The Illegal Method To Detect Lies (Ep.5)

So let me show you how to discover if someone's lying to you or telling you the truth. This method is so unbelievably effective that you would think it should be illegal. In fact, it was illegal in ancient Rome and it was completely removed from our education system during the Industrial Revolution.

I've only ever met one other person who knew about it—the man who taught it to me. He was a priest in a secret society who had been initiated into the ancient mystery traditions. And today this secret shall be a secret no more.

Welcome to The Meditate More Podcast, where it's all about helping you to meditate more consistently so you can reap all the incredible magical benefits that meditation can bring to your life today. And here is your host, Manny Mandala.

Hey, and welcome to another episode of The Meditate More Podcast. And if you're here for the first time, make sure to subscribe because we have a great show for you here today. We have some powerpacked content. Today we'll talk about the way to find truth. 

In Episode 2, we discussed what truth really is, and today we'll talk about how to find it. How can you know for sure that something is true? How can you find out if someone's lying to you? And the question of truth is at the very foundation of the spiritual path as per Episode 2. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, go back and check that out first. It'll lay a very necessary foundation for today's episode. So we're spiritual seekers. What are we really seeking if what we find isn't true? So it's very important to really understand what truth is and how to find it. And we'll go much deeper on this topic today. 

Next, we'll also talk about how meditation can help you, how it can help you to have a better life. And specifically today, I'll talk about how you can use meditation to strengthen your memory to the point where you won't just remember everyday stuff you tend to forget. You'll even remember events from your childhood as if it was yesterday, and some claim, even past lives. So we'll talk about all that today, and of course, we'll talk about how you can really know for sure that something is truth and not opinion. Or even a lie. Very important stuff. 

So we'll talk about all that should be a pretty awesome show. Before we do, I want to remind you to listen to this podcast at 1x speed for a number of reasons I've discussed in previous episodes. Just be present with it, don't rush through it. And by the way, meditation itself will make that easy. The more you meditate, the more present you become, and the more comfortable 1x speed will feel again. So you see, if fast listening has become a compulsion, that's actually a sign of an overagitated mind, overstimulated by the screens, by social media, and by the fast listening itself. 

And second, if you haven't listened to the previous episodes yet, I highly recommend to do that. Start with Episode 1 and go in order. Because these episodes build on each other like episodes in a TV show, just like you'd watch Episode 1 of Breaking Bad before watching Episode 2, right? 

And I'm laying out teachings in a very specific order here the way I would teach math in order. You have to learn addition before multiplication and multiplication before equations and equations before functions and so forth. At the very least, you really want to listen to Episode 2 to understand today's episode properly. Because if you don't know addition and you start with equations without learning addition first, you'll get lost and it'll sound like gibberish. 

But if you lay the foundation properly, it all falls into place logically and easily. So hit pause and listen to the previous episodes in order first, then come back and into today's episode will make a lot more sense. 

Final point, I'm on all the social platforms. All my profiles are linked up on my website, mannymandala.com. That's M-A-N-N-Y, Manny Mandala. It's not Mandela, it's Mandala. mannymandala.com.

All right, with the housekeeping out of the way, we'll get started. I'm back in Central America and we don't have rain today, but I'm deep in the jungle, so there's going to be some animal noises. You may hear some birds. There's some howler monkeys, so I hope the mic doesn't pick up too much on that.

But guys, something bizarre happened to me again. So I recently was in Colombia and this Colombian girl, she couldn't have been much older than 21 years old, took my backpack right in front of my nose and grabbed my cologne out of my backpack and stole it. She took it right away from me under my nose. Do you believe that shit? I felt like giving her an earful and of course I wanted to take my cologne back, but I couldn't do that because she had a uniform on. I'm talking about airport security, of course.

Again, people don't question these things, and we'll talk more about this later in today's episode in detail, but it's another example of the strange things that are going on in our society, and I like to quote Shakespeare about that when he says, “Life is a tale told by an idiot.” Who's the idiot? The idiot is the mind that doesn't meditate, that isn't present, that isn't aligned with truth. That mind is all over the place and creates all kinds of nonsense in the world. 

Anyway, let's get into the heart of the episode, into the meditation content, and I've been meditating for almost 20 years now. We're coming up on my 20-year anniversary in the next couple of months. I've often done up to two hours a day, and I've even gone to India to meditate for 10 hours a day. And in the spring of 2023, I popped, I reached what I believe the Buddha was talking about when he described stream entry, or in Pali, in the language of the Buddha, that was called sotāpatti. And that's the first level of enlightenment. 

And by the way, that's far from full enlightenment of a Buddha, which would be called arahant in the Pali language. So I'm far from that level and I have a very long way to go still. According to traditional Buddhism, up to seven more lifetimes to full enlightenment.
But I can see. I can see the nature of this reality now. I can see what this place is and I can see why we are here and what we are here to do. This becomes so clear. It's almost like a facepalm moment when you see it. How isn't everybody seeing this? How wasn't I seeing this before? 

