Ismael

471. How Survival Shapes Who You Are https://youtu.be/mPIVZtxYHJc You became how you survived. Builds on survival part 1 & 2. "Who you are today was shaped by your early survival demands just like the shape of a snake was gradually formed over millions and billions of years of evolution, of natural selection." We completely forget how much we were shaped by all of the environments, especially during the first 20 years. The base layers of your psyche go "unconscious" and you assume that this is just who you are now. "Psychic archeology" can help you remember how and why some of the dysfunctional base layers were built. Start to really notice: How much survival demands from your environment shaped you The kind of survival strategies you had to adapt as coping mechanisms to deal with whatever situation you were faced with. The software is more important than the hardware in the context of survival. Culture, family, schooling, work environment shape, etc. shaping mind, psyche, beliefs, worldviews, morality, values. Human survival varies enormously around the globe. Your personal survival situations: Creates huge blind spots in your psyche. Limits your ability to understand others. Limits your ability to grow, succeed, and transcend to higher levels. The wounds, and scars, karma, samskaras you incurred as you were growing up stay with you and influence how you behave. They can corrupt: Desires Goals, ambitions in life Fears, insecurities, lead to overreacting emotionally to certain things Can give you: Biases Predilections Aversions …all of these fundamentally shaping how your life unfolds. …and if your life is unfolding in ways you don't like. With bad habits, addictions, and stuckness, you have to look back and see what's sourcing that. …probably early childhood survival situations that you didn't quite know fully how to deal with, and you might have dealt with them in unholistic ways, and now those became ingrained in your psyche and now you still keep acting from that place. …it becomes more difficult to change as you get into your 30s, 40s, and beyond. We tend to assume that humans have lived the same way: When you're studying history you have to really put yourself in the shoes of the people that were living in that culture at that time. To live 2000 years ago was such a starkly different way of surviving than today and even a hundred years ago survival was so different for your great grandparents than it is for you today. Just a single generation is actually very significant. Visualize: How different would you be today if… Your father was a drug dealer, You were raped by your father, You were a Mormon in a Mormon family + community, You were gay or confused about your sexuality, You were bullied in school because you were ugly, You were born in an Eskimo tribe, You grew up in a foster home without parents. You grew up with a chronic illness instead of a healthy body, maybe in a wheelchair, You were a hot pretty girl, and everyone admired you and lavished attention on you, You grew up in a war zone, You grew up in a small rural village, You grew up as a woman in Saudi Arabia, You grew up in a royal family with a palace, You grew up seeing mystical visions as a child, You would be a different person. Humans survive in very different ways, yet we judge others for how we survive, we're very judgmental about the survival strategies of other people. Because ours so deeply shaped who we are and how we see reality it's difficult to see beyond that. Example: Who Hitler was and what he did were merely the reflection of his mind. And Hitler's mind was merely a reflection of the survival challenges he faced during his youth. List out: The core survival challenges that shaped your mind. Go all the way back to your earliest years and try to remember them. Examples: Learning how to eat without spilling food everywhere, learning how to chew & not bite your tongue. Maintaining your temperature and dealing with heat and cold. Learning how to dress for different weathers. Think about sexuality and how it was formed until 20, what struggles existed that are still with you today. Kinesthetically working how your body works, injuring/bruising/cutting yourself constantly. Dangerous situations you faced. With strangers trying to pick you up, with cars, bicycles, weather. Times when you cried from age 0 to 20, what were you crying about? What wounds did that leave? Challenges of learning language properly or learning what time is, not knowing what the arrows mean. Struggling through school. Learning mathematics. Socializing with children of your own age. Remember getting in trouble, all the rules you broke, the detentions you got, all the scolding and punishments you got from your environment, and how that affected you. The struggle of fitting in, of being cool. Academic achievement and how felt about your own sense of intelligence and self-esteem related to that. Struggles with sports. Fights with your family, rebelling against your parents, or conforming to your parents. Trying to gain approval or love from your parents and friends. Divorce in your family is a huge one. How your identity was forged, playing with different identities and friends. Various interests you explored, struggling with different hobbies. The challenge of learning concepts. The struggle of being lazy or disciplined. Being bored and what you did during your spare time. Religion. Philosophical questions that you struggled with, what is life, what is death, first time seeing your parents and you too are going to die. Debates and disagreements you had with your parents, elders, friends, and colleagues. Mentors who influenced you in positive ways negative ways. The music you listened to. Lack or abundance of money. Other kinds of family dysfunctions you struggled with. Early romances you had. Pregnancy or abortion if early. Being denied or rejected for things. Sports team, early job position, school, or university. How did you adapt and cope with all of the above? The suffering that you incurred when you were young and very impressionable left very deep samskaras [wounds] in your psyche, which you're probably still compensating for today. The "fill in the blank" exercise: (pause for 20-30 mins) Fill in that blank with the first things that pop into your mind, don't overthink it too much. Life is… The opposite sex is… Happiness is… Success is… (where did your definition of success come from?) Money is… Sex is… Science/religion is… Spirituality is… Work is… School is… Government is… I am… Humans are… Key question: How did early survival shape who you are today? Likes and dislikes. Believes, convictions, principles, pet-theories, firmly held opinions, your worldview. Your morality, your judgments, and the things you hate. How they came about as a function of survival and how they served survival. **Not just physical survival but as a psyche, as an ego. Notice your political and economic philosophy. Your sexual identity. Your views of men and women. Your social behaviors, tendencies, and attitudes towards other people. Your career. Your strengths, weaknesses, fears, and insecurities. (the ladder two only come from survival struggles, spend serious time looking at those and where they came from) Your defense mechanisms. Your values. Your life philosophy. (implicitly we all have a life philosophy) The kind of food you eat, the books you read, the media you consume, the work you do, and how all of this was shaped by early survival. The way you react to strangers in social situations, how social you are, and how you socialize, even down to the facial expressions you make when you are dealing with people in social situations. The muscle tension in your body. Your darkest thoughts. Your nightly dreams, your nightmares. Your highest goals, your highest dreams for your life. How you handle money. How you dress, what you consider appropriate. What you guilt yourself over. Notice how little of it was chosen consciously and yet all of the above basically constitutes who you are. "Is it really your true self? Or is it just an accretion of a bunch of random stuff that happened to you as you were bumbling through life just trying to survive by the skin of your teeth?" The mind is very good at backward rationalizing to itself the way you are and how it is for very good reasons and doesn't need to be questioned. If you aren't really willing to change yourself at the identity level, how can you expect to get any significant, meaningful change in your life? The deeper you go the more it feels like some part of you is dying, and the more results you can get, it's very counter-intuitive. Half the battle is noticing and accepting that that part of you has to change. Notice how your choices were shaped by survival demands Spend a lot of time contemplating who you are as a result of the love you didn't receive when you were young. **None of this is good or bad, it just is survival. Don't judge yourself, it'll interfere with your psychic archaeology, do it neutrally. ...Sometimes it's something very simplistic, sometimes convoluted, but it stayed with you to this day. Forced to go to church Now you hate or love religion. The difference between those two paths can be razor-thin, as little as a single word, one wrong or right word. Got approval for acting the class clown Now are very extroverted and social. Approval for getting good grades in school Pleasing authority figures, it's how you learned to get love. Approval for being pretty Now obsessed with playing that up. Maybe your first girlfriend cheated on you Developed an anti-feminist, anti-women ideology. Maybe your mom/dad wasn't loving, so you developed…survival strategy/coping mechanism/fear/insecurity. Your dad was a businessman. You changed your identity to earn his respect. Grew up rich/poor White/black/asian Fighting with your parents or had divorced parents Grew up with animals Reading lots of books Watching lots of TV or playing lots of video games Hung out with certain kinds of friends Bullied in school Laughed at for your height Mother yelled at you and criticized you constantly Father was inept/inefficient/ineffective provider for your family Father was very critical of you Household was religious The whole family ate junk food Were an only child Less good looking than average kids in school All of this creates biases in your mind and compensation mechanisms. Many inadequacies could be misperceptions, complete illusions, sourced from some childhood interpretation. Distorting your perception of reality because you can't even imagine living without them anymore since survival is such a serious matter. Examples from Leo's life - 1:23:20 Leo had to learn American culture and fake it until he made it to fit in socially as a child while learning English as a foreigner after moving to the U.S. This lead to constant second-guessing in social situations, overcompensating, people-pleasing, introversion, and not enjoying socializing as much. It both has very big pros and cons and trade-offs. **Genetics also play a significant role, they have to be accepted and only the survival situations and cultural programming can really be changed. Psychopaths, sociopaths, criminals, narcissists, multiple personality disorders, schizophrenics, alcoholics, what do all these people have in common? All of these are the result of survival situations. Much of your core identity was created around the avoidance of deep suffering. What shaped you the most are the sources of the deepest suffering during the first 20 years of your life and the sources of the deepest love in your life. Closest family members probably were some of the biggest sources of your deepest suffering and love. Mind says: "Yes, it's dysfunctional and it creates suffering but not as much suffering as I would have gotten if I hadn't created it." It takes courage to take down your armor, but you can upgrade your armor and find healthier coping mechanisms, healthier survival strategies. Be careful about where you try to get love from because you can try to get it from very dysfunctional places. From authority figures, from external sources You want to be able to feed yourself your own carrots. Replace the ways in which you get love. The partial and contingent ways that you have developed for more holistic expansive ways Episodes: Self-love, What Is Love part 1 & 2 Bottom line: You are confusing your survival patterns and strategies with who you are. You become attached to them because you formed an identity out of them you have in other words become your survival. This is a problem because survival always ultimately fails. In the long term as they say we're all dead. It's to show you just how contingent your worldview is, how arbitrary, how precarious. This helps you to detach from your worldview and to stop treating your worldview as this special. It's not who you really are and it's not how reality actually is Science is not how reality actually is science is a survival strategy. For the most part, it's fantasies, and houses of cards you've built that allow you to barely survive. You are acting out deep survival patterns that are deeply unconscious within you without realizing that you're doing so. So you're justifying them as important, true, and real. They aren't, they're a fantasy. This is just the beginning of the unraveling of self-deception. Start to recognize how your survival strategies limit you. The biggest mistake people make is that they confuse survival with truth or with goodness or with love. Survival is a thing holding you back from truth goodness and love. The more seriously you take this process the more you do the exercises the more you will dilate that bottleneck Anything that allows you to survive and to thrive especially thrive gets backwards rationalized by the ego-mind as true valid and good. It's always the ego's job to rationalize whatever it's doing as being good, your mind is doing this every day. The ego is carving out its own version of Goodness but it's always a finite piece of the pie. Hitler basically said: "I only like this much of the pie." People carve out different sizes of pie but all of them are still less than one percent of the whole pie. What nobody understands is that the entire pie is Absolutely good The entire piece, the entire pie, is just Love. The pie is Love itself, it's infinite Love, an infinite Love pie. You can't love the whole pie because it'll kill you. So you love little pieces of it that don't threaten you. Key questions: How are your top fears and insecurities shaped by your early survival challenges? How did your early survival challenges shape your values? What strategies did you invent to get love? In what ways are you still overcompensating? What are some outdated survival patterns, armors, and defense mechanisms that you still act out today? How have they served you well in the past? How are they limiting you today? What would it look like if you let them go? What are you afraid would happen if you let them go? Have compassion for your early survival situations. You just did the best you could. You can do better now with more knowledge, more experience, more consciousness, higher teachings that you didn't have back then. It's easier to do this when you're young. As you have compassion for your own early situation have compassion for the early situations of others who probably had it worse than you. Hitler had very little choice about his early situation. Whenever you see somebody doing something you don't like or that you hate ask: "What was the early survival situation that he was cornered into where he was forced to learn these bad habits these dysfunctional survival strategies?" Can you see why people's world views are so different, why people don't get along and why people don't understand each other? They had such different survival situations. "All the evil people in the world that are doing stuff you don't like that you hate all they're doing is they're just surviving in the only way they know how the best way they know how. Their survival situation and their environment offered them no opportunities to know more. Opportunities for education, for spiritual work, for personal development advice, for these kinds of videos, for mentors, and gurus, and teachers who are loving, and kind, and wise, and truthful, and unbiased, and who could guide them, but this is extremely rare. It's much more common to have mentors, and teachers, and adults who abuse you, exploit you, manipulate you, control you, mislead you, feed you fantasies, brainwash you, use you selfishly to serve their own survival." In conclusion, you are a robot acting out a survival script, 99% of you. Spirituality is about transcending that script. Once you see everyone is just acting out their survival script you stop taking things personally. All the ways you struggled to survive as a kid left karma, patterns, scars, wounds, and insecurities, and samskaras in your psyche, and now you're left coping with those scars. Spirituality is about purifying and healing those scars, transcending survival altogether, and finding aspects of life that are beyond survival. Development is about finding more nuanced and functional ways of surviving. As important or even more important than the spiritual work. Every generation faces new survival challenges and develops unique coping mechanisms with unique blind spots and limits and trade-offs. A never-ending cycle of growth into more consciousness, and love, and various limitations and biases and resistance that holds us back from doing that individually and collectively. Key distinction: Notice how most people around you are surviving reactively not consciously. Opportunistic/reactive survival vs conscious survival. Stop surviving opportunistically because down that road lies evil and devilry. Follow a higher purpose, live life for a higher purpose, you will be rewarded for it. There are trade-offs and it's harder at first. **The majority of you listening to me are missing survival. Handle your survival, get good at mastering survival. Don't get too far ahead of your skis with the spiritual stuff.

“My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.” —Osho

Erratic patterns – CBL Look at the pattern, Can you see what's wrong? It's supposed to be perfect but, But really it's not. Can you find the flaws, Hidden in structured code, Hiding in the pattern, In between the rows? Only illogics can find, Hidden flaws in a straight logic line. Only erratics recognize, Errors in patterns of a perfect design. [2x] Now that you know, That something's not right, look at it carefully, In pale logic light. Don't be sorry, If you can't recognize the errors and faults, is such a perfect disguise. Only illogics can find, Hidden flaws in a straight logic line. Only erratics recognize, Errors in patterns of a perfect design.

Good reminder to always double check and not take everything at face value. I’ll have to admit that I was pretty bought in until watching the 2nd video. Did you write the channel? Maybe they didn’t know any better.

Love (Love) Devotion (Devotion) Feeling (Feeling) Emotion (Emotion) Don't be afraid to be weak Don't be too proud to be strong Just look into your heart my friend That will be the return to yourself The return to innocence The return to innocence And if you want then start to laugh If you must then start to cry Be yourself don't hide Just believe in destiny Don't care what people say Just follow your own way Don't give up and use the chance To return to innocence That's not the beginning of the end That's the return to yourself The return to innocence It's the return to innocence

Oh wow, I keep getting the numbers wrongs! ? Thank you for the reminders. ? My pleasure

Lost in a dreamworld...

