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[Music] ego is not only individual but also collective I'm really excited about this topic because it's such a juicy one there's so much to say here in this episode I want to share with you a powerful lens for looking at social systems and understanding how they work and that is the lens of the collective ego now with personal development and self-actualization a lot of what we do is we turn inwards and we focus on ourselves on our own individual egos and we've talked about this topic ad nauseam at this point throughout the episodes but there's also a lot of value in studying yourself and learning the tricks of your own ego learning your own self-deception mechanisms and then starting to see parallels of that out in the social systems of which you are a part of and which comprise the majority of human life if you think about it are comprised of various kinds of social systems which also have a sort of ego such that once you start to understand the tricks of your own ego you will start to understand all social systems and this becomes extremely useful because you then become quite good at predicting why these systems are malfunctioning and also how to guide these systems to better levels of performance and higher consciousness which is ultimately what we want we want that individually for ourselves which is where it starts that's a good start but then we also want collectively the same sort of thing as a general principle of life we can say that every complex system or group of people tends to exhibit ego that's my claim now what is ego well of course that's a that's a loaded word and there's a there's hours of discussion we can have about that and there's different perspectives we can take on it but for the purposes of this conversation here let's keep it simple for this episode let's define ego as the rational self-preservation instinct that a complicated system has a human being has it the human brain tends to exhibit it but also social systems which involve human beings also tend to exhibit it now you might say but leo why do you say it's irrational why is ego irrational after all what's irrational about self-preservation but what's rational about it have you ever wondered about why you care about self-preservation and whether that's a subjective or an objective concern what is rational about caring that you or your body survives and somebody else doesn't what's rational about caring about protecting your family and your company and your corporation in your nation versus some other family or some other company or some other nation is there anything rational about that at all no if you were perfectly objective if you took the the universe's perspective you would see that it doesn't matter whether you protect yourself or your family or somebody else it doesn't matter who survives because in the end they're all gonna die this ego game that you're playing it's gonna end nobody wins this game has that sunk it in yet self-preservation is highly highly irrational there's no reason why your human life is worth more than an insect or a tree or a rock or anything else you need to start to think about reality in a much more impersonal manner and from outside of the human species perspective think of reality as a collection of thing different organizations are happening and unless you have a sense of self or a sense of ego then an object doesn't care whether it lives or dies its own survival is completely irrelevant to it for example a rock doesn't care whether it lives or dies and many other things in nature don't care whether they are attacked or disturbed and broken up and collapsed and crumbled into pieces so see but that as life becomes more complicated as objects and structures develop within life then they need to build sort of defense mechanisms against the forces of chaos which are outside and so therefore you need to start to define an inside versus an outside the inside is the thing that's being protected and preserved that's the order that's being maintained it's a highly ordered system if you think about the human organism or even an insect or an ant or even a bacteria that's a highly ordered thing it needs to maintain itself it's constantly struggling and fighting against its environment now what is the environment the environment is simply defined as that which is not the thing that is trying to survive so in a sense every sufficiently complex organism needs to start to develop some sort of ego now maybe it's a very rudimentary ego a sort of proto ego maybe it's not fully self-aware but still it needs to have a sense of self because if it didn't how would it distinguish between itself and its environment and how would it know what needs to be protected and defended versus what needs to be attacked how does it know not to eat its own tail if it doesn't have a sense of self you see the problem here and you see the problem is that nature is very chaotic stuff is always changing nothing is ever staying the same everything absolutely everything is changing all the time so this is a very tenuous situation to be in if you want to maintain a consistent order and that's what ego is about it's about hang on to some aspect of reality and then maintaining it that way so don't think of ego as something that human beings have or like all yeah some human beings are egotistical that's not what I mean by ego I mean a much much much more general principle we're talking about how life is constructed at all all right and I'm not just talking about biological life I'm talking about any complicated system I'm even talking about something like let's say you have a religion we can say that a religion is like an organism it's alive in a certain sense it needs to be able to organize and protect itself otherwise what happens is that it gets taken over by the forces of chaos and it ceases to exist so if something is in existence and it keeps existing for any significant length of time for a few days a few months a few years a few centuries then it has to develop a system to maintain its integrity otherwise what happens is that either the thing will crumble and collapse and dissolve entirely which we might call death or it will morph and evolve to such a degree that you won't be able to recognize it anymore which is what we see with animal species you take some sort of lizard or you take some sort of bird or creature and you you rewind the clock 100 million years and that thing is unrecognizable it's not the same as it was it's a completely different thing it's completely evolved in a sense you could say that it died because it evolved that animal that used to live a hundred million years ago does it live anymore that's how it works unless it goes to extraordinary measures to keep itself intact and that's where ego comes in the more complicated a system becomes the more sophisticated the ego structures become until eventually like in humans it starts to develop a sense of self awareness and self reflection and that comes with various pros and cons so fundamentally when you have a highly ordered object nevermind whether it's allied or not if you have a highly ordered object or system it needs a way of protecting itself because the more order it has the more fragile it is the more susceptible and vulnerable it is to too little things causing great errors for example if you take a human brain which has tens of billions maybe a hundred billion neurons all interconnected in a very specific way you can't just go in there with an icepick and muck around and change a few neurons here and there and think that everything's gonna turn out fine no it won't for your brain to be able to maintain itself it needs to have a specific sort of structure within certain tight bounds narrow bounds otherwise you're gonna become a [ __ ] or a psychopath and you're not going to be able to survive effectively in life so maintaining homeostasis becomes the number one priority of any complex system where there's a human being or some sort of organization a collective organization so let me give you some examples of these what am I talking about when I mean collective ego it's a lot of stuff let's make it very concrete I'm talking about your family I'm talking about any club that you're a part of or a musical band a sports team a gang a committee of any kind a local church a business whether it's a small startup business with you and a couple of your buddies in a garage or it's a giant multinational corporation that employs 50,000 people it has an ego it has a collective ego an ashram or a monastery cults have egos religions have egos nonprofit organizations political parties labor unions cities grassroots campaigns communes even online forums and subreddits institutions like mathematics or science have an ego universities even entire professional fields like you can take the entire professional field of doctors or lawyers or accountants they will have a certain professional ego collective professional ego in addition to and above their individual egos of course spiritual schools all have their own egos races and ethnic groups have collective egos Nations alliances like the European Union or the UN or NATO those sorts of things even the human species as a whole has a collective ego and then there are things which you would think wouldn't have an ego but they sort of do like culture tends to have its own ego and even systems like language and you might wonder well how can language have an ego but in a sense it kind of does have you noticed grammar nazis how you notice how how people get really hung up on using language properly and then there's different ways different dialects and people get really picky about what's the perfect pronunciation for certain words certain dialects are are minimized while others are elevated in status and then of course languages evolve and morph over time you can't recognize what English is like from 500 years ago it's hard to read Shakespeare and yet that's English that's because it's always evolving and people are always trying to preserve language as it is so in a sense language is trying to preserve itself against the forces of evolution and cancer is another good example of something that has a sort of proto ego to it because what cancer is is just these cells that start to multiply but then they get out of hand they multiply too much and so they try to do that in fact when you attack when you attack these cancer cells and you try to kill them they defend themselves and they fight against that so they have a sort of sense of self and the entire earth as a whole you could say has a collective ego of course not all complex systems exhibit ego your computer doesn't have an ego cars your car doesn't have an ego your house doesn't have an ego but then again these technologies are very new relatively speaking computers and cars have only existed for about a hundred years who knows where they will be in a thousand years in a thousand years maybe even sooner maybe even in a hundred years your computer or your car or your house it gets so complex that it starts to have an ego so what's required is massive complexity not just complexity yes your computer is complex yes your car is complex in your house is complex but not nearly complex enough what seems to be required is a vast interconnectedness the way that you get inside of a brain the brain is the perfect example of this sort of massive interconnectedness or you link a bunch of brains together into some sort of internet type of system into a network or into a religious organization or into a corporation or into a nation and then that acquires an ego because that's also networking this complicated multi multi parallel sort of way I want you to start to draw a parallel between your struggle for self-control in life and the collective egos all around you which are also struggling for self-control if you think about what life is at the most general level it's all about self-control it's the self trying to control itself struggling with itself fighting with itself this is not particular to just you as a human being of course you have your petty little struggles every single day you get up and you're dealing with stuff you're dealing with emails and work problems and financial problems relationship problems what are you doing you're struggling to maintain a a stasis within a general environment of chaos stuff is always changing you know your cars is breaking