And in fact, I do believe this is very attainable for you. I believe this is very attainable for anyone who really puts their mind to it and makes the effort. And there is an easy way to do it, and it doesn't have to be this gritting willpower way of meditating. Like the war stories you hear from Asian monasteries. Doesn't have to be like that. There's a way to gradually ramp up the effort.

If you're interested, check out meditatemorechallenge.com and I'll teach you step by step how to do that. And I believe it's very worth it and even necessary if we're going to fix the situation we're in right now. And to be honest, it's even worth it for selfish reasons. Your life will magically transform for the better as well as you make progress on this path.

And I'll just give you one of many examples right now. Because something miraculous happened to me when I was meditating about three hours a day at the time. My memories started becoming very sharp. I suddenly had all kinds of memories pop into my mind that I hadn't thought of in literally decades. 

And that's amazing, because you know, I always thought of myself as someone who has a particularly bad memory. I don't really remember much from my childhood. Only very broad strokes. I needed all kinds of mnemonics, that's techniques to memorize stuff that had to be memorized for tests. I've even introduced myself to the same person twice before because my memory for names and faces was so bad.

But a lot of that stuff started coming back, including a lot of details and very vividly. I was literally able to watch my childhood as if it was a movie. And I realized that's our natural state, is to have a pretty much perfect memory, a photographic memory. And it's just the monkey mind that incessant chattering of the mental verbalizations that you notice when you sit to meditate that covers that up. So the more you meditate, the sharper your memory will become. 

And that's also pretty amazing because that's something my teacher said would happen. He said this is actually how the Buddha found out about reincarnation. So as the story goes, the Buddha's memory started getting so sharp that he went back to his earliest childhood and then to his birth, and then beyond the time of his birth. And that's how he started to recover memories from before he was born, from his past lives. So the legend goes, right? 

So we'll talk more about the topic of reincarnation as well in future episodes. In fact, I'll really start to get into that next week. But I'll just say this, I have four friends who also have past life memories. And I'm not talking about when they went to some gypsy lady who told them, “Oh, you were Cleopatra or Caesar in a past life.” I'm talking about how they recovered those memories themselves. They remember what their past lives were like. 

And that's kind of more common with children. You may have heard of the documentary The Boy Who Lived Before, or the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. There are all kinds of cases of children who remember situations and places from their past lives and describe them to the parents and sometimes the parents don't just dismiss it as the crazy fantasies of a child, but they track it down and they find that the descriptions are accurate. The places exist. There really is the picture of a bird at a gate and there's a piano in the living room. And whatever details they describe are actually in the places that that children claim to remember.

But I know of four adults who actually make that claim as well. I haven't gotten to that level myself yet with my meditation, but maybe it's something to look forward to, right? An additional reason to meditate more. 

So if you want that benefit, if you want to have a sharp memory and be able to remember everything, watch your childhood like a movie to avoid losing your memory more and more like most people do as they get older, right? People say when they forget something, “I'm getting old, getting up there,” it doesn't have to be that way. It's just the mind getting cluttered. The hard drive is getting fragmented, as we talked about, right? So we all really want to meditate more. It's just nothing is really more worthwhile in my experience. It's certainly not the only thing. But it's a great foundation to put everything else on top of. 

And by the way, if you're still struggling to meditate every day consistently, or if you're not quite sure how to meditate, you may want to check out The Meditate More Challenge. That's free for now. It's a seven-day course. I put together a complete nuts-to-soup course. It's great for absolute beginners and advanced students as well, and everything in between, because we start where you're at. We can start with as little as one minute per day or more if you want to. And then we gradually work our way up to more advanced stuff and to deeper levels of meditation.

So I'll teach you exactly how to meditate. I'll teach you the best meditation technique in the world in my experience, because I've tried dozens of different techniques over the past two decades, and we take it all the way to the most advanced stuff. So on Day 7, I discussed taking meditation to the point where it matches psychedelic experiences and what got me to the enlightenment experience that I talked about earlier and in previous episodes.

So if that sounds interesting, The Meditate More Challenge is still free. I'm not sure how long. I'm trying to figure out payment processing and the bureaucracy is a nightmare as usual, but that's to your advantage in this case, because that's why it's still free. So go to meditatemorechallenge.com and check that out. I think you'll really like that one. 

But I want to move on. I want to get to the most important part of the podcast, the Dhamma Discourse. And today we'll talk about truth discovery because truth is really at the foundation of meditation and spiritual practice, as we discussed in Episode 2. And that's why the Buddha talked so much about truth, starting with the Four Noble Truths and many other truths you can find in Buddhism. 

Like I always say, I'm not a Buddhist. I don't ascribe to any dogmatic institutionalized belief system. I think we'll get to that in a bit on today's episode, but the question is really how can you tell the truth from a lie with certainty? How can you tell fact from opinion with certainty? And yes, there are ways to find out with certainty. But again, Episode 2 is absolutely prerequisite knowledge for this one today. So if you haven't listened to Episode 2 yet, go back.

