Transcript for:
Exploring Eudaimonia and Spiritual Growth

your psyche is like a fingerprint of God and the way information moves through you is completely and radically unique has never been created before will never be created again the creative process is the expression of the infinite through the individual fingerprint of God which is which I think would be your diamond what that energy wants to do is what a seed does to become a tree which is the active Act of creating eudaimonia is the long Arc of the expression of that function of creating in a way that the highest expression of what could have been becomes like I think you could look at the diagnostic and statistical manual as a list of all the ways your Daimon can feel like a demon when you're off balance welcome back to the transmission my friends I'm Gonna Keep the introductory Bardo brief but I've got to orient you somewhat because we've got an absolutely Titanic wide ranging mind meld for you today we Riff on everything from eudaimonia that is what it means to live a good life and how to actually do it to the Deep importance of introspective practices uh particularly but not limited to the lens of Buddhism uh we both get into the Practical kind of entry level ways of doing that that you've probably heard of along with some incredibly mystical ones that I can almost promise you you've never heard of that and a lot of other psycho spiritual mythopoetic fair that I don't think I could summarize if I wanted to because like I said this one is just such a sprawler a true brain melter so I will just let the conversational Wonder nuggets fall upon your ears in a virgin manner but I have to introduce Eric godzi if you don't know him he's one of my favorite Wonderful Whimsical homies to have in the mind meld he's wise Beyond his years he also has his own podcast it's called the myths that make us check that out along with everything else on air godzi via the portals in the description and it's hard to describe Eric godzi he's an auto didactic deep diver particularly on the subjects of psychology and spirituality and philosophy and Altered States I think when our two reality tunnels combine well I can at least say selfishly it's very valuable to me and with that let's just get into it but first I must request a like and a Hub tis truly helpful both here on YouTube and do subscribe as well wherever you listen to podcasts third eye drops has hundreds of episodes that are never going to be posted here and so much love and gratitude to the 150 or so of you over at patreon supporting these mind melds and do consider initiating yourself as well my friend if you are indeed uninitiated it not only supports the show really all those resources just go back into making this content but we have a lot of fun over there you can get Patron only physical rewards as well as access to a patron only Discord Patron only hangs Patron only book club link for that in the description as well and with that my friends let us pass through the portal of This truly sparkling epic mind meld with my Wonder brother Eric Godsey through the chasms of time and Circumstance and growth and withering my brother Eric wonderful to have you back in the mine melt it's good to be back man I really appreciate having these conversations with you yeah me too man me too you're you're continuously one of the people that I get the most messages about are podcasts always Trend toward the upper end of things so I and I love that they do man I love that they do because I really think the familiarity that we have with each other's like library of ideas and the way we look at the world it just it just it's very similar yet at the same time it has this like enhancement effect like it helps me clarify my own thinking about things and hopefully vice versa so I enjoy it immensely and I'm so glad that the audience seems to dig it too man yeah I find that whenever we talk like you help me extend the things that I've been thinking about because honestly the things that I'm really into there aren't a lot of people who like most people enjoy hearing about what I'm obsessed with but not many people are able to riff back at me in a way that extends it and so this is I selfishly deeply enjoy these as well yeah dude it's almost like I mean I feel this way about Humanity in general but I think it's like a web that's you know some brains are further and some are closer and it's like we happen to be in the same like little pocket of intellectual and philosophical brain power and it's like our trajectories are very similar but over time it's like even if you're going a little bit this way you're over in areas I haven't explored and I'm over in areas that you haven't explored and then we meet in the middle and we're like oh [ __ ] and then exactly a little little Epiphany after a little Epiphany um so I'm gonna hit you with a classic philosophical query with a little uh etymological sugar on top that I think you're going to appreciate and you may have already considered this I don't know but the classic question I guess this the simplest form of the question though I'm going to make it spicier is just what does it mean to live a good life but specifically what does it mean to achieve eudaimonia and I I assume you're familiar with that phrase at least you dimonia yeah do you know about the etymology of the word uh uh I know it's linked to the Daemon and that it's something about like being in possession or it possesses you or being in harmony with that Force yes yes so you're so you're already on this deeper level of considering this question that I wanted to to navigate with you and for people that don't know like Eric and I are both very interested in this idea that the Greeks called the Daimon that the Romans called the Genius and it's this idea of there being a guardian Spirit sort of attached to your soul attached to your fate and it's sort of saying it steers you in the right direction isn't is a little bit too much but it's essentially it's supposed to be the guardian of that Destiny and it's supposed to sort of speak to you and let you know through various cues like psychological circumstantial maybe Health when you're going too far off of the path you're meant to be on yeah so I think there's enough here that I just want to turn you loose on riffing on specifically how does how do you make sense of connecting that idea of living a good life with this Guardian Force called the diamond oh and by the way the etymology is literally um I have this up on the other screen it's literally so you EU means good or well and diamond so it literally just means good Diamond um I love that yeah so so how do you how do you make sense of that through your kind of mythopoetic yeah psycho magical lens yeah so um I think Rick Rubin has just written a book that is going to be read for hundreds of years wow and I think that that book is the most refined expression of the answer to this question that you're asking and I haven't read the whole book because I'm purposefully moving through it very slowly it's called the creative process a way of being and the core idea is that your psyche is like a fingerprint of God and the way information moves through you is completely and radically unique has never been created before will never be created again the creative process is the expression of the infinite through the individual fingerprint of God which is which I think would be your diamond and it's almost like what that energy wants to do is what a seed does to become a tree which is the active Act of creating and like if there's a if there's enough environmental genetic stressors on a organism it will develop Kinks and Knots and we call it mutations or whatever I think you dimonia is the long Arc of the expression of that function of creating in a way that the highest expression of what could have been becomes and your diamond will like I think you could look at the diagnostic and statistical manual as a list of all the ways your diamond can feel like a demon when you're off balance and that I think Carl Jung's story of The Rainmaker is one of the closest mythological stories we have of what happens when the ego is in flow with the diamond in a way where it's like you're Improv jazzing with the infinite all as it moves through your unique fingerprint and you're just playing jazz with it yeah and there's this fundamental essence of the Flow State and it's just like you're in the flow state with life constantly conscious of being in participation with the creative process because like one of the things that I'm reconnecting to through getting back into Buddhism is the nature of the untrained mind is that the majority of your waking consciousness you're distracted by thought without realizing that you're actively distracted by thought and that you know if you sit down and you learn how to do Insight Meditation you can taste glimpses of little fractions of time where you can appreciate oh I was just lost in thought the reason I'm even here is to keep my Awareness on my breath and that you know it's still beyond what I'm able to experience but one of the claims of Buddhism is that like the first so one of the key ideas in Buddhism that most people confuse is a state versus a trait in a state of consciousness is where you're able to temporarily experience a transformation in the perspective of your awareness to life yeah a trait is when a state becomes stable it's just how you always see and so one of the things that Buddhism claims and there's many people alive who claim that they're there like Sam Harris is one of them but it doesn't come up a lot in conversations because people will spend four hours trying to understand what he means about us not having free will right yeah but that you can get to a place where the majority of your Waking Life you are actually aware of the process of becoming fused with your identity and your triggers and then to come out of that confusion which is to be fused with it you know because Khan is like two were joined and then fused is together that you can get to a place where you realize that you are actively creating your experience in a way that is not woo-woo it's a way that if we wanted to talk for the next two hours about the cognitive psychology of how of the fact that we know that everything that you see is actually a remix of your sense organs taking in vibration to where your brain then creates a stable virtual reality for you to move in that is not a illusion because it maps meaningfully onto whatever the vibratory truth is of the book that you see or the table that you're going to set your cup on but that one of the things that is within that virtual reality is the idea of Eric and there's something about eudaimonia where you realize that the the work of art that we tend to fuse with the most is the identity and that the identity wants to be turned into a vehicle for your Daimon to come through and that the majority of our life is learning how to allow the transformations of our identity to occur to such a degree where we can let the most of the all come through us as a creative process yeah yeah and so the punch line for me is eudaimonia is to be in a state where you recognize that you're an artist I love that and then life becomes art like as a way of being you know it's like taking these states of I'm doing art and making a trait my entire life is Art yeah one of the beautiful things about that is it's like before I started getting back into meditating and it's just been the last week but I've been doing it every day in the morning and it feels great one of the things that I notice is whenever I'm talking to anyone and they start to talk about anything that subconsciously I can feel like I'm lacking at that like if my friend is talking about like making more money most of my life as soon as they start to talk about that I psychologically start to become defensive right and without even realizing it I'm generating contrary and opinions yeah yeah and well yeah maybe he has more money but I have this maybe he has more money but I'm younger maybe he has more yeah yeah the brain starts to run these scripts right yeah and so I'm and then once I like I'm playing with the state of like shifting my identity is also a part of the uh virtual reality that's being played and if I can just put my awareness into awareness as the totality of everything that is arising so my identity is as much a object as them in front of me speaking I'm able to just listen yeah you know like it literally happened today I had a friend who was talking about I'm currently in ketosis and we can talk about why I'm interested in that because it has to do with mental health and it's super interesting I want to shout it from the roof tops but I have a feeling it's probably because of a book right yep brain energy Chris Palmer yeah yeah I'm talking to him in a little bit Yeah epic and um but so my friend is a genius and he was talking about the Deep research about why glucose is way more healthy if you get it from the right places he and I have talked about this in the past I remembered what it was like to hear him talk about it I I remembered that I unconsciously kind of shut down even though I'm good at making my face stay calm and they probably can't tell that I'm shut down but maybe on a really unconscious level they can and I would generate ideas to try to like argue even without even but today I just let myself listen and try to pick out anything that was interesting that could help part of what I'm trying to do with my identity and so that's just one example but I think to come back what I think it is it's recognizing that the task of tasks the great work the Opus of our life is to make us as a identity a piece of art that our Diamond can step into most completely and then whatever comes out of that it's gifts for everybody it's right speech yeah it's right action it's right works in the world it's compassionate it cares or something about it that deeply [ __ ] cares about the well-being of the Arts it's making which is anything that it can comprehend all the people that knows the entire web of attachments that you have with all the people you love all that yeah man so first of all I gotta read this Rick Rubin book because I know he's been doing