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[Music] what are hollands that will be the topic of this first episode which is really the first in a two-part series on holism and holistic thinking so we're going to introduce this concept of whole lawns but that's not really why we're talking about this stuff we're talking about this stuff because i want to introduce you to holism and the importance of holistic thinking and what it really means the bulk of that material will be coming next week in part two on holistic thinking there's so much material there to cover make sure you stick around for that but this here today is the preamble now there's still going to be powerful and profound stuff here so don't get me wrong it's all powerful stuff we're gonna go pretty deep in this episode on the metaphysics and so forth but uh the more practical stuff will come in part two so make sure you stick around for that i've been wanting to introduce this this concept of holism and what it really means to define it and to explain it for a long time now we've been kind of uh beating around the bush and finally here we are i'm excited really excited to to explain all of it to you in part two all right so let's build the foundation here we need some foundation so this concept of holons this is a concept you want to learn because i'm going to be using it a lot in the future and it's going to help ground your understanding of what holism is about and what holistic thinking is about so this concept of hollandes was formed or coined i guess by arthur costler who wrote a book called the ghost in the machine it's a rather sort of academic-y sciency type of book do you need to read it i don't think so unless you really want to and you want to kind of go deep on the science and and the philosophy of these sorts of things uh but if you're just sort of interested in self-help then you don't need to read it it's not it's not a self-help book so this concept of a whole on what is a whole on well when we look at reality and we ask ourselves what is reality composed of objects things relationships interactions what atoms right so we look at these things we look at different objects in the world we ask ourselves what are sort of the fundamental categories of which nature is made and how it works and mankind all the way back to the you know times of the the ancient greek philosophers like aristotle and so forth you know they have been trying to categorize and classify nature for a long time and this has been a thorny philosophical issue for mankind like what are the right categories it's not so obvious what the right categories of thing are like what is the most fundamental thing in the universe is it the universe itself is it the atoms that make up the universe is it something within the atoms is it energy is it numbers is it mathematics what is it and so there's been a lot of philosophical debate on this issue but uh but relatively recently i mean this this idea by arthur costler has really just it's only like what 50 70 years old it's not it's not a very old idea it's relatively new so he sort of came up with the idea and then ken wilbur took that idea of hollons and and and really ran with it and they together basically came up with this notion that really the fundamental building block of reality is hollands so what is a hole on a whole on is both a part and a hole simultaneously so the best example would be the cells in your body the cells in the human body or in any any animal body they're very tiny things but they're still relatively large compared to atoms so a cell is both a part and a hole it's a whole on so it's a part because it's a part of your whole body which your body would be a whole and it's also um a hole in itself a cell as a whole in itself because if you studied a cell in biology class you looked at those diagrams a cell is a very complicated thing it's almost like a city it's it's quite amazing and fascinating all the you've studied all the organelles within cells if you took biology class you know the mitochondria the ribosomes the nucleus the envelopes and the membranes and all that stuff that i can hardly remember nowadays so um so yeah so there are all those parts and they're all moving there's a bunch of molecules coming in and out there's osmosis and various proton pumps and weird stuff going on in their dna and replication of dna and every cell is a little bit different they're not all the same like the cells in your face are going to be different than the cells in your heart different than the cells in your brain and so on so these cells are hollons so what's interesting is that usually we think of things being just parts or just holes but not both simultaneously so that's the unique thing about holons is that they're both simultaneously it's a sort of a superposition which is uh kind of cool and nifty as a concept it's both simultaneously it's sort of a relativistic concept and all of reality turns out is a nested hierarchy of these holons so my body sitting here before you speaking to you this you usually would think this is a hole like this is an individual object called leo or a human it's sitting here you would think well that's just that's a hole and that's it that's where it ends but that's not where it ends because yes my body is a whole but it's also a part of a larger thing for example the entire earth what is the earth usually when we say the earth we think of just the rocky part of the earth the earth that was there before there were humans or animals and plant life but that's not really the what the earth is the earth like if you go off you know stand on the moon and look down at the earth from outer space you're going to see the entire planet including all the humans on it all the vegetation all the oceans all the rocks and i mean if you zoomed in if you had a uh high power enough telescope you would actually be able to resolve the people and stuff so really when you're looking at the earth from outer space in a sense you're seeing the people it's just the people are so small that they're you don't see them because they're just like microscopic little you know below the threshold of the resolution of your vision but the people are there you're looking at them so what we call the earth is not something that's separate from humans humans make up the earth and so as i'm sitting here before you i am literally a part of a larger hole called the earth and so are you if you're on the earth listening to me if you're some alien in outer space well then uh come check out earth it's a cool place but also full of fools so yeah so this is um so we see this all throughout nature that's the key insight of arthur costler and ken wilbur is that when you really start to look at all the different parts of nature whether you're zooming in or you're zooming all the way out you're seeing ons everywhere and the earth itself is you might think well the earth is is is a whole it's not a part but it is a part the earth is a part of the solar system and you might say well the solar system then is a hole well yes the solar system is a whole but it's also also a part because it's part of the milky way galaxy and so you see it goes up and down in this fashion all the way up and all the way down so we could say that every object in reality is actually not a part and not a whole but a whole on both simultaneously depending on which perspective you take and that's what's so powerful about this concept is that it's a sort of a perspectival relativistic concept and i like to i like to think of it as as the russian matroshka dolls that you might be familiar with they nest inside each other and that's how every object is that's how cells are that's how humans are and of course what's interesting about these holons is that they don't nest as neatly as these matrashka dolls it's a little bit more complicated than that more messy and more interesting because for example even though i said that me as as a human here and you as a human sitting on this earth were part of the whole lawn of the earth but we're also part of other hollands so these hollands are not mutually exclusive they sort of interpenetrate which was where it gets really interesting so for example uh i'm part of the whole and hold on of the united states because i live in america i'm also part of the whole lawn of my family i'm also part of the whole lawn of what what else am i of of let's say the species homo sapiens i'm also part of the whole lawn of males the gender male and so i'm part of many many hollands and so are you and some of them are mutually exclusive and other ones aren't and they interpenetrate and some of them are larger whole on some of them are smaller holos and so forth so let's uh give some more examples of hold on so you really get a sense of just how powerful this notion is these holons are not just necessarily physical objects they can also include abstractions and mental objects and categories which makes it even more interesting so of course the most obvious hololens are things like atoms proteins molecules cells organs the body your family a car see a car is usually you think of it as just a whole object but a car is a is made up of thousands of components and parts and subsystems within subsystems within subsystems like your car has a tire or like a wheel let's say uh and then the wheel has its own sub components it has tires a tire on it it has the uh the the bolts that are used to to bolt it to the to the car to the axis to the axle and then uh even it has those little caps uh that that plug the little hole for the air those plastic caps that you lose and then and probably other components within that and but the wheel is a pretty simple part and your car has other sub-systems that are very complicated like the engine probably the most complicated part of your car which has a thousand different sub components within it and then those have more sub components and more sub components and more sub components like a spark even a spark plug will have multiple sub components in it and so it's a very complicated thing but what's what's uh and each of those that i was describing all of those are holons even when you get down to the most basic let's say just a screw or a bolt in your car you might say well that's just a part and that's it well but it's not of course the screw is made up of molecules and atoms and then those are made up of quarks and whatever else down there in the subatomic realm you see and a bunch of intermediate stuff too between the molecules and the ultimate screw and so what's what's interesting is that really good design of whether it's biological organic life or of physical gadgets and objects and machinery machinery usually has multiple layers of sub-components within it and this is very handy because this allows sort of modularity to the design such that if one component breaks the entire thing doesn't break down so like maybe one part of your engine breaks but that doesn't necessarily mean that the whole engine is broken maybe it's just not operating at 100 because one part broke like maybe one piston broke but your engine has multiple pistons and then you can replace the piston keep the rest of the engine and then it'll be operational again see this kind of modularity is very powerful you see this kind of design everywhere in phones and computers any human device that is invented but you also see it within life forms too you see this kind of modularity uh i mean it's very apparent these days with the human body you might think well the human body is just this one thing it's not made out of components but it is we do surgeries that replace organs all the time you can do a face transplant these days you can replace someone's heart or a valve in the heart with an artificial valve you can replace a hip you can even replace an amputated leg you can sew parts of the body back on you can lose a finger so a new finger on there you can take organs from donors of people who who died you can take their liver you can take their kidneys and you can install them into your body and it works it's pretty amazing that that's possible you think that that wouldn't be possible but it almost works just like a car or like a computer you just swap parts around it's pretty amazing so this is this is part of the power of this sort of hollandic design of complex systems you see i want you to appreciate how complex reality is especially in spiritual circles i see spiritual people and spiritual teachers oversimplifying reality because they don't like to think very deeply about reality because a lot of spiritual traditions just tell you to shut up and shut off your mind don't think about anything and then in this in a sense that simplifies reality a lot the more you think the more complex reality gets um but uh but also like the truth is that reality is ridiculously astronomically staggeringly mind-blowingly complex there's nothing simple about anything in reality even the most simplest thing is ridiculously complex and that's what makes it so challenging to understand reality accurately and then to manipulate reality accurately because to manipulate it accurately you have to understand it accurately but how can you understand it accurately when it has all these parts i mean just to understand how your car engine works would take you like months of study to understand all the parts so well that you can just swap them out and manipulate however you want it's extremely complex and a car engine is far from anywhere near as complex as the human eye or some other biological thing or even some more complex human invention like let's say even uh a single cpu intel cpu processor chip there's so much complexity going on there it's ridiculous how complex these things are and then not to mention if we take the complexity of the entire planet as a whole on i mean the earth is just bafflingly when you take into account that a single tornado will have trillions and trillions of atoms in it just that one tornado and think of how much atmosphere there is in the entire earth and that's just the atmosphere it's not counting the oceans it's not counting the brains of every living being on the entire planet all billions of living beings with brains human non-human alike i mean it's ridiculously complex and that's just one little speck within the milky way galaxy which is just one little speck within the entire universe it's it's crazy so uh so this complexity how do we deal with this complexity well well we need to start to see that these different parts that they interact with each other in in complicated ways and the interactions are not all bottom up but also top down and sideways as well and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we keep going here let me get continue the list of hold ons with examples here so your computer is the whole long as you know if you've ever built your own computer with all the different sub-components you can swap them out things like software programs like the windows operating system that's a whole on there are so many complicated parts to any software program that's why they developed object oriented programming which is very hollow in its approach to how to design software it's a powerful approach and you