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[Music] you what is perception that's a question which we will answer in this episode very conclusively by this question what we mean is not only what is perception but what is the relationship between perception the mind the brain consciousness and reality how is it that perception can happen at all this is a very deep philosophical question that Western philosophers and scientists have been pondering literally for thousands of years and still struggle with today and I've been wracking my mind over this question for probably two decades until I finally resolved it around six months ago during my 30-day solo meditation retreat now that retreat didn't quite go fully to plan I only completed half of it 14 days but nevertheless in those 14 days that I did complete I had some pretty epic epiphanies and one of the things that I discovered is that I discovered they answered this question and I discovered that perception actually does not exist it's an illusion and that was one of the deepest mind [ __ ] of my life and I've had many mine flux which I've shared with you but this one in particular was quite astounding and so I want to go a little bit into the mechanics of how it is that we get perception so wrong wise perception so tricky why do so few people understand it there are many philosophers and academics and neuroscientists right now in top-notch universities who are trying to understand this problem and they still aren't getting it because of how tricky it is but we will explain it for you here today and that's not because I'm arrogant it's not because I have some kind of special knowledge that I think that I'm above everybody else that I know something that other people don't know it's not that it's just that this problem which is otherwise known as the mind-body problem which we will result today this problem has been resolved for over 5,000 years it was resolved by saints and sages but the problem is is that in modern Western culture modern science doesn't really go to thee to these ancient sources to to study them into and to do the practices to realize what they realized 5,000 years ago and even before that so and that's a shame and that's what we're gonna correct here today so my explanation is gonna try to address this question from a sort of a very modern 21st century perspective for modern materialists so I'm making a pretty big claim here I'm saying that perception does not exist and you should be rightly skeptical about what it is exactly that I'm saying their perception does not exist I mean am i contradicting all the stuff that you're experiencing right this very moment well obviously I can't be but at the same time then what am I talking about I promise you though that what I'm talking about it's not merely a word game or not merely some philosophy but something very significant something life-transforming if you stay with me and really grasp what I'm saying here something is being pointed to that's a little bit tricky to grasp but with some luck today with some examples and metaphors and even some demonstrations that I'll show you some props that I brought it'll be a little bit easier for you to understand so perception contrary to what most people are taught is not a biological or a neurological process perception doesn't actually occur but when I say that I don't mean what you think I mean because obviously the raw data of perception is undeniable so I'm not denying colors I'm not denying that you see shapes I'm not denying that you hear sounds so then what am I really saying well we're gonna get into that in a second but first let's let's really clarify what I mean by the word perception what are we really talking about so bring it into your direct experience perception and we're not just going to be using the word perception we're going to be talking about experience or the visual field all of these words and labels are gonna be synonymous basically interchangeable for us here so when I'm talking about the visual field of course that's that's only part of perception there's also the auditory field and your body sensations on it that's part of experience that's part of perception but I'm gonna focus on the visual field today because if you can grasp the visual field then all the other perceptual fields you'll be able to make sense of just as well so what I mean by perception or experience is this sensory bubble that you are in have you noticed that you're inside the sensory bubble whatever room you're sitting in wherever you are indoors outdoors doesn't matter you're basically encased in this bubble of perceptions and this is how you interact with reality right you know humans are very visual creatures so for us it's mostly this visual bubble but of course there's sort of all the auditory sounds are here and all that but it's all basically happening in this bubble it's almost as though you're living your entire life in this snow globe or this at the inside of a Christmas ornament this round Christmas ornament that's how I like to conceive of it in my mind which is painted from the inside not from the outside and so all you see is the inner walls of this Christmas ornament so every time that I'm using the word perception or experience or visual field that's what I'm talking about and I want you to become aware of that right now look around you and notice that what you're in right now is this perceptual bubble and that's we're gonna be talking about this entire time here in this episode so what you have to understand though about the word perception and also experience that these are very sneaky words very sneaky they carry in a hidden metaphysics because perception and experience the way that they're used in language they imply a subject in an object duality and this is a very important point a lot of people overlook so it doesn't make sense in our language or any human language to say that there is a perception or an experience but that nobody is having it so this is what I mean by subject object so the subject would be like me leo and the object would be let's say the color red that I see on the wall over there so the color is the subject is is the object I'm the subject and so I am perceiving that color we would say like that so by definition really perception and experience requires a subject or someone who is having the experience and so if I just told you one day that there's a free-floating experience somewhere out in the universe like the color red is just floating around somewhere that would make sense to you say something is wrong with you something's wrong with your with your head Leo because you can't just have the color red floating around in the universe someone has to be perceiving it because that's the implicit metaphysics that comes with thinking about perceptions and experiences so now I want you to kind of open up your mind a little bit more and think about what do what does an experience or perception look like when we remove the subject or the owner of the perception or the experience so try to imagine like the color red literally just kind of floating out in the vacuum of empty space not something that's happening to you you're not seeing it you're not experiencing it but it's there so what would that be really what we're doing is we're we're stripping the object of the subject we're taking away the subject or another we can think of it is that we're collapsing the subject and object together such that that thing is just being out there without a creature or an entity or a sentient being looking at it and experiencing it would you still call that thing an experience or a perception if that was even possible well on the one hand you might be tempted to say that yes it's still a perception it's still basically an experience leo it's just that it's not occurring to anybody but then again that really changes what you think an experience or a perception really is if it can be experienced or perceived without an experiencer or a perceiver that sort of redefines radically redefines what those terms mean and not just in sort of a a word gaming kind of way something very significantly different is happening now so here's what I want you to consider is