 Purpose of this thing that we call the world, I think, is to send us synchronicities or send us experiences that help us unravel that stuff. And a lot of times we get sent situations which make us trigger us with those kind of wounds that we have, but it's an opportunity for us to unravel them and change them. So I think we have the opportunity to grow and change and become better versions of ourselves and up-level our game. My mother coming to the United States and birthing me here triggered a completely different tree of possibility than if I was born in Yerevan in Armenia. Completely different. Right. And maybe there's a point at which on her journey, you know, a few months before she left for the United States where it was a really fine line between which she was going to choose. Yes. And we can look at that situation and say, okay, every other day, the decision of whether she got up in the morning and went to look out the window was inconsequential. But on one particular day, she got up and looked out the window and it was a beautiful day. And she got her mind set in her heart that she was going to make this change. And that led to her having an experience that day, which just made her decide to move. And that led to you being born here. So down the road, there's this hugely different outcome. We can look at that one decision as meaningful, not in a subjective sense, like, you know, it was good or bad. But in a sense of, if you look at this direction, it's very, very different in the long run from this direction. Yes. Just a difference in types of experiences that happen from that one choice point. Yes. So we can identify those as like the singular moments in life when it's more crucial how we approach a situation and what decisions we make. The picture that I have in my worldview that's come to me from like where I started trying to understand the meaning of events in my life. We just talked about the meaningful choices that we make and how, you know, they decide what career we choose or what country we live in or just who we become. Those are the meaningful choices that we make and how do they show up in our lives? How do we make those decisions? What, and then I started doing research. I've been studying for decades is an interest in Fourier transforms and holograms. I read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot when I was a teenager and really passionate and the work by David Bohm and the Implicit Order and really passionately trying to understand what it could mean that the world is really informational. What it could mean that consciousness comes first. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two, one. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Saakian. I'm very pumped to be talking with Sky Nelson Isaacs. Hi, Sky. Hey, Alan. Good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the program and I'm very grateful to Seth Kostak for introducing us. So pumped, so pumped. Yeah. Thanks for the intro. It's been great to meet you, Alan, and find out more about what you're doing and spreading lots of good information and ideas and curiosity. It's what I love about you the most, the curiosity that you bring to the show. Thank you, Sky. It was so fascinating when we began uncovering this such a similar space of interest between us, you from a very physics-oriented standpoint and also integrating some of that spirituality in there and me coming at it from a bunch of other areas of thinking. So we've really been able to hit the ball back so well with each other on this. So you even went as far as authoring a book on it. Let's give a quick background on Sky. So he's the author of Living in Flow. He got a Bachelor of Science from Berkeley in Physics and then a Master of Science in Physics with a thesis on string theory from San Francisco State University. And it's so cool when I get to dive into depth on what you wrote because Living in Flow is all about the science of synchronicity and how our choices shape our world. And we talk about this quite a lot on the program regarding having a constant decisions that we make that are bifurcations in this beautiful tree, in the tree of possibility and all these little bifurcating moments. And you and I went really hard on that. We're going to get into all of that and we're going to get into a lot more. I want to start with one of our favorite questions to start the shows off with, which is ultimately what is the nature of this reality? What made it? What's the point of it? What's our role in it? That's a great question and I'm not going to answer it, but I'll talk about it. And that's been a question I've been curious about my whole life, the same as you. And what I sort of realized pretty early was that we're here to learn. We're here to grow. And I was introduced to traditions that have that as their background. I read the Tao Te Ching in my teens and I was introduced to Hinduism early on. And of course, I was familiar with Christianity and Judaism. And Sufi Islam has been interesting to me reading the poetry of Rumi for decades. I love those influences. Those influences are so sacred to me. I love it. It's just for me, the beauty of life is around the way in which events happen, the way in which life falls into place. And it can be really heartbreaking sometimes and painful. It can be really beautiful and fun and exciting. And all of it in some sense is sacred as this aura of why is this happening a certain way? So what I feel about that is that we're here to learn and grow and heal the parts of ourselves that have been wounded. And we take on wounds when we're little, I think, as we are kids. We take on other people's issues. We respond to situations that happen to us in certain ways. And those responses aren't always the most healthy way to respond. Like if my parents ignore me at a crucial time in my life, I might feel like I'm abandoned or something like that. So I start to react to different people in the same way with that same pattern. So I think we develop patterns that are emotional patterns and psychological patterns. And the purpose of life is, or I don't like phrasing it that way, but the purpose of this thing that we call the world I think is to send us synchronicities or send us experiences that help us unravel that stuff. And a lot of times we get sent situations which make us trigger us with those kind of wounds that we have, but it's an opportunity for us to unravel them and change them. So I think we have the opportunity to grow and change and become better versions of ourselves and up level our game. Yes, yes. Okay, what a great way to kick us off. So this idea of this reality being a creation of ourselves is something that has been very interesting that we ourselves are the creators. We are all that is. We made this school that we are understanding ourselves better in by playing in the game. And that I really appreciated how you went back in terms of ancient spiritualities of the world, the Taoism, the Hinduism, the great philosophers and poets, Rumi. I would highly recommend those that are listening that haven't really dived into ancient spirituality to go and spend a week or two of your life just on Wikipedia studying the ancient spiritualities of the world. Because I think that given the fact that we live in 2020 and that everyone thinks that all the coolest shit is happening today, I think that that is actually a horrible aspect of what it's a beautiful feature in the sense that it's drawing so many people away from the ancient spiritualities. But now it's our turn to try and help people realize that so much of the profundity of understanding the nature of reality is actually not in the 2020 instantaneous new cycle, but it's actually in the old codes. Well, let's talk about the Tao, Cohen or the Zen Cohen. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you think about if, and this is a big if, this is controversial stuff, if quantum mechanics applies to the whole world, if it's universal and not just a tool we use on the very microscopic things, that's controversial theorem, but it's this part of the center of my work, if we can show that that's the case, then what quantum mechanics says, quantum mechanics is the study of what the world is doing when we're not watching it. When you look at electron going through a magnetic field that splits into one of two different possible directions based upon its spin, and when you're not watching it, all you can say is that there's a superposition of possibilities, certain statistical likelihood of one or the other. So what is a tree doing when you're not watching it? If the same rules apply, it's in a superposition of the fallen and not fallen. And so they were seeming to describe the very same conundrums that we came to in the early 20th century when we started studying stuff at the microscopic level and realizing that there's this intermediate level, there's reality as we know it, and then there's the void of non-existence, and that's all most people think about, but actually quantum mechanics says it's this in-between level of possibilities. The wave function is describing all the possibilities of something, and it's only when we measure it that we get to this level of existence. And I think there's a direct connection between us trying to solve that problem and the early Zen trying to solve the other problem. We just didn't have the tools that we have, and that's the beautiful thing about the knowledge we have today is we can apply it to some of these ancient riddles. Yes, yes. Okay, this is such a great way to move us in. As we get into the hardcore cutting-edge sciences of quantum mechanics and the way that those actually are so deeply related with ancient spiritualities, I want us to also brush on what you were mentioning in that intro segment around the complexity of birth, the polarity of birth, and then the other polarity of death, and then the interval of life in between, and how you began touching on, you use this word pattern and stimuli. And there's a lot that we take in from even our ancestors, our ancestral lineage. There's so much complexity over the billions of years of evolution that led to our birth, where it is our, we're now starting to really understand at a deeper level how much the microbiome affects us. And those are microbes that have been around billions of years, and we're starting to understand more about how epigenetically our ancestral lineage, we may be actually carrying significant stress from our ancestors or our trauma from our ancestors, but also some of the great skills that they brought forth. Maybe they themselves were engineers, or they themselves were designers of some sort or doctors or teachers. And so we carry that with us. So then there's the moment of birth, when you're actually beginning to take in all of the stimuli every second, and how that shapes your neurophysiology, your heart, your brain, everything that now, now, now, now, Sky, I'm so interested to know where, you know, this tree of possibility, we, we ourselves, let me, let me give you the example with me. My, my mother coming to the United States and birthing me here, sugared a completely different tree of possibility than if, if I was born in Yerevan in Armenia, completely different. Right. And maybe there's a point at which on her journey, you know, a few months before she left for the United States, where it was a really fine line between what she was going to choose. Yes. And we can look at that situation and say, okay, every other day, the decision of whether she got up in the morning and went to look out the window was inconsequential. But on one particular day, she got up and looked out the window, and it was a beautiful day. And she got her mind set in her heart that she was going to make this change. And that led to her having an experience that day, which just made her decide to move. And that led to you being born here. So down the road, there's this hugely different outcome. And we can look at that one decision as meaningful, not in a subjective sense, like, you know, it was good or bad, but in the sense of, if you look at this direction, it's very, very different in the long run from this direction. It's just a difference in the types of experiences that happen from that one choice point. Yes. So we can identify those as like the singular moments in life when it's more crucial how we approach a situation and what decisions we make. Now, could we, I really want to ask this question. There's so many ways to go from here. Could it be that everything, everything is perfect? Beautiful. That's a great, great way to put it. So the picture that I have in my worldview that's come to me from, like, where I started trying to understand the meaning of events in my life. We just talked about the meaningful choices that we make and how, you know, they decide what career we choose or what country we live in or just who we become. Those are the meaningful choices that we make and how do they show up in our lives? How do we make those decisions? And then I started doing research. I've been studying for decades. There's an interest in Fourier transforms and holograms. I read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot when I was a teenager and really passionate and the work by David Bohm on the Implicit Order and really passionately trying to understand what it could mean that the world is really informational. What it could mean that consciousness comes first. What I mean by that is if you take a second and stop thinking about the world and notice that you're actually experiencing the world right now, there's this thing called experience. And philosophers like David Chalmers use the word qualia to describe the qualitative experience that you can't give it to anybody else. You can't say, here's a code describing my qualitative experience. You can only experience qualitative experience. And then I can tell you the dinner I had of pasta last night tasted divine and you would have an imagination about what pasta's like because you've tasted it before. But I couldn't actually convey to you the information about the taste and the sensation and the experience that I had. So my sense is that we can't ever explain in materialist terms what qualia are, what experience is. We have to start with that as the basis. The basis of reality is the aware experience we're having of it. And in that aware experience, we have a physical world which unfolds and we can talk more about the math underneath us if you want. Unfolds like a hologram unfolds. It's a representation, an informational representation of data that shows up in a physical form that you can feel, you can touch, you can see. But nonetheless, what differentiates a holographic world from the world that we think of normally is that in a holographic world, you don't have what you might call object permanence. Like when a baby is born, coming back to your example, they