hello everybody how are you hello how are you fine fine glad to be here it's such an honor to  have you here i really appreciate you coming thank you very much i'm delighted to be here  and um i can't look forward enough to our discussions i would also like to say that i  really love your scarf oh thank you you're welcome okay so should we start off asking um  just a little bit of questions that we were you should probably introduce yourself oh my gosh i'm  so sorry that completely forgot sorry um my name is zoe trey i am a senior at um choked rosemary  hall hi my name is isaacu diallo i am also a senior um and my name is noah delorme i'm also  a senior and in the back we have  our faithful teacher mr harris hey mr off camera all right let's go let's take off yeah so i mean  basically we sort of structured our entire directed study which is um a semester uh at  our final term in school around your book um sex ecology spirituality and we've dedicated the last  couple months to reading it and talking about it and we meet twice or three times a week um and  it's just us three uh and so we're  huge fans of your work again thank you so much for for coming uh and so i guess my biggest  question for now as i was reading the entire book was like what was the process of writing this  right um it was an interesting overall process because i had been writing essentially a book a  year for about 15 years and then i got married  to treya and 10 days after we were married she was discovered to have breast cancer  and so our honeymoon was called off or rather we spent our honeymoon with me lying on a cart  in her hospital room with my legs hanging off about a foot or so i'm a little taller than those  carts were um and so i was able to write a book and i was able to write a book and i was able to  write a book and i was able to write a book and i was able to write a book and i was able to write a book and i was able to  and for the next five years i devoted myself to taking care of treya and so i really didn't  write specifically write anything at that time i gave all of that up so i could attend to her  needs and the  period  that i had stopped writing  was the period that post-modernism  first  really took over academia  it was about 19  early 1990s into 1995 1996 97  and so i ended up it was  all told  um about 10 years  between writing a book, the last book I'd written was Transformations of Consciousness  with Daniel P. Brown and Jack Engler. And it dealt with the growth in the upper left quadrant  of the major stages of development, including the transpersonal stages of development.  And things that could go wrong at each of those levels, various pathologies that could occur.  And then I stopped writing, like I say, for, it was almost 10 years before I sat down  and was able to start writing again. And the first thing I wrote was a book that I promised  Treya I would write called Grace and Grit, which was a book.  She was working on just talking about the personal changes that she was going through  as she dealt with cancer and particularly other people's responses to her having cancer  and the things that she had learned from that. And before she could finish writing that, she died.  And the,  last thing she asked me to do was to write that book for her.  And so I wrote the book, it's called Grace and Grit.  And by the way, that's finally been made into a major motion picture,  which will be released, I think, this June 4th.  So that's a very interesting sort of culmination of that period.  But,  as I sat down to write,  even though I had not written for about 10 years, my mind was still thinking and writing ideas  and producing ideas as it had most of my adult life.  And so I sat down to write Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.  And I noticed that in the first paragraph, I used about four words that weren't even,  allowed to be used in the academia run by postmodernists.  So things like hierarchy were just categorically out.  And so there went any sort of development because virtually every major developmental model in existence  talks about hierarchies, but hierarchies are badly misunderstood.  There are growth hierarchies,  and there are dominator hierarchies.  And the dominator hierarchies are all the horrible things that the postmodernists say they are.  But there are growth hierarchies.  And most growth hierarchies are the ones found in nature.  They're actually, they're not like dominator hierarchies,  where the higher you go in the level and the dominator hierarchy, the more people you can oppress or disown,  or tyrannize with power or something like that.  And those are true.  And you have to watch out for those.  But most hierarchies in nature are growth hierarchies or actualization hierarchies.  And what they are is not the higher you get in the level of the hierarchy,  the more you oppress lower levels.  It's the higher you get in the level of a growth hierarchy,  the more inclusive,  and embracing you become.  So atoms to molecules to cells to organisms is a growth hierarchy.  So that became the fact that I was jammed up on the first page by several of these types of concepts that I couldn't use really threw me for a loop.  Because most of the time when I would sit down to write,  I've always just had a fairly complete,  the ideas come down to me in forms of complete books.  And I just sit down and I start writing.  And I just write them out without stopping.  But the problem here was that I couldn't get past the first page without having to stop.  So I did stop.  And I did an enormous amount of writing.  And I did an enormous amount of writing.  And I did an enormous amount of writing.  And I did an enormous study about three years of post-modernism and what it meant and all of its major figures and what they were saying and so on.  So I could get an idea about what was going on.  And that became an important ingredient of sex,  psychology,  spirituality,  because I wanted to include the insights of the post-modernists,  but also,  I wanted to also be able to cogently point out their limitations or what I saw as flat out mistakes,  like they're confusing of growth hierarchies with dominator hierarchies.  And so after going through all of that,  then I sat down to write the book and it came out like most books do just a steady stream of writing from beginning to end.  And that had included it's a long book because it included sort of over that 10 year period when I wasn't formally writing my brain was still stacking up ideas that were important and all of those came tumbling out in this rather large book.  So that was the sort of real instigating part of writing.  So that was the sort of real instigating part of writing.  So that was the sort of real instigating part of writing.  And that's what,  I mean,  I'm still very happy with it.  It was written 26 years ago,  but I've gone on to write another 20 books and I've included,  continued to grow the integral framework.  So it continues to include stuff,  but,  uh,  uh,  uh,  virtually all of the ideas in SES I still agree with quite,  quite strongly.  So we can discuss any of those that you would like to in any order that you'd like to,  and I'll see if I can't attempt to shed some light on them.  Thank you so much.  Yeah.  Um,  I apologize.  In advance,  I sometimes have like a hard time sort of articulating,  um,  my questions,  but one of the things that I've been thinking about,  um,  while reading and,  and having just finished the book is like in the research I did while reading,  I feel like integral theory is often defined as an organization of various fields and knowledge and knowledge traditions into something that like recognizes how they all play into each other.  Uh,  and in my experience of trying to explain this book to people,  I feel like that leaves opportunity for the spirituality aspect to be neglected.  Um,  for example,  if I was someone who came across integral theory and understood it to be just harmonization,  I would find meaning in that.  Um,  and I would find solace in practices that seem to embody the theory on the surface level,  um,  and sort of fall victim to the idea that it does not take development,  to get there.  Um,  if we all agree on an integral approach.  And what did you say the relation of spirituality was in that situation that you're talking about?  Um,  I just met like,  oh,  I don't know if I know how to articulate.  Um,  did it mean that spirituality was to be included in integral or it wasn't necessary to include.  