From milk to meat. This presentation is gonna be a whirlwind of ideas that, uh, maybe you've never thought of before or heard of before and I hope that it touches you in some way and inspires you to think more deeply about life and eternity. Uh They, these are ideas. We're gonna basically just take a
whirlwind tour through some things I've written in my books and some things I've written on my blog and things have touched on in other videos and things from going to go into more depth on in some videos, maybe someday. Um Yep. Ok. Let's just get started. So, uh, if you've ever seen a kid draw something
with a fat crayon, uh you know, it has a certain look, it's very low resolution and it might not be very true to reality. I mean, it certainly won't be because there are absolute limits to how accurate you can get with a fat crayon. Uh And then if you have a highly skilled artist use colored pencils
, he or she can make something that looks very lifelike, very beautiful and um high fidelity to reality or maybe even something that looks different to reality, if it helps you understand reality in a greater way than you would with just looking at it yourself. And you could do the same thing by comparing
what a child could paint with finger paint versus what a master painter could paint with oil. Um And you could think about this in terms of selection of brushes, you have those like dollar store cheapo plastic uh brushes versus the array of professional wooden handle, horse bristle brushes that professional
painters use. And what I invite you to think about is that diversity of skill and tools and knowledge and output the difference that you get in the production of one versus the other, the quality. What they can do. Now, if you take someone of sufficiently low skill, they're not going to really notice
a difference. So a kid who's very young, if you take them to an art gallery, are they really gonna notice the difference between the Mona Lisa and a finger painted uh first painting of like a three year old? Probably not. Um And certainly, even if they notice a difference, they will not be able to define
that difference as well as say, someone with a master's in art history or something. So why does this matter? It turns out that just with these analogous situations, there is a diversity of understanding in life and those who have the tools and the skills to navigate the complexity of life will encounter
much more uh of God's knowledge than those who do not. And that has many, many high impact um outcomes. You can describe the Gospel in about a million different ways. But one way of describing it is that its purpose is to teach us how to cope with and overcome an ever expanding awareness of reality.
And I've talked about this a lot lately, but it's really important. So I'm gonna keep talking about it. This requires an increasingly advanced understanding of constraints and cause and effect. And I've talked about these before. So very briefly, let's just start. This whole presentation is just gonna
be rapid fire things that uh I just gonna tie together and hope that somehow it benefits you. So if you read John 717, Jesus uh evokes a challenge and he says in effect, anyone who do does what I say will know in themselves that it's from the father. And I personally strongly prefer the, the amplified
version of this. Um which unfortunately, there's not a good online resource for when I've Googled. This takes me to um text that is not the same as my print copy that I have right here. So reading from that, it says, if any man desires to do his will, God's pleasure, he will know have the needed illumination
to recognize and can tell for himself whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking from myself and of my own accord. And on my own authority. Now, I, I don't recommend the amplified Bible in exclusion to any other version, but it's pretty damn good as a study tool. So this is, this is an
important verse and he lays down a challenge and, and he's talking about cause and effect and how you will know within yourself through the light that God has given you if things are true. But only after you've experimented upon the word and tried it. So if we look in the scriptures, we see the story
of the sons of Siva. And these are the people that were going around and doing things in the name of Jesus uh quote unquote and kind of mimicking the forms that they had seen the apostles do. Um But uh they didn't understand the cause and effect of what they were seeing, they misunderstood their observation
and what happened was they tried to cast out some demons and those demons turned on them and hurt them very badly. And uh this is because they didn't understand the root cause there are these things in computer science called hidden Markov models. And I, I try to stay away from things like this because
people won't understand them. But you, you just can't find, I don't know of a better analogy. Maybe I'm blind to the existence of one because I already know what this is. So I gravitate towards it. But in effect, uh what this is is that you can create um you can create a system on a computer that will