come into the world and you give them a toy and they play with the toy and you take it away and they forget that the toy exists. And that's a great example. And it's also the way video games are designed. If you play a multiplayer online video game, you're playing your game, but the game is actually in your computer. It's not out there in the world. It's not even on a central server anywhere. It's in your laptop and it's being rendered for you. And it seems like there's this world out there because other people are on their laptops doing their thing. But what's really happening is a personal rendering of the world and then sharing the relevant sharing of information between the worlds to make it seem like there's a seamless world. And that's a great model for how I think this holographic multiverse that we're in works. We're experiencing a rendering of this holographic information that exists in what can be called frequency space or the frequency domain. And that's rendering a sense of reality that has mass and has touch as color has all those things. And gives us the sense that we are existing in a physical world and it is a physical world. But it's primarily information coming from the conscious experience we're having first. Yes, yes. Oh, okay. Now, we make us us creating this with the ingenious of making it so that we have an individual holographic rendering that is happening for each one of us in the massive multiplayer game that we're in. And then we have a shared reality about the word cup and that cup being filled with water and that we can say, please refill my cup and you know what that means and then to do that. So there's, again, there's just so many interesting ways to take it. But I want to stay with a couple of things. Coming back again, we have, this is probably one of the coolest words that exists in the world. It's the word bifurcation. And I know it's such a, it's such a cool, cool word. I don't think I could use that in the song, though. Yeah, it wouldn't sound very good as a lyric. Oh, the bifurcation. It would kind of ruin the moment, you know, if I love a song or something. You and I met on a cold dark night and our paths bifurcated. Yes. Or, or, you know, like you were, like we were describing with, you know, these profound moments for our, our ancestors in our lineage, you know, we could make a whole love song about that bifurcating moment about my mom coming here rather than Armenia. And so, and how important those choices are now that we're making for our children and their children. And looking a little, and that's, that's a key element of the holographic formulation of, of the world and quantum mechanics that I'm working on is that instead of focusing on the present moment, which is what we're also focused on, we think that we live in the present. We actually are existing on a timeline. There is no present moment in physics, in my understanding. There are timelines or branches of this tree that bifurcate. And so, when we, when we start to see ourselves more on a timeline that has an outcome, we start to take a little bit more, or at least I should speak for myself. It gives me more context for what I'm choosing. And then the moment I might be feeling grumpy or morose or whatever, but when I look at the timeline and where I'm going, it gets me out of that and say, okay, I got to focus on what's the outcome I'm looking for and then wait for the, notice how the outcome is giving me opportunities filling in the path for me to get there. And those are what we call synchronicities. The opportunity is to move forward in the meaningful path that we want to get onto. Yes, yes. Now, you bring up again something that's just so pivotal, crucial for us to realize is that this idea of like a North star or a, as we call in computer science, a MCTS, a Monte Carlo tree search, that you go for this most distant fruit of yours and that you really want to achieve that fruit in terms of what impact you want to make in the world, what value you want to bring to other people, et cetera, your lineage that you want to leave behind all these types of things. So, and then if this is a multi-agent reinforcement learning environment that we find ourselves in, that then in order for us, we can do really interesting things like sky, I can find a peak where that fruit is that of a person that's at the cutting edge of biotech or neuroscience or AI or crypto and blockchain or spirituality or whatever. And I can identify that, and then I can make crucial steps in order to attempt to get mentors in that space. There's so many ways to rise up. These are those bifurcating moments. Are you going to focus hardcore on achieving your fruit or are you going to maybe want to go and party more? Are you going to want to watch more Netflix? Are you going to want to eat more processed foods and refined sugars that are going to kill you faster? Are you not going to sleep enough? Are you not going to exercise enough? So, these are all bifurcating moments and you can have small ones like let's probably hit on this point then. Bifurcating moments can have a weight to them that is lower than other bifurcating moments. So, certain bifurcating moments like that decision for my mom to come to the US or for me to move to Silicon Valley, those are larger weights than maybe my one instance of eating a cupcake versus not. Right. And I think it's really useful, a really useful aspect of this way of understanding the world is seeing these things that happen in life with some context. So, you talked about gaining a mentor. Well, maybe you're thinking, I want to be in this field. I want to be doing what? I want to be a rock star. I want to be a computer programmer or whatever it is. And what happens is you come across somebody who's not going to get you anywhere but actually has some things to teach you. And if you're paying attention, you notice that as an actual moment along the path that's sent there to help you. It's responding to the choice you made and the actions you've taken. But it doesn't look like you thought it would. You didn't realize you needed a mentor, you thought you needed a breakthrough. But what you really needed was this person to come along and help you see things a little differently. So, I think it's really, there's a sense of humility that comes to me when I see like, oh yeah, I think I need X, Y, Z in order to get where I want to go. But actually the situations I'm being sent right now are the very situations I need to get where I want to go. And that might be like, I've set my goal on hitting half a million dollars in my revenue this year or something like that. Let's say, that's not me. Let's say that was my business goal and I'm trying to work my way up the ladder. And then something happens at home that I have to deal with that I really just can't avoid. Even though I want to, because I'm trying to focus on this goal I have, that thing happening at home is in service. Yes, yes, yes. It's all in service to that goal. And so trusting that, okay, I need to divert my attention to this other place. I need to learn. I need to deal with this and understand myself at a deeper level so that I can use that information to get where I need to go. It's probably one of the most reoccurring themes on our show with all the different people we sit down with is that their greatest traumas have led to their greatest treasures. And it's almost as though the faster that we realize that those bifurcating