Word count:20690
[Music] in this episode I want to lay out the core principles of actualized org what are we doing here at the biggest picture level what is my style of personal development if we think of actualized org as a school or as a teaching or as a style or as a philosophy as a system then what are the core tenets of this system I wanted to lay those out for you it can be very useful to be able to zoom out from all the individual stuff that we talked about you know sometimes I'll spend an hour two or three talking about some very narrow topic which is important but that's only covering like maybe one principal out of many many principles so here we're gonna talk about close to sixty five different principles for creating the good life this is what I feel is necessary for a human being to live a good life now of course this is informed by my life experience and my own biases my own perspective my own experiences in life and my own style so in an important sense there's a sort of a stylistic component to any teacher that you're gonna be learning from any spiritual teaching any philosophical system any political theory you know there's there's a sort of like a idiosyncratic style that comes along with it so you have to also determine for yourself whether this style is gonna resonate with you now even if it doesn't fully resonate with you you can still learn stuff from it so it's not like you should only listen to teachers or teachings that are fully aligned with your style but do recognize that of course the things I say come from certain biases and experiences that I have and that doesn't mean that they're absolutely true for everybody but at the same time I must say that some of these principles are such rock-solid principles that I'm very tempted to say that they should be true for a large percentage of human beings so it's not just purely style there's there's a lot of profound wisdom in these principles now it can take years to be able to fully implement one of these principles sometimes these principles sound very simple just they can be stated in one or two sentences but to really be able to embody it and to have this principle functioning in your life and even just to be able to understand why this principle is so important can take years can take decades which is why I have a lot of individual episodes devoted to each one of these in many cases not all of them in the future I'll be releasing more to make sure I cover as much these principles as I can in a lot of depth because we can't go into a lot of depth here because here we just have to kind of like list them all out and give you a big picture perspective now I'm not gonna go into explaining why each of these principles is true that would be way too much work and way too much detail for this overview though that we're doing here but if you're curious about why these principles are true and you want me to like prove it to you well first of all I'm not gonna prove anything to you that's that's your job is to figure out what actually works in life and what doesn't I'm just offering these as suggestions not as Dogma not as beliefs that you take blindly but ultimately why they're true how do I know that they're true it's because of all of my life experience all of my experience doing business all of my experience trying to figure out my own life dealing with my own neuroses and problems and sticking points my own pathologies all of the enormous research that I've done theoretical research reading hundreds of books studying with advanced teachers and light masters traveling around the country traveling around the world to various places to learn studying hundreds of different perspective literally hundreds of different perspectives hundreds of different traditions from Easter ones to Western ones for modern ones to ancient ones reading lots of self-help books trying to experiment with all these techniques myself and seeing what works what doesn't work what's important what's not so important right so from all of this and all of my meditating and contemplating and journaling and thinking about this and all of my five years of teaching all of this and getting feedback from people and coaching people professionally as I used to do working with clients one-on-one seeing what they're sticking points are talking with friends around the country about what their various sticking points are you know working on improving various limitations in my own life like my my health and my nutrition and my fitness and my inability to socialize when I was younger and my introversion my shyness so working through all of this stuff right all of it is sort of getting compiled together and is informing my understanding of reality and what's important to live the good life and of course very importantly I forgot to mention my pretty deep experience with psychedelics at this point has been very instrumental in informing me about what the most important principles for living a good life are and this is something that I really been interested in for probably close to 20 years all the way back to high school I was just interested in what are the principles of living a good life so without further ado let's get into these principles core principle number one and I'm not going to list them in any particular order here but but this one is so important maybe it does deserve to be number one is no ideology and no dogma of any kind this is one of the things that makes actualize that work unique among many other teachings and schools is that most teachings and most schools are filled with a lot of ideology and a lot of dogma stuff they they just want you to accept and I have a whole episode called how ideology works which goes into a lot of depth about the dangers of ideology the dangers of dogma do not make the mistake of thinking that ideology and dogma is just a mistake that religious people make no no no this is mistake that almost everybody makes scientific people make this mistake atheists make this mistake skeptics make this mistake political people make this mistake very intelligent people make this mistake it's very easy to fall into some kind of ideology because that's what society feeds you as various kinds of ideologies and one of the most difficult things to do in life is to question and undo all the ideologies and dogmas that you've been filled with growing up in whatever culture you grew up in whatever family you grew up in whatever school system you went to you know they all filled your mind with various kinds of programming and beliefs and ideologies and so questioning and undoing all of that and living a dogma free ideology free life that is very challenging and it can be a little difficult to understand why that's even important but the reason that it is is because the thing you're ultimately after is you're after the highest truth and you're after you you're after freedom freedom of your mind and so the problem with ideology and Dogma is that it it sort of anchors your mind down and it doesn't allow your mind to explore all the nooks and crannies of reality that it needs to be able to explore to understand what reality is and to live the good life you see these ideologies are like grooves that your mind gets stuck in and then it keeps going down these grooves it keeps thinking down these grooves and looking at the world through these lenses and that shapes and distorts what you're able to see and how flexible you're able to be and how you're able to change your life people who are very ideology ideological and dogmatic they're not actually able to change themselves which is what we need to do we need to massively change ourselves in order to create the good life and all of my research and and philosophizing into the topic of epistemology or the theory of knowledge if I could boil all of that down to just one simple principle it would just be do not be ideological it's just that simple that's a very very simple principle and this grounds pretty much everything that I ever talked about ever in any of my content and I stress this over and over and over again because it's so important and it'll take you years to realize how important this is but if you can follow this one principle in your life this will save you a lot of misery and trouble and a lot of going down dead ends and various kinds of ideological traps the next core principle is that big-picture thinking is greater than technical knowledge and always Trump's technical knowledge that's another thing that I stress in my work all the time is big-picture thinking do you understand what's really going on at the highest possible levels and are you concerned about that over all the technical details that's like one of my greatest strengths this big-picture thinking the technical details of of things I'm not really that good at that's actually sort of a weakness of mine and sometimes when I'm delivering some piece of content or I'm talking about some topic it's in the technical details that I can screw up and get something wrong here there I've certainly done that plenty of times in past episodes but I'm never too concerned about that because my focus is always on the big picture and that's because what I saw when I was younger is I saw the opposite of that I saw everybody around me including my teachers and society and culture at large and my professors and so forth they were so focused on the technical knowledge and yet they had very little of the big picture and because of this they were living the wrong kinds of lives see you can have all the perfect technical knowledge you can be an expert in your technical field but have no idea of the big picture and your life will be miserable and highly dysfunctional and pathological whereas if you get the big picture right and you're focused on nailing the big picture the technical details you don't need to waste a lot of time energy on that it doesn't matter and if you get a few technical details wrong here or there it doesn't really matter so the big picture like in this example with this episode is we're gonna we're gonna give you all these sixty-five principles for creating the good life that's a very big picture so if you just follow these principles intelligently not robotically then you should make very good progress to creating a great life and notice that these principles they don't depend on technical knowledge we're talking about very broad ideas here the next core principle is that direct experience is king direct experience is king experience is really the only thing that exists and the only thing that is real right now your experience whatever you're experiencing right now that's what's real that's what's actual that's what exists everything else is fantasy everything else is imagination this is a very powerful principle for cutting through all the [ __ ] that culture and society and people feed you and also for cutting through your own [ __ ] the [ __ ] that your own mind feeds you your own imaginings and musings and theories and philosophies and ideologies how do you cut through all that by grounding yourself in your present direct experience that's what's King if it's not present in your direct experience it's not real that's very powerful and you need to use this principle over and over again as you're inquiring into reality to help you to to sort the wheat from the chaff to sort the actuality from all the concepts and beliefs that you will be learning from books and so forth and coming up in your own mind the next core principle is self experimentation actualized org is all about self experimentation how do you discover what really works what is true and which principles will lead to the good life by believing me by reading a book by listening to some PhD professor who has a Nobel Prize and trusting him or some guru who's sitting up on a pedestal no it's through self experimentation you won't know what techniques will or won't work for you or will or won't resonate with you until you try them and this principle really is a corollary of the idea that direct experience is king so it's because we realize that direct experiences is king that we also realize that we do a lot of self experimentation because it's only by going out and experiencing different things trying different techniques that we will discover what really works for us so what this means is if you have some kind of problem let's say you have a consistent relationship problem in your intimate relationships so self experimentation this principle is what it means is that you're gonna go out there and you're gonna experiment with various solutions you're not gonna come and trust me or somebody else or try to get the answer from someplace you can experiment now of course this means you can you can listen to people you can get advice from people you can read books of course and you should but self experimentation means that your to solving any problem is always gonna be one of okay let me experiment and troubleshoot this and try different things until something works so you're gonna go maybe read some books on relationships maybe you're gonna go hire a therapist and talk to them maybe you're gonna go see a life coach maybe you're gonna go to do some psychedelics and contemplate the nature of your relationship and your sticking points while you're on psychedelics or maybe you're gonna do some journaling or maybe you're gonna have a serious one-to-one conversation with your loved one or your spouse or whatever to try to resolve this relationship thing or maybe you're gonna go do a solo retreat in the woods for a week and contemplate the nature of your relationship you know so all of these are different things you can experiment with and and your approach is gonna be looking let me try this stuff out and see what's gonna what's gonna solve it and if you have money problems same thing you're gonna try various self experiments to resolve your money problems and if you have some depression you're gonna do more self experimentation and so forth and this is how basically you solve all of your