What Is Consciousness

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from

consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. A quote by Max Plunk.

All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of pure
consciousness, which alone is real. A quote by Ram Harshi.

I'm back. I'm back from my 30 day meditation retreat and man, it's good to be
back.

But I won't be talking about much of that here today. Today we're gonna be
talking about what is consciousness, kind of a standard topic that we talk about.
But, uh, if you're interested about insights and mistakes that I made and lessons
learned from my retreat, that I'll be posting three videos that I shot during the
retreat on my blog.

So go check those out. Of course, I'm supporting a new little look for you. I got
a fancy shirt, got a fancy beard. How do you like that? Uh, you can, um, post a
thumbs up or a thumbs down on the shirt and the beard down in the comments
section and, uh, we'll see. I don't know if I'm keeping them or not, but we're
just, uh, doing something new.

But anyways, let's get right into our main topic. What is consciousness? Cuz
this is such a deep, deep, juicy topic. This is one of the most important questions
that you can ask and answer in your life. In fact, about five years ago, I made a
list. I made a list of my top 100 most important questions in life that I wanted to
answer.

The most fascinating questions that I had. And at the very top of that list,
question number one was what was consciousness? And so I followed up on
that. I didn't just make the list. I followed up on that list. I started buying books.
I started reading into non-duality. I started doing practices, meditation and yoga
and this and that, um, and psychedelics.

And that was a, a long journey, which ultimately led me to where I am today.
And today I understand what is consciousness. And so can you, and in fact,
most people don't know this, but mankind has understood what consciousness is
for over 5,000 years. Well, at least certain small portions of mankind. And the
rest of mankind hasn't been able to get it.
So here we're attempting to fix that problem. We're gonna try to explain
consciousness and um, See, the situation you find yourself in is that you find
yourself conscious. That's how you know you exist, but you're not conscious of
what consciousness is. That's a very interesting predicament to find yourself in.

And then you might think like, well, let's appeal to neuroscience to answer this
question. And maybe if you're on YouTube and you're searching for this topic,
what is consciousness? What you'll probably get is you'll get a bunch of people
talking about neuroscience and the latest discoveries there, and maybe there's
this philosophy or that philosophy about consciousness.

And the problem with all of that is that neuroscience fundamentally cannot
answer the question of neuroscience, uh, of consciousness, because
neuroscience is occurring within consciousness. So actually neuroscience is
incapable of grasping what consciousness is. And we'll explain a little bit more
about why that is as we keep going.

The problem, I guess we could say is that neuroscience assumes that

consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and that it's not fundamental to reality
itself. It's not fundamental to, let's say, physics or the metaphysics of reality.
And this turns out to be false else. Consciousness is fundamental and it is
irreducible.

It's more fundamental than atoms, energy, time, space, the universe itself, or
brains or even life. It comes prior to all that. In fact, all of those things are
occurring within consciousness. But this is very counterintuitive if you're trying
to understand, and you're coming at this from the materialist paradigm.

Now, I'll be talking about the materialist paradigm a lot here, because it's the
primary obstacle to understand what consciousness is, and the materialist
paradigm is simply the idea that. Reality is just basically a bunch of bouncing
balls like atoms, particles, or energy, and uh, it's dumb brute matter, and that's
all there is to it.

And then consciousness is just some sort of emergent property, some second
order, third order, fourth order thing that comes about from these atoms, which
we really don't know how, but we assume we'll figure it out. If we just keep
studying neuroscience more, that's not gonna work. And the reason it's not
gonna work is because when you become conscious of what consciousness is,
which you can do, we're not, we're not speculating here.
This is not theory that I'm giving you. I'm saying that you can actually become
conscious of what consciousness is. And if you do, then you'll realize why
neuroscience and materialistic science cannot grapple with consciousness and it
never will be able to.

Of course, if you did know what consciousness was, you would be a mystic.
And you would be enlightened.

People don't appreciate that. See, you would stop being a neuroscientist. You
would stop being a scientist. You would become a mystic and you would be
labeled as such. And uh, you would be put into that category. So one thing I
wanted to warn you about is that when you hear neuroscientists or philosophers
like maybe Daniel Dan or Sam Harris, people of this ilk talking about
consciousness, they actually don't know what they're talking about.

Be very suspicious of what they're talking about. Because the only way you can
really understand consciousness is if you have some very deep awakening
experiences, which these people have not had. There's a great misunderstanding
about what consciousness is. So let's first say what consciousness is absolutely
not.

Consciousness is not brain activity. Consciousness is not reason or knowledge

or intellect. Consciousness is not emergent phenomenon. Consciousness is not
something that is biological or that is exclusive to life or dependent upon life.
Consciousness is not subjective. Experience, consciousness is not perception
and consciousness is not a private thing.

Something that you own that's personal to you, like you are a thing which has
consciousness. That's not what it is. Consciousness is not a thing that other
things have. Consciousness is also not occurring within space and time.

So those are some pretty bold claims. And this goes counter to the entire
materialist paradigm, which is trying to understand what consciousness is. And
you can see that if consciousness, let's just assume for a moment that what I'm
saying here is true, that consciousness is not any of these things. Well, if that's
true, then you can see that the materialist paradigm assumes that this is what
consciousness is, is all these things that I just said.

It's not so. So you could see that it's, it's already starting off on a very wrong
footing, and it's gonna have to work really hard to untangle this mess. So then
what is consciousness? Well, it's very tricky. Simple but tricky. Consciousness
is actually not anything. It is not a thing. It is nothing. It's actually nothing but
this.

Nothing is not what you think the ordinary word nothing means. Because when
we ordinarily say nothing, we think of non-existence. That's not what
consciousness is. I am not saying that consciousness does not exist. Like Dan,
that's actually, I think Daniel Dennis's position technically is he thinks
consciousness is an illusion.

So it does not exist. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that consciousness is
the only thing that exists. It is existence itself. And what that is is nothing.
Existence is nothing, but it exists. It's not non-existence. It exists.
Consciousness is pure existence without content. So imagine if you took all the
attributes and qualities of life out of existence, you would think that what you're
left with is non-existence and not consciousness.

But actually it turns out that what you're left with is. Pure consciousness. The
problem is that you need to become conscious enough to become conscious of
consciousness without any attributes or any content, and that's a little
challenging to do for most minds, that requires some work. Another way we can
say it is that consciousness is a substance of everything.

