 So, matter is just what conscious inner life looks like from a perspective. If I look in the mirror, I see my conscious inner life presenting itself to me in the form of an image, in the mirror. If I look at somebody else's brain on their brain scanner, the images I will see on the monitor of the brain scanner are what the inner life of that person, the conscious inner life of that person, will be looking like from my perspective. So I would even define matter as what experiential states look like from a perspective. And is there something beyond matter? Of course, there are other experiential states that are not directly translatable into matter, like our endogenous feelings, our emotions, even some of our abstract thoughts. What we call matter is what presents itself on the screen of perception. In a sense, it is perception, but there are more experiential states than just perceptual states. If I lock you up in an ideal sensory deprivation chamber and you can't hear, see, touch, smell, anything, you will still have experiential states. You still have experiential states like desire, fear, thoughts, emotions of every kind. So matter is one part of the puzzle and it's certainly reconcilable with idealism. Well, I mentioned earlier, I think matter is just what inner experience looks like from a perspective, from across a dissociative boundary. And I think the dissociative boundary that defines us as individuals presents itself in perception as the skin, the eyes, or our sensory organs. This is the boundary of this dissociative process in the universal mind that we call ourselves. If you understand this, you will immediately come to the conclusion that what is really out there is not physical, it is mental. And physicality is relative to mentality, and that's how physicality arrives from an interaction between two segments of mind, at least two. Physicality is relative to mentality. That's what quantum mechanics seems to be suggesting. The mentality part I added, because I think it's inevitable, it's the only other thing we know of next to physicality. But quantum mechanics seems to be telling us quite unambiguously. After a superb experiment in 2018 that sort of closed all-loop holes, that physicality is relative. But relative to what? I would say it's relative to mentality. So in so far as each person is a observer, a different observer with a unique perspective, then your physical world is fundamentally different from my physical world. Because my physical world is relative to me, and I'm taking a different perspective. So we all inhabit different physical worlds. And more physical worlds, buried me, don't misunderstand me yet, I have to complete this thought. But my personal intuition about it is that we are the same subject in different timelines interacting with itself across those timelines, if that is conceivable at all. So perhaps it is doing that through us. We are those eyes that turn back and look back at the existence and say, oh, this is what's happening. This is what's going on. Maybe this is this universal metacognition, conscious metacognition, and we are just the beginning. 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. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. I'm super pumped for this episode. We're going to be talking about all things metaphysical idealism. We have Dr. Bernardo Castro joining us on the show. Hi, Bernardo. Hey there. Good to be here. Thanks so much for coming on the program. I'm so pumped for this. I have been intaking all of what you've been teaching about. And I think it's been super refreshing for getting us to think more deeply about what is the true nature of reality. And that's just such a fundamental. And for those who don't know Bernardo's background, he's a nine-time author, philosopher of ontology in mind, an AI and reconfigurable computing scientist leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. The notion that reality is essentially experiential. And you can find his links in the bio below to his website, BernardoCastrup.com. That has links to his books, his papers, his essays, also his social media profiles. So check that out. All right, Bernardo, I mentioned this in the intro. Obviously this is the most first principled question that we must not only ask ourselves as adults, but even inspire children at the youngest ages to have deep inquiry into metaphysics, the nature of reality, ontology, the nature of being, what's the nature of consciousness. And so, yeah, this is the most first principle. And I really appreciate how the push for idealism was very important. It was the first sort of ideas about that reality is inextricably connected to our experience. I think that that was super important in awakening. I like your phrase, omnis rest, onimus est, everything is mind. And my favorite Latin logo. Your favorite Latin logo on the site as well, on your Twitter as well. Yes, yes. And a good way to explain that is also all events, facts and causes are soul, spirit and feelings. That would be the broad translation of the Latin. Yes. Now, I really want to see if there's a way to harmonize the idea of the single reality whose nature is consciousness with the idea of the so-called material, but evolution specifically, the fact that there has been an evolutionary process to get us to this point. So what, how do you bring the topics together of the fact that there has been this evolutionary process for the knowing to be enabled? Well, can we reconcile idealism with matter? Well, there is this thing out there and even in us that we call matter, right? There can be a dispute about what is it exactly? How do we conceptualize it? What true statements can we can we make about it and what false statements? But there is this thing we see, smell, touch that that's undeniable. So if idealism cannot be reconcilable with that, it's just playing wrong, right? Because there is this thing out there. I think it's completely reconcilable because you see, we only know matter in so far as we experience it. If there is something out there that nobody ever has experienced, it might as well not exist. It becomes just a conceptual inferential reality that doesn't have any, any true existence. What idealism would say is that what we call matter is what conscious inner life looks like from a certain perspective. To be more specific, I would say from across a dissociative boundary, but then start getting into the details. So matter is just what conscious inner life looks like from a perspective. If I look in the mirror, I see my conscious inner life presenting itself to me in the form of an image in the mirror. If I look at somebody else's brain on their brain scanner, the images I will see on the monitor of the brain scanner are what the inner life of that person, the conscious inner life of that person will be looking like from my perspective. So I would even define matter as what experiential states look like from a perspective. And is there something beyond matter? Of course, there are other experiential states that are not directly translatable into matter, like our endogenous feelings, our emotions, even some of our abstract thoughts. What we call matter is what presents itself on the screen of perception. In a sense, it is perception, but there are more experiential states than just perceptual states. If I lock you up in an ideal sensory deprivation chamber and you can't hear, see, touch, smell, anything, you will still have experiential states. You will still have experiential states like desire, fear, thoughts, emotions of every kind. So matter is one part of the puzzle and it's certainly reconcilable with idealism. Oh, sorry, I gave you an extended answer and I forget the second part of your question, evolution. We have very, very good reasons to infer that the organization of living organisms has evolved, not only that, even the universe has evolved. It started as a fairly uniform framework, so to say, and then because of quantum fluctuations and gravity being applicable to those quantum fluctuations, it started differentiating itself and form, eventually matter and stars and planets and moons and life. We have plenty of evidence to indicate that and I also don't think any of that is incompatible with idealism. On the contrary, it even substantiates idealism because even if everything is consciousness, it's not only your or my consciousness alone. It's a transpersonal consciousness, so to say, especially unbound. So we have to account for how individual, private consciousness has a reason within this transpersonal background and that's evolution right there. Okay, so out of the which you've called like a cosmic consciousness or other people call an infinite consciousness, there is a, and there is a private consciousness, as he said, an individual consciousness that forms and I really like how Rupert Spira has talked about this idea of the perforation and like the more that you perforate the circle of the individual or the private consciousness, the more that you truly feel like you are, and Shri Arbindo has talked about the simultaneity being a key of life, can you simultaneously be an individual, be the universal and the transcendent at the same time. I think that's a really beautiful way to also put it. I like how, yeah, I totally vibe on the idea that these are absolutely compatible things. I think, you know, and Shri Arbindo also said that one of the main keys to life is to just never cut life into two. And if you do that, if you always keep it at one, every time you try and break these concepts into this materialism versus idealism and and like you try and like consciousness only versus materialism, it's just this idea of like breaking it up and trying to like I like your point about sensory deprivation. I think that's an interesting one. So even if I'm, because especially for those that have been in sensory deprivation tanks, I think that's extremely salient because if you have been in them, you know that it, it's just, it really in a sense, it also kind of feels like the womb and I think that's really beautiful, but and occasionally sure you can maybe hear like a little bit of the warm water like slosh against the side, but really you're, you're there. It's completely sensory deprived. And if you don't have a good job of taming the the elephant. I mean, the elephant is, you know, can be on cocaine and just your mind the elephant monkey mind just, you know, and so if you, yeah, and so that's the idea that you still get some sort of bubbles of experience, even during a complete sensory deprivation. I would say it's the prime directive of mind. It's prime directive is not to be quiet. It is to generate experiences and dodging as experiences and then deceive itself because if there is no deception at some level of reality, then everything just goes out of existence. So reality is fundamentally dependent on a certain level of self deception. I'm not saying that it's personal only there could be something transpersonal behind it, but it's the nature of my your things up and deceive itself in the process. So when you are in a sensory