Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bernardo Kastrup
Today Bernardo Kastrup returns to the salon with more metaphysical speculations. Supplementing his recently released book, “Brief Peeks Beyond,” he touches on the so-called hard problem of consciousness faced by materialists. In his examination of the dominant materialistic world view, Bernardo reveals the forces behind our value systems, which in turn determine our behavior. He ends with some very concrete suggestions for five things each of us can do to make the world a little better. However, my favorite section of this talk comes when he suggests that cosmic consciousness at-large may actually be experiencing what we humans call multiple personality disorder.
Bernardo Kastrup on Amazon
Bernardo Kastrup’s Metaphysical Speculations
Bernardo Kastrup’s Facebook Page
Tink Tink podcast with Diana Reed Slattery
Transmutation (a feature documentary film about uprooting the experience of normality)
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447 - Manifesting New Communities
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449 - McKenna’s Speculations About 2012
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And before I introduce today’s talk, I would first like to point you to a podcast and to a video trailer.
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The podcast is from the Tink Tink Club, and it features our friend Diana Reed Slattery,
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who you heard a while back here in the salon in podcast number 424.
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It’s a really interesting interview, and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes And the video trailer is for an upcoming feature titled Transmutation
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Which is a feature documentary film about uprooting the experience of normality
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Something that probably most psychonauts are familiar with
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And this film is being done by two of our long time fellow salonners
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Neil Kramer and niles
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heckman so if you get a chance surf on over to our program notes which you can get to via
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psychedelicsalon.us and you’ll find the link there and my final announcement for today is that there
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is now an effort underway to transcribe all of the talks of Terrence McKenna. As you may not know, on our Program Notes blog, there’s a menu option that’s titled Extras.
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And in addition to Gary Fisher’s art, some sections about a few of the elders,
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and some old scientific papers, you’ll find a number of transcripts of Terrence’s talks
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that some of our fellow salonners have sent me.
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you will find a number of transcripts of Terrence’s talks that some of our fellow salonners have sent me.
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However, we now have some exciting news about the transcripts of Terrence McKenna talks.
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A concerted and organized effort is underway to put as many transcripts as possible in a single place. And appropriately, it’s titled the Terrence McKenna Wiki and may be found at www.terrencemckenna.wikispaces.com
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And there you’re going to find instructions on how you can help.
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And you’ll also find what, I guess, there are probably well over 100 transcripts already there.
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And they’re arranged by year, so it’s real easy to find what you’re looking for.
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It’s a really wonderful resource,
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and well worth your time to check it out. And of course, I’ll link to that in the program notes as
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well. So now let’s get to today’s program, which is another talk by our fellow salonner, Bernardo
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Castro. If you’ve been to our program notes blog and visited the page for podcast number 434, which is Bernardo’s
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first podcast for the salon, you’ll notice that it’s received the most comments of any podcast
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in a long time. And my guess is that today’s talk, which Bernardo wrote and recorded specifically for
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the salon, is also going to generate a lot of conversation. And I should let you know that originally I was going to play this talk on the last Monday of this month
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so as to coincide with the publication of his new book.
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And the book is titled, Brief Peaks Beyond,
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Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism, and Culture.
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And Bernardo had sent me a preview copy copy which i’m now about a third of the
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way through so i can’t give you a complete review of it myself but what happened is the publisher
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moved the release date forward and so the book is now available so i decided to not wait until
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i finished reading the entire book before playing this talk for you. And while you won’t get the full impact of his thinking with just this podcast,
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if you are interested at all in these topics, you know, the simple questions like,
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Who am I? Why am I here? What should I be doing?
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You know the litany.
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Those are the questions that we often find ways to not think about.
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But should you be so inclined as to entertain these topics,
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then I think that some of the metaphors and ideas in Bernardo’s talk right now and further developed in his new book are really going to be of great help to you
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and definitely of interest.
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And so in the interest of not disturbing your train of thought
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when we get to the end of this disturbing your train of thought when we get
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to the end of this audio essay by Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, I won’t be adding my own commentary
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at the end today. My guess is that, well, you’re going to have a lot to think about
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without me adding my own comments. So let’s join Bernardo now.
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join Bernardo now. We live in a culture that has come to adopt the worldview of materialism as its mainstream view. Materialism has now even come to be a kind of synonym with reason,
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with rationality, with empirical honesty. But what is materialism? What does it entail? Well, there are two key notions behind this worldview of materialism that I think we should look at critically
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before just taking it for granted that materialism is the best interpretation of facts and experiences that there has ever been.
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of facts and experiences that has ever been.
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The first notion entailed by materialism is that reality, the physical world, matter and energy, exist fundamentally outside consciousness, independent of consciousness, that the entire
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universe would still go merrily on even if there were no conscious entities to observe it, to perceive
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it, to think about it.
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That’s the first notion.
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And the second notion is that this matter and energy fundamentally outside consciousness,
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when they are arranged according to specific complex patterns, namely biological brains,
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they then generate consciousness.
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Now, look at what an amazing abstraction this is. Conscious experience is the only carrier of
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reality any one of us can ever know. Everything touched by the fingertip of knowledge, no matter how slightly, how subtly, is immediately brought into the fold of conscious awareness.
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You cannot know that which you aren’t or has never been conscious of.
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Knowledge exists within consciousness.
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So to infer that reality is fundamentally outside consciousness is actually beyond knowledge.
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It’s an abstraction.
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And worse yet, materialists take yet another amazing step of abstraction when they say that consciousness itself, which is the primary datum of reality, the only carrier of reality we can
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ever know, is generated by specific arrangements of this abstract matter and energy in this
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abstract world outside mind.
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So the mainstream worldview of our culture is very abstract.
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It’s fundamentally beyond knowledge.
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It’s highly metaphysical, in a sense, in a strong sense.
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But that’s not the only problem with it. The main problem with it
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is that it leaves some very important and fundamental questions unanswered. It leaves,
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for instance, the origin of consciousness, the mechanisms behind consciousness, totally unanswered. Materialists appeal to this idea of emergence to explain consciousness.
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They say that consciousness is the emergent property of biological brains.
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They would say that an individual neuron is just a machine,
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an unconscious little machine, a switch, if you will,
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completely unconscious.
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There is nothing it is like to be an individual neuron. But if you put enough neurons together,
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then somehow, and they don’t explain how because they are unable to, that’s the so-called hard
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problem of consciousness, somehow, when enough neurons are put together according to
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specific patterns, consciousness lights up. Suddenly, there is something it is like to be
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a brain, that being your inner life, my inner life. My inner life is supposedly what it feels
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like to be my brain. Now, this step of emergence, how do you come from unconscious
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individual neurons to a conscious brain, that step is left unexplained. They just give a name to it.
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They say, oh, it’s emergence. But they’re actually saying nothing by using this word. They are just
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labeling a fundamental unknown. They are giving a name to something they can’t explain.
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And somehow, this is supposed to be enough.
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This is supposed to be enough to give us confidence in their highly abstract worldview.
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So what I want to do now is to invite you to a little thought experiment.
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A thought experiment that will lead us to a different world view.
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And I would invite you to go along with me in this experiment and at the end to critically evaluate whether you think this is reasonable and this makes any sense, and
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then to contemplate the implications with me.
