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[Music] what is paradox a few years ago i released an episode called the metaphysical implications of google's incompleteness theorem and i promised that that was part one and there's gonna be a part two well i'm long overdue on part two and this episode is in a sense part two fulfilling on that promise in this episode we're going to go deeply into the nature of paradox and how it works and why it exists this is going to be a profound explanation for the existential reasons behind paradox if you understand what i'm saying here you will understand why all paradox exists and why it must exist and the profound implications this has for science for epistemology for understanding what reality is and this is the kind of information that you will not hear from any scientists or materialist or academic so we're really expanding and deepening our understanding and appreciation of paradox here now i hope that like me you love paradox from a young age i've always been fascinated by paradox i didn't find it ugly i found it beautiful to me paradox is is one of the greatest beauties of reality to explore paradoxes and to see why they exist and why they occur and if you want a little bit more about that to get in touch with the beauty of paradox go watch my other episode called reality is a strange loop where i introduce the strange loop concept from douglas hofstadter and i illustrate it with many beautiful examples visual examples so actually funnily enough my love for paradox is ultimately what led me to the realization of absolute truth it's through paradox that you do this and it can do this for you too which is why this episode is not merely purely aesthetic or philosophical but actually has practical consequences because what happens is that if you are serious about pursuing and understanding paradox and you you track all paradoxes down to the very root of what sources them what you'll discover is that the source is absolute truth the thing that you've been searching for the most beautiful thing that you can discover and so paradoxes are in a sense like glitches in the matrix that point you towards absolute truth that's why this is practical unfortunately most minds especially scientific minds skeptical minds rational minds atheistic minds find paradox threatening there's a very good reason for why that is which we will expand upon here but before we get into all those details let's start off with the basics what is paradox the oxford dictionary has the following definition quote a paradox is a statement or proposition that despite sound reasoning from acceptable premises leads to conclusion that seems senseless logically unacceptable or self-contradictory end quote that is essentially what it is but we need to explore more deeply why this is the case where does paradox really come from and also we need to explore western intellectual traditions history with paradox how it struggles to deal with paradox and the fear that exists within western mainstream intellectual tradition surrounding paradox there's a deep seated fear there and one of the principles like as a rule of thumb that you should take with you in all of your investigations of reality is that any time there's any fear about some portion of reality whether it's a paradox of some kind or some sort of scientific truth or religious truth or any kind of thing like this uh that fear actually is your best clue that something deceptive is going on and that you should want to look deeper under that fear because that fear is hiding something from you and so sure enough western intellectual tradition has always feared paradox and it's actively swept it under the rug and the reason that is because paradox is very threatening for rationality for science for materialism and for the entire academic game that is being played in universities so that's an abstract explanation of what's going on but now let's get very specific about it here's the best example that i found to illustrate this point and this is an example from douglas hofstadter's other book called i am a strange loop so i'm going to read you an extensive quotation by the way this episode will have a lot of quotations that i'll be reading so here we go from hofstadter he's gonna explain this situation to us with one example quote some years earlier russell had been struggling to ground mathematics in the theory of sets which he was convinced constituted the deepest bedrock of human thought but just when he thought he was within sight of his goal he unexpectedly discovered a terrible loophole in set theory this loophole was based on the notion of the the set of all sets that don't contain themselves a notion that was legitimate in set theory but that turned out to be deeply self-contradictory when set theory turned out to allow self-contradictory entities like this russell's dream of solidly grounding mathematics came crashing down on him this trauma instilled in him a terror of theories that permitted loops of self-reference since he attributed the intellectual devastation he had experienced to loopiness and to loopiness alone in trying to recover then russell working with his old mentor and new colleague whitehead invented a novel kind of set theory in which a definition of a set could never invoke that set and moreover in which a strict linguistic hierarchy was set up rigidly preventing any sentence from referring to itself when i read about this theory of types it struck me as a pathological retreat from common sense as well as from the fascination of loops categorically banishing all loops of reference struck me as such a paranoid maneuver that i was disappointed for a lifetime with the one spit and twice shy mind of bertrand russell what remained with me however was the realization that some highly educated and otherwise sensible people are irrationally allergic to the idea of self-reference or of the structures or systems that fall back upon themselves i suspect that such people's allergy stems in the final analysis from a deep-seated fear of paradox or of the universe exploding metaphorically end quote this beautiful passage by hofstadter just perfectly encapsulates the point that i'm trying to make and many rationally minded people still don't fathom the significance of what is explained in this passage there is sort of just the simple literal definition or the literal example here the literal lesson of this example which is some nerdy aspect of set theory and mathematics and logic which to most people you might be wondering like leo what does this matter how does this apply to my life it doesn't matter at all yes that's a very nerdy application of this issue but what i want you to see is that we need to expand and learn a broader deeper more universal lesson here from this one specific instance with the failure of set theory and and this is a lesson that has still not been learned by most scientists by rationalists academics and materialists because they're still playing this game of believing that they can ground reality into some sort of formal logical symbolic system this is impossible to do and if you want more about the problems with that go watch part one of the series which is the metaphysical implications of girdles and completeness theorem i won't rehash all that here but suffice it to say basically in a nutshell what happened was that historically is that a hundred years ago most mathematicians logicians and scientists and rationalists believed that they could actually completely ground all of mathematics within something logical like set theory and then paradoxes were discovered by bertrand russell and by kurt gerdel and by alfred tarski and others that proved once and for all that this is a fool's errand that is impossible to achieve but rather than actually biting that bullet and learning the lesson of like aha our whole scheme here of trying to formalize and rationalize reality is impossible and that we've been fools for trying to do so rather than learning that lesson instead what most scientists and academics did is they said ah well that just means we have to reconfigure our symbolic systems to outlaw the possibility of paradox and the way that that was done is by forbidding self-reflection or self-reference and so the whole the whole thing here the whole key to all this hinges upon the idea of self-reference if a system is capable of and allows for self-reflection or self-reference which i explained in part one go go watch that for a deeper understanding of what self-reference means and why it's so important then that system will always ultimately contradict itself and destroy itself or eat itself alive and of course this is completely unacceptable to most scientists and logicians and academics and so what uh what they do is they they pull up a sleight of hand which is what hofstadter is saying happened here with the one spitting twice shy mind of bertrand russell and whitehead and others like like them is that what they do is they say okay how can we reconfigure our logical schemes to outlaw self-reflection by fiat and by doing so we will prevent paradox and self-contradiction and then it will seem to us as though we have our formal systems and that our formal systems are are perfect and complete but they're not complete that's what google showed they're not complete and they don't capture all of reality and in fact they're missing the most important part of reality which is the capacity for self-reference and self-reflection in other words self-awareness or consciousness that's the most important aspect of reality is self-reference and when you cut that out of your symbolic systems it's like neutering your children that's what you're doing here but if you have a bias towards rationality towards being perfectly logical if you're stuck in your left brain and you need reality to be logical and to not have any contradictions and no paradoxes then you have to play now a game of denying a game of denial very sophisticated denial that what you're doing is your your your neutering reality you're dumbing yourself down you're dumbing yourself down so much that you're becoming willfully ignorant of the self-reflection problems that exist within science within mathematics within logic and so on and you have to do that in order to keep playing the scientific logical mathematical rationalist game that you want to be playing but of course the question is does that actually reflect the true nature of reality or is reality a thing which is inherently self-contradictory because of self-reference so sure you could construct a walled garden within your logic or within your university or within your worldview you could construct a finite walled garden where you outlaw self-reflection and consciousness and then it will seem to you from within that walled garden if you always stay within that wall garden you're very careful guarding those walls it will always seem to you as though reality is non-contradictory and perfectly logical but what you're not seeing is that that's just a little walled garden that you've constructed there's there's an entire ocean of stuff that's real that exists beyond your little walled garden which you've just stuck your head into the sand about and you're actively in denial about and so this is the situation that science mathematics and logic finds itself in still to this day the lessons of russell's paradox and girdles and completeness theorem and tarski's influence and these lessons have not been learned even by those people who proclaim themselves to understand girdles and completeness theorems it's actually shocking to me how many mathematically inclined people will will preach to me about how they have dealt deep and they have proven and you know they have done the proofs of of actual girls and complaining serum and that they understand the proofs when in fact they they might understand the technical proofs they might even be able to do a technical proof it's a very sophisticated proof they might be able to do it but they have no understanding of the broader implications this has for their understanding of reality because that's not an accident if they truly did grasp the things that i'm saying here this would destroy their entire worldview and their entire epistemic attitude and their metaphysics so you have to understand that there's something very sneaky going on here your mind is playing very sneaky games especially when you're being logical and rational and rigorous do not believe your lying mind when you're lying mind tells you that oh leo i'm just being very rigorous yeah you're being very rigorous and you're using rigor as a weapon against actually grasping the ultimate nature of reality and yourself and consciousness so watch out watch out with the games you play so a lot of what western intellectual tradition has done is it it has created models theories and various kinds of logics which had to be fudged to make reality c more rational and linear than it actually is that fudging that fudge factor is what bertrand russell did in this explanation that hofstadter gave you can construct a sort of set theory which is so crippled that it prevents through fudging it prevents self-reflection and if you do construct such a system then you can start to believe that this system actually is a true reflection of reality and what i'm saying is that it's not and see what's happening here is that the mind again see the mind is more attached to logic or to science or to academic model building than it is to truth i've talked about this divergence in my episode my series on deconstructing the myth of science part one two three i've talked specifically about this divergence between science and truth that can happen well the same kind of divergence can actually happen between truth and logic and that's exactly what happens in this case with bertrand brussell and with seth theories and so forth you see the scientific academic mind is so committed to the academic pursuits that it loses sight of the fact that academia and the way that academics study reality could not be the same thing as the pursuit of truth and then what's going to happen is that your loyalties will be with academia and with model building rather than with truth but you will convince yourself that no leo i'm pursuing the truth by building my models you will convince yourself of that without realizing that actually building your models that is a survival activity of your mind not a genuine pursuit of the truth and so you see the human mind is so sneaky that it will even fudge logic and rationality in order to defend its worldview because to a rationalist reality has to be rational and if you try to explain to a rationalist that reality doesn't have to be rational he will say but you're using rationality to talk to me therefore you're contradicting yourself no i'm only using rationality to talk to you because that's the level you're at and that's all you understand so of course i'm using rationality to talk to you how else am i supposed to get through to you you're a rationalist you will only listen to rationality now look i could speak to you in completely irrational ways and that's perfectly fine for my point of view because i have no loyalty to rationalism but will it penetrate your stubborn ass mind probably not so therefore i am forced to use rationality to communicate with you rationalists just try to fathom the the sneakiness of what's going on here if there actually is something profoundly true that exists outside of rationality notice that you will not be able to see it precisely because you're committed to maintaining this walled garden that you've built that you call rationality what is within the walled garden is rationality and what's without is the dangerous stuff that you're scared of the irrational stuff the a-rational stuff the stuff that is trans-rational and you see the ego mind needs to construct these sorts of walled gardens with its worldview whether it's a scientific worldview or religious world you the ego has to do this because the ego has a deep need for control over reality and so while most scientists and mathematicians and logicians might fancy themselves pure objective impartial pursuers of truth this is not the case this is a ruse that their mind is playing on them this is a self-deception in fact their minds deeply want to control and manipulate reality and they do that through the intellectual pursuits that academics do and you see if your whole career your whole life is is devoted to intellectual model building the most dangerous thing to you is going to be this conversation we're having right now about the fundamental limitations of all models and the fact that all models must ultimately contradict themselves