 
Here's a quick refresher on just some of the core points. First, truth is possibly the most important thing in the world because nothing else is even valid if there is no truth, if it's not true, right? So everything else stands on the foundation of truth. And second, our suffering is caused by a misalignment with truth. So the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, which is suffering, and the third Noble Truth of Buddhism, which is the cessation or the end of suffering, then depend on finding truth. Let me say that again: the end of suffering depends on the truth. 

So now how do we find the truth? And there are a number of truth discovery methods, and I'll leave the most important one for last. So make sure you listen all the way to the end. I referenced the movie in the last episode. Because some of these movie writers and producers have a lot of esoteric knowledge and they try to convey some of it in these movies as allegorical fiction. And at some point soon, I'll make entire episodes about allegorical movies and the spiritual lessons they try to convey. Because not all of Hollywood is evil. Much of it is propaganda, sure, but not all of it.

So today, let's just have a quick look at the movie Inside Out. And anyone interested in meditation should watch this movie because it's all about the mind. So in this movie, there's a few characters and they travel through the mind of a girl. And at one point, they get on the train that has a bunch of boxes on it, filled with little cubes. And some of the cubes are labeled facts and some are labeled opinions. 

And then one of the characters tips over some of the boxes and the facts and the opinions, these little cubes all fall into one big pile together in a big mess. So she tries to separate them out again, but she can't tell them apart. And she says, “These facts and opinions look so similar.” Let me say that again: these facts and opinions look so similar. And then another character replies, "Don't worry about it. Happens all the time." Ain't that the truth? Doesn't that happen all the time, that facts and opinions look similar? It's been a long time since I saw that movie, but I will never forget that scene.

So how can we tell facts apart from opinions, given that they can look so similar inside our own minds? And yes, there is a way. We have to be very clear about definitions and we have to see what the words really mean, facts and opinions, and the simplest way to look at it is, facts are objective, while opinions are subjective.

If you think about it that way, it becomes actually very simple. Facts don't depend on what we think. They're true independent of our perception of them. A fact is a fact is a fact whether you or I or anyone understands it, perceives it correctly or not. Whereas an opinion does depend on what you think, it's entirely yours.

So that applies to everything that is subjective. That's a matter of preference, for example, or taste. If you think pineapple pizza is great, as much as my uncle from Italy would probably call that blasphemy; but if you think pineapple pizza is horrible, that's also valid. But if you think pineapple pizza is a jellyfish just because it's round, it has a similar shape, the cheese is hanging from it like tentacles, that's not valid. That's an objective fact misperceived. Whereas with subjective opinions, all points of view are valid. 

If you think two plus two is four, that's valid. If someone thinks two plus two is five, that's not valid because this is about an objective fact. Now, if someone thinks the number four looks prettier on paper than the number five, that's valid either way, because that's a subjective opinion about a taste or preference. 

So we can help the little girl in the movie to organize the boxes. Facts and opinions can look similar, sure. But they're actually quite easy to distinguish. When it comes to subjective matters, that's opinion. And there are infinite valid perspectives and infinite valid opinions and no wrong ones. But there's only applies to what’s subjective. 

When it comes to objective matters, those are about fact, and there are infinite wrong perspectives and only one correct one. Because truth is singular. There is only one truth, the one that aligns with objective reality as it is. And if that sounds controversial, go back to Episode 2. That's what Episode 2 was about. I really hope you listen to that one first. So objective facts have a truth to them, and we can epistemologically get to the correct answer. Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. 

And so the rest of today's episode will break down exactly how we do that. So every time there's a disagreement about a situation or a topic, it's not ‘Well, you know, different people have different ways of looking at different things,’ but it's really about the distinction between fact and opinion. If a disagreement is about a subjective matter of opinion, then sure, everybody's entitled to their opinion, but that only applies to issues that are subjective.

 
When it comes to matters of objective fact, it's the opposite. Nobody is entitled to their opinion. Everyone needs to align their perception with the truth. An opinion about a fact is, at best, a truth that you're not certain about, and at worst, a deception or a lie that you bought into. 

So one of the biggest problems in the world today and the cause of many of our problems is this. There's a lot of people that are adamant about their opinions regarding objective topics, when opinions don't even apply to objective topics. Opinions only apply to subjective topics, and with whatever's objective, the truth has to be discovered and then our perception has to be aligned with it. Either you know or you don't know. 

Remember from Episode 2, the wording "I believe" betrays that someone doesn't know the wording "I think" does too. The wording "in my opinion" does too. So since we're talking about meditation, we need to at some point start talking about the ego and what the ego really is. Because that's a big topic in spiritual circles, the word “ego” gets thrown around a lot in the meditation community at large, in Asian philosophy. But a lot of people are confused about what the ego really is, and that's one aspect of the ego. 

