 The purpose of creation and ourselves in it is for creation to become more and more alive. That is the natural tendency of all things, of the universe, to become more and more complex, to grow into more and more layers of complexity, to become more alive. Humanity has been exploring an extreme of separation, the horror that has gone down on this planet. It's super separate from the one. Yes. It's super separate. And if this planet can come back from that place, if it can go on such a deep journey into separation, into prison planet, into the horror, and actually reintegrate, that is a new step of cosmic evolution. And that's why the evil forces are actually rendering an evolutionary service. The tendency of the universe is to become more and more alive. And our purpose in it is to participate in the coming alive of the universe. Yeah, that's the basic. My basic understanding. To participate in the coming aliveness of the universe. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. So pumped to have Charles Eisenstein joining us on the show. Hi Charles. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. I'm super excited for this conversation. If those don't know Charles's background. He's a pioneering storyteller of the new world. Author of several books, including The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, Climate A New Story, and he's the host of A New and Ancient Story podcast. And you can find his main link in the bio below CharlesEisenstein.org as well as his book profile page and his Twitter. Alright Charles, we have to start with this question. We're both so obsessed with it. Where did we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? What is the nature of this reality? You want me to answer those questions? I mean, our culture gives us answers to those. And then we come up with our own variants on those questions, on those answers. And the answers that we are given by the culture don't really make much sense anymore. They don't resonate with us. So I've been, yeah, my work is to offer different answers or maybe even different questions or different ways of finding the answers or perhaps different ways of making ourselves available for the answers to find us. And seeing more and more the value in the question rather than the value being in the answer. The question being an expression of the life force. Underneath the question, there's a questioning or you could even say a question. You're probably not expecting me to answer those questions, but that's how I would begin to talk about them. I love that. It's the questing as the questioner of those questions that is this life force, awakening life force. It catalyzes such profound awareness and consciousness shifts when we dig into those questions. And the modalities that we can take, the different methods that we can take to bring that question more to the essence of our social fabric is beautiful. There's so many different ways to do so. Yeah, like why do you even want to ask these questions? There's a force within you that will not actually be satisfied even when you arrive at an answer. Because it's coming from the desire or the imperative to grow, to become who you can be. That's the animating force that is behind the questions. So it's not actually about finding the answers. Someone asked me today the question, something like, how do I reconnect? How do I find a way to belong again? And I pointed out that what you're really seeking isn't the how. What you're seeking is the actual belonging. That's the drive underneath. And I think a lot of times we take this drive, which could even be a frustrated life force that generates discontent, and then we displace that onto intellectualized questions. When those are actually sometimes even an escape from the movement that is trying to happen within us. So yeah, and here you are doing this series, this podcast, seeking to satisfy a deep yearning by interviewing smart people who have answers. And hopefully inspiring other people who watch to care more about these questions and the way that these questions can impact their lives. And like you said, a lot of people also come back to those questions and say that is that question that going on that quest is the journey, not trophy of an answer. So the question could be to other questions, like that might be the best effect of it. Anyway, I'm very happy to be in this territory with you, starting with the questions and who knows where it'll go. I'm so interested in those questions and maybe a good approach to it with you would be... Maybe I just said all that so I could avoid admitting that I don't even know the answers. I would be so surprised by people who do and I want to know, and maybe there could be a great civilizational dialogue that happens around these questions and what could potentially be these answers. Let's approach this from this idea that whether you allow spirituality and mysticism and magic in with your understanding of the nature of reality, whether you take a strictly materialistic physical scientific approach, you still go back in lineage all of our parents and their parents and their parents and their parents, all of our ancestors, all of life on this planet, all of the stars and planets, all go back to the Big Bang, what created the Big Bang, it all goes back again to that single source of creation and also asking about it from that perspective of the nature of our reality. Why created this reality? Why was it created? Why are we here? Will you speak about that? Allowing that little bit of science is like Big Bang till now, evolution, and then it's like what happened before the Big Bang? We don't know yet, we're figuring out. Spirituality and mysticism and magic have all different ideas about what it could potentially be for. We're in a school and we're training our spirit, our consciousness on a school. So yeah, how do you interact and engage with those? Okay, yeah, a couple of things. For one, you asked or referred to these two different ways of answering the question. One is, excuse me, two different ways of answering the question. One is the scientific path, the other is the mystical or spiritual path. I would say that I believe both of them. I am a materialist and at the same time I think that matter is so much more subtle and mysterious than we imagine that when we fully comprehend or even take one step into a deeper comprehension of what matter is, we discover that it has the properties that we've exported onto spirit. And that matter is not actually matter. And that ultimately science is going to take us to the same place that other traditions of knowledge took us to. That science is challenging its own ideological limits. The program of science was to examine things more and more carefully, to quantify them more and more extensively, and to reduce the many to the one. The basic idea is to reduce the world of a multiplicity of phenomena to, oh, that's just different permutations of a few basic building blocks and a few forces of nature that we can mathematically describe. The complexity is an illusion that's all actually very simple, therefore very understandable, therefore controllable. So I think that spirituality, various, some of the traditions that you spoke of, are trying to do the same thing to reduce a mystery to something that we can grasp. Like you mentioned, oh, it's just a school or it's all consciousness, or it's all like to reduce it is comforting in a way, but it's part of a paradigm of control that infiltrates our culture on every level. And I believe that right now we face the possibility and invitation of letting go of that control, whether we're talking about technology or our conceptual categories of the world or the domestication of the wild. Like we've accomplished a lot through technologies of control, mental and material, but we are reaching its limits, whether you're talking about medicine, whether you're talking about our understanding of the world, politics, you know. I mean, back in the day the sciences, the social sciences were supposed to work the same miracles that the material sciences had accomplished in the material world. We were going to have an engineered perfect society thanks to political science, sociology, economics. And we are reaching an apparent limit to our ability to improve ourselves and improve the world. And so it's calling us into a kind of a revolution that is not just about replacing one reductionistic scheme with another one, but to maybe entertain the idea that reality is irreducible, that no matter how we confine it, categorize it, reduce it, there will always be something left out and that thing that is left out will be an endless source of anomalies or you could say miracles or an endless source of humiliation, that something happens that doesn't fit into your reality picture and you're like, wow, I guess I didn't know what reality really was. I thought I knew, but here's something that happened and if you have the courage to accept that and not toss