's say black holes extend infinitely far and they can suck up to an infinite for our distance um in practice they really can't but if you give it long enough time you know in theory every black hole in the universe would eventually gravitate towards itself towards other black holes and then they would all start to lump together and sucking each other up but then how do you determine which black hole sucks up the other black hole what's going to be the bigger black hole right so supposedly in our universe in our physical universe there's one black hole that is the biggest and there's one black hole that is the smallest and then there's a bunch of millions of them in between somewhere and so of course you have to go through all the nitty-gritty details of you know which is bigger than which and who's going to suck up whom the most but eventually it doesn't really matter because all of them will end up sucking each other up you know the bill the millions of black holes will turn into thousands of black holes those thousands will turn into hundreds those hundreds will turn into tens those tens will eventually turn into two black holes one of those are going to be bigger than the other one um and even if they're identical it doesn't really matter they're both going to merge into each other and eventually you're going to end up with what one object one single thing but of course in practice it doesn't even work this way because these black holes actually emit bits of radiation it's called hawking radiation so in practice a black hole is never going to suck up the entire universe because it actually for it for a black hole to work it turns out that the very the very structure of a black hole is that yes it sucks stuff in but as it sucks in it must also leak some stuff out otherwise it couldn't work this is called hawking radiation so eventually a black hole even though it sucks in a lot of stuff around it eventually it peters out and it dies even a black hole dies you see so even you might think like if anything could monopolize everything in the universe it would be a black hole but it can't because even the black hole is a finite object and it's not powerful enough to to unify all of reality the only thing that's powerful enough to unify all of reality is infinity or god or nothingness or consciousness or formlessness or emptiness and so of course if a black hole can't do it then certainly a corporation can't do it see you might have a fear in your mind that leo what if one corporation monopolizes everything every other corporation wouldn't that be an awful dystopian world to live in well don't worry it's not going to happen because there's natural trade-offs see as a corporation grows bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes so big it becomes unwieldy and inflexible and it lacks the agility necessary to innovate and so in practice when corporations actually become very big they actually end up dying and going bankrupt and they get out competed by smaller corporations which is not to say that we shouldn't have antitrust regulation i think we should that's important stuff so don't use these existential ideas to say that oh okay we don't have any regulations on companies no we we do uh there's plenty of need for that and you know empires you might think well what about an empire what happens if one country dominates every other country in the world maybe the way that hitler wanted maybe i don't know did hitler want world domination maybe he did maybe it was just like europe um did he did he want to dominate africa i don't know or like south america i don't know i guess he probably probably did um there were wars in africa at least in the north but anyways um you would think like what if there ever comes like a tyrant and a dictator who amasses so much power that he creates an empire that just takes over the entire planet well in practice it doesn't work because again fundamentally one part one finite part does not ever have enough power because it have it has trade-offs by virtue of being finite it doesn't have enough power to encompass everything now it can go pretty far like for example the american empire stretches pretty wide around the world um the british empire used to as they say the sun never set on the british empire hundreds of years ago that it all collapsed so there's a lot of empire you know the roman empire was enormous it also collapsed the mongol empire of genghis khan was was i think technically the largest empire that ever existed it basically stretched from from the the east coast of china all the way like across europe it's insane the size of the mongol empire its height but it didn't last very long it fell apart it fractured and divided itself so i have an episode called unity versus division or rather division versus unity search for that because because really what we're talking about here is division versus unity and the sort of back and flow back and forth flow between these two things so um the design of of the world is so incredible because thanks to this inherent nature of finite things finite things must always be ever flowing and the universe is always running and it's never locked into a static state precisely because no one part can monopolize everything like everything can't just be sucked into one black hole because if it could then reality would sort of just like get stuck into some static state existing as that one black hole that can't ever happen and this is the genius of the design of god this is the highest good the highest love the way reality or god is designed is that god is designed to ensure maximum diversity it's all inclusive it's total right infinite diversity infinite diversity is a maximization of love why because your love is highest when it can incorporate the most within it until literally imagine you incorporate absolutely everything that could possibly exist within yourself that would be the highest that's what god is that's what infinity is in a sense if all conflict stopped reality would freeze even motion would stop because you see even even molecules of gas in a jar let's say we just have some oxygen in a jar you might say well where's the conflict there but even in that jar if the temperature is anything above absolute zero the molecules are bouncing around that's what temperature is it's a measure of the bouncing and velocities of all the you know average of the molecules they're bouncing around they're colliding and hitting into each other when they collide they generate a little bit of heat and they lose a little bit of their energy as they collide right they're colliding colliding colliding heat is dissipating because they're they're bouncing into each other they're losing momentum and there's friction going on between these different little molecules eventually if that jar was sitting there long enough it would it would go to absolute zero all the heat would be lost and all the motion the molecules would settle down into a total freeze this is the heat death of the universe and if that happened eventually it would all just become one single thing right not only would the whole universe freeze but it would literally fuse into one singularity and that would be ultimate peace that would be consciousness in its undifferentiated state that would be pure formlessness pure emptiness that would be the godhead that would be infinity that would be god's mind in total repose total rest this is you know imagine what the universe was like before the big bang that's what that would be so even though you might say you want peace do you really want peace because that's real peace you call that peace death scientists call it heat death the heat death of the universe it's hard to love that because you're attached to existing within the formed world the formed universe you don't want a formless universe you call that death you're afraid of that so there's a paradox of unity the paradox of unity is this absolute unity must include division within itself it can't exclude division because if it excluded anything it wouldn't be unity it wouldn't be absolute unity so actually uh the same also applies to infinity absolute infinity must include all finite things and so therefore unity leads to division and division leads to unity you see it's a cycle it goes in both directions and as i talked about in my episode about division versus unity you know what you see all across nature and all across human culture and society is that things become unified no let me rephrase it um things differentiate themselves starting from unity things differentiate themselves and then as they differentiate the differentiates pro the differentiations and divisions proliferate and then it reaches a certain point like a pendulum that swings back and forth eventually once there's enough division the division starts to collapse and unif and reunify and then as they reunify they redivide again in a fractal fashion and this keeps happening fractally to an infinite degree have you noticed this this is [ __ ] profound this is the very heart of the design of reality division creates an impulse towards unity and unity creates an impulse towards division but this unification process is a struggle to go from division to unity is not all rainbows and butterflies people usually think