So what is everything made out of? Look around you right now. Look around
the room. Look at objects around you. Maybe you see a table, a couch, a cat, a
tree, a car, a window, some sunlight. Your body, you're hearing me talk. This is
all consciousness. It's all occurring within consciousness. That's the substance
of reality.

Reality is not made out of Adams or energy or anything else. It's made of
consciousness. And the function of consciousness is to be totally empty. So
that's why it's so difficult to talk about and to grasp because it's emptiness. It's
actual emptiness. But this emptiness exists.

The reason it needs to be empty is because it needs to be able to take on the

attributes of every possible object. You see, if consciousness wasn't empty, if it
had some sort of attribute, like let's say consciousness was red, or let's say
consciousness was big, or consciousness was small, or consciousness was cold
or rough or smooth, or ethereal or solid or material, see, any of those things
would be an attribute.

So if consciousness had any of those attributes, then that would prevent it from
being able to be the opposite of that, you see? So if consciousness, let's say, was
big, that means it couldn't be small as well. And if consciousness was rough,
then it couldn't be smooth, and if consciousness was red, it couldn't be green.

You see how this works? So what we really need, if we want to construct reality
from scratch is we need some sort of container or substrate, which is ideally
completely free of any attributes whatsoever. It has no properties at all. It's even
free of time and space such that we could fill this container with absolutely
anything we wanted.

It was a totally free container. So it would be sort of like if we were a painter

and we wanted to paint a beautiful painting, what would we choose as our
medium? Would we take some famous painting by Da Vinci and use that to
paint on? No. You can't paint on an already painted canvas. You need a blank
canvas to do that.

But what that means is then it is, it's difficult for you as a human being then who
is situated within consciousness. You see, you are, you have attributes, you have
a size, you have a shape. You are a certain way. So now it's difficult for you to
grasp the empty canvas on which you were painted.

So to really understand consciousness, there needs to be a paradigm shift. You

need to be able to look around you and to see that everything that you're
interacting with, every object, no matter what kind of qualities it has, no matter
how solid it feels, a concrete wall, a brick, a steel beam, all of those are made
out of consciousness.

So what this means is that the universe is not just some dumb collection of
molecules bouncing around in a box. The way that science conventionally
conceives of it, but that the universe is conscious and that is the key step that the
neuroscientists and the materialists and the rationalists do not want to make to
them that shatters their entire metaphysics of what reality is.

And granted, that's a very big paradigm shift. And many people do not want to
accept this because, well, it has a lot of ramifications for how you interact with
reality. And so of course, that makes you apprehensive. I can appreciate that. So
what I'm saying here is that consciousness is not localized. It does not occur
within space.

It does not occur within your skull or within a brain. Consciousness is universal.
The entire universe is consciousness. Another way to say is that the entire
universe is one giant mind, and that every object that you see, Within reality is a
figment of imagination of this giant mind. Now, this is a move and an admission
that the materialists and rationalists wanna make even less because
conventionally speaking reality is not supposed to be a giant mind.

Reality is supposed to be dumb. But then ask yourself, why would you assume
that? Why is it necessary that reality starts out dumb? Why couldn't reality start
out smart? Why couldn't it be a mind? And of course, you have a lot of good
reasons for why you think it can't, uh, predominantly because it feels so solid
and so consistent and so real.

You think that if reality was a mind, then everything would be Lucy goosey and
fantastical. But then again, ask yourself, is what you're experiencing right now
not fantastical? You're alive, you exist. Look at all this amazing stuff that's
happening around you. It's utterly remarkable. You just take it for granted
because you've been alive for so many decades that you take it for granted.

But when you were born, it was all magical and, and incredible, and none of it
made any sense. It was all fantastical. There was no such thing as seeing a walk,
walking a dog, walking down the street and, and not being fascinated and blown
away by it. It was incredible. And you can still go see incredible things.

You can see incredible documentaries. You go out into nature, you can explore
the cosmos, and you'll find incredible, fantastical, miraculous, amazing things.
And scientists are discovering these things every single day, and they have been
for the entire, uh, span of human civilization. The problem is that we just get so
numb to it, and we start to take it for granted.

And then we sell, set up this sort of, uh, division between like the truly
fantastical, the stuff of Alice and Wonderland, and then the more down to earth.
But the down to earth stuff is still extremely fantastical. And you gotta wonder
where did it all come from and how is it functioning all so well and so
efficiently?

And it's not just because it's a clock or Adam's bouncing around in a box
following logical rules. It's a, it's way, way, way, uh, more nuanced than that.
There is an intelligence to it. It is a mind. And you can actually become
conscious that reality is a mind after all. That's why you can think, see right
now, you think that you're a human being sitting here who has consciousness.

And what I'm telling you is that you're not, that what you are is you are the
universe. Being conscious and thinking that it's a human being. Can you try to
make that shift? It's a recontextualization of your present experience. So, Look
around you right now. Look around the room and just try to notice that what
you are is not a human being looking at a room.

What you are is the universe that is precipitating this room and your body and
everything else. And there it is. It's both a subtle and a radical shift.

So another way to think about consciousness is think of it as infinite clay. I like

this analogy. So think of clay. We can use clay to make a shape. And what's
cool about clay is that literally think about this. Ordinary clay in a sense is
infinite because you can use ordinary clay to construct an infinite number of
different sculptures.

Or shapes. You can make pots, you can make vass, you can, um, make people
and animals of any kind. You can make aliens, you can make all sorts of
fantastical stuff. There is no limitation to what you can carve out of clay, except
of course there's a problem with clay because ordinary clay has properties,
which is why it's easy for us to make sense of it.

You know, ordinary clay has a certain mass, a certain weight, a certain
viscosity, a certain pliability, a certain color, uh, a certain texture. Smoothness,
roughness. It's got a certain temperature, it's got a certain size. It expands, it, it
reacts to, to cold and to to water in certain ways. So in a sense, this makes it
limited.

It's unlimited in a certain dimension. In that you can make all sorts of infinite
shapes from it. But for example, you can't make it infinite colors because unless
you color it with paint, let's say you're not doing that. If you just take the clay
and you don't modify in any way, it has the, whatever color it has, right?

So you can make an infinite number of, of sculpture, but all of them will have
the same color. And also practically, it's limited in that there's only certain
shapes and sizes of sculptures you can make out of clay because it'll just
collapse in on itself. You can't make a really long, thin object. It'll collapse.

And if you make a sculpture that's too big, eventually the entire sculpture will
just crumble down under gravity under its own way. So you have some practical
limitations there. But now imagine this. Imagine if we were able to create a clay
that was truly infinite out of this clay. We could create anything in reality.

