The Nature of God and the Role of Revelation in Our Lives

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Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠Tim Ferriss⁠, ⁠Sam Harris⁠, ⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠, ⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠, ⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠, ⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠, ⁠Jonathan Haight⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠Niall Ferguson⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠Bill Gurely⁠, ⁠Jason Calacanis⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠, ⁠Howard Marks⁠, ⁠Ray Dalio⁠, ⁠Naval Ravikant⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠Todd McFarlane⁠, ⁠Bill Burr⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠Hugh Jackman⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠James Clear⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠Seth Godin⁠, ⁠Susan Cain⁠, ⁠Morgan Housel⁠, ⁠Jocko Willink⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠Tamara Levitt⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠, David Deutsch, Richard Dawkins, John Vervaeke

Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

• Quote and Discussion from David Deutsch: Problems and Conjectures

Discussion

• Divine Revelation and Cultural Memes

• Discussion of Polarity and the Buddhist Toolkit

• Pros and Cons of Christianity

• The value of Jewish tradition

• Pros and Cons of Islam

• Discussion of Buddhism and Alan Watts "Dream" Allegory

• The nature of consciousness and its intersection with the nature of God

Hello, beautiful people. I am Matthew Harris, and it's time once again for the Matt's Mindset Podcast.

So last week, we discussed the secret to life. This week, we will be discussing the nature of God. I know, I'm keeping the topics light.

But in all seriousness, as these topics require the utmost reverence and respect, I welcome discussion or a critique of any of my work or anything that I have to say.

These are my conjectures. As the Oxford professor of physics, David Deutsch, said, we begin with a problem. And then, to solve that problem, we put forth conjectures.

The only way that epistemological knowledge grows is by taking issue with previous knowledge. We run into a problem. A contradiction. And the individual puts forth conjectures that seek to resolve the conflict.

This is also known as dialectic discourse, which has its roots, as so much else, in the ancient Greek world but was really memorialized in the 19th century by Georg Hegel and Friedrich Engels.

There is a problem, a status quo, a thesis. And this thesis comes into conflict with an anti-thesis. An antithesis. A contradiction of previous knowledge and new insight. And people put forth conjectures until we reach a good explanation. And a synthesis is reached. This synthesis then becomes the new thesis, and epistemological knowledge is created.

These are my conjectures based on my reading and interpretation of the world's religions. So if it resonates, please feel free to let me know in the comments or by showing me support by liking and reviewing this podcast.

And if you disagree with my conjectures, please let me know in the comments and by leaving a review, or in some other way, letting me know why you disagree with my conjectures so that we can grow together and reach a more perfect truth.

Because, in the words of Phil Tutlock, the esteemed political science writer and professor at the Wharton School of Arts and Sciences, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected.

So without further ado, let's get into it, shall we?

We begin with the idea of divine revelation. Specifically, Revelation 21:6 from the New Testament: "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the thirsty the wellspring of water without payment."

Anyone can receive revelation. It doesn’t have to be something entirely profound like the nature of the universe.

It can simply be a revelation of the way that life works so the way that you operate in the world in a better way. The more you learn about yourself, the more you learn about the world, and the more you learn about others. These are all revelations. Insights.

But the only way you can have revelations is if you are open to them. You can’t seek them; you must allow them. You live and then examine.

To quote Socrates, "the examined life is not worth living," but I also want to put a counterpoint to that statement that the unlived life is not worth living.

You must live and have experiences, and then reflect on them to receive the revelation. "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," Alfred Lord Tennyson.

There have been innumerable revelations throughout history, the most important staying with us in sacred books but also in famous works of literature, culture, and art.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, would refer to this phenomenon as a "meme." Memes, of course, as you know, are jokes or bits of information that are shared and take on meaning based on their multifaceted and layered meaning.

Memes in our culture are funny and ironic because of the juxtaposition of the ideas presented. But Dawkins, who, ironically enough, is a staunch atheist, would classify memes as cultural ideas or symbols that are transmitted from one person to another, much like genes are transmitted from one generation to the next.

