Bernardo Kastrup - Part II - The Nature of Reality

6:20PM Sep 15, 2022

Speakers:

Andrew Holecek

Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo Kastrup

Keywords:

intellect

nature

impersonal

reification

suffering

bernardo

evil

intellectual

book

sense

mind

point

movement

reality

philosophy

understand

relational

nietzsche

individual

practice

Absolutely. Please.

So, you asked me and I didn't get to that. Is nature at its foundational level? Is it something that we could accurately describe as unconditional love? So is there? Is there a value judgment that we can make about the bottom level of nature of nature? Is it neutral? Or does it have valuations? Again, I'm not enlightened so I can tell I can give you an answer based on direct experience. But I am a attentive observer of nature. So if you look at nature before human beings, the natural world with animals, plants, fungus and the ecosystems of this planet, to the extent that they are not yet touched by human hands, what do I see? What I see is that unless you are a vegetable or a fungus, you have to kill to survive. And that killing is not sanitized. It's not like here in the Netherlands, if you want to die, you call your doctor who you have known for 30 years. And he comes to you in the comfort of your home and gives you an injection that makes you pass away lightly. And that's not how death occurs in nature. For animals to kill one another. It takes time, it takes a lot of blood, a lot of pain. It's messy. There's this documentary your watch the years ago never left my mind, pride of lions managed to pull down a medium sized elephant who got separated from from its group and the eight the elephant alive starting from its hind legs for six hours before the elephant passed out. against nature, in your backyard. Now in the summer, earthworms are being cut into pieces while alive and wiggling by ants. It's a bloodbath. So if you ask me, no, by observation of the natural world, whether nature is morally neutral, or has more evaluations, I would be tempted to say it's morally neutral. It acts spontaneously, not based on value judgments. Unconditional Love is obviously a part of it, because we see it happening even amongst animals. But I would say, the infliction of pain and fear, they are equally a part of it, apparently, because this stuff happens. It's just out there. You know, if there are other inhabited planets on this universe, and their star goes supernova, you know, they are barbecued. And in according to I forgot his name. Now, Dante according to Dante, stars are the image of an outpouring of love, you know, the love that moves the sun and the other stars, he wrote. And yet that outpouring of love burns you to a crisp. You could say, well, that's not good or evil. It's just an absence of of evaluations of moral evaluations. It's just nature being spontaneous. And so that's what I'm inclined to, I think nature, in and of itself, aside from human minds that have developed the higher level mental functions required to pass more evaluations, I think nature before that is neutral. That that would be my my suspicion. And look, I think we have a very pure Ohio infantile relationship with what we call evil. We think that evil is, say, this metal large scale. But it's obviously wrong, because sadism is by definition, something personal, at a very low scale and say this will only derive pleasure from inflicting suffering. If he if he has a direct intimate relationship with the subject who is suffering, who is then a masochist. If it's mutually consent consensual that that modality of mentation doesn't scale to the to the impersonal, like putting putting Is this the symbol of the greatest evil in the world today? Is he a sadist? I'm sure he's not. What he does is he replaces the concreteness of human experience with geopolitical abstractions in his mind. He's doing the right thing. Just like a Hitler's mind. He was doing the right thing. That is evil. It Evil is when you replace the concreteness of human suffering with abstractions.

When you replace reality with an abstraction, and you tell yourself I am doing the right thing, because this abstraction is true, that evil, we also think that only the others are evil and there is no evil in ourselves. That's profoundly infantile. And that's why evil grabs you on the butt. When you turn 40, you were a righteous citizen or of your life, not paying attention to the evil in you because you think there is no no, you tell yourself there is nothing until one day you pick up a rifle and you kill 15 in the nearest shopping mall. This is our naive relationship with evil with evil. I mean, if if we speak religious language, and through what we haven't realized yet is that the devil is secretly in the service of God. Yeah, Lucifer. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's what we are missing. So why am I saying all this because on the one hand, I'm not excluding evil from the fabric of nature, if unconditional love is there, and so is evil in the form of abstractions, or in the form of sadism at a small scale. But at the same time, I think when we look upon evil as something fully undesirable, we are not keeping our eyes on the ball. Because sometimes not sometimes I think it's systematically so if you don't suffer, you don't ask the right questions. Don't ask the deep questions, and you do not evolve, you do not become more mature, you would have an epicurean life as Tolstoy quote, it's a purely epicurean life. In other words, you're just riding away thoughtlessly. You having fun, and at the end of it, you look back, and you're like, What was this about again, and it was all for nothing. It is suffering, the suffering that life imposes on us, that stops us in our tracks and forces us to ask, Oh, wait a moment. What's going on here? What is this for? Who am I? Why Am I Suffering? What What am I supposed to do? What is the meaning of this whole thing, and suffering forces metacognitive introspection. And if you think enlightenment is full, metacognitive introspection, then maybe suffering is another way to go. It's what it's nature's way to force you to stop and contemplate what's going on. So I think the evil that inflict suffering is as much a part of nature as anything else. And to some extent, it's not even undesirable. Of course, what Putin is doing is completely undesirable, completely unnecessary. you're achieving nothing, nothing, because at some point, after you have extracted the juice out of your suffering, and you've learned everything there is to learn from that. If you continue to suffer, then that is futile. And that's for nothing. And usually we do that to ourselves. We, we squeeze the juice out of our suffering, and then because of habit, we continue to force ourselves to suffer, we continue to torture ourselves. Because we don't know of any other way to go about life. We've become habituated to that. So that's one form of unnecessary suffering that should be eradicated if we could. And the other one is large scale suffering posed by futile and senseless geopolitical abstraction, which is the puddings, the Hitler's and the Stalin's and the others that we've seen through history. Because that's unnecessary suffering life, by by its nature already imposes enough suffering on us. We all have to leave the maternal safety and face this world. At some point, we all lose our loved ones, we all get sick. We all have unavoidable unavoidable disappointments. So it's enough that natural suffering, there's no need to add to that. But that that natural suffering, which sometimes is induced by what we might call evil, like the evil of a disease that robbed you of your loved one, like my father was robbed from me when I was 12. We may call that evil, I would say it's just nature being nature, and it's not even undesirable. Yeah, yeah. And,

again, so much here, marinara, what comes to mind is to what degree is available for you to associate evil, with again, returning to this narrative of contraction, I mean, when I look at a Putin and again, I look about your own experience, the speed of the spin, the degree of the contraction is core relative to the degree of the self sense, the separation there also, the more I reify the sense of self, the more by immediate implication are we find this sense of other and therefore, I don't give a crap about the other because I can't even feel myself. And so to whatever, to what extent can we associate returning some of these narratives, bring them together? This notion of evil with hyper contraction, the speed of the spin being so self centered, so imploded such an incredible black hole, you've lost touch with everything, there's no sense of empathy, feeling, whatever. And so therefore, through that, perhaps an understanding of what could be done as a curative ingredient with these sorts of things. Does that hold traction for you?

