graded24

This is slightly confusing. I understand you are not the mind. But somehow you, or whatever it is that is capable of reading these questions and replying, has access to the mind and it's experiences and can write about it. Its like I don't identify with the table but can still report it's state to others. Would you say it is analogous between you and the mind like it is with me and the table?

@winterknight what is time to you? Do you have a memory of how Time was to you few years ago. What has changed?

This sounds very much like a quantum mechanical statement, where states of things are not expressible as either this or that or both or not. Have you read any quantum?

I mean we have to keep in mind that math is also just a language on one level. IT is a collection of symbols pointing to other things. So in that sense, language is not lagging behind quantum mechanics. It has been formulated in a language, just that it is a special kind of language. But is that a surprise? I have wondered about it quite a bit. I wonder if a mathematical language can be developed to formulate Nonduality, and THEN it CAN be communicated, just like quantum mechanics is now. Because nondual teachers have never been mathematically inclined perhaps it was never tried. But mathematics is quite powerful, it has the ability to convey extremely complex, often paradoxical ideas in a consistent manner.

It is quite a mystery to all physicists why the more fundamental you go, the purer thought (mathematical object can be looked as units of pure thought) becomes more applicable. There is a classically famous essay on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences You are exactly right: predictions in newtonian mechanics are more accurate the more you zoom out while opposite is true in quantum mechanics. Magnetic moment of electron is an example of this. Its value was predicted with 99.9999999% accuracy by quantum mechanical calculations way before it was actually measured. This has made many people say that reality on the most fundamental level is pure mathematical. There is no substance there, just mathematical objects. This would match up nicely with nondual worldview.

In short the answer would be, may be there will be something beyond mathematics which would help us understand quantum mechanics better than we do today, but it's just that it is the best we got at the moment. I dont think people are 'twisting reality into mathematical paradigm' when it comes to physics. It may be true for other sciences when mathematical models are forced upon a data. Physics is as if the natural laws were actually written in mathematics. Mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in explaining physics. Note that it didnt have to be this way. It could have been that mathematics was about as effective in explaining atoms as it is in explaining humans (which is not effective at all). But it just so happens that this is not the case. The more fundamental you go, the more accurate mathematical predictions become. I share your skepticism of whether or not physics really "understands" reality. But the problem is, what would you call understanding something in any case? When you can explain things in an intuitive common sense way? That cant be it. And how do you know whether quantum mechanics is just 'providing results' ? May be it is pointing to the way things actually are and it is just that the way we can verify it is by getting results.

Sorry I did not follow what you're trying to say. Could you please simply describe what is happening from your vantage point, when your body-mind is sitting say in a room? Could you describe the direct experience and the interpretation you'd give to someone of that experience? What is your I-ness now? I understand some of it would be hard to communicate but you can try

I am not exactly sure what you are trying to say. The mathematical system is not fuzzy, no. And that's the reason for me calling quantum objects every bit as Real as anything else. I dont think electrons are performing inconsistently. They look inconsistent only if you approach them with a wrong assumption about reality. For example, lets imagine you say that objects should have a certain position. I ask you to make it more precise. So you say, 'position of an object is a real number, like x=2.5'. Notice that it is mathematical statement which matches with our physical intuition. But now, i can forget about the physical intuition and ask mathematically, 'why should it be a real number? What if it is a matrix-- a collection of 4 real numbers? like x= [ 1.5, 2; 3.3 5] " . And indeed it turns out that position of quantum objects is a matrix not a number. So you see, mathematically all i did was to generalize the classical idea of position and it is still well defined, but now we dont know how to physically interpret it anymore. But who cares if it gives me all the right results when i do the experiments? Would you call this inconsistent or consistent? It is only inconsistent if you insist that position must be a real number. But what is the basis of saying that? Only your experience with classical reality. Actually quantum physicist do not really use probability theory. The quantum objects need no probabilities in them. They are defined on their own. Probability enters only when you perform an experiment and, you being classical, want to know the classical outcome. Only hen probability theory is used to predict the outcome.