371. Sameness vs Difference - The Metaphysical Foundation Of Reality https://youtu.be/M5tWkG5SGcU Every thing is the same, in that it is different. According to sameness, there is no difference between sameness and difference; according to difference, there is. This episode is aiming to show how to take your contemplations really deep. Many people still don't understand just how deep contemplation can go. By end of this episode see what you assumed this topic was about in the beginning and then what it actually turned out to be after going through all the details. Are you a "sameness person" or a "difference person"? Is Coke the same as Pepsi? Are two Coke cans the same? Both have 475ml of liquid and basically the same ingredients. Certainly more similar than when compared to other kinds of drinks. Two Coke cans have different locations in space, temperatures, number of bubbles, volumes, unique scratches, and expiration dates. Is an ant the same as an elephant? Living creatures, carbon-based life forms, have DNA, both made out of eucaryotic cells containing the same organelles. (Mitochondria, ribosomes, etc.) ~50% similar DNA. Both have legs, eyes, both can smell, probably both can hear, both have a brain, both have a nervous system, both can see color, both can die and are alive. Is a chimpanzee the same as a human? Science says a chimpanzee has ~89+% similarity in the genome to a human being. Many people find the idea that we have a shared ancestor disturbing and feel the need to differentiate themselves from the chimpanzee. Same size, ten fingers, and toes, hearts, mammals, both born in the same way, almost identical nervous systems, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, similar teeth, grasping hands, opposable thumbs, both use tools, both have hair, we both care about our young, both live in tribes. There's a lot to be learned about the deep similarities between chimpanzees and humans. Many profound psychological and sociological lessons. We get scared by the same things, angered by similar types of things, both get jealous, cause violence to each other, attack each other and start small wars with each other, they have tribal warfare. Is the number five the same as the number 25? Both numbers, both odd, both whole numbers, both able to divide the number 100. 25 is divisible by 5 and 25 is just 5x5. In fact, the similarities are infinite as well as the differences. So out of those two lists, which ones do you select, which ones do you focus on? Are men and women the same? Same basic DNA, same species, hair, nails, fingers, same organs, can do the same things. But then we have different ways of thinking, psychologies, sexually attracted to different things, some have a masculine essence some a feminine essence. Are all human beings the same? Could it be that it's a matter of perspective and that there's no such thing as an objective answer to this question in the way that most people think? Maybe reality doesn't actually know whether all human beings are the same or whether they're all different. How would reality know the difference? Are you the same as a nazi? Same species, same organs, same brains, same mind, same basic ideas, pretty much same value system. It's actually important to study the deep similarities between your mind and the nazi's mind. Is reality the same as illusion and fantasy? What if reality cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality? What would you use to distinguish between an illusion and reality? And that criterion that you're using to distinguish between reality and illusion… how do you know that itself is not an illusion? Is good the same as evil? What's good for one person is precisely evil for another person and vice versa. Everybody feels they're right, what's the difference between right and wrong? Is that something that your own mind created? Is Leo the same as you? Maybe ultimately Leo is just you telling yourself to wake up. Is nothing the same as something? People take nothing as the opposite of something, some black void. Who's making that distinction? What if nothing is so nothing that it hides right underneath everything? Sameness and difference is a matter of perspective more so than a matter of objective fact. Episode: Understand Relativism Relativity: Without a perspective, there's nothing there. …There's no tree and there's no forest if you are not there looking at it, thus no "sound when a tree falls." Inability to see the relativity leads to: Racism, xenophobia, race wars. Israel and Palestine conflict. Christianity vs Islam. Capitalists vs socialists. Culture wars. Gender wars. Feminists vs men's rights advocates. "Me 2" movement lumping too many different kinds of sexual harassment into one category. **Then again it's also important to recognize the commonalities. Science vs religion. Is the one thing everything has in common that it is happening in your consciousness? Is there anything happening outside your consciousness? **Check in your direct experience and contemplate. What is sameness and difference really? Notice that technically every single object is different from every other object. Existence = difference. To be, to exist, is to be different. To have two objects they must distinct by at least one measure of quality. To have two particles, at the very least, they must be separate from each other in the X, Y, or Z coordinate, or in time, in their shape, color, etc. Otherwise, you couldn't see it, it wouldn't exist. At the same time, everything is sameness. So which one is it? Could that be the essence of relativity? Blog video of child not being able to look past the differences. Object impermanence. What if the kid was right and the object does disappear. And you as an adult, for your survival, you learned how to trick yourself into believing that the object was still there behind the scenes. To be able to look past the differences is to actually fudge the truth. Sameness and difference are relative to context. Ignoring one or the other is necessary for your comfortable survival. …In order to exist as a self at all. Are these the same or are they different? It's precisely because they're distinct that you can count four of them. There must always be at least one difference. Everything is different. Science Science cannot prove difference or sameness. Sameness and difference are prior to science. Science is mostly looking for similarities between things, grouping things into various categories. (animals, elements, atoms, subatomic particles, people, apes, psychological disorders) Science is deeply subjective. Your mind is creating them and they are not found in the world. Modern science isn't conscious of the way that it's constructing these categories and metaphysical understanding of reality, sneaking in hidden metaphysical assumptions while denying that it's doing so. Category: A collection of different objects which are similar. Who gets to determine what counts as different and similar? Who is determining that DNA is what should be the criterion that accounts for the similarity or the difference? Where does it come from? How much DNA similarity does it take? 1%... 5%? Science tells you that you're 99% chimpanzee, so why don't you call yourself a chimpanzee? Categories are created by the ego-mind. If it's the scientist who's determining things for you, then you're citing authority. Deeply similar to religion. Science wins through consensus, not through truth. Precisely because categories are arbitrary. Science is far from some objective pursuit of objective truth. Science is about creating categories that serve the ego-mind. Identity is not an objective fact. Science cannot determine if two things are identical. Because by definition if you have two things, they are distinct. So that means there's no objective determination within reality for the identity 1=1. Science also cannot tell you which two objects are distinct. Only your mind subjectively. Your mind has to start making distinctions long before science is invented, creating a distinction between science and not science. Science itself is a part of reality and for it to exist as a part of reality it has to be distinct. Which is the reason why scientists get very touchy when their metaphysics is questioned because it dissolves the erected boundaries between science and pseudo-science. To BE is to be a specific way. If you remove all the differences you're killing it. The ego & the self "You, are not a body, or a creature, or an ape, or a living being, or molecules, not a brain. You are an identity, a set of differences, you have differentiated yourself from your environment. […] And through that differentiation you actually came into existence. And when you die the difference between what you thought you were, your identity, and your environment, will collapse and you will merge back into the totality you emerged. And so your very life depends upon you being different from your environment and other people. You being distinct. If you stop being distinct you'll physically die." The notion of identity is a very tricky business and much more significant to you and your mind than you ever thought. You spent your teenage years and all your early twenties building up your identity: Man, women, republican, democrat, American, Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Christian, good person, bad person, attractive, unattractive, tall, short, fat, skinny, successful, irresponsible, addicted to porn, love video games, like fast food, love sushi, etc. You are differentiating yourself to create an identity. It's like a snowball … accreting more and more stuff, and then it gains momentum. And as it gains momentum eventually it gains a sense of mass and solidity until this giant snowball is so big and fast with such a force behind it that it really feels solid. This is a force to be reconned with. That's your ego, that's who you are, your very life. Now you can appreciate why self-actualization, getting some new result in some area, is so difficult. Changing the trajectory of that giant snowball. The reason you resist it so much is because fundamentally you don't want to change. Because deep down you know real change is death. You want the results you want without changing your identity. But you get the results you get because of your identity. Catch 22 of all personal development. And really all society sells you is serving your ego to build up your identity. Because your ego will only pay money for that which builds up its identity. It doesn't want to pay money for breaking itself down. Your ego will now twist everything around here and build a self-actualization identity. Enlightenment = conceptual death of your identity = Happiness The entire time you were infinite, everything and nothing, sameness and difference, and that there is no difference between sameness and difference. "Until then you're going to keep struggling and keep trying to differentiate yourself. The ego needs this. That's why it creates enemies. That's why it demonizes, criticizes, builds up ideologies, joins groups, cults, sects, philosophies, scientific schools, economic groups, political groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, national groups, family groups. All of this is building the ego's identity. It needs to say 'I am different from you!' If not, we're becoming closer and closer and closer until we literally join and become one. And it's a big burden to realize that you are Hitler, Donald Trump, a terrorist... That you are everything you ever hated in your life. See, the very reason that you hate in the first place is precisely because you are denying the very thing that you are. And the reason you are unhappy is because fundamentally you're denying your true nature. And your true nature is infinite. Indiscriminate. It's all. But that's too much for you. See the whole cake of reality is so big, and so delicious, and so beautiful, that it's too much. You can't eat so much fucking cake. You think you want cake, but after you've eaten 50 slices of cake and there's still a million pieces to go, you're done with cake. So you're drawing the line. And the whole purpose of life is to go for the whole cake." "The mind works by tuning into differences and samenesses like a lense. It can dilate and focus on whatever it wants to see. And what does it focus on? It's never a question of objective truth or objective difference or sameness, but of what you select. Based on who you are as an identity. Most conducive to your survival as the identity you have identified yourself to be. It's not a matter of truth. Your mind doesn't give a fuck about truth. It cares about preserving your identity. And it'll cite all the scientific evidence, all the rationale, all the justifications, all the logic, all the religious scriptures, everything! It will muster and marshal everything in its power to see reality as selectively as it possibly can such that your identity is preserved, despite the changing circumstances of the environment. That's a struggle. Because the battle will always be lost. You are the whole and you can only remain the part for so long. You have to be deluding yourself constantly, actively, that you are the part until finally the game ends and you merge in back with the whole. And you cannot be other than what you really are other than for a short period of time which is what your life amounts to." "The ego-mind is terrified of deep sameness. This is why it clings to ideology and to anything it identifies with." A racist doesn't want to admit that we're all the same. And is in denial about it. His identity is built on being a certain ethnicity, it's a deep part of him. So now to tell him that he's the same as a black person, a Chinese person, etc. that's going to threaten his identity in a deep way. Which is why very conscious people very grounded in their metaphysical identity don't care and are not threatened by other races, their identity transcends all of that. And you've sunk so much energy into building your current identity that you will not admit that it's a lie. That's the last thing you want to do. So you come up with justifications and further lies to explain why this is not true and that your lies are actually true. If the ego wants to see difference where there isn't and if it wants to see sameness where there isn't it will. Rather the reason it can do that is because sameness and difference are in the same place, they're always there at the same time everywhere. Everything is different and everything the same. The ego cherrypicks whatever is most self-serving. Everything socially constructed is based upon this fundamental principle of helping you to maintain your identity, both individually and collectively. Bottom rung of Maslow's "hierarchy of needs". Sex, food, partying, entertainment, identity politics, ethnocentrism. Good sales & marketing is about riling up people's emotions, not truth. Episode: The Deep Problem Of Marketing "We live in a time of seeing differences." The devil uses fragmentation to achieve his aims "The devil is that which separated itself from God. The devil is the fallen angel. A true angel understands that the angel and God are really one. But an angel who is arrogant and denies that it is God, hates God, starts to criticize God, deny that God exists, what the devil does is the devil fragments, and the devil depends upon fragmentation because that's ultimately what the devil's very existence is. The devil's body is made out of a fragment of God. So of course if the devil wants to stay separate from God, God will allow it as long as the devil keeps insisting on fragmentation. And then the only way fragmentation can happen is through delusion, through lack of consciousness. So the devil has to limit it's own consciousness to maintain its devilry. It's you. The fragmentation you create. The scapegoating, the demonizing, the hatred, the denying, the criticism, the crusading, the sects that you create, all the cherry-picking that you do, all the differences and samenesses you see that serve your identity rather than the truth. And of course, God is the truth." One of the deep sameness' that we all have, we're doing this all the time, the only question is how conscious are you of the process, and the more conscious you become of the process, the less you'll do it. "While materialism emphasizes fragmentation and seeing differences. True spirituality is the opposite movement. An emphasis of deep sameness. And this is done through the right hemisphere. Responsible for intuition, integration, consciousness, and wisdom. Taking all the fragments that materialism has left on the floor and piecing them all together. Actualized videos are trying to show the deep sameness between everything. Whether it's religion and science, meditation techniques, etc. Because the rest of society has already filled your mind with all the fragments & differences." Deep sameness vs surface sameness Ego likes to use surface sameness, sameness of appearances, instead of deep sameness. Seeing the similar essence of all the appearances. That's what intelligence and genius are. Able to see deep sameness where others are only seeing differences & surface similarities. Similarities that the ego deliberately uses to create an identity for itself. Atheists create an identity for themselves by saying that all religion is delusion, a surface sameness. The deep similarity is enlightenment, awakening, God. Conservatives call all liberals SJWs and Marxists, a surface similarity, thereby differentiating themselves to build their egoic identity. "Deep sameness is about dissolving your egoic identity into your ultimate true identity as everything. Wisdom comes with deep sameness. Wise people are able to see deep sameness." Examples of deep sameness: Paradigm and paradigm lock present within religion and science. Both are dogmatic, both are ideological, both are sneaking in a metaphysics without realizing that they're doing so, both are locked into a certain paradigm without realizing that they're doing so. Start to understand where all the suffering in the world comes from and that it comes from selfishenss which is there present within you and all people. All living beings have equal worth. "If you want to really be intelligent don't bother taking IQ tests, don't bother reading textbooks, what you need to do is you need to develop your capacity to see deep sameness." The wisdom and intelligence of geniuses, mystics, sages, visionary scientists like Leibnize, DaVinci, Einstein, was based upon their ability to make analogies between unlike things. Newton making the analogous connection between the apple falling on his head, that meaning that there must be a force pulling it down, and then looking at the moon, realizing there also must be force pulling on moon, that means the moon is also falling towards the earth. That's a deep profound similarity. Douglas Hofstaedter gives many more examples in his work. Applying lessons of history to the present and future. Integrating all of religion requires seeing deep sameness. "The ultimate deep sameness is that everything is consciousness. There are no two objects in existence which are not occuring right now within your consciousness. They are made out of consciousness, they are consciousness, everything is consciousness. That's the second half of the equation. Consciousness is all the differences possible, infinite differences. And since everything is different that makes it all the same. The deepest sameness is to realize that all of reality is alive and intelligent. Intelligence and aliveness is not something human beings possess or that creatures possess it's a quality of the universe itself." Love and compassion "True love comes from seeing deep sameness. Whereas hatred comes from emphasizing differences between things. Seeing differences is not a problem. You can see differences. Because technically everything is different. What is a problem is when you make an identity out of your particular set of differences and then you need to defend it. That's where then hatred comes in. Your capacity to love is directly proportional to how big your identity is. If you want infinite love you need infinite identity. That is why religious people are not capable of love and compassion. It's because they can't. You can't get there through belief. Believing you can be like Christ and all loving while at the same time maintaining a small itty bitty identity. Religion teaches you how to ape enlightened beings like Buddha or Christ. But if you were enlightened that would come without effort." The broad applications of the topic of sameness and difference Historical analysis Medicine Science -- Lacks the ability to self-reflect and see how it's creating categories, subjectively. This limits science, it lacks holism because of hyperspecialization. Be an integrater, not a fragmenter. The legal system -- Drawing similarities or making differences. Politics -- Fighting for your built-up individual and collective agenda. Get good at noticing how both you and your culture draw differences, both arbitrarily. Gender wars -- Drawing samenesses and differences in a favorable manner will advance the egoic agenda of the people who're participating in these wars. Identity is what everybody cares about most. Problem = a threat to your identity. If you didn't care how you were, not even distinguishing living and non-living, would you have any problems at all? Religion and spirituality -- debating each other, criticizing each other, splitting off into sects, forming various groups, conspiring against each other… fragmentation. Conflict = Not being able to see the situation from the other person's POV. Relationships -- let go of the differences and start seeing the deeper similarities. Finding new music, movies, books, teachers & gurus that you resonate with -- looking for samenesses in between differences. Many algorithms do this matching-up process for you. Shazam. "There is no law in the universe that says that you are you, only you say that you are you, and therefore you become you, and so you are born. Tada! Identity is not found out in the world, identity is what you create it to be." What you construct, you can also deconstruct. What is your identity without any kinds of stuff added onto it? What were you before that giant snowball even started rolling? Applications of samenesses and differences with respect to self-actualization Integrating all spiritual schools and understanding why they originated in the first place. The mind will select those problems which it needs such that it can create a differentiation between those people over there and us over here. Integrating science and religion. Understanding the blunders of epistemology -- the mind misusing beliefs. How evil, corruption, and conflict work -- we're too self-centered and don't see our own evil. Understanding human motivation -- all human beings are driven by exactly the same psychological drivers, which are grounded even deeper into existential motivation. Defending your identity. If you think natural selection & evolution explain all this: "How does evolution know that something is a thing that needs to be perpetuated or survived at all?" Understanding all human suffering -- all suffering basically comes from one source, but it tends to proliferate in many different ways. "Have you ever wondered why you never run out of problems in your life? Could it be because you're creating the problems yourself, and all the suffering that comes along with it?" Important note: Sameness is not better than difference or vice versa, both can be traps. There are tradeoffs with both abilities. Do both. Difference is important for developing technical expertise in a field. Sameness is good for holistic understanding and the big picture. The danger with that is overgeneralization. Sameness pathologies The early scientific revolutions and the discoveries of Galileo. He made his own telescope and when looking out into the stars, Jupiter, and various planets and moons noticed the numbers he came up with while counting didn't correspond with the classical medieval notions that existed in his society. Justification for why he was wrong by the church and prevailing intellectuals: "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warm, and to nourish it. What are these parts of the microcosm? Two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in the macrocosm, there are two favorable starts, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven." --Charles Taylor, Hegel Reasoning based on sameness. This wasn't really religious reasoning, this was the prevailing science of that time. **Scientist meaning people who think about the nature of reality. "Today we have visionary scientists just like Galileo who're advancing radical theories about the nature of existence, the mind, consciousness, psychic phenomena, psychedelics, etc., which are being roundly rejected by materialist scientists in universities and academia using similar kinds of ridiculous arguments as this." The content is different but the structure is exactly the same. "Intellectuals of his time told him that that instrument is the work of the devil and that nothing that could be seen through that instrument can be counted as evidence or truth because it's the work of the devil, so of course we're not going to look into your devil instrument." Any evidence that gets presented contradicting materialism is false by definition because they believe in materialism first and foremost. Nowhere is this more true than with psychedelics. Science at large within academia and university confusing the map for the territory The menu is not the meal. Seeing the sameness between an equation and reality so much that you lose sight of the difference. "Just as ridiculous as a pig believing that God looked like swine, with snout and bristles." A mathematician isn't conscious that he's projecting mathematics onto the world. Example from the social domain Scandinavian schools trying to remove gender stereotypes between men and women by switching the roles in the magazines, showing girls playing with guns, and boys playing with dolls. This will create a whole generation of boys and girls who are confused about how to be masculine and how to be feminine. This is coming from good intentions and yes, not all boys want to be masculine and not all girls want to feminine. But it's also true that it's certainly not the case that boys and girls are indifferent to which toys they play with, their sexual preferences, and whether they have a feminine or masculine core. We don't want to force masculinity or femininity on anybody, but maybe we could have a class on "how to be masculine" and "how to be feminine". After taking both they can decide which ones they want to adopt and what to leave. In traditional and tribal cultures this was taught by the tribe to boys and girls. Our way of going about this doesn't lead to proper functioning. Pre-rational/ trans-rational fallacy Lumping together fundamentalist religion with mysticism. Both seem similar because they're both not 'rational' or 'conventional'. Lumping together all forms of sexual harassment Treating a serial rapist with the same outrage as someone who pats a women on the butt, with the same outrage who tells a dirty joke, etc. Psychedelics Lumping them in with hard drugs. Weed, mushrooms, LSD, DMT are listed as a schedule one substance, the same as heroin, cocaine, etc. We stigmatize psychedelics so much that they're not taken seriously in the medical, scientific community, by the culture at large, thereby this powerful tool ending up going to waste. These sameness pathologies are done by the ego-mind on purpose, precisely because it doesn't want the truth, it loves being deluded. Assuming it already has the truth. Jordan Peterson Lumping together Spiral Dynamics stage Green post-modernism in with soviet style marxism and communism and all the evils of the early 20th century. He's criticizing post-modernism from below not above and advocates for a blue/ORANGE/green society. Overabundance of Orange and Orange materialism is destroying the entire planet, creating gross income inequality and other sorts of social problems, corrupting politics with lobbyist money. We need more Americans who're stuck in Blue and Orange to start to open up and accept Green. Calling all corporations evil Stage Green people commit a lot of sameness pathologies because they tend to see everything as equal. Assuming that all human consciousness is the same Episode: Why People Seem Crazy Especially if you've never experienced altered states of consciousness. Difference pathologies Literal demonization done during wartime Google: "demonization poster WW2" It's hard to kill other people without separating yourself from them. ~The 60s the CIA and U.S. government wanted to use LSD hoping to create "super-soldiers". But the LSD expanded their identity so much such that they couldn't shoot the enemy. Men's right movement Pick-up, MGTOW, RedPill, Incels. Guys who have dysfunctional problems with their entire relationship to womankind as a whole. They were raised in such a way that they didn't know how to attract women or were wounded by some women. But at the same time, they have their biological needs and hormones while still having their secret hatred of women. Don't know how to approach women, what masculinity or femininity is. They end up externalizing the problem and don't take responsibility for educating themselves about it and solving it. Pick up teaches guys how to attract women, but it doesn't really teach them how to understand women, this feeds their egocentric view of women as just sexual objects and how to have transactional relationships with them. There's still a hole in the PUA's soul, blaming women, an insecurity. This is all creating a rift, a fragmentation, between themselves 'men' and 'women'. This turns into a whole political ideology. That's where Jordan Peterson comes in with a silver platter. The problem comes with creating an identity out of the wound. Sam Harris and Islam Ranting against Islam saying it's "the motherload of bad ideas." Islam falls into the trap of the "lesser jihad", externalizing the struggle instead of pursuing the "greater struggle" of going in. Fundamentalism also exists in Sam Harris and within his whole movement. He's a rationalist fundamentalist, the deeper similarity is that the dogmas within Islam are also materialist dogmas that exist within Islam, especially his followers deeply subscribe to his rationalist cult. He has a half-baked sense of awakening and chosen the "lesser struggle" by railing against Islam and other political things. The very evil that Harris is railing against within Islam is the very evil he's committing. Make sure you don't make an identity out of criticizing. Richard Dawkins and himself vs creationists There's a lot wrong with creationism. But he has a different flavor of religion himself, the scientism version of religion. He talks pretty much like a religious person, just as dogmatic, closed-minded, oblivious to the truth of mysticism and non-duality, lumping them together with those of fundamentalist religion. Ethnocentrism and racism Thinking that your culture is a better culture than other cultures and cherrypicking the evidence to justify your beliefs. The reason for this is your identity and your attachment to it. Not seeing one's own evil The reason evil really exists in the world in the first place is because every individual thinks that they are different from all the evil people out there. Focusing outward makes you lose self-reflection which leads to selfishness, thereby creating evil, blindness to one's own self-biases. Assume that you're capable of the very same evils that everybody else is and therefore be careful about justifying your own selfishness to yourself using reason, science, logic, and all sorts of excuses and rationalizations. Awareness is curative. Questions to use for the rest of your life in all sorts of situations: How are these two things the same? How are these two things different? How are these two things deeply the same? Homework: (for the next week 30 to 60 minutes daily) Contemplate this topic of sameness vs difference from scratch. 1.) What is difference between any two objects? What is sameness between any two objects? **Go with direct experience and resist theorizing. 2.) Find the two most distinct things and then find how they're still the same. **See how radically you can pull things apart and then still find similarity no matter what. Develop the ability to be able to both rely on external sources but then be able to isolate yourself for 30 to 60 minutes as though in a hermetic bubble and contemplate a topic that you have studied and read about from scratch. Without bringing assumptions and without bringing preconceived notions or any baggage into it. Become mentally flexible, see both difference and similarity, without needing a particular difference or similarity to be true. A process of letting go. Goal: Nuanced and greyscale, thinker, not black and white. Plus an ability to see the deep interconnectedness of things. Integrate and distinguish. And not using either of these to serve your egoic, self-centered, agenda of survival. 3.) Ponder: "Form is emptiness; emptiness is not different than form." --Heart Sutra

