The Point

In this, the final episode of Get 2 the Point, we start out by recapping the series.  Then, we talk about the U.S. Senate, including the history of the filibuster and the problem of aging Senators who don't have term limits.  After that, we speculate on where the U.S. political landscape is going from here.  Then we smoothly segue from discussing the Senate to discussing how various people have more versus less amounts of power to change things in their lives.

And the rest of the episode is impossible to sum up succinctly in any way that could do it justice.  But we do end with getting to the point.


Quick note: What do I mean by fungibility?  In earthly situations, I mean the degree to which you can change your circumstances in life.  And, in dreamlike or heavenly situations, I mean the degree to which you can change the physical environment around you with thought.  Officially, the word's meaning is more about being able to perfectly replace something with something else... but words like convertible and swappable are still considered synonyms for it.  It's hard to find a word that means exactly what I was going for, so I went with that one.


Acknowledgments: For this episode, I give thanks to all the people who have given me (or have helped lead me to) little bits of profound wisdom here and there over the years.  I was listening, I put it all together as cohesively as I could, and a ton of it even made its way into this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Anthony Camberiati. Welcome to the final episode of Get to the Point. I'll still be doing other podcasts, but this one had to be a limited series by its very nature. The idea behind this podcast is, of course, to address the political issues of the day in a way that really gets to the heart of the matter. We want to understand the deeper problems as well as we can and get to their root causes. This inevitably brings us into the realms of morality and spirituality as well. So in this episode, we're going to start out by addressing something we touched on at the very end of the interview in episode three, and then, having tied up all the loose ends, we're going to go into deeper and deeper territory from there. But first, let's recap what we've addressed so far. In episode one, we looked at the U.S. Supreme Court. We looked at how a decades-long Republican movement to advance pro-life causes led to a point where the U.S. Supreme Court, which now has five members completely dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade, sacrificed its own relevance and its own capability to enforce constitutional rights in any capacity in order to allow a vigilante enforced six-week abortion ban in Texas. And it did so knowing full well that another Roe challenging case from Mississippi was scheduled on their docket for just a month later, which it has since used to overturn Roe v. Wade. In episode two, we looked at the nature of human consciousness and the nature of AI and went into what we're actually dealing with when you compare the two. In episode three, I interviewed two amateur political expert friends to lay out the relevant topics to cover for the rest of this series. In episode four, we talked about gerrymandering, one of the roots of all evil, and how it screwed up the US House of Representatives. In episode five, we talked about the context we live within, time, and all the reasons why people shouldn't try messing with how we define it. In episode six, we talked about the flaws in our education system, the problems of the present that are leading us towards more problems in the future. In episode seven, we talked about how we're becoming more and more polarized and how one man's mental health issues catalyzed a whole subset of the U.S. population. These were people who were deeply frustrated with how things were changing, and he made it okay for them to believe whatever they wanted to believe rather than accepting unpleasant realities. And that brings us to the content of episode eight. So let's get started. The idea behind the United States of America is that it's designed to be democratic, small d in nature. This means that with few exceptions, every adult citizen of the country technically is allowed to vote anytime we have an election. I just got my paper in the mail for the upcoming midterms. And every person in every state gets a voting representative for their district. But the system is technically not so much a democracy as it is a republic. When we have a nationwide election, particularly for US president, ultimately people's votes aren't tallied individually. States' votes are. But in another context, the states are all put on even footing with each other. Therefore, each state is fairly represented by exactly two elected representatives, senators. So we, in a sense, we the people, and in a sense, we the states, put people in power to make these big important decisions for us, which affect us very widely and sometimes very profoundly. Okay, so let's talk about what problems we've ended up with in the state based part of our representation, the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Senate is a deliberative body where bills are brought to the floor. Senators get an opportunity to make passionate speeches in support of or against each bill, with the idea being that all sorts of different sides are being represented, and the best argument should help persuade other senators to join that side. The Senate is led by a majority leader. The one hundred senators are divided into two caucuses, Democrats and Republicans, and whichever has more seats at any given time is the majority. At the moment, the Senate has fifty Republicans, forty eight Democrats, and two independents. The two independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, both caucus with the Democrats. So there's a fifty fifty tie for control. Now, the role of President of the Senate is filled by the Vice President of the United States. So the tiebreaker for control of the Senate comes down to her. Since the Democrats hold the presidency and vice presidency right now, we essentially have a fifty-one fifty Democratic majority. That applies when votes come down to an exact 50-50 split and the vice president casts a tiebreaking vote. The majority leader of the Senate actually is the one who controls which bills are brought to the floor. For most things, a majority vote is all you need for something to pass. You do also have a situation where if the House votes to impeach the president, it goes to trial in the Senate. In that case, conviction requires a two-thirds vote, not just a straightforward majority. But historically, impeachment trials have been very rare. They only ever came up twice in the history of the country before the Trump presidency, after all. But even a majority isn't really enough in many practical situations. To really get legislation through with the rules as they stand now, you need what's called a supermajority, 60 out of 100 seats, not just 50. And the way to explain why that is, is with a history lesson about something called the filibuster. Now the word filibuster first appeared in the English language in 1591. It goes back to a Dutch word for freebooter, which is someone who took booty or loot like a pirate. So in another context, it can be used to mean a legislator who is quote unquote pirating parliamentary proceedings. In 1789, the first