This is an exploration between Shinzen Young and Bernardo Kastrup on mysticism, science, and liberation. Shinzen Young is a mindfulness teacher, the author of the Science of Enlightenment, and is the co-director of the SEMA lab at the University of Arizona. Bernardo Kastrup is an analytic philosopher, computer engineer, metaphysical idealist, and executive director of the Essentia Foundation.

Essentia Foundation: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/

Shinzen Young: https://www.shinzen.org/

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Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
2:46 Can philosophy, science, and mysticism align? 
7:39 What does liberation consist of? 
11:38 Bernardo’s path to insight 
17:43 The paradox of cultivated improvement vs. nothing to improve 
31:16 Blocking ourselves from life’s teaching 
36:01 Did Spinoza have mystical experience? 
48:58 The truth is not vulnerable 
51:29 Training people in the spirit of science 
1:06:59 Reflecting on Bernardo’s insight 

Jordan Myska Allen is CEO and founder of The Relateful Company, an organization focused on building inner peace and interconnection through truth and love. At the heart of their approach is Relatefulness, a practice emphasizing present-moment relating, construct awareness, and non-duality. Jordan is also a practicing life coach, the author of A Beautiful Apocalypse, and a long-time practitioner of A Course in Miracles.

The Relateful Company: https://www.relateful.com/

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/9ENdAlvkOQ0

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
3:24 Switching between the ultimate and the relative
5:48 Everything is either love or a call for love
7:52 ACIM doesn’t comment on the world of form 
9:21 Fundamental existential guilt 
11:58 Leaning into what we flinch from 
14:31 What it means to flinch from God
20:12 Transcending but including all that is
25:20 The opening quote of ACIM
26:36 What does it mean that “the world is an illusion?” 
33:15 What’s so good about choosing fear over love? 
36:43 The choice between love and fear, and coming to surrender
42:40 What is forgiveness? 
54:27 Clarifying perfect forgiveness 
1:00:32 The Diamond Sutra 
1:05:24 The gateless gate 
1:12:45 Key takeaways 
1:19:17 Final thoughts

Federico Faggin is an engineer and physicist who invented the world's first commercial micro processor, the Intel 4004. He is also the founder of the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation which is dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness.

Faggin Foundation: http://www.fagginfoundation.org

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/7HgXwbIMRsc

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:54 Federico’s awakening experience
12:36 Consciousness, free will, and identity 
18:09 Truth and freedom from suffering
21:55 “The one” that seeks to know itself
26:22 How “the one” becomes the many
28:55 “The one” and classic/quantum physics
41:51 Fundamental entities with free will, identity, and consciousness 
44:15 Consciousness needs classical memory to store experience
46:06 Was the Big Bang a free will choice
56:06 The reality of the irreducible 
1:00:39 Semantic space 
1:04:41 Methods of inquiring into symbolic and semantic space
1:11:17 Will everything eventually converge? 
1:14:58 Taking semantic reality seriously 
1:21:13 Near death experiences 
1:23:33 Taking experience seriously 
1:29:28 Quantum information as a representation of inner experience
1:33:03 What do we do given this understanding? 
1:35:37 We are not machines
1:42:15 Negating the reality of the soul
1:46:08 Meaninglessness and dynamic truth 
1:51:29 Goodbyes

Bruce Tift is a licensed Psychotherapist and the author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. He is a long-time practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Bruce's website: https://www.brucetift.com/ 

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/cESdYTKz0dM

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Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro

3:09 What is freedom? 

4:39 What is conscious participation in open awareness?

6:47 Is this the fruitional view? 

9:09 The western therapeutic perspective of healing core wounds

11:18 How do the fruitonal view and the developmental view relate? 

14:31 Commiting to experience sense of problem without trying to resolve it

19:12 The path of Vajrayana Buddhism

29:42 Belief is a substitute for groundlessness 

34:21 I give myself permission to never experience what I most want in life

38:13 What is non-divided reality?

43:29 Freedom is not synonymous with positive feelings

47:47 Neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity 

51:35 Falling through the air with no parachute

52:25 Challenging our identification with hope

55:17 Bruce’s gradual shift towards freedom

58:00 Being profoundly limited

1:03:03 Asking if what you most want is available right now

1:04:44 One taste 

1:05:54 Impermanence and dependent origination

1:10:27 Enlightenment 

1:13:24 Trying to experience no-self can be motivated by fundamental aggression to experience

1:15:04 Maintaining a center through problem maintaining

1:18:53 The function of neurosis

1:26:00 What’s fundamentally disturbing about our experience? 

1:33:05 How does groundlessness fit into freedom and nirvana? 

1:34:33 Do we know anything? 

1:39:05 What does it mean to be “Already Free?” 

1:43:24 Neurosis is a clever way to pretend to ourselves we’re addressing our life while guaranteeing nothing happens 

1:47:08 What’s always available?

