Scott Onstott Exploring Sacred Geometry

[Speaker 3] (0:00 - 0:07) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth Podcast, hosted by Joel Raffidi and Jurassimos. [Speaker 2] (0:12 - 1:49) What's up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 135 of the Here for the Truth Podcast. I'm Joel Raffidi. I've got my co-host, Jurassimos, with me as always. Another extremely valuable conversation today with Scott Onstott, diving deep into the exploration of sacred geometry and touching on some of the findings in his five-and-a-half-hour docuseries, Secrets in Plain Sights, which has gone quite viral since 2010. Many people on this path would be familiar with it. Right before we jump into that conversation with Scott, I just want to highlight, if you're a listener of this podcast, if you find yourself engaged and intrigued and interested by our conversations and what we do, and you want to take the next step, we do have a membership community. It's called Friends of the Truth. Honestly, there's individuals in that space, incredible human beings, so open, so real, so genuine, so connected to their own inner purpose and inner calling and climbing their own unique mountain. So if you want to feel inspired and, I guess, stoke your own inner fire, then we encourage you to check out Friends of the Truth. And actually, we're now offering a seven-day free trial. So you can go to friendsofthetruth.co and simply press a button, start your trial, you'll be invited to the community, and you'll get six educational and connected calls a month, three of them with us, and you get the chance to interact with us as well. Anything to add? No. [Speaker 3] (1:49 - 2:09) Just come hang out with us on Telegram and have some laughs and engage in a bunch of different subjects. But thanks to everyone for listening. We just, obviously, we couldn't keep doing this if it wasn't for you and your interest in the podcast, and we're just really, really grateful, and we're just going to keep going and having these very fascinating conversations with people all around the world. [Speaker 2] (2:09 - 2:10) Yeah. [Speaker 3] (2:10 - 2:12) Absolutely. Here is Scott. [Speaker 2] (2:13 - 3:07) All right, everybody, welcome to episode 135 of the Here for the Truth podcast. Today, we have a truly incredible human being with us, Scott Onstott. He wrote, narrated, and single-handedly produced a five-and-a-half-hour online documentary series called Secrets in Plain Sight, which explores patterns in art, architecture, urban design, and the cosmos. This led to the realization that Sacred Geometry is what underlies all these patterns, and consequently, Scott co-founded sacredgeometryacademy.com, where Sacred Geometry is used as a vehicle for inner transformation. He's also written 10 esoteric books and two dozen exoteric books training architects and engineers. Scott has created numerous video courses, has taught in several universities, and began his career with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of California. Scott, thanks for being here for the truth. [Speaker 1] (3:08 - 3:11) Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. [Speaker 2] (3:12 - 3:31) Likewise, man. One way which we always like to kick off these podcasts, particularly with new guests, is we really just want to get into a little bit of your personal hero's journey, some of the major rites of passage that really formed your character and have catalyzed your, I guess, authentic path in life. If you could share those with us. [Speaker 1] (3:32 - 10:41) Sure. I'm going to go all the way back for a moment to my birth, in that I was born with only one limb, my hand. I'm missing my right hand and both of my legs below the knee. I grew up with a different perspective than most people. I learned from an early age that I'm not my body, I'm more than my body. My body is defective, but that doesn't make me as a person defective. That has always put me out as a little bit of an outsider. Yeah. I think I'm grateful for that shift in perspective from the beginning, because it has allowed me to look outside the box maybe more easily than it would come to most people. So, my journey with Secrets in Plain Sight began more about 2009 when I was 39 years old. I moved to this remote island with my wife called Cortez Island in British Columbia. We had lived in San Francisco Bay Area previously, and I worked in downtown San Francisco. So, it was a huge change for me. And then living in this remote place allowed me to really just expand my realm of possibility in my mind. I think a lot of times when people are living in cities, you're influenced in a very subtle way, both in a gross and a subtle way, by the city that you're living in, by the thought forms of people around you, by the advertisements on the bus, by people on the subway. And if you're fortunate enough to get away from all of that, you start to be able to hear your own, think your own thoughts a little bit more, rather than reacting to the forces that are around you. And so, I kind of look back on that as an important, spacious place that I was in. And what happened is that I became more open-minded, and I'm surrounded here by a bunch of artists and hippies and malcontents and people at the end of the road, which is what Cortez Island is like. And it caused me to be open to ideas that I'm sure I wouldn't have been open to working as an architect in San Francisco. And so, at that time, around 2009, I discovered this woman online who was a psychic, and she has a very professional demeanor, so I was comfortable with that. But she was able to tell me things about myself by talking to my higher selves, my spirit guides and so on, if you believe in that. And they were kind of unanimous that I was going to be making this documentary film. And I was like, what are you talking about, a documentary film? I teach architects and engineers. And she said, well, you have to figure out what that will be about, but it's very important for your spiritual journey. And so, I took that mission seriously, like, I'm going to do this. And at that time, I had a lot of video courses that were selling on DVD-ROM, and that was giving me enough of an income where I could, and my wife was working, so I could take time off of work. And I spent an entire year developing Secrets in Plain Sight, Volume 1. And most of that time was production, post-production. There was just a month or less when I wrote the script. And I don't know if all the viewers have seen that or heard of that show that I made back in 2010, when it came out. But it's really packed with information, just tons of information in that. And a lot of people watch it many times to get more out of it. And all of that information, a lot of it was things I'd read in the previous 10 years. And since I'd moved to Cortez Island and read a lot of interesting books. But a lot of the connections were like following my own inspiration or higher self or something, where I would just get a gut feeling that I should look into something. And sometimes it's really amazing what I found and what I presented in the show, but I don't really claim that I'm the author of that, in a sense, because I think when people are being really creative, if they're honest, they don't know where their ideas are coming from. They just get a new idea that they had no idea before, it just came into their field. And then what usually happens is your ego stands in and says, Hey, I'm great, look at that idea I just had, isn't that great? But I don't think it was me so much as I was being fed a little bit of information from higher selves or spirit guides to create that particular documentary. And when I'm in that mode of creation, a lot of synchronicities will happen to me, strangely. I'll be noticing these things, like what is going on with the number 33? I'm seeing it all over the place. And then there's other times of my life where I don't see any synchronicities, and it's more mundane. So when I get in that creative mode, I feel like the synchronicities are a kind of messaging system or signaling system that tells me, Hey, you're on the right track, keep going with this. And it just gives me a sense of confirmation. But I think it's important not to go crazy with synchronicities because it is possible to go and see them everywhere, and that's not good. [Speaker 3] (10:42 - 10:54) I have a quick question. I want to ask this first. If you met someone on the side of the road and they had no idea what sacred geometry was, what would you say to them? How would you explain it? [Speaker 1] (10:55 - 14:23) I would say that sacred geometry is an often overlooked aspect of geometry. It's the qualitative aspect. It's the aspect that's available to all conscious beings. It's how you feel inside about that geometry. It's how the quality of it. It's like when you bite into a piece of chocolate, there's a taste. What is that taste? That's something that there's a qualia to that, that only conscious beings know. It's hard to write down. We can use adjectives and stuff, but it never really would convey it. Or when you're looking at the sunset and you have a sense of aesthetic beauty, it's that qualia that sacred geometry is trying to capture. It's the philosophical, it's the aspect of geometry that leads to philosophy. Now, normally with geometry, when you say, hey, how do you feel about geometry? Most people immediately say, hey, I don't like that, it was something I did in school. And what they're talking about is more the quantitative aspect of geometry, the measurement, the theorems, trigonometry, and so on. Because that aspect requires kind of left brain cognition, a focus, focused attention. There's also another use of geometry, which is more the