um guess what's really going on under the surface by looking at observations. And so it, it, it encapsulates the idea of, um, that we see so much in our lives where, what we're seeing doesn't really tell the whole story. And so it tries to guess what the whole story is based on what you can see. And
there are, you know, there are costs and benefits to that. But the point is that all of reality is like this, whether we understand what a hidden Markov model is or not, is kind of irrelevant, but we walk around every day and make observations and some of us are more observant than others. But um the
point is not to just make these observations and abs and we're supposed to sort of abstract this into higher order systems and understanding so that we can better learn cause and effect. And those of us who have been blessed with an understanding that there is a spiritual side to life. Uh And in fact
, all of life is spiritual, the the physical part is just the subset of the spiritual part. When, when you understand that you can make models that are much more accurate and, and explain reality much better. And why this matters is because it gives you the rains to be able to control the effects via
the, the the cause that's driving them. And that's really what the gospel is about. It's about giving us the tools to be exposed to a greater degree of reality and to cope with that and to interact with that. Because God is the example of this. He has the greatest understanding of reality and he knows
how to navigate it. And this is why he's able to create the earth. And this is why he's able to uh heal the blind and, and the sick and he's able to know the future perfectly and all of these things. It's because he understands reality to a greater degree than we do. Now. He can't just dump this understanding
on us. There are experiences we have to go through in order to uh acquire that understanding. And also we have to develop as people in order to cope with what comes with it because it's not all roses. It there is AAA an awful, awful. Um I guess flip side to the coin, which is our awareness of evil. And
those two things have to grow together as I've discussed before. Now, I want to talk about how it happens that we build our knowledge. Um So I've talked in the past about increasing our understanding of uh good and evil and our understanding of reality. But it's not the case that as we acquire more knowledge
of reality that that our understanding just expands. Um There's a picture I'm going to show it again actually, in this slide show where I've um try to simplify things pictorially and, and that's sort of what I've shown is things just continuously expanding, but that's not really the way it works. And
so, um there's a key to this, I'm about to show you. And if you're listening to this, I know a lot of people. Um, well, a, a relative amount of people, I should say, not a lot of people watch these videos but um of those who experience this stuff, a lot of people do it um in sound, they, they convert
these things to MP threes or they just hit play on youtube and then go about their business. But these slides are visually important. So I encourage you to watch this one anyway. Um So you see these triangles in this progression from bottom to top and the triangles are getting wider. And what I'm trying
to show here is that as you increase in knowledge, the, the the breadth of what you know is going to expand and also the depth. But anyway, the quantity of knowledge is going to increase, but it's not the case that it just keeps going. So that would look like a funnel, right? And instead what we have
here is this series of triangles with breaks. And what happens here is that you get exposed to greater uh quantity of light and truth, then you order that into um a more simple representation. And uh in this presentation, we're gonna draw on a lot of things that are outside of what we usually talk about
and I, I'm just gonna touch on them briefly and I hope it's helpful and it doesn't just make your mind melt. But, um, hopefully it makes sense. So, so as a first example of this, I want you to think about the number of pi it's actually a series and it keeps going on infinite infinitely. But, um, you've
probably seen this before. It's important in math and um we never write out the whole series. I mean, if you were to do that, you'd have to stop what you're doing and spend the rest of your life writing and you'd never finish. You died before you were done because it's infinite, right? So if you were
storing that, so let's say that you were writing this on a chalkboard, you, you'd need a really big chalkboard, right? In fact, it would have to be continuously growing as you were writing. Someone would have to be building on to the end so that you could just keep going. Um So you deem the infinite
chalkboard to write this down. But you can uh if you understand how that number is built, you can replace that number with uh a name pi that uh is shorthand for the, the process that you use to know what the next digit is. So if you know that process, you can just keep writing the digits forever and
ever and then you can actually replace that process with just pie. And in fact, you can just write the Greek letter, which I didn't do. And and that's just one character versus an infinite series. So what I just did was I used something called representation to reduce a vast quantity of information.