Absolutely. I mean, if your understanding is not purely intellectual, and unfortunately, analytic philosophy, academic philosophy today has become a purely conceptual exercise. They are assembling structures with dominoes, that conceptually they they look right. And then two years later, they look back at it, and ah, no, it's wrong. And then they reassemble the dominoes and publish another book, that academic philosophy for you today, it's not true philosophy, philosophy has to be embodied, you have to take your understanding seriously, you have to actually believe what you're saying. And when you're playing conceptual games, you don't actually believe what you're saying, you're just moving the dominoes around. And many of my famous colleagues out there in the world today, which you have heard about, that's what they do. That is the business of analytic philosophy in academia. But if you internalize a certain understanding, it inevitably leads to life changes, not all of them good. For instance, empathy is something that through understanding increases a lot, even recovering your natural self increases empathy, because your natural self is empathic. I remember, when I was a kid, I had a fight with a lawyer, friend of mine. And I managed to place the right point at the right time, and he began to bleed from his nose, I went into despair. I thought, Oh, my God, I hurt him. And I remember that he needs to today I was like, I needed to not be myself. I was just out of I mean, the empathy with Him, knowing that I was the cause of it was just, I wasn't distraught because of that. And that's, that's your natural self, you recover that you don't even need an understanding and recover your natural self, your natural self, is rooted in reality in nature. And it intuitively picks up on that reality without needing a conceptual model like we do as adults. But because I, at least my idealism is embedded in me, at least, if not in others, but at least in me, life becomes more difficult in other ways, like the first three weeks of the Ukraine war, I was completely dysfunctional. Yeah. And I had to relearn how to be a bastard, how to compartmentalize my empathy and put it in a room and lock it up for most of the week, and just visit during the weekend, so I can preserve my humanity. So I had to learn that because I was completely dysfunctional. So again, I know beware of what you want.

Yeah. Yeah, it is a surgeon general's warning on the spiritual path that when we open to that degree, then we become more transparent not only to ourselves, but to the world at large in this in this openness can translate into into hypersensitivity. And you know what one maximum, I think my friend Ken Wilber talks about it this way, is along the spiritual path, you feel things more, but eventually, they hurt you less, because you don't give them a place to land. And so I find that very interesting. The one thing there's two things I want to tie together Bernardo, there's so much rich material here. I'm wondering, one of the big issues, these things are these narratives are all connected. So if there is an original sin in Buddhism, and of course there isn't. It's one of the reasons I like it so much. If there is an original sin in Buddhism, I would argue that it's reification born of ignorance, and therefore reification is really almost closely synonymous with materialism itself. And so what I'm concerned with here are interested in how this relates to you. And, you know, this is a study at a student of the neurosciences that we talked about mind and we talked about mind at large and there's an inherent monotheism implied here. Well, I'm wondering if it's more accurate, to talk about non dualism, that even when we talk about mind, in this relates to this notion of identity, the plasticity of identity the ego is just one dimension, one locus FaceTimed coordinate locus of identity, and part of the spectrum of our being and even understanding that helps with the D reification. of the self set. So we're not just this one monolithic thing. So to me, isn't it more accurate Bernardo to talk about minds plural mind, that every moment and a pixelated atomistic way out of the zero point energy field or the Dharmakaya, whatever term you want to talk about, reality is popping in and out of existence mind is expressing itself at these lightning fast speeds that we flicker fuse together to create the illusion of continuity. But these these principles, I think, are important, because otherwise we reify even the notion of mind idealism, and there's a there's a wonderful maximum, I wanted to share this with you from the Maha Mudra tradition, so has so much power with the it goes like this, they will call the four pointings out, the first one is all appearances are mind, second one, mind itself is empty. Third, emptiness is spontaneously present. Fourth, spontaneous presence itself liberated, and therefore understanding the empty nature of mind itself, is actually important, because otherwise one can slide into a subtle reification that takes place, even in the idealistic trajectory. So can you talk to us a little bit about that minds not mind, the plasticity of identity and then this,

there are two points one is what is meant by mind. Yep. And the other point is reification. I won't speak to them separately, although they are obviously interrelated. What I mean, when I use the word mind is just subjectivity. In spirituality, it seems that many spiritual teachers use the word mind to mean particular contents of mind like thoughts, particular expressions of subjectivity, that what they call mind, thinking is mind. But I use the word mind in, according to the meaning in the Western tradition, which equated mind with psyche, which was also so which basically means just the empty field of subjectivity. Now, the way to understand why it's empty is the following. Every experience is an excitation of that field. Physicists understand this immediately, because quantum field theory is based on exactly the same idea, the field itself isn't a thing, it's empty. But when the field gets excited, then that's what we call things like elementary, subatomic particles are patterns of excitation of a quantum field. And without the excitation, there is no particle, there is nothing, there is only the potential for excitation, which is what we call the field, the field is not a thing, it's a potential for things, when that potential gets excited. So mind is exactly like that mind is pure subjectivity, in and of itself, if it's if it's not excited, it's not a thing, it's not even an experience. It's the potential for experience. But when it gets excited, then you have experiences and things are experiences, of course, insofar as we can determine. So that's what I mean by by mind, mind, I mean by it, a field of subjectivity, that isn't a thing, it's the potential for experience, and experiences or patterns of excitation of that field. And because there are infinite possible patterns of excitation, out of that one empty thing, you can have the infinitude of the complexity of nature. Now, this is not difficult to understand for anybody in in working on high energy physics or fundamental physics, because it's the ABC 123 of quantum field theory, the field is not a thing, things are patterns of excitation of the field. And that's why everything can exist out of no thing. It's not nothing, because the potential is, is not nothing. There is a potential in nature, metaphysical potential in nature. So it's nothing. But it's it's no thing. It's not a thing, because things are it's excitations. So that's the first thing now on reification. I think the dilemma we face, now and have faced for over a century, has been resized in the life of Nietzsche. Because you see, we all have a deep intuition of transcendence. And that intuition is both a awareness that there is something transcendent in the sense that something that we cannot perceive or conceptualize. It transcends the intellect. It's beyond the reach of the intellect. And we feel a pull towards it, which you could refer to as the religious impulse. And it's very natural in religion is absolutely natural. It has been a part of human life for 95% of the human population throughout history, if not more, so it's completely natural. And so that it reflects both the awareness that the restaurant sentence and the pole to go to it. Now, something that transcends you is by definition bigger than you. It cannot be corralled into the confines of, of the ego, of the individual. But if you conceptually and intellectually, refuse transcendence, if you go against your natural intuition of transcendence, your natural religious impulse, you face a peculiar dilemma and that was embodied most in Nietzsche because Nietzsche had tremendous innate religious disposition, a profoundly profoundly religious person. And we know that from good sources, we know that from Luz Salome, the only woman who ever lived in his life, and she wrote about it, while Nietzsche was still alive, crazy, but it's still alive. In a wonderful book called Nietzsche, by loose Solomon, I would recommend everybody to read that book.