down your house is breaking down you always have to fix this stuff up your relationship is deteriorating you have to work on that your job is deteriorating if you're not working on that your business is deteriorating everything everything has to be worked and maintained this is just a general principle of entropy your fatty against entropy so you of course are familiar with the fact that you're struggling all the time but are you familiar and are you really conscious that the same struggle within you is the same struggle that you see for example taking place within a religion like Christianity or Islam or within a city government or within a sports team or within a new business startup or within an alliance or within the community of scientists and mathematicians or within some spiritual school or within an ethnic group or a racial group are you conscious of that and are you drawing parallels are you seeing the deep interconnectedness in the mechanisms there's an isomorphism between the mechanisms that are happening within you to maintain yourself and the mechanisms that are happening out there and all these systems and of course these systems are not separate from you you're intimately involved in many of these systems you're a part of your government you're a part of your nation you're a part of your ethnic group you're a part of all these groups they're not something out there that you can just point your finger at and judge you have to also take responsibility for the fact that you contribute to all this stuff start to notice the similar dynamics that are going on as you study your own ego with all the self-actualization stuff your eyes should be opening to like oh wow yeah all this stuff is happening in me and all these tricks that I play on myself and all this this need that I have for self preservation that's the same thing that's happening with that corporation over there or that government over there and that helps to start to explain a lot of the evil that you see out in the world because you might wonder like well how come that corporation is so greedy and how come that religion is is so oppressive and so violent and how come how come there's so much corruption in that nonprofit group over there and all the sorts of stuff you start to really appreciate that when you become conscious of that very same stuff happening within you when you start to see the corruption within you the struggles for self-preservation within yourself I also want you to start to notice especially what happens draw the parallel between self-preservation running amok in your own life and running amuck collectively what do I mean by this I'll give you an example in your own life your individual ego for example maybe you grew up in a in a poor family in a poor neighborhood but you worked hard now you're doing well for yourself but deep down you still fear poverty and so you work hard every day on your business or at your work at your job you're trying to climb the corporate ladder or whatever you're doing you're saving money you're you're looking out for all the stuff but deep down you're you're always afraid that you're not saving enough and so you're working more and more and more and every time you know you're presented new opportunities you always go for the opportunity that gets you more money more success because deep down that's what's driving you is this sort of fear and you might say well what's the prob with that well the same thing as with cancer too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing because you start to chase more and more money more and more money and then your business or your work becomes just about money and you lose sight of the higher consciousness values if you're an artist you lose sight of your artwork if you you lose sight of your creativity you sell yourself out you just go for more money more money more money and then maybe you start to do shady stuff borderline unethical stuff gray hat sort of stuff and then nad devolves into black hat sort of stuff and then you maybe start to do some illegal sort of stuff and you start to do some fraud and you start to do a little bit of this and cutting corners a little bit there and stealing a little bit from work and this and that yourself preservation instinct is starting to run amok you can you start to realize the limits of that and stop it before it gets out of control because the fact is that you could become a billionaire you could have a hundred billion dollars and you will still not have enough because fundamentally you haven't address the deep fear inside of you that you're still running away from because that's what's really driving your ego your ego wants self-preservation to an infinite degree and unfortunately that's just not sustainable in many cases so you start to see if you do some inner work some consciousness work you start to become more aware you sure to see oh yeah I do have this fear let me work on that let me get to the root and to the bottom of it and if I fix that then maybe I won't be so attached to success into money and then I can kind of relax I'm not gonna be working overtime all the time my wife and my kids aren't gonna hate me because I spend all my free time working and I don't spend any time with them and also my health is gonna improve because now I have more time to go to the gym and I have more time to enjoy myself and I have more time to relax I'm not so stressed and I can meditate a little bit right see so you let go of the self-preservation instinct and actually what happens is that you start to improve you start to thrive more so it's not the case that to be rigidly attached to self-preservation means that you're gonna live the best life possible not at all it doesn't work that simply life is not so linear these these sorts of dynamics they tend to backfire on you life is all about finding the right equilibrium and balance so that's an example from your personal life hopefully that makes sense for you but now I want you to start to see that all around you in the collective egos that exist the exact same stuff is happening it's happening within religions within corporations within governments and you start to wonder well well why is that religion so violent well maybe it's because that religion is afraid of dying it's afraid of its environment changing so radically it's afraid of the new technologies in the internet and and and gay rights and all this sort of stuff it's so afraid that it needs to defend itself so when it does is it lashes out and it goes and it proselytize those people at the at the at the point of a gun or it employs tactics to manipulate people because otherwise the religion would go out of business start to draw those parallels it's rarely talked about this topic of collective ego by spiritual teachers and that's really a problem because just working on your own ego turns out to not really be enough to understand life because life for human beings because we're social creatures were hive like like ants or bees the groups that were part of shape us enormous lee and how we behave and how we think in turn feeds back and shapes the groups such that when we don't understand this dynamic of collective ego or the individual ego and we don't link them together then what ends up happening is that actually a lot of evil is created in the world collective ego is responsible for some of the greatest evils of all time and hey maybe you're gonna become enlightened one day and you think okay I'm enlightened and everything's good I've solved all the world's problems well not so fast because even though you might be enlightened your group still has a collective ego just because you got enlightened doesn't mean that your organization got enlightened with you your corporation or your nation or even your ashram or your monastery just because you're a Zen monk who got enlightened in a in a Zen monastery does not mean that your Zen monastery now doesn't have a collective ego oh no and it's very easy for you to come under the collective pressure of that ego because you're you're at the whim in a sense of these larger forces that shape society and the even though you are enlightened just because you're going along with the flow it will carry you to some great evil and there's many examples where that has happened to people even enlightened people individual human beings if you meet them face to face most of the time they're pretty kind and decent people now of course there are exceptions some people you meet them face to face and they stab you in the eye with a fork because they're Psychopaths or they got something else going on with them there's definitely that possibility out of billions of people but most people are pretty decent most people have a sense of compassion because they aren't connected to their heart they don't just think with their mind they're also connected with their heart and they're not cold-blooded but in groups that's another matter when you get human beings into groups even though the human beings might have heart when they come together into a group they sort of give themselves up to the collective ego of the group the problem is though that the collective ego of the group is very mechanical the collective group of a religion for example doesn't have a heart it doesn't have a conscience and when you surrender yourself to that when your individual ego gets identified with the collective ego now there's this sort of bond and you become like a child of the larger parent you're sort of attached to it the way that the wrist is attached to the to the arm or the hand is attached to them to the wrist such that now you know I move the rig move the hand or the arm and the hand moves along with it and that's when a lot of great evil can get done human beings can turn into monsters and then you're not conscious see most human beings are not conscious of the egoic mechanisms within themselves because they've never bothered to look deeply in words nobody has taught them how the way that actualize that org is trying to teach you how so they're unconscious of their own self deceptions and egoic tricks and therefore of course they're extremely unconscious of all the egoic tricks of all the groups that they're a part of and then all hell breaks loose so I want you to start to notice that the ego is a very general dynamic and that it tends to operate in the same way at the individual and the collective level it tends to use the same bag of tricks so specifically what bag of tricks does it use well let's give you a little list here and I'm not going to go into full depth on all of these because these are entire episodes all in and of themselves and I've already shot episodes about some of this stuff and I will shoot more in the future but we got to give you this list and talk about some of this stuff a little bit so here are some mechanisms self bias this happens at the individual level and the collective level and that's true of all these mechanisms self deception dishonesty secrecy and lack of transparency oh the ego loves that one that you love secrecy the more secrecy there is the less transparency the more the ego flourishes because the devil loves to do his work in the shadows in fact that's the only place where he can really be effective is in the shadows that's why in organizations whether it's governments or corporations or religious organizations whatever lack of transparency is always a problem if you notice it always leads to corruption abuse of power why is that because the ego runs amok when nobody else is holding it to account and the only way you can hold it to account is through transparency and that's especially true with religious and spiritual groups which is one of the reasons why with actualized dot orgs forum I try to keep all conversations public on the forum we don't have any side discussions private chat groups or any of this kind of stuff because I know just how much corruption potential there is there you have to moderate that stuff and it has to be open when the stuff is open it's fully transparent to everybody that's what keeps it from festering and getting infected but then people people love to form a little splinter groups their own little private chats and all this sorts of stuff and then I can quickly quickly get out of hand so see that's just one little area of application there and of course know whatever organization you're a part of you can apply that to your organization and you can see