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hey Leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about balancing theory versus practice [Music] you this topic of theory versus practice is foundational to your success with this self-actualization journey so today what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you basically a superpower this ability to balance between the two to understand the nuances because this is a very nuanced and tricky topic and yet it's critical to your success in life in many areas from business to relationships to your spiritual life and so forth and the sad thing is that almost nobody understands the nuances of theory versus practice and I'm going to tell you a lot more than merely that you need to be practicing more so a lot of you listen to me and by its very nature anything you listen to is theoretical right so all my content in a sense is theoretical now of course some content can be more theoretical and abstract than other content which can be very practical but nevertheless a lot of people get caught in this trap of mental masturbation where they just listen to a lot of theory but then aren't able to implement and take action on it that's not really what I'm going to be talking about today I'm going to share some much more profound things with you although that problem right there is a very big sticking point that probably a majority of you have so make sure you don't fall into this trap of over theorizing see most people get the balance wrong here they're either too theoretical in life or they're too practical in life and both of these take into their extremes get you stuck and create their own set of problems so what's the problem with excessive pragmatism a lot of people like to pride themselves on being a pragmatic person I'm a pragmatic person as though that's somehow a virtue it can be a virtue but as soon as you think of yourself as a pragmatic person well that's a person right there that I can almost guarantee you is stuck and they are stuck in the following ways basically they're living a shallow existence they're they tend to be very materialistic to be very selfish they tend to always be chasing after experiences because that's what that's what the code word I'm pragmatic means is that I'm chasing after gross experiences in life because what else does that mean for the average person that's what they mean by pragmatism they have no really big picture understanding of life nor do they care about that they don't see the value in that because they hate that's just theory it's just theory it's just philosophy why do I need that since I'm a pragmatic person and of course these people are not able to tap into the power of spirituality almost at all because they're lost in pragmatism and in this sense they've really sold their soul to the devil one way to think about this notion of selling your soul to the devil is that you just become highly utilitarian and pragmatic in life to the point of becoming Machiavellian and then you cannot be satisfied with life so that's the problem of pragmatism now the problem with theorizing that's also problem the excesses of theorizing lead to armchair philosophy mental masturbation arguing and debating criticizing others as though arguing debating and criticizing really gets you anywhere it leads to paralysis by analysis it leads to fantasies of all sorts getting lost in concepts without realizing that you're lost in concepts it leads to the problem of not recognizing that the map is not the territory that all your models are not reality itself and that the the meal is not the menu this is a huge problem for theoreticians they don't really cognize this and it also leads to lack of real-world results so you might have a lunch of good theories about how the whole world works and what you're supposed to be doing and what other people are supposed to be doing and what's moral and what's the more you have all these theories but then in your own life you're not demonstrating it and again even with theoreticians they still lack big picture understanding because the probability of additions is they all didn't over specialize in one area and then they don't see the bigger hole that they're missing out on so they also don't have the big picture and they're also not able to tap into the power spirituality because spirituality is about actuality not theories not concepts not models not maps not just philosophy but real philosophy which means embodiment so those are the two extremes most people tend to cling to one of these poles and they actually create an identity out of this like I said with the pragmatic person they really you know pride themselves on their pragmatism and the theoreticians pride themselves on their theory their reasoning abilities their rationality yeah I call these people the rationalists so what needs to happen here is that you need to start to see how the two both theory and practice interpenetrate and how they rely upon each other and that they're both necessary and that really what's optimal here is a dynamic flow between the two it's like a dance your theory must be able to inform your practice and vice versa and you must be able to control the flow almost think of it like some sort of like high school physics device where you have like a glass bubble on this end and a glass bubble on this on the connected by a tube and you've got water moving between the two and you've got like a little valve here that can control the flow of water between the two and so what needs to happen is you need to strategically be able to shift the balance depending on your context depending on the situation in life you need to be able to shift this balance so the water flows and stays in the right proportions in this system and doesn't fill up one end or the other end too much see and you got to be able to control that valve in the middle you got to be able to leverage theory against practice and then practice against theory jumping back and forth between the two now this is a rather complex issue there's some nuances here so it's going to take some explaining and I've racked my brain about this for a while now as to how to explain some of these nuances because it's quite tricky to explain to someone who hasn't done a lot of philosophizing on this matter so the way I decided to explain it is just by telling you that you need some specific abilities within this domain of theory versus practice there are about 15 of these abilities that I've identified so firstly you need the ability to theorize in the abstract without concern for any pragmatic issues or the value of theory C so the problem with a lot of pragmatic people is that when you ask them to theorize or to think about something abstract they'll immediately have a knee-jerk reaction say oh well but what's the point it's just going to be theory anyways and I'm a very pragmatic person so I don't need the theory let me just go take a bunch of action and solve the problem that way or they say well but this is this theory you know what's the value of the theory like Leah why should I pursue and care about truth truth is some lofty philosophical notion why do I need to care about the truth what value is it I mean is it going to is it going to like get me more money is it going to get me more sex is it Devon get me a better house if not then why should I care about truth see this is a huge trap for these sort of pragmatic people you need to allow for the possibility of theorizing without knowing whether something valuable will or won't come of it because honestly you don't know at first you start to theorize you might theorize and your theories might have no value and no use to you and you you see no practical application for it