Advice for young people (part 1&2)   Lessons: Life needs to be lived to be understood. We are born like blank slates, knowing nothing and completely ignorant and then we get bombarded by life, life is not an intellectual pursuit, life is here, it is embodied, you're in it, you're feeling it, there is pain, there is suffering, intense pleasure and joy, it takes most people a long time to get the enormity of what life is. So much to do, to learn, to explore, so many mistakes to make, so many traps to fall into. When you're a blank white paper anything can be written on it (the challenge is that the individual and the collective are intertwined that it's both a blessing (technology, comforting lifestyle, entertainment, books...)  and a curse (if you blindly allow yourself to be programmed by your culture and society - this will rob you of your happiness and potential to use your mind to really ace life)  Life is enormously complex, there are many dimensions to it, so many variables, and the most important variable is who you are Life can get much much worse than you ever imagined and life can get much much better than you ever imagined You will have to both learn and figure out how life works but also learn and figure out how you work and how you fit into life and nobody can tell you that because you're uniquely you (Leo will give general advice, but you will still need to customize your life to you, nobody can tell what you should be, only you know what is best for you, if you want to be this or that, only you know what brings an emotional response out of you...) You gotta be true to yourself, be willing to honor your uniqueness Life is a self-discovery process. Be original. Don't copy others, don't try to copy the success of others, don't try to jump on trends in society...make a long term investment to develop your own internal success by discovering your authentic passions, motivations and values. Find your own voice and style.  Figure your life for yourself, be introspecting, you gotta wonder at some point (Why am I alive, Why am I here at all, am I just here to repeat somebody else's life or am I here to do something new? Leo suggests that you're here to do something NEW...Why am I here to do? - Don't look for that answer from somebody else, turn inwards ) Spend more time reflecting and turning inwards and ask yourself deep questions about life rather than getting answers from other people. What do I want? What do I desire? What am I passionate about? How can I be more passionate about life? Why was I chosen to be here? How to live a good life? Quickly pick up on lessons.  The quality of your life hinges upon the quality of your mind and how you use your mind. The people that earn the most money and are the most successful in our society they are not manual labors, construction workers, they are the deep thinkers, strategist, visionaries, inventors and the creators. Master your mind, most traps are the traps of the mind, the enemy is yourself.  If you want to ace life, you need to take responsibility and ownership of your mind and how you're using your mind and by introspecting seeing how your mind is contributing to the kind of results that you're getting in your life. The mind doesn't want to look inwards it likes to projects outwards. Reality is weird and twisted thing that it seems as if we're in a physical material tangible world and it seems as if stuff is happening to you, that in fact is an illusion, your mind is projecting and creating reality, it is not simply that there is a reality and you were born into it. Your thoughts, emotions, belief systems, ideologies are all creating the kind of reality that you see out there.  Your mind is playing an active creative role not just in how your personal life unfolds but it is generating all of reality. And when you're conscious of that it is no longer your reality, but your creation.  Take the process of learning and understanding extremely seriously.  (#1 Key: Start Questioning Everything. Ask high quality questions. Always be questioning what is life and how it works. 26min) The point of questioning is not to get the answer, the point is to go through the process of questioning and thinking through it. If Leo gives you an answer but you don't go through the process of deriving it from yourself, you're not gonna get the value from it. Sometimes it will take you years of curiosity and passion to discover an answer to a question.  Have something in your life that you're deeply passionate about. Find a few things that you want to develop your life around. Go beyond finding a job, develop a career and even beyond that to developing a life purpose (check the Leo's life purpose's course). 1/3 to 1/2 of your waking hours of your life will be devoted to work, so it makes sense that you wanna have a lot of passion in your work. You want to feel like your work is meaningful. Meaning is something you create. If you find something meaningful, then that is what you're gonna do. Meaningful is whatever you say it is.  You want to be useful to mankind. Be useful to society on your terms not on societies terms.  The rarer you are compared to other's around you, the more valuable your skill set is, the more they are willing to pay you to help them and to partake in whatever creative work you're doing. And on this basis you can build a relatively comfortable life with freedom and such that you don't have to worry about money.  Develop high quality desires. There are low quality desires (desire for heroin) and high quality desires (desire to be selfless). Purify your desires.  