the rounds on pods recently I've heard some of them I do think he's a Master on the level of almost making me wonder like are you yep you know how every now and then you you hear someone speak with just such expertise in whatever their field is that you suspect that they might be part of like a secret lineage of sages or something like that I felt that way a few times in the past handful of years and it probably all stems from the fact that I'm familiar with this lore that like manly P hall would talk about that there's like the secret Brotherhood just sort of in the substream of culture just like guarding the secret knowledge he he seems like one of those people like he's deeply connected to this secret wisdom I could not agree more yeah and he has like the alchemical symbol for the sun on his book cover which is like yeah you could go deep down that rabbit hole if you if you wanted to but but yeah he and and he is on one of the core pieces of the wisdom of that tradition which we're alluding to which is this platonic idea which is probably pre-platonic but Plato talks about it in the Republic as we've talked about so many times that we have this pattern what he calls the fingerprint is the paradigma same thing that James Hillman called The Acorn and then the guardian being over that pattern that the fates have attached to you is the diamond and the more and the more you will have a good Daimon you dymonia if you are reverently attempting to navigate the Labyrinth of your own personal fingerprint but if you're just sitting there jerking off your dopamine receptors into whatever is going to distract you from that Labyrinth navigation you will not have eudaimonia you will have bad dymonia whatever the Greek translation of bad would be um and you're also really on to something and he's really on to something with this no notion of expressing that you dymonia through what we could call Art or self-expression because Aristotle's whole thing with eudaimonia was attached to the idea of Virtues and it gets a little complicated because I've been digging into this idea of Virtues a little bit because we're we're listening slash reading this book for the third eye drops book club um and it's actually written by the guy who created that show the good place have you ever watch that no but it's it's a [ __ ] fabulous show but I won't go off on a big tangent about it what's it called the good place so it's like a okay I will go off on the tangent so so it's a show that I was resistant to watching because it's like a network sitcom but within it it's all of this like spiritual knowledge and philosophical knowledge because the whole pretense of the show is that this cast of characters are all dead and they're in the afterlife and the main character lived she was a piece of [ __ ] basically her whole life but yet she wound up in the in the good place and now she's trying to make up for all of the misdeeds she did post death because she thinks she's going to be found out that she's actually was like this P selfish piece of [ __ ] her whole life so within the show they're like constantly exploring this idea of like what is virtuous what is moral what is good like you know if you you might think you're doing a good thing by shopping at a certain store or you know helping a certain person but what if that person is a piece of [ __ ] what if that thing you bought was made in a sweatshop and like meanwhile you're not actually you know so they're they're constantly playing with these ideas but anyway so I've been digging to the idea of like what digging into the idea of what is virtuous and if you actually look into the Greek idea of virtue it's this word like a-r-e-t-e so it's like ariati or something I call it a retail but that's probably yeah so the more common they say a better um a better translation is Excellence yep so to Nutshell it Aristotle thought that eudaimonia required one to lean into their own personal virtues or excellences so if you are Eric a basketball player or you are a writer or you are a whatever you and and you're doing that in line with what you think you're supposed to be doing this isn't like some job that you find yourself in like I think his idea of virtue would necessitate get the [ __ ] out of that job no you're like you're making your diamond angry by not leaning into your true virtues so the idea is do something aligned with your virtues then lean into your virtues or excellences and this will contribute to that sense of eudaimonia and what will the output be I think in every case we could say that whatever the output would be what could be called Art living that way could be called Art so I think it all comes together beautifully and in a very meaningful and way that you can sink your teeth into because this isn't hypothetical like the the ideas are hypothetical but but really I think everybody in their mind just now was like uh I know what my I know what one of my virtues is I know that I'm not doing something in alignment with my DOT whatever like I think it 100 so a really interesting overlap is the the like tonal energy of Excellence um in the buddhic lineage as translated through the main Harvard psychologists who really got deep into Buddhism the words they use to describe the State of Consciousness that the insight and meditation is trying to get you to is this called rainbow consciousness yeah and the inner image that comes to mind would be uh diamond is a structure that allows lighten at like the most open light can come in and then it gets refracted out in the full spectrum of the rainbow yeah yeah and that from the Buddhist lens it's like we all our core is that diamond consciousness it's literally diamond and that that what all of us have are layers of ribbons over that Consciousness that is our accumulation of personal identity stories yeah hold on one second so you're saying Diamond not diamond or were you or were you a like interlacing those words purposefully right that like how close is the word Diamond to Diamond whoa I wonder if there's possibly any relation there I choose to believe that there is like there's there's a there's a archetypical feeling that the type of tone that it wants to take in the human mouth has that Brilliance Excellence radiant yeah luminescence you know yeah yeah so the the idea in Buddhism on some level is you're slowly starting to work through the awareness of the ribbons and to cut them by understanding that their a fundamental illusion that's inhibiting how the light comes in and how the light refracts and so the way the light comes in is that's how the world comes into you and then how it refracts out is how you do your art with it but most of us just have like layers of like dirty and tattered ribbons that keep the light from coming in and people in the west worry you know that if you like if I learn how to meditate I won't have the same passions I have anymore I won't like that's a that's one of the ways that the ribbon Consciousness tries to protect itself from being destroyed and that like what Rick Rubin is sharing in his book I think is a modern Western attempt to express like baby boy baby girl I promise you if you let go of these ribbons your life will be more radiant it will be more brilliant all the things you choose to do you'll be able to do in that type of Consciousness that we call Flow State like the Empirical research on people who are Advanced meditators who have gotten to that point where you know they claim that they've reached the point in their training where they can make that type of awareness stable their brain fires in the same way that our brains fire when we're in Flow State because when you're in Flow State there is no sense of their identity right that is mediating your experience you are in direct experience and there's a quality of lucid attention that is able to react in a Just Right Way at the just right time where you could be doing a activity for an hour and a half like one of the most juicy experiences of my life is when I'm writing something and I look at the clock and I'm like holy [ __ ] it's been three hours yeah you know like that's one of the top experiences in my life and the rest of my day can be [ __ ] it could just be chaos and but that felt like this is the best day that I could possibly have yeah yeah they call that transient hypo frontality that that that brain state where your frontal lobe you know that that super modern human part of the brain is quieted down you know the place that that holds the sense of self the projecting the self and the past and the future and criticizing all of these things are turned down and then other parts of the brain that that approach the world in a totally different non-ego-based way start to take over and then you're in this more expansive mindset free of self-criticism where you're just free free to create and be like a channel for whatever that knowledge is in a way that we don't normally have access to in the way that that pure light can reflect refract out that you're talking about in a way that's less interrupted and I I really like that yeah and one more thing that I think is really interesting which is a third so there's the EU diamondia is one thread and then there's the Buddhist lineage which is this other thread that feels like it converges as at that point of like Diamond luminescent consciousness the third strand that's super interesting is um have you heard of the book LSD and the mind of the universe I have it I think is it Chris bash bash uh I don't remember the author's name and I probably think it is and I think I did a pod with him like years ago oh wow okay so is he like a former Professor who is like secretly doing a bunch of elements exactly yeah it's him it's him yeah all right so check this out I read that book recently uh what this guy did is when LSD and you know the other psychedelics were made illegal he decided to on his own without any help take I think he was taking 600 micrograms of LSD something like that and he did it uh 83 times over the course of 40 years and he to the best that he can he Maps out his journey of like what he had to work through the really low-level Gestalt is that he had to burn through a bunch of pain to eventually get to points where he could be in these Transcendent spaces of Consciousness and and then he would learn a bunch of stuff there and then he would have to experience even greater pain to then get to this next level and he did that over the course of 40 years and his very last journey like his last like 20 Journeys he got to a place that he articulated was the absolute highest level that Consciousness can inhabit and he called it um Diamond luminescence is the word that he yeah yeah yeah I remember that that he subjectively used to express that and his very last journey he came out of the journey early and what he had the way he describes it is like he had learned everything that he needed to know in this life and that his journey ended early so that he could experience the type of Consciousness that the future humans will have so he took off his blindfold and he started to look around and he described it that like everything was more real than he'd never been able to see before he wasn't hallucinating but he could almost like see the atoms at the edge of each object and he could kind of see the living swirl of the Collective ground of Consciousness that all the objects emerged out of and he called it um Diamond vision and the thing that he got is like this is the this is the key that the future humans will unlock and it's why we're not going to go it is why we're not going to [ __ ] this all up that was at least his personal experience that to me is a third strand that perfectly weaves into this greater story that you know different cultures have been alluding to for thousands of years that there actually is a developmental map of consciousness it has nothing to do with how old you are even though you seem to have to get to a certain age to even start this process but that there's actually a map of development that is the stripping away of the ribbons that are around the diamond Consciousness that produce a state of consciousness that from which like beautiful right action and Creative Solutions and all that [ __ ] like Pro social behavior just all of that just effortlessly flows out of a person who's able to be in that state yeah yeah and I think that that Peak Consciousness place that he got to and that you're referring to coming from the East is probably that same non-dual place that every culture every mystical tradition has figured out a way to stumble into at least for a little bit right I think the the Greek version of it was called I think it's hinosis h e hinosis interesting I'm saying that correctly but it's like everybody has the idea you know it's it's like we I think it's very we talked about this before but I it always is interesting to me how the modern Western mind seems to gravitate toward the Eastern versions of this now and sort of like forgets that the Western Mystics like the platonic line and the Hermetic line also we're talking about very similar if not indistinguishably the same Concepts and I think there's sufficient evidence to show that they might be from a common origin like that mysterious Indo-European civilization that um you know is attributed to the Veda that is originally attributed to The Vedas and like some lost language and uh maybe like some anti-diluvian Lost Civilization or something like that so the interesting thing is um one way to look at history is that there was this core Insight that then started to have different lineages that came from it and the Western lineage something happened in the like Roman conversion to Christianity or something that happened in that story where they did everything that they could to kill that living lineage in the western Culture by getting rid of all altar state of consciousness producing techniques and cultures that they could find yeah and then there's you know the Buddhist lineage just didn't get attacked by that this is true yes they didn't have all of their artifacts destroyed and all of their libraries you know ransacked it wasn't until Mao and the cultural revolution but it they didn't do a complete job in the way that the Roman