The ego wants to dig in its heels when it's not actually sure. So one aspect of the ego is that it has a false sense of certainty. Like those song lyrics. Not sure if you've heard that song. It's on one of the Coya mixes on SoundCloud and the lyrics go, "If you don't know, act like you know." Guys, that's not even good advice for a job interview, much less for real life. 

So spirituality is an inquiry into the nature of this reality, meaning, into facts. And therefore, beliefs and opinions about spirituality are off track. We need to find the truth. We need facts. And a lot of religions at the exoteric level, at the level that is given to the masses, to the general public, are very much about belief. But even Jesus himself, in the Gospels, in John 8:32, Jesus says, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” 

So at the end of Episode 1, I encouraged you to think a little bit about truth, and one of the questions I asked you is this: can you find truth by thinking about it? And thinking is really a process of the mind. So it's intimately related to meditation. So let's have a look at this.
Why do people confuse facts and opinions? Why does what they say in the movie happen all the time? And the answer is there are some problems with the mind, especially with the unmeditative mind. You see, the mind inherently makes major mistakes in thinking—inherently. 

As they say in NLP, that's neurolinguistic programming, a science of the mind that we'll talk about that as well in future episodes, but they say the mind distorts, generalizes and deletes. How can you perceive truth accurately by using the mind if the mind itself is a tool that distorts, generalizes, and deletes everything that goes through it? It's like looking at reality through a dirty glass. You will not get an accurate perception of what the other side looks like, but you can clean the glass, right? And that's where meditation comes in. Or in psychology, they say that the mind often falls prey to cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

So let me give you a couple of examples of how the mind goes astray exactly. So a famous cognitive bias, for example, is the confirmation bias. Here's a quick definition. The mind emphasizes information that confirms preexisting beliefs. That's also called the primacy effect in hypnosis. But topic for a different episode. I'm just pointing out that all kinds of different sciences come to the same conclusion. You've got NLP, you got hypnosis, you got psychology, you got meditation. They all come to the same conclusions about these things because again, truth is universal and singular. 

So confirmation bias is that the mind emphasizes information that confirms its beliefs and dismisses information that goes against preexisting beliefs. And obviously, that's no way to find truth. You can't just dismiss anything that you don't already agree with. That presupposes that you already know everything. And that's why that's an aspect of the ego. 

So we have to be like a judge in a courtroom who hears all witnesses, not just the ones who say what the judge already believes. And see, that's just one example of how the mind automatically and inherently leads us astray because there are many of these cognitive biases, not just the confirmation bias. 

And you know, people say that those biases have evolutionary reasons that people come to snap judgments because historically that increased our chances of survival because people could respond faster to threats and opportunities that way. But whatever the case may be, it's possible and necessary to come out of this level of consciousness. 

And there's not only cognitive biases, our minds also easily fall prey to logical fallacies. And there are many of those as well. By the way, side note, a great exercise you can do to train your mind is go to ChatGPT or the AI of your preference, have it give you a list of cognitive biases, of logical fallacies and let it test you, and let it give you all kinds of examples. So it'll quiz you on whether this is logical or whether this is a fallacy, whether this is in alignment with truth or whether it's biased. 

Because the mind is a minefield, no pun intended. The mind is full of these little traps and tricks. That's why we meditate more. It's impossible to perceive reality with an unmeditative mind. 

So let me give an example of a logical fallacy. Appeal to authority is a famous example of a logical fallacy. People often believe a claim is true just because an authority or an expert says so, but that's not enough evidence of course. The expert could be wrong, the expert could be incompetent, the expert could be lying. But unfortunately, for most people, if an expert says something, it's immediately true. And we saw that during the pandemic, right?

And this is where we come back to basic Asian philosophy and wisdom, where they say, “Mind is illusion.” So for example, I can put a pink elephant in your mind right now. It's in your mind right now. There's a pink elephant in your mind. I put it there. It's riding on yellow roller skates, but it's not real. 

So you see, some contents of your mind are not only an illusion like the pink elephant, but they can actually be controlled by other people. Someone else can actually put an illusion into your mind. And another way of looking at the ego is that's when these illusions solidify and turn into solid opinions, into beliefs. That's an aspect of the ego. 

So the mind makes mistakes, the mind contains illusions. And when those turn into beliefs, when they solidify into hardened opinions, then we're deep in ego. And you probably know that when Asians say that reality is an illusion, they call it maya, or they say that this reality is like a dream. And it's true. Because as long as we're stuck in the mind, reality is illusion because the mind is full of illusions and we perceive reality through this veil of the mind.

So only when we're fully present can we even begin to perceive reality accurately, and that's why the Buddha always said, “See reality as it is.” In Pali, in the language of the Buddha, this was called Yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti. So as long as our consciousness is trapped by the mind, we're living in illusion. And that's the default state of the un meditative mind.

