E219 - Robert Greene: The 12 Doorways to the Sublime & What Almost Dying Taught Me About Being Alive

In this episode I sit down with Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The Art of Seduction, and The Laws of Human Nature, to explore his latest book on the sublime. Robert first imagined researching it through travels to the Amazon and distant mountains. Then a stroke nearly took his life and confined him to his home. With his left side paralyzed, he spent seven years handwriting the book and discovered that the sublime was waiting in his own backyard. What We Dive Into: 1. Robert describes adult life as dead time, measured in abstract blocks of minutes and hours. Children live inside time like a river, seeing the world for the first time, and much of our restless dissatisfaction is a buried memory of that open, unfiltered way of meeting the world each day. 2. The brain prunes enormous amounts of sensory data so we can function, constructing both our reality and a sense of a separate self. Focused attention, like Gurdjieff’s practice of self-remembering, can loosen that filter and let the world appear strange, vivid, and alive again. 3. Robert links our avoidance of pain, discomfort, and death to a loss of inner resilience. When suffering and mortality are faced deliberately, they can be transmuted into acceptance and compassion, along with a deeper kinship with everyone who has lived, suffered, and died before us. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://www.sleep.me/knowthyself To get up to $640 off your Chilipad 2.0 with code KNOWTHYSELF https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide Waking Up: Get your 14 day free trial! https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself ___________ 00:00 Intro 02:00 A Stroke and the Backyard Amazon 10:03 Writing a Book by Hand 13:07 The Circle of Everyday Consciousness 18:54 The Anti-Sublime 25:01 The Cosmic Sublime 35:00 The Pagan Sublime and Eleusinian Mysteries 42:50 The Hunger for Collective Ecstasy 47:01 Childhood as an Awakening 52:20 Returning to a Second Innocence 59:15 Despair as a Doorway 1:02:51 Vulnerability and Feeling Ridiculous 1:04:25 The Naked Brain 1:12:37 Gurdjieff and the Power of Attention 1:22:22 The Interspecies Sublime 1:31:00 Loneliness and the Animal World 1:37:56 The Love Sublime 1:45:58 Love and the Art of Seduction 1:50:07 The Historical Sublime 1:55:13 How Language Shapes Experience 1:59:46 The Daemon and the Primary Self 2:06:27 Mastery and the Inner Voice 2:15:04 Ingrid Bergman and Her Daemon 2:19:07 Different Forms of Intelligence 2:23:22 Talent Without Love 2:27:33 The Aesthetic Sublime 2:36:03 The Dynamical Sublime 2:43:41 Inviting Challenge Back In 2:52:13 Suffering as a Rite of Passage 2:56:32 The Death Sublime 3:00:34 Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness 3:08:31 Visualizing Your Own Death 3:12:51 The Haiku Poet Issa 3:17:13 One Thing to Carry Forward ___________ ✨MORE FROM ROBERT GREENE ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/ ↳Pre-order The Law of the Sublime: https://sites.prh.com/lawofthesublime?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAad30lDYWsD_tVwsefFroQ0yA0SpKuRsN-lBhV7iqF_2m0foDmB2qlDKpVA9pg_aem_pjv6BG4q4JoEqBVGGwHeDA ↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertGreeneOfficial ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robertgreene ↳All Books: https://powerseductionandwar.com: 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We live in what I call dead time. You're in a state of sleep. Life seems a little bit flat. You don't know why you're unhappy. Something is missing. When you're a child, you're seeing the world for the first time. You're in awe of everything. Everything was magical. That is what you miss. You miss that openness to experience. It's because the culture has programmed you to think a certain way. I like to imagine a kind of a circle. It's invisible to you, but your thoughts never leave that circle.

• 0:28André Duqum?

  So we have cosmic, biological, pagan, childhood, neural, interspecies, love, historical, daemon, aesthetic, dynamical, and death, which we're going to be unpacking in this conversation.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Yes. And the sublime are moments where you touch something outside that circle. It's like an electric shock.

• 0:47André Duqum?

  When you initially had the idea to write a book around this, you envisioned yourself traveling in the Amazon.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  It's been sitting in my mind. And then one day I had a stroke. Within 30 seconds, I would be dead. But now I can't go out. I can't take a hike. I can barely walk from room to room. And then I would sit out in our backyard and I'd realize, all right, this is my Amazon. The point of all this is it's like awakening up to the sublime and all the little tiny little details of life. If you walk around today enclosed in your thoughts, stop for a moment and go, I'm alive. How did this happen?

• 1:22André Duqum?

  What are some practical examples?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  First of all, just.

• 1:31André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the No Less Self Podcast. Our guest today needs no introduction. He's one of the most prolific and powerful writers of our time. Many people know him for his work regarding human nature, power, seduction, mastery. Today, we're diving deep into the sublime and why it largely feels so absent from modern civilization today. Robert Green, thank you for being here.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Thank you for inviting me. My pleasure.

• 1:57André Duqum?

  The pleasure is mine, indeed. What an incredible book.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:02André Duqum?

  And work. And I know that when you initially had the idea to write a book around this over 20 years ago, you envisioned yourself traveling to mountains abroad in the Amazon and swimming with dolphins in the Gobi Desert. And I would love for you to set the stage for what transpired with your stroke and how you had to rediscover the sublime and the everyday surroundings.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Well, I initially got interested in the subject of the sublime. I think around the year 2000, I read a book, kind of an academic book about the literature of the sublime. But the idea seems so weird and interesting to me because I'm always looking for ideas that are not in the ordinary, that people don't, that you don't normally come across, things that are kind of exotic or strange. So I wanted to write a book on the subject because it intrigued me. It's also a challenge because the sublime is essentially experiences that go beyond words, that are hard to verbalize. So how you write a book about something you can't verbalize? I love challenges like that. Anyways, it'd been sitting in my mind and I kept getting distracted from it.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  And then one day I was driving my car in Los Angeles. My girlfriend in the passenger seat. And suddenly she starts yelling at me to pull over, to pull over. I said, well, what's going on? What's wrong? She's just insisting I pull over. And I started getting out of the car. I was all kind of confused. Then I got back in the car and everything started going really weird. And then I was unconscious. I had no idea what was going on. She'd seen that I was really slurring my words and half my face was drooping in a way that was quite frightening. Anyway, I wake up in a hospital. I don't know where I am. I don't know what happened. And I'm a little bit frightened and I'm a little bit, something strange has happened because I have these weird sensations,

• 3:56Speaker 00

  like a strange taste in my mouth, a feeling something, something different in my body has happened. I don't know where I am. Finally, I get into a hospital when they explain it. And I'm just in this kind of very excited, elated, almost ecstatic state of mind. The nurses thought something might have, I might have suffered some, I had a stroke, obviously. So basically, a blood clot in the right side of my neck was stopping the blood flowing to my brain. And within 30 seconds, if the ambulance hadn't arrived, I would either be brain dead or I would be dead. So I was very lucky. Anyway, they thought I had suffered some kind of brain damage

• 4:39Speaker 00

  because I was laughing and I was so happy. And then, so I spent a week in the hospital and I'm still in this kind of elated mood, but the left side of my body is like paralyzed. I can't move it at all. And in the ambulance ride home, I'm kind of absorbing this very weird experience, having like feeling a kind of death crawling inside of your skin, you know? Hard to explain. I'm trying to just sort of figure out what it all was. And then the idea comes, suddenly comes back to me about, oh, the sublime. You've been meaning to write this book. And it's kind of a book that takes you out of the ordinary circle of experience in daily life. Robert, you just had the ultimate experience

• 5:24Speaker 00

  that took you out of the circle of daily life. You had something, you were entering death at some point. So I go, all right, the gods, whoever they may be, are telling me this is the time to write the book. So I'm kind of excited. I get home, all right, I'm going to write this book finally because I've been meaning to write it for so long. And then I realize that I was kind of like, I didn't know what I was getting myself into because I can't type. This left hand is still kind of frozen. And I'm used to like handwriting and then typing really quickly and editing. I have, you know, I had a very fast typist. So I've started, oh, I'm going to have to handwrite. I'm going to have to handwrite this entire damn book, right?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  That's not going to be easy because it's a much slower process. You have to like handwrite, then you have to edit handwriting, then you have to edit more handwriting. But worse than that, I can't go out. I can't take a hike. I was someone who was very active. I was doing a lot of swimming. I was hiking up in mountain, taking very long hikes, mountain biking. I can't, I can barely walk from room to room. And so the confines of my life had shrunk to like a pretty small space. I compared it to like being in a birdcage because I was, I've been flying all around. And now I was sort of stuck in this birdcage.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  And outside, I could see other birds flying about like I was trapped. And so I was kind of depressed. So I had this moment of ecstasy, elation, coming so close to death. And at the same time, now I was just like so led into depressed about my body and everything. How am I going to be able to write about the sublime? Well, I don't feel it. I don't, I feel so trapped. So slowly, I had to return back to that time in the hospital room. It's, as I said, it's hard to verbalize. But when that death feeling comes inside of you and you, and you get past it, the world not just only looks different,

• 7:37Speaker 00

  it feels different. It's hard to explain. There's, there's an intensity to the sky, the colors, to things that you see. So I kind of returned to that, just looking out my, the window in my office. Okay, I can get back that feeling. And then I would sit out in our backyard, which was very, which is quite small, but it's very pleasant. And I'd realize, all right, this is my Amazon. This is my Gobi Desert. The butterflies, the hummingbirds, these are my dolphins, right? This little enclosed space is full of all of this weird life. Grasshoppers, possums would pass through, squirrels, all sorts of birds,

• 8:18Speaker 00

  you know, ants and every spiders, everything you can imagine in this enclosed space. But I started focusing in on that and how strange and weird the world is, you know, everything. And, and I would look up at the sky and I would see the clouds. And the clouds suddenly struck me as strange things to look at. We don't think about our environment as being strange. But if you do think about it, it's very strange because probably there is no other planet in the universe that has clouds, that has a sky like this. It's a very unique thing to planet Earth, but who thinks about such things? Suddenly clouds were, anyway, the point I'm saying,

• 9:03Speaker 00

  the point of all this is, it's like awakening up to the sublime and all the little tiny little details of life. It's like chills passing through you continually as you start returning to the ground of being alive, the world around you. And so slowly, it starts coming back inside of me. As I just calm down, I slow down and I see that I don't have to be in the Amazon. It's right there in front of me. It's right outside my, my window. So I was a bird in a cage, but now I could like sort of go outside that cage, you know? So anyway, that was kind of the process that, that I went through. And in the beginning, I just never thought I'd get through this book

• 9:45Speaker 00

  because it was so laborious. But then slowly, I started building momentum and starts, as I started getting like to chapter seven of the 12th, sort of think, oh, I'm going to get to the end. And that kind of brought a kind of a pretty ecstatic feeling as well, like I could manage this.

• 10:04André Duqum?

  It took what, around six, five, six years to write?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Seven.

• 10:07André Duqum?

  Seven. And handwriting a book that's over 400 pages is no joke. As you could attest.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you know, I can't even, it's really hard to describe, but I would sit there with these notebooks and write a paragraph and then, or a story. And then I'd have to go to another notebook and look at it and re copy it out, like I was like the 13th century or something. Handwriting, handwriting, like that. And then, this isn't very good. I have to go back to the other one and rewrite it there. Finally, after like 12 versions of it, I would dictate it into the computer with a, you know, whispered transcription, print it out and then hand edit it on paper again.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  And then finally, dictated one final time and then edit it with one hand, you know? And at times, I couldn't read my own handwriting. I couldn't figure out where the paragraphs were and how they fit. So it was.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  I don't recommend anybody trying to write a book like that today, but I manage.

• 11:20Speaker 02

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• 12:21André Duqum?

  It's incredible that you, and in some ways, you mentioned how the challenge provided a unique gift. Like being forced to find the sublime in the quote unquote birdcage.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:34André Duqum?

  Whilst perhaps you wouldn't choose that for anybody else, it did provide a unique challenge for you.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had to discover things about myself. I had to go deep into myself. I would see people running past my window, walking their dogs, riding their bicycles. I'd go, god damn, I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous. But then I would think, yes, but they don't appreciate it. They don't know what they have. They're like asleep. They just take everything for granted. So what is the gift that they have? They don't have a gift. I can at least imagine myself doing these things and feel what it means to be alive, what it means to be human. So I'd kind of have to go through processes like that. And then in the writing, in the handwriting,

• 13:25Speaker 00

  I realized there's a slowness that it requires, and the slowness would actually work for me. Because I had to think on a deeper level. We don't realize that thinking has like layers and has levels. And so when you're so used to speed and everything's AI and everything's Google and everything, you're not really thinking on a deep level. You're just kind of skimming these surfaces. I had to like write and think and then rewrite and so slow that it engaged a level of thinking that to me was deeper. And I probably could have gone even to a deeper level if I'd spent 14 years instead of seven. But I had to, I had to reach the end at some point.

• 14:09André Duqum?

  So tell me about this everyday consciousness circle. How so much of our life we spend in our own sort of perceptual box of sorts. And then how you came across these 12 areas, which we're going to be unpacking in this conversation.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Well, the idea is that, because you know, the sublime, people think of the word, well, it just means something great. You know, I had a sublime breakfast or whatever, a vacation. So what do I mean by that word? I had to find like kind of a way to express it because I, I knew it intuitively what it is. But how can I express it to the reader? So my idea was that our minds live in a kind of a mental space. We don't think of it that way because there is no kind of limit to our minds. We can't think of it. But I like to imagine a kind of a circle. And within that circle, you're not aware of it. It's invisible to you. But your thoughts never leave that circle.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  They stay inside. The thoughts revolve around and around, around the same obsessions. You read, you read an article, some ideas in it. Maybe occasionally a new idea comes to you, but then it's absorbed into the obsessive kind of roundabout thoughts that you have. The culture kind of inculcates in us a certain patterns of thinking. You're not aware that in 21st century United States of America, the culture has programmed you to think a certain way.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  When you read a lot of history like I do, you understand, and it's pretty simple, that in ancient China, the thought processes were different. I mean, they were human, they were conscious, but their way of thinking, their value system was different. So we have our own values, our own logic, our own grammar, our own way of thinking. And it's a circle that encloses us. Sometimes that circle can get very narrow. Particularly if you get really rigid in your thoughts. And sometimes when you get older, that circle just starts narrowing. Because when you were born, when you were a child, it was actually fairly wide. But it remains a circle that you don't go outside of. And the sublime are moments where you touch something outside that circle.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  And it's like an electric shock. It goes, whoa. I'm actually not in the real world. There's actually something more real out there. I'm living in this little human abstract world that people assume is reality, but isn't. It's just words, symbols. There's something else out there that I'm not aware of, and suddenly I became aware of it. So these little doorways, I like to envision it as a door outside of that circle. And you're moving up towards it and you're peering through it. And you're seeing that there's something else outside that is beyond how you normally think, how you normally experience life.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  And when you peer through that doorway, you get this kind of powerful sensation. A little bit of it is fear because living inside that circle is comfortable. The world is familiar. It's easy. It's predictable. I, I don't need to look at trees. I don't need to look at clouds. I just know what they are. So there's a little bit of fear as you go outside of your comfort zone. But there's also this sort of pleasure of like opening up, of like waking up out of a dream kind of thing. So that's how I kind of explained the circle metaphor.

• 17:37André Duqum?

  And how did you come up with these categories as being the most worthwhile sort of doorways into the sublime? Outside the circle, so to speak.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Well, I have a research method that I've been using for almost 30 years now, where I read hundreds of books. This probably, this book probably read like over 300 books. And I take note cards, right?

• 18:02André Duqum?

  It inspired me actually to get my own note card taking system.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 18:05André Duqum?

  I'm in the early, early stages of that.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Are you writing, you writing a book? You've written books?

• 18:10André Duqum?

  This would be my first.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Oh, fantastic. Well, I'll talk about it.

• 18:13André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I devised it because I believe research is kind of the key to writing an interesting book.

• 18:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Absorbing ideas from other places and then making your own. But it becomes overwhelming. There's too much information. So putting everything into note cards gives me a way to organize it. So initially I'll have like 200 note card, no, sorry, more like 500 note cards. And as I go through them, I see that there are themes. And the themes kind of turn into chapters. And so that's how the chapters evolved. Initially, when I first proposed the book, I had maybe 20 chapters, 20 or 18. And then slowly I realized this isn't really a complete chapter, that it's part of something else. You know, I had a chapter on the Dionysian experience.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  And then I realized, well, it actually fits in to the chapter on aesthetics and to other chapters. I had a chapter on nature, but then it's all the whole books about nature. So I slowly just kind of put things in other one, other categories. And I ended up with 12. I like numbers like 12, so I kind of decided to sort of stop there anyway. There's a little bit of arbitrary nature to it.

• 19:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. 12, 48.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  11 would, 11 would have been so nice.

• 19:36André Duqum?

  12 fits into 48, kind of.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 19:40André Duqum?

  So we have cosmic, biological, pagan, childhood, neural, interspecies, love, historical, daemon, aesthetic, dynamical, and death.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:53André Duqum?

  So before we dive into cosmic, which would be the first one, you refer to this modern reflex to like foo foo away anything that can't be measured as the anti-sublime.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:08André Duqum?

  And when we're talking about the sublime, which is inherently, it's a quality, it's an ontological experience we are having that is in many ways ineffable, like words can't touch it, right? The map's not the territory. Could you, could you share more about what you mean when you say the anti-sublime? And how it's something that is actually robbing us of experiencing more of it?