Desire is much more important than knowing how to do something. All tangible things are accomplished only through desire. Life is something precious. Life is a miracle. Life is amazing and you have been blessed with it.  My life is important. Reality is incredible, tune in for a second that you were born as you think you were, in the conventional sense, you exist, here you are, you're a part of reality, you're participating in this subjective experience of reality, put your awareness on that be WOW, it is a miracle that I was even born. Notice how lucky you are to be living where you are, that you have decent health and a lot of time ahead of you. Your obligation is to make the most out of your life.  How do I live a good life? What do I desire, what is worth while doing, what is meaningful to me, what do I want out of life.  Reality is a subjective thing. It is not like a physical object found somewhere in the universe.  Be in touch with your feelings. Be in touch with how reality feels. Being in touch with your feelings and your intuitions is far more important than just thinking. Spend a lot of time feeling.  Feel physical objects, environments, feel emotions, feel the difference between anger and sadness and depression and sexual arousal.  Make fine distinctions between these and many more. Also, you cannot logically think through what your passion should be, you gotta feel it. You have to be connected with what moves you and what moves you is emotion not logic. Emotions are more powerful than logic. Your life is run by emotions, emotions are more fundamental than logic and thinking. So get out of your head and more into your body and feel yourself. If you don't feel good in your body and if feel good about your life no amount of logic and no amount of external conditions will do it for you. Because in the end you want to be satisfied and you want to be happy and passionate.   Intuition will get you a lot further in life than just cold reason and logic. You have to be in tune with your heart not just with your logical left hemisphere.  Feel deeper into negative emotions. That will allow you to feel better in general and that will allow you to feel deeper into positive emotions.  You will be suffering a lot, when you are feeling lonely, sad, depressed, angry, jealous and any other negative emotion, rather than numbing yourself and distracting yourself, have the courage to feel into that more deeply.  Face difficulties head on rather than trying to avoid them. Stuff that you deny, ignore, suppress or sweep under the rug in life will always come back to haunt you (it will create a neurotic toxic psychology in you,  there is a cost to these things... there is a cost to lying, manipulating, stealing, cheating) The worst thing you can do is lying to yourself.  You have to deal with the hand that you've been dealt. Like in poker.  Sometimes life will be challenging but you have to commit to living a good life.  Take truth really seriously. If you don't know the truth about a situation and you have some false story about it, then what you got is nothing. The truth is the substance, the reality of it. If you don't have the truth about a situation you literally have nothing. Because reality is what is true. Truth is reality. Reality is what you see around you. Truth is what everything is and the only thing that there is.   So if something isn't true, it is not real. And if it isn't real, it is not here and if it is not here, it is not in your experience and if it is not in your experience then it's nothing to you, it doesn't exist. Make a life-long commitment to be committed to truth at all costs even when it's painful. Avoid all temptations to lie, manipulate, to deceive and to not be truthful with other's and even more importantly with yourself.  Human beings are different. Externally but also internally in their minds. Notice how different people are on the outside and translate that into inside. It will seem like they are similar, it will seem like they are copies of you, it will seem like they feel like you, it will seem that they behave like you. People have different personalities, genetics, brain chemistry, ideologies and software that is running their mind, different operating system, different levels of ambition, motivation, different fears, different levels of neurosis, different levels of trauma they experienced, different energy levels, moods (some are more happy, some are more depressed, some are more positive, some are more negative), introverted, extroverted, different stages of development and consciousness, have  access to different aspects of reality, they don't see the same things as you. Advice is not the same for everybody. What works for you might not work for somebody else.  Life is not just a process of exploring external reality and other people, it's a process of exploring your own self because you don't really know who you really are (as an ego and personality). You don't know what food you like when you start, you don't know what sex you like, you don't know what school and career you would like to have Go above and beyond the bare minimum in life.  Always work on some personal/career related project in your life. Through these projects you will develop skill and experience.  Never allow the phrase "But I don't know how" stop you from doing something or attempting to do something. If you don't know how to do something, research it, buy books around it, go to google, read articles around it, find videos about it on youtube, ask people about it, find the people who know how. You don't need to know anything in life, all you need  to have is the desire and the clear intent that you want to do it. From that everything else will be generated.  