In fact, an infinite amount of information into a finite representation. That's, that's quite small, it's just one character. And this is what's happening as we progress through these triangles. So if the base of the first triangle is pi and I introduced this concept, you've never seen it before. And
I'm talking about what this number is and why it's important and what you use it for. And then I teach you the process of enumerating the digits, then uh we're at the base of the triangle. And this is a lot of information, but you can simplify all of that down to one letter really, which is kind of like
the point of the triangle, the top point. I hope that you're still with me. So what representation does is it makes things understandable at multiple resolutions. So someone who understands what pie is, why it's important and how you get it. They can use it for all sorts of things. Everything from as
simple as saying like, hey pie and, and that's it. And we know that number and everything else to, I have to calculate um some geometry of a circle and um I know how to do that, et cetera. Now, God does this. Uh the Lord did this by teaching in parables, for example. Um So representation, it can simplify
complicated things. Um I say can because just because you represent something in some way, doesn't mean that it's in a better way, a mo more, more powerful way. Uh You can come up with nonsense representations that just make things even more complicated. In fact, in the space of all possible representations
, the vast majority are not beneficial anyway. Um So yeah, and one definition of this is that you can, you can reduce the amount of space it takes to store the same quantity of information. This is really important. Um I'll give you a quick physical example. So the amount of information that is stored
in your body and I'm talking about at the molecular level, if you were to represent this uh in binary, which is the language of our computers, you would need um enough data centers to cover the entire land surface of the earth in one human body. And I'm not gonna go through that math here, but I've done
the calculations before and it's pretty incredible. So representation can make a huge difference because you can reduce an earth worth of hard drives into one body or you could reduce this infinite sequence into one letter. Um This applies to all things. And I gave you one example of a spiritual um example
of this with parables. And another one is the phrase God is love, which John recorded. And it's true. But uh it's true on every level and the more knowledge you have and experience you have, the more information is packed into those three words. So even though one word love it, it's the same for that
. So representation really matters, it really matters. OK? So let's talk about how it is that you um progress through these triangles, right? Because we were just talking about one so far. So I put these arrows between them. And if you follow the arrows, what you see is you go from wide to narrow, to
even wider, to narrow, to even wider, to narrow, and this process can continue forever. So what happens when you get to the point is that you have the ability to continue or you can cash out your chips. So if you continue along the arrow, what is going on there? That mechanism is that you're going to
get hit with a sudden increase in awareness. And what's going to happen is that your simplifications of your knowledge, your, your encoding is a better way of saying it because we think when we say simplify, we think we're losing something. And I don't mean that at all, you retain all of it, but you
come up with an encoding or a representation that um it compresses it so that you, you can squeeze more of it into less space. And so it's not so hard to wrangle and you kind of master these things. OK. These are all analogous ideas. But what happens is you find out that there is a question for which
you do not know the answer or you find out that some pillar idea that you had, that you had built this superstructure on is incomplete or incorrect. And what happens is everything you think you know is now in question and you dismantle your whole thing and that's why it's broader than it was before.
And you have new information, new observations, maybe it contradicts some things that you thought before and it just demolishes and explodes all of the order in your life. And then you're left to pick up the pieces. Now, the good news is you will always, if you trust God and you do what he says and you
seek him, you will always end up in a better place than you did before. You'll end up with a system that's stronger than it was before. Uh You'll end up with an e an estimation of reality that is um more accurate than the one you had before. But this is very painful. And so people don't like to do this
. So I showed this picture in some of my presentations before. And what this is meant to show is that as you increase enlighten truth, your awareness of good and your awareness of evil jointly increase and as you go through life, you're supposed to, you know, increase um go up on this slide, right? Well
, how it really happens is this zigzag and what happens is typically that exposure that you get when your triangle goes broad again, goes from a point to go going broad. That's usually an exposure to evil. This can come in many forms. But uh for example, maybe I, I don't know. So maybe you're a kid and
your dad gets cancer and dies or maybe you find out that your spouse has been cheating on you for the last five years. Or maybe, uh, you lose your job suddenly or maybe, uh, you find out that, I don't know, someone's been gossiping about you. That's probably a minor thing. Or maybe you realize that the
entire global banking system is based on, um, some really nasty concepts or, and on and on and on. I mean, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But you find out that, that things are worse than you thought in some way that, uh, you sort of relied upon not being so before. And so it crushes you and, uh
