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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about the single most important tool for sages, which is contemplation. A while back, I released an episode about becoming a sage, and how that is sort of the ultimate most advanced mission for actualized how to work and what I really want to help you to do. If you really want to take your life to the highest level possible, I suggested that you create a vision for yourself to become a sage, and I talked about what being a sage is, well, fulfilling on that vision. And on that promise. I mean, we have been with all the episodes that have been coming out. But specifically what I want to talk about is the defining characteristic of a sage. And that is his or her ability to really get a core of nature at the core of reality. And how does the sage do that? Through this process called contemplation, and specifically what I want to focus on here, because contemplation is a pretty deep topic, I want to focus on the single most important question that a sage needs to use when he's contemplating. And that question is, what is it? What is it? Do not underestimate the power of this question, this question right here. If you understand the full ramifications that it can have on your life, wow, it could completely transform the way that you live your life and the way that you understand what reality is, there's a lot more depth to it than would initially appear. So what do I mean by what is it? Well, what is color? For example? Or what is happiness? Or what is success? Or what is space? Or what is science? Or what are emotions? These are just a few examples of what I mean by this very versatile question of what is it? You replace the it with whatever object or thing that you want to inquire about? And then you get to work contemplating. Speaking of which, we should ask ourselves the question right now, what is contemplation? You see, we can apply this question to anything in life, including to contemplation itself. So if you don't know what contemplation is, you could what you could contemplate what contemplation is. And you could ask yourself, well, what is it? What is it really? What is it about? And then see what your mind comes up with your mind to come up with some interesting ideas. From the dictionary, though, we look it up in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, they say they have a couple of different ways of thinking about contemplation. I was actually very surprised when I looked this up, because the very first definition they have is, quote, to concentrate on spiritual things as a form of private devotion. Interesting, very interest. That was the first definition. But they had more they said, secondly, a state of mystical awareness. Hmm, that's very interesting. What does contemplation have to do with spirituality and mysticism? We'll get to that later in the episode. But also they have more mundane definitions, the ones that you probably think of when you think of contemplation, things like an act of considering with attention, or the act of regarding steadily, or the act of thinking deeply about something. So that would be the more prosaic understanding of contemplation. So you have this more prosaic understanding, which basically just means thinking about something steadily. And then you have the more mystical existential version of it's like getting to some sort of spiritual reality, and even like a mystical state of awareness. That's very interesting. What's the connection between these two? We'll get to that. The way that I would basically defined contemplation though, is I would say that it's openly pondering a question that you are interested in, with focus and without bias, in order to inquire into the nature of that thing, the truth of it, or the very essence of what it is. That's how I would define contemplation. How do you contemplate it's very simple, you basically sit down and relax, set aside some time and you select one question that you are Have curious about, and you have to genuinely be curious about it. Define what that question is, and then sit there and just openly ponder that thing from ground zero. And now it's very important that you do it from Ground Zero, not based on what you read in a book or what someone's told you or what you might want this thing to be. Because otherwise, you're going to go into hearsay and fantasy, hearsay and fantasy is not contemplation. And then you just maintain that focus, steadily questioning and questioning and questioning and just kind of probing into the matter, whatever it is, for at least five or 10 minutes straight without getting distracted and monkey mind or other considerations or other questions. And if you do that, you're basically contemplating that's contemplation in Nutshell. Now there's a lot more that I could say to it, I could give you a lot of different tips and advice and different components to contemplation, we can start to split hairs about what is and what isn't contemplation, how it differs from meditation, and we'll talk about some of that. But first what I want to do is I want to show you the versatility and just how much ground there is to cover with contemplation. Because it might seem like oh, well, contemplation, yeah, okay, it sounds like an interesting technique. But is there really that much stuff to contemplate? I mean, Leo, what am I going to contemplate in my life? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let me give you a long list of examples. You might be surprised by how much stuff there is. Here we go. What is society? What is life? What is color, what is sound? What is love? What is happiness? What is anger? What is desire? What is suffering? What is hatred? What are emotions? What is ignorance? What is fear? What is death? What is meditation? What is the mind? What is disagreement? What is pain? What is success? What is failure? What is the thought, what is experience? What is the number zero? What am I what is duality? What is non duality, what is truth? What is non existence, what is consciousness? What is awareness? What is God? What is reality? What is knowledge? What is logic? What is language? What is science? What is mathematics? What is culture? What is the devil? What is government? What is art? What is freewill? What is selfishness? What is Karma? What is creativity? What is evolution? What is relationship? What is sentience, what is leadership? What is power? What is goodness? What is evil? What is philosophy? What is spirituality? What is personal development? What is business? What is the subconscious mind? What is a guru? What is masculinity? What is fame? What is sex? What is birth? What is the ego? What is honesty? What is communication? What is objectivity? What is wisdom? What is rationality? What is religion? What are beliefs, what is humor? What is attraction? What is purpose, what is meaning? What is my life purpose, what is understanding? What is space? What is time? What is the past, what is the future, what is matter, what is energy, what is motivation? What is writing, what is architecture, what is entertainment? What is technology? What is the computer? What is economics? What is pickup? What is education? What is good cuisine? What is fun in a video game, what is good storytelling? What is drama, what is intimacy, what is neurosis, what is health, what is disease, what is materialism, what is another, what is history, what is the distinction, what is learning, what is war, what is dogma? What is organization, what is systems thinking, what is design, what is management? What is lying? What is the symbol, what is Psychology? What is insight? What is Depression, what is mysticism, what is an object, what is strategy, what is enlightenment? What is compassion, what is a model, what is value? What is money? What stress, what is mastery? What is illusion? What is the Zen devil? What is the problem? What is hurt? What is nothingness? What is infinity? What is paradox? What is work? What is discipline? What is freedom? What is courage? What is passion? What is skepticism? What is atheism? What is prayer? What is open mindedness? What is terrorism? What is intuition? What is beauty? What is surprise, what is information? That's a pretty long list of stuff. And that's just the beginning. You could keep going and going with that list. Literally, what I want you to get is that literally in every domain of life, at every level, whether it's your career, your family, your relationships, your personal life, or existential questions about the nature of reality, or scientific questions, philosophical questions, artistic questions, it doesn't end, you can keep asking what all this stuff is. You see, you might be surprised that you never actually sat down and really pondered any of this stuff. A lot of these questions and things are just taken as elemental, and basic and just given, we take them for granted. Like, have you ever sat down? And honestly ask yourself, like, what is science? What actually, is it? Not what did they teach you in school about science? But what actually is the process of science? Or how do you ask yourself, what is society? Like what actually is society? I mean, yeah, you're a part of society. But that doesn't mean you understand what society is, essentially, what it's about what its purpose is. Can you see how this one question, what is the what is it question? If you actually sat down and deeply contemplated each one of these hundreds of questions that I gave you with this example? With all these examples, right? Can you see how much more depth of understanding you would have about reality? Most people never ever do this. They don't live a contemplative life. Because they just assume that oh, well, we already know that stuff. So it's not worth wasting my time pondering about it very deeply. And they turn out to be very wrong in that there's something very deep that they miss. You could contemplate existential questions, you could contemplate questions for your career or your profession. Like let's say you're an artist. There's a lot of different stuff within art that you could contemplate and contemplate what color is what form is what, what your particular medium is, if you're a painter, what is painting? What is paint? What makes good art? What makes bad art, all these things you can contemplate? Why does art exist? See, how is art differ from science. And so because you can, you can ask a lot of questions. And if you're an artist, and you really want to be successful at that, you're going to need to go deeper than just learning basic painting techniques, you're going to want to understand the essence of what you're doing. Same thing, if you're a scientist, you're gonna want to question that entire process of science, and all the tools and distinctions that you make within science, you're gonna want to question all those to really get to the root of science, that's going to make a big difference in how how much depth you get out of your career. Of course, in your relationships, there's a lot of questioning you can do about relationships, the nature of relationships, in your personal life, there's a lot of questions we can do about your emotions, how you feel, to understand what each category of emotion is, and why it's there. Can you see how that might be useful? Of course, you're a philosopher, then you should be questioning stuff all the time. That's what defines philosophers as philosophers are always contemplating about the nature of stuff. So really this question of what is it? This is a philosophical question? And if you're philosophically minded, then you've probably been asking this question in one degree or another, maybe unconsciously, throughout your life. And the more you ask that question of things, the more you get to the essence of stuff. Of course, it's also possible to delude yourself