Bernardo Kastrup- Why Materialism Is Baloney- Ep. 88

I've been following Bernardo Kastrup for a few years. He's a brilliant man with PhDs in both computer science and philosophy. His books "Why Materialism Is Baloney" and "More Than Allegory" have literally changed my life by giving me a deeper understanding of the origins of Everything.

Bernardo Kastrup's work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. This idea might seem for us born during this age of materialism. But, the idea is as old as mankind. It's what every religious tradition has always taught. What Bernardo brings is a logical way of coming to these same revelations.

Bernardo has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others.

You can find Bernardo at:

www.bernardokastrup.com

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Transcript

Brian Smith : 0:55

Hey everybody, it's Brian. I'm back with another episode of grief to growth and today I've got with me one of my heroes, Dr. Bernardo kastrup. have to admit I'm a little bit nervous about interviewing Dr. cashier because I've been reading his books and watching him on YouTube for quite a while and finally got him here with me. I wanted to introduce you guys to an idea called idealism. And we'll get into that what that is in a minute. But I want to first start with a quote by Dr. Kastrup. He says, Let there be no ambiguity here. It is a direct and unavoidable implication of my worldview, that your consciousness, your subjective experience of being here right now. We'll survive bodily death. So I want to read his bio, and then we'll get started. Dr. Carson's work has been leading the Modern Renaissance and metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essential and mental. He has a PhD in philosophy, ontology philosophy of mind, and another PhD in computer engineering reconfigurable computing artificial intelligence. As a scientist Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, and the Philips research laboratories, where the Casimir effect of quantum field theory was discovered. formulated in detail in many academic papers and books. His ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the Institute of Art and ideas, the blog of the American Philosophical system. ideation and Big Think among others. His most recent book is the idea of the world, a multidisciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information for freely downloadable papers, videos, etc. Please visit his website Bernardo Kastrup calm that's Bernardo BR and AR do Castro cacher k str. up.com. And with that, I want to welcome Dr. Kastrup. To grief to growth. Thanks for having me. burnings a pleasure. I have to tell you right up front, I just said I'm nervous about interviewing you. I've been following your work for a while. But I will tell you I don't know a lot about philosophy I'd never read or I don't think I've ever read a philosophy book until I read your book. Why material? materialism is baloney. And frankly, I look at philosophers and say they just tie themselves up in knots. You know, there's a guy that says, I think, therefore I am and I'm like, why know that I am. I don't need philosophy for that. And I hear Daniel Dennett, say think come to the conclusion that consciousness is as a as a fallacy. It's just a artificial construct. So, when I read your books, it really they really grabbed me you know this idea of material or of idealism. So could you explain to me what is idealism?