And what I'm about to say next is very important. For most people, mind is above consciousness. What do I mean by that? If you've started meditating already, you've noticed that you are not your mind. You're consciousness. You are that which can observe the mind. You are that which can catch the mind running away, which can bring it back when it runs away, and which can then once again get lost in the mind, get dragged away by the mind. 

One way to look at meditation is like a tug of war between your mind and your consciousness. Your consciousness tries to come back to the present moment, to the here and now. And meanwhile, your mind tries to drag your consciousness away from the here and now into random thoughts of the past of the future. And whenever mind wins the tug of war, we're in illusion. And that's 99.99% of the time for 99.99% of people. And that's how humanity can be said to exist in a dream state, in illusion, in maya.

But whenever consciousness wins the tug of war, that's what I mean when I say consciousness needs to be above mind. It needs to flip. For most people, mind is above consciousness. We need to flip it and get consciousness above mind. We're trapped by the mind. The mind is the trap. And to my knowledge, only a consistent meditation practice can achieve that flip long term. 

So to answer the question from Episode 1, no, we can't perceive truth by thinking about it. We cannot perceive truth with the mind. We have to be present so the mind becomes a tool we control before we employ it. As long as the mind drags us all over the place, it'll run the show with illusions like that pink elephant, or communism, or fascism, or even imaginary illnesses. 

You know, I say to my parents, “You are not your mind.” And they look at me like I have three heads because they never meditate consistently. But I say the same thing to my sister who has a fair bit of experience with meditation at this point, and she knows exactly what I mean.
So if this statement is unclear, if the past five minutes were confusing to you, if you don't quite get what I mean when I say you are not your mind, your consciousness needs to be above your mind, there's a tug of war going on, just meditate more and it'll become very clear and pretty quickly too. 

Because that's one of the first big insights you gain from your own experience when you meditate. So you're not your mind, you are the consciousness beyond the mind, but the mind has taken over. It's running the show. It has trapped your consciousness and you need to free it. You, the real you, your consciousness, is trying to look at reality. 

And while the monkey mind is chattering, as you notice when you meditate, you look at reality through that veil of illusion, through the lens which is the mind, the dirty and messy and chaotic lens. So as long as the mind's an autopilot, running, running, anything you look at will filter through the mind and the mind will distort it. That's what NLP talks about. The mind generalizes, distorts and deletes. 

But here's the thing, that's where all disagreement comes from. If everybody could perceive truth, there would never be any disagreement. Since most people can't perceive truth, there is disagreement all the time. So society is more divided than ever. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new here, and that's not because, well, people just have different opinions. Human nature is just like that. No, it's because most people are not aligned with truth. When two people are both aligned with truth, there will be no disagreement. There will be no division. 

Two reasonable people can say two plus two is four. Yes, they agree with each other. That does not stir debate because that's something so simple that even most un meditative minds can perceive this.vYou put two apples on the table, you put two more apples on the table. Now there's four apples on the table. This is not terribly complicated. And you may be shocked to find out that some people would even disagree that two plus two is four. But that's a topic for another day, and I don't think any of those people made it past Episode 2 of my podcast.

So most people are not present. They're in illusion. And it's so solidified. And that's the ego you've heard about. And meditation is a big part of the solution. It's the first step to the solution. So again, we can't discern truth by thinking about it. We can't discern truth with the mind alone. 

When we try, even the smartest people will come up with all kinds of utter nonsense. Nietzsche, for example, or Richard Dawkins or Sartre. Very smart minds, but they came up with ideas like materialism. There is no such thing as spirituality. And I feel bad for those people that they've never had a true spiritual experience. But at the same time, it's because they haven't really knocked on that door.

The earnest spiritual seeker will find what he's looking for. That's what the ancient saying means, right? Knock and knock and knock and it shall be opened unto you. Or they come up with ideas like subjectivism, the idea that there is no such thing as objective reality or objective truth. We get to make it all up. That's literally saying they think they're God if they think they can make up what reality is. 

Or the worst one, there is no such thing as right and wrong. Okay, so raping and torturing little children isn't wrong then, is that what they're saying? But we're living in an age when humanity has fallen to the point where some people do rape and torture children. This actually happens. This isn't some hypothetical gotcha kind of moral dilemma argument. 

All right, let's move on. So we've discussed a whole bunch of obstacles to finding truth and how to deal with those obstacles. So we're ready to move on to the actual truth discovery method that I mentioned in the introduction. So how do we overcome these obstacles?
And truth is actually relatively easy to discern when you have personal experience with it. That's the best way. If you had a coffee this morning, then you know the truth of the matter. No research is required, no debate is required. But what about topics you can't experience personally? How can you find out the truth about what happened in history, for example? You weren't there. How can you find out the truth about something that's taking place far away in a war in another country? You're not there. 

And the answer is the ancient truth discovery method I talked about, and this is really important stuff, it's called the Trivium. The ancients had it. You know, mystery schools of the ancient world knew about this method and taught this method, but not all people were privy to it. Even then slaves weren't told about the Trivium. They were even forbidden from knowing about it. 