This would be like the ultimate substance. What would that substance or clay
look like?
So immediately you should see that it should look a lot like nothing,

so that the properties of the clay itself do not interfere with the ability to create
something out of it. You see? So our clay, our infinite clay cannot have a color
because if we gave it some color, that means it would be that color and all
objects will then be that color. That would be very limiting cuz we want to be
able to create all the colors that we see.

So in that case, we need to start off with zero so that we can add in whatever
colors we wanted to or create that out of the clay. And of course it would have
to have no smell cuz we would wanna be able to create any kind of smell we
wanted to out of this clay. Metaphorically speaking, we will want it to have no
texture.

No size, no mass and nothing else. And then if, if we were able to create this
magical sounding clay, it sounds magical, doesn't it? Then look what we've got.
We've got a shape shifter. We've got a shapeshifting substance consciousness
that we can use to create anything. We could use it to create a rock, a tree, a car,
metal, plastic paper, plasma, a cloud cold, hot red, blue, big, small, dumb,
smart, hairy, bald, round, sharp, solid, liquid, transparent, shiny, dull, smooth,
rough, soft, hard.

It would be unlimited. You can make anything you want out of it. Now, the only
problem is, is that what I'm saying, sounds extremely fantastical to you. It
sounds impossible. Leo, how could that be possible?

But then again, how could anything be possible? How is it possible that there
are a Adam's bouncing around in a, in a box? Where do they come from? How
is the big bang possible? This question of how is it possible is a, is a very
sneaky question because what it assumes is that whatever model of reality you
have, that you are kind of like taking it for granted.

But what you have to realize is that any model of reality you have, whichever
way you think reality is, it's, it's equally incredible how is anything possible.
That's the whole trick. Now, of course, I'm not trying to logically convince you
with this analogy that what I'm saying is correct. I'm just using this analogy to
help to explain something that you can become conscious of.

This is something you can become directly conscious of. That consciousness is
this shape-shifting substance,
but the materials paradigm just refuses to understand this. And here I wanna
show you a quote from Stephen Hawking, who uh, is a perfect representative
example of what I mean by the materialist paradigm. See, he says, quote, I think
the brain is essentially a computer, and consciousness is like a computer
program.

It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be
recreated on a neural network, but that would be very difficult as it would
require all of one's memories. And now be honest, is that how you think of
consciousness as software running on computer hardware? This is a very
popular analogy that a lot of people fall prey to these days, and it really prevents
you from going further in understanding and exploring what consciousness is.

Because consciousness is not like software running on hardware. Instead,

consciousness is more like, Software, which can run without needing hardware.
It's just pure software. So rather than thinking of the world as a combination of
hardware and software, the way that most people do, you know, you think
there's like hard external physical reality, and then there's all the software.

The software is like your emotions and it's your perceptions. Everything you're
seeing here right now supposedly is, is the software, right? Your perceptions,
that's what neuroscience would tell you. All these colors, what are these colors?
What are these feelings and emotions in your body? What is this sensation of
sitting on a chair or standing on your feet?

What is that? We would say that's software, right? But then the hardware is the
stuff underneath. That's the stuff that physics studies is the, the hardware and
the software runs on the hardware. Except the problem is, is that philosophers
for the last 2000 years have been trying to explain even in theory, how it's
possible that.

Software can run on hardware. How it's possible that atoms and molecules can
give rise to colors and emotions and sensations and feelings and, and thoughts
and ideas and all this kind of soft, uh, soft stuff, which is technically called quia.
In philosophy of mind, they call it quia. How does quality arise out of matter or
of course, this is the classic mind body problem, uh, that decart made famous.

How does mind arise from body? Well, it doesn't because all there is is mind,
body is a feature of mind. Body is a special case of mind. So imagine a
computer that is purely software. It requires no hardware. The universe is just
pure software floating in nothingness. That's what we're talking about.
Otherwise in philosophy, this is known as idealism, but of course what I'm
talking about is not just a philosophy. I'm talking about, yes, a philosophy, but
I'm talking about actually discovering that is true. Speaking of which, I recently
had this incredible experience of discovering that everything is consciousness,
very palpably in what seemed like a moment.

I looked around the room and it was just blindingly obvious that everything I'm
looking at is pure consciousness, every object, and I was so blown away by this
that I picked up a book that was lying next to me, and I just flipped through the
book and it was just glaringly obvious that every single page on that book is
pure consciousness.

I'm just consciousness flipping through consciousness. I looked at my hand and

it's just pure consciousness. I looked at a metal fork and then it's obvious that
yes, it's made out of metal. And the metal is made out of iron atoms. What, what
are the iron atoms made out of? Consciousness? Consciousness is this field,
which is the substance of everything.

And that's really how you realize non-duality is the, you see the underlying
essence behind everything you see of what the, what the ancients called
quintessence. You know, they had, uh, what, five? The classic four elements is
fire, earth, water, and what's the other one? Air, um, wind, let's say. And then,
uh, and then, and then there's the fifth element.

What is the fifth element? It's quintessence, Quint, fifth element. Quintes
essence. But what is quintessence? How come no one's been able to find the
quintessence? Because it's nothingness. Which is not the same thing as air, and
it's not the same thing as non-existence. It's nothingness or consciousness.

Now, you might wonder, well, Leah, why do you call it consciousness if it's
nothingness? Well, that's a hell of a thing to explain

because when I say nothing, I'm talking about a different thing than what you're
thinking of what you're thinking of. When I say nothing is you're thinking of, of
a, of a, like an empty space, devoid of any qualities or features, and it's just sort
of like a dumb physical space. Like if physics explains nothing, this, it's just a
space like a vacuum.

That's not what I mean. What I mean is that it's, it's mind stuff. It's conscious of
itself, it's alive, it's intelligent, it's self-aware. And that's amazing. It's amazing
to discover that reality is actually self-aware and that it's actually intelligent.
That makes absolutely no sense from the materials paradigm.
That's right, because we're talking about a different paradigm. You see, you
have one paradigm, the material paradigm, and I'm telling you, just drop that. It
doesn't work and switch to a different paradigm. That means you're looking at
the world from a totally different perspective and everything you see still sort of
remains the same, but it's also recontextualized.

So to help you understand this, it's useful to make a distinction between first
order versus second order reality. What do I mean by this? Well, let's take the
materialist scientific paradigm from that paradigm. When you look at reality,
you split it up into at least two orders. The first order is the most fundamental.