Memes are cultural genes that all generations that follow inherit. And when a sliver of revelation is introduced into society in the form of a meme, it will stand the test of time. When individuals receive revelation about the nature of what it means to be human or about the nature of reality, people resonate with it.

Whether it's Plato's Allegory of the Cave, published in 390 BC, which we discussed last week, or J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series, these are ideas that have been revealed to certain individuals, who have then shared them with the general public. And the general public has agreed that, yes, this is “what is”. This is the way. This is what it means to be human. I resonate with this experience.

And when it comes to the nature of God, many of these truths have been revealed to prophets or religious leaders throughout history. And in the words of Naval Ravikant, Indian-American entrepreneur and investor, there are two kinds of fools: those who take religion literally, and those who think it has no value.

Religions are stories that lay out specific mental models, morality, and ways to live. Over the years, many have been bastardized to suit the timing themes of consciousness we discussed last week. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to my last episode, where I discussed the themes of consciousness at length.

But for now, suffice it to say, all the major religions of the world still have value and insight as they are all divine revelation and have stood the test of time. They are cultural memes that we have inherited from previous generations.

And just like genes, cultural memes are put through the gauntlet of survival of the fittest. There are many forms of Christianity that existed in 300 AD, for example, that don’t exist now, foremost of such being Gnosticism, Arianism, and Donatism.

But as religions grow, they become inflexible. They become treasures to be protected, not hypothesized to be tested. For example, for me and my part, I reject the concept of original sin. The knowledge of good and evil is what makes us fundamentally human.

Having free will makes us fundamentally human. If we don't have the knowledge of good and evil, we don't have free will because we can't make rational decisions, and therefore, we can't have committed original sin.

It's an allegory that’s meant to explain why suffering exists in the world, and it claims it's because of “us,” humanity, because it’s tough to justify why a benevolent God would allow suffering if he’s all-powerful and fully benevolent.

It's a contradiction. It's a problem. So the conjecture the writers of Genesis put forward was that it was our fault, and not God’s, that suffering exists in the world. It must be because we’re bad, and not God. We messed up. Not him. It was a conjecture, put forth to explain a problem, which I disagree with. And so I'll put forward one of my own conjectures.

I think the answer to this problem is where the Buddhists and Daoists get it right. Suffering is the result of cause and effect or karma. For each action you take, there will be a reaction. Polarity and equal and opposing forces are a fundamental part of the universe. According to the tradition of Daoism, there is yin and yang, the chi force that holds it together.

And according to the standard model of particle physics, there are protons and neutrons, which are held together by the “strong force”. This is the same conjecture, which was revealed, recorded, and agreed upon, and has become epistemological knowledge.

There is both space and void. Chaos and order. Love and hate. And, by definition, good and evil. Joy and suffering. Evil and suffering do not exist in the world because humanity created them. Evil exists because it is part of the fundamental nature of what is.

Now the Buddhists give us a good toolkit to work with. Meditate. Detach yourself from desire, as the root of all suffering, and be in flow with the universe. Desire being a limiting theme of consciousness.

Now, I don’t mean confine yourself to a monastery and never want anything ever again. When I say detach from desire, what I mean is to understand what you want, and why you want it. Then take inspired action toward it, but don’t force it. Don’t harm yourself or others trying to get it. Take action, and allow it to come to you. And if it passes you by, consider that perhaps it was a desire that was not in your highest good and something better is coming along.

Such advice is reflected in both the Daoist and Stoic traditions. Daoism and Stoicism evolved independently of one another, and yet are almost Eastern and Western philosophical mirrors of each other, in the same way that flood myths and trickster myths emerged in almost every ancient culture and civilization. Revelation knows no borders or boundaries.

Some of the most valuable memes contributed by Christianity are the parables that Jesus tells. They’re stories that deconstruct truth, almost in the same way that Jacques Derrida would go on to do nearly two millennial later by pioneering his philosophy of deconstruction.

The theory of deconstruction holds that the binary oppositions in literature are not mutually exclusive but rather interdependent. Basically, he argues that there is no end-all-be-all “moral of the story”. By deconstructing a story, we can reveal multiple and at times conflicting meanings.

