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[Music] [Laughter] hey happy halloween 2021. so in this episode we're actually going to have a pretty practical and serious talk i want to talk about this concept that is called burning through karma and it has very much to do with tackling the issue of desire and craving in your life and how to go about that this is going to help many of you who are pursuing spirituality who are young in your 20s and maybe 30s but are really overlooking some uh important considerations when it comes to spirituality on the one hand and then materialism on the other hand so this concept of burning through karma what does it mean and don't don't take this too literally this is not some sort of scientific theory this is just it's it's a loose sort of metaphor you might say basically you know like i teach a lot of deep spiritual stuff uh and many of you guys who watch me are in your 20s and 30s and one of the challenges that i one of the challenges that i see with you guys is that because i'm talking about these lofty metaphysical things like god and love and consciousness and awakening and so forth that then you tend to just pursue it simply because leo is talking about it and it's the cool thing to do the right thing to do the highest truth or the highest good or whatever to pursue and while that is technically correct the problem is that your psyche might not be prepared to pursue it because as they say you might have karma that you need to burn through first and so what this just means is is it means that look uh you have basic material needs and cravings and desires that are motivating you as the sort of biological animal being that you are that most of us are we're talking about cravings for food for money for sex for approval for fame for success for materialistic possessions maybe it's uh having a house or having a sports car or going on a beautiful vacation to some you know bahama resort or going skydiving a scuba dive like this kind of stuff right the sort of fun adventurous kind of stuff that ordinarily if you would ask a person like what does a good life look like and let's say they have no idea what spirituality is or any of these deep philosophical ideas then to them a good life would just be like a very adventurous fun life where you're successful you're famous you have plenty of money you have financial freedom to do whatever you want you have cars and you have friends and you can party and you can enjoy yourself this people imagine this to be the best life possible um but of course now when i get to you and i start brainwashing you with all these spiritual ideas you start to realize that well the best life possible is not that that's an illusion that's not the best life possible and then what can happen is that you can swing your pendulum in the opposite direction to the point where you poo poo all material pursuits and then any actual cravings or materialistic needs that you have inside of you for financial stability or for friends or for sex or romantic relationships or maybe even for marriage and children like maybe you have these cravings inside of you but just because you've been brainwashing yourself with spiritual ideas of asceticism and detachment and non-materialism this kind of stuff and letting go and surrender and not chasing and not manipulating reality too much right these sorts of spiritual concepts you can swing your pendulum in the opposite direction to the point where you neglect these aspects of your life and for some people the ascetic lifestyle might be appropriate but generally speaking i would say that's a minority of people a tiny minority of people maybe less than one percent of people are suited to the ascetic mystic lifestyle where you eschew all of these things that i was just mentioning and just go straight for awakening something sort of like the classic you know ramana maharshi case where the guy was like a teenager and basically he was already so conscious and wise that he wasn't even interested in materialistic pursuits you know he wasn't interested in women he wasn't interested in money he wasn't interested in business he wasn't interested in having a family he just he was just interested in basically in like contemplating what death is and just awakening and then that's what his whole life became but people you know you have to understand that this is a very exceptional human being you are probably not this human being if you're this kind of human being you're not listening to me you don't need to listen to me you're already out there doing it and you probably are more conscious than i am so why are you even listening to me so for the majority of you who are listening to me especially you youngsters i want to make sure that you're you have one foot on the ground and that you keep yourself realistic as you go about developing yourself the reality is is that most of us have animalistic cravings that we need to somehow work through and this is what is called burning through one's karma now whatever the the metaphysics of it is you could say that you know from past lives you were kind of working your way way up and now through this life you're still working your way up and you're still maybe not ready for a full you know a straight path to awakening but i don't really care you know what the what the what the actual like physical explanations of this are whether you have past lives or not just the reality is is that you probably have basic needs that you need to satisfy first before you're ready to do really deep spiritual work and really the best time to satisfy those needs are when you're young in your 20s and 30s and so i want to share some some insights from my own personal lessons that i got my own personal life experiences here which will make maybe help to shed some light on what you're going through because i know a lot of you guys are going through this so basically the way it worked in my life is that i had a certain unusual set of priorities that i focused on so when i was in my teens i focused a lot on my sense of life purpose and what my career would be and my academics and my education so i knew that i wanted to have a great career and for that i knew i needed to have a great education so i put all of my skill points and sort of time and energy into that to the point where i neglected a lot of stuff like socializing having a lot of friends sleeping around having girlfriends this sort of i i deliberately ignored this it's not that i couldn't have done these things it's that i was more interested and had a higher priority in my education and then as i got good at education another priority arose which was philosophy i discovered philosophy and i started to study philosophy and i started to just contemplate life deeply for my own self metaphysics epistemology this sort of stuff asking the big questions and so that became a big priority for me that was more important to me than chasing girls and so that's what i focused on and then through university and university you know usually when people go to university they party they go drinking they go to various kinds of um dances and clubs and bars and this sort of stuff a lot of a lot of folks will actually spend more time socializing in university and having sex and chasing girls and whatever else being in relationships than they do on the academics so i deliberately ignored all of that and focused completely on