The Unity of Opposites: How both things can be true

The Unity of Opposites: How both things be true

00:00 Jeffrey Besecker This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Our differences, they become our strength as a species and as a universal community. Embracing our differences will enable us to build a world where our individuality and our uniqueness are celebrated. However, understanding these factors can often leave us feeling bewildered as we challenge our assumptions about ourselves and others. And sometimes, seeing beyond the nose on our face feels dauntingly impossible. Yet overcoming these perceived challenges comes down to one thing. Union. All of us have heard the old saying that every story has three sides. Yours, mine, and the truth. Despite this, the truth is fluid, ever-changing, and constantly evolving. In our daily lives, we often encounter situations where opposing perspectives or contradictory information are valid in different contexts or from different points of view. We humans, therefore, may not always see things eye to eye, but both things can be true, as we often find out. Today we look at how a concept of logic known as the unity of opposites can empower us to see the truth within us all. Find out how when we return to The Light Inside. We'd like to offer a shout out to our affiliate matching partner, PodMatch.com. PodMatch is the revolutionary podcasting matching system driven by AI. As an industry leader in podcast guesting and hosting, they are a go-to solution for creating meaningful podcast interactions. PodMatch.com makes finding the ideal guest or host effortless. Stop by and visit our affiliate link today at www.thelightinside.us. In Sanskrit, the word Samhita literally means put together, to join, union. Yet as humans, we often struggle to put things together. Nowhere is this more true than within our concepts surrounding truth. And in this struggle, we sometimes neglect to find a common ground and to get our collective shit together. However, in this basic Vedic mantra, we find a hymn that becomes our only hope or prayer for truth. In this union of opposites, we discover the ultimate truth. We join author, yoga teacher and wise Vedic sage, Troy Hadid, to reflect on this one key objective.

02:39 Jeffrey Besecker Putting our differences aside, simply embracing a love for one another to find the unity of opposites. Troy, can you share a bit with us about how your experience with yoga started you on this journey of love and discovery? You know, I have many stories, Jeffrey, but being a yoga teacher, to me, the very essence of yoga is union. So that to me is the essence of what I like to bring into the fact that whatever you like to call God or spirit or creation or whatever that is, it's in everything. It's in absolutely everything. And there's light and darkness.

03:18 Troy Hadeed There's always light and darkness or what appears as darkness, you know. I just stumbled across a juicy little book that I can't wait to dig into called You Are God this morning on LinkedIn with one of my associations over there. I'm excited to look at that concept because so often we feel like we remove ourselves from that energy, from that spirit.

03:40 Jeffrey Besecker So I'm looking forward to diving into that. It chimes in where we're heading today. On that note, so it's funny you say that because I have a book coming out in October, not that I'm out to plug that in anyway. But the very last chapter of that book is called Are You God? And it tells a story about when I was in university and got pulled over by cops and then sentenced to community service. And I went to orphanage. And at this orphanage, this little kid runs up to me in the playground and he tags on me and he looks at me with a big giant smile. And all he says was, Are you God? And then before I could reply, he laughs hysterically and he runs off. And it's a story that I for many years I never told because I had such a hard time trying to understand what happened. And it's only years later when I went to write an Instagram post about God, it really all came rushing back to me. And I realized that kid wasn't asking a question. It was a rhetorical question. And he was trying to get me to wake up to recognize that God lived in me. And recognizing that meant that I had a responsibility and that there was a great power that lived within me. And until I saw and recognized that power and God within me, that I couldn't really recognize God that lived in anyone else if I couldn't recognize a God that lived within me. What do you feel was your takeaway from that and how you relate to that nature of what we call God? Yeah, I think, you know, like I grew up in a Catholic home, right? And I always like to say I'm not against religion. I'm not against any views at all surrounding religion. But I do think sometimes there are a few dots that we fail to connect and there are a few missing links. So I grew up, of course, for the narrative that God is outside of us. That's very much the foundation of the narrative is that God is something that is separate from us. And one of my biggest teachers is a man called Jesus. He is like my biggest guru. He's one of my best friends ever. But I connect to him and his teachings outside the context of organized religion and what is often told. And I think if the life and his teachings, one of the things he wanted us to wake up to is that we are not just children and creations of God, but we in ourselves are able to create that we are elements of God. And he said that he said you will do far greater things than I have ever done. He rose from dead. He walked on water. He did miracles. And then he says you will do far greater things than I have ever done. And I think one of the missing links is that I don't generally believe in a life of sin and life of sinners that we are born into sin. I believe that what God or Spirit or Christ or whatever you want to call it wants us to wake up to is our greatness and the potential that lives within us. And that God himself lives within us and wants to come through us. Because get this, Jeffrey, it's a lot easier to believe otherwise. It's a lot easier and comes with a lot less responsibility if we allow ourselves to believe that we are mere mortals, that we are born into these lives of sin and that we will always live this life of sin and we will always struggle to embody our godliness. Because to recognize that God lives within us, to recognize our true potential, to embody this love and its greatness of God means that that comes with responsibility. And that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry. It's not easy to carry. And I believe that when that little boy came to me, sure, I wasn't able to unwrap that experience till a decade and a half later. But I think he was trying to call on me and remind me that, yo, God lives in you. Wake up to that. Because when we wake up to that is when we start to unwrap our real potential.