problems in life is through self experimentation the next core principle is radical open-mindedness I've talked a lot about this in the past I have entire episodes about open-mindedness and I'll have some more in the future but the reason radical open-mindedness is so important is because we we recognize that we enter this world not knowing anything and that we need to be able to fully explore every nook and cranny of reality without prejudging it so that we don't accidentally cut ourselves off from great discoveries and amazing insights and truths see and we also recognize that the mind the ego mind tends to love to be closed-minded to new experiences and to challenging new ideas and so therefore we take the opposite step the counterintuitive move and we open ourselves up radically so radically that it would shock most people that were this open this means you have to be open to any ID any perspective any teaching no matter how ridiculous or crazy and untrue it might sound at first this might seem dangerous but actually it's the opposite open-mindedness doesn't mean that you are gonna believe a bunch of ridiculous things it just means that you're open to exploring different ideas and perspectives and the reason that we accept this principle and we follow it is because we recognize that if we're not radically open-minded then our mind is going to judge prematurely and cut us off from all these other avenues that we can explore and we also recognize that a lot of the deepest truths in life are counterintuitive and seem ridiculous and silly on the surface until they are deeply explored and it can take a lot of time to deeply explore these various truths and topics before we realise just how true and powerful they are which means that we need to remain open-minded during that time otherwise if we're closed-minded then what's gonna happen is that we're gonna just gonna say oh well that thing is stupid that thing is crazy that can't possibly be true that thing is irrational that thing is silly and religious and that thing is criminal and we're gonna do all this but we're not actually gonna explore all of that it's much better to go and actually explore all of that which again is not the same thing as becoming dogmatic about any one of those things or clinging to any one of those things we're interested in exploration genuine exploration exploration means you don't know what you're gonna find sometimes you'll find great stuff sometimes you'll find ugly bad stuff the next core principle is that you do not judge things which you have not experienced personally this again is sort of a corollary to the radical open-mindedness principle but it bears making explicit here because I can't tell you how many times I've fallen into this trap of judging things that I hadn't personally experienced and talking about it as though I knew about it and I understood it but really that was just a self-deception and I didn't really understand it because I didn't have any experience with the thing and this is something that the mind loves to do all the time it loves to judge things especially when it has zero experience with it so maybe you judge Middle Easterners or Middle Eastern countries but the question is have you actually been to a Middle Eastern country how many middle Easterner friends do you have or maybe you judge psychedelics have you ever even done psychedelics see but of course the mind is very tricky so the mind will say olio but I don't need to do that I don't need to go to Middle Eastern countries I don't need to do psychedelics I don't need to try that food I don't need to explore that culture I don't need to study this religion because I already know it's [ __ ] that line of reasoning itself is the [ __ ] so be very careful about judging things you have not experienced you need to become very good at recognizing when your mind is about to judge something and then you ask you to wait a minute have I actually experienced this thing that I'm gonna be talking about here in a second oh I haven't then I should keep my mouth shut and I keep my mind open that's a very powerful skill to develop very few people have developed that skill and I still struggle with that one myself the next core principle is question everything question everything there is no idea too sacred not to question in fact anything that is sacred needs to be questioned even more so doubly so triply so question especially the most obvious stuff the stuff that people with think that you're crazy or insane to question question that question the world even exists question whether you even exist question everything the more fundamental your questioning the better and especially become very good at questioning assumptions what are the assumptions of this philosophical system what are the assumptions of this scientific model what are the assumptions of this spiritual teacher you have to get very very good at sussing out assumptions and questioning them and of course questioning all of your own assumptions and all of your own ideas so you don't just question skeptically on the outside you also question even more so on the inside question every teaching question everything I say but of course be careful not to turn this into a weapon where you're just questioning and you're putting the burden of understanding on others the burden of proving things on others you need to question in a way where you still assume the burden and responsibility of finding the truth for yourself the next core principle is care about philosophical and metaphysical matters most people do not care about these because they think that there's no practical application there is it's just that philosophical and metaphysical matters are more abstract and therefore it takes more effort and more study to find the applications there are very practical applications but it takes a little bit more work if you fail to follow this principle it's gonna happen that you're gonna get lost in the transactional pragmatic nature of mundane everyday life of business of doing chores and you're gonna get so lost in that and there's really no soul or spirit to be found there there's nothing deep or profound to be found in just doing business just earning money just being transactional in your relationships the depth in life is found in having philosophical and metaphysical matters questioned and resolved that's where the really juicy and powerful work lies so you need to care about that you need to cultivate a certain curiosity a philosophical metaphysical curiosity which means that you're not just chasing practical self-help advice like how to get laid how to earn a million dollars how to cure my depression all of that it's fine to a certain degree but you need to go away beyond that something deeper and you'll notice that that's one of the things that differentiates actualizado work from a lot of the other self-help material that's out there is that most of it tends to be just very very strictly transactional and pragmatic about having have how to get you a particular specific result and while that that's sort of appealing on the surface it's hollow on the inside it doesn't go deep enough into addressing your root issues in life because most of your surface level issues stem from your deeper existential metaphysical problems that you're not even aware of yet the next core principle is genuine intent for truth at whatever cost you need to genuinely care about the truth with a capital T as one of your highest priorities and values no matter what the cost is to get at this truth it doesn't matter if you need to move to a different city break up with all of your friends pay tens of thousands of dollars work overtime you know whatever you got to do if that's what's required to get at the truth then that's what's required and you're going to accept that cost because you have a genuine intent and desire and curiosity for the ultimate truth without this what's gonna happen is that you're gonna keep falling into falsehood and delusion you see because if you're not willing to accept the costs that come with seeking the ultimate truth you're gonna get sucked into the lesser things in life you're gonna pursue money and sex and comfort and luxury and these sorts of things and all of that is best pursued with falsehood see and you're gonna end up deluding yourself very deeply in life you're not gonna really understand what life is at the highest level because you never made it a genuine intent your priorities instead were chasing material stuff which has nothing to do with truth and often is actually aligned with falsehood oftentimes the easiest way to make money is through falsehood not through truth the easiest way to attract a sexual partner and oftentimes us through falsehood not through truth the next core principle is you need to have a genuine intent to understand every point of view one thing you notice about life is that there are so many different kinds of points of view people have all kinds of points of view different groups of people different cultures and nations and ethnicities have all sorts of different points of view and usually what what the average person does is they just stay in their point of view and then they criticize and judge the other points of view without genuinely caring to look at the world from the perspective of all those other people and you need to do the opposite of that you need to get very curious and good at jumping into other people's shoes and looking at the world from their perspective and that's because you recognize that the world really is nothing but different points of view there's no such thing as a understanding of the world without a point of view and your own point of view is not the most important or the best you recognize that so when you recognize that you understand that hey I can learn a lot from looking at the world from many points of view and that's one of the things that you become passionate about is exploring different points of view the next core principle is integral thinking you need to think integrally and what that really boils down to is the realization that every point of view or perspective contains some kernel of truth no matter what it is even some of the most atrocious perspectives Nazism radical Islamic terrorism and others that you would think have no redeeming qualities you can find a kernel of truth even in those points of view and less radical ones especially and so this is where open-mindedness comes in right you need to be able to integrate all these different points of view would and bring them all together and to see okay what's really going on here what's sort of the meta perspective the meta point of view when we combine all these other points of view what does that tell us about life what does that tell me about myself what does that tell us about humanity what does it tell us about society and so forth and from that you get so much more than just sticking to your own points of view and defending your own points of view this is really the opposite of ideology and dogma because what ideology and dog would try to do is they try to limit your point of view and defend a rigid perspective on the world so it's the opposite of integral the opposite of holistic and therefore people with with this limited perspective they they understand so much less of life then the otherwise could and so just I want you to keep this core principle in mind that every point of view contains some truth and it's your job to discover what that is it's not the responsibility of the other person to tell you or convince you of that kernel of truth for example it's not the job of a Nazi or a radical terrorist to convince you of their truth it's your job to go study them and discover what is the truth that they are so passionate about what is that and very importantly just because you're doing this does not mean that you have to become a Nazi of course or a terrorist of course not you're exploring points of view you're gonna be exploring hundreds of points of you throughout your whole life that doesn't mean that you have to get married to any one point of view in fact integral thinking is the recognition that every point of view is partial never the ultimate truth always partial so that's why we're exploring so many of them is precisely because it's just a little piece think of every point of view as like a 1% perspective on reality so 1% is not a lot so you know we need to explore hundreds of them for all those individual ones to add up to something substantial the next core principle is that everything basically boils down to inner game the quality of your life boils down to your psychology this means that all problems and all suffering is self created and self inflicted and this is very difficult for many people to believe because it runs counter to the idea that we are living in some sort of rigid fixed external reality a material reality with unbreakable physical laws where it seems like all the problems are out there in the world and all the suffering is created by the world outside of me and then I have nothing to do with it so this is flipping that on its head upside down 180 degrees and realizing that actually all of those external problems that I think exists out there all the suffering that's created by the world all of that external material physical hard stuff that can't be changed what is that but actually an aspect of my own inner game that's actually a belief that I have that's a paradigm that I'm in and that itself is not an outer thing but an inner thing this is like the master key that unlocks all of your potential in life because it's only when you realize that the most important thing for determining the quality of your life and everything you do and solving all of your problems and suffering is mastering the internal software of your mind when you realize that now you have so much power now there's all this potential that opens up now you're no longer a victim whereas in the other case there's very little you can do you get stuck very easily