Word count:17930
[Music] you what is truth the ultimate guide warning this is a very advanced episode so be careful it's my great honor and privilege to be able to be the first person today in your life to tell you what truth is nobody has ever told you in your entire life what truth is this is a big deal now that doesn't mean you're gonna understand what I'm saying but it's a big deal to understand what truth is a common misconception that people have about truth is they think that scientists academics philosophers for priests and rabbis understand what truth is and they don't they don't truth is something that transcends science which is something that just doesn't compute in the minds of most ordinary people so we're gonna work through all that but this is a very tricky topic the amazing thing is though and the good news here is that it actually is possible to know what the truth is and to understand it so this is not just speculation and theory on my part and in fact my bold claim here is is that I have become directly conscious of absolute truth and that you can too so it's not that I have some special privilege here you can do it everybody can do it the problem is that nobody does it or hardly anyone does it so I will be explaining why this is the case and helping you to understand where you're going wrong but you need to appreciate how tricky of a topic this is and how serious this is so even though I'll be explaining stuff to you here that's not going to be nearly enough you're gonna have to do homework you're gonna have to really pursue the truth to understand the things that are said in this episode because like I said this is very advanced stuff and none of this can be taken for granted also I just want to underscore that nothing I say here should be taken as a belief as an ideology don't take it as a religion don't take me on my word you have to do the work of finding out what I'm gonna be telling you here so let's begin so I guess I should tell you a little bit of the story of how I became conscious of absolute truth what truth is now I've become conscious of it in many different respects and in many different ways at many different points in my life so it didn't just happen once but there was one particular moment which is still very vivid in my mind that I can recall where I penetrated through to what truth really means what that word really means because we use this word you know colloquially all the time casually in conversation you've used it in school as though you knew what it meant but isn't it funny how you went through 12 years of school and then maybe four more years of university and not once not once did anyone tell you what the truth is nor did you sit down and seriously question to yourself and try to figure out what the truth is you took it for granted I will even bet you I would bet you $1,000 that most of you never even in your entire life cracked open dictionary and looked up what the word truth means of course not the dictionary would know because the dictionary doesn't know the dictionaries can have a circular definition which just points to two other terms all of which are defined in terms of another and so it'll be a circular definition which doesn't help you at all but you know most people haven't even bothered to go that deep in their inquiry into what truth is so anyways I was standing there one day taking a piss and as I was pissing I was wondering what is the truth because this is a question that I've been asking myself since I was a teenager basically for my whole life I've been asking the question of what is the truth pursuing this question for for years and for decades for thousands of hours contemplating wracking my mind over it so I'm standing there pissing and I'm and I'm just wondering to myself what is the truth what is it what is truth what is truth and then it hit me just like that the conceptual notion of truth melted away the idea that truth is some sort of idea in my mind that whole notion melted away and then what and was actual truth that's what was revealed to me and it's nothing crazy like you might think it's just being it's the entirety of the present moment as I was standing there pissing that very moment all of it became the truth and while that naam might not sound too profound to you it was extremely profound so the trickiness with truth is that at the same time it's totally ordinary and there's nothing crazy about it and yet also on the other hand it's the most extraordinary radical outrageous shocking mind-blowing thing you've ever understood and of course it certainly helped me that I was on LSD at the time so I highly recommend that if you're gonna be pursuing the question of what is truth you you you want to have some assistance because the majority of people even people who meditate I've known many people who meditate who do yoga and so forth even people who consider themselves awake and they still don't really understand what the word truth actually means so let me explain it to you here but first let's tackle some of the common misconceptions about truth truth is a belief this is false truth is a concept or an abstraction this is false truth is a philosophy or some ideology like a religion this is false truth is knowledge this is false that truth is a theory or a model this is false that truth is science logic or mathematics this is false that truth is impossible to access this is false that truth is subjective this is false that truth must be logical and it must make sense this is false that truth can be written down in a book and that you can read this book and learn the truth this is false that truth can be proven and that if truth exists then surely it's provable this turns out to be false and the last misconception is that truth is no big deal and that it's irrelevant to ordinary life this is false so now let's dig into what truth is there are two kinds of truth that we need to distinguish here otherwise we get very confused very fast the first kind is relative truth we'll call it these are conceptual truths these are truths of the mind and the second kind is absolute truth or truth the capital T as I sometimes say this is truth that is true under all circumstances and conditions it's the opposite of relative you might say it's not conceptual it's actual and so you have to be a little bit careful cuz sometimes I will use the word just simply truth ambiguously without telling you explicitly which one of these I'm referring to sometimes I'll just say the truth and you know usually when I say with authority like that you know the truth that's what I mean by absolute truth truth with a capital T and then sometimes I just say truth in which case I'm just talking about some relative truth so what's the difference between these two well you have to be careful about how the words are used I'll try to be clear in this episode but you know in future episodes sometimes I use the word rather loosely and you know most people do most people don't distinguish between these two and can create confusion so what are some examples of relative truth the sky is blue is a relative truth the Eiffel Tower is located in Paris France is a relative truth a human being a human beings hand has five fingers on it that's a relative truth one plus one equals two what do you think relative or absolute relative that's a relative truth squirrels like to eat acorns a relative truth World War two happened a relative truth objects are made out of atoms also a relative truth now you might be scratching your head at this point likely Oh hmm a relative true how but how can how can the sky is blue be a relative truth what's relative about that and one plus one equals two relative how is this relative conceptual I mean if one plus one equals two is not the truest thing we know then what does truth even mean that's right that's a very very good question but I want you now to start to get interested in this idea of absolute truth because of all the stuff I mentioned above is relative and that's some of the most certain stuff you've ever known in your life then what could the absolute be and what would it mean for all the above stuff you know given that it's relative for it to be contingent meaning that it could be otherwise see as amazing as this might sound to you all of the stuff I mentioned up above these are all pseudo truths because they depend upon concept symbols language interpretation and thought these are all truths that are held within your mind and for the truth of these statements to register in your mind requires that your mind work in certain ways see so even just to take a statement like the sky is blue to be able to say that to yourself in your mind and then either validate it or invalidate it to believe in it or not to believe in it to claim it as true or false already this requires interpretive functions in your mind you have to first of all you've to understand the language so this is a linguistic truth you have to be able to decipher the words you have to you have to be intelligent enough as an organism to be able to even understand what language is you know many animals don't if you tell a donkey that the sky is blue it's gonna go in one ear and out the other he's not gonna understand what that means so he can't claim it as true or untrue and in fact a donkey doesn't even know the difference between truth and falsehood that's the level that a donkey is at see we have to be very careful with our with our assumptions here we can't just assume that all consciousnesses and all beings are humans nor can we assume that humans are the highest level of consciousness and intelligence that there is in the universe or that is accessible you know if we go beyond ordinary human faculties so so that the sky is blue you know this this is contingent and relative in many ways first all which sky are we talking about are we talking about the sky of the earth or are we talking about the sky of another planet you see so depends of course which planet you're standing on but even if you are more specific and you say well the sky of the earth is blue still depends what time of the day or you looking at this guy at nighttime it's not blue but even if you say okay well Leo what I mean is the sky during high noon with no clouds it's blue what do you mean by blue there's need for shades of blue which which blue are you talking about see the mind has to take all of these factors into account just to make sense of this statement the sky's blue it seems so simplistic but really the sky's blue is a gross abstraction people think well no the sky is blue just a fact it's not a fact there's nothing factual about that this is a gross highly complicated abstraction which depends on how you're interpreting every word in that statement and even even if all of that is given to you in the end we could say well the sky appears blue to human eyes does it appear blue to a dog to a cat to a lizard to a worm to an alien is it still blue there's a worm even see a sky does the sky even exist for a worm does the color blue even exist for a worm there are some animals for whom colors may not even be a thing so in that case what is the sky actually because you know if a worm looks at the sky and let's see he sees it as orange and then I look at and see his blue and some alien looks at it and sees something else who's right what is the sky actually see it's not so easy it's not so easy at all these simple questions you know a human hand has five fingers I posted a video recently on my blog of humans who have six fingers they exist it's actually a genetic trait that gets passed on that's a very rare gene humans with six fingers six functional fingers pretty freaky that's the thing you know and then even with one plus one equals two you might say well how can this possibly be relative and