spirituality and integral but just sort of work with its integrating the more common and  conventional modes of knowing um i think my understanding is that spirituality should be  included or at least like is inherently included um and i guess my question is like it seems like  it in explaining it it's easy for it to seem as though it's just like let's all have an  understanding of what it means and how to get to collective consciousness um and that kind of  like neglects a little bit the spirituality i think in the way that it's sometimes explained  or at least maybe it's my poverty in articulating it um so i guess yeah just like my question is  i think like on a personal level or i guess not a personal level how do i navigate that  right um well this is  actually one area where although i still agree with what the essentials talk about i have  well i've added another dimension to spirituality which i'll explain as we go through it but in  ses spirituality is looked upon as particularly involving higher stages of  normal development they so they start out at pre-rational pre-verbal pre-conventional stages  the young infant and so on we also call these magic and mythic stages and then they grow through  rational stages conventional stages and then there's a third growth that can continue which  is into trans-rational or the truly spiritual  stages of development and those stages and those experiences have always been important to me  um in part i was introduced to spiritual experience when i was in  middle to late adolescence and i discovered zen buddhism  and i started reading like essays in zen buddhism by a scholar called vt suzuki it's really a  brilliant series of discussions on what a zen waking up or zen realization it's often called  a satori a zen satori what that really gave to human awareness and it was such a shock to me  i had never heard about something called satori a real enlightenment or a real awakening or a real  waking up process and i was for three days after i finished reading the book i was just enraged i was  infuriated because i kept going around saying why has nobody told me about this the only kind of  religion i had gotten was from sunday school christianity and god's this great male  grandfather in the sky and he has an actual son to a biological virgin and you're supposed to  believe all of those myths it just didn't really make sense to me and so i had pretty much dropped  out of religion by that time and then when i read about what was happening with things like zen  buddhism or vedanta hinduism or even christian mysticism the purely mystical parts of christianity  this whole process of waking up presented an absolutely radically new orientation  for me towards spirituality  that it wasn't just regressing to childhood myths it was actually taking the rational stage you're  at and going beyond it into higher trans rational realities and this struck me as absolutely  first of all it made sense i believed it because there was no silly mythic you know things being  said about it but it made sense to me that there was no silly mythic things being said about it  and all of the experiences and stages that it talked about were actual experiences that many  other people had had i mean zen had been passed on for over a thousand years and in its same it  managed to deliver satori at each of its generations because it had discovered various  practices and methodologies that could help you  awaken this divine or spiritual or one taste or satori experience and so that was  extremely interesting for me and so starting in books well even before sex ecology spirituality  but certainly in a book like that  i gave a fairly solid grounding of the early stages of development based on  experts in the field like margaret mahler and jean piaget and all these developmental psychologists  to show what archaic magic mythic and rational stages looked like and combined that with  and combined that with um  theorists in anthropology, sociology, people like Jürgen Habermas, and so on,  to try to give a foundation of developmental stages that we had all gone through. And some  of the models of these things, for example, like Piaget's, have been tested in over 40  different cultures. And so far, there are no exceptions found to these models. They're  really cross-culturally important. And of course, each culture will have different surface  structures that they add, and their surface structures are different everywhere. But the  deep structures, the actual pattern or form of the structure itself,  is what is cross-cultural or universal, or appears the same in every culture that's been tested in so  far. So I wanted to give that foundation of here's what's happening to consciousness as it continues  to unfold through a series of stages or waves of unfolding. And then we get up to starting to move  into higher and not conventionally recognized stages of awareness. I wanted to be able to  give that as well. And it just turns out that in the trans-rational stages,  almost all of them sound very spiritual. So you have people actually talking about,  like when I talk about psychic,  subtle, causal, and non-dual as four higher stages of transpersonal or trans-rational  development. These stages have been gone through and experienced by thousands of people in the  particular communities that study and practice these various stages of spirituality. So it became  important for me,  to include, if you're going to have a comprehensive theory of human development,  let's be comprehensive. Let's go from the lowest stages we can find to the highest stages we can  literally find with believable evidence. And so that's what I wanted to do.  And so a spiritual dimension is central to an  integral framework. Now, I'll tell you the one way that I have ended up modifying that a little  bit. And that is, I took in SES, I took all of the higher trans-rational stages, the psychic,  subtle, causal, and non-dual, as if they were in some sense, just a continuation,  of the same stage growth process that had occurred at all of the earlier and lower stages.  So in other words, when you went from pre-rational to rational to trans-rational stages,  those could all be outlined as part of one specific overall growth process that human  beings go through. And so that generally means that in order to get to a higher level, you have to  go through all of the lower stages, because the lower stages become components of each higher  stage. So it's like you can get a cell, but you have to go through atoms and molecules in order  to get to the cell. You can't get a cell by skipping atoms and molecules. It just doesn't  work. And so the same is true of each major conventional stage.  And I think it's true of all stages of development. But what I became curious about  understanding is that if you look at the population growth through the various stages  of development, and let's say you look up to moving from rational stages into vision logic  stages, or what I call centauri.  The percentage of the population that reaches the very highest levels of development  becomes a very small number of people. So in rational world-centric stages,  anywhere from 30 to 40% of the population reaches those stages. When you get into  what's sometimes called second tier,  or vision logic, centauri, existential stages, the highest of those stages  is reached by only 0.5% of the population. So it's growing and continued to grow as evolution moves  forward. When I first started writing about the percentages, the highest,  the highest stage in the vision logic stages was indeed called turquoise integral, and it did have  about a 0.5%. And the stage previous to it, which is called integral holistic, or just holistic  teal, had about three to 5% of the population had reached it. We find that when any of the  stage of development reaches around 10%,  then there's some sort of tipping point  in culture. And a culture starts  to adopt the values  of that higher stage that's now 10% of the  population.  So, what happened  when I was just always looking at the various  stages, including stages that I had called the transpersonal  stages, sometimes call them third tier,  that they were even less  than the 0.5%  of the population.  Of the turquoise integral stage.  That is, if the  theory was to be carried  through in one coherent  sweep, the whole point is that  the higher the stage, the fewer  the number of people there are.  And that's true for everything.  There are always fewer molecules and there are  atoms, because molecules  include atoms. So, there will always be more atoms  and there are molecules. And there will always be more  cells than there are molecules, because cells  include molecules. So, for every one cell,  you have maybe 100 molecules.  So, each higher stage contains  fewer people at it.  But, did you have a question?  I was just going to ask a question about how you measure  the percent of a population.  How do you measure the percent of a population?  Right. There are  about  one to two dozen  different, well-accepted  models of development  in today's academic world.  But, each of them  tends to focus on what I call  a different line of  development.  Sometimes called multiple intelligences.  So, Piaget  focused on cognitive  intelligence,  Kohlberg focused on moral intelligence,  Maslow focused on needs,  intelligence, and so on.  So, each of those models  has slightly different  ways that they measure  how a person is at each level of their line.  So, if you're at Piaget,  and you're measuring the percent of a population,  and you're measuring the percent of a population,  and you're measuring the percent of a population,  you're measuring the stage of development  from  sensorimotor to preoperational,  the concrete operational,  the formal operational,  there's simple fill-in-the-blank questions  that you can answer  and see how well you do on that test.  And then they can determine what general level  of development you're at using that test.  And so, that's how we measure the level of development.  That's how we determine what percentage of a population  is at a particular level.  But the point is that since each of these dozen or so  models of development,  whether it's Lovinger's or Kohlberg's or Keegan's  or Piaget's, because they have slightly different,  and the lines themselves can develop at independent rates,  some of these lines of development,  some of these lines of development,  some of these lines of development,  will be much more developed than other lines.  