that if this could happen the raw data let's say of this experience or perception would still stay exactly the same so colors would still stay the same shapes they wouldn't change the color red would still be the color red but what would happen is a radical recontextualization such that this raw data of red or whatever it is is no longer yours and is own no longer a thing that is happening to you and that's very very significant it's been depersonalized you might say and along with that it's also no longer biological it's no longer something that is related to your brain or to your mind and it's no longer even a part of your life because all of that assumes a you or a subject that is part of this relationship with the object it's just a pure object we might say or another way to say it is that we removed all the personal selfhood out of this thing and we've just turned it into a universal experience so you might think of it as the universe who is experiencing this color red out in a vacuum the universe not you not some of the creature knots other person but the universe but the trick here is that you don't want to think of the universe as a human or a person or even as a sentient thing it's just that that object is just like floating out there sort of the way that you might imagine for example that an object might have been flowing out in the vacuum of empty space billions of years ago long before there were humans long before there was even a planet earth long before there were any planets in the entire universe there were no sentient creatures of any kind no biological life anywhere in the universe and yet we still think that they were like asteroids planets forming stars star dust nebulas supernovas and black holes and stuff like that right so you might kind of wonder like well who was perceiving those obviously nobody there was nobody there to perceive them and yet you still believe that those objects were out there and that they existed so I want you now to try to imagine an object that exists all by itself in an empty universe with no one perceiving it what might that be like how would the universe even know or register that this object is there this is a very tricky and deep problem you see how does the universe even know itself like if an asteroid existed 10 billion years ago so did the universe kind of have a record like this the universe have a database of all the asteroids and it's kind of knows what asteroids are inside of it well you could think of it that way but still it's not quite right because what does it mean for the universe like so if this database exists is there somebody in the universe like some entity looking at the database seeing the database perceiving the database no you can't quite say that because we're saying that the universe hasn't evolved yet to the point where there are sentient creatures so you're sort of in this weird situation where you have to say that there there is this kind of database but yeah nobody knows about it so what does it even mean to say that there is a database because what we mean when we say that something is is we really mean that we're perceiving it someone is perceiving it so this sort of gets us into some very deep metaphysical waters that are tricky to navigate but let's back up a step it lets go sort of go back to the beginning let's simplify this conversation and let me explain to you what your current conception of reality is the conception which gets you confused about what perception is so number one what you believe is that there is an objective external material world and that this world exists independently of you right that's what 99.9% of you believe number two is that there are two kinds of objects in this world there are dumb objects like rocks cars buildings and planets and then there are sentient creatures like humans cats dogs and apes number three you believe that these sentient objects sentient creatures that they perceive the external world and that every creature has this perceptual field or bubble that is their perception of the external world number five you believe that you were born into the world as one of these biological sentient creatures you believe that that's what you are and number six you believe that the perceptual field that you have as one of these creatures is inside of the brain or is produced by the brain which is itself a dumb objects from like a rock which exists as part of the external world and you would say well we don't know exactly how this dumb object called a brain can produce this perceptual bubble field but nevertheless obviously it does because here it is so that's the conventional model this is the sort of scientific materialistic model that everybody follows even religious people still basically buy into this model so what I realized during my meditation retreat is that all of this is an illusion created by the ego that's not actually how it works here's how it actually works number one there is no objective external material world only one thing exists in all of existence and that is one universal field of consciousness that's what everything you've ever interacted with has been is this one universal field of consciousness number two you did not come into existence as an object not as a dumb object nor as one of these sentient creatures that's an illusion actually you were born as an idea follow me here this is very mind-warping you're not an object you're an idea you right there that thing that thinks it's a physical object you're actually an idea now you'll see leo but no I'm a physical object I can't be an idea that's silly how could I be an idea when looking look on physically on physical yeah that's the idea that you're a physical object you're not actually a physical object you're the idea that you're a physical object you following this it gets a little weird they're still number three this idea of you when it spawned into being into existence it took ownership of this field of consciousness that exists and misinterpreted it as its own perceptions and here we are so you are sitting here right now listening to me and you find yourself in this bubble and you believe that this bubble is yours you believe that it's you you actually believe that this is comprising your life like if this bubble was extinguished that's what you imagine death is right is the ending of this bubble the cessation of this bubble lights out the bubble is gone and what you imagine your birth was was the instantiation of this bubble and what I'm telling you is that that's not the case what actually happened is that there was this field this field stretches out to infinity and then one day this field had an idea and the idea was that oh this field is mine and this is my life and so what you did is you've actually constructed the ego when it came into existence it constructed out of this field this sense of this is me this sense of selfhood and it took ownership of it and then it convinced itself that well if this is me and this is my life and this is what's happening then I must be perceiving some external world out there behind the scene somewhere and this is these are my perceptions of that external world behind seen somewhere that external objective material world which of course you've never encountered because all you ever encounter is this perceptual bubble that you're in and so literally your sense of selfhood has distorted this non-personal field and has made it personal for you and you've actually constructed your own life out of it you've sort of carved your own life out of this giant block of stone and you have can confused it with yourself and this is where the idea of perception comes in but of course there's really no such thing as perception in the same way that when let's say you're a child and you're given a toy and you really are attached to this toy you start to actually believe that this is this is my toy now of course when you were given the toy nothing changed about the toy the toy before it was your toy it was just a toy nobody owned it you didn't own it it was just an object floating around the universe they gave it to you you got attached to it and now you call it my toy mine it's mine but of course you created that nothing