of unity as some beautiful positive peaceful thing but it isn't so simple in practice and the reason that is is because you yourself are not united yet see you're divided you are divided from the world you're divided from your family you're divided from other humans you're divided from other races from other species from animals you're divided from inanimate objects so you have all these divisions in your own mind about what you are you're even divided about your own psychology you're divided about what you want in the world do you want to be fit or do you want to eat junk food you're divided even about that do you want sex with this person or do you want sex with that person you're divided about that see so because your mind is so divided that distorts your perception of what unity is and your ability to love unity you actually can't love unity when your mind is divided unity terrifies you because you're attached to certain divisions you've identified yourself with certain divisions and absolute unity would erase those divisions you call that death so in practice when unity is is occurring within reality this can look very ugly see ultimately when you really zoom out and you look at what is the universe doing it used to be a total unity then it exploded into a big bang of division it divided into all these different molecules and atoms right or rather into into just like quarks let's say then those turn into atoms then those atoms started unifying into molecules then those molecules started unifying further into proteins then those proteins into cells and to dna and then those into organisms and then those organisms are like one single cellular organisms then those single cellular organisms to multicellular organisms those multicellular organisms into more complex organisms than and mammals then those mammals you know they started dividing themselves into males and females and they started to recombine together to create more offspring and and so on like this um and then we got humans and then humans started to dev you know there was an original race of humans maybe like in africa or someplace and then from there they started to spread and proliferate and divide into sub-races then you got the asians then you got the the you know the people the north people in the south then you got um whites and you got blacks and you got native americans and all this right so there's a lot of division now it's reunifying again all the different races are interbreeding we have more mixed-race children every single year and maybe in a thousand years we won't even have races because all the races will interbreed so much see how this works but that process is not all peaceful it's not all beautiful and positive from your point of view there are a lot of people in the world who are opposed to interracial um marriages there are a lot of racist people in the world still who believe that their race is the best or their culture or their nation is the best see even cultures right now as the world is globalizing our cultures are starting to unify and merge together as well there's less distinct cultures and some people bemoan that as the death of some culture we also have the death of languages languages are unifying right there's a point in human history where human history where most of the languages couldn't be translated into each other and there was like thousands of languages now every year languages are dying off and going extinct some people bemoan this fact the people who study language are horrified by this a lot of beautiful languages are going extinct but at the same time it's all unifying into one language eventually we'll probably have one universal language whether that's english or something or chinese or whatever see we don't know which language is going to win out that battle we don't know now if you speak english you want it to be english because that makes life easier for you you have to learn chinese if you're chinese you want to be chinese because you don't want to learn english so how's that conflict going to get resolved there's going to be a culture war there see people are going to cling and there's going to be pain involved with that but it's a unification process you see take a look at how geopolitics works and how wars and empires works for example from putin's point of view he's trying to unify russia but look at how ugly that looks when you turn on the news how do you think the ukrainians feel about the unification of russia when when putin doesn't even acknowledge the difference between ukraine and russia see in a ukrainian person's mind there's a division between russia and ukraine and in putin's mind there isn't now the question is who's right the problem is that the ukrainians are so biased that they think they're right and putin is so biased that he thinks he's right and then everybody watching is taking sides and they think that their side whatever side they're taking that they're right now of course it's all relative go check out my episode called understanding relativism for more on that which is not to say that i i'm sort of making a um a false equivalence here and i'm not trying to say that the ukrainian position is the same as the russian position i'm not trying to whitewash what putin is doing he's committing atrocities and that's obvious um but we're just taking a very zoomed out perspective right this is like i'm trying to explain to you the perspective of god you know how does god view the ukraine russia situation this is how god views it this is not how normal humans look at things look at china trying is uh china is trying to unify taiwan and hong kong with china now from china's point of view that's correct because they don't recognize the difference between china taiwan hong kong but westerners have created these differences and have fought wars over these differences and they want to maintain these differences again who's right is there going to be a war over that well if everybody thinks that they're right yeah there's going to be a war there there's going to be conflict there if not a war at least conflict there's already conflict in that situation because both sides think they're right and they don't want to realize the re uh the relativity of that situation of their position see the european union is trying to unify europe that's happening and notice how many struggles come from that see that's a that's a messy difficult process uh the uk was in the eu then it left the eu what happened why why didn't the unity succeed see the u.s is a unification of all of 50 states and these states they have battles with each other uh it's you know not war but uh there's conflicts between different states and uh it's difficult to to unify them all together to keep them all together some states actually want to secede that's what the civil war was about see there's talk these days of california seceding or texas seating or the south succeeding there's people who seriously want to do this there's actually secessionist movements within the u.s that want to you know a divorce let's divorce the the red states from the blue states but see as you do that you actually weaken both if the red states and the blue states turn into two separate countries they're both going to be weaker than they were together and then that makes them pray for china or for russia so there is strength in unity but what i want you to recognize is that the process of unification is not all pretty it can be very very ugly including brutal bloody wars what was world war ii that was hitler's attempt to unify the world under his command now the world didn't agree with that didn't sit too well with them and he didn't succeed but that was his idea see this is tricky stuff you got to be very mature to like really think about these things properly because you have so many biases political parties these days especially in america are very divided uh they're divided against each other you know democrats republicans are very divided against themselves but also within themselves they're divided even like within the democratic party there's a lot of division between the sort of the corporate democrats versus the progressive wing of the party conflict happening there what did emperors and kings try to do what was their most important function in the old days when they used to exist it was trying to unify people that was the function and that that's like that's the hardest job you want the hardest job in the world is to unify people it's so hard to do people just don't appreciate how difficult this is to do to unify to unify diverse people of different races different cultures different languages different survival agendas the more diverse or survival agendas the harder they are to unify and that's uh what emperors and kings try to do the history of mankind you might say is the history of unification at gunpoint and a really great example of this that i love is actually this goes back so far into history one of the earliest examples in history that that we have of this unification is ancient egypt did you know that ancient egypt was divided into upper egypt and lower egypt and then what we know of now as ancient egypt that amazing civilization with the the pyramids and the sphinx and all this amazing culture and temples and this