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Feb. 27, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:50
663 Unlearning, or - why I do what I do
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Time Text
Hi, everybody. Hope you're doing well, Steph.
It is the 27th of February 2007.
It's 5.30.
I'm just on my way home. I'm going to backup recording device.
There is no access through the microphone to my Windows computer, so no problemo.
So I wanted to talk about something that's sort of been on my mind, and I hope it makes some sense to you.
I've been quite emotional over the last couple of days, And it is really sort of like I came home last night and I just said to Christina, I said, you know, I've been sort of waiting for this company to get back to me about part-time work and there's not been any particular mention of it.
There's not been any particular mention of anything else either.
So I'm going to have to take my fate and my future in my own hands and do something a little bit more proactive.
But I'm telling you, it is a thousand mile walk to that exit ramp.
From this life that I've lived for the past, I guess, 10 or 11 years of being in the business world.
And the last time that I talked about this, I got a fair number of emails and some posts, well-meaning, that were telling me that I don't have a duty or a responsibility to do what I think needs to be done, what I think the world needs the most.
And I really do appreciate that and I really do appreciate where that's coming from.
But I'd sort of like to make the case in a way that maybe makes a bit more sense to you rather than obligation.
So that you can maybe get it into your...
If it's of interest to you, I think it might be.
If you can get it into your heart, what it is that is...
Driving me in this direction.
What is a hollowing out the path of all other joys except this one?
It is a...
And it's cheesy, I hate to say it, but it's absolutely true.
It is love that is driving me in this direction.
And I kind of wanted to share that...
Because I know it's just a podcast and I know it's just a conversation.
But to me, it is essential.
Not for me. I mean, I have a great life and a wonderful life and I have been unbelievably blessed in my life.
Even when I look back upon the trials of what I went through when I was younger, I have been incredibly blessed.
In that if I had not gone through those trials, and if I had not been, had the nature or had the personality that I had, and to some degree I would say made the choices that I made, then I don't think that I would have a tenth of a tenth of the strength that I need to do what I feel is most important to do next in my life.
So I'll sort of try and explain why It's so important to me and maybe it will resonate with you and maybe it'll help you understand the challenge that, you know, I'm going over this cliff first, but I'm telling you I'm not going to be alone in this for long.
And I'm going to shout down from the world below because what we think of as a cliff is in fact only a cloud.
And I really want to fall to earth.
I really want to make the leap down to earth and I want to go into the earth.
I want to go into the earth and into the caves.
Because I know...
Well, let me get to that in a bit.
But it really is for me a kind of immense and intense love for even the world...
As it is. And even people as they are.
And I know that I spend time, a lot of time, criticizing.
And I've tried to not let that reign over me.
Like, I've tried not to let the critical aspect of what it is that I do, of which it's not an inconsiderable aspect, I've tried not to let that overwhelm my amazing love, my deep and abiding love for the world that is and the people who are in it.
You know, a cynic is for the most part a thwarted optimist and to a large degree the depth of despair is related to the height of the idealism that the further you reach the farther you fall and that of course has been a real balancing act for me.
I mean I reach for me so immensely far into the future and I reach for me so immensely high from where I've come from and from what I see around me and I reach For such a degree of depth within myself that I feel like I almost get lost in these caves down in the bottom of things, in the bowels of the soul, in the root of being.
And I try, as I talked about the last time that I talked about this, I was raised to be small.
I was raised To be small, I think we all are raised to be immensely, immensely small, infinitesimally small, and yet the world needs The world needs philosophers.
The world needs heroes.
And we have to be large in a way that is not recognizable.
We have to be enormous ghosts, I guess, in ways that people don't recognize.
We have to be enormous and powerful in a way that is invisible to people and that, as I mentioned before, feels a whole lot like narcissism or craziness, but I'm fairly resolved to that and I don't think that it is at all.
But the love that I have for reality, for the tangible, for the sensual, for the material.
I am wed to matter.
I am a slave to matter.
I am a material slut.
And I just have such an incredible...
I mean, even this driving down, I'm feeling the bump of the road on my butt.
I'm looking at these dead trees in the middle of winter, these patches of snow, this uneven road, and I love it all.