424. How To Discover What's True https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdrmdMhf_sY "If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?" --Dogen Every century there's new stuff discovered that disproves old models of the world How do we know? There are so many different philosophical, religious, and scientific systems. Different teachers teach different things. How do you know science is true unless you have done a deep investigation into the foundations of what science is and how science works? We have to be careful to not assume anything. We have to be willing to investigate how it actually is. (Objective and unbiased) And if the way that it really is contradicts the way that I want it to be or how I think it is, I need to be willing to admit that I have been wrong. Have wrong assumptions or that the way that I want it to be is false. If we assume science is the method to arrive at truth, then which science? Which scientists, from which era? Scientific theories are constantly disproven every century. You are not playing favorites and not trying to defend any worldview. We have to be totally neutral, and indifferent to the result. Maybe it'll be beautiful, maybe it'll reveal something unpleasant. In doing this inquiry we're denying ourselves reliance on external authority. Investigating reality from scratch. No hearsay. We have to take 100% responsibility here. We don't know what methods are valid for discovering the truth. No knee-jerk assessments. You have to be very serious about being introspective and very conscious of your own biases, preferences, psyche, fears, attachments. (What do I want it to be?) Did the idea that science obviously is the method to start with come from yourself or was it the result of cultural programming? If something is true, it must be true independent of someone else telling it to me. It's external to human activity. And perhaps if we could find the truth, perhaps we could ground ourselves in the truth rather than always navigating by human constructions. (Books, science, universities, experts, masters, religions. They have to be grounded to something outside of that, something prior to all that. Or maybe not.) Assumptions: Make assumptions to bootstrap the inquiry process. Every assumption we make, we don't really know if it's true or not. It might seem likely, reasonable, obvious, but again, how do we know what's obvious, likely, etc.? We're judging based on the cultural background we're in. Every time you make an assumption, make a note. If you get the first floor of a skyscraper wrong, the 100th floor is gonna be way wrong. We can't even take reason or logic for granted. Where it all begins is with admitting that you honestly admit that you don't know what the truth is. We don't even know if reason will deliver us the truth. (Because it's very easy for the mind to rationalize whatever worldview it believes in already.) Radical open-mindedness is required. No hearsay, or external human source. Complete objective, completely impartial. That means you have to be open to every possibility. Just because you've never seen something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. 99,999% of reality you haven't seen. You have to be open to surprises. You don't really know, and your assignments of probabilities to outcomes are really ultimately groundless. To be very strict with what you allow within your inquiry assumes that you already know the truth. How are you disallowing something from your inquiry? We cannot prejudge the inquiry. Methods we might use for discovering truth: Reason, basic common sense History. Which we'll allow a little bit for now. Of course, we'll have to question it in the future. Books. But there are so many contradictory books. Intuition. Science. There are so many methodologies. Witchcraft, voodoo, astral projection, psychedelics, meditation, contemplation. Direct experience. Perceptions. Our awareness of the present moment. It seems like that our sense of aliveness comes before reason, science, and religion. Like it is the most fundamental. After all, you have to experience them all. If I eliminate all my direct experiences then all the science flies out the window. You have to experience the Bible, and the word christ. But how can you trust your perceptions? If we find a truth it needs to be certain. No speculation. Keep digging into it. It is possible. Keep questioning. Every criterion will itself be in doubt because your action already reveals your underlying bias. First, spend some years being skeptical, and then spend a few years being skeptical of your own skepticism. There's a logical faculty and an intuitive faculty in the background. And from that intuition, you start to see certain connections. And the big picture is puzzled together of the deep background. Catching a glimpse of the tail rounding the corner. But of course, you're always doubting. Can I trust the logical foreground or the deep background? At this early stage, you don't know, so you just work with it, see where it takes you. Distinguish your thinking about reality and the thing itself. (concept/thought vs direct experience) Abstractions, models, gross simplifications. How do you get to it? Is there even an it? If there is, that would be the truth. If no, then that would be the truth. We're talking about the truest thing that could possibly be. Reality itself. It's not just a word game. Through this whole process, you have to hold your feet to the fire and burn off all your old ideologies and pet theories. It's emotionally disturbing, unpleasant, can make you reclusive, feel like you're losing your mind, depressed. This is just the beginning of the inquiry into the foundations of human knowledge (Epistemology) Thinking independently for yourself. The only thing you have is existence. Figments of your imagination also must exist. Don't you want to know what it is? Keep questioning what truth is. Keep going down the same lines of logic from this episode. Be patient, have a long time horizon. Take it up as a hobby. Real philosophy is life-transforming stuff. Not coming up with ideologies, but really questioning and introspecting. It's learning various principles of how the mind works. Inquiry will teach you the trickeries of your own mind. In a way that you can't possibly learn by reading some book. It'll give you an x-ray superpower to see through the bullshit of other people trying to trick you. Because you know your own tricks so well. If truth is reality, and if truth is finding out how reality actually is, that which is the case. What else is there? That which is not the case. That which is false. And by definition, it's what doesn't exist. So the only thing there is is the truth and nothing else but the truth. So if you don't find the truth, what do you have? That which is not the case. How are you gonna live your life if all you have is that which isn't?

336. Comprehension Has Many Degrees Summary by @AsafTheMagniv https://youtu.be/Fh-BchpGXD0 Levels of comprehension: 1. Knowing the concept exist 2. Properly understanding the concept, Be careful not misinterpreting it - A lot of people go wrong already in this step by misinterpreting the concept - Most people don't even get to the point of properly understanding the concept - The more deep a concept is, the more traps(misunderstanding) there could be. For example, it took Leo 3 years to understand the concept of non-duality 3. Tracing the truth, tracing all of its ramifications, and seeing the significance of it ( still conceptually ) 4. you get glimpses of the concept in reality, in your direct experience - A big leap from level 3 that most people never even get to in their life - To get to stage 4 you need to work/practice, you need to mentally work of contemplation 5. Starting to see these glimpses intermittently, on a regular basis You start to understand how the concept affects and is affected in reality, and you get this understanding occasionally. At this stage you are still unconscious, mostly asleep 6. you see this concept constantly, you become constantly conscious of it to the point where it's difficult to not see it anymore You start seeing the full ramifications not just in theory but in practice You become very aware of all the traps in this process You're getting better and better avoiding the traps, and even if you get trapped you easily wake up and understand that it's a trap Most of the time there are 2 sides to a trap, you can swing too much to the right or too much to the left For example in honesty: 1. you can be not honest and lie or 2. you can be too honest, brutally honest and in the 6th stage, you understand the two sides and you do the between them to not get trapped And Finally, you know how the flower will bloom, you know exactly how your concept is affecting reality and why it can't be any other way, and that's how you get peace "you will never be at peace so long as you believe that things can be otherwise, as long as you don't understand why it exists exactly this way and can't be any other way" "derive your understanding from yourself" Two high-level lessons: 1. There are many levels of comprehension to every insight Which make it very worthwhile to dig deeper into every single one 2. You got to derive some of these truths and insights for yourself, and in fact, most of the growth lies here Which makes it very worthwhile. How to increase the depth of comprehension: 1. start taking ideas more seriously, don't take them as mere philosophy and mere ideas. Ideas can be very powerful things 2. start to seek out true understanding rather than results, don't focus on results or on a particular problem you have. seek to understand the situation, to really understand it means that you know how the mechanics of it come together and how they work and why they work that's a change in your attitude, that's a change in your intentions to all of your problems in life. most people don't go into their problems with a desire for true understanding it's like why am I depressed?, I don't care about that but how do I fix my depression? "The biggest sign that you don't got it, is when you think you got it" Think before someone teaches you something if it's a trivial point or is it a cosmically a significant point, contemplate about it Derivation and Contemplation is not an optional thing, they are a must in this work "the deepest wisdom comes in tight simple packages" which makes it deceptively simple

"Sacrificing the self does not mean much if you are asking God to take out your garbage for you. Cultivate a beautiful loving honest genuine caring small self. Then you will have something worth giving to God." -Unknown