08:14 Troy Hadeed I think from that level, as we lean in today, it's interesting to observe our energy states, our state of energy being. I was doing some research just this morning, you know, been on a quest to really dive into what does it mean to be energy? What does it mean to understand how our frequencies affect our consciousness and how those frequencies inhabit all existing potential being? Looking at that idea was reading through where their scientific research studying our actual brainwave activity. You know, looking at Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta, all of those various brainwave frequencies, narrowing them down to specific bandwidths where specific interactions of our physical manifestation surface. And when we look at that, we can witness where the actual state of wake and consciousness coexists with the actual state of frequency vibration where dreaming exists. They operate on the same energy in that regard. We're truly awake within that dream within any given moment. And it's something I've put a lot of resistance toward emotionally, physically, mentally, psychologically created that wall that well, what is a dream? You know, and through some of that resistance, you know, saying, well, does a dream drive our purpose? You know, I've had my own wrestle with that and I'm going to acknowledge it and leave it today. I don't want to fully dissect that. But looking at this new awareness, I'm now able to shift my belief a little bit and say what we dream, what we beyond that kind of sleep state of dreaming and moving into that kind of lucid dreaming. What we believe and create simply does become that reality. We're starting to see that with more and more, dare I say, quote, concrete evidence. Do we need that validation for it to be concrete? That's an area I'm looking through and that's an area for open consideration. I'm going to put it that way for me.

10:23 Jeffrey Besecker And I often see this. I have no problem having these conversations. But I love to point out to people that on some aspect, these conversations to me are somewhat pointless. Because at the very underlying of all science, of all science, of our very existence, there is one truth and one truth only. And that truth is that we don't know. We do not know. Right. And when it comes to there, there is one thing, though, there are a few things that we do know in addition to not knowing. Right. When it comes to that conversation about dreams and real estate and that stuff, they have so many things that people can contribute and they might connect to it. They might choose to believe it or not choose to believe it. So I don't generally touch that stuff, but I do want to touch one thing you mentioned. Right. And that is vibration and frequency. And whether someone believes in God or science or a big bang or whatever, the very source of creation was vibration. It was energy. It was frequency. It's the very source of all creation. Whether someone chooses to believe it was the word of God, well, that's sound. So that's still vibration and frequency. Or whether someone believes it was a big bang or whatever, it's all vibration and frequency is the source of everything. That means it is the very root of our existence. It is everything we are. And here's how I like to speak to that. Every word, every thought and every action that we embody carries with it a frequency. It carries with it a vibration. And there's an environment that's called Jane Goodall. Right. She's a gorilla lady, I believe. And she says something very beautiful that I always talk about. She says, if you're asking question, how can I change the world? You're asking the wrong question. She implies that we should be asking question. How am I changing the world? Because everything we do, every word, every conversation, every action, every thought actually changes the world we live in. It impacts people around us in every moment. So we need to bring more awareness to what vibration and what frequency are we contributing to our existence, the human consciousness. And I'll say one more thing here, because I think it's summed it up really nicely, Jeffrey. Last year, I embarked in what is called now called a darkness retreat, where you go into solitary room in a complete absence of light for a period of time. And I went into that experience because I acknowledged that everything I know myself to be is in relation to something externally, whether it be me being a human being because this is a phone or whether it be me being Troy because I know Jeffrey is a body that's separate from me or whether it be me having an opinion because there is an alternate opinion. I define myself. We all define ourselves by the external world in relation to the external world. So if my question was this, if I went into a room of absolute darkness by myself and I removed as much of the external world as I can, who am I? Who am I then? And what I came out recognizing, what I came out of that experience recognizing is this, Jeffrey, and it comes back to what we were just saying. We are our relationships in the sense of not that I am Troy because this is a phone. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But we are the resonance and vibration and frequency of our relationships because you can't no one can convince me that I am my physical body because I know I will exist beyond my physical body. And he's like, he couldn't understand how I can know that for truth and fact. I know that for truth and fact because I know I am energy. I am frequency. I am vibration. And for us both, Jeffrey, for me and you both, it is impossible for us to leave this call today as the same individuals that came to it. Because we have shared a frequency. We have shared a vibration. We have shared a conversation. And I, from this point on, will live in you and you will live in me. And we won't be seen, which now means that the frequency and the vibration that we shared, we carry that when we go separate ways. And every conversation you have from this point on, I live in that. And every conversation I have, you live in that. So when we leave our bodies, the frequency, the vibration and the resonance that we leave on this planet will never end. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It merely changes state. So when we understand that we are that, we are that vibration, we are that frequency, then we understand that we live far beyond our bodies. It is impossible for us not to exist, that what we are is our vibrational contribution to the evolution of human consciousness. That's it.

