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46. An Investigation Of Philosophical Inquiry III
67 Plays1 year ago
In this week’s episode, we revisit our large list of philosophical inquiries, continuing from episode 42 with a set of new questions to challenge our minds.
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Music By Nathan Willis RIP
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Transcript
Introduction & Engagement
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to pursuit of infinity. In this week's episode, we revisit our large list of philosophical inquiries, continuing from episode 42 with a new set of questions to challenge our minds. If you like these types of episodes, or if you don't let us know wherever you watch or listen in a review in the YouTube comments section. Our channel's tag is at pursuit of infinity or on Instagram at pursuit of infinity pod.
00:00:25
Speaker
Or you can visit us on Patreon at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity and get into contact with us there. All of these things and more can be found at pursuit of infinity.com, which is our newly published home. So head over there and see what we've got. And without further delay, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this week's discussion.
Motives Behind Acts of Kindness
00:01:08
Speaker
Today we're back with a large series of philosophical questions that we're going to discuss. Last time we left off at number 24, which is what is time? So now we're on number 25, which is do acts of kindness have a motive? Joe, what do you think? I think acts of kindness do have a motive. Um,
00:01:37
Speaker
I think it could be a wide range of motives. I mean, some acts of kindness can come from a quote unquote negative place. If you're trying to like manipulate someone, that's one motive. But I think most of the time, if it's a genuine act of kindness, the motive is to make the other person feel good or, you know, just to make them feel loved. I'm trying to think what an act of kindness would be without a motive.
00:02:06
Speaker
I think the only act of kindness that would be without motive would be like an indirect act of kindness. Like if I did something that I was going to do anyway, and it just so happened to affect somebody in the same way as if I was doing it for them out of kindness. But even so, I think every action that a human being makes has a motive. It originates from somewhere. Whether you look at where it originates in the human brain, like chemically, you can, you can narrow that down, but
00:02:36
Speaker
It always starts with something, you know, there's only so fast that electrical signals can travel through your body, like to make you do something. So there has to be like an initiative or like an, an, an initiator of the act. I don't see how there can be any kind of action, whether it be kindness or hatred or anything that doesn't have some kind of a motive.
Ego and Selflessness
00:03:01
Speaker
I wonder if the question is referring to like an egotistical motive or like a self-serving motive. I mean if the question was worded like are acts of selflessness guided by a motive I would say yes because every act of selflessness is like it originates as a selfish thing because you're getting the reward of
00:03:31
Speaker
feeling good of, you know, uh, the endorphin rush and the dopamine rush of like doing something for someone and seeing their response to it, feeling good about yourself for being altruistic. Like there's, there's a lot of selfish aspects of selfless acts, but I mean, that's not technically the question, but I think that's kind of what you're getting at. Right.
00:03:51
Speaker
Right. I've heard that I've heard the idea that there's no such thing as a selfless act like every act is selfish in the way you just described. Even if you think
00:04:02
Speaker
you're being selfless and it's purely like a selfless act, you're still receiving like a positive feedback. For some reason, there will always be something that comes back to you. But I don't think it's necessarily true that there's no such thing as a selfless act. I think there can be selfless acts, but it requires like an enlightened state of consciousness. It has to be, you have to be
00:04:33
Speaker
you know, highly conscious to the point where you are not identifying with the ego and feeling purely selfless. But that's extremely rare. So generally, I do agree with the fact that every act is selfish in a sense, but I think it's possible to act selflessly. But it requires, you know, killing your ego, basically, or just
00:05:02
Speaker
identifying with everything and nothing. Well, then if you're going to kill the ego, then who is or what is performing the act? Like to me, it's it's both. Like a little bit of both, like it can be selfless and selfish because like the ego itself is the one that's committing the act, that's doing the thing. And everything that we do, everything that we think we are exists on that layer of consciousness that is our ego. So.
00:05:35
Speaker
Something can still be selfless as in like, if you're going to describe the act itself as selfless from a third person perspective, like if you, if you save somebody from a burning building, you go in there and you risk your life to do it.
00:05:51
Speaker
On the outside i can look at you and say man that was a really selfless thing you did there that's amazing. But it's still your ego it's still the person that you are your personality who decided to jump into that building and save the person so to me it's. It's definitely both it just depends on what perspective you're looking at from it's like a most things paradox really.
00:06:12
Speaker
right but what I'm saying is if you're that's what I mean when I said like enlightened like I mean actually like if you live your life which I'm saying may very few people on this planet do but if you're living in a constant non dual state and you don't
00:06:30
Speaker
identify yourself with the ego with yourself. If you are constantly reality itself, if you are just existence, living in the non-dual basically just being the unity itself, that's I think how you achieve selflessness basically. But you know speaking from generally like how we behave and how 99.9999 people behave, I think I agree with everything you just said. I think
00:06:59
Speaker
pretty much all of it is selfless or both or all of it's selfish excuse me or both but for that tiny tiny percentage of people who have like mastered this journey basically and live in a pure state of non-duality that's I think the only way you could achieve selfless acts in a true sense.
00:07:22
Speaker
The people that come to mind are like the Dalai Lama or, uh, Ram Dasa's guru named Karoldi Baba. It seems that those type of people, like if you look at what they're doing in their life, they're helping others along the path or they're helping others to awaken.
00:07:41
Speaker
And they're doing it in a selfless way because they're not identifying with themselves or their ego named Karol de Baba was famous for Like performing miracles and then saying like that wasn't me like I didn't do that It wasn't it was like God's will God did it. I don't have any special powers. So yeah, I guess you'd have to look to The saints of our world, you know the people who have been proven to be like actual gurus and
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, and interestingly enough, it's like all the you named like a couple people there. But pretty much all the people that are in that state.
00:08:21
Speaker
I'd say most of them, the really high percentage of them will never know who they are, will never know their name, or they'll never be exposed in a large scale because they have no desire to, mostly.
Mind vs. Matter Reality
00:08:35
Speaker
But there's the very few that we've been blessed with that we get to hear them speak or read their books, this and that.
