- Howdy, I'm Brandon, 27 from South Australia,
and this is five lessons I've learned
from reading over 500 books.
So the first lesson is,
is that books don't teach me anything.
I've spent a lot of my life just reading
so many books for the sake of becoming smarter,
for becoming better, for becoming more knowledgeable.
But I realised, yeah, it's pointless.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, we need to break down what a book really is.
A book is just words on a page.
Those words are pointing to something.
Until I act on what those words are pointing to,
or understand what it is that those words are pointing to,
then I haven't learned anything.
Let's take the example of an apple.
Apple is just a word,
the word points to something.
When I say apple, you probably think of this big red ball
like thing that you eat and it tastes sweet.
But you can't know what that is unless
you've held an apple,
ate an apple, et cetera, et cetera.
You've had a direct experience of the apple.
Now you understand what the apple is.
But even that, if we take it a layer deeper,
I don't wanna confuse you here,
but if we take it a layer deeper.
Notice how we've just described the apple,
but what actually is the apple?
We can only say kind of what it tastes like.
It tastes sweet, it looks red,
but even the word red is appointed to something.
Unless you've experienced red you can't know
what red is just like a blind person.
There's no idea what you mean when you say red
until they have a direct experience of red.
- So being blind's birth, I've never seen colour.
I don't have any concept of what it is.
I mean, I've never seen anything.
So when somebody says something's red to me,
I don't quite get it.
- So let's say they did experience red.
Well, they can see it, but what actually is red?
You'll notice that you'll never be able
to come up with an answer.
So you can't actually ever learn anything
if we're talking on a very deep and absolute level.
So when it comes to reading books,
if you just read about an apple
and you read that it's sweet and that it's red,
you don't know what an apple is.
You've just got an idea about the apple.
Let's have a look at another example.
If I'm reading "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle,
all about inner piece,
and let's say I read a line in his book and it says,
"Peace is your true nature."
Now I can read that and I could say,
oh yeah, I understand that.
Of course, peace is my true nature.
And then I could go around all day telling myself
peace is my true nature.
And it may be a comforting thought
but that's all it is, a comforting thought.
It isn't actually true understanding
until I directly experience peace is my true nature.
Eckhart Tolle is speaking from a place of conviction,
from experience.
But until then, if I just read those pages on the book,
turn it into an idea, and then keep repeating
that idea to myself, then I'm essentially
just a foolish parrot.
I'm a parrot that doesn't truly understand
but tells himself he understands.
Coming back to the original lesson,
books don't teach me anything,
it's direct experience that teaches me.
The second lesson I've learned
is that hoarding knowledge does not make me wiser.
Now, a big reason I picked up reading
and I've kept reading is because I feel I'm becoming smarter
when I read more books.
I've meticulously tracked over 500 books
since 2013 when I was, I think about 17 years old.
And, you know, there's all these little dopamine hits,
you know, I get from, like, ticking off a box
for reading a book.
When I truly examine my motives
as to why I was tracking all these books
and doing all this reading,
I was just doing it to accumulate knowledge
for the sake of becoming smarter
or even appearing smarter.
Am I smart now?
(laughs)
It's a foolish game.
It's really quite silly.
And that's not to say there's anything
inherently wrong with that.
And I'm not saying about what you should or shouldn't do.
I've just learned in my experience
that reading for the sake of reading
and for the sake of becoming smarter,
I'm not becoming wiser.
I'm just hoarding information.
So I think it's important to go
into what is knowledge,
what is knowledge?
- Knowledge.
- Knowledge is information.
Information by itself is just information.
And when you're reading and extracting
this information from the books,
it's, let's say going into your brain,
and it's just sitting there as information.
So you could parrot it to someone else
but it's just, that's so empty.
The idea of information is basically to use it
so you can understand or achieve something.
Otherwise it's just,
it's just dead.
It's just nothing.
It's just dust.
(laughs)
So how I approach reading now
is it's just to purely understand.
Storing knowledge in my head is like storing potatoes
in my garage for when the global food crisis comes,
when Klaus Schwab takes over the world,
but never actually eating the potatoes,
something like that.
So knowledge only becomes wisdom when it's applied
successfully or fully understood through direct experience.
If I read all about nootropics and smart drugs
and I read about the benefits without ever
having tried them myself,
not saying you should or shouldn't by the way,
then how can I truly understand them?
I'm just sort of taking someone's word for it.
I don't truly understand.
It's just sort of a piece of knowledge
or just floating information.
I'm not any wiser for reading this.
I just now pretend I know something
and I could parrot it to others so I look smart.