academics because i knew that that was important for my life purpose so i did that and then after i graduated from university i had to work extra hard to start my career as the beginning of my career so i worked for a few years on that then i got my first job and i basically got my dream job as a game designer and that seemed to be going well but then within about a year i realized that this is still not really what i wanted what i really wanted was to work for myself to be uh fully creatively autonomous not beholden to any boss or any corporation and so for that i had to start my own business so then i i spent the next three years or so like really working hard 100 on my business and so during this whole time i was neglecting for example the social aspects of my life now there's pros and cons to this the pros is that i got an amazing education the pros is that uh uh i was able to to really work on my career and i was able to build a a a great business which made me financially independent and i knew how important that was to me because because that gave me the thing i value the most which was creative autonomy i could basically do any kind of work that i wanted to do that's what i wanted the most that meant more to me than having girls relationships romance friends or anything else so that's what i focused all my energy into and i got it but then after about three years of doing business there like i started to realize that my life was out of balance i was neglecting the social aspects i was exactly the romantic aspects of my life and i was starting to feel that right so what happens is that when you neglect certain aspects of your life a craving builds up there a deep craving a deep desire for that thing that you've been neglecting or that you've been ascetical towards and in a certain sense for the first 25 years of my life i was like a basically like a monk because i was so focused on life purpose and there was a lot of great stuff that in a sense that built the foundation for my life but also on the other hand there were sacrifices that were made there because certain things like socializing and romantic relationships and dating and this sort of stuff this stuff is actually better learned when you're young there's actually a certain period in your life where you're supposed to it's sort of like the ideal window to be learning that stuff which is basically like from age i would say 20 to 40 or maybe even 35 like while you're young handle your romantic stuff and in a certain sense i've that was the con there is that i started late and then because of that there were certain um i had to work extra hard to solve that because you can't solve something like that that lack of experience you can't solve it overnight or even in a single year right because people who were doing this since high school they've gotten 10 20 years of experience meanwhile i was working on my business this sort of thing so then what happened for me is after my business uh was reasonably successful and i felt financially comfortable i i i then i shifted i put a lot of energy and attention i got it to pick up i i shifted into learning to socialize going out to bars and clubs and so forth i hadn't even been to a bar or a club in my entire life up to that point that's how i focused i was on what was truly important to me um and so i did that but i had certain deficiencies it was difficult to it was difficult to change that because in a certain sense when you put your mind in a single focused way on one thing like meditation or enlightenment or business or whatever it's almost easier i mean it is easier it is much easier to get success that way than it is to be focusing on multiple things at once and trying to to get them all right and um and then uh i did that for a few years and then i got i started actualize.org and i worked on actualize.org because actually it was a new business i was really passionate about it then i spent the next five or eight years working really hard and actualized that or again sort of neglecting the social and uh romantic aspects of my life uh and during this time that i was developing actualized.org the the eight years that i was working on actually.org flew by so fast because it wasn't that i was just pumping out content every single week which i was basically for eight years but it's also that i had to be learning so much because i felt such an obligation to my audience to not mislead them and to inform them with you know the best insights that i could so i had to be reading a lot researching a lot meditating a lot i got into spirituality during this point got very serious about psychedelics during this point psychedelics were a whole tangent that i wasn't really expecting that um was a basically like a detour uh within my life and really transformed how i see uh reality and what my priorities were and so forth and in a sense i got into spirituality and i just started doing it not really knowing where it's going to take me and it took me into incredible directions that i didn't even anticipate but at the same time i realize now that there's certain aspects of my life that i still haven't burnt the karma through yet to the end and so specifically with me it's in the romantic relationship domain so what i've you know as i was focused on actualize at org over the last five or eight years it's not that i didn't have romantic relationships i i did but they weren't they weren't like a focus of mine and um and they didn't meet my cravings and what i really wanted out of them so what i find now is that what i want what i have a craving for is um and this is something so here's the lesson for you that you have to be very honest with yourself about what your cravings are what do you generally crave in life because there's a lot of times that you might crave something but then society or somebody else or even some spiritual teacher or maybe you even perceive that leo myself am somehow judging you for what you crave like maybe what you just crave is money or what you crave as sex or what you crave is drugs or what you crave as food or what you crave is you know something like that that's pretty shallow like that and basically the lesson of this episode is you have to be honest with yourself this is part of what self-honesty is about part of what introspection is about and really this is part of spirituality here is if you have materialistic cravings be honest about what those are if you've been living your whole life in poverty and what you really crave is to just have some financial freedom and to be able to buy a nice car and to be able to you know pay for your kids so that you don't have to keep making excuses to them for why you can't buy them the kind of gifts they want for christmas or whatever or you want to buy yourself some nice clothes that you normally wouldn't have been able to afford but you want to treat yourself materially to these things then that's where you're at in life be careful trying to pretend that you're more spiritual or more detached than you really are the reality is that you have those cravings and desires those are your particular attachments we might say that's your karma and that's now something you got to deal with and you need a realistic strategy for how to deal with that so there's really the question here is you know what are the what are the strategies for dealing with cravings and desires ultimately what we want to do with low