16:32 Troy Hadeed A beautiful and awakening perspective to look at. That's such an excellent point, I feel, for us to launch into today. Not that we haven't already launched, but as we consider this idea of the unity of opposites, if we may, let's reverse engineer a bit here today and kind of backtrack now, because I feel that moment we've shared already kind of sums up from a certain awareness all we need to know. But as we back up throughout life, we so often form these places of energetic resistance. We form these gaps in our perception of that reality, in our gaps of how we create that reality from moment to moment. So let's look at the concept of unity of opposites and how it suggests that contradictory elements or ideas can coexist and both be true or false simultaneously. I'm going to offer a for instance here. So for instance, when a loved one passes away, our emotions and feelings are often very conflicting. You know, we can feel both fond, happy memories, yet at the same time, it's also true that we feel sadness. We feel that sense of loss. We feel that sense of longing that we experience that surfaces as that existential loss. Even though we understand the person's energy will always be present with us, there is our magic point. Having baked that in for my lead in today, I have to honor and acknowledge that at some point that awareness already met its way to me to create this bond together today, because we've naturally stepped into that alignment and path today. Yeah. Within that is that magic, if we want to call it magic, that wonder and awe of collective consciousness to me. So from that aspect, I'm going to actually launch in here with a question and lean into an interview type conversation a little bit. So Troy, in our daily lives, we often encounter situations where opposing perspectives are valid. The unity of opposites recognizes that truth in and of itself is multifaceted. So from that regard, Troy, how does the concept of unity of opposites impact our ability to consider varying degrees of truth in different situations?

18:59 Jeffrey Besecker Yeah, loaded question. Definitely. Let me try and let me try and start here because for listeners that don't know, I am a practitioner of yoga and I've been teaching and practicing yoga now for over 15 years. And I only say that because I'm going to reference that the very meaning of yoga is union. That's what it means, right? It comes from the Sanskrit word, yuj. And it's often translated as to join or unite, right? And if I were to ask someone, well, in practice of yoga and in philosophy of yoga, what are you joining? They might say light and dark. They might say myself with God. They might say right and wrong. They might say whatever the joining of everything. Right. And there's a spiritual teacher. I'm sure you've heard of his name was Osho. And I read once a teaching of his way said that he pretty much I'm paraphrasing here in my words. He pretty much said that yoga is BS. He said, because you can't join what was never separate. So that's why I'm going to lead into this conversation, because I think that our opinions and our ideologies and all these different truths that each one of us have. And we have different truths and opinions and perspectives. And they are all shaped and built on our conditioning and our identity, our individual identity, more so. And to me, one of the I don't call it a lie, because a lie implies deception. A lie implies something that was intentionally told to deceive someone. So I don't call it a lie. But I think the biggest misinformation and narrative that has come over the human species is this idea of individual identity. From that perspective, Troy, how does ego development influence our propensity to clean the binary viewpoints rather than embracing the complexity of varying truths? For me, I call it the human identity crisis, because from the day I was born, I was told that this is my body and my name is Troy. From the second that happened, everything else and everyone else around me was made separate. There was division. There was separation. From the second that narrative was told and I chose to believe it, everything else became separate. I became other and I became an individual who was separate from everything else and everyone else around me. As we grow in our lives, we build upon that narrative. We build upon that narrative from our upbringing, from our opinions, our ideologies, our religion, our race, our belief system, our social circles, all of it. We begin to identify with these things as if they define us. So much so that someone might say, I am democratic. I am Republican. I am pro-vax. I am anti-vax. I am sad. I am happy. Listen to these statements. We define ourselves by these ideologies, by these opinions, by these temporary states of being. So much so that if someone has an opposing or a different perspective or a different ideology, it's almost like we feel like we're being attacked because we feel like our identity is under threat.