deprivation chamber, you may feel very quiet in the beginning, but wait a little longer and you start seeing that it's almost impossible to stop that that dynamism that dynamic activity of mind to produce images produce thoughts produce narratives and then deceive itself get gets all tied up in its own narrative. It's it's the nature of the beast. Yeah. Bernard I'm so interested to hear your take on this you hinted at it in this last segment. It's this idea that there is a, there's a there's a list in a sense of, there's like a catalog of biometric correlates to phenomenon phenomenological states of experience. I really like this a lot and actually, I think the more that we collectively invest into science identifying these biomarkers and especially at the building better tools to understand the biometrics, everything from EEG and fMRI to EKG to microbiome so all over, and then taking that read out and then being able to provide like a artificial general intelligence health corpus be able to or AI coach can just, you know, provide these in these feedbacks these insights into, you know, you your heart rate variability is super low right now you are stressed, and like what's the, what's the interaction that you know, maybe going to the pool or going in a walk right or whatever it may be doing some motion. So, how do you, you mentioned this earlier about this idea that like, if we had the biometric correlate of your phenomenon phenomenological state, we could in a sense have like a telescopic or microscopic idea of what that is so tell us about your reasoning process around that. Well, I mentioned earlier I think matter is just what inner experience looks like from a perspective from across the dissociative boundary and I think the dissociative boundary that that defines us as individuals presents itself in perception as the skin the eyes or our sensory organs this is the boundary of this dissociative process in universal mind that we call ourselves. So, if matter is that what is what experience looks like from across the dissociative boundary then the matter of the brain is no exception. Neither is the matter of the rest of the universe but let's talk about the brain. If brain activity is what our normal individual mentation looks like from across a perspective of course there will be correlations there will be lots of correlations. I would go further and say and suggest that we could even come up with interventions in our patterns of brain activity that could lead us to certain in desirable inner states. We know that psychoactive substances from alcohol to psychedelics. They intervene with the matter in our brain and they lead us to other experiential states I would say that the psychedelic the alcohol or the scalpel of a neurosurgeon when he's digging into your brain. This is all material therefore these two are images of transpersonal conscious processes the scalpel is what the transpersonal conscious process looks like. And it goes across your dissociative boundary interferes with your dissociate dissociated individual experiential states. What it looks like is a scalpel cutting in your brain or a pill being digested and flooding your brain with a psychoactive substance that one mental process influences another is trivial or emotions influence our thoughts they are different but the influence one another. So by the same token a scalpel or drug can influence our inner states both are images our brain and that scalpel and that drug are images of mental processes. So, if we can decode the neuro correlates of meta consciousness or metacognitive awareness which we which is what I think they are. We can even find ways to intervene into our brain activity and force desirable experiential states by disrupting ordinary brain activity in just the right way. I think it is possible to develop this technology and I would look forward to using it. Yes. Yes. Okay, this this this bit's gonna. It's getting very interesting so I loved the focus there on especially on entheogens and I love that word because it's about unleashing the divine within. And it's without a doubt that there is a super highly correlative experience experiment with taking a substance that lately and then the agent and then having a psychoactive experience that in a sense, could incrementally awaken and lighten. And so this is where I want to take this segment now. Ultimately, we're talking about this idea of some sort of like an artificial general intelligence that's constantly taking in all the sensor data like you have. Like today we have jets that have hundreds of sensors that constantly monitor everything but like what our body goes to the doctor one time a year it's a joke. So that so the idea is that if if we're constantly analyzing that stream of sensor data from our body. And then we gave this idea earlier that there's even something as simple as an intervention for for stress maybe you go out walk on a walk etc. But there's even deeper interventions which you were hinting at the idea that could it be possible to have a deeper understanding of a correlate of specifically enlightenment or awakening something that is so. causeless joy and imperturbable peace that is the essence of what it would be across brain across heart across gut and then and then do our best to nudge our society in that direction how does that resonate. I don't see any fundamental reason why that shouldn't be possible. I could imagine that under different circumstances it could be impossible you could speculate that maybe our brain activity is not the complete image of what's happening in our mind it's a partial image. So by intervening in it, you're not intervening in a large segments that may be relevant so you could speculate about that I don't see a reason to think that. measurable brain activity at least measurable in principle that there is activity in the deeper areas of the brain that today is very hard to measure with proper spatial and temporal resolution, but I'm talking about what is possible in principle. I think we can in principle measure everything that plays a role in our mental states and it should be possible if we cared to invest and if we cared to develop the technology and do the research necessary to stimulate. And mental states that are conducive to enlightenment or which maybe our enlightenment. We know anecdotally that many a psychedelic traveler traveler has maybe by sheer luck or chance. arrived at the mental states that they described as unmistakingly enlightened. You can't do that every time you can choose that that's where it's going to take you psychedelic trips are very noisy unpredictable they they mix profound truths with with profound delusions. It doesn't make sense of that we don't have any control of that, but if we could develop a technology to control it better at the right resolution I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be possible. Yeah. There's. And that's this idea of one. These interventions on the awakening or enlightenment trajectory is one sort of idea in, in a sense, they're, they're, they're interconnected with these other ones but just some general other ones where like, Okay, you're having, you know, some back pain that we're getting an idea about like get up and go on that walk Another idea. Okay, we're sensing some, you know, some ghrelin you you you're having this active sensation happen for you to want to eat. And so, but you want to fast today. So what is the intervention that could happen today to help you fast. And so, what's your north star if your if your idea is that you want to become a deeper philosopher of mind or if you want to become a better artist or scientist or spiritual leader whatever you want to become. What are those interventions that can help you achieve that north star yeah There is a technology we call it a transcranial magnetic stimulation. The name is a little bit misleading because it may be the opposite of stimulation it may actually dampen down brain activity. It has beautiful spatial resolution. It's basically an electromagnetic beam that goes across your skull and messes up with the activity of your neurons in in the desired way. And that's very promising. The problem is that it doesn't have much penetration. So you can activate or deactivate superficial areas of the new cortex but you can't go much deeper. But that's an avenue of of R&D research and development that we could pursue to achieve exactly what you what you're hinting at. Yeah, that's that's a crucial one and we've heard the analogies of it being like a like a stadium or an arena and like you're just like outside the stadium or the arena trying to like understand what's happening on the field and just by like the bear the bear noise on the. Yeah. Yeah. And the tools that's why it's so important to build better tools because the better tools enable more edge pushing to happen. All right. And it's does seem like it's slowly going in the direction of an idea of like a service to self, like a more of a self dealing ego driven mentality of just survival and reproduction towards something that is more of an enlightened awakened service to other consciousness. Do you feel that I in my optimistic moments. Yeah, the rest of the time. You know, we've taken such an individualistic turn after the 60s, especially in the 80s and from then onwards that it's hard sometimes to stay positive but there are some bright lights there are things happening today that would be unthinkable. It was a long time ago. For instance, because of the benign influence of non dualism in the West, which picked up steam really this century. It started already back in the New Age movement new thought but it really picked up steam at this century. We didn't even have a language to talk about transpersonal mental states non dual states before we didn't even have the language that collects on that so the lexicon that the to the conceptual tool set to even talk about that to say something coherent about it. And that has led to some disasters. I mean, there was a book written about famous Western philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a written about him in 1994 by supposedly expert on his writings and philosophy. And this guy had the temerity of criticize Schopenhauer but in doing that criticism. The only thing he revealed was his utter inability to comprehend Schopenhauer's non dual ideas is non dual philosophy. And why did that happen because, you know, I'm being kind to this professor now, because in 1994 we didn't have the language the conceptual tool set to even not only to understand but to talk about what that guy was trying to hint at. He had to develop his own language which in a way led to disaster because nobody really understood what he was talking about. But now we can understand. Now I can write a book talking about these things and people share the dictionary with me. They know what I'm hinting at so that's very optimistic. That's a good sign that things are going the right way. I try to remember this every day. Yeah, I'm so happy you brought that up the more that we drive the novel lexicon that is very