Chris Niebauer

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chris Naibauer, PhD in cognitive neuropsychology from the University of Toledo, where he specialized

in left and right brain differences. Chris has conducted research on consciousness, handedness, beliefs, and the sense of self and is currently the Associate Professor of cognitive Psychology at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. When he's not teaching, Chris likes to play guitar, spend time with his family, and work on new books. His current book is The Neurotics Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment, How the Left Brain plays unending games of self improvement. If you value the content we put

out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five percent of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you Feed dot net

slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Chris Nibauer. Hi, Chris, welcome to the show. Great to be here. I'm excited to have you on. I read the title of your book and I immediately asked you to come on the show without even reading it, which is always kind of a risk because the title is so great and the book lived up to the title, so the title of your book is called the Neurotics Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment how the

left brain plays unending games of self improvement. So wonderful title. We're going to get into all different parts of that here in a minute, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which

represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. It's a great question. That's a great story. And the reason I like it so much is you

can hit at so many levels. And I've been thinking about this on at least three or four different levels, And so if you don't mind, I'll just kind of go through a couple of these just to kind of explore it and kind of show you how I think the story is really important. Ye, perfectly. So I think we can start off really with a simple level, the psychological level, and I think the story tells us a

couple of things about Freud. Most people are familiar with Sigmad Freud to famous psychologist, and one of his assumptions was that venting is really important. You know, if you build up all this tension and you need to vent. But this idea of feeding the negative, we we know that that really doesn't work. And we should have known this. If you've ever been part of a complaint session at work.

You know, a bunch of people get together and they all, if it's funny, they have a battle for who has the worst day, and in a strange way, you know, whoever winds really loses. And at the end, according to Freud, everyone should walk away feeling wonderful they've vented. But the exact opposite is true, and we know this. They walk away and they feel terrible. And there's two or old reasons behind this. So we can do a little bit

of applied psychology with this. One is cognitive dissonance are you familiar with that idea, yes, absolutely, and uh, cognitive dissonance is one of the simplest, but I think it's one of the most interesting theories in psychology. And it's this idea that your thoughts and behaviors should be consistent and when they're not, we need to make them so. And so here's the problem. You're complaining and you're feeding the negative, and you hear yourself making all these negative statements.

You hear yourself feed feeding the negative, and you come to believe it. That's part of the problem. The second part of the problem is something called confirmation biased and confirmation biases, I think, and I was just finished. It was this finals week and I just finished lecturing on this. Confirmation bias is one of the most powerful human biases. We seek to confirm our suspicions. And the problem with this is so first you feed it, and then you

believe it, and then you seek to confirm it. And so when you feed the negative, it starts a cycle where that becomes your world. I don't know if you're familiar with the author of zeddin Art or Motorcycle Maintenance robber Person, and he just recently passed and and so he's really been on my mind. And I always share this quote with my class because it's one of my favorite quotes in the book. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us, and

we call this handful of sand the world. And what that handful of sand is, to a large extent, depends on this process of feeding it, believing it, and then confirming it. And so you can end up with this really negative handful of stand. Now, I think in an interesting way, those exact same mechanics can work in a positive way. Think about it. You can do the exact same thing for the positive instead of getting into a

complaint session, even if you're faking it a bit. You start with gratitude, and you start with being thankful for what you have in your life. Cognitive businance works in the same way. You start to believe it and then you start to look for confirmation for you end up with a completely different handful stand and it completely depends on which one you feed. I agree. I mean, we've railed on this show about mindless positive thinking. I think

that you know. The way I like to talk about it is that you know, in any given situation there's there's probably something that I like, and there's some things that I don't like, and which do I want to choose to focus on. It's not a matter of avoiding the truth or trying to be unrealistic. It's about, you know, truly, like you said, where am I going to direct my attention?