but then years down the road you will find a practical application see also another problem here is that if you're always concerned about just personal value for yourself out of any kind of mental activity that you do then it's like you don't give yourself any kind of room for anything significant to blossom in your theorizing right in the same way that if I was running a business and my scientists my research team came to me and said hey can you allocate some more millions of dollars to our research and development department and I would just you know be a very pragmatic CEO and I would say well is it going to like increase our next quarterly profit and you know the researcher looks at me and says well no why would it do that it means it's research we don't know what's going to come out of the research but we know that if we increase research and development that in a couple of years we might have some breakthrough technology and then we might have some new patents which will give us an edge on the competition and then as a CEO I'm very pragmatic I said no we're not going to allocate money to that I'm going to put this money directly to what's going to increase my next quarterly statement because that's what I care about and see that's a very myopic way to think a smart CEO would recognize the value of like yeah let's invest millions of dollars into research and development so that maybe five ten years down the road we could have some breakthrough technology and that could make or break our whole company you see so the same thing with your theorizing you can't know where it's going to lead to therefore you need to be open to doing it even though you not might not be getting an immediate you know payoff very practical payoff it's hard to judge the pragmatic implications of many theoretical things and if we take a look at human history actually this is beautifully borne out with mathematics and science these two fields have always had this interesting relationship where mathematicians are more theoretical than scientists and engineers and mathematicians for hundreds of years now maybe even thousands of years have come up with various theorems and discoveries within theoretical math headaches which when we look at that real world an engineer would say well there's no application for this in the real world until maybe two or three hundred years later when finally we realize like oh my god this has huge implications for the real world for example that occurred with non Euclidean geometry and many other things within mathematics work that way so there's value we've discovered through trial and error through a lot of epistemic folly we've discovered that we need to let mathematics do it's highly abstract theoretical stuff trusting that down the road and it might take hundreds of years down the road we will find some very useful applications for it and that we shouldn't be too quick to judge that see my mom always likes to refer to what I what I do for work and and how I live my life is you know you're the philosopher it's all philosophy oh you're just engaging in philosophy you know I'm I'm not philosophical like you I just live a very simple pragmatic kind of life and so anytime I try to give her some advice or whatever you know mention one of these concepts to her that might improve her life she always dismisses it as no no it's just philosophy I mean what's that going to really do for me it's not really gonna do anything for me it's just philosophy right um because she's stuck on this point right she's not seeing that yes it's philosophy it starts out as theory but then the whole point of the theory is that you want it to percolate down through the through this contraption here that I talked about into the the practice true philosophy is not just armchair philosophy there's a big difference in armchair philosophy and true philosophy which maybe I'll talk about more in the future so that's a very important ability another important ability here is to see the practical consequences of your theorizing a lot of theoreticians and rationalists get this one really wrong they theorize away maybe they're very good academic philosophers Messer's and scientists and mathematicians and they accomplished some good stuff within a little local domain of their theorizing but what they're bad at is seeing the practical consequences of their theories usually when you're theorizing properly you're going to need to have some breakthroughs in your theories and then you're going to need to ask yourself the question well what does this mean for my life what does this mean for human beings what does this mean for society and a lot of scientists get this part wrong especially when it comes to the emotional and personal ramifications of a theory the human implications of the theory see the scientists like to separate out the theorizing from living of life but really that's an artificial distinction maybe it's useful for science departments but it has its limits because again you're not getting the bigger picture and also because your profound theorizing is then not able to percolate and penetrate through into your everyday life you're not able to embody it and also this is where a lot of philosophers and and ideologues go wrong is that they start to theorize about something like maybe person is a nihilist or you know they're starting to get depressed because they're thinking about all these things about like oh well Humanity is terrible it's like a cancer upon the planet and look at we're destroying the environment and this and that and and you know now I'm starting to become a misanthrope and start to hate humanity and you know well life is also pointless because I've been studying existentialism and that tells me that life is all pointless and there's nothing to do and all I have to do is think about my own death and so I start to theorize along those lines but then I'm not seeing how this is toxifying my life and I'm not actually able to be happy and joyful and I'm not able to be loving or compassionate other people I'm becoming a misanthrope I'm becoming antagonistic I have grudges against people in society and but I'm so lost in the theory of it that I get mesmerized by the theory and I fail to see how this theory is now actually percolating negatively into my life and what I need to be able to do is I need to be able to say wait a minute yes this is all good theory perhaps perhaps all the theory is correct but look it's ruining my life my life is turning into a mess I'm not able to motivate myself I'm not able to be a good friend I'm not able to be a good father I'm not able to be a good spouse I'm not able to be a good human being at that point you need to be able to shift your balance on a dime so to speak and say wait a minute I'm getting too theoretical here let me shift my balance to being practical let me approach this whole problem from the practical perspective now and you flip that around you say this this philosophy is making me depressed this existentialism is very disempowering let me drop that and let me actually start to take my my practical concerns and apply them to my philosophizing so what are my practical concerns well I want to be a happy human being I want to have good positive emotions I don't want to be depressed all the time I don't want to be sleeping in bed and not able to get up on time because I'm so miserable from all my you know theorizing and so let that now let the practice now inform and flow into my theorizing so that I can say oh well what would it take for me to feel happy on an everyday level to actually enjoy life to see the beauty of life to be a good human being oh well that would take my thinking to change my beliefs and my ideology has to change