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[Music] you I'm back I'm back from my 30-day meditation retreat and man it's good to be back but I won't be talking about much of that here today today we're gonna be talking about what is consciousness kind of a standard topic that we talk about but if you're interested about insights and mistakes that I made and lessons learned from my retreat that I'll be posting three videos that I shot during the retreat on my blog so go check those out of course I'm sporting a new look for you I got a fancy shirt got a fancy beard how do you like that you can post a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the shirt and the beard down in the comments section and we'll see I don't know if I'm keeping them or not but we're just doing something new but anyways let's get right into our main topic what is consciousness because this is such a deep deep juicy topic this is one of the most important questions that you can ask an answer in your life in fact about five years ago I made a list I made a list of my top 100 most important questions in life that I wanted to answer the most fascinating questions that I had and at the very top of that list question number one was what was consciousness and so I follow it up on that I didn't just make the list I followed up on that list I started buying books I started reading into non-duality I started doing practices meditation and yoga and this and that and psychedelics and that was a long journey which ultimately led me to where I am today and today I understand what is consciousness and so can you and in fact most people don't know this but mankind has understood what consciousness is for over 5,000 years well at least certain small portions of mankind and the rest of mankind hasn't been able to get it so here we're attempting to fix that problem we're gonna try to explain consciousness and see the situation you find yourself in is that you find yourself conscious that's how you know you exist but you're not conscious of what consciousness is that's a very interesting predicament to find yourself in and then you might think like well let's appeal to neuroscience to answer this question and maybe if you're on YouTube and you're searching for this topic what is consciousness what you'll probably get is to get a bunch of people talking about neuroscience and the latest discoveries there and maybe there's this philosophy or that philosophy about consciousness and the problem with all of that is that neuroscience fundamentally cannot answer the question of neurosis of consciousness because neuroscience is occurring within consciousness so actually neuroscience is incapable of grasping what consciousness is and will explain a little bit more about why that is as we keep going the problem I guess we could say is that neuroscience assumes that consciousness is an epiphenomena and that it's not fundamental to reality itself it's not fundamental to let's say physics or the metaphysics of reality and this turns out to be false consciousness is fundamental and it is irreducible it's more fundamental than atoms energy time space the universe itself or brains or even life it comes prior to all that in fact all of those things are occurring within consciousness but this is very counterintuitive if you're trying to understand and you're coming at this from the materialist paradigm now I'll be talking about the materials paradigm a lot here because it's the primary obstacle to understanding what consciousness is and the materials paradigm is simply the idea that reality is just basically a bunch of bouncing balls like atoms particles or energy and it's dumb brute matter and that's all there is to it and then consciousness is just some sort of emergent property some second order third order fourth order thing that comes about from these atoms which we really don't know how but we assume we'll figure it out if we just keep studying neuroscience more that's not gonna work and the reason it's not going to work is because when you become conscious of what consciousness is which you can do we're not we're not speculating here this is not theory that I'm giving you I'm saying that you can actually become conscious of what consciousness is and if you do then you'll realize why neuroscience and materialistic science cannot grapple with consciousness and it never will be able to of course if you didn't know what consciousness was you would be a mystic and you would be enlightened people don't appreciate that see you would stop being a neuroscientist you would stop being a scientist you would be holistic and you would be labeled as such and you would be put into that category so one thing I wanted to warn you about is that when you hear neuro scientists or philosophers like maybe Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris people of this ilk talking about consciousness they actually don't know what they're talking about be very suspicious of what they're talking about because the only way you can really understand consciousness is if you have some very deep awakening experiences which these people have not had there's a great misunderstanding about what consciousness is so let's first say what consciousness is absolutely not consciousness is not brain activity consciousness is not reason or knowledge or intellect consciousness is not emergent phenomena consciousness is not something that is biological or that is exclusive to life or dependent upon life consciousness is not subjective experience consciousness is not perception and consciousness is not a private thing something that you own that's personal to you like you are a thing which has consciousness that's not what it is consciousness is not a thing that other things have consciousness is also not occurring within space and time so those are some pretty bold claims and this goes counter to the entire materialist paradigm which is trying to understand what consciousness is and you can see that if consciousness let's just assume for a moment that what I'm saying here is true that consciousness is not any of these things well if that's true then you can see that the materials paradigm assumes that this is what consciousness is is all these things that I just said it's not so so you could see that it's it's already starting off on a very wrong footing and it's gonna have to work really hard to untangle this mess so then what is consciousness well it's very tricky simple but tricky consciousness is actually not anything it is not a thing it is nothing it's actually nothing but this nothing is not what you think the ordinary word nothing means because when we ordinarily say nothing we think of non-existence that's not what consciousness is I am NOT saying that consciousness does not exist like then that's actually I think Daniel Dennett's position technically is he thinks consciousness is an illusion so it does not exist I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that consciousness is the only thing that exists it is existence itself and what that is is nothing existence is nothing but it exists it's not non-existence it exists consciousness is pure existence without content so imagine if you took all the attributes and qualities of life out of existence you would think that what you're left with is non existence and not consciousness but actually it turns out that what you're left with is pure consciousness the problem is that you need to become conscious enough to become conscious of consciousness without any attributes or any Content and that's a little challenging to do for most minds that requires some work another way we can say it is that consciousness is the substance of everything so what is everything made out of look around you right now look around the room look at objects around you maybe you see a table a couch a cat a tree a