And no one does this better than Jesus of Nazareth. For example, the parable of the prodigal son, where you have a son who goes to his father and asks him for an advance on his inheritance, and the father respects his wishes and gives him the advance on his inheritance.

And the youngest son goes off and fritzes it away on sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and a good time, and living the dream. He lives out all of his base desires, and he ends up running out of money, and then only being able to get a job as someone who takes care of pigs. Pigs, according to Jewish tradition, being some of the lowest of all the animals, which is why kosher law prohibits the consumption of pork.

But taking care of the pigs, he makes little to no money. He can’t even afford food, and he hits rock bottom when he finds himself eating the shells of pea pods that the pigs leave behind.

And as he's in this rock bottom state, he realizes, "You know what? I should just shelve my pride and go back home and beg my father's forgiveness. I'll tell him that, while I don't deserve to be your son, I will beg to be your servant and work in your household because I know that at least you'll pay me well and treat me well.

I don't expect to be welcomed back as your son, but I'm just going to beg your forgiveness and ask for a job." So he does; he goes back home and begs forgiveness from his father.

And what happens? The father runs out, embraces him, and cries, throws a richly embroidered cloak around his shoulders, and welcomes him back as his son. He asks the staff to slaughter a calf, and they're going to have a huge celebration of his son returning.

The older son, who's been dutiful, helping out on the farm, being a good son, not demanding his inheritance, and basically toeing the line, living a good and just life, is a bit miffed.

He says, "I mean, I'm the one who stayed here. I'm the one who did everything you asked me to. And yet, you've never slaughtered a calf for me or thrown a party for me. Don't you think that's a little messed up?"

The father says, "Rejoice because your brother was lost, and now he's been found." And that's it. That's the end.

These types of parables, which Jesus was so famous for, basically explode the concept of narrative because, in their telling, Jesus is not super concerned with the idea of objective truth or a specific moral. He's exploring perspectives in these stories.

Because this son, the oldest son, is correct to be annoyed that he's doing everything right and yet hasn't been given special treatment by his father. But he overlooks the fact that he has enjoyed the benefits of a stable, happy life of fulfillment because he never left home. He always had food, a warm place to sleep, and the support of his friends and family.

Meanwhile, the younger brother, while he got to have some base pleasure for a limited amount of time and was then forcibly redirected, experienced a period of tremendous suffering before being welcomed home.

So both perspectives are correct. It's not that one is better than the other or that there is one more objectively true than the other. These are perspectives that are to be considered. These are conjectures. And truth is like a sculpture; one perspective will never lend true understanding.

If three blind men were to encounter an elephant, and all three attempted to articulate an elephant's nature, they would naturally put their hands on the elephant. The one who touched the trunk would say, "An elephant is like a snake." The one who touched its side would say, "No, the elephant is like a strong wall." And the one that touched its ear would say, "No, the elephant is like a fan or palm frond." And all three would be correct based on their perspective, but none understand the fundamental nature of the elephant unless they tried to understand every perspective. And the same is true of religion.

So what I think Catholicism and much of Christianity gets wrong is guilt. Guilt for enjoying life. Guilt and shame are perhaps some of the worst limiting themes of consciousness, and they are put forward to try to control the masses. Christianity at its height in the Middle Ages was, as Karl Marx would say, the opium of the people. It was there to provide them a salve for their terrible lives, but also keep them in the depths of shame and guilt to limit their consciousness.

Judaism, on the other hand, is more of a birthright. You are born into the religion and come to understand the value of what a relationship with God looks like, and oftentimes that involves suffering and the resilience of following the spiritual path. They were God's original chosen people and throughout their history, often stray from the path, and so have to be redirected, often violently, back into communion with God, whether it was as slaves in Egypt or the Babylonian exile or their predicament today.

This pretty much defines the Torah and Old Testament and can be applied to anyone’s spiritual journey. When you are living or acting in ways that are not in service of others, or your highest good, perhaps you will be able to enjoy yourself for a short time, like the younger brother in the parable, but you’ll always be redirected.

Islam is interesting because they see themselves as the culmination of the Abraham of religions of Judaism and Christianity.

