Are you there God ? | Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse

What is the first memory that you have of a lived experience of something you would have identified—that you would identify now as having been God?

It's worth pointing out, I think, that one can have meaningful belief in God or a relationship to God and also not necessarily think that God is, quote-unquote, there. You know, for something to be there—I mean, that's actually like a non-trivial philosophical question. That's actually a thorny question, what it even means for something to be there. And in fact, yeah, if there's a separate God, where would he or she stand, right? Like, where exactly is this person hanging out? Then whose spot is that? Why is that a separate thing? And then what one thing...

I don't buy that either. Where would God be drawn to? How could God need the system? If God leaves, that what remains? And if something remains, then what was that created by? And it was created by something else. Well, then that thing was the real God. So God by definition cannot withdraw. Everything must be part of God. Everything. So there cannot be a withdrawn God. If there is a God in any sense of the word, that God is everywhere and everyone and in everything at all times.

Yeah, I do. I do think that the interesting loop in what you're saying is that God as a construct exists due to our conscious, sentient experience, which most of the time brings us out of that kind of God construct in which we are just part of everything. I do feel like there's a difference, a meaningful difference between beingness and sentience and consciousness, and then everythingness and like perfect, perfect connection.

Well, isn't it possible to imagine that we do live in a simulation and that the simulator is another name for God, and God is basically sitting outside the simulation watching the simulation play out?

You're right, but it's not impossible to conceive. It's possible.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's why it's so crazy to talk about God. And fascinating also. Okay, let's talk about God seriously, right? So there were people in human history who tried to approach this very, very seriously, right? And these were extremely logical and scientific people. Like if you ever read Leibniz on free will, you know, he goes through huge gyrations to prove that free will was a real thing back when he was living. Everyone's a determinist, and so people would argue all the time free will, because it's very intimately connected with the notion of God, right? Ted Chiang has this great short story in which there's like a—they invent this device which destroys the idea of free will. You can basically see—the device can always predict whether you're gonna push a button or not before you push it. And so people kind of see this and, you know, half of them sort of lose all their desire and willpower to do anything and sort of go insane because they're like, well, I don't have any free will, so what's the point of doing anything, right? So the free will question is very intimately linked to the God question. And so great thinkers in time have explored that, and I would argue that they were considering free will before we knew about the concept of emergence and complexity. And a lot of so-called free will can be explained by emerging properties of complex beings that then exhibit behaviors that are completely different from their constituent parts. So even if you think the universe is deterministic and all billiard balls crashing into each other, an emergent creature on top can still not be explained by the constituent collisions in some predictable way and can have emergent properties of how they behave. And then the outside actor doesn't quite know how to model that, so they have to attribute that to free will. Anyway, it's going a little aside, but this is the God question. Because now people have also approached the God question in supposedly logical ways. So there was a monk—I don't remember if he was French, anyways, his name was Anselm—and he came up with a God proof. He came up with the first hardcore proof of the existence of God, and it was called like the ontological proof of the existence of God. And I don't remember how it goes exactly, but the high-level trick that he does is he basically says, look, God is—the definition of God is perfection. And if a perfect thing must exist, or it must be imperfect, or it would be imperfect. And so because I can imagine perfection, it must exist, otherwise it's not perfect and I haven't imagined perfection. So he uses the proof by contradiction, and this only works on the concept of perfection, but he basically says this leads to the existence of God. Just the concept of God alone implies the existence of God. And that's why it's called the ontological proof of the existence of God. And I know it's not a very satisfying proof when I kind of buzzed through it in 30 seconds, but it's actually worth thinking about. And then there are advanced versions of this. There's an advanced version of this proof that Jed McKenna tries out, where he basically asks the question, like, does truth exist? And if truth exists, where does it exist? What does this stop? And when does it stop? And who does it apply to? And who does it not apply to? And you pretty quickly come to the conclusion, well, like, oh, well, yeah, if truth exists, then it has to exist everywhere at all times. And if that's the case, what do we know that exists everywhere at all times? And the only thing we know for sure that exists everywhere at all times is our own awareness and consciousness. So then he closed the circle and says, okay, consciousness is God, and consciousness is all. Everything is consciousness. Again, not satisfying when I buzz through it, but sorry, I'm rambling.

No, no. Well, I definitely—I want the room to be able to comment. I also want to at least bookmark that one of my, I guess, issues with Buddhism is that I don't think it sufficiently considers that being and consciousness, etc., have like tremendous amounts of constraints, actually, which are not equal in all space and time necessarily. But anyways, I don't want to go down my rabbit hole without giving James and Zohar the opportunity to talk. So I will come back to it.

