To Live For Pure Understanding

By Leo Gura - June 6, 2025

Imagine the power of a life lived for pure understanding. You don’t care about other stuff. You don’t care about pleasure or money or sex or power or success or love or politics or friends or family or sports or small-talk. You just wake up and your primary motivation is to understand reality — truly, genuinely, actually. Not how you want it to be. Not what you believe. Not some spiritual fantasy. Not how someone told you it is. You only care how anything actually is. You just want to know what is true.

And now, try to imagine what steps you would take from this one pure intention. How you’d think, how you’d question, how you’d study, what sources you’d gather, what tools you’d use — if your goal was pure understanding of the highest truths. How would you go about deriving pure, actual understanding of reality from scratch?

Just look at the purity of such a life! Look at all the bullshit that is instantly eliminated. Would you run off to join some fancy university? No! Would you join a cult? No! Would you believe New Age stories? No! Would you trust science? No! Would you believe religion? No! Would you subscribe to any ideology? No! Would you trust Buddhism? No! Would you trust reason? No! Would you trust mankind? No! Would you become a political activist? No! Would you join a giant corporation and do grinding administrative work to earn money and climb the corporate ladder? No! Would you get drunk and high? No! Would you waste your time chasing girls? No! Would you waste your time hanging out with loudmouthed friends? No! Would you waste your time in online debates? No! Would you spend any time defending and rationalizing your worldview and beliefs? No! Would you need someone tell you what to do and how to think? No!

Why not? Because naturally none of this is compatible with a genuine desire for understanding and truth. People who do that shit never cared about truth, they had some other agenda! So what would you do? You would sit down and start exploring your direct experience from scratch, making observations about the world from first principles, observing how your own mind, body, emotions, and rationality work. You would derive all understanding from scratch, trusting no one, believing no one, caring about no one’s approval, validation, nor opinion. It would just be a pure, genuine, selfless process of exploring raw experience, communion with reality itself, having direct insights into its structure and true nature.

Do not underestimate the power of genuine motive for truth and understanding. This cuts through all human nonsense and noise. This desire is completely self-sufficient, able to bootstrap itself from total ignorance to Omniscience. This is the purest, cleanest, healthiest way of life. You just wake up every morning and you look for truth and understanding.

Note: You don’t have to be so pure and perfect about it. This was an idealized scenario. You could still make room for stuff like work, fun, family, occasional sex. This was an idealization to help you see the power of pure desire for understanding. To see how self-guiding, self-correcting it is.

This kind of motivation generated Actualized.org. My secret is, unlike everyone else you know, I actually cared about knowing what’s true. Not something else. That makes all the difference in the world. I was far from so pure and perfect about it. But the core motive was there. I am not saying this kind of life is right for everyone. I’m just explaining where my understanding ultimately comes from. People often think I do this work as a career, for money, for ego, for approval, to run a cult, to change the world. People even think I do it to help people. No. I do it for pure understanding. Because that is the purest motive.

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