contingent you know supposedly mathematics is the universal language even aliens on another star system if you know if we send a binary code they're supposed to be able to interpret our binary code or whatever we send them and through mathematics we can communicate this this sort of idea no that's not how it works you see you need to understand what these symbols mean one the symbol one the symbol plus the simple equal sign the symbol two and then you have to understand what is trying to be said by that statement these are not obvious at all there was a time in your life where you didn't know what one or plus or equals or two was let alone how all that stuff fit together you have to learn that that required trial and error it required insight it required some function of thought and the mind don't overlook that stuff another aspect that makes all of these relative truths contingent truths is that this is based on a sort of a correspondence theory of truth all of Western philosophy pretty much works on a correspondence theory of truth and really most most philosophies and not even just West but even Eastin around the world what this means simply is that our understanding of what truth is it's like we have a sense of an objective external reality out there somewhere the way things actually are and then we have what humans can know about it and think about it and then what we say well the stuff that we know which is true is that which corresponds with what's out there in the real world and then that stuff which we tell ourselves or think to ourselves which is false which is not true is that stuff which does not correspond with the world so if we say that the sky is blue but then we go out and we look at it and it turns out to be orange then there's a lack of correspondence there and therefore based on this we can determine that something is true or false this whole notion of the correspondence theory of truth is very problematic and tricky it's totally false it's partially correct the problem with it is though is that it's it's confining truth only to symbols and concepts and mind stuff right I want you to notice that there's a very important difference between the actual sky being blue and your thinking or believing that the sky is blue these are two totally different things so don't get me wrong it's not that I'm denying that the sky is blue per se I'm not denying that but we have to be very careful to tease apart the typical conflation that we have between the actual being or raw data that is out there whatever it is the sky or the Eiffel Tower versus our affirmation of its truth in our own mind you see these are totally different things so we might imagine for example for a donkey we could imagine the donkey probably sees the sky and we might even imagine that for the sky for the donkey disguise probably blue reasonable to assume that given that you know mammals have a similar nervous system and so forth eyes work the same way probably between donkeys and humans too reasonable to assume of course so we don't really know but we can assume that and so so I don't explain this so even though that's true the donkey does not have in his mind in his consciousness the idea that the sky is blue you see even though the sky might be blue for him that doesn't mean he can affirm the statement in his mind the sky is blue nor does he even know what truth is nor does he even know what the sky is or what a color is okay this is very important it might seem like I'm just making some hair-splitting semantic distinctions here but this is very important to understand there's a very big difference that thing which is blue might be there for the donkey but when we say the sky is blue is true that's an additional layer of cognitive stuff that we're adding on to what was there originally see even like for a human baby he can see a blue sky but he's not going to know anything about it nor can he say that that statement is true see that's important so what you need to see here is that relative truths are second-order it's something your mind is doing on top of the reality which is there and also it's important to note that relative truth has an opposite which is namely falsehood and we tend to think in terms of this duality something is true or something is false and then it must be either true or it must be false well that's gonna fly out the window when we get to absolute truth so all of that stuff I've been talking about that's not really truth now let's get to actual truth true through the capital T absolute truth what is this well it's tricky and the best way to show it to you is not by talking but through a little exercise so take out your hand do this with me right now take out your hand put it in front of your face about a foot or two away focus your eyes on it and look at it and be just become conscious of the fact that there's a hand here or some kind of object that you're looking at and I want you to to really train your consciousness on the fact that this this hand exists right now it's real this is real this is as real as real gets you're experiencing it right now that is absolute truth now widen your gaze and look around the room that you're sitting in look around see what's that what's what's here look up and down and side to side to actually do this with me and just become conscious right now get out of your mind and just become conscious that reality is happening right here this is reality this is as real as reality guess they can't get any realer than this be conscious of it of the entire room be conscious of the entire room that's absolute truth but of course you wonder will believe so so what what do you this is not a big deal who cares I already knew that no you didn't and you still don't you still don't I'm trying to point you to what it is but that doesn't mean you're conscious of what it is I'm just pointing you to it we got more to talk about here so stay patient with me here this is leading somewhere so what humans conventionally call experience our most intimate personal experience is absolute truth except with a very deceptive wrinkle which is that experience what we traditionally call experience is not what you think it is it's something else and that's what I need to explain to you here but before I do that though what I'm saying is that everything that happens to you everything that you experience is absolute truth in other words if something is happening to you it must be the truth interesting Lia why do you call it the truth and not just experience then and Leo how can you trust experience how do you know it's the truth these are all very good questions that we're gonna answer as we keep going here but let me tell you this truth is simply that which is the case if you want a definition for what truth is it's that which is the case or actually we could even remove one word from that definition or you just say truth is simply that which is well that's removing two words that which is the case or that which is truth is business itself truth is being truth is actuality truth is reality truth is direct experience that's what truth is but the trick is what is business what is being what is actuality what is reality what is direct experience what is existence so the question of what is truth is identical to the question of what is any of these other things that I just mentioned what is existence what is reality what is business have you ever wondered what is easing what does it mean to is now you might think well Lea this is just a silly word game nobody knows how to answer this it's just you know you can't really define what is this is but have you thought about what that means this is a very profound direction that we're going in that people usually don't go in they usually don't question reality this deeply and it's tricky how do you answer the question of what is business it might seem like that's impossible to answer that and yet what I'm telling you is that it is possible and I'm telling you that right now you have it answered it you don't understand what is this is which is why I mean to have this conversation and which is why this conversation is jut not just mental masturbation but it's actually practical it'll actually lead you somewhere I'm not wasting your time here believe me on that front I wouldn't be doing this if this was just all a word game and you know you might want to go into the dictionary and check what what does the dictionary say business is lookup is in dictionary what will they tell you you'll immediately find there's gonna be a problem there how do you define isness it seems like business is something so fundamental so rock to our experience of life that you can't even define it with words because words aren't fundamental enough to tell you what is 'no tsa's because words themselves are is explain what is this is they have to be they have to is and in fact do you have experience of anything that isn't ism some food for thought for you truth is the actual state of reality at all points in space and time truth is not your knowledge of reality truth is actual reality of which knowledge is one part this is where it gets tricky so I'm not saying that knowledge is separate from truth I'm saying that there is actual reality then there's a second-order knowledge of reality but that's still part of reality because knowledge is within reality cuz everything is within reality because the term reality includes everything it's one of those tricky terms that expands to include everything that's real so truth is reality itself so you see the problem with using knowledge to get out the truth is that knowledge itself leads to a sort of self reference problem because you're trying to use knowledge to get around at itself but knowledge is part of the thing you're trying to question so it's like you're trying to use a finger to point back at the finger you can't do it though that's because we've hit rock bottom you can't go any lower than truth you can't go any lower than reality you can't go any lower than easing so it's just it's so tricky to explain what truth is because it defies explanation that's our problem here but basically what I want to convince you of or suggest to you rather is that think of the universe as if it's sort of like you could say a machine and it can have any kind of state at once like let's say it's a computer hard drive you know computer hard drive has bits ones and zeros and you can flip those those bits on and off 1 or 0 and through this you can get different states of the hard drive and there are trillions of different states that every hard drive can take well imagine that reality is like that except it has no boundaries so it's infinite in all directions there's not a limit to how many bits there are in reality because reality has an infinite number of bits and so the truth would be the state of all the bits in the system whatever it is it doesn't matter which bits are turned on or off the truth is whatever bits are on or on and whatever bits are off or off and that's the whole state it defines the whole state of everything that is that's what absolute truth means and part of that state that is is this present moment right here right now so what I'm telling you is that reality is not made out of atoms the way that science says reality is made out of truth let me repeat that reality is not made out of atoms realities men of truth but what is truth so see we're at work we're trying to get deeper here and try to understand what is reality made out of you're trying to understand what is the very substance of the bits of which reality is made because you know if we're considering a hard drive you can say well Lea but but the bits in a hard drive what are the bits in a hard drive really made out of and you know you take a microscope and you zoom in on it