Tripartite Truth: Reckoning with Multiple Realities | Mind Health Webinar

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Join the WCH Mind Health Committee on Wednesday as we explore a common confusion and engage a powerful awareness to elucidate life, the universe, and everything with Patrick Dubois, PhD.

Prepare to have your minds expanded.

Find more Mind Health Committee videos and events here. 

Thank you very much. Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Mind Health webinar. We’re really glad that you’ve joined us today. If you’re joining us on our website in the actual webinar itself, you can participate in the chat there. If you’re watching on one of the many places that we’re live streaming right now, I will also monitor those chats. But if you would like to join the webinar itself, head over to worldcouncilforhealth.org slash mindhealth and you can pop in your email address there and watch the webinar right on that page and participate in the webinar chat. And if you would like to revisit this webinar later or see another one that we’ve done in the past or share that with someone, you can also find all of those on that same page too. That’s worldcouncilforhealth.org slash mindhealth. And today we are joined by our friend and fellow committee member, Patrick. And Patrick has a packed webinar for us that we are excited to get to. So I’m just going to hand it right over to Patrick who is going to introduce himself. Hello. Yes, I’m going to introduce myself as nothing and insignificant because it doesn’t matter who I am. What should matter is the ideas I present. not based on my identity or ethnicity or history or anything like that. You should evaluate what somebody says based on their ideas without judgments, based on their physicality or history or anything like that. So with that having said, I’m going to present some ideas. Now let’s see, how do I switch over to my, all right, I’m on my screen sharing now. uh all right is this moving all right yes so I intend to mess with your minds a bit today and challenge our common sense of reality and talk about a different way of viewing ourselves and the world, seeing beyond the veil of a common misunderstanding that hopefully will give you some more power and flexibility in your life, but may also challenge some fundamental beliefs you have. So I look forward to feedback at the end. So what do we mean by truth and reality? People talk about this all the time. People are fighting for truth. People argue about what’s real. We need to think about this. It’s a deep philosophical question that people have been bickering about for ages. Hopefully this will provide a foundation that expands your consciousness. So I did a little look up on the web to see what do people associate with the word reality. And this website came up with all sorts of really kind of weird, inconsistent things. We’ve got words like objective and true, but we also have dreams and feelings. And reality is associated with lots of different things. It’s really kind of almost controversial. And particularly, we have this notion of some people talk about one true God. which is this idea of something that different cultures believe, but then presenting that it’s kind of some universal truth. So we’ve got this big riddle going on with what did we mean by truth and reality, because people fight wars over these things. So let’s dig into it. Where does this come from? Like, what do we even mean by reality? Well, consider that every living organism has to have its own reality it has to have its own model of the universe how it operates even a jellyfish which is very very simple has to decide where it’s going to go it has to process something from the outside world and make a decision and do something that’s going to benefit it so it has its own albeit very simple reality its own consciousness its own you know intellect its own world that it lives in and operates in as do all organisms. Now, when you get more sophisticated and you’ve got other organisms that you work in a social unit with, then you have to consider their subjective realities in your reality. So you have to blend your internal universe with theirs. You need to understand why are they all running away in that particular direction. You need to have some kind of theory of mind that your reality can match and synchronize with their reality to understand if they’re running away from a predator or they’re moving towards a food source or whatever it is. You need in your subjective reality to model their subjective reality. And you need to agree and have some harmony. We call it intersubjective reality. Then, of course, we also have what is sometimes known as objective reality. And this is really a fairly recent cultural invention with the idea of science and measurement and reason, because most of humanity was fine with their subjective and intersubjective reality. As long as you agreed with people around you, it didn’t really matter. You had to deal with objective reality in a trivial way, but what mattered most was what other people thought. With the advent of science and enlightenment and so forth, we have this idea of a world that exists independent of what we think or know. There are planets and stars that we know nothing about, and they exist separate from our knowing them. So to summarize, let’s talk about three different parallel realities. And I get this idea from Ken Wilber, who goes into much more detail and sophisticating, but I’m going to keep it very simple. We have objective reality. This is the universe. This is what exists. All that is. It exists independent of us, separate from us. We can’t really know it. We can approximate it. But it is this great physical mystery outside of us. And our best model of it is with matter, energy, space, and time. This is what exists independent of us. Then, of course, what we have is what I like to call the universe, Y-O universe, because this is the world that really matters. This is what we experience. This is what we know. These are our perceptions and sensations and memory, our history of our experience. This is the most important reality, because this is your reality. This is the one you live in, which you have to harmonize a little bit with the objective world, but you also have to harmonize with the intersubjective realities of other people, the culture we live in. And so this is the realities that we agree on, that we can share. And this is where we get the world of language and art and morality and science. And I’ll go into all these in more detail later. Important thing to understand, now that I’ve introduced these three parallel realities, is a cultural bias… Wherein we privilege and seem to give more value to objective reality over intersubjective reality over subjective reality. That we somehow have this value system comparing the realities rather than letting them coexist in parallel. And part of the reason for that is… When you can master objective reality, then you can have technology and you can have power and money. And that’s good for capitalists and centralizing political