, you have to integrate that into your belief system and discover the good that makes all of that. Ok? Not, it doesn't make it good but it makes it, um, so that you can cope with that and it doesn't steal your joy because remember God possesses the greatest amount of knowledge of good and happiness and
joy, but he also um possesses the greatest knowledge of evil. And I'm not saying he is evil. Of course, I'm saying he's aware of it. He understands what it is to a greater extent than anyone else. And uh for that reason, he also feels sorrow and pain and suffering more than anyone else. And these things
coexist, there is opposition in all things. So it's like a pendulum. If you swing it on the side of good, you also have to deal with the swing to, to bad. That's those co occur. So it's not all cost though. There is a reward, right? And that's the peace and rest that you receive when you integrate the
good or when you get to these points on the triangle. But one important thing to realize and again, every single thing in this presentation, we could probably talk for five hours on and I think there's 30 slides or something. So that's not gonna happen. I don't have that kind of time and neither do you
. But I'm hoping I can sort of give you a bunch of keys and then you can chase these things down on your own and learn more from God and uh end up with a lot more knowledge than you had previously. So when you get to these peace and rest points, um that's the reward. But it's kind of interesting because
that reward can only exist in ignorance of what comes next. Because you're never done, right. So this is very interesting. But after you die, um if you're a good and honest person, you receive uh an eternal reward that varies according to uh your degree of trust in God in this life. And um that, that
situation is peaceful and it's restful because there, and this is one reason you can't really increase and trust in God. Once you're there, there, the exposure to greater awareness is capped except for those who had unlimited trust in God in this life and, and for them, they can uh continue to increase
there uh for reasons that I talked about in another video. But uh I'm trying not to get bogged down by details here. The, the point is that this process continues forever and it only ceases uh for those who either have um paused maybe permanently if, if they choose to um because they're dead and they're
in some degree of heaven or for those on earth, those who um fool themselves into thinking that this is sort of all there is to know. And for that category, that latter category, that peace and rest is always temporary because they will with 100% certainty, get hit with something that they're not expecting
. And we'll get to this uh in a few minutes. So here's a key that you can use to unlock a much greater rate of acquisition of light and truth in your life. If you choose to do so at your option. And I talked about this in the oh what was it called? But it was the video about compound interest. Judge
Justice God's Justice video. You can opt to waive these green bars and compress this experience. And this is what it would look like in using these uh pictorial analogies that I've been using. So what you do here is you say, look, I don't need AAA rest period. I'm here for a reason. For this end was
I born. Let's get on with the show and you can only do this by having very great trust in God. But when you say, look, I understand why I'm here. Let me have it. Let's go. Then you end up getting much, much farther than other people and the breadth of variance and speed of acquisition of light and truth
is enormous. What I mean by that is the difference between someone who acquires light and truth at a normal rate and the sort of maximum rate of acquisition is huge, it's much, much larger than you realize. So if you want the most abundant life and you want to compress this down, uh so that you can acquire
much more light and truth in far fewer years, the way to do this is to beg God for more light and truth to be absolutely obedient to everything He gives you. Because if you're taking time to decide whether you trust him or not enough to listen to him. Then you're wasting time because that's time that
he could be using to give you more. You want to give him time and you want to pay attention. What I mean by this is there's a passage in the sermon on the mount where Jesus says, seek ye first, the Kingdom of God. You really need to do that. And it doesn't matter uh how rich you are, how poor you are
, uh how smart you are, how dumb you are. It doesn't matter if you focus everything you have on him first and foremost. And I'm not talking about spending more time at church and I'm not necessarily saying spending more time reading your scriptures, but you actually have to draw out your heart to Him
at all times and in all places, no matter what you're doing. And when He tells you anything, you have to do it. And as you do this and you train those muscles and you become more and more resolute in this, you'll find that he reveals so much to you that you can't even keep up. It's just like a cup flooding
over. Like like if you take a fire hose and you turn it on and you point it at a coffee cup, that's how your life will be in terms of your revelation that you get from God, but you have to have unconditional trust in Him. Nothing can be off limits no sacred cows no, God would never tell me to do this
. None of that. You have to accept everything he tells you. So, um some, some uh some additional notes on this idea of knowledge simplifying as you get more of it. Uh When I say, pay attention, what I mean is that, uh God has said that all things witness of him and it's true and you can learn more about
Him through every everyday experience you have. If your heart is drawn out to Him, you'll see things, you know, Jesus. One of the reasons Jesus taught in, in parables and analogies was that he was paying attention. And so when he saw people fishing, he was thinking about um the father and the father
revealed to him something about his kingdom and himself through that analogy. And that Jesus could use that to teach others too. It's a really great mechanism for bridging what we know and what we don't know by using familiar things in a slightly different context. It, it, it's a great way of teaching