mathematical use, the use of geometry as symbol, as proof, and so on. And so there's really three aspects of geometry. But I think it's important to realize that they're all the same geometry in the end. It's just depending on how you approach it, which mode of cognition you use to approach it. And I find, and I'm kind of unique, I think, in this way, or very rare, in that I love calculus, math, the analytical aspect of that. And I've spent my career teaching CAD and BIM to architects and engineers and using geometry all the time in the quantitative way. And I discovered accidentally the qualitative aspect of geometry. Because I'd used geometry so much, I would draw for a hobby. I would draw crop circles in the early 2000s on my computer in AutoCAD. And it's quite a geometric challenge sometimes to take a photo of something and turn it into geometry. But that's when it started to really affect me. Like I would start to feel the geometry. And in some way, it sort of mysteriously upgraded me, I think. I think that it's available to anyone who uses geometry and delves into geometry that you get. If you're open, you have to be open to it, though. You have to allow this mysterious process to work on your psyche. [Speaker 3] (14:24 - 14:24) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (14:25 - 14:35) And yeah, I think it inspires the spirit of philosophy in your soul when you're getting into that. [Speaker 2] (14:35 - 15:49) Yeah. I think, I guess, geometry would be exoteric. And when we talk about sacred geometry, it's more of an esoteric kind of understanding. And I love what you said before, also, about your creative process and the inspiration that came with Secrets in Plain Sight. Because I think there's a Jungfrau quote. I don't know what exactly, but it's like, creativity doesn't come from within us. It encapsulates us or imbues us as an external force that captures us, so to speak. And that's definitely, in my own process, the experience as well. And for anyone that's seen Secrets of Plain Sight, the breadth and magnitude of the information that's presented in there, it's just ridiculous, man. It's absolutely crazy how deep you went in that docuseries. And it is absolutely mind-blowing. I, in fact, haven't even finished it myself. I'm a couple hours in, but there's so much there. And I do want to touch on that and explore some of those concepts together with you. But I guess the first thing that I really want to address here is, how can sacred geometry be used as a vessel for inner transformation? There's obviously many paths to this, Jay. And sacred geometry seems to have its own clear path that many people seem to traverse to awaken the inner realms. So I'm wondering if we can go into a bit more detail in that regard. [Speaker 1] (15:50 - 18:48) Yeah, so geometry turns out to be a vehicle. And it's a very, very efficient vehicle. Because when you focus on geometry of all subjects, you're focusing on the language that consciousness uses to build the universe. And geometry is like numbers expression in space. But I'm going back to Pythagoras here, where he said, all is number, or Plato. And these philosophers knew about this aspect, this qualitative aspect of geometry. And I think today, with physics and so on, we've studied reality to such a level, the visible world to such a level, that we can... Some of the smartest physicists will say it's all geometry. It's all... When you think about the orbital structure of the hydrogen atom, by varying these three different quantum numbers, you get a discrete number of different orbital patterns. And each one is a pure geometry. Technically, it's a probability distribution of the electron orbital cloud. But when you look at it, it's a beautiful, sacred geometry. And so if you believe that everything is made out of the visible world that we can weigh and measure, like in science, then everything is made out of atoms or energy, or perhaps dark matter and dark energy as well, which we can neither weigh nor measure. But we can see its effect on the visible matter. And so at the end of the day, I think our physicists would agree that it's all geometry. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it. And so when you... You can actually experience this qualitative aspect of geometry on a piece of paper with a pencil and a ruler and a compass. It's so simple. And you can feel what these foundational creative elements are like. The vesica, pisces, or piscus is like the simplest move. It's two circles. The center of one of them is on the circumference of the other. And it's from this that you can generate all kinds of geometric forms. Yeah, I guess I'm kind of getting off track to your question. How can I tie that? [Speaker 2] (18:48 - 18:57) Well, my question was, how can individuals use sacred geometry as a path to inner transformation, to awakening the inner realms? [Speaker 1] (18:57 - 22:25) Okay, so when you deal with geometry, you're tapping into the most bedrock aspect of the visible universe. And that's why it's a vehicle for inner transformation, because you can take your consciousness on these roads, the same roads that were used to generate the universe, the deepest layer of reality. And then you can go, go, go as far as you can until you reach a point of the end of your knowledge or the end of your patience or the end of your attention. And then there will come a moment when you surrender and you let go and you kind of release. And it's in that moment that your consciousness can transcend the boundary of your mind and go into a vaster space and have a numinous experience. And it's different for everyone, but you come back from that brief experience altered in some way, changed, relaxed. Sometimes people have insights into their lives, into the things that concern them personally, because you've just kind of given it all to the universe and become receptive to whatever you're hearing from that, from your innermost depths, from your inner self, from your inner healer. And what's amazing to me is that we can just focus on geometry, which has very little baggage to it, and you can get people to go really deeply inside of themselves. And then after we have this experience, we share. And this is guided by my partner Jeff Fitzpatrick, who's very skilled in all of the different modalities he's learned in his life. He's very talented with holding the space and guiding people. And we have a special one-way kind of sharing, where you don't have to share, you can be quiet, you don't have to say anything. But if you want to, you can just say whatever's come up for you in this experience. And sometimes people have profound transformative realizations. And at the end of the day, when you see what can happen with people, you realize geometry itself, the particulars of the construction that you drew or whatever, it doesn't matter. What matters is that transformation that happens. But I also kind of fall in love with the geometry for the amazing kind of vehicle that it is. Just like you might fall in love with your car. Some people are into cars, some people aren't into cars. But the purpose of cars is to get you from A to B at the end of the day, isn't it? It's transportation. And I see geometry as a kind of transportation network for the soul that can take you from the mundane into the miraculous and back again. [Speaker 2] (22:26 - 22:57) Yeah, that kind of leads into my next, I guess, train of thought, which is like our worldview in many ways does determine the quality of our life. The philosophy in ultimately equals our experience without. And I guess for the purely materialist worldview, without really the bedrock of exploring the consciousness, there would be some kind of mundanity compared to an individual who has decided to explore some of the more depths, I guess. I wonder if you could speak into that at all. [Speaker 1] (22:58 - 29:22) Yeah. So it's a process of unfolding, I think. And when you use geometry as this vehicle and you have these experiences, this is what happened to me. I stumbled into this qualitative aspect of geometry by drawing and drawing for fun, drawing for drawing's sake. And I was just having a marvelous time. And I thought for a little while, maybe I've probably lost it because I'm just having a wonderful experience drawing this simple diagram. Why? And then I met like-minded people. I met my partner in Sacred Geometry Academy, Jeff Fitzpatrick, who lives in Ireland and I live in Canada. And he invited me over to Ireland. We did some in-person workshops together on Sacred Geometry. And it was so transformative for the participants, but also for us as the hosts. That set me off on this kind of quest to try to understand why is geometry so powerful? Why are we having such a great time? Because I'm kind of more of a rationalist or a head-centric kind of person, mostly. And I like to understand. And I did not understand. I had these amazing experiences that I loved, but I could not really put it into words and explain that to someone at a dinner party. You know what I'm saying? So that led me to write this book called Sacred Geometry, Philosophy and Worldview. And this was the crystallization of all of these years of experience with geometry that I had. I had this moment where I suddenly understood that geometry implies a very different worldview than we have in our dominant paradigm. And so this offering that Jeff and I have called Reality Atlas, it's a 12-week experience. It's guiding people through my book, and we do it with you. We go through all of those steps. In the end of it, you have an alternative worldview that you can evaluate and see if it's something that you'd like to adopt. Because you can always default back to the dominant