22:51 Troy Hadeed Does that make sense? I love that idea. And I feel we're going to dive into that even further here at a moment. From that perspective, for me, I like to look at that idea of what we believe about those identities and those associations creates the reality that surfaces what we manifest. And from a certain perspective, I feel those are shaped by, in and of themselves, emotional inference and transference. Those cycles where we project our emotions based on our beliefs. For me, I'd like to, within my own concept, emphasize the specific elements of the five factor model of personality, conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion. Within those elements, if we're relating and identifying from those perspectives by embracing these elements of personality, we allow for greater vulnerability and increased social and parochial empathy. Parochial means we're able to see that throughout a vast group. Parochial meaning that whole notion of unity. We can have unity with one person. We can have unity with a group.

24:06 Jeffrey Besecker If we zero kind of that energy and then expand the view out, zeroing meaning we go inside and look outward, we see that everything is interconnected. Yeah. So from that regard, Troy, how then from that perspective, can we enhance that ability to optimize that level of association and identification? Yeah. Oh, all right. First thing I want to say is I feel that we often talk about ego. As if the ego is a bad thing, right? And sometimes, you know, one of my favorite musicians, and I could see this because I did a post about it with a little tag on social media. And he replied to me and we had a little sharing. So I know he gets it as well. But his name is Nako and he's such an amazing, beautiful musician. And in a lyric in one of his songs, he implies that today's a good day for my ego to die. And at first, I was so taken up, so I felt it was such a powerful, it is a powerful lyric, but I was so overcome by it that I almost tattooed it on my skin. And a friend sent me once, you sure you want to do that? And she got me thinking. And the thing is that ego has its purpose. But to call the ego bad or irrelevant or to want to kill or remove the ego completely would be to call a human experience useless. And I don't think it is. I think it's a very divinely created, molded experience by some form of intelligence for me, whatever that intelligence is. I'm not too sure yet, but it's intelligent. And I believe that the ego gives us a sense of individuality. And if that ego overcomes us, we lose our way. We lose our way. We forget how interconnected we are. So when our ego overcomes us, we get overcome by this sense of individual belonging, individual identity. And that, of course, leads to separation, division, otherness, everything. Because if I am my physical body, then unconsciously what that programming is telling me is that when I die, I cease to exist. And then that unconscious programming now dictates everything I do and all my decisions and all my perspectives to be driven by self-preservation. Troy, how then do you feel we challenge our ego filters and expand our mental models? I will always put my ego as priority above everything else, because my unconscious programming is that when I cease to exist, when I leave my body, I cease to exist. So if that ego overcomes us, we end up living a very self-centered existence. And it inhibits our ability of understanding what it really means to love, what it really means to love one another. For me, if we can be in relationship to our ego, our ego, to me, is one of our greatest teachers ever. If we can be in relationship to our ego and understand that the human experience is like a curriculum, it's like school. We've come here to move through a human experience in order to learn certain things, whether it be to learn and remember what it means to love, maybe to learn empathy and forgiveness and compassion. And a lot of times this curriculum is uncomfortable. It's painful. It causes suffering. And in some instances, it is inhumane beyond our conception.

28:08 Troy Hadeed But if we can understand that we are not our bodies, then we also understand that any state of suffering or disconnect or pain is merely temporary. In the context of the unity of opposites, this can lead individuals to rationalize or reconcile opposing ideas, allowing them to find common ground and foster a sense of unity despite their apparent contradictions. From that perspective, on one end of the spectrum, we use disassociation as a means of avoiding our own inner emotional turmoil. On the other end of that spectrum, we utilize over identification as a defensive coping mechanism, perhaps looking at hyper individualism as an example.

28:55 Jeffrey Besecker No, here's where this comes into our relationship to everything else around us and everyone else around us, which is what I think you were pointing out. Jeffrey, correct me if I'm wrong, right? But if we am I right in getting that? We're in alignment on that today. Yeah, good. So here's where that adds up is that if I can understand that I am not actually my body, that I embody a certain conditioning, and though that conditioning breeds belief systems and habits and ways of showing up in the world, then if I can understand that, then it means I also have to understand that this person on a call in front of me that I am calling Jeffrey, he is also just a bag of conditioning. That this body is not really who he is, but this body has certain experiences, upbringing and belief systems that have conditioned it. So I'm going to go a little esoteric here, but hopefully we can connect your dots. No one can ever do something to hurt me because I am not my body. I am just part of a curriculum. It may hurt me. It may cause me pain. It may cause me suffering, but it's not personal because I am not my body. And likewise, Jeffrey, if you were to do something that caused me pain and suffering, it leads me to understand that it's not actually you doing it to me. It's your conditioning doing it to my body, that this individual that I embody, this thing that I represent, it's not in any way personal at all because we are not our bodies. We are here to be part of one another's curriculum. We are here to be one another's teachers and to be students of each other. And in this human experience, which is like a dance of curriculum, we've both come here to learn and grow. Nothing we do or nothing we cause one another to experience is personal. There's no such thing as a personal vendetta. Now, what I love to point out with this understanding is once we understand this, then forgiveness is not an option. Forgiveness is inevitable. It is inevitable that we begin to see each other's conditioning and understand one another's perspectives. Because if we choose to reprogram anything in the world, if you really want to have an impact on someone on a heart level, on their views and perspectives and ideologies of the world, then we have to understand their perspective first. We have to allow them to be seen and heard and allow them to feel safe. Then we could help one another reprogram.