because all models are finite and because reality is infinite but we'll get to that in more detail in a minute so you see science and academia actually has a constructivist bias that means that scientists and academics they're not just pursuing the truth for truth's sake they're seeking to build something they're seeking to construct something now it could be a technology or it could just be some theoretical model or scheme but it has to be something positive and constructive because if it's not positive or constructive you can't write a research paper on it you can't get published you can't get tenure in a university you can't be a professor you can't contribute to the growing knowledge base of science you see the scientific knowledge base is always growing and growing and growing that's construction science is constructing similar to a tree the way a tree grows in rings every year every season it adds an extra layer of ring of bark around itself and then it grows bigger and bigger and bigger that's what science is doing that's what i mean by the constructivist bias so uh you're going to run into problems as a scientist or as an academic if you take a more deconstructive approach where you are deconstructing everything because the problem is is that people will tell you well why are you deconstructing everything what's the use in that that's not useful since it's not useful we can't teach it since we can't teach it then we can't charge money you know thousands of dollars for students to come to our university and we can't get grants either from the government because the government is not going to give grants for deconstruction of reality it only gives grants for the construction of reality businesses will not fund you as a scientist or a researcher if you're deconstructing stuff because businesses all are in the business of constructing stuff not deconstructing stuff see but what if truth lies in the direction of deconstruction more so than in the direction of construction what if the truth is that all of reality is a construction and you're in denial about that what if the truth is that science all of science is a construction what if the truth is that all of logic is a construction what if the truth is that all of mathematics is a construction will you have enough objectivity to admit that to yourself do you see the conflict of interest here it's a very profound conflict of interest that no academic or scientist fully fathoms so this turns out to be a corruption at the heart of science yes you can create a contradiction-free walled garden if you disallow all contradictions but the deeper question is does this actually reflect reality is this how reality is or is this something you've constructed some simplification that you've imagined of reality simply because you can't deal with the larger reality you see if the mind is so small that it can only deal with this much reality when in fact this much reality exists but your mind can only deal with this much of it you see notice the following trick that the mind can play on itself is the mind can define reality according to its own self such that reality coincides with the limits of the mind and then reality just appears to be your own mind all that your mind can understand this is how much of reality you see and you don't see anything beyond that and therefore from your point of view you're so ignorant you don't even understand what you're ignorant of you don't see what you're missing and therefore you can act arrogant and you can act as though you've you're about to figure everything out when in fact you're nowhere close to figuring everything out and this is precisely the situation that modern science and philosophy even and academia find themselves in this trap because you see as soon as your mind is pushed outside of its comfort zone outside of its own narrow self definitions you're pushed to explore some new domain of reality that you haven't yet explained to yourself that your own model and paradigm cannot account for you see there's there's an interesting dilemma that you have either you can be very open-minded and intellectually honest and you can go forth and be fearless and explore those new domains but then those new domains will contradict your old definition of what reality was and so that means you have to expand first first of all you have to admit that you were wrong which most minds don't want to do especially most intellectual minds because to an intellectual person admitting their own intellectual errors is one of the deepest fears they have and it's the last thing they want to do the last thing a scientist or an academic wants to do is admit a profound egregious error in their understanding of reality that's that's the worst thing that could happen to a scientist because it undermines his entire reputation now sure most scientists and academics are happy to admit of of little mistakes and in fact this is this is a further game that they're playing is they'll say oh leo we admit our mistakes all the time what are you talking about man i admit when i'm wrong you admit when you're wrong about shallow easy things what i'm talking about is admitting that you're profoundly wrong about the entire pursuit of your intellectual career that's a much deeper level of of error than you're willing to uh to admit to yourself and even to me and so your denial about this so anyways you have two options you can either admit you were wrong and then expand your sense of reality that's painful emotionally that takes emotional labor or what you can do is you can actually just cut off that new domain and deny that that domain even exists or that it's valid or that it has anything to do with science or that it should be of any significance or interest to you or to the larger academic community you can do that you can pull that move and when you pull that move that's the easiest move to pull because to pull that move all you have to do is fool yourself into believing that that domain is some sort of inferior marginalized st area of study some sort of pseudoscience or some sort of irrationality or nonsense and then you can just dismiss that from your mind very easily and you can go back to just studying all the stuff that exists within your established paradigm you see but the cost notice the cost the cost is that you never fully understand the larger reality so what do you want ask yourself what do you want more do you more care about understanding all of reality or do you care more about defending your little paradigm and intellectual corner because you can't have both if you want to understand all of reality all of a reality actually the only way you're gonna be able to do that is by completely deconstructing all of your paradigms all of your assumptions all of your attachments all of your pet theories all of your models they're all gonna have to go and that's unacceptable to most scientists and academics and logicians and mathematicians and skeptics and rationalists so choose where do your loyalties lie so yes if you want you can maintain non-contradiction within your systems but this is maintained at a cost and the cost is completeness and scope in other words you can have a non-contradictory symbolic system or model you can have that but it's not going to be complete it's going to be extremely limited extremely partial and it's not going to be capable of self-reference it's not going to be able to explain itself you see because one of the tricks that science pulls one of the dualistic tricks is that science comes up with models but then those models they can explain reality some corner of reality but they never explain the whole of reality nor are they capable notices they're not capable of explaining themselves and this is true of science as a whole science as a whole can explain a lot of stuff within reality but science as a whole cannot explain science have you noticed this this is not an accident there's a deep fundamental reason for why this must be the case because see science is something consciousness is doing science is something the mind is doing so science can explain everything but science can't explain consciousness and science can't explain the mind and you might say well leo so what you know what's the big deal but actually there is a big deal because ultimately what science really cares about the spirit of science is about trying to understand all of reality which includes consciousness that includes minds too and so there's a deep problem because right now you can find on youtube many videos of like interviews with famous scientists and they're commonly asked questions like what is consciousness where did consciousness come from is conscious is fundamental and you see them giving these long-winded winding answers which clearly show that they are clueless about what consciousness is um and and you know they're playing games and they're pretending to give you answers but they're not really giving you answers and some of these scientists are even forced into a position where they have to deny consciousness they have to deny consciousness because you can't explain consciousness through science because consciousness is prior to science because science is something conscious is doing so this is the self-reference problem the problem is that they're not conscious enough to realize that this self-reference problem is at the heart of all of science and logic and mathematics and rationality and skepticism because they've limited themselves to that particular paradigm and they refuse to see anything beyond that and it's actually not possible to understand accurately what reality is as long as you're working within a finite closed carefully curated symbolic system you can't understand the ultimate questions about reality that way you can't answer questions like why is there something rather than nothing what is consciousness what is death what is the purpose of life what is love what is god is there free will what is the self where did the universe come from will it ever end you can't answer these questions from that little walled garden and then here's the mistake that many scientists and rationalists make is they say well leo you can't answer those questions because those questions don't have answers they're just [ __ ] philosophical armchair questions that don't have any answers no they have absolute definite answers they have very satisfying answers they have answers that are beyond any word games and beyond even the answers of of science but it's just that those answers lie outside of your little walled garden your paradigm and so see you can either admit that there are answers that exist outside your walled garden or you can deny it and you can say no only answers within my walled garden are true answers and then if you do that you're stuck forever in ignorance and then when you actually do hear the answers like when you hear me talking about love or god or consciousness and i give you dfinity answers you get upset if you're attached to that walled garden of yours you get upset why well you have to because the things i'm saying are directly contradicting your little walled garden they're destroying your walled garden and you must maintain that wall of garden because that's what you're committed to as a scientist rationalist academic materialist duelist realist skeptic logician mathematician that's what you're in the business of please see that so there's an enormous cost that comes the cost that comes with maintaining your little walled garden is so high that you don't even understand the cost yet i haven't even begun to articulate the cost you i've only been talking about some of the like theoretical costs there are actually survival level costs there are emotional costs there are karmic costs there is the suffering and pain that you construct for yourself by constructing your little narrow walled gardens and you don't see those costs because your walled garden is so deeply at the root of the way that you see reality that any errors in your epistemology there will percolate through and distort your entire perception of reality so thoroughly that you won't even be able to have enough self-awareness and self-reflection to see how your own epistemology is constructing your own limits as a human as a living being as a conscious agent it's sort of like you're handcuffing yourself without realizing that you're handcuffing yourself and then you're throwing away the key you're never ever going to be able to find it again because not only do you throw away the key you also brainwash yourself to tell yourself that the key never even existed and that you've always just been in handcuffs and that this is the natural condition that everybody is like this and there's no solution there is a solution but you have to stop brainwashing yourself with these limited rigid narrow symbolic systems that you've constructed that you've picked up from your culture so in practice the way that science and logic handles this problem is that as with like what bertrand russell did is that they create second order logics and meta languages they create a language to talk about language they create a logic to talk about logic so there are truths that first order logic cannot encompass so to speak or cannot hold because it's too finite because truth is infinite so truth always escapes any finite system so your finite system let's say is first order logic there are some truths that exist that are meta truths outside of that first order logic so what the scientists did is they they came up with a second order logic the second order logic expands beyond first order logic and it can it can encapsulate some more truths it can hold some truths about first order logic that first order logic speak about itself because of the self-reflection problem you see because self-reflection is prohibited within the first order logic so for that reason you need a second order logic but then second order logic same problem you're just kicking the can down the road now you need a third order logic to explain certain truths meta truths about second order logic that second order logic can't explain about itself you see because second order logic is also finite it's just a larger form of finite thing and so what happens then you go to third order logic fourth order logic and you can keep expanding but see there's a trick is that the human mind is not so sophisticated and so conscious that it actually can go this many orders and what this allows for in practice if you just create a first order logic and a second order maybe a third order logic this will handle most objections by most intellectuals by 99 of intellectuals they will just stop at third order logic and they won't think any further they will think that well you know we can just create more logics and then and there's no problem there's nothing to see here nothing to see here folks nothing's wrong um but but this is just a plain old sticking your head in the sand because the thing you're not seeing is that you you can't capture reality with any number of any finite logics no matter how many of them you create and in fact the fact that you have to create more and more logics to maintain the consistency of your logical schemes is already evidence of infinity because how many different logics are there infinity you can have an infinity of metal logics you can have an infinity of metal languages but it you still don't get it you mathematicians and logicians and scientists and rationalists you still don't [ __ ] get how profound this is you think you're smarter than what i'm telling you you're not you're [ __ ] stupid you are playing a mind game of rigor pretenses of rigor you're acting as though you're being rigorous and consistent and logical but you're not you're actually being highly irrational in what you're doing and one of the fundamental reasons for why you're doing this you're pretending to be rigorous and the reason i say you're pretending to be rigorous by the way is because to truly be rigorous you would have to encapsulate all of reality that's what true rigor means true rigor is not constructing a little walled garden amidst this giant ocean of chaotic phenomena that you have no idea how to explain that's not true rigor true rigor would be having a full understanding of the entire ocean of chaos that would be true rigor but that kind of rigor cannot be done through logic or any finite symbolic system or method or model it can't be done through mathematics you can't quantify you can't formalize it and so see there's a deep-seated fear in you of expanding your mind to include the entire chaotic field of infinite conscious phenomena because one of the implicit biases you you've adopted as a scientist or as a materialist