clearly the essence of where our North stars on our civilizational and individual trajectories. That's when it makes it more and more clear for us to share that corpus, like you were indicating that's so so critical and share that vision. I mentioned Schopenhauer which is excellent. I feel like the idea of nothing more fundamental than the will, the inner nature of everything I love that one I love the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature. I love that one as well. So, you know, given, given the case of Schopenhauer and yourself. We now have significantly more than 100 years ago had especially thousands of years ago for talking like the Vedic Rishis and stuff. We have significantly more access, especially under our revelation of quantum mechanics and whatnot it's just giving us more and more access to what we believe is that nature of reality so let's talk about this you've written about this quite a bit now I find this subject to be really deeply interrelated between consciousness and physics in the sense that this is about the up panpsychism and cosmos psychism that's that's a good that's occurring a fundamental consciousness as a universe wide field. And that is is would it would it be fair to say that there's a some sort of an abstract mathematics that are happening, you know, infinitely far away, and that it's emerging to emerging and illusory holographic space time. Just on a point of terminology, you alluded to bottom up and psychism but you really meant cosmos psychism, bottom up and psychism, also called constitutive panpsychism. What they would say is that every elementary subatomic particles conscious that there is no universal consciousness. There are only gazillions of little tiny microscopic consciousnesses. I think that's an untenable view. The only view is the opposite. There is only one cosmic subject and individual subjectivity is an illusion, which is the view I subscribed to that would be a form of cosmos psychism. Now the mathematics. Well, Alan, I think a mathematics is how we describe things. The fact that mathematical truths which are so intuitive to us so intuitive that it's like it's self evidence to us it has to be true right to plus two is for almost by definition and there are a number of much more subtle nuanced mathematical truths that we are absolutely sure are correct and this psychological intuition happens to apply perfectly to the dynamics of the world up there. I mean this in itself is extraordinary under a materialistic metaphysics because there is no reasoning principle why our axiomatic rules of thought should be the rules according to which the world up there evolves and moves. Under idealism. It's not a problem because it's a mind out there as well. Actually it's the same mind and the division is the separation is an illusion. So our axioms of thoughts those rules of thought that we consider self evidence applied to the world because it's the same mind that is behind the world applying those same axiomatic rules of thinking. We use this fact this the similarity between how well this equivalence between how we think and how the world behaves. We use it to our advantage to describe the behavior of the world according to these axioms of thought and that's that's what we call mathematics. We are describing the behavior of the world. What it I think ultimately informs us off is of how mind behaves. That's what mathematics is telling us a mind has some inherent patterns of behavior which a union would call archetypes of behavior. And unions went as far as to say that the axioms of mathematics were archetype in nature. Marie Louise von Franz wrote a book I think in 1974. I think it's called the number and time. I'm not sure anymore about the title, but the explorer this notion to which I subscribe at the archetypes of minds are them. How to say they're the fundamental source codes. Another way to put it would be to use a vibration analogy. When you plug a guitar string, it vibrates according to one of its normal modes of vibration. It plays certain notes but not other and that note depends on how long the string is, the elasticity of the string. So mind has its normal modes of excitation. Once mind gets excited, it gets excited in certain ways and not in others. There are these archetypal fundamental modes of behavior in mind. And I think mathematics by giving people direct inner access to those templates allows us to describe from the outside as well how the world behaves and it gives us profound hints to what mind is and how it comports itself. Interesting. So it's more accurate to say a bottom up panpsychism given what cosmopsychism currently describes itself as but if we could say more accurate that I would say top down. Is a top down panpsychism. Yeah. Oh, interesting from from mind. From a universal mind individual mind as opposed to from microscopic minds to. Okay. Oh, interesting. Okay. Interesting. So a top down panpsychism from universal mind to us. And but there there's a there's some interesting. So the feedback sort of function isn't necessarily from an at like an abstract mathematics that are happening beyond the like quantum field level and then and they're going through this process of the unfolding and unfolding as like David would say, but but it could, or from this universal consciousness level or this infinite consciousness level. So it could, the idea is that it could be doing the unfolding and folding from the those seem like the same thing to me as well this in that macro micro sense. I see how you're visualizing it because the laws of quantum mechanics are microscopic laws you're thinking in terms of the bottom up. I understand that I think the way to visualize space is is misleading. And when you go down that path, the laws of quantum mechanics apply to all space everywhere. Yeah, these are fundamental laws in modern physics we even don't talk anymore about the literal particles we talk about excitations of a few particles are little ripples on a few the like ripples in the water there is nothing to the ripple but the water in the same way there's nothing to a particle but this field. Today, we still didn't manage to reconcile the different quantum fields. So we still talk about a set of them, but there is a very strong intuition in physics that they are actually all facets of one field. And this one field is not spatially bound. It doesn't have a size it is the entire universe. I was about to say it encompasses the entire university it is the entire universe. The laws apply to this spatially unbound field. So, even if you talk about microscopic laws with a term that we use because we are not able to separate and bring these laws into focus on micro macroscopic objects they are hidden behind their own interactions. So to see them we need to look at the microscope microscopic system but but this is an artifact of our ability to detect something that something in itself is not microscopic. It is the behavior the templates of movement or vibration the archetypes of a spatially unbound quantum field which is the universe the laws of quantum mechanics are not even local. So, when you talk about microscopic laws, we are just saying that we can't discern these laws, unless we look at very tiny things. It doesn't mean that the laws are only in the tiny things. No, they are in front of you right now they are making this screen in front of you be able to exist and do what it does it's just that we can't discern them at the microscopic level, but the laws are not microscopic they are universal. Yeah, okay this is very interesting so like a like an implicate or like a source code or an infinite consciousness or cosmic consciousness that it would it pervades absolutely everything always and that it's not. But this this part of it's this part of it's interesting you mentioned this. This is sort of potentially power law of the most common abstract mathematics, the relationships that are going on, and that those most common relationships emerge in the holographic illusory space time, as the most common archetypes. Yes. Okay, now now you hinted that one of the most difficult topics in science and philosophy today. We do not have consensus about how the laws of quantum mechanics, which we discern at the microscopic level, how they somehow give rise to the classical laws of physics like Maxwell equations new tones equations. Why do these equations approximate so well the behavior of of the world we see. And how do they emerge from a purely probabilistic framework, which, which is what seems to apply at the most fundamental level now on purpose avoiding the word microscopic I'll talk about the most fundamental level. How does the orderliness of macro macroscopic laws arise or emerge out of the probabilistic behavior of nature at its most fundamental levels. We do not have a clear answer to that there are many attempted answers. I'm right now reading an excellent paper by a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the leader of a quantum physics group in the University of Vienna, which I think is one of the most promising avenues of investigation. And now you have a cubism, which is another attempt to make sense of this. But it's an open question. Somehow that probabilistic behavior at the most fundamental level, preferentially leads to the emergence of recognizable regularities which we call laws of nature. And that leads us into recognizable phenomenological states. So then there's that relationship. So, so in a sense, we can say that there are specific. feedback mechanism that occurs where the more that I as my illusory individual become more causeless joy and imperturbable piece the more that I become that the more that I cause a feedback loop to this source code that then makes the abstract mathematical relationships more in the emergent direction of that causeless piece causes joint imperturbable piece. We do not know if and how these feedback mechanisms work we haven't been able to model them. But I think it would be extraordinarily implausible to say that the direction of influences here is only in one way points only in one way. I think it's extraordinarily implausible. I think it's almost a virtual certainty that there are feedback mechanisms in operation here as well, because we've known from complexity sciences, for instance, that it is feedback mechanisms that give rise to complexity. Why is this world complex. So there there should be feedback mechanisms mechanisms operating at every level here including endogenous experiential states that are providing feedback mechanisms in a way that we haven't been being able to model and discern clearly yet. And we could say that then that feedback is potentially the idea of the co creators that we are these. We have a co creative relationship with reality. This is an extraordinarily sensitive topic. So, it's so easy to be misunderstood to be misunderstood when you talk about this so bear with me. This is an approach in physics, a very conservative very level headed. I would say unassailable approach for interpreting quantum mechanics, I would say it's not even an