All of us have traumas. And that is like a weight you have to remove from your shoulders. You have to heal that.  Anytime you were not approved of or loved, you got trauma, something that shocked you and denied you the love and acceptance that you should have gotten. or scared you... and then because of that you get desperate for love. What you need to understand is that you are not looking for seeds, you are looking for love.  The earlier the trauma, the more work you will have to put in to heal it. Ask yourself how much trauma did you accumulate in the first 20 years on a scale of 1 to 10. That trauma creates neediness and then you spend your life to get that love that you have been desperately craving in that specific form that you wanted.  Learn about proper nutrition. Read books about how to eat healthy and look carefully at the food that you're eating.If you eat the mainstream diet you will not be able to fulfill on your amazing life. Focus on eating whole foods, vegetables, fruits. You need that raw fuel. You will need a very clear mind, you will need to be able to focus Reality is not a physical system. It's consciousness. Everything that you see or experience is  consciousness. The way you understand consciousness is by experiencing it and by being conscious of it. Everything is made out of consciousness. Why is that important? Because if reality was made of atoms then that makes it seem as if reality is separate and distant from you, like there is a subject and an object and the subject is separate from the object, that means I am here and I am looking at the atoms over there. But that is not your experience of reality, you experience of reality is that you are meshed in with it, this physical room that you are sitting in is part of your head, there is no boundary between it and you, that opens up a radical new possibility, because if reality was separate from you, external to you, then there is always a boundary through which you can never pierce through to get to the bottom of reality. To live life awesomely you need to understand that it is all consciousness, and once you grasp that the subject and the object are interconnected that means that you have direct access to reality itself, access to all different levels of consciousness. Reality is infinite states of consciousness. (waking, dreaming...). You can be in bad contracted states and in good expansive states.  The more conscious you become, the more understanding you have of how everything truly is. The less conscious you are, the more you are in a sort of a daze and a zombie,the more you are sleep walking through life, the more you lie to yourself, the more you manipulate,  the more selfish you are, the more fearful you are, the more petty you are, the more lost you are and you cannot see why the smartest and the most intelligent choice is to be on a most selfless and most loving path.  Love is a fundamental feature of reality, because reality never was some molecules and atoms, it was consciousness. The entire system was designed by consciousness so that consciousness can teach itself what it is, which is love. So it can explore different ways in which love gets expressed and how love gets manifested and actualized. Fear is just an absence of love. Fear is love of a very contracted sort. Love is fully expanded without any fear. Like a dimmer switch. more light is more love.  Life is a training ground to teach you how to love and how to be selfless. This requires going through great struggle and suffering, falling in many traps and much trial and error. The suffering will teach you how to be more loving and more selfless.  The quality of your life is about how much love you can radiate out to others. How do you want to radiate love? How are you gonna manifest it? How god like are you willing to be? (selfless and loving) Radiating love - pure radiation of yourself, your personality, of how you want to live, of how you want to use your body, your creativity...  The quality of your life will hinge upon how much you give into the fear vs how much you pursue love. Pursuing love is difficult.  Notice that in your life you are doing things out of fear or out of love. You are feeling fear or you're feeling love and you're driven by these 2 forces. Consciousness can either love itself or recoil from itself. Your job is to love more and more and more especially those things that recoil you until you become completely unconditionally loving and this requires becoming more and more selfless.  The more selfish in life you are, the worse your life will be. The more selfless, the better your life will be. And this is one of the most counter-intuitive things.  Life is imaginary, you are in a dream. Don't confuse the dream for reality. The entire universe is a giant infinite mind of infinite imaginary potential. Atoms are something that consciousness dreams into existence.  Life is like a game, it is an experiment in creativity, you are thrown into the matrix of possibility and you get to decide which things you want to actualize.  Don't waste time criticizing and judging others and yourself, simply focus on what you want to create.  Direct experience is king. Notice that experience is all that you have of reality. You can't name a thing that was not experienced by you. Reality is experience. So, don't believe everything, test it out and see, everything that Leo said here has not validity and truth to it unless you validate it for yourself in your direct experience.   You have to practice observation, meditation, you have to be aware, you have to turn inward, self-reflect, introspect, question deeply, contemplate. Turn your life into a scientific investigation and experiment. The aim of your experiment is to figure out what is reality, consciousness, life and how you live the best life possible.  