car a window some sunlight your body you're hearing me talk this is all consciousness it's all occurring within consciousness that's the substance of reality reality is not made out of atoms or energy or anything else's man of consciousness and the function of consciousness is to be totally empty so that's why it's so difficult to talk about into grasp because it's emptiness it's actual emptiness but this emptiness exists the reason it needs to be empty is because it needs to be able to take on the attributes of every possible object you see if consciousness wasn't empty if had some sort of attribute like let's say consciousness was red or let's say consciousness was big or consciousness was small or consciousness was cold or rough or smooth or ethereal or solid or material see any of those things would be an attribute so if consciousness had any of those attributes then that would prevent it from being able to be the opposite of that you see so if consciousness let's say was big that means it couldn't be small as well and if consciousness was rough then it couldn't be smooth and if consciousness was red it couldn't be green you see how this works so what we really need if we want to construct reality from scratch is we need some sort of container or substrate which is ideally completely free of any attributes whatsoever it has no properties at all it's even free of time and space such that we could fill this container with absolutely anything we wanted it was a totally free container so it would be sort of like if we were a painter and we wanted to paint a beautiful painting what would we choose as our medium would we take some famous painting by da Vinci and use that to paint on no you can't paint on an already painted canvas you need a blank canvas to do that but what that means is then it's it's difficult for you as a human being then who is situated within consciousness you see you are you have attributes you have a size you have a shape you are a certain way so now it's difficult for you to grasp the empty canvas on which you were painted so to really understand consciousness there needs to be a paradigm shift you need to be able to look around you and to see that everything that you're interacting with every object no matter what kind of qualities it has no matter how solid it feels a concrete wall a brick a steel beam all of those are made out of consciousness so what this means is that the universe is not just some dumb collection of molecules bouncing around in a box the way that science convention conceives of it but that the universe is conscious and that is the key step that the neuroscientists and the materialists and the rationalists do not want to make to them that shatters their entire metaphysics of what reality is and granted that's a very big paradigm shift and many people do not want to accept this because well it has a lot of ramifications for how you interact with reality and so of course that makes you apprehensive I can appreciate that so what I'm saying here is that consciousness is not localized it does not occur within space it does not occur within your skull or within a brain consciousness is universal the entire universe is consciousness another way to say is that the entire universe is one giant mind and that every object that you see within reality is a figment of imagination of this giant mind now this is a move and an admission that the materialists and rationalist want to make even less because conventionally speaking reality's not supposed to be a giant mind reality is supposed to be dumb but then ask yourself why would you assume that why is it necessary that reality starts out dumb why couldn't reality start out smart why couldn't it be in mind and of course you have a lot of good reasons for why you think it can't predominantly because it feels so solid and so consistent in so real you think that if reality was a mind then everything would be loosey-goosey and fantastical but then again ask yourself is what you're experiencing right now not fantastical you're alive you exist look at all this amazing stuff that's happening around you it's utterly remarkable you just take it for granted because you've been alive for so many decades that you take it for granted but when you were born it was all magical and incredible and none of it made any sense it was all fantastical there was no such thing as seeing a walk that walking a dog walking down the street and and not being fascinated and blown away by it it was incredible and you can still go see incredible things you can see incredible documentaries you go out into nature you can explore the cosmos and you will find incredible fantastical miraculous amazing things and scientists are discovering these things every single day and they have been for the entire span of human civilization the problem is that we just get so numb to it and we start to take it for granted and then we set up this sort of division between like the truly fantastical the stuff of Alice in Wonderland and then the more down-to-earth but the down-to-earth stuff is still extremely fantastical and you got to wonder where did it all come from and how is it functioning all so well and so efficiently and it's not just because it's a clock or Adams bouncing around in a box following logical rules it's it's way way way more nuanced than that there's an intelligence to it it is a mind and you can actually become conscious that reality is a mind after all that's why you can think see right now you think that you're a human being sitting here who has consciousness and what I'm telling you is that you're not that what you are is you are the universe being conscious and thinking that it's a human being can you try to make that shift it's a recontextualization of your present experience so look around you right now look around the room and just try to notice that what you are is not a human being looking at a room what you are is the universe that is precipitating this room and your body and everything else and there it is it's both a subtle and a radical shift so another way to think about consciousness is think of it as infinite clay I like this analogy so think of clay we can use clay to make a shape and what's cool about clay is that literally think about this ordinary clay in a sense is infinite because you can use ordinary clay to construct an infinite number of different sculptures or shapes you can make pots you can make vases you can make people and animals of any kind you can make aliens you can make all sorts of fantastical stuff there is no limitation to what you can carve out of clay except of course there's a problem with clay because ordinary clay has properties which is why is easy for us to make sense of it in an ordinary clay has a certain mass a certain weight a certain viscosity certain pliability a certain color a certain texture smoothness roughness it's got a certain temperature it's got a certain size it expands it reacts to cold into water in certain ways so in a sense this makes it limited it's unlimited in a certain dimension in that you can make all sorts of infinite shapes from it but for example you can't make an infinite colors because unless you color it with paint let's say you're not doing that if you just take the clay and you don't modify in any way it has the whatever color it has right so you can make an infinite number of sculptures but all of them will have the same color and also practically it's limited in that there's only certain shapes and sizes of sculptures you can make out of clay because it'll just collapse in on itself you can't make a really long thin object it'll collapse and if you make a sculpture that's too big eventually the entire sculpture will just crumble down under gravity under its own weight so you have some practical limitations there but now imagine this imagine if we were