Bernardo Kastrup : 4:07

idealism is a metaphysics like materialism, is it a hypothesis or a statement about the nature of reality about what reality essentially is? Which is to say more than to say how reality behaves? The latter is what science does science studies the behavior of nature if you do this and that, how will nature reply by manifesting a certain behavior that that's what an experiment is, philosophy goes a step further, once we know how nature behaves, what inferences what best guesses Can we make about what nature essentially is? Today, we hardly give it a second thought, because the idea of metaphysical materialism the notion that reality is essentially material in order in other words, something outside and independent of conditions. It's so ingrained in the culture that we take it for granted. And very people, very few people know how precarious this idea is how malformed and untenable it is. So there is an open playing field and I think idealism is the best hypothesis for what reality is it basically says that reality is mental. It's not in your mind alone. It's not in my mind alone. It is out there beyond our personal mind. But it is mental at the transpersonal level. Yeah, and I think that's, it's interesting, also, because it's it I was, I was reading your bio this morning. It says, you're leading the Modern Renaissance of idealism. And I think some people times we think materialism has always been the paradigm, we've always thought that everything is just material. And that's not true, is it? No, that's not true at all, no, for most of human history. That was not the paradigm, arguably, not even the Greek atomists who were credited with having created materialism. Arguably even They were not metaphysical materialists. materialism has become a mainstream metaphysical view, only from say the latter parts of the 19th century onwards. So it's a phenomenon of the last 150 years. Some started thinking about it more seriously back in the 17th century, but it wasn't mainstream for a long time. So it's for the past century and a half that it's been mainstream. So you have PhDs in both computer science and philosophy which one came first? Computer Science came 19 years First, the earlier Okay, and then we'll get your idea what got you interested in philosophy? I you know, I by temperament, I was always a philosopher. Since I was a kid. I always like to think about the big questions, you know, What is life? Who are we what are we doing here? Where are we going to go? What is this all about? What's the point of it all? I did Computer Engineering first. Because it was also a passion like philosophy, but it was a passion that gave me a better chance of securing some financial stability in my life. So that was my first PhD in philosophy, I started writing books and doing philosophy for many years. I do it for several years now, as a sort of a my second life I used to be in the corporate world until until very recently now I'm a full time philosopher. And I did philosophy as the extra in my life. And at some point that I realized that I had published so many academic papers, so many so much technical material, that I could just put it together and get to PhDs in philosophy, so I got one. Yeah. So was there a shift for you when you when you just started to discover that idealism was was the way to go where rather than materialism? Yeah, that was a big thing. Because then I think like you Most of us, when I was in academia studying doing research, I wasn't materialist, by default, an unthinking materialists. I was materialist because everybody around me was a materialist. And I didn't give it a second thought I was busy with other things that have a scientific nature. In other words, I was busy investigating how nature behaves. But at some point, I was doing some research on artificial intelligence. And then it's very easy to go from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness in your own mind. Because you build a computer that behaves intelligently and you start wondering, Well, what would it take now to make it conscious, not only intelligent, but to have it data processing the component by experience just like the data processing in my brain is accompanied by experience. And I started posing these questions to myself and tying myself up in knots because it just doesn't compute this idea of creating consciousness out of something known unconscious, it's any any possible breach to make. And then I read a paper by philosopher David Chalmers years ago, in which he articulated the key problem that I was struggling with which today is called the hard problem of consciousness, which basically states that there is nothing about a material arrangement, in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience. There is nothing about the position and momentum of the atoms in my brain, in terms of which I could deduce what it is like for me to have a bellyache to fall in love or or taste a strawberry is an arbitrary bridge. And then I woke up to the idea that I was making a wrong but implicit assumption I was assuming that consciousness is the derivative phenomenon, and matter is the primary one. So you start from there and you get consciousness, but I never examined that assumption. Once they started examined it, bam, it was very quickly arrived at Conclusion and it was a wrong assumption, it was the wrong logical step to take and it created all the problems that subsequently became obvious. So reverse that. And I realized that it makes a lot more sense, more sense to think of mind as the primary. And everything that is created is created within mind by mind, not my personal mind alone, but mind as a substrate, mind as a framework as a scaffolding, the essence of reality. And therefore you don't need to create consciousness you can modify consciousness by, you know, interfering with the brain and doing all that you can change the configuration of consciousness, it can change the patterns of excitation of consciousness, but all reality unfolds as patterns of excitation of a transpersonal form of consciousness, and everything started falling place. And since then, I'm trying to communicate that and I'm not trying to convince people but I'm inviting people to have a second look at this knee jerk assumption that we make in our culture that matter comes first and consciousness next, invite people to consider the possibility that it may be the other way around. And that's all empirical observations can actually be understood as supporting this this distance that mind is first. Yeah, it's a big shift, I guess. Because I think a lot of times when people think of and we can interchange terms mind consciousness, we think Well, okay, where did consciousness come from, but I have my consciousness and, and all we know is our own consciousness. All we can know as our own personal experiences. That's all we have. We know what's going on around us. So I think we assumed Well, there must have been some matter first, and then the matter became conscious and people don't even realize that that's an assumption in itself. And it's consciousness you're talking about it's not a personal consciousness like my consciousness but it's a it's a greater we might call it God might call it source, the force, you know, something of that nature to kind of get our minds out of just like it's this little thing that's in my head. Yeah, surely a mine in your personal consciousness have come into being at a certain point when we are born. And surely our personal consciousness consciousness will cease to be personal at some point because at some point in the future, we will not be personal agents anymore. So I'm not claiming that our personal consciousness has existed forever. I'm not a solid system. I'm not saying that my reality is your personal dream. But our personal consciousness exists in a broader context in a in a within a broader mind, and it forms and dissolve in that broader mind. That's the claim. Yeah, well, and in the book you go into like, there's our personal consciousness and there's our personal unconsciousness or you called obviously obfuscated conscious, which we'll get into with why you choose to use that term, but then there's also the greatest consciousness that we're all a part of. So it's for people. It's just I'm just trying to help people make this shift from consciousness just being what's going on inside my head to consciousness being something that's, that's universal. And that matter, as we perceive, it rises out of that, kind of like when we dream at night that we create these characters in our dream, we create everything in our dream, through our own consciousness. Yeah, and I talk about consciousness as a type of existence. For instance, I know that you are conscious, but I don't have access to your personal consciousness. Yet I grant that it exists. I believe that it exists. In doing that I grant that there is consciousness beyond my own personal consciousness. We all do that. There is nothing counterintuitive about it. There is consciousness out there in the minds of other people, other animals and whatever. The claim I'm making is that even things that are known living or even the inanimate universe, as our Hole, eat two exists in a form of transpersonal consciousness. So you have to grant that, that there is this transpersonal consciousness out there. But that's not much more difficult than to grant that another person is conscious. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, interesting when we talk about consciousness or life being almost like a dream, which you use a lot of allegories, which you kind of have to write because to get to this stuff we really can't talk about through direct experiences. As you mentioned, in the book, we can only talk about the objects that are being experienced as opposed to the experiencer. So when we say that life is like a dream, it doesn't mean like it's like one of our dreams, where it's arbitrary and ephemeral. It just kind of you know, it's all crazy. We grant that there are constants in the universe, for example, that are but they're a part of this overall mind. Is that correct? Yes, I grant that there is a world out there and we are immersed in that world. We inhabited. And that world would continue to exist, whether we are here looking at it or not, I grant that. The only claim is that common shared world is mental in essence, and it presents itself to us in the form of perception, the things we see, hear, taste, which are themselves experiences, perception is experiential in nature. So the claim is, the contents of your perception are they appearance, the image, the representation of something that is really out there beyond us. But that's something that is really out there is consciousness is those are experiential states that present themselves to us as matter in much the same way. As your experiential states. Your conscious in their life presents itself to me as a matter the matter of your body, your brain, its brain activity, my view that's just the extrinsic appearance, the image of inner experiential states, they just present themselves to me on my screen of perception in the form of matter. And then I extend this claim, and I say the universe, the inanimate universe as a whole, to present itself to us as the matter that we call the inanimate universe. But from its own first person perspective, it is experiential in nature. Yeah, and I think that these are really important concepts. And we and I hear, I've heard some of this coming out of science, like, we live in a simulation, or we live in a projection or something and you talk about, you have a really great analogy, I think of the cylinder projection, right? That if you look, if you take a cylinder, and you look at it from the side and make a projection on the wall, it looks like a square like a rectangle. But if you look at it from the end, it's a circle. And so when we're trying to describe this ultimate reality that that lies beyond what we can perceive. We can perceive it in different in different ways, but we're kind of like a, like a derivative of it. I guess. Polling is something that is by definition, almost by definition, ineffable, because our language has evolved for very practical purposes, you know, to the point where the food is to tell where danger lies, which anymore can jump on you and kill you. So the language has evolved for very pragmatic reasons. It didn't evolve to talk about what is transcendent, to our sense perception. So from that point of view, you're bound to use metaphors. And sometimes people think that if two metaphors contradict one another, then one of them has necessarily to be false. Maybe both, but at least one of them seems to contradict one another. But that's not necessarily the case. Because metaphors are not literal. It's just like the shadow projection of a cylinder. Both are correct. Somebody will see the shadow of a cylinder and we'll say it's a circle. Somebody else will say it's a rectangle. Oh, they contradict one another. So one is incorrect. No, both are correct, because at a higher level the reconcile but that time leverages transcendence so it's very difficult to talk about, which leads to all kinds of confusion. But maybe we don't even need to go to this transcendent space to to adopt idealism as the most plausible and fashionable view. Because, look, there is no question that mind is capable to generate an entire world on the screen of perception. It happens every night when we dream. I have had the privilege a few times in my life to have lucid dreams. And I always the first thing I do is, Oh, I know I'm dreaming now. Can I tell from the resolution, the vividness of what I'm seeing and perceiving around me that it's a dream. And then if the attention, no, it's crisp, the resolution The colors are vivid, it's very autonomous, it seems to have a life of its own. And at the same time, I know that I'm dreaming because I remember having gone to bed. So because of my continuity in the continuity of my memory. I know that the times are me, but I can't tell it based on my perceptions in the dream alone, I know that it is my mind that's generating all this stuff that I perceive around me in the dream. I know that it's a part of my mind that I am dissociated from. So it looks like me inhabiting it and I am not it. During the dream, you think you are the dream avatar. But in fact, you are the one mind that is doing the Avatar and doing everything else in the dream as well. So the we know that minds can do this and the only jump you have to make is Can it be doing this right now? Are we avatars of a dream of a dreaming mind right now? And if so, how can we explain that we are all seemingly having the same dream or at least mutually consistent dreams? Because you you will also report seeing cars and trees and stars and whatnot. And that's consistent with my experiences. So there seems to be a collective collective level of mind that we are dissociated from during the dream. In other words during life, which is generating this imagery for all of us. Yet even that is not very difficult to imagine because when you're dreaming and you're lucid in your dream, you know that it is a dissociated part of your mind that is generating the rest of the dream. And yet it feels so external to your dreaming avatar. So it is not countering to it of idealism, actually, nature is giving us floods of suggestion hints and evidence that this is what's going on. But you're stubborn. We get all tied up in conceptual abstractions, and then we lose touch with what is really right, right there under our noses.

