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[Music] what is God part-2 fa Q's and objections make sure you go watch part 1 of this miniseries where we cover the foundations of what God is otherwise you're gonna be very lost here but after I released part 1 I gathered a lot of great questions and objections from you guys which I'll be answering right now probably over 50 of them maybe close to even 80 different questions some really good ones here so let's dig right in after we answer all these God should be very clear for you all right the first question is Leo are you saying that I'm part of God or that I am God I'm saying that you are God but also you are part of God so it depends on what you define you as in that sentence so if you're meaning you in the conventional sense of you as you think of yourself this biological creature that was born the ego-mind in other words that you is a part of God but the deeper you the you that you will discover after awakening through self inquiry through yoga through meditation that you the the ultimate you the self with a capital S that thing is God proper fully God not just a part of God and sometimes I hear this objection from people who do spiritual work or who are religious and they say well yeah okay Leo I buy the the fact that maybe I'm part of God but now you're going too far by saying that I actually am God I'm not actually God I'm just a part of God that's what you mean right and again until you know if you go deep enough with your consciousness work if you become fully awake which you'll realize is that you literally are the whole of God that's a radical statement that many Orthodox exoteric religious teachings do not tell you which is why it confuses people but nevertheless it is the case you just need to go very deep into your realization of God and usually when you first start to realize God you might start to realize that you're part of God but not yet realize that you're the whole of God so that just requires going deeper and doing more work next question Leo if I'm God why don't I experience it or feel it after all if God is real why can't we see it this requires a little bit of explanation because it is tricky see God is a trickster by his very nature and why is that because trickery or illusion is the substance of reality what you know of as reality you know you've taken reality for granted your whole life and you've just assumed that reality is just a given well turns out reality is not a given reality is only possible when you imagine that it's possible and you believe in it in a sense so you have to trick yourself in order to experience reality in the solid concrete physical way that you do so in fact you are experiencing God right now you've been experiencing God your entire life the entire universe is God so you've been looking at it the whole time the problem with God though is that it's so total that precisely because its totality is absolute there's nothing beyond it there's nothing outside of it it encompasses absolutely everything it's because of this that when you are born as a human being you mistake God for this little physical reality that you're in right now and this happens because of the sense of ego or the sense of self that you have and the sense of self is what helps you just survive so you are in God all the time but you're not realizing it precisely because it's not important to your survival for you to be able to be conscious of God to clean your dishes to wake up in the morning to go to school to go to work to have sex to earn money to raise a family to buy a house and to maintain all of that it turns out that you don't need to be conscious of God in fact being conscious of God in a certain sense hinders those things because a lot of those things are predicated upon lies and illusion you know it's hard to to devote your whole life to earning billions of dollars if you're conscious enough to realize that money is an illusion so you have to appreciate that the substance out of which everything is made is actually completely irrelevant to you in your everyday life which is why you ignore it you sort of factor it out right because God is the common denominator between all things that's precisely why you can factor it out your mind filters it out because you don't you don't notice anything but God so then what's the point of even talking about God if everything is God well of course you can become conscious that it's all God and that's a very significant thing to become conscious of that radically changes how you see the whole world so it's not just a word game so you're seeing it right now reality this is it but you're not conscious of what it is next question Leah why is god hiding from us why is God so tricky after all if God is good good with a capital G like you said before why would God be so deceptive it seems like God should be honest and straightforward rather than tricky well you have to appreciate though that if God was totally honest and straightforward and not tricky then you couldn't exist you couldn't be born because for you to be born you have to be born as a lie as a trick as a deception you see God is hiding from us precisely because God is a shapeshifter it's God's very nature to be formless and then also to materialize all form so think of God as an infinite chameleon God takes the shape of a of a Pepsi bottle of an apple of a tree of a car of a house of a man of a woman of something beautiful of something ugly of something good of something evil as you of course as well God is taking all of these shapes because God's most essential nature the nature of the Godhead is pure formlessness pure potentiality from this potentiality all form precipitates or emerges so before any form can precipitate a human body or an atom or a car or a tree or the planet or a galaxy or the Big Bang or anything all that is formed before that can precipitate it has to start as pure potential emptiness and so that's the Godhead but then because God is a shapeshifter and takes all of these different forms then it's difficult to spot because you confuse the form for a physical object precisely because God is so so good at shape-shifting it's perfect at it so when God turns itself into a a Pepsi bottle you really believe all that's just a Pepsi bottle or when God transforms itself into a physical planet you believe like oh that's a physical planet no that's God playing a really good disguise and that's why it's tricky now you might wonder well why does it need to do that well like I said before because there's actually no difference between illusion and reality this is how God creates this is the very mechanism of the creation of anything appearance is reality the illusion is all you can have if you insist on having no illusions that's okay you can do that you can go into a deep meditative state where you can expunge all illusions all sensory data and what you'll end up with is just pure nothingness and you'll be conscious as that nothingness the entire universe will be expunged and then you come back into the world of form you can do that and you can realize that both are actually the same thing the world of form in the world of formlessness when you're not meditative state they're not they're not really different you can merge those two together to realize that it's all actually one seamless whole and so what we call our formed physical world is is a constant never-ending process of things emerging forms emerging out of formlessness like every word that I'm saying is form emerging out of formlessness it's happening all the time right now that is what reality is so God is not somehow bad or evil for for being tricky it's just the nature of creation that it must be tricky next question Leo how come well how convenient is it for you to claim that God is this invisible being because this lets you be very unscientific because it seems like it's impossible than to falsify your God so is your claim in God falsifiable and if it isn't then isn't it just fantasy look at some point like we said before you have to get to rock bottom of what is true and what reality is you have to accept it for what it is and if you get to the rock bottom of reality and you discover there's an invisible being there you have to accept that as it is rather than arguing oh well how convenient that it's an invisible being it just is what it is you can't justify it any further it's not a matter of convenience it's actually highly inconvenient that this being is invisible because it's very challenging to find this invisible being and yet of course it is possible to find it it is you just search deeper inside yourself and feel that invisible being inside of you I mean after all what are you can you point to yourself your body is not what you really are you believe you're inside the body you believe you're an observer inside the body but what does that observer well it's some invisible being which of course is God right so that invisible being was there the whole time now is my claim in God falsifiable well strictly speaking not but you have to understand why that is it's not falsifiable because God is pure truth you can't falsify that which is true you see a lot of rationalist materialists and atheists they get hung up on this notion of falsifiability someone taught them this silly notion that everything must be falsifiable anything scientific and valid must be falsifiable I mean that any theory that's not falsifiable is somehow bad is somehow superstitious and mystical there's some import to that within science and it's good to be empirical when you can but like we said before if God is prior to empiricism and prior to science and it's prior to the notion of falsifiability theories are falsifiable god is not a theory God is pure truth you have to be open to the possibility that there is such a thing as pure truth and that you can directly access it using your consciousness at least give it a shot and see whether that's possible so rather than God being falsifiable because you can't falsify the truth what God is is a verifiable you can verify what I'm saying so that's what makes my claiming God different than just some blind faith or some superstition I'm actually challenging you to verify the things that I'm saying you can't falsify the things that I'm saying because they're true so how can you falsify it you can only verify it so there are actual experiential correlates to the things that I'm saying which means that you've got to do the practices and by doing the practices you could actually have some of these mystical States and various experiences and then ultimately you reach the absolute truth and that is self validating and at that moment you discover that actually there is nothing but absolute truth everything that's ever happened to you has always been absolute truth you just weren't conscious of it there actually is no such thing as falsehood there is only truth God is absolute truth falsehood doesn't exist only delusion exists which is really what you think of as falsehood next question leo but isn't it the burden of proof isn't the burden of proof on you to prove that there is a God why are you making me prove some of your silly claims you should be doing it well we already addressed the issue of proof and the challenges of it and that you can't actually prove truth because truth is prior to proof we talked about in apart what about that in part one but um but see again a lot of people like to call themselves skeptics so-called skeptics and they use skepticism falsely and they go around demanding proof from other people for various sorts of things expecting absolute truth to just be delivered to you on a silver platter well that's not going to fly as it turns out if you really care about the truth you need to be willing to actually go and validate it for yourself that's how this works so if you're too lazy or you're too skeptical to take on the burden of the responsibility of discovering what is ultimately true about the universe where the whole universe came from if you want to cut through all the illusions of social conditioning and everything you've been taught and indoctrinated with in school and by your parents and by religion and by science and by academia and by philosophy if you want to cut through all that that's gonna be a personal journey that you go on truth-seeking it's called this is the spiritual quest it's the quest of seeking the truth this is the ultimate hero's journey is finding the truth the Holy Grail is the truth and it's gonna take a lot of work from you and you need to take responsibility for that don't expect other people to deliver it to you I'm doing you a huge favor compiling all this information in such an easy to digest and clear-cut fashion by no means am i obligated to do that for you and by no means am I gonna bend over backwards and waste a bunch of my time to try to convince you in your stubborn skepticism and cynicism that there is a God ultimately no one can force you to see the truth unless you're willing to go and find it yourself that's how truth works even though truth is true and in that sense it's unquestionable it's very easy for the human mind to ignore or to deny or to resist the truth simply by being closed-minded or cynical or skeptical very easy and that's the whole trap of false skepticism that I've talked about before see people falsely assume that well if it's the truth then it should just overwhelm me and I should be unable to deny it know your mind is very good at denying stuff it's an expert at it your entire life you've been denying truth and so nothing in the world can prevent you from denying truth you can take the most powerful psychedelics that revealed the truth to you in minutes but if you're really adamant on denying it you can deny it you'll go through hell but you can deny it you can read and watch all the best videos and books about truth and if you're stubborn you can deny it and that's exactly what people do and I've addressed that in my mini series on self-deception you have to really appreciate the power of self-deception the power of self-deception is total and in the sense that is the power of God so we talk about God being all-powerful well God is so powerful that God it turns out is capable of deceiving itself that it's not God now that takes real power to be able to do that but also at the same time God also has enough power to overcome that deception but of course that's going to take some work which is why awaking is possible so God has power in both directions God has the power to fully deceive itself and God has the power to awaken itself through all that infinite deception and that's the game we're playing your life so it's sort of tug-of-war this battle between truth and delusion next question but Leo aren't you just saying that God works in mysterious ways aren't you just making the old God of the gaps argument and you're just taking those areas of science where science hasn't figured out all the answers yet casino science is honest science admits that does know everything and so now is because of that you're exploiting that that little loophole within science and now you're stuffing God into those gaps this is how the atheist thinks this is how the atheist defends his position the reality is is that God does work in mysterious ways reality is a mystery science is in the business of demystifying reality and it succeeds to some extent but like I said before in part one it never fully succeeds nor will it ever fully succeed because the bottom line is is that reality is infinite there's infinite form infinite things for science to study so science will never complete its mission of demystifying reality and in fact the more it tries the more deluded it becomes because actually by explaining one piece of reality in terms of another piece of reality you're missing the total mystery of it all so in a sense God is the gap God is the nothingness in between all the surfaces so you know if you take an apple and you cut it in half what do you get you get more surfaces you cut that in half more surfaces more surfaces you cut the cells of the Apple in half just more surfaces you cut those in half you get atoms cut those in half you get other things always surfaces no substance have you noticed this there's no substance to anything within reality and just surfaces so what is the substance that of reality it's nothing it's the gap it's the emptiness between the surfaces that unifies all the surfaces into a oneness that's what you're missing next question leo you say that God is nothing but isn't that the same as atheism you know as an atheist I also believe that God is nothing there is no God what is it that the atheist or the materialist is missing is there any practical difference between what you're saying and what I believe is an atheist there's enormous practical difference and I will give you a list of it right now of the most important components but when I say God is nothing that is not what the atheist means that is not what the atheist believes this is a different kind of nothing than nothing that you imagine it's a nothing that exists and you can become conscious of it which is not what the atheist holds so here is what the Atheist and the materialist is not actually recognizing about reality which he will recognize once he becomes conscious of God he's not recognising that objective physical reality doesn't actually exist the atheist and the material system to the illusion of objective physical reality and that's that's a huge thing to deconstruct and to see through try to understand how huge that is right there but that's only one point another point is that the Atheist is not recognizing that reality is relative and subjective there is no such thing as objectivity the way the atheist or materialist believes there is only your subjective experience that's what reality boils down to and reality is relative there is no way that reality is reality is however you hold it that's very twisted and that that confuses a lot of people another point that the atheist doesn't recognize is that there are no human beings human beings don't exist what you call human beings and the thing that you think you are as a human being this is the universe being sentient of itself this is God consciousness that you've confused for human beings other people your parents these are all figments of god's imagination and that's a very shocking thing to discover to discover that your parents never existed for example that's not a joke that's not a word game that's a shocking insight I remember when I had this insight about a year ago like it it it startled me so much that for the rest of the day I had to actually contact some but somebody that I knew a friend of mine who was enlightened I had to contact him and just double check with him whether this is correct because I couldn't like I couldn't just accept it he was unacceptable so at the war on the one hand I I became conscious of it but I couldn't yet accept it the ego couldn't accept it but then of course what made the situation even more worse was that of course this friends that I was contacting was also just a figment of my imagination so I felt completely alone there was nobody I could ask I felt like I was going insane like I was losing my mind quite scary that's the very significant insight that you're not recognizing as an atheist see as an atheist you think you're so skeptical well you're not skeptical of the existence of your parents are you see you've never really questioned that have you of course not because it's a skeptic all you're doing you're just buying into all the scientific materialistic believes that society has taught you we didn't ever question them you're not skeptical about them your skepticism is [ __ ] that's what it is just a smokescreen another thing the Atheist doesn't recognize is that reality is sentient intelligent alive and a mechanical this is big because the Atheist believes in a dumb brute force physical reality a mechanical reality where things happen mechanically as though inside of a computer that is not how reality is the sentience that you feel inside of yourself your own personal intelligence your own aliveness that you feel that is not yours as a human being that is the universe the universe essentially the universe is intelligent and alive and you are just a little piece of that that's a big reframing of how you see reality when you realize that that's huge and also when you realize that reality is a mechanical it's not a clockwork this is really hard for a scientifically minded people to wrap their mind around because they their mind around because they expect reality to be a mechanical system with simple linear causes and effects but that's not how it works reality is one spontaneous occurrence therefore you can't explain it through any mechanical process because there is no process it's instant it's direct nothing is really happening through a process think of the entire universe is just being one solid block of stuff that has existed for eternity there is no process