Great Books #1: Secrets of the Universe

What is a great book? What I want to show you is that a great book is something that makes you fully human by revealing to you the secrets of the universe and the secrets of what it means to be human.

In school, you've been taught that a person comes from evolution. We evolve from monkeys; 99% of our DNA is that of a chimpanzee. You're taught that the world is primarily materialistic—what you can see, observe, and measure, and that's it.

This is the great lie, the great deception that we teach you in school. And we know it's a lie.

It's a deception because everything that you've been taught in school, everything that you've learned here, that you will learn in university, in graduate school, in science, in life, does not answer a fundamental question: What is consciousness?

Why do we see the world the way it is? How do we think? How do we have ideas? How do we communicate? You're not allowed to ask this question. And therefore, you're not allowed to ask, "What does it mean to be human?"

I will show you that there are two aspects of being human. There is, of course, the material aspect. You have a body, but you also have a soul that connects you to the spiritual or the divine. That's who you are. And the spiritual divine, there's a spark inside of you that comes from God. This spark is what allows you to love and to imagine.

Being human means engaging in two fundamental acts: the act of loving someone, which allows you to unify with God, and the act of imagination to expand your consciousness, which allows you to be God itself. Love is the unifying force of the universe, the God force. The imagination is the animating force of the universe. This is the great secret: the universe is not material. It is conscious.

This is a really hard concept to understand, so let's work through it slowly.

The Nature of Reality: Noumena and Phenomena

We have Immanuel Kant, and he's trying to figure out what reality is. How do we perceive reality? His solution is this: he believes that the world is divided into reality itself, called the noumena—the things in themselves, the objective reality—and then there is the phenomena.

What we do is perceive or engage with the noumena and translate it into the phenomena. The things in themselves become the things to us, the things that appear to us. We do this by filtering the noumena through time and space. Our brains are constructed in a way that allows us to perceive the spiritual and turn it into the material.

Another man named Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist, takes this idea and gives it a physical basis. He says that our brains have both a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere. The right hemisphere connects to the noumena, the things in themselves that we can never know, and then the left hemisphere translates it into the phenomena. This is a mechanism in the brain that does this. The right hemisphere gets all this information from the noumena, the spiritual, and then the left brain, through our eyes and senses, translates it into the phenomena.

The Spiritual Universe: Consciousness and Vibration

So, another question then is, what is the noumena? This is a question that mystics and monks have been struggling with for all of human history. We can never describe the noumena because it is beyond space and time; it's beyond our capacity to describe it. I can only explain it to you metaphorically.

What the noumena really is is consciousness. Consciousness comes from energy vibrations. The entire universe is vibrations. Vibrations carry information, and information becomes consciousness.

Metaphorically, we say there's a source called the monad—the one, the center of the universe, God. The monad works through breathing, through emanation. It breathes in and breathes out, and this creates vibrations throughout the universe. This is the basis of the universe: these vibrational fields.

Through this process, this also creates other entities as well, which we call the dyads. These are the basic structure of the universe, and then the dyads create other forces. As the universe keeps on vibrating, the frequencies become slower. You go from high to low, and because it's going slow, physicality and materialism develop. This creates the material universe.

The thing to understand is that the material is always connected to the spiritual. This entire force, the entire universe, is all interconnected. It's both everything and nothing at the same time.

The problem, though, is that eventually our world is created, and our world is materialistic. We have bodies. Our bodies are part of this material world, but our consciousness comes from the divine. Our bodies are created through evolution, but our consciousness is created through the vibrations of the universe. Our consciousness is connected with the universe itself.

Another way we can understand this concept is to imagine people together. Consciousness is an infinite-dimensional consciousness. Your consciousness is expanding infinitely into the universe.

At one level, you are by yourself. Your consciousness is unique to you. But at a higher level, you're connecting with someone else, and then you're connected to another person. You go on and on until you connect with everything. Within your consciousness is a capacity to connect with the entire universe, but it's really far away.

Plato's Cave: The Metaphor for Our Enslavement

This is complicated. Different philosophers throughout history have tried to figure out how to best articulate this truth, this great secret to humanity. The best metaphor that we have is something called Plato's Allegory of the Cave. This helps us understand who we are, where we came from, and where we're going. It is a metaphor that helps us understand what it means to be human and the human condition.