468. What It Means To "Go Meta" House of cards has some great breaking of the 4th wall. Examples: Attracting females is not about what is explicitly stated, it doesn't matter what you say verbally when you're trying to attract a female. What matters is the implicit honest signals that are sent based on how strongly you're able to embody your masculine authenticity and the kind of confidence and humor and detachment from outcome that you're able to display. This is one of the craziest and unbelievable aspects of game when you learn to really game. It doesn't matter what you verbally say, it matters what you sub communicate and what you do. This is what most people don't understand about pickup. Even women say those cheesy pickup lines won't work on me it's just showing they're misunderstanding pickup. It matters how the guy shows up. If shows up and he's confident, he's cocky, he's humorous, he's lighthearted, he's detached, he's cool, he's suave, it doesn't matter if you know he's a player you'll still get attracted. It can be really effective to be meta about picking up a girl. The authentic opener. Admitting something bad and negative about yourself. You're able to have balls and own all things about yourself. And people admire that. Meta-lying. Lying about lying. Deception Self-deception series, very important. There's a meta component to deception. To execute a successful deception you also have to deceive about the fact that you're deceiving. To deceive yourself effectively you have to twice deceive yourself, meta-deceive yourself. By deceiving yourself that you deceived yourself. If you are in denial you'll also deny the fact that you're in denial. Criticizing others. The selfishness of others only bothers me because I myself am selfish. If I want others to stop being selfish I have to make the first and final move, which is to eliminate selfishness within me, and then it doesn't even matter that others eliminate selfishness within them because it no longer bothers me. That'd be Selfish with a capital S. Strange-loopy collapsing between selfishness and selflessness. Neti-neti method. Going meta on the entire world. I'm not this and not that. Keep going meta on everything until you're awake. The finger-pointing to the moon cited by zen masters. Going meta on the finger. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Every single logic itself requires a meta-logic to ground that logic in. And then a metalogic requires a meta-meta-logic to ground it in. That's because all logics are ultimately groundless. Because all of reality is ultimately groundless. So anytime you're dealing with a closed system, which is what a logic is, there's always some larger system that that closed system has to be couched within some larger frame. Any finite frame has another frame outside of it. Meta-philosophy. Philosophy about how to do philosophy. Meta-politics. If conventional politics is about dividing ourselves into tribes and trying to dominate the other one. Meta-politics is about raising the consciousness of everybody involved in the game to the point where they can recognize all these tribal dynamics. And the way in which our worldview and our belief systems are shaping our biases and then we're fighting over these different biases. How it's all just about brute survival, and that our survival agendas are arbitrary and that really we need to spiritualize our politics and make it about consciousness not about winning any particular one policy battle like abortion, civil rights, racism, gun control, etc. Really, politics is about raising the consciousness of mankind and getting everybody to love each other. Meta-science. The stuff of deconstructing the myth of science. How we can make science better? by questioning its foundations. Meta-business. How to create a more conscious business. How business is done as a whole. What are the externalities that businesses create? What kind of impact do businesses have on their environments and on their marketplaces. How do businesses shape the consciousness of mankind individually and collectively? How businesses are just functions of survival usually and then trying to look at business from this higher perspective. Meta-media. Media about media. Meta-relationship. There has to be you and her and then the larger holon of the two of you. Meta-spirituality. The study of all the different schools. Aligning all of those together and taking the best parts. Understanding what all of them are trying to do. Meta-work. Doing work by while you're doing your work finding ways to do your work better. Meta-sex. During sex, you want to be in the flow and moment. But meta-sex would be figuring out ways of how to please each other better and learning how to improve the quality of the sex and the intimacy and then that would be meta-sex. Meat of this episode: Many of our deepest problems can only be solved by going meta. Getting locked in battles on content while not seeing the structure. If you're gonna do something well you must bring the method of doing it, or process of doing it, itself under scrutiny. If you want to do language really well you have to observe your language and create a language about language. If not it's like looking at the moon through a telescope but never spending any time to inspect the telescope itself. If you're too attached to your method then you'll not be able to step outside to then improve the method. It's not that you don't want to look for corruptions where there are none. But that if you went and truly looked you'd be horrified. Going meta creates detachment, that's one of the superpowers of going meta. The whole logic behind spirituality or awakening is that you go meta, meta, meta, meta, meta, meta, and go so meta that eventually you identify with absolutely nothing, and then nothing can hurt you you become literally immortal. Your truest nature is infinite transcendence. That's what makes spirituality so confusing, your mind doesn't want a direct path towards emptiness and complete detachment. It wants to attach to stuff. Therefore it makes spirituality into this very complicated, controversial, difficult ordeal, simply because on its way to nothingness it wants to cling to absolutely everything that it can. You personally suffer when you can't sufficiently suffer and also important domains of life like science, politics, logic, religion, they also suffer when they aren't able to. Jail-breaking the mind requires that the mind go meta. The mind is always engaged in an active process of constructing reality, but the mind is not aware that it's doing so and needs to deny that it's doing so. If you don't deny it you realize that reality is a construction and therefore becomes illusory and therefore it loses its reality. Reality is really just a lack of consciousness of the fact that you're dreaming this whole thing up. The trick is to dream it up and then deny that you dreamt it, that's the whole game. That's the game humans play, always constructing reality to suit ourselves. The trick with science is that no amount of science can get you to realize that you're inside of a dream. Science is happening within a frame. Scientists think that it is this universal solvent. But it's just a picture, in a frame, hanging on a wall in a giant museum with a thousand other paintings. The same goes for rationality. Also just a single painting in a frame. If you get stuck in one single frame from your vantage frame it will seem as though that frame is all that there is. That's what a frame is. It seems total, but it's not total. That's the whole trick. To realize that it's not total, you have to be able to go meta. If you can't go meta or beyond something that thing ends up being the totality of your reality. But really you've just confined yourself to a kiddie pool and there's a giant ocean out there. And no amount of logic or debate will convince you that there's more outside your kiddie pool. The only thing that'll convince you that there's something more outside your kiddie pool is the intuition that there might be something more and then your personal effort to step outside the pool and go find something more. That'd be going meta. That's why scientists can be so dumb, and why highly rational people with high IQs can be so clueless about the nature of existence, and consciousness, and spirituality. Why is meta such a deep feature of reality? It's because reality is infinite. It has no limits. No outer boundary. Completely open-ended. There's always more, no matter how much you've seen, there's always an infinite amount more. Reality is one, reality is infinite, absolute infinity. But we humans we're finite creatures, and we create lots of finite closed systems via language, symbols, thought, and logic. We always try to grasp some little corner of reality, but every little piece of reality we grasp is not the whole thing by definition. But then we take our little finite closed systems and we wanna pretend as though they are the whole thing. But every finite closed system has a boundary around it. If it has a boundary around it that means there's an inside and there's outside. Infinity is that which has no inside and outside, inside and outside are the same, but within every finite closed system, there's always an inside and an outside. And this is where the problem happens. If you have a system that has an inside or an outside that means you could be inside it or outside it. So to go meta is to jump from inside to outside it. Then you can see it. If you're inside of it you can't fully see it. When you're inside of it it seems like it is the total thing. When you're outside of it you can see that oh this is just one part of something larger. Since reality is made out of holons you can infinitely jump outside one holon to another one and another one. And why's reality infinite and not finite? Simply because there can't exist anything outside of reality that would constrain it or put a boundary around it because anything that's outside of it by definition has to be inside of it. As it turns out truth exists, truth and reality are identical, and Truth is infinitely meta. Truth with a capital T is the whole of reality, everything that exists. And that Truth is infinite, it spans forever, it's endless. And this Truth is transcendental, it can't be captured with symbols, thoughts, logic, or any kind of closed systems or language. Any time you try to capture the Truth in a closed system you can capture a piece of it, but the piece is never the whole, therefore you can keep talking and talking and talking but you're never ever going to be able to reach the end of Truth. Truth always escapes symbolic and systemic encapsulation. (Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) So why do smart people not understand God? Because God is not a bearded man in the cloud. God is infinity. God is Truth. God is infinitely meta. To understand God your mind needs to become infinitely meta, literally detach from the whole of reality, every single one of your attachments. And you have to grasp it implicitly. You can't grasp God explicitly in a finite manner, because God is infinite. You can't make God finite. Scientists, rationalists, and other materialists make the mistake of asking for proof for God. But you're asking for a quantified, formalized, finite, explicit, symbolic proof, via language, or logic, or mathematics or whatever, but by definition that can't be God because that's finite. The problem is that you're not understanding what you're asking for. That it's impossible. And the impossible thing that you're asking for you're taking as evidence that God isn't real. It's like you're asking for a square circle. The more fear you have the lower you are stuck. So really just ask yourself what things am I clinging to? What are the payoffs you get by clinging to your ideology? The problem with spiritual growth is that it can't be forced upon you. You have to come to it yourself. Don't let Leo push you beyond where you're at. Maybe you have to go explore the lower stages. Burn through those attachments. And realize they're not as great as you think they are. Then you come back after those 10 or 20 years. When you see the frame of a situation and able to pop outside of the frame, when you do this there's a certain delight that fills your soul. The delight of meta-recognition. You recognize that the finger is pointing towards the moon, rather than just a finger that you look at. You discover that there's something implicit that's being suggested. And when you discover that implicit thing it gives you delight. Going meta has this slippery quality to it. Just like with a really good joke has a strong punchline, and you either get the punch line or you don't. And if you don't get the punchline, explaining the punchline to a person who didn't get it, is not the same thing as just getting it right of the bet. Next time you get that meta-recognition notice how it feels, and ask yourself why are you enjoying it? And then maybe it'll make you more and more interested and then it'll maybe one day lead to your awakening. With going meta you're in some way touching the implicit, touching the divine, discovering the divine within the universe. That's one of the charms of doing spiritual work. Going meta on the topic of going meta. The ultimate level of meta.

**Not sure if extensive enough, but I feel like a lot of this video needs to be watched. 460. Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 3 "Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay, it is an obstructive nuisance." Alfred North Whitehead "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." Nikola Tesla Anybody below the rational level can take this deconstructing as a license to believe whatever is convenient to their survival. Just be careful about that. Main points: It's impossible to do current modern science without language. Science is a linguistic scheme. And any kind of limitations within language itself will sneak themselves into science. Philosophy of language. We can use language to trap ourselves. The problems being more of a linguistic problem than any other. All of science hinges upon language and categories which come with language. As science evolves language evolves. As technology evolves language evolves. Language is an entire vast complex network of meanings, and many of the meanings are subconscious. Every word comes with hidden metaphysical baggage and assumptions and baked in projections and expectations of what reality is. Many of them are not questioned or examined by science and taken for granted. We just assume there is such a thing as a rabbit, energy, matter, the body, death, time. We assume these are just physical objects out there and we're just labeling them. But what if that's not the case? What if our minds are entangled with language such that they can never be disentangled. What comes first, reality, language, mind, and what creates what? What is science? Leo's conclusions: (Different perspectives) Science is an imaginary scheme for explaining, predicting, manipulating, and making sense of the world. It's a projection of the mind. A human invention. Science is a collection of ideas, beliefs, concepts, and models. Symbolic representation. The map and not the territory. A shared cultural web of belief. As Quine talked about so eloquently in part 1. Science is an epistemology and a metaphysics. One e. and one m. out of many possible ones and not the best one. Science is just trial and error. It's a collection of values, principles, norms, standards, and methods. And they all evolve over time. It's a worldview, a mental attachment, and an identity. Science is a perspective. And that everything is a perspective. Reality is perspectival. One out of millions. It's an ideology and that it denies that it's an ideology. Group-think. Institution, bureaucracy, and a collective ego. Science is a state of consciousness. Science is an empirical investigation of how human experience works. Science is holistic, intuitive pattern recognition within human experience. Science is survival. Science is a linguistic structure. A symbolic system. Science is a sensemaking narrative activity that anchors "reality". It grounds you. Science is a collection of conceptual distinctions. Science is finite, limited, partial, relative, subjective truth. Science is a hallucination within universal mind. A dream. The universe is dreaming science. Science is not something that merely academics do. There's a protoscience that comes before science. When you're searching for something you're going through a scientific process. Simple, but this is how science began. The essence is really the exploration of your own first-person phenomena. Stop thinking of science as just some sort of thing that other people do. Take responsibility and consciously be a scientist in your life. Study your own emotions, direct experience. Actualized.org is inner science. And you have to take responsibility for this inner science you can't believe some authority, you need to test. There's cost and risk associated with the experiments. Deep questions to contemplate about science: (Over the next 10 years) What is science? What makes science work? How can we be sure science is true? Where did science come from and who invented it? What are sciences assumptions? What is sciences' function? What are sciences limitations and biases? Why has science committed so many deep epistemic blunders historically? In what ways is science corrupted? What alternatives exist to science? "I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics." Michel de Montaigne "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you." Werner Heisenberg "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a mircale. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

459. Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 2 "It's structured to cover up a lie. The most dangerous lies are lies in the guise of truth. Where, all that you say factually is true, but it's part of a semantic field which is in itself a lie." -Slavoj Zizek "There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them." -George Orwell Only listening is insufficient. Long contemplation is required and deriving the insights yourself. Your mind is the gatekeeper. Objections: Ironically, shutting down someone critiquing science because science will evolve on its own is the very mechanism keeping science stuck. And the nature of the ego-mind is to be stubborn and refuse to evolve and change. The same way it is in institutions. It's more like a war, not some effortless evolution. So this video plus contemplation is the very evolution of science! Pragmatism is equating the manipulating of reality with truth. Usefulness =/= truth. Lying is very useful for survival but it doesn't make it true. Scientists are just not conscious of what they're doing and the limitations of their worldview. Newtonian mechanics. Using it to track the trajectory of a projectile very accurately, you could use this to kill your enemies, and you might really start to believe that it's true. But modern science recognizes NM isn't true, but useful. Or standard model of atomic theory. You can use that model to predict phenomena, but again it's been recognized as not true. Yet it's taught in high schools all around the world. It also would allow us to justify any sort of crazy worldview as long as it's useful. So the tribal people use all sorts of beliefs in deities and ghosts to help them survive in the amazon and therefore it's true? The pragmatic defense would never grant this kind of leeway to religion. Truth is not the same thing as survival, happiness, usefulness. And science is not the same thing as pragmatism. Science is much deeper than the pragmatists claim. Science serves a much deeper cultural function. It creates a narrative, of where we are going and why it's happening. Absolute truth cannot be explained. Modern science's methods are incapable of grasping absolute truth. So either it admits that its methods are limited, or they completely deny its existence. To admit that would create a huge problem for science. Science is studying absolute truth. Without absolute Truth, science couldn't exist. Just like there's no best culture. The same applies to science. There's an infinite number of how to slice the cake. We tend to slice the cake in a way that facilitates our manipulation of material reality. Makes us believe that reality is material. That our way is the best alternative and the truth. But we just haven't explored other sciences. There's no one objective "science". You have to adapt your standards to nature. Not nature to your standards. Your mind has an infinite capacity to deny observation. If it doesn't fit the confines of your worldview. Anomaly Problem of science: At what point come enough researchers come forth with enough data that you recognize it. There are no objective criteria by which you can adjudicate these anomalies. It's very easy to dismiss even anomalies that disprove a theory merely as noise because there's no standard to determine something as just noise or fact. Recontextualization Problem: We assume that facts are static objective truths that we find out in the world. Facts make only sense within a context. Two types of qualities of mind. Not context-aware. Facts have meaning independently without a context. One that is understands there's no such thing as a fact outside of its context. Therefore context becomes crucial. Any scientific facts can always be radically recontextualized in the future to give it a totally different meaning. Entanglement Problem: Because reality is one singular thing, you can't separate it into parts. And this leads to entanglement problems. The measuring instrument that a scientist uses to study nature is entangled with the data it produces. We tend to assume that data can just be independent of the instrument that is measuring it. That is untrue. Not only measuring instruments but also eyes, ears, the entire human nervous system. The instrument can be living or inanimate. Any data that is generated is going to be entangled with that instrument. The scientific method is entangled with the results and the data and the conclusions that are produced by the method. If you have a different method you get different results. The question then becomes which methods generate which kinds of results. Individual statements of scientific fact are entangled with the entire scientific framework for evaluating that fact. The scientist is entangled with his experiment. But the scientist is part of nature, he's not just a neutral observer of nature. His mind is entangled with the experiment he's doing. His upbringing and biases are going to influence what constitutes a valid experiment and not, his personal beliefs. Your ego-mind is running the whole show. It is there before science, it invented science as part of its function of making sense of reality. Reason and emotions are entangled. Science is entangled with perception and consciousness. It is completely dependent on these, if they change, whole science would change. Science is also entangled with survival. Primarily of ego-mind more so than the body. Science and culture. It's hugely significant for science. It corrupts science deeply. This all leads to: All scientific claims are perspectival, relative, biased, and partial due to these entanglements. These entanglements forbid science from being objective or absolute or neutral, there's no such thing a neutral. Your mind is completely entangled with reality, culture, science, perception, consciousness, etc. If your mind is so entangled with reality then how can you do objective science? "Lex Fridman: You are observing stuff right now, on the conscious level. Do you think there are echoes of that kind of entanglement on our macro scale? Susskind: YES! Absolutely! For sure. We are quantum mechanically entangled with everything in this room. If we weren't, well, we wouldn't be observing it. But on the other hand, you can ask me: am I really comfortable with it? And I'm uncomfortable with it in the same way that I can never get comfortable with five dimensions. My brain isn't wired for it." Interview with Lex Fridman "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Werner Heisenberg "Both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable." David Bohm "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve." Max Planck "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." John Archibald Wheeler "The body-mind is an open circuit completed by the world." Maurice Merleau-Ponty The number one enemy of truth is belief. And science is 99% belief. The hard part of science is not to find truth, but to get the many unthinking people who don't do any science to accept the truth. This requires a culture war, a massive marketing campaign. Science and marketing are entangled. The mechanisms have largely stayed the same from religion to science. Merely the content has changed. It takes a long time for culture to change. The majority still don't understand the lessons of QM or general relativity or chaos theory. Or the works of Georg Kanter with multiple sets of infinity. Or Kurt Goedel's incompleteness theorem. Or postmodernism. 99% of humans do not understand these things. Not fully contemplated the significance of the epistemic and metaphysical implications and significance of these things. The history of science is full of these sorts of epistemic blunders which are then denied and whitewashed. "Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "savior of mothers",[2] Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever." Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time, and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. He died 14 days later after being beaten by the guards, from a gangrenous wound on his right hand which might have been caused by the beating. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory." Science routinely talks about how willing it is to better itself and to evolve itself. When in practice it isn't. Historically all these errors are whitewashed away. And it's happening today. With every generation, the boundaries are expanded. Through a culture war process. The truth is threatening to ego-minds. Science is not immune to biases, psychology, prejudices, attachments, ideology, group-think, arrogance, cultural norms, survival. These institutions like Cal-Tec are not primarily concerned with truth but with donors and survival. This is why they charge their students so much for attendance and books, etc. (Corruption within science) Fragmented and technocratic picture of reality. Artificially fragmented reality into all these different subfields. Reality is not just the sum of its parts. We need a breaking up of all these boundaries and get them communicating with each other. Reductionist bias at the heart of materialist science. You cannot reduce all of science to physics, bouncing atoms, or strings. You can't fully understand all of the frogs by blending them up and then studying them under a microscope. All Leo is doing in the series is questioning all the assumptions ever made by science. He said he'll burn everything to get to the truth. Don't be afraid to throw stuff into the fire, the truth will survive the fire, it's not hurt by questioning, it's benefitted.

458. Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 1 "Every scientific man, in order to preserve his reputation, has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized." - Alfred North Whitehead "The theoretical authority of science is much smaller than it is supposed to be." - Paul Feyerabend Four-part series on the epistemic and metaphysical foundations of science, the limits of science, and how to take science beyond science. Your entire identity is wrapped up with the worldview of science. So your mind is going to have an entire host of sneaky defense mechanisms. I'm not anti-science, I'm anti-dogma. I love science so much that I want to clean up science. Heretic Problem It's a defense mechanism and as soon as somebody wants to clean up the institution, whether it's religion/science/etc, they're excommunicated. First distinction Science can be criticized from below or above. The greatest deceptions are not pure falsehoods, they are truths with nuggets of falsehood inside of them. The success of modern science has given us an overinflated sense of how much we understand reality. The doing of science and understanding science as a system are two totally different variables. Understanding science as a system requires stepping outside of the system. Meta-science/Philosophy/Epistemology. Thinking outside the box of the limitations of your system. Here we're disputing the interpretations, the assumptions, the context, the paradigms, the methodology, and the meta-science behind the empirical measurements. And the entire sensemaking apparatus behind these measurements. Two meanings of science: The pop-cultural/laymen science. The myth of science. What normies think science is. Distinct from professional/academic scientists. Pop-cultural myth of science: Scientism, rationalism, atheism, reductionism, logicism, logical positivism. Scientific & rational vs religious fundamentalists, new age, woo-woo, cult stuff, etc. This battle is present within the culture and the zeitgeist. And when you see Deepak Chopra you lump him in with the crazy nutcases. Putting science on the pedestal idealizing it. Science is the only tool to lead us to objective truth. This makes you very attached to your worldview and perspective. And then it starts diverging from the truth and not about it anymore. Culture creates scientists and scientists create culture. More about culture in part 2. Biggest misconceptions of the pop-cultural myth of science: Science is just a collection of objective facts. Science equals truth because it works and successful at producing technology. That there is a clear boundary between science, pseudoscience, and religion. Science is the opposite of religion. Therefore can't be an ideology. And therefore immune to these problems. Science is not based on belief or authority. Science is immune from problems of the ego. Scientists understand what science is. Science is objective and unbiased because it ignores things like subjective feelings, emotions, and first-person experiences. If a thing is true it can be proven by science. Reason and logic are exclusive to science and differentiates it from delusion. Reason and logic are objectively true. The scientific method is an obvious given, monolithic, static, and singular thing. There are no methodological disputes between scientists. Science does not make deep errors. Unlike religion, science is eager to correct itself. Science is immune to self-deception, and psychological, historical, and cultural forces. Science seeks truth. Mathematics is objectively true. Science proves the existence of an objective, external, material reality. Science proves the existence of other beings, of objects, of a self, that you are the body. That proof is a simple objective notion that is not relativistic. Science does not have any contradictions within it unlike let's say religion. Science is not circular, unlike religion. Science has debunked religion, mysticism, the new age, spirituality, the paranormal, ESP, and God. Science is not relative to culture, language, or the human mind. Science is not corrupted by business and capitalism. Meat of this topic: What is science? Success is not happiness, success is not truth. How can you know science isn't making any errors right now. You have never validated science as a method. A true scientist is interested in understanding everything that's possible to understand in the universe. He doesn't judge. The total pursuit of knowledge. So now the question is: What are all the valid ways of pursuing knowledge? Meditation, contemplation, shamanism, voodoo, reading tea leaves, belief, witchcraft, gossip from your neighbors, speculation in an armchair, logical deductions, reason, looking at omens, dreams, visions, direct experience, alchemy, phrenology, yoga, scripture, holy book, ancestral stories, astral projection, animal sacrifice, books, google searches, microscopes, radar, x-rays, interviews, polls, surveys, statistics, drawing a map. Everyone will circle different words. A tribe shaman is mapping flowers and what ailments they can cure. Is he a scientist? Is that science? What's the difference between the tribal people trusting the shaman and how laymen interact with science never having validated the method themselves? And when the tribal people create a big story on top of the fact that the red flower cures you of some ancestor God which doesn't have anything to do with the facts. How is that different from the secular way the laymen and academics and pro-scientists are? Without having actually done witchcraft how do you know it doesn't have a scientific component? It's from your culture. You're creating a deep methodological confirmation bias. Remember scientific method wasn't empirically validated at all. All knowledge is non-trivial. Distinguishing truth from falsehood is completely non-obvious and non-trivial. If you are the first human alive, completely ignorant, knowing nothing, you do not know that alchemy will yield valid knowledge, witchcraft will yield valid knowledge, meditation will yield valid knowledge, etc. Completely non-obvious. You are already assuming running an experiment will yield more valid knowledge than just sitting in an armchair and speculating. Not obvious. There is no neutrality in how your mind constructs reality. It makes it up on the fly. And what you consider "science" is part of your meaning-making system. Anything the ego-mind imagines to be really it takes as objectively true. Method is completely relativistic. Not that the method hasn't been found yet. But that just isn't such a method in the entire universe, because the universe is relativistic, all knowledge is relativistic. The only way to empirically validate the scientific method would be to explore the entire universe in totality and to know every fact about the universe and only then you can say in retrospect yes our method was valid. We're developing the method as we're going. It's like we're trying to build a ship at sea. -Otto Neurath, Philosopher. Therefore. Literally, scientists have blind faith in the scientific method because their method is limited and it will always be found limited in the future, it will always have to be expanded. Question begging in science: Using science to validate the scientific method science is circular, similar to religion. You can't do this with science, you need meta-science to do this. The scientist sees meta-science as woo-woo stuff so he can't go outside his narrow confines of science because he considers it invalid. So in truth, it's impossible to distinguish science from pseudoscience. You would need the entire truth of the universe and didn't need science. It begs the question, there is no clear line. You have to use science to distinguish between the two. The belief that philosophy is dumb and irrelevant and unscientific and unnecessary to the hard sciences is itself an untested metaphysical epistemic claim which you hold unconsciously. Notice that your ego-mind is playing tricks on you. It has the power to deny any point at any time as long as it suits you convincing yourself what you're doing is truthful, not self-serving. Reason and logic themselves face the same problem of circularity. How do you know which reasons are valid? Thinking that the world is rational and that you can distinguish truth from falsehood through rationality is complete nonsense and itself irrational. Everybody who has ever believed something crazy or false has always had good reasons and logic behind their beliefs. That being the case, how can you ever think that you can trust logic and reason? Logic and reason are completely co-opted by the ego-mind you can't trust them. There is in fact no clear distinction between the reasonable and the unreasonable, the rational and the irrational. It's actually culturally defined and evolves over time. Paul Feyerabend - "One can show the following: give any rule, however 'fundamental' or 'necessary' for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule but to adopt its opposite." "The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal: his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test." - Paul Feyerabend "The history of science shows that the progress of science has constantly been hampered by the tyrannical influence of certain conceptions that finally came to be considered as dogma. For this reason, it is proper to submit periodically to a very searching examination, principles that we have come to assume without any more discussion." - Louis de Broglie "I believe there is no philosophical high road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest." -Max Bohr On the one hand, science wants to claim that it is strictly empirical yet in practice it's highly theoretical and most of the people involved in science actually do zero empirical work. Science is 99% interpretation in theory, and conjecture, and speculation and interpretation and assumption and all this and one percent only one percent of any kind of empirical fact Science has never been a set of individual raw facts like some database or excel spreadsheet. The myth of scientism paints science this way. Science is full of oversimplifications. Science is completely intertwined with language, culture, philosophy, basically, anything you can conceive of, it's this giant mess. Underdetermination problem: Given a set of five raw data points. You can create many models and many explanations for those five data points and they have implications for future data points. Ways of making sense of reality. But truth is not a model. All of science is deeply theory-laden. You can't separate fact from theory. Science is a giant web of ideas, every idea pointing to other ideas. They loosely connect on the periphery to some sort of empirical data, which really that's not objective truth, what it's connecting to is to different measurements from our instruments. On the inside of the thin periphery of this field are all the ways in which you make sense of all this data. It can be secular, religious, new-age on the inside accounting for the same data. What you take objection to is not the data, but how to explain the data, and which data to focus on, how to interpret the data, and what the data means, because raw data means nothing to you as a human. Nobody gets heated about data, the ego gets emotional about things that threaten its survival. Pretending to be neutral. No fact means anything in isolation from the framework that it's looked at from. Interpretation is unavoidable in science. Also, which relationships between the data are you emphasizing and tracking, a lot of what science is is pattern recognition. In a sense which relationships you pick is biased. "The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experienced. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. The total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions - experience - that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement - especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Any statement can be held true come what may if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying QM; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein, Newton, or Darwin Aristotle? For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits the myth of physical objects is epistemically superior to most in that it proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." --Willard Van Orman Quine Most rationalists want to create a mechanical proof-generating system that will be able to easily adjudicate between truth and falsehood. Nature is so complex, sprawling, and counter-intuitive that you can't do that. The biggest geniuses in science were able to think outside the confines of science. "So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." - Albert Einstein "I want to know God's thoughts… the rest are details." -Albert Einstein

@Loving Radiance @FlyingLotus Well edited notes! 200. All Of Religion Explained In One Video Religion vs Science - The origins of all major religions are actually grounded in a truth that the rational, scientific mind hates to admit. Why are there so many similarities between religions? And why have they gotten such a strong foothold on culture and society? Rationally minded people have a lot more similarities with religious people than they'd like to admit. Everything said here is empirical. You can verify this in your own direct experience if you want. The problem with the science vs religion debate: humans are extremely dogmatic. Clinging to a worldview or belief. Doing it unconsciously. Thinking you have the facts. This isn't a problem of religion, but of the human psyche. We don't just treat these issues emotionally. Even your rational view of looking at the world is just as grounded in emotions and dogma. Another problem is that the rational person doesn't see any supernatural stuff and says: "why then would I assume that supernatural stuff exists?" Why do so many religions exist? With so many common elements and threats? You have to think about this very open-mindedly. Following explanations of the origin of religions are wrong: Religion is just primitive stupidity, superstition, tradition, social-political controlling mechanism. Might be true to some degree, but they miss the core. The core: There is an absolute Truth and this absolute Truth is accessible to human beings. It is not accessible to the rational mind. This the rational mind hates. But if your mind is rejecting this idea and it's not even open to this possibility you're being dogmatic. Rejecting out of hand. Why does this happen? You've got a sense of personal self. You believe that you are a body, this mind, and brain inside the body. You've got this personal story, you can remember the time you were born, the way you grew up, the way you're gonna die, etc. That all makes pretty good sense. Except there's one problem. Problem: If you look very carefully and very deeply, what you're gonna realize is that this sense of self that you have is actually an illusion and that there's nothing as a sense of self. You can jailbreak the mind from the brain. Answering the deep existential question of who you are. You are literally nothingness. Cannot be believed or logically understood, it has to be directly experienced. That'd be enlightenment. Second enlightenment. What is existence? The absolute nature of existence is revealed. All of reality comes from Nothingness. Another enlightenment. Everything is nothing. The same on an existential/metaphysical level. Absolute Truth is the ultimate enlightenment. Existence arises out of nothing. This Nothingness/ultimate Void is God. The source of everything. No space, no location, no size, no personal God. Nothingness doesn't have any of those qualities. We're not talking about an idea of Nothingness, which is something. We're talking about literally Nothingness. You are Nothing. God is Nothing. You are God. This is the core of every major religion. All major religions are grounded in the truth of no-self. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Sufism, Yogic practices in India and the east are founded on this. This explains a whole hell of a lot if you look at religions through this lens. But the truth of no-self has to be directly experienced. Thinking about Nothingness is something. You can't get at the Nothingness through thinking. You cannot do science without language. There's a third alternative of understanding reality. 1. Conceptualize about it. Creating a model about how reality works. Science and religions do this. 2. An even better one. Experience it with your own senses. First-person experiences. And science is great because it founded its models on experiences. It seems like this is the end of the story. 3. What if you could actually be the thing itself. But you're extremely attached to your selfhood. Jailbreaking your brain doesn't happen easily because everything in your psyche resists it. You can't communicate being. Being something, you have to be it. Everything you communicate about it is just more story. So the only way to get and use this third alternative of being is to actually do the being yourself. Because it's so difficult to actually jailbreak your own mind that when you talk about these things to other people they construct stories and they turn this stuff into belief systems. And those beliefs turn into myths. It's mostly talked about in analogy. Because you can't talk about it only be it. That's a big problem because other forms of human knowledge can be easily spread. So the only way you can mass-spread the truth of no-self is by turning it into a belief system that makes it necessarily false. Think about what life was like 5000-2000 years ago. Scientific principles and sound philosophical reasoning processes were nonexistent. So there was not a very scientific way to explain the things explained here now. Then a few in a million breakthrough and some stay silent, but then others want to distribute their realization of living in a dream. All they could do is tell stories because their path to an enlightenment experience wasn't well studied or established. It also had to be made palatable to the culture, that's in a sense what religion tries to do. But no matter what explanation you give of no-self it doesn't really matter. Because every explanation is wrong. The only right "explanation" is to have the person become the Truth themselves and get it for themselves. Every twist put on it is just a tool, a teaching mechanism. The question is are you gonna be receptive to this tool or want it. Getting lost in ideas and stories, looking for it where you will never find enlightenment. That's what ended up happening with religions. Talking about it without realizing what the hardcore mystics were talking about. If you study every major religion you discover that there's a hardcore mystical strand called esoteric. Living religion in a true way. Seeming very radical and very anti-mainstream. But that what the truth is. They're usually demonized. They can't compete with the hyped-up bullshit that's generated when you take the truth of no-self and you spin a bunch of crazy story about it and give it to the dogmatic mind. The dogmatic mind can't understand the truth of no-self, but it can very easily take no self, spin some tails around it and then understand those and latch on and cling to those. Which is exactly what religions do. Terms and concepts in religion mean really: God = Absolute Nothingness. You are it. But identified with your body. Heaven & hell = Hell refers to your current existence of being stuck and identified with your body that's going to die. And because of that, there's suffering. Heaven is the disidentification of yourself with your body and becoming absolute Nothingness. No one and nothing can't be harmed. It exists absolutely all the time forever. Untouchable. Faith = Your ability to open your mind up to the third possibility. (Concepts, Experience, Being) You have to have faith in it.