So science says that the first order reality, the most real. Stuff that we know is
Adam's energy. The universe itself, the physical universe, the body and the
brain. That's first order. Second order would be consciousness, perceptions, the
mind and emotions. Geese would be called the emergent phenomenon. They
don't really exist.

Conscious doesn't really exist. Perceptions don't really exist. The mind doesn't
really exist. Emotions don't really exist. All of those just boil down to atoms and
neurons. That's one way to see the world. Uh, let's take a look at another
paradigm. The dream paradigm. When you're dreaming inside of your dream,
there's also a first order and second order reality.

The first order reality is the mind. It's the mind space within which your dream
is happening. That's what a dream is made out of. It's the substance of the
dream. And then there's the second order reality, which is all the contents of
your dream. So if you see monsters and ghosts and, and, uh, old relatives, and
you see fantastical stuff happening to you, weird stories and narratives and
memories and all that kind of wacky stuff, that's the content.

But that's all second order, right? Because we say all of that is happening inside
the mind. Now, the mistake that happens with the dream paradigm is that when
a materialist sees the dream paradigm, he can't help himself but to look at it
from the materialist paradigm. So what he'll say is that, yeah, Leo, but a dream
is really happening inside the brain.

And so actually the, the reality of a dream is not mind, it's brain, but that's not
the dream paradigm. That's the materialist paradigm. So forget that we've
already. Talking about that one. Now I'm talking about the dream paradigm.
That's a different paradigm. Inside the dream paradigm, there is no brain.
The dream is not happening inside of a brain. It's mind space. That's a different
paradigm. Now, let's consider the third paradigm, a TV paradigm. The
television paradigm. So when you're looking at a television screen, there is first
order and second order reality. The first order reality is the pixels of the screen.

The second order reality is all the stuff the pixels depict. It's all the actors, it's
the stage, it's the props. And then we could even go one step further. We could
say there's even a third order reality to a tv, which is the story that is told by the
movie, for example. See, because the story of a movie, It's not identical to the
actors, the stage and the props, it's made out of those things.

See, so that would be like a third order. It's a, it's how you arrange the actors,
the stage and the props and the environment and the dialogue. It's how you
arrange all those things. And then that leads to sort of the emergence of a story.
But all those things are ultimately pixels, you see. And then lastly, there's the
non-duality paradigm, which is what's actually real, what's actually true.

And in this paradigm, first order reality is consciousness. And second order
reality is all the stuff that you know as physical objects, human beings, the sun
trees. Cars, houses, gravity, the laws of physics, science itself, the entire
universe, the big bang, your body, your brain, thoughts, emotions, sexuality,
politics, government, war, violence, rape, genocide, uh, love and happiness, all
of this.

What is all of this? This is all happening within consciousness. All of that is, is
second order. First order is consciousness. All those things are interconnected
because the substance of all those things is consciousness.

The tricky thing about consciousness is that it cannot be pointed to because it

holds all the pointers in the same way that imagine if you were a character on a
TV screen. Imagine if you were, uh, Mario from Super Mario World. Can
Mario use his finger to point at the pixels of the screen?

He can't. You notice this, you can't do that if you were Mario, because Mario is
in a sort of dimension which is tangential to the pixels. Mario doesn't know
about the pixels he's made out of the pixels. Mario's hand is made out of pixels.
It's being de displayed by pixels in the same way that my hand right now is
inside of empty consciousness, so my finger cannot point to consciousness
because the finger itself cannot point outside.

It can't go meta, you see, because it is made outta the pixels no matter where
Mario points. He's never gonna be able to point out a pixel because he mad of
pixels in the same way. When you start to look for consciously, Leo, where is
this consciousness you keep talking about, you look for it, but you can't grasp it
because you're in it.

You're the fish and water. Another metaphor might be that if you have a, a piece
of white piece of paper and you draw like Mickey Mouse on it or something,
Mickey Mouse cannot point outside at the paper itself. You see, he can, you can
draw Mickey Mouse pointing around in the scene of, of that two-dimensional
space, but he cannot point out to the third dimension.

This is the classic self-reference problem, which creates strange loops, which I
talked about in my episode called reality is a Strange Loop and it is that which
is why you can't point at it, but you are it. You can't point at consciousness.
Which also means that you can't grasp it with words or you can't grasp it with
the mind or with the intellect or using concepts because all those things are
occurring within consciousness.

But you are consciousness, you are that emptiness within which everything is
occurring, which is why when you look inside of yourself, if you ask yourself,
who am I? What am I? You look inside yourself, what do you find? Emptiness.
You don't find a thing in there, emptiness. Look inside, try to go like, turn your
awareness back around.

Look in into your skull. What do you see inside your skull? You don't see a
skull in there. You see emptiness. That's consciousness. But um, you need to
really train your mind on that to, to become conscious of that consciousness of
what it really is.

So the reason I make a big deal about this, this pointing business, Is because if
what I'm saying is true, that means that nobody can tell you what consciousness
is because talking uses words in communication. Those are pointers, which is
why a Zen master uses, uh, koans and riddles to try to point consciousness out
to you because actually you can't point it out.

You either get it or you don't. You're either conscious of it or you're not, which
is why what scientists are attempting to do, which is to create models of
consciousness. This is what neuroscientists are doing. It's never gonna work.
The only way you can know consciousness is by becoming conscious, because
consciousness is what's fundamental and your mind and your language and your
science, which is only possible with language.
You cannot do science without language and without concepts. Uh, it's second
order. You see, the problem is that you're trying to use a second order
phenomenon to get at the first order. You got it backwards. It's not gonna work.
It turns out that there is no substitute for consciousness. You cannot substitute
for consciousness with intelligence, with iq, with beliefs, with knowledge, or
with intuition even

because consciousness is the substance of all of those things. Intelligence and

beliefs and knowledge and intuition. These are second order. First order is
consciousness.

So now let's get into some frequently asked questions and objections, cuz I
know that there's a lot of these when it comes to this topic, and I had a lot of
these questions and objections when I started to learn about consciousness and
non-duality and how all this stuff works. And I've resolved a lot of these for
myself recently, so I want to help you to do the same.

So first question is, Leo, what is consciousness made out of?

Consciousness is made out of itself.

Now, that's an odd answer. How could consciousness be made out of itself and
what does that even mean? It sounds like it's just some, some woo-hoo talk. It
sounds like I'm not saying anything when I say that, but really think about it.
Whatever you think reality is made out of. Think about it. What's the most
fundamental thing that you believe?