consciousness or sort of base animalistic cravings and desires is the materialistic ones is we want to we want to exhaust them and as we exhaust them or transcend them and there might be multiple ways of doing that i'll talk about that in a second then what we want to do is we want to transcend those to reach higher kinds of desires so a base desire might just be having a lot of money or getting a lot of one night stands and then if you exhaust that you can transcend to deeper and higher quality desires like the desire to be creative for example or artistic or the desire to have free time just to to meditate into introspect or to do philosophy and then you could even transcend those into even higher desires right um ultimately if you transcend everything you're gonna you're gonna reach the desire for total selflessness that will be your highest desire so the more you transcend selfishness and materialism the more purified your psyche becomes and your consciousness and the more your desires shift towards helping others towards communion with others towards a deep intimacy with other towards a merging of self and other towards becoming more selfless and more loving and more godlike until eventually you become metaphysical love you become god the problem though is trying to get there too quickly without deeply exploring and exhausting burning through the karma that you have because there's a tendency to want to kind of like leapfrog all the all that stuff and just get to the top of the pyramid so to speak now for for certain people for certain spiritually talented attuned exceptional people they can do that they don't necessarily need to go out there and earn a bunch of money and get very famous and have a bunch of sex in order to ultimately realize that none of that makes them happy you know buy 10 sports cars and that doesn't do it for you and then um and then finally then you reach god um for for some exceptional people that's not necessary they can just go straight to god so like rahm and maharshi for example um but that's probably not you and that's not even me and so what i've been coming to grips with lately is i've done a lot of spirituality over the last five years let's say um but i noticed that there's still certain things that i want out of material out of materialistic life out of this dream that i'm in there shouldn't certain experiences that i'm sort of missing that i want to have that i know that i will regret not having and so for me specifically again what that is is i want it's not it's not just sex and it's not uh it's not just one night stands what i'm interested in is i want uh like a very deep profound uh romantic experience with a woman and i mean i've had certain levels of it but but you have to realize how many levels of depth there are to this like a profound uh like sexual intimacy is how i would characterize this craving uh not just physical intimacy of course physical but also uh emotional and and even spiritual and ultimately metaphysical and so i feel like i haven't i haven't scratched that itch deeply enough within myself and i feel like that's holding me back so what i've noticed in myself through introspection is that i could like ignore that craving and just sort of put it in the back of my mind and just sort of like focused towards doing deep spiritual work and that's what i've been doing uh over some number of years um but then lately i've been thinking rethinking that strategy and i've been thinking like you know i'm still young i'm still relatively young is that the right strategy or is is the better strategy here to actually recognize that i have these cravings within myself and rather than trying to like deny them or demonize them or judge them and say that they're wrong or that they're low consciousness or that they're too materialistic or whatever actually maybe the higher spiritual move here is to admit to accept and then to actually work through them not to just ignore them or to deny them and this actually is a very high in a certain sense counterintuitive move of self-love right because look if you really loved yourself you would also accept and love your shadow and your dark side any kind of materials to cravings and desires that you have and you would want yourself to satisfy those in a deep way such that you can transcend them not in a sort of a rushed way where it's like yeah okay quickly get it over with like get it over with you know go have sex with a few people and just get out of your system like not like that i mean like if you really truly loved yourself think about god's love for you god's love for if god truly loved you you might say like well leo god wants me to quickly realize that i'm god uh maybe not maybe what god wants for you is really because the love is so deep that god accepts your agenda so much as its own that god wants you to want what you want in a sense that's what true love is true love is not to demand of the other to do what you need them to do to reach your level true love a deeper love than that would be a love where you you accept the place that that consciousness is in that conscious being is at a certain level and it can't realize the higher levels until it exhausts its lower levels of consciousness and therefore if it wants something petty then you're you love that being enough that you are okay with it wanting something petty like if your child wants some candy see one attitude you could take is you could say you know no don't eat any candy it's bad for you it'll it'll rot your teeth and it'll make you fat like you could take that attitude and you might say well that's loving because in certain times you're looking out for the child that's one way to look at it but another way to look at it is that still it's not it's not the deepest love the deepest love would be to actually put yourself in the child's shoes don't look down at the child what if you were the child what if you had those cravings and you you wanted some of that sugar maybe what the child needs is not a a lecture from you about how bad sugar is and why he shouldn't eat it but maybe what the child needs is actually some like deep compassion and a realization that this this child this this conscious being needs to actually experience for itself what sugar tastes like to satisfy that craving and even if he gets addicted to it maybe he needs that too that's also part of his evolution and and then also this conscious being needs to learn the downsides for itself not to be lectured about how bad sugar is but have the child eat the sugar and then realize what the downsides of it are through direct experience so that then the child can awaken to something beyond the craving for sugar you see this would be sort of a strategy of burning through the sugar karma we might say and so um and so really there's there's two strategies for dealing with cravings and desires one is to try to ignore them suppress them and ultimately let them go and it is possible and i want you to to always remember this that whatever craving or desire you have in life you should be open to the idea that it's always possible just to let it go just let it go whatever it is you want that you think you're lacking just let it go and in a certain sense this is the most spiritually evolved and direct path towards your evolution is just let it go if you can but that's a big if if you can if you want to see you have to want to because if you do it out