I absolutely, completely and totally love it all.
I embrace it all.
I think that it is the most beautiful, wonderful existence, and even the challenges which we have make that existence so much deeper and so much richer and so much more meaningful.
For me, the connection that keeps this conversation so alive for me, so important for me, and I hope for you too, is that through this process, and the process that I embarked upon long before these podcasts came bubbling up,
the process is or has provided me such Immense beauty.
Such immense beauty.
I feel, I feel, I feel like I live in this absolute sunbeam cathedral.
This absolutely joyous life.
I mean, literally, I feel bathed in life.
Elevated beyond measure.
And I feel humbled beyond words.
Well, maybe not beyond words, but I think you know what I mean.
And I don't think that it's singular.
I don't think it's me. I don't think that it's me.
I don't think that this is...
I don't think this is a talent.
You know, like how Pavarotti can sing and you can enjoy listening to Pavarotti sing, but that doesn't mean that you can sing like Pavarotti.
I don't think it's a talent.
I don't think it is specific to me.
I think we can all do this.
I really, really think.
I think you can do this. I think that you can do this.
And I feel that to be so elementally true that I see It's funny, I don't want to say possibility because that sounds like diminishing what is,
but when I think back to myself five years ago or seven years ago ten years ago or longer and I think of myself now and I think of this mighty unfurling and this immense raising and deepening of my experience and the enriching of my soul that has occurred through the examination of truth and the pursuit of wisdom
and I really think it's for everyone I really, really, really think that it's for everyone.
And that's what I think I love the most about this world and you and the other listeners and the people who are to come.
That is what I love the most.
About the world that can be.
The world that is within our hearts and the world that can be in the world.
I used this metaphor of caves a little while back and I sort of want to explain what that means so it sort of makes sense to you.
Caves are mysterious and wonderful things of course and full of beauty and danger.
and internal, and they've long been a metaphor for internal processes all the way back to Plato and beyond.
And I feel a little bit like a Moloch, like I was driven underground as a kind of punishment.
I don't know.
As a kind of punishment, as a kind of...
The retaliation for the crime of not being strong enough to share the world with the cold and brutal people who seem to run it and seem to have no problem having voice and willing and intimidating and enforcing and disapproving and the cold icebergs that we otter a swim between.
That's sort of what it felt like.
It felt like when I was a child.
I was surrounded by these crashing, gnashing icebergs.
And I'm really mixing my metaphors here.
I do apologize for that.
But I felt that I was naked and vulnerable in a world of empty armor, of I really felt that the surface world was populated by these cold robots and you didn't want to get their attention and you didn't want them to turn their beady electronic eyes on you because their curiosity It was always and forever only about your pain and inflicting it.
It was never about your joys.
And the cold curiosity of these beings was always focused on hurt, hurting.
And so you didn't want to try or you didn't want to get the attention of these creatures.
And it feels to me or it felt to me like the world was just so full of these people.
You know, when I was I don't know, 11 years old or something.
There was this guy named Greg Thompson.
I went to school with him.
And he was a very cool and aggressive kid.
And I remember he was very, I guess, insouciant.
And he would, you know, mark up.
I remember him drawing with a felt marker on a girl's face for a joke.
And this, you know, this just popped into my mind as well.
The very first day that I went to school in Canada here, the game is, oh, you're going to come out and play.
It's like, great, let's go play.
And the game was to chase the girls down and punch them in the crotch.
To chase the girls down and punch them in the crotch.
Savagery! Lord of the Flies!
Well, of course, in a public school.
Where else would it be? This is where...
The women are trained to be frightened and the men are trained to be angry.
And this guy, Greg Thompson, I'm over at his house because I was going to help him with his paper the next morning because I needed the money.
And I eat a cookie and I guess a couple of crumbs fall down and he says to me, pick up the crumbs.
We don't allow crumbs in this house, right?
This is another 11-year-old kid, right?
And I'm standing there, I'm sort of goggled and I know that it's kind of weird, but what am I going to do, right?
This is the world of the people that I was sort of full of, or who filled my world.