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So I want to do this in five steps, and I’ll take you through this step by step.
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The first step is to separate what we know about the brain, namely the human brain, because
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it’s the only one we know from within.
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We know what it’s like to be the human brain, because it’s the only one we know from within. We know what it’s
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like to be a human brain. We don’t know what it’s like to be an insect’s brain, for instance. We can
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infer things about it, but we don’t really know. To separate what we know from what we assume,
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what we speculate, what we infer. What we know about the human brain
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is that patterns of electrochemical activity in the brain
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correlate with or go with certain subjective experiences.
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For instance, if I move my left arm
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and I have the conscious awareness of that movement,
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the inner perception of that movement,
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that will correlate with the activation of certain neurons in my brain.
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If I look at pictures of my loved ones,
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and I am overwhelmed by the warm feelings of love,
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those feelings will correlate to the activity of particular neurons,
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other particular neurons in my brain, or regions of my brain, and so
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on and so forth.
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So, certain patterns of electrochemical activity in the brain go with, correlate with, certain
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subjective states or experiences.
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That’s what we know.
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Some of us, namely materialists, then infer or speculate or assume that those patterns of electrochemical
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activity must be the cause of my inner life, of my subjective experience of being, perceiving,
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feeling, and so on. But we do not know that, that being the so-called hard problem of consciousness.
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We cannot explain how or why, when you put enough neurons together,
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or enough unconscious switches together,
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somehow and suddenly it lights up with conscious awareness.
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We can’t explain that.
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So it’s just an inference.
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It’s the labeling of an unknown.
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So if we stick to what we know,
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all we can say about the human brain is that it is a system that has, in the words of Lee Smolin, internal aspects and external aspects.
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Let me quote for you a passage from a book by Lee, a book he has published, if I’m not mistaken, last year.
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It’s called Time Reborn, From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe.
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Lee Smolin, by the way, is a mainstream, very well-known, highly regarded physicist from the Perimeter Institute.
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He wrote, and I quote,
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Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects.
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The external properties are those that science can capture
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and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic
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essence. It is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relationships.
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And then he goes on to identify this internal aspect with conscious experience, conscious awareness.
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He writes, and I quote again,
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Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.
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So notice that what he’s doing is he’s avoiding the statement that brain states cause subjective experience.
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He’s just saying these are two aspects of the system,
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two sides of one coin. Maybe one is the image of the other. Maybe the brain is what direct
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experience looks like without necessarily causing direct experience. He seems to leave it open.
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He’s just saying that there are two points of view to experience.
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The first person point of view of experience, which is, for instance, my feeling of love,
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and the second person point of view of the same experience,
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which would be, for instance, what a neuroscience would see in a brain scanner
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if I were inside a brain scanner looking at photos of my loved ones.
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Two perspectives, two points of
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view, both of them subjective, both of them experiences. The neuroscientist experiences
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images in his brain scanner. These are images he sees, he measures and experiences in his own
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inner life. They just seem to correlate with my direct experience of feeling
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love. So the point one of our thought exercise is to drop what we don’t know about the brain,
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namely that there is a causation between brain states and subjective experience,
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and stick to what we do know, which is there are two aspects to the system, an internal aspect, what it feels like to be me,
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and an external aspect, what my brain looks like to a neuroscientist inside a brain scanner,
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or if somebody cracks my skull open and looks at my brain.
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Now, and that’s the second step of our little thought experiment.
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What is a brain but an arrangement of so-called material particles? Whatever an atom or
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a subatomic particle is, we know that there is such a thing. Let’s not get too hung up on
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philosophical or ontological interpretations of atoms. Let’s just use the word. A brain is a system composed of atoms, the same atoms that compose, say, rocks, stars, moons, and planets.
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Any other inanimate object, say, a crystal, a crystal can also be composed of carbon atoms,
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which also exist in my brain under a different arrangement, a different structure, different patterns, so to say.
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arrangement, a different structure, different patterns, so to say.
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So, in principle, we cannot really fundamentally differentiate a living biological brain from a crystal insofar as both are arrangements of the same types of atoms.
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So, unless we can determine that conscious experience arises from specific arrangements of atoms, from a specific architecture, a specific structure that is embodied in a brain and is not embodied in a crystal, for instance, unless we can do that, we must consider the possibility that not only brains, but
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any material system has an inner aspect as well. That in the same way that there is something
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it is like to be a brain, there is something it is like to be the entire material universe.
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it is like to be the entire material universe.
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Now, as I’ve just tried to point to a moment ago,
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we do not know how specific structures of allegedly unconscious matter
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could give rise to conscious experience.
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That’s the hard problem of consciousness,
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the second most important unanswered question in science, according to the 2005 anniversary edition of Science Magazine.
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So we cannot associate consciousness to a specific arrangement of matter insofar as we know today.
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So we must grant consciousness to be the internal aspect of the universe as a whole.
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Now, if that’s the case, then there is something it is
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like to be the universe. The universe as a whole has an inner life, and the universe we see, we
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measure, the planets, moons, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and so on and so forth, that’s the image of a sort of cosmic nervous system, in exactly the same
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way that a human brain is the image of a person’s inner life.
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That nervous system that the human brain consists of is the external aspect, the second-person
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perspective of somebody’s subjective inner life. And since a brain is just
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an arrangement of material particles like the rest of the universe, what I’m saying is that
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the universe as a whole is also a nervous system. It is the external aspect, the second-person
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perspective of a cosmic inner life, of a cosmic stream of subjective experiences
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that we might say, we might call God’s dream. God is a very overloaded word, but I think it’s
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appropriate in this context. So when we look out to the stars and galaxies, the hypothesis here
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is that we are just seeing a segment of God’s brain, the external view
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of God’s inner life. As a matter of fact, there has been some computer modeling of the structure
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of the universe at the largest scales. It’s something that we cannot see directly because
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we are, of course, within a small segment of the universe, but we can calculate in a computer, and we can see how the distribution of galaxies, galaxy clusters,
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and the dark matter that connects them all together,
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how it looks exactly like a brain, like interconnected neurons,
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forming clusters with the synapses connecting them.
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The patterns are exactly the same.
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The New York Times has published a photo comparison, I think in 2006,
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showing this.
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Neurons on the one hand and the structure of the universe at the largest scales on the other hand,
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and the images are very similar.
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And, of course, visual similarities can be very misleading,
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but there has also been some very detailed mathematical
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studies about the structure of the universe and the structure of networks and the structure
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of the brain.
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There has been a publication in 2012 at the University of California at San Diego, some
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research done there that shows that it’s not only a visual illusion, it’s not only a visual comparison that at the level of
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the distribution of structures
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and interconnects,
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the universe at the
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largest scales does
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really resemble a nervous
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system, a brain.
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There are unknown
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laws, apparently, that
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leads to this. Scientists
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are a bit at a loss to explain why this is so.
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Nothing that we know would require the structure of the universe to be like this.
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So they postulate some unknown laws, unknown organizing principles that lead to this. I myself
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would say that the universe looks like a brain because that’s exactly what it is. It is the external aspect of the cosmic inner life of a cosmic intelligence. Now, and that’s point three in our little
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thought experiment. You might ask then, does that mean that an inanimate object like a
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crystal, like a diamond, like a rock, is also conscious, does it mean that
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there is something it is like to be a piece of rock, or a wall, or a painting? Not necessarily.