or as a academic is what i call the demystification bias you're actually biased towards demystifying reality you fundamentally believe that all of reality is non-mystical and that it can be demystified through a gradual process of scientific empirical work and you believe that you're part of that process and you fancy yourself a champion of that process the process of demystification and you believe that if you just systematically demystify every single natural phenomenon that exists that eventually you will reach your goal your crowning achievement of understanding all of reality and what i'm telling you is that that's pure delusion that will never happen because actually you have to ask yourself why are you assuming that reality is something that is non-mystical notice that is something you have to assume if you're trying to demystify everything because again see you're assuming that your demystification project is going to be the same thing as truth but don't be so sure about that what if there's a divergence what if the truth is actually that reality is mystical can you see that you're going to miss that if your project in life is to demystify everything so what you're missing is that you're not realizing that actually you and science at large cannot know whether reality is mystical or not a priori you have to actually go and explore all of reality and ask the question is reality mystical and treat that as a legitimate question don't treat it as though you already know the answer you might be surprised by what nature reveals to you if you're truly open with that question here are some empirical questions that science should be asking but isn't asking is reality mystical or not is reality paradoxical or not is rationality fundamental is rationality the best way is rationality the only way what are the limits of rationality what are the limits of science is truth with a capital t even accessible to reason is reason objective and universal what exists beyond what reason can grasp but you see the typical rationalist scientist is not interested in these questions doesn't take these questions seriously and never tests them never treats these questions as though they were legitimate empirical questions and yet they are they are they're meta scientific questions if you want to be technical so what creates paradox several deeply interconnected notions here are these notions self-reference circular definitions recursion infinite regress denial of contradiction duality and identity that's a profound list i just gave you the ultimate answer that explains all of paradox if a paradox exists in any system whether it's logical or within one's worldview or elsewhere it's going to be because of one of these seven or so reasons that i just gave you and if you study each of these i don't have time to go into all of them for you you can go and study them on your own and contemplate the nature of what they are i've talked about some of these in other episodes check that out i have episodes about duality i have episodes about infinity uh i might do an episode in the future about recursion i have i've talked about self-reference in the past i have episodes about identity so you know um and and we'll talk a little bit more about some of those here as we keep going but you got to really study and contemplate those for yourself and you got to ask yourself the question how did all those things interconnect and construct paradox but the most important perhaps of all of these is self-reference so let's go into the problem of self-reference here to to really drive this point home so what is self-reference i actually call this the self-reference problem the self-reference problem the self-reference problem is whenever any kind of formal system it could be a logical system it could be a worldview it could be signs as a whole these are all systems it could be mathematics could be arithmetic it could be a religion these are all systems whenever one of these systems tries to grasp itself this creates a self-reference problem because usually the function of all these systems is to grasp other things these systems are like hands like this hand that i have i can grasp the camera i can grasp the light i can grasp the chair i can grasp another person with this hand i can grasp a lot of stuff but notice there's a self-reference problem is that i can't grasp my own hand by using my hand and why is that really contemplate why this seems kind of obvious and stupid but it's not it's extremely [ __ ] profound so really contemplate this for a year every day for a year contemplate why can't my hand grab my own hand why try it why can't it work what is what is the profound metaphysical reason for why my hand can't grab my own hand if you understand this one point you will understand the entire problem of grasping what consciousness is how can you use consciousness to grasp consciousness how can you use mind to grasp mind and remember science is mind scientists forget this and rationalists forget this rationalists and scientists like to pretend and skeptics too like to pretend as though skepticism rationality and science are not mined but that they are somehow outside or prior to mind they're not their mind you can't have science skepticism or rationality without mind do you get it so what's going on here is that mind is trying to grasp reality that's what science is doing that's what logic is for that's what all human knowledge is about even if you're doing philosophy philosophical systems also have a self-reference problem because see for for a philosopher like as a philosopher what do we want we want to create some sort of philosophy that explains all of reality right but then of course if your philosophy is going to explain all of reality isn't your philosophy part of the reality you're trying to explain therefore your philosophy by definition if it's going to explain all reality has to also be able to explain itself do you see that and so most philosophers are not conscious of this self-reference problem that exists within all philosophical systems and therefore they're not able to properly explain or account for reality because you actually can't explain all of reality through a linguistic scheme or through a thought-based scheme of any kind and there's a very deep reason for that which we'll get to in a minute so anyways mind tries to grasp reality assuming notice notice there's a there's such a deep implicit assumption just in this attempt to grasp reality when you're asking the question like what is reality see you're trying to grasp reality with your mind notice that but also notice that when you're doing that don't just assume that it's going to be possible ask yourself what are the assumptions just in that process in that method of grasping reality when science is the least is reaching out to grasp some some corner of reality it's assuming that the mind or the method of science is separate from the reality that it's trying to grasp it assumes a duality between these two things mind and reality science and reality that's a distinction so the mind goes looking for some part of reality that it can use to define itself with for example if you ask a scientist what is mind the scientists will say well of course mind is just neurons in the brain but you see neurons in the brain what is that that itself is mind so how you're defining mind is in a circular manner without noticing that that's what you're doing you're in denial about the fact that you're doing this which means you don't actually have a true understanding of what you're doing and what mind is in order for for mind to explain itself mind has to try to look for something outside of itself to define itself with so it might say neurons neuron leo neurons are not part of the mind neurons are part of the brain therefore this is acceptable we can define the mind using something outside the mind which is called the neuron which is in the brain and then you can say well what defines a brain then you say well the brain is defined by atoms which are not in the brain but something beyond the brain like that see it's an endless game like this that the scientific mind plays without realizing that's what it's doing so notice what's happening here at a metaphysical level is that mind in order to explain and to define itself to understand itself tries to look for something other to itself but notice what that means notice what that assumes that assumes that there is something other to mind but consider the possibility that mind is everything that's a problem see you can either assume that there's mind and then other to mind or you can assume that there's only mind science assumes there's mind and there's something other to mind therefore that's a dualistic paradigm and a naturalistic paradigm you can play as sort of a little bit of a game there try to define mine relative to something other outside the mind but the problem of course is that if if the mind keeps looking deeper and deeper and further out to the to its extents what it realizes that it can look infinitely far in every direction and it'll find nothing but itself more mind because the absolute truth is that mind is all that there is there is no other to mind mind is an absolute and so now the problem becomes that of the hand grasping itself if all there exists is the hand and nothing else to be grasped but the hand and you're trying to use the hand to grasp the only thing that there is is the hand imagine the hand is everything how can you use everything to grasp everything you see the mind is trying to grasp itself but it can't define itself against anything other than itself because itself is only is the only thing that there exists by definition so then how can mind grasp mind well it can't but this is very counter-intuitive and tricky because it might sound like leo so what you're saying is that all of philosophy and science and all this knowledge seeking is all [ __ ] it's impossible and the answers can't really be arrived at or all the questions the deep questions can't really be answered no that's not what i'm saying leo you're saying all this is just a [ __ ] mind game and it's just all just armchair philosophy and speculative metaphysics it's all pointless and we should stop doing it no that's not what i'm saying i'm saying precisely the opposite of that the mind cannot grasp itself but the mind can grasp the fact that it cannot grasp itself and furthermore that the mind exists as mind and that mind is everything this is a very subtle nuanced distinction so although mind cannot fully know itself mind can realize that it is being itself and so the answers that we seek the deepest answers that we seek can be reached but those answers don't exist at the level of logical symbolic mind those answers are so [ __ ] profound they exist at the level of being you don't know the answer you become the answer you don't know that the mind is infinite you become infinity you become infinite mind is that making sense so in a sense what i'm saying is that self-knowledge is impossible so you might say well that's that's a that's a very negative point leo it sounds like you're a nihilist self-knowledge is impossible sure that's easy to say then you have to do any work but i'm saying something much deeper than that even though self-knowledge is impossible self with a capital s is possible so it turns out that the answers you seek don't exist at the level of self-knowledge because knowledge itself is a second order feature of consciousness and mind they exist at a at a more primordial level which is at the at the level of consciousness or direct experience or self or being which is prior to knowledge and the problem with science and logic and rationality and skepticism around and materialism and all this sorts of stuff is it's it's all at the level of knowledge religion too religion is all at the level of knowledge all philosophies too are at the level of knowledge whether you're an idealist or a realist or a an existentialist or a kantian or or a cartesian or whatever you are that's all knowledge and this explains why philosophy throughout the ages especially in the west has not been very successful in answering the deepest questions about reality it's not because they can't be answered it's because they can't be answered at the level of knowledge but they can be answered at the more primordial level of being and actually paradoxically at the level of not knowing so you see now we're getting very zen here even though you can't reach the answers through knowing you can paradoxically and counterintuitively reach the answers through not knowing this takes us into the issue of not knowing which i'll shoot a separate episode about a very profound notion not knowing the self or mind with a capital m cannot know itself because it is infinite and knowing or knowledge is not infinity it is less than if it's a subset of infinity knowing is a conceptual activity concepts are a subset of infinity therefore they can't encompass the whole of infinity but what can encompass the whole of infinity is being being is actually infinite being is more fundamental than concept or the knowing and at the level of being what you have is not knowing i'm sorry if this is confusing you and it sounds like word salad but this is just the nature of the paradoxes we run into when we're talking about infinity because you see the self what you are your mind is infinity it's everything it's rocks it's trees it's cars it's people it's good it's bad it's evil it's criminality it's torture it's murder it's theft it's love it's cute babies and animals it's planets it's stars it's galaxies it's science it's pseudoscience it's rationality it's irrationality it's sanity it's madness it's schizophrenia it's high iq it's low iq and everything literally everything else that you could imagine so see the problem here is that your methodology is too limited your methodology needs to be deeper than the knowing methodology your methodology needs to include not knowing in it too that's what you're missing so here's the paradox of knowing this is one of the first paradoxes we'll cover i'll give you a list here in a moment of many other paradoxes that are very interesting but here's the first one is the highest knowing is not knowing that's the paradox of knowing so what you need to understand about the self-reference problem is that self-reference is equivalent to in a sense self-destruction if you have constructed a finite limited self and here by self we can really be generic here we can we can not just refer to human selves we can refer to even science as a self like the whole system of science or language or logic or mathematics any of these can be a finite self we could say if one of these finite selves finite portions of consciousness is allowed to self-reflect and self-reference deeply enough it will become so self-aware that it will realize that its own self cannot be contained within any finite definition of itself and therefore it will actually annihilate itself and when it annihilates itself what it's annihilating is not the infant itself it's annihilating the finite self-definition so that finite self-definition of mathematics logic science religion christianity buddhism islam rationality atheism whatever it is that finite self-definition of your human biological self that will collapse that will annihilate and then you will become the infant itself that's what i mean when i say self-reference equals self-destruction the finite self self-destructs or eats its own tail as the oroboros when the finite self merges with its polar opposite because you see to define a finite self it's like you're drawing a circle when you draw a circle you're simultaneously creating the inside and the outside of the circle you can't have a circle with just inside and no outside and you can't have a circle with just outside and no inside you're co-defining the outside and the inside this is what it means to create a distinction or a duality so the reason that all these symbolic systems must collapse and cannot grasp themselves nor larger ultimate reality is because all of them are constructed out of distinctions that's so that remember i talked about construction bias so for example when you're doing quantum mechanics you're making distinctions between electrons and protons and quarks up quarks and down quarks and spin and color quarks and this and that and other subatomic particles muons and gluons and firm ions and whatever and then you're making further distinctions about fields energies momentum velocities time gravity and space time and this you're making distinctions even when you're using mathematical formulas you're making distinctions between the number one two three the equal sign the