power they had this amazing military power at their height they had this amazing architectural power they had amazing science and engineering they had amazing uh agricultural power too supplied wheat to all of rome basically before it became that powerful one egypt it was divided and then and here now i'm quoting from study.com quote sometime around 2686 bce upper egypt came north and invaded lower egypt unifying the two kingdoms under a single ruler who took the title of pharaoh and wore a double crown most accounts attribute this moment to the king menes or the king narmer end quote and so if you look at depictions of the egyptian pharaoh he wears a crown there's one crown within another crown there's like one large crown with a smaller crown within it that signifies the unification and the titles that the egyptian pharaoh had was quote uniter of the two lands and lord of the two lands and there's actually this this artifact that we have called the palette of king narmer which supposedly depicts this unification so in this palette you see the pharaoh and he is smiting his enemies subduing them so there's conflict and violence i'm sure it was very bloody a lot of people died to have this happen and then you see on the other side of this palette you see this these like two i don't know they look like lion creatures or whatever they are with this like double helix like these two necks of theirs are are spiraling together symbolizing this unification and then from this egypt became this amazing great power but that wasn't pretty a lot of people probably died a lot of people got raped a lot of people got their skulls cracked probably a lot of children were killed to make that happen so do you see the problem with unification which part is going to rule over the other part going to be the servant and who's going to be the master therein lies the struggle because each part wants to be the master and there can only be one master each part or self has its own agenda these diverse parts then seek autonomy and communion so we've also talked about this in the past autonomy versus communion you seek both see on the one hand you want to be an independent person completely independent of other people you don't want to depend on their money you don't want to depend on other people for sex or for love or for anything you want to be strong and all by yourself you want to be all powerful but the problem is that as you become all independent all-powerful you become lonely because then you don't need anything from anybody and now you're lonely and now you want a connection you want communion with other with something other than yourself this is god's predicament god is all-powerful so he doesn't need anything else and there can't be anything outside of god because it's oneness but at the same time god also wants communion there's a trade-off between these two and so every whole on see my episode called what are hold-ons every hold on within reality is seeking both autonomy and communion and then that that creates a tug of war and even in your own life for example when you um you probably experience this you find a guy or a girl that you fall in love with have sex with have real passionate you know love making and the first few weeks you just want to spend all your time together but then after a few weeks of just spending all your time together having a bunch of sex and all this and just like never leaving each other's side um eventually you kind of get sick of it and you say okay that's enough of that now i'm kind of sick of that i've had too much communion now i want some free time i want some space i just want to be by myself so then you go and you be by yourself for a while and then you get lonely again and then you want to come back and make more love and more communion and share more and then you get sick of sharing and sick of making love then you want to separate again so this keeps happening people keep getting into relationships relationships keep getting broken up marriages then marriages turn into divorces into new marriages and on and on it goes so the seeking of autonomy creates contradictory agendas because see autonomy means that i want to be sovereign i want to have my agenda and i want to have enough power to enforce my agenda but then everybody is doing that right so then if i'm doing that and you're doing that which now we're going to be in conflict if we ever come near each other but at the same time we can't just say separate all the time because we actually want to come near each other right because what's the point of having all the power all the money all the wealth and all the love in the world if you can't share it with somebody you see it becomes useless so the more the more you get in life the more fulfillment you get in life the more the things of your agenda that gets satisfied the more of your selfish needs get satisfied the more you want to just share that with others and eventually if you get to the point where you you become fully realized as god and you acquire infinite power omniscience consciousness love and everything you become completely selfless you see what do you want then what what what is the point of your existence at that point the only point of your existence is to share that with others but the problem is as we talked about at that point you're so conscious you're so one there is nobody else to share it with unless unless you can fool yourself into thinking that you're not god fall asleep divide your own consciousness into others and then you can play the game of sharing but then you don't have infinity to share anymore now you're sharing in a finite way you're sharing in a selfish way so you share a little bit but then also you want something in return you want to give it a love but then you want to get some love too see and this is the existential predicament of human life you want both autonomy and communion and they're at odds with each other not all agendas can co-exist and due to self-bias see my episode called understanding self-bias each being thinks that its agenda is the most important so it's hard to convince a being to submit itself to another's autonomy or agenda because you're selfish and you think your agenda is the right one and in a certain sense it is the right one for you but not necessarily for me so selfish agendas collide resulting in conflict so again to to really underscore this the key insight i want you to take away from this is that metaphysically speaking division equals conflict and struggle and all form is division and peace equals absolute selflessness or formlessness as we've talked about in my episodes about whole laws and holistic thinking and holism the human body is one of the best examples that we can look at for how division and unity can be harmonized in a in a profound way that human society still hasn't figured out quite how to do uh autonomy versus communion work together in an overarching harmony within a human organism or any any living organism right because you have all these individual cells millions and billions and trillions of cells in your body which are arranged then into into organ systems and these organs they have sort of a mind of their own they have their own agendas you know your heart needs nutrients your liver needs nutrients your brain needs nutrients how do they figure out where the nutrients go you see if every one of your organs was selfish or some cell in your body was selfish was sucking up all the nutrients for itself and replicating itself endlessly that would be cancer that would kill the whole organism right that would be a lack of coherence a lack of harmony that would be selfishness so the different organs have to be somewhat selfish because they need nutrients in certain requirements but also they have to be selfless enough to surrender their autonomy in an intelligent way such that they can be part of some larger thing called an organism right like the heart can't have a mind of its own it can't just be a dictator or a tyrant it has to recognize the importance of submitting to the rule of the central nervous system same thing with my hands right so like my hands can't just do their own thing they have to listen to the signals that are being sent to them so that we can have like a some sort of coordination here then the hands can do something they can you know chop some food or use a hammer or screwdriver or something it's amazing to think about this stuff it's amazing to see the kind of harmony that has arisen through evolution within the human organism within yourself but then also notice that your own mind then becomes conflicted even though your body might not be conflicted your mind might be conflicted and then also if you have some kind of disease like an autoimmune disorder then your body could be conflicted too maybe your immune system is attacking your body so uh really we want to study how the body does it well how a healthy body does it well remember we talked about how health equals wholeness we're coming back to that point you know a healthy body how does it harmonize and create peace within itself right so like a healthy body is not at war with itself fundamentally it's not a conflict with itself well then how do we replicate that within societies and within the whole global system