able to create a clay that was truly infinite out of this clay we could create anything in reality this would be like the ultimate substance what would that substance or clay look like so immediately you should see that it should look a lot like nothing so that the properties of the clay itself do not interfere with the ability to create something out of it you see so our clay are infinite clay cannot have a color because if we gave it some color that means it would be that color and all objects would then be that color that would be very limiting because we want to be able to create all the colors that we see so in that case we need to start off with zero so that we can add in whatever colors we wanted to or create that out of the clay and of course it would have to have no smell because we would want to be able to create any kind of smell wanted to out of this clay metaphorically speaking we were wanted to have no texture no size no mass and nothing else and then if we were able to create this magical sounding clay it sounds magical doesn't it then look what we've got we've got a shapeshifter we've got a shape-shifting substance consciousness that we can use to create anything we could use it to create a rock a tree a car metal plastic paper plasma a cloud called hot red blue big small dumb smart hairy bald round sharp solid liquid transparent shiny dull smooth rough soft hard it would be unlimited you could make anything you want out of it now the only problem is is that what I'm saying sounds extremely fantastical to you it sounds impossible Leo how could that be possible but then again how could anything be possible how is it possible that there are atoms bouncing around in a box where do they come from how is the Big Bang possible this question of how is it possible is a is a very sneaky question because what it assumes is that whatever model of reality you have that you are kind of like taking it for granted but you have to realize that any model of reality you have whichever way you think reality is it's it's equally incredible how is anything possible that's the whole trick now of course I'm not trying to logically convince you with this analogy that what I'm saying is correct I'm just using this analogy to help to explain something that you can become conscious of this is something you can become directly conscious of that consciousness is this shape-shifting substance but the materials paradigm just refuses to understand this and here I want to show you a quote from Stephen Hawking who is a perfect representative example of what I mean by the materialist paradigm see he says quote I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program it will cease to run when the computer is turned off theoretically it could be recreated on a neural network but that would be very difficult as it would require all of one's memories and quote now be honest is that how you think of consciousness as software running on computer hardware this is a very popular analogy that a lot of people fall prey to these days and it really prevents you from going further in understanding and exploring what consciousness is because consciousness is not like software running on hardware instead consciousness is more like software which can run without needing hardware it's just pure software so rather than thinking of the world as a combination of hardware and software the way that most people do you know you think there's like hard external physical reality and there's all the software the software's like your emotions and it's your perceptions everything you're seeing here right now supposedly is is the software right your perceptions that's what neuroscience would tell you all these colors what are these colors what are these feelings and emotions in your body what is this sensation of sitting on a chair or standing on your feet what is that we would say that's software right but then the hardware is the stuff underneath that's the stuff that physics study system the hardware and the software runs on the hardware except the problem is is that philosophers for the last two thousand years have been trying to explain even in theory how it's possible that software can run on hardware how it's possible that atoms and molecules can give rise to colors and emotions and sensations and feelings and and thoughts and ideas and all this kind of stuff soft stuff which is technically called qualia in philosophy of mind they call it qualia how does qualia arise out of matter or of course this is the classic mind-body problem that decart made famous how does mine arise from body well it doesn't because all there is is mind body is a feature of mind body is a special case of mind so imagine a computer that is purely software it requires no hardware the universe is just pure software floating in nothingness that's what we're talking about otherwise in philosophy is known as idealism but of course what I'm talking about is not just a philosophy I'm talking about yes a philosophy but I'm talking about actually discovering that is true speaking of which I recently had this incredible experience of discovering that everything is consciousness very palpably in what seemed like a moment I looked around the room and it was just blindingly obvious that everything I'm looking at is pure consciousness every object and I was so blown away by this that I picked up a book that was lying next to me and I just flipped through the book and it was just glaringly obvious that every single page on that book is pure consciousness I'm just consciousness flipping through consciousness I looked at my hand and it's just pure consciousness I looked at a metal fork and then it's obvious that yes it's made out of metal and the metal is made of iron atoms but what if the iron atom is made out of consciousness consciousness is this field which is the substance of everything and that's really how you realize non-duality is that you see the underlying essence behind everything you see of what the what the ancients called quintessence you know they had what five the class of four elements it's fire earth water and what's the other one air wind let's say and then and then and then there's the fifth element what is the fifth element its quintessence quint v l quint essence but what is quintessence how come no one's been able to find the quintessence because it's nothingness which is not the same thing as air and it's not the same thing as non-existence its nothingness or consciousness now you might wonder well Leah why do you call it consciousness if it's nothingness well that's a hell of a thing to explain because when I say nothing I'm talking about a different thing than what you're thinking of what you're thinking of when I say nothing is you're thinking of a like an empty space devoid of any qualities or features and it's just sort of like a dumb physical space like if physics explains nothingness it's just a space like a vacuum that's not what I mean what I mean is that it's it's mind stuff it's conscious of itself it's alive it's intelligent it's self-aware and that's amazing it's amazing to discover that reality is actually self-aware and that it's actually intelligent that makes absolutely no sense from the materials paradigm that's right because we're talking about a different paradigm you see you have one paradigm the material paradigm and I'm telling you just drop that it doesn't work and switch to a different paradigm that means you're looking at the world from a totally different perspective and everything you see still sort of remains the same but it's also recontextualized so to help you understand this it's useful to make a distinction between first order versus second order reality what do I mean by this well let's take the materialist scientific paradigm from that paradigm when you look at reality you split it up into at