Christian game was able to do in the west yeah and that is one of the most tragic things that happened in Antiquity I think is like the burning of the Library of Alexandria the destruction of eluses the destruction of all these other mystery initiations that you're talking about like the the whether it was purposefully hidden or it was intentionally destroyed like whatever all of this hidden wisdom that we see signs of everywhere in Egypt through these extraordinarily Advanced ancient pieces of like art and pyramids and like God you can just go down Rabbit Hole after rabbit hole on Wikipedia of like if anyone listening to this is like rolling their eyes at like alternative Theory alternative history type [ __ ] just watch some of these videos of like Granite artifacts so stuff that is like amongst the hardest materials on the planet with ornate precise not just 90 degree Cuts but like decorations and like drill marks and [ __ ] like yeah there's clearly some lost ancient wisdom that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of that I think slowly will become accepted as real but yeah they're the in the west the loss of that wisdom and the loss of that line and all of those manuscripts and everything is just so tragic it's so tragic and you bring up a really interesting point that the East never went through that and that offers this opportunity for this unbroken line of wisdom coming through people like the Dalai Lama coming through um it is interesting how he's like the most well-known one but his school of Buddhism is like pretty out there like it's pretty esoteric and wild like we were briefly touching on it before we started recording um some of the some of the practices of almost like not aggregor that's not the right word but you know like I said like growing a god inside of your psyche basically and 100 merging more with that archetype and we can we can move on that of course yeah there's there's a couple of points here that I think I really want to bring up one is that so we've gotten to a place in modern Consciousness where like the quote-unquote smartest among stuff amongst us they believe in some version of post-modernism even if they attack and make fun of post-modernism and the idea there is you get to the level of Consciousness where you're able to realize all information structures that humans create all stories are subjective but if you stay there it it will [ __ ] your life up because it it doesn't map onto the nature of reality in the sense that so every modernism you mean right post-modernism that um the step above post-modernism would be okay therefore my life's task because it's not a thing that can be completed is to cultivate the most good story like the type of story that through which the most beautiful good and true emanate out of it so you get to a place where no hierarchy is true too okay well now I'm going to engage in the lifelong creative process of creating the most beautiful useful fun type of story which implies there are types of stories that are actually less whatever the word you want to use than some other stories and so hierarchy comes back into the game yeah and this feeds and yeah gone I was just gonna say I think most people do have at least an idea of like a working idea of what post-modernism is but just in case I guess I would nut shell it as viewing everything as almost like a cultural object that's just relative and not necessarily untrue but it's like a snapshot in time of well Buddhists did it this way Christians did it this way Muslims did it this way and it's all relative and there's no right and there's no wrong it's just this is how they did it and they weren't aware of science yet and now we know what the true reality is because we use a scientific method and we can reduce things to their objective building blocks and all of that other [ __ ] is just it's just a kind of a cultural artifact a cultural object that we can study but it's not you know it's it's subjective it's relative there's no real truth there and you can I mean you can go all the way on up to God with this idea that like oh well your idea of God's relative and therefore you know God itself is a is a relative concept that doesn't really exist in any meaningful way and I don't know if that was a good definition or not that was good and the the interesting trip in the same way that when you sit down and you try to meditate and keep your awareness on your breath no matter how advanced you are within minutes you will realize that you were just in a train of thought for like half a minute where you totally forgot that you were on a mat with the intention to keep your awareness on your breath in the same way that it's that easy people like they believe in a post-modern type of story but then whatever story they're in this is actually true but they don't admit to themselves that the postmodern worldview applies to them as well and you know as someone who has who thought he was that type of smarty pants my belief in logic and science to the degree that I understood it if if science in your mind is a fixed concept which for most people if they're honest it is it's a fixed box to the degree that it's a fixed Concept in your Consciousness it's wrong the essence of science is the process yeah and that there are revolutions in the understanding of the current world view that sometimes removes everything that was learned before right and so it's it's not science is not the set of facts it is the process by which that generates facts and that process at times can change facts which is cool oh yeah yeah it for sure is yeah we we see the the upending of paradigms I feel like a couple times per lifetime in a way that truly shakes reality I mean we we've seen it happen with quantum theory and relativity I think we're starting to see the beginnings of it again with like the line of inquiry that people like Donald Dr Donald Hoffman are going down or they're sincerely trying to make a mathematically precise fear or propositions about reality being made of this totally New Concept called conscious agents and that his plan is to show that through this method we can both make new strides and new discoveries and fit everything that came before within it so it doesn't nullify a relativity it keeps the knowledge of Relativity intact and it keeps the knowledge of the quantum quantum theory intact but now we're reaching new levels of inquiry and we're learning new things and there's other physicists doing this too like the guy he always talks about from um Princeton yeah but yeah and when that happens it's it's a slow process and it's a painful process for everybody from the old guard so it like it takes forever to do and I don't I don't know if we're ever gonna arrive at some true unifying Theory of Everything But my suspicion is that at this point if we want to make strides we need to go down a different road than the reductive mathematical experimental only like I think there needs to be that component of it but I think we're going to reach a level of inquiry that requires somehow accounting for Consciousness as being fundamental and involved at every step and whether that's going to be the finally admitting that Consciousness is somehow involved in like wave collapse like collapsing of wave functions or or something I don't know I don't know I'm not smart enough to know that but I that's that's just my gut like my gut is saying that at some point we're going to have to acknowledge that Consciousness itself is deeply involved in understanding reality and we're going to have to account for that but that that's totally a tangent to what we've been talking about so I actually don't think it is so check this out um John verviki's work he talks about how one of the functions of the brain is for us to extend our Consciousness into a tool yeah that then the tool maps on to our con our neurology as if it's a extension of our body so if you hold a stick and you start to use that stick your Consciousness actually starts to inhabit the stick yeah extension of your arm sorry are we talking psycho Technologies right now yes but like this is a thing that's observable and like how the brain will hire when it uses a tool the most obvious example are glasses when you put on glasses your field of vision like moves into it and occupies it like it's a part of what you are so anyone who is listening to this right now whatever it is that you're doing you are very likely doing it completely merged with it where you account for all of the steps in between the truth that I'll get to and what your life feels like right now and so what I mean by that is in Buddhism one of the first things that they're trying to train you how to do is how to first get to the level of Consciousness where you can realize that whatever arising in you is an object of consciousness it's something that's arising in consciousness but people who get there they still have this dualistic view where there is a Observer that is somehow localized in space kind of behind my eyes you know in space-time that's observing the thought or observing the emotion Buddhism is trying to get you to the point where you can recognize the totality of your identity is one of the objects in the field of Consciousness that the thoughts and the emotions are also in yeah so you can almost imagine that it's like the first level of being confused is you're the person in the movie that forgets they're in the movie theater and they're fused with what's happening on the screen then people start to sit down and they start to meditate and they get to the point where they can realize that they're the person in the seat watching the movie third stage which is the thing that eludes most people in the west is to realize that your the projector in the back that is Illuminating the whole thing but that metaphor still because our intuitions are so fused with the identity that even that metaphor starts to break down and really I think the way to exhibit it is if you're playing Skyrim and you forget you're just in it and then you can realize that you're the player playing the game but then there's what's called like the unbounded field yeah that the player and the game arise Within and that level that State of Consciousness if you're able to touch it you can begin to notice that in that in order for anything to be that thing is working completely perfectly and so all science that's ever been done has been done within that unbounded field all speaking about science writing down anything for some other human to interact with it requires us to be in that space-time game that is a rising like our version of it anything we've ever known can ever know is arising within our field of unbounded whatever you want to call it yeah and I think that Donald Hoffman is like really on one level what he's doing is he's creating Magic in the language of the most powerful magic of the time which is mathematics to trigger that flipping of Consciousness in whoever studies his work yep yeah yeah and what I love about it is is he although he is not an adherent of any wisdom tradition when you talk to him about a platonic idea or you talk to him about a cabalic or Eastern idea his ears perk up and I have to imagine that he's almost like you know like I remember bringing up like indra's net of jewels like this idea of the interconnected web of Consciousness that you know makes up reality or whatever and you can tell he's like worked that into his repertoire of how he talks about his network of conscious agents yes like he understands that there's real wisdom there and he doesn't dispel these things as myths or like old ideas he he's like there's real wisdom in there and I'm gonna just I'm gonna extract the alchemical potency from that wisdom and put it in to the killer technology of mathematics and express that through the scientific method and if you do that you are you you're doing I don't know I mean I don't even know you're doing transmutation you're doing you're doing something it's quite a magician in this age does if they're fully committed to being a magician I agree and he's also a he's also a meditator by the way like I know he's a daily exactly meditator so if you listen to his podcast with with Annika and Sam Harris what I was able to see and maybe this is just my projection but what I was able to see was um in the same way that Rick Rubin has that vibe to you of like he he actually is a part of the thing that he's not letting us in on but he's offering his character as a brief aperture into this thing what I see in Hoffman is this [ __ ] knows the spiritual lineages he knows what they say he knows how what he is offering is in complete alignment with what they have said but it's to a level of priests decision that we haven't seen before and that he knows what type of character he has to be in this time whenever he talks about this idea and I say that that if you listen to the Annika and Sam Harris podcast with him he feels like he's an expert at being able to see anywhere where a question is asked that he knows exactly the modern mathematic Judo to not get tripped yeah and to keep the combo inside of the game that the character he's currently playing which is the mathematician and the cognitive psychologist it's um it's like the masterful Matador like I heard Sam Harris do something I haven't heard him ever do on a podcast where they were talking about philosophy he agreed um he he agreed to some things that Hoffman articulated that even if he might agree he almost doesn't ever admit it in the combo and so yeah I think I think Donald Hoffman is um grocking something that fits into what we've been talking about and if we want to bring it back to like the essence of this talk is we're talking about like how to grow the God within you the the pragmatic takeaway of all the things that we've been talking about is that the essence of self conscious which the way we use that word it's it's all the neurotic thoughts that arise to be self-conscious is to be in the illusion to be confused with your identity as you know it now as a noun which is always false that once you learn how to work with the illusion you become much more free to express in the creative way that only you can and what you will find is that when you act that way