it into the garbage bin of anomaly or I can't explain that or that didn't happen, then you're able to take it in, then an expansion is possible or an initiation into a larger reality than you had known. Does that make sense? I want to start with a couple points that you listed there. One of them being that this idea that maybe it almost seems like then this reality being that I couldn't possibly, and I think nothing's impossible, but that I couldn't possibly be able to compress reality down into some sort of exciting and all-encompassing storytelling experiences that could awaken people and could just get them super excited to be alive and bring their unique consciousness forward into the world. And it's fine to do that, it's just that not to imagine that you have said everything or that your particular offering applies universally to all people, to all times, to all situations, but it could be a story that makes people come alive and that carries truth in it, even if it is not the truth. Interesting, so we can aim for the absolute best, as we would say here in Silicon Valley, compression algorithm of understanding the key essences, the essentials of reality, as we say with Pareto or power law distributions, that you find the 20% of reality that gives you an 80% understanding of what you're actually here embedded in. And then if you can tell that story to the world, then that at least gets it out in the most compressed and excitable way. But it requires not only your parsing for signal, but it requires you to be a really good artist and designer and storyteller to get it out and land in people's hearts. Yeah, so the metaphor of a compression algorithm only goes so far. Because the compression algorithm that you're using is going to carry biases. It's going to carry an implicit judgment about what exists because you're looking for certain things, looking at certain things and not even seeing other things. So imagine if you had a image compression algorithm that always eliminated fairies. Suppose there's actually fairies and if you use a different algorithm than the image that you end up with, you'd be able to see these fairies. Let me give this also as an example as someone that is deep in philosophy. It would be like I was never born and raised in Africa or in South America or in Asia. So I don't actually have like a first principles, first 20 years of my life understanding of that continent's philosophies, of family interactions and life interactions in general. And so because of that, I will have bias as I make my story that's hoping to help awaken people towards just who I am and how I was born and how I was grown up like here in the United States. Yeah. And so that's these ideas of these biases. Okay, but then this other thing that you mentioned in that first segment was that this idea of letting go, it's both incredibly beautiful. Yet it's like if I let go and then we, you know, if you let go, you wouldn't have written your books. Maybe. I wrote my books because I let go. Because you let go. Okay. So let go of what I thought I knew. And that opened up vistas that would have been veiled by the distorting lens that I had grown up wearing. So it's not like, so it's not actually letting go of knowing anything. That's not what I'm talking about. It's to recognize that the map that you're carrying of the world is just a map. And then, and that's not bad. I mean, it's useful. Maps are useful. But at some point in one's development, the map becomes like confining. You realize that there are things that it's not showing. And I think that that's happening on a collective level too. There's, there are features of the terrain that are super important that are invisible on the, on the maps that we have inherited from our modern scientific tradition. Okay. So our map, aka worldview is limited to the stimuli that we've taken in growing up and experiencing as adults and from our lineage, etc. And to our experiences that we've had. And so then there are certain aspects to our existence that are really important that are maybe not embedded in our worldviews because we have yet to have discovered them. And the idea of is it of letting, of letting go has something also to do with that. You just good luck parsing for all of those really incredibly important things because if you do, you can do that. You can go out and parse and find these things. But also just know that having a more, you know, peaceful, equanimous interconnected relationship with your North Star and your journey here is beautiful as you go and parse and find and seek and disseminate after you synthesize. Yeah. You could say that, that, so these maps or these worldviews, belief systems, whatever you want to call it, these are not purely intellectual. They reveal the world in a certain way that resonates or co-resonates with a state of being of your own. So as you change and fully inhabit the particular reality that you have constructed or that we have constructed collectively and grow into that and then eventually grow up against its boundaries. Then the reality starts no longer to co-resonate with who you are becoming. And that is the time to let go. There's a time not to let go. There's a time when a worldview or a belief system, it's totally working for you and your job is to grow. And if somebody comes and criticizes it, you're going to be like, yeah, whatever. Or you're going to be defensive. You're not going to be willing or ready to hear it. And that's why I'm not out there trying to convince people that their map is wrong. Because I respect, like, there is a time. There's a phase of growth. There's a phase of limits. There's a phase of crisis. There's a phase of dissolution. And my intention then is to serve whatever phase, whatever is ready to happen. And if it's not ready to change, then maybe I'll just tell a joke. Maybe I'll just show some love or plant a seed that might sprout many, many lifetimes in the future. Okay. There's also something about this letting go that is, in a sense, hard because we desire to build the new world that our hearts know is possible. We want that world. We all collect in many ways our nodes making changes aiming to get to that world. So would you call it some sort of ebb and flow along the way of building and creating and also letting go and being interconnected? Letting go is not something that you can actually do. Usually, for me at least, it comes in despite my doing. It comes when I can't do anymore. When I'm hanging on to the precipice with all my might terrified of falling and finally my grip falters and I can't hold on anymore. I like that. Then I let go. That's a great analogy. Okay. So it's like you've done a great amount of the work towards that beautiful world we all know in our hearts is possible. And then there's the moment of us realizing that, hey, it's time for me to go play with my kid or for me to go on that date or for me to go and exercise or for me to go and do these other activities that could be part of the essence. And there's also something there that speaks to Taoism quite a bit, being on this the way. But also, are we on the Tao? Are we on the way? Have we veered completely off? What are your thoughts about that? Yeah. When you're in your territory, then how do you know what the way is except to take wrong turns and false paths? You can only discover the true path by walking the false path. So you could say that there is no false path. There is only learning from errors and infinite opportunities to learn from those errors, including the errors that you regret for your whole life and wish that you hadn't done that. Somehow those mistakes are recorded in the collective field. And I therefore feel grateful for all of those who have come before me who have made the mistakes that I no longer need to make because their regret is recorded in our collective consciousness. You're tapping in to learn from that mistake and then not veering off on that same path. Everything you do is on behalf of all beings. Would you call this like a karmic lineage? I would call it a universal principle. Everything that you do is on behalf of all beings. This is similar to the Bodhisattva vow in which you declare an intention to work for the enlightenment of all beings. But what I'm saying is that this vow is unnecessary because it's already happening. So a more subtle form of the vow is simply a statement of recognition that actually I am working on behalf of all beings, that it's already true. Paradoxically, the statement that it is already true, the statement, the recognition of it makes it true. This is getting into some mysteries here. So I guess I want to say this though because one of the formulas that has guided the modern separate self, the modern individual, is this heroic striving, this idea of attainment, this idea that always comes up in the question, well, how do I do it? That question may be based on false premises, to turn everything into something to accomplish, including your spiritual