Get metaphysically serious about life. Figure out what life is, why you're here and what it's all about. The taller you want to build your skyscraper the deeper you have to dig the foundation.  Understanding reality is worth it. The work is worth it. To independently investigate and understand reality for what it is and how it works is worth it and you will never regret it.  Your youth is your most precious resource. A 750 million net worth guy said in his 60s that if he had the chance to go back and start from scratch and lose all of it, he would take the deal. This is how much your youth is worth if you use it properly. Be very very careful about how you're investing your time. Most of your time you should be investing in your future. Be very strategic about how you use your time and energy because it will get much harder as you get older (your mental peak will start to decline after your 30s). From the age of 15 to 30, this is where your ENTIRE life can be made or lost. Don't waste your time on stupid activities that don't pay you anything back. You want to make a commitment to make a strategic long term investments in yourself.  Think of your life as the ultimate DO IT YOURSELF PROJECT.  You can play the game of life exactly as some MMO video game like world of warcraft. The trick is that the game of life has so much freedom that in a sense you get lost in the freedom of it, there are so many things to do and so many ways you can be that there is nobody guiding you the way they do in the world of warcraft, where you start one quest and that leads you to the next quest. But with life is much more - WHAT DO YOU WANT OUT OF IT. You need to be the designer of your own game and life, you need to set your own objectives, you need to have enough vision to see the possibilities Treat your life as an adventure and work of art to see what you can create with your life.   Take risks and don't be afraid to fail in life. Fail more, fail faster. The real danger is not that you will take some crazy risk, the real is you're gonna be complacent and do nothing and that you're just gonna get the same result that everybody around you is getting which is a mediocre result. What you should be scared of is you not taking some BOLD action like starting a business and maybe failing at it or getting into that relationship and maybe failing at it or maybe traveling into a new country and living there and maybe failing at it and have to return back home. This is all great stuff that will grow you even if you fail at it. And these failures will be the investment upon which you build the foundation for the rest of your life. So, don't worry about failures. The greatest failure you should be scared to death of is just sitting around and squandering your time and achieving nothing and investing nothing and then in your 30s you have nothing to show but a meaningless job. What you should be scared of is being distracted by all the unimportant stuff that is happening around you that most people are engaged in, not having a vision that you're working on. Don't get distracted by petty "human" shit. (gossip, politics, who is the victim, who is the victimizer, who started a war, who cheated on who, who is being mean to who, who did what to who... there is no satisfaction in playing these game) Imagine you were the only human on earth and see how this cuts out so much bullshit. Don't pay too much attention to what the herd around you is doing. (see also trap 16) Commit to challenging yourself with your life. Be the one who sets the challenges, don't wait for life to challenge you. By challenging yourself, you get to live life on your terms and that strengthens you up so the demands of life don't overwhelm you and you can easily deal with them. In this way you get to choose the challenges you're passionate about rather than the challenges that are enforced upon you from the outside, things that other people want you to do or that society demands of you because you might not be passionate about those things and you might not find those challenges meaningful.  Counter-intuitively, the easier you try to make your life, the harder it's gonna be. Stop looking for life to be easy. Stop trying to find the path of least resistance in life. Stop looking for some shortcut on how to get rich or how to quickly build a business so it quickly earns you money or just how to get some quick sex or how to get any kind of job so you just have a job. Stop with this bare minimum approach to life. Be wary of shortcuts and magic pill solutions, usually they don't pay out and end up wasting your time because you don't build anything stable with them.  Focus on building stable solid things in your life. (business, relationships, health&fitness)  There is a stable way to build a business that is grounded in a deep foundation or there is a flimsy way of building a business, if you build something flimsy it might make you money for a few year but it will crash down and you will have nothing left. If you focus on building a solid foundation for your business it might take you longer, it might take you 5-10 years to do that, but once you do it, that foundation will be so solid that it will pay you dividends for a long time to come and the skills you learn and who you have to become to build a solid foundation for a business that is the real gold of life. Take the time to do things right, even thought it's gonna take more work and there's gonna be less immediate pay off. You will get out of life exactly the effort that you put into it. Who you become in the process is the real gold in life. Not the end result but who you become.  