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Wolfgang Smith: Beyond Non-Dualism and Materialism
March 13, 2023
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The Vedic union with God and the Christian union with God are totally different and in fact in a sense they are opposite.
With this knowledge comes power.
In this conversation we cover interpretations of quantum mechanics, the distinction between corporeal and physical reality, vertical causation, and irreducible wholeness. Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher of science, who draws heavily from pre-modern ontology. He obtained his bachelor's in Columbia in physics, mathematics, and philosophy simultaneously by the time he was 18. Now that's unheard of. Wolfgang was a mathematics professor at UCLA as well as MIT, publishing research in the field of differential geometry. Then he worked
It's good to meet you, Professor.
Yes, I've been looking forward to that. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. So have I. I'm going to begin by reading a poem. If all the good people were clever, and all the clever people were good, the world would be nicer than ever we thought it possibly could. But somehow, to seldom or never, the two hit it off as they should. The good are so harsh to the clever, the clever so rude to the good.
So friends, let it be our endeavor To make each by each understood For few can be good like the clever Or clever so well as the good I like that Why do you like that? First of all, I don't remember that this has ever been said And I think it needs to be said What about that do you feel like applies to our age?
I think it applies really to every age, maybe more so to our age because our age is in very great need of wisdom. We have all sorts of things, but wisdom we are generally lacking. I hear this plenty that we were wiser in the past than we are now. Is that true? Firstly, can you define wisdom?
Well, I'm not sure that I can define it, but I can point out a fact about wisdom which we tend to forget nowadays. Namely, that wisdom is closely related to tradition. It is not something we invent, it is something we receive. And this is something which I think
is largely forgotten. In fact, we bring up our young people to believe that everything just started a little while ago and that we are essentially inventing wisdom. I don't think
wisdom is to be invented, it is to be received. What do you mean that people are brought up to feel like this was all started some recent time ago? What do you mean? Well, I think the typical man of today thinks of wisdom and knowledge and enlightenment as something that came about rather recently.
He associates it with our science, our technology, our modern outlook. I strongly disagree with that and I think one of the main points I have to make is that wisdom is something that actually is not invented, it is received.
And I think it is very, very important to realize that it cannot be received unless we bring a certain humility. And in fact, as I like to say, we need to approach this with folded hands. I'm not sure that everyone today understands what I mean by that, but I think most people do.
You mean to say that most people nowadays think that proper morality came about from the Enlightenment and prior to that we were backward and religious and irrational? I don't know what percentage of people today believe that, but I know one thing that practically all our educational systems are geared to that message.
Many people no doubt are wise enough not to pay that much attention to it, to what our schools and universities transmit in that regard, but this is indeed the thrust of modern education. Start from scratch, science is the key to everything and in this regard it all started
in the 20th century, if you will, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics. Can you tell us about how you got started in physics as well as started in philosophy? Well, it clearly began at the age of 14. Somehow I got a hold of a very important book by Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World.
And I read this book with great interest and so much so that I became absorbed in it. I remember there were times when my mother called me down for dinner and I would say, I can't come now, I'm thinking. So this is an indication that it not only interested me,
but I felt somehow fascinated by these questions. And after reading a few popular science books, I think for a while there I was spellbound by what I would now call the scientific worldview, which
made a lot of sense to me at that time and I accepted it as a true outlook on the cosmos. But I wasn't satisfied with this, I wanted to go deeper and so I applied to
Cornell University when I was just starting the age of 15 and I remember to this day that the application form asked the question what do you want to major in and why and I answered that
I want to major in physics because I believe that physics is the key to the understanding of the universe. And so this shows that somehow interesting myself in physics is natural to me. This is just how I'm constituted. And so I entered
Cornell University when I was 15 and I majored in physics, mathematics and philosophy. And I think I was equally interested in all these subjects, in all three of these subjects I should say. And in a sense they were three aspects of the same enigma.
And let me say that it did not take long before I was terribly disappointed in what I encountered at Cornell University. I was disappointed in the professors, I was disappointed in what they taught me, because somehow I felt that
There was not enough seriousness. It was specialization and I didn't feel at home with these people. So by the time I graduated from Cornell at age 18, I was very, very disillusioned with the universities. Somehow I had
a conception of wisdom which was something entirely different from the professionalism I found at Cornell University. And I should mention that when I graduated, I was offered a three-year fellowship in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell.
so I could have gone on there for my PhD in philosophy and in point of fact I accepted this and started out on a doctoral program in philosophy and if you can imagine after three weeks I was so disappointed and felt so out of
harmony with the presiding spirit there that I went to the head of the philosophy department and told him I have not yet touched any any money I am quitting and he asked me what are you going to do I said I'm going to the state of Oregon to be a lumberjack
And it was on my way that after communicating this decision to my brother who was studying chemical engineering at Purdue, my brother took this letter to the chairman of the physics department and said, I have this young brother, he's smart but he's a little crazy, can you do anything for him?
And so the professor of the head of the physics department who happened to come from Austria, my country, he said, tell your brother I want to see him Monday morning in my office. He's a graduate assistant in our department. I'm offering him that. So you see my attempt to escape from the universities did not
I had scarcely cut my bridges as I thought. Then, against my will, if you wish, I was called back. So I spent two years then at Cornell University getting a master's degree in physics.
I'm very glad that I did because, as it turned out, this proved to be an important factor in my life. I received a certain basic background in contemporary physics. So your initial bachelor's was math and philosophy and then your master's was physics?
Well, actually I had a triple major at Cornell. I majored in physics, mathematics and philosophy. And I liked all three subjects very much. What aspect of physics did you do your masters in? Did you specialize? It was in quantum theory. What aspect of quantum theory? Well, this was way back in
1948 to 1950, these are the two years I spent at Cornell. It was basic quantum theory and incidentally we had very good professors because this was immediately after the war and a lot of top professors from Europe came to the United States and at Purdue at that time many of the senior professors were from Germany.
And in fact, the head of the department, his name was Lach Horowitz, he came from Vienna, my own hometown. So why don't you explain to the audience and myself what is the measurement problem? Well, the measurement problem is something very, very interesting. As most people know, I'm sure the world,
The physical universe as perceived in quantum mechanics is something utterly different from the physical world as we normally know it and think of it. And so a physical system in the eyes of quantum mechanics is described by so-called wave function.
Suppose you have the simplest system possible, a single particle. The wave function description of that particle will give a certain probability that the particle is just about anywhere in the universe. It is not at any particular point, in fact,
in reference to certain experiments, it can in fact multi-locate, it can pass through two slits at the same time. So in short, the world as seen in quantum mechanics is something utterly different from the world that we perceive in ordinary life and the world as described also in classical physics.
So the transition between quantum mechanics and classical physics takes place in the act of measurement. And so you measure a quantum system and in a single instant the picture changes in place of a multi-locating particle
described by wave function which is highly mathematical and only really the trained mathematician can understand what this wave function actually has to say. So in an instant the picture changes from the quantum mechanical to the classical which means that after measurement the particle has a definite position, a definite momentum and so on. After
After measurement we find ourselves, so to speak, in the world that we normally know as a physical universe. And so what then is the measurement problem? It is simply the question, how does this miracle take place? And leading physicists have
I've been thinking about this problem ever since quantum mechanics really was discovered, 1926 to be exact. But when it comes right down to it, no one has given us the answer. I mean it remains an open question. And so in 1995, I think it was,
became interested in that problem and I wanted to find a solution. And after considerable thinking and research and reading, I put it all together and wrote a book called The Quantum Enigma. And in this Quantum Enigma I do propose a solution.
And the key idea, there are really two key ideas. The first key idea is that we need to distinguish between the physical universe, which is the universe as conceived by the classical physicist, and what I call the corporeal world,
which is something much richer. The difference between the physical universe and the corporeal world is basically that the corporeal world is perceivable, which means that in addition to quantities, it owns qualities, for example color,
So I postulated that color is not just a thing of the mind, it is actually a quality pertaining to the corporeal world. So the physical universe then is a corporeal world as conceived by the physicist.
So in passing from the corporeal world to the physical, something is lost. And I recognize this all, I introduce the formalism. So with every corporeal object x, I associate a physical object, which I call Sx, and so there is actually a kind of function from x to Sx.
because x determines Sx. So this was the first idea, the distinction between the corporeal world and the physical. And having made this distinction, you still have a problem left. How namely does this transition take place? Because in the act of measurement,
There is a passage from the physical to the corporeal. The quantum system, the wave function, describes the physical, pertains to the physical universe, and after the measurement is made, you are actually in the corporeal world because
you couldn't have a measurement if the result of the measurement were not perceptible. So you end up with a pointer pointing to a certain location on a scale and you visibly read off the measurement. So measurement is a transition from the physical to the corporeal
And it is quite easy to understand rigorously that this transition cannot take place through the causation known to physics. So the causation known to physics is what I call horizontal causation and it is affected by a process taking place in time.
On the other hand, the transition from the physical to the corporeal plane, well, I just explained it cannot be understood on the basis of horizontal causation, so a different mode of causation is required, as this mode I call vertical causation.
It is easy to see on ontological grounds. I mean, we're outside the domain of physics. You can't write an equation for vertical causation. You can't even talk of it as a physicist without introducing some other notion.
So this is what I called vertical causation and the defining characteristic of vertical causation is the fact that it does not take place in time. In other words, it is instantaneous. I think it will be of interest to put in a little bit of a comment at this point.
because many people know that the Nobel Prize in Physics issued in 2022 dealt with a certain question relating to quantum theory on one side and relativity on the other and one has known for quite a while
that the two cannot both be true. Now, the Nobel Prize of 2022 was issued for, I think, three experiments which actually were able to decide which of the two theories is true. And we know they can't both be true. There's something called the Bell Inequalities and
Quantum mechanics says the results will be on this side of an inequality. Einsteinian physics says the result will be on the other side of the inequality. So these experiments actually decided between the two issues and the winner was quantum theory. And now what does this have to do with vertical causation? The answer is everything. Because
The point at issue in these experiments, therefore in the Nobel Prize, was whether a physical effect can be transmitted instantaneously, in other words faster than the speed of light. Relativity theory says no.
Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics says yes. When you make a measurement on a particle which is entangled, every particle entangled with this one will be instantly affected.
So there's a clear incompatibility here between classical physics and Einstein relativity on one side and quantum theory on the other and so as I said quantum theory won and the implication is that classical physics
in its Einsteinian mode is contradicted. Very interesting that I think this has to do with the fact that they waited such a very long time to issue that Nobel Prize, I think what, more than 30 years they waited. And I think the reason is that this is a very hot potato.
By saying that quantum theory won and relativity theory lost, you're stepping on a lot of toes. It's a very sensitive matter, but quantum theory did win, and the Nobel Prize acknowledges that, and incidentally
What does that have to do with vertical causation? The answer again is everything because it was really vertical causation that was at issue here. Whether there is a causality that acts instantaneously as quantum mechanics demands or whether Einstein was right that no causation
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You'll hear that in quantum entanglement. Sure, something is transmitted instantaneously, but you can't use it to send information, and so special relativity says no information can be sent. What do you say to that?
Well, I tend to think ontologically, and ontologically there's no problem. According to quantum theory, there are effects which operate instantaneously.
From an ontological point of view, this settles the matter. There's a clear contradiction here with relativity theory. So, from this point of view, from an ontological point of view, the matter is settled. Quantum theory is true, at least in this particular experiment,
came out in favor of quantum theory, there's no question about that. Einstein was very very concerned about this point because he realized that the theory which it was his life's work to develop hinges upon the outcome of this experiment and what is in a sense ironic
It was Einstein himself who first conceived the basic structure of this experiment. And he did so because he was hoping at least that this would empirically vindicate his theory with a V quantum mechanics. So in connection with this result,
I would like to point out something which is very closely related to what we're talking about here. My own approach to philosophy has always been instinctively Platonist. I became interested in Platonism at a very early age.
And I never really wavered in this regard. Something in me recognized this as the true ontology. Now, when you study Platonism very, very carefully, you discover that the Platonist, Weltanschaum, conceives of the cosmos as inherently tripartite.
The three planes, if you want to put it that way, are firstly what I call the avid tunnel plane, which is a domain which is subject neither to space nor to time. And this is really where reality comes from. Reality emanates from that domain.
And the second domain, which I call the, the Platonists call it the psychic domain, I call it the intermediary. So the psychic domain is subject to time, but not to space. And incidentally,
I'm convinced that this is integral Platonism, but I've never in any Platonist or Neoplatonist document read this interpretation. I doubt not that all the real Platonists understood this very well, but it is of interest that, for whatever reason, I don't think it has been explicitly stated.
And then the third domain I call the corporeal, this is the world in which we normally find ourselves. That domain is obviously subject to time but not to space. Excuse me, both time and space. So this is the basic tripartite ontology associated with Platonism. Now let me just mention
For the record that I think many people will be interested to know that this tripartite ontology is also found in the Vedic tradition, which is by far the oldest tradition in the world. It antecedes all others, including the Judeo-Christian which came much later.
This tripartite ontology underlies both the Vedic and the Platonist traditions. Let me say first of all, I find it very fascinating that the mere existence of this intermediary level implies
the falsity of relativistic physics. It is absolutely clear and beyond dispute because according to relativistic physics there is no time and there is no space. There is only a space-time and the fact that there is a time-only realm obviously contradicts that assumption.
I was very fascinated to discover that both the Vedic and the Platonist ontology disproves all of relativistic physics at one stroke. Incidentally, regarding the intermediary or psychic realm, let me point out
Even though nobody in the western world knows these things now, because we are all into the scientific, quote unquote, scientific way of looking at things. So even though we don't know about it, we spend a part of our life, our conscious life in that domain, namely we enter that, we are in that domain whenever we dream.
The dream state is we enter the dream state when we dream. The dream state is which one? The intermediary. In the dreams there is no space? The space in the dream state is not real. It's a kind of a hallucination and you can easily prove that because
Whereas the time that we experience in the dream state coincides with our temporal time. I mean for example I think everyone has experienced being awakened in the middle of a dream and the point is the moment of awakening you can identify in the dream. So
The time in the dream state is none other than the time of the waking state. But the space that you experience in the dream state proves to be unreal. In the dream you may see a castle on a three-dimensional thing and the instant you wake up you realize that there never was such a thing, meaning this belonged to the dream state but not to the corporeal.
So there is a rigorous, precise ontological distinction between the three states. You may say, well, what about the eternal state? It is true that we normally do not experience that. We do not experience it in the waking state. We do not experience it in the dream state.
And this is exactly where these yogic traditions enter the picture. In other words, to enter the eternal state is not given to the ordinary human being. It is something that can be acquired, but at a great cost.
As everyone that has any acquaintance with these domains knows very well, it is after a lifetime of endeavor, under the guidance of someone who has himself received that from a master, if you're lucky, you can do that. It's a great achievement and it turns out
that this has not only been always the chief goal, as it were, in the Vedic tradition, but the same is true in the Platonist. And let me mention that this is something I did not know until very, very recently when I came across
some writings by an 18th century British Platonist known as Thomas Taylor, who for some unknowable reason strikes me as a perfect insider of the Platonist tradition. How that is to be explained is totally beyond my comprehension, but I have no doubt
The Thomas Taylor knows very well what he is talking about when he gives a so to speak an inside view of the Platonist tradition and it turns out that the Platonist tradition is
identical to the Pythagorean. In fact it comes from the Pythagorean. If you will, Plato was a distant disciple of Pythagoras. And now what we learn from Thomas Taylor is that Pythagoras as a young man traveled to Egypt and actually became a disciple of an Egyptian master. And
Thomas Taylor, where he gets this information from, I don't know. Undoubtedly, there are sources. But what I recognized immediately is that from the description that Thomas Taylor gives us of the life of these disciples, when I read this,
I said to myself, my God, this is what I witnessed when 50 years ago I traveled in India and lived amongst real sadhus. That's how they live. So this explains the correspondence between the Pythagorean Platonist tradition on the one side and the Vedic on the other. In a sense, they are the same tradition.
However, there is a very decisive feature of the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which, so far as I know, simply does not exist in the Vedic. What is that? It is the rule of geometry. Geometry in the hands of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was an instrument
which enabled the practicing yogi to ascend from the psychic to the eternal plane and conceptually we can see how this is possible because geometry as a subject studied in our schools for example
pertains to the psychic realm. It's the realm of thought, of consciousness. But the truth of geometry, what it really deals with, pertains to the eternal plan. After all, when you prove a theorem, you prove a theorem, and the theorem is something that is eternal.
And in fact, geometry derives from the Ave eternal plane, because what we experience, if you will, on the psychic realm, comes from the Ave eternal. If there were not an Ave eternal geometry, there could be no geometry as we understand it. So the Greeks,
Pythagoreans, first of all, understood this very well and realized that because geometry does come from the avid tunnel and what it essentially asserts pertains to the avid tunnel, it can be used as an instrument to actually ascend from the psychic level
With this kind of, I mean our discussion right now, even though it involves the corporeal, actually takes place on the psychic. There is no geometry running around here on the corporeal plane. We're talking about something on the psychic level and the crucial point is, and this is what the Pythagoreans and the Platonists understood so well, the point is that because
Geometry derives from the eternal realm. It is in principle possible to use geometry to ascend from the psychic to the soul. This is very easy to say, but as I indicated a moment ago, the actual accomplishment of this is a lifetime's task.
And incidentally we're talking here, an authentic spiritual tradition is nothing that you can access on your own. It entails discipleship. And this is vital. I found in India when I was traveling there half a century ago,
Every fourteen-year-old Brahmin boy would understand this very well, simply known. Here in the West it is almost totally unknown. But the fact is, if you want to ascend to the eternal plane, you have to become a disciple of someone who was himself a disciple. And incidentally,
both in the Vedic tradition and in the Pythagorean Platonist, it is well understood that this path calls for lifelong celibacy. So in India, I noticed this, as I say, every 14-year-old Brahmin boy understands, if you want to ascend this path,
it will cost you lifelong celibacy and the writings of Thomas Taylor confirm that such was the case in the Pythagorean tradition and undoubtedly also in the Platonist. Incidentally, what I have said so far gives you the key to understanding
a very mysterious inscription which reputedly was inscribed over the portal of the Plato Platonic Academy. In English it says, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. So we understand this now in a different way.
because actually no one ignorant of Geometry can enter here if entering means to access the Ave eternal plane. So the modus operandi used in the Pythagorean Platonist tradition which comes from the Egyptian differs from the Vedic
in the sense that the means of access were different. Of course they had the common elements of celibacy and this incredible practice. You know when I lived among sadhus in India about fifty years ago, I was amazed that
These men spend a good twenty hours a day in other states, in higher states. If you were to put a knife in their flesh while they are in these states, there would be no reaction because they are no longer in this body. And so I also realized then when they did
come to know consciousness I could talk with them and it was as you can imagine absolutely fascinating to me to talk to someone who has just been somewhere that our wisest men in the contemporary West know nothing about I mean we know nothing even about the intermediaries plate
Go to Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. I guarantee that there's not a single person there, unless he happens to have read the books that I have read, knows about that. And incidentally, in India, just about everyone knows about these things. In fact,
these three states. When you talk to an educated Hindu in my day, you could converse with him about the so-called Tribhuvana. I talked to people who were businessmen and we could talk about the Tribhuvana. It was in their tradition. Tribhuvana is just a Sanskrit word meaning three worlds. So
After this trip to India, the first trip, I realized how ignorant we are in the West. I mean, we know a little piece of the world. We don't even know about the existence of the intermediary world, which we actually enter just about every day in the dream state. And let me in this connection tell you something which illustrates what I'm talking about here, namely the fact
that fifty years ago and probably doesn't exist anymore, but at that time there was this remarkable knowledge among even ordinary people in India. So, on my first trip to India, I think I landed in New Delhi and
took a room in a hotel and that first evening I had some telephone conversations and I was very very happy to learn that someone whom I had great admiration for was going to arrive in New Delhi the next day by train at 11 o'clock. So I was very very happy about that
and just took a stroll in the city and went to Old Delhi and on my return to the hotel I was accosted by, I guess you could call him a fakir. That means a person who has a little bit of knowledge of yoga but not all that much. And this fakir accosted me out of the blue
says, very lucky man. So he says, oh yeah, he says, very lucky man, tomorrow at 11 o'clock something good will happen. Well, no one in New Delhi, besides myself, knew about this tomorrow 11 o'clock, which is really something that elated me.
And so I must have been thinking about it deeply. So this fakir somehow picked that up out of thin air. Well, this fact, of course, interested me. So I went to a nearby garden with him to see what he can have to say. And so he gave me a piece of paper and he said, look at it. So I saw it was blank.
Then he says, please fold it and hold it in your hand. So I did, I held this paper. And then he said, all right, now think of a number between 1 and 100. So I thought of a number, I think it was 36. And then he says, all right, now open your hand and look at the paper. And on this paper was written 36.
So I gave him something, but on my way home to the hotel, I brooded on this. What's going on? And I think I figured it out. The fact that he talked to me, accosted me,
in reference to something good that would happen tomorrow at 11 o'clock. This was clearly a case of telepathy. I mean, he was able to read my mind. So then, what about the 36, that number? Well, I eventually did figure that out too. There is something called invisible ink.
And so that number must have been written in invisible ink, and it became visible when I held this in my hands. Meanwhile, he puts that number into my mind. So there were two, for us, supernatural powers that he had. A, to read someone else's mind, and B, to put something into someone else's mind.
So here, the first day in India, I by chance encountered a fakir who had these two powers and he could demonstrate that to me. Now why do I speak of fakir? Well, clearly these are yogic powers and you cannot acquire them just out of books.
Absolutely not. So this man had a guru. He was a disciple or someone who was enough for a yogi to possess these two powers and therefore he could transmit it to his disciple. All this doesn't come on the cheap. This fakir must have
spent maybe two, three years, I don't know, a certain period of time as a disciple, subject to a very disciplined kind of life, to acquire these powers. So why do we call him a Fakir, which is a somewhat derogatory term? How do you spell that, by the way? F-A-T-I-R. And, as I understand it,
A fakir is someone who has a certain knowledge of yoga, not a very high knowledge, but a certain knowledge just the same, and who instead of going on, I mean ideally yoga is given to us in order to go all the way, but there is a possibility that at various stages you stop.
and utilize this knowledge and it can be utilized in many ways you can become a millionaire if you play your cards right I mean this knowledge is knowledge of a very unusual kind so the word fakir as I understand it refers to these yogis who instead of going on
In a certain, at a certain level, use this half-knowledge that they have for pecuniary purposes. That's all right.
But it was so interesting. My first day in India, I learned things which here in the West hardly anyone knows. As I said, if we were to go to the Institute for Advanced Studies, I don't think you would find anyone there who has a ghost of an idea about these things. And yet it's real and it's in a way science. It's a higher science than what we possess.
because our sciences actually, our physical science doesn't even reach up to the corporeal level. This is why I had to introduce it. I had to distinguish between X and Sx and that was one of the two keys to the resolution of the measurement problem. The reason that top physicists have not been able to solve the problem to this day is that the
The ontology of physics doesn't suffice. If there were only a physical domain and no corporeal domain which is higher than that, there could be no measurement. So I think I have made the point in light of my contact with India
that there are things between heaven and earth that our sciences here in the west, our contemporary sciences, don't know anything about. But would you agree, Brian, with my point
that these things are there in the quantum world, but in potency you need to understand quantum mechanics, you do need the Aristotelian distinction between potency and act. And in fact Heisenberg understood this almost immediately when he said that so-called quantum particles
are not real particles, they are potentiae. They become real particles precisely when they interact with a corporeal instrument, and as I show in my latest book on physics, the point of it is that the reality comes from the corporeal level. In other words, the reason
Quantum physics, the reason quantum physics deals with entities that in a sense do not exist is because classical physics is sub corporeal. I mean, this little entity is corporeal, but when the physicist looks at it,
It becomes physical. In other words, he sees it as a physical entity and as a physical entity it still has being because the physical coaster receives its being from the corporeal. Is the Sx a subset of X or is it a different domain? It's a different domain. It's not a subset. It is something
You might say it's a physicist's way of comprehending X, but the point that I'm making is that the reality comes from the corporeal. It's the complete opposite of what contemporary scientists tend to believe.
Contemporary scientists tend to believe that the reality that we encounter here on the corporeal level derives ultimately from the particulate domain, the domain of quantum theory, but the actual fact of the matter is just the opposite. There's no intermediary here. I have come to look upon physics from a rigorous
Platonist ontological standpoint. And there it is very, very simple. All reality, all being comes from the aviturnal plane. So, iconically, you have a circle with a center. The center represents the aviturnal plane. The intermediary is the interior.
And then the corporeal is the actual circumference of that circle. I sort of taught myself to think in terms of this icon, because if you do everything becomes very simple. So all the reality, whether in the corporeal world or the physical, derives from that center. And now
And how does it derive it through vertical causation? So how then is the reality of corporeal objects transmitted to the physical realm? Well, the physical realm breaks into two parts, and this is absolutely essential. You can't understand physics without that.
You have to make the distinction between subcorporeal physics, which is the physics of entities which derive from the corporeal level. So subcorporeal physics deals with objects Sx derived from a corporeal X. And the crucial point here is that because
sub corporeal physics derives from the corporeal level it receives being which is the same as irreducible wholeness through vertical causation there's vertical causation from the corporeal level to the physical level and that is why the physical level has a reality
Technically speaking it has being because that being is transmitted from the corporeal to the physical level through vertical causation. So this is the story about classical physics. Now what about quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics is the physics of the trans-corporeal. Trans-corporeal means
not subcorporeal. Do you describe that as Tx? So Sx is classical physics? Yes, classical physics is a physics of physical systems Sx derived from X. But in quantum theory, strange as it obviously must be, you are dealing with
entities that are physical but not derived from a corporeal entity. Now, if you think about this, and it's not quite that easy, I mean these are subtle points, because the quantum world is not sub-corporeal, it does not
have its own intrinsic reality. So this is why quantum theory is so weird. This is why particles can multi-locate, for example. The answer is, in plain terms, that in itself quantum entities have no reality, have no being.
So how then can there be a classical physics, a quantum physics? Well, the point is that the quantum realm does not exist all by itself. It interacts with corporeal instruments in two ways. First, in its definition,
A quantum theory is not just a mental thing, it has a certain reality, because by virtue of the instruments, the corporeal instruments, which define the physical system. So this already is one source which transmits reality to the non
Non-reality of the quantum world conceived in isolation from the corporeal. The second way in which reality is transmitted into the quantum world from the corporeal is interactive measurement. And it is a great
genius of Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg. He was the first one, the first human being in history who got a glimpse of that. He said with reference to quantum theory that physics today is not
is not based upon an outside reality, but it is based upon an interplay of the observer with the observed. In other words, the quantum world comes into existence through the activity of the physicist.
where there are no corporeal objects acting as instruments of measurement, excuse me, I take this back, we need to distinguish between the act of defining a physical system
and the act of measuring a physical system thus defined. These are two different acts, but they are both acts which come from the activity of the scientist. So the scientist gives rise to the quantum world
through this interplay between the corporeal and the trans-corporeal, which he actually initiates in two ways by defining the physical system, which is done with corporeal instruments, and by measuring the physical system thus defined, which is also done with physical instruments.
So these are the two ways in which the physicist creates, if you will, the transcorporeal world. The transcorporeal world is not God-made, it's man-made. It's not there until you A, define the instruments, set up the instruments which define this physical system.
and B, then it's there in a potential sense, but that's not enough. It isn't fully there until you measure it and then you move from potency to act. So there's X, there's SX, there's the transcorporeal. Do you have a letter for that? The transcorporeal is
It's misleading because the transcorporeal doesn't really exist until the physicist comes into the picture, because the transcorporeal is, so to speak, produced through the questions that the physicist gives, the physicist asks.
I can quote the exact words of Heisenberg. He says that the new physics is an interplay between the physicist and nature. It is not
Unless there is an interplay, an interaction between the physicist and his activity and nature, there is no quantum world. There is no transcoporeal quantum world because the transcoporeal quantum world comes into play
in this two-fold activity of the physicist. First, he defines a physical system, and this is done through physical instruments, through, well actually, through corporeal instruments. And having defined a physical system, the physicist is in a position to measure
to make measurements on that physical system and this is again done with corporeal instruments. So it was Heisenberg who had this enormous insight right at the very beginning that with the
The advent of quantum theory and entirely new physics has begun, a physics in which the physicist is no longer the onlooker, but he is also, if you will, in a way the creator of what he measures. It's a two-way street.
The way Arthur Eddington expressed it, he says, the mathematics isn't there till we put it there. So it was first Heisenberg, then Eddington, soon thereafter, both had the same vision of physics, and it was completely different from the classical.
In classical physics, you postulate that nature is out there and you are merely the spectator of what is actually out there. And when you're dealing with large ensembles of the quantum world, this physics works fine. But when you come down to smaller units, it breaks down.
And this is where in a sense the physicist himself creates what he measures. So does this not apply to regular people who aren't physicists? Well, we are discussing physics, so what is physics? It's what physicists do.
The big change from classical to quantum physics came about when Heisenberg recognized that when you are dealing with
what we now call quantum system, we're dealing with something that we ourselves have in a way created. So this is why Heisenberg said that we now understand that the physicist is not simply a spectator, he is himself playing, he is in a way creating the very things that he is then measuring.
Because there are these two distinguishable phases of physics. There is first of all the phase where you define a physical system which you do through corporeal instruments. And having defined it, you then can measure it.
and this is how quantum physics comes about and the point is that in classical physics the system gains its reality through first through
being defined by corporeal instruments. It's the corporeal instruments that define what the physicist is measuring and then it is secondly again corporeal instruments which actually measure the system that you have so to speak created. Are our eyes a corporeal instrument? Oh yes of course.