U.S. Senate adopted rules that allowed senators to move on from a given debate to a vote by a simple majority. However, Thomas Jefferson's vice president, Aaron Burr, argued that having a rule for this was redundant and should be eliminated, since it had only been used once in the preceding four years. The Senate did this in 1806 after Burr left office, but in doing so it neglected to create any alternative mechanism for actually terminating debate. Though this idea of prolonging debate indefinitely, filibustering, was available as a theoretical option, no one really pursued it until 1837. That's when a group of senators from the Whig Party used this technique to prevent allies of Democratic President Andrew Jackson from expunging a resolution of censure against him. In eighteen forty one, Whig Senator Henry Clay tried to end debate on a bill to charter a new national bank with a majority vote, but Democratic Senator William H. King threatened a filibuster, saying that Clay, quote, may make his arrangements at his boarding house for the winter, unquote. Since other senators sided with him, Clay backed down. In nineteen seventeen, the Senate established a rule for ending debate called cloture. The requirement was that two thirds of Sanders be present for them to hold a vote on the cloture measure. In the nineteen thirties, Senator Huey Long wanted to promote his populist policies, so he occupied fifteen hours of debate with recitation of Shakespeare and reading recipes. In nineteen forty six, five Democrats filibustered a bill by another Democrat, Dennis Chavez, to create a Fair Employment Practice Committee. This one lasted weeks, and Senator Chavez removed the bill from consideration after a cloture vote failed. There were further changes to the cloture rules starting in nineteen forty nine, and a couple of single senator filibuster length records were set in the nineteen fifties. Senator Strom Thurman famously filibustered once for a little over twenty four hours straight. In nineteen seventy, the Senate put into place a two-track system so that the Senate could have more than one main motion pending on the floor at once. This way, the Senate could still carry on with other business even if a given motion was technically still being held up. The Senate would then designate specific periods of time during the day when each piece of legislation would be considered. But this had the effect of making it easier for the minorities to sustain a filibuster on any particular motion. In 1975, the Senate changed the two-thirds requirement for cloture to three-fifths, so 60 instead of 67. But they also changed this to require an absolute number of total senators rather than just requiring a percentage of senators present for a vote. So basically, the minority party didn't need to be there en masse to sustain a filibuster. They could do it just by having forty-one senators not be there. Since then, exceptions were made for judicial nominees aside from Supreme Court justices and for nominations to the president's cabinet. But even Supreme Court nominations were switched to only require a simple majority vote in 2017 for Neil Gorsuch's nomination, like we talked about in the first episode. There are a number of other types of legislation that have also been exempted from the filibuster, such as budget reconciliation. In December 2021, the Senate had to allow a one-time exception to it for voting on raising the debt ceiling. Basically, the Senate couldn't even get ten Republicans to agree with the Democrats to take action to prevent major economic damage to the whole country, if not the world overall. So it's quite clear that we've reached a new low with our levels of partisanship at this point. This brings us to the past few years. So we move on from historical events into events that many of us have just recently witnessed in real time. In 2019, the Democrats introduced a bill in the House called the For the People Act. The basic idea of this bill was that it was supposed to fix up a great deal of the flaws in the system that Republicans have been ruthlessly exploiting in recent elections. Without going into too much detail, the bill helped codify voting rights, it increased election security measures, it started the process to push against Citizens United and otherwise helped with campaign finance reform. It introduced a bunch of ethics requirements, including requiring presidential candidates to publicly disclose their tax returns. It helped push for potential DC statehood. It improved the Federal Election Commission, and my favorite provision, it outlawed gerrymandering. It passed the House on party lines 234 to 193 in 2019, but since the Republicans held the majority in the Senate at the time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked it from being brought up for a vote there. As you know, the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2021. So for that term, the Congressional Democrats reintroduced the bill as the very first one on the docket in each house. So it was given the numbers HR one and S1, House of Representatives won, Senate won. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced it in the Senate, and then, of course, it was blocked from cloture with the Senate Republican filibuster. Now it's worth noting that with the Democrats having power in the Senate, they actually are able to change Senate rules if they can get 50 votes to do so. So there were extensive and increasing calls to abolish the filibusters so they could get this through. But they needed all 50 Sanders in the Democratic caucus to agree on this, and they couldn't get the support of Sanders, Joe Manchin, and Kirsten Cinema. So what happened next is that Joe Manchin worked on and championed his own bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, which toned down a lot of what was in for the people. The thinking here was that he'd be more amenable to working around the filibuster for a bill that was less extensive and less specifically favorable to Democrats. So they kept working on that. Eventually, Senate Democrats overall determined that they could make it easier still. They didn't need to completely abolish the filibuster. They didn't even need to make a carve out for the filibuster for voting rights bills, as the Senate had done for many other types of bills before. No. All they needed was to allow for a small, one time change in the filibuster rule. Instead of allowing for 41 senators to prevent cloture merely by the threat of a filibuster, they just needed to go back to the old process of requiring a talking filibuster. So if Republican senators really wanted to go on for hours and hours straight talking about why people didn't need voting rights, they could do that. So in January 2022, after months and months of speculation about what Manchin and Cinema were going to do, the Democrats finally stopped playing around and brought freedom to vote to a Senate vote. The Freedom to Vote Act itself got its 50 votes plus the tiebreaker vote. But then that minimalist Senate filibuster rule change vote only got as many had dreaded and hoped against 48 votes. After the vote, Cinema was seen high-fiving many Republicans. And this is when I decided that listening to MSNBC a lot is basically a masochistic endeavor. You get all your hopes up for things to finally turn around and get better, and then you realize that very little ever changes or