The Map Is Not the Road

 Most of us spend our spiritual lives in the hearing and understanding phase — and never quite cross into direct experience. In this episode, Jacob opens in real time, frustrated after seven false starts, becoming the thesis of the episode before he even names it. From sitting on a cushion at 6:30am to waddling through a grocery store in compromised underwear, this is what direct experience actually looks like. Why belief won't keep you warm on a cold night. Why 100% of your thoughts are outside your control. Why the dreamer is not separate from the dream. Closes with a wisdom reading from Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation. 

Transcript

The Seventh Attempt

Hearing, Understanding, Experiencing

Faith vs. Belief

The Thought Identification Trap

The Dreamer and the Dream

Lean Toward the Good

Closing / Thomas Merton

Jacob 0:01

When you dream at night, you have a dream. Let's say somebody's in your dream and they're either a good person or bad person. In your dream, you don't identify with the other person in your dream, do you? They're scary. You're running from them. Holy shit, I had a dream about you last night. You were chasing me with an axe. It was terrifying. Wait a minute. That person chasing you with the axe in your dream? That was actually you, wasn't it? Well, yeah, I guess so. It was my dream, after all. Yeah. So in the dream, you were yourself? You were the other person? You were the environment. You were the room that you were inhabiting. You were the space between you and the other person. You were everything of the dream, weren't you? The whole thing top to bottom. But in the dream, you only felt like the person being chased. Now you see that right there, that is where the Zen tradition and the Advaita Vedanta tradition from Hinduism just merge. Because the experiencer and the experience are not two things. We're rolling. There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. That was Morpheus speaking to Neo in the Matrix film. In that film, he understood that he was inside of a computer simulation and that as long as he had confidence, he could jump from a building to another building. No problem. He tries and he fails. And therein lies the difference between knowing and walking in a sci-fi action film. But that quote, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Well, that is good advice, and that applies to us in real life. My name is Jacob, and I'm the host of Standing Nowhere, and I am pleased to be back with you. But if I'm really honest, I'm frustrated right now. I didn't know how to start this episode. And hand to God, this is I think my seventh time restarting this episode. Seven times. So what is the difference between knowing the path and walking the path? Well, knowing would be I love podcasting, I love recording, I love doing a podcast. But walking the path in this exact moment isn't easy. And I would call it frustrating. I've started this episode over seven times, three to four minutes on average each time. This recording right now may not ever see the light of day. I am talking into a microphone by myself in my bedroom, and this may never see the light of day. So imagine how frustrating it can be when you can't find the words, and yet the thing you love and you know and you understand that you love to do is podcast, but you can't find the words. So what is the experience right now? Well, the experience is frustration. That's reality. And yet here I am. I'm recording and I'm trying to find the words. Or let them flow out of me, if you will. It's like when you're taking a dump, right? If you try to push really hard, it just doesn't get anywhere. But if you relax, suddenly things start to flow. And if that's too vile of an example for you, I apologize. I do not mean to offend you, but sometimes humorous analogies can loosen us up a little bit to let things sink in, right? So why do I bring this up? Well, there's a big difference between hearing, understanding, and experiencing. Most of the time in life, we hear a lot from religious people about God. And we hear a lot of religious people talk about Krishna, and a lot of religious people talk about meditation if you're a Buddhist. Take your pick. There's a big problem with spirituality. You see, it's always pointing at the moon. It's always pointing to the moment, right? The indescribable, the unknowable. It's pointing to it, and it uses wonderful words, wonderful stories. Check this thing out. It's great. It's full of love. It's all you need. You can trust it. But ask someone to draw you a picture of it. Good luck. It's the tooth that can't bite itself, or the finger that it can't touch itself. It's the eye that can't see itself. And here I am starting a podcast about something that can't be put into words. So imagine my frustration, right? And what's the difference when it comes to spiritual traditions? Well, we we go to church or wherever you go or whatever you do to learn about your tradition, watch a YouTube video, listen to a podcast, read a book, and you conceptually understand it. The concepts are there and you understand them. But then when it comes to experience, that's a whole nother animal. Whole different animal. Just hearing about meditation can conjure up all sorts of different understandings for different people. If I describe my ZaZen practice to you, where I sit on a cushion in the morning and I let my thumbs rest together and I focus on my breath and