I mean I see your eyes, I see the color of the pupil and the... So you don't mean to say you go into the lab and you set up a laser and then all of a sudden quantum mechanics is created. So is this an observer, the table? Well, there are really two tables. The table of quantum physics, which is simply the Sx of this X,
And then there are the quantum tables. So the Sx was the classical. Yes, that's classical. So the difference is that in quantum theory, the physicist not only describes what is out there, but in a sense he creates what is out there.
As Eddington said, the mathematics isn't there till we put it there. We put that mathematics there. And this is something that Heisenberg just understood as a metaphysician. What sets Heisenberg apart from all other physicists of renown is that he was the son of a classicist.
which means that Heisenberg was highly schooled in Plato and Aristotle and that gave him a new way of looking at things. I don't know how many other physicists have really followed Heisenberg fully in this recognition and
On account of this new way of seeing what physics is, he was able to recognize that the quantum world is ontologically beneath the corporeal, beneath the physical and the physical, of course. So there are really three levels. You've got the corporeal, which is the sense-perceived world.
Then you have the world of classical physics, which is subcorporeal in the sense that it deals with entities Sx derived from X. So the classical physicist deals essentially with the corporeal world, but he is interested only at its quantitative aspect.
He closes his eyes, so to speak, to all the rest. For example, he is blind to color. And the sad thing is that it's one thing to forget about color when you put on your physics hat. It's in fact necessary. That's how physics originates from that blindness. What is sad
is if you carry that blindness over to your normal life then you become a materialist and in a sense you talk nonsense and not only do you talk nonsense but you can't recognize that this is nonsense and this is more or less where the intellectual elite of the western world stands now that
They take the physical universe to be real and the corporeal world is then what Descartes called the res cogitans, the thing of the mind. This is what Whitehead called bifurcation and he spent maybe 30 years of his life going around to all the universities in Europe and America
trying to explain to the people how wrong this is, how actually foolish, but the strange thing is that very few people got the message and in fact anyone who tries to explain to a physicist the idea of bifurcation
will to his disappointment learn that the likelihood is 99.9 that the physicist won't understand a word he's saying because this bifurcationist and therefore spurious metaphysics is so ingrained in the mind of a physicist and you know that's understandable because you can't do physics until you bifurcate.
It is this bifurcation that in a sense creates the physical universe and that's what the physicist is there to understand. That's what he thinks about morning noon at night until he regains a normal state of mind when again the grass is green. But while he is doing physics, the grass is not green. While he is doing physics, he is bifurcationist.
he's a Cartesian and so he sees only a part of the world and incidentally this is what makes the whole enterprise in a sense unwholesome because man was not put here on earth to put on blinders and actually shut off the better half
of the world. What the physicist casts out by his very modus operandi is in fact the creme de la creme, I mean the world of color and sound and all these innumerable things that poets think about, I mean sing about and artists paint
This is all blocked out. As soon as you put on a physics hat, this no longer exists. And what the tragedy is that many physicists, if not most, after doing physics for a good length of time, they forget that the so-called physical universe is not the whole thing. And so in a sense,
They are split in two. I mean, the human part of the physicist is always there. I mean, we breathe and we feel pain and so on, might even feel love, but officially we are democratic and we know only atoms and the void. It's a terrible disease. And it's a disease which can infect not only individuals,
It can affect the whole society. And this is what I have been trying to express in all my writings, that we, the modern contemporary West, are a sick society. This is not how man is meant to be. We are not hitting on all cylinders. In fact,
The higher side of our nature is, as it were, excluded. It has no rights. It has no place in the public marketplace. You won't learn about it in the universities, because the message is that we've picked up the most ancient heresy in the history of the world, the philosophy of Democritus.
5th century BC. Democritus said, what was it? The vulgar think of color, the bitter and the sweet. In reality, they are only atoms in the void. It's amazing, about 490 BC or something like that,
Democritus came upon the scene and in a few words he epitomized the philosophy which would dominate Western civilization from the 17th century onwards. So Democritus was very soon followed by Plato and Plato completely
invalidated the Democritian axiom. And all of antiquity followed in the footsteps of Plato in that regard, which means that the well-informed
For 2000 years, the well-informed understood very well that this doctrine of atoms and the void is untenable. And so one can very well say that it is the oldest heresy in the world. And what we have done, beginning with people like Galileo and Descartes,
We have instituted the oldest heresy in the world as the basis of our intellectual culture. And we have done so with a vengeance because the Weltanschauung, which Galileo and Descartes instituted,
which as I said is a revival of the Democritian, and is thus what might be called the oldest heresy in the world, has now been baptized as the Enlightenment. So it's no wonder that we are in difficulty, because I think we can all agree
that basically a certain wisdom is necessary for a good life. And on a global scale, it's in fact necessary for survival. You will not survive if your well-done shang is upside down. And that it is. So that's very simple. That's all I have to say.
I'm going to ask you if you have symbols for the avaturnal, the psychic, because you have X for an object in the corporeal. So is it A and is it P? For the avaturnal then the psychic is P. I just want to know about the symbology of it, like the symbols that you write down. Well the real symbology of it is what I call the cosmic icon. So this circle which entails three elements. The circle has the center, the
interior and the boundary, the circumference. And so I really think that this idea of the circle, this iconic view of the circle was known to the Pythagorean and Platonists, but so far as I know
There's no literary evidence to that effect. But that's how I think about it. You know, since we are tripartite, corpus animus spiritus, we also need to, as it were, understand things tripartite, in a tripartite way.
And so, in order to understand these things that we're talking about here, the cosmic icon really, for me, it needs to be there sort of in the background. When I talk, for example, about geometry elevating you from the psychic to the to the eternal realm,
I instinctively think of it in iconic terms. So a certain visualization is almost necessary for me. So I think this is probably true for everyone. Since we are tripartite, our thinking is also in a certain sense tripartite.
So the iconic way of dealing with very abstract, very metaphysical things is natural because it is tripartite and we are tripartite. So I'm always skeptical of people who claim they think just rationally. I think an iconic
dimension is absolutely necessary and then it becomes real and then it has power otherwise if it is otherwise it is in truth a Cartesian res cogitans and that doesn't amount to anything. Descartes has done a tremendous harm to western civilization
by the fact that we have become Cartesian in our way of and this idea of the rest's extended entities in the so-called real world and everything else the rest cogitons which we have degraded into a sort of a fantasy world
You can see how this opens the door to something absolutely dehumanizing. Because once you really become a believer in this dichotomy of res extensei and res cogitans, you are incorrigibly subhuman. You can never again attain the human level
unless you cast out that idea. It's a tough thing to cast out once you've become enslaved by it. This is why when you try to explain the idea of bifurcation to physicists, they really don't get it. Do you want to explain bifurcation to the audience right now? Yes, well, let me just finish this and we can...
You know, I'd like to ask you a question because I've wondered it, but I don't know if it's appropriate. Ask away. Judging by your name, I thought that your ancestry goes back to India. Does it? Oh, okay, good. Well then, I'm glad I'm talking much about Vedic culture because that's what you carry in your DNA.
You know, so it's interesting, you know, that there is a certain parallel between your life and mine, because in my case, yes, I was born into a Catholic family, but I sort of forgot all about it, you know, then came the war, and we almost got killed in the process, and so by the time I settled in America,
I had forgotten all about my Christianity and as I told you my mind became engrossed in other other type of questions. It was during my college days that I became not only acquainted with Indian culture but
tremendously drawn to it. So I became very drawn to it and at first if you read my book on physics I relate that story
My first encounter with Hindu tradition was through Rabindranath Tagore. I read a very famous little book of his called Gitanjali, and that set me on fire. So, for about 40 years of my life, I lived
in a Vedic ambience. The first time I traveled to India I stayed seven months and I lived exclusively amongst the sadhus and I came back a different man. I realized when I was flying back I used the seven months because I was just finishing a stretch at MIT
and starting a stretch at UCLA. So from the end of the winter semester to the beginning of the fall semester, I was free, so I went to India. And when I flew back to Los Angeles after seven months of living amongst sadhus and witnessing things that are incredible, I realized I'm not the same man.
The man who is flying back is not the man that was flying over. I had been permanently changed. And which is actually what should happen when you open yourself to real sadhus, to people who have experience of higher spheres, you should be changed by that.
And the one thing I brought with me to India, great, great reverence. Instinctively, I approached these sadhus with folded hands. And it's amazing if we were to get along. I have many stories I could tell you, but I invariably found that if you
honor a sadhu just in your heart without any physical evidence he knows it instantly and they always respond if you give something to a real sadhu he will give you something back and what he gives you back
is more valuable than all the gold in Fort Knox. So I experienced this again and again when I was in India. And if there's anything good in my life, I don't think it could have come without that contact. And then when I was about 40 years old I married a wonderful Catholic woman. And
In a sense she became my guru because, not that she ever lectured, but by her mere presence she connected me, reconnected me to Christianity.
My wife did the same for me. Is that wonderful? I grew up Christian and then I became an atheist from when I was eight years old or so because I remember asking my brother who was a physicist at the time how did the universe come about and he said it could have come from quantum fluctuations that's how nothing comes from something or something comes from nothing and then I remember sitting and thinking okay then that solves the last problem I had with the notion of God namely how can anything be here
So from that point forward I became an atheist and it wasn't until I met my wife and just her sweetness, her lovingness, her endearedness, I've never met someone that I felt like I can't hurt them. If I hurt them I would feel so horrible. I like very much what you're saying. It's wonderful. It took me a long time also to get to think like that. And so
You know it's amazing we have something really in common in the sense that in my life it was Thea who brought me back to my Christian roots and the fact that I had gone really quite deeply into the Vedantic way turned out to be essential because it gave me something that
My fellow Christians here generally have not been exposed to. In other words, I brought something back with me from India, which I was able to put to very good use. There are very few meetings, genuine meetings, between a Western man and a Vedic man. And in fact,
The Vedic side of India has been under attack ever since the British came there because the British of course introduced Western ideas and Western modes of living and I don't want to go back to India because I'm afraid I would not, the India that I experienced half a century ago
places in the Himalayas and the regions, you will still meet it, but I'm sure it's essentially gone. And so I was blessed in the sense that I could still absorb that. And at the time when I was in India, I thought like an Indian. In other words, I totally forgot about my Christian background. It was really
It was somehow deep in my being, but I wasn't conscious of it. So what I'm saying is that I was able to experience the Vedic India in a rather deep way. And this has been a great blessing in my life because it gave me something that is rather rare in this part of the world.
And when I got back to Christianity, I was able to integrate these two, these two sources, if you will. And in fact, I will give you a book I published last year called Vedanta in Light of Christian Wisdom, where I attack a very now prevalent philosophy, if you want to call it that,
The so-called perennialists, people like Prithu Shuan, Ananda Kumaraswamy from India, René Guénon, they are all perennialists. Perennialism means that there is one high truth and one pure religion of the world over
And in particular they think that the different religions are different paths to the same summit. All of the major religions lead to the same place? Exactly. And this in fact
This view is so widely disseminated nowadays that whether you talk to an educated Hindu or an educated Muslim or an educated Christian, when it comes to the intellectual
class. Yeah, this is almost unanimously assumed nowadays. It's like the enlightenment of the spiritual community. So rationality is the enlightenment of the atheistic community, and then the spiritual community that feels like, oh, I have the answers is more of the type that feels like, well, that religion is correct. It's distorted. It's somewhat incomplete, but that one's correct. That one's correct. Amongst the really educated people, word over.
you find that this is almost axiomatic and there was a time when I was in a way flirting with this outlook. I read Schuon and you know Schuon was a very brilliant man and when you read him it is easy to fall into his way of looking at things because he was a very powerful person. In fact I visited him
in Bloomington. He comes from Germany but early in life he converted to Islam and then he founded the Tariqa in Bloomington and so I had personal contact with him and at the end I realized that this is not someone you want to follow. So I
I'm probably now the chief literary exponent of the opposite view. Instead of perennialism, the idea of all religions are different ways of climbing the same mountain, the first thesis and the primary thesis which I document in this
book that I just mentioned, Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom. The first point, the main, the central point I document is that the eschaton of the Vedic tradition and the eschaton of the Christian tradition, both are in a way to establish a union with God. There's no question about that. That's what religion, true religion is about.
But the point is that the Vedic union with God and the Christian union with God are totally different and in fact in a sense they are opposite. Because the Vedic union with God, I call it the Nirvanic option, because Buddhism and Hinduism are not
totally the same but the word nirvana which comes from the buddha expresses it so as perfectly as it can be expressed nirvana literally means blowing out like a candle flame and this is really what the vedic path the the highest vedic path the vedantic path advaita path accomplishes and aims to accomplish it's a blowing out
of the human. Now the point is, it is a very deeply philosophical point to discover that there is something in us which transcends the human. I mean there is something called Wolfgang Smith, but if you wipe that out,
If a super yogi could put his hand on me and this Wolfgang Smith is gone, what would remain is the Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the supreme state of the Vedantic Way. The Vedantic Way is nirvanic. It is a way of wiping out the merely human.
It's hard to describe these things because we are touching rock bottom here. We are talking about absolutely foundational things. So the Vedic path is Nirvanic. In the Vedic tradition you speak about Nirvikalpa Samadhi.
It is a state which very few sadhus even in India attain, but every now and then it is attained. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, there was a great sadhu in India who had attained that Nirvikalpa Samadhi state, and I read about him when I was very young.
You have photographs of him. There are people who visited him and made conversations. And the point is that from our point of view this was a human being. We could talk to him and he could talk to us. But in reality that human side was just a facade. We think of him that way. He didn't experience himself as that.
In other words, he had attained the actual eschaton of the Vedic religion, and there are various names, Nirvikalpa Samadhi... This is not Nirvana, this is different? It's the same, exactly the same. I'm convinced that Buddha, even though he was not organically or historically related to India,
Nevertheless, he belongs in the Vedic tradition, so that the distinction is accidental, it's not essential. So this is one eschaton, and incidentally, I mean, it's like Mount Everest, it's too big for us to, we can say the words, but we don't really have any conception about that.
The important thing that I came to realize in the course of my life is that the Christian eschaton is something utterly different, so much so that in a sense they are antipodal. Why? The key is, as every Christian knows,
As the Church Fathers used to say, God became man so that man can become God. But who says that? The Fathers. I mean, it was assumed St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, they all would have agreed with that. Who actually spoke these words?
I'm not enough of a scholar, too, but it's a formula that is accepted in Christianity as orthodox. God became man so that man can become God. But to be more precise, the way of knowing God or seeing God
that is offered to us by Christianity in contrast to the Vedantic way is that by becoming a member of the mystical body of Christ through baptism we are able to see God the Father through Christ the Son through the incarnate Christ
without the incarnation there would be no such possibility but this is why God became man to form a bridge as it were between the human and the divine and through that bridge we can come to God the Father through God the Son and more specifically the incarnate Son. There is a distinction between
Christ as the second person of the Holy Trinity and Christ as we worship him in our churches because what we worship and what otherwise could not really be worshiped is God in the form of man. This is a crucial point. So through Christianity a new eschaton was given to mankind.
And the interesting thing is that in Vedic days that did not exist. That became a reality when Christ was born on earth. And that is long after the Vedic period had begun. So the sadhus in India were practicing their Vedanta long before there was a Christianity.
So that began with the birth of Christ and it ended, it was completed with the resurrection. And we are part of that. We belong to that path. Our path is not the direct path, which is practiced in Vedanta. Our path is through the God man.
And incidentally, there's a wonderful passage in the Gospel of St. John, which speaks very directly to this. It is taken from what is traditionally called the high priestly prayer, it is called. So it is
uh... before the passion when christ went into this garden to pray uh... he said addressing God the Father he said this is life eternal to know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ who was sent this says it all
coming from the mouth of God himself. This says it all. In other words, our approach to salvation, to the union with God, is through Jesus Christ who was sent. These are the actual words of Jesus. And when he says who was sent, is a direct reference to the incarnation.
In other words, there could be no Christianity, no other path to God than the Vedic, if it were not for the incarnation. It is by God becoming man that this other path was born. So the Vedas know nothing about that.
In fact, I was very surprised when in the recent days in writing this book that I'm going to give you, I was carefully thinking about all these issues and I discovered, to my surprise, how very little of anything Christian was known to the Vedic tradition. For example, the story of Adam and the idea of the fall of Adam and original sin, which is all integral to Christianity,
is not known to the Vedas. In fact, in Sanskrit there is strictly speaking no word expressing the Judeo-Christian idea of sin. Bad karma is one thing, but sin is something entirely different and you will not find any mention in the Vedic literature of sin. In fact, if you talk to sin to an indigenous Hindu, however educated he may be,
He wanted to understand what you're saying. I speak to people who are on the Western of the Eastern end, meaning that they have a Western interpretation of the East, and they like to say that, well, the East has everything that the West has and more. You're saying no. No. In fact, you know, what you just said is part of the perennialist cradle. It all comes in the same package. And so this book that I wrote
which I hope will be read by many perennialists. It's the only book I know of that is a rigorous contradiction of perennialism. And not only do I contradict the notion of many paths to the same summit,
But I go into much more detail. For example, I tried to demonstrate that the eschaton of Christianity, which is called salvation, is the polar opposite of the Nirvanic goal. There are many words you can use to describe it in Vedic terms.
Let's call it the Nirvanic state. Salvation and the Nirvanic state are the complete opposite. Why? Because in the Nirvanic state the human person has disappeared. The Vedic path, there are many Vedic paths to lesser ends, but the supreme Vedic path
is a path which requires the immolation of the human being. This is why, if you go to India, the sadhus, they all wear garu. That is the color that identifies the sadhu. And well, in a country that burns the bodies of the dead,
It is easy to see that the garu or collar bears a reference to the self-immolation. And incidentally, living with the sadhus for seven months, as I did, I came to experiences. I saw that this is what these men were doing. It was a self-immolation. And I admire them tremendously. I mean, just the strength that it needs.
to rise above all our human proclivities to give that all up to literally as it were take our body and consign it to the flames this is what they do and my hat off to them and I love them dearly I love them dearly because
They were so kind to me. They immediately read all my mind and whatever is even beneath the mind. I was an open book to them. This is automatic. If you rise to authentically high spiritual levels, everything here in this world becomes an open book.
When you look at the person, you can tell his future and his past. Everything, because in the eternal state, everything is here now. So, by the grace of God, I got a glimpse of the greatness of the Hindu sadhus. They are giants. And in fact, when I was traveling in India,
One of the great spiritual personalities was a woman, her name was Ananda Mohima, and incidentally, your Trudeau person, whom I don't like at all, he traveled to India and visited Ananda Mohima. I'll give him credit for that, that was a noble thing to do. Well, Ananda Mohima, from childhood,
represented the highest state of consciousness. I mean, we of course saw her as a woman, but she did not for a moment think of herself that way. So she was more divine than human. And incidentally when you got to know her a little bit,
The better you knew her, the more you saw the divine part and the less you saw the human part. And they're different. And incidentally, it was the first time I was able to encounter a Samadhi state. Samadhi is the super consciousness. It was on her birthday and on her birthday she always went into Samadhi.
And so when she was in Samadhi, she was not in this world at all. And so that was the first time I'd read about Samadhi ever since I was 17 years old. I knew about it. But this is the first time I saw a human being in that state. And it's amazing because
When she came out of Samadhi, for about three or four hours she was in Samadhi, and when she came out of Samadhi, it was sort of a gradual, continuous process, and in this process her actual features changed. At first she looked like a young girl, and then the more she regained her normal state,
The more she began to look, as we normally saw her, of a rather past middle-aged woman. And so this was supernatural. I mean, how can you change in a few minutes from, if it were, a child to an old man? I mean, this is clearly supernatural. And
I knew, of course, that the Samadhi state is something supernatural, is something which in the ordinary Christian tradition is not known. You have to get into the esoteric side of Christianity, then you will begin to... Incidentally, let me say this, years before that experience in India, yeah,
Years before that experience in India I had already read about Samadhi states and I visited in Italy a bona fide Christian saint, no question about it, Padre Pio is his name, he's since been canonized and when I first saw Padre Pio
He was being led into the church by another priest and looking at Padre Pio, I said to myself, my God, he's in Samadhi. It was clear that in his consciousness he was no longer seeing what we normally see. That's why another priest had to lead him by the hand. So having had some experience
In India, I looked upon our spiritual champions with a different light. I saw the supernatural side in somebody like Padre Pihom. So Samadhi is a real thing. You do see it also in the West, but only in the highest grades of sanctity.
It is more known, well, I speak about India, I speak about India half a century ago. I don't think there's much left of that spiritual culture, because India has been westernized and contemporary western culture is like water to fire. Water extinguishes fire.
So I have no interest even if I were young to go back to India because I've seen the best of India. And as I said, when I was traveling there, I could still encounter and actually speak with sadhus of very high rank. Did you speak in English? Yeah. That's the one good thing that came out of the British Raj.
It made English the lingua franca of India, and for people like myself it was a godsend, because wherever I went I could speak to the people. Of course that's an exaggeration. When you went into the countryside in India, the people only knew the particular Indian language of that district.
But anyone who's had a high school education of course knew English. So it did give me access and I remember I had beautiful conversations with some of these sadhus. There was one in particular, he was the head of a monastery and he spent 20 hours a day in these Samadhi states
But when he came out of it, he was very normal and natural, and he liked me. And he called me Smitananda, and at one point he said to me, he said, we are seeking to enter the abode of death, and they ask us to write books. I've pondered over that statement a lot of time,
Many, many times it says a lot. First of all, it says that the Vedantic path is a path to the abode of death. And you could write a whole book explaining that. It explains everything. So I was fascinated with that. And in my book, as you will read, it explains what
You learn from the so-called Phoenicians, like the pre-Socratics, Parmenides. Parmenides, what we have from Parmenides in the form of fragments is a journey, quote unquote, to the abode of death.
So when I heard from the sadhu, we are trying to enter the board of death, I remembered, aha, Parmedinus said the same. And so, these pre-Socratics were following a basically yogic discipline,
which they received from the Phoenicians. So there was an actual connection with India there. And then as I write in this book, I recalled that Socrates, who was not in the Phoenician tradition at all, but Socrates did write that, quote, philosophy is the practice of death.
So in the Platonists you find the same Vedic theme that the way to wisdom is to enter the abode of death. And we can now understand this because the Samadhi state, which is state of enlightenment, in the Samadhi state the normal human function cease.
The breathing stops, the heartbeat does not stop completely, but it goes down and it's like the heartbeat of a hibernating bear. Very, very slow, just enough to keep the body alive. So the Vedic path is a path leading directly into death.
And so the Vedic people also have their resurrection, but it's a resurrection not in human form. What is their resurrection? It is Nirvikalpa Samadhi. It is that state. And in India, every now and then, you actually find a sadhu who is in that state.
And as I told you in the early twentieth century, one of these Hindu personalities became world famous. I have books here in my library where you can see his photograph. A German wrote that book. He records the conversations he had with Ramana Maharshi. And chapter two of the book deals with a French
Benedictine monk who came to India. He had a face-to-face visit with Ramana Maharshi and from that point on all he wanted to do is follow the Hindu sadhana which he did follow successfully up to a certain point. I think he was very very advanced when he finally died but
What I bring out in this book is that what he says about Christianity, following his, as it were, initiation into the Vedic religion, is all wrong. So in chapter two, I use the biography of Henri Lassault, this Benedictine monk,
who then became in a way a disciple of Ramana Maharshi to show how completely distorted his view of Christianity had become then because he no longer had any idea about Christianity he confused Christianity with Vedanta and of course if you compare Christianity to Vedanta from a Vedantic point of view Christianity falls short of the mark
So, this I think is one of the important features of this book. I correct something that might have very dangerous effect upon many readers, because it would very falsely, it would essentially corroborate the false ideas of the Perennialists. This Orville Lassault, after his
conversion, if you will, to Vedanta, saw everything through Vedantic eyes, so he was therefore, in a sense, reproducing the perennialist outlook. So I regard it as an important part of my work to rigorously disprove
What people like Shuon are talking about, because it's very dangerous. Shuon himself had attained rather high spiritual states, and that's when people become most dangerous, because they have a certain spiritual power, and yet they do not have the sanctity that should go with it, and then they become dangerous.
Can you expand more on that last point where people get close to enlightenment? What is it that they get close to and then they become dangerous? To the extent that a person makes progress in any spiritual path, whether it's Christian or Vedantic, with this knowledge comes power. And if you're not
very pure in your inner being, it can very easily happen that you misuse that power. And then you have something very dangerous. Carl Jung had a phrase which said, beware of undeserved wisdom. Good phrase. He was referring to psychedelics. He was referring to, you can get into certain states with psychedelics, you can get what you at least feel like are spiritual lessons. What do you make of that phrase?
Yes, it's a good phrase and an important thing to understand, but let me tell you this. Jung is very, very dangerous because he certainly had a degree of knowledge way above the average, but way below the degree of authentic religion.
and in my first book called Cosmos and Transcendence I have a whole chapter on Carl Jung which I entitled the deification of the unconscious in other words Jung took the unconscious and essentially put it in the place of God and
So what he really was presenting was a kind of religion, but it was a false religion, and there's nothing more dangerous, nothing more lethal in all the world than a false religion. Because even as true religion takes you up, a false religion takes you down.
In this book, my first book, I talk about two false religions. One, the religion of Sigmund Freud, which really was a kind of religion, certainly as a Satan's religion, if you can put it that way, and the religion of Jung, which leads in the same direction, but it is geared to intellectually more advanced
So, when a priest falls and goes down, it was usually through Sigmund, through Carl Jung, and when a centurious man falls and goes down, it was probably through Freud. Both were very dangerous characters and have had an enormous impact upon the Western world.
I have a friend who is a psychologist and one of the few psychologists who is quite enlightened. Most of them are under all sorts of delusions. And he has written book after book about the Freudian heritage, how Freud really brought us what he himself, Freud, called the plague. So it's a very dangerous thing.
Freudianism is basically a religion, although it pretends to be a science. It isn't. Well, it's Satan's science. And so the evil that has come into our world, first through Sigmund Freud and then through Carl Jung, is enormous. What makes a religion false? Its origin. It comes from below.
And of course, the falsity is patent in what the religion actually says, but in order to see that, you must have some bona fide knowledge of an authentic religion. As this is very rare, in Christianity
It pertains mainly to the esoteric level. In other words, if you take everything literally, this is all you need to know in order to be saved. You can take the words of Christ just in the most literal sense possible, and if you make this the guiding star of your life, you will
attain salvation on the word of God. But there are certain things, in fact what we are trying to talk about, I think is one of them, there are certain things that cannot be comprehended in Christian terms on that level of understanding. So in Christianity, and incidentally this is not true for the Vedic tradition,
In the Vedic tradition, there's no hard and fast division between an exoteric knowledge, which is for all, and an esoteric knowledge, which is for an elite. It's the same teaching, but viewed on a different level. Now, in the Christian sphere, I think there is a fairly sharp
dividing line between a literal understanding and a spiritual understanding. And of course, as I said before, they both will lead you to God. But the difference is that the literal understanding does not
need you to a higher understanding of your religion. For example, if you take Christianity on its literal level, you may very well end up saying, well, these Hindus, they are heretics, they are pagans, they believe in false gods and so on, and I'm afraid many of the
the missionaries that came to India for example they were not all very wise and I think one of the reasons why they accomplished so very little is they looked upon Hinduism from an exoteric point of view and if you do so as a Christian you don't really understand
In India, as I said before, I think, there's no hard and fast distinction between esoteric and exoteric, which means that in a sense it's all esoteric. In Christianity there is this division, and you see it in the teachings of Christ. Christ clearly distinguishes what he says, so to speak, for everyone and what he says to his disciples who needed to
no more than that. So the reason why the Christian, the missionary activity in India has been very unsuccessful is that in order to actually reach
Even a mediocre Hindu, you need to speak from a different point of view. I remember I was one time, not on my first trip, but I was visiting in India, I think it was during a Christmas break, and I was in a monastic community in the Himalayan foothills of quite up north, and a Protestant minister came
I was addressing these monks and he was talking on a purely exoteric level which means that he saw all of Hinduism as just a paganism and so on. He had not the foggiest idea of what it was all about and I must say I was impressed by these monks
They sat there. They didn't get excited or angry or anything. Just think how a Christian would feel if a Hindu came and essentially made Christianity look like nonsense. We would be very upset. Well, they weren't. And they were very polite. And after that, after he was finished, they said, well, thank you very much for talking to us and goodbye.
So there was no connection at all and as I said these sadhus were not a bit angry, they simply realized that this man didn't know what he was talking about and that's something we all need to know and not get excited about it because otherwise we'll have perpetual high blood pressure. So de facto there has been very little
contact between Christianity and the Vedantic tradition and I firmly believe that the time will come soon when such a contact will take place and it will completely change the outlook of the Western world. So the time has come
when the exoteric level is not sufficient. In the days during the middle ages, for example, with an exoteric knowledge of Christianity you could get to heaven very readily. Now it is not so clear because the point is on an exoteric level
You cannot protect yourself against the heresy of our contemporary world. Interesting, interesting. In order to get out of this, the real paganism is not in authentic India. The real paganism is right here, our present day Western culture. And to the extent that we are a part of that,
We are cut off from Christianity. We cannot follow Christ and Mammon at the same time. And this culture that we live in basically comes from below. These are important things, because it's not just a matter of theory, it's not just a matter of metaphysical speculation.
It's a matter of life and death. That's what it's all about. This is why we founded a foundation, because I hope that these ideas, which we are trying to express and disseminate, I hope that this will continue. You were talking about the foundation. What is it called?
Right now, that will be listed on the screen and if you're just listening to this, it's in the description.
You were speaking to Jonathan Pageau on Karen Wong's channel called The Meaning Code. Oh, yeah, right. Jonathan said that Christianity transcends non-dualism through salvation and that unity with God in the East is seen as becoming the same as or becoming one with. Whereas, at least in Jonathan's words, unity with God to the Christian is still retaining a multiplicity. So it's not just becoming one with, but even becoming more multiplied. And he says the blades of grass in heaven are more real.