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There is no reason, no more reason to believe that an individual rock is conscious than
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there is to believe that an individual neuron in your brain
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has an inner life of its own,
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that there is something it is like to be a separate individual neuron in your brain.
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Allow me to quote a passage of a recent book,
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a new book I’m publishing now,
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now means April, May 2015 for you time travelers,
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called Brief Peaks Beyond, in which I explore this point.
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Let me quote you this passage for you. If you dream about a tropical holiday location with
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trees, waterfalls, and singing birds, all those images will correlate with particular measurable
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patterns of activated neurons in your head. Theoretically, a neuroscientist could identify different groups of neurons in your
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brain and say, group A correlates with a tree, group B correlates with a waterfall, group C
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correlates with a singing bird, and so on and so forth. However, based on your direct experience
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of what it feels like to imagine this scenario, this tropical holiday scenario,
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is there anything it is like to be group A in isolation? Is there anything it is like to be
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group C in and of itself? Or is there only something it is like to be the whole daydreaming
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you, your whole brain, imagining trees, waterfalls and birds as component
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parts of an integrated scenario? Do you experience multiple separate streams of imagination,
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one for trees, another for waterfalls, another for birds, or only one stream,
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wherein trees, waterfalls and birds are all together. Do you see the point?
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Unless there is dissociation, there is nothing it is like to be separate groups of neurons in a person’s brain.
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We can only speak of a holistic stream of imagination of the person as a whole.
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For exactly the same reason that there is nothing it is like to be
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an isolated group of neurons in a person’s
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brain, there is nothing it is like to be an inanimate object, end quote. So the point I’m
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trying to make here is that we shouldn’t confuse this idea that the universe as a whole is a nervous
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system of a cosmic mind with the notion that in philosophy is called panpsychism, the notion that there
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is something it is like to be a table, a chair, a rock, or a moon, that a table also has inner
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experience the way we have.
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No, I think moons, rocks, tables, and chairs, and the entire inanimate aspect of the universe, these
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are just images of one integrated nervous system that is having one
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integrated stream of conscious experiences. God’s dream, if you will. I
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think when we look out to the empirical world, what we see is God’s brain and it
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doesn’t look like a brain, because
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we are looking, in our immediate surroundings, at a very, very tiny part of it. It is as if you were
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a nanometer-sized person sitting on one synapse in the brain, looking at an ion channel open and
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releasing neuron transmitters. You would see just isolated clumps of matter,
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isolated structures floating around, like we see isolated rocks tumbling down mountains,
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or isolated moons going around planets and planets going around stars. It would look nothing
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like an interconnected, integrated, networked nervous system, because we are looking at a very, very, very zoomed-in,
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very, very tiny part of it. And only if you would step out and zoom out considerably would you see
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that this is all actually interconnected like a nervous system. But for the same reason that
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there is nothing it is like to be an individual synapse, an individual ion channel, or an
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individual molecule of a neurotransmitter in
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your brain, there is only something it is like to be you, having one integrated holistic inner life.
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For that same reason, there is nothing it’s like to be a rock. There is only something it is like
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to be God, or mind at large, or that cosmic consciousness that is having the dream whose external aspect is the universe, is the whole
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of empirical reality. I think creation, the universe, is merely this, the external aspect
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of God’s creative mental conscious activity. All right, so this has been point three.
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Now point four of our little thought experiment.
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You may now be wondering, well, if there is only this one integrated stream of conscious experience,
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this cosmic dream, God’s dream that you’ve described, how come I seem to have my own inner
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life, right? You seem to have a very localized inner life.
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It’s not divine, apparently.
00:26:28 ►
It doesn’t have the cosmic scale of what you would suppose God’s dream to feel like.
00:26:33 ►
Moreover, it’s separate from mine.
00:26:36 ►
I have my inner life and I don’t have access to yours.
00:26:38 ►
They don’t seem to be connected.
00:26:40 ►
I don’t know how you’re feeling right now, what you’re perceiving.
00:26:43 ►
I have no access to your inner life and you have no access to mine. How could this be if the whole universe is just the
00:26:50 ►
outside image of one integrated holistic stream of conscious experience? My hypothesis here is
00:26:58 ►
the following. Have you ever heard of people with dissociative identity disorder? This is just the new name for what in the early days was called multiple personality disorder.
00:27:10 ►
These are people who seem to have different centers of consciousness with separate,
00:27:15 ►
non-overlapping inner lives.
00:27:17 ►
They have multiple identities, each with his or her own inner life.
00:27:22 ►
And often these identities don’t even know of the other identities or alters, as they are called in psychology. Each separate personality is an
00:27:31 ►
alter of one’s psyche. This reflects a dissociative process in what should have been an integrated
00:27:40 ►
inner life, an integrated stream of consciousness belonging to one person.
00:27:45 ►
That integrated stream seems to partition, dissociate into multiple separate streams,
00:27:50 ►
which become disconnected because they become amnesic of each other.
00:27:55 ►
There is a kind of forgetfulness of the inner life of the other alters.
00:28:01 ►
So each alter becomes dissociated into its own little separate stream and amnesic of the
00:28:07 ►
stream of the other alters, the subjective stream, the experiences of the other alters.
00:28:14 ►
This is very easy to see if we flip this around, if I invert the argument. Think about it this way.
00:28:21 ►
Suppose you were entirely conscious of my whole inner life. You could perceive everything
00:28:28 ►
I perceive. You could feel everything I feel. Now imagine that I too would be conscious of your
00:28:36 ►
entire inner life, that I could perceive everything you perceive, that I could feel everything you
00:28:42 ►
feel. In that case, you and I would be effectively the
00:28:46 ►
same being, the same conscious entity. We would have one integrated, holistic stream of conscious
00:28:54 ►
experience, and we would both identify with it to the point that we would be one. There would be no
00:29:00 ►
difference between us, right? Why is that not so? Because I do not have access to your inner life.
00:29:07 ►
In a sense, it is as if I forgot I became amnesic of your inner life and you of mine. It is this
00:29:15 ►
forgetfulness, this obfuscation of each other’s inner life that leads to a dissociation. I am
00:29:21 ►
dissociated from you, therefore I identify myself as a
00:29:25 ►
separate conscious entity than you. So, what I’m postulating is that God has dissociative
00:29:32 ►
identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, and that biology, metabolism, life is merely the image, the external aspect of a dissociative process in God’s mind.
00:29:49 ►
To see biology in the empirical world, in a sense, if you follow the metaphor,
00:29:55 ►
would be entirely equivalent to diagnosing an aneurysm in a brain by looking at a brain scan,
00:30:02 ►
by taking an MRI picture of a brain, or by cracking a skull
00:30:05 ►
open and looking at the brain, and detecting an aneurysm.
00:30:10 ►
Metabolism, life, biology, conscious beings, living beings, are the image in the scan of
00:30:17 ►
God’s brain that we call the material universe of dissociative processes that correlate from
00:30:24 ►
the subjective perspective, from the inner aspect
00:30:26 ►
perspective, or the first person perspective, correlates with amnesia, with a separation,
00:30:33 ►
a breaking off of what would be one stream of consciousness into multiple ones. That, in my view,
00:30:41 ►
is the reason why we feel like we are separate entities.