And I’ll tell you what I mean, but to do that, I have to go back to Genesis for a second.

In the book of Genesis, they cut a cow in half to make a covenant. Specifically in Genesis 15:9-17, Yaweh asks Abraham to bring a heifer, goat, and ram and saw them in half.

This was how covenants were sealed back then. It was like a contract, and when both of you walked through the blood, it signified, "May what happened to these animals happen to the person who breaks this covenant."

But instead of both of them walking through, God puts Abraham into a trance and, in the personification of a torch, walks through cows' blood. Meaning, if either of us breaks this covenant, may what happened to this cow happen to me.

And when the Jews did break the covenant, God sent his sons to fulfill the prophecies of the prophet Isaiah, to die for man’s sins and reconcile man to God.

But when Christianity became a power structure and once again broke their covenant with God, the angel Gabriel, yes, that Angel Gabriel, came to Muhammad and basically said, "They both have lost their way, it’s now up to you."

Islam is an interesting religion, and I think there are great many essential truths there as well. I believe one of the most important truths to take away from Islam is the idea of supplication.

The word Muslim literally means submission. You have to submit to God because He knows best. Time is relative, and He can see the past, present, and future, and knows what you need to do before you do.

And this is, I think, the true strength of Islam. It’s almost like coming home. When we’re young, we have to depend on the absolute authority of our parents, and then we come to an age where we discover they are fallible, just like us, and we have to rely on our own rationality and develop into a self.

But along the way, we will encounter a problem, a challenge, a situation that may make us naturally reach out to God because it is a challenge so severe we can’t handle it on our own. And God will tell us what we need to do. But often, the message will be a little bit crazy. We need to have faith to follow through with it. We need to submit.

And this is not an easy thing to do. The Imam Omar Suleiman said of Malcolm X, perhaps one of the most famous Muslim converts in American history, that submission is one of the hardest things to do, especially for highly ambitious and successful people.

It’s not any different from Jesus telling the people in the Gospel of Matthew to be more like children. “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

But submission requires introspection and a personal connection to God, and Islam suffers from the same problems as Christianity in that parts of it have grown to become a power structure. Certain bad actors take its message to promote their own physical agendas here on earth, most notably in the form of radical Islamic terror or using it in a similar way to Christianity in the Middle Ages, which was to provide a salve for injustice and terrible lives, and use it to repress individuals, especially women.

So those are the so-called Abrahamic religions, called so because they stem, at least theologically, from Abraham. Judaism, and by extension Christianity, extends from Abraham’s son Isaac, and Islam extends from Abraham’s son Ishmael.

But Buddhism and Taoism, on the other hand, are eastern religions that developed independently of western or Middle Eastern social and theological thought.

And while Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all contain essential truth, I think Buddhism and Taoism get the closest to the nature of reality and the nature of God. Alan Watts, the English writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Japanese traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience, describes it as such:

Suppose you were God, suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal. What would you do?

It’s like asking another question, which is, supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time.

You could dream seventy-five years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night. And it could be anything you want, you make up your mind before you went to sleep: “Tonight I’m going to dream of so-and-so.” Well, naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes.

You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys. You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. And for several nights, or maybe for a whole month of nights, you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you’ll begin to think, “Well, I’ve seen quite a bit. Let’s spice it up. Let’s have a little adventure.”

And therefore, you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then, as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things. And at some point in the game, you would say, tonight, I am going to dream in such a way that I don’t know that I’m dreaming.

So that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality. And what a shock when you woke up. You would really scare yourself. And then, on successive nights, you might get yourself to experience the most extraordinary things just for the contrast when you woke up. You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony.

You could work on the vibration of suffering and then suddenly wake up and find it was, after all, nothing but a dream, and everything was perfectly OK.

“Well, how do you know that’s not what you’re doing already?”

We are the universe. Science confirms it; we are made of stardust. And that’s why Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Our neighbor is ourselves. And we are simply different reincarnations of ourselves dreaming the dream that we are not fundamentally from source.

And each soul continues on its journey, and that’s why we have the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, strife, revelation, death and rebirth, caused by the karma of our past lives and by generational trauma. Not only is the cycle happening on a grand scale, a scale of lifetimes, it’s happening every day, every month, every six months, every year.

