I’ve often used the words presence and awareness interchangeably—but they’re really not. They’re two distinctly different things, and in this episode, I discuss the difference, and talk about my recent experiments with awareness.
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] what is the difference between awareness and presence?
[00:00:04] awareness is the foundation on which you can be present, but it’s very foundational. it’s interesting. Precision of language is a funny thing, because again and again, I discover or uncover that in precision, in my language and awareness and presence of two words that I definitely have used interchangeably in the past where now I don’t think that makes any sense because those are not the same thing at all.
[00:00:36] Right. They’re very, very different. Um
[00:00:39] well, I feel like, I feel like they’re kind of cousins. They’re not super simple.
[00:00:43] Yeah, I mean, they’re related, they’re related, you know, uh, they’re related for sure, but they’re not the same thing. And to me, awareness is about the, you know, the [00:01:00] becoming. Transforming into the observer, the one instance above the beam, this of yourself, where you can see, hear, feel, and notice way more than you usually would, right?
[00:01:17] You you’re really wide, wide open to perceive, to be aware, to notice it’s more of a curiosity. It’s more of a willingness to find the necessarily a question that you ask for it to be answered. So you can walk down, you know, nature and practice awareness and just feel many, feel the energy of the trees, the wind, the, your breath, the tension in your legs, many, many things at once and what you notice and what you are. [00:02:00] How broad and wide your awareness grows and how much your awareness can hold is part of, kind of the exercise, but it’s sort of an unfolding of sorts. And it’s a very, it’s seeing how much broader you can make the vision of like, almost like, you know, typically during normal day-to-day living, you look through a very kind of small circle through a board. And then when you practice awareness, that means how much broader can you make that circle until eventually, you know, you see everything, right?
[00:02:35] So you have like a whole range of you and with a witness it’s not just the scene. It’s the sensing, the feeling, the noticing of things, presence to me is about using awareness. Once you have awareness, laser focusing it on one. Right. It means like it is, it’s very directive when I’m [00:03:00] present or when I have presence, I am focusing my awareness on something and nothing else.
[00:03:06] And I choose that. I choose where I focus on and I’m fully focused on, right? So it’s like a laser beam. One thing is a laser beam. Another thing is, I don’t know what would be a good example for something that receives more and more data like opens up, maybe a funnel, a bigger and bigger funnel through which the data through which the world can, can be filtered through a captured.
[00:03:29] I don’t know, maybe a net, right. Awareness is like casting a broader and broader and broader net and catching more and more and more things. And presence to me is like a laser beam. It’s like pointing your awareness on a very narrow area to one thing or one person and being fully there. I thought like a hundred percent with all the cells in your body, then.
[00:03:52] And present for that experience for that thing. Um, and when you don’t have [00:04:00] awareness without awareness, you cannot generate the focus to create presence. Right. But you can have awareness without presence, and it actually is a totally different stated or not totally different, but it is distinctly different state related.
[00:04:16] Like it feels somewhat similar, but distinct, but it’s much more, um, yeah. I mean, awareness is receiving and presence is giving in some, like it’s a, it, the, the, the arrows point, you know, away from you or towards you and practicing awareness for the last couple of days. I now start my day. I’m going on a walk through nature through a trail of the river and practicing nothing but loving awareness.
[00:04:54] You know, it’s being as broad in my perception as possible. Like noticing the [00:05:00] people, the trees, the river, the wind, the, you know, what all things as much at once as possible with as little judgment thought, focusing on one thing, evaluating as possible and trying to hold as much of the world and as much of myself at once in that awareness.
[00:05:26] And sometimes I can notice that I switch either I can do one or the other. And then as I, as I practice the balancing act, then eventually like, can fully feel my breath, my legs. I can hear the sound of my walking while I see the trees and the light I can, but it’s always a, I put more things in the basket more, more than eventually it overflows and flips or one thing in the basket pushes everything else away. And all of a sudden I’m focused on that one thing. And then I have to come back at like opening the basket for all the
[00:05:57] And then there’s also this, this [00:06:00] perceiving and being aware, but then that creates like, almost like echoes within you, which I now, again, your own constructs, which take away from, you know, awareness again. And it’s it’s that for me is like the most tricky part about practicing this almost, uh,
[00:06:18] Yeah.
[00:06:18] it is because as the world around you moves and flows and things pop up into. Site into your sphere of awareness. It has many things, different things have different magnetic power, right? So, you know, maybe as you walk through the forest, uh, you could hold many, many trees at once that are glittering in the sunlight.
[00:06:43] And it just like, it, it feels like one big organism. Maybe that’s easy, but as people pass you by, you know, it’s going to be easy sometimes to just perceive them without a magnetic force, focusing your awareness or your, your, your [00:07:00] attention to one person or one thing, or a judgment boy thought on association.
[00:07:05] But inevitably some person, some people will move and talk and look and do something that will magnetically pull you to them, right? Like negative magnetically, pull your awareness to them, or there’s going to be. A bicycle that writes very close to you. And all of a sudden, you know, you’re not at everything you’re not aware of the whole world around you.
[00:07:27] You’re zeroing in, on the danger, on the bicycle, on a dog or whatever it is. Um, and it’s the constant, the moment you noticed that something magnetised you, and now you’re like you went from like, just being then holding everything, to flying towards the thing and attaching to it. The moment you realize that it magnifies again, you know, magnetizes again and boom, you’re back into the game, like walking awareness, being [00:08:00] awareness, um, and it’s, and then it requires great trust and surrender and like a sort of elegance of letting go.