plus sign the minus sign the division sign the the integral sign the derivative sign these are all distinctions you're you have to construct these to do your quantum mechanics or if you're doing astrophysics with general relativity also you're using distinctions you see and even for example general relativity versus quantum mechanics which has not been reconciled yet has not been unified yet scientists are trying to unify it but they don't know how to unify it well how can you unify it when you're creating distinctions between the two literally the difference between quantum mechanics and general relativity is a distinction in the mind of a scientist that they're trying to unify without realizing that they've made this distinction so of course you can't unify it because you're not conscious what you're doing and so you see this issue of self-reference and self-reflection is is the the linchpin to everything because if you're not conscious of how you're using your own mind when you're doing science or logic or quantum mechanic or general relativity you're not going to understand reality the only way to understand reality is through infinite self-reference and self-reflection infinite consciousness that's the only force in the universe that's capable of understanding its own self because it is itself but scientists and rationalists think that they can get away with doing their work while not doing self-reflection and it can't see they're they're actively running away from self-reflection when if you truly wanted to do good science and logic and rationality you would have to embrace and run towards self uh reference and self reflection so bertrand russell made a huge mistake when he was trying to excise self-reference from set theory he should have been doing what hofstadter was doing which is embracing the beauty of self-reference and strange loops although douglas hofstadter didn't do it to the ultimate degree either which i explained in my episode about reality is a strange loop so you see the fundamental problem here is that the mind whether it's a scientific mind or any mind takes identity for granted identity meaning what is a thing when a thing is a thing how do you know it's that thing and not some other thing that's the that's the problem of identity so within science there's identity problems like how do you define what science is how do you know what science is that's an identity problem for science now most scientists ignore that identity problem and they say well we've always known what science was there's no real fundamental identity problem in science oh yes there is because the distinction between science and non-science or science and pseudoscience that itself is the identity of science and where you draw that line how you construct that distinction you better be very conscious of it or you're going to make mistakes and that's exactly the problem with science it's not conscious that it doesn't even acknowledge that it's drawing that line it's taking that line to be some sort of absolute god-given thing it's not you're constructing it using your mind and that that line by the way has always shifted throughout all of human history the line between science and pseudoscience science and non-science science and religion science and spirituality has always been shifting and it's shifting to this day but most people are in denial about it because they don't take this identity problem seriously but this identity problem doesn't just apply to science it applies to literally every single object in the universe who says that a chair is a chair that's the identity problem in a nutshell all right so we've covered a lot of deep stuff here um now let's move on to a list of examples of paradox because when i say paradox you might still be scratching your head like leo what are you even talking about with paradox well here are some examples this sentence is false that's the classic liar paradox there's also visual paradoxes like the penrose triangle you've probably seen many of these types of visual paradoxes they're quite cool i show a lot of them in my episode called reality is a strange loop another paradox is less is more has anyone ever given you that advice if you're an artist if you're a designer really good advice for you a really good principle is less is more but that seems paradoxical why would less be more this paradox can even apply to something like money or material possessions you might think the greatest life possible is for me to have as many material possessions as possible right and then the minimalist comes in and says counterintuitively no less is more you can actually get more out of life by having less [ __ ] so sell most of your [ __ ] and watch the quality of your life actually improve paradoxical huh here's one that i love uh it's a quote by yogi berra quote nobody goes to that restaurant it's too crowded end quote when a restaurant becomes so crowded nobody goes there anymore here's another one the only rule is ignore all rules so if i'm going to ignore all rules do i follow the only rule which is to ignore all rules here's other paradox make money by spending it what how can you make money by spending it but you can and in fact the most wealthy people in the world are those who follow this principle of make money by spending it rather than hoarding it here's the paradox is a quote describing the late ronald reagan this was a quote describing his personality and the quote says he was an authentic phony i love that description an authentic phony another paradox if i know one thing it's that i know nothing that's a sort of a socrates paradox here's a quote from shakespeare i must be cruel to be kind said by hamlet i must be cruel to be kind what how does that work that ties in with the concept of masculine compassion which i've talked a long time ago in my episode called masculine versus feminine compassion here's a paradox i love maybe you're familiar with this if you're a bit of an excel nerd have you ever done your text or something in excel spreadsheet software and then you're trying to like you have a column of cells with different values and you're trying to add them all up into like a final total at the bottom and you can use excel to draw a little square like a rectangle around that column and then you can get the sum total at the bottom so that's fine it works the reason it works is because you're referencing some other cell from the bottom cell so the bottom cell is the one that contains the formula that references all the cells above it and adds them up into a total that works but what happens when you draw your rectangle in such a way that it it includes the whole column but that column since it's the whole column also includes the the sum total too so see now you've got a self-reference problem this is the perfect like visual metaphor uh of the self-reference problem in action it's when that bottom cell the total cell which is supposed to contain the answer is itself referenced in the question or the tally of the total you see so this creates a sort of a recursion problem self-reference problem and then what does excel tell you when you actually do this try try doing this in your excel program see what happens it'll give you an error that says something like circular reference error so this is exactly what i'm talking about this error doesn't just exist in excel it exists in every single symbolic system whether it's an excel spreadsheet or some computer code you know you can actually cause a computer to crash or to malfunction by finding this sort of self-reference error in in computer code hackers can use this to break into systems you can do like mysql injections this way very interestingly um you can crack passwords and and break into the most secure computer systems through these sorts of circular reference errors um but these errors exist in all kinds of systems these errors exist within religion they exist within the english language they exist within all worldviews and and books you can find them and um all logical schemes within science let's see another example of paradox is try time travel paradoxes so what happens if you travel back in time kill kill your own grandfather will you still have been born will you also kill yourself at the same moment interesting to think about those and there are plenty of movies that have explored those kinds of time travel paradoxes like a one of the movies that comes to mind is with bruce willis it's called looper appropriately named looper it's real really good check it out it's a it's a very strange loopy sort of movie um within quantum mechanics there are interesting paradoxes between the particle wave duality sort of retroactive backwards causality information can flow almost in spooky backwards ways within quantum mechanical experiments if you've researched or studied those a bit you can relate to what i'm saying there of course there's russell's paradox which we've already talked about which can be stated as it's the list of all lists that do not contain themselves and that list would itself include itself it's very twisted even when i say it it doesn't really make sense in my own mind like i have to go through it very slowly for it to make sense you can actually go on google and search for russell's paradox you can find videos on it on youtube and where they will give you a very technical explanation of the paradox i'm not going to go into that here because it's not relevant to what we're talking about we're talking about big picture stuff here not the little details so here's another paradox for you the mind is in the brain but the brain is also in the mind how can that be which is it is the mind in the brain or is the brain in the mind what materialists call the brain they are too stupid to understand is actually the mind they think they can explain mind by appealing to brain without being conscious that brain is actually mind if you cut open your own skull and you feel your physical pink squishy brain those will all be phenomenal experiences and sensations which by definition are mind the walls of your house are mined the walls of your house are not made out of brains they're made of minds a tree is not man of a brain it's made of a mind and the brain itself is not mad of a brain it's mad of a mind brain has always been mind you just didn't look deeply enough into it there's an additional sort of corollary paradox here it's like it can this problem can also be reframed as the universe is in the mind but the mind is in the universe again which is it is it that the mind is in the universe or is the universe in the mind if we're sort of naive materialists and realists we tend to believe that the mind is in the universe the mind is this small thing the universe is this large thing and the mind is contained in the universe but that's not true because the universe the big bang outer space is in your own mind where else did it ever exist but in your own mind you've never been to outer space it was always your mind the big bang only exists in your mind it doesn't exist anywhere else but see science will try to convince you that no no leo your brain came out of the big bang before the big bang there was no brain no you don't get how radical this is your brain didn't come out of the big bang or rather you could you could see if you want you could say the brain okay the brain came out of the big bang but where the big bang came out of the big bang came out of your mind because it only ever existed in your mind so first there was your mind then there was the big bang then there was your brain are you getting this another paradox the classic one from philosophy is called the ship of theseus there was the greek ship of theseus the original ship it has special significance from mythology and then the some philosopher asked the question of like okay so we have this ship it's mad at wood and wooden planks there's like thousands of wooden planks so what happens if i replace one of the planks in the ship is it still the ship of theseus most people say yeah sure of course planks are replaced on ships all the time it doesn't change the fact that it's a ship okay but what if i replace two planks three planks four planks what if i keep doing this until i replace every single plank in the ship such that no none of the original planks remain is it still the ship of theseus and you see this is pointing out what identity is it it's pointing out the paradox is inherent to identity what is identity what does it mean to say that this thing here is the ship of theseus what does it mean to say that see we take this for granted and by the way this happens with your body so you might think well leo this ship of theseus example is so contrived and silly how does it apply to my life well look at your body every cell in your body has been replaced over time by other cells so you say you're still the same person you were 10 20 30 years ago but are you really the same person who says so see science assumes that when i'm sitting here that this here is leo and if a year passes from now i can still be sitting here and this will still be leo that's what science just takes for granted that's objectively true but it's not objectively true because what i'm going to be sitting here even just five minutes from now before the end of this episode what was sitting here was already changed there's no such thing as leo sitting here there's leo 1 leo 2 leo 3 leo 4 leo infinity so which leo are you talking about there's a similar related problem called the heap problem if we take a pile of sand you know a sizable pile of sand we could say that's a heap of sand okay most people would agree and then i can take some tweezers and pull one grain of sand out of that pile and i can still ask the question is this still a heap and most people say yes it is so i can pull two three four five grains of sand a hundred thousand grain percent a million at some point will be down to just two grains of sand left is two grains of sand a pile of sand and if you still say yes i'm going to pull the last grain of sand and it's just going to be a single grain of sand it's a single grain of sand a pile of sand and you're going to say no so how many grains of sand does it take to make a heap of sand so what this example also shows you is the relativity of our notions of what a thing is like a heap you might say again leo that's a contrived example okay well what about your body let's take your body so your body is all of this let's say i cut out a few cells from my face is this still a body you would say yes okay well if i cut off my arm is it still a body you would say yes if i cut off all my arms legs and and i keep cutting off more and more and more until there's just two cells of leo left is that still leo is that still leo's body and you would say maybe and then if i take away everything except one cell if there's one cell of leo left is that leo's body so what does it mean to say that leo has a body what does it mean to say leo because as leo was talking his thoughts are changing his genetics are changing as he's talking the epigenetics the expression of my genetics are literally changing as i talk as i think as i eat as i contemplate i'm gonna be a different person by the end of this episode watch watch me and intuitively that makes sense because look even as i'm talking by the fact that i can hear myself talking about these ideas this gives me a deeper understanding of the things i'm talking about i actually learn when i teach you guys from this episode even though i generally understand what i'm talking about here i've thought about this for years so i'm well versed with with this subject matter but still just in delivering it i'm going to learn new things about myself and these ideas that i'm communicating with you so literally by the end of this episode i'm going to be smarter about this issue of paradox than i was when i began so i will have turned into a different person will you recognize that about me see i can recognize that about me because i'm very self-aware of how this works but will you recognize that about me maybe you won't and then maybe you'll be disappointed after five years of teaching i'll become a totally different person and then you're gonna say well where did the old leo go leo i i like the old leo i don't like the new leo the old leo is because there never was a leo here's a cool paradox you have a magic genie lamp you find in the desert and you rub it and out pops a genie and the genie grants you three wishes what do you wish for if you're very clever you wish to the magic genie that none of your wishes come true in this way you mind [ __ ] the the magic genie because if the magic genie grants you your wishes then he's not granting you your