the next core principle is lifelong learning and self education you need to become a lifelong learner you need become passionate about learning and your education you've got to take full responsibility for it and take ownership of it and be proactive about it don't wait for a teacher to get you to do some homework assignment or to read a book don't wait for some program or some training to teach you something go out there and proactively learn about life and the reason this principles is so paramount is because when you're born you have no information about the world you don't know how the world works or what it is or what you're doing here so you got to start to learn and this process of learning will continue for the rest of your life it's not just school it's not just University in fact all of that was just the beginning of your entire educational career which only really takes off after you graduate University so of course this means reading lots of books you should expect to read a hundred or 200 books over the next five or ten years this is gonna be absolutely essential it's through these books that you will learn various perspectives techniques traps mistakes lessons principles you'll be exposed to new ideas to new cultures to history things you haven't ever heard about anywhere else the quality and and detail of information that's presented in books the quality book will be much greater than what you see in a video or on television or on some social media website and you need that you need that solid high quality reliable information to get you started these are like your leads these books are the source of leads for you as to what you should be pursuing and what techniques can work for you and so forth and these books help you to understand what your problems are see part of the challenge is that you have problems that you don't even understand you have yet takes a lot of reading just to realize that but also don't stop at books you also need to take courses seminars workshops there are many online courses that are available these days on almost any topic that you would want to learn about you could find in-person seminars and workshops which are super important to go to there's a very big difference between watching a workshop or a seminar online in video form and actually going to one live in-person you'll get 10 times more from going to the exact same workshop or seminar live rather than watching it as the video do not be cheap with your self education it's because you recognize that this principle is so important lifelong learning that you are willing to invest in your learning you're willing to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for courses seminars workshops you're willing to invest 500 to a thousand dollars every year in buying a bunch of new books and an additional point about this lifelong learning we're still talking about just this one principle of lifelong learning is you need to develop a system for taking notes and for organizing all of this stuff that you're going to be researching and learning because you're gonna have various techniques and ideas and principles that you're learning vocabulary words all of this and you're gonna have to compile it together in some way a system if you want an idea for how to do that check out my episode about how to keep a commonplace book that's my system that I use the next core principle is observation observation is one of the keys to life the essence of learning is observation how do you learn anything by observing it for a long period of time very patiently very methodically over and over and over again the power of observation is enormous way more than anyone would ever imagine which is why you can spend years and decades doing very careful and painstaking observation an observation is the solution to the problem of ideology and dogma and various kinds of belief systems that you get trapped in observation is the antidote to being lost inside your own mind what you need to do is to observe and that's why science to the extent that science is successful and has some good benefits for society is because science focuses on observation but now you need to take that on as a principle for yourself it's not enough to have science observed for you and then to report the results to you you need to become a keen observer of life and of reality observe everything observe people observe animals observe nature observe trees observe your own behaviors observe your own thinking process observe your motivations your fears observe your problems and neuroses observe when you suffer observe when you're in pain observe when you're happy observe what makes you motivated observe what makes you depressed carefully observe all of that and through this process you will learn about yourself you will learn about the world you will learn about mankind you will learn about business anything anything you observe you will make finer grained distinctions in and you will learn how that thing works so observation is related of course to our earlier principle of direct experience as King observation goes hand-in-hand with direct experience and the opposite of that is believing what other people tell you so to really be able to embody the things that I teach with actualize or you need to do an enormous amount of observation years of observation on everything that I talk about so the things I talked about in the episode then you got to go and actually observe it in your own life and see that oh yes this is exactly how it works or maybe you'll realize no it's not quite how Leo said it works maybe he was only half right but the other half I have observed that it works differently what he said see and that could happen because you know what my observation is not perfect by any means there's there's so much to observe about so many different facets of reality that it's hard to observe a hundred percent of all of it so you're bound to if you're gonna be seriously observing observe some things about the things I talked about that I was not able to observe and it's through observation that insights come the next closely related principle is plan to meditate for one hour every day for the rest of your life do you have a meditation practice yet why not how many times have I told you that meditation is one of the most important things you can do for your personal development it's a cornerstone have it you need to install this habit don't start with an hour start with 10 20 minutes whatever you can but eventually you got to build up and you should already have the expectations in place that you're gonna be meditating for one hour every day for the rest of your life this is not negotiable you're just gonna do it and you're gonna enjoy it it'll take you a while before you start to enjoy it but you should already be envisioning that you're going to be enjoying it now why meditation well because meditation is really just observation when you're meditating you're just sitting there and you're observing the present moment and again that ties us back to the earlier principle of direct experiences King what is meditation it's just your direct experience of whatever is happening in the present moment that's all that it is and you're just observing and you're observing the function of your own mind various body sensations and emotions that you're having and it's only through this observation process through meditation that you're going to be able to understand yourself and how your body and mind work through years of careful and painstaking observation and this is why most spiritual teachings cannot be directly related to people and why you can't sell spiritual advancement and you can't sell psychological maturity and you can't sell wisdom you can't sell these things to people because the only way they can get those things is by doing the observational work that's required to have those insights and understandings to have that base of experience you see it's like no amount of money could you give me to be able to make you into like a master piano player the only way you can become a master piano player is by going through all the direct experience and practice and observation that a master piano player has that makes him a master and so now apply this dough to your body and your mind in your life no amount of listening to me or paying me any amount of money will get you the experience the observational experience that you need to understand the functioning of your own mind and body this is absolutely critical this is why spiritual growth is so difficult because most people just don't do the observation work it takes a lot of time and energy and it's difficult and it's boring and sometimes it's painful and you suffer through it and sometimes you observe things which freak you out you observe things about reality which run counter to all your ideologies and beliefs and all the programming you got when you were younger and that freaks you out and then when you become really good at meditation that that enables you to access mystical States higher states of consciousness non-ordinary states of consciousness which is where all the really powerful gains lie and which is absolutely essential for developing a good life but it takes years to get there years of practice to get there for most people the next core principle is that ego is the root of all human problems and suffering and ego is just that sense of you ego is the sense that you were born as that human being right there and that you will die one day that your identity with that biological body in mind that you have and your personal story about the fact that you were born you went to school and you you had all these problems and now here you are sitting there as this material creature that's ego and from that stem all human problems and suffering both individual and collective this is a super powerful principle this one principle basically explains all of yourself and all of mankind and there's so much to be said about this and I have said quite a lot about it throughout many episodes in the past and basically every episode I talk about touches upon this principle in one form or another the next principle which is closely related is self-deception self-deception is the biggest thing you need to be worried about in life how your own mind lies to you and tricks you and deceives you the ego mind corrupts everything that it comes in contact with and even more so than you lie to others and that you deceive others you deceive yourself and I have a whole three-part episode series called self-deception where I list many self-deception mechanisms that I've been studying over the last five or ten years it's how your own mind trips you you need to get very very very good at seeing your own self deceptions not so much the stuff deceptions of others but of yourself because you see if we're trying to get to the truth if we're trying to really understand reality at a big picture level that means that we have to contend with the biggest obstacle which is self deception because self-deception leads to delusion into falsehood city so that's your greatest obstacle is your own mind and of course this connects with the earlier principle of the inner game is the most important thing for solving all of your problems because all of your problems basically stem for various kinds of self deceptions that are running inside of your mind which you aren't conscious of yet the next closely-related principle is self bias you need to recognize and be able to see within yourself your own selfishness and your own self biases you need to see how your ego mind or the self lowercase s self distorts everything that it perceives because the whole purpose of the self is to survive and therefore you're always going to be looking and interacting with situations and manipulating situations in such a way that it's gonna serve yourself and therefore your perceptual system is self biased filled with conflicts of interest and double standards so a very simple example of of self bias is that you know if if I'm a criminal and like I robbed a grocery store I can't be allowed to be my own judge and jury at the trial because I would have a self bias of setting myself free I would create all sorts of justifications and excuses for why I didn't commit the crime scene which is why judges have to recuse themselves if they have any kind of mature real connection with the case that they're trying because otherwise self bias is gonna creep in there but of course this is just one little tip of the iceberg of how self bias works these are some gross examples there are very subtle examples of house of bias works basically all of your ideologies and beliefs and everything you you perceive out there is always biased by your own needs your ego ik needs your survival needs so your relationships are self biased your business is self biased your your attitudes politically ourself biased and so on and so forth and all of this is preventing you from being able to access the truth which you need to live the good life so you need to unwire all of those self biases or at the very least become very conscious of them the next core principle is that all fear all judgment all evil all anger and all suffering are delusion and falsehood this is huge this is a huge principle which will save you so much suffering all fear judgment evil anger and suffering is delusion that means anytime you're experiencing those and of course you don't enjoy experiencing those and you want a way to not experience those anymore well you start to have to become more conscious and realize just how much of all of that is falsehood and it stems from falsehood so the reason that we want to pursue truth so much aside from the fact that we're just genuinely curious about it but it's also because if we do discover the truth then we will realize that fear judgment evil anger and suffering have all been false and that's precisely what we need to live the good life you can't live the good life while you're in fear while you're judging