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Well, it's almost like a fear of something that's different, right? And so, you know, when you were a child, we all went through childhood. The world is experienced differently than when you get older. There's a slight magical quality to things, right? Your imagination is inhabiting the world around you and everything kind of feels alive. But then you get older and now we live in a rational, scientific, technological age. And you look back on that and you look back on history and it seems superstitious. It seems irrational.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  It seems childish, seems like a stage of life and of civilization that we have left behind. And you're so much more mature, you've figured things out, you know what the world is like. You know, you read books, you understand science. This is the world we live in. There's nothing divine, there's nothing sacred. Things just are the way they are, right? And it reveals this tremendous discomfort with anything slightly different. Anything that is, that breathes of the unknown. Because you are in a rush to know everything, to be certain of it. But you don't realize how irrational that is and how it's closing you off from any kind of wider experience.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  So I remember this guy, I had been in the early stages of writing the book. I had been on a podcast and I was sort of explaining the sublime. And then there was a comment, it was like a YouTube comment or something. I don't normally read them, but it caught my attention. It's like, come on, the universe is just the way it is. Things just happen the way they are. There's nothing else, you don't need to read into this anything else. Science has shown us what the world is. And I post, my reply to him was just a series of quotes from Albert Einstein. The most scientific person you can imagine saying, the universe is a mystery. I'm like a child on the edge of the ocean. I don't know what anything is.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  If you don't have a sense of mystery and awe about the universe, your brain is dead, right? And so, there's that reaction that things just have to be the way they are. Because it's comfortable, because you want to think that you know everything. And there's no zone of any kind of experience that is mysterious, that is unknown. And it's the anti-sublime. Because the need to transcend yourself, to feel like you are a part of something larger than just your individual self, your ego, is a deep human need. It goes back thousands, tens of thousands of years. It's who we are.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Because as creatures that are aware of our mortality, of our death, the feeling of death just cancelling out everything that we do makes life seem purposeless. There's no meaning, why even go on? So we're always in search of something greater, something transcendent. To deny that is just to like enclose yourself in this kind of prison. And the only way I can feel of it is it's a tremendous, tremendous fear of anything that is going to shake you up. And so, I see that there's a lot of the anti-sublime in the world today, particularly with algorithms and AI and how we see ourselves as machines, essentially.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  And then there's also the false sublime, which is briefly, because it's such a need to feel that sense of transcendence and you, in order to have that, you have to kind of open yourself up to experience. But because the culture is all about speed and convenience and ease, you want to get that feeling of the sublime, the transcendent through quick and easy things, through entertainment, right, through movies. When I look at movies today, like Marvel movies, et cetera, I'm not focusing on the content, I'm looking at the imagery. And all of it is trying to give people a sense of something almost godlike in the power of film itself, of displaying a kind of reality where we humans can do almost

• 24:50Speaker 00

  anything, right? Fly through the air, et cetera. It's almost trying to create a sense of the sublime in people that's quick and easy, that's just images that are, you know, washing over you. You know, online porn, addictions, video games, all that kind of imagery is so fantastical and bizarre. It's trying to feel transcendent, but it's not coming from within anything, it's not coming from you, it's people imposing their sense of something exciting. Because you're bored and you're restless and you want something different and exciting. But the sublime has to be an experience that comes from within you.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  It can't come from without, it can't be coming from people trying to entertain you and amuse you. It has to be something that comes from within, that's an experience that you have that's completely your own. And so, I find in the culture today, because there's this deep, deep, deep need to feel something transcendent, particularly in an age that is so robbed of enchantment, that you're going to find, try and get it in cheap ways. And that, to me, is the false sublime.

• 26:03André Duqum?

  And there's many words we could use to describe that, but it's a felt reality across the board, I think on the globe, that we're like living a simulacrum of our life. That instead of the intimate conversations around the campfire, so to speak, we have these social dialogues without the physical contact, right? And we, instead of having really nutrient-dense food from soil that is rich, we have this ultra-processed substitutes. And in many ways, we're malnourished and we have these like poor substitutions across the board of things that we need. And I think the framework, and we'll go make our way around the circle, so to speak, that like really give that re-enchantment and that reminder.

• 26:45André Duqum?

  So to start with cosmic, you, I love, I loved it so much. And how does contemplating the sheer improbability of our own existence re-evoke the sublime for you?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Well, I take, I take the reader on a journey through what I can, through my research is literally the history of the universe. Now, keep in mind that probably in 200 years, that'll have to be rewritten from new discoveries. So I have a degree of humility that what I'm describing isn't precisely the reality. But I'm taking you, first of all, just stop all of your, the banal thoughts in your mind and contemplate one thing. The universe began with a big bang, some 13.8 billion years ago. There was a moment when our universe began. What an insane thought. You can't even get your mind around it, right? But was there before the big bang?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Was there, what was there? What is this? To me, it's the most insane, mind-altering thought that you can possibly have. And I read a book, a very technical book, but it was interesting, called The First Three Minutes, where a physicist describes the first three minutes of our universe. It's insane. And so, what it basically boils down to is there's these series of events that I don't know how physicists have been able to recreate it, it's pretty miraculous. So first get, understand that I'm not anti-science. There's a lot of science in this book and I find things that science is uncovering utterly sublime, okay?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  So there are all these series of events that occur in the history of our universe that could have easily gone differently. Temperatures couldn't have cooled down as quickly as they did. There may not have been no light in the universe, there may not have been any matter, right? Atoms had to be able to cool down enough so that they could combine to form matter. The first star was born by kind of some weird, random set of circumstances. And then that star, as it got bigger and bigger and got heated up, all these elements were cooked inside that became the elements that form planets, that form, that formed life itself. Then the star explodes.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  First of all, think of the thought that there was just the first star in the universe. What an insane thought that is as well, right? What was there to see? There was nothing, there was just a darkness. Okay? On and on and on, there are these sequences of events that occur that could have easily gone differently, okay? And then you forward billions of years to the birth of planet Earth and our solar system. You see more of these weird little random coincidences that occur. Like planet Earth was just this rock, right? It's just a rock. And then it collides with another, a moon-like planet called Thaya, which is about the same size as Earth.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  They collide and then there's a massive explosion. And because of that collision, certain things happen to this rock that is planet Earth that are going to be allowing us to have life, to have an environment, to have a climate, to have seasons. And that rock that had hit us could easily have missed or could have come at a different angle. So there's all these other random sets of circumstances. The fact that we're the precise distance from the sun that allows for the, for the life to form, that this rock that is planet Earth, which has all these craters from meteors, suddenly there's a thousand-year reign.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  First of all, conceive of that raining for a thousand years. They don't know exactly, but just continual rain. And where did this water come from? That was also a series of weird, random circumstances. So the planet is filling with water. And so all these other events are occurring that allow for the formation of life in these seas, in these oceans that are, that fill the planet, right? There are these basins. So when you're in the ocean, if you go sailing or you're swimming in the ocean, understand that those are basins formed by meteors that collided with Earth, right? So that's what you're swimming in, which is also another rather strange thought. On and on and on, the extinction of the dinosaurs,

• 31:14Speaker 00

  the fact that Homo sapiens nearly disappeared. And Neanderthals might have been roaming the planet instead of Homo sapiens, which might have been much better in some ways. Okay, we won't go into that. Then how our brains form, how conscious, how language forms, how just your parents' meeting was a random event that could have not happened. You wouldn't be who you are. Multiply that by 70,000 generations of couples that met that allow for you. If you add all this up, it is absolutely insane. The astronomical improbability of us being here, you and I talking, is impossible to calculate. All these things had to fall exactly into place, right?

• 31:59Speaker 00

  It's bizarre. At some point, you almost wonder, did it happen for a purpose? Now, I'm not, I'm not Christian or anything, but you almost think that there's some kind of creator out there that's allowing for these things to fall into place so that we can be conscious and so that the universe can have consciousness and we could understand and know all of these things. It almost feels like that. I'm not going to say whether that's true or not. But if you walk around today with your two feet wandering around the city, kind of enclosed in your thoughts, and you stop for a moment and go, "Jesus Christ, I'm alive. How did this happen? It's just so random. It's so weird."

• 32:44Speaker 00

  It makes you look at your world in a much different light. You take nothing for granted. You realize that your own body, your own physiology is the product of these single-celled organisms in the oceans 800 million years ago and the first nervous systems. Your brains are formed from all sorts of other animals that evolved, reptiles, et cetera. Your body is this creation out of a weird mix of random events throughout evolution. I'm sorry, but it's, it's just the most insane story. And in the second chapter, I write, "If we just stopped and thought about it,

• 33:27Speaker 00

  we would create religions and temples to literally contemplate and venerate these random series of circumstances that allow for us to be who we are right now."

• 33:40André Duqum?

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• 34:23André Duqum?

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• 34:57André Duqum?

  It's something that I feel very passionate about as well and have had a natural inclination towards philosophy, mysticism, and just being dumbfounded for existence existing at all. And the way that you just walked us through the origin of the universe, which is the spark notes of the spark notes, of course.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  It is.

• 35:17André Duqum?

  Of course. But it's, I get the feeling when listening, and I'm sure everybody's hearing in, that we just take our everyday consciousness for granted. Like, we forget all that came before us that made this human experience of having an experience of ourself and the world even possible. The fine tuning, you know, of the universe and all the, yeah, the perfect tuning of the laws of physics that made life on Earth possible is just, it's, it's amazing. And I think that when you say that we should be erecting temples to contemplate the sheer miraculous nature of our own existence, I think people feel that,

• 36:00André Duqum?

  especially as, you know, people have, there's been like an exodus from religion in the modern, post-enlightenment secular world. We've kind of thrown the baby out with the bathwater. There is this need for communal spaces to contemplate these things and to have these experiences of the divine. And, you know, that used to be the church. And for many good reasons, people don't, you know, ascribe to the same religions. But I think when you explore in the third chapter around the pagan sublime and the Eleusinian mysteries, it speaks directly to this need. It's a real need to access in communal, collective settings. So what were the Eleusinian mysteries? And walk us through a bit of that, that real human need we have.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, I'm, you know, my, when I was in college, my major was ancient Greek. So I'm sort of infused in the ancient world. And I'm so deeply attracted to the ancient world. I can't explain why the art of it and the architecture and just the, everything about it just has a primal connection to me. And so having studied ancient Greek and being deeply involved in, in, in the culture and in the language, there's always been this thing about the Eleusinian mysteries. It was a series of rituals that probably had like a matriarchal origin. It was like an agriculture-type festival. So one thing you have to understand is our ancient ancestors

• 37:30Speaker 00

  were fascinated by the phenomenon of life itself sprouting out of the ground, that there were seasons, that things would die in the winter, and then suddenly they would, plants would reappear in the spring. We take that completely for granted if we even ever see plants or vegetation. But to them, it was like, life is being reborn. It's a miracle. How does it happen? And so as we became agriculturalists, that became a kind of a religious sort of phenomenon. And so out of that grew a series of gods, gods of fertility, gods of agriculture. And so the Eleusinian mysteries were kind of, kind of rotated around that idea, okay?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  But the thing was, nobody knows what they were. They're mysteries. And we, this, this ritual that was the Eleusinian mysteries went on for like a thousand years. So imagine a ritual that everyone, peasants, intellectuals, men and women of all classes, were obsessed with and would go through and be initiated in for a thousand years. There must have been something incredibly powerful about it, okay? But you could never reveal that anybody who revealed the secrets would be killed because that was the whole point. It's a mystery, right? It was supposed, the secretness of it was, was, was, made it sacred. So I gave myself the task

• 38:59Speaker 00

  of trying to uncover as much as I could about the mysteries, knowing that there was a kernel that I could never understand. And so I studied all of the details of it, the people that they went to, what they wore, the clothes that they wore, the rituals, the, the priestesses that led the procession from Athens to the city of Eleusis, right? On and on, and all the little details that I could find as much as possible. And essentially, it revolves around the myth of Persephone and Demeter, okay? Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, as I said, probably an ancient matriarchal goddess. And she had a daughter, Persephone,

• 39:44Speaker 00

  who one day was in the fields plucking flowers with her maiden girlfriends, who were all nymphs.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  And Hades, the god of the underworld, suddenly sucked her into the underworld and raped her and made her the queen of the underworld. And now Persephone was living among the dead. She yearned for the light. She yearned to be back with her mother. She was so upset. And the mother, Demeter, pleads for Zeus to free her daughter. Finally, he agrees that for part of the year, she will come out of the underworld, and that will be spring and summer. And then she will descend back into the underworld, and that will be winter, right? So her coming up coincides with the birth of vegetation, with the return of life from death. Okay?

• 40:36Speaker 00

  So the rituals centered, the Eleusinian mysteries centered on the mystery of life and death itself. Do we just die and nothing happens? Or does our death allow for life to come back up? Is there a cycle that we humans are a part of, right? And so in my uncovering of all the details, and I, you know, I hope you will read it if you do, because I'm not going to go through everything now. The mysteries were all about creating the feeling in the initiates that you had died, that you had literally died. There was probably the ingestion of plant substances that were hallucinogenic. We believed that maybe there were poppies. It could have been something similar to mushrooms

• 41:20Speaker 00

  or LSD, ergot, whatever it was. But they created this sense that you had literally died, and now you were being reborn along with Persephone. And the feeling was so powerful that people like Plato and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, people who were high intellectuals, who you wouldn't think of, who poo that, like the anti-sublime people today would go like that. They were completely enraptured. They completely felt it for their whole lives. People who went through the mysteries never, ever forgot it. It was the most memorable experience in their life, right?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  And so what I wanted to impress on people in this is that your idea of ancient religion and gods is completely misconceived. You have no idea what the gods were. They weren't these like little kind of cartoon-like figures out in space who were like human-like, doing all these silly little things. They were forces of nature, right? They were the embodiment of, they were not entities. They were these powers, these forces of nature that would wash through you. So when you fell deep love for someone, when you were sexually attracted or you were just in love with another person,

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Aphrodite had passed through you. Aphrodite wasn't this like figure that you could see. It was just this sensation of overpowering love, of like almost a biological sensation that transcended your own desires. On and on and on. Persephone, Demeter, Zeus, all of these were these forces of nature that would come and inhabit and possess you. And the feeling of possession of these natural forces was the divine, was the sacred. It was so powerful that it was not something we can even conceive of today. Our sense of religion is so different, is so, I don't even know how to explain it.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  But pagan religions were these life forces that would possess you, that would inhabit you, that were part of life itself and that took you out of your individual existence. So I wanted to give people a feeling that there is another way to conceive of religion and the divine and the sacred that has nothing to do with our modern conceptions.

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• 44:53André Duqum?

  And you talk about things from extreme sports to Burning Man sort of being this collective, this repressed pagan hunger for collective ecstasy in disguise. Would you say that is a need that is not being fulfilled currently in society?

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there are all kinds of qualities that I sort of see as a desire for returning to paganism. I mean, the word almost has like a cartoonish feel to it if you say that. It conjures up, you know, wearing furs and horns and dancing around, but that's not the connotation I like to give it. But yeah, I mean, collective events like the Eleusinian mysteries, because being in a group and going through the mysteries was what was part of it. The group energy, the feeling that you were all part of this one life force that was being reborn, gave it its power. And we're so lonely now.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  We're so isolated. We're all so cut off from each other that we yearn for some kind of collective experience. And that yearn for collective experience that is not just watching a football game, that is something deeper, is to me a kind of a hankering for the pagan type experience, right? And so we have these kind of events like Burning Man, like raves, like other concerts and such, that kind of have that feeling where you can get that sort of collective energy, where everyone is one. If you've ever been in a place where you see people singing together,

• 46:40Speaker 00

  it can give you that chill. So the other night, I was watching a movie. It was a Japanese movie by the Japanese director Ozu, in which these old men, 12 of them, who had all been fought in World War II, were remembering the war, and they started singing a song, a kind of a soldier's song. And I got this feeling, 12 people singing a song in the collective voice. It was chilling. It was so powerful, the sense of like one voice. And that's the kind of experience that the collective had. People singing all together in unison, feeling like one, is an overpowering experience. I remember when I was in my twenties,

• 47:24Speaker 00

  I went to Nicaragua, like 19, there was a war going on, it was like 1982, 1983. And the Pope was visiting Nicaragua, which was a big thing because Nicaragua back then was kind of this revolution. It was socialist, communist, whatever you want to call it. And the Pope was kind of angry. But it's a very castled country. Anywhere, I was in this enormous square in Managua, Nicaragua, which had been devastated by an earthquake. So there was no, it was just this huge square filled with almost everybody in Nicaragua. And there was the Pope. I felt an experience of all these people there and this kind of worshiping sense that I'll never forget.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  It was like, it was like kind of like the divine. It was like sacred. It was so weird and powerful. That's what we're hankering for, that kind of collective experience. And that, to me, is a hunger for the kind of pagan experience that I'm describing.

• 48:24André Duqum?