to it it's just there it's being being is a mechanical and this is a radically different way of looking at the world the Atheist is also not recognizing the importance of love see the atheist treats love as though it's a it's a petty human emotion feelings over facts some new-agey sappy concept some religious mumbo-jumbo some girly thing the atheist is not recognizing that being is love everything that's happening here physically the physical substance of existence is mad of love and that's really difficult for that for the atheist to understand because the atheist thinks of love is just an emotion within the human brain somewhere not recognizing the centrality of love to everything that's going on to the centrality of love to evolution for example the atheist doesn't understand this it's completely outside his of his paradigm the atheist also doesn't recognize oneness the atheist thinks of the world as being fragmented a bunch of physical objects all separate from each other that just exists independently that come into an out of existence the atheist doesn't understand the literal oneness of reality and his own deep personal connection with the oneness as a scientist you're not sitting outside the universe observing it objectively you are intimately in the universe which is how you can know the universe at all you're not really interfacing with the universe through perceptions you are the universe there is no veil between you and the universe the way that science tells you that's a huge Epiphany another thing the atheist doesn't recognize is that space time past future matter energy cause-and-effect birth and death are all illusions that's huge that's huge your whole life is made out of those things now of course you might say Oh Lee oh yeah I know that I know that time is an illusion because I've read some Einstein and he says time is relative and space-time and all this blah blah blah yeah yeah you know that intellectually but you're not actually conscious that there is no such thing as time or space or past or future or matter or energy or cause-and-effect or even your birth and your death you believe in your birth you believe in your death you believe in cause and effect you believe you can explain reality through causes and effects you believe in matter and energy and you believe in a physical 3-dimensional four-dimensional universe whatever it is or twenty dimensional twelve dimensional strength it doesn't matter see you're still believing in that and to realize that all of those are concepts that's a huge difference between the way it used to look at the world and the way you see the world now after you've awoken to God the Atheist doesn't recognize higher states of consciousness the Atheist operates as though his state of consciousness is the best one the highest one from which everything can be understood you recognize right that all of your skepticism and all your questions and all your doubts is coming from your current state of consciousness especially if we just change your current state of consciousness even a little bit that all of your doubts and fears and concerns will change you recognize that science is completely contingent on your current state of consciousness if your state of consciousness was even a little bit different your entire science would change there would be a new physics the materialists an atheist doesn't understand this the atheist doesn't recognize that consciousness is not a byproduct of the brain this is a huge trap for virtually all materialists and atheists they don't recognize that the brain is something happening within consciousness rather than the other way around I've talked about that before at length in my episode why brains do not exist go check that out if you're interested in more details on that the Atheist doesn't recognize that science is limited the Atheist assumes that scientific method can be used like a hammer to hammer everything you know when you've got a hammer everything looks like a nail that old saying well that's how the atheists treat science assuming that science will be able to understand everything including God well turns out you can't do that science has certain limits certain epistemic limits that you must take seriously and if you want to understand God you got to go beyond science and use other methods that are outside of science and see many atheists aren't open to that because to them they just assume that science is supposed to be able to resolve everything well that turns out to be a false assumption of course that assumption was never scientific can you prove to me the science is capable of resolving every question of course not that's a completely unscientific claim that's a philosophical quasi religious claim it's a dogma atheists also don't recognize the existence of paranormal phenomena as a deep topic that I can't elaborate upon too much here go check out my episode called making sense of paranormal phenomena but basically there are paranormal phenomena at the trans rational levels at higher stages of consciousness or sorry at higher states of consciousness you can access various kinds of paranormal phenomena which generally material science denies it's in denial about it even though there's lots of good studies that that show possibilities for telepathy and remote viewing and clairvoyance and channeling and other sorts of interesting phenomena like that the atheist doesn't recognize that he created himself see the Atheist believes that he's just like a a thing like a what I guess you're a little embryo that was born from from another creature and that creature was born from some other creature from some ape from some something else not recognizing that actually you created yourself as a god that's a huge mindfuck right there to realize that the Atheist doesn't recognize that all dualities that he uses to understand the world with and all knowledge of all Sciences man-made conceptual and man-made not objective truth that's it that has huge ramifications for how we do science and how we do high quality knowledge the atheist doesn't recognize that he is God who sums of course the elephant in the room you are god you're missing that as the atheist even if you agree with everything I'm saying right now you're still missing the fact that your God you're not conscious of it the atheist is also not recognizing that reality has no limits outside of the physical universe outside of the Big Bang there is an infinite sea of possibilities where anything is possible you're not bound by any physical laws you're not bound by the speed of light you're not bound by gravity you're not bound by any universal constants it's literally infinite out there and in this infinity everything is possible any kind of rules any kind of logic there are no limits the universe doesn't have to obey some sort of logical or scientific rules that you have discovered as a scientist I mean those can be valid within the current state of consciousness that we're in but when you change your state of consciousness all those rules fly out the window and the state of consciousness can be anything you want there are infinite number of states of consciousness next question Leo can God be a hallucination or a delusion and the answer is no of course you can certainly be deluded that you are conscious of God that's possible you can trick yourself you can convince yourself that you did experience God when actually you didn't that's possible but when you actually become directly conscious of God that is unmistakable because God is the absolute truth you become conscious of the absolute truth through no intermediary not through language not through symbols not through perceptions not even through experience per se but directly imagine that there is an absolute truth and that you have become the literal apse of the truth so there is no doubt possible at that point you can understand that doubt and the possibility of delusion and the possibility of even hallucination is only possible when you're not directly interfaced with the absolute truth when you have a mind that can think and come up with ideas of hallucinations or delusions none of that applies when your action the present and fully conscious of the absolute truth the reason this objection comes up that God could be a hallucination is because of this next objection which is Leo but couldn't God just be a brain state after all I mean you take psychedelics leo and you say five mio DMT can give you experiences of God so doesn't that actually proved my point Leo because if you can take a chemical a neurotransmitter which you know DMT is supposedly that effects your brain and that gives you an experience of God so doesn't that prove that God is just some chemical no it doesn't prove that not at all what you're not understanding is that all of it is consciousness the brain is consciousness the chemical v m EO DMT that you're taking is consciousness so it's consciousness interacting with consciousness that's what it is and what happens with you after you take five amino DMT is so radical and flips your reality so inside out that you forget you ever had a brain you forget that chemicals existed you forget that the universe ever existed and what you realize is you realize that the five Meo DMT is not a brain state and it's not a chemical and it's not a neurotransmitter what it is is it's God actual God is what it is but you can only understand just how profound what I just said is if you go through the experience of it see you can't sit here in your current state of consciousness or you believe in brains and in chemicals and you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain see while you have all these concepts and ideas and beliefs what I'm saying makes no sense and so from your perspective yeah God can be a hallucination or a brain state but when you actually become conscious of God you realize that God has nothing to do with the brain and it's not even a state it's not even an experience it's not a hallucinations on a delusion it's not a perception it's not anything you've ever known its God it's absolute truth and of course that's so shocking that it ends your whole reality your whole reality collapses the moment you realize that in a way that's impossible to happen as you're sitting here just listening to me it has to actually happen to you next question Leo how can you trust that psychedelics reveal anything true at all well this can't really be explained to you unless you actually go through the process of taking psychedelics in sufficient enough doses that you have a breakthrough experience and only then will you understand B it's shocking it seems impossible and when it happens to you you'll be saying this is impossible it's impossible and it'll be happening to you anyways because you see you you got to stop trusting what you your mind tells you is possible or impossible like I said before everything is possible consciousness can do anything there's nothing that consciousness cannot do because God is omniscient consciousness I mean not admission about omnipotent all-powerful consciousness is all-powerful it has no limits it can imagine anything it can imagine you taking a psychedelic and arriving at the absolute truth and that becomes the truth be careful about judging and try to evaluate psychedelics that actually having done them none of that is correct because you're evaluating again going back to the matrix example you're inside the matrix trying to evaluate things I'm telling you about what's outside the matrix from within the matrix and that's not going to fly it's sort of like you're asking but leo you say you've been outside the matrix but how do you know that you've actually been outside the matrix and that it wasn't just more matrix and you think you're being smart by saying this but actually you're being stupid because what you don't realize is that to exit the matrix is not to just exit the matrix into some new space that's similar the one you left to exit the matrix is to realize that there is one matrix inside of another matrix inside of another matrix inside another matrix forever to infinity that's what the matrix is is an infinity of matrixes one inside the other you see and it's to realize that this meta truth that is the realization of God God is not just some experience outside the matrix God is the realization that there's nothing but matrix up and down forever matrix within matrix so it's not that the psychedelic shows you some vision of Jesus or some interesting visual phenomena or something like that the psychedelic reveals to you that it's all a hallucination it's always a hallucination psychedelics show you hallucinations and what you're experiencing right now is a hallucination there's no difference and there's no possibility but hallucinations that's what psychedelics reveal to you it's a meta truth it's a truth at a new or higher level than you've conceived possible next question Leo could there be something beyond God for example could God just be part of some computer simulation why do you speak of God is the ultimate shouldn't we all be open to the possibility that yeah okay even if there is a God and you've experienced it but there's probably something beyond that too right no you don't get it you're treating God is again as some phenomenon like you go and you see some alien that's how you're treating God that's not what God is what I'm telling you is God is a meta thing God is the realization of absolute infinity or totality you have to appreciate when we say the word God at least what I do what we're really saying replace that word God with everything the word everything is a very special kind of word it's an elastic word it's a concept that expands to include more and more stuff so for example if I told you everything is there anything more I could tell you no because I've told you everything they say olya but what about that thing you didn't tell me no but the notion of everything includes even that thing that you think I didn't tell you it includes that no believable or what about that other thing that maybe you forgot know the word everything the concept everything expands its elastic to include everything its total the word total also works like that when you say something is total that means you leave no piece left out so when we're saying God we're saying everything and we're saying totality when we're saying reality you might wonder well Leo couldn't there be other realities no there couldn't because the notion reality includes everything if there's two separate realities what's connecting them the new reality is that there's two of them so there's a meta reality that contains the two smaller realities and you might say well what if there's two better realities right there aren't there are too many realities and there's a meta meta reality that contains those two and so on to infinity forever until we got everything you see so in this way you can become absolutely clear you can become absolutely conscious that there is nothing beyond God God is infinite which means it goes beyond itself forever God is the process of beyond ding beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond infinity to the infinite power to the infinite power to the infinite power to the infinite power forever for infinity forever it just keeps going and going and going and going and going that's what the realization of God is such that when you understand that that's it you're done you've understood the entirety of everything there's nothing more to understand literally nothing more as possible if you're imagining that something more could be possible you haven't understood what the notion of totality is otherwise you would have included that thing that you excluded can God be part of a computer simulation no because a computer simulation is a very specific finite thing see to say that it's a computer simulation and not something else presupposes a distinction between two different things there's the computer simulation on the one side or something else like reality on their side but God is the thing that encapsulated both of those so computer simulations occur within God but God does not occur within his computer simulation see God is not a computer simulation you've been watching way too much science fiction and you've been too addicted to technology you got to drop that [ __ ] God is way more radical than a computer simulation God is a mechanical mysterious in a way that a computer simulation is not Leo next question how do you know that this infinity you're talking about wasn't generated by something else well again if you're still imagining something else outside of this infinity that could have generated this infinity you're actually not conscious of infinity to be actually conscious of infinity you realize that there's nothing outside of infinity in the same way that let's let's take an example of numbers so what I'm talking about infinity in turn in terms of God I'm not talking about numbers I'm talking about actual infinity this very moment right here is actual infinity but in the in the example of numbers you know we can take the integers and when I tell you all the numbers here we have all the numbers and you tell me but couldn't there be some other number outside of all the numbers know all the numbers contain all the numbers the infinity of numbers is all that there is he already includes any higher number you can say well Balea what about the the billions trillions trillions number you've missed that one no I didn't that's included in infinity what about the negative numbers no that's also included what about the decimal points yeah that's also included if we want to take for example infinite the infinity of reals not just integers see and you say well what about the imaginary numbers well we can include those two so take the largest infinity stop taking the small infinities take the largest infinity as a Georg Cantor set of the the absolute infinite set the infinity of infinities take that one that's what God is so you see it can't be generated by something else because there's nothing else but it oneness when you realize the totality of oneness you realize that there's nothing but it therefore it has to create itself and it has to interact only with itself there's nothing else that God can interact with but itself which is why God has to be disguising itself because if God didn't disguise itself and didn't limit itself then God would be conscious of everything all the time see it's sort of like you're trying to play a chess game but there's only one player there's only you so how do you play a chess game when you need two players but there's only one player well what you could do is you can if if you're good enough you can sort of compartmentalize your mind and you can like almost be running the chess simulation on like two different parts of your brain like maybe on the one one hemisphere you're running the black and on the other hemisphere you're running the white and you're trying to compartmentalize those two so that you can't look inside the other one you know you can't peek in because you don't want to look at the strategy you don't want to know like what what the other player is planning because that would eliminate the possibility of surprise so this is go God generates the ability of surprise they say he tricks himself with these false separations see and this is why there can't be two gods or more than two gods because absolute infinity or totality or everything you can't have two everything's you can't have two totalities if it's a true totality it has to be one see it's very important to understand how that works this next question I love Leo can God create a rock that he himself cannot lift I love this question so here's how it really works God creates a rock and God creates a human certain rocks are small the human cliff those certain rocks are too big human can't lift those so they're in acid scenario God created Iraq that he himself could not lift in fact you are the living incarnation of this you are the proof of it go outside find a giant rock that's too heavy for you to lift and notice that you can't lift it so you are God trying to lift that rock but you can't do it see so God imposed this limitation on itself now you might ask but Leo but what about what about God it's all you know I don't mean God in the human form I mean just God in its pure form like the Godhead can the Godhead create a rock that it cannot lift well this makes no sense to ask that because the Godhead in its formless State has no form so it can't lift anything it can't do anything in his pure formless State the Godhead is just infinite potential so if you want lifting to happen because lifting only happens within the realm of form you're talking about creating different forms that can do the lifting which means you got to create a rock you got to create a surface that the rock is on you got to create another creature that lifts it or you've got to create a lever that lifts it and so in order to do stuff God has to incarnate itself into some