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hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm gonna be talking about building the basic vocabulary for understanding life [Music] you now at first glance this may sound like an odd topic but what I want to share with you is actually a very simple but powerful technique that I have discovered really I've stumbled upon in my own life and I've been implementing it and I found that it's quite effective for deepening your understanding of life and the way that it works is by getting you to think and contemplate about the basic building blocks the most fundamental concepts or words that make up life and what this technique involves is you just looking up basic words in the dictionary it's really that simple here's how the technique works you're gonna run across some ordinary but fundamental word which points to a basic or fundamental concept about life something like reality or the word existence or the word awareness or the word self or reason or experience etc and there's a long list of these that I will help point you towards as we go here but anyways you're gonna find one of these words and then what you're gonna notice to yourself is that hey have I ever actually looked up the definition of this word in the dictionary I mean yeah I think I know what reality is I think I know what awareness is it seems obvious it seems self-evident why would I even need to look something like that up but this is where it's a little counterintuitive you force yourself to look it up anyways because you realize hey you know what actually I've never bothered to look it up before and so then what you do is you do a google search for the definition of this word and you use multiple dictionaries which are available easily online not just one but multiple dictionaries because they do offer different perspectives and definitions which are important for deepening your understanding of these concepts and then what you do is you take those definitions you copy and paste them into your digital notebook and you keep a log of all this terminology and over time you build up a long catalogue of hundreds of these words with all the definitions from multiple dictionaries and then what you do is you just sit there and you contemplate and you think about it and you think about how does one word connect with another word and how are these definitions and concepts really working under the surface and that's the whole technique don't underestimate the power of this technique it might sound kind of silly and odd but again I'm telling you your language is much more important people realize your vocabulary is very important to how you think your vocabulary influences what you're able to think and then what you're able to think influences your reality people underestimate that the way that I stumbled upon this technique for myself is that I just noticed one day that hey you know most people when they look up words in the dictionary they look up complicated exotic flowery sounding words SAT words million-dollar words like supercilious words that you use to impress people words that make you sound very academic and intelligent and while they're busy doing that what they're not doing is they're not looking up the most basic words because they assume that there's no worthwhile reason to look those up because they think they already know what those things are but actually they don't and that's the whole trick to it that's how the mind tricks itself is it assumes that it knows the basics when actually it doesn't these basic words correspond to the most fundamental and basic concepts or building blocks of life words like time matter energy these aren't just words these are very basic and essential concepts and these basic concepts it's not just a matter of do you know what you're talking about when you're talking about time or space or existence or awareness but actually these fundamental building blocks they shape your metaphysics and the funny thing about metaphysics is that most people will say oh well leo i don't care about metaphysics I don't do metaphysics I'm not interested in metaphysics and see the trick though with metaphysics is that when you don't do metaphysics you still have a metaphysics and it's that same way with philosophy you think you don't do philosophy and therefore that you have avoided philosophy no actually what you have committed yourself to when you don't do philosophy when you don't do metaphysics is the default metaphysics of your society and your culture and you said no Lea I don't care about metaphysics and philosophy that stuff doesn't it's not important to me I just go about my life I earn my money I earn my living I do the stuff I you gotta do I care about success and and all this kind of you know real down-to-earth stuff not your airy fairy metaphysics stuff but see what you don't understand is that as you're doing all that actually you've absorbed the metaphysics of your culture and now that runs and shapes your entire life and what you call reality what you really believe is solid reality which cannot be questioned and which there is no more reason to do metaphysics towards because it's all settled actually that's not settled at all it only feels settled to you because well you haven't really bothered to consciously explore metaphysics or philosophy that trips a lot of people up it's really interesting that if you take a look at what school and colleges teach you when it comes to vocabulary they never really ask you to look up the basic definitions of things like reality and this should actually strike you as very odd and backwards if you think about it because really if you think about it what should we be teaching first graders and even 10th graders or twelfth graders we should be forcing them to go into the books and to look at what is reality what is time what is space what is energy but none of these things are actually encouraged to be explored by our education system instead what our schools emphasize is the emphasize learning complicated fancy SAT words very exotic and flowery vocabulary which if if you had