I have to drop this existentialist [ __ ] this this Nietzschean philosophy or whatever it is you know you're studying search or something I have to drop that because it's not working let me go explore some other avenues let me go find a person who's actually happy in life like maybe I'll find a Buddhist the Buddhist looks happy okay let me maybe try to do what the Buddhist is doing and see their what you're doing is you're allowing your practice the practical stuff in your life to actually inform your theory so it's not flowing from theory to practice all the way down but always but also up from practice to theory you see you need this is so critical this is so critical you need this ability to recognize when you're stuck too much in one or in the other and you need one to be able to inform the other and then the other to be able to inform the other one depending on the situation you also need the ability to be motivated to action by good theory so that when you're reading a book and you read something in a book that's like oh that's a profound insight like oh that might really change my life if I applied that or like yeah that's a really good business strategy right there if I follow that business strategy that would earn me lots more money right you need to be able to go from that to actually getting motivation out of that to then go and take action on that theory I don't know about you but I get really inspired when I do listen to or I find a piece of good theory like a great strategy or a great technique because then I want to go and I want to embody it and implement it and have it actually pay the dividends you see but a lot of people might struggle with this I can see because they're reading it they read it and it sounds good to them but then they sort of just say oh well yeah but I don't know how to implement that and so I'm not even going to get really motivated by that and therefore it's just leftist theory a lot of times what I find is that when people complain about stuff just being theory it's really just because they lack the ability to embody the theory and so to them it's true to them it's just theory whereas to someone who knows how to embody it it's not just theory it becomes the very essence of their being it penetrates through into their bones into the Mayer of their bones see so this criticism often is a self-fulfilling prophecy it's like Oh Ali oh you know your notions of good and evil you talk about good and evil how how these things don't exist and this is just theory it's just theory to you perhaps but it's not just theory to me I see the world in that way and it takes effort to see the world in that way see people who often criticize philosophers for just being abstract will really these people don't understand how difficult it is to be a philosopher to be a philosopher isn't you just sitting in a chair all day dreaming up ideas you know pet theories about life no being a philosopher is about embodying the deepest truths and wisdom about how to live a good life and then working really hard to embody these very abstract and also emotionally challenging things and so people who criticize philosophers often are just the ones who aren't realizing that they have to work really hard to be able to embody the philosophy so the ability that you need here is you need the ability to create concrete action plans based upon theory so you've got a great theory and now it's motivated you and you're ready to start to take action but of course the question comes up how do I take a very abstract lofty notion and turn it into practical results how do I embody it and a lot of people fail right here because they're not able to create an action plan like one two three four five you know inning steps step one step two step three and so forth for how to get this theory so you might hear about enlightenment but then you are not actually taking steps every single day to actualize the enlightenment and so for you enlightenment remains a theory and I agree with you if enlightenment is just a theory for you then uh it's actually doing you harm not only is it wasting your time it's actually doing you harm as a theory because as a theory it's it's false it's actually false believing all these things I say but they're not actually embodying them and coming up with action plans for how to put this into place in your life it's going to make you very miserable and it could actually backfire on you and make your life worse not better so you got to be careful there another ability you need is the ability to drop theorizing on a dime so your theorizing about something in your life and your theorizing about relationships or about you know maybe moving to a different country or about your life purpose or about enlightenment and about reality about God whatever and then you just need to be able to stop that drop it without any reason and then you need to be able to start to see action on a dime because notice if you're not able to do this you are basically a slave to your theorizing see and theorizing can be seductive where you sort of theorize about something and then the theory starts to sort of congeal around itself and create its own little bubble or universe such that you are not even able to take action or to listen to other people giving you feedback or advice because your little bubble of theorizing will say something like well but I can't take action because my theory says it's not possible or my theory is telling me I need to do more theorizing before I can go take action and so this is what kind of leads to paralysis by analysis and this becomes a huge trap so you need to be able to recognize that you know what your theory is not all-encompassing yeah theorizing is good it can be very helpful to inform your practices you can strategize and so forth you can you can learn important overarching principles of life and then apply them to the way you behave to the way you emot-- to the way you relate to people and so forth and all that is very powerful but also you recognize that there are limits here and that you need to be able to just let it go let it go don't become an ideologue to any philosophy to any scientific model to any religious or spiritual teaching and just start to take action without any justification behind it without any reasons see a lot of theories trap themselves by saying well I need a good reason to stop following this theory no you don't you can just drop that theory right now and start to take action right on a dime take action go take action if you're feeling depressed because of the way you've been reasoning about life for the last five years just drop it and go start to take action that's a very effective way rather than trying to think your way out of a theory a lot of times the best way to exit a theory is just to act your way out of it not to think your way out of it thinking usually only makes the problem worse you need the ability to theorize one way but then act in the opposite way and this is a tricky thing because it feels like maybe you're breaking integrity or you're becoming schizophrenic when you do this you feel maybe like a hypocrite or like you're contradicting yourself and yet this is such a critical thing maybe you're theorizing about your life purpose or your theory theorizing about the nature of life and reality and so forth and your theories are leading you in this direction over here but first of all your theories might not be fully formed therefore you still need to be acting maybe in this direction over here and this direction here might not yet be aligned with the theories there so you need to be kind of doing both simultaneously like during the day you go to your day job you keep doing your day job you don't quit it but