  I think we certainly yearn for that state and that feeling of in a the most individualistic culture, that sense for like collective remembrance. And I think that especially as the artificial worlds tend to, you know, take the stage, the the yearning for those in-person kind of immersive experiences are going to continue to be demanded and really needed as their sustenance for for individuals. Another one you look back on, and we can have this nostalgia, in particular with childhood, which you write about in the fourth chapter. And what do you think we get wrong about how we look back with nostalgia about our

• 49:09André Duqum?

  childhood years, almost with a sense of like superiority?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Well, we kind of smile when we think of children, we look at them, we smile how cute they are. We think of our own childhood, how sweet and nice it was, and oh, it would be nice to have, you know, to be back there. And we look at photographs and we talk with our family members and we reminisce. And we kind of turn childhood into what it isn't. We look at it through our adult lens, right? Childhood was not this sweet, little, innocent, wondrous little time of life. It was this awakening to the world as it actually is, right? You're seeing the world for the first time. You're becoming conscious for the first

• 49:56Speaker 00

  time, right? When you're two, three years old. Right now, we don't know when children start to become truly self-aware. Some people think it's one, two, three years old. But anyway, there's a moment we start becoming self-aware, and you're looking at the world, and you're seeing things, and you're small, and you're helpless. And everything seems huge and wondrous and weird. I remember when I was four years old, and my earliest memories is staring at this red glass that had these ridges in it, and the and the color. And I was just like, whoa, that is so beautiful, right? And the ice in it and the water. You were, your senses were so alive. Your brain was so fluid and plastic, and you

• 50:36Speaker 00

  were, and all these thoughts are coming to, your, your brain is so plastic and is expanding, that everything is, is just eye-opening, right? You're in awe of everything. Of course, there are painful moments of childhood, because you're weak and you're vulnerable, and you're dependent on others. So mixed with this kind of excitement is a little bit of terror and fear and vulnerability. But the sublime involves a bit of terror and vulnerability. And just to go back briefly to the cosmic sublime, I try and say that why children are so obsessed with the night sky? Because I think if you went back in your own childhood, you would remember that looking up at the sky, particularly

• 51:21Speaker 00

  at night, was a weird experience, like the sky is infinite. It's because you were so small, and you were looking at something that expanded into infinitely, that it caused you to like, have this feeling of fear and excitement about the infinite, right? And so, childhood is not this sweet, little, innocent kind of nostalgic thing. Oh, we played games. Oh, how sweet it was. It was this awakening to this world, to seeing things as they are. Our experience of time was different. We live in what I call dead time. And dead time is abstract time. It's minutes passing. In an hour, I have to get this done.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  In two hours, I have to get that done. By the end of this day, we think in these abstract terms, blocks of time. Time is outside of us. It's like dead. When you're a child, time flows as you're inside of it. It's like a river that you're inside of. And the feeling of the passage of time is sensual. So your senses are so much more alive. And what happens is when you're in your 20, as you get older, you've become kind of bored and dissatisfied with life. Life seems a little bit empty. Life seems a little bit flat. You don't know why you're unhappy. You don't know why you want addictions, why you want to grab for

• 52:48Speaker 00

  things. But I'm saying, in the back of your mind, unconsciously, you can remember a time in your own life, when you were three or four, when your experience of life was different. That is what you miss. That is what you miss, not being young, not having your life all over again. But you miss that kind of openness to experience. And that, to me, is the childhood sublime.

• 53:14André Duqum?

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• 54:23André Duqum?

  I think many people can relate to this feeling like their raw experience of life has been swapped out for a narration of it. And we see children have this unmediated experience, a bottom-up, raw experience of what's happening in the world. And you share how we can return back to this sort of second innocence and re evoke that child, childlike sense of discovering the world. And I know you had moments throughout your stroke in particular, and of course, in the process of writing your book, where you

• 55:01André Duqum?

  had that. And I love the, the example you gave of staring at something until the word of it dissolves, you know? Like, looking at a tree until the word tree dissolves. So if you could share a little bit more about how to return back to that sense of experiencing life without the continual narration and the voice in your head dictating what something is, thinking you know it?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Well, I illustrate, each of the chapters is illustrated with a particular story that's like the archetype. And the story I use is of this Russian writer named Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, who was most famous for writing the novel Lolita, but he wrote many other wonderful things. And the story, the reason I chose Nabokov is, he had this wondrous childhood, incredibly enchanted. He, he lived on, his family was relatively wealthy, and they lived out in the country, and everything was magical. And then, at the age of 18 or 19, the Russian Revolution breaks out. His, his father, who was sort of wealthy, even though he was a liberal, was forced into exile. They had, parts of their family were

• 56:15Speaker 00

  killed. They had to immigrate to Europe. They went to Berlin, and then the Nazis came. And Nabokov's wife was Jewish. They had to flee Germany. He had fled to New York. His mother died. His brother was killed in a concentration camp. His father was murdered. He lost his entire family. He could never, ever return to Russia, because now it was under Stalin. So here, he lived in this exile. He had no photographs. He had no memorabilia, but he longed for his childhood so deeply. And the pain of that was unbearable. So he experimented as a writer. He was going to recreate his childhood, not as something,

• 56:57Speaker 00

  as you say, narrated, as if it's like a series of events, but as if it's an experience that he can re-experience by writing about it. And so, using that as a model, I try getting you to try something similar with your own life. And so, it's not a question of revisiting the events of your childhood. It's a question of revisiting the experience of your childhood. So I mentioned, for instance, that time was experienced differently in childhood. And I have an exercise towards the end of the chapter of trying to experience time differently, as if it's a flow, as if you're entering a river, and it's inside

• 57:42Speaker 00

  of you. Now, I know that concept might be alien to the listener, but I meditate every morning. And I go through this exercise myself, often in the morning, where I feel like, like, I'm not thinking about minutes or whatever. I'm actually inside the moment itself. I'm inside time. And it's this flow, and it's a physical sensation. Time should be a physical sensation in your body, not a thought, not something abstract from the outside. It's flowing inside of you, each moment passing. We are all alive at the same

• 58:21Speaker 00

  time. I know that sounds like an obvious thing, but just think of it. We are all alive at the same time. We're all conscious of it. Some of us are, are passing out of it and are dying, but we are alive at that moment. And that moment is time inside of us. It's like a river that you're in, that you're inside. You're not looking at it from the shore.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Language you mentioned. I have a story of a woman who revisited her childhood because language fell out.

• 58:52André Duqum?

  Is it Erin Reich?

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Yes, Barbara Erin Reich. She had this kind of weird experience where she's like 18 or 19 and she's in some city in California, some town, and suddenly everything is bright and intense. And she no longer can hear the word tree. And so when she sees this tree, it's like this sort of magnificent thing sprouting out of the earth and trying to reach up into the sky. And it has a presence to it. And it has like life itself inside of it, right? And for a moment, she feels like there's no separation between me and the tree because the word drops out.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  When you walk through your daily life and you just have the word tree, you never look at them, you never think about them. You never see how weird it is to have plant life and tree life on this earth and what it represents. So when words drop out, you have a different form of consciousness. Now, it's hard to, because we're so verbal, it's hard to completely do that. But you can walk around and you can start looking at things as if there were no words for them. So you look at birds in the sky, there's no word for bird. There's just these strange things flitting about in the sky that somehow took to flight. How does that happen? They're very strange. They're very interesting looking.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  They're alive like me, I am right now. So when words drop out, your experience returns somewhat to that feeling of childhood, right? And so your experience of time, your experience of senses, your experience of motion. When you're a child and you travel in a car or a plane or a train, your body feels like it's a part of it. You're moving with it. And your sense of motion is much different than now. Where we fly, we don't even think about it, right? We're just, oh, we're so in, we're so in our little computers. You look at people on a plane, who looks outside the window? Who's feeling that miraculous sense that you're fucking flying in the air? You know, if it's all like this.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  That's what a child does. That's a child's like, Jesus Christ, I'm flying. How insane. So these are things that you go back to. Not nostalgia, not cute little memories, but the experience of childhood itself.

• 1:01:19André Duqum?

  I think despair is a doorway into that space. And you talk about Goodall, her, what, you know, drove her to be with the chimps in the rainforest and your own example as well. How is that a unique opportunity to revisit the childlike sense available to us?

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Well, so when you're a child, you're very vulnerable. And you're weak and you're a very immense sensitive and emotional. So you experience a lot of pain, right? You don't have the distance from your own emotions to kind of analyze them. And so you're in the moment and you feel deeply, if a parent isn't paying you attention, or that sense of abandonment. When we become adults, we become invulnerable. We have so many defenses, right? That just enclose us in our bodies, right? The great psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich said it's like our body armor that we wear in our chest, right? Okay, you feel so closed.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  But in those moments of despair, for Jane Goodall, it happened with her husband that she loved deeply, living with him as he died of cancer, and how horrific it was. And how her life now became just like this business, managing her foundation. She was losing contact with her childhood, right? And in those moments of despair and unhappiness and loneliness, you're actually opening up, you're actually vulnerable. Your defenses are down and you can't, you have uncontrollable emotions. It's similar to childhood, right? And so in those moments

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  is when you can almost best feel what it was like when you were a child. I tell the story in that chapter of Buddha himself, Gautama, of whatever the rest of his name is.

• 1:03:19André Duqum?

  Siddhartha.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  However it is, okay? He left his wealthy family to go wander in the forest to find out the purpose of his life. He tried all these ascetic practices, just like totally like no food and eating, drinking his own urine and everything and fasting. It got him no closer to enlightenment. For six years, he sat and he tried to figure it out. And he was in deep, deep, deep despair. He was almost like to give up. He was in incredible state of depression. He's sitting out underneath a tree one day. And a memory, in that state of despair, a memory comes back to him from his childhood

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  of seeing the, of seeing the grass being cut for harvesting time and all the millions of insects that are being butchered in this harvest, of the cutting of the vegetation. And as a child, he's like, oh my God, all these creatures are dying. I feel horrible. But at the same time, the sky is out there. It's beautiful. This is just life itself. In his moment of despair, he returns to that childhood memory and he feels enlightened. It's this moment of enlightenment. So that feeling of despair, of vulnerability and of, oh God, I'm so lost. What has happened to me? Is when you can be closer to actually experiencing

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  the sublime that you had in childhood because you are opening up and you are vulnerable in those moments.

• 1:04:55André Duqum?

  I love that reframing of vulnerability as an actual doorway to access more of the sublime. And one exercise or recommendation you give is to seek out experiences where you yourself feel exposed, humiliated, you know, ridiculous. And to get out of yourself and outside of the over seriousness of taking, you know, us so seriously as an individual. I did improv recently. Like that was a good example for me of, you know, just trying something new and, and, you know, being able to just make fun of yourself is so liberating.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:32André Duqum?

  When was the last time you did something like that?

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Well, I'm always laughing at myself because I find myself rather ridiculous. But I don't know. My wife and I, back 30 years ago, we did theater in Los Angeles. And I wrote these plays that were really kind of making fun of myself. And I acted in them. So that was my equivalent of improv. But I haven't had that so recently. I really probably should do that. Maybe I should consider it. That sounds like fun.

• 1:06:04André Duqum?

  Let's go. I'll take it improv.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  But I have to get up there and I have to improvise.

• 1:06:11André Duqum?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  I remember I took an acting class when I was about to start. My first book came out and I had to go in front of media. So I thought I'd take acting classes. And he was all about improv. And I was terrible at it. So I don't know if I want to do this. I might let.

• 1:06:29André Duqum?

  So I think this goes nicely into the fifth one, the naked brain. Because one thing that helps me at least take my life less seriously and personally and be able to like laugh at myself and things like that is to realize how much of a perceptual box that we are constantly looking through. And you refer to our brains as these passive passengers. So I'd love for you to share a bit more about how often we take reality as though it is the way it appears. But in truth, it is a behavioral adaptive system for us to be able to navigate. And thank God, it's so useful. But it is not the way reality is.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  Well, I tell the story in there that illustrates it of a woman, Jill Bolte Taylor. You may have heard her.

• 1:07:17André Duqum?

  She's coming on in a bit, yeah, on the show.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:07:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  Oh, please say hello to her. I know her. We've conversed on the phone several times. Yeah, that's exciting. She's an amazing woman.

• 1:07:27André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Anyway, she suffered a stroke, but she was a neuroscientist, who was a very serious scientist who studied the human brain in depth. Her specialty was schizophrenia and the chemical processes in the brain that perhaps are causing schizophrenia. And one day, she's having a stroke, a hemorrhagic stroke. I don't want to spoil the story because she's going to be on your show. But blood, blood is flowing through her brain and it's shutting down one by one the different functionings of the brain. And as it's occurring, she doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know that it's a stroke, although at some point she realizes it. But she later understands that she is experiencing the world

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  before the brain filters and constructs what we take for reality. And so I use that story to illustrate the idea that you're not aware, you're walking around, you're not aware that your brain is continually filtering all of your perceptions and pruning what you see, what you hear, what you think. Because the brain is trying to make it easier for you to navigate this world. It's like, I don't mean to, it's not like the brain is consciously doing that. But the brain is designed as a mechanism to help you survive. And we survive in environments that are very different from animals a couple billions of years ago, right? And so the brain is doing all of these things

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  to help you in your day to day life, to help you navigate a very complicated world. It's pruning down all the things that are all the sensory data. Because if you were aware like a baby is of everything going on around you, you'd be overwhelmed. You wouldn't be able to function, right? It's too much. So it's filtering, it's pruning it down to the essentials that'll help you to survive. It creates a self, an ego, that gives you the sense of an order, a consistency, memories that you can recall and that will help you learn from experience. But that self is created out of nothing. There was originally no self. It creates that, right?

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  It creates a feeling of time. It creates a feeling of you have a separate body so that you can navigate spaces and not feel like, God, I'm part of that wood over there and I'm gonna hit it. So you're separate from it so you can walk around. But these are all constructions. They are not reality. The reality is your brain is just filtering all of this data. The world looks much differently when it's not filtering. It's almost like pixels. It's almost like all of this information out there that's really weird and strange and wondrous. It's also creating a sense of a self separate from the world. But in fact, you're not separate from the world.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  All of your internal, your consciousness, everything that makes you alive is part of everything else that is around your environment. You are not a separate, you don't have a self. You don't have an ego. It's creating all of this. It's creating your reality. It's creating what you see, what you think, so that life is not overwhelming, so that you can survive. What would it be like if you didn't have these filtering mechanisms? I recommend you read a book called The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. And Aldous Huxley has this idea of the small mind and the big mind, mind at large. The small mind is what this brain is creating for you.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  The mind at large is experiencing, is the doors of perception opening to everything around you. It can open up too much and you would go insane because there's too much happening in this world. And if you've ever been on a drug trip, like I used to do, it can be overwhelming. You can almost go too far and it's excessive. But those doors of perception are opening and you're seeing more of the world. You're perceiving more of it. And it's a wondrous feeling. It's, people are so defensive and aggressive and angry, right? Because their world is so closed and limited. But when this opens up, you lose all of those defensiveness

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  and the world is, you feel like you're part of the world itself. There's no, nothing separating you from your environment. And so people like Aldous Huxley believed that if we could see through our own brains and see through the constructions and open ourselves up, it would solve all of humanity's problems. And so I have exercises in there to sort of lead you through what I call pure perception, pure consciousness, without all the filtering mechanisms, pure thinking where you're not, it's not like programmed from the outside, pure emotion.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  You don't realize, but your emotions are simply chemicals in your body, right? Chemicals that are, hormones that are racing through your body that are creating moods. Your brain goes, okay, Robert, that mood is anger. You're putting a label on it. But in fact, it's not anger. It's just this kind of roiling sensation inside of you. Then you think about anger and it turns into this obsessive thought. Pure emotion are just chemicals constantly roiling through you. If you just feel those chemicals, then you're not gonna hang on to these particular emotions that your mind is making you think about. It's a very freeing and opening experience. So I'm taking you through these ways of kind of having

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  pure consciousness without all of these filters going on.

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• 1:14:17André Duqum?

  I too love Huxley and his framework around the reducing valve.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:25André Duqum?

  The sheer amount of overwhelming stimuli that is available to us, which thank God, you know, we've had some great people on like Neil Seth, who I know you write about, and Donald Hoffman and

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:14:39André Duqum?

  Lots of people in the consciousness research space. And there's been many useful frameworks. One is like the display of a computer screen. You know, like the user face of a computer display is very useful for navigating it. But it is not at all representative of what's actually in the computer. You know, like the electricity that's running through different gates in the computer that's actually happening anytime you're typing something or sending an email. It's, yeah, it's kind of like an analogy for the way that we perceive reality and the way that this display of experience comes to us through our

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  We're just seeing the screen.

• 1:15:19André Duqum?

  Right, our five sensory experience is our screen. It's our interface. But it's not at all exhaustive of what's happening on an energetic level. We're like perceiving such a small fraction on the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:15:36André Duqum?

  And it's, I think it definitely for me invites humility. And something that you write about Uspensky and Gurdjieff

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:47André Duqum?

  is really, I think, powerful here because he refers to it as though we are in this hypnotic sleep state, walking through our life. And we are so largely missing the power of our attention.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59André Duqum?

  And we know that, you know, we live in a time where attention is being fought for. It's a commodity.

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05André Duqum?