moments that seem like their horrible diseases, divorces, death. There's all of these different traumas that come up. And for us to realize that they actually serve us as lessons in the school that we were first referencing towards that fruit, that's been such a reoccurring theme. It's probably one of the top reoccurring themes with all the people that we sit down with. If we could wave a big wand and try and pass along a profound experiential wisdom to people all over the world, I think that probably one of the top ones, if not the top one, would be that idea that everything that happens is to serve us in some way in the school. The picture that I have from the work I do is a branching tree, as we've talked about. And when you take an action, you're always at the base of that tree. The tree is relative to you. You're standing at the base of this tree of all your decisions you could make and all the things that could happen to you. And the choices you make have to do with the experiences that you're anticipating having. If I anticipate being healthier a year from now, I'm going to start making choices that involve planning a better diet and shopping for better food and eating that food and going to the gym because that's what I'm anticipating experiencing. I'm going to naturally do those activities. And so if you look at the actions you take at the base of the tree and you look at all the branches of the tree that have the outcome, let's say these, I can't do it on the screen, but those four and this one have the apples. Like these are the ones that have the experience I want to have. Those become heavier. And because there's four on this branch and only one over here, then this branch becomes heavier. And anything that's on this branch becomes more likely to happen. So I have situations showing up in my life to lead me onto this branch. And if we have that picture in mind, then whatever it is that we're acting towards, if we're aligned with our intention and what we want out of life, if those things are aligned, actions that are aligned with that, then we can trust that those apples are lining up and weighing down the possibilities in such a way that, and this is of course controversial, this isn't something that's been widely accepted, but it's what I try and show that that weighs down the branches in a particular way that bring you, more likely bring you situations that help you get there. Yes. It's still in the path. Yes. So then you can start to trust, okay, whatever's showing up in my life is probably going to be useful in some way. Yes. Yes. Excellent, excellent way to visually describe it. So that this idea of like, whatever you're uniquely here to do as your gift or your North Star, for you to basically be in constant check with yourself about what that is, because then that's what gives you that idea of where your directional arrow is going towards, and then you're constantly then choosing decisions and synchronicities arise for you to go in that direction more and more. Yeah, and a lot of times the things that happen can be obstacles. They can be things that show up that make us feel insecure or make us feel angry or make us feel hurt. And these are, these are those patterns right from childhood. These are the things that are being triggered in us that make us want to go one direction, but we always have the choice to how we respond. And yes, by choosing to respond differently over time and stop, stop reacting with anger. Yes. Channel the anger in a different way or express ourselves vulnerably instead of being angry, you know. Anger is not bad. It's anger that's directed in the wrong direction at the wrong person that can cause wounds. And so the more we become handy with that kind of stuff, the more we can properly handle ourselves under those situations that we hurt during, more we're able to catch the opportunities that are leading us through flow into better parts of our lives into up-leveling our game. Which is probably why people give such a big fuck now about mindfulness and meditation because they realize now more than ever in the modern world that the more that I work on my ability to stay completely equanimous when massive stress and anger and all these types of things arise that the more that I can vigilantly align myself towards that apple on the tree that I actually want to go towards. And so it's a big meditation and mindfulness and spirituality are so deeply aligned with one's ability to make the decisions that we want at the branch. At the right time, yeah. Yeah, and so in my book I connect that to flow when we start paying attention to the situations that show up in our life, when we have some trust that those situations are useful in some way. Then we start to experience more flow. A lot of times those situations might be obstacles or problems that show up in our life and instead of reacting to them we see where we're being led. But it's not about going with the flow and that's a very important distinction. It's this is about the balance between assertiveness and receptivity. Yeah. And I use a process that's very simple. L-O-R-R-A-X, the Lorax. And it's listen to the situation, not just to people, but to the situation. What's going on here that I need to pay attention to? Open my mind. So I usually have a snap judgment about what's going on and instead of paying attention to that or doing what it says, I can say, okay, but maybe there's a different interpretation of the situation. Let me take a minute and just think about it. So then I reflect on the situation and this is where I start to look at what are my goals in this situation? What have I been wanting to experience differently in my life? What am I aiming for professionally that this experience might actually be helping me towards? Let's say I'm going to a meeting and my boss cancels the meeting and I'm supposed to present in that meeting and I've done all this preparation while I might be angry about that. But then I take a second and say maybe there's a different interpretation. I start looking and reflecting on some open-minded reflection of how this could be good. It turns out that later in the following week it's rescheduled and somebody important is in town, the CEO is in town and he or she sits in on the meeting and so you get this bigger platform you wouldn't have otherwise. So it's reflecting on how could this possibly serve me in ways that I'm not aware of and then releasing the attachment because we're always attached, right? I thought I was going to do this presentation today and I have to let that go because it's not happening and that allows me to then not be reactive and angry and then from there I can act and so this is four steps that have to do with receptivity and one step that has to do with action proactivity, you know? And then X is to not give up to keep doing this and always recognize that there's another chance coming. So there's a lot of importance in balancing not just going with the flow not just being receptive and doing whatever everyone wants there's an action that's needed some initiative but it's also starting with listening and aligning yourself with the circumstances without being reactive to them. Yes, now this kind of leads me into asking you this question because this word balance is so critical that it's, you know, we can look back and you can see it all over ancient spirituality as well that there's a moment to both be completely non-action oriented and then