gets done. It's like running for a bad sports team. Sure, they win sometimes, but not a whole lot, and you have to make sure you don't buy into all the hype and expect better results overall. To be fair though, a lot of Trump voters fell for the hype themselves with the 2020 election. And as you know, many of them still haven't accepted reality. Hey, do you know which red state in the US has the biggest population? The state of denial. Now you may be thinking that, hey, all the Democrats really need is to add two more senators to their caucus in an upcoming election, and then they can get fifty votes together for rule changes, right? Well, that sounds good on paper, but we have to ask this question. Is it really just Mansion and Cinema? Or are there actually some other Democratic senators who play along with the majority publicly, but privately you're compromised by special interests? After all, anyone can vote for something that'll make them look good to their voters if they know it isn't going to pass. If there are other special interests who can exert control on even just a few more Democratic senators, then well anyway, that pessimistic note actually brings us right into the next topic, aging senators, which we touched on right near the end of episode three. The average age of a member of the US Senate is roughly sixty-four years old. Right now, there are five senators over eighty years old, and many senators just keep getting re-elected over and over again. Given that the average American is in their thirties and that the world is only changing more and more quickly, you can picture how increasingly out of touch the senators overall are becoming. If you were over fifty years old when this thing called the Internet really showed up in society around 1996, then you probably weren't going to be too inclined to learn much about it. By then you'd have been pretty set in your ways. You'd lived over half a century without websites, emails, social media, podcasts, and you did just fine without them, right? So it's hard for you to grasp how they work and how much they affect so many people in this country and the world overall every single day. You know how older people like to complain about how kids are on their phones all the time. Well, yeah, that's how they see it, and they fail to grasp how many different things those kids might be using those phones for. So I'm sure a lot of kids are mostly just texting and watching Minecraft videos. You can do a heck of a lot with that tiny little supercomputer you carry around all the time. You can learn a lot from it, and you can connect to all sorts of different people from all over the world with it. And the kids and young adults are doing just that. We're not just in tribes anymore. And that's not the only huge divide that comes into play here. If you're in the Senate, you're living a significantly different lifestyle than the average American. For starters, the base salary of a senator is $174,000 a year. And that's not even getting into all the other ways senators can make money, be it through scrupulous or unscrupulous means. We talked about how people can find themselves in bubbles via biased news sources or social media. Well, it's worth noting that if you want to get elected to the Senate, you probably have to toe the party line to some degree, even just to get funding for your campaign. So it's no surprise that most senators live in a bubble where their whole political reality is defined within the context of the left or the right. Nowadays this even applies to most Supreme Court justices, and they're supposed to be impartial. As we mentioned in episode three, the idea of setting term limits for the Senate seems like a really good one. Given that a Senate term lasts for six years, maybe twelve or twenty four years would be a good cutoff. The idea of being a senator or any member of the government actually is that you're a civil servant. They're literally called civil servants. It is a service position where you are in a role where you are working hard to fight for your constituents. And it's supposed to be a somewhat thankless job. So one would think that two to four terms in a job like that would be enough. But obviously the situation as it is now certainly motivates sitting senators to keep running for another term for as long as they can. Strom Thurman was still in the Senate just past his one hundredth birthday. Robert Byrd was still a senator when he died at age ninety two. And right now we have eighty eight year old Chuck Grassley running for another six year term, which would theoretically end with him at age ninety four. There's a joke out there that I read about how ageism is a problem in the job market. Often potential employees are discriminated against because they're too old to be on top of the latest technology and so forth. However, the federal government is almost exclusively run by these same old people. Okay, I guess that's more of a sad reality than a joke. Either way, it's a disconnect that's interesting to think about. Anyway, so yeah, it'd be nice to seriously consider term limits. Unfortunately, the people who would have to put the rules in place to set these term limits are the very same people who would be affected by them. So we would need some sort of societal mindset shift or groundswell where the people advocating for term limits were the actual people winning primaries and being voted into the Senate. And how do you get there when so many rich and powerful corporations have these existing cozy relationships with long-term senators already? Also, it's a lot easier to collect compromising information on one senator than on a whole series of them. For example, if anybody spills the beans on the coke fueled orgies that the senators have, then a bunch of compromising photos of that person suddenly show up on the internet, and they end up losing their primary. Just ask Representative Madison Cawthorne about that. So where are things going from here? Well, even though the Senator's getting older and older, the fact that older people are more likely to die doesn't seem to be countering that. If you have the best health care out there and are reasonably healthy to begin with, then you can stave off many cancers and other issues, and nowadays easily make it into your nineties. Those coke filled orgies really help keep people stay thin, I hear. Former presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Ford all made it well into their nineties, and Jimmy Carter seems to still be doing fine as well. Hopefully he'll live a long time yet to come, but he is still alive as of this recording. Wealth disparity is increasing over time. So with wealth becoming more concentrated, power is also becoming more concentrated. Likewise, with gerrymandering and other exploitations, people in power are becoming better and better at staying in power. So by and large, the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. But there eventually has to be a tipping point. We're becoming less and less inclined to support our existing institutions over time. Though many people in the United States are certainly religious, the percentages of people who are atheist, agnostic, and spiritual but not religious are all going up. But right now, many people are very much siding with their political camps, Republican and Democrat. There's an understanding that there's a two-party system in this