about the toy changes when you call it my toy except it is significant to realize that this toy is not really mine and that I'm creating the idea that it's mine you see so that's why what we're talking about here is not merely a word game because it does matter if the child is deluded and really believes that he owns this toy that ownership is some sort of objective property of the universe rather than a projection of his own mind right and so that's what I'm trying to get you to realize here is that this belief you have that this bubble of perception is yours it's part of your biological being the creature that you are that this is just like that child buying into that toy so this this sort of co-opting of this field of consciousness by your ego happens so seamlessly that you just took it as a physical fact and you just completely bought into the idea that you're a biological sentient creature and your parents reinforce this idea inside of you when you were young because well they also bought into this idea and they weren't very conscious and they reinforced this idea that you are a sentient creature and they told you that other sentient creatures exist like birds and dogs and cows and cats and all this other humans and you just started to believe that oh yeah all these other things out there are also sentient creatures like me but really what happened is that you were carved out of the universal field of consciousness like a negative sculpture and I want to show you an image here of a negative sculpture so you understand what that looks like you see this rectangle at first glance it seems like it's there it's real and it exists but that's only because of how it's been carved out by all the surrounding material and so that's what you are you are not an object that came into existence rather you are the whole that was sort of carved out of this field of consciousness you see and so what you believe death is is the disillusion of this structure which will break apart this rectangle if if you're the rectangle in this analogy see but that rectangle isn't really real it's just like a negative space and so that's what you are you are just sort of like a negative space within this bubble of what we're calling perception but if we remove the you from this bubble of perception what do we have left the perceptions don't change per se the raw data of the perceptions don't change so the colors are still there the shapes are still there the sounds are still dil all of that is there the only thing we're removing is the you and you might at first think well that's not very significant but think about a little bit deeper it's extremely significant because what we're saying here is that these perceptions are not happening to a biological creature these perceptions are just floating out in the vacuum of empty space you might say are you getting this it's pretty twisted but actually also it's very very simple actually it's your models the model that I showed you before it's that model that you have the conventional model that's what's really twisted what I'm explaining now is actually very simple the only reason it seems twisted is because it's it's so counterintuitive and it's so weird it seems so foreign it seems like magic or it seems like it's just impossible or it seems like it's some sort of science fiction story so it just it seems very radical and it is it's very very radical we're talking about a radical recontextualization of everything you've ever encountered in your life see so as I talked about in my understanding recontextualization episode make sure you go watch that when I was rather profound and important for understand you what I'm talking about here when I use the word recontextualization we are reinterpreting how you've been interpreting all of the raw data of reality your entire life you have been mistaken that for perceptions of a biological creature organism that you think you are and now what I'm saying is that there never was such a biological creature organism that was an illusion it was the sort of negative space that you bought into and thought was real so you can think of what we're talking about here in two different ways and this of course again is non duality non-duality means that all boundaries and dualities and categories must collapse so of course you must expect that the duality between subject and object must ultimately collapse but you can think of that in two ways you can think that the object disappears and only the subject remains or you can think of the subject disappears and only the object remains so what that means in this example is that you could think of it as what I'm saying is that it's as though the external world is not real and never actually existed so that external material objective world that you thought was out there behind your perceptions causing your perceptions what we're saying here is that there's no such thing it never existed another way to say that is to say that appearance is reality there's nothing more to reality than appearance so that's sort of one side of this coin but actually there's sort of a rather more profound way to think about it which is actually the exact opposite way which is not to eliminate the external world but rather to eliminate the internal world you know because if we eliminate the external world then all you might think there is is just the internal world just appearances and appearances we think of as the internal world but now think of it the other way the second way you can think of it as imagine that the internal world is not real and never existed and that all there ever was was the external world but you have mistaken the external world for the internal world and so now we're reinterpreting it and putting in its proper place that what you thought was the internal world all of this of all these colors and sensations right this is what I mean by the internal world you've thought about this as being the internal world because you know of course these we call these by definition subjective we say that well certain people can be color blind so they'll see a certain color but then another person won't see that same color or you know maybe like a dog they say has black and white vision dog can't see in color so you would think that well if a dog is looking at that flower he's seeing in black and white and when I look at the flower I'm seeing red and yellow and blue and green and all these other colors so we're thinking that these are like you know our individual bubbles and that these are subjective internal worlds that biological creatures create using their brains but no no what I'm saying now is that forget all that there never was an internal world what you thought was the internal world is actually the external world so what this means is is that the external world we're changing really kind of like the definition of what the external world beans here the external world is not something behind-the-scenes that is hidden that you never get to interact with it's the exact opposite the internal world is completely open to you and not hidden from you at all now at first glance you might say well leo these are like polar opposites ways of thinking about reality which way is correct but actually they're identical they're identical it's just different ways of looking at it different perspectives notice that in both of these examples the raw data doesn't change the colors all stay the same the shapes stayed the same the sounds stay the same the feelings in the body stay the same all that's changing is how you're interpreting all of that and that's extremely significant that's life-changing stuff don't think of interpretation as just some odds just some interesting philosophical mumbo jumbo no no interpretation is everything here because now what I want you to imagine is that as you're sitting here right now imagine being able to reinterpret your very experience that's happening right now all the colors and sounds and sights imagine reinterpreting that so radically that you actually cease to exist you reinterpret yourself out of existence because you're removing the subject what you thought was an experience or a perception where there was you back here the subject