can see if you're a computer nerd the difference between programming languages that are object oriented and then the older languages that were not object oriented and how much power you gained with an object-oriented programming language which is basically showing you the power of sort of hollandic thinking when it comes to designing complex systems also something like a sports team is a whole on think of all the complex interactions going on within a sports team to make it effective at winning the super bowl or the fifa world cup or whatever a city is a hold on a political party is a hold on a nation is a hold on a fishery a fishery would be some part of the ocean or lake or a river whatever where they're fishing certain kinds of fish commercially and that fishery could be destroyed by overfishing it or by polluting it entire species within that fishery could die but there could be multiple different fisheries you know there could be a fishery on the east coast on the west coast whatever the economy is a hold on and then you can have the economy has sub-hollands within it there are economies within the global economy there are sub-economies there's the american economy there's the icelandic economy there's the japanese economy and so forth and then even there you have sub-economies within that the economy is a very interesting and complicated hold on to study and to try to wrap your mind around how that works of course individual companies corporations are hollands the coral reef is a whole on and in fact what's interesting with corals if you've ever studied i i actually used to grow corals uh my brother grows corals as a hobby and as a sort of a profession he sells them too but yeah like saltwater aquarium corals a coral is actually made up of little little like individual polyps that gather together and then they grow so a coral is a coral a single animal or is it many animals together who's to say maybe there isn't one way that a coral is and in fact it sort of makes you wonder once you think about how a coral works is it even proper to think of a human as a single animal i mean we think of ourselves as individual animals but that's sort of a selfish very uh egotistical way to think of ourselves because really all of our organ systems are quasi-independent like one of your kidneys could fail but the other one would still be alive and still work like one of your fingers could die from frostbite and then the other fingers they would still all work or cells within your body are dying all the time you have millions of cells that are dying every day in your body they're getting replenished and replaced really it's better to think of your body as a as a city than it is to think of it as an individual physical object the way that we usually think of it it's more like a city you know within a city you can demolish one square block of a city it really doesn't make much difference to the existence of the city as a whole likewise we can cut some cells off of your finger it wouldn't make much difference to you as a whole pretty cool huh the amazon rainforest is the whole lawn made up of whole lawns of trees i mean how think of how many trillions of trees there are in the amazon rainforest and a tree is already a very complex hole on each tree has a bunch of bugs crawling all over it growing on it funguses and other plants and things so even to take one tree within the amazon rainforest is all ready to take a massively complex hold-on and think of how many different trees there are an island is a whole on a language as a whole on think of the english language or the japanese language or all languages all human languages you could even include mathematics in there as a language perhaps you could include programming languages in there as well if you wanted to the entire whole lot of symbolic representation that humans are so good at and that gets us into so much trouble and then of course within the language you have individual words which are hollands and even letters which are hollows ideas can be hollows a species can be a whole lot like the species of elephants a pirate ship is the whole on you've got the ship you've got the crew on the ship industries entire industries or hollands like hollywood or the music industry the porn industry the military industrial complex hold on it's a big pharma industry the big oil industry silicon valley industry science of course is a whole on which includes so many different sub sciences within it biology chemistry physics astronomy the social sciences psychology and then each of those have many sub sciences within them just within physics you've got like quantum mechanics you've got energy physics you've got classical physics you've got general relativity and you've got astrophysics and blah blah blah blah a website is a whole on like youtube and then every video on youtube is its own hold on even every pixel on your computer screen that is depicting the video that you're looking at right now if you're watching this each pixel that's making up my face right now for you each of those are hollons making up the larger hole on of the face that you're seeing there because each pixel is made up of like three little diodes of red green and blue and other kinds of variations and combinations but then each of those pixels itself will have sub components a pixel is not just one thing it's got different wires in it and other things that make up one of those diodes the solar system is a whole on the galaxy is the whole on of course and the universe as we know it is a whole on and all of reality we might say is the ultimate hold on that includes everything so again this is just a a brief survey you should contemplate this list and just familiarize yourself as you look around you as you're driving around going to work and doing your stuff just look around the room right now and notice how many hold ons you can see it's pretty amazing to start to look around the room that way everything becomes a whole lot like whoa i've got this new way of looking at that reality that i didn't have before so let me read to you some quotes about hollons and how they work there's some there's some nuances to hold ons here in these quotes and then we'll talk about them so many of these will be from wikipedia on the page about holland's they've got some great definitions and descriptions there so quote a hold on is a system or phenomenon that is an evolving self-organizing dissipative structure composed of other holons whose structures exist at a balance point between chaos and order a whole on is maintained by the throughput of matter energy and information entropy connected to other holons and is simultaneously a hole in itself and at the same time is nested within another whole on and so it is part of something much larger than itself holland's range in size from the smallest subatomic particles and strings all the way up to the multiverse comprising many universes end quote and then there's a few quotes here from mark edwards from a brief history of holland's he writes quote a holon as costler devised the term is an identifiable part of a system that has a unique identity yet it is made up of subordinate parts and in turn is part of a larger whole kosler noted that in every order of existence from physical to chemical to biological and social systems entirely self-supporting non-interacting entities did not exist unquote so it's not merely that we have these static russian matrashka type dolls that are nested within each other it's much more interesting than that because imagine these dolls are interacting with each other they're not just static and they're morphing and they're changing all the time such that they're not just these rigid wooden objects and that they're interacting at multiple different levels of hierarchy not just in one way and this gives you a little bit of an idea of the complexity of what we're dealing with and also helps to explain why science is so difficult science is difficult because we're trying to wrap our minds around these ridiculously complex interactions multiple interpenetrating causal chains going up and down and sideways throughout these vast hierarchies and making sense of all that is very difficult that's why science textbooks are so thick and so dense and full of equations and then that's just one science book and then you've got hundreds of those and none of that comes even close to describing the complexity of reality going on here's another quote from wikipedia quote an individual hold on is discrete self-contained and also demonstrates the quality of agency or self-directed behavior hold ons are self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and can handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions that is they have a degree of autonomy these holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities the first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole end quote so this idea of autonomy and community we're going to discuss this more after i read the quotes to you uh because this is a super important idea that many people misunderstand because they get trapped into just valuing autonomy or just valuing community while denigrating and demonizing the other we'll get back to that point but for now just understand that a cell in your body has a certain degree of autonomy and freedom and individualism but also it's part of a larger collective and community and it's in communion with all the other cells and other parts of the body organs and and other systems that comprise the ultimate whole of the body and so there are delicate trade-offs between autonomy and community within all the whole lawns especially within living objects and especially within higher order hold ons such as cities sports teams corporations any kind of social stuff what's also interesting about these holons is that the holons get more complex and more twisted and more creative as we go up the chain of holons so a molecule is not that complex and there's not that much stuff interesting creative stuff that a molecule can do but a cell can do more interesting creative stuff it has more degrees of freedom and then an organ has even more degrees of freedom than a cell and then a human has even more degrees of freedom than an organ and then something like a society or a city or an entire country has even more degrees of freedom than a single human and then the entire planet has even more degrees of freedom than a city or country and so the complexity just grows at a exponential rate as we go up the chain of being here's another quote from wikipedia quote every holon is created by the interaction of forces working upon it both top down and bottom up since the whole lawn is embedded in larger holes it is influenced by and influences these larger holes and since a whole long also contains subsystems or parts it is similarly influenced by and influences these parts information flows bi-directionally between the smaller and the larger systems when this bi-directionality of information flow and understanding of role is compromised for whatever reason the system begins to break down holes no longer recognize their dependence on their subsidiary parts and parts no longer recognize the organizing authority of the holes cancer may be understood as such a breakdown in the biological realm end quote so are you seeing the the trickiness here of how this works there's a a bi-directional flow in these causal chains and really it's more than bi-directional because it it goes bottom up top down and also sideways as well and in various sort of diagonal directions too in a very complex system like a living animal organism you see and it's very important to get all of the balance right within that system otherwise it all breaks down and collapses and turns into disease people don't appreciate just the exquisite order and balance that needs to occur within the human body just to keep you alive for one minute let alone for 80 years it's remarkable that our bodies can last for 80 years especially with how badly we abuse them and the kind of food and toxins we put inside of them and they still keep working it's it's amazing and only when you start to get a little bit of disease here and there something goes wrong in your hormone system or some organ in your body starts failing you start to realize just how delicate the balance is or maybe you get a little bit of toxin in you and you realize just how delicate your whole life is and how exquisitely balanced it is i mean think about the staggering complexity of of running your body and the fact that every cell in your body right now has to be doing something it has to be doing respiration generating energy converting oxygen pumping out various kinds of nutrients pumping in the right kinds of nutrients pumping out toxins replicating handling dead cells sweeping those away i mean your immune system is doing that recognizing foreign agents discriminating between foreign bacteria foreign viruses and then the good healthy bacteria that's supposed to be in your intestines they're you know in the millions there's a there's there's more healthy bacteria in your intestines than there are cells in your entire body that's pretty amazing and there's a a lot of cells in your body there's like something like 70 trillion cells in your body but there's more bacteria and then there's good bacteria bad bacteria how do you distinguish between the two well your body somehow is doing it using various kinds of holons within whole lawns within hollands which comprise your immune system then you have your white cells you know your your t cells and whatever b cells other kind of cells as part of your immune system that are doing all this stuff it's it's insane it's insane what's really going on just to have you sitting here breathing looking around the room all that stuff is going on and if just one or two things goes a little bit wrong in that whole process it all collapses and you die within a minute that's pretty amazing so we can learn a lot from life because as we mimic life in our engineering because we're engineering mechanical objects gadgets but also more importantly even we're engineering social systems we're engineering cities sports teams corporations entire governments and nations stuff like the un where do we get insights and inspiration how to engineer these things in a way that is healthy and as stable and as amazing as the human body see humans are still way inferior to designing a city or designing a country or a corporation or a sports team that comes anywhere near the amazing feats of complexity and harmony and balance and holism of the human body we're not even anywhere close to that in our ability to design so there's a lot for us to study there how did nature do it the genius of nature is there if you don't take it for granted you really look and see what we're dealing with here and then here's another quote from wikipedia this one is about holarchy the concept of holarchy so what is that quote a holarchy is a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function first as autonomous holes in supraordination with their parts secondly as dependent parts in subordination to controls on higher levels and thirdly in coordination with