For me? That's the psychological level, and I like to take it a little bit more metaphysical because one of the most interesting things about our thoughts, because the whole story is about which one you feed, and it really makes it sound like we have choice. Okay, I'll feed this one or I'll feed this one. But one of the interesting mysteries and this drew me into psychology in the first place. Back when I was a teen, I was fascinated by thoughts in themselves and how we don't

always seem to have control over them. Thoughts just happen, and not only good thoughts just happen, but they happen in a way that I think sets up a very mysterious situation for a lot of people. They happen in a way that seems to be in the exact opposite of where we're trying to go. And Alan Watts is very one of my favorite philosophers, and he wold always use this example. You know, for the next five seconds, don't think of the number thirteen. You fail miserably. You know,

we all do. I mean, you can't do it. And so that brings in this question about okay, everyone wants to feed the positive. I mean, if you just ask people, I mean, why wouldn't we? With the self health movement really was an effort to say, listen, we want to feed the positive. And the problem with the self help movement is it's being really criticized now because many people think it is a failed movement. It started in the sixties and seventies and people wanted to be happy, people

wanted to feed the positive. But it didn't work. And so we have to really get back to how thoughts work, the mechanics of thought themselves, how do they work? And if we just wanted to be positive, we would have all been positive since the sixties. I think it brings into another kind of one level deeper where we have to get into why why do my thoughts work like this?

Why is it if I try to go in one direction, they seem to go on the sit And so my insight that I had, And it was very sometime in my twenties, after having lots of anxiety for a long time, years of anxiety, and I could figure out why couldn't just stop thinking of these thoughts? And then it clicked and and it hit in a very profound way that my anxiety was me not wanting to be anxious, that was my anxiety. It was me trying to be calm that resulted in my anxiety. Actually, I found that, I mean,

I'm not the only person who had this insight. In fact, Victor Frankel, the famous existancial psychiatrist during World War Two, he came up with this notion of paradoxical intention. And when I saw that, I started to figure out what is going on with thought and paradoxical intention. I'll tell you.

I'll give you an example. And he talks about a physician and this physician had this terrible problem with his hand sweating and his hands with his sweat, so it was embarrassing, and so he went to Frankle and he said, can he help me out because this is just interfering with my business. And Frankel said, your problem is you're trying not to sweat so I want you to sweat

as much as you can. He shifted the effort and he said, okay, just try as much as you can, and that actually fixed them and cured him, and that, I think is an important thing about how thoughts work. And that's why I came up in my book. I came up with this this law of opposition, which I didn't invent, I didn't discover. It goes back to Victor Frankel all this. Huxley had his own version of it,

the law of opposite effect. But for me, I really wanted to make it kind of a center stage in the book because if you just feed the positive, if it was simple as that, it should work. And why isn't it because people, if you just did a survey, people would say, of course I want to feed the positive, and I think they do. Let me think about it. Take any day and you're going around, you're doing your day to day stuff. How many times a day to people tell you have a good day, you know, being

in a bad mood? In other words, feeding the negative is almost the equivalent of what people thought out of sin in the past. I mean, people feel very guilty, you know, they're like like they feel bad to be in a bad mood. And no one feels worse than this than the spiritual people. People want a spiritual kick. I mean, they feel terrible about it. But this is a very big hint about the nature of thinking and how we have to be careful because thinking doesn't work

the way we think it does. We think, you know, on a surface level, well, I should just have positive thoughts and and it actually does sometimes work for a short time. But the problem is if you take the law of opposition into consideration, the more I try to be positive, the more that can backfire. And we and think about it. You know, you have a interview the next day, and you need to sleep. You're up all night.

You know it's New Year's and you need to stay awake, and you're sleep attend and you're you know, you're confused, because why it feels like we're at odds with ourselves, like we're we're our own worst enemy. And it's not that we're our own worst enemy, it's that the nature of thinking, I believe very strongly works on this law of opposition. And so that tells us a little bit about who we should feed and why we shouldn't be

so worried about occasionally feeding the negative. But I tell people, when you get in the bad mood, go for it, get into it. Own your bad mood, and it'd be really surprised when that happens. When you really own your bad mood, it's a very strange things happen. You're accepting it, and instead of resisting it, which actually intensifies it. Your acceptance makes it a very short ride. Yeah, I agree.