of geopolitics empires nations cultures languages families corporations the legal system see this is the real work of mankind it's difficult work it takes a lot of nuance and selflessness and neutrality lack of bias to do this work most people are too selfish and too biased too needy to really be thinking about these things at this high level instead they're just taking sides which just creates more conflict so fundamentally conflict is one part of reality trying to preserve itself at the cost of other parts all of this is unfolding of the is an unfolding of the infinite fractal of god god is this entire process god is not just the peaceful parts god is all the parts including the most violent parts and all of this is necessary inevitable and the highest good so long as there are individual selves or parts within reality then with autonomy there will be conflict if your survival is assured if your needs are fully met there is no conflict but for most of us our survival is not assured and our needs are far from met but as soon as your survival is threatened or your needs go unmet then conflict arises and conflict is going to be in proportion to how much your needs are not being met the more a thing is needed for your survival the sharper the conflict will be over it and remember what i mean by survival here see my episodes understanding survival part one part two is not just physical survival although of course it includes that but also more importantly survival in a sort of conceptual in the conceptual domain in a very abstract sense your mind is trying to survive your worldview is trying to survive there's sort of a further paradox and complication here is that it's hard to really understand and appreciate war and conflict when you are sitting comfortably at home in a peaceful country when war is not going on so uh people might criticize me like oh leo you're taking this such a philosophical and abstract position here like you're talking about these things and the only reason you're talking about these things is because you're sitting here you know you know in your cushy house in some expensive part of the world in a democracy and all this you're getting the benefits of all that and so that's why you can talk so flippantly about war and conflict but you know those people who are in a war zone and their children are getting bombed you know they don't have this luxury to sit here and just philosophize about this stuff they know what war really is like and leo you don't know what war is really like because you've never been in war that is that is a valid point that's an important point to keep in mind you can't really appreciate the significance of what conflict is until you find yourself in a deprived position where your survival is genuinely threatened to the point where you can't even think straight you're so biased you're cornered like a rat only in those situations can you really appreciate the necessity of conflict however there's a flip side to that coin here's the paradox is that it's also equally hard to understand what conflict is and why it occurs when you are caught in the middle of it and forced to choose sides so those people who are caught in a war zone and have been for their entire lives let's say who do not have the luxury to sit down and to contemplate peacefully about their experiences these people also don't actually understand conflict and war and the reason that is is because they're they're too close to it they're too attached to it their survival is so so threatened that literally they don't have the luxury to see the truth and to understand conflict and war and to appreciate it and to put it into a larger context because if they were to do that they would be killed and so all they're doing is just struggling to survive now i'm not blaming them for that that's just the position they're in but also they don't really see the depth of of what's happening to them but at the same time if you're just staying at home in a comfy situation where your survival is never threatened you also don't really appreciate the power and profundity of conflict but you don't need to go to war per se you don't need a war zone to really understand conflict you have conflict in your life all the time we all do to various degrees now of course if you were to war zone it would be very poignant for you unlike it is for most people but you have conflicts with your family you have conflicts even with your dog or your cat you have conflicts with your lawyer with your accountant with your dentist you have conflicts with um with your boss with your employees with political parties there's plenty of conflict that you see that you can use to start to understand right and you can feel you've had experiences in your life where you felt very deprived your knees were not met you felt very threatened even if you were not in a war zone the difficulty with understanding conflict is that it's like trying to understand pain you see when most people are experiencing pain they're so at the effect of the pain that all they can think about is how to stop the pain they don't even care about thinking about what pain is and they mistake the sharpness of the pain and the suffering they mistake that for the reality of the situation like the more painful it is the more real it is no that's not true pain doesn't make a thing more real it just makes it more difficult for you to to pierce through the illusion of it see that's precisely the point of pain the point of pain is to be such a sharp illusion that it distracts you from even thinking about it as an illusion because if you start thinking of pain as an illusion then very quickly you're going to be dead it's like that with conflict when you're really in a conflict about something that's important to your survival you don't have time to sit there and go met on the issue to really think about the philosophy of it and the existential nature of it and how it fits into god and love and you don't have time for this you just want to quickly get the fight over with you want to win and get what you need to survive so what's to be done about all this philosophy well first there is some practical action steps for you here you have to start to really observe how conflict occurs first of all notice when conflict is occurring and label it as such start to notice how diverse conflict is as a category of thing start to draw sort of a common connection between all the different kinds of conflict you see so when you have a conflict with your roommate look at that as though it's a war between two countries or two empires just a microcosm of that see and then then you can observe that there are commonalities the things that will stop you from arguing with your wife or your mom or your dad or your children it's a similar sort of thing that will get two empires to cease escalating and starting a third world war also notice that there's individual conflicts and collective conflicts individual conflicts is like you arguing with your dad uh collective conflict is like you know two empires going to war with each other or two political parties or two factions within a political party fighting or two factions within a religious group fighting and you know trying to splinter off contemplate what causes the conflict that you're observing notice yourself being biased and choosing sides and getting sucked into the conflict uh the most strong example of this is when you're actually con you know in the conflict yourself like if it's a fight between you and your roommate obviously you're involved in that so you're picking sides and you're biased already but also sometimes maybe you have two roommates and they are fighting with each other or you have you know your mom and your dad are fighting with each other you're a third party but then you're sucked in they suck you in you know your dad tells you you should be taking his side and your mom tells you you should be taking her side and then they you know they get mad at you when you take the other person's side in the argument that sucks you in and then you get biased and as you're getting sucked into it you're failing to go meta enough to really see what's going on and to appreciate it also as you're getting sucked in i want you to actually like introspect and feel yourself getting sucked in see my episode developing introspection this is where that skill comes in you feel yourself getting sucked into this conflict maybe you're watching a conflict on the news maybe you're watching a debate online you're getting sucked in feel that notice that and contemplate why you're getting sucked in and notice that it's difficult to stay meta in that situation also notice how other people are getting sucked in and how easily and quickly everybody is taking sides and getting sucked into the conflict since you're watching my work and you understand the notion of going meta and you're more conscious than the average person you are less likely to get sucked in as quickly and as easily as others around you but still you're gonna notice yourself getting sucked in but you're gonna see others getting sucked in so rapidly and so unconsciously that they don't even understand they're getting sucked in but you since you're doing this work and you're you're noticing things you're being