Develop a strong work ethic. Learn how to hunt before the age of 20. Earn the money for the things you want to buy and don't depend on your parents to buy you stuff.  Set a high standard for yourself. You get in life whatever your lowest standard is. Whatever is your lowest standard for the house you wanna live in, is probably the house you will end up living in. Whatever is the lowest standard for the kind of relationship you're willing to tolerate is probably the relationship you will end up with. Whatever is the lowest standard for the kind of career or job that you have is probably the  job that you will have. Whatever is your lowest standard for how much money should be in your bank account in probably the amount that will have. This also applies to your physical appearance, your weight, what kind of food you put into your body, the excuses that you're willing to tolerate. So have high standards for the people you relate with, for your friends (don't let just anybody be your friend), don't sleep with just anybody have some standards, standards for the kind of teachers you learn from, standards for the books you read, standards for the kind of environment you live in Aim beyond basic survival in life. If your life is gonna be just about survival and getting by, and if it's gonna be just about utility and pragmatism, you will not be satisfied with life. The greatest joys in life are not basic survival and are not pragmatic and utilitarian. You can become very successful and wealthy by being highly pragmatic and utilitarian but it won't be satisfying. There is a deeper dimension to life than survival, that doesn't mean you should ignore survival, survival is crucial, it's just that survival is the bare minimum and we're going beyond that into spirituality.  Commit to never doing mindless work. (working at starbucks, flipping burgers, cleaning toilets..)Work on things that have add something to the advancement of mankind. Work on that in a conscious way. You need to feel like you are contributing to society in some important way.  Don't over-plan your future. You need to be adaptable, improvisational and opportunistic. Give your life room to breathe and to unfold. You want to have a vision for your life but also you want to have some room for exploration so when you notice some opportunity you are free to jump on it, don't have some rigid idea that your life has to unfold in a particular way. You will not be able to predict the greatest opportunities in your life years in advance, it's gonna be an opportunity that arises in the moment and in those moments you need to have the courage to seize on those. Be careful to not get stuck in a rut. Don't tie yourself down too much with a bunch of commitments ( a house, a marriage with children) You want the freedom to explore yourself more, you can tie yourself down once you get in your 40s and 50s. In your 20s and 30s you want to travel, live in different places (change the city you live in every 5 years at least).  Don't overload your schedule with too much obligations. (socializing and non-stop work...) Leave room for going inward: for solitude, to meditate, to self-reflect, read, plan out your life, vision, dream, work on a side project, be creative, to listen to yourself, to find the deep answers The deepest answers are not found in books or from other people they are found inside yourself in moments of solitude and deep self-reflection. Make time for solitude. Make time where you can sit for an entire day/ .  (without internet, social media,  no obligations, no chores, no socializing, no work, no entertainment, no distractions, no phone calls..) and listen to your heart, your highest self, listen to your creative aspirations,passions, Visioning and thinking about your life, self-reflecting, doing the inner work, that's where the real work happens. Discover yourself in those moments.    Create something new. Become creative. Creativity is the source of passion. Focusing on being creative empowers you.  You feel like a victim and dis-empowered when you're not being creative.  Go beyond the mainstream most popular sources of information. Find sources that are not popular but create amazing content. Instead of following the one with 10million subs, follow the one with a few thousand but make sure that it's still high quality content and that it's truthful, don't fall into some occult practices. Pull from many different sources and perspectives and don't just do what everyone else in the mainstream is doing.  Don't waste your time hating, fighting, judging, criticizing, blaming, negativity, trying to control others, have no desire to control others but yourself, have no desire to tell other's from some righteous position how they are wrong and what they're doing is bad and evil and that it could be done better. This is all distraction rather focus on what you need to do to be creative in your life. When you're being creative and when you're investing in yourself you have no time for all these pointless distractions. You can create value, you don't need to control or manipulate others to get you something that you can get yourself by turning inwards. Be creative in your life...because then you will be empowered. When all your time and energy is spent on inner work, making yourself more creative, more passionate, growing yourself, investing in yourself, becoming more spiritual when you're doing this you have no time and room for negativity, blaming, criticizing, judging, fighting, hating it's all pointless, it's a distraction. And