And so, measuring the population of a particular group  of people that's at each stage will vary  depending on which model and which test is used.  So, when I say turquoise was at 0.5%,  that was using a cognitive,  a cognitive test of development.  Some others might show not, it won't differ greatly,  Some others might show not, it won't differ greatly,  but some others will show, well, actually we have 1.5%  but some others will show, well, actually we have 1.5%  at that level.  And others might say, well, actually it's about 0.25%.  And others might say, well, actually it's about 0.25%.  So, they'll vary, but not very much.  But that's how we tend to do that.  But one of the problems was that,  if the percentage of vision logic,  if the percentage of vision logic,  if the percentage of vision logic,  high vision logic achievement is, let's say 0.5%.  The problem is we have polls that taken by just,  a Gallup can take these polls.  or Pew, just large polls of a large number of random Americans, we find that some 60%  of the people report that they've had some experience of cosmic consciousness or unity  consciousness. They have had an experience where they feel one with the entire universe.  And that's 60% of them are having that. And if that is really at a higher stage  than vision logic, it wouldn't fit. You can't go through 0.5%. And then at the next stage,  you have 60% experiencing it. It's just not right. So I started  writing the integral framework into several different aspects and several different  types of practices that were necessary in order to get in touch with that integral aspect.  So for example, getting in touch with all four quadrants  and spending time with the integral framework, and then writing the integral framework into several  different aspects. And then getting some time to learn about all four quadrants and how they're  behind so many different things in the world, including first, second, and third person  pronouns that you find in all languages. Those are the four quadrants or the big three.  Habermas's validity claims are the quadrants. And so learning about all of that,  because most people don't realize they have all these different dimensions available to them.  So when you learn that and actually start to incorporate it into your life,  we call that showing up. Now, if you have, and that's one area, if you have an actual  experience of growing up or going through the stages of development,  so that would go from sensory motor to pre-operational to concrete operational to  vision logic, to the extent that you actually grow through all of those, we call that growing up.  And then we distinguish that from the third process, which is called waking up. And wakening up  is exactly the pathway or the experience of taking up a little bit of time, taking a little bit of time to  say a meditative discipline until you actually wake up, have a satori experience. And what we  find is that that's very independent from the stage of growing up that you're at.  And so we took all of the higher psychic, subtle, causal stages of transrational development  and just moved that.  Over to a different dimension, which we call waking up. And it turns out that you can do all  of these. We also have cleaning up, which has to do with any psychotherapeutic process that you might  want to go through. And opening up, which means taking into account all of the multiple intelligences  that you have. So  you can do all of these. But at waking up and growing up, because these are independent,  you can have people that have grown up all the way to a vision logic level, and never  had a single experience of waking up in their life. And likewise, the traditions of waking up,  Zen, Vedanta, meditative, contemplative traditions all over the world,  none of them are aware of any of the stages of growing up. So you just don't have any,  not literally, not a single great tradition, or path of liberation, or meditative system  that has an understanding of the stages of growing up. So you can be quite evolved in waking up,  which, by the way, still goes through the...  the same stages that used to be just the upper end of growing up. So waking up still goes to  stages of psychic, to subtle, to causal, to turia, to non-dual. But you can have people that have  gone virtually all the way through that series of waking up stages, and still are located at  rather medium-high stages of waking up. So you can have people that have gone virtually all the way  through that series of waking up. So you can have people that have gone virtually all the way through  the yoker stages of growing up. And we find this all the time with great mystics who  seem to have this great sense of oneness with everything, but they can still be emotionally  quite childish. And they can also have shadow elements. Cleaning up is different from growing up,  and it's different from waking up. So all five stages of waking up,  five of these areas, showing up, waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and opening up,  are all five important areas of an integral overview. But they are all relatively independent.  You can advance quite a bit on one, and not at all on any of the others. And so we find that,  to be, that has a great deal of evidence now. And a lot of tests have been done to demonstrate  that. So for example, in here in Boulder, they did a group of tests where they took  individual teachers who were regarded as quite enlightened. And everybody sort of  recognized who they were. And so they did a group of tests where they took  these enlightened people, people that had progressed quite substantially on the waking  up dimension. And they gave them tests across a half dozen multiple intelligences  to see how far they had grown up. And what they found was, with virtually no exceptions,  no matter how high the teachers were on the waking up scale, all of them scored absolutely average  on the growing up scale. And these are all the gold standard tests that were given,  the Piaget test, the Colbert test, Lovinger test, and all that. And they all came across  exactly average. So getting a great deal of waking up won't necessarily,  draw you up in terms of growing up. And it also won't do anything for cleaning up. You have to  address that as a separate issue. So this was a bit of a rambling response to your question of  spirituality. And if you're interested in that, I'm happy to answer that. And I'll see you next  week.  relationship to the overall integral framework. And what my own sense about these five different  areas of showing up, waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and opening up is that  all five of them are important and need to be included in a true integral or comprehensive  approach. And the sum total in each of those areas gives you a particular wholeness.  I mean, so when you wake up, you have a sense of wholeness with the entire universe.  And when you grow up, you have an increasing sense of the increasing number of perspectives  you can take at those different levels. So you go from egocentric to ethnocentric to  worldly. So you go from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldly.  centric to integrated. But notice that the stages in those two are very different. So the stages in  growing up are, to put them in simple terms, archaic to magic to mythic to rational to  pluralistic to integral. But the stages in growing up or in waking up are gross to subtle to causal  to turia to one taste or ultimate unity consciousness. So you can see that they don't  really sound the same at all, and they're not the same at all. But because learning one of these  five wholenesses,  won't tell you about any of the others. And this is one of the most shocking  recent discoveries, in a sense that has become obvious.  Again, you can have a complete waking up, and it won't help you get a growing up wholeness.  And because of that, you want to specifically look for the wholenesses in all five of these  dimensions, and include all of them. And so, you can see that there's a lot of different  dimensions. And so, you can see that there's a lot of different dimensions. And so, you can see  all of them consciously  look to bring them all together. And so, you can see in the senses, it's a continuation of  the fundamental aspects laid out in SES. But by pulling all of these areas of wholeness together,  we create what we call a big wholeness. Simply because that's a big wholeness that  contains all of the,  five smaller wholenesses that each of these areas give you.  So that increasingly strikes me as an important addition  to the framework that was outlined in SES.  Thank you so much.  Yeah.  That's crazy.  That's like a whole new chapter to think about.  Yeah, it is.  But off of that, I do have a question.  So my question coming in was,  can you achieve higher consciousness without consciously trying to?  I know in the book it mentions a great thing for achieving that causal  or non-duality.  A great thing in that journey is to have a group of people around you.  But now with this new information, my question is,  for waking up, how much of that can be done?  Is it possible?  For anyone?  Is any of that to be done unconsciously, like without intention?  Could somebody end up a higher consciousness being without practicing,  meditating every day?  Yeah.  Yes.  