The Truth About Truth, Part #5/5: Truth And Enlightenment

In this talk, #5/5 in the "Truth About Truth" series, we'll explore the importance of spiritual truth and discover the benefits and drawbacks of using the scientific method to find spiritual truth through processes such as meditation and energy healing.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Brett Michael Phillips,

And welcome back for The Truth About Truth.

I want to tie it all together for you.

I want to show you how all these things relate,

Because some of you may have come to this for more of the science and truth angle,

Wanting to understand reality better.

Give me the truth,

Give me the facts,

Discover what's real,

Discover what's true.

And that's awesome.

I'm like that.

Some of you may come at this for more of the law of attraction,

Spirituality,

Energy angle.

And I love that too.

And you may be wondering,

Okay,

Brent,

Why are you talking about cosmology and gravity and relativity here?

I want to learn how to heal my body,

How to activate my manifesting ability,

Have a better life.

Well,

Just know you're both right,

Because this is all tied together.

That's what I want to talk about here,

Specifically how science and truth and the scientific method relate to spirituality,

To consciousness,

To healing.

And so first thing I want to put out there,

And this is going to be a little controversial,

You may surprise you,

Is that while the scientific method is the best rational process we have for discovering and identifying truth,

It's not perfect.

It has some really severe limitations.

So before I go further,

Just to be fair,

I love science.

I think the scientific method in a lot of ways is the best thing we have going to discover truth,

To identify it,

To build new models of reality that we can use that are functional.

That's what brought us the internet and airplanes and electric cars and YouTube and all this fun stuff,

Right?

It came through the scientific method.

At the same time,

We want to temper that with the understanding that it does have some limits.

So I want to take just a few quick minutes to give an overview of the scientific method,

Because a lot of people think that they're rational and know science,

But the truth is a lot of people don't.

That being said,

If you are a legitimate scientist and you have done real research,

Skip ahead like two minutes.

I don't want to bore you.

For everyone else,

This is important stuff,

Because remember,

You can't learn something if you think you already know it.

So put aside what you think you know.

So the scientific method is actually very simple.

You have an idea of how things work,

A new model.

So you make a hypothesis that has a prediction.

You go,

You know what?

I think that gravity is based on the distance and the mass of something,

But the relative mass doesn't matter.

As an example from history,

Galileo famously said,

If you take a small rock and a big rock and drop them,

They fall at the same rate.

People argued with him.

They go,

No,

Everyone knows that big things fall faster.

They have more mass.

So Galileo did an experiment.

This is the scientific method,

Right?

You have a hypothesis.

You go,

This is how I think it works.

And you create an experiment to either verify or to contradict the hypothesis.

So Galileo went and famously dropped rocks of different sizes off the Tower of Pisa and found that no matter how big or how small the rock,

They all fell at the same rate.

And people were surprised.

Why?

He actually did an experiment to prove his hypothesis.

Later Newton figured out the equation.

And we found that the reason bigger and smaller rocks fall at the same rate is that the mass completely cancels out.

It doesn't matter.

All that matters is the relative distance.

So don't worry about the nerdy stuff.

That's an example of hypothesis experiment,

Either validate or contradict.

That's the essence of it.

Now to get into modern science,

We've also learned that studies need to be double blind.

What does that mean?

What that means is when people are in a study,

They don't know whether they're getting option A or option B.

So let's say you're testing a new medical drug.

Half the people they will give the drug,

The other half they give a placebo.

In other words,

Nothing.

Now the blind part is the people receiving it don't know if they're getting the actual drug or the placebo.

The double blind means that the experimenters,

The scientists,

The doctors doing the experiment,

They don't know either.

That way they can't unconsciously communicate whether they're getting the actual drug or their placebo.

That's all the double blind means.

So if you didn't know,

Now you know.

And the other part of science is it needs to be peer reviewed.

In other words,

When you do an experiment,

Others who have similar training and ability that can understand it have to replicate it.

They have to review it and say,

Yes,

This is a properly done experiment.

If you don't have that,

Then anomalies or mistakes can create a huge disaster.

A good example would be we had the whole excitement around cold fusion in the early nineties,

That there were some researchers,

I think in Utah,

That did an experiment that showed that they had created cold fusion.

And it took the world by storm.

I was at MIT at the time.

I think I was an undergrad.

And I remember for about the next week,

It's all anybody wanted to talk about.

You drop in on any lunchtime table,

Any conversation of people walking on campus,

They were all talking about it.

What they found though,

Was that their experiment didn't pass the peer review threshold.

In other words,

Other physicists and other labs who ran the same experiment did not get the same result.

And then I'm going to circle back to why that happened in a few minutes.

So long story short,

This is the scientific method.

You have an idea,

A model,

You make a prediction,

You then do an experiment,

Either validate or contradict it.

And you do it in a peer reviewed,

Double blind manner.

And that gives you the closest thing we can get to truth in our modern world.

So that's awesome.

That does a lot for us.

But it does have some limits.

Here's the biggest limiter,

The consciousness of the observer,

The one doing the experiment.

This is the biggest flaw in the scientific method,

That there's an assumption that the experiment happens completely independent of those observing or recording it.