all the time while you see evil out there in the world while you're angry and while you're suffering by definition that's the bad life so the bad life goes with falsehood and the good life goes with truth another closely related principle here is do not demonize anyone all demonization is delusion as well anytime you think somebody out there is evil you're wrong this is one of the self deception mechanisms of the mind is to try to demonize others or groups of people or entities or organizations somewhat of a related principle is that reality is perfect there is nothing at all wrong with reality if you think that something is wrong in the world it's because of your inner game and how you're looking at it not because it actually is wrong or it actually is bad or it actually is evil reality is literally perfect but you can only appreciate that and it will only start sounding like something that's real and not just rule wishful thinking at enormous ly high levels of consciousness so it'll take you years and perhaps decades to have enough mystical experiences to ultimately realize that reality is perfect until then well you're sort of just got to take my word for it but this is a powerful principle because you can use it to change and grow yourself so any time in your life that you're finding something that is bothering you or annoying you and you think it should be otherwise and that this is wrong and that person is doing something wrong you can always remind yourself wait a minute but I know in the back of my mind that reality is perfect maybe I haven't had the mystical experience yet to experience that like Liam says but I but I can Intuit something about that and and so maybe maybe there's something wrong with me the way that I'm looking at this situation the way I'm looking at this person how am i creating the imperfection out of the perfection that's already there it's powerful principle that you can use to to change your feelings about things now the next four principles that I'm going to give you are very important ones and there are going to be four different ways of looking at the purpose of life what is the purpose of life so the purpose of life there's a lot we could say about this and I've said stuff in the past about it but basically here are four different purposes of life these are very overarching big-picture purposes which help to orient you as to what you should be doing in your life so the first purpose of life is to raise your consciousness that should be something that you're concerned with every single day of your life from now on the second purpose of life is to raise your capacity to love to embrace the full spectrum of experience not just the good experiences and the sweet and pleasant ones but everything raised your capacity to love everything and everyone the third purpose of life is to take in the beauty of life have you noticed how beautiful it all is but of course there's also a spectrum of beauty and it's very easy to to see the beauty when you go to a museum and you look at a fine Picasso painting or you go to some national park like Yosemite and you look at the beautiful mountains and trees and the sunset and that's beautiful that's the kind of beauty that's sort of easy to see but can you see the beauty of everyday life of the most mundane things can you see the beauty of your body of your hands can you see the beauty on the wall can you see the beauty of that pencil of that lamp of the carpet of this room the beauty of society the beauty of mankind the beauty of even the ugly things that really is if you think about it the essence of a good life to live the greatest life possible is really just none other than to see Beauty everywhere all the time and to be conscious of that but you have to train yourself because Society has trained you to be judgmental in to pick and choose and to not like the ugly stuff and to only like a like 1% of the full spectrum of all this stuff that there is to love that requires surrendering your ego see the ego doesn't want to love and see the beauty of everything it wants to cherry-pick and so your job is to surrender that more and more and more and to take in more of the beauty all the time so that you don't have a day where you go by in your life or you're just going through the motions just going to work just punching the clock just earning some money just doing some business just taking care of the kids just cooking a meal but you're disconnected from the beauty of it all and that's what very careful observation and meditation will ultimately teach you is they will teach you the beauty of the most simple things just like looking at your hands and seeing the enormous beauty in the design of your hands and how they function you know you can sit there for hours marveling at this but only after enormous training that doesn't come to you from a diet of playing video games and watching Netflix for your whole life yeah you're not going to be able to do that it'll take years to untrain yourself from from that Netflix video game diet to be able to see the beauty of very simple things you know the average person when they're walking on the sidewalk and they see some dog poo they can't see the beauty in that and you need to train yourself to see the beauty in that and whatever it takes that you need to surrender to see the beauty in that that's your work that's one of your highest purposes in life you know I was driving yesterday late at night like I like to do I Drive around Las Vegas late at night just looking at the at the lights and just contemplating and meditating while I Drive actually I love to meditate while I Drive the most so I Drive I do this whole loop around Las Vegas it takes about an hour and a half it's probably like 80 miles or so I Drive around the entire city late at night and I was driving and there was like some part on the road where I usually drive where there was like construction going on and I got annoyed by that I'm thinking like oh I got this peaceful Drive and I have to deal with all this construction nonsense that's happening late at night but then I also realized like oh wait a minute why am I not taking in the beauty of all of this I mean it's beautiful like the construction signs are certain Beauty to them and people working you know the way they're constructing this this off ramp or on ramp or whatever it is like there's a certain beauty to that and then and then you kind of just see that all this is a society it's sort of like almost like ants working on the little ant colony you know building something on the road and so like you see that beauty whereas normally I would get annoyed by that here I saw the beauty of it and it completely transformed that experience so you need to get good at doing that all the time in more and more difficult situations you know it's very difficult to see the beauty when you're dealing with a situation that is affecting your survival needs so that's where most spiritual work happens right there and the fourth purpose of life is to feel alive every day to live proactively to not have a single day where you're just like I said going through some boring motions just kind of doing another typical day just kind of phoning it in and being robotic to actually feel alive that feeling of engagement you want to be passionate and alive so whatever that takes that that takes you doing more travel then do that and if if that requires you have a better job in order to finance your travel then do that but of course to feel alive also what that means is being more conscious being less robotic and less mechanical in the way that you live the next principle is to build your metaphysical connection to reality I've talked about this explicitly in my video called what is spirituality so we can rephrase now this principle as just pursue spirituality or be spiritual and what that means is developing your connection to reality but your metaphysical connection and what that means is that means realizing that you're not just some creature some mammalian meatbag who is living on this rock that's rotating around the Sun but rather that you are the entire universe you're not an object that is within existence you are existence itself to realize that I am the whole universe as I stand here that is only possible through all of the metaphysical contemplations and various meditations that I have done for many many years and that is starting to develop within me and it's only going to develop more and more and more and the more that happens the better your life becomes because now you feel like life is not just about living and surviving and doing chores for people but it's it's really just about connecting more and more with yourself as the entire universe and be more conscious to that the next core principle is counter-intuitive 'no such a profound point and topic I'll have a whole episode about in the future what it means is that reality is deeply counterintuitive almost every facet of anything worthwhile that you want to accomplish in life you're gonna notice the counterintuitive nosov it that means that reality is gonna work the opposite of how you think it will work until you get a lot of experience with it so for example if you're a man trying to attract a woman a beautiful woman attracting a beautiful woman is very counterintuitive because you have to do the opposite of what you think you would have to do to attract her you would think that you'd have to go up and brag to her and show off your big muscles and all that and counter-intuitively if you do that you're actually going to repel her and that takes a lot of experience to unlearn that naive intuition that you had and to learn how it really works and other examples for example business in business to earn money and be successful you have to do the opposite of what you would think like for example you might think in business the best way to earn a bunch of money is just to to market to everybody as many eyeballs as possible make my message as most generic as possible so it appeals to absolutely everybody but if you do that in business these what's gonna happen is that actually you're gonna fail it's much better to to narrow your niche and your focus and to only target your advertising and sales and your product to a very narrow specific group of people like less than 1% of the entire population and you would think that but below that means I'm alienating 99% of people yes but you're gonna convert that other 1% whereas if you try to appeal to everybody you're gonna convert nobody and that's just one of the many counterintuitive things that you'll discover in business relationships are also very counterintuitive happiness the pursuit of happiness is counterintuitive fear is counterintuitive emotions are counterintuitive like I said I mean literally like every aspect of life is so counterintuitive it works the opposite of what you would initially think how it would work and so actually a corollary principle to this is and this is a very powerful principle as as almost stupid as it sounds do the opposite of what everybody else is doing I can't explain to you just how much leverage I've gotten out of following this one principle in my life sometimes I will literally just see what is the common thing people do and I'll just do the opposite just based on this principle purely on this principle and the reason that is is because I know that what most people are doing isn't making them happy nor is it making them successful what most people are doing is they're getting very mediocre results in all areas of life and so if I do what they do I expect I'll get mediocrity so almost as a default what I do is I just try to be a contrarian to the opposite our most people meditating know so I'll meditate are most people taking psychedelics no so I'll take psychedelics our most people you know working hard to discover their life purpose know so I'll do that now of course you can find exceptions to this so I wouldn't recommend you know applying this in an in a in a robotic way like well leo so by this logic does it mean that you know most people aren't taking heroin so I should take care no of course not so you have to be intelligent in how you apply this principle but generally speaking it's because reality is so counterintuitive it's pretty smart you know after you realize how counterintuitive things are the next time you go into a fresh situation you almost start to expect that well I expect the situation should work like this but I also know that reality is so [ __ ] counterintuitive and I've been burned so many times before by the counterintuitive things let me just now do the opposite thing first and see if that works and oftentimes it will work the first time see you learn that lesson hmm the next core principle is that non-duality is the ultimate truth reality is non-dual which means that all boundaries all categories and all distinctions ultimately collapse they're all relative there is no distinction between inside/outside physical non-physical me other good bad black/white human non-human living nonliving organic inorganic scientific versus religious so all of these dualities all of these will ultimately collapse they don't hold if you follow them all the way this is a super profound truth and this one principle can help you to cut through so much [ __ ] and to see how the mind constructs all these categories and distinctions very very helpful to see how most of the things you were taught as a child all the way up through university have just been categories that were constructed by the human mind by the human race and that many of these distinctions are purely conceptual they're not absolute in any sense and that they will ultimately all collapse as you keep observing deeper and deeper keep meditating keep contemplating keep having mystical experiences all this will ultimately collapse into one unity one ultimate absolute truth which leads us to the next core principle which is that absolute truth exists but it cannot be thought believed imagined communicated