their local environments end quote so holarchy is basically a open ended hierarchy made up of hollands so the difference between a hierarchy and a hollar key is that a hierarchy is a more simple concept which includes a fixed bottom and a fixed top it's sort of like a pyramid it's closed-ended there are units at the very bottom and there there's like one or two units or whatever much fewer units at the very top but a holar key is a hierarchy with no bottom and no top which means it's infinite so a hierarchy is finite a hollar key is infinite that's an important point if you've studied my other episodes about infinity and the significance of infinity then you understand how the concept of hierarchies is a is too rigid and limited of a concept when we're talking about all of reality and we're talking about infinity and uh different orders and gradations of infinity check out my episodes understanding infinity part one part two and other episodes in which i talk about infinity and then merge this concept of hall our key with that infinity and then you start to get a little bit deeper of an understanding and then here's one more quote this one is from fr capra from the systems view of life he says quote the web of life consists of networks within networks at each scale under closer scrutiny the nodes of the network reveal themselves as smaller networks we tend to arrange these systems all nesting within larger systems in a hierarchical scheme by placing the larger systems above the smaller ones in pyramid fashion but this is a human projection in nature there is no above or below there are no hierarchies there are only networks nesting within other networks end quote so this moves us away from the rigidity of the concept of hierarchies to the more open-ended infinite notion of holarchies which sort of frees up our mind to think about reality in more sophisticated and complex ways than we were able to think of before when we were thinking about hierarchies and see when your mind only thinks of reality in terms of hierarchies and not holarchies this creates problems because then we create our organizations like our our corporations and our governments as these pyramidal hierarchical structures would in fact maybe it would be healthier and better for the whole if we created them more holarchically more open-endedly and we viewed them in a less rigid way such that it wasn't just about the ceo at the top or the king or the monarch at the top but a more distributed way of thinking about things because you see in your body the most amazing thing about your body is that there's no one ceo or king that manages your body now of course you could say maybe the ego is that ceo or king that would be you but again that's really not you that's sort of an illusion and that ego by the way creates all the problems in your life um but but really your body does a lot of stuff that you have no awareness or control of that's what's so amazing about your body you can't control directly with your will your heartbeat or the temperature of your body no i mean some advanced yogis develop certain certain abilities but still the majority of your of your body's functions are done automatically that means they have more control than you do as an ego so you might think that the ego is this king sitting at the top top of the hierarchy of the body but in many ways no certain things the ego can do like the ego can certainly throw the body off a cliff and kill it so in that sense the the ego has the ultimate control over the body but at the same time your body could decide to stop pumping your heart and you would die just as fast so who controls whom if you think of only these simplistic hierarchies then that gives you a sort of a false impression of control going from the top to the bottom like in a dictatorship but your body is not a dictatorship and in fact these dictatorships they're not able to produce the kind of highly creative adaptable and innovative and robust and well-balanced systems such as even an ant you couldn't control an ant through a dictatorial hierarchical scheme or the ant colony that he's a part of because an ant can't live by himself he's part of a colony and even though colony has a queen the queen is not controlling all the ants so it's this sort of distributed decentralized highly non-linear very tangled messy system which is an ant colony and that's what all the most interesting systems are like and in fact the ais that we're developing now with these machine learning algorithms and neural networks and so forth that are mirroring the structure of our brains um they are these these very complicated tangled black boxes within which all sorts of interesting not hierarchical but hall article stuff is going on which we're still trying to wrap our minds around so here's some key points about hole loans parts and holes what is a part and what is a hole this is not automatically baked into the structure of the universe you might think that somewhere in the universe it is written that the hand is a part of the body or that a human is a part of a city this is not written anywhere it all depends on your perspective and this is all relative it depends on how you look at things it's sort of like you're given a watermelon a giant watermelon and then you're given a knife and you can slice that watermelon in an infinite number of different ways you can slice it down the middle sideways vertically you know depth wise you can cut different shapes out of it and so forth and depending on how you slice it and how you cut it you're going to see different cross sections different shapes and different aspects and facets of the totality of that watermelon and so your mind plays an important role here in how you're seeing hold-ons and sometimes your mind will focus on the wrong whole or the wrong part and this leads to wrong thinking and various sorts of problems within design problems about how to deal with society and so forth uh just as one example of this if you're living in a country where the cultural zeitgeist and how it thinks about reality and human nature and society is such that they believe that the country is the most important thing and everybody else all the individual humans must subordinate themselves to the country and do what is best for the country at all times and sacrifice themselves this can become extremely problematic and dysfunctional and cancerous and toxic and self-destructive as we've seen for example in nazi germany or as we're seeing today in the sort of uh authoritarian communist regime in china they seem to be swinging their pendulum too far towards the community away from individuality such that they spy on their individual citizens they abuse them and in a certain sense the individual citizens of china tolerate that because they have a different mindset than here in you know in europe and in the west in america they have different mindset where they sort of buy into that cultural idea that yeah we should be sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of the country but of course the problem with that is that it can create a lot of dysfunction there's no freedom of the press you can't criticize the government you can't criticize the communist party this leads to all sorts of devilry and evil and abuses and who knows whether china will be able to sustain that almost certainly they won't be able to because as china develops and their level of income rises and luxury rises people are going to want to demand democracy almost certainly it's just a question of how how long will it take maybe it takes 100 years 200 years to get to that point but after a certain while that system probably will begin to collapse and it'll need to change because it won't be sustainable it might be sustainable for the next 20 30 years but then maybe not beyond that and then they'll have to change and the pendulum will probably swing in the opposite direction more towards autonomy and individuality where the individuals will start to value the parts rather than the hole a little bit more um but of course we have the opposite problem here in america we have the problem of libertarianism which is a toxic pathological political philosophy which is which is sort of the polar opposite of what they got going on in communism which is the idea that every individual human is just every citizen is just an individual and you know don't put any responsibilities on me i'll just do whatever i want i'll behave however i want damn the consequences to the collective it doesn't matter you know i'll own as many guns as i want i'll park my car wherever i want i'll not pay my taxes if i don't want and this sort of stuff and then when you have people behaving like this it's impossible to create any kind of higher well-coordinated collective now the libertarian might say well i don't want to be part of a collective yeah but you are part of a collective you couldn't be living and breathing unless you were part of this collective this collective gives you all of your freedoms laws property rights these things don't exist without this collective it defends you against attack from invaders and outsiders the police forces protect you from theft and rape and other horrible things that would destroy you and provide you with supply chains of electricity and food and water and internet and all these sorts of things none of these things would be possible without government and so this sort of toxic idea that has developed in right-wing circles and amongst libertarians in america especially but in other parts of the world as well is this sort of toxic idea that you know big government is bad and small government is good but that's not the right question the right question is how do we balance between the different hold ons between autonomy and community in a healthy way such that we create higher holes without oppressing the lower you see it's all about exquisite balance if you take an extremist dogmatic position on either autonomy or on community whether libertarians or the communists whatever the chinese communists then it's going to be unsustainable and we see problems with sustainability both in communist china and also here in america there are many systems and and ways in which america is operating which is unsustainable because it's too libertarian and this could ultimately lead to the destruction of america that's what the libertarians don't understand if you want to know more about that then check out my my deep series called the nonsense why libertarianism is nonsense where i i talk about that a lot but see this just shows you that when your mind is thinking too simplistically and is not understanding this sort of organic dynamic harmonic essence of what life is the holonic essence of what life is that it leads to all sorts of problems especially when you're designing things and society is something we're designing that's what we don't realize we're most of us are just living in this society in this country or as part of the human species or as as the city that we're living in and we don't think about the fact that we're designing this stuff but we are we're either designing it consciously or unconsciously mostly we're doing it unconsciously which then gets us bad results it gets us school shootings it gets us pollution it gets us criminality it gets us drug abuse it gets us war it gets genocide it gets racism all this sort of stuff this is all stuff we're designing usually unconsciously and that's why it's so ugly most of the time so one thing you should notice is that the more holistic the design the more it takes into account the harmony between the holes and the parts the more it sees the interconnections the more it balances the different levels of causal chains and interactions the up and down um causal changes sideways diagonals and all these and then it interconnects them in a in a harmonious way the more amazing of a device or machine you can create and sustain like the human body some more key points about hololens so there is coordination and unified action and it's not just every man for himself it's not just every part for himself but in order to get this coordination and unified action there need to be sacrifices made by the individual hold ons so a part has to sacrifice some part of its autonomy it can't just do whatever it wants the little cell right here in my pinky can't just do whatever it wants it has to follow all the other cells when my brain sends a signal through the nervous system here to move the pinky you know left or right up and down it has to obey those rules it also has to sort of obey the laws of physics it can't just do whatever it wants is to follow the laws of physics in order to to to create this unified thing called a hand right every muscle has to obey a muscle in my body can't just do whatever it wants whenever it wants if it did i would have muscle spasms and we would call that some kind of disease and it would inhibit the functioning of my body you see how this works now consider yourself as an ego as an individual animal human this chimp that you are consider sort of extrapolate out from this analogize and consider what kind of sacrifices do you have to make as an individual in order to fit into the larger hole-ons of which you're a part like your family your religious community or spiritual community your university your corporation your sports team your city your country and the entire human race see you can't just go out and do whatever you want you can't just walk into walmart and take a on the checkout counter can't have that we need to have laws and rules against that but hopefully you don't need external enforcement of those laws and rules you don't need a policeman there policing you on every checkout counter so you don't on it hopefully you're wise enough to see that there's something larger going on here aside from yourself maybe you feel like taking a sometimes just wherever but you realize well i gotta sacrifice my desire to take a whenever wherever i want with with concern for the larger whole because there's a certain a sort of order a higher order that we're trying to establish as a society within that walmart you know we don't want to be walking into a walmart where people are on the checkout counters we don't want to do it ourselves because if everybody started doing it we wouldn't like that either if i'm going to check out counter i want to be sure there's no smeared on the checkout counter now as obvious as this sounds i'm not telling you anything new but the problem is that most people haven't really thought deeply about these very simple obvious things because even though it's simple in this extreme example that i'm giving you might say well leo nobody would ever do that well you'd be surprised what they do in china but but but the reason they don't do that is because we have a culture that has fed our mind with certain ideas that instruct us not to do these things we will get publicly shamed or ridiculed uh we will feel embarrassment and we learn all these basic things in school usually in elementary school we start to learn this sort of stuff then there's very complicated peer pressure forces acting upon us and remember culture itself is a hold on and culture has sub-hollands or