you have no desire to control or to manipulate anybody else because then you become self-reliant. You don't need to control somebody else or manipulate them to get you something can get yourself by turning inwards and anything important, that is of any real value in life you can generate for yourself, you don't need to control or to manipulate somebody else to give it to you. SO why play those game, go directly to the source. Generate it yourself. A lot of people create entire careers out of negativity and blaming others... focus on what you're gonna create for the world that is positive, how are you gonna grow yourself, when you're growing yourself you have no time for these distractions, you don't care what others are doing around you because you are too powerful, you are too creative, you don't need their approval, you don't care about their criticism because you are going full steam ahead. Be careful because people in society will try to trick you and scam you and deceive you. This is just normal for the level of development of the current society. Don't take the people's words at face value, and they are tricking you and scamming you not because they are evil and that you should resent them for it, it's simply because they themselves are ignorant and looking for shortcuts and this is just a survival strategy. People will tell you things when in in fact the thing they are describing is exactly the opposite of what they are trying to convince you it is. People will try to trick you and deceive you in relationships in friendships in business, when you go to the grocery store, when you go to the restaurant, when you're reading books, watching the media... because most people are enagaged in lying to themselves, most people don't value truth very much.  When you're not in touch with your own deep creative resources and power, you're still gonna survive in the world somehow, so you will do it through trickery, deception and scamming, you will create a business that doesn't produce anything new and valuable for mankind rather it tries to scam you. Example: grocery store a label fat-free, as if it's something healthy and then you look closer and see that there are all sorts of chemicals in there that are even worse than fat. Don't automatically assume that what somebody is telling you is true. Somebody tells you they are enlightened/ that it is a good deal/ that you will earn a lot of money this way/...don't believe them. You can take this too far where you become paranoid, skeptical and fearful and you're not able to relate to anybody because you're not able to trust anybody. Don't try to get loved from others or from things. When you got trauma (been denied love) then because of that you get desperate for love. What you need to understand is that you are not looking for seeds, you are looking for love. Love is counter-intuitive in the sense that you think that you will get love by getting others to fill your cup and so you will be running around with your empty cup asking them to fill your cup for you, begging them, being needy, trying to manipulate or control others to give you the love that you seek. This is the opposite of how love really works. Develop yourself to be a non-needy person, such that your cup is already filled and so you're filling other people's empty cup. And you fill your cup through spiritual practice, creative work and passion. Changing who you are in the world, changing your being at the identity level, this is where your deepest results come from. Why you buy the car? Because it gives you the feeling of love, you do some drugs because it gets you some feeling of love...having these things is fine but don't expect these things to give you love and stop making these the things the source of your love. These things should be secondary, but for most people these things are primary. Because they don't know how to generate love within themselves and so the only substitute is get love from the outside through purchasing stuff and clinging to stuff. Transcend that paradigm by working on yourself, by doing spiritual practice, by being passionate about life. There are many stages of development that human being go through. These levels of development are totally different ways of looking at the world and being in the world. There is a certain sequence of these developmental levels and stages that people go through.Studying these stages can give you a preview and a road map of things you'll be getting yourself into in the next stage which can be very useful and can speed up your entire growth process and that can point out all the common traps. (spiral dynamics, Ken Wilber's model and others from the developmental psychology) ...What is really important to understand is that There are stages of human development and consciousness that we could call super human, which are possible, these are ways of being the world that are so radically advanced and profound and different from the stage you're starting this journey from, that you can't even imagine it, you can't conceive of it and it would be shocking and radical if you were dropped into it that you would have a hard time believing that such a thing is even possible or real. These stages are so advanced that we couldn't even call them human, these are beyond human. The point of life is to reach these super human levels of development. To break out of the mold of what you consider ordinary physical reality and all the limitations that come with it, this is what everything is leading you towards that where you will transform from the caterpillar into the butterfly, which means a new kind of human. Reality is perspectival, relative and subjective. Perspecival=reality is perspective. Reality is not one way, reality is the perspective you take on it and everyone is taking different perspectives on reality. Appreciate and Fall in love with the idea that there is no reality outside of one's perspective of it.  