God and Other Ultimates:
Philosophy of Religion
First published Mon Mar 12, 2007; substantive revision Tue Mar 28, 2023
Graviton Ring was my pen name from a movie script that I own.
Sue Grandys has disappeared from the web ??
See or download a pdf transcript of my interview with Sue with additional references
Some links in the pdf may have been removed from the current blog page
December 19, 2019: Sorry to say, Sue Grandys' podcast Uncomfortable Questions at libsyn went offline a few months ago. ALL 70 episodes except mine, episode 48, seem to be lost forever. I cannot locate them in the internet archives, nor any new site. My messages to Sue's sites have not been answered.
January 2007. Uncomfortable Questions. With your host Sue Grandys, big questions of ordinary people.
Listen to the audio of my interview with Sue Grandys in January 2007: [47 minutes]
Note: Audio may need to be restarted at a different point if it stops at a certain point ??
The following is a transcript of the original interview which Sue recorded and edited from about 90 minutes down to about 45 minutes. I have also edited this text which was automatically transcribed from the audio by https://go-transcribe.com
Uncomfortable Questions with your host Sue Grandys. Big questions of ordinary people.
[Sue:] Welcome. This is Uncomfortable Questions. Show number 48. I am your host, Sue Grandys. This show sets out to discover what ordinary people have discovered about life, love, spirituality, consciousness and share their views on the journey they have taken. Sorry this show was so long in coming. I was out of action for a couple of weeks after minor surgery, but I'm back again. Today's interview is with Graviton Ring, as he is known on the web. Age 67, science fiction and story writer and armchair cosmologist. He taught me that I still have a ways to go as an interviewer. His ideas are really out there and hard to put into words. At one point I just scrapped all my questions and just tried to follow him. I thought of all the brilliant questions I should have asked after the interview, but it was great fun and I hope it really makes you think. Enjoy the view of the inside.
[Sue:] Does evil exist?
[Me:] I would say it doesn't exist, as most people think of it. My first thought when I wrote to you was since everyone said Hitler, I was thinking, What about Hitler? That made what he did evil. Essentially, there is no such thing as evil until it's actually done. But what he was trying to do is make something perfect. He was trying to perfect something, which I think is an object of our observation, we are the actual awareness of what's happening in the physical reality. But if we become that physical reality, we make ourselves an object. That was what I was thinking at that time. It's trying to make something perfect in the physical reality.
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/germans-supported-hitler-part-1/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z0L0If9AoC-oTtKZDJ3m8PgkvLq0hXAa/view?usp=sharing
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/germans-supported-hitler-part-2/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AJX8etfo5D5r8olas-VjxiIA69wIIYXG/view?usp=sharing
[Sue:] You think that was his motivation?
[Me:] Oh, I've read all of his papers and all of his speeches, and I was in the Pentagon for 21 months in 1962, in 1963, when JFK was president and they had a Nazi museum. Hitler owned the first electron microscope. He bought it off the inventor, the Nazi membership book. It was like being an Alice in Wonderland. It was like six feet high, about four feet wide and at least a foot thick. And it was the most beautiful red and black leather you could ever imagine. And you open up the pages. And there Adolf Hitler wrote his name in huge letters. It was like he was in some kind of different dimension of reality.
[Sue:] Right. Do you think he even thought about all the death and the killing and if that even occurred to him as being wrong?
[Me:] No, because he thought that was right. He wanted to make something the evil person other than himself, which I think is called projection. Hmm. When a person has this criminal insanity, they have to project that on to someone else. Because how would you live with yourself if you saw yourself as Hitler? You know you couldn't do it. So you have to project that evil onto someone else. And I think he just randomly picked the Jewish people because there was nothing in his philosophy about that up until a certain point where all of his staff was criminally insane.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] And I talked to an older man who was young when Hitler first started, which was like 1921. He was living in Germany, and he said Hitler had a small group of people, less than 50 people. They went from town to town and they had machine guns. And he said that was the greatest thing in the world to have a machine gun. So that was how he got popular, you know? Well, what I think is World War One caused World War two. What happened after World War One is they punished all the enemy, the so-called enemies that were defeated.
[Sue:] Right.