the same high school experience and college experience that I did then you spent a lot of your time memorizing these words and some value comes from that your vocabulary and your ability to think complex thoughts generally increases from that but still you're lacking the basics and really if you want to have the most powerful vocabulary possible it's not in the flowery words and it took me a long time to realize that I was actually very seduced into learning all these big fancy words and then after I got out of college because I was using all these fancy words in my philosophy papers and in all my essays and stuff that I wrote in college and I would get great grades and my teachers would Pat me on the back for for being able to put all these complicated words in there and make it sound very academic but then when I got out into the business world I realized hey all this flowery stuff is just complete nonsense it's [ __ ] and this whole game that academics play of of writing complicated ideas and complicated long sentences that are half a page long that just run on and on and use semicolon after semicolon after semicolon and use all these complicated terms to describe things that actually what this is masking is their inherent fundamental ignorance about the core building blocks of reality and it makes it seem like you're you're really doing something important when you're putting all these words together when really you're just jerking off into a paper cup that's what that is that's the one of the problems with academia now I've been meaning to talk to you for a while now about just how powerful languages when it comes to self-actualization and when it comes to existential inquiry and thinking about reality this is is greatly underappreciated by most people just how central language is to how you think and how much it's influenced by culture and that language is really a game and that language has limits and yet most people don't know this they don't realize the limits of language even many philosophers of language and linguists themselves fall into the trap of language because see language is connected with thoughts connected with the mind and the mind is the most trickiest thing that we know of in existence and it has a million ways to trick you into deceive you and it doesn't matter how intelligent you are or how big your IQ is or how big your your word repository is your vocabulary you will get tricked by language and you will get tricked by the mind that thing is almost guaranteed to happen unless you're very careful about studying the the limits of language so in the future I'll have more episodes about language but let's start with this very basic thing right here and let's make the following simple point I want you to notice that perhaps yourself and many people around you suffer from the problem of having sloppy vocabulary and what I mean by that is that we talk about things without knowing what we are really saying people talk about God people talk about physics people talk about existence people talk about awareness people talk about happiness and emotions and all this sort of stuff but yet they never bothered to think about what these concepts are the mind is murky about many of these essential concepts I want you to notice that in yourself and in other people as an example of this how we can be sure this is true what I'm saying is that if we take the average person off the street and we ask them something very basic like what is existence what you're gonna get as your typical answer is a lot of hemming and hawing and the person not being able to articulate what existence really is or what they're gonna do is they're gonna talk in circles they will use existence to define existence itself which really doesn't tell you anything about existence although it makes you feel like you know something about existence when you really don't and the same thing goes for time or space or matter or energy it's really odd it always struck me as very odd when I was doing physics and physics class in high school that science actually is very deliberate in not defining and not carefully investigating the most elemental building blocks that compose science so for example if you ask your physics teacher what is time what is space what does matter what is energy they will give you circular definitions which really say nothing at all which sort of hides the fact that we could really don't know and then this is a real deep problem and it's worth thinking about because the way that science works is it sort of uses variables to shuffle numbers around formulas around but yet the essences of the things that the variables represent the scientists don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about because actually they say oh well Leo that's metaphysics we don't know anything about that and that's like doing philosophy doing metaphysics that takes us down the wrong road and so we are just pragmatic scientists all we care about is we just care about creating this technology and making sure that it works and in a certain sense there's value in that because you actually can get pretty far oddly enough you can get pretty far manipulating time counting time measuring time doing calculations and running GPS satellites with time with out actually knowing what the [ __ ] time is it's quite remarkable that actually you don't need to know the substance of anything in order to manipulate it in the same way that you don't need to know how your car works in order to drive your car and in this sort of same fashion a lot of scientists don't actually know anything real about reality what they know is they know a lot of ways to conceptualize it as a variable and then to manipulate and play with those variables and that has produced a lot of technological breakthroughs and in a sense that's good and you might say well Leo what's wrong with that sounds like science is working perfectly but actually there's a there's a very deep problem at the core and then that problem is all the loose ends that actually exists within science which are so carefully hidden by most active scientists and