. So uh just pay attention to that. OK. We're gonna shift gears a little and talk about um different people and how they make different choices about uh how directly they're going to engage with the resources that God gives us this journey. And I'm about to talk more about the journey. But so far, what
we've talked about is that progression through the triangles or the, the, I don't know what to call that other shape. Um But our progression through that thing um that, that journey, it's for everybody. It is the gospel. OK? But not everybody is going to go through it and, and not everybody is going
to go through it to the same extent. Some people what this is like, it's like a race but some people just kind of stay at the starting line and they're like, yeah, I just, I don't really want to do this and they go over to the snack table and eat a bagel. Other people will say, yeah, yeah, race. Yeah
, let's do it. And then the, the, the gun goes off and they just kind of stumble across the start line and loiter around and then maybe they go get a bagel or maybe they just, they walk but it boys, it's slow. It's like a granny with a walker or something. Um, I will tell a funny story once I, I was
dating a girl once and she wanted to run this five K and she trained and trained for it and I wanted to support her. So I went with her and, uh, at the time I was in really, really good running shape because of some military stuff. But, uh, I was pretty confident about my running skills and, uh, as I
was trucking through this five K, um, my confidence evaporated when I turned to my right and I turned to my left and I saw, um, I saw some ladies with like twin strollers just totally flying by me. And this is, this is a ways into the race and they, they weren't even breathing heavy and I was dying so
, um, races can be fun and in life that happens a lot too where you look to your left and look to your right and maybe the last people you expect to be uh spiritually advance, end up knowing a lot more than you do. This certainly happened to the Pharisees with Jesus and it's not an uncommon experience
and you can turn that situation to your advantage to say, man, if this lady is pushing two babies in a stroller and she's beating me, maybe I can pick up the pace a little bit and do a little, a little faster pace than I'm doing right now. Anyway. So, um there's a system here that God has ordained to
help us and you can read about this in the book of Alma chapter 13, I believe, uh which is that he ordains some people to be priests so that they can uh deliver some of the benefits. At least of knowing these things to people who aren't necessarily willing to do what it takes to be full participants
in these experiences. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Um And I want to talk about when I say the word priests, I'm meaning this in a way that's probably different than you would use the word. So try to just uh treat that as a meaningless word for now and fill it in based on what I say about it
instead of assuming I'm talking about whatever it is you think about when I say that word because it's probably not the same. So, uh, these, these um, as good as we can do, experiences are not the same as actually running the whole race and being a champion marathon runner. But uh given the situation
, sometimes it's the best outcome and the gospel is all about delivering the best possible outcome, given the constraints. So here's another picture. And again, if you're just listening to this, you really should look at it. But we've, what we've got here is this big brown tree and then we've got all
these little trees and I don't have a picture of a sapling. Uh so deal with it, but these little trees are supposed to be young trees as well. Well, we talk about roles in the gospel and roles in revealing light and truth and teaching light and truth. This is kind of the way it works. So the big tree
has big roots, the little trees have little roots. The big tree can pull up nutrients from very deep in the soil, which is where they tend to be because of runoff from, from rain. And it pulls all these nutrients up into itself and then deposits them on the surface of the ground through shedding leaves
and then all the, the trees with shallow roots can access those nutrients. And it's not exactly the same as what the big tree has access to. But um in this way, the smaller trees can have at least some of the benefit of those deep roots and grow deeper roots than they otherwise would have had. That's
very important. So, um here's the thing you might say like, hey, well, it doesn't this violate cause and effect because the little trees aren't doing what the big trees are doing. But you're making a case that they're getting comparable benefits. And I say here, all the benefits is probably way too strong
. So um let's blur that over a little bit. But the truth is no, it doesn't violate cause and effect be because there is still an enormous price to pay at that price is humility. Humility is a very rare attribute because people are more concerned about what they think they know than the possibility of
what they don't know. And that's the root cause of it. And this is pride. Some people are much more interested in feeling good about reality than they are about being good. And being good is knowing more of reality and being reconciled to it. But uh most people look at every opportunity to learn as an
opportunity to feel good about what they already know and that's wrong. It's reverse. And uh there's a better way of doing it. Ok. But it's not easy. Um, as easy as just finding a big tree. The challenge of mortality is not finding the right horse to hit your wagon to anytime you find a person that has
more light and truth than you do. You should definitely see this as a mining opportunity to sort of, if they're an orange, you want to squeeze out the juice and then throw away the peel. Um The problem is most people see this as a accept all or accept nothing situation and that's really not the way it's