00:08:44
Speaker
I think we got a little bit off the question maybe, but maybe a bit, maybe a bit, but I think that, that, uh, that probably sums it up unless you have something else to say about that. No, I think I'm good with that one. Okay. All right. Number 26 is, is mind or matter more real? In my opinion,
00:09:09
Speaker
mind is more real because from the perspective that I'm standing from. I believe that mind creates matter more than matter creates mind. This is really just.
00:09:23
Speaker
What do you feel is fundamental? The wetware of your brain or the broadcast of consciousness? What creates what, what's more fundamental than the other? I could see a perfectly sound argument for matter being more fundamental and being more real because people would just look to the evidence of the brain creating consciousness, consciousness and generating it as their evidence for that. And that's cool. But in my view, it's definitely mind.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, when you talk about what's real, or what's more real, that's kind of weird. Something's real or it isn't, I guess. But I think you put it well, if they're talking about more real, it seems like what they're saying is like, what is fundamental. And whenever I see like, a question like this, that's like mind or matter, or good or bad, anything like that, when it's a duality, would I try to do like an exercise in my mind?
00:10:19
Speaker
is attempt to even just intellectually dissect that duality and transcend it. And that's what I think with mind and matter. We talk about them like they're opposites or they're two separate things. I think that the duality of mind and matter
00:10:37
Speaker
collapses into mind. Because essentially, like you said, if mind is fundamental, then matter is mind. This thing that, you know, mind creates matter, as you said. So there's no actual difference between mind and matter. All the matter is mind. So the duality would collapse into capital M, mind. But as far as I get kind of what the question is going at, I would have to say mind as well.
00:11:04
Speaker
I'd like to maybe phrase it as like to think of it on a deeper level.
00:11:08
Speaker
Um, as instead of mind and matter, like formlessness being mind and then form being matter, because you can see the correlation between the two and the interdependence that they each have on one another. When you think about form and formlessness, because with, again, you know, without, without form, we say this a lot. You don't have formlessness and without formlessness, you don't have form because they provide context for each other.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, it has to be to, unless if it's not, then it just collapses into all just pure unity. Yeah, and then you have nothing because the only way we can identify the unity is by collapsing it into a duality for like descriptive purposes, right? Yeah, yeah, just like this state of consciousness. That's why everything is nothing. You just said basically that without the comparison, it's nothing. But the two of them together are everything.
00:12:08
Speaker
So they're the same thing when they collapse into nothing or everything. Cause everything and nothing are the same thing unless it's a true, unless you break one of those two concepts down into a duality, then you have the two. Right. And that's what I was saying. Like with any duality you choose, they can be collapsed into one because essentially at the core of reality is one, you know, the unity is, is like the most foundational.
00:12:37
Speaker
consciousness of reality. So that's whenever I see any kind of duality, like this or that, and they're supposed to be opposites on the yin and yang, I try to figure out how they're actually the same thing intellectually. It's just like a fun exercise.
00:12:53
Speaker
If you envision the yin and the yang, you see the eye of each fish is the color of the opposite, and that's because they both have to have a piece of one another, and they intermingle, they coexist together, creating that thing that we feel is a unity.
The Nature of Love
00:13:12
Speaker
Right, and that's interesting, like the yin and yang, most people see that as a symbol of duality, which it is, but it's such a cool symbol because it's also, the whole thing together is a symbol of non-duality, for the reason you just mentioned, because even though the eye of the fish is the color of the opposing fish, so the whole symbol itself is non-duality, it's unity.
00:13:39
Speaker
But a lot of people look at it and just see the dual aspect of it. 27. Is love simply physical desire or something more? Love is not physical desire. It can be in a very basic human sense of love. But love is definitely something more.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's basically, didn't we talk about this? We did. We talked about this in depth, I think. Yeah, we could just run through it a little bit. Love is God, basically. Love is everything.
00:14:21
Speaker
It sounds like one of those like kind of hippie sayings, but the point is that the most foundational, fundamental driving force of existence of consciousness is love, which is everything. And we talked about a little bit, you can kind of, you can, not kind of, you can boil everything down to love.
00:14:45
Speaker
even negative actions come from a place of love. I don't know if you want to talk about it a little bit. Yeah, well, what strikes me initially about the question itself is that when you have a question that puts it is love simply, then you can pretty much guarantee that no, it's not going to just be simply one thing. Physical attraction, physical, romantic love is one aspect of love. It's like a doorway to love. But
00:15:15
Speaker
to say that the doorway is the thing. It's like the map is not the territory. I'm sure you've heard that quote before. The parts don't necessarily describe the entirety of the thing, especially something like love. I mean, we can't really pin down a definition of love without going on and on and on.
00:15:36
Speaker
for like an essay's worth of words here. Like for me to describe what love is, it would just, it would be very difficult. So to say it's simply a physical attraction, that's just part of it. That's just one of the many doorways that you can take to get yourself into the state of love. Yeah, love is the transcendence of all dualities. It's unity.
00:16:07
Speaker
That's why I said, like you said, you could speak on it forever. You never really get it fully down. That's why I said the word God, because it's the same thing, same force, and you can't really describe it in its entirety with language in a human state of consciousness, just in this standard state.
00:16:28
Speaker
But it's something that is, and it's all there is. So in our current state, we don't always recognize things as love because we're conditioned to think as love as what it describes, like simply a desire or attraction.
00:16:43
Speaker
But underneath it all, and I think this is why psychedelics are fantastic, because it's like a key to access those states. And you can feel that universal love, that driving force, that foundational love that basically creates everything.
00:17:03
Speaker
creates your whole experience that you live. It binds everything. It's like the substance to which everything is interconnected. And it's the source of all of it. If everything is interconnected and we all meet at one coordinate, that's the coordinate. It's love. It's the foundational connection of everything.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's why like through a materialist, it sounds crazy, but I think a pretty good way to say it to like a standard materialist would just be like the fundamental force that drives the universe that kind of fits the paradigm a little bit and is one simple sentence that breaks it down a little bit, kind of says what you just said. All right, 28. Where do thoughts come from?
Origin of Thoughts
00:17:57
Speaker
I love this one. There's a school of thought that thoughts come from something that's external that you're sort of tapping into. Um, and some schools of thought even give it a personality, they give it almost a form or they give it its own intelligence, its own form of communication where like, if you can sit quietly, you can tap into it and it can feed you ideas.