So he, he repressed his natural impulse towards transcendence by convincing himself given the Darwinian and materialist ethos of his time, in the late 19th century, that there was no God and religion was nonsense. So what he had to do was to find transcendence in himself. And that was the Uber match. That was the Superman, which, of course, is, is a responsibility that the individual cannot bear. It's too weighty, we are not atlases holding the world on our shoulders, the individual cannot bear the risk the weight of the responsibility of transcendence, and need to drove him literally insane. No surprise there. No man went nuts. Of course, because he was a sincere philosopher, his philosophy was embodied. It was not just a conceptual game for him, he lived his philosophy. And the moment, he puts that responsibility on his shoulder, he collapsed. Now what others do when they try to do the same thing, and that's the danger is when you redefine the individual and try to turn individual into a historical figure bigger than life, you try to turn your moist, warm, stinky body into a marble statue while you're still alive. And that's what Hitler tried to do. Hitler, he, he identified himself with the whole of the Germanic peoples. And he tried to bear the responsibility for the destiny of the Germanic peoples. And that not only is a responsibility that cannot be contained in an individual, if you try to either drive you insane, or will inflate you. And that's what happened to him. He became well not but inflated Lee, so you try to make your individual and historical figure bigger than life. And that is what we call evil. That's real evil. Sadism is not evil. Sadism is localized, containable, it's not not welcome shouldn't be tolerated. But it's not a social problem. This is the reification of the individual to try to comport within its boundaries, the entire way to the sheer weight of transcendence is what will drive you to evil under the guise of profound. Good.

Exactly, exactly. So in a certain way, it's a very twisted substitute gratification. You know, one of the things that you picked out earlier, Bernardo, my languaging is by discovering the literally discovering the ultimate empty nature of the self sense that that in Buddhism is, is emptiness, and we've been, you've been circumambulating, this even the notion of the excitation of the zero point energy field, that that is an absolutely perfect definition of emptiness in a Buddhist tradition, but that emptiness is also fullness. It's a plenitude is potentiality for arising and so, what the way I read this is that this ties into the notion of fear there are two fundamental twofold fear with fear of our inherent non existence that's fear of emptiness, no thingness aspect of our identity and by definition, reality, but also a social way. There's the fear of emptiness, the fear of fullness, the fear of being everything. And so someone like Hitler, is a substitute gratification instead of realizing that he is everything right by becoming nothing he becomes everything is perverted into this twisted thing. I am going to become everything I'm going to conquer it appropriated and even could even Putin is a raging insane, fundamentally reducible to these principles, the application of the His teachings that fundamentally, instead of being everything, just relax and be the universe, no, I don't get it, I still have this longing, I have this impulse, I haven't yet I have to scratch. I don't know how to scratch it, I just know I feel empty and a deficient sense. And so I'm just going to, I'm just going to consume everything. And

the difference is the difference between being everything, by understanding you are not the individual, and trying to bring everything into the individual. That's the unlock, it's not only here to learn, and putting this has happened, this is happening all the time companies, CEOs, Trump, the closer he gets to death, the older he gets, the higher the need for him to transcend individuality. And that will go completely off the rails at some point. You see that everywhere. Rupert Murdoch, Murdoch, in his 80s Still fighting the fights of an of an adolescent, because he's trying to transcend the individual by consuming the transpersonal data, that's the right word consuming you nail in the head. So you transcend try to transcend individual not by dropping the individual. But But by having the individual consume the world. And unfortunately, that's the recipe or culture gives us

you instead of the instead of the individual consuming itself, fundamentally. And so really, for me, Bernard, again, I want to bring this back to this extraordinary cash value, practical street level application of what we're talking about here. The Fundamentally, this is the source of the obesity epidemic at every level, whether it's physical obesity, or for me, intellectual obesity, I have to consume that next ideology, that next book, I'm gonna get a fat belly, but I get a fat head, spiritual obesity, spiritual materialism. And so to me, right here, this misunderstanding of these fundamental principles, substitute gratifications instead of the real thing. That's why we have so many problems, we're eating the menu instead of the meal. And that's why we're getting fat and not full. And you can see this at every level of consumerism, it's killing the planet, it's killing other people, it all can be reduced to these fundamental ideological principles, they can see my philosophical arm cheering. But, lordy, lordy, this is the way to explain the vast variety of the shitshow that we know some sorrow in the world today.

Yeah, we are another lesson culture, in the sense that, you know, the recipes and the formulas we get from, from our culture are suitable, suitable for the first half of life when you have to carve out a space in the world for you. And there is no other way to do that. But to have some degree of self affirmation. And so you, you carve out a space for you, you have a job, you have some degree of participation in the society where you live, you have a home, you can put food on the table, you start building a family. So that's the recipe for the first 35 years of life. But older cultures have always known that once you get there, then the game changes. And there is a sense in which it becomes the opposite of that. It's not about carving out the carving out space for you as an individual. It's about transcending your individuality, and dropping old systems of valuations, dropping the old understanding about what's important, what life is about, it's a different, a different turn a different perspective on life. But our culture, unlike older cultures, do not have recipes and, and guidance for that. On the contrary, we we figured that out, though, everything changes in the second when you transit through now, that Saturnian phase in the in the middle of life. We think that we can only keep applying the same rules, the same values, the same goals, the same recipes. So if you have a house then the second one, if you have a card and the second one. And if you have the second one, then a boat, a yacht. And if your company is already turning revenues of $10 million. Well, the neighbor is turning 100. So I want the 100 then after that the billion and then you end up with Elon Musk and the head of Amazon. What was his name again, Bezos, Bezos, Jeff Bezos exchanging farms online like to teenagers, to teenagers. Right. And so we have lots of septuagenarians and octogenarian teenagers. In our society today. We've dropped adulthood and maturity off. It's gone. Yeah, this is yeah, that this leads to dysfunctional situations shouldn't be shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. So my

daughter let's get practical here then. So Oh, WTF WTF do you do? How do you shake the snow globe? Short of, you know, nature's fundamental imposition of impermanence, old age, sickness and death? How can people like us and people who are listening? work really well, the question is transformation. What is the mechanics the mechanism of transformation? How can we in any way outside of what we're doing with our life work? Invite avenues of transformation by pointing out the limitations of the previous paradigm? I mean, really open question for you, how can we work to change the samsaric agenda?

See, see our answer, I have no clue, I have no idea. And I'm completely at peace with having no clue. Because that too, is, is an implication of dropping the individual in you, I no longer feel personal responsibility for the end result of this planet wide process. Who am I to try to comprehend the dynamics or of that process and take responsibility for the end result, all that I can do is to not fight nature, when nature is trying to express itself through me. In other words, to pay attention to the impersonal within me to the movements of the impersonal within me, which most people don't even know it's there, let alone identify, it's also part of growing up, it's to, to realize what movements of your mind are yours, and in which ones aren't yours at all. It's like, you know, your thinking thoughts, like you see the houses as you walk down the lane, they are not yours. They are movements of the impersonal within you. And after a decade of, of suffering, I, I figured out how to I think how to identify the movements of the impersonal within me, and I go along with it. And I don't need to understand how this will contribute to the final solution. Or even if there is a solution. I don't know when I'm not trying to know. And I don't need to know. My responsibility is to not resist what nature stopped trying to do through me. Now, do I believe that preaching will solve anything? Well, I reserve the right as a little monkey evolved on this planet to think that it doesn't, because otherwise 2000 years of Christianity would have solved a lot of things. It has been a lot of preaching. So it doesn't seem the way to go about it. So how do we differentiate what I'm doing from from preaching? I don't know. But again, I don't need to know. The only thing I need to know is, is this what nature spontaneously is trying to do through me? Yes, absolutely. And it's crystal clear to me. Because when I resist it, I suffer in ways that I know I don't need to suffer. And if I go with it, then I am in peace, even though I don't quite understand if for why I'm helping in any way. And even if I actually don't think I'm helping anything. Yeah. And I'm stewing piece that I'm doing this. So yeah, I don't know if this helps you. I didn't know.