country, but most people honestly are relatively moderate and would probably be happy to support someone more centrist if that person could actually win. Also, it's well worth noting that the country was very happy to resoundingly vote against Trump in 2020 after COVID hit. And now Biden's approval rating is down as well because all these COVID-related problems haven't gotten any better under his watch either. Conventional wisdom says is that voters are fickle and keep going back and forth. But what do they do if they already know that neither party has people who can actually deal with these problems? As we've noted here before, Maryland is a very liberal state, but it's worth noting that we have a Republican governor here right now. Why? Because sometimes you find yourself in a situation where your Democratic governor is so far left that he raises the sales tax rate by 1% and still ends up with a massively increased deficit. And even most Democrats are only willing to go so far in putting up with the most extreme policies of the Democratic Party. In comparison, Kentucky is a very conservative state and they have a Democratic governor now. Ironically, Donald Trump may actually be the answer to establishing a viable third party in the U.S. What has to happen is that the Republicans have to end up nominating someone else in 2024. Then, kind of like Teddy Roosevelt with his Bull Moose Party, Trump would run on his own. The result would be that the Democrats would win in a landslide, and the Trump Party and Republican Party would split electoral votes. So at that point, with the Democrats having a supermajority in the Senate and I guess building everything back even better than before, and quite possibly causing big inflation problems again, Republican voters and Trump supporters would both find themselves very much not represented by their government. So depending on where the collective patient stands at this point, one of two things could happen. One is that the Republican Party would finally adapt and form a much more tolerable and representative party that could actually appeal to enough voters to win the popular vote again. Or the other is that we could have what is being referred to as another civil war. Keep in mind that we're not talking about a Confederate army rising up against the U.S. government. It's almost impossible to go up against the US military in combat. Instead, we'd have a great many domestic terrorism acts occurring, various bombings and such, and perhaps more occurrences akin to the january sixth attack on the Capitol. Given how unwilling the diehard Trump supporters were to even accept the prospect of losing the presidency for four years after the twenty twenty election, I'm thinking the Civil War result is more likely than the Republican Party recalibration result. So what does happen just after twenty twenty four if we're in the middle of this new type of civil war? Trump is not likely to run again after twenty twenty four for various reasons. But Trump was a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. There's a quote unquote Trumpiness that goes even further than Trump himself has, a reality where you have your own facts and believe whatever makes you feel good. But the problem there is that when there's no factual consistency underlying your belief system, how do you keep straight exactly how crazy you need to go? There's a clear progression of three levels of craziness among Republicans, which I've noticed. The first level is the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. It sounded crazy at the time, but recently the mainstream media actually admitted that there was a lot of truth to it. So that's just a temporary apparent craziness, not actual craziness. The second level is the one where people believe that Trump won the 2020 election. This is where you just have willful ignorance and complete denial of unpleasant realities, like I explained last episode. It's false in this universe, but in an alternative universe, Trump. Trump theoretically could have won the 2020 election. And then there's a third level, the QAnon one. That's where people believe stuff that's not just isn't true, and where you'd have a hard time convincing most people that it was even possible at all, no matter what parallel earth you're theorizing about here. QAnon is the one where they're calling Democrats pedophiles and claiming that they're eating babies in the basement of a pizza parlor in DC. And don't forget the Jewish space lasers while you're at it. What I'm saying is that I think at some point these three completely different facets of the Republican Party are going to realize that they're living in three completely different realities and that they don't really have much in common at all. The first group is completely fed with Trump and wants him out of politics for good. The second group still really loves Trump, thinks he should still be president now, and completely supports him for 2024. And the third group thinks Trump isn't Trumpy enough anymore because, for example, he actually believes COVID exists and he got vaccinated and boosted for it. I mean, either you're part of the cult or you're not, right? So I think the Republican Party is about to die a very painful, very angry death with a great many people fighting very hard to the bitter rant. And with its main opposition dead, I think Democrats will then be inclined to split into progressives and moderates themselves. If the moderate party can win over most of the more reasonable Republicans, like that first group, then it could become the dominant force moving forward. And then it's just a question of whether either extreme can build up enough support to actually challenge them. I think eventually the progressives will become a big enough force to do that. But as for the Republicans, a lot of the people who are still around supporting it now are going to die out. Unlike senators, they don't have the best health care, and many of them still don't believe COVID is real. I've also been entertaining the idea that Texas could attempt to secede from the U.S. if the Democrats win the 2024 election and hold on to power, but they'd have to take a lot of other red states with them, otherwise it wouldn't really work. The important thing to note about Republicans, though, is that they're spread out all over the place in rural areas throughout the whole country. So there isn't really a defined land mass that could secede and properly capture the relevant populations. So I think all that these domestic terrorist types are really going to be able to do is commit small scale attacks. We've been talking about the Senate, and the Senate is actually very relevant for a perspective on spirituality that I want to cover. Basically, if you're a member of the Senate, then you are definitively one of a hundred total people where large contingents of senators are working towards certain goals and getting certain bills passed, and other large contingents are working towards blocking those bills. Any member of the Senate can sponsor a bill, and any member of the Senate can give speeches on behalf of their bill specifically or on any other relevant topic in general. So here's some perspective on how the world works, and you can picture it working like you're a senator if that helps with visualizing it. When you look at the rest of the universe or the rest of the Senate, there