Episode 4: Standing on Nothing — Mysticism and the Illusion of Measurement

This episode was recorded in one take — unscripted, imperfect, and real — just like the mystical life it explores.

Jacob dives into mysticism: what it is, why it arises, and how it appears across spiritual traditions. From the illusion of measurement to the poetic wisdom of mystics like Rumi, Kabir, and Meister Eckhart, this episode takes you on a winding but grounded journey through the conceptual filters that shape (and often limit) how we experience life.

Drawing from personal stories, sacred texts, musical metaphors, and moments of honest doubt, he invites you to consider that the world you’ve labeled is not the world itself. That maybe—just maybe—God, truth, and peace are found not in more thinking, but in being.

The episode closes with Rumi’s The Guest House—a powerful invitation to welcome every part of your experience with presence, compassion, and trust.

Whether you’re overwhelmed by thought, burned out by belief, or simply curious about what lies beyond the mind, this episode invites you to stand nowhere… and remember where you’ve always been.

🕊️
 “Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.”

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening & Why Mysticism (Beyond magic → basic)
• 2:15 Concept Filters & Labels (Tree ≠ “tree”)
• 3:18 Equator & Measurement Illusions (Inch has no start)
• 5:52 No Pixels in Reality (Quantum zoom; Planck scale)
• 8:52 Maya & The Fall (Labels aren’t reality)
• 14:08 Fingers → The Moon (Beyond concepts to being)
• 18:20 Life Is Music (Play, don’t strive)
• 52:30 Closing CTA & Poem (Rumi — The Guest House)

Transcript

Jacob: 0:03

all right guys welcome to episode four of standing nowhere i'm your host jacob And this episode, I wanted to dive into something that I found really interesting over the last three years, and that is mysticism. I don't know what I'm going to call this episode yet, but it'll have something to do with that word mysticism, the mystics, mystical experience. What does that mean? For those who are not familiar with the word mysticism yet, It can sound like something out of a Harry Potter movie, almost like magic or something, but I assure you, it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it is the most basic thing. But before we jump in to exactly what it is, I thought it would be helpful to talk about kind of what caused the idea of it to emerge. I mentioned on episode two how there's kind of this dance of opposites. You can't have hard without soft, or you wouldn't know what you meant by hard unless you knew what soft meant. Well, with mysticism... It's sort of like if you live in the desert and it's really hot out, you're going to need an air conditioner. It creates the demand for an air conditioner. So what created the demand for the mystics, or why did they emerge naturally from all different various faiths and backgrounds? I mean, mystics came out of Christianity. They came out of Judaism. They came out of Islam and the Muslim religion. They came out of Advaita Vedanta and Hinduism. The entire path of Buddhism and the Dharma you could consider mystical. Same thing with Zen, especially Taoism, Lao Tzu. So what caused this to arise? Well, I thought we would start with that. So let's dive right in. The one thing that you have to understand about the way that you see the world is is that we are all taught right from a young age to start labeling things, to looking at the world through a conceptual filter, if you will. If I look at a tree and then I tell my son, look, that's a tree, his mind is gonna start to layer over that with tree. That's a tree. But a tree is nothing like a tree. of the kind. When we say tree, that's a word, that's a concept. But a tree is just what you see. When you see it, when you hear wind passing through its branches and leaves, when you touch the bark of a tree or maybe feel sap on your fingers, this experience goes beyond words, but we put words over it. Another example would be the equator. We know that the earth has imaginary lines that we've drawn all over it, lines of latitude, longitude, the equator, the very concept of north, south, east, west. These are all useful, no doubt, but they're not real. They're not really real. For example, if we walk to the equator line, I can say, well, Where is it? Can I grab the equator? No, it's not really there. It's useful, but it's just a concept. In the same way, if you look at a ruler, you could say, okay, this is a 12-inch ruler. It measures a foot. But what is a foot or 12 inches? What is an inch? You might say, well, it's this. And you can hold up your fingers approximately to an inch. What you'll find, and this might be unsettling for some of you listening to this, but there actually is no such thing as an inch or any measurement whatsoever. Huh? How can that be? I'm looking at my ruler right now. Or whatever. And follow with me here because I'm going to take you on a little journey to look at what you already know and what you think to be real but is not real at all. So we all know that you can theoretically comprehend things in larger and larger scales and smaller and smaller scales to an infinite variable degree, right? So if you zoom in on an inch, you will find that there is no fixed starting point for an inch, right? a starting point of where this inch begins and where this inch ends. For practical purposes, we can make rulers that all, generally speaking, have