there's a moment to be action oriented the receptivity versus the execution and it happens over and over again in our lives, you know, there's that word balance we can talk about it in so many different ways the balance between good and bad or light and dark or male and female or in hot and cold I mean it is literally all over the place and the question is do you think that our creation, this one, do you think that it necessarily the one expresses itself dualistically in this reality giving us those two polarities and then all of the nuance in between wow that's a great question it's going to be interpreted in so many different ways so we can just play with it a little bit one of the things I love about the author Mihai Csikszentmihalyi who wrote the book on flow that I use a lot I reference a lot of my work in my book and I met him actually through a synchronicity about a month ago for the first time and he endorsed my book and that was great I love it that's so huge it's so huge and he did great work on flow and the way he talks about it is you know there's a spectrum you know on one hand we could take control of the situation we can exert control we all know how to take more control of life we also all know how to throw up our hands in the air and say I give up by surrender and some of us do one or the other more often right and some of us do both at different times what you might think the balance is like being in the middle like I'm going to halfway throw up my hands in the air and halfway take control but that's not it flow is about transcending that whole spectrum it's about transcending the worry recognizing that when you're either in control or throwing your hands up in the air and out of control you're still in both cases you're basically worried about the situation you're trying to figure out what can I do to solve this thing what can I do to get a hold of life and take some kind of when I throw my hands in the air I'm actually trying to take control by giving up control right if I give up control maybe things will go well I'm still trying to get things to go well what an interesting way to put it in either case I'm worried because I don't have control over my life the way I want it and so flow is about transcending the worry about control recognizing what it is you're holding on to that's making you concerned about the situation and then being able to see what is needed without that worry getting in the way your personal ego worry and see what's needed and then because in flow there's no right way there's no like when flow you always do this the whole point of flow is that it's never predictable it's only when you transcend your worry and get out of that dynamic that you can see oh in this case I need to apologize to this person or in this case I need to hold my ground it might be different in different situations so it could it be then that in other words that the dichotomy between those polarities it can be a useful way of interpreting the reality for us to understand it but the complete flow or dow that is occurring when these with the process of the growth the aliveness to flourishing the evolution of what this reality really is and our unique little puzzle piece role in it there's this balance of complete the flow feeling with the what is my north star what is my apple and how can I what's what's going on at these bifurcating moments of man I'm being drawn to go out right now but I also really want to study or I'm being I have this opportunity to listen to this mentor's advice versus not so this right yeah so what yeah go ahead so I don't think that there's a right choice and one of the things that actually got me started thinking seriously about synchronicity was this question I'm a musician and so I would sometimes go out and go to an open mic or play play music with people but I was also doing studying and research and reading up on the things we're talking about and on a given night I would be like what which should I do there's this open mic but I'm reading this book that I really want to read and what I would find is if I go to the open mic I'd have this experience with people that was amazing and we'd play together on stage and there'd be this moment and it comes back to the experience of awareness we'd have this experience that was priceless right yeah never predicted this thing and yet if I had done something different and this hadn't happened I can't imagine my life without this experience that I just had I love playing music with these people and and having a good time at the same time another night I might stay home and skip that and and do my reading and I get some insight that would guide my work for years to come exactly and so so clearly there's not a right decision yes and and what I came to was that the universe is actually responding to the choices we make that on this branching tree whichever choice I make there are opportunities for well-being on both branches and so there's a sense of having to like let go of the attachment to getting it right and yes I might miss out on a great in every choice I make I'm missing out on great things on the other branches always great things so I actually except in crazy scenarios like maybe being prescribed an opioid and getting addicted and then you know things like that so there's very seriously like ones that's true yeah where it's really hard to you know we're talking about such kind of like privileged ones where it's like oh should I go or be the play music so but on ones where it's maybe less privileged where it's like oh like I'm literally about to like nine out of ten pain level what do I do opioid or not you know how do I handle that yeah so stuff like that and then where that can lead so so there's there's these there those are really difficult questions and it's something I struggle with a lot recognizing the limitations of my own upbringing and the culture that I live in and the the community that I have that's a certain level of privilege I'm a white male I'm living in the Bay Area and I have a certain level of affluence you know I'm somewhere on that spectrum and I can't see it from a different person's perspective and I can't say it's always one thing or the other I think it's valuable we can't say that synchronicity is something that everybody can see all the time in their life unfolding and I don't want to imply that we all have access to the same level of choice we don't many of us have degrees of freedom are less yeah for some and more for others yeah so I think what's really valuable is to recognize what degrees of freedom we have yeah and allow ourselves to gratitude for those degrees of freedom yeah yeah I have gratitude for what choices we have and see if there's any ways in which we're blocking a way forward because of our own inner reactions our own resentments or anger or misdirected feelings of frustration I think we all carry this levels of negative emotions that can get in the way of us making choices that lead us out of danger so I don't know what it's like to be in a real dangerous situation and have to navigate these same things so I don't want to speak to that but I think that there's a lot of a lot of progress we can make even in the simpler situations that aren't as extreme in how we heal ourselves from some of those negative dynamics and I think when we heal ourselves of anger that we've inherited from our parents and our their parents and our ancestors we make a difference all