with a bunch of fantasies. And we'll get to that in a bit. I'll talk about the dangers of contemplation. So, hopefully, you can see the potential here and why this is an important topic. Now, let me give you an example of how you might contemplate so first you select a question, such as in this case, let me select the question like, what is art? Okay. The second step is I need to be genuinely curious about the question I need to care about it. It's not enough just to ask it robotically. I need to really care. I need to have proper motivation behind it. So let's say I really care about art like I'm fascinated by it or I'm an artist. So pertains to my job, let's say. And then you start to ponder. And you basically just ask yourself questions. The contemplation is just you asking yourself questions about this topic over and over again. And there's about a handful of questions that can get you to contemplate from slightly different perspectives or slightly different angles. So the first question is, of course, what is it? So what is art? And then I might ask myself that, and then I just kind of like leave some room open in my mind to get the answer, my mind will just generate some answers. You know that? Well, art is like painting, that's an example of art. And then sculpture is also art. And maybe architecture is art. And maybe some sort of video mediums are also considered art, like film might be an art form. Okay, but then what is that? I mean, is it? Is Art the actual canvas that it's painted on? Is it the medium? Or is it something more ethereal? Oh, that's a good question. Let me contemplate that a little bit deeper, and see. So you just kind of keep asking and probing and going deeper and deeper and deeper into the nature of what this thing is. Another question you can ask yourself, which is, what is its true nature? What is its true nature? What is the true nature of art? Matter? No, maybe it's maybe it's like a form of expression? Maybe it's communication. But then what is communication? What is expression? I don't know. Let me contemplate that a little bit deeper and see what other kinds of answers I can come up with. So you just kind of keep, keep going that way. And you come up with examples. And then as you come up with examples, you try to find commonalities between the examples. And you try to see like, Okay, what is it trying to suss it out? Another question you can ask yourself is, how did it come into being? How did art come into being? Hmm, that's interesting. For that one, you might need to go and actually read some history books, and study the history of this thing. But you can't just rely on the history books that can serve as a sort of background knowledge, then you got to throw away the history books, you got to come back and check. Okay, how did art come into being? And really think about that? Why did it come into being? What are the elements that make it up so to speak? What allows art to exist at all? Hmm, that's very interesting. When I asked this question, I don't so much mean, like, oh, well, it came into being because some caveman painted it on a cave one day because he was bored. I don't mean that. That sort of question. Maybe you can't even answer because it happened so long ago that you don't have access to that information. But what you can answer is you can kind of just kind of probe like, you know, what are the components that allow art to exist at all? Human beings have art, for example, but pigeons? Don't. insects don't have art? So what is it about human beings that allows us to create art? Why do we care about art? But insects don't? That's some interesting stuff to ponder. Another question you can ask yourself along these lines is, what is its purpose? What is the purpose of art? Hmm, that's interesting. Is it done to to motivate people, to inspire people, maybe it's done to entertain people? Maybe it's done to communicate something important? Hmm, I have to test all those theories out against my experience of what art is. See? And maybe my initial assumptions or theories end up being wrong. When I keep pondering deeper. Another similar question is, what is it substance? So what is the substance of art? Is it a physical thing? Is that what art? Is it physical? Is it actually made of atoms and molecules? Is that what art is? Or is art a sort of like, emergent property? A higher order thing? Is Art physical? Or is it maybe conceptual and mental? In nature? Hmm, that's interesting. And then you might want to go in deeper and ponder what that is. You know, what's the difference between art like real art made by by a high quality artist, and just, let's say, a kid's crayon drawing, which we might not consider art. What's the difference mean though, isn't so. So you, you find examples like that, which tend to suss out the essence of the matter? And then you study that and you ponder it deeper and deeper and deeper. And the last question you might want to ask yourself is, what is it significance? Or why is it important? Like why do we even care about art? That's interesting. Like, what would we lose if we didn't have art? What does it contribute? Why do I care about let's say, if I'm an artist? Why is it important to me? And so these are some different angles at which you can get at this at this issue. Right. But the core question, the overall theme is you're trying to get to the bottom of what it is. So that's how you contemplate and you could sit there. And you can do that for five minutes. Or you can do it for hours, hours, and hours and hours. Now, let me talk about some of the nuances of contemplation. So first, let's make a distinction between contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, and concentration. These are all different things, although they can overlap. And there's some complexity here, which will probably leave you scratching your head for a while, until you really contemplated the nature of all these different