specific form God has to limit itself because see when God is truly infinite in a sort of Godhead state it's so infinite that it can't be a human or an elephant or a bulldozer or a crane or something because all of those are specific limited things and God is infinite so it can't have any of those limitations it has to be unlimited but it can also limit itself into these various kinds of forms and then these forms of course have real limitations so a human can the bigger rock that an ant can you know a human has a mind human can invent a bulldozer or a giant crane which he'll help him to lift and even bigger rock next question if God is all-powerful can he destroy himself the answer generally speaking is no not as the Godhead because as the Godhead God is all-powerful but it has no form and so destruction is a concept that only makes sense with him within the realm of form you can destroy a formed object like a rock a human a tree a plan of the galaxy you can destroy those but you can't destroy the vacuum would be space so to speak you see but God can destroy himself in his incarnated versions so God incarnates as you and of course you can easily destroy yourself by jumping off a tall building if God incarnate itself as a star the star can get destroyed by getting sucked into some black hole and that in fact is the fate of all forms all forms get created and they all get destroyed no form is permanent the only permanent thing is formless itself the Godhead the Godhead is sort of like the head of a fountain that's always spitting out form next question leo how do you know that your experiences of God aren't just confirmation bias of stuff that you've read it's a good question and you do have to be careful about that especially when doing psychedelics but mostly because hmm when you have these absolute Samadhi experiences all of your conceptual knowledge flies out the window and you're right there in the truth of it and it's self validating also because these truths they come as such huge mind [ __ ] and they hit you so just like out of the blue that they blindside you and oftentimes even though maybe you've read about it even when it hits you you still don't believe it you see it's shocking like I told you about that example of realizing that there are no others but me that all human beings are unreal you know that was a shocking shocking discovery you can read about that in a book or you can even hear it for me but when it actually happens to you and you realize it you're not gonna want to accept it it's gonna be the opposite of confirmation bias this is scary stuff and a lot of things that I've become conscious of when I become conscious of it it's something I hadn't read about or even if I had read about it it was not something I took seriously or I believed and then now it actually becomes president my consciousness and I'm like oh damn Wow it's it's way more powerful than anything that I read about it it's like that and also because I I'm very careful to cross-reference my experiences with insights from spiritual texts various traditions so they don't get caught in one tradition various masters and teachers that I trust who who are very truthful and have crazy degrees of consciousness I you know I check against their insights to make sure that I'm not tricking myself next question but Leah aren't you just backwards rationalizing your personal religious beliefs aren't you just like a closeted Christian or a closeted Buddhists isn't that you just want God to be real which is why you're coming up with all these rationalizations and stories no not at all like I told you I was an atheist for most of my life I had no interest in discovering that God was real even when I was doing enlightenment work mm-hm I still didn't have any tensions of discovering God I viewed enlightenment as a very sort of Buddhist notion of just like nothingness so you know nothing this isn't God I thought I thought so I'm not a closeted Christian I'm not neither my closet Buddhist I don't subscribe to any religious teaching or tradition of course I study them I study all the traditions but that's mostly for for curiosity I had no religious beliefs until I started having these profound awakening experiences and what I'm talking about here is not belief next question leo how can you be so sure that you're right isn't it arrogant and egotistical of you to be here speaking with such authority about these things with such certainty shouldn't we be more humble with our truth claims well that's the nature of absolute truth is that it's absolutely true under all conditions so either you're conscious of it or not if you're not conscious of it fully then you can't understand how absolute truth can be possible it doesn't make sense to you under your materialist paradigm because under the material's paradigm what that paradigm tells you is that you're a living creature which is interfacing with physical objective reality through a veil of perceptions and therefore you never have a possibility of accessing reality itself but it turns out that that paradigm is wrong and untrue itself so even though it might seem arrogant and egotistical it's actually not I'm just being honest and it would actually be less honest if I came up here and tried to put on a front of fake humility when you recognize what God is you're clear about it all right there's no questions or no doubts it's a certainty that's the whole value of realizing God it's not like scientific knowledge it's not like speculation about the nature of the Big Bang or something it's not like that it's a totally different type of thing you need to experience it to find out what I'm talking about and until then it's going to be outside the realm of your credulity leo is it possible to understand or is it possible to misunderstand God to have a false experience of God and if so how can you be sure that you haven't misunderstood God and now here's where it gets real interesting and tricky is that yes it is possible to misunderstand God and yes it is possible to have a false experience of God so then of course you wonder how how can I be certain that I haven't fallen into this trap and there's no way to explain that other than that you have to awaken when you awaken you'll know what awakening is but even so you can still trick yourself and delude yourself this is precisely why this whole spiritual domain is so fraught with traps and trickery and self-deception it's not enough just to have one mystical experience and to think that oh well now I'm in you into self-deception no actually just by having one little mystical experience now you actually open yourself up to a whole new realm of of possible self-deception misunderstanding which is exactly why I spend a lot of time cross-referencing various sources hundreds of sources studying under various kinds of masters and Yogi's and sages listening to their wisdom double-checking not believing anything not taking anything on faith taking a non dogmatic approach being conscious of various kinds of self-deception mechanisms studying myself carefully contemplating this stuff journaling about this stuff you know this is many years of work go into this and even so I never claimed to be infallible I'm always open to to having new revelations to having certain things recontextualize maybe reinterpret fine-tune some stuff you know I'm oh I'm always open to that because you have to be because you have to take the possibility of self-deception very seriously but the actual experience of God is not a self-deception there's many degrees of it the highest degrees of it are not a self-deception certain lower degrees of it can be quite self deceptive next question Leo aren't you just afraid of admitting that you really don't know what's wrong with just saying we don't know the way that science does see science is humble and you're arrogant like I said false humility is no virtue saying you don't know is great when it's actually true but when you really do know something like if you become conscious of what God is then saying you don't know is actually a lie and just adds falsehood to the truth that was there so generally speaking it's very good to adopt the attitude of I don't know and so I highly recommend that you adopt that attitude yourself and there are many things that I don't know I'm not saying I know everything I'm just saying I know what God is and that you can know what God is and it's actually a big agnostic mistake to make the claim that we don't know because when you make that claim definitively what you're actually saying is that you know that we don't know and that we can't know but actually you don't know that you see not knowing is a tricky thing you don't know what you don't know so you have to be open to the possibility that you could know something very astounding precisely because you don't know the mistake that most scientists make is that they they limit their own realm of possibility so much that when something astounding some astounding possibility is is put forth they immediately become very skeptical and very conservative and they say well we can't possibly know something like that that can't possibly be validated forgetting that they don't know whether it's possible to know that and that some people could actually have broken through through this astounding insight next question Leo if God is all loving how come there is evil in the world why would God create such a terrible world why does so much suffering exist isn't there a contradiction between the classic definition of God as being omnipotent and and good and all loving and yet we have the existence of evil so how could a good all-loving all-powerful God allow for so much evil well the answer is that in fact there is no such thing as evil evil doesn't exist evil is a projection of your ego mind the only reason there's evil from your point of view is because you're a limited biological creature from your point of view and therefore you need to survive and your whole life is about survival and what you call evil are those things which threaten your survival and as a limited formed being within this larger universe you're very vulnerable to extermination to having your form radically change when your form radically changes that's what you call death and so your entire existence is predicated upon you surviving and fighting to survive so therefore you've internalized this notion of evil and you really believe that it exists and you really believe suffering exists because suffering is a mechanism a psychological mechanism within you which helps you to avoid dangerous situations that's the function of suffering so suffering is there because it keeps you alive if you didn't suffer if creatures didn't feel pain then they wouldn't live for very long and therefore you wouldn't be here questioning what God is or what suffering is or what evil is or why there's so much evil in the world you wouldn't exist at all you would be that infinite formless Godhead which can't do anything because it's infinite and formless which isn't very interesting so we need to God needs to incarnate itself into the world but when it incarnate itself it makes itself limited and therefore it obligates itself to now play the game of survival which necessitates pain and suffering so from God's point of view there's no such thing as evil nothing terrible is happening in the world the world is perfectly fine and beautiful and so there's no contradiction at all in fact the world is perfect you can't see it because you're looking at the world through the egos eyes so to really dry this point home for you here's a great analogy think about going to the movies you go to the movies and as the audience member you're sitting there in the movie with your popcorn and you're watching some horror movie or some some action movie where people are getting shot bad guys are getting shot and so forth know from the point of view from from your point of view sitting there in the movie theater you're having fun you're entertained even when people are getting shot on the screen but from the point of view of one of the characters on the movie screen you can see how that character might say what kind of sick evil twisted / and would create such a movie where I get shot and my girlfriend gets raped and there's this war and there's this bad guy and there's torture and slavery and all this stuff and there's blood and there's monsters you know what kind of sick human being or sick creator would create a horror movie why is why why is there so much evil why is the Creator so evil for creating this horror movie but of course Saul illusion it's a fantasy the movies not real so the movie would be terrible if it was real but because it's an illusion it's not bad at all you see it's all good so from the point of view from the higher vantage point of the audience member who's enjoying the movie there's no problem with a horror movie and monsters and aliens and people killing each other it's all just fun and entertainment the trick is not to get sucked into the movie too much can you imagine if you were at the movie theater and you were watching this horror movie and like a monster was chasing some little girl in the horror movie and then you you actually started to believe that this monster's gonna eat this little girl and then when the monster actually does eat the girl in the movie you actually start crying and you get upset and you get offended you know how dare this monster this monster killed that little girl and he made her suffer look at all the pain and you know what kind of sick movie director would sacrifice a little girl a little girl for this monster to feed this monster how sick is this you know and then you'd call the child services you'd get you get out of the theatre you call child services and complain and you'd you'd write down the movie directors name you know when the credits roll you'd write it down and then you'd call the police you'd call the FBI and telling you know this this guy he'd killed a little girl for this monster see it's delusion literally delusion and this is exactly what's happening right now in your life the problem is that you can't you can't believe that this actually applies to your life because hey after all it's your life and your life is the most important thing there is and death is the worst thing that there is and suffering feels so bad and pain feels so bad and so you confuse all the suffering in the pain and the idea of death you confuse all this for reality and the reason you do that is because you're so goddamn egotistical and selfish and the reason you are that way is because you had to be in order to be here at all to experience the universe see so you're caught in a bind you are God caught in a bind you put yourself in this situation and now you got to live through it until the end in the same way that you know have you ever gone on a roller coaster like a really epic roller coaster like the most wicked roller coaster in the whole park and you get on it with your friends and you know at first you're just guys are just kind of like talking [ __ ] before you get on it you're like oh yeah we're gonna go to the let's get to the biggest roller coaster yeah I want the most epic roller coaster all this yeah we can handle it and then you get on it and then the roller coasters inching up inching up inching up to the very top to the very top to the very top and then when you're when you're at the very top and the roller coaster finally starts to crest and to finally you know really get juicy and your stomach starts to sink and at that moment you still hope you tell yourself holy [ __ ] what I get myself into what the [ __ ] is this why did I ever agree to this see that's exactly what's happening with God and with human beings we're putting ourselves as God into these situations and we're living through them and it seems very horrible but also at the same time it's kind of exhilarating and fun it's like the ultimate virtual reality a virtual reality where your own life is on the line actually kind of like them in the movie The Matrix you know I remember when I was 24 years old for my birthday present what I wanted was to John out of an airplane to go skydiving and so I did and I did a solo jump so usually when people go skydiving they they jump tandem which means that they are strapped to the belly of some expert skydiver and so in that case it's very easy you just jump with the skydiver you're basically attached to the sky to the master skydivers front and he just you know pulls the chute and he does everything for you just kind of enjoy the ride well I wanted to jump solo because I was trying to be macho and so I found a place in Dallas that actually allowed solo jumps which is quite rare there's only a few places in the u.s. that allow solo jumps for newbies but they had to you have to go through a long course like a weekend long course where they taught you all the all the necessary instruction for how to jump solo and so I went through that whole course and I was excited about I thought it was gonna be all great and then I jump out of the airplane and I remember so vividly my my first thought that came to me after I jump at an airplane and you know jumping out of the airplane actually wasn't the scary part pulling the cord of the parachute that's the scary part but before I even got to that when I jump out of the plane my first thought was I'm never [ __ ] doing this again if I live and my thought was why the [ __ ] did I put myself through this because it was so what they don't tell you is that it's so uncomfortable to jump out of an airplane it's really cold you've got this like torrent of air speeding into your face at 120 miles an hour as you're falling down it's really really cold it's like you're in a refrigerator and you're just getting blasted in your face and in your no thanos and in your mouth with this like torrent of cold air imagine someone took a cold water firehose and just like sprayed you with it for several minutes straight and it was just like pummeling your face it's really uncomfortable so I didn't enjoy that part and yeah I promised myself I would never do it again and I haven't since and yeah pulling that cord is the scariest part because you'd be surprised at how many times the parachute fails to open properly quite often you have a reserve chute the reserve chute is much more reliable than your standard chute but the standard chute a lot of times well most times it'll open successfully very rarely does it not open at all where you have to cut it away but a lot of times the chute will open but it won't open properly it'll get tangled up one of the cells in the chute will get collapsed and you have to deal with that nightmare while you're descending down so um I remember when I was about to pull that that cord I was and at that point I didn't believe in God at that point I was an atheist back then this was before I did any actualized I'd work stuff and yeah when I was pulling that core I was praying to [ __ ] God to all the gods that I knew I was afraid of that parachute would open successfully and sure enough it did I didn't have any tangles but it did get caught in my crotch a little bit and that was kind of painful but anyways that's my skydiving experience so that's you know that were addicted to to excitement as human beings were addicted to excitement were addicted to violence or to horror were addicted to sex worth of food wordings it's a pain we're even if they fit to suffering we enjoy it secretly you love your suffering you don't want to give up your suffering to be happy if you did you'd you'd be awake long time ago next question Leo if God is all loving and good how come God doesn't care if we are murderers rapists and so forth well it's actually precisely because God is all loving that it loves everything and so he doesn't judge so see you as an ego because you care about survival you judge murder and war and rape and criminality as bad and wrong but the only reason you judge it as such is because you have something to lose from it because you've created a an identity that you need to defend and you've also created an identity of being moral and good and upright and so you view yourself as the defender of innocent people against murder and war and rape right of course and see so actually the reason that you don't understand why God doesn't condemn us for these things is because actually you hate murder war rape and criminality see you're filled with hatred you hate these things but God is all loving God loves all these things which is why they exist if something exists God loves it and since everything that there is exists God loves everything and this is the infinite love of God but this love is way too radical for you you're not able to embody this love because you have way too much to lose because you have your life riding online you have your children to defend you have your money to defend you have your company to defend you have your religion to defend and so you're not able to be all loving for you to actually embody true