and the object out there that you back here in the subject that just gets completely eliminated like it never even existed that's that empty rectangle from the negative space that gets eliminated and now all that you see is you just see the material the substrate that was that was carving out that negative square or rectangle see so literally if you're able to accomplish this you reinterpret yourself out of existence and that's pretty radical it's pretty radical because then you no longer think of this everything that's going on here as your life it stops being personal it's no longer your life is no longer your perceptions what is it it's been universalized this is universal it's being rather than perception and that's one of the key things I want you to take away from this episode the difference between experience perception which are the same and being which is different I use the word being sometimes in my various talks but people don't really register what being is and they can't because they don't understand what perception is so that's why this episode is so important because it draws the distinction between perception and being so the definition of being is perception - the ego or experience - the ego is being and another way to phrase it is that what perception is is being plus ego so when we take experience and we separate off the subject and we kill the subject and all we have is the object that's being that is like when you were imagining an object or the color red just floating out in the middle of empty space like an asteroid that existed ten billion years ago before there were any sentient creatures in the universe that was being because there was no subject there and then conventionally what you've been experiencing your whole life is perception or experience which is an illusion because really perception or experience really is nothing but being you see there is no difference between being and perception other than the way that you interpret it or rather the way you misinterpret it so perception and experience is actually technically speaking a misinterpretation of being and this misinterpretation happens because the ego comes in there and it takes ownership over being and it says me mine this is all mine this is all happening to me this is my life mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine and when that happens you get experience or perception and if you stop doing that if you train your mind to undo that then you will decontextualize perception and experience and it will go back to just being being but of course that means that you're gonna be dead there's not going to be a you anymore there's gonna be being but there's not gonna be you so just to be very clear what this means is that again that doesn't mean that these colors and shapes and sounds that you hear that they will change they will still be here but there will not be a you who is hearing them or who is experiencing them and that's a pretty radical change in perception very radical so I have a little analogy here that I like to use to think about how this unified field of consciousness works and here an old prop for you it's a sponge so what's cool about a sponge of course as you know and as you can see here is that it's got all these tiny little bubbles in it they don't actually look like complete bubbles because we've actually sliced through them such that you're actually seeing like half bubbles but inside you can use your mind's eye to imagine that actually inside the sponge deep in there where we haven't sliced through there our entire complete self-contained bubbles and so what this sponge represents it represents all of reality or all of existence this is everything that ever existed or ever will exist right here this is that one unified field of consciousness that I'm talking about this is everything you've ever experienced and a lot more because what you are in this analogy is you are one of these bubbles so imagine if you could kind of like look through one of those bubbles what do you see well you only see the back of the bubble there right like this and like if you're looking through it you just see the back of the bubble like this you're looking through this way and so that's like your whole life you've lived your whole life as that bubble and here you're living it right now this very moment that's happening right now the room that you're sitting in wherever you are that's you inside of this bubble now what you believe your whole life is you believe that yes there is this bubble but you've also believed that there's something beyond the bubble some objective material external reality beyond the bubble and you've also believed that this bubble is happening to some kind of object like to there like a brain somewhere in the external world back there or there's some kind of biological creature who is experiencing this bubble but what you can see from this analogy and why we're talking about it is that there's no subject there's only the bubble there's only the object this entire sponge is just free-floating out in the vacuum of empty space you might say and now you might wonder well Leo but who's experiencing who's perceiving this sponge and of course that's the mindfuck of it is that the answer is nobody there's nobody to perceive the sponge the sponge just is that's what we mean by being being is just a thing that just is without anybody looking at it that doesn't necessarily change how it looks it just changes what you understand looking to be and it eliminates you from the equation it D personalizes everything C now it's still a bit inaccurate even to say that this sponge is just floating out in the vacuum of E space because actually time and space this sponge does not occur within time and space I mean it does here because we're limited to that right now but if we're gonna take this as the analogy for all of reality time and space is happening inside the sponge the sponge is actually itself not constrained or limited to time and space nor is it constrained or limited by physical or logical laws because all of those physical and logical laws is you know them that's happening inside of these various bubbles in fact you could have different bubbles with different logical laws different time lines different spatial dimensions and so forth you could have like four dimensional bubbles five dimensional bubbles and anything else you can imagine this sponge itself is actually infinite so of course even though here right now I'm only presenting it to you as a as a three dimensional object in the analogy and the full analogy that I'm trying to get across to you imagine that this sponge it doesn't actually have a shape it extends this way and this way and this way up and down and in every direction and of course not just in three dimensions but an infinite number of dimensions so if you imagine that of course if you did that now the sponge becomes infinite and it doesn't even have a shape anymore you can't think of it as being ground or square or anything it's just it literally takes up everything it's total it's infinite that's what infinite means and you are just one of these tiny little bubbles in this giant thing and your mom your dad your cat your dog your boss your brother your sister what are they they're just other bubbles in this thing but look look at this are the bubbles actually a thing are they actually real no they're just negative space what's actually real you might say is the yellow substance the foam that's what's real the bubbles are really just sort of illusions there's no substance to the bubble it's Hollow see and moreover all of the bubbles are really what are they are they separate no it's the exact opposite they're all unified in fact the space of all of these bubbles is the exact same space it's one space it's just emptiness it's one emptiness so as I've said before in my episode about the radical implications of oneness I said we're all one well this explains why when I say we're all one I'm not speaking metaphorically or poetically or I'm not saying some wishy-washy new-agey platitude like oh yeah we're all one let's love each other no no what I mean is very literally physically we're all one in the same way that