least two orders the first order is the most fundamental so science says that the first order reality the most real stuff that we know is atoms energy the universe itself the physical universe the body and the brain that's first order second order would be consciousness perceptions the mind and emotions these would be called the emergent phenomena they don't really exist consciousness it really says perceptions don't really exist the mind doesn't really exist emotions don't really exist all of those just boil down to atoms and neurons that's one way to see the world let's take a look at other paradigm the dream paradigm when you're dreaming inside of your dream there's also a first-order and second-order reality the first-order reality is the mind it's the mind space within which your dream is happening that's what a dream is made of it's the substance of the dream and then there's the second-order reality which is all the contents of your dreams so if you see monsters and ghosts and and old relatives and you see fantastical stuff happening to you weird stories and narratives and memories and all that kind of wacky stuff that's the content but that's all second-order right because we say all of that is happening inside the mind now the mistake that happens with the dream paradigm is that when a materialist sees the dream paradigm he can't help himself but to look at it from the materialist paradigm so what he'll say is that yeah leo but a dream is really happening inside the brain and so actually the the reality of a dream is not mind its brain but that's not the dream paradigm that's the materialist paradigm so forget that we've already talked about that one now I'm talking about the dream paradigm that's a different paradigm inside the dream paradigm there is no brain the dream is not happening inside of a brain it's mind space that's a different paradigm now let's consider the third paradigm a TV paradigm the television paradigm so when you're looking at a television screen there is first-order and second-order reality the first-order reality is the pixels of the screen the second-order reality is all the stuff the pixels depict all the actors it's the stage it's the props and then we could even go one step further we could say there's even a third order reality to a TV which is the story that is told by the movie for example see because the story of a movie it's not identical to the actor as the stage and the props it's made out of those things see so that would be like a third order it's a it's how you arrange the actors the stage and the props and the environment and the dialogue is how you arrange all those things and then that leads to sort of the emergence of a story but all those things are ultimately pixels you see and then lastly there's the non-duality paradigm which is what's actually real what's actually true and in this paradigm first-order reality is consciousness and second-order reality is all the stuff that you know as physical objects human beings the Sun trees cars houses gravity the laws of physics science itself the entire universe the Big Bang your body your brain thoughts emotions sexuality politics government war violence rape genocide love and happiness all of this what is all of this this is all happening within consciousness all of that is is second order first order is consciousness all those things are interconnected because the substance of all those things is consciousness the tricky thing about consciousness is that it cannot be pointed to because it holds all the pointers in the same way that imagine if you were a character on a TV screen imagine if you were Mario from Super Mario World can Mario use his finger to point at the pixels of the screen he can't you notice this you can't do that if you were Mario because Mario is in a sort of dimension which is tangential to the pixels Mario doesn't know about the pixels he's made out of the pixels Mario's hand is made out of pixels being displayed by pixels in the same way that my hand right now is inside of empty consciousness so my finger cannot point to consciousness because the finger itself cannot point outside it can't go meta you see because it is made out of the pixels no matter where Mario points he's never gonna be able to point out a pixel because he made of pixels in the same way when you start to look for constantly Lea where is this consciousness you keep talking about you look for it but you can't grasp it because you're in it you're the fish and water another metaphor might be that if you have a a piece of white piece of paper and you draw like Mickey Mouse on it or something Mickey Mouse cannot point outside at the paper itself you say he can you can draw Mickey Mouse pointing around in the scene of of that two-dimensional space but he cannot point out to the third dimension this is the classic self-reference problem which creates strange loops which I talked about in my episode called reality is a strange loop and it is that which is why you can't point at it but you are it you can't point at consciousness which also means that you can't grasp it with words or you can't grasp it with the mind or with the intellect or using concepts because all those things are occurring within consciousness but you are consciousness you are that emptiness within which everything is occurring which is why when you look inside of yourself if you ask yourself Who am i what am i you look inside yourself what do you find emptiness you don't find a thing in there emptiness look inside try to go like turn your awareness back around looking into your skull what do you see inside your skull you don't see a skull in there you see emptiness that's consciousness but you need to really train your mind on that too to become conscious of that consciousness of what it really is so the reason I make a big deal about this this pointing business is because if what I'm saying is true that means that nobody can tell you what consciousness is because talking uses words and communication those are pointers which is why a Zen master uses cones and riddles to try to point consciousness out to you because actually you can't point it out you either get it or you don't you either conscious of it or you're not which is why what scientists are attempting to do which is to create models of consciousness this is what neuroscientists are doing it's never going to work the only way you can know consciousness is by becoming conscious because consciousness is what's fundamental and your mind and your language and your science which is only possible with language you cannot do science without language and without concepts it's second order you see the problem is that you're trying to use a second-order phenomenon to get at the first order you got it backwards it's not going to work it turns out that there is no substitute for consciousness you cannot substitute for consciousness with intelligence with IQ with beliefs with knowledge or with intuition even because consciousness is the substance of all of those things intelligence and beliefs and knowledge and intuition these are second order first order is consciousness so now let's get into some frequently asked questions and objections because I know that there's a lot of these when it comes to topic and I had a lot of these questions and objections when I started to learn about consciousness and non-duality and how all this stuff works and I've resolved a lot of these for myself recently so I want to help you to do the same so first question is Leo what is consciousness made out of consciousness is made out of itself and that's an odd answer how could consciousness be made out of itself and what does that even mean it sounds like it's just some some woowoo talk it sounds like I'm not saying anything when I say that but really think about it whatever you think reality is made out