Brian Smith : 21:27

Yeah, you touched on that. And I think that was another brilliant thing I loved about the book, you talked about how basically, the universe nature is all a metaphor. It's all showing us something that that can't be really expressed in words. It's all metaphorical. And you mentioned one of my things Favorite philosophers actually do know swedenborg one of my favorite theologians philosophy room, a column, and he talks about correspondences. And in the latter part of more than that are in latter part of material why materialism is baloney. You talk about how, you know, really, if we wake up and look at the world, it's always delivering messages towards just like the symbols on the dream.

Bernardo Kastrup : 22:04

Absolutely. There is a famous quote, well, I'm not sure it's a famous quote, but it is my favorite quote of an Indian Sage called and these Agata Maharaj, who lived in the 20th century even

Unknown Speaker : 22:20

you he said

Bernardo Kastrup : 22:23

it to see the world is to see God. There is no seeing God apart from the world. To know God beyond the world, is to be God. So, basically, what he's saying is that the world around us that we perceive is how a human Universal Mind presents itself to us. It's the appearance of that universal mind from our perspective from across the dissociative boundary. And that's it all you have to know about that Universal Mind. It presents itself to you in the metaphorical way that we call the physical world. And to know more about it beyond its representation, its appearance, its extrinsic image, you have to be it. And it is possible to be it I think, because one day, the dissociative process that maintains our individuality will end we call it death. And maybe we merge back into that and then we get to know it from a first person perspective, as opposed to a third person perspective. So what many traditions are hinting at not only nisargadatta but swedenborg that you talked about? Schopenhauer, one of my favorite philosopher is just wrote a book about him. He talks about view in representation. So he says the world as it is, as it is in itself, as from a first person perspective, is a wheel. In other words, volitional experiential states. That's why that's why the universe is moving, going somewhere doing something. But that will present itself to us from a second or third person perspective. In the form we call physicality for Schopenhauer that's representation. The physical is a representation of endogenous in their experiential states, volitional states that just present themselves to us in the form that we call the material world. From that perspective, matter is a metaphor for whatever is going on from the first person perspective, in just the same way that our patterns of brain activity are a metaphor for how we feel from within.

Brian Smith : 24:34

Yeah, you know, I want to get into some of the things I was I was listening to your book earlier this week, so I don't normally read it. I was listening cuz I wanted to get through it before our interview. You talked about it's there's just so much stuff that explains that just not explainable in other ways. And you talk about consciousness and which I kind of touched on before, and what people call the subconscious, but you call obfuscated kind of consciousness, because nothing is really outside of our conscious, and I just had to stop the recording. And just, I had like a five minute lecture with myself because I was like, I don't want to forget this. So explain what it is that what's the difference between what's in our consciousness and what's the absolute greater part of our consciousness.

Bernardo Kastrup : 25:12

So, the word consciousness is used in many different ways, even by philosophers themselves, and there is a reigning confusion about what any one person means, by that word, at any one instance. To be very explicit and unambiguous. When I use the word consciousness, I mean what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. In other words, if there is something that is like to be you, anything doesn't matter what then you are calling A conscious state is a state in which there is something that is like to be. If there is nothing, it's like to be in a state, then it's non conscious. If there is nothing, it's like to be a computer, then the computer is not conscious. If there is nothing, it's like to be a dead person. And that person is not conscious, which of course immediately raises the question. Is that the case? I don't think it is. But this is what we mean by phenomenal consciousness. If there is experienced any, it doesn't matter how simple you don't need to have higher level mental functions. None of that you don't need to self reflect the need to be self aware. Now, if there is an experience as simple as white and black, warm or cold, that's already phenomenal consciousness and that's what I mean by consciousness. But in even in colloquial use in our senior science of consciousness, some people use the word to mean something a lot more restricted. What they mean by It is what should be called meta consciousness. Now, consciousness is something you have when you have an experience. Meta consciousness is something you have when you both have the experience and know that you have the experience. So, meta consciousness is conscious meta cognition, you not only have an experience you, you represent that experience to yourself. Let me try to illustrate it even better. We say I have pain, or I have hunger. We when we say that that's an expression of meta consciousness. If you were not met the conscious but only conscious what you would say is, I am pain. I am hunger, because there is no distinction between the experience and the subject of the experience to say that you have pain you have to pull yourself out of the experience and contemplate your own experience at a meta level, that is meta consciousness. Now, what I would say is that we need meta consciousness even to report to ourselves that we are conscious. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to report that to ourselves. So you would have experiences but we wouldn't know that we have experiences. Yeah. Because of that when we study consciousness, or when we introspect into our own consciousness, all we can report is the contents of meta consciousness. The stuff that you can self reflect about, yeah, the stuff that escapes the reach of meta conscious introspection may still be experienced, but you will not be able to report it even to yourself. Let me give examples again. Some people have been without being aware of their pain. You may even ask them, are you paying attention No. But then at some point later on, they realize that actually, they were in paying all that. That's the moment when they become a method conscious of me. Before they were having the pain and they know it in hindsight. Another another thing that everybody can relate to. Were you conscious of your breathing? 10 seconds ago? Were you experiencing the inflation of your of your of your chest, the movement of your diaphragm, the flow of air through your nostrils? I would say you were conscious of it. But you only became meta conscious of it the moment I brought your attention to it.