the way down that tree yes future generations will look back and say oh that that time it stopped that pattern stopped sky healed the transgenerational trauma that was occurring and then now sky's children don't experience that and they have more degrees of freedom they have more they're not as susceptible to falling into the same loops of anger or fear etc sure and I don't think that we can solve every problem you know I don't think that the goal is to to get things and to have a certain level of affluence or anything like that I think that the goal is to heal, grow, and evolve yeah we can all do that yes and there's you know heal, grow, evolve fascinating excellent words and as our we mentioned one of them a little bit ago gratitude is another one empathy is huge we were both mentioning that a moment ago we're trying to get behind the eyes of other people and their little tree of possibilities that then give us a better understanding and you know humility is another really important word in that patience is another very important word to have patience on the on our on our journey towards our north star now I just really real quick on this one and then I want to get into a little bit on the heavier science stuff as we wrap one more thought around this is so then sky we see ourselves as individual artists there's eight currently there's eight billion individual artists that are all in a collective symphony and that whatever I am going to play as my next note which can be this bifurcation you know if it's not one of those severe ones like an opioid addiction let's say but if it's one where it's like I'm going to go play with my band at a musical event versus stay at home and research and read you can have profound insight happen from either of those so the note is just as beautiful from either of those decisions that you play right yes that's absolutely true and that you know I think it opens up I go into in my book grief because I think grief is is a really important emotion that we tend to push away and we push it away because it's uncomfortable and I'm not saying that I know what anybody else's grief is like but I know that for me when I'm disappointed even in the missed opportunity there's a level of grief that's there I have a section in my book actually that talks directly about that can I read of course please read and the link is in the bio for everyone living in flow our grief allows us to let go of what is holding us back from living fully authentic lives our sorrow and the outrage that may come with it can light a fire within us we don't all need to become activists we don't all need to follow an outward path of political or social change rather allowing those authentic feelings into our hearts can give us the courage to be honest right here in our own lives in our own homes in our own places of work or worship when we authentically feel our emotions we are no longer willing to let life go by without speaking up into the microphone we're also no longer willing to let external circumstances or standards determine who we are an important first step is allowing ourselves to feel the grief of loss whether it's a loss of a relationship with a person we've loved the loss of ecosystems or creatures or the loss of a profession a way of life or an opportunity when we open to the full range of our experiences we can also reconnect with our ability to feel joy to feel gratitude for what we have and to sense our power to direct our own lives it speaks so truly about again something that's both very ancient advice and very modern coming up again this idea of clean your own room tune inward what inner engineering you mentioned right there as you were reading we're constantly like oh how do I fix the world become the warrior for planet earth etc most often by tuning inward and doing grief work and the amount of time sky that I've done shitty things in my life lie sheet steel manipulate in malevolent ways that I've written down that I've went and faced I have to face these things I wrote it I'm facing them all the time I'm facing them when they come up I don't just go bury move on to the next execution task I actually face that grief where I'm like wow what was going on then and how am I going through the process of consciously healing that to make sure that I've grown and evolved in a more light driven pure way and I think there's a danger and becoming overly what's it called spiritual bypass where spiritual bypass I think is what happens when we don't grieve when we grieve our loss and our sense of you know the things that haven't worked out the way we'd hoped then it's it allows us to move forward and change those patterns and not hold on to those patterns and keep recreating the situations yes so that's my experience yes yes so eloquently said there last bit I want to I want to roll with this with you we talked about this in our previous conversations we were not recording those really looking forward to continuing to record these okay this is going to get maybe a little bit abstract and a little bit esoteric but let's let's hope that we can keep we can we can both visualize this and share it with people as we talk about it yeah okay we've we've talked about what is called an eternal static timeless non-changing frequency space and that being known spiritually by some people as an Akashic records as you've been describing this also being known as this one unity and then as you've been describing you've used this word of Fourier transform you've used those words before we've talked about it how every action that we take we're actually we're actually making a choice and then that is collapsing that trajectory in the infinite possibility space so will you please speak about that interaction between that one eternal static timeless non-changing frequency space and then our own Fourier transform choices that collapse the trajectory in the infinite possibility space well thank you for asking that's fun to talk about and we're going to sort of do the really quick version here and I think it's important to start by saying these are really new ideas and we don't know what all the connections are what is fascinating to me after having studied this for over two decades from a passionate point of view you know just this is like my life question I've been interested in the Fourier transform because Fourier transforms allow you to take a pattern in physical space and transform it into frequency space and when you transform it in the frequency space you may not realize this but you've totally gotten rid of space totally gotten rid of time if you take a music file of sounds vibrating like an orchestra and you transform it with a Fourier transform you now have a file that has no beginning and end the low end is the low frequency the high end is the high frequency where's the beginning of the song it's not anywhere specific the song becomes distributed throughout the whole file that's a really profound concept we live our lives orienting through space and through time we go to the kitchen we get a snack we talk to our friends who are across the room from us and they're separate from us and we're separate separated by a few feet and that's stuff that we can make sense of in the Fourier transformed version of that that that few feet doesn't have any local existence it doesn't doesn't make any sense to talk about those separations so more than anything I want to bring up some really important questions when