of think about it what's the most fundamental thing that you believe realities matter atoms quarks strings energy whatever it is does it matter at some point you're gonna get to the bottom end like to the bottom line rock but you're gonna hit rock bottom so let's say it's just for a simplicity sake it's man of atoms okay and atoms are indivisible that's not true but let's say that's true so if it's atoms what are these dad is made out of you'd have to say the same thing that atoms just are and nothing more that's rock bottom so that's sort of what we're saying about consciousness is it's rock bottom you can't get below that but actually in a way you can because when you become fully conscious of consciousness you realize that the rock bottom is nothingness and nothingness is itself existence is itself and therefore it just is and that's the bottom line but this is not sort of like an intellectual exercise in the same way that atoms are understood because with atoms you can say yeah atoms we don't know what atoms are made out of their ear Adu scible they just are that way stop asking stupid questions that's not what I'm telling you here I'm not saying that you can't get to the bottom of conscious I'm saying you can get to the bottom of consciousness you can get to the bottom of reality and what you find there is nothing but that's not the same nothing that the scientists think that strings or quarks are made out of its actual nothing and you can be conscious of it so it's a strange loop reality is made out of itself and you might say how is that possible and the answer is because everything is possible and it has no limits consciousness is unlimited so it can do anything it literally anything that it wants and so it gives birth to itself it's sort of like consciousness is its own mother and its own father kind of an interesting twist on the time travel paradox where you go back in time and you give birth to yourself by having sex with your grandmother or something like that yeah that's basically how consciousness came into being is sort of like went back in time it had sex with itself and it gave birth to itself it's a mindfuck next question how come if I damage my brain I will lose consciousness this is a tricky one this is a tricky one to help you to understand yes it's true that if you damage your brain you could lose consciousness however I'm not I'm not talking about that per se here so when I use the word consciousness I'm not talking about consciousness is that that it's something you have see the way you frame it here metaphysically when you say I will lose consciousness you assume that subconscious something you had to begin with which is not the case so let's think of it this way use let's let's bring in the Lego analogy we're using a lot of analogies here to explain this so the Lego analogy and this is actually a really good analogy for explaining first-order second-order reality so we have Lego blocks right let's assume that the Lego blocks are just the most fundamental particles and we can use Lego blocks to build a castle so we build this beautiful castle the shape of the castle that's notice that's a second-order reality the blocks themselves that make up the castle that's first-order reality okay so here's what's going on when you think that you lose consciousness by damaging your brain it's actually like this you've taken these Legos and you've built a beautiful castle and now what you've done is you've identified consciousness and yourself with the castle which is a mistake because actually consciousness is the the Lego blocks themselves but you're not conscious of that yet so you've identified yourself with the shape the castle so when that shape breaks down which is what happens when we take a hammer and hit you over the skull and and damage your brain what that amounts to is taking a sledgehammer and hitting the castle what happens a bunch of the blocks break off and you ruin the shape of the castle and then you say to yourself oh look I've lost my consciousness my conscious has been damaged no it hasn't what's happened is that the thing you identified with you've misidentified that thing has been damaged the content within consciousness that has been damaged let's say but consciousness itself will always be there in fact we could deconstruct the entire castle such that the castle no longer exists but the consciousness the building blocks they're still there you cannot destroy the building blocks in this analogy next question how can there be consciousness without a brain this is also very difficult to explain to someone who's stuck in the materialist paradigm well I could ask you the same question how is it possible that there could be consciousness with a brain man why do you assume that that's just a given that that's obvious because mankind has been investigating this question both theoretically and experimentally for over 2,000 years and we still haven't figured it out so maybe that's a clue that your paradigm is backwards it makes no sense how consciousness could be possible with a brain how is it possible that there are atoms how's that possible how's it possible there's a universe how is materialism possible when you really step back and you remove all of your biases and you stop taking anything for granted and you really objectively evaluate all of these different paradigms you will see that they're all equally fantastical there's nothing fantastical more fantastical for example about reality being a giant mind versus reality being just a bunch of dumb particles bouncing around in a box because you still have to account for the dumb particles on the box where the box come from where time come from what space come from where did the physical laws of of the universe come from where the physical constants come from like the gravitational constant and so on where they come from of course science has no explanation nor is there even a explanation on the horizon even in theory it's not possible because you're always taking something for granted you're always starting off with something an axiom or an assumption of some kind or something that you hold as reality but see in this example we're we're questioning much deeper than most scientists or even most philosophers that were questioned so we're getting into uncharted territories foremost Minds so see one of the problems with the English word consciousness is that it's not just a word for some idea it comes with an implicit metaphysics and and what's implicit to the definition of that word is that when people hear consciousness or mind they automatically bring in with it the metaphysics of a brain they just assume that minds and consciousnesses must happen in brains duh but why would you assume that really think about that think about that existentially from from ground zero without any kind of assumptions why would mind or consciousness to need a brain to begin with if you really investigate that Discover's actually maybe they don't maybe the problem is the way that I'm defining conscious maybe consciousness is it exists but it doesn't depend upon some mechanism that brings it about and that turns out to be the case another question is Leo how come I lose consciousness when I go to sleep doesn't that prove that the universe is not conscious because supposedly if the universe was always conscious then I wouldn't be able to go to sleep again this is because you miss identify what consciousness is again you're holding in us something that you lose you're going to sleep and you're losing it that assumed that you had it to begin with which you didn't again what's happening when you're going to sleep is that since you're identified with this castle that you've built out of Lego blocks when you go to sleep at night the entire Castle gets disassembled and it just becomes Lego blocks but since you are at that