that there are tendencies within an organization to become more and more secretive less and less transparency give less and less information by a government for example to its population and as soon as that starts to happen you know it's coming next something pretty evil double standards is another mechanism of the collective ego the ego loves to set up a standard for itself which is much laxer than the standards for other egos out there and that's what allows the ego to start to judge others is these double standards so judgement is the next mechanism huge mechanism if you notice collectively these groups these collective egos they love to judge every religion loves to judge every other religion every spiritual teacher loves to judge every other spiritual teacher every school of mysticism and enlightenment loves to judge and criticize all the other schools as being inferior for whatever justifications they have and it doesn't matter the mind and the ego will come up with an infinite number of justifications to justify absolutely any position the justifications of the mind and the ego or the the collective in this case is simply anything that serves its self-preservation it doesn't matter what the truth is the number one thing is self-preservation and that's where judgment is used other mechanisms include denial projection manipulation and abuse of power these are huge notice all of these in yourself no notice all the deception or I mean the manipulation the denial the projection within you and notice it all around you collectively abuse of power is not just something that applies to government's abuse of power is something that applies to you first and foremost you abuse power and it's because you abuse power because you have not purified yourself enough that collectively egos abused power as well to have a collective organization that does not abuse power is no easy thing that means that organization has to be a high consciousness organization it has to do work on itself in a sense in order to not lead to abuse of power another mechanism that's common to individual and collective egos is having base needs like Maslow's hierarchy of needs the very bottom rung of the entire hierarchy is stuff like food shelter you know just very basic stuff water or maybe sex maybe some other kind of stuff like that well guess what corporations also have basic needs governments have basic needs sports teams have basic needs churches and and cults have basic needs and you know what they're doing most of the time just like you are in your life mostly they're spending 90% of their time trying to satisfy their basic needs that's it I mean think about it what are most human beings doing most the time just struggling fighting with reality to satisfy their base needs and same thing for most corporations and most governments start to see that the reason that our governments are not better is the same reason that individual human beings and you yourself are not better because it's hard to satisfy your base needs and transcend beyond them to the higher consciousness needs that's not easy to do that requires self-actualization work lots of work lots of self-reflection lots of consciousness another mechanism is language and categories this is huge notice that all groups construct their own languages and use language as a tool to advance their own self-preservation now language is a deep topic and all shoots specific episodes on language but language allows you to create categories and allows you to set frames and to define situations you use language in order to judge people or to judge other groups and organizations you use language to manipulate you use language to deny to project you use language to frame things in favourable ways to yourself for example a corporation could be stealing from the taxpayers or a corporation could be exploiting people a corporation could be polluting the ocean but then they're gonna use language and categories through language to frame what they're doing in such a way such that it doesn't appear like they're doing anything wrong at all they're not gonna call it pollution cuz that's got a negative connotation they're gonna come up with some other word or language for it they're gonna create some other kind of category to justify it justifications happen within language also notice that every group develops its own jargon this jargon reinforces membership within that group its greats a sense of identity just by knowing the jargon you feel like you sort of belong mm-hmm-hmm because language isn't just language language comes with an implicit metaphysics and thus metaphysics shapes how the ego or the collective ego in this case looks at reality and by changing how it looks in reality that changes how effective the ego is at manipulating this reality so language is critical which is why there are PR departments in big businesses and they're masters at language using language to manipulate just like individual human beings notice how you yourself used language to manipulate you use language to manipulate your spouse your girlfriend or your boyfriend your children your parents your boss your co-workers use language to do that language allows you to lie and the lying is key for the ego because the ego fundamentally is based upon a lie the ego is a lie the ego is the lie that you drew a boundary around some corner of reality and said okay this is me this is what's important that's entirely a lie but since you're living that lie now you've got to kind of roll with it so that massive core fundamental lie necessitates further lies to maintain the lie so it's just like a snowball of lies and that's why you have so many corporations and organizations and governments lying to you of course of course of course religion lies to you of course because the whole thing is predicated upon that otherwise it would die your hairy life depends upon lying lying to others and also lying to yourself notice that corporations and organizations governments they don't just lie to you as the consumer or the citizen on the receiving end of the lie they lie to themselves they lie to their own employees and their own members the church lies to its own Cardinals and priests first and foremost only secondarily does it lie to you another mechanism is ideology and paradigm blindness every collective ego uses ideology just like almost every individual ego does ideology is huge the whole idea is to indoctrinate someone into some way of thinking such that then that ideology becomes the thing that sustains it's like the software that sustains the hardware and the whole idea is to create this bubble that's isolated from the rest of reality so it's a that's what ego is trying to construct it's trying to create this sort of isolated walled garden this bubble such that you can't see outside of it and that's what's happening with science with religion with government with political ideology with economic philosophy like it doesn't matter what it is it's it's building paradigms other mechanisms include narratives identity and a sense of history notice that every collective organization if it has any degree of success it starts to develop a narrative of itself in the same way that you have a narrative of your own life you think you were born in such a city and you went to such and such a school and such and stuff happened to you all of that is a fiction that your mind and invented but corporations and governments do the same governments spend a lot of time orchestrating and crafting engineering the history of the government how did the United States government come about who's the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and it was so idealistic and they were so brilliant and it was all based on freedom and and overcoming tyranny and you build this up you build up this identity through these narratives and then you construct this history but of course it's a very selective history it's not fair at all it's not objective at all you're cherry-picking the stuff you need to preserve and to aggrandize this structure your narrative will be the the most positive narrative that could exist that will help to maintain the structure including even a narrative of being a victim because being a victim and having that narrative for many people that's a way that they survive is by developing this victim identity and many organizations and groups develop victim identities or other kinds of identities that's just one trick there's many different narratives that you can develop for yourself and corporations what are they big on they're big on branding why do they brand because is the image it's the identity of the company and that becomes important the brand itself in a business is really the most valuable part it's the brand how well people know you and what your brand represents and that needs to be manipulated constructed in the same way that individually as an individual person you also have a sort of brand you have a reputation people think of you in a certain way do they think that you're a sheet do they think you're a murderer a rapist or do they think that you're sweet and nice and that you're you're kind you give to charity and so what do you do you play to that self image and one of my most popular and most watched and most highly rated episodes of all time is how to stop caring what other people think about you and that's because you care so much about how people think about you why do you care so much because you have this self-image and you have this identity and the whole important thing is that you got to project a good identity out into the world because if you don't project a good identity that other people accept then you're gonna get ostracized and that's gonna directly affect your ability to survive and to live your very life depends on your identity the identity that you project out into the world which is why so many people percent a false front they lie so much to construct this pleasant identity whereas deep down inside they're so screwed up and so neurotic that they're not even honest with themselves about what their true identity is because they just buy in it's just easier to buy in the projected outward identity same thing with companies companies [ __ ] themselves all the time by creating this this nice identity they'll run ads that they're they're nice to the environment they're nice to this or they're doing this all this lofty stuff but then deep down when you look at what's the company actually doing what they're doing is they're just they're really their identities just greed rampant greed and exploitation in many cases that's it for most companies that's our whole identity but I mean will they admit that to themselves of course not never they buy into the project the projected identity that they put out there for the rest of the world why wouldn't they because that's the identity that makes them succeed another mechanism is tribalism the sort of us versus them mentality defining in us defining of them and having enemies oh this is huge notice that individual people have enemies but collective egos organizations corporations governments they all have enemies to every religion has an enemy religion every spiritual teacher probably has an enemy spiritual teacher every government has an enemy government every sports team has an enemy sports team every corporation has an enemy corporation that is gonna kill them of course because when you are living as an ego in an environment with our other egos one of the biggest threats to your survival is other egos similar to yourself so in a sense the more similar someone is to you the more they can encroach on your territory and that becomes a problem and that's where this tribalism comes in another mechanism that collective egos use is rewarding loyalty and punishing disloyalty threatening to outcast you as a heretic someone who has broken their orthodoxy what is that about that's about making sure that they don't have too much dissent within the organization if some element of a complicated organization is starting to stir up a revolution what are you you kicked them out you don't let that thing metastasize and turn into a cancer and take the whole thing over that's too much of a threat to the to the homeostasis of that system you kick them out so you need to have mechanisms to isolate to find those people immediately and to demonize them to ridicule them to marginalize them and kick them out and the final mechanism