  And I'm curious what you, what your thoughts are around Gurdjieff and the reflections on using our attention to actually be able to glean deeper into reality itself.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  Well, Gurdjieff is an absolutely fascinating figure. He traveled throughout the Far East and the Middle East, trying to learn all the secrets of various esoteric religions and cults and putting it all together into some sort of modern philosophy that would allow for transcendent experiences. And one thing that he discovered through all of these different practices was the power of attention and focus. And he says it's like this, it really is what makes us human. So an animal, and believe me, I love animals and we're gonna get to that very soon. Their attention is just focused here

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  on what's immediately in front of them, right? Okay, maybe they look a little bit in the distance or if you're a bird, it's a little wider. But they can't focus on things that are invisible, like the future or the past or things that are not for their senses, right? And so they can only focus on what's immediately in front of them. But our attention is immense. We can focus on almost anything. And when we focus our attention deeply on something, these kind of miraculous things can happen. So he has this idea, he calls it self remembering. So if you're having, normally you go through a life

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  and you have all these series of events and experiences and you're there in the moment, but then they pass. And maybe three years from now, you remember absolutely nothing of that particular day. If you thought about it, what you remember about the past is this tiny little spectrum of things that stood out. But most of the time, you remember nothing, right? Why? Because you're in a state of sleep. You're in a state of hypnosis. You're walking through the streets. You're experiencing things, but they're not deeply registering to you. You're not paying attention. They're not, you're not ingesting them like food. They're not a part of you. So we have this thing called self remembering, where you're walking around

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  and you're looking at things as almost as if you're remembering it later. And so you're attending to them on this deeper, deeper level so that you will, so that you will have, this will actually mean something to you and it'll have intensity and depth, not just this surface skimming through life. You will feel awake. You will feel every moment that you're awake and alive, right? And so

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Uspensky, who was this sort of pupil of his, was going through, was being taught by him. And he decided to use this experiment of self-remembering. And he started, just in the beginning, of looking at a flower in a vase and going, "I'm remembering this, I'm remembering this, I'm seeing this, I'm alive, I'm experiencing it here in the moment." He could only hold on to it for a few seconds because of all the distracting thoughts. But then, when he held on to it for like a minute, suddenly that flower like sparked to life. It was like inside of him, there was an intensity to it. It was a part of him. And he suddenly realized, wow, this is a powerful, powerful experiment I can go through.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  He realized the power in it that Gurdjieff had experienced with all of these mystics. Now we can do it for three minutes, now we can do it for five minutes. Suddenly, everything is like, it's like taking a peyote or something, it's magical. He takes it outside, he's walking around, he's going, "I'm remembering, I'm remembering, I'm living this, I'm experiencing it." And suddenly, he's having all of these visions. The houses that he's looking at are like talking to him, they're alive. You might think it's irrational, but he's not experiencing it as irrational. He's experiencing it as if I'm waking up to my own experience. The world is now alive to me, instead of sleepwalking through it.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  And then, suddenly, he finds himself in a tobacco shop, like on the other side of town, and he goes, "What happened?" "I was experimenting, I was seeing all these things." Then he realized, for about a half hour, he fell back into a state of slumber. And he ends up in a tobacco shop, almost mechanically looking for cigarettes. He forgot the experiment, and he returned to the state of sleepwalking. And now he could see the contrast between the normal experience of life, where you're not aware of anything, you're just mechanically going through it as literally sleep, and contrasting it to this different experience of life.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  And so, I've tried it myself, the experiment, and it's not easy because you're constantly being distracted. But I swear to you, if you can go through it for a few minutes and just do like that flower experiment, it has, and read the chapter, and so I'll sort of tell you how to do it. It is incredibly powerful, and it shows, once you experience, you see the difference between your daily life and how asleep you are, and what that there's a potential for a different kind of experience.

• 1:21:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, I know, Spencey gives an example of when the attention got so concentrated that he felt he could hear the inner thoughts of Gurdjieff. And, you know, this is something that mystical and contemplative traditions have written great links around. And the Eight Lems of Yoga are centered around like first withdrawing the senses with pratyahara, and then developing concentration with practices like tratsika, which is like staring at a candle flame for 15 minutes. And it's a, it's something that I've personally practiced a good bit around

• 1:22:13André Duqum?

  because I've contemplated how, like, the dial of consciousness from being asleep, which is not metaphorically, I feel like it actually is a sort of dream state.

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28André Duqum?

  To then paying attention deeper, you start to glean insights that you otherwise didn't occur to you about somebody that you're paying attention to, or a flower, or a candle flame. And I just think of how much suffering comes relationally, especially because we're living in these abstractions of who somebody is and the memory of who they've been for us, as opposed to being attentive to who they are in this moment. And yeah, I found that bit on, on attention really, really powerful because I think we are suffering, like, not having concentrated minds. We struggle to concentrate on something for reading a single page of a book, let alone a conversation. Yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  Well, as part of my meditation, this is part of Zen practice called shikantaza, which is you try and go through the full time period, which for me is 40 minutes, without a single thought crossing your mind, right? And it's impossible. But you have, you have a way of relating to your thoughts as if they are just secretions of the brain. And you don't pay it, you let them come to you, and you just let them wash by. And then you're not thinking because they're just, these things occurring and they just go away. So you can go through the full 30, 40 minutes like that. And I tell you, it is, it is a wondrous feeling when you get through it.

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  It's like you have a different kind of energy and a different kind of consciousness. And you're only feeling the potential of it. But if you went around, that's what enlightenment is like. And that's what yogis and other people who have gone deep into this, if you walked around life with that kind of focus, with that kind of no thought mujo in Zen, no mind, it would be an awesome experience. You would realize that there is a different form of consciousness you can have.

• 1:24:30André Duqum?

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• 1:25:14André Duqum?

  you wouldn't love what they have going on there, too. The quality is just creme de la creme. That's wakingup.com/knowthyself, or link in description as always. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show.

• 1:25:28André Duqum?

  It's very exciting for me to explore. And speaking of different types of consciousness that one could have, there is this whole world of interspecies sublime and animal consciousness, which again gives us insight into this realm that, hey, your sensory system as a human being, as a homo sapien, is great. And it's just one lens into reality. There are many different lenses into reality. None are objectively true. And so I would love for you to set the framework for the interspecies. And yeah, what came up as you started to dig deeper into the animal world?

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, I have a, like pagans, I have a, when I said the pagan chapter, I have a deep, deep relationship to animals. They're a huge part of my life. I've always had pets. And I'm obsessed with animal consciousness, with animal existence. I don't know, maybe I prefer animals to humans some days, but anyway, I just.

• 1:26:23André Duqum?

  I think that we can all relate to that a bit.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  So this chapter meant a lot to me. Part of it is, we have this word called the, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, the anthropocene?

• 1:26:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, anthropocene, yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  Okay. And basically, it means we've entered a period of time where everything, the human dominates the planet, and everything is human, everything is filtered through human experience. There's no part of wilderness on any part of the planet we haven't touched and in some way altered, even Antarctica, okay? And so you don't realize, as you walk through life, that everything that you encounter is through this human lens, right? You don't have to, everything is laid out for you, you have your phone, everything is oriented. You're constantly interacting with humans, and it's the only world you know. Well, the animal world is a different form of consciousness. It's a different way of relating to the world.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  And we are gifted with this intense ability to enter into the minds of other creatures. We can do this through science, which is miraculous, what they're uncovering about the consciousness of bats, of whales, of dolphins, of wolves. And we have our immense powers of empathy and imagination, where we can feel what it could be like to be that creature. You combine those two together, and it's an amazing gift that you must use to enter into the consciousness of other creatures. And so, I tell the story of a man, a young man, who had a very, who had a terminal illness, rheumatoid arthritis.

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  And he was in love with birds, particularly hawks, peregrine falcons in England. He was obsessed with them. And as he knows, this is perhaps the last season that he can, can observe them because he's, he's literally dying. He says, "I am going to become a falcon, I'm going to be, I'm going to go so intensely into their world that I'm going to feel what it's like to be that peregrine." And it's not just intuition. He studied everything about their physiology. He looked at maps to understand what the world might look like when you're flying 1,000 feet up high in the sky. He studied their physiology in detail, and he followed this one falcon everywhere until he felt like he was part of it, right?

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  He could experience it. And he could almost like, he would see one of their kills in the snow, and he would put his hand in it, and he would like taste the blood, like, because the falcon was sort of, loved that taste of blood of his creatures he killed.

• 1:29:04André Duqum?

  That's commitment to the, commitment to the role.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And at the end of it, he feels like, because the falcon is very wary of him, just looking at this ugly human that's following, this pink, two-legged creature that's following him everywhere. He's kind of, oh, keep away. By the end of the story, the peregrine has almost accepted him so that he could walk somewhat closer up to them, and he could see them like a few yards away. And he sees that the falcon, the peregrine is sleeping, the ultimate sign that they'd gained this trust.

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  But the idea is, we have this deep, deep need for connecting to animals. And the reason I explain is, we think of dogs and cats and cattle as domesticated animals. But we are, in fact, the domesticated animal par excellence. When we became agriculturists, we live in these confined spaces. We limit what we can do, we limit what we can think, we limit who we can partner with. We can limit our food supply. We are these confined domesticated animals. And we are obsessed, we are fascinated by what is wild, because we are no longer wild. But we know that there's a part of us that could be wild, right?

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  So animals are our connection to who we used to be, to that sense of freedom and wildness that used to be a part of the human experience. And so we are deeply, deeply attracted to them. And their senses, we think our intelligence makes us superior. But when it comes to senses, we're actually quite inferior, right? So that hawk could see things we could never perceive, right? A dog lives in a world of smells. It can smell things and relate the entire history of people that have passed through a room, these chemicals, they can smell everything, right? Birds have these intense powers of navigating, of seeing the magnetic fields of Earth and

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  navigating, robins can navigate these incredible spaces by seeing the magnetic fields. Snakes can feel the heat of other organisms and sense, right? Spiders and elephants are attuned to the vibrations of the environment. So we are only seeing a tiny little sliver of the world. But there are vibrations, there are acoustic things, there are vision, things we can't perceive visually, there's magnetic fields, there's heat, there's all these other things that we're missing of the reality of being on planet Earth. So if you explore all of these worlds, and I go through many different, many different species, it's like your own consciousness is expanding.

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  It's like you're becoming a part of them and you're seeing a different viewpoint of planet Earth and you can kind of internalize some of this. And you can also feel a deep, deep connection to the, to the natural world, to all the organisms that exist and get you out of this kind of human lock that we're all in.

• 1:32:14André Duqum?

  It's so fascinating to contemplate what the internal experience of an octopus or elephant or bat could be like, you know?

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Octopuses, so you had a Neil Seth on, right?

• 1:32:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, and I also have this, I don't know if you've seen this book, Other Minds, Peter Gottlieb Smith, who's coming on next month.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I'm so jealous. That is a fantastic book.

• 1:32:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm excited. I feel like the luckiest guy to.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  You are the luckiest guy, Jesus Christ, man.

• 1:32:42André Duqum?

  Well, you could talk to all these people, too.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  Well, I could, maybe I will. Well, Neil Seth wrote an amazing article in a book called Aliens, in which he speculated that octopuses could be what alien consciousness could be like, right? Because they have distributed consciousness. Their consciousness is not centered in the brain, it's throughout their whole body. Their arms have, have brain cells in them, so their arms can think. And each arm has like a separate personality. And so imagine if your whole body was conscious, if you could smell through your feet, if you could see through your belly, that's what an octopus can do.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  And that maybe is what life on other planets could be like. But octopuses are the most insane of all, because they live three years at most. And yet they're highly intelligent. They can do things that, they have a form of intelligence that's remarkable. And people who've experimented with them or lived with them and, and Other Minds goes into this, it's remarkable. But they're not learning from experience, because they only live three years. Where did this insane intelligence come from cephalopods who are not, you know, mollusks, who are not gifted with intelligence? It's a remarkable story.

• 1:34:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's, you have this line that I love, "Our loneliness is not only in relation to other humans, but also in relation to nature and to all forms of life." And you speak about, you know, what animals did for your own loneliness, reading this book and connecting with the creatures in your backyard.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And my cats, I owe everything to my cats, I'm a huge cat lover.

• 1:34:33André Duqum?

  Cats are trippy. It's something, again, I think we take for, for granted. All of these are doorways, as you say, as well, into the sublime. And certainly, not only just contemplating the quality of, of an animal that's so much different than our perceptual system, but also connecting with them. Like, the animal agriculture industry is, I think, an absolute abomination. And I think we are so disconnected from seeing that, yes, we have this amazing intellect, and that's really novel to us human beings. But they're so intelligent and emotionally connected as, as beings in their own right, and we just forget that.

• 1:35:17André Duqum?

  And I think that is something that is sad, while there's been many gifts building these concrete jungles and the technological era that's come, but we're like also so disconnected from having the encounter with wildlife. And, yeah, I'm curious.

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  We're lonely. I tell a story, early on, though, in, in one chapter, I think the first chapter, no, third chapter, maybe, of this indigenous man of a tribe in Siberia. And this Russian scientist who encounters him, Teresu Usala. There's a great film made from the story, if you ever want to see it, and also a book. But he was this indigenous hunter that lived by himself and hunted different furs and pelts. But he was part of this indigenous culture called Gold. And the scientist is, uses him as a scout, and they develop this relationship and this kind of love and this friendship.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  And through him, he discovers this kind of indigenous way of looking at the world. And this man, Teresu, is so connected to the environment that he can sense what the clouds are saying about the weather, he can sense the inner lives of all the animals around him. And at one point, a tiger is like a few feet away roaring at the Siberian tiger, you don't want to mess with that. And the scientist is like trembling, he's pulling out his rifle. And Teresu says, "Put down that gun." And he walks straight up to the tiger on the other side of the bushes, and he talks to him, and he says, "Sorry, Amba, I know this is your, Amba, the word for tiger, this is your world, we're sorry, we don't mean to intrude, we come here in peace, we will

• 1:37:00Speaker 00

  leave you alone, this is your forest, we bow down to you." The tiger calms down and walks away. And the scientist is like, "My God." And then he realizes that we humans used to have this power. We once were so connected to our environments that we had powers of thinking and a connection to the environment where we could sense things that were about to happen, we could sense the weather, we could sense storms, we could sense danger, and that we've lost it all. And he wondered, what, in the end of the book, what if we could combine our Western technological sophistication with this kind of shamanistic relationship to the world? How much richer we would be, how much more powerful we would be?

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  And so my point is, our ancestors used to have that kind of closeness to the animal world, because they felt it very deeply. And all of our spiritual practices emerged from worshiping animals, worshiping large animals, because we couldn't believe that bears and wolves and mastodons existed. What, what created this? They had to be godlike. So our relationship to the animal world is a very, very important part of who we are.

• 1:38:17André Duqum?

  Yeah, and the doctrines of Vedanta Buddhism, like when they explain ahimsa and having a quality of nonviolence.

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:38:26André Duqum?

  And the way that it transforms the way that you relate to not just animal, but all natural life. You commune with it differently in a way that I've experienced in pockets where, you know, it takes you really feeling it and believing it to walk up to a tiger. And, you know, do in that sense. But animals, of course, can sense these subtle energies of fear, intrepidation. And when that's not present, I found that there's a sensitivity, not with just animals, but also biological life at large, trees, plant life. That, and it can sound so woo woo that they communicate.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  It's a shame that it does.

• 1:39:10André Duqum?

  It's a shame, though, you know? Because it is real. And I think they respond to you differently when you come from that, that place of nonviolence.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Well, if you've ever ridden horses, I did a lot when I was very young. Horses are basically, unfortunately, highly domesticated. But there's still an element of wildness to them. They sense your fear, your legs, the tension in your legs, etc. They know that the rider on them is somebody that's nervous and fearful, and it makes them nervous and fearful, and it makes them behave in bad ways. If you're relaxed and you're calm, the horse senses it, not just in your legs, but it senses your energy. Dogs have that too. And cats, they can sense when you're nervous, anxious, and that infects their moods. So they have a sensitivity that's very powerful and that we have lost.

• 1:40:04André Duqum?

  I'm forgetting the study of the, like, the trace pheromones that you can actually like test and observe in a room where somebody was just angry or just had a fight versus had a joyous feeling. Like, we emit these things, we chemically excrete them, you know? So it's, it's, we forget because it's kind of subperceptual and we can't see the nonphysical, right? But it is fascinating to explore that dynamic and how it's playing out.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:40:33André Duqum?

  So this goes nicely into chapter seven, love. And I wanted to read this line, "Brick by brick, we erect walls around us. The world is no longer vibrating within us, but is outside of us at a distance. We become spectators at the banquet of life." And I'm curious for you just to elaborate a little bit more about this feeling that I think we can all relate to at times, feeling like there is life, I'm a spectator of it, and not involved with it to the same degree. So what is the love sublime?

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we're biological, physiological creatures. We have a need, a drive to reproduce, to mate. We're attracted to certain people. And, and that sexual desire can translate into something deeper, which is love. And we might think it's only human, but I do believe animals have it in a different way. But it's a strange phenomenon, if you think about it. And we use the metaphor of falling in love, which I think is, is very eloquent. So when you're falling, there's a sense of vulnerability and fear

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  because you fall very deeply and, you know, what's at the bottom, right? Could be death. And so the act of falling in love with another person involves a sense of fear. Like, I'm opening myself up, I'm vulnerable. They could hurt me at any point. I'm letting them into my life, I'm becoming emotional, and I could be damaged by this, right? If they abandon me, if they choose to ignore me, if they don't fall in love with me. And so we catch ourselves as we're falling, we stop here and we go, wait a minute. I'm not sure about this. And then when we get to that moment of wait a minute, and all these kind of thoughts starts percolating in us about maybe they don't love us,

• 1:42:31Speaker 00

  maybe they could hurt us, maybe I can't trust them. They sense that as well. And they might have been falling and they sense you're hitting that level and stopping, and it causes them to stop. And a kind of a mutual mistrust starts building. And so we walk around with all of these walls inside of us. We want to feel protected. And our egos, they may cause this pain of being separated, but they also protect us from any kind of pain. But they separate us from the world at large. They separate us from being open and involved in experience. And so your ego is trying to protect you. And then other people will come, will intervene and say, oh, that other person,

• 1:43:14Speaker 00

  they may not be good for you, you may not be able to trust them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the sense of falling is broken, the spell is broken. It may go on for a few more months, but it's kind of dragging its feet. It's no longer love, it's like something else. You've, you separate. And now you know, you've had that feeling of falling and it was one, it was kind of wondrous, the first months of falling in love with someone. And then it stopped, but you want it again. So you find another person and then you start doing that again. Then you stop again, you stop, you stop, you stop, you stop. You keep, you never allow yourself to fall. And I tell the story of perhaps the greatest love story in Western history of Abba Lard Eloise

• 1:43:57Speaker 00

  and the sensation of just falling completely, where you lose all of your defenses, you lose all of your ego, and you let the consciousness of another person merge inside of you and become a part of you. It's not like you lose who you are, but you feel deep, the other person is no longer an object, but they're a subject, they're part of you, they're inside of you to some degree. It's the most ecstatic, sublime, transcendent experience, I believe, humans can have. Because we are both physical and spiritual creatures. Sex is just pure physicality without the spirituality. It feels at the end kind of empty.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  Spirituality is great, religion is great, but we're animal, we're physical creatures. There's something is missing. Putting the two together, the physicality and the spirituality in a love for another human being is a completely transcendent experience. But in order to do that, you have to allow that process of falling. And we live in a culture that very much degrades and denigrates that sense of falling in love. It seems romantic and sentimental. We think of love as being something of comfort and security and two people kind of just sort of helping each other. And it's kind of milquetoasty, it's lost its intensity. And what I'm trying to say in the book is, love is an act of rebellion

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  against a world that is so ugly and disenchanted and that wants, there's so many defenses. You're raising a middle finger to this culture and saying, I'm rebelling against, I'm rebelling against the narcissism, and I'm going to let go of all my defenses and I'm going to give myself over to someone, even if they hurt me. If they hurt me, so what? I'll rebound, I'm tough enough, I can handle it, I'll find someone else. But I just want to say the sense of letting yourself merge with another person and letting go of all your defenses can lead, in some ways, to the most sublime experience of all.