mindful you're being introspective you're gonna notice yourself getting sucked in and then also you're gonna get to a point where you're going to stop yourself from getting sucked into a conflict so i want you to reach that point where like the first step is that you just you allow yourself to get sucked in but you observe it observe it observe it observe it and observe the consequences of getting sucked in eventually you'll start to see that it's foolish to get stuck into these conflicts and then one day you'll see a conflict happening everybody else gets sucked in but you will remain meta and neutral and you'll notice that other actually other people will start to attack you they don't like when you stay neutral and meta and when you try to help them to understand the conflict they don't want help understanding the conflict they want to win the war they're bloodthirsty they want to fight and of course this is exactly what perpetuates conflict and this is why conflict de-escalation is so difficult so i really want you to see the microcosm of a macrocosm of this notice this happening between individuals like at your office or within your family these sorts of conflicts and how this occurs and how hard it is to get them to de-escalate like maybe maybe your brother is fighting with your mother and you're trying to de-escalate as you're trying to de-escalate they both start attacking you so you've experienced this right um and and then i want you to to take the lessons from that and apply it to the larger macrocosm of how this works between nations and between empires and coalitions or between two companies or between two religions or even between like two animals that are fighting with each other good luck you know if two animals are really going at it good luck getting them to calm down and de-escalate so that's your homework right this is observation you got to do observation you gotta do introspection and just kind of like really work with this over the next like year really observe conflict all around you work with this ask questions try to prevent yourself from getting sucked in just see how all this works this is where you're you're really going to learn and grow from this work if all you do is you just listen to this episode and you don't do any of this observation work it's going to be in one ear out the other you're not going to gain much from this just from listening to me see i'm sharing with you conclusions of years of observing conflict and thinking about it contemplating it and trying to find the profound aspects of it drawing interconnections be different kinds of conflict and i'm not done with that work i'm still doing it right like i'm watching the news i'm seeing what's going on between russia and ukraine for example i'm seeing western media versus putin media i'm seeing how you know they're blaming each other and fighting with each other and all this demonizing each other and i'm observing that and i'm i'm thinking about like what is really going on here and i'm really careful not to take sides in it but really to kind of see both perspectives and stay meta on the issue with the hope that by staying meta i will learn something deeper about myself and mankind and society and countries and then ultimately consciousness and reality and love and god and all this so this is a practice that you do otherwise you don't gain the benefits all right so you might wonder well how do we reduce conflict are there you know what are the principles of conflict reduction so i've contemplated this pretty deeply and i've come up with a pretty good list for you so here's the list take notes and then contemplate for yourself see if you agree with me keep adding to the list if if you find other points i'm sure there's other ones it's not a total list but this is a good place to get started so we reduce conflict by first of all creating harmony and coherence that's really what we're talking about how to create harmony and coherence that's the problem that's a big topic i could i could just talk about that for hours um this notion of coherence is something i'm going to talk about in the future there's this there's this powerful idea called game a versus game b uh it's a bit jargony but we're gonna i'm gonna have a whole episode on that in the future um basically game a is sort of a rivalries dynamic where where two sides are fighting with each other sort of like classic game theory and then game b is how do you create harmony and coherence cooperative relationships um we'll talk about that later i don't have time to get into that here but basically creating coherence the next point is by understanding why conflict exists so we've done a lot of that work here right so everything hinges on proper understanding this is why all of my work is about helping you to understand things at a deep level because the idea is that if you can understand a thing at a deep level like if you understand war at a deep level it's going to help you to then resolve it and to avoid the worst aspects of it so we've done a lot of that work here in this episode the next way we reduce conflict after we understand its existential origins is by simply raising our consciousness becoming more conscious and all the practices that help with that spiritual practices meditation practices yoga practices psychedelic practices that sort of stuff the next way we reduce conflict is by a deep study of selfishness devilry self bias ego and survival i've got you covered there i have episodes on all of those topics go see my episodes on every single one of those topics it'll really help you with reducing conflict because if you don't understand those dynamics also i would add in there see my episode about my three-part episode about self-deception so if you don't understand how devil reworks how self-bias works how ego works how survival works how self-deception works there's no chance that you're gonna be able to reduce conflict effectively the next step is by understanding the survival agenda of others you got to start to understand your survival agenda and then other beings and parties survival agendas not just individual ones but also collective ones you have to understand the survival agenda of ukraine this rival agenda of america the survival agenda of nato the survival agenda of russia the survival agenda of putin these are all different survival agendas that are conflicting with each other you know even something like putin's survival agenda is not identical to russia's survival agenda there's overlap there's significant overlap but they're not identical likewise like you know the survival agenda of the president of the united states is not the same thing as a survival agenda of the united states these are separate survival agendas although there's a lot of overlap there as well um the next way to reduce conflict is seeing multiple perspectives i've talked about this a lot we've been stressing i've been stressing in this work the importance of multi-perspectivalism the understanding of relativism of relativity i have a whole episode about that go check that out i'll have more episodes about relativity in the future another way to reduce conflict is by creating abundance and reducing neediness the more needy somebody is the more threatened they feel the more likely there will be conflict when there's an abundance of resources there's very little need for conflict if there's way too much food way too much water way too many diamonds way too much gold way too many animals like way too much land what conflict is there's not going to be a conflict the conflict is when there's not enough of these things another way to reduce conflict is to get your survival needs met don't be thirsty you personally right take responsibility for meeting your survival needs because nobody else is going to do it for you pretty much once you're an adult you know as a kid your parents help you but once you're an adult no one's gonna do it for you and if you don't do it you're gonna be needy and thirsty and then you're gonna get sucked into conflicts more easily if you're desperate for for food for water for shelter for sex for love for approval it's like having your hand in a fire when your hand is in a fire you can't contemplate or care about the fire all you care about is is getting yourself out of the pain you don't care about the source of the fire how to put out the fire all you care about is getting your hand out of the fire and coping with the pain and that's what most people are doing in life is that they're just coping with the suffering and pain of life so much so that they can't even even be bothered to sit through a couple of hours of of this sort of philosophy talk because to them this doesn't immediately resolve their pain and suffering i understand that but at the same time that doesn't help the world to you know end conflict that actually furthers the conflict understanding is crucial to reducing conflict a lot of conflict simply comes from just misunderstanding the other side and not even caring to understand the other side because you're in such deep pain that you don't even give a [ __ ] about understanding or the other side you just want yours you want what you want another way to reduce conflict is by transcending survival and going beyond materialism