I mean, it's a primitive and cold planet on the surface with all of these robots or empty armors stalking around, bashing things.
And I felt, I think...
Oh, it's more than I think.
I felt that I was banished to the underworld.
I was banished to hide in the underworld, and I spent a good deal of my life hiding, writing and thinking and reading and being alone and surrendering this surface world and going underground.
And it felt like a defeat.
I mean, people have always felt impossible, for me, people have always felt impossible to fight.
They're missing something so fundamental, something that to me is so fundamental and involuntary, whatever you want to call it, the empathy, the concern, the care, the whatever.
They're missing, people are just missing something so fundamental that I was never able to argue with any of them, never able to get purchased, never able to Because aren't you always a sense in a child begging and stretching out your hands, looking for some sort of empathy or some sort of warmth?
And it feels like people are just taking fistfuls of snow and pressing them into your chest, into the hole in your heart.
And the freezing and the shuddering and the shaking, I just felt pushed away from the surface world.
And I guess that word has two meanings.
I pushed away from that world.
And so I went inside.
I went underground.
I went into reading, into thinking, into art.
I went into the world of imagination and introspection.
And the most amazing thing about that for me was it was in there that I found the real world.
And the world that is so joyous and the world that is so magical and the world that is so wonderful, that is rich with imagination, not blighted with fantasy and cruelty.
I thought I was going underground, but I was stepping off a bloody cloud and onto the ground.
Thank you.
And so for me, these caves...
They actually open to the sky and there is such beauty and such life in these worlds, in these reaches and these spans that I tread.
And it really is the most astoundingly non-intuitive thing for me that I went inside, which seems to me to be away from the world, that I went internal And stepped out into the real world.
I would as likely imagine that I go past the fur coats into the back of a closet and emerge into another world.
And I think that it is not me.
I haven't popped out into a world that is me, a narcissistic world all about me.
I really feel that That I've popped out, I shouldn't say popped, I've emerged, with your help, in the world that is, right?
In the world that is revealed when you let go of illusions, right?
When you let go of illusions, there is a world that is, and it is just simply the world, and there's a beauty and a love in being in accordance, in concordance with that world, in the same way that When you're trying to listen to a melody and someone's screaming, it's really tough to enjoy anything.
But when somebody blends their voice in harmony, it can enhance it.
And that's the richness that I feel by living sort of in harmony or with as few as illusions as I think I can have at the moment with relation to the world.
There is just such a beauty and harmony.
And I feel like a perfect tuning fork vibrating in happiness.
And I don't think that that's just for me.
I don't think that's particular or peculiar to me.
And it is the love that I feel for the world that is, that emerged from going inside, going into the caves, and finding that they're not caves, right?
They're not caves.
It is that world that I want to share.
That's a lot of what it is that I'm trying to do here.
It's trying to share this simple, beautiful, clean, natural, heavenly world that is without prejudice.
The world without prejudice. The world without interpretation.
The world without falsehood.
The world without justification.
The world of mere identification.
Sense free of story.
Sense free of story.
Because isn't that really what traps us so much is that we're just told a story about everything.
This guy's a bad guy.
This guy's got a uniform on.
He's a good guy. You're an adult.
You choose your leaders, but your leaders force you to do things.
Your parents are virtuous.
Virtue is something you have to earn.
Your parents haven't earned it, but they're still virtuous.
Nothing is true. It's true that nothing is true.
God is real. I mean, we are bludgeoned with stories.
We are buried under narrative.
We are drowned.
In meaningless meaning, empty meaning, imagined meaning, fantasy, choked, strangled with fantasy.
And letting all of that go is a very difficult thing, is a very emotional thing for me.
But, by God, what's on the other side is unbelievable.
It's so hard to get there.
But what's on the other side is...
Well, there is no other side to this side, you know?
There is no other side to this side.
There's just emptiness. It's like saying, what's on the other side of the atmosphere?
Well, nothing. Looking out, right?
Space. Emptiness.
vacuum.
There is no other side.
And what is propelling me, and I think I can sort of make some sense of it
this way, what is propelling me is when you love someone, when you really love someone and you have discovered something beautiful or something wonderful.