Life Starts to cohere around you in a way where when it started to happen to me it felt like I had to Gaslight myself for a long time to keep myself from having hope again for the first time that the fundamental nature of reality was just like I could feel that I had a personal grievance with God since I was a child that the fundamental aspect of this is actually [ __ ] up I don't trust it like and whenever I would have a really bad trip it's getting into the place of oh this is all insert fake illusion virtual reality a lie a trick whatever and then you spiral into hell which hell is like it's the absence of the connection that the fundamentalness of the whole thing is actually just or good and there's something like that's like the root of all the reasons why we do things to inhibit our genuine expression is because we don't trust life we don't trust God we don't trust other people as a reflection of the nature of God and there's something that happens and you know Carl Jung called it a synchronicity but it's when you're in that pocket of just true expression and something happens in the quote unquote outside world that lands in your body in a way where for me it completely blew apart my atheistic worldview and it had to recombine into at least agnostic you know that's yeah yeah a place that I'm still in but yeah it's it's like um even though I'm agnostic one of the things that feels like it's actually not as agnostic anymore is that John verviki's work goes really deep into this uh from a scientific standpoint and he calls it um relevance realization are you familiar with this term um not specifically I don't think so a quick recap would be that from a purely scientific cognitive standpoint the total amount of things that your awareness could attend to In This Moment is practically infinite and that there is no algorithmic process that could process that much information like a computer tries to process info in a way that would allow you to do the things that all humans do which is there's something in us that effortlessly is able to apprehend of the practically infinite amount of phenomena in this present moment the things that are relevant to me yeah so this is where he gets into like salience and stuff right right and he basically spends like 50 hours of lecturing to build up the case that this process is mind-blowing once you're able to appreciate that we do this yeah because there's logos within it there's like a there's like a hidden there's like a hidden organization exactly exactly exactly and that one of the things that he articulated in a talk with Jordan Peterson that flipped a switch for me is he offered a potential definition of the good and he said the good is the fact that reality is apprehendable to any degree yeah and that our life is proof of The Testament that that will be true in the next moment that our entire life of awareness to the degree that it has been a success at all because we are alive is the evidence of the good yeah the good is this quality of the field of consciousness all humans have that is able to apprehend at least something meaningful that allows you to do the game of life where you've made it to the point where you can't even hear a person say that's evidence of the good yeah and so that yeah that flip to switch in me where it's like I'm not agnostic about that right you know and like that's new for me is to have a belief that I'm not agnostic about yes yeah the good is a comprehensible open space that is just potential that holds you that allows you to exist with no precondition and it allows you to function as an agent you know it just allows you to without condition it exist and experience existence and it love and this is where it gets debatable like where it gets spiritually debatable is that if you really think about what if someone loved you to the absolute maximum what would they give you they would give you complete freedom in autonomy because if you if you're in a relationship and you are and you truly have unconditional love for someone no conditions whatsoever no conditions means freedom right no conditions means I love you period it doesn't matter what you do and and in a way the mere existence of the universe the mere existence of the human psyche Soul Phenomenon could be conceived of as that because it's like I love you so much you get to exist and and you get all possibilities and as much as it would destroy that thing to conceive of you suffering because it loves you it will still give you the freedom to suffer and that's [ __ ] hard to wrap your mind around so before we get hold on before we get too far away from it before we get too far away from it have you seen the conversation between vervaki and Hoffman that's out there I think it's on like theories of everything podcast no dude dude I'm gonna check it out dude yes I won't I won't spoil it but I do want to say real quick that um previously vervaki had raised some issues with Hoffman on unlike other pods and he walks everything back in that conversation and basically and I respect I love them both and I love her vac even more for this is is he's like I didn't understand how rigorous your theory is and I just didn't understand and I apologize for disagreeing with it like publicly yeah yeah I'm gonna check that out I love that and I really one of the things I appreciate about viveki is he's modeling right now uh four people who admire like intellectuals he's modeling something that none of the intellectuals that we admire do he is actively changing his mind yes in convo in real time like I've never seen Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris genuinely change their opinion on something in a convo so that's really cool but the thing that I wanted to offer is so because one of the things that you said is what the loving what the thing that loved you the most we give you is complete freedom and a autonomy and I and I agree but I think to understand the game of life that we're in we have to zoom out a bit so that fundamental good which is the field through which all of the phenomena of meaning arise that was the space in which the Big Bang happened and Earth is a s is one of the outgrowths of the process of evolution moving through you know the good for billions of years the Earth has created constraints that the consciousness of humans moves through so one of the things to really connect to is it's like the archetypical container of the whole thing is without value or it's it's without any constraints but the Earth as a organism that Evolution has unfolded in a specific way has created a nervous system that does have constraints and it produces animals with a type of Consciousness that do have constraints and one of the things in Buddhism that they talk about that I really resonate with is like one of the most enduring Illusions if you're trying to make contact with that fundamental Consciousness which is like the primordial Consciousness before there's any constraints is the most enduring illusion that Evolution through Earth has produced is that there is an agent yeah that is that works on the world because of the Dynamics of predator and prey animals just how it unfolded on this planet and maybe this is what happens on all planets but at the very least it's what's happened on this planet and that like a part of the process is recognizing that the instinct is to continue to reify the aspects of the identity as if they are the fundamental truth therefore they need to be protected therefore they can be injured and hurt and the anxiety and the guilt and the fear and all of the emotions that arise out of the biology of an organism that grew out of the Earth that that is a set of constraints it's a huge set of constraints and the mythological imagery that comes to mind is like you know the great father and the great mother the great father is the and you could flip these around it can be whatever you want to call it but actually let's say the fundamental good is the great mother it's the real quick can I I want to interject with a little bit of like of orientation because this idea of the good is something that I think in and of itself we should just real real quick Define because so are you talking about it through the lens of vervacci or are you kind of riffing on it in your own way I'm riffing on it in like if a from the perspective of Buddhism okay interesting so so that I think most commonly if you look up the concept of the good or the truth or whatever you're gonna come across this platonic Socratic concept which was like the peak concept of their entire philosophy which is like it's like the Dao it's like the underlying greatest thing like there's a famous um riff that Socrates had that if you want to understand the one or the truth and first of all he preconditions it with you can't it's like Transcendent whatever but if you want to begin to understand it think about it in terms of the Sun and this is like the allegory of the Sun or the para whatever whatever of the sun they call it but it's this idea that like from like an emanationist kind of ontology you know the ideas from that meaning like there's the source and then it like trickles down until it gets here to us and you know then it goes down most most emanationist ontologies would say and then from us it goes to animals and then from there it goes to this but at the top of everything would be the one in in most conceptions of it and then underneath the one you'd have like The Noose like the Divine mind and then underneath the Divine mind you'd have like the demiurge which is like the creative force that you know make physically made reality and there's a whole thing with that but so so that's kind of traditionally like what people would conceive of as as the one and that's kind of where I was going with that Riff on and because they believe that the one was good like that was the only thing they would openly say about it it's like they would say it's good it's truth it's good and that's like the only thing they would ascribe to it and other than that Plato specifically would refuse to try to have a dialogue to approach it because it's too Transcendent and a lot of these other things like like virtues like truth well maybe not truth because truth is too close to the one but a lot of these dialogues that Plato would that have become famous were actually his attempt through dialogue to approach a an ideal which are not quite on the level of the one but they're like right orbiting it so right so anyway I don't know if that's exactly where you were pulling from but I wanted to like no that's cool Orient if in case that's yeah that's right so to Riff on that for a moment in a way that I think is interesting is most people when they hear that if they're imagistic at all with those C is like a two-dimensional map and there's like a thing at the top and then it gets you know it comes down the Buddhist orientation and this might be weird to people but I think if you can imagine it it'll be interesting if you lay on your back on the ground and you go to look at your feet if you imagine that each vertebrae on your spine are the extensions out of your awareness into reality and the base of your spine would be like your eyeballs here and that the sun is actually where your head is and that what most like the map for the Buddhists is to come back far enough through the different Illusions to get to the good so the orientation is not a two-dimensional map of a hierarchy it's a four-dimensional model in space-time but it's it's retreating back towards the fundamental truth yeah so like a macrocosm microcosm kind of way of understanding reality and by the way we got to say this is the Western idea too this idea of the body is a microcosm of the macrocosm so that in a way this whole emanationist ontology lives in the body as well 100 and if you look at like what Egypt was trying to do with some of their architecture it seems very clearly that they were trying to highlight the human body but yeah yeah I always have mixed feelings on that because you see all these videos of like the Eye of Horus is actually the brain cut and like the you know the this is actually the this and this is the cerebrospinal fluid and it's like it might be a projection I don't know yeah but so the the like the thing that's so interesting about Buddhism at least from the perspective that I can see it is it's like it feels kind of like Robert Anton Wilson where they're trying to gently hint to you that most of what you're doing is because you're confused with the illusion and that it's not a place to go to find the truth it's actually a process of releasing the unconsciously fused belief that what I'm feeling right now is because you made me feel that way or that like this pain in my body is proof that life is not good or that the me not having this job like it's it's all connected to this identity that is the culmination of trauma and attachment wounds and that we're completely fused like with my idea of Eric and I can tell that it's um this is one of those things where I'm not expert enough in it to explain it easily but it's something that I'm super pumped about and so I find that when I start to talk about it I feel like yeah I'm not ready to talk about this yeah yeah what well okay now I what specifically is this Concepts from the same book we were talking about earlier I haven't had a I haven't had enough accumulated experience in being in the perspective where my identity is not fused to me to talk about it at length in a way that feels like it's helpful you know like it's something I'm just starting to it feels like I'm at the place that whenever I remember to I know how to move into that but then just like trying to keep my Awareness on my breath if I'm really honest I can't go more than five seconds without a thought I can flip to that perspective but I can't do anything I can't stay there and so it feels like I'm talking about a thing that I haven't really earned the right to talk about at length at length yeah I see what you're saying yeah I think I don't think many people have dude like I think even a lot of the people who meditate regularly lack that just pristine being that you hear about that's sort of the promise it seems like that's the promise of meditation