• 1:46:03André Duqum?

  You mentioned that we typically stop at a certain level of depth because of the fear it evokes versus a loss of our individual self, our defense mechanisms, which we, you know, likely have a lifetime of evidence backing. And it's scary in that process. And I think we do live in a culture, especially the younger generations, where there's so much optionality. And you discard something the moment something uncomfortable happens. And I'm curious, what do you think happens when you stop resisting the potential you have to love and take away somebody being an object?

• 1:46:47André Duqum?

  And like you said, commune with them as a subject and let that open and kind of break your heart in a sense?

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, our metaphor for relationships between any kind of romance, gay or straight, is the marketplace. It's psh, psh, psh, psh, right? I can exchange one person for another. I can shop and I can find somebody better. There's always somebody better out there. But your initial attraction to somebody is, there's a reason for it. There's something deep going on. It could be something primal, it could be something to do with your childhood. And if you look at the people you're attracted to, you will notice patterns. You will notice a certain kind of look, a certain kind of energy that you are attracted to.

• 1:47:35Speaker 00

  And so the thing that's stopping you is your mind, it is not the reality. So we are emotional creatures, not so much intellectual, but emotional creatures. We pick up the emotions of the other person like a virus. And when the other person is open and vulnerable and expresses a deep need to fall, we're invited to fall with them, right? And then the mutual process can occur and something profound can happen. Okay? But if we start closing ourselves off, as I said, the other person feels it and they close themselves off. And, you know, if you could think of all the moments in your own life

• 1:48:19Speaker 00

  where someone actually sees you as an individual, that kind of recognizes that you have a different experience from me, that you have a separate consciousness, that you have your own values, your own problems, your own emotions, that you are a subject, not an object. You could count, on one hand, and less than one hand, the amount of times you've had that feeling. But we all crave it. We all crave to have somebody recognize us, not as an object to use for their satisfaction, for their sexual desires, but as a subject that they can relate to, that we can explore together in this kind of mutual exploration of what I call the love sublime.

• 1:49:05André Duqum?

  That distinction you give of our willingness to surrender to another, I'm curious how you contrast that with your work on seduction.

• 1:49:14Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:16André Duqum?

  Because, yeah, you've written the book on seduction.

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  Yes, I have.

• 1:49:19André Duqum?

  And

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  A book, a book.

• 1:49:22André Duqum?

  In my words, you know,

• 1:49:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:49:24André Duqum?

  Wiley recognizes, you know, one of the books on seduction seminal for sure. And on the strategy and the keeping the other person off balance

• 1:49:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:35André Duqum?

  And the play that's at that. So how do you contrast?

• 1:49:38Speaker 00

  Well, it's a different book. It's a different subject matter.

• 1:49:41André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  So The Art of Seduction is you could use it to have someone fall in love with you and then you fall in love with them. But it's really about seduction, right? And the psychological process that's involved. And yes, there's a degree of manipulation and power games going on. And there's a kind of transgressive element because the word seduction kind of conjures up something a little bit dastardly, a little bit evil to us. I kind of embrace that in the book and I describe it. And I describe the vast literature of seduction, which kind of fascinates me because the psychological process

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  is pretty damn intriguing when it comes to sexual seductions, political seductions, marketing seductions, social seductions. What is it about the human brain that allows us to be seduced by another person? Okay. That is what I'm examining in that book. And so this is different. I agree. People will want to say, well, Robert, you've evolved. You're a higher being. I don't look at myself that way. I don't see breaks in that. It's a different book for a different time in my life, for maybe a different cultural moment, although a lot of people are still reading that book. But I will say one thing. I describe in The Art of Seduction,

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  the quintessential seduction fiction story, Dangerous Liaisons. And there's this dastardly seducer named Valmont, who's seduced hundreds of women. And he's the most manipulative evil seducer you could imagine. He meets this woman, Président de Tourvel, who's very prudish, very religious. And she's beautiful. And he decides it's the ultimate challenge. If I could seduce this prude, then I will be famous throughout France and I will have conquered the most impossible person. She resists him because she knows his horrible reputation. She resists, she resists, she resists. And as she keeps resisting him, he finds himself falling in love with her.

• 1:51:52Speaker 00

  He starts seeing that there's something about her spirit and her power, that there's something else he didn't realize. And he starts letting go of his need to seduce. And he finds himself, despite himself, falling in love with her. And as he falls in love with her, she starts lowering her defenses and she starts falling for him because maybe he's not this evil seducer. She feels him falling in love with her. And then the seduction proceeds. And of course, he ends up seducing her and he ends up ruining her in her own way. But the lesson of it was, in order to seduce her, he had to fall in love with her. And that falling in love created a mutual kind of energy between them,

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  which is similar to what I'm describing in this chapter. But I will say seduction and love sublime are different phenomena that I'm writing about.

• 1:52:43André Duqum?

  Yeah. And I appreciate that you aren't as precious with your own work to ever pigeonhole yourself into like, all right, I'm just exploring the underbelly, the dark side of human nature. Acknowledge it. It's very real. If you don't have awareness to the way it's operating, then you will, it will be used against you.

• 1:53:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02André Duqum?

  And then there's also this more transcendent way of living and falling in love and surrendering that is available. And I think, yeah, having context and awareness for both is incredibly important.

• 1:53:13Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 1:53:15André Duqum?

  Again, making our way around town on the circle, the circle of the sublime, is the historical sublime, which we can touch here. Because I love how you explore, we don't remember, we have this amnesia of all the ways that we are culturally, through the myths and the stories and the languages that have been passed down, shaping the way that we think about the world and of self. And so it's something that's really excited me to even just dive more into history at large. And I think that, yeah, I would just love for you to explain, why is that such an important aspect that you felt you wanted to touch on here?

• 1:54:00André Duqum?

  As I know you're a lover of history and the way that it informs our present.

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  Well, I had this notion while writing the book, and I've had it before. I can't really explain it because these things are hard to verbalize, but I have the word there. And what I mean by the word there, and in my notes, I'd always kind of write that, is I'd be reading a story and I'd have this feeling that I was there, that I could experience what it was like to be in ancient Rome, that I was walking down the streets of ancient Rome and there were the shops and these things going on. And I was there. And I have this over and over again, even in cultures that are so disparate, like the Aztecs or watching a movie that takes place in Japan in the 30s or 40s.

• 1:54:49Speaker 00

  It's a sensation of, I'm human. I can almost recall or feel what it was like to be there at that moment. And so I have this idea that history can be either something dead or alive. Your dead history is a bunch of facts. Napoleon conquered this country. He had these many soldiers. He used this strategy. Or there's a live history where I'm literally Napoleon Bonaparte, feeling, you know, my ego and my sense of pride and my superiority and the drama of the moment I'm in. And I'm alive. I'm a human being living through this moment. Napoleon isn't this fantastic. He was a human being, like you or I.

• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  He had consciousness, he had emotions, he had insecurities. That is living history. And it's something that lives inside of us because we think of ourselves as just living in this present moment. But we are part of this stream of history. And we use language for our thinking. We have thoughts, we have ideas, we have concepts. We have cliches that we use in our language. They're not our own. We did not invent our language. We did not invent how our brain thinks. It's the product of thousands of years of evolution. And so the dead, the ghosts of the past are inside our brain right now. All the practices of the past, all the social things about strangers

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  and wariness of strangers, which is part of our culture now with how we treat immigrants, is a very human experience, right? It's in us, social customs like that. On and on and on, our brains were formed thousands of years ago. It's the same brain. We're filled with these ghosts and these dead of the past, and they're alive within us. So I want the reader, as I tell these stories in history, to feel like they are alive, that they are there in that moment. And I tell the story to introduce the chapter of one of my favorite stories in the book, of these cave explorers in France who come upon a cave with the most magnificent cave paintings, one of the most magnificent cave paintings.

• 1:57:01Speaker 00

  I highly recommend this Werner Herzog documentary about it, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. You will see what I mean. They are absolutely spectacular. Horses and mastodons and tigers, et cetera. They're alive, they're so vivid. And these modern explorers are in this cave. They're the first ones to see it in 37,000 years. And they're so moved, they're so astounded by it. They feel the past come alive within them 37,000 years later, right? And you have to ask yourself, what is it about human experience that transcends such vast amounts of time? They could feel the rituals that were going on in this cave.

• 1:57:46Speaker 00

  They could feel the power of these animals. It's because we have the same brains as they do. We respond to the same things, the same patterns, the same aesthetic, the same abstraction of animals on a wall. We are creatures of the past. And the more we feel that inside of us now, then we feel something of eternity, of timelessness. We're not just living in the present. We're living through millions of years of evolution and that's inside of us, not outside of us.

• 1:58:18André Duqum?

  Hmm.

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• 1:59:20André Duqum?

  What do you think is one of the most predominant ways in which language in particular is shaping what we think is possible, the way we relate to each other? Yeah, what do you think is a predominant way in which the dead is controlling our present?

• 1:59:38Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, our language is limiting. It's a constriction on what we experience. But I can say this, having studied ancient Greek, their vocabulary was much wider than our own. And so they had words for colors that we can't even, we have blue, blue. They had like 25 different words for blue. And that meant that they were seeing different shades of blue as they walked around, where we just see this one thing, right? And so, language kind of limits your experience by the vocabulary that we use. If we don't have words for things, we don't experience them.

• 2:00:21Speaker 00

  But think of how many words we don't have for. My wife and I have this interesting experiment. She's half-Japanese, she knows some Japanese. And the Japanese have these words for things that don't exist in English, like the feeling of someone's, the back of their head, and what is going on from the, I don't even, you know better than I do, probably.

• 2:00:43André Duqum?

  No, no, no. That's, and one I love is, I think, kamehrebi. It's like the dappled sunlight through the trees that like, you never walk into a room and there's like the sun that's beaming in through a window, that's like making pattern, that's so beautiful. Like, that's a word that describes that. And I think of, you know, there's that saying that Eskimos have 100 different names for snow.

• 2:01:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 2:01:07André Duqum?

  And in the Sanskrit, you know, language and tradition, they have so many words for our inner realm, right? Where our modern English language has, is great for the scientific endeavor.

• 2:01:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:21André Duqum?

  And I just, of course, just like we talked about, no one perceptual system or sensory system is exhaustive of all of reality. No one language is going to give us full insight into reality. It will never, will always fall short. But it is just fascinating how we are limited in ways we don't know. Like, we don't know what we don't know in the way that we're using language and how it's limiting us.

• 2:01:45Speaker 00

  Well, the prevailing metaphor for us now in the 21st century is the computer and algorithms. And we think of the mind as a machine and we talk like that. You know, our brains is like software and files in our mind, et cetera. But in the past, the metaphors were very different. And in that, in this chapter we're talking about, I describe, "I try and relive a moment in London, England, in the year 1749, what it would be like and how different humans are." The prevailing metaphor was the theater. We are all actors on a stage and everyone's wearing a costume and everyone's playing a part. And maybe we could play different parts

• 2:02:28Speaker 00

  and have fun and wear different costumes. And so when you have that kind of metaphor, you have a different set of language and everything sort of centers around the social personality. And if you read like a novel of Jane Austen, which is, you know, 70 years later, the descriptions of the social niceties going on between people is intense. We don't think like that, we don't have that vocabulary. The Eskimos with their 50 different words for snow, Jane Austen has 50 different words for all of the weird interactions between men and women, all the weird emotions passing between them. Because our metaphor is the computer, our language is kind of shrinking down

• 2:03:13Speaker 00

  to one of those manuals of computer speak, right? We're losing this kind of richness of describing things that go beyond just sort of technical phenomena.

• 2:03:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think of things like the DSM and all of the diagnoses that we have for the mental ailments that are so prevalent in modern culture. Compare it to the contemplative practices and how we just have like, meditation is just one word that describes somebody sitting still peacefully is like kind of our word.

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44André Duqum?

  And you know, there's dhyana, dharana, shunya, so many different words that describe different things that you could be doing while meditating, right?

• 2:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:54André Duqum?

  And so it's fascinating and is something that you explore as we go to the next one of the daemon.

• 2:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01André Duqum?

  Because it certainly feels like, as the sociologist Cooley misquotes, like, "I am not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am."

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15André Duqum?

  And we live in this perpetual image management.

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19André Duqum?

  And so I would love for you just to lay out the, you know, first, second self and what a daemon is so that we can get a little bit closer to what is and who we are in our essence and essentially are.

• 2:04:34Speaker 00

  Well, one day, I think I woke from a dream and I had this image in my head. And the image was, the real world, or who I am, sorry, is just this jumbled black and white picture that you can barely focus on. It's very chaotic. It's like this weird work of art. And that my mind then converts all that into this image of me in a mirror and who I am. But in fact, I'm a chaos of all these different impulses that go, flow through me. So we have a very simplified image of who we are. It's like how the brain, I said, constructs our reality. And the daemon is a concept from ancient Greek.

• 2:05:19Speaker 00

  But if you study ancient religions and cultures, you will see that almost all of them have a similar concept. They had it in ancient Egypt called the ba. And basically what it is, is the gods, in the Greek sense, were pitied humans who were so lost and so miserable. They have no sense of the future or what's really going on around them. So out of pity, they implanted in each human a daemon, a kind of god, a demigod in there that is fitted to their individuality, to their soul. There's actually a word for soul, right? And this daemon is placed in there by the god Eros. So there's an element of love, an erotic element to it. And as they go through life,

• 2:06:04Speaker 00

  the daemon will speak to them of where they should be, what they should do. But it's completely themselves, it has nothing to do with anybody else. It's fitted precisely to who they are as an individual. And if you think of that, what it represents is, you are not this sophisticated creature with all these languages and all these social layers and personalities. You are just this organism with an energy, with a biology, with a physiology. Your heart beats to a particular rhythm. Your blood flows in its own way. You have your own energy about you that has nothing to do with words. It has nothing to do with concepts or categories. It's you as this biological creature

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  with your very unique DNA, with this particular way your brain is wired, unlike any other human being. You are completely unique. You are a true individual. And that is your daemon. That is life implanting itself in you. It's kind of a transcendent force. To us today, that seems, God, that's just so goddamn irrational. How silly, Robert. How woo-woo can you get, right? But I don't think of it that way. I like to, I like to, because I've translated into these terms that I just mentioned. And the reason why it seems so alien to us is we're so captured by the social. We're so captured by how other people look at us,

• 2:07:33Speaker 00

  how they judge us, that we have no idea anymore of who we are. Oh, I'm shy, I'm ambitious, I'm successful, I'm insecure. But they're all in relation to how other people judge you. You think you're shy, okay, you're shy. But in other situations with some people, you're not so shy. You're shy in front of your boss, but in front of children, you kind of, in some people, you open up. So who are you? You're not these qualities that you think that you have. You're a mystery to yourself. You are so alienated from who you truly are that you think that this social mirrors of judgments, of categories, is who you are, right? But there's something much deeper.

• 2:08:18Speaker 00

  There's something much more authentic about you. It is a voice in your head that if you listen to is telling you, these are things that are you, that are natural to you. These are things that attract you. These are things that repel you. This is who you are as this biological creature that has a particular energy. And even if, and if you tap into it and if you hear that voice, it's very, very powerful. It guides you. I've always had this feeling, since I was pretty young, that there was something kind of guiding me in life. I've made a lot of mistakes. I did not have any success until I was 38, 39 years old.

• 2:09:03Speaker 00

  I was wandering through life. I was lost. I had moments of deep depression. I even had moments of suicide, suicidal thoughts. But there was always something in the back of my mind that was guiding me, that was saying, "Stop that, go here. Don't go this direction, go that direction." Almost like a feeling of like fate. And when I listened to it and I had this horrible job and I quit the job, I knew I was like aligning with that voice inside of me. And then, you know, I happened to write the books that I have and my life changed. But that feeling like there is a fate that fits you, that's you. And when you follow it, things, good things happen. And when you ignore it, you turn into dead ends

• 2:09:48Speaker 00

  and you become so depressed, you don't know why. I think it's a very alive concept and it's the daemon. And I want to reintroduce it to the modern audience to think that you have a second self buried deep within all these social layers that you think you are but are not you. They're just reflections of what other people think you are.

• 2:10:10André Duqum?

  I resonate so much with what you said and the way that...

• 2:10:16André Duqum?

  It's easy to get lost in the descriptions of self continually through the relations of others and how they see you. And it's dead because you're looking through a mirror of a mirror instead of listening to the source and that primary self. And I'm curious about clarifying that because you also wrote an amazing book on mastery, which is like finding your life's task, devoting yourself to it, the apprenticeship of it. Whereas the mastery book feels like building towards a life. This is like, I think, orienting towards like listening a little bit more in the way that you've been writing about it.

• 2:10:56André Duqum?

  And certainly, one of the most immediate accesses I've had to my own personal experience of sublime are when those moments, especially like on this podcast, where I feel like I'm all the things that I love and that I'm good at and my skill sets come together in this boiling pot of like an offering that's contributing to the world in a meaningful way. And I think we all yearn for that feeling. And I'm curious how we and how you've learned through your research, through your own personal life, been able to discover and clarify, listening to what is that original primary self, maybe you call it the second self, but that daemon, that that voice that has an intelligent kind of guidance system for you. How do you clarify to actually really hear that more?

