It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: Welcome back to the Alive and Free podcast. Today, I want to do you guys a huge favor just because I love you and just because I think it's important.
You see, it's really easy to get lost in all of the information out there about anything that you may be struggling with. And if you really want to live a life of freedom, and be fully alive and come to life, there's a point at which you have to be able to clearly discern which information is going to help you and which one isn't.
So, today we're going to talk about science, particularly the social sciences, but science in general, and I want to help you figure out when it's important to listen to what's going on and also when you should just take it with a little bit of a grain of salt, so that you can sift through all the things out there that are being said. [01:16.2]
No scientists agree on everything. Anybody telling you that science says something obviously isn't looking at science, because there's a bunch of scientists on all different sides of the same question, left and right.
Now, you may recall that when I was coming outside of addiction, I had been told, according to the science, neuroscience, that it was going to take at least 18 months to two years for my brain to reset. I had been told, according to the science on addiction, and this is the social sciences, psychology and whatnot, that addiction didn't go away and, in fact, not only did it not go away, but it was something I was always going to have to be coping with and always be managing. It's not like it would even go dormant.
I had been told all of these different things that would happen, and as a result of being told that, I was left in a place of total despair at times, total helplessness, because the, quote-unquote, “facts” were speaking against me and there was nothing I could do, except accept the fact that I was going to be an addict forever. [02:09.2]
Now, this is the same with depression. This is the same with anxiety. In fact, we just finished with a client who we helped to completely ditch her anxiety. It was absolutely incredible, and that was the thing that got her so interested in the work we were doing, because she was like, No, nobody just gets rid of anxiety. You don't do that. But you're telling me you can. Yes, you can.
So, when do we listen to science? We're going to go on a little field trip. We're going to give you a little history lesson. You may recall that we looked back into the mid-1800s to figure out where the notion of addiction comes from. Newsflash: the notion of addiction has just been revised. Mid-1800s, addiction was obviously a habit. You can listen to this more in the episodes called “The Addiction Myth,” Part 1 and Part 2, and it'll give you the whole history. But it was just a bad habit or something and eventually it became a disease, and eventually all these addictive substances and everything else as well along with it. [03:03.2]
But, now, the DSM, which is the diagnostic manual for all of these psychologists, counselors and whatnot, has officially—has officially—declared that not just pornography, but all kinds of things are not addictions. Now, I know that some of them would say that's not the case, but if you look in there, there are no diagnoses anymore for addictions. There's substance abuse disorder and other types of abuse disorders, and the only time the word “addiction” actually shows up in their manual is when they have it as the section “Addictive Disorders,” which is funny because apparently that means that you can now be addicted to a disorder. Ah, a side note.
Anyway, back in the 1800s, this whole thing started. There was a certain level of hubris and investigation and whatnot going on with it that said “Hey, look, addiction is a disease. Alcoholism is a disease. I can cure you” kind of thing, right? That history you can listen to in those other episodes, mid-1800s.
We also talked about this with Belldon Colme a little bit in the episode called, “It's All About The Chemistry” when the idea of calories and nutrition shows up, and all of these assumptions made by scientists about the way that the human body and mind work, and the way the human metabolism works, they were based on steam engines and not based on real fact. So, that, too, started in the mid-1800s. [04:21.1]
Turns out, in the mid-1800s, there was a series of roughly around 10 hypotheses that science in general picked up. Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to see these hypotheses are assumptions. They're guesses. And if you believe everything that says science says this and all the headlines that tell you that, you need to understand where it's coming from, so you can be free to actually take the information that helps you and throw away the stuff that isn't going to be helpful for you.
So, 10 different hypotheses back there in the beginning and these 10 hypotheses, more or less, kind of encapsulated a certain sense of what science was about, of what the universe was about, and I'm going to read them to you. [05:00.1]
They're encapsulated and summarized in the book, Science Set Free, by Rupert Sheldrake, great volume. He has done some incredible work in helping to examine the roots of what science believes and opening up different forms of investigation. He has been around a long time. Seriously credentialed scientist.