1:48:08 Final words from Bruce

1:50:30 Outro

Andres Gomez Emilsson is the director of research at the Qualia Research Institute where he works to build a science of consciousness to improve the lives of sentient beings. His work at QRI ranges from psychedelic theory, to neurotechnology development, and mapping the computational properties of consciousness. 

Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org/

Andres' Twitter: https://twitter.com/algekalipso

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/xJzBjBo24g8

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:13Are current AI systems conscious? 
4:10 Marr's levels of analysis 
9:16 Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment 
20:53 The binding problem 
35:25 Computers do not leverage the EM field to do computationally useful things 
46:46 Equanimity and the sense of self 
53:36  Binding is frame invariant and provides computational benefits 
56:41 Avoiding strong emergence 
58:37 Sidestepping the hard problem of consciousness
59:03 Avoiding epiphenomenalism
1:01:07 Being compatible with modern scientific world picture 
1:04:56 Experiments for testing to see if electromagnetic fields of human brain form unified global topology 
1:07:14 Merging your consciousness field topology with someone else’s 
1:14:07 Summary of if current AI models are conscious 
1:16:55 Doing and undoing the topological twist of consciousness 
1:24:56 What it’s like to be the field before topological segmentation 
1:27:43 Why is there something rather than nothing?
1:32:04 Does valence add up to zero? 
1:35:42 The symmetry theory of valence 
1:39:20 Does the static field of consciousness have an experience? 
1:41:07 Grounding ethics in open individualism and valence realism 
1:44:57 Clarifying ethical thought experiments with a science of consciousness 
1:47:33 Why does valence exist?
1:48:45 What does it mean for the field to tear? 
1:50:51 Infinite universes through the fracturing of nothing 
1:53:20 Would replacing humans with happy AIs solve the alignment problem? 
1:55:28 If AIs don’t leverage field topology for computation, does that null the alignment problem? 
1:58:30 Non-linear wave computing 
2:01:08 How does the enteric nervous system fit into sentience? 
2:03:49 Why is the electromagnetic field especially relevant to consciousness 
2:05:25 Cosmological qualia 
2:07:40 Hedonium shockwaves and Andres’ shirt 
2:08:32 The perfume “Hedonium Shockwave” by Andres Gomez Emilsson 
2:15:47 Using Hedonium Shockwave to explore consciousness 
2:17:46 The future of art given the rise of AI models 
2:22:42 Final thoughts from Andres
2:23:53Where to find and follow Andres

Culum Brown is a professor at Macquarie University where he is a behavioral ecologist studying fish behavior and cognition. He is a long time proponent of fish intelligence and welfare, arguing for interventions to improve the lives of fish. Culum has over 150 research publications and is in the top 2.5% of Research Gate.

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/LN6cgNu9QAM

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
2:10 Better understanding fish 
4:44 Fish learning and memory
11:20 Social learning and culture
20:56 Cross species relationships: offering backrubs 
27:59 Fish participate in predator evaluation together
32:57 Knowing their place in the hierarchy 
37:18 Cooperating across species to hunt 
41:58 Fish accumulate cultural knowledge across generations 
43:46 Machiavellian intelligence in fish 
46:12 What brain size means 
49:04 Tool use and house building 
58:14 Intelligence in parrots 
59:28 Breadth of fish sensing 
1:03:44 Pain in fish and other animals
1:14:24 The experience of farmed, wild-caught, lab grown, and pet fish 
1:27:58 How fish are caught and killed
1:34:19 What do we do given all this suffering? 
1:37:58 Policy solutions for fish welfare
1:42:43 Can we abolish the biological roots of suffering? 
1:49:19 Why did land animals become generally intelligent instead of sea creatures? 
1:52:49 Final thoughts from Culum
1:54:18 Where to find and follow Culum 

Philip Golabuk is founder of PhilosophyCenter, where he offers philosophical counseling, self-study courses, and LIFECOACH Training. Their mission is to encourage and facilitate the self-work that leads to greater awareness, creative expression, and personal evolution as well as a deeper appreciation for the miracle, mystery, and opportunity of being alive. Philip is a member of the National Philosophical Counseling Association, has taught college level philosophy courses, and has worked as part of a community outreach program to inmates in jail and prison.

PhilosophyCenter: https://philosophycenter.net/

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Video episode: https://youtu.be/ZcOcZ_EZDD8

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
1:54 Life principles: Truth and uncertainty 
6:50 Life principles: Limitation and responsibility 
13:10 Useful questions in self-work 
16:40 Being in conflict with your own truth 
20:19 Off handed remarks that confess beliefs 
23:47 Bottom up and top down self-work 
30:29 Accessing and practicing bottom up and top down self-work 
35:50 The decisive question: What bad thing happens if I have what I want? 
38:18 Willingness being 90% of self-work 
44:35 The mind as a good servant but a bad master 
50:33 Degrees of certainty, induction, and truth
55:05 A perspective on Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person by Scott Alexander 
1:04:20 Outro 

Bernardo Kastrup is a metaphysical idealist, arguing that universal phenomenal consciousness is all there ultimately is. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering and another in philosophy. Bernardo is also the executive director of the Essentia Foundation.