Brian Smith : 29:22

Yeah, right.

Bernardo Kastrup : 29:24

So my point is, what many of us call consciousness is actually only meta consciousness. It's just a tiny little bit of consciousness. But because we call it consciousness, we think that it's the hole. We created words to refer to the rest as subconscious or unconscious even psychologists did that Carl Jung, Freud, they all talk about the unconscious. My point is the unconscious is not unconscious at all. It is conscious. It is just not meta conscious. And we don't see it because we can't report it to ourselves and because we are so enamored, so involved with our own method consciousness, which is a sort of it just evolved with ourselves, with our own pains with our own worries with our own wishes, with our own needs, with the things that we fear and reject. We are so enamored in this narcissistic loop of meta consciousness that it obfuscates everything else if we could just turn down the volume on this meta consciousness, be a little less busy with what we can introspect into and just become receptive. Boy, you would find out so many things that are going on in consciousness, but we can't reports to ourselves. You think Most people would be amazed how much is going on there? Yeah, I

Brian Smith : 30:46

love the some of the analysis you gave in the book you talked about like effect. If you're in your car and you're driving, and you get home, you don't realize how you got there. You're obviously conscious while you were driving or you wouldn't gotten home, but you just weren't aware of it. And you talked about the self reflective thing, which actually amplifies these certain things, which kind of makes everything else stamping out. So we can't perceive it. And you gave a great analogy there of the stars during the day, we can't see the stars. And I started thinking about things. I work a lot with people like who are intuitives, who people who are meetings, for example. And they've done studies on them when they're actually in a trance state, their brain is kind of turned down. And I'm wondering if that's what it is. That's what allows that to come through. That's actually available to all of us, but it's just being obfuscated by everything else is going on in our heads. Yes,

Bernardo Kastrup : 31:32

I think well, there has been neuro imaging studies showing that that's what actually happens with trance mediums their brain activity decreases. Significantly, if you pretend to be a medium, your brain activity will increase. But people who seem to be authentic trance mediums their brain activity reduces I think this has two effects. One is it reduces the obfuscation if you're not so busy with your own narcissistic, you know, thoughts states emotional states, suddenly, more stuff begins to come into focus in your peripheral vision. You see that with the corner of your eyes. It is a metaphor and I'm talking about a mental process. But it is as if the obfuscation in the center of your field of view reduced and suddenly you realize that there is a lot going on in your peripheral vision that suddenly you become receptive to and alert to. The other thing that I think's going on and they may be the same thing. I'm not sure is that I think normal brain activities what a dissociative person says in a universal mind looks like it is the representation the appearance of a dissociative process we are associated alter personalities have a universal mind. And that dissociation looks like what we call living being a body with its ordinary brain activity. I think if you can reduce your brain activity, or at least those parts of patterns of brain function that correspond to this to the dissociative process itself, you reduce the dissociation, the dissociative boundary becomes more porous, permeable.

Brian Smith : 33:16

Yeah. And you sort of go beyond your own individual self and you experience things that are out there all the time, but which you couldn't reach because you are dissociated from them. So, I think both play a role in this. Yeah, I wish I had so much more time with you. But I you know, the thing is, your book also describes because we hear through a lot of religious traditions that we're all one and you hear people that have indies that come back and say we're all one people. What does that really mean? through all the metaphors you use in your book in terms of us being consciousness or individual conscious being like a whirlpool in the stream, or ripples on a thing of mercury or the membrane? We're all we're all part of this one thing at a substrate level, but we feel differentiated because of our ego. And because of the self reflection that we're doing, it cuts us off from the experience of the other person. Is that is that a good way of putting it? We'll get back to grief to growth in just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach? If you're grieving or know someone who is grieving his book, grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know, people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers at www grief to growth com www dot g ri f the number two gr o w t

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Bernardo Kastrup : 35:11

Yes, of course this is a conceptual narrative. For most people, even the ones that buy into this conceptual story, which I think is accurate. I think it's a correct conceptual story as conceptual stories go. They still have a very hard time sort of really grokking it really internalizing this oneness. Because even if I say, as I normally do, when you die, your consciousness will go nowhere. It will stay exactly where it is right now. You will not Brian anymore, it will be something a lot broader. And then people still can't help but think Yeah, but but then that's not really me. Because what I am is Brian. Yeah, but I am is this body limited in space time. So when we say that your consciousness will survive and you will still be what you are if people don't really feel it, they understand conceptually because of all the metaphors even buy into it. They give themselves intellectual, intellectual permission to consider this a serious, plausible hypothesis, but they don't feel it in their bones. Right. And, and it's a pity because what I really mean is that it's really you to survive. And in the same way that it's really you that wakes up from the dream. When you wake up from a dream in the morning, you don't mourn the death of your dream avatar. Do you not realize it you realize it was me all along. Didn't know it's during the dream during the dream I thought I was a dream avatar inhabiting a world. Now I woke up now I know that I was doing the whole thing the dream Avatar and the world. Hmm. So your dream avatars toast is dead? He has fast. Yeah, but he's anybody mourning the death of your dream avatar. Of course not. Because you realize it, it was just a trick, an illusion, a dissociative process in your own mind. So that part of your mind is identified with another part of your mind. In other words, the part of your mind playing the dream avatar became alienated, dissociated from the part of your mind generating the rest of the dream. You thought I am the Avatar and the world is something else. But guess what it was you doing both all along? When you wake up, that's playing abuse, and there is no problem when you realize it was really you. You are the one who was the Avatar and you are the one who continues to exist after you woke up. If people could just internalize that it's exactly The same thing that I'm trying to say happens when we die, then it would be more than a conceptual story. But it's very difficult to get this point across, you would have to have a major direct experience of a transpersonal state to realize that hell barn it's really me. Yeah, it's really near what's going on here. It's very, very, very hard to say. It's so close to your core. It's so intimate. The thing that survives it's so close to you. So essential, so, so intimate, that you don't see it. It's under your nose. If you don't see it, you miss it altogether. It's a pity.