Plato says this: Imagine you have these prisoners. They're all tied down, chained to the ground. Their necks are chained, their arms are chained, so they can't move their heads or get up. What they're doing is watching a wall. Behind them is a great fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people—we don't know who they are—putting up figures. They are projecting shadows onto the wall. Because we, the prisoners, cannot see the entirety of reality, we believe that the wall itself is reality.

An example of this, of course, is movies. We watch movies and we think this is reality.

The question then is, why are these people making this effort to fool us into believing that this wall, these movies, are real? The answer is because they're trying to enslave us. But slavery isn't taking a gun and saying, "If you don't do what I say, I'll kill you."

If the universe is conscious, our energy comes from our attention. Attention is energy. What they want is our energy. That's true wealth. If they are able to focus our energy and capture our imagination, they can construct reality in the way that they want it. Because reality is what we imagine it to be. The imagination is the animating force of the universe. If they can focus our attention for us, they can create their own reality.

Now we understand why we watch movies. Now we understand why we have the internet. Now we understand why the school wants you to love artificial intelligence: because it's to enslave you. All of human history is about enslavement. That's what progress is. You think, "Oh my god, I can now watch movies. I have social media. I can communicate with anyone. I have ChatGPT, and it can tell me the truth about the world." No. All these things are created to enslave your mind because you have access to God.

They're trying to trick you into believing that this reality is the true reality. Because once you believe that, this reality becomes the only reality.

So then the question is, who are these people? We don't know. You can say they're the elite, the powers that be. You can also say they're demons. We don't know. But they're interested in fooling us into believing that the movies we see are real, the internet is real, social media is real.

The Path to Freedom

If this is slavery, what is freedom? Freedom is to escape this system and to be able to think for yourself, to see for yourself, to be yourself.

Plato goes on and says one guy, for whatever reason, his chains break loose, and he stumbles out of the cave into the wilderness. He sees the sun, and the sun, of course, is God. At first, he's blinded by the light. He hates it, but he struggles. Then he teaches his eyes to see, and he recognizes that this world is beautiful. It is infinite, diverse, and alive. This world that he thought was real is just a corpse, a dead zombie world. This is what life is.

That's what freedom is. Freedom means that you are now finally able to awake from this terrible nightmare, see everything that is around us—movies, AI, school—as a prison, as hell. Then you're able to look inside yourself and connect back to God, to the spiritual, to look beyond the phenomena and return to the noumena, to peer into the noumena, which is vibrations and energy.

How Do We Escape?

This raises a question: how do we seek freedom? If you look at every single religious tradition—whether it's Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism, it doesn't matter—every single religion proposes the same solution: meditation.

What is meditation? If the world is vibration, if it flows, there must be a logic to this flow, a certain structure to this movement. The Egyptians proposed that what governs this flow is the idea of sacred geometry. They spent thousands of years figuring out that vibrational energy flows in certain geometric patterns, and these geometric patterns are the basis for the universe itself.

If we understand this sacred geometry, we can construct our consciousness in a way that allows us to match the vibrational flow of the universe, to harmonize with it. You do that through breathing, through breathwork. By breathing, you're going to structure your consciousness in a way that becomes part of the universe itself. This will take decades, but you can do this. When you're able to harmonize with the vibrational flow of the universe, then reality itself reveals itself to you. You're able to see this world as false and connect to the true spiritual universe.

This is true consciousness, and this is what all monks in the world are trying to do. You're trying to leave your body and embrace the spiritual because when you do that, it allows you to connect with the divine and discover the secrets of the universe. You're able to see both the phenomena as well as the noumena. This is the great secret of all religions.

Hacks to Alter Consciousness

At the same time, there are actually some hacks. Meditation is what you're supposed to do, but a lot of people feel this takes a long time—decades and decades of isolation. There must be an easier way. And there are. They're not great, but we figured them out.

1. Psychedelics: These drugs—magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, whatever—alter your consciousness in a way that disrupts your left hemisphere and allows you to focus on your right hemisphere, which allows you to see the noumena. When you see the noumena, you realize it's just energy, just colors. If you go online and see artwork from people who've used psychedelics, you will see that it's very colorful and vibrational.
2. Self-Denial: You can starve yourself through fasting. You can go out naked in the cold. When you collapse your body and you're approaching death, your consciousness shifts into the spiritual. It's important to understand that death is not the end; death is release because this world that we live in, our bodies, are the prison. So don't fear death. It's just part of the natural cycle.
3. Near-Death Experiences (NDEs): These are people who don't want to die, but they might be in a car accident or they could have drowned. They die for five minutes, and they all come back and say the same thing. When they die, they escape into the spiritual realm and they meet God. These are people who don't know each other, but they say the same thing about the near-death experience. The world that they go into is Plato's world; it's like escaping the cave and going to the world of the light. It is a world of compassion, of love, of forgiveness. It is as though you're connected again with the divine.