all of these bubbles in this sponge are all one and in fact this entire sponge is just all one but in order to realize that you need to stop identifying with being one of these bubbles and you need to realise that you are the entire thing and not only are you entire the entire thing but that the entire thing itself is also infinite and if you grasp that that is enlightenment enlightenment is going from believing that you're one of these bubbles to realizing that you're the entire sponge and that the entire sponge is infinite and that this right here this yellow sponge this is God this is what God is this is what God consciousness is is when you realize that you're this entire thing and that is believe it or not actually possible to do now of course you probably won't do it in five minutes you probably won't have this realization while you're sitting here listening to me although you could that's sort of the the ideal scenario but you know it used takes a lot of work takes a lot of meditation contemplation psychedelics and other things like that to help you to realize this but but this is this is what enlightenment is this is what every mystical teaching and school and religion is pointing to is it's pointing to this but notice because this thing you know it's so totally so vast that it's so epic and mind-blowing that it it's really difficult to explain it to you and that no analogy or metaphor really does justice to it so don't take this foam example too literally because of course there's limitations you know I'm a limited to 3d space and time and we're limited to language which is necessarily dualistic but but you can grasp this in one go you can just use your consciousness to directly realize that you're not perceiving the sponge you are the entire sponge and that in fact there is nobody who will perceive this sponge there is only the sponge there's only the external world so to speak there is no internal world but really that's the same thing as saying that the internal world and the external world that they merge and collapse into one another which is what non duality is right it's the collapsing of all categories and distinctions including the distinction between subject and object and inner and outer internal and external mind and bodies this is how we resolve the mind-body problem you see so we're going from the mind-body dualism of Descartes and we're unifying it all into one field of consciousness so let's try to get you to grasp this right now maybe you can get it maybe you can actually experience this shift so do the following exercise first of all ground yourself in actuality as I said in my what is actuality episode so pull out your hand take out your hand like this and actually look at your hand and realize here's the hand and that this this is actuality everything I've been talking about so far all that was just ideas fantasies and concepts and imagination ground yourself by looking at your hand at actuality and notice what this is this is part of this perceptual bubble that I've been talking about here it is alright so I wasn't just talking about airy-fairy stuff I'm just pointing to something concrete so find that thing that I'm pointing to this is the visual field find it become conscious of it right now put your awareness on top of it right now and now what I want you to realize try to notice this is that this is not biology you are not a biological creature this field is not some part of some biological creature that's coming from some brain somewhere that's not what this is also notice that this visual field is not yours you don't own it it seems as though this field is your life it actually constitutes your whole life that's what you believe your whole life but try to unsee that right now try to look at your hand and look at it and see it as just an object floating out in the vacuum of empty space like that meteor or that asteroid that was floating around ten billion years ago try to see this hand that same way right now and try to notice that there's no you here looking at the hand what there is really it's just a hand and it's being so deep personalize your experience of the you D personalize all this try to not see this as your life or your emotions or your perceptions or your sensations but that this is the external world right here there's no external world somewhere else the external world is not hidden from you it's totally laid bare before your eyes this is how the external world looks or rather not looks but is this is not you as a creature experiencing the external world no no no this is the raw unmediated external world you have full access to reality right now this visual field that you have always thought is your biological part your biological creatures stuff this is not that this is the raw fabric of the universe try to see it that this literally is the universe and here it is it's existing that means the universe has colors and shapes and smells and sounds and emotions and feelings and thoughts and ideas and it can think and it can understand that's not biology that's the raw physical universe it can do that now of course you're wondering now believe how is it possible that the fabric of the universe itself has all these things when these are all subjective qualities well that's the mind [ __ ] you have to recontextualize that and realize that it's possible because here it is it's always been possible the only problem is that you have misinterpreted at your whole life and you've always just assumed that these are all subjective properties stuff that happens to biological organisms inside of brains just stop assuming that you see that was a groundless assumption that was a bad assumption rather what the raw universe is is that it just is this and it's not happening to you it's happening to itself it's happening without you it's always been happening without you the only time that you think it's happening to you is when you think it's happening to you you see you have to think that it's happening to me for it to actually appear as though it's happening to you when you're not thinking about it it's not happening to you it's just there for itself so try to get that right now if you can if you succeed at this what you're doing is you're stripping the you or the ego or the self away from this experience here this changes the experience to not being an experience anymore but to just being absolute being absolute being or truth with a capital T so what is true the capital T it's this stripped of the you don't expect it to look different don't expect the colors to change don't expect the sounds and sights to change don't expect unicorns and angels and harps playing and the light of God shining down upon don't expect that stuff none of that stuff will happen what will just happen is that you will realize that there never was a you here and that what this is is just absolute pure truth pure being can you get that I mean don't beat yourself up if you can't this is this is very deep stuff this takes a lot of focus and attention and contemplation to get this is not something you get in five minutes which is not to say you should limit yourself you certainly could get it in five minutes if your mind was very open you might get a glimpse of it right now some of you will post me a comment down below if you do but many of you won't many of you won't won't be able to break through and that's okay it's just you're gonna have to work through it you know you can you can pause you can rewind you could try this exercise a hundred times and you probably will need to and then one day you will break through and realize what I'm talking about and what's being pointed to so this is why it's so difficult to realize God or to realize the absolute is Heisley because it's not different than what you've always been experiencing it's just a reinterpretation a very very radical reinterpretation or recontextualization of what you've always been experiencing and this is why they say that enlightenment is already here this is why they say that you're already enlightened this is why they say that there's nothing you can do to become enlightened because you're I mean they're right in a sense because this I mean there's only one thing