Okay, so these 10 hypotheses go like this.
1. Everything is essentially mechanical, which means dogs are mechanical, as he states, or even like Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist. He's like, people are basically just lumbering robots. And all that means is, if we can figure out how the machine works every time like clockwork, it's going to go that way. So, basically we're just machines, right?
2. All matter is unconscious. There's no consciousness in matter. So, where consciousness came from becomes a question.
3. The total amount of matter and energy in the universe is always the same, with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared out of nothing, but all of it is the same. This was also a hypothesis or an assumption.
4. The laws of nature are fixed, despite the fact that there is clear evidence that they aren't fixed and that they may have operated differently at certain points in time in the past. [06:07.2]
5. Nature is purposeless. There's no point to it and evolution has no goal or direction. That's another assumption.
6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the stuff like DNA and genetic material, so you don't inherit anything else that's not material.
7. Minds, what a mind is, is inside of heads and there's nothing but the activities of the brain. That's what a mind is.
8. Memories are stored as material traces in the brain and they are wiped out at death, so memory doesn't exist outside the brain and it's only physical stuff.
9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory, meaning they're just deceptions. They're just illusions. They're not real.
10. And mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
So, these 10 assumptions, right? This starts in the mid-1800s and they were assumptions and the scientific establishment knew that they were assumptions. It was just a working theory about how the universe works. [07:06.0]
We move forward in time, and just like with addiction, and just like with calories and nutrition, there's a lot of data and a lot of research trying to figure out if this is the way things go, and pretty soon, even in Rupert Sheldrake, it's life. It became pretty much expected that if you were a scientist, you were also an atheist and you also believe these things implicitly, to the point where they became dogmas. They became things that were not questioned.
So, in his book, Science Set Free, Rupert Sheldrake literally goes and just turns each one of these into a question.
Is nature essentially mechanical? Question mark.
Is all matter unconscious? Question mark.
Is the total amount of matter and energy the same? Question mark.
Are the laws of nature fixed? Question mark.
Is nature really purposeless and evolution, if it exists, has no goal? Question mark.
And so on and so forth. And in so doing, it opens up all kinds of different avenues of exploration, scientific exploration, which is the way science is supposed to be designed to constantly be questioning itself and everything, except that these are taken as implicit truths nowadays. [08:10.6]
Why is this important to you? Somebody who's maybe not a scientist and not really interested in that kind of stuff. Maybe you're struggling with depression or maybe you're just anxious or addicted or something else. Why is it important? It's important because science has a certain kind of hold on the information that's coming out of you, that's coming to you in the media, and anything that says “Oh, researchers have found,” even with the coronavirus that's happening recently, “research has found.” It holds a certain kind of weight in your psyche because some lab-coated professional who has a certificate on the wall said so, even if the data they put together is extremely biased and is extremely flawed.
So, that's how we want to go into this. I want to help you see the holes in science, so that you can use science for your benefit because that's what it's there for—we're not trying to down it. We're not trying to diss it. Lots of great stuff has come from it—but I want you to see the limitations of that kind of inquiry, so that you can also have a hole and a gap to go through when it's not helping you, because you have other ways to explore things. [09:14.8]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety, or just anything that's making you feel flat-out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateAMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
First limitation that science is going to bring to you—the first limitation is there is no such thing as objective science. All science is measured by a subject. Even if it's measured by a machine, it's a subject, a person who's taking the readings from the machine and interpreting them, right? So, there we're trying to create this objective truth idea, but even that objective truth is flawed by nature because the people perceiving this truth are subjects. [10:12.7]
Now, that sounds like a weird point to make, so let me help break this apart. When a scientist puts together a research group, they're going to take a group of people—and we're going to talk about social science right here, psychology, because we're dealing a lot with that in the subject matter of what we talk about on this podcast.
