Is Everything Made of Matter or Consciousness? | Rupert Spira & Bernardo Kastrup in Conversation

rupert bernardo lovely to see you both uh let me start with you rupert how are you very well lovely to see you uh simon and bernardo good to see you lovely to see you again too and bernardo you and i have never met so i have to say it's an honor and a privilege are you well i'm doing well um yeah yeah feeling feeling good looking forward to this conversation i'm very much looking forward to it too and um there's that saying there's nowhere i'd rather be so on one hand that takes care of time however on the other hand obviously time is pressing and we've got a lot to to get on with so let's dive straight in and i want to ask my first question which is how and when did you first to meet the two of you we met in amsterdam bernardo you'll probably remember the date it was on one of my uh pre-covered i used to go to amsterdam twice a year to for a weekend and bernardo and i had been in correspondence and we met one sunday evening for dinner at the end of um at the end of my weekend remember which date which year it was bernardo i also don't remember years ago was it easily five or six it maybe even even seven anyway we we met and and i think we already intuited that we had um a lot in common and it was one of those lovely meetings where there's almost no impediment to understanding no need to explain your terms no need to just immediately you you you say half a sentence and it's not necessary to complete it the other one just just knows immediately what you're saying so it was one of these it was um it was very i certainly for me it was very special meeting bernardo immediately i felt it was like speaking to an old friend we just the conversation just flowed so so readily and so easily and it was such a pleasure to meet someone who had come to this understanding in a completely different way from the way i had come to it and yet there was such a deep and shared understanding and resonance uh you've clearly developed a beautiful friendship and what is interesting as you mentioned there rupa is that um where you have arrived in your understanding of reality your lived experience of it and that it's come from these two very apparently different directions you could say for example rupert that um i think a lot of people would think of you as in spiritual terms i think and bernardo i mean your background is very much it was certainly initially um very much hard science i mean you worked at cern at the uh haldrun collider so actually could you just give us a bit of a give me as much as anyone else a bit of a backdrop of your scientific credentials if you may okay my original education was in computer science but i very quickly immediately after my graduation found myself working in a large physics experiment doing part of the data acquisition system for the atlas experiment of the large hadron collider at cern in switzerland got started thinking about artificial intelligence because it was one of the techniques we were working on in order to recognize relevant physics events from the data stream and and separating those events from the sort of the trash and the background that any physics experiment generates after that i started thinking about well if i can build an ai can i build an ac an artificial artificially conscious entity and then that got me back to philosophy which was something i was interested on i don't know since birth i don't remember not being interest interested in philosophy and then got a second doctorate in philosophy started thinking about the deep questions especially when you get to a point in life where you already carved out the space in the world for you so you're not in that desperate need for you know um i would say you know having a place to live and having a good job and a partner and a dog and a cat and all that um yeah and then suddenly i find myself here next to rupert which is for me a massive cosmic irony it's like god looking at me having a laugh and saying haha you didn't see this one coming did you because i never thought of myself as even remotely spiritually talented so i still don't think myself that way i still think it's deep inside i still feel slightly ashamed for for being next to rupert in a situation like this i mean having a dinner with rupert is something else that that's a situation in which i'm in learning mode uh but to appear as an equal next to rupert is uh is a massive cosmic irony for me that's peaceful um what now i just said something quickly simon to that is is that um what's up also ironical is that um you say bernardo that you don't really feel that you're kind of spiritual or qualified in that way but but i don't feel myself that i'm a a spiritual person i i dislike intensely the label spiritual teacher because spiritual the word spiritual implies something sort of something other yeah something i i'm talking about not something other about i'm talking about this yeah this ordinary everyday experience so i actually um i'd rather agree with you but i don't feel spiritual i just i just feel like an ordinary person that's interested in the reality of our ordinary everyday experience yeah then we share that i'm also interested in this world right now yeah yes yes so i think that's where we that's where we where we meet yes and that's why this is so exciting because spiritual is something of a loaded word particularly let's say in scientific circles and so to be able to bring the two together uh really and just in terms of pure experience it is very exciting now um just just to in terms of my own qualifications as it were i'm uniquely unqualified i failed my physics gcse which means that so to be able to explore these terms particularly perhaps from a scientific point of view um i'm hoping to bring you down to my level now in terms of the the man or woman in the street and their understanding of reality of experience of science someone at the moment here in britain who is very much the figurehead in that area is is brian cox now he um you could say he's a celebrity physicist he worked um at cern as well in terms of for example the amount of publications you've had um written about about an idealism in uh scientific papers uh how would you compare you and brian and i don't mean to be in any way leading but just out of interest well brian worked at cern as well at some point i think um i don't have much sympathy for him um even in his efforts to communicate physics i think he's more focused on drawing drawing um a flabbergasted reaction from his public than to actually explain what's going on no more focused on the whoa wow what is this what does quantum physics mean then actually explaining things um and he seems to be married to a particular metaphysics without even thinking of it as a metaphysics and that metaphysics is of course physical is more materialism and metaphysics again for someone like me just so that just means reality the model a model of reality yeah metaphysics is what is behind physics physics is how nature behaves metaphysics is what is it that behaves so it's behind the physics or beyond the physics yes so so am i right in saying science doesn't tell us what reality is but it tells us how it behaves correctly correct of course you can derive some implications regarding what nature is from nature's behavior but that's an indirect step science doesn't provide a direct answer to what nature is since it only studies nature's behavior okay now rupert in terms of then the perennial understanding as it were so does this then explain what reality is in a way that science can't yes the perennial understanding that is really more a philosophy than a science because philosophy is more concerned with what nature is rather than than what it does so the perennial non-dual understanding is an attempt to both explore the nature of reality to recognize the nature of reality and then it addresses the implications of that recognition in our in our life in our life both internally that is what it means for us internally in in relation to our suffering our love of happiness and peace our internal and emotional experience but it also has implications for our external experience that is our activities and relationships in the world you often say reality is one single indivisible whole and so there's nothing separate from that it's also described as the consciously consciousness only model non-duality idealism so where you've both arrived at is is am i right saying it's exactly the same spot bernardo pretty much yeah yeah we would have to put um bernardo and and my understanding under a very powerful microscope to find any differences between us okay well that's a fantastic place to start so right let's let's then begin with a bit of a dismantling process in terms of the way that culture at large believes that reality is how people believe what is going on and all that kind of stuff um so that brings us obviously to materialism or physicalism uh and also our intuitions about reality so for me right now if i feel like there is a world out there i can see out the window there are cars there are houses there are pavement um there's sky it's cloudy i in the form of a body would walk out the door inside that body uh there is a mind and a self that is deciding to walk down the road and perhaps get in a car or go to the shop or whatever and if i ran into a wall it would hurt etc so it's a world of things and i am a thing within that that just happens to have a mind within it is that that seems to me to be the sort of the everyday understanding of reality is is that about right would you say that's the average everyday understanding yeah but it's it's wrong it's certainly wrong yeah could you just explain bernardo actually just to start how our intuitions then mislead us we nature has provided us with a set of sense organs sensors uh eyes ears nose and the results of this sensing of the world is presented to us as what we call perception but if you think of it perception is like just a dashboard of instruments it's like you're a pilot in an airplane and instead of having a transparent windshield there is only aluminum and now you can see aluminium and now you can see uh is the dashboard of instruments in front of you which provide us with sense data there are sensors outside there the airplane providing you with sense data accurate information about the world but of course the dashboard doesn't look like the world it provides relevant and accurate sense data about the world but it doesn't look like the world as it is in itself the problem is we are born inside that cockpit we have never peaked out a transparent window to see the world as it actually is all we have is the dashboard so we talk in terms of the language of the dashboard we don't talk about um the storm outside we talk in terms of wind speed uh direction of movement you know uh air pressure which is what the dashboards of instruments provide us and we end up concluding that the world is the dashboard because that's all we ever had our language evolved around that our thinking evolved around that but of course although the dashboard is useful you can fly by instrument and we need the the the sensors and and the and the dials in the dashboard to navigate live and and survive uh obviously the world as it is in itself is not a dashboard it doesn't look like a dashboard and that's where things go wrong because we are cooped up in that cockpit we think in terms of the dials and we forget that the real world is that which is being sensed that which is being measured and not the needles inside the dials inside your dashboard of instruments rupert bernardo mentioned our perception so when i go outside and i see cars houses people etc actually what i'm seeing is um seeing the perception of seeing the perception of hearing perception of feeling etc so can you just talk a little bit about that about how that is what we're seeing whilst but superimposed on top of that is the idea of things yes there is experience we're having an experience or we are experiencing and that we extrapolate from this fact a model which as you rightly described in your introduction to this question the the model of a mind or a self inside the body looking out through our sense perceptions of what we consider to be we consider our sense perceptions to be a transparent windscreen through which we look and get an accurate picture of reality whereas as bernardo has just explained no our sense perceptions are limited they they filter reality and they they make reality appear in a way that is consistent with their own limitations just like one who wears orange tinted glasses sees orange snow and well if you wear orange tinted glasses when you're skiing in the mountains for long enough you forget you've got the glasses on and you think that the way you're seeing the snow is the way it really and then at the end of the day you take your glasses off and you think oh i had forgotten that i was receiving i was viewing a filtered picture of of the reality that the glasses are so close to me that i had forgotten and that i thought that i was just looking through the clear windscreen of of my eyes so um and this is this is um because our sense perceptions as bernard said that they're so close to us we've forgotten that we are so just being wearing them like glasses or like a vr headset and we we presume that the the model of reality that that they present to us is how reality actually is no it's just how reality appears when it's filtered through the limitations of a human mind you mentioned the senses and obviously so we've got seeing hearing tasting touching smelling so these five sensory words so we have five ways of experiencing should we say and then we also have the equivalent number of of organs to help us in that is the the coincidental nature of that and anything worth commenting on absolutely you know you're right as human beings we we experience seeing hearing touching tasting and smelling and we experience the world in the form of sight sounds tastes textures and smells like is that a coincidence of course not there's a direct correlation let's say we had a a sixth well we have a sixth um sense that thinking but let's say there was that there was let's just talk about perception let's