I'll give you here which by no means is the end of the list but for this episode it is is refusing to self-reflect just like as an individual you don't like to self-reflect well guess what corporations governments these collective egos they hate to self-reflect to get a large company like ExxonMobil to really self reflect about the environment environmental impact the economic impact that they are having on the world their carbon footprint hmm get a religion like Islam to really self reflect about the way that it operates around the world hmm and I'm not just picking on Islam you can pick any religion it's the same same deal for are any religion or really for that matter any organization get a non-profit get the most charitable nonprofit you know whatever organization whatever charity you love get it to really self reflect good luck good luck that's heart and if you are an individual in that organization and you try to get them to self-reflect what do you thing is gonna do to you are they gonna listen are they gonna say oh how wonderful that you wrote me this memo like let's say you wrote up a memo to your CEO of their company oh let's let's self reflect it let's really think about whether we're charging people too much money and whether maybe we're exploiting our workers and maybe we should raise our our minimum wages and maybe we should not dump so much pollution into the ocean yeah good luck good luck you're gonna get fired of course you will so now let's go through some examples some concrete examples of collective ego across various domains of life so first let's look at religion Islam which I recently talked about in a separate episode is a really interesting one great example certain elements within Islam in Islam as a is a big tradition there's a lot of diversity there so we can't we have to be careful not to over generalize but small minorities some radical minorities within Islam are trying to build an Islamic caliphate that's what Isis is trying to do and they're their firm believers they've got a certain ideology now that's a small percentage of overall Islam so now there's a sort of battle going on within Islam be too the more moderates and the more radicals and different factions and all this is trying to get fought out but fundamentally what is Islam trying to do Islam whether it's radical Islam or moderate Islam doesn't really matter it's trying to grow because it's an ego an ego is not just interested in maintaining itself it's also interested in expanding itself like a cancer so if you're a moderate Muslim you still want Islam to grow you're still converting other people to Islam because you believe in it and if you're a radical Islamist well then you're really you're really serious about it and you want it to grow in a particular way you want it to grow in a particular direction your direction because you have a certain conception of it and so now there's a sort of battle going on there you see and that's all ego that's what that is and Islam needs tools to defend itself from attack from outsiders and also from insiders see there's always the threat from the outside and also in a sense from the inside in a sense most systems their greatest threat is actually not from the outside but being sabotaged from some faction from the inside which is why there's such a strong emphasis on orthodoxy and maintaining power see and so these radical Islamists what they want is they want a really pure strong strain of Islam which domineers over everybody else because what is that that's pure ego that's what ego loves to do is it love to dominate in domineer its authoritarian Bynes very nature ego is all about control control and manipulation damn the costs because the ego doesn't care about whose toes it steps on whose head it chops off or what it done it doesn't really care at least not when you have the most pure form of ego now as your ego evolves and it becomes more conscious more self-aware and the boundary between itself and others starts to dissolve then the ego gets moderated it's no longer as hostile you see the less ego you have the more likely you are to want to dominate somebody else and control them because alessi go you have the more you realize that control is an illusion there's no such thing as control you're not in control of anything you're always gonna lose ego will always lose eventually Islam will be completely gone and dead no matter how hard you try I'm sorry that's just the truth that's not just true of Islam that's true very every religion every religion will ultimately die or become so corrupted and so transmuted through evolution that it will be completely and utterly unrecognizable which is already really the case in a sense you could say that modern Catholicism modern Islam modern Judaism it's dead it's died thousands of years ago it's the opposite of what it used to be how about the example of the Catholic Church let's not just pick on Islam here don't think that uh I have a bone to pick with Islam this is this is true of every single religious institution the Catholic Church look at what it's doing it's using denial classic mechanism denial to deny the fact that it's priests have a problem with pedophilia that's how it defends itself it's completely in denial about it it tries to sweep that under the rug in the same way that you would as an individual if you found out that you were doing something nasty in your own life you would deny it of course you would in the same way that if if you're getting out of your car in a parking lot and you actually accidentally hit the the neighboring car with your door and you make a dent what are you gonna do are you gonna are you gonna and let's say nobody sees you so it's just you only you see it are you gonna be conscious enough and really compassionate enough to leave a note on the other guy's car with your phone number and let's say your credit card number so that they could get their money back no of course not if they don't see you you're just gonna sweep down on the register oh well oh it's just a little scratch oh it's just a little scratch it probably only costs um ten bucks to fix that oh it's not a big deal I don't want to inconvenience in by leaving the snowed I don't even have a pen with me oh it's okay and then you just walk away drive away exactly what the Catholic Church does and of course it also wants to expand as well that's why you've got that's why you've got missionaries all around the world converting all sorts of people under the threat of a gun destroying cultures destroying families just for the sake of promoting the Catholic Church the Catholic ideology yeah and then you got the cat the Spanish Inquisition and what's the Spanish Inquisition about it's about rooting out the corrupters of the one true ideology and so you got that and all the dirty tricks that the Catholic Church has played throughout history which pretty much every religion every Church has played throughout history we all know them well those are the exact same tricks that you play in your own life individually how about Scientology Scientology is a very egotistical religion it uses all sorts of highly manipulative tactics to control its members to brainwash its members to to extract huge sums of money from its member to the point of bankrupting them discrediting ex-members anyone who leaves Scientology is discredited they use blackmail to to pressure ex members and and all sorts of stuff to keep them silent yeah it's classic egotistical behavior and in a sense it has to do that in order because because it's afraid it's afraid of what it's afraid of dissolving what's gonna happen Scientology if it doesn't use all these methods if it actually has some heart well maybe it actually become more popular but for that to happen it would have to release its fear but the people running it are all afraid they're all claim to their egos they're not at a high level of consciousness that entire organization has a very low level of collective consciousness and therefore it's doing the dirty stuff that it does and it's because of that ironically that it's probably gonna lead to its own self-destruction because more and more people now are finding out about this bad reputation it's ruining its brand now you talk about Scientology to most people they don't want to have anything to do with it because of all the bad stories all the bad publicity right that's exactly what happens that's what happens to an individual when he's a liar a cheat a manipulator and he's domineering same thing happens eventually people find out you'd have up that reputation and then you can no longer do business and that and near that person anymore no one wants to do business with you now of course let's not just pick on religion let's pick a little bit on science as well you myself silly oh but that's all religion yeah of course religions full of collective ego yeah it's really easy to to see the collective ego and religion it's a little bit harder with science most scientists are so in denial that science has a massive collective ego how so well science is not about truth you see the way that people assume science is number one priority because it's a collective ego is self-preservation Sciences job is to maintain develop and defend the existing paradigm of science which in the 21st century now happens to be materialist reductionism science is in denial about consciousness science is in denial about psychedelics Sciences in denial about altered states of consciousness science is in denial about mystical traditions and spirituality science is denying evidence of the paranormal which clearly exists science tries to fragment reality very sneaky this notion of fragmentation is a classic egoic technique it separates reality into domains the physical science of the biological science is the this kind of science that kind of science and then of course science and academia has to be carefully isolated from spirituality from mysticism from philosophy from something else carefully everything is isolated such that when you go into a scientific conference you start talking about mysticism they kick you out they're not gonna listen about nandu I think I'll listen about parable no they're not gonna listen to you because they're gonna say even if they believe you they're gonna say well yeah maybe you're right but that belongs in the domain of religious studies right because that's the ego is fundamentally about fragmenting ality it's all about fragmentation because the thing that the ego is fundamentally resisting is the fact that everything is infinitely interconnected it's all one but the ego to maintain itself as an ego the whole point of being an ego is that you're denying that everything is one you're deny that everything is interconnected you're saying no this is most important here so fragmentation is a very handy tool and science uses it masterfully masterfully universities have mastered this science defends itself and tries to frame its narrative as its it's the one and only source of truth the one and only true method of understanding the world that's anything but true but nevertheless that narrative is still there and most scientific people believe in it even those pay me absurd in fact science will never get you to the ultimate truth but try explaining that to a dogmatic scientist the mistake is that scientists falsely assume that their science is about truth no it's not it's about self-preservation it's a collective ego and if you carefully turned inside and really study your own ego you would clearly see that it would be obvious to you that those same mechanisms are operating within science but of course most scientists they don't turn inside because again they've used fragmentation to say that well size has nothing to do with psychology science has nothing to do with my own level of consciousness léo science is objective right because you've fragmented and separated science scientific pursuits from your own emotions your own consciousness so of course that looks like it's true for you in the same way a to a religious person it looks to them that their little bubble of religion makes perfect sense of the world of course it doesn't but that doesn't matter the truth doesn't matter the ego doesn't care about truth if the ego cared about true it would allow itself to die how about the domain of politics tons of examples here especially lately really good ones you can see ego on full display right now in our politics