[Me:] And then it builds up, you know, like 20 or 30 years later, all that revenge comes back, Right? And there's another war. Yeah.
[Sue:] So back to evil. And you don't think it exists?
[Me:] Well, I tried to think about why, like, when I was seven years old, I had a near-death experience. A very, very short one. Hmm. But I knew that there were certain people there in my near-death experience. My uncle, who had been killed, like, two years earlier, he was killed in Britain by an in an accident while he was in the U.S. Army. Mm hmm. And he told me things like that were going to happen in the next 20 years. And they all happened.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] So to me, that is our reality. There's a true reality there, an awareness of things as they actually happen. But the physical cosmos is so locked up, it's like 18 billion years or 14 billion years old.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] And nothing new has happened in it. So there has to be a new set of experiences. Every nanosecond there's a reality somewhere. The true reality. There's an infinite set of experiences that never repeat themselves. But everything in the physical cosmos repeats itself for billions and billions of years.
[Sue:] Do you think it's, like, predetermined or predestined?
[Me:] The true reality is not. It's where boredom can't exist. But in the physical reality, there's nothing here but boredom. Because what you look at the night sky, you can be excited, especially if you're a scientist or a cosmologist or an astronomer. The night sky is beautiful and gives all kinds of inspiration that you can study. 14 billion years of history. But it's all a canned bunch of nonsense. It just happened. I think the Big Bang was actually an accident. Two other membranes caused the Big Bang and our visible cosmos was a result. I am not sure if I answered the question.
Dark energy is the product of quantum universe interaction
By Artyom Yurov and Valerian Yurov.
Is the universe a quantum object?
'...we now know that the universe is about 13-14 billion years old. In its early infancy, the universe has undergone a mind-blowingly fast expansion, aptly named “the cosmological inflation” (the term borrowed from the economy). In a fraction of a second, a region of space the size of a pin head and weighing 1 milligram, had exploded in size, forming an entire observable universe. Such a rapid expansion has radically smoothed the distribution of matter in the region, making the universe extremely homogeneous and isotropic. Accidentally, this turned our universe into a relatively simple object of study, named an FLRW universe -- an acronym lovingly assembled out of family names of four mathematicians who first studied such universes: Alexander Friedman (USSR), Georges Lemaître (Belgium), Howard Robinson (USA) and Arthur Walker (UK)...'
[Sue:] No, but you keep opening new ones.
[Me:] Oh, I was afraid of that.
[Sue:] Okay, then let's go for reality. You said there's a true reality. What do you mean by that?
[Me:] Well, at first I'd say about the past two months, my ideas have changed about that. I was thinking that the physical cosmos has this true reality in it, that everything in the physical reality could change because of this true reality. But now I don't. I don't think that anymore. I think the physical reality is just stuck in this huge 13 billion light year egg. So I think reality is there's a nonphysical awareness that we are actually experiencing, but it happens so fast, an infinite set of experiences. You can't put that into a human intelligence. Mm hmm. But it's happening. Something other than our physical cosmos exists, which I call the the Infinite Mind or the infinite universe. And it's actually a concept now in cosmology. Andrei Linde. https://profiles.stanford.edu/andrei-linde The most, I think, well respected cosmologist today who is writing calls it the Eternal Universe. There's an infinite fractal set of potential big bangs, and all of them have spawned in the past forever, and they'll spawn in the future forever. And we're stuck in this one little part of the infinite universe that we call a universe. But it's really just one cosmos.
[Sue:] So you think we're just in one little piece of it?
[Me:] Well, it's not even a piece. It's an infinite set of broken pieces. So that's why my my whole movie script is based on that idea that the Big Bang was an accident. It broke the grand unity. All the scientists today are looking for this grand, unified theory.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] They have to go back to the Big Bang, because that's where I think there was a relative sense of something at the point of the Big Bang. But our Big bang just created one small slice of reality. It is a reality, but it's artificial, meaning that it's our sensory perception. We can see it and touch it.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. Why do you say artificial.