00:30:45 ►
We have become amnesic of the rest of the conscious stream of experiences in God’s brain,
00:30:52 ►
the moment we dissociated from it.
00:30:55 ►
And it is this dissociation that leads to this first and second person perspective duality.
00:31:02 ►
If there were no dissociation in God’s mind, in other words,
00:31:06 ►
if there were no biology, if there were no metabolism, no life in the universe, there would
00:31:11 ►
be only one dream, one entity. But because there is this dissociation, the inner life of the rest
00:31:20 ►
of the universe becomes accessible to me as a dissociated alter only through a second
00:31:28 ►
person perspective. And that is the origin of what we call sense perceptions. That is the origin of
00:31:35 ►
what we call the external world. The external world is just what the inner life of God looks like from our perspective, as a dissociated
00:31:46 ►
alter. Other people are the image of other dissociated alters in the stream of God’s
00:31:53 ►
consciousness. A biological body in the form of a human being is just what it looks like,
00:32:00 ►
in the same way that an aneurysm or a brain tumor looks like something in an
00:32:06 ►
MRI scan or a PET scan.
00:32:08 ►
And when I make this metaphor, I don’t mean to imply that life is some kind of disease.
00:32:13 ►
The metaphor breaks at this point, so bear with me.
00:32:16 ►
There are limitations to the metaphor.
00:32:20 ►
So this is my point, you see.
00:32:21 ►
I think the universe, the inanimate universe, is just the external aspect, the image of God’s dream,
00:32:28 ►
in the same way that the brain is the image of a person’s inner life, in exactly the same way.
00:32:33 ►
And a brain, the body of another person, is simply the image of a dissociative process in that one nervous system,
00:32:42 ►
in that one universal cosmic nervous system.
00:32:46 ►
And so are other living creatures.
00:32:48 ►
And you could even imagine many degrees of dissociation.
00:32:53 ►
You could say that a primate is a highly, highly dissociated segment of God’s mind.
00:33:01 ►
And that a plant is a less dissociated one. It’s the beginning of the
00:33:07 ►
process of dissociation. There are intimations of a separation coming, but it isn’t complete.
00:33:14 ►
You could imagine that bacterial life, funguses, for instance, are also the early stages,
00:33:21 ►
the rehearsal for that more complete dissociation that comes later.
00:33:27 ►
And that we are basically witnessing God’s nervous system dissociating as we witness
00:33:33 ►
the ebb and flow and the evolution of life on this planet and wherever else we might
00:33:38 ►
find life in the universe.
00:33:42 ►
So this has been point four in our little thought experiment. Now point five, which
00:33:48 ►
doesn’t introduce any new element, but just wraps it up and makes the implications clear.
00:33:54 ►
Notice the following. If dissociation is a merely mental process, totally subjective process,
00:34:03 ►
that leads to the emergence of this first and second
00:34:06 ►
person perspectives of experience, then we do not need to postulate a universe fundamentally
00:34:12 ►
outside consciousness to explain empirical facts. The world that apparently is outside my
00:34:20 ►
consciousness, the external world, is simply the second person perspective, the external world, it’s simply the second person perspective, the external aspect,
00:34:27 ►
the outside image of fundamentally subjective processes in God’s mind, or in other people’s,
00:34:34 ►
or in other living beings’ minds, as dissociated alters of God’s mind. And what I consider my own
00:34:42 ►
inner life, my inner stream of experiences, feelings and emotions and so on,
00:34:47 ►
that’s just my first person direct experience of certain aspects of the flow of consciousness,
00:34:55 ►
the universal flow of consciousness, that happen to be dissociated and localized in my own altar.
00:35:02 ►
It is altar formation that leads to this duality of points of view, but not to a
00:35:09 ►
duality of fundamental nature. After all, and bear with me, the second person perspective of an
00:35:16 ►
experience, like when I watch somebody’s brain while this person is having an experience, that second-person perspective is also an experience, an experience
00:35:27 ►
of alters. The entire empirical world is an experience of alters. You have to have an alter,
00:35:36 ►
a dissociated element of God’s mind, to witness the universe from a second-person perspective.
00:35:43 ►
to witness the universe from a second-person perspective.
00:35:46 ►
But that witnessing is an experience too.
00:35:52 ►
Another person’s brain is something I can see, I can measure.
00:35:55 ►
Hypothetically, I could touch, even smell.
00:35:58 ►
It’s just a material object, like any other,
00:36:03 ►
that appears to me in the form of my five sensory modalities. What I can see, what I can smell, what I can hear,
00:36:06 ►
what I can touch, and what I can taste. These are all experiences. There is nothing to any brain,
00:36:14 ►
or there can’t ever be anything to any brain, that isn’t an experience in some alter’s localized stream of consciousness.
00:36:26 ►
Do you see what I mean?
00:36:31 ►
So, the idea of a cosmic mind having dissociative identity disorder
00:36:33 ►
and forming alters,
00:36:35 ►
this single idea explains all empirical reality
00:36:39 ►
without the need to go into the abstraction
00:36:42 ►
of a world outside consciousness,
00:36:44 ►
without the need to go into the abstraction of a world outside consciousness, without the need to
00:36:45 ►
infer that somehow, magically, specific arrangements of matter generate consciousness in the first
00:36:52 ►
place, all those abstractions, all those inflationary theoretical entities and postulates become
00:37:01 ►
unnecessary, completely unnecessary to make sense of things.
00:37:07 ►
Alternatively, we can develop a view of the world
00:37:11 ►
wherein we are basically living within God’s brain,
00:37:16 ►
and we are just dissociated alters within God’s stream of conscious experiences.
00:37:23 ►
And birth is the beginning of a dissociative process
00:37:27 ►
that we come to identify ourselves with,
00:37:30 ►
maybe mistakenly,
00:37:32 ►
just like a specific personality in a person
00:37:35 ►
with dissociative personality disorder
00:37:37 ►
mistakenly believes itself to be separate
00:37:40 ►
from the other alters, from the other personalities.
00:37:43 ►
And death is a process, or at least
00:37:46 ►
the external aspect, the outside image, the second person perspective of a process of reintegration
00:37:53 ►
of what was my personal stream of experiences, my dissociated stream of experiences,
00:37:59 ►
getting integrated back into the cosmic global stream of experiences in God’s mind, so to say.
00:38:08 ►
How that feels from a first-person perspective, it’s very difficult to say.
00:38:14 ►
Perhaps psychedelic trances give us some intuition about what it feels like to experience the whole world,
00:38:22 ►
the whole earth and the universe, not from a second person perspective,
00:38:25 ►
but from a first person perspective. It would be like entering somebody’s brain. It would be like
00:38:31 ►
a neuroscientist that spent hours looking at somebody’s brain scan, suddenly becoming that
00:38:37 ►
person and experiencing all that from within. So if the universe is God’s brain and we are
00:38:43 ►
observing it from outside as a dissociated
00:38:46 ►
altar, when we die, maybe we merge back into it and we begin to experience it from within.