wishes and that creates a glitch in the matrix and yet if the magic genie doesn't grant you your wish that none of your wishes should come true then he is granting your wish and so the genie is damned if he doesn't and damned if he does that's a really good paradox um here's one i recently learned from from uh from kurt uh i did an interview with kurt jay mongol on his channel uh theories of everything go check out my two-part interview with him it's actually a very long profound conversation we had but anyways in the in that um in that conversation with him he he brought up an interesting paradox that i jotted down it goes like this if you're worried you shouldn't be worried and if you're not worried you should be worried so this is sort of a classic problem for neurotic people it's like leo should i be worried about my money situation well if you're worried too much that'll be a problem and if you're not worried at all then you should start to worry about your money situation because people who don't worry at all about their money situation have a very bad money situation so for example right now where i am in my life i don't worry about my money situation very much but the only reason i don't worry is because i've spent my whole life worrying about it which has motivated me to put a lot of place things in place get all my ducks in a row financially such that now i don't have to worry about it but that's the result of years and years of worrying about it you see there's the paradox of impermanence which says that nothing is permanent except impermanence there is the paradox of tolerance which exists within politics and governance it works like this if society is absolutely tolerant then it will tolerate the intolerant who will make society intolerant you get that so for example if our society is so tolerant that we tolerate fascists because we're so democratic that will even allow fascists on social media and on tv just complete free reign and car blanche to fascists without checking them in some way well what happens is that those fascists then can actually use the tools of democracy and healthy governance they can use those tools to amass power and then because those fascists themselves are intolerant what they will do is then they will cut that off for everybody else and then we will actually paradoxically end up in a very intolerant society precisely because we were so lax and so tolerant about intolerance therefore if you want a tolerant society you have to actually be intolerant towards the intolerant mind [ __ ] huh um there's a similar paradox that comes with absolute freedom i've discussed this in my episode about libertarianism why libertarianism is nonsense in that episode i talked about how counterintuitive absolute freedom is it's similar to this paradox of intolerance it's like you know if we have a society that only values freedom the way that libertarians tend to want the end result of that is going to be slavery the end result of libertarianism if it's enacted is going to be slavery and totalitarian control why is that well because if you remove all regulations and you allow within a society total freedom anybody can do whatever they want then what happens is that people start amassing more and more power and wealth they start to create cabals and syndicates larger collective constructs like corporations those corporations amass more power more wealth and they start to dominate and eat up other corporations until they have giant monopolies and if you keep allowing that more and more without checking in in some way then eventually what's going to happen is that one corporation will end up with so much money and a monopoly over every single industry they will literally dominate and they will become the new government except this government is not going to be democratically uh accountable because a corporation is not democratically accountable so whoever owns all the stock in that corporation will be the de facto dictator and tyrant of the world in this system so libertarians are not conscious enough to understand that this is going to happen under their scheme which is why regulation is so so crucial now of course libertarians will deny all this and they'll say oh leo but our system doesn't allow for such a thing because it's a it's a it's a press this this would be too oppressive it and we have a rule that says that you know you're not allowed to use force against others against their will but yeah that you have those rules but all those rules will be broken in practice right nobody's gonna abide by your stupid libertarian morals um there's a deep paradox between the relative and the absolute which i've talked about before in my episode about relative versus absolute truth go check that out there's the paradox of skepticism which goes like this and actually this is a profound self-reflection problem within skepticism or a self-reference problem look let's say i'm going to be the world's biggest skeptic i'm skeptical about everything i believe that if i if you're not skeptical to the to the nth degree then you're deluded okay so that i'm skeptical about everything but then eventually once i've exhausted my skepticism towards everything in the world notice what happens now i have to turn it in on myself is it true that skepticism is a truthful way of understanding reality and when i start to question that i realize uh oh what if it's not true that skepticism is true what then and then in this way skepticism destroys itself this would be a valid and proper use of skepticism but most skeptics notice most skeptics do not do this most skeptics only use skepticism as a weapon to attack other ideologies and belief systems but not to question their own worldview and so in this sense they're missing the self-reflection they're missing that self-reference move and by missing that they're not actually able to to penetrate to the truth of reality or skepticism or philosophy there's a similar paradox within nihilism i've talked about this in my episode called understanding and coping with nihilism go check that out one of my best episodes i give a full explanation of nihilism there and i talk at length about this paradox look the nihilist says that he believes in nothing and the nihilist says that everything is absolutely meaningless and because of this reality is bleak and that we must now destroy government and other institutions because all of it is meaningless and maybe even i should kill myself as the ultimate conclusion of that but hold on have you fully turned nihilism in on itself have you become nihilistic about your own nihilism you would have to if you were a true nihilist because see if you're going to say that everything is meaningless you can't now be depressed about the fact that reality is meaningless because depression is a meaning you're adding to reality so if nihilism makes you depressed you have to go further in your nihilism to the point where even your depression annihilates itself because depression is completely meaningless people who are depressed are not nihilists you can't be depressed if you're a true nihilist because as a true nihilist nothing has any meaning and therefore what are you depressed about you also then have no reason or excuse to attack social institutions or to destroy things because the only reason to destroy things rather than to create things is if you find more meaning and destruction than in creation you see so in this way nihilists fooled themselves by not being fully self-aware notice with skepticism with libertarianism with nihilism what is the problem with all these different systems they're not fully self-aware they're partially self-aware and this leaves something always that is missing a similar paradox exists within post-modernism post-modernism basically says that we shouldn't privilege any one perspective or world view over any other perspective or worldview for example western culture is not better than eastern culture american culture is not better than middle eastern culture men are not superior to women straight people are not superior to gay people and so on so we should put all of them on the same playing field that's what post-modernism sort of wants to say yet at the same time when you take one of these post-modernists and you say i don't believe in your post-modernism post-modernism is [ __ ] they will say ah no post-modernism is not [ __ ] post-modernism sits above other positions but what if my position is that post-modernism doesn't sit above other positions what if in my position post-modernism sits below all of their positions see a post-modernism would a post-modernist would deny that but by denying that the postmodernist contradicts themselves go check out my episode called um jacques derrida deconstruction and non-duality where i talk about daredev's work and there there's a paradox sort of within daredev's work although he's he's self-aware enough to see it which is that see derrida with his post-modernist deconstructivist work he's trying to point out that all of language is a lie that's essentially in a nutshell what he's trying to do if all of language is a lie and by the way science is language so he would say you know science is a lie because it's language but you see the the self-reference problem here is that if if darada is trying to tell us that all use of language is a lie he has to use language to tell us that which means that he himself is lying so it's the liar paradox in a different form so how does daredevil avoid this problem well it's very sneaky i mean tricky and his writings are notoriously obscure and convoluted precisely because he's trying to use language to point to the fact that all of language is a lie yet at the same time he has to do it in such a way where he's not directly contradicting himself and so that's that's a very difficult uh tight rope walk to act uh tight rope act to walk see that episode for a fuller explanation there's the paradox of neuroscience which goes like this if human experience is caused by chemicals which neuroscience says is true then according to neuroscience all of neuroscience is also caused by chemicals and is therefore just a hallucination have you neuroscientists got this yet see neuroscientists are so [ __ ] stupid and this also connects to psychedelics when scientists or rationalists or skeptics reason about psychedelics they're being so stupid because they say oh yeah leo you talk about experiencing god on a psychedelic but that's just all hallucination science tells us so neuroscience tells us so it's just all chemicals okay let's take your logic let's say that my experience of god is all hallucination and all chemicals if that's true and i'm using your logic here then that means all of neuroscience is also just a hallucination and it's as unreal as my claims to god why because neuroscience can only occur with the chemicals in your brain you can't do neuroscience without a brain according to neuroscience it's not according to me according to neuroscience according to your own worldview you can't do neuroscience you can't do science you can't do logic without chemicals in your brain so you see if you're going to use that logic against me i can use it against you the problem though is that when people use that logic against me and the things that i say they're not actually honest actors they will use that logic against me but then they will not allow the same logic to be used against them it won't compute in their mind because in their mind they think that psychedelics are a hallucination and neuroscience is not a hallucination my point is meta i make a metapoint that everything is hallucination including neuroscience including logic including history including mathematics it's all hallucination and it cannot work without chemicals in your imaginary brain and by the way chemicals themselves of course are a hallucination so you have a hallucination within a hallucination which is the very essence and crux of the self-reference problem but the self-reference problem is denied by every single neuroscientist and materialist it would be funny if it wasn't so stupid it's so [ __ ] stupid like it's just it it it blows my mind how stupid people can be about these matters and that's because people can be otherwise rather intelligent and even high iq but when it comes to the self-reference issue they're particularly dumb about self-reflection because they don't self-reflect and the reason they don't self-reflect is because if they self-reflected they would [ __ ] die their whole worldview would collapse so of course they don't self-reflect that's not an accident it's not an accident that everybody sucks at self-reflection that's by design if you didn't suck at self-reflection you'd realize you're infinite you'd realize your gut and we wouldn't need to be having this conversation i just have to look at you and you'd look at me and we'd be done i wouldn't need to shoot hour-long videos explaining this stuff to you there's the paradox of logic it goes like this if everything in logic must be proven which is generally how logic works but then what about logic itself logic itself as a scheme isn't provable because proof is something logic is doing but if you expect everything to be provable why are you accepting logic can you see that you're accepting logic on faith you haven't proved logic you've accepted it on faith which is the definition of illogical logic is illogical there's a paradox about proof itself the notion of proof itself is a paradox because how can you prove what counts as valid proof see anything you say is a valid proof i can always ask as a skeptic i can always say well but prove to me that that criteria for proof is itself valid and in order to prove it you'll have to appeal to some other criteria i can say to that criteria what about prove to me that that criteria is valid criteria and then you're going to appeal to more criteria and this isn't going to be an infinite regress problem you see because truth is actually a greater notion than proof i've talked about that many times in the past there's a paradox within logical positivism logical positivism was a movement that was popular 100 years ago within science and academia and to some degree it still is popular today i mean it's still it's still active even though it's kind of gone out of fashion it's still active in in an implicit way logical positivism basically said that the only kind of statements that are valid within science and human knowledge are those which can be demonstrated empirically that's what logical positivism was trying to say it was trying to say that no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true but the problem here via self reflection is that that statement itself is not an empirically verifiable statement so you can be a logical positivist but it's not an empirical position because in fact you can't test every single statement in the universe to test whether it is empirical or not logical positivism is not an empirically verifiable position therefore it eats its own tail and deconstructs itself so in order to be a logical positivist you have to deny self-reflection and that's exactly what logical positivists did you can use logical positivism on everything else but you can't turn it in on itself otherwise it collapses this is true of every single conceptual paradigmatic scheme that you can imagine every epistemic scheme will fall prey to this sort of self-reflection problem if you reflect deeply enough but that is the key you have to reflect deep enough which most people are not willing to do because they suck at self-reflection and that's because they don't want to self-reflect because if they did everything they believed would collapse including science mathematics logic and logical positivism skepticism and so forth then there's the paradox of selflessness it goes like this if being selfless gives me the greatest personal joy am i then not being selfish you see what if i love being selfless more than anything else in the world would i not then be selfish if i was selfless that's right because there is a profound connection between selflessness and selfishness these are not two distinct things and in fact nothing in the universe is distinct from anything else which is why these all these dualities keep collapsing how about this the paradox of love if you love everything then you must even love the things you hate including your inability to love see when you start doing spiritual work and you hear people like me talking about love you start thinking to yourself like okay leo so i'm gonna be i'm gonna commit myself to a course of becoming more loving as a person i'm gonna try to be more loving of everyone including myself but then what you find is that as