then at night you're theorizing in this direction and they might be totally opposite directions right like maybe you're theorizing about becoming a Buddhist monk but then and during the day you're going and you're being a stockbroker you're being a stock broker on Wall Street right and these two things seem like they're totally opposite things and yet this is necessary for you to to hold this tension because you know you're not quite sure yet whether you really want to commit to becoming a Buddhist monk that's a big commitment you got a you know think that through and while you're doing that you don't want to quit your day job you don't want to quit maybe your life purpose or whatever practical thing you're doing like maybe you're going to university you don't to just quit going to university on a dime because that would be a rash decision right you need consistency in whatever you're doing whether you're stockbroker or you're following your life purpose or you're in a university consistency is important to success because see what happens is that if you're always directly following your theories your theories could be changing every single day you might be you know thinking about a new life purpose or dreaming up some new place you want to live in but you can't be following that every single day there needs to be a sort of gap between the two that gap there is like a cushion like a spring that kind of holds these things together but sort of loosely they're not supposed to be glued together your theory and your practice cannot be just cemented together all the time that's going to lead to problems and likewise also there's a trap in having your theory and your practice totally isolated which is the trap that a lot of academics and scientists and rationalists make is that they draw a very firm distinction between the theory and the practice and you know their practice in life is one way and then all their lofty theorizing in this way and this never ends up being able to inform this you see and also this doesn't end up being able to inform that and then they walk around like like a I mean they're really fragmented they're not a whole integrated human being and these sorts of you human beings I find them quite unspiritual they are quite closed-minded even though they might be very intelligent logical and rational and then the quality of their emotions reflects that and you can tell that these people are not really satisfied with life they don't really have the bigger picture because you can't live life by fragmenting it into little pieces so so yeah so that's this ability to theorize and act in opposite ways but of course you don't want to be always acting in opposite ways to all your theories because that means you're breaking integrity after a certain point like if your theories tell you you should stop stealing and yet at work you're always stealing and scamming your customers or something like that then clearly you're going to have a breaking of integrity there and so you're going to want to align your your work to your theories because in this case the theory is good the theories telling you that you know spiritually you should not steal because that's creating deep rifts within within inside you and that's going to lead to a miserable guilty sort of lifestyle so of course you don't want that so you want that theory to be able to inform your practice in this case and the sooner the better in that case but you need to develop the capacity to modulate that c2c because otherwise you might become overly moralistic with yourself and you always guilt yourself and you said wow you know I saw I stole some some paperclips at work and my theory tells me that I should never steal anything and if I do then I'm evil and I'm bad and so now I'm like okay leo told me that I need to apply my theory to my practice and to have integrity with everything so that means I got to make myself feel very very guilty and bad and evil for stealing some paperclips at work and of course what does that do that just gets you more stuck you see so it's very tricky here you got to be able to navigate this dynamic balance you also need the ability to see the big picture patterns that come about through your actions and your practices so the best theorizing comes often from when you're practicing a lot you're in practice mode and then as you're practicing you're also just observing and you're observing what you're doing and then your mind sees patterns within what you're doing and some of these patterns are very broad overarching patterns that then can become principles or insights and they can inform your theory because another problem at theoretician space is that they theorize in the abstract without double-checking their theory against the practical real-world situation so you might sit there and you might theorize about you know what's the best way to run a business and what's the best way to form society you know should we should be we be Democrats or Republicans liberals are conservative so you know what's the best way to form society and you can sit there and you can philosophize about this stuff for a long time but really you're going to get yourself into a lot of traps that way because what needs to happen is you need to actually implement and test your your principles you know you need to actually go out there and test let's make our taxes very high and see how society works when taxes are very high test it make it a science experiment and then do another do the opposite science experiment make taxes very low and then let's test that and see how society is doing see one of the problems of politics is that people in politics just have ideologies and opinions they have a lot of opinions but politics is unscientific we rarely actually test the ideology and so this gives people so much wiggle room and so much fudge factor that they are able to come up with all sorts of theories about which public policies are best without actually seeing which ones are best see it would be a lot wiser if we actually derived our public policy more scientifically based on actual experiments doing actual tests with tax policy education policy military policy and so forth but we're very far from that a lot of it is ideologically driven which is why we have these inefficiencies because we're just basically going on personal opinion we're basing the direction of our country on personal opinions that are disconnected from facts that's a problem you also need the ability to see when you're stuck in theory and conversely you need the ability to see when you're stuck in action and you can get stuck in both what does it look like to be stuck in a theory well I gave you that example of sitting there and being depressed so maybe you're wallowing in nihilism for years wallowing in nihilism wallowing in nihilism and now you're stuck in it and your nihilism is so pernicious that it doesn't even give you an escape a safety valve the safety valve in that case is to start to take action so you need the ability to be able to use practice to break out of a bad cycle of theory that would be the case with this nihilism but also the opposite you need the ability to use theory to break out of a bad cycle of action so what's a bad cycle of action maybe you've been eating junk food for your whole life and that's now become a habit and it's just a mechanical action or maybe you're stuck chasing money in your life and you've been doing that for the last decade and that's become a cycle you're always chasing money always chasing money always chasing money because you're a very pragmatic person but you're stuck doing that and maybe what you need is you need some good theory that can prompt you out of that cycle so maybe you read some self-help