I don't know that I see the law of opposites being in play, you know, kind of all the time, But I do see exactly what you're saying that we're often our own worst enemy. And probably the favorite metaphor on the show, besides the one that opens the show, that I probably use the most often is the idea

of the second arrow in Buddhism. I don't know if you're familiar with with that one, where the Buddha basically says, you know, if you get shot with one arrow, you know it hurts, right, and very says yeah, He's like, but what most of us do is we then take that first arrow and we start shooting more arrows at ourselves, and those arrows are exactly what you said. I feel bad because I'm in a bad mood. You know, I'm anxious.

Because I'm anxious, you know, I fall down and I instead of just recognizing like, oh I just hurt my knee, I'm into I'm clumsy. You know, my bones are probably failing. Like it's all the stories that we we add on. And I think that's exactly what you're kind of getting at with this, is that that if we are trying so hard to force things in a in a positive direction, it's it's going to rebound on us, exactly. And I think the short version is, don't worry if you occasionally

feed the negative. Yeah, you know, don't feel guilty if you get caught up at work drama and you come home and you're in a bad mood. It's human nature and you're stuck there, and you're gonna be even more stuck there if you fight it. One of the things I love about The Parable is that I think it sets this idea that as human we are going to

have both these things going on inside us. And the way The Parable lays it out, it sounds like it's kind of a close fight, right, Like the Good and the Bad Wolf are kind of like, well, they're pretty close, right, and so you feed the good one a little bit more. But I think it normalizes, at least to me. And I think a lot of what we try and do on the show is normalize that being a human is

gonna mean that you're gonna have unpleasant moods. You're gonna have bad feelings no matter how you are trying to be a better person in whatever ways. And we'll talk about that in a minute and your thoughts on that. But that's that's part of being alive. And I think the more we can normalize it and accept it, the far better off we are. There's a lot of metaphysics

behind us. But one of the short phrases I tell people that you pick the life that doesn't seem like a life you would ever pick, and so the two paths have to be pretty close. That's where the adventure comes in. I mean, if one just was overwhelming, if it was just so much superior, there wouldn't be any adventure to life. And by having them close, I think creates an advent, which I think the universe enjoys. I think we live in this universe that wants adventure, mystery.

We want things to be a close call. Hey everybody, Before we get back to the interview, we just want to ask you to go to one you Feed Slash support and make a monthly donation so we can keep this great thing going. It does require an enormous amount of time and effort to deliver the content and quality of the one you Feed podcast on the level we do. We're shooting for what we think is fair and realistic target of just five percent of our listeners supporting the show.

And we want to thank you all for listening and we appreciate you tuning in every week and spending your time with us. So go to one you Feed Slash support and make a monthly donation if you can, and if you cannot, just please keep listening. And here's the rest of the interview with Chris Niveauer. We had a guest on a few weeks ago. He had something in his book that really struck me that says exactly what

you said. He was like, if you gave actors in a movie the ability to write their own screenplay, every movie would be crushing lee boring. Because we all try and avoid anything that is what you just said, that is exciting or you know, we we try and keep things in a certain way, and it's the it's the challenges in the ups and downs and all that that give it its flavor. I just thought it was a very interesting insight, and you just said pretty much the

same thing. So I want to transfer from that into a question about something you say in the book and is another theme that comes up over and over again. So I'm just gonna read what you said here and just ask you to kind of tell us more about it. So you say, we are so good at seeing things in the world that we are no longer aware of processes, actions and verbs. Can you spound on that for me? Metaphysically, the basic idea is that the universe is always becoming