unconditional love you'd have to be dead which means you'd have to be God you'd have to be the Godhead not God incarnated as a little human being or at the very least you'd have to be conscious that you're a God and that's exactly what you become conscious of when you become fully awoke leo next question Leo if God is infinitely good and loving as you say why isn't it also infinitely evil and hateful why are you cherry-picking here it's a good question it's a good question because like I said evil doesn't really exist evil only exists from the ego Minds point of view so God literally cannot see evil and there's nothing for God to hate if God wants to be evil or if God wants to hate what God needs to do is to incarnate itself in some limited form so for example in a certain sense God is evil and hateful but it's doing it through humanity see God loves evil and hate so much that it doesn't mind living through it as a human being which is why you're here tah-dah you see God wants to know what it's like to experience getting murdered getting raped going to war getting your arm blown off being a slave being in a concentration camp and every other evil that you can imagine God wants to know it all but you probably don't as a little human being thing so in a certain sense God is both infinitely good and loving and also hateful and evil but but in another sense that the evil and the hate is only visible so to speak from a limited human point of view and this is really difficult for people to accept hmm Spile dynamic stage blue people just don't want to accept many even stage orange people just don't want to accept this even stage green people don't want to accept this they want they want God to be all loving and they want God to not have anything to do with murder and rape but you know murder and rape are creations they exist if they exist where they come from what do you think you think that the God created everything except murder and rape that though somehow he wasn't responsible for those he was responsible for the entire universe he created the entire earth but the creatures who are killing and raping each other on this earth well he's got nothing to do with that of course he does God created everything including all the stuff that you think is evil the trick is is that it's only evil from your point of view so in the ultimate sense God is just good and loving next question is there a devil and if so did God create the devil you have to understand what devil means devil just refers to the mechanism of survival devil refers to the ego devil refers to separation illusion and falsehood not some man with a pointy tail and horns if you want to know more about what the devil really means check out my episode what is the devil so in a certain sense there is the devil you are the devil the ego is the devil the thing that's going to die is the devil and of course God created that not only did God create the devil not only did God create the ego God is the devil because remember we're talking about oneness totality because of the oneness there cannot be anything separate from God you can't separate evil from God the ego from God or the devil from God and now at this point is where the stage blew people just lose it how dare you Leo compared God with the devil when clearly they're opposites but they can't be opposites because if the devil exists then it's a part of the creation and if it's a part of creation who created everything God so God created the devil in fact really what the devil is is just a disguise of God see when the when the when God incarnates itself into various forms into various disguises because it's a shapeshifter it will incarnate itself into devilish forms which create evil which are selfish and and through that God gets to experience what it's like to be a devil and that pleases God very much but it probably doesn't please you or your ego next question why is mainstream religion so confusing diluted and inaccurate why can't they explain God in a straightforward manner the way that you're explaining it here Leo why all the silly metaphors why do they say that God is separate from me why are we told to worship God why are we told that God will punish us for being bad and so forth religion is a very tricky thing and you have to appreciate its origin where it came from it's very problematic to evaluate religions like Christianity or Islam from a modern perspective you have to really look at it from the perspective of 2,000 years ago when these religions were mostly created mankind was that a very unsophisticated level of cognitive development back then there wasn't even such a thing as the notion of science the way we know of it today science as we know of it today is really a modern invention several hundred years old so this notion of very carefully analytically empirically breaking stuff down I mean it exists in certain Buddhist traditions and certain yogic traditions but generally speaking this is a modern notion so to expect religions from thousands of years ago to be very precise and scientific and clinical and also to be very integrative and also to share modern values and to not be homophobic or to not be patriarchal or to not be moralizing this is absurd the era in which these religions sprang forth most people were at spiral Adamic stage purple or red at that time we're talking about very unsophisticated levels of development and so religion was a vehicle for promulgating the idea of God but how do you do that with people who are not scientifically minded people who are not integral people who are highly racist in ethnocentric people who are very closed-minded people who have no sense of the world back then people didn't even most people didn't even know that the world was round of course the educated people knew but regular people for whom religion was was meant they didn't know they didn't know how to read they didn't know mathematics like they didn't know anything about the world you have to understand this so how do you get these very tribal people to recognize the higher truth of God well you have to couch it in some kind of language that they can understand so you're gonna use metaphors you're gonna use stories there weren't even printing presses back then there were no books you couldn't even print a Bible back then so of course you're gonna use various kinds of metaphors and analogies that make sense for that time and this stuff was passed down oftentimes as stories not even written down and of course as you're doing this the people who are passing it down and then writing it all down these people are not the most enlightened people so even though maybe Jesus was very enlightened you might imagine or Muhammad was or the Buddha or somebody else these people they didn't write any books didn't record any videos so Jesus's story was recorded hundreds of years after the fact and the people who recorded the story will who knows different people reported different Gospels various conflicting accounts and these people who made these recordings of course they might have tried to like get the gist of Jesus down and his teachings but they themselves I doubt were significantly enlightened and so they're filtering it through their own mind through their own ethnocentric and maybe spiral dynamics tej red or blue worldview and they're putting it into metaphors and stories that ordinary folk can understand so of course it's going to be confusing and diluted and filled with inaccuracies of course and then of course the way it works is because these stories get passed down through the ages it's like a game of telephone where every person talks about God to another person to another person so the knowledge gets further and further removed from the direct awakening experience and how many of these people actually were able to follow the instructions and the teachings of Jesus and actually have for example some massive enlightenment very few I would bet and then how do you talk about it in a way that isn't dogmatic that isn't overly ethnocentric that isn't overly moralistic because you see whatever spiral dynamics stage your cognitive level of development is that when you have these epiphanies and realizations you're gonna filter your experiences of God and understanding of God through that lens because you have to bring the truth back down to earth and embody it here within this particular country within a particular era within a particular community within a particular culture and so because of that for example a lot of old religious teachings are very moralistic and they talk about right and wrong and lawful and unlawful and and that they make various kinds of rules against what you should and what you shouldn't do because back then that was advanced for their time back then back then before there were even countries before there were legal codes this was actually an innovation to couch morality and law and to ground it with religion but you see of course also what happened is that all of these religions and spiritual teachings they become corrupt the ego and the devil corrupts all these teachings he uses it for its devilish purposes so of course various kinds of countries and nation-states rulers and kings got ahold of these religions started using them to control the masses starting using them to justify their own rule and to justify the various kinds of wars and legal codes various kinds of things that they wanted for their government so you see the ego seizes a powerful tool like religion if you have a really high quality spiritual teaching the ego will seize it co-opt it and actually it will become the chief tool by which the devil will then spread falsehood confusion delusion and egotism and so that's exactly what happened which was why I have to be very careful with religions and in general the whole problem with God is that because it's such a it's such a personal and subjective realization that you can't codify it and you can't spread it through mass means you can't write a book that's gonna spread it you can't create a video about it you can try but people will misunderstand and then even even if you do a really good job writing a great book or creating a great video well some of your followers they will just be fanatics and they will just believe the stuff they won't actually do the practices because the practice are too hard for them and they will just believe in it and then after you're dead they're gonna create a cult and they're gonna perpetuate this ideology and that's what generally happens with these spiritual teachings that's we got to be very careful and so you have to learn how to read these teachings properly sort the wheat from the chaff and you have to be careful to account for the various spiral stages that are present for example in the Bible so when they when they tell you to stone homosexuals in the Bible or something like this you know you have to be able to say okay with it that that's old old style thinking from 2,000 years ago we don't do that today all right you don't wanna take that part seriously but then other parts of the Bible are still legitimate and has legitimate wisdom in their next question why do all the religions disagree so much fundamentally it's actually amazing how much the religions all agree with each other considering that they were started in different continents at different times by different people under different situations there's a shocking amount of agreement between Buddhism Hinduism Christianity Islam Judaism and others that is if you know how to look and study the texts properly and then you might wonder well you how do you know you're studying text properly well you need direct experience direct mystical experience by having these mystical experiences by having a personal understanding of God it becomes extremely easy to sort the wheat from the chaff in these various religious texts and it's also then extremely easy to see the commonalities a lot of the disagreements can be explained simply because like I said different cultures different times call for different types of explanations religions will stress one thing over another thing because their culture needed that religions will also use different language they will carve up God into different parts because the human mind categorizes things in different ways and there's various kinds of categorization schemes not one ultimate one and because there's so few people that actually have the full awakening experience of God that usually oftentimes they have more minor awakenings various other kinds of visions and mystical insights and experiences but not like the full monty and so because of that most people never reach full non-duality and so then they end up having partial understanding not a full integral understanding and also of course these religions they are not integral they don't seek to understand each other they always seek to kind of monopolize the truth for themselves they tend to favor themselves in their own culture while denying other religions other cultures so the attitude of trying to integrate religions this is a rather modern notion which was it really only existed like from the last 50 or 100 years at most and it's something that I love to do I love taking that kind of integral holistic approach when studying spirituality but um a lot of people don't do that and so of course when you don't do that then a lot of surface disagreements will seem as though they run all the way down to the bone but they don't they're just surface level stuff different language different rays of phrasing things so you got to learn how to understand these religious texts in fact one of the things that made me so convinced of the possibility of Awakening before I even awoke was I started studying really studying various religious traditions and spiritual traditions and seeing just how much commonality there is between the things they talked about and to me that actually became very convincing corroborating evidence that this was really worthwhile to pursue because if all these people across all this time are talking about it in such similar ways then surely there must be something there and it can't all just be a fantasy and superstition and that turns out to be exactly correct there was a reason why billions of people on the planet throughout all of human history across all continents and eras have believed in God it ain't just a superstition of course very few of these people have actually experienced God but their belief in it and the fact that this belief spreads so easily says something more than just mass psychosis or mass hallucination or just groupthink there's actually something there and that's something that a lot of atheists don't appreciate as an atheist I challenge you to come up with some crazy fantastical idea and try to get to spread to billions of people across the entire planet before the age of the internet before books before television before radio that was not easy to do so it's not as easy as you think to just mind viruses and delusion always delusion has to be grounded in some kernel of truth so usually the delusion isn't just mad a whole cloth there's a kernel of truth underneath it which is what atheist misunderstand about religion next question but Leo isn't religion responsible for most of the war and evil throughout history that's true religion is responsible for a lot of so-called evil what we as humans perceive as evil and religion has definitely been used by kings and emperors and nations and governments to justify all sorts of wars and atrocities and all that but then again you know technology is also used for a bunch of evil capitalism is used for evil many wars have been started purely for capitalistic purposes mmm a lot of people were killed simply with various kinds of technological advances from nuclear weapons - there's kinds of chemical warfare gas and bows and arrows and so I mean you have to you have to separate out the fact that people are selfish and they're egotistical and they're very tribal and they're very warlike whether they have their hands on religion or not so just because that is true doesn't mean that God isn't something that you can discover for yourself next question Leah why use the word god it's such a loaded word it's so misunderstood by people why not use the word like reality or even invent a new word well it's true that the word God is very much misunderstood by most people but at the same time it is the most proper word when you have this experience the first words coming to your mind will be oh my [ __ ] god that's actual God I'm in the presence of actual God that's what you're gonna say so that's why I use that word of course we could always use different words in a certain sense it's a stylistic choice you could call it nothingness you could call it Buddha mine you could call it being you could call it infinity you could call it some new word that you invent but really it's just God there's a lot of confusion around it but understand that no matter which word you use there's gonna be a lot of confusion around it because that's how the devilish ego mind works is that it always seeks to co-opt the truth and turn it into falsehood so whatever knew you were you would invent people would come along and they would find ways to delude themselves about it you almost can't help it the ignorant mind can't help but being ignorant and if you call it something very neutral like reality the problem with that is that well people also think they know what reality is so people have a lot of conceptions about reality which are completely wrong so if I was just gonna call it reality then it would be very difficult for an ordinary person to distinguish what I'm talking about from their ordinary experience because everyone thinks they know what reality is at least when I say God and it's like well God is something kind of controversial is something different most people don't believe that they've experienced God and so that's why I use that word next question why do different religions or different religious people have different experiences or visions of gods for example a Christian might see Christ whereas a Hindu might see Vishnu or a Muslim might see Allah or so or Mohammed or something like this so people talk about various kinds of mystical visions and how do these mystical visions relate to God cuz Leo you say God is formless but then how come someone can see a vision of Christ is that a hallucination or what what is that because reality is one giant mind this mind uses various kinds of symbols to understand understanding is done symbolically even scientific understanding which you might think is literal is not actually literal it's still symbolic it's still metaphoric so your mind needs to make sense of the formless in some kind of formed ways in order to talk about it to think about it to believe in it to pray to it and so forth so when a christian who grew up his whole life with symbols of Christ pictures of Christ and Bible stories and so forth when he's having the experience of God it might appear as though like the vision of Christ and vice-versa for uh for a Hindu with one of his deities whatever date he believed in and was growing up with and got attached to you see the mind gets attached to various kinds of symbols and likewise if you're highly scientific like if you're a mathematician and you have a mystical experience you might interpret that in a mathematical sort of language you might see a formula that you think of it as which was actually sort of what happened for example with Georg Cantor who was the father of modern set theory when he discovered the absolute infinite set all right he called it God and he was a Christian he framed it in Christian terms that's how it sort of works so this is not this is not actually an argument against God it's actually um it's actually exactly how you sort of expect it to work is that your understanding of God is going to be again filtered through your culture and the stuff that you grew up learning so if you're a scientist you can have a scientific understanding of God if you're Christian it'll be a Christian understanding a Hindu some kind of Hindu understanding and so forth you know of course also understand that most people when they have awakening experience they don't get a full pure non-dual god consciousness of the formless Godhead very rarely does that happen usually they get more minor mystical visions and those usually can come in the form of various kinds of avatars and light shining from the clouds or some sort of stuff like this and these can still be valid but they're just not that like full-on pure like Buddha Mind full awakening that you would get if you were you know sitting and meditating for thousands of hours very rigorously hmm and that that's that's all fine it's just like very few people become totally awake and that's one of the values of 5ml DMT is that it's a tool that allows you to be totally awake very clearly without any kind of visual distortions or hallucinations or visions it's just like pure full-on consciousness which is