00:38:52 ►
We begin to experience what it is like to be planet Earth, what it is like to be the solar
00:38:58 ►
system, what it’s like to be the whole universe with its galaxies and galaxy clusters and maybe whatever number of extra dimensions
00:39:06 ►
there might be. Maybe we have a very small, tiny, infinitesimal glimpse of that during
00:39:13 ►
psychedelic trances, maybe even during near-death experiences. But fundamentally then, death
00:39:19 ►
could be reinterpreted as a process of psychological reassociation,
00:39:25 ►
of a merging back of a localized, dissociated stream of experiences
00:39:32 ►
back into the whole, back into the broader stream.
00:39:37 ►
Now, of course, the question this all raises is why on earth did materialism
00:39:45 ►
become and survive
00:39:47 ►
as the mainstream
00:39:49 ►
worldview in our culture
00:39:52 ►
and that already
00:39:53 ►
for at least a couple of hundred years
00:39:56 ►
since the Enlightenment maybe.
00:39:59 ►
Why is that?
00:40:00 ►
You see, it’s a worldview that
00:40:02 ►
is inflationary, highly metaphysical
00:40:04 ►
and abstract, and doesn’t explain even the most primary aspect of existence, which is consciousness itself.
00:40:11 ►
And admittedly so. This is not in contention. Materialism cannot explain consciousness today and never will, in my view.
00:40:27 ►
How come a precarious worldview like that has come to dominate and have such a strong grip, not only in Western culture, but now across the world, even in the East, and I know that from first-hand experience?
00:40:35 ►
I have many hypotheses about it, and I think the main strength of materialism is not that it is a good philosophical position, a good
00:40:48 ►
ontological position. I think its main strength is the fact that it is so synergistic with our
00:40:56 ►
economic system and the current power structures. You see, a worldview, an ontology, largely determines the value system of a society.
00:41:08 ►
It determines what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong, what life should be about,
00:41:14 ►
what’s meaningful, what’s meaningless.
00:41:16 ►
It determines what’s considered success and failure.
00:41:20 ►
So there is tremendous cultural pressure from anyone taking part in our society to conform to that value system.
00:41:29 ►
And the moment materialism is the force behind the determination of the value system, it also determines our behavior.
00:41:47 ►
is then synergistic with existing or even emerging power structures and with the economy,
00:41:53 ►
which is again, whether we like it or not, it’s a tool of the power structures.
00:41:58 ►
If it is synergistic with that, it has the tendency to remain.
00:42:05 ►
I’m not necessarily postulating that there is a conspiracy here. A conspiracy evokes a more or less cartoonish view of a globally integrated cabal that is in control, that is having secret meetings and
00:42:13 ►
issuing orders that are spread down the pyramid of power through secret channels,
00:42:19 ►
and everybody’s involved, and everybody’s complying with that. Everybody’s involved and everybody’s complying with that. Everybody’s involved except us.
00:42:25 ►
Everybody in any position of any power is involved except us.
00:42:29 ►
I don’t think that is the case.
00:42:31 ►
I don’t think that is possible to begin with.
00:42:34 ►
And I’ve been around in my professional life and I have seen no reason to believe that.
00:42:41 ►
As our old friend Terence McKenna used to say, I also think nobody is in control.
00:42:49 ►
So how does this power structure then effectively remains what it is?
00:42:56 ►
It keeps on calling the shots and reinforcing the value system in a sort of symbiotic relationship.
00:43:04 ►
Let me introduce to you another word.
00:43:07 ►
It’s not a conspiracy, but it’s stigmaty.
00:43:12 ►
It’s a complicated word.
00:43:14 ►
Let me explain to you where this word comes from.
00:43:18 ►
It comes from the study of insects like ants, which do not have coordinated control.
00:43:26 ►
Ants do not have bosses and power structures that pass on orders.
00:43:30 ►
And yet, they manifest globally coordinated behavior, highly complex behavior.
00:43:36 ►
As a matter of fact, I used to work with artificial intelligence systems.
00:43:41 ►
That’s one of my academic backgrounds.
00:43:43 ►
And I remember that we tried to emulate the
00:43:47 ►
behavior and the skills of ant colonies to solve highly complex engineering problems.
00:43:53 ►
So complex is their behavior that we try to emulate it to solve engineering problems.
00:43:59 ►
How does that complex coordinated behavior emerge? How can ants practice agriculture, architecture, engineering, sophisticated defense systems
00:44:10 ►
without any cabal, without any boss, without any central coordination and the passing of
00:44:16 ►
secret orders?
00:44:17 ►
How does that work?
00:44:19 ►
It works through stigmaty.
00:44:21 ►
And stigmaty happens when an individual agent, through his or her behavior,
00:44:27 ►
leaves an imprint in the environment, a cue that an other agent can perceive, in which calibrates
00:44:33 ►
the behavior of this other agent, modifying this other agent’s behavior, which in turn leaves some
00:44:40 ►
cues or footprints in the environment, which again calibrates the behavior of other agents,
00:44:45 ►
and so on and so forth, until some seemingly coordinated global pattern emerges from the
00:44:53 ►
bottom. So there is an emergence from the ground up of coordinated behavior, not from the top down.
00:45:00 ►
And I think materialism is maintained through stigmaty. It is the individual behavior of people based on our culture’s value system that leads to its survival and its reinforcement. for instance, to show results that contradict materialism, will, for the sake of his or her
00:45:25 ►
career, his income, his ability to feed his family, or his ego-driven desires to get a promotion or
00:45:33 ►
to become famous, will likely adapt the directions of his research in the search for results that
00:45:40 ►
will ultimately reinforce materialism. The questions he will ask himself,
00:45:46 ►
his methods, his hypothesis,
00:45:48 ►
will be derived from the value system,
00:45:52 ►
the worldview of materialism,
00:45:54 ►
and it will tend to reinforce it.
00:45:56 ►
Avenues that could refute it will be left alone.
00:46:00 ►
Avenues that have the promise to reinforce it
00:46:02 ►
will be pursued for the sake of personal success, of personal values.
00:46:09 ►
And the behavior of this scientist will imprint on other scientists who will be observing what he is doing and act accordingly,
00:46:17 ►
especially if this scientist gets promoted and finds himself in the position of deciding where grants go and where resources go that will leave
00:46:26 ►
an imprint on the environment that other people will perceive and will adjust their behavior
00:46:32 ►
accordingly so they also achieve some degree of personal success and personal satisfaction or even
00:46:37 ►
mere survival. I think this happens in science. This may happen in the corporate world. This happens in the media.
00:46:45 ►
It is astonishing how easy it is for the media to commit mistakes when reporting on scientific
00:46:53 ►
results, so long as those mistakes seem to reinforce materialism.
00:46:58 ►
It’s very easy to err on the side of the reigning worldview.