[Me:] For example Anything that humans build I would call it an artificial structure.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] Nature didn't build it, but humans built it. So whatever was built out of the Big Bang was built by what I consider now to be a pure accident. Two other membranes, or how many other collisions might have occurred at once, whether it was just one big bang, which I consider now the string theory as an infinite set of strings, the smallest concept that you can imagine is much, much smaller than the Planck's constant, which originally, sometime in the 20th century, Planck discovered that we will never be able to look at anything with scientific instruments or whatever, you know, physically beyond Planck's constant. But what I'm saying is beyond Planck's constant, there's an infinitesimally small item which I call the graviton ring, a closed string of energy. And when that close string of energy breaks, it becomes open and sticks on to something. And then time happens because there's two observers of that. There's a person who sees the object and there's the object itself. So my question right now for me and in my own podcast is can the universe observe me? If there's an infinite mind that we all share, it can't belong to anyone. It can't be divided up. It's intangible. So does it observe me? And I would say, yes. It observes everything, Everything physical.
[Sue:] Is that your image of a god force?
[Me:] I wouldn't call it that because there's just like a billion misconceptions of god. And that was what my my last podcast was trying to say, that if there is any type of God, it can only be that nonphysical awareness, but it can't be individualized. There can't be an individual God. There could be the other observer would be this nonphysical awareness, but that other observer could never own the awareness. And there's no such thing as omnipotence. There's nothing was ever created and nothing is ever destroyed. It just changes shape. And when it changes, that's when time becomes a factor that whoever observes the change becomes Einstein's observer. And what I believe is the observer and the physical thing that the observer is looking at. They're both the same thing in sort of like the simplest Zen Buddhism of Alan Watts: you are the experience and you are the experiencer. They cannot be separate. It's like the yin and yang. They're connected. So my last podcast, I really opened my own mind to what I think about this is that there has to be two observers for anything to exist, but there is an infinite set of observers, and then there's an infinite set of the observed. The observed is the physical, tangible stuff, just as real is as the observer. But they can't be separated.
[Sue:] OK. I'm trying to get my mind around it. I'm not sure I've got that yet. I'm trying to picture how you view them. The universe or the eternal universe?
[Me:] Yeah. The infinite mind cannot observe itself because it's an observer. It's not the observed.
[Sue:] What is the infinite mind?
[Me:] It's how we are aware. How we are aware right now of anything. We are that infinite mind. That's the awareness that we all share. But it doesn't have an existence, so to speak. It's not tangible. It's a how and not a who.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] Our physical presence is a who, but there is no who in the awareness. It's just how. How we are aware of who we are.
[Sue:] So what you picture outside of the physical universe, then you said that there's this awareness.
[Me:] Well, the awareness itself, it doesn't have a physical location or anything. It is everywhere. It is everything.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] But the physical cosmos, to me, it's like a the tiniest electron compared to the cosmos itself. So our cosmos is the tiniest thing in the universe. There's a literal, physical, tangible universe outside of our cosmos that is also infinite. It may not have anything similar to our cosmos. It may have completely different laws of physics. It may have no laws of physics, but it has some physical tangibility that makes it an observed event or an observed what's called now information. The current scientists don't say there's anything other than information in the physical reality. We're observing the information in the first place, and when that information becomes something solid or tangible, it just carries its information in that form.
[Sue:] Hmm.
[Me:] The way I use an example is there's an infinite set of continuums. You can define yourself as a total freethinker. You can define yourself on any continuum. You can define yourself as an infinite mind with absolute intangibility. Or you can go along that whole continuum down to a you are a physical body with no intangible stuff, and that in there's usually atheists at that end will say, there's nothing intangible. My physical body, when I die, I die. And that's the end of it. And the other end is where the infinite mind and everything is intangible. You might be Hindu or a Buddhist or some eastern religion or even some contemplative Catholics would say the Holy Spirit or whatever their concept is, doesn't come into reality. Only something a messiah like Christ would come into reality in the physical reality. But the Holy Spirit could never be made out of a physical thing. So there's always that continuum. But that's not the only continuum. There's a billion other ways to think of yourself as something, star stuff. As Carl Sagan used to say, We're all made out of star stuff.
[Sue:] So you think these are choices that we make? It's just a million ways to view ourselves.