To some extent, yes. But i dont think it has to do with modeling. Physics is a LOT OF analytical thinking. Over time it becomes a habit. So switching between physics and nonduality can be difficult for this reason. This is going to be a challenge. It is not at all clear what post-rational science would look like. Science means a very high bar against falsehood. As long as you can maintain that, there can be a hope. That is great! Which book are you using? They can try doing what I am doing. But it is difficult. First, scientists can be pretty closed minded themselves to even engage with non-materialist viewpoint. Almost all of them see consciousness as a by-product of the brain. So they feel materialism is the end of story pretty much. Second, even if they try it is hard to convey ideas accurately to the general public without being too technical. Physics has this problem more than any other science because "true" physics is actually just math. No words. And a very abstract math at that. As soon as you translate it into general language, you are bound to run into fantasies and falsehoods. I know what you're saying. Things, statements, don't feel intuitive until you can visualize them. But you must be able to see that our visualization is so very limited that it cannot possibly be a test of what is legitimate what is not. For example, can you visualize a 4 dimensional sphere? I sure cant. But can i calculate and hence make statements about its surface areas and its volume? I sure can. Physics is mathematics. Rest are just stories, mnemonics if you will, to aid to or to shorten the mathematical calculations.

Here is another perspective on it. English was developed by our minds to discuss classical reality. When you try to fit quantum reality into English, it doesnt make much sense. There is another language suitable for quantum objects, where no such confusions arise, and that language is mathematics. Why we humans are capable of speaking the language of the quantum realm, is a big mystery! For example, Here is how you would write an electron that is both here and there (say at distance x): |e> = |0> + |x> . As a mathematical statement is perfectly meaningful sentence. Problems arise when you try to translate it into English.

I don't think science itself is limited to materialism, but yeh, most scientists do have the working metaphysics of materialism. They consider any sway from materialism as a slippery slope to pseudo-sciences. Since there is a legitimate basis for this concern it is a hard nut to crack. Keep in mind that most scientists are not spiritual, so there is just no way of getting them out of materialist metaphysics. What is strange is, physics heavily relies on maths, and math is anything but materialistic. But most do not see this strangeness. In short, Leo is quite accurate in his bashing of academic circles. Whether or not electron was formless before an observation happened is an open question within physics and is considered under the subfield of 'Interpretation of Quantum Physics'. People still do not know exactly what happens in the process of observation. I would say that it is best to not take away the reality of electrons before observation, because whatever it is, it is very well defined. Just call it 'quantum reality', as opposed to the more familiar, 'classical reality'. Imagine quatum reality as a 'fuzzy reality' where things are uncertain: particles can be both here AND there, spins can be both up AND down etc. It is different from our day to day classical reality in which things are certain. A ball is either here OR there. (notice the difference between OR and AND). It is like how when you zoom in on a picture, it becomes fuzzy. In a very similar manner, when we zoom in on the universe, things are fuzzy. At this point confusion arises: people tend to think that things are fuzzy because we cant investigate them down to their last details at such small scales. That is not the case at all. They are fuzzy because that is what they are, that is their very reality. That is what quantum reality is. Quantum objects satisfy all qualifications of being Real. They have quantum properties that can be calculated and measured to an unbelievable accuracy. So what all this means is, quantum reality is extremely accurate as quantum reality, but when you try to impose your classical reality on it, it looks fuzzy to you. It is the reality of the particle to be both here and there. It is YOU who want it to here or there and call it weird when it is not. Imagine if we were visited by creature from the quatum realm. She would look at us and say 'wow pretty weird reality. Everything is definite'. No, observation is not related to transfer of energy. However there is a transfer of classical-ness/quantum-ness when observation happens. When you, a big classical being, observe an electron, you transfer your classical definiteness to the electron and make it classical as well. The electron stops being quantum (both here and there) and becomes classical (here or there). So if you want to contemplate on physics, try to imagine what it is like for one thing to be many things at once! Because that is how physical Reality is at the most fundamental level.