connecting with the spirit connecting with spirit connecting with being you might notice that when you're on psychedelics and you're connected to being into spirit you don't even care about suffering and pain anymore you don't care about money anymore you don't care about sex anymore um you're beyond it all because you're so connected to spirit into being and to god the other way to reduce conflict is selflessness ultimately that's what it takes conflict comes from selfishness reducing it requires selflessness that's why it's so difficult to reduce conflict and why conflict is so prevalent is because we're all so selfish reducing selfishness means seeing yourself in other treating other and self equally rather than treating yourself as better than others and being willing to take a hit on your own survival surrendering your own selfish agenda transcending your own greed fear attachment and craving this is crucial for reducing conflict another way is by expanding your sense of identity the more limited your identity is we've talked about this in the past the lower your consciousness is the more selfish you are the more you're going to cling to it but as you do spiritual work your identity expands to include more and more until your identity becomes infinite and the closer you reach to an infinite identity the more god-like you become the more selfless you become and the less conflict you're gonna want and the easier it is for you to stay out of conflict another aspect of this is is doing shadow work if you don't do shadow work you don't integrate your shadow you're going to be fighting with your shadow another way to reduce conflict is holism thinking in more holistic ways see my episodes about called um holism and holistic thinking part one and part two that explains that the importance of holism remember holism is health you can't have health without holism another way to reduce conflict is conscious communication clear conscious communication honest communication is such a crucial um aspect of of healthy human living i'm gonna have a whole episode about that in the future stay tuned um an aspect of that conscious communication is setting clear boundaries and communicating your boundaries first you have to define your boundaries for yourself based on your values and what you want and then you have to communicate those to others and then you have to enforce those boundaries so that whole set i'll have an episode in the future about setting boundaries and forcing boundaries big topic for relationships uh another way to reduce conflict is by transcending dualistic morality this is huge most religions have this dualistic morality thing going on which makes you very judgmental by becoming judgmental a lot of conflict is created so dropping morality realizing the relativity of all morality and moral systems uh dropping all judgment i have episodes talking about how to drop judgment um and letting go of blaming blaming others this is a huge aspect of all conflicts every conflict is about blaming the other and casting yourself as a victim and to not cast yourself as a victim requires that you take responsibility so extraordinary responsibility taking is necessary to reduce conflict and people usually hate responsibility taking instead they like to blame somebody else and because of this this perpetuates more conflict the next thing you can do to reduce conflict is seeing good in others and not demonizing them you want to develop this capacity i might have a whole separate episode on this because it's such an important topic but like the ability to look at somebody and to see the good in them beyond even what they are able to see in themselves usually people are very selfish and they think of themselves as being better than they really are but it's possible to have a way of looking at somebody that you see them better even than they see themselves like it's almost like god looking within you and seeing the goodness within your own heart that you yourself don't even yet realize is there that's a profound ability and if you want to be a leader if you want to be really good high consciousness leader you want to develop this ability is to see the good in others that they don't even yet see that in themselves because they doubt themselves and you know their true potential you know their true identity you know the heart i mean the the love in their heart that is that can be brought forth if they do the work on themselves that of course they don't want to do that they fear doing and then you guide them into doing that work that's powerful that reduces conflict forgiveness and mercy reduce conflict i have a whole episode about how to forgive people go check that out mercy is a quality of god that religions talk about forgiveness is the quality of god as well another way to reduce conflict is with empathy and genuine care for the other so practicing being more empathetic usually in a conflict the opposite happens for example when soldiers go to war they so demonize the other side and they deliberately have methods that they kind of like mental tricks they play on themselves to shut off their empathy because otherwise it would be too big of a conflict in their psyche you can't shoot somebody in the face when you have empathy for them another important aspect of reducing conflict is radical open-mindedness i have episodes about that open-mindedness is so important because close the more close-minded you are the more conflict you get into because you simply can't understand the relativistic perspectival differences between different people you're so locked into your own perspective that and your mind is so shut down from exploring other perspectives that you just can't you can't understand and make sense of other people and the world from a closed-minded position that's why that's so important speaking of perspectives the next step for reducing conflict is exploring many different perspectives the more perspectives you explore the less conflict you're generally going to get into the more you appreciate perspectival differences the less conflict you'll create the next way to reduce conflict is epistemic humility basically admitting not knowing admitting when you don't know a lot of conflict comes from the arrogance of thinking you know more than you really do religious conflict political conflict and so on comes from this kind of lack of epistemic humility even conflict within science and academia a lot of it comes from lack of epistemic humility very importantly to reduce conflict you need to be willing to admit you're wrong when you're wrong because if you get stubborn and you refuse to admit your wrong your wrongness or your mistakes well the other side is going to know you're wrong and they're going to fight you to get you to admit that you were wrong and then you're going to play the game of denying you wrong and that's going to create a whole battle right there another way to reduce conflict is by being non-ideological i've talked about that in my episode called how ideology works go check that out non-ideology not being non-ideological is so important another way to reduce conflict this is huge is education and improving the quality of our education system education needs to incorporate things like epistemology metaphysics mindfulness contemplation direct experience spirituality psychedelics other things i've talked about i'm gonna have a whole series of episodes in the future that talk about problems within our education system and how to improve our education systems and what's what's missing there we have a very poor education system our education system right now is still in the dark ages so no wonder there's so much conflict in the world you can't have a reduction in conflict fundamentally without improving our education system that's so important another way to reduce conflict is a commitment to truth and integrity a lot of conflict actually stems directly from falsehood and a lack of integrity corruption go see my episodes about integrity see my episode about corruption another way to reduce conflict very practically is to eliminate the urge within yourself to cheat steal or look for shortcuts in life a lot of conflict comes from this and a corollary to this point is develop a willingness to work hard lazy people people who do not have a work ethic people who just want to mooch and slide by in life who want to just leech off of others these people get themselves into a lot of conflict a lot of conflict simply comes from people not wanting to do hard work for example a nation who doesn't want to actually build and be creative on their own they just want to invade some other nation or some other tribe nearby let's say tribe is better than nation right like in the old days if a tribe wanted to get wealthy it could either invest years building up its infrastructure building houses building you know fishing boats um developing infrastructure and so forth farms and stuff like that weaving baskets creating art or they could just go raid a neighboring tribe invade them uh you know kill all their men take all their women and uh you know uh annex the tribe steal all their buildings and artifacts all their boats and baskets and art and then take it as their own and what why do they do it this way because it's