The Christ Consciousness

There's also another way, and this is what the Christians believe. Christian mystics believe that there's a way for Jesus to connect fully with the divine. This is the idea of the Christ consciousness.

It's important to understand that we're not just passive observers of reality; we're active participants. As we are receiving all these vibrations, we ourselves are vibrating through our imagination. As we are receiving information which allows us to create memories, we then implant our memories into this consciousness, which changes the universe. Think of the internet: you have a computer that connects to the internet, receiving information, but then you change this information and it goes back into the internet. Through memories, you are participating in the universe.

Another metaphor is to think of an ocean. All these pebbles are dropping in the ocean, which creates vibrations. You are that pebble. Your role in the world is to create as much of a splash as possible, to vibrate. The Greeks have a term for this called eudaimonia, which is the purpose of life: to be your creative best, to flourish, to blossom, to imagine, to vibrate as much as possible.

This is important because if we all at the same time imagine something to be true, it becomes true. Who's the most famous person in the world? Jesus. Jesus is immortal, eternal, because there are two billion people in the world who love him, who imagine him all the time, who believe that he's part of their lives. Because of their imagination, Jesus is still with us today, but he's at a high vibration.

The question is, how do you resurrect Jesus? How do you bring him back? The answer is by making your body a vessel for Jesus to return in. Your body can become a portal for Jesus to inhabit, to possess, if you welcome him through certain spiritual practices, including love, generosity, and forgiveness. If someone killed your son, you may hate that person. But if you're able to forgive that person and show true forgiveness—of your own free choice—you open yourself up to divinity. This divinity can now flow into you, and this is what we call the Christ consciousness or the second coming of Jesus.

If you are a Christian, you believe in the second coming, that Jesus will return. Christian mystics believe that yes, he can always return if you open your heart to him. But you have to construct your body, your mind, your consciousness in a way that allows for Jesus to inhabit you.

The Secret of the Universe

This is the secret of the universe. The universe exists in our consciousness. Consciousness is what's real; the material is what's false. As we imagine, we participate in the universe and we change it. When we focus on a certain reality, that reality becomes manifest. It becomes reality itself.

By living in the memories of others, we become immortal like Jesus. By constructing our lives in a way that allows for Jesus to return, we can resurrect Jesus in ourselves. This is the secret to immortality, reincarnation, and godhood.

Most of us will fail, but it's okay because our consciousness is forever. Reincarnation means that when we die, we can escape back to the spiritual, and then maybe a thousand years later, we come back. It's a constant cycle where we're trying to achieve these three things. The secret is love powering our imagination. We're here to imagine things.

This is the great secret that religions have passed on through thousands of years of human history and which schools, science, government—all the powers that be—try to suppress because it is a direct threat to this reality. This reality is false, but they want to make it real because they derive power from it. Everything that you've been taught in school, everything that you've learned in science class, is complete and utter nonsense. This is what's true.

The Role of the Great Books

Now that we understand all of this, we can also understand the great books. If you truly want to achieve these three things—immortality, reincarnation, godhood—the secret lies in the great books. The great books are constructed in a way that allows you to access the entire secrets of the universe.

The great books are a capturing of the universe in a state. As a result, there's a universe within the great books. By embracing the great books, by letting them come into you and then entering them, you have the capacity to travel in a new universe, but you also have the capacity to create your own universe. That's what the great books are. They are the secret of what it means to be human. They provide the secret of how to be truly, fully human.

This is not meant to be a quick fix. This is a path. It's up to you to focus and sacrifice yourself on this path into enlightenment. A simple analogy is that everyone knows swimming is the best exercise in the world. But if I just say, "Go swim," it doesn't mean you learn how to swim in one day. It'll take you decades to learn how to swim really well. We all know meditation is really good for you, but it'll take you decades to fully learn how to meditate well.