is you, and there is the huge mass of decision makers that is the other. The idea is that your own mind via your own body has some degree of power to influence where the world overall is going. Sometimes it's via writing or speech, other times it's by actions you take. Hopefully these actions you take are for the benefit of others, perhaps the greater good, or at least of benefit to yourself. So you definitely have some influence over the progress of the world overall, but the question is how much? There was a point a number of years ago where there was this book called The Secret that became very popular. It was basically a pop culture version of prayer. The idea is that you're sending out intentions into the universe to get what you want out of it. The interesting thing about The Secret is that it kind of works, but in certain contexts it very much does not work. I remember that one time Dave Chappelle was talking about The Secret. Say you tell a poor person in the middle of a very poor community in Africa about it. It doesn't seem like they're going to get very far in getting what they want out of the universe, does it? Well, okay. But if you go back to the model of the US government, you can see how different people have different levels of power. The president can get a lot of stuff to happen personally. Any given senator can have some degree of impact, but only so much without a broad coalition, usually with other members of their own party who are working towards the same types of goals. Any given member of the House of Representatives has some degree of power as well, but decidedly less so. And then you have voters. Your vote is your power, but usually it's just one of many votes, where you hope the voting population at large goes the same way you do. So back to the secret. Before that came out, I was already studying up on New Age spirituality, which delved into the same concept. In that discipline, I like to say that there are different quote unquote vibration levels that we're operating at. Sometimes people like to use that terminology to refer to what types of emotions we're feeling, with the idea that love-based emotions are at higher vibration levels and fear-based ones are at lower vibration levels. You can certainly explore that yourself if you'd like, but I'm talking about a different definition of vibration levels here. Basically, it applies to the overall world that you find yourself in. If you're in a world where you have a lot of money, power, and influence, you can use those tools to influence the world a lot. But if you're poor and greatly discriminated against by your society, certain opportunities are going to be much, much harder to come by for you. It should be pretty obvious that being at a higher vibration does not mean you're a better person. We quite often see the exact opposite. I'm just saying that the secret is probably going to work a lot better for you in that case. Another way to look at this is with the concept of fungibility. How fungible is your reality compared to someone else's? I'll leave it to you to model what levels of fungibility you would think various people you know or know about are operating at. There was a point in time before the secret when I got enough of a handle on all this that I could get certain things to happen, manipulating the randomness basically. Stuff like getting a certain song to show up on the radio at a certain time, for example. You know, parlor tricks. The interesting thing that I found from that experience is that once you have a sense that you can kind of get what you want out of the universe, you kind of stop wanting as many things from it. A lot of these material things just naturally become less appealing to you. So after you get past the parlor trick phase and build up enough proof that this whole faith-based thing works, you can mature with it. Like I've often said, the scientific method doesn't work on matters of faith. But that doesn't mean that you can't use a methodology where you have faith to start with, and then you check to see how well it worked. Back to the idea of maturing past the parlor tricks. Once you feel confident that you can get a lot of things if you really want them, you start questioning what exactly you do really want. Discerning what you really want is not as easy as what common wisdom seems to think. Also, if you're setting your intentions and manifesting outcomes intentionally some of the time, then you have to wonder if you're actually doing that unintentionally and haphazardly all the rest of the time. You know, after Einstein published his first paper on relativity, there was certainly some desire for other people to test it and to see if it applied in all the different areas the logic implied. Einstein's attitude was the theory is correct. It's not arrogance here, it's just that when you figure something out, instead of just doubting yourself when some uncertainty arises, consider working from the assumption that the theory is correct and you're making other assumptions which are incorrect. In other words, maybe we do want bad things to happen sometimes. Maybe there's a greater good that can only be achieved by a bad thing happening. Maybe we need evil in this world to become more good by and large. This is often a hard line of reasoning for us humans to consider because eventually we find ourselves feeling or empathizing with someone's pain and we feel how wrong it is in the moment. But for every extremely sad and tragic school shooting, there's an incredible outpouring of love and increased push against the brick wall we keep running up against when it comes to gun law reform. We did make some progress in this past week, but there's a long way to go. Maybe one school shooting happening leads us to preventing ten more. I'm not trying to wish suffering on anyone. I'm just saying that it's the trials and tribulations that we go through that help us to grow and help us to better sympathize with what others around us are going through. So if you're trying to figure out what you really want to experience, creating your own reality, as they sometimes call it in New Age spirituality, then you have to think very carefully about what's really for the greater good for yourself and for others around you. So here's a question that comes to mind when we're on this topic of influencing and creating your own reality. If you're one of about eight billion people, but you're certainly finding yourself able to influence things in certain ways more than one eight billionth of the way, then how does it even work? I mean, if I get a certain song to play on the radio at a certain time, I'm affecting the reality of everyone else who's listening to that station at the same time, correct? So say there are two different people out there who are trying to manifest two different songs at the same time. Well, that wouldn't work, right? Well, yeah, that would be the case, but like I said, start with the idea that the theory is correct and presume that the error is somewhere else instead. In this case, the conflict of two different people trying to manifest two incompatible things at the same time requires an assumption that almost all of us always make. The idea that the other person is inherently at odds with us. It doesn't consider the possibility that we're all synced up. In other words, there's you and there are all the other people around you, but the