power and so forth. But that kind of scientistic reductionist, positivist view kills the soul because it says the only thing that’s real is what we can measure. And you kind of disavow devalue the inner world of subjective. And I like the little serpent icon there because this resonates with the old Garden of Eden mythology about the fruit of knowledge becomes the knowledge of good and evil. There’s an interesting resonance there. But I want to dig into a little bit about the objective world and how it isn’t so concrete and obvious as we know it. Traditionally, we had the four elements earth, wind, earth, air, water, fire. The modern view of the universe is we’ve got four fundamental elements of matter, energy, space, and time. And Einstein did a great job of understanding this with this little equation. E equals MC squared. Now C stands for the speed of light. Speed is distance or space over time. So you can rewrite this equation. And I asked a physicist about this. This is exactly the same thing, just with different words. Energy equals mass times space squared over time squared. Now this should be a little bit mind blowing because what on earth is time squared? It’s acceleration, which relates to gravity, but I won’t go there. The importance of this equation is that it equates the four elements, which basically is saying these are expressions of the same kind of unknowable reality of the universe, which ends up being what the Tao is about. This mysterious world that manifests in different ways but it is this ultimate mystery that just shows up in different forms as we perceive them. And when you understand this, then you don’t need to appeal to the supernatural because you realize that nature is super and creation is the creator. You don’t need to separate it. This is a beginning to appreciating the mysticism of the material world. Now that’s, Pretty deep, but I’m going to move on for now. To give an idea of this mystery is to accept that our brains can’t handle the truth. We cannot process it. The same way as we don’t understand what this universal reality is, we have to parse it as matter, energy, space, and time. We also have, like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, wave-particle duality, where we say a particle is both a wave and something is both a particle and a wave. Now, that’s its own existence. It’s us that are trying to shoehorn it into these two different concepts because that’s all our brain can deal with. A parallel paradox is the ship of Theseus, which is the idea of a ship. If you replace a plank each day, when does it become another ship? We have the same thing with the human body. We think of our bodies as a particle. you know, a separate individual thing. And yet every day we ingest and excrete biomass until after a few years, every molecule, every atom in our bodies is different, just like the ship of Theseus. So are we a particle or are we a wave of biomass? This just shows the limitations of our brain in grappling with very basic macroscopic reality. You don’t have to appeal to quantum mechanics. Reality, even most obvious things are things our brains can’t entirely process. And another example of the limitations of our brains, Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist, he’s got lots of evidence showing how intelligence, including our own, evolved for functionality, getting things done, not for accuracy. And this is, again, a big, heavy concept. But a simple example I can give is presented with a carrot and caramels. If we have accurate knowledge of the world and our bodies, we will always choose the carrot for nutrition. But the way we’re evolved, we prefer the simple analysis of salt, sugar, and fat. So we’re going to choose caramels. That’s functional for us, but it’s not the most accurate model of the world. So to summarize, objective reality is something that we model necessarily. We do it fairly productively, but we are inevitably quite inaccurate because we’ve mastered the material world well enough to make fancy cars, and yet we don’t always drive them well. Physics messes us up again and again. Now, looking at subjective reality, like I said, this is all that really matters. This is you, the you in universe. and simple psychophysics. To understand this, we have to accept that there’s an outside objective world, which we don’t really know. We take in senses, we take in information through our senses, and then we have internal perceptions, which feed our magical mystery internal universe, which is unbounded, can be anything. Now, how do we get a sense of truth with our personal world? Well, part of that comes from self-cultivation of personal expression and creativity. That’s our truth. And that’s unbounded. That’s magical. That’s everything. You know, you’re only limited by your imagination, but we still have to function in the world. So we have to calibrate ourselves with the objective of and intersubjective realities. And we do that through learning and self-discovery and compassion, which is trying to reckon with other realities and things like meditation or exercise. We do this to calibrate ourselves with the rest of the world. Why do we need to temper that? Why do we need to grow up? Because we need to interact with the physical world and other realities. So in between the subjective and the objective, which is what most animals deal with, We also have to deal with this in-between world, which is vague and ungrounded and mysterious like the subjective world, but also something we have to deal with like the objective world. Humans live in virtual reality of our culture, our beliefs, our language, and so forth. And this includes our myth, our mythology, and it’s a common thing nowadays to Compare myth versus fact. You’ll see lots of things saying, what’s a myth? What’s a fact? But when you appreciate multiple realities, you start to appreciate that myth is a fact. In other words, myth is what really drives our life, whether you’re aware of it or not. And fact, the idea of some objective truth being transcendent over other realities, is part of the mythology. Myth is a fact, and fact is a myth. When you can really appreciate these separate realities. Whoops, there’s my click. This also relates to morality because we tend to think of morality as absolute, but it isn’t. It’s relative. No matter how broad you think you have a sense of values or good or bad, it’s not going to match with what a crow or a snake thinks of as good or bad. There’s no universal good or bad or ethics. It’s only what you as a group, as your intersubjective reality, agrees on. And a great example of that is money. What is money? It’s arbitrary value, only valuable if other people agree it’s valuable. So money, the value of money, only depends on a group reality. And same thing with manias. As we’ve seen, a lot of people can agree on something that kind of makes no sense, and they can be heavily invested in something that’s no grounding in actual objective reality. There’s so many more examples. So intersubjective reality also depends on the scope, how far it extends from just yourself