subcultures within it see and there was a separate culture within your family see your family taught you certain ethics morals values rules standards and principles that you just absorbed unconsciously and that you adhere to blindly without ever thinking about it see you probably never even asked is it even a good thing that i'm not allowed to take a anytime i want maybe that actually hurts my body maybe my digestive system isn't working properly because i'm holding my in all the time maybe busy have you thought about that because sometimes your culture programs you with ideas and rules that are not so healthy now maybe in this walmart example it's a healthy rule it's good that you're not allowed to take a anywhere you want anytime you want but maybe there are other things that are dysfunctional for example the libertarian political philosophy that's been programmed into you by whatever youtubers you like to listen to or whatever or podcasts talk radio maybe that ideology is creating dysfunction maybe this idea that every american should be able to own an unlimited number of guns maybe that's not such a good idea for the whole but you see if you take the position that i am the most important thing in the world in the universe and that there are no hold ons above me and that any other hold on above me is just trying to oppress me take away my freedom and my liberty if that's your approach that's the same approach as one of the cells in my body deciding that it wants to replicate itself and leech all of the other resources in the body it wants to steal all the calories and take all of the immune cells for itself and replicate itself damn everything else and that's called cancer and the problem with that is that not only does that kill the rest of the body eventually it also kills that cell which relies on the rest of the body but that cell only began to do this replication process in a sense because it didn't see how it fit into the larger hole and it refused to sacrifice itself for the larger hole so sacrificing yourself a larger hole doesn't mean that you're going to be a slave to the whole that would also if if it turned into slavery that would be oppressive and that would be pathological too so we don't have just two choices here either absolute freedom in the libertarian sense or slavery and tyranny there's a delicate medium balance that needs to be exquisitely struck and it's really difficult to strike that balance well that's the challenge of government and politics we've had governments all over the world that were way too oppressive and tyrannical that were unsustainable and had to be overthrown and led to lots of misery and suffering and on the other hand we've also had social organizations that were too lacks too libertarian-like too loosey-goosey didn't have enough laws rules structures and that led to all forms of exploitation evil enslavement and so forth for example right now in america and in most parts of the world there's not sufficient regulation over the powers of corporations and these corporations are basically able to do whatever they want and they're able to exploit the out of a majority of the citizens they're able to basically practice predator predatory capitalism and predatory marketing to sell and milk money from the citizenry and the government isn't really doing much about it because it can't because it's been co-opted and corrupted by these corporations and so rather than having tyranny of a king or a monarch which we don't have in america that we have tyranny of of of libertarian uh anarcho-capitalism effectively and plutocracy so it's all about striking that exquisite balance and most humans are really bad at doing that it takes wisdom to know how to do that there's no algorithm that tells you how to strike this balance there's no mathematical formula there's no simple procedure that's the whole intelligence of life and reality is figuring out all of these balances in all of these infinite different situations and we as mankind are placed right in the nexus of making these decisions you see when it comes to evolving your body you didn't make any conscious decisions for how to organize your body how the cells are going to work you know what the heart is going to do how many times it's going to be you didn't make any of these decisions it was all made for you by the universe and you're just coasting off of that you're taking it all for granted but now the universe gave you an opportunity with this body since this is the brilliance of the universe the beauty the universe designed this body and then gave you this body so that now now the universe is sort of putting upon you this this interesting question of like what are you gonna you do with this body and this mind because the mind is part of the body uh what are you gonna do with this how are you gonna use it and can you create something analogous to what i created with when i created you can you do that yourself and achieve the same kind of exquisite balance that i achieved to create you so that you could create something else and transfer that beauty throughout the universe at higher and higher orders it would be sort of like a really good analogy is imagine if i was a really good drawer and i took a pencil and on a white piece of paper i drew a human and then i drew for him a pencil and i animated that human such that he can then and i gave him the off the autonomy to then draw his own drawings and then i would see can he draw as good let's say i'm a master drawer i can just do everything perfectly if i draw him perfectly can he then also learn how to draw something else perfectly that's that's the amazing thing that's going on here and it's not easy or trivial for that little version of me because i basically drew a version of myself on this paper that little version of me to learn the wisdom and intelligence that i use to create him to then create something else as holistic and harmonic as what i created when i created him so you have to be very careful in how you think about where you sacrifice for your collective because you can also sacrifice for your collective in dysfunctional toxic ways for example tomorrow the gov the american government could declare war on iran and issue a draft and draft you into the war potentially and this war could be predicated upon you know a need to get iranian oil or some you know some stupid reason like that now am i telling you that you should go and sacrifice yourself for america in order to kill iranians and and perpetuate this war no see that would not be intelligent that would not be wise that would not be the right balance so you can't just be a a sheep in the herd and just walk off off the cliff when the whole herd decides to go off a cliff you got to be part of the herd because you can't avoid living without the herd as a as a social animal humans are very social and everything we do is social so you can't avoid being part of the herd but what you can do is you can be independent enough to avoid the you know collective madnesses that come every every generation whether it's with war or with religion or with genocide or with racism or whatever it is you can avoid those you can stand up and say no to those you could say that's wrong that's that's a that's swing the pendulum too much in the opposite direction see with the with these hall our keys there's no clear controller of the system and this is what many conspiracy theorists get wrong is they they they they tend to have a worldview that thinks that there's a a small number of people sitting at the top of a pyramid that are controlling and manipulating the events of the world but that's not really what's going on now that doesn't mean there can't be some conspiracies there can be certainly a group of people can can gather together and conspire to assassinate jfk certainly that's possible in fact that's that's basically what happened there i imagine i don't think it was a single gunman but anyways so that's certainly possible but what you have to understand is that nobody is really controlling this thing it's it's a deeply twisted inverted strange loopy circular causality sort of system so like for example who controls the us government is it the head politicians is it the president is it the speaker of the house is it the senators sort of but not really none of them individually has that much control over anything no individual senator can pass almost anything even the president has extremely limited abilities to do stuff as we've seen lately with the trump administration even as as awful as trump was and uh as sort of uh you know as much stuff as he wanted to push through with executive orders there's only so much he can do many of them are struck and down struck down by by courts checks and balances and so forth there's very little an individual senator can do and so in a sense blaming them for the collective actions of america is rather silly like when you blame an individual senator for us going toward iraq an individual center doesn't really have that that much responsibility and then you have to ask but how did the senators get there who gave the senators and the the president power well it was the people so isn't it all ultimately the people who are to blame so like if there's some president you don't like let's say you don't like donald trump but who elected him the people now you might argue that well he didn't win the popular vote and all this well i mean fine uh but there were other presidents you don't like who who did win the popular vote so what the fact that you're ignoring is that it's really the people who are giving the power to the politicians or then controlling things who you're mad at so who are you really mad at you're mad at yourself you're just not seeing it right because to see it you need to have a holistic understanding and you would need to appreciate the sort of circular causal chains that are going on now you might say oh leo but that's just that's just sort of the the uh all a facade government really the control of the government is in the deep state and in the you know the rich and powerful jews or whoever who are who are controlling the world uh so this this sort of these conspiracy theories right but but this is this is completely delusional because no single billionaire i don't care how rich he is has that much control over society or the world jeff bezos elon musk these people they don't have that much control over things and even you may say well but if we get 20 of them together then they have control and not not really you can get 20 billionaires together and they still won't have that much control now could they do some scheming and manipulating and be evil together sure of course they could and they do um but they don't really control nearly as much as you think and again who gives them power where do they get their money from again from you you probably shop on amazon pay jeff bezos's salary see so it all goes around circularly such that it's not clear who's in charge because there is nobody really in charge of course that doesn't mean everyone has equal power not at all some people have way more power than others and i'm not saying that the power structure we have now is optimal it's very far from optimal it's very dysfunctional but we can't make it functional and optimal we can't find that exquisite right balance until we come to an understanding of how complex and multi-dimensional this whole causal chain is how circular it is and we also make sure we include ourselves in that to take responsibility for it right see one of the one of the most idiotic attitudes you can take is to be mad at your government for doing things you don't like and then blaming them because that creates sort of a duality between your government and you you are your government now of course that doesn't mean that you individually can stop a war or change the present or something but that's the nature of how holons work right an individual cell in my pinky can't do very much in terms of changing the body it can't just like decide to you know do whatever the hell it wants and that's not a bad thing so of course to start to realize how you are just a a whole lawn within many larger hold ons above you this this requires humility and a letting go of one's ego because by definition the more egotistical you are the more selfish you are the more you believe that the whole world revolves around you and therefore damn everybody else i'm just going to do what serves me this kind of selfishness is the very definition of evil and this is what leads to all the suffering and problems and ugliness in the world so to have a well-balanced harmonized system the individual holons and elements within the system need to have a proper humility and to know their proper place which requires selflessness so the only reason realize this the only reason your body is able to function and to generate the ego that you are that you think is so special and so important is because every part of your body is in a sense selfless your heart is selfless because it just pumps when it needs to pump and it doesn't just take a break whenever it wants you would think that the heart gets tired doesn't it deserve a break no it doesn't deserve a break because if the heart takes a break that will kill the body and in turn that will kill the environment for the heart the heart can't exist without a outer body protecting it and supplying it with food and oxygen and nutrients and immune functions and so forth you see so in a sense the heart is wise enough to understand that it needs to keep working for the sake of the body and that that is not enslaving the heart that's actually allowing the heart to exist see obeying the laws of your country like paying your taxes rather than trying to cheat on your taxes if you're selfish you want to cheat on your taxes because you feel taxation is theft and then you become like wesley snipes and then they they throw you in jail if they catch you um but but see that's necessary because if we didn't pay our taxes if everybody was like wesley snipes then we couldn't have a military to defend us against invaders we couldn't have roads couldn't have electric system couldn't have schools fire departments police and many other things that we all need and without these you would be living in such an awful community that you yourself as a libertarian you might think you would want to live in such a community but you just don't understand that this community would be so awful it would be full of so much theft and rape and violence and exploitation and slavery that you yourself would denounce this community and start your own new community with some laws and rules that are more strictly enforced and taxation to pay for all those um enforcement mechanisms it's just that you haven't thought through how everything is interconnected and that is the that is the key to holistic thinking which we're gonna talk about much more in part two we're just we're just getting started here and you can see just how interesting and and profound already this is and how many implications this has if you're a designer if you're gonna design anything in your life if you're an engineer if you're uh even like a web designer software programmer a lot