[Me:] Yeah, it's how we see ourselves. It's only a how. Yeah. The continuums are only a how to observe yourself.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] How you choose to observe yourself, though, changes everything. I'm not an atheist. I'm not a theist. I'm not an agnostic. I consider myself an absolute freethinker. There is nothing that I cannot observe. And there's nothing that I can't conceive of myself as being in the observed. So I could be anything. I could be a particle that has no mass. I believe that Alan Watts had at least one thing right. Which was: that we are the whole universe. You can't separate yourself from any part of the physical cosmos or anything else that's beyond that. Where else would you go?
[Sue:] So do you think what we experience is a continuum? You know, you talked about all the infinite possibilities, and this universe is just this tiny little speck. But is this kind of a continuum or are we still having multiple parallel universes all at the same time and we may be jumping between them or something like that?
[Me:] Oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah, I. Think what happens is in this inflationary cosmology is any of the big bangs will just continue to expand so they all expand into infinity. An infinite number have already expanded into infinity and our physical cosmos will also expand into infinity. But they don't necessarily collide with each other. And I would say from our evidence, they don't collide with each other for billions of years. There's not been a collision that we know of in our physical cosmos for 13 billion years. So the chances are that the other infinite set of physical membranes can coincide with each other because their physics are very different. So we're already there. We already have the infinite set of expanded big bangs or however they, you know, the physical sets of membranes expand or conceive of themselves. They've already expanded. So we're already present in that infinity.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. But do you think we're kind of contained to this one?
[Me:] No. Like I said, I think ours is just, it's been talking to itself for 13 billion years.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] And it's time that we matured out of that concept and realized that there's an infinite set of other physical membranes. And there's probably a lot of other extraterrestrials with sentience other than ourselves just in our own physical cosmos.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] Any of those physical cosmos would all have the same basic observer, which is a how and not a who. We're all aware of the physical set.
[Sue:] But you think we can cross between them? Could we experience another universe?
[Me:] That's what I'm saying. We already do.
[Sue:] We really do. We just don't know.
[Me:] Well, no, you can't translate it because how would you put it into a human form or human intelligence? There is an infinite set already existing, and they're infinitely changing. Every smaller than a nanosecond. There's an infinite set of infinite stuff happening all the time. It's impossible as a human, to ever put a single word or picture on any of that.
[Sue:] Well, then what is a human?
[Me:] I would say it's an observed portion of our physical cosmos. But that's why I mentioned Alan Watts, because his whole idea was very simple. We are the entire set of everything. We cannot separate ourselves from it. Even if you just consider it as the physical cosmos, which is 13 billion light years across or whatever it is.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] You still can't separate yourself from that physical cosmos. So either you are the whole thing or you don't exist.
[Sue:] Right. But you can't experience the whole cosmos, can you?
[Me:] I would say yes. You can. You can experience it as an awareness, but you can't translate it into human intelligence.
[Sue:] As a human. Why do you think we are this little limited piece? You know, we can only carve out so much?
[Me:] Oh, as a physical aspect, because this is what I've just come across in my last podcast. That is the tiniest aspect of both the physical cosmos and the intangible universe. Every single aspect of it is an observer and and observed. It's all integrated. It's not like I am a single human observing a 13 billion light year cosmos. It's more like I'm an infinite mind, observing every single piece of the whole infinity.
[Sue:] But most humans can only tap into such a tiny portion of that. Why do you think that is?
[Me:] Yeah, that's why I mentioned the continuum. If you think of yourself as only that physical human body, you can't shut off your infinite awareness. The people who do that say that I'm only a physical body, and when I die, I die. They just love Carl Sagan Or, you know, somebody who shows them this infinite set. Well, how do you separate yourself from that infinite set?
[Sue:] But it seems to me that at least from our personal awarenesses, we don't expand well, you know, you can only expand so far. And then it's like, oh, I got to go eat, you know? So there does seem to be some limits, whether they're self-imposed or not. And I'm kind of curious, why do you think that is?
[Me:] Oh, well, it is because it is. You know, that's one of the continuums. One of the points in the continuum is that you can sort of like drop out. You can have your privacy, you can hide somewhere, but it's only one set of one part of one continuum.
[Sue:] Do you think that's a good thing that we can you know, drop out, privacy, that's a good thing?