academics that it gives you the illusion that science is more complete than it actually is when in fact science doesn't have a good handle on things like time matter energy space or existence itself or consciousness and awareness or qualia and phenomena or human experience and then you have all these sorts of things like the mind-body problem and all these tricky problems in philosophy which scientists just leave to the philosophers and they don't really concern themselves much about but eventually it comes back to bite the scientists in the ass so anyways coming back to our topic of vocabulary it's important for you to learn how to articulate some of these basic concepts because articulation is not just about being able to communicate it to somebody else although that's a huge benefit and if you ever want to teach any of these self-actualization principles to people if you ever want to teach non-duality you want to be able to communicate with people you want to be able to persuade your friends about what we're talking about here then learning how to be articulate about this stuff is is very important but also articulation is first and foremost for you for clearing up your murky mind that's what it's really about when you force yourself to to really explain what the hell something like existence or time is and then you struggle with that and you start to realize you have to see like wait a minute I'm just playing word games I'm saying time as this but I'm just using other synonyms to define it and really I'm not saying anything so what is time or what is existence I'm just spinning my wheels here that's very important for you to see because you start to see that language could maybe be a game and it's a way to actually hide our ignorance and pretend as though we know more than we really do I want you to notice that there's a big difference between knowing something implicitly and explicitly implicitly is the way that most people know most things which means that they haven't bothered to really articulate it to explicate it to make it clear because the way that most people use language especially if you're a native English speaker for example all these words like time energy existence you take them completely for granted these are words you just picked up when you are very very young and you never bother to think about these words at all you took them as just hey they're just Givens this is just how life is I think I'm actually more sensitive to this because I'm not a native English speaker I came here from Russia when I was seven years old and I had to really struggle for a good ten years to learn the English language and for a while there for those ten years all the way up to high school I was behind the curve my Anglet my my English language skills my vocabulary was worse than the average American and I had to work really hard there was a long time there for maybe a span of 10 years where I was just constantly constantly learning vocabulary drilling myself on vocabulary looking up definitions of a lot of stuff until now I think my my my English is better than most Americans English and through that process I got a more of an appreciation of the importance of really being explicit about knowing that the meaning of a word it's not enough just to know the meaning of a word intuitively just by the seat of your pants the way that most people know you got to bother to really look it up and that's just a matter of being lazy most people are just so lazy they run across a word that they don't know and they just say oh well I don't know it so it's not very important and then just go on but see what I force myself to do is I actually made a rule with myself back in high school early high school and then I I kept up with it for for all of high school in all of college basically is that every single new word that I didn't know that I ran across I would force myself to immediately not sometime later but immediately look it up in the dictionary and that forced me to learn all these words until I got to the point where it's very rare that I'm reading a book and there's a word in there that I don't know and chances are if I am reading a book and there are a lot of words in there that I don't know that's a badly written book I can tell very easily but that's a academic book and I just I usually sigh when I run into those kinds of books because these people are not writing very clearly and if you notice the way that I like to talk and communicate in my videos is I actually keep my vocabulary very very simple I don't use a lot of fancy flowery vocabulary even though I easily could I was very good at my verbal SATs I could through all sorts of fancy words at you million-dollar polysyllabic words that will leave you scratching your head and make me sound very academic but also what it'll do is it actually it will reduce the clarity I can speak like a philosopher to I can write like a philosopher you know how I used to write in philosophy class I would write those long ass your typical academic philosopher type sentences which were very formal and we're very very long very complicate you have to sit down and decode this stuff and what I actually had to do is and I'm still doing this because I'm actually planning to write a book and so what I'm doing is I'm actually training myself to write in the most simple that I can like very very clear and straightforward which is the exact opposite of the trend in modern academic philosophy the trend there has been just so much complexity that you have to sit and study some of these philosophers books for years you have to spend years to study one book just to understand what his basic ideas were when in fact once you understand the ideas they can be easily summarized within a couple of sentences and usually by the time you get to to that point you realize those ideas are worthless and rather rather rather unsophisticated and unadvised and there are many flaws in those ideas but it took you a couple of years of study maybe the entire PhD program to learn what that philosopher was talking about it's really a ridiculous state of affairs so I try to keep my communications very simple and very clear and what you notice is that the most conscious the most enlightened teachers the most masterful human beings who have the deepest access to reality how do they communicate extremely clearly extremely simply that should be a clue that should be a lesson to you if you're in college and you're participating in this academic game of mental masturbation outward playing other people when you really know a thing you don't need a lot of complex words you can explain it very very simply you can explain to a child that's the ideal not what they teach you in universities these days so anyways let's come back here to the topic and so what I was saying is that there is a difference between knowing something implicitly versus explicitly and there's a difference between having a solid grasp of a concept versus a Loog loose and vague grasp of it big difference because when you have and you bother to go through the process of developing a solid grasp you see that language and the mind are a lot more slippery than you ever assumed and that a lot of stuff that normally people take for granted you can't take for granted anymore and then you become more and more interested in the fundamental building blocks of reality and you see that actually this illusion that we have in mainstream society that we've got reality understood that actually this is just an illusion the foundation is rotten it's hollow inside so anyways enough about that let me now get to the meat of one of what I want to point you out here which is the list of all the words to get you start it so you might be wondering okay leo so how do I apply this technique well it's really easy to apply you just google the definitions but the key to this technique is that you have to know which words to search the definitions for and you have to actually notice it when they come up in your everyday life and then you have to do the search quickly don't leave off the search for the next day or later tonight do it right now immediately while you're thinking about the concept so here's some a list of words to get you started reality existence being hallucination magic time energy matter and mass reason perspective truth God emotion concept psyche science religion delusion illusion what's the difference we knows - when should you use the word delusion versus illusion consciousness absolute relative wisdom spirit I'll make a comment about this when Rives still have more of the list to give you but spirit is very interesting and also the the word God is very interesting because a lot of people especially a rationalist and an atheistic Allah minded people they will criticize God and spirit and spirituality and religion as as this sort of nonsense fluffy wishful thinking sort of stuff and yet when you're talking with these people you very quickly realize that they never even bother to look up the definition of these words they don't even know what these words mean they are they're spending a lot of time and energy arguing and denying concepts and words that they've never even bothered to look up or to think about when you think about that when you realize that it's actually it's it's shockingly ignorant shockingly ignorant and yet these people often claim to be the champions of science what's perhaps most scandalous of all there's a fancy word for you right there is that people who claim to be the champions of science haven't even bothered to look up the definition of the word science and to think about what science actually is how it works what it means and what the limits of science are limits of science Leigha what limits of science that's the whole problem is you've never really studied that you never thought about that now of course just looking at the definition of science is not gonna get you all the way to what I'm talking about just looking up a definition in your basic dictionary it's a good start for contemplation but you got to go a lot more deeper than that your average dictionary is not gonna tell you the limits of science that's something you have to spend that you know really literally years studying I've I've devoted a decade of my life or more to studying the limits of science because I actually care about what science is the more you care about science the more you will study the limits of science so let's keep going with the list we mentioned the spirit how about the word ecology I love that word ecology insight on my blog the first thing I have on my blog is actually a definition that I compiled from multiple dictionaries for what the word inside means and if you go and you just look at that and you read it and think about it just for a few minutes you realize how profound of a definition that is and I also go out of my way to list all the synonyms for the word insight and it can be also very helpful in trying to increase your vocabulary not just to define a word but to also compile lists of all the synonyms so you start to see the interconnections of all the words and that's what language is this giant infinite web of interconnected words and that's something I'll talk about in the future when I talk about econstruction when I talk about Jacques Derrida when I talk about post-modernism and I talk about some of the important lessons from the philosophy of language that we have discovered in the last hundred years it's really a a remarkable field that is so little talked about a little understood by common people and yet it's so central to your understanding of reality so anyway insight creativity paranormal I love that word that's a really good one to look up philosophy psychology mind integrity profound basic evil virtue excellence confusion logic theory knowledge awareness experience belief universe epiphany enlightenment go look up the definition for enlightenment that in and of itself can be enlightening depression love self meditation contemplation thought perception essence skepticism substance what is substance intelligence that's a really good one what is intelligence evolution suffering karma mysticism a cult and on and on and on and on it goes this list