the same inch measurement when we put them next to each other. And from our perspective, they look like they match. Architects can design buildings using measurements. They have to in order for them to stand. However, again, when we zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, we find that there is no fixed starting point for the beginning or the end of an inch or any measurement for that matter. So let's see if I can explain this better. We've all heard of the quantum realm or things that you know, are so small. They're beyond even us seeing them. The smallest practical measurement that we have as human beings is I think what they call the plank scale. And in order to get to that scale, you almost have to create, it takes so much energy that you, you almost create a black hole trying to look at something that small. So that's the limits of what we can measure or conceivably measure. I think it's like a trillionth of a trillionth of, I don't know the exact measurement. Um, Perhaps I should have taken some notes and brought them with me. But the point is you can keep zooming in and zooming in and zooming in infinitely. There is no limit to how small something can get in the same way there is no limit to how large something can get. There are no pixels in reality. Like when you zoom in, you're never going to find, okay, there's the solid edge of a pixel. There is where an inch begins. That does not exist. Astrophysicists, anyone will confirm this. All measurement essentially is an illusion. And what kind of sparked my interest in doing an episode like this is I was just browsing YouTube and I saw another podcaster. I think his name is Alex O'Connor. Pretty cool guy. He has a philosophy podcast, probably similar to this in many respects. And But he did a YouTube video where he was trying to stump, not Alexa, but OpenAI. So he was chatting with OpenAI and he said, if I hold my hands a foot apart, I can divide that foot in half and then I can divide that half foot in half and add infinitum. So if I can divide it infinitely, how can my hands ever touch if I bring them together? And OpenAI was really struggling with the question. And the reason is it didn't carefully examine the premise of the question, which in itself was false. There is no... static foot. Like if I hold my hands a foot apart and I measure it to the most accurate that we can as humans, that still is not one foot. It's approximately what we would call a foot for usefulness as we navigate life, but there is no fixed point of one foot. The idea of that is a fallacy and thus the question is a fallacy. So Chatbot was struggling with him and his argument trying to figure out how to divide something that doesn't exist in the first place in half ad infinitum until the hands touch. Another way you could look at that is that nothing in reality actually ever touches. Electromagnetism just pushes things away as they get close. When you put your hands together, it feels like they're touching, but they're really not. That's another rabbit hole we won't go into. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because we like to put labels on everything in life. We sort of, like take the United States. There's a clearly outlined, if I say picture the US in your mind, you can picture the United States, the 48 contiguous, and you can picture Alaska and the shape of it and everything like that. But you and I both know that there is actually no line in the sand that is shaped like that. It is a concept. It is a filter that we have layered over the earth saying everything inside this imaginary line is the US and everything outside of it is not the US. I hope that this is making sense. These concepts are useful, but fundamentally, in reality, They do not exist. They only exist in our minds. If all humans were to die overnight, what would happen to all the territories that we've drawn on the ground? They would go with us, right? I mean, there'd still be maps and things like that, but animals, they don't give two shits, excuse my language, about our idea or concept of a country or not. Now, other things that we can point out like this would be Well, let's take another concept which creates division is your political party, for example. Some people will label themselves as a Democrat. Some will label as a Republican, Marxist, whatever it is. These are also labels that technically do not exist. They do point to things, yes. So it is useful as a social convention. It shouldn't be dismissed. You know, I'm not saying all concepts and ideas are false. They just aren't really real. I hope you guys are following with me here. Like when we look at the sun, we call it the sun, but the sun doesn't call itself the sun. We just put a label on that, the word sun. Let's say that out loud a few times. You ever notice, this is also what I'm getting at. When you say a word over and over again, it loses its conceptual value in your mind and suddenly the word will sound funny. Right? Like in that movie Black Sheep with Chris Farley and David Spade and some of the nitrous oxide was like leaking from the back of a cop car that they stole and they start getting really high and they're like roads, roads, roads. That's a funny word. Roads, roads, roads. Keep saying any word over and over again and it eventually loses its conceptual meaning and you just hear the vibrations. And it sounds funny. That's when your mind sort of goes beyond the concepts. It peeks above, or peeks