@winterknight When you look at a wall, it is not that the wall exists because you are aware of it, because there is no "you looking at it". Wall just IS. It's pure self-aware being. Is that right? Does that mean colors that i feel like 'i see' are actually just self aware without needing a 'me'? So are colors, thoughts, sounds are simply self-aware being?

Most earning livelihood methods would come invariably with two kinds of thoughts: competition and survival. Both are me-my-thoughts. They provide a kind of orientation to the person by organizing their 'to-do's in a hierarchy of priority and, perhaps more importantly, answering 'what should i do' questions on multiple scales, from their day to day activity to big career moves. It is very hard to orient oneself in a profession if one disregard me-thoughts. Can I orient myself with me-thoughts while simultaneously inquiring who these thoughts are arising to?

Again, thanks for a detailed reply. I have thought of making changes, but it seems like some of these problems are so fundamental that they would follow me wherever I go. So why not try and reconcile them internally before making irreversible external changes. To that end.. Is it possible to indulge in the usual career-ambition and career-activity, with a kind of playfulness (as opposed to trying to use success to escape death as i was doing before) , while on the self-inuiry Path? Due to the nature of my career (physics), at least a part of this ambition is and parts of the activity are not that different from spiritual motivations (understanding fundamental Reality). Of course it will come with a load of other things with no immediate spiritual significance (writing papers, giving talks, competition etc ) to it. But well, still, its at least the good part can sustain me through the not-so-good part. But if a career-ambition is a big obstacle to The Path, then that's another story..

Thank you for answering questions with patience. Here comes the most practical most relevant question for me at the moment. It might be too personal for you to relate or answer but i am gonna try anyway as i am desperate. I am 30, and have been an overambitious, overachiever but also a seeker at heart all my life. Since I study science, I had a passive assumption that success career and 'understanding reality' would be one and the same for me. But of course being exposed to Nonduality two years ago, that assumption looks clearly wrong and a trick of the ego. There have been 3 components of motivations so far, 1- Egoic, proving i am better than everyone, 2- Understanding Truth, which seemed to align with my work until recently 3- Financial/social survival. As you can guess, Nonduality has clearly undermined all these three motivations. So I find myself simply not working and expending most of my time on Nondual teachings. The love for truth that fueled my professional work all these years have now totally shifted onto spirituality, leaving very little motivation and indeed time for the professional science work. This is clearly not sustainable for many reasons but even the fear of future problems get set aside as mere 'egoic thoughts'. What would you suggest for someone like me? It is not enough to know that self-inquiry can be done with worldly work, because if there is not enough motivation to work daily, one simply doesnt work. How do I work without making Nonduality an excuse to not work? Ego can appropriate nonduality at times and use it as a 'loser's excuse'. the ideal scenario would be if i can continue both in parallel and complimentary way. But that seems like a pipe dream so far. If the first thought in the morning is about Nonduality my whole day goes into it. Thanks.

What is the 'enlightened one' ? For there to be one, there is also an unenlightened one. Why is this duality there?

Well, I certainly did not ask how often you 'think thoughts'. I can ask the question in a twisted language avoiding a thinker altogether, but of course you understand what i mean in any case. In almost all traditions, advaita and Buddhists alike, frequency of thoughts is a litmus-test against any self-delusions of realizing the Self. I remember a story from Sam Harris's book Waking Up about a female Student of Poonja-ji in India. She declared enlightenment and was ordained by her Guru as a nondual Teacher. Then harris traveled to a Buddhist place with her where the Buddhist monk clearly saw through her claim and said "ok, we are going to sit here calmly until you get the next thought. Let us know". And within minutes she was like "uh, oh here is one..". Harris commented on this that Advaita for all its greatness runs into this problem often.