If I'm a psychologist and I'm going to put together a research study, what am I going to do? Or if I'm a doctor or a psychiatrist and I'm going to put together a research study, I'm going to try and get a sample size of the population that I'm looking at—so, I'm going to get as diverse a group as I can, the right spread of age groups or whatever else that I'm trying to look for—and I am going to get a sample population.
And then, what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up an experiment that allows me, if it's done well, to have a control group, meaning blind or double-blind even. This control group doesn't know that they're the control group, but they're the ones that we're measuring to say, If nothing changed, how would things go? And then, we have a group who tests one thing, and then we have possibly a group who tests another thing, and so on, and then we measure those changes and experiences over time. Cool. [11:12.7]
First problem. Who’s setting up the experiment? What are the thoughts in their head? What's their back history? What are the things they're aware of and not aware of? What are their personal biases and religious views, and all the other things that are informing the way they're setting up the experiment? That's the first struggle. If you don't know that, then you're going to run into some trouble.
Now, this is something I learned way back in college, not studying science, but studying how to understand another person's words by looking at four main ingredients with them, the main points. I don't know if we covered this on a podcast. I don't remember. But the main points, they're supporting data, but then also their values as a person, what they value most because that's going to inform what they say, and also what their purpose in saying it is. Right?
So, if we look at this, what's the purpose of the experiment? Are they looking to create a new drug that will help or automatically the experiment is biased toward drugs? Not saying that's good or bad, but it's biased also, so we have the biases of the person that's creating the experiment. [12:12.1]
Then, on top of that, what do we have? We have a certain population, and when we're talking about what is possible for humankind, no scientist can ever make that declaration, because all they can declare is what has happened and what they've observed. They cannot extrapolate from that, however remote, that it is impossible for a person to do something different. Even if 99.9 percent of the people studied or even have 100 percent of the people studied, experienced one thing, that doesn't mean that it's not possible for another person to experience something different.
If you are trying to say that it is impossible, that is not a scientific statement, unless you're talking about mathematics, and the rules of mathematics and physics, in which case, sure, that's impossible, right, and they haven't figured out how bumblebees fly yet. Somehow physics can't account for that. Okay? It is impossible in physics but not in real life. So, they can't state that because it is a metaphysical statement. [13:06.0]
In other words, it steps out of the realm of physics and turns into metaphysics or that which goes beyond science. It's philosophy, and it's okay if they want to say it's impossible, but that's now a belief system. It's no longer science.
So, anybody telling you it's impossible to ditch depression and anxiety, addiction or anything else, they're not speaking scientifically. It doesn't matter how much data they're using to back it up. A scientist could never predict like that. They can use probabilities and statistics. They can say it's highly likely. But they could be way off base, and they're going to have a margin of error in all this stuff that they're doing, and, still, reality could show up differently. Okay?
Now, with this test group—so, already we have the biases of the experimenter. We also have the notion that what a scientist can declare is already limited by what they can observe and that's about it. And then, we have the test group. If we're trying to talk about human possibility, cool.
If Jesus were in the middle of the test group, the guy who said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” that guy, if he's in the middle of the test group and he was the one guy, and another enlightened being, whatever, and we have a thousand people and there are these two or three people that are just a hundred percent happy all the time, the scientists are going to throw out that data as outliers, meaning it doesn't fit inside the regular group, so it doesn't count. [14:20.5]
If Satan, the miserable one, was in that group, and Hitler and Mein Kamp, and anybody else that's extremely low on the scale, they'd throw that out, too.
And so, what they're going to get is an average of the average people inside the study. In other words, if you're trying to figure out what's possible for the human population in terms of how the human body is built and designed, taking an average of a bunch of Americans who are malnourished, who are overstressed, working like a dog, underslept, poorly rested, and they have all these different struggles and problems, and they're chronically fatigued, and they're dealing with all kinds of relationship issues and everything else, and you're going to take these people and you're going to take the average of them, and you're going to say, This is what's possible for humankind? [15:08.3]
No, what you're looking at as a bunch of very, very sick people in terms of what's possible, and you're saying that's what's possible for all people. That's not a statement that a scientist, 1) can make, and 2) it's not giving you accurate data. It's only telling you what scientists have observed.