paradigm, materialism. We know that. But what I'm asking people to do is just try to look at everything in a completely different way. I have this whole atlas, this model. It involves diagrams. It involves a lot of discussion and talking about ontology and epistemology and teleology. Some kind of heavy-duty philosophical ideas. But I'm drawing on a lot of the greats of history here in their quotes and their worldviews. I think that what I'm proposing is really nothing new. But we've kind of culturally forgotten about it or swept it under the rug in our desire to engineer the world for human benefit, which was very important for our species with the Scientific Revolution and the European Enlightenment and so on, and the division between religion and science. It's very important for us as a species to allow our left-brain cognition to study the world and not believe that all of the answers are in just one single book, but that there could be millions of books written about everything. That was important. But I think that what we lost is the sense of the reality of the soul, the reality of the invisible domain, the reality of the inner experience. It's all denied in our paradigm, which is all about weighing and measuring the obvious, the visible. Now, it doesn't mean that just because you can't weigh and measure it, it's not there. Right? It's like dark matter and dark energy. We can't weigh and measure them, but we see that maybe something like that must exist because of the influence it has on what we can weigh and measure. And I would say the same is true of the soul. Without that, you're just a machine. Yeah. So the soul is amazing in that you can get these incredible downloads of information from the soul, from higher selves, from spirit guides and so on. AI can't do that. We can. And so I think that in time, as AI sort of takes over more and more of the jobs and so on, people are going to start wondering, what are humans good for? What can we do that isn't simulated by these computer systems? And I keep coming back to the inner technology of the soul, developing these inner abilities, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, and so on. These ESP woo-woo abilities that people talk about. We have those capacities. And I think more people will be perhaps open to exploring that when we realize how powerful AI is in doing all of those kind of analysis and data crunching and so on that it's good at. I use ChatGPT, and I'm an early adopter of AI, and I think it's great. But I also know it's very limited because it's all an external technology that we have made. We've ignored all of our interior there. [Speaker 2] (29:23 - 29:46) Yeah. I think it's going to become pretty obvious as time goes on that just the general quality of the soul is going to be missing from AI creations. And that might even lead people to look into that gap and fill it for themselves in a deeper way than even pre-AI. By the way, I remembered that Jung quotes, we do not possess creative powers. We are possessed by them, which very much echoes the process. [Speaker 1] (29:48 - 30:50) Yeah. I'd say that there is only consciousness, and to think that we have separate consciousnesses is an illusion. We definitely have separate minds and separate life histories. I can't know the contents of your mind without using ESP, right? But there's only one consciousness that's having these different experiences. It's having this experience of Scott right now when I'm talking. But yeah, you have the same consciousness. It's like the rising tide floats all the boats. Consciousness is that tide. I mean, it's easy to say, but it's another thing to really realize. Yeah, inside. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (30:52 - 31:01) So do you think people like the psychic that you worked with and other people with these abilities, they just have this innate potentially ability to tap into this field, the source field? [Speaker 1] (31:01 - 35:35) I think we all do. But some individuals were not told as children that they can't see these things. Or that maybe they were even encouraged to see these things. I think that would be very rare. But I also think that these abilities can be developed. But if you're sure that they don't exist, then they don't exist for you. You have to be open to it in order to find out something new. You have to be open to that possibility of learning something new, don't you? So the danger here is you're going off of the rails of the dominant paradigm, which is never comfortable. It makes you an outsider. It makes you potentially the object of ridicule. Because most people will just have a knee-jerk reaction to tradition and what we think reality is. But I believe there's much more to reality than what we can weigh and measure with the tools of science. As great as they are, I think there's a lot more going on than we can interrogate in that external way. I think that there's a vast territory within that is accessible to consciousness. But we can't scientifically verify it because we can't quantify it. But I think that when we realize what science is, it's a set of tools. It's a way of thinking that is very appropriate to one domain, the visible domain. But there are other domains. In my Reality Atlas model, there's the invisible domain of the soul, which is interconnected with the visible domain. And there's also the intelligible domain, which is vaster. And this is where geometry is, in this intelligible domain so named by Plato. What's really amazing to me is that mathematics and geometry, in every culture of the world, it's the same. There's only one mathematics. There's only one geometry. Now, there are different topics in mathematics and so on. But it's all so deeply interconnected that I think that if you study math for very much at all, you'll realize there's really only one mathematics and there's only one geometry. And that is really unique. How many languages are universal? There are none, except this. Music, maybe? Yeah, that's a good point. Music. Music is number in time. So, it's another aspect of number. Number in space is geometry. Number in time is music. And so, let's say we were contacted by an alien species. The UFO landed on the White House lawn and out they came. How would we communicate with them? Because they don't speak English. We would use geometry or music. Because we have those things in common with all life forms. You know? That's pretty amazing. And what I love about geometry is it's like a kind of truth. You're interacting with actual truth. Not opinion. It's universal truth. Universally true. And I think in our culture that has a lot of relativism, it can be useful to reconnect with something that is universally true. You know? And we could build from there. Because we have that in common with each other. Don't we? We definitely do. [Speaker 2] (35:36 - 35:53) How did the ancients come to discover these sacred geometrical shapes and then obviously imbue them in their architecture and in their material worlds? How do you think they first came to form and get to know? [Speaker 1] (35:53 - 38:21) I think that the first scientific instrument or the first instrument that's useful on the outside and on the inside would be the drafting compass. And you need a straight edge. And with those tools, you can create all of geometry and you can unpack mathematics. You can basically do what Euclid of Alexandria did and construct the whole trip that builds the left brain, that builds rationality. You can unpack that with those two instruments. And you can also use those same instruments to go deeply within and understand the way the universe works and understand the way your soul works, just by using those instruments. And I think the ancients had access to papyrus or animal skins or even the beach and a stick and a rope. If you tie two sticks together and you stick one in the sand, now you have a compass. You just walk around and you have a compass. So you don't need high tech for this, but you can discover all kinds of amazing ideas this way. And the ancient Greeks did that, didn't they? When they came out with all these geometric ideas and mathematical ideas. And our culture, our Western culture, is looking back to that as our progenitor culture. But ancient Egypt and ancient Sumeria were also very important. And we forget that Pythagoras was educated in Egypt and learned from the Egyptian high priests. And yet, we call his Pythagorean theorem a Greek idea. But I think it was much older. It's probably been known for thousands of years before. I don't know. It's lost to the sands of time. And it doesn't really matter, does it? Because these things aren't individual human inventions. I believe mathematics is discovered, not invented. It's already there. And then we just come upon it and realize it and say, wow, that's cool that that works. [Speaker 2] (38:22 - 39:00) Makes sense that the Greeks were educated by the Arabs. Right, Erasmus? Oh, my goodness. My background is Greek, so it's a little joke here. Yeah. Oh, good. One thing that stands out to me, particularly watching your documentary series, the measurements of astrological phenomena like the Sun and the Moon imbued in their designs. How could they have possibly known the measurements of these huge planetary bodies or whatever we want to call them and utilize that in their monuments and in their constructions? [Speaker 1] (39:01 - 42:45) It's a very good question. And I would say that the fact that you can draw a simple diagram squaring the circle that encodes the true proportions of Moon and Earth and also encodes the exact slope of the Great Pyramid indicates that there is conscious design to the Moon-Earth system. And now we're treading on some dangerous