meant to be. It's not supposed to sidestep your duty and your need to discern. And I've talked about discernment in another video. But the thing is is that if you go into this uh in a less imperfect way, then what you're going to do is you're going to get whatever light and truth they have and you're
also going to inherit all their limitations in terms of all their incorrect and incomplete beliefs. And um even if this is just a, even if what they believe is just incomplete, I mean, their set of beliefs, um that's still a major handicap. So again, you have to see this as one step in a staircase, not
, it's never an end, it's never terminal. The only time this relationship is going to be terminal. And I hope this doesn't seem like I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth. Here um is when that person is acquiring more light and truth at a rate faster than you can. And so, uh they're always going
to be multiple steps ahead of you. But again, because truth is so multidimensional, the likelihood of, of being uh I guess the, the only way I can think of saying this is spiritually dominated, but I'm thinking about this from a, a data science perspective when, if you're graphing two things, one line
is always over the other. So, um that is going to be really rare. But anyway, that's a kind of shotgun shooting you here with this, this idea. But there's value in finding people that have more light and truth than you. It's part of the way things are set up to work. It's supposed to be training wheels
until you have the capability to grow or, or that your roots are deep enough that you can grab, grab these things directly from the soil. But um yeah, some people stay in this subordinate role longer than they should. Uh Most people do not discriminate as much as they should. And um I think a lot of
people aren't aware of the, the risks and costs in this relationship. But anyway, it, it's, I, I also need to say that if you're a new seedling and you're like, oh, I'm just gonna get these things from God. That's fine. But remember it was God who ordained these priests. It's part of the system. And
if you say you're just going to get it from God and you really don't have much to go on, then basically, what you're doing is turning away from God because you're turning away from the resources he has given you to grow faster than you otherwise would be able to. So as a really zoomed out example of
this, no Christian can say, oh, I don't need Jesus. I'm just gonna go directly to the father. I'm good like that would obvious, obviously be a very ridiculous thing to say. So um it applies on smaller scales as well. Uh Another unfortunate situation is that these kinds of people are incredibly rare and
the greater the magnitude of truth and the broader the scope of it, um The less likely you are to find these types of people and for reasons, I'm about to explain uh these people tend to go go crazy as well. So that's just be aware of that. I'll talk about more about that uh in a minute. So I'm gonna
shift now and I was talking more to the saplings and now I'm going to talk more to the big trees or people who could be big trees, which again could be anybody. There's nothing special about these people except that they're willing to pay the price. It's really it, they don't quit in the face of challenges
and, and they're willing to trust God without condition. So in another video I showed this image as I was describing the role of husbands and wives when I talk about priests. Uh It's a very similar situation as um it, it's a very similar situation to the, the relationship that husbands have to wives
in terms of chaos and order. Priests are like husbands because what they do is they go out into the chaos and they neatly package that chaos into um packets of order and they hand those packets of order to people who, uh, have not yet grown to the point where they can go out and order that same chaos
themselves. And um in terms of, of husbands and wives, this has to do with a whole lot of things including uh genetics, hormones, disposition. But most importantly, the idea that women like to marry up. So it's not so much that, uh, you know, I'm not saying at all that men are uniformly better than women
. I'm saying that women tend to pick men who are better than them, even if they don't like to admit that it's true, scientifically speaking. And they would do much better to make that an explicit thing that they talk about. But anyway, um, so priests are like husbands and that chaos, chaos that the priest
goes out and contends with. It's infinite. It never stops. But the priest's job is to grab a chunk of that to order it and then pass it off to somebody else so that somebody else might be a lesser priest or it might be a non priest. It doesn't matter. And I'm not getting hung up. I'm not talking about
hierarchies or anything else. It's about service. It's not about, you know, I'm better than you, whatever. It just, just about service. Um So, so an example of a priest handing something off to a priest is Moses and Aaron and then Aaron and the people. So I show you something and this is uh I guess this
idea started with this thing called the Ken framework. But I've gone so far afi from that that it's probably not even appropriate to mention it, but just in case someone knows about that and they're like, oh there, he's just ripping this off of the kneen framework. No, not really. Uh I heard about that
for the first time, I think six years ago or something. I don't know. Um And it since bounced for, for years now. It's been bouncing around in my mind and, and like a snowball picking up a lot of stuff. So that's the rock at the center of the snowball. But the snow is the important part actually. So
let's go through this. And um very briefly again, you can spend a long time thinking about this. I just told you, I've been thinking about it for about six years. So um we obviously won't be able to get into all that. I just wanna sort of rapid fire these slides as best I can to give you something to
chew on here. OK. So the way this works is it starts in the bottom, right, goes up, left and down. So the first stage, this is 11 application of this is, is you can parse problems by thinking about which sector it goes into. And then there's a whole set of things you can do about it, but it helps you