It's first of all, it's extraordinarily honest, candid and points to the enormity that that fundamentally, there's a maximum in the Buddhist tradition. Don't expect applause that it's a long slog and mind training slogan where basically, you just do the right thing, based on your Damon, letting nature work its way through you. And then that's all you can do. That's the best you can live your life. And then short of you know, Albert had some idea of throwing LSD into the water system. You know, I'm hoping and this is to me, I interview some guests where they talk about this impending punctuated equilibrium where there's going to be this cataclysmic awakening in direct proportion to the darkness. I think keep my fingers crossed and pray that that it may be so but developmentally, historically, it doesn't seem to work that way. That's an open question for me. But a couple of things Barnardos as we start to slowly wrap up, because oh, I mean, really, I can talk to you for hours. So incredibly rich, the strengths and the limitations of intellect, the cognitive apparatus, which you archetypically represent in the most dazzling way. How far can it take you? How much of reality can you grok? And where does that in your experience and also, academically, doctrinally praxis? At what point does Praxis come into play? Because for me philosophy, and again, I'm a dilettante. I'm not a professional philosopher. For me philosophy, a little bit like politics has a slight pejorative tinge in the sense that it can be constipation from the head on up where you're just mentally masturbating and what Are you know the story?

Oh, the most of it is that mental masturbation.

So at what point in your life as, as the archetype of incisive, The Guardian, you know, critical analysis, dissecting reality into its fundamental ingredients? How far can that take you and the role of Praxis practice, both in your life personally, if you don't mind going there. And somewhat? Certainly, theoretically.

Well, let me let me start by just trying to echo what you just said. If you find yourself in a position where I find myself in which I have to anonymously review, technical manuscripts submitted to a few well known philosophy journals, only then do you grasp the sheer amount of mental masturbation going on out there. Totally useless, disconnected, conceptual, clouded nonsense, that would do nothing to anyone other than to help you achieve your quota of publications per year. So you maybe get tenure at some point. That's all. That's all it is. It's a massive waste of human resources and creativity. It's at a scale. That is sometimes you go like, Oh, my God, what are we doing? Is this what philosophy has turned into? No conceptual card games, pure mental masturbation, through philosophy is not that even when it's wrong, like probably everything Nietzsche ever said was wrong. But it was embodied. It was lived in it helped him mature it it, it brought him somewhere, and therefore brought the mind of nature through him somewhere. So that's, that's just the beginning now. Your question was, sorry, Mr. Yeah.

How far can intellect really, when it's used them in the best possible way?

I think, and this is what happened to me. When I did an MBTI test, then. Yeah, whatever that personality test with 16 profiles. When I did that, in my 20s, I scored a perfect score on the thinking. They mentioned, pure thinking, I don't think it happens very often that anybody scores a perfect score. And thinking that I did. If I would do that test again, today, it would be completely different. And the reason was the following, I have always taken my intellect extremely seriously. When I was in my teens and my 20s, I thought, this is the only reliable avenue to knowledge today, I know that the intellect has led most of us astray throughout history. But at the time, I really believed that so I took my intellect very seriously. But one thing that happened to me and doesn't seem to have happened to many other people is that I could not help but be intellectually honest towards myself. And I see so much self inflicted intellectual dishonesty around today that I'm not quite capable of relating to it. I don't know how that plays out. I don't know what happens in the minds of people. For that to happen. I couldn't help but be intellectually honest towards myself. So when I discerned clearly what we today call the hard problem of consciousness in my 20s, I could not look in the mirror and say, Well, this is something we will solve at some point in the future. So let's just go merrily on that. I couldn't do that. Because to me, that was an obvious sign that I took a certain path of reasoning that led to an internal contradiction. Just playing out, yes, something was wrong in that pattern, the pattern of thinking. So I had this apparently, to my advantage, apparently, even if it's natural, it's not average. Because there is so much intellectual dishonesty of there, which I frankly, don't quite understand. But again, I don't need to understand it is okay, you know, I'm not responsible for it. So I don't need to understand. But it was my intellect that forced itself to recognize the limits of the intellect in my 30s. Beautiful, because it's only when you mature that you realize, for instance, that logic is intrinsically arbitrary. You cannot logically argue for the validity of logic, because that's circular reasoning. Yeah, the five axioms that underlie Aristotelian logic they seem to have a lot of empirical grounding, and there is debate about around that because quantum mechanics actually contradict contradicts those five axioms, but they are just that they're just axioms, things that seem to be self evidently true to our monkey mind. But who is to say that the monkey has evolved enough to be able to recognize self evident truths instead of deluding itself? I mean, the limits of the intellect become painfully clear to a self honest intellect. You know what I mean?

And that's a rare it's a rare bird.

It may be rare statistically. But it seems to me to be incredibly natural. That if you pursue your intellect, consequently, and honestly, it's inevitable, you will confront its limitations. And then how do you use the intellect to make sense of this? Well, it's also very self evident, we think symbolically, we use reason to think symbolically means to replace elements of realities with concepts and then work out those concepts, and translate the results to reality. In other words, you need some kind of inner language, either language like English, or the language of mathematics, or conceptual language, you need some kind of language. And we think linguistically only for about 30,000, maybe 50,000 years. It's a blink of an eye ago just happened. The intellect has just been born to think that it's mature enough, to cognize. Every salient aspect of nature, as far as the meaning and purpose of life is concerned, is intellectually speaking, preposterous hubris, it's absolutely preposterous. It's the intellect contradicting itself. So an intellectual edification of the intellect is internally contradictory. Because if you pursue the intellect, consequently, you will very quickly find out that the limits of the intellect are very near, we see very little, very, very little, there is a lot more going on that is not amenable to intellect, intellectual comprehension, comprehension, than the things that are amenable to intellectual comprehension. The problem is that we create our whole lives around the things that are amenable. Let me let me give you a concrete example from my other profession. I'm also a computer scientist. People say, Well, we must understand nature very well, because we can build these exquisite computers. reliably they all work. Well, what people don't know is that in computer engineering, there is a concept called signal to noise ratio. And what it means is that we build everything. So the thing we understand, is expressed in everything else that we don't understand which we don't even know how much it is, we lock out of the system. So we design systems that are immune to everything we don't understand, and operate only on the basis of what we do. And we call it a good signal to noise ratio. That's the technical term. So therefore, our lives our world around us, is permeated by everything we understand. So we think we understand everything. No, no, no, that's by construction. We just shut out everything that we don't understand, which may be 99% of nature. Actually, it's at least 95% of nature or 96% of nature. Because even matter, which we don't understand, but we fancy that we do even matter is only 4% of what is out there. And even matter we don't understand we think matter. Now, most people think we we saw the Higgs boson at CERN. No, we didn't see. And then the people who know we didn't see they think we've measured the Higgs boson directly. No, not even that. The Higgs Boson decays before it interacts with any measurement surface. If people actually knew what it what it is that we mean, when we say we found the Higgs boson. They would go like this that is really fantastic.