versions of the people around you that you experience are the very versions of them that you want, need, are manifesting, whatever, for your own spiritual journey. Here's one way to look at it. We just had this whole COVID-19 pandemic that started greatly affecting all of us in early 2020. You were probably quarantined to some degree. Various friends and family years were also probably quarantined. When you turn on late night TV, all the hosts were operating from home or from empty studios or whatever. COVID 19 is, quite definitively, something that could easily not have happened to our world. Many, many years went by when nothing like it happened, after all, but it did happen. Now, if there was some sort of other person you're thinking of, and they didn't have COVID-19 planned as part of their own spiritual journey, then well, that version of that person would have had to have diverged off from your particular universe into some other part of the multi universe where COVID 19 didn't happen. In their universe, Trump probably got re-elected, so pick your poison, I guess. So yes, obviously you are the star of your own life. But you have many others in your life as well who are present to various degrees. Some are guest stars in your TV show. Others just make a quick cameo or two. Some are there for a number of seasons, and they're written out of the main plot lines. You get the idea. Likewise, we are guest stars or cameo actors or whatever in the lives of all the other people we interact with. They are playing the perfect role for what you need, and vice versa. Well, that brings us back to a point I just made a little earlier about the greater good and bad things happening. But now we're taking into account the idea that we're all synced up. So now it's a little more personal to say the least, and it's trickier. Sometimes a role someone else plays in your life is a very dark role. They may be very malevolent or otherwise cause you great suffering. Well, if we're all synced up, then the tug of war games are really just illusions. Ultimately there's really only one source of control behind everything, and that source of control is causing some very, very bad things to happen. That brings us to the idea of a divine presence or a god. Except when you think about these types of terrible experiences, it really pierces the idealism of God, doesn't it? It makes you want to forget all about us being synced up and start buying into the idea that everything's just random and often very, very tragic. It makes you wonder if there's a divine presence at all. Yeah, well, don't do that. Address your concerns by phrasing them in the form of this question. If God is all powerful and all loving, then why does evil exist in the world? Well, now we run into another situation where we have a theory. And for all sorts of reasons, I have the rock solid confidence of Einstein that the theory is correct. The theory is that yes, God is all powerful and all loving. In other words, take the fact that God is all powerful and all loving as a given. It's up to you to recast all those extremely painful and seemingly random experiences that people go through in a way that fits that theory. Like I was saying before, which definitely bears repeating, it can be incredibly hard to do this. There are a great many horrific things that people on this earth can and have experienced, which I have not and which you have not. The pain can become very, very real. The suffering can endure for decades. We do not live in quote unquote the good place here on earth, that's for sure. But that said, one thing that is consistent is that every single one of us eventually dies. Most of us die in less than a hundred years. The official record unsurpassed since 1997 is 122. So no matter how horrific and unimaginable anyone's suffering is, eventually they die and it ends. And then, like I was discussing in episode two, after you die, no more body. So no more physical ailments, that's for sure. And you're quite possibly reunited with others in your life who had died before you, particularly those you were close with. So eventually, no matter how bad it is, it ends. In our lives, we live within an environment with all sorts of different restrictions and challenges at all sorts of so-called vibration levels. We learn and grow from it all, and then eventually it's over. Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of a couple different things. One thing that it reminds me of is a story. Stories have to build around conflicts. If there's no conflict, then there's no compelling central focus to make it interesting. So after it's all over and all the sufferings are done with, when you look back at it, isn't your lifetime going to look quite a bit like a story? Another thing it reminds me of is a game. A game is a playful activity where you operate within certain rules and limitations and you attempt to perform well within that context. I love games myself. Let's take it a step further. Life is like a video game. You often have this rich, well-rendered, three-dimensional world. You have a playable character, you have other characters around you. There are conflicts and opponents, goals to achieve, people to help, and so forth. The graphical detail and the complex environments that modern gaming systems can model and simulate just keep getting better and better. It's very hard not to see how reflective gaming is of real life in many ways. Well, it's usually designed to be more streamlined and more, well, fun than real life is, but the framework is still the same. So if video games don't reflect on what life is really like, then what does? Well, here's how I like to look at it. The very nature of you being in a body in the physical world is like you being the player of a video game. You exist outside of the gaming world. You existed before you started playing it, and you'll exist after you stop. And your spiritual development in life is akin to your overcoming various challenges and hardships within the game. You learn things and improve in various ways from your progress. A lot of what you learn and develop will probably come in handy later on. And when it's over, maybe you'll have some memory or instinct from what you've learned, which you can then apply if you do another one. And why not play a bunch of other times after you finish the first one? So tying a few things together here. We're not in the good place, we're all synchronized, and we're each contributing to this massive patchwork of good and bad things that plays out like an ongoing interactive story or game. So how long does this Earth game keep going anyway? Is it set up to just continue on perpetually, like the ongoing adventures of a comic book character that started over fifty years ago? Or do we eventually all just get tired of all the drama, decide enough is enough, and start acting more earnestly to wrap it all up? Well, one thing I can tell you is that the drama is only increasing over time, not decreasing. Many problems in the world are getting worse and worse, and the world itself is certainly getting more and more complex. When you have a dramatic TV show or movie series, the dramatic plot lines have to build up over time. Each season should be more complex and intense than the last. On Earth here, it's pretty obvious that we like building up our drama over time. We're giving ourselves more and more intense experiences in all sorts