things. And you've gotten some experience with them. So first of all, let's distinguish contemplation from meditation. This is tricky because they can overlap. But generally, when you meditate, you're trying to sit there and kind of empty your mind and you don't have any goal or objective that you're meditating towards, you're just basically relaxing your mind and freeing yourself of thoughts. And then maybe if you're doing more advanced forms of meditation, that you're actually trying to concentrate, your meditation becomes a sort of a form of concentration, where you're trying to reach a certain state, like an emotional state, or spiritual state, or a samadhi experience. Or maybe you're meditating towards enlightened something like that, or you're doing some form of yoga. So that's different than contemplation in my mind, contemplation for me is more a little bit more of an intellectual activity, you're putting your mind into it, and you're really pondering and thinking about one very specific thing. Whereas when you're meditating, you're just using some technique to kind of relax and quiet the mind. Now, what's tricky about that is that actually, when you concentrate, I mean, when you contemplate and you become really good at it, what will tend to happen is that your contemplation will actually become a sort of meditation, you're going to go into the zone with it, your concentration is going to become one pointed, and you're going to focus so much on the question that is going to be hard to then distinguish between what a contemplation is where it begins and where meditation starts. But that gives you a rough idea. Regarding self inquiry, self inquiry is basically a form of contemplation. But it's a very specific one. In self inquiry, you're specifically concerned with the question of who am I and what am I? Now you can consider that as contemplation. But will self inquiry is very specific, because you're really using that specifically to attain enlightenment. And nothing wrong with that. That's a good way to contemplate. But I want to make you aware that there's a lot more stuff that you can contemplate than merely. Who are you and what are you, as I mentioned, with all the examples above, and then there's concentration. The difference between concentration and contemplation is that when you're concentrating, you can concentrate on something that has no intellectual question behind it, so to speak, for example, you can concentrate on a candle flame. And you can build your concentration skills by concentrating on a candle flame. But you're not really asking yourself anything there. You're just sitting there and you're building your mind's concentration, focusing abilities. And that's a good thing. And I'll talk about that in the future. How to develop more of that. But contemplation is different because you're actually really curious about a question. It's more of a philosophical sort of endeavor. See? Now another nuance of contemplation is notice that there can be contemplation done on the personal level, on one extreme, and then on the existential level on the other extreme, so think of it as a spectrum. You have a bunch of these questions that I threw at you up up above already, on the one level that you can ask yourself questions personally, like, Hmm, what should I have for dinner tonight? You could contemplate that. But that's sort of a shallow question to contemplate. A more deeper question would be more towards the existential domain, such as what is life? Oh, that's a little bit more of a philosophical sort of sagely question. Okay. It's a little more closer to this end of the spectrum. And then he wants something very existential, you might ask yourself, what is existence? And that's about as existential as it gets, right? Because you're actually asking about what is everything when you ask that question? So there's a whole degree of things here. Now, don't get me wrong, though. Personal questions are still important to contemplate. Now, while something like you know what am I going to have for dinner tonight, is pretty shallow and pointless. Something like, what do I want out of my life? Now, that's a really good question to contemplate. You should spend many, many hours contemplating that question, or something like what do I want out of my relationship? What do I want out of my marriage? What is my deepest passion in life? What is my life purpose? How could I actualize my life purpose? So these I consider important personal questions, right? It's not frivolous stuff, like, what do I want to have for dinner? So, there's a lot that you can do there, a lot of a lot of deep work can go on there. But also, I want to encourage you not just to get stuck on yourself and your own personal stuff, but to go and question some larger domains of life, like what is art? What is science? What is logic? What is life? What is love? You know, these more philosophical questions, I get the sense that most people do not ponder these at all in their life. And then their life reflects that. Because if you haven't pondered these things, you don't know what they are. You see, you might think you know what art is. But even if you're successful artists, by pretty much guarantee that if you haven't spent hours and hours contemplating what art is, you don't know what it is. What you have are just beliefs and ideas that you picked up from culture. And most of those are probably wrong. You need to actually sit down and do it for yourself. It's not enough to just read books about it. See? Now another important nuance of contemplation is that you can have insights at the level of thought, or at the level of being. Now this addresses that duality that we saw in the definition from Webster's Dictionary, you can remember the first one was something about mysticism and spirituality, well, contemplation becomes spiritual and mystical. When it goes so deep. That your answers the answers you get your contemplation