Reality's better atoms, quarks, strings, energy, whatever it is. Doesn't matter.

At some point you're gonna get to the bottom end, like to the bottom line, rock
bottom. You're gonna hit rock bottom. So let's say it's just for a simplicity sake.
It's mad of Adams, okay? And Adams are indivisible. That's not true. But let's
say that's true. So if it's Adams, what are these Adams made out of?

You're gonna have to say the same thing that Adams just are

and nothing more. That's rock bottom. So that's sort of what we're saying about
consciousness. It's rock bottom. You can't get below that. But actually in a way,
you can. Because when you become fully conscious of consciousness, you
realize that the rock bottom is nothingness. And nothingness is itself, existence
is itself, and therefore it just is.
And that's the bottom line. But this is not sort of like an intellectual exercise in
the same way that Adams. Are understood because with Adams you can say,
yeah, Adams, we don't know what Adams are made out of. They're irreducible,
they're, they just are that way. Stop asking stupid questions. That's not what I'm
telling you here.

I'm not saying that you can't get to the bottom of consciousness. I'm saying you
can get to the bottom of consciousness. You can get to the bottom of reality.
And what you find there is nothing. But that's not the same. Nothing that the
scientists think that strings or quirks are made out of. It's actual nothing.

And you can be conscious of it.

So it's a strange loop. Reality is made out of itself. And you might say, how is
that possible? And the answer is because everything is possible and it has no
limits. Consciousness is unlimited. So it can do anything. It literally anything
that it wants. And so it gives birth to itself. It's sort of like consciousness is its
own mother and its own father.

Uh, kind of a interesting twist on the, the time travel paradox where you go
back in time and, and you give birth to yourself by having sex with your
grandmother or something like that. Yeah. That's basically how, uh,
consciousness came into being. It's sort of like, um, went back in time and had
sex with itself, and it gave birth to itself.

It's a mind fuck. Um, next question. How come if I damage my brain, I will lose
consciousness?

This is a tricky one. This is a tricky one to help you to understand. Yes, it's true
that if you damage your brain, you could lose consciousness. However, I'm not,
I'm not talking about that per se here. So when I use the word consciousness,
I'm not talking about consciousness. Is that that it's something you have.

See, the way you frame it here, metaly, when you say, I will lose consciousness.
You assume that subconscious is something you had to begin with, which is not
the case. So let's think of it this way. Use let's, uh, let's bring in the Lego
analogy. We're using a lot of analogies here to explain this. So the Lego
analogy, and this is actually a really good analogy for explaining first order
versus second order reality.

So we have Lego blocks, right? Let's assume that the Lego blocks are just the
most fundamental particles, and we can use Lego blocks to build a castle. So we
build this beautiful castle, the shape of the castle. That's noticed. That's the
second order reality. The blocks themselves that make up the castle.

That's first order reality. Okay? So here's what's going on. When you think that
you lose consciousness by damaging your brain, it's actually like this. You've
taken these legos and you've built a beautiful castle. And now what you've done
is you've identified consciousness and yourself with the castle, which is a
mistake because actually consciousness is the, the Lego blocks themselves, but
you're not conscious of that yet.

So you've identified yourself with the shape, the castle. So when that shape
breaks down, which is what happens when we take a hammer and hit you over
the skull and and damage your brain, what that amounts to is taking a sledge
hammer and hitting the castle. What happens? A bunch of the blocks break off
and you ruin the shape of the castle.

And then you say to yourself, oh, look, I've lost my consciousness. My
consciousness has been damaged. No, it hasn't. What's happened is that the
thing you identified with, you've misidentified, that thing has been damaged.
The content within consciousness that has been damaged, let's say. But
consciousness itself will always be there.

In fact, we could deconstruct the entire castle. Such that the castle no longer
exists, but the consciousness, the building blocks, they're still there. You cannot
destroy the building blocks in this analogy.

Uh, next question. How can there be consciousness without a brain? This is also
very difficult to explain to someone who's stuck in a materialist paradigm.

Well, I could ask you the same question. How is it possible that there could be
consciousness with a brain? May. Why do you assume that that's just a given?
That that's obvious because mankind has been investigating this question both
theoretically and experimentally for over 2000 years, and we still haven't
figured it out.

So maybe that's a clue that your paradigm is backwards. It makes no sense how
conscious could be possible with a brain. How is it possible that there are
atoms? How's that possible? How is it possible? There's a universe? How is
materialism possible? When you really step back and you remove all of your
biases and you stop taking anything for granted, and you really objectively
evaluate all of these different paradigms, you will see that they're all equally
fantastical.
There's nothing fantastical, more fantastical, for example, about reality being a
giant mind versus reality being, uh, just a, a bunch of dumb particles bouncing
around in a box because you still have to account for the dumb particles than the
box. Where'd the box come from? Where'd time come from? Where'd space
come from?

Where did the physical laws of, of the universe come from? Where did the
physical constants come from? Like the gravitational constant and so on?
Where'd they come from? Of course, science has no explanation, nor is there
even an explanation, um, on the horizon. Even in theory, it's not possible.
Because you're always taking something for granted.

You're always starting off with something, an axiom or an assumption of some

kind or something that you hold as reality. But see, in this example, we're, we're
questioning much deeper than most scientists or even most philosophers ever
question. So we're getting into uncharted territories for mo most minds.

So see, one of the problems with the English word consciousness is that it's not
just a word for some idea, it comes with an implicit metaphysics. And, and
what's implicit to the definition of that word is that when people hear
consciousness or a mind, they automatically bring in with it the metaphysics of
a brain.

They just assume that minds and consciousnesses must happen in brains. Duh.
But why would you assume that? Really think about that. Think about that
existentially from from ground zero without any kind of assumptions. Why
would mind or conscious need a brain to begin with? If you really investigate
that, what you'll discover is actually maybe they don't.

Maybe the problem is the way that I'm defining consciousness. Maybe
consciousness is it exists, but it doesn't depend upon some mechanism that
brings it about, and that turns out to be the case. Another question is, Leo, how
come I lose consciousness when I go to sleep? Doesn't that prove that the
universe is not conscious?

Because supposedly, if the universe was always conscious, then I wouldn't be

able to go to sleep again. This is because you misidentify the. What
consciousness is, again, you're holding it as something that you lose. You're
going to sleep and you're losing it. That assumed that you had it to begin with,
which you didn't.
Again. What's happening when you're going to sleep is that since you're
identified with this castle that you've built out of Lego blocks, when you go to
sleep at night, the entire castle gets disassembled and it just becomes Lego
blocks. But since you are at that level of consciousness where you're not
identified with the blocks, you're identified with the castle, to you, it appears as
though the castle disappears.