my posture. Some people will think of a very Zen-like scenario, peace, and all that jazz, right? Whatever comes to mind when you think of meditation. Maybe a pompous asshole who thinks he's one-upping people because he meditates, right? Whatever. But what's the reality? What's the reality of it? What's the reality of hearing that the universe is all one and the more you practice being present, the more, you know, whatever, fill in the blank, right? But what's the actual experience? Well, for me, I roll out of bed at 6:30 in the morning. I drop a pretty considerably large deuce. Pardon my um disgusting uh revelation for you there. And then I grab my meditation cushion and I sit for 30 minutes. And when I sit, it is not unicorns and rainbows. Sometimes it's like a little bit of back pain. Sometimes it's a little bit of knee pain. Sometimes it's an overwhelming feeling that I don't want to sit today. I don't want to sit. I gotta get to work. And work. Here we are again, same old everyday thing over and over and over again. That is the experience. What is the practice though? The practice is being with those experiences exactly as they are in 4K detail. You see? Here's a little circle again. I'm talking to you, you're hearing me, you're understanding me conceptually, right? But tomorrow morning, I'm gonna sit on that cushion and I'm gonna experience all those things. Maybe while I'm sitting, I smell a little bit of body odor or something. Oh my gosh, time to take a shower. Oh my gosh, did I pay that bill? Oh my gosh, is this doing anything? That is the experience sometimes. On other days, my posture feels perfect. There is no pain whatsoever. I feel like I am floating, literally floating. That is another experience. And I notice that, and I come back to my breath. Happy brain, sad brain, confused brain, frustrated brain. The practice, the experience is being with what is. Now it's not glamorous for me to talk about those things, but that's the experience. And then what is the experience off the cushion? Taking a shower, seeing myself in the mirror, observing thoughts of self-judgment or self-aggrandizement. Oh, you look good today. Oh, you look terrible today. Whatever. That's the experience at that moment. Just off the cushion, back in motion, in the shower, on the road. My car, it's 207,000 miles on it. There's a thick coat of dust on the dashboard. The clutch is still going strong, but it's not as strong as when I first bought it, of course. It's showing signs of age. Creaks, cracks, clinks, clanks. That's the experience. That's the texture of life. My seat, my driver's seat, it's come off the rail on the right side. So my whole seat sits slightly angled up on the right side. So I have to lean to the right to get my seat to stay flat. Can I be with that experience? Just with that experience and nothing else. You see what I'm getting at here? There's hearing, there's understanding, and there's experience. In mysticism, we emphasize experience. But there's something curious that happens to you when you actively pursue experience and bringing your full awareness and your full being to whatever you're experiencing, regardless of if your brain labels them as good or bad. I've started this episode seven. This is my eighth attempt to do this episode. You bet your butt, my brain is thinking bad, frustrated. Pause, delete, stand up, walk around. That's an experience. Now when I when I open up the the book of the way, the Tao De Qing by Lao Tzu, and I read beautiful words that he wrote 2,500 years ago, that's amazing. I can recite some by memory. Let's see here. Every day in the pursuit of knowledge, something is added. Every day in the pursuit of the Tao, everything or something is dropped. I don't remember the rest. You get the point. It's beautiful. And then I close the book and I get in my car with 207,000 miles on it while I am doing delivery apps full time to support a family, knowing that my car could break down at any time, and I would be completely and utterly fucked. Do you see the gap between understanding concepts and experience? The difference between me and someone who doesn't practice is that my experiences do not overwhelm me anymore. I embrace them and I hold them fully in awareness as often as I can. I am not a fully realized being like the Buddha or Jesus walking around with complete awareness at all times. Of course not. I fail constantly. That is why it's called a practice. But it's important to understand that when you are either at church hearing your pastor tell you to love everyone and do better, and then you go to work, and your coworker Bob, who is just the worst kind of asshole you've ever seen in your life and just does unbelievable things to you to go out of their way to make your life miserable. It's a little different to love that person in that moment, as opposed to when you were in church and you got the guy on the keyboard in the background playing all those chords that make you feel good. There's a big difference. And it doesn't matter what tradition. I'm not here to bash on one in particular. And words, we give them meaning. Words change in their meaning throughout time and history, right? See, today, when you read the Bible, anytime you see faith, at least the New Testament, faith or belief or trust, all three of those words can be derived from whatever word is in written. I don't have the exact word memorized that's written in Greek, but that word can be translated into faith, belief, or