This is a journey that is lifelong, but it's a journey that requires sacrifice. It requires you to fully learn the great books. I can't teach you all the great books or all their secrets. I can only give you a framework. You must abandon this material reality that is false. Abandon money, power, sex, and fame, and focus on embracing the great books. When you do that, the universe comes into you.

Christians want to be possessed by Jesus. They want Jesus to enter them and resurrect him, creating the Christ consciousness in them. What we want to do is welcome the greatest minds of human civilization—the prophets of humanity, including Homer, Plato, Dante, Kant—into our consciousness so we can be fully human. We're going to do what the Christians want to do, but instead of Jesus, we'll have Homer, Dante, Kant, Plato, and anyone else you want. It's your choice who you want to come and possess you.

I will teach you the power, the secret to resurrect Homer and Dante inside of you. But it's your choice. You must abandon the world to do this, and you must dedicate your entire life to doing this.

The Reading List

• The Iliad by Homer
• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Republic by Plato
• The Aeneid by Virgil (which is not a great book, by the way, but we have to read it anyway)
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Possibly The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, if we have time.

Questions and Answers

How can the prisoners escape the cave?

The prisoners are the ones who have the capacity to create reality. The powers behind them, these people, also have the power to create reality. So what they need to do is trick the prisoners into creating the reality that they want them to create. These are the powers that be, and they hide in the shadows and use deception and manipulation to trick you into thinking that you're a slave, into wanting to create a reality that they want you to create but which you think you want to create.

We are the ones with the power of God. We're the ones with imagination. The ones behind us don't have an imagination. They have power, but they don't have imagination. So they need to trick us into wanting to create the world they want us to create.

Why are you in school being a slave? You say, "I'm not being a slave. I'm being free. I'm in school so I can get into a good college, make a lot of money, and live a happy life." You've been tricked. The truth is, you don't need money to be happy. You don't need anything to be happy. You have yourself. You have your imagination. You have the capacity to love anyone. If you just love your mother, your father, and everyone around you, you'll be happy. You don't need money.

You've been tricked. It's really easy. Just say to yourself, "I'm a slave, and I refuse to be a slave. I refuse to listen to what everyone tells me." That's the hardest thing to do in the world because it would mean your rejection from reality. It would mean, "Oh, I have no more friends. My parents hate me. I'm a loser. Everyone makes fun of me at school."

That's the reality we live in. We fear social isolation. We fear being laughed at. So we just go with the flow even though in our hearts we know this is all a lie. This school, what the teachers teach us, it's all nonsense. ChatGPT is lying to us all the time. Seeking money is going to make me unhappy. Why am I seeking money? Not for yourself. Because you fear social condemnation. You fear being laughed at. That's why you want money. That's why you want to do well in school. Once you accept that, you are free.

Can a slave consciously realize they're enslaved and refuse to embrace freedom?

That's what a slave is. A slave is someone who wants to be a slave, who chooses to be a slave, because it's all choice. It's all free will. I cannot make you do this. I cannot force you to lie to yourself. You have to choose to lie to yourself. Don't think you're being coerced. Don't think you are being enslaved. You choose to come to school. You choose to be lied to. You choose to accept things as they are. Free will is the number one principle of the universe. When you say, "I'm forced to be a slave," you're lying to yourself. It's always been your choice.

These prisoners, they could probably break those chains. And what do you think is going to happen when this guy who's seen the real world comes and tells everyone, "Hey guys, I've seen the real world. Let's get out of here"? They're going to kill him. That's what Plato says. If you dare speak the truth, and people know the truth, they will kill you for speaking it. So, don't try to convince anyone of the truth. Just know the truth for yourself and be free yourself. You can never convince someone who doesn't want to listen.

What about the subjective physical feeling of pain?

The question is, why do we feel pain and why do we have bodies? The reason is that the universe is constructed in a way to promote imagination. The universe is trying to vibrate more, which just means imagine more. If you can't feel pain, if you can't suffer, if you can't lose, if there's no evil, you can't imagine things. If everything was so easy, nothing would ever have any meaning.

If you want to have meaning, you have to struggle for it, and that requires pain and suffering. So, if this world is one of death, pain, and suffering, why are we in it? To improve our imagination. Only through pain and suffering can you truly achieve your full potential as a human. That's why these monks meditate for decades in the snow—they understand that pain is what allows you to focus your mind. Without evil, there can be no good. If everyone's good, what's the point of being good? It's only when everyone is evil and you choose to be good that it gives meaning to your life. That's what gives meaning to the universe.