@winterknight Could you please clarify the following for me. Sorry if some of these are something you have already answered, 1- If there is no "I" then what is the meaning of "I am enlightened" ? Who started this post? 2- If there is no separate you from me, then how come there is Ignorance "here" but not "there"? (I didnt ask why is there enlightenment there but not here because I know you'd reply that it is here but i dont see it :P) 2- Is it possible to follow the path and get enlightened without causing too much trouble for your family, which means managing wife, kids and a successful career (a successful career because i am already on that path and leaving that will cause my dependent suffering) ? 3- Ramana maharshi and others say the Self has an I-AMness to it which the ego appropriates. "The source of ego is God" as Ramana maharshi puts it. But Nisaragadatta emphasizes that the Absolute is beyong this I-AMness. "The Absolute does not know it is". Could you please clarify this one for me? Thank you,

How often do you get "thoughts" ?

Hi I guess you know what I am going to ask. It's the universal problem. Any suggestions, new ways of thinking, references would be welcome. I am in an academic career. It is not a 9 to 5 job I can 'just do on the side' mindlessly. I need to be very proactive. Initiate projects, collaboration, think creatively etc. It was hard enough with the egoic way of working. And now to make it worse, the old sticks and carrots paradigm of motivation is just not working. Like it or not, purely egoic way of looking at life is pretty efficient in professional competition and advancing in a career. Granted you are suffering the whole way, but still.. it gets things done. Of course I dont want to go back to it. I cant even if i tried to. I am on the Nondual path now. Not free of ego yet, but I can see through the movement of egoic thoughts. They dont have the same hold over me as they used to. It is great in every aspect of life. A general happiness without a cause has started pouring in and I dont need to have frequent points of success to find happiness. That's all great, but at some point, you also need to work. But I find myself listening to and reading nondual stuff, contemplating etc way more than I should. At this rate, I wont survive at all in my profession. I wonder if other people have gone through something similar and have a useful way of looking at it. How can I formulate a motivation that is sustainable, forceful enough and consistent with nondual practices on the side. Thanks

I would like to contribute to this community with one expertise I have, and that is quantum mechanics. With the risk of stroking my own ego, let me mention that I have a doctorate in what would be called 'many- body quantum systems'. I have spent considerable time studying Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics as well. At this point you might suspect that the doctorate was from Trump university and that's why I am here-- but, no, it was from Caltech. I mention this because I think, as a general rule, we should always give more careful consideration to what the "experts" are saying. Just a more careful consideration, no blind acceptance of course. Quantum Mechanics is very mysterious and it is not a stretch to say that even physicist do not understand it's implications for 'reality'. There are several proposals on what to 'make of' quantum mechanics and it is by no means settled yet. Note that this allows for people to choose an interpretation from the zoo of possibilities to meet their preconceived metaphysics. And that is true of physicists and non-physicists alike. Now with this background, the very first thing I would like everyone here to know is that 'wavefunction collapse', or the so called Copenhagen interpretation, a term coined in mystic circles a lot, is not the only, or an uncontested leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yes, it is also not a fringe interpretation. In fact, when we do quantum mechanical calculations for any practical purposes in physics, we are by default working with the collapse interpretation. But it is because no matter which interpretation is correct, for practical purposes, any of them do for now, so we stick with the collapse one as it is both traditional and easiest. Having said that, the way collapse interpretation is used in mystic circles is almost always a misrepresentation. (Leo's one was a better one among them though. I did not find anything obviously wrong.) For example, nowhere in physics does it say that things collapse only when a conscious observer interacts with a system. Collapse results when any 'classical' (something macroscopic that exists in single state not in superposition of multiple possibilities) object interacts with a quantum mechanical object. There is a rough (but clearly incomplete) understanding of why this collapse happens. There is no need to invoke consciousness for it. It happens because in interaction, the 'big' classical object gets entangled with the small quantum object, making it classical as well. There are two other main contending interpretations, 'many-world interpretation' and 'Qubism' . Good news is though, none of these interpretation is in any obvious conflict with the Nondual metaphysics. If you ask me, I would say that actually Qubism is the one most in line with the Nondual understanding of reality. In some sense Qubism is the only one that directly invokes a conscious observer in its formalism. So look this one up. Actually qubism seems to directly spawn from a nondual understanding of humans. Paradoxically, it would be somewhat of a bad news for mystic circles if qubism turns out to be the correct interpretation, because it kinda dymystifies quantum mechanics, but I digress.. With all this, coming to your question. I strongly disagree that quantum mechanics says that. Here I would agree with my dirty materialists colleagues like Sean Carroll. Atom did exist before it 'collapsed' , it's just that it existed as a quantum object not as a classical one. I cannot stress enough how important it is to understand this point. Much of this tomfoolery around Quantum mechanics arises because we conflate 'existence' with 'classical existence'. Believe it or not, an atom, as a 'cloud of possibilities' , is a very well defined object that exists in a very very precise way. it is more precise than our classical minds can fathom. (Here I am using 'existence' in the dual sense, not Nondual sense) In fact, to a physicist, it has a more concrete existence than a chair or a table. More precise things can be said, calculated and measured about an atom than you can ever do for a chair or a table. Call it 'quantum existence' if you like to differentiate it from 'common sense existence'. But dont take its existence away from it. When 'you look at it', as far as physics is concerned, all that happened was, you, a macroscopic classical object, got entangled with the atom and made it a classical object like yourself. Classical objects of course are also quantum objects, just of a special kind. So from quantum mechanics' perspective nothing radical really happened. Things change when they interact. Now you can also see why many physicists disregard (unjustifiably so in the final analysis) this whole question of interpretation. Because to them the debacle only arises if you try to force classical existence on quantum objects, and there is no apriori reason why you should be able to do that. Hope this very long post helped. I, as the in house physicist, would be happy to be of any use and entertain more questions..