you're trying to you know love certain things you know someone's being a dick to you and and then you find yourself incapable of loving that person and then you start to feel bad like oh [ __ ] you know that guy was a dick to me today so i was a dick back to him and we got into a fight and you know at the end of the day you sit there and you reflect about it and say [ __ ] you know i screwed up i shouldn't have judged him he should have just been able to be a dick to me i should have just been more loving to him accept that and then the situation would have worked out better i would have been more loving and then i would have actually stuck and i've been in alignment with the things leo was talking about you know love and now you feel guilty like [ __ ] i feel guilty now because i wasn't loving enough and now i'm beating myself up for not being loving enough to that person even though he was a dick to me i should have been loving to him and now i feel bad about it but when i'm doing that i'm not loving myself you see if i was truly being loving like leo teaches then i would love myself even if i was a dick to that guy and for any reason that's absolute love that's true love that's the true lesson but you see but it's tricky it's tricky there's a great quote that i have used in the past some of you have heard it but i'll say it again it's a it's an old zen saying i love how beautiful paradoxical it is it says quote there is no path but only a fool doesn't walk it and quote there is no path but only a fool doesn't walk it super important spiritual principle because if you tell a newbie there is no path the newbie will say oh okay well then i shouldn't meditate anymore and i shouldn't do psychedelics and i shouldn't do yoga i shouldn't do anything i'll just be lazy and sit on the couch looking at porn no that's not what it means when we say there is no path walk the path that isn't there there's a profound paradox about non-existence does non-existence itself exist contemplate that one and of course there's a profound paradox related to infinity and zero or everything and nothing see ordinarily people think that infinity and zero are two different things and that everything is the opposite of nothing or something is the opposite of nothing but then of course when you become infinitely conscious and you collapse all distinctions and dualities you realize infinity is zero everything is nothing something is nothing they're identical so here is the ultimate paradox of the mind i'm going to quote here from the ambrose pierce unabridged devil's dictionary it defines mind as quote mind a noun a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with end quote i just love that it's deliciously self-referential deliciously paradoxical deliciously strange loopy which is exactly correct the mind is a strange loop you see the mind creates simplistic categories to make sense of reality these categories include man versus woman matter versus anti-matter good versus bad real versus fantasy science versus religion rational versus irrational objective versus subjective and so on but all of these categories dualities distinctions are finite while reality as a whole is infinite there is no set of categories that can be complete and they will always break down or contradict themselves at the edges so science the reason science isn't up to the task of understanding ultimate reality nor is logic nor is skepticism nor is materialism nor is dualism nor is realism is because all of these ideologies and worldviews take for granted certain categories that they have constructed and are not aware that they have constructed and they assume that those categories are somehow absolute when no category is absolute and no set of categories can ground all of reality and this is being missed by all these different worldviews and so science will always fail to grasp the ultimate reality because science is nothing more than a set of categories and ultimate reality is not one set of categories ultimate reality is all possible sets of categories including the category of non-science by definition science cannot grasp all of reality because science itself is merely a distinction within reality between science and non-science so if you think all of reality is just science you're missing the non-science in fact more of reality is non-scientific then it is scientific and that's what you're missing here's a quote to drive this point home quote the greeks observed a paradox about the dyad dayad meaning duality while it appears separate from unity its opposite poles remember their source and attract each other in an attempt to merge and return to the state of unity the dyad simultaneously divides and unites repels and attracts separates and returns end quote that's by priya hemingway beautiful beautiful articulation of what we're talking about here the dyad everything in science is a dyad everything your mind knows is a dyad big versus small good versus bad etc etc even the dyad that you created between you and leo you versus leo student versus teacher you versus guru you versus god this is a dyad these are dyads you created and every dayad must loop back around and the the polar opposites of the dyad must touch at which point they become one the dyad becomes the monad and what we're talking about here is monism monism is the philosophy that everything is one and because everything is one everything is two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and infinity so what i want you to deeply take away from this episode is that all mental constructions must be vulnerable to paradox why because ultimately reality is one and all constructions use the assumption that reality is two or more any time that you assume reality is anything other than one you're setting yourself up for contradiction and for paradox as long as you're open-minded enough to look for it now if you want to close your mind and deny the paradox or the contradiction you can do that your mind has an infinite capacity for looking the other way and not seeing your own internal contradictions but then you should also contemplate the question of wait a minute why are we taking contradiction for granted after all non-contradiction versus contradiction is itself a duality so there's a even deeper layer of self-reference problem here when we start talking about contradiction why is contradiction such a bad thing is it true that contradiction is inferior to non-contradiction see most humans would say yes but is that true from the absolute point of view see the reason that most scientists and academic types are marginalizing contradiction and demonizing contradiction is because contradiction breaks all formal systems if you allow for a contradiction within any logical system that means anything goes you can literally prove anything in a logical system if contradiction is acceptable therefore every logical system has to deny contradiction otherwise all hell breaks loose but you know what is another word for anything goes and all hell breaks loose infinity literally all hell breaks loose means everything occurs infinity infinity is everything occurring now most scientists and academics when they see infinity in their in their math equations or in their uh in their work they get scared because they can't now control infinity they can't define infinity they can't work with infinity they can't use infinity to construct something so they they have to manipulate their work to hide the bursting forth of infinity or chaos in their systems and models so scientists in practice they don't like infinities because you can't crunch infinity you can't put infinity into a calculator or into a computer it's going to break it and they assume that that's something like a bug of the system it's not a bug of the system it's the feature of reality you got it precisely backwards why do you assume contradiction is a bad thing so what if contradiction destroys your whole system maybe the truth is that your system is [ __ ] and it needs to be destroyed how about that how do you like them apples are you willing to accept that not if you've staked your entire career on building that system not if you get your paycheck from that system not if your children are fed from that system not if your electric bill is paid by that system not if your intellectual ego is supported by that system have you considered the possibility what if reality is contradictory see you assume reality is not contradictory but how do you know that can you see that that should be an empirical question that you have to ask and go and actually research you can't know this question a priori but most people assume it a priority they don't actually test it they just assume it and that turns out to be a big [ __ ] mistake the contradiction of your symbolic systems is not in any way a bug of reality it is the key feature of reality because it's those contradictions within your symbolic systems that save you from being lost in your own finite walled garden see if your finite system didn't contradict itself then that means god could lock itself into a finite system and then forever disconnect itself from god from unity from love this would be a terrible design so god designed reality in such a way that any time you take a formal finite system and you try to say this is it i've got reality in this finite formal system god says if you look deep enough within that final finite formal system you will always discover some loophole that you can break through the system out into the larger system but only if you're willing to look only if you're truly interested in finding the loophole because if you're not you will stay locked in that system forever so another way to frame it is contradiction is when finity tries to grasp infinity and it fails this is not a mistake finity cannot grasp infinity actually it would be a contradiction if any finite formal system could capture all of reality without contradiction that would be the ultimate contradiction which is what god cannot allow paradox is a sign from god that all division must end in unity contradiction paradox is inherent to any dualistic linguistic symbolic system any logic mathematics science and philosophy if you think that your worldview or your philosophical system is not contradictory what i'm telling you is that it is and if you say no leo it's not how can you be so sure you haven't even heard my system yet my reply to you is yes i'm 100 sure because whatever your system is i don't care what the details of your system are no matter what your system is if it's symbolic if it's linguistic if it's conceptual it's got to be dualistic and that means it's finite and the finite will always contradict itself because it isn't infinite do you understand the profundity of what i just said i have given you the master skeleton key that will unlock every single conceptual lock that exists in the human mind i've given you the skeleton key to every lock in the [ __ ] world if you're wise enough to underst to understand what i said and it's not difficult to understand what i said but you have to you have to really grok it which means you have to be very open-minded about what i'm saying and you have to be very detached from all of the other systems that you're attached to see you have some sort of pet theory pet world view whether it's a religious one atheistic one rational or whatever it is logical one skeptical one scientific one you're attached to that and so even though i just gave you the skeleton key will you actually dare to use the key to jailbreak your mind and free yourself of the shackles you have put upon your own mind do you dare to do that and what kind of crazy things will you discover outside of that walled garden that you've been constructing your whole life what kind of monsters and dragons lurk in the sea of chaos beyond your little walled garden madness lurks there the dragon of chaos lurks there be careful or he'll bite your ass here's a quote from lk samuels who says quote paradoxes often arise because theory routinely refuses to subordinate to reality end quote that is the crux of the matter here humans are arrogant creatures and what i'm talking about it might sound like what i'm talking about is intellectual arrogance actually it's not i am speaking from a position of deep epistemic humility the deepest epistemic humility is to acknowledge to yourself definitively and conclusively and absolutely that all of your theories about reality are not going to be sufficient to grasp all of reality and therefore you must be humble and you must subordinate your theories to reality itself and so this is the chief sin and evil of science and rationality is that even though they like to put on an air of being humble like scientists will say oh leo we we admit that we don't know so much whereas you are sitting here talking about god and other definitive things so you're the arrogant one and we're the humble scientists no no no i'm the humble one here you're the [ __ ] arrogant scientists and rationalists because the humility in my position is that i have i have realized and surrendered the notion that i can formalize reality or model reality with any kind of theoretical scheme whereas you actually believe you can and that is your arrogance and then your claims to humility that's just a a game you're playing to deny the actual arrogance of your position every scientist is deeply deeply arrogant in their epistemology because if they were truly humble they would have to abandon all of science now you might wonder but leo why why must theory always be insufficient to grasp reality because theory is always a subset of reality and not the whole of reality somewhere along the road in your education as a scientist or a rationalist or a skeptic or an academic what has happened is that you were so brainwashed with theory that you have mistaken theory for reality and the only way you know how to understand or think about reality or even interface with reality is via theory and of course there's no reason why that should be the only method you've just been brainwashed into it in the same way that a fundamentalist muslim is brainwashed into islam and cannot interface with reality in any other way they're stuck in that paradigm it's a hermetically sealed self-justifying self-isolating walled garden which keeps you from exploring the outer confines of the territory in this way islam and science are exactly the same now there are important distinctions between islam and science but on this point there is no distinction now this question of mystery becomes very important we've talked about it a little bit earlier where i talked about demystification that bias to demystify all of reality but you see what if reality is a mystery fundamentally what does mystery mean actually go look up the word mystery in the dictionary it'll be illuminating for you here's after you do that uh here's here's a little bit more of the full picture for you of how profound mystery is this question of mystery don't take this lightly see when we say that reality is a mystery usually people think oh well that just means like we haven't done enough science on it if we do enough science on it it'll stop being a mystery no no no that's not what i mean when i say reality is a mystery that's a metaphysical claim that's a profound epistemological claim what i'm saying is that reality is that which cannot be known because it's literally endless you see infinity is endless mystery that's not a problem to be solved by doing more science the way that scientists think you will never science your way out of the mystery of infinity if you could know infinity it would have an end to it meaning it would be finite meaning it wouldn't be infinite meaning you would be contradicting yourself so infinity has to be unknowable and so ultimately what has to happen here is that there needs to be a profound collapse between the duality of knowledge and being or grounding it's not that there is a ground to reality and there's knowledge knowledge of the ground no knowing in ground are the same thing here metaphysics and epistemology they collapse into each other into immunity and then you're in non-dual non-symbolic absolute god consciousness so paradox threatens science because it forces science then to admit that there are other domains outside of science which are valid legitimate and worthwhile to study but see science wants a monopoly on truth a monopoly on reality science wants to say that hey guys we got all this everything that's real and true and and factual and objective it exists within the the confines of our walled garden that we've been curating carefully over the centuries and then paradox says no that's not true so science is playing a game where it's