If you want to repeat the past, and I'm going to say this twice, if you want to repeat the past, listen to people who have observed the past and take their advice. If you want to create something new, be aware of what happened, of what people are saying, but go focus on creating something different. That's the big difference between innovators and people who create and inventors, and people who create new possibilities and the people who are busy maintaining the status quo.
If you're looking for disease, what are you going to find? Disease. And the number of diagnoses continues to grow in terms of what kinds of diseases there are on the planet because we keep looking for them. Is it bad to look for them? I'm not going to say that. Is it bad to look for solutions to those? I'm not going to say that either. All I'm saying is if you're looking for it, you'll probably find it. Ask and you shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. This is a pretty common principle in a lot of different spiritual traditions. [16:16.9]
So, if you want to repeat the past, continue to listen to and take advice from the people in the past on how to live. Keep living the way that you've lived or the way that supposedly Einstein put it—you cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking you were at when you created it. You have to change your way of thinking, which in spiritual terms is the word repentance.
So, the limitations inside of anything in the social sciences or in the hard scientists are built around a bunch of dogmas and assumptions about the way life works when there's plenty of suggestive evidence to say that maybe we got those wrong, since the mid-1800s, which is funny because in the early-1900s they were so sure, so cocksure of how good science was that Bertrand Russell in the early-1900s and a bunch of philosophers and other people said that basically there's nothing new that we're going to be able to discover in science, that we've already discovered everything major. If there's anything new discovered, it's a minor thing on the side. That was in the early-1900s. [17:11.4]
Have we discovered some things since then? Have we made some major breakthroughs in science since then? I think so, but they believed, still, that what they had settled on, because they were confident in it, they believed, still, that what they had settled on was the summum bonum of all scientific truth and knowledge.
Little did they know, right? Constant questioning leads to constant discovery, and finding of new answers and new ways of seeing things. So, the limitations there are when somebody is telling you it's not possible to get rid of depression; it's not possible to get rid of anxiety; it's not possible to get rid of addiction; it's not possible to do it fast; it's going to take a long time; it's not possible to just completely change your personality; it's not possible to no longer struggle with things—everybody says, Oh, life is hard. Life is stressful. Trials are going to be there—they're telling you that because that's what they've lived, but that doesn't mean that that's the whole truth. It means just that. That's what they've observed in their life experience. That's it. And you don't have to play into that, folks. [18:08.1]
My permission that I'm giving you today, I hereby give you permission from the seat of whatever this thing I'm sitting on that you never have to listen to another person's way of living and duplicate it. It doesn’t matter if it has found power in them. If, for you, it’s not helping, throw it out and find something that helps. And it doesn't matter if you're throwing out science, because science itself is built on assumptions and cannot, by the way it's built, tell you the ultimate and whole truth about things.
And so, the reason I wanted to address this today was there's too much going around where we just listened to what a scientist says and assume it as fact, when there are a number of other scientists that believe differently and feel differently, and are setting up experiments based on those beliefs that confirmed the beliefs they have.
This is the sort of conspiratorial side of things, so it's a side note, but who's funding the scientific endeavor and what are they trying to accomplish, that purpose? That's also a good thing to note. [19:05.6]
So, today, as you go throughout your day and you look at all the things that you've assumed are facts—facts because you've experienced them before, facts because that's the way someone taught you—I want you to take a minute today and just ask yourself a simple question. What if I'm wrong? What if that's not really the way things are? And what if there's an easier, faster, better way of looking at things that would make my life so much happier? Because, in the end, how happy you are and how good you feel, that's the ticket to real life and real freedom.
And that's it for today's “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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