trust. And all three of those words are a little bit different in English in 2026 in today. You see, belief today, that strikes to mind more of a really intense hoping or wishing that something is true. And I'm not here to say this is what belief means, but you know, generally speaking, when someone says, I believe in X, what we hear is, well, I really, really think that this is true, or I really hope it's true. Oh if it's not true, I don't know what I'm gonna do. You know, it's something that you can argue. It's a prop it's propositional, it's fragile, and it won't keep you warm at night on a cold night. Belief is what Alan Watts says is a fervent wishing that something were true. And faith gets lumped in with that, which is where I'm trying to like claw the word faith back from going down with the ship with belief. Faith is more akin to trust, that other that third possible word. A trust, an openness, not a faith or a trust in a certain concept, but trust in whatever arises. Essentially, you're saying to yourself, I don't know, but I trust it. I don't know how this universe exists. It's weird, right? It's weird that there's anything at all versus nothing at all. Have you ever thought about that? Why is there anything versus nothing? Why is there anything at all? It's a mystery. Take take Nathan, a Zen monk who I've quoted many times in this podcast, who's a wonderful human being. He was in exile. Imagine being exiled. We hear that, we go, whoa. But imagine it. You go to work every day, you do your thing every day, and then one day you're exiled. Imagine the government knocking on your door. You're exiled. Don't come back. Well, that might shake your belief a little bit. There's a quote that says, the mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. I think one of the biggest problems that I've noticed in my practice is identifying with thoughts. And I've spoken about this before. If you observe in awareness, if you observe your mind in awareness, you will see that thoughts arise of themselves. I've talked about this before. Many of you who listen to this podcast understand this. Many of you who have never heard this podcast, I'm sure you've heard this concept. Thoughts arise by themselves. You don't think them. But most people, they never think this through. Like when I tell you that right now, there's going to be people who listen and say, that's true, that's true. There are some that I do think, though, or there's some that I shouldn't think. You know, you don't think any thoughts. Okay? And this is really important. Thoughts arise by themselves. You are not your thought. You are not doing your thoughts. They're just happening to you. The problem is you identify with your thoughts. And the ego is really slippery because our language that we've been taught since birth creates this illusion, illusory effect. For example, we always try to put a noun into things, right? Like when we say it is raining, what is the it that is raining? Or when we say I am angry versus observing anger arise. Did you ever notice that? That you are the one observing everything? It's like if I if I say, look at your hand right now, is your hand you? Well, no, because I can cut my hand off and I'm still me, right? Yeah. But you'll notice that you could go limb by limb removing limbs from your body and you'd still be you. So you know you're not your arms or your legs. And if we skip to the end, you can remove everything from your material body and you'd still be you. Which means you're not anything material. You are not your thoughts either, because your thought is something that is being witnessed. Like if I say think of the word elephant right now. Okay, we all heard elephant in our head, right? But you're watching that when you hear elephant in your head, you're watching that thought. You see what I'm saying? You stand behind the thought. When you feel pain, you're watching the pain. It's the same you, it's the same awareness as when you were an infant, as you were a five year old, as a twenty year old, as a forty year old. That awareness. Never changes. Ever. It is static. It is always there and it's always in the background. It's very peaceful. Notice the words that I'm saying to you that you're hearing right now are inside the same awareness that your thoughts are. So every thought that I'm articulating to you is just as much you as your own thoughts are. Is this making sense? I hope it is. I I really hope it is. But even then, you're still in the understanding phase. When you practice actively with interest and and um energy, when you start really getting interested in it in watching, you will rest in that awareness. But you're gonna start to notice a tug of war. When you stop identifying with tr with thoughts, they're really gonna try to bring you back in and get you to identify with them again. Well, if I just rest in awareness, oh my gosh, well then my life will fall apart. I've gotta think, I've gotta do something. Do you see? We just established earlier that your thoughts do themselves. And already we're identifying with them by saying, Well, I can't not think, I've got to keep thinking, I've got to keep planning, I don't want to be a pacifist. Do you see the identification trap? It's real easy to miss. If some of you right now are saying, I don't understand what you're saying, that's okay. Let me try it another way. If you're having the thought or can of a confusing thought right now saying, I don't understand