book and then you start to see like oh yeah this cycle of chasing money is breaking certain spiritual principles and that's why it's not working very well for me so there you you take the theory and you let the theory percolate into your practice then break this cycle of bad practice see or maybe you're stuck going to church every Sunday because that's how you were raised and then you're reading some books or you're listening to me talk or whatever and then maybe the theory is telling you hey you should stop going to church because that's not real spirituality going to church has nothing to do with real spirituality maybe you need to start to do spirituality in a very different way than you were taught and but that's difficult for you right because even though you've heard this advice and this advice sounds reasonable and sounds like it's right but still you're stuck in the cycle of action because you feel guilty now for not going every day to church or not going every Sunday or whatever and you've got peer pressure you know your family's trying to pull you back there they're telling you oh how dare you not come to church last Sunday and all this and this makes you feel guilty and bad but see you've got to be able to use your better theory to influence your practice you need to be able to see the limitations of both theory and practice and what are the limitations well the limitation of the theory is that you can really get lost in a lot of concepts which are disconnected from reality and that then you can be theorizing one way but then living your life a totally different way and that your theories might be very beautiful and ideal and they might be very moral but then your actual life is very immoral a low quality low consciousness you're eating bad food you're not exercising your you know your being an [ __ ] to your family and and you're being selfish and petty but then you have on the other hand all these beautiful theoretical ideals and so that becomes a big limitation and then of course the limitation of action is that you're just stuck mechanically doing stuff going to your nine-to-five job taking care of the kids and doing all these obligations and chasing money and trying to get up from all your friends and you know trying to be humorous and and trying to be you know socially acceptable to fit into society to keep up with the Joneses and all that sort of stuff and then you're stuck in that cycle so much that you've completely lost sight of being of the beauty of life you've forgotten how to relax you've forgotten the most important spiritual principles of life you can no longer value philosophy because you reject it as just theory just theory and you're not able to even strategize towards bigger things in your life right you hear about stuff like life purpose and then you say oh like purpose that's just theory right and then that keeps you stuck in this cycle that you've been stuck on you also need the ability to stop the mind entirely theoretical people get stuck in their mind but also practical people get stuck in their money the entire pragmatic orientation towards life is actually very conceptual and very theoretical if you think about it because that's a paradise all paradigm is an attitude just because you think of yourself as a very pragmatic person and let's say you're a business oriented person you like money and you're always chasing after success and money but what is that that's a highly conceptual activity even though you tell yourself it's pragmatic and you know there's no philosophy involved but actually you have all sorts of notions and beliefs and concepts about how business works and why money is important and how to acquire the most of it and what are all the best ways to acquire it in all this sort of stuff so your mind is still constantly churning whether you're a theoretically minded person or a pragmatically minded person and you need to be able to just shut it off just shut it off and that's a difficult ability to acquire because the value of that is going to be that if you ever get stuck in theory you can just shut your mind off get right back into being and that centers you in what's most important in life and if you're ever stuck in action and you're always taking action action action you become very mechanical with your action again you can just kind of cut off your mind and when you cut off your mind that opens up new possibilities of again just coming back getting centered in being so that you no need to be doing so much all the time acquiring so many things and then you're just happy in being with still calm mind you also need the ability to read between the lines of your thinking this is a huge and subtle point most people when they're thinking they're not observing they're thinking they're thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking but then they're not noticing hey I'm thinking about this stuff and that my thinking about anything is not reality it's just thinking and so if it's useful good but also it might not be useful and also I need to see that what I'm thinking about something like when I'm being very rational for example rational sponsons trap a lot these are being very logical rational all of reality except they're forgetting to apply the rationalism to itself like they never ask themselves hey is there good evidence for why all of reality should obey my rationalism because if they ever asked that question they would see that no there's no good evidence that's just an assumption that they took on C but they rarely think about their thinking process likewise with skeptics skeptics like to be skeptical about everything is the false skeptics that I'm talking about and and of course they don't read between the lines of their skepticism because really if you're truly properly skeptical you and be able to reflect the skepticism in on itself and ask yourself the question wait a minute all this skepticism is it really true is it really the right position could it be that I'm in being a skeptic I'm actually adopting a wrong position here let me be skeptical about my own skepticism but to do that you need to sort of step back and do some sort of what I would call maybe meta thinking thinking about your thinking and most people are very bad at this you also need the ability to move forward despite paradox confusion and indecision so you might be theorizing about your life purpose got starting a business about some philosophical concept about what reality is about how best to meditate or how to self inquire and you might be theorizing about this and thinking about it wracking your mind around it but in the end you're going to encounter paradox they're probably confusion probably indecision like maybe you have to live purposes that you're considering you're not sure should I go with this one or with this one they're very different I don't know what Leo which one should I choose how do I decide in that case you need to understand that hey maybe the greater danger here is not in choosing the wrong one but in not choosing at all indecision might be the greater danger there see and so hey just pick one and go go with it maybe you change it later but just pick one for now and go with it this ability to kind of push forward and push forward and push forward even though you're confused you're feeling cognitive dissonance you're feeling schizophrenic you're not sure if it's the right decision you just push yourself forward this is a critical ability this is another example of practice pushing the theory forward right when the theory can't wrap itself around reality the action and the practice can push you that problem and then the theory will catch up later so one of the big dangers is assuming that you can theorize