Do you know about Trivium? Were you taught the Trivium in school? If not, something's very wrong because that means you're at the level of a slave of the ancient world when it comes to education and truth discovery method. Because traditionally this method was kept back from slaves. Julius Caesar actually once caught a military officer teaching the Trivium to a slave and he threatened that officer with the death penalty. 

Because you can't enslave someone who knows the truth. As Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” You can't control someone who knows the truth. So to keep someone a slave, you have to hide the truth from them, and that means you have to hide the Trivium from them. Was the Trivium hidden from you? 

And as it turns out, the Trivium was indeed removed from our education system in the 19th century. In the 1850s to be precise. During the Industrial Revolution, the ruling class decided they need obedient workers that can sit still for eight hours and do repetitive stupid shit in factories or soldiers just like the Roman Caesars did. So they implemented what's known as the Prussian Education System and they removed the Trivium from our education. Let's take it back, folks. We need it. 

So what's the Trivium? And this is a big topic that's probably deserving of an entire episode, but I'll give you a quick overview here. The word Trivium comes from the Latin and Greek prefix "tri", which means three, which means there are three parts of the Trivium. 

The first part is grammar, and that's nothing to do with linguistics. This isn't about conjugation and nouns and adjectives. This means gathering data from an eclectic array of sources. So that's step one. You have to gather data from all kinds of different sources, not just from the ones that you agree with or that you think might be true and without prejudging it. Just like when you're brainstorming ideas, you collect all the ideas without throwing out any of them and without accepting any of them yet.

And the second stage is called the logic stage. That is when you analyze all the data you've gathered, filter it, look for correlations for contradictions, analyze it. And then the third stage is called the rhetoric stage. That is speech and action based on the truth discovered, and this is also known as wisdom. Wisdom is the application of knowledge of truth. 

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own experience. I started getting really interested in geopolitics more than a decade ago. And how can you get to the bottom of a topic that's as complex and as vast as geopolitics? And the answer is actually simple. It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time, but it is simple. You have to apply the Trivium. 

You have to take in data about the subject from a very eclectic array of sources, not just a few. You're not going to get the truth from CNN, and you're also not going to get the truth from Fox News. You have to go far beyond even looking at both sides of the story, so to speak. You have to look at all sides of the story. 

So I became a voracious reader, and I spent many hours a day for many years digging deep. I read conservative news and liberal news. I read left-wing news and right-wing news. American News, European, Russian, Asian Arab news. I read the corporate media and the independent media, the citizen journalists, whistleblowers, mainstream media, alternative media, you name it. I just looked at all of it. 

And you know what? If you do that for long enough, a very clear picture emerges, and surprisingly, you find out that politics is not a matter of opinion because it is based on facts that took place in the real world. Therefore, it's objective. Remember, opinions are only about subjective topics. So since geopolitics is about facts about what actually happened, it's therefore objective. And so to distinguish what's true from what's false, very, very deep and eclectic research without prejudging any of the information is required, but this is very figureoutable. 

And another example is spirituality. That's also not a matter of opinion or belief. The objective truth about spirituality, about the nature of the Self, the nature of this reality, of the Divine, of the Creator is also figureoutable, at least within certain limits that are conceded to us while we're here in this human body, right? You can have a personal experience with it, with meditation, with prayer, with other spiritual practices, and you can apply the Trivium to it with eclectic spiritual study.

And I talked about this briefly in Episode 1 when I got really interested in spirituality in 2004, I compared all religions, all spiritual paths, all esoteric teachings that I could find with each other. First, I looked at every single major religion on the planet and all their sub religions. And then I looked at all kinds of other spiritual teachings like tarot, like astrology, like spiritism, you name it. And I found out that all of them actually agree about the core truths, and that's what Episode 1 of my podcast was about, right?

So if you're the judge in a court hearing, trying to determine what's true and what's lies, and all the witnesses agree on one point, you can be pretty sure that that point that everyone agrees on is an aspect of the truth. 

And by the way, here's something very interesting. Note that all religious institutions try to actively prevent you from doing exactly this. They all say these other religions are off limits. Don't even look there or you'll go to hell or some variation of that. And it's not only churches that do that, Hinduism also tells people, “Don't look at Buddhism or you'll go to hell.” Many religions do this. 

And here's something else very interesting. Once you've found the truth by applying the Trivium, you will be shocked by how simple and elegant and beautiful the truth really is. Like I said, it's pretty much a face palm moment, like, “Oh, man, this is so simple.” And then there's only one thing left to do, and that is to share it with others because then you realize that all our suffering comes from not understanding the simple truth. 

But then the frustrating realization sets in. You cannot pass it on to other people easily because everyone has to find the truth for themselves. You can't give it to someone. I can't give it to you. You have to find the truth yourself. If I told you I could point you in the right direction, but you would still have to go through the process yourself because otherwise you would still just have a belief. You would still just have the belief in what I told you. And that wouldn't be much better than the belief in what a priest told you or what a book told you. And unfortunately, most people don't take the time to do this because it's a lot of digging. It's a lot of work, a lot of deep research.