what it isn't. And that's really what the whole theme of my second book is is that consciousness is becoming everything that isn't. And so solids, they seem solid, but they're really empty space. You know, we seem isolated, but we're really connected. And so the idea of things in the universe it's very seductive. I mean, it really feels like we're in a world of material things, but even

business will tell us that it's mostly empty space. And the thing that this is most important with is the ego, the self, the thing that we call you know, who I am. And the self, I think is the most deceptive because it really feels like a solid thing. And it's not only just a solid thing. It's the most important thing. That's the first thing we bring to the surface when we're in a conversation, and it's a thing that when people are honest, they really want the ego

to survive eternity. You know, they wanted to go on. But here's the good and bad news about the ego. The bad news is that it's not a thing at all. It's a verb. It only comes online when we think about it because it's in the process of thinking about it. I mean thinking as a verb. Thinking isn't a thing. And so when you start to think about yourself, that's

when you come online and you do the ego. And sometimes I'll use the word ego as a verb, like, oh, forgive me, I'm egoing right now, and people sort of they don't know what I'm getting at, and they're like, what do you mean? And actually, I didn't come up with us. It's been Other writers have talked about how the nature of the ego is much more like a verb than a noun. So it sounds like it's bad news because we think things are permanent, but actually the

exact opposite is true. Things decay physical world as a time limit. Verbs are eternal. Verbs come and go and and people worry about death, and particularly they worry about the death of the ego. But you die all the time. And sometimes I say that, you know, I worked into electorate, and people really freak out because I'll say, what do you mean I die all the time? Like, well, when you're walking over here, you know, you're walking over in zombie mode. Where were you? You weren't egoing and it

wasn't anywhere. So the ego is just like a song. It has to be sung to come into existence. And the reason people should really embrace that is because verbs are eternal, and verbs have no time stamp on them. If the universe ever wants to sing your song again, there's nothing stopping it from doing it. Yeah, And I think that the idea of of viewing the world, you know,

more in terms of verbs versus nouns or things. So much of what happens in the world and what matters is the interaction between things and verbs tend to sort of signal that there's some sort interaction happening. And I think it's just a very interesting way if we if we try and get into the sense of that light life is kind of flowing in a certain way of verbs. Just it. That made sense to me when you said that, I'm gonna read something else you said related to that,

because I think it touches on this. You talk about something called the interpretive machine, which is another word for what you're sort of talking about with ego and the left side of the brain. We'll get that in a second, but you say, and the most fascinating thing about the interpretive machine that solves puzzles and creates egos is that

it itself is transparent. That is, we cannot directly experience it. Ever, the process that creates all thought cannot itself ever be thought about, and therefore is the eternal stranger we will never meet. Tell me about that. That's a that's a great sentence. But because it seems like I know myself right this idea, like I go, well, I'm Eric, and this is the things about me, and and so help me understand how it's it's transparent and I can never

really directly experience it. One of the main things that the book came out of a lot of research in the sixties and seventies concerning the left brain, and they did series of surgeries where they disconnected the left side from the right side, and what they found is that the left brain, and they found us over forty fifty years of research, is an amazing storyteller. It is an amazing hypothesis generator. It creates ideas about the world. It looks out and tries to figure the world out, and

it's an incredibly useful tool. But the problem is is that it's often wrong. It sees patterns everywhere. It looks so much so that when we look at Mars and we see the you know, the face on Mars, and we say, well, that's a face. We see things all around us. Because it is so good at pattern perception, it no longer can look out and see nothingness. We're

kind of stuck in this. And here's the problem. Imagine having a being with this ultimate pattern perception machine and the left side and all of a sudden it looks inward, and what's it going to find. It's going to find an ego itself. It's and it's going to create it online. But that process of creating the ego online is itself a verb. And the whole problem with this is you can't really see a verb. You're only there when you're