Brian Smith : 38:22

Yeah, I think you do such a great job and it helped me because I thought, okay, if my ego goes away, then I go away. I am my ego. And you do you get some really great thought exercises. Like Imagine if you if you didn't have your name, or if you lost a limb, would you still be yourself and you go and if you've lost your memories, you'd still have that perception of yourself. So what I got out of was when we when we die, our egoic structure, as you put it in this metaphor kind of unravels, but the core that's still us is still there. And when that structure unravels, it actually gives us access to or being blocked off from now, that explains me some of the near death experiences people have when they say, well, suddenly I was one with everything, or I knew everything there is to know I hear so many people said, I knew everything there is to know. And that's because all that information that we're all gathering is all out there. And I love what you said, we take it with us, you know, so it's like, we lose this when we go.

Bernardo Kastrup : 40:03

In the same way that you don't lose the memory of the dream when you wake up. Well, sometimes you think you lost it, but actually, it's there because you may remember it days or even years afterwards. The experiential contents of our individual life. I don't think they stay because where are they going to go? I mean, what's going on in his mind, one mind, so where are they going to go? They have no where to go. It's just the the narrative of self that changes during your dream. In your dream avatar, you have a narrative of self and implicit one, you identify with a part of your dream and not with another. When you wake up you realize that how it was just you well along your narrative of self will change but your core subjectivity, what Schopenhauer called the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature that is one and the same everywhere at all times. It goes nowhere because it is that within which everything happens, including birth and death, so where is it going to go? Yeah,

Brian Smith : 41:08

I said I was I was I just actually finished the book up for I read it before but I was reading again, you know, getting ready for the interview to just finish it up this morning. And I just, that helped me like so much to understand that you know, not only am I not going to lose anything when I when I my body dies, but I'll actually Gain, because all these memories, all these feelings, everything we have, it's still there. We just don't have access to it from the limited perspective we have. And so that that what we call death actually can open that up. And that's been like a second kind of reinforced by people who have had near death experiences.

Bernardo Kastrup : 41:41

Absolutely. I mean, the the metaphor of a life review, I think that's a metaphor because I think it's much more than than review. It's probably, you're living it again, or you're leaving it in the only way that you have ever lived it. It's just presents itself to you in a different from a different angle. Maybe. If we could remember everything we've ever experienced in our lives, we would be absolutely and completely overwhelmed by richness. So much, so that would become completely dysfunctional, where we just lie in in an ecstasy of emotions of every kind. So we didn't evolve to experience that we have evolved to let things go. So you remain functional. But I would say that once we are dead, and these evolved mechanisms are no longer playing a function, because they evolved within dream the dream is over so so art mechanisms I think we would be overwhelmed by the richness of our of our lives.

Unknown Speaker : 42:50

Yeah, that's what

Brian Smith : 42:52

Yeah, I think that's that's right. There are people that can actually remember almost everything and they usually go pretty much insane. People that if you give them a time and date, they can remember exactly what was happening that time of date. And it's, it seems to be more of a curse than than it is a blessing. So there's seems to be something about this, coming into the separateness, this this individualization, that causes this not only forgetfulness of our own personal past, but forgetfulness of where we came from.

Bernardo Kastrup : 43:20

I think life is what dissociation in the universe is Wind looks like. So it's not caused by dissociation. It's not it's just what dissociation looks like. And in the same way that flames are what combustion looks like, in the same way that lightning is what atmospheric electric discharge looks like. Atmospheric electric discharge doesn't cause lightning combustion doesn't cause flames. flames are what combustion looks like lightning is what discharge looks like. Life is what this association in Universal Mind looks like. It's just the appearance of it. It's the image of the process. So by definition, if this is correct, by definition, yes, life is intimately tied with a sort of a separation, a forgetting a dissociation from the transpersonal contents of consciousness. So it's a experiences that go not only beyond your present moment in life, they span your whole life, but they span the whole life of every living being that ever existed. Plus the life of transpersonal states that have never been part of a living being that ought to be very overwhelming, and not conducive to the continuance of life. I think if you were in that state continuously, you wouldn't even try to survive. And survival would become such an insignificant pixel in the whole image of universal experience, that you would not try to survive. Therefore, life didn't didn't evolve to give you access to those states. Because if it did, you would die and you wouldn't pass on your genes. Right? So that's the nature of the game. We've evolved in order to forget, because that preserves our ability to function.

Brian Smith : 45:18

Yeah, it's such a success. I read your book and you know, people talk about the purpose of life, you know, Why are we here? And, and you know, what I kind of got out of it is, you know, the experience, not only because we think of ourselves as I'm a person, I'm separate from you. I'm separate from everyone else. But this really this idea that we're all connected to this one, you know, great mind and all having these experiences that contribute to the hall as a notional. I found in a couple of books, there's a woman named Natalie suchman, who had a near death experience and her experience, she actually goes and she kind of reports back to this, this team of beings, it's really interested in her experience. And I'm reading a book right now called the team. That's kind of the same thing. So we're all here. So I got the same theme from from your philosophy that we're all experiencing life from individual points of view, but we're all sharing it at the same time.