actually easier than building it all yourself it's more energy efficient so so don't be that guy right actually be willing to work for for the things you want in life that's super important another way to reduce conflict is mindfulness over your emotions when you get very emotional especially in a negative way anger jealousy hatred fear these core emotions um [Music] they drive you crazy they put you into a low consciousness state from which then you create a lot of conflict a lot of conflict is created out of anger and fear basically another way to reduce conflict is learning to let things go just the practice of letting go i have a whole episode about the power of letting go learning to let go of emotions learning to let go of fear and anger learning to let go of grudges learning to let go of just bad [ __ ] that happened to you that's huge because if you can't let a thing go then you're gonna want revenge you're gonna want justice and so forth speaking of letting go another point here is letting go of control and manipulation we all have the desire to control and manipulate reality so much and spirituality teaches you to let that go the less you try to control and manipulate reality the more you flow with it the more organic your life becomes the less conflict there is in your life a lot of conflict comes from like over manipulation you try to manipulate your spouse you try to manipulate your children you have to manipulate your family try to manipulate your boss your co-workers you try to manipulate some other country in the world like it's just like so much manipulation and then it all backfires on you another huge point for reducing conflict is look look at this respect for other simply respecting the person or party that you're dealing with is in a certain sense a prerequisite for any sort of piece or conflict de-escalation because if you don't respect another country if you don't respect another company if you don't respect another religion if you don't respect other person how can you possibly um you know try to understand their perspective and care about them and be empathetic like you can't do these things so a lot of con conflict comes with disrespect a disrespectful attitude and that's actually something that i want to personally work on a lot more in the future is just um i've been noticing myself not being respectful enough of others sort of um too arrogant and i've been noticing the the bad karma this brings and i've been noticing how untenable it is so in the future i'm going to work on correcting that i'll probably have a whole episode in the future about respect because it's a pretty important topic another point here is to reduce conflict you need to have concern for fairness equality and the suffering of others that's huge fixing systemic inequalities within society is huge if you don't care about the fair and equal distribution of resources then you're going to create a lot of conflict it's sort of like imagine if you go to a birthday party and there's a cake and they cut the cake into 20 pieces and you take 19 of the pieces and eat them leaving only one piece for everybody else at the party and while you're doing that at the same time you have no concern whatev whatsoever about the fact that you ate the majority of the cake like you just don't care for from your point of view you just want as many pieces as you can get into your stomach right like you see how this will create a lot of conflict yet this is the attitude that a lot of business people take in the world a lot of nations take this sort of attitude does that mean fundamentally it's just selfishness and an obsession with material acquisition so this needs to stop in order for us to reduce conflict there needs to be a much fair distribution of resources across the whole world to reduce conflict and war and you have to care about reducing income inequality that's one of the biggest sources of conflict in american politics for example is that we have uh uh really terrible income inequality in america uh a bad gene it's called there's actually a measure of income inequality for countries it's called the genie coefficient you can look it up for different countries um the worse the genie coefficient is the more problems that cause for for a society there's been studies done on this you can look those up but basically we need to improve the genie coefficient in in america but also really around the whole world and see you have to have a holistic concern you can't just care about america only or your own country because the problem is that okay if you only like if you're an american you only care about america fine you're going to reduce conflict within america but you're not going to solve the conflict outside of america and then america will go to war with other countries you see so if you want america is not going to work out a country you got to start having a holistic view of the whole world and not just care about reducing the conflicts or the like the income inequality within america a lot of people sort of care about reducing income inequality within america but not around the world which of course a lot of the reduction of income inequality within america can be done at the expense of third world countries that would be a problem because even though america will equalize and everybody in america let's say we'll be driving a fancy car and living in a fancy house but then the rest of the world will be living in poverty and that itself will create new conflict a new war america will rightly be hated by those third world countries another way to reduce conflict is through unification but a very specific kind of unification right the problem with unification is that it can be oppressive this is sort of like what china is doing with hong kong or what what russia is doing with ukraine is that they're trying to unify and that in itself is a is proper and noble to want to unify people however as we've talked about in my episode about whole lawns and uh holism and hosting thinking is that remember when you're unifying these hold hollands you can't just do balls to the wall unification with a disrespect of the autonomy of the sub-hole ons in the holarchy right you have to have a concern for maintaining the autonomy of the subholons and this is what fundamentally you know uh the china taiwan and hong kong situation is getting wrong and the russia ukraine thing is getting wrong is that like russia is trying to dominate ukraine through physical force and with no respect to its autonomy and so in this sense fundamentally is a failure right it's not going to hold for something to hold and to be at peace and to be in harmony there needs to be respect for autonomy at the lower levels of the hierarchy as well uh you can't just it can't just be a top down domination there has to be a a flow of balance between um orders coming from the top down but then all but then the top has to be also sensitive to or to the needs coming up from the grassroots so to speak so like a tyrant trying to dominate his people is not sustainable because he needs to be sensitive a leader needs to be sensitive to the needs of the people and then to modify his actions to accommodate their needs and then it's a sustainable situation because then the leader is served it's not just dominating the people but it's serving their needs and the people love the leader so this is what's you know there are two different types of unification they're sort of like a uh the benevolent unification that i'm just talking about here that respects the sub-holons and then there's a domineering unification which is that you just try to like bash somebody into becoming your slave or your vassal and that doesn't work so well that backfires that creates bad karma so strong arming people and extorting and blackmailing people into unifying with you this doesn't work right you can't create a good marriage by telling a girl to sleep with you and to marry you at the point of a gun that's not going to be a good marriage now you might even be able to get her to marry you because she's so terrified she'll marry you she might even have sex with you for a while at the point of a gun but it's not gonna last see to get a good marriage going you have to you have to she has to want to be part of this dynamic then there's harmony and then two final ways for reducing conflict which are kind of like very profound existential one is by experiencing deep suffering yourself and the second is by experiencing deep love yourself as you suffer very deeply and as you experience love very deeply this is what transforms you into wanting to be a more loving person being more empathetic and caring about the suffering of others and in so doing then you have the motivation to want to reduce conflict um but it's it's very tricky because it's possible to experience deep suffering in an unconscious way that actually leads to the creation of more conflict in fact this is a lot of what sources conflict around the world like for example you kill one of my family members like you kill a child of mine i suffer for it in unconscious way then i want revenge and i go kill one of your children and then we have like a blood feud going back and forth this is classic uh especially in tribal cultures this is classic uh cultures