understand the scope and cost of addressing problems. So um common is a problem that's immediate. It's obvious. Uh And it has a 1 to 1 mapping problem to solution. So like if you need to cut a straight line and a piece of paper, then you use scissors and that's that um complicated is direct. It might
be non obvious and it's usually it's one problem and it has several solutions. A lot of times you think about this as an a la carte menu. So you look at everything that's been done before and you pick option 16 and eight and combine them and that's a complicated problem. Once you go to the left, you
step into complexity and now you're, you're talking about problems that are non obvious, but they're also hard to analyze. They don't have off the shelf solutions. You can't just take options 16 and eight off the menu and combine them and be done. And that's a complex problem. You're stepping into the
unknown but only partially usually it's a combination of known and unknown. So you take option one and option four off the menu and you combine it with something that's never been done before. Then you get into the bottom left, which is where chaos is. And uh these are things that people think are impossible
. Now, the good news about humans, which is also bad news is that we're really awful at distinguishing between things that are impossible and things that are unknown. And that's where this quadrant comes in. Again. I'm trying to be as brief as I can about this. So this is how it lays out onto that circle
funnel diagram that I showed you before. And um so common and complicated live within the bubble and then once you go outside the bubble, you're contending with things that are unknown and that's where complex lives, complex is like the the region that you're ordering. And so part of it's unknown, but
part of it you've packaged up and then chaos lives outside of that. Here's some more characteristics, common things are simple, complicated things are multidimensional, complex. Things are partially hidden and chaotic things are totally hidden. And if you haven't caught on already, the value in each
of these quadrants is very different. Um The value in common, it is um how broadly applicable it is. So once you make something common, anyone can do it like today, anyone can do it. If something is uncomplicated, you make it accessible to very many people, but not everyone because now you're getting
into IQ limitations and determination limitations. If you step into the unknown, you, you drastically limit the number of people that can contend with those sorts of things because more than half of people will not contend with the unknown through choice and through capability. And then once you get
to chaotic, you're in a place where very few people tread. So uh the way you attack these things is different. And I'm actually for time gonna skip over this, you can read it. Um Here's an example of how this works. Um There's a guy Joseph Campbell who wrote a book called uh oh Gosh, The Hero's Journey
or something like this. It's on my bookshelf, I should know. Anyway, um he, his thesis and I think he wrote this back in the sixties. Was that pretty much every story or myth has this archetypal basis? That's the same. And uh I think it's called the Hero's Journey. I don't know if I said that before
, but that's, I'm pretty confident that's what it's called anyway. Um I think he was on the right track, but I think he was, um he could have completed that, uh his understanding of that to a greater degree than he did by having this. And um basically, if you understand this traversal from common to
complicated, complex to chaotic and back again, then you'll be able to explain many many things, not only in um stories and myth, but in your own life. And one example of this is the story of the Hobbit. And maybe you're familiar with this, but common is like life in the Shire. All these Hobbits are
just there and there's really no, no distinction between them. They all have this very define life and um that's all they know. But then in the story, when the hobbit goes and has dinner with the dwarves in his house, uh all of a sudden, he's aware of many more things. He's still in the shire, he's in
his house. But uh a lot of other things have been injected into this, but it's all known. It's all in the, in the border of his house and in the Shire. And then as the story progresses, there are things he encounters that, that are um bridging into the unknown. And then finally at the pinnacle of the
story, he's in this layer of the dragon. And that's uh that's sort of uh very, very specific uh chaos imagery. And the, the story he writes about his story is called there and back again, which is funny. But uh where he's coming from is the shire. He goes all the way to the dragon's lair and then he
comes all the way back and it turns out that this journey is a very, um I hope it doesn't just seem like esoteric babble here. This is a very central important idea if you want to acquire um great quantities of light and truth. Because what you will find as you progress through experience is that this
, this cycle and it doesn't go all the way around, you go into chaos and then you have to come back to common and it just keeps oscillating like that. This cycle is exactly what you will have to walk through if you want to acquire light and truth and dispense it to others because most others live in
common and some live in complicated, very few live in complex, but you could go up to complicated and you could minister to those at common, you could go up to complex and minister to complicated and common. But the greatest contribution you could make is to walk in chaos, to mine out light and truth
and to traverse back through these quadrants to give it to everyone along the way. But uh what most people will do is nothing. They'll just live in common. What some people will do is that they will ascend to the next level, mine something and then go back and minister to the others. But uh it is incredibly