Okay, I have a very bad interpretation of the East of Eden that I can share, which is essentially about the necessity of the fall in order to experience God at all, right? There's, you know, the kind of foundation of Judeo-Christian thought, or at least the first story in Zohar—and James, please hold me accountable to this—is one where the first decision that man makes is to fall. But of course, God knew that we were going to choose to fall. We chose to fall because we wanted to know about the difference between good and evil, and in that sense be like God. But God had also created us in his image in the first place in order to glorify God, right? There's some constraint whereby God required us to kind of accomplish his glorification. And so my bad, wrecked interpretation of this is basically—I'm going to lose my place, guys—is basically that in order to glorify God or experience God in any capacity at all, it was necessary that we fall from God and have some distance and separation. And I do think that the vast majority of our lived experience as conscious beings, we are apart from God, right? Like of all your experience of this oneness or this everythingness, these are like very, very small parts of our experience. They're not really like permanent states. But I do—

Yeah, no, I just absorb everything. My conception of God is also that it is everything. And I think we share that in common. I think the thing that I take more issue with is Buddhism itself and the construct that the way to achieve a connection with God is by sitting and trying to meditate on the everythingness, which is actually core to our nature. Because I think our nature is finite, our nature is being, our nature is this sort of embodied material consciousness that constructs and develops a relationship—

Yeah, how does this feel consistent or inconsistent with what value or credit we should give to, like, the experience of good societies, for example, or our call in the world? I'm again going to box in James and Zohar. I would love for your contributions here, but my understanding is that, like, the highest form of giving—or my understanding of Judaism is that it takes a very contrary approach to something like Buddhism, and that it cares very much about the volitional act of work that we do in the world. Zohar, do you want to back me or refute me in this notion?

I'll go along with it.

Sounds good, cool. The thing that I, as in my like Judeo-Christian Western stance, love about this is that there are—and having been raised a Christian, right—the notion of like, that which you have done to the least of my brothers, you've done to me. I think there's a lot that comes from a respect for the finiteness of our being on this earth and the materiality of our experience that has created societies which can feed people and replenish them in ways that feel meaningful. And at least insofar as I guess maybe your concepts of God are above notions of goodness and evil, which maybe makes this different than—

I mean, I'm inclined to think that if they are good operating systems, as you're willing to admit—

Well, but they can all be true, right? There's a great old Far Side cartoon where all these people are standing outside the pearly gates and there's a Hindu and a Christian and a Buddhist and whatnot. And Saint Peter gets up and opens a scroll and says, 'Oh, the correct answer is Mormon.' The correct answer was Mormon, right? And I think that just tells you sort of the problem with the religions is the way they're laid out is they're mutually exclusive. They can't all be right. And so if Christianity is true, then Islam is false and Judaism is false. If Islam is correct, then the others are false, right? So that right there. And then how would you measure the relative truth or falsity of any one of these?

Can I just pop in here, please? This is so awesome. I'm loving this. My question is, let's grant your premise that God is everything. Why is it that so few people have come to that conclusion? And the second part to the question is, if in modern times more people are coming to that conclusion, why is modernity or why is our moment better suited to that discovery? Is there a metaphysical explanation that, as it were, being wants to be known, wants to be discovered? Or is it just chance, just random that Spinoza thought God was everything, and yet that conclusion came to him alone? Hegel thought that he was at the end of history, but nobody else in his moment, except for him, had that thought.

Is there a teleology, though? Is there something in the universe that's hardwired to having more and more people discover that God is everything? That wants us to be individualized destinations of history?

I mean, I'm not so sure about that. Just because I know that some extremely smart people in the history of religion who have, you know, themselves, whether we believe or not is quite apart from the matter, but just very smart people in history have deeply believed in God and then also felt very convinced that God called them to go out into the world with that. And so just on face, I guess I don't quite see what you're saying. I don't see why a deep connection with God would not possibly call someone forward out into the world.

Right, right. I quite liked where Zohar was going a moment ago with the sort of the natural history of religion. I mean, it is compelling what you think about the thesis that God is everything and everywhere, but it is kind of curious that this idea or insight only comes quite late. It does take modernity. It does take someone like Spinoza to really systematize this intuition.

It seems like there's two arguments here. One is about the nature of God, and the other is how should society be organized. And the ancients might have discovered that everything was God, but they didn't seem to live exoterically individualistic lives. They seem to be very into social conformity in a way that in modernity we really celebrate the individual's journey. And so if you think that religion is a construct and that religion by and large gets in the way of this discovery that God is everything, it didn't seem to be the case for the ancients. On the contrary, it seemed like they accepted those constructs and then kind of kept it to themselves as a mystical secret that God was everything, but they still participated in traditional liturgy and traditional rituals that maybe to a modern would seem kind of backwards or not progressive enough.

Do you see any connection between God and what is good or moral in your experience?

It does seem like some of the thread that we're playing with here, though, is about this notion of an ability to experience the everythingness which is us and to kind of transcend our own egos for that, and that experience as being an experience of God and that being the foundation. And as I'm listening to you, I'm hearing that you experience everything beyond that as no longer really about God per se. Any concept or construct that comes on top of that is really more about our own packages as people and our psychologies and inclinations and social, cultural needs.