development. Something that you exert your will to do, to find something to overcome, to find something to fight. That whole template. The action of non-action? That's just one way to do things. So how do I do it? That assumes that you are doing it. But what if it's being done to you? That all of us embedded in this creation are on this journey and that journey is already on this ascension process period. Yeah. I mean, no matter how you state it, I would probably be able to say, well, that's not quite it. The words that we're using, even to describe it, introduce errors in understanding. But they might be the right words in a certain situation, in a certain relationship. Truth is a relationship function. So yeah, what you say might be, it carries some truth. Maybe to you at this moment, it is true. Not saying that there is no such thing as truth or that it's relative or that we make it up, not saying that. But words that carry truth in one interaction may not carry truth in another interaction. And I realize I'm kind of dancing around here and I feel free to try to pin me down on something. Excellent. Back and forth. So we have a evolutionary trajectory embedded within this creation that is ascending over time and whether we're letting go to the process of ascension or we're actually building the new world that our hearts know is possible. It's hard for me to envision the new world our hearts know is possible when we're all completely letting go. But it's also hard for me to envision the new world our hearts all know is possible when we're all just builders. But there's a time for each. So then what is the point of the teleology, the purpose? Why are we embedded in this creation? Why was this creation made? Why are we endeavoring into consciousness here? Why are we experiencing this ascension? What does it teach us? Is it a teaching function? What are we doing? The purpose of creation and ourselves in it is for creation to become more and more alive. That is the natural tendency of all things, of the universe to become more and more complex, to grow into more and more layers of complexity, to become more alive. You can see the organic tendency toward life anytime you leave a parking lot alone for 20 or 30 years. If you don't maintain that in a state of unlife, then cracks form. Uniformity becomes non-uniform and then weeds grow up through the cracks and over time it becomes more and more alive. You can only hold it in a state of death, in a state of stasis with a lot of effort. That's an example. You can look at the history of the earth becoming more and more alive, more and more complex. The advent of human beings on earth is introducing the possibility of a next level of complexification, where we have ways of exchanging information that are new and therefore new levels of life. The multicellular body is one level of life and then a society, a civilization, that's a new level. This is just the beginning. Where we are going is totally inconceivable. That's why we're here, that's why we're created, is to participate in the coming alive of the cosmos. That's why as an individual, if you are evaluating your life and trying to make a choice, the thing that makes you feel alive is the thing that is participating in life, that is serving life. You might be bribed or frightened, coerced, into spending your life energy on something that does not serve life. But you're not going to feel fully alive doing it. You're not going to feel like you're living your life. You'll feel like you're living the life someone's paying you to live. And there will be an unmet longing that constantly seeks satisfaction. And then this is what generates the economy, the manufacturing of artificial needs. It's an addiction. The one thing that you're really seeking is unavailable, which is to fully express your gifts and service to life. Well, instead, here, you know, have a sports car. If you are missing the deep security of belonging, of being part of the process of creation, because that's really what makes us feel at home. It's to belong in participation in the process of creation. If you're missing that, then you're going to feel insecure. And you're going to feel not at home. Oh, maybe some financial security, some investments. And I could go through many, many addictions that all illustrate the same principle. Wow. All right, let's stay on this for a little bit. Well, we have the purpose of creation is two words you used, used alive and complexity. Life is the name that we give to a certain unfolding of complexity. Okay. Life is us giving the name to the unfolding of complexity. And then when we don't feel belonging to life and complexity, then the propensity for us to fall away from beautiful bringing forth of our gifts into the world, we succumb to that. One more thought on that page is this idea of the Ouroboros theory of source, that rather than thinking linearly from simplicity to complexity, that we think cyclically, that once we have the initial source code that made us, that made creation, we then embed that in our complexity and start the next cycle of creation, of life, evolving to complexity again. And that therefore we are embedded right in it. And that this objective function as you list is life and complexity. And then more life, more alive, creation feeling more alive. Yeah, more conscious experience, more finding meaning, we're finding expressing creativity. Would those be good words? Would you say meaning, consciousness, creativity? Gifts, gems. Yeah, I could play with any of those words. The discovery and or construction of meaning is part of the, the search for meaning, let's say, is part of the expression of, it's just like the questing that I mentioned at the beginning, like what is the quest? What is a quest? A quest is a journey with a sacred purpose. So ultimately, pilgrimage is another pilgrimage is the female counterpart of a quest. A quest is a masculine journey. A pilgrimage is a feminine journey. And both of them are necessary. The pilgrimage does not know its object. Pilgrimage is a state of openness. It's a journey that you're in which you're open to receive something from beyond your knowing. And quest knows the object. A quest is very goal-oriented. Okay, yeah. Pilgrimage is open, non... Yeah, that's the way I'm engaging in anyway. I mean, you know, these words can be used in whatever way you like. But yeah, pilgrimage, you're not actually, properly, you're not trying to accomplish anything that you know. You're opening yourself to be accomplished by something. By a place. Something's going to happen to you. Anyway, yeah, so what is the quest? What is the sacred purpose? What is the driver of our questions? Why do you want to know the answers to these metaphysical questions? Like where's this curiosity coming from? And I would say that it is an expression of your deep imperative to participate more fully in the coming alive of the universe. That's what drives it. So the feeling of many of us here caring more for these questions, the feeling is being channeled by creation itself wanting to feel more alive and belonging in the path of ascension. Yeah, I mean, I don't usually think of it in terms of ascension. Why do you not think of it in terms of ascension? Well, I mean, this goes back thousands of years to the advent of civilization with the advent of social classes. At the bottom was the farmer and at the top was the king and the priests. And in the middle were artisans and soldiers and things like that. So if you wanted to raise your status, I mean, even like that word, why is high good and low bad? Well, this has an origin in that time when the low, the inferior, I mean, all of these are using the same value system that high is good and low is bad. That originated because farmers were close to the soil. And progress meant, you know, progressing your status in society, excuse me, meant ascending the social hierarchy until you were the king and your feet were not even allowed to touch the ground. In a lot of ancient societies, the king's feet were not allowed to touch the ground. The priest's temple was separate from the earth and from the soil. So this became encoded in a paradigm of progress that says that our destiny is to rise above nature, to be no longer dependent on nature, to be spiritual, to be intellectual, to be rational. Therefore, the most prestigious of the sciences is theoretical physics, the most abstract or maybe mathematics. You know, that's the most abstract. Much more prestigious than applied physics, which is more prestigious than engineering, which is more prestigious than plumbing, which is more prestigious than farming. So that's the order. So this whole idea of ascension, of leaving matter behind, of abstracting ourselves from going off into space, of entering the pristine world of the mind or the pristine world of the spirit where you are not dirty. Why is dirty bad? Why do we associate spirituality with cleanliness? Why do they wear white robes? Why do we speak of high vibrations? This