Unfortunately, most people only acquire this curiosity, this thirst for knowledge, for truth once they suffered a lot and they want to know why? Why me? What's the way out of this suffering, right? That is what ultimately cracks the ego, the solidified belief systems, and that gets people on the path, on the deep search for truth, applying the Trivium to spiritual topics and to discover what the truth really is.

But most people, they jump to conclusions without all the data in hand. And then over time, those wrong conclusions solidify into solid opinions and then they will defend it as if it was their very life. And that's the ego.

And not only are religious institutions discouraging us from looking at things eclectically, our schooling institutions are also doing that. Have you noticed that? So not only do our schools not teach the Trivium, they actually tell you not to apply the Trivium. So what was once "Listen to all the witnesses. To determine what the truth is. Study all the different aspects of this subject," that was replaced by "The truth is in this book, read it, memorize it, and then regurgitate it on the test."

So in other words, if a student was a judge in training, a judge of what's true and what's not, the school system would tell that judge in training, “Of all the witnesses that come into your courtroom, this one over here is the one who's going to tell you the truth. So listen to that one.” 

Honi soit qui mal y pense. As the French say, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it.” That's an old French way of saying, “No, no, no. The system really is noble. If you think it's bad or dishonorable, the shame is on you.” The French love their irony, don't they? And by the way, this current school system is called outcome-based education, and you can do some research into that topic on your own time. Maybe I'll revisit it in a future episode. 

It's very much worth doing, by the way, but it's basically about achieving a specific outcome. It's about getting the student into a predetermined mindset rather than teaching the student how to discover the actual truth. And this recently got even worse with a new system called Common Core.

So we went from the truth discovery method, the Trivium. It degraded during the Industrial Revolution into the Prussian Education System, then it degraded further into outcome-based education around the time of World War II. And in the past years, it has degraded into Common Core education. And your teacher will tell you, here's this one book, memorize it, regurgitate it, it's on the test. So then there is a reward and punishment system in place to condition kids like Pavlov's dog. And so for 12 years straight, we get subconsciously programmed with, “I read this from an authoritative source. So therefore it is true.” 

And that's exactly how the people that run the show are still getting away with so much nonsense. And then people go into the street and protest and wave signs. But we have to fix these problems at the level of consciousness. Because it's really up to us to come out of that state of mind and to find truth, and to align ourselves and our perceptions and our actions with truth. And if we do that, we will have good outcomes. We will live in a good society.

And that's why meditation is so important, because you cannot do that while the mind is on autopilot. And it is on autopilot until you've meditated a shit load. And you can prove that to yourself in five minutes of trying to focus on the breath, and you'll quickly see the mind is on a random autopilot.

Imagine a plane that's being steered by an autopilot, and imagine that autopilot is programmed to fly in random directions. It's not going to take very long before it crashes. And the same is true with us. The unmeditative mind hears a piece of information, whether it's true or false, and then runs away with it immediately. It's a knee-jerk response to either accept it or reject it, and almost immediately, instead of vetting it with the Trivium process. 

So just like the mind runs away when you're trying to focus on your breath during your meditation, it doesn't stay present with new information presented either. Instead, it goes straight into this dream state, into I agree, or I disagree. And we don't notice, just like we usually don't notice when we're dreaming at night. 

And that brings me to the last point and possibly the most important point. I talked about the mystery schools a few times now, and you may have heard that they have initiations. Do you know what the first step of initiation in the ancient mystery schools is? It's simply this: stop lying, especially to yourself. 

And the reason that's the first thing they teach an initiate is: truth is at the core of the spiritual path. And you cannot perceive truth if you are not aligned with truth in your whole being. Your very soul will be out of tune with truth itself. You're not at the same frequency. You're basically not even in the same dimension, so you cannot perceive it. 

And it's very interesting to note that lying is the least frowned upon wrongdoing in our society. It's not criminalized except under certain circumstances, like under oath or in contracts. But in everyday society, lying is pretty much normalized. Especially online, and I'll talk more about the initiation of mystery schools more in future episodes because there are five steps. So stay tuned for that. But that's the primer on the first one. 

So in conclusion, spirituality is figureoutable. We don't need opinions about spirituality or beliefs in religious institutions. You can have those if they give you peace of mind. But make sure to go beyond them. Because no single book can ever hold the whole truth. We can arrive at objective knowledge about the nature of this reality. Not all knowledge, but enough to get the point. 

This was pretty long, but incredibly important because it's the foundation for all other truths that will discuss in future episodes. So I had to take the time to record this one first to call back to Episode 5 later, and I'll do that many times throughout this podcast series.
And now before we wrap up, let's see what the spirits have to say about all this. Let's see if we get any channel communications, if we can get some further clarifications from beyond.