• 2:11:40Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it's hard for me to understand other people sometimes, and it's particularly in light of mastery, because I call it in mastery, your life's task, which is another word for it. And a lot of people afterwards would come to me and for advice and say, Robert, I have no idea what my life's task is. Help me find it. And the hard problem for me is I always had a sense of it since I was a child. Words and language and books enchanted me. They were so rich, they were so exciting, that I knew that this is where I had to be in life. And even though I had moments where I lost it, I always found myself back to that. I knew I couldn't do anything else.

• 2:12:25Speaker 00

  I couldn't get into science. I couldn't get into computers. I was not gifted for anything else but words. And so it's hard for me to understand, but I've had to put myself in other people's shoes. And the problem is, you don't hear that voice because you're hearing a thousand other voices in your head. You're hearing the voice of your parents, plays a huge role. I had this moment in my meditation this morning where I was going, I was being aware of myself and I was going, Robert, stop thinking, stop having these thoughts. And I'm going, where's that voice coming from? Who is that saying that?

• 2:13:07Speaker 00

  And then I realized that it was a voice probably from my mother, who was always observing me as a child and kind of scrutinizing me and judging me. And I've internalized her voice and I'm always scrutinizing and judging myself. And so I became aware that I was performing in front of this invisible audience continually through my life. So you have these voices inside of you from your parents, from your peers, your friends, from your colleagues at work, from social media, the thousand different voices that you were hearing on your Instagram feed. And you have no idea anymore who you are.

• 2:13:47Speaker 00

  You become a reflection of all the different things going on in the culture. And you have no relationship to that daemon, to that life's task, that voice inside of your head. And so the process, the older you get, the harder it becomes. But if you're 19, 20, 21 years old, and I've helped a lot of people find it, it's not so difficult because you're still close enough to your childhood. And when you were a child, you felt that voice very naturally. I love sports. I love mathematics. I'm attracted to music. I'm attracted to the social and other people. I'm attracted to words and language, patterns, et cetera. You knew it as a child.

• 2:14:32Speaker 00

  You felt it deeply. Then you've forgotten it. And you know, you've forgotten it so deeply that you don't even have any concept of this anymore. I'm returning you through a process. It's almost like a kind of therapy to who you were as a child, to those things that excited you so deeply, you can't even find words for them, right? And I don't know if we talked about yourself, we could perhaps clarify that, why those moments in podcasting kind of feel that way. There was something about you, the Andre, when you were three or four years old, that is still alive with you in those moments. You have a child inside of you that's still alive, that's screaming for attention, but

• 2:15:17Speaker 00

  you can't hear it anymore. It's who you were and who you are. So we have to go through a process of digging. We have to cut away all the things that you hate. I hated working for other people. I couldn't stand office politics. I couldn't stand all the egos and all the gameplay. It drove me crazy. In fact, it inspired the 48 Laws of Power. I hated it so much, right? So that to me was a signal that I can't work for other people. It makes it a little hard in life, but it means I've finally found my way to the one thing I can do where I don't have to work for other people. What is it you hate? We go through this process, pruning away all the other little voices going on inside

• 2:16:00Speaker 00

  of your head from your mother, your father, your friends telling you who you are. You cut that out slowly and maybe you can find your way back to that real voice that says, this is who I am. It feels right. When you've discovered something feels right and something opens up inside you. It's not going to be a specific thing. It's not like, I was meant to be a chemical engineer. No, it's more general. I have a love of science. I have a love of research and discovering things. I have a love of words. I have a love of physical movement and motion. It's general. But once you capture that general thing that attracts you, then we can start figuring

• 2:16:40Speaker 00

  out, getting a little bit more specific and tailoring where you go in life to suiting that. Because a lot of it has to do in mastery with your career path. In the daemon, it's not so general, related to your career path. It's more of a sense of fulfillment. But your career path is very important. It's a very important part of your life. And figuring out a direction you can head into that feels like you're you, like you podcasting. I don't know what you were doing before, but you were probably in some career that didn't feel right. Was that correct?

• 2:17:16André Duqum?

  Yeah, not fully right, but right in a context that's helpful to this right. You know, it was more in filmmaking and videography and photography, which I still love, but isn't like my absolute. But it's made its way into helping this, you know, and the things that we do now. So yeah, not fully aligned, but integrated sort of.

• 2:17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:40André Duqum?

  And I find it really fascinating because we, so we just started doing these in-person retreats. And on the third day, it's about contribution and we do a value clarification process. And I found it really interesting that you mentioned what really was one of the bigger things that ignited the 48 Laws of Power was the things that you didn't like, the things that that also clarifies your direction as much as the things that you value as the things you don't.

• 2:18:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:18:10André Duqum?

  So I found that really insightful as well to like examine that and look at that. Because it helped push you down and follow and listen to the path that is in alignment.

• 2:18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the people that you're attracted to and the people you're not attracted to, the spirits of a place that you feel aligned within the spirits of the place, the kind of, oh, I can't stand being in this, just physically. Trust your intuitions. Trust that feeling of ew. Trust that thing that's hard to even put in words, where I don't like this, this isn't me. Now, it doesn't have to, you can't have everything glorious and wonderful and easy life. There are going to be jobs where you have to do things that you don't like. I don't want to make, give you the wrong impression. But in an overall sense, if you're in a career path where it's like, oh, this doesn't fit me, I'm uncomfortable, I'm frustrated.

• 2:19:06Speaker 00

  I'm telling you to listen to that voice very deeply and take it very seriously because it's talking to you.

• 2:19:13André Duqum?

  You tell the story of Ingrid Bergman.

• 2:19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19:16André Duqum?

  And I'm curious for you to share a little bit about that and what happens when you don't listen to that voice as it turns from a daemon to a demon.

• 2:19:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25André Duqum?

  And yeah, I would love to hear.

• 2:19:29Speaker 00

  Well, she's a remarkable story. A lot of people may not have heard of her. She was a fantastic actress, probably one of the greatest actresses ever. She had this ability to feel so natural, you felt like she wasn't acting. And the story of her life is, her mother dies when she's very young and her father owns a photography shop. And she's drawn to wearing costumes and being photographed. And she comes alive and playing these different parts. Part of it was feeling like she could be another person because she lost her mother and she was sort of a lost person.

• 2:20:06Speaker 00

  She sees a movie and she goes, oh my God, these characters on the screen. This is enchantment, how you can be inside a character that's invented, that's on this like silent films, because it was silent back in those days. She's enchanted. She goes to a play with her father and she screams in intermission, that's what I'm gonna do Papa, I'm gonna become an actress. Because she's so enchanted with the physicality of a stage, like almost a dollhouse and people playing these different roles, right? So she knows early on, this is where she's headed. She goes to acting school and it feels wonderful, she's alive. She gets into her first film, she goes, this is even better because it's related to my father and photography.

• 2:20:50Speaker 00

  Her father dies when she's young and she's always been in love with her father. So I'm gonna do film. She gets into, she becomes like Sweden's greatest actress, even greater than Greta Garbo. She's just so famous because she's beautiful, she's natural. Hollywood comes calling. She goes to Hollywood. They wanna make her over. They wanna make her face more glamorous, they wanna cut her hair, they wanna fix her mouth. They wanna do all these things, they wanna change her name. She says, no, I'm none of that, I'm going back to Sweden. You either take me as I am, or I'm not gonna be here. In other words, she hears this voice that keeps telling her what she wants, where she's going. She's very adamant at it.

• 2:21:32Speaker 00

  She gets into the Hollywood mill and she becomes very, she becomes the most successful actress in the Hollywood system. She's adored, she has a perfect marriage, everyone thinks she's wonderful. But she's incredibly uncomfortable because she's playing this role of this saintly woman. She doesn't feel that. Her marriage is unhappy, she's having affairs. And they're typecasting her and it just feels wrong. She leaves Hollywood, she falls in love with this Italian director, Rossellini. She has an affair with him, he's married, she's married. She's this disgraceful figure. Now she went from being a saint to being this whore that is like banned, people won't look at her films anymore.

• 2:22:15Speaker 00

  But through Rossellini, she discovers that she wants a different kind of filmmaking than it was like when she was a child, that she can explore these parts that are incredibly natural, that are lifelike. And she goes in a completely new direction and it opens up a new chapter in her life. But the point is, this power inside of her was so strong that whenever she took a wrong turn, the voice would say, get the hell out. She was gonna tell David O. Selznick, the great producer, I'm not gonna be in Hollywood. If you wanna make me over, screw it, I'm going back to Sweden. For an actress, that was an act of incredible strength because actresses were like pawns.

• 2:22:59Speaker 00

  She listened to it and she rebelled when people tried to make her into something she wasn't. And it made her an incredibly fulfilled career with all different chapters in her life because she was constantly attuned to that voice inside of her.

• 2:23:16André Duqum?

  Now, that voice inside of us has different flavors for us all. I love, I got introduced through Howard, to Howard Gardner's work through you.

• 2:23:25Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, oh, really?

• 2:23:26André Duqum?

  Yeah, and I'm curious, what, if you were to give a bird's eye view of those different forms of intelligence and why it's important?

• 2:23:34Speaker 00

  It's not so much the different forms of intelligence that are important, it's the fact that there are different forms of intelligence. So we think of intelligence as just this kind of intellectual capacity. But what Howard Gardner shows is that there are other forms of intelligence. So there's kinetic intelligence, which has to do with movement and sports and dance. So a great basketball player or ballerina dancer has an intelligence that's not intellectual, but is part of her body and it's intelligence just as good as Hegel or Nietzsche or any philosopher, right? It's form of intelligence.

• 2:24:16Speaker 00

  Music is a form of intelligence and music is all about patterns, right? Patterns of notes. And it's related to math. And certain brains are attracted to those kinds of patterns and sounds for themselves. And that's what like a Mozart was like or a John Coltrane. There are words like it was for me. There's the social element, like you love being around people, you're very good with people and you want, it's almost like, it could be a great career path for you. There's engineering, there's making things, that's knowing the shapes of things and having mechanical intelligence, something I realized at a very young age that I was terrible at, right?

• 2:24:59Speaker 00

  So the main thing is, each person has a kind of a grain to their brain that draws them to this particular form of intelligence. Now, you can have a combination of them, like a Leonardo da Vinci or something. There's also visual intelligence, I left that out. Yes, but generally, there is one frame that fits you and that is you. And that if you, if you know that, that this is your form of intelligence, you will make the right choices in life. So parents will often think, my kid is into dance and sports. I want them to get into math, I want them to be able to go to college and go become a doctor.

• 2:25:45Speaker 00

  This is just a frivolous thing, dance and sports. And so they deviate their child from that path. The child hears their parents. They love, they go through medical school. It doesn't feel good, they're not, doesn't feel comfortable. They know that they were attracted to physical things. And if they don't return to that, they're gonna be a miserable person for their whole life. And so often your parents and your teachers deviate you from what you are naturally gifted at. You may not be gifted at math at all, and yet they force you to learn math and you hate it and it turns you off from learning in general. So if you attune yourself to what that is, for me, it was words, what would it have been for you in that, those frames?

• 2:26:30André Duqum?

  The pattern and music one is, was something I can track back, is like always kind of, I always loved math and music from an early age.

• 2:26:41André Duqum?

  I would say probably that one.

• 2:26:46André Duqum?

  Cause yeah, kinesthetic, linguistic, the musical, mathematical one, what else is there? The sociological one or people one?

• 2:26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and visual.

• 2:26:59André Duqum?

  Visual.

• 2:27:00Speaker 00

  I don't know if that was also related to the mechanical one, I can't remember.

• 2:27:04André Duqum?

  Yeah, probably that one. Maybe, maybe the people one a little bit, I don't know.

• 2:27:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:27:10André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:10Speaker 00

  So the main idea is that intelligence is not just intellectual, it's not just words and being able to describe, analyze things and critique things. Being, being good at physical things is just as valuable as being good at intellectual things and we, and we should acknowledge that in our culture.

• 2:27:32André Duqum?

  Yeah. You give this context of how the daemon is ruthless and will punish you for straying.

• 2:27:39André Duqum?

  And you describe a kind of person who reaches their daemon but subtracts the love from it. And it becomes service to self and all that. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit of, of that and maybe any examples come to life where somebody can become incredibly developed following their daemon, but it turns against them.

• 2:28:02Speaker 00

  Well, the, the part of Eros injecting the daemon into you seemed very interesting to me and very telling. And it's that, because the Greeks were, were not so prudish as we are, they could see the sexual component in intelligence, as sexual energy permeated everything.

• 2:28:24André Duqum?

  Eros, yeah.

• 2:28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so Eros is the god of love. And so the idea that you have this special spirit inside of you is infused with that drop of love. And so it means that there's, there's a kind of excitement that is a kind of love of what you're doing and a love. And with that love comes this sort of compassion and empathy that is natural with, with the love emotion, right? This kind of attraction to things, but also this, this empathy. And people who hear that voice but subtract the love, they become very powerful, they become extremely good at something, but they have no, there's no love attached to it, there's

• 2:29:10Speaker 00

  no kind of energy that's beyond just getting power and success. I mean, a classic example would be a Joseph Stalin, for instance, who, I studied very deeply because I'm kind of intrigued by these kind of demonic figures. He was actually a very interesting child who was interested in poetry and literature, but he also had a very troubled childhood. And he was mistreated. And so his energy became, I have to get power, I have to get power over people. And that became the dominant force in his life. And he became so good at it because he was such an observer of humanity and seeing people's weaknesses, that he knew how to exploit people to a very high degree.

• 2:29:55Speaker 00

  He became brilliant at that psychological game, but there was absolutely no love, no compassion, no empathy involved.

• 2:30:04Speaker 00

  If you've ever encountered a narcissist, and in my book on human nature, I have a whole chapter on narcissism because it fascinates me because we've all had to deal with them and I've had to deal with them, right? They're like these weird creatures. And if you look at narcissists, they give the impression of listening to you. They give the impression that they're interested in you, right? Which is strange because you think, well, that's not a narcissistic quality. But they're looking, they're interested in how they can use you. You become an object for them, an extension of their own willpower. And so they're listening to you without any life. And I tell people, look at their eyes as they're listening to you. Their eyes will be kind of dead.

• 2:30:48Speaker 00

  They're not registering your story as something subjective that they can get inside. They're seeing you as this animal that they could torture or use, this object that they can play with. It's in their eyes, their eyes are dead. So these narcissists can be very powerful. They're very good at observing people, but it's subtracted with all that love energy, the arrows. And so they become truly demonic and they get power and they're successful. And Elon Musk is a raging narcissist and we know that. And if you read the books about him, it's very clear. He's someone who's gained all this power and success. He's very good at marketing and at inventing things.

• 2:31:33Speaker 00

  But there's absolutely no love, there's no compassion, there's no empathy. And it's a deadness, it's a complete deadness to it. That's the demonic.

• 2:31:43André Duqum?

  This, as you likely intended, flows into the aesthetic sublime. You say that if our environment becomes too predictable, our senses atrophy and with them, our thinking and creativity.

• 2:32:01André Duqum?

  And you talk about how art has become a part of that predictability. What's it costing us to swap out deep art for whatever the algorithm serves up?

• 2:32:13Speaker 00

  Well, the title of that chapter is Disorder the Senses. And so the idea is that when your senses are alive, when you're connected to things, when you're actually like they're awakened, you become creative and the world looks a lot differently. And I say that if you suddenly were dropped into an island by yourself and your survival now was very precarious, your senses would suddenly spark to life because you're a human being. You'd be aware of everything, you'd be hearing sounds. You'd be figuring out where you could get food.

• 2:32:55Speaker 00

  You'd become inventive and creative because your senses. So your senses play a huge role in your intelligence and your imagination. When your senses are closed, when you're not paying attention, when you're not listening and seeing things, your mind and your thoughts become circular and framed, okay? So the role of culture is to, of sublime art, I'm not saying all art, is to kind of shake up your senses so that you can see things in different ways and get you outside of that kind of circle that you're confined in. And so when our culture is so algorithmic,

• 2:33:39Speaker 00

  when we are so kind of mesmerized by it and it's kind of standardizes our experience, our senses kind of go flat. It's like sparkling water that's lost all its sparkle. It's completely flat, right? And so when our senses go flat, our thoughts go flat. We think it's the other way around. We think thoughts, we're either intelligent or not. But our thoughts depend on our senses, how we experience the world and how it relates to our imagination. And so the danger is, is that when you become trapped in the kind of algorithmic culture, it creates this kind of familiarity and comfort

• 2:34:23Speaker 00

  that for you feels good because it's like a drug that keeps you asleep. Everything is familiar. It follows the conventional patterns. Yeah, it's filled with weird imagery and films, et cetera, but it's still extremely conventional. It has the same kind of storylines that have evolved that are entertainment, quote unquote. And it's putting you to sleep, right? So if you watch something or encountered something from a different culture, from a different time period, you're suddenly encountering a different way of thinking, a different way of telling a story, a different structure. So the imagery might be all exciting and fantastic and Marvel

• 2:35:07Speaker 00

  and all these other things, but the structure is always the same. It's conventional, it's cliche. When you see things with a different structure, it shakes you up and it puts you in a different frame of mind. It opens your senses, it opens your imagination. And I give examples in the book of artists who do that. A lot of them are, I'm afraid, are from different eras. But there are contemporary artists who do that. And I mentioned James Terrell, an amazing, amazing visual artist, American visual artist who creates land art, who puts you in these spaces where you become aware of the sky as simply sky, as simply a phenomenon, without that word, sky,

• 2:35:52Speaker 00

  and the cosmos and the universe and how small you are. And his land art is absolutely mesmerizing and is fantastic. It is utterly sublime. And you don't, once you experience one of his land arts and you can find them in different parts of the world, there's one that will be opening in Arizona that is not opening, it's supposedly fantastic. Once you see the sky through how he's given it to you, you will never look at it again the same way. So I have examples of other artists who break up the structure and make your senses experience something differently, which then has that effect on your mind and on your imagination.