of a sort of a moralistic place like uh you know a lot of religious people will do this stage blue religious people is they will they will try to you know avoid sinful behavior because it's wrong and they're going to go to hell and there's some sort of like they feel like there's an external moralistic pressure put upon them to not behave in sinful or evil ways well that's definitely not going to work because that's going to lead to guilt and suppression and repression and that's that's so that's a recipe for uh um for a lot of bad stuff uh so the other approach is to uh actually recognize that you have this craving within you and then actually to in a in a non-self-destructive manner to go about satisfying it with the idea that you will pursue it for some number of years hopefully you will reach the results you want you will experience the fruits you'll experience what it's like to satisfy that desire and you will also experience that the satisfaction of that desire does not make you complete or happy in some ultimate sense you're still going to be facing with unhappiness and there's still going to be many problems in your life and you're still not going to feel complete and the reason that is because what you ultimately desire is you desire infinite love you desire god you don't just desire some sex or a relationship or some children or some money or a sports car you desire something much deeper than that but you yourself aren't ready to really face your true desire and you're not really really ready to surrender all of your attachments yet to reach that highest level of selflessness and love so you have to work your way up to it in baby steps so that's the second method i think the second method is much more realistic for many people and i want you to think about your own situation in life whatever it is for you whether it's food sugar sex money houses cars relationships whatever get clear about what you really crave and get clear about what things are you willing to surrender without experiencing them and then what things are you unwilling to surrender what i mean what desires and cravings are you simply unwilling to surrender without first experiencing them like for example let's say you're a virgin and i tell you you know hey you can be totally happy and complete you can experience profound levels of of metaphysical joy and bliss and ecstasy beyond anything that a human orgasm can give you that beyond any sexual experience that you can get i can tell you that and that's technically um and so in that sense you might say okay well then i don't need sex i don't need to pursue sex i can just shortcut that and just go straight to to what leo's talking about here with this sort of metaphysical ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy but like um but then you also have to ask yourself yeah but am i willing to like never have a sexual experience in my entire life is that something that would that would sit well with me or would that bug me for the rest of my life would i regret not doing it and it's not that you're fooling yourself to think that having sex one time will somehow complete you or solve all your problems it won't it's obvious that it won't but on the other hand if you're so lacking in that department maybe it's not so wise to just treat that lack flippantly as though it doesn't matter as though it's not important maybe it is important and and no one can tell you what's important it's all about you like what what are you what are your standards what kind of experiences you want to have in this life so for me personally um even though that i know that i'm in i'm in a dream here and that no particular experience that i have will ever satisfy me or please me in any lasting way in this world in this dream um there are still certain experiences that i want to have and so namely i want to have some very deep um physical emotional and spiritually and even like metaphysical um intimate romantic experiences uh and i feel like if i just imagine myself on my deathbed not having had what i know i can have in this department i feel like i would feel like my life was not fully actualized something would be missing and yet at the same time i'm not fooling myself into thinking that if i have some of these romantic experiences that all of a sudden that will like solve everything in my life you see so it's a little bit subtle and nuanced here i'm not fooling myself anything that if i have these experiences that now all of a sudden you know like the spiritual work is no longer important i can just ignore that no in fact the way i frame it in my mind is that i need to burn through this karma i have these experiences that i want to have satisfied to a certain degree and then also realize that that it still won't fully satisfy me and then then i can go to really deep spiritual levels with my work and if i try to ignore this then it's going to hold me back from going to the deepest spiritual levels that i could go to so that's sort of the conclusion that i reach for myself um again i'm not saying this is something that applies to you i'm just giving this to you as an example so that you can you know try to apply this to your life see in which areas of your life this applies maybe it applies with your finances maybe it applies with your art for example on the one hand you want to pursue awakening in god and love on the other hand you just want to be artistic and you find that there's some tension between those two like should you focus more of your energy on your art or on your meditation your spiritual work and you find that when you focus your attention on on the meditation spiritual work in a certain sense you know that's like the right move but in a certain sense it doesn't really satisfy you as much as if you focused on your art right now for the next five or ten years and so my point here being is that when you're still young when you're in your 20s and 30s and maybe even 40s there's something to be said to investing that time on tackling materialistic desires that you have try to get that out of your system as early as possible i see that some of you who are following me are sort of taking the opposite approach which is what you're doing is you're sort of like neglecting all the material aspects and you're just going straight to psychedelics and straight to meditation and self-inquiry and yoga and nonduality and you're still maybe only 20 years old or 25 years old or 30 years old and i think that this is dangerous now for some of you it's it's right and if it works for you it clicks for you great do it but for others of you who are trying to do this and you're seeing that it's failing you're not getting the results you want i would suggest that maybe you need to rethink your strategy and that really you got to get honest with yourself about your materialistic cravings and desires and needs and really focus on those first focus on those for 5 10 15 years satisfy those you know build a business do your art develop your career um handle your finances move away from your family so that you're independent you're not under there um you know under the heel um have the romantic and sexual relationships you want develop the friendships you want go socialize go party go have fun do this sort of stuff get it out of your system and then maybe when you're older now once you get that stuff out of your system then there will become a natural place in your