why it's really good for cutting through all of the nonsense and all of the various imagery and symbolism just going straight for pure consciousness so that's why that happens another question next question leo aren't you just stealing and rebranding ideas from advise of a danta Zen yoga and Buddhism various Eastern religions no actually I study all spiritual traditions of course in the East they have some really good high-quality teachings generally speaking the Eastern teachings are less corrupt than the Western teachings they're more strict they tend to be a little bit more scientific like for example with Buddhism or with Zen or with advise Vedanta but that doesn't mean that the Western teachings are are bad or that there's not amazing stuff to be found in the Western teachings so yeah I recommend that you study all this stuff and as far as stealing and rebranding you've to understand that that no religion and no culture has a monopoly on the idea of God or spirituality now the Hindus like to say that all we are the first ones you know leo in India we've been doing yoga and we've known about Brahman for five thousand years blah blah blah blah blah we were the first certainly India has an amazing rich tradition has some great traditions like advised Vedanta but don't kid yourself to think that you were somehow the first you weren't the first modern Homo sapiens have been dated back to 450,000 years ago and I would be willing to bet that mankind has known about God and about various spiritual techniques and teachings and insights for at least that long for four hundred fifty thousand years long before there was in India and it's been known all around the world in Africa in Aboriginal Australia the Eskimos in and in North America knew about it the Native Americans the South Americans knew about it you know the Irish and the British knew about it before even the Romans and the Greeks the Egyptians knew about it I mean so don't don't get too partial about your culture yeah you love your culture everybody loves their culture so what let it go nobody has a monopoly on the truth these these truths were there from the very beginning of human history before history was recorded so so yeah I mean of course yeah we're all talking about the same stuff basically the Christians the Buddhists the Jews our you know stealing is one of them stealing from the other no it's just think you can access these things independently and then of course there's cross-pollination we also borrow ideas from each other we try to find the best ideas from each tradition sure that's that's totally natural that's how it should be next question but Leo Buddhism and Hinduism are actually different Buddhism doesn't have a God what are you talking about of course Buddhism hasn't got the God of Buddhism is mu the Ox no self Buddha mind the Dharmakaya Nirvana these are various ways of talking about God within Buddhism the mistake that some Buddhists make and some Hindus make is that they think that there's a there's a substantial difference in enlightenment between the Buddhists no self and the Hindu self with a capital S as though these are two different things to different enlightenment they're not two different enlightenment what there are there are there are degrees of awakening at the earliest stages of awakening usually what you become conscious of is the truth of no self that's a powerful insight but that's not the end of the road and usually that's not enough to have consciousness of God to have conscious of God you need to go beyond the insight of they're not just being a self but to realize what is the ultimate self what is the nature of reality itself what is form you need to not only be able to realize God is the formless but also God is the form and then also to unify the two together and to see that God is both the form the formless in that there's actually no distinction between the forum and the formless so Buddhism certainly has a God it's just that in Buddhism it's not talked about as God in the traditional sense and so this can give you the impression that Buddhism doesn't believe in a God well that's right Buddhism doesn't really believe in a God per se but Buddhism has practices that get you to a consciousness of your true nature which is God same thing Nirvana the Dharmakaya the mu mu that is talked about in the Zen riddles next question belay oh god is not an experience what are you talking about experience well don't get too pedantic on me here I use the word experience rather loosely because we don't have really any other word for for how to explain once access to God really the proper word would be something more akin to being or direct consciousness but oftentimes I just use the word experience instead because most people don't have a reference point for what being or direct consciousness is but they understand what experience is so if you expand your notion of experience to also include direct consciousness or being then then what I'm saying makes sense also understand that when you're when you're coming into contact with the Godhead the pure formless God which is free of any sensation there any quote-unquote experience there's kind of like no experience there's just like nothingness the void you can have that and that's good but you also need to understand that you got to bring that back down to earth and integrate it with the experience that you're having here you need to become conscious that this experience that's happening right now all the colors sounds feelings and all this that this is actually identical to that pure empty void which you might experience in some deep meditative trance see so the fact is that this experience right this very moment is God you just need to become conscious that that's what it is that will recontextualize the experience that you're having here to the point that you're not even gonna think of it as an experience anymore really what's happening here is not an experience we conventionally call it an experience but what's happening here is just absolute truth absolute truth is happening at all times there's nothing but absolute truth we just confuse it in various ways next question Leah what is the point of cross-referencing sources like you say you do when God is a direct experience so why do you need these other sources well precisely because you can trick yourself precisely because there's the danger of becoming a Zen devil see my episode becoming a Zen devil which talks about the danger of pursuing Zen practice without reading the scriptures without grounding yourself in some theoretical foundation that turns out to be important and because it is possible to have half-assed experiences it is possible to have an experience but not to fully understand it to misinterpret it or to have some ego backlash and then to use it in a narcissistic manner to to to do whatever for your survival agenda you know because all that is possible it's important to have high-quality sources to double-check yourself definitely don't just take your mystical experiences at face value validate them against what the best scriptures and teachings of ancient times and modern times say so that you're in accordance with that find some high-quality sources books teachers videos YouTube channels audio books whatever find some great Yogi's some great masters and then cross-reference your experiences with that double-check the things that I'm telling you again other sources then you won't be so skeptical and you won't be so stubbornly close-minded about it you see the more sources you you cross-reference the more convinced you're going to become that this is something that's worthwhile for you to pursue and then it's not just New Age mumbo jumbo and superstition next question why not just kill yourself and become God right now if you say that death is God then why didn't you kill yourself leo well yeah it's true that when you die you will become God but but also you're gonna lose this life and there's a reason why God incarnated itself into this life in the first place you're here to experience this life you see so I mean you could cut it short if you want but also I mean understand that if you kill yourself you're not going anywhere but exactly here there's nowhere to go you're gonna end up right back here God is constantly reincarnating itself so it'll just incarnate itself into some other form maybe you'll become a a crow sitting on a building squawking away or maybe you'll become an alligator or something else you know so while you're in this incarnation make the most of it I say that's sort of my theory do the work to become enlightened and the reason you want to become enlightened sooner rather than later is because you want to experience the fullness of life you want to be able to experience the magnificence of this life of this particular incarnation that you have and how are you going to do that if you're preoccupied with delusions and if you're so self-involved in narcissistic and you're suffering and you're in pain all the time and you hate the world and you're depressed and you're anxious and you're miserable how are you going to really fulfill your mission as god of experiencing this incarnation you won't so if you become enlightened now rather than later you know then you'll get to experience a long rich life of living and walk living is much better than living as a zombie addicted and suffering and miserable and confused about life you don't want to wait till your last breath to realize God in a sense that's very sad because if you realize God in the last five minutes of your life on your deathbed well all you're gonna realize is how much of your life you could have lived being conscious of the miracle that is here rather than being so frustrated and bitter all the time hating on other people doing violence to other people fighting with other people manipulating other people right so uh-huh the point is to live a conscious life as soon as you can ideally unless you want to suffer and you know what sometimes God just wants to suffer and so maybe in this particular incarnation the purpose of your birth was that you as God are gonna live through the worst possible form of egotism and just cause yourself all sorts of hell and suffering and misery and not wake and hey ya know that's the case for 99% of people but it doesn't have to be that way for you you have some say in the matter you can change that by doing spiritual practices so I would say don't wait until the end become enlightened now and and make the most of your life it's kind of like a video game you turn on the video game and now you get to play and enjoy it so of course you could always turn off the video game if you don't want to play um but the only thing to do in the universe is to play these games there's nothing but games to play so you might as well kind of like try to make them but the most of it and enjoy it as much as you can next question Leo how can I go exist in the presence of God if God is all-knowing well it's precisely because God is all-powerful that God is actually able to set up a situation where it forgets itself and then has to awaken to itself see because that pure formless Godhead it doesn't really have the ability to awaken to itself because it already is itself and it doesn't really have any kind of mind or form that can kind of like realize what it is it's too empty for that all it does is it just sits there and it just bees but you as a human you can awaken precisely because you do have a mind and your mind is filled with all sorts of concepts and delusions and false ideas about the world and you don't know everything and so because of this you can precisely awaken to to that formlessness and then you can also kind of like bring it back into your earthly life and then you can you can then see how that formlessness is manifest in all of the various forms that exists and you can sort of see how God manifests itself as a lamp as a dog as a tree as a car as a galaxy as the night sky as murder as war as rape and all these other things and you can marvel at that but see the Godhead itself can't really do that because it's it's just pure potential and pure pure emptiness so in a sense the Godhead incarnate itself into form so that I could see the full ramifications of what it is and so really what God is up to here is God is becoming conscious of itself what does it mean to be God it doesn't just mean to be a formless singularity it also simultaneously means all of the form and structure that you've experienced in your life it means that puppy that's being walked down the street in the morning it means the hot cup of coffee that you spill on yourself when you're rushing to work it means getting a flat tire and then having to deal with that in the rain it means getting some money stolen from you by a business partner and making you feel bad about your business it means war and famine and political chaos and corruption it means all of this but see forgot to really understand what it is what it means to be God it has to live through it it can't be a theoretical exercise God has to actually incarnate and live through itself to know itself and so that's what's going on here in your life is just one little infinitesimal fragment of the entirety of God that God must live through to understand what it means to be God so what it means to be God is what it means to live through your life my life and every life that has ever lived as a human being on this planet since the beginning of humans but not just that also every ant every dragonfly every butterfly every monkey every bird that has ever lived on this entire planet and will ever live so God needs to incarnate as all of that to experience what earth really is you can only understand Earth by living through it through the perspective and eyes so to speak of all the different creatures that live on earth but of course it's just earth I read just yesterday that the latest estimate by scientists is that there are like a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy just the Milky Way galaxy and now the estimate for how many galaxies are in this universe is one trillion galaxies so just think about how many earths are out there in all these trillion galaxies in this one universe out of potentially many other universes you know comprising a multiverse and how many creatures God is simultaneously living through but of course not just this slice of time but throughout all of time throughout infinite time so just you know it's staggering it's staggering to consider that so God has to go through all of that in order to realize oh so that's what it means to be God all right in the same way that you know when you were born do you remember being amazed by your own body and just like looking at your body when you were born cuz you you didn't know yourself as a body even you have to like actually look at your hand and at first it was kind of amazed like why do I have five fingers why not six and you know what what can my fingers do like when you were a baby you didn't even know what your fingers were capable of you have to actually like learn that your fingers can bend forwards but not backwards or if you push your finger too much to to one side it's gonna cause pain you have to learn that by actually going through it you couldn't learn that by being told about it you had to live through it and you have to actually like feel your body you have to actually like I remember when I was little I would have to like open my mouth in front of a mirror and like look inside and see teeth because I didn't know what teeth looked like or why were there even teeth in them and then like new teeth start growing when you're in in elementary school you know you get your second set of teeth and then and then the baby teeth fall out and it's all so weird and like you don't know what's happening then like when you're not a lesson your body is changing hormones and all this and then so you know your facial hair is coming in and so it's like you're feeling it you're looking at it like what is this [ __ ] what is what is going on here I don't even know myself well that's exactly what's happening at large with God see God doesn't really know itself until it lives through itself next question what is the point of talking about God the point of talking about God is to make you aware that this is the possibility that you can realize for yourself and that this is an amazing possibility it's not just like talking about some little thing like oh yeah you could start up a cookie baking business that's a possibility but for most people you know cookie baking business isn't their thing so talking about it isn't that relevant but when we're talking about God this is relevant to absolutely everybody because everybody is God it's the one common denominator and not only that but it's so relevant because it completely transforms your life and it makes you well if it frees you of all the suffering and delusion and opens your life for the possibility of true genuine joy and health and well-being so the point talking about God is to make you aware of that because most people aren't aware that and to point you to techniques for achieving that because it's not enough to be aware of the possibility got to actualize the possibility and also to point out all the trickeries and traps that exist along the way that almost everybody inevitably falls into and there's hundreds of different traps so there's actually quite a lot to talk about even though while we're doing all this talking we're never actually gonna get to God through our words and through our talking the talking is still extremely valuable so don't dismiss the talking don't dismiss the teachings sometimes a teaching can seem repetitive you can seem like all this stuff I already know well to really know it you got to live it so sometimes you got to go through the repetition in order to really get it to motivate yourself to inspire you that's a lot of what spiritual teachings are about to inspire you so it doesn't matter if you've heard this stuff before the question is are you living it and if not then maybe you could stand hearing it another time until you really get it till it hits you and you actually start to do the practices and then you can let go of the teachings and the talking once you're fully awake but for most people we're talking about decades before they become fully awake and many mistakes that they'll make and many areas in which they'll get stuck before they become fully awake and even if you are fully awake there's still more to talk about because there's development as well there's not just God to realize there's also emotional mastery and there's other components and how do you how do you apply your realization of God in the everyday world that's sort of called a post Satori practice next question well science ever be able to understand God depends on how you define science the way science is defined today no because science today is conceptual and symbolic and by definition God is not a symbol God is being so you can't get there with symbols you can't get there with equations but of course science will evolve and mature in the future and it will open itself up more and more to mysticism into non symbolic methods of investigation first-person experiences will be admitted as legitimate and not just anecdotal psychedelics will become a legitimate scientific tool scientists will begin using psychedelics to do better research on themselves not just in clinical trials on any pigs and stuff and so I anticipate that with it within the next couple hundred years science will recognize God of course it'll be sort of a different version of God it won't be the Christian God it'll be sort of a scientific version of God so maybe science will acknowledge something like absolute infinity or nothingness that will be easier for most scientists to swallow but it'll only do that by really transforming itself so the old science will die and the new science will basically incorporate mysticism into it because you know what we already have a science of God we've had a science of God for over 5,000 years you know it's called is called mysticism mysticism is the direct empirical pursuit of God and the study of God through meditation contemplation yoga and other methods so we have a rich science of God the problem is that it's separated from modern academic materialist science and so these will need to be bridged and it's already beginning the bridge is already being built by five visionaries and pioneers so it's already started to happen and so in the future more and more scientists will have these mystical experiences for themselves and when that starts to happen that's when science will really explode because once you become a mystic and you also combine that with science well then you can make some amazing breakthroughs because your mind is so much more integrated and you can have so much such powerful insights that you couldn't have before but also understand that at that point science will sort of become mysticism to a certain degree