to your family, your community, your religion, and so forth. And it multidimensionally varies by your age, your gender, your experience. So you really have billions of different realities we are engaging with. And it’s important to respect that these are different realities. Now, the question becomes, well, then what is valid within that reality? So consider that for a subjective reality, what makes it real, what makes it sense, valid or useful reality is we feel it. It’s our sensation. And a good example of the enigma about that is pain. Because we tend to associate, and doctors do this all the time, they make this horrible mistake, of associating objective things with subjective experience. We say, oh, it’s only real pain if we can find some kind of objective correlator cause. But pain is really purely subjective. There’s pain only exists within you. And this completely throws the doctors off because they say, well, we don’t have an explanation for your pain, so it doesn’t exist. It exists subjectively. Pain never should. It means nothing. Pain means nothing objectively. but it does intersubjectively and subjectively. So applying an objective model is inherently wrong. What makes something intersubjectively real is when we agree, when we understand, when we communicate. And I thank Delinda for her little blog piece about the Velveteen Rabbit, because this is a great story of what it means to become intersubjectively real. When somebody loves us, when somebody understands us, when somebody connects with us, Then it becomes real. When you have an idea and nobody else shares it, it feels horrible until you can talk to somebody and share that. That makes it real. Jerry talks about the importance of touch, and that is like the primordial communication of intersubjective reality. When you are physically touched with somebody, you become real. I like to say that touch paints us into existence because we know that infants need physical touch to grow their nervous system. Psychologists, researchers can count the number of licks a mother rat gives to her pups, and that number of licks of physical touching can predict the life outcome of the baby rat. Touch is kind of a primordial way of manifesting intersubjective validity and reality. And of course, anytime you talk, you communicate. The reason I’m doing this here is I’m trying to share my reality with yours and hopefully enrich yours. Then, of course, we have objective reality. And the way to get validity in that is through evidence predictability, you know, standard science properly done. because then you can assess, oh, this seems to exist outside of us because I can predict what’s going on and I’ve got evidence for it and other people can look at it and so forth. So altogether, this points to a tripartite truth, three different realities that coexist or three spheres of reality. So I am encouraging you to practice the mental discipline of allowing those to coexist for anything you experience. Because confusion between those creates enormous suffering and inhumanity and division because we’re trying to impose one reality on another and they don’t fit. So how can we apply this new insight? I’ve been very, very theoretical. Hopefully some concrete examples might help. There’s a question for a talk earlier on this channel. The viewer said, there are different kinds of fear. A big angry dog causes a very immediate form of fear, whereas a fear of a tyrannical government causes a longer, less immediate response. How do we deal differently with these two different kinds of fear? Excellent question. This is a big question with lots to mention, but I will say fundamentally, you open up your options significantly when you recognize that the threat from the dog is objective. That’s material. That’s a physical universe. Whether you like it or not, there is an angry dog there threatening you. And so you can respond to that with the tools given to you by evolution. Anger, fear, fight or flight, get a weapon, run away, whatever it is, that’s within the objective material world, and you have tools built for that. A tyrannical government, however, that only exists in the intersubjective world. They depend on agreement of others, ideological agreement. So their foundation is completely arbitrary. It’s just based on ideas and what people agree to, meaning that it can be undermined by different ideas. So you’ve got a whole different set of tools and strategies dealing with a threat that is in the intersubjective reality versus a threat that’s in the objective reality. So just that awareness can provide a lot more options and expand your consciousness to solution. One way to remember this is if it’s raining, the government doesn’t need to mandate umbrellas. If it’s raining, if there’s something objectively real, you don’t need a government or a group or a religion or any bunch of people to tell you how to interpret it. You can interpret it yourself. It exists outside in the objective world. You don’t need others to tell you what to do. When you see people trying to convince you of a reality, that’s a good hint that it’s something that is in their imaginal world. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in yours. Another application. Jerry Marzynski did a great talk a while ago here, and he’s talking about his experience treating schizophrenics. And part of that experience is people have psychosis, which the doctors define as a break from reality. But the question is, what kind of reality is it breaking from? When you understand multiple realities, it gives you a much deeper insight. Because the doctors were trying to dismiss inner voices, their subjective reality, as hallucinations, meaning, oh, it isn’t valid objectively, so it doesn’t count. That gets back to the cultural bias of privileging objective reality over subjective reality. And the doctors actually are ironically guilty of the same thing because they are assuming, based on crappy science, that the drugs are relevant for treating that. What the drugs do is they just disable people, so they stop shouting. They don’t actually deal with the cause. So the doctors are in their own intersubjective hallucination about the relevance of the drugs. So they’re imposing their intersubjective reality on the patient’s subjective reality. that insight you can see the violence and the cruelty inherent in this even though it has the guise of caring for people and I could go on about schizophrenia and how the western model is damaging but that’s another topic another application another way of understanding this is and I don’t want to really offend anybody but we’ve had people on this channel and lots of places otherwise other places where we see a lot of new age healing scientism so what people do is they use pseudoscience to sell their a particular approach to healing by appealing to an objective approach now my argument is you don’t need to do that and I think it undervalues what you’re doing because personal healing is subjective only you know what’s right for you so if it works for you if you think it work it does you don’t have to put up