00:47:02 ►
But if the conclusion they are reporting would contradict the reigning worldview. But if the conclusion they are reporting would
00:47:05 ►
contradict the reigning worldview, they would look to ICE three times, four times, and maybe
00:47:10 ►
not publish the results at all, for fear that they would be wrong. So they will calibrate their
00:47:15 ►
editorial policies, even unconsciously, seemingly unconsciously, along the guidelines of the
00:47:22 ►
stigmaty of materialism,
00:47:27 ►
for fear of ridicule, for fear of being wrong. And of course the whole thing self-reinforces,
00:47:30 ►
and we are now in a cultural era in our civilization,
00:47:35 ►
where materialism, as I said in the beginning,
00:47:38 ►
has become synonym with reason and rationality themselves,
00:47:43 ►
which is completely absurd.
00:47:46 ►
I think this has emerged out of this materialist stigmaty
00:47:51 ►
that is so prevalent in society today.
00:47:57 ►
Now, you might ask,
00:47:59 ►
why does any of this matter, right?
00:48:03 ►
Why is it important whether materialism is correct,
00:48:08 ►
whether this view that all reality unfolds in some kind of cosmic consciousness is correct?
00:48:14 ►
What are the practical differences?
00:48:16 ►
What does it matter at the end of the day?
00:48:19 ►
Well, the differences are enormous.
00:48:23 ►
And they can be theoretical on the one hand, and they can be theoretical
00:48:25 ►
on the one hand and they can be very pragmatic
00:48:27 ►
on the other hand as well
00:48:29 ►
I explore this at length
00:48:30 ►
in the book but I wanted to give you
00:48:33 ►
just a brief overview
00:48:35 ►
to begin with
00:48:37 ►
our ideas about
00:48:39 ►
what death means
00:48:40 ►
are entirely determined
00:48:42 ►
by our world view
00:48:44 ►
if materialism is correct, when you die, you’re
00:48:48 ►
dead. It’s the end of it. It’s the end of your inner life, of your conscious experience,
00:48:53 ►
of the feeling that you have when you think, I am, that would disappear. You’ll be gone for good,
00:48:59 ►
and nothing will ever matter to you anymore. What are the implications of this? Well,
00:49:07 ►
on the one hand, it gives you an easy way out.
00:49:10 ►
You know for sure, if you believe in materialism,
00:49:15 ►
that all of your problems and your suffering will inevitably come to an end one day. That’s very comforting and probably lies at the root,
00:49:20 ►
at the inception of materialism as an attractive worldview.
00:49:24 ►
But it also means that the only meaning there can be in life is to consume.
00:49:30 ►
Because if matter is the only thing that endures, that persists,
00:49:34 ►
and life always comes to an end, and is so evanescent and short-lived,
00:49:39 ►
then the only conceivable meaning for existence is to accumulate matter in the form of material goods.
00:49:47 ►
And that, of course, calibrates your whole behavior in society and may lead to a lot of death anxiety
00:49:53 ►
because it’s intrinsic to being alive that you fear for your own end.
00:50:00 ►
Now, if the worldview of our culture weren’t materialism, but were the one I tried to elucidate earlier in this talk, the implications are completely different. forgetful about, that your amnesia will end, that you will experience the universe not
00:50:26 ►
anymore from a second-person perspective, but from a first-person perspective, that
00:50:32 ►
you will experience what it is to be stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters and the planet
00:50:38 ►
Earth itself.
00:50:40 ►
Death becomes then a promising event, a natural promising event in the natural course of existence.
00:50:50 ►
It becomes something that we may want to spend parts of our lives to prepare for, to understand,
00:50:57 ►
and not to be caught in a panic, not to be caught in surprise with the intensity of the transition.
00:51:03 ►
It would change our values, it would change our
00:51:06 ►
behaviors, we wouldn’t spend our lives anymore just trying to buy things, we wouldn’t treat the
00:51:12 ►
earth as a resource, because after all, if the earth goes to hell 100 years from now, I won’t be
00:51:18 ►
here to witness it anyway, so what do I care, right? Another implication has to do with our ideas of health and health care.
00:51:29 ►
You see, under materialism, your body is just a machine. It’s an unconscious mechanism in which
00:51:35 ►
a few parts come together to magically generate consciousness inside your brain. But beyond that,
00:51:41 ►
it’s just an unconscious mechanism. And because of that, doctors recently,
00:51:47 ►
in the past few decades, they have become akin to car mechanics. They are mechanics that try to fix
00:51:53 ►
the mechanism, and they don’t have an integral view of health. Now, if the worldview I posited
00:52:00 ►
in this talk is correct, then what is the body? The body is not a mechanism,
00:52:06 ►
but is merely the external aspect, the outside image of psychic conscious processes. Some of
00:52:17 ►
these processes are within your self-reflective awareness, your ordinary stream of consciousness.
00:52:23 ►
Others are eclipsed, they’re obfuscated,
00:52:26 ►
they correspond to the so-called subconscious or the personal, quote, unconscious. I don’t believe
00:52:31 ►
in the unconscious, I think it’s just obfuscated consciousness, but I’ll stick to the word
00:52:35 ►
to avoid confusion because it’s easier. If the body is the image of your subconscious mental processes, then it opens an entirely new avenue of health care
00:52:49 ►
through psychological intervention. Theoretically, if this view is correct, one could treat all
00:52:57 ►
diseases through talk therapy, through rituals that will leave imprints in the subconscious mind, through all kinds of
00:53:07 ►
methods for suggestion, some of which could even be considered unethical according to our society’s
00:53:14 ►
current value system, because they would imply some form of deception. It’s never a deception
00:53:19 ►
if it works. I’m talking here about things like the placebo effect. If it works, it really isn’t a deception, but it may come across as such.
00:53:30 ►
But it would open an entirely new avenue of treatment.
00:53:34 ►
And there are more implications, not only these two broad umbrella implications I just talked about.
00:53:40 ►
But, for instance, if all reality actually unfolds within one cosmic nervous
00:53:47 ►
system, within one mind with dissociated elements, that then opens the door for psi phenomena,
00:53:54 ►
like telepathy, like precognition. Because after all, all of this is unfolding within one mind.
00:54:02 ►
Minds are not just epiphenomena of brains fundamentally disconnected from each other,
00:54:07 ►
but they are dissociated aspects of something that is fundamentally interconnected through invisible layers, if you will.
00:54:17 ►
It opens the door for a variety of phenomena that science today discards rather a priori.
00:54:24 ►
There have been some brief, modest looks from a scientific standpoint at psi phenomena,
00:54:29 ►
but not anywhere near the critical mass that would be necessary to really understand it.
00:54:35 ►
And moreover, the research that has been done is largely based on assumptions
00:54:41 ►
that basically preclude psi phenomena from happening when they are being studied.
00:54:46 ►
If you’re studying the mind of an individual
00:54:49 ►
that’s driven by a stream of emotions and affections
00:54:54 ►
that you can’t really control under laboratory conditions,
00:54:57 ►
understanding the world through this other perspective
00:55:00 ►
would allow us to reinterpret the whole thing
00:55:04 ►
and maybe come up with methods that would allow us to reinterpret the whole thing and maybe come up with methods
00:55:07 ►
that would allow us to do more efficient, effective side research, giving the phenomenon
00:55:11 ►
a chance to actually happen while it’s being studied.
00:55:16 ►
And even more implications.
00:55:18 ►
I mean, look at our psychiatric system today and look at the way we look upon our own emotions.