There's a couple of things that really come to mind here Bernard, I want to share you may know this famous story about you know, Mulan, Naza. Dean right, the great Sufi jokester, fantastic story were being up to the modern age where that was my dean is looking outside underneath the streetlight for these keys, and he's scurrying right or this he's scurrying around looking looking looking and the neighbor comes up and says moolah, what are you doing man? He goes, I lost my keys. Oh, I'll help so they're out there looking together looking looking. And finally you know, half an hour later the neighbor says, I'm not finding anything man. Like where did you lose these things? Oh, I lost them back in my house. And they will why that F are we looking out here because they There's more light out here, right? We look where the looking is easy. But that's not where the key was lost and therefore it can be found. And so the other thing along this that I wanted to share with you again the genius in the garden I'm not sure I haven't heard references from you and your work of his work if it's there I haven't seen it. But his classic treatise the fundamental entrance to the middle way the moolah Metallica characters that influence Rovelli so beautiful. One of the things that Nagarjuna does that you do to a great degree is use the intellect against itself. What Nagarjuna did that he was unparalleled was like a master jujitsu artist. He basically took whatever came at him and turned it back upon the presenter. And his his form of reasoning was called the non affirming negation. In a certain sense, there's an affirmation quality where you're, you're not just negating, but there was a slight ending, not a criticism of math, massive applause. There is this affirmation of the idealistic approach. But the non affirming negation seems to be a large part of what you're doing as well, that you're just negating, negating whatever, you know, look at look at the the inherent fallacies in the construct, in this case, the edifice of the materialistic view, turn it against itself, let this house of cards reveal itself and then crumble under its own weight. And to me when I look at your work, that that's part of the extraordinary contribution and Bernardo, I've been around the block, I've heard a few things, I've seen a lot of things, and your genius. And that capacity is without peer, your your ability to to, to actually engage in this community. First of all is unparalleled. Your courage in doing so is is applaudable. And then underneath it all this this this sense of irony humor that that the levity, you could say, behind the seriousness of what you're doing is just something that really warms my heart and brings just a smile to my face. So I just wanted to throw that out. As a warm,

there are a couple of comments I want to make, please. The first one is the following. You've, you've put me to great heights several times today. But based on everything else, you said, I think that you know that none of this is me and you're just playing a social game here. So in that sense, it's fine, I'm not going to resist the social game, because I think you know, better deep inside. The other thing about Nagarjuna or Nagarjuna, the correct pronunciation, rebel is use of Nagarjuna, I would say the following the intellect is very limited. But for certain things, it has proven useful. So it's not valueless, it's not something to discard and throw away. The other thing is, even with its limitations, If one chooses to make one's case based on the intellect, then one has to be consistent within the rules of the intellect. Now you might say, well, the intellect is not reliable, okay, then play a different game, play the game of intuition. But then you don't build your case house based on the intellect and then switch to something else. Because then you're just shooting yourself in the foot. If you don't change the rules of the game, after you're playing, you started playing. So because otherwise even the limited value of the intellect now it will be zero. Because you know, you start playing the game, according to intellectual rules, then you switch switch to something else. Yeah, now it's just nonsense. Yeah, even the limited value of the intellect is being thrown away. And what Colonel has done, but I've confronted him with this once and me and him, and and others have indirectly, indirectly, indirectly confronted him with my statements about this thing that I'm going to talk about now. So it's no news for him. I think he built relational quantum mechanics, which is a perspective on quantum mechanics that I agree with, it basically says, All physical entities are relational. They don't have absolute existence. They're like movement movement is relational. Now, if you're inside the train, you are not moving in relation to the train, but you are moving in relation to the platform. There is no absolute movement, there is only movement in relation to something else. And relational quantum mechanics, based on empirical results in laboratory results, says that all physical entities are just like movement. They are relative to the to the to the perspective of measurement, in technical terms. They are contextual, they do not have absolute existence. If they are not being observed, there is nothing there. For the same reason that if all that existed in the universe were billiard ball, then it makes no difference would make no difference whether the billiard ball is static or movement, because there is no reference for it. So you can't even talk about existence in that case. So you cannot talk about the existence of the physical world in absolute terms, because all physical entities are relational, just like movement. That's relational quantum mechanics. But then, of course, it immediately raises or implies the following. Relational entities exist in relation to absolutes. Movement is relational, but you end the training in absolutes. You see what I mean?

Totally. And so right away? Can't you just say relationships to other relationships, there is no absolute,

but that's exactly what Ravel is doing? What he says the following, there are no absolutes. Relationships, are relationships between relationships, right? And those are relationships between meta relationships. And those are relationships between meta meta relationships, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. In philosophy, we call it infinite regress. Exactly. And it's an example of a fallacy. It's nonsense.

So it only will make sense. But I also educate me here. So it only makes sense. If it's relational, then to some absolute, is that what you're positing? Is that your challenge to exactly and so the absolute? So say more about that? What then is

that? Okay, so bear with me a little, sorry, I'm

so excited. I can't

translate this into language, everybody can understand what Ravalli is saying is entirely equivalent to the following. He's saying that everything is movement, but there is nothing that moves. Move movement is a relationship between movements. But there is nothing that moves. In other words, you are saying nothing. It's a statement you can construct linguistically in a grammatically correct way. But it has no meaning. There is no semantic value to it, you are seeing absolutely nothing if I say everything that exists is movement, and there is nothing that moves. Well, I produced words in English, but I'm saying absolutely nothing. And in philosophy, it's one of the it's one. textbook example of the fallacy fallacy is nonsensical stuff when your thinking goes astray. It's a textbook example of the infinite regress fallacy. It's turtles all the way down so far, well, it's movement all the way down, and there is nothing that moves, moves. It doesn't help that you make this chain of recursion infinite. At the end, there will still be nothing that moves. You see. So what you're doing is you're trying to create a mist of infinitude in infinite recursions. And you need a closing your eyes and see and it works out. No, it doesn't work out. Because on the other side of the mystery, still nothing. You see what I mean? So now you may say, well, Bernardo, you don't get it. It's the intellect that is unreliable. Okay? But then drop relational quantum mechanics because relational quantum mechanics was built according to rules of reasoning. You, if that's the game you chose to play, then play the game consistently. And in the back of your head, you are aware that the intellect has its limitations, but at least whatever value it does have, you milked it, because you have been intellectually consistent. But if you change the rules of the game, then it's nothing. You have nothing. It's just nonsense. A miracle. It's like that cartoon. There is a guy on the blackboard long mathematical derivation. And then there is nothing there. And then he continues, and then somebody else asks, What is this here in the middle? And he says, oh, here, a miracle happens? No, that's not the way to go. And what Ravel is doing is the following. He's going to Nagarjuna, who was playing a different game, the game Nagarjuna was playing was realize the limits of the intellect. He was not building a theory on an intellectual basis. On the contrary, he was trying to point out the limitations of the intellect. That's also a self consistent game, but a different one. You cannot tell us during his Yeah, I will do relational quantum mechanics based on the intellect and drag it as far as I can, but when it violates my metaphysical prejudices, because his metaphysical prejudice is the following, the bottom layer of reality is physical. So if physicality is relative, there can be no absolute absolute layer underneath to ground the meaning of those relations, because physicality is the bottom layer. So if physicality is relative, then there can be nothing See nothing under lies physically, that's his prejudice. So he follows reason until the point the limit of what his prejudice is accept. And then he surrenders to this practice his prejudices and goes to Nagarjuna and say, well, it's not it's turtles until the end, because it's nothing. It's all nothing anyway. I don't need to think about that. It's all nothing. I think that is not fair play.