And when we finally learn all the lessons from a certain perspective, we reach a state of moksha, which is a transcendent state attained as a result of being released from the cycle of rebirth. And we retire that perspective, having learned all the lessons. Having learned all the truth from that perspective. Having completely exhausted that part of the elephant and truly gotten to know the nature of reality from that perspective.

And when we can all truly love ourselves and, by definition, others, the kingdom of God will be here.

According to Buddhist tradition, Nirvana (basically the equivalent of the Buddhist kingdom of God) is not like heaven or paradise.

It is not a location that you go to. It is not a place. It is a state of being. It is a theme of consciousness. It is the condition when you are not compelled by desire or by fear or by social commitments. It is when you can hold your center and act from there.

The Covenant in Genesis was always with ourselves. God walked through the cow's blood by himself. And we are different perspectives of God having a human experience.

And as Jesus said, "Eye has not seen, and ear has not heard what God has in store for those who love him," and so by definition, love themselves in the truest sense.

And so, by loving yourself, you are loving God, and by loving God, you are loving yourself, and by loving others, you are loving yourself and God.

ow, here's the kicker to the whole thing. We may be the universe, but the universe still came from somewhere. And I'm not just talking about just our universe. I mean the fundamental nature of all things came from somewhere.

And here's where the Daoists take the cake.Their tradition comes closest to explaining the nature of all that is.

They come closest to the truth because they don't try to explain things in language that is not suited to explain the unexplainable.

Similar to Jesus' parables, Daoism uses imagery that is almost anti-narrative in nature.

Daoism focuses on the use of allegory and metaphor to explain what the truth is.

The Tao te Ching begins with these words: "The Dao that can be understood is not the eternal cosmic Dao, just as an idea that can be expressed in words is not the infinite idea. And yet this ineffable Dao is the source of all spirit and matter, and in expressing itself, is the mother of all created things.

The Dao is obsessed with the idea of immateriality. "A wheel may have 30 spokes, but its usefulness lies in the empty hub. A jar is formed from clay (or in our case, glass), but its usefulness lies in the empty center, a room is made of four walls, but its usefulness lies in its empty center, matter is necessary to give form, but its value to reality lies in its immateriality. Everything that lives has a physical body, but the value of a life is measured by the soul." - Verse II Tao te Ching.

And this harkens back to Plato's idea of the ideal forms. What makes a jar a jar? It has empty space. That is the fundamental nature of a jar, as it is designed as a vessel. What makes it valuable is not its matter but its lack of matter. It is designed specifically with this un-thingness in mind.

So, therefore, the ultimate intelligence, the really real, God, the most high, whatever you want to call it, isn't a thing at all. It is neither chaos nor order. It is neither love nor hate. It is neither good nor evil. It does not conform to the fundamental nature of reality because it is not of this reality and cannot be constrained by the rules of such reality.

As Professor John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, would put it, the ultimate intelligence is a "no-thingness" which is not the same as nothing. And not the same as void because we can enter into a profound relationship with that no-thingness.

Think that's too abstract?

Well, let's ground some of those abstractions into reality.

Consider this, when you meditate, you can be an observer of your thoughts, feelings, and impulses. You can observe the observable mind. You can notice what's there, track thoughts, note them, and then return to an anchor, such as the breath, a candle, or a mantra.

But who is doing the observing?

Who is observing your thoughts, emotions, and impulses?

You cannot observe who is doing the observing.

That is the seat of the mind. Nothing can observe the observing self which does not identify as a gender, sex, or even as a self. It does not have desires, thoughts, impulses, dreams, or emotions.

It is pure awareness, peace, and satisfaction. It is a blue sky that always exists far above the swirling and constantly changing clouds of emotion and thought. And that is the no-thingness within you.

And the no-thingness within you can come into greater contact with the ultimate intelligence, which is the ultimate no-thingness.

The pure awareness that is peace and satisfaction.

And that is the nature of God.

Light and love my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.

Outro: SIAMO DI UN ALTRO PIANETA by Random