happening here the problem is that you're misinterpreting it so what needs to change is your misinterpretation you're sort of in this spell or in this illusion and you need to break out of the solution and that's what we say waking up is that's what we mean by waking up is you wake up to the thing that was always here but you just somehow misinterpreted and why did you misinterpret it because of your drive to survive your drive to live and your fear of death because you want you to survive that's your number one priority in life is to be you so the reason that God is so difficult to realize the reason enlightenment is so rare is because you don't want to surrender the you so it's not merely that you have to understand what I'm talking about here and be able to to grok it before you can accomplish the grokking part you first need to surrender a lot of your psychological fears because if you're doing this process correctly you're going to start to feel your heart pound you might start to experience a panic attack you might get depressed you might have some fit of anger you might have some kind of egoic knee-jerk reaction that's right because your mind doesn't play fair because it wants you to survive and survival is not about fairness and it's not about truth it's about lies and deception so your mind is going to be working overtime right now to maintain the deception that you have under your entire life because your entire life hinges upon it and if you were to realize what I'm saying here that would be the end of you you'd be dead but of course death here doesn't mean what you think it means death doesn't mean the cessation of perceptions and colors and stuff it just means the elimination of the idea of you which is what you have always been from the very beginning is just an idea there's never gonna be a physical death of you because that assumes that you were a physical object but that was a false assumption so there could be no physical deaths the only thing that can be is a conceptual death what you think of as physical death is actually conceptual death and of course they know Leo that that can't be right there actually is physical death what is that but another concept see the mind traps itself with concepts mistaking these concepts for physical reality and that's why people are so touchy when we come and question their metaphysical beliefs or their religious beliefs or their scientific materialistic beliefs why is that because if we question it too much it literally starts to pull apart their entire reality and what they fear is not that reality will will fall apart although that is a that is a certain fear that you can encounter that's what I would call the fear of insanity because when your reality starts to fly apart you actually feel like you're going insane and it feels very scary but before you even get to that fear there's gonna be a more urgent and immediate fear which is going to be a fear of death and that's right that's right when you question reality deeply enough you experience your own death and then what remains is just this sponge floating out an empty space without you anymore you have realized that you're not one of these bubbles so really your whole game in life is trying to maintain the sense that you're one of these bubbles and as soon as you get anywhere close to realizing that you're not one of these bubbles your ego goes crazy hyper reactive and emotional in order to distract you away from the truth and to drive you deeper into falsehood and that's usually what most of your emotions do most of the negative emotions is they drive you deeper into the illusion that you're one of these bubbles pretty deep huh yeah pretty deep I mean we're we're we're explaining the mechanics of the entire game of life here I mean we're or we're revealing the full monty we're spoiling it all for you here once you understand this and you get this at a cellular level your life will never be the same again this transforms your entire relationships to life and to human beings and living creatures and non living creatures and everything else now you might still wonder Willie oh so it seems like you're saying that the universe is like self-aware is that what you're saying because if there's nobody to perceive this sponge then how is it possible that it's being perceived like by who by nobody that means like it's perceiving itself it's self-aware but awareness is something that only living creatures can do the universe can't be self-aware that's impossible no it turns out that it actually is possible you merely assumed that awareness is something that living creatures do when in fact there's no such thing as a living creature your mistake was coming up with this imaginary idea of a sentient living creature there are no such things that's a fiction there are no such things so never were such things and you are not such a thing so then you want to believe it but how how is it possible that there can just be awareness without a living creature well I can throw the question back to you how is it possible there can be an awareness with living creatures I mean no matter how you try to explain it or how you slice it awareness is a very mysterious and weird thing and that's precisely what science can't explain science and philosophers have been trying to explain what awareness is for thousands of years and have been very unsuccessful at it especially in the Western intellectual tradition and that's because awareness is not a thing and it can't be explained and it's irreducibly mystical and mysterious you will never explain it because it's the most fundamental thing you can't get more fundamental than awareness awareness is not a property of biological creatures it's not like rocks are not aware but then one day when matter evolves into microbes and complicated creatures than like fish and lizards are crawling over on land and then you have rats and mice and stuff like this and mammals that finally one of those like the lizard becomes aware no no no no no no no that's not how it works awareness isn't actually a thing technically speaking awareness doesn't even exist awareness just is pure nothingness it's a pure void or vacuum awareness is simply that in which the sponge is suspended it's not a thing nobody has awareness no brain produces awareness awareness is just nothingness and so to even think that there is such a thing as awareness he's already a mistake because usually when we think of awareness we think of like some sort of field and it's kind of mystical and weird and all this no awareness is not really that it's just nothing so imagine that there is some alternate universe in which awareness doesn't exist in this universe there are no living sentient creatures in this universe there are no internal worlds there are no perceptions no feelings nothing all there is in this universe are like facts you might think of like objects like a ball floating out in the middle of this universe or a sponge floating out in the middle universe or an asteroid or something like that but there's nobody to perceive these things so the collection of everything in that universe this alternate universe the collection of all the facts of that universe is what we call the truth the ultimate absolute truth of the capital T and there's nobody perceiving it or looking at it but it's the truth because it just is it's being that asteroid that ball that that sponge that's just floating out there it's just there you might think of it as just like a database with a bunch of entries and and you might think well that's kind of a boring universe nothing exciting can happen there you can't have love you can't have emotions or thoughts you can't have knowledge you can't have anything interesting you can't have living creatures so it's kind of this dead stale universe well what I'm describing this alternate universe is our present universe that's exactly what's happening right now try to get this try to get it right now our entire universe consists of only one thing the raw truth the raw facts the raw data and that's what this is all these colors and shapes sounds and everything else is just pure raw data happening to absolutely nobody perceived by nobody with no awareness