The thing that is there is an infinite number of perspectives and without those perspectives there is nothing there. Study all the implications of this. What this does is opens you up from being locked in one perspective yourself and then it will allow you to explore different perspectives and to appreciate them all and to be free of them all because every perspective is limited. GO through life not trying to defend your perspective as if that it's the only right one and not thinking that there is one true perspective out there that people can have and that all other ones are false but rather look at reality as if there is no reality, there is only perspectives and get curious and open enough to want to explore different perspectives. Explore perspectives just for the sake of exploring perspectives and your life will go much better than what 99% of people do which is just defending their own perspective and trying to trick themselves into thinking that it's the objective ultimate truth when it isn't. You want to create a meta universal operating system which is able to deal with applications from any other operating system, then you're free, you're not limited or bound to one perspective/paradigm and this makes your mind the most flexible, creative and you're also able to appreciate the full diversity that constitutes life. (think about all the apps that Mac can't use because they are stuck with Mac OS or the app that is available on Mac but can't run on windows) What you need is the willingness to detach from your own perspective, question your own mind at the kernel level and let go of these kernels that are grounding your sense of reality and that is scary, difficult, emotionally challenging because that anchors your entire sense of identity in life so take that on as a project to explore more and more perspectives without getting attached to any particular one. This will deepen your ability to love, understand, it will make you more creative, flexible, make you less arrogant, less selfish. There is more happening in life than meets the eye and to discover that you will have to go beyond materialism, what culture, science, parents and teachers teach you, you will have to go deep inside, deconstruct your own mind and push yourself to lead a life that is not ordinary get to work and repeat the next day kind of life.   The most significant challenge you will be dealing with for the rest of your life if you want to understand reality and yourself is the epistemic challenge of figuring out what is true and what isn't and deconstructing all of the programming that you received during the first 20 years of your life through your childhood and education... and that comes from your culture and any bottlenecks or falsehoods or deceptions or lies within your culture will be programmed into you but you don't know what all of those are and so in the process of discovering yourself you will have to shed layer upon layer of all the false conditioning you've been programmed with that is keeping you from living a free open life. So you'll have to overcome your culture's programming but also your own internal self-deceptions (see 3 part series on self-deception) Greatest enemy/obstacle will be complacency, laziness, distractions, the taking life for granted and the fact that nobody around you is doing it ( and that is happening all around you among your peers. ) You will need a deep commitment to this process. A very long time horizon, a deep motivating vision and confidence in yourself that this is the kind of life that you wanna live The #1 key to living a good life is to be more conscious and to raise your level of consciousness.  Life is about 2 forces. Fear vs love. Selfishness vs selflessness. This is what all life boils down to at a metaphysical level. Your life is driven by fear or love.  Most important core pillars (the engine that you use to drive your life, instead of going with the flow and getting the status quo, the default and the boring stuff, like a monotonous job): Curiosity. Develop curiosity about everything. Constantly be learning. Be passionate about teaching yourself how life works. Through questioning, reading books that you're interested in.  Passion. Find something you're ridiculously passionate about so you can pour 10000 of hours into it.  Desire and ambition. Maximum, radical self-honesty. Always be honest and truthful with yourself.  Life is deeply counter-intuitive.  Being proactive. Be in the drivers seat when setting the direction of your life. You have to be proactive and go out there and be learning, researching, looking for things that you're passionate about, setting goals for yourself, motivating yourself,  Mastery. Pick one thing to develop mastery in and skill around that. Radically open mind.   Most common traps people fall into (you gotta be careful): Ideology and falling into belief systems that other people have invented and taking them as dogma and defending those and fighting over those and debating over those. The number 1 trap is getting your mind locked into one of those belief systems because those beliefs are like the operating system upon which your life will hinge, the operating system then dictates what software can run in that environment. You need to make sure that you're not working on the surface level (changing the apps) but that you're working on deeper level of looking at the internal working of your operating system and making sure that you're not limited or straight jacked by some operating system, some ideology, paradigm, belief system and even going deeper to the heart of the OS and that takes into metaphysics and spirituality.  