actually looking for yourself. What I mean by that is you're only there when you're thinking about your Like you say, Eric, I say, I'm Chris, but I'm only Chris when I turned that online. And look within, if I'm changing a tire in a car, I'm not doing that. I'm nowhere, and in a real practical way, I don't even exist. So here, we have this machine in the left brain, and it goes around and it creates hypotheses, and it creates stories, and it sees patterns. But the problem is

the machine itself isn't a pattern. The left brain is a machine that perceives patterns, but it itself is not a pattern to be perceived. And so really, when we get to it, all self reflection is going to end in that way. It's going to be very limited. There's a possibility even the Buddha himself may have picked up on this idea of the left brain interpreter, and some of his poems kind of suggest that maybe he had this notion that there was an interpretive machine in the mind.

But even though you have that, you get it from you know, the evidence, you never get to directly see it because it itself isn't really a thing that can be seen. You know. You get like people like Ecker Toli and and and the Buddha and Alan Watts and all these people on the spiritual trip that eventually figure out that the ego is this the story that they're telling themselves. It's a verb that they engage in. It's an it's an activity, you know, I ego for a

while and then it's gone. I want to follow that with another concept that's similar. You you talk about the interpretive mind, and you say that it's deeply connected to the Cartesian theater. What is that? Cartesian theater comes from Reneed de cart famous philosopher mostly known for his I Think, Therefore I Am, But he also talked about the nature of consciousness and how all the senses seems to be interwoven into one unified experience, which again, think about being

at the movies. You have a visual experience, you have an auditory experience, and they seem to be connected, unified into one coherent consciousness. And so the idea of the Cartesian theater is that there must be someplace in the brain that this all comes together. Most neuroscientists have actually because they've looked for it. They've tried to find some place in the brain where everything gets woven into one coherent experience, and they have been totally unsuccessful. And so, um,

most people say there is no continuous Cartesian theater. There is no place in the brain where all comes together. However, it does certainly seem like there is. And so this is kind of the screen in our mind. It's kind of what's playing in our mind. Is I think the analogy uses sort of you know, on one hand, we can sometimes be sort of sitting in the audience and watching everything kind of happen and come together on the

screen in front of us. Yes, exactly, when you say that we can't find a place where or this all comes together, is this similar to trying to find the source of consciousness in the brain. Is this a similar exercise that that fails? Oh? Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean people have been trying to find consciousness in the brain. I taught a course unconsciousness just last year. And the problem is is that you can't find consciousness in the brain because it is exactly like the other things that

we've been talking about. It is not a thing to be found. Consciousness is a doing. We just don't have a good language for I mean to say that I'm consciousness. Name is awkward. Yeah, it's even worse than egoing. And it's just not a thing. And so again neuroscientists, again, our culture is obsessed with things that we go around looking in the brain. We're trying to find this thing called consciousness. And there have been a few people out there who have stumbled upon this idea. It's not a

thing to be found. It's a verb. It's like going for a jog and then stopping and trying to like pat all over your body on where's the job. It's not a thing, it's it's doing. Right. You at some point say that right, you say that you know we should maybe we're thinking about consciousness incredibly wrong. Instead of thinking about having consciousness, to think about that we're actually doing consciousness. It's that you know exactly what you just said.

I just think that's a very interesting way to look at what we're seeing. The other place that you start to take this and we've we've gone here with a couple of guests before, is the idea of consciousness not necessarily being confined. We think of it being as inside here. But there are ways that we could look at this that sort of point to or at least indicate that there's possibility of of consciousness being broader than what's in our skull. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

The gold standard and neuroscience is that consciousness is limited to the brain. It is somehow more of a thing than a doing. And again, of course that's been a total failure. And so there's a couple of things that make us suspicious about consciousness maybe not being trapped in the skull. The first is, again if you start thinking about it as a verb, it becomes this idea about okay, a is the brain the only thing that can do consciousness?