all encodes a value system that's rooted in the original hierarchical structures of the first mass civilizations. But on the other hand, we know that that is changing now. A lot of people want to go back to the land. They want to have their hands in the soil. They don't use usually the term, but I would like to lower my vibration. I would like to reincorporate some of the suppressed low vibrations to be more earthy. Is a bassoon worse than a flute? Why is higher better than lower? Why does superior mean better? You can see from the depth of the undoing that is upon us or the depth of the revolution that is upon us to overturn that fundamental paradigm to embrace our fullness as material beings and not seek to escape into spirituality, to escape a materiality that has been made almost uninhabitable because of the very effort to escape materiality. The denial of the sacredness of the material makes the material into something profane. It makes it into commodities, makes it into parking lots and strip lines and an ugly, very efficient but ugly constructed world that has been stripped of its qualities, leaving only its quantities. That is not a fit habitation for the human soul. So of course we seek to escape into some spiritual world, but that's because we've rendered the material world profane. The revolution that we're in that you are part of is to take a different course, to stop doing that, to bring the material and the spiritual back together, to reinvest the world with sacredness, to unify mind and body, to unify heart and mind. That's what is upon us today. Or that's the opportunity that we have and nothing less will enable us to fully participate in the creative process of the universe. Okay, so then that is one of the core principles, if not the core principle of aliveness, of creation is the bringing together of the heart and the mind. And you gave us these examples throughout. The hierarchy is such a very serious conversational topic. And it's very interesting hearing from you about people being at the low, farming, people being at the high that could never touch the ground on being as close to the gods as possible. Very interesting. But also that the idea of a hierarchy of decision goes all the way back to the initial bits of life that existed, period. Life had to decide, even at the single cell organism level, when to go and find food, when it was ready to divide. These had to happen, these decisions had to happen, just like even today with us, we have to set stomach empty, food priority. You know, these are just embedded. But is there then a, how do you then, is there some sort of like heterarchical approach that comes with, I know you. I don't think hierarchy is bad. I'm not anti-hierarchy. Okay. Yeah. And I'm not anti-structure. How does a hierarchy work with this? And again, you didn't use this process of, or you didn't use this word of, essentially, you actually kind of described in a way why you weren't using the word ascension. Right. Because we are kind of, we're fishing back down to find these roots of our interconnectedness with nature and boomerang that back up to where we hope to continue evolving. Is that kind of the connectedness? It's incorporating some missing pieces, some neglected pieces that are invisible from within our operating maps. You know, we can return to that metaphor as well, things that are barely even recognized to exist or relegated to the margins or devalued. In our economic system, for example, anything that is not easily convertible into money tends to get devalued. Just even love, intimacy, family, it's not that we say that those are not important, but what do you have less and less time for? The more you are immersed in a money economy, what gets functionally pushed to the edges? The way that I recently unpacked it myself was I think the first thing that goes to sleep, which we spend a third of our lives doing is so crucial to our wellness. So crucial. Okay, then the next thing that goes, like you were I think just listing, love, family, time with your kids and your friends and because why? Because I need to climb up the hierarchy. I need to make more money. Or could you just be economic desperation? You know, it's not necessarily that you're possessed by a delusion. I mean, a lot of I think the median income in the United States is like it's under $40,000. You know, people are working, you know, two or three jobs. So it's not that, you know, people adopt these distorted values. It's that the system enforces these values whether we embrace them or not. So systemically, what gets pushed out to the outskirts, to the margins, what gets sacrificed, it's the things that are not measurable. If something's not measurable, if it's a qualitative property of life, then it's really hard to subject it to the market. It's incorporated into economic growth. And so we see we have a society that is getting richer and richer in everything that we can measure. Like we have twice the floor space per capita as we did in the 1950s or 1960s. We have but well-being, right? What gets sacrificed, the things we can't measure, like community. You can kind of quantify leisure, but really the essence of leisure escapes quantification. You can measure time, but you can't measure how you feel in that time. Do you feel like you are on your own timeline that there's nothing hanging over your head? So people might have actually I think even measurable leisure peaked in the 1970s in the United States. I read that somewhere. I don't know if it's true. Yeah, because that is a brown the same time that median male income became stagnating compared to the GDP, which is continuing to increase. Where are those fruits going? Apparently 50% of all new income that's generated goes to the 1%, which is mind-blowing. Well then the question is how did they do that? Were they providing extremely great value to society? Were they reshaping rules and regulations in just their own favor? And could it potentially be that people that are of such a high amount of money making have the greatest amount of potential to increase the amount of aliveness that this creation roars with? But this is a very tough thing to dive into and understand. Yeah, I mean we can talk about that. My point was more of the systemically enforced values of the quantifiable. The economic machinery in a sense. You're born as a child and you become embedded in the economic machinery. There's like no exit door left on the economic machinery. And the non-economic parts of life have receded certainly over my lifetime. There used to be a lot more of life that was not in the money realm. Like if you needed to fix your roof, you might not even hire roofers. Like some neighbors might get together and help you. That maybe was more in my father's generation than in my generation, but there was still some of that left. Child care was often not a paid service. You know neighbors would watch the kids and so forth. Cooking was not a paid service. Mom cooked. Supermarkets didn't have delis where they didn't have like prepared food. People didn't eat in restaurants as much. Advice. Companionship. You know you didn't go to a life coach or a counselor as much as you do today. So many functions have entered the money realm that were not in it before. Because it's so crucial to increase the GDP. Well it's aesthetically necessary to increase the GDP. Yeah there's like a value assignment. These are sacred activities? No worries. Let's throw them in that economic machinery. But what I'm saying is that it's not just some dogma that GDP represents well-being. There is that dogma, but the growth of GDP, economic growth is systemically necessary in a system where money is created as interest-bearing debt. I wrote a whole book about that. And it's a mistake. It's an inaccuracy let's say to blame all that's happening on the greed of wealthy people or the nefarious plots of the power elite or something like that. All of that is a symptom. Greed is a symptom. The neoliberal austerity programs are a symptom of a deeper imperative of the system. And that imperative of growth is embedded in the mythology, the defining stories of civilization. Which is, in those stories, growth is our destiny, the expansion of the human realm. This has been what civilization has been about, the conquest of nature for thousands of years. And even in science too, the ambition of science is to bring more and more of the world into the realm of the quantitative. Something in science is only real if you can measure it, if you can describe it with numbers. To treat something scientifically you have to make data out of it. Like what would be a scientific treatment of emotions? You'd have to describe them in terms of neural patterns and peptides and neurotransmitters and something that you could measure. Then it's a science. So science mirrors economics in that we have an expansion of the quantified realm and a shrinking of that which cannot be measured or quantified. So that's part of the stripping