say there was a sixth way of perceiving seeing hearing touching tasting and smelling and let's call it x-ing let's say there was some experience called x-ing we would experience x's out there or if there was something called y in we would experience y's out there so we would say this is how the world is what and then we would say that's how the world really is texas and wise out here in other words the world is not what we see it is the way we see yes it's reality i i'm not and bernardo and i both um we both make this point over and over again to prevent this understanding from sliding into um solipsism i'm not saying i know bernardo is not saying that all there is to reality is our individual experience of it reality precedes the finite mind or its observation but the finite mind um filters reality and makes it appear to us in a way that is consistent with uh the limitations of our sense faculties it's what william wordsworth beautifully said when he said we both we half create and half perceive the world we perceive it in the sense that what we're looking at is what's real it's the reality that precedes the human mind that the mind but we created in the sense that we lend it its appearance this beautiful understanding that the world as we experience it is is a it's an interaction between reality and the finite mind it the world borrows its realities from something that is way bigger than the finite mind but it borrows its appearance from the finite mind i'll come back to that solipsism point very soon but quickly bernardo can you explain so why then do we have the perceptions appear as they do why aren't why do they not more accurately reflect reality perceptions may be fairly accurate in the same sense that the dial in the dashboard of instruments of an airplane provides accurate information about what's going on outside information that you can react to and fly safely by instruments but that of course doesn't mean that the world outside looks like a dashboard and and that's the key difference the world outside may not be and i'm highly convinced it's not because there's plenty of evidence for it the world outside may not be material in the way we think of it discrete objects in the space time scaffolding that's the paradigm of the dashboard it's accurate in the sense that it allows us to survive allows us to react timely to environmental challenges by presenting what's relevant about the world at a glance to us on the screen of perception it helps us avoid unlimited increases of entropy in our internal states now this is complicated it only means the following if we saw the world as it actually is in other words if our perception mirrors the world as it actually is then our internal states would be as unbound as the states of the world which we have no control of and that means that seeing alone could kill you it could increase your the dispersion of your internal states to the point that you would melt into hot soup and that's thermodynamics for you so it has been shown mathematically already by a person from the uk that perception cannot mirror the world we would die very quickly if it did that perception is an encoded at a glance overview of what is salient and relevant about the world but it may look like nothing it may look nothing like the world actually is although it conveys accurate information about the world so that's the critical difference the information is accurate but it's presented in a way that is not the same as the world is in and of itself it could not be the same can i can i add something to that yeah sure um to just um really just to reiterate um what bernardo's saying just the fact that we perceive the world from one localized point of view it implies that our view of it must be limited because to get an accurate view of reality we would have to perceive it simultaneously from all possible points of view so just the very fact and and and then all we would perceive then is that utter blackness but just just the fact that we that perception always takes place from a localized point of view but what is perceived is always relative to that point of view it can always only be a a limitation of what is really there so perception by definition is is limited and and inaccurate which doesn't mean i'm not invalidating it it has a purpose as bernardo says but it must give us an inaccurate picture of reality uh something i've heard that you say bernardo that made a bit of sense to me was the idea of for example a computer game you're playing a computer game and um let's say you're moving your character around and he can go through a world but if you saw the actual world of the computer game it would be all these you know ones and zeros and it would just be absolutely nonsensical so if there's there's an equivalence there we have evolved in order to generate a representation of the world that is conducive to our survival not necessarily one that reflects the truth of how the world is in and of itself that's not amenable to survival um so yeah there is a difference between accuracy and truthfulness and we perceive largely accurately but not in a truthful way in the sense that the appearances are not the world they why would they be there is absolutely no reason for them to be yeah so take reality seriously but not literally um correct so rupert just to go back to that solipsism point and i found this quite interesting while doing a bit of research for this is how it can be easily misunderstood so solipsism um correct me if i'm wrong is the uns the belief that that nothing exists outside of our finite mind even outside of my own finite mind and some people um believe and i've seen this on threads it's actually quite common that for example idealism is in line with that but actually it's the other way around materialism is more in line with that than non-duality uh rupert could you can you feel this one yes the the belief that um idealism is uh synonymous with solipsism is um at best a misunderstanding of what idealism entails and and at worst and as you say is very common nowadays a complete misrepresentation of idealism and it's pernicious because many people who would genuinely be open to the possibility of idealism um dismiss it on the grounds of its association with solipsism which is i would suggest a it's just it's a it's a philosophy that that just that doesn't even get off the ground and as you say it's it's not it is solipsism as you say it's the um it's the belief that all there is to reality not is not the content of our individual minds it's the content of my mind all i can be sure about is the content of my own mind therefore you too for instance you you are just images on my screen you you are not having experience now my mind and not only my mind but all there is to my mind is is this all there is in existence is that my study in oxford there's nothing even there's no house there's no other no other beings that it's it's it's it's a form of madness and it's um it's remarkable how often in uh non-dual in the in the circles that i operate in perhaps more than bernardo although there's quite a lot of overlap more and more so these days but it it's remarkable how many people misunderstand um idealism or the non-dual philosophy and equate it with uh solipsism and it and in this way bring it into disrepute let me just say one more thing what um idealism really means or what the non-dual perennial non-dual understanding suggests is not that reality is contained in an individual mind or even the sum total of all individual minds it it suggests that reality is takes place in a universal consciousness and is ultimately made of that or is the activity of that universal consciousness so non-jewish non-duality or idealism ever states that everything is in consciousness not everything is in the finite mind there's a big difference actually bernardo before i come to you actually rupert could you just then that the best metaphor for me is the dream metaphor so could you could you just illustrate it with that at this point yes it's the it's it's the the analogy that i use most often it's it's my equivalent to barnardo's dissociation identity disorder um yes imagine mary falls asleep in london she dreams she's jane on the streets of paris now some people object when i say this because they say well i'm the same person in my dream than i am in real life why you give them two different names only for ease of communication so just so that i can communicate easily so mary falls asleep in london she dreams she's jane on the streets of paris and now from jane's point of view jane represents the finite mind that is each of us or all of us are like james in the dream or the imagination of a universal consciousness now from jane's point of view she um she closes her eyes the streets of paris disappear she opens them again they reappear and she reasonably concludes from this that whatever it is that is perceiving the streets of paris lives just behind her eyes and this is corroborated when she closes her ears etc and everybody else on the streets of paris all her friends think the same thing and from this they build this model that whatever it is that knows my experience lives in my brain and everything that i experience externally the world is outside this the consciousness that i believe is located in my brain and the name we give to that is mata so from jane's point of view her experience is is divided into mind on the inside which in this context we can use synonymously with with consciousness in other contexts i would make a distinction but in this context we can say jane's experience is divided into consciousness on the inside and matter on the outside moreover she then um i don't have to elaborate the whole analogy she believes that the world made out of matter precedes the consciousness with which she experiences it so she believes along with all her friends and colleagues that that the matter which exists outside of her mind gives rise to consciousness hence the materialistic model um it grows out to this point of course when mary wakes up she thinks oh no that's just how it appeared from jane's limited localized and ultimately illusory point of view what what was really taking place was that the the single indivisible field of my own mind consciousness albeit unlimited consciousness was within its with within itself it was assuming simultaneously that the form of the the dream and the form of the the the subject in the dream from whose perspective the dream was was known so that the distinction between mind and matter between the subject and the object was only real from the localized perspective of jane in the dream but when mary wakes up it's the whole thing is one infinite indivisible whole made out of made out of pure consciousness yeah so the that the dreams that we have at night are just a microcosm of reality all you need to do is is take the analogy i've given and just raise it one level up that in the waking state we are all jains localized perspectives of infinite consciousness within infinite consciousness from whose point of view infinite consciousness perceives itself its own activity as an apparently physical universe yeah lovely now bernardo would you mind before we get the dissociated uh altars i want to come to later because the research was fascinating but could you just share your analogy around another beautiful one the sort of infinite river with whirlpools within it which is another way of saying the same thing but it's definitely worth hearing um the motivation for that was um a model that some people use the the transceiver model of the brain that the brain doesn't generate consciousness it just receives it the problem is that there is a built-in dualism to that you know if you have a coffee filter the filter is not made of coffee so if the brain is a filter then filtering consciousness then presumably the brain is not made of consciousness but that i think would be a wrong conclusion as rupert just beautifully explained everything is in consciousness and of consciousness so what's actually going on so the analogy of the whirlpool is is an attempt to solve this seeming dilemma if you go to a river and you find a whirlpool you can delineate the boundaries that world whirlpool precisely and say the whirlpool is here and not there and these are the boundaries of the whirlpool it has an obvious individuality to it an obvious localization to it the water in the whirlpool keeps turning around the same point the same center while the rest of the river flows away so the idea is that our brain and its brain activity the rest of our body it's not generating consciousness it's the image of a certain localization of the stream of consciousness in the same way that the whirlpool is the image of a certain localization of water in a flowing stream and brain activity correlates with experience because it's the image thereof the image of a phenomenon of course correlates with the phenomenon it's an image of the the body doesn't generate uh consciousness it's just what the localization of consciousness looks like from the outside and you can delineate the boundaries of the body and say here is the body in the same way that you can delineate the boundaries of the whirlpool and say here is the whirlpool yet just like there is nothing to the whirlpool but water you can't lift the whirlpool out of the river there's nothing to it but the same water as the river there is only the river in the same way there is nothing to the body but consciousness it's just the image of a certain localization of conscious content two wonderful uh ways of looking at things take your pick before i go on to um celipsism and perhaps how it's actually closer to physicalism and materialism um just can you just define in the simplest terms you can what consciousness is rupert consciousness is that with which our experience is known it is that within which everything appears and it is that out of which everything is made up of which everything is the activity that was nice and concise bernardo yeah it's difficult to add something to that um maybe another formulation consciousness is that whose excitations are experiences if you mean by define consciousness if you mean by it how i use the word then i use the word in the sense of phenomenal consciousness