rare to have someone go from common to chaotic and back again. And it's even more rare for them to just keep doing that, to keep walking the cycle. The reason for this is that once you get into the chaotic quadrant, uh the risk is immensely high and the odds of success are immensely low. And so in order
to do this, you have to basically be crazy. Uh It's not a rational choice. It is the only reason you could do this is either because you're crazy or because you're altruistic in a way that most people don't think is possible. Um The reason they don't think it's possible is because they're projecting
the evil in their hearts onto others. But they don't realize that some few people exist who actually operate like that. So, uh again, you can read this slide, I don't want to take the time to go over it. You can read this slide here are examples of people who operate in these various quadrants. But the
one I want to point out to you is that these people in chaos, we call them oracles, philosophers. These are uh acclaimed mathematicians. Most, most mathematicians are actually uh in the complicated segment and I put it up here in complex, but that's probably wrong anyway. Um But, but these are like the
people who invent calculus kind of people. Um Some people call these folks alchemists, wizards, prophets, et cetera. OK. And there's nothing magical about this. There's nothing magical about being a wizard either. That, that word doesn't mean what people think it means. It just means unknown, someone
who uses things that are unknown uh to, to most it's still cause and effect and same thing with profit. There's nothing magical about being a prophet. I uh I could go on about that for a long time. But people think, oh prophets are these magical people that God arbitrarily selects and then gives them
a, a permission slip. That's, that's greater than the one everyone else gets. That's not true at all. It's just people who were willing to walk further than everyone else into the chaos. And therefore God reveals to them things that he hasn't revealed to everyone else and that's it anyway. Um Skipping
that this is ok. Yeah. So most people who dwell in the chaotic quadrant or even venture into it, they don't come out. I'll repeat that more than 50% of the people that go into this once either kill themselves or die in the process or go crazy. And I could go into lists of people who are like this, but
it's, this is a well known thing. Um Ironically, so Nietzsche described that um this was the case and then fulfilled his own prophecy by going crazy. So that's interesting anyway. And that's why so few people go there and, and that's why they're so, it's so rare to see someone come out of it to actually
deliver the boon to society or to others because most people don't make it out of this. And that's why it's so rare for someone to keep going back in because like going back to the hobbit, which is obviously fiction, he could have died about a million times on that journey to go, another time would just
be increasing the odds of him dying. And so maybe if he had gone and died, there wouldn't be a story. I mean, it's fiction. But again, so a nonfictional example of this is Elijah. And how does his story end as far as we know he's taken up into heaven. He doesn't come back or enoch, he walks with God
. And according to tradition, this became a, a more and more regular thing where he would leave for spans of time to go to heaven and he didn't come back eventually. Right? Moses uh was in heaven for 40 days and 40 nights up on the mount and uh he did come back. But after sojourning with Israel, he left
again and he didn't come back, right? Typically these people get to a point where they don't come back and those are positive examples. But like I said before, you can also kill yourself or lose your mind or just die from, from natural causes like I don't know, a heart attack or something. Um Because
once you remember what we're talking about here, going back to that shape with good on the right side and evil on the left side or the triangle thing, you're taking on massive amounts of uh what Joseph Smith would call contradictions. And you have to, you have to integrate this awareness and, and construct
it into forms that can be dealt with, that can be contented with. And the likelihood of you being overcome is very, very high. So, uh why on earth would you do this? Right? And like I said, everyone can walk this journey and everyone eventually will have to if they want to uh obtain what the Lord offers
them. But most people will not do it at least for right now. And the reason is um because it's so risky like I've described, but there are benefits, there are reasons to do it and they're compelling. The first one, which is really big is that the security of the common quadrant or any lesser quadrant
is actually an illusion. What most people think about is chaos is this thing. You need to go on a journey to encounter, but that's actually reverse. So the Garden of Eden was a bubble of order in a sea of chaos. It wasn't the other way around and it was so um oh, volatile is not the word anyway. It was
, it was the relationship of order. There was so uh sensitive that the whole thing was blown apart just from eve eating some fruit, right? It was, it was a, it wasn't a very stable situation. Order is never stable. Chaos is the default and it's coming for you, whether you recognize it or not in the hobbit
, that dragon had the capability to kill everyone in the shire and would have done so eventually, even though no one there knew about it. So with this knowledge, some of us stand up and say, well, I'm gonna deal with this, but it's a rare thing. But those few realize that we all have inside of us, the
seed of uh I wanna say greatness, but it comes from God because we're Children of God, we can do these things that He is calling us to do. Very few people respond. But that doesn't mean that the call isn't uh universal. And finally, uh the biggest motivator is love because you recognize in learning these
things, what the need is and what the cost is and how many people will not respond. So you offer yourself to make that sacrifice, to help them. So this concludes these topics. I hope that this has been beneficial and uh that we haven't jumped around too much.