Summary and closing

So what does this say about our system of incarcerating individuals determined to be unfit to live freely in society, here in the US they’re mostly privately owned and for profit (at about $100,000 per inmate per year, pd with tax dollars) and sadly most were locked up because they had some weed or because they couldn’t pay their legal fines. Oh and now they’re trying to criminalize homelessness.

Spirituality is what you do when no one is looking.

I just finished this course. Thank you, Bernardo, for this amazing class. You make it understandable and fascinating. My world view has grown by the most it ever has, and my take on life is being transformed. I have been studying these things, consciousness, quantum physics, relativity, etc, on my own for decades, and it has all led me here. I feel like I found my way home! I can't wait to learn more!

So, how can this realization be applied to life, and make it more tenable to be alive? What are the implications for improving and enjoying day-to-day existence?

Financial struggle melting my life into the hot soup of dashboard reality!😅 life sucks man.😢

One question is: To what extent can we know 'mind-at -large'? To what extent can the dissociative boundary be made transparent? Einstein is reported to have said something like "I want to know the mind of God". His way was through the pursuit of understanding through physics and this is one approach. However, perhaps the more direct approach, is taken by the inner traditions such as religion, philosophy and alchemy before they become corrupted. In modern times the best of these 'inner' pursuits includes physics as well as the other 'outer' sciences of today. We could say that these inner approaches seek to learn what will allow the dissolving of the dissociative boundary to whatever extent is possible. Can we be clear about what appears to be 'outer science' and what appears to be 'inner sciences'? And how the two can be seen to be not separate and can complement and cooperate with one another? Can it be that the 'stuff' that keeps us from communicating with our self is the same 'stuff' that keeps us from effectively communicating with others, regardless of their appearance or intellectual position? This 'stuff' is the fragmentation of the ordinary mind of the human being. It is made up of the states of mind that we say 'I' to that as of yet have not come to a point of coherence so that there is no self conflict or even conflict with other selves that can't be resolved as need be. We are speaking of two different kinds of knowledge. One is commonly called 'self-knowledge' (how the mind and its motivators work and how we can fall into identification with mind states). And the other is called 'technical knowledge'. Many people have tried to make this distinction. Krishnamurti in his talks for over 50 years tried to make this distinction clear but he was not able to effectively communicate to others what he could readily see as to how the mind with its many motivators worked and how it could so easily deceive itself.

Thank you for the best closing man. I love you and everyone!

That's the first time I truly live a philosophy. Thank you so much

Thanks for this great series. If the world/universe at large we observe is akin to viewing a conscious brain from the outside (patterns on a brain scan),I fail to make the step that this somehow infuses the representation with "meaning"? We would not say the electrical patterns of, for example, the prefrontal cortex is meaningful in itself, so why would we apply this to the universe at large? Maybe the trans-personal conscious or thing in itself is unfolding in a way that the experiences "it" is having are perceived as meaningful in itself, or it could just be the laws of nature playing out in a way because as you say "it is what it is and couldn't be any other way". Is meaning not just another abstraction we meta conscious beings give to a process to make sense of it (like numbers,equations etc) of what it ultimately just the unfolding of a natural process? Meaning seems to be a coping mechanism/survival instinct of evolved creatures to help us deal with a cosmos that seems impersonal and indifferent to our concerns. Apologies if this has been dealt with in your book, I plan on purchasing it and reading it in the New Year. Thanks again, your ideas are fascinating.

Thank you, Bernardo, for this fascinating series of talks. I admire the way in which you are presenting your ideas through clear, concise, and structured ways of talking. Are you doing this all from memory (obviously well prepared, but still…)? Perhaps you can help me with my own specific experience (and people will probably recognize it) of full anesthesia. Recently I had a minor surgery for appendicitis and was fully under anesthesia. I remember going 'asleep' and 'waking up' quite well. For me, no time whatsoever had passed between these moments, while the operation took more than one hour. For me, in hindsight, this was the same as being dead. My conscious being was totally absent. The dissociation, so to speak, was gone. This is kind of reassuring in the sense that when you are 'really' dead there will be total nothingness. How to square this with your view on death in your episode on "When we die …"?

Thanks to both Bernardo and Keytoe for this production.