that's truth but then you're gonna wonder believe yo but if but if that's possible then how come I'm perceiving it here that's your mistake is you think you're perceiving it but you might want to believe oh how come the truth knows itself how can the truth just be how come it looks as though it's being aware that's what truth is truth just is it's pure isness it's got nowhere else to go because it's the only thing that there is it can't go anywhere so here it is and by virtue of this it's self apparent or you might say self aware but you can see now where we're getting into sort of paradoxical territory language is starting to break down as I'm talking about this that's precisely because non duality cannot be talked about with language and it can about cannot be put into analogies and metaphors and concepts so you know I'm trying I'm doing the best that we can with with language and with with the limits of of sponges and stuff but you need to go beyond all of that to actually grasp what's being pointed out here I'm not talking about beliefs I'm not talking about ideas I'm not talking about philosophy and I'm talking about concepts look look at actuality look at your hand look at what's happening around you this is what I'm talking about pure truth that's the only thing that's ever been here is pure truth now there's one final and ultimate objection that people have on this topic which is will Leo how do you explain that the brain effects perceptions so for example if if my brain is damaged then maybe might like my visual cortex let's say is damaged then I won't be able to see colors properly maybe I'll lose color vision I'll start to see in black and white like a dog so how do you explain that leo well firstly you have to understand that the brain is itself a perception that's super important to understand the mistake that neuroscientists and various philosophers in the West's materialists have always made is that they have assumed that the brain is something other than a perception something more fundamental something more prior to perceptions that is not the case what we're doing here is we're putting the brain on the same level we're bringing the brain up to the same level as all of the perceptions that we attribute to the brain such that the brain itself is just one of the perceptions so when you do that the brain ceases to be or to have that same kind of explanatory causal power that it used to have you can no longer use the concept of a brain to metaphysically ground the rest of reality and perception but it's still nevertheless true that the brain although it is a perception it's a rather special perception it's a perception that tends to have a global effect on all other perceptions if it's tweaked and changed in a certain way so for example you can take a drug or a pill or psychedelic and that will change all of your perceptions now of course the psychedelic or the pill is itself a perception so look what's happening we're taking a pill which is a perception we're sticky inside our mouth which is a perception then it's going through our blood blood is a perception then those chemicals are going inside our brain chemicals is a perception brain is a perception so what we have here is how the entire universe works is it's a field of perceptions interacting with themselves in various ways sometimes perceptions can have local effects sometimes an interaction between two perceptions can have sort of a global effect which is what would happen if your brain was damaged let's say and of course how do you damage the brain you take a perception like a hammer and you hit the back of the skull which is also perception and so you know perception affects perception affects the perception of course I'm using the word perception here but there really is no perception we're really talking about being so we have being which is interacting with other being being effects being effects being effects being so it's really no different than the way that you think of how molecules interact how is it possible that one molecule can hit another ball he'll bounce off of it and cause some kind of effect well it's no different with perceptions this one unified field of consciousness is self interactive it's it's not static like this sponge it's constantly morphing and changing and twisting and all sorts of super super complicated stuff is happening inside of it all the time these bubbles they're not static they're popping in and out of existence that's what you would think of as your physical birth and death these bubbles so it's just like this bubbling boiling roiling soup of stuff is just constantly happening but from the vantage point of one of those bubbles you know it seems like 80 years and it seems like this long life that you have with all these experiences and emotions and stuff but that's just like one little blip on the radar screen of this entire infinite thing that's happening you know and it's gonna happen forever it's never gonna get created or destroyed it's just it's constantly bubbling away like a lava lamp and it'll bubble away or forever forever for infinity and it can do all sorts of very complicated things it can create emotions it can think it can feel it can it can make love it can trick itself into thinking that it that it's seeing things it can it can trick itself into thinking that it's a self and that has a life and all of this and that's what it is this is God this is everything this is the ultimate self this is the Buddha this is Christ consciousness this is everything so in conclusion what is perception really perception is actually being or absolute truth when properly interpreted but most people on earth misinterpret this because they have a sense of self and so their sense of self co-opts absolute being and mistakes it for the self makes a mistakes it for my perceptions and mistakes itself as being a sentient creature but these sentient creatures aren't really real they're just illusions like negative sculptures in this one Unified Field now of course the final objection that people have when I talk about this is but Leo how do you know all this how is this possible how is it possible to know any of this it seems like science fiction it seems like a bunch of stuff that you just sat down one day and pulled out of your ass just stuff that you believe well it's not that it's possible for you to realize this you can realize it because it's right here here it is it's right here right before your eyes all you got to do is properly interpret what's right here which mostly means shutting down your mind becoming very very focused on the present moment and just sitting there in meditation with a very quiet and focused one point in mind and doing that hour after hour day after day week after week for months and for years until finally it clicks you can't make it click it will click on its own but what you can do to sort of make it click is put in the work of sitting there quieting your mind and meditating contemplating or there are various other techniques doing yoga or that shamanic breathing technique that could help or psychedelics that's very very powerful and would really help you to understand this you know if you really want to get a lot of this episode try watching it or listening to it not during your trip but right before your trip and then contemplate about this maybe do some of these exercises that I showed you in the middle of your trip and then you'll get it and then you'll see just how profound this all is so there you go we've explained perception and we've resolved the many thousands years old mind-body problem it's done it's simple the solution is very simple I'm not the first person to have discovered it for sure so I don't take any special credit here I'm just explaining in a way that I think would be would resonate with people in 21st century that's all I'm doing that's all actualize that org is is it's me basically taking timeless truths that have been known for over 5,000 years by mankind pretty much everything I've talked about has been known by mankind for centuries and I'm just popularizing it I'm just communicating it in a way that works with youngsters on YouTube and which is kind of hip and modern and which