you'll see some sort of circuitry some sort of silicon chips and whatnot I don't really know what they make them the memory out of some sort of silicon I assume you know flash memory or spinning disks with sort of magnetic coating on it what's the magnetic coating mataf iron I guess some sort of iron film on top of some sort of plastic or I don't know what they use copper in a hard drive you know the spinning hard drives so you might say well so leo so in a hard drive in your analogy here in a hard drive that bits are literally man of what like some sort of iron particles right if we get to the bottom of it's iron particles but then you're saying that reality is man of truth how can reality be man of truth what are the like what are the iron filings made out of well that's exactly our problem here you see the lower you go the more fundamental you get at some point you get to hit rock bottom and the problem here is that we got we hit the self-reference problem we get strange loops as we try to go deeper and deeper we get paradoxes as we try to understand reality in the deepest level the reason we get these soft reference paradoxes which I talked about it before in my own reality is a strange loop episode and I talked about before in the metaphysical implications of Google's incompleteness theorem I've talked about these strange loops the strange loops result because of a soft reference problem and that is that look when I'm sitting here or you're sitting there trying to understand what truth is the problem is that we ourselves are part of the truth that we're trying to describe which will necessarily lead to a a soft reference problem in a paradox because again the finger can't really point at itself and so this might make you think well okay leo so I guess we're stuck like we can't ever figure out what the truth is except we can there's a paradox within a paradox the paradox is that it seems impossible to understand the truth but actually it's possible it just requires a radical new state of consciousness it requires an epiphany it requires an insight it requires an awakening so yes in that hard drive those you know those bits let's say our man of iron atoms but then what are atoms Matt have quarks and what acrux made out of something smaller strings and what our strings mataf what see science can't answer these questions because of the self-reference problem but you can go beyond science and you can go beyond the self reference problem and you can realize that what everything is ultimately made out of including atoms strings molecules hard drives humans animals space-time and everything else is math truth I also want you to notice an interesting thing in this sort of model that we have where reality is these bits that are turned on and off if we turn all the bits off to zero that's still going to be truth so what I want you to notice is that it's impossible to escape truth truth is always the case because truth is not dependent upon any particular state of this system it doesn't matter if all the bits are off or all of them are on or whatever combination of bits in between is on and off and all this it doesn't matter that is the state of reality so we're actually talking about the entire state of the entire universe and not just at this point in time but all points in time in all points in space and not just this universe but all multiverses everything every last [ __ ] thing that could ever possibly be whatever it is whatever it was whatever it will be that's the absolute truth remember the definition of truth is that which is the case that means if you're sitting here and you've got an itch on your ass that is the case that is truth that's why it's happening to you if it wasn't the truth you couldn't experience it it couldn't be happening to you and this goes for everything that you've ever experienced in your life and anything that ever happened in history or will ever happen in the future so if you want to think of it from God's point of view so to speak imagine God sitting outside the universe somehow and looking down upon it as if that was possible looking down upon it and seeing the entire state of everything within creation has ever happened and that entire snapshot of the state of all of creation that would be the absolute truth but also not just the big picture but also the small picture so if God sort of took a telescope and zoomed in or a microscope and zoomed into the universe and you know looked at one little particle on one little leaf on one tree on one planet in one galaxy on earth let's say looks at this little leaf looks the particle zooms in on that whatever that's being shown to him that is also part of the absolute truth you see because the big picture is simply the summation of all the little pictures you might say every molecule that you can zoom into is part of the big picture just like the big picture is all of it at once now let's consider the following example I'm going to show you here an equation on the screen 1 plus 1 equals 3 and now I have a question for you is this the truth careful it's a trick question is this the truth what do you think yes or no the answer is yes now I deliberately picked this example because it's tricky and I want to illustrate the point so stick with me try to understand what I'm trying to say here it's a little difficult to to get it across what I'm saying here is not that 1 plus 1 actually equals 3 in the symbolic sense that you're looking at these symbols and try to interpret the meaning I'm trying to get underneath that I'm trying to help you to get underneath that to realize that there's something more fundamental about this equation than its meaning or its symbols are trying to convey so yes ordinarily we would say 1 plus 1 equals 3 is false because we're interpreting that from the symbolic level but what I'm trying to get you to do is to realize that that symbolic interpretation and that symbolic falsehood that's a second-order relative thing there's something more fundamental happening which we call truth which is the isness or the being or the very experience of the equation that's written here so in this sense I say that it's truth I'm not saying that it's true I'm saying it is truth are you catching that subtle difference to understand this you have to stop looking at this equation symbolically or what it means because the symbolism and the meaning of it is second-order before you can have a symbol that you can interpret and you can analyze whether it's true or false or whatever else well other kind of meaning you want to give it first of course you understand that the symbol has to exist it has to is it has to be and for it to be it must be part of the truth see it's not the whole truth river I I didn't say that this is the whole truth it is the truth but the truth includes all the little parts so this is one little part of the ultimate truth the ultimate big picture you see so somewhere in the universe right now obviously there exists one plus one equals three namely on your screen right here you're looking at it you're experiencing it so obviously it exists for you obviously it's true for you it is the case that's how this is part of the truth the absolute truth so what we're doing here is we're distinguishing between knowledge and isness and now here's the the real mindfuck that i want you to understand is that false things must also exist in fact the very concept and notion of falsehood which we ordinarily think is the opposite of truth actually exists it must exist because the only thing that exists are things that exist so the only way you can think of the concept of falsehood is because it exists in your mind right now it is the case the concept of falsehood is the case are you getting that you can't escape truth falsehood is a second-order relativistic thing not a first-order thing as far as first-order things go the rock-bottom of what reality consists of is only truth truth as an absolute truth with no opposite there is no opposite to absolute truth absolute truth does not no falsehood there actually isn't any falsehood in reality there's only falsehood as a concept there is no such thing as non-existence in actuality there's only non-existence as a concept you see to even think of non-existence that idea has to exist to even say that a statement is false the statement has to exist and you saying that is false has to exist these are not just words I'm saying something very profound here that you need to grasp at a level deeper than merely language and deeper than logic I want you to see that non-existence is impossible I want you to see that falsehood is impossible now of course you're suspicious and you're right to be suspicious you can be all suspicious of me as much as you want because what I'm saying is not based on a belief system or an ideology that I have what I'm saying is the truth it's actually what's happening it's actually what is the case I mean I'm explaining to you precisely how your experience works okay in your experience there actually is no such thing as non-existence there is only existence but you raise the objection but Leo this doesn't make any sense because look like I'm looking at you right now let's say for example and I'm seeing you of course you exist and I'm seeing the stuff around you this is all real ok we can agree on that it exists but what about a kangaroo like Leo there's no kangaroo right here right now so look the kangaroo does it exist good let's go with that example so notice what is actually happening there you're actually getting lost in concept but you're not aware of how you're getting lost in concept with this kangaroo so what's actually happening is that you're imagining a kangaroo in your mind that image of the kangaroo exists as an image in your mind and then furthermore you're projecting that image onto what is happening here on this screen before you and then you're kind of imagining like kangaroo could potentially exist here somewhere maybe a kangaroo could be sitting on my head you could imagine that and then furthermore you say to yourself well but yeah I think that could be the case but it isn't the case and therefore the statement that there's a kangaroo on Leo's head is false and therefore there's a the kangaroo doesn't exist but all of that that whole chain of of mental I don't know what you call it mental work mental gymnastics that you're doing all that conceptualizing that you're doing there in that scenario all of it exists so what is really happening when you think that non-existence is real is that you're fooling yourself it's like an optical illusion you're fooling yourself using your mind - is running through these cycles through these loops and it's from losing track of these loops and it's forgetting that really what it's doing is that it's it's easing it's creating your mind is literally creating the idea of non-existence but to create the idea of non-existence it has to exist so you're literally bringing non-existence into existence as a concept not as actuality because in actuality there cannot be non-existence you see there's only truth there's no such thing as falsehood falsehood is a conceptual second-order phenomenon pretty cool huh interesting interesting how about your death what is your death if non-existence isn't real is your death real can you die what is your death is your death actually something truthful is it actually a case a fact or is it something that you're imagining something conceptual in something second-order huh see now now we get into some interesting possibilities all of a sudden now all the sudden the possibility opens up that maybe maybe death isn't what you thought it was maybe death isn't as final as you thought it was interesting but you still might be asking leo but what is truth itself you still haven't told me