[00:08:14] To not stumble over all the, like the first game that you play is to not focus on something, right. To not judge, to not think, right. That’s game number one. But then game number two is to not, when you do it, trip over why you did it. So there’s some people that then go combat with them. Why are you always looking at,
[00:08:36] yeah. I, I would even put like one game in between. It’s like, just noticing because sometimes even you do it, but you don’t notice, right?
[00:08:45] oh Yeah, It might take you a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes or whatever it is. Sometimes it just runs away with you until you catch it, you know, and a half have not stayed. So that’s there, then there’s the, this I don’t have, [00:09:00] I’m not aware of it, but some people get into like a self judgment argument feeling guilty or angry.
[00:09:08] Why did you always look at, you know, a little box that, you know, They’ve had that kind of a thing. Then sometimes there’s an elliptical mind that can happen to me where it goes, oh, you know, I’ve looked at this woman, come back to awareness and then there’s a part of me. that’s, like, what was it about this woman that cat caught you?
[00:09:30] Or, Ooh, did you notice, you always look at the dogs? It probably because when you were a child and then, you know, my analytical mind wants to analyze, why was this, why did this take you out of awareness? Is there a pattern? Is there a reason? Is there history is their narrative and then stopping that as well.
[00:09:49] Like
[00:09:49] that’s interesting. The different flavors, like for me, it’s mostly like stories that come up where then I imagine like interesting to see it.
[00:09:58] there’s different games. [00:10:00] Our mind wants to play. It’s like this really hyperactive puppy. That’s. Everywhere. There’s balls everywhere. There’s like things to play and chase. And we’re trying to get that puppy to be quiet. And it is, but constantly there’s like these shiny toys that being thrown around, you know, and then these like yummy little snacks and the little puppies, like, oh my God, oh my God.
[00:10:23] Oh my God. I catch that. It just runs away. So that’s the way it catches something. And then you, you, you, you call it back and it comes back. You take away the finger, like slow down, sit down, calm coming. It’s like, I’m calm, I’m calm. I’m calm. Hey, let’s go. And then there’s another dog, Rodney, by this coffee.
[00:10:43] That’s
[00:10:44] yup.
[00:10:44] that’s basically what you Do Um, and doing that, this connects to the conversation we had yesterday about the power of patients, but also what makes patients powerful [00:11:00] is the attitude with which you wait, not just how long you wait or that you will. That you’re quiet that you’re still, that you’re, you know, and the way you train yourself in awareness requires a great level of patience in that as you keep running as the little doggie of you keeps running away and can contain itself, you have to have unlimited love for the game and, and accept that this running away is not failing.
[00:11:39] It is part of the game. Right. Um, and also the differences, you know, comparisons. So I did this, um, two days ago where I went on this awareness walk and it was amazing. My mind was my mind was pretty quiet and I was, you [00:12:00] know, pretty good at. Just feeling and sensing still kept going to places, but it was very gentle.
[00:12:08] Everything felt pretty gentle. And then the very next day I do it again and it was not gentle at all. And this is very difficult to accept. Uh, I think we, humans are maybe okay. I mean, we were never okay with struggle. We’re never okay with struggle, but what makes struggle worse is when it’s in reverse, like if it’s unexplainable, right?
[00:12:34] Like we’re not okay. Struggling at the beginning, but we are, we’re sort of okay with struggling at the beginning because we understand that it’s the beginning, but as we do it more and more, and as then we see success when we regress and we feel like, well, last week I was better than this week at this how’s this possible.
[00:12:53] Am I getting worse? That’s so much harder for us to deal with and to handle like it’s okay. If the first [00:13:00] time I did it. But it’s not okay if it was awesome. And the second time sucks. That’s much worse. If every time you do it, it gets worse and worse. That’s not something we’re equipped to handle, to deal with as humans we quit when that happens.
[00:13:14] Um, but when it’s unexplainable and that’s also part of the practice, a similar thing, when you do physical exercises, I mean, all kinds of sports are the same way, really. Um, but some may be more obvious than others or more loudly, but noticing that every day your body is different. So even if yesterday you did really well, and you’ve been doing this activity or the sport for very long, if today, you’re not performing as well.
[00:13:45] It’s because today’s version of you just, isn’t like at peak performance levels. And that is part of the journey. If you stop,
[00:13:54] gyms were closed.
[00:13:55] you’ll never get
[00:13:56] Jim’s worked Jim’s for close to you because of COVID for like eight [00:14:00] months. Right. And then they recently reopened and I go back and I had notes, well, NOLA. Okay. Every day was so-and-so minutes of this kind of cardio, the weights, it’s this so many ribbons of that way.
[00:14:10] And when I came back again, I was like, ah, okay. Let’s start at a, somewhat lower level again, especially for the weights. Right. And the cardio, anyway, I know I start much lower and I’m like far, okay, this is, this is so, and then accepting that and making peace in your mind with that, like, okay.
[00:14:28] I was already here and now I’m fucking there. It’s like, okay. Back to back to second grade and sitting there as a grownup man, a, B, C, it’s really
[00:14:43] And then you all, obviously you then project. Your own judgment onto everybody else. And as you go and pick up these really, you know, peaceful lightweights, you think, well, if I could just tell all of you that this is not, this is just because this is my [00:15:00] first day back at the two, you almost would like to have like a t-shirt that explains, you know, that explains everything
[00:15:05] oh, funny.
[00:15:05] Can I
[00:15:06] I didn’t have that, but,
[00:15:07] can I just have like, Yeah. but so they’re all these, all these, um, gains and traps we can stumble over when we attempt awareness and presence. Um, and, and where does the presence just like mindfulness? Right. Well, maybe in a simpler term, like. Meditation. This is the one kind of thing that you cannot get better at. Like it’s not, it’s so contrary to everything else we do in this world. And in today’s world that doing something where the longer you do it, you don’t get better at it. You are not an expert [00:16:00] is something that is impossible to comprehend for most people. So there’s the kind of people that then just pretend it’s.