interpretation. It's an acknowledgement of what quantum mechanics the same, which is called relational quantum mechanics by an Italian physicist called Carlo rovelli who has written a number of very good books. What rovelli says is that, you know, if you bite the bullet of quantum mechanics from experiments, then there is no physical quantity no physical entity that's absolute. They're all relative. Everything that's physical is relative to to an observer is relative to a point of measurement, which then immediately raises the question, well if everything physical is relative. It's relative to what whatever it's relative to it can't be physical. Otherwise you're getting to infinite regress. Right. So, if you understand this, you will immediately come to the conclusion that what is really out there is not physical. It is mental and physicality is relative to mentality. And that's how it arrives from an interaction between two segments of mind, at least to physicality is relative to mentality. That's what quantum mechanics seems to be suggesting. I'm the mentality part I added because I think it's inevitable. It's the only other thing we know of next to physicality. But quantum mechanics seems to be telling us quite unambiguously, especially after superb experiment in 2018 that sort of closed all loopholes that physicality is relative. Relative to what I would say it's relative to mentality. So, in so far as each person is a observer, a different observer with a unique perspective. Your physical world is fundamentally different from my physical world, because my physical world is relative to me and I'm taking a different perspective. So we all inhabit different physical worlds. And more physical worlds and buried me. Don't misunderstand me yet. I have to complete this thought. So, of course, we co create our physical world, because it's relative it arises from an interaction between our personal dissociated mentation, and the transpersonal mental states out there. It is from that interaction that our physical world is created. So we co created we are half of the equation. However, we describe our respective physical worlds in mutually consistent manners. You also would say, well, there is a moon at night, there are stars, there are trees, there are cars, you know what I mean. So, the other part of the equation seems to be transpersonal mental states in which we are all immersed. Can we change that? I would say all indications that are that we can't. Because otherwise, I would just conjure up the world to be much better than it is now and I seem to be unable to do that. I don't seem to be able to create my own reality fully. And I understand that that's not what we are claiming either. You're not saying that we all create our own reality. You're saying that there is some degree of influence. So I would say there's a massive degree of influence as far as the physicality that surrounds you is concerned. But what ensures that your physical world is consistent with mine and with everybody else's is this transpersonal ocean of mentation that is out there. And then can we as individuals influence that ocean of transpersonal mentation? I personally think very little, if at all. Some of the greatest minds of all time have influenced that and made everything much better. I am open to that idea. But then you could say, well, I influence the world in trivial ways. Like if I use my arms and I move a rock, I've influenced the world. What you mean is something deeper than that. I mean Michelangelo. I'll go along with that. But that's not what we mean, right? What we mean is, can your inner attitude influence the physical world through non-physical means? In other words, not through the use of perception and everything that correlates with perception. Can a thought, can a inner feeling influence something non-locally? Perhaps there is some evidence that this could be the case arising from research on so-called side phenomena. For instance, at the University of Virginia in the US. But I'm tempted to think that that influence is rather limited. Let me give you another example on that is even something as simple as like if we have the spectrum from Michelangelo to something very simple. It can be something along the lines of when you are with another person, especially if it's a family member or a friend. The idea is that everything is inextricably connected in this knot of life and that if one has that equanimity, that immovable peace that causes joy, just by that simple phenomenological state can significantly affect what the other person's experience is. So that slowly, in a sense, it takes the suffering out of the knot of life. How is that? How does it take the suffering out? Because by your phenomenological state being that causes joy and imperturbable peace, it butterfly effects to the other person in that knot of life. All of a sudden, the other person feels your peace and then they themselves also take the notch down. And we all know of the scenario where if you go a notch up, they go a notch up and it just versus bringing it. Slowly work out the misery and the suffering and the needless replaying of the worst possible archetypal phenomenologies. This section has been super, super interesting. In this last bit, is it is it possible to say that the like there is a wherever everywhere is this source code implicate cosmic consciousness, infinite consciousness. Non-spatial. Non-spatial. Everywhere or nowhere. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Non-spatial. God, it's everywhere. Yeah, or nowhere. So, so now this idea that from this source code implicate etc. from there we have a we have a we have a power law of the abstract mathematical possibilities that exist and then from there it's possible that there is the emergence of common logical states and that we have a direct feedback potentially influence on that on those abstract mathematical states by in a sense we can drive the knot of life anywhere from a simple relationship making it better to being like a Michelangelo or an Elon Musk and trying to drive some sort of massive artistic or technological revolutionary change to better the world. Well, look, I think what you're hinting at is, is our does our influence extend beyond the visual or perceptual cues that we provide I mean you have that you had that example of a discussion that escalates. You could say well it escalates because each participant is providing obvious visual cues to the other he's speaking out there his eyes are going wide open he's just circulating more. What you're hinting at if I understand you is that beyond the perceptual cues beyond your physical action in the world. There is a direct influence between your inner states and the inner states of other people and maybe the inner states of the universe at large it's beyond the visual cues. So that's correct I see you're not in so that that my interpretation and you call that a trans personal ocean. Well, in so far as there is a direct influence between you and something outside you it's going through a trans personal field. Yeah, ocean. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, the drop in the ocean analogy. Yeah, an ocean a few days are all metaphors and you get my meaning. Can that be happening. I think it can. It's a personal opinion. I think people who deny that that's happening are in a position to deny it because usually that happens together with all the visual cues and and and physical effects that we produce just by being in the world with this, you know, just by existing we displace air we occupy a certain volume in space. So, because these things always go together, the so called trivial influences which are visual perceptual cues and your physical presence in the world, and the direct more subtle influences it's very hard to tease them apart. So we can categorically say that there aren't is more subtle influences as well as well. That's why it's so difficult to categorically say yes they exist because it's difficult to tease them apart from all the other things that are happening. I think there is some research indicating that these subtle influences do occur. But they are not massive because if they were massive. I mean, I'll give you an example if if I knew that war is about to happen I would immediately seek meditate concentrate and stop it from happening but I can't do that I can't stop world hunger hunger I can't I can't stop the devastation of the environment that is happening around the world today I can't stop people from getting sick I can't stop my loved ones from dying from cancer and heart attacks. So, somehow, the so called physical way of influencing which does not entail a direct interconnection, but just your action in the space time framework that we call the physical world. Those seem to be overwhelming in relation to the more subtle channels for for influencing things I think it's just an observation it's not even an opinion it's an observation. And that's what makes it difficult to categorically pin down this other thing that might be going on. And the thing is, if it is going on then it opens up a whole lot of other degrees of freedom. Yeah, so it's important to know whether they are actually going on or not. It's almost seems like a fool's errand to try and say that it doesn't go on in the sense that if if if the even the simple beautiful imaginative idea of a rock star electric car company that, you know, may take two decades to actually get into solid production worldwide does end up that started just as that imaginative idea now is able to distribute 10s of thousands and more of these of the what would what one could call the top quality electric vehicle across across the planet which then somebody else does in a sense, exchange that value of money, or the vehicle and so then they themselves, they've basically taken what was an, an imagined, imagined, imagined idea that they themselves are now purchasing and now it's in there. Yeah, something that they use every day. And so, yeah, and that same thing is true about basically everything and Steve Jobs is one of the ones that said that you know these devices the phones and computers and but everything else as well, we're literally imagined by people and executed by people that are just like you. And that's why the idea is, you know, there is of course a bell curve and there are people that are extremely conscientious, and that are that can abstractly reason and that have emotional intelligence to work with teams and stuff like that versus other people that don't but there's and so people have the possibility to make things even incrementally better, even at that, at that person level. And in a sense, Bernardo, I want to ask you this question as well. You're familiar with cloud Shannon and the course and yeah and so the, you know, the idea that we've been talking about kind of like what would be a hypothesis in some ways of what his work and extrapolated potentially version of his work would be I have a way to to ask you about that process. Is it the same way to envision a zygote and the way that a zygote becomes an adult, and the