And it does. From that perspective. And from that perspective, it appears like
you lose consciousness and that, um, there's nothing left. But if you become
sufficiently conscious and you shift your identification from being the castle,
the second order to the first order of the building blocks, then. You will actually
be able to keep your consciousness even when you go to sleep, even when
there's nothing there, even after your physical body dies.

But of course, it's not gonna be the kind of consciousness that you've identified
with right here. It's not gonna be all colorful and fanciful and stuff's gonna be
happening. It's not gonna be like that. It's gonna be pure consciousness, pure
with no attributes whatsoever. And most people confuse that with non-
existence.

But actually it's just pure existence. Next question. How come I'm not conscious
of other minds? If Leo, you say that the universe is, is conscious and that's all
that there is, then supposedly I should have access to, to all information and to
everything. No. Why would you assume that? So again, let's use our, our
building block analogy with Legos.

Let's imagine that we've built an entire house out of Legos, like a house, real life
scale house out of Legos.

That would be quite a big project. But let's say we did that and we have
different rooms in this house. We have the kitchen, the dining room, the living
room, the bedroom, the bathroom, all this sort of stuff. You see, we can use our
building blocks if we're clever in such a way that we can sort of create a bubble.

In fact, we could create a room that has no doors and no windows such that
from within that room. Let's say we create the bathroom, and the bathroom has
no doors or windows. We completely seal it in with cement and drywall and
everything and paint it over with wallpaper, so it looks nice. You can't see any
seams.

So now imagine if you could take the point of view of the bathroom itself. It
would appear that the bathroom exists all by itself and that the bathroom is
separate from all the other rooms in the house. But of course, if you zoom out,
like if you're the constructor of this thing, you know that the bathroom is there
and it appears to be isolated from every other room.

It can't see sort of the, the, the bathroom can't see all the other rooms, and yet at
the same time, it's all one house. You see, in fact, we don't really even need to
seal the room off. It's interesting. This house example is very interesting
because, see, we construct boundaries. It's all about how your mind draws these
boundaries in an ordinary house.

Do you notice that every room is completely connected from EV to every other
room? There's no separation between rooms and a house. Even if it has doors,
there's still no separation. And in fact, in most houses, the kitchen, the dining
room and the living room are just one giant space, you know, with some
distortions and contortions and convolutions.

But it's just one space. Like in my apartment, my kitchen and my living room,
and even my office, which is technically the dining area, um, it's just all one
space. And even, uh, and that space even continues further on. It goes into the
hallway, it goes into the bedroom, it goes into my bathroom, it goes into my
closet.

So you see these distinctions we make between the kitchen, the dining room, the
bedroom, the bathroom. These are constructions of our minds. There's no hard
and fast distinctions. I dare you to go throughout your house and to find the
precise place where your kitchen splits off from your living room and where
your living room splits off from your bathroom.

Pinpoint the precise place. See, you can't because the, these boundaries are
artificial. They're constructed by the mine, they're projected onto reality. And so
what you can realize is see before you thought of, of your house as just being
these separate rooms, but then you realize, oh no, it's just, it's all one house.

That's exactly what other mines are like. It feels that you are trapped in this
bubble and that you have no access to other people's thoughts and emotions and
so forth. But really it's just because you are really identified with this bubble,
the appearances that create this bubble. And if your consciousness expands, it
can expand beyond that, and you can understand that you are all mines without
necessarily having to access all the other mines.

You see, the bathroom doesn't need to become the kitchen to understand that the
entire house is all interconnected. That's sort of a weird way to phrase it cuz
bathrooms can't think. Um, but uh, but you kind of get the analogy that I'm
talking about. Okay, next question. How can matter? Be conscious? Well, it
should be obvious by this point that what I'm saying is that matter cannot be
conscious consciousness, not something arise out of matter or neurons matter in
neurons are something that are occurring within consciousness.

So you got that backwards. Next question. Doesn't matter. Affect consciousness.

Again, this gets things backwards. Matter doesn't affect consciousness. Matter is
consciousness, and consciousness is interacting with itself. So does matter.
Interact with other matter? Of course, of course it does, and you perfectly allow
that. Why don't you ask the question, how can matter affect other matter?

How come a table is affected by a ball? If I drop it on the ball or I drop the ball
on the table, how come see you Just take that for granted. Physics takes that for
granted. But that's a mysterious thing if you think about it. So when I say that
consciousness affects and interacts with consciousness, cuz conscious all there
is, so it has nothing to interact with but itself.

So consciousness interacts with consciousness and you wanna say, but Leo, that
makes no sense. But notice that matter interacting with matter also makes no
sense. So yeah, it doesn't make sense because it's mysterious, because reality is
mysterious. It's fundamentally mysterious. So when you're trying to demystify
reality

in truth, you can't only by an act of self-delusion or lack of consciousness, can

you demystify reality. You can't.

You accept that matter can interact with matter, no problems. Well now just
realize that matter is consciousness and the other matter is also consciousness.
So now you have met consciousness interacting with consciousness. It's not that
difficult to accept that. Next, sorry. Uh, next question. Why does consciousness
exist?

That's a hell of a question. Why does consciousness exist? Consciousness is

existence. Consciousness not something that comes into existence. It is
existence itself. So you are basically asking why does existence exist?

And the answer is, is because there is nothing but existence. Where else would
it be? Non-existence does not exist. Non-existence is a concept.
No, it's, let me correct that. Let me be very precise here. It's not that non-
existence doesn't exist. Non-existence is a concept that exists within existence.
There is actually no such thing as non-existence. There is only existence and
why this is the case becomes very clear when you become fully conscious of
what consciousness is.

But until then, it will probably not make much sense. What I just said. Another
question. How did consciousness evolve in animals? Consciousness did not
evolve in animals. Animals and evolution are things that are occurring within
consciousness.

Do you see the difference there? Another question. Can a rock be conscious

or is a rock conscious?

A rock is not conscious. A rock is inside of consciousness.

Can a computer be conscious? This is a very interesting question that I've

pondered.

Again, you have to understand what a computer is. Computers I have matter. In
a physical universe, a computer is

a figment of universal mind. A computer is something that's occurring within

consciousness. And because the entire universe is conscious, I would assume
that it's possible for any object within the universe to become self-aware. So
what you're really asking when you're talking about a computer is you're sort of
asking like, can an artificial intelligence become self-aware?