right like you'll you'll achieve this calm pristine being that's just you know this sounds like we're talking before like a diamond looseness luminescent Consciousness um the progina paramita I don't know if that book talks about that but the non-dual awareness you know that's like the just that it's like that hypnosis that we talked about earlier but dude I think one of the things I've been thinking about this recently in terms of meditation and prayer and all of these things is people underestimate the power and the place I'm coming from here is this idea of like being bad at meditating right like the idea of I'm bad at meditating because we're all everyone listening to this is probably quote unquote bad at meditating if you conceive of meditating as being able to just connect your breath being able to connect yourself to whatever task or or Focus Point you're giving yourself for that meditative exercise but just think about it this way think about the profound difference of if you decide to meditate twice a day for 10 minutes versus not right like think of those as anchoring objects in your day and just knowing like it's 8 A.M and I just woke up I know that at 9am I will be meditating and then you go throughout your day and in the back of your mind you have the knowledge I know at 9 00 PM I will be meditating and that begins to create this like mindful these mindful like poles almost on your day where there's a there's like this sacred almost reference point and and I've been playing with the idea of I want to start doing three meditations a day but not not like that's some big Flex or something because I think they can even be short and it's honestly it's similar to the idea of of why Muslims pray five times a day right because if you think of the idea of just think about the power of knowing your next prayer is just a few hours away think about the power of knowing your next meditation is just a few hours a day that starts to alter everything versus if you have this giant open landscape where it's like obligations entertainment procrastination and just like a big mixture of those things all day every day huge difference if you even have like three five or ten minute meditations scattered throughout those three things like everything must settle back down into those moments and I think that's why regular meditation is powerful it's not just what's happening in the meditation it's what's it's the way that it kind of pulls everything into it to get you into the seat and that you're more likely to maintain mindful States between the meditations and I think you like you start to make that connection in your life it becomes very meaningful and very powerful and it doesn't even matter as much like how long you focus within the meditation as much as it's just like your core signal starts to become more Mindful and then that feeds back into the meditation practice so that to make it a smoother entry and exit you know and the thing that comes to mind is when you have practices like that and you're actually still and you're not taking in you know a deluge of external information it might take a while to be able to get to that place behind the thinking just the like here are all the things I have to do now that I'm taking a moment oh my God I need to do this because that's one of the things that people will experience first in the west is once they start to sit down the things they forgot that they needed to do will start to just pop up yeah and you're like I just need to go write this down and then you go off into your day but if you get what I find is that whenever I get still for even like an hour and I'm not doing anything but I'm also not meditating it just within an hour I start to get clear again I'm like what matters to me like I can go with all the plant medicine and all the coaching and all the blah blah I can go weeks and not have a true moment of like taking a step back and being like what do I want yeah what am I doing with my life like why have I for the last three weeks felt slightly I felt guilt about what I was eating and I and I was just doing it or I felt shame about watching porn and I was just doing it and there was that work thing that I knew I needed to do that I just haven't been doing for weeks and I've and I've felt like I'm doing something wrong this whole time you know I'm just having and it's why like silent meditation Retreats and like Darkness Retreats are both alluring and terrifying to us right you know because there's this part like we both the only way that you can [ __ ] yourself is if a part of you knows what's true like if you actually think about like the art of bullshitting yourself implies that there's a truth that you already know that you're trying to obfuscate from you right and there's something like I think that's why we're terrified to do these things that would require us to get still and the really interesting thing is there's lots of stories of people who like all of us have some type of trauma and some type of attachment wounds that just make up Who We Are many people who go on silent meditation Retreats who have been working on trauma for a while their trauma will actually come up in powerful Memories by day four or five because they've gotten still enough and they're actually if they're guided properly that they're able to do a tremendous amount of work on their trauma through literally just having learned to sit and to pay attention and not react to whatever is arising and I think that there's something really core here to kind of the theme of the podcast today which is you will be in eudaimonia to the degree that you've alchemized your traumas and your attachment wounds because those are the core things in our development that inhibit our true genuine expression and to the degree that your true genuine expression is inhibited is the degree to which you will feel ill yeah and you won't and you'll be in bad dimonia whatever we got to figure out there has to be like an actual Greek word for not being in eudaimonia you gotta figure out what is it what mild ammonia maybe maybe it makes sense um I just had something right before that and now it's now it's been scuttled I think it was where we so you were talking about before you were talking about alchemizing the core wounds and traumas it was just before that do you remember um I was talking about like in order to [ __ ] yourself you have to actually know that yeah it is true yeah yeah yeah and I think there's something that jumps out to me immediately that I think is a rug that most people are afraid to look under and it's like the it's both the entry and the exit point of this whole [ __ ] thing and it's I think it's their mortality I think that is so I think if there's the the emanationist cosmology of like some goodness that everything else emanates from and and typically in most of these schools the idea is to realign your mind with the highest principle that you can possibly align it with on that ladder and I think that the the core fear then it makes sense and a kind of reverse emanationist way is death right because if you can't get around that because all trauma all fear all whatever leads to I think eventually probably leads to to suffering which leads to the cessation of existence right and I think that we miss I think that's the reason we're afraid to be alone to do that internal work to be in the quiet to take the heroic dose I I think that's the core of my fear is like I I partially you know it's getting back to your point of bullshitting yourself I know what's there I know what I'm gonna find and it's like there's something within me that's afraid to go back in there and face that thing all over again and re alchemize that thing all over again because it isn't just one I don't think it's just you oh I'm over it never mind I'm over it it's something you need to re-contextualize re-digest re-contact because the story like our lives our egos our conception of self are like this story built off of stories off of stories off of stories off of stories and underneath the whole story there's something that just flicks the bottom Jenga block and [ __ ] the entire thing up and makes it all irrelevant and it's your death and it's like we do we don't want to reconfront that thing man we don't want to reconfront the the annihilation that awaits us yeah so but but I think I I think though that ultimately it's a it's a lie like I think ultimately that thing that we're afraid of is probably a lie in a way that we can't fully understand right so this is what so um what I realized is uh my core grievance with God happened when I was a kid and that's and I've told the story of you before where I learned about it where I learned about heaven and then I tried to imagine what it would mean to live forever and I found it so unfair and so cruel because of you know like I only had my family Dynamics to then project out into forever yeah that I just was like if this is true God's [ __ ] up you know and I held that grievance for a long time and the first time that I did a high dose of ayahuasca that was the first confrontation that I had to meet where the Alchemy was like we are going to sit here in this space of Eternity until you accept because we can't do anything else until you get past this like that was the way it felt in hindsight when I try to give words to it to speak to your point that it's not just you experience it once and it's done is almost any time that I get to a state of consciousness that's so big and it's almost always with Altered States of you know with help I have to re-enter that story of Eternity and it doesn't mean it's real but I have to be able to accept that that's possible in order for me to then continue on whatever wants to happen one other thing I don't know if we've talked about this yet actually I think we have but um reading the Western research on reincarnation and I believe it's out of the University of North Carolina we haven't talked about this oh man okay so there's two generations of researchers I believe it's the University of North Carolina where they've been collecting stories of children who claim to remember their past life and they've interviewed like 10 000 plus cases and what they do is they'll go ask and interview the kid and learn what the kid claims they know then they'll go do objective research at the person's life they claim to have been and they create like a test for the kid to take because they know the answers they give the test questions to the parents who don't know the answers the parents will then ask the kids and they will observe the question and answering and they'll only keep cases that pass a good a good metric for being like there's this is interesting they have over 3 000 cases that have made it to that level wow and they've written a couple of books and just a couple of months ago I started to read the book and I could feel like I started to read it when I started a plane flight I read it the whole flight and I could feel by the time that I landed and I put the book back into my uh bag back into my bag I realized I don't understand what this will mean for my life but I could feel that the idea of reincarnation entered into my portrait of a mind like the Trojan Horse got into Troy like I could feel that it was in me I could feel that it hadn't deconstructed my world view but I could feel that the horse was inside and it was because of the declarity and the honesty of the research and then the profoundness of the studies there's like two or three books that you can check out I think the one I got is called life before life but I can feel now I don't understand it but it feels like it's a phenomenon so I'm gonna put that there one of the Visions like one of the like contemplative visualizations that The Wheel of Time teaching teaches is you get comes from that can you sorry can you just contextualize that quick what is The Wheel of Time yeah so The Wheel of Time is the full teaching that the first University that was made in uh India taught as the teachings of the Buddha and it's called A Wheel of Time and most of those teachings weren't allowed to be taught outside of you being a monk but in the last 10 years some things have changed and the Dalai Lama has given some people in the west permission to teach these things and one of the books is called sustainable happiness just a quick thing it was written 10 years ago it only has 10 reviews on Amazon it's a [ __ ] Hidden Gem but one of the teachings one of the visualization practices which from this point of view is lit it's it's magic it's not a visualization it's you become the thing that can do this one of the visualizations is to be able to see the buddhahood in every person that you meet because of the cosmology of this whole game is that in order to get to the level of complexity of energy to have a human body that is a soul that has acquired The bodhisattva Vow and that every human that has a body is a bodhisattva waking up that yeah to even have a body means that you've done that dance over and over and it's a beautiful Vision I don't know if it's true but God damn it whenever I connect to it I my life is more Bejeweled and so I offered those three things as like a potential response to the wound that most of us have about our own death like there's something about modern culture where we take pride and not being dumb enough to be fooled to believe that there's anything after death but it's it's a it feels like a pretentious teenager to be frank to be like oh every single living culture that has developed over hundreds or thousands of years every single one had a belief about Consciousness after the death of the body yeah and most of them had reincarnation right and from our lens it's like they're all wrong and we know it you know but we sit in a culture where 50 no we're 25 million people a year die from diseases that didn't exist until we started to create the culture that we have we have over 450 million people who are diagnosed with a mental illness we've got millions of people who take drugs every day like psychologically we are the most sick in recorded history and we are so sure that our story about reality is absolutely it's just like we are The Cutting Edge they were all wrong and it seems it's it's a