are not at the level of intellect and thought, but you penetrate past the intellect past the mind, you actually transcend the mind, and you get at the being level of things. You actually merge with the thing that you're contemplating. And your insight is at the level of being, it's an existential insight. Now, this is tricky. This is not easy to do. Most people have probably never experienced this depth of contemplation in their entire life. I have only experienced it once or twice, to break through the intellectual level into the being level is very rare. You need to contemplate for hundreds of hours for that to happen. This is not going to happen by accident. And it's not going to happen just by a random five or 10 minutes of contemplating here and there, you need to be extremely serious about it, which is why it's so rare. But this is why they have contemplative prayer in the spiritual traditions, and many of the yogic traditions and Advaita Vedanta, they talk about contemplation and there they use contemplation for enlightenment. That's sort of the highest levels of contemplation is when you break through towards the being level. And the being level of things is not just who and what you are, or what existence is. But other things you can break through to the being level on what another is, what love is, what God is, and so forth. So that's really a deeper topic that I'll go into more in the future, because it's not easy to do. But at first, you want to start with just the intellectual level, the intellectual level is still important to understand. A concept or an idea or a thing at the intellectual level is still valuable to you, right? So even if you're going to start contemplating something very existential, like what is reality, when you first start that inquiry, it's going to be at the level of intellect. For a long time, the first 100 hours of the first 1000 hours of contemplating that question, it's gonna be a lot of intellect, you're gonna have theories and ideas and speculations and so forth. And actually, what you need to do is you need to get past all that to the being level. But if you're contemplating something like arts, I'm not sure if you can break through to the being level of art, but just the intellectual level will be still valuable to you. Alright, so understand that there's sort of a spectrum here, depth of insight. And there's a big difference between just a little bit of intellectual understanding and then massive, massive, being level understanding and everything in between. Right, so you want to move your way that way as you're engaging in this process. Another nuance of contemplation means that don't confuse it merely with thinking. Yes, you start it by thinking. But be careful of thinking of it just as thinking. You want to also hold open the possibility that you can break through beyond thinking beyond mind to the being level. Also be careful with contemplating and just speculating or theorizing about stuff. It's very easy to sit there just like, oh, well, yeah, what is God and let me speculate about God, well, maybe God is this and maybe God has that and just theories and speculation. That will lead to delusion. That can be very dangerous and damaging. When you speculate and theorize for a long period of time, you fall into the philosophy trap, which is that you sort of become the armchair philosopher, and you come up with these very brilliant theories about how the whole world works. But all these theories, they're just stories, and you're not conscious that they're just stories. They're very self cohesive stories. But that's all they are just very elaborate stories. That is not the proper purpose of contemplation. Or contemplation, it's very important that you, you really open yourself up, you're very self honest, and you're very aware of what you're doing. And you're very aware of the thought process, you want to make sure that you don't get lost in your thoughts. That's very easy, lost in your story. See, your ego is going to distort any contemplative efforts that you make. Why is that because your ego is largely composed of your likes and dislikes, your desires, your fears, and your hatreds in life. So if you start speculating and theorizing, and coming up with stories and spinning that stuff, based on what your ego likes and dislikes, you're gonna fall into some of the classical traps that many philosophers throughout history have fallen into, right? So you're just going to be creating justifications for the ego. And that is not proper contemplation. Because there, you're not really getting the nature of the thing. You're projecting onto the thing. So you got to be very careful with how you project your preconceived notions and opinions on to the things that you're contemplating. That's extremely tricky. Very, very tricky. And you'll have to very carefully keep in mind, a lot of the traps that I have spoken about in prior episodes, especially the episodes, we're talking about epistemology, you have to really carefully take into account all those traps because your mind is the trickiest thing that exists in nature. The deepest wisdom of humanity comes from contemplation. Not from science, not from speculating, not from theorizing. But from contemplation. Very careful, very precise, very rigorous contemplation. It's not easy to do. And to get to that really deep wisdom takes many, many hours, we're talking hundreds, 1000s of hours of contemplation. Most of the spiritual and religious truths, if they are true, spiritual insights have come through contemplation. Enormous contemplative efforts were put forth by human beings to acquire that wisdom. And now wisdom is genuine. It's not something they made up. It's something that is transcendental. And you can reach that for yourself if you're really serious. But before you start to scare yourself off with the magnitude of such an endeavor, start with the small stuff. What I would suggest that your life