The Absurdity of Human Existence and Consciousness

0:00What a confusing world it can be sometimes. I mean most of the time really. We spend all of it working to death and being taxed to death to the point where we feel lucky if we can manage to take two weeks off once a day. for a real vacation. No, I don't feel like talking about politics today, or the news for that matter. We've got Trump's State of the Union speech tonight that I'm not going to watch, because all of the best parts will be already highlighted for me tomorrow in the morning, and I can just react to them then. Today I want to talk about the absurdity of human existence and consciousness itself, because I've spent more time over the course of my life fixating on these questions more than anything else.

0:37Now, I'm not any sort of trained expert, but thankfully none of the trained experts understand exactly why we're here or what consciousness is to begin with either. So forgive me for speaking with a little bit of a Thoratai, but in my 45 years on this planet so far, I have picked up on a few patterns along the way that would suggest to me, like many others, that we are clearly living in some sort of simulation. I don't mean that in the technological sense, but that's generally how a lot of secularly based minds tend to interpret it. Religious folks have their own idea of what the afterlife means, and yet a surprising amount of people tend to believe that consciousness is a byproduct of a chemical reaction in the brain.

1:14Which is interesting when you consider the fact that mainstream science is now starting to lean towards a model where reality itself appears to be rendering in real time as it's observed by the brain. You can take this all the way back to Plato or even Nikola Tesla if you'd rather. Men who believe that the brain was a receiver and that consciousness comes from the same universal source. Some call it God, some call it universal consciousness, some call it another dimension, the truth is that none of us really know what consciousness is. And that has bothered me since I was a child to no end. I've watched hundreds of these near-death experience videos I'm sure most of you have seen on YouTube and TikTok and Reels.

1:49Now, assuming just for argument's sake for a moment that we believe all of these people at face value, the overwhelming majority of folks who are clinically dead and come back to life do experience some form of consciousness after the body dies. Now, you can't prove or disprove that in a lab, but it doesn't mean that we're not allowed to talk about it. This is where science fades off into the periphery. The only thing left is what we as individuals have seen and heard to come up with our own conclusions of the what and why as to what exactly we're supposed to be doing here on earth. It's the line of thinking that brought me out of almost becoming an atheist in my 20s.

2:25It's called deism, and it's the belief that casts aside all forms of religion while acknowledging and holding sacred the fact that God is very real and very much alive. Our founding fathers were all deists, not evangelical Christians. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, all deists in one form or another. It is a vast spectrum. The idea is that every single human being on this planet is born with everything that it requires to understand the who, what, when, and where as to why any of us are here in the first place without the religious dogma, which is nothing more than other human beings translating their own personal experiences of the divine, and sometimes turning that into the law of the land.

3:07Every single word of the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah was written by a flawed, mortal human being just like anyone else and rewritten a hundred times again over by another series of names and faces lost to the sands of time. Some of us believe that religion itself is the original sin. By bastardizing the divine spiritual connection with a creator into a one size fits all money making contraption, it becomes nothing more than humans curating, packaging, marketing, and selling divinity in the form of organized religion. You can start to see how the middleman becomes an easy scapegoat. So I tend to see religion itself more like a necessary evil because it does help a lot of scared and hopeless folks to hold on to something that feels real here and now.

3:50But our treasures are not of this world, are they? There's a reason we take everything for granted when we hit that clifftop, when we're buying new houses and new cars and new flashy bling that inevitably leaves us feeling empty. Because once you got it, you realize you can't take any of it with you. And time itself is all you really have left. Well, time and consciousness, that is. Some philosophers say that time and consciousness are one and the same, but I'm starting to believe that consciousness itself is all we really have. You see, deism is sort of an anti-religion that answers more than just one question for me.

4:20And it started to become a way of looking at life in every aspect differently through the aperture of reason and logic. Just assume for a minute that you were given everything that you would ever need as a divine being from birth to death to be able to come to conclusions about the nature of this world and what an incredible force must have been required to bring about not only everything around us, but to give everyone the gift of individual perspective. I think the most difficult question to answer on this planet is, who are you? Because when you sit down with yourself for any amount of time and search deeply for an answer, really press yourself on it.