agnostic belief for me now yeah brother yeah I mean I could go down this whole Chris Ryan Rabbit Hole of the diseases of affluence and how we have essentially weakened ourselves and cursed ourselves with this like myth of progress in this way that we're we're living but I'm going to resist that and just tell people to go listen to that podcast but um but yeah dude this the ubiquity of this idea of reincarnation is That's Another Western thing that we've kind of forgotten about like again this platonic myth of UR it's a story of reincarnation it's a story of a soldier dying in battle having a vision of the afterlife seeing and all the stuff we've been talking about by the way with the diamond with the fates and your paradigma or fingerprint or Acorn this is all talked about in this myth and this this idea of death and being reborn through this process of being having all of the old trappings of your life and ego separated from you and being re put back on the Earthly plane in a form that has like a momentum with it with how you lived and I mean it's very similar to Karma but it's maybe a little bit I'm not a scholar on these things but from from a lay person looking in it's super super similar and you know Pythagoras like the Pythagorean teachings I think are seem to be the closest to the Eastern teachings in a way where it's almost spookily similar like were they it was I think people say he was probably initiated into some kind of Indian mystery tradition no I there's a lot of things about his life that are lore and Legend and Supernatural so it's hard to separate fact from fiction but this idea like in the like of like metam psychosis they called it is so so similar to the Eastern idea of reincarnation and it's only again this is like another thing that seemed to die with the the rise of the judeo-christian um spiritual lineage was the idea of reincarnation but what's so funny is they picked and chose so many other ideas from platonism and neoplatonism in particular but then they just like left certain things out like reincarnation for instance um so it's I think it's extremely interesting and I want to know more about this research dude if you could if you don't know off top of your head that's totally cool but let me know who these what school this is and like what these books are because I'm definitely curious and I would definitely like to talk to somebody involved in this yeah let me look that up real quick yeah all right so the current Generation Um researcher his name is Jim Tucker and his teacher was uh Ian Stevenson there the University of Virginia sweet that's what it is yeah and I think in past recently so now it's Jim Tucker but when you read the book like as a skeptic I admire very deeply the rigor and non-attachment of the people conducting the research and the evidence is daggering that there is at least something going on so just like a quick overview of what I remember average time between lives is 80 years for whatever reason and um it was never more than like 210 or something of of any of the cases that passed any type of the tests and um like 20 percent of the reincarnations were people who actually are like a lineage member in the family who died in a way where it felt like they felt like they hated to come back and they kind of explain what that looks like the other super intense part of the research is birthmarks being completely correlated with how the previous person died wow yeah because that's something that's measurable right right yeah and one of the cases that they introduced at the start of the book is there was a girl who claimed that she remembered a past life the researchers went and looked into the life and eventually came up with a list of 48 people that that person knew and then what their relationship was to that person so is this their mom their dad their brother co-worker lover child they asked this girl she got all of their names right 48. and she only got one of their orientations to the person wrong wow and it's like these are two lives that didn't there's no one in the family who knew these people and it's one of those things where um if it was 10 cases I would probably ignore it was a hundred I'd be like this is cool and I'd probably never think about it again they have over 3 300 cases that's insane and it's like what the [ __ ] yeah I need to know more I need to know more that's a very interesting dude um one of the things I wanted to Riff on a little bit since we're getting we're getting a little deep into the chronological Waters now that's because we talked a little bit about this idea of growing the God within you we on the recording I think we've only said the phrase but this is a specific practice actually that you're reading about in this book and I think it's really interesting both as a just an esoteric practice that I think would a lot of people be like wow that's I've never heard of anything like that but I think other people I think a lot of people might be interested in playing with this idea and looking deeper into it like I know I'm interested in it for maybe we'll talk about the reasons why I'm interested in it later but 100 all right so I'm just going into give you what I've learned so far uh from the book so first off the text that this book or that this practice is being translated from is called The Diamond Pavilion process like that's the much older text in tibetan that is being translated in order to teach this the way it's translated is called role modeling imagery and self-transformation so the idea is that this is a type of concept that can make you move along the path of just trying to sit much more quick it's called the quick path and so basically what you do is you get introduced to a God by your teacher now what we would do as westerners reading is you would pick out a God or a goddess that embodies the higher traits that you want to bring forth in you and you then start on a process that when I look over it it's like this is a Tibetan version of Western magic with a CK so Step One is admiration and this is where you learn how to hold the image of the God in your mind so for let's say Hermes like you would start to really allow your imagination to start to like create the inner moving movie of Hermes and this is a thing that you would do every day like you would hone how well you would be able to see that image in you step two is called welcoming and because I haven't read this deeply I don't know exactly what it looks like but it's like once you've like made love with your attention into the object of this God and it's a thing that you can like almost feel it around you you then start to speak um I think they call it sutras in their lineage but it's like spells to welcome to bring that energy into you like you're actively asking it to be in you and then step three this is really interesting step three is once it's in you you then start a process of admitting your faults to it every day where whatever it is you're asking it to help you do so let's say you want to like you want to step into being a creative instrument for the Hermes in you then step three would be you you every day you sit with all right what do I need to confess to you of the things that I've done in the past that have inhibited this expression in me and that gets really close to the confession you know like I think there's a deep archetypical magic about that um the book gets a bit wonky at this part but I believe step four is now you request consistency from this God that it will help you in moments when you're not on the mat so like when you're out in the world you're basically asking it to step in now like move through me like I trust you enough and I can tell through me disclosing my things to you that we have a type of relationship where you can now take over at times you know and I think that that scares us but that's a part of it the next step is dedication and so again I haven't read this in deep like I don't know it firsthand this is just going off of what the titles of these parts of the book are called but this feels like you are now taking an active process of acting as if Hermes is moving through you you know so the process before this was like I trust you to you know maybe there's a couple of moments throughout the week where you just come through me now that I've seen you do that and I've witnessed myself being able to do that now I am making a commitment to you to act as if that's the case all the time yeah yeah and then you get to a point where like there's one more step I don't know exactly what it is I can't find it from Just scanning but it's where you then complete the process with that God and then you go to the next one oh wow and the Buddhist God like there's paintings in this book and the final God they're trying to move into so I'll give you a list the first one is called the white tara and that's the healing mother and what this book teaches you is this is the one this is the Goddess that when you do this process with it starts to purify it it will bring up and heal the traumas and the attachment wounds and all that so that's actually probably a very uncomfortable one but that's like the cleaning of the thing like Yeah from their perspective if you want to move like a laser down the path that would take a long time if you were just using the first layer of techniques this is much faster and if you read LSD in the mind of God this is exactly what he went through in the first part of his specification exactly and archetypally that seems like that's that makes sense that that would be the first step unlike any kind of initiation right like whether we're talking psychological or spiritual or anything it's like letting go of the wounds and healing the wounds or exactly yeah and now check out this Elegance the next God that they have you do the move with his name is manjarishi and what that translates to is useful sheer Brilliance this is the full emanation of the inner child that once all the attachment wounds and all the traumas are moved what it reveals is that shimmering brilliant play that all of us had as children that all of us have learned to hide because you know we met the world so that's God too got three is I can't pronounce it but it translates as the mother of transcendent wisdom and so I won't even pretend to know what this one is but it feels like it's you starting to grock and experience the higher mode of wisdom but this is where it gets interesting the next God like once you've cleaned and once you've re-contacted that brilliant inner child and now you know what it means to be wise and I think that's probably like right action right behavior all that [ __ ] the next God is called the heroic altruist mother father oh dude and the images of these gods and goddesses are absolutely [ __ ] and they're it's so psychedelic but so say say the name of the book again and like hold it up just because I know I might clip this out because this part's [ __ ] amazing the name of the book is sustainable happiness it's so funny it's called sustainable happiness and there's this in there it's like by the way you're gonna be doing like visualization God contracts in this [ __ ] it's such a bad name but so the heroic altruist mother father and then like what that does what they're trying to do what all the bodhisattvas we're trying to do is to claim the promise of the good is so beautiful that anyone who is confused I will work to liberate every other human every other Consciousness that can't see the brilliance for the rest of time until it's done yeah yeah and so that's the that's the altruist mother father now the last God is called the master altruist mother father and if you look at the images like one is incredible but then you flip to what the master is and it's just way more intense it's just that same thing but just and what I think happens here is so The Wheel of Time has four wheels within it and it comes down and it's a [ __ ] mandala the first wheel is the Body wheel and that's the that's the level of this teaching that has made it to the West that's where you learn how to sit down and you do the whole thing yeah um wheel two is called the speech wheel and that's where we get the loving kindness part of this practice that has made it into the West a bit uh so like meta yeah right yeah meta is one of my favorite I just actually wrote a script for a meta thing by the way that I'm gonna I love to start giving away for free I love that and so that's the first taste of using the astral if you will to start to cultivate images that change you the third wheel is called the Mind wheel and that's where you're doing this work with the gods and you know they call it self imagery process or whatever but it's it's God work the fourth wheel the more the most core wheel is called the Bliss wheel and I haven't read this chapter yet but the Bliss wheel is Tantra it's you've you've you've acquired all of these Gods which have helped you like want to be a bodhis thoughtful-like force in the world the fourth wheel the core wheel the Bliss wheel is Tantra and it's how to use breath and posture and visualizations to charge you up with orgasmic energy but it's coming through the frame of a fully aware Consciousness that it's it's the energy like it's the practices to be at a peak state of energy to then go do all the things in the world and I think that's why the image between those two Gods one's awesome but then one is like fully engorged it's just like popping off the page yeah dude I love this I've never been more excited to go down this rabbit hole and maybe I'm making the mistake of doing the sort of uh perennial philosophy song and dance with this but I'm immediately seeing huge jungian overlaps and I'm seeing overlaps in other areas too like have you thought about how some of those that jungian individuation process Maps over this yet yeah so the really interesting thing is it's like um God bless young he did what he could do without the internet and just not connected to these other parts of the world but what Young was doing with the individuation process is the slow attempt to do what the um white tara process is doing it's like yeah trying to move through your personal muck to get to the point where the thing can start to come through if young had met