To directly answer your question, yes, it's possible.  But it becomes a little bit less probable.  It's a little less likely that it will happen.  But there are.  There are plenty of cases.  And many of the great mystics in the West are ones who had an individual  awakening experience.  And they could have awakened to really any of the five major types of  mysticism, gross, subtle, causal, Turia, or non-dual.  But it is a little bit hard.  harder, and it usually happens to them unbidden. I mean, they're kind of surprised by it. They're  walking through the woods one day, and there's the sun above them, and they see that, and they're  walking on the earth, and they feel that. Maybe they're walking through the woods, and they feel  that. And then all of a sudden, pow, they have this extraordinary awakening experience to a  non-dual ultimate unity consciousness. And all of a sudden, their self disappears.  They're one with the sun. They're one with the trees. They're one with the earth.  They don't look at the mountain. They are the mountain. They don't look at the clouds. They  are the clouds. There's just this profound oneness that overcomes them. And then if they're  riders, which many of them were, then they'll write about that experience.  And they'll talk about it, and they'll say how important it is. But the number of people that  then have that same experience, just from reading this person's account of it, is usually not very  high. And so what we've found is that as people have had these experiences, they've tended on  average, not always, but on...  average, to draw together with other people that have had these experiences. And then often the  first person that had the really profound awakening experience becomes the teacher  and attempts to give guidance for the type of meditation or the type of mental attitude  or exercises or practices that you can do that will try to open you to this grand unity  consciousness. And then those, to the extent that they take, are passed down from generation to  generation. And so that happened in Zen, for example. The first person to have a real Zen-like  Satori was Bodhidharma.  About 500 AD. And the same insight has been passed down unbroken all the way to the present  Zen masters today, who transmit that same Satori, that same universal oneness, that same  being one with everything experience. And so that tends to be the reason I would say  that.  Like an SES, when I would talk about it, I would say, and done in a community of other practicing  practitioners, simply because I was sort of reflecting what normally happened historically.  Although, no, it's to repeat, you can definitely have any one of these experiences on your own  at any time. And there are even,  you know, certain mystics that will then say, okay, and then I knew I had to take up a practice  to keep that alive every day. And they would do it on their own. And often, if they really did  it extensively, and they first started out at, say, a subtle level experience of oneness,  and they kept practicing, then they would actually have a causal level experience. And if they kept  practicing, they'd have a non-dual experience. And so those are definitely possible. As I say,  they're just not as likely to happen. And if you're really serious about wanting to have a Satori-like  experience, it's best to probably try and hook up with some community that's practicing either  mindfulness or Buddhist meditation or Vedanta.  Vedanta, mantra meditation, or even Christian mysticism. I know a fair number of terrific  Christian, almost saints, like St. Father, St. Thomas. And he, in his lifetime, created over 300  meditative schools worldwide, where people could come and practice his  form of meditation, which was generally called centering meditation. And so he was a perfect  example of somebody who had this experience and then wanted to transmit it, and so created 300  schools. And I knew Father Thomas, and he really was, to the extent that this word makes any  meaning, he was a living,  Christian saint. I mean, he really was. And you could just feel it radiating off of him  at all hours of the day or night. He was plugged in, and you could really notice it.  So if you're interested in centering Christianity, I'd recommend looking up Father Thomas  on the net and finding a local one of those.  You could go to. If not, Zen still works great. Tibetan Buddhism is still probably one of the most  complete forms of practice of waking up. And you can check one of those, or any of the other ones  that have some efficacy. I'm Mr. Harris off camera here real quick to follow up on that. I'm so  curious.  If you are familiar with people like Tony Parsons and like certain people in a  contemporary, nonduality scene, where they, they sort of  make, it seems a little bit almost arrogant where they're like meditating in itself. And any type  of contemplative practice by its nature, frames things in a dualistic framework, because it  implies that there is a separate seeker, right Whom is looking to achieve sheet this union. And if  doing it's like any of those kind of practices then you are actually reinforcing the dualistic  stance right yeah um yes and no um they're stating a position that you're allowed to state  if you are so-called quote awakened so if you are awakened to the real self  then you can speak from that and what you'll say if you're a zen master for example  you'll say enlightenment cannot be achieved anything you're trying to achieve is will not  get you enlightenment because the very attempt to achieve enlightenment presupposes that it's  not present right now and the whole point of the enlightened traditions is enlightened mind  enlightened mind  is 100% present right now. If you bring it into existence, then it has a beginning in time.  It's temporal. It's no longer timeless. So you can't even do that. So you can make those kinds  of lecture statements, and you can put everybody else down when you're doing it. But the fact of  the matter is, there's a real paradox of instruction. And the paradox of instruction is  that you need a satori in order to realize you don't need a satori. So even hearing that, oh,  you can't seek it, it's all here and now, your mind, your present mind right now is 100% enlightened,  and it cannot be achieved. You're hearing that as,  one thing. But there is a difference between just hearing that and actually realizing that.  So from just between me spouting off these words, and you having an actual experience of,  whoa, I get it, my pure, true witnessing self is already present, is already active,  and is already enlightened. That's a direct experience. And when you have that,  then you'll be able to talk from that vantage point. And you'll realize one of the first  things that's realized with satori is that as strange as it sounds, you'll realize you already  knew, you always knew what you're realizing. One of the most common reactions that people  have when they first have satori is first great tears, God, I'm finally awake, I'm seeing reality,  but the second thing they realize is, wait a minute, I've known this forever. I've always  known this. I've always been enlightened, and now I'm just seeing that I always knew I was  enlightened. So that's what I mean by the paradox of instruction is you sort of need a satori in  order to realize you don't need a satori, if that makes any sense.  Yeah, I was gonna ask a question about, so you basically outline in your book about how  you can, like, sorry, we had a lot of conversations about the ways that we have all in our own lives as  students been able to like, sort of take this third hand perspective mode on a lot of our own  situations and a lot of the conflicts that we see happening within the country and sort of analyze  them with fresh eyes, knowing all of the kind of terminology that you outline and the kind of  paths of development and you can sort of see in certain groups or like movements and like, okay,  this is definitely magic mythic kind of thinking, stuff like that. So how do you think that  your work in SES and beyond can help people, especially in America now become better  activists, right, or effectively make change?  Right. Well, the ultimate goal, if I could state it this way, is to change the educational system.  Now, that does sound fairly utopian, and quite far out. And I'll give you a  a version of what each industry,  individual can do to help. But just in terms of a bigger picture, getting  actual, well, educational, particularly the humanities, right now, is stuck in a postmodern,  relativistic, pluralistic mode. And about  23,  20% of the population is at the postmodern, pluralistic, relativistic mode. And it has  dominated education. And it did it fairly quickly. Because that comes from their teaching,  a worldview that does come from the postmodern,  pluralistic, relativistic stage. In 1959, the percent of the population in America  that was at the postmodern, pluralistic stage of development was 3%. By 1972, Jacques-Thierry Da  was the most frequently quoted academic writer in America. And the percentage of population that was  at green had moved to about 23%.  So, and then, from there, they started taking over the humanities and education.  And as soon as they had done that, which they completed fairly quickly,  they started moving it down, the wokeism. They started moving that down into lower and lower  grades.  