Well, I agree that
Certainly Christianity is a union with God. I don't know exactly what Jonathan means. Incidentally, when I had our conversation together, I was very impressed by him. I was impressed by how he looks and how he speaks. He is a very deep man, a very fine Christian,
And I'm very happy that we had a meeting, but I don't know whether he and I look upon the Vedic religion quite the same way. I'd have to talk to him more to get a clearer idea of how he looks upon it. There are two ways of looking upon it.
One is the usual way of the Christian of somehow putting the Vedic religion down a few notches, how much that depends upon what kind of a Christian you are. Now, needless to say, I disagree with that. There's no question of putting one above the other, because what I believe is that
All true religion comes from God, and certainly this is the case in the Vedic, and this is the case in the Christian. And so, having said that, it follows really that there is more than one religion.
With the understanding that religion comes from God. If it didn't, you couldn't legitimately call it religion. The word is a thing from really God, really God re-binding back, and only God can do that, and only God can tell us the way. So I look upon both
the vedic and the christian as each true religion which means that it comes from god and it leads to god but that said and i think many many people would say the same thing what is somewhat unusual about the point of view at which i arrived late in my life uh... is that whereas i regard both
The Vedic and the Christian is true religion. That means a way leading to a union with God. I do not agree, for example, with the perennialists that what stands at issue is the same union. In fact, I have gone out of my way trying to explain that in point of fact, these two unions are antipodal.
Because both are extremes. The Vedic extreme is the extreme of self-immolation. It is, to see it in pictures, which is the only thing that we can do actually, it's as if we take this body and cast it into a blazing fire. What happens is that the body is burnt. It exists no more after that.
as body. And this is what you actually, what confronts you in the Vedic religion when you take it at its highest level. It is a self-immolation and this is why the sadhus wear the garua cloth. The Vedanta is a path of self-immolation.
And the Christian path is something utterly different. And in fact, it is something that did not really exist in the Vedic age. I think I've said many a time that the Vedic is the oldest religion in the world. And at the time that the Vedas and the Upanishads were written, there was
before Abraham was even born. So the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, which of course culminates in the birth and teaching of Christ, is later than the Vedic tradition. So in the Vedic tradition you find no Judeo-Christian ideas at all. I was so
amazed when rather recently I discovered that basic notions pertaining to the today of Christian religion are completely unknown in the Vedic world. For example, Adam and the fall of Adam and the original sin and
What I'm curious about is, remember how you were saying the way that the more literalist Christian speaks to the Hindu, it's not getting the message across, and in Christianity there is something that talks about that, like Paul says, to the Jew I became a Jew, to the lawless I become the lawless.
What I'm curious about is, it's almost like there's the literal, and then there's a more esoteric interpretation, and maybe then there's even a more mystical interpretation. Regardless, there's a literal, then there's an esoteric, and that we need to go to the esoteric in order to combat some of the perils of today, like materialism and so on.
So what I'm curious about is often people stop as if the bedrock is the literal and then they go upward like I said there's esoteric and then there's like the most esoteric like their degrees upward but doesn't seem like people consider that there could be something that's more literal than the literal.
Well, I think
The division between the exoteric and the esoteric is the only thing we need to consider and talk about because it's the only thing that is real. Now in the teaching of Christ and in fact right through the patristic age the exoteric and the esoteric
coexisted almost. Both were well and alive. Let me give you an example. In St. Augustine's Confessions, which was a book, so to speak, written for everyone, you will encounter
The exoteric and the esoteric side by side. Some of the most beautifully esoteric teachings that I have ever heard you find in the Confessions of St. Augustine. I'll give you one example, it's an example I love so much I've cited it often in my writings. St. Augustine begins a chapter
speaking as it were to God and he says let me see if I can I want to remember it precisely he says I see these others beneath thee an existence they have
because they are from thee, yet no existence, because they are not what thou art. Now, I won't go into this now, that would not be the time, but let me say that this is one of the most esoteric statements I have ever read. And you could give lectures about it, you could
For example, explain how all of Vedanta is really contained in these words. They go as deep and as high as the human mind can go. And yet, it is something that is said casually in St. Augustine's autobiography. I mean, the Confessions is his autobiography.
which weaves into one the story of his intellectual and spiritual life, and also the teachings of Christ on both the exoteric and the esoteric plane. So everything is in there. Now, during the patristic age, both levels of understanding, the exoteric and the esoteric,
went hand-in-hand. It was part and parcel of the Christian heritage. And then, during the Middle Ages, in the West mainly, in the West more than in the East, this equilibrium was disturbed and esotericism tended to disappear.
I mean, there always were and there always will be individuals who have been given from God this higher vision. But when I say it disappeared, I mean, for instance, that it was no longer recognized officially. And I'm sorry to say that undoubtedly many esoteric Christians
were actually burned at the stake in the European Middle Ages. This is a sad fact, which however is true and you can't deny it. Meister Eckhart for example, who was in the opinion of many, including my own, perhaps the greatest esoterist that Western Christianity has ever produced,
He was a master of scholasticism who took scholasticism to its ultimate end, which is far above the exoteric level. He actually was condemned by the Inquisition and would have been burnt at the stake if he had lived two years longer, because two years after his death a bull came out known as in agrodominici,
that is the name of the bull where 29 propositions I think which he had written down were declared heretical and in a sense these accusers were justified because these 29
propositions that were declared heretical were in fact purely esoteric and they were formulated in a way which was clearly dangerous to ordinary people. There are things that are not meant for ordinary people and can be dangerous
And so I'm not accusing these, what were they called? Well, never mind. The censors were doing something which is inherently legitimate. I mean, they were protecting the flock from teachings which would have been dangerous to them.
And in fact, if you want to find fault with Master Eckhart, you could say he was sometimes too esoteric in his manner of speaking, not realizing that this could be dangerous to ordinary folk, ordinary Christians. How is it dangerous? Well, for example, at one point he said, God can do nothing without me.
Now, obviously, he was not just jabbering. If an ordinary person says that, it's nonsense. But when Meister Eckhart said this, it was indicative of some high truth. There is a kernel of truth there. And he had, incidentally, I've often observed and even written in some of my books, that what
The manner of expression that Master Eckhardt used, I call Koanic, because it is very similar to what is used in Zen Buddhism. In Zen Buddhism you have a kind of a custom, a tradition, that the master teaches the disciple by throwing at him statements which cannot but be shocking
and which obviously make no sense exoterically and therefore force the disciple to ascend to an esoteric level. For example, the story is told in many of these Buddhist books. A disciple comes to the master and says, what shall I do if I see the Buddha walking down the street? And the master says, kill him.
Now, it's a perfect example. Spoken to a disciple who has the capacity to get the point of it, this is a very powerful way of instructing him. Because there's a lot of emotion really that enters into this. But at the same time you run the risk that if the person doesn't really understand what you're saying,
It may confuse him. It may even hurt his religious beliefs, his faith. So it's a double-edged sword. So I've recognized the fact that Meister Eckhart did definitely express himself in what I call a qu'onic way, which is what got the Inquisition on his back. I am definitely no friend of burning anybody alive.
And I'm sorry that the Catholic Church did that, but it happened. You know, there are two churches. There's one that is holy because it comes directly from God, but there's always a human element. If we were confronted just by God's Church, by the words of Christ falling from the Master's mouth,
That would be one thing, but religion must have also an earthly side, and so conflicts do enter, and dangers do enter, and you can look at the so-called Inquisition from two directions. From an Orthodox Catholic point of view you can say, well it was necessary because we had to control the heretics,
From another point of view, you can say it was a catastrophe because de facto you killed off esotericism. What finally remained after so many centuries of this kind of rule by the clergy was the effective end of esotericism.
In that killing Buddha cone, what's the proper way of interpreting it? Well, you must kill our human way of looking at Buddha in terms of bones and flesh and blood and appetites and even perhaps some human faults, we don't know. That's not the real Buddha and that's not the Buddha you want to
set up as an exemplar, you need to understand his message and his true nature, which can only be seen with the spiritual eye, not with the eyes of flesh.
Something that Carl Jung said, in a sense it saved me, was that when delving into these topics, there's a danger of floating so far above the ground that you just start to float. And he said that's what happened to Nietzsche. And he said someone was asking Carl, why haven't you gone mad? Why are you grounded? And Carl said the grounding of his feet is one, his patience, the people that he sees in his practice, and second, his wife.
I found that to be the case for me that my wife is this grounding point and if I didn't have that I don't know where I would be because I'm just such an abstract person I feel like I could think myself into madness I could reason myself into believing I don't exist or you're all that exists or I'm a plate and if people hear this then they think that's a bit foolish to me it's like I don't think they've thought
Deeply enough about existence or about themselves. Anyhow, I heard that you've also expressed a similar sentiment in one of your books. There's a danger of floating too far up in the same way that there's a danger in- well, there's less of a danger in being just rooted. Mainly you start to criticize people and you become racist and egocentric and so on. But it's not a danger of the same sort. Can you express what your views are on that?
Well, I'm glad you asked this question Kurt, because I think it's very, very important and in fact it connects intimately with all that we've been talking about. You see, there was a time both in the East and in the West when things were rather normal and so
The people who were interested in the deep things, the esoteric, when it comes to the Christian world, there is this division. There is no such official division in the Vedic tradition. It's all one. But in Christianity there are these two levels. And in the early days when things were normal,
Everybody was in the right place and the people who were more or less exoteric in their DNA, in their natural way, they would get their spiritual food from the ordinary sources. They would go to
a religion class where a priest would explain the words of Christ and so on, and if they wanted to go further beyond that, they would find a suitable teacher. In the case of St. Augustine, what was the name of this wonderful saint who helped St. Augustine to convert and to
ascent to an esoteric understanding of Christianity. So everything was really in order. Everyone had what he needed. It was at hand. And as time went on the situation changed and more in the West than in the East, in the Eastern part of the Christian world you find more
of the old system of guru and disciple, but in the western world things changed very much and in a sense esotericism was misrepresented and to a large extent it was lost. There are always going to be people
inspired by God and people who are very pure in their nature and can go very deep into prayer and can ascend as it were the ladder of God but they are very very special people and what I'm saying is that in the West the normal supports for that kind of an ascent
ceased to exist. And this is a problem you did not have in the patristic era. Wherever you were, you were never too far from a real Christian man of experience who had a kind of first-hand knowledge of the esoteric plane. And this is what in the West, as I say,
was getting scarcer and scarcer and finally almost disappeared and this is why the outer church collapsed and actually the splitting up into many sects so you had the catholic church which continued as it were in a single line from the actual days of Christ
In addition to that there were various sects which each had a little piece of the truth but something essential was lacking and finally things got so bad that the institutional Catholic Church itself in a visible sense collapsed. That's a sad truth.
And I've written a book about that. My book on Thea Deschardins essentially tells the story of a man who was somewhere along the line, he was actually possessed in a clinical sense, and he exerted an enormous influence upon the clergy
And when you look at the Second Vatican Council where essentially the cleavage occurred, you find that Teatr Shaddah was the guiding spirit of that council. All the younger clergymen were somehow, it was almost like a kind of madness. I mean, actually,
In a sense it was because it was occult. It was not a human thing, an occult power manifested through this Teer Desharda and through Teer Desharda it really gained a kind of power over the younger generations in the church. So it was a revolution and
We are now in a transitional state where there's a lot of confusion and things are happening which eventually will lead to a new rebirth of the Christian religion.
This splintering will be no more. All who regard Christ as their savior will belong to one and the same church and esotericism will again be, not only it will again enter into play, but in a sense it will become the norm
Which means that this church, which a great Christian master has called referred to as the Church of the Resurrection, this church will be not so much rational as it will be mystical. Because mysticism is something that can be accessed
By anyone, regardless of his education, for example, the simplest peasant and the most learned scholar, when it comes to a mystical recognition, they are on the same plane. They can speak the same language.
This is what I learned from a very holy, Catholic figure, a very well-known Malachy Martin. He wrote these best-seller books which were widely known in the Christian world.
and I was lucky I spent two years in correspondence with him and I had a lot of questions in my mind so I would ask him these questions and he would answer them and in fact a few years after he died I was in living contact with him for two years and then he passed away
and a few years after he passed away, I realized that this correspondence we had was very important because it brought up questions which were not ever officially or publicly discussed, and I felt these are very, very important questions, so this little book came out, Malachy Martin, A Response to Wolfgang Schmitz,
simply the correspondence that we had over two years but the issues that we were really discussing in this correspondence evidently was something rather new and this is why I'm glad this book is published because I regard Malachy Martin as a very important figure. He has yet to be recognized
and I feel one day he will be. He was a man of very great spirituality and a very heroic man and I hope that someday he will be recognized and appreciated.
Do you think that both the esoteric and the exoteric will be needed in the new church or will just purely be esoteric? No, both. Both are needed because humanity always is comprised by many different types of people. Supposedly we're now all the same. It's not true. We're not all the same and thank God for that because life would be very boring if we were all the same.
So there are many different types of human beings with many different talents and many different blind spots too. And this is what makes it all very interesting. It would be utterly boring if we were all the same.
I was speaking to a psychiatrist named Ian McGilchrist. I was talking to him about that experience of solipsism that I had before, where just everything was in my own head. And he said, Kurt, you're not the same as the plant, and you're not the same as your wife, and you're not the same as God, and so on. Well, you share an element. And he said, the fact that you share implies that you're different. Why? Because you don't share with yourself. And that I found terribly insightful. But this is a beautiful thing.
about the fact that there are men and there are women and they are different and not the same. Let the gurus of the present day say what they want. Men and women are fundamentally different. The difference is so profound that few people are intelligent enough to even get a glimpse of that difference.
What our present civilization is trying to do in this regard is criminal. It is absolutely criminal. Telling a young girl that she can be a boy and so on. Not only is it utter nonsense, it's like drinking cyanide. It poisons. It poisons the human beings. Because the difference between man and woman
is in a sense sacred because like all real things it is rooted in God. Going back to that other statement that could potentially be seen as dangerous which came from Meister Eckhart saying that God cannot do anything without me along those lines, what's the proper interpretation of that? You ask a very difficult question. I don't think I ever gave this a great deal of thought because
What fascinated me when I read this was to say, aha, this is Quranic, this is Quranic. And this is also why Eckhart got into such deep trouble with the Inquisition, because the Inquisition had no comprehension of the Quranic nature of discourse, so they took literally what was never meant literally.
I mean the statement God can do nothing with me obviously this was not for a microsecond meant to be taken literally because that would be flagrant lunacy and in fact the whole point of the quonic way of expressing oneself is to use lunacy as a means of
jarring people out of their everyday complacent Weltanschaum, which is actually what you need to do in order to grow spiritually. In order to understand, say, the saying of a saint, which is above the normal level, you must somehow jolt yourself out of that normal level
Because if you don't do it, you will never understand what the saint is talking about. So, instinctively, Meister Eckhart was quonic in his teaching. Not always, mind you. He was, in fact, technically speaking, he was a scholastic, but if you compare him, say, to
to St. Thomas Aquinas, he was a very different kind of Stroelastic, because St. Thomas Aquinas did not cross the divide between Exoteric and Esoteric. I think their grounds for saying that, and as a matter of fact, the last teaching that St. Thomas Aquinas bequeathed unto his disciples
It is a remark that he made to Reginald, who was his private secretary. So in the last days of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas said to his secretary, quote, I see now that all I have written is false, even worse than that, is mere straw.
I see now that all I have written is mere straw. And this is an accurate statement regarding his position. He decided, for reasons of his own, to step back from the esoteric level.
If he had not done that, his fate would have been like that of Meister Eckhart and we would probably not even know about him. He became the doctor of the church and the paragon of Christian wisdom for many many centuries precisely because he took exotericism to its ultimate level. He was very well
aware of the division between what comes beyond that and the exoteric plane, but he chose not to follow that path. He perhaps knew that in the providence of God, God inspired Meister Eckhart to take care of the esoteric, which he did in a non plus ultra manner, a supreme perfection.
And Saint Thomas Aquinas was to take care of the exoteric. I think it's a plausible conjecture. But in any case, what Meister Eckhart did, and relatively few people recognize this, is he continued what is called the scholastic method.
The scholastics had their own way of dealing with theological and metaphysical issues, and it is different from what you find anywhere else. For example, they use Aristotelian terminology in a way which you don't find anywhere else. So it's a specific path, if you will, and Meister Eckhart
chose to take the path all the way, to pull out all the stops, so to speak, which of course then got him into trouble, as we know. St. Thomas Aquinas did not do that. I think when it comes to things of that magnitude, you cannot but conclude that this must have been the will of God. God wanted Meister Eckhart to give us, as it were,
to pull out all the stops which he did and he wanted Saint Thomas Aquinas to remain below a certain level in order that he can become quote unquote the doctor of the church. Meister Eckhart although his teaching is if you will higher could not be a doctor of the church because he's not for everyone
And as I say, if you read the writings of Meister Eckhart, there are many things that he says which are definitely dangerous to the ordinary Christian.
When you were speaking near the beginning of this answer, you were saying that lunacy is a step along the path. Now I just want to make clear, so were you saying that or are you saying like, look, do not go insane, go seek help if you're feeling... Well, I was speaking in a sort of a... An esoteric manner?
No, I think it was a little loosely that I was speaking, because there are two kinds of lunacy in principle. There's the ordinary kind of lunacy, which arises from a lack of intelligence. That's what our clinical psychologists know about. But there's another kind of apparent lunacy,
wisdom beyond an ordinary human level. When your wisdom exceeds a certain plane, your manner of expressing it can very readily be seen as lunacy. And in the history of human religions,
I think you can in just about every religion point to actual historic figures which had that kind of lunacy.
So here's where I disagree with Jung, Carl Jung, or maybe it's more that I don't know. So Carl Jung had the phrase that beware of undeserved wisdom, and then you express the sentiment that there's wisdom, and if you're not ready for it, it's beyond your level, it can be seen as lunacy. So I don't know if what people attain when they crack or they have psychotic episodes and so on is indeed wisdom, just they weren't ready for it. I was speaking to John Vervecky, who you spoke to as well.
Well, I think
There are both. We must recognize that both of these things are real. On the one hand, you have people who, for example, try to ascend in an intellectual or spiritual way. And incidentally, if you do this without a guru, without somebody who is really a master and is guiding you, you're doing something that's very risky.
I think this is what happened to Nietzsche. I think Nietzsche was by nature a very, very brilliant and very, very deep man who, as it were, by his DNA was seeking God. But in the European culture of his day, there was no one who could even understand Nietzsche.
There were very few figures in the Europe of that time in the German-speaking world who had any real conception. I think one of the few people who broke out of that milieu was Goethe. I think he was one of the few. But Goethe himself was not clear about everything.
In Goethe, I see a man who was way, way beyond the level of his day. Nietzsche was, I think by nature, equally deep, but somehow or other he got off to the deep end.
If Nietzsche had had a proper guru, I think we would now know him as a great man.
This is why I worry about myself and then also some of the people who are watching, because I feel similar feelings of going off the deep end in these subjects. And I also wonder how much of this exploration of theories of everything is helping versus hindering. I want to make sure that what I'm doing is good. Well, that's just a worry. Well, it is an absolutely marvelous point that you raise.
and the point which i think is very very essential especially in this day and age because uh... in this day and age i think two things are true more people perhaps than for a long time to say ever before is too too grandiose a word but for a long time uh...
We have in the Western world observed a sort of a level of mediocrity. And truth seekers after truth, where it comes from the heart, not from the cerebrum, were few and far between. Now, because the world is growing darker and more dangerous, there's no question about that,
More and more people are, whether they know it or not, they're seeking God. It's as simple as that. But our civilization is so confused and so anti-God in its present manifestations that many people who seek God do not in any way realize that that's what they're doing. And so there are a lot of people who
are seeking something which they do not understand and they do not also know how it is to be thought uh... and i think the the bottom line is they need help they need help as ever before have you heard of the dark night of the soul yeah
You know, in a sense, this is almost an inevitable episode in the life of a seeker. In other words, in one way or another, everyone who moves from the ordinary common way of looking at life to something that is
belongs to the supernatural, belongs to the spiritual realm, needs to pass through that state. But there is a great difference between someone who makes this journey under the guidance of a qualified teacher and someone who doesn't, who sort of does it on his own,
And this is something that I think can be said very apodictically, even though there are always exceptions to just about every rule. But we may safely take it for granted that if we truly desire higher knowledge and desire somehow to draw closer to God, we need an appropriate
guide and there are basically two ways. In the Vedic way it is a question of finding a guru and then becoming a disciple and half a century ago when I was traveling in India and I'm sure this is no longer true today but in those days if you were in India and you wanted to find a guru
and you searched, you would surely find someone who was qualified to act as your guru. Because, as I say, you could go to the Himalayan regions and you could find areas like Rishikesh, for example, where you would see these real sadhus who spent the greater part of the day in Samadhi states,
That all existed then, I don't think it exists anymore today. So, the normal thing is, when a human being seeks God, and whether this is in the Vedic or the Christian concept, in one way or another, you're always going to need a guru. In India, that meant in those days, coming in contact
with a man who has actually attained access to higher states. In the West it means associating yourself with a legitimate church which is able to transmit the teaching of Christ and the grace that comes from that. And that's a complicated subject because
Not all churches are equal and there are also bad churches, so it's all complicated. Here's something I have been thinking about. Is it the case that you marry a church or you marry a religion, but let's say a church in this case because we're in the West, in the same way that you marry a woman, namely that there is no perfect one and if you're going to wait around and try and find a perfect match, you're not going to find one. So what you do is you commit yourself knowing that there are flaws.
I cannot look at things that way, because it is certain that in churches there is a human element. But it is equally certain that there is a pure supernatural also. I'm a Catholic, so I will speak in Catholic terms. What
is the supernatural and the true Catholic Church. The supernatural resides in the priesthood. And what is a priesthood? First of all, to make a priest, it's like the initiation I talked about in India. You don't become a yogi unless you receive that
from someone who is and who himself received it from his own guru. The same thing in principle you find in the Catholic Church. To become a priest, actually I should talk about bishop because priest is something lower than that, to become a bishop
Someone who is already a bishop has to put his hands upon you and say something sacred. And how did he become a bishop? The same way. So there's a continuous chain going right back to our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles.
The apostles were the first bishops, if you will, and they became that directly through the hands of Christ. And so the real treasure in the Catholic Church and in the Orthodox Church, the same applies in both cases, is that the functionaries of religion were all
part of the same transmission which originates in Christ and then through the apostles down the line right to Bishop Mahoney today I shouldn't use Mahoney's name because he was a terrible bishop but a real bishop is part of that lineage and you know it's like electricity we have light here
And how is that possible? There is an actual wire that connects this bulb to something like Niagara Falls, which is where this electric power originates. So in similarly, in a bona fide religion, the functionaries, and there is no religion without functionaries, somehow there must be a priesthood. The ordinary person
cannot serve as a functionary. For example, I'm not a priest, I cannot forgive sins, I cannot do any of these priestly acts which are an integral part of the church. And so there must be this wire going right back to the origin which is in Christ.
Now, in a chain, a chain is only as good as its weakest link, and then a wire wouldn't transmit if there was a cut in it. So in the same way, given that churches have an element of corruption because we're human, so there's always a small element, sometimes it can be large, sometimes it can be smaller. It's a wonderful question, and a very necessary question, because it takes the case of a bishop. There are two things here.
There is a bishop properly so called, and as I told you that cannot exist without the chain of transmission. It's the only way you can create the bishop. So there is a bishop, but in addition, there is a human being with all the frailty of a human being. And it is certainly possible for a bishop to be an absolute role
It's possible and has happened many, many times. You can be sure of that. But the point is that even though both things exist in one and the same man, they are utterly different. As a bishop, as wicked as he may be, he still can confect the sacraments. He can make another bishop.
He can say mass, He can forgive sins, He can do everything that is in the power of the bishop.
You know, in fish, we talk about bioaccumulation like plastic or mercury. They bioaccumulate the more that you eat it and the more that those eat that. Why can't we have something similar where the sins of a bishop, rather than the sanctity being passed down in the same way we have original sin, we can have a bioaccumulation of sin to a bishop, our current day bishops, or that somewhere down the line a line was cut because the sin was of sufficient critical points. Ah. Well, the critical question
is not what is conceivable, but what is actual. And for thousands of years now, the Western Church and the Eastern Churches, they agree perfectly in these fundamental matters. So both the Roman Church and the Eastern Churches agree a hundred percent that
There is a spiritual line. So that means there is an ontological difference between a bishop and an ordinary person. This is an ontological difference. It's like the difference between having electricity and being able to turn on the light and not having it. And this is not a matter of belief or faith. It's a matter of fact.
And at the same time it is also and equally true that every bishop is also a human being and it can very well happen and has happened innumerable times that this human being is very unworthy. Now let me say this, woe unto him who is because the higher you rise the deeper you may fall.
And if a bishop commits sins, his punishment will be much worse than if you and I do that. But we have to understand the categorical, ontological difference between, say, a priest or a bishop on one side and an ordinary person on the other.
The ordinary person may be as pious as any man can be. He may be erudite, a model of perfection. But if he's not a bishop, he can't make a priest. And if he's not a priest, he cannot convict the sacraments. It's as simple as that, and it's every bit as rigorously true as this analogy about electricity.
So this is a fact. Unfortunately this fact has been forgotten and there's been a lot of confusion because all sorts of people have founded churches and given religious instruction who were simply not qualified. And this is why the world is full of all sorts of groups
that have partly the truth of Christ and partly they don't and have misconceptions. So this is a reality you cannot deny. Speaking about lines that go back, do you have any issues with evolution versus intelligent design? Do you have any thoughts there? Oh, absolutely. Evolution is a heresy. It's a fundamentally false doctrine.
There's no actual scientific evidence whatsoever about evolution, and as I keep writing in my various articles, since 1998 evolution has been mathematically disproved. It is impossible, and that can be proved rigorously, and it has been proved.
But even so, I think it's ultimately due to satanic forces, evolution is, so to speak, the pseudo-religious cradle of our civilization.
So this may be one of those coans that can be misinterpreted. So what specifically about evolution do you not agree with? Is it that we share common ancestor with a different species or that we all came from a single-celled organism? Well, fundamentally, what I object to in
evolution and why i think that it is basically satanic teaching satanic is always inverting putting god down and satan up it's a complete inversion and evolution is a complete inversion inversion because instead of recognizing that all being comes from above from what i call the eternal plane and thus from god because
Who puts that eternal plane in there? That is the creative act. Platonism is very clear about this, and of course the Vedic teaching is also very clear about this. But in reality,
The entire universe, I'm just gesturing, the entire universe is descending from that avid tunnel, from that central point of the cosmic icon. And the doctrine of evolution puts it completely, it puts the world upside down. Particles, quantum particles, as I, we talked about that earlier this afternoon and I pointed out to you that quantum particles
As quantum particles don't exist, whatever existence, whatever reality they have, they obtain in one of two ways. It's always through contact with the corporeal entity, and there are two ways in which this actually happens.
In the corporeal entity that defines the quantum system, quantum systems don't just grow on trees. I mean, every physicist, if he wants to study a quantum system, he has to set up equipment which in effect produces that quantum system. So the quantum systems don't grow on trees. They are in a certain sense man-made.
which means that the impetus comes from the opposite direction that our physicists think it comes from. It comes from the center of the cosmic icon, it comes from the eternal realm, because it was known since the days of Plato and Pythagoras that that's where all being comes from.
These are absolute statements. I've just finished an article on consciousness and in fact I added a very essential section this morning, so this is all very recent. But the central point about consciousness is that it
definitely derives not just from the eternal realm, but from God himself. And this is where I quote a Vedic statement, namely that the fundamental principle is what is called in an Upanishad Satchitananda. So Sat is being,
Chit is consciousness and Ananda is bliss. So these are three Nomen Dei, names of God, which are Vedic in origin. And it is from this divine trinity, Sath, Chit, Ananda, that the creation comes and this is why the creation
is tripartite because these three parts, the aviturnal, the psychic and the corporeal, are manifestations respectively of sot, chit, ananda. And in my paper I have to explain that because at first hearing you don't grasp how ananda
which means bliss, is in any way associated with the corporeal world. In fact, you might very well conceive the opposite, that this is a veil of tears and it's a place where there is least an underworld. Well, I go into all these issues very carefully and I hope I'm making a very plausible argument.
So the point is that consciousness, we have it all wrong. And not just the gross materialists, but also the people who think they are spiritualists or what have you. The point is, one way or another, we all try to explain or understand consciousness from below.
The outright materialist says, aha, it all comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of them aggregating in suitable ways, voila, there's consciousness. But pardon me for saying so. This is nonsense. This is utter sheer nonsense. There's not a speck of truth in that. And in fact, it's a complete inversion.
because there's only one place where consciousness can actually originate, and that's in God himself. And we have a Vedic source which tells us so. One of the most profound nomen Dei in the Vedic tradition is Satchitananda. Satchitananda is a name of God, and it's a name which tells us something about
the nature of God. And interestingly enough, it's triadic. God is in a sense one and three at the same time. You find the same thing in Christianity, but in a very, very different way. Christianity speaks of the Trinity, yes. So it also sees God as a triad, a triplicity, but let's leave that out of the picture because it's completely different from the Vedic.
Not at all. On the contrary, in a sense, there are polar opposites. So, in order to understand cosmology, in a Platonist cosmology, you have to start with the Vedic nomen Dei. The key is, unquestionably, the revealed name Sat-Chit-Ananda.
This is not a human invention that comes from God, and it is the oldest name of God because the Vedic tradition is the oldest tradition in the world, by a long shot, even as Christianity is, so to speak, the last. I think there are in essence only these two traditions and then there are many in-betweens, but I think so far as bona fide
Manifestations from God Himself. You have the Vedic and you have the Christic. I don't think there's anything else on that level. And they are polar opposites. And, however, to understand cosmology, you have to go back to the Vedic. The Vedic and the Platonist are one and the same.