of sacredness from matter. That's really abstract. I hope I didn't go too far into that. That's beautiful though. So as we grow, which we're on trajectory to continue growing and becoming more alive, that again this boomerang function of going and grabbing that initial interconnectedness of all things, the nature, the beauty, those things and embedding them in our future. So this seems like we're in creation. Creation is about increasing aliveness and complexity. In order for us to best do that where we are today is to look back at some of the things from our past. There's a deep again aliveness of interconnectedness, of unity, of nature, of these types of things and embed them in as we go forward. So in a sense I was mentioning this to you before we started. It really feels like things are moving in the direction of making super intelligence. Everyone in their mother's talking about AI. Everyone's now talking about quantum supremacy. People are talking about indistinguishable virtual realities, neurotech, biotech. Everything is up and up and up and up and up. Yet the most popular things that people are watching on video in China and the United States are many times these primitive technology YouTube channels and on their Chinese correlate platforms that people are literally watching how we used to hunt and gather and build with our hands in nature and embedded in the trees while we program super intelligence. How does that function sit with you? Okay. So first I'll say that I'm not opposed to AI or opposed. I don't think that this is all a big mistake, but I think that we have to recognize what the appropriate application of the technologies of quantity is. What is the appropriate application of the technologies of quantity? They can accomplish certain things, but it is a mistake to think that everything can be brought into that realm. So take AI. If you can describe a problem numerically, if you can define a desired outcome in terms of some data, like say chess, there's no ambiguity about what victory is in chess. You can describe that algorithmically and you can then create a self-adjusting artificial intelligence program that can play chess better than a human being can. Competitive self-play is the big key. Right. And those can even outperform brute force chess engines. So like Mila and AlphaZero. The more general question of can AI outperform human intelligence in every way depends on an assumption that all expressions of human intelligence are at bottom quantitative. That everything that a human being is and does is somehow reducible to a data set. And it's the same ideology that is at the basis of science that says everything that is real is measurable. This goes back to Galileo. The ambition of science is to encompass everything in number. To assume that is possible is to make a statement about, that is a metaphysical statement. It is a doctrine about reality. Only the measurable is real and that everything is measurable. Everything can be reduced to quantity. Maybe it's true, but we have to recognize that that is an assumption. And what I have observed is that, like if you look at AI generated art or something like that, there's always something missing in it. There's at least what I've seen for now. Right. So is that always going to be the case? Is there something in beauty that escapes quantity that is beyond quantity? Is there something else? If there isn't, then yeah. There's no reason why AI can't become more human than human beings are. Because human beings aren't actually human. We're just a, we too are reducible to a bunch of space-time coordinates operated on by mathematical forces. That has been the reigning ideology for a couple hundred years. Most human beings who have lived on Earth did not think that. They didn't think that nature was, in essence, predictable and controllable. And I think that we are discovering that it, as well, that it is not. That there are, well, I could go in different directions with that, but maybe I'll just pause right now. Okay. All right. There's within me this urge to understand from you, from your perspective, that it seems to be more and more that there is this desire for owning nature, owning other humans, owning the planet, owning the next celestial bodies that we go to, owning the substrate that everybody goes into to play in these virtual worlds. It's all about who owns it. All about that. Yeah. What forces are at play in creation that are not tangible and visible here in this physical world? I'm trying to decide whether to comment on the expansion of the realm of the owned, or where you got to from that. I'm trying to see the link. It seems as though that expansion of the world of the owned is there are forces channeling through. Okay. Yeah. The desire to expand the realm of the owned, or let's take it on a personal level, the desire to own more and more, is the desire to expand the separate self. It's a desire to dominate. If you own something, then you decide what happens to it. This is the ancient Roman concept of ownership. You can remember the Roman, the Latin, but you can use it or abuse it. You can do anything you want with it. It's yours. It's as if it becomes part of you. So what is the origin of this desire to expand the self? I think it is because of the stripping of the full complement of relationships that are the true self. The true self is not a separate individual. The true self is not a skin-encapsulated ego. It's not a bubble of psychology inside of a flesh robot. That is a truncated version of the self. The true self is a nexus of relationships that include everything. It is a holographic mirror of all that is. Or more practically speaking, like historically or prehistorically, to exist meant if you were alive, then you were in deep intimate relationship with every person and every feature of the landscape, every bird, every tree, every plant, everything. You knew them really well and they knew you really well. You knew the story of every person that you saw and you knew their grandfather's story. There was no pretending actually because you were so deeply known. That is what it's like to be at home in the world. In an industrial society, most of those relationships are stripped from us. We are cast into a sea of strangers. Other people and the trees. How many people in the United States could identify more than ten different trees? Much less know when each tree flowers. But ten different brands, no problem. The atrophy of our full relatedness leaves us profoundly insecure. The infinite connected self has been cordoned off into this cramped, lonely, separate self. What does that separate self want? It wants to recover its lost beingness. One way to recover that lost beingness is to seek to expand itself by getting more money, more property, more control, more domination. This will never achieve its desire because the desire is for an infinite web of relations. How much of the finite does it take to compensate for the loss of the infinite? How much of the profane does it take to compensate for the loss of the sacred? How much pornography does it take to compensate for the loss of intimacy? How much social status does it take to compensate for the loss of respect? An infinite amount is what it takes. So that generates greed and the desire to expand the realm of the owned. So everybody's burdened with that hunger. Everybody is experiencing that poverty. So of course we generate a society where everybody's trying to get more and more and more. And what do you think is at play going on through people? Who are the players in creation that are coming through humans on this big board game of risk, monopoly, Sims? Yeah. I mean, you could look at it in terms of archetypal forces playing themselves out, evil forces, but ultimately they too are in service of creation. They too are in service of the world coming more of the universe even coming more and more alive. The journey of separation has brought with it a tremendous development. Okay, so we have the creations, objective function of becoming more alive. And then we have the even entities or other forces that are at play that are in service to aliveness that are archetypal forces that are then at play through us to make this an interesting process of becoming more alive. Yeah, those forces, those beings may not know that they are in service to the universe becoming more alive, but they are part of this inconceivably mysterious orchestration. Everything is born into the universe for a reason and it's always the same reason ultimately. Okay, and then what would you say these forces are? They are beings. What are these beings? There's many, many kinds of these beings and different cultures have different names for them. Yeah, I don't have my favorite typology. There's many ways to look at it. Yeah, I mean, we could go into, you know, I mean, there's whole, it seems like taxonomies of extraterrestrials or non-material beings. Sure. Yeah, I haven't, you know, I have some of these taxonomies on