without entailing or requiring any higher level mental functions such as self-awareness metacognition and so forth so if you have experience then you're conscious even the simplest experiences already imply consciousness technically this is called phenomenal consciousness and that's what i mean when i use the word consciousness now if you mean by it give me a way to explain consciousness in terms of something else then i draw a blank because i think consciousness is primary i can explain everything else in terms of consciousness but not consciousness in terms of something else because you cannot reduce one thing to another forever at some point you hit rock bottom in reality and i think consciousness is that rock bottom so there is nothing i can explain consciousness in terms of so that's why i prefer to say consciousness is simply that whose excitations are experiences so it's experience experiencing our language and our way of thinking sort of tries to say what consciousness is as if it were a thing that you could point to and say there there is consciousness here it is it's a thing of some sort and and of course that's contradictory with consciousness consciousness is that within which things appear it's not itself a thing it's not itself a substance in the literal sense consciousness is pure subjectivity if you need to think in terms of things whatever you do there it will be wrong but what is the least wrong way to think of consciousness in terms of a thing think of it as empty space it's still completely wrong but it's less wrong than to think of it in terms of an object or or a substance think of consciousness as empty space and experiences as excitations of that empty space which creates creates the world you mentioned things which brings us neatly to physicalism materialism and so as i said i came across a few comments on various forums that dismissed sort of the non-dual idealism understanding um in terms of this solipsistic outlet but actually and i didn't even realize this until very recently um thanks to bernardo materialism so the the current model of reality that has more in common with solipsism than idealism the non-duality because the implication is it's actually everything we experience is taking place in ab in our brain in our mind so can you just explain that in the simple simplest terms possible under materialism the qualities of your perceptual experiences all the colors you see the sounds you hear the smells you taste the textures you touch and feel all these qualities are generated by your brain side your skull um if you look up to the sky at night and you see a bright star say sirius that quality that star you see that thing you perceive all those qualities all of that perception is happening inside your skull so your real skull skull under materialism is above the stars as you see them now materialism would say there are real stars out there but they are not what you see they have no qualities they are pure abstraction you cannot visualize them because if you visualize it you're already bringing qualities into the picture and other materialism qualities are created by your brain inside your head so under materialism the world of your experiences is entirely within your real head but can i just ask just just quickly when you just could just elaborate a tiny bit on qualities what you mean by that qualities is colors are qualities melodies are qualities flavors are qualities um the world as it is in itself under materialism has no qualities it has no colors has no tastes has no no smells it has matter and what is matter it's it's um something entirely defined in terms of quantities of numbers it's an abstraction you cannot visualize it but theoretically if you provide a long enough list with the relevant numbers you will have said everything there is to be said about matter as defined under materialism it has no qualities under materialism all qualities are somehow nobody has any clue how not even in somehow generated by your brain inside your head can i answer your question yeah sure i'm asking you a question um i know it's not what would you believe it if i were asking a materialist someone that that has this view that that you've just um given that the or all of them that the world really exists inside our head so what about the head itself surely if the world exists inside the brain inside the head then the brain and the head must exist in the argument falls apart there a materialist would say um the head you see in the mirror is not your head it's an internal representation of your real head created by your brain and what about the brain then uh the brain you see if you crack my skull open is not my real brain it's an internal representation of my real brain created by your brain inside your real skull the real brain the real skull under materialism have no qualities they have no color no qualities whatsoever they are pure abstraction they are defined in terms of a list of numbers and mathematical relationships between these numbers like spatial temporal position mass charge spin momentum frequency amplitude and all that so most casual materialists don't notice because if they knew they would say this is absolute nonsense i mean i'm replacing reality with an abstraction which happens to also not work because there is no coherent and explicit way to to tell how quantities can generate qualities it's an absurdity it's an inversion of of reasoning so to say rupert can you just then i've heard you dismantle it in very simple terms the the material model so i'm going to challenge you to do that again and i know that you know you're not going to be pulling something from memory but i've seen you do it in a couple of sentences before and really starkly paint how absurd it can be so i i'm going to challenge you to try and do that again if i if you could not sure i'll manage two sentences simon but i'll do my best the only thing we can be certain of is the knowing of experience and in fact not even the knowing of experience as if the knowing of it were one thing an experience itself was something other than knowing all we can be certain of is knowing that's the only absolute certainty i'm using knowing synonymous with consciousness but i use the word knowing to try and bring it close to our experience there is the the knowing of the sound of my voice the knowing of the sight of your screen the knowing of the temperature of the air on your face and knowing of whatever emotion you may be experienced there's just the knowing of experience knowing is the only substance that is ever known or experienced so anything that we posit outside of knowing is an abstraction a mental abstraction that can never be verified because if we were to come in contact with it all that we would know of it is the knowing of it so knowing is the only certainty it's the only thing which is of course not a thing that has ever been experienced or could ever be experienced by anybody i'm inclined that knowing is known by a person i don't mean that knowing is that which knows so this knowing is is known by itself that's all we can be sure of so if we want to build a model of reality that is anything other than or could ever be anything other than a mental abstraction unrelated to our experience why don't we start with what we know with what we have in our hands knowing consciousness and only resort to something outside of that if our current experience cannot be satisfactorily explained using only consciousness which it can not only can our current experience be explained very satisfactorily referring only to knowing or consciousness there are so many aspects of our current experience that cannot be satisfactorily explained under the prevailing materialist paradigm so i i could elaborate i think that's that that's a yes the best known of which of course is the hard problem of consciousness and um i believe it was david chalmers who i believe also you know bernardo who came up with that so could you just give a quick brief explanation of actually what that is in simple terms and why it's not just a hard problem it's a completely unsolvable problem under the current paradigm they've framed the problem as follows there is nothing about physical parameters in terms of which we could deduce even in principle the qualities of experience in other words the gap between the qualities that our nature is given our experiences our qualitative experience that's pre-theoretical it's what is given to us it's how the whole thing starts there is nothing about what we call physical parameters in terms of which we could deduce experience so whatever brain arrangement you come up with whatever pattern of brain activity you come up with it it may corresponds to the quality of warmth or to the quality of cognitives but there is nothing in terms of those physical nothing about those physical parameters in terms of which we could deduce this is a hot experience or this is the experience of coldness it's a completely arbitrary gap between the two and and and they've formulated this very precisely in 94. uh he puts himself down he says well no i didn't do anything people already knew that i just chose certain words but of course framing the problem is half way to to the solution and the solution in this case is to take a couple of steps back because we took a wrong turn at some point we need to take retrace our steps back and and and try a different understanding of what's going on because what the heart problem shows is that there is an internal contradiction in the materialist way of thinking and there is no way to solve that in the sense that we can continue in the materialist path and account for experience in terms of quantities that's incoherent already in principle let alone in practice we have to trace our steps back and and try a different road so the one thing we know for sure is experience and it comes from something that is outside of experience namely matter with no reason or ex why experience should rise from mata so why why has this leap been made that there's these things stuff and then bang out of nowhere comes experience look if you were born inside the airplane cockpit and all you have all you have ever had are the dials your language evolves around the paradigm of the dials and you try to make sense of everything in terms of dials and that's what we are doing it's a little bit clueless but it's understandable it's wrong but it's understandable to some extent our brain activity seems highly correlated with our experiences if i put alcohol in my system something changes in my experience if a neurosurgeon goes around my brain poking it with an electromagnetic probe he will induce all kinds of experiences in me well we don't need to go that far if i'm punched in the head something happens to my experience so we have all these correlations between experience and what we call physicality so the the the easy intuition is well experience arises from physicality of course there is a completely different way to see this and once you get that it's obvious that that other way is the way to go but i understand the the common superficial intuition that the arrow of causation goes from matter to consciousness because there is such tight correlation between patterns of brain activity and even anatomy and the contents of our inner experience just something i want to add so rupert you talk often about the the perennial understanding so this is this is not new this is thousands of years old um yet physicalism materialism the current model is actually relatively new is it not and bernardo can you just explain a little bit from a historical point of view the role the church and scientists who didn't want to be burned at the stake played in in the development of that okay in the 16th century early 17th century in the beginning of science scientists realized that it was very handy to describe the qualities of of perception in terms of numbers like you know if you assign a number of kilos to a piece of luggage it's a nice description of how it feels to lift that piece of luggage so numbers arised as descriptions of the universe of perceptions and at some point in the fight between science and the church because you know the church started burning some scientists like they burned bruno at the stake in 1600 um it became convenient socio-politically speaking to try to carve out a space for science that left the church feeling um unthreatened so when and the cart was instrumental in that so the the story that they come up came up with was the following instead of these numbers being descriptions let's make them a thing in themselves let's make them a reality let's say it's matter so the numbers became not only a description now they were a thing in themselves called matter and that was the domain of science and everything that had to do with qualities and consciousness in other words all we have uh okay that's the domain of the church and of course the church leaders probably thought yeah okay go around go ahead in your fool's errand and we are happy if you leave the psyche you know the soul the mind the qualities the consciousness to us because we know that's all that exists in the beginning um the people of the enlightenment later in this game in the 18th century they were still aware that this was a political move so scientists wouldn't be burned at the stake uh denis did a whole one of the two altars of lianciclopedi one of perhaps the founding document of the enlightenment he's on record saying well materialism doesn't quite work but we need it in order to fight the church so that awareness was still there that this was not a philosophy motivated by reason this was largely motivated by short thinking and politics you know important politics if you are afraid for your life but at some point in the 19th century halfway in the 19th century we've lost the notion that this was a political move um and we started thinking this is really what's going on there are only quantities so that was the moment when we replaced the territory with the map and then we started trying to pull the territory out of the map that's the hard problem of consciousness it doesn't work you can't pull the territory out of the map you can't pull the world out of what was a description of the world but instead