[00:16:10] So, so that I go off of meditation, I’ve been meditating for five years. I know everything about meditation. It’s like, alright, well, you obviously know nothing about meditation, but even even saying for how many years you’ve been meditating is sort of like a, in that moment, you’re not mindful and it’s not a good meditation, like holding onto some kind of a status, like counting the days as if it’s something that can be counted.
[00:16:36] Right. Um, And, or most people who attempt to go into this modality where it’s more about being than doing something. And it’s about experiencing who you are in this moment, as non-judgmentally, as you can. And then noticing that you stopped noticing, and then notice that you did judge, right? [00:17:00] And then let go of both of these quote unquote mistakes, letting them go.
[00:17:05] Your point is not to fix them, repair them, you know, but to let them go forget and forgive them, and then just accept the next moment in full presence with no agenda, with no judgment, with no thinking. And then the very next moment, notice again that you lost it. You started judging again or thinking that is something that as people try it, they struggle.
[00:17:34] And as they struggle, they go, oh, I’m just not good at this. The, a lot of people I’ve heard say the words. Ah, Yeah. I tried meditating, but I’m not, it’s not for me. I’m not good at it. It’s like, how could You not be good at it? Like good, good at meditation means you sat there and you were breathing. Right.
[00:17:52] And even if at every breath you thought something and then at every other breath you judged were thinking you were still meditating, right? [00:18:00] Like you weren’t doing it poorly. If you noticed your struggle. If you’d notice that it sucked, you did it. Well, as well as a Zen Buddhist master, you noticed yourself, right.
[00:18:15] Congratulate. That’s pretty much it right now. You
[00:18:17] might’ve noticed today.
[00:18:19] It’s just
[00:18:20] You’re doing the practice, Yeah. But It’s a sort of practice that is where the practice itself is the outcome and not. Um, and it, quizzes of skill on improvement of skill, you are not practicing to get better. You’re practicing to practice Yeah. And that, what, where does that exist in any other area of our lives? Almost nowhere. Right. And it’s the way, the way the world is designed nothing. Well, very little things exist and they are fine, just existing.
[00:18:59] [00:19:00] again, I can
[00:19:00] we want to do them everyday just to do them.
[00:19:03] Yeah. I can see some kind of, uh, whatever organization where it’s like, you got. The blue meditation belt. And then while you meditate, they kind of put some little electrodes to your head and they measure the Brendan. Okay. You get the blue certified, but it takes
[00:19:19] you know that. Yeah.
[00:19:22] that I’m a third degree meditational black belt. Um, I got a nod from the Zen Buddhist association. I got it from the masters and boosts association in New York city. Um, so I do know a thing or two about mindfulness can teach it. Um, and it’s great. Like I you know, and, and the other thing again, with meditation, you could be meditating or you could be maybe, you know, you could be walking in doing an awareness walk the way I did it, or do whatever, and [00:20:00] you do it for days and days and days, and you feel very connected and very calm and very gentle.
[00:20:13] And then you start feeling very overwhelmed or very. Disjointed or very disoriented or stressed where at the end you feel more stressed than before, because it was so stressful to meditate because your thoughts kept coming and you kept throwing them away. And it just, they, they kept attacking you. And it was a fight, a fight you were losing, you’re drowning and this like battle of more and more thoughts attacking you.
[00:20:44] And at the end you were exhausted. And you’re like, I can’t be doing this every day. That’s exhausting. The thing is you, this exhaustion was not something that the meditation created. It is something that the meditation [00:21:00] uncovered for you. It’s something that was going on before. And we’ll keep going. Once you start distracting your mind, subconsciously again, it’s just that through it, through the mindfulness practice, you now know you cannot not know anymore.
[00:21:15] Now, you know that your mind is going crazy. And now you would have to decide how to deal with it. And it’s difficult because especially when our minds are a mess, we don’t want to fix it because our minds are a mess. It’s like when the inmates are running the asylum, they’re not making the decision to keep, give back the keys to the administration.
[00:21:39] Why, although they know bad things will have well, because they, the inmates, like when we’re in a bad state, we know we’re in a bad state. We know that what we want to do next is going to be bad. And we know that we still want to do it. And we’ll proceed with us. We just, because [00:22:00] the state dictates what we’ll do.
[00:22:01] So it can be very painful to do meditation. Notice that you’re in a really shitty place. And now what the problem is that now, you know, it’s kind of nice though, when you don’t know. And then you hit rock bottom and then you’ll have to deal with it. You know, you kind of, while you fall, if you’re in a, in a sleep while falling, there’s a beauty in that.
[00:22:24] I mean, it’s going to hurt once you land, but the entire time falling, it’s not going to be that terrifying you asleep, but meditation wakes you up and it can be very terrifying as you’re falling down, like, you know, 130 stairs down the skyscraper,
[00:22:40] you that story where I was at that meditation retreat. Right. And then, uh, it was like, uh, at the end of it, like, you meet the monk and you have like a conversation with him, you can ask questions. And then I was like, well, I felt a little bit weird because you know, there’s like a monk, orange robe, no hair.
[00:22:56] I go, well, look at nice. Put his mark. Right. And, but I was [00:23:00] thinking so much about sex right at the meditation. I say, well, you know, I was thinking like, I never thought so much about sex as I did, like during the last couple of days. Right. And he’s like, well, maybe you actually do, but you don’t notice right then it’s okay.