00:18:30
Speaker
This is prominent in like Steven Pressfield's work.
00:18:34
Speaker
he will call like, if you're creating some sort of an art form, um, say you're a writer and you have writer's block, then he calls that resistance. And the key to overcoming resistance is connecting yourself to what he calls the muse, which is like this external intelligence that is the source of all ideas that when you quiet yourself enough, you can hear it, you can communicate with it. And it does sort of present itself as, um, like an intelligence or another person that you're talking to.
00:19:05
Speaker
The Greeks have an idea that's similar to this, which they call the logos, which is like the ever informing intelligence of God or the external transcendence. They also call it the daemon, which is like your personal call to action, your personal call for purpose and meaning. And if you follow the daemon, which is like this
00:19:30
Speaker
this guiding force of positivity and love and progress, you're going to actualize into the version of yourself that you're meant to be or something like that. So I think all of this
00:19:42
Speaker
encapsulates this idea of an external force that's giving you the ideas that you can sort of tap into. But again, it's like this in the Yang thing, it's not as if this external force is separate from us or separate from ourselves, because when we start to identify with our egos and with our separateness, we find ourselves farther and farther away from this thing. So it's a weird paradox in that way too.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the standard argument I think for most people would be that thoughts come from the brain. That's the materialist view. I agree with everything you just said too. But as you said, you said externally and at the same time, there's nothing external to you. It's all you. You're not separate from the universe. You are the universe. So it's both external and internal.
00:20:35
Speaker
I think it just helps to think about it as something external from yourself. So that again, it's like when you're trying to describe a unity, you break it into a duality just to get a handle on what it is and how to think about it. Right. Because basically what you are saying is that it's, it's not the ego. It's something other than the ego. It's not, you know, standardly think.
00:20:59
Speaker
That me, the ego, came up with the thoughts. That it came from my brain and it just happened because of me, the ego. But it comes from the universe or the muse, whatever you want to call it. The Akashic Records, I hear that too. That's kind of like New Age. But yeah, I find that always fascinating to think about where thoughts come from.
00:21:28
Speaker
do thoughts come from the future? You know, that's an interesting aspect of it potentially. It's fun to think about. Um, but yeah, I think the main thing is that thoughts come from something that isn't the ego. That's for sure. It's interesting though, like when you're in your head and when you're thinking about
00:21:58
Speaker
thoughts. And when you're thinking too much on an intellectual level, your default mode network in your brain is like firing on all cylinders, you know, it's at a higher level of functioning. And then when you quiet that default mode network, whether it be with breath work, meditation, psychedelics, the connections in your brain, or the different parts of your brain,
00:22:21
Speaker
communicate with one another and form connections where the default mode network would filter them out. So it's like the thoughts themselves can be associated with the ego because you're thinking too much about it. But then when you think about where the thoughts come from and
00:22:41
Speaker
the opportunity to grant yourself higher access to new thoughts and new insights. It seems that lowering the activity of the default mode network more readily makes you available for them, which is kind of a weird thing to think about.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's counterintuitive. Like if you, cause it seems like when you are trying really hard to intellectually think about something and you're trying to get a result, you're really thinking what you're doing. Like when you're, you're overactive in thinking, it's like you're just trying to remember things and piece them together. So you're just thinking backwards and thinking of things you already thought and trying to piece it into a new thought.
00:23:23
Speaker
But then, when you quiet the mind, that's when, interestingly enough, when you stop thinking about the thing, that's when the insight comes, when the thought is just allowed to happen, when the thought just enters the vessel, rather than trying to be created inside the vessel.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's that idea of like, if you're working on a tough problem, sometimes you have to just work on it for a little bit, get it in your brain, have it cemented there as an idea in the back of your mind as a planted seed. And then you, you leave the situation, you go, you do something else, you do something for fun, or you work on a different project, or you just, uh, you sort of put that on the back burner. And then a lot of times you'll have an insight related to that project or that thought pattern.
00:24:11
Speaker
that will then like guide you toward figuring it out or solving the issue. And I think that's the same idea. It's like you let yourself relax into absorbing the thoughts from, you know, wherever, wherever you get them.
00:24:27
Speaker
A lot of the most important insights that are modern scientists and all these discoveries people have had, a lot of them will say the same thing. That doesn't happen when they're sitting there crunching the numbers or just really pushing into their work. It usually happens.
00:24:46
Speaker
Kind of as you're describing is the you know you work all day at it you work all day at it and then. You step away for a few minutes you step away for a few hours and then it comes to you and i think that's that's key about.
Flow States & Insights
00:25:00
Speaker
Having any type of insight is stepping away from the problem and allowing it to happen.
00:25:06
Speaker
just allowing the thought instead of forcing the thought because you know where do thoughts come from it's better said where do new thoughts come from because old thoughts come from i would say memories you know you're just patching memories together but the new thought that's interesting because it's something that you hadn't thought before so it's something brand new created which comes from something similar to like the muse or just not the ego it's you know
00:25:36
Speaker
the universe, it's God. You can call it whatever you'd like, but it's just not happening as simply as in your brain, you know, through thinking hard about something. I can't remember if I read this or if I heard it, but I heard or read somebody say, like, why do you think the concept of shower thoughts are a thing? Because when you take yourself out of any sort of intellectual situation and put yourself in a little box,
00:26:05
Speaker
And you're focusing on something that's not the problem. You're washing yourself. You're doing this like normal mundane thing, but it still takes up some brain power to do it. It frees you up to absorb, you know, the external thoughts that, well, I say external, but, you know, um, and also.
00:26:23
Speaker
We were just discussing insight before we started to record. And, uh, I was just like describing to you how my most influential insights come into my mind. And it's always right before bed. I'm laying in bed or it's not even right before it's right before I fall asleep. So I'll be laying in bed in the darkness.
00:26:45
Speaker
And my mind will be sort of free of all of the things that I experienced during the day. It's almost like the defrag process has just started to begin and I'm available to absorb these insights and they just, they happen. They fly into my brain and they fly out. I try to remember them and they're gone. I got to start writing them down.