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• 2:37:36André Duqum?

  You made a playlist, didn't you?

• 2:37:38Speaker 00

  I did. Did you listen to any of it?

• 2:37:41André Duqum?

  I didn't because I don't think it was, I didn't see it in the PDF, but it's in here.

• 2:37:46Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, yeah.

• 2:37:49André Duqum?

  So how did you select the music?

• 2:37:51Speaker 00

  Well, the playlist is, so part of the problem with my book, I told you, is I couldn't take a walk, I couldn't hike. So music played a very important part in keeping me excited.

• 2:38:06André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Speaker 00

  And so when I was writing The Cosmic Sublime, I listened to cosmic music. Alice Coltrane, the wife of John Coltrane, did an album on cosmic, universal consciousness, based on things that John Coltrane was doing. Charles Ives wrote a symphony called The Cosmic Symphony, which is really, really weird. I listened to things like, to kind of reproduce the sounds of outer space. Pagan chapter, I listened to recreations of ancient Greek music, which put me in the mood. So the playlist has things from the different chapters. But for the chapter on the aesthetic sublime,

• 2:38:49Speaker 00

  I tell the story of one of my favorite composers, and it's an acquired taste, called Alexander Skriabin, who was a great Russian mystic. He had a mystic connection to music. He wanted to return to the Eleusinian mysteries. He wanted to create a kind of music that would explode your consciousness and make you aware, like Aldous Huxley, of the world at large. His last symphony, which he died before he could create, was called The Mysterium, which would take place in India and would be an immersive experience with the roof opening and incense and lights and colors. He was a synesthetiak, so he was trying to create synesthetic art.

• 2:39:31Speaker 00

  So a lot of the music is from Skriabin. I also have music from other modern composers who are trying to kind of mess with your sense of, because music has become very formulaic, right? It has a pattern that we're not even aware of, which is a certain kind of sense of rhythm and then dissonance that's resolved into consonants constantly. So if you listen to music, there'll be moments that seem a little discordant and then they're resolved. And that sense of resolution keeps you excited, keeps you listening to the music. What I'm having here is music that doesn't do that, that disturbs your sense of flow,

• 2:40:13Speaker 00

  that creates a different feeling because music is very emotional, right? That disturbs that kind of familiarity that you have got and creates a much different mood. Because Skriabin, the whole point of his music was to create ecstasy. He wanted to say, how can I create ecstasy in music? And so that was his whole goal. And so the playlist is music. I also include things like Bach because he was a sublime composer who tried to mess with your mind. He tried to create voices and patterns that were like, I can't even explain the like, moving from right to left counterpoint that's very intense, very complex, like math,

• 2:40:56Speaker 00

  and that has a feeling of infinity, like a pattern that could go on forever. It's very sublime. So artists that kind of mess with how you normally relate to music and how you want these familiar patterns are what I've used in that playlist.

• 2:41:14André Duqum?

  Amazing. We'll link it down below if that's okay with you.

• 2:41:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:41:17André Duqum?

  Yeah, great. Okay, so how would you introduce the next one?

• 2:41:22Speaker 00

  Well, we're talking about a lot of things that are sublime about the world, about animals, the cosmos, about falling in love with other person. But in this chapter, the dynamical sublime, I'm trying to say what is sublime about the human animal in general. And I talk about how we evolved in perhaps the most chaotic climatic moment in the history of planet Earth. The ice age that began about 800,000 years ago. We weren't Homo sapiens yet, but it's, we were formed in that period. And all of the forests that we grew up, that we emerged from, where we were in trees

• 2:42:07Speaker 00

  and we were protected, disappeared and it became open grassland because as the temperatures cooled, there was much less rainfall. Okay? So, everything changed on planet Earth. And suddenly, we found ourselves in these open grasslands, these exposed bipedal creatures, rather weak. And there were leopards everywhere and there were very dangerous animals. And we were extremely exposed. And we had to adapt. And that pressure of that violent environment we were now in made us very creative. We had to become social. We had to form very tight knit bands that could communicate with one another, that could hunt large game.

• 2:42:49Speaker 00

  To hunt large game was a very gutsy proposal because it was very dangerous. You had to have a band of 12 hunters, whatever, all communicating. You had to track the animal. You'd be very patient and you had to kill it. And then, and then you had all this food in these pelts, et cetera. And so, the pressures of this environment made us incredibly inventive and creative, right? And soon, our population expanded and we had to move to all different parts of planet Earth because it was getting too crowded in our areas for food sources. We expanded into Asia and throughout Europe and all these different climates that were much colder. We adapted.

• 2:43:32Speaker 00

  We found different ways of hunting other animals. We started creating tools so we could hunt on a high level. Okay? And in that crucifix of 800, 750,000 years, whatever number you want to put on it, a huge percentage of mammals went extinct because they could not adapt because it was so dangerous and so unfamiliar. We emerged as Homo sapiens, right? In that period, maybe 80,000 years ago. I don't know who we exactly date the origin of Homo sapiens. But we emerged out of that period. So, who we are as an animal is a creature that is incredibly adaptive, right?

• 2:44:17Speaker 00

  And that is incredibly persistent, even violent to an extent where we don't accept a particular set of circumstances. We try to mold them to our will. We're very willful. We're very persistent and we get to what we want. And that power is what intensified our intelligence. It's what skyrocketed the evolving of our brain, this ability to solve all of these different problems. So, that's who we are. This adaptive, very creative, inventive animal that depends on pressure, adversity, challenges, obstacles, and the presence of death. Okay?

• 2:45:01Speaker 00

  Now, you go, you fast forward to the year 2026. And I try and say, we're part of this immense social experiment to change human nature, to change the human animal. Everything is about speed, ease, convenience, and comfort, right? We don't want to have any adversity in our life. We don't have any suffering. We don't see the value of have any kind of pain. If you have the slightest psychological pain, here's a drug to treat you. If you have any ailments, here's a drug to treat you. We don't want to see anybody dying, so we march them off into hospitals.

• 2:45:43Speaker 00

  We don't want to see our animals being killed, so we have factory farms. We, we want to have an app or something that will solve everything for us. If we want to have transcendent experiences, here's ketamine. You can have it in instantly. You don't have to meditate for 20 years. You can have this, you can have that experience right now at a drop of a drug, right? So, and then, of course, here comes AI. You don't have to study anything. You don't have to learn how to write. Let it write for you. Okay? So, we're creating a new kind of human being that is not who we were. Okay? All right? Maybe it'll succeed. I don't know where it will go, but back of my mind, it will go someplace dangerous

• 2:46:27Speaker 00

  and dark. That if we have too much ease and convenience, our minds kind of rot, right? We don't have to think very deeply about anything. So, why think very deeply about anything? We don't have to study anything very deeply. So, why study anything every deeply? We don't have to learn how to write. We don't have to go through the seven years of writing a book. You know, Claude could write us a book in, in, in a couple of months. Okay? So, all that speed and convenience, it's also wilting our, our willpower, our ability to persist and to push past moments of tedium. What are we going to become? We need, we need to be incredibly inventive.

• 2:47:11Speaker 00

  We're facing the extinction of our species from, from climate change. We have to become extremely inventive. We have to create new cultural forms. We have to constantly reinvent ourselves. That's what the human animal is. But if we no longer have that kind of intelligence, that kind of patience, that kind of adaptability, that resilience, how are we going to function? And so, the dynamical sublime is returning to that animal that we used to be. And what it means is suffering, pain, adversity, challenge is what you need. You need to go towards it. You need to embrace it. You need to feel like the suffering and the pain in your life is teaching you something.

• 2:47:55Speaker 00

  It's teaching you patience. It's teaching you resilience. It's making you have a little bit of toughness in life to deal with the hardships. It's making you learn things and not go for all this ease. And so, that is the dynamical sublime. It's returning to who we used to be and not, it's almost like you have to learn how to resist our, your own culture, right? You have to learn to, to say, these are things that are bad for me. You think that junk food is bad for you and it is, but the culture is also rotting you out, not, not your nutrition, not your body, but your mind.

• 2:48:35Speaker 00

  You have to resist it and you have to say, challenges and difficulty and doing things against the grain and being, and embracing obstacles is the way to become more human again.

• 2:48:52André Duqum?

  Manny, I think we all can relate to the subtle but pervasive feeling of anxiety that comes alongside with just having all of your conveniences at your doorstep. And that when we don't seek out discomfort, it will find us. You know, when we seek out discomfort, comfort kind of comes to us because it's the way we evolved to be. And then, when we seek out perpetual comfort, discomfort becomes the way in which we live internally, how, how we feel. And so, you speak about this time in our generation of being individuals who are untested and soft, you know? And what are some practical examples of way to invite that challenge back in to the

• 2:49:36André Duqum?

  human animal in today's day and age?

• 2:49:40Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's a simple philosophy that you have to adopt. It's a philosophy I've talked about in my other books. It's called amor fati, which means love of fate. So, life involves death and nobody wants to die. We all want to cling to life, but it's, it's reality that we all have to face, right? And so, instead of avoiding death, instead of avoiding the thought of death, and we get to that in the next chapter, you embrace the thought and you move towards it and you incorporate it into your life. The, the idea is that pain and discomfort and inconvenience is something that you want,

• 2:50:24Speaker 00

  that you want to bring into your life, that you do not try to avoid, right? And so, that is the main thing. And so, other things are learning the value of slowness. Okay? So, you want everything fast and easy. I'm telling you.

• 2:50:45Speaker 00

  Take up, read a novel. Your entertainment has to be so quick and easy. You have to get Netflix and get that new movie that's gonna kind of entertain you. Turn off Netflix, get rid of the subscription, and read an 800-page novel, War and Peace, or whatever it is. Damn it, you can't go fast with that. You have to go slow. You have to read page by page. You have to think about it. You have to return back, go, who was that character? Your mind is developing slowly. Pick up a musical instrument. Instead of rushing for your music on Spotify, start playing the piano. That will teach you to slow down. That'll teach you patience.

• 2:51:30Speaker 00

  That'll teach you humility. You suck at it in the beginning.

• 2:51:33André Duqum?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:51:34Speaker 00

  But after six months, you don't suck so much. After a year, you're actually playing something that's kind of fun. Take up chess, right? You can't go fast with chess. You can't suddenly speed up your moves and have AI show you what to do. It's difficult. You're gonna suffer for a little while, but it'll be fun.

• 2:51:51André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:52Speaker 00

  Take cooking. Take a meal that's gonna take three hours to prepare. In Indian cooking, somebody will spend like an entire day cooking one dish, all these ingredients. If you have one of those Indian dishes that are cooked like that slowly, with all these different spices, it's an experience. Do something like that. Slow the fuck down and try and get some in, tedium into your life in a constructive way. That's one thing I would tell you to do.

• 2:52:24André Duqum?

  Those are all great. And definitely piano and chess for me are endlessly humbling and a great way to slow down.

• 2:52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw your beautiful chess board.

• 2:52:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. I love it. And also, I personally feel the call for like a bigger physical challenge. So my friends and I are talking about maybe doing Akankawa, which I heard you write about.

• 2:52:49Speaker 00

  Oh, oh.

• 2:52:49André Duqum?

  Which would be a big commitment.

• 2:52:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 2:52:53André Duqum?

  Like a month backpacking.

• 2:52:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a form of therapy for a patient who was very neurotic and very unhappy. The psychiatrist said, screw all this talking. We're not getting anywhere. I'm gonna take you up Mount Ankenawa, the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere. And it was a cosmic experience that changed his life. Yeah, go ahead and do it.

• 2:53:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Speaker 00

  I wish I could join you, but I can't.

• 2:53:17André Duqum?

  Aw, man. Is there a way that you're actively seeking that challenge out? Or do you feel like because of the stroke, do you meet that more? How do you navigate that?

• 2:53:25Speaker 00

  Well, it's so frustrating for me. But I have a, I have a recumbent bike. Cause I used to mountain bike and I can't be on a bike, so I have no balance. So you know what a recumbent bike looks like?

• 2:53:37André Duqum?

  I don't.

• 2:53:39Speaker 00

  It's like three wheels. It's a tricycle. And you sit and you pedal like this, right? But I got the lightest weight one I could get. And I go up into these hills, into these mountains. And I'm slow as hell. People are walking past me, you know? But it's beautiful and it's an incredible challenge. And I go up these hills and other cyclists are going, damn it, how the hell did you ever get up here? Because they can't believe that cycling like this while you're sitting in a chair. So that's the challenge I do. And I'm looking for like new hills to climb.

• 2:54:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16Speaker 00

  So that's the most I can do. It's been eight years and I wish I could hike. I'm so jealous.

• 2:54:25André Duqum?

  It's humbling. I can only imagine the challenges that it's brought into your life and also the opportunities for gratitude, which otherwise we just completely forget about. You write that, living in this culture, you know, where all forms of resistance are essentially removed, that we can all imagine that we are amazing and worthy of adulation, when in fact, we are simply avoided and untested.

• 2:54:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, if you do like do what I say, like you took up chess, you would be humbled and you would realize, God, I am not amazing. I am not fantastic. I'm actually pretty dumb. I don't know, I can't, you know, there are people so much smarter than I am. When you actually take up something that's a challenge, that tests you, you realize who you are. And by overcoming that obstacle, by spending four years becoming a better chess player, now you go, well, actually, I am pretty good, cause I earned it. I didn't say I was amazing. It's not like somebody on Instagram said I was amazing. I feel it inside.

• 2:55:38Speaker 00

  I overcame my own weaknesses, you know? I told you, I didn't think I'd ever get to the end of this book. When I got to the end, I was like, I can be very hard on myself, but I could go, God, never forget that you actually made it through, that you actually accomplished this. Cause it was the hardest thing I've ever tried to pull off in my life.

• 2:55:59André Duqum?

  Wow. Wow, that's a big statement. Yeah, I could only imagine just the writing of it. I mean, the research, let alone, you know, 300 books and it's impressive. And it's so inspiring. There's something I truly feel when someone's devoted their life and their energy for years or decades to pour themselves and all of themselves into a project that with, you know, if you didn't, this would just not exist. This, this collection of ideas and stories and exercises that really, I'm excited for people, for it to get in the hands of people. Because I think it's really gonna really re-evoke that, that sense of sublime,

• 2:56:42André Duqum?

  which to me is one of the most meaningful things that you could do in life, is to re-enchant the experience and all that's, that we're capable of. So, yeah.

• 2:56:51Speaker 00

  That really moves me. Thank you.

• 2:56:53André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:54Speaker 00

  Appreciate it. Cause sometimes I, I don't know how the book's gonna be received. So that makes me feel a lot better.

• 2:57:00André Duqum?

  Oh, man, it's incredible. Yeah, and it's, it's really sweet to see the body of work that you've built up until the point. And then the challenge that you had to surmount to then come to writing this.

• 2:57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:57:13André Duqum?

  And it's, it's got so many of the things I love all coming together.

• 2:57:18Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 2:57:20André Duqum?

  And, yeah, man, you, you know, you say to kind of wrap a bow on that suffering is our spiritual rite of passage.

• 2:57:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:57:30André Duqum?

  And you wrote that, you know, with your left hand paralyzed.

• 2:57:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:57:34André Duqum?

  Do you believe that these are actual rites of passages meant for us somehow? Or just the meaning we give to self, the meaning we give to suffering to help lighten the load?

• 2:57:47Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it's a supreme human ability. If you can transmute the pains of life, the separations, the deaths that you have to witness, into something higher, into a kind of acceptance, into kind of an idea that, that this is what it means to be born and that I'm part of a process, part of a cycle. That is, to me, the ultimate sublime power in the universe, that you can take the worst that life gives you, the fact that your life is going to end, and you transmute it into a feeling of, of something sublime and powerful and beautiful and meaningful

• 2:58:31Speaker 00

  is like the ultimate power that, that we can have. And, you know, suffering, you know, like losing someone close to you is probably in some ways the highest form of suffering. Because when you die, you die. And then you're gone, right? And it's painful, but then it's over. But the people you've left behind have this big gaping hole inside themselves. And it can be a source of very deep depression, particularly if it's like your parent or your loved one, or even a pet. I've had Brutus, my cat who lived to 19, who saw me through five books.

• 2:59:15Speaker 00

  When he died, I was so distraught. I loved that animal so much. Okay? But if you, and this is going into the next chapter a bit, but if you can take that and kind of accept it and accept that this is all a part of life and everything dies and everybody around you will die. And if it's the spark of like compassion and empathy for, for the fate of all living things, then that worst experience of living through the death of someone can translate into something very meaningful and very powerful. And to me, in my way of thinking, that is kind of the ultimate form of sublime.

• 2:59:58André Duqum?

  It's counterintuitive, right? We think would largely associate the sublime with the pleasant experiences that would evoke that. And you're saying potentially the most, the strongest form of evoking the sublime is something that is the most pain, the suffering.

• 3:00:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:00:17Speaker 00

  Because it's calling up something in you that's very primal and very human. And it's awakening you. So we've been talking about how we're sleepwalking through life, how we're not aware of anything.

• 3:00:33Speaker 00

  Suffering and pain makes you very... Now, it can crush you. So don't get me wrong. It's not always a sublime experience. Suffering and pain can completely destroy your willpower and make you a crippled individual for your whole life. But I'm trying to talk to you of a different way of approaching suffering and pain so it doesn't overwhelm you. So what happens when people are avoidant? When they don't want... When everything has to be convenient and easy?