[Me:] Yeah. One of my concepts is. As in the infinite set of observers and observed, there is no such thing as polarity. In the physical reality. There's polarity because things can get destroyed physically, but in an intangible awareness, nothing is created and nothing is destroyed as that observer. So there's no polarity in the observer, except that you can't separate the observer from the observed. So you still have to respect the observed. In other words, you have to keep order and morality in your physical life, even though it's not separate from the rest of the infinity, it's still the only thing that we have as humans. So it's extremely important. That is. Oh, shoot, I forgot what the question was.
[Sue:] I think we're so far from the question. It's like, let's just keep going, see where it goes. I guess I was still trying to understand what being human is in this info.
[Me:] Oh, yeah, it being human is a result of the Big Bang. Everything that we know of physically, including our humanity, is a result of the Big Bang. But it's one physical aspect, a tiny physical speck in the entire infinite set of things.
[Sue:] Right. But this awareness that is in this human body. Well, yeah. Well, how do you view that?
[Me:] Well, it's not in the human body. That human body is the observed portion of the union, and there's a consciousness that is attached to it. Everyone, everyone who says that they're only a human body, how do they know that? They have to have a point of view that observes that human body, which is a thought experiment which doesn't need to prove or disprove it, can't have a prove or disprove. How are you aware that you have a human body if you're human? If the body was all by itself somewhere, it wouldn't be aware of itself. So there is an awareness of being human. It's just for some reason, we're stuck and thinking that that's the only aspect of ourselves.
[Sue:] And do you think we're individual consciousnesses? Well, I think I am Me. But is that true? Am I separate? Is my consciousness separate? You know.
[Me:] Everyone is an observed aspect of reality and everyone is an observing aspect of reality. So we observe ourselves and we observe everything else. What I'm saying, though, is the individuation of a human or however you perceive yourself as being as a separate entity that's a part of the observed or the physical or tangible set, but they can't be separated from the awareness because if you didn't have the intangible awareness of yourself as being tangible, you wouldn't even know that you exist.
[Sue:] Hmm. But I guess I'm now trying to go after the awareness part of it. It's like, what is that awareness? Are there all kinds of individual consciousnesses running around, or are they all part of one super mind or?
[Me:] No, I would say it's only a how. It's. It's not an object. If it were an object, it could be observed. So the observer or the awareness or any type of sentience, it has no physical aspect to itself except in the sense of being observed. It can't separate itself from the observation.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] So to try to pinpoint it, to make a place or a person or a thing out of the awareness is impossible.
[Sue:] Okay. I could take that so many ways. Trying to decide if I should go back to the questions or pursue this some more. Well, let's. Let's go back to those a little bit. Just to get a little sense of you. What makes you the saddest about life?
[Me:] I think seeing other people destroy themselves in some way. A lot of the people that I interviewed for drug abuse treatment outcome and who in my interviewing in my nuclear family, for example, my sister had a child with Leukodystrophy who died at the age of three and. She just went into the whole drug abuse thing and was basically trying to kill herself because she couldn't live with that idea. And I met a lot of people in the drug abuse community that had that same kind of exact same scenario. You know, they had a child with Down's Syndrome or they had their own profound neurological damage.
[Sue:] So a person destroying themselves makes you sad.
[Me:] Well, trying to destroy themselves. I don't think it's possible to be destroyed because we are the awareness. Essentially, we are the observer.
[Sue:] So what you think is sad is just the suffering or that they don't realize there is more?
[Me:] I'm not sure. I think it's because they're focusing only on the physical aspect of life. And that's why I said what I think evil might be is trying to perfect the physical in any way. It doesn't matter if it's Hitler or who it is. If you focus only on perfecting the physical, which has to be perfected, you have to address it. You have to make it the best it can be. But if you see that as the only thing that exists is the physical, then eventually you end up into some kind of end time philosophy. You know, the world is going to end because you can't isolate that physical aspect of yourself and say that's all there is to it.
[Sue:] Don't you think that's hard?
[Me:] It's impossible.
[Sue:] But hard to step outside of the physical. But yeah, you know, I think people, they do get trapped in that. But I think it's insanely hard to see beyond that. We're so into the physical life.