00:27:07
Speaker
That's exactly what I was going to say because we just had talked about that. It's like you hit that hypnagogic state right before you're actually asleep. Your mind is awake, but your body is fully relaxed and you're beyond the ego mind at that point. You're not thinking about your day or yourself or anything at all, really. It's when your mind is fully empty and detached from your ego,
00:27:34
Speaker
that suddenly the answers come flying into you. But you know, the funny thing about being in that state is because, well, the funny thing about it is that you usually fall asleep or pop back up and you, you know, you either fall asleep or you wake up and either way, then you forget the insight. Cause if you wake up, you suddenly suck back to the ego mind and start thinking about, I need to remember that. I need to remember that. Meaning the ego.
00:27:59
Speaker
And those insights weren't for your ego. You know what I mean? So it's like, either way, those are hard to hold on to. Like you said, you want to write them down, but it's still going to be hard because you get up and then your mind suddenly goes right back to that like survival ego mode. And it'll be like, I can't put the words to paper. That happens a lot. But yeah, we were just talking about that. And I find that to be.
00:28:26
Speaker
the key time where I have a lot of insights and thoughts same as you. I've also noticed that, um, you mentioned the shower. It's another one that, that is common. When I play music, when I play like my bass or even I just started learning the piano, when I get into like kind of a flow state and I'm not really thinking about the music, I'm just kind of playing it and I got, you know,
00:28:51
Speaker
just purely playing, not thinking about making something new, just flowing. In that state, I'll get, um, some creative insights like that. I'm not looking for, they just start to happen. Dude. Yes. Yes. The flow state, the flow state is the most reliable way to get these insights. And when you describe a flow state, a flow state is,
00:29:16
Speaker
another way of sort of off lining that default mode network. It seems that any way that you can limit that and quiet that part of your brain, where it's able to just sort of like fully communicate with the rest of the parts of the brain that the default mode network sort of filters out. That's where the insights come from. That's where the thoughts and the ideas come.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think the more detached you become from your standard state, like your standard egocentric state of consciousness, like I think you might have just mentioned this before too, but like with meditation and breath work,
00:29:51
Speaker
I think I get insights during breathwork too and meditation because when you get into a really deep state, you kind of start to just let go of everything. When you can really get into a deep state, then thoughts come that you've never had before. You start to maybe realize something that you've never had in the past. So I think the key is basically thoughts come from a detached state of consciousness.
Subjectivity of Evil
00:30:20
Speaker
Very well said.
00:30:22
Speaker
Number 29. Does evil come from within? And if so, why? See, with the question, that's the thing. I mean, it does come within. Evil does come from within. Because you create evil. Evil doesn't exist independent of your mind. Nothing is inherently evil until you label it as such.
00:30:49
Speaker
So from within yourself, that's where the evil comes from. If you don't perceive something as evil, it ceases to be evil. Evil isn't an absolute property of the universe. Love is. So even that which you presume is evil is actually love, fundamentally. So yes, evil comes from within because you're creating it every time you see it. Wouldn't you say, though, in that rationale that it doesn't come from within because it's a label?
00:31:18
Speaker
And labels not being fundamental to the universe would be sort of external from it. Although I do understand what you're, what you're saying. Cause I agree. I do think that it comes from within because like evil is ultimately like, it's almost like the, the, the, the question that we had earlier, it's like, everything has a motivation. Everything comes from and originates inside your mind. So if you're going to perform any act.
00:31:48
Speaker
that act is going to come from within first. It's like, or even the ideas, you know, it comes from an idea, it comes from a thought.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think within or, you know, without same difference, really, but it's easier for me to convey by saying within because, I mean, you think about it from the ego perspective, you know, even with your ego mind, that's what's creating it. So you think about within, you think that's coming from your ego mind. But yeah, the ego doesn't exist outside of that. So it has to come within.
00:32:28
Speaker
In what way could you say that it doesn't come from within? Like, say you steelman the other side of the argument.
00:32:39
Speaker
I think the best way for the other side of the argument would be kind of to revert what we were just talking about and say that evil comes from the muse, you know, whatever that is, which creates new insights, that thing, quote unquote, outside of yourself, meaning the ego that you gather new thoughts from.
00:33:02
Speaker
That same thing is what's propelling the evil thought or the evil action. But like I said, you first have to believe that it is evil for it to be evil. But putting that aside, then you could say it comes from outside of you because it comes from that muse. It comes from the thing we were just talking about that gives you insights during a flow state.
00:33:29
Speaker
I think some people would say that evil comes from the outside in the form of your environment, as in like people say, Oh, we're a product of our environment. So evil is going to come from an external source that motivates you or influences you to then do something evil. Um, or like, if I say like, Oh, we in America or you and I, like we're good people, you know, we're not evil people.
00:33:55
Speaker
But people like Putin, he's evil. And the Communist Party in China, they're evil. Like you look externally and you can find what you define as evil outside of yourself. And that's where I think people would go if they were to describe evil coming from the outside. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. And I totally agree. But
00:34:20
Speaker
The rebuttal would be what I said, that those things aren't actually evil. You're calling them evil, which creates the evil. So the action is actually love. Even no matter how twisted the love may be, it's still love. But the same way you said like, oh, I say Putin is evil.
00:34:37
Speaker
Well, Putin doesn't see himself as evil, so he's not actually evil. He's evil when I create the idea of him being evil in my mind. So that's when I say it comes from within, and that would be the best way I could answer, but also the rebuttal that you gave would be, it totally makes sense. And I could see, you know, the product of your environment, the evil being outside of yourself.
00:35:03
Speaker
I think that's a more of a short sighted version of an answer though, personally, like I align myself with your position a lot more. Um, because it's always about your perspective. It's the perspective that you currently take your perspective can change in an instant. Because again, it comes from within, it comes from deep within your subconscious. It comes from, you know, your experiences who you define yourself as again, that pesky little default mode network. So in my view.
00:35:33
Speaker
all things come from within. Exactly. It's like have you ever had an experience of pointing at something and saying it's evil and with all of your being feeling it like that is evil and then you obtain a new piece of information and you found out you were wrong and you're like oh no that's not evil so it was never actually evil until you created it you know so it's something you can
00:36:01
Speaker
Say something is evil with all of your heart and then one new piece of information makes it not evil, then it just shows that you're the one that's creating what is evil.