of acknowledging that we are totally often intelligent here we say it's a problem and in version 2 3 or 10 of the map we will be able to pull that territory out of the map well go ahead try pull a chair while you wait rupert i'm going to give you um two questions and take your pick could you either want to say something about the pulling the territory out of the map that sort of analogy or the fact that this habit has has continued over the last few centuries and perhaps why in your opinion that has this um this model has continued and just being passed down passed down without much introspection i think it it can continued it's been perpetuated uh simply because it seems to be consistent with the way we perceive as einstein said uh common sense the evidence of our common sense perceptions are a series of prejudices that most people acquire by the age of 18. it's it's just um jane on the streets of paris everything about her experience everything about her friends and her colleagues experience seemed to corroborate this belief that her experience is generated by mata going back to bernardo's analogy of being punched in the face someone comes up to j this is the i'm going back to my dream analogy someone slaps jane on the face she her internal experience correlates with that she feels pain what caused the the actual experience the knowing of her experience it was a physical hand on her physical face and it seems that most of her experience seems to be explicable by this paradigm it seems to hold up until you start questioning it now what is it that causes most people to question it suffering if we didn't suffer there would be no reason to question our view of the world on the country we would think the happiness i experience is a confirmation that my view of the world is correct we would never question anything and that's why so many people are first open to the possibility that we are discussing here through the experience of suffering their life falls apart they realize something's not working and it's not just today that it's not working it gets worse the older you get as ori david thoreau said most people lead lives of quiet desperation you get you get halfway through your life and you you you you're it's not working relationships um activities you you you've experienced enough suffering to to to no longer be able to keep it at bay through objects substances activities relationship you've been failed by life sufficiently often to probe a little bit deeper could there be something about my attitude that is responsible might i have got something wrong and for most of us it's suffering that that opens this door so for me it was although i had this this very early intuition um age seven that that everything is a dream in god's mind that and then i forgot that intuition as i i grew up it was suffering that reignited my interest in these matters um in fact in my case it was it was a very particular experience when um the girlfriend i was with my first girlfriend with whom i thought i would get married and have four children live happily ever after now it ended our three-year relationship in a two-minute phone call and for the first time in my life i i became aware of the extent to which i had invested the thing that i loved the most namely happiness in objective experience did this cracked my world my world had already been cracked by my parents divorce and but this was this was a crack that i could no longer plaster over am i going to spend the rest of my life investing the the thing that i love most in life which is peace or joy in something which is inherently unstable that this this this brought urgency to to my to what had then i was already interested in these matters but it became a passion i want that there's something must be wrong about my model of reality what is what what what can i know for certain is true and if i were to start there and hold on to that and only lead a life that was consistent with that what kind of a life would that be so two things suffering first then can be very much a blessing even though it's not perceived in that way culturally and then secondly through [Music] your understanding of nonduality of the nature of reality and through choosing to live in accordance with it and i know you say that's a it's a never-ending journey to what degree if your suffering was previously at 100 where would you rate it now i don't mean right now i mean generally yes yes okay simon i'm reluctant to put a a number on it but but let me say this that when the the suffering arises less and less frequently and it lasts for less and less time and fewer and fewer experiences have the power to provoke it now i would never say that it never happens i i can be triggered in a situation and it can create an emotional resistance in me that's what suffering is emotional resistance but i notice that fewer experiences have that capacity they have to be quite intense and when so it happens less and less frequently and when it does happen when the experience of suffering is triggered this understanding kicks in quite quickly and i'm able to trace my way back to the to my essential being and its innate peace that lies behind so to speak the content of my experience how about you bernardo um this is the point where any comparison between me and rupert is look rupert radiates peace um there was this once i took him for a walk around some shady areas of amsterdam he didn't lose his center um i'm not there i i don't radiate peace i still have my anxieties what did happen for me and and i'm extraordinarily grateful for that because i think that's what makes all the difference the banality the meaninglessness that most people experience as their lives that is completely gone for me i'm not in peace profound um i'm have my demons have my anxieties suffer um [Music] suffer with things that there's nothing i can do about some of them even physical in my own body but i never have that notion that all this suffering is for nothing that life is meaningless that everything comes to a total end and it's over nothing that i don't have my life is infused with meaning in particular the suffering is infused with meaning suffering is is a isn't is a great drive it's it's what keeps us moving in the direction of depth otherwise life would remain so shallow we wouldn't be asking the the deep questions i i feel compelled to say something here and i've said it bernardo to you before but i i want to say it again that i think the fruit of this understanding is a piece on the inside absence of suffering on the inside and love on the outside and when i say love i don't just mean a a warm cozy feeling when i use the word life i mean the recognition that we share our being or our reality with everyone and everything in other words it is the felt sense of of the understand that we are speaking of here so these two experiences are i would suggest a fruit of this understanding peace on the inside love or beauty oneness or on the outside and i i have always felt with you bernado that um that you share this understanding profoundly but that the fruit of it at least on the inside um has been delayed in your case why because as you've just said suffering propels us to go deeper and deeper and deeper it's the fuel for this investigation and i think you have a um a unique role in the world to to to share this understanding in a way that nobody else can and in a field that nobody else can and rather than a way in a field for instance that i'm not qualified to speak in the world of science and and for this reason i feel that the fruit of this understanding although i see i i see it in you more and more over the years but i feel the fruit of this understanding is being withheld from you precisely to keep you motivated to do what you are supposed to be doing in the world and i think as time goes on i see it happening in you already i think as time goes on this piece will gradually emerge in your experience and i don't in any it's absence i do not in any way consider to be a failure of your understanding i think it's necessary for you for you to be able to do what you are doing so beautifully in the world yes but you've got work to do in the meantime bernardo that's just that's just i mean this what rupert is saying of course means instills hope uh in me um but even if rupert is wrong and what i'm going to say now will seem like a contradiction but there is a sense in which it's not a contradiction i am in peace with my lack of peace yes yes so doesn't that mean you're at least in a way um in a way i i don't double my suffering by not being in peace with the suffering because if you're suffering and then you tell yourself but i should not be suffering then you just multiply it by two you just make it worse no i don't make it worse i don't have that voice telling me i should not suffer i am in peace with my suffering it's part of nature i'm aware life is sacrificial um i mean i'm opening a door here that is a rabbit hole but i am okay with it i do suffer but i don't make it worse than it needs to be yeah and you don't personalize it rupert you're absolutely right bernardo it it would appear superficially to be a contradiction for what i'm saying but it's not it's it's a it's another way of expressing beautifully what i'm saying and this is this is what is meant by ananda in the pedantic tradition it's the it's the piece that lies behind the content of our experience whatever it's the peace that passive understanding the peace that has nothing to do what with what is taking place so that your suffering is in the foreground it's the content of your experience and most people's experience of suffering is that that takes up the full picture but i you you that there is this peace behind your suffering that enables you to say i am at peace with my suffering and i suspect that the peace behind your suffering will will grow and will progressively outshine the suffering in the foreground that's my intuition and as you say even if it doesn't it in a way it it doesn't matter because our lives are the meaning of our lives is so much bigger than our own personal experience now life is not about me life is not about any one of us right exactly it's sacrificial as you as you say yes now um i had a conversation with a gentleman i know uh and i explained in my own limited um still fairly um uh unexpert way this sort of awareness the consciousness only model and he his conclusion was that it was nihilistic that you know if we are uh if we don't have individuality if we are just if there is just one what is the point and my argument against him was well look i would suggest the current approach to life is you're born you work you die that doesn't feel hugely meaningful but i was wondering if you have a more sophisticated answer for that uh particular criticism let me stop no one is denying individuality individuality flourishes as a result of this understanding it is not diminished by individuality i mean the unique expression of each of our minds and bodies when it is liberated from the tyranny of materialism the character flourishes going just commenting briefly on on nihilism it's so kind of um how could you it's what pasolini said about the purpose of his films i'm trying to restore to reality its original sacred significance this is not a diminishing of reality it's an upgrading of reality yes it it's nicholistic in a very limited sense in that it denies the discrete independently existing object made out of matter that is the the foundation of the materialist model it denies so it starts with a denial yes no that things don't exist in and of themselves but that's there's much more that that's just the preparation there's much more to this understanding to this it's not just a denial of the reality of appearances it it is the penetration through appearances the recognition of their reality so it is it is restoring to reality it's i can use religious language it it it's sacred nature it's universal nature it's it's a it's a and this gentleman you spoke to may um may have got this idea that this perennial non-dual understanding is nihilistic by listening to some contemporary expressions of this understanding on the non-dual scene that that simply demolish that are nicholistic that just deny that there is anything apart from this our current experience these are misrepresentations of this understanding and do lead to the holistic conclusions and then everybody on the internet everybody says oh well everybody's just saying the same thing and expressing the same understanding no that's not true they're not it all comes under the umbrella of non-duality but if you look carefully you have extreme opposite understandings purporting to be the same recognition so this gentleman i would suggest has some [Music] either misunderstood what is being said or has been um watching the wrong videos uh bernardo how has this understanding then infused your own life with with meaning so that anyone listening can perhaps absorb some of that just a quick comment before i get there i think what rupert just said is the most important thing of this entire event today what he has just said um look it is imaginable that if suffering in your life has come to a point where it has become so completely unbearable that nihilism seems like paradise it's a way out of that it it there's no point in this whole thing there's no point to the suffering it's all for nothing anyway so why worry uh milan kundera called it the unbearable likeness of being um and there is a character in his book dr thomas who who is sort of the embodiment of this lightness of being of this this nihilism which gives a certain lightness um to what's going on and and and that can be alluring to some people um if they are desperate enough now my own relationship with the core of my being and the world and other people and life in general uh is not nihilistic at all much to the contrary to for me materialism was highly uh nihilistic you know there is only matter but whatever insights you have come to a complete end when you die um so whatever you learn whatever maturity you accumulate it's all for nothing anyway that's nihilistic um today i am i i live the reality that um there is tremendous meaning to whatever suffering i have because they are the conduits to