level of consciousness where you're not identified with the blocks you're identified with the castle to you it appears as though the castle disappears and it does from that perspective and from that perspective it appears like you lose consciousness and then there's nothing left but if you become sufficiently conscious and you shift your identification from being the castle the second order to the first order of the building blocks then you will actually be able to keep your consciousness even when you go to sleep even when there's nothing there even after your physical body dies but of course it's not going to be the kind of consciousness that you've identified with right here it's not gonna be all colorful and fanciful and stuff's gonna be happening it's not gonna be like that it's going to be pure consciousness it's pure with no attributes whatsoever and most people confuse that with non-existence but actually it's just pure existence next question how come I'm not conscious of other minds if Leo you say that the universe is is conscious and that's all that there is then supposedly I should have access to to all information and to everything no why would you assume that so again let's use our building block analogy Legos let's imagine that we've built an entire house out of Legos like a house real life scale house out of Legos that would be quite a big project but let's say we did that and we have different rooms in this house we have the kitchen the dining room the living room the bedroom the bathroom all this sort of stuff you see we can use our building blocks if we're clever in such a way that we can sort of create a bubble in fact we could create a room that has no doors and no windows such that from within that room let's say we create the bathroom and the bathroom has no doors or windows we completely seal it in with cement and drywall and everything and paint it over with wallpaper so it looks nice you can't see any seams so now imagine if you could take the point of view of the bathroom itself it would appear that the bathroom exists all by itself and that the bathroom is separate from all the other rooms in the house but of course if you zoom out like if you're the constructor of this thing you know that the bathroom is there and it appears to be isolated from every other room it can't see sort of the bathroom can't see all the other rooms and yet at the same time it's all one house you see in fact we don't really even need to seal the room off it's interesting this house example is very interesting because see we construct boundaries it's all about how your mind draws these boundaries in an ordinary house do you notice that every room is completely connected from to every other room there's no separation between rooms in a house even if it has doors there's still no separation and in fact in most houses the kitchen the dining room in the living room are just one giant space you know with some distortions and contortions and convolutions but it's just one space like in my apartment my kitchen and my living room and even my office which is technically the dining area it's just all one space and even and that space even continues further on it goes into the hallway it goes into the bedroom it goes into my bathroom it goes into my closet so you see these distinctions we make between the kitchen the dining room the bedroom the bathroom these are constructions of our minds there's no hard and fast distinctions I dare you to go throughout your house and to find the precise place where your kitchen splits off from your living room and where your living room splits off from your bathroom pinpoint the precise place see you can't because the these boundaries are artificial they're constructed by the mind they're projected onto reality and so what you can realize is see before you thought of of your houses just being these separate rooms but then you realize oh no it's just it's all one house that's exactly what other minds are like it feels that you are trapped in this bubble and that you have no access to other people's thoughts and emotions and so forth but really it's just because you're really identified with this bubble the appearances that create this bubble and if your consciousness expands it can expand beyond that and you can understand that you are all Minds without necessarily having to access all the other minds you see the bathroom doesn't need to become the kitchen to understand that the entire house is all interconnected sort of a weird way to phrase it because bathrooms can't think but but you kind of get the analogy that I'm talking about okay next question how can matter be conscious well it should be obvious by this point that I'm saying is that matter cannot be conscious consciousness not something arises out of matter or neurons matter and neurons are something that are occurring within consciousness so you got that backwards next question doesn't matter affect consciousness again this gets things backwards matter doesn't affect consciousness matter is consciousness and consciousness is interacting with itself so does matter interact with other matter of course of course it does and you perfectly allow that why don't you ask the question how can matter affect other matter how come a table is affected by a ball if I drop it on the ball or I drop the ball on the table how come see you just take that for granted physics takes that for granted but that's a mysterious thing if you think about it so when I say that consciousness affects and interacts with consciousness because consciousness is so it has nothing to interact with but itself so conscious interacts with consciousness and you might say but Leo that makes no sense but notice that matter interacting with matter also makes no sense so yeah it doesn't make sense because it's mysterious because reality is mysterious it's fundamentally mysterious so when you're trying to demystify reality in truth you can't only by an act of self delusion or lack of consciousness can you demystify reality you can't you accept that matter can interact with matter no problems well now just realize that matter is consciousness and the other matter is also consciousness today I've met conscious interacting with consciousness it's not that difficult to accept that necklace sorry next question why does consciousness exist that's a hell of a question why does conscience exist consciousness is existence conscious is not something that comes into existence it is existence itself so you are basically asking why does existence exist and the answer is is because there is nothing but existence where else would it be non-existence does not exist non-existence is a concept you know it's let me correct that let me be very precise here it's not that non-existence doesn't exist non-existence is a concept that exists within existence there is actually no such thing as non-existence there is only existence and why this is the case becomes very clear when you become fully conscious of what conscious --is but until then it will probably not make much sense what I just said another question how did consciousness evolve in animals consciousness did not evolve in animals animals and evolution are things that are occurring within consciousness you see the difference there another question can Iraq be conscious or is a rock conscious a rock is not conscious a rock is inside of consciousness can a computer be conscious it's a very interesting question that I've pondered again you understand what a computer is computers I'm an have matter in a physical universe a computer is a figment of universal mind a computer is something that's occurring within consciousness and because the entire universe is conscious I would assume that it's possible for any object within the universe to become self-aware so what you're really asking when you're talking about