You can't play that game.

You can't play that game. Yeah. Nagarjuna was saying is, there is no thing. And that's what relational quantum mechanics states, things are relational. They don't have absolute existence. There is no thing. But there are potentials for things because even if everything's an illusion, the illusion is not nothing. It's an illusion. It's not nothing. Some thing not a thing, but something.

Yeah. Some phenomena. Yeah. You just say that.

Yeah. Some existent has to be the case, even if it is just the potential for things. But that potential is not nothing. In the same way that an illusion is not nothing. There is a difference between an illusion happening in illusion not not not happening. Yeah, yeah. So like I Judith Nagarjuna was saying, there are no things. Because at the bottom level, it's only mind and mind is a field. It's a set of potentials. It's not a thing. Yeah. But there are valleys taking that to mean, nothing. Yeah, yeah, there isn't even a non physical field. Because physicality is all there is in his worldview, according to his prejudices. And what I'm trying to say is the following. There is an absolute level to reality. It's just not physical. physicality is relational to that absolute level. And that absolute absolute level is mental. Yeah. And physicality is what arises when there is an interference pattern between the mentation of their implementation. Is he in here? And if there isn't this interaction, there is no interference pattern, and there is no physicality. Yeah, but the mental stuff is still there. Yeah. Yeah. And that seems to me the only intellectually, or intellectually consistent conclusion you can derive from the intellectual edifice of relational quantum mechanics and that its author violates the direct implication of his own work, because of a metaphysical prejudice, and then appealing to somebody who was precisely trying to undermine an intellectual game. It's like, Come on, don't do this.

Yes, like when you do when you engage, when one engages in Buddhist dialectic and debate, you may, you may have seen these videos of monks doing, you know, the waving thing, and they throw their hand and I've had the great wonder, of training and that kind of dialectic. And one of the classic things you do there that's incredibly elegant, very precise, is you cannot jump out of these frameworks, you set a particular set of frameworks, you have agreed upon definitions. And the only way that has the devastating power that is designed to have is if you don't jump ship, if you stay within the paradigms of that particular approach, and don't have the impulse to jump out like that, because that's cheating, that doesn't work in that way. So

even beyond that entry, look, I'm keenly aware of things be aware of the limitations of the intellect. But even if I, if I accept that the game we play today, in our culture is an intellectual game, it will probably take 1000 years for it to be a more mature game than that. But even within the parameters of the intellect, we we can extract still much better conclusions than we are extracting today. So even given the limitations of the intellect, we can still do a lot better within those limitations, because materialist is materialism is empirically contradictory, internally contradictory. It has arguably no explanatory power because it doesn't explain experience and all we have is experience, right? I mean, it's just nonsense. It is very bad. It's bullshit. It's the worst option on the table today, we can do better than that, before we start having the ambition to transcend the intellect you know, why would we would we be talking about transcending the intellect if even within the intellect we are doing so poorly?

Well, it's interesting because in the in the spiritual business that I also roll in, there's there's a very insidious anti intellectual sentiment that somehow the intellect is the enemy. And I think it's probably for those who don't have the qualities even engage that particular skill set. But you know, for us the charter is the strengths and the limitations of the intellectual approach. And then to come back. If you don't mind me asking you a little bit more personally if you if you don't want to go here, that's totally fine. The place of practice in your Life because you mentioned in dreamed, dreamed up reality. I think it's that was called the book. You talk about your four experiments or so. But I was curious when I read it. Why you never actually mentioned what those experiments were they were they were never really articulated as such. And I said, Why isn't he telling us what these things actually were? So it seems like you engaged in some practices. And now you don't have to reveal those to me. But I'm curious what you didn't mention that. And then what in fact, is the role of practice, practice, practice in your life today?

So back to dream, the reality I don't list exactly what were the procedures I undertook, because I'm keenly aware that these things are very personal. What works for me doesn't work for someone else. So I didn't want to give a recipe and cause disappointment, because you know, what ended up working for me was not something I saw anybody else doing. The exact way I was doing, it took trial and error, which I do say in the book that it took trial and error. To get there. I have a very particular, we all have very particular idiosyncratic, mental makeups, psychic men makeups. So I don't think that what works for me would work for you. I mean, I am particularly hard headed. I am not one to open up easily. I valued, strict, rigorous thinking all my life. And it's very hard for me to depart from that and be more open, more soft, more mushy, it's very hard for me, and sometimes it's exactly what you need, if you're going to explore yet unexplored territory that you haven't visited before. So for me, it was a particular combination of because of the country in which I live, certain psychedelic substances are illegal to the point that before it took psychedelics for the first time, I went to my doctor, and asked him to check my heart and my liver to make sure that they will metabolize it properly and not have any concerns. So then I got professional help in that. And each of the experiments I described were different different combinations of these things, but they involved binaural rhythms. What at the time was called Mind machines, certain precise sequence of flashings and colors in your eyes that have an effect of sort of locking your neural activity. It makes neuronal firings go into lockstep according to a certain rhythm, which has certain effects. So listen, or psilocybin, which is drug in magic mushrooms, magic mushrooms, which I grew myself, I didn't buy the drug, I bought spores, I took care of my mushrooms myself every day. Until harvest time, I used certain meditative practices, especially when the trip is beginning. Because what I realized is that the trip tends to amplify what you bring to it in the beginning. So if you bring certain anxieties to it, that's tends to become a theme. Not the main thing. The main theme is totally out of your control. It seems random. But the the ancillary themes and the tone of the trip seems to be calibrated by that. So I did some meditative practices because I wanted to focus the trip on getting philosophical answers or thinking philosophically, as opposed to watching.