But I don't know, I've never tried the nootropic.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
Even scientific studies, if they say,
"If you take this nootropic
you'll become 36% smarter on average."
You still don't actually know that,
scientific studies aren't the truth.
- You're attacking science.
- Scientific studies aren't understanding.
You have to go through direct experience
to understand it yourself.
Otherwise, it's just existing as an idea.
- You're attacking science.
- Even scientific studies,
(giggles) might get some heat for this.
That's okay.
But scientific studies,
they're really just an idea in your head.
When I look at a scientific study on a screen,
I'm looking at more information
that someone's written and I'm just,
there's so many built-in assumptions
that these people are correct.
Oh, look this is how they conducted the experiment,
et cetera, et cetera.
That's all still ideas in my head.
Notice how that's just a concept arising in this moment
and that's all it is.
Just a thought.
So this sort of stuff goes deeper but that doesn't,
kind of goes outside the scope of this video.
So we'll keep going.
(soft music)
The third lesson I've learned is that reading
books isn't necessarily better than other sources.
You can learn just as much
from a book as you can from a video.
But notice that books, videos, images,
they're all forms of communication.
They're attempting to communicate an idea to you
or even an experience.
The reason I like to read books
is because I love that, you know, someone's put
like 20 years of their work into a book.
They've really sat down,
maybe spent a few years just writing it,
editing it, perfecting it so that they can really convey
their ideas in the best way possible.
I feel they're more carefully curated
than other sources of information.
So anyone kind of go on a YouTube video,
and five minutes and talk about something.
But I find books have just been the thing
I've got the most value from.
With that said, you could have someone
with 30 years of understanding in their field,
like maybe there's a gardener,
they've been doing gardening for 30 years
and they can just slap on a video, five minutes,
absolutely nail it cuz they know what they're talking
about and their understanding gets transferred to me.
You know, I sort of hear what they're saying
and then I go out and try and grow an apple myself
or grow a potato and it works,
and I go, wow, what a great video that was.
So, you know, videos aren't to be underlooked either
or any source of information.
It's just, what's gonna lead you to understanding?
I would say, yeah,
there's some information sources other than books
that I found to be even more valuable
in my personal experience,
which I won't be speaking about today.
But, yeah, experiment,
see what works for you.
Now, for the fourth lesson.
My biggest leaps in personal growth have come
from examining basic assumptions about life.
Those things you'd never even think to ask
because it's just an assumed reality.
So for example, here's some assumptions I've found
that I've just assumed my whole entire life
until I put them under the microscope.
So one is that the past exists,
the future exists,
I exist,
I was born,
I die.
Now we all go around assuming these are true,
like it's something you may not even think to question.
Because you're on this channel,
maybe you have actually questioned some of these.
But until they're questioned so thoroughly
to where the point you come to a full understanding
that they are indeed false,
then we're still kind of playing around with ideas.
But the main point here is that, yeah,
I've learned by uncovering these assumptions
and beliefs you'd never think to question,
it leads to profound levels of growth.
More than any smart drug
or anything that could ever give me,
this is what I found to be
like the biggest factor in my personal growth.
Let's just take one example
without going too crazy deep into this.
Otherwise, this is gonna be a very long video.
The assumption that the past exists.
Okay, so we often tell ourselves throughout the day
to other people, oh yeah, yesterday I went
to Harry's birthday party and we got so drunk, man.
Or we read tonnes of books, man
cuz that's what you do, right?
When you're in your twenties,
you hang out and you read books together.
(laughs)
You know, you tell yourself that
that yesterday you were at the library
and you read a book,
but did you?
(sneaky music)
Or is that just a memory occurring now
in the present moment?
And there actually is no such thing as past,
it's just illusory.
It's an illusion.
It is an assumption that you keep telling yourself
when you have ever since you were born.
- [Alan Watts] The present is the only real time.
There is no past.
And there isn't a future.
- Really consider that the past and the future
are merely memory and imagination occurring
in the present moment.
And when that's truly understood,
like it will be a massive breakthrough.
If you're saying you understand now,
it may still just be a conceptual idea.
It's very likely the case,
but when you really pierce through the veil
of the illusion of time,
just it's so absolutely apparent
that all there ever is is now.
And this is what Eckhart Tolle is pointing to
in his book "The Power of Now"
and many other books and gurus and spiritual teachers,
et cetera, et cetera.
And the deepest truths of religion, et cetera, et cetera.
But the main point is,
is just that questioning these unexamined assumptions
have led to the biggest personal growth for me.
And books have been a big part of that,
to sort of pointing some out to me
that if I didn't read the book,
who knows how long it would take for me to come across,
you know, those insights or those assumptions
that I've been holding.