behind the curtain that we've all, the veil that we've put over reality. There's a culture, the Hindus, who have a name for this veil that we've veiled reality with, and they call that maya or ma-ya, the illusion of dividing the infinite into parts. The Judeo-Christians have a tradition as well that calls it the, well, they call it the fall of man. In the Garden of Eden, when Eve and Adam bite into the fruit of knowledge, this is pointing to the same thing as maya, the illusion of dividing things. As soon as Eve bit into the apple, she became aware of the concept of herself as separate from everything else. Even the concept of yourself is is a concept and ultimately, on the ultimate fundamental reality level, is not real. Notice that's why she felt naked and grabbed clothes and God's like, who told you you were naked? Essentially like, who told you you were separate from everything? Notice that it was when they gained knowledge that they were thrown out of the garden. So in the Hindu tradition, they label this maya. So they say maya is essentially an illusion. The conceptual filters, I pronounce that weird, conceptual, conceptual filters that we've layered over reality, that fundamentally is not real. In a way, it is as natural and as organic as a flower, because we live in a universe that has flowers, and they came about organically. And Conceptual filters also came about organically. When I call myself Jacob, I am not the word Jacob. I am beyond words. Everything is beyond words. Words are useful. They point to things, but they are not the things themselves. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, there's a saying that all spiritual traditions are like fingers pointing to the moon, but they are not the moon itself. The moon is not the finger. In order to see the moon, one must see beyond the finger. In the Christian tradition, for example, when Paul is writing his epistles, I forget which one it is, he says the peace that surpasses All knowledge, all comprehension, all understanding, all mind. That word is basically mind in Greek. And there are various spiritual teachers throughout the millennia that point to going beyond knowledge to experience experiencing what is. And that, my friends, is what mysticism is all about. It is the experiential nature of reality, of the divine. And notice, when we gained knowledge, that's when Eve labeled herself as a separate individual from the whole, and she was thrown out of the when we try to look beyond the concepts of self and other, it emphasizes unity and union with the divine. And this is echoed throughout the millennia from various mystics of all spiritual traditions, be it Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, Islam, you name it, Hindu. They all point to union with the divine. Yoga, for example, means union with divine. And if you read several passages from Jesus in the Gospels, he is always talking about, may they be one in us as I am one in you, and I am in you, you are in me, yada, yada, yada. It's almost like we're looking through a window or a looking glass at the sun or at the sky. But instead of just seeing the sky, we're We've sort of layer over that glass with an image of the sun or an image of the horizon. And then we don't actually see the full light that comes through the glass. We're sort of blocked by our conceptual ideas about reality, about ourselves. So mystics and mysticism in general, the emphasis is direct experiential nature of the divine. So how do we do that? That brings in the processes of things like mindfulness and meditation, looking at the world without filters. But before we get to that, I want to also talk about one of the major, major conceptual filters that we put on life. And this, of course, ties into the purpose of life. What is the meaning of life? And this is where you can put a really dark filter on your life and yourself if you're not careful. There are some who have the conceptual model that the universe is random, that all energy is blind and it's bumping into each other, and somehow out of that randomness, we popped out of it. It's a very dark way of looking at things. It's echoed in Shakespeare's Macbeth, a tale... told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing something to that effect like it's all meaningless what's the point because we are taught from a young age that there is a purpose to life that we're going to get to that end and you've got to struggle and strive to get there As opposed to just being exactly where you are with what is, each moment is meaning unto itself. Let me give you an example from this, and I'm going to pull from Alan Watts again here, where he points out when you listen to music, you are not thinking to yourself, the purpose of this song is to get to the very final note. You don't think that way at all. When you listen to music, you are in love with every note. Assuming you're listening to music that you enjoy, you're enjoying the verses, the choruses, the bridges, the solos, whatever is coming up in the music, you're with it at that moment. And it's complete into itself. A friend of mine and myself, we are huge fans of a band called Dream Theater. They're considered progressive, meaning they don't fit into industry standard three to five minute songs on the radio. They like to play their instruments and have fun. That's another thing. We say we play the guitar. We play the piano. We don't work the piano. It's not work, it's playful. So this model, this conceptual filter that we put over life of what's the meaning of it, when you say what's the meaning of something, you're basically saying, what is this thing pointing to? So when you put that concept on life, you're basically saying, okay, what is life pointing to? like it's pointing to something else, what is that else thing that it's pointing to? Instead of looking at life like it's a song or music, and you're supposed to just be with what is right now at this exact moment. So my friend and I, we love Dream Theater. We go to their concerts. And when we go, man, we're just jumping up and down. We're having fun. And what's happening when we're at a concert? I mean, To anyone listening, if you've been to a concert, you know what I'm talking about. There's this feeling that just, it just fills your whole body. It's like your hair stands on end, you know, and you're just having a blast. You can feel it passing through you. And what is it other than vibrations floating through the air to your ears? You know, different frequencies of vibrations and the variations of them excite us. But that to me shows you that in our deepest of deepest self, that life is a game. It's a fun play. It is not meant to be taken seriously. And I don't mean life isn't serious, like who cares? Another word, a better word, which I like again from Alan Watts when he describes how music is not for the purpose of getting to the end of the song. But he says that life isn't serious, it's something that's sincere. So you play your part sincerely. If you're a father, if you're whatever position you are in your vocation in life, that you do it sincerely. But it's not serious, it's not heavy. Like G.K. Chesterton said, the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. So the purpose of life is not to get to the end of life. It's to dance while you're in the middle of it, just like a dance. We don't dance to get to the last spot on the floor. The dance is the purpose in itself, being with it. you know, when we're at those shows, I can just feel myself letting go, you know, whether it's bobbing my head or just jumping up and down. My daughter, when she was, uh, not even a year, about a year old, you know, she's, she's, we're all watching frozen with her and she's doing the cutest little bobbing where she like, she does like a little half squat and then she stands up, half squat, stands up just to the music, you know? And, and It's not something that she needed to be taught. She just instinctually knows that life is a dance. It goes up, it goes down. Even the sound waves that are coming at you right now from this podcast are waves, waves that crest and then they go down to the valley or the trough. They come back up. Everything is now you see me, now you don't. But when we try to make sense of all these vibrations, all these waves, all these things happening in life, we label everything, which again is useful because But we can miss the forest for the trees. We can take the concepts too literally. And that's sort of the opposite of mysticism is literalness, too much emphasis on literalness. When I was brought up in the Christian tradition, there were people who would argue that about Genesis, the book of Genesis, whether it was literal or whether it was metaphorical or more poetic, like mythopoetry. Some people, when they hear the word myth, they cringe like it's a falsehood, when really myth is a powerful way of describing and making sense of the universe, and not in a way where it's false, but in a way for us to understand. Like, for example, if I... try to explain the expansion of the universe to somebody, and I use the metaphor of, say, a black balloon, and I put a bunch of white dots on the balloon, and then I say I'm inflating the balloon, and this simulates the expansion, and you can see all the white dots are stars, and they're expanding outward. That is a useful metaphor or myth or parable for explaining reality. Now, if you look at that and you say, well, Jake, you're kind of silly. The universe is not a rubber balloon, sir. Thank you very much. Obviously not, but it's a useful metaphor for understanding the way things are. In similar fashion, the various spiritual traditions, they use metaphor and parable for understanding the way things are in the universe. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, they look at whatever you want to call this life as a father. And why not? I think I mentioned on another podcast, you had a father, his father had a father, and so on and so forth, all the way back to the Big Bang. So why not look at it as a universe with a personality? After all, you are the universe and and you have a personality. So that personality that is you was already there, encoded in the Big Bang. So let's shift forward a little bit. Let's look at some of the mystics and see what they've said. But before we move on to the next point that I wanted to make, is that you can shift your mindset from life is work and life is hard, to life is a playful thing, a playful presence you can be with. And yes, sometimes it will have down moments. Sometimes there is the minor fall before the major lift in the song. That's what makes music so beautiful. If the whole song is just all up notes, high notes, there's no down notes to contrast it with. And before I move on, I also wanted to note that the illusion of constancy is also demonstrated in music. For example, when you are listening to a quote song, that's another concept. The reality is there are notes coming at you in the present moment, one after another, that create the illusion of continuity of a song. Just like I mentioned, I think in another podcast, the flame. When you look at a candle flame, it looks like a static, solid thing, but it's nothing of the kind. It's a constant stream stream of oxidation of the wick as it is burned up by the flame. And it looks constant, but it's not, just like a song, just like you. But we take things to be solid and constant and forever lasting when they're really not, at least in the material world. So the etymology of the word mysticism, it implies going beyond what can be said. quote unquote, shutting up in order to truly see. It's the same root as mystery, and even the colloquial mums the word. Mystics in various traditions have often used those who use words against themselves. That is, they speak, but only to prompt you towards what lies beyond speaking. Think of them as guides who say, don't take my word for it, look for yourself. So I want to read to you, I want to read to you guys a a couple of verses from the Tao Te Ching. This is a book written by a man named Lao Tzu, who is considered a mystic. So the first verse that I want to read says, and Tao means the way, the way of things. Kind of like if you watch water roll down an object or a mountain, it takes the path of least resistance. There is a way of things in all things in reality, including you. So the Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name. The nameless is the boundary of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of creation. Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding. And when it says darkness here, he's not talking about literal darkness, like scary darkness. The darkness he's talking about is that... How do I put this into words? Because it's beyond words. It's the mind when it's not thinking about anything or thinking at all in terms of concepts, labels. It's just experiencing what is. And he calls it darkness because there's really no description for it because it goes beyond description. Description beyond description. So I wanted to read another verse from this guy. This is written about 500 BC, and this touches on what I was talking about earlier, how you wouldn't know hard without soft, et cetera, the play of opposites, which I think I mentioned in episode two. So he says here, and this is verse two, when people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created. Being and non-being are produce each other. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other. Fore and aft follow each other. Fore and aft means front and back for those who didn't catch that. Therefore, the master can act without doing anything And teach without saying a word. Things come her way and she does not stop them. Things leave and she lets them go. She has without possessing and acts without any expectations. When her work is done, she takes no credit. That is why it will last forever. And then I only want to read one more from Lao Tzu. And I'm going to read... In this segment of the episode, I'm going to read from a couple of different mystics just so you can see how they all point to the same thing. They all say the same thing through their various traditions. Here's the other verse I wanted to read. This is verse 11. And this is really key because this is the point of the show, essentially. When you see the cover of this show and you see those two feet standing on nothing, that's something that you can actually experience firsthand. I can talk about it. But me talking about it and putting it into words is a concept. I have to point to it and you have to try it. If you can maintain continuity of your mindfulness, of your day-to-day activities, you will start to feel like you are floating, just like that image. And it feels really good. I'm just forewarning you now. I don't mean to tell you how you're going to feel. You'll feel it when you feel it. When you make... spiritual practice or a practice to stay rooted in your experiences throughout the day, essentially to lessen your thinking and your conceptual mind, you'll start to feel like you're floating, like you have this great energy in you. And I think in the Zen tradition, they have a saying, the student who experiences Satori, which is a word describing that feeling, goes to hell as straight as an arrow. And what they mean by that is, your first attempts to kind of take flight experiencing mindfulness, especially when you start to lengthen the continuity, essentially how long you're mindful, longer and longer bouts, you'll start to feel that weightless feeling, almost like you're floating a few inches off the ground and everything is just, you're in that flow state. But when you feel that, It can be exciting, and that will pull you back into conceptual reality, like, whoa, that felt really good. Oh, darn, I'm thinking again. Anyways, that's why they call it practice, spiritual practice. And this is really pointing to that, this next verse. It says, there are 30 spokes joined together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that allows the wheel to function. We mold clay. into a pot but it is the emptiness inside the pot that makes the vessel useful we fashion wood for a house but it is the emptiness inside that makes it livable we work with the substantial but the emptiness is what we use so you see what he's saying is Concepts are useful. The spokes on a wheel, they make the wagon move. But it is that spaciousness in the center that makes the entire wheel possible. In the same way, if you don't have that spaciousness inside of you, life's gonna be rough. You gotta work on creating that space. And the way you do that is by tethering yourself to the experiences of every single moment. Wherever you are, whatever you're experiencing right now is exactly what you need to get free. And this might seem like we're putting thoughts down or saying that thoughts are bad, and that's not what I'm trying to say. This is a countermeasure. Like I said in the beginning of the episode, I wanted to talk about what created the need for mysticism or why mysticism naturally arose out of each spiritual tradition. And that is because in each tradition, people get lost in the words and the concepts too much. They get shackled by them. There's verses all throughout even the Christian Bible, for example, where it says God laughs at the wisdom of men or the wisdom of man makes God laugh or something in that vein. And I had pointed out in episode two how some Christians love the smell of their own Bibles. That's any spiritual faith, not just Christianity. I want to make that clear. I grew up in a Christian background, so I have a lot of experiences I can share from that background, but I am not bashing Christianity as opposed to other faiths at all. I'm pointing out how all of them have these traditions, and we lose the... thing that they're pointing to for the words themselves. And I'm really hammering this home because even this podcast episode, you can hear it and it might ring a bell of truth in you, but if you don't make an effort to tether yourself to your experiences on a moment-to-moment-to-moment basis, you're going to keep getting sucked up back into your skull and and thinking about concepts and things like that. Think of a child. We put them in a school, and when you walk into a school, what do you see? Letters and numbers lined around the ceiling. The whole idea of school is to label everything. And again, that is useful. But we are not taught anywhere in life to slow down breathe. You'll hear bits of it try to come through in the culture, like stop and smell the roses, or our grandparents when they used to just sit on the porch in the front yard and just kind of watch the trees sway in the wind. We've lost touch with that. And now we have smartphones in our pocket, for the love of God. You can pull up anything in your pocket at any time. You know, I don't know if you guys have ever struggled with this, but I'll be watching a movie and I'm like, I got to know how old this person is. I got to know who that actor is. Let me pause the film and look it up. It's real easy to get dominated by the conceptual mind. And if you don't flex your experience muscle, your spiritual practice muscle, you're going to live a life that's very stressed out and very dark and very depressing and And that is what all these paths point to. Like, if you read the book of Proverbs, for example, Solomon, who wrote the book of Proverbs, talks about just watching every step you're taking and letting Yahweh handle the rest. And you'll notice the name of God, Yahweh, means to be, to exist, I am, being. In other words... When he says trust in Yahweh, he's saying you can literalize that and personify that, like trust in the person God, but you can also look at it from the meaning of his name, because all Hebrew names have a very important or deep meaning, typically, especially the name of God from Exodus, I believe, 3.14, when he says, "'I am that I am.'" I don't think that ancient Hebrews could simply write I am, but that's what that means. I am, to exist, to be. So when you hear Solomon say trust in Yahweh, trust in your being. Trust the moment. Be completely with what is. I had another thought on that and I lost it. Or take Jesus' name. His actual name is Yeshua, which means Yahweh saves or is salvation. So if you look closely at what that name means, to be, to exist, I am, is salvation. And oh, that's what I was going to say. Jesus, he evoked the name of God as, in Aramaic, as a way of stating this. Like you can look at I am the way, the truth, and the life, which many people love to use as a conceptual model of we're in the in-group, everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus is the out-group. But another way you can look at that is Jesus was speaking from the I am, the being in him that we all share, which he's said many times in the gospel, I am. is the way, the truth, and the life. To be, to exist, to rest into your being will guide your steps, as it says in Proverbs and every other book in the Bible. And he also uses that I am statement in many other ways. Like, I am the vine, you are the branch. Being is the core vine of everyone. And our various masks that we wear I'm Jacob, you are Joe, and he's Bill. These masks that we wear are the branches that all extend from the same being, the indivisible being. Because going back to what we said earlier, all measurement is illusory, including the idea of yourself being separate from all of everything that is. And that's one of the great things about mysticism is the more you rest in being and your experiential nature, the more you grow the continuity of mindfulness, the more you will feel intuitively beyond words that you are absolutely one in the same with everything else that is. You are one with God. You're not separate from him. Some people