There's a little technical difference, as I said. The Platonic involves the idea of geometry in a way which you nowhere find in the Vedas. But apart from this, the Vedic and the Platonist are interchangeable. And so, if you want to understand cosmology,
ontologically there's no other way you can get it from the Vedas you can get it from Plato in either case you get the tripartite cosmos and this is the way you are going to understand cosmology and once you have seen that you recognize at the glance that
the modern scientific way. I say scientific because it's not really scientific at all, but all of our scientists think that way, so it's scientific. The scientific way is the polar opposite of the Vedic or Platonist, where the Vedic and Platonist sees being
or irreducible wholeness, which is the same thing as originating on the eternal plane and actually beyond that it originates in the tripartite divinity, the scientistic things that comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of these non-existent things, you will have consciousness. This is nonsense, complete nonsense.
And I want to use what little energy I have left to get this message across. This is nonsense. There's no evidence for it and theoretically it doesn't make sense. Excuse me. Sure, sure. In fact, I was in telephone connection with Bill Dembski just before Christmas.
Well,
I have looked at Dembski's theorem very carefully. In fact, his is the only bit of mathematics that I ever put into any of my books.
In one of my books, there's a chapter on Dempsey's stuff, and I actually go through the main step of his theory. It's very simple, really. The mathematics is very simple, and I think there's absolutely not a shred of doubt that it is a completely rigorous mathematical theorem.
And if people disagree, it's just because evolution is against their religion. I mean, excuse me, evolution is part of their religion, is what I wanted to say. And so it's a kind of on a religious grounds that they attack Dembski. And I'm not surprised at all. I've seen enough to realize
that our religious convictions, whether it's true religion or false religion, they're equally strong and equally definitive. So my own conviction is that Bill Dembski's theorem is a bona fide mathematical theorem, as good as any other mathematical theorem, and it does prove
that deterministic, random and stochastic processes cannot produce complex specified information. That is, you can bank on that, that's like the Pythagorean theorem, it simply is, and if people don't like it, it's their problem.
and it does rigorously disprove evolution, its pattern dried. It's easy to see because you couldn't have seen it before the discovery of DNA, but with the discovery of DNA we realize that the simplest living organism contains in every one of its cells
what might be popularly characterized as tons of complex specified information. And that's clear. And therefore, this tons of complex specified information could not have been put there by either deterministic or random or a combination of the two that is stochastic process.
This is crystal clear. And if even, you know, well-known scientists object, it's on emotional, psychological grounds, not on mathematical. And one can very well understand that they would object, because if you realize that evolution is impossible,
then had one stroke, our entire scientific Weltanschauung is kaputt, instantly. And it would surprise me enormously if under these conditions you will not find very erudite, very famous, celebrated men who will oppose that tooth and nail.
and incidentally I know Dersky fairly well enough to realize that he has personally suffered terribly because he is just a mathematician who happened to prove this incredible theorem
and then people like Stephen Meyer and so on realized the importance of it and founded something called the what is it uh... intelligent design institute and they have lots of money and they're very prestigious and uh... so uh... Demsci became a celebrity on account of that and since
The intelligent design movement, their main tenet is that evolution is wrong, that intelligent design is producing all these biological phenomena.
Now, obviously, since they have, so to speak, become very visible, the opposition has also been very visible and very audible, and so there has been a tremendous attack upon the intelligent design people, and especially Bill Demske,
and there's been personal attacks and you know Dempsky is a very good man he's a little childlike he's not sophisticated and so on which is perhaps why God gave him that insight you know there's a goodness there and a devotion to God which is natural not sectarian or anything like that so at a certain point Bill Dempsky couldn't take it anymore
because his personal life was attacked. So he sort of withdrew and then I happened to get in touch with him before Christmas. I think I took the initiative, I called him and we had a nice conversation and I was happy to hear that he is back in action as it were.
because in fact he was just on his way to a conference in Europe some place. So he's back active representing the Intelligent Design Institute and in fact I told him a little bit about my work and so forth and he was interested in
He wants to visit me one of these days. I hope so because he's a very, very good man. I'm not taking a side here, but in defense of David Walpart, I don't believe he is a proponent of evolution. I think he's actually a critic of it. He thinks it's incomplete. So his grounds for disliking the application of the no free lunch theorems, I don't think come from that. David Walpart also has the monotheism theorem. I don't know if you know about that.
But it says that if there's a god, there could be only one god. And he mathematically shows this. I have a podcast on that. But anyway, I'm not terribly convinced that the criticism just comes from his emotional appeal, though I think almost all our criticisms for anything come from emotional appeals, because we're deeply emotional people.
Anyhow, let's put that aside and I'll just wrap with a couple questions, which actually come from a friend of mine who's watched so much of your work and is a huge fan. His name is Matthew Whiten. He asks, Aquinas says that God is being while Whitehead says God is becoming. Do you think these are opposed or both captured with Platonism? Whiten is wrong. Being has nothing to do with
process, process ontology as Whitehead understood it. So my own outlook towards Whitehead is in a sense mixed. I owe him a great deal because he opened my eyes to bifurcation and the absolute absurdity of our scientistic Weltanschauung.
So we're totally in agreement on that. But I'm a Platonist, right down to the bone, and Whitehead certainly is not, even though he's very sympathetic to Plato, and in fact, in this book which I read when I was 14, he says that all subsequent philosophy are footnotes to Plato,
So he was very respectful of Platonism, but he was not actually in his philosophy a Platonist. There's no way of squaring his process theology with Platonism. And so I can very well understand that somebody who is a process theologist and sort of following Whitehead in that
Part of his teaching might have reservations about Dembski's theorem.
At the core of Verveki's Platonism is his ontology, which he calls the perceptual promise that reality is inexhaustibly intelligible. He has a Taoist definition of reality, calling it the ground of being, which itself cannot be a being, but is rather the unintelligible ground which all being comes into being. Western religions rather consider reality to be the supreme being, an inexhaustible sentience. Whereas Saint Maximus joined these saying God is both being and non-being.
What do you think about these different ways of describing reality? Well, I think Saint Maximus was basically right. There is in Christianity a tradition, let's see, what is it called? It corresponds to Advaita Vedanta in the sense that
It emphasizes the transcendence of God to an extreme. But there is also in Christianity a tradition which is based upon the immanence of God. So God is both absolutely transcendent and absolutely immanent whether we can grasp that or not.
I have some mathematical questions, and one of them is, in differential geometry, there's some results by Radin and Moyes, or the Radin-Moyse theorems. It says the amount of differentiable structures that can be placed on dimension 1, 2, and 3 is actually just 1, up to diffeomorphism, and then from 5, 6, and onward, it's finite. It's large, but it's still finite.
Dimension 4 is uncountably infinite, not even infinite, it's uncountably infinite. I haven't heard many people talk about this and I wonder if that's related to space-time being four-dimensional. Very interesting. You must realize that I got interested in
differential geometry after I took my PhD. My doctoral dissertation was simply a matter of an existence theorem for solutions of differential equations and a convergence theorem for some process of approximation. So it was very, very classical and then what happened was this.
I knew that my profession was going to be a professor of mathematics, so I knew that I would have to earn my living, so to speak, by proving mathematical theorems. Now, I didn't want to go into any field that other people had already worked in, because I didn't want to be obligated to read hundreds of papers in the literature.
In other words, to me mathematics was just a job, my main interest was elsewhere. So I developed a subject in mathematics which when I started was completely unexplored, the theory of submersions. And I'll tell you what that is, if you have an n-dimensional space and an n plus p-dimensional larger space,
And you have a differentiable map from the big space to the little space, which is everywhere of maximal rank. This is called a submersion. And what it does is, it slices the big manifold. We're talking differentiable manifold. We're slicing the big manifold into P-dimensional sub-manifolds.
And so this defines a subject, and I think I was the first mathematician to systematically study submersions. And when I started, I was practically the man who was building it up from nothing. And I wrote
about 23 papers on submersions. In each paper it made a contribution so that by the time I was finished after, I don't know, 30 years of being a professor of mathematics, by the time I was finished the series of submersions was on the record. It became a recognized
discipline in mathematics and you know the funny thing is I belong now to something called academia and whenever my name is mentioned anywhere in the journal literature they give me the actual quotation and so by as of this morning
During the last year or so, my name was mentioned 210 times. Okay, so that's one thing. But the interesting thing is that about 10% of these mentions go back to my mathematical days. In other words, along with my recent books and all of that, mention is made
so less frequently, of my articles on submersions. So by now submersions is a mathematical discipline which is of interest in universities all over the world. So there are people, so my old papers that go back 60 years ago are being cited in the mathematical literature because
Submersions, as I say, is one of the accepted domains of research now. John Byas, who's a physicist, a mathematician, he has a paper on categories and smooth maps, and he references you, and then I saw that paper and it was the D'Rom's theorem on general spaces. Yeah, right, right. It's one of my 23 papers. Anyhow, the point is, I looked at mathematics
as earning my living. In other words, my actual interest was in Platonism and Whitehead and so on and so forth in philosophical things. But we all have to earn our living and it earned me a good living. It didn't take much time. Most of my time was free.
Sir, it's been a pleasure. It's been more than a pleasure. Thank you so much for not only speaking with me for this long but inviting me to your home and inviting me out to dinner as well, which we'll get to shortly. Thank you. Well, I can tell you frankly that when I first heard about you and you to our friend Brian,
And I began to look you up on the internet and see what you're all about. I became tremendously eager to meet you because I felt that we might really have a lot to say to each other. And so far I feel that I was on track. I mean, your background and mine are so different in many ways. Still,
have common interests and in fact I would say that fundamentally you and I are very much interested in the same questions. We come perhaps from somewhat different directions, you know much more about what's really going on in the technical world
I'm so happy that you came and I'm looking forward to having another couple of days at least to exchange ideas. And I'm very happy that you have some Indian blood because as you know I have the highest regard for the Vedic tradition. Well, something we can speak about later is that generally in our culture we don't have high regard for virtually anything.
Yeah, yeah, isn't it true? Okay. Okay.
That was a far-reaching, fantastic conversation. Thank you for watching for four hours now. This is a reminder that on Toll, on theories of everything, we recently published two videos that I think you'd like. One is called Kurt Plays Everything, which is a video of me playing a video game that envelops the themes of Toll, namely the consciousness, philosophical, metaphysical themes. Also, there's a part one of a debate that I was lucky enough to host with Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and Susan Schneider. Both are linked in the description.
And there are so many more plans for the future. For instance, we're going to be delving deep into artificial intelligence. We're going to be bringing lectures, actual lectures, to the fore. That's coming up shortly with the Mind and Machines conference with Susan Schneider. Also, I just wanted to thank you for watching, for listening. Your viewership, your financial support helps Toe. It wouldn't be, Toe wouldn't exist without your viewership slash your sponsorship slash your support. You may not know it, but it's a tremendous,
Thank you so much. Every dollar, every comment, every like, every subscribe, every Twitter share helps tremendously. Thank you. Thank you so much and take care.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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{
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines."
},
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
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"text": " The Vedic union with God and the Christian union with God are totally different and in fact in a sense they are opposite."
},
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"text": " With this knowledge comes power."
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"text": " In this conversation we cover interpretations of quantum mechanics, the distinction between corporeal and physical reality, vertical causation, and irreducible wholeness. Wolfgang Smith is a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher of science, who draws heavily from pre-modern ontology. He obtained his bachelor's in Columbia in physics, mathematics, and philosophy simultaneously by the time he was 18. Now that's unheard of. Wolfgang was a mathematics professor at UCLA as well as MIT, publishing research in the field of differential geometry. Then he worked"
},
{
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"start_time": 142.995,
"text": " It's good to meet you, Professor."
},
{
"end_time": 197.517,
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"start_time": 168.729,
"text": " Yes, I've been looking forward to that. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. So have I. I'm going to begin by reading a poem. If all the good people were clever, and all the clever people were good, the world would be nicer than ever we thought it possibly could. But somehow, to seldom or never, the two hit it off as they should. The good are so harsh to the clever, the clever so rude to the good."
},
{
"end_time": 226.186,
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"start_time": 198.2,
"text": " So friends, let it be our endeavor To make each by each understood For few can be good like the clever Or clever so well as the good I like that Why do you like that? First of all, I don't remember that this has ever been said And I think it needs to be said What about that do you feel like applies to our age?"
},
{
"end_time": 259.36,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 229.36,
"text": " I think it applies really to every age, maybe more so to our age because our age is in very great need of wisdom. We have all sorts of things, but wisdom we are generally lacking. I hear this plenty that we were wiser in the past than we are now. Is that true? Firstly, can you define wisdom?"
},
{
"end_time": 292.841,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 263.353,
"text": " Well, I'm not sure that I can define it, but I can point out a fact about wisdom which we tend to forget nowadays. Namely, that wisdom is closely related to tradition. It is not something we invent, it is something we receive. And this is something which I think"
},
{
"end_time": 315.811,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 293.712,
"text": " is largely forgotten. In fact, we bring up our young people to believe that everything just started a little while ago and that we are essentially inventing wisdom. I don't think"
},
{
"end_time": 346.408,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 316.749,
"text": " wisdom is to be invented, it is to be received. What do you mean that people are brought up to feel like this was all started some recent time ago? What do you mean? Well, I think the typical man of today thinks of wisdom and knowledge and enlightenment as something that came about rather recently."
},
{
"end_time": 375.247,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 347.056,
"text": " He associates it with our science, our technology, our modern outlook. I strongly disagree with that and I think one of the main points I have to make is that wisdom is something that actually is not invented, it is received."
},
{
"end_time": 402.722,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 375.913,
"text": " And I think it is very, very important to realize that it cannot be received unless we bring a certain humility. And in fact, as I like to say, we need to approach this with folded hands. I'm not sure that everyone today understands what I mean by that, but I think most people do."
},
{
"end_time": 429.019,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 403.166,
"text": " You mean to say that most people nowadays think that proper morality came about from the Enlightenment and prior to that we were backward and religious and irrational? I don't know what percentage of people today believe that, but I know one thing that practically all our educational systems are geared to that message."
},
{
"end_time": 459.616,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 431.732,
"text": " Many people no doubt are wise enough not to pay that much attention to it, to what our schools and universities transmit in that regard, but this is indeed the thrust of modern education. Start from scratch, science is the key to everything and in this regard it all started"
},
{
"end_time": 486.988,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 459.906,
"text": " in the 20th century, if you will, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics. Can you tell us about how you got started in physics as well as started in philosophy? Well, it clearly began at the age of 14. Somehow I got a hold of a very important book by Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World."
},
{
"end_time": 513.677,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 487.688,
"text": " And I read this book with great interest and so much so that I became absorbed in it. I remember there were times when my mother called me down for dinner and I would say, I can't come now, I'm thinking. So this is an indication that it not only interested me,"
},
{
"end_time": 539.991,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 513.968,
"text": " but I felt somehow fascinated by these questions. And after reading a few popular science books, I think for a while there I was spellbound by what I would now call the scientific worldview, which"
},
{
"end_time": 567.739,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 541.527,
"text": " made a lot of sense to me at that time and I accepted it as a true outlook on the cosmos. But I wasn't satisfied with this, I wanted to go deeper and so I applied to"
},
{
"end_time": 596.817,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 568.268,
"text": " Cornell University when I was just starting the age of 15 and I remember to this day that the application form asked the question what do you want to major in and why and I answered that"
},
{
"end_time": 625.572,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 597.363,
"text": " I want to major in physics because I believe that physics is the key to the understanding of the universe. And so this shows that somehow interesting myself in physics is natural to me. This is just how I'm constituted. And so I entered"
},
{
"end_time": 652.841,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 626.067,
"text": " Cornell University when I was 15 and I majored in physics, mathematics and philosophy. And I think I was equally interested in all these subjects, in all three of these subjects I should say. And in a sense they were three aspects of the same enigma."
},
{
"end_time": 680.162,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 654.104,
"text": " And let me say that it did not take long before I was terribly disappointed in what I encountered at Cornell University. I was disappointed in the professors, I was disappointed in what they taught me, because somehow I felt that"
},
{
"end_time": 709.121,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 681.152,
"text": " There was not enough seriousness. It was specialization and I didn't feel at home with these people. So by the time I graduated from Cornell at age 18, I was very, very disillusioned with the universities. Somehow I had"
},
{
"end_time": 737.961,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 709.735,
"text": " a conception of wisdom which was something entirely different from the professionalism I found at Cornell University. And I should mention that when I graduated, I was offered a three-year fellowship in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell."
},
{
"end_time": 764.582,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 738.353,
"text": " so I could have gone on there for my PhD in philosophy and in point of fact I accepted this and started out on a doctoral program in philosophy and if you can imagine after three weeks I was so disappointed and felt so out of"
},
{
"end_time": 793.848,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 764.923,
"text": " harmony with the presiding spirit there that I went to the head of the philosophy department and told him I have not yet touched any any money I am quitting and he asked me what are you going to do I said I'm going to the state of Oregon to be a lumberjack"
},
{
"end_time": 823.012,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 794.923,
"text": " And it was on my way that after communicating this decision to my brother who was studying chemical engineering at Purdue, my brother took this letter to the chairman of the physics department and said, I have this young brother, he's smart but he's a little crazy, can you do anything for him?"
},
{
"end_time": 852.21,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 823.626,
"text": " And so the professor of the head of the physics department who happened to come from Austria, my country, he said, tell your brother I want to see him Monday morning in my office. He's a graduate assistant in our department. I'm offering him that. So you see my attempt to escape from the universities did not"
},
{
"end_time": 869.872,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 852.517,
"text": " I had scarcely cut my bridges as I thought. Then, against my will, if you wish, I was called back. So I spent two years then at Cornell University getting a master's degree in physics."
},
{
"end_time": 893.729,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 871.647,
"text": " I'm very glad that I did because, as it turned out, this proved to be an important factor in my life. I received a certain basic background in contemporary physics. So your initial bachelor's was math and philosophy and then your master's was physics?"
},
{
"end_time": 917.79,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 894.172,
"text": " Well, actually I had a triple major at Cornell. I majored in physics, mathematics and philosophy. And I liked all three subjects very much. What aspect of physics did you do your masters in? Did you specialize? It was in quantum theory. What aspect of quantum theory? Well, this was way back in"
},
{
"end_time": 946.664,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 919.053,
"text": " 1948 to 1950, these are the two years I spent at Cornell. It was basic quantum theory and incidentally we had very good professors because this was immediately after the war and a lot of top professors from Europe came to the United States and at Purdue at that time many of the senior professors were from Germany."
},
{
"end_time": 974.531,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 947.5,
"text": " And in fact, the head of the department, his name was Lach Horowitz, he came from Vienna, my own hometown. So why don't you explain to the audience and myself what is the measurement problem? Well, the measurement problem is something very, very interesting. As most people know, I'm sure the world,"
},
{
"end_time": 1001.118,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 974.821,
"text": " The physical universe as perceived in quantum mechanics is something utterly different from the physical world as we normally know it and think of it. And so a physical system in the eyes of quantum mechanics is described by so-called wave function."
},
{
"end_time": 1023.422,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1001.869,
"text": " Suppose you have the simplest system possible, a single particle. The wave function description of that particle will give a certain probability that the particle is just about anywhere in the universe. It is not at any particular point, in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 1050.691,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1023.729,
"text": " in reference to certain experiments, it can in fact multi-locate, it can pass through two slits at the same time. So in short, the world as seen in quantum mechanics is something utterly different from the world that we perceive in ordinary life and the world as described also in classical physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1078.251,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1051.357,
"text": " So the transition between quantum mechanics and classical physics takes place in the act of measurement. And so you measure a quantum system and in a single instant the picture changes in place of a multi-locating particle"
},
{
"end_time": 1107.466,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1078.66,
"text": " described by wave function which is highly mathematical and only really the trained mathematician can understand what this wave function actually has to say. So in an instant the picture changes from the quantum mechanical to the classical which means that after measurement the particle has a definite position, a definite momentum and so on. After"
},
{
"end_time": 1131.237,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1108.183,
"text": " After measurement we find ourselves, so to speak, in the world that we normally know as a physical universe. And so what then is the measurement problem? It is simply the question, how does this miracle take place? And leading physicists have"
},
{
"end_time": 1159.053,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1131.664,
"text": " I've been thinking about this problem ever since quantum mechanics really was discovered, 1926 to be exact. But when it comes right down to it, no one has given us the answer. I mean it remains an open question. And so in 1995, I think it was,"
},
{
"end_time": 1189.138,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1159.616,
"text": " became interested in that problem and I wanted to find a solution. And after considerable thinking and research and reading, I put it all together and wrote a book called The Quantum Enigma. And in this Quantum Enigma I do propose a solution."
},
{
"end_time": 1217.193,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1189.445,
"text": " And the key idea, there are really two key ideas. The first key idea is that we need to distinguish between the physical universe, which is the universe as conceived by the classical physicist, and what I call the corporeal world,"
},
{
"end_time": 1245.657,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1218.046,
"text": " which is something much richer. The difference between the physical universe and the corporeal world is basically that the corporeal world is perceivable, which means that in addition to quantities, it owns qualities, for example color,"
},
{
"end_time": 1272.927,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1246.63,
"text": " So I postulated that color is not just a thing of the mind, it is actually a quality pertaining to the corporeal world. So the physical universe then is a corporeal world as conceived by the physicist."
},
{
"end_time": 1303.131,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1273.507,
"text": " So in passing from the corporeal world to the physical, something is lost. And I recognize this all, I introduce the formalism. So with every corporeal object x, I associate a physical object, which I call Sx, and so there is actually a kind of function from x to Sx."
},
{
"end_time": 1331.852,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1303.66,
"text": " because x determines Sx. So this was the first idea, the distinction between the corporeal world and the physical. And having made this distinction, you still have a problem left. How namely does this transition take place? Because in the act of measurement,"
},
{
"end_time": 1362.073,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1332.415,
"text": " There is a passage from the physical to the corporeal. The quantum system, the wave function, describes the physical, pertains to the physical universe, and after the measurement is made, you are actually in the corporeal world because"
},
{
"end_time": 1388.626,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1362.688,
"text": " you couldn't have a measurement if the result of the measurement were not perceptible. So you end up with a pointer pointing to a certain location on a scale and you visibly read off the measurement. So measurement is a transition from the physical to the corporeal"
},
{
"end_time": 1411.664,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1389.053,
"text": " And it is quite easy to understand rigorously that this transition cannot take place through the causation known to physics. So the causation known to physics is what I call horizontal causation and it is affected by a process taking place in time."
},
{
"end_time": 1441.578,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1414.531,
"text": " On the other hand, the transition from the physical to the corporeal plane, well, I just explained it cannot be understood on the basis of horizontal causation, so a different mode of causation is required, as this mode I call vertical causation."
},
{
"end_time": 1464.684,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1443.49,
"text": " It is easy to see on ontological grounds. I mean, we're outside the domain of physics. You can't write an equation for vertical causation. You can't even talk of it as a physicist without introducing some other notion."
},
{
"end_time": 1493.319,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1465.316,
"text": " So this is what I called vertical causation and the defining characteristic of vertical causation is the fact that it does not take place in time. In other words, it is instantaneous. I think it will be of interest to put in a little bit of a comment at this point."
},
{
"end_time": 1523.848,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1494.804,
"text": " because many people know that the Nobel Prize in Physics issued in 2022 dealt with a certain question relating to quantum theory on one side and relativity on the other and one has known for quite a while"
},
{
"end_time": 1553.848,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1524.292,
"text": " that the two cannot both be true. Now, the Nobel Prize of 2022 was issued for, I think, three experiments which actually were able to decide which of the two theories is true. And we know they can't both be true. There's something called the Bell Inequalities and"
},
{
"end_time": 1583.899,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1554.258,
"text": " Quantum mechanics says the results will be on this side of an inequality. Einsteinian physics says the result will be on the other side of the inequality. So these experiments actually decided between the two issues and the winner was quantum theory. And now what does this have to do with vertical causation? The answer is everything. Because"
},
{
"end_time": 1611.766,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1584.718,
"text": " The point at issue in these experiments, therefore in the Nobel Prize, was whether a physical effect can be transmitted instantaneously, in other words faster than the speed of light. Relativity theory says no."
},
{
"end_time": 1638.302,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1612.517,
"text": " Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics says yes. When you make a measurement on a particle which is entangled, every particle entangled with this one will be instantly affected."
},
{
"end_time": 1667.585,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1638.916,
"text": " So there's a clear incompatibility here between classical physics and Einstein relativity on one side and quantum theory on the other and so as I said quantum theory won and the implication is that classical physics"
},
{
"end_time": 1698.558,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1668.677,
"text": " in its Einsteinian mode is contradicted. Very interesting that I think this has to do with the fact that they waited such a very long time to issue that Nobel Prize, I think what, more than 30 years they waited. And I think the reason is that this is a very hot potato."
},
{
"end_time": 1723.387,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1699.616,
"text": " By saying that quantum theory won and relativity theory lost, you're stepping on a lot of toes. It's a very sensitive matter, but quantum theory did win, and the Nobel Prize acknowledges that, and incidentally"
},
{
"end_time": 1751.305,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1723.797,
"text": " What does that have to do with vertical causation? The answer again is everything because it was really vertical causation that was at issue here. Whether there is a causality that acts instantaneously as quantum mechanics demands or whether Einstein was right that no causation"
},
{
"end_time": 1779.821,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1752.108,
"text": " Ladies and gentlemen, gather around for a lesson in the mathematics of slumber. Are you aware of the remarkable correlation between a comfortable temperature at night and the quality of one's sleep? It's no secret that better sleep leads to greater fitness and increased productivity at work, even improved parenting such as patience, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 1805.947,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1779.821,
"text": " With Miracle-Made sheets, you can bask in the wonders of self-cooling temperature regulation, which has been proven to enhance sleep quality by a substantial 34%. Inspired by the silver-infused fabrics developed by NASA, Miracle-Made has harnessed this innovative technology to provide you with a peaceful and uninterrupted night's sleep. Hey, let us not forget the unhygienic conditions often present in traditional bedding."
},
{
"end_time": 1827.551,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1805.947,
"text": " Which, according to some studies, have been known to harbor more bacteria than a toilet seat. Miracle Maid offers a range of self-cleaning and eco-friendly bedding, preventing 99% of bacteria and requiring three times less laundry. And hello to luxurious comfort and quality. Experience a healthy, cleaner, and more rejuvenating sleep with Miracle Maid Sheets."
},
{
"end_time": 1853.422,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1827.551,
"text": " My wife and I both prioritize quality sleep and Miracle Made Sheets help make sleeping one of the highlights of our day or more specifically our night. Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made. Go to trymiraclemade.com slash everything and use the code EVERYTHING to claim your free three-piece towel set and save over 40% off. Again, that's trymiracle.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 1884.616,
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"start_time": 1854.616,
"text": " Henson Shaving is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover. And now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. So here's a personal story. I gave the razor to Sam who's working behind the scenes here at the Toe podcast. I didn't tell him who it was from. I just said, do you need a razor? He said, sure. Then I asked him, hey, how was that razor? The next couple of days later, he's like, Kurt, that is the best razor I have ever used."
},
{
"end_time": 1912.671,
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"text": " And then I said, by the way, that's a sponsor, Henson. And he said, that is fantastic. And he looked it up and they're an aerospace engineering company. So that's an aside story. That's a true story. It's packaged extremely carefully. The handle looks beautiful. The assembly takes 10 seconds and the blade is as precise as I've ever seen in a commercial razor. By using aerospace grade CNC machines, Henson makes metal razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair."
},
{
"end_time": 1923.507,
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"text": " That means it's a secure and stable blade with no vibrations. So the razor has built-in channels and it evacuates hair and cream which makes clogging virtually impossible. You blow it out and it's cleared."
},
{
"end_time": 1952.483,
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"text": " That's what she said. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. And it's extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free."
},
{
"end_time": 1978.524,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1952.483,
"text": " You'll hear that in quantum entanglement. Sure, something is transmitted instantaneously, but you can't use it to send information, and so special relativity says no information can be sent. What do you say to that?"
},
{
"end_time": 2007.483,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1979.65,
"text": " Well, I tend to think ontologically, and ontologically there's no problem. According to quantum theory, there are effects which operate instantaneously."
},
{
"end_time": 2035.316,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2008.114,
"text": " From an ontological point of view, this settles the matter. There's a clear contradiction here with relativity theory. So, from this point of view, from an ontological point of view, the matter is settled. Quantum theory is true, at least in this particular experiment,"
},
{
"end_time": 2066.237,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2036.323,
"text": " came out in favor of quantum theory, there's no question about that. Einstein was very very concerned about this point because he realized that the theory which it was his life's work to develop hinges upon the outcome of this experiment and what is in a sense ironic"
},
{
"end_time": 2095.759,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2066.766,
"text": " It was Einstein himself who first conceived the basic structure of this experiment. And he did so because he was hoping at least that this would empirically vindicate his theory with a V quantum mechanics. So in connection with this result,"
},
{
"end_time": 2121.886,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2097.739,
"text": " I would like to point out something which is very closely related to what we're talking about here. My own approach to philosophy has always been instinctively Platonist. I became interested in Platonism at a very early age."
},
{
"end_time": 2151.51,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2122.073,
"text": " And I never really wavered in this regard. Something in me recognized this as the true ontology. Now, when you study Platonism very, very carefully, you discover that the Platonist, Weltanschaum, conceives of the cosmos as inherently tripartite."
},
{
"end_time": 2180.742,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2153.626,
"text": " The three planes, if you want to put it that way, are firstly what I call the avid tunnel plane, which is a domain which is subject neither to space nor to time. And this is really where reality comes from. Reality emanates from that domain."