same way that a seed becomes a tree, and the same way that a big bang becomes a civilization, and there is that compact information theoretical substrate that does that process and then there's and then there would you say a recursive function as well in all of those processes. So you're alluding to Shannon's information theory and communication theory. Shannon was basically trying to model what colloquially you can refer to as the amount of information that is transmitted, given a transmitter and the receiver and a channel that has noise and he modeled all that the information that is transmitted is inherent in the transmitter so it's not created out of, you know, out of nowhere. So if I understand your line of thinking, you're thinking about the information being implicit in that implicate order to use it as a metaphor based on the work of David Bohm. And that information is just unfolding and becoming visible exfoliating as an acorn grows into an oak, or as the big bang grows into a civilization am I interpreting it correctly. Yeah. Whether that information, well, I would say it is an implication of determinism. Problem is determinism is not doesn't hold quite well at the at the quantum level. I would say that almost by definition, whatever is whatever happens whatever unfolds is the realization of an implicit implicit potential of the universe, almost by definition, because if it's happening it was a potential before otherwise it couldn't happen, right. So, there is a, at least theoretically, there is a plenum, a level in the hierarchy of existence where you could say that everything that has been is or will ever be already is as a potential. And then, and then what we are interested in is how that potential unfolds and becomes a reality or what are the influencers of that process can we guide it can we steer it in a certain way. It's a valid question at the same time it's an extraordinarily complex question it may be, well it almost certainly is beyond human cognitive abilities today I think. Well, in a sense, the way that you can take a zygote and that you can begin screening the embryos and be able to take even maybe multiple embryos and you know this is, you know there's some bioethics implications that that occur here, but to be able to screen many embryos, and then to be able to identify ones that potentially have single or multiple point mutations that are causing downstream illnesses, and say that, you know, let's not continue the evolutionary process with that, but actually these that have a more that have better health outcomes but also that we can, you know, it is in a sense an ATC and G in double helix that can then be reprogrammed, as long as you know we do this longitudinally and figure out the right combinatorics for the right outcomes. That we're doing an interventional process that has these downstream effects so in that analogy it would be the same way that you can tweak zygotes embryos and is in the same way can tweak the existing model T 100 years ago and then having the motor vehicles begin spreading around the world or or now there's 100,000 or more commercial flights that happen every single day across the planet from the idea of like we want to do that thing called flying. So there, there is a, there's a way to affect, you know, like john von Neumann would would call it like this strip in a sense and like you are in a sense making a mutation in the strip, and that mutation that you make to enable humans to fly across the planet for every, you know, iteration of a human that exists downstream is going to have the airplane present for them to enjoy. Look, the history of science is the history of manipulating possibilities and putting things to work in a way you want them to work for you. Using the laws of nature in your favor. Science is about figuring out what are the patterns of evolution I'm using the word evolution here in a broad sense not necessarily Darwinian evolution alone, but in the sense of dynamism things happen, things are dynamically unfold and therefore we can say that they have to move in the history of science is the history of figuring out how this evolution happens, and then putting it to use for us like creating a model T and now shooting humans to the moon on the top of a big rocket. So did this improve our lives. From a certain perspective, undoubtedly, really, we live longer more comfortably, we have the means to do things today that previous generations wouldn't even dream of. Of course, there are enormous ethical implications for further increases in this power, you know we stole the fire from the gods. We took the realm of evolution on earth. And in all senses, even in a Darwinian sense we have taken the realm now for how species evolve which species will die which species will live. We decide we've decided that, for instance, we would be the most successful grass on the planet. We've decided it, we've decided that cows would be one of the most successful mammals mammals in the world. Of course, from the point of view of the cow, that's terrible because they're being killed and tortured like pigs and chickens every day. But from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, they are on top of the world, there are more cows now than money, many, many, many more than has ever been in the history of this planet. So we've taken the realms, whether we like it or not, whether we like it or not, it's our decisions that will decide whether most of these species in the world today will go extinct or not. It's our decisions that will define whether we survive one more century or not. So whether we like it or not, we've stolen the fire from the gods. And how to use this power correctly is a whole discipline in itself, it's ethics. How far can we go in manipulating nature, which is basically everything, in manipulating everything. When should we stop and say, well, we have the power to manipulate it, but we haven't yet acquired a sufficient understanding of what we are doing in order to manipulate it responsibly. Should you use the power you have for the mere fact that you have that power? Or should you enforce some matter rules on yourself and say, well, I have the power to change it, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing, so I will not use it. I mean, to give you an, I'm a member of the computer retro community. I like to fool around and change with these old computers. If you would give a computer to a kid, the kid has the power to press every key to press different buttons, connect and disconnect things. But chances are that you will zap the computer if you do that. So the kid has the power to do that. Should the kid use that power until the kid understands what a computer is, how it works, how it's supposed to be used. One could say the same thing about the operating system of the human body as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we are messing around with it in all kinds of unexamined ways. For instance, we mess with our operating system just by watching television and we mess it in a very bad way just by watching television of all things. By choosing where you breathe your air, you're messing with your operating system. By choosing what thoughts you think and there's nothing new age about it. We know that mind and body are deeply interconnected in surprising ways by allowing certain thoughts to go unchecked. You are influencing your operating system. The thing is, when it comes to our own body, we don't have a choice because choosing not to influence it is in fact to influence it in an unexamined way. We don't have a choice there, right? We better get our act together because whether we want it or not, we will be influencing it. But the mere fact that we are living, that we are going about life, other things are not necessarily like that. So I don't have the ethical answers to this. I'm not an ethicist. As a technologist, I have the instinctual tendency to err by doing more than I should because I'm a technologist. And if I see that protein power in my hands, the fire of the gods in my hands, I have an instinctive urge to go and check. And what can I do with this? To press the buttons, even if I don't understand the buttons. But there is my Freudian id, the supervisor in my mind who is saying, hey, hey, hey, wait a moment. Don't give in to all of your instinctive urges because there are more things at play here. That's about as much as I can say about this, Alan. It feels like a lot of that has to do with what has been quoted as this pause, the pause that is what enables us to be observant rather than reactive. And that pause when unlocked the Promethean fire to pause and to observe and to compute the combinatorial longitudinal effects. So take stock before you start messing about with things, right? I would say that, look, there are certain problems we face today where we no longer have the luxury to pause and contemplate. We have to act even if we don't know exactly what we're doing. For instance, if I take climate science seriously, which I do, I think we are no longer in the luxury position of pausing. Let's see how this goes. For all we know it's already too late. The fact that we don't know it is already an urge for action, and I would be willing to endorse. Nobody's waiting for my endorsement, but from my in my own mind, I would be willing to endorse people who'd say, hey, let's develop some technology to actively try to compensate for the climate effects that we are causing. Yes, I don't know. Let's blanket the Sahara on a white sheet. In a sense is so simple in the sense of just transitions intelligently from the use of hydrocarbons to nuclear fusion and all these other extremely futuristic star trekking styles of energy and complete abundance for all. For use the mass energy equivalents to make replicators and synthesize whatever you would like from pure energy. And this really is in a sense going like, like, what do you want for your great grandkids in 100 years, you know, you want this absolute flourishing prosperous society for them and for all. And so the question then is how do we make that those incremental architectural steps and and why not galvanize the world. Like one of the problems that Eric Weinstein talks a lot about is just that what's going on with our like sense making apparatus around allocating the brilliant minds with the proper incentive structures to things like the SDGs. We know that solving these things like the SDGs is exactly one of the biggest longitudinal success points that we want to have. Yeah. You touched on a number of things that that are my buttons. So very me. Look, the first thing is, for as long as our mainstream metaphysics, metaphysics is materialism, people will not move to better the world for four generations in the future, because, you know, their grand children will be dead by then they will not get to know that great grand children and they will be dead and under materialism they will cease to exist. So it is all quote immaterial what will happen for generations from now and that's a big problem of materialism because it sort of stimulates this