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Did I mention the best part? You keep more money in your pocket. And with Mimp's referral plan, you can rescue more friends from big wireless bills while earning up to $90 for each referral. Visit our MimpMobile affiliate link at thelightinside.us forward slash sponsors for additional mobile savings or activate your plan in minutes with the MimpMobile app. In a time where information is easily accessible, the internet can be an echo chamber reinforcing our existing perspectives. We all have different experiences in our own perceptions of the universe we inhabit. When we try to understand the perspective of others, it often helps us to create connections, bridging the gap that exists between us. The news? It can be overwhelming. Our universe? Constantly changing. And there are many stories and events happening all at once. In short, this human experiment, it can be pretty fucking complex. In the truth? Well, we all know it rarely is black and white, and we frequently find ourselves feeling bewildered and confused. To further complicate this story, the human experience is full of contradictions, contradictions that are often self motivated. When it comes to the foundations and frameworks that form our beliefs, they're influenced in large part by our unconscious behavior patterns. As a common heuristic or mental shortcut, we often defer to the confirmation bias, a common cognitive bias that leads us to disregard or dismiss contradictory evidence. In short, we dismiss those things we feel are less than self evident. Instead, we toss aside anything that doesn't serve our own agenda and self interests. This is due in large part to motivated reasoning. It influences our perception of truth, making contradictory viewpoints difficult to embrace. Our social and cultural cues also contribute to our perception of truth, and echo chambers reinforce our existing perspectives. There's an answer to this self limitation, acknowledging the unity of opposites. Doing so allows us to embrace the complexity. We see new truths and we see more nuance and open understanding of this universe we inhabit. But how? Troy, we've held on to a model of perspective of ego that's existed largely for a hundred plus years now. That conventional level of ego development. In that hundred plus years, several individuals, many individuals have kind of danced within that theory and formed a more expanded awareness and theory of ego development. Within that conditional model or level of ego development, autonomy and singularity rule. You know, me first approach becomes that notion of what ego is and how we relate to it, how we see through it to see others, how we look through it to see ourselves. I was kind of pondering just this notion of ego, probably about 15, 20 minutes before we jumped on this call today. Yeah. From a certain perspective, the ego itself is nothing more than the window of consciousness. It's simply the set of eyes. We see all that is how we view others, how we view ourselves, how we view these concepts we feel are somehow in a lot of regards. We create the notion that they are separate from us. Going back to some of this expanded awareness of consciousness now, this expanded awareness of how that relates to the ego. Jan Levinger and Susan Cook-Gutier, you know, are my go-tos now. Kind of my new conditioned belief because I feel conditioning in and of itself can work for us or against us. We have to condition habits to get up every day. We have to condition habits to feed ourselves. We have to condition the habit of caring for our health. So that's conditioning. Are we making healthy, beneficial conditioning or do we embrace conditioning that becomes counteractive for us, that becomes unhealthy? So looking at these models of ego development, we look at post-autonomous ego development, moving beyond that singularity. Singularity is just one view and into a fourth person perspective. Us too becomes the approach in that bringing that unity of consciousness back together. When we can filter our view of our conscious being through those filters, we can see what goes on beyond us. We can see how we interact. We can see how we interrelate. We're also open and vulnerable to just simply accept others and their views, their perspective as they are free of that detrimental judgment. Discernment and judgment is kind of a double-edged dual sword itself. Yeah. Discernment is a certain element of awareness. Judgment kind of becomes a little bit loaded with that conventional ego perspective of me first. So looking at that, you know, to me, healthy ego development can either, again, work in our favor or create energetic resistance that works against us. Yeah. Relating to this statement, Troy, do you feel we sometimes form an energetic resistance to others as a result of those ego filters in our emotional reactivity?