241. Ultimate Model Of Human Knowledge Dogmatism: Set in your own beliefs, and trying to prove your own beliefs as correct. History: Cultures being blind to other cultures. A lot of these cultures sure did hold a lot of crazy beliefs. How is it that our beliefs are right, compared to other cultures? History of Science: Intellectual blunders by intelligent people. 500 years ago believed that the earth is the center of the universe. Or that the sun orbits around the earth. 2000 years the majority of mankind believed that the earth is flat. Why don't we take these doubts more seriously? Why do intelligent people believe crazy things? What if you're the one who's wrong? How can you really honestly assess that you aren't bullshitting yourself? (self-deception) Epistemology (Theory of knowledge) How do we know what's true? How can you be certain of your own beliefs? Examine your beliefs totally objectively. Belief -> Justification. How do you know that that's true? How do you know the next and next thing is true? The justification itself it's just another belief. Until you arrive at some ultimate rock bottom belief. (assumption) Called the "self-evident" assumptions. But how do you really know what is self-evident, and what isn't? You believe it not because there's a good piece of evidence, but because it feels right. Intuitively it makes sense because it fits into other things that I know about the world. If this wasn't the case, other things in my worldview wouldn't make sense. But that's a feeling. How do you know that you can trust your feeling? What if human intuition isn't the only intuition out there? How can you really trust yourself, to be a fair judge in your own trial? It all boils down to some fundamental belief that is never justifiable, but just accepted on faith! All the justifications are ultimately groundless. Your belief that God doesn't exist, is ultimately no more justified than someone's belief that God does exist. Every belief system has a personal bias in it. You're using your own intuition to judge. Does it feel right to you? It's your own personal bias. It's an emotional thing. Not just an intellectual thing. We're all just using our intuitions. They are highly self-biased. That's the game that's being played. Quein's Model of the Knowledge Graph: Every single belief fits into this graph. The graph only contacts empirical truths along the edges. All the stuff that's on the inside is all the beliefs that don't really contact reality directly. A belief: A statement about reality that you think is true. Or think is false. Human knowledge is this graph: Your beliefs are man-made and only the edges are empirical facts, the rest is up to you. Not every single belief is pinned down by hard facts. The system is underdetermined. This gives you wiggle room. You can't just take a single belief and really justify whether it's true or false. Cause it depends on other beliefs and other facts within your world view. The whole thing deeply interconnected. A fundamentalist takes a certain belief and holds it as so true, that he's able to then readjust his entire knowledge to then somehow support or buffer that one belief or one statement from contact with direct experience. There's nothing that's outside of this model. Even the most fundamental unquestionable things are just additional models. Logical laws are not hard empirical facts, these are things that sit in the middle of the knowledge graph. That's the stuff that's the most unassailable. (unanfechtbar) Also, the stuff that allows to hold onto no matter what evidence is presented. How can you really trust yourself? Gods, physical forces, physical objects, quarks, atoms, aren't brute hard facts. These are conceptual entities that we create. Man-made things. You don't encounter them in direct experience. They exist within the center of your knowledge graph because they're useful for explaining the raw hard facts. Science is not brute hard facts. It's a lot of modeling and conceptualizing. And those models are then supported by experiments and brute hard facts, but then there still is a lot of interpretation going on, a lot of wiggle room for what kinda models you can create. Even mathematics is not excluded from this discussion even logic. All these things are man-made creations. The only reason we care about them or feel that they're true is because in some sense they help us deal with the indisputable raw data. Our statements of the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a cooperate body. You're never evaluating one individual statement. All of your beliefs come into play at the same time. They all reinforce each other. You're dragging this person's entire worldview into the argument. That's why we get very emotional and defensive. Debating = A clashing of two knowledge graphs. Takeaways: 1. A ton of leeway for how we construct our own personal knowledge graphs. They're mostly arbitrary. Not nearly as set in stone and fixed as we like to believe. There's so much wiggle room that you could almost say, that they're a complete fiction of the mind. God is one of these fictional entities and it's fundamentally no different from an entity such as an atom or molecule. Not if you really look at it objectively 2. World views work in a holistic way. The entire worldview gets questioned simultaneously. That*s what makes the view so different to question. It's extremely easy for the other person to wiesle out of any argument you create because this knowledge graph has got a lot of ways that it can do mental gymnastics and accommodate any kind of fact that you present to it. This creates a lot of blind spot possibility. 3. Argumentation and justification are just a game. A tool that the graph uses to maintain its structural integrity. That's what you're doing when arguing. Or justifying something in your mind. Not just philosophical stuff but everything. Views on: women, men, murder, rape, what you can accomplish in life, politics, cosmology, etc. This directly speaks to your life! Nobody wants to admit that we're all playing a justification game in our minds. And that this knowledge graph is controlling us more than we control it. People care about practically. They don't really care about truth. What's convenient to them in their life. Our senses are human in is what we're receiving as hard factual data. These are unique to us. So what can we really know for certain? Enlightenment: What if it was possible to get rid of the self? This boundary. What if that's a conceptual boundary, not a physical boundary. What if this self is actually a node within the knowledge graph. Then you have a possibility of direct access to empirical reality. This allows us to access truth directly without using the graph at all. Not construction of entities or models about truth, you can get truth straight from the source. Truth is what remains after the knowledge graph has been completely destroyed. Because it's at the rock bottom of everything. The explanations aren't truth, they're just explanations. What will make real change, is not adding to your knowledge graph, but destroying your entire knowledge graph. But you can't destroy it by listening to Leo. By thinking more stuff. You can't think your way into enlightenment. Every single actualized video is just adding more shit to your knowledge graph. It can't do anything else. Because this is how human knowledge works. It's a game. Rearranging a web of bullshit. This is why people disagree so much. Too busy rearranging the bullshit web of beliefs, not recognizing that they're just beliefs, and there is something deeper going on. (Actualized fights illusion with illusion.) What's required is to destroy the graph.

372. WHAT IS IDEOLOGY? "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." -A misquote by Mark Twain Number one rule for life when it comes to knowledge: Don't be ideological. Ideology is the greatest obstacle to truth-seeking. It corrupts both science and spirituality. A cohesive web of beliefs about how reality works. And with it comes a stubborn intellectual attachment. Almost always this set of beliefs say something about how you think things ought to be. (Normativity) Synonyms: Belief, Dogma, Paradigm, World View, Perspective. (Not perfect synonyms) Ideology comes in degrees and flavors One big misconception that people have about the topic of ideology is that this is just exclusive to religion Leo always mentions the rational, scientific, "skeptic" people, not because they're shit or to be demonized or everything they say is wrong. But to become aware of the subtler forms of ideology and the danger of that. Use it to isolate and pinpoint those hidden ideological positions you hold Be careful in not becoming the ideologue yourself in labeling others ideological. No black and white thinking here. Ideology sells and it's addictive to the mind. It's crack for the mind. Ideology reveals many deep inner workings of the human mind It's not about the content. But your mode of holding the belief. The meta-structure. You can hold the belief about God in an ideological manner or not. Things people get most ideological about are identity issues: Gender, sex, livelihood, power, race, ethnicity, civil rights, culture, equality. Metaphysical issues: cosmological, issues pertaining to the core of what you think reality is or truth. Morality. Issues of life and death, the more serious the issue is the more likely someone is to be ideological about it. And of course politics and power. Even in video games. Fitness. Diet. It's about building an identity around it. Spiral dynamic stages blue, orange, and Green are ideological in their own ways. As you're developing up the spiral, what's generally happening is that you're becoming more mature and becoming more conscious and your sense of self and identity is expanding. And so as that happens your form of ideology becomes subtler and subtler. Ideology is not particular to one type of belief (religion, capitalism, etc). It's a very general function of the mind. As the mind develops, as culture develops, as humanity develops, the content always changes, but the ideology stays. And of course, it lessens and lessens as we become more aware. This is what yellow understands, not demonizing them. What does every ideology have in common? Every ideology is conceptual and belief-based and it's dependent on language. If there was no language and no conceptualizing there would be no ideologies whatsoever of any kind. It's something that your mind is doing. And also that there's stuff outside of your mind. Every ideology feels true due to confirmation bias. Every ideology basically claims absolute truth for itself. Claiming an absolute truth is sort of the point of an ideology. All ideologies are arrogant. Being certain that what you hold is correct, believing that you figured out reality. If you really did, why would you hold ít so tightly, get emotional and heated? An ideology thinks that reality is simple. All ideologies are fundamentally stubborn and closed-minded. That's the point of having an ideology. To close your mind down to further inquiry. All ideologies refuse to self-reflect. An ideologue just wants to defend his ideology. Why self-reflect, why question the truth, when I've already got the truth is what he thinks. All ideologies lack self-awareness. All ideologies refuse to explore new perspectives. And to have radically new experiences. Almost all ideologies take themselves way too seriously. Because they think they're right, and what they think they're right about, they think is important. The more ideological a person is the more serious that person tends to be. All ideologies tend to be black and white thinking. They tend to fail to make subtle distinctions between different kinds of people and situations. Tend to lump stuff together. All ideologies are normative. Make rules that everyone has to follow. All ideologies are defensive. Because fundamentally they're in denial about some aspect of reality. All ideologies are emotional not grounded in truth, or in logic, or reasons, or evidence, they're grounded in emotions. Deep down it's rooted in fear, attachment. It's a matter of life and death. Your very survival. They govern how you live. Your opportunities in life. Who you can have sex with. Who you can marry. How you earn a livelihood. Ideologies attack. Judge, criticize, blame, scapegoat, demonize. All ideologies use projection to defend themselves. Because the ideology is disowning one part of reality or your own self, to successfully do that what needs to happen is that the psyche needs to project that out onto other people. They all cause suffering to various degrees. All ideologies are incapable of explaining all of reality. All ideologies are necessarily partial. This is why they're not the absolute truth. They're creating this bubble of ideology. No ideology understands the nature consciousness itself. And all the levels stages of consciousness that exist. All ideologies spread themselves as viruses Ideology confuses beliefs for reality. Belief and experience. Concept and actuality. All ideologues fail to understand that the truth can never be captured with beliefs, or with models, mathematics of any kind. Never ever. Not even close. Why is ideology problematic? It closes the mind to genuine inquiry. Confirmation bias. It becomes an egoic identity. It locks the mind into one single perspective. But human development is about expanding your capacity to take on more and more perspective. It oversimplifies matters. Because it wants to judge, criticize and demonize. It's not interested in investigating seriously. It makes people intolerant, oppressive, violent, and cruel. Most of the world's violence comes from ideology. It wastes time and energy. Arguing for it. Spreading it. It radicalizes people. It fragments. And they become antagonistic against one another. Ideology is the opposite of love and consciousness. Which is the whole purpose of life and development. Stalls real solutions and progress. Attacking others, so that no real solutions come. Israel and Palestine. Both sides have been radicalized. It corrupts science. True science requires extreme open-mindedness. Complete nonideological. It even sours truthful things. Like religions for example. The truthful nuggets are completely corrupted by the fact that it's been turned into an ideology. What is the deep function of ideology? It's to maintain a sense of separate self. To build identity. It actually is who you are. To maintain a sense of reality. If you were to really surrender all your ideologies you would have to admit that you don't really know anything. That you don't even know what reality is. You were not even sure that you were ever born. To disown and deny certain aspects of reality. Stop you from questioning reality To prevent self-reflection. Why do ideologues spread their ideology? For a sense of belonging To create a false life purpose (motivated by your deficiency needs) It gives the mind a sense of security in an otherwise insecure world To rile up a mob that is going to be loyal fans of mine. It's extremely easy to sell shit, to a uniformed, emotional mob who's afraid, and has some enemy that we're gonna scapegoat. The easiest way to sell stuff. Because when you have very nuanced. Independently thinking, highly conscious individuals, it's hard to sell to them. The only stuff that will help them raise their consciousness. What's the opposite of ideology? Not-knowing Openmindedness Experience Consciousness Being Presence Truth/actual Truth An empty mind Wisdom Detachment Unconditional love Homework: In your direct experience, feel the distinction between being ideological and really not. Every great sage steers their students away from ideology- https://www.actualized.org/downloads/how-ideology-works-worksheet.docx