Bernardo Kastrup : 46:19

You're hinting on the notion of a to lose a purpose to this all right. Yes. I am not sure there is a premeditated purpose, but I do think there is a natural purpose. And if I look at, based on my own philosophy, if I look at what actually then should be happening is that birth is the beginning of the dissociative process sort of isolates a part of mine from the rest of mine, much like it happens during your dreams, part of you gets isolated from the part of mine that conjures up the rest of the dream. But because of evolution, the evolution of life, these dissociated segments of mind has evolved. Some mental abilities that may be were not present there from the beginning, for instance, meta consciousness, our ability to meta cognize our own experiential states to be self aware to identify ourselves as subjects of experience. In other words, we aren't our experiences we are dead Which has the experiences, that's a major leap. My cats are their experiences. They're not looking in the mirror and thinking or feeling kind of bored. They know they know they are in the flow, instinctual flow of experience. And I think that's the original state of the universe. But because living beings is neuro dissociated fragments of the Universal Mind, have had to evolve within a planetary ecosystem. And to survive, they have had to develop new cognitive skills, new cognitive abilities, that has led to meta consciousness because for survival, it's extremely useful. If you can recognize yourself as a separate agent that has a vested interest in survival. Now you can premeditate you can plan you can coordinate activities, all those things that that have made us the dominant species on this planet. So all very nice, but there is something you get along with that. interval evolved for it, but you've got along with it, which is your ability to think about mind, your ability to not only be mind but to ponder mentation to form their mind to ask the big questions. I suspect these was the implicit tailors the implicit goal in all this game. And so we accumulate metacognitive insights and meta consciousness insights during life, but we are dissociated so those insights remain with us. But you know, when we die, by definition, death is the end of the dissociation, we sort of released that into a broader field. And you could think of no better metaphor, I don't want to go there. But I don't think any of our insights are ever lost. They are just released into a broader context, when we pass by the nature of the thing.

Brian Smith : 49:20

Now, this is interesting. I found this in your book. So I want to ask the question. So we see We say at a death the death of the body we are our egoic structure unravels at least somewhat, but we still maintain our individual identity. But you said that birth is the beginning of us is that is so it does do we begin at birth or do we maybe began before birth?

Bernardo Kastrup : 49:44

I don't think what we really are has ever begun is that within which things begin and end. But, you know, one hypothesis is that there is only a universal mind that dissociates when it dissociates life happens, and when life ends, it's the end of that particular dissociative process and then it goes back to the Universal Mind. So, there are only two levels either we are individual living beings or we are oceanic mind. it is conceivable that there are levels in between that there is a hierarchy of dissociation so when you die, you don't become the oceanic mind in one go again, you fall back into brother left But also still individual differentiated or individuated. At some level, maybe not a single person, but still differentiated from the rest. It is possible. I don't know whether we have strong enough empirical reasons to think that that is the case. I know very serious people who are convinced that there are enough empirical reasons to to categorically state that this is the case that you don't cease to exist as an individual agent, even though you're no longer an individual person. I'm open minded about that. I think the jury is still out. But if you ask me, do I find it important? Not at all. I don't think it's any more important than whether you should mourn the death of your dream avatar when you wake up. Because if it is the case, that there is a hierarchy of this of dissociation, then there is a hierarchy to To dream, there is a hierarchy to the illusion but what is really, really, really going on is there is only one subject experiencing, experiencing itself through multiple points of view. And it is this distinct point of view with that, that arise from dissociation that leads to the illusion of individual agency separateness differentiation, but it is ultimately an illusion. So, for me, it's not very important, although I know that for many, many people, it is important to to think that some form of indeed individuation of differentiation, persist. And it's very possible that that's the case.

Brian Smith : 52:09

Yeah, I think there's, um, I'm not a philosopher, of course, but I think there's evidence for it, you know, from from mediumship. For example, when they tell us they're communicating with an individual consciousness on the other side, and the consciousness is still the same as they were when they were here. From their death experiences, even when people And merged into the one. They're like, but it was still I used to have one is you right?

Bernardo Kastrup : 52:30

So but the one is the AI. Exactly,

Brian Smith : 52:33

yeah. But they still had that individual perspective, I guess. But you know, it's it just got out of friend. She had a near death experience and we were talking about reincarnation. And she said, I'm not sure if there's reincarnation or not. She said, I saw all these other people. But she said, I was so close to them, like the sharing thoughts and everything that I couldn't tell whether they were me or I was them. There you go. There you go. Yeah, there you go.

Bernardo Kastrup : 53:01

What can I add to this? I would just plant another thought in your mind if I may. I'll try to Yeah. Along with Emmanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. I also think that space and time arm is our cognitive scaffoldings. They don't exist out there. They are categories of perception. They are modes by which we know things, we learn things. And we can organize our knowledge we need extension, we need a scaffolding on which we can hang pieces of knowledge. So we can organize them in a way that makes sense. So I think space and time are not objectively out there. I think what's out there is mind outside space time. In space time is something we create as part of the dissociation in order to try and make sense of what's going on. It's our own category of perception, built by nature, but it is illusory. If that is true, and out there, there is no space and time. And there is no sense in talking about what happened before somebody's birth of or where the person is after the person has died. Because this is all time dependent. This is all time language, spatial temporal language. And if it's true that this is just in our cognition and out there, there is no such a thing, then there is no sense in talking about the end or the beginning of anything.

Brian Smith : 54:34

Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. And I think the dream analogy kind of helps with that, because we realize this world to create our dreams, we would never say the space or time in our in our dreams, but we perceive it. Or when we're playing a computer game, you know, our character, the pixels are running across the screen, there's no space or time in a computer game, but the character can move in space and time. So those analogies helped me because that's a really difficult thing. When people say to me, you know, space and time we're just an illusion because I experienced it every day.