you're playing these word games and it's like yeah I'm looking at my hand right now and you said my hand is the truth look at your hand but what are you really looking at what is it what is isness what is existence what does it mean to say that something is true well I'm not being slippery on purpose here even though it might sound that way this is just the very nature of the limitations of language and not just language but logic and the human mind you see where we're getting so deep that we're starting to transcend language and we're running into paradox what truth is cannot be told to you because it's already right in front of you right now and yet you're still not getting it see the only one who can grasp what truth is is you I can't do it for you only you can do it for you because the truth is intimate it's it's infused directly into your state of being in your state of consciousness the truth is not some foreign object that we can look upon with a telescope or a microscope and we can analyze it as though we're some sort of impartial observer we are intimately interwoven with the very thing that we're trying to understand here so if you're asking me to tell you what the truth is you fundamentally misunderstand what the truth is because I can't tell you what the truth is because the truth is right in front of you and any word that I say will just be more truth more parts of the truth more isness I'm easing at you here this entire video I'm just easing at you but you don't know what is this is so how do you find out well you is your isn't put your awareness on is in itself and keep it there and keep it there and keep it there and keep it there until you get very bored and frustrated and keep it there some more and keep it there some more and keep it there for 10 hours keep it there for a hundred hours keep it there for a thousand hours keep it there for 5,000 hours and at some point it will dawn upon you what is nice is and that will be a revolutionary discovery for you even though really nothing will change the colors and sights and sounds of this room will still all be the same nothing will really change yet at the same time everything will change because suddenly you will understand in one fell swoop what existence is you see the problem here is that it's like I'm trying to explain to a donkey what his reflection is in the mirror I'm trying to get him to recognize his reflection and I have this giant mirror and I'm holding up in front of the donkey and I'm pointing to the to the mirror you know the image here's the donkey's reflection and I'm telling you no I'm grabbing the donkey by the ears I'm I'm pulling and I'm saying it looks stupid look at look at your face this is you you look you this is you I'm doing this I'm yelling at the donkey but the donkey's standing there giving me a stupid look and he just doesn't understand and nothing I say or do will make him understand unless he has a massive epiphany and a a sudden insight or a realization of like oh that's me Oh like that that's that's our communication gap here see you are that donkey you know people take for granted the ability to recognize ones image or reflection in a mirror this is a highly sophisticated thing that only the most advanced life forms can do most animals on this planet cannot do it chips can do it I think dolphins can do it a few other animals can do it Ravens I think can do it and a few others but most animals can't do it they're not conscious enough likewise most humans are not conscious enough to recognize what business is what truth is and so because of this it seems impossible but then again plenty of people have done it so you can do it it's just that it takes some work it's not a biological thing it takes work it takes practice you cannot understand what truth is without a massive awakening it's also impossible to know what the truth is without knowing what the truth is it's a catch-22 to know what the truth is you have to already know what the truth is if you knew what the truth was you wouldn't need to watch this episode and if you don't know what the truth is and you watch this episode you still won't know what the truth is so how do you get to the truth well you can't get to it because it's already here it's already here you're just not recognizing it it's a function of recognition it's a lack of consciousness that's the problem it's not a lack of proof it's not a lack of evidence it's not a lack of logic it's a lack of consciousness on your part truth is not something your brain as thinking or holding truth is not something your mind is doing truth isn't a thought a thought is part of the truth I want you to consider the following interesting scenario if the entire universe was destroyed the truth would still exist what leo how could that be so because the truth would be that there is no universe you see the truth becomes whatever is the case remember what I said truth is that which is the case so if it is the case that there is no universe that's the case that's the truth if it is the case that there is a universe that's the truth see truth is a really slippery beast you might think well Leo but what if there just isn't any truth but you see you contradict yourself if you imagine a scenario in which like let's say you imagine an alternate universe where there never was any truth at all a non truth universe if that's the case then that would be the truth the truth would be that there is no truth see in this way like I said before the truth is inescapable and it's absolute you cannot destroy the truth because destruction itself must be the case if you imagine destruction if destruction happens then that's what happens and that's what the truth is the truth doesn't care about the details of the universe the truth like that hard drive I was talking about it doesn't matter if you flip all the bits to off that doesn't bother the hard drive it's just in that state it's sort of in an off state so the universe can be in an off state or an on state or anywhere in between it doesn't matter that's what it is and it is that so when we say that there is no universe you might say well it's been destroyed and therefore there there exists nothing but be very very careful about how you're thinking about this in that example they're literally exists nothing which is not the same thing as non-existence because remember non-existence isn't a real thing non-existence is a concept non-existence has to exist as a concept for there to be non-existence so if you actually completely wipe the universe clean to just a completely blank slate what you're left with is not non-existence what you're left with is pure empty existence pure isness pure formlessness which is pure absolute truth which exists it exists because it is existence itself it is what is the case truth is not a linguistic or a semantic notion all things and all concepts depend upon their first being truth truth is prior to everything else including all physical objects time space and the universe in fact all those objects time space and the universe energy matter and all of that that is just an aspect of the ultimate truth now let's address another important objection that you probably have which is the one about experience so you might even be agreeing with various things that I'm saying here but then of course you're coming from the materials paradigm so you have to bring up the objection of subjective experience something along the lines I believe yeah okay you're describing our experiences here and maybe our experience our human experience does work this way that you're where you're talking about but this is just human experience human perception why are you placing so much importance on human perception it's just human perception people can hallucinate stuff and you know this isn't the real world the real world is out there behind the curtain of perception how do we know what daddy is here is where the ego comes in the problem is that the ego has co-opted absolute truth or is Nisour being and has turned it into a conceptual amalgam that we call conventionally experience there actually is no such thing as experience or perception as I have explained in my episode what is perception go check that out for a detailed explanation but there is no such thing as perception or experience there is only absolute truth perception and experience is a second-order thing that the mind projects on to the truth it's a it's an illusion it's a delusion you might say because you're committed to the idea that you exist so because you think you were born and because you think you exist as a human as a biological entity you think that this truth here is somehow happening to you through a system of of perception their sense organs there's light molecules bouncing forth you know photons and so forth bouncing into your eye getting interpreted the mind is creating all of this this whole scheme that you have learned from science and from culture this is all a self-involved fantasy that allows you to believe that you exist as a human being as a biological creature that was born in time and in space that's the ego that's you that's what you think you are so right now I'm telling you that you're not real so to understand what truth is you would have to stop believing that you're real which which explains why truth is so rare and which explains why truth is so little understood by by human beings which explains why scientists don't know what the truth is why philosophers don't know what the truth is why many spiritual people don't know what the truth is because they're committed to their existence and the only way you will understand what the truth is is by realizing that you're not real so what is the thing that's preventing you from realizing everything I'm saying in this episode it's your insistence that you are real it's your insistence that you're a human that you're a biological entity that's an illusion there are no biological entities there are no sense organs there is no such thing as perception there is only absolute truth and there is no such thing as experience and there is no such thing as subjectivity there is only objective absolute ultimate truth this truth is so objective that it's true across the board for the entire universe for all living beings because all living beings are solutions so here's the trick that your mind has been playing on you it's been telling you that this this world of colors and sights and sounds and ideas and personal feelings and emotions and pains and suffering and all of this human all of this animal stuff that you thought you were experiencing which wasn't the actual real world you thought the real world was somewhere behind a curtain this is the real world this is the universe this is reality the universe reality is acting like a human or like an animal and it's having feelings and sensations they can get horny and hungry and it can cry and it can get angry and pissed off and they can get his feelings hurt it could be happy it can be sad it can be depressed the universe can be all these things the universe is all these things because look here it is you're doing it actually you're not doing it it is doing you are you getting this make sure you don't misunderstand me when I say that there's no such thing as experience or perception I am NOT saying that if you realize this that all the colors and sights and sounds will disappear all the emotions and feelings will disappear and you will be in some sort of black hole that's not what I'm saying I'm saying all the colors and sights and sounds and feelings and emotions will all be here exactly like they were before but the only thing that will be missing is you you will be gone you so imagine that we took the universe and we kept it precisely as it is we took your entire perceptual field that you