360. COLLECTIVE EGO "Every sufficiently complex system tends to exhibit ego." A lens for understanding the behaviors of social systems like family, political parties, religions, institutions, businesses, and governments. Once you start to understand the tricks of your own ego you start to understand all social systems. Good because then you can see: Why are these social systems malfunctioning How to guide these systems to better systems better levels of performance and higher consciousness Ego: The irrational self-preservation instinct that a complicated system has. (Human being, Human brain, social systems) Self-preservation is highly irrational. Inside VS outside. The order that's being maintained. (human organism, insect, bacteria) That which is not the thing that is trying to survive. Every sufficiently complex organism needs to start to develop some sort of ego. How life is constructed at all. Any complicated system. Not only biological organisms. The more complicated a system becomes the more sophisticated the ego structures become. The more order it has, the more fragile it is. The more vulnerable it is to little things causing great errors. So maintaining homeostasis becomes the number one priority of any complex system. (whether it's a human being or some sort of collective organization) Examples of collective ego: Family, Club, Musical band, Sports team, Gang, Committee, Local church, Business, Ashram or monastery, Cults, Religions, Nonprofits, Political parties, Labor unions, Cities, Grassroots campaigns, Communes, Online forums and subreddits, Institutions like mathematics or science, Universities, Even entire professional fields: Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants, Spiritual schools, Races, and ethnic groups, Alliances and nations (nato, EU, UN), Human species as a whole, Culture, Language, Cancer, The entire earth as a whole Of course not all complex systems exhibit ego: Computers, Cars, Houses. What's required is a vast interconnectedness, the way that you get inside of a brain. Start to draw a parallel between your struggle for self-control in life and the collective egos all around you which also struggling for self-control Life at the most general level is all about maintaining self-control Start to notice the similar dynamics that are going on Draw the parallel between self-preservation running a muck in your own life and running a muck collectively. The groups that we're part of shape us enormously. And how we behave and think internally feeds back and shapes the groups. Ego tends to use the same bag of tricks on the individual and collective level: Self-bias Self-deception Dishonesty Secrecy and lack of transparency. The devil loves to do his work in the shadows. The more secrecy there is the more the ego flurishes. Double standards Judgment Denial, projection, manipulation, and abuse of power Having base needs (food, shelter, water, sex, etc) The reason that our governments are not better is the same reason that individual human beings and you yourself are not better. Because it's hard to satisfy your base needs and transcend beyond them to the higher consciousness needs. Language and categories. Every group develops its own jargon. Within language justification happens, it allows you to lie. Language isn't just language, it comes with an implicit metaphysics. Which shapes how the collective ego looks at reality. And by changing how it looks at reality that changes how effective the ego is at manipulating this reality. Language is critical. Lying is key for the ego. The ego is fundamentally a lie. Your very life depends upon lying. Ideology and paradigm blindness. The software that sustains the hardware. To create this bubble. Ego is trying to create its own little garden. Building paradigms Building narratives, identity, and a sense of history. Tribalism. Us vs them identity. And having enemies. Rewarding loyalty and punishing disloyalty. Threatening to outcast you as a heretic. Refusing to self reflect Concrete examples of collective ego: Religion Science Politics (alt-right is an ego backlash) Order is the opposite of freedom true freedom is chaos. CIA Cooperations Philosophical and ideological movements Online communities, forums, subreddits, political, nonpolitical, videogames Core principles of the collective ego: 1. The number priority of a group is always to defend itself. Not truth, but the opposite of truth. Falsehood and the preservation of a boundary of separation. Fragmentation is the number priority of every group. Not the truth, not unconditional love, not consciousness, not goodness, and benevolence. All of that is antithetical to ego. So pragmatism always prevails. 2. It's all about increasing control and leverage. 3. The consciousness level of the members of a group basically determines the consciousness of the group If you want to improve the group study how to make yourself more conscious, struggle and fight with your own ego, as you're doing this you'll learn the patterns that raise your own individual consciousness, and then you can probably apply many of those techniques to group dynamics Corollary you will experience ego backlash. Not too much too fast. This is life and death. To the ego, its survival is not a game. 4. It is always engaged in fragmentation and splintering 5. High consciousness groups outperform low consciousness groups in the long run Characteristics of low consciousness groups: Tend to be materialistic, aggressive, violent, dysfunctional, neurotic, at conflict with themselves, tribal, lacking innovation, very rigid, very ideological, anti-democratic, untruthful, manipulative, coercive, enslaving, mechanical, greedy, heartless, abusive, dogmatic, thinking in the short term, corrupt, propagandistic, power-hungry, judgmental Observe and gain empathy. Don't judge now. You'd be falling into the same trap. This will give you a much better chance at changing complicated Systems Leadership isn't about being president. You're a leader at work, in your family, in your friend's group. It's about raising the quality of the consciousness of others in a way that is productive and practical it doesn't put those people off. So judging people for not being conscious wouldn't make you a good leader. He would study methods and techniques for how to embody consciousness for him of herself, to radiate that consciousness outwards in the face of all the evil and selfishness that exists in the world and have enough strength to stand through all that and to insist on the truth and to spread the truth. To be a conscious leader you need to embody first. The consciousness of your followers or the people around you that you influence can only rise as high as your own level of consciousness. That's how you create real change, not by demonizing.

358. Understanding Islam "Half of disbelief in Allah in the world is caused by people who make religion look ugly due to their bad conduct and ignorance." Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali The core of what Islam is is lost on 99.9% of people and lots of energy is wasted on the science and religion debate. We're not taught about this in school in West. Factors: Xenophobia, fear of foreigners, tribalist mentality going on in the West and Middle-East. Root: Not understanding the roots of religion and mysticism. Islam = submission in Arabic language. The total surrender of one's ego, sense of identity to Truth, Reality, or God. Other synonyms: obedience, peace, purity -> which follow submission of your ego to God. It's self-transcendence, the same as is the goal and objective of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Yoga, Zen, etc. Simply framed in the style of the middle-east, from their cultural point of view, based on their values, traditions, and history. Muslim = one who submits to God. Many Westerners don't understand that Islam is not a separate religion from Christianity or Judaism. Islam recognizes Christian and Jewish prophets like Jesus, Moses, David, Abraham, etc. It also recognizes the validity of Christian and Jewish sacred texts like the Torah and others, it builds on top of them. Islam is like the third incarnation of Judeo-Christianity. Judaism -> with Jesus comes the Christian incarnation -> with Muhammad, around 600 AD, the third. The additional extra little twist that Islam adds on top of the Judeo-Christian philosophy is that Muhammad was the final or the last prophet. Just like most religious traditions they try to get a monopoly over the Truth, which is completely antithetical to the Truth. There will never be such a thing as "the last prophet", everyone can become enlightened right now and be a prophet. There are hundreds of prophets alive that you can go speak to and visit and at the very least they're as equally spiritually enlightened as Muhammad was. Many Westerners also miss that Allah is just another name for the Christian God. There's a lot we can learn from studying the history of Islam, its origin story, the biography of Muhammad, and the developments of the tradition. We're not taught well about it in the West which is where the xenophobic reaction against it is coming from. There's something to gleaned from almost every mystical tradition and every religion if you know how to see the truth and ignore the corruption and minutiae. Corruption is a problem that runs rampant throughout every facet of human life. Not just in all the religious traditions, but even in science and academia. Jihad = struggle Not the struggle to kill your enemies, fight over oppression or evil. The struggle with yourself, your own ego, and the evil inside of you. Lesser jihad = external struggle, fighting enemies abroad, the infidels and enemies of Allah Greater jihad = spiritual inner journey to self-realization Inner and outer, lesser and greater are dualities which ultimately collapse and break down. Really there's only one Jihad, the struggle with the self. You fighting enemies out there somewhere is you really just fighting with yourself because there's nothing but Allah. Allah can be ignorant or Allah can be awake and stop fighting with himself. But when Allah is ignorant and stuck inside of Maya or illusion then he thinks that there's separation and boundaries, us-versus-them and believers as well as disbelievers who need to be punished and fought for threatening the believers. Fully awakened Allah is not frightened by anything and his faith is unshakable. It's not faith anymore but being/direct consciousness. Allah is Allah, you can't shake Allah when you realize that you are Allah. It's all about overcoming your own inner self-deceptions to ultimately transcend the ego and to realize the Self, the infinite Self, which is what Allah is. And this is self-actualization, Jihad is nothing other than what Actualized.org is about, the essence of every single spiritual path and self-help, personal development, and self-actualization. Actualized.org is a modern version of Jihad, framed in a culture and in a way that is suited to the 21st century, materialistic, rationalist, secular, Western mind. What else is Jihad? Zen, neo-Advaita, Vedanta, Yoga, self-help are all Jihad and Jed McKenna's work is an especially potent form of Jihad. The other spiritual traditions tend to emphasize the Jihad component less, trying to trick the ego into doing spiritual work. The ego will only understand what it really means to die after it's dead. The more you emphasize Jihad the smaller your spiritual audience will shrink and the less you emphasize Jihad the more people will be attracted to you because they want to have a spiritualized ego. The devil turns everything backward and inside-out so when you hear jihad in the news or in the mainstream culture you hear it as the exact opposite of what's being described here. Jihad is selfishness and people engaging in violence, warfare, hatred, condemnation of other groups, judging others, and waging jihad against them. The Mechanics Of Evil: https://youtu.be/rVcxIamwO5g The devil works through illusion and self-deception and so he takes the most Truth, the most potent forms of spirituality, and corrupts them inside out which is exactly what happens with Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and all the other isms out there. The greatest threat to the devil is the Truth so he has to take control over any mechanisms which might reveal the Truth too directly. When a spiritual teaching is too direct it gets corrupted and the more mainstream it gets it becomes the enemy of its own success. Allah = God = Absolute Infinity Not God as a bearded man in the clouds, but God as direct experience. What science calls reality is what Islam calls Allah. What the atheist calls the Big Bang, objective physical reality, is what the Muslim calls Allah. But the atheist and scientist aren't conscious of the full significance of what the word reality really is. (Absolute Infinity) In Islam there's "the 99 names of Allah," which are titles given to Allah describing the various properties and characteristics of Allah: The Beneficent/ All-Compassionate/ Most Gracious/ The Most Merciful/ Ever-Merciful/ Merciful/ Most Clement The King/ Lord/ Sovereign/ Dominion/ Master [also means "the God/ Lord, the One and Only", "Possessor of Supreme Power or Authority"] The Holy/ All-Holy/ All-Pure/ Sacred/ All-Sacred The Giver of Peace/ Peace/ All-Calm/ Ever-Tranquil The Granter of Security/ the Giver/ Faith/ Supreme Believer (of Belief)/ Giver of Belief/ All-Assurer The Controller/ Absolute Authority Over All/ Guardian Over All/ Absolute Master/ Eternal Dominating The Exalted in Might and Power/ Exalted/ Powerful/ Almighty/ Mighty The Omnipotent/ Supreme Power/ Possessor of Having All Power/ Strong The Possessor of Greatness/ Supreme/ Justly Proud The Creator/ Creator of the Universe/ Maker/ True Originator/ Absolute Author The Initiator/ Evolver/ Eternal Spirit Worshipped By All, Have Absolute Power Over All Matters, Nature and Events The Fashioner/ Shaper/ Designer/ Artist The Repeatedly Forgiving/ Absolute Forgiver/ Pardoner/ Condoner [He Who is Ready to Pardon and Forgive] The Subduer/ Overcomer/ Conqueror/ Absolute Vanquisher [Possessor of Who Subdues Evil and Oppression] The Absolute Bestower/ Giver/ Grantor/ Great Donor The Provider/ Sustainer/ Bestower of Sustenance/ All-Provider The Opener/ Opener of the Gates of Profits/ Reliever/ The Victory Giver The Knowing/ All-Knower/ Omniscient/ All-Knowledgeable/ Possessor of Knowing Much of Ever Thing/ All-Knowing The Restrainer/ Withholder/ Straightener/ Absolute Seizer The Extender/ Expander/ Generous Provider The Abaser/ Humiliator/ Downgrader [Possessor of Giving Comfort, Free from Pain Anxiety or Troubles] The Exalter/ Upgrader [of Ranks] The Giver of Honor/ Bestower of Honor/ Empowerer The Giver of Dishonor/ the Giver of Disgrace The Hearing/ All-Hearing/ Hearer of Invocation The All-Seeing/ All-Seer/ Ever-Clairvoyant/ Clear-Sighted/ Clear-Seeing The Judge/ Arbitrator/ Arbiter/ All-Decree/ Possessor of Authority of Decisions and Judgment The Just/ Authorized and Straightforward Judge of Dealing Justly The Gentle/ Benignant/ Subtly Kind/ All-Subtle The All-Aware/ Well-Acquainted/ Ever-Adept The Forbearing/ Indulgent/ Oft Forbearing/ All-Enduring The Most Great/ Ever-Magnificent/ Most Supreme/ Exalted/ Absolute Dignified The Ever-Forgiving/ Oft-Forgiving The Grateful/ Appreciative/ Multiplier of Rewards The Sublime/ Ever-Exalted/ Supreme/ Most High/ Most Lofty The Great/ Ever-Great/ Grand/ Most Great/ Greatly Abundant of Extent, Capacity and Importance The Preserver/ Ever-Preserving/ All-Watching/ Protector/ Guardian/ Oft-Conservator The Nourisher/ Feeder The Bringer of Judgment/ Ever-Reckoner [the One Who Takes Account of All Matters] The Majestic/ Exalted/ Oft-Important/ Splendid The Noble/ Bountiful/ Generous/ Precious/ Honored/ Benefactor The Watchful/ Observer/ Ever-Watchful/ Watcher The Responsive/ Answerer/ Supreme Answerer/ Accepter of Invocation The Vast/ All-Embracing/ Omnipresent/ Boundless/ All-Encompassing The Wise/ Ever-Wise/ Endowed with Sound Judgment The Affectionate/ Ever-Affectionate/ Loving One/ Loving/ the Lover/ the One Who Tenders and Warm Hearts The All-Glorious/ Majestic/ Ever-Illustrious [Oft-Brilliant in Dignity, Achievements or Actions] The Resurrector/ Awakener/ Arouser/ Dispatcher The Witness/ Testifier/ Ever-Witnessing The Truth/ Reality/ the Only One Certainly Sound and Genuine in Truth The Trustee, The Dependable, The Advocate The Strong The Firm, The Steadfast The Friend, Helper The All Praiseworthy The Accounter, The Numberer of All The Originator, The Producer, The Initiator The Restorer, The Reinstater Who Brings Back All The Giver of Life The Bringer of Death The Living The Subsisting, The Independent The Perceiver, The Finder, The Unfailing The Illustrious, The Magnificent, The Glorious The Unique, The Single The One, The Indivisible The Eternal, The Absolute, The Self-Sufficient The All-Powerful, He Who is able to do Everything The Determiner, The Dominant The Expediter, He Who Brings Forward The Delayer, He Who Puts Far Away The First, The Beginning-less The Last, The Endless The Manifest, The Evident, The Outer The Hidden, The Unmanifest, The Inner The Patron, The Protecting Friend, The Friendly Lord The Supremely Exalted, The Most High The Good, The Beneficent The Ever-Returning, Ever-Relenting The Avenger The Pardoner, The Effacer, The Forgiver The Kind, The Pitying The Owner of all Sovereignty The Owner, Lord of Majesty and Honour The Equitable, The Requiter The Gatherer, The Unifier The Rich, The Independent The Enricher, The Emancipator The Preventer, The Withholder, The Shielder, The Defender The Distressor, The Harmer, The Afflictor The Propitious, The Benefactor, The Source of Good The Light The Guide, The Way The Originator, The Incomparable, The Unattainable, The Beautiful The Immutable, The Infinite, The Everlasting The Heir, The Inheritor of All The Guide to the Right Path The Timeless, The Patient These are the properties of reality when you have direct consciousness of what reality is as a whole. Not just some fragment in the way that science for example studies it or the way that atheists understand it. When you directly experience your true nature as Allah you'll understand that all of these properties perfectly describe Allah. We're going into such detail is because we don't want to lose the core that's containing some deep truth besides all the corruption around it. In the West, we often just get to see the corruption and therefore can't understand why people aren't just giving it up. Now of course that truth is equally there in many other traditions through many other forms. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Yoga, Zen, Shamanism, psychedelics, contemplation, meditation, etc. Islam is certainly not the best way, not the only way. The 72 virgins: The Arabian prophets who experienced Allah came up with this metaphor because it was very appropriate for the culture, time and context. This metaphor of the 72 virgins is perfect for the context in which Allah was developed, in 600 AD Arabia. After you experience Allah directly for yourself you'll see this metaphor for the magnificence of Allah as very accurate. The mistake people make when thinking about religion, spiritual and mystical religions is they take them out of the historical and cultural context. We assume that just because the world is globalized we all understand each other globally. But we don't even understand 1% of the cultures existing today let alone the historical evolution of them. No depictions of Allah: The map is not the territory! The mind gets hooked on images and icons and then starts to worship those. Allah is not any particular image, icon, or form. Allah is the Formless, Nothingness, Infinity is Nothingness. So to maintain the purity of the teaching you don't want to corrupt the teaching by putting pictures of Allah everywhere, because people will start to worship that rather than seeing Allah as what's here right now. All the art that has been done around Christianity has actually done a great disservice to it. All symbols are not the Absolute. Islam does have geometric patterns as art and this is one way to depict Allah without anthropomorphizing Allah the way that Christians do. These fractal patterns align very well with what's seen on psychedelics. Forgetfulness: Praying five times a day. We fall back asleep so easily, the human mind falls back asleep into complacency and into materialism. You have to keep being mindful because you'll go from mindfulness to mindlessness. It's so that you don't get so wrapped up in your day doing practical and materialistic stuff the way that most Westerners do. Interrupting your day five times to focus on the more subtle and spiritual aspects of life. Reflecting on: death, the suffering of humanity, the pursuit of materialistic pleasures, true happiness. Muhammad: The prophet who channeled the Quran from a higher source. Was he enlightened? There are various degrees and facets of enlightenment so it's a question of degree. It seems like he had an understanding of the Absolute from direct experience since. He meditated by himself in a cave according to his origin story and it seems like he had mystical experiences throughout his whole life. He composed the Quran for around 30 years after his initial awakening. Supposed to have communicator channeled the angel Gabriel. It's illuminating to learn about the historical facts we know about Muhammad's origin story. Eye-opening to see the context and culture he was dealing with at the time. Don't get lost in the minutia of debating about little details about Islam. Go to the big picture, otherwise, you'll get lost in the minutia. Most of the Westerners who like to debate and criticize Islam do so without ever having a direct experience of Allah. (Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc) This doesn't invalidate all of their criticisms and some of them are totally valid. But corruption is not a problem exclusive to Islam it exists all around the world, especially in the U.S. government. It's a problem of ego, dogma, and fundamentalism. Why is Islam so corrupt and archaic? Every spiritual teaching has to be suited to the era, the culture, the geography from which it came about. This one is suited to 600 AD Arabia. If Islam was invented today it would look like Actualized.org and conversely if Actualized.org was invented in 600 AD Arabia for that era, culture, and geography it would look something like Islam. The problem is people cling to spiritual tradition and try to maintain and apply it to today. Society has evolved and these spiritual traditions also need to evolve. Spirituality is about the present moment, the Truth. The obstacles preventing you from connecting you to the Truth that exists today in 21st century America for example are very different. (Porn, YouTube, video games) The mind being ideological and not letting the tradition evolve as they need to is also present in Christianity, Judaism and even in science and atheism. They cling to their dogmas and paradigms just as much. 600 AD Arabia was very traditional, conservative, tribal, and combative, lacking a unifying element. Islam brought peace and stability to a region that otherwise was slitting each other's throats over family feud's going back hundreds of years. It taught that there's something larger that's connecting all of these tribes together. That was a huge technological innovation at the time! Today we think of technology as computers, the internet, and smartphones, but some of the biggest innovations in technology weren't machines but social, cultural, spiritual, and religious innovations. Now when you bring that technology into today without adjusting it and too literal and Orthodox about it you're going to bring that culture and the problems of 600 AD Arabia into today's world. The mind has a big problem with evolution because the whole point of the ego is to prevent evolution. The more you want to maintain your Orthodoxies the more it backfires. What's wiser is to understand the heart and core of it and throw away the dogma. The selfish mind is materialistic and wants to find authority figures that it can latch on to in order to get a sense of reality and stability. But to awaken is to realize that there is no stability at all and that Allah is infinitely groundless, with no beginning or end to it, and that there's no foundation to anything and therefore you're completely liberated. The devil has co-opted the teaching precisely so that it leads you in the exact opposite direction of awakening. That's why you see so much hypocrisy within religion. Not because the religion is false, but precisely because it's so true and the techniques are so powerful that they need to be corrupted. Is this a defense of Islamic fundamentalism? No, this is about developing a higher understanding. Understanding that all religions, traditions, and even secular foundations and organizations basically have one common goal. With that understanding, you soften with compassion and stop playing tribal and ideological games to snipe at the other side. West and the Middle East are both trying to realize truth but in different ways. Isn't Islam dangerous? Consider that actually the greatest danger to the world is the opposite, materialism. Rampant secularism, rationalism, corporate greed, nuclear war, global warming, artificial intelligence which are all fueled by those. We have record numbers of depressed people, suicidal people, PTSD, relationship and marriage problems, etc. All this is coming from materialism and a lack of self-actualization. This seems to only be getting worse because Western society is becoming more and more materialistic. In a sense, the Islamic radicals have a reason to be concerned. They fear this same thing taking over their region, village, city or country. Let alone all the ways in which the Western powers metal in Middle Eastern affairs, geopolitics or manipulating of elections, etc. Our superficial solutions and knee-jerk reactions to go bomb somebody, to attack or criticize somebody, could actually be backfiring on us and contributing to the problem. First, you need to understand at a very deep level why fundamentalism exists in the first place. It's a condition of the egoic mind. Materialist egoic minds are fundamentalist. We have a lot of fundamentalism here in the West it just takes a different style. The most prevalent form of it in the West is capitalism. The solution is to start to see that it's the ego-mind that's responsible and to start to see that it's all happening within yourself. You're not separate from it and are contributing to the problem. You as the American or European taxpayer. The ideas and opinions you hold, how you understand yourself and the world is all contributing. This corrupting force is within you, you are the source of the corruption, you are the source of the evil. And that is not going to stop no matter what you do externally until you take care of your ego which is what Islam is trying to get you to do. A lot of Western secular, rational, scientifically minded people think that they're immune to the problem of fundamentalism which makes them all the more susceptible. Because they're thinking fundamentally that they're immune and not fundamentalists. Regardless of content, the whole point of fundamentalism is denying that you're a fundamentalist. The West is committing the very same problem that the Middle East is committing, waging a lesser jihad. The U.S. is waging a lesser jihad against the jihadis in the Middle East and the jihadis in the Middle East are waging a lesser jihad against Western powers creating a family feud. The solution is to go meta and see the commonalities in the same way that Muhammad introduced Islam in 600 AD Arabia to elevate them to seeing commonality where before there was infighting and tribalism. The same thing now needs to happen between Islam in the Middle East and the West. All external fighting is really just a distraction from the greater jihad of turning inwards. The lesser jihads are precisely because these people do not engage in the greater jihad. The devil is inside of you, you are the devil, wake up to that and take control of the real problem. Homework recommendation: "Teaching Company" lecture series called "Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad". 40-hour long lecture series covering these four religious leaders. Start and focus on Muhammad first. It has 10 videos on his origin story and how he founded Islam and the trials and tribulations he had to go through.