my radar screen, but I haven't elaborated on them in detail. You have to ask somebody else about that. And different people have different answers. We've had a couple of people on the show that talk about your right. There's different answers to taxonomy of the classification of forces or entities that are at play through us on the planet is fascinating. And then we also very frequently talk about the interplay between them in this, what seems like both a beautiful aliveness that's coming, but also this predation farm. A predation farm and aliveness that are going up at the same time. So, yeah. And the line is becoming so much more thin that it's becoming more transparent. You can tell who is awake and who is not more and more easily through the transparency that is coming with the internet and exponential technology. Okay, so let me say that okay, so let's step into the world of nefarious evil forces, the negative alien agenda, all that kind of stuff. I assume that you're a little bit or maybe a lot familiar with it. These beings are only able to operate in co-resonance with a human state of being. We're not their helpless victims, but our personal and collective evolutionary stage necessitates these archetypal forces to be at play with us. They are part of the full exploration of the particular corner of the realm of separation that civilization is exploring right now. The more interconnected that we become, the more we feel belonging, the more we feel that unity, that then it's both the less we feel this need to dominate and control, and the less that these negative forces can come in and take root in our free will. Yeah, yes, that's true. Yeah, that's yes, that's true. And humanity has been exploring an extreme of separation. The horror that has gone down on this planet is almost unknown in the galaxy. It's super separate from the one. It's super separate. And if this planet can come back from that place, if it can go on such a deep journey into separation, into prison planet, into the horror, and actually reintegrate, that is a new step of cosmic evolution. That's never happened before. That would have been a pretty big boomerang throw into the craziness of the economic machinery and predation farm, all this type of stuff, dopamine monkeys, all this type of stuff that's had depression, anxiety, pull me up, and throw it all the way over there and then be able to evolve through that towards the one, towards the interconnectedness of with nature and with each other, belonging, aliveness, that's a new step. It's the same principle as if you run into somebody who had the most horrific childhood you can imagine, tied to the bed by his father and beaten with a baseball bat and locked in a closet and made to eat his own shit. And you hear these stories sometimes and then you meet them. And a lot of them end up doing the same to the next generation, but some of them become these radiant beings because of what they've healed from. And you recognize that they have done that healing on behalf of all beings to return to that theme. That's us on the micro level of an individual. That's what this planet, that's the service that this planet is rendering. Doesn't guarantee that we're gonna make it through. We could end up with a dead earth. We could destroy everything. But the- So there's no guarantees. Right. Just as there's no guarantee that the horribly abused child is gonna grow up to be a radiant angel carrying love. But it can happen. And when it does happen, that is a medicine for the whole planet. We're getting through our traumas, but in order for us to really express our treasures galactically, universally, is gonna require a lot of sincere self-work to identify those traumas, heal. But that is how radiant a being earth can become if we can heal from this trauma that we've gone through. Every time somebody, like that's what I say to people when I run into people who have really suffered horribly. I say like, if you accomplish nothing else in your life, but to heal and not pass that on, you're actually demonstrating a principle of healing to the whole planet. If it can happen to you, it can happen to everybody, it can happen to the planet. You're shifting reality into alignment with your own healing, by healing. And the same, yeah, on a planetary collective level, the same principle operates. So all of these negative forces, all these dark forces, they are actually rendering an evolutionary service to the galaxy or to the cosmos by creating the conditions for this healing to even have to happen, yeah. And this resonates with certain Gnostic teachings that say that the world is in the hands of a usurper, that there's a false God that is actively making hell on earth. How is that a service? Well, being cast into this hell, it calls on us. Our roots reach down to hell and then our flowers and our leaves reach the heavens afterward. Yeah, and the capacities that we develop when love is hard, when we have an intense gradient to go against. Like we would never discover how powerful we are as lovers and as healers if we weren't in these adverse conditions. If we were just gifted a utopic love scenario. Right, right. And that's why the evil forces are actually rendering an evolutionary service. This is super esoteric. I love this. I love this. I'm like, are these like Silicon Valley like gear heads listening to this? What are they thinking about anyway? You're great. No, the audience is worldwide and the audience is just embedded. I love gear heads, by the way. That wasn't an insult, but yeah. Embedded with people that care about science, spirituality, just overall this aliveness process that's coming. So. I mean, I don't often talk about this stuff. Like, you know, I'm out there speaking about climate change. That's our job. Our job is to get these profound wisdoms that don't normally come up to shine on the show so that other people can just be like, whoa, how do I take that and run with it? And because you're highlighting the importance of healing there was so beautiful that we had, that we go through this process of that creation has the negative entities that have the hold on this predation farm at times that then creates the incredible amount of love that there's no guarantees that we get through the little tiny pinhole that we have to get through in order to make sure that we continue the process of aliveness. But when we do, we will have learned and loved at unprecedented capacities that then we embed in where we go. I think that's very beautiful. And there's a bigger mystery here too. Even if this planet doesn't make it, still every contribution we make toward this passage still registers an effect. So this is hard to understand from the perspective of linear time, but no action is wasted. Every experience moment to moment that you have in your adventure of consciousness goes to creation, it goes to source. And whether the entire planet ceases to exist in a couple hundred years or not. And besides, there's not actually one future. How many are there? There are many future timelines that are converging on the present. And they're in a quantum superposition. So which one is the real future? This is actually with a past too. There's not just one past. So there's an infinite amount of earth's orbiting stars that have Charles and Alan talking. Well, you could say that, but then you run into the problem of what does is mean. Because is as we use it encodes a Cartesian reality. Where something either is or it isn't, but can, so we get a superposition. But you could just say that there are many futures and which one becomes real is the one that we come into a relationship with. That we align to. All the futures exist and then we collapse the probability towards the one that we make a relationship with. So which one do we want to? So every act of love is a kind of a quantum measurement that puts us in relationship to a world of love. That's another way of explaining morphic resonance. You are shape-shifting the world into alignment with every choice that you make. Which means that every person is equally powerful on this earth. And every choice is equally impactful. Although one person that engages with a million people in their, in the organization that they run or in the social sphere that they can send a message out to, they could potentially create a bigger splash of love. They can make a bigger wave on the surface. And on a short timescale, it may look as if they've had a bigger effect than the single mom taking care of an autistic child that never goes viral, that no one ever finds out about or celebrates. But on, but those people are altering the deep currents that might surface only in 500 or 5,000 years. Yeah, but no less important than anything you're doing with your big platform. That's an important realization to have. Because then you'll no longer value the big over the small. You won't necessarily devalue the big. Maybe your calling is to do something, you know, on this level, but you won't think that