thought was the purpose perceptual field and we keep it precisely as it is nothing changes but the only thing we do is we take a magic wand and we hit you over the head and you disappear you disappear I don't mean your body that your body doesn't disappear you disappear that thing you think you are inside the body that thing that thing I'm pointing at that that right there that's not the body nor is that colors or sounds or shapes or feelings the thing that is experiencing all the colors and sights and feelings the thing that I'm pointing my finger at right now is that thing that thing that you think is you that thing that you think is gonna die that thing you think was born that thing imagine that we got rid of that thing and everything else stayed the same are you getting that then what would happen if we could get rid of that thing is that experience would be recontextualized perception would be recontextualized into pure objective absolute truth subjectivity would disappear from the universe there is no such thing as subjectivity unless you imagine that you exist so if you're wondering we'll Leo how is it possible that a human being could access absolute truth objective truth it seems impossible because we're stuck in subjectivity but what you're not realizing is that you're only stuck in subjectivity because you imagine that you're a subject stop imagining that your subject and subjectivity will cease to exist and then you will be left with pure objectivity what you thought was subjectivity will become objectivity and through this way we can access absolute truth even though were just mere humans of course the reality is that were not mere humans we imagine that were humans if we were actually humans you're right we could never access absolute truth fortunately enough for us we're not humans because humans are imaginary it's a lot to take in I understand I know it's a lot to take in but uh there's no other way let's just go for it directly why beat around the bush right by the way if you're having an emotional reaction against this notice that your mind is designed with elaborate sophisticated ingenious defense mechanisms to prevent you from understanding what I'm saying so if you get angry depressed fearful if your start if your heart starts to pound and race if you make a little panic attack if you little taste of existential terror you're right on the right track those are defense mechanisms fear is a defense mechanism anger is a defense mechanism criticism of me is a defense mechanism every reaction you have against this information as a defense mechanism that is trying to distract you from the truth penetrating right through you and annihilating you see because you're trying to survive the truth is that you're not interested in the truth you're interested in survival and it's it's hard to bust through that veil of disinterest that you have contrary to what many Western philosophers believe the truth is not an epistemic EnOcean truth is actually metaphysical but also really what happens is that metaphysics and epistemology as a duality these two they they must be reconciled and they must interpret rate and unify into one and so that's what happens in non duality that's what happens at a non dual state truth is non dual truth is the unification of all dualities and so what we're doing when we're eliminating the the you we're eliminating the experiencer of experience we're eliminating the perceiver of perception such that all that remains is just pure experience or per your perception but what is pure experience or pure perfect perception it's absolute truth here are some interesting features of absolute truth absolute truth has no opposite absolute truth cannot be proven by scientific experiment absolute truth cannot be captured in a symbol absolute truth cannot be captured in a mathematical equation absolute truth cannot be quantified enumerated or formalized in any way absolute truth cannot be communicated absolute truth cannot be taught absolute truth is infinite absolute truth is one singular total absolute truth is utterly paradoxical and illogical and it makes no sense to the mind absolute truth must necessarily negate itself any quality that you ascribe to absolute truth is both true and false and both and neither that's the paradoxical nature of truth because absolute truth possesses all qualities including the quality of having no quality and so when you ask what is the isness what is existence what is truth Lia what is it you still haven't told me what it is it's nothing isn't anything there it's consciousness consciousness is nothing right now put your consciousness on your consciousness put your awareness on your awareness and ask yourself what is awareness what is this mysterious thing called awareness do it right now and notice that there's nothing there that's pure existence pure isness pure truth awareness you can't find any form or quality to awareness because the quality of awareness is that it has no qualities but also it has all qualities and all forms say it goes full circle it's very paradoxical don't worry if you're not getting it this is like I said this is some of the most advanced stuff that you'll ever hear me say this is one of the most advanced teachings that you could hear as a human being this is a very tricky stuff so it'll probably take you years to understand everything I say here don't worry about that you know we gotta just start somewhere just jump right in try to figure it out and then you know some of you will actually get it but you might be lucky and you'll get it for a second and then you'll lose it that's usually how it works you'll get it for a split second or you got it for a minute and then you lose it don't worry about that - that's all just part of the process you're gonna have to keep piercing through that veil over and over and over again until this this this understanding stabilizes we're just we're just getting you started here are some other aspects some important aspects of truth truth is consciousness truth is the whole universe truth is God truth is love truth is uncaused a mechanical and self created truth is eternal meaning in us outside of time truth is not localized it's not limited to space truth is intelligent and sentient truth is good absolute good with a capital G truth has no beginning or end there is nothing beyond the absolute truth truth is everything and simultaneously nothing truth is form and formlessness truth includes all dualities and distinctions and differences truth is all-powerful it creates everything because it is everything truth is now the present moment of now is the truth truth is impossible to avoid truth is mysterious and mystical by its very nature truth is not knowing truth is utter mind [ __ ] truth is enormous truth is life transforming truth is so important that it is beyond importance truth is so meaningful that is beyond meaning truth is life and death truth is the only thing there is and could ever be truth cannot be turned into an ideology truth is radical truth is awesome and terrifying at the same time truth is paradise and total perfection truth is self-awareness truth is self-illuminating self knowing and self-evident truth is omniscience truth is totally direct it has zero process method or mechanism truth is a solution to all human problems truth is the aim of all philosophy and spirituality truth has many practical implications which I won't be getting into in this episode but just know that they exist many many practical implications truth is you you are the truth truth is not something you think or know truth is what you are pretty cool huh now I said a lot of deep stuff there I equated truth with many different things and you're probably scratching your head about some of those and I just don't have enough time right now to go into detail on each one of those things that I equated truth with just know that what I said is correct if you investigate this stuff for yourself for years eventually maybe after a decade or two you will discover that everything I just said in that list is correct but if you have to really work at it one of the trips was truth is that it's multi-dimensional it's got layers to it it's got aspects to it it's got degrees to it and so what that means is that even if you understand one aspect of the truth that doesn't mean you understand all the aspects of the truth there's a lot there so I through a lot of different aspects at you some of them might still be mysterious and puzzling and confusing to you that's okay just understand that I'm just kind of giving you a road map you know a high-level road map that you'll use for a decade going forward in your in your work so now let's do a little FAQ first question Leah where did the truth come from like how did it get here it must have come from somewhere right who created it was it the Big Bang was it God what it didn't come from anywhere because anywhere it might have come from is a place that you have to imagine and anywhere it goes to is also a place so you need two places but these two places they are the case remember anything is the case is the truth so if there are two places that already is the truth so where do those two cases come from nowhere not only are they coming from nowhere they are nowhere now everywhere is nowhere no when no how no thing the truth is nothing which is everything which is infinity which is what all of this is what is infinity everything that's precisely happening right now exactly as it is and the way that has always happened throughout the whole universe throughout all of human history that is infinity everything is infinity the definition of infinity is your life you're living it you're living through infinity your life is like one wormhole through a giant ball of infinity this is what infinity looks like your life my life your parents life your dog's life and so forth that's infinity where did it come from it didn't come from anywhere because it's actually nowhere and it's nothing and how is that possible it's possible because there's no difference between possible and impossible and that's God where did God come from God always was its eternity it existed forever it can't go anywhere because it has nowhere to go because for it to go somewhere it would need to have somewhere to go but how can I have something where to go if that's somewhere to go is already part of it see can't go anywhere it's stuck it's stuck for eternity you're stuck here for eternity you exist forever sorry to break it to you next question but Leo what if you're deluded all of this sounds nice but couldn't you be wrong you talked about LSD and psychedelics isn't that just delusions yeah there's just no way to get around it you see the problem here is that it's like you're sort of like that donkey I'm pointing to your reflection I'm showing you the reflection and you're asking me but Lea what if you're deluded what if I'm not the donkey what if I'm not the reflection and how do you answer that you can't answer it it just is what it is you can't explain truth any further truth is the most fundamental thing there is so I understand if you think I'm deluded you might have your reasons for believing that I totally understand but the truth is just the truth I can't really you know come up with a little story for you do a little song and dance for you to convince you that Debbie what is this this is not what we're doing here well I'm doing here I'm not trying to convince you of anything I'm trying to just show you things that you're overlooking the most obvious things that you're overlooking in your direct experience right now and so my claim is that if you want to know what I know just do the things that I tell you to do well use the techniques I tell you to use and you will come to know the things that I know all