[Me:] Yeah, I don't think you can separate yourself from the physical life, That's why I've donated my whole body to at least two or three different organizations. Because, you know, I see my physicality as something that's part of the whole. It doesn't really belong to me. It doesn't belong in some casket or some grave somewhere. It needs to be in a test tube or in a medical school cadaver or on the plastination exhibit so people can see what human reality is actually like,
[Sue:] Okay, so then what makes you happiest about life?
[Me:] Kind of the same. The idea that if a person thinks of themselves as being able to exist as any part of any continuum, they have some freedom of thought.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] Because what I see, I only go out into the community when I shop or visit my family. But every single time I go out, there's an obsessed person there. You know, I'm like a magnet for these people. It's been happening my whole life, and I'm sure everybody has the same experience. You go out there and there's somebody there says, Oh, the world is going and the world is going to end. Jesus is coming back. And, you know, if you lived in some place in the Middle East or Far East, they would say the same thing. The Mahdi, you know, is coming back in Islam to kill all the unbelievers and all this blabbing about the end times.
[Sue:] I'm still going to keep asking this because I'm still ... How do you think you can step out of that? How do you step out of that physicality only?
[Me:] I think it's just realizing that there are continuums. The person who really put all the terminology on this for me, about a little over ten years ago, I met Phyllis Atwater, who's a near-death researcher.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] And she said that near-death experiences are not necessary to change all of the things that happen in the most profound near-death experience can happen in everyday life. All you have to do is realize that you have this sort of continuum. You can change anything you want in those continuums as the observer, but trying to change it as the physical observed part of it, it has to be done. But like you say, it's so slow, slow, so tedious to do it from the physical point of view.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] If you have the idea that you can change something about your life profoundly, change what you believe or what you think or how you see other people, then you already have an infinite set of choices. You have a literal free thought.
[Sue:] Hmm. I guess the thing I keep wrestling with, though, is is the how. Because it just seems so hard. Unless you directly experience something like a near-death experience or something that kind of frees you from the physical, it's really hard to believe in it.
[Me:] Yeah, that's my point, though. There's nothing to believe in. You already have it now. That's, I think, another definition of evil, I might add, would be the person who wants to put all kinds of crappy nonsense religious bullshit and stuff on the physical and nonphysical reality. It is what it is. It doesn't change. You don't have to die or go to heaven or believe in Christ or believe in anything except pay attention. Pay attention to your awareness of everything and pay attention to yourself as an individual.
[Sue:] Hmm. So what do you think happens after your physical body dies? What do you think happens to your awareness?
[Me:] Absolutely nothing. It's exactly the same as it always was and always will be right now. That's my point. And I'm not saying that any kind of ritual or any kind of religion is bad. Just the opposite. I think most people couldn't survive without some dogmatic beliefs. Mm hmm. They can't do what I do as a hobby or as an almost as a non thought. I can conceive of myself as absolutely free. Most people can't. I can't even imagine what would make people do that. But if they're in a culture where if they drop out and say they don't believe in Catholicism, if they're in a literal community like a monk or a Catholic Convent or something, and they say they don't believe they may get thrown out. And there's, I think, a parallel in reality, too, because there are many communities and all these ethnic enclaves where if you deny whatever that ethnic enclave supports, you may be out.
[Sue:] Why do you think people put those limitations on? There are all these religious dogmas and belief structures.
[Me:] Yeah, I would say it's just because the simple mistake is it's so easy to make, you know, that there is nothing except the physical and you are nothing except yourself as an individual. And once you do that, then you have an infinite set of mistakes available to you. And
everything you can believe or conceive of from that point on is going to be an illusion.
[Sue:] Hmm. So does anything scare you?
[Me:] I don't think so. No. No, because I've seen everything happen to everyone. Everything that could happen. I've seen it happen.
[Sue:] The wisdom of age.
[Me:] In the first. Well, the first seven years of my life was World War Two. Right. They didn't censor anything. And there was no censorship possible because there was no TV. There was basically no movie houses that owned everything, you know, like owned all the information. There was no information. News giant like Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner to manage the news. You just went to some church or some local group who had the movies and you saw literally right in front of you the 50 million people being murdered by Hitler, by whoever. So I've seen everything. Maybe that's forced some of my silly ideas, too. But I think also I'm probably correct in saying that we're an intangible observer of all of that.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. Do you think your life has a meaning or purpose? Your personal life?