38:46 Jeffrey Besecker I want to go back there, but I want to share a story with you first that I think you really appreciate. When I am, I've been doing a lot of corporate speaking and public speaking recently. And when I came back from my darkroom experience last year, I was speaking about that experience on stage. And after the speech, this lady came up to me and she explained to me that she had a seven-year-old son who was born blind. And she explains to me the psychology of a child who was born blind. And she says to me that her son is seven years old and still can't use the pronoun I, still can't use the pronoun I, because he doesn't understand that everything else is separate. That's not his experience of life. His experience of life is that everything is part of him. So it got me to stop. And I was like, wow. And I remember telling this story once and someone says to me, well, hopefully when he's 15 years old, he'll realize and recognize that we're all separate and he'll get it. And I said, no, my friend. I said, no, he gets it. I say he understands it. We've been conditioned by our ego and our separateness. He is our teacher because he understands this interconnectedness. And it was just such a beautiful moment for me to be told that. And I've never met this kid before, but he's my teacher in that one little story. And to get back to just a regress now, get back to your question about discernment and judgment. I think I'm going to answer that in a really simple way, at least I think simple to me. Hopefully listeners would feel the same way. As long as I am overcome by my ego and my individuality, I'm going to judge things upon their impact on me and my well-being. And what my perspectives and my ideology and what I think and have been conditioned to believe is right or is wrong. And in a lot of ways, we look at judgment as right and wrong, as black and white, as we often mention when talking about truth. We look at things that's good or bad. And I would like to propose a different way of viewing the world. I would love for us to start to look and just simply ask a question. What is in our greatest good? What serves the greatest amount of people in this moment? What way forward? What decision? What action? What thought? What words serve the greatest amount of people? And who does it serve? Because a lot of the time we can see that something is good for us. But who's us? Is us you and your family? Is us a social group or collective belief system? So we need to start when we look at we analyze actions, words and thoughts, when we analyze how people show up in the world and we judge things. We have to ask rather than judge them as good or bad, ask you question, what serves the greatest amount of people? What serves the greater collective and what impact does this have on greater collective? And I think when we start to ask those questions, we start to kind of dissolve in lines around what is good and what is bad. And we start to dissolve judgment of others and judgment of things, because I don't believe you can ever be grateful for someone or something if you judge it as bad. And let's look, for instance, as there are a lot of very negative experiences that people have to endure that cause pain and suffering. And they might judge that experience as bad. And if they judge that experience as bad, then it's impossible to be grateful for that experience, because you're saying that you wish it never happened. But if you can in some way pinpoint some element of growth or transformation for you or someone else that has come out of an experience, then it can't be bad. It can be uncomfortable and painful, and maybe it caused a lot of immense suffering. But as long as we can see something good that can come out of it, then that experience would never bad. And I know that's a hard one to sit with for a lot of people. But again, if we can begin to see our experience of life beyond our individual identity, beyond the experience of our ego at any one point in time, then this becomes a lot more digestible. Again, I don't know if that answered your question, Jeffrey.

44:03 Troy Hadeed That offers a fluid perspective. That's how I like to frame that today. Looking at that perspective, when we look at ego itself, now largely believed in many realms to be just simply a lens or filtering device, much like our emotions. Yeah. From that perspective, when we look at those judgment projections, judgment evaluations, they're based a lot of times in and of themselves on a state called emotional inference. Basically, what this is, is when we start to project and forecast our belief of somebody's emotional state, he's mad at me without any real feedback from the person to share their inner state. We get locked in this a lot throughout society, making assumptions about other people, starting to build this kind of preformed concept, projecting it on future circumstances. When we get locked in that in kind of a conflicting role, inference and transference happens. We imply one thing to a person, no, this is not what I'm experiencing. Rather than being open to that feedback, then we start this kind of back and forth dance cycle. Now I'm implying that, well, because you said this, this is how you feel. We see that in our relationships, turns into those kind of quarrels or bickering where we're not open and being empathetic. We're not genuinely connecting. We're not engaging in active listening, where we're open to someone sharing their feeling. And we go through this path with a lot of resistance and a lot of quote unquote baggage from our past, you know, our past trauma surface, our implicit memory. We record things from our past, store that in our brain, and we're recalling and comparing. We're going back to that implicit cycle. Now I'm inferring based on what happened. X, Y, and Z in the past is now the reality and truth of the X, Y, and Z of the future and present. Yeah, we start to look to see where that unity of opposites begins to disintegrate. Now it's me trying to insinuate what I believe. We're trying to exercise control and certainty.