right it's not complicated this is exactly how science works you know like if a scientist tells you that there's a new planet that he discovered in our solar system an 11th planet or whatever and you tell them well but what if you're deluded the scientists will say well look here I have a microscope or telescope go look into the telescope and there it is and if you tell him but but what if you're deluded about telescopes what if telescopes are delusionary well nobody can help you dude if that's your position you can't be helped you're stuck you're [ __ ] you're like that dog you can't understand see what you need to be much more worried about is not my own delusions but yours what if you're deluded what if this is the absolute truth exactly I'm telling you but you're so deluded you're so attached to being yourself that you think this is all subjective you think this is your personal experience yeah you know what that's called that's called egotism daddy is the very heart of delusion so the irony is that you're projecting your own delusion onto me what I'm telling you what I'm pointing you to is absolute truth you're too deluded to understand it therefore you call me deluded that's a defense mechanism we already talked about those next question but Leo what if there's something beyond absolute truth aha I have you I have you Leo how do you know how can you possibly know that there can't be something beyond absolute truth you can only ask this question when you don't know and aren't conscious of the absolute truth absolute truth is infinity its boundless it's everything there can't be anything beyond it because it is all things you got to understand that if you don't understand that then to you you have absolute truth as a concept in your mind when you have absolute truth as a concept in your mind then yeah you can imagine something beyond it but that's because you didn't actually have full consciousness of it it was just a concept in your mind of course you could have another concept another concept in your mind but what I'm telling you is that absolute truth is the sum total of all possible concepts you could ever have so if you can imagine something beyond absolute truth the absolute truth is that it includes that already and if you can imagine something beyond that it includes that as well it includes everything you could possibly imagine because it is your very imagination the imagination you're using to come up with these objections is itself the absolute truth that doesn't mean your objections are true it just means that you're deluded you're confusing conceptual truths with absolute truth next question but leo how come science doesn't validate what you're saying what you're saying here sounds so radical and it sounds so significant and important that surely if this was true you would get alike a Nobel Prize or something right but who would give me a Nobel Prize if the people handing out the Nobel Prize are themselves unaware of what truth is how are they gonna validate what I'm saying they can't the very nature of truth is that it can't be validated because it's you you got to get it you got to get it it's sort of like you're asking you know imagine that donkey Bachelet that donkey could talk and he was very skeptical about this idea that that this image in the mirror is actually him so he was talking back to me and you know coming up with cute objections and one of his objections was something like this well Leo if that image in the mirror really was me if I was that donkey then this is the most radical radical discovery ever you should get a Nobel Prize for that why don't you get a Nobel Prize well because the people who are running the Nobel Prize Committee are also [ __ ] donkeys just like you and when I show them the mirror they also will say the same thing you see the delusion is so thick that it's very difficult to escape you can't depend upon other human beings validating this for you sorry that's not how truth works why do you assume it should work that way what if absolute truth is only something you can access personally yourself what if what if that's true that means that all of your appeals to science mathematics professors Pope's and priests and Zen masters and gurus none of it will help you none of it will help you and that is in fact the case next question leo what is the relationship between absolute truth and relative truths like science and mathematics are you saying that all of science and math is [ __ ] how can that be the case because you know science and math they seem to work we sent a man to the moon or so so people believe if you're not a conspiracy theorist you know science has accomplished some amazing things that's true science has some accomplished some amazing things and the reason that is is because science is full of relative truths and math is full of relative truths and relative truths in the relative world the world that we live our life in are very handy and useful and important and they can help you to survive but it's not absolute truth science is not based on absolute truth because the interesting thing about absolute truth is that it's not necessary to know absolute truth in order to live life in order to do science in order to just kind of like engage in the relative world knowing the absolute truth is not important for that but also it is important because relative truths do have to correspond in some way with absolute truth there is some sort of tracking that's going on between scientific truth and actual isness and being you know when we say that the sky is blue we are saying some sort of partial truth we're capturing some essence of the absolute the absolute is the actual sky and it's actual color but when we have a second-order conceptual statement about it like the sky is blue or whatever yeah we're capturing some aspect of it but never the whole relative truth are always finite an absolute truth is infinite and so you can keep discovering more and more relative truths till it until the end of time and you will never exhaust all of them nor will you ever get to the absolute because the absolute is right here right now you don't get to the absolute by an accumulation of relative truths you get to the absolute by realizing it's everything at once and science and math are just not in that business they're in a different business they're not in the business of finding absolute truth they're in the business of studying relative my new show in the world they're in the business of studying form and all form is relative contingent it's changing all the time it's dependent upon perception and experience and all this it's dualistic see science doesn't care about and doesn't study metaphysics and what we're talking about here is metaphysics yet at the same time I'm there really isn't a difference between metaphysics and physics or between your everyday life unless you believe there is which is the case with science next question well Leo it sounds like you're saying that there's two truths there's the relative and there's the absolute isn't that a duality shouldn't reality be non-dual like you said all the time in the past isn't that the highest truth that everything's non-dual but then you pause these two different truths how can that be again this is the the paradoxical nature of truth is that it's both its non-dual and its dual ultimately when you're at the highest level of non-dual consciousness there is only one thing there's only absolute truth there are really no relative truths even all the relative truths sort of collapse into and just become one aspect or facet of the absolute but most of us most of the time are just sort of in a in a in an ordinary conventional dualistic state of consciousness and we're just going about our lives and so in that sense it's helpful to talk about the relative and the absolute as though they're two separate things they're not really two separate things but it's helpful to distinguish them precisely because we need we need not only the whole truth but we also need partial truths partial truths are useful for manipulating reality see you can't really manipulate reality effectively when you know all of reality as one whole you can't do anything with it you got to like break it up into pieces and chunks then you can shift those chunks and pieces around in the same way that you know if you just have one solid harddrive of date of like all ones and no zeros you can't do anything with that hard drive the function of the hard drive is precisely in that you can do subdivide all the different bits into little pieces and then you can make a very complex soup of ones and zeros which creates the thing that you're working with and you can shuffle those around using software and then that allows your computer to do sophisticated stuff so that's kind of how is working and not just science but ordinary human life you know there's truth in science there's choose within business there's truth within relationships this truths within your everyday life like you can ask your your spouse hey did you go to the grocery store to pick up the milk and the spouse can tell you yes or no and we can correlate that with stuff that's happened with evidence and all that that's all relative but also it's all it's all absolute as well it's just that the relative is a part of the absolute it's sort of like if I have my hand here I can either talk about the entire hand or I can talk about one of the fingers but the finger is not different from the hand it's just one part one aspect of the hand see so when I called the finger a hand I'm not lying the finger is a hand it's just a part of the hand get that next question Leo how is absolute truth useful or practical this is tricky to answer because on the one hand it's not useful and practical at all that's not its function on the other hand though what you have to understand is that usefulness and practicality itself is a part of absolute truth if there was no absolute truth usefulness of practicality couldn't exist because there would be no world so if you want to know what is the function of absolute truth the function of absolute truth is to be the substance of the entire [ __ ] universe you see the problem is that when you're in the universe and you take you to the universe for granted when you take existence for granted then you can sit around and you can wonder well Lea what's the usefulness of existence but do you realize the stupidity of that logic because if if you're treating existence as though it's not useful well that means that the existence of your daughter is not useful the existence of your parents are not useful the existence of sex is not useful that means money doesn't exist and it's no longer useful what is usefulness usefulness requires existence so it's so useful that is useless of course it goes full circle the absolute truth is so useful that it's useless which is precisely why nobody cares about it nobody pursues it and nobody gets it next question leo why should I pursue the truth what's in it for me first of all that's a stupid question what's in it for me stop asking what's in it for me all the time that's your problem right there you'll fix 50% of your life problems by just stop if you just stop asking what's in it for me the other answer to your question here is that you shouldn't there is no should if you want to pursue the truth if you're curious if you're interested if it's something that appeals to you then pursue it and if it doesn't if you don't give a [ __ ] then don't go away do something else go watch some stupid cat videos on YouTube I won't care that's what most people do anyways there is absolutely no reason for why you should pursue the truth that's the truth but also at the same time I don't want to make it seem as though pursuing the truth is a completely