we start thinking about the world as information we're talking about signal processing and in Silicon Valley we talk all about data right big data processing data in Photoshop you've taken a photograph and manipulated it to get rid of certain frequencies or certain high resolution stuff you can get rid of it or you can enhance it these are all things that are being done in the frequency domain you do that by transforming the file into the frequency domain it loses all spatial coordination you then make a change to the file in the frequency domain and transform it back and you get the spatial information back with some overall changes based on the thing you changed so if I take a photograph of a city for instance and I transform it I get just a bunch of dots that look like a kind of a weird spectrum it represents all the patterns that exist in that photograph the buildings might be sort of lined up like this and the patterns are kind of like there's a pattern left to right of kind of vertical buildings right and you can kind of see that in the spectrum the spectrum captures that information in a way that you can't quite tell looks like a bunch of noise and then if you place a piece of masking tape you know what they call a mask in photo editing you place a mask on just one little section of that file you erase a small portion of the frequency space you leave the rest of the frequency space intact you don't touch it and you transform that file back into regular space what do you think you see everything is changed the entire picture has artifacts of waves and shapes in it that weren't there before so when you change one small section of frequency space you change the entire photograph so there's this there's this mathematics there that is saying if frequency space really represents our physical world which is the bulk of what I'm trying to propose you do this Fourier transform both in space and also in time like you would for music you take a music file you can transform it to its spectrum high frequencies low frequencies and if you do that then whatever that is in frequency space represents all of physical reality yeah yeah and a choice is a Fourier transform well that's I'm not sure about that okay I think it's a little more complicated than that yeah yeah yeah every interaction in my work every interaction is a process of transforming the world into frequency space making a change to its shape and then transferring it back to regular space every interaction so when I bump two particles together boom that happens when you and I shake hands boom that happens I mean at a microscopic level I'm not sure exactly how to explain that but at a microscopic level every interaction is this Fourier transform and inverse okay okay okay now I think I'm following better so when I when I do reach out and grab this cup that then I am the relationship the interaction between between between what is me in in the space and time and what is the cup in the space and time that the infinite amount of possibility in that frequency space the the relation there's like a there's a there's the there's a Fourier transform that happens for me and the cup and then the and then the inverse how does yeah how would that be a style of yeah so first of all these these results aren't published they're in review right now and so what I'm saying is with scientific grain assault like these are things that we're talking about that are postulated that are not understood at you know in general the idea is you know your viewers probably understand or know that quantum mechanics is typically thought to be something that applies just to the microscopic world and doesn't apply to your cup for instance and that's an interesting there's an interesting history to that it actually comes out of history not so much out of science it comes from the the early conclusions from quantum mechanics where the microscopic particles could be in two places at once like electrons could go through two paths of an of a slit you know that's not actually true they're not going through both paths they're not being in two places at once they're it's a possibility space yeah it's more subtle than that and it turns out that whenever you look at an electron you get one or the other when you observe it quantum mechanics is about what's happening when you're not looking when you observe an electron you get a certain result you collapse it so but when we look at the physical world we when we get on an airplane it's only in one place at a time right and so we assume well it's classical it doesn't obey quantum mechanics but just like the electron when we observe the airplane it's in one place so we can't actually observe something when we're not observing it so yes so everything behind me right now is not or in china right now is in superposition it's in relative to you in relative to me and all the viewers we can see what's there and there's a certainty oh actually you can see it too because you're looking on your screen but this is all about remember we come back to that rendering of the of the virtual reality yes yes or you yes so this is what's called relationality where the world takes a certain shape relative to you and all that's required is that your view is consistent with my view when we meet my consciousness perception is what is rendering the infinite possibility space with just you right now our relationship rather than china and what's even until I grab the cup even the cup which is in my peripheral vision is has less more undetermined in the pot interesting and so yeah go ahead the the main theory that describes why the classical world is not quantum mechanical the reason that we think it's just like the the normal world is just normal that theory is called decoherence theory and the in the paper that proselyted this which is very well accepted now Zurich the author writes that we can assume that there's an objective environment if there's an objective environment then quantum mechanics must not apply to the macroscopic world and that's exactly what isn't true in the in the relational perspective there's an environment relative to me and when it's this growing web of interconnections when you and I meet our environments meet and they line up but all that we can say is this this enhanced web of interconnections there's not some objective physical cosmos out there that we're birthing in it's all relative to our conscious awareness of it and that's a really huge leap away from what is generally thought in the mainstream to be the nature of our reality and you know you should take it with a grain of salt but these are real ideas that are out there and they're actually supported by experiment I'll take these with a grain of salt also but some recent experiments having to do with observer independence in quantum measurements and the Wigner's friend paradox there's one experiment called quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself and another called experimental rejection of observer independence in the quantum world these do not prove the relational theory but they support it they're consistent with it and to all the data that we have from experiment is actually consistent with this perspective as far as I understand and I'll say one more thing that's really cool when you approach the world through this holographic formulation when you look at the world as a hologram what's cool about holograms is that they exist as a whole yeah you're gonna