your way out of every problem another big danger is assuming that you could act your way out of every problem sometimes you've been acting a lot and hasn't been working need to be able to just sit yourself down say okay I'm just going to take a week off out of work out of my life do nothing but just sit and theorize all week strategize think this problem through and then you might find a very creative solution that would save you know years maybe a decade of going down the wrong road and likewise if you're theorizing too much you need to be able to say hey you know what screw the theorizing let me just go start taking action and stuff will happen I don't know how to start my business I just know that I want to start my business and so let me just go sir taking action I'm going to start a project a little business project let me just see let me just get some feedback from the real world because hey just sitting here diarrea theorizing about how do I start a business it's not getting me anywhere see and you need to be a good judge of when to do which and that's a difficult thing for me to teach you because it's a it's an issue of dynamic balance it depends on the context depends on the situation depends on your values depends on your strengths right but what I want to make sure you understand is that all of these minor abilities that I talked about this is all components we might say of the larger ultimate ability of simply to be able to balance properly Theory versus practice and if you want to nail the big ability you got to get these components into place so working on these components as you improve all those then you improve the overarching ability and once you get good at that then it's like oh you're a good unit cycler you can balance on a unicycle no matter where you are on no matter what kind of terrain you've practiced and you've learned how to balance dynamically and that's why this process is hard because it's messy it's not just black and white I can't give you a one two three step formula for how to do it you got to struggle through it and be conscious and learn through trial and error and through experience so how is this accomplished of course you're wondering right Leo how do I do this the key is observation you have to be aware of these dynamics in your life don't be so concerned with a 1 to 3 step formula here I just want you to start to become more observant of these different dynamics and I want you to start to become observant of the limitations of theory versus the limitations of practice and also how you can use one to improve the other right they can prop each other up as you start to become more aware of that you'll see that your mind will figure out the details for you I don't think you need to micromanage your mind so much which is why I'm not giving you some simple mechanical technique for how to develop these abilities I'm just basically telling you to become more observant because I think that larger this is a matter of awareness you need to start to see these dynamics happening in your life you need to become convinced by seeing them that it's important to the quality of your life that you become more and more observant of these things and as you do that as you think about your thinking as you break cycles of theory with practice and vice-versa you'll become more and more adept at these things and that's basically how you're going to develop this stuff um and also just you know learning more self-actualization theory will be helpful some people say well Lia all the stuff you teach is just very abstract and theoretical yes it is and that can be a huge danger but then again it's very helpful to have a solid foundation of theory so that you know what the right steps are and where you're screwing up a lot of people do not even know what they're doing wrong in their life and before you can correct what you're doing wrong you need to know what's right see if you think about it like you're a young cadet who went to military training school and you became an officer and they taught you military strategy and theory you know for how to fight balint battles on the battlefield and let's say you're a general and you're commanding troops now and so you have all these theories from the classroom those are good those are very important a general needs to have studied the decisive battles of the past throughout history throughout the last three thousand years of history to see what other generals did wrong and what they did right how military battles are actually fought and won and what are all the traps and mistakes that could happen you need to know that in in theory but then of course you need to be able to to take that theory and then actually apply it to your troops to your particular situation on the ground which might not fit any of the templates that you've studied in the classroom although some of the principles you can still carry over and apply and so a good general is one who both has practical experience but also theoretical know-how and he lets the theory inform the practice he knows how to take the theory and create a solid strategy fitting his particular situation on the battlefield he knows how to convert the high-level strategy into a concrete action step and orders that he can get to his troops so that they can go and actually execute on the strategy because if you have a great strategy but no ability to execute on it you know what good is that and he also knows when to break with the theory because he sees some sort of unique situation in practice unfolding on the ground right maybe the theory is telling him that he needs to concentrate all his force in this one spot and attack the enemy in this one particular way but in practice he's looking at the situation on the ground and he's saying yeah I should do that but my troops say I'm just sensing that my troops don't have enough morale to follow through on that theory so in practice I couldn't follow through on that theory so I need another strategy I need something practical that's going to raise my troops morale first so maybe I'll figure out some way to do that which I wasn't taught in the in the textbooks maybe I'll take my men to a brothel and then get them all laid and now their morale is going to be up and now I can finally execute on that strategy that was taught to me in the textbooks but you know in the textbooks and they didn't tell me to take my men to a brothel that's sort of like you know outside the bounds of what a textbook can teach you just a random example so see this this is it's a very interesting and subtle game that's being played here in life between theory and practice and I want you to start to see this so I've already given you a lot of examples about how this works let me give you a few more let's take the example of someone who is mmm learning personal development theory and so they spent maybe a year watching videos and reading books and stuff like that if they have this ability of manipulating theory and practice properly then they need to tell us it's okay I've got much theory now I've got enough it was important for me to learn I spent the last year learning all these principles it was very important I recognized the value there but now I need to stop reading books for a while not forever just for a while I'm going to stop reading books and I'm just going to sit down I'm going to come up with the best action plan that I can take into account everything I learned about what I need to do in my life to start to embody some of these personal development principles and I'll just make a list and then start to act on it starting tomorrow BAM done and then you start to do that and you do that for a few months and then you start to see okay yeah this is