• 3:01:01Speaker 00

  When that moment arrives where they have to face death, or their spouse dies, or their parent dies, they have no internal resources to handle it. And it does crush them, and it does overwhelm them. But if you train yourself to use these moments as ways of acceptance, of seeing that this is just a part of life, this is... Everything is impermanent, nothing lasts. Then it's not... It becomes into something else. You are connecting... Look, stars in the sky die. They're born and they die, you know? That's entropy. It's a part of the universe, okay? So death is like connecting you to everything in the universe. I know I'm getting into the other chapter here.

• 3:01:43André Duqum?

  We're here. We're here. Death has arrived in the conversation.

• 3:01:49Speaker 00

  Well, the last chapter is... So if there were doors that you're looking through, death is the last door. And you're peering through it. And you're looking at the darkness on the other side and the heaviness on the other side, that it's the opposite of life. And when you peer through that door, it's not just death is a thought. I can... Yeah, I'm gonna die one day. No. When you peer through that door, you feel that heaviness. You feel it invading your body. You feel that death is inside of you. It's no longer this thought that will occur in 30, 40, 10 years, or whatever. It's inside of you now. It's something physical and visceral.

• 3:02:34Speaker 00

  And you look at it, and you feel the silence, the emptiness, the darkness, that is eternal. And it has a very powerful effect on your physiology and neurology, like it did on me. I couldn't look at the world afterwards, right? I had to go through that... Practically go through that door and be pulled back. You don't have to go through that door and be pulled back. You can voyage up to there, and you can encounter death on a much deeper level than just a thought.

• 3:03:04Speaker 00

  And I describe in the book the experiences of people who've had near-death experiences. And one gentleman... My favorite story, and there is John Ren Lewis, who was traveling in Thailand and was poisoned with drugs to put him to sleep so he could be robbed. And he nearly died. And he woke up with this feeling of... Suddenly, the world looked like he was a newborn baby. Everything was beautiful. Even this ugly, disgusting, putrid hospital room that he was in. The smells were magnificent, right? What is this? What happened to me? He realizes he had a near-death experience. And for the rest of his life, and that sensation keeps coming back. And he says,

• 3:03:49Speaker 00

  "I'm gonna try and teach humanity how to have this kind of relationship to death, because I think it will save us in the end." He devoted the last 20 years of his life to that. He never quite got to the end where he could write about it and describe how to do it, but he leaves enough traces that converting our fear of death into a visceral experience of it could transform all of us. Because people who are aggressive and manipulative and angry, a lot of it comes from their repression of death. It comes from a deep, deep, deep wells of anxiety, right? And their way of getting away from death is to hurt other people, is to inflict pain,

• 3:04:33Speaker 00

  to make other people die so that they feel more distant from death. We make humanity accept our mortality and go closer to it. It would transform the world. I'm not saying it would be paradise or utopia, but it would have a very powerful effect. So I'm trying to... And at the end of the chapter, the end of the book, I have an exercise, because each chapter ends with exercises, which I literally try to have you lie down on the ground and go through your own death. And it's based on my own experience and how I felt. And it's based on all my research, how literally the process of dying feels, and how the brain is dying. And as the brain dies,

• 3:05:17Speaker 00

  all these sensations come to you. A lot of it described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the 11th chapter, about the bardo and the luminous consciousness that you can have at the moment of death. I'm trying to lead you through that. I'm not saying it's the ultimate exercise. It's my attempt. But I'm trying to take you so that you can have some of that experience while you're alive. And it could have a very powerful effect on you.

• 3:05:46André Duqum?

  You mentioned earlier how much we are shielded from the reality of death. We turn it into cartoons. We are dogs and family members that, you know, die behind closed doors. And the...

• 3:06:01André Duqum?

  So let's just keep diving deeper here into the afterlife, NDEs, death itself. I...

• 3:06:11André Duqum?

  I found the stories you recounted, and then also your own personal near-death experience, illuminating, because...

• 3:06:23André Duqum?

  One of the biggest questions I feel like people have on spiritual quests and what religions are built upon is what happens after we die. And of course, I'm not expecting you to deliver the answer, final message here. But it is interesting that we have reports of people that have literally been dead and come back, and they share things. And so what did you find in researching the NDEs that was particularly evocative?

• 3:06:49Speaker 00

  Well, okay. So we think of consciousness as located in the brain, right? That it's an organ, it's physical, it's material, and that it's there in the brain, right? So the stories I have, and there are many more that I didn't include, are people whose brains are not functioning. There's one famous story, Pamela Lowry Reynolds, who is put into a state of close to death as possible so that somebody can surgically operate on her brain, right? So everything is shut down. She can't hear, she can't see anything. And she's literally as close to a state of death as you could put somebody in.

• 3:07:34Speaker 00

  And yet, in her death, in her coma, in this unconsciousness, she sees and experiences everything going on in the room as they're operating on her. And when she later relates it to the doctors, they're like, "There's no way you could know what music we were playing. There's no way you could have seen the instruments they were using. There's no way you could have heard the conversations going on in that operating room. You are unconscious. So what is it?" You know? Some people have tried to rationally explain that story because it's one of the most conundrums that rationalists and materialists struggle to try and explain away. I'm not saying that her descriptions of God

• 3:08:17Speaker 00

  and seeing dead people is real. I don't know, okay? Because I didn't have that experience. But what I can say is it presents a puzzle. If our consciousness is in our brains, and yet the brain is dead, and she is experiencing things, what is she experiencing? It opens up the question, at least, that consciousness isn't necessarily locked inside of our brain. That maybe consciousness is something that exists outside, that is something that we are picking up, that pervades the universe. It's called panpsychism. And there are famous scientists, neuroscientists, who believe in it, who feel it's very serious. And even physicists,

• 3:09:02Speaker 00

  that there's a consciousness in the universe, and that we are just simply... It's transmitting to us, and we're picking up these signals. And so when the brain is dead, there's still those signals going on. And the person who is not yet dead is still picking them up. It makes us question our whole relationship to consciousness itself. And I have a story of a blind woman with a near-death experience. And she suddenly sees things, right? And she can describe what she sees, and it's pretty accurate, right? And yet, the rest of her life, she has no vision. She's born blind, she's completely blind. But for five minutes, or whatever long it lasted, she was seeing things.

• 3:09:46Speaker 00

  How do you explain that? It's vision without a brain. It's like the mind can see things without the brain functioning. I'm just saying it opens up questions, and it makes us rethink our rigid ideas of materialism, right? And I have earlier in the book a story of a famous professor at UCLA who tried to solve the problem of obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD. He created a form of therapy that trained patients to analyze their own fears and do activities that would calm them down.

• 3:10:30Speaker 00

  He took brain scans before and after his therapy. And the brain scans after showed changes in their brain. And he decided, "Your thoughts can literally alter your brain and the wiring of your brain. So the invisible, the immaterial, your thoughts, can affect the material." These are kind of things that should make us question our very rigid ideas of what the world is that we live in.

• 3:11:00André Duqum?

  Yeah, I've, again, been fortunate to speak to both sides of materialist reductionists and then also panpsychist idealists. And it's, it's so fascinating that we just have access to all these alternative, over 400 different theories of consciousness.

• 3:11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:11:19André Duqum?

  And certainly, these NDE cases provide some sort of insight, because there are themes that you can extract from them and similarities of things you experience when people are clinically dead for minutes on end. We had one lady, Anita Morjani, on the podcast.

• 3:11:38Speaker 00

  Oh, she's amazing.

• 3:11:39André Duqum?

  She's amazing, yeah.

• 3:11:40Speaker 00

  Amazing story, that the image of the warehouse.

• 3:11:43André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:44Speaker 00

  Is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read on this. I wanted to include her in it, but for some reason I didn't.

• 3:11:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:50Speaker 00

  But yeah.

• 3:11:51André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, it's so, and that, they had that analogy of like the flashlight versus the warehouse of consciousness.

• 3:11:57Speaker 00

  Explain that to you, explain that if you can, because it's a great.

• 3:12:00André Duqum?

  Yeah, well, it maps on exactly with what you were saying earlier, right? And Huxley's reduction valve, that like, normal waking consciousness is like a flashlight of awareness we're pointing at from point A to point B. In the deeper meditative states, you can diffuse that awareness, then dissolve the sense of individuality within your awareness, but you can keep widening that scope of context. In her case, in her, in her case where she was dead and brought back to life, that she like, went to this warehouse analogy where it wasn't a flashlight, it wasn't just this room, but a much vaster, where there's no boundaries of her consciousness and had experiences with people that had passed and.

• 3:12:42Speaker 00

  She cured herself of cancer.

• 3:12:45André Duqum?

  Mm-hmm, came back, okay.

• 3:12:46Speaker 00

  So it's like, the flashlight is our normal consciousness, where we just see little pinpoints. She said, it's like, all the lights are turned on, you see everything in the warehouse, you see all, everything going on.

• 3:12:58André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:58Speaker 00

  Right? And she had that for brief moments in her NDE. What does that mean? It means we're normally just walking around with our flashlights.

• 3:13:06André Duqum?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, it, I, I appreciate the humility, epistemically at least, when, because it's very, for me, it's very exciting to then jump to, okay, so consciousness is fundamental, and then you're like, okay, what does that really mean? But nonetheless, we need to have the conversation of, we don't know what we don't know.

• 3:13:26Speaker 00

  We don't know.

• 3:13:27André Duqum?

  And we don't have a viable explanation for why consciousness would be emergent from matter.

• 3:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:13:33André Duqum?

  So, let's keep exploring.

• 3:13:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, we can't explain how life emerged from, from inorganic material. We have no explanation for how the universe, we're surrounded by mysteries.

• 3:13:44André Duqum?

  So you give the example of walking through your own visualization of your own death. How do you think that the contemplation of your own mortality changes how you live? You know, I think that, we've shared a lot of words throughout this whole podcast. One of the most, I just find that death always brings this immediacy to life, you know? And you shared it as well in your stroke, where it's like, whoa, like, the sensory experience becomes way more vivid. And so, talk to me about the, the relationship there between death and life, and how important it is for us to reconnect with that reality.

• 3:14:20Speaker 00

  Well, it, it has several aspects, so, you know, mountain climbers get addicted to the sensation where they're climbing up a mountain, and they can look back and there's abyss behind them, they could die at any moment, they can fall, and it's real. And that sense of being on the edge between life and death intensifies their experience of life to a very high degree. You don't have to be a mountain climber, you are continually walking on that edge. Your body is very fragile, at any moment, things could stop functioning, you can die tomorrow. So visualize yourself walking on that edge.

• 3:15:03Speaker 00

  Literally, here's a cliff, you're walking on the edge, you're alive, and there is death, right? And that sense of walking along a cliff, ah, wow, it kind of wakes you up, it makes every moment of life that much more intense. So you can be aware of the fragility of your body, and it doesn't have to make you paranoid and nervous and anxious, and it can actually make you, every moment heightened and that much more intense. And then, when I had my stroke, I was like, suddenly very helpless and vulnerable and dependent, and I'm a very independent person.

• 3:15:43Speaker 00

  And in the aftermath, one effect on me was an incredible amount of compassion for other people who feel defenseless, who feel weak and vulnerable, who may not have enough money to sustain them during the day, who have other ailments that are making them, to, to all kinds of people who are feeling weak and dependent. And so, the sense of your own mortality should make you awaken to the fact that everybody is going through the same thing. And maybe you're disconnected from them, maybe it's a parent who you, who kind of irritates you and you've grown alienated from.

• 3:16:24Speaker 00

  But if you sit there and you focus on their mortality and their anxiety about it, and how it's warping them and how they have these fears, it can humanize them to you to the degree that maybe it can melt some of your defensiveness and some of the barriers between you. So a closeness to death can create, create a kind of, now, it can have the opposite effect, there are sadists like that, but it should have the effect of being aware of the mortality of everyone, and kind of opening up a deep and wide compassion for all creatures that die, including animals, right?

• 3:17:05Speaker 00

  So, try to imagine, I think it's 80 billion Homo sapiens that have lived and have died, right? They went through the same thing that you're going through now, and they met death, and it was painful. And all of them went through that, and it should give you a sense of a deep, deep connection to all the ancestors behind us, to all the drama that disappeared with them, to all the pain and suffering that people have had. And so, it's not just you, it's not just about you and your miniscule little problems and worries and anxieties, it's universal, everybody is going through it. It's a way to break up your own ego, because you think that, oh, only I have pain, only

• 3:17:49Speaker 00

  I am suffering, oh, my life is so terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, people are going through much worse things, and everybody is facing death, so it, it kind of gives you a sense of something much larger than your own pain.

• 3:18:02André Duqum?

  Hmm. I think what you just shared in the book at large has this amazing ability to shake you awake, you know, like, realize you're alive and what a gift it is. You ended with this Japanese poet.

• 3:18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:18:16André Duqum?

  Why?

• 3:18:17Speaker 00

  Well, I, I am deeply imputed in Japanese culture as much as a Western can, because I love particularly Zen Buddhism, but everything about Japanese culture that intrigues me. And a major part of, of Zen and Buddhism is the impermanence of everything that exists, to the point where you don't even see that there are any forms, everything is in the process of dissolving, so there's nothing actually real out there, only impermanence is real. And so, it's the story of a Japanese poet, who wrote mostly haiku, named Issa Kobayashi

• 3:18:56Speaker 00

  Issa, lived at the turn of the 19th century, and his life was just endless pain and suffering, his mother dying, his father remarrying, his stepmother torturing him, not letting him read, not letting him write, being shipped off to Ido, Tokyo, Tokyo back then, alone, and, and trying to make it through life, and being homeless and hungry, and then wandering around Japan as a pilgrim, begging for food and writing his poetry. And then, his father died, and then he marries, a series of, all of his children die after a few months, one daughter that he loves deeply, survives to two years, and then she

• 3:19:36Speaker 00

  dies, then his wife gives childbirth and dies in childbirth, and then the baby dies, on and on and on and on, the kind of experiences of rejection from parents, of alone, of being homeless, of being hungry, that would cripple a human being. And yet, he has this joyful, Buddhistic belief in the impermanence of life is the grace of life, and I'm going to embrace it in every form. And so, he falls in love with all the marginalized creatures of the world, the snails, the birds that nobody throws pebbles at, that nobody loves like pigeons, prostitutes and criminals and homeless people.

• 3:20:19Speaker 00

  He loves them more because they know about impermanence. And being close to impermanence, being close to every, he grew up in an area of Japan that was alpine, that was snow. For half the year, there was no life, no sounds, no birds, no insects, just snow and silence. And then, spring comes, and suddenly, there's green everywhere, and there's butterflies, and there's insects, and there's birds flying around. It was like, that became the model of his life. There's always this process of death covering so much of, of people's experience. And so, he embraced the impermanence of life.

• 3:20:59Speaker 00

  And even after his daughter died, which was the worst of all, he felt the pain of losing someone that close, but he still came back to that moment of when you embrace the impermanence, life has this beauty and this intensity and this stillness to it, that's absolutely essential. And he was a Buddhist, so was connected to his religious beliefs, but it's the sense that when somebody dies, it's not about you, it's not about your pain, your grief, your loneliness, it's about how it's a universal experience. As I said, stars are born and stars die. So, it's a way of saying that you approach death as this universal phenomena that you

• 3:21:43Speaker 00

  accept, and that opens you up to all of life and to all of creation.

• 3:21:53André Duqum?

  You've said that this is potentially your last big book.

• 3:21:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:21:58André Duqum?

  Is that right?

• 3:22:00Speaker 00

  I don't think I can do another book like that because then I'm heading into my late 60s. I don't have my energy. I don't have the powers I used to have. I had a stroke. I don't, it might be my swan song, but I will write shorter books and I'm looking at other projects that I will do. I'm not finished writing.

• 3:22:19André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:20Speaker 00

  I don't think my body can withstand another project like this.

• 3:22:25André Duqum?

  It's, I know I've shared, but I really do think it's so special what you've become a conduit for and all of the, and everything that you've shared. If somebody at the end of this conversation was to leave this conversation, as they will, walk back into the rest of their life, and you wanted them to carry one thing with them, and you had 60 seconds to share, what would that be?

• 3:22:49Speaker 00

  Well, it's to make you feel like you're being alive and being conscious is not something that you just go around and don't think about. I want you to go and be deeply present with the experience of the planet Earth that you are on, and how strange and weird and marvelous it is to see life on this planet, that there are probably no other, maybe there may not be any other planet in the universe that has life. You were gifted this thing by this insane chain of circumstances. It's one of a kind.

• 3:23:29Speaker 00

  It's one experience that you have. You only live once, to coin a phrase. So just think about it deeply and awaken yourself. The chapter, the title of chapter two, which to me is, sums everything up, is awaken to the strangeness of being alive. It is strange to be alive. It is not something you just take for granted. It's very strange to be conscious. It's very strange to be wandering around with other species and other humans. Think about that and internalize that and don't be asleep, but awaken to this very weird reality of what you were born into. That's about the best I could do.

• 3:24:14André Duqum?

  Five, 10 out of 10.

• 3:24:15Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 3:24:17André Duqum?

  Robert, thank you so much for sharing your heart with us today.

• 3:24:21Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:24:22André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's been an absolute joy.

• 3:24:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:24:25André Duqum?

  I really, really appreciate your time, your energy, and the care and love and devotion you put into The Law of Sublime, which is now available to order and we'll leave.

• 3:24:33Speaker 00

  Pre-ordered. It'll be out on November 10.

• 3:24:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, by the time this release.

• 3:24:37Speaker 00

  Okay, sorry.

• 3:24:38André Duqum?

  It should be out, or just about. And amazing work, man. Thank you. So is there anything else in your heart that you want to share before we wrap up?

• 3:24:46Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I think I've covered a lot and I really appreciate that.

• 3:24:51André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:52Speaker 00

  I think that's pretty much it.

• 3:24:54André Duqum?

  Amazing. Thank you, Robert.

• 3:24:56Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

• 3:24:58André Duqum?

  Yeah, likewise. All right, everyone. Until next time, be well.