Maybe other things can do consciousness, And if it's a doing, why would it necessarily be limited to the brain. The other part of this that gets problematic, and again I've had debates with other people because if you've only experienced consciousness inside this skull, then this argument isn't gonna go very far. But if you talk to people like race car drivers, I mean, when you ask them, where's your consciousness,

it's always in the tires. You know. If you talk to a blind person, their consciousness is in the tip of the cane. So consciousness seems to be routinely outside of the skull. But that argument goes for people who have experienced themselves. So I think maybe we're dealing with an illusion of the opposite sort. Maybe actually the natural state of consciousness is to be quite often outside of this skull. But it's sort of a limitations that we've

been culturally, we've bought into. I have this notion that I'm stuck in the head, you know, and it's something we can learn, maybe it's something we can unlearn. I've had a few experiences myself or consciousness seems to be outside of the skull, and you know, typical neural scientists and say, well, that's an illusion. There's all kinds of illusions you can do with the body now, and I just like to at least bring up the possibility maybe not.

If we believe consciousness is in the brain, how is neuroscience reconciling that with the fact of the neurons that we're finding in our gut. Does that challenge that belief in any way? For more traditional people who are looking at this, does that cause them to reevaluate and go, oh, well, wait a minute, well again. I think neuroscience is such a young science that if you take anything too much

on faith, you're you're probably gonna be wrong. I think the most dangerous field is going to be consciousness, and so um consciousness at least isn't limited to just the skull. So if it's not limited to the skull, and you can find maybe it extending out, then it just becomes a question of how far can it extend? Is it

totally dependent on the nervous system? Um, And we have these accounts of these mystical experiences, and it's probably not a coincidence that there's a new kind of genre of mysticism and neuroscience, you know these and people are trying to connect it to and I think the thing behind that is extending the nervous system outward. And of course, you know when we extended outward that one place that

might be very likely is with computers. I mean, there's so many similarities in terms of what they do in terms of being these massive binary systems, and like I see my son playing these video games, like you wonder how much anxiousness extends out into these the video games themselves.

And so, um, I'm not sure your consciousness research is going to go, but I just not convinced that, you know, I think I think one of the most important things will be shifting our practice from looking for things to looking for verbs, which actually takes time. It's a practice you have, and when you get good at it, though you can start seeing, you start seeing everything as a verb. You know, it takes time. Are you familiar with Dan

Siegel's work. I think he's another neuroscience who's in this area a little bit, and he has a concept of the mind, and it's very similar in that he doesn't believe the mind is only in the skull, right. He believes the mind is is extended beyond that, based on the interactions that you're having with what's around you, which is kind of what you're saying with the cane or with other people. I just very very phrase differently but

but similar idea. So we're running out of time here, but I want to hit two more quick things before we wrap up. Boy gone fast. We talk about the left brain being a pattern perceiver, and you talk about that if we turn that way down, sometimes what you can find is depression. You say, in depression one doesn't

see meaningful patterns or connections, and life seems meaningless. And then you talk about in anxiety, we start to find patterns everywhere, and you say, it's ironic to consider that the depressed person might be closer to enlightenment than the person with anxiety if they turn the pattern receiver down just a little more. The interpreter, by being off for a while, would become opaque in the sense that if we see a shadow move, we can infer that there

is something casting it. I just thought that comparison of depression and anxiety with the pattern receiver was was an interesting way to think of how what we consider mood relates to level of consciousness or could in certain ways. Level is probably the wrong word, but you know where I'm going, Yeah, oh, absolutely, And you know this is really um I mentioned, and many neuroscientists mentioned Joe Bold Taylor and her left brain stroke when her pattern perceiver

was offline. And so the problem with depression again, you're not finding any meaning in life. So clearly the perception machine is turned down. It's not turned up enough where you're finding meaning. But the problem is it's not turned down enough, because if you could turn it down just a little bit more, you get the exact experience that Joe Bowld Taylor had. She turned her left brain off

and had instant enlightenment. The way she describes her stroke is exactly that she could look down and there were no more patterns. And my favorite part of that story is and she no longer saw a boundary between herself and the rest of the world. And you know that is one of our favorite patterns, is the ego. And so if you can turn the pattern perceiver down all the way, which I'm not suggesting you just turn your left brain off, um, but if you could, I really

do think that is anonymous. And I think that does happen occasionally with meditation. I think people achieve a state very similar to what Joe bol Taylor had in certain states of meditation. I think astronauts have had it sometimes in space for some reason, the vastness of space overwhelms the pattern perception machine and it just shuts down for a short time, and then they get this mystical state of bliss. People ask me what do you mean by enlightenment.