00:55:26 ►
theatric system today and look at the way we look upon our own emotions. Materialists will say that even our strongest emotions, like love and hate, they are just the result of chemicals suffusing
00:55:35 ►
our brains, suffusing our bodies. Nothing really necessary, just the side effect of chemistry.
00:55:42 ►
Now, if my view is correct, then chemistry is just the external
00:55:46 ►
aspect, the second person perspective, the outside image of a fundamentally effective,
00:55:53 ►
subjective process that really exists and is not just a side effect of something else.
00:55:59 ►
Our love, our affections are real. They are fundamental. They are an integral part of existence, of the
00:56:07 ►
fabric of existence. They cannot be dismissed as epiphenomena, as side effects. They have to be
00:56:15 ►
taken as primary. If you interpret life in this way, how would that affect your relationships?
00:56:21 ►
How would that affect your own relationship with your inner
00:56:25 ►
life, with your feelings? How would that affect the way we treat each other? How would that
00:56:30 ►
affect the way psychiatry handles patients, patients with schizophrenia, patients with
00:56:37 ►
depression? Would we look upon a depressed human being just as a malfunctioning biological robot that should be fixed through
00:56:46 ►
chemical intervention? Or would we look upon that human being as a dissociated altar of a cosmic
00:56:53 ►
mind that is going through a meaningful learning experience and whose inner life should be respected
00:57:00 ►
and validated as such, and not just fixed mechanically. Everything would change.
00:57:07 ►
So, it is crucially important that we question our mainstream worldview of materialism
00:57:14 ►
critically, honestly, in a way that complies with logic and which is empirically honest,
00:57:22 ►
honest to our observations of the world,, honest to our observations of the world and honest
00:57:26 ►
to our observations of ourselves, that we don’t miss our steps of abstraction and take
00:57:31 ►
them for granted, take them as self-evident.
00:57:35 ►
If we are self-critical and critical towards the worldview of the culture, we will change
00:57:41 ►
our worldview.
00:57:42 ►
We will go to a better place.
00:57:44 ►
And that better worldview will change our value. We would go to a better place. And that better
00:57:45 ►
worldview would change our value systems, would change the way we relate to each other,
00:57:50 ►
would change our economic system, would change the power structures, would change how we
00:57:55 ►
live our lives and our experience of life. And there cannot be anything more important
00:58:00 ►
than that at the current historical juncture, in my view. So the
00:58:07 ►
only question left, which you might ask yourself now, is what is there for us to
00:58:14 ►
do? How do we enable this transition? How do we enable this improvement? How can we
00:58:22 ►
participate in this? I thought a lot about this and I came to the
00:58:28 ►
conclusion that it’s not so much about what to do, but about what not to do, about what to stop doing.
00:58:40 ►
This idea that everything that has any meaning comes out of action, comes out of doing, doing, doing, that’s also a value, an element of the current value system of our culture that we should also be critical about.
00:58:57 ►
Sometimes our problems arise from what we do.
00:59:05 ►
do. So, for instance, if I’m hammering myself in the head, if I’m knocking my head off with a hammer, the right course of action is not to get myself a helmet, but to just stop the hammering.
00:59:12 ►
So, here is my list of five simple things that if we could stop doing today, we would have a much
00:59:20 ►
better world tomorrow. And again, this is all elaborated better in the book Brief
00:59:27 ►
Peaks Beyond. So number one, let us stop compulsively stupefying ourselves. If you look
00:59:37 ►
at how most people live their lives, they’re constantly looking for distractions. They’re
00:59:42 ►
constantly looking for something to take their attention outside of themselves, outside of their inner lives and distract them and numb them. We do that
00:59:50 ►
through idiotic television shows. We do that through fanatic rooting for sports teams,
00:59:56 ►
through alcohol, through so-called retail therapy, the idea that you feel better if you just go
01:00:02 ►
shopping, if you just go consuming and buying all kinds of things you don’t need
01:00:05 ►
and which don’t really enrich your life.
01:00:08 ►
We do that through hollow social networking where we don’t really develop any deep relationship with anyone.
01:00:15 ►
We just try to manage and project an image through social media.
01:00:20 ►
We distract ourselves through compulsive casual dating. There’s a whole myriad of things
01:00:29 ►
we do to take our attention out of ourselves, out of our inner lives, because we don’t want
01:00:35 ►
to confront the deepest questions that our subconscious mind is constantly asking.
01:00:41 ►
Who am I? Why am I here in this world? What am I supposed to do? What are my pains?
01:00:47 ►
What are my fears? What are my angers, my anxieties? And how do I reconcile them with myself?
01:00:55 ►
These are the deepest questions that we are all busy avoiding. And I think that there is no way we can find the path back to meaning in our lives, to make our lives really meaningful, unless we confront these questions, these subconscious questions that are very hard to confront, that are often very painful to acknowledge and integrate. But if we don’t, if we don’t confront them, if we don’t integrate them,
01:01:25 ►
how can we ever find true meaning in our lives? We will live a superficial life of distractions,
01:01:32 ►
and then in our deathbeds, we’ll finally get around to asking ourselves,
01:01:36 ►
why was I here to begin with? And then it’s too late.
01:01:50 ►
too late. The second thing is, let us stop believing so readily. We tend to believe things so easily when it’s broadcast by the mainstream media. I mean, I’m not even talking about
01:01:55 ►
the pathological beliefs that you find in the fringes of the culture, religious fundamentalism
01:02:01 ►
and some new age stuff that you see around that is, frankly, absurd.
01:02:08 ►
I’m talking about belief in the mainstream worldview of materialism,
01:02:12 ►
which is ridiculous in many ways.
01:02:17 ►
But we believe so readily in it because it is the mainstream,
01:02:22 ►
because we will not be ridiculed by believing in it,
01:02:24 ►
because everybody is on the same boat and will not be ridiculed by believing it,
01:02:29 ►
because everybody’s on the same boat and everybody’s going to sink together with it.
01:02:36 ►
If we are more critical and if we just stop believing so readily, a lot can change.
01:02:40 ►
And you see, to stop believing doesn’t mean to become cynical.
01:02:43 ►
Cynical is a disguised form of belief.
01:02:48 ►
It’s a very strong commitment to the impossibility of certain things,
01:02:53 ►
even in the absence of any evidence to believe in that impossibility.
01:02:54 ►
That’s cynicism.
01:03:00 ►
What I’m talking about is what has come to be called negative capability.
01:03:04 ►
It’s an attitude of openness to the possibility of many things, but without being committed to its truth or to its impossibility.
01:03:09 ►
It’s to live with openness, with receptivity.
01:03:14 ►
There’s a fantastic quote by poet John Keats, English poet John Keats, where he talked about negative capability.
01:03:20 ►
Let me read it for you.
01:03:22 ►
He said,
01:03:26 ►
negative capability. Let me read it for you. He said, at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, in which Shakespeare possessed so enormously.
01:03:32 ►
I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
01:03:41 ►
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
01:03:47 ►
End quote.
01:03:48 ►
If we would all live more with this negative capability, I think a lot of negative aspects
01:03:56 ►
of our civilization could be alleviated, I believe.
01:04:00 ►
Because there is, if we are really honest, there is so little in the form of reliable facts and conclusions available out there,
01:04:09 ►
that our only honest option is to live in that openness, in that receptivity for the many possibilities of existence.