},
{
"end_time": 2205.35,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2182.534,
"text": " And the second domain, which I call the, the Platonists call it the psychic domain, I call it the intermediary. So the psychic domain is subject to time, but not to space. And incidentally,"
},
{
"end_time": 2234.923,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2205.725,
"text": " I'm convinced that this is integral Platonism, but I've never in any Platonist or Neoplatonist document read this interpretation. I doubt not that all the real Platonists understood this very well, but it is of interest that, for whatever reason, I don't think it has been explicitly stated."
},
{
"end_time": 2266.476,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2237.688,
"text": " And then the third domain I call the corporeal, this is the world in which we normally find ourselves. That domain is obviously subject to time but not to space. Excuse me, both time and space. So this is the basic tripartite ontology associated with Platonism. Now let me just mention"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.613,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2267.09,
"text": " For the record that I think many people will be interested to know that this tripartite ontology is also found in the Vedic tradition, which is by far the oldest tradition in the world. It antecedes all others, including the Judeo-Christian which came much later."
},
{
"end_time": 2325.947,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2298.865,
"text": " This tripartite ontology underlies both the Vedic and the Platonist traditions. Let me say first of all, I find it very fascinating that the mere existence of this intermediary level implies"
},
{
"end_time": 2356.374,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2326.425,
"text": " the falsity of relativistic physics. It is absolutely clear and beyond dispute because according to relativistic physics there is no time and there is no space. There is only a space-time and the fact that there is a time-only realm obviously contradicts that assumption."
},
{
"end_time": 2384.411,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2356.732,
"text": " I was very fascinated to discover that both the Vedic and the Platonist ontology disproves all of relativistic physics at one stroke. Incidentally, regarding the intermediary or psychic realm, let me point out"
},
{
"end_time": 2412.944,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2385.435,
"text": " Even though nobody in the western world knows these things now, because we are all into the scientific, quote unquote, scientific way of looking at things. So even though we don't know about it, we spend a part of our life, our conscious life in that domain, namely we enter that, we are in that domain whenever we dream."
},
{
"end_time": 2439.514,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2413.695,
"text": " The dream state is we enter the dream state when we dream. The dream state is which one? The intermediary. In the dreams there is no space? The space in the dream state is not real. It's a kind of a hallucination and you can easily prove that because"
},
{
"end_time": 2465.145,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2441.732,
"text": " Whereas the time that we experience in the dream state coincides with our temporal time. I mean for example I think everyone has experienced being awakened in the middle of a dream and the point is the moment of awakening you can identify in the dream. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2495.64,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2466.169,
"text": " The time in the dream state is none other than the time of the waking state. But the space that you experience in the dream state proves to be unreal. In the dream you may see a castle on a three-dimensional thing and the instant you wake up you realize that there never was such a thing, meaning this belonged to the dream state but not to the corporeal."
},
{
"end_time": 2526.067,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2496.442,
"text": " So there is a rigorous, precise ontological distinction between the three states. You may say, well, what about the eternal state? It is true that we normally do not experience that. We do not experience it in the waking state. We do not experience it in the dream state."
},
{
"end_time": 2549.445,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2526.305,
"text": " And this is exactly where these yogic traditions enter the picture. In other words, to enter the eternal state is not given to the ordinary human being. It is something that can be acquired, but at a great cost."
},
{
"end_time": 2579.224,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2550.247,
"text": " As everyone that has any acquaintance with these domains knows very well, it is after a lifetime of endeavor, under the guidance of someone who has himself received that from a master, if you're lucky, you can do that. It's a great achievement and it turns out"
},
{
"end_time": 2606.664,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2580.299,
"text": " that this has not only been always the chief goal, as it were, in the Vedic tradition, but the same is true in the Platonist. And let me mention that this is something I did not know until very, very recently when I came across"
},
{
"end_time": 2636.408,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2606.988,
"text": " some writings by an 18th century British Platonist known as Thomas Taylor, who for some unknowable reason strikes me as a perfect insider of the Platonist tradition. How that is to be explained is totally beyond my comprehension, but I have no doubt"
},
{
"end_time": 2657.005,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2636.544,
"text": " The Thomas Taylor knows very well what he is talking about when he gives a so to speak an inside view of the Platonist tradition and it turns out that the Platonist tradition is"
},
{
"end_time": 2685.794,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2657.568,
"text": " identical to the Pythagorean. In fact it comes from the Pythagorean. If you will, Plato was a distant disciple of Pythagoras. And now what we learn from Thomas Taylor is that Pythagoras as a young man traveled to Egypt and actually became a disciple of an Egyptian master. And"
},
{
"end_time": 2710.759,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2685.998,
"text": " Thomas Taylor, where he gets this information from, I don't know. Undoubtedly, there are sources. But what I recognized immediately is that from the description that Thomas Taylor gives us of the life of these disciples, when I read this,"
},
{
"end_time": 2741.596,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2711.8,
"text": " I said to myself, my God, this is what I witnessed when 50 years ago I traveled in India and lived amongst real sadhus. That's how they live. So this explains the correspondence between the Pythagorean Platonist tradition on the one side and the Vedic on the other. In a sense, they are the same tradition."
},
{
"end_time": 2771.954,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2742.739,
"text": " However, there is a very decisive feature of the Pythagorean Platonist tradition, which, so far as I know, simply does not exist in the Vedic. What is that? It is the rule of geometry. Geometry in the hands of the Pythagoreans and Platonists was an instrument"
},
{
"end_time": 2800.708,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2772.637,
"text": " which enabled the practicing yogi to ascend from the psychic to the eternal plane and conceptually we can see how this is possible because geometry as a subject studied in our schools for example"
},
{
"end_time": 2826.715,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2801.101,
"text": " pertains to the psychic realm. It's the realm of thought, of consciousness. But the truth of geometry, what it really deals with, pertains to the eternal plan. After all, when you prove a theorem, you prove a theorem, and the theorem is something that is eternal."
},
{
"end_time": 2856.22,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2827.346,
"text": " And in fact, geometry derives from the Ave eternal plane, because what we experience, if you will, on the psychic realm, comes from the Ave eternal. If there were not an Ave eternal geometry, there could be no geometry as we understand it. So the Greeks,"
},
{
"end_time": 2878.387,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2856.766,
"text": " Pythagoreans, first of all, understood this very well and realized that because geometry does come from the avid tunnel and what it essentially asserts pertains to the avid tunnel, it can be used as an instrument to actually ascend from the psychic level"
},
{
"end_time": 2909.224,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2879.292,
"text": " With this kind of, I mean our discussion right now, even though it involves the corporeal, actually takes place on the psychic. There is no geometry running around here on the corporeal plane. We're talking about something on the psychic level and the crucial point is, and this is what the Pythagoreans and the Platonists understood so well, the point is that because"
},
{
"end_time": 2937.739,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2909.787,
"text": " Geometry derives from the eternal realm. It is in principle possible to use geometry to ascend from the psychic to the soul. This is very easy to say, but as I indicated a moment ago, the actual accomplishment of this is a lifetime's task."
},
{
"end_time": 2959.155,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2938.422,
"text": " And incidentally we're talking here, an authentic spiritual tradition is nothing that you can access on your own. It entails discipleship. And this is vital. I found in India when I was traveling there half a century ago,"
},
{
"end_time": 2986.971,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2959.787,
"text": " Every fourteen-year-old Brahmin boy would understand this very well, simply known. Here in the West it is almost totally unknown. But the fact is, if you want to ascend to the eternal plane, you have to become a disciple of someone who was himself a disciple. And incidentally,"
},
{
"end_time": 3014.087,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2987.278,
"text": " both in the Vedic tradition and in the Pythagorean Platonist, it is well understood that this path calls for lifelong celibacy. So in India, I noticed this, as I say, every 14-year-old Brahmin boy understands, if you want to ascend this path,"
},
{
"end_time": 3043.234,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3014.787,
"text": " it will cost you lifelong celibacy and the writings of Thomas Taylor confirm that such was the case in the Pythagorean tradition and undoubtedly also in the Platonist. Incidentally, what I have said so far gives you the key to understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 3073.336,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3043.541,
"text": " a very mysterious inscription which reputedly was inscribed over the portal of the Plato Platonic Academy. In English it says, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. So we understand this now in a different way."
},
{
"end_time": 3101.937,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3074.275,
"text": " because actually no one ignorant of Geometry can enter here if entering means to access the Ave eternal plane. So the modus operandi used in the Pythagorean Platonist tradition which comes from the Egyptian differs from the Vedic"
},
{
"end_time": 3131.869,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3102.619,
"text": " in the sense that the means of access were different. Of course they had the common elements of celibacy and this incredible practice. You know when I lived among sadhus in India about fifty years ago, I was amazed that"
},
{
"end_time": 3161.647,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3132.466,
"text": " These men spend a good twenty hours a day in other states, in higher states. If you were to put a knife in their flesh while they are in these states, there would be no reaction because they are no longer in this body. And so I also realized then when they did"
},
{
"end_time": 3188.131,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3162.056,
"text": " come to know consciousness I could talk with them and it was as you can imagine absolutely fascinating to me to talk to someone who has just been somewhere that our wisest men in the contemporary West know nothing about I mean we know nothing even about the intermediaries plate"
},
{
"end_time": 3211.032,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3188.626,
"text": " Go to Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. I guarantee that there's not a single person there, unless he happens to have read the books that I have read, knows about that. And incidentally, in India, just about everyone knows about these things. In fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 3240.589,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3211.544,
"text": " these three states. When you talk to an educated Hindu in my day, you could converse with him about the so-called Tribhuvana. I talked to people who were businessmen and we could talk about the Tribhuvana. It was in their tradition. Tribhuvana is just a Sanskrit word meaning three worlds. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3273.046,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3243.268,
"text": " After this trip to India, the first trip, I realized how ignorant we are in the West. I mean, we know a little piece of the world. We don't even know about the existence of the intermediary world, which we actually enter just about every day in the dream state. And let me in this connection tell you something which illustrates what I'm talking about here, namely the fact"
},
{
"end_time": 3300.179,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3273.473,
"text": " that fifty years ago and probably doesn't exist anymore, but at that time there was this remarkable knowledge among even ordinary people in India. So, on my first trip to India, I think I landed in New Delhi and"
},
{
"end_time": 3329.172,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3301.476,
"text": " took a room in a hotel and that first evening I had some telephone conversations and I was very very happy to learn that someone whom I had great admiration for was going to arrive in New Delhi the next day by train at 11 o'clock. So I was very very happy about that"
},
{
"end_time": 3356.698,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3329.667,
"text": " and just took a stroll in the city and went to Old Delhi and on my return to the hotel I was accosted by, I guess you could call him a fakir. That means a person who has a little bit of knowledge of yoga but not all that much. And this fakir accosted me out of the blue"
},
{
"end_time": 3386.186,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3357.517,
"text": " says, very lucky man. So he says, oh yeah, he says, very lucky man, tomorrow at 11 o'clock something good will happen. Well, no one in New Delhi, besides myself, knew about this tomorrow 11 o'clock, which is really something that elated me."
},
{
"end_time": 3414.445,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3386.8,
"text": " And so I must have been thinking about it deeply. So this fakir somehow picked that up out of thin air. Well, this fact, of course, interested me. So I went to a nearby garden with him to see what he can have to say. And so he gave me a piece of paper and he said, look at it. So I saw it was blank."
},
{
"end_time": 3443.183,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3415.043,
"text": " Then he says, please fold it and hold it in your hand. So I did, I held this paper. And then he said, all right, now think of a number between 1 and 100. So I thought of a number, I think it was 36. And then he says, all right, now open your hand and look at the paper. And on this paper was written 36."
},
{
"end_time": 3469.514,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3444.224,
"text": " So I gave him something, but on my way home to the hotel, I brooded on this. What's going on? And I think I figured it out. The fact that he talked to me, accosted me,"
},
{
"end_time": 3496.203,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3469.991,
"text": " in reference to something good that would happen tomorrow at 11 o'clock. This was clearly a case of telepathy. I mean, he was able to read my mind. So then, what about the 36, that number? Well, I eventually did figure that out too. There is something called invisible ink."
},
{
"end_time": 3526.971,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3497.005,
"text": " And so that number must have been written in invisible ink, and it became visible when I held this in my hands. Meanwhile, he puts that number into my mind. So there were two, for us, supernatural powers that he had. A, to read someone else's mind, and B, to put something into someone else's mind."
},
{
"end_time": 3556.852,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3528.012,
"text": " So here, the first day in India, I by chance encountered a fakir who had these two powers and he could demonstrate that to me. Now why do I speak of fakir? Well, clearly these are yogic powers and you cannot acquire them just out of books."
},
{
"end_time": 3585.247,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3557.927,
"text": " Absolutely not. So this man had a guru. He was a disciple or someone who was enough for a yogi to possess these two powers and therefore he could transmit it to his disciple. All this doesn't come on the cheap. This fakir must have"
},
{
"end_time": 3613.439,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3586.032,
"text": " spent maybe two, three years, I don't know, a certain period of time as a disciple, subject to a very disciplined kind of life, to acquire these powers. So why do we call him a Fakir, which is a somewhat derogatory term? How do you spell that, by the way? F-A-T-I-R. And, as I understand it,"
},
{
"end_time": 3641.22,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3614.104,
"text": " A fakir is someone who has a certain knowledge of yoga, not a very high knowledge, but a certain knowledge just the same, and who instead of going on, I mean ideally yoga is given to us in order to go all the way, but there is a possibility that at various stages you stop."
},
{
"end_time": 3666.442,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3641.852,
"text": " and utilize this knowledge and it can be utilized in many ways you can become a millionaire if you play your cards right I mean this knowledge is knowledge of a very unusual kind so the word fakir as I understand it refers to these yogis who instead of going on"
},
{
"end_time": 3677.619,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3666.92,
"text": " In a certain, at a certain level, use this half-knowledge that they have for pecuniary purposes. That's all right."
},
{
"end_time": 3705.469,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3678.234,
"text": " But it was so interesting. My first day in India, I learned things which here in the West hardly anyone knows. As I said, if we were to go to the Institute for Advanced Studies, I don't think you would find anyone there who has a ghost of an idea about these things. And yet it's real and it's in a way science. It's a higher science than what we possess."
},
{
"end_time": 3735.401,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3706.34,
"text": " because our sciences actually, our physical science doesn't even reach up to the corporeal level. This is why I had to introduce it. I had to distinguish between X and Sx and that was one of the two keys to the resolution of the measurement problem. The reason that top physicists have not been able to solve the problem to this day is that the"
},
{
"end_time": 3762.568,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3735.794,
"text": " The ontology of physics doesn't suffice. If there were only a physical domain and no corporeal domain which is higher than that, there could be no measurement. So I think I have made the point in light of my contact with India"
},
{
"end_time": 3779.155,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3763.37,
"text": " that there are things between heaven and earth that our sciences here in the west, our contemporary sciences, don't know anything about. But would you agree, Brian, with my point"
},
{
"end_time": 3809.531,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3779.582,
"text": " that these things are there in the quantum world, but in potency you need to understand quantum mechanics, you do need the Aristotelian distinction between potency and act. And in fact Heisenberg understood this almost immediately when he said that so-called quantum particles"
},
{
"end_time": 3838.592,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3809.889,
"text": " are not real particles, they are potentiae. They become real particles precisely when they interact with a corporeal instrument, and as I show in my latest book on physics, the point of it is that the reality comes from the corporeal level. In other words, the reason"
},
{
"end_time": 3868.234,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3839.377,
"text": " Quantum physics, the reason quantum physics deals with entities that in a sense do not exist is because classical physics is sub corporeal. I mean, this little entity is corporeal, but when the physicist looks at it,"
},
{
"end_time": 3897.21,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3868.78,
"text": " It becomes physical. In other words, he sees it as a physical entity and as a physical entity it still has being because the physical coaster receives its being from the corporeal. Is the Sx a subset of X or is it a different domain? It's a different domain. It's not a subset. It is something"
},
{
"end_time": 3916.152,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3899.036,
"text": " You might say it's a physicist's way of comprehending X, but the point that I'm making is that the reality comes from the corporeal. It's the complete opposite of what contemporary scientists tend to believe."
},
{
"end_time": 3945.128,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3916.459,
"text": " Contemporary scientists tend to believe that the reality that we encounter here on the corporeal level derives ultimately from the particulate domain, the domain of quantum theory, but the actual fact of the matter is just the opposite. There's no intermediary here. I have come to look upon physics from a rigorous"
},
{
"end_time": 3973.933,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3945.674,
"text": " Platonist ontological standpoint. And there it is very, very simple. All reality, all being comes from the aviturnal plane. So, iconically, you have a circle with a center. The center represents the aviturnal plane. The intermediary is the interior."
},
{
"end_time": 4002.09,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3974.565,
"text": " And then the corporeal is the actual circumference of that circle. I sort of taught myself to think in terms of this icon, because if you do everything becomes very simple. So all the reality, whether in the corporeal world or the physical, derives from that center. And now"
},
{
"end_time": 4030.128,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4003.643,
"text": " And how does it derive it through vertical causation? So how then is the reality of corporeal objects transmitted to the physical realm? Well, the physical realm breaks into two parts, and this is absolutely essential. You can't understand physics without that."
},
{
"end_time": 4058.541,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4030.691,
"text": " You have to make the distinction between subcorporeal physics, which is the physics of entities which derive from the corporeal level. So subcorporeal physics deals with objects Sx derived from a corporeal X. And the crucial point here is that because"
},
{
"end_time": 4087.568,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4059.087,
"text": " sub corporeal physics derives from the corporeal level it receives being which is the same as irreducible wholeness through vertical causation there's vertical causation from the corporeal level to the physical level and that is why the physical level has a reality"
},
{
"end_time": 4117.756,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4088.131,
"text": " Technically speaking it has being because that being is transmitted from the corporeal to the physical level through vertical causation. So this is the story about classical physics. Now what about quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics is the physics of the trans-corporeal. Trans-corporeal means"
},
{
"end_time": 4144.923,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4119.002,
"text": " not subcorporeal. Do you describe that as Tx? So Sx is classical physics? Yes, classical physics is a physics of physical systems Sx derived from X. But in quantum theory, strange as it obviously must be, you are dealing with"
},
{
"end_time": 4172.466,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4145.435,
"text": " entities that are physical but not derived from a corporeal entity. Now, if you think about this, and it's not quite that easy, I mean these are subtle points, because the quantum world is not sub-corporeal, it does not"
},
{
"end_time": 4198.353,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4172.978,
"text": " have its own intrinsic reality. So this is why quantum theory is so weird. This is why particles can multi-locate, for example. The answer is, in plain terms, that in itself quantum entities have no reality, have no being."
},
{
"end_time": 4229.445,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4199.787,
"text": " So how then can there be a classical physics, a quantum physics? Well, the point is that the quantum realm does not exist all by itself. It interacts with corporeal instruments in two ways. First, in its definition,"
},
{
"end_time": 4259.889,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4230.213,
"text": " A quantum theory is not just a mental thing, it has a certain reality, because by virtue of the instruments, the corporeal instruments, which define the physical system. So this already is one source which transmits reality to the non"
},
{
"end_time": 4290.538,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4261.186,
"text": " Non-reality of the quantum world conceived in isolation from the corporeal. The second way in which reality is transmitted into the quantum world from the corporeal is interactive measurement. And it is a great"
},
{
"end_time": 4319.275,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4290.93,
"text": " genius of Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg. He was the first one, the first human being in history who got a glimpse of that. He said with reference to quantum theory that physics today is not"
},
{
"end_time": 4347.858,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4321.408,
"text": " is not based upon an outside reality, but it is based upon an interplay of the observer with the observed. In other words, the quantum world comes into existence through the activity of the physicist."
},
{
"end_time": 4373.626,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4349.155,
"text": " where there are no corporeal objects acting as instruments of measurement, excuse me, I take this back, we need to distinguish between the act of defining a physical system"
},
{
"end_time": 4398.831,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4375.179,
"text": " and the act of measuring a physical system thus defined. These are two different acts, but they are both acts which come from the activity of the scientist. So the scientist gives rise to the quantum world"
},
{
"end_time": 4426.647,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4399.65,
"text": " through this interplay between the corporeal and the trans-corporeal, which he actually initiates in two ways by defining the physical system, which is done with corporeal instruments, and by measuring the physical system thus defined, which is also done with physical instruments."
},
{
"end_time": 4453.217,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4427.295,
"text": " So these are the two ways in which the physicist creates, if you will, the transcorporeal world. The transcorporeal world is not God-made, it's man-made. It's not there until you A, define the instruments, set up the instruments which define this physical system."
},
{
"end_time": 4477.193,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4454.224,
"text": " and B, then it's there in a potential sense, but that's not enough. It isn't fully there until you measure it and then you move from potency to act. So there's X, there's SX, there's the transcorporeal. Do you have a letter for that? The transcorporeal is"
},
{
"end_time": 4505.196,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4478.217,
"text": " It's misleading because the transcorporeal doesn't really exist until the physicist comes into the picture, because the transcorporeal is, so to speak, produced through the questions that the physicist gives, the physicist asks."
},
{
"end_time": 4529.565,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4506.374,
"text": " I can quote the exact words of Heisenberg. He says that the new physics is an interplay between the physicist and nature. It is not"
},
{
"end_time": 4555.776,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4529.923,
"text": " Unless there is an interplay, an interaction between the physicist and his activity and nature, there is no quantum world. There is no transcoporeal quantum world because the transcoporeal quantum world comes into play"
},
{
"end_time": 4582.142,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4556.34,
"text": " in this two-fold activity of the physicist. First, he defines a physical system, and this is done through physical instruments, through, well actually, through corporeal instruments. And having defined a physical system, the physicist is in a position to measure"
},
{
"end_time": 4603.592,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4582.534,
"text": " to make measurements on that physical system and this is again done with corporeal instruments. So it was Heisenberg who had this enormous insight right at the very beginning that with the"
},
{
"end_time": 4626.51,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4604.48,
"text": " The advent of quantum theory and entirely new physics has begun, a physics in which the physicist is no longer the onlooker, but he is also, if you will, in a way the creator of what he measures. It's a two-way street."
},
{
"end_time": 4653.097,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4628.217,
"text": " The way Arthur Eddington expressed it, he says, the mathematics isn't there till we put it there. So it was first Heisenberg, then Eddington, soon thereafter, both had the same vision of physics, and it was completely different from the classical."
},
{
"end_time": 4683.592,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4654.224,
"text": " In classical physics, you postulate that nature is out there and you are merely the spectator of what is actually out there. And when you're dealing with large ensembles of the quantum world, this physics works fine. But when you come down to smaller units, it breaks down."
},
{
"end_time": 4709.974,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4684.684,
"text": " And this is where in a sense the physicist himself creates what he measures. So does this not apply to regular people who aren't physicists? Well, we are discussing physics, so what is physics? It's what physicists do."
},
{
"end_time": 4738.746,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4711.749,
"text": " The big change from classical to quantum physics came about when Heisenberg recognized that when you are dealing with"
},
{
"end_time": 4769.002,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4740.964,
"text": " what we now call quantum system, we're dealing with something that we ourselves have in a way created. So this is why Heisenberg said that we now understand that the physicist is not simply a spectator, he is himself playing, he is in a way creating the very things that he is then measuring."
},
{
"end_time": 4791.698,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4769.838,
"text": " Because there are these two distinguishable phases of physics. There is first of all the phase where you define a physical system which you do through corporeal instruments. And having defined it, you then can measure it."
},
{
"end_time": 4818.797,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4794.019,
"text": " and this is how quantum physics comes about and the point is that in classical physics the system gains its reality through first through"
},
{
"end_time": 4848.08,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4821.715,
"text": " being defined by corporeal instruments. It's the corporeal instruments that define what the physicist is measuring and then it is secondly again corporeal instruments which actually measure the system that you have so to speak created. Are our eyes a corporeal instrument? Oh yes of course."
},
{
"end_time": 4877.5,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4850.026,
"text": " I mean I see your eyes, I see the color of the pupil and the... So you don't mean to say you go into the lab and you set up a laser and then all of a sudden quantum mechanics is created. So is this an observer, the table? Well, there are really two tables. The table of quantum physics, which is simply the Sx of this X,"
},
{
"end_time": 4904.77,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4878.183,
"text": " And then there are the quantum tables. So the Sx was the classical. Yes, that's classical. So the difference is that in quantum theory, the physicist not only describes what is out there, but in a sense he creates what is out there."
},
{
"end_time": 4932.944,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4905.589,
"text": " As Eddington said, the mathematics isn't there till we put it there. We put that mathematics there. And this is something that Heisenberg just understood as a metaphysician. What sets Heisenberg apart from all other physicists of renown is that he was the son of a classicist."
},
{
"end_time": 4960.657,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4933.643,
"text": " which means that Heisenberg was highly schooled in Plato and Aristotle and that gave him a new way of looking at things. I don't know how many other physicists have really followed Heisenberg fully in this recognition and"
},
{
"end_time": 4991.152,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4961.561,
"text": " On account of this new way of seeing what physics is, he was able to recognize that the quantum world is ontologically beneath the corporeal, beneath the physical and the physical, of course. So there are really three levels. You've got the corporeal, which is the sense-perceived world."
},
{
"end_time": 5020.043,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4991.971,
"text": " Then you have the world of classical physics, which is subcorporeal in the sense that it deals with entities Sx derived from X. So the classical physicist deals essentially with the corporeal world, but he is interested only at its quantitative aspect."
},
{
"end_time": 5050.316,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5020.52,
"text": " He closes his eyes, so to speak, to all the rest. For example, he is blind to color. And the sad thing is that it's one thing to forget about color when you put on your physics hat. It's in fact necessary. That's how physics originates from that blindness. What is sad"
},
{
"end_time": 5077.193,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5050.725,
"text": " is if you carry that blindness over to your normal life then you become a materialist and in a sense you talk nonsense and not only do you talk nonsense but you can't recognize that this is nonsense and this is more or less where the intellectual elite of the western world stands now that"
},
{
"end_time": 5105.128,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5077.517,
"text": " They take the physical universe to be real and the corporeal world is then what Descartes called the res cogitans, the thing of the mind. This is what Whitehead called bifurcation and he spent maybe 30 years of his life going around to all the universities in Europe and America"
},
{
"end_time": 5133.985,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5105.691,
"text": " trying to explain to the people how wrong this is, how actually foolish, but the strange thing is that very few people got the message and in fact anyone who tries to explain to a physicist the idea of bifurcation"
},
{
"end_time": 5164.36,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5134.428,
"text": " will to his disappointment learn that the likelihood is 99.9 that the physicist won't understand a word he's saying because this bifurcationist and therefore spurious metaphysics is so ingrained in the mind of a physicist and you know that's understandable because you can't do physics until you bifurcate."
},
{
"end_time": 5194.684,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5165.162,
"text": " It is this bifurcation that in a sense creates the physical universe and that's what the physicist is there to understand. That's what he thinks about morning noon at night until he regains a normal state of mind when again the grass is green. But while he is doing physics, the grass is not green. While he is doing physics, he is bifurcationist."
},
{
"end_time": 5224.684,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5195.845,
"text": " he's a Cartesian and so he sees only a part of the world and incidentally this is what makes the whole enterprise in a sense unwholesome because man was not put here on earth to put on blinders and actually shut off the better half"
},
{
"end_time": 5253.012,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5225.265,
"text": " of the world. What the physicist casts out by his very modus operandi is in fact the creme de la creme, I mean the world of color and sound and all these innumerable things that poets think about, I mean sing about and artists paint"
},
{
"end_time": 5282.978,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5253.677,
"text": " This is all blocked out. As soon as you put on a physics hat, this no longer exists. And what the tragedy is that many physicists, if not most, after doing physics for a good length of time, they forget that the so-called physical universe is not the whole thing. And so in a sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 5312.5,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5283.251,
"text": " They are split in two. I mean, the human part of the physicist is always there. I mean, we breathe and we feel pain and so on, might even feel love, but officially we are democratic and we know only atoms and the void. It's a terrible disease. And it's a disease which can infect not only individuals,"
},
{
"end_time": 5339.497,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5313.166,
"text": " It can affect the whole society. And this is what I have been trying to express in all my writings, that we, the modern contemporary West, are a sick society. This is not how man is meant to be. We are not hitting on all cylinders. In fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 5369.309,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5339.855,
"text": " The higher side of our nature is, as it were, excluded. It has no rights. It has no place in the public marketplace. You won't learn about it in the universities, because the message is that we've picked up the most ancient heresy in the history of the world, the philosophy of Democritus."
},
{
"end_time": 5399.804,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5371.288,
"text": " 5th century BC. Democritus said, what was it? The vulgar think of color, the bitter and the sweet. In reality, they are only atoms in the void. It's amazing, about 490 BC or something like that,"
},
{
"end_time": 5429.155,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5400.657,
"text": " Democritus came upon the scene and in a few words he epitomized the philosophy which would dominate Western civilization from the 17th century onwards. So Democritus was very soon followed by Plato and Plato completely"
},
{
"end_time": 5450.026,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5430.196,
"text": " invalidated the Democritian axiom. And all of antiquity followed in the footsteps of Plato in that regard, which means that the well-informed"
},
{
"end_time": 5478.08,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5450.299,
"text": " For 2000 years, the well-informed understood very well that this doctrine of atoms and the void is untenable. And so one can very well say that it is the oldest heresy in the world. And what we have done, beginning with people like Galileo and Descartes,"
},
{
"end_time": 5507.858,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5478.729,
"text": " We have instituted the oldest heresy in the world as the basis of our intellectual culture. And we have done so with a vengeance because the Weltanschauung, which Galileo and Descartes instituted,"
},
{
"end_time": 5537.398,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5508.217,
"text": " which as I said is a revival of the Democritian, and is thus what might be called the oldest heresy in the world, has now been baptized as the Enlightenment. So it's no wonder that we are in difficulty, because I think we can all agree"
},
{
"end_time": 5562.995,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5537.892,
"text": " that basically a certain wisdom is necessary for a good life. And on a global scale, it's in fact necessary for survival. You will not survive if your well-done shang is upside down. And that it is. So that's very simple. That's all I have to say."