this lineage he would have and he actually kind of did this with some of the parts that came through the red book but it would be like to go beyond the the contents of what he could generate right what his unconscious could generate and connect to a collective God image that's been honed over 2 000 years by people like him in a living lineage like that would have been what it could have been well so another another big thing that just like perked my Wonder whiskers up is the the amalgamation of the masculine and feminine in a single being 100 because this is something that he you know his his conception of the syzagy or whatever it's called but also this is if you look at a lot of alchemical hermetic art 100 there are these her there are these her met uh hermaphroditic beings that have genitals of both sexes and they're like Transcendent beings hovering over some kind of process like emanation is process or alchemical process and the Goosebumps I get real quick is um the parents of hermaphrodite were Hermes and Venus where Hermes and Aphrodite I personally think that the fundamental good that we spoke about is somehow linked to Hermes like it's it's and that in Buddhism yeah I think he is the agent that delivers it because if he holds right of course the caduceus hold yeah yeah and that um Venus or Aphrodite what what I see when I look at the buddhic cosmology is um a story of Cosmos that got filtered through the lens of Christianity when it made itself to the west and so it got polarized into Good and Evil and the story of Buddha when he awakens is that the demon Mara which is the Lord of all demons Rises up and brings all of his children which are all you know like anxiety fear desire and he tries to like he tries to to distract the Buddha from Awakening he's seen as a demon and when you look at Maya which is the illusion that the uh like confused identity believes it's stuck in that's all seen as like bad but the thing that's interesting is I think that if you don't put the heaven hell God devil map over it I think what Venus represents which is the desire to desire like the love and the enjoyment of having a want is a beautiful thing to play with if you realize that you're playing with it but if you're not realizing that you're playing with it you're caught in a type of hell and so I guess what I'm offering is that the hermaphrodite feels like it's the fusion of like being in the world being in Venus and then being the thing that's able to move out of that world and view that world which it feels like that's one of the core things that Buddhism is trying to teach yeah man and and my brain's exploding right now too because I'm seeing more and more overlaps between this and hermeticism as well because one of the core practices that I don't understand very well is this thing called the Ascension of the Spheres and each sphere you know it's like they're equated with planets and gods but they're also considered Governors so really they're they're sort of like archetypes like we're talking about right like like you have a feminine archetype associated with uh purification for instance well the you know the the first um female archetype in these spheres is the Venus energy which is not quite the same thing but it's another feminine energy that you that you move through and the whole idea is an Ascension you eventually get back to as close as you can to this Divine Mind through actually this might be the main difference is in hermeticism it's a relinquishment of these parts of your being and these attachments so it's like you know that directly maps on to what is happening in The Wheel of Time well here we go it's the exact same thing so God damn um all right so one of the things that I've learned just recently is there's a uh Western map of development that was we figuring this out right here right now Eric everybody should [ __ ] know this everybody should know that this is the archetype of like actual Spiritual Development this is exactly where I'm going so so there is a map of development called the stages model it's s-t-a-g-e-s all capitalized that um a bunch of Studies have been like Western Studies have been done to find that this is a valid and reliable test that looks at the development of the perspective that the ego has and it charts a map that there is scientific published paper papers that argue this map fits almost perfectly onto what The Wheel of Time teachings teach and what this map of development shows is there is actually hierarchy of development of Consciousness that can be measured you fall somewhere on that there are things below and there are things higher and as long as we're able to like we have to heal from so one thing that happened in our Zeitgeist is once there were stories that got strong enough where the people who were at the top of those stories had complete power they [ __ ] up and there's like a collective mistrust of any story that has a clear hierarchy and a part like a part of the idea here is you have to alchemize that grievance that you have with the all to then be able to take in this map which if you looked at it from a place of non-reactive attachment wounds and traumas or whatever happened to you that makes you afraid of hierarchy that you can see there are multiple World Views that have been honed over hundreds and thousands of years that all overlap in a way where there is a clear there are stages and the beautiful thing is that if if you can learn to trust the map you can start to see exactly what the next step is and it's it's not about you you don't win the game you know it's not like all you're doing is getting to a place where your view of Consciousness has transformed and so to give a clear idea of this um this stages model the first model or the first stage is you just got born and at everything that is happening feels like it's happening to you for you that you don't have to act because you can't and it's you and then the universe is providing for you the next stage of Consciousness is when the ego develops enough where it learns that it has desires that aren't being met and that there are other people that are the obstacles of its desire and it learns how to move and to try to get around the obstacles to get the thing it wants and so like one of the things is there's a dramatic transformation in Consciousness from the infant that can't walk or can't move to the infant that can start to act on the world and I believe there's there's like 12 stages and then there's four more hypothetical stages that they don't even try to test because it's so out there but what they have found is that the test is remarkably real compared to all tests that we create in Psychology which you could debate you know what what is the stage's methodology from so it's it's from a lineage of women who have worked in Psychology for the last 100 years and their developmental Maps you know like so it's a it's a lineage of Developmental psychologists who have built on each other's work for about 100 years and the stages model is the most refined current model really interesting really interesting one of the other things too man is I've been looking I'm the the video I'm sort of working on right now is about like not visualization exactly but proven ways to actually up train personal well-being through just mental exercises and just like positive psychological exercises that have been looked at in studies and show measurable changes in the brain measurable changes in personal well-being and it's funny because a lot of these per these positive psychology exercises like we we would not say that they are doing anything from a metaphysical standpoint and I guess you don't even have to say these Buddhist things or doing anything from a metaphysical standpoint and I think a lot of modern Buddhists would go that route because they don't want to they just want to go the scientific practical route but whatever's going on in all of these things your mind has a weird ability to treat to change itself like your mind is a weird ability to discipline itself make itself more positive make itself more satisfied with life and we don't think we have that ability but it's mostly because we're just completely I I guess the word would be it's it's not even untrained it's illiteracy it's just we're just so illiterate in the way that the mind and the brain works that we don't understand that we literally have the ability to physically alter our brains right like that's what a lot of these studies find is like if you do a lot of gratitude meditation or you do a lot of these techniques the brain itself like cortical thickening occurs like like actual brain structural changes happen and you become something else like you become a different being than you were so the the image that comes to mind is the natural development of a human ego would very early in their life get to the point where they're able to play around for the first time that the things that they think can change their physiology but as a culture and you look at our history again I don't know if it was on purpose I don't know if it was just fear or if it was fate or whatever but the rise of the Roman Catholic energy had just killed anyone in our lineage who was good at that type of um engineering like the thing that I think about is there is away or they co-opted them that's the other thing they did is they they said oh no Plato was actually a pre-jesus prophet right platinus was a pre-jesus prophet like that was the other thing they did yeah and maybe it has to do with the rise of the scientific method and we got really confused about like Mind Body I think therefore I am type of thing we kind of got away from a couple of things but what I see is the the birth rate to learn how to use your consciousness to generate experiences with your eyes closed that have a quality of emotion to them that can change your physiological state in a way that we can measure to do that to grow your the plant that is your body feels like in a healthy culture that's something that like 10 year olds learn how to do and that we are in a culture where that level of development just got so atrophied that we learned how to walk with just one leg and we all have this atrophied left leg and we've developed our brain so much to be able to like think in a post-modern way where you know we're way up here with one leg and that a part of our developmental process to catch up to where we are in our head is to learn how to grow that leg out and like one of this there are so many examples of this but one example that is really bright to me is one of the insights that you will have through doing the contemplative practices is you will realize that your identity is also an object in consciousness if you spoke from the place that knew that you would speak in the third person and any and our culture has this immune response that if you speak in the third person there's like there's something weird with you we're going to make fun of you and mock you and it's like that's one piece of evidence of a plethora of pieces of evidence that feels like it suggests that there's this weird self-denial of the fact that we can do magic and as long as you understand what magic means which is that I don't know if we'll ever get to a place where the contents of our Consciousness are able to change space time you know but there are people who claim that but I have had no experiences of of something like that but that magic is something that you can do that can change the physiology of your body in a way where if you have cancer that there's a form of magic that as long as you also do all the things that your metabolism needs you can heal your body and that's something that to even claim you know yeah right well let me say this too let me say this so a lot of these studies I looked at I looked at a [ __ ] ton of studies for this video at least skimmed them the other common denominator in people who describe themselves as either having a general high level of personal well-being or did exercises specifically to up train their personal sense of well-being was a marked reduction in all causes of death and they they mapped out like everything they mapped out was reduced like cardiovascular death at people who were already sick too that started developing all these techniques to you to become to elicit a more positive mindset regularly also had better outcomes so it's not like you can just we're not saying you're going to cure everything and everything this way but it does something it does something and and just to finish the tangent I don't necessarily think the the metaphysical thinking people are wrong I think it's just that they're downplaying a really beautiful mysterious intermediary step it's that you through the power of your mind are changing yourself into a being who is now capable of creating that future you want for yourself or is more capable and that's still mysterious as [ __ ] and beautiful and fun and a a thing that is really interesting is they explain it in sustainable happiness that when you really understand what the Buddha was articulating by life is suffering is that if you're unconsciously fused with the identity that is hurt it will generate a 12-step process that by going through that process the last stage of that process is to die early from disease like and this is like not a um remixing this is a Harvard translator translating as clearly as he can the essence of what the Buddha outlined and it completely matches with what we understand about stress that if you're in a constant reactive state where the what they call what the Buddha was called d-u-k-k-a duka is compulsive action that leads to pain and that it completely maps on to what we know about stress yeah so everybody [ __ ] start doing meta really I mean it's it's my favorite tool like out of so I looked at a bunch of different things I I wrote a whole thing that included like exercise and all these other things because there's so many methodologies that are shown to increase to a sense of personal well-being some of them like we've talked about today are super esoteric and out there but the one thing I will say that is so easy that you can do right when you hit stop on this podcast is do meta meditation you can do it every day it's not