the entire rise of the alt-right and this trumpism phenomenon and the entire phenomenon the fact that Donald Trump is even involved in politics what is that it's an ego backlash that's what that is nothing more that's what the alt-right is it's an ego backlash you can talk about economic factors and socio political and racial factors in all of this and sure yeah that's right but when you really understand non-duality you understand what ego is how it really works you just look at the whole situation for a big picture Brazil you like yeah that's just an ego backlash that's all it is it's an ego backlash against eight years of Obama and in a sense all what conservatism is is just it's it's a clinging to the past make America great again right yeah that's the ego trying to maintain itself that's what it is and the ego loves to do an ego backlash after big changes come you know you have the first black president that's a big change for many people of course many of them don't like that and I'm not saying that that's the only factor there's other factors it's not that simple but fundamentally it's an ego backlash it's an ego backlash against progressivism it's an ego backlash against all this sort of stuff that's happening you know gay rights are coming becoming legitimate and and civil riots are becoming legit there's always an ego backlash look through history every single time there's been big progress there's nigo backlash and how do you really verify that's the case study yourself study your own personal ego backlashes do a deep meditation retreat or take a deep psychedelic trip and then notice what happens the next week you have a massive ego backlash and then you're like oh yeah of course that's exactly what's happening with our nation as a whole because there's only so much progress you can take that a system take before it destabilizes too much it experiences an identity crisis that's why we have these culture wars why culture wars because it's all about an identity crisis but of course you know liberals are also guilty of plenty of ego as well the Democratic convention Democratic Party rigs the Democratic system or the Democratic primary process for example against against progressives because the Democratic Party is sort of entrenched in the sort of centralist and doesn't want to go to left-wing to progressive so it rigs against that Hillary Clinton was involved with that against Bernie Sanders for example great example of how that works so we can expect the Democratic Party to try to maintain the Democratic Party the Democratic Party is corrupted with all sorts of lobbyists and and Pro corporate interests so of course that's what they're trying to maintain they don't care about creating the best countries not about creating the best country the alt-right is not about creating the best country it's not about the truth it has nothing to do with that it's all about defending their view of the world and defending themselves their very existence is on the line same thing with the Democratic Party gerrymandering is a really good example of how the collective ego works so gerrymandering is is redrawing the districts inside of a state or county so that if it's in your favor that's precisely what the ego is about this is like the epitome of egotism is gerrymandering you redraw all the rules so they favor you and then on top of that if anybody comes and contests you're redrawing of the maps you contest they're contesting of it which is what happens in like like in Pennsylvania like they had a big good gerrymandering case there lately and the Supreme Court in that state struck down the Republican gerrymandering but the Republicans are fighting it see cuz it's not about honest he's not about having fair elections nobody cares about that how about gerrymandering that's how the ego works and of course that particular examples Republicans but Democrats also do gerrymandering so it's the problem on both sides how about the Iraq war what was that all about you could say well there were all these complicated factors to the Iraq war no it's very simple from a non-dual perspective it's just an ego backlash to 9/11 that's all it really is now you might say but Leo like bush and the neocons they had plans maybe they wanted to invade Iraq even before 9/11 and you know it's all about the military-industrial complex and all of this so how is that an ego backlash that seems like self-interest well obviously it's self-interest and that's the ego on itself but I'm saying the entire nation experienced an ego backlash after 9/11 see the way that an ego works is that when it gets attacked it reacts and oftentimes it reacts in unconscious and knee-jerk ways and that's exactly what happened after 9/11 now sure maybe Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons they had this sort of desire to go start to invade countries and maybe go back into Iraq there's some evidence that they wanted to go back into Iraq even before 9/11 9/11 was sort of just the the catalyst for that but would they have been able to do that were it not for 9/11 maybe you could make the case that maybe they could but it would've been much much harder what they did is they exploited the the sort of collective egoic consciousness which was wounded at that time and they exploited it and created a sort of us versus them enemy sort of mentality and then they went and they started to wage their war they probably would not have been able to get away with that unless 9/11 happened because otherwise the the collective system you know the Senate the the house it would not have approved the war and and people would have protested it too much but because 9/11 happened in the whole the whole country was kind of feeling wounded didn't know what to do felt angry felt afraid these very base fears base base emotions and desires and needs their very survival felt threatened now all the sudden now we can justify all sorts of lashing out in projection and and all sorts of selfish stuff and so that's what happened let's look at the domain of government the government for example outlaw psychedelics why does it do that is it because I can else are harmful and evil no of course not psychedelics if the government would allow them and if the government actually supported them and actually distributed them helped to distribute them and help to advertise them psychedelics would destroy the current government it would destroy the entire capitalist economy and capitalist system like radically decimated so of course it's not in the government's interest to promote psychedelics not only that it outlaws them and actively demonizes them lies about them just pure out lies completely unscientific we have tons of scientific studies which show all the benefits and the safety of psychedelics completely validated both empirically and theoretically and in all sorts of ways clinically and individually is all been validated or last 60 years but the government still says that these are illegal schedule 1 substances which have no no medical or clinical or scientifically proven use complete nonsense but hey the government doesn't care about the truth the ego never cares about the truth it cares about preserving itself how about the government suppressing minorities almost every government Andris the US government almost every government suppresses minorities always has pretty much always will why is that because the majority constitutes the majority of the ego and nass was trying to maintain its power so of course it's gonna suppress minorities and of course as minorities get more power the majority will start to feel threatened which is a huge factor to the this rise of the alright it's just an ego reaction that's all it is how about the expansion of federal power that's a good example especially if you're a right winger and you think that I'm ragging too much on right-wingers here well look here I'll say something in a little more towards your liking the federal government has been expanding its powerful last 30 not thirty three hundred years since the founding of this country the federal government has been expanding its power originally the United States was not supposed to have a federal government at all but you know we were kind of forced into it of is an agreement of convenience but then federal power grew more and more and more and more in states rights these days states rights even most Republicans these days don't really believe in states rights just some some [ __ ] they say when it helps them but you know and and if you're a right winger if you're conservative maybe you're a libertarian or something then you you you want to go back you want to roll that back you want to roll back the power of the federal government but the federal government is ego that's collective ego it's growing of course it's gonna grow more it's not gonna grow less it's only going to grow more because the more complicated a system gets the more the more control the more fine control it needs over itself that's what a lot of libertarians and right ringers don't really understand when you have a very sophisticated system you cannot roll back all the regulations and all the rules and just go back to simple Wild West style living it ain't gonna work it ain't gonna work can you imagine if you decided to do that for example with a biological organism if you said oh you know I don't want all these controls and all these rules and all these regulations within my body I mean after all there's a there's hundreds of trillions of cells in my body but I don't I don't really want to inconvenience them they want to be free all these cells want to be free well if all the cells in your body are gonna be free and do whatever the [ __ ] they want you'd be dead can't do that in order to have a very complicated system that functions like a well-oiled machine you need a lot of rules and regulations and limits in place it's all about limitations the opposite of freedom order is the opposite of freedom you know what true freedom is it's chaos true freedom is no ego just by the very fact that you're trying to be an ego is you are enslaving yourself so everything you're doing all all these pretenses of freedom it's it's a it's a complete circle jerk if you wanted true freedom you would surrender to death that would be true freedom but of course you don't want to do that it was never about that it was always about just defending your ideology that's all it was how about the CIA we have a new CIA director who's being nominated lately seems like she has credible accusations of being a torturer supporting torture supervising torture personally videotaping torture of the CIA doing torture to innocent people by the way in many cases and yeah destroying evidence destroying evidence of this torture why would the CIA want the torture and then destroy evidence of the torture because the CIA wants power wants control that's what ego is all about it's all about control and it's all about thinking that your control is justified it doesn't matter who you use your power control against the ego doesn't care about that so it wants to torture and then it wants to hide the fact that is torturing and all it wants to do all this secretly so when you have some whistleblower revealing the fact that some of these government programs are doing torture or secret surveillance so you have someone like and word Snowden who reveals the stuff what is he called he's called a traitor why is he a traitor because because he went against the ego self-interest what's the that's the greatest that's the greatest crime the ego the shallow the very shallow very condensed ego that that's that's the worst thing that you can do to it is you can betray it because that that is an affront to everything the ego is about the ego all is all about just pure unadulterated on self-reflective selfishness and any sort of attempt to reveal it to some light on it is going to be immediately smashed and crushed and quelled if possible which is why the US government right now is trying to kill Edward Snowden they're gonna they're gonna try to extradite him if they can and and if they do they're gonna probably try him and are they gonna give him a fair trial of course not and then if they if they convict him they're gonna they're gonna execute him under the the acts of treason of course of course he was revealing truth he was being a whistleblower and trying to make things more transparent but that doesn't matter to the