},
{
"end_time": 5592.585,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5563.695,
"text": " I'm going to ask you if you have symbols for the avaturnal, the psychic, because you have X for an object in the corporeal. So is it A and is it P? For the avaturnal then the psychic is P. I just want to know about the symbology of it, like the symbols that you write down. Well the real symbology of it is what I call the cosmic icon. So this circle which entails three elements. The circle has the center, the"
},
{
"end_time": 5618.012,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5593.575,
"text": " interior and the boundary, the circumference. And so I really think that this idea of the circle, this iconic view of the circle was known to the Pythagorean and Platonists, but so far as I know"
},
{
"end_time": 5644.377,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5618.695,
"text": " There's no literary evidence to that effect. But that's how I think about it. You know, since we are tripartite, corpus animus spiritus, we also need to, as it were, understand things tripartite, in a tripartite way."
},
{
"end_time": 5672.466,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5645.282,
"text": " And so, in order to understand these things that we're talking about here, the cosmic icon really, for me, it needs to be there sort of in the background. When I talk, for example, about geometry elevating you from the psychic to the to the eternal realm,"
},
{
"end_time": 5702.637,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5672.688,
"text": " I instinctively think of it in iconic terms. So a certain visualization is almost necessary for me. So I think this is probably true for everyone. Since we are tripartite, our thinking is also in a certain sense tripartite."
},
{
"end_time": 5733.746,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5704.514,
"text": " So the iconic way of dealing with very abstract, very metaphysical things is natural because it is tripartite and we are tripartite. So I'm always skeptical of people who claim they think just rationally. I think an iconic"
},
{
"end_time": 5762.056,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5734.462,
"text": " dimension is absolutely necessary and then it becomes real and then it has power otherwise if it is otherwise it is in truth a Cartesian res cogitans and that doesn't amount to anything. Descartes has done a tremendous harm to western civilization"
},
{
"end_time": 5788.899,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5764.258,
"text": " by the fact that we have become Cartesian in our way of and this idea of the rest's extended entities in the so-called real world and everything else the rest cogitons which we have degraded into a sort of a fantasy world"
},
{
"end_time": 5819.394,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5789.48,
"text": " You can see how this opens the door to something absolutely dehumanizing. Because once you really become a believer in this dichotomy of res extensei and res cogitans, you are incorrigibly subhuman. You can never again attain the human level"
},
{
"end_time": 5848.029,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5819.957,
"text": " unless you cast out that idea. It's a tough thing to cast out once you've become enslaved by it. This is why when you try to explain the idea of bifurcation to physicists, they really don't get it. Do you want to explain bifurcation to the audience right now? Yes, well, let me just finish this and we can..."
},
{
"end_time": 5882.329,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5854.77,
"text": " You know, I'd like to ask you a question because I've wondered it, but I don't know if it's appropriate. Ask away. Judging by your name, I thought that your ancestry goes back to India. Does it? Oh, okay, good. Well then, I'm glad I'm talking much about Vedic culture because that's what you carry in your DNA."
},
{
"end_time": 5912.568,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5882.995,
"text": " You know, so it's interesting, you know, that there is a certain parallel between your life and mine, because in my case, yes, I was born into a Catholic family, but I sort of forgot all about it, you know, then came the war, and we almost got killed in the process, and so by the time I settled in America,"
},
{
"end_time": 5941.22,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5912.961,
"text": " I had forgotten all about my Christianity and as I told you my mind became engrossed in other other type of questions. It was during my college days that I became not only acquainted with Indian culture but"
},
{
"end_time": 5971.664,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5942.312,
"text": " tremendously drawn to it. So I became very drawn to it and at first if you read my book on physics I relate that story"
},
{
"end_time": 6002.398,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5974.241,
"text": " My first encounter with Hindu tradition was through Rabindranath Tagore. I read a very famous little book of his called Gitanjali, and that set me on fire. So, for about 40 years of my life, I lived"
},
{
"end_time": 6031.357,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 6002.619,
"text": " in a Vedic ambience. The first time I traveled to India I stayed seven months and I lived exclusively amongst the sadhus and I came back a different man. I realized when I was flying back I used the seven months because I was just finishing a stretch at MIT"
},
{
"end_time": 6060.06,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 6031.937,
"text": " and starting a stretch at UCLA. So from the end of the winter semester to the beginning of the fall semester, I was free, so I went to India. And when I flew back to Los Angeles after seven months of living amongst sadhus and witnessing things that are incredible, I realized I'm not the same man."
},
{
"end_time": 6083.882,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 6060.998,
"text": " The man who is flying back is not the man that was flying over. I had been permanently changed. And which is actually what should happen when you open yourself to real sadhus, to people who have experience of higher spheres, you should be changed by that."
},
{
"end_time": 6113.166,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6085.145,
"text": " And the one thing I brought with me to India, great, great reverence. Instinctively, I approached these sadhus with folded hands. And it's amazing if we were to get along. I have many stories I could tell you, but I invariably found that if you"
},
{
"end_time": 6140.435,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6114.019,
"text": " honor a sadhu just in your heart without any physical evidence he knows it instantly and they always respond if you give something to a real sadhu he will give you something back and what he gives you back"
},
{
"end_time": 6168.114,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6140.879,
"text": " is more valuable than all the gold in Fort Knox. So I experienced this again and again when I was in India. And if there's anything good in my life, I don't think it could have come without that contact. And then when I was about 40 years old I married a wonderful Catholic woman. And"
},
{
"end_time": 6181.34,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6168.66,
"text": " In a sense she became my guru because, not that she ever lectured, but by her mere presence she connected me, reconnected me to Christianity."
},
{
"end_time": 6209.582,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6182.602,
"text": " My wife did the same for me. Is that wonderful? I grew up Christian and then I became an atheist from when I was eight years old or so because I remember asking my brother who was a physicist at the time how did the universe come about and he said it could have come from quantum fluctuations that's how nothing comes from something or something comes from nothing and then I remember sitting and thinking okay then that solves the last problem I had with the notion of God namely how can anything be here"
},
{
"end_time": 6236.886,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6209.582,
"text": " So from that point forward I became an atheist and it wasn't until I met my wife and just her sweetness, her lovingness, her endearedness, I've never met someone that I felt like I can't hurt them. If I hurt them I would feel so horrible. I like very much what you're saying. It's wonderful. It took me a long time also to get to think like that. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 6266.988,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6238.012,
"text": " You know it's amazing we have something really in common in the sense that in my life it was Thea who brought me back to my Christian roots and the fact that I had gone really quite deeply into the Vedantic way turned out to be essential because it gave me something that"
},
{
"end_time": 6295.196,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6267.483,
"text": " My fellow Christians here generally have not been exposed to. In other words, I brought something back with me from India, which I was able to put to very good use. There are very few meetings, genuine meetings, between a Western man and a Vedic man. And in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 6322.739,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6295.452,
"text": " The Vedic side of India has been under attack ever since the British came there because the British of course introduced Western ideas and Western modes of living and I don't want to go back to India because I'm afraid I would not, the India that I experienced half a century ago"
},
{
"end_time": 6353.336,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6326.869,
"text": " places in the Himalayas and the regions, you will still meet it, but I'm sure it's essentially gone. And so I was blessed in the sense that I could still absorb that. And at the time when I was in India, I thought like an Indian. In other words, I totally forgot about my Christian background. It was really"
},
{
"end_time": 6379.394,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6353.763,
"text": " It was somehow deep in my being, but I wasn't conscious of it. So what I'm saying is that I was able to experience the Vedic India in a rather deep way. And this has been a great blessing in my life because it gave me something that is rather rare in this part of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 6410.794,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6380.896,
"text": " And when I got back to Christianity, I was able to integrate these two, these two sources, if you will. And in fact, I will give you a book I published last year called Vedanta in Light of Christian Wisdom, where I attack a very now prevalent philosophy, if you want to call it that,"
},
{
"end_time": 6440.862,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6411.254,
"text": " The so-called perennialists, people like Prithu Shuan, Ananda Kumaraswamy from India, René Guénon, they are all perennialists. Perennialism means that there is one high truth and one pure religion of the world over"
},
{
"end_time": 6458.763,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6441.937,
"text": " And in particular they think that the different religions are different paths to the same summit. All of the major religions lead to the same place? Exactly. And this in fact"
},
{
"end_time": 6478.592,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6459.019,
"text": " This view is so widely disseminated nowadays that whether you talk to an educated Hindu or an educated Muslim or an educated Christian, when it comes to the intellectual"
},
{
"end_time": 6506.903,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6479.394,
"text": " class. Yeah, this is almost unanimously assumed nowadays. It's like the enlightenment of the spiritual community. So rationality is the enlightenment of the atheistic community, and then the spiritual community that feels like, oh, I have the answers is more of the type that feels like, well, that religion is correct. It's distorted. It's somewhat incomplete, but that one's correct. That one's correct. Amongst the really educated people, word over."
},
{
"end_time": 6534.821,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6507.363,
"text": " you find that this is almost axiomatic and there was a time when I was in a way flirting with this outlook. I read Schuon and you know Schuon was a very brilliant man and when you read him it is easy to fall into his way of looking at things because he was a very powerful person. In fact I visited him"
},
{
"end_time": 6565.145,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6535.316,
"text": " in Bloomington. He comes from Germany but early in life he converted to Islam and then he founded the Tariqa in Bloomington and so I had personal contact with him and at the end I realized that this is not someone you want to follow. So I"
},
{
"end_time": 6594.172,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6565.486,
"text": " I'm probably now the chief literary exponent of the opposite view. Instead of perennialism, the idea of all religions are different ways of climbing the same mountain, the first thesis and the primary thesis which I document in this"
},
{
"end_time": 6624.48,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6594.599,
"text": " book that I just mentioned, Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom. The first point, the main, the central point I document is that the eschaton of the Vedic tradition and the eschaton of the Christian tradition, both are in a way to establish a union with God. There's no question about that. That's what religion, true religion is about."
},
{
"end_time": 6652.585,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6624.991,
"text": " But the point is that the Vedic union with God and the Christian union with God are totally different and in fact in a sense they are opposite. Because the Vedic union with God, I call it the Nirvanic option, because Buddhism and Hinduism are not"
},
{
"end_time": 6683.012,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6653.66,
"text": " totally the same but the word nirvana which comes from the buddha expresses it so as perfectly as it can be expressed nirvana literally means blowing out like a candle flame and this is really what the vedic path the the highest vedic path the vedantic path advaita path accomplishes and aims to accomplish it's a blowing out"
},
{
"end_time": 6710.896,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6683.882,
"text": " of the human. Now the point is, it is a very deeply philosophical point to discover that there is something in us which transcends the human. I mean there is something called Wolfgang Smith, but if you wipe that out,"
},
{
"end_time": 6738.387,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6712.295,
"text": " If a super yogi could put his hand on me and this Wolfgang Smith is gone, what would remain is the Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the supreme state of the Vedantic Way. The Vedantic Way is nirvanic. It is a way of wiping out the merely human."
},
{
"end_time": 6761.374,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6739.753,
"text": " It's hard to describe these things because we are touching rock bottom here. We are talking about absolutely foundational things. So the Vedic path is Nirvanic. In the Vedic tradition you speak about Nirvikalpa Samadhi."
},
{
"end_time": 6791.169,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6762.329,
"text": " It is a state which very few sadhus even in India attain, but every now and then it is attained. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, there was a great sadhu in India who had attained that Nirvikalpa Samadhi state, and I read about him when I was very young."
},
{
"end_time": 6822.022,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6792.398,
"text": " You have photographs of him. There are people who visited him and made conversations. And the point is that from our point of view this was a human being. We could talk to him and he could talk to us. But in reality that human side was just a facade. We think of him that way. He didn't experience himself as that."
},
{
"end_time": 6847.824,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6822.415,
"text": " In other words, he had attained the actual eschaton of the Vedic religion, and there are various names, Nirvikalpa Samadhi... This is not Nirvana, this is different? It's the same, exactly the same. I'm convinced that Buddha, even though he was not organically or historically related to India,"
},
{
"end_time": 6877.295,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6848.302,
"text": " Nevertheless, he belongs in the Vedic tradition, so that the distinction is accidental, it's not essential. So this is one eschaton, and incidentally, I mean, it's like Mount Everest, it's too big for us to, we can say the words, but we don't really have any conception about that."
},
{
"end_time": 6904.565,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6877.79,
"text": " The important thing that I came to realize in the course of my life is that the Christian eschaton is something utterly different, so much so that in a sense they are antipodal. Why? The key is, as every Christian knows,"
},
{
"end_time": 6932.5,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6904.735,
"text": " As the Church Fathers used to say, God became man so that man can become God. But who says that? The Fathers. I mean, it was assumed St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, they all would have agreed with that. Who actually spoke these words?"
},
{
"end_time": 6957.159,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6932.79,
"text": " I'm not enough of a scholar, too, but it's a formula that is accepted in Christianity as orthodox. God became man so that man can become God. But to be more precise, the way of knowing God or seeing God"
},
{
"end_time": 6985.93,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6957.483,
"text": " that is offered to us by Christianity in contrast to the Vedantic way is that by becoming a member of the mystical body of Christ through baptism we are able to see God the Father through Christ the Son through the incarnate Christ"
},
{
"end_time": 7014.974,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6986.834,
"text": " without the incarnation there would be no such possibility but this is why God became man to form a bridge as it were between the human and the divine and through that bridge we can come to God the Father through God the Son and more specifically the incarnate Son. There is a distinction between"
},
{
"end_time": 7043.439,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 7015.247,
"text": " Christ as the second person of the Holy Trinity and Christ as we worship him in our churches because what we worship and what otherwise could not really be worshiped is God in the form of man. This is a crucial point. So through Christianity a new eschaton was given to mankind."
},
{
"end_time": 7072.756,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 7043.746,
"text": " And the interesting thing is that in Vedic days that did not exist. That became a reality when Christ was born on earth. And that is long after the Vedic period had begun. So the sadhus in India were practicing their Vedanta long before there was a Christianity."
},
{
"end_time": 7100.811,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 7073.985,
"text": " So that began with the birth of Christ and it ended, it was completed with the resurrection. And we are part of that. We belong to that path. Our path is not the direct path, which is practiced in Vedanta. Our path is through the God man."
},
{
"end_time": 7128.439,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 7101.954,
"text": " And incidentally, there's a wonderful passage in the Gospel of St. John, which speaks very directly to this. It is taken from what is traditionally called the high priestly prayer, it is called. So it is"
},
{
"end_time": 7157.381,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7129.019,
"text": " uh... before the passion when christ went into this garden to pray uh... he said addressing God the Father he said this is life eternal to know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ who was sent this says it all"
},
{
"end_time": 7186.34,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7158.473,
"text": " coming from the mouth of God himself. This says it all. In other words, our approach to salvation, to the union with God, is through Jesus Christ who was sent. These are the actual words of Jesus. And when he says who was sent, is a direct reference to the incarnation."
},
{
"end_time": 7209.667,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7187.585,
"text": " In other words, there could be no Christianity, no other path to God than the Vedic, if it were not for the incarnation. It is by God becoming man that this other path was born. So the Vedas know nothing about that."
},
{
"end_time": 7239.428,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7210.35,
"text": " In fact, I was very surprised when in the recent days in writing this book that I'm going to give you, I was carefully thinking about all these issues and I discovered, to my surprise, how very little of anything Christian was known to the Vedic tradition. For example, the story of Adam and the idea of the fall of Adam and original sin, which is all integral to Christianity,"
},
{
"end_time": 7268.951,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7239.94,
"text": " is not known to the Vedas. In fact, in Sanskrit there is strictly speaking no word expressing the Judeo-Christian idea of sin. Bad karma is one thing, but sin is something entirely different and you will not find any mention in the Vedic literature of sin. In fact, if you talk to sin to an indigenous Hindu, however educated he may be,"
},
{
"end_time": 7299.121,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7269.667,
"text": " He wanted to understand what you're saying. I speak to people who are on the Western of the Eastern end, meaning that they have a Western interpretation of the East, and they like to say that, well, the East has everything that the West has and more. You're saying no. No. In fact, you know, what you just said is part of the perennialist cradle. It all comes in the same package. And so this book that I wrote"
},
{
"end_time": 7325.145,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7299.48,
"text": " which I hope will be read by many perennialists. It's the only book I know of that is a rigorous contradiction of perennialism. And not only do I contradict the notion of many paths to the same summit,"
},
{
"end_time": 7355.776,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7325.896,
"text": " But I go into much more detail. For example, I tried to demonstrate that the eschaton of Christianity, which is called salvation, is the polar opposite of the Nirvanic goal. There are many words you can use to describe it in Vedic terms."
},
{
"end_time": 7383.029,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7356.817,
"text": " Let's call it the Nirvanic state. Salvation and the Nirvanic state are the complete opposite. Why? Because in the Nirvanic state the human person has disappeared. The Vedic path, there are many Vedic paths to lesser ends, but the supreme Vedic path"
},
{
"end_time": 7412.329,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7383.848,
"text": " is a path which requires the immolation of the human being. This is why, if you go to India, the sadhus, they all wear garu. That is the color that identifies the sadhu. And well, in a country that burns the bodies of the dead,"
},
{
"end_time": 7441.817,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7413.029,
"text": " It is easy to see that the garu or collar bears a reference to the self-immolation. And incidentally, living with the sadhus for seven months, as I did, I came to experiences. I saw that this is what these men were doing. It was a self-immolation. And I admire them tremendously. I mean, just the strength that it needs."
},
{
"end_time": 7467.978,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7442.5,
"text": " to rise above all our human proclivities to give that all up to literally as it were take our body and consign it to the flames this is what they do and my hat off to them and I love them dearly I love them dearly because"
},
{
"end_time": 7495.486,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7468.592,
"text": " They were so kind to me. They immediately read all my mind and whatever is even beneath the mind. I was an open book to them. This is automatic. If you rise to authentically high spiritual levels, everything here in this world becomes an open book."
},
{
"end_time": 7526.476,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7496.596,
"text": " When you look at the person, you can tell his future and his past. Everything, because in the eternal state, everything is here now. So, by the grace of God, I got a glimpse of the greatness of the Hindu sadhus. They are giants. And in fact, when I was traveling in India,"
},
{
"end_time": 7556.561,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7526.954,
"text": " One of the great spiritual personalities was a woman, her name was Ananda Mohima, and incidentally, your Trudeau person, whom I don't like at all, he traveled to India and visited Ananda Mohima. I'll give him credit for that, that was a noble thing to do. Well, Ananda Mohima, from childhood,"
},
{
"end_time": 7581.237,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7557.398,
"text": " represented the highest state of consciousness. I mean, we of course saw her as a woman, but she did not for a moment think of herself that way. So she was more divine than human. And incidentally when you got to know her a little bit,"
},
{
"end_time": 7611.084,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7581.664,
"text": " The better you knew her, the more you saw the divine part and the less you saw the human part. And they're different. And incidentally, it was the first time I was able to encounter a Samadhi state. Samadhi is the super consciousness. It was on her birthday and on her birthday she always went into Samadhi."
},
{
"end_time": 7636.783,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7612.21,
"text": " And so when she was in Samadhi, she was not in this world at all. And so that was the first time I'd read about Samadhi ever since I was 17 years old. I knew about it. But this is the first time I saw a human being in that state. And it's amazing because"
},
{
"end_time": 7667.193,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7637.295,
"text": " When she came out of Samadhi, for about three or four hours she was in Samadhi, and when she came out of Samadhi, it was sort of a gradual, continuous process, and in this process her actual features changed. At first she looked like a young girl, and then the more she regained her normal state,"
},
{
"end_time": 7692.671,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7667.585,
"text": " The more she began to look, as we normally saw her, of a rather past middle-aged woman. And so this was supernatural. I mean, how can you change in a few minutes from, if it were, a child to an old man? I mean, this is clearly supernatural. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7721.698,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7693.643,
"text": " I knew, of course, that the Samadhi state is something supernatural, is something which in the ordinary Christian tradition is not known. You have to get into the esoteric side of Christianity, then you will begin to... Incidentally, let me say this, years before that experience in India, yeah,"
},
{
"end_time": 7753.422,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7724.224,
"text": " Years before that experience in India I had already read about Samadhi states and I visited in Italy a bona fide Christian saint, no question about it, Padre Pio is his name, he's since been canonized and when I first saw Padre Pio"
},
{
"end_time": 7782.773,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7753.78,
"text": " He was being led into the church by another priest and looking at Padre Pio, I said to myself, my God, he's in Samadhi. It was clear that in his consciousness he was no longer seeing what we normally see. That's why another priest had to lead him by the hand. So having had some experience"
},
{
"end_time": 7810.947,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7783.251,
"text": " In India, I looked upon our spiritual champions with a different light. I saw the supernatural side in somebody like Padre Pihom. So Samadhi is a real thing. You do see it also in the West, but only in the highest grades of sanctity."
},
{
"end_time": 7837.295,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7812.415,
"text": " It is more known, well, I speak about India, I speak about India half a century ago. I don't think there's much left of that spiritual culture, because India has been westernized and contemporary western culture is like water to fire. Water extinguishes fire."
},
{
"end_time": 7865.043,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7839.957,
"text": " So I have no interest even if I were young to go back to India because I've seen the best of India. And as I said, when I was traveling there, I could still encounter and actually speak with sadhus of very high rank. Did you speak in English? Yeah. That's the one good thing that came out of the British Raj."
},
{
"end_time": 7892.295,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7865.742,
"text": " It made English the lingua franca of India, and for people like myself it was a godsend, because wherever I went I could speak to the people. Of course that's an exaggeration. When you went into the countryside in India, the people only knew the particular Indian language of that district."
},
{
"end_time": 7922.381,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7893.166,
"text": " But anyone who's had a high school education of course knew English. So it did give me access and I remember I had beautiful conversations with some of these sadhus. There was one in particular, he was the head of a monastery and he spent 20 hours a day in these Samadhi states"
},
{
"end_time": 7953.37,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7923.814,
"text": " But when he came out of it, he was very normal and natural, and he liked me. And he called me Smitananda, and at one point he said to me, he said, we are seeking to enter the abode of death, and they ask us to write books. I've pondered over that statement a lot of time,"
},
{
"end_time": 7980.367,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7953.729,
"text": " Many, many times it says a lot. First of all, it says that the Vedantic path is a path to the abode of death. And you could write a whole book explaining that. It explains everything. So I was fascinated with that. And in my book, as you will read, it explains what"
},
{
"end_time": 8010.742,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7980.845,
"text": " You learn from the so-called Phoenicians, like the pre-Socratics, Parmenides. Parmenides, what we have from Parmenides in the form of fragments is a journey, quote unquote, to the abode of death."
},
{
"end_time": 8039.053,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 8011.783,
"text": " So when I heard from the sadhu, we are trying to enter the board of death, I remembered, aha, Parmedinus said the same. And so, these pre-Socratics were following a basically yogic discipline,"
},
{
"end_time": 8068.319,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 8039.36,
"text": " which they received from the Phoenicians. So there was an actual connection with India there. And then as I write in this book, I recalled that Socrates, who was not in the Phoenician tradition at all, but Socrates did write that, quote, philosophy is the practice of death."
},
{
"end_time": 8097.125,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 8069.462,
"text": " So in the Platonists you find the same Vedic theme that the way to wisdom is to enter the abode of death. And we can now understand this because the Samadhi state, which is state of enlightenment, in the Samadhi state the normal human function cease."
},
{
"end_time": 8120.828,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 8097.722,
"text": " The breathing stops, the heartbeat does not stop completely, but it goes down and it's like the heartbeat of a hibernating bear. Very, very slow, just enough to keep the body alive. So the Vedic path is a path leading directly into death."
},
{
"end_time": 8149.872,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 8122.995,
"text": " And so the Vedic people also have their resurrection, but it's a resurrection not in human form. What is their resurrection? It is Nirvikalpa Samadhi. It is that state. And in India, every now and then, you actually find a sadhu who is in that state."
},
{
"end_time": 8179.548,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 8150.179,
"text": " And as I told you in the early twentieth century, one of these Hindu personalities became world famous. I have books here in my library where you can see his photograph. A German wrote that book. He records the conversations he had with Ramana Maharshi. And chapter two of the book deals with a French"
},
{
"end_time": 8206.135,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 8179.991,
"text": " Benedictine monk who came to India. He had a face-to-face visit with Ramana Maharshi and from that point on all he wanted to do is follow the Hindu sadhana which he did follow successfully up to a certain point. I think he was very very advanced when he finally died but"
},
{
"end_time": 8236.118,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 8206.971,
"text": " What I bring out in this book is that what he says about Christianity, following his, as it were, initiation into the Vedic religion, is all wrong. So in chapter two, I use the biography of Henri Lassault, this Benedictine monk,"
},
{
"end_time": 8266.237,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 8237.056,
"text": " who then became in a way a disciple of Ramana Maharshi to show how completely distorted his view of Christianity had become then because he no longer had any idea about Christianity he confused Christianity with Vedanta and of course if you compare Christianity to Vedanta from a Vedantic point of view Christianity falls short of the mark"
},
{
"end_time": 8291.92,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8267.21,
"text": " So, this I think is one of the important features of this book. I correct something that might have very dangerous effect upon many readers, because it would very falsely, it would essentially corroborate the false ideas of the Perennialists. This Orville Lassault, after his"
},
{
"end_time": 8321.698,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8292.261,
"text": " conversion, if you will, to Vedanta, saw everything through Vedantic eyes, so he was therefore, in a sense, reproducing the perennialist outlook. So I regard it as an important part of my work to rigorously disprove"
},
{
"end_time": 8347.961,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8322.295,
"text": " What people like Shuon are talking about, because it's very dangerous. Shuon himself had attained rather high spiritual states, and that's when people become most dangerous, because they have a certain spiritual power, and yet they do not have the sanctity that should go with it, and then they become dangerous."
},
{
"end_time": 8375.606,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8348.302,
"text": " Can you expand more on that last point where people get close to enlightenment? What is it that they get close to and then they become dangerous? To the extent that a person makes progress in any spiritual path, whether it's Christian or Vedantic, with this knowledge comes power. And if you're not"
},
{
"end_time": 8406.681,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8377.841,
"text": " very pure in your inner being, it can very easily happen that you misuse that power. And then you have something very dangerous. Carl Jung had a phrase which said, beware of undeserved wisdom. Good phrase. He was referring to psychedelics. He was referring to, you can get into certain states with psychedelics, you can get what you at least feel like are spiritual lessons. What do you make of that phrase?"
},
{
"end_time": 8433.677,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8407.278,
"text": " Yes, it's a good phrase and an important thing to understand, but let me tell you this. Jung is very, very dangerous because he certainly had a degree of knowledge way above the average, but way below the degree of authentic religion."
},
{
"end_time": 8463.148,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8434.77,
"text": " and in my first book called Cosmos and Transcendence I have a whole chapter on Carl Jung which I entitled the deification of the unconscious in other words Jung took the unconscious and essentially put it in the place of God and"
},
{
"end_time": 8488.49,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8464.531,
"text": " So what he really was presenting was a kind of religion, but it was a false religion, and there's nothing more dangerous, nothing more lethal in all the world than a false religion. Because even as true religion takes you up, a false religion takes you down."
},
{
"end_time": 8520.179,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8490.64,
"text": " In this book, my first book, I talk about two false religions. One, the religion of Sigmund Freud, which really was a kind of religion, certainly as a Satan's religion, if you can put it that way, and the religion of Jung, which leads in the same direction, but it is geared to intellectually more advanced"
},
{
"end_time": 8549.735,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8520.725,
"text": " So, when a priest falls and goes down, it was usually through Sigmund, through Carl Jung, and when a centurious man falls and goes down, it was probably through Freud. Both were very dangerous characters and have had an enormous impact upon the Western world."
},
{
"end_time": 8577.79,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8550.162,
"text": " I have a friend who is a psychologist and one of the few psychologists who is quite enlightened. Most of them are under all sorts of delusions. And he has written book after book about the Freudian heritage, how Freud really brought us what he himself, Freud, called the plague. So it's a very dangerous thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8608.609,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8579.087,
"text": " Freudianism is basically a religion, although it pretends to be a science. It isn't. Well, it's Satan's science. And so the evil that has come into our world, first through Sigmund Freud and then through Carl Jung, is enormous. What makes a religion false? Its origin. It comes from below."