[00:23:14] Yeah. It could be something too.
[00:23:18] maybe it’s not the meditation that makes you think of sex because the meditation had most sexual content. Maybe it just made you hear and see all the sexual thoughts, you know, that you have during a normal day. Uh, and you know, we all want to be enlightened, but nobody wants to like, I think deal with the consequences of enlightenment, right?
[00:23:43] Like now, you know, and it’s like, ah, now I kind of don’t have the bliss of ignorance
[00:23:50] there’s a reason why
[00:23:51] when I don’t know, I just don’t
[00:23:52] know. There’s a reason why we are ignoring things right. Uh, because it’s [00:24:00] very, very inconvenient to see. Can be very inconvenient unless you have a growing amount of patients, forgiveness love openness curiosity.
[00:24:18] The more we develop these traits in us, curiosity, openness patients love forgiveness, acceptance. The more we develop these traits, the better we can handle what we see, no matter what, no matter how good the uglier, the thing, the, the, the, the, the uglier, the secrets, the bigger, the bad surprises, the more capacity you will take from us to hold that new truth, that new insight, and have love for it.
[00:24:54] Openness for it. Patience, forgiveness. To handle it. And the bigger it [00:25:00] is, the more of these traits it requires. And when we don’t, when we’re not very strong on these things, and most of us are pretty weak on most of these areas. Then when we find out something new and terrifying about ourselves, we’re just like, ah, I don’t know this is burning.
[00:25:14] This is, but we’re flipping it over from one hand to another, it’s burning, burning, and then we let it drop. And we think, I wish I’d never known this didn’t help. I didn’t change anything. The reason we didn’t change anything that didn’t help was not that knowing is not helpful is that knowing can only be helpful if we have the required amount of no self-love patience, forgiveness, to understand why it is the way.
[00:25:44] Why am I this way? What does it mean? It’s not that big of a deal and here’s what I’ll do next or here’s what I’ll try next. Um, having kind of a very gentle, very [00:26:00] like relaxed lighthearted attitude to the most horrific new facts you find out about you through your new found awareness of that area. Like all of a sudden there’s a light that shines on something and you know, oh, in my closet, there is this skeleton. I didn’t know this existed there. Now I know what do I do? Um, but yeah, those thoughts that people often think, oh, I try to meditate. But when I sit down to meditate, my thoughts go crazy. And it’s exactly that it’s like, well, probably the w the probable truth is that your thoughts always go crazy. And when you sit down to meditate, it’s the only time you have ever noticed in your life. Noticing things like really noticing yourself, really experiencing yourself, being self aware, you know, is, you know, [00:27:00] a really powerful thing, but it is tricky business. Um, and when you go quiet, that’s the same thing. Uh, I think the vault, we tweeted this once, where it’s like, if you want to know the quality of your life, sit alone in silence for 30 minutes and see how you feel. That’s going to, you want to know if you live a good life, sit somewhere in silence for 30 minutes and see how you, how you’re doing, right? How are you doing? Are you panicking or you’re bored or you’re nervous and you’re afraid. Can you even bear half an hour of silence in today’s world? You take a hundred people.
[00:27:39] You tell them to sit somewhere randomly and not do anything for half an hour. And it’s not like some kind of stimulating environment that can be on their phone, just sitting. And many people will not be able to finish 30 minutes. They will decide to stop the experiment and like pick up the phone or call somebody or move somewhere to eat something, to [00:28:00] do something right.
[00:28:01] I’m sitting half an hour just being bored. There’s an, a mindfulness exercise where it’s like practicing boredom, daily practice boredom. And the whole idea is you take, you take an hour a day. Now that’s extreme. Some people will reduce it down to 30 minutes. Some people start with 15 minutes, but you take an hour.
[00:28:18] The goal is in that hour to not do anything. Right. And that includes, uh, you know, to be hyper mindful. That includes to be like, oh, I’m just going to notice my breath and sit here and say, that’s meditating. That’s not doing nothing. Right. Um, so it’s the art of like just sitting there and looking around the room and waiting for the time to be.
[00:28:43] And just allowing random thoughts or bad feelings you can be. I think playful, most people will like anything that turns this to play or makes it more interesting is fair game. Not I’m going to solve like math problems, Right?
[00:28:58] That’s like doing math or [00:29:00] I’m going to think about this problem I have in my marriage and then solve that in my mind.
[00:29:03] That’s also not doing nothing. it’s solving math, but I’m going to start, you know, I’m going to start looking at the, at the pattern of the wall, you know, and I’m going to start seeing little faces in it. And then I’m going to think about like these faces having a conversation, what their names are. That’s fair game.
[00:29:20] You’re bored and you’re just fantasizing. Right? That’s something that’s like. Yeah, exactly. I mean, kids are bored. That’s exactly what they do. They just look around for everything that they can turn into minded to play. Right. That’s cool. Uh, And, uh, and some people do this like a as a 30 day challenge where you have to like be bored for 30 minutes for 30 days go, and it sounds laughable. And it sounds like it should be the easiest thing in the world. But today, and in an increasing fashion, this is going to be black belt shit. People there’s going to be, I’ve taught, I’ve set this for, I’ve been saying this for seven, eight years. Now [00:30:00] that in the future, there’s going to be seminars, workshops, schools, courses, spas, where we’re going to be going to be offline, to just be offline, just, and it sounds laughable, but having taught like 200 years ago, if you told somebody that you’re buying a book to learn how to eat, I mean, it’d been insane.
[00:30:23] It’d be an insane statement. What do you mean. Learn how to eat. It’s not like there’s nothing to learn. You just put it in your mouth, but I want to know what is good to teach. What do you mean? What is good to what’s available is good to eat. Anything that won’t kill you. It’s good to eat. What are you talking about?