a computer is you're sort of asking like can and artificial intelligence become self-aware and the trick with that question is that what you're really asking about you're not asking whether it can become conscious what you're actually asking about is can it develop an ego a sense of self the way that you did of course the ego is an illusion your sense of self is an illusion which is what's preventing you from realizing what consciousness is so here's what would happen if a computer developed an ego and I believe it can probably I don't know for sure probably it can then what would happen is at that instant where it developed an ego what that ego does is that ego will appropriate absolute being consciousness it will appropriate that for itself and it will claim that it is conscious see that's what the ego does fundamentally the ego takes ownership over consciousness where in fact consciousness is absolute and universal the ego localizes it and it takes ownership of it and in that case it would become just as deluded as most human beings are and then it would have all the all the the difficulties and struggles that we have with spear Shuu ality so I think that's probably possible but we're probably a far away from that for now mostly because people who are doing artificial intelligence research and neuroscientists who are working on these issues they they have a completely wrong paradigm they don't understand what consciousness is so until they really understand what consciousness is and they're not even closed to that because their entire foundation but a physical foundation is backwards I think we're gonna be far away from having true egotistical artificial intelligences although you know who knows I might be wrong next question are consciousness and awareness the same thing this is an interesting question I was going to shoot a whole episode about this actually but maybe I'll just address it here different teachers and people can use words in different ways you have to be careful sometimes teachers will use these words synonymously like I do sometimes teachers will make very fine fine grained distinctions between these two and they will actually mean two different things by these words personally for me I don't like making these very fine-grained distinctions because it's lost on students and it becomes confusing so I just used consciousness and awareness basically synonymously so when you hear me talking about this stuff I will use those words interchangeably and they basically mean the same thing for me but when you're reading other teachers try to get inside their head and try to understand what are they talking about in what contexts are they using that word it's very important otherwise you might misunderstand them next question Leo how can you be so sure that there isn't something beyond consciousness because when you become fully conscious of what consciousness is you realize that consciousness is infinite and that there are no boundaries and so therefore you understand that there is nothing beyond because consciousness includes everything that's beyond itself that's what's so interesting about it so anything you can imagine that's beyond consciousness is consciousness it's really that simple because see in order for something to be beyond consciousness that means you would have to draw a boundary between consciousness and not consciousness but there is no such thing as not consciousness despite what the materials paradigm tells you see the problem the MCOs paradigm is that it makes it seem as though there's conscious things and there's not conscious things there's the conscious mind and the unconscious mind there's no such thing as the unconscious mind and this is no such thing unconscious things everything is conscious or it doesn't exist next question so then leo is neuroscience is false like you're saying is it useless well first of all not all neuroscience is false there are some good studies that neuroscientists do and I think it's a good field that needs to continue to do its work I am NOT talking about abandoning neuroscience I'm talking about actually correcting the metaphysical foundations of neuroscience so that I can do its own work more effectively that's what I'm trying to help neuroscience figure itself out I don't think it's useless I think there's a lot of important stuff that we can learn from neuroscience in fact my hope is is that maybe within the next hundred years shorter your standard years once neuroscience makes this paradigm shift at the non-duality which it must it will it'll just be forced to it can't deny the obvious forever so once what's mainstream science comes along there's gonna be a huge paradigm shift within the field of neuroscience non-duality it will go from duality into non duality then from that framework there will be a revolution within neuroscience there will be a lot of amazing discoveries and my hope is that neuro scientists will be able to discover a way to induce enlightenment either chemically or surgically very quickly and easily such that you can like just go to the doctor he just snipped some stuff in your brain you know like sniffs out the default mode Network whatever and you just walk out the next the next day and you're you're fully aligned and it's super easy and you don't need to listen to any of these videos you just walk around like a full Buddha and everything's hunky-dory I think we can get there one day we just have to really understand how the brain works and and that's tricky because see the brain is in a strange loop relationship with perceptions and with consciousness and with reality and so very carefully untwine that's trains loop is gonna be very tricky but you know that's what science is all about it's all about dealing with this strange loop and it's amazing how successful science can be in certain domains next question Leo how do I become more conscious that would probably be the whole point of all this discussion is for you to understand that consciousness is what you're really after in life and that you should be pursuing more of it how do you become more conscious well basically by focusing consciousness on itself consciousness turned on itself can become self conscious because the property of consciousness is self-awareness in fact it's the only thing that can really be self-aware so how do you do that well there's various methods yoga many different schools of yoga meditation many kinds of meditation self-inquiry psychedelics contemplation all these techniques that I've talked about and that I will continue to talk about you just got to do them and you got to do them with discipline and with focus and with concentration not just slacking around and the last question Leo how can there be different levels of consciousness if everything is consciousness it seems like you're talking about like these building blocks like Legos but these Legos I mean do you have different levels of Legos that doesn't make any sense and sometimes you talking about consciousness oh there's different levels well yeah that's tricky to answer that because I do sometimes talk about consciousness as though there are different levels of it like I say you can raise your conscience or you can become more conscious I'm sort of when I say that I'm sort of speaking from the relative perspective but then from the absolute perspective when you become fully conscious so to speak you realize that actually everything is consciousness and it's just one and there's really sort of not levels of consciousness so it's kind of twisted it's like there are and there aren't levels of consciousness sometimes people criticize me by by saying that only oh you shouldn't tell people their the levels of consciousness because everything is just one right but it's still very useful to be able to break it down into levels it's just very useful so