spoken written proven or argued this is very difficult for most people to accept especially many scientifically minded rationally minded people they tend to assume that if absolute truth does exist then it must be possible to prove it or argue it or communicate it or write about it or imagine it or think about it but the fact is that it's not because all those are limited and the absolute truth is unlimited it's absolute that's what makes it so interesting and special and important so this is just a brute fact of reality mm-hmm you can go test it for yourself and if you discover the absolute truth what I'm claiming is that if you do the practices one day you will discover the absolute truth and once you do you will realize that it cannot be thought believed imagined communicated spoken written proven or argued and yet you will know about it more certainly than you know anything else in the world how is that possible well it can't really be explained or imagined or communicated but it is possible through mystical experience through lots of observation again that's that's very important it's super important principle because a lot of people get stuck arguing and trying to communicate and imagine and think about absolute truth and you need to just know right off the bat that that's just not possible so stop wasting your time doing that you waste a lot of time doing that you waste years and decades doing that just stop it your life will go a lot better another core principle is that reality is not Material reality is not a physical object of any kind reality is a giant mind everything you think is physical like walls roads cars planets solar systems it's all one mind these are all imaginings within a mindscape and there is nothing outside of mindscape mindscape is all that there ever is and again this is not something you believe this is something that you experience through direct observation lots and lots and lots of observation psychedelics help a lot as well the next closely related principle is that life is a dream and I have a whole episode called life is a dream or I explain this but it just basically is what it sounds like life is literally a dream what you have here is just a dream there is no external world beyond this dream that you're in it's a dream just like the dreams you have when you're asleep at night and just like those it's possible to awaken from the dream so you can awaken from life this is a super important principle because it helps you to dis identify from all of your attachments that you have to this dream you start taking the dream less seriously and that's very important for living the good life to live the good life you must awaken from the dream otherwise you're always gonna be haunted by this dream and the stuff that happens within it in the same way that you know a nightmare terrifies you only because you're not aware that you're inside of a dream but once you realize that it's just a dream the nightmare is no longer a big deal and you know here the next core principles that reality is infinite and that god is a real thing not the Christian God sitting up in the clouds with a beard judging you but the word God points to something that's very real it points to infinity and just what that is and how it works that's complicated I won't get into that here it's also very controversial it's also much misunderstood with many traps uh this is also the same as talking about the absolute so you can see that there's a problem talking about or communicating about it because it's the absolute but I have I have episodes I have a two-part series called what's it called it's called um understanding absolute infinity part one and two go check that out that explains a lot of what infinity means and how reality could be infinite and what God is and I'll have future episodes about what God is explaining that the next very important principle is that you are God so God is not something separate from you literally you are God not in the egotistical sense that you are a God and you can do anything you want in the world and you can be an [ __ ] and be arrogant not not that way I mean literally you created yourself you created the entire universe you are the entire universe this is a very advanced mystical insight that you will only get from years and years of meditation and spiritual practice but you can get there and it's very important that you do realize that you are God because only then will you take full responsibility for your life and only then will you really understand how profound life is and what existence is closely related follow-up principle to this is that God is the devil there is absolutely no difference between God and the devil they are the same thing because again what non-duality tells us is that every duality including the duality between god and devil is ultimately gonna collapse into a unity so God and the devil must collapse into a unity which tells you you know what's the what's the value of knowing that God is nil well the value of it is that you stopped seeing evil and being bothered by evil so much because you realize that all the evil you see out there there's a higher intelligence behind it it exists for a reason it's part of infinity it's part of all the stuff that you need to love in to embrace and also calling it the devil the reason understanding the devil is so important by the way I have a whole episode about what is the devil really good episode go check that one out I think it's one of my best one they will change your whole understanding of this this this duality is that you know you need to understand selfishness you need to understand where evil comes from you need to understand why reality is so deceptive you need to understand Maya in other words and you need to understand that this is part of God God is the one to self-deceptive [ __ ] and in fact that's how reality comes into existence is through various forms of deception and that's why we say it's all one mind it's all a dream and so one aspect of this dream is that it's very hypnotic and it's very self deceptive and it's very twisted and it can be very neurotic and pathological at times that's all part of the entire whole that's not something to cut out and to ignore that's something to understand into a brace otherwise you you will actually be yourself pathological by denying those aspects of reality another very important principle is that all identity is relative and fluid so literally there is no identity within reality other than oneness so any limited identities that you create like you as a body you as a biological organism you as somebody who was born to certain parents or maybe you identify with your car or you identify with your house you're dead or how is your job all of these identities that you have they're all relative they're all constructions of your mind they're not absolutely true and they're fluid and they can change and in fact they have been changing for all of your life and that's very very significant to understand and any identity that other people take out there whether they're individuals or entire cultural identities or political parties take identities companies created and these all of these identities that are being created this is all part of ego the ego mind individual ego mine collective ego mind and this is all part of how God and the devil work is through creating these identities it's why you feel that you're a living creature but all these identities are rather arbitrary and they're they're are malleable they're changeable and this is uh this is a very good news because it means you can change what you identify with which means you can actually dis identify with your physical body and also your mind and identify yourself with the ultimate with the absolute which ends up being the trick for overcoming death and attaining immortality as preposterous as that sounds it is nevertheless possible and it is true the next core principle is at 99.999% of people are deluded and asleep and they don't know about any of the things that I am explaining here today and that's extremely important to understand because otherwise what's gonna happen is that you're gonna get lost in the delusions and a sleepness of all the other people who are surrounding you it's precisely because all the other people are so asleep that you can't look to them for advice or for guidance because you look over here you look over there you see people doing stupid stuff you see people not doing this work and then you think that oh well that means I should be doing what they're doing I'm weird for not doing what they're doing but actually no they're the weird ones there to dilute it once so keep that in mind this is why you won't get a bunch of confirmation from science and from medical community from other traditional sources about the things that I talk about because they're not there yet which leads us to the next closely related principle which is that society is still in the dark ages yes we're the 21st century but stop thinking of the 21st century as being some kind of like highly advanced society no no we are still adolescents as a species we are very very immature very unconscious very emotionally stunted very repressed very neurotic very pathological very dysfunctional as a species and our understanding of reality and consciousness and how to live the good life is very crude akin to the kind of medical knowledge that existed in the dark ages or they would use leeches and other sorts of crude techniques in order to cure people they actually ended up killing many people rather than curing them that's the state of current society's understanding of spirituality psychology philosophy science and many other things so do not get seduced by this facade that's directed by society where we tend to think that all well we've already gone through the dark ages and now we're out of the dark ages now we're very technologically advanced than we have planes and cars and phones and all of this computers and stuff and because of this we know everything that's just a facade don't get tricked by it and the reason it's important to realize that we're in the dark ages is because again that explains to you why you're not getting all this confirmation from your society it's because you're assuming your society is far more advanced than it actually is see so don't expect society to just give you these answers while you're on social media or watching cable TV the kind of advertisements you're getting there have nothing to do with how to live a good life it's actually all the opposite again this is one of the counterintuitive elements of life is that the things that you're taught mostly in school and through the media and in the culture or precisely those things which lead to living a mediocre miserable life which of course explains why everyone or most people are living such a mediocre miserable life the next core principle is development and Awakening not either or both you want to awaken from the dream that you're in but also you need to learn how to mass stur living in the dream and develop yourself within the dream these are sort of like two core avenues of growth that you're working towards in your life you're developing yourself and then you're also awakening from the dream if you only develop yourself but you don't awaken you will get lost in the dream and you will suffer if you only awaken but you don't develop then you're not gonna have any mastery or excellence in living in the dream and so you might be awake and that's great but then your development is stunted in certain ways and that's also not you living up to your full potentials and getting the most juice out of life you want both and you're gonna need a certain amount of development before you can even think about possibly awakening to really seriously awake and you already need to be very developed in most cases it's very rare that someone just awakens while they're completely undeveloped that's gonna be hard for you to accomplish a few rare people one in a hundred million maybe could do that but I wouldn't count on that the next core principle is figure out who you are and what you want out of life this is super important and it's not as easy as it sounds you're not just gonna sit down for ten minutes and in ten minutes figure out who you are and what you want in life this is something you have to work on think about contemplate journal about talk with coaches about talk with therapists about for four years for decades you're gonna keep honing and honing and honing and refining your understanding of who you are and what you really want from life you need as much clarity as possible about what you want from life absolutely important this allows you to make decisions and allows you to to channel your energy and your focus towards those things that you want if you're not clear about what you want if you're wishy-washy vague and ambiguous you're gonna get nothing that's the default thing that you get is nothing and mediocrity you're not just gonna randomly get a bunch of good stuff and a good life by not knowing what you want you to be very clear and decisive about what do you want you want to awaken then be [ __ ] clear about it I want to awaken do you want to have a house what kind of house where should it be located how much should it cost be clear about that you want to have a girlfriend or a spouse what kind do you want where are you gonna find them how is it gonna really work do you really want them if to be very clear about all these things and about your career and everything which leads to the next core principle which is authenticity you need to be striving every day to be more and more authentic in your life it's only when you're being authentic that you're truly satisfied and happy and a lot of a society programs you with is reasons and incentives for being inauthentic you see all throughout school and university and when you were dating people and when you were at work trying to get a job and with your family and all this you were you were