[00:30:38] Learning to eat. And now we have like books, courses, industries, experts, nutritional. What is all this shit? Right? Same thing with like exercising. It’s insane. A couple of hundred years ago, you told somebody you go to a place and you pay them to lift heavy stuffs a couple of times up and down, and then you leave that stuff.
[00:30:57] Then you leave and then somebody else comes and pays them to [00:31:00] lift the heavy stuff a couple of times up and down and leave again. It’s insane. What do.
[00:31:03] you mean exercise? Exercise is a completely insane.
[00:31:08] I even remember reading the, the, the night founders, uh, story. Right. And then he talked about like, when, when jogging became a thing in, in the S at first people looked at this like, crazy, like what you’re running, but not a way or towards something, but you’re just running for running. And now it’s like, yeah, of course it’s chugging, but it’s, it’s kind of funny too, to think, oh, this is how people thought about it.
[00:31:31] When this first happened. Like some people running for no reason.
[00:31:36] It is insane. Somebody invented this, right? Somebody came up with the idea of this because of the insane and inhumane world we live in. Right. We live in a world that is not designed for humans anymore. And so we need to then design solutions. So we feel a little bit like humans again. Right. We don’t see sunlight.
[00:31:57] So just take pills, vitamin D pills, [00:32:00] and we don’t take get exercise. So just run in circles inside of a building and paid them a hundred bucks a month. No, we don’t know what to eat because we have too much and it’s too shitty. So buy this book and go sign up for this online course and then pay this personal nutrition coach to help you eat the right stuff.
[00:32:16] I mean, that’s all insane. And one day increasingly people will have to learn what it feels like to be offline. Like we, people are going to be, we’re going to eventually get some kind of sunglasses or, you know, contact lenses or something, and then game over. Then I don’t need a fucking phone. A phone is a dumb device.
[00:32:40] Then the, the internet is overlaid over all reality, always accessible. And then that’s it. And then going offline will be like a weird feeling. People, people will have to learn it while I’m offline, but I don’t know how to do this. Well, we have an offline coach for you that [00:33:00] he’s going to teach you how to like walk around and just look at those.
[00:33:03] But just the real world it’s so boring and empty. I’m under-stimulated yes. Just, we’re going to teach you how to walk and look at one building at a time. What I can, can we start with 10 minutes? Of course we have a 10 minute package with a 12 minute package. You know, people are going to have to learn what it feels like to be offline.
[00:33:25] Like, just like we’re saying now. Oh, I’m going, like, they used to say it. I’m going online, mom. Hey, Hey friends, I can’t speak. Now I’m planning to go on the interwebs, you know, for an hour. Like that was a thing. Now it would be funny to tell somebody that you’re going online. Cause it’s sort of assumed that, you know, you’re always kind of close in close proximity to a device that’s online, but there’s going to be a time where it’s going to be the reverse.
[00:33:51] You’re going to have to tell people, Hey, I’m, uh, I’m going offline from. And people are like, wow, you’re going to offline. Why are [00:34:00] you doing that? Where people are going to be asking, where, where do you go offline? Oh, you know, there’s three places. There’s one place. It’s really great that I like it’s on fourth and 16th street.
[00:34:11] Oh, I’ve never been to that place. I go offline to this other place, you know, because no, no human and no apartment and no fucking car and nothing will be off on your chair, your socks, your fucking underwear, everything will be online. So you’ll have to go to a place, pay people and you know, where special Deere to be offline for a couple of hours because people are going to be losing their fucking minds and smashing their heads against walls and jumping off buildings and to. As many as people as possible doctors will be prescribing. Well, I think that about two hours a week offline is what would be best in this situation. Plus these pills that they’ll give you so you can handle always be online better because that’s what we’re doing. Right? We’re giving people prescriptions so they can [00:35:00] handle that terrible instrument lives a little bit better than Cayman jury at a bit better.
[00:35:04] And it’s going to be the same thing. It’s going to be like, oh, you know, the, the more holistic approach is for you to be offline for a couple of hours a day. But if you can’t do it, here’s some drugs you can take.
[00:35:13] and then, because nobody’s offline anymore, everything is just like, whatever, the most efficient mono colored material. And there’s like a little, little grid overlaid on everything. So, all right. So that the projection spaces are perfectly and with minimum processing power. So when you go offline, everything is just like little gray grits.
[00:35:38] Yeah, it’s a, it’s all just, it’s all imagined an entire world. That’s green screen. That’s it? That’s the world. Every building, every park, every street, everything is just green screen. There’s no color anymore. There’s no nothing because it’s irrelevant because we’re making all it also amazing much more amazing than if it was real [00:36:00] through the overlay of the web on top of it, over the virtual reality, whatever the fuck. and so going offline will be terrifying because what are you doing now? You’re walking through like a green screen city and there’s nothing to look at. You’ll you’ll, you know, you wouldn’t also know how to like cross the street because you don’t know if there’s lights or not like what’s going on. Like there’s going to be all these unique, dangerous of being offline now.
[00:36:24] And, uh,
[00:36:26] and you’re like, huh? They don’t shine as nice as they do online.
[00:36:33] What is the big deal? I mean, what the fuck is the big deal? I don’t get it. Um, who’s the guy, uh, and it, it doesn’t matter if I do a tribunal or not. There’s a guy on Twitter that I follow that I like. And he, he was tweeting about the Meda verse. There’s like, you know, fucking Facebook rebranding is made a verse.