For the following segment, listener discretion is advised. No claims are made as to whether its content is a comedic voice acting performance, or a channeled message from beyond. The views expressed are those of the entity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the medium. Manny Mandala and The Meditate More Podcast assume no responsibility for actions taken based on these communications, which are offered for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as advice. Always consult a qualified professional from the 3D physical plane before acting on information from the spirit realm.

In Episode 1, I told you that this life is a test. Yes, indeed. This life is a test. You were born into this world with the intuitive knowing that this life is a test. Then you started attending school. And in school, you were given one test after another. And your soul, with its deep knowing how important the test is, started to become very anxious. I have to pass the test. I have to memorize the books. And so you did for years and years and years. You memorized everything that was put in front of you. You accepted what the authorities told you. I have to pass the test. 

What if that is not the test? What if the test was something much greater? What if the test was the reason you're here? I already told you what the test is really about. The test is about one simple question. What's the difference between right and wrong? Do you know the answer? The test will take place very soon. Start preparing. 

A man has been with his wife for 75 years. They're in their 90s, and she's so beautiful to him. She cannot win beauty pageants anymore to be sure. But to him, she's so beautiful. He looks at her face and sees her as she looked when she was 17. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Truth is not. Truth is not in the eye of the beholder. Discover it.

Okay, guys, I'm back. So to find the truth, we first have to stop lying to others and to ourselves. We have to meditate more to become fully present, so we're able to discern truths, so our minds stop distorting, generalizing, and deleting. So we get past cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Then we have to do our homework.

We have to do deep research into all aspects of every topic that matters until we've completely exhausted all available information, then compare, contrast, and filter, and the truth becomes clear. So meditate more to raise your ability to discern truth, to align yourself with truth. Because our suffering is caused by our misalignment with truth.

All right. And now I have a few more very important points. Make sure you stick around for these because we have some absolutely life-changing killer content coming up next week, and I'll tell you all about that in a second. 

First, if you like this episode, you'll probably love The Meditate More Challenge. You've seen now how life changing a consistent meditation practice really is to improve your memory, to discover the truth, to end suffering. So if you want to meditate more, to be more consistent, to really learn how, either as a beginner or to take it to psychedelic levels, go to meditatemorechallenge.com and check that out. It's free for now. Not sure how long for. That's meditatemorechallenge.com. 

If you like this episode, would you do me a favor too? Think if you know someone who's interested in spirituality and meditation and send them this episode. Actually the best place to send them to, is the first episode so they can start their journey there, and the best way to do that is to go to meditatemorepodcast.com. Then your friends can listen right there on the website or they can hit the links to Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast, and a whole bunch of other platforms. 

And if you haven't listened to the other episodes yet, I recommend you go over the archive starting with Episode 1, too. I think you'll really like it. And you should subscribe, of course, if you haven't yet, so you don't miss the next episode. Because next episode, we'll talk about ghosts. We'll talk about spirits, entities and channeling. I've had some channeled content in a few of these episodes so far, so we'll talk about that. Is that real? Is that voice acting?
All that stuff was actually studied in the 1850s and 1860s by a scientist in France, and most people aren't aware of this work because it got censored. Some people said it was demon worship. Is it, really? We'll look at that question too. 

So all that and more in the next episode of The Meditate More Podcast. Subscribe if you want to be notified right away when that episode drops. The best way to do that is to hit the big yellow button on my website, mannymandala.com.

And finally, I want to once again leave you with a few questions to think about until next week. And it's back on the topic of the girl at airport security who took my cologne, right? So here's the question. Whose cologne is it? Mine or hers? Does she have the right to take it? After she took it, was it still mine or was it then hers? Or did it then belong to the government? Or did it then belong in the trash?

Would she be allowed to take it if she wasn't wearing a uniform? Same person, same two people. Still me. It's still her. It's still the same backpack and the same cologne. Would she be allowed to take my cologne out of my backpack if she wasn't wearing a uniform? 

Then do blue clothes with symbols on them, change what rights we have and don't have? Do blue clothes with symbols on them give someone the right to steal? And if so, where is the line? What additional rights do people get by wearing blue clothes? Stealing your cologne? Stopping your car in the street? Putting you in a camp? Where is the line? Where exactly is the line?

We'll talk about that more because it's actually a spiritual question, but more about that also in future episodes of The Meditate More Podcast. So you won't want to miss that. So subscribe to the podcast now at mannymandala.com and join The Meditate More inner circle. That's free. And you'll get an email right away every time a new episode is ready. You'll also get exclusive bonus content that I don't publish anywhere else, starting with The Meditate More Challenge.

Or if you don't want all that, if you just want the podcast, then scroll down a bit on the same website on mannymandala.com for Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcast and so forth.
So thanks so much for listening, I'll see you on the next episode, so make sure to subscribe to the podcast now. And special thanks to Mariano Roguin and Lex Van Someren for providing some of their music for the podcast. Thank you for the music, guys. I really appreciate it. And remember to meditate more, meditate more, meditate more because it is so, so worth it.