So at age five now, in many early grades of education,  white kids are taught that they have white privilege  and white supremacy, and they're responsible  for oppressing other races, other ethnic groups,  other classes.  And I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with that.  What I am pointing out is how quickly that what we call  the green pluralistic stage took over the entire educational system  from top to bottom.  And that could seem fairly depressing.  Because they also, in subsequent work,  we refer to, following Claire Graves' work,  we refer to stages that are first tier and stages  that are second tier.  And the stages that are first tier are archaic, magic, mythic,  rational, and pluralistic, or postmodern.  And the definition of a first tier stage is it thinks  its truth and values are the only real truth and values  in existence.  Everybody else's are goofy, wrong, childish, misplaced,  but they're not real.  And they're not worth giving much credit to.  And so that green postmodern stage is the highest of first tier  values.  Stages.  But they're still a first tier stage.  And what's called second tier are the integral stages,  stages of vision logic.  And we call them holistic teal and integral turquoise,  just to give them some names.  And the sum total of the population that are at those second tier stages  is now around five to seven.  When that reaches ten percent, if it's the same thing that's happened,  as it's happened every time in history, when we hit ten percent,  there's a tipping point.  And the values of those higher stages start to seep down and to saturate  the entire culture, because this ten percent stage is now the leading  edge.  It's the highest stage of cultural evolution.  It's the highest stage that cultural evolution understands.  And this in SES is what I refer to as vision logic.  And I would always say, it's coming.  It's on its way.  It's not here yet, but it's right above rational.  And rational includes what we call orange rational, and it includes green  pluralistic rational.  And it's the highest stage that cultural evolution understands.  And it's the highest stage that cultural evolution understands.  So those stages, particularly green, which has a multi-systemic,  a meta-systemic capacity, so it can reflect on the systemic third-person  perspectives of the previous rational stage and can start to differentiate  them.  And to multiple different cultures, because what orange rational stage  tends to produce are uniformly similar systems around the world.  So with orange rational chemistry, for example, there isn't Jewish chemistry  and Hindu chemistry and Irish chemistry.  There's just chemistry.  It's universally uniform.  Well, when the next stage, the pluralistic postmodern stage came into existence,  it had a capacity to reflect on that previous stage.  And so it could differentiate all those uniform systems into multicultural units.  And it would say, oh, all of those multicultural units have something,  and they all have to be equal or equal.  Don't just be unique.  They have to be equal or important to offer us.  And so that tended to create things like, well, since all cultures are differentiated,  but they all have equal value because it really can't integrate them into growth hierarchies,  where you can say, okay, some cultures are egocentric,  some cultures are ethnocentric, some cultures are world-centric,  any of that, by default, it just proclaimed that all of them are equal.  And that's the egalitarianism, diversity, multiculturalism.  That's what the central values of postmodernism, wokeism, are.  They're equity, diversity, inclusion.  But my whole point in bringing all those up is that the only item on the horizon  that looks like it can reintegrate those re-tribalized fragments  that the postmodern brings up, and with its multiculturalism,  since...  All of them have an equal value, then you get the values of multiculturalism  and egalitarianism and equity and so on.  But although they can differentiate them very carefully,  they can't, they don't, the postmodern mind doesn't have enough power  to integrate them.  That's what comes from the leap to second tier,  which Claire Gray has called monumental,  and a cataclysmic leap of meaning.  And what second tier can do is take all of the differentiations  that the green postmodern stage created,  and can actually start to integrate them,  pull them together into unified systems.  And that appears to be a major force that will help reunify  the extremely...  Polarized and re-tribalized world of identity politics  and all of those sorts of inherently divisive moves  that we're now seeing.  But I wanted to mention all of this only because,  no matter how right or wrong some of those ideas might mean,  the takeaway from postmodernism, in my mind, is as I said,  is that, as I said, postmodernism is, as I said, postmodernism is, as I said,  the incredible speed with which they entered academia  and took over academia.  And it moved it out of orange, rational thinking,  and moved it into green, pluralistic, relativistic,  multicultural types of modes of thought.  And that happened very, very quickly.  And the extreme postmodernists, they entrench re-tribalization to such a great degree that they don't even think that they have to discuss their ideas with people who disagree with them.  So on colleges, what you often find is, particularly if a Republican, let's say, is going to give a talk, they'll be shouted down.  And the heckler's veto is used to simply cut off all discussion whatsoever.  What I look forward to is in the coming future, as I've said right now, the sum total of the stages at second tier is somewhere between.  Five and seven or 8%.  I look forward to that becoming a 10% tipping point, which will then take their cultural leading edge away from postmodern relativistic differentiated stages and give them to the integrative, pulling together, uniting.  Synthesizing and systemic stages of second tier.  And that, I think, is very, very important.  And particularly given that Green has demonstrated how quickly academia can, in fact, be taken over by an idea.  I think we can look to see the same thing happening when people move into academia.  And I think this will be very important, because you have to look at the actual integral stages of development, because it's going to give them so many benefits that they hadn't previously had.  Such as cooling down on polarization.  And a cooling down on retribalization.  And a cooling down on these ethnic warfares that have just become insane.  And so I'm loving that.  That's a great point.  looking forward to a future where we'll get some sort of integral cultural leading edge.  In the meantime, what can an individual do? And the only thing that I can think of  is when you hear somebody state a view that because of your understanding of SES or because  of the conversations we're having now, you have a different view than what they're presenting,  then my recommendation is in the very gentlest ways possible, not mean or,  aggressive or attacking, but just in the gentlest ways possible saying, well,  have you thought about looking at it in this way? Or aren't you getting a little tired of  all this fragmentation that we're having in culture? Wouldn't you like to see it brought  together? Well, developmental studies indicate there's an actual stage where that happens  and it's logical.  It's lying right ahead of us. And so we can move towards something that works towards  that integral orientation. And I know that that's not a specifically easy or wonderful  solution to what anybody can do, but it is a bit of an indicator.  You can also throw in things like, you can also try mindfulness meditation, because that acts as a very powerful recentering of the brain itself.  And people that practice it seriously get a very sort of integrated sense of being and self, and certainly mind and body.  So I think that can also be something that you can recommend to people.  Thank you.  So I had kind of a question about relativism that ties into,  I guess, the self and what I've been hearing a lot lately, which is that reality is relative.  Right.  Which I understand to be like, for myself, I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am.  I am what I think you think I am.  Which, in my understanding, is inherently egotistical.  But it's also like an understanding of reality as consciousness.  And so I'm just kind of wondering what you think about that.  And also the idea that you kind of have to be like, you kind of have to have an out-of-body understanding to reach awareness.  Yeah.  Well, relativity is, unfortunately, it's a very confusing topic, because it does come into existence.  Yeah.  Just.  We'll just say the general meaning of relativity, and we'll explain exactly what we mean as we go on.  But general relativity, as a general understanding, does come into existence.  And particularly, well, it starts with the rational level, but it particularly comes into being with the postmodern relativistic level.  And it's often called the relativistic level.  Because it understands everything as being relative.  And in a sense, that's very true.  But what we have to be careful about is the very picture of everything being relative is itself held in a very certain way, with a great deal of certainty.  So, in other words...  In other words, if you say, well, you've got, that's just your relative view about it.  And I'll say, well, are you sure?  I mean, are you holding relativity in an almost absolute fashion?  