integrates a lot of stuff together and just which isn't talked about in mainstream culture very much that's it and if you were lucky enough to stumble upon this then here you are and that's why you know about it whereas 99% of people I'm not going to watch my stuff they're never gonna sit through a hour-long two-hour long video week after week or to seriously do the practices to realize this stuff that's it that's it what makes this stuff so challenging is that it takes a lot of work it takes a lot of work and it's emotionally difficult you are intimately involved with this inquiry it's not only you can just sit on a couch and navel gaze and just philosophize idly no like when you're doing this right what's gonna happen is you're gonna realize that your entire emotional system all of your deepest fears and and problems and all of your anger and anxiety all of that is deeply connected all your inadequacies as a human being all of the challenges and problems you have in your life all the suffering all of that is deeply connected to this entire inquiry which is why isn't quiet this inquiry is so life-changing because if you go through this whole process it will transform your entire life every corner of it will get transformed because what we're talking about here is transforming your entire perceptual system literally the doors of your perception will be cleansed and what you will be left with as William Blake said so eloquently is the infinite you will realize that you are the entire universe the entire universe is this thing that's here right now this is it you're the whole shebang you're not just some little object in the universe you are the whole universe but to realize that will be an ordeal for you you see because even though it might sound like a kind of a pretty and a nice truth it is it's very pretty it's it's it's hauntingly beautiful and it's it's profound beyond description and it produces feelings and emotions of joy and bliss that you can't even imagine your wildest imagination joy and bliss beyond that of a heroine hi but to get there you must go through all of your fears through all of your neuroses through all of your hangups through all of your ego quarks you must surrender your arrogance you must surrender your judgment you must surrender your demonization of others you must open your mind very very radically and you must ultimately lay down your entire life as a self as an ego to eventually break through and have this awakening and then you will have your bliss so the end results of cleansing the doors of your perception is the most amazing joy that you could ever imagine but the process of cleansing the doors of your perception is some of the greatest hell and struggle that you could possibly imagine so that's why so few people do it and what I encourage for you is that you make a commitment in your life to do it you will never regret doing it and you will never know what you missed unless you do it and what you will miss will be the greatest thing ever so great that it's impossible to put into words and that's what motivates me to talk about these topics in such length and depth is because it just gives me joy to know that one or two people will get it out of the thousands and millions that watch one or two will get it and they will have that kind of profound joy that metaphysical joy of discovering their full infinite nature having cleansed the doors of their perception that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button and come check out actualize that org we've got a blog you've got a forum we've got resources like book lists and life purpose courses and other courses that I'll be releasing in the future and some other ideas that I have planned coming up soon so keep abreast of all of that if you have questions come interact on our forum and just ask there we have some people that can help you figure stuff out and the last thing that I'll say here is what actualized org is is I'm trying to create a comprehensive catalogue of the deepest explanations of life that I wish existed when I was young when I was a teenager when I was in my early 20s because I had all these deep profound questions about life like what is perception what is consciousness what is awareness does God exist why is there something rather than nothing where did the universe come from what does all this stuff what is happiness how do I become happy why do I suffer how can I eliminate my suffering how can I be a good human being and so forth and so forth so all these questions I add I was just passionate about figuring them out and so I spent decades trying to figure all this stuff out and the more I researched it and the more I figured out the more amazed I was at why this stuff wasn't talked about everywhere because this is the most amazing stuff this is what life is about he's figuring this stuff out and then crafting a life around this around these answers and so it was always just mind-blowing to me that that there weren't videos about this why why aren't there why am i one of the first people releasing videos like this like it just it honestly it still baffles me but of course you know I also understand why why it's not done it's you know these are challenging ideas they're challenging to communicate they're challenging the study they require radical open mindedness to understand they require enormous work to actualize to glue evenly let alone to master all these ideas so there's there's just so much here you know there's so much that goes into creating a great life to being a great human being because as it turns out you're not just trying to be how a great human being you're realizing that you are the entire universe see and that's that's a big project to go from being a tiny little human being what you thought you were when you were born to realizing that you're this infinite universe god thing you know that's that's like night and day you're basically going from 0 to infinity that's a hell of a ride a hell of a gear shift to go through and that's not easy to do you have to go through so many challenges but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create this catalog so I'm trying to create these various episodes that address very fundamental questions like what is consciousness what is intelligence what is God what is enlightenment what is in this case perception and so forth and so forth so in the future you'll see more of these sorts of what is episodes that tackle very fundamental metaphysical questions but there will also be a lot of practical stuff that I'll release in the future as well so I'm kind of going through this phase where I'm addressing a lot of this kind of metaphysical stuff you might think it's not too practical for you because you're chasing success okay that's fine I understand that but uh but bear with me you know I'm I'm gonna release these then we're gonna go back into practical psychological type stuff I'm gonna help you to figure how to be more confident how to have higher self-esteem how to attract friends into your life how to be more social how to be more confident how to be more charismatic so all that stuff we'll get to it you know we'll get to it one of the things that I'm most passionate about though is the very metaphysical stuff because like this is the stuff that that has sort of motivated my entire journey and so without these questions really there wouldn't be an actualized org so that's why I cover some of these sorts of very nerdy you might think kind of esoteric philosophical type topics and also because there's a deep lack of videos talking about this stuff at the level of depth that I think is required to really understand this stuff there's just a lack of this information you know maybe in two hundred years that problem will be solved but right now I feel like it's sort of my duty to to solve this problem that's sort of my purpose here is to be a solution to this lack that exists in society and so you know over the years that's sort of what I'm angling at is creating this catalog we're gonna have hundreds of these videos that explain all of these topics and then my hope is is that that transforms someone's life somebody like you so stick around and maybe that'll happen you