working it's finally working on finally starting to embody the theory into the practice okay now I can allow myself to go maybe read a few more books and then continue that process see so that would be an example of someone properly managing the theory a wrong example of that would be someone who just says now I'm just going to watch more theory and then I want to watch more thing I'm going to buy even more books and I'm going to I'm going to go to some seminars I'm gonna learn even more and more and more and more and more and then you become a personal development Theory glutton but you're not able to embody it another example of this careful balance between practice and theory is let's say you're learning about spirituality and as you're reading some book on spirituality one of the teachers tells you hey spiritual seeking is very dangerous do not become a spiritual seeker because enlightenment cannot be attained in the way that you attain a material object and so you read that and you might say oh I shouldn't become a spiritual seeker and then you say okay so I'm going to stop meditating I used to meditate I'm going to stop I used to do visualizations about becoming I'm going to stop that I used to read spiritual books I'm going to stop that and so you do that and then a month later what do you discover you discover that you're sitting on your couch watching television eating Cheetos not meditating not reading and you've now all of a sudden found yourself in a much worse situation than you were before so even though the theory tells you you shouldn't be a spiritual seeker in practice what you're seeing that by following that advice you're actually lazy and complacent and that you are further away from spirituality than ever and that you will never become enlightened through that process and so now you need to be able to recognize that and say oh wait a minute wait a minute I've misinterpreted misapplied the theory and then you realize ah but see seeking actually is necessary from a practical point of view yes in theory spiritual seeking is a trap but in practice by not actually meditating every day by not studying spiritual literature by not thinking about these things by not putting effort into it I find that nothing happens at all and I'm deeper into monkey mind and I'm more depressed and more frustrated with my life than ever at least when I was meditating I felt like I was growing I felt like my awareness was rising see and then in that situation you're you're you're being aware you're being observant of the limitations of both ends of this right and then maybe you become too much of a spiritual seeker and then you can say oh yeah I've been seeking way too much I should just sit down and you know calm down and just relax and do some do nothing for for a few days okay then you do that and then you start to see that that works for you see but you have to be able to balance that another example might be let's say you're working in a university department and all your professors are telling you hey yeah you got to specialize more and more and more specialize in your very very narrow people and in practice maybe that's what makes you a successful professor that you specialize more and more and more and more in your field but in theory for example you know that specializing so much you're going to lose sight of the bigger picture and that ultimately what's more important in life is not success in your university but to understand life as a whole to see the bigger picture to be able to embody the bigger picture and so here your theory is telling you wait a minute like warning warning warning alarm bells should be going off in your mind about over specializing in some area and so you let your theory inform your practical decisions maybe decide here you know what becoming a university professor is not right for me that might work for some people but it is work for me because I care about the bigger picture I care about holism I care about actually embodying the the research that I do and so forth and I just can't do that in a university setting that's just an example right I'm not saying that this is what you should be doing right now if you're a university I'm not saying that data day you should quit University maybe it's the opposite for you you see these are just random examples you have to figure out what's right for you another example might be let's say that you're trying to figure out your life purpose and maybe you've taken my course and you've got a general idea have a little bit of a hunch of maybe what your life purpose is but it's not quite resonating with you you don't really feel that proper fit you're not really sure if it's your life purpose and so you're just sitting you've been sitting there for a month thinking about this you know doing the course over again really trying to get it locked down and it still doesn't click well what you need to do is need to recognize okay that was me acting on the theory that was me sitting there theorizing a lot about my life purpose now I've done enough of that I can only get so far by just theorizing now I have to actually go out into the real world and test some of this stuff out yeah I don't have a proper fit it hasn't completely clicked I'm not totally sure but so what so what if I'm going to be sitting here and theorizing about my life purpose until it's a perfect fit in my mind I might do that for the rest of my life and that's not a risk I want to take so let me try to use action and practice to inform my theory trusting that if I go out there take action for six months and then I come back to it and think about my life purpose some more I'll have new insights new perspective a bigger picture more of a context from which to see that and in that way you're using action to prop yourself out of a stuck situation in the theory let's say as another example you're sitting there and you're doing self inquiry and you're really curious to know then you're really working hard at understanding what enlightenment is and you're sitting there and you're sitting here trying to get to enlightenment try and get to enlightenment like oh well as enlightenment this is that that is it nothing what is nothing where am i what am i what is reality or thinking about all this stuff you're sitting at you're doing all the exercises maybe you heard from me or from other non-dual teachers and you're trying to do is you've been doing it for months and you start to now observe wait a minute if I step back for a moment and I start to meta think about all my thinking on this topic of enlightenment and on self inquiry I can start to see that I'm trying to conceptualize the truth I keep thinking about the truth keep thinking about in life and keep thinking about a figure what is nothing what am i what doing illicit it's just thinking I'm thinking more and more thinking and then you realize ah but I need to acknowledge the limits of thinking I'm not going to get to enlightenment through thinking maybe there's a different way see and when you notice that when you actually observe that at a deep level then your mind will actually release and drop the thinking that's a very important component of not getting stuck in theory is to you can what I found is this very interesting thing happens when you're thinking sometimes you're thinking very deeply about something especially if you're doing some sort of existential level of thinking you're thinking very deeply about something and then what will happen is that your mind will reach a point where the thinking sees and thinks of how limited the thinking is and when that happens there's a sort of like party of the clouds and the thinking sort of starts to melt and dissolve away and what you're left with is