[Me:] In a sense, yeah. I think there is. There's an aspect of life that I call absolute goodness, and that's probably the purpose of life. But how to achieve that? I think if you try to achieve it directly, you sort of get into all this egotism, like just being a US Congressman or one of these Christian evangelists on TV or something. You just know that they're going to go down the tubes one of these times because they base it all on their ego rather than common awareness.
[Sue:] So what do you think Good is? This absolute goodness.
[Me:] Well, I would say it's the absence of the polarity in the observer. The observer doesn't become the observed, ever. If you become the observed, I think that's where you lose your capacity as being intangible and being a how, and you start being something that tampers with other people. That's where I think problems start happening.
[Sue:] Right. But goodness is what, the freedom to be what?
[Me:] In fact, I've never thought of that, actually. But I would say from the point of view that we're talking right at this moment, the only aspect of goodness that could possibly exist in my little concept here is for me to show other people how they're able to be free in their thoughts or free as an observer.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] And then there isn't anything that goes wrong in that set because it's intangible. It's awareness. It isn't something that has an aspect of polarity. That doesn't mean you cannot abandon the physical in that scenario, or else you end up like Timothy Leary and all those idiots in the 1960s who basically killed themselves on drugs, you know, just went about saying, well, the physical doesn't matter. I don't have to do anything. I can drop out, you know, like Timothy's, you know, I love Timothy Leary and the people who love him. And I think he could have been and it was in part a great scientist, but he lost it because of trying to abandon the physical. To abandon your physical reality is a great mistake.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] It's essentially the other part of who you are. We are the observer. We are the observed. We are the experiencer. We are the experience. They can't be separated.
[Sue:] I'm looking through my questions going kind of what what makes sense here anymore? We've gone into another universe. Do you think love exists in this scenario? Is love real?
[Me:] Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
[Sue:] And what would that be? What is love?
[Me:] I think it's just the bond that you have with identifying with everyone who is an observer.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] It's sharing of every observation that you can make. And it translates into the physical. Everything does. There is a tangible set of love, and But that. It's like you're saying it's so hard for humans to achieve that.
[Sue:] Mm hmm.
[Me:] Ego. The the need, the physical deprivation, the the whole human, huge set of human population. It makes it too difficult to do it from a physical point of view. There's nothing really to share as a physical entity or any physical aspect. You're the observed rather than the observer. If you lose your position as an observer, then you've already lost everything that you have.
[Sue:] Hmm. I'm trying to think of. Then what do we have to do as the observer?
[Me:] There isn't anything else to do except to, you know, be aware or to observe. You know, and. And you can't abandon anything that you're able to do. To do something to help other people or help yourself be healthy or whatever. All those things have to be done because they're an equal part of how and who we are.
[Sue:] Hmm. I'm so curious as to why why all of this? Why the human, why the physical, Why the you know, you talk about this universe and the membranes. What's the membrane?
[Me:] It's just an aspect of the physical set. It can be anything in our cosmos. It's a very specific thing. The laws of physics find every little puny little thing all the way down to a quark. But a quark to me is a huge thing. It's not even real in the laws of physics, but it's still the hugest thing to me. A quark is not tiny at all. There's still an infinite set of dimensions all the way up to the quark from, say, the tiniest energy string or whatever is the tiniest pixel in the whole physical cosmos. It's not the quark, that's for sure.
Quarks: What are they?
[Sue:] Mm hmm. Do you ever contemplate the why? Why all of this? And what's in what's outside of it?
[Me:] There can't be a why. Because unless you say it didn't exist forever, then you have to add whys. Why does it exist?
[Sue:] You're saying it simply is.
[Me:] Yeah. The Tao is what it is. It's always existed. It is. The reason for everything doesn't end. It is everything possible. And everything actual. And also everything impossible. And everything, you know, not actual. So there isn't any why because there's no beginning and there's no ending. There's not even a dimension that you can put on the infinite mind.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. So why do you think we ask why all the time? As humans, we are whys, you know, It's always why why why.