Yeah, and this is the place where I feel I start to differ, which is I think we needed a mind in order to experience God at all. And outside of mind, how is there an experience of God? So I understand that there's a relationship there where you achieve your own smallness by stopping the mensing, and that the mensing is oftentimes what gets us away from our relationships to God. And it strikes me as a necessary piece of it. Our minds, however limiting, are also salvific in that they make it possible to reason about the concept of everything in the first place. And I think it's therefore of a higher priority and maybe something we should value at a little bit of a greater level and inquire. I guess I would just say that there are definitely experiences you can have that are beyond the mind. You can maybe talk about getting... yeah, without being prescriptive about it, you can have experiences where the mind itself is still not active within those experiences, and those are very interesting experiences.

And I guess where does mind fit all of this and how critical is it? 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' John, in writing this verse, does this really lovely thing where in the beginning was the Word, he uses the Greek word logos. Logos is about the ability to understand, the ability to make sense of things, the fact that that's possible at all, which of course is a huge Greek construct. And so in the beginning is the possibility of understanding. The thing that's really lovely about what John does there is that he has logos mean Christ there. Right? So in the beginning was the Word, who is Christ. And the Word, Christ, was with God, and the Word was God. And the thing that I really love about this idea is that John essentially put Christ as the salvific character which allows us to have a relationship with God through an ability to reason, which I find quite lovely.

Now, you're uncancelable. What are you possibly going to do?

Well, I don't think you're going to get canceled for that one.

I don't think... I don't think... Frederick, you know, why not? When it... yeah, one at a time. You know, lots of people... anyway, I'm not going to... I don't think anyone gets canceled for that nowadays. I think that's a very high-status view. That's the dominant view, I would say.

Oh no, we're cool. We're cool here with anything. Yeah, we have six friends, right? Yeah, just be... we know six friends. Scope the title of the title.

Yeah, well, something that's come up a little bit is that in Western culture, we have this strong civic tradition in which only rational deliberation is considered legitimate public discourse. And there's a lot of merit to that. There are very good reasons why we have kind of evolved norms around not making claims to revelation in the public sphere. But the fact of the matter is that people do have all kinds of weird and interesting personal experiences, as you were mentioning before, Naval. And I think it's an unfortunate fact that public intellectuals in the West always want to stop themselves short of simply talking about those experiences and categorizing them, sharing them, revealing them, and just trying to compare notes on them.

So is my connection bad? It keeps flashing.

That's what God said.

No, yeah, so I don't know. So I think that's a shame, though, that public intellectuals in the West disallow themselves the freedom of at least just comparing notes on the different experiences, insights, intuitions, hunches, hypotheses. Because in some ways, it is a betrayal of the real intellectual vocation. And in some way, the true public intellectual must report the full data set. And if that data set includes anomalies and weird experiences and feelings and hunches related to the supernatural or the non-material, then we do ourselves a disservice as thinkers to not go fully into all of those nooks and crannies publicly and analytically.

Luther was very into the personal relationship with God, but he also was very skeptical of his own ability to connect with God because he had the view that human nature is fundamentally distorted. And then we moderns, following Rousseau, kind of flip it. So we have the individualism, but we start from the assumption that we're fundamentally trustworthy and good. And I'm wondering if you take a stand on that. Should we err on the side of believing our own experience, or should we be skeptical of ourselves? Like there's this phrase 'spiritual bypass' that's sometimes used to talk about people who claim enlightenment or think that because they've had one good experience that now they've figured it all out. Are we in danger of over-emphasizing our understanding of God because of this Rousseauian legacy? Should we be more Lutheran?

Oh, I just wanted to mention, and hello everyone. The Christian tradition is sort of fractally non-dual, and that the experience of God is... and one way this shows up is that the experience of God is both an individual and communally mediated thing. And the individual component of that is a source of dynamism and reform. We have the monastic tradition of the saints. We have people that go out to the desert by themselves and experience God, and they talk about God in a new way to the community when they return, and they become the source of a lot of fresh energy in the system. But it's also communally mediated, which keeps people from going off the rails, from turning into anti-social delusions. And so I think that there are also more powerful experiences that are available to socially mediated consciousnesses that aren't available when they're fragmented. So a purely individualistic spirituality seems to me an impoverished one. Anyway.

Yeah, thanks. Bye-bye. Thanks for showing up. Find them all.

Yeah, I feel that, Jacob. I feel that, Jacob. I think that I would like to ask Naval if he was still here, like, where did he get the ideas of how he approaches his spiritual experience? If he... you know, it comes from a certain set.

Yeah, I think the thing... Do you guys know Martha Nussbaum? Anyone on stage?

I love her. And one of the things that she really values is narrative as a way of experiencing ourselves.