Bernardo Kastrup : 55:04

Our our way of thinking our language is our assumed space and time it is impossible to talk coherently, without implicitly assuming space and time. It's built into language. When you talk about the separation between subject and object, that space built into it. When we conjugate a verb in different tenses, past, present and future. I was there I am here, I will be somewhere else. It's built into language, space and time. So it is hopeless to try to reason outside space and time. All we can do is to abstract the possibility that it's not really out there that there is no space and time out there. It's like It's like a record when you play a record it plays in time, but the information is all there at any one point. Yeah, so here we are playing the record because it helps our cognition. But the idea of there not being space and time, it's like the record, everything is out there. But in the now and there's only the now it's like the record all songs on the record at all times. Actually, arguably, this is even one of the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity, the blocked universe hypothesis, because time becomes relative to an observer. You're sort of forced into the idea that everything that has ever been easily will ever be, in fact is, it exists as the block universe and time is just how you traverse that block. It's how you slice that loaf of bread. That's time but the love is there at all times the block universe. I mean, at all times here, I'm talking about time again. Yeah. There. Yeah, the love exists, period. Anything else I see about it is about how we traverse the love. It's already already has a space and time scaffolding built into it. So it's very difficult to talk about it in explicit, literal and accurate ways. But the whole idea of the end of personal identity is associated with this limitation of our cognition, we have to think in terms of space and time. So you have to think in terms of beginning and end I want to suggest is that this may not really reflect what's going on. Whoever was is or will ever be his, his period. Yeah.

Brian Smith : 57:32

Yeah, I think that's a great way of looking at it and putting it. I want to touch on one more point that you brought up in the book that that was really interesting about freewill. And I just watched a series on TV called devs was on Hulu was really, really interesting. These because these guys are like the universe is deterministic period. There's no such thing as freewill, you just you start it it's a chain of cause and effect. And and that's it if we had a big enough powerful computer, we could predict you know, everything we could projected in the forward and in the future and in the past. And you brought up freewill and it's just how you talked about First of all, we can never really experience it, which I never thought about. I never know but I'm making a choice until I've made it but also the freewill is maybe outside of our material universe.

Bernardo Kastrup : 58:19

This is a nuanced subject. When we when we talk about free, we will let you know our intuition. We don't mean by free wheel that our choices are random. Right? our choices are not random. They are determined by our tastes, preferences, predispositions, predilections, you know, things that we are. So our choices are not random, they are free. But by being free, we don't mean that they are random. But they aren't determined either, right? Because otherwise there wouldn't be freewill, right. So, the problem is, there is nothing in between randomness and determination. There is no semantic space in between these two concepts. So what we mean by free wheel are determined choices, but choices that are determined by debt with which we identify, in other words, choices determined by us by that which we consider ourselves to be. The problem is we don't identify To find with patterns of brain activity inside our scope, because that's an abstraction, we don't identify with that. So if somebody tells you that your choices are determined by patterns of brain activity in your skull, it violates your sense of freewill because that's not how you see yourself. What you think of as yourself, are your felt predispositions, your felt preferences and tastes, your felt preferences and tastes, not neurons firing inside your head? I don't think there is a contradiction here because neurons firing without within your head are just what your felt preferences look like from a perspective but they are the image of the process, not the cause of the process. So I think if there is only one Universal Mind by definition there is freewill in the sense that everything that's chosen by the Universal Mind is chosen by itself. There is nothing beyond it. You see I'm not free free to choose if there are outside forces that impose a choice on me. If I cannot choose my favorite job, because there are economic pressures for me to pick that one instead of anything else, then I'm not free to make the choice, because there are external forces that impinge on me and force my hand on making the choice. But at the level of the Universal Mind, there are no external forces. There is only it it's the one thing that's going on, so even to talk about for you, loses its meaning. Because whatever choices the Universal Mind makes, they are determined, they are determined by the Universal Mind by the inherent preferences and predispositions of the Universal Mind, which arise from the fact that the Universal Mind is what it is. It's just what it is. It can't help being something else it is what it is. So he chooses according to what it is, according to how it fused what he prefers. First and so forth. So, yes, it's free but at the same time, it's fully determined. It's determined by what it is. So the whole talk about Free Will I think sort of dissipates into a semi semantic void at that level now the question is this free will exist at our individual level? There is tricky I also don't think that's very important and I'll tell you why. This your dream avatar have free will.

Unknown Speaker : 1:01:54

No, it doesn't

Brian Smith : 1:01:56

seem like oh, we'll write Yes, my well Yeah, it does. Yes.

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:01:59

Yeah. So we your dream avatar was an illusion. How can an illusion have freewill? Right. It's not what's going on. It's an artifact of thoughts. Right. So I think that's exactly what's going on right now. So I don't think we have freewill. But we don't exist to begin with a cognitive hallucination. At the same time, I could say in full confidence. Yes, we have free will. What we really really Are which is not the Bernardo and Brian and somebody else what we really, really are as free will? what we think we are doesn't? It can't it's an illusion. Yeah, that's not even there to begin with. How can it have anything? It's not there?

Brian Smith : 1:02:40

Yeah, that's a really great point. So I one last thing I want to touch on is your book more than allegory? Because for me, you know, I, it was really interesting how you basically said, we have to have allegory, because there are some things we just can't talk about with, with our language limits with the limits of our mind. And for you really redeemed for me a lot of these things that we say are just allegories just, you know, it's just a, it's just a fictional story. And I gotta give you the last part of more than allegory, you could be a fiction writer, it was really, you, you created this, this this new allegory this new, as you call it, a religious allegory that people wouldn't recognize as religious. So if you could just finish by talking about that, I'd appreciate it.

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:03:22

About to the third part of that book,

Brian Smith : 1:03:25

Apart from the book and about the whole idea of allegory,

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:03:27

okay. We are so used to this unexamined assumption that language can point to the ultimate reality literally. And he never stopped to think that there is no reason to believe that the cognitive apparatus of primate evolved the very peripheral planet on a peripheral Solar System probably didn't evolve enough to pin down the literal facts of reality. I mean, we are deluding ourselves. It's like, if a mouse would look up to you and say, I think I can solve the grand unification theory problems. I mean, you would laugh at that mouse, the mouse just doesn't have what it takes to figure that out. I think we are the mouse in another frame, in other in another. from another perspective, we are the mice and this man. We think that we pinpointed the literal facts of reality. Of course we can't. Language didn't even evolve for this. I think allegories, myths are very important because they admit that they are not pointing at anything literal. They are not telling you look, this really happened. As I'm saying, if you interpret an allegory or a myth like this, you're flattening it. You're making it a pancake instead of the rich, three dimensional thing that it's meant to be. What they do is they point your mind in a certain direction, such that you can pick what to pick up what is really going on with your peripheral vision. You know what I mean? Yes, absolutely. So they guide you to look here, but what they want to show you is not that it's what you can pick up with your peripheral vision, if you're looking more or less in that direction. And I think that's what myths do. They they help us pick The real nature of reality, what is really going on with our peripheral vision. But for that it's important that we keep in mind that we shouldn't take it too literally because to take it literally is to kill it. Yes. And we should keep alert for what's going on in our peripheral vision, when we indulge ourselves in a myth, which I think is something that we would benefit from doing a lot more than we do today. We've lost respect for myths, with with associated myths with fiction. That's not what they are. It's not fiction. It's it's, it's a metaphor. It's a symbol. It is pointing at something that is true and nonfiction, but it's doing so indirectly. Through a what Peter Kingsley would call