insights and these insights are eternal in the sense of being outside time life is what provides the universe with a perspective a point of view on itself that it would otherwise not have and therefore life is pregnant with purpose and meaning the world of appearances is now a book to be read it's the superficial image of a deeper truth there is a dimension of depth meaning and significance to the entire world that wasn't there before everything you are surrounded with now is is a dance of symbols symbols that point at something beyond themselves the point to something fundamental to mind the mind of the universe to consciousness um and and and there is a point to this particular seemingly individual state uh we are in right now in trying to make sense of this i mean this is the antithesis of nihilism this is the universe pregnant with meaning this is life pregnant with purpose it it is baffling that someone would equate this with nihilism um people often talk about purpose and the need for purpose and uh how it provides happiness and it's correlated with longevity and all sorts of things and i'm reminded of that alan what's quote about the purpose of life is just simply you know to be alive nothing more than that and yet everyone sort of runs around in a blind panic feeling they need to achieve something beyond themselves so could you then under this model then is just the simple fact of being alive purpose enough in itself i i would suggest not because if that were the case everyone who is alive and that is everyone would feel fulfilled their purpose had been accomplished that's not the case most people do not feel fulfilled what is the the overarching drive in most people's lives to get rid of their suffering which stated in the positive means to find happiness to be at peace so i would say i actually think we have two purposes i don't think it's enough to simply say the purpose of life is to find happiness i think that that is our primary motivation and it relates to our inner experience but i think there's a symmetrical purpose that relates to the way we live and act and relate in the world so i think we could say that perhaps on the inside is to to find peace to find happiness but our purpose on the outside is to express this understanding to live this understanding you know and communicate it to demonstrate it to share it to celebrate it in our activities and relationships so so sorry bernardo just just quickly so but the hunt for purpose as it's currently understood though might that not be a way of seeking to alleviate the unhappiness that is instigated by the sort of misunderstanding of of reality as it is sorry i haven't understood your questions so people talk about purpose or goals let's say you know oh i i i've got when i find my purpose of i don't know whatever it may be um or i achieve a goal let's even say it's running a marathon i don't know whatever it may be then i will be happy that understanding of purpose and goals is that not that's just a misunderstanding of the uh alleviating unhappiness so if if we in that case if we stated our purpose as uh winning a marathon that that would be a that would be a superficial purpose if you said to the person if winning the marathon if you could be guaranteed that winning the marathon would make you miserable would you still train for it they would say no if you said to the person if if you ask somebody what they want above all else they say i'm longing for an intimate relationship and then they say okay i can give you an intimate relationship but i guarantee it will make you miserable do you still want it no way in other words it's not the intimate relationship the the million dollars the the the two children the beautiful house that what it's not we only want these things because we believe that the happiness and the peace which is what we really want will be derived from or provided by them right bernardo anything to add for i guess i'm passionate about this point um i i think we go wrong when we imagine purpose to be something that we determine and define when we sit down and make a bucket list or a list of things that we define as our personal goals because those purposes are false purposes and they are ultimately not fulfilling once you realize those goals you become cognizant that they were ghosts that you don't get the fulfillment that you were expecting from them when you buy the big house when you drive your ferrari when you have your trophy wife these things turn out to be uh gaseous now you run your fingers through them you can't grab hold of them um so i think this kind of projected ego purposes are illusions that will lead to disillusionment because they almost their power resides in they're not being achieved because then you project the true meaning the true purpose of nature you project it on them um and and then they have luminosity they have that drive but once you achieve them you realize that was not it that said i i do have a teleological view of nature the universe is dynamic it's change it's it's unfolding it's evolving and if all of that is the image of conscious processes there seems to be a conscious impulse impetus behind it otherwise the universe would remain in whatever state it is because that would be good enough um so i think the key is when you realize that it's not about you it's not about your little egoic goals it's about surrendering to what nature wants to do through you to what nature wants to manifest through you or learn through you um and this kind of purpose is not something that you can write down a piece of paper and say i will have achieved this purpose of by year x it doesn't work like that it's a continuous unfolding yeah you don't know where where it's going you only know if you develop the sensitivity for it where nature wants to be next day with you what you're supposed to do next you don't have the global picture of a super plan i don't think nature has it either it's a game of warm and cold you're getting warmer oh you're getting colder you correct your your path but there is a richness and then a deathless well not deathless a bottomless richness of purpose when you surrender goals yes so if if if if you understand could i could i summarize it thus ditch the five-year plan and learn to trust your intuition yes yes trust in your intuition my own experience maybe distorts my view on this it's extraordinarily tricky to discern what your ego is surreptitiously trying to make you do out of its own narratives and views about what should happen who you should be and where you should go to discern that from the true impersonal whispers of nature there there are several clues for how to discern them usually the impersonal whispers of nature don't give a damn about what whether you're happy or not you know whether whether your ego will be satisfied or not whether you get respect or not it can be almost self-destructive from an egoic perspective it doesn't give a damn about your safety um so this is one of the clues there are other clues so it's tricky to listen to your intuition because that can be a straightforward way to deceive yourself into you know the the not of narratives of the ego expressing themselves in a more subtle way than than just the five-year plan but ultimately i think if you get enough hard knocks in life ultimately you come to a place where you learn to discern them you know what is the impersonal whisper what nature wants next through you yeah you don't really exist you're just a part of nature you you're at best a tool you're not even that because you're not individualized enough to even be a tool but to surrender to nature's telos it's so reaching purpose and at the same time it requires a complete abandon abandonment of your goals your personal goals of your five-year plan your new year's resolutions all of that it's a total surrender to the now to to to that subtle whisper um which at first seems like to be a complete abandonment of any purpose any goal because you're in the present and goals and purposes seem to be future oriented so at first it seems like everything became purposeless but the next level of subtlety when you get there is it is pregnant with a kind of purpose that has nothing to do with personal goals it is bursting full with that it's the engine of everything as as dante said it is the love that moves the sun and the other stars and can move you i'm reminded rupert i'm coming to you i'm reminded of michael singer's book the surrender experiment which i very much enjoyed and you know even in my own experience a very um superficial example of intuition would be people trying to come on my podcast and and you get a sense of of right and wrong perhaps and when i have ignored it um i've paid for it in only a very small fashion so so in my experience um i feel like i've increasingly learning to tune into that i'm perhaps i'm still getting confused with ego but if to refine that rupert what would you suggest whenever i'm faced with a decision whether it's a large or small some kind of a choice i briefly refer back to my deepest love and understanding such as it is and i make the best attempt to make a decision or a choice that is consistent with and expressive of that love and understanding and the more one does that one's ability to do so becomes progressively refined by doing so yeah yeah that's it yeah very lovely okay now look i i want to just go off on a bit of a sidetrack backtrack just a couple of short points before we then leap forward again uh and it this may feel like we've slightly already trodden on them but i just want to to get them done as it were just to return briefly to physicalism materialism that model bernardo now you talk about all the key enlightenment values that a whole held up to be important when any view of reality is considered coherence simplicity etc etc we haven't got time to to delve into all of them can you pick the strongest one in your view for why materialism does not uh tick the uh enlightenment box oh explanatory power it doesn't explain experience which is all we have so there is a sense in which it explains nothing um internal consistency it uh it defines matter by definition it defines matter as that which has nothing to do with qualities and then it tries to explain qualities in terms of matter it's an internal inconsistency i mean it could go on and on and on but you asked for one again and you did give it to you too and the fact that you laughed i think speaks i mean you do find it laughable once you've looked at it it seems to me yeah yeah materialism is the worst option on the table right now it is it is literally laughable okay and the reason we don't laugh about it in the culture is that culture has manufactured plausibility for it okay now just a quick word as well uh on the on the brain right just the whole the view of it okay so my experience of my brain and your experience of my brain just because i think this is a key point would you mind just quickly again explaining that the brain from my point of view and from your point of view the brain is what your conscious inner life especially the metacognitive part looks like when observes from the outside look if you observe combustion from the outside it looks like flames um it's the image of the phenomenon and therefore it correlates with the phenomenon but the image is not the cause the image is an appearance that's what the brain is from my experience there is no brain because my experiences are experienced directly by me i have a first person perspective on my conscious in their life but if you were a neuroscientist taking a fmri scan of my brain you would see certain patterns of brain activity that's your view your point of view on my experiences in other words that's what my direct experiences look like to you when you observe me from the outside perfect perfect nice and simple right that propels us forward into non-dualism and idealism and rupert you talked about individual well i mentioned individuality and you addressed it individuality very much true um and even as you live this understanding more and more perhaps even that flourishes and becomes even more um rich in its own in its own way in its own form but can you just distinguish then you talk a lot about the separate self other people know it as the ego the thinker of our thoughts whatever you you know however you want to define it can you just explain what the difference is between individuality the mind and the so-called or the the illusory separate self okay individuality the mind and the separate self let's start with the mind the finite mind that is the the the collection of thinking feeling sensing and perceiving that each of us feels ourself to be i would suggest that that is a a localization of infinite consciousness within infinite consciousness um from whose perspective or through whose agency it perceives its own activity as the universe so in fact there is no real entity called a finite mind a finite mind is not a bounded entity in reality there are no bounded entities in reality there is just one unlimited whole whose nature is consciousness so um just like a thought is not a bounded entity in your own mind it is a process in your own mind that is not clearly defined so each of our finite minds are not really bounded entities within the universal consciousness it is a let's just say a a cluster a localization of of thinking and perceiving and as such it is not problematic it is simply the the means through which the universe perceives itself in the form that we perceive it so the finite mind is not synonymous with the what is commonly referred to as the separate self or the ego the separate self or the ego would be the belief that that finite mind defines who we are exactly so that the two the two different things the finite mind is just the impersonal functioning of thinking and perceiving that each of us feels we are from the inside one such thought of the of this impersonal functioning of thinking and perceiving one such instance of thinking is the belief i am this discrete independently existing entity that's the ego or the separate self and it is on behalf of that one that suffering arises on the inside conflict arises on the outside and by extension the degradation and the exploitation of the earth the individuality