Recording: Is love fundamental? (and is there a plan?)

"all creatures are maintained in existence by love" - Meister Ekhart

It is one of the great privileges of these meetings that Bernardo is willing to discuss his more private intuitions. Whilst careful to delineate exactly where analysis ends and speculation begins, in this session he shares both.

• Is love fundamental?
• What is the nature of prayer?
• Does creation have a plan?
• Considering religious myths

Mystics worldwide and across time have attested to love as a fundamental property of existence.

Can this be defended from an analytic idealist perspective?

Strictly speaking, no. There is no technical reason to elevate love above any other experience.

But there are many ideas that aren't necessary under analytic idealism but are compatible with it. Bernardo takes anecdotal evidence seriously when it is consistent, such as reports of love being fundamental from non-dual 5-meo DMT experiences, Near Death Experiences and the revelations of mystics across traditions.

Consider an old-fashioned amplitude modulated radio station. The broadcast is done via a carrier wave of a certain frequency, for example, 800 kilohertz. That's what you tune into to hear a the station. The music, the voices of that radio station are the excitations on top of that carrier wave.

So it's coherent to speculate that nature's frequency is never at complete rest, and whilst the fabric of reality could manifest in many forms, love might be the underlying tone that carries these experiences and is present even when other experiences subside. It might not be fundamental to it's being, but could be fundamental to how it is known.

Does nature have a plan?

Publicly, Bernardo has repeatedly indicated the reasons why nature is likely not metaconscious - not able to self-reflect and plan. It may 'know' everything it is doing, but not anticipate the consequences. This is implied by the incredible suffering woven into nature, which under idealism would be suffering inflicted by nature onto itself.

In contrast, some have argued that the incredible fine tuning of the universe implies that creation is planned. Even one microscopic changes to the universal constants (such as gravity) would prevent life, galaxies, and stars from existing. Some of these are detailed in Martin Rees' book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe.

"if they were not exactly what they are, there would be no life, there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no complexity.... there would be no form arising, or if it did arise, it would come to an end immediately."

There are ways to explain this without needing to assume a metacognitive creator. For example, it could be our dashboard representation that is finely tuned, not existence itself. Or the black hole-based universal evolution theory: When a massive star collapses into a black hole, the matter inside doesn't just crush into nothing. Instead, it "bounces" and expands into a brand-new "baby" universe on the other side of the singularity, inheriting the laws of physics but with slight variations, until finely tuned universes like ours evolves.

But this theory relies on countless postulates. Meanwhile, "there is nothing incoherent in the hypothesis that there maybe be a very deliberate, very self-aware, conscious entity at some level of reality that has set this up for some kind of deliberate purpose." A kind of hierarchy of nested dreams, in which the dreamer pops into its own creation and forgets she had set up the dream.

Many world mythologies indicate something similar - from Plato's Republic to the Kabballah to Native American account of reincarnation and Australian aboriginal conceptions of creation.

Bernardo was again willing to share some personal perspectives that he doesn't make public, and has asked not to share. I encourage you to watch, at around half-way through the meeting, and to share your own reflections on telegram.

I hope you enjoy, and I look forward to seeing you next week!

Amir

TIMESTAMPS

Courtesy of Rita Conde

00:00:00 Introductions
00:05:07 - Is love fundamental?
00:05:17 - psychedelics and the overwhelming feeling of love after ego dissolution
00:07:00 - the mystical experience of love in different spiritual traditions; love as the ontological glue
00:08:24 - under analytic idealism, there is only one field of subjectivity, and love is an excitation of that field
00:10:20 - nature’s consciousness is never at rest; it is always in excitation
00:11:46 - does love take precedence?
00:12:12 - Bernardo’s experience with psychedelics
00:15:48 - 5-MeO-DMT: direct experience of non-duality
00:20:55 - the ontological status of love
00:23:53 - an illusory experience is still an experience
00:25:51 - facing the insurmountable scale of the universe with alarm and confusion lies at the very core of the human condition
00:27:00 - Do western philosophers propose love is fundamental?
00:28:31 - Nietzsche: philosophy must be an act of passion
00:30:40 - Jungian German mystic Ludwig Binswanger: “love is the substrate of reality”
00:33:54 - what is the field of subjectivity
00:37:30 - what happens when we pray
00:39:39 - Bernardo’s prayer
00:45:00 - why nature doesn’t always act according to the precedence of love
00:50:00 - the cruelty and suffering inherent in nature
00:53:00 - two options: love isn't fundamental / nature doesn’t know what it’s doing
00:56:53 - not knowing consequence does not contradict omniscience
00:58:40 - the fine-tuning of the universe implies metacognition
01:02:10 - the perspective of first-person physics
01:04:30 - the simulation hypothesis
01:05:45 - there might be a demiurge; this is not incoherent under analytic idealism
01:00:50 - Plato’s Republic: we volunteer to enter the game and enter it amnesic (Myth of Er)
01:07:30 - Australian Aboriginal mythology
01:10:00 - why nature doesn’t know what it’s doing, even though it is omniscient
01:10:50 - Nature doesn't need Occam’s razor
01:12:00 - are religious mythologies nonsense?
01:15:50 - Bernardo shares private intuitions about dualism, hierarchies of mind, divinity and the purpose of nature
01:24:40 - the exact and precise fine-tuning of the universe and the a priori rules and forces of nature
01:29:22 - Martin Rees, astronomer, book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
01:33:33 - would the naturalistic hypothesis pass Occam’s razor, given the extraordinary degree of fine-tuning required?
01:34:40 - fine-tuning and the Big Bang
01:42:00 - Qur’an: “I am as My servant thinks of Me”
01:44:50 - divinity appears in the form that we are capable of cognizing
01:47:32 - truth revealed has to be symbolic
01:49:00 - transcendence must take a distinct form depending on the individual who is apprehending it, so that the same meaning is conveyed (Christians see Christ, Hindus see Krishna)
01:50:00 - when we dream, we use our personal life dictionary
01:54:00 - book The World as Icon by Douglas Hedley
01:55:28 - Shiite and Sunni traditions in Islam
01:57:10 - F. H. Bradley, British idealist philosopher
01:57:50 - Bernardo recommends Gemini 3 Pro as the best AI bot today

Recording