ego about corporations like something let's make sure we include some of these examples exxon mobil has been hiding evidence of global warming data for over 30 years internally they did their own studies using their own scientists and concluded over 30 years ago that the the effects of all this burning of oil sort of stuff and all the activities of exxon mobil will be raising and creating contributing to global warming they themselves know about that but of course they they kept all that stuff silent and now in certain states they're actually suing suing exxon mobil like new york state i think is suing exxon mobil for this sort of fraud that they've been committing of course because it's not in exxon mobil's self-interest to reveal facts that will undermine its own business of course not in the same way when you go to a job interview are you gonna voluntarily disclose that you have some sort of deep problem or some sort of deep and competency which is gonna disqualify you from this job of course not you're gonna present this fancy resume with all this doctored up stuff everything's gonna be made good like oh yeah you have five years of experience at this company when in fact you only worked out for three years and you have oh and you worked at this company but really that was somebody else's company that you just kind of put your name on and you say that all you started that company but really it didn't so you pat up your [ __ ] resume so that's what exxon mobil is doing just same basic thing how about the tobacco companies denying all the the damage that their that their that their products did of course large denial is is a strategy number one for the ego how about have you heard in the news these patent Wars that happen between these giant corporations like Google Apple Samsung Oracle Microsoft and so on what is that about these companies are hoarding thousands of technology patents against each other and as soon as one of them doesn't have enough patents to outweigh the others then that one starts to sue it and these patents can be because they're so broadly used and billions and billions dollars at stake one of these lawsuits can cost you five ten billion dollar massive amounts of money there's so much money there so they got teams of lawyers they've got teams of hundreds thousands of lawyers these lawyers probably make millions of dollars a year fighting over these gigantic cases all these patent Wars is just like a cold war with patents with technology that's what it is and these companies are buying up smaller companies for their patents and all the sorts of stuff what is that that's just ego collective ego but I'll bet you this these fancy Harvard and Princeton and Yale lawyers who get paid a million dollars a year for fighting these cases and they were straight-a students they went to school for dozens and dozens of years they're very smart they're very intelligent you know I'm sure they're very good at what they do and they think that they're that they really understand what's going on in life but they don't even see if they're participating in this collective ego war which is really no different than to hordes of barbarians fighting with each other it's really it's no different or two to religious groups slaughtering each other in a genocide it's no different no different at all and these people are earning a good healthy profit every year from this but are they conscious of their participation in this larger dynamic no they're not because if they were they would stop doing it how about lobbying that goes on in the government our government of Mary Mueller is completely corrupt with with the legalized bribery basically that's what lobbying has turned into and of course that's what the ego loves the ego loves to bribe somebody for a favor love so you get special favors special treatment loves to rig the rules that it's sewn favor all loves that anything to destabilize the playing field that's all that the ego is about it's all about destabilizing reality to favor itself to favor its self-preservation and its expansion imagine if the cancer cells inside of your body were able to reprogram the epigenetics inside your body such that your body would actually feed the cancer cells more uh-huh make it grow even more that's exactly what's happening with this with lobbying in America and it might lead to some disastrous and results how about various kinds of philosophical and ideological movements like pick up is popular today the pick up movement the men's rights movement MOG child a mocktail movement the red pill movement what is this about this is pure [ __ ] ego that's all is pure ego it's all about control how to control and manipulate and create an ideology that makes you so blind to your own selfishness and narcissism that you start to flow your narcissism as though you're proud of it it's I mean it's pure devilry is what that is how about the new atheist movement this is exactly the same thing just collective ego what is sam harris doing what is Christopher Hitchens doing what does Bill Maher doing what does Daniel Dennett do Laurens got these new atheists they think they're so sophisticated is just another collective ego that's being built up another ideology defending itself protecting itself writing books it's not about truth is about promulgating this ideology of course all under the clever disguise of being for the truth and against the dogma and against the collective egos of the religions see how tricky the ego is it's a master of trickery it's it's a thing of beauty how how much trickery there is the ego it's it's really it's it's so it's so efficiently tricky it's tricky in so many ways the multitudes of it streakiness are are really something that only God could accomplish how about have you watched this new documentary that I mentioned on my forum All Shall mention on my blog about osho's commune in Oregon it's really interesting documentary it's available on Netflix go check it out it's pretty new but yeah they talked about how this commune developed and Osho was an enlightened master but then this commune of his develop in Oregon and and you see all the shenanigans this documentary the outline all the shenanigans all the stuff that went wrong with the Kanye and it was a complete disaster towards the very end it always survive for about four or five years but it's really interesting all the stuff that happened how it was all justified and all the details of that crazy stuff crazy stuff but what was that that was collective ego pure collective ego that's why I think collapsed even though he himself was enlightened which is why I say just because you're enlightened doesn't mean you're immune Oh shoh suffered from this stuff even though he was enlightened because even though he was individually aware of his own ego and maybe he transcended that maybe he didn't really transcend I don't know but um but then he really didn't appreciate the problems with collective ego that we're building up around him and his irresponsibility and lack of consciousness than that in that area led to some lesson some crazy crazy shenanigans how about online communities are you a part of an online community maybe a forum maybe a subreddit may be some sort of yeah any online community political or non-political video games doesn't matter what it is notice how much collective ego there is within these online communities how much people fight and debate and - flame wars about all this sorts of nonsense and they use all the tricks of the ego manipulation lying projection judgments I mean yada yada yada we've mentioned them all already so that's the list of mechanisms that's the list of examples let's take a quick intermission here you don't go anywhere and I will be right back all right let's talk now about the principles the core principles of the collective ego principle number one is that the number one priority of a group is always to defend itself not truth but the opposite of truth falsehood and the preservation of a boundary of separation fragmentation is the number one priority of every group not the truth not unconditional love not consciousness not goodness and benevolence all of that isn't antithetical to ego so pragmatism always prevails and in fact pragmatism is the chief vehicle for delusion and egotism contrary to what many scientific and rational people think they think that all well religion is so impractical it's so philosophical and lofty if we just made everything secular and highly pragmatic and materialistic and hard-nosed and just strictly empirical that that would be the most truthful way to live no not at all pragmatism is what you're talking about science is pragmatism religion is also pragmatism politics is pragmatism business is pragmatism capitalism is pragmatism it's all about pragmatism and what's pragmatism is about it's all about serving the ego that's what's pragmatic it's what's useful for the ego survival and that's all the ego really cares about now the more the ego evolves the more it starts to open up to possibilities beyond pure pragmatism which is why science and rationalism is not a solution to any of these problems more science more rationalism more materialism just leads to more pragmatism it does not get you to truth another principle of collective ego is that it's all about increasing control and leverage if you have a free market which doesn't ever really exist but let's just imagine the the libertarians ideal of free market free-market capitalism what happens every party seeks maximum control and leverage until some party's completely win out and dominate over all the others that's what happens or at least that's what happens if they all behave egotistical II forever without end now of course in reality it doesn't quite happen that way because actually the ego ends up eroding itself just like a cancer so a cancer doesn't succeed in taking over everything because if that happened reality would just be monopolized by one ego and reality is designed in such a way that seems like no one ego can get a monopoly over absolutely everything but the ego will surely try it will surely try until it is killed that's its tendency and you can count on that you can count on the ego to manipulate without any moral compunctions or any compassion to service agenda and you can count on the ego becoming blind to the collateral damage that it creates which is the source of all evil if you're concerned about evil you should be concerned about your own ego and how you contribute with your ego to the collective ego of all the groups that you are part of and that will be the ultimate solution to all the evil in the world principle number three is that the consciousness level of the members of a group basically determines the consciousness of the group so a corollary is that if you want to improve the group if your question is well Leo how do we use all these ideas to improve our groups well you want to make them more conscious and how do you make them more conscious well that's a deep topic there's a lot that can be said about that then I really don't have time to go into here but just some clues for you study how to make your self more conscious struggle and fight with your own ego and as you do that you will learn the patterns and the things that raise your own individual consciousness and you can then start to probably apply many of those techniques to group dynamics now of course you could probably expect that group dynamics will have additional factors because they're not completely identical so in fact you could have an entire science if you wanted to if universities were really open minded they could actually develop an entire subfield of just studying how to raise the consciousness of collective egos and that would be of enormous practical value and benefit to mankind is to do study a testing you do empirical testing not theories not ideologies about what you think will work but actually do empirical testing on groups of various kinds from corporations to churches to governments to see what techniques actually raises the consciousness of the group now of course raising the individual members consciousness is perhaps the most direct way for example if you took the entire country of Russia and you forced everybody in that country to practice yoga for five years that would raise the consciousness of the entire country radically like radically the country would never be the same again for the positive in that