That's a tough one because you think, well, it's been used in so many different ways, But that's exactly what I mean. Enlightenment is this overused pattern, perception machine turned off for a little time, and and it seems that

you know, mystical experiences what she's describing. There's a common pattern among these things, whether they're they're induced by brain injury, by contemplative practice that brings you closer to its psychedelics, name your poison, right, But the experience that seems to occur in all of that, in varying degrees, is exactly what you're describing, the sense of the self fading way

and the boundaries between us and everyone else disappearing. I sometimes wonder is that a reality and we're just only seen part of the time or is it something that our brain just does when it gets in a certain place and it sort of perceives that? And I don't. I'm not expecting that you have the answer to that, because nobody does, right. I wonder about that often. I think to myself, well, so the fact that those experiences occurred, does that mean, truly, we are all connected. Most of

us just can't see it. Or is it a you know, to use a word you used earlier, a brain tricker, brain illusion that happens in certain states of the brain. And maybe it doesn't matter, but it seems to matter to me. But that's my pattern perceiver wanting to know it, wants to know absolutely. And the thing I find really hinting about the nature of the universe and those types of questions is why is it always set up that

we never really know. Eban Alexander goes if you remember his story where he has meningitis, is brain is decaying and and he has this wonderful experience of the afterlife and very detailed and and he talks about this consciousness being more real than this state of consciousness. It's such a wonderful story. But then the first thing that happens is we doubt it. But I think that that is a hint to the mystery of the universe. It is

a hint because we wanted to be a mystery. We don't want the smoking gun where we know what's going on, because I think we said have it set up. I think we have it set up like this so it is itself an adventure the question because it is unsolvable.

That's what we were going for. Think about being an omnipotent, all knowing, all powerful consciousness, and what if the universe started this way and and and First, I think this would be interesting and it really would be a rush, but I think it would be a horrible, boring, dull existence. I mean, there'll be no mystery, there will be no adventure.

So I think Allen Watts talks about this a lot, and it goes back to some ancient hinto myths, this notion that God just got lost, became ignorant of himself, and so he stopped being what he was, and in doing so, we're exactly where we're at right now because we have forgotten who we truly are. Then mystery becomes possible, adventure becomes I don't know what's going to happen the next sixty seconds, and that makes it a very interesting game.

I mean, if I had one line my perhaps my favorite line from Alan Watts, he said, all of life is a game, and the very first rule is that life isn't the game. Yeah, there's a paradox for you. So we're not gonna know, you know, we can, we can play with consciousness, but I don't think we're ever going to find exactly what's going on with it. I think it's more fun. I think the adventure is just going along for the ride. I agree, and I think

that is a great place to wrap up. I feel like we got to like less than half of the things I wanted to explore from the book. So there's a lot of great stuff in there. Um, there'll be links to the book in the show notes, like there always are, folks, if you want to buy it, which a lot of people do. If you do it that way, uh you know, we'll get a couple of pennies and I'll badger you let for for for other money. So if you're gonna buy it, so, but it's it. Links

in the show notes, links to Chris's website. All that stuff is there. Thanks Chris so much for coming on. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks. It was really enjoyable, and I'd always be willing to finish you off the second half if you ever are interested. Yeah, you got another book coming too, so we'll also, uh, you know, that might be an opportunity at that point. Also, Okay,

well thanks all right, thanks Chris. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One you Feed podcast Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support