46:22 Jeffrey Besecker Yeah. You know what comes to mind when I hear you talk about that, Jeff, is I'm sure you have heard of or read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Right. So this whole concept of living in the present moment has become like such a big part of New Age spirituality and movement. Right. Funny enough, the very first teaching of yoga, Atayoga Nushasanam, says that yoga is now. So let me translate that for you, at least what it means to me. Union, the realization of our interconnectedness and wholeness can only exist in the present moment. Because the second in mind starts to fluctuate, in mind, in mind is the root of the ego. Right. In mind creates all fluctuations and sense of identity. The second in mind starts to fluctuate. It creates separation. It creates otherness. And then it starts to, like you rightfully said, it starts to project onto people and our relationships based on our past experiences. And so we end up living any future, any past. We are immediately ripped out of the present moment because we are, I like to say, we are puppets to our past experiences. And if we don't have a relationship to them, they will always govern how we show up in our lives. In that regard, are we using insecurity to some degree to emotionally separate from others? Of course, because I have this sense of ego and identity, that ego is always concerned with ensuring my safety. It's concerned with self-preservation. It's concerned with protecting my perspectives, my ideology, my safety, my well-being. So we use these past experiences to try and project narratives onto people, places and things in an effort to create safety and security for our ego. Ego and in mind is always an impasse to any future. We cannot really understand one another unless we're able to quiet that mind, quiet that fluctuation of in mind. Because like you rightfully said, we are always projecting. We are always assuming. And if we could actually be present with someone and hear and understand and feel their perspectives, their views, how they are experiencing something in a moment and understand their conditioning, then very quickly we will dissolve separation. We will dissolve this sense of feeling like we're on opposite teams, like we have something to prove. And rather than try to make someone else wrong and prove ourselves right, rather than try to judge someone or situation, we now begin to find what is the best way forward that serves everyone involved. Can you relate to that?

49:43 Troy Hadeed When we turn that lens inward, that lens of ego, there's benefit, can be benefit in protecting our common good. So often we form a resistance to that idea of protection. We somehow judge and subjectively dissociate from that itself. We sometimes then move into that judgment that well, because it's defending me. Well, why is it defending you and against what? Is it reinforcing you edifying you toward your optimum state of being in your ultimate well-being? Or are you wrestling it because it's pointing towards something inward? You're resisting in and of itself that gets you to that state. Are we over identifying with that ego? Are we over identifying with the self when we are? What can of worms are we opening up? I say can of worms just because that's where I'm going to naturally go with it. Sometimes we turn it into a can of worms. Yeah. You know, it's this sticky, ewy thing we don't want to mess with. Yeah. When we look at those implicit memories, those are the stored unconscious or subconscious memories that we seek to repress. They're an energy we're running away from. We're resisting them. We're avoiding them. We're dissociating from them. I no longer want this because I've already exercised the judgment. Yeah. The judgments happened in the past. Now we're dragging that judgment forward as continued resistance. Yeah. Until we allow that filter to kind of wipe clean and look at it. The energy is going to come up again and again and again, because that's it's one job. It's one job is to process the emotional signal in that perception. And the more you run away from the job, the more you neglect that experience, the more you disown yourself from that sense of authority, agency and volition. The job is to just acknowledge it. Say, I see you. I accept you. I'm open to you. I love you. Now, what can I gain from this? Yeah.

51:51 Jeffrey Besecker What is the benefit that's going to move me forward? I think that that last question is so essential, Jeffrey, because, you know, you often have a lot of people talk about they want to forget the past. They want to forget something has ever happened. And some people block it out and say they moved on or they cast judgment on it as bad and they move on and say I'm over with that or that piece and whatever. But when when we look at life differently as a curriculum and we look at each other as our teachers, we have to begin to look at every experience and ask a question. How can I grow? What was there there for me to learn? And when we ask those questions, here's the tricky part. And this is the ego as well. We always love to project something on someone else. I learn not to interact with someone like that. I learn not to get involved with people like that. I learn to walk away from this or walk away from that. A lot of the time we project the disconnect onto something or someone else because it's easy for us to do that. Then we don't have to take accountability. But there's always a way. There is absolutely always a way. I would let me rephrase because because that could come back and bite me in my ass. 90% of the time, the majority of the time, there's always a way where we could have acted differently. We could have responded more consciously or a way in which we could have brought more empathy, love, compassion or forgiveness or understanding the situation. There's always something for us to learn. And let me put a point here. Sometimes maybe what we had to learn was courage. Courage to walk away. Courage to draw our boundaries. Courage to stand up for ourselves. Very possibly. But we always should ask a question. What was there for me to learn? What could I have done differently? And because it's so much easier to look at the world around us and see what everyone else should have done differently. But that's not a question we need to be asking, right? Our growth and transformation as human beings is in our flaws. It's in our mistakes. And if we don't have the courage to look into that darkness, then we can never turn that darkness to light. Troy, do you feel in that regard that emotional insecurity and that illusion or need for control often hinder our ability to grasp the unity of opposites and see things in that new light? Absolutely. Because you know, it's so funny that everything comes back around, right? It all comes back around to this narrative that we are separate. The narrative we've been told from the day we were born, right? Everything comes back to that. And all our separation and otherness, I like to say everything that is wrong or misaligned or disconnected in a world that we know it or has ever been has been born out of this concept of separateness. It has been born out of this idea that we are different out of this idea of individual ego. It has been born out of that. And it all comes back to that very thing. Because as long as we believe that we are separate, we are individual and we are our ego, and we don't have a relationship to that. I like to use it with relationship because I'm not judging it as bad. But if it overcomes us, and we do not question the programming of our ego, then everything becomes driven by self-preservation. Everything becomes driven by this need to prove ourselves, whether we prove ourselves right, prove ourselves successful, or be remembered for our accomplishments and our deeds. All of our entire existence begins to revolve around that ego and that identity. And here's something that's important for us to recognize. I think at some point in our lives, hopefully, we've all recognized that we are going to leave our body one day. Death is your only certainty in life. It is the absolute only certainty of life. But let me put one more certainty here for us to consider. Our names will be forgotten. At some point after we leave our body, it might be a day, it might be a year, it might be 10 years, it might be 40 years, it might be a century, it might be two centuries. At some point, along a timeline of human existence, our names will be forgotten. Everything we have ever done or accomplished or experienced will be forgotten. Every trace of anything Troy Hadid has ever done will be forgotten. Or Jeffrey Bessecker. Everything we have ever accomplished or done, even our mistakes, our deeds, our actions, all of it will be forgotten. We will not even remember this amazing joyride of the human experience. But the resonance and vibration of our lives and our choices will always live. It will always exist in some form and it will always influence human consciousness or the consciousness of existence. But as long as we overcome with this I and this me, without having a relationship to it, then we will always be trying to prove ourselves worthy as I and as me. And that inhibits our ability to really see God in one another, to really see creation in one another. That being overcome with a sense of individuality, the sense of I and me, inhibits our ability to love.

58:36 Troy Hadeed That's such a beautiful way for us to wrap things up today, I feel, Troy. If you could offer just one insight today that you feel would allow us to connect with another and open to their perspective. I'm going to frame it that way. What would this one piece of advice be?

58:56 Jeffrey Besecker I would say this. I would say to remember that every individual is simply conditioning. And I'll quote, I think it's Antoro Ali, he's an astrologer. And I love to talk about his quotes, it's so beautiful. He says that privilege is blind to those that have it. And to know what love is, is a privilege. To know what safety and security is, is a privilege. To know what right and wrong is, I'm using inverted commas in my hands, is a privilege. To know how to be in relationship, how to love one another, how to serve something bigger than ourselves, how to care for someone. These are privileges. To know how to forgive and how to understand. These are privileges. They're all programming that everyone has or does not have. So if in our relationships, we could see someone's programming, understand their conditioning, then we can help one another recondition and reprogram. But you cannot help someone recondition and reprogram by judging them. You can judge their actions, but that's different from judging them. You can judge their conditioning, but that's different from judging them. The quickest way to help someone reprogram or recondition is to first make them feel heard, seen, understood, and safe. There's a quote I have tattooed on my arm that I love to reference. It says that, so I'll leave your listeners with this, Jeff. It says, I have not come to teach. I have come to love and love will teach. So that's what I will leave you guys with. What a wonderful point to linger with today. We're simply here to love and be together. Thank you for sharing this time together with us today. I am so grateful for being able to sit with your perspective today and feel that loving energy. It truly, truly has been such a heartwarming interaction today, Troy. Jeffrey, thanks for having me. I feel the same way. And yeah, I know sometimes listeners don't always realize how much it takes for a host to have a podcast and edit a podcast and the energy that you guys bring. And I just want to acknowledge that and say thank you for having me and I'll be back anytime. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing that recognition today and sharing that loving energy. I would love to have you back soon. Thank you, my friend. Namaste. The light in me acknowledges the light in you. Love. Same to you, brother. From a certain perspective in an uncertain universe, there is no greater comfort than the comfort we often find in our own discomfort. If we want to truly grow from our discomfort, it's essential we embrace the comfort we often vehemently resist. Therein lies a version of truth. Find that truth you feel serves your optimum state of consciousness. If you found meaning in today's episode, please share it with a friend or loved one. And as always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Thank you.