[00:36:55] And then what is it? And web three and all that virtual reality and all that shit. And he had a really cool [00:37:00] threat, a really smart threat where he said, I think people are missing the point of the meta versus the middle versus not really the moment where we all just like in a virtual world maybe. But what I propose is that it’s the moment in time where people’s online life becomes significantly more important than our offline life.
[00:37:19] Constantly trending more and more towards it, right? When you make most of your money online, when most of your friends you’ve met online, when all your social status is online, like all of a sudden your NFT icon is more important than a Porsche because the NFT item will get you all this attention on live, where all the women and men are and all your friends versus your Porsche, you you’re going to drive it in the city, but who, you know, it’s going to be just a couple of a couple hundred people versus online your profile.
[00:37:46] You have a hundred thousand followers, right? It’s much more important how you flex to them. And once more and more about our lives And identities online, which is the direction it’s taking. Eventually our online life, our [00:38:00] online identity, our online icons are, will be more important than our offline life because it, it I’ll find life carries less value.
[00:38:10] Um, I thought that’s kind of a, it’s a various student interesting kind of perspective. I’ve never thought about it, but there is a tipping point. Who you are online in your life, online is the priority for you and the offline life is not, and there are kids out there. There are people where you have the extreme example where their entire life is online.
[00:38:32] They, they, they just sit and are gaming all day long and then they’re chatting all day long and they spent maybe an hour, you know, a day in the real world when they have
[00:38:42] it’s a noise it’s for them. Yeah.
[00:38:45] Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s annoying, you know, you kind of have to, once they find the way to not have to deal with the offline life and they won’t.
[00:38:54] Right. And so they can just game all day and watch some movies. And, you know, we, you know, [00:39:00] inconveniently, they still have to eat in this world, but if it could like turn it off, if it was an option that you could just be like, can I kind of just not have to eat? That would just totally click it. And you have things like, you know, what was it called for a while?
[00:39:13] It was all the rage in Silicon valley, in the bay area, which was. Yeah, Soylent, right? You, you you’ll have, Soylent was a first attempt. Somebody is going to do this where it’s going to be some sort of like a pill or some sort of like a tiny little thing you put in your fucking mouth and that’s it, all your desires, drinks eat food.
[00:39:34] You don’t have any of it. And conveniently, you only poop every fucking month for like 10 seconds. And that’s it. The whole problem, quote, unquote of eating is solved now. Well, the pleasure of it too, but who cares? Right. And the humanity of it. And then, um, and because we’re, I mean, we’re not robots, right?
[00:39:55] We’re not like somebody, somebody once said we’re not thinking machines that feel, [00:40:00] we’re feeling beings that think, right. And that’s, uh, it’s not in a court with the world. We are building, we’re building a world that is for thinking machines and for thinking beings, but not fulfilling. Uh, beings. And so as the world becomes less and less humane, uh, we will have to counteract it one with more and more things that suppressed how broken we feel, how out of place we feel, how out of touch without purpose, without meaning how deeply empty we feel we’re going to have to suppress more and more and more.
[00:40:38] And then there’s going to be these kinds of like funny places for the most enlightened of the depressed. We’re going to have, you know, an offline center that you can visit if you’re along the privileged and rich. And the very conscious if you’re at the top, this sounds funny, but only the most conscious of humans will have the desire [00:41:00] to go and be offline once a month for an hour or something.
[00:41:04] And they’re going to think of themselves as the most evolved of all humans, the ones that still connect to the humanity. But once that still kind of know how to feel grass and look up in the sky, they’ve done a feel like that’s something that gives them status and makes them more important because now the normal people don’t do that anymore.
[00:41:20] They haven’t been offline. And like, since birth ever not for a second, from today’s perspective, we would think about these people would be like, oh, you’re not that evolved. Hi. If you do like an hour or two a month of offline sort of special thing. No, it’s the same way today, right? Like today you, you, you go and meditate for half an hour, you know, every other day you go do yoga once a week and you think you’re. almost close to Buddha status, like your world. You’re like a super enlightened, ah, nature. So important to me. And you know how I really connect with the creative force of the universe. It’s like, motherfucker, no, you just, [00:42:00] you just meditate for 15 minutes in the morning and go to yoga once a week.
[00:42:04] Like just chill. You’re not that enlightened of a, of a human, but that’s, that’s the direction at least that we’re taking. I don’t think that that’s a secret. Um,
[00:42:16] I mean,
[00:42:17] and it’s, uh,
[00:42:18] when did matrix come out, right? Let’s say
[00:42:22] uh, it’s been a minute, but it’s definitely been predictive. You know, what’s funny about matrix is that it’s a sort of movie. It is probably the last movie of its kind where when matrix one came out. People did not know what the movie was about. They had no idea and they ran there. The only thing you would ever get as information before going and watching a movie would be the poster and a trailer. And for matrix, they deliberately made the decision to make the trailer [00:43:00] something that made you go, this movie is about something, something science fiction, something that’s called matrix.
[00:43:05] But I don’t know what it is. Nobody knows what the matrix is. Like the whole movie plot was a mystery. So they couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. They couldn’t say the movies about the future, where the machines rule the people, because then you already know what the matrix is like. Are you suspect?
[00:43:22] So you knew it was a scifi movie and people did not know anything else about it. They’re like no fucking clue what this movie is about. And as they would go in. They will be completely surprised by the plot. like the whole movie, the reveal of it would be like mind blowing what the fuck. And then they would leave the theater.
[00:43:44] And for the rest of the day, they will freak the fuck out. You’d be in an altered state of mind where you looked at reality for the first time in your life, you know, suspiciously. Hmm. I [00:44:00] wonder how do I know that this reality is real reality? I mean, tell me a movie that is able to create that level of mind.