is present in both cases in other words the individuality um can be used either in the service of an ignorance or in service of truth when i say ignorance i don't mean that pejoratively i mean the ignoring of the nature of reality so individual can be informed by and an expression of the belief in the separate self and and the individual such an individual brings conflict misunderstanding and so on into the world the same individuality can be used in the service of of love and understanding although that would be the relationship between those those three can i ask that let me just add one more thing as we go more deeply into this understanding we could say that the uh um our individuality is liberated from the tyranny of the ego or of egoic thinking and flourishes as a result of this understanding it is not diminished by it for some people the idea that their ego is illusory that for example they are not the thinker of their thoughts that thinker is just a thought amongst many can be in my experience a little scary yet that would contrast with um conflict on the outside and suffering on the inside why is there that tension can i can i um let me use the analogy of the moth and the flame the flame is the only thing the moth really wants and as long as the flame is at a distance the moth longs for it now it approaches the flame and until it gets three inches away and then there is this recognition oh my god if i achieve what i long for in order to achieve what i long for i have to die and it moves away from the flame again but all it wants is the flame so it comes back and it gets to within two inches of the flame and then this fear again in order to have what i want above all else i must cease to be as a moth i must become the flame and this this uh the flame of course is the happiness for which all people long the moth is the separate self all the separate self truly longs for is to bring its own illusory existence to an end that's called happiness yeah so that that's why this separates up goes again and again and again to towards happiness but but as you say very often there is it pulls back at the last moment that from surrendering into that for which it longs because it realizes if i do this not i will cease to be on the contrary i will be liberated from a limitation but from the perspective of the separate self the separate self feels i will cease to be no it won't cease to be we just lose a limitation and we we don't become what we truly are but we we recognize what we truly are so it only feels like a death or a it's only a it's only um from the point of view of the separate self or ego that this is uh to be feared yeah well that's why the separate self is always engaged is ambivalent it fears the one thing for which it but the one thing it loves above all else it fears above all else hence this dance we do until at some point we are so fed up with the dance we we are willing to to go into the flame bernardo can i ask you i'm very familiar with i've followed rupert's work for many years and very familiar with seeing through the separate self in his the way he describes it what's your take on the ego and how one can recognize its illusory nature i mean after what we've just heard what can possibly be added i'm completely in agreement with rupert that there is a difference between an individualization of consciousness and the ego the the narrative of a separate self and it's it's very important to be aware of this distinction to avoid the seemingly nihilistic implications of idealism and non-duality the fact that the separate self does not exist does not entail or imply that there is no point to an individualization of consciousness that is the key point now how do you recognize the difference between the two i i can only draw from my own experience over the years it has become so straightforward for me now to picture myself in the shoes of other people even animals sometimes like it's easy for me now i at least i imagine it to put myself in the shoes of a cat and i have cats i've had cats all my life i'm very familiar with felinines if you know what i mean so that is that ability to imagine yourself being someone else makes it so clear that what you are is just this it's this pure subjectivity and everything else is ancillary it's what happens to be happening uh within that subjectivity um how how do i put in words how you can make that differentiation i think this is the best exercise if you come to the point where you can truly feel yourself in the skin of someone else and yet to recognize that i am still me that's when you realize the distinction between the seeming separate self or a narrative a story of the ego and an individual point of view because it's the same you in every individual point of view fundamentally it's the same you i have been so many people in my life i have been a scientist a philosopher business person an entrepreneur a husband i have been so many people and so many of them i look back now and i think that was not me at all and yet that was me the real thing behind all of them was me so i think life if you pay attention if you remain sensitive on purpose life brings you naturally to a point where you realize that all those things that you think are you they have an uncanny tendency to fall off and be left behind along the way you need only you don't even notice and yet you still keep telling yourself that these other things that have grown around me right now and i still haven't allowed them to fall off it's me and then 10 years old they all fall off as well but you others grow and you think that that's you i mean once you've been through this loop a few times you realize that's that's just ancillary stuff now the real me is the pure subjectivity and it's the same in you yeah and it's the same in my cat and i can imagine me being both of them so easily and and and then it becomes so bloody obvious what you are and what you are not uh yeah why isn't everybody realizing this i don't know it it's it's it's baffling yeah you mentioned what it happens to be happening in subjectivity and that would include all thoughts all feelings the story of me uh our self-image everything everything everything comes and goes rupert you know how would you enable someone unfamiliar with this to really recognize that throughout our lives we think and or feel and say i'm five years old i'm 15 years old i'm 47 i'm 63 i'm studying at school i'm falling in love i'm eating dinner i'm walking down the street i'm having a conversation i'm cold i'm tired et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera i'm single i'm married always the same i am qualified temporarily by various ages feelings states activities and relationships all of these are the temporary clothing like fernando says that they are they are the clothing that we wear but there's one there's one element of our experience that that remains consistently present throughout all changing experience just the awareness of being i am now if we if we take off so to speak all the layers of experience that are not essential to us when we when we've taken off everything when we've removed we don't literally have to do it but in in our if we if we go to that place in our own experience that is unconditioned or unqualified by the content of our experience that pure naked being the pure i am before it is colored or qualified by experience it is without agitation hence its nature is peace it there is no sense of lack in it hence it is what we call joy or happiness and the more deeply we sink into it the more it loses its apparent limitations because it borrows its apparent limitations from the content of experience divested of the content of experience it it it so to speak expands it doesn't really expand because it is always fully expanded but it seems to expand it grows wider and wider and at some point it it it's as if it flows out beyond the limitations of us as a person and there is this you you describe it beautifully bernardo when you say you you have the ability to feel your own core subjectivity your own being as the being of another that's love that's what love is to be able to feel one's own being as the being of another and it even goes beyond people and animals that at some stage there is this this recognition that that the being the is-ness from which everything derives its apparently independent existence is the same unqualified unlimited being from which we derive our apparently independent existence that's the experience of beauty this identity with the object that this recognition that the amnesty of the self is the is-ness of things okay i'm just going to ask you to do one of your quick uh quick fire answers if i may bernardo uh so we've talked about non-duality and idealism and the illusory separate self and the pure subjectivity its nature being peace and well-being and that kind of thing we've uh you you gave some quick examples why materialism falls down as per post enlightenment values can you just give a few explanations as for why idealism doesn't um okay um idealism doesn't postulate a kind of existence different than nature's given which is consciousness uh uh experience um it admits that there is more than our individual experience just like the earth continues beyond the horizon but that more is of the same kind as individual experience in other words beyond the horizon it's more earth not something totally different from earthness beyond the individual mind is more mind not something of a different kind than mind because it does this it circumvents the heart problem of consciousness altogether because you don't need to reduce experience to something that is non-experiential in nature there is no such thing it's all experience it's just that experience continues beyond the horizon of the individual uh center of awareness uh and that point of view we occupy in life that's one point the other point is it's much more consistent with the latest empirical data from the neuroscience of consciousness and foundations of physics because what this data is contradicting in foundations of physics for instance is that um it is the standalone existence of physical entities that's contradicted by laboratory evidence well it doesn't contradict idealism because under idealism physical entities indeed do not have standalone existence they are mere appearances dashboard representations of a deeper layer of reality that's another point there's a point of parsimony it makes less postulates about what's going on than the other uh um ontological or the other theories uh uh on the table so just just quickly just for people of my uh education level parsimony just means the simplest explanation simplicity yeah but parsimony means that you require the least number of postulated entities beyond immediate experience so if you can account for everything with the least postulates that's the simplest explanation and the more likely to be true yes okay and then just quickly the laws of science aren't made redundant by all this of course not science is the study and modeling and then the prediction of the behavior of nature the understanding of how nature behaves remains the same regardless of what nature is whatever it is it behaves the way we know it does now that knowledge is very limited there are many things we do not know about the behavior of nature but none of the things we do know becomes invalidated by idealism science is still just as valid what what falls through the cracks and then may be refuted is scientism is the attempt to create a hidden metaphysics out of certain scientific prejudices about what the world should be for it to behave the way it does but science itself no it remains intact okay when sam harris who obviously has got the waking up app um making sense podcast etc uh neuroscientist when he says these ideas or describes them as high falutin what's your reaction to that i don't think sam harris knows what he's talking about which is surprising for someone who brandishes a bachelor's degree in philosophy from stanford he conflates idealism with solipsism and therefore burns a straw man which is a philosophical term to say that what he's refuting is not idealism it it's his own hallucination and misunderstanding of what idealism is so he's refuting his own his own hallucination which is fine if he didn't have a large platform and weren't perceived as somebody who may actually know what he's talking about because he's just perpetuating a pernicious misunderstanding um and he seems to be largely unaware of his own ignorance so all in all i think he's quite negative force in the cultural dialogue right now because of this mismatch between how he is perceived as a deep thinker and the immaturity shallowness and vast ignorance of of what he has to say bernardo something that um you introduced me to was the the difference between phenomenal consciousness and uh meta consciousness so meta consciousness being you know that you're having an experience so right now i know i am talking to the two of you and it seems i was very surprised when i heard that a lot of scientists um confuse meta consciousness with phenomenal consciousness so for example and correct me if i'm wrong the phenomenal consciousness could be my cat could come and sit over here and at the corner of my eye that i might be aware of it but i might not have picked up on it so would that be an exam that would be an example of phenomenal consciousness would it that would that yes that would be an experience that you have you are experiencing it but you are not telling yourself oh i am experiencing okay rupert then so when we've spoken about flow and things like that and when experience becomes so intimate that there's you can't separate yourself out are you talking about and the inherent peace and joy and all those things in that is that are you talking about phenomenal consciousness and not meta consciousness there yes because we can be um we are intimately one with the entire content of our experience without necessarily having to represent it to ourselves for instance the tingling sensation at the souls of your feet well this moment i mention it meta consciousness begins but your experience didn't begin you were experiencing the tingling vibration of the souls of your feet but it was it was because of