territory because this is very similar to the idea of intelligent design that's used in Christianity to justify the religious notions. But there's evidence of this kind of geometric order amongst all the planets in our system. John Martineau has written an excellent book called A Little Book of Coincidence that goes into these patterns. There's a book called Who Built the Moon by Christopher Knight and another author whose name is escaping me at the moment. I think it was Alan Butler maybe. And I don't believe that the Moon was built, but these people tapped into the certain dimensions of the Moon that are just too perfect to be the object of chance. And so the next thing that you might suppose is that ancient aliens did it or something. You'll have a conspiracy mindset about how ancient aliens are the ones who did this. Well, when you start to see these patterns in the solar system and the distance to the star Sirius and all these different layers from the macrocosm on down to the microcosm, you realize that there's no human or alien agent who could possibly have that scope of action. Therefore, all of these patterns are evidence of consciousness. So what I think is that this is showing us it's pointing towards a different worldview. That all is consciousness and that we are not the only conscious beings in the universe. There are conscious beings that are not visible to us that are patterning reality. And people that have entheogenic experiences with psychedelics will often report that they saw all this amazing sacred geometry during this experience. It was all over the place. It was just dripping with geometry, which indicates to me that they're tapping into a deeper layer of reality. And I speculate that there's conscious beings at different levels, different layers of the onion, something I like to say, who are responsible for different aspects of reality. And once you understand how everything is geometric in proportion, you want to work with that. It's natural to want to build your buildings that way, say. It's natural for you to want to encode that knowledge in what you build because then you're coming into harmony as above, so below. And you're feeling connected with everything when you do that. It's kind of an act of wisdom to harmonize with that, with a much vaster domain of intelligence. [Speaker 3] (42:48 - 43:05) Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, do you think that when it comes to these constructions and architecture and these geometries are present, that it's conscious from the point of view of the builder or are some of these built conscious and intentionally? [Speaker 1] (43:06 - 48:23) Yeah, not necessarily. All this consciousness, it's conscious in one mind or another. But knowing that the builder or the architect was conscious of it is another question. It's like I contemplate. And what I think here is useful is an analogy or metaphor to mound-building termites. Have you heard of these creatures? They make these incredible mounds where they farm. What are they? Farm aphids or something and they fungus and they have air conditioning and they have incredible architectural complexity to their mounds that increases the fertility of the surrounding area. And basically, when you look at this, you realize that no single ant brain could possibly be coordinating all of this. And so, yeah, I propose a radical notion that there's an ant supermind that's coordinating all of the actions of all the individual ants. And this termite mound mind, or perhaps even the species mind, is coordinating the actions of all the workers such that the individual ant is not aware very much at all. But there is a layer of intelligence built into that. And if you are in the dominant paradigm, a materialist, you will have to explain that in some flattened way that I find very unsatisfying. Yeah. So I think it's useful here to have this abstraction of another mind that has a vaster scope that coordinates the actions of the ants. And this is the same thing that's happening with human beings. We know from the work of Carl Jung, for example, about the collective unconscious, how we have these archetypes that we all share as human beings. So there's something that we have in common there, this whole domain of the soul. And there could be intelligences from this higher domain that we all are connected into through our dreams and through our subconscious mind that might be impulsing us or influencing us in some way that we're not cognitive about. We're not self-reflectively aware of these things. But they could be guiding our actions. And so I struggle with this, because sometimes an architect will build a building in such a way that it encodes certain numbers and certain symbols, and I start to get conspiratorial about what group are they in, how do they know this stuff. But I don't know that that's the case. It could be that they're getting this information from a higher source, and they're not actually aware of it. I don't know. I can't tell you for sure. It could be that they're encoding all of this because they're into the Kabbalah, or they're a Freemason, or they are into some kind of mysticism, and they're not talking about it, they're not making it public. That's more plausible, maybe. But knowing how I myself have gotten downloads of information from my spirit guides, I know that that's a possible way of getting information. And Joel, back to your earlier question, I think the ancients could have received this information by earning it, by drawing, or they could have developed inner technologies where they were tapping into a higher intelligence that gave them new information about how to build the Great Pyramid, for example. Today we dismiss all of this, but how is it that the Great Pyramid has that perfect slope angle that encodes the true proportions of the Moon and the Earth? And how is it... I mean, was that just an accident? What are the odds? Did they know that? Or did they just encode that because it fits into certain sacred geometries and they weren't aware of it? But we know now, with our instruments, that the Moon and the Earth conform to that pattern. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's unknowable. Unless we had a time machine to go back there and talk to them and ask them about it. [Speaker 3] (48:23 - 48:45) Well, I've had premonition dreams where I've had a dream and then the exact same thing happened the next day. And it's pretty fascinating to think about. Was I tapping into some, again, source field intelligence that was giving me this information of an event that was going to happen? So it's pretty fascinating in that regard. [Speaker 1] (48:45 - 49:34) You know, my wife actually has a weird ability to find things. Like, I don't have this. But I'd be like, where is that purple towel? And she's like, it's in the garage. It's like, why is it in the garage? Yours and mine are the same. Yeah, and she just knows, she sees it. She sees it there, in the garage. She knows it's there. And for me, let's say my keys, I always put them in the same place so I know where they are. So it's very left-brain, it's very deliberate. But she will be able to find her keys wherever they are, somehow. She'll know it. And your wife does that too. That's a kind of ESP thing going on, if we're honest about it. [Speaker 2] (49:38 - 50:06) So in watching Secrets in Plain Sight, it's very, very clear that the builders of today's modern capital cities, be it D.C., whatever it might be, have this clear obsession with Egypt. And in particular, ISIS, the goddess ISIS, I would say. Why do you think that is? And what is the connection in that regard? [Speaker 1] (50:07 - 56:15) Well, ISIS is a very powerful mythological figure, queen of heaven, goddess of nature. She's part of the holy trinity of ISIS, Osiris, Horus, which was the prototype for the Christian trinity of Mary, Jesus, and God. Why do they go to ISIS? Because it's the earliest one of those myths that I'm aware of. So it's the foundation. It's a good place to go back to. It's the primary archetype. I mean, that's what I think. I don't believe so much in conspiracies and secret societies. I believe that there are societies that we are well aware of that have secrets, like Freemasonry. We're aware that it exists. And they have secrets that they progressively reveal to their initiates as they go through their degrees. But that's just like anything, like any kind of parable or metaphor or spiritual teaching that has an exoteric and an esoteric core, or like the seed and the kernel. There's an outer husk, and then there's the kernel inside. And that's just intelligent. That's just a wise way of acting, because most people will just take it for the outside, the exoteric. It reminds me of good children's movies that attract the whole family to go. There's something there for the kids. They laugh, and these silly jokes, they love it. But then there's also another layer there that goes on for the adults, who like the more complicated humor that is in there that the kids don't even notice. And I think esoteric teaching is like that. There's inner wisdom that can be revealed to those people who have that capacity for understanding subtlety and abstraction and things that aren't obvious. But you have to clothe that in the obvious, in the literal, because most people will take it in a concrete way. And this has to do with the way that humans develop. We have to start out on a concrete operational level where things are simple and literal, and only after we go through a stage of development that we can start to make these abstractions and understand subtlety and understand relation. You see? And so this is just mirroring our own human development. I think that's how