this just this sense of awareness and knowing but not thinking how do i articulate this better yeah you have to experience this to know what I'm talking about if you if you're a conceptual person you thought of a lot about very stuff you philosophize a lot in life then I'm pretty sure you must have reached this point at some point with your thinking where you realize where you're thinking realizes the limits of itself it's a pretty profound and cool phenomenon I think that a lot of rationalist people miss this point which is why they keep insisting that hey everything can be logical everything can be rational but when you experience these moments where you're thinking realizes its own limitations then it becomes very obvious and apparent to you that actually you can't think your way out of every problem because the thinking itself is a very limited thing you're trying to use a subset of reality a symbol to represent something much larger than that symbol and that's just impossible you can become conscious of this but thinking about it alone is not enough you need to actually become conscious of this when this happens your thing sort of stops and you get this nice quietness about you where you have a sort of sense of knowing but the knowing is not a logical knowing it's just like you're sitting there and you kind of know maybe you could call it an intuition or just knowing is a good word but if you think of knowing as logical thinking and verbalizing that's not what I'm talking about it's a sort of deeper knowing it's a knowing that transcends verbalization and you know if you take in psychedelics then you know what I'm talking about there are things that you can experience on psychedelics that you will struggle for a hundred years to write down in words and yet it's some of the truest stuff you've ever experienced some of the true stuff you've known so anyways I tried to give you a lot of examples here I hope you get it you need to actually go out there now actually sort of try to implement this stuff in conclusion let me just tell you that you need to be very pragmatic in life and very philosophical in life and very idealistic in life and very realistic in life do not make these into false dichotomies don't create an identity out of being any one of these things to the exclusion of others you need to be able to balance depending on the situation because ultimately if we want to take your life and boil it down and put it into a nutshell what are you doing your life you are solving utilitarian problems in the service of higher consciousness that's what you're here to do and this is tricky because you're solving utilitarian problems which is very pragmatic stuff in the service of higher consciousness which is very abstract stuff so that's the nature of the beast balancing theory versus practice is a very rare skill it's a highly valuable skill if you learn how to do this you will have a much easier time in life much easier time with business with relationships with everything and you will be a much more valuable to your employer's to your customers because you're just going to be a kind of a down-to-earth person yet at the same time you're going to have a sense of what's really important in life see this really is like a superpower so I hope this inspires you to go and develop it alright I'm signing off please click the like button for me post your comments down below share this episode with a friend and lastly come check out actualize that org this is my website right here I have some exclusive resources there my book list life purpose course my blog I'm posting a lot of cool insights on my blog and I'm going to continue to do that so make sure that you stay up to dip up-to-date with those every week my newsletter is there so you can stay on track with me for the future it's very important that you stick with me because this is an epic journey this is not just a couple of videos that you watch this is your whole life trajectory that we're talking about here self-actualization and I have so many profound concepts that I need to share with you and I don't just say that to brag I say that because it's it is the case my biggest struggle is to to find the time and energy to articulate all these very profound concepts because there's I'm drowning in them there's too many I'm drowning in them it's going to take me years to cover all the most fundamental topics and they're going to keep getting more and more fundamental and more profound as we go along the most important thing for you is to recognize this as a resource that could really transform your life not because I'm important not because I'm special just because this is a rare opportunity these sorts of resources are very difficult to market the fact that you found this resource just by luck is a very rare thing most people in life will never find such a resource so you found the trailhead of this path you're not really on this path proper yet but you found the trailhead the most important thing you can do now the wisest thing is to realize I found the trailhead of the most important thing in life self-actualization it is the most important thing what else is there named Eve one other thing that's more important I dare you if there is I would be doing it I wouldn't be wasting my time here people sometimes they only oh but do you know if you were so smart and so good then why don't you do with something that earns you millions of dollars and you know why aren't you earning tens of millions of dollars doing something else because I know that that stuff will not be it this is the highest path right here there's nowhere else to be this is the path of greatest value and it will be that way for you too because you're a human being and you can't help it these are the most fundamental the most rock-bottom principles that create a great life right here there's no other alternatives really not when you understand this stuff fully so the most important thing we do now is recognize that you found the trailhead and make a commitment to stick with this path follow the path wherever it leads even when you're confused when you're frustrated when you're not seeing the results that you were expecting stay with it this is a big prize that you're after a big prize comes with of course a big investment the investment here is not so much money but just your time your emotional labor your consistency the ability to stick with me here in - to keep watching this stuff over and over and over again every single week so that you build a theoretical foundation and then once you've got a solid theoretical foundation you can go rock it with the action you should start taking action already but do not dismiss the importance of building a solid theoretical foundation I only feel that now after maybe about seven years of actively very actively studying personal development and spirituality only now am I feeling okay I've sort of got a bit of a handle on the theoretical foundation part sort of a bit of a handle after seven [ __ ] years so don't be too afraid by this notion like oh yeah I've I've been watching your videos for a year leo and it seems like you know I know too much theory now no you don't you're still completely confused about what's right and wrong for you in your life when you really know the theory man you'll feel it in your action now don't use that as an excuse to watch my videos for seven years and not take any action that would be a big mistake but also don't fall into the trap of thinking like oh yeah I've already watched 100 videos and that means I'm good now no you're not you're not even close to conceptually understanding everything you need to to live a great life so that's coming more in the future stick with me for that you