what he's saying, that thought appeared by itself. Slow down. Look at this, understand this, really understand this, because then you'll move to experience every single thought it does itself. You have just as much control over your thoughts as you do the weather. If you think I'm wrong, please experiment for yourself. There's a couple experiments you can do. The first experiment, you can set a timer on your phone, say sixty seconds, and watch the timer tick down and say to yourself, I will not think a single thought for 60 seconds. You don't even have to do that experiment because you and I both know you won't make it two seconds. Try to make it, try to make it three seconds without thinking. And you'll start to notice that it's just something that happens. And you'll catch yourself. Notice when you're completely lost in thoughts. And see, the only quote unquote lost part of it is identifying with it. It's really hard to articulate this stuff, which is why some teachers are famous because they're just so good at articulating this stuff. Um, like Lao Tzu, you know, when he wrote the Tao De Ching 2,500 years ago, the very first thing he said is that the Tao that can be named or explained is not the Tao. Because understand this a concept is like a still frame, it's like a picture of the present moment that, of course, is instantly the past because the present is eternal and it's always now, and you can't ever catch it with a net, you can't ever um preserve it. It's always changing. There is constantly something new arising in the present moment, and there's constantly something fading away from the present moment. So if we take a snapshot of the present moment, it's like collecting dead butterflies. But real life is the laboratory where you can experiment and experience this for yourself. This is where mysticism lives. It's not in doctrines, it's in the sit, it's in the walk, it's in what you're doing. And a flip happens when you take an active interest in sitting and practicing on a consistent basis, you will start to notice an inversion of your identification. You will start to see that thoughts are not you. Emotions are not you, but you are that awareness containing them. The thoughts, the emotions, the everyday activities of life, they will still continue as they always have and as they always will. But a massive cataclysmic shift has taken place here. Suddenly, you're not the thought. You're not the little you that you thought you were. You're the big awareness that you always were that you forgot about. Now right now, some people hearing that will go two directions. Some will nod their heads saying, Yep, yep, that's right, absolutely. And some will say, Well, that sounds like bullshit to me. But those people haven't taken the time to realize that the bullshit thought just appeared on its own just now. You see? It snuck in real quick, didn't it? Did you notice it? The more you start noticing the thoughts automatically doing themselves, the more you realize, holy crap, I'm not doing anything on those thoughts. They're just happening. And then you'll start to realize that the motivation to move your body, even as simple as scratching an itch, first begins with a thought, a thought of volition, which is to say, a thought of desire to move my limb to do something. Watch your body sometimes, just for fun, and see if you notice anything interesting. Like right now, I'm recording this episode and I have two of my nails interlocked as like I guess you could call it a nervous habit. But did I choose with willpower to do that? Or did it just start happening on its own? Have you ever seen someone tap their their leg repeatedly and quickly, and then you notice it and you point it out to them? Hey, your leg's tapping. Whoa. If I have free will and I didn't choose to tap my leg nervously, what the hell? You see? Now this is where some people who are really identified with thoughts in their body will have more thoughts that say, Well, some thoughts you can't control, but some you can. That's another thought. And it's bullshit, by the way. 100% of thoughts are outside of your control. Not ninety-nine percent, not ninety-five percent, not fifty percent. One hundred percent of thoughts are outside of your control. Now here's another way I can flip it again, so I can keep you confused. I've said you're not your hand, you're not your limbs, you're not your thoughts, you're not anything material, right? But at the same time, you are. I'm not gonna sit here and create a duality in your mind, because that's another concept. If I say you are the empty awareness, you're not the thing that you are aware of, that creates a duality. You're over here, invisible, undefinable, eternal awareness, and over there is nasty material stuff that arises and ends and stinks and hurts, and it's itchy and frustrating, or it's addictive and pleasant and pleasurable and um consuming, and it's either good or bad, and I hate it, and I'm just this pleasant awareness over here. Well, I hate to tell you, but in the realm of spiritual conceptualizing, you are actually also everything that you see. Like I said earlier, the things that I'm saying to you and articulating to you right now, you have just as much control over as the thoughts you have in response to the things I'm saying to you. So, right now, my articulated thought and your response to my articulated thought are both equally something that you are observing and have control over. So, what