[00:44:11] Fuck that level of altering people’s stay. And that consistently, not that one person really loved this philosophical movie and thought deeply about the meaning of life afterwards, but that every movie gore like, uh,
[00:44:25] you know, no matter how uneducated about how uninterested John old, they all went in and all of the without, and we’re freaked the fuck out about life.
[00:44:34] And what reality really feels like, um, a movie was amazing. It was like a, and it will never, there’s never going to be a movie like that again, like we already know everything about every movie before it comes out. Like,
[00:44:45] How about, how about, uh, I feel like about, I had a little bit of, of, no, I feel like,
[00:44:52] no. no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re way off. The mark avatar had the whole, wow. A 3d movie [00:45:00] look how cool it looks. I’ve never watched a 3d movie that looks this cool. But the storyline, the plot, you didn’t walk out of avatar and you were like challenged by your own sense of reality or the meaning of life.
[00:45:12] right. But there was a, like a, this kind of like different world where you almost felt like, wow, I want to be there.
[00:45:23] Well, there’ve been many movies where something really beautiful transformative happens, but not in a way where you don’t fully grasp. If your reality in this moment is actually true, like that’s sort of like challenging your life and your sense for reality. I don’t think there’s ever been a movie like that before.
[00:45:45] I’m pretty sure there’s ever been a movie like that before. Um, what’s pretty fucking amazing. That’s a dope thing for anything too, for anyone in any art form to accomplish that at a massive scale is. Incredible. Um, but [00:46:00] that’s kind of, that’s where we’re going, right? I mean, you know, who knows minus the, probably see the enslavement will probably be voluntary and people will like it.
[00:46:10] Right. That’s really what it is. it’s not going to be a whole fucking war and that a die, there’s a resistance. No bitch. Everybody’s going to be like, wait, I can plug this into my head and then I’ll have the best Netflix movies and shows and they will, there’s never going to be a boring show
[00:46:27] more a brave new world rather than 1984.
[00:46:30] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. W we’re we’re definitely, we’re definitely down the path of brave new world. Like we’re just all going to be happy campers going with the program and anyone that doesn’t is going to seem insane. Like why would you want to not eat good food and live in a comfortable apartment and sleep nicely?
[00:46:50] Why would you, are you in. Like you only dumped people. This is the best thing ever. We get, we have everything we want unlimited entertainment, a limited, fun, [00:47:00] new food shelter, you know? And just like, why would you live in real reality when you could live here? Like, here’s just like a million times better.
[00:47:09] Um, and if you think about it, the road to a future like that, where we lose a big portion of our humanity and maybe we really lose everything that could fill us with meaning, but we replace it with these over this over sterile overstimulated overmedicated medic. It doesn’t matter if it’s medicational or distraction or whatever, like just like pushing away the pain, changing the biochemistry to, to, to not like freak out and lose your mind. The, the road to that world can only be paid. With less and less awareness with less and less mindfulness, less and less presence, right? As you take [00:48:00] away awareness and mindfulness from humanity, social humanity speeds up its March towards that future, right. And needs that future really to come quicker.
[00:48:13] Like the more, the more I’m on my phone and on my tablet and gaming, the more of that I need to handle my anxiety. Their hand will help terrible. My body feels because it has moved in fucking 10 hours of just looking at a screen, right? The more I need an addicting addicted I get. So this voluntary, brave new world comes about because of the way that technology.
[00:48:41] Eradicating awareness and mindfulness in our daily lives. It chips away at it a little bit away from there a little bit, you know, now I still remember a time where, when I was waiting for the bus, I had to just wait. There was nothing to do. And sometimes the [00:49:00] bus didn’t show up and then there was really nothing to do.
[00:49:04] Like for half an hour, sometimes I just stood there and fucking waited, looked at the sky at the birds. I didn’t enjoy it, but I was just waiting. Just waiting. Does not exist in more for children today. They don’t know the concept of this. Like I am, I, I cannot, I just gonna stand here and not do anything for five minutes while we wait. Um, so many things have been chipped away and eradicated and with them, what goes with them as a byproduct is our awareness is our mindful. Is our ability to be present. And as all these things go, the more we actually need that future to come and to take care of us because we can’t take care of us anymore.
[00:49:51] and then as this plays out over time, also, like you said, 10 hours, you don’t move your body and then you feel really shitty. Right. And then you do that over [00:50:00] 10 years and your body becomes this weird thing that really now it’s just the noise. It’s right here. It’s like you don’t
[00:50:09] Yeah. The longer you there, these are all momentum based self-perpetuating systems. That we’re one thing leads to an amplification of the next, which leads to the amplification of the first thing and so on and so forth. Yeah. Like w w.
[00:50:26] it’s like electric stimulating your muscles just to, uh, you know, survive necessary level.
[00:50:34] And even that should already exists right there. These places where you go and you wear a suit, like a diverse suit, and it’s connected with a million cables. And it’s the workout of the future. I mean, this has been around for a number of years now where you do a 25 minute workout that is supported by these electroshocks that are stimulating your [00:51:00] muscles, right.
[00:51:00] You’re holding different is a different positions. You have to hold and then the electroshock stimulate your muscles and contract them and all that. And they marketed as the workout for the busy, it’s like a holistic, perfectly healthy, safe. You’re not going to get. Workout for the busy, what if you could get your whole body to be worked out like a one and a half hour workout? If it was just
[00:51:24] There you go?
[00:51:25] In Germany, there’s a bunch of places where I live today. I passed my building gym and as I was looking inside, There was a personal trainer and there was an old lady and she had a suit like that on.