would be enormously benefited by just some basic, careful pondering into the nature of some of the most basic stuff that you find in your life, like, contemplating what is anger? What is happiness? What is sexuality? What are relationships? What is self discipline, you know, stuff like that. That'll be very valuable for you to contemplate. It requires very strong focusing ability to contemplate to the deepest levels, and that's the thing that holds most people back. Anybody can contemplate for five or 10 minutes, that's pretty easy, although even that will be challenging for many people, because we're so distracted these days that we can't even focus for five minutes. But to be able to focus for 100 hours straight on one question, to break through to the being level is that's a very rare, rare, very rare ability that needs to be cultivated. You need to take that very seriously. And the other thing that holds people back with their from the very deep being level contemplations is that they're just not radically open minded enough. And you've heard me harping about radical open mindedness over and over and over again, in my episodes, especially the the ones we're talking about a customer ology, and enlightenment. And that's because to break through to the being level of some of these very profound truths, like what are you? What is existence? What is love? What is God to break through to these requires degrees of open mindedness that you can't, you can't even fathom how open minded you need to be. And you will not understand the importance of this until you spend years, years, literally years contemplating and failing to get to the being level of things. And then maybe you break through after five years of trial and error, and only then will you realize that oh, now I see what real radical open mindedness was required in order to open me up to that, to that degree of insight. You see your paradigms, the problem is that all your existing paradigms, really lock in your your minds imagination, is not open to receiving the highest transcendental insights. Because you already feel like you know, your paradigm already tells you what's possible, and what's not possible. Of course, most of that ends up being Baloney, it's just totally false. But you won't know that until you exit those paradigms. And so it turns into the sort of catch 22. And you won't exit those paradigms until you do a lot of very deep contemplating. Also understand that these questions that I gave you as examples, you know, like, what is art? What is science? What is God and so forth? These questions, you could literally contemplate these questions for years. And get more and more juice out of them. I sort of like squeezing a really hard lemon, you could squeeze that sucker for a long time, and there's always more juice left inside. And you can always come back for another squeeze. It's really important that you understand that there are many levels of facets of understanding even so just one of these questions, a question like what is art, you could spend years pondering that question. And looking at it from all sorts of different levels, all sorts of different facets will reveal to you as you ponder it deeper, and deeper and deeper. And as you have more life experience. And as you as you develop more concentration ability. As you meditate, as you self inquire, that will increase your ability to understand what art is, and you will go deeper and deeper and deeper with it. So don't just stop at the surface. Most people The problem is they stop at the surface of questioning. They ask themselves a question like, Oh, what is science? And I think about for five seconds, and like, oh, yeah, I kind of know what science is done. Let's move on to next one. No, no, what is science? You can, you could, you could spend an entire eight years of a doctoral program, studying what science is and still not get to the bottom of it. Right? So there's so much to contemplate there. So do not stop. Just because you feel like oh, yeah, I've contemplated this question for an hour. And it seems like I got some good answers. And that's it. No, that's not it at all. That's just the beginning. And the initial answers that you get in the first dozen or two dozen hours of contemplating a question, those are superficial answers. very superficial, and oftentimes flat out wrong. Flat out opposite of what the ultimate answers will be. So be careful about that. Another warning I'll give you is that don't just look up the answer. That is not contemplation. The point of contemplation is to derive the answer for yourself. There's something very valuable in that derivation process. You develop true understanding. You own the answers and the insights, once they come to you from that process. It's sort of like learning mathematics. It's not good enough, you're not going to learn mathematics. Just by looking up the answers in the back of your textbook. You need to actually go through the mathematical proof to understand how the mathematics works. See, so don't cheat yourself by saying, oh, yeah, what is art? Let me just go get an art book and let it tell me what art is. That's not going to work. Like that's what you've been doing your whole life. In fact. That's why people don't contemplate anymore. That's why philosophy is not considered a serious human endeavor anymore. because we have so much information available to us in the information age, that you can just go Google it and think that like, oh, yeah, I got my answer to my questions from Yahoo Answers, or from Google or from Quora, or some other stupid social network or whatever. And that's the answer. No, no, this is why people are so lost. See, is because they have stopped thinking that contemplation is important. And they have outsource this. And they think that oh, yeah, other people can just do it for me. Well, I mean, why would I need to go through the hard labor of actually doing this? That means