00:36:12
Speaker
Another way to look at it too is like in our popular entertainment, anytime an evil character has a redemption arc where they go from being bad to being good and to like joining the hero that happens constantly. It's one of our, uh, one of our top myths that you can see in our popular entertainment. You know, I think of, um,
00:36:35
Speaker
You know, shows like the walking dead or like dragon ball or a bunch of these books, you know, all kinds of stories that you see. Um, and you can look at that character beforehand before their redemption. And you see them as this evil tyrant. And then when you start to understand, say their backstory and their motivations, you start to see exactly where they come from and that they were a product of their environment or, you know, whatever it may be.
00:37:03
Speaker
You start to understand them and see them from a new perspective. So the same thing as what you're saying, when you start to get new information, your perspective can change in an instant. So you can't really trust it necessarily.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, I like the, like the film analogy because like, if you think back to, you know, decades ago in movies, the villains were always just evil. But it seems like now we've creeped into the era of like the anti-hero where, you know, instead of just being an evil villain that the good guy fights, they give you the whole backstory of the villain.
00:37:45
Speaker
And then you can determine like, oh, well, he's not actually just pure evil. Like you said, you get a backstory, you get more information. Like the new Joker movie, for instance. Like, you know, he's committing pure evil acts, you know, but people love the character because, you know, he shoots people, whatever. But, um, when you get the information, it allows you to understand that it's not, it's not as evil as it appears on the surface.
00:38:12
Speaker
There's love in that person, there's pain, suffering, all this stuff. Which I find interesting now that that never was in older movies and older films. But now it seems like the anti-hero, they're going into these evil people and showing you their humanity.
00:38:30
Speaker
Yeah. It seems like culturally we're starting to catch up, you know, like our, our cultural myths of the time are starting to catch up with the ancient myths because there are ancient myths you can look to that have the same types of themes. They weren't scared to explore all of this type of stuff. Yeah. So like with any new information, your, your mind could be changed. So that just proves that your mind is what makes
Perceptions of Beauty
00:38:55
Speaker
it evil. It says like, no matter how hard it may seem.
00:38:58
Speaker
You can apply this to anyone. I always go to Hitler because he's the clearest example of what we perceive as evil. But if you see the backstory and you see all this stuff, you can just kind of see the humanity at least. So it's not just pure evil. It's a human being. And it is you. You are that same thing. You as a human being are capable of exactly that because that's what you are.
00:39:26
Speaker
All right, next question 30. All right. What is beauty? Well, I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So in that way, whatever ignites that fire within you that warms your heart and makes you feel that love, that's beauty. And that can differ from person to person. But
00:39:50
Speaker
I do think that there is a directionality to beauty that maybe comes from the evolutionary mind. You know, it might come from our biology, but there are universal beauties that.
00:40:09
Speaker
We all can share in, in a way that's kind of undeniable. Like when you look up at the Milky Way galaxy, I don't care who you are. That's beautiful because it ignites something in you, something deep in you that you're yearning for. When you look at a mountain or an amazing summit, a beautiful Canyon, usually these things that are.
00:40:32
Speaker
inherently beautiful to all of us that we all share exist in nature. So I think there are two aspects to it, that aspect, the aspect of it where there are things that we all commonly
00:40:45
Speaker
feel that warmth in our, in our hearts and our souls from, uh, that is like this universal beauty. But I do think that there's another aspect of beauty that is more individualized. Like I might think that something is beautiful and you might think it's not, or same thing with like attraction. People might, I mean, obviously people have very different views of, of like what and who they're attracted to. And that also changes during the times because
00:41:14
Speaker
If you look back to times in our history where we weren't as like, luxuriously advantageous, uh, in a wide way, like where everybody wasn't fed, everybody didn't have apartments and TVs and all kinds of good stuff.
00:41:31
Speaker
really obese and overweight people were thought of as the most attractive because what came along with that was the idea that they had more stuff. They were fed, they were more well off. They were a better partner to have because you were able to progress evolutionarily and, you know, within your survival mind in that way. So I really do think that on a meta level, there are things we share.
00:42:00
Speaker
But it also does exist in the eye of the beholder as well. I think beauty is.
00:42:09
Speaker
It's similar to love in that it's inherent to reality. That it is something that's fundamental to reality. That I think everything is beauty. Everything is beauty. Everything is beautiful by its nature. It just takes the ability to recognize it. But I think everything is actually beautiful.
00:42:33
Speaker
For instance, you said obviously that you look up at the stars and you say, yeah, we all think it's beautiful. But there are people that don't give a shit about that and don't really think it's that beautiful. The thing is, it actually is.
00:42:48
Speaker
And you could say that for anything, you know, you could see an ugly person, quote unquote, and be like, they're ugly, but there's beauty there. There's always beauty, but you just have to see it. So I think it's, it's fundamental. It's foundational to reality, but it takes the awareness to see it in everything. Um, so it is in a sense in the, in the eye of the beholder.
00:43:14
Speaker
But in actuality, it is everything. I think everything is actually beauty, but not everybody sees everything as such. And when you talk about the relative domain, like speaking relatively person to person, ego to ego, then it's only going to be things that are pleasing to the senses on the lowest level of awareness and consciousness. That woman's beautiful, that woman's not.
00:43:39
Speaker
But in actuality, it's just both perfection and beauty in its truest sense. So I think you're right when you say there's like kind of two different ways you could talk about that, but the absolute way and the relative way. So I think you pretty much sum most of that up too. So it seems like complexity equals beauty and simplicity.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way that the universe forms itself, like you said, can be seen as beautiful in every way, shape and form, just because life itself.
00:44:11
Speaker
just the fact that all of this exists around us is just it's beautiful in nature. It's absolute beauty and that's the thing about and I've really got this from psychedelics because when a psychedelic you can look at something that you see every day and it's just like a random object or just nothing something you don't think about and you can see it on on a psychedelic or in certain states of consciousness it's not gonna happen every time you take a psychedelic with every object
00:44:40
Speaker
but psychedelics can get you there. In my opinion, I think it can get you there in an easier way than without. But you could look at just a random object and see meaning in it and the beauty behind the meaning. So it's all in the awareness that you have when you're perceiving something. And then you look around, you realize, wow, this is all beauty.