[00:51:36] Right. So this already exists. It is just that it’s not good enough yet. So they, so they have to work really hard to market it. I think, um, oil was actually doing that for a while, like for a year or two. And he was saying, you know, it’s not as good as if you really worked out, but I do it once a week. And it’s sort of, I get the feeling that [00:52:00] it’s way better than if I didn’t do anything.
[00:52:01] I’m like, well, if you went to go on a walk for an hour, once a week, that also would be better than doing nothing. Okay. I don’t know. Um, so they, they, they’re smart, amazing humans that do this, uh, and it already exists and it’s just not as good as real workout, but as soon as it gets a little bit better and a little bit more convenient, I don’t know how, like also less awkward.
[00:52:26] I think people still feel awkward when they go.
[00:52:29] to these, these places and they have to wear a fucking like weird suit with cables on to do the workout. That’s why also they can never do a workout. And it’s not probably not the only reason, but this is the kind of gym that is very small. That looks almost like a little boutique.
[00:52:46] And there can only be just like two or three people that work out. And you always work out with the trainer because it’s just 20 minutes at the trainer is going to be telling you, you know, go down to a plank or move your left hand this way, that way. not just because you [00:53:00] need the train. It’s probably also, because it would just be so awkward to go there and stand there with a suit or by yourself, and then just do the weird movements.
[00:53:08] So by having somebody that looks very professional, they all have polo shirts on and like a little clipboard and stuff by doing that, it feels like very like scientific science. Oh, we’re doing this. And being coached by this cutting edge science workout program. Um, but it already exists. yeah.
[00:53:25] The future, the future is already there.
[00:53:27] It’s just not evenly distributed in this, in this sense, but we’ll have to, you know, every mind, your own mind will have to be the resistance to this, right? If, if you want to hold onto your humanity, um, you’ll have to develop and nurture your awareness in your mindfulness. It’s a difficult battle because you are fighting hundreds and hundreds and [00:54:00] hundreds of thousands of the best engineers and business people on earth.
[00:54:04] And you’re fighting the largest corporations on earth that are all conspiring, truly conspiring to make you spend less and less of your awareness on the fucking trees and the road, and more and more of your time, energy and awareness on their device, on their application. On that technology. It’s, you’re fighting.
[00:54:21] It’s this massive army. This is the way I was explaining it to my children when I was telling them why they can’t have a phone. And I was like, you have to realize that behind this phone, there’s an army of the million people. And all they do is the work every day. And what they want to do is they want to get you addicted to it.
[00:54:37] And no, none of us is smart enough and strong enough to fight against that many smart people. You can only lose. So anytime you use this device, you lose, you just have to choose how much losing can you handle. And when you’re an adult, it’s easier. Most adults still fail at this but we try to lose [00:55:00] an amount we can afford.
[00:55:01] But when you are a child, you will lose too much and we have to protect you from that. Right? So that’s what we do. And you know what, the people that invented these fucking devices that got rich, they don’t allow their children to play with them. So there must be a lesson in here, right? You were in the same privilege position as the children of the people who invented the device.
[00:55:22] would be another interesting, , idea to explore, like in that future where everything is, you know, virtual, how about the, billionaires, right? W w w will they?
[00:55:33] what do they do?
[00:55:34] because if you think about it, like if you had that experience where the virtual is actually as real as the real, but then you can have whatever you want.
[00:55:44] Right. Even if you can have everything, sometimes, that’s just as compelling to them to experience that.
[00:55:50] Yeah, but you know, somebody will always have to, I mean, we’re not talking the moment where the machines take over it because who the fuck knows then humans don’t matter [00:56:00] anymore. Billionaires probably don’t exist anymore because we’re all just like aunts. Uh, and so when maybe we’re all like happy in our virtual world, but we’re totally irrelevant to what’s really going on in the world.
[00:56:10] Um, but as long as humans let’s say rule the world, right? Like dictate what’s going on, the people with more focus, more awareness. We’ll be able to make the other people do what they want them to do. And hence they will accrue all the power and all the money. Um, and so I think that awareness and presence and the ability to concentrate, these things will become, um, you know, in shorter and shorter supply.
[00:56:47] So I assume that for the time that humans reign, they will become the mark of the people that rule the world. It’s like, oh, did you know this billionaire can actually focus on a [00:57:00] single task for three hours? Like just writing a memo, nothing else, three hours that.
[00:57:05] will seem like inhumane to us. It’s like, oh, of course he’s controlled the air.
[00:57:12] Right. He can do these things with high profile. he thinks he can think five years ahead. What, that’s crazy. Nobody could big that far ahead. Um, most people like the average attention span is two seconds. And the actual time that a human can imagine its own future is like a three and a half days.
[00:57:33] Like how, what do you mean five years? I think that that will be very, very valuable until it becomes irrelevant because all humans, all of a sudden are just in the same class, which is, you know, they’re ants. Like it doesn’t matter what they like. It doesn’t matter if one end is smarter than the other or bigger or smaller, they’re all just fucking ends.
[00:57:50] Okay. They’re in a sub category on this planet. They don’t decide what’s happening. Um, but [00:58:00] for now, for today, all we really can do. Is the site. How important is our awareness? How important is our humanity?
[00:58:11] the way to save as much of humanity as possible, the starting point for sure is to save yourself. Right. And the first way to save yourself is to ask yourself, what do I do today to carve out space, to unfold awareness, to connect with my mind, with my being, with my body, to really feel, to really think, to really breathe, and to be in control. Of my life. So I decide when I pick up a technology like a phone or like a laptop or tablet or something else that I had a purpose and a mission with it. And then I used it to accomplish these things. And it’s, didn’t end up using me to accomplish its [00:59:00] own agendas,