93. Profound Quotes #001 - "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Blaise Pascal Idea: Do more contemplation. Not very cool or hip nowadays, but this is where great ideas have come from and great people have accomplished great things. Philosophers, mathematicians, humanitarians, psychologists, political figures, leaders that contributed something meaningful to us have all taken time in solitude to think and be silent. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Henry D. Thoreau, Emerson, Gandhi, W. Churchill. Pull yourself out of the rat race and enjoy your own creative goodness. Many of us are very overstimulated and hardly find time to relax. Even more importantly taking the time to contemplate with a journal in a very conscious methodical way, peacefully, calmly. A lot of both individual and collective problems stem from an imbalance between doing and being. Homework: Sit still for 60 minutes and let whatever thoughts come to mind and think them through. Start noticing how much your body resists and your addiction to stimulation. Start noticing what type of thoughts come up, negative ones, or positive ones? Notice how after you settled in new creative ideas just start coming up. You're busy doing the wrong things, probably causing more problems for humanity.

92. Why Am I Depressed? Bottom line: Because your psychology sucks. 1. Clinical depression. Legitimate physiological conditions. (Minority) 2. In a bad psychological state. Not taking responsibility for your personal development. (Majority) Your happiness level is only about 50% genetics. (Book: The How Of Happiness) Stop being a victim and take ownership of your own psychology. The software is more important than the hardware. You are too identified with yourself. Too self-absorbed. Too egotistical. Your depression is contributing to that false sense of who you are. Also, have a negative self-image. Like that something is inherently wrong with you. These are mostly operating on you on a subconscious level. Writing them out might help. Realizing that all this past history is bullshit. Let it go. Meditation will help. It'll get you in touch with genuine happiness. The natural state of a human being is bliss and happiness. Without external stimulation. This will prove to you that your depression is self-created. Other things feeding into your depression: - Not living in integrity with your values - Being inauthentic and fake with other people, and with yourself (not honoring what you're actually feeling) Solutions: - Introspection. Developing an understanding of you're creating your depression. - Meditation. At least 20 minutes. - Exercise. Studies show that it is equally effective as anti-depressants. - Do the little things you know you need to be doing. Eat healthily, wake up on time, get to work on time, etc. - Life purpose. You need a strong sense of purpose. To know what you're committed to creating in your life. When your life is about serving others and not just about you. - Serious meditation and contemplation work. Research the ideas of ego, subconscious mind, and enlightenment.

7. How I lost 65 Pounds in 5 Months He committed 110% to it. As though he already had it. Knowing without a shadow of a doubt. Visualizing it and really seeing yourself already there. Then he made an action plan. Committed to going to the gym 5 days a week for the rest of his life. Epiphany was that if he wants to be fit and the cost he had to pay to the gods was going to the gym 5x/week He also had to cut out all sodas and cut back on portion size not feeling stuffed. Threw out all the food he would usually snack. At that point, he didn't even limit what he could eat, just sweets, and limiting his portioning & snacking. It's about setting your inner game right. Insights from articles about food-cravings about getting results if you're serious: "Q: It's so hard, I'm around this type of food all the time, the cravings just won't go away, I have a sweet tooth, I just have to give in to my cravings. A: Shut up! Who the hell are you to whine to me. Shut up already! Stop boring me with your story. Don't give me your little stories, like you're around this type of food all the time, do you think you're the only one buddy? Everyone I know and everyone that's around me eats junk food ALL DAY LONG. This crappy food is everywhere I look. I'm no different than you except I don't give in. Do I have superhuman powers? No. Do I not give in because my muscles and arms are bigger than yours? No. Do I not give in because I can bench press more than you? No! Do I not give in because my body fat is lower than yours? No. Do I not give in because I'm physically better or physically stronger than you? No. I don't give in because I'm mentally stronger than you. That's all it really is, is that it's mental. And for you to give in, and for me not to give in, we can only assume that I'm mentally stronger than you. How does that make you feel? I don't know a damn thing about you, but I know that mentally I can do something that you can't do. It sure makes me feel good though. In fact, it motivates me even more. So thanks for being so mentally weak. It'll make me work that much harder during my next workout, so thanks a lot." "Next time your little food craving starts to come out, think about this: Look at that food and think, "What do I want more? The five seconds of pleasure and enjoyment that I'm gonna get from chewing this food. Or the enjoyment of the fact, that 24 hours every day, 7 days a week I'll have the body that I want to have. That's what it really comes down to. And let me tell you! No food tastes as good as that feeling feels. Your reward for sticking with your diet, are all the results that you're gonna get. So stop giving in to your cravings and your cravings will go away, it's really as simple as that. Now I probably know what you're thinking. You're thinking right now "Who am I!?" Who am I to be telling you this. Like I never cheat, or I like never give in to cravings, or have little cravings. No! I don't, not at all, not a little, not in moderation, not anything. The thought of even some type of junk food doesn't even enter my mind. I don't need those 5 seconds, I'm stronger than that. Call it willpower, call it mental strength. My goal is my result. My road to getting that result doesn't have the 5 seconds of chewing pleasure on it. I eat for purpose, not for pleasure. Food is not a hobby, food is something you need to survive, your body needs it. And in this case, in the case of working out and getting results, food is something that your body needs to get you the results that you want. It's fuel, food is nothing more than that. So I give my body only what it needs to make these results happen. Does my body need 5 seconds of chewing chocolate? No. Does my mind need it? No! My mind is way too strong to need it. And that feels much better than any piece of chocolate would ever taste and I loooove knowing that. So, it's exactly as hard as it is for you, as it is for everybody else. You're not some special little flower. What's the difference? I have what it mentally takes and you don't." The honesty of that article set Leo's inner game straight. He watched his cravings mindfully and asked himself the question of what he values more, The 5 seconds of pleasure vs the higher consciousness satisfaction of living by your values. He started out very slow on weights and running not caring what he looked like in a small gym. There's too much work in counting all your calories. You want to be consistent and stick to consistent foods. Start feeling the level of hunger and fullness instead. Started with eating the hamburger and fries and just leaving one fry. Your mind deceives you with tricks. "Don't waste any food!" or "You're gonna get hungry very soon!" Then slowly leaving a little more. Then he started getting to that spot where you're moderately full but not stuffed, knowing that once he walked away and the food settles in he'll be fine. Starting to get more comfortable with hunger by starving himself a bit by skipping meals or substituting for something light like a yogurt or chocolate pudding. Whereas before hunger it was a no-no. Do a lot of fitness. Get a calorie deficit to shed some pounds. Weighing every day. First two weeks not really judging himself. After those, he started seeing a very consistent drop of like 2-3 pounds a week. Part of any challenge in your life is that if it's drastic enough improvement, very counter-intuitively and almost scarily, that the friends and people that you hang out with, your family, will start to hold you back from making those changes. Crabs in the bucket analogy. At the start, it really was about willpower. First, you need to connect to your motivation. At some point, your beliefs and mindsets permanently shift and the willpower from the beginning will not be needed anymore. Your body will naturally push you back! Also, your diet will drastically evolve. You'll cut out more and more... grains and bread, sweets.

4. Get Coached Link: https://youtu.be/ZS3sOfs5jBY Do you ever feel like you have a ton of untapped potential? Ever felt like you've had a dream but it faded? Not honoring your true values? "Your potential is almost unlimited if you really think about it." What is holding you back from tapping into that full potential? The masses make excuses. "What's stopping you is a lack of resourcefulness and not having the mindsets that you need to be successful." The difference is in thought and taking massive real-world action. Life purpose is built and evolved. Leo is here to step up and take a lot of action making your life exciting. Leo wants to share resources for free that are no quick fixes but go to the root. Leo wants to dial in your inner-game and then getting your outer-game dialed in by taking action. It's about how you feel. Finding your life purpose will give you a sense of confidence. Thinking about what your values are and what your purpose is. You'll set your priorities straight and ignore unimportant things and become focused. If you're not excited about your future something is amiss. Not living your values. You wanna start taking action right now.

2. Why Life Coaching Works Link: https://youtu.be/8cbtMhHpLC8 Coach asks questions. Consultant or mentor gives you specific advice. Consultant gives you advice for your specific business niche. Mentor has been through what you're going to through. Therapy is working with dysfunctional people with more serious mental issues. Coach is working with someone who's already more functional and taking them to an optimal level. Asking a lot of questions and not giving any advice. Relying on and trusting that the client has the resources themselves to figure that out. Coaching really makes you think. A lot of times you're caught in your own story becoming stuck on your own road. An external force to nod you off into a different direction. It's more objective. Making you see stuff from a different angle. Coaching challenges your beliefs. It starts to makes you think and process more consciously and more deliberately. You are lazy with your thinking. Not very rigorous about introspection. You're not very deliberate about what you want and don't. Not very deliberate about learning different strategies. "What keeps you blocked is not the fact that you don't have enough knowledge or awareness of how to do stuff. It's usually just simply the fact that you have your own inner issues that are there, beliefs and experiences, that have all lead you up to the point where you're at right now and created the way you think. Positively and negatively." Coaching can make you realize what those are until you start working through them. When someone is overweight it's because they are not thinking about the gym correctly. Coaching goes well together will traditional self-help. (Books, Seminars, etc) It's going to be tailored to your specific inner game. Especially with issues that have been around for very long. Leo tries to ask questions that make you pause. (Leading questions) Probing in directions they've never thought about in their branching of beliefs. Coaching assumes that you have all the answers within yourself. Getting the client's mind jogging and letting them figure it out. The coach doesn't have to have the level of specialization of a consultant. It's more about getting you engaged and motivated.