of this is designed if you're an architect if you're even a politician because a politician is basically a designer of society that's what a politician is or at least should be this term social engineering has has gotten sort of a negative connotation uh but actually social engineering is exactly what we need more of we need to be less political and more socially engineery think like engineers selflessly so this sort of selfishness creates pathology within the holarchy but at the same time if you're too selfless then you can't survive so how do you strike that balance well that is the whole dilemma of life that's why you're alive that's why you have a brain that's why you have consciousness is to figure that out that's the game of life is figuring that out so don't look for a simple algorithm or some ten commandments to tell you how to do it that's where you're gonna become conscious do conscious work do all the self-development work and then you're gonna be one of the best people on the planet at doing that and still you'll make mistakes but but it'll be a lot better so it's important to remember that holes are not automatically more important than parts and parts are not automatically more important than holes and that the causal connections that we're talking about here tend to be circular tend to be strange loopy tend to boomerang on themselves tend to backfire and they tend to be not just bottom up but top down and sideways and diagonal so we could say that every whole on seeks some degree of autonomy to do its own thing and individualism and every hold on seeks some degree of community see you might think that you want to maximize individuality and just to be purely individual but actually you don't want that you're not going to be happy doing that for you to be happy as a human you want to find a balance again an exquisite balance between individuality and community you want to engage with others in friendships in sexual union in relationships and families and so forth in teams in corporations you want to do all that even like when you interact online on twitter or in the youtube comments section or on facebook that's you engaging in community when you leave your little stupid troll comment that's you actually getting some value and pleasure out of community otherwise you'd just be sitting at home alone and that would get boring for you so you don't want to you don't want to be purely individual to be like a pure individual you'd have to go and like live in the middle of the forest all by yourself for the rest of your life you would be miserable most people would be miserable they actually wouldn't be able to handle it they would have deep depression and some existential crisis even some people who do that they still they have loved ones they have family they go see and so forth in order to just to tolerate being out in the wilderness for a year or two even monks who live in monasteries they're part of a community it's not one monk it's a bunch of monks ramen and maharshi he didn't just live in a cave by himself he had a whole village that basically grew up around him and gave him a sense of purpose and meaning and community now of course he probably could he was probably so awake that he could have just lived by himself and been happy but but nevertheless he didn't do that why didn't rama and maharshi just tell everyone to off in his village and just go live literally in a cave by himself with not talking to anybody clearly because he found some value in community even though he was supposedly very enlightened um but also you don't want to get too lost in community there's the opposite problem of getting too lost with your family getting too attached to your family too tied up with their stuff this is a big problem for people or getting too wrapped up in a romantic relationship such that it becomes codependent and toxic and you lose your own sense of values and priorities and life purpose just to be with the other person this can also happen with your country or with your religion you can become too attached to dependent too merged into your country or your religion such that you're not thinking independently you're not acting independently and this leads to all sorts of horrors and evils there's a further wrinkle here i have for you and this is where it gets really practical there's a difference between males and females the masculine and the feminine there's maybe a better way to put it uh in what they seek and value autonomy or community so the feminine values community more the masculine values autonomy and individuality more this these are generalizations it doesn't always have to be this way and remember some men can be more feminine and some women can be more masculine and all of us value these things to some degree it's just a matter of finding these balances and they're general trends but generally the male mind the masculine mind tends to want to assert itself in the universe tends to want to control and to dominate and the feminine wants to be part it wants to surrender to the universe not to dominate it but to be dominated to surrender in a healthy way and to be part of a union and so that that's what many females are looking for in relationships and with marriage is they're looking for that sense of community with the guy they're looking to for a stable guy that they can surrender to in a healthy way and of course the guy is sort of interested in that but at the same time the guy wants his autonomy uh and sometimes females don't understand the male's need for autonomy and independence and sometimes males don't understand the females need for surrender and community and so there's uh there's sort of a there's pathologies on both sides in both directions oftentimes a common problem men have in romantic relationships is that they're too afraid of commitment and uh of intimacy with the woman they want to have sex with a woman but they don't want to get too intimate because they they start to feel that they're losing their sense of individuality autonomy they're getting tied down that sort of feeling and so you have to work past that if you want to have good relationships with women as a man and then with women it's a different problem it's that the woman tends to lose herself too easily to the man and to sort of become like a doormat or become relinquish her own values and sense of priorities and life purpose to the man and then not really have her own she gets lost in the romance and in the love of it and then and then that becomes a problem for her because if the man leaves her or cheats on her she can't stand on her own she can't take care of herself and she becomes too attached so the male is generally too detached the female is too attached so we have to we have to learn to compensate for our weaknesses and for our strengths so this idea that individualism is an absolute good or collectivism is an absolute good or that libertarianism is an absolute goat or that socialism is an absolute good this is all nonsense it obviously doesn't work if you look throughout history we have a long record of extreme individualism and extreme collectivism and both of them fail miserably so what you need to see is you need to sort of rise above that go meta don't get don't get caught up in the in the war between the individuals and collectivists that you see in the news and on in politics and on tv you got to rise above that and start to look at the situation from a higher sort of a holistically informed perspective to see the the true complexities here of the situation it's not about capitalism versus socialism it's about rising above that and looking for for higher transcendent metastructures and systems beyond those two that will address the limitations of of each one without succumbing to the pitfalls of the other and a perspective and an understanding that is more complex more holistic and more self-aware and more selfless than the the previous two systems so be careful about demonizing one side or the other or getting lost in these culture wars or these partisan debates now that doesn't mean that both sides and all these debates are equally wrong or equally right both sides are usually partial one side could be more wrong and more selfish than the other side but that still doesn't give you license to demonize them that would be doubling down on the mistake and this i see the same sort of problem happening in in the gender wars in trying to understand male and female attraction uh i see that men and women both struggle very much to understand the opposite sex and to understand especially how sexual attraction works and how how different it is for males and for females and then demonizing the other for it so you got to be very careful not to get wrapped up in that so evolution is made of hole ons gaining more and more complexity with new levels emerging and you have to recognize that humans are not the highest hold on in the universe we tend to act that way because we're so narcissistic and egotistical and we like to pretend that the whole universe revolves around us to the point where we actually believed at one point not that long ago that literally the earth was the center of the universe and that humans have dominion over all the animals and everything else of course this is obviously self-biased and when a whole on behaves in this sort of narcissistic egotistical selfish manner it becomes a devilish hold on and then all sorts of suffering and pathology ensues which is what we're seeing all around the world all right so one of the solutions to mankind's problems is to just start to acknowledge culturally that humans are not the highest hotline and that we need to have humility and to realize that we need to make some sacrifices to fit properly into the ecosystem that we're a part of with the animals the fish the plants the planet and then the solar system and beyond what happens when we meet aliens we're going to try to think we're better than them and that's going to create all sorts of new problems so we need to upgrade our thinking such that by the time the aliens come here which they probably will at some point then we got to be already at such a level that we we can coordinate with them and understand that we're not going to try to dominate them and they're not going to try to dominate us but that it's about finding this sort of holiday balance so reality is an infinite chain of hollands which is what a holarchy is a holarchy is multi-dimensional non-linear relativistic it's groundless it's centerless it's bottomless it's topless it's infinite and it's strange loopy if you don't know what a strange loop is that's sort of a technical term go check out my episode called reality is a strange loop where we talk about that sort of escher-like circular causality that is very fundamental to the way that reality works and now i want to sort of move on and introduce an additional interesting topic here an ancillary topic but it ties in with holland's this is the notion of the indra's net this is a concept from hinduism and from buddhism which which is which is a very powerful concept indra's net is this idea that the ultimate structure of the universe is this um sort of web of orbs think of them as mirrored orbs that are all networked together to each other they extend infinitely out in all directions and they mirror each other because they're like mirrored spheres such that every orb contains the reflection of every other orb and you can see a few images depictions artistic depictions of what that might look like now of course don't take these too literally this is not literally what it looks like this is just a metaphor to help you to start to think more holonically and more holistically about how the universe is so under the materialist paradigm under the sort of ordinary classical science we tend to think of the universe as just this rigid material set of physical objects that build upon each other you know atoms cells organs humans cities planets solar systems galaxies and up and so forth this is a very outdated way of thinking about the universe you need to replace this image with this image of indra's net where instead you see hollands that are non-linearly interconnected with each other and that contain and reflect parts of each other within themselves and that this is the real structure it's a much better way to think i want to read you a few quotations here from wikipedia about uh indra's net describing indra's net because there's some beautiful descriptions of it within various buddhist and hindu texts so wikipedia here is quoting some of these ancient hindu and buddhist texts so here's one example of that quote the manner in which all dharmas interpenetrate is like an imperial net of celestial jewels extending in all directions infinitely without limit as for the imperial net of heavenly jewels it is known as indra's net a net which is made entirely of jewels because of the clarity of the jewels they are all reflected in and enter into each other at infinitum within each jewel simultaneously is reflected the whole net ultimately nothing comes or goes if we now turn to the southwest we can pick one particular jewel and examine it closely this individual jewel can immediately reflect the image of every other jewel as is the case with this jewel this is further more the case with all the rest of the jewels each and every jewel simultaneously and immediately reflects each and every other jewel added to an item the image of each of these limitless jewels is within one jewel appearing brilliantly none of the other jewels interfere with this when one sits within one jewel one is simultaneously sitting in all the infinite jewels in all 10 directions how is this so because within each jewel are present all joules if all jewels are present within each jewel it is also the case that if you sit in one jewel you will sit in all the jewels at the same time the inverse is also understood in the same way just as one goes into one joule and thus enters every other joule while never leaving this one joule so too one enters any joule while never leaving this particular joule end quote that's a mouthful you see it's this recursive fractal interpenetration which leads to the deep connectedness and unity and holism of the universe so holism is baked into the very structure of existence is what we're saying and this quote by the way was from from patriarch duchun quoted on wikipedia there's another patriarch quoted there who uses a metaphor of the golden lion statue in describing the structure the ultimate structure of the universe and so i'm going to quote that to you here this is from patriarch fazang and he says quote so here he's describing this golden lion statue the golden lion statue represents the universe at its highest level so here he says quote in each of the lion's eyes in its ears limbs and so forth down to each and every single hair there is a golden lion all the lions embraced by each other and every hair simultaneously and instantaneously enter into one single hair thus in each and every hair there is an infinite number of lions the progression is infinite like the jewels of the celestial lord indra's net a realm embracing realm ad infinitum is thus established and is called the realm