short term of acknowledging mentality, which is very dangerous. But on their idealism. Hey, you're great when children are you in another form. So is a planet. So are the birds. Yeah. So you have any, you have a stake. You're invested in this. Now, having said that the problem of energy that you touched upon and this futuristic energy sources. Energy is the key, because you see, we can solve everything else if energy is for free and abundant everywhere. We can desalinate ocean water and have potable water anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat and solve the freshwater crisis which is one of the biggest looming crisis in the world today. And recycling, you know what the main problem of recycling is, is that it's a major energy drain to recycle things need to heat them up you need to reprocess them it consumes a lot of energy. But if we could have energy for free everywhere we could recycle everything, everything. Another one, the food crisis. Vertical farms would solve the food crisis. What's the problem. Yeah, you cannot count on sunlight because sunlight only hits the top layer, the layers underneath are in the shade food doesn't grow, but you can put artificial lighting. You can put LEDs and you can grow things 24 hours a day in urban areas to entire populations. Why don't we do that, because it takes energy and energy is not available everywhere. The reason we got away from the magical abundant forever source of energy which is nuclear energy is that it's unsafe and it produces waste that is the risks of store of storing that are just unacceptable. But we think of nuclear energy in terms of the 1950s when reactors needed what we call active safety. In other words, if everything shuts down, then the reactor explodes. If you put a plug on everything the reactor explodes because it needs to be actively controlled. It's active safety. Since then we have passive safety nuclear reactors, volume reactors, wavefront reactors, this technology exists. And these reactors are such that if anything goes wrong, the whole thing shuts down. No, I mean, if you put a plug the whole thing just shuts down the reactor doesn't react. The reaction doesn't continue unless you're constantly stimulating anything just the right way. If Fukushima happened and that was a passive safety reaction of reactor, nothing would have happened. The whole thing would have just shut down with that wave. And that's fission and we have fusion Tokamak stellarators. That is even better. Yeah, that's even better, but it doesn't exist today. And that's the galvanization of resources and talent to tackle that. Yeah, yeah, but I'm insisting on this because passive safety reaction reactors exist, but the laws forbid us from doing more R&D and deploying them. Now imagine for a moment that we could deploy them. These are reactors that use as fuel spent fuel from old generation reactors. So you would clean up the earth by using them. If we would deploy them and have the courage to understand that the technology has changed. We could deploy them everywhere and we would solve nearly every problem we could recycle everything we could grow vertical food farms everywhere the salinate ocean water. I mean, the world would be different not to mention the fact that we pollute a lot less because these reactors produce no airborne pollutants. Anyway, this was my pet subject. I'm so happy you did that. You're like, there were so many of my buttons pushed there. I must get this all out. I love that. Yeah. I want to ask about if we observe the the observers that is this now. The notion that there are a an infinite amount of observations and that there is a there is a a dimensionless singularity that is indivisible and undescribable. And that there are all of these potential infinite observations and that there is an evolutionary process that is occurring in all of those. And we can even just focus it in on this one but I am curious of what you think about those about that other idea it's almost like that the that the the function is to validate the infinity like and that's why the infinite and then there's that evolutionary process and then the idea is that the telos telos of this evolutionary process potentially baked right in there in the initial source code like we were talking about earlier. Is that telos to or boros is the telos for the recursion, or the the quine. What what is the that telos so it's both that more that that infinite consciousness multiversal perspective plus the telek perspective. I think you hinted on the answer already, and I think you know you did. I would just agree with you. Just on the terminology. I think there are infinite perspectives but one observer like Schopenhauer said one eye of the world that looks out from every creature. And it is the perspective what goes in your visual field in each instance, but the eye is the same the subject is the same. I think the subject in you is the same subject in me. If we would become amnesic in an ideal sensor deprivation chamber together, what it's like to be you would be identical to what it's like to be me. Basically be identical what changes is the perspective, but it's okay to talk about multiple or infinite observers because that's how physics defines the observer. It defines it in terms of the perspective. But philosophically I would say the core subjectivity of every observer is the same so there's actually only one. Yes, that is that is then in a sense of you could you could say fractal doubt. You can you can immediately get intuition about it by closing one of your eyes and then two perspectives the same observer. That's interesting. That's interesting. And if you put your finger in front of your nose and you look with one eye and look with the other you see that the part of your finger that you see with one eye and the other is completely different. Yeah. So there isn't even a part of the finger that is common to the two perspectives but the observer is the same. This is very interesting examples very interesting even at the child level can begin getting that. The only difference is that in the case of what's happening here. The two perspectives are separated, but they are co-conscious in time, or at least they seem to be. I have a friend, Professor Bernard Carr was first student of Stephen Hawkins. I'm not sure I should publicly say this, but not that I started a sorry Bernard if I, if I, if I said too much. He's working on a theory of time a multi-dimensional theory of time that may explain why or how one subject can be many and my personal intuition about it not necessarily what he's saying. I don't know what he's going to say, but my personal intuition about it is that we are the same subject in different timelines interacting with with itself across those timelines. If that is conceivable at all. Yeah. So where is this all leading, right? Yes. Where is that acorn? How would the oak look like? I am an empiricist as well. So I take my juice from what I see happening. And if you look at the evolution of life, which is the apex of cosmic evolution as far as we are aware of. What is that how life is evolving and what is the apex of that. There is a very important sense in which we are the apex in the sense that we have become for good or worse, the dominant species on this planet. What is it that has allowed us to occupy this position? What is the unique cognitive ability of our consciousness as humans. It differentiated us from everything else alive in the world today and arguably everything else that has ever been alive on this planet in the in the last three and a half billion years of the history of life. I would say it's metacognition. It's our ability to not only experience things, but to know that we experienced things is the ability to say, I am having this thought, as opposed to just having the thought. It's the ability to say, I am the one having this feeling, as opposed to just having the feeling. When my cat is eager to go out in the morning, my cat feels the eagerness. It's an experiential state. But I think from from my cat's perspective, he is the eagerness. My cat, I don't think has the ability to step out of itself and say, I am the subject feeling eagerness. I'm not the eagerness. I am the one having the eagerness. Douglas Hofstadt called this stepping out of the system in his monumental and magnificent book, Godel Ashabar. We have this ability to step out of ourselves, step out of the system, and then contemplate the system from the outside. And the system is us, but we have this ability to metacognize, not only cognize, but to cognize the cognition, in other words, metacognize. Insofar as we are the apex of the evolutionary trajectory, and what defines us as consciousnesses is metaconsciousness. In other words, conscious, metacognition, self-reflection, self-awareness. Then I would say the whole of nature seems to be pushing towards this ability to metacognize, to self-reflection, self-awareness, to the ability to not only feel, but to step out of the feeling and say, I am the one having the feeling. And maybe beyond us, nature is instinctual, and it's overwhelmed by the flow of its own instincts, which probably is not very pleasant. It's probably very confusing, very stressful, or perhaps fantastic as well in other ways. I don't know, but it's not able to step out of itself and contemplate itself in the way we can do that. Perhaps it is doing that through us. Perhaps we are those eyes that turn back and look back at the existence and say, oh, this is what's happening. This is what's going on. Maybe the theory is this universal metacognition, conscious metacognition, and we are just the beginning. I don't know. Yes, this is where I could also include some of the existing technological advances that have enabled us to feel even more like we are getting a mirror of the nature of reality. And those advances are things like artificial intelligence. They're like virtual realities, simulation technologies. Yeah, so then that question is that, is it then or or a boros and recursive? Is the tree dropping the seed for another tree? Metacognition is the ability to turn your cognition towards itself. It is the aura boros. There is no better symbol. It's when you stop looking out and you turn to yourself and say, oh, this is what I'm feeling. This is what I'm thinking that is the aura boros. So the relaxation of the awareness into the simultaneous individual universal transcendent, the feeling of truth when you relax the awareness inward is the epitome of the aura boros. And then yes, I like that a lot. And then on the trajectory of where it seems like an automata orthogenesis is what it kind of seems and feels. It's growing towards, right? So look back at itself. Yes, yes. And then there's that aura boric moment like you just described. But then there's another like whatever ends up happening with the synthesis of AI VR simulation technology, wherever that ends up going. The transcension hypothesis of going, John Smart, of going inward and that kind of solving like the Fermi paradox and stuff like that of just the aura boric moment of going into infinite designer virtual worlds and just going into the next. The inner world, which is the outer world. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. This is rich territory. I think this is a fascinating subject to go back to technology. Do you know the Oculus quest that's virtual reality? Do you have one? I've played with it. Yeah, okay. I own one. And there is something everybody can relate to without a psychedelic trip just by using that of course the psychedelic trip brings the same insight 1000 fold stronger. If you use the Oculus quest for half an hour, you become so immersed in that you take it so much for granted as reality. The world where you're in that when you take it out and you realize, oh, I'm in a completely other world. That's the first thought. And then the next thought is this too. Yeah, just like that's the next thought. What makes me believe that right now, it isn't the exact same thing going on. You have that a lot with psychedelics when you trip, you have the feeling that what you're experiencing during the trip is more real than real. It is so palpably and richly and unambiguously real. And then you come back and you tell yourself, well, that wasn't real right because after all what is real is where I am right now. And then you think, oh, wait a moment. Maybe the exact same thing is going on. I can either say that both are real, which is okay. Or I can say both are unreal because if you tell yourself that after that unambiguous feeling of reality, you come back and you pointed it and say, well, but that was not real. Then what reason do you have to say but this is. You see. So yeah, I think VR mind manipulation technologists are going in the way of facilitating this kind of insight, which is ironic, right, because you would think, you know, meditation and non dualism, you know, the eastern traditions. They would not converge with the madness of our technological society. Oh man, that's probably one of my favorite focuses is that grand synthesis of the non dual eastern spiritual perennial wisdom with what is the rocket ship of what has happened in since the Enlightenment Industrial Revolution towards this and computers were just such a massive unlocking it may even be that like biology has an automata orthogenesis to create computers and an an artificial like we are a biological bootloader as Elon Musk said and I think that's quite fascinating and interesting and then the recognition that the West did create a serious amount of of flourishing across. There's just no better thing for you to do when you have like a serious like a femur snaps or something, then for you to go to, you know, like western medicine medicine. Yeah, exactly. So, so there's that and then there's also like yeah like AI is somehow in VR and simulations are somehow synthesizing with like indigenous and spiritual wisdoms of the planet, which is super interesting as well. So, so yeah that's this is such a big interest of of it's just that whole idea of not dividing into two and realizing that it is that it's the same source code there in the implicate order right so it shouldn't be surprising that it's unfolding in the same directions, but somehow we cognize it as surprising. Look, I am. I am an admirer of Eastern traditions. No question. No questions about that. I'm an admirer of native American traditions. I'm an admirer of African traditions, which are, I think, unjustifiably ignored. Yeah, because the African things with his heart. And that's something we need that color in the rainbow of humanity. If you know what I mean. But I am a very proud outcome of the Western tradition. I don't pull pull the West at all like, many of us seem to do. I think the Western path, maybe misinformed as it may be, or whatever you can say about it. I think it is a valid path. It's just a path that carries more responsibility than everybody else because we have the Prothian fire in our hands and we can end the game for everybody in the drop of a dime. So that means that our responsibility is greater. You can even ask, can the earth afford the existence of the Western tradition is this not too big of a gamble because the payoff is drastic. The payoff may be instant forced enlightenment 100 years down the road. You know, no need for 35 years of meditation, man, just put this little helmet. There you are. That's a major payoff. But the risk is fantastically high. That said, you know, I'm a proud philosopher in the Western tradition. And I think we pull pull our own tradition too much. We should we should honor what is ours. We should honor our inheritance like Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuel Kant, going all the way back to Parmenides. How many people know what Parmenides said? And how many people interpret him correctly amongst the ones that know what he said? I mean, 12 scholars in the world. I mean, it's ridiculous how much we ignore our own tradition while turning our eyes to the richness of other traditions which are unquestionable. I think the influence of Eastern traditions in the West has been very useful, very benign. It has given us language, a conceptual toolset that we didn't have, but this should not come at the cost of our own tradition. We are products of the Western world. Amen. Yeah, that's so so well said. Then there's there's always room at the big buffet of Union. Again, yoga does not mean holding a stretching pose. It means union in Sanskrit. So please, everyone remember that forever. And at this big buffet of Union, that there are all of these options and for the for the parent to expose their child to the options and to follow the child to follow their curiosity. And for the child to truly dig the well to water in the sense of realizing that infinite consciousness at the same time as for them to be able to sample from that buffet. I mean, some West, some East, some science, technology, biotech, neurotech, VR, AI, quantum sciences, all the way to understanding what the Buddhist teachingers or Lao Tzu's teachings, Confucius' teachings, the African traditions, the Native Americans. Just, just there's so much richness to select from the buffet. In a sense, the more exposure also that you have, at least to, you know, become leverage that Pareto leverage only looking at maybe the five or 10% of all of those that give you the most like 80 or 90% understanding of what the essence of it is. If you get really efficient at that process and education, then you become that polymath that is able to put on all of these different costumes to engage with the world and all of these different ways and you're you're making novel connections between fields that nobody else sees. But, you know, in the process of doing that, one of those clothes to put on should be our own. Right. Yes. But let me give you an example. I think there is a profound point when an advisor teacher says, thought is your enemy, your monkey mind will just get you caught up caught up in all kinds of conceptual narratives, and you will completely lose sight of what is right under your nose, which is who you actually are and what is actually going on. We get so, you know, tied up in that conceptual web. So thought is your enemy. There is a very important sense in which this is correct. But you see, the West has a tradition that uses thought to get you out of the web. Peter Kingsley calls this logic, true logic, as opposed to just reasoning. He considers true logic, an enchantment. It's a way to enchant your own mind out of the delusion. Throw some fairy dust in your mind in a very subtle way. You see it. And we have a tradition of people using logic to do that, like Zeno's paradox of paradoxes. You know, so you know about it. But you probably recognize that there are many people who never heard of Zeno's paradoxes. That's a way to use logic to tie you up in such an impossible conclusion in their contradiction that it works like that Japanese hype. No, not the haiku. How is it called again? It's part of Zen Buddhism. Oh, part of Zen Buddhism. Oh, the like the one hand clapping or yes, yes, like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I forgot what the word is, but yeah, if I blank to blank to I mean this happens so that's our no local connection here. So Zeno's paradoxes work like that. And in modern science, we have the tendency to say well now we figured out the answer to Zeno's paradoxes know we have the notion of limits and derivatives and integrals it can make sense of that. But actually you can't really because you make sense of that by imagining that you've reached a limit that you actually never reach because it's infinite. It's an infinity. So you actually don't make sense of it you just postpone it infinitely. And but we don't follow that path we say well you know, forget logic forget the thoughts forget the monkey mind. There is an important sense in which that's true but it makes us blind to our own the richness of our own inheritance our own tendencies our own tools to get there and you know I'm making a point of it because it's one of my you know I have a beef with it. And I like to highlight it every time I can you bring up what is probably the most salient and simple way of endeavoring as a more thought provoking human in our world which is posing these questions of this true logic, where when you pose such a question, it makes the other person, the comp the does not compute emotion, or, or like the mind blowing emotion. Yeah, it's inspirational because it drives people to, to further inquiry that they didn't know that those things existed and like you said, there's so much. There's so much malware that is programmed in. And we treat these things as mere curiosities, like a little game you play you don't get an answer for it, but then you just dismiss it. Oh, it's just a little, little game. It's not these are tools for for very deep thinking. But we dismiss them. It's unfortunate. Yeah. And then the Rupert Spira said there's this difference between a something that's not real which is like the square circle. We're taking the half the distance to the wall. That's the Zeno's paradox of Achilles in the tortoise. Yeah. Achilles never overtakes the tortoise. You can prove that logically that he can never overtake the tortoise. It just causes a tilt, you know, an old arcade games. If you shoot the machine too hard to tilt to stop working. The Zeno's paradox is just tilt your logical mind and that's how they take you out of the story because you realize that if you follow the logic very strictly, it's sort of short circuits. It contradicts itself and then there is a moment that you go like, space is not what I think it is. Yes. Yeah. Now you're there. But then you immediately come back. And there's these cards that I think are another very interesting way to do it is you take these you take three of these little cards and you put the words past, present and future on them. And then you give them to somebody and you say order them as you please. And then there are certain people in the world that put them in order of past, present, future, like a linear order. And then there are other people in the world that stack all three on top of each other. And, and I think that these are also those small in a sense. Like, there's, it's like true logic. It's also kind of like mind blowing activities. It's, it's questioning the nature of reality and fun child like engaging ways you could even write the number you know I think even people like Takashi 69 have come up with interesting things just put the number six on the sheet of paper, and then you look at it and I look at it and you see that I see a nine and you see a six. And it's the same thing with the dress, the dress in 2015, about half. Yeah, half of people saw it as as black and blue and half people saw it as gold and white and when you when you there's also the the necker cube and the Rubin vase. There are all these different ways of, if you slowly incrementally realize that it's not that you're you perceiving the dress as gold and white is incorrect, and me perceiving it as blue and black is correct, but that both of us are holding that truth. Like, that simple recognition so all of these activities that we've been talking about are all just really solid ways to, to bring activities and questions to adults and children to slowly bring them towards a more awakened state. VR surely. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that Bernardo let some, let's wrap I have one thought to wrap with you on. I've been enjoying. Oh, by the way, everything we were just talking about is about cleansing the doors of perception, the William Blake all this Huxley, Martha Schopenhauer style of, yeah, of cleansing those. Those doors, awakening them and okay let some let's let's wrap with this thought. I've been toying around with the idea of like a dreamed symphony as a very interesting analogy for the nature of reality and so whatever that source or that implicate or that infinite consciousness that that dimensionless singularity that's indescribable and indivisible that that is in manifest whatever the function may be of self determining its infinity whatever the function may be. In a sense we can analogize what exists right now as a symphony in the sense that all of us are artists in the symphony, and that again the idea of the illusory individual the artist just not what it appears to be, but that we we have this like contribution like you're going to play the clarinet I'm going to play the piano someone else is going to play the sax, and we're even if you play the same instrument still going to play a different melody or a different harmony than other people will. People are maybe playing a little bit more out of tune because they're in like the service to self mentality they're still thinking themselves as the ego and separate and other people are in the service to other they're playing in tune mentality. And our like slowly our like symphonic evolution has like the the conductor is like the attractor, we can say in a mathematical system towards like an oral boros or whatever the telos is. So how do you like that like dreamed symphony analogy. I think not only is it an excellent analogy it may be the only viable analogy. Let me try to tell you why oh by the way I would prefer to say that I am the violin being played and you are the cello being played and I like that better. Expand on that to more for us because otherwise you have a very dual thing right I am playing the violin as if the violin were outside of you. I don't account for that duality while if I am the violin being played, I am the result of the play. And that's why I'm different of you from you and you are different from somebody else we are all unique notes being produced by this underlying instrument. And that look the idea of notes that use the vibration what is a vibration in air which is produced by the vibration of a string or a hammer or a column of air in a in a in an organ. And it is crucial to have this as the metaphor it's the only metaphor I found so far because it allows us to make sense of diversity. If all there is is oneness. It's the only way for you to explain diversity if you postulate that only oneness is truly real. Because diversity is then the variety of vibrations or the variety of excitations of that oneness. If a guitar string can you can produce different notes with it by plugging it with in different ways, or by holding the chord different different points, holding the string at different points. But there is nothing to anyone of those very different notes, other than that one string. The only thing that's going on is string in movement, but there is nothing to the note, but the string. If you remove the string there is a note. It's like a ripple in water that there is nothing to the ripple but the water in movement, you can't take the ripple out of the water. You can do that. If you take the water away there is no ripple. The ripple is the water there is nothing to the ripple but the water yet. have ripples of different frequencies, patterns of movement, heights, momentum, direction. I mean, that's how you get diversity from oneness. It's the metaphor of vibration. So I think you're right on. Wow, I love that. And I know that Shri Arbindo said that the diversity of the oneness is the mathematics of the infinite. And yes, look, even science is coming. Well, a philosophical part of science that arguably is not real science. But but it's very interesting nonetheless. M theory, the idea of M theory is that everything, all reality is constituted of patterns of excitation of a hyperdimensional membrane or brain, as they call it. And you can write all the mathematics for that. So even even physics seems to be heading in that direction. I think it's an unavoidable insight. Patterns of excitation. And I know this is getting so interesting. I'm so pumped for for further explorations here. Who else have you heard talk about the dream symphony? Because I want to research them as well. I have a good friend called Fred Matzer. He's publishing a book next year. He has a film out called Beyond Me. And he talks about it. But I sort of plagiarized him a little bit because he's the one who said, I am the violin being played. Yeah, interesting. I'm not playing. I am being played. Yeah. And his idea is that individuals don't really exist. They are illusions. So if they don't really exist, they can't be playing anything because they're not there to play to begin with. But they may be being played. They may be. Yeah, they may be being played. Yeah. Yeah. Good. And or Bindo also talked about the body as the receiving station for universal music. And yeah, that's that's another metaphor, right? Yeah, same metaphor. Same metaphor. Yeah. So this is so interestingly triangulating on the nature of reality. And I'm so pumped to embed these beautiful wisdoms that you've been able to share with us plus also that you've been teaching and that are also from all of the leaders because both of us, we stand on the shoulders of such massive giants. And this this big synthesis that I'm super pumped and passionate about is really the it's it's the culmination of like the apex of critical thinking around the nature of reality. And it's really, really important to use metaphor. It's so important. It enables conversation at the highest levels of abstraction. Exactly. And the way you started the interview, you made, you said something in the beginning that I didn't react to, but I didn't forget. You're saying, you know, idealism versus materialism, mind versus matter. These are all dualities. Yes, they are. And they ultimately hold no water, because there is ultimately only one thing going on. The problem is, and that's what you alluded to right now, to get into the discourse, we have to make a concession to the current rules of the game. So I make a dualist concession when I label my view idealism as opposed to materialism and all the rest. Because if you don't do that, you don't get into the conversation. Now, once you find the conversation, you can make the conversation implode from within my evil plan. But I have to get into it first. This is such such an interesting way of viewing it is that there is this there's this like bell curve that we could call like, you know, somewhere around maybe 95% or so people fit within two standard deviations. And we could call this like the evolutionary pacer, where many people are focused on survival and reproduction. And many of the symbols that are being exchanged, like memes, are of kind of that that that they're not at the the the edges of the bell curve at these tails. Because what's going on at the regressive tail are still some people violence and slavery and it's all these bad things. But at this very progressive tail, there are people beyond two standard deviations that are the ones that are at the highest levels of abstraction, that have to then create some sort of stories and metaphors like we got to do some Harry Potter Pixar Walt Disney style communication of the stories to get the center the evolutionary pacer for people to kind of like level up like we're shooting portals in a sense for people to jump through. And like you said, there has to be a sometimes this like concession, just because you can't bypass the gatekeeper, unless you do these concessions, or maybe if you embed the stories in animations or music or other things. But even then, like I really like your point down. We need myths. We absolutely need the myths. Otherwise, we don't have a democratic process. So we need modern myths, and we need to take myths seriously, not literally, seriously. Oh, Bernardo, wow, such a powerful conversation. Thank you for joining us on the show. I had a lot of fun. It was a pleasure. I just looked at the clock. Now it's been almost too hard. I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. So fast. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We greatly, greatly appreciate it. We would love to hear your thoughts and the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Have more conversations with your friends, families, coworkers, people online about all the subjects that Bernardo was teaching us about. Just get going on a more on a more become a deep truth, a deep student of the nature of reality and make that if you make that your first principle, you will be able to have a more happy, peaceful, robustly enlightened and successful life. You will be at that level. So do do that and inspire more people around the world to check out the links in the bio below to Bernardo's work. Check out his website link that has all of his essays, his books, his papers. Check that out. Also his social media links are there. He has a YouTube channel. He has a Twitter. So check that out and support him, support the other people in your communities that you believe in. Begin that process of really mimicking, biomimicking through inclusive stakeholder of the way that we can help fund the people that we believe in. So help each other out in that sense. And that's all folks. Thanks so much. Bernardo, again, thank you. Thanks for having me. Boom. We love you very much. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you soon. Fantastic, man. Wow.