Because that's what tends to happen as people start thinking about relativity.  They get onto it at first, and it looks like, oh, this is exactly correct.  Everything is relative.  But then...  That viewpoint itself is not held in a relative fashion.  So, people that believe that will say, for example, well, there is no truth.  There is no objective truth.  Because everything is relative.  And you say, well, so are you saying it's absolutely true that there is no truth?  And they'll say, all perspectives...  Are relative.  There's no absolute perspective anywhere.  They're all relative.  And we have to understand that.  And you say, okay, so do you believe that that is true for everybody?  Because if it is true for everybody, you've got a universal truth.  And your universal truth is that everything is relative.  And I'm saying it's fine if you hold a relative...  Relative truth.  But realize that you're holding it with a great deal of certainty.  And that's because awareness itself always presents what is arising in its own field.  It presents that with quite certainty.  Quite a bit of certainty.  And so, as long as you have an awareness, you are absolutely grasping what it is that's in you.  In your awareness.  You believe that that is true.  So, when you hold relativity as a general idea, just realize you are holding it.  And you're holding it as being completely true.  So, relativists will come along and say, well, all cultures have different truths and different values and different meanings.  And you'll say, why?  And they'll say, well, because the mind makes pictures of things.  And those pictures depend upon interaction with other pictures.  And they depend upon their context and so on.  And so, you'll go, okay, I agree with that.  Now, you're saying that's the reason that everybody in different cultures has different ideas.  So, what you're telling me is that that structure of...  Mind is the same for everybody.  And that's why everybody produces these different ideas.  So, in other words, what the relativists are claiming is true of the mind,  they're claiming is true for all people in all cultures, everywhere, at all times.  In other words, they're holding it absolutely.  With an ultimate certainty.  Does that make sense?  Yes.  Thank you.  I do have, I don't know if they're two separate questions, but how does or can integral theory or these ideas help somebody?  I know you mentioned the opening up and cleaning up.  Yeah.  Can this theory help somebody with substance abuse or something like that?  Yeah.  So, my other half of this question is how...  We've talked about this in our discussions.  How can you convince people of a poor class or people considered less privileged that  this is an effective way forward or an effective mindset?  Even if it isn't something that, although I would argue that meditation can provide  some pretty immediate benefits.  Right.  Isn't something that would provide immediate relief.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  this bigger picture. And under the general category of cleaning up, there are an enormous  number of methods and practices, some of them very conventional, which is fine, we'll take  whatever works, wherever we can get it. Some of them are new and been added, but they do work with  what could broadly be called emotional problems, including substance abuse and  domestic violence and any of these areas. So the area of cleaning up does very aggressively  deal with those issues. And it's important because  cleaning up  and waking up and growing up and opening up and showing up, again, work different areas,  they don't do the same. So it's important to have a cleaning up access in any overall growth  process that you might undertake. And it doesn't have to be, you don't have to become a master of  cleaning up, you don't have to become a great psychotherapist or anything like that. You  just have to be a master of cleaning up. And it doesn't have to be, you don't have to become a  just generally want to recognize certain signs or signals that you are getting out of touch with  some aspect of yourself or some shadow material is becoming unconscious in you. And if you can  just spot those, then we have a series of exercises that can help anybody with almost any shadow issue  reintegrate that shadow issue into themselves. And we call it a 3-2-1 process. Well, one of them is  called the 3-2-1 process. And what that does is it takes any symptoms that you have, it could be  depression, could be anxiety, it could be interpersonal problems. You think your partner  wants to get involved in having an affair.  Or you have a new boss and you hate him because he's so over controlling, or any of those types  of issues that can upset you. From conventional ones, like I've got a new boss and he's way over  controlling, to very serious ones like substance abuse. And what we do with the 3-2-1 process,  for example, is if you, let's say,  have an overblown reaction to your new boss because he's so over controlling. And you don't  feel that you're over controlling at all, but your boss is, and you can't stand that. So you  actually end up hating your boss. Well, you might be, everybody might hate your boss as well,  but probably not. I mean, you might be one of the,  relatively few who actively hate your boss. And so what the 3-2-1 process does  is it takes whatever is bothering you and it talks to it as third person and then moves it  to second person and then moves it to first person. Because the idea is that the only reason  that your boss's controlling activities upset you is because you have some of these controlling  activities yourself. You become unaware of them and projected them onto him. Then you can't stand  him, which is really your own shadow material. And so when you set your boss down in the empty chair,  which just means,  the place that you're going to talk to your problem, and you start dialoguing with your boss,  why are you so controlling? Why are you so annoying? Why do you hate me? And so on. And you  talk back and forth with your boss. And so you might ask him, why are you so controlling? And  he might answer, and you would be,  the person answering this, because it's just you and your imaginary boss. And so you ask a question  and then as your imaginary boss, you answer, well, I dislike you because you don't work hard  enough. And therefore I have to keep on you as a controlling endeavor. And then you go back and  forth and talk with the,  the symptom, the problem, the shadow. And the more you do that, the more you start to identify  with the person who's answering as your boss. And so you'll start to, as you go back and forth  and talk to them for 10, 15 minutes, you'll start to actually get a feel for the control,  the control of the person. And then you start to think about the controlling nature of your boss,  because you're acting as this controlling person. So you're adopting these controlling facets that  you dislike. And the more you do that, the more you're turning that third person thing that you  don't like into a second person, you, that you're actually in dialogue with. And the more you do  that, the more you start to realize what it is that you're doing wrong. And so you start to  project it onto that person. And so the more you become that controlling boss, then the more you're  taking that issue back, the more you're reintegrating, the more you're realizing that,  wait a minute, I'm the controller. I've been talking like a controller for the last 10 or 15  minutes. And because, and I can start to feel the controlling,  nature of my own side. I don't like that in me. That's why I got rid of it and projected it  onto somebody else like the boss. And so the three, two, one is locate the problem,  talk to the problem, and then be the problem. And that takes that shadow back from third person  into second person, into first person. And when you are,  well done with this process, and you've realized that, wait a minute, this controlling  quality is something I possess. And I have to come to terms with that. I don't like it myself.  That's why I'm repressing it and projecting it onto other people.  So that's just one example of a cleaning up process.  Um, and by the way, it's, you're taking an it third person object and converting it back into  an I or first person. Most people don't realize that Freud himself, they think that Freud used  terms like ego and id. So when he was asked, what does psychotherapy do in the psychoanalytic  version? He famously said, where id,  was their ego shall be. But Freud never used the terms ego or id, not once. They were added  to his translations by his official translator, Jane Sprocky, because Sprocky thought it made  Freud sound more scientific to use these Latin terms, ego and id. So he just punched them in.  The terms Freud used were,  the actual German pronouns for the I and the id. So, and that's the way he would talk.  