it's hard work? Why go through all the hard work? Like Leo, can't you just give me the answers? Why don't you just shoot a video that gives me all the answers to all these questions? That wouldn't help you, you see, because your growth comes from deriving the answer. And the point of all this contemplating is not to be a smart aleck. And to say that, Oh, now I know everything. That's not the point. The point is to transform yourself. This process will transform you in unimaginable ways. It's remarkable. Your entire relationship to life will change. Every object that you contemplate your relationship, that object will change. You're gonna have genuine insights, ones that you can't just read in the book. Now you might object and say, Oh, Leo's are so hard work. Why go to all this trouble? Do I really need to go off to all this trouble? Can I just like, find YouTube videos that will explain all this stuff for me? Well, how myopic is that? You still don't understand who you that your number one problem is, life is ignorance. That's your number one problem in life is ignorance. I don't care how smart you are, you're still fucking ignorant. At the bottom of it, you're still basically ignorant. You're as ignorant as a child. You have a lot of information and knowledge which was pumped into your mind. But that does not remove the ignorance that's there. In fact, that only makes your ignorance deeper, because now you actually have stopped believing that you're ignorant. That's your number one. Problem is ignorance. From ignorance stem, all your other problems. You have depression, you have anger problems, you have relationship problems, you have career problems, you have money problems. You have meditation problems, you have problems reaching enlightenment, what is all that that's all ignorance. That's what that is. Ignorance of psychology, ignorance of yourself, ignorance of reality, ignorance of relationships, ignorance of how the world works, how it really works deep down inside, underneath the illusion. Because life I don't know if you've noticed, this is a giant, magic show. Giant magic show filled with illusions, everything you see is illusions, you're just interacting with things at the surface level, at the level of illusion. And one of the only tools you have to break through illusion is contemplation. That's what allows you to penetrate through the illusion to the to the truth behind it underneath it. What actually grounds the magic show. If you don't take this upon yourself, and you think that you'll just get the answers from books, or from other people or from your college professor or something like that. You have no idea what you're missing. And if you think you know what you'll find, and therefore, it's not worth contemplating because you think like, well, it's not worth contemplating. Because I already know the answer. I already know it's not going to be worthwhile. No, you don't. You can't know the answer to research that you haven't done yet. That's the point of research. Think of contemplation as basically a form of intellectual research, grounded in your own mental faculties rather than grounded in grabbing information from some database. And so if your life sucks, don't be surprised that it sucks. If it sucks, it's because you're not contemplating. That's why it sucks. The more you contemplate the less your life will suck. There's a direct correlation between those two. There is, of course, that assumes that you know how to contemplate properly. A lot of people think they're contemplating when they're not really contemplating. They're rearranging their prejudices. That's a famous quote from William James, one of the founders of philosophy. I'm not philosophy but psychology, early fathers of psychology, William James, he said most people, they think that they're thinking but really, they're just merely real. arranging their prejudices. That's what you're doing. A lot of philosophers do this. And that's why a lot of philosophers is life's suck. Because when you do true and proper contemplation, it actually improves your life. It has to because you're discovering truth, the more truth you discover, and the more you then want to embody that truth, and then you actually do embody it, the better your life is, the quality of your life is directly proportional to how clear you are about what the truth is, in every particular situation, and how well aligned you are with that knowledge. That's basically it. The overarching goal that I want to leave you with is to live a more contemplative lifestyle. To contemplate effectively, you'd have to change your life around, you ain't going to be contemplating effectively. If you're playing fucking the latest video games. And you're addicted to porn. And you've ever meditated a day in your life. And you eat garbage food, and you're busy working a 60 hour job, you ain't gonna be contemplating shit. With that kind of lifestyle. A contemplative lifestyle needs to be created, go see my episode called Lifestyle minimalism, where I talk about how important it is to remove the distractions from your life so that you have enough free room and time. And you're not so overwhelmed and stressed by your life circumstances that you could actually sit down and then bothered to contemplate something for five minutes, and not get distracted by something else. That should be your overarching goal, you should be building this building a contemplative lifestyle over the next year, two years, three years and so forth. What I'm going to leave you with is an assignment. This assignment will get you to see the power of contemplation. Because unless you do something like this exercise, I'm going to show you, you're not really going to grab grasp the significance of this, what I want you to do is I want you to get a wristband like this, or a rubber band, something that fits loosely around your wrist, put it on your wrist for the next week, like this. I see how it's