a screen of a brain and point to the limbic system and talk about neurotransmitters and try and explain how your particular approach is going to use all these biochemical mechanisms you’re making the same mistake as the doctors were you should be selling your healing techniques on the subjective effect you don’t need to appeal to objectivism to me that just undermines it and I listen to people talk and they’re trying to tell me how great their idea is and I say the science is really crappy but the experience you gave me works so just throw out the cheap science and keep the experience because that’s what’s important so this doesn’t invalidate new age healing it just I’m just saying don’t try and use the inappropriate objectivist model to try and validate it validate it on its own when people experience it that’s real that’s all you need Another application is looking at religious dogma, the source of many wars and conflicts throughout the world. Because when religion confuses the intersubjective, you know, what we agree on is our values and our mythology and our story, with objective, like saying, oh yeah, the world’s only existed for 6,000 years because that’s when God made it. and dinosaurs don’t exist, then you’re creating all sorts of problems that you don’t need to. The intersubjective world can have validity on its own. Literalizing metaphor causes pain and problem. You’re mixing realities. You’re trying to impose one reality on another. Really, what religion and spirituality is about is your relationship with the mystery and the community. And you can think of that as your own personal great and wonderful discovery or God. And I like this because it’s got awe in the middle. This is what your real spiritual journey is about. You don’t have to impose another reality. You can celebrate your own. That’s a whole other chapter I could go into. And I want to summarize with an old comedian. He’s very corny, but very funny. And there’s a YouTube link you can look at, Swami Beyond Ananda. And he has some lovely insights. Even though he’s very corny, he actually gets some of this. He says, turn off the television and tell a vision instead. What he’s saying is reject the objective inputs of the lights and colors and sounds of the television and the intersubjective oppression from media companies and so forth. that is kind of crushing and controlling your inner reality and instead take your inner reality and share it. Tell a vision, share your vision like indigenous people used to do, talk about dream time. You talk about your experience of your own creative inner world and you share that instead. And instead of getting even, falling into a kind of biological revenge model, get odd, get creative, get different. Again, celebrate your subjective reality. Make that more important than the other realities. Each of us is totally unique, just like everybody else. That is understanding and appreciating multiple subjective realities. Everybody has their own different realities. And the truth shall upset you free. This is recognizing that you have your own reality. It does need to be calibrated and harmonized with objective and intersubjective reality. And that could be upsetting, but that frees you to more possibilities. He says, children of God become adults of God. If your intersubjective reality frames you as a child, you’ve given away some of your agency. You can still relate to God as an adult. And with that, you can achieve non-judgment day and disarmageddon because you now are not imposing one reality on another and confusing and harming different ideologies. You’re now welcoming this multiplicity of realities. So to summarize, what I’m trying to pitch here is the idea of respecting multiple realities and embracing the mystery that we don’t fully know objective reality, no matter how good science does. We don’t really understand intersubjective reality because it’s too complex and chaotic. and sometimes untethered to any other kind of reality. And we don’t always understand ourselves. That’s why we have to have our spiritual disciplines and so forth. Stay humble, stay curious, stay open to multiple realities and multiple truths. So with that, I thank you very, very much for lending me your ears. And I would really love any kind of feedback or questions or considerations of other ways to apply this expansion of your consciousness into multiple realities. Thank you very, very much. I look forward to your critiques and your inputs and your questions. You can turn on the audio and applaud. Boom. 30 minutes. Awesome. Can you hear me? I can hear you, Jerry. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Patrick. I’m reeling. Did you get wet? No, but I just wanted to sit outside in the sun. Beautiful. Yeah. This is what I would call your great and wonderful discovery. You are engaging your subjective reality with external objective reality, and this is spirituality. You are meeting God, great and wonderful discovery, in doing that. Well, forgive me for being very simple about this, but when you get multiple realities, my first question is this, and I love everything about your talk, and it is a challenging talk, but when we get multiple realities and people interface with multiple realities, then we’re also creating something that can be quite disturbing to people, do we not? When we interface with multiple realities, we’re actually also distressing ourselves, which is why I think we all want to have everyone agree with the same thing. We want that kind of reality. But I wonder if you might talk about that distress a bit, Patrick. Well, that is part of the great and wonderful discovery because you’ve got to distress just challenging your view with the physical world. So let’s start with that because, you know, this happens all the time. You go to open a door and it doesn’t open. You’ve got a model of the physical world that isn’t quite working. You drop something. You misguide the physics of something. Every car accident in the world is a tension between internal reality and objective reality. Every little mistake we make, and can we engage that in an enlightening way that’s going to empower this? Can we laugh at our mistakes, for example? Because that comes down to the simple discipline of like, wow, there’s multiple realities. There’s what I thought, and there’s the physics. And whoops, I don’t understand physics well because that’s why I dropped that plate. And that is a constant reminder of calibrating ourselves and that tension that there are multiple realities. And that’s why I call it the great and wonderful discovery because I think there’s spirituality on a microscopic level, even with how do we deal with, whoops, that slipped and I dropped something. How do we deal with the humility of accepting ourselves which doesn’t crush us, but we still go on. So accepting those multiple realities like, oh, that’s valid. You know, we will curse the plate. We’ll say, what is wrong with you? Because we are putting it into our realities. The challenge, the spiritual challenge, is how do we engage these multiple realities? And yes, there’s