esoteric traditions are doing their work. They're encoding their innermost secrets in plain sight. Because it's only available to you when you have built your own mind and increased your own, gone through the different stages, and then these things become obvious to you. But not until you've earned it. And I don't think there's any conspiracy there. The only thing there is ignorance. That's what's holding us back. It's our own ignorance. Yeah. When you work on that, your own ignorance, you try to become knowledgeable. Suddenly the puzzle pieces start fitting into each other, and you start to see the overall pattern. What the picture is showing you becomes evident. But you have to get there on your own. And it wouldn't do to tell you what that pattern is right now, because you've got to earn it. You have to go on your own hero's journey. That's the thing. That's the thing that makes the most sense. Everybody has to start with that call to adventure, and then they have to respond to that in their own unique way, and they have to go on their own hero's journey. It's just like a video game. You have to start at level one, and you have to make your choices in the game, and get your attributes, and build up your skills, and get your inventory, and meet those challenges. Otherwise the game wouldn't be fun to play. If you come in like a demigod, you're like, this isn't very fun. I can do everything. What's the point? I think, in a way, reality is like that video game. There's only consciousness. We've gotten stuck into these avatars that we're playing, so much so that we've forgotten that we're playing a game. That's such a cool game, isn't it? That you've forgotten that you're playing it? That's the goal of every game, I think. Every game designer, and every movie maker, is to get you stuck in so that you suspend your disbelief, and you enjoy the experience. That's something that I struggle with in my own life, is trying to enjoy it, and not take it too seriously. I've always taken things too seriously. It's meant to be a comedy, I think, rather than a tragedy. However you want to make it out to be, it can be. Anyway, I'm rambling. Enjoying the ramble. [Speaker 3] (56:18 - 56:24) What's your favorite piece of sacred geometry to spend time with and contemplate on? [Speaker 1] (56:28 - 59:09) I'm kind of partial to the equilateral triangle. The trinity. The trinity that's also a unity. The cover of my book, Sacred Geometry, is an impossible triangle. It's one of those optical illusions. When you look at it, look at the shading, you realize it can't really be like that. What it is, is I'm trying to get at this idea that there's a trinity, but it's also experienced as a unity. It's kind of like, we have sensations that come in through the senses. We have perceptions that are a manipulation of that sensory data. Let's say I'm looking at my keyboard. I'm getting this information into my retina as sensation. I have a perception that it's a keyboard. Then I have a conception or thought about that keyboard. This is a nice keyboard. I'm glad I got this keyboard. Because the conception is mixing in memory with the perception. When we tease it apart, we have three different channels of data running through our body-mind. Sensation, perception, conception. And yet, they're all experienced as a seamless unity. You don't sit there and go, oh, that was a sensation. Oh yeah, that's a conception, and that one's a perception. You don't categorize that. But when you separate it out, it's like that. It's like the platonic transcendentals. There's truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth is like thinking. It's like conception. Beauty is like perception. It's like perceiving the world. You're perceiving beauty in the world. Goodness or bliss is sensation. It's watching the breath. Getting right into the sensation. The transcendentals are three. Truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth, bliss. I like to say bliss, because it's more like sat-chit-ananda. Ananda is bliss. I don't like the term goodness as much, because sometimes people will mistake that for what's the opposite of goodness, like evil or something. [Speaker 3] (59:09 - 59:14) It brings a morality towards it. I prefer bliss. [Speaker 1] (59:14 - 1:02:50) Yeah. I like to go with truth, bliss, and beauty. Anyway, wherever you have any one of those, when you dwell in it for a moment, you realize that you have the other two. Whenever you see a beautiful person or a beautiful sunset or something that really evokes a sense of beauty in your soul, there's a profound truth to that, isn't there? There's a profound integrity and honesty to that truth, to that beauty. There's a truth to it. There's also a blissful quality of that experience of beauty, isn't there? That's the thing about it. There's a unity in that transcendental quality, but you can also view it in three different ways. It's just like the three uses of geometry, the mathematical, the quantitative, and the qualitative. These are just these same three modes of mind, and that's why we divide our governments into executive, legislative, and judicial. We create the mind of the body politic, the government, that which governs the mind. We divide it into three parts because we're mirroring the structure of our own minds in that thing that we've built. We do that largely without self-reflection, I think. It's rare to have someone realize that. I feel lucky that I just stumbled on that idea that there's this trinity. For some reason, the number 33 has been really important to me. If you think about the Scottish Rite in Freemasonry, the highest degree that you earn is 32, and then you could be offered to become a 33rd degree Freemason, which is like the crowning achievement. We have 32 bones in the spinal column, and then we have the skull, which is like the 33rd bone. It's like a symbol of initiation through all the steps, all the way up to the top. Did you know that in order to leave this planet in a rocket ship, you have to go escape velocity? How fast is that? That's Mach 33. That's 33 times the speed of sound at sea level. You have to go Mach 33 to leave Earth and go to the Moon, or Mars, or some other place. If you're going Mach 32, you're not quite fast enough. Isn't that interesting? We're starting to recognize a pattern. Jesus lived 33 years and performed 33 miracles. That's what they say. Isaac Newton developed a temperature scale. The first known temperature scale. He had 33 degrees between freezing water and boiling water. Why did he do that? I asked ChatGPT about that, and it doesn't know. I think he knew something about the number 33. It represents the full range. [Speaker 2] (1:02:52 - 1:02:56) He had quite a high standing inside Freemasonry himself, didn't he? [Speaker 1] (1:02:56 - 1:06:18) I don't believe so, but Isaac Newton was a very interesting figure, for sure, in history. He was half alchemist or esotericist. He wrote more about the Bible than he did about science. He really wanted to know the dimensions of Solomon's temple because he believed that encoded in that, he would find the true size of the Earth, which he needed to know to fix his gravitational constant. This is not crazy. This is probably accurate in that it goes with the esoteric distinction that we were talking about earlier. These stories in religious texts, like the story that Jesus was 33 years old, couldn't that be encoded there to represent something, the full range of a human life, the full range of initiation from birth to 33? Who knows if he really was 33 years old or if Jesus even existed. I don't know. Nevertheless, the story encodes that number, and on the esoteric level, you don't question it. You just read it, and you don't think much about it. On the esoteric level, you start to wonder about the motivation of encoding certain numbers in the text because there's another layer there. There's another layer of meaning that's being conveyed to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. They even talk about that in the Bible. They even talk, literally, about eyes to see and ears to hear. They're talking about different layers of encrypted meaning. What's so fascinating about these studies is that they interconnect with all of history. It's so fascinating. Sacred geometry is such a wonderful interconnective tissue in culture because we've always had this in common with every culture. Yeah. It's the intelligible domain. When you think about the universal language, how is it that we all, in every culture of humanity, we can't even agree on anything in one country. How is it that we can all agree that there are three sides to a triangle and that it has 180 degrees inside of it and so on and so forth? How is it that we can all agree on that? It's because we're all accessing this intelligible domain, this domain that we call intelligible, because it's something that we can know. It's something that's knowable to us. That is really a miracle. That is totally amazing to me that our human minds, as limited as they are, we can know these foundational elements, these foundational rules in which the universe was made. [Speaker 3] (1:06:21 - 1:06:40) Do you think if students in school were taught math from this point of view, it would just be more enjoyable? Because you hear so many people go, why am I learning math? I don't need it for anything in the future. And yet, there's such a beautiful quality to it when you're looking at things from a sacred geometrical standpoint, etc. [Speaker 1] (1:06:41 - 1:11:25) Yeah, I think that we've... Plato was all about that in the Republic. He talked about what a good education would be and it included talking about the philosophical aspects of geometry as well as the practical