Unknown Speaker : 1:06:17

what's the word he used?

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:06:20

A form of incantation Hmm. It's an incantation. And that's the value they have, if we receive them, take them on board, as that incantation that makes make something appear within us, as opposed to pointing our eyes to something that exists out there. They turn your eyes somewhere. But by doing that something appears within you that was not in the words of the myth. It evokes that within you. And we've lost that ability in our society, which is a phenomenal pity.

Brian Smith : 1:06:58

Well, I think most of the problems of our world and all the problems are real can be pinned to the fact that we don't know who we are, that we have this materialist mindset that we think we're meaningless cosmological accidents were random, random configurations of atoms and molecules. We, we were born and we're going to die. So I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing and I appreciate it from a philosophical question. With a scientific perspective doesn't require me to have any faith in anything. I can just look at this and you can read yourself through it. I can only read a little bit at a time because it's so it's so deep. I have to like I have to sit and reflect on it for a while, but just really understand what I've just read. Are there any Is there anybody else is doing what you're doing that preaching the message of real idealism? Oh, certainly.

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:07:48

Okay. Certainly I'm trying to bring them together and okay becomes more visible. But you know, this message is not is nothing new. It has been around for at least what 3500 years. The the original scriptures behind the Vedas were passed on the first time. This is an intuition that has been in the human species since the dawn of our species. When we were connected to the ground of reality, we knew it. We were not metacognitive of it. We didn't know that we knew it. We knew it. And now we got lost in a conceptual story. So now, it has become a discovery. Nothing is being discovered here. Yes, the raw, primordial reality, to which we have always been connected by our umbilical cord, it's the ground from which we arise. So deep within, at the core of our being we all know and have always known it. But there are other people making it explicit. Some of them are quantum physicists, and they use the language of quantum physics. Some of them are analytic philosophers, and they use the language of analytic philosophy and reason logic. Others are philosophers in the continental tradition, and they use completely different language to talk about the same things and you can look at the phenomenologists at the constructivists it's very different language. They're saying the same thing. And then there are the spiritual guys the new advice, the non duality guys. They're saying the same thing, Robert spyera, IBS Shanti. These guys are all saying the same thing with different metaphors, different language, different references that they substantiated differently. So it looks like a call funny, have different messages. But if we can really go past the appearances and really grasp the underlying meaning, man, everybody's saying the same thing. It's it. It's all over the place. If we have the eyes to see,

Brian Smith : 1:09:53

yeah, just just in the last couple of weeks, I was just fumbling around the internet, and I came across something from the Khan Academy. And this guy was explaining Hinduism. And when he starts off with Brahman and Atman, and and Maya, it was like, This is the same thing. Bernardo is saying, it's the exact same thing and it's Hinduism, which is what 5000 years old, I don't even know but

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:10:15

yeah, but you have to you have to have the eyes to to go where the myth wants to take you because you've interpreted literally you just say, oh, Hinduism is a politics. Religion many gods. No, it is not. And they're quite clear about it there is only Brahman there is only one thing going on. And everything else is generated for Brahman within Brahman in a, in a fin tastic strike of cognitive hallucination that that's basically what it's saying, in mythological form in the language of the people of the time, the time when it was written today, we can't read it in that way. Because you see, those myths were written for people who could only understand things symbolically, the idea of a literal truth didn't exist. That's not how the human mind worked. Originally, we sort of invented it the past few centuries, this idea of something literal, isn't is fresh, it's rather new. We naturally think by analogy. In other words, we think symbolically, yes. And these texts were written to be read that way because when they were written, there was no other way to read it. was the only thing the only game in town. Now we created this distinction metaphorical and literal. And it got lost in that. And we think that those were just myths, or just just fictions they weren't.

Brian Smith : 1:11:36

Yeah. And that's a big mistake we make even with the Bible, which compared to those things is relatively modern. But people read the Bible as literal. And if you can step back and take a metaphorical view of the Bible, it's so rich. You talks about God coming into his own creation through Jesus, and how that lines up with all the other religious allegories or myths,

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:11:55

and things like the book of Job that's rich, the book of Job, I mean, that's subject for a lifetime of meditation, if you can read it, in the way it was meant to be read, which is not as God literally torturing for a job, right? for no reason. Right? Just because the devil dared God to do it. No, no, no, there is something much deeper going on there. That speaks to what we are.

Brian Smith : 1:12:25

Yeah. Well, I want to thank you very much for doing this. As I said, it's been a thrill for me to sit down and have a conversation with you. I've learned I learned so much from your books and your lectures and encourage people to go to your website. It's Could you give your website again, please? One word Bernardo kastrup. With a cake kastrup.com. And from there you can go everywhere else on social media, videos, papers, essays, books, everything. Yeah, you're doing fantastic work. So I appreciate everything you're doing. And thank you for your time today.

Bernardo Kastrup : 1:12:56

Thanks for having me. Brian Smith.

Unknown Speaker : 1:12:58

You have a good evening. You too. Take care. Bye.

Brian Smith : 1:13:01

Bye. That's it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www. Grief to growth calm. That's grief the number two growth com or you can text the word growth to 31996. That's simply text growth gr o wt h 231. 996 so if you're watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe so hit the subscribe button and then hit the little bell here and it'll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it that helps me to get more views and and get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.