of different ways. We're interconnecting with each other more and more, so more people are aware of any given problem out there. Technology continues to move forward, we certainly had huge paradigm shifts with telephones, radios, televisions, personal computers, and the internet, for example. Not only is there a dramatic value in being able to live within so many different conflicts and problems at once, but sometimes you get to pick and choose which dramas you want to delve into. Hundreds of years ago, everyone who lived in the same town probably pretty much thought the same way. But nowadays everyone has so much ability to access so many different ideas, stories, forms of entertainment, news, online social groups, and so forth. We each get to become our own very customized human being. And that's a very beautiful thing. One reason that it's worth living is that no one else has what you have. No one else can create what you can create or contribute in exactly the way you can contribute. We're each one valuable and important part of the greater tapestry, but we're each only here making our positive and negative contributions to that tapestry for a limited amount of time. So now let's talk about the afterlife. I remember at one point I heard, or came to understand, that when you die and go to some sort of afterlife, what you actually perceive there is based on your beliefs. Basically, it's all indeterminate, unsubstantial spiritual stuff. It's all God, if you will. And the matter itself is far more fungible than what we experience here on earth. So it can take any form it wants to. You can see how, after you're done with the drama of earth, an all powerful, all living God would make heaven look like whatever you would feel most comfortable with. Ever notice how when people have those experiences when they die and come back to tell us about it, none of them ever says, By the way, I was a member of the wrong faith, so I'm converting to this other one now. So yeah, if you believe in Jesus, it appears as Jesus. If you believe in Buddha, it appears as Buddha. I suppose Saint Peter and the Proligates appear for a lot of people as well. For many, the ground pie looks like clouds. Once you're outside the whole realm of physicality, this whole concept of separate identities is a lot less definitive. It's like ice, water, and water vapor. Pick whatever form you want, it's the same thing. What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't a situation where everyone who's a member of some other faith is seeing illusions and what you're seeing heaven is the reality because your faith is the correct one. No, what I'm saying is that there are no absolute specifics there. If you really want specifics, God will humor you with them, sure. But you're not going to find yourself in a situation where you'll be able to get all smug about how you knew you were right all along and screw all those heathens who were wrong. If you're hoping for that, well, sorry to burst your bubble, I guess. Anyway, let's talk about the one thing you'll experience in the afterlife that is going to have some specifics to it. You. Your life experience isn't going to just immediately become irrelevant. You've been working on something after all. You've been growing, maturing, learning for at least one whole lifetime's worth. So let's generalize and simplify this. As I see it, there are two basic states that you could be in when you die. One is what you'd expect just about everyone to be in, that you lived your life with various acts of goodness and various acts of badness, and like Black Widow and the Marvel movies, there's still some red in your ledger. At least a little bit. Maybe not as much as she had. In other words, some of the drama that you experience on Earth is still real to you, and you may still be addicted to it. Sure, your new Hemley environment is much more fungible than you're used to. You're at a much higher vibration level than anyone playing around with the secret on Earth is. But that can be really jarring and scary. Maybe you're rather comfortable with all your scars, physical and emotional both, since they're still part of your identity to you. Maybe there's a lot of fear, guilt, shame, and whatever else still glopped all over you. Well, Catholics like to believe that you can burn all that off in purgatory. Buddhists believe you are reincarnated instead, and you move up or down the case system or animal hierarchy according to where you need to be next. Maybe purgatory and reincarnation aren't really as different as they seem to be at first glance, though. It seems like it'd be a lot easier to burn off your sins in a physical world with some long term consequences than in a little simulator where you can be completely aware of it the whole time, right? Hey, did you ever hear about those little kids who tell their parents stories about how their plane got shot down in World War II and they died? Sounds like there's something to that whole idea of coming back to Earth again. You know, we we check the thermometer, you need to go back in the oven again. You're not finished cooking yet. Speaking of which, the other state you can be in when you die is that you are done. That can mean that you've atoned for all your sins and received forgiveness. Or it can mean that you've detached from all the dramas of earthly life and progressed beyond them. So the New Age approach has tried to amalgamate the different religions together with the concept of ascended masters. If you're Christian, we're talking about people like Jesus or Mary. If you're Buddhist, we're talking about Buddha, and there are a great many other ascended masters in their canon as well. The Comte Saint Germain is an interesting one for me. He was big on science and spirituality. Alchemy. Basically, these people are completely done cooking and they're past all the melodrama of Earth. And now they're in a position to help the rest of us poor souls who are still in the thick of it. Like I was saying before, once you get away from Earth and into that so-called higher vibration realm, physicality becomes less and less of an issue. And once you've ascended, so to speak, separate identity becomes less and less of an issue as well. It's like if your ego self is really just this little ball of fears that you're unwrapping and peeling apart, then the deeper you go, the less it's all about you as in this one little human being, and the more it's about, well, God. Have you ever seen those bumper stickers, I must decrease and Jesus must increase? Basically, the idea is that you're becoming less and less about these finite, petty little things, and becoming more and more about the infinite, universal, and magnanimous. Or here's another way to look at it. God is more you than you are. So part of the point of all this spiritual development is that it's not just about playing around Earth for a number of decades and then worrying about it after you're dead. The idea is that Earth, with all its faults, is the perfect place for us to learn lessons and spiritually develop. I've already talked about human suffering and how I don't want to come across as cavalier about it, looking at life like it's all just a game. Part of the point of all the suffering is that it can be real to us. It's as real as we feel it is, or perhaps it's as real as we make it become. As I talked about in the second episode, we know that we're