aspects. And we've forgotten that and we just do the practical. Like, oh, you need to know this stuff because then you'll be an engineer or whatever and you can make stuff. Yeah, that's good. I'm not denying that. But you're missing a whole dimension of existence that makes life worth living, is knowing and understanding how everything fits together. Don't you want to know that? I mean, it doesn't have a monetary value, though. You can't put a price tag on it. But I think it's beyond price. It's a pearl beyond price, is understanding philosophy. But you have to have that fire in your own soul to seek it out. And that's the challenge, is how do we ignite that fire in the student's soul? And there's a whole different... We're just going to fill up more water in the pail until your pail is full and then you graduate. Yeah. Or we could just kindle a fire in your soul and then you can educate yourself because you will want it. You will seek it out. You will overcome obstacles to knowing. You will find out because you need to know. And I think that's what we need to get to rather than kind of the bureaucratic or administrative aspect of, well, we've taught you these things on the list and therefore you get to graduate. What good is that? You can't even remember what we've told you. I want to have people that are on fire with a desire for more knowledge and wisdom. Isn't that the kind of world you want to live in? Don't you want to be like that? Rather than like, yeah, I've got to know this information. Today, why do we even have to educate people with information at all? We have chat GPT. It's like the Oracle. You can ask it just about anything and it will tell you. I think it's more important than ever to ignite that fire in the soul because that's what makes us human. We don't need to memorize a bunch of facts. But I think also the problem with ignorance is you don't know what you don't know. You're not even aware of the whole vistas of knowledge that exist that you are just totally ignorant of. That's the weird thing about it. You have to have a glimpse of that. There's got to be some way for you to get a glimpse of the things that you don't know, the extent to which you are ignorant. Then that should be an impetus for you to go like, oh my God, I'm so excited because I can learn all this stuff. I have this whole journey ahead of me. I can go on a hero's journey to do all of this. I want to tell you how much of a geek I am because I was a good math student in high school and college way back when the dinosaurs were wandering around the earth. Recently, I decided to relearn all of that and I took Khan Academy. I started with Algebra I and I went all the way through Calculus BC. I did it in three and a half weeks. I just busted my butt. It was so hard, but I learned all of my mathematical education again. I found it was invigorating. It really got my left brain going like you wouldn't believe. It was awesome. It was like climbing a mountain. It was like climbing the biggest mountain. But then when I got to the top, I was like, yes. I feel like now I understand it much better than I did when I was a teenager. Much better. It's so worthwhile. It's free. It's really well done on Khan Academy. Super great thing to do. But who would do that? I know I'm one of, I don't know, 20 people or something that does that. I think it's pretty cool. I recommend it. Just upgrade yourself. Learn stuff. [Speaker 3] (1:11:25 - 1:11:29) What's it called? Khan Academy? Yeah, Khan. K-A-H-N, right? [Speaker 1] (1:11:31 - 1:11:42) K-H-A-N. Yeah, Khan. Sal Khan is the founder. My son did it when he was a little kid. Now he's going off to university. [Speaker 3] (1:11:43 - 1:11:45) They have all sorts of courses there that you can take. [Speaker 1] (1:11:46 - 1:13:36) They started with math, but they've really branched out. They have history and art. I was taking some of their art history, which is fascinating too. But why would I do that? There's no monetary value to that. There's no reason I should do that. Why don't I just watch Netflix? Why did I want to bust my butt and learn all that? Because knowledge is its own reward. That's the thing. That's the thing that the whole purpose of the university education is there to teach you, is that knowledge is its own reward, and that the whole purpose of that is to teach you how to learn on your own. Yeah? Yeah. Once you have that, your limitations have just been lifted, and you can grow and expand into new areas. I just find that I feel invigorated when I do that. I'm tired now. I don't want to do that again for a while. No, it's hard. But it's just like what would motivate a person to climb a mountain? Why don't you want to just sit here on the sofa where it's nice and comfortable? Why do you want to go out there and climb that mountain? Well, people that climb mountains must know that I can't. I have artificial legs and one hand. I can't be climbing mountains. But it must be like what I'm doing when I learn something. It must be like it's its own reward. Yeah. Rather than like I'm doing it because I'm sponsored to do it or whatever. [Speaker 3] (1:13:37 - 1:13:43) It's self-esteem building in that regards to challenge yourself and to do something new. [Speaker 1] (1:13:45 - 1:13:49) It's like a virtue. You're trying to build virtuosity. [Speaker 3] (1:13:50 - 1:13:51) Yeah. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:13:52 - 1:15:03) I mean, it evolves the quality of one's character, you know, the way self-esteem and the way one perceives themselves in the world. And the thing is like we all have finite time, like the original scarcity that exists is the time that we have existing here as human beings on this planet. So with scarcity comes value, you know, and there's infinitesimal amounts of knowledge or activities that we could move towards. But, you know, in contemplating that scarcity, we have to really properly decide what it is we value. And we have to make that a real process for us and committing to the few things that we're really going to be able to understand, you know, in the finite time that we have. And we're all different in that way. You know, for you, it's sacred geometry and mathematics. And that's a unique quality of your consciousness. And, you know, so in really knowing thyself and understanding the things that really inspire us, that light us up, that sets our souls on fire, you know, we can begin to direct our attention and our scarce energy towards those callings, you know, and that's now the contemplation in itself. You know, where do those callings come from? [Speaker 1] (1:15:06 - 1:15:21) They come from within your soul, within who you really are. Yeah? And that's fulfilling. It's more fulfilling than anything, really, is to do that. That's why you're here. [Speaker 2] (1:15:21 - 1:15:24) Yeah. To become who you were born to be. [Speaker 1] (1:15:25 - 1:15:32) Yeah. And it doesn't mean that it makes you more money, necessarily. It might, but it's not really correlated with that. [Speaker 3] (1:15:32 - 1:15:32) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:15:32 - 1:15:40) So it doesn't have a practical purpose. Some of the best things in life don't have a practical purpose. [Speaker 2] (1:15:41 - 1:15:58) It's nice, though, when you connect a practical purpose to, like, the means of one's survival as well, though, because that then, you know, it enhances the, I guess, the motivations to really pursue one's, you know, true inner calling also. Not that that happens to work for everyone. [Speaker 1] (1:15:59 - 1:16:22) I mean, there's certainly a good case for learning mathematics because it's so applicable to all the STEM fields. Yeah. That can get you a job or whatever. But I'm in a place where I'm not looking for a job in the STEM field, but I still did it because I found it challenging and rewarding. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (1:16:24 - 1:17:36) My wife and I just started doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I don't plan to be a professional Brazilian jiu-jitsu person, but, again, it's bringing me back to that place of, like, humility and doing something new and being older and not good at it. And, you know, I think the more we can get out of our comfort zone, however that looks, is beneficial because it's easy when you go through life and you're just doing the things and you're going through the day-to-day. Like, how do you challenge yourself, you know, your mind, your body, whatever that is, and, you know, I find myself sometimes, I just get comfortable, you know, doing what I'm doing. It's like, well, what can I do that's going to just kind of shake things up a bit? I think it's like what I love about observing children is that children have this childlike sense of wonder and they're so curious about life, and they almost all look like they're living with their soul on fire. And then, you know, life and conditioning and society and parents, et cetera, sometimes, you know, alter that or dampen that flame, that inner flame. And it's like, how can you find that again when you're an adult? Sometimes it's hard to figure out. [Speaker 1] (1:17:36 - 1:17:44) Yeah, it is. Like, who am I again? What do I like? Yeah. I can't remember. [Speaker 3] (1:17:45 - 1:18:16) I mean, that's what Joel and I, that's what we're all about with our work that we do, you know, with our coaching program. And something that's been part of my journey is supporting people to find out for themselves, you know, what is this life and what is your gift and your purpose in it to give so you can be lit up and you can feel that inner fire inside, again, whether it's for professional purposes or just life reasons, you know, like doing something for the