your focus on the content of our conversation the sensation of the souls of your feet was just a faint whisper on the on on the extremity on the extremities of your experience so you don't represent it to yourself but you are experiencing it now even more subtle than the tingling sensation of the swords of your be your breath as soon as i mention it you become aware of your breath actually you didn't become aware of it it just came out of the background it came out of the shadows of your experience and you become meta conscious of it you represent it oh i'm aware of my breathing you don't you don't become aware of it you you just become aware that you were previously aware of it now go one step further back the awareness of being awareness of being our being is even more transparent even more silent even more veiled by the content of experience than is our breath which is we could say the most transparent of all our experiences but just the simple awareness of being is even more transparent now if i were to say to you now be aware of the fact of simply being you would suddenly become meta conscious you would suddenly be become aware of being known you were always aware of being but a being was if not completely eclipsed largely obscured by our awareness of objects by objects i don't mean physical objects i mean thoughts feelings sensations and perceptions now when i say we become aware of being i i don't mean that being is something we can become aware of like a table or a chair we are essentially that being it is we this being who who is inherently aware of itself but overlooks its awareness of its own being in favor of the content of experience and we seem as a result to forget or lose ourselves and therefore we have to engage in this process which is called self-inquiry or prayer or meditation where we return from the adventure of experience trace our way back to the simple fact of being lovely right before we get on to we're in the final straight before we get on to the implications which is a pretty important thing just a couple of another a couple of other quick fire things for you if you wouldn't mind bernardo and then sure um first of all the idea or rather not the idea the evidence that the structure of the brain is uncannily similar to the structure of the universe this is uh pretty compelling if we're talking that or sense of you know science yeah so if the brain is what conscious experience looks like when observed from the outside from a third or second person perspective then if all the universe is actually the appearance of one universal mind you would expect to find a structure in some way similar to that of the brain because both are appearances of mentation of experiencing so is that the case it turns out that it is the case and studies have been done to avoid um comparing misleading pictures because if you're comparing just pictures you know you can crop a picture in just the right way and do some color filtering just the light way the right way that anything looks like anything else but these things were studied with the tools of information theory network topology um where you can derive you know specific salient properties about the structure of the universe at its largest scales and the structure of brains the network structure and they are uncannily similar and there is nothing known in physics that could justify this uh similarity so that's curious yes it's yeah it's very uh curious and then another thing you introduced me to was the um dissociative identity disorder now i i was phenomenally conscious of it to a degree but um but i wasn't you know wasn't really familiar with it and i want to tie this in with an objection to idealism because there and and there are lots of objections that you can swat away i've i've seen you do it and there are places for that but a very obvious one is for example that i can't read your thoughts you can't read my thoughts right so i was wondering if you could relate that to just the the dissociative identity disorder particularly the harvard uh paper and then the woman who couldn't see i've given you a lot there but if you can tie them all together with a with a nice little bow that would be great yeah so there is this psychiatric well-known um condition called dissociative identity disorder in which what was originally one center of awareness seemingly splits into multiple and separate sense centers of awareness which used to be called um multiple personalities in multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder is the new name in the dsm-5 the new menu of psychiatry until the beginning of this century there were doubts whether this condition really existed because all we had was what patients reported being different people having different ages and some doctors thought well this is just an attempt to get attention this condition doesn't really exist but since the advent of neuro imaging and the ability to image the brain activity where we know that the condition is real one example is this study done in 2015 in germany a woman with uh dissociative identity disorder had multiple alters or split-off personalities a couple of which claimed to be blind and the others not and the host was not blind and her visual system was intact so they had this brilliant idea of instrumenting her with an eeg cap to measure her brain activity and when a blind alter was in executive control of the body a brain activity in the visual cortex here the back of the brain would disappear even though the woman's eyes were open and there was nothing wrong with her visual system now that's something you cannot fake and when the host personality or one of the the other alters would assume executive control normal brain activity would resume in the visual cortex so dissociation is literally blinding it is capable of rendering you blind to what is right in front of your eyes even though your eyes are open and working so of course it can render me incapable of reading your thoughts and the other way around even if we are part of one universal mind one universal consciousness we know that one mind undergoing this empirically established phenomenon of dissociation can seemingly split into different centers of awareness that become blind to what's happening in the rest of that mental context even though at the fundamental level it's all one mind and we know that that's the case because people with the id can be cured those outers can be reintegrated into one host personality which then remembers the memories of each alter as the person's own integrated memories so my hypothesis is that this is what's happening right now there is only one universal consciousness and we are dreamed up uh uh avatars like in rupert's metaphor keep in mind a dream is a dissociative state you think you are your dream avatar and you are not doing the streets the cars and the houses around you in the dream while in fact it is your mind doing the avatar and the streets the cars and then the other houses and everything it's one minds doing doing the whole thing but in the dream state you become dissociated from yourself you split into the part of mind doing the context of the dream and the part of mind doing the avatar so that's an example of dissociation we are dissociated authors of this universal mind and that's why we seem to be separate but the underlying subjectivity in all of us is not only identical it's one it's the same just like it's the same underlying subjectivity doing the streets the cars and the houses in the dream and the dream avatar and you've shared a lovely story elsewhere well it's not necessarily actually a lovely story at all but a story about a woman with several dissociative um avatars or alters sorry and she had this one dream and they were all in various positions within the stream i mean yes it was it's actually a bit of a gruesome scene but but it it basically perfectly matches with rupert's we are one dream in in god's infinite or consciousness yes that was uh it was researched by the barrett from harvard she studied the dreams of patients with dissociative identity disorder or did which is just an extreme form of dissociation we all undergo dissociation if you don't remember something you do know you know that there you are you are dissociated from yourself but the id becomes pathological because because it becomes dysfunctional so strong it is now studying the dreams of patients with did the researcher realize that one quarter of them um had dreams in which multiple alters were present each alter experiencing the dream from its own point of view and then relating the dream in a waking state from their own point of view and each altar could see the other altars in the form of their own dream avatars so to say actually there was a dream in which one of the authors clubbed the other over the head with a stick so you see in your own mind one mind you can have multiple distinct centers of awareness that don't not only see each other but can club each other over the head so that happens in the mind of a person the hypothesis here as rupert suggested this take this one level up this is what's happening in the mind of nature we can see each other interact with each other within the dream we call life and even club each other over the head right let's move on to the implications the so what question right um because this head does have implications for the end of dissociation aka death um the ways we relate to other people the planet ourselves um so yeah rupert can you could you kick us off please with what do you think is the most profound and important implication of this understanding i think there are three implications the first in relation to our interior experience and that is the the piece that is the the nature of our essential being begins to uh progressively outshine our afflictive emotions in other words suffering reduces dramatically and and is replaced by this quiet joy or the causeless joy that is a joy that that is not derived from anything that takes place in the content of experience that is derived directly from its source namely being in relation to our to external experience and first of all in relation to people and animals and as i suggested earlier at some point there is this feeling that that our being extends beyond the limitations of us as an apparent individual and there is this more than just an intuition this felt sense that we share our what we essentially are our being with with all people and all animals and this it doesn't mean to say that we no longer have disagreements with people we can still have opposing points of view discuss them and even argue about them but um there is this increasingly there is this felt sense that we we share our being with all people and with all animals that that's the experience we refer to as love and this recognition of our shared being informs the way we treat people and animals and then the third consequence of this understanding is that we intuit or recognize that we share our being not only with all people and all animals but all things all of nature and this restores this recognition restores the proper relationship with nature and we live in harmony with our environment because we not just understand but we feel that what we essentially are is what it essentially is so the exploitation and degradation of our environment diminishes and we we we live a life individually and collectively that is in harmony with nature bernardo just in terms of the death problem um and actually it reminds me something else i wanted to mention to you but i previously forgot which is uh further evidence i believe for analytical idealism for non-duality etc which is that two two examples um you give the example of a fighter pilot who does the centrifuge thing who who blacks out so the blood is gone from his brain and you'd expect there to be no experience but actually the experience is reported to be even richer and then there is the case of psychedelic experience now anyone who's done psychedelics knows that you know the experience is uh rich beyond um imagination really and um but you would expect in that case would you not the activity of a brain to go up but actually the opposite in both case happens so again i don't know if those are those are relatable to to the broader questions totally yeah so under at least analytic idealism if not idealism in general what we call life biology metabolism organisms is just what a dissociative state in the mind of nature looks like when observed from a certain perspective from across a dissociative boundary that's what life is it's the appearance of a dissociated state it's what the dissociated state looks like so if death is the end of life then it's it's the end of dissociation so you would expect that if your ordinary brain function is fully compromised in other words you died you would expect your dissociation to end your inner life would then be reintegrated into a broader context and what you would experience is an enrichment of awareness not the extinction of awareness so precisely the opposite of the prediction of materialism now we cannot talk to people who really died and for obvious reasons they are no longer dissociated so there is nobody here to talk and tell us and the ease near-death experiences may be um but we cannot no i cannot ask my father who died when i was 12 you know what it was like so what can we do instead we can look at things that approach the death state severe compromises of brain activity and ask ourselves do people report an extinction of awareness or an expansion of awareness so when you put pilots in a centrifuge and they become unresponsive because the centrifugal forces drain blood out of their heads so their brain activity becomes highly compromised much reduced and when they come round they report quote memorable dreams that the words used uh in the academic paper that related this study so here you have an instance of severely compromised brain activity being correlated with enriched experience which is what you would expect if life is a dissociative state and death the the end of the dissociation psychedelics um you know if you until 2012 if you would have done a study and realized that psychedelics light up your brain like a christmas tree materialists would say aha of course