life where you say well i've done this and i've done that i've traveled i've ate great food i've made good money i've had some fame i've had some success and this sort of stuff and okay i've done that stuff it's great fine but now i want something more and then i think that's really when your spiritual work will produce the most fruits and in a certain sense to to pursue awakening and spirituality too early in your life is in a certain sense doing things backwards now again for some people it's it's appropriate but for most people i think it's backwards actually because there is that maslow's hierarchy of needs and self-transcendence is at the very top of the hierarchy for a good reason so you want to satisfy your lower needs first for most people now again this doesn't mean you have to do it this way it just means for most people this is probably their karma and what they need to do is you know burn through a good amount of it in their 20s and 30s before they can get really serious about spiritual work now you might wonder well but leo um what makes the difference how about you know some people who pursue like sex or luxury or travel or money it seems like some people maybe even most people pursue that stuff and they get stuck in it they get lost in it and they end up chasing money or sex or whatever like for their entire lives it doesn't seem like they exhausted what's the difference between a person who pursues sex and has sex for five or ten years gets a lot of it out of his system and then moves on to other things versus a person who becomes a sex addict and just has sex chasing women endlessly you know philandering endlessly for the rest of his life what's the difference between those two how do we avoid this second situation how do we actually make sure that when we're pursuing and satisfying our desires that they're actually getting satisfied and then transcended rather than just an endless pursuit of the same thing over and over and over again like some people you know some some millionaires and billionaires they just pursue more and more money there's they're like 80 90 years old and they're still just chasing money every day they're waking up thinking about how to make more money but what's the point of all that money you're going to be dead in five years you don't need any more billions of dollars you already got more than you can spend what are you doing so this is this is a question i've been pondering it's a deep question i i recommend you contemplate it too because i honestly i don't know exactly the answer but here i'll speculate a little bit with you i think that i think that honestly some people are just so dense in their consciousness and they have so much karma so to speak to burn through that in this lifetime they're not going to burn through much of it they're going to get stuck with sex money or whatever i think that another important factor is that these people just don't a lot of people simply don't have the theoretical foundation to know about the possibilities of even transcending these desires and what what greater things lie beyond right so if you've been following actualize.org and you've been studying my content then you're in a rather unique situation because i've talked a lot about the limitations of materialistic pursuits and uh you know if you've contemplated this stuff you should and you introspective you should notice how you're chasing and pursuing of materialistic things never really fully satisfies you and so as you apply consciousness to the fact that your selfish actions and your limited ways of pleasuring yourself um as you become more conscious you realize that the these things they they they don't lead to the greatest satisfaction and then you listen to me and i talk about things that are sort of higher forms of satisfaction like spiritual satisfaction that you might get or if you've done psychedelics you've experienced the kind of love profound love and sense of completeness that you get on a psychedelic journey um and that's just that that puts your ordinary materialistic pursuits into into a context into their place it shows you how petty they are right but i think that for from for most people who are out there pursuing materialistic things um they're roughly a spirodamic stage orange they don't even know of the higher stages they don't even know about green or yellow or turquoise they don't know about transcending the ego they don't know about spiritual ecstasy and bliss right they don't know about love they don't know about god they don't know about these things they're not even in that person's mind like you know take someone like like warren buffett i don't know i really don't know much about his psychology or what he knows or doesn't know but i just picture him as somebody who just like materialistically pursues more and more money for its own sake i don't know how this makes him happy but apparently apparently it does somehow um i don't know why he's like 80 years old now and he's still not sick of pursuing money and just investing more and more i would think he would have exhausted that by now but apparently he hasn't and why is that probably because he doesn't know that there's higher things because he's so stuck on just that one thing also i think that people who are very very good and talented in a narrow capacity at one thing they can easily get stuck in that thing so for example if you're really really good at investing you can easily get stuck 80 years of your life just investing investing investing investing because that's all you know that's that's what you're best at and you don't want to explore any other aspects of life really because you wouldn't be very good at them as you are at investing or if you're like if you're really good with women i know some guys like this who are just like players like they're just naturally really good with women they always were and so for them having lots of sex just comes very naturally and effortlessly they're really good at it it gives them a certain amount of pleasure of course it never fully satisfies them so they have to have more and more and more hundreds of women and then they just keep doing this into their 40s and 50s and maybe their whole life they will just be doing this um and uh that just might be because that that's the like the easiest path for them that's what they're really good at and then for them to do something else to find other higher pleasures this might be um you know this might be very much out of their comfort zone not something they're talented or or gifted in and they would have to work really hard at it it would be painful and so they don't do it they don't go in that direction i think that also people with a lot of trauma early trauma that trauma can can sort of twist and distort your psyche and get you stuck in certain ways and then keep you stuck there in those patterns for the rest of your life unless you go and deeply heal that trauma and address it and of course that trauma usually is very difficult to heal it's painful people don't want to look at it it's buried deep in the psyche and so i think a lot of trauma contributes to people getting stuck um and that would require you know years of therapy years of psychedelic work years of introspection and and for many people it's easier just to avoid that and just to you know to focus on the simpler pleasures of life as sort of a coping mechanism against that um but what