},
{
"end_time": 8639.718,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8611.357,
"text": " And of course, the falsity is patent in what the religion actually says, but in order to see that, you must have some bona fide knowledge of an authentic religion. As this is very rare, in Christianity"
},
{
"end_time": 8666.766,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8640.06,
"text": " It pertains mainly to the esoteric level. In other words, if you take everything literally, this is all you need to know in order to be saved. You can take the words of Christ just in the most literal sense possible, and if you make this the guiding star of your life, you will"
},
{
"end_time": 8695.299,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8667.517,
"text": " attain salvation on the word of God. But there are certain things, in fact what we are trying to talk about, I think is one of them, there are certain things that cannot be comprehended in Christian terms on that level of understanding. So in Christianity, and incidentally this is not true for the Vedic tradition,"
},
{
"end_time": 8722.944,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8695.64,
"text": " In the Vedic tradition, there's no hard and fast division between an exoteric knowledge, which is for all, and an esoteric knowledge, which is for an elite. It's the same teaching, but viewed on a different level. Now, in the Christian sphere, I think there is a fairly sharp"
},
{
"end_time": 8747.824,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8723.404,
"text": " dividing line between a literal understanding and a spiritual understanding. And of course, as I said before, they both will lead you to God. But the difference is that the literal understanding does not"
},
{
"end_time": 8778.353,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8748.456,
"text": " need you to a higher understanding of your religion. For example, if you take Christianity on its literal level, you may very well end up saying, well, these Hindus, they are heretics, they are pagans, they believe in false gods and so on, and I'm afraid many of the"
},
{
"end_time": 8807.568,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8779.07,
"text": " the missionaries that came to India for example they were not all very wise and I think one of the reasons why they accomplished so very little is they looked upon Hinduism from an exoteric point of view and if you do so as a Christian you don't really understand"
},
{
"end_time": 8837.671,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8807.892,
"text": " In India, as I said before, I think, there's no hard and fast distinction between esoteric and exoteric, which means that in a sense it's all esoteric. In Christianity there is this division, and you see it in the teachings of Christ. Christ clearly distinguishes what he says, so to speak, for everyone and what he says to his disciples who needed to"
},
{
"end_time": 8861.152,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8837.961,
"text": " no more than that. So the reason why the Christian, the missionary activity in India has been very unsuccessful is that in order to actually reach"
},
{
"end_time": 8891.783,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8862.534,
"text": " Even a mediocre Hindu, you need to speak from a different point of view. I remember I was one time, not on my first trip, but I was visiting in India, I think it was during a Christmas break, and I was in a monastic community in the Himalayan foothills of quite up north, and a Protestant minister came"
},
{
"end_time": 8915.35,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8892.824,
"text": " I was addressing these monks and he was talking on a purely exoteric level which means that he saw all of Hinduism as just a paganism and so on. He had not the foggiest idea of what it was all about and I must say I was impressed by these monks"
},
{
"end_time": 8944.787,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8915.862,
"text": " They sat there. They didn't get excited or angry or anything. Just think how a Christian would feel if a Hindu came and essentially made Christianity look like nonsense. We would be very upset. Well, they weren't. And they were very polite. And after that, after he was finished, they said, well, thank you very much for talking to us and goodbye."
},
{
"end_time": 8975.145,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8945.35,
"text": " So there was no connection at all and as I said these sadhus were not a bit angry, they simply realized that this man didn't know what he was talking about and that's something we all need to know and not get excited about it because otherwise we'll have perpetual high blood pressure. So de facto there has been very little"
},
{
"end_time": 9002.415,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8975.742,
"text": " contact between Christianity and the Vedantic tradition and I firmly believe that the time will come soon when such a contact will take place and it will completely change the outlook of the Western world. So the time has come"
},
{
"end_time": 9025.998,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 9002.773,
"text": " when the exoteric level is not sufficient. In the days during the middle ages, for example, with an exoteric knowledge of Christianity you could get to heaven very readily. Now it is not so clear because the point is on an exoteric level"
},
{
"end_time": 9053.695,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 9026.305,
"text": " You cannot protect yourself against the heresy of our contemporary world. Interesting, interesting. In order to get out of this, the real paganism is not in authentic India. The real paganism is right here, our present day Western culture. And to the extent that we are a part of that,"
},
{
"end_time": 9082.176,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 9054.019,
"text": " We are cut off from Christianity. We cannot follow Christ and Mammon at the same time. And this culture that we live in basically comes from below. These are important things, because it's not just a matter of theory, it's not just a matter of metaphysical speculation."
},
{
"end_time": 9110.555,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 9082.927,
"text": " It's a matter of life and death. That's what it's all about. This is why we founded a foundation, because I hope that these ideas, which we are trying to express and disseminate, I hope that this will continue. You were talking about the foundation. What is it called?"
},
{
"end_time": 9133.609,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 9111.186,
"text": " Right now, that will be listed on the screen and if you're just listening to this, it's in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 9162.432,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 9134.548,
"text": " You were speaking to Jonathan Pageau on Karen Wong's channel called The Meaning Code. Oh, yeah, right. Jonathan said that Christianity transcends non-dualism through salvation and that unity with God in the East is seen as becoming the same as or becoming one with. Whereas, at least in Jonathan's words, unity with God to the Christian is still retaining a multiplicity. So it's not just becoming one with, but even becoming more multiplied. And he says the blades of grass in heaven are more real."
},
{
"end_time": 9191.22,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 9162.432,
"text": " Well, I agree that"
},
{
"end_time": 9221.305,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 9191.869,
"text": " Certainly Christianity is a union with God. I don't know exactly what Jonathan means. Incidentally, when I had our conversation together, I was very impressed by him. I was impressed by how he looks and how he speaks. He is a very deep man, a very fine Christian,"
},
{
"end_time": 9251.527,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 9221.971,
"text": " And I'm very happy that we had a meeting, but I don't know whether he and I look upon the Vedic religion quite the same way. I'd have to talk to him more to get a clearer idea of how he looks upon it. There are two ways of looking upon it."
},
{
"end_time": 9282.022,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 9252.159,
"text": " One is the usual way of the Christian of somehow putting the Vedic religion down a few notches, how much that depends upon what kind of a Christian you are. Now, needless to say, I disagree with that. There's no question of putting one above the other, because what I believe is that"
},
{
"end_time": 9306.544,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9282.312,
"text": " All true religion comes from God, and certainly this is the case in the Vedic, and this is the case in the Christian. And so, having said that, it follows really that there is more than one religion."
},
{
"end_time": 9332.381,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9308.677,
"text": " With the understanding that religion comes from God. If it didn't, you couldn't legitimately call it religion. The word is a thing from really God, really God re-binding back, and only God can do that, and only God can tell us the way. So I look upon both"
},
{
"end_time": 9362.312,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9333.541,
"text": " the vedic and the christian as each true religion which means that it comes from god and it leads to god but that said and i think many many people would say the same thing what is somewhat unusual about the point of view at which i arrived late in my life uh... is that whereas i regard both"
},
{
"end_time": 9393.268,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9363.268,
"text": " The Vedic and the Christian is true religion. That means a way leading to a union with God. I do not agree, for example, with the perennialists that what stands at issue is the same union. In fact, I have gone out of my way trying to explain that in point of fact, these two unions are antipodal."
},
{
"end_time": 9422.551,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9393.712,
"text": " Because both are extremes. The Vedic extreme is the extreme of self-immolation. It is, to see it in pictures, which is the only thing that we can do actually, it's as if we take this body and cast it into a blazing fire. What happens is that the body is burnt. It exists no more after that."
},
{
"end_time": 9447.415,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9423.234,
"text": " as body. And this is what you actually, what confronts you in the Vedic religion when you take it at its highest level. It is a self-immolation and this is why the sadhus wear the garua cloth. The Vedanta is a path of self-immolation."
},
{
"end_time": 9480.213,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9450.947,
"text": " And the Christian path is something utterly different. And in fact, it is something that did not really exist in the Vedic age. I think I've said many a time that the Vedic is the oldest religion in the world. And at the time that the Vedas and the Upanishads were written, there was"
},
{
"end_time": 9510.828,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9481.442,
"text": " before Abraham was even born. So the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, which of course culminates in the birth and teaching of Christ, is later than the Vedic tradition. So in the Vedic tradition you find no Judeo-Christian ideas at all. I was so"
},
{
"end_time": 9537.415,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9512.125,
"text": " amazed when rather recently I discovered that basic notions pertaining to the today of Christian religion are completely unknown in the Vedic world. For example, Adam and the fall of Adam and the original sin and"
},
{
"end_time": 9555.333,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9539.053,
"text": " What I'm curious about is, remember how you were saying the way that the more literalist Christian speaks to the Hindu, it's not getting the message across, and in Christianity there is something that talks about that, like Paul says, to the Jew I became a Jew, to the lawless I become the lawless."
},
{
"end_time": 9571.869,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9555.333,
"text": " What I'm curious about is, it's almost like there's the literal, and then there's a more esoteric interpretation, and maybe then there's even a more mystical interpretation. Regardless, there's a literal, then there's an esoteric, and that we need to go to the esoteric in order to combat some of the perils of today, like materialism and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9587.005,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9571.869,
"text": " So what I'm curious about is often people stop as if the bedrock is the literal and then they go upward like I said there's esoteric and then there's like the most esoteric like their degrees upward but doesn't seem like people consider that there could be something that's more literal than the literal."
},
{
"end_time": 9608.029,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9587.005,
"text": " Well, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 9636.493,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9608.882,
"text": " The division between the exoteric and the esoteric is the only thing we need to consider and talk about because it's the only thing that is real. Now in the teaching of Christ and in fact right through the patristic age the exoteric and the esoteric"
},
{
"end_time": 9664.462,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9637.619,
"text": " coexisted almost. Both were well and alive. Let me give you an example. In St. Augustine's Confessions, which was a book, so to speak, written for everyone, you will encounter"
},
{
"end_time": 9694.548,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9666.305,
"text": " The exoteric and the esoteric side by side. Some of the most beautifully esoteric teachings that I have ever heard you find in the Confessions of St. Augustine. I'll give you one example, it's an example I love so much I've cited it often in my writings. St. Augustine begins a chapter"
},
{
"end_time": 9719.787,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9695.691,
"text": " speaking as it were to God and he says let me see if I can I want to remember it precisely he says I see these others beneath thee an existence they have"
},
{
"end_time": 9749.667,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9720.657,
"text": " because they are from thee, yet no existence, because they are not what thou art. Now, I won't go into this now, that would not be the time, but let me say that this is one of the most esoteric statements I have ever read. And you could give lectures about it, you could"
},
{
"end_time": 9776.425,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9750.503,
"text": " For example, explain how all of Vedanta is really contained in these words. They go as deep and as high as the human mind can go. And yet, it is something that is said casually in St. Augustine's autobiography. I mean, the Confessions is his autobiography."
},
{
"end_time": 9805.964,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9776.8,
"text": " which weaves into one the story of his intellectual and spiritual life, and also the teachings of Christ on both the exoteric and the esoteric plane. So everything is in there. Now, during the patristic age, both levels of understanding, the exoteric and the esoteric,"
},
{
"end_time": 9836.783,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9806.783,
"text": " went hand-in-hand. It was part and parcel of the Christian heritage. And then, during the Middle Ages, in the West mainly, in the West more than in the East, this equilibrium was disturbed and esotericism tended to disappear."
},
{
"end_time": 9866.681,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9837.568,
"text": " I mean, there always were and there always will be individuals who have been given from God this higher vision. But when I say it disappeared, I mean, for instance, that it was no longer recognized officially. And I'm sorry to say that undoubtedly many esoteric Christians"
},
{
"end_time": 9892.637,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9867.142,
"text": " were actually burned at the stake in the European Middle Ages. This is a sad fact, which however is true and you can't deny it. Meister Eckhart for example, who was in the opinion of many, including my own, perhaps the greatest esoterist that Western Christianity has ever produced,"
},
{
"end_time": 9922.671,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9893.166,
"text": " He was a master of scholasticism who took scholasticism to its ultimate end, which is far above the exoteric level. He actually was condemned by the Inquisition and would have been burnt at the stake if he had lived two years longer, because two years after his death a bull came out known as in agrodominici,"
},
{
"end_time": 9953.046,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9923.899,
"text": " that is the name of the bull where 29 propositions I think which he had written down were declared heretical and in a sense these accusers were justified because these 29"
},
{
"end_time": 9981.459,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9953.541,
"text": " propositions that were declared heretical were in fact purely esoteric and they were formulated in a way which was clearly dangerous to ordinary people. There are things that are not meant for ordinary people and can be dangerous"
},
{
"end_time": 10007.875,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9982.159,
"text": " And so I'm not accusing these, what were they called? Well, never mind. The censors were doing something which is inherently legitimate. I mean, they were protecting the flock from teachings which would have been dangerous to them."
},
{
"end_time": 10034.804,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 10008.319,
"text": " And in fact, if you want to find fault with Master Eckhart, you could say he was sometimes too esoteric in his manner of speaking, not realizing that this could be dangerous to ordinary folk, ordinary Christians. How is it dangerous? Well, for example, at one point he said, God can do nothing without me."
},
{
"end_time": 10060.247,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 10035.947,
"text": " Now, obviously, he was not just jabbering. If an ordinary person says that, it's nonsense. But when Meister Eckhart said this, it was indicative of some high truth. There is a kernel of truth there. And he had, incidentally, I've often observed and even written in some of my books, that what"
},
{
"end_time": 10089.599,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 10060.572,
"text": " The manner of expression that Master Eckhardt used, I call Koanic, because it is very similar to what is used in Zen Buddhism. In Zen Buddhism you have a kind of a custom, a tradition, that the master teaches the disciple by throwing at him statements which cannot but be shocking"
},
{
"end_time": 10118.387,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 10089.838,
"text": " and which obviously make no sense exoterically and therefore force the disciple to ascend to an esoteric level. For example, the story is told in many of these Buddhist books. A disciple comes to the master and says, what shall I do if I see the Buddha walking down the street? And the master says, kill him."
},
{
"end_time": 10148.234,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 10119.616,
"text": " Now, it's a perfect example. Spoken to a disciple who has the capacity to get the point of it, this is a very powerful way of instructing him. Because there's a lot of emotion really that enters into this. But at the same time you run the risk that if the person doesn't really understand what you're saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 10178.012,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 10148.609,
"text": " It may confuse him. It may even hurt his religious beliefs, his faith. So it's a double-edged sword. So I've recognized the fact that Meister Eckhart did definitely express himself in what I call a qu'onic way, which is what got the Inquisition on his back. I am definitely no friend of burning anybody alive."
},
{
"end_time": 10207.142,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 10178.831,
"text": " And I'm sorry that the Catholic Church did that, but it happened. You know, there are two churches. There's one that is holy because it comes directly from God, but there's always a human element. If we were confronted just by God's Church, by the words of Christ falling from the Master's mouth,"
},
{
"end_time": 10235.759,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 10207.619,
"text": " That would be one thing, but religion must have also an earthly side, and so conflicts do enter, and dangers do enter, and you can look at the so-called Inquisition from two directions. From an Orthodox Catholic point of view you can say, well it was necessary because we had to control the heretics,"
},
{
"end_time": 10261.527,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 10236.254,
"text": " From another point of view, you can say it was a catastrophe because de facto you killed off esotericism. What finally remained after so many centuries of this kind of rule by the clergy was the effective end of esotericism."
},
{
"end_time": 10292.278,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 10262.449,
"text": " In that killing Buddha cone, what's the proper way of interpreting it? Well, you must kill our human way of looking at Buddha in terms of bones and flesh and blood and appetites and even perhaps some human faults, we don't know. That's not the real Buddha and that's not the Buddha you want to"
},
{
"end_time": 10307.415,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 10292.688,
"text": " set up as an exemplar, you need to understand his message and his true nature, which can only be seen with the spiritual eye, not with the eyes of flesh."
},
{
"end_time": 10333.114,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 10307.637,
"text": " Something that Carl Jung said, in a sense it saved me, was that when delving into these topics, there's a danger of floating so far above the ground that you just start to float. And he said that's what happened to Nietzsche. And he said someone was asking Carl, why haven't you gone mad? Why are you grounded? And Carl said the grounding of his feet is one, his patience, the people that he sees in his practice, and second, his wife."
},
{
"end_time": 10356.374,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 10333.114,
"text": " I found that to be the case for me that my wife is this grounding point and if I didn't have that I don't know where I would be because I'm just such an abstract person I feel like I could think myself into madness I could reason myself into believing I don't exist or you're all that exists or I'm a plate and if people hear this then they think that's a bit foolish to me it's like I don't think they've thought"
},
{
"end_time": 10379.582,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 10356.374,
"text": " Deeply enough about existence or about themselves. Anyhow, I heard that you've also expressed a similar sentiment in one of your books. There's a danger of floating too far up in the same way that there's a danger in- well, there's less of a danger in being just rooted. Mainly you start to criticize people and you become racist and egocentric and so on. But it's not a danger of the same sort. Can you express what your views are on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 10409.326,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 10380.384,
"text": " Well, I'm glad you asked this question Kurt, because I think it's very, very important and in fact it connects intimately with all that we've been talking about. You see, there was a time both in the East and in the West when things were rather normal and so"
},
{
"end_time": 10438.302,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 10410.23,
"text": " The people who were interested in the deep things, the esoteric, when it comes to the Christian world, there is this division. There is no such official division in the Vedic tradition. It's all one. But in Christianity there are these two levels. And in the early days when things were normal,"
},
{
"end_time": 10467.858,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 10439.821,
"text": " Everybody was in the right place and the people who were more or less exoteric in their DNA, in their natural way, they would get their spiritual food from the ordinary sources. They would go to"
},
{
"end_time": 10498.643,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 10468.643,
"text": " a religion class where a priest would explain the words of Christ and so on, and if they wanted to go further beyond that, they would find a suitable teacher. In the case of St. Augustine, what was the name of this wonderful saint who helped St. Augustine to convert and to"
},
{
"end_time": 10528.387,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 10500.316,
"text": " ascent to an esoteric understanding of Christianity. So everything was really in order. Everyone had what he needed. It was at hand. And as time went on the situation changed and more in the West than in the East, in the Eastern part of the Christian world you find more"
},
{
"end_time": 10556.476,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 10528.951,
"text": " of the old system of guru and disciple, but in the western world things changed very much and in a sense esotericism was misrepresented and to a large extent it was lost. There are always going to be people"
},
{
"end_time": 10586.237,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 10557.346,
"text": " inspired by God and people who are very pure in their nature and can go very deep into prayer and can ascend as it were the ladder of God but they are very very special people and what I'm saying is that in the West the normal supports for that kind of an ascent"
},
{
"end_time": 10614.121,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10586.681,
"text": " ceased to exist. And this is a problem you did not have in the patristic era. Wherever you were, you were never too far from a real Christian man of experience who had a kind of first-hand knowledge of the esoteric plane. And this is what in the West, as I say,"
},
{
"end_time": 10641.357,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 10614.582,
"text": " was getting scarcer and scarcer and finally almost disappeared and this is why the outer church collapsed and actually the splitting up into many sects so you had the catholic church which continued as it were in a single line from the actual days of Christ"
},
{
"end_time": 10668.541,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10642.022,
"text": " In addition to that there were various sects which each had a little piece of the truth but something essential was lacking and finally things got so bad that the institutional Catholic Church itself in a visible sense collapsed. That's a sad truth."
},
{
"end_time": 10698.046,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 10669.548,
"text": " And I've written a book about that. My book on Thea Deschardins essentially tells the story of a man who was somewhere along the line, he was actually possessed in a clinical sense, and he exerted an enormous influence upon the clergy"
},
{
"end_time": 10726.664,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 10698.882,
"text": " And when you look at the Second Vatican Council where essentially the cleavage occurred, you find that Teatr Shaddah was the guiding spirit of that council. All the younger clergymen were somehow, it was almost like a kind of madness. I mean, actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 10756.357,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 10727.125,
"text": " In a sense it was because it was occult. It was not a human thing, an occult power manifested through this Teer Desharda and through Teer Desharda it really gained a kind of power over the younger generations in the church. So it was a revolution and"
},
{
"end_time": 10785.691,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 10756.903,
"text": " We are now in a transitional state where there's a lot of confusion and things are happening which eventually will lead to a new rebirth of the Christian religion."
},
{
"end_time": 10814.036,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 10786.561,
"text": " This splintering will be no more. All who regard Christ as their savior will belong to one and the same church and esotericism will again be, not only it will again enter into play, but in a sense it will become the norm"
},
{
"end_time": 10838.524,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10814.462,
"text": " Which means that this church, which a great Christian master has called referred to as the Church of the Resurrection, this church will be not so much rational as it will be mystical. Because mysticism is something that can be accessed"
},
{
"end_time": 10863.49,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10838.985,
"text": " By anyone, regardless of his education, for example, the simplest peasant and the most learned scholar, when it comes to a mystical recognition, they are on the same plane. They can speak the same language."
},
{
"end_time": 10882.995,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10865.043,
"text": " This is what I learned from a very holy, Catholic figure, a very well-known Malachy Martin. He wrote these best-seller books which were widely known in the Christian world."
},
{
"end_time": 10908.848,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10883.66,
"text": " and I was lucky I spent two years in correspondence with him and I had a lot of questions in my mind so I would ask him these questions and he would answer them and in fact a few years after he died I was in living contact with him for two years and then he passed away"
},
{
"end_time": 10936.442,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10909.411,
"text": " and a few years after he passed away, I realized that this correspondence we had was very important because it brought up questions which were not ever officially or publicly discussed, and I felt these are very, very important questions, so this little book came out, Malachy Martin, A Response to Wolfgang Schmitz,"
},
{
"end_time": 10965.452,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10936.8,
"text": " simply the correspondence that we had over two years but the issues that we were really discussing in this correspondence evidently was something rather new and this is why I'm glad this book is published because I regard Malachy Martin as a very important figure. He has yet to be recognized"
},
{
"end_time": 10989.445,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 10966.237,
"text": " and I feel one day he will be. He was a man of very great spirituality and a very heroic man and I hope that someday he will be recognized and appreciated."
},
{
"end_time": 11019.633,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 10990.538,
"text": " Do you think that both the esoteric and the exoteric will be needed in the new church or will just purely be esoteric? No, both. Both are needed because humanity always is comprised by many different types of people. Supposedly we're now all the same. It's not true. We're not all the same and thank God for that because life would be very boring if we were all the same."
},
{
"end_time": 11038.08,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 11020.503,
"text": " So there are many different types of human beings with many different talents and many different blind spots too. And this is what makes it all very interesting. It would be utterly boring if we were all the same."
},
{
"end_time": 11067.807,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 11038.353,
"text": " I was speaking to a psychiatrist named Ian McGilchrist. I was talking to him about that experience of solipsism that I had before, where just everything was in my own head. And he said, Kurt, you're not the same as the plant, and you're not the same as your wife, and you're not the same as God, and so on. Well, you share an element. And he said, the fact that you share implies that you're different. Why? Because you don't share with yourself. And that I found terribly insightful. But this is a beautiful thing."
},
{
"end_time": 11096.374,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 11068.319,
"text": " about the fact that there are men and there are women and they are different and not the same. Let the gurus of the present day say what they want. Men and women are fundamentally different. The difference is so profound that few people are intelligent enough to even get a glimpse of that difference."
},
{
"end_time": 11127.056,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 11099.019,
"text": " What our present civilization is trying to do in this regard is criminal. It is absolutely criminal. Telling a young girl that she can be a boy and so on. Not only is it utter nonsense, it's like drinking cyanide. It poisons. It poisons the human beings. Because the difference between man and woman"
},
{
"end_time": 11155.179,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 11127.705,
"text": " is in a sense sacred because like all real things it is rooted in God. Going back to that other statement that could potentially be seen as dangerous which came from Meister Eckhart saying that God cannot do anything without me along those lines, what's the proper interpretation of that? You ask a very difficult question. I don't think I ever gave this a great deal of thought because"
},
{
"end_time": 11185.282,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 11155.452,
"text": " What fascinated me when I read this was to say, aha, this is Quranic, this is Quranic. And this is also why Eckhart got into such deep trouble with the Inquisition, because the Inquisition had no comprehension of the Quranic nature of discourse, so they took literally what was never meant literally."
},
{
"end_time": 11214.224,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 11185.845,
"text": " I mean the statement God can do nothing with me obviously this was not for a microsecond meant to be taken literally because that would be flagrant lunacy and in fact the whole point of the quonic way of expressing oneself is to use lunacy as a means of"
},
{
"end_time": 11241.186,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 11214.787,
"text": " jarring people out of their everyday complacent Weltanschaum, which is actually what you need to do in order to grow spiritually. In order to understand, say, the saying of a saint, which is above the normal level, you must somehow jolt yourself out of that normal level"
},
{
"end_time": 11270.947,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 11241.459,
"text": " Because if you don't do it, you will never understand what the saint is talking about. So, instinctively, Meister Eckhart was quonic in his teaching. Not always, mind you. He was, in fact, technically speaking, he was a scholastic, but if you compare him, say, to"
},
{
"end_time": 11301.357,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 11271.8,
"text": " to St. Thomas Aquinas, he was a very different kind of Stroelastic, because St. Thomas Aquinas did not cross the divide between Exoteric and Esoteric. I think their grounds for saying that, and as a matter of fact, the last teaching that St. Thomas Aquinas bequeathed unto his disciples"
},
{
"end_time": 11330.469,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 11302.022,
"text": " It is a remark that he made to Reginald, who was his private secretary. So in the last days of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas said to his secretary, quote, I see now that all I have written is false, even worse than that, is mere straw."
},
{
"end_time": 11357.961,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 11334.633,
"text": " I see now that all I have written is mere straw. And this is an accurate statement regarding his position. He decided, for reasons of his own, to step back from the esoteric level."
},
{
"end_time": 11387.637,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 11358.609,
"text": " If he had not done that, his fate would have been like that of Meister Eckhart and we would probably not even know about him. He became the doctor of the church and the paragon of Christian wisdom for many many centuries precisely because he took exotericism to its ultimate level. He was very well"
},
{
"end_time": 11417.073,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 11388.439,
"text": " aware of the division between what comes beyond that and the exoteric plane, but he chose not to follow that path. He perhaps knew that in the providence of God, God inspired Meister Eckhart to take care of the esoteric, which he did in a non plus ultra manner, a supreme perfection."
},
{
"end_time": 11445.964,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 11417.961,
"text": " And Saint Thomas Aquinas was to take care of the exoteric. I think it's a plausible conjecture. But in any case, what Meister Eckhart did, and relatively few people recognize this, is he continued what is called the scholastic method."
},
{
"end_time": 11473.387,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 11446.698,
"text": " The scholastics had their own way of dealing with theological and metaphysical issues, and it is different from what you find anywhere else. For example, they use Aristotelian terminology in a way which you don't find anywhere else. So it's a specific path, if you will, and Meister Eckhart"
},
{
"end_time": 11503.643,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 11473.899,
"text": " chose to take the path all the way, to pull out all the stops, so to speak, which of course then got him into trouble, as we know. St. Thomas Aquinas did not do that. I think when it comes to things of that magnitude, you cannot but conclude that this must have been the will of God. God wanted Meister Eckhart to give us, as it were,"
},
{
"end_time": 11534.275,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 11504.462,
"text": " to pull out all the stops which he did and he wanted Saint Thomas Aquinas to remain below a certain level in order that he can become quote unquote the doctor of the church. Meister Eckhart although his teaching is if you will higher could not be a doctor of the church because he's not for everyone"
},
{
"end_time": 11550.555,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 11535.333,
"text": " And as I say, if you read the writings of Meister Eckhart, there are many things that he says which are definitely dangerous to the ordinary Christian."
},
{
"end_time": 11569.548,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 11550.981,
"text": " When you were speaking near the beginning of this answer, you were saying that lunacy is a step along the path. Now I just want to make clear, so were you saying that or are you saying like, look, do not go insane, go seek help if you're feeling... Well, I was speaking in a sort of a... An esoteric manner?"
},
{
"end_time": 11595.947,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 11569.804,
"text": " No, I think it was a little loosely that I was speaking, because there are two kinds of lunacy in principle. There's the ordinary kind of lunacy, which arises from a lack of intelligence. That's what our clinical psychologists know about. But there's another kind of apparent lunacy,"
},
{
"end_time": 11625.93,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 11597.466,
"text": " wisdom beyond an ordinary human level. When your wisdom exceeds a certain plane, your manner of expressing it can very readily be seen as lunacy. And in the history of human religions,"
},
{
"end_time": 11636.152,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 11626.22,
"text": " I think you can in just about every religion point to actual historic figures which had that kind of lunacy."
},
{
"end_time": 11665.196,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 11636.63,
"text": " So here's where I disagree with Jung, Carl Jung, or maybe it's more that I don't know. So Carl Jung had the phrase that beware of undeserved wisdom, and then you express the sentiment that there's wisdom, and if you're not ready for it, it's beyond your level, it can be seen as lunacy. So I don't know if what people attain when they crack or they have psychotic episodes and so on is indeed wisdom, just they weren't ready for it. I was speaking to John Vervecky, who you spoke to as well."
},
{
"end_time": 11690.998,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 11665.401,
"text": " Well, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 11719.019,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 11691.596,
"text": " There are both. We must recognize that both of these things are real. On the one hand, you have people who, for example, try to ascend in an intellectual or spiritual way. And incidentally, if you do this without a guru, without somebody who is really a master and is guiding you, you're doing something that's very risky."
},
{
"end_time": 11745.964,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 11719.462,
"text": " I think this is what happened to Nietzsche. I think Nietzsche was by nature a very, very brilliant and very, very deep man who, as it were, by his DNA was seeking God. But in the European culture of his day, there was no one who could even understand Nietzsche."
},
{
"end_time": 11772.159,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 11746.852,
"text": " There were very few figures in the Europe of that time in the German-speaking world who had any real conception. I think one of the few people who broke out of that milieu was Goethe. I think he was one of the few. But Goethe himself was not clear about everything."
},
{
"end_time": 11795.282,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 11772.654,
"text": " In Goethe, I see a man who was way, way beyond the level of his day. Nietzsche was, I think by nature, equally deep, but somehow or other he got off to the deep end."
},
{
"end_time": 11806.135,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 11797.841,
"text": " If Nietzsche had had a proper guru, I think we would now know him as a great man."
},
{
"end_time": 11833.712,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 11806.8,
"text": " This is why I worry about myself and then also some of the people who are watching, because I feel similar feelings of going off the deep end in these subjects. And I also wonder how much of this exploration of theories of everything is helping versus hindering. I want to make sure that what I'm doing is good. Well, that's just a worry. Well, it is an absolutely marvelous point that you raise."
},
{
"end_time": 11862.637,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 11834.138,
"text": " and the point which i think is very very essential especially in this day and age because uh... in this day and age i think two things are true more people perhaps than for a long time to say ever before is too too grandiose a word but for a long time uh..."