loose, it's not tight. So I'm going to cut off circulation. So it's gonna be on the whole week, don't take it off at all, even when you're sleeping and showering. And then you're going to contemplate the following question, What is relationship? What is relationship? I want you to contemplate that for the next week, you can sit down for five or 10 minutes every day to contemplate it. But also, the point of this wristband is that whenever you catch a glimpse of this wristband, in your field of view, remember, oh, yeah, that's what I'm contemplating this question of what is relationship and then I want you to spend even just 30 seconds contemplating what a relationship is? What it really is, like really, really, really, really, what is the nature of relationship? What is its purpose? What is it substance? What is the significance? What are all different examples and kinds of relationships? Ponder that for the next week. And especially when you're interacting with people, so the best time to contemplate something a lot of times is when you're actually in the middle of it. So when you're actually relating to somebody else, like maybe you go to the store to buy some food, and you're there to catch a checkout counter. And you see your wristband, you're like, oh, yeah, relationship. I'm relating right now to the clerk who I'm talking to, to pay my bill. Or maybe you're with your children. And you remember, like, oh, yeah, I'm relating to my children. Right now. They're playing on the playground. And I'm here looking at them sitting there watching them, I'm sort of relating to them. And then think about what that is what is relationship. Because otherwise, you tend to get lost in abstract theories and intellect intellectualization. Right, do that for the next week. And then just notice, at the end of the week, just notice how different you relate to relationships, how much more you understand about relationships than you did before. And notice how different that is than just reading about it in a book. Hmm, that's a powerful assignment. So pretty easy, but it does take a little bit of work from you this week. So I recommend you do it. Because this could mean the difference between you getting on track with a contemplative lifestyle or not, which would be a huge difference in the trajectory of your life going forward. All right, that's it. I'm signing off. Post me your comments down below. Remember to click the like button for me. Please share this episode with a friend. And lastly, come check out actualized. Org right here. This is my website. I have some goodies and resources there sign up to my newsletter to stay on track with the new content that I'm going to be releasing. Check out my life purpose course check out my book list. Check out the forum to get answers to some of your questions for self actualization. But most importantly, what I want from you is to come commitment to this process, the process of growing yourself for the rest of your life. That's what I'm pitching here. That's what I'm selling, quote unquote selling. This is the most important thing you can do in your life. One of the easiest commitments you can make us just watch one of these videos every single week, if you do that for the next several years, here's what I promise you. The content I'm releasing right now is going deeper and deeper, you can probably notice if you've been onboard with me for a while, it's getting deeper, and it will continue to. And I'm going to be really focusing on releasing foundational, existential level stuff that most selfhelp folks don't talk about very much. And if you take action on the things that I will be releasing the next year or two, even only 50%, even if you only watched 50% of it and take action, only 50% of it, your life will still transform in amazing ways. Right? I hope this is clear to you. All the stuff I talked about. It's not just theory, it's got to be applied and embodied. And that's the really challenging part. And that's where you come in, you got to see the value of this, you got to put a vision together of how much this stuff can transform your life. And then that will fuel you to do the work every week. Also, if you've been noticing, I keep releasing more and more worksheets. Every single episode I tried to relate and give you practical methods assignments that you can do, because I know how easy it is to intellectualize all this stuff and move nowhere. But if you start doing little baby step assignments, that I'm giving you the worksheets and so forth, building some of the habits like meditation, self inquiry, and so forth, that I was telling you to build for years now. Your life will be unspeakably better, you will systematically weed out all the ignorance in your life. That's basically what we're doing here is we're weeding out ignorance, one layer at a time. But this signal is very deep. So it'll take a lot of work to weed it out. And don't fret about that. This is the process. I've been doing this process for like 10 years, at least, probably even earlier, back in, when I was still a teenager, I was basically doing this stuff without even consciously know knowing that I was doing this stuff. And that's really the only reason that my life is better than most people's lives. My life is objectively better than most people's lives, not by accident, not because I'm special. But because I've been contemplating and inquiring and working on myself for a long time. This is the most enjoyable thing you can do. It's a bit of a pain to start. But once you get the momentum built up a few years of doing this, you build up the momentum, it's becomes the most rewarding facet of life. And then everything else that you want all the little petty things that you want, they will either die away or you will easily get them and then you will be shooting for much bigger things that you can't even perceive right now. So make sure you sign up. Stay tuned, and I'll see you soon with more.