process an image like a photograph of the city that image exists as a whole and the patterns in the whole image get turned into frequency space in the same way metaphorically speaking that that could be a metaphor or or maybe even an example of this cup and can also you can take the Fourier transform of this particular shape and you get a certain spectrum that's different than if I cut the top off and I took that away the spectrum of a half glass would be different from the spectrum of a full glass completely different there's no actual similarity between the spectrum of two different objects that are partly different from each other so there's this way in which the holographic approach to understanding the world is dealing with things at a whole it's not because in quantum mechanics we're always building from the ground up we're saying okay quantum mechanics applies to electrons and if I put enough electrons together I should get a macroscopic quantum mechanics but I don't because they collapse but what we can actually start to question is whether objects as a whole obey these properties just like a photograph as a whole has a certain spectrum these are really what's the word these are very new ideas that haven't been shown to be true but I think they're I've thought about them a lot and given them in my writing so I think they're worth talking about it and of course open our minds to these other possibilities it's probably most it's most abstract to me to understand the all of those different paper titles that you mentioned a moment ago it's it's so important so there's a couple things here one of them is that the ideas of of quantum mechanics and the ideas of of a holographic reality those two things are probably the most like abstract and hard for me right now to to grasp in the same amount of the frequency space and the Fourier transforms right those kind of like four things kind of commingling are things where your way studied and like all those different papers are being published in yours as well I think it's super important for us collectively to recognize that this is in the like you know the point one percenters and that we have to in a sense we have to come and hug and and and try and and and and take these as hypotheses and further try and do more tests on if these things are the actual way of what is of what the reality is it's so paramount to to warmly welcome whereas so much of the time we just just say get out of here nonsense so that's why I write as an author because I think it's important not just to leave these in academic papers but to say here's the conclusion I draw from the holographic discussion we just had that instead of in the moment life existing in the moment you're existing on a timeline yes because you Fourier transform everything there's a wholeness to history history doesn't exist as you moving along a you know the present moment from moment to moment and making it as you can you're on a timeline that has a beginning and an end and you're choosing between the different possible timelines and this has an impact on how likely you are then to think about what's your long-term vision and what are the circumstances that are showing up in your path to help you to that vision so this is where you and I definitely this is our most synergistic area of study for us too is the is the idea of of the tree of possibility and the birth to death and the north star and all the bifurcating moments and having foresight and vision and choice to want to go in the direction that is what your unique gift and inner artist can express in the world and then okay and just on a on a very on a very kind of last thought around this is I want I want as much of this cutting edge thinking all the way from the tree of possibility where we were at initially to the complexity of the holographic quantum mechanic reality that you were describing I want people to begin endeavoring into understanding it even at the most even at the most surface level thinking about our lives as the tree of possibility and the bifurcations thinking about as we mentioned at the very beginning going back and studying for weeks at a time ancient spiritualities of the world and what they were thinking comparatively with the holographic quantum mechanics and Fourier transforms that you're talking about now and really really really trying to begin to peace and understand that's why we're doing this conversation and you want some book recommendations give some book recommendations let's do that okay so a book that got me started was the Dancing Wooly Masters by Gary Zukov and that's for non-scientists who want to understand what quantum mechanics why it's profound what it's really pointing towards in a profound sort of way towards the eastern spirituality another book that's more advanced for people who feel really comfortable with more technical stuff that aren't physicists is the strange story of the quantum by Banesh Hoffman and then the book by David Bohm called Holiness in the Implicit Order was was pretty good and there's others but let's stick with that I love that and of course Living in Flow by Skymelson Isaacs as well yeah I love I love these recommendations these are super super also to look into our episode that we've recorded with Seth Kostak that's on our channel as well would highly recommend looking into that as well and I know you two are working closely together which is very exciting and there's a lot more to unpack on our next conversations that I'm really looking forward to Sky this has been yeah such an honor and a pleasure always yeah thanks Alan it's great to be here thanks Seth for getting us together and I look forward to next time yeah likewise and let's go ahead and also give your the the YouTube channel website website and YouTube channel are kind of the main spots right now right for you along with the book yeah so I have a course that I just launched called the living in flow course which dives into some of the the ways that you can use tools of flow and synchronicity to see the goals in your life and how to adapt and move around the resistance that you might have and get back into flow you can find that at my website skynelson.com and the the URL for that is also you thrive here that's the letter you thrive here com slash living in flow you can find me on YouTube under Sky Nelson I love it all those links are going to be in the bio everyone I love it wow it's so fascinating seeing what cutting edge science and its harmonization with the ancient spirituality around the nature of reality this is my favorite my favorite biggest questions in field sky that's what gravitates us so much together I'm really pumped and looking forward to our continued co-creation so biggest oh man appreciate it always and we're going to do more in person as well I'm looking forward to those too great so thank you thank you very much all right bye everyone thank you for tuning in we really appreciate it we'd love to hear thoughts in the comments below on the episode do let us know what you're thinking about this awesome episode of sky and check out all the links in the bio below to Sky's work go and support him check out all those links in his course in his book and also go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into a world we love you very much thank you for tuning in we will see you soon everyone much love peace boom I love it it's great I love it thanks man great questions great conversation