case of course the fact that you're doing at a gunpoint would be a problem in itself because that's not a conscious behavior you can't consciously really force people to do that but it's just a random example so that's something to keep in mind especially if you're a leader inside of an organization another principle of collective ego is that the group will always resist the raising of its consciousness in fact it will perceive the raising of its consciousness as the greatest threat to its existence so not only will the group not want to listen to your proposals for how to raise the consciousness of the group but it will actively attack you demonize you ostracize you and in the most drastic scenarios kill you for attempting to do this that's precisely where all evil comes from the resisting of the raising of consciousness why is that because the ego is an illusion it's based on falsehood to raise consciousness is to bring more truth more light shine more light on the shadow as you shine more light on the shadow the shadow evaporates and disappears the shadow if it wants to remain a shadow which is what's happening here is gonna lash out and attack and resist the light even though the light is the thing that could happen to it but because it's ignorant because it is the shadow because it is the devil because it is the ego it misconstrues every attempt that is made to help it which is why consciousness is very difficult to teach you can only teach consciousness to people who are on board with the program raising their consciousness and even then it's still very tricky but if a person doesn't want to listen to it no it's not going to work they're gonna lash out at you in fact a corollary principle is that you will experience ego backlash so whether you're a teacher of consciousness or whether you're trying to reform your school you're trying to reform your government you're trying to reform your sports team you're trying to reform your nonprofit organization or your religious group or whatever you will experience massive resistance and you will experience backlash you will make changes and improvements and then it will collapse and slide back down to its original homeostasis and so the process of improving an organization or a collective ego is the same as improving an individual one it's a sort of back and forth painful process it's two steps forward one step backward and sometimes it's two steps forward and three steps backward and then again you have to start all over again and that's how it works so don't get discouraged just like with yourself individually the key is persistence and also the key is not not making too much change too quickly if you introduce too much change into a government what's gonna happen they're going to throw you out that's if they're nice in many places in the world they'll kill you if you introduce too much change to a religion they'll kick you out or in many places in the world they will kill you this isn't a game this is life and death this is not a game that's what people don't understand about this I mean it is a game in a certain sense but to the ego its survival is not a game because its survival is this entire reason for being so to it seriousness is defined relative to it being able to survive so the eco will love to laugh and make jokes and all this sort of stuff as long as it's not threatened as soon as it's threatened all the jokes and all the laughing quickly stop [ __ ] gets real serious another principle of collective ego is that it is always engaged in fragmentation and splintering which is why if you study all these organizations you always see fragmentation and splintering within all collective groups so if you have a corporation and it becomes successful what's gonna happen there's gonna be splinters off that corporation people are gonna leave factions are gonna break out factions will break out and start their own companies this sort of stuff will happen if you have a religion or a you you teach mysticism what's gonna happen eventually your community is gonna split off and splinter and they're gonna become adversaries that's happens with every religion every spiritual tradition ever and it will continue to happen if you run an online forum there's gonna be a tendency for that forum to break off into factions if you run a government there's gonna be secessionist movements and so on and so forth because that's what the ego loves to do it's fighting with itself it's always fragmented it's based upon fragmentation it's sort of like I don't know if you had like a chronic liar you would expect him to lie all the time he's constantly lying you see and the more he lies the more he has to lie to maintain his lies well as the same way with ego it starts as a fragment you're fragmenting reality and then it has to keep fragmenting because that's sort of its its modus operandi can't stop it can't help itself another principle is that high consciousness groups outperform low consciousness groups in the long run because it seems that the more complicated you become as an organism you need to start to notice your own shadow your own footprint otherwise you're undercutting yourself in the foot a self-awareness and intelligence is required to be able to live without for example polluting your own environment like if you weren't fully conscious let's say you were just like an animal who lived in a cage and you would just keep booing and pooing and pooing in your cage until your entire cage filled up with poo and then you would die because you would have any space to live anymore if we just kept supplying you with food for example see the animal has to be intelligent enough to see that its own actions can lead to its own self-destruction so like in the example of cancer if the cancer was really intelligent and became self-aware it would see that oh I can't just keep multiplying endlessly cuz I'm gonna kill the host and that means I'm gonna kill myself oh that means I have to moderate and balanced my activities I have to be aware of my own reproduction rate and control that develop some sort of discipline over that such that I don't exhaust this host oh that would be a much smarter way to survive whereas if I'm just going to be a dumb cancer and I'm just gonna multiply endlessly well I'm not gonna live very long I'm gonna self-destruct low consciousness groups are defined by the following list of characteristics they tend to be materialistic aggressive violent dysfunctional neurotic at conflict with themselves tribal lacking innovation very rigid very ideological anti-democratic untruthful manipulative coercive enslaving mechanical greedy heartless abusive dogmatic thinking in the short term corrupt propagandistic power-hungry and judgmental that's useful to know and you can use that list to evaluate the level of consciousness of any group and also any individual for that matter groups have various degrees of consciousness just like individuals and it's not just about having an ego or not having an ego every single organization or group that we've been talking about here must have an ego so don't fall into the trap of thinking that ego is bad ego is all evil no ego is necessary for a thing to exist so you can't just completely get rid of ego and live in some fantasy land not for an organization now we've got enlightenment for individuals that's a whole nother can of worms I'm not going to get into that here but for organizations we're not talking about enlightenment so organizations have different degrees of ego now the question is how conscious is this ego how big of an ego is that how condensed and contracted is it if it's very very contracted and very condensed in the worst case scenarios it's going to be extremely materialistic and utilitarian to the extent of being violent and authoritarian and dictatorial and just absolutely power-hungry and it's gonna slit everybody's throats that's in the worst case scenario as it becomes more aware of its surroundings it starts to play nicer as its circle of awareness and sense of responsibility expands more and more and more it loosens its grip and need to control and it becomes less fearful less angry less power-hungry it starts to surrender these things its surrendering itself to reality the ego is getting thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner and that's what we're aiming towards so I want you to see that there's a there can be big differences between groups and what their egos are for example you can have the KKK which has a much more contracted ego than something like the civil rights movement and you can see that reflected in their thoughts in their speech and in their actions how these people behave but of course now you can break down the civil rights movement into into different components of the civil rights movement and you can see like Martin Luther King had sort of one strand of civil rights movement which was the more peaceful higher consciousness version and then someone like Malcolm X had a more egotistical version of the civil rights movement which was more aggressive more prone to violence and more similar to the KKK see but overall the civil rights movement was more conscious than the KKK and you can do these sorts of comparisons for all sorts of different corporations different governments you can see how conscious are they take for example the Chinese communist regime versus Tibet and sort of the hostile takeover of Tibet that they did when communism was was was starting to flower in China in that region in the 1950s and 60s and 70s you know they China really oppressed Tibet why is that because these Tibetan monks like the Dali Lama many of them were very peaceful and there is very spiritual and they not really interested in taking part in this materialistic hierarchical authoritarian scheme that these communists the Chinese Communists were running and that they're still running to this day and so there's there's a fundamental clash between the consciousness of the Tibetan monks and the unconsciousness of the Chinese Communist government so of course there's going to be a clash there at different levels so the the goal here is not to criticize all the different stuff collectively you see out there to say oh look look how egotistical our government is look how egotistical the Communists are look how he could take still the capitalists are and the corporations on this that would be falling into the trap of just more ego when you're doing now what are you doing you're just judging you're falling into that very same trap instead what you want to do is you want to just mindfully observe observe these egos in action in the same way that you observe your own ego in action start to draw these parallels and connections and then start to see what's really going on and why it's going on and develop compassion for it rather than judgment or anger and from that you learn and from that you're in a much more resourceful position to make changes you're really robbed of your power when you start to try to make a change as a knee-jerk reaction like what the alt-right is doing or what the what the Nazis were doing or what the you know any other any kind of group which is in an ego backlash against something that they don't like something is threatening their ego that's them playing the ego game what needs to happen he to sort of rise above it's not about taking sides it's not about saying oh yeah the civil rights was great in the con and the KKK was bad or the Chinese Communists they're evil in the Tibetan monks they're all good no the Tibetan monks also have ego as a community some of them might be enlightened okay great but as a community they still have ego and they still have a goa cabooses think that they're innocent in all this they participate and they in a sense they need to have an ego because their ego is even though it's more evolved it's still what helps them to survive they still need to have a sense of boundary everything we've been talking about here is especially important if you're a leader and if you're doing this self-actualization process then you are a leader and I hope you see yourself as one leadership is not just about being some corporate Titan or some CEO or some President of the United States or president of a company you're a leader even inside your family inside your relationships you're a leader inside your small social circle of friends you're a leader at work and what leadership is really about is raising the