does that tell you about you? Are you catching on to that? There's an old Buddhist quote. It says, Um, I'm doing it by memory here because I don't have it in my outline, but it just popped in my head. It says, um, we live in the illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are no thing. And being no thing, you are everything. Boy, I can slip into um philosophical territory here, but I'm just pointing out things that you can independently verify right now. That's the my goal on this podcast is to share things with you that you can experience for yourself. I don't want you to take my word for it. Because if you're a fundamentalist Christian and you take my word for it and um you become a mystic, a Christian mystic, well, you've traded one set of concepts for another, unless you appreciate the mystic teachings, like Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Teresa Vavila, and you experience the teachings. And it's so sad because you've got to drop it all. You've got to drop everything. You've got to drop everything that I've said to you in this episode thus far, and just come to whatever your experience is, which is not initially going to be as exciting to your brain. Me quoting wise scripture from Lao Tzu is so cool, and it's so cool to think about, but it ultimately falls far short of whatever experience you are having at exactly this moment. My experience yesterday. I went to the store to buy some soda because I was tired of drinking water. Just water. Saving money, being responsible, being healthy. I want something sweet on my tongue. So I go to the store, I buy some soda. As I'm selecting the soda in the aisle, I've got to let one rip. So I fart. And then I've got another fart lined up right behind it. I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. So I fart again. But at that fart, I didn't feel the bubble at the end of it. And you know what happens when you don't feel the bubble at the end of your fart. When you're in your 40s, you can't trust the fart anymore. So I waddled my way to the bathroom really quickly. After that failed second fart, it felt like something was gonna leak. Something was coming loose. So I'm waddling my way to the bathroom. I had to use the bathroom for like 10-15 minutes, kept my wife waiting, finally made it out. But I didn't make it to the bathroom, truth be told. There was a little bit of uh biological matter that escaped the uh musculature of my structure. Let's just say that. Okay. Hope you're not eating while you're listening to this podcast. Now, some of you might be laughing, some of you might be grossed out right now, but I assure you, whatever you're experiencing is exactly the desired effect that I had bringing this up. And that's because that was my experience yesterday. Now, was I fighting the experience? Well, certainly there was some tension, right? Literally, keeping the gap closed, try to try to make it to the bathroom. Was I present during that experience? I was actually. I've been practicing three years now, so weird oddity moments like that I use as little cues or identifiers to come back to presence. So I'm mindfully walking back to the bathroom, waddling. And then the experience of leaving the bathroom, and it's like, I've got to, you know, get home, shower, burn my clothes? Have you ever put on underwear that is compromised? It doesn't feel good. It's cold and it's it doesn't feel good. And what is that feeling inside when something gross touches you? Don't put it into words. What's that experience like? You see, I just described an incredibly humiliating and disgusting and gross experience. But it's a human experience. Did I identify with it the whole way? See, the ego can flip the script and say, Well, I'm awareness. I'm not actually shitty underwear, I'm just awareness, holding the shitty underwear in awareness. I'm good. But you see, that's called spiritual bypassing. That's where the ego dresses itself up as awareness and says, This is me. This is me. I'm not that thing. That's also escapism. When the point I'm trying to make here is when you come keep coming back to the experience, it's almost like you have, like, I can describe it when I sit in meditation and I am very successful at focusing on my breath. Because in a meditation, we practice concentration, which is just like the word suggests, you're concentrating something into a single point instead of having it spread out. Now, concentration is not the same thing as meditation, and concentration is not the same thing as mindfulness. But concentration is a tool in the toolkit that helps us along because it reduces and calms the monkey mind down. I used an analogy on the last episode, it calms the lake. So there's no more splashing. So you can see the reflection of the moon in the lake. And me describing this to you right now, it might ring a bell of truth in you, but until you've experienced it, there's no words that I can say to you right now that will come close to the experience of you staying with an object long enough for your mind to calm down, for you to actually experience your true nature. Many people, when they first start meditating and experiencing this, they they laugh. They just can't stop laughing, or they just feel so good. And there's a reason behind that. But then the ego will come in and say, Oh, this is what meditation is. It's feeling good, feeling calm, yes. But then you have a meditation where you're not calm or feeling good, and you think the