frivolous activity which will not improve your life in any way it'll improve your life enormous ly in many ways and I've talked in past episodes about how Awakening can benefit you in various selfish ways primarily the benefit to defining the truth beyond just the beauty of it and the wonder of it is that it eliminates suffering that's probably your most selfish reason to pursue it suffering is an illusion suffering is falsehood so when you discover the absolute truth it cuts out a lot of suffering for your life and in fact that's most why most people end up discovering the absolute truth if they do is because they suffer so much that the suffering leads them desperately to want to escape it and so they end up stumbling their way into the truth although I don't really recommend that approach first of all to this very painful second of all because there's a higher motivation if you want to pursue the truth pursue it because you care about it pursue it because you value truth for truths sake pursue it for the beauty pursue it for the love of it pursue it out of curiosity not because you want to escape some suffering next question leo how can I discover absolute truth for myself what do I need to do you need to begin to meditate and develop a laser focused concentration ability you need to do yoga I recommend Kriya yoga I've talked about it in the past I have guides about it on the forum go check out the forum where there's some threads about how to begin create you go I have books on my book list about Kriya yoga check that out powerful technique you need to start doing psychedelics probably the most powerful technique for discovering absolute through this psychedelics you can start doing self inquiry you can start contemplating using a journal I have an episode about that how to contemplate using a journal I also recommend you start to read some books on my book list about truth and about non-duality about spirituality about consciousness watch more of my videos put in the time and actually do the practices meditation concentration self inquiry psychedelics yoga that's basically how you get there if you're not doing those practices you'll you'll not get there so start doing them and there's other methods you know there's a lot of different spiritual techniques out there but these are the ones I feel are the most powerful the ones that I'm most familiar with so that's what I recommend but you can find crazy stuff like you know Jesus supposedly went out into the desert and spent 30 days or 40 days how long I don't know he was out in the desert with no food and no water you know that's a classic spiritual technique it's called the Vision Quest that could work again it's very painful I don't I don't recommend it but you could do that you know Jesus also did baptism you know what baptism is not that not the [ __ ] they do today real baptism is when somebody grabs your head dunks you into a river full of water until you start to choke and suffocate on the water until you're right at the brink of asphyxiation and death and then they pull you out that's real baptism that's a spiritual technique again I don't recommend you use that it's kind of dangerous these days you know cut up barbaric but hey that's what people used in the past to to awaken to the truth next question Leo how will I know that I've actually discovered the absolute truth and then I'm not just deluding myself that's a very good question it certainly is possible to delude yourself as you go about pursuing absolute truth but at the same time there is a moment where you will actually have a genuine authentic awakening to the absolute truth and it will be self-evident you will know it because you will be it it is self validating it is the highest authority in the universe sustains our universe what other authority do you want do you want the Pope to come validate your Europe your awakening you don't need it by the time you're awake you don't need anyone to validate your awakening but until you get there yeah you could delude yourself so be careful don't worry it's to be a massive massive massive epiphany when you understand absolute truth you understand the entire universe in a sense you know that's a big deal very big deal it's not something that you just like accidentally it happens to you and then you you know you you sleep through it and it's like damn it Leo I I got I woke to the absolute truth but I slept through it or I was just distracted watching television or something you know my dog was barking ayat I overlooked it and now I don't know what it is like it doesn't work this way next question Leo how can a psychedelic reveal the app so the truth isn't psychedelics just a chemical in the brain no it's not you think that a psychedelic is a chemical in the brain but a psychedelic has nothing really to do with chemicals or brains it just does the answers it just does it won't make sense to you try it and you'll see it the proof is in the in the tests we run the tests and see what happens I will guarantee you that if you do enough psychedelics you will be revealed the absolute truth it's just it's just the case it's just a fact I can't give you a little cute story about why it is the way it is it just is this [ __ ] way and it can't be explained to you because you're not awake once you awaken then you'll understand it'll be so shocking that you'll understand why I couldn't explain it to you next question Leo how can truth be love isn't love just an emotion this is a deep question I I don't really want to go into explaining it too much sure I'll have dedicated episodes in the future about how truth and love are connected I'll just say for now that they're absolutely identical love is not an emotion love is not a human thing love is the very substrate of existence love is consciousness love is nothingness love is truth I know that sounds outlandish you don't believe that the universe can possibly love leo how can the universe love this is silly it's so new agey well you're deluded so it can't be explained to you until you awaken you need to have an awakening into the nature of what love is and just because you had an awakening into the nature of truth does not mean you understand what love is that's an additional little wrinkle right there next question but Leo if I go pursuing the truth like you say and then I find the truth isn't it possible that my truth will be different from your truth like maybe you know different people can have their own truths no that's not possible you can interpret it in different ways you can conceptualize the apse of the truth in different ways you can speak about in different ways you can use different metaphors you can access different aspects of it but it itself is singular and if you really go deep with this and you discover all the aspects you'll see that it accords with what I'm telling you here so you're not gonna have this problem next question but Leo is what you're saying in this video is this the truth or not because if what you're saying here is the truth then you contradict yourself because you say the truth can't be spoken and get Leo if what you're saying here isn't the truth then why am I even listening to you because everything you're saying here is false and it's not the truth and you also contradict yourself because supposedly you're telling me what the truth is here and yet you're also trying to tell me that this isn't the truth so which is it are you saying the truth or not yeah now you understand the the paradox this is the paradox see you're stuck in your mind you're stuck with these dualistic categories like I told you the truth cannot be communicated and of course I'm not above that limitation all the words that I use are not the absolute truth but also they are you got to get it if you're still stuck debating with me here it's because you're stuck at the level of language you're stuck at the second order you need to move to the first order where you read between the lines where you don't look at the finger you look at the thing that my finger is pointing at you look at the moon and the last question is but Leo isn't it egotistical to say that you know the absolute truth I thought spirituality enlightenment was all about being humble and modest and you seemed so arrogant and narcissistic you're not modest at all shouldn't we be reasonable and admit that we just don't know leo shouldn't you just if you were honest wouldn't you just admit that you don't know isn't that what the truth is see you're very sneaky here and clever no the truth is just what it is you can be humble or not it doesn't [ __ ] matter to the truth I'm just being direct and blunt with you I'm trying to frame these teachings in a way that appeals to ordinary people I try to be a little bit dramatic I tried exaggerate sometimes I try to play it up sometimes I try to be emotional sometimes I try to be cute with you whatever I act out sometimes yeah to make this stuff interesting for me and for you I don't want to be up here just you know reading you a boring lecture about truth trying to make it kind of interesting so sometimes I'm in your face I'm provocative I like to deliberately provoke you sometimes by making outrageous claims but in the end if you go through this whole journey which what you'll discover is that every outrageous claim that I've made is gonna pale in comparison to what you will discover so I'm sometimes I exaggerate I bloviate and I do the sort of stuff I huff and puff because what I'm trying to communicate to you I'm not trying to strew strictly just like be too literal sometimes when I'm trying to be is be more poetic and I'm also trying to communicate to you on an emotion level the significance of what this is because it's not like you just discover the truth the absolute truth of the whole universe one day and then you just say like oh yeah okay cool I got it let's just go about my ordinary life like it's not like that it transforms you and I'm trying to get across to you the significance of that transformation because the whole point here is to inspire and to motivate you rather than just to to strictly give you some formal definition of what the truth is it is not egotistical to say that one knows the absolute truth if one does now if you have never experienced the absolute truth if you never become conscious of it directly then sure you'd be lying and you might wonder well Leo how do I know that you've actually experienced the absolute truth I can't know that of course you can't nor am i asking you to know it that I know it I'm asking you to know it for yourself or rather even I'm just I'm just inviting you I'm proposing this as a possibility I'm suggesting that it might be something worthwhile for you to pursue it's all I'm doing here it would actually be untruthful of me if I said that I don't understand what the absolute truth is because I do either you do or you don't and of course there's there's shades in between you can have different degrees of understanding I'm not saying I have the ultimate understanding I'm not saying I can't go further I certainly feel like I can but at this point I feel like I understand it enough that I am that I can I can share with you what I'm sharing with you now and be fairly confident about it now let me conclude this episode by giving you some warnings about truth cuz truth is a very very sneaky tricky thing there's nothing more sneaky than truth number one warning beware of anyone who claims to know the truth and touts the truth and uses truth as part of their brand name or teaching there are a lot of Devils in the world who like to construct various kinds of ideologies they construct these ideologies and of course all these ideologies claim to be the truth to know the truth to be the most truthful the most authentic be extremely suspicious in this