of indra's net end quote now you might think that this is just cute stories and metaphors but actually if you become ridiculously ridiculously conscious levels of consciousness that are superhuman that you probably could not imagine the kinds of levels of consciousness that you can experience on breakthrough doses of psychedelics you can become so conscious and i'm speaking now from direct experience i've had the experience of literally looking at my hands in one of these states of consciousness and realizing that my hands contain and are made out of because my hands are made of consciousness so are yours everything's out of consciousness that my hands literally contain every animal every tree every human idea and concept that are literally making up the structure of my hands so even though it might seem like i'm sitting here on planet earth looking at these biological hands actually no i'm sitting inside of an infinite mind looking at the hands which are made out of infinite consciousness and literally these hands the consciousness in these hands is the same consciousness that is imagining kangaroos and hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses and humans and aliens and planets and gods and everything and all of that is contained within my hands and literally you can be so conscious as to look at your hands and you can see the rhinoceroses and the atoms and the molecules and the humans you can see your mother's face inside your own hand how's that for a trip now you say leo that's some crazy trippy stuff that can't be real that's just a hallucination right wrong because everything is a hallucination that's what you don't understand see the earth itself is a hallucination your body is a hallucination and so what you're hallucinating is completely relative and completely arbitrary and it's completely fluid one minute you can be hallucinating this the next minute you can be hallucinating yourself as a kangaroo and uh so uh there's nothing preventing you from literally seeing your mother's face in your hands and that will be as real as her real face that you believe is somewhere wherever you believe it is see when you become so conscious that all these distinctions of materialism uh are erased all the boundaries are erased then then you really start to trip consciousness is tricky is well it's tricky and it's trippy it's both the problem is that when most people trip they don't take their trips seriously it's not that they take their trip seriously they don't take their trip seriously enough that's the problem it takes a deep wisdom and intelligence to actually really accept the metaphysical and epistemic implications of your trip and if you want to know more about how that works and the whole metaphysics behind psychedelics go check out my episode how psychedelics work where i explain all that so now we come to the final subtopic here as we wrap up and that is that i want to stress the point that reality is groundless this is utterly fundamental if you want to understand reality and this is a huge mistake that many academic scientists and intelligent people make is they assume that reality has a ground this is the problem of science religion and philosophy is that it seeks almost always it seeks to supply a ground to reality different philosophies and religions and sciences will try to ground reality in different things mankind has always sought to ground reality because otherwise reality is groundless and when you realize truly understand and you truly realize that reality is groundless um yeah it feels like you're losing your mind it feels a bit like you're going insane because how do you explain what it is when you have nothing to anchor it to so what do i mean by ground and groundless let me give you some examples so for example physics has tried to ground reality into things like atoms or strings or quantum mechanics or energy or information or simulation theory or multiverses or the big bang or dark energy so what we mean when we say a ground for reality that means like if i ask you clearly you're seeing some object right here i'm holding up my hand you're seeing my hand or if you're listening to this you're hearing my voice so clearly you're some kind of object now where did this object come from you have to explain it somehow because if you can't say where it came from this is a very very big problem for you because it is very mysterious and in fact it it's it causes an existential crisis for your ego because your ego needs to be able to explain where it came from so usually we take this whole process for granted and we just assume that well we we came from from the earth or from the pairs or whatever uh but see the the problem is that if you if you keep going back through this causal chain the mind wants to create these causal chains and it wants to say well you know i'm ultimately made of atoms that's just what i am just atoms and what are atoms are just energy and what is energy well it's just information and what is information oh maybe it's a simulation in the computer somewhere see and then and then our mind gets tired of this and just says well we don't we don't really know it's too complicated maybe science will figure it out in the future right now we just got to say we don't know this is the standard game that mankind has played at any time that mankind has come up with a ground that ground has been debunked so the ancient greek philosophers said that everything was made of atoms well then we figured out no atoms are divisible and have sub-components so then so then they said well it's not made out of atoms it's made of quarks but then we realize that even quarks seem to be divisible and maybe they have something smaller in them we just can't see it but sometimes the grounding is not just on downwards it's also done upwards you might say well where do we come from well we came from the universe from the stars we're all made out of stardust right this is a common sort of scientific explanation we're made of stardust and where does stardust come from well it came from the big bang and where did that come from well we don't know see it keeps happening so on the one hand we want to construct a ground but at the same time if we dig deeper into the ground we realize it's actually groundless every ground you look at and question if you don't question deeply it'll serve as a ground but it's really a pseudo round it's a it's an illusion it's really something your mind comes up with as a placeholder to say ah just shut up already and move on with life stop asking stupid questions stop wasting time with philosophy but if you probe deeper using philosophy and contemplation and inquiry then all these grounds reveal themselves to be absurd and ridiculous and none of them are the ultimate ground within mathematics for example they tried mathematicians try to ground the universe in numbers and equations and of course this is ridiculously transparently self-biased because of course the only reason a mathematician thinks the universe is mad at numbers and equations is because he's good at manipulating them and he enjoys them that's the only reason the universe is not actually made of numbers or equations that's just a projection of the mathematician's mind similarly you could try to ground reality biologically you could say well it's actually animal consciousness that's what reality is or it's it's body living bodies living beings that's what reality is made up or it's the brain really you know a lot of people when you when you push them into a corner on this issue they will say well it's all it's all neurons in the brain that's what it really is but then where's the brain say oh the brain is somewhere in in space in a it's in a it's in a uh it's in a vat like a like a jar suspended in some sort of liquid brain and a vat scenario but where is this vat and uh what kind of space is it occupying in time and so forth you see so you keep pushing the problem back further and further but with no resolution this is a game that the ego plays the ego tries to play this game to convince itself that reality has a ground because the ego needs that in order to ground itself the ego literally is looking for an anchor for its own self because the ego needs to believe that it's real so how does the ego believe that it's real by telling itself that it's the brain or that it's mad of atoms or that it's the body or that it's energy or information or that it's a simulation or whatever a brain in a vat all of that is imaginary because the truth is that reality is groundless it has no ground why did you ever assume there was a ground why would there need to be a need to be a ground after all for reality to have a ground that would be a very limited reality why would reality limit itself to a ground for example if reality was made of atoms that would limit reality that means reality could only be whatever those atoms allow it to be why why would reality do that to itself if reality was just animal consciousness in a brain it would be limited to whatever neurons can do in a brain that would be very limited why would it do that to itself you also ground yourself in history not just in science for example if i ask you you're sitting here this moment right now listening to me but where did you come from where did this moment come from you're going to say well it came from the previous moment from the this day today came from yesterday and yesterday came from the day before and that came from the last decade in the last decade and the last decade until you get all the way down to your birth and then you say i was born and then i say well where were you where does your birth come from and you say well it came from my parents but your parents didn't exist before your birth your birth was the birth of your parents you get that so the ego is trying to ground itself in an idea of a birth of your life story of your parents of a ancestry and lineage you say well my where did your parents come from i might ask you and say well they came from their parents and where they come from well they came from our ape ancestors oh yeah but where they come from well they came from ancient mammals and where they come from well they came from uh from little reptiles and things and where they come well they came from fish and those came from bacteria and microorganisms and where they come from well they came from organically assembling molecules in the oceans somewhere we don't even know uh and where did those come from well they came from the earth and where did that come from well the stardust and where that come from well that came from the big bang and where'd that come from well we don't know but all of that came after your birth you see you want to ground your birth in the big bang but the big bang is something you learned and invented after your birth likewise you want to ground your birth inside your parents as though your birth came from your parents but your birth didn't come from your parents your parents came from your birth you get that your ape ancestors they didn't come before your birth they came after your birth so where did your birth come from do you even have a birth or is your birth just a memory that your ego invented to anchor your sense of sanity and existence because if you realize that your birth is just imaginary then what is this doing here what is this how did i get here if my birth didn't bring me here that gets a little closer to enlightenment if you think that way you might think i'm just joking or being cute with you but i'm i'm being deadly serious and literal your birth is imaginary it didn't happen likewise with the with the parents you think that caused you and your your big bang so but that's for another topic i've discussed that kind of stuff elsewhere i don't want to get too crazy metaphysical with you here um so my point is though that any way that you think that reality is you made that up you imagined it so if you think reality is energy you imagined it if you think reality is the big bang or stardust you imagine that if you think that reality is atoms you imagine that if you think reality is numbers you imagine that if you think reality is science you imagine that so then you ask well leo then what way is it and of course the way that it is is no way other than how you imagine it reality is imagination and what is imagination you might ask it's whatever you're imagining you're asking me to help you imagine what imagination is but that's just more imagination you can't go you can't go underneath imagination because that's all there is you might say but leo what is imagination made out of it must be made of atoms or neurons right energy isn't imagination energy no energy is imagined but isn't it atoms no atoms are imagined but isn't it happening in space no space is imagined but isn't it happening in a human body and a brain from a ape creature that was born on a planet no all of those are imagined you can't get underneath imagining stuff see the problem here is that you want to confine reality to a finite thing you want to say reality is like this and not like this but the nature of reality is that it's infinite it's an infinite i'll argue so it's not limited to being this way but not that way it's always it's any way that it wants to be reality is being however it wants if reality wants to be a human believing that it's a brain that was born to parents on a planet called earth that is 14 billion years old in the universe if that's what the universe wants to believe and imagine that's what it becomes now if you want to change your mind if the universe wants to change its mind and imagine that it's a kangaroo living a thousand years in the future on the planet mars that's what it'll imagine and that's what will be true and real for it until it imagines something else and then when it imagines nothing then it'll be nothing and there's no way that it can't be because it can imagine everything because it's infinite imagination if you want more on that check out my episode called what is reality where i explain that in more detail so reality is not made out of objects reality here we're going to use some fancy language look at this reality is an infinite holographic fractal mindscape otherwise imagination infinite imagination it's infinite because it has no limits it's holographic what does holographic mean holographic is basically just another word for indra's net where every piece of itself is contained within itself so a hologram is if you don't know a hologram is a picture uh if you take a holograph holographic picture it'll have like a picture of a whatever a bouquet of flowers if you take a hammer and smash this picture into a bunch of little fragments each fragment you might think well in an ordinary photograph each fragment would just be a piece of the of the bouquet of flowers like sort of a jigsaw puzzle right you break it apart little pieces but in a hologram when you smash it with a hammer you get little fragments every fragment still contains the full flower not a piece of the flower the full flower and if you break that piece with a hammer again to break one little broken shard into more shards that shard and its shards sub shards will all contain the original flower so no matter how