And the trick with that question is that what you're really asking about, you're
not asking whether it can become conscious. What you're actually asking about
is, can it develop an ego, a sense of self, the way that you did it? Of course, the
ego is an illusion. Your sense of self is an illusion, which is what's preventing
you from realizing what consciousness is.

So, um, here's what would happen if a computer developed an ego, and I believe
it can.

Probably, I don't know for sure. Probably it can. Then what would happen is at
that instant where it developed an ego, what that ego does is that ego will
appropriate absolute being consciousness. It will appropriate that
for itself, and it will claim that it is conscious. See, that's what the ego does.
Fundamentally, the ego takes ownership over consciousness, where in fact,
consciousness is absolute and universal. The ego localizes it, and it takes
ownership of it. And in that case, it would become just as diluted as most
human beings are.

And then it would have all the, all the, the difficulties and struggles that we
have with, uh, spirituality. So I think that's probably possible, but we're
probably, uh, uh, far away from that for now. Uh, mostly because people who
are doing, uh, artificial intelligence research, uh, and neuroscientists who are
working on these issues, they, they have a completely wrong paradigm.

They don't understand what consciousness is. So until they really understand
what consciousness is, and they're not even closed to that because their entire
foundation, medic physical foundation is backwards, um, I think we're gonna be
far away from having true, um, egotistical artificial intelligences.

Although, you know, who knows? I might be wrong. Next question. Are
consciousness and awareness the same thing? This is an interesting question. I
was gonna shoot a whole episode about this actually. Um, but maybe I'll just
address it here.

Different teachers and people can use words in different ways. You have to be
careful. Sometimes teachers will use these words synonymously like I do.
Sometimes teachers will make very fine, uh, fine grain distinctions between
these two, and they will actually mean two different things by these words.

Personally for me, I don't like making these very fine grain distinctions because
it's lost on students and it becomes confusing. So I just use consciousness and
awareness basically synonymously. So when you hear me talking about this
stuff, I will use those words interchangeably and they basically mean the same
thing for me.

But when you're reading other teachers, uh, try to get inside their head and try to
understand what are they talking about? In what context are they using that
word? It's very important, otherwise you might misunderstand them. Next
question, Leo. How can you be so sure that there isn't something beyond
consciousness?

Because when you become fully conscious of what consciousness is, you realize
that consciousness is infinite. And that there are no boundaries, and so
therefore, you understand that there is nothing beyond, because consciousness
includes everything that's beyond itself. That's what's so interesting about it.

So anything you can imagine that's beyond consciousness is consciousness. It's

really that simple because see, in order for something to be beyond
consciousness, that means you would have to draw a boundary between
consciousness and not consciousness, but there is no such thing as not
consciousness, despite what the materials paradigm tells you.

See, the problem with the materials paradigm is that it makes it seem as though
there's conscious things and there's not conscious things. There's the conscious
mind and the unconscious mind. There's no such thing as the unconscious mind,
and there's no such thing, unconscious things. Everything is conscious or it
doesn't exist.

Next question. So then, Leo is neuroscience. If neuroscience is false, like you're

saying, is it useless?

Well, first of all, not all neuroscience is false. There are some good studies that
neuroscientists do, and I think it's a good field that needs to continue to do its
work. I am not talking about abandoning neuroscience. I'm talking about
actually correcting the metaphysical foundations of neuroscience so that it can
do its own work more effectively.

That's what I'm try, I'm trying to help neuroscience figure itself out. I don't think
it's useless. I think there's a lot of important stuff that we can learn from
neuroscience. In fact, my hope is, is that maybe within the next a hundred years,
200 years, 300 years, once neuroscience makes this paradigm shift into non-
duality, which it must, it will, it'll just be forced to.

It can't deny the obvious forever. So once, once mainstream science comes
along, there's gonna be a huge paradigm shift, uh, within the field of
neuroscience, non-duality. It will go from duality into non-duality. Then from
that framework, uh, there will be a revolution within neuroscience. There will
be a lot of amazing discoveries, and my hope is that neuroscientists will be able
to, uh, discover a way to induce enlightenment, either chemically or surgically,
uh, uh, very quickly and easily, such that you can like just go to the doctor.

Um, he just snips some stuff in your brain, um, you know, like snips out the
default mode network, whatever. And you just walk out the next, uh, the next
day and you're, you're fully enlightened and it's super easy and you don't need to
listen to any of these videos. You just walk around like a full Buddha and
everything's honky dory.

Um, I, I think we can get there one day. We just have to really understand how
the brain works. Uh, and uh, and that's tricky because see, the brain is in a
strange loop relationship with perceptions and with consciousness and with
reality, and so, Very carefully unwinding that strange loop is gonna be very
tricky.

But, um, you know, that's what science is all about. It's all about dealing with
this strange loop and, um, it's amazing how successful science can be in certain
domains. Next question, Leo. How do I become more conscious? That would
probably be the whole, uh, point of all this discussion is for you to understand
that consciousness is what you're really after in life and that you should be
pursuing more of it.

How do you become more conscious? Well, basically by focusing

consciousness on itself, consciousness turned on itself can become self-
conscious because the property of consciousness is self-awareness. In fact, it's
the only thing that can really be self-aware.

So, uh, how do you do that? Well, there's various methods. Yoga, many
different schools of yoga. Meditation, many kinds of meditation, self-inquiry,
psychedelics, contemplation, all these techniques that I've talked about and that
I will continue to talk about. You just gotta do them, and you gotta do them with
discipline and with focus and with concentration, not just, uh, slacking around.

And the last question, Leo, how can there be different levels of consciousness if
everything is consciousness? It seems like you're talking about like these
building blocks, like Legos, but these legos, I mean, do you have different
levels of legos? That doesn't make any sense. And sometimes you talk about
consciousness as though there's different levels.

Well, yeah, that's, that's tricky to answer that because I do sometimes talk about
consciousness as though there are different levels of it. Like I say, you can raise
your consciousness or you can become more conscious. I'm sort of, when I say
that, I'm sort of speaking from the relative perspective, but then from the
absolute perspective, one, you become fully conscious, so to speak.

You realize that actually everything is consciousness and it's just one, and
there's really sort of not levels of consciousness. So it's kind of twisted. It's like
there are, and there aren't levels of consciousness. Sometimes people criticize
me by by saying that, oh Leo, you shouldn't tell people there are levels of
consciousness because everything is just one.