whole thing's done. But here I am, three years experienced meditator, walking home in shitty underwear, completely with it. Not fighting it, just laughing about it. Because that's my present experience at that moment. It is becoming interested in the moment. Now, when you when I say to you that you are not your hand and you are just as much your thought as you are my words coming at you right now, you might say to yourself, well, that that just sounds really stupid. How is that possible? Let me ask you this. When you dream at night, you have a dream. Let's say somebody's in your dream and they're either a good person or bad person. In your dream, you don't identify with the other person in your dream, do you? They're scary. You're running from them. Holy shit, I had a dream about you last night. You were chasing me with an axe. It was terrifying. Wait a minute. That person chasing you with the axe in your dream? That was actually you, wasn't it? Well, yeah, I guess so. It was my dream, after all. Yeah. So in the dream, you were yourself, you were the other person, you were the environment, you were the room that you were inhabiting, you were the space between you and the other person. You were everything of the dream, weren't you? The whole thing top to bottom. But in the dream, you only felt like the person being chased. Now you see that right there, that is where the Zen tradition and the Advaita Vedanta tradition from Hinduism just merge. Because the experiencer and the experience are not two things. But if you don't practice what I'm telling you, and try practice, just try it. You'll never experience it. And once you experience it, there's no doubt in your mind. This is why the Buddha said doubt is a good thing. Because, well, it can be a good thing. If if you use doubt as motivation to investigate. You will see for yourself. But if you're a person who says meditation is bullshit, enlightenment is bullshit, heaven is bullshit, hell is bullshit, God is bullshit, everything is bullshit, this whole thing sucks. When I die, it's a black box forever, the end, goodbye. That's a thought. And that thought is the prevailing thought of 2026. And it has been for about 200 years now. And I won't digress into why, church, but a lot of people think this way. It's called nihilism. I won't say it's called atheism, but the general accepted, agreed upon conceptual model of the universe is that everything is random. That I am little old me, and the universe is so big and huge. I'm just a little dot. I'm going to die someday, and none of it matters. Or worse, you get some people that say, well, you just got to make your own meaning of life, and uh that's just how it is, and then you're dead. You know? But understand, you are not separate from the whole thing. You are the whole thing. Uh there's a quote from Meister Eckhart. He was a Christian mystic from I get the date wrong so often. I think it's 400 years ago. Four or five hundred years ago. Four or five hundred years ago, okay, half a millennia ago, this man wrote the following words. The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. Do you see what he's saying here? He's saying that there is one eye, one awareness. There is one seeing, there's one knowing, one love. He's saying that the knowing that is saying these words to you, and the knowing that is hearing these words is the same knowing. Read through the New Testament. Read the words of Jesus. Even if you hate modern churches because they're so easy to hate, because a lot of them represent everything that's just nasty in the world, and there's a lot of good ones, but read the New Testament where Jesus says I and the Father are one, or where he prays over his disciples. May they be completely one in us. But no matter if you think the universe is random and cold and unfeeling, and that you are separate from it, or if you think that you are one with it, both of those are thoughts. Both of those are in awareness. The difference is, do you identify with the thought? And this is where this is where I stand. Because this podcast is called Standing Nowhere. I'm not standing on any concept whatsoever, except the present moment. It's better to stand on the firm ground of nothingness than the quick stand of somethingness, right? But here's the thing. I will not stand on any concept. I will always choose experience and I will always trust it. But if you are going to talk about the universe, there's two types of people. There's those who say that the universe is hostile and separate and other, and there's some who say it's alive and caring and loving. Neither of them can be proven objectively. Both are a choice of orientation. I say hold all beliefs loosely, use them as pointers. But why talk the universe down? You know? Whether you think the universe is random or love and that it's all one? Why uh you know why why put it down? Why not lean towards the one that says, hooray, what a great show. There's something to this, you know? It's real easy for the um the collective ego, the collective mindset of people, especially in a materialist consumerist age like we are, to get down on their luck and down on their on themselves and think that this is just a mess. William James says, be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. So if you are going to have some beliefs or hold some concepts, why not pick the one that is an upper, you know? You are the universe. Whether you believe it's random as AF or uh, you know, actually