Bernardo's website: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/

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Video episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaCij4vXwpA

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

 Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:42 Bernardo’s metaphysics 
4:15 What does it mean for something to be a transpersonal mental process
10:11 What is it like to be nature at large?
12:20 Is the consciousness that underlies the inanimate universe like dust or completely unified? 
16:55 How is it that mind at large fragments into particular beings?
22:40 How can we remember our original state if it's formless/contentless? 
28:39 What is it like to be the field when it’s completely at rest? 
32:17 Is there formless or contentless consciousness? 
39:25 The great void state
43:13 Being and seeing god 
45:40 Knowledge without intermediation of a mental model 
48:03 The role and place of introspection 
52:38 Physicalism robs us of meaning as the entities outside of us are their own ends 
56:58 Is there a necessary relationship between truth and freedom from suffering 
59:28 What it means to be set free 
1:08:50 There is freedom is seeing what you think you are doesn’t exist 
1:10:22 Surrender and defeat 
1:19:16 Embracing duality and the western background 
1:35:40 The importance of suffering 
1:47:05 The maturation of religion
1:52:45 A spontaneous unfolding can still follow a telos
1:56:50 The telos of universal mind
2:01:43 Innocence, evil, and the asymmetry between truth and illusion
2:12:06 The spirit of our technology and artificial consciousness 
2:20:05 The binding problem of consciousness and substrate independence 
2:50:30 Testing for consciousness in machines 
3:07:35 AGI timelines 
3:11:07 Imbuing machines with values 
3:08:10 Clarifying intuition pumps for idealism
3:18:45 Outro

Roger Thisdell is a long time meditator who over the years has managed to increase his baseline of well-being to a level much higher than the norm. Rodger's mind now features a permanent sense of centerlessness where there is a lack of the sense of an epistemic agent at the center. He aims to help others achieve similar well-being, unperturbability, and freedom from suffering.  

Follow Rodger: https://www.rogerthisdell.com/

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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5VYkm1iU0tmbBvJohdTZcv?si=4be5c4df79fc4aa8 

ApplePodcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mu/id1640125881

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro 
3:15 What is suffering? 
4:29 What is contraction? 
8:12 Why does contraction entail suffering? 
9:21 The relationship between truth and freedom
10:58 How do we defabricate experience? 
13:57 Rodger’s spiritual path 
15:21 Practices for defabricating experience 
17:37 What are the stages of awakening 
18:34 Different paths to the same thing? 
24:23 What’s Rodger’s current experience like?
29:16 There is only negative valence and its attenuation 
35:16 Does taking a bunch of MDMA not add positive valence? 
37:35 The void at the center of the soul 
39:18 Meditation instructions 
46:37 How does insight work? 
49:56 Insight practice on the sense of separate self 
54:57 The will as a way of maintaining separate self
57:55 Cessation, true nature, and neither perception nor non-perception 
1:04:35 Practicing the jhanas 
1:16:25 Cessation and nirvikalpa samadhi
1:19:47 Is the void preferable to highly defabricated consciousness? 
1:24:11 How does this all fit into the 21st century? 
1:26:40 Using insights from meditation for architecting new minds 
1:28:48 Immoral behavior as a failure to see the truth 
1:30:23 Where to follow and find out more about Rodger

Philip Golabuk is founder of PhilosophyCenter, where he offers philosophical counseling, self-study courses, and LIFECOACH Training. Their mission is to encourage and facilitate the self-work that leads to greater awareness, creative expression, and personal evolution as well as a deeper appreciation for the miracle, mystery, and opportunity of being alive. Philip is a member of the National Philosophical Counseling Association, has taught college level philosophy courses, and has worked as part of a community outreach program to inmates in jail and prison. 

PhilosophyCenter: https://philosophycenter.net/

Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Mu_Podcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5VYkm1iU0tmbBvJohdTZcv?si=4be5c4df79fc4aa8&nd=1

ApplePodcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mu/id1640125881

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LucasFMPerry


Timestamps:

0:00 intro 

2:03 What is suffering?

3:05 How do we turn pain into suffering?

4:56 What is resistance? 

7:00 How does alignment with truth lead to freedom from suffering? 

14:51 Non-local will and our resistance truth 

21:25 How do you let go without it being an act of will? 

27:08 Allowing unwillingness and how non-resistance shifts problems into solutions 

32:20 Deconstructing false belief (bottom-up) and living from the higher-self (top down) 

39:15 How are unwitting beliefs released from the top down approach? 

42:34 Nirvana and samsara as undivided, and whether suffering is an illusion

52:06 Where to find and follow Philip

53:00 outro