so you see the line between science and religion and science and mysticism that's not a hard line that exists in the world that's a line that the human mind is drawing that's a culturally drawn line and so culture will have to change for that line to change will change our definitions of mysticism and science in such a way that they will be more closely merged together another question is isn't it possible Leo that science will answer all questions given enough time and that we really don't need mysticism we just need to give science more time the answer is no not unless you radically redefined with Sciences if you redefine signs to include mysticism then yes the answer is yes but modern science no it's gonna have to shed its materialistic dogmas and it's gonna have to recognize limits science has serious limits science only works through language through concepts through the mind and yet there are aspects of reality which are beyond the mind so how is science going to deal with that at some point science is gonna have to relent and acknowledge that there are aspects of reality which are true but which are not provable in the traditional materialistic sense and which are beyond the mind and which needs to be accessed through methods that are not equations or charts or graphs or particle colliders or rulers or photographs but something else next question is it possible that science and spirituality work together in the future yes that's just what I was describing in fact I see personally my greatest contribution I think to mankind will be to help to integrate science and spirituality that's basically what I'm doing here I'm laying the epistemic foundation for the reform of science that's really what I'm doing that's where most of my intellectual efforts go it's not into creating videos that help you to awake and per se although I enjoy doing that it's mostly to reform the epistemology of science because I see very important reforms that need to be made within the foundations of Western science which will then advanced advance both science and it'll advance spirituality as well so it's already happening I'm working on that right now I'm working on on books and things that I'm writing in order to do this I'm working on videos in order to do this but it won't just be me many people will be doing this over the next 100 or 200 years and it will be a very important and revolutionary development within Western civilization and within the history of science it'll be a it'll be a new scientific revolution when that is complete but there will also be a lot of resistance and it won't happen within our lifetimes next question if God is all alone does God feel lonely does God have imperfections like loneliness or is God completely satisfied and sufficient in itself so here again we got a distinguish between for Godhead the formless Godhead and God incarnated as various things so the formless Godhead is completely devoid of qualities so it's not lonely even though it is all alone it's not lonely he doesn't feel anything and loneliness is a sort of feeling but God in His incarnated form as a human being or maybe as a as an animal in that way God can feel lonely and that's precisely why to keep you from feeling alone you have created the notion of other people and other beings which gives you company and when you realize that all these they're beings are really just figments of your imagination your own projections well at that moment you will start to feel very alone but that's still your ego reacting once you accept that you get past it you will realize that actually being all alone is God is a is great there's no one about it except yourself but yeah you can always fall back into the delusion that there are other people and that can I can relieve you of your loneliness but generally speaking when you're fully fully conscious and awake you're not going to feel lonely even though you will be alone you're the only thing there is and can never be next question why are some people very curious about God while others are not it's a good question I've been thinking about this one for a while and I don't have a clear answer so I'm gonna speculate a bit here this is my best attempt so far I think that people are born with different brain types different genetics and also there's a strong environmental factor to how you're raised where you go to school and so forth and so I think that certain people have a brain type which is more metaphysically oriented like myself and we have been curious about metaphysical questions since we were kids throughout our whole life and we just can't turn it off we're always asking where's reality coming and why is it here what's it doing here what is the point of life and and so forth where did consciousness come from right we're very naturally curious about very fundamental issues but most people aren't most people are just interested in survival taking care of their basic needs having a family business work sex entertainment and so forth I mean I'm interested in those things too so don't get me wrong I enjoy all those things but um but fundamentally I'm very metaphysically curious and you probably are too if you're following actualized I don't work in a lot of depth but most people you meet won't be that way and that's probably because of combination that they don't have the right brain type but also they probably weren't raised in such a manner where they were exposed to these things you know if we had a really good education system we would expose children to the joys of epistemic and metaphysical inquiry and spirituality very early on and then I think many more of them would be curious about questions of God and spirituality and so forth also I think that you have to understand that some people are just born spiritually gifted whether its genetic or I don't know what it is but it just seems to be that way and and I think and this is just a theory of mine but it's interesting theory that ancient humans if we're talking about four hundred thousand years ago or even ten thousand years ago ancient humans were much more spiritually interested and curious than modern humans but as modern civilization arose about ten thousand years ago during ancient Egypt and then through modern times we had an enormous amount of war genocide torture and just slavery brutality of a very kind and so because the competitive survival pressures became so large on all human populations as the world got overpopulated what happened was that I'm willing to bet that a lot of very spiritual people were just killed off because that's how survival works when you're not overly obsessed with your survival but everyone else around you is that gives them a certain competitive advantage so in a certain sense people today are very focused on their survival and they're very egotistical and materialistic and that is because they needed to be that way in order to survive all of the wars and brutality that happened during the last ten thousand years of human civilization that was the cost of building modern civilization but also that comes at a at a great well at a great cost because because now we're starting to see the limits of that you know we're starting to overpopulate the whole planet and we might even kill ourselves off as a species if we continue with our materialism unabated so I can easily see how thousands of years ago deeply spiritually attuned people people who were literally Genet we predisposed to being very mystical and to have easy access to God and various other kinds of mystical insights and paranormal abilities that these people just killed off because they were practical to civilization and because they were a thorn in the side of most kings and dictators and tyrants who wanted to rule the world and so I think millions of people who were naturally spiritually gifted were just killed off to the point where the most ruthless and egotistical one survived and also remember the reason why few people are so curious about God is because curiosity killed the cat and curiosity is a dangerous thing you're playing with your whole sense of reality and life here when we're talking about curiosity it's not just curiosity as I like oh yeah I'm just curious about watching some YouTube video about God no it's like if you follow this rabbit hole all the way to its conclusion it's gonna kill you and you don't want that so so of course most people aren't that curious most people's curiosity is just skin deep next question by what mechanism does God create things this is so challenging to explain to a materialist because you're used to having mechanisms for everything and science sighs this whole job is to break reality down into chains of cause and effect and mechanisms that you can manipulate to make technology and so we think that there well then God must also do that the universe must somehow like have mechanical rules or mathematical equations or it must be a computer simulation shuffling nura electrons back and forth via circus or something like that in order to actually create the universe but they actually the answer is much more simple than that the mechanism of God is direct there is no mechanism what you see is the mechanism so conventionally this present experience that we're having together right now you would think that this experience right here is caused by some neurons some neurotransmitters in the mind or in the brain rather biological phenomena or even molecules bouncing around quantum mechanic effects or whatever you believe physical laws equations none of that is actually true the entire universe is spontaneously a mechanically existing it's just being it has no mechanism the mechanism only appears to you cause and effect chains only appear to you when you are looking through it using the human mind and trying to make sense of little pieces of it then you can mechanically break it apart and it seems as though there's mechanisms and causes and effects actually there is no mechanism there's no mathematical equations behind the scenes there's absolutely nothing what you see is exactly the mechanism here it is the problem is you're not conscious of it the problem is if you became conscious of it you would see and realize that it's literally one solid miracle and that's precisely what you're resisting as a materialist that's something you're gonna have to experience a rude awakening into to realize you might wonder well Leo how is it possible that a thing can appear spontaneously a mechanically as if by magic but how is anything possible how is anything possible you see as a scientist and materialist you need to have some kind of ultimate elementary particle that is grounding your entire sense of reality so quarks strings atoms whatever it is so you might ask a scientist how can there be quarks what is the mechanism of their being quarks and the answer will be we can't say we can only get to the bottom level and as we get to the most bottom level we can't say any more about it than that sometimes some scientists will say well it's equations but then you can always ask but well what's the mechanism for the generation of the equations and by what mechanism do the generate but do the equations actually run the universe to which the answer will be we can't say so in a sense what you're doing with science is you're pushing the explanation down down down down down down down down to the lowest level and then you're excusing it away and you're saying well maybe we'll figure it out in the next hundred years but you never figure it out because it's infinite you'll you're gonna be pushing that explanation forever what you need to realize is that the what you can do is you can treat the entire universe as one elemental molecule so instead of saying that quarks just are elemental and fundamental and they just exist and they just are or equations just are imagine if you just said this present moment just is and there's no explanation for it and you will never explain it not in a million years because there is no explanation because the explanation is itself the explanation is being you see it's it's so direct you can't point to it is the problem it's so direct you can't explain it it's so direct you can't know it but you can become conscious of the fact that it is just pure magical manifestation from nothingness and that's an amazing thing to realize next question where did God come from God has always existed God is a turtle so imagine a thing that he has existed for ever and will exist forever that's God God also created itself name I wonder Leo if God is a turtle then how come you say it created itself isn't that a contradiction it's like either it was a turtle or it was created but can't be both actually it's both depending on how you understand God so that formless Godhead he's a turtle but form you might say is sort of created and so in this sense I say God created itself I say that you created yourself in the sense that you like created your own body created your own mind created this particular moment but at the same time this moment in this body this mind has also existed eternally so in us it's a weird it's a very weird paradoxical thing it makes no sense to explain it I'm kind of the way I'm doing now but you just like you can become conscious that it's both eternal and that you created yourself both are true you might also wonder why did God create itself and the answer is that well first of all is eternal so it's always been but also it created itself like I said earlier because it wants to experience itself creation and being are really the same thing so to say that God created itself is just to say that God is is being and so for God to be it needs to be in all the ways that it is in all the ways that it can be you know that's saying be the best that you can be make the most of yourself well that's what God is doing God is following that motto God is making the most of itself God is creating itself every second so don't think of it as like God created itself sometime a long time ago before the universe happened God created itself no no no God is constantly creating itself every word coming out of my mouth is a creation of God which is happening every second it's happening as though for the first time right now and right now and right now and right now in every moment forever it's a never-ending process of self creation and being next question can God be an alien or an AI and the answer is no it can't because an alien or an AI is a specific limited thing so if you have an AI you have something that's not an AI which is possible if you have an alien you have something that's not an alien which is possible but God is the totality of everything it's the meta thing God includes all the different ai's all the different aliens all the different humans and everything else in between so it can't you can definitively know that AI God is not AI or an alien which is not to say you can't have a eyes or aliens you could probably have both I don't know I don't know if there's aliens out there but if there are they certainly aren't the end-all be-all they aren't the Godhead but also they are the Godhead too because God is incarnated through the alien through the eye or whatever else you're gonna find out there next question could God have evolved to which the answer is that God is eternal so in that sense no but at the same time God is constantly evolving so creation and evolution are one in the same process evolution is happening right now every thought you're having every word you're saying it's all evolution it's all happening evolutions not limited to biological creatures or to sexuality evolution is the movement of the entire universe as a whole and so God is in a sense evolving next question how do you reconcile God with scientific traditional Darwinian evolution because these can seem like they're at odds they're actually not at odds they're the same thing design and evolution are actually the same thing when a human being sits down to design a skyscraper or a clock it might seem like what he's doing is not evolution actually it is that is evolution to evolution definitely occurs in the sense that animals change their forms and they adapt to their environments and all of that and it happens through various genetics and all that we have understand that there's a larger context for scientific Darwinian evolution all of that is happening within the larger context of the mind of God and all that half is happening with intelligence and sentient and by design so to speak it's not happening through randomness or chaos and just fluke luck that some creature evolves with with wings or with eyes or with feathers or whatever next question Leo if I created myself as God then why did I create this shitty life well that's a good question you do have the option to change your life at any time so feel free to exercise that option feel free to exercise the option of spiritual development to grow yourself and to awaken and then you won't feel like your life is shitty anymore but really I mean you have to understand that culture and society it's all evolving the world it is still in the dark ages basically and so God is trying to bootstrap itself so civilization society it's all bootstrapping itself and evolving forward so of course you think your life is bad now imagine how your life might have been back in the in the Roman days where 40% of the Roman population were slaves so I mean life can get very hellish and that's just part of the brutality of life see the thing that's really difficult for people to understand is that God is really truly in love with all of creation to such a radical degree that it's difficult for most human beings to fathom that such a love is actually love try to imagine being in love with with the most shitty situations that you as a human can imagine and yet God is in love with those it's living through all of those it doesn't judge anything so you know God is going to live through every possible scenario that a human being has ever lived through in fact you as God will live through every possible scenario that any human being will ever live through so you will know what it's like to feel a depression and death and cancer and disability and heartbreak and cheating and lying and thieving and all this sort of stuff so really that's why the Buddha said that life is suffering and the only solution to that is to awaken awakening is what allows you to deal with any kind of shitty life so to speak that's what allows you to deal with it gracefully and really of most people in life they're only joyful and happy to the extent that life is going their way they don't realize just how fragile their happiness is so easy to lose your happiness in life because it's so conditional which is why you should strive to awaken but you know fear not if you have a shitty life you can change it too that's what all this content is here for all these self-help techniques and books you can educate yourself and you can improve your life enormous li and most of all by awakening next question is it possible to become conscious of God at all times in everyday life and not just as some peak experience or some five amiyo trip or only in some meditative state and the answer is yes it is and this is something called sahaja Samadhi sahaja Samadhi is kind of considered like the ultimate state of Samadhi its neuro Kalpa Samadhi taken to a permanent degree so you're constantly permanently awake it's like being in a high meditative state all the time 24/7 whether you're going through your day doing your chores cooking eating doing whatever and even sleeping so that's really like what the the ultimate attainment would be with this work is for you to attain sahaja Samadhi but don't expect to attain that easily with one awakening most of your first awakenings will just be peak experiences which will fade which brings us to the next question well Leo how come people realize God but then fall back into duality they awaken and then they go back to sleep why don't these mystical experiences stick this is a really good question I still haven't totally answered it for myself I think there's a lot of factors involved but I think my theory about is so far is that what happens is that because the absolute truth is such a huge thing that you're rarely gonna get it in one go you're gonna have to glimpse it piece by piece by piece and to assemble it and not only that but also you're gonna have to deconstruct a lot of your old ways of living life and understanding reality and that is just it's difficult to do that it's difficult to deconstruct the entire illusion of life in one single moment that's gonna take some real serious work before that happens and so I think that for these experiences for these P experience to really stick so to speak what needs to happen is that you got to grasp them at the very deep level you have to like fully deconstruct the illusion that was there it infused consciousness into it such that you can never get tricked by that illusion again usually what happens you get some mystical insight you're not even