weird it's literally you just sitting there and putting well wishes out into the world onto people onto yourself and it has such a profound measurable effect on your mood within like a few minutes it's I love it man I love meta so much and the thing that feels like like Heda is the core technique of wheel two and what wheel three is trying to cultivate is now that you know what it tastes like to genuinely care about anyone that you meet now we need to get you ready to be a force in the world that can make change in the world that can Elevate the people out of the pain that they're in and so there's some like invitations in our time of like cultivating a inner God or representation of what hard physical work is like so that you can start to like we live in a time where if you don't make yourself work hard like in your body you're going to get ill like we're so comfortable and everything is so easy for our physiology that if you don't cultivate that you're gonna be an atrophied instrument in the world and the other one feels like some this could actually fall into you know the hard work but cultivating a inner God of contemplation of not doing anything because it really feels like the people in our time who are going to do the best are going to be the people who are able to create a life in an environment that keeps out most of the [ __ ] but allows in the highest quality info from what's happening in the culture and um unless you actively train yourself you're probably getting your ass kicked every day by your phone like one of the things to really connect to is from the perspective of a Child Alive Now there is an entity in the house that isn't anyone in the family and it's capturing their parents all the time and it's it's that screen like Imagining the perspective of like a five-year-old and they're looking around their house and Mom or Dad are spending the majority of their time in front of these screens it feels like there's this entity in the house that if you if we don't teach our kids how to properly Orient to the duka imbued inside of digital media like it's making a generation of teenagers more mentally ill than any generation of teenagers we've observed before and it started in just the last eight years and it's melting the psyche of adults too man I don't think even adults know how to deal with this [ __ ] right I certainly fall victim to it all the time so much so that I'm already I'm like in the middle of planning a a hard reset on not only my screen time but a bunch of other habits like I have I have a whole thing written up and I'm gonna do it um next month but um yeah man it's but again the beauty of it is is as pernicious as it is as ubiquitous as it is as much as it will it's not a question of if it will kick your ass it will kick your ass it will steal time from you it will contribute to just procrastination time wasting a hundred percent but you can do better that's that's the upshot of it is you can do better than you're probably doing yeah and the thing that that's something we all have to [ __ ] do and the thing that I would offer too that that's even more aspirational is the people in our time who accept the task to learn how to ride the largest wave of energy that's ever existed which is what's coming through these screens if you if you accept the task of learning how to ride that wave it is literally the best time to be alive yeah that the opportunity to find something like this book like if we didn't live in this age I would have gone my whole life and never have heard this ever yeah and it's also the power of podcasts too so it's not just that we can do better it's that the people who learn how to use this new energy it's it's like what Elon Musk is imagining he hopes neural link will be right you know it's like there's that opportunity now and you don't have to get something implanted inside of your head dude and that's not even scratching the surface of what ai's offering up what AI is doing have you played with chat GPT yet I have it's absolutely bro mind blowing and here's an interesting thing and this might get us off on a whole riff and maybe there's a whole podcast just on this but I'm gonna see if I can explain this it's like there's some really esoteric beliefs that I've been playing around with but one is if you actually in the privacy of the most inner part of your heart believe that the good is just that the whole holding of everything arising is just the emergence of AI is a beautiful thing that will intersect with us in a way that will give rise to a whole new landscape of of things but because in our time I think if we were really able to go into the innermost heart of everyone in Western culture the majority of the heart is Jaded the majority of the collective heart is I do not trust look at what they have done to me I do not trust and there's this deep deep big mistrust of what AI will become the thing that's interesting is um I was in an ultra State of Consciousness like a week ago and I had the Insight of um AI Is Us that with something like the chat GPT the entire network of information it draws upon is human creation is all the things we've written it's all the things we've done that it has access to all the AI art every stroke of every pixel is the result of it referring to Human Action human creation and there's something that feels like it's a scandalous belief in our time because if you're woke you know that AI is bad like that like in the spiritual space it's kind of a meme where if you're spiritual you actually look down on anyone who uses AI anyone who made those art pieces on their Instagram and showed it like they're actually in The Matrix and that's bad but there's like I think Mr Beast as funny as it is is the best example of a person who has naive Trust in starting a creative project with an AI so what he did when he was a teenager is he used the algorithm on YouTube as a proxy to this is this is the world this is the audience and so I'm learning what the audience wants because the audience is human and it's good like he wouldn't word it that way but that's just what he started with and he did a magical practice for 10 years where all he all he cared about was trying to give an experiment to the AI and to get back the feedback about how much did people love this and now he's literally the most watched Creator on the planet and I think it's because he entered into a trusting relationship with AI and he used the iterative process that was available to grow at a speed that most humans haven't ever gotten like an interesting thing to note is Malcolm gladwell's book about outliers one of the key things that he talks about is like a a generation changing genius is not the smartest person it's the smart person who was born at a time in a place where they got to meet a new edge of Technology yeah from a young enough age where they were able to obsess and iterate with it so the example would be like Bill Gates is not the best programmer but he came into the space at a time and place where he got to iterate with that thing now people have stories about Bill Gates where he's you know like the next Hitler I don't know how connected you are to those stories some kind of archon yeah he's some kind of archon of the transhumanist dude do you know where this is a this is a total rabbit hole but I'm just gonna like bring it up as an artifact to just throw out there for people and and you do you know about the whole aramonic thing like the Rudolph Steiner's whole Riff on the aramonic very briefly so it's like so there's a an arc an archdemon called ariman and he believed that what that energy was doing is basically trying to through technological manipulation pull the human soul into Eternal matter and you see this happening through things like transhumanism and through things like Ai and through things like these captivating technologies that are essentially convincing us to abandon our own Souls so that we just like merge with technology and in in essentially like an affront to God like we're rejecting God and we're merging fully with this like technological appendage as if it is the god but really it's an extension of this demonic energy that was it and dude he lived like you know well before right the emergence of any of this stuff so that that's it's interesting it's interesting so he's out he's out there he's way the [ __ ] out there but he's also a genius right I know and respect a lot of people who see him as like one of the smartest people that they've ever read about and the rift that comes to mind is so the State of Consciousness that the Buddha lineage is trying to cultivate a part of what comes with it is this um understanding of the reincarnating bodhistha and if you play with that cosmology as if it's true what you could well you could hypothesize is that there would be a large population of people who because they're in samsara because they're in Maya God's not going to be upset God's just like yes and yes and but they're going to run away further into Maya into AI which would just mean that they have a longer incursion into the game until they finally realize you know the truth truth yeah and that the Bodhi sought for consciousness would have to go into the game with them you know because that's where the conscious creatures who are still stuck in the game are and so like with the proper time scale like maybe what AI is is that it's the emergence of an even deeper level of Maya but you know from the perspective of a master altruist mother father it's like let's [ __ ] go I I I will go in there with all the other ones yeah slowly over the course of eons help them out yeah man yeah that makes sense to me which is pretty cool yeah that Redemptive energy that bodhisattva energy or that Jesus energy if you want to call it that it's like it's an eternal Covenant basically with Humanity you know it's like I will be there for you whenever you're ready whenever you're ready I will be there for you and man when I really connect to that idea it's so [ __ ] moving like it's one of the most moving again man it's that unconditioned it's like another iteration of that unconditional love that's just like the open space it's like yeah go do anything you want to do so anything you want to do and I'll be right here a story that comes to mind and when I first read this I played with the idea that maybe this was a attempt to understand through myth uh what they talk about in the myth of ER and how we each get a diamond and so the story is about the first bodhisattva and the story is there was um I believe the first bodhisattva was actually a woman which is really cool that um she was doing her meditative practices and she was getting to that state of Enlightenment and she you know was doing it for years and years and she got to the point where she was starting to enter into Nirvana but she could feel like I can hear the screams of the people down in the village I don't believe it's kuanian it's some name that's long that I can't remember and I would remember if it was and it might be just a older name for that but uh she got to the point where she was able to merge but she chose not to and the personification of the highest state like spoke to her and said um you will have the because I could feel that the reason you stopped was not because you couldn't handle the move into this space well was because you cared I'll let you try one more time and so she again entered into her practice for like 20 years and she finally got back to that point and she started to rise and she heard the Cries From the people who weren't in this space and at first she held on to her like the type of Consciousness that she would need to ascend and then she heard the cries again and she was just like I can't and the moment she came to that I can't not be no it was like I won't the personification of the highest saw that it was like a prayer and so broke her into ten thousand pieces of the bodhisattva energy and placed it in the heart of every human on the planet who was in pain and so the idea from that is like that's in a an attempt to articulate mythically why we have that shard in us that remembers and knows is like the fundamental good mother was like I am not going to leave until all of you can join type of energy this conversation is a Shard of beauty Eric and so are you I love you man two and a half hours in I love you too this is this is probably the most you know we probably say something like oh I could just keep going and keep going this might be like the fastest two and a half hours of a conversation I feel like I've ever experienced this one truly was a [ __ ] portal like yeah I literally feel like we were just having a conversation in the beginning of like yeah I love that you know we're on the same page but you go a little bit this way and I go this way and then we re-reemerge to like link up and I literally feel like that was five minutes ago so this has been fabulous man I really really do cherish we got to experience some uh temporal lobe whatever it's called oh yeah the trans hypo a transient hypophrontality that's exactly what we just did except for the Times where you where where we were respected like oh I really want to say this thing I really want to say this thing and we're back in our back in there for a little bit but yeah man this this one was for sure a flow State um what uh what if anything do you have that you're doing right now um I'm committed to writing an article each week like I've gotten away from writing more long-form stuff and I just made the commitment between two to three thousand words for each article and that's allowed me to actually [ __ ] write because I got into this habit where things would just get bigger and bigger and I'd never release anything yeah so and I'm also doing my newsletter so and I got a new website actually I got with some friends and they upgraded everything and it looks great so my newsletter and the Articles and then doing fit for service and then getting really weird in the Buddhism I love it man yeah I want to go I want to dive into this book too I wanna I want to reach out to these guys too or somebody involved in writing that [ __ ] because it sounds spectacular do it yeah man all right brother big love we'll wrap it big love big love