00:45:07
Speaker
And you can even look at something dark and dismal, like death and rotting corpses as beautiful. Um, in India, when people die, they take them to a city, I think it's called Benares. Benares or something like that. And they like just burn the bodies and just in the open. And it's a beautiful place. It's where everybody wants to go when they're, when they die, because they think of it as, you know, death equals rebirth. When you look at.
00:45:37
Speaker
For instance, close to my heart where mushrooms grow, they grow on dead things. So if you want to look at where some of the most magical, um, biological bodies grow from, you can just look to anything that's decomposing. Uh, you can look to decomposing bodies and how they, they nurture the earth themselves, or, you know, you go hunting and you kill an animal, you eat that thing and it gives you the energy of life.
00:46:05
Speaker
Even the most dismal of things can be looked at as beautiful. Yeah, I think this was in India as well, but a tradition, it might not have been, but I think there's a tradition of, you know, when a family member dies. I don't remember the exact details of how it operates, but it's a tradition.
00:46:27
Speaker
Um, they take the dead body up to a mountain and let, um, the vultures pick it apart and eat it. And it's like a beautiful thing. I mean, you think about somebody you love being picked apart by vultures. You're like, Oh my God, that's the worst thing ever. But they see it as beautiful and it is beautiful. They're, they're looking at, you know, your energy going into nature again. They're, they're seeing these animals get use from you and you becoming one with it all.
00:46:57
Speaker
So you could see beauty in everything. And I think it just actually is beauty. Everything is inherently beautiful. But depending on your state of consciousness, your ego, you just won't see it that way. But you can see it that way. I'm with you. Number 31. Are people in this current generation less or more sensitive than people from past generations?
Sensitivity in Modern Society
00:47:24
Speaker
I think to lump the entire past together is hard to say, but I'm just going to talk about basically the recent past, and I would say right now, yes. I think more now than ever, people are
00:47:40
Speaker
especially in Western culture, okay? Because if we're talking about people all together, then no. But in Western culture, if we're looking at just this culture, people in this generation are more sensitive than people in Western culture, you know, for many years, centuries even.
00:47:59
Speaker
We're too privileged. So smaller things make us upset and this type of thing. You see a lot of mental health in this newest generation. You see a lot of oversensitivity to people's environments. This new thing I'm hearing a lot about is people are having problems with
00:48:26
Speaker
Sensory overload. People won't be able to go somewhere because it's too loud. It goes for every sense. I don't think that these things were as prominent in past generations. I think it's a product of
00:48:44
Speaker
just kind of babying our children. It's like, what's the quote? Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.
00:49:00
Speaker
So I think in Western culture right now, it appears that we are weak men creating hard times, in a sense, because we had it so good in our culture that we became oversensitive. And so that's why you see a little bit of cultural decay right now. Basically, yes, I think this generation of Westerners is more sensitive than those of the recent past.
00:49:27
Speaker
Yeah, it seems that with more luxury and with easier access to our survival needs like food and water and all the things that we take for granted nowadays, our sensibilities are altered in a way where like
00:49:44
Speaker
a lot of very simple things can can affect us in ways that were just non existent back when we were still surviving amongst the animals in the in the woods in the forest and stuff you know you said the most the more recent past but if you go to like the far distant past you can see it probably even more prominently because we were
00:50:06
Speaker
like hunter-gatherers, we were surviving on the land, and you would have to be a lot tougher of an individual and a lot of ways to survive in that kind of environment, in that kind of atmosphere. I mean, it breeds savagery. It's where our tribalistic nature comes from. And
00:50:28
Speaker
I don't really know either way if becoming more sensitive is a good or bad thing because the more sensitive I think you become, the more open you are to existential thought.
00:50:44
Speaker
spirituality and things like that. Just look no further than people who are in our poorest cities in Western culture. Go to like Detroit, Chicago. Go to some of these places where people are suffering and struggling just to survive. They don't have time to think existentially. They don't have time to listen to Pursuit of Infinity and contemplate whether or not God is within them and God is everywhere.
00:51:12
Speaker
because they're worried about where the next meal is going to come from. They're worried about getting fired from their job. A lot of us are. So I feel like, yes, we are more sensitive as the times go by. And if you look at Steven Pinker's work, he writes a lot about the progress of humanity in our species as like continuously just rising and rising and rising with the times.
00:51:38
Speaker
And the easier life gets for people, the easier it becomes to survive, I think just overall, the more sensitive we get. Again, whether or not that's a good or bad thing still remains to be seen. But regardless, I think, yes, we are more sensitive now than we have been in the past. Yeah. And to add to that, I would say that sensitivity is a good thing. It's a great thing. But what you're seeing now, the negative aspects of it is because it's not coupled with strength.
00:52:05
Speaker
not coupled with knowledge. Sensitivity, like you said, it allows us to be sensitive to others, our surroundings, our spirituality, our relationships with God, all these different things. But if you're only sensitive, you can be stepped on. It's not a good thing for a culture to be sensitive without coupling it with strength and knowledge. So it is a good thing, sensitivity as a whole.
00:52:33
Speaker
But by itself, it's dangerous. Yeah. When sensitivity is not coupled with wisdom, you're getting your own way. And that's what you see right now is a lot of people just getting in their own way, which is why the mental illness epidemic is happening. Um, people are just like stepping on their own feet, trying to move forward because you know, they're, they're, they're triggered by too much.
00:53:01
Speaker
There's a difference because when you are so sensitive that you become triggered by things, that's the wrong type of sensitivity. It's based in like, um, like cognitive dissonance or something. It's not based in like a foundation of wisdom. Yeah. And that's exactly it. The whole triggered phenomenon. It's so over the top. And like you said, it's because.
00:53:25
Speaker
When you have a sensitive society that is also probably the most egotistical of them all, then it allows you to be oversensitive at others instead of sensitive to others and so sensitive in yourself and pleasing yourself and having things be exactly the way you need them rather than being sensitive to others and how they feel and what, you know, there's plenty of good aspects to sensitivity.