sure what it is you saw exactly you just know it was amazing and and mystical and awesome and life transforming but you can't quite put your finger on it yet and usually it escapes you and then you're kind of like falling back into duality and your old habits and maybe you even have some ego backlash that even kind of feels like it regrets is you in your development that's totally normal and so what needs to happen is the sort of constructive process that's why it can be helpful to actually sit down with a journal and start deconstructing your whole life deconstructing your beliefs so that you can really see through the illusion and you don't buy into it again see the illusion is so powerful that even when you break out of it you're very tempted to fall back in it's almost hypnotic in how it sucks you back in and of course all the temptations of sex and food and money and family and business and career and politics and whatever ideologies you've had whatever but religions you subscribe to but that even if you escape them for a little while it's just so seductive that it sucks you right back in and that's gonna take a lot of work for you to overcome that next question why does it have to be so hard to realize God because of the survival mechanism that is driving and dominating your entire life what people do not understand is the significance of the survival Drive which is responsible for everything in your life thoroughly dominates your entire life God is the undoing of this survival Drive God is really the opposite of life God is death from the egos point of view it is the surrendering of this survival Drive how do you surrender it when you've spent literally your entire life addicted to it it is the thing that is responsible for you sitting here and being able to listen to me it is the thing that's responsible for you putting food in your stomach for breathing for getting water and those are just the basics what about your social survival strategies all of the ideologies you have they're all tied in with survival everything you believe your family everything you love it's all survival and not only that but there's millions of years of evolution within your genetics which is running you because your ancestors those of them that didn't have a strong survival Drive well they were killed off long ago and maybe some of them were very spiritual but nevertheless they were killed off you see there's no problem dying there's no problem with God getting killed but it won't exist then in a formed incarnated way it'll be formless so as formlessness it doesn't need to go through survival but once you're in the formed realm here what we call physical reality then you need to pay very close attention to your survival and so it's hard to realize God it's hard to awaken it's hard to make these mystical insights stay because you have decades of habits that you need to undo and the mind and the brain is slow to change itself neurons have to rewire themselves and so forth in order for you to be able to change your behaviors and your habits now of course don't make that a limiting belief in a certain sense God could also be easy to realize in a certain sense all you have to do to realize God is lock yourself in a room for 30 days and sit there and do nothing and by the end of those 30 days you will be conscious of God or something close to it if you literally do nothing for 30 days straight including not fantasizing and thinking for 30 days straight so I mean how hard is that you're doing nothing literally nothing but at the same time this is the most hard thing you could possibly do in your life is to just sit for 30 days straight and do nothing and not even think not even fantasize so it's both hard and it's easy depending on on you a lot of it of course depends on how serious you are it becomes very hard to realize God when you're not fully committed to it and you're wishy-washy and you're pursuing all these other things and you're distracted and you're trying to raise your family and run your career knew all this sort of stuff yeah that it's quite challenging to realize God but if you're super laser focused you know the Buddha when he sat down he supposedly did it in under a month of course he had years of training before that but still when you're really serious you can do it in under a month next question can I realize God while running a family or a career the answer is absolutely I have books in my book list by enlightened people who became enlightened while they were also in relationships while they had children her family while they were going to medical school or being a doctor so it's been done before and you can do it the only thing I would recommend is don't try to do it all at once don't try to start your family at the same time as you're starting your career at the same time as you're starting your serious pursuit of enlightenment you want to space those out so maybe spend five years raising your kid until she's at a certain level where she's off at school okay good now you can spend five years building your business or your career until it's stabilized good and then you spend five years by yourself pursuing serious spiritual research and practice so you could definitely do it that way and in fact you know like in India they have entire spiritual schools that are devoted to helping what are called householders to pursue a spiritual path because most people are not going to become monks and renunciants and ascetics so most people are running a family in India you know they have big families they need careers to maintain those families and so forth but various schools of yoga teach powerful yogic techniques that you can practice while you're running a family and your career and then in five 10 20 years all those results sack up and you awaken for example the one of the founders of Kriya yoga he he was a householder she had a family that he ran and yet he practiced Kriya yoga and became a guru became very awake next question Leo how come God can be realized through visualization after all you say that God is is beyond the mind that the mind is the chief obstacle to God and so shouldn't visualization be an obstacle to realizing God well this is very interesting you think so but this is kind of a counterintuitive point remember also though that the key to realizing God one of the keys is concentration so the way that these visualization methods of realizing God work and these come from for example Tantra yoga and certain Tibetan Buddhist traditions what you can do is you can actually visualize with enormous concentration some kind of deity that you believe in whether it's Christ or Krishna or sus or something else and you visualize it with such intensity that because the mind is a giant or the universe is a giant mind and because what you imagine tends to become your reality you can literally sort of materialize a vision of your deity and then what usually happens is then though you merge into it so this is where the Samadhi happens is you actually merge into the deity and so your vision of the deity and your sense of self they collapse and merge together and that's where you have your non dual unitive mystical experience and that can be how you realize God now of course there can be some limitations with this because you can get too attached to the form of this day that you're visualizing so like we talked about earlier if you can be visualizing Christ the problem with that is that yes you might realize some facet of God but are you going to really fully get that full non-dual formless realization of the Godhead or are you gonna attach to this image of Christ of yours so you do have to be careful because otherwise you might get too partial of view of what God is or of what awakening is because the deepest awakening is not going to have any form to it it's not going to be an image of Shiva or Krishna or Christ or anything else or Buddha it's just going to be pure formless void so you want to make sure you break through to that but there are a lot of visualization techniques within Tantra yoga and Tibetan Buddhism do I recommend them probably not I think it's a little too esoteric and too specific I would recommend something more like self-inquiry or Korea yoga or just regular old meditation next question am I too young to pursue God some of you are in your teenage years and you might be asking yourself that look I was asking questions about God basically back when I was 14 years old now I was an atheist back then so I didn't really believe in God or the possibility of God but I was asking questions about what is the universe and where did it come from and how come reality works this way and I was asking epistemic questions and metaphysical questions which basically were questions about the nature of God I just didn't call it God at that point I didn't realize that this was spirituality was I called it philosophy and so I became a philosopher around that time so I don't really think there is such a thing as too young and another similar question is is it possible to awaken as a teen or in your early 20s certainly you can I know enlightened masters who became enlightened in their early 20s so you can definitely do it and the sooner you become awake the better the only thing I'll say about that as a caveat though is that you also want to make sure as a teen and someone in your early 20s like many of you are that you're also taking care of solving your survival in your teens and early 20s you need to spend a lot of energy figuring out how to educate yourself properly learning how the world works learning how social relationships work learning how sexuality works getting your diet and health in order so that you don't destroy your health when you're older figuring out how to make a living how to be financially independent off by yourself so you're not leeching off your parents finding your career yourself a sense of direction your life a sense of life purpose so all this is very important for you practically speaking as a team so be working on that because if you only pursue awakening you're gonna be very deficient in these other categories and that might create problems for you down the road so as a teen and in your early twenties you've got a lot of work to do to figure out how to live life next question can God be experienced at any stage of the spiral can God be experienced at the pre rational and the rational stages of cognitive development or must one be at the trans rational level the answer is that yes God can be experienced at any stage of the spiral you don't have to be stage turquoise or even yellow you don't have to be trans rational either but remember that how you experience it will be strongly affected by your level of cognitive development and where you are on the spiral so if you're a stage blue person and you have an experience of God you can have a very limited partial ethnocentric version of God a very moralistic version of God one that accords with your religion and if you're a stage orange person you're gonna have a very scientific materialistic version of God and this this will create problems for you so you definitely want to also work on raising your level of cognitive development to get to tier 2 at least yellow so you have a holistic understanding of God and spirituality once you do experience it and also the higher you are in your spiral level of development the easier it will be for you to have mystical experiences and to interpret them properly because most for example stage blue people are so wrapped up in their dogmas about God and their beliefs and their morality and their religion that they won't be even open to for example reading some of the advanced spiritual books on my book list that I recommend or doing some of the practices that I recommend because they're gonna be so caught up in their stage blue perspective on the world same thing with sage orange people so it's very important that you move into tier two because really people who are Tier one they are so preoccupied with their survival needs that they don't really ask very good metaphysical questions and it's difficult for them to spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff or to pursue that so climb as high as you can and your your fullest deepest understanding of God will come into your - with yellow and with turquoise next question why does God need to self realize well of course the answer is God doesn't God is perfectly fine with living a life that's not self-realized in a certain sense but also in other sense like I said earlier God's whole point is just to be to exist and to experience itself to live through all of its possibilities and of course to realize what it is so of course it's living through the possibility of your current life but unless you awaken in this current life you won't experience what it's like to live in a wake life as an awake human being and you won't fully understand what God is there's certain ways and things that you can understand about God only because you're in this human form that you couldn't if you were a dog or a worm or something like that so make sure that you should use it but there's no need for you to do it it's just like if you want to next question is God personal or impersonal the answer is both this is hard for people to understand so what do we mean by personal versus impersonal well the atheist has a very impersonal view of a universe the atheist thinks the universe is just like an impersonal object atoms are not personal and so the a this is very opposed to any kind of personal notions of reality or existence as though existence is somehow here for the benefit of mankind or that existence has any kind of human personal qualities to it and in a certain sense that's right the Godhead itself is impersonal in the sense that it doesn't have any kind of human personal qualities but at the same time it's also deeply personal because it's you you are it this Godhead is you it's inside of you right now being conscious of all this you see and the universe does have human qualities in a certain sense because this intelligence that you're experiencing right now as you're sitting here listening to me the emotions you feel the laughter and all the human qualities that you exhibit the universe has these qualities it's not that a human being has these qualities it's no it's the universe is taking on human qualities in a sense the universe has all qualities but when you're a human is especially got human qualities and so you got to that you got to integrate the personal and the impersonal together it's very it's a very personal experience when you become fully conscious of who you are as God very personal experience and yet at the same time there's a sense of no self a sense of transcending your biological biographical self so that's sort of the paradox next question does God take an active role in manipulating our lives again it sort of depends on what you mean by God here if you mean the Godhead itself then not really know the Godhead is just very passive it just sits and observes doesn't really do anything but at the same time the God is not really different from all the form that is here and all the thoughts you're having this is all the work of God your whole body everything that's going on here all your thoughts your emotions your plans for your life your ambitions on all this this is God sort of using the body as a puppet to do its bidding so in a certain sense it is manipulating your life all the time next question does God have an agenda or a plan for the universe where is creation going again all of these answers basically have this sort of double sided 'no stu them in a certain sense god has no agenda or plan for the universe there is no purpose or point of the universe other than the being of the universe you see being is its own point being is its own purpose just to be is all that really the universe is doing but at the same time there's also that evolutionary process that's unfolding especially from our perspective humans it definitely seems like the universe is evolving and moving towards greater complexity greater self-awareness and it seems reasonable to me to assume that that's gonna keep happening and so I would assume that what's happening is that God is becoming more and more complex experiencing itself in more and more forms and ultimately sort of reaching to a singularity or to an infinity in the sense that you might imagine that in like ten thousand years from now we could imagine that all of humanity is linked together through some kind of neural networks and we're integrating our brains and our minds with computers and with a eyes and all of it is merging together into just one giant hive like hyper mind which is able to experience life through all sorts of different sensory modalities and it's able to you know query Wikipedia pages take that knowledge to get inside of its computer mind and combine it with it's calculating mathematical knowledge like a calculator like a supercomputer it's able to crunch numbers like crazy but also it's able to feel emotions the way that a human can all of this kind of integrated and all of the experiences of every human being and every living creature on the entire planet is all linked together into this ultimate like singularity maybe it's heading towards something like that that's what I would imagine next question which is more true pantheism or pan and theism so pantheism says that everything is God all of reality is God pan and theism is a slightly different version of that which says that everything all of reality is inside of God which is very slight little distinction and really it's kind of a distinction without a difference in reality both are true it's true that everything absolutely everything is God but at the same time everything is inside of God because God is the Godhead the formlessness that is sort of the background against which all the form is happening and at the same time the formlessness is not different from the form the form in the poses are identical so really it kind of depends a little bit on your perspective on how you're looking at it and when you're becoming conscious and awake to these things you might at first experience it as though it's pantheism and then you might experience it separately as pantheism and then you might also experience that both as as both of them simultaneously in a kind of a superposition overlapping each other that's the paradoxical nature of non-duality next question how did mankind first learn about God well of course I don't know for sure I don't have perfect historical knowledge of human history but I can take a guess I can speculate I think mankind has known about God like I said for over 450,000 years since the very beginning of modern humans and maybe even before that maybe even before they were modern humans are anthropoid ancestors even they might have had some mystical insights into God but basically the way I think it happened is probably a combination of things I think people human beings used to be more spiritual in the past and so it probably was even easier for them to access God also you know four hundred thousand years ago what was there to do there was no television there was no distractions there weren't a lot of humans even so there wasn't a lot of war going on there wasn't farming there wasn't much to do so human beings sat around a lot and effectively what they were was meditating as they were sitting around and doing nothing and so I think many of them had spontaneous mystical experiences I also think that they used psychedelics because psychedelics are readily available on all continents around the entire world and herbalism and shamanism we know dates back tens of thousands of years at least that we have good historical evidence for so that shamanism probably dates back all the way to 450,000 years ago and also remember that some people are just naturally spiritually gifted when they're born whether it's genetics or whatever however you want to explain it through past lives or whatever so some people are just naturally born and they have spontaneous awakenings and so I think that um before there was Jesus before there was Buddha there were thousands of Jesus's and Buddha's that date back for hundreds of thousands of years that just nobody knows about because they've been long forgotten because there were no books there was no writing back then and so this stuff you know people had these realizations but they probably weren't able to communicate it very well or it was just kept very locally within their little tribe that was her tribe died out and all that knowledge died out with them and it was only later once we got systems of writing with the ancient Egyptians and so forth that we finally started to codify these insights and turn them into various kinds of religious and mystical schools and systems next question why did God decide to take on my particular human form well God is taking on every possible form simultaneously one of which is this particular human form that you're in so don't take it