we always told you so it can't be any different the brain generates experience so if you have a mind-boggling experience your brain is lit up like a christmas tree now from 2012 until today we've tested multiple psychedelic substances in multiple institutes multiple groups multiple testing procedures and protocols and the one major and consistent result is that psychedelics only reduce brain activity quite significantly and they don't increase brain activity anywhere else so the suggestion that i would make is that the brain activity that is being reduced by psychedelics is the brain activity that is the appearance of the dissociative process itself it's a model for death it's a quasi-death you enter the death process but you don't go all the way into it you come back and to tell the story and the stories people tell are mind-boggling and it's not only g-force or g-loc geforce induced loss of consciousness which is not a loss of consciousness at all it's a loss of responsiveness in psychedelics um and there was a study in brazil um about psychography which is some people claim that they can enter a trans state and write down all kinds of things that they are not supposed to know but somehow they get to know them turns out that people who can actually do that they can write very complex text while bringing activity related to language and logic and text writing is severely uh reduced under their trance state or teenagers playing the dangerous choking game in which they partly strangled themselves in order to have a high and if you see the descriptions of that high it's like well they're going back to cosmic consciousness and how do they do that by restricting blood flow to the head and severely compromising ordinary or normal brain function nobody should do that it's unsafe you can die if you do that but teenagers do that i mean the list goes on and on bullet wounds to the head correlate with acquired savant enhanced cognitive skills because of bullet wounds to the head i'm not saying that every time you wound your brain your consciousness will expand no most of the times you will compromise the contents of your dissociated altar and your cognitive skills will reduce your memory will reduce most of the times almost all the time that's what will happen but if that that damage happens in in the part of this image we call the brain that correlates with the dissociative process itself as opposed to the mental contents of the dissociation then in those rare cases you should have an expansion of awareness under idealism and under materialism there should be none of such cases not one even one contradicts materialism and it turns out there are loads of such cases the literature abounds with such cases and just one last thing bernardo and this is something you talk about as well a lot rupert deep sleep um the awareness of absence but bernardo you say when people in deep sleep when they're hooked up to a machine and are woken up they report some pretty funky stuff yeah we people dream we know that um but dreams have a particular signature on an eeg brains a tool that allows you scientists to read your brain activity so what is new in this research is that they looked at people they woke up they woke people up when they were not dreaming and they knew that because the eeg reading did not have the characteristics of a dream state so they wanted to know whether when people were asleep but not dreaming whether they are really unconscious dreamless sleep is this a lack of consciousness on the idealism it shouldn't be because consciousness is all there is there is no such a thing as total unconsciousness there is only dissociation and lack of meta consciousness but not phenomenal unconsciousness so they would wake people up when they were not dreaming and ask them quickly were you unconscious or were you experiencing something and people would systematically report they were experiencing things that were in dreams and they categorized those things in three different boxes dream thinking turns out that you can think while you're dreaming um subliminal perceptions you may be feeling the wind and when your window is open even though you are asleep you are still having that perception or what they called selfless states of awareness by which they mean a state of awareness in which you do not have the identification with an individual self um so apparently throughout the night you are experiencing things during your sleep even if you're not dreaming okay right that's pretty cool um and very much correlates with what you say rupert now now just just to finish then if this the perennial understanding reasserted itself and became the uh sort of the typical understanding of reality that most people had across the world what do you think would happen to the world as a result rupert i think people would be generally much happier there would be much less depression anxiety fear despair i think there would be much less conflict in the world conflicts between um individuals either in intimate relationships or friendships between families communities nations take take the conflicts that exist now between nations they are all perpetrated by people who do not understand or feel what we are speaking of here those conflicts would come to an end and as i said earlier it doesn't mean that we would necessarily agree with everything there would still be points of view different points of view and discussions and those discussions may be heated but they would be informed by this this understanding there would be more tolerance more openness more ability to listen and feel another point of view not just be stuck in one's own perspective that we would be a more compassionate society we would we would take care of our animals much better we would uh um as i said earlier we'd have a harmonious relationship with nature and that would have implications for that there's no area there is literally there is no area of society that would not be profoundly affected by this understanding it would infiltrate um education commerce government economics it would it would transform everything from the inside is what you're working towards as nip bernardo i have a more realistic view i think of of what i'm doing look analytical idealism has a conceptual theory it it doesn't change anyone's lives in enough itself because it's something of the head it's it's conceptual it's thought stuff it doesn't sink into the rest of your felt being in your heart into your emotions you know the lived presence of your life is not directly affected by it so what i what i see as the role of what i'm doing what i'm trying to do or what nature is trying to do through me is to help people give themselves permission to truly listen to rupert and others like him so it's a secondary role but but nonetheless i think it's it's an important role because there may be people who listen to rupert and their intuition is screaming to them this man is right he's saying something important but then comes the intellect and says ah but wait a moment if a surgeon cuts into my brain my experience changes so how come experience is primary no the intellect is the bouncer of the heart and my role is to give yourself permission to keep that bouncer under control to not let him sort of rule the pen if you know if you know what i mean um but real transformation comes from feeling it directly and i i can't help people do that uh rupert can um so i i think my role is to sort of pave the way for for people who are intellectually driven which is not the majority um but it's it it's a group of people who are disproportionately represented amongst the group that has their hands on the knobs and levers of human civilization that group is prone to having a bouncer an intellectual an intellect-driven bouncer of the heart that is totally out of control and and those are the people i'm trying to reach to to not really prime them but to make them more receptive to the transformative direct experience of non-duality that rupert can help them achieve so i i don't want to come across as putting myself down too much it's a secondary role in the sense that it is indirect but i think for this particular group of people it's something that is needed so i i don't want to to come across as unduly or artificially too modest and i'm just aware of what my role is and and this group of people though you mentioned though if they became more open to this it would trickle down far more easily would it would not and then um you talked about the ego is or the intellect is the the bouncer saying no you know what about the surgeon's scalpel but there's also that wanting to fit into a into a tribe isn't there of of not wanting to stand against what is the perceived um correct way of viewing things i know this even as a sports reporter i pretended to be a football fan for many years for the exact same reason so so that is a that's a fundamental thing as well isn't it rupert it's it's the tipping point yes yes i think well i think all three of us can um identify with this now because none of us are beholden to institutions for whom we are dependent for our livelihood so nobody is telling us what to think or what to say and that gives us um great freedom we don't have to compromise we we we can all speak our our understanding such as it is without fear of being censored in this day and age you don't get executed for it but you lose your job for it you lose the respect of your peers if you're in academia et cetera and i think um all of us all three of us are [Music] free of any such external pressure i and i it's no coincidence it's because of our in each case i believe that our our love of truth the universe let's put it like this the universe has cooperated with our love of truth and has provided circumstances for each of us where we can speak freely without fear of censorship or or condemnation or that's one thing and then it's another thing which in a way is a possibly a deeper reason that that and enables us to do what we do in that our our sense of our self is no longer invested at least to a large degree no longer invested in the amount of respect we derive from our colleagues um whether we're admired or not how many facebook likes or our sense of identity is derived from our intuition and recognition of truth and that gives you great courage it doesn't mean to say that you necessarily go out fight fighting or that you become very argumentative but it gives you this quiet courage to to to stay with truth such as you understand it and and to speak it irrespective of the consequences for your personal life yeah which is what your devotion to the truth is stronger than your devotion to yourself as a personal entity right lovely right listen i've asked everything i want to ask before i i lay out just a final thought is there anything uh either of you rupert or you bernardo would like to to throw into the mix i'd love to do this again i mean i love to listen to rupert i mean his choice of words is always so precise and he systematically hits the bullseye with the minimum number of words it's a delight isn't it i mean i love to do this again absolutely yeah i i would love to do this again the the the quality and content of this conversation gives me the same joy i experience when i listen to it's the same quality of intelligence and sensitivity that i that i experience in that music which gives me this this joy i experience the same joy and and that for me is that the hallmark of truth somehow truth and joy they're always connected yeah plato later made the same point you just made yeah it's a universal human intuition exactly exactly yes yeah i would agree as roger federer retires here we are that's that that's for me and the one one thing i'd like to just add is um is that steve jobs and i was looking for this quote just a minute ago i was trying to do it subtly but i couldn't find it and obviously my phone's off anyway but it was something along the lines of i think something comes along once in a while that changes things he was obviously talking about an iphone and it had i mean he was right it has changed things but i would suggest that the sort of the work you're doing and both of you and the collaboration and the potential impact of that could be far more profound than one of these so i just want to say um you know that what a a joy it's been to talk to you both and also just to tip my cap and say um you know what you're both doing is very important very special and very appreciated so thank you so simon thank you for saying that i just want to add one thing please don't um exclude yourself and thank you for for um orchestrating moderating this conversation your own very particular quality to draw out threads of conversation and understanding that that is that is uh that is important but bernardo and i have known each other for for several years we've had several conversations in in private and i've often talked about how much we would like to do this but we've never managed it we've always said oh yeah be lovely i'll come and spend the weekend with you in holland we'll just leave the camera on and we've had very excited but it's never it's never crystallized into a form although both of us i think have wanted to do this we both intuited just how rich it is and and could be so um you know thank you it's a very particular skill for for drawing out these the the conversation and i share the same sentiment well that's very much appreciated you're both very kind which doesn't come as a surprise anyway uh it has been a joy thank you very much indeed and uh until next time goodbye thank you so much thank you rupert thank you both of you lovely lovely to be with you thank you

Channel: Rupert Spira

Views: 114,282

Keywords: Matter or Consciousness, consciousness, science vs spirituality, bernardo kastrup, bernardo kastrup materialism, what is matter, what is consciousness, what are perceptions, rupert spira, non duality, vedantic, tantric, non-dualism, non dual, nature of reality, matter or conciousness, matter and the mind, consciousness vs matter, what is matter made of, where is consciousness made from, where does consciousness come from, consciousness from the brain

Id: MQuMzocvmTQ

Length: 150min 31sec (9031 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022