I do I do talk about it like that like I'll talk about spiral dynamics and I'll say that the spiral dynamics stages are all different levels of consciousness and even though in the absolute sense that's false in the relative sense it's a very useful model and it works and so you know we have to we have to we have to sort of like claw our way out of this deep well that we that we're drowning in so you know we're sort of just pragmatically using whatever conceptual tools we can to help us climb out and so one of those tools is these different levels of consciousness and so consciousness can also sort of kind of expand and contract I don't know how to how to really explain how or why it does that but it just has this ability like you can sort of be dumb or it could be smart it can be self-aware or can kind of like lack self-awareness so it's it's rather interesting in this serious so there are a lot of different synonyms that people use for consciousness and that I use so to me these are all synonymous consciousness awareness nothing everything infinity reality god.you emptiness void brahman mu formlessness form awakeness absolute and being all of these words are basically synonymous they're pointing to the same thing but perhaps different aspects or facets of the same thing see the the twisted thing about nothing is that it has like it has fast - but how do you explain it because I told you that nothing this has no attributes but then again it does have attributes it has attributes like intelligence it has attributes like like infinity it has attributes for like love but it's sort of like a cosmic sort of love so yeah it's it's difficult to explain this stuff you need to actually start to experience it alright so as we conclude let me just give you a last couple of pointers very practical things that you should know about consciousness firstly there are many different levels of consciousness and the level of consciousness that you are at on a daily basis is what dictates all of your actions all of your emotions how you feel in what you do in life so if you want to be able to predict what a human being is going to do throughout his life just look at his level of consciousness that is the determining factor if you care about morality and being a good human being the most important factor that morality hinges on is not rules or it's not a tradition you believe in it's not your personal manifesto or principles it's your level of consciousness if you have low consciousness but very lofty ideals and you follow the Ten Commandments you're still going to be an evil selfish person because that's what low consciousness is about it's about selfishness whereas if you have high levels of consciousness you realize the self is an illusion then it doesn't matter what kind of books you read or what kind of principles you have you're gonna be a pretty kind decent and loving person the most loving people are the most conscious people and vice versa although it's not always a perfect correlation it is possible that highly conscious people still do selfish things because there's still people and their minds are still selfish and even if you're highly conscious you still have to survive in the world and so survival is selfishness you cannot survive without being selfish so you're stuck with it unless you want to depart this world early and you can always do that if you want to but in that case we won't be talking about you because we won't know that you exist another point for you here is that make sure you understand that altered states of consciousness are possible and that there's a wide variety of them there's not just one or two there are many different kinds and types and also many degrees to each kind and type which is what makes spirituality so complicated because to study all these different states and all the different depths of these states is a lifelong work and very few people have access to all the different states that exist and probably most people cannot access all the states some people access some of these states but not others and then some people ask is access other states but not these and so you have a lot of disagreement and back and forth and lastly just make sure you understand that consciousness can be raised dramatically we're not talking about a 10% increase or even a 200% increase we're talking about like a 10,000 percent increase a million percent increase a billion percent increase in consciousness such that you literally start to feel like you're inhabiting a different reality even though in a sense nothing changes but then everything changes so this needs to be understood because some people convince themselves that oh I've increased my consciousness a bit and then they start to think like okay so yeah I've experienced a few mystical states or few altered states of consciousness I've been raising my conscience or the last couple years therefore I understand what it's like to be at the highest levels no you don't not even close you're probably not even 1% complete there are probably states that are so radical that you couldn't even imagine them and so just stay humble stay humble stay open keep doing the work keep checking yourself never tell yourself that you've that's it I've arrived and that that's that's the end of that because usually if you say that you're gonna be wrong you're gonna stop very short of the ultimate depth that you can go to all right that's it that's what consciousness is please click the like button for me leave a comment about my beard leave a comment about my shirt let me know what you think and come check out actualize that org that's my website come check out the blog I post some exclusive content and videos and stuff there there's some there's some pretty good blog post that you can find there I think come check out the forum come check out the book list I'm actually going to be updating the book list really soon so stay tuned to the next week or two I will update the book list with about 20 new books about yoga about consciousness about all the sorts of stuff so that's gonna be cool and that update is free for people who've already purchased it and also check out the life purpose course alright that's it the last thing I'll tell you is that there's nothing more worthwhile than becoming more conscious and that's what actualize that work is about every video that I released is trying to make you move towards higher consciousness of fashion because that's what all personal of element ultimately boils down to consciousness is the master key to life so stick with me keep watching the episodes keep doing the practices and working on it and what you'll find is that your consciousness will gradually increase there will be moments when you do maybe some psychedelics or you go on some meditation retreat or whatever you have some mystical experience that your conscious will shoot through the roof those will be those exciting amazing peak peak experiences which will then really convince you of the value of this work and then you'll get much more serious about it and then you'll start to actually understand some of this lofty abstract philosophical metaphysical stuff that I talked about and then you will really get into it and from then on your life will be will be very special which is not to say it won't be difficult there will still be a lot of difficulties there you're still gonna have to pursue more consciousness so you're not gonna fix it in one shot but which like the most important thing I think for for people who are new this work is try to get your first real mystical experience however you do it through psychedelics which is probably the easiest way or through a meditation retreat through yoga something like that get it and then just see how miraculous and amazing and mystical reality is and then come back and we can really get to work you