tension in this all the time, but there is also discovery and opportunity. That’s why I call it the great and wonderful discovery, because there’s got to be wonder. There’s mystery. You don’t know how everything’s going to work, and yet you still engage. That, to me, is the kind of universal spiritual challenge. which happens on a microscopic level. That, of course, happens on big levels like we’re dealing with every day. And I think about how we actually sort of in many ways need stressors to grow. I mean, like when we’re learning to walk, I mean, we stumble and fall down and we don’t. You’re right. We don’t need to understand physics to figure out how to walk. Right. Right. Well, we develop our own model of the universe. And as I pointed out, our models are necessarily incorrect. They’re necessarily very weak approximations. And this includes even the best of what science can do. And we need to embrace that as like, wow, I will never know. So what I’m basically saying is we have this urge to want to be right, to have a singular truth, a singular reality. And basically the essence of my talk is give up on that. Give up on ever completely knowing anything except the mystery. Live in mystery all the time. Embrace it. Yes, well, I have a number of degrees. Yes. In a number of different fields. Yes. And the older I get, you know, it’s like the more I learn, the less I know, which is fine. I’m very comfortable with that. And I should say that I also need to have the concept that it’s okay to be comfortable with that, you know, because we sort of need stories how to hold our experiences. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah. So that’s part of the challenge. You’re right. And, you know, Delinda, you’re such a great example, because you are so knowledgeable in so many different ways. And yet you’re open. And, you know, you are a great example of this kind of balance. And I love the way you approach things with a, you know, a quizzical, open mind, and yet really, really well grounded in you know, your science and your education and so forth, and that you keep this sense of open mystery, I think that’s what we should all aspire to. And it’s refreshing and it’s encouraging because it’s like, well, all we need to be is curious. And the more curious you are, you know, then you get more and more realities and it just becomes richer and richer. But I think we don’t, we’ve been taught to, you know, expect things a certain way or we get visualizations of things are a certain way. And that’s so controlling and devastating. And then when people’s dreams are shattered or their expectations are You know, it’s like it’s so painful, whereas it is. Well, oh, gosh, you know, like even in a car accident, what did that mean? Well, gosh, what’s going to happen now? And, you know, it’s different, you know, as my day is totally different than I thought it was going to be. and yeah good this could be great and yeah and and I must say I really admire people who are really curious and playful and really make the most of life because that’s really all we have to do we stay like you know like delinda was saying when you learn to walk your children are so curious and they’re just everything’s fascinating and um And it’s still fascinating. It’s just we got jaded by our education, our expectations. Right. And that’s the cultural bias that privileges objectivism as in this one ultimate truth. And yeah, it is an ultimate truth in the objective world. You know, the moons of Saturn or Jupiter or whatever, they are what they are, whether you know anything about them or not. But. That’s its own thing. What really matters to us is the intersubjective reality and subjective reality, which are much more malleable. There is no real ultimate truth there except, you know, personally what you feel. And like you were talking about before, it’s important to remember that you can never be disillusioned without being previously illusioned. I can… One way I can understand ideas like this and these three realities is I look at something I’ve done, like I look at my book, for example, on touching trauma, building resilience, and you were kind enough to reference some of my work around touch. Now, touch is very interesting. You described it as an intersubjective reality, or it’s a connection between two realities, right? So that someone else is impacting on me when I’m being touched, but also when I’m touching another, they’re also impacting on me. But when I thought about my book, I said, isn’t that interesting? These three objective realities all had a place in my book without me understanding that’s what I was doing. So I wrote it in a very personal story. So I validated it from my own personal experiences and journey. And I told it, if you like, partly as a memoir. And I deliberately did that because that’s important to me. Our personal stories and the stories of others have always mattered to me almost more than anything. If someone perceives their life, they have a voice that tells them something, I’ve always wanted to validate their experience because that’s really all I felt we’ve really got at the end of the day is that personal experience of reality inwardly and inside. And then I thought, well, in the book, I also talk about my approach, which was to let the clients that I worked with through touch describe their reality at the end of every treatment. So I never defined for them with some objective truth. Oh, well, I’ve done work on your neck, and that will do this and this and this, and this is how you will feel. No, I told them to get dressed, walk around the room, and tell me what they noticed. So they were giving me their personal reality, which suddenly meant that my interaction was intersubjective, right? But then I did another thing, which I, for a moment, thought you were criticizing me for, but I don’t think you were, which is fine if you are, by the way. I’m very happy to be criticized. But then I did all the science stuff on the amygdala, on the neuroscience, and talked about how that related. But really, the way I look at that so-called objective science is, as you do, deeply, deeply flawed. And I knew from the get-go I was only going to pick the so-called objective science that fitted with my own personal narrative. So I was not unbiased. So that’s where your sort of pseudo new age science-y thing came in, which I think I’m probably going to put my hand up and say I’m probably guilty of that. But the interesting thing for me was how all three realities, pseudo or otherwise for objective, some of the science is real, some of it is massively contaminated and corrupted. We’ve seen massive, corruptive, so-called objective reality actually being, well, I don’t know what you’d call that. When they take, they pretend it’s objective, but in a way, it’s a myth, isn’t it? It’s a story. But I just wanted to share with you and the listeners How I can think of these three realities all dancing together in some kind of smorgasbord of evolution or mystery or whatever. And I just wanted to share that’s how I ground what you’ve said into my life. I think