many times you break it it'll still contain the full flower or the full bouquet of flowers in this case now that might seem like it's impossible but it's not impossible these holographic images actually exist now you might ask leo if i take a hologram like there's a hologram on your visa credit card if i take it and cut it with scissors it's not gonna it's not gonna display two images you can actually try it it won't that's because it's not a true hologram the hologram on your visa card is sort of a fake hologram and most most holographic images that you see at novelty stores and such they weren't true holograms a true hologram is actually pretty expensive and difficult to make they make it with lasers and such things and there's some complicated science to it um sort of the science of holography you can read about it on wikipedia if you like but anyways the point being is that the hologram from which the hologram on your visa card was made in the original that is not on your visa card but somewhere in some laboratory that original is actually a true hologram and if you broke it with a hammer it would actually exhibit this holographic behavior but consciousness is infinitely holographic which means that every every corner of consciousness contains every other uh aspect of consciousness so this coordinate in space right here contains as much consciousness as this coordinate space here and it could independently imagine an entire universe if it wanted to that's the power of consciousness now see this this seems sort of outlandish it might seem like i'm talking about science fiction here not reality but this is reality and you can become directly conscious of these things for yourself so you don't have to believe me here i'm not selling you on some ideology you can become conscious and validate everything i'm telling you here so you can actually become directly conscious of the fact that consciousness is everything you can become conscious that consciousness is infinite you can become conscious that consciousness is holographic you can become conscious that consciousness is fractal you can become become conscious that it's all one mind therefore i call it an infinite holographic fractal mind space think of it as the universe can imagine any scenario it wants as a whole the universe is not limited to being built up of little parts like lego bricks the the universe is from the top down the universe can imagine any scenario it wants for example if the universe wants to imagine that it's a human in the 21st century it can do that it takes it no effort in fact that's what it's doing right now with you if the universe wants to imagine it's a kangaroo living in australia 10 million years ago you can imagine that no problem if the universe wants to imagine that it's a rock sitting on a hill it can do that it doesn't need a brain it doesn't need life it doesn't need evolution it cuts through all that to imagine whatever it was evolution is something the universe is imagining the 21st century is something the universe is imagining you are something the universe is imagining that's how you got here you imagined yourself into existence not something in fact that's not the right but that's not the right way to put it you didn't imagine yourself into existence you are currently imagining yourself into existence and you always have been now you might wonder but leo why can't reality have a ground maybe one day science will find the ground maybe we haven't found it yet we need better instruments better particle colliders better microscopes and we'll find the ground you will never find the ground because it has no ground you might say well how can you be sure you haven't scoured the entire universe to know that it has no ground right wrong i have because you are the universe you have the ability to actually literally become conscious of the entire universe thereby scouring the whole thing thereby leaving no corner unturned and therefore realizing it has no ground the buddhists also call this the groundless ground if you want you could call it the groundless ground when you realize it has no ground that sort of becomes the ground the ground is that it has no ground although if you make that the ground that's not the true ground the the dow that can be spoken is not the true dao that's what we're talking about here anything you say is the ground is not the ground so even when i say it has no ground you might say well but that's a ground and then what i will say is that no that's not the ground that's just symbols and words the words are not the ground you might say well then that's the ground and i said no that's just a thought that's also not the ground you say well what is the ground and i say there is no ground you say ah so that's the ground and i say no that's not the ground and this goes on forever infinitely see reality cannot have a ground because if it did it would be finite and if reality was finite it wouldn't be one and it couldn't exist it's impossible for anything to exist other than infinity a finite thing cannot exist by itself you can't have one thing without everything this is a key insight you will one day come to if you're serious about this work is that the only way to have anything is to have everything you can't you can't be biased you need everything you can't have an asymmetry within reality so another way to put this is that reality is perfectly and infinitely symmetrical which means that if reality was made of atoms that would be a bias and an asymmetry it would be wrong and it couldn't there couldn't be atoms without being other stuff and you might say well maybe it's energy well you can't have energy without also other stuff and that's also a bias and an asymmetry ultimately you realize it's all of those things so people sometimes wonder well it's it's a miracle that we're here it's a miracle that the universe exists at all well in a sense yes but also in a sense no and uh you know the logical mind wants to know what caused the universe where did it come from and the answer of course is that it always was it didn't come from anywhere and you might say well but how could it always be that seems magical and impossible well that's the kicker is that infinity is magic it is the impossible made possible see for the universe to exist the only way it could exist because it is one is that it had to create itself and the only way the universe could create itself is if it was infinite because it requires infinite power because what it has to do is has to it has to break the very rules of logic itself to go backwards in time to cause and create itself before it even existed it's a mind this is the ultimate strange loop that i'm explaining to you where you came from where everything came from where you came from is using infinite power you created yourself you created yourself before you existed therefore causing your existence without this infinite power nothing could exist with this infinite power everything can exist so there is not even a possibility of anything not existing there's only the possibility of existence that's the top logical absolute nature of infinite power or of infinity or otherwise known as god so what i'm telling you is that for anything to exist literally what is necessary is the infinite power of god infinite powers necessary to bring even a single atom into existence that's what the scientists and materialists and rationalists and atheists don't understand see everyone keeps looking for a ground for reality but the reality is that all you're doing when you're looking for a ground is you're just unraveling the infinite fractal that you yourself are as god you are god wondering where you came from and as you look outside of yourself you are literally inventing a back story to explain where everything came from and literally you're seeing it is the backstory created in real life so for example if you if you go look into a mirror right now your bathroom mirror you might think that you're looking at yourself that is a backstory that is being imagined by you to help you to sort of unravel the fractal the infinite fractal that you are if you uh if you go travel to the edge of the universe you might wonder maybe i'll reach the you know some ultimate answer to the to the source of the universe by by reaching its edge as you're traveling through space you're looking around you're seeing stars and dust and whatever else is out there aliens and stuff as you see all that all that is doing is unraveling the fractal of you see the nature of this infinite mind is that if you keep asking it questions where did it come from where did it come from where to come from it's always going to keep creating more backstory more backstory more back for it's an infinite backstory it's sort of like if i told you you know luke skywalker exists and you would say well where did he come from me as the writer the author i could just keep inventing an infinite baxter i could say well he came from darth vader his father anakin skywalker he might say well where did he come from well he came from uh you know he came from tatooine and his mother you know and he was he was made by the medicalrians and the emperor or whatever and then where did the emperor come from well he came from some other sith lord who invented him and where did that guy come from well he came from somebody else and would just keep we can keep this going can you see that we can keep this going forever we can also make it perfectly consistent with itself such that the perfect the story is perfectly consistent with no contradictions in it whatsoever so this is what the infinite mind is doing is it's constantly unraveling this infinite fractal of everything you see around you so that you keep getting more and more answers finite answers all your answers are finite because the nature of the infinite is that it spawns infinite finite stuff and so that's what you're seeing around you and the trick is to realize and to grasp the whole thing at once right what you're doing is you're unraveling it piece by piece by piece and you're ending you're chasing your tail in an infinite circle so what needs to happen you need to grasp the entire thing as a whole that's what enlightenment basically is grasp the entire thing as a whole instantly grasp that your god creating yourself and stop looking for a ground find the groundless ground realize that there is no ground because you're infinite and you can keep asking more questions forever you can keep doing science forever you can keep doing history forever it's just story you're imagining stories it's an infinite dream and in this dream you can navigate the dream forever in all directions and it's perfectly consistent uh it's made up of infinite infinite hold-ons in all directions and uh and then what you're not getting though is that you are the ultimate hold on so there actually is an ultimate hold on and the ultimate hold on is you i the ultimate hold on is i not the ego eye but you and not the ego you but i'm talking about the the god you the god i so in the bible there's a famous quote where um was it moses maybe it was moses or one of the one of the prophets you know has a communication with god on the mountaintop somewhere or whatever um or maybe it was the burning bush i forget and uh and anyways he has this conversation with god and then he wants to he wants to run back to his his his you know his fellow villagers or whatever and tell them about this amazing conversation with god that he has and then and finally he asks god you know before leaving he's like well who should i tell them you are and uh and god says i am tell them i am that's it that's the whole highest hold on so what happened there was that moses or wherever this this dude was i forget his name he communed he opened up a channel to the highest hole on which was of course himself he was stupid he didn't understand this he was actually talking himself um so he opened the channel to his own higher self which is god and then his higher self told him i am and so that's that but he didn't really understand and his and the people he told also didn't understand and the people who read the bible also don't understand so you are the highest hold on there's nothing higher than you but i don't mean the human you that's a false hold on so it's tricky here with these holons because there's multiple planes and dimensions within which they operate so you might think that leo i can't be the highest hole on because the highest hole on is the universe as a whole like the big bang isn't that the highest hold on it's like 100 million light years across or something isn't that the highest hold on no because that's happening within the higher hold on of your consciousness it's happening to you and so the the whole trick here that this is the thing that is so counterintuitive that's so difficult for scientists and materialists to understand is that the highest hold on is not the physical universe it's you you've you've cleverly hidden that from yourself by by imagining yourself to be an animal or a human or a brain or something like that that's that's a trick that you've played on yourself in order to instantiate yourself as a human so you're imagining you're you're cosplaying as a human you've been cosplaying as a human your whole life oh yeah that's how tricky you are so god everything that's happening right now god is an infinite hallarc fractal hallucination here it is consciousness can subdivide itself infinitely subdivisions within subdivisions within subdivisions within subdivisions for more on that see my episode called guided exercises for understanding infinite consciousness where i guide you through some visualizations for that and uh and lastly reality is unity through division reality is a unity that's infinitely subdivided that's what these holons are all about and for more on that see my episode called division versus unity where i explain that in more detail all right so finally what should you do about all this to bring it back down to earth first of all start to notice hold ons everywhere spend some time really internalizing this whole on concept with your direct experience next notice how deeply interconnected everything is keep noticing that not just once but keep doing it every day for for years keep seeing the interconnectedness of life and reality and everything start realizing how just how miraculously interconnected everything is this is so important and then this will tie in with the holistic thinking that we'll be talking about next time next notice that the whole is more than some of its parts reality is not just an assemblage of a bunch of lego blocks thrown together in a box it's more than just a bunch of building blocks or a chemical soup it's more than some of its parts start noticing how everything you're interacting with is more than the sum of its parts also of course notice yourself as a whole on both as a human hold on because the human whole on is not the highest hold on that's the delusion that's the ego but also notice yourself as the god self the pure i the i am that you get from self inquiry and from awakening and consciousness and enlightenment and non duality notice that that eye the non-human eye the witness of everything