01:04:22 ►
Number three, let us stop acting so much and you see if we are really honest to ourselves we are
01:04:30 ►
acting all the time we are always managing our image we are always trying to project what jung
01:04:36 ►
jung called the persona manage the way other people look upon us, perceive us, see us, because he wants to put out that image of strength. He
01:04:47 ►
wants to be seen as successful, intelligent, attractive, and whatnot. While deep inside,
01:04:54 ►
and let’s be honest, we are all living with suffering. We all have anxieties. We all have
01:05:01 ►
insecurities, uncertainties, regrets, anger, and whatnot.
01:05:06 ►
We are all living with that.
01:05:08 ►
It’s an enormous part of everybody’s life because it’s part of the human condition.
01:05:14 ►
But we hide that and we try to project this image of harmony and strength and security and attractiveness.
01:05:22 ►
What is the net effect of this?
01:05:24 ►
Are we reducing any suffering by anyone
01:05:28 ►
in the world? Of course not. In fact, we are reinforcing the suffering. We are adding insult
01:05:35 ►
to injury, because since everybody’s projecting this image of strength, every single person thinks
01:05:42 ►
that he or she is alone in the suffering, is alone in the
01:05:46 ►
insecurities, in the anxieties, the fears, the terrors. We think we are alone in that, that the
01:05:51 ►
rest of the world is doing just fine, and we are the only miserable souls around, or at least one
01:05:56 ►
of the few, which is an illusion. We are all on the same boat. We are all weak, suffering human beings.
01:06:05 ►
It would be much better if we stopped trying to conceal that
01:06:09 ►
and just have the courage to present ourselves to the world the way we really are.
01:06:14 ►
Because that’s the only way to create authentic community,
01:06:17 ►
help each other out, and reduce our inherent suffering.
01:06:23 ►
Number four,
01:06:27 ►
and this will be misinterpreted at first,
01:06:29 ►
but I will explain it better.
01:06:32 ►
Let us stop eating so much meat.
01:06:35 ►
And I don’t mean that for the usual health reasons.
01:06:39 ►
I mean, it may be healthier to be vegetarian indeed,
01:06:41 ►
but that’s not the reason I’m saying this.
01:06:43 ►
I’m saying this for the following reason.
01:06:49 ►
The moment you treat animals as a product, as a commodity,
01:06:51 ►
which is the way they are treated today for food,
01:06:58 ►
you cannot avoid that the intrinsic human tendencies and intrinsic tendencies in the economic system, in the industrial system,
01:07:03 ►
will kick in and these animals will be treated under savage conditions.
01:07:07 ►
They will have horrible lives, and they will be killed in similar ways.
01:07:13 ►
And since animals are just dissociated alters in a broader stream of mind at large,
01:07:19 ►
like any living being, we are basically injecting enormous, inconceivable amounts of suffering
01:07:27 ►
into our own subconscious minds, into the cosmic mind of which we are all parts.
01:07:33 ►
That cannot do us any good at a subconscious level. What are we really doing to ourselves
01:07:39 ►
when we carry out an orgy of torture and killing towards millions of higher animals every week on the
01:07:48 ►
account of meeting a market consumer demand. And how much of that could we reduce if we simply
01:07:57 ►
stopped eating so much meat, perhaps not eliminate meat completely from our diet. It’s part of nature that animals eat each other,
01:08:08 ►
but at the industrial scale, we carry it out.
01:08:11 ►
This is an abnormality with, I believe,
01:08:17 ►
unimaginable consequences for the health of our psychic lives at the deepest levels.
01:08:21 ►
And finally, number five,
01:08:26 ►
my last modest suggestion for what we could stop doing to improve the world,
01:08:30 ►
let us stop buying so much unnecessary stuff.
01:08:35 ►
Our drive to consume is motivated by the value system of materialism, which basically entails, if you think about it, that there can only be one meaning in life,
01:08:41 ►
that being to accumulate material goods and have the experiences they enable while you can, because after that, you’ll be dead anyway and nothing will matter.
01:08:50 ►
And that leads to the reinforcement of the current power structures of the current economic
01:08:55 ►
system with all the pathological consequences that we know.
01:09:06 ►
if we would just change our patterns of consumption,
01:09:10 ►
so as to avoid consumerism,
01:09:15 ►
to avoid this insane rush towards unnecessary material goods, and focusing instead on our inner lives,
01:09:19 ►
on things like art, poetry, interacting with nature,
01:09:23 ►
making our subconscious mind self-reflective, bringing it to
01:09:28 ►
awareness, engaging in deep, meaningful relationships with other human beings, improving our understanding,
01:09:35 ►
expressing our feelings, because what other meaning that can really be in life but to improve our
01:09:42 ►
understanding of what’s going on and express whatever it is that
01:09:45 ►
we are. If we would change our patterns of consumption along these lines, we would
01:09:52 ►
inevitably undermine the pathological power structures that are in place today, undermine
01:10:00 ►
the pathological system that is in place today, and force an adjustment in a positive direction.
01:10:06 ►
And notice that unlike street revolutions,
01:10:09 ►
a change in our patterns of consumption would be impossible to repress.
01:10:15 ►
Of course, the media is out there really trying to stimulate current patterns of consumption.
01:10:22 ►
But if we decide to change them, that decision cannot be repressed.
01:10:28 ►
Nobody can throw you in jail because you’re not buying what they want you to buy.
01:10:34 ►
And it would have an enormous impact on the current state of affairs.
01:10:38 ►
More, I believe, than any street revolution could ever achieve.
01:10:43 ►
And it would be peaceful and quiet.
01:10:46 ►
It wouldn’t lead to death.
01:10:51 ►
It wouldn’t lead to war.
01:10:53 ►
It could lead to difficult times
01:10:55 ►
because any change in the economic system
01:10:57 ►
would dislodge it from the current equilibrium point
01:11:00 ►
and bring it to a point of confusion,
01:11:04 ►
to a lack of balance, and that could be very
01:11:06 ►
painful, maybe for a while, but it would eventually lead to a better situation.
01:11:13 ►
And if we don’t do that, what’s the alternative?
01:11:18 ►
We have an economic system that is entirely based on growth.
01:11:21 ►
While the planet is not growing, while the ecosystem is not growing,
01:11:25 ►
how much more can we grow
01:11:27 ►
before we spoil the whole thing
01:11:29 ►
and arrive at a completely unsustainable situation?
01:11:34 ►
And if our consciousness is never going to end,
01:11:37 ►
if we are going to be around in one or another form
01:11:39 ►
ad infinitum,
01:11:41 ►
we are the ones that are going to suffer
01:11:44 ►
the consequences of this, not the next
01:11:46 ►
generations. Anyway, this is what I wanted to share with you today, starting from a different
01:11:53 ►
way of looking at the world, looking at existence, interpreting the facts of reality, looking at the
01:11:59 ►
implications of that, and looking at possible ways in which we could help a healthy change in our worldview
01:12:06 ►
in the way we relate to ourselves, to the world, and to the universe at large.
01:12:12 ►
I hope you enjoyed it.
01:12:14 ►
Take care.
01:12:18 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:23 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.