about it in terms of my life. And I wonder if there’s anything you want to say about that, Patrick. That is perfect. Thank you, Jerry. That is exactly the point. I’m communicating my ideas. They’re resonating with you. This is what intersubjective connection is about. This is the communication. And you’re saying, hey, this is what I get from you. This is how it lands for me. This kind of communication is what makes something real. So this talk was not real until all these ideas, which I’ve been working on feverishly for the last week, were not real intersubjectively until now, until it resonated and started to grow in you. And you’re getting exactly the right idea. I’m not trying to say that you should discard objective science. And I’m sure a lot of the models you use about the limbic system and the amygdala and all this stuff are very relevant My argument is that should not be the main sole source for validity of something that is ultimately subjective. And your technique is exactly what I would recommend for any therapist is come from your own personal space. bring that out for the other person to drink from, to engage, to explore in their own personal space, in their own reality, try it out, see how it works, and then share it back. Exactly like the practice you were doing is, here’s my reality, here’s what works for me, you try it for yourself. Does that work for you? Oh, yes, it does. Boom, you’ve made that connection. You’ve enriched their subjective reality with yours. You’ve made that intersubjective connection. group connection, and that is what life is all about. So exactly, Jerry, you exactly got it. And this is what Buddha would say too, is saying like, I do these meditative practices, but don’t trust me. Try it for yourself. See how it works. And that to me is, those are the more important realities. Don’t just point to the objective world and think you know it. Oh, by the way, notice on one of my slides under intersubjective reality, I list science because science is intersubjective. It’s not objective. The objective world we’re guessing at through science, but science itself is an intersubjective social process, which of course can be corrupted by money and politics and so forth. Thank you, Jerry. That was spot on. Yeah. And Patrick, Jennifer says, thank you for putting words around the concepts of multiple realities. I didn’t find this at all challenging or distressing. Patrick’s reality and mine seem to coincide. See, now I’ve fallen in love with Jennifer just because we share realities. And indeed, isn’t that, sorry, Jennifer, for being inappropriate, but isn’t that how we connect with somebody is you get people and they share reality and boom, you feel an affinity for them. I’m sure you’ve probably had this interaction before where you’re talking with a stranger somewhere and you realize, oh, they get it. They’re a skeptic. They’re a conspiracy theorist like me. Boom, you become brothers and sisters because you understand some kind of shared reality. And that makes things real. It makes you feel more real when you’re heard, just like the Velveteen Rabbits. um so thank you and thank you jennifer because I do believe that when people get it to be like yes of course that makes perfect sense but I don’t know how weird and abstract this is for uh some people there’s another question here from emma distress caused by our government’s agenda of pushing safe and effective vaccines some people are still living in that real and it’s hard to wake them up okay so that is a great example of how we uh intersubjective reality which we have to accept is completely malleable uh you know we we understand hopefully we understand how our subjective reality is kind of arbitrary and we can think crazy things you know it’s good to celebrate our individuality and creativity but unbounded we can lose touch with the other realities that unboundedness that um Looseness is true for intersubjective realities. They can be crazy, crazy out of touch. And so by respecting these different things, part of my message here is celebrate your subjective truth. Do things like spiritual practice, like connecting with friends to strengthen your own sense of validity of your own world. to protect yourself against possible contamination by other intersubjective realities. And what do you do with people who you would like to connect with but don’t? Still people living in that other reality? Well, I would say start from the ground up. Don’t fight with information. Don’t try and fight on the same level as the government and argue with things like that. Connect with them as humans. I know a friend who has a new girlfriend and he’s trying to progressively red pill her as he’s saying, like wake her up to different things. Luckily, she’s open-minded, but we’ve been talking about the strategy and the first thing is, have people that you can connect with and feel safe with, that you’ve got a very tangible, concrete sense of connection. And then you build ideas on top of that because people aren’t going to trust just ideas from somebody else they don’t know. because that’s gonna be threatening and ideas are easy to dismiss. It’s when you actually have an embodied connection with somebody that you’re actually friends with, you trust with, then you can slowly titrate in other ideas and basically demonstrate, hey, my reality still works. I have friends who share this reality. We’re doing okay. They need to see that physical reality that, oh, here are people who are living without being vaccinated or whatever. And they’re safe. They’re okay. You need to start from that kind of ground up rather than information because information is abstract. I don’t know if that really explained much, but, you know, start with actual real connection, Delinda. Yeah. This somehow relates to the question that you shared, the complicated one about the difference between fear of an angry dog versus fear of a tyrannical government. And And you said that the fear of the tyrannical government can be more subjective. And that’s true until they’re actually throwing you into cells and arresting you and stuff like that. However, I think the key there is to not live into the fear. Yes, because that’s their reality infecting yours. Exactly. Yeah. but to be very clear what your reality is and, you know, live out of that reality. And, you know, I mean, part of it comes to, you know, I know I had an issue that I could have gotten in trouble for. I could have been arrested. I could have had to pay a big fine. And, you know, it’s like, Well, my reality and my integrity requires that I act in this sort of way. And I said, it’s more important to me that I stay with this integrity and treat others, treat myself right, treat others right, even if they throw me in jail or fine me or whatever. Yes. It’s being okay that, you know, and, you know, as far as, you know, am I going to die? Yeah, we’re all going to die someday. So… Well, yeah, so that’s validating, that’s giving value to your subjective reality over the intersubjective. And that’s, I think, crucial to mental health, is that balance. And