So when he said, where id was, their ego shall be, what he really said was, where it was,  their I shall become. And that was exactly taking this it third person thing that you don't think  you have, and that that other person does, and taking it back into your,  by your own self. And that's exactly what is in a sense, it's what all good forms of psychotherapy  do. But we have a lot of other specific programs that we work with people that have substance abuse  or something along that line. And then as for your second question about what to,  how to,  how to help the poor, that's clearly a difficult issue because it, whenever we're talking about the  poor, we're talking about the whole economic structure and how to change that. And that's at  least as difficult or more difficult than changing the educational system. So, but I would say,  and you hinted at it,  that at least one of the things that any individual can do with any uncomfortable position  that they are in is take a meditative stance towards it. So to the extent that a person can  sit back and just witness what's happening, then they tend to gain a certain freedom  from what's happening. So the stance of the witness,  the transcendental witness is, I see the mountain, but I'm not the mountain. I have sensations,  but I'm not sensations. I have feelings, but I'm not feelings. I have thoughts,  but I'm not my thoughts. I'm the pure seer, the pure witness of all of those.  And to the extent a person can get into that stance, then they're not grabbed,  by their pain. The pain doesn't have them, they have it. And this is why Zen masters  who get deeply into that process will notoriously have surgery without even anesthetic,  because they are so into the pure witnessing that they are not any pain that arises.  And that can clearly be very, very helpful.  It won't put food on your table, but it might give you enough relaxing break from the turmoil  to allow you to regroup and maybe head out on some more productive and fruitful endeavors.  Thank you.  Sure.  Okay, I have another. Okay, I also don't know how to articulate this question. So another thing  I've thought about a lot while reading is emotions, and my emotions specifically.  We've obviously assigned like positive and negative meanings to different emotions.  But I think about like how they influence my development in terms of like the stages of  developmental consciousness. And so, for example, when I think about like the things and the people  that I love, who I recognize,  as having contributed to to my being um and i also recognize that i often don't think about  the negative things or the things i hate and how they've also contributed but um specifically with  love um there's kind of this reminder as i'm reading the book or like when i sit down when  i did sit down to read um that everything has contributed to my being um and even if it's not  obvious the things that are that i identify as as others have also contributed to my being um  because my ego and myself like creates that otherness um and so in thinking about that  and that kind of reminder um you kind of have in order to justify loving these people and these  things um you have to love everything and justify loving everything um i don't know it's just this  this  weird thing for me to think about and for me to recognize in my everyday life and it gets a little  frustrating in moments when i'm like i'm not i hate this right now and it's like very obviously  just my projection of of those emotions and like the fact that i have not overcome that and so i'm  just wondering if you have any thoughts or tips on that yeah well love is a very  complex human  emotion and i i think this is especially true because it's one of the emotions that  can span almost the entire spectrum of consciousness um because what we were  looking at when we looked at cognitive development and ses we were looking at  a self-identity so the self starts out just identified exclusively with its own organism  and then it starts to expand it can see other people and identify with them and in a sense love  them so it's not just loving itself but it's starting to love other people even though it  still often confuses itself with those people and has sort of anthropomorphic or  animistic or egocentric notions about them it's still more love than the present the previous  stage then when it gets up to concrete operational and it can actually take the role of other  then it can actually love another person largely for what that person is for themselves because in  concrete operational thinking remember one of the experiments was  taking a doll and have it point to three different mountains and then asking what  color it saw and it was only a concrete operational that the child could actually say  oh i'm looking at all three of the mountains but the doll is looking at just the green mountain  so it can start to actually reconstruct what another person's perspective is like  so it's not just about the person's perspective it's about the person's perspective  so in other words they can actually start to see you and therefore they can actually start to love  you and that's a genuine expansion of love and then as we get into formal operational  your identity expands again and it expands from trying to treat all  people in  your special group fairly regardless of race color sex or creed to being able to with rationality  treat all people in all groups fairly regardless of race color sex or creed and so love is expanding  again at that point and so love is also the mystics maintain that  love can continue of course into the transpersonal dimensions into dimensions of waking up because  states of consciousness that include everything embrace everything in a sense love everything  because they're embracing them within this caring and folding  магic and  and  is  doing  is  transform  transform  meaning  this  is  this  the  this  want  to  entity, that's very true. And so love is a way that you can connect not only with people around  you that might have helped a lot or circumstances around you that might have helped you a lot,  but it's a way to essentially connect with any of your levels of being and awareness,  including up to God, where you have a love that you might expend to your partner.  And then when you get to a psychic level, that love expands to the whole world. And you feel  a oneness with the entire universe. And then by the time you get up to unity with spirit,  then that's your one with the ground of all being. So it's the same love in a sense,  only it gets shaved down, so to speak, in lesser levels, but it's still connected to its source,  which is a primal, loving ground of all being. So love is a  very important distinction, very important emotion to be in touch with.  And the fact that we talked about a lot of higher levels in cognitive terms,  I pointed out that I was only going through the levels in cognitive terms, and I wasn't including  emotional intelligence or really moral intelligence or anything like that. But as cognition,  it creates greater, wider self-identities. It's also allowing love to expand into those greater,  wider identities. So your capacity to love increases and gets greater and greater.  And so that's an important aspect of love. And it doesn't mean that, again,  one of the difficulties with any developmental sequence is if you're on the lower stage,  you sort of get judgmental about yourself, you feel guilty because I could be higher. And that's  not what the point of the developmental models are about. It's not to create a new type of guilt  in you. It's just a point to deeper and wider and higher potentials that you do have available to you.  And we know they're there because thousands of other people have grown through them.  And we've tested them for it and found that to be true. As I said, some of these tests have  been done in over 40 different cultures. So we have a lot of reasons to believe  that these general stage possibilities are potentials that each of us have. And I think  we have all of them. Some of them are psychological. Some of them are not. And we're  always trying to identify and identify the potential that's in those physical and emotional  conditions. And it is like you said, there's mental and physical moments that are important  in that kind of relationship. And the ones that are in the spiritual are important. The  ones that are in the emotional, the emotional moments are important. There's a lot of them  that we don't have. We tend to notice it if we're parents and have young kids, because they'll  grow through magic and mythic stages and you can notice them immediately. You can see how a 3-year-old  walking, and it knows what it's doing. And all of those kinds of magic beliefs  will be stated very clearly by youngsters. And adults mostly just sort of smile and go,  oh, that's cute. That's funny. But what's happening really is that they're starting  their developmental growth. And they are going through archaic and magic and mythic periods  on the way to the emergence of rationality, which is then they all of a sudden make sense.  And we can follow that. But the stages of most of our capacities are important,  including emotional stages. And that certainly includes  love. Thank you.  Yeah, I was just going to ask another question. So I was saying how even before we had started  reading this book or had this entire experience, I had never considered myself a spiritual person.  And I think that comes as a result of my parents aren't followers of any religion,  and their understanding of religion is strictly the mythic level of how it is conveyed.  To a wide degree, because I can, you know, that's sort of how a lot of  religions can be expressed or practiced. And so my question is like now trying to describe to them  how important I think the under like spirituality is or how I consider myself a spiritual person now.  And just like the deeper appreciation and beauty and like presence and all these kinds of things.  