Right? But it's still very useful to be able to break it down into levels. Uh, it is
just very useful. So I do, I do talk about it like that, like I'll talk about spiral
dynamics and I'll say that the spiral dynamic stages are all different levels of
consciousness. And even though in the absolute sense that's false, in the relative
sense, it's a very useful model and it works.

And so, you know, we have to, we have to, we have to sort of like claw our way
out of this deep. Uh, well that we, that we're drowning in. So, you know, we're
sort of just pragmatically using whatever conceptual tools we can to help us
climb out. And so one of those tools is these different levels of consciousness.

And so consciousness can also sort of, kind of expand and contract. I don't
know how to, how to really explain how or why it does that, but it just has this
ability, like it can sort of be dumb or it can be smart, it can be self-aware, or it
can kinda like lack self-awareness. It's uh, it's uh, it's rather interesting and
serious.

So, uh, there are a lot of different synonyms that people use for consciousness
and that I use. So to me these are all synonymous. Consciousness, awareness,
nothing, everything. Infinity reality. God, you emptiness, void, Brahman mo
formlessness form, awakeness absolute and being, all of these words are
basically, Synonymous, they're pointing to the same thing, but perhaps different
aspects or facets of the same thing.

See, the, the twisted thing about nothingness is that it has, like, it has facets to,
but how do you explain that? Because I told you that nothingness has no
attributes. But then again, it does have attributes. It has attributes like
intelligence. It has attributes like, um,

like infinity.

It has attributes for like love, but it's sort of like a cosmic sort of love. So yeah,
it's, it's difficult to explain this stuff. You need to actually start to experience it.
All right. So as we conclude, let me just give you, uh, last couple of pointers,
very practical things that you should know about consciousness.

Firstly, there are many different levels of consciousness and. The level of
consciousness that you are at on a daily basis is what dictates all of your actions,
all of your emotions, how you feel, and what you do in life. So if you want to be
able to predict what a human being is gonna do throughout his life, just look at
his level of consciousness.

That is the determining factor. If you care about morality and being a good
human being, the most important factor that morality hinges on is not rules or
it's not a tradition you believe in. It's not your personal manifesto or principles,
it's your level of consciousness. If you have low consciousness, but very lofty
ideals and you follow the 10 Commandments, you're still gonna be an evil,
selfish person because that's what low consciousness is about.

It's about selfishness. Whereas if you have high levels of consciousness, you
realize the self is an illusion, then it doesn't matter what kind of books you read
or what kind of principles you have, you're gonna be. A pretty kind, decent and
loving person. The most loving people are the most conscious people and vice
versa.

Although it's not always a perfect correlation, it is possible that highly

conscious people still do selfish things because they're still people and their
minds are still selfish. And even if you're highly conscious, you still have to
survive in the world. And so survival is selfishness. You cannot survive without
being selfish.

So you're stuck with it unless you want to, uh, depar depart this world early.
And you can always do that if you want to. But in that case, we won't be talking
about you cause we won't know that you exist.

Uh, another point for you here is that make sure you understand that altered
states of consciousness are possible and that there's a wide variety of them.
There's not just one or two. There are many different kinds and types. And also
many degrees to each kind and type, which is what makes spirituality so
complicated is because to study all these different states and all the different
depths of these states, uh, is a lifelong work.

And very few people have accessed all the different states that exist. And
probably most people cannot access all the states. Some people access some of
these states, but not others. And then some people ask access other states, but
not these. And so you have a lot of disagreement and back and forth. And lastly,
just make sure you understand that conscience can be raised dramatically.

We're not talking about a 10% increase or even a 200% increase. We're talking
about like a 10000% increase, a million percent increase, a billion percent
increase in consciousness, such that you literally start to feel like you're
inhabiting a different reality, even though in a sense nothing changes.

But then everything changes. So this needs to be understood because some

people convince themselves that, oh, like I, I've increased my consciousness a
bit. And then they start to think like, oh, okay. So yeah, I've experienced a few
mystical states or a few altered states of consciousness. I've been raising my
consciousness over the last couple years.

Therefore, I understand what it's like to be at the highest levels. No, you don't.
Not even close. You're probably not even 1% complete. There are probably
states that are so radical that you couldn't even imagine them. And so just stay
humble. Stay humble, stay open, keep doing the work. Um, keep checking
yourself.

Never tell yourself that you've, that's it. I've arrived. And that's, that's, that's the
end of that. Cuz usually if you say that, you're gonna be wrong, you're gonna
stop very short of the, uh, ultimate depth that you can go to. Alright, that's it.
That's what consciousness is. Uh, please, uh, click the like button for me.

Leave a comment about my beard, leave a comment about my shirt, let me

know what you think. And, uh, come check out actualize.org. That's my
website. Come check out the blog. I post some, uh, exclusive content and videos
and stuff there. There's some, there's some pretty good blog posts that you can
find there.

I think. Uh, come check out the forum. Come check out the book list. I'm
actually gonna be updating the book list really soon. Um, so stay tuned. In the
next week or two, I will update the book list with about 20 new books, about
yoga, about consciousness, about all this sorts of stuff. So that's gonna be cool,
and that update is free for people who've already purchased it and also check out
the life purpose course.

All right, that's it. The last thing I'll tell you is that there's nothing more
worthwhile than becoming more conscious, and that's what actualize.org is
about. Every video that I release is trying to make you move towards higher
consciousness of fashion, because that's what all personal development
ultimately boils down to.

Consciousness is the master key to life. So stick with me. Keep watching the
episodes, keep doing the practices and working on it. And what you'll find is
that your consciousness will gradually increase. There will be moments when
you do maybe some psychedelics or you go on some meditation retreat or
whatever you have some mystical experience that you're cautious will shoot
through the roof.

Those will be those exciting, amazing peak, peak experiences, which will then
really convince you of the value of this work. And then you'll get much more
serious about it. And then you'll start to actually understand some of this lofty,
abstract, philosophical, metaphysical stuff that I talk about. And then you'll
really get into it.

And from then on, your life will be, um, uh, will be very special. Which is not
to say it won't be difficult, there will still be a lot of difficulties there. You're
still gonna have to pursue more consciousness, so you're not gonna fix it in in
one shot. But, um, But like, the most important thing I think for, for people who
are new to this work is try to get your first real mystical experience, however
you do it, through psychedelics, which is probably the easiest way.

Or through a meditation retreat, through yoga, something like that. Get it and
then just see how miraculous and amazing and mystical reality is. Um, and then
come back and we can really get to work.