i would say is that if you pursue the satisfying of some of your deepest desires some of your genuine desires with an attitude of mindfulness and consciousness and you put it in the proper context and also at the same time you're studying spiritual theory and you're building this deep foundation that we build here with with actualized content and maybe you're exploring a little bit of psychedelics and you're still meditating a little bit these sorts of things um and you you understand that the pursuit of these desires is going to be a temporary thing you're not like you're not fooling yourself into thinking that you're going to keep doing this for the rest of your life in fact you might sort of set it like a rule for yourself like okay you know i'm going to pursue business for the next five or 10 years i'm going to exhaust that i'm going to pursue money or fame for the next five or 10 years i'm going to exhaust that i'm going to pursue sex and relationships for the next five or 10 years i'm going to exhaust that craving and then i'm going to move on to higher things and by the way when i say exhaust and move on to higher things i'm not saying that you know you have relationships for 10 years then you stop having relationships after 10 years i don't mean that i just mean that like you're going to get to a point where you're not needy and lacking in that thing anymore whatever is money you know i'm not saying you you make money for 10 years then you stop making money i'm saying you focus on money intensely for 10 years maybe over overcompensate for that and then maybe your business stabilizes you can still earn money you can still do business but then after that that's not no longer like a a deep motivating thing for you you move on to other things meanwhile you still end up earning a little bit of money right like you don't be be realistic about how this works um and so in this way you evolve and also you know you you you're aware of spiral dynamics you're aware of developmental psychology you're aware of the susan cook reuter nine stages of ego development model that i talked about um with an episode series by that title so um you're aware of those stages and you you know you're you're sort of anticipating that basically if you're sort of following this developmental psychology model of spirodynamics or susan cook reuter you're sort of expecting that every five years or so of active development will move you up one stage five to ten years one stage so maybe right now you peg yourself at blue or orange so you kind of anticipate that you know for the next five or ten years i'm gonna move one stage from orange to to green and then another five or ten years from green to yellow and so forth um [Music] so as long as you're studying this theory and you're you're serious about your own evolution i wouldn't worry too much about getting stuck chasing some desire for the rest of your life i think that mostly happens when people have a lot of trauma and who are overly specialized in that thing and also they're not they're not they're not thinking deeply about metaphysics spirituality and the all the foundational kind of principles that we talk about in this work so i think if you're if you're following that then i wouldn't worry too much about that and i would actually encourage you to allow yourself to accept embrace and to even love some of your cravings and desires and to to be honest with yourself about your need to satisfy those and to burn through some of that karma and also recognize that there are certain things that are best done when you're younger and other things that are best done when you're older in fact spirituality and meditation and awakening we might say that these are actually more suited towards the second half of your life not the first half of your life because in the first half of your life you really have to master survival that's what a lot of you are missing you need to figure out a way to pay for yourself to be independent of your family to um socialize have friends have intimate relationships because you crave those things um like if you're like most people you need to figure out your nutrition your diet your exercise regimen you need to work on your health make sure that your health situation is stable and balanced so you don't have problems there if you have any kind of disorders autoimmune issues whatever you got to fix those a lot of those have to do with your diet and your lack of exercise success this is the time to work on your success if you have a feeling that you need to be artistic this is the time to be artistic because this you're in your prime you know in your 20s and 30s you're at your prime intellectually in many ways you're at your prime in terms of your energy levels because after age 40 your energy levels are going to start to dip um your cognitive capacity is going to start to dip um and also like with with with with sex specifically and romantic relationships um your 20s and 30s this is the prime time this is when you do it because the last thing you want and this is sort of like where i was coming from thinking about this is like the last thing i want is to be some 60 year old man who is very awake and conscious and spiritual but on the other hand i still have sexual cravings that i didn't satisfy when i was younger and those are still lingering with me when i'm 60 and then i'm like a horny 60 year old right like this and and you actually see this with plenty of spiritual teachers a lot of spiritual gurus and so forth and monks um one of the problems with them is that because usually a monk goes into being a monk very early in life in their 20s and then they spend like let's say all their 20s and 30s pursuing monk hood and sainthood and this sort of stuff being a yogi and then they end up being like a great teacher in their 50s or 60s but then you have all these sexual scandals that happen with these spiritual cults and so forth because the bottom line is that these these some of these gurus and monks and yogis and so forth they um they kind of went about the whole thing backwards and then they spend their later half of their life trying to like satisfy some of those base sexual cravings and i think that honestly they um they still have those very powerful sexual cravings because they didn't satisfy them when they were a monk and and honestly awakening and enlightenment may not be enough to satisfy you in that domain it may it may not be enough it can satisfy you in other ways but you will still have those lingering sexual cravings that you didn't get out of your system and maybe you'll have other sorts of cravings maybe you'll have a craving for money too because you didn't pursue it when you were younger so there is a certain wisdom to pursuing the base material things when you're in your first half of your life um otherwise you're going to end up as some like creepy 60 year old who's all awake but then like chasing 20 year old girls you you didn't satisfy that when you were in your 20s and your 30s and then that can become abusive that can become toxic and kind of creepy and weird um and so like looking at my own life i see myself like i don't want to be in that situation so i want to um and i want to be realistic with myself now could i just sit down and tell myself you know what i'm just going to completely let go and surrender of any kind of cravings or desires that i have for any sexual or romantic