maintaining one’s integrity of one’s subjective reality is crucial. You can’t let Others infect your reality. And you can hold the two, and this is part of the multiple realities. You can say, all right, they think that, I think this, and that’s okay. They don’t have to agree. I mean, this all gets really, really deep, and there’s no easy answers to any of this stuff. But thank you for that. Jerry. Yeah, I love this discussion because now we’re entering really into the heart of the intersubjective dynamic, which is between two different views and two different people, whether it’s a view put forward by government and by a government employee, or it’s a person you care about and know and know well. And we’re looking really at also the definition of madness and sanity. Yes. So if I only refer to my own subjective reality, as you described so eloquently, we can go into some very bad places. We can literally, we can drive ourselves mad with that, actually. The subjective, unbridled, unconnected with others is potentially highly dangerous, and yet it’s also the source of inspiration. Now, right there, you’ve got that beautiful yin-yang symbol of the Tao, which by the way, I loved the way it was moving and that symbol, the way it moved in and out. That was just, I’ve never seen that before. And I thought that was beautiful. But that seems to hold the essence of the mystery of what it means to be human. We’re not on a planet living in separate caves. We’re here interacting. We’re doing that right now. People are with us. We’re trying to connect with people who can’t see us. We can’t see them, but they’re writing stuff. And we’re interconnecting into subjectivity. And that, I mean, one of the things is the balance between The balance between our own inner reality and our own narrative, if you like, or even in psychology, we maybe call it the frame of reference. This is my frame of reference. How does that bounce up against other frames of references? And how do I interact with that? Do I let it dominate me? And so the key thing here is the psychological war that has been going on for the last 200 years and longer, I believe, which has been to validate this so-called objective reality of science, which is, in fact, just like the little person behind the big machine in that story of Wizard of Oz. It looks like a great big thing, but then we see behind it and we see there’s a little man pulling levers. And it’s not objective. It’s intersubjective with a manipulative intent, with a power intent, a money intent, whatever intent. So where I’m going with this is it’s like we’ve been in a boxing ring. for 15 rounds with Mike Tyson or something, and we’ve been badly softened up. We’re not dead yet. And then we’re staggering around the ring, and in comes a new fighter who says, right, here I am. I’m called science. Just let me ping you with that piece of science. And we fall over because we’re battered already. Sorry about the noise. The people who are running a narrative that is full of lies and corruption, objective lies, I believe, These are people who have actually been in a ring with Mike Tyson for 15 rounds. And all the new scientific priest or wizard has to come here, just blow at them, and they fall over because they’ve been so battered by this belief, this false belief that objective reality is knowable. And this is what I like about your talk. At the heart of your talk, you said right at the beginning, Objective reality is fundamentally unknowable. And I love that. So I’m waffling a bit here, but I just think it’s right at the heart of what we’re going through today. yeah yeah well I didn’t want to uh make my talk specifically about these these current things but you’re right it can apply um yeah the general message I want to get across is if is the the practice the mental spiritual practice or discipline of considering multiple realities and when you do that you can see how things our intention or harmonize. And you can see the illusion. That’s why I say at the beginning, you know, seeing beyond the veil, the illusion of trying to force one reality on another and the abuse of people saying, I am science. This is the truth. It’s like, no, no, no. Anybody who says the truth It’s always their own personal truth. And why are they necessarily doing that? What are their motivations and so forth? When you really get the grasp of like, there’s multiple realities, different perspectives, and I get to choose what to do with that, that provides a lot more fluidity and freedom. And you see beyond the veil of the bullshit of people are trying to tell you what is true. And just to go a little bit deeper, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea about, you know, you cognitively understand something, you think about something versus you know something. And I’m just very taken with the Hebrew word for knowing, which basically implies an intimacy, a sexual intimacy. Yes. Union, which is, again, quite different from an intellectual understanding of things. Right. Well, that’s when we talk about subjective reality, we like to think we’re reasoning and so forth, but we’re not that good at it. When we know something, it is a deeper thing. That isn’t just reasoning. It is a felt sense. Understanding is a feeling. It’s not a logical thing. It’s a feeling. And I love that the ancient Hebrews got that. That knowing is a kind of physical intimacy. On a subjective level, that’s exactly what it is. And when we can get that resonance with somebody else, that feels like that physical intimacy. When I see someone like, oh, you get it. I get some of that sense of physical connection and intimacy. It’s kind of like a psychic touch. I don’t know. But yeah, thank you for that. That’s a wonderful, wonderful word to remember because that is. That’s what knowing is on a subjective level. It physically feels like that intimate connection. Any other questions from the audience or Anne? I don’t know. I’m not sure if we’ve got any that we can see here, any other questions, maybe Emma has some, but I was just thinking that knowing kind of explains, and you’re talking, I was just thinking, well, it’s really about once you’ve explained all these different realities and intersubjective, and we don’t have to push one against the other, it’s just interesting that where people are coming from, it’s that tolerance. But because we’ve got an understanding, we can have tolerance and we can be curious and we can just let things be without trying to manipulate things. And the thing is that if somebody’s trying to manipulate you, if you don’t react, well, they can’t do anything. You’re just a kind of a wet rag, really. So maybe that’s the thing about the tyrannical governments. We’re giving them that power. But actually, they’re only tyrannical if we cooperate in their imposed reality. So if we say, well, look, thanks very much. That’s very interesting. But actually, this is mine. And I’m happy that you’ve got that. but I’m going to hang on to mine because I feel better in mine and I don’t care what you do, then, you know, that’s the thing. Yes, and remember that the reality