trying to deny validity to other domains outside of science science cannot acknowledge other ways of knowing because that makes science insecure about itself that makes science wonder like huh well maybe maybe i'm not superior to other schemes maybe i'm not better than religion maybe i can learn something from religion or from spirituality or from the new agers or from ufo phenomena or from paranormal phenomena or from psychedelics but see science is too arrogant to have this kind of epistemic humility to learn from sources outside of itself because it wants to be king it has crown itself king which is by the very definition of what devilry is what satan is so by definition science is devilry because it's trying to crown itself as king within god's kingdom of which it's just a small portion of the entire kingdom it's not the whole kingdom and so for science this creates a slippery slope because as you start to deconstruct science scientists become more and more scared that the entire foundations of their science are getting destroyed and their attachment is more to science than the truth so then they start to play games to prevent themselves from slipping down the slippery slope which is why if you go show to some scientists or academics my three-part series on deconstructing the myth of science they're not going to sit through and watch the whole thing and gr grock it and then uh actually use the wisdom that's contained in that three-part series they're gonna they're gonna try to dispute me or write snarky comments or they'll just turn it off they won't finish watching it why not because it's too threatening i mean i'm not kidding you will you will realize if you if you take that series seriously you will realize that all of science is a myth it's something you're imagining and furthermore the rational mind fears paradox it's not just science also the rational mind why because paradox breaks rationality it exposes the limits of rationality as a paradigm the rational also has a bias to demystify everything and paradox reveals that rationality is not all-encompassing there are many a-rational and irrational aspects to the universe which rationalists are in denial about because they want everything to be rational because they just assume that everything is rational but why would you assume everything is rational see the paradox here it's so funny the paradox is that it's actually irrational to be stubbornly rational notice the strange loop of this this isn't an accident all right this is uh the first part of this i'm going to take a quick intermission here for a little break and then i'll be back in a second to finish this up all right let's continue i have a series of profound quotes for you about this whole topic that we've been discussing so here we go it's a collection of various authors and thinkers and philosophers so here's the first one quote the commonest kind of trouble is that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite life is not an illogicality yet it is a trap for logicians it looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is end quote that's from gk chesterton furthermore quote if you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason end quote by samuel butler and also quote relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth a formal system will give you some truths but a formal system no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths end quote from douglas hofstadter also quote reason is limited in that it does not afford the capacity for the discernment of essence or the critical point of a complex issue and generally disregards context reason does not itself provide a guide to truth it produces massive amounts of information and documentation but lacks the capability to resolve discrepancies and data and conclusions all philosophic arguments sound convincing on their own although reason is highly effective in a technical world where the methodologies of logic dominate reason itself paradoxically is the major block to reaching the higher levels of consciousness and transcending this level is relatively uncommon in our society end quote that's from david hawkins and also quote in our modern world we have inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility end quote by john buchan and also quote beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions end quote by freeman dyson and also quote the supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason end quote by blaise pascal so these are what some of our greatest thinkers and philosophers who have gone into the trans-rational domains have to say about reason and logic this is what people who are stuck in rationalism and reacting against pre-rational worldviews do not yet comprehend and so if you're stuck in the rational paradigm and you're fretting over the pre-rational and you think that what i'm trying to teach you here is the pre-rational you're not getting that there's a step beyond the rational which is the trans-rational which is where i'm speaking to you from but you need to be wise enough to to see that distinction otherwise you're going to fall into the pre-rational trans-rational fallacy so actually logic and reason secretly rely on intuition and infinite intelligence to actually do the heavy lifting this is the big takeaway from girdle's work there's something more fundamental at work when you are doing mathematics and when you are logicing reality than merely your logic you have to ask yourself what is the source of logic what makes logic function at all and that would be actually intuition or infinite intelligence and actually if you carefully study western intellectual tradition if you study the greatest scientists the greatest thinkers the greatest philosophers what you realize is that the greatest thinkers have always used highly non-linear forms of reasoning intuition and trans-rational modes of thinking and what is called vision logic this is what our greatest scientists and logicians and mathematicians have always relied upon to make great leaps paradigm shifts within science and logic and mathematics so there's an interesting paradox at the heart of science and mathematics and rationality is that all the greatest scientific discoveries were actually made not by left-brained number crunching they were made by mystical leaps of intuition and if you don't believe me carefully study the works of the greatest thinkers philosophers scientists and logicians study einstein study newton study leibniz study galileo study carl gauss niels bohr the fathers of quantum mechanics like heisenberg schroedinger david baume richard feynman leonardo da vinci charles darwin nicola tesla kurt gerdel george cantor ramanujan the famous indian mathematician who was a math prodigy he was able to see mathematical proofs and insights without actually having to go through any formal process to arrive at the proof see many so-called scientifically-minded people actually have a very poor understanding of the history of science deeply study what actually made science work what made science work is very rare individuals who had access to higher levels of consciousness and intuition beyond those of most scientists and academics of their era and then in retrospect what we do is we incorporate we integrate into our culture the developments and discoveries of these intellectual giants and we tend to rationalize it to ourselves oh they were just strictly rational logical empirical people and that's how they arrived at their conclusions and their discoveries but the answer is no that's not how they did it that's not how einstein did it that's not how nikola tesla did it that's not how kurt gerdel did it they used a mystical intuition to achieve their results and then in retrospect after hundreds of years have passed now as a culture we look back at those people and say oh yeah of course it was obvious their discoveries were just obvious and it was all logical and rational and scientific no it wasn't not at the time when george cantor for example discovered multiple orders of infinity which led to the creation of seth theory and so forth modern set theory his work was completely denounced and demonized by his colleagues for being some sort of superstitious woo nonsense garrett cantor who today if you go to a math class or a a logic class they will revere him as one of the you know intellectual giants but he also happened to be a deeply religious man and he believed that his discovery of mathematical infinities was the discovery of god see but modern materialists and scientists and rationalists and skeptics and atheists are completely in denial about this go read the works of isaac newton he was a deeply religious woo-woo guy he practiced alchemy he talked about infinity he talked about the mystery of nature the infinite mystery of nature and yet today when they teach about isaac newton it's as though he was just this strictly left-brained guy who was just using pure logic and pure reason to understand nature no that's not what he was doing that's not how he developed calculus he used profound levels of intuition to do that and it was radical and nobody unders understood his work at the time when he was doing it i mean leibniz leibniz was was doing it also he was co-developing calculus but aliveness is also a great example of of a deeply intuitive uh trans-rational guy who was not limiting his mind just to the little you know walled garden that most academics and scientists and thinkers limit themselves to so here are some quotes about albert einstein who is a brilliant example of this i actually spent quite a bit of time just taking courses and studying the work and life of albert einstein i actually studied his philosophy i studied his metaphysics i studied his approach because to me what's more interesting about einstein is not his theory per se like they will teach physicists general relativity and special relativity in college physics classes but what they don't teach is actually how einstein developed it what it actually took for him to be able to think in the relativistic ways that he thought they don't really teach that and they don't teach einstein's philosophy of science because einstein had some sharp critiques against the way that science and academia was done so did by the way kurt gerdel he had some sharp critiques too of how dense most logicians and academics were which was why they were not able to achieve his results but he was likewise with einstein likewise with nikola tesla likewise with garrett cantor these were all brilliantly intuitive minds highly non-linear so here's a quote by albert einstein quote when i examine myself and my methods of thought i come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge all great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge i believe in intuition and inspiration at times i feel certain that i am right while not knowing the reason end quote you see but many of today's academics and scientists would actually outlaw this method of doing science they call this woo here's another quote from psychology today describing einstein's epistemic attitude quote einstein first described his intuitive thought processes at a physics conference in kyoto in 1922 when he indicated that he used images to solve his problems and found words later einstein explicated this bold idea at length to one scholar of creativity in 1959 telling max wertheimer that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations but in images feelings and even musical architectures end quote you see so was einstein being scientific or not if you say he wasn't then perhaps the most quintessential scientific discovery of all time which is general relativity is not proper science on the other hand if you consider it proper science then be honest with yourself about how it was actually discovered it wasn't discovered how you think it was discovered it was discovered via leaps of mystical intuition and you might say oh leo but you are just you're just projecting mysticism onto einstein no i'm not actually read about einstein's mysticism read about his reverence for spinoza who was an idealist who was a deist who believed in god so which is it is is einstein the greatest scientist of all time or isn't he and if he is then how could he have been so stupid to talk about god see this is a sort of paradox that that you rationalists and scientifically-minded people um and materialists simply aren't comprehending deeply enough how about isaac newton was isaac newton one of the most brilliant scientists of all time if he was why did he practice alchemy why did he study the occult why did he talk about god why did he talk about infinity see today's scientists and materials think that oh well yeah leo sure einstein and newton they got some things right but but other things they got wrong they were stupid in other areas were they really stupid in other areas or are you stupid in other areas be careful about confusing your stupidity for their stupidity and now i want to quote a little bit about ramanujan who was this brilliant indian hindu prodigy in mathematics he developed some of the greatest discoveries in mathematics that were basically considered impossible by his colleagues and the world's greatest mathematicians what's even more amazing is how he did it so here's a quote about that quote a deeply religious hindu ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity and said that the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes he once said quote an equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of god end quote that's from wikipedia furthermore quote suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from zero to a hundred hardy hardy was ramanujan's colleague and advisor in the uk hardy gave himself a score of 25. he gave j.e littlewood a score of 30 david hilbert a score of 80 and ramanujan 100. end quote so what happened was that hardy discovered ramanujan and his amazing mathematical talents his intuitive talents and then he brought ramanujan over to the uk to to work in their universities to help him to make groundbreaking discoveries within mathematics unfortunately ramanujan fell ill and died at a very young age like in his late 20s or early 30s and so if he lived a full life who knows what kind of amazing mathematical contributions he could have made with his intuitive talents but his life was cut very short but even so he he was still able to make incredible contributions to mathematics and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and if you want a little bit more about that go check out the movie called you can find this on youtube it's a free free movie you can watch called the man who knew infinity it's a biography basically a very well done biography of ramanujan i'm going to post a link down below the video and i'm going to also post a link on my blog so check that out i highly recommend you watch this movie because it'll it'll get you to understand what i'm pointing to with this entire conversation i'm pointing to something very profound and i'm afraid that many of you guys will will not grasp it you'll miss it you'll miss the profanity of what's being said here so watch that movie it'll it'll help you to integrate what i'm teaching here at a deeper more emotional more intuitive level for you so it's not just purely rational so why is paradox important paradox is important because a proper understanding of paradox is what allows you to go from the rational to the to the trans-rational to vision logic and beyond to understand reality at profoundly higher levels than is possible with the ordinary logical mind you cannot do this if you don't confront paradox directly and some of these issues i've been talking about here you have to confront this stuff very directly and you have to let it affect your entire world view and how you think about science logic rationality atheism and other things like this paradox is also important because it shows you the limits of language logic and mind it sort of is a gateway paradoxes are a gateway to transcend the finite mind paradox is also important because it's humbling paradox humbles the arrogant rational mind which thinks that understands everything or that it will understand everything through its preconceived methods and paradigm and ultimately paradox is important because of spirituality paradox is a gateway to spirit absolute truth god infinite consciousness love which are the most important things that are missed by modern science mathematics and logic rationality materialism atheism all of these isms are missing the most important aspect of reality they're missing the spirit and soul of the mind they have de-spirited the mind thereby crippling their own minds and