where there's not a legal system this is how they resolve their disputes just by you know killing family members for generations um to get revenge on each other to the point where they don't even remember who started the blood feud so so this this kind of suffering actually increases conflict does not decrease conflict the kind of suffering that decreases conflict is when you suffer mindfully within a sort of a spiritual context where you you put the suffering into a proper context you don't blame somebody else for it you don't demonize somebody else you don't lash out at somebody else but you you really feel the conflict you suffer through it and you put it into a larger context you understand where the suffering is coming from in that case there that will reduce conflict and then of course just experiencing deep love for yourself i like to say that [Music] the second greatest teacher in the world is suffering and the greatest teacher is love nothing will teach you deeper than suffering other than love but it needs to be a very deep love and also a conscious love because you can love unconsciously and that also doesn't work so i mean it all hinges on consciousness of course as you should expect but now so that's the list of ways to reduce conflict feel free to add to that list it's a pretty solid list if you can do all those things you're going to be a very peaceful person i guarantee you but the problem of course as you can see is that all those things are so difficult to do this is the last thing that anybody wants to do is work on all this this whole list it's so difficult but also remember that even if you do all that and you execute on this list perfectly there'll still be conflict first of all because most other people will not do it because it's so difficult to do but also even even in your own life there will be conflicts still even if you're an awakened person if even if you're the buddha you're still going to have conflict again first of all because the most people you're going to be dealing with are not going to be buddhist yourself but even if all the people you dealt with were buddhas like you let's say uh there would still be conflict why because you're you're a you're a finite you're in a finite body you're in a finite world as long as there's forms there's going to be conflict we talked about this if you want complete peace then what you're talking about is uh ending all form you have to exist as the godhead that's the only place where there will be no conflict whatsoever and then at that point life is over the universe is over the universe doesn't exist reality doesn't nothing exists except just infinity pure infinity as emptiness and nothingness that exists and that is completely peaceful but there's nothing there and uh i mean you would call that death um here's an another little wrinkle to all this is that if you want to reduce conflict it's important that you stop hating conflict because the hating of conflict creates more conflict so there's a counterintuitive move here is that you got to start to love conflict accept it as part of the infinite self that you are stop thinking that conflict should never happen this is a mistake this is too naive is conflict bad no conflict is existentially inevitable it is a part of absolute unity it is a part of infinity as a part of god as a part of love but at the same time even though i say this you know love conflict that doesn't mean that you should that this is a justification or a license for selfishness i'm not giving you license to go start a bunch of conflicts here because the ego would love that you know some dictator would love to say that you know i'm conquering you because i love you of course that's what a dictator thinks so you need to drop the idea that conflict is bad and yet at the same time you want to um not engage in conflict where you can avoid it a lot of conflict is avoidable so you sort of make a distinction between conflicts which are just absolutely unavoidable and then most conflicts which are avoidable most human conflicts are avoidable so that's what you want to take care of and the conflicts which are not avoidable well then you can't do anything about that you know like for example a conflict that is not avoidable as a human is that you got to eat so you're going to be killing something to eat whether it's going to be a plant or an animal you've got to kill something to eat you can't avoid that now but you can reduce conflict over what you eat and how you eat for example you know if you were a cannibal that would create a lot of conflict for you um you know there's quite a bit of conflict that also comes with eating animals there's less conflict with eating plants so in that sense you know make yourself a vegan if you can handle that diet then that will reduce conflict that won't eliminate conflict it'll just reduce it and hey reducing conflict is still good we don't need to be perfectionistic here you're not again you're not going to eliminate all conflict you want to limit out conflict then you gotta die so that's not gonna work uh i mean it'll work but you don't want that um and i'm not recommending that but um you know short of short of death uh is good to to move towards reducing conflict now i want to make some points about um spiral dynamic stage green here because spider-dynamic stage green go see my episode called spider-dynamic stage green if you don't know what that means uh tends to be kind of naive about conflict in the following ways green tends to value peace at all costs green tends to see war and violence as evil which is not correct green tends to believe that a state of peace can be reached and green basically tends to be too idealist and utopian uh green tends to uh uh to under appreciate how brutal life can be green tends to not see that love doesn't just include hugs and kisses but war rape exploitation slavery racism and so on and so in general green tends to swing its pendulum more towards pacifism and pacifism is just too naive of a way of of thinking about how how the world really works and how to navigate survival in the world so another set of action steps for you is i want you to start to study how conflict arises in your own life at the micro level for example you have disputes on a regular basis with your spouse girlfriend or boyfriend disputes with with family members disputes with your children disputes on online forums um disputes over which restaurant to go to even disputes within your own mind with yourself so observe all these and study these carefully notice why these conflicts occur contemplate how you can reduce these conflicts in your life and as you actually try to reduce those conflicts in your own personal life you're also going to learn principles many of the principles i mentioned above you're going to learn those as universal principles for reducing conflict everywhere not just individually but collectively and then you'll be able to teach and help others to do the same thing and if you can't do it in your own life you're not going to be able to really help others do it as well so in conclusion as we wrap up here why does understanding war and conflict matter why is this more than just philosophy because how can you be at peace when you haven't made peace with war war and conflict is an integral part of reality and of humanity and yet most people don't understand it they're flummoxed by it they have misconceptions about it and in so doing they add to the conflict you see so fundamentally if you don't understand conflict you're going to create more conflict that's the point that's why it's important that's why it's practical and not just mental masturbation everything starts with proper understanding and you'd be surprised at how rare proper understanding is all right so we're done with part one stay tuned for part two part two is actually going to be more practical here we covered sort of the philosophy and a lot of like metaphysical spiritual mumbo jumbo in part two it's going to be very more practical it's going to be more of a historical more of a human look at how conflict and war between societies evolved and why and sort of the trickeries of how it really works we're going to look at arms races we're going to look at social evolution um from a historical perspective i'm going to give you a lot of quotes and from from a great book that i've read on this topic and also in the future i'll probably have a separate episode about game a versus game b stay tuned for that and the final idea i'll leave you with is that i started off this episode with a quote from a native american chief seattle after whom the city of seattle was named the quote was that day and night cannot dwell together right makes sense on a certain level but also what i want you to see is the paradox here is that of course on the one hand day and night cannot dwell together but they do you see day and night do dwell together they dwell together within reality so there's that overarching unity that i want you to always keep in mind everything that's on at conflict everything that's at war with itself everything that seems like it can't coexist ultimately it does co-exist and it's unified by a higher order and that higher order is reality or god or infinity or consciousness so never forget that you