taught to be inauthentic as a survival strategy such that you don't even know what it means to be authentic how that really feels you're so out of touch with who you are and and what you really want and how you should all your body how you should behave how you should speak how you should smile like all of this is so fake for many people so you need to get more and more in touch with your authenticity strip away all the layers of of social conditioning that is preventing you from being authentic and all the fears that you have and worries that are preventing you such that you're able to express your deepest being your deepest values need to be able to express that effortlessly to have a good life and your career needs to be authentic your speech needs to be authentic your eye contact needs to be authentic yeah what else you know your your relationships with your family and your spouse's and your girlfriends and boyfriends that needs to be off but for you to be able to do that to achieve that you first need to discover who you are and what you really want very clearly and also you need to uncover the fears and incentives which are keeping you being inauthentic see like what are you really afraid of what are you gonna lose are you gonna get rejected are you gonna be lonely and miserable or are you gonna be judged the next core principle is that you need to develop a life purpose I have a cold course about that 25 hours long course on how to develop a life purpose is so important life purpose is the sense of what you're doing in your life again it's all about clarity it's about finding the right alignment between your values and what you really want and you're a career and merging those together and then working on that and building something of lasting value there that you can offer to the world so check out my course if you're interested in that the next core principle is take 100% responsibility for your life and don't blame anyone observe yourself blaming people and stop doing it train yourself to stop doing it take full responsibility if you don't take full responsibility anything less of a hundred percent that means you're gonna be a victim in those areas that you don't take responsibility in which means you're gonna feel stuck and you're gonna feel miserable and depressed and bitter and annoyed and frustrated and ask the definition of not a good life by taking responsibility you assume the burden of solving every problem that comes your way and that makes you very resourceful and creative because now you've committed to solving all these problems to studying them to doing self experimentation trying different techniques turning to different sources reading books and videos and courses and all of this to solve your problems see and it's only through this kind of attitude that you actually will end up solving your problems whereas most people they just come up with excuses and blame others or why the problems can't be fixed it's actually a lot better to be able to fix a problem than to suffer through it for the rest of your life and it gives you a sense of power and strength and self-esteem when you do that when you become a victim you lose self-esteem and you sort of feel bad about yourself and you feel like you're a weak and you're not able to handle life and then you you unplug from life you become alienated and you just kind of like go through the motions robotically and that's when you lose touch with that one of those core of for purposes of life which is feeling alive you no longer feel alive because you're not actually taking challenges head-on because you've instead opted to be a victim the next core principle is be a leader lead yourself lead others around you don't wait other people to inspire you to motivate you to tell you what to do you do that yourself be proactive be decisive take risks this also connects with that principle of living a life and feeling alive this is how you feel alive as being a leader being proactive being decisive taking some risks which leads to the next core principle which is be a creator tap into the joy of creativity you have the power to be a creator and to create all sorts of beautiful things art music film writing novels magazines websites you know entire philosophical systems and schools and religions and spiritual groups like there's cars you could engineer airplanes new technologies like there's so much stuff you can create pick something that you want to be a creator in and then do that and enjoy that you do it because it's enjoyable because as god you're participating in the creative process of all of creation and as a corollary here provide massive value to mankind as the creator that's something you should strive for how do I provide lots of value to mankind how do I contribute to society improve the world that's part of life purpose that's very important because if you are lacking this component in your life you're gonna feel empty and also what's gonna happen is that other people will come and seduce you with various kinds of low consciousness ideologies to get you to fill that void of a lack of purpose in your life right so then what happens is that people become Nazis or they become terrorists or they they become some like right-wing fringe guy who posts on some forum some like racist stuff like this kind of stuff right why do people get sucked into these kinds of low consciousness ideologies it's precisely because they lack a legitimate life purpose they are not taught how to be powerful creators they are not able to provide massive value to the world so what they do instead is they focus their energy on demonizing judging doing violence and other sorts of schemes and manipulation tactics to get their fill of life purpose it's sort of like if you don't have a quality person to have sex with then the way you're gonna it's not like you're never gonna have sex you will have sex it's just it's gonna it's gonna be probably in very low quality forms like jerking off into a plastic cup see so it's the same sort of thing with life purpose if you neglect life purpose you're gonna pick up all sorts of dysfunctional life purposes unconsciously that's like the default position the next core principle is that reason cannot be trusted this throws a lot of people for a loop and this is very counterintuitive but reason and rationality cannot be trusted all the highest insights and truths are trans rational not irrational not less than rational but trans meaning beyond rational think of it this way every single criminal terrorist murder rapist thief religious fanatic con artists and wrongheaded scientist who did bad science every single political party every single tyrant and dictator what do all these people have in common reason you might think no leo these people are all unreasonable no every single one of these people has very good reasons for why they do what they do and why what they do is exactly right and good and why they should continue doing it so how can you trust reason by definition reason always feels reasonable to the one whose reasoning this is what I mean by the self-deception and by self bias see yourself biased to your own chains of reasoning and what you don't understand is that reason is not a vehicle towards truth it was never intended for that reason is concoctions by your mind by your lawyerly mind mostly your left hemisphere for most people in order to justify your it going addenda that's the real function of reason so reason just like a good lawyer will be able to craft a case and argument for any position any egoic agenda that you have so reason cannot be trusted any time that you hear a speaker who is making appeals to reason and is arguing and saying and kind of framing the situation such a way that all those people are unreasonable but I'm the reasonable one and it's through reason that we get to the truth anytime you hear that anytime you see a person trying to be extra reasonable that's exactly the same as looking at a person who's trying to be extra moral you become immediately suspicious that the person who's preaching morality and how good he is and how good everyone can be but how they're all evil and how they should be as good as him and that morality is gonna solve everything you should be immediately suspicious and you should expect that moralizing person has skeletons in their closet and they're actually not moral well the same thing with reason with these people who doubt reason as a sort of ideology or a solution to everything if only we were all a more reasonable than mankind would get along be very suspicious of that the next core principle is to embrace paradox confusion and not knowing again this is one of the very counterintuitive things most people think of paradox confusion and not knowing as bad things as the opposite of personal development and the opposite of a good life but no it's just the opposite the closer you get to the good life the more you will embrace paradox confusion and not knowing and you will get comfortable with these things it's the person who thinks he's figured everything out perfectly in this little model and put it all into a little model and he thinks that that model is is perfect it's consistent and it's it's is it's airtight and super logical it's that person who's deluded you can't do that with reality because reality is infinite and all your little models and schemes are all finite see my episode about doodles and completeness theorem if you want to understand why that's impossible Kurt durdle actually proved that truth is larger than proof area counterintuitive discovery the core principle is emotional mastery you should be very interested in mastering your emotions you should be very interested in emotions period and how they work and spend a lot of your time observing emotions now here's a mistake that people make about emotional mastery it's when I say emotional mastery they think oh yeah that sounds good I'll just be hyper rational I'll be this unemotional detached person who's above it all that's not emotional mastery that's the suppression or repression of emotions to develop emotional mastery to feel deeper into your emotions and this is a lot of the type of concern that women have women can object to some of my teachings they might say leo but you're you're teaching us how to be like unemotional and robotic and I want to be more emotional know what I'm talking about is how to be more emotional emotional mastery does not mean that you stop experiencing emotions it actually means you experience emotions deeper but you're more conscious of what they actually are and that's what gets you mastery and control which should also be distinguished from outbursts of negative emotions so somebody else listening here might say Oh leo so what you're saying here to become an emotional master I have to let all my emotions out and be fully authentic with my emotions that means that if someone cuts me off at traffic I will open my window and and scream expletives at that person because I'm angry and now I'm you know I'm being authentic I'm expressing my anger and this is developing emotional mastery no that's not emotional mastery that's actually a smokescreen from fully feeling and observing your own emotions yelling at people outbursts anger violence expressions of negative emotions these are often just smoke screens from really self reflecting and and feeling your own emotions an angry person doesn't really feel their emotions they just act them out robotically you want to read books about emotional mastery about how emotions work because emotions are so sneaky and so tricky and you know speaking of reason and emotions these rationalists they think that reason is superior to emotions but actually it's the other way around it's emotions which are dominating your reasoning process those people who are hyper rational they're not hyper-rational really they're emotional they're just not conscious of the emotions that are fueling their reason you see their reason the reason that they're so attached to reasoning is emotional and it's because it's connected with their ego mind which is full of emotions emotions are much more powerful in motivating you and affecting your behavior than any reasons that you have reasons come after the fact reasons are rationalizations they're backwards rationalizations your left hemisphere actually confabulate s-- these reasons later to justify whatever you're doing emotionally whatever's driving you emotionally and to live the good life you're not gonna be able to do that through reason you'd have to do that by becoming a very observant of your emotions and it's by curing your emotions that then your reasoning process will also get purified along with that the next core principle is you must integrate the masculine and the feminine no matter whether you're a guy or a girl and whether you lead more masculine or more feminine there's a whole spectrum there and people lean in different directions and so forth as of course we're all aware at this point but what you need to do whichever direction you lean in so let's say you're a man that leans masculine like most men and you're a woman that leans feminine okay so what you need to do as a man is you need to go deeper into your masculinity understand what it really is but at the same time you want to make sure you don't create a shadow out of the feminine so you're not doing at the expense of the feminine you also need to dive into your feminine side and explore that and master that and integrate that feminine shadow into you and you need to actually become sort of a synthesis of both and you know vice-versa for the woman this is very important for you to be able to then relate properly with the opposite sex otherwise you're gonna become masculine but you're gonna have a feminine shadow or vice versa and that's gonna create all sorts of relationship problems for you and also you're not gonna feel as good just being macho masculine or girly feminine without integrating the other side so like what we're trying to become