having hallucinations of you know, beautiful aliens and spaceships. And that's not what I was doing it for it it happened. But that's not what I was doing it for I wanted. For me, it was not for fun. I was doing that I had an an investigative program, because I was writing about the mind. So I thought I cannot sincerely and honestly write about the mind without exploring mind along every avenue available to me in this world today. And I could do that legally and medically safely. So I didn't do that. I also didn't want to encourage people to think that psychedelics are the panacea. Yep. For me, they seem to have been necessary because my mind is very hard. But I know a lot of people who I think would not win anything from psychedelics, they are already open. They don't need the hammer of a psychedelic to break that door open. Their door is already gently open. Man, it may just lead to confusion to certain types of mental makeup. So I don't think it's a panacea. So that's the reason and also what you saw there in articulated as for experiments, they were more than for experts. moments, it's just a literary literary device to try to condense the information in a way that it's easy to absorb. But things were not as neat as they are in there. Some of the things I did on my own some in some of those experiences, I was part of a program. So it, I talked about this other part in modern allegory. It is impossible to make a book understandable, and easy to read, if you just dump everything as it actually was, because reality is messy and confusing. And you have to distill the value out of that somehow. So in more than an allegory, I explicitly say, this is a myth. Whatever you're about to read in part three is a myth. It's not the literal truth, but it captures aspects of what I think is the truth. So yeah, that's, that's the reason that practice for me, at that time was the big thing. My life, run around practice, either intellectual practice, or discipline, practice of mind exploration, which is what I've just described. Today, there is no practice today, because once and maybe I'm deluding myself about this, but this is what I believe. Once you learn to recognize the movements of the impersonal within you, you're not setting the agenda anymore. That story of how I've set a certain practice for me, so I can get to that thing never know, that dissolves like butter under the sun. It's not how life goes. You just follow the movements of the impersonal, and you make adjustments to it. Because listening to the impersonal is a noisy process, you have to be sure that you're really listening to the person. Yeah, sometimes you have to apply some filtering things. And you know, or hold back until you're more confident that that's the way nature wants to go. But right now, my practice is listen to the impersonal and non resisted, in sum total. So say

a little bit more about that, because that's a languaging. That may not be familiar to our audience, when you say listen to the impersonal, say more about that tuning into, for instance,

the impersonal very recently, the last few years, I felt the movement of it within me that if I were to put in language, it's not linguistic at all. It's not like a voice. It's not that. But if I were to translate it into words, and the movement was the following. nurture the contact with the child in you again, say that, again, Bernard said, again, nurture your contact with the child within you beautiful, beautiful. And, unusually, you recognize these things as movements of the impersonal because they have some telltale characteristics. The number one is, it doesn't give a damn about your personal safety or comfort. It doesn't care if you're, we if what it's pushing you to to, will contribute to your career or destroy your career, whether you were to whether it will contribute or destroy your finances, whether it will help your status improve or be destroyed. It doesn't care about any of this. And that's where the ego has to come in and say, Well, yes, I will follow you. But a roof needs to be above my head tomorrow. Because the impersonal is well impersonal. It's not concerned about your personal safety and comfort. So the ego has to play a little role there. Young emphasize this a lot. The role of consciousness in modulating the unconscious, which were his words for what I'm talking in terms of the personal and the impersonal. That's one characteristic, another telltale characteristic is, it doesn't tell you the reason it's pointing you in this or that direction. It's not giving you the whole story. It doesn't bother to explain you why you have to do this. How does it fit in the greater scheme of things? You know, that doesn't come to you? When it's your personal bullshit. And there is a whole narrative there is a neatly close narrative and I need to do this because that and then in five years, this is what will happen. Yeah. And I want that because my career or my money or my stats, when it has this woven narrative.

That was this a very passionate statement, because that was exactly what I was about to ask you. How do you know like Fineman said that you're just not kidding yourself? And you just answered that. How do you know that it is, in fact that it impersonal flash transpersonal versus

the give you the honest answer I don't know how I know. What I do know is the following the question, How do I know has come to play no role? We might? I don't know whether you can make heads or tails? Yeah. Oh, totally, totally. I don't feel any impulse to ask the question. So if you force the question on me, I will say, I don't know how I know. But I don't need to ask that question. And very comfortable falling what I am labeling as the impersonal without knowing. I

think that's real not I would say that's real Gnosticism. I mean, is that one label that you could append to that experience?

I am, you know, I tend to avoid labels if they are not needed, because you don't know what baggage they carry, especially a label like Gnosticism or the motherlode God, which is you know, that you don't know what people interpret. So I prefer to talk about things as simply bare bones and honestly as I can, for one reason, or another right or wrong. I don't feel the need to ask this question. How do I know? I don't know if I know. And it's not important. I am comfortable falling along what I'm calling name impersonal. And it doesn't tell me the whole story doesn't give me the whys. It just shows the watts. Yeah. So part of the Watts is having this conversation with you today. Yeah, exactly. In my ego, I'm like, preaching doesn't help didn't help for 2000 years. Why? Why do I think that it will help now? My ego doesn't understand. But I've come to a point where my ego doesn't need to understand because I know it's not about me. Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's not about me, and I act accordingly. So I don't need to know the whys. I don't need to know the how it all builds up to the end result. I don't need to know the end result. All I need to know is that I am comfortable following this movement of what I consider the impersonal within me. And that's enough. Yeah. Practice my practice now. Limit, I can limit it to two words. I pay attention. Yes. Fantastic. That's it. That's all I do. I pay attention. I pay attention to the movements of the impersonal and don't resist it. And in the process of following it, of going along with it. I pay attention. Yeah, in this blood, I decided to pay attention to it because I can't help this. This is what I do.

This is this again for maybe for a future conversation because I want to respect your time but just the This leads into something we haven't really fully unpacked is the whole lucidity principle. As lucidity is represented in lucid dreams and the nocturnal meditations and the light. But we can come back to that later. What I love excuse me, Bernardo, what I really love about this is the refreshing quality of your practice because my bias and this is my

practice and I just pay attention.

Well that's that's it that is exactly but but it's very interesting because I mean, my my bias my predisposition, my whatever is or the contemplative so called meditative arts, I have done a three year retreat. 40,000 hours of meditation is a massive part of my life, in what I so appreciate about what you say. And it was similar to I had five hours of conversation over two sessions with LSD in the mind of the universe, a Christopher beige, who went on a 20 year journey, and then spent 20 years unpacking it exploring 500 microgram doses of LSD, and how that became his path, his practice. And so therefore, I love him, I'm so interested these days in the spirit of integral approaches, how other people roll their boat, how how they engage in qualities of opening, awakening, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And, and one limitation I see, again, in this kind of reifying tendency that everybody has, is, even if even if it's if it's the great meditative community, the the shadow sides, the near enemies of even the art of meditation, that it's not necessarily a one size fits all enterprise. And then there are other ways to walk our pads based on their idiosyncrasies and predispositions towards greater openness and awakening. And so I love to hear this sort of thing. Dialogue is path engaging and what we're doing here is a type of Praxis to basically create avenues of opening and So Bernardo, again, I, I can't I share with you how delightful this has been for me, I wanted to read just to give you some sense, there were a couple of things very, very brief that you may not be aware Have that may be of some interest to you to return to close up a couple of things. I meant to do this two and a half hours ago, but I just didn't get to it. The confirmation from the Buddhist tradition of so much of your work so, one of my main teachers have a cop art Carter Rinpoche, I have this stuck up around the Hill House, one simple line, the only obstacle is to regard something is other than mind, beautiful. And then the four yogic contemplations, this is fantastic, outer objects are observed, to be nothing but mind. Thus, outer objects are not observed as such. Without our objects being an observable, a mind cognizing them is not observed either not observing both non duality is observed. And then one more from a Karmapa Rangjung, door je. Looking at objects, there are no objects there seem to be mind. Looking at mind there is no mind is empty of essence. Looking at both liberates dualistic clinging in its own ground, may we realize luminosity, the true nature of mind. And so I just wanted to pick because I know you spent so much time with your dear friend Rupert, who I adore his approach principally from Advaita Vedanta. He's brilliant in that regard. And so I'm not that up on what your relationship is with a Buddhist approach to things. And so I wanted to just pick a couple contributions that I think were so resonant with so much of what you've talked about, in this is we do start to close up for today. Any question that I should have asked didn't ask any anything that you

wish? I don't do that. I don't have agendas. Great. I go with the flow, man.