How do you rationalize that to people in general who are in a way kind of like gross reductionists?  And like see them, you know, expose them to the importance of the left-hand quadrants  and why they're equally as valid as the right?  Yeah. That also takes a little bit of what you could, what we could call miniature education  to distinguish it from the large educational systems that we talked about.  But when you are talking to somebody and attempting,  to explain some viewpoint that you're having, it often takes a little bit of miniature  educating. Because in order for you to fill out what you're trying to convey,  you do have to give them some alternative idea that is being offered. In this case, how to handle,  okay, how can I use this to have a better understanding of what we're trying to do?  You can take a few of these cono-mythic literal religions,  and what you want to say in terms of that. And so you need to just determine,  okay, what would be the best approach for me to explain these differences.  And, you know, take the best that you can come up with at that time, and start out on little,  miniature educational procedure and try to convey again in very gentle non-aggressive terms  try to convey exactly the points you consider central for that conversation  thank you with all the talking about love i think earlier in the term me and mr harris were having  this conversation um and i have this question at the higher at those points of consciousness  or spirituality when you get if you are to reach that level of um like godly love like god and  all love is there room for significant others anymore um sure um one of the um  hardest things to understand when we get to  discussing spiritual realities whether it's the ground of all being or even something like  emptiness um is it's very hard to realize that none of those affect the actual  manifestation or the appearance of all those objects we're now looking at  they all remain essentially the same objects that you're now  looking at  aware of. It's just you're plugging it into a bigger background. And that background cannot  itself usually be seen. It's something that is the condition or the ground of all things that are  seen. And so emptiness, for example, which is sort of the central Buddhist notion of a ground of all  being, doesn't really mean without form, or formless. It technically means that  this is an experience that you have, when you have a real satori, or real waking up.  And it's not something that can be verbalized. As a matter of fact,  Nagarjuna,  who is credited with coming up with a central notion of emptiness,  said, you can pick any thing you want for absolute reality. Call it God, love, spirit,  truth, goodness, beauty, it doesn't matter. Because without a direct experience of that reality,  all of those terms are meaningless. So he actually developed a bit of a dialectic that demonstrated  that no matter what term you use for ultimate reality, again, it could be the good, the true,  the beautiful, God, spirit, light, any of those, call them all of those X.  Nagarjuna demonstrated that reality is neither X, nor not X, nor both,  nor neither. That sort of takes care of words, in terms of your chance to explain this in any  sort of rational or linguistic fashion. But you can know it. You can know it by shifting  the mode of consciousness you have to a mode that's non-dual awareness. So it's not a subject  versus object.  You're not standing back thinking something and looking at all the objects out there. But rather,  you are such a mirror mind of all these objects out there, that you and the objects in a sense  become one. And in that oneness, you will see this non-dual reality, you'll have a direct experience  of it.  So it's sort of like actually going to Bermuda and having an actual experience of Bermuda,  or simply having a photo book of Bermuda and looking at all the pictures of it.  So he really wanted people to understand how important not merely talking about this  but the ultimate reality was, the steps you had to take to directly realize it yourself. And then  you would know what it was. But for just all of those reasons, if we take emptiness as an example,  everything that's now arising is still arising, only it's arising on your own mirror mind.  So in other words, you're not standing back from everything, you're reflecting everything,  you become one with everything. And that oneness is the non-duality of subject and object or non-dual  mind and matter are non dual, spirit and form are non dual. And everything else though,  is...  essentially untouched. And this means you can still have a partner that you intimately love.  You can still have children that you want to care for. You can still go to work each day  at some job that you may hate or not. But all of that is essentially unchanged.  What is changed is you are no longer separate from any of it. The entire universe is arising  within you. Just as right now, if you just look at the room you're in, you're not really  in that room. That room is in your awareness. So you're actually one with that room that's  arising within you. And that room is in your awareness. And that room is in your awareness.  Within you. Well, when you have that experience on a massive, huge scale,  then that's what you experience. The entire universe is arising within you. And so  your relationship with everything changes. Everything itself stays essentially the same.  You're just no longer standing back from it and watching it.  So then if you become one with all of these objects, then certain aspects of your relationship  with them will indeed change. So if you are in a relationship with your partner, and all of a  sudden you feel that you're genuinely one with your partner, you can love her freely and fully.  That, if anything, that love would be increased. But you can still get into fights,  and still have problems, and still have issues. But to the extent that you're in an enlightened  mind, all of those issues will not be separate from you. They won't be something outside of you  that's whacking you in the head, or torturing you, or causing problems.  They'll be things that are arising within your being. And you are one with everything.  We call it making room for everything. And that's essentially what this universal,  it's called ultimate unity consciousness sometimes, or cosmic consciousness.  Everything is continuing to arise. It's just arising within you.  So,  as I say, that's the hard part.  No, no, no. That makes sense.  Okay.  I think that's the, do you have another question?  I have a silly question that I was just curious about, which is, I guess it's not as,  are you afraid of anything? If so, what is your biggest fear, if you're comfortable saying it?  Oh,  sure. It's, they're different than they used to be. Before I started on this path,  when I would have fears, they would threaten me. And so I would be directly frightened by items  that would threaten me. And they were, they included things, oh, in high school,  I wasn't getting, you know, good grades. I ran for student body president several times.  And I won several times, but I also was afraid that I would lose. And that would just,  that was crushing to me. Then the more I began this process of expanding my own awareness,  and,  and so I could reach out and embrace everything. Items could still, let's say fear could still  arise. But it wasn't something that was happening to me. It was just something that was arising.  And I went to witness it. So I have fear, but I am not my fear.  So, like, I have sensations, but I'm not my sensations, I have thoughts, I'm not my thoughts.  I have feelings, I'm not my feelings. I have fears, I'm not my fear.  And so it would cease directly attacking me. Because me was getting less and less,  and wider and wider and more embracing and more encompassing. And so,  I just simply felt that I was opening up and letting it all come rushing through.  And when that, when I got good at that, fear would arise, but it was no longer frightening  because I could just open up and let it wash through me like everything else.  And that's the sort of one of the central notions of some of the higher reaches of meditation.  Or read Ramana Maharshi, for example, would talk about these kinds of things  and how he would simply, the world simply washed through him  as a,  as part of his big self,  big mind,  transcendental self.  And that reached out and embraced everything in the manifest world.  And therefore nothing really frightened him anymore.  Although fear could still arise, but it's, oh, fear over here, joy over here,  happiness over here, a little bit of sadness over here.  And they're just,  all arising, but they're not threatening to you anymore.  And that's essentially the main difference in how fear and my own fears have changed.  Thank you.  Yeah.  So I think that's the majority of our, of our questions.  We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.  This has been a really wonderful experience.  Oh, it's been,  we've been looking forward to it for months.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  It's been wonderful.  And I, we had we got two hours done.  Yeah.  That's pretty good.  Yeah.  All right.  Well, it's wonderful talking with all of you.  Thank you again.  It was really a pleasure.  We really appreciate it.  Thank you very much.  Be well.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  Bye.  We'll be right back.