00:53:51
Speaker
But it appears that right now in this generation, we're seeing mostly the negative aspects. And a lot of times that means it's going to swing in the other direction. So there's like a happy medium to be found.
Balancing Masculine and Feminine Traits
00:54:05
Speaker
So you want both. You want strength and sensitivity. It's masculinity and femininity right there. You want to combine the two.
00:54:14
Speaker
And, uh, and then that's where you want to be rather than swinging from direction to direction, like authoritarian to just, you know, you understand what I'm saying. I do. I do. Like you said, merging the masculine and the feminine, and in this culture, we're seeming to like distance the masculine and the feminine, and we're starting to label them as more defined edges instead of like parts of ourselves. You know, the divine feminine is in all of us in the,
00:54:44
Speaker
You know the warrior king is also in all of us whether you're a female or a male we we we have both of these aspects to us and to our subconscious and they build us into the people that we are and the more you separate the two and you and the more you you identify as one or the other and you group yourself and you look at the other group as like bad or
00:55:07
Speaker
You know, the de-masculinization of men, you know, this whole like, uh, like male toxicity thing that's going around. There's two sides of that too, because yes, there is a lot of toxic masculinity that's happening, but on the flip side of that, it's becoming too much of a buzzword and a buzz concept, and it's being applied to like all men. And you need to have that masculine aspect of being a man, or it's just not
00:55:38
Speaker
You're not compatible with biology. You're not compatible with living a fulfilled life. And you're not going to be the type of man that a woman is going to benefit from being with. I'll say I disagree with the analysis of toxic masculinity as a whole. I don't think it actually exists. I don't think it's a real thing. I think there are toxic people. It's not toxic masculinity. Masculinity
00:56:05
Speaker
is a fundamental, beautiful thing. If people aren't being what is toxic masculinity, whatever that means, that's not masculinity at all. That's not what masculinity represents or what it is. So I disagree. I think, like you said, it's a buzzword. I don't agree with it at all. I think it's just a way to attack masculinity and try to push men and feminize them and kind of
00:56:32
Speaker
You know, flip the whole board upside down because now you're it seems as if the goal is to feminize men and, you know, make women more masculine, which, you know, women should connect with their masculinity.
00:56:48
Speaker
And men should connect with their femininity, but you shouldn't just flip the roles upside down and kind of demonize one. Because even for women, people don't talk about this, but femininity is kind of demonized in women now.
00:57:04
Speaker
to be just you have to be a boss bitch or something like that. That is what is pushed on women, which is a masculine trait, in a sense, to be assertive and bold. And, you know, it's just masculine traits. So I disagree with the whole. The whole narrative of masculinity and femininity in our modern culture. Where were people before they were born?
00:57:31
Speaker
Well, I think you have to approach the question as like, what is a person? If you decide to find a person as their physical being, then they were nowhere because they weren't anything. But I tend to think about things like in a reincarnation, like rebirth type of.
00:57:50
Speaker
And there's a lot of really cool research that's being done on like two and three year old kids who are remembering past lives. And like they're talking to researchers and the researchers are going back and they're validating their stories. Um, and they're actually finding that the people that they're describing that they once were are accurate in name and job. Um, these kids know certain details about like their profession and stuff that, you know,
00:58:17
Speaker
You just wouldn't know as a two or three year old, just things that you haven't developed the capacity to understand yet. So I don't know. In my view, I feel like when we all die, we, we go somewhere else. Our consciousness goes somewhere. Our soul goes somewhere. So wherever that is seems to be where, where we are before we're born. Yeah, I don't know. The question is kind of weird. It says where were people before they were born. I think it's just.
00:58:48
Speaker
Nowhere. I mean, if there's no person, then the person isn't there. So you're saying like the person as in like the biological? Yeah, I mean, where was the person, you before you were born, you weren't, you weren't here yet. I don't know. I mean, you could say they all exist in time at some point, you're always in existence, but
00:59:13
Speaker
If you're not born, then you're not here. So by person, it's like the physical form of the person, then maybe their ego. That's what the person is? I think that's what it's asking, right? Where is the person? That's what it seems like, but I think it really just depends on what you think a person is or how are you interpreting the question.
00:59:35
Speaker
I interpret it as like, where was your body before you were born? If they're just talking about the mind, it's always existed. The mind has always existed. But where were people before they were born? They were existing in a different time, I guess. I mean, you always exist as a person. But if you're looking at just like linear time, and the moment that you die,
01:00:03
Speaker
and your body decomposes, the person is no longer there. Same before the child is conceived, the body isn't there. So do you think that individuals have a soul or like an individualized spirit? Or do you feel like when we die, it's like our water droplet of consciousness just gets kind of put back into the ocean of consciousness and we become like one with that thing?
01:00:29
Speaker
I think that there's always going to be a unity, but I also think that as the one, you experience everyone's life. So you are me and I am you. And like, for instance, if you think about a dead relative, they still exist in the time where I am them experiencing it. So like at some point I was experiencing reality through your eyes. It's all part of the same,
01:00:58
Speaker
me, the same I. So if you die and you have another life and you remember something, it's because you have lived that life. But you've also lived my life, you know, every life. There's only one consciousness that's experiencing all of us. So I would say that you can experience all that stuff. You can experience reincarnation and memories of a past life, but it's still all part of the one.
01:01:27
Speaker
Number 33, what is true friendship? I think true friendship is based on love, trust and loyalty. I think it has to be an aspect of unconditional love. I mean, you can't have unconditional love as it exists.
01:01:48
Speaker
But there has to be some sort of like selfless aspect of it, because it's like seeing yourself in that other person, I think is like a big part of friendship. Because you're feeling their empathy and you're, you're caring enough about them to, to look at them as if they are, they are you. I mean, I don't know, I when I think of true friendship, it's, it's
01:02:12
Speaker
Basically just someone you can trust. I mean, you should still treat everyone with kindness and treat them as a friend. But a true friend is someone who is loyal to you and you can trust them with your life or trust them in a circumstance to have your back. Whereas you can treat anyone as a friend, but it doesn't mean they're going to treat you as a friend.