that that nothingness that emptiness notice that that is the highest hold on uh also catch yourself engaging in reductionism we didn't talk about much reductionism here but we'll talk about it in part two uh reductionism just basically the the opposite of of this sort of hollandic thinking where you're trying to boil everything down to just atoms or something simple like that like you're you're boiling down society just to humans or you're boiling down corporations just to the employees a corporation is more than just its employees a society is more than just the humans that make it up a planet is more than just the physical matter that is making it up so notice yourself engaging in various forms of reductionism also start caring about holes that are higher than you if you're a very narcissistic and selfish person and you're barely struggling to make it in life and you're driven by your personal cravings then you're so preoccupied with yourself and how to survive that you don't care about anything beyond you no higher holes you don't care about your city you don't care about your local government you don't care about the federal government you don't care about the world you don't care about the environment you don't care about animals you don't care about your family only you that's a very bad way to live instead start opening up your circle of concern actually caring for holes higher than you as though it was you start to care about your community as though it was you start to care about your family as though it was you start to care about your city and your society the whole planet and the whole universe and eventually you're going to literally expand that out to to care about the whole universe that will put you in the perspective of god the difference between god's perspective and a human's perspective even though a human is just god cosplaying um the human perspective is just very narrow whereas god's perspective just is so wide that it goes full circle and just becomes everything that's the only difference and the reason god is good the highest good is because it it has the highest most holistic concern for the well-being of itself and everybody that is a part of itself also start caring about the parts within your whole this is also a problem that immature underdeveloped people have is that they're fighting with themselves all the time it's all like they're schizophrenic one part part of your mind wants to jerk off another part of your mind wants to go out and pick up girls another part of your mind wants to get married another part of your mind wants food another part of your mind wants to do self-development work another part of your mind wants to meditate and you're you're scattered and split everywhere and then usually you pick one part to the exclusion of other parts all your parts are warring with each other even in your body you might have a part you know you might be part of your mind wants to work real hard but then your body is another part of you that is running down it's getting sick but you're pushing yourself because you want to work and you know become rich or something and then this fragments you creates disease physical disease mental disease all sorts of spiritual diseases and so forth so start caring about your part start caring about different parts of your body start caring about different parts of your mind there might be parts of your mind that are scared that are um wounded and hurt and angry they need to be healed and how do you heal by unifying stuff and how do you unify stuff by caring about it see if you don't have love and compassion for the for the wounded part of your psyche maybe that inner child you have that was bullied and abused back in elementary school well that part is still a part of you it's a part of your eo it's a fragment of your ego but you've never really looked at it loved it accept it and embrace it and healed it therefore it's acting out like a little angry child and it's ruining your life and it's not allowing you to discipline yourself or to do the other higher stuff you want to do because it just wants it wants some security you want some comfort it wants some love it wants some approval maybe some girl in school told you your nose was too big and now you're living with that you know that wound and um that needs to be healed by actually maybe caring about your nose maybe you think some part of your body is ugly that means you're not accepting it you're not loving it you're in conflict with the different parts of your body even not to mention your own mind uh also be careful judging demonizing and dismissing parts of reality this is a huge huge trap everywhere you see this you see this in business in politics especially you even see it in spiritual communities you know spiritual people will will dismiss the non-spiritual parts of reality and on and on it goes but see the whole point for you to fully embody god consciousness you have to accept and stop judging and demonizing and dismissing all parts of reality otherwise you're less than god you're a devil so start seeing also reality as a hall archic tapestry start seeing hollar keys instead of hierarchies start seeing the circular causations and loops the strange loops and notice how your actions reverberate throughout the tapestry when you go to a fast food joint and buy food from them that reverberates throughout the tapestry it the food reverberates in your body affects you affects your mind but also the money you pay to that company that reverberates too that raises the stock of that company in the on wall street and then that proliferates the company makes it more popular and then more of that toxic fast food is open in other parts of the country and then not only are you damaging your own body when you buy that fast food you're also damaging the body of future generations of children maybe even your own children because once you get addicted to this food you will addict your children to this food and more of these stores will be opened all around the world and then you will even affect people in africa in asia and in australia and elsewhere as these toxic fast food stores open up because you're feeding them money stuff like this is what i mean but do that without demonizing that part so see the mistake here would be ah that fast food is evil and i'm never gonna shop there again well that is also a problem because now you've cut that part off and if you start judging people who eat fast food that's also a problem because you now you've cut yourself off from those people who eat fast food and you don't have love and compassion for them so this is very tricky stuff you gotta get the balance right so start practicing this just start noticing the reverberations throughout the hall arctic tapestry first and then orient your life with concern for the highest hole you can without excluding the parts but for the highest hole what would your life be like just ask yourself what would my life be like if from now on i devoted every action every day from the moment i woke up to the moment i went to sleep if all of that was devoted to the raising of the hot to the serving of the highest good of the universe without demonizing or oppressing any of the parts that's a very powerful question if you can actually discipline yourself to align your life with that principle that's it you found the secret to the best life you could live right there because what better life could you live than serving the entire universe there's nothing better to do there's no other universes around there's only this universe and if you say there are multiverses i'm including those in the universe my my my notion of universe is universe with a capital u it includes all multiverses too so when you're working for the universe you're also working for all the multiverses at the same time if you believe in multiverses that is all right that's it we're done here stay tuned for part two holistic thinking which is going to take this and it's going to make it more practical and we're going to go in a lot of uh specific examples if you thought this was a little too metaphysical in woo-woo part 2 will be much more pragmatic and very very foundational for everything else that i talk about alright that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that is my website there you will find exclusive free video content on my blog make sure you check that out some powerful insights there i share a lot of cool stuff on the blog that i can't really share through the videos sometimes it's other external video sources sometimes it's quotes sometimes it's images sometimes it's gifs cool stuff links research papers whatever whatever i find i try to throw up there so there's that uh check out my book list with a lot of books on this topic check out my life purpose course to help you align yourself with the with the universe the life purpose course will basically help you to align with the highest whole of the universe but in a very practical way not a bunch of stuff and uh you can support me at patreon.com actualized if you'd like to support this work and here's the last thing i'll say actualized episodes themselves of course as you should anticipate link up with each other like indra's net the episodes are meant to be deeply interwoven with each other what i mean by that is that if you just watch one or two episodes you'll get some good insights hopefully and you could apply it and maybe improve your life a little bit here and there but that's that's really that's peanuts the real value of what we're doing here is i'm trying to build a deep catalog sort of like an interest net and every little jewel every episode is like a jewel that i'm adding to this catalog right now we have like 300 videos or something um and my older videos are not as good so really the last 100 or 200 videos are the best and of course they keep getting better so every new jewel that i'm adding is a better jewel basically um and so we're creating this so right now we have like these 300 joules they're all and they're all interconnected with each other and the more of these episodes i release the more the deeper the interconnection becomes and it grows exponentially and so as you watch 100 200 300 of these episodes your understanding of reality becomes so interconnected all the concepts you're going to start to notice concepts like counter-intuitiveness and the theme of things going full circle and strange loops and then holistic thinking and then unity and then duality and non-duality and enlightenment and consciousness and love and fear and ego and the self and being selfless and the good and the evil and devilry and all these terms and and hundreds more that i can't even remember all right now because it's so much they're all going to get deeper and deeper and deeper interconnected until you're going to get to my ultimate goal for you is not just to improve your little life a little bit but to develop this just this raging holistic understanding of everything where everything makes sense everything is just perfectly fitting together that's one of the most rewarding aspects of understanding reality is that it does fit together better and better and better it makes more and more and more sense the universe makes so much sense it's crazy as albert einstein once said in a quote that i'll paraphrase is something along the lines of like the most the most amazing thing or the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible it's comprehensible you can understand yourself precisely because you are yourself see consciousness is a thing that is capable of understanding itself but it's not easy it takes work and one of the downsides of holistic understanding rather than reductionistic understanding is that reductionistic understanding is much easier to achieve because you can just carve reality up into little bite-sized pieces you know i can release a little episode of five-minute clip here five-minute clip there about something this that but then you get this and then you think you're saving time and that is very efficient the episodes are short and you get little tidbits of stuff uh it would be better for me because i would get more views but the problem is is that you never truly develop the holistic understanding because the dots are not connected you're given a bunch of dots but no connections that's what you got in school that's what you got in university that's what you get in most other youtube channels where you're watching videos or listening to podcasts you get little tidbits and insights about this and that but nobody is helping you to really connect everything from the highest level up on down that's my unique niche in this field of personal development is that i try to take the most holistic approach so that if you do this work with me the difference from other places you might do similar work is that they might help you to improve your life and to understand certain parts of yourself and the world they might even have help you to have a few awakenings but you will not have this kind of ridiculous holistic understanding that i'm talking about and this work is very ambitious my work is very ambitious in that it's trying to do nothing short of understanding the entire universe all of it most people will tell you that's impossible most people will tell you that's egotistical and that that shouldn't be done and you should just shut up and just repeat a mantra or something or do self-inquiry well i disagree but of course how do you know i'm not deluded i could be deluded you don't know so of course verify everything i say for yourself of course it goes without it should go without saying it's so obvious i don't even say it although i should because it's not obvious to most people but everything that i say is only true if you're able to validate it if you're not able to validate what i'm saying then it's not true so this is not a matter of ideology but you do have to be open to the things i say because if you're not open to the things i say then how are you going to validate it validating some of the things i say is difficult sometimes it takes years to validate one of the things that i say you can't do that unless you're open-minded so you want to be open-minded but you don't want to be gullible and stupid you do want to be open-minded also to the possibility that i don't have a perfect understanding i could be fooling myself i could be self-deceived i've told you in my three-part series on self-deception which is so foundational perhaps one of the most foundational series of this whole channel i told you in that series that i'm not immune to self-deception nobody is immune to self-deception when you start to think you're immune to self-deception that's when you've fallen into self-deception the most so of course there could be errors in the things that i'm saying you don't know and you can't nor should you trust me it's like oh well leo just leo sounds like he he's got all figured out so i'll just believe him no that's not going to help you this is work that's why i call it work because you got to do work you got homework to do it's not enough just to listen to this stuff you got homework to do a lot of it so get started and make sure you stay for part two you