consciousness of the people around you the best leaders are the ones that have the most consciousness and are able to share and radiate that consciousness to others around them in a way which is productive and practical and doesn't put those people off so judging people for not being conscious wouldn't make you a very good leader a good leader would study techniques and methods for how to embody consciousness him or herself radiate that consciousness outwards in the face of all the selfishness and evil that exists in the world and have enough strength to to stand to stand through all that and to insist on the truth and to spread the truth and to help people become more conscious and that's your job as a leader that's your job inside of a family that's your job inside of your marriage that's your job with your children that's your job at work that's your job in your political party that's your job as a citizen of this nation or whatever nation you're part of or whatever committee you're sitting on and that's what we really need to transform the world is we need more conscious leaders who first master their own consciousnesses embody that but then also learn how to help other people embody that it's one thing to be able to embody it yourself that's a key step you can't over overlook that step you need that you cannot be a conscious leader just by preaching to people but not being conscious yourself the consciousness of your followers or the people around you that you influence can only rise as high as your own level of consciousness that's important to remember so that means you got to raise your own consciousness and that's for example why over the last year or two with actualised org I could have released like I've been working on a course or two that I wanted to release and you know courses for me are great because they earn me good money and so if I was purely focused on money I would be pumping out courses non-stop that makes me really good sums of money compared to just releasing free videos instead what I did is I put almost all of my focus into deepening the free videos over the last two years which you can probably notice there's been a pretty big shift and also into working on myself on my own personal consciousness that's taken up an enormous amount of time I've probably lost over a million dollars in the last two years just as an opportunity cost by choosing to work on myself rather than working on my business to maximize the profits of my business because I wanted to raise my own consciousness because I know that to lead you and to help you to become as conscious as you can be I myself need to be more conscious because I can see in the way that I interact with all these people and like everything I do I'm very conscious of the limitations of my own levels of consciousness you see and that's what you want to to start to become aware of so invest in yourself but then investing in yourself alone is not enough you also then need to teach yourself learn the techniques study the books takes the courses you know whatever do the experimentation the trial and error to learn how do you help other people raise their consciousness and then you will truly combine your own success and growth with also contributing in the right way to society and so now imagine what would happen if we taught people all over the world how to do that in every culture that's how you create real change not by demonizing and nitpicking and criticizing that doesn't work when you do that people get defensive that doesn't help them to raise their consciousness what I have for you to really bring all this home and to get the rubber to meet the road is I have a worksheet I haven't done one of these in a while this is a really good juicy in-depth worksheet it's gonna be here i opening for you and it's gonna take everything we've talked about and and apply it to your own personal life so it's a free worksheet you'll find the link down below go click it download it spend some time seriously contemplating and filling it out you'll get a lot of benefit and growth from that and the last thing I'll tell you is just what do you do with this stuff that we've talked about you just start observing it in a non-judgmental way all around you sort of like you're just a scientist just studying this phenomenon and start making the connections between what's happening collectively and what's happening within you individually and what you'll start to notice is that as you work on yourself as you start doing yoga start doing meditation start doing self inquiry you start cleaning up your diet you start becoming more mindful of how you relate to human be all the sorts of stuff starts to happen you start to put your own life together you become more conscious you're gonna start to see oh yeah it's hard to do that no wonder people aren't doing this it's hard it's emotionally difficult it's scary it's it brings up emotions and anger and frustration all this OH could that be why our government is corrupt for those exact same reasons could that be why corporations are corrupt because they're also afraid because it's also scary for them because they also have basic needs they need to satisfy because they're also addicted to things like money and power in the same ways that I am and then you develop more compassion more understanding if all these conversations were having are making you more angry and bitter about the world you're doing it completely wrong when you do this properly at first it's a bitter sting of the truth it stings because your illusions and fantasies are shattered and you learn how little you really know and you see how ignorant you really are and you see how ignorant everyone else is around you and that can be a little depressing sometimes but you also start to see that you have a lot of potential and room for growth and that starts to get you hopeful and then you start doing these practices and you grow and grow and grow and and then you see the potential and you see all the incredible potential you see just how amazing our economy could be how amazing our government can be how amazing our corporations can be how amazing your fam all these things you see all the potential and then you see that reality as we currently know it and I mean it's pretty good unless you're really living in in some in some [ __ ] as Donald Trump says it's pretty good it's pretty good 21st century society even in the [ __ ] areas of the world is still pretty good way better than what it was 2,000 years ago for example 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome 45% of the Roman population were enslaved so it's pretty good but then you start to see the potential you start to see where the human race will be in a thousand years and ten thousand years it completely blows your mind the potential is incredible then you get excited then you see that you have potential to contribute to that and in fact that's why you were born in the first place is to contribute to become conscious to become a leader to to develop a life purpose around this to customize it to to your way of wanting to interact with reality and then you build your entire life around that and you align that with your life purpose and then your self-actualization your ear your personal growth also becomes about growth of the whole community and then that inspires you and that motivates you and you've got so much motivation so many ideas that you you would need many lifetimes to actualize them all and that's where we need human beings to be that's where you need to be that's the ultimate vision of what we're doing here with actual eyes not organ we're bringing all these pieces together and one of the things we're doing is we're we're we're turning ourselves into responsible citizens one of the reasons that our governments are so dysfunctional and corrupt is because our citizenry is so ignorant and so unconscious and so poorly educated and of course that's not an accident the government doesn't educate you for very good reason our Education Department is being dismantled in the United States right now why is that because that's how the devil works the ego works to destroy or sabotage any mechanisms which might ultimately lead to its undoing so what the ego or the devil is gonna do is it's gonna go for the light source and it's gonna try to sabotage the light source because the shadow is afraid of the light so the the devil runs around with a hammer breaking all the light bulbs that's basically what's happening and that's what the that's what what the Trump administration basically is Trump is a walking narcissistic ego and all the people that he's appointing to power are just basically devils with hammers that are trying to try to break these lightbulbs now I'm not saying this to to pick on him to demonize him I'm not saying this from a position of bitterness or anger I'm just talking about a general dynamic of how ego works it's not about Trump it's not personal if you're a fan of Trump I mean I'm sure you're gonna think that I'm biased and that I'm liberal and all the sorts of stuff but no we're just talking about consciousness here these are meta dynamics way beyond any kind of political debates it's not about being a democrat or republican talking about something much much larger so there's a lot here I can I hope you can see how much juiciness there is to this topic so much detail and I'm only still showing you the ice tip of the iceberg I want you to follow up on all this and continue studying these examples start coming up with your own examples too to fill in the gaps I sort of painted this with broad strokes now fill in the fine details and all the minutiae it's gonna start to blow your mind you're gonna start to see the matrix of reality that you're in and that will be a little disconcerting at first but also very very empowering in the very end and in the very end you can transform yourself into new individual who really makes a positive difference in the world all right that's it I'm done here please click the like button for me come check out actualized org that's my website you'll find some good resources there check out the book list for reading material to educate yourself about all the possibilities and also I have books on there that talk about for example systems thinking you definitely want to study and learn systems thinking and spiral dynamics if you are gonna be doing this whole leadership thing conscious leadership and I'll be adding more of those types of books in the future as well I update my book list a couple of times a year I usually try to do it every six months with new books and those are all free for those people who have already purchased it once check out the life purpose course that's all about figuring out what your purpose in life is your high consciousness purpose aligning self-actualization personally with your career and what you're doing and finding the kind of impact that you want to have in the world and making sure that that's something that is your highest passion check out my blog I post new insights and exclusive content there and check out the forum where you can ask questions and talk to like-minded people and lastly stick around with me we have a lot more amazing topics to cover so many amazing topics one set of topics that I want to turn my attention to in the future is talking more about social dynamics how different social systems work we're going to be talking more in more depth about politics about economics about leadership and we're talking a lot more about spiral dynamics I have one episode about spiral dynamics which you should definitely watch that will really help you to understand levels of consciousness and collective enforces individual egos that's very important it's a very important model to learn but there's so much to that model that I probably want to shoot an episode in the future one episode per stage of the spiral dynamics model so I'm probably gonna shoot an episode about stage Lew stage orange stage green stage yellow and stage turquoise that's five stages those are the most important ones to talk about so we can talk about in depth what every stage is what its limitations are how to outgrow it and also in general I want to talk more about how to take spiral dynamics and apply it more practically in your everyday life for growth so I'm not sure when that's coming but I definitely am excited to do that in the future so stay tuned for that and much more you