01:02:33
Speaker
I think another aspect of it is like, have you ever had a friend where you don't talk to him for like a year or so or like a real long time? And then when you reconnect with them, it just kind of feels like no time has passed. I think that's an aspect of true friendship as well. There's certain people in my life that no matter how long I go without talking to them, I can reconnect with them and it just, it feels like, like no time has passed and we just kind of pick up where we left off.
01:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, shared trauma often is like can create a true friendship. That's why I think you see like, you know, soldiers in war, they those are become brothers in arms, that type of thing. Anybody that you've been through something difficult with?
01:03:18
Speaker
It often develops into a true friendship, especially if you've been through something difficult and you each came out on the other side or did something for you in a tough time. That's why I think it boils down to trust and loyalty.
01:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, also people who go through like spiritual experiences together, people who take psychedelics together. They call it like the Sangha and Buddhism, like the people who help you along the path and you're helping them at the same time. It's like you're both headed toward the same thing. Both have the same values and you're just like selflessly, or as much as you can, selflessly helping that person to go down that path, whatever path it is that they're choosing.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, and that's why churches are a great thing and really were a great thing. I don't see it as much in my community, but when the church was a central point of the community, you gather with people that become true friends because, like you said, they have the same values, the same goal. They're going through spiritual experiences together. So I think you really hit the nail on the head too there with
01:04:33
Speaker
the same morals and values. I think that really breeds a tight friendship. But like I said, you can treat anyone as a friend, but a true friend is about how they treat you back. Because you can give trust and loyalty and all this positivity to someone else, and if they backstab you, then that's not a true friendship.
01:04:58
Speaker
All right, we'll go to the next one is number 34. How does gravity work? I don't really know how gravity works. Like on a level where I feel competent enough to speak on it. I mean, I can say that to me, gravity is sort of like a dimension similar to time in space. And it seems like it's not fundamental. It's like a measured phenomenon that we.
01:05:29
Speaker
kind of look at with our senses and with our mathematics and how we observe the world. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think anybody who claims to know exactly how gravity works or what it is is probably wrong because really we don't know, right? Well, yeah, that's the thing. We don't know what gravity is. So how gravity works is hard to say when you don't know what it is. I would say gravity works by working. But, um, the thing is,
01:06:00
Speaker
we consider something real as materialist once we measure it. So gravity, to me, it just seems like a concept that isn't fundamental. See, when I think about gravity as like a lot of people would think it's an absolute and it's a force rather than something that's just happening right now, I think it's more of something that's just happening right now because in a different state of consciousness, like let's say an elusive dream,
01:06:30
Speaker
The world I'm in is as real as this and gravity is working just fine. But with my mind, I can defy it. So in a lucid dream, I can load up out of my seat and fly away and just avoid gravity of all its power. So I think maybe gravity works as all things do through our minds. We are willing it to happen. It's just a part of this state of consciousness is being
01:06:58
Speaker
in this thing that we describe as gravity. But maybe gravity isn't an actual thing that's just a feature of this current state. Because I always go to, like I said, dream states. It seems like a lot of things that, and it just depends on how much you value your dream state. You could just say, oh, that's a dream, that's nothing. I personally value my dreams and I take them seriously and kind of treat them as reality. Because when I'm in them, it is reality.
01:07:28
Speaker
feels as real as this. And when you can do something with your mind, like void gravity, I mean, I, you can move things with your mind. You can float, you can do all this different stuff. It seems that gravity is just working as a property of this state of consciousness. So how it works, I would say is the mind is willing it to work.
01:07:53
Speaker
I don't know, I think it's possible for us to, you know, in a reductionist type way, maybe boil everything down so small enough that we can maybe manipulate that type of gravity. But that would be just something that's happening in that state also. So how it works, I have no idea, but I know that in this state, it's just a property of, you know, standard human consciousness.
01:08:20
Speaker
I don't know if it's actually a thing that exists or it's just a human conception. I like the way you put that. It's a feature of our reality.
01:08:29
Speaker
And I'm sure that somebody very scientifically minded could put together like a real comprehensive description of how gravity works in relation to the results that we see from it and the things that we can measure out of it. Same way that we don't know what quantum mechanics is, but we can describe sort of how it yields results that we can see and measure.
01:08:52
Speaker
But it's like one of those things, it's like what is consciousness? We don't really know what it is. We can see how it affects our reality, but I don't think we have any idea of what it actually is, fundamentally. Like you said, the same with consciousness, it just is what is. And see, with gravity, it's funny because even with all these different scientists, nobody can really agree or solidify what it is.
01:09:20
Speaker
while they thought it was just like a wave then you know there's the graviton that it's actually a particle but all these are just kind of human conceptions it's not what the thing actually is so the standard idea I would say gravity works by a force pulling you towards a large mass that's what what was believed but it turns out that
01:09:46
Speaker
That's not really it. I mean, I don't know about anybody else, but I believe in UFOs and it seems that UFOs can manipulate gravity. So it, I don't know if something is happening in the state. I personally have a feeling that it all has to do with mind and consciousness, that you might be able to, like I do in my lucid dream, defy, defy gravity with a certain state of consciousness.
01:10:15
Speaker
I don't know, maybe interdimensional beings can use their mind to define gravity because they can manipulate that dimension as they are from a higher dimension or something like that. That would make sense because we seem to be able to manipulate lower dimensions that we have access to. And you think that if dimensionality is a thing that can be transcended or, you know, gone down into, then
01:10:42
Speaker
you'd have to be able to kind of harness it and understand it if you can exist outside of it or above it or something. It's a weird thing to try to conceptualize. Yeah, I don't think anybody could answer that question right now. I agree. But fundamentally, I think it's just an aspect of this state of consciousness. That's how it works. The same way everything works, it's just our mind, the mind, capital M, willing it to happen. I like that. I like that.
01:11:13
Speaker
So we're going to end for this time. At some point again, we're going to be picking this up. I really do enjoy these episodes. Give us a lot to talk about and a lot to discuss. And we'll start up on the next one, which will be, can achieving nothing make a person happy? I'm going to think on that one for a while. I like that question. That's a good one.
01:14:06
Speaker
you