that they tell you, they will tell you that they’ve got the majority behind them. That’s just their storytelling. I mean, we know from tons of political polls that the limited perspective that the governments allow us to think about is way, way, way too limited for what people actually think. Most people have much more diversity and much more openness in the general populace than the very narrow narrative, the Overton window, as they say, of what’s allowable discussion on popular media. Don’t be fooled by that. Again, Don’t turn off the television and tell a vision instead. Share your own vision with other people. Don’t be manipulated by the media. I know we’re running out of time here, but I want to bring in the importance of resilience in what you’re talking about, Patrick, because I think to be curious, to not be threatened, to be able to hold our own reality and interface with other people’s reality, I think there’s a level of resilience required. So in terms of what helps us, we need to comprehend, I think, this very clear description you’ve made of these three realities, objective, intersubjective, and subjective. And to comprehend these three and somehow dance between them, I think requires a lot of resilience. So the thing that I think comes out of this for me is it’s really important to keep doing those things which build our own personal resilience. And I don’t know if you want to say anything about that. Yes, exactly. Well, when I talked about personal truth, You’re celebrating your personal expression. You’re celebrating your creativity. You’re also doing the work of calibration. Those are things that help you have a strength of yourself. And like I said, there’s a cultural bias that devalues the subjective. And that’s what’s happening with people in mental institutions and all around the world is we get this, our culture says what you personally believe doesn’t matter. It’s hallucinations, it’s imagination, it’s your own dreams. None of those count, which is of course the antithesis of really being human. A human perspective is it’s that reality, our own personal reality that is the most important. We have to calibrate that with other things, but we still need to privilege our own individual reality. So when you’re feeling down and broken and beaten and worn down, take time to celebrate and nurture your own reality through music, through dance, through art, through connecting with friends, all those things that remind you that your own personal subjective reality is the most important thing in the universe because you are the you in universe. Wow, beautiful. I think that kind of does address one of the questions that did turn up that came from one of the other streams, which was, you know, can you speak about the distress caused by our government’s agenda for pushing a safe and effective vaccine, in quotes, that some people are living in that reality and it’s hard to wake them up. And I do think this question speaks to the overriding concern of almost everyone who’s going to be watching this, Patrick. And I know we’re over time, but I just wonder… If you have anything to say about that, I mean, we’re touching on it, but I wondered if you have anything specific to say about that question. Well, I would say first, take care of yourself. Don’t feel it’s your duty to change everybody else’s reality. You can’t do that. The governments have tried with billions of dollars and they still haven’t. So don’t try and change other people’s reality. Make sure yours is in tune first and then live it. And that will that will spread. And you will find ways, but take care of yourself first. Thank you. And when you live your beautiful reality, others will want to join you. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Thank you, Delinda. And also, yeah, if you think about, well, what am I going to regret most on my deathbed and do that while you’re alive? I mean, that’s what you’re talking about. know what are the things that made you feel most alive and it wasn’t about you know petitions and things like that it was you know actually connecting with people and having fun and learning and yeah exploring and and all these things are mutually exclusive it’s not one or the other they coexist On that note, I think we should end. Does Emma want to come in with any announcements to end? Thank you so much, Patrick. I’m really glad I was here for this discussion and people were with us. That’s on my wish list to be connected. So I’m really glad we’re all here having this discussion. Emma, do you want to come in with anything? Sure. Just a reminder for anyone, I guess that’s been here the whole time or anyone that has joined us since I spoke right at the beginning, you can go back and watch this again on the Mind Health Committee page. Most of the places that you’re watching it where it’s live streaming, it’ll stay there so you can share it from wherever you are right now. But if you want to share it from our page, that’s worldcouncilforhealth.org slash mindhealth. Further down on the page, you can see all of our previous videos there. So Take a look at any of them and share any of them in addition to this one, too, please. We’ve got a wealth of information down there. Next week, I believe we have a meditation happening at this time on Telegram. And then we’ll be back with another webinar the following week. So always check the Mind Health Committee page. I keep that updated with all of our upcoming events, whether we’re doing something on Telegram or we have a webinar that’s happening on the website. That’s where you can find the information. So that’s all I’ve got. I believe we’re getting Jerry Mazinski back. So Patrick mentioned him in his talk. And I believe we’re negotiating a date. So keep your eyes peeled, everyone, for that. That should be very, very interesting. The man who basically has spent his life talking to so-called hallucinations and has learned a lot from it. So yeah. But Patrick, I just want to say a big thank you for all the work you put into that presentation. It’s really, really, really valuable stuff and helping people to see these three realities and the hope that’s in there. I want people to take hope from this. This is a very hopeful message. Thank you, Jerry. To Linda and Anne and Emma. Thank you very much. Thank you all the listeners and all the watchers and all the people who catch this later. Bless you for coming on. And I hope you find this validating and strengthening to your own reality, to your own purpose, to your own awesome, awesome creativity and mystery of being human. Great. Thank you, everyone. Let’s do our wave. We will wave to all of you and hopefully wherever you are, you’re waving back at us and we will see you later. Bye everyone. Please consider making a value exchange with us. The World Council for Health is a grassroots people’s organization and we rely on funding from people just like you. Your contributions from as little as $5 or £5 or 100 Rand help to power our work. The World Council for Health team is on a mission to serve you. Please make it your mission to support us. Thank you.