is full well-rounded human beings now that doesn't mean that you need to be down the middle 50/50 so you know if you're a masculine man I'm not saying that you need to be half masculine half feminine you can still specialize and kind of be predominantly masculine but you also need to integrate the feminine aspects into your psyche and make sure you don't hold any kind of grudges or judgments about the opposite polarity the next core principle is non manipulation if you do a lot of observation of your behaviors you will notice how much you manipulate you manipulate all the time the ego-mind that's sort of this whole role is to be constantly manipulating everything you're manipulating your thoughts your face your body posture your your relationships and in your work and in your career and all of this your costly manipulating and so one of the things you need to do if you want to live a good life is let go of that manipulation more and more and more and more the less manipulative you are as a person the better your life will be the next core principle is that everything is relative what this means is that anything except the absolute the ultimate truth of the capital T is relative that means that it's only known in relation to something else and I'll have a whole episode in the future about relativity and how that contrasts with the absolute but briefly here all conventional understanding and even conventional experience that you have it's always relative so an elephant is big only relative to a mouse it's small relative to the entire earth and so on and so this is this goes on and on and on and affects everything that you know everything you know is basically relative all perspectives are relative your entire understanding of reality is relative all truth claims unless they're the absolute which is not really a claim at all it's it's something way beyond that all truth claims in words all beliefs this is all relative all cultural norms all moral standards it's all relative science is relative relative to what relative to the human mind if the human mind has changed if the chemistry the human mind has changed all science flies out the window and all changes relative see what you see what you experience what you know politics and government and business it's all relative its relative to the particular circumstances in context in which it's situated and if the context changes then the situation changes your knowledge changes none of that is absolute there is no absolute external world physical world material world which leads us to next principle which is context over facts most people get very stuck on facts but they don't realize the importance of context context is the the background within the fit which the facts are situated and I have a whole episode about context which is called understanding recontextualization go check that one out it's a pretty profound episode with lots of examples that I won't go into here the next core principle is to pull from hundreds of diverse sources this is done so that you don't get stuck in any one perspective or paradigm this is absolutely critical as you're going through life and you're doing this whole lifelong learning thing which is one of your principles then you need to be gathering from a lot of diverse sources don't just read Western books read Eastern books don't just read Hinduism read Christianity and read Greek philosophy and you know spread it around diversify then fortify your portfolio of knowledge and information just like you would stocks in a stock market for exactly that same reason because you want to avoid getting locked into some one thing someone terrible paradigm which is very limiting and what will happen if you study hundreds of diverse perspectives and this is one of the core principles of actualized org is that I do this very seriously then the truth will get triangulated and cross-reference from all these different sources and books you read you know you read hundreds of books eventually it all gets triangulated in it and then it emerges the sort of the big picture emerges that would be impossible if you were only studying one particular school or one tradition or one guru or you know one discipline within a university you couldn't do that and it's only because you're studying all these diverse sources that you learn about all the traps and you learn about the full diversity of of this thing called human life and human development and there's so much more there than you could have possibly gotten from any one school teacher or teaching which of course applies to me you can't take me as your only source you need to include me as part of hundreds of other sources that you study from the next principle is to satisfy your base needs so that you stop craving this is very important I have a soda that I release quite a bit ago called using Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualize and what I talked about there is it's all about satisfying your lower needs your basic needs for shelter and water and food and sex and this sorts of stuff and some friendships and some self-esteem stuff like your career you got to handle that stuff so you're not craving it so that you can move higher up the pyramid to this higher metaphysical existential stuff that we talked about this is so important which leads to the next closely related principal of master your basic survival and livelihood this is utterly important if you don't do this it's as though you were a lion on the savanna and you didn't know how to hunt a lot of people these days especially young folks I see this very often teenagers people in their early 20s you know they grew up in a cushy suburb somewhere in the United States or maybe in Europe and their parents coddled them and so these kids they just spent their whole childhood playing video games and watching movies and just like [ __ ] around in school with their friends and stuff smoking weed and this kind of stuff and then by the time they're 20 and maybe they finish even university they get out into the real world and they have no idea about how to actually survive or make a livelihood and then they start thinking about some of the high lofty things I talked about like consciousness and psychedelics and enlightenment and this but it's like what enlightenment can there be when you don't even know how to hunt learn how to hunt the modern-day equivalent for human beings of what a lion does on a savanna is business learn business learn how business works learn how money works this is absolutely essential without this you're gonna be crippled you need to be able to just handle the basic basic things like paying your rent being able to afford food if you can't do these things forget about enlightenment for now focus on handling that and of course that's all a function of your inner game so it's not because the economy is bad that you struggle with survival and livelihood it's because your parents and your schooling and your childhood they didn't program you with those survive the inner game survival skills that you need to earn a living in the Savannah the modern-day Savannah that humans live in and grow up in which is cities and suburbs see a lion needs a certain set of skills to be able to survive in Savannah and a human in a 21st century need a certain kind of skills in a certain kind of inner game in psychology to be able to make a living and survive in a city or in a suburban environment that's super important I spent at least probably 10 years of my life really working on developing a way for how to be independent and survive on my own without depending on my parents or money from other places or anything like that so I can be self-sufficient and then it's based on that foundation that then I could go and do the higher stuff that I do I couldn't do that otherwise like if I was worrying about how to pay my my bills tomorrow I couldn't do this other work that I'm doing the higher stuff because I would always be in this kind of cycle of fear not knowing what's next how to make ends meet this sort of stuff you got to figure that out if it takes you five or ten years that's okay figure that out that's basically what you need to be spending your teenage years and your all of your twenties up through your 30s doing you want to you want to solve that by the time you're 30 ideally if not sooner the next core principle is mastery you need to have something at least one thing in your life that you are gonna plan to become a master in I don't care what it is there are millions of options you could be a master at drawing painting music DJing weightlifting life coaching writing programming whatever you got to pick one thing though and do it this jack-of-all-trades thing where you're just dabbling in a bunch of [ __ ] that doesn't work you need one thing that you're gonna master this is connected with your life purpose this is also connected with your thing that I just said about survival and livelihood you know the lion is a master at chasing down and lopes master hunting this gives you a certain stability it also gives you enjoyment because really your work what you're gonna be doing most of your life the enjoyment that you get from that depends on how much of a master you and it takes five or ten years to become a master in something so you got to pick one thing and do it so that you could produce excellent work and so that you could be a creator and you could be a massive value provider to society one of the biggest things I think young people are are screwing up on these days Millennials and so forth is that they they just they don't pursue mastery they're not a master at anything they don't know how to do anything and therefore they can't provide value to anyone and therefore you're stuck with the some kind of waitressing job or working at McDonald's yeah that's what happens when you're a master of nothing start by mastering one thing one thing that you really enjoy and it is important that you enjoy this thing that you're gonna be mastering because you're gonna be putting so much time and effort into it so you better enjoy a lot now this doesn't mean you can't have hobbies I'm not saying that like right now if you're playing a guitar just for fun and you're an amateur at it that doesn't mean you have to become a master guitarist because hey maybe your field of mastery is programming so if you're a master of programming sure you can go dabble in guitar you can go dabble and painting it doesn't matter cuz you're a master in programming you got at least that one thing but if you're not a master at anything and you're just dabbling and trying a bunch of different stuff without selecting anything and being decisive and clear about it and not being certain about what you want to master that's gonna come back to bite you really hard later in life and the older you get the harder it is to master things so start young but if you're old still do it better late than never the next core principle is be aware of distractions I have a whole episode by the way I do have an episode about mastery it's an older one you can go check it out it's called mastery I have an episode about distractions it's called the egos favorite defense mechanism distraction go check that one out where I list all the different distractions that the ego mind comes up with to prevent you from doing this work from creating the good life these distractions of course includes stuff like TV pour and video games internet social media various kinds of ideologies and family can be a distraction kids can distraction chasing material success business money drugs all these can be distractions so you've got to be very careful this is all part of the self-deception nation self deceptive nature of the EO mind the next principle is systems thinking you need to become a systems thinker learn to think in terms of systems learn to see systems at work everywhere and develop awareness for the ecological interconnectedness of things I have a whole episode called intro to systems thinking which will do just that introduce you to systems thinking and explain all of this stuff if you don't know what systems thinking is there are books you can read about it on my book list that's a pretty deep topic hmm people who aren't systems thinkers aren't very good at solving bigger problems they tend to think of problems in the world very simplistically in black and white ways and I think that every problem is just you know has one root cause or something like that we're usually in a system you have a lot of factors that are coming into play you have various kinds of feedback loops that you need to think about systems tend to work in counter intuitive ways oftentimes you're trying to change a system the thing you do to change the system actually ends up worsening the problem rather than improving it so it's because of this that this is important this is gonna help you to actually make the contribution to the world that you want to make because almost anything that you're gonna be interacting with in the world that's of any interest is gonna be a complex system of one form or another especially if we're talking about large groups of people businesses societies cultures those are all systems another core principle is be a good citizen and be conscious of your ecological footprint you are part of a larger whole you're like one ant in an ant colony and you need to become conscious that you are an ant in an ant colony and that you're connected to a colony that your existence is not something you do independently you do it as part of the entire collective that you're a part of and you need to seek to educate yourself about how that works part of that is systems thinking because this colony is a system but also you need to teach yourself about what impact are you having on the larger culture and the larger working of this colony that you're in are you contributing to the lowering of its consciousness or the raising of its consciousness are you contributing to the problems or are you helping solve the problems are