you're more important than anybody else. That's also a very interesting thing to quantify slash feel that it becomes part of your ethos when someone sits with millions of people that they can disseminate content to versus someone that's, like you said, raising a child that is having troubled experiences with the natural world that maybe like the care that goes into raising that child, maybe because of that, that child turns into a wonderful parent himself. And maybe that gets passed down and passed down and passed down and maybe in 500 years, that's the person who is, you know, the global shooter. Doing incredible work just because of that. Just because of that thing. Mom with child. Yeah, we don't know how this world works. Okay, that's beautifully said. We go a couple of generations into the future and you can see incredible effects of that. Yeah, that butterfly effect take off. Okay, I wanna ask you about solutions. There are a lot of things that are being propagated as solutions to our boomeranging, going towards that interconnectedness and bringing that up as we build the super intelligence and as we bring more aliveness to the world. One of the things that's really powerful is of course the use of meditation, the use of psychedelics, the use of these inward experiences, but also bringing it outward, bringing it out into the world, bringing that love forth in those increments. Another one that's literally a part of our social contract is inclusive stakeholder. So moving away from self-dealing which happened, which did not happen as much back in the day where you had me telling you a story for our inclusive fitness versus now telling you a story for self-dealing. So this idea of inclusive fitness, inclusive stakeholder is that I give the opportunity to, through tokenomics, through a bunch of different methodologies to bring everyone in as a stakeholder of the future. And so it's not just the classic example of the drivers of the cars and the people riding in the cars as getting nothing, but getting tokens of ownership. The community that the company is in gets tokens of ownership. The physician and the patient have an inclusive stakeholder relationship, the teacher and the student. How do you like that as a solution? Well, I think it would be easy to critique those things, but I think that they are kind of a groping toward the recovery of the principle of gift into economics. They are, yeah. They're coming from an understanding that where we wanna go is a world that expresses and embodies the principle that we're all in this together, that your wellbeing is to my benefit too. Which is different from the classic laissez-faire economy where we're all in competition with each other and if you gain the means to repay your debts, then that deprives me of that money in this scarcity-based system. We're in competition for each other if you get the job I don't and so forth. Like that is contrary to nature. I mean, there is competition in nature, but fundamentally ecology is a circle of gift. If one species is removed, extinguished, everybody suffers. The whole system gets less resilient. Every species is, as I said earlier, born into being to contribute to the aliveness of the whole. And the same thing is true in a social ecology in a mature meta-organism that humanity wants to become. So these systems that you're talking about are kind of reaching for an economy in which more for you is more for me just as it was in an ancient gift economy where if you were very successful, if you were very excellent, if you were a great hunter, if you were really clever, then everybody would benefit from that because you didn't keep and hoard for yourself. Wealth was not an individual function. The best place to store extra food is in your friend's stomach. Yeah, that was a quote from an indigenous person that I mentioned in my book. I store my meat in the belly of my brother because like this guy was like, the anthropologist said, why don't you store your meat? Why don't you smoke it? Why don't you keep it? You know, you kill a big game and you have a feast and you give it away to everybody. And the next day you have none left and you could have security for a month. Why did you do that? And he was like, yeah, you don't understand. I do store meat. It's in the belly of my brother. He's generous. And then everybody's gonna invite him to his feast too. That's how an economy could work where you celebrate the success of somebody else because now they're gonna have more to share. Compersion, I feel joy when you feel joy. Yeah, right. So that's a spiritual principle. It's a movement of consciousness but it has not yet manifested in our economic systems, in our organizations. So we're striving for that and trying out all these experiments. So in their actual mechanics, I might be able to critique tokenization or all of these social currencies and things like that. I mean, there's definitely things to critique about them but the underlying impulse, I believe is a transition to gift economy. Yeah, yeah. So then how about strategies for non-separation? Experiences of non-separation. Yeah. For me, these experiences come as a gift. They're not something that I can, that I, from a place of separation, can engineer but I can create an invitation for those experiences to find me. The search generates the discovery. It's like in the matrix. If you remember, Neo is on his computer typing in what is the matrix he's searching but no matter what he's searching, everything, his entire search is happening inside the matrix but his search, the sincerity and commitment of his search makes him visible to Morpheus so that Morpheus is able to find him because of the diligence of his search and then in their first interview, he says, I've been looking for you for a long time. So I think that our sincerity and our hopeless efforts to transcend the matrix that we are trapped in is what makes us findable by those beings that are wanting to liberate us from the matrix and so those experiences of non-separation, they are the instruments of that liberation. We incrementally bring in that with our will into the potential futures that exist and then we are then brought that gift, we're met with that gift of finding more modalities of non-separation, experiences of it. Right, so all of these modalities, none of them are a guarantee. You know, you could meditate for 20 years and not have a transcendent experience, yeah. As someone that's obsessed with creation design, so literally being creation and designing the world that makes aliveness, more moral aliveness, how would you design creation? I would start by recognizing that any creation worth living in would be far beyond my capacity to design it and to see myself therefore as a participant in a design that is unfolding, that is well beyond my understanding that I might be able to contribute to and then it becomes a matter of listening for or watching for the next unfolding of that design that calls me into participation and to learn to recognize what is mine to do, what is my role to play, what is my gift to give, how can I make myself available as one of the instruments of a designer beyond my knowing. My puny attempts to design something such as in the Sacred Economics book, like I recognize those probably, probably everything I'm saying is wrong in those, probably if these were actually implemented, they would fail miserably, but their failure would be a stepping stone toward a next failure and a next failure and a next failure which ultimately would add up to what you might call a success. More and more closer to the pinnacle of what we're aiming to achieve. Yeah, well these failures are part of the design process of a greater designer. Part of the creation process. I'm obsessed with that designer question and it's interesting hearing people. Yeah, I mean this idea that, see this is part of an ideology that holds the universe outside of ourselves as without intelligence and then arrogates to human beings the sacred duty of imposing intelligence onto a world that has none, imposing order onto a world that has none. It's the ideology that says that the natural tendency of the universe is towards disorder, toward entropy, toward thermodynamic dissolution. And that is really an obsolete scientific view. The tendency of the universe as I keep saying is toward complexity. If that's the case, if there is an intelligence not outside the universe guiding it, not outside materiality but inherent in materiality, if there is a organic constitutional movement toward order, toward complexity, then we no longer have to be the imposers of order. We no longer have to be the designers. But we can design with the source code to go towards complexity. Yeah, we can participate in the unfolding of complexity. But we're not like in the central driver's seat nor will we ever be. Why will we not be if our... We can try but we will recognize how limited we are as we do so. And the process of recognizing our limitations, the humiliation