},
{
"end_time": 11893.336,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 11865.435,
"text": " We have in the Western world observed a sort of a level of mediocrity. And truth seekers after truth, where it comes from the heart, not from the cerebrum, were few and far between. Now, because the world is growing darker and more dangerous, there's no question about that,"
},
{
"end_time": 11922.995,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 11893.695,
"text": " More and more people are, whether they know it or not, they're seeking God. It's as simple as that. But our civilization is so confused and so anti-God in its present manifestations that many people who seek God do not in any way realize that that's what they're doing. And so there are a lot of people who"
},
{
"end_time": 11953.2,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 11923.916,
"text": " are seeking something which they do not understand and they do not also know how it is to be thought uh... and i think the the bottom line is they need help they need help as ever before have you heard of the dark night of the soul yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 11980.469,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 11953.712,
"text": " You know, in a sense, this is almost an inevitable episode in the life of a seeker. In other words, in one way or another, everyone who moves from the ordinary common way of looking at life to something that is"
},
{
"end_time": 12010.606,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 11982.261,
"text": " belongs to the supernatural, belongs to the spiritual realm, needs to pass through that state. But there is a great difference between someone who makes this journey under the guidance of a qualified teacher and someone who doesn't, who sort of does it on his own,"
},
{
"end_time": 12039.855,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 12010.93,
"text": " And this is something that I think can be said very apodictically, even though there are always exceptions to just about every rule. But we may safely take it for granted that if we truly desire higher knowledge and desire somehow to draw closer to God, we need an appropriate"
},
{
"end_time": 12068.131,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 12040.555,
"text": " guide and there are basically two ways. In the Vedic way it is a question of finding a guru and then becoming a disciple and half a century ago when I was traveling in India and I'm sure this is no longer true today but in those days if you were in India and you wanted to find a guru"
},
{
"end_time": 12097.056,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 12068.456,
"text": " and you searched, you would surely find someone who was qualified to act as your guru. Because, as I say, you could go to the Himalayan regions and you could find areas like Rishikesh, for example, where you would see these real sadhus who spent the greater part of the day in Samadhi states,"
},
{
"end_time": 12124.36,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 12098.541,
"text": " That all existed then, I don't think it exists anymore today. So, the normal thing is, when a human being seeks God, and whether this is in the Vedic or the Christian concept, in one way or another, you're always going to need a guru. In India, that meant in those days, coming in contact"
},
{
"end_time": 12154.172,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 12124.855,
"text": " with a man who has actually attained access to higher states. In the West it means associating yourself with a legitimate church which is able to transmit the teaching of Christ and the grace that comes from that. And that's a complicated subject because"
},
{
"end_time": 12179.616,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 12154.65,
"text": " Not all churches are equal and there are also bad churches, so it's all complicated. Here's something I have been thinking about. Is it the case that you marry a church or you marry a religion, but let's say a church in this case because we're in the West, in the same way that you marry a woman, namely that there is no perfect one and if you're going to wait around and try and find a perfect match, you're not going to find one. So what you do is you commit yourself knowing that there are flaws."
},
{
"end_time": 12209.411,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 12181.715,
"text": " I cannot look at things that way, because it is certain that in churches there is a human element. But it is equally certain that there is a pure supernatural also. I'm a Catholic, so I will speak in Catholic terms. What"
},
{
"end_time": 12235.213,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 12209.838,
"text": " is the supernatural and the true Catholic Church. The supernatural resides in the priesthood. And what is a priesthood? First of all, to make a priest, it's like the initiation I talked about in India. You don't become a yogi unless you receive that"
},
{
"end_time": 12261.749,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 12235.691,
"text": " from someone who is and who himself received it from his own guru. The same thing in principle you find in the Catholic Church. To become a priest, actually I should talk about bishop because priest is something lower than that, to become a bishop"
},
{
"end_time": 12285.316,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 12262.722,
"text": " Someone who is already a bishop has to put his hands upon you and say something sacred. And how did he become a bishop? The same way. So there's a continuous chain going right back to our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles."
},
{
"end_time": 12314.565,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 12286.118,
"text": " The apostles were the first bishops, if you will, and they became that directly through the hands of Christ. And so the real treasure in the Catholic Church and in the Orthodox Church, the same applies in both cases, is that the functionaries of religion were all"
},
{
"end_time": 12343.49,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 12314.991,
"text": " part of the same transmission which originates in Christ and then through the apostles down the line right to Bishop Mahoney today I shouldn't use Mahoney's name because he was a terrible bishop but a real bishop is part of that lineage and you know it's like electricity we have light here"
},
{
"end_time": 12373.012,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 12344.036,
"text": " And how is that possible? There is an actual wire that connects this bulb to something like Niagara Falls, which is where this electric power originates. So in similarly, in a bona fide religion, the functionaries, and there is no religion without functionaries, somehow there must be a priesthood. The ordinary person"
},
{
"end_time": 12398.302,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 12373.251,
"text": " cannot serve as a functionary. For example, I'm not a priest, I cannot forgive sins, I cannot do any of these priestly acts which are an integral part of the church. And so there must be this wire going right back to the origin which is in Christ."
},
{
"end_time": 12423.37,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 12398.951,
"text": " Now, in a chain, a chain is only as good as its weakest link, and then a wire wouldn't transmit if there was a cut in it. So in the same way, given that churches have an element of corruption because we're human, so there's always a small element, sometimes it can be large, sometimes it can be smaller. It's a wonderful question, and a very necessary question, because it takes the case of a bishop. There are two things here."
},
{
"end_time": 12450.794,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 12423.951,
"text": " There is a bishop properly so called, and as I told you that cannot exist without the chain of transmission. It's the only way you can create the bishop. So there is a bishop, but in addition, there is a human being with all the frailty of a human being. And it is certainly possible for a bishop to be an absolute role"
},
{
"end_time": 12478.729,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 12451.8,
"text": " It's possible and has happened many, many times. You can be sure of that. But the point is that even though both things exist in one and the same man, they are utterly different. As a bishop, as wicked as he may be, he still can confect the sacraments. He can make another bishop."
},
{
"end_time": 12485.947,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 12479.838,
"text": " He can say mass, He can forgive sins, He can do everything that is in the power of the bishop."
},
{
"end_time": 12515.111,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 12486.988,
"text": " You know, in fish, we talk about bioaccumulation like plastic or mercury. They bioaccumulate the more that you eat it and the more that those eat that. Why can't we have something similar where the sins of a bishop, rather than the sanctity being passed down in the same way we have original sin, we can have a bioaccumulation of sin to a bishop, our current day bishops, or that somewhere down the line a line was cut because the sin was of sufficient critical points. Ah. Well, the critical question"
},
{
"end_time": 12545.691,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 12516.254,
"text": " is not what is conceivable, but what is actual. And for thousands of years now, the Western Church and the Eastern Churches, they agree perfectly in these fundamental matters. So both the Roman Church and the Eastern Churches agree a hundred percent that"
},
{
"end_time": 12574.138,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 12546.169,
"text": " There is a spiritual line. So that means there is an ontological difference between a bishop and an ordinary person. This is an ontological difference. It's like the difference between having electricity and being able to turn on the light and not having it. And this is not a matter of belief or faith. It's a matter of fact."
},
{
"end_time": 12605.503,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 12576.152,
"text": " And at the same time it is also and equally true that every bishop is also a human being and it can very well happen and has happened innumerable times that this human being is very unworthy. Now let me say this, woe unto him who is because the higher you rise the deeper you may fall."
},
{
"end_time": 12632.022,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 12606.118,
"text": " And if a bishop commits sins, his punishment will be much worse than if you and I do that. But we have to understand the categorical, ontological difference between, say, a priest or a bishop on one side and an ordinary person on the other."
},
{
"end_time": 12659.462,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 12632.637,
"text": " The ordinary person may be as pious as any man can be. He may be erudite, a model of perfection. But if he's not a bishop, he can't make a priest. And if he's not a priest, he cannot convict the sacraments. It's as simple as that, and it's every bit as rigorously true as this analogy about electricity."
},
{
"end_time": 12684.684,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 12660.981,
"text": " So this is a fact. Unfortunately this fact has been forgotten and there's been a lot of confusion because all sorts of people have founded churches and given religious instruction who were simply not qualified. And this is why the world is full of all sorts of groups"
},
{
"end_time": 12711.852,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 12685.282,
"text": " that have partly the truth of Christ and partly they don't and have misconceptions. So this is a reality you cannot deny. Speaking about lines that go back, do you have any issues with evolution versus intelligent design? Do you have any thoughts there? Oh, absolutely. Evolution is a heresy. It's a fundamentally false doctrine."
},
{
"end_time": 12739.889,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 12712.5,
"text": " There's no actual scientific evidence whatsoever about evolution, and as I keep writing in my various articles, since 1998 evolution has been mathematically disproved. It is impossible, and that can be proved rigorously, and it has been proved."
},
{
"end_time": 12754.309,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 12741.34,
"text": " But even so, I think it's ultimately due to satanic forces, evolution is, so to speak, the pseudo-religious cradle of our civilization."
},
{
"end_time": 12774.258,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 12755.333,
"text": " So this may be one of those coans that can be misinterpreted. So what specifically about evolution do you not agree with? Is it that we share common ancestor with a different species or that we all came from a single-celled organism? Well, fundamentally, what I object to in"
},
{
"end_time": 12804.445,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 12774.616,
"text": " evolution and why i think that it is basically satanic teaching satanic is always inverting putting god down and satan up it's a complete inversion and evolution is a complete inversion inversion because instead of recognizing that all being comes from above from what i call the eternal plane and thus from god because"
},
{
"end_time": 12821.22,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 12804.735,
"text": " Who puts that eternal plane in there? That is the creative act. Platonism is very clear about this, and of course the Vedic teaching is also very clear about this. But in reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 12852.159,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 12822.841,
"text": " The entire universe, I'm just gesturing, the entire universe is descending from that avid tunnel, from that central point of the cosmic icon. And the doctrine of evolution puts it completely, it puts the world upside down. Particles, quantum particles, as I, we talked about that earlier this afternoon and I pointed out to you that quantum particles"
},
{
"end_time": 12872.79,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 12852.79,
"text": " As quantum particles don't exist, whatever existence, whatever reality they have, they obtain in one of two ways. It's always through contact with the corporeal entity, and there are two ways in which this actually happens."
},
{
"end_time": 12900.316,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 12874.138,
"text": " In the corporeal entity that defines the quantum system, quantum systems don't just grow on trees. I mean, every physicist, if he wants to study a quantum system, he has to set up equipment which in effect produces that quantum system. So the quantum systems don't grow on trees. They are in a certain sense man-made."
},
{
"end_time": 12927.039,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 12900.691,
"text": " which means that the impetus comes from the opposite direction that our physicists think it comes from. It comes from the center of the cosmic icon, it comes from the eternal realm, because it was known since the days of Plato and Pythagoras that that's where all being comes from."
},
{
"end_time": 12957.125,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 12927.722,
"text": " These are absolute statements. I've just finished an article on consciousness and in fact I added a very essential section this morning, so this is all very recent. But the central point about consciousness is that it"
},
{
"end_time": 12986.169,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 12957.892,
"text": " definitely derives not just from the eternal realm, but from God himself. And this is where I quote a Vedic statement, namely that the fundamental principle is what is called in an Upanishad Satchitananda. So Sat is being,"
},
{
"end_time": 13015.435,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 12986.544,
"text": " Chit is consciousness and Ananda is bliss. So these are three Nomen Dei, names of God, which are Vedic in origin. And it is from this divine trinity, Sath, Chit, Ananda, that the creation comes and this is why the creation"
},
{
"end_time": 13045.776,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 13016.135,
"text": " is tripartite because these three parts, the aviturnal, the psychic and the corporeal, are manifestations respectively of sot, chit, ananda. And in my paper I have to explain that because at first hearing you don't grasp how ananda"
},
{
"end_time": 13072.654,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 13046.34,
"text": " which means bliss, is in any way associated with the corporeal world. In fact, you might very well conceive the opposite, that this is a veil of tears and it's a place where there is least an underworld. Well, I go into all these issues very carefully and I hope I'm making a very plausible argument."
},
{
"end_time": 13098.916,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 13072.892,
"text": " So the point is that consciousness, we have it all wrong. And not just the gross materialists, but also the people who think they are spiritualists or what have you. The point is, one way or another, we all try to explain or understand consciousness from below."
},
{
"end_time": 13123.729,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 13099.462,
"text": " The outright materialist says, aha, it all comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of them aggregating in suitable ways, voila, there's consciousness. But pardon me for saying so. This is nonsense. This is utter sheer nonsense. There's not a speck of truth in that. And in fact, it's a complete inversion."
},
{
"end_time": 13151.783,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 13124.633,
"text": " because there's only one place where consciousness can actually originate, and that's in God himself. And we have a Vedic source which tells us so. One of the most profound nomen Dei in the Vedic tradition is Satchitananda. Satchitananda is a name of God, and it's a name which tells us something about"
},
{
"end_time": 13181.903,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 13152.278,
"text": " the nature of God. And interestingly enough, it's triadic. God is in a sense one and three at the same time. You find the same thing in Christianity, but in a very, very different way. Christianity speaks of the Trinity, yes. So it also sees God as a triad, a triplicity, but let's leave that out of the picture because it's completely different from the Vedic."
},
{
"end_time": 13212.466,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 13183.148,
"text": " Not at all. On the contrary, in a sense, there are polar opposites. So, in order to understand cosmology, in a Platonist cosmology, you have to start with the Vedic nomen Dei. The key is, unquestionably, the revealed name Sat-Chit-Ananda."
},
{
"end_time": 13242.773,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 13213.387,
"text": " This is not a human invention that comes from God, and it is the oldest name of God because the Vedic tradition is the oldest tradition in the world, by a long shot, even as Christianity is, so to speak, the last. I think there are in essence only these two traditions and then there are many in-betweens, but I think so far as bona fide"
},
{
"end_time": 13273.387,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 13243.899,
"text": " Manifestations from God Himself. You have the Vedic and you have the Christic. I don't think there's anything else on that level. And they are polar opposites. And, however, to understand cosmology, you have to go back to the Vedic. The Vedic and the Platonist are one and the same."
},
{
"end_time": 13303.148,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 13273.916,
"text": " There's a little technical difference, as I said. The Platonic involves the idea of geometry in a way which you nowhere find in the Vedas. But apart from this, the Vedic and the Platonist are interchangeable. And so, if you want to understand cosmology,"
},
{
"end_time": 13333.131,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 13303.729,
"text": " ontologically there's no other way you can get it from the Vedas you can get it from Plato in either case you get the tripartite cosmos and this is the way you are going to understand cosmology and once you have seen that you recognize at the glance that"
},
{
"end_time": 13358.763,
"index": 484,
"start_time": 13333.387,
"text": " the modern scientific way. I say scientific because it's not really scientific at all, but all of our scientists think that way, so it's scientific. The scientific way is the polar opposite of the Vedic or Platonist, where the Vedic and Platonist sees being"
},
{
"end_time": 13388.183,
"index": 485,
"start_time": 13359.377,
"text": " or irreducible wholeness, which is the same thing as originating on the eternal plane and actually beyond that it originates in the tripartite divinity, the scientistic things that comes from quantum particles. If you have enough of these non-existent things, you will have consciousness. This is nonsense, complete nonsense."
},
{
"end_time": 13418.183,
"index": 486,
"start_time": 13388.763,
"text": " And I want to use what little energy I have left to get this message across. This is nonsense. There's no evidence for it and theoretically it doesn't make sense. Excuse me. Sure, sure. In fact, I was in telephone connection with Bill Dembski just before Christmas."
},
{
"end_time": 13443.626,
"index": 487,
"start_time": 13418.473,
"text": " Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 13456.51,
"index": 488,
"start_time": 13444.155,
"text": " I have looked at Dembski's theorem very carefully. In fact, his is the only bit of mathematics that I ever put into any of my books."
},
{
"end_time": 13481.203,
"index": 489,
"start_time": 13456.903,
"text": " In one of my books, there's a chapter on Dempsey's stuff, and I actually go through the main step of his theory. It's very simple, really. The mathematics is very simple, and I think there's absolutely not a shred of doubt that it is a completely rigorous mathematical theorem."
},
{
"end_time": 13511.493,
"index": 490,
"start_time": 13481.715,
"text": " And if people disagree, it's just because evolution is against their religion. I mean, excuse me, evolution is part of their religion, is what I wanted to say. And so it's a kind of on a religious grounds that they attack Dembski. And I'm not surprised at all. I've seen enough to realize"
},
{
"end_time": 13540.981,
"index": 491,
"start_time": 13511.988,
"text": " that our religious convictions, whether it's true religion or false religion, they're equally strong and equally definitive. So my own conviction is that Bill Dembski's theorem is a bona fide mathematical theorem, as good as any other mathematical theorem, and it does prove"
},
{
"end_time": 13564.906,
"index": 492,
"start_time": 13541.493,
"text": " that deterministic, random and stochastic processes cannot produce complex specified information. That is, you can bank on that, that's like the Pythagorean theorem, it simply is, and if people don't like it, it's their problem."
},
{
"end_time": 13593.473,
"index": 493,
"start_time": 13566.049,
"text": " and it does rigorously disprove evolution, its pattern dried. It's easy to see because you couldn't have seen it before the discovery of DNA, but with the discovery of DNA we realize that the simplest living organism contains in every one of its cells"
},
{
"end_time": 13623.439,
"index": 494,
"start_time": 13593.677,
"text": " what might be popularly characterized as tons of complex specified information. And that's clear. And therefore, this tons of complex specified information could not have been put there by either deterministic or random or a combination of the two that is stochastic process."
},
{
"end_time": 13652.312,
"index": 495,
"start_time": 13624.65,
"text": " This is crystal clear. And if even, you know, well-known scientists object, it's on emotional, psychological grounds, not on mathematical. And one can very well understand that they would object, because if you realize that evolution is impossible,"
},
{
"end_time": 13678.063,
"index": 496,
"start_time": 13652.619,
"text": " then had one stroke, our entire scientific Weltanschauung is kaputt, instantly. And it would surprise me enormously if under these conditions you will not find very erudite, very famous, celebrated men who will oppose that tooth and nail."
},
{
"end_time": 13697.073,
"index": 497,
"start_time": 13678.865,
"text": " and incidentally I know Dersky fairly well enough to realize that he has personally suffered terribly because he is just a mathematician who happened to prove this incredible theorem"
},
{
"end_time": 13724.872,
"index": 498,
"start_time": 13697.585,
"text": " and then people like Stephen Meyer and so on realized the importance of it and founded something called the what is it uh... intelligent design institute and they have lots of money and they're very prestigious and uh... so uh... Demsci became a celebrity on account of that and since"
},
{
"end_time": 13743.473,
"index": 499,
"start_time": 13725.401,
"text": " The intelligent design movement, their main tenet is that evolution is wrong, that intelligent design is producing all these biological phenomena."
},
{
"end_time": 13767.108,
"index": 500,
"start_time": 13743.951,
"text": " Now, obviously, since they have, so to speak, become very visible, the opposition has also been very visible and very audible, and so there has been a tremendous attack upon the intelligent design people, and especially Bill Demske,"
},
{
"end_time": 13795.896,
"index": 501,
"start_time": 13767.432,
"text": " and there's been personal attacks and you know Dempsky is a very good man he's a little childlike he's not sophisticated and so on which is perhaps why God gave him that insight you know there's a goodness there and a devotion to God which is natural not sectarian or anything like that so at a certain point Bill Dempsky couldn't take it anymore"
},
{
"end_time": 13820.998,
"index": 502,
"start_time": 13796.544,
"text": " because his personal life was attacked. So he sort of withdrew and then I happened to get in touch with him before Christmas. I think I took the initiative, I called him and we had a nice conversation and I was happy to hear that he is back in action as it were."
},
{
"end_time": 13848.933,
"index": 503,
"start_time": 13821.869,
"text": " because in fact he was just on his way to a conference in Europe some place. So he's back active representing the Intelligent Design Institute and in fact I told him a little bit about my work and so forth and he was interested in"
},
{
"end_time": 13876.374,
"index": 504,
"start_time": 13850.23,
"text": " He wants to visit me one of these days. I hope so because he's a very, very good man. I'm not taking a side here, but in defense of David Walpart, I don't believe he is a proponent of evolution. I think he's actually a critic of it. He thinks it's incomplete. So his grounds for disliking the application of the no free lunch theorems, I don't think come from that. David Walpart also has the monotheism theorem. I don't know if you know about that."
},
{
"end_time": 13893.695,
"index": 505,
"start_time": 13876.374,
"text": " But it says that if there's a god, there could be only one god. And he mathematically shows this. I have a podcast on that. But anyway, I'm not terribly convinced that the criticism just comes from his emotional appeal, though I think almost all our criticisms for anything come from emotional appeals, because we're deeply emotional people."
},
{
"end_time": 13918.524,
"index": 506,
"start_time": 13893.695,
"text": " Anyhow, let's put that aside and I'll just wrap with a couple questions, which actually come from a friend of mine who's watched so much of your work and is a huge fan. His name is Matthew Whiten. He asks, Aquinas says that God is being while Whitehead says God is becoming. Do you think these are opposed or both captured with Platonism? Whiten is wrong. Being has nothing to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 13945.998,
"index": 507,
"start_time": 13919.155,
"text": " process, process ontology as Whitehead understood it. So my own outlook towards Whitehead is in a sense mixed. I owe him a great deal because he opened my eyes to bifurcation and the absolute absurdity of our scientistic Weltanschauung."
},
{
"end_time": 13971.305,
"index": 508,
"start_time": 13946.203,
"text": " So we're totally in agreement on that. But I'm a Platonist, right down to the bone, and Whitehead certainly is not, even though he's very sympathetic to Plato, and in fact, in this book which I read when I was 14, he says that all subsequent philosophy are footnotes to Plato,"
},
{
"end_time": 13995.452,
"index": 509,
"start_time": 13971.8,
"text": " So he was very respectful of Platonism, but he was not actually in his philosophy a Platonist. There's no way of squaring his process theology with Platonism. And so I can very well understand that somebody who is a process theologist and sort of following Whitehead in that"
},
{
"end_time": 14002.944,
"index": 510,
"start_time": 13996.049,
"text": " Part of his teaching might have reservations about Dembski's theorem."
},
{
"end_time": 14033.524,
"index": 511,
"start_time": 14003.763,
"text": " At the core of Verveki's Platonism is his ontology, which he calls the perceptual promise that reality is inexhaustibly intelligible. He has a Taoist definition of reality, calling it the ground of being, which itself cannot be a being, but is rather the unintelligible ground which all being comes into being. Western religions rather consider reality to be the supreme being, an inexhaustible sentience. Whereas Saint Maximus joined these saying God is both being and non-being."
},
{
"end_time": 14061.8,
"index": 512,
"start_time": 14033.524,
"text": " What do you think about these different ways of describing reality? Well, I think Saint Maximus was basically right. There is in Christianity a tradition, let's see, what is it called? It corresponds to Advaita Vedanta in the sense that"
},
{
"end_time": 14086.664,
"index": 513,
"start_time": 14062.227,
"text": " It emphasizes the transcendence of God to an extreme. But there is also in Christianity a tradition which is based upon the immanence of God. So God is both absolutely transcendent and absolutely immanent whether we can grasp that or not."
},
{
"end_time": 14110.23,
"index": 514,
"start_time": 14087.551,
"text": " I have some mathematical questions, and one of them is, in differential geometry, there's some results by Radin and Moyes, or the Radin-Moyse theorems. It says the amount of differentiable structures that can be placed on dimension 1, 2, and 3 is actually just 1, up to diffeomorphism, and then from 5, 6, and onward, it's finite. It's large, but it's still finite."
},
{
"end_time": 14139.991,
"index": 515,
"start_time": 14110.23,
"text": " Dimension 4 is uncountably infinite, not even infinite, it's uncountably infinite. I haven't heard many people talk about this and I wonder if that's related to space-time being four-dimensional. Very interesting. You must realize that I got interested in"
},
{
"end_time": 14170.435,
"index": 516,
"start_time": 14140.538,
"text": " differential geometry after I took my PhD. My doctoral dissertation was simply a matter of an existence theorem for solutions of differential equations and a convergence theorem for some process of approximation. So it was very, very classical and then what happened was this."
},
{
"end_time": 14198.063,
"index": 517,
"start_time": 14171.459,
"text": " I knew that my profession was going to be a professor of mathematics, so I knew that I would have to earn my living, so to speak, by proving mathematical theorems. Now, I didn't want to go into any field that other people had already worked in, because I didn't want to be obligated to read hundreds of papers in the literature."
},
{
"end_time": 14228.353,
"index": 518,
"start_time": 14198.49,
"text": " In other words, to me mathematics was just a job, my main interest was elsewhere. So I developed a subject in mathematics which when I started was completely unexplored, the theory of submersions. And I'll tell you what that is, if you have an n-dimensional space and an n plus p-dimensional larger space,"
},
{
"end_time": 14255.265,
"index": 519,
"start_time": 14228.626,
"text": " And you have a differentiable map from the big space to the little space, which is everywhere of maximal rank. This is called a submersion. And what it does is, it slices the big manifold. We're talking differentiable manifold. We're slicing the big manifold into P-dimensional sub-manifolds."
},
{
"end_time": 14275.555,
"index": 520,
"start_time": 14255.896,
"text": " And so this defines a subject, and I think I was the first mathematician to systematically study submersions. And when I started, I was practically the man who was building it up from nothing. And I wrote"
},
{
"end_time": 14302.944,
"index": 521,
"start_time": 14275.981,
"text": " about 23 papers on submersions. In each paper it made a contribution so that by the time I was finished after, I don't know, 30 years of being a professor of mathematics, by the time I was finished the series of submersions was on the record. It became a recognized"
},
{
"end_time": 14325.503,
"index": 522,
"start_time": 14303.2,
"text": " discipline in mathematics and you know the funny thing is I belong now to something called academia and whenever my name is mentioned anywhere in the journal literature they give me the actual quotation and so by as of this morning"
},
{
"end_time": 14355.384,
"index": 523,
"start_time": 14326.135,
"text": " During the last year or so, my name was mentioned 210 times. Okay, so that's one thing. But the interesting thing is that about 10% of these mentions go back to my mathematical days. In other words, along with my recent books and all of that, mention is made"
},
{
"end_time": 14381.903,
"index": 524,
"start_time": 14355.862,
"text": " so less frequently, of my articles on submersions. So by now submersions is a mathematical discipline which is of interest in universities all over the world. So there are people, so my old papers that go back 60 years ago are being cited in the mathematical literature because"
},
{
"end_time": 14412.568,
"index": 525,
"start_time": 14383.695,
"text": " Submersions, as I say, is one of the accepted domains of research now. John Byas, who's a physicist, a mathematician, he has a paper on categories and smooth maps, and he references you, and then I saw that paper and it was the D'Rom's theorem on general spaces. Yeah, right, right. It's one of my 23 papers. Anyhow, the point is, I looked at mathematics"
},
{
"end_time": 14437.773,
"index": 526,
"start_time": 14413.268,
"text": " as earning my living. In other words, my actual interest was in Platonism and Whitehead and so on and so forth in philosophical things. But we all have to earn our living and it earned me a good living. It didn't take much time. Most of my time was free."
},
{
"end_time": 14460.333,
"index": 527,
"start_time": 14438.353,
"text": " Sir, it's been a pleasure. It's been more than a pleasure. Thank you so much for not only speaking with me for this long but inviting me to your home and inviting me out to dinner as well, which we'll get to shortly. Thank you. Well, I can tell you frankly that when I first heard about you and you to our friend Brian,"
},
{
"end_time": 14490.503,
"index": 528,
"start_time": 14460.811,
"text": " And I began to look you up on the internet and see what you're all about. I became tremendously eager to meet you because I felt that we might really have a lot to say to each other. And so far I feel that I was on track. I mean, your background and mine are so different in many ways. Still,"
},
{
"end_time": 14515.742,
"index": 529,
"start_time": 14491.288,
"text": " have common interests and in fact I would say that fundamentally you and I are very much interested in the same questions. We come perhaps from somewhat different directions, you know much more about what's really going on in the technical world"
},
{
"end_time": 14544.241,
"index": 530,
"start_time": 14516.101,
"text": " I'm so happy that you came and I'm looking forward to having another couple of days at least to exchange ideas. And I'm very happy that you have some Indian blood because as you know I have the highest regard for the Vedic tradition. Well, something we can speak about later is that generally in our culture we don't have high regard for virtually anything."
},
{
"end_time": 14550.947,
"index": 531,
"start_time": 14545.555,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, isn't it true? Okay. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 14580.333,
"index": 532,
"start_time": 14551.664,
"text": " That was a far-reaching, fantastic conversation. Thank you for watching for four hours now. This is a reminder that on Toll, on theories of everything, we recently published two videos that I think you'd like. One is called Kurt Plays Everything, which is a video of me playing a video game that envelops the themes of Toll, namely the consciousness, philosophical, metaphysical themes. Also, there's a part one of a debate that I was lucky enough to host with Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, and Susan Schneider. Both are linked in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 14605.452,
"index": 533,
"start_time": 14580.333,
"text": " And there are so many more plans for the future. For instance, we're going to be delving deep into artificial intelligence. We're going to be bringing lectures, actual lectures, to the fore. That's coming up shortly with the Mind and Machines conference with Susan Schneider. Also, I just wanted to thank you for watching, for listening. Your viewership, your financial support helps Toe. It wouldn't be, Toe wouldn't exist without your viewership slash your sponsorship slash your support. You may not know it, but it's a tremendous,"
},
{
"end_time": 14634.582,
"index": 534,
"start_time": 14605.452,
"text": " Thank you so much. Every dollar, every comment, every like, every subscribe, every Twitter share helps tremendously. Thank you. Thank you so much and take care."
},
{
"end_time": 14663.643,
"index": 535,
"start_time": 14635.009,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 14690.589,
"index": 536,
"start_time": 14663.643,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.