you being a good citizen that requires a lot of education teaching yourself about politics and governance and and how collective ego works and how ecology works and your environmental impact even when you're walking down the sidewalk eating a icecream what are you gonna do with the rapper are you gonna throw it on the ground or are you conscious of how you're contributing to that are you conscious of how when you're driving your car you're contributing to air pollution are you conscious of how you know you being a citizen of the United States for example contributes to the wars that the United States starts overseas are you are you conscious of your role in that or are you just blind to that are you conscious of the kind of food that you eat and how that impacts the environment and animals and and other human beings are you conscious of the products that you buy and how that impacts third-world countries where these products might be developed under sweatshop conditions right and you take responsibility for that and you strive to be a good citizen otherwise what you get is you get a kind of a crummy society that's unconscious a kind of society that you don't want to live in another core principle is be strategic I have a very popular episode called how to be a strategic [ __ ] it's one of my most practical episodes that's why people like it I go into a lot of nuances there about how to be strategic but you need to be able to be patient with your plans you need to lay out plans have a long time horizon think 5 10 years down the road plan stuff out in your life and be strategic about it so that you're moving towards the things that you really want and you need to have some short-term goals meeting from goals long-term goals etc you need to be able to go through multiple stepping stones to reach some kind of goal a lot of people it's like they they want something but then that's something is over here and they're over here they don't see a path to there and they're not able to create the stepping stones to move their way up and in fact most of the biggest things in life that you want to acquire are gonna require multiple stepping stones to inch your way towards them you're not gonna be able to just leap and get it in one step the next core principle is that happiness is only possible with enlightenment so if you're not enlightened don't kick yourself too much for not being happy it's actually not possible happiness comes with enlightenment now that doesn't mean you can't improve your level of happiness of course you can and you should you should work to increase your happiness as much as you can even though you won't be able to really lock in your happiness without enlightenment you don't even know what true happiness is without enlightenment but also what this principle demonstrates to use why Lightman is so important because what you ultimately want is happiness and the only way you're gonna get it is through enlightenment so don't put and light it off for too long another related principle is that no material possessions will ever make you happy this is impossible this is like a loss is exerting and reliable than Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's equations of e equals mc-squared this is this is more certain than that no material possession will ever make you happy no matter what it is cars houses money yachts but not just that also the stuff that you normally wouldn't consider material like relationships family knowledge the acquisition of knowledge travel you think travel is not material well I'm including all of that under the label of material here none of that stuff will make you happy guaranteed impossible the sooner you can accept that ah the much better your life will go if you haven't you understood this principle you're gonna be chasing for many many years you're gonna waste decades of your life the next related core principle is be happy all by yourself train yourself to be happy all alone just sitting doing nothing that doesn't mean you have to be a loner for your whole life you can socialize and have fun with friends that's okay but if you can't be happy just sitting on your couch doing nothing you really can't be happy all the other stuff is just temporary little boosts little shots of adrenaline and excitement little drugs really that are distracting you from doing the inner work you got to do to just be happy sitting there by yourself on a couch for an hour or two or a whole day or all week the next core principle is keep your life simple and Spartan don't over clutter your life not just with objects but also with all kinds of social obligations and commitments family and a bunch of kids and all this now that doesn't mean there's a problem with having kids and family of course you can have those things but just be mindful of the fact that any time your life sort of frees up your ego mind tends to want to fill it with just any kind of distraction or activity what you want to do is you want to minimize your life and I have a whole video called lifestyle minimalism check it that out minimize your life stitch that you have room several hours every day to do self-improvement and to meditate and do spirituality maybe do some psychedelics this sort of stuff so you can work on everything we're talking about here right everything we're talking about her the implementation of all these principles requires a lot of free time and work which most people waste on various kinds of frivolous activities you know don't buy a house too big that you don't really need because you're gonna waste time cleaning that house maintaining that house doing all this stuff when really buy a smaller house instead so that you waste less of that time doing that and it says spend more time working on yourself because remember the really good stuff is the inner game changing the inner game is really what's going to make you happy and satisfied and get you all the other stuff that you want not having a big mansion-house the next core principle is that without practice and exercises and techniques there will be no results theory alone while important to know what to do will not in itself produce much results like 95% of your results will come from the practices and exercise and techniques not from the theory that doesn't mean the theory is pointless the theory is very useful but you got to go beyond that and as far as techniques go let me share with you the most powerful techniques that I have discovered very simple I'm not gonna hold it back from you psychedelics meditation meditative yoga journaling contemplation visualization and solo retreats these are the most powerful techniques that I discovered in the last five or ten years of doing this work for me now for you there might be other techniques but these are pretty solid and consistent techniques these techniques have been proven by thousands and millions of people to produce some of the biggest gains that you can get in your life so the biggest transformation come from these techniques and notice that most of these techniques are inner techniques even psychedelics isn't it seems like an outer technique but it's an inner technique it's an outer technique which triggers an inner process and the final principle and a very important one is do not turn actualized unrig into an ideology actualize that work is not meant to be an ideology it's not meant to really be a philosophy or a system of any kind it's not meant to have any rigid principles or rules you're not supposed to follow these sixty-five principles that I gave you like the ten commandments nothing like that because that would violate principle number one which is ideology and dogma so I have to be careful every time I speak that it doesn't turn into that and of course I have to play my part but you have to play your part because I can do everything in my power but then you could still turn what I say into an ideology or into a dogma and in fact that's what most people do so you have to be very careful not to turn actualize that organ to another religion see to be able to implement all the stuff I talked about about above you need to you need to be very intelligent about it and you need to be very thoughtful and mindful and you need to be very context sensitive you see it's not a formula that you just kind of like follow it's not a robotic thing that you do it it requires consciousness it requires active participation every single day they that you're implementing this stuff and also of course the reason I say this is because actualizado work teachings have certain limitations it's still a perspective even though I cover hundreds of perspectives that I compile them together it's still a perspective it's still coming from me it's less certain the limitations and biases that I have and stuff that I got to work through and of course of course it has that which is why you got to be careful and you got to look at other sources and not turn this into an ideology so those are the 65 principles now of course I have left stuff out these are like the major principles of actualize that work there are hundreds of more minor principles which I've talked about in other episodes which would be too long to include here but you know I've left has some important stuff like physical health fitness nutrition and and other things like that which are still important but as far as actual eyes that org goes be sixty-five principles I think encapsulate a lot of what I teach all right that's it I'm down here please click that like button for me and come check out exercise that all right that's my website you'll be able to find my blog with various insights my book list with lots of books the life purpose course and the forum where you can chat about all this stuff and finally I'll just conclude by saying this this last thing and this you might think of like as the final core principle is that life is complex and challenging life is extremely deep but also very broad there are many many many facets to it so just because you understand someone or two facets don't get too cocky and think that you've got it all there's so much here to explore it's gonna take you your entire lifetime to explore and you still will have much left over for for future lifetimes and life is challenging which means that you have to appreciate that you know I went to into a lot of depth here in this episode is it's almost like a two-hour episode here and still I've only kind of just glossed over the surface of these principles it will take you years to study and learn all of these principles don't get intimidated by that just realize that yes that's because life is so complex and it is challenging it's difficult to learn all this stuff which is exactly why most people have a mediocre life because it takes a lot of work and energy and time to do stuff to study all this stuff to verify for yourself that it's true you know it's one thing to just listen to me and believe everything I say that in itself will take you a couple hours here at least but that's not enough to actually go and verify each these principles for yourself to corroborate and cross-reference with other sources to triangulate the truth to get other perspectives to see where I might be wrong in all of this and then to implement all that in your life that will take years and decades but hey that's why you're alive and that's why you got 80 years to live you so that you can do this this is this is the the meat of life right here everything else that you do is just a garnish this is the main course so try to structure your life in such a way that you're focused on the main course and not the garnishes of life and also this should alert you to the fact that there are no easy answers see there's no one technique no one magic pill no one method that will solve everything for you because life is just too broad for that to work so you got to be nuanced no black and white simplistic answers here that's why my episodes are so long because you know the kind of stuff you could fit into a five ten minute episode just like what it's not gonna make a dent in the real issues you have in your life it's only gonna be rearranging the the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and I want to really help you to get to the root of things to get to the ultimate peak experiences those mystical experiences you know to have to it to handle all the bottom of the pyramid to get to the very top of Maslow's pyramid and to go even beyond that that's where yeah that's where life gets really good that's what I'm really passionate about teaching and experiencing for myself and then of course you take that wisdom and you bring it back down to the bottom pyramid and you infuse the bottom with the top and then that's when your life really becomes something special so we're gonna continue talking about that more and more that's what all my episodes are geared towards hopefully now you have a good understanding of what actualize that org is about and you can follow these principles to to create a really powerful life I hope you can see the value of what's being shared here do not take it for granted this day today from this information from now on if you really make a commitment you can change the entire trajectory of the future of your life in an amazing way but it's not enough just to make that commitment you're also gonna have to remember to work at it every single day from now on as well yes it's challenging but that's why I actually eyes already exists is I keep releasing new videos to release more insights for you more techniques and also just to keep you motivated inspired and reminded that you've made this commitment so stay tuned with me for more if for no other reason than just to have me remind you that this is what you really want because it's very easy to forget and to fall back asleep in with all your friends and then before you know it ten twenty years goes by and you've pissed it all away and you have nothing to show for it and you're more depressed and miserable and regretful than ever you