One book for this that was very helpful
was "The Book of Not Knowing" by Peter Ralston,
"Pursuing Consciousness" by Peter Ralston,
"The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle.
So I'll leave those books in the description.
The final lesson for this video,
this one is so challenging to speak of.
This one just takes my breath away.
Lesson number five is that I believe God exists.
I believe God exists.
I don't say that I know God exists,
but this is the path of understanding I'm on currently.
It consumes my whole day.
Now this is coming from someone who's in the past
been very obsessed with rationality and logic
and all this sort of stuff.
I've read the, what is it, by Richard Dawkins.
"The God Delusion," who was like the God of atheism.
And a lot of it, you know,
I was nodding my head to this book many years ago.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
I've had a Christian upbringing.
So, you know, you kind of just get fed this belief
that oh yep, God exists
and you kind of accept it, unconsciously.
So yeah, you know, I went on this big,
big long pilgrimage to,
you know, sort of question it.
So yeah, anyway, over the years,
especially in the last two years,
man, this is a whole nother video.
But basically what happened is I had this very joyous
and blissful experience that just arose out of nowhere.
I was at the beach one day about two years ago,
and this feeling of joy just came upon me.
It showered upon me
and for absolutely no reason,
I felt so much joy, just frolicking in joy
and high spirits and great energy for no reason.
(laughs)
And it was this spark
that really took me on this journey
into what self-realization is.
I don't have any really logical rationality for this,
but basically I just started bingeing on Osho books.
Osho was sort of my first entry point
in terms of another authority or another author
or book or influencer, whatever you wanna call it
that really affected
just my whole life.
(soft music)
I, after that experience,
I knew there was something here
in this whole spiritual stuff.
The hippies are onto something,
the core of religions is onto something,
Jesus was saying something
but I hadn't fully understood yet.
I know there's something here.
Love, unconditional love, divine love.
There is something here.
I know it, I have to find out.
There's so much to fill in here.
But basically another next significant experience
was my first experience of kensho.
This is the word I find best,
most accurately describes sort of the first awakening
experience you have about the truth and nature of reality.
Yeah, the first big kensho experience I had,
I was once again on the beach with a bearded man I met
in the Gold Coast, Australia.
And I noticed he had this inner peace about him.
I just knew, I could tell by his energy, and I tried.
I sat down with a table with him,
thanks to his invitation.
We got on this topic organically about spirituality
and I learned that he had learned from a guru
and I was very interested.
And so, anyway, this could be a very long story
but basically I question the heck out of him.
I tried to look for any bit of inauthenticity in him
and I couldn't find anything.
I kept poking him, poking him,
sort of questioning his understanding of stuff
and he just had this inner peace,
this blankness to him.
And there's something in it him that I wanted
and I wanted to know
and I wanted to find out why he was so damn peaceful.
God damn it.
And anyway, after a lot of dialogue,
I came to this realisation
that all this conflict I had in my head about
philosophising about border and consciousness
and everything, really trying to understand the mind
about what all these spiritual gurus are saying
about the ultimate truth and Eckhart told about inner peace.
It finally dawned on me that,
it dawned on me that my own mind
was the very source of the conflict
I was looking to resolve.
(laughs)
Oh man, it's the biggest fat belly laugh
when it's really seen in that light.
This is why that Buddha like figure,
that big fat belly man is laughing.
I finally understood why,
in that moment I understood why
and that understanding carries on to this day.
So if you go beyond the mind and really see it
for what it is, then there's just peace.
There's just contentment,
there's just truth.
There's just what is.
(soft music)
So that was my first kensho experience.
It was only later in another kensho experience
where for the first time,
I saw fully and completely that the I,
the sense of who I am doesn't exist.
So I wanna make it clear here.
It's not that I'm living in some delusional world
that I don't exist.
Yes, the body is here, the voice is here,
all of this is still here.
But the I as I knew it,
I am Brandon, I'm from South Australia,
I'm 27, I'm some YouTube guy,
that just got absolutely obliterated
by the light of awareness.
It was really seen for what it is.
This is what Ramana Maharshi is pointing to
with his question, who am I?
This is what, from what I understand,
all these meditation practises are pointing to,
or trying to get you to is,
is to see that illusion of I.
We've never really asked, who am I?
And then sincerely investigated it
to the point where we see it for what it truly is.
Now that I've seen the illusory nature of myself
that doesn't mean I'm stopping here
and stopping off all my learning
and saying I know the ultimate truth.
There's still patterns and ways
in which I get caught up in my own mind.
So that's it.
Number five, I believe God exists.
Thank you for watching.
Peace.
(calming music)