experiences any kind of intimacy intimacy just let go of all of it and just go purely for the abstract metaphysical love and that will be enough to satisfy me i mean i'd like to believe that's possible um but on the other hand i'm also just human i'm infinite but i'm also human too right that's that's the conundrum and so are you you're infinite but you're also human and so your mind is corrupted with various kinds of attachments and limitations you have a limited finite mind um which is attached to a sort of an animal body and that animal body has its cravings and needs and you have to be realistic about those in general i think that the idea that you can transcend sexual craving through pure abstinence is a very flawed idea and that for the majority of people this will not work that's also why uh i'm pretty much against the no fap movement because there's there's this sort of silly idea within the no fap movement that you can just sort of will yourself to abstain from masturbation and then that that somehow you're gonna you know you're gonna break that craving and you're gonna transcend it through this abstinence and through being very kind of like strict with yourself i don't think this works effectively it's never really worked the church has tried this various monastic traditions have tried this and what ends up happening usually is it backfires there are many stories that you can read of monks and celibate priests and so forth who try to abstain from sex because you know you're not supposed to it's not spiritual so to speak uh and then what ends up happening is that actually even if those people are spiritual in other ways those cravings don't go away in fact they intensify and they get perverted because they're they're being suppressed they get perverted and they manifest themselves in perverted ways in abusive ways leading to molestation rape and all sorts of weird crepe creepy stuff like that that um that is way worse than if they were just honest and allowed themselves to satisfy those cravings when they were younger in a healthy reasonable way now of course you can always go overboard with the satisfaction of your cravings and you can even destroy your life by chasing sex or drugs or money or fame or material possessions and luxury you can destroy your life this way so it's very much about balance you have to find that balancing point and you have to pursue the satisfaction of your desires in a in a mindful conscious way consciousness is the key i think a lot of people who pursue material pleasures they do it unconsciously and then it becomes uh it just becomes like another habit a compulsive habit and so one area in my life where i have transcended desire and craving the most is when it comes to food i used to be very addicted to food the worst kinds of junk food when i was younger because in my family the the notion of health food simply didn't didn't exist you would eat the greasiest saltiest fattiest uh least healthy food that you could find because it tasted the best that was the sort of family culture that i grew up in and then i i had to work really hard to change that within myself and that took a process of like 10 years of rewiring my mind retraining myself but i i'm i'm at the point now where um i still get cravings for sugar and sweet things for example and certain kinds of you know guilty pleasure food but generally speaking i've i feel like i've transcended those cravings and part of the reason that is i think is because what happened with me the way i translated my food cravings is basically i ate so much of the greasiest saltiest unhealthiest worst food imaginable in my youth i ate so much of that food that i basically became disgusted with myself and the consequences this was having on my body on my physical appearance on my self-esteem on my confidence on my sexuality um on my ability to attract girls on on my on my mental performance on my mood and my feelings my energy levels all this stuff i became so disgusted with the negative consequences of this that i reached certain tipping points in my life there were multiple tipping points that i reached where i just like swore off junk food forever and it was such a deep swearing off that i don't even crave it anymore like for example i haven't eaten pizza in probably eight years i have i hadn't eaten a slice of pizza not because i don't love it i love pizza ordinarily speaking um but um i just i reached sort of a tipping point where i became disgusted with eating pizza to the point where now i can walk by you know a pizza parlor and they have these big juicy pizzas rotating right in front of the window i can walk by and i can look at i can kind of say in my mind i can be like yeah that looks that looks kind of delicious but on the other hand i have no more craving for it it's a it's a very interesting phenomena i kind of i can appreciate it i could i could almost want to eat the slice but there's no more craving and i don't really have to hold myself back the way i used to in the past a similar situation for example with ice cream i i would love ice cream i would you know over eat buckets of ice cream to the point where i was just nauseous and disgusted with myself from eating so much ice cream but then after doing that so many times i became so disgusted that now even though i still enjoy ice cream um i basically rarely partake in it and um and if i do it's not gonna it's gonna be moderate it's not gonna be to the extent where i nauseate myself with it and i'm disgusted with myself um and and that took a lot of a lot of failure and trial and error to reach that point in my psyche where something shifted like that so i think similar things are possible for example with sexual cravings and with cravings for material things um i still have certain material cravings i would say the biggest one would be like romantic intimacy um and you might not even say that that's material i mean in a certain sense it's not material really what i crave is not sex what i crave is like a deep spiritual intimacy with another human you know fem with feminine energy basically um you could call that material or not material however you want but still it's a craving and so i kind of put it in the material category it's sort of an attachment but you know i still for example enjoy nice things i like to buy nice things sometimes i like buying i like to buy nice clothes sometimes um but it's it's very help i would say my relationship to all that is very healthy in the sense that i i don't go overboard i don't waste a bunch of money here or there and i don't fool myself into thinking that this is going to somehow make me happy or that this will obviate the need for deep spiritual work that i plan to be doing in the future so anyways these are just some thoughts on what it means to burn through karma think about how this applies to your own life be realistic with yourself if you can surrender and let go certain cravings just without having to experience them then do it that's the most direct path but if you can't that's also okay and consider this as part of your practice of self-love right god's love for you is so profound that if you want to eat a bucket of ice cream to the point where you're just disgusted and you have a stomachache and you're in a food coma for the next day from eating a gallon of ice cream god's love for you is such that god wants you to experience that and there is a higher wisdom there