love and it's all one. It's it's like I it's just it doesn't make sense to me how you can be the universe and and and speak ill of it. Why do that? That it's a mindset that I've never understood. It's it's not toxic positivity and it's not being naive, it's faith. It's trust. You came out of this mystery. You are this mystery. Jesus even said in the Bible, is it not written in your law that you are Elohim? That is the word he used. Elohim of divine nature. There's another quote in the Matrix that I love. Um The Oracle, she says to Neo, you didn't come here to make the choice. You have already made it. You're here to understand why. Now, some of you might be asking, and rightfully so, okay, Jake, you're saying that I'm God or I'm the universe and I'm I'm love and I'm everything. So why? Why would I do this to myself? Why would I split myself into a million different pieces and willfully forget who I am and what I am? Why would I put myself through this torturous nightmare? Why would I do that? There's the question. We're going to answer that question next week. You have a good night. No, I'm just joking. My best attempt at answering that question is well, for one, it's happening, which means it's our nature. It's our nature too. But for me, that for my mind, that doesn't really do it justice, right? So I ask myself to look closer. And I look close and close and close. And what do I see? I look at people that are the least polluted by concepts and ideas. These people are called children. Children come unpackaged with concepts. They come into this world concept-free, pure loving awareness. You ever notice when you see a child and they just look at you with no thoughts, concepts, or judgments, just pure honesty and truth, it makes you smile, doesn't it? Because they're present. They don't know how to be anything but present. Children are like little Buddhas. Even Jesus said, unless you convert and become as a child again, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Which, the kingdom of heaven, he said, by the way, is here now. It is not in the future to be perceived with signs. It's already here. So in the Christian tradition, according to Jesus Christ, heaven is here. And if you look at the world through a child's eyes, you will see it. And back to my point as to why, why would God do this? Again, I look at children and I see playfulness. I see fun. Children like to play and have fun. If you were God, you would be bored. Good Lord, can you imagine being God? Anything you want can happen at any time, and you're the only one that there is. There's no one else but you. You're God. You can do anything. How boring. It's like I remember as a kid, um, we had this thing called the game genie. We could cheat at video games, but cheating at video games, it's no fun, is it? Why does the fun go out of the game when there's no challenge anymore? You see? My last episode in a morata, I talked about how we fall in love with our suffering and our misery. And it's true. So this is nature. This is our nature. Not that we love suffering, but you might say that we enjoy the challenge. Because if you were God, there's nothing to do. Everything obeys your every command. So you would want more than anything to forget yourself, wouldn't you? And you'd go through all sorts of horrors. For those of you familiar with the Hindu tradition, this is exactly the cosmological, um, I guess you would say the cosmology of the Hindu tradition. God, their word for God is Brahman. Brahman is the ultimate reality. It encompasses everything, it is everything, and it is inconceivable, the para Brahman. And Brahman enjoys dreaming, falling asleep and dreaming a dream. And it's just one conceptual way of understanding the mystery. And even that has to be abandoned for the present moment. Whether it's being uncomfortable on a cushion in the morning and not wanting to do it, observing the not wanting to do it, or whether it's your boss yelling at you and you remember in that moment to come back to the moment, to be present, or shitting your pants in a grocery store. Life has many experiences. Some of them are funny and humorous, like a fart that went too far, and some of them are truly horrifying. And all of them are in this dream, you could call it, of life. The goal is to practice coming back to whatever is and trusting it. Trusting it. Not defaulting to the doomer mindset that it's all random and cold, and I'm just little old me separate from the whole thing. You can break out of that if you truly are ready. And the way you can do it is by practicing awareness. There's many ways to do it. It doesn't have to be sitting on a cushion. You can practice karma yoga on the go. There's so many ways, different forms of practice, different traditions that have popped up throughout millennia. The Buddhists, the Taoists, the Eastern Orthodox Christians. There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Well, I've talked your ear off long enough today, and it has been a pleasure, and I will close this episode out with a wisdom reading from Thomas Merton, who was a Christian mystic. Someone who emphasized the present experience. Listen to his words. This is from his book, New Seeds of Contemplation. He says, To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must, in a certain sense, die. But this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being. Every form of intuition and experience die to be born again on a higher level of life.