too personally God's doing everything at once next question why did God create humans and animals again because God is everything that's possible so it's gonna take on every possible form that it can humans animals aliens a eyes and a million other things that you can't even possibly imagine yet it's doing all of it simultaneously and I think to it humans and animals are especially valuable because you get to actually experience what that's like to be some creature or some sentient entity in a way that you can't really do with an atom or with a rock but of course God is also atoms and rocks it's just that items and rocks are so simple that there's not enough complexity there to really create a rich experience but you know in the form of a human God can experience all sorts of things laughter jealousy sexuality love emotions that rocks and even other animals can't experience so it seems that generally speaking this evolution is creating more and more complex life forms which can experience reality in richer and richer ways richer senses richer emotional capacities richer intellectual capacities richer conceptualization abilities with language and with religion and culture and entertainment and all this so it seems like that's gonna keep going and whatever comes after humans you can imagine it's gonna be like a step above in the same way that humans are step above animals in their ability to interface with the universe next question how can the realization of God be used from the human perspective this is a bit tricky because the ego loves to ask this question and loves to think about how you can use God to earn money or sex or something like that and of course you can people have used the realization of God to become famous and to become successful or money to get sex and write books and do tours and become a celebrity yeah you can do all that that would be very uh very tricky though because you can get easily lost in all those materialistic trappings but you can use the realization of God from the human perspective to elevate the consciousness of mankind so once you yourself become awake it becomes very easy and effortless for you to transmit that awakeness to everybody around you and this helps to wake up the rest of the world you can use the realization of God to teach you can use it to master your emotions you can use it to improve for example how you do science you can use it to be hyper creative you can become a really great artist from this place it will improve every aspect of your life you can use it to become a better athlete you can use it to become a better father or mother you can use it to raise a better family you can use it to improve the quality of your relationships and your sex life and many other things basically consciousness helps to improve everything you do you can even use it to improve your ability to run a business of course that sort of assumes that you're gonna be running a conscious business if you're running a very unconscious business where you're fleecing people and gouging people hurting people then that's probably not going to be compatible with awakening but you can transform your business and your conscious business same thing with your relationships if you're inside a very toxic dysfunctional relationships and awakening will probably end those relationships but then you can forge new relationships which which will be much healthier and more conscious next question does realizing God give you any special powers or abilities this is a bit of a dangerous question because the answer is that yes it can it can this is the realm of paranormal abilities and cities what the Yogi's call cities these special spiritual powers even so these are the powers that have been written about in various spiritual books magical healing abilities clairvoyance telepathic abilities and abilities to see auras and other things like this so this is a whole separate subject matter that can be studying a lot of depth it can also become a big distraction to awakening the pursuit of these powers is usually sought by an ego which can be very problematic because the ego is hungry for power but uh but yeah some people do develop these abilities these abilities are real but you're not guaranteed to develop any particular ability and most people who awaken probably won't develop any abilities but some people will I think that genetic predisposition has something to do with it and other factors that I don't quite understand yet next question our miracles possible well first you have to realize that everything is a miracle literally this very moment right now is a miracle all of existence is a miracle but that's not what you're asking you're asking can-can miracles happen within this physical reality and the answer is that I think yes in the sense of paranormal stuff can happen certain paranormal healing can happen which is very well documented certain synchronicities can happen in synchrony so knees are kind of a weird thing that are difficult to explain unless you're already awake and you're experiencing them so in this sense miracles can sort of happen but I also think it can be kind of over exaggerated I don't really know if Jesus walked on water and this sorts of stuff I wouldn't really pay too much credence to that but stuff like for example healing people I think is definitely possible next question so is everything in the Bible false the answer of course is no there's a lot of good stuff in the Bible but also a lot of outdated stuff there's racist stuff in there as an eccentric stuff closed-minded stuff there's factually incorrect stuff because the Bible is written by humans and it wasn't even written by Jesus so you should expect that there would be a lot of inaccuracies and errors in the Bible but at the same time there's really good stuff like there's a passage in the Bible that says where were Moses Moses communicates with God he sees God and then he asks God okay so I'm gonna go back to my people and tell them that I saw God but what should I call you and God tells them you can tell them that I am my name is I am and that's a really good passage very very accurate that tells you exactly what God is I am you are you are God when Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is found within that's a really good pointer to where you find heaven within Nirvana's found within heaven it's not outside of you so you can find all sorts of little interesting clues and and pointers in the Bible but at the same time you know there's a lot of fluff in the Bible a lot of misleading stuff so I wouldn't consider it a really high quality practical spiritual text you can find much better modern books that will teach you how to actually do the practices of being able to realize what the Bible is pointing to next question what is our duty towards God what should we do should we worship God should we pray to God well in the ultimate sense you have no duty towards God since you are God what duty can you have to yourself your duty is simply to just be however you are is you fulfilling your duty whether you're a monster you're an angel you're fulfilling your duty in other sense your duty is to awaken and to help to raise the awareness of all of mankind and to help to raise the awareness of the entire cosmos and to participate in this creative evolutionary game that God is playing it should you worship God or pray to God the problem with this that I find is that people who worship God or pray to God are doing it under the presumption of a duality between God and themselves so you need to make sure you realize that the thing you're worshipping or praying to is exactly yourself so really when you're worshiping or you're praying it is a form of masturbation and you should be conscious of that and then if you still want to worship or prayer I don't really know why you would I guess you could but this is a classic mistake that many Orthodox religious people make is that they just they worship God so much that that then becomes the obstacle to realizing that I am God because you know Leo if I have been worshiping God for twenty years what the hell was i worshipping if I was just worshiping myself exactly exactly that's the whole point there's nothing to worship but yourself so careful with that next question what does God want from us well again really nothing just be however you want to be and gods happy with it whatever you do God is fine with it doesn't matter but in another certain sense try to be as conscious as you can try to appreciate your own magnificence is God otherwise it's sort of like your hey you're not realizing how amazing you are how I may this whole thing is your dad I'm missing the beauty of life it's wasted on you it's almost like we're going to a really great movie and we're sitting down to the theater to to watch the movie and instead of sitting pointing your face at the movie screen you turn around and look backwards at the projector the whole time and of course in a certain sense it's like you're wasting this opportunity if you would just turn around and look the right direction you would see a really beautiful movie so why are you getting in your own way but at the same time also if you want to sit backwards that's also fine God doesn't really care there's a certain point in doing that too then you get to experience what the back of the movie theaters like next question well following my religion lead me to God should I abandon my religion I'm sort of biased actually against religion I have an allergy against any kind of dog more fundamentalism or any belief system whatsoever I'm mmm I'm even allergic to ideologies secular ideologies economic ideologies and political ones and so forth so personally I recommend that you do abandon your religion because it's mostly gonna get in the way have the courage just to let it go after all it's just brainwashing is all that really is you can never lose the only true thing there is which is God so if you really care about your religion and you really care about God then abandon your religion and then you will discover that all that there is is God and you won't need a religion anymore your religion will become the real thing God you you are the source or the thing that religion is pointing at nothing but you so why do you need all those belief systems try to let them go as much as you can next question leo my religion like the Quran the Bible Buddhism Vedanta already says all the stuff you're talking about it's already filled with all the wisdom so what's the point of your teachings aren't you just rehashing the same stuff plagiarizing them no it might seem like I'm rehashing the same stuff but actually I'm talking about at a different level I'm actually talking about at a higher level I'm talking about it from a stage yellow stage turquoise perspective from an integral holistic perspective in a way that the Quran or the Bible doesn't the problem with the Quran with the Bible with traditional Buddhist sutras and even traditional Vedanta is that it's a very ethnocentric version of spirituality it's not truly holistic it doesn't take into account all the different other spiritual schools that exist it tries to be exclusive it also is dogmatic it teaches you certain things that it wants you to believe and just to take on blind faith it's not very empirically based it's also not very well integrated with modern science and so while all those traditions are great and you can glean certain insights from them really in the 21st century you need to be going beyond there's a lot of stuff that these thousand-year-old spiritual traditions just will not teach you because those things weren't known back then we have modern psychological insights modern insights from quantum mechanics from chaos theory from sociology anthropology history economics linguistics modern philosophy post-modernism you know that there's just there's so much stuff beyond what you will learn in the quran or in the bible or through classical Buddhism or Vedanta and we need to do that we need to we need to be constantly evolving our spiritual practice we can't be living in a spiritual tradition of a thousand years ago that's way too medieval it's not gonna work in our modern world you always have to adopt your spiritual practice to fit the modern world and to deal with new technological realities and complexities that just didn't exist back then because the entire universe is evolving and it's evolving at an ever-accelerating rate so my teachings are really trying to be the cutting edge of spirituality I'm trying to teach spirituality in a way that I think it needs to be evolved into in the 21st century so even though I speak about a lot of timeless truths I also do put a new twist on it and I point out important traps that you won't learn about in many other places for example are you going to read about cult dynamics in the Bible or in the Quran or it within Buddhism or Vedanta no you're not they're not gonna teach you about cults because that's more modern psychological theory which we've learned recently or for example spiral dynamics you know the quran i'm going to teach you about spiral dynamics and that's that's a great problem the quran is also not going to teach you about various kinds of psychopathologies and shadow work and other things that weren't known back then which are really important for for you to be successful in your practice today next question what is the number one requirement for realizing God I've thought about this for a long while and I came up with actually with three important requirements number one is concentration you need to develop laser focused concentration abilities for hours on end number two is radical open mindedness you need to literally open your mind so much that you even open your minds to death to evil to all the stuff that you resist and would never even imagine is possible and third is you need to be genuinely metaphysically curious this is so important because you got to actually have a desire to want to understand what is existence and why is it here and why is there something rather than nothing and what is God you have to really want to get to the bottom of those answers not as beliefs or theories but actuality so those I think are the three keys next question but Leo how do I know that I can trust everything that you're saying and of course the answer here is that you shouldn't just blindly trust me that's one way in which stuff that I teach is different from the Quran or the Bible or Buddhism or something else you shouldn't blindly trust me you should validate everything that I'm saying here cross reference read different sources verify things for yourself experiment with psychedelics experiment with yoga experiment meditation experiment self inquiry and so on and discover what's true for yourself some of the things I'm saying could be wrong I could be deluded from your point of view I could be a cult leader I could be insane you don't know do you must verify but at the same time also don't miss trust me in a cynical sort of way as well that would also be a mistake because if you mistrust me talk too much then you're not going to give your yourself enough open-mindedness to even kind of like bootstrap yourself out of whatever situation in life right now that you're stuck in you need to you need to have kind of like mmm enough openness that you're willing to consider these possibilities seriously and follow up with them and to actually test them in the same way that a good scientist can't be so mistrustful that he can't even run an experiment for a few years and get the results back he has to be able to have enough trust to run the experiment and then to to either confirm or to dis confirm what's being said so that's the end of the list those are all your questions still confused after all this well God is a very confusing topic but you also have to understand that in the end all these conversations that we're having about God all these answers that I'm giving you it's just story you're never going to figure out God through this sort of question-and-answer thing this question-and-answer stuff can go on forever your mind loves to ask questions because it's a great way to avoid doing the actual work and the answers at some point they become an obstacle because your mind gets filled with all these answers but you're not actually discovering them for yourself it's like looking up the answers in the back of a book for your math problems rather than solving them yourself so in the end the only way to understand God is to awaken to God to become God and then to look and to feel yourself as God and then from that will come all the answers remember that you cannot awaken before you awaken some people try to get like a preview of God they try to find out all what's God gonna be like I want an image of it I want a metaphor I want this I want a map I want a model I want like what's it gonna be like when I awaken you can't do that if you truly knew what it would be like to awaken you would already be awake that's the whole challenge of awakening so um just try to be comfortable with not knowing for a while while you're doing your practices and then trust that one day you'll figure it out what actually comes but if you try to get a sneak preview of it that's actually gonna get in the way of you awakening and the last thing that I'll just remind you of is that one awakening is not enough to understand that everything I told you in this miniseries I have described God in many different facets in many different ways from many different angles which took me over a dozen separate awakening experiences to piece together and it probably will for you as well I highly doubt and I think you'll be very disappointed if you go in to this process expecting to understand everything that I talked about in these two episodes after one awakening experience I just find that very difficult to believe it's way too much for you to understand at all with one experience you're probably gonna need multiple glimpses and then you probably can also need to spend time thinking about it integrating it maybe reading some books maybe talking to a guru kind of figuring stuff out in your mind before you really understand at the level that I described it here in the last two episodes this is this is a very thorough comprehensive explanation that probably many Zen monks and Yogi's unless they're super masterful they won't know all this stuff they probably will be missing some of these facets because it's hard to have this many awakenings most people have one or two awakenings in their whole life if they're lucky not a dozen or thirty of them which is again why psychedelics can be so beneficial because you can use psychedelics to create 30 awakenings for yourself over the next couple of years which would be virtually impossible through other methods but of course yoga and self inquiry can also basically do the job so don't feel like you have to do psychedelics it's just an option alright that's it I'm done here please click the like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll find resources there like my blog the book lists the life purpose course and the forum the final thing they'll say is that actualised org can help you to discover God I receive emails and private messages on my forum every month of people who have awoken maybe not fully awoken but they had some kind of glimpse or even a significant awakening from following the stuff that I say doing the practices that I talked about maybe reading some of the books that I recommend on my book list and just getting on with the program so if you're serious about understanding God for yourself experientially then follow along try to do the actual practices that I recommend I recommend some very powerful practices I'm sort of a no-nonsense kind of guy and I like to do techniques that actually work that don't waste my time and I spent a lot of time experimenting over the last three years with various kinds of techniques and I think some of the techniques that I offer are some of the most potent techniques that you'll find anywhere within spirituality so don't take them for granted take them seriously and it doesn't always take that long I have people who have been meditating for 6 months or 12 months and they're already having awakening experiences you know so don't create limiting beliefs for yourself don't tell yourself it's gonna take 10 years it doesn't have to you can you can awaken within a couple of years if you're serious about it so I recommend you get started and then stick around for more as I will be helping to guide you in the future pointing out various kinds of traps that you'll be falling into giving you various other kinds of pointers sharing other techniques that I'm still researching there are techniques that I haven't shared yet with you I'm always looking for cutting-edge stuff that's what excites me about this work I don't like rehashing old stuff I like talking about new stuff which is why I'm always doing lots of research and there will be a lot of that coming in future you