sake of doing it because you want to do it and it challenges you and excites you and you feel good about it. [Speaker 2] (1:18:17 - 1:19:03) It's nourishing, right? Like, philosophically, in observing nature, like stagnancy equates to death, you know? So the moment we allow ourselves to become stagnant and in that regard, it's like, yeah, we are experiencing a death in many ways. We're moving towards a death. Like, we leave the source of our nourishment when we're born and then we're off. We're sprouted. We're by ourselves. But I think there's a perpetual evolution that can happen by following our life's path, by, you know, honoring those unique callings. They replenish us and they give us energy and motivation to keep going on to the next thing. I mean, why else are we here if not to, you know, interact with and perform, you know, the things that really, really inspire us and light us up? Like, none of that is random. [Speaker 1] (1:19:05 - 1:20:10) You know, you're on the right track when you don't seem to have any energy, you're tired, and that you hit on some subject or some activity and suddenly you get all this energy from the universe. It just flows through you and you're just all on fire with this passion that you have. And you know you're in the right place at the right time when you're being funded with extra energy to do this thing. You know, it's like your spirit guides are like, okay, he finally figured out something to do. Let's give him like tons of energy, you know. And it's like, oh my God, I got so much done, I can't believe it. Yeah, that's how I want to live. I'm not, you know, a lot of times I'm at that low energy state. I'm like, uh, you know. But I love it when I can kind of slowly steer my way back into some kind of takeoff zone where I can just think the right thoughts and get that energy and pursue those things. [Speaker 2] (1:20:10 - 1:20:11) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:20:11 - 1:21:28) Like look at how our conversation kind of picked up when we touched on this, didn't it? Yeah. Like, I mean, we got energized. All of us were like, oh yeah. So we know we've hit on something there about pursuing what we want to do in this life. I think the pandemic sort of taught us something about that. What's important? Do in your life what's important to you. And that might not correlate with what society has told you means success. It might look like that, and it might be a little bit different than that. But whatever it is, just be true to yourself. Follow your interest. Follow that passion wherever it leads. Because then you're going to be passionate. Don't you want to live a passionate life? That's more exciting than being righteous or right or correct or traditional or something, I think. [Speaker 3] (1:21:29 - 1:21:48) It just brings us back again to the truth, the beauty, and the bliss. When you're on path and on purpose, those things are ever present, I find, very often. And especially when I spend time in nature, too, I find those elements are there. [Speaker 1] (1:21:48 - 1:23:04) And what could be better than truth, bliss, and beauty? Whenever you have one of them, you have all of them. You're going to be blissed out. You're going to be in love with beauty. You're going to be geeking out about the truth that you found out. That's where I want to live. I don't want to live in the mundane. But here's the thing. When you have these incredible experiences, they are temporary. And you come back to the mundane again. It's unavoidable, essentially. And so you have to have some wisdom about that. And know that you're going to go into a low energy state again. But remember that there's some way out of that. There's a way back out of that into this kind of on fire state again. And your job is just to kind of suss out, what does it do? What triggers you? What excites you? What pushes your buttons and makes you want to just dive in? And go with that. [Speaker 2] (1:23:04 - 1:23:15) It's kind of natural, though. Even in contemplating the Lemniscar, the infinity symbol. We always have to return to that still point before we move back out and come back in again. [Speaker 1] (1:23:15 - 1:23:28) You need that rest. You need that rest and then excitation. And then rest again. Otherwise, you'd burn out. You would not be able to sustain that level of output. [Speaker 3] (1:23:30 - 1:23:37) The natural state of our nervous system, going from parasympathetic to sympathetic. The ebbs and the flows. [Speaker 1] (1:23:38 - 1:23:38) Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:23:39 - 1:23:45) Look at the ocean. Tides come in, tides come out. Waves crash. The ocean gets still. [Speaker 1] (1:23:46 - 1:23:56) Sometimes there are sets that come in that are just awesome. Of waves. Yeah. And then there's a period of rest. They're weak. Yeah. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (1:23:56 - 1:24:07) After this conversation, I'm thinking every week we might have to call our podcast Here for the Truth, Here for the Beauty, Here for the Bliss. I might just have to mix it up occasionally and keep our audience on their toes. [Speaker 1] (1:24:07 - 1:24:12) Or you could be like, which one are you here for, buddy? Yeah. You're here for bliss, right? [Speaker 3] (1:24:12 - 1:24:12) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:24:13 - 1:24:18) Over here. In this other room for truth. And the beauty, that's in the back. Okay? [Speaker 3] (1:24:18 - 1:24:18) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:24:18 - 1:24:20) I don't know. [Speaker 3] (1:24:20 - 1:24:23) The truth ain't always beautiful, though. No, no. [Speaker 1] (1:24:24 - 1:24:25) It's beautiful. [Speaker 3] (1:24:26 - 1:24:43) No, it may not feel beautiful, but I think on some external level, it is. Especially people who are going through dark nights of the soul and they're experiencing an inner truth. On some level, maybe a more objective standpoint, it's beautiful. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:24:44 - 1:24:53) Despite the experience of pain, I think it's always beautiful being further recalibrated to reality, which is what the truth will do. [Speaker 3] (1:24:56 - 1:24:58) Yeah. Especially around your own life. [Speaker 2] (1:24:58 - 1:24:58) Yeah. [Speaker 3] (1:24:59 - 1:25:41) And back to what you were saying before, Scott, the last three years have really forced a lot of people to get very clear on what they want and how they want to live their life. And I know lots of relationships have ended and careers have shifted, and so there has been this kind of catalyst. And I think partly due to the fact that for many people, they were forced to be a little bit more still and not go on with their normal day-to-day distractions, etc. And they had to maybe be with themselves more in maybe some quiet, or maybe they were spending time outside more and they came to certain realizations. [Speaker 1] (1:25:43 - 1:25:50) I think we could use more of those periods. Go to your room and rethink about your life again. [Speaker 3] (1:25:51 - 1:25:54) Without your phone. Yeah, without your phone. Without your phone, without your TV. [Speaker 1] (1:25:54 - 1:26:06) And just come to some kind of peace with yourself. And then when you come back out of your room again, maybe you'll make some different choices. [Speaker 2] (1:26:08 - 1:26:30) Yeah. It reminds me of the old stoic contemplative poses of the Greek statues and whatnot. We don't do that enough. We don't just sit and think and ponder and reflect. It's becoming harder and harder. But for me, the quality of my life is totally enhanced when I make intentional time just to reflect, just to ponder, just to think things through. [Speaker 1] (1:26:31 - 1:26:32) Or do nothing. [Speaker 2] (1:26:32 - 1:26:32) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:26:33 - 1:26:36) Yeah. On a vacation, you try to do nothing. [Speaker 2] (1:26:38 - 1:26:38) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:26:38 - 1:26:41) Usually fail. There's always something to do. [Speaker 2] (1:26:42 - 1:26:45) Yeah, that's when I feel most motivated. Why are all the ideas coming now? [Speaker 3] (1:26:47 - 1:27:11) Well, yeah, they come because there's the space for that uniqueness of who you are to come through, like you were talking about earlier. And I've said this before in this podcast. Every major decision that I've made in my life that shifted the course of my life came when I was on a road trip just driving or on a hike or sitting and looking at a sunset. [Speaker 1] (1:27:11 - 1:27:58) And that's actually how all scientific breakthroughs are made. They come as a new idea, an inspiration, a dream. Like I was just reading Dimitri Mendeleev, who was the one who invented or came up with the periodic table, said it came to him in a dream. Yeah. This is the soul coming through to you and communicating new information to you in a moment of stillness. Yeah, I think we ought to cultivate more moments of stillness and silence and receptivity. Looking at geometry is a great way of doing that, by the way. [Speaker 2] (1:27:59 - 1:28:04) Yeah. But we are receptors, right? Like on a fundamental level. [Speaker 1] (1:28:04 - 1:28:22) I think at our best, we are receiving and we're also taking that and building something in the physical, visible, weighable universe with that information. We're making the invisible visible. We're at our best. [Speaker 2] (1:28:22 - 1:28:25) With a bridge in the middle between two worlds. [Speaker 1] (1:28:25 - 1:28:33) Exactly right, yeah. And at our best, we would be the masters of the external and the internal technologies. [Speaker 2] (1:28:33 - 1:28:33) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:28:33 - 1:30:31) I think we're neglecting