And those that have studied quantum physics know that's not the truth.

There is this thing called the observer effect,

Which quite simply tells us that when something is observed,

It distorts it,

It changes it.

That quite simply,

You cannot observe or measure or record something without disturbing it.

But you cannot observe,

Watch,

Record something without influencing it,

Without disturbing it.

That's a limitation.

Because the scientific method assumes that we can run an experiment and the one observing it doesn't change the outcome.

We know that's not true.

The other thing that's unseen about science and a great limiter is one of the things that affects the result of the experiment is the consciousness of the observer.

That people of different levels of consciousness actually experience different kinds of reality.

In the extreme,

If we see the stories of the Siddhas,

The supermen from India that can do the most advanced metaphysical things,

Levitating,

Walking on water,

Bilocation,

Teleportation,

I'd like to believe it's true.

I also believe that many of them that make the claims are faking.

But I do believe such a thing is possible.

Why is that?

They are of such high consciousness,

The laws of the universe work differently for them.

So if you are of sufficiently high consciousness,

You can bend the laws of reality.

And so if you took one of these incredibly advanced people in terms of consciousness and you had them measure gravity as they're levitating,

You would get a different answer.

The consciousness of the person doing the measurement impacts and changes it.

And in terms of the cold fusion experiment,

I don't know exactly what happened,

Right?

I'm not a physicist.

I wasn't there.

I was not on any of the teams that either did it or tried to verify it.

What I do know is that one,

The consciousness of the experimenters could create a different result in the same way that most of us can't levitate.

But I believe there are humans that can.

The second thing is some people believe that it was electromagnetic fields.

That in the original experiment,

There were powerful electromagnets that were very close by so that the cold fusion happened.

But it happened because there was a powerful electromagnetic field.

And that was not understood.

It wasn't observed.

It wasn't recorded.

It was just a coincidence.

So the other teams that went to try to replicate the cold fusion,

They didn't know about that.

They couldn't replicate it.

And so they fail.

Now I don't know for sure why it worked or didn't work,

Right?

I wasn't there.

But this is an example of how the environment,

The context,

And the consciousness influences things.

So now let's talk about spiritual truth.

Let's connect this all together.

So why does this matter for you?

How does this impact your ability to make money,

To heal your body?

Well,

First,

I want you to know that all of the leading edge scientists today are becoming spiritual.

They're starting to recognize there is really a crossover between consciousness and scientific result.

And we will not be able to get past a certain point with science until we accept that.

Earlier,

I talked about how we're all limited by models and maps with our biology and our beliefs.

That's okay.

As long as we're aware of the limitations,

We can correct for it and asymptotically approach the truth,

Get closer and closer.

So if science is to go beyond a certain point,

We need to understand and quantify this observer effect.

We need to take into account things such as the local electromagnetic fields,

The consciousness,

The awareness,

The belief systems,

The internal mythology of the ones running the experiment.

And if we can do that,

We can get closer and closer to the truth.

Because this distinction between scientific truth and spiritual truth is artificial.

Descartes made that up several hundred years ago.

It worked at the time,

But it doesn't work today.

And if we're really going to move forward in our lives,

We need to bridge that gap.

We need to bring the two worlds together.

So for you science-y types out there,

I encourage you to open your mind to the spiritual stuff.

There is something real.

I used to think it was a bunch of hippie bunk.

It's not.

There is something there.

Now to the spiritual types out there,

You need to be open to science.

You need to realize that a lot of the spiritual claims people make are nonsense and BS.

A lot of them are people that just don't know what they're doing.

Others are outright fraudsters and scammers.

So we need to apply that scientific method because great claims require great evidence.

If someone says they can levitate,

I would not believe that right off the bat.

I would need to see that under controlled circumstances.

That's what I mean by we have to bring these two worlds together.

The science types need to open to spirit,

To consciousness,

To intuition.

And the spirit types need to open to science,

To rigorous thinking.

It's the masculine and the feminine,

The left and the right.

Science,

Technology,

Engineering is very masculine.

Spiritual work,

Healing,

Intuition is very feminine.

If we want to create something real,

We got to bring the two together.

So whether you're from the science camp or the spirit camp,

I hope you found this very interesting.

I hope you found something in here that's going to move you forward.

And I hope it makes you curious to learn more about the other side because we need both.

Here's a fact that all of our greatest scientists were intuitives.

They were Tesla,

Einstein,

Newton,

Galileo,

All intuitives.

It takes both sides,

The masculine and the feminine.

And that's why I've devoted my life to this conjunction of where science meets spirit.

My goal is to bring the rigor,

The discipline,

The methodology of science and engineering to the new age world,

To spirituality,

To energy,

Healing the consciousness,

To find the best of both.

See into the quantum field,

Manifest,

Change lives.

I would love to have you come to one of my live events.

So we're at the end here.

Again,

I hope you found this series on the truth about truth to be some combination of entertaining,

Informational,

And transformational.

And I hope to see you again very soon.

Until then,

Take care and namaste.

Reviews

Thank Brent I really enjoyed this series. I wasn't able to find the 4th talk in The Truth About Truth series. Is it available?
Love and blessings to you