spirits that inhabit these physical bodies temporarily, and that those physical bodies are very important to tie us to Earth where we can coexist and communicate with other living people. But there's another very different part of our lives too. We sleep, and while we're sleeping, we dream. It's very interesting to compare awaking life with dreams. I'm very big on rational thinking in my waking life, but one thing that becomes rather obvious to me in dreams is that the rational thinking is much less available there. It's almost impossible to do anything with numbers or written words in a dream, for example. The environment is a lot more fungible too. Sound familiar? Maybe dreams help keep us from getting too detached from a more heavenlike environment. Anyway, on a personal note, if that somehow means that I'm not going to be able to read or crunch numbers in heaven, then I'm all the more inclined to make good use of those abilities while I'm alive and awake. I'm just joking around. Or am I? Well might as well make good use of all that rational thinking capability while we're still here, regardless. On that note, as we start to get into the conclusion here, let's get back to the stuff that's more directly relevant for our regular waking lives on Earth. It's easy to look at the world like those atheists from the last episode did. Maybe they're a doubt because you can't quote unquote prove there's a god, or maybe something I said about the afterlife and all that rubbed you the wrong way. Well, that's okay. Remember, I'm just the judge making the initial ruling here. You're the appeals court judge. You're the one who has to evaluate everything in my ruling, and then you get to make a second ruling yourself. But don't just believe and close yourself off to everything you can't definitively prove. In math you always have zero equals zero. You can trust that even when you don't have proof of anything else. But that's the null set, the case of nothingness, and it's extremely unfulfilling to believe in nothing at all. See what rings true to you, to your own logic and to what just feels right to you. Because sometimes faith will get you to where the scientific method never could. Not only is there beauty in believing in something, but there's also beauty in having a sense of purpose to one's life. And the idea of that sense of purpose is to make things better for other people. Are you on a mission? Do you feel like you have some overarching thing in your life that you're supposed to be working on? You should. And I humbly hope that what all I'm saying here is doing at least one small part to help you get back on track with that. So yes, hopefully we're all finding our sense of purpose and using our own particular experiences and talents to do our parts to make the world better. I think everyone has potential to help, but we still have quite a few people willfully causing problems. So if you can help bring injustices to light, do it. If you can find a better way to articulate an important point than anyone else has so far, articulate it. If you can take the time to understand where those you disagree with are coming from and truly listen to them, then do it. Maybe you'll learn something, maybe they will, or maybe you both will. Sometimes even a simple act of kindness to just one other person ripples out into the rest of the world to a degree you'd never expect. Everything you do affects everyone else. If you ever find yourself doubting how much of an impact a single person can make on the world, remember that one guy in the fall of twenty nineteen who was dining at a wet market in Wuhan, China and said, I'll have my bat medium rare. Okay, that's probably not quite historically accurate, but the point still stands. Anyway, yeah, COVID nineteen is just one of many really big dramatic things in our lives. Maybe at some deep level we're addicted to the increasing drama. It's like when people aren't happy unless they're angry. But part of me wonders if there's some sort of limit to how far all this drama can go. We saw the Arab Spring in the Middle East about a decade ago. We see lots of protesting in Russia, even when the penalty is great and the state media is replaced with propaganda. It's harder and harder to keep people suppressed and uninformed to control all the information they have access to. And even if things change with all these dictatorships and theocracies where they treat various groups of people as inferiors, we still have this whole climate change issue in the background that appears to be making the earth harder and harder to inhabit. We all have finite lives on this earth. There's a value in the opportunity to care and be of service, even if all you're doing is helping one person have a better quality of life experience in their waning days. And then of course we have the abortion issue where you're weighing the potential mother's livelihood or even their life against the potentially insold fetus. How much should we value bringing as many lives as possible into this world when in so many cases we don't have the mechanisms in place to help those people realize a truly positive potential? Sometimes it seems like every teenage boy with certain types of mental health issues and access to guns ends up going on a school shooting spree and cutting short the lives of many other people whose lives had so much potential for so much good. Though we should certainly increase funding for helping people with mental health issues, we also have to remember the great deal of capacity for harm any individual can cause if we aren't able to invest in them to help them become the best versions of themselves. Well, if it makes you feel better, here and there you can try writing it all off as a game. I mean, it's true that we're all in a temporary setting playing by specific rules, at least. Maybe what we really need to do is do what we can to help, but in the meantime, try not to get too attached to anything too earthly. Well, believe it or not, we've now reached that titular point that we've been working our way to for this whole series. It's not about the few words I say here at the very end, as much as it is about the context and perspective of everything from before that gives it all meaning. Fundamentally speaking, all synchronized together, we have free will. And that free will gives us en masse the freedom to operate in fear, but it also gives us the freedom to operate in love, and there's a reason to operate in love. Well, love, what is it anyway? Love means doing something for somebody else for their sake, not for yours. Love is selfless giving. It's putting effort into something that reaches out into that unknown void of stuff that's not you yourself and betters it. You have your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul. It's easy to see value in fighting for that, in advocating for the self, but there's most certainly something more fulfilling about doing things for the other rather than just for yourself. There's nothing better to do. No, I mean there's literally nothing better to do. That's the point. Ruling complete. Now the case moves on to you in your appeals court, and each of you are making your own rulings on this with every good or bad thing you do for the rest of your lives, whether you like it or not. So make it a wise ruling and make it a loving one too. Court adjourned. See you another time in another podcast. I'm out.