can be thousands of terms long I just wanted to give you the tip of the iceberg here some juicy stuff that you can start off with and if you just go and you spend a couple of hours searching for the definitions of all these terms and compiling your own log already you will get a lot of aha mini aha moments and insights and your your appreciation of language and of these essential concepts will deepen and the more obvious a word is the less you think you need to look it up the better it is for you to look it up so look up even the most obvious words like am is I and B as in to B or B in those are really good and for extra credit if you want to make this an even more powerful technique I recommend that you also look up the etymology of the word and what Arab ology means is it's the historical context of where did the word come from because language is interesting language evolves and words take on new meanings and words take on subtle different gradations of different they will take they have different connotations they can have positive and negative connotations and sometimes those change words can have multiple meanings and there could be subtle differences between those meanings and if you really want to become really good with your mind really good at understanding things it's really important that you take these subtleties of language seriously and that you study them so etymology kiemce can be important it tells you what the origin of the word is and also for extra credit look up the Greek and Latin stem words the prefixes and suffixes that make up a lot of English words now if you're not using English here to do this you could do this in any language but I'm mostly talking about in English but for English so many of our words can actually be kind of broken down into the Greek and Latin components and those can can teach you a lot about what this concept represents and why it's called the way that it's called and it can give you some some deeper a little hidden nuggets and insights into the word and I think it's very important that you actually do keep a journal of this stuff and that you don't just look it up and forget it but you actually bother to copy and paste or to write some of this stuff down in your journal all of that is going to make this technique more powerful and that will be the extra-credit stuff and also look up the synonyms and look up the antonyms so synonyms are the other alternative ways to say the same thing but again every synonym has its own flavorings and its own connotations and radiations and subtleties and the antonyms which are the opposites of those words and what I recommend for you is to try this out and then make this a lifelong habit make a commitment right now that for the rest of your life whenever you run across a basic fundamental word which represents a building block of reality and of life you will bother to look it up look up words like sex and love and relationship and happiness and sadness and money and all this sort of stuff that usually you would not consider these to be vocabulary words make that commitment and just imagine how many concepts you will explore over the rest of your life imagine how much deeper your understanding of these things will go and then your overall understanding of life and also your ability to communicate to articulate and to think about these things clearly both for yourself and publicly as you go forward and you probably will want to teach our kids about some of these concepts teach your friends teach your family talked about it with your with your spouse your girlfriend or your boyfriend your co-workers and so forth this is a very low investment activity this is not something you need to spend an hour doing every single day like meditation it's not going to take up a lot of your time I recommend that really in reality how this is gonna work if you make this commitment it's a it's a very low energy commitment you're gonna be spending literally like maybe five minutes a day or even just five minutes a week looking up one or two of these words per week and at first it's gonna seem like oh that's so subtle it's so little it's not gonna be a big change Leah why even waste time talking about why I waste the whole episode talking about this stuff it just seems like such an insignificant topic but see your language in your vocabulary affects how you think and here we're talking about the most basic vocabulary the most basic concepts these will forever shape and color your relationship to reality across the board in everything in your relationships in your pursuit of enlightenment in your pursuit of self-actualization in your business life and in pursuing money you know whatever it is you're doing it's all gonna play a subtle role and over time it's gonna snowball so for the first year you might not see huge benefits from this but it's such a low investment it takes so little of your time all you have to do is just to remember to do it and not be lazy and now every day you got a smartphone so it's so easy to look this stuff up it was a lot harder 10 20 years ago when you actually had to maybe carry around a dictionary and those dictionaries were incomplete and you couldn't get multiple dictionaries and those dictionaries didn't offer you any etymology they didn't offer you any synonyms or antonyms or any of that kind of stuff nowadays is so easy to find websites that do all that stuff for you it's a it's remarkable one of the most amazing things about the Internet is that we've got that at our fingertips now so use that tool and just imagine how much that's going to snowball then in five or ten years you will become an expert at all these concepts and that's it that's the whole technique now if you're a non-native English speaker actually this technique is even more important for you because you've got catching up to do you need to be doing this more and more and more every single day I want you to make a commitment that every single time you encounter an English word that you never heard before or that you're not quite sure what it means you look it up immediately that's one of the best ways to