this is the devil's number one tactic is to co-opt the truth of course the irony here is that I talk about the truth a lot so you're probably wondering well leo so does that mean I should be wary of you yes you should be aware of me from your perspective I could be a deluded a cult leader as far as you know I could be insane you don't know you have no idea I could be a murderer you don't know so yeah beware beware be skeptical validate everything I say don't don't take anything anything here as Dogma beware warning number two if you think truth is a property of the mind or the brain you don't understand what truth is if you think that truth is some human phenomenon you don't understand what truth is go deeper warning number three truth is not merely formlessness or cessation this is a problem I noticed some meditators and Buddhist types falling into there are certain states of consciousness that one can access where you can have a total cessation of all perception for example total formlessness they might call it and this might seem like the absolute truth and well that's correct that is that is the absolute truth but the mistake is to think that dad is the absolute truth while this here this formed world these colors and sights and sounds them spinning over myself that that that cessation is separate from what's going on here know what's going on here is precisely identical to cessation form and formlessness are identical so don't fall in that trap the entire relative domain is absolute truth in disguise cessation of experience is not necessary for realization of absolute truth although it could be a good a good experience to have but it's not mandatory nor is it the end-all be-all truth is right here right now always at all times under all conditions no matter what's happening whether you feel happy or sad whether you see colors or don't whether there are aliens raping you or not it doesn't matter the truth is always there the truth just is the case of whatever is happening if aliens are raping you that's the truth if all experience has ceased and there's just pure empty void the NASA truth warning number for one awakening does not guarantee that you will understand absolute truth there are many aspects to awakening in many degrees and depths to it so be careful you might have had a single awakening and maybe you have realized no self for example maybe you have had some glimpses into the fact that you're not real at your imaginary that you weren't ever born great but that does not mean you understand what absolute truth is you must go deeper in fact I suspect that most people who have their initial awakenings and glimpses of no self and and so forth they still don't know what absolute truth is in fact I know I know some Zen masters some meditation teachers who teach for decades they teach and you know in my interviews with that might my conversation with them I don't get the sense that they understand what truth actually is even though I consider them enlightened or awakened so you know to really understand what truth is you got to go very deep with this work and a little bit of meditation here and there it's not gonna be enough warning number five you will not access the truth without a change in your state of consciousness so don't be wasting your time sitting there and just kind of thinking your your way in to the truth you're not gonna think your way into the truth you need a change in your state of consciousness and the easiest way for you to do that is through psychedelics there are other ways there's yoga there's intense concentration there's meditation retreats and so forth the pass on uh all of those can help all those work but nothing is as immediate and as guaranteed as a psychedelic wish of course you have to be careful with I don't recommend psychedelics for for people under 21 you have to be mature you have to be responsible you have to do it carefully so just don't get the wrong idea here warning number six anything you think is the absolute truth is probably a lie stop fooling yourself the apps the truth is not what you think it is also I want to connect this a little bit with psychology because you might be wondering like at this point well leo but this is getting so abstract and so metaphysical that it's like what about just helping me in my ordinary life what is true that to do with that which is why I bring forth to you this quote by Abraham Maslow quote all the techniques of the therapist are in one way or another truth revealing or our ways of strengthening the patient so he can bear the truth and quote so he's talking about therapy patience and your thing in yourself well Leo I don't go to therapy I'm not a patient what does this got to do with me what this has to do with you is that all of us basically are therapy patients it's just that some of us go to therapy and most of us don't and it's the ones that don't who are really screwed up all of this work we're doing self actualizing it's therapy basically we're doing therapy work if you want to fix your life if you're frustrated with your life you need therapy but not therapy with a therapist you need to do your own inner therapy self therapy so what does that involve that involves strengthening yourself to be able to bear more and more of the truth as Maslow says here what is psychopathology it's being dishonest with yourself the gap between you and truth if it becomes too great all sorts of terrible dysfunctions arise in your life emotional problems addictions frustrations hang-ups bullying behavior cheating immorality devilry depression anger emotional problems laziness nihilism all of these are just symptoms surface symptoms of something much deeper which is your disconnection from the truth why are you unhappy fundamentally in your life why are you suffering why are you lost why are you confused why are you running around like a chicken with its head cut off because you're disconnected from truth and the more you resist and deny the truth the more dysfunctional you become and the worse it gets in your life goes into this downward spiral and you suffer more and more and more and more so this is why the truth is important in practice this is why the truth is not just some abstraction you need it to be fulfilled because only by being conscious of absolute truth are you conscious of your own true nature because truth is what you are right now you don't know what you are and so you are engaged in all sorts of dysfunctional petty activities to distract from discovering what you are which is your mission in this life is to discover what you are and what the universe is but you're so distracted by your survival needs that you've really lost your way and no amount of success within your survival needs will resolve this problem don't be fooling yourself into thinking that if if I just get a an extra hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars or if I just get a few more cars or a better house or if I get my dream girlfriend or if I get my dream husband that that will do it for me it's not gonna do it for you nothing will do it for you until you discover yourself as absolute truth that's what will do it for you and then from there you can live a good life the wise as human-beings pursue truth for truths sake not of suffering everything else that you're doing is nonsense become a truth seeker I promise you that it'll be worth it it will be worth it I can't communicate to you how much it will be worth it but precisely because the reward is so great the cost is also so great so you're gonna have to be willing to stomach the cost of seeking the truth and the cost will be yourself the cost will be your egotism but then again that's real change that's transformation you want to change in your life you want a significant improvement well you got to figure you got to do something radically different than you've been doing because if you just keep doing what you've basically been doing but you just change the surface of it you're not gonna get significant change what I'm talking about here is significant change a very different way to live your life alright that's basically it I just want to leave you with one final warning that this everything that I teach is not religion it's not even science I'm not asking you to trust me I'm not asking you to hold me as an authority figure as someone who knows more than you I'm just a guy who's pointing out stuff you can discover for yourself and your job is to do serious inquiry for yourself and to rediscover everything that I told you it does you no good just to listen to me you got to do the work you actually have to awaken and member that everything I said in this episode is not the truth but it also is the truth and this is my finger pointing to the moon alright that's it I'm done here please click like button for me and come check out my website that's actualized that order right there you'll find my blog where I post a lot of interesting and exclusive content including vlogs that I shoot various interesting YouTube videos that I share links that I share resources documentaries this cool stuff check that out check it periodically I update it multiple times a week check out my book list check out my life purpose course and come check out the forum and on the forum you can get any your questions answered we have some enlightened folks there who can guide you we have resources we just recently opened up a new sub forum on conscious politics and government and environment in society so we're having discussions there about that all good stuff and the last thing that I just want to reiterate to you here is that actualized org is not pretending to be the truth it might seem that way but that's not what it is that's what it's never been that actualize that org is just a set of relative partial contingent mental scaffoldings which help to guide you towards a deeper understanding of yourself in life that's all it is it's like training wheels do not take these teachings too seriously to literally their function is pragmatic it's not ideological I don't have an ideological function with my content I'm not trying to build some master philosophy and then program it into your mind of all my viewers and then to build the organization or religion around it or what I'm not trying to do that it's just mental scaffolding you use scaffolding to build the building and then you throw the scaffolding away that's exactly how my videos work you don't worship my videos you don't take them as gospel you don't even take them as truth you just recognize that these are helpful to you if they are if they're not stop watching them if they are keep watching them if they help to motivate you to inspire you that's the point if they help to engage you and to get you activated into into action into practices that's the point if they get you to to read new books and to study new videos and content and they expose you to new sources of information that's the point and then as you're going through the journey you're doing the practices you're discovering the stuff for yourself you don't need to go back and rewatch the videos unless you do unless you need a reminder unless you forget something but generally you don't need to go back and re-watch and study this stuff the way that Christians study a Bible you know you don't need to do that it's just scaffolding if I had a Bible if I took all of my teachers and I wrote it into a Bible the Bible would be that you read the whole Bible and the last page of the Bible would say and burn this book so you would read the whole book you would master everything in the book and then once it is no longer useful to you you take that book you throw it in the fire and then you walk off into the sunset and you enjoy your life that's what this work is so don't cling to it too much you