If you're dinner with someone you love and you order, I don't know, a fabulous creme brulee or something like that.
Apparently when I'm emotional I can't speak French.
You order some beautiful food, some wonderful food, and what are you going to do?
Are you going to have an impulse to share it with someone that you love?
Well, of course you are. You want to share that positive and beautiful taste, the wonderful taste.
When you hear a wonderful song or you see a great movie and you care about someone, you think that that would be meaningful or important to them or bring them happiness, you want to share it with them.
I mean, that's part of what love is, right?
It's wanting to share what is beautiful with deserving people, with people who've earned that regard.
And that, in its most fundamental, I think in its most fundamental essence is...
But you won't do it if it can't be shared, right?
You don't go up to a good friend or a friend that you love who's deaf and say, hey, listen to this wonderful music.
I mean, I guess they'll get the bass beat and if it's rap, they might get most of it, but you only will share it with people who are able to receive it.
And it is my particular conviction that...
This is far more common a capacity than we think it is.
This simple, incredibly complex to get to, but very simple when you're there, this simple kind of clarity, this is not as rare a capacity as we think it is.
I feel, I think.
I think that the depth of the human soul is just so immense That there's no limit to what people can think and what they can feel and what they can do.
And it's one of the reasons I do the dream analyses, is I want to say to people who may not have a PhD in philosophy, who may not have read all the great books, ancient Greek, who may not have read Plato in the original, that...
They know everything.
They know everything about everything.
That the amount of knowledge that we have within us that accumulates within our sensual experience, within our minds, and the depth of knowledge that we have, beyond this glassy emptiness, this iceberg of nothing that is the illusions of the false self, what we know and what we understand that's at the bottom of that is so immense and so powerful.
And the truth, you know, everything that I talk about During this is telling you that you already know.
It's telling you that you already know.
And it's not trying to teach you something new.
It is trying to un-teach you something old.
It's not trying to heal a wound.
It is trying to get a cast taken off you to say there is no wound.
I'm not trying to heal a broken arm.
I'm trying to get you to take off the cast and say, look, it's not broken and it never was.
That the only break is thinking that you have to keep your arm in a cast.
And the doubt that we all have, because we're doing something radical and new here, the doubt that we all have...
Because we are social animals and we're innately, partly all social metaphysicians and the idea that we're right and other people are wrong is always a strain for non-narcissistic people.
Narcissists don't hang around here very much.
But it really is that love of the happiness that I have both found and been given.
I mean, I've been in pursuit of it, but my nature has allowed me to be able to achieve it.
It is this beautiful song that I can hear, that I live, and because I have such an extraordinarily deep affection for people and for the world and for what could be, I want so much to pass it along, right?
right to say, put these headphones on and listen to yourself.
Because it really is all within you.
All within you.
It really is all within you.
And there's nothing that you need to hear.
There's just a whole chorus and a whole bunch of empty words that you need to unhear and to listen again from the beginning with the simple clarity of who you were before all of this nonsense descended upon you, before Before the world of ideas, before the world of social constructs, before the stories were inflicted upon you, before you were lashed with the tales of the crazy.
All of the simple stuff which we have at the very beginning, which is object constancy, the ball rolls under the rug, we pick up the rug, we go, hey, the ball!
All of the simple stuff about reality, all the stuff that we start with.
It's all in there, and everything that we hear, and everything that we imagine, and all the nonsense that we are force-fed, all of the crippling results of such an unhealthy diet of empty words,
everything that That accumulates to us through our experience is always compared, I think, I really believe, to this very first simple model of reality that we work with and so much of...
Of the efforts of philosophers and educators and priests and parents and governments is just to get you to forget all of the very simple stuff at the very beginning of things.
If you remember the Jennyism part two, how much work had to go in for years and years and years to get someone to forget to such basic things and to live so much in a castle cloud of empty words and contradictions that never show up as contradictions because nothing can be connected.
But our minds are designed to connect and our minds connect anyway!
And we get that in our dreams, and we get that in our depressions, and we get that in our yearnings.
So this is just about take off the cast, get out of the wheelchair.
Because you're not broken.
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