might hear that and say, well, does that mean I'm God? better way to say it would be, there is only God, or whatever word you want to use for God, and that you, technically you exist, but just like an inch, an inch doesn't really exist. It's a useful social convention. You can consider when I say I, it's a point of view, it's a perspective. You know, a In the same way that you can cover your right eye and then look through your right eye and see darkness and then close your right eye and look through your left eye and see what your left eye is seeing, you can open both eyes and one eye can see one thing and the other eye is seeing something completely different. In the same way, all of the eyes on Earth or any other planet are all seeing, which is in the field of awareness of one single thing that is aware of everything at all times, everywhere, all at once. Great movie too, by the way. But again, everything I'm saying here is conceptual. So the best thing you can do is not take my word for it. That's where doubt becomes useful. See for yourself. That's why I did in episode three kind of a little bit of a mindfulness meditation walkthrough. See for yourself. Try to rest in the spaces between words, between thoughts, and rest in that and experience that. And don't try to conceptualize it. You cannot grasp this with knowledge. Just as water cannot exceed the level, its maximum level, The mind cannot conceive of its maximum level. The only thing you can do is let go and trust. That's why the word faith is the same meaning as trust. Trust what is. You came out of it. If you look at the universe as separate and other than you, that conceptual layer, that model, will make you very fearful in life. You'll feel very small in a big universe. But let's read some of the other mystics here because I think you guys are going to love these. So I've read to you Lao Tzu in the Taoist tradition. Now let's look at Jalal al-Din Rumi, a 13th century Sufi from Persia. I'm going to read a poem from his later in the podcast. But for now, I want to read a little bio description and only take a moment. It says, Rumi is one of the world's most beloved mystical poets. He was born in 1207 in present-day Afghanistan, which was then part of the Persian Empire. He was an Islamic scholar who, after meeting the mystic Shams of Tabriz, became a passionate Sufi, a lover of God in the form of beauty and love. Rumi's poetry overflows with the idea of union with the divine. He saw God in everything, every person, every experience, even the painful ones. One famous Rumi saying, quote, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. See, this captures his sense that truth lives beyond our dualistic judgments. We draw lines between everything. So let's fast forward. I'm going to come back to Rumi. I have a really great poem I want to read you from him called The Guest House, which some of you who are familiar with him no doubt have heard that poem. And it's wonderful. It's a great philosophy for you to live your life by. Honestly, just hearing the poem can change the way you live your life. It's literally life-changing. Let's see. Another one I wanted to talk about was Kabir. He was a 15th century mystic poet from India. And some people argued whether he was Hindu or Muslim. He claimed that he was neither. There is a quote from him that says, the Hindu says Ram is supreme. The Muslim says Rahim is supreme. Then they kill each other. And then he says, but tell me, brother, who created Ram and who created Rahim? Right? It says, in Kabir's eyes, God was one and found in all. He says, quote, I am not a Hindu nor a Muslim am I. He sings, I am this body, a play of five elements, a drama of the spirit dancing with joy and sorrow. So he describes, or he declares that he identifies only with the fundamental reality common to us all, the lila, the play of life, right? So let's pull another quote of his. He says, quote, all know that the drop emerges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. In other words, we typically think of the individual soul dissolving into the infinite like a drop into the sea. But the mystic realizes the infinite also resides within the individual. The entire ocean of divinity can be found inside each drop of creation. Such words beautifully convey the non-dual idea that God is not separate from the world or from us. Great stuff. And this really mirrors, I believe it's in the Mahayana tradition, something called Indra's net or Indra's web. So if you picture a spider web with morning dew drops all over it, each drop reflects all of the other drops within it. And all of the drops reflected in it all reflect the other drops. So it's like this infinite... You get the picture. It's a great way of describing reality. Now, the mystics from the Christian faith have wonderful, wonderful things to say. And I want to read to you this little description of Meister Eckhart here. It says, from the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart stands out as a bold voice of mysticism. He was born around 1260 in what is now Germany. Eckhart was a Dominican friar. and a mystic who taught the radical idea of the soul's unity with God. Preaching in the vernacular German, he urged people to look within for the divine reality. Some of Eckhart's statements were so daring, borderline heretical to the authorities of the time, that they got him in trouble with the church. For instance, Eckhart taught that there is an innermost spark