the collective mind of our species weak minds cannot handle paradox paradox is a clue that reality is groundless and infinite in its ultimate nature but you have to be open enough and fearless enough to accept these clues you have to be willing to connect the dots between all the different paradoxes and to see what is the common root that is sourcing all paradox whether in logic science or elsewhere and the deepest example of paradox is god itself because one definition for god which is a very powerful definition is that god is that which created itself so one of the things that i know i struggled with as an atheist the most when it came to the god question is i had a very difficult time accepting the idea of god when i was younger when i was a materialist and an atheist because according to my logic i was thinking like this i was thinking that god is like a some sort of supreme being but then if you posit god to explain where the universe came from then you need some other thing beyond god that will explain where god came from because otherwise what does god really explain so to me it felt like positing god was a cop-out and it didn't really resolve any deep existential issues it just pushed the problem back one level well what i later came to realize of course is that god is not like other objects in the universe other objects in the universe do not create themselves objects in the universe are sourced by some other object have you noticed this like your body did not create itself it came out of your mother's body and your car didn't create itself it came out of a factory and that factory didn't create itself it came out of some other factory and the first factory came out of you know furnaces and forges that were not yet factories and so on for everything in the universe the earth came out of the sun or the early gas clouds that were orbiting the sun and then the sun came out of some other place like the big bang you might say you know whatever you're always going to find this sort of chain this nested chain but then see if you assume god is just like one more object like that then you say well then god must have some other source too right no you don't understand that god is absolute god is not a part of the universe god is the entire universe so when we're speaking about god we're speaking about the totality of everything and so when we're speaking about the totality of everything what you have to realize is that thing created itself it has the power to create itself which is the ultimate paradox the ultimate strange loop how can something create itself you might think this is impossible it's a logical impossibility but what you don't understand yet what you're not conscious of yet is that for god because it imagines what is possible and what is impossible nothing is impossible therefore god is so unlimited it is able to literally create itself how is that possible see if you tell a scientist that the universe created itself this is not going to compute in the normal scientist's mind in the materialist mind because it's not logical how can something create itself but then again how can something exist unless it created itself where else could the universe come from other than from itself and you can only understand this if you understand and appreciate paradox and strange loops infinity of course itself is a very paradoxical notion there are many paradoxes that stem from infinity and see scientists and materialists and rationalists make a mistake here because when they start thinking about infinity they run into these paradoxes their logical mind does at least and then they take that as evidence of the fact that infinity must not be real it can't be actual it can't exist it's like a unicorn we can think about it but it can't be real but it is real it's everything you see around you so what are some of the paradoxes of infinity well for example if infinity is infinite then it must also be finite because if infinity wasn't also finite then it actually wouldn't be infinite because to be truly infinite you must include the finite in the infinite otherwise you're missing the finite you see infinite means you're not missing anything it's all encompassing its total a further paradox of infinity is that if reality or infinity is absolute unity then it must also be divided but leo i thought unity was the opposite of division how could absolute unity also be infinitely divided but how could it not you see because if your unity excluded division then it wouldn't be unity it would be division because you would be dividing unity from division that's division that's not unity so unity paradoxically must include all possible divisions so there are interesting paradoxes here such as how could god have created itself that seems logically impossible how uh for example the question of can god destroy itself that's an interesting paradox that applies to infinity there are interesting paradoxes about stuff that's beyond absolute infinity you can ask the question like well can there be something beyond absolute infinity and you can think about that and play interesting games with yourself and as soon as you imagine something beyond absolute infinity you have to reincorporate it within absolute infinity because absolutely is absolute but then you can keep imagining stuff beyond and then you have to keep reincorporating it you're playing this infinite game or the question of are other people real or imaginary this is a question that many of you guys struggle with with this solipsism question and this is really just a the reason that this question is so tricky and difficult i'll talk about solipsism in the future in its own episode but it's really so tricky and difficult because it's paradoxical you're trying to understand and you're trying to put infinity into some sort of box like idealism or solipsism or some other ism but it's none of those it transcends all of that it's more radical than all of that but your mind your finite mind wants to lock it down he's like oh leo is talking about solipsism and it like wants to lock it down but i'm actually not talking about is i'm talking about god i'm talking about infinity that's more radical than solipsism and you're not going to get a clear answer to this question of are other people real or imaginary because you're making a distinction there between real and imaginary and you're assuming that distinction and so you're running into paradoxes when you're thinking about do other people really exist paradoxes within paradoxes you're not going to be able to solve those paradoxes at the level of mind that you're at you can only resolve them by increasing your consciousness and then incorporating all of these dualities into a deep unity and only then will the paradox truly resolve so here's what i want you to understand the big takeaway from this episode is that all paradox is what happens when you try to put infinity into a finite box infinity is such a thing that it refuses to be put into a box because infinity cannot be a box infinity is that which has no boundaries a box has boundaries and yet at the same time infinity does allow itself to be boxed in it's just that that's one box out of an infinite number of different boxes there are an infinite number of ways that you could box infinity and yet none of them are the entirety of infinity you could box infinity as science as mathematics as logic as islam as the new age as christianity as buddhism as hinduism as judaism as nazism as postmodernism you see and this keeps going it keeps going forever so what you have to understand is that if absolute truth is ever spoken it will always sound paradoxical but the mistake people make is that when they hear paradoxical contradictory speech about absolute truth they hear it and they say ah that's contradictory therefore it must be false no this is not a mistake stop thinking this is a mistake absolute truth must be self-contradictory whenever it's spoken or thought about or modeled or systematized in any way if you try to put absolute truth into an equation your equations will break if you try to hold absolute truth in your mind your mind will break if you try to capture absolute truth into language your language will break that's not because absolute truth isn't real it's because absolute truth is more real than whatever you're trying to contain it in so be careful about that mistake here's an analogy to help you out you've seen maps of the earth the classical map of the earth is the mercator projection where you see the continents laid out but if you compare the mercator projection to an actual globe you'll find that the size of the continents are significantly distorted in the mercator projection because the mercator projection is trying to take a three-dimensional object which is a globe and project it and map it onto a two-dimensional surface and this is impossible to do it's an impossible task and yet the task is still attempted and it's still useful if you look at a mercator projection if you look at the size of greenland or antarctica and compare it to africa or to europe you'll see that greenland looks as though it's the size of africa or europe and when i was a kid i actually thought greenland was that big but then when you look at a globe you see how small greenland is the mercator projection distorts the size of continents especially towards the top and bottom poles the north and south pole so if you want to really understand the earth you have to look at a globe you have to work with globes and also if you take a mercator projection and you try to actually use like a ruler to measure distances between points on a mercator projection to like see where your airplane flight is going to be if you've ever done this you think like you know flying from los angeles to to russia for example to moscow you might think that you know you just take a ruler on a mercator projection you just draw a straight line from from los angeles to moscow and it's like a straight line that goes like this kind of like maybe at a 45 degree angle but then if you actually look at the flight paths of airplanes that fly from los angeles to moscow you see that they fly in a completely different direction when they're flying they don't fly over those countries you thought you would fly over if you were going to just do a straight line on a mercator projection they fly across the north pole because that's actually the shorter route on a on an actual globe surface which is what the earth is and so the actual flight paths of airplanes when you take them are very different from what you thought they would be by looking at a mercator projection so something analogous to this is going on when you are talking about absolute infinity or god because your speech and your thoughts about it your models of it your explanations of it are all like these oversimplified maps these mercator projections which don't really do justice to the the true thing and so what's required to access god is to go beyond all the projections and by the way everything i speak you might say well leo but isn't there a self-reference problem here because actualize.org is teaching about god and yet you're saying that all teachings about god are in a certain sense distortions and falsehoods they aren't really truly god therefore what about actual israelite teachings and of course that's correct actual israelite teachings are fully self-conscious which means that they understand their own limits i'm not sitting here deluding myself that my speech about absolute truth is the same as absolute truth which is actually why i advocate for psychedelics so strongly because psychedelics will actually take you to absolute truth whereas my words cannot my words are a mercator-like projection of the absolute truth we can further extend this analogy if you've ever looked at four-dimensional objects projected into three-dimensional spaces it's the same sort of problem so think of god or infinity as a four-dimensional object how do you display a four-dimensional cube when our reality is only three-dimensional well go take a look go google for tesseracts google four-dimensional cubes and take a look at how four-dimensional cubes are actually projected into three-dimensional space and try to understand from looking at three-dimensional projections of a four-dimensional hypercube tesseract try to actually get an intuitive grasp of what the actual tesseract is the four-dimensional thing because what you see depicted in three-dimensional drawings are not the tesseract i can show you an unlimited number of different projections of the tesseract in three-dimensional space and you're never gonna really understand what a tesseract is from that because they're all distortions just like the mercator projection so that is something i want you to keep in mind for the rest of the time that you continue to listen to me and to learn from other spiritual teachers and you take notes on all this stuff and information wisdom that i teach you through actualize.org you have to understand that actualize.org is a mercator-like projection of the real stuff that i'm pointing to and talking about do not confuse the projection do not confuse the teachings for the actual thing that is being pointed at got it now you might wonder but leo i want to know is ultimate reality itself paradoxical because it seems like you're saying that paradoxes are something that the finite mind is creating when it's doing these projections but what about reality itself the answer here is no ultimate reality is not paradoxical because it is infinite and it's conscious of its own infinitude and the contradictions only arise when you try to take infinity and you try to put it into some kind of symbolic system some finite system like math language logic reason explanations a religious framework a scientific framework a materialist framework that's when you get the contradictions and paradoxes so in other words what i'm saying is that if you actually stop your mind stop it from thinking the paradoxes will disappear but if you're addicted to thinking if the only way you know how to interface and understand reality is through thinking then do you see the problem there you're always going to be fighting and wrestling with these paradoxes and contradictions within your own mind it's going to be a never-ending struggle you're going to have to either confront them or you have to somehow avoid them and play a game of denial about them however at the same time since infinity contains all finite domains infinity is at the same time paradoxical so the paradox of infinity is that infinity is not paradoxical and infinity is paradoxical you see because paradox is a feature of the finite mind but the finite mind is a feature of the infinite mind but leo be straight with me stop stopping all contradictory is paradox really real no it's not yes it is there's a great quote by meister eckhart the christian mystic who says quote only the hand that erases can write the true thing end quote contemplate that what does that mean furthermore douglas hofstadter says quote zen is holism carried to its logical extreme if holism claims that things can only be understood as wholes not as sums of parts zen goes further in maintaining that the world cannot be broken into parts at all to divide the world into parts is to be deluded and to miss enlightenment end quote and walt whitman says quote do i contradict myself very well then i contradict myself i am large i contain multitudes end quote so in conclusion what i want you to remember for as long as you watch my content and you listen to me is that everything i ever say to you is only relatively true it is true assuming a certain point of view a certain paradigm a certain perspective a certain vantage point a certain context a certain goal that i have in teaching you something for your own benefit this is all relative you cannot take any actualized teaching as absolute truth and yet at the same time i'm not contradicting myself when i say that i'm talking about absolute truth do you get it the things i say are only true assuming a certain point of view and so when you listen to me you have to understand that i'm speaking from a certain point of view and for you to understand you have to recognize what that point of view is and try to stand within that point of view otherwise the things i'm saying are not going to make sense to you this is relativity at its purest i cannot give you a precise articulation of reality and the reason that is because reality is infinite if you think anyone can give you a precise articulation of reality you're a fool and you haven't understood the communication in this episode so contemplate contemplate contemplate contemplate until you finally get it you