Hey Leo, I am new here and don't know if there is a channel to request a topic for you to cover. But I know plenty of people, including me, would love to see a leo-style nondual approach to time. In fact I am surprised you haven't already done it. It is one of the key things to transcend going from duality to nonduality. thanks

@Leo Gura C'mon! I will forward that to Sean Carroll I promise!

Indeed, he has talked about illusion of time in many of his videos. But it would be a different thing having a whole video dedicated to it.

Hi, Just watched Leo's latest video, What Is Spirituality? - A No-Bullshit Intro To Spirituality. At 1:13:00 he discusses the brain issue, and how it is the biggest stumbling block for rational, scientific minded people. And he is right, I am one of them and it indeed is the trickiest issue of all. The so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' is nothing but a manifestation of the same issue in the scientific world. Before I ask the question, let me clarify the context. I have a foot on each boat. I have studied physics all of my life. And yet, after a year of meditative and contemplative practices, I have now become directly conscious of how the physical reality, as a matter of experience, is actually made of the 'mind stuff'. So the body, the head on top, and the brain inside it, all of it, as a matter of experience, are made of the 'mind stuff'. They are like objects in a simulation. They are made of substance-less substance, so to speak. So the brain we see is not 'real'. It does not 'exist' in the way we think it does. But, the problem is, as the scientific paradigm would say, may be the brain is a simulation of something else, something real, that we don't have a direct access to. When I see a tree, the tree that appears in my consciousness is a simulation of something out there that I couldn't possibly know otherwise. Same with the brain. Now, brain and other objects that appear in my consciousness are not on equal footing. It is evidently clear that the contents of my consciousness have a huge correlation with whats happening to the brain. And I don't mean it as a theory. It is a direct experience of all of us. For example, if I inject my brain with a psychedelic, the contents of my consciousness change drastically. It is abundantly clear that whatever we experience is preceded by corresponding neural activity. (Note that I am not saying I am my brain, for I am the one that experiences what the brain creates. ) Experience is not inside the brain, but it sure looks caused by it. Leo says we are inside a Mind. Indeed. May be we are inside our own minds. All evidences point to it. But I mean the real mind, (whatever that means) and not this brain that is a mere representation of that mind inside our minds. I have struggled with this dilemma for long. And would love to know what you think about it. Thanks!