of the soul that is one with God, and that our task is to realize this inherent oneness by emptying ourselves of all ego and image. You see the language he's using there? empty yourself. When you hear emptiness in Buddhism to the Western mind, that sounds scary. I don't want to be empty or void, but all that really means is selflessness. You're just with what is without the conceptual filter of you. How dare he do this to me? He writes here in a quote, my eye and God's eye are one eye, or I'm sorry, It says, the eye with which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. This stunning quote illustrates how in mystical union, the distinction between lover and beloved disappears. There is only one. In his sermons, this is another interesting thing. It says he spoke of the need for, and I'm mispronouncing this possibly, gelassenheit, which means letting go-ness, a complete yielding of oneself into God's presence. Let God be God in you, he advised, meaning that we should stop clinging to the small self so that the divine self can express freely through us. He even said, Whoa, what does that mean? He's basically saying that are ideas of God. must also be discarded for the true God beyond all ideas to manifest. And this echoes what the ancient Hebrews talked about with the word idol or hevel, which is vapor, vanity. Idols, some people think, are simply old statues that people bow down to. Not at all. They can also include concepts or thoughts. And when the Bible says no idols before God, they are saying no concept of God whatsoever. Just like Lao Tzu said a moment ago when I read to you from the Tao Te Ching, the Tao that can be named or described is not the eternal Tao. The ancient Hebrews knew this as well. They called the Tao God, and they would refuse to write his name entirely, not only out of respect, but because it's impossible. You can't write down the unwriteable. They would write as they write today, G-D, but back then it was the Tetragrammaton, Y-H-W-H, Yod-Heh-Wah-Heh, and the most educated guess as to how to pronounce it is what we know as Yahweh. Was Yahweh the actual pronunciation? We don't know. We will never know. It is the best guess that we have, but we know that his name ultimately means I am or to be. Now there's other Christian mystics, wonderful ones, like St. John of the Cross. I want to read a quote from him real fast. All that the imagination can imagine and the understanding it can receive and understand in this life is not, nor can it be, a proximate means of union with God. So here he's saying that anything you can possibly think of is not God. So it's easy to misunderstand the mystics or mysticism in general for putting down concepts or putting down theology. There's another quote that's attributed to Meister Eckhart that says, theologians argue, but mystics all speak the same language. But what they're doing is not putting down beliefs or concepts, they're saying that beliefs are ladders, concepts are ladders to be climbed up and then let go of when you reach the roof. Or in Buddhism, they say spiritual traditions are like a boat that you use to cross to the other side of the river, to reach the other shore. When you get to the other shore, you don't pick up the boat and carry it on your back. You just live the reality of it. Like I mentioned in episode two, I believe it was, when Jesus was asked, how will they know we are your disciples? He said, they will know you are my disciple by the love that you have for one another. So he didn't say by how many verses you memorized. They didn't even have the Bible back then. The Gospels weren't written until many decades after him. Even Paul's epistles, you know, Jesus just said, love everyone. Or John Lennon, all you need is love. It's not complicated. It's Take an active interest in your life and what you are. We're pulling close to the finish line here, guys. So I am going to leave you with... A wonderful poem. This is my first episode doing an outline, so please go easy on me. I'm trying to pace myself. I'm trying to be spontaneous and free-flowing from my own brain here, but also follow an outline which will constantly derail your train of thought. No pun intended there. But before I read this poem to you, I just wanted to give you a little call to action. If this episode has spoke to you or any other prior ones, please consider following the show, leaving a review, or sharing it with someone who might need it. You can also support the podcast at patreon.com slash standingnowherepodcast. And you can connect with us in our growing Discord community or by email. All the links are in the description. And we're also on the socials if you want to follow along there. So let's close out with a Rumi poem. And this is a... kicking my desk here. This is a poem that could possibly change the way you experience your life. So listen close. The Guesthouse by Rumi. This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Thanks for tuning in to Standing Nowhere, guys. I love you. Blessings to all.

Music: 54:12

This voice might feel like dust on the dial But I'm standing over Just a whisper that won't be afraid Standing nowhere and it feels like home No flags to wave, no need to roam The silence speaks louder So understood The static is kind It leaves me alone No orders to follow No king on the throne The sky's turning amber The clock's all reset I haven't stopped walking just yet. Standing nowhere, air wide and free. No chains, no Nothing.