Laziness There will be a lot of people that will try to tell you the answers, but you have to discover the answers for yourself.  Treating reality as though logic is the ultimate lens through which to understand reality. Being hyper logical and analyzing everything.  "I want the positive emotions and I don't want the negative ones, so what I'm gonna do is feel the positive ones and then suppress, deny, ignore and numb out the negative ones. " Huge mistake.  Deceiving and bullshitting yourself (stems from a lack of self-honesty) Eating the mainstream diet. Culture feeds you poison, so you will have a hard time using your mind and feel into your body. Judging what is being created around you.  Not taking life seriously. Most people don't take life seriously. There are many people that are completely not serious and work at star bucks and watch netflix, then there are a little more serious people who start businesses and become doctors and lawyers, and then there are the really serious people, these are the people who are metaphysically serious. This means they are serious about questioning consciousness itself and how you got here and what you're  doing here and actually trying to figure out life.  Squandering your youth. .. where you are doing the bare minimum to survive.  Playing video games, letting parents to pay everything for you, partying all the time, spending time in immature relationships which go around in circles and don't go anywhere, using too much social media, watching too much TV, masturbating to porn Settling for mediocrity by having low standards.  Temptations to imitate others. DON'T. Notice when you're imitating others and force yourself to be authentically you. Falling into temptations to take shortcuts. Looking for shortcuts and immitating people who take shortcuts and most people like to take shortcuts because they don't think long-term. Settling for a meaningless job instead of seeing it as a stepping stone toward something larger. (a job, or business that actually contributes to the advancement of mankind) Not outgrowing desires.  Being distracted by petty human shit. (Imagine you're the only human on earth and notice how that cuts out so much bullshit). Society will always try to distract you and convince you that this stuff is important. Focus on your vision and what you want to create and focus on becoming a strong human being . So when most people are talking about politics, gossip.... you're at home working on yourself, focusing on creating,  reading books, meditating,  contemplating and introspecting... Trying to control other people. (see lesson 68) Feeling weird for not doing the stuff that most people do (engaging in complacency, distractions and laziness) and then doing the things that most people do when they nay say you and discourage you and drag you down like crabs in a bucket (when one crabs try to exit the bucket the rest of the crabs try to pull it down) living life on the surface, not going deep being deceived by other people believing that other people around you are more developed than they are. Most people are mediocre and they have never seriously developed themselves. clinging to your perspective and trying to denounce the perspectives of others (this comes from believing that reality is an one objective material thing – how can then be possible that people have such different perspectives on reality...it's that there is no one thing there, there is only perspectives)   Core values you need to follow to live a good life: Creativity Heart Love Intuition Independence of mind Clarity of mind Life long learning Reading Authenticity Radical open-mindedness Passion Vision Ambition Purpose Spirituality Fearlessness Truth Raising your consciosness Work ethic Focus (The ability to concentrate your mind) Wisdom Service to others Selflessness Solitude and self-reflection Questioning everything Curiosity Going beyond materialism and survival There are many degrees to all of this is not either you are ambitious or you're not. Commit to following on this every single day and keep reminding yourself that this is what you're doing in this life. This is the back bone of your life and everything else is secondary (entertainment, socializing, games, fun) Fundamentals are simple but executing on this is difficult because it takes commitment and you have to do it day after day, year after year and not get distracted by all sorts of silliness that is happening around you in society. It takes vision, courage and the willingness to go it alone. This is a journey that is done in one in a million if not less. You can find like minded people, but if you want to go to the super human levels, don't expect anybody to come along on your journey, you're gonna do it all alone or you're not gonna do it at all. The ultimate questions: How much are you willing to invest in your life. How much do you want out of life. What are you willing to settle for, are you willing to settling for nothing less than super human? Are you going to honor your life and acknowledge the miracle that it is by working on actualizing your full super human potential. Are you willing to sacrifice and to work and to pay the price for that? To invest in yourself, every single day. To push your comfort zone, to ascend every stage that we have mapped and that we know that humans are capable of ascending up, are you willing to go to the very top