I love it. I love it. And for listeners who are interested in exploring your work, you know, your your output is voluminous is profound. What might you recommend two questions, any introduction to your work? And then the impossible question of your own output? What is your favorite book, I can show you what mine is, but what are what can you share with our listeners to introduce you introduce them to your work.

There is an in depth and completely free introduction to my work, which is a six hour long video course, on the YouTube channel of essential foundation. It's the analytic idealism course, it's completely for free, it's on YouTube, it's not even monetized. So you will not even get ads, you don't need to send your email address to subscribe to anything, nothing, let alone payment. It's six hours long. It took me a few weeks to do and I tried to tell as much as possible in as easy a language as possible. Across the seven modules of that course, it's seven videos, a little under an hour, each one of them. So that would be the way to go. If you don't want to commit money, or the effort of reading a book, if you just want to watch a video, you will be done in a week watching a video of less than one hour a day. And it's very low threshold, do that. And that may be enough or not if it's not enough, and then I went through the your second question. My favorite book is not the world's favorite book of mine. My favorite book is more than allegory now, because it was my second attempt to talk about something that isn't intellectual. My it was my second attempt to not speak a purely intellectual language, I begin intellectual, because I need people to board my boat. And so I need to make it amenable and pleasant and harmless to people in appearance. But once they board my boat, then I will steer it towards waters that are beyond the intellect. So it's the only book where I tried to articulate in a seemingly intellectual way. The reality which is the most disturbing aspect of reality that everything comes out of nothing. So it's the one book where I don't write it this way. I I make it innocent sounding with the parts to when I talk about time. But if you ask me what has been the most important book that has come into the world through me that's the one that's the book I like to read. If you know what I mean this stuff is not mine. Channeling here, I'm not channeling any, any alien It's not that I'm talking about very bad taste stuff. But this stuff doesn't come through Barnard it comes through Bernardo but not from Bernardo, that's, it's just the way it is, you know, I'm not saying that to put myself down water put myself up earlier this month, elementary fact of the matter. And I would have to be blind, to not realize this, if you know what I mean. So, as a reader of the stuff that nature is doing through me, that's the book I like the most. That's

fantastic. It really this is beautiful, because it'd be speaks to the artistry and your work, that it's, you know, many creative artists, countless often speak if they're honest, that they simply get out of the way. And then whatever it is, just comes through, and then sometimes you go back, reread it and say, Hey, that wasn't too bad. But it didn't, didn't come from me,

the ocean of nature churning and it tries to find find a sort of a least resistant path to go somewhere. And if you're standing in the right place at the right time, it will go through you, right, and then you can resist it. Or maybe you don't resist and you let it happen. So

well. If you resist that, then you could then you can get electrocuted if you don't resist this, and then you become electrified, and then you light up, otherwise you burn up. And that's what Nietzsche and other great artists to perhaps maybe didn't understand that particular process somehow appropriated Graf resisted or whatever, and then they they get crispy.

Yeah. It's, it's very difficult to hold that charge and not let it float through. Exactly. It's tough stuff. And then but but you learn that after 10 years of suffering, it's not something at least me, maybe I'm just stupid. But it took me over 10 years of suffering, to soften me soften me until I was like, Okay, this is how it is. And I told you is it's obvious that the best I can possibly do with my life is to trust that nature knows better because I'm just a monkey running around their little rock hurtling through infinity. Who am I to know anything? So all I can do is to not resist whatever nature is trying to do through me. It's like when I read this stuff that comes that's on the page. At the end. I go like, Yeah, this is good stuff. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So it's really good. It gives me confidence that it's okay to let nature do its its thing through me. Yes, I can do.

Yeah. And it's beautiful, isn't it? Bernard because it really helps people work with this question of what should I do with my life? Well, it's what does life want to do with me? Surrender open, and it's not thy My will be done. It's Thy will be done. And then in a certain way, not in any self aggrandizing capacity? Really, in a certain sense, you you you act? Is it representative of reality, as an agent of reality, you know, as a kind of transducer of that. And so, as we close up, what's next? What's on the agenda for you? More? More books more? No agenda? No idea.

I have no idea. Tomorrow, I will know what I need to do. When I wake up. And during my breakfast, I pay attention. I will know enough. And if I don't, then I don't know. Then yeah, it's, yeah, I'm writing a book, which I started last year. And then I stopped. It's been six months now that they didn't write a single word more. And I'm very curious where it's gonna go. I have no idea. It has happened before. Maybe tomorrow, wake up and go like, I'm going to write the whole day today. Yeah, maybe. But that's not what I feel right now. What I feel right now is reconnect with the kid in you. Yeah. So that's what it is today. Yeah.

And then it becomes a wonderful dance, then, you know, in my own experience, it's a dance that you no longer lead this dance reality. Reality leads this dance, right?

We never lead it. We just have an illusion that we are living in. Yeah, exactly. You're never in control, you are never in control, you will never be there is no such a thing as being in control. And what most people don't realize is that when you surrender to the impersonal if I want to personalize it, I will call it the diamond, which is what Western philosophers have done since Socrates and his diamond, you personalize the movements of the person or within you by giving it a name, which was corrupted later internally to demons, which was not at all the original meaning, but nevermind. So what people don't understand is, when you accept to be in the serve in service to the diamond, you become a slave, but it is it is in that slavery, that sort of freedom resides Yeah. Because when you think the ego is in control, you have no freedom, because you have to be in control and that is incredibly confining, credibly confining to rules your whole life that need to try and be in control. And when you accept service to the diamond, you are absolutely free. Because you just don't take the responsibility for the end result. You don't take responsibility for understanding all the whys and how and how it all comes together. In what's the purpose? No, you don't need to know any of that. All you need to know is what does the diamond want to do through me? Yeah, can I will make sure that there's a roof over my head and enough money in the bank to pay for my health care and put food on the table and preserve my relationship with my partner and keep my cat safe. But beyond that, it's not my responsibility. I am free to be a slave the ultimate freedom. Yeah, beautiful.

Fernando what what a honor. He has been you're incredibly generous with your, with your time what you've given me over these last couple of years, and I can't wait to finish the corpus of your work. Studying it is really no small thing. And so on behalf of my community, this has been really such a delight for me. I so appreciate you taking the time. And perhaps at a future date. When I go through the other books that I haven't read. To come back. I still like to explore the DREAM principle dream as manifestation remind, again, there's so much to go. But I think for today, this has been an enormous, generous gift from you. And so on behalf of our community depower gratitude, very grateful.

It's been a pleasure. I had fun too. So thank you guys

Take care my friend.

Thanks