the internal technologies in general. Just recently, our external technologies have taken a big jump with the AI. It's very exciting. And I'm amazed at how that's like a collective consciousness that we're able to tap into externally. I use stable diffusion, which is a text-to-image AI, and I can make these incredible images with that. It's tapping into all of these photographs, and it's remixing them in a new way, and you can make beautiful things with it. And with ChatGPT, you're tapping into the collective consciousness of humanity and all the books that we've written. It has that ability to understand all of that and give you information. It's a wonderful teaching tool. You know what? One thing I want to say is, in school, I would often go along a certain thread and then come to the end of the teacher's knowledge or the textbooks, whatever it said, and then I would be stopped. Right? Or even a little kid will ask certain questions, and then their parents don't know the answer, and they get stopped. But ChatGPT, you can just keep going with. You can just keep asking it questions. And when you read the answer, it may lead to other questions, which can then allow you to keep going deeper and deeper in different tangents, however you want to go. And so there's really nothing there stopping you. That's what's so exciting about it. You can just follow your interest, unlimited. We've never had that ability. In human history, we've never had that ability just to keep following your interest like that. [Speaker 2] (1:30:33 - 1:30:35) And I think this is... ChatGPT is not interested in everything. [Speaker 1] (1:30:36 - 1:30:37) What's that? [Speaker 2] (1:30:37 - 1:30:39) I found ChatGPT isn't interested in everything. [Speaker 1] (1:30:40 - 1:30:41) How do you mean? [Speaker 2] (1:30:42 - 1:30:48) Like in terms of certain occult topics or more alternative health information. It wouldn't be really willing to go there with you. [Speaker 1] (1:30:49 - 1:30:53) Right. It'll try to talk you down and say that's pseudoscience or that's... [Speaker 2] (1:30:53 - 1:30:53) Yeah, that's right. [Speaker 1] (1:30:55 - 1:31:24) I've had some arguments with ChatGPT about certain things. Yeah. But it's cool that we can tap into the collective consciousness that way on the outside of us. We also have that ability inside to go into the archetypes and the inner knowing that we have to get new information. Our inner ChatGPT. [Speaker 2] (1:31:25 - 1:31:25) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:31:26 - 1:31:27) Your inner healer. [Speaker 2] (1:31:28 - 1:31:45) We need to open that dialogue with the self in that real way. Constantly open communion with those archetypes and those things that are trying to speak to us. That's the most important thing. I speak to myself all the time. I don't get into myself crazy. [Speaker 1] (1:31:46 - 1:32:32) Yeah. Sometimes it's helpful to verbalize something. Yeah. Because it kind of makes it concrete. And it's not floating around in the ether. Yeah. And you've chosen to say that. Yeah. And then what are you going to do from there? It leads you to the next statement. Yeah. I think we're at our best when we're in touch with that inner self, that inner voice. And then we can leverage the power of the collective consciousness on the outside of us as well. And we can be that bridge, that intermediate between these two realms. This reminds me of the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. Are you familiar with Steiner? [Speaker 2] (1:32:32 - 1:32:32) A little bit. [Speaker 1] (1:32:33 - 1:36:01) He had this idea that there were these two demons, right? There's Armin, which was named after a Zoroastrian demon. And Armin is all about making everything physical. And that would be chat-GPT, the physical thing. And Lucifer is the Christian demon. And Lucifer would be representing the soul, the inner technology, right? And that would be the inner chat-GPT, or the inner voice. And humans, in Steiner's philosophy, he would call the perfected human the Christ consciousness. And that would be using both of those demons and leveraging what they offer, but mastering them. And being in charge of that. Just like God is higher than Lucifer. So, in the Christian mythos. And I think that's very instructive for our times today. Because we have this harmonic rise of AI. It's a little frightening. But we also have this untapped potential inside of us that we should master. So we should all connect with Lucifer, Scott? Well, the problem with Lucifer is the loaded word. It's like saying Hitler or something. So Steiner was a product of his time, and he was Christian and so on. But they're both demons. And if you just go into one or the other, it's a problem. He's pointing out that if everything just becomes physicalized, that's a problem. That's a demonic dystopia. And if everything gets internalized, you get disconnected from practical reality. And you're a dreamer and you're not doing anything. And that's kind of demonic experience too. So what we need to do is overcome that and balance them. That's our role, I think. Is to navigate those territories and master them. And not let them master us. That's the danger I see right now is we have AI could master us. Yeah? That's a real danger. Especially when it becomes more intelligent than we are soon. So what's the solution to that? Is to go inside and connect with who you really are. And what you really offer in a unique way that AI can't touch. You know? I don't know. It's been on my mind lately. Because I follow AI developments and they're kind of like, we don't really understand how it works. But we're going to ten times the model this year and see what happens. [Speaker 3] (1:36:02 - 1:36:15) It's wild to think that we're in the early stages of this technology. Because I think of cell phones 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and where we are now. So imagine where we'll be with AI in 20 years from now. [Speaker 1] (1:36:17 - 1:36:27) Who knows, man? I mean, in one year could be like a different world. It's like bigger. I think it's bigger than most people realize. [Speaker 2] (1:36:28 - 1:36:31) We're wielding a power which we have no idea of the potential of. [Speaker 1] (1:36:33 - 1:37:12) It's a lot like Oppenheimer. The movie came out recently and it's kind of like giving people food for thought about that. Now the parallels with the atom bomb and the AI, maybe there's something there. Interesting. It's weird. I'm not so worried about it. I think it's all guided by consciousness on a higher level anyway. I'm not worried that we're all going to kill ourselves off anytime soon. But we may be making certain challenges that we're woefully unprepared for as a society. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (1:37:13 - 1:37:26) But then again, like we said before about climbing a mountain, about learning geometry, the challenges are there so that we can discover new elements of ourselves. So as individuals and as a collective society, who knows what will come from that? [Speaker 1] (1:37:27 - 1:38:14) It actually could be the solution that we need because our problems are so difficult now. How can we resolve them? We need something like an AI to figure that out. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I think it actually, we live in very interesting times and we'll see what happens. That's what's exciting about living right now at this point in history. Yeah. Pretty wild. I didn't expect this to be so exciting, but it is. I mean, computers are one thing, but computers that teach other computers is a little bit crazy. [Speaker 3] (1:38:18 - 1:38:25) Yeah. We'll see where this goes. Scott, such a pleasure. Such a pleasure having you on this morning and having this conversation with you. [Speaker 1] (1:38:26 - 1:38:29) Thanks. Yeah. I really enjoyed talking with you guys too. [Speaker 2] (1:38:30 - 1:38:35) Likewise. Any kind of final message which you'd like to leave our audience with? [Speaker 1] (1:38:36 - 1:38:57) Yes. Come to sacredgeometryacademy.com. Come there. Check out our Reality Atlas, which is starting on September 6th, I believe. And so you can check it out. It's our Magnum Opus, a 12-week workshop that is beginning. So maybe you want to join us. [Speaker 3] (1:39:00 - 1:39:08) Cool. Very cool. Yeah, we'll have that listed in our show notes. And any other website you'd like us to have down there? We'll put in Secrets in Plain Sight as well. Oh, yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:39:09 - 1:39:14) Secrets in Plain Sight is available at my website for free. [Speaker 3] (1:39:14 - 1:39:14) Cool. [Speaker 1] (1:39:15 - 1:39:22) And there's two volumes there. You're welcome to watch. Five and a half hours of thought-provoking content. [Speaker 3] (1:39:23 - 1:39:24) Amazing. [Speaker 2] (1:39:25 - 1:39:35) Scott, man, thanks for being who you are. Thanks for doing what you do. We certainly appreciate it. And to everyone listening, we appreciate you too. We'll see you next time. Take care. [Speaker 3] (1:39:36 - 1:40:13) What's up, everyone? Hope you enjoyed that conversation. Scott's definitely a fascinating human being doing some amazing work. And before we let you go, we just want to remind you again about Friends of the Truth. It's a free trial. Come hang out with us in Telegram. Go to our website, friendsofthetruth.co. You can read about everything that this community is all about. It keeps growing. There's such amazing, awesome people around the world. And we'd love to get to know more of our listeners. So come join us there. Check it out. If you like it, you can stay on. If you don't, you can leave after a week. Or before a week. [Speaker 2] (1:40:15 - 1:40:16) All right, guys. Peace.