that when you do that that's where you your consciousness truly starts to learn from direct experience why you shouldn't eat a bucket or a gallon of ice cream right you sort of hit rock bottom and that's honestly what happens with a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts is at some point they hit rock bottom either they die or they hit a psychological rock bottom where they realize like you know if i keep going down this road my entire life will be destroyed and so i have to stop and then they learn to stop and then they learn to moderate themselves now you have to be careful you know with something like hard drugs it's it's extra dangerous because you can easily kill yourself you have more leeway when it comes to sex and food and chasing money and so forth but still you have to be careful because you you can waste decades of your life chasing this stuff if you're doing it in a compulsive unconscious way and you don't properly contextualize so what i recommend is that if you're going to pursue some of your you know material desires and cravings do it but still keep learning the theory keep learning the theory keep reading the books keep a little bit of a spiritual practice going you can still meditate an hour a day while you're pursuing whatever you're pursuing materially you can still do a psychedelic once a month and now psychedelic for example will will help to keep your priorities straight so that you understand and remember you don't forget that this chasing of whatever material thing you're chasing that it's not going to ultimately lead to the highest satisfaction for you psychedelics will show you that they will get you to think deeply about your priorities and so just what i recommend is that you maintain even if you're going to be doing something material like doing a business or pursuing money and fame still maintain at least a little bit an hour or two a day of some kind of spiritual practice or just even spiritual study or just reading spiritual books or watching my videos or watching somebody else's videos along the same lines as what we're talking about here just to make sure you don't completely fall off track right and then also put this process into a larger context of like this is part of your whole evolution right it's not that you're pursuing women or you're pursuing a car or a house for it so it's like you're seeing that that's that's part of your evolutionary process and and that that puts it into a larger context and you have sort of a plan in your life that you know for the next five years i'm gonna be doing business then for the next five years i'm gonna be doing uh relationships then for the next five years i'm gonna be doing something else and then i'm gonna be evolving myself in this way and i think if you do it like that then um realistically for most people this is the best way for them to evolve themselves telling the average person to just drop all of their cravings all of their attachments and go straight for god in love this is not going to work for the majority of people it has never worked throughout the history of of of mankind it has never worked this has been tried by spiritual and religious orders and cults and traditions for thousands of years there have been ascetic monastic traditions and and what's the conclusion from all that we have we have thousands of years of experience the conclusion is that it works for a tiny percentage less than one percent of people and for normal people it doesn't work it's not sustainable they don't have the spiritual giftedness for it they have too much karma they have too much baggage uh or whatever they're they're simply not wise enough to execute on that and honestly i don't know if i'm uh strong enough to execute on that like a hundred percent directly you know in the sort of in like the classic buddha sense you know the buddha just like the buddha the story of the boot is that he left his wife he left his children he left his palace in his kingdom and he went for seven years into the force to meditate and to attain nirvana and enlightenment um that's very [ __ ] radical the reason that story is so powerful is because precisely because almost nobody that story doesn't apply to almost anybody it's it's like supernatural it's like being the michael jordan or the kobe bryant of of baseball or basketball um like that the average person cannot ever become that good at basketball they don't have that kind of drive that motivation that skill set those genetics that perfect combination of everything that is necessary to be able to achieve that level of world-class performance so um be careful comparing yourself to these sorts of mythical figures like ramana maharshi or the buddha or christ or something like this you're not like this if you were you wouldn't be watching my videos and i'm not like that either right uh i'm not as spiritually strong or um maybe courageous or as motivated as those people so i have to i have to do spirituality in my way whatever suits my situation i can only progress at my own rate so you have to be careful comparing yourself to people who you are not like um all right so there you go there you have it and now you understand what burning through karma means i'm gonna i'm gonna use that phrase in the future i've been actually wanting to explain this phrase for a while because i like using it it's just a quick little phrase that you can use to help to help people who are stuck and sometimes what happens is that when you pursue spirituality too early too soon without handling your basic survival what happens that you can actually get very bad consequences you can misapply the teachings i've spoken about that in the past you can even become suicidal or depressed you can get ahead of your skis or you can just put yourself into a very bad material situation where you let's say you even attain your mater you know your your spiritual pursuits and fruits you attain all those but then like your life conditions are very very bad you don't have a house to live in you're homeless you don't have a career you don't know how to make money you know how to socialize you're very awkward with with people you're sexually inexperienced this sort of stuff and that that doesn't really make for a great life either you see so balance is important survival mastering survival i consider that uh inescapable if you think you're gonna pursue buddhahood while completely ignoring survival and that the pursuit of buddhahood will allow you to short-circuit the need to learn survival you're fooling yourself in fact if you can't master basic survival then the chances of you ever waking up i think are pretty small i would consider getting proficient at survival like a prerequisite even for the pursuit of serious spirituality because serious spirituality is is much more difficult than just learning how to get a job or developing a career or earning a bit of money or learning to socialize or learning some dating skills so be realistic with yourself and remember that everything i said here is really a part of a deeper self love you're not going to reach the highest spiritual attainments through some sort of puritanical moralistic guilt-tripping of yourself there has to be a deep self-acceptance a deep honesty about your own limitations whatever they are your own cravings you have to accept them you have to love them and only then can you transcend them so try that on precise you