[Me:] Yeah. If you have anything to do with a young child, you know, there's a why, there's a whole year of why why.
[Sue:] Right. I mean, there's that curiosity. So why do you think that is?
[Me:] It's just a learning set of the physical reality, I guess. Okay.
[Sue:] So if you could change anything about humanity, would you change anything?
[Me:] Oh, of course. You know, you would have to want to change all of the problems, especially right now. And in fact, I'd say for at least 20 years, more than 20 years, I'd say sometime in the late sixties and late seventies, I was studying at the University of Pittsburgh and realized that there is a statistical reality, which I consider now to be genetic, that there's a hundred million criminally insane men in the world, and maybe 1 million of them are being treated well in American prisons and jails and, you know, halfway houses or whatever being treated medically. They receive everything that they need to keep themselves away from their criminal insanity. But there's 99 million others who are Saddam Hussein and Uday Hussein. You know, they're in office, they're in power. They're all over the world. And there's a violent crime every 12 seconds or something. And these 99% of the people do 0% of the crime and 1% of the people do 100% of the crimes.
[Sue:] Why are there so many criminally insane men then?
[Me:] I think there's an infinite set of reasons, but the main reason is 40,000 years of alcohol abuse and an infinite set of other forms of substance abuse. Every culture has a profoundly stupid substance abuse, at least one substance that totally destroys their mental and physical health.
[Sue:] So we're not taking care of the physical very well, are we?
[Me:] No, and I'm not sure what the answer to that is. I I'm sure it's good medical science in our cosmos, but we're just, like I said, one tiny little cosmos, one tiny little earth and one tiny little portion of a 13 billion light- year thing. So that's why I say it's extremely important to pay attention to every tiny little physical thing, every piece of chemistry that goes into your body and every other aspect of the physical is extremely important.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. I can see with your background on substance abuse that it would give you quite a view of that. You've seen the the real bad side of it.
[Me:] Yeah. And I would say it was demonized beyond the need to demonize it. You know, these people and even the the prisoners that are that were in prison for life that I interviewed, they're the most gentle, beautiful, loving people you could ever imagine. They just know themselves, the two prisoners in for life that I interviewed. They both said the same thing at different times, and I don't think they knew each other at all. That if they let me out of this prison in less than 24 hours, I'll be back doing all of the same things that got me here. So to me, they're the most enlightened people on earth.
[Sue:] Hmm. Wow. So if you could change anything about yourself, would you change anything?
[Me:] I'd definitely be rich, with money. I mean, I'm rich in every other way except money. I'm not sure I would really want that because I lived in Palm Beach, Florida, for in 1984, for about a year. And I worked for a millionaire who sold insurance to billionaires. So I was in the homes of billionaires all the time. Mm hmm. I am a billionaire. I'm on welfare, food stamps. But I am a billionaire. I have the privacy. I have the mental peace of mind that billionaires don't have.
[Sue:] Mm hmm. But a little money might be nice.
[Me:] Oh, yeah. If my movie script sells, I'll definitely do something with my money. I would pay other people's bills. My daughter and my sister.
[Sue:] Right. So, overall, are you happy with your life and what you've done?
[Me:] In a certain sense, yeah. Physically, I could have done a billion things differently, and then I would have had a billion different regrets. So I kind of agree that you can't regret anything because first of all, you can't go back in time to do it any other way. And if you didn't do it that way, you wouldn't have learned the lesson.
[Sue:] Gee, is there somewhere you want to go from here, though, with with the rest of your life?
[Me:] I literally could live another 40 years. So physically, I would want to stay healthy for those 40 years and try to, you know, like I said, get some of the cash that I never had really much of during my lifetime.
[Sue:] Do you have any final thoughts and advice that you'd like to share with others?
[Me:] Wow. Just keep the focus on how you are. We always say how you are. You never walk up to someone on the street and say, Who are you? You know, they'll feel threatened. But if you go up and say, How are you? Everybody says, Fine. How are you?
[Sue:] Mm hmm. And are they? Good.
[Me:] Oh, I think so. You know, that's essentially, I think a better definition of how we exist is how we are.
[Sue:] Hmm. Wow. Oh, you're most engaging. Thank you.
[Me:] Thank you.
Bye.