of crashing into our limitations, we thought we knew. We thought we knew how to do this. We thought we could design a perfect society or a perfect world and look what happened. That learning process is part of a larger transhuman design process. Like to set us up to fail. But it creates movement. It's part of these feedback loops, these nonlinear feedback loops that are so much bigger than humanity. So I'm not saying don't try. But if you can recognize that everything that we work with in our design toolkit is based on such a limited map, then maybe that recognition will allow us to learn more quickly from our mistakes to not hold on to something that's not working. We gain more and more insight about the totality of the map of creation as we probe it more and more. And then if possible to gain all insight about the source code, the underlying source code from the initial source until today, the roaring complexity that exists, and then to be able to create another cycle of that ourselves or quadrillions of cycles of that. The source code is infinite. Because then how else does it create more aliveness but through us making more? That's part of the process. What other things make more aliveness besides us making more creations, making more cycles? Well, there are many, many beings in the universe that are part of the unfolding of aliveness. What are their beings? Elemental beings, solar beings. What are terrestrial beings? What are those? What are elemental and solar beings? They really are patterns of information and energy. They are self-sustaining, sometimes replicating patterns of information and energy that are sometimes vastly more complex than a human being is. Or just very different than a human being is. I'm not an expert on these beings. I just know that they exist. There are beings... This might disqualify me from any serious conversation but I believe that there are beings inside the sun that are alive. The sun is way more complex than people think. It's not just this uniform ball of fusing hydrogen gas. The electromagnetic structures in the sun are enduring and incredibly complex. There's no rational reason to think that the sun is not alive. Most human beings who have ever been on Earth recognize that the sun is alive. Most human beings on Earth think it's the God. Not necessarily. A lot of people did think it's God. It is, in many ways, the thing that gave us life as well. Most people lived in a world full of beings, surrounded by beings. Everything is a being. Potentially the birth of a star is the birth of life or the birth of elements is the birth of life. You might be reincarnated as a star. Imagine that. You might be reincarnated as a planet. You might be reincarnated as a rock. It's interesting thinking how that feels. That's my favorite stuff. What is the conscious experience of a star or a planet? Or a rock. It just gets rained on by water. Rocks are very quiet. How connected would you be to all that is all the time? Sure. On the note of quadrillions of simulations and us playing God, do you feel like this is a simulation? If this is a simulation, then what is a simulation? We have an idea of what a simulation is. But to say that reality is a simulation already changes what the word simulation means. This is a very old philosophical riddle. The brains and vats proposition. What if this isn't real? What if this is just we're all brains and vats like in the matrix and we're just given the simulation of reality. It's just a stimulation of neurons in these brains and vats. Well, what we mean by real is nothing other than these simulations. I think it's a meaningless proposition. But where it's going to is basically to recognize that the reality that we're familiar with is a tiny corner of what is really there. Is humanity a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence? That is maybe only, that might be part of what we are. Digital superintelligence is an unfolding of complexity. But as I said before, its domain is very limited. From a quantitative mindset, it seems like its domain is huge and that we can do anything with it. It could accomplish anything. But its accomplishments are limited to the tiny corner of the universe that is the realm of quantity. The things that can be achieved through the manipulation of data and number are, they look huge from where we are in a society that is dominated by quantity. All that stuff I talked about before by efficiency, by the maximization of some measurable thing, that's what efficiency means, by money. Another form of measure. So it seems like we're like the frog at the bottom of the well. And it looks like, and the well is the well of the quantitative. And therefore the, in principle, controllable. It's this narrow realm that we have declared ourselves the lords of. But it is very, very narrow. It's a tiny piece of reality and there are, there have been and still are cultures on this planet that are living in a much vaster realm and able to accomplish things that are totally beyond anything we or any of our AI could ever accomplish. What are those things? So, for example, a, I, there's a bit of a leap, but I spoke to some Dogon about climate change. I asked them, what do you guys think about climate change? And they said, oh yeah, climate is really spinning out of control and the reason is that you've been taking sacred artifacts that have been buried ceremonially or placed ceremonially in key power places on the earth and you've been taking them away and putting them in museums in New York and London, thereby disrupting the covenant that has been maintained between humans and the planet. That allows a planet to maintain a habitation for humanity and you're disrupting that. So this is a technology that is completely off the radar screen. A technology, the technology of ceremony, the technology of earth's power points. You cannot find those through any geological survey. The entire data set of all of the world's computers does not contain the information that is necessary to exercise that technology. If I ran the simulations and then I moved those artifacts in one and then watched the evolution of humanity and then I left them in the other and watched the evolution of humanity, we could see what the results are of things like that that are deemed to be so sacred that even superintelligence can figure it out. Yeah, but you can only run that experiment once. You can run it quadrillions of times in different permutations. That's the beauty of superintelligence. Well, you couldn't go back in time and move those artifacts and repeat the experiment. You only live once. Well, I would launch that many from the beginning and then be able to observe their evolution and then launch another quadrillion if I'd like because we have the god-like superpowers of the source. Your ability to simulate it depends on the doctrine that you can reduce all of reality to a dataset. To a simple source code and that does also have complexity that's non-dataset oriented. So what I'm saying is that there are incredible capacities of human beings in relationship to transhuman powers that did not depend and do not depend on encompassing more and more of the world into a dataset. That is a certain strategy for engaging reality. I'm not saying it's useless or bad, but what I'm saying is that it is limited to achieve what the Dogon and other ancient cultures were able to achieve through superintelligence. That requires a lot of effort. The limit superintelligence to a dataset I think also is myopic in a sense. There's more to it. We're crickets trying to imagine the big game. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just sharing my view about it. I like this. And then how about the last question that we like asking our guests? What do you think is the most beautiful thing in creation? The most beautiful thing? It depends on the moment that you ask me. Well, I'm looking at you. Don't take it the wrong way. I was thinking about you too. That shows presence, I think. I must also ask you, what has been your deepest experiential connection to creation? I'd say witnessing the birth of my children. That totally took me apart. The pieces didn't get put together the same way. Have you had that experience? Not yet. But hearing from moms and from other people like yourself, it's like, yeah, dads. That totally changes the game. Wow. And I also want to make sure that we touch on this big picture synthesis as well. You mentioned it, and I think it's really beautiful. Creation's purpose to create life. More aliveness. The tendency of the universe is to become more and more alive, and our purpose in it is to participate in the coming alive of the universe. Yeah, that's the basic understanding. Participate in the coming aliveness of the universe. I love it. Charles, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you for having me on. We're so honored. Thank you. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. 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