master the English language or for that matter any language that you're trying to master just keep doing that keep doing that you'll notice that in 5 5 10 20 years you are gonna become an expert much better you can have a much deeper understanding of the language a much more much more appreciation of the language than the native speakers do because they take it for granted so in conclusion what this technique will do is it'll make you a much better intellectual and it'll teach you how to be a better thinker now be careful not to fall into the following trap is to assume that Haley oh but enlightenment is the teaching that we should stop thinking and if the mind is the problem the mind is the enemy and that therefore because we're pursuing enlightenment here and we're talking about non-duality often because of this I don't need to learn how to be a clear thinker I can just half-ass my thinking I can be a sloppy thinker that's a trap do not make that mistake enlightenment does not mean that you need to not be a thinker or to be a sloppy thinker there is no contradiction between enlightenment and becoming a clear thinker and a good intellectual it might seem at first that these things are contradictions and it might seem at first when you're starting to pursue enlightenment that yeah of course you're gonna meditate and you're gonna try to calm your monkey mind down and you're not gonna try to over things and when you are meditating or self inquiring for example you might need to shut off your mind for the next hour or two completely and if you're at a meditation retreat maybe you want to shut off your mind for the next ten days nothing wrong with that but that does not conflict with becoming a good thinker and there's no benefit that you get from remaining a sloppy thinker you can do both the same time you can pursue non duality you can also clarify your thinking and actually the two will synergize and actually what I'm talking about here will will make you better able to to question existentially you will start to see the limits of thinking the limits of language and then that will open you up to have these non symbolic experiences of reality which will be very powerful but then you know what you come back anyways you come back and then you probably want to teach people you want to talk to people you want to communicate to people clearly anyways you want to think you want to be able to write those are very critical skills to your success in life and that's it so if you like that please click the like button right now don't forget to click that helps me with the videos and then come check out actualize that org check out my blog I'm posting a lot of advanced and interesting insights on the blog check out the forum check out my life purpose course check out my book list and more stuff to come the last thing that I'll say here is that you know lately late lately I've been stuck in this sort of paralysis when it comes to actualized org in my work because actually there is I've reached the point where there is so much profound stuff yet to share that I have not shared with you that I can't get any work done because I'm too excited by it it's so big I don't even know where to begin it's like I have all of reality to share with you to communicate to you to analyze to break down to give my commentary on to point all this stuff out to you about life it's so [ __ ] big there's so much to this you might seem like oh it might seem like to you ollie oh you've already covered all the important topics now you're just scratching the bottom of the barrel No if it seems that way it just seems that way in reality it's just days I actually find it it's getting harder and harder for me to shoot these videos in a sense in a sense it's easier because I'm getting better at talking without filters but also in a sense it's getting harder because well the quality bar is rising I always want them to be better and better and better and so it just you know you got a point of diminishing returns um so there's that you know in the early days I didn't I didn't care about quality nearly as much I just wanted to get the stuff out there but also it's because now my understanding is becoming so much more holistic that it's like there's there's so many interconnections between all these topics so many interesting interconnections and yet I don't want to repeat topics so I'm trying to think about how do I carve out all these topics so that I present them to you but then they don't overlap too much so you don't get bored so I'm not saying the same things over and over again because I hate that I hate it when teachers just say the same [ __ ] all [ __ ] time that's one of the things that upsets me about non-duality teachers they just teach the same [ __ ] every time I tried to put out new content every single time and minimize overlap and that's actually quite challenging to do you know it wastes a lot of my mental energy to do that but more than that what I'm paralyzed by is just how amazing some of these subtleties of this work are and the subtleties are so challenging sometimes to articulate and to to get people to appreciate so a lot of my time is spent wracking my brain about how to how to present these things on a sort of a silver platter to you so it's it's clear it's simple it doesn't repeat itself and then that trips me up because it's daunting you know sometimes I know a topic I know it kind of intimately but then it's one thing to kind of know it it's one thing to come out and just ramble about it but I don't do that I don't just stand up here and ramble I have a very specific structure and plan for what I want to say I want to have specific points that I want to hit I want to be very comprehensive in the way that I cover a topic which is why my topics are always so long and I try not to repeat myself but that's also very challenging to do and so anyways I just wanted to share that with you as I'm going through that those are some of the challenges that I face you don't really need to know about those challenges but hey I'm putting it out there so anyways I'll see you next week with more you