4:55I guarantee the answer is not going to come easily. Now lately, it feels like I've transcended this boundary by realizing that I'm not my job or my house or my car or even my family. I'm not my race. I'm not my skin color. I'm not my gender. I'm not the color of my hair. The only thing that I really am is a single point of consciousness that's aware of itself floating off in space somewhere as a formless sphere of energy pretending to host a podcast called Newsweek Radio. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get all weird on today's show. Maybe somebody put some LSD in the coffee this morning without telling me.

5:30I'm joking, of course. And while I didn't wake up this morning planning on sharing this part of my life with the audience here in Newsweek, I did happen to stumble across an incredible piece of audio here from the great Alan Watts, who just happens to be my personal favorite philosopher. And he became famous in the 60s for interpreting Eastern religions for Western audiences out of San Francisco on the radio and in lecture halls and in his incredible books. Definitely my favorite teacher just all the way around of all time as well. But I found this clip that I'm going to leave you here with today that explains this deist mentality even better than I can.

6:02So here's the great Alan Watts with what he calls the economics of spirituality. People in religion are the worst game players in the world. They're always trying to outface each other and say, well, you don't have quite the right conception. Even among the most orthodox confraternities, say orthodox Catholic theologians, they're always trying to one-up each other. Say, yes, you believe that that your explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity is very correct, but there are certain subtle respects in which you haven't quite got the point. And they go round and round and round on this forever, because it's not really religion at all, it's a form of personal contest.

6:43Because everybody in the world almost is challenging someone else to say, you're not real, are you? You're not really sincere. You don't actually mean what you say. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Prove it. I don't think you can. Everybody's going, so everybody's frightened. Everybody's guilty. And everybody else knows how to exploit everybody else's fear and guilt. And emotions, say, like guilt, are absolutely useless because they always frustrate their own objective. Guilt is supposed to make you good. We have to see that all these games of spiritual one-upmanship, We have to see through them.

7:28Every guru, spiritual teacher, comes on like, he's got something that you don't have. More insight, more relaxation, more happiness, more oneness with God, whatever it may be. And this is the bait which catches you. Now, there are two kinds of gurus. One kind of guru really believes he's got more than you have. And he can do nothing for you except lead you into a bag. that's the ordinary minister who believes that he is a representative of the true and authentic religion and that he is going to get you into the church and he's going to get you hooked on the religion so that you become a religious addict and so of course so long as you're a religious addict just like an addict on heroin will have to fork out 50 bucks a day to get his connection so you're going to have to tithe your income or whatever it is to pay off the mortgage on the church buildings and to keep the clergy alive.

8:26That's why they want to get you hooked on it. There's another kind of guru. He makes his living in an entirely different way. He wants to get rid of you. He's got some way of liberating you so that you can function on your own without having any guru at all and without belonging to any religion because he treats his doctrine and his practice as medicine, not as diet. And eventually you take the medicine, you understand, and you can function on your own and you go away. But when you go away, you say hey to everybody else, I got this guru, you know, he was just fabulous. And he set me free. So what happens is this kind of guru, instead of having a permanent group of followers, has a big turnover.

9:07And he gets on all right. I'm just explaining the economics of spirituality.

9:22What he's really pointing at here, I think, is the moment spirituality becomes a competition. It stops being spiritual. And I think the same can and should be said about politics, and even content programming philosophy where I work. The urge to prove belief and to defend doctrine and signal morality and superiority isn't devotion. It's insecurity dressed up as sacred language. Real growth doesn't hook you. It frees you. The teachers who matter aren't the ones who convince you that you're lacking, but the ones who quietly remind you that nothing essential was missing in the first place. And maybe that's the deeper relief underneath all of this, because whatever God is, whatever consciousness is, and whatever politics have become was never something to win or perform or defend.

10:03It was always something to recognize and experience and eventually walk forward, carrying on your own. This is Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards.