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[Music] in this episode I want to introduce to you a very powerful distinction which I call the content versus structure distinction so this whole episode is going to be about making it clear in your mind what the difference is between content and structure on the other hand and we're going to do this with a lot of examples so let's just jump right into it so consider a DVD disc the DVD disc itself and the format of the disc the encoding that's the structure will say and whereas the data encoded on the disc that's the content or for example consider the NFL the National Football League that's the structure and then the content includes the teams all the teams all the games that are played all the individual players all the people who work for the NFL that entire organization is structured under the NFL and the NFL sets the parameters of what the teams are gonna be who they're gonna hire how they're gonna play what the rules are gonna be how much is gonna be charged etc what the punishments are gonna be who the referees are gonna be so forth so what football can be is very much dictated by the structure of the NFL now of course you can go outside that structure but that's another story another example of structure is the English language the English language sets up elaborate structure and then the content is all the stuff that can be said or written using that language and the stuff that's said or written or even thought because you also think in the English language so even your thoughts are shaped by that structure so literally there are certain things you can't think because your language doesn't allow you to think them and conversely there are certain things you can think only because your language allows you to think them people often overlook those sides of the coin another example of structure is a TED talk you watch some of these videos on YouTube the TED videos so that's a very specific format he's got a very specific audience there's a specific length like a 20-minute segment that you have to do there's only specific topics you can talk about you can't just talk about anything you want there's a very specific audience you're targeting you're doing it in a specific setting there are certain rules you're following when you're doing that it's very tightly constrained and yet there's a lot of diversity of content within what a TED talk can be you've probably watched some on environmental issues you've watched some on politics you've watched some on psychology sociology science physics philosophy computers engineering and God knows what else so a lot of variety within that narrow structure a video game is also a structure it's an entire medium a medium basically is a structure so there are certain norms and standards in the video games there's certain things that are possible to do in a video game that aren't possible to do for example in a movie or in a book and vice versa there are sort of things that are not possible to do in a video game that you can do in a movie or in a book there are certain constraints when you start to design a video game and then of course the content is all the different games that exist within the structure of video games there can be shooter games and horror games and adventure games and online games offline games and whatever else another structure is school school has a very specific structure to it that most people have a question very much and then the content is the stuff that they teach you the individual classes you go to the teachers what time you go there and what time you leave to go back home and what you learn which books you read and what the rules are and all that that's part of the content of what a school is so people don't consider for example that the structure of a school might determine what kind of things can and can't be learned in that environment there might be certain topics that can't be taught in a school because that's the structure unless you change the structure of the school but then your school isn't really what it used to be so notice that you can make changes in content and then you can make changes in structure and a lot of what we do is we make changes in content we get wrapped up in content and we ignore the structure and so this whole episode is about helping you to make this distinction to see the structure better because structure can be challenging to see structure usually sits deep and it requires study and awareness to get at you don't get it at the surface level it's not usually at the level of appearances like for example when you're watching a football game on television you're not thinking about the structure of a television and what a television can display or can't display and you're not thinking about the structure of the NFL and all the structure of the business and the marketing and the team management and the rules that go into it you're just sitting there you're watching the the end result the sort of appearance of the content and you might be so wrapped up in one of the individual games or one of the particular teams that you get so wrapped up in that content that you forget that there's any structure whatsoever and so this this becomes a trap and a problem and a really powerful way to illustrate this for you is with the example of a dream you know the kind of dreams that you dream when you're sleeping so you've had those now all of the stuff that goes on in your dream all of that is content so you can see animals people houses trees cars various scenes you can experience emotions stuff happens in your dream all that is content almost like a video game or a movie but the structure is that it's a dream that's the structure that you're in a dream now of course as all of us have experienced you know what it's like to be stuck in a dream thinking that you're in real life only later to awaken and to realize oh that wasn't real life it wasn't just a dream what was happening in that situation you were so engrossed in the content of that dream that you were unconscious of its structure the fact that it was a dream and that's why you got tricked into it and so the only way you can break out of a dream is you can't do it by changing content within the dream no amount of buying a house within a dream or talking to people within a dream or cutting down a tree in a dream or driving a car and dream whatever you're experiencing any kind of scene in a dream that's not going to break you out of a dream to break out of a dream well either you have to break out of it or you have to realize oh wait a minute maybe this content isn't really what's going on here maybe there's a sort of a deeper higher metal level and then when your attention shifts to that then you could pop out break out of the dream and sometimes that is exactly how you break out of a dream oftentimes what happens is that some sort of crazy thing happens content-wise in the dream and it's so crazy and so outlandish and so yet like impossible or weird relative to ordinary reality that it actually disturbs your sense of reality and it shifts your attention away from the content and onto the structure so you know like if if you are driving a car and then all of a sudden you're you're lifting off the highway and you're flying through the air that such sort of a crazy outlandish thing that wouldn't happen in a normal life that that gets you to to change your attention until now focus it on the structure and then you realize like oh wait a minute this must mean I'm in a dream and then you can either loose a dream or you could just wake up so to realize that you're in a dream requires going Metta what is this notion of going Metta this is a notion I've talked about in the past but I don't think I've made it very explicit before which I want to do right now it's a notion that I personally use a lot it helps me in navigating all this stuff that I talk about this notion of going Metta this is a very handy notion that you can use for the rest of your life it's also sort of a little distinction you could make going Metta what that means is that you're you're stepping outside of the plain of the content it's almost like if you're imagine that you're in a two-dimensional drawing on a two-dimensional plane and you've been living on these two dimensions your whole life and thinking about two dimensions your whole life and then all of a sudden you realize like oh there can be a third dimension you can kind of go Metta out of the plane of whatever you were living in and I'm sort of like what you're doing in a dream you might say that in a dream you're sort of a stuck on a two-dimensional surface and then to wake up from the dream you have to realize that there's a third dimension to the surface and that takes a sort of an intuitive leap a leap of consciousness of stepping back you might say rather than being absorbed in the content it's like discovering a hidden dimension to life or to reality that you hadn't noticed before I call this going meta so for example if you're sitting there doing science your whole life going meta would be realizing that there's a sort of a meta science a science of science it's being able to observe what science is and how science works rather than actually engaging in the science same thing with like for example religion if you've been religious your whole life let's say you were raised an Orthodox Christian or Muslim or something like that or Jew and you've been practicing and you've been believing in it you've been reading books and you've been going to church and study groups and all this and you've been praying and doing all this stuff but then what can happen is that you can actually go meta and you can real like well this is just one religion there's other religions maybe my religion isn't the only one and in fact maybe it's not just that I think that I found some better religion over there it's not like I was a Christian and now I want to become a Muslim that would be just a change in content rather what happens is that you go meta so much you step so far back from all religions that you realize oh all religions are basically different flavors of the same sort of structure and I'm done I've outgrown that structure I don't want to live within that structure anymore so it's not just that I'm unhappy being a Christian and now I want to look for some better thing it's like no I'm done with that entire structure I'm done with the structure of religion and ideology and dogma and following some authority figures and then that that is like discovering a new dimension to reality there's sort of freedom that comes with that now of course just because you do that doesn't mean you're free you're not free at all so there can be structured within structure within structure content within content with encanta so realities are nested there's not just one or two dimensions that are hidden for you to discover there's a lot more there's many of them and in many different areas of life so it's quite complicated and tricky so for example here's another example that I like let's say that you're interested in buying a used car and so what you do is you go around to different car dealerships and you shop around and you're really attached to getting that one car that you really like and so you're just looking for a good car at the right price with the right features that you want that would be like being lost in the in the content and unaware of the structure whereas if you cared about the structure of buying used cars what you would do is you would go to these different car dealerships and you would study how are these cars sold what kind of car are sold and bought what kind of tactics are that used by the salesman to sell these cars what kind of prices and what kind of Rangers that they have what are the profit margins what kind of marketing strategies do they use how did they get these cars who buys these cars what are the demographics so you're studying how used cars are sold and purchased notice this is a meta activity its meta in the sense that you're you're not any longer interested in in one particular car that's not what you're looking for you're interested in the entire process of how cars are bought and sold you see how different that is so likewise with the religion for example you could live life where you are shopping for the one true religion the best one and then you could shop shop it you could buy it you could subscribe to it and then you could stick with it and practice it that would be like buying one used car or you could live your life where you're living it from a matter perspective where you're studying the structures of religion you're not being seduced by any one piece of content within religion you're studying the whole thing from a distance we might say by transcending it so that's another word for going meta is transcendence you're rising above it so to speak or you're getting underneath it whichever phrasing you want to use or another example for you with structured content and going meta is let's say you enjoy movies you go to a movie you watch it then you go to the movie next week you watch it and you're just into enjoying movies okay that's fun that's great but you're wrapped up in the content you have no idea how movies are actually made you don't even think about what movies even are you don't consider the science behind the movies you don't consider the art you don't consider the people who make them you don't consider the various rules for making movies how do you please an audience what kind of movies are why are they made wire movies a certain length what kind of film are they on how are they shot how much money is paid to the director to the cast to the actors and what kind of business and marketing goes into these movies who are these movies made for what kind of audiences see so there's a huge difference between the content of movies versus studying the the structure of how movies are made you see can you see how powerful it is to go from simply consuming content to becoming conscious and to deeply studying and understanding the structure of a thing whatever it is if you really care about movies and you're like a film buff you can find a lot of value in just going beyond just watching movies but actually critiquing them studying movies critically and even making your own movies cuz it's really only when you try to make your own movie that you start to really appreciate all that behind the scenes stuff and personally for me I've always of course I always have enjoyed watching movies most of my life I basically was raised on them but what I even enjoyed more is I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries of the movies like as much as I like Star Wars for example the classic once not the new ones that's great I enjoy even more reading the behind-the-scenes making-of or watching the documentary of how they made the original Star Wars movies like to me that's even more fascinating that's that's the more interesting story and as you do that it kind of goes meta but also notice that there's there's a cost there's sort of a benefit and a cost that comes with this the the benefit is that you learn so much more about the movie and how movies are made in general it also makes you appreciate the movie and also it allows you to kind of spot its flaws and be less naive about it if you were just watching it for entertainment but the downside is that it disillusions you it makes you kind of jaded it robs or breaks the magic and the spell of the movie so if you watch a lot of the behind the scenes of how Star Wars was made you're gonna know so much of that meta stuff all the problems they had and all the imperfections in it and how it should have been but how it couldn't be because the budget constraints and all this that you can't really watch that movie the same way anymore it sort of ruins the story and that's that's one of the one of the key features of going meta is that it it shatters the illusion shatters the illusion of a dream it shatters the illusion of how used cars are sold it shatters the illusion of how the sausage is made see most people enjoy sausage but they don't want to know how it's made well it's exactly the same thing with reality most people enjoy reality are so wrapped up in the content of reality they don't want to know how it's actually made but the downside is that when you don't know how something is actually made you're stuck with how it is you're sort of powerless to change it or to do anything about it content can be hypnotizing literally it hypnotize us when it's really good content know if it's shitty content then it doesn't hypnotize us but like for example a really good horror movie you're so wrapped up in it that two hours can fly by in what seems like minutes and it gets your emotions pumping and you're really scared and you know the jump scares get you and you're entertained and all this and maybe you're even crying or you're laughing and so it completely hypnotizes here your mind and your consciousness for those two hours see and for it tippet eyes you it you need to lose sight of the structure because if you're sitting in a horror movie and you're hyper analyzing it from a meta perspective then well while you're sitting there you're gonna be constantly telling yourself stuff like well this is just horror movie I mean I know that this isn't real the monsters not real it's just some guy in some makeup it's just some computer-generated CGI stuff and the blood isn't real and the weapons aren't real and so you know you can just keep telling yourself all this but that's gonna spoil the movie so you can't have it both ways you can't be wrapped up in it and also understand what it really is because what you're doing is you're you're subjecting yourself to an illusion here and of course if you've ever made a movie or really if you've ever made anything then you have a totally different appreciation of what that thing is compared to somebody who never made it so if you've made a movie you can't be entertained by watching your own movie because you spent so much time making that movie you know it backwards and forwards you're sick of it same thing with a video game if you make your own video game you you can't really enjoy playing it there's no surprises the illusion is gone and you're probably sitting there and thinking about all the problems and flaws with it rather than appreciating for it is where as somebody who is detached from all that process doesn't know the meta stuff they can just enjoy enjoy your game see that's the trade-off religion the content of religion can be very engrossing for the mind literally hypnotizing us and when we're so hypnotized in the content of something we can not want to break out of the illusion and talking meta about the thing that we're attached to us content revealing the structure of it this can actually threaten us this can make us fear of real afraid depressed angry you know if you come to a really religious person you tell him hey you're just you're just executing a religious dogma a script that you were programmed with since birth just like all the other religious people that's gonna make him very upset uncomfortable he's not gonna want to hear you because he doesn't want to be taken meta because he's absorbed in the illusion culture another example we get so absorbed and engrossed in a culture whatever it happens to be probably the one you grew up in the one that you liked the most that we forget that culture is just like religion there's hundreds thousands of different ones and they're all basically arbitrary and if you go meta on culture you see that the commonalities between all different cultures and you see that culture is just a a system a set of norms and standards that are being executed by groups of people there's nothing particularly special about your culture nothing extra true or better than other cultures about your culture they all have their pros and cons there's no one best culture but you can only see that when you go meta of course if you're stuck in a culture and nobody has taught you how to go mad and you haven't figured out for yourself then you truly believe that your culture is the best culture you believe European culture or Western culture is the best one or whatever you believe does it matter see every culture believes that they're the best culture don't you find that funny but see the only way you can understand that to really appreciate that point that is a meta point that I just made see most people are so entrenched in a culture that they don't understand that every culture thinks they are the best culture like people who really like European culture or Western culture or American culture they actually honestly believe that American culture is the best culture and they have a whole set of rationale and arguments that they're gonna put forth and deny the meta point that know the way you feel about your culture is the same way the Japanese people feel about their culture if they're attached to it or Chinese people fear about their culture or middle-eastern people feel about their culture and that's what nationalism is about nationalism is about getting absorbed and defending the content of a culture rather than looking at it from a meta perspective see nationalists don't like the idea of going meta on their own culture because that would shatter the illusion the identity that they've created out of their culture to maintain an identity and identity is an illusion whether it's a cultural identity or religious identity or whatever other kind which brings us to science science can also be very engrossing you can get so wrapped up doing science your whole life that you forget that you're only interfacing with reality looking at reality through a very particular lens and there's a very particular structure that goes along with science and the content of that structure can make you blind to the structure which is shaping the content so what happens with a lot of scientifically minded people and scientists is that they think that while they're exploring all of reality through science actually science is just a very narrow like keyhole that you're looking at reality from or through and so you're only seeing the content that is allowed by the filter by the polarizing filter of science but of course many scientists deny this precisely because they're wrapped up in the content and they're attached to the structure of science and they don't want to go meta on that structure they don't want to truly look at science and investigate the structures of science which shape the content that then scientists see or study so the key insight here for you is that the difference in content is far less important than a difference in structure difference in content distracts from seeing the sameness in the structure and here are some examples to illustrate this point so for example Christianity versus Islam on the surface these two to many people seem like polar opposites or very different because it seems like well the Christians believe such different things than the Muslims do and they're fighting with each other there's so many disagreements they have different prophets they have different holy books that they believe in they pray in different ways they they live in different parts of the world they have a different history a lot of different stuff there are actual metaphysical doctrines are different their moral standards and rules are different so in a certain sense you could say well these are as different as as two religions can be but if you go meta on religion itself what you see is that there's a deeper structural similarity between Christians and Muslims then each of them like to believe or admit and in a certain sense Christianity and Islam are are very very very similar they stare so many structural similarities they're sets of ideologies really and really ideology is a larger structure which encompasses both Christianity Islam and then many other things but we can we can go even further here we could say for example within Islam there's this the Sunnis and there's the Shia from a Western perspective from a Christian perspective or from a non Muslim perspective the difference between Shia and Sunni seems trivial and almost ridiculously absurd because like in the Middle East Sunnis and Shias they they will ethnically cleanse each other and they will kill each other they will go to war over each other they were slit each other's throats over the difference between Sunnis and Shiites but really the difference is so small if you go and you study historically what the difference is the disagreement is minor both of them believe in Allah both of them basically believe in Muhammad and they revere him as the main prophet so there's no real contradiction there it's really a minor discrepancy about the lineage that was passed on after Muhammad died and of course I'm not a scholar so I'm not familiar with all the technical details of that dispute but there's there's a disagreement there between the lineage of like well so who was a successor to Muhammad after his death was it was it like his uncle cuz I don't think he had any children so it was either his uncle or some other part of his extended family and so they traced the lineages in different ways and so the depending on which way you think the lineage should be traced that determines whether you're she a Shiite or or a Sunni I mean if you think about it in the grand scheme of things very minor difference they're basically like 95 percent in agreement and then there's five percent disagreement and yet they kill each other over this and so why does this happen it happens because if you are if you were raised as a Sunni or Shiite and you're very Orthodox and serious about it and you've created a whole identity out of it then you're so wrapped up in and gross and hypnotized by the content of being a Sunni or Shiite that you can't go met you don't see the Metta angle you're not able to zoom out you're not able to step above it see because you take it too seriously you're too attached to it and so this is an example of the hypnotizing power of content so really to resolve these sort of ethnic disputes in the Middle East what needs to happen is the way you solve that is not by having the Sunnis conquer the Shias or the Shias conquer the Sunnis the way that they think because when you're wrapped up in the content you think that the way to resolve a Content dispute is by having your way like the Suey's believe that hey if if we just had all the Shia's died and then all the sunnis were just reigned supreme then that would solve this problem and of course the other side believes the exact opposite so that's exactly what contributes to this conflict which is irreconcilable how do you reconcile it by going meta by realizing that the problem is not really at the content level is it the structural level rising above your content problems another example is atheism versus theism many people believe that these are polar opposites as opposite as two things can be an atheist or the theist the the atheist is very rational doesn't believe in God the theist believes in God and religious stuff but this is not true at all there is a much deeper structural similarity between the two then both would like to admit it's the same issue as with the Shia's and the Sunnis the the meta structure of what atheists and theists are doing is they're both believing atheism is a belief system theism is a belief system both atheists and theists believe that their beliefs are not just beliefs but that they're the truth both of them believe that they're right both of them believe the other side is wrong both of them believe that if my side just wins and conquers the other side that's going to be for the best of everybody else that's gonna be the truth and so the fantasy of the atheist is that one day atheism will reign supreme and theism won't exist at all and God will be removed from from all the books and never talked about again because it's so ridiculous and and the fantasy of the theist is that one day his religion and his God we'll be taught in all the schools and atheists will be long gone cast out or whatever or admit of their of their ignorance this is this is what's going on you see the deeper structural similarity here of course atheists don't like to admit that atheism is a belief they like to say that no ilio atheism isn't a belief it's a lack of belief no it's not a lack of belief atheism is a belief that there is no God and that there can't be a God and that the idea of God is ridiculous that's essentially what atheism boils down to it's not based on any actual proof or even on reason I mean atheists of course like to say that their beliefs are based on reason but hey you know what every religion and all the theists like to say that they're theism and all their religious ideas are all based on reason reason is not the exclusive province of atheists everybody champions reason towards whatever they believe so you can't adjudicate this problem based on reason or logic or facts because it's not about facts it's about belief it's about your worldview it's about your metaphysics it's about the epistemology that you're using but to understand these higher things you'd have to go meta you'd have to go above both atheism and theism and look at the commonalities between these things but of course both I see it atheists and theists don't want to admit the things that I'm saying here and they will argue vehemently with me and they will try to criticize me and poke holes and debunk me and all this sort of stuff but all of that is just the hypnotic pull of the content of your atheism or your theism see if you were willing to surrender all of that and to go meta you would learn some powerful new things about yourself about life about how your mind works how ideology works how atheism works how theism works but if you're really attached you don't want to do that you don't want to go meta you don't want your illusion spoiled because if you did go meta I promise see this you would realize that both atheism and theism are deluded that are not true both see but you can't realize that unless you're willing to let them go first which of course most people are not so they're stuck at the level of content how about another example of drugs versus psychedelics mainstream society loves to conflate these two the way that schools teach against drugs various anti-drug programs and schools the way that we were raised most of us the way our parents think and the way our governments think about drugs versus psychedelics is that they think that these are identical the same thing because they look at the surface appearance of like well what's the difference between mushrooms and LSD or heroin or a crack cocaine or something like that you smoke both of them or you ingest both of them they give you some sort of cool high they make you feel good and then it's just the it's just like a emotional state then they make you addicted and then it's just a cycle it doesn't go anywhere and it's waste money and it's a criminal activity like like this is a sort of like the conflation that's made but structurally drugs what we think of as hard drugs like heroin and cocaine and meth these are very very structurally different from psychedelics very different almost the opposite whereas a classical hard drug like heroin cocaine crack and meth these will a dick to you really hard psychedelics have the exact opposite properties they're anti addictive in fact most psychedelics have tolerance so you can't just take mushrooms today and then take more tomorrow they won't work if they wait a week some psychedelics don't have tolerance but even those that don't have tolerance still you're not gonna want to take them with psychedelics if you really do psychedelics you don't want to take a psychedelic the next time you have to take a second you're not looking forward to it you're not doing it for a high and you're doing it for very very different reasons than the reason people get addicted to meth or to heroin and of course the effects of it on your body are very very different whereas heroin and meth and cocaine these these can ruin and harm organs in your body they can damage the brain they can rewire the brain in in unhealthy waves and really they're used as an escape from real life with what psychedelics is it's the opposite they can be healing that can help you to deal with your trauma they can help you to to introspect they can help you to go meta sea they can help you to break addiction the most powerful cures to hard addiction like heroin and meth and crack is psychedelics there's no better proven scientifically proven method of addiction recovery than psychedelics so is it right that we classified both of them as drugs of course not it's it's ridiculous but for you to discover that difference you would have to go meta you would have to actually have some experience you'd have to want to change your mind about these things people don't want to they're just stuck on the content of like drugs are bad that's the content here another example is voting for politicians based on their identity or on their superficial appearance I guess or their superficial talking points sometimes two politicians can appear very similar but be structurally very different in their policies or how they're gonna run the government or even they're in their psychological cognitive or moral development or spiritual development sometimes you hold in the trap a thing like well next in cycle we need a woman to be President or we need a weed a Hispanic to be President we need a gay person to be President this is this is being stuck at the level of content you see cuz you can have a gay president who's terrible president who's very low in cognitive moral and spiritual development who will make terrible decisions that will harm many people just because he's gay doesn't doesn't mean he's gonna be a good leader same thing you could have a woman and just cuz she's a woman doesn't mean that she won't start a war doesn't mean that she won't be racist doesn't mean that she won't have some regressive policies see there's a big difference you have to you have to look beneath the surface at the structure and just because someone running for president some old white guy doesn't mean that necessarily he's gonna be the same status quo as we've had before because I mean the sort of the the conventional thinking is like well we've had we've had old white guys running the world for four centuries now now isn't it time for a woman to do it and of course there's some validity to that but you can't just look at it like that because it's so that's a very superficial way to look at it you can have a woman who's gonna be more regressive racist and violent as a leader and more incompetent than some old white guy so gender and diversity doesn't automatically solve your problem it very much depends which is not to say that these are unimportant factors if all things are equal you know it's nice to have diversity and representation all that but it can't be your only criteria otherwise you're falling into the content rather than the structure and structure is ultimately what you care about if you want to make a significant improvement in anything you have to care about the structure of it otherwise you're just shuffling content around so nothing fundamentally changes because the structure is the thing that sets the parameters of how a thing functions it's the structure of the government that is the problem if you think there's a problem with government it's not the content it's not just replacing a person here or there that's gonna change anything it's the structure and the structure is a really difficult thing to change and one of the maze the main reasons why the structure is so difficult to change is because we don't see it we don't acknowledge it it's difficult for us to collectively talk about the structure because most people are so wrapped up in the appearances they're hypnotized by appearances when all of your friends let's say you grew up in the Middle East in Iran or someplace all of your friends are wrapped up in the content of Islam so how are you gonna change structurally change that even if you managed to break free of it if you go meta how are you going to convince them to go meta when they're hypnotized by the content so you're if your whole family supports conservatives or Trump let's say how are you going to convince them to go meta on that they're attached to that conservative content that's what they like they watch Fox News they consume it they lap it up and fox news is just serving you up content exactly the kind of content that that you want if you're an unthinking uncritical person who does not want to go meta so the function of fox news is to reinforce the illusion of the solidity of that content they're that they're that they're pitching because that's what many people want and it sells it sells because most people don't wanna go meta they like the comfort of that illusion and they pay good money for others to maintain and to hypnotize them in that illusion see people actually pay money for this [ __ ] people will pay money for being in a cult people pay huge sums of money for being in a religion and having that religion the money is literally paid into the religion so that religion hypnotizes you people will pay money to science as well people of course will pay money to politicians whether you're a liberal or a conservative you'll pay so don't think I'm choosing sides here almost everybody is guilty of this to some extent or another so it's the structure that sets the parameters of how things work for example cable news cable news has a certain kind of structure it's cut up into very short segments it needs to be punchy it needs to be breaking news it needs to be shocking it needs to get eyeballs it needs to appeal to millions of people it needs to be mass market it needs to to appeal to advertisers like giant oil companies military companies aerospace companies you know pharmaceutical companies so that they could fund the large budgets of these news anchors and news shows and you know maintain that whole infrastructure that is the structure of cable news and so when you're looking at cable news what many people don't realize is that they're only they're only seeing the filtered content that comes through that TV screen they have no idea of the structure behind it and how that structure is warping distorting and biasing filtering polarizing the content that is coming through this is true not only of Fox News but of course CNN MSNBC any of the cable news shows so I'm not just peeing on Fox News here now of course Fox News is particularly egregious at this particularly shameless at it because they're the least meta like their whole business model is just feeding you exactly what your reptilian brain craves and that's that's very problematic that's basically a indoctrination machine but you know CNN MSNBC they also give you very biased perspectives on the world for example one of the biggest biases it's not a liberal conservative it's just shock value and breaking new stuff so the important in depth news that really needs to be covered that's not covered on cable news you don't get that there well you get there is you get shocking stuff somebody died somebody killed somebody somebody raped somebody somebody was involved as some sort of heinous act somebody is a cannibal and somebody is this and that like it's all this this stuff that you see mostly on the news and that can give you a very twisted biased perspective of the world cuz you know you if you watch the news every day for 365 days by the end of that period you're gonna have a very twisted and warped perspective of what goes on in the world because the news doesn't show you all the good stuff the news doesn't show you I mean sometimes they do but rarely you know they don't show you all the people who were saved and benefited all the people who had enlightenment experiences this year they don't show you about all the humanitarian aid that was done and all the dogs and animals that were saved and all the kind acts that mankind is that none of this is shown what's shown is the cannibals the rapists the murderers the the war criminals this sort of stuff you know the the scandalous politicians and the mass shooters that's what's shown because that's the structure of it but it takes a lot of experience in life before you start to realize that this is the structure of the news when you're a kid and you're just watching the news you have no idea about any of this you just consume that news and not just kids but adults too will just blindly consume that news a lot of fox viewers will just watch fox news and nothing else they never go meta they never realize there's even a possibility of going meta they have no idea that there is such a thing as structure they haven't made this distinction being content in structure that we're making here in this episode and so they really get hypnotized by the content and that shapes their whole worldview and their sense of reality literally constructs their new reality and then they think that that reality is actually what's true when it's just content see you have to peek behind the curtain to really see what's going on you can't just look at the TV screen the end result it's almost like people imagine a whole society of people who grew up watching movies thinking that everything that they watch all the movies are actually real life like they you know they spend eight seasons watching Game of Thrones or something like that or Breaking Bad and and nobody tells them in this society that this is all fake and that these are all actors they believe that these are just some TV shows that were discovered from a lost civilization let's say that they're in the future let's say and they're they just they found this and this is some lost civilization that was somehow magically filmed and I think all these people actually look like this and there were dragons and there were zombies and and all this stuff and there were all these beautiful people and all the CGI stuff that was real see you see how twisted their worldview would be so it's very important when you're watching Game of Thrones that in the back of your mind you understand that this is an illusion it's not real because if you think that Game of Thrones is real that's gonna really screw you up in life now you would think of well this is Leah this is such a ridiculous example that it would it would never happen in the real world it could not possibly happen that people confuse illusion for reality like you're describing this is an absurd example this would never happen but of course it's happening right now it's happening all over the world right now Fox News is doing it Cable News is doing it science is doing it religion is doing it politics economics is doing it there are so many ways in which this is happening the problem is that when you confuse illusion for reality when you make that critical mistake and you have no way of going meta and you're not even interested in going meta because what you think you have is reality see you don't know that you don't know the only way you could know what you're missing by not going meta is by going meta you see a fox a fox news viewer for example has no idea what they're missing by constantly only watching fox news but the only way they could know is if they went meta and they started watching other news sources questioning this stuff questioning all new sources in general questioning the worldview questioning their conservatism questioning their religious ideas and all that only if they questioned all that could they then look back and accept oh my god it literally was like I was hypnotized watching Game of Thrones thinking it was real that became my reality but I didn't know it because it seemed real that's precisely what a really good illusion is a good illusion is indistinguishable from reality people forget that when people hear the word illusion they think oh well illusion that's some fakery it's not real I know what's real and illusion is just us or some nonsense it's so easy to tell what's what's a losery but it's not because this thing that you think is real that is the illusion if you know that something is an illusion it's not really an illusion anymore it's an illusion precisely when you believe it's reality and in that case you're so satisfied thinking that you have reality right here that you don't bother to go meta you don't bother to go look at the structures you don't bother to pull back the curtain because in your mind it seems like well why should I pull back the curtain because I've already got reality by here it would be a waste of my time to pull back the curtain but you don't know if you've got reality unless you pull back the curtain is the meta point but you don't care about them at a point because you're absorbed in the content you're so satisfied with the content you're so satisfied and thinking you're right and thinking that you're righteous and that you're moral that you're stuck this is what I call paradigm lock your paradigm locked they're really hard to break out of that of course it's possible but it's hard the structure of Facebook for example sets the parameters of everything that happens on Facebook everything that happens on Facebook all the messages in the news that's shared and all that other stuff the videos it's all it's it's like pushing cheese through a cheese grater that's what structure does and then what comes out the other end is determined by what the holes are and your cheese grater or I guess maybe a better example would be a better metaphor would be play-doh through one of those play-doh machines and then that extrudes it see that's what's happening so there are certain trade-offs pros and cons it's not I'm not saying that structures are necessarily bad or good there's nothing bad or good about a structure it's all relative and there's trade-offs to each one so cable news has a certain structure with certain pros and cons Facebook has a certain structure with certain pros and cons it allows you to do some things and not other things and it also depends on who you are and what your agenda is as far as what the pros and cons are like if you're if you're a foreign country that wants to manipulate US elections Facebook is great the structure of Facebook is great for you you can use it to exploit people and propagandize to them in a convenient and affordable way and that serves your agenda so from like Russia's point of view there's no problem with Facebook it's awesome from them from that point of view from the American point of view it's bad if you care about having integrity in our elections but you know if you're a trump supporter and you think that like well Trump needs to win it all cost doesn't matter how he wins if he has to use you know Russian help through Facebook to do it no problem as long as he wins well if that's your agenda then Facebook's no problem for you either and if your agenda is that you want to reinforce your conservative worldview and you want to live in a certain bubble but of course there's liberal bubbles on Facebook too I imagine I don't personally use Facebook but but you know there's a lot of ideal bubbles on facebook Facebook helps you to preserve these ideological bubbles because their algorithm should kind of feed you more and more of the same kind of ideology by matching up keywords and so forth so in this case it's great for those who want to be stuck in content because Facebook allows marketers to basically market to you and to exploit the hypnosis that you're under with the content that you like they don't really care about what content you like they will just feed you whatever you want fed to you see they don't care about helping you to go meta another example is religion is a structure religion is a very specific structure with very specific parameters and think things work in a very specific way when you subscribe to a religion University in school is a very specific kind of structure academic philosophy academia in general but then specifically like academic philosophy is a very particular kind of structure when you do academic philosophy you have to do philosophy in a very specific kind of way you have to write your research papers in a certain way there's norms and standards you have to behave in a certain way or they'll kick you out and they won't consider you an academic philosopher anymore literally it's so bad these days that if you want to go into a university and do real philosophy the kind of stuff that we talked about here on actualised at work you can't do it they won't allow you to do this even though it's real philosophy it's high-quality philosophy you're really searching for the truth they actually won't allow you to search for the truth within academic philosophy in a university can't do it because to them the structure is more important preserving the structure is more important rather than going meta but if you go meta with an academic philosophy you'll realize that academic philosophy is very limited it's a limited structure and that it's it's not conducive to truth seeking and then you'll you'll transcend it and you'll leave it which actually something that I did because at one point I was considering becoming a philosophy professor in a university and I quickly saw that the structure of it simply was not appropriate for truth seeking which is what I really cared about I cared about truth seeking not being a professor or upholding some university structure the health care system in America for example is a structure and right now for many people it's a very dysfunctional structure for other people it's a it's a great structure if you're a doctor who benefits from it if your insurance salesman if you're a pharmaceutical salesman if you're a giant CEO of one of these companies if you're a shareholder of a company that rakes in billions of dollars from health care then for you it's a great system to great structure but then for many millions of other people it's a terrible structure people die needlessly with our with our kind of structure and this can't change once we change the structure see it's not enough to just change your doctor you have to change the whole structure because the doctors are educated and corrupted by the very system that they then work in they're corrupted long before they become doctors they're corrupted through the entire university doctor educational system through Medical School they start getting corrupted through that and they go through eight years of that or however long and then they do the residency they get corrupted by that by the time you know they're they're actually a real doctor and they have their first patients they've already gone through ten years of corruption in the system and now you know they got half a million dollars of student loans to pay off that's part of the system they're basically indentured servants they got to work that stuff off and then you know there's a there's a carrot at the end of the stick which which promises them to be rich you know they could become millionaires if they just keep at it for another ten twenty years they can become real rich and so that that benefits them in a certain way but it's also highly dysfunctional because that system isn't open to alternative medicines isn't really interested in healing patients it's just treating symptoms not really interested in root causes many people die needlessly diseases go undiagnosed and uncured it's really an atrocious system our healthcare system right now is in the dark ages literally barbaric Dark Age type stuff like using leeches on people that's the equivalent of what we're doing today really by analogy when you are gonna look back at this health care system in 21st century when people look back on it a thousand years from now they're gonna think that we're monsters today and that were barbarians and that we're so ignorant about how we how we treat human health but in anyway that's a that's a tangent so a medium is a new structure which then allows for a whole new domain of infinite content for example novels writing novels is a medium filmmaking is a medium video games in medium music is a medium the internet as a medium languages and medium science as a medium and then within each one of those you can have an infinite expression of various kinds of content the content is so bewildering that a lot of people they get stuck in this one medium this one structure and then they just are stuck in it their whole life and then just they play with the content within that medium that structure and they miss out on all the other mediums and structures that exist in life think of how much you miss out on if you just become a Christian and you only do Christian stuff but never Muslim stuff Hindu stuff Jewish stuff Buddhist stuff science stuff and many other kinds of stuff you miss out on a lot of the diversity and beauty and richness of life you artificially narrow yourself same thing with science you know you can go into science you can specialize into some sub sub sub field like you're some sort of quantum nuclear physicist and that's all you do your whole life but you miss out on so much of science but not just other sciences I mean you miss out on biology - out on chem sure you might miss out on psychology you might miss out on philosophy you might miss out on art you might miss out on engineering medicine but of course you miss out on other stuff beyond the whole academic field as well no of course people do partake in and in sort of a smorgasbord of all sorts of stuff but generally people limit themselves artificially they don't see the fullness of what reality is things can look very similar on the surface but be very different in structure one example is education versus indoctrination these can look very similar when they're being done but actually they're very very different true education or you help to guide somebody towards a process of discovery and inquiry about reality figuring stuff out for themselves having their own unique insights rather than just reading books and listening to lectures and just copying notes like a monkey in a classroom versus indoctrination when I say indoctrination you might think I'm talking about a religious school which of course is correct that's indoctrination but I'm also talking about regular secular school I don't know how it is other countries but in America for my experience and I went to some pretty good public schools probably some of the best in America and I have mmm have them to think but but also I mean it's completely an indoctrination system there's almost no independent Discovery allowed in public schools and for that reason for that matter in public universities as well you're just copying down notes like a monkey you're just reading books you're just regurgitating answers that the professor or the teacher wants you to or that the state or the government wants you you're memorizing stuff all the time just to pass tests there there's no actual investigation no inquiry no independent thinking it's indoctrination it's not really education but it looks a lot like education so we at that and we think that everything is fine but it's not in fact there are a lot of different educational structures that are possible for example there's there's there's very different teaching techniques then the traditional public school system that we have where you go into a classroom you sit down and you read a book or you solve some math problems that the teacher tells you to solve there are there's a lot of research that's been done that has been validated scientifically to be much more effective than the current system we're using now of course it could be more expensive there's stuff called like the Montessori method in Montessori schools where kids are actually allowed to pick their own topic they don't have to go to a classroom to learn chemistry or biology or American history they can pick their own topic like what are you interested are you interested in cars go learn about cars will help you to learn about cars and you can actually like do your own independent research you could play around with stuff you can solve problems and the teacher will facilitate and guide you in doing that for every child it's unique so not every child in the same room is sitting there learning about cars or about biology but they're learning about their own stuff it's a much more powerful system but of course that says that's it see that's a structural change but to implement a structural change across the entire country for 330 million people that's a huge undertaking very difficult politically financially I imagine and in many other ways you'd have to you'd have to restructure a lot of the schools sometimes even physically change how the buildings are laid out and so forth same thing for universities universities largely don't allow you to really do independent study and to see they don't even allow you to take the subjects you wanna member and I went through university most the classes that I took even though like I was in philosophy I was taking philosophy classes half the philosophy classes that I wanted to take that I was really passionate about I couldn't take them simply because they didn't fit my schedule like you could have two classes but they would conflict with each other there was one class that I would have to take because like a requirement to get a degree and then there's another class and I really was passionate about but I couldn't take the passionate one because it conflicted in the timeslot for the one that I had to take and so like the stuff that I was really passionate I couldn't learn it there I had to learn it on my own which is what I'm doing now see so this is this is all a tragedy of the structure another example of how things can look the same on the surface but actually be different in structure is for example when I talk about God so people who listen to me for the first time if it's the first video of mine you're watching and you hear me talking about God already you're gonna put me in a certain category because you have a very preconceived notion of what God is and it's very likely that you'll conflate my uses of the word God with a sort of a Orthodox Christian conception or maybe a Muslim conception of God or a Jewish conception of God whereas when I use the word God it's it's it's so radically different from the way that mainstream culture and most people talk about God most people talk about God as a belief I talk about God is a direct experience it's a very different thing and if you're scientifically minded watch out because when I talk about God you might get spooked and you might push the off button and not want to listen to me anymore and the reason that is is because you're stuck in content you're not seeing the structural difference of how the word God can be used there's huge structural differences and how that word can be used so don't be fooled by surface appearances another piece of structure that's rarely acknowledged by people is how different human psyches and minds are we assume that all human beings are just basically the same living in the same reality seeing reality in the same way having the same basic set of facts having the same kind of brains and minds this isn't true at all go check out my older episode called why people seem crazy where I go into a lot of depth about this topic I won't retread that ground here but suffice to say that actually structurally people have very different genetics biology brain types personality types their brains process information in different ways process language in different ways process chemicals in different ways psychedelics for example affect people very differently based on their genetics biology chemistry and so forth and people just have very different psyches there are some people who can add up large numbers instantly in their mind there are people like that you you couldn't even do it on a calculator they can add it up in their mind how do they do it because their their psyche in their brain in their mind or just structured very differently there are people who have perfect memory that can recall phone numbers that they learned 20 years ago they can recall them today how is that possible they're just different very structurally different psyches and minds you can't just assume they're all the same things can also look very different on the surface but have the same structure underneath we've talked about this a little bit already with the Shiite and Sunni example but for example Christianity versus Hinduism these look like two very different religions but actually they share a lot of the same structure sometimes scientists and atheists will will use the discrepancy between different religions as an argument against religion and God they'll say like well Leo how can we take religion seriously if every religion believes something so different and they're all hundred taking each other well it seems that way on the surface because you haven't actually studied deeply what religion is and what religions were talking about but if you actually deeply study Christianity Hinduism Buddhism Islam mmm Jainism Judaism if you really study the text very very deeply and you think about them at a structural level what you'll see is that there's enormous commonality and fact this will actually go from being evidence against God to evidence for God because you'll wonder how is it possible that human beings on every continent in every era for the last hundred thousand years all across history and all around the whole globe every single culture there's not been a single culture which has not been spiritual and has not had beliefs in God and supernatural deities and various mystical ideas how is it possible so if your theory is that well it's just all some mind virus some indoctrination [ __ ] some some wishful fantasy some you know some clever a bit of wishful thinking like you don't appreciate the depth of the problem of explaining this so could that be a clue that there's actually some deep truth there that you're missing maybe but for you to realize that you would have to look at the structure very deeply and not get stuck on the content differences again we come to the example of science versus religion as as an instance or example of how things can look very different on the surface but actually have the same structure because for example both science and religion one commonality they have is they both rely on Authority very heavily science cannot exist without Authority and religion cannot exist without Authority the whole point of these institutions is that you are appealing to an authority figure to tell you what is true in both cases and many scientifically minded people are in denial about this they don't like to admit the commonality of authority to see they like to criticize and religious people for blindly believing in the Pope or some Bible or something but then what do you do when you're reading a science textbook you're blindly believing in a science textbook basically have you done any biology no of course not you're just believing your biology textbook that's what you're doing there so now of course there are structural differences don't get me wrong between science and religion but there's also a lot of structural similarity as well another example of how things can look very different on the surface but actually have the same structure is survival as a poor person versus survival as a wealthy person so if you're a poor person you think like you're really struggling in life to just barely make ends meet you're working to make my minimum wage job you're not getting enough money you can sometimes not afford to pay for your bills and you don't eat the right food you want life is difficult for you you're you're worrying about the stuff that you buy you're worried about your money all this and you imagine that well if I just become rich then all these problems will go away all my money problems will go away I won't have to worry about money anymore it'll be so nice I'll be so happy but it's not true because structurally survival is survival regardless of whether you're poor or you're rich rich people have to survive as well they're just engaged in survival at a higher level and a lot of times you know have you heard this of course you have where they say oh that's a first world problem right so sometimes you know maybe somebody watching Americans talking about their problems if you're watching Americans talking about the problems from some third-world underdeveloped country in Africa maybe or in India or some place you know where the economic growth is very very low you might say oh well these Americans are what are they bitching and moaning about they got such a great country they got so much freedom and they make so much money and they got well you know they're complaining about health care but you know their health care is still great relative to India or to Pakistan or someplace and you know they're complaining about racism but the racism in America is is is insignificant compared to the racism the Middle East or in mmm I don't know some other underdeveloped part of the world so but what you don't understand is that when your country if right now you're living in third-world country if right now you're judging the problems in America as first world problems well when you become a first world country you will also have those same problems you've to understand you're not gonna be above these problems so the problems with luxury that rich people have you're gonna have the same problems when you become rich that's what the poor person doesn't understand so survival for a rich person rich person has to worry about money except now the money he's worried about is not the money that he needs to pay his electric bill or to buy some groceries for his baby or whatever or to feed his dog now he's worried about how do i buy that yacht how do I pay my golf membership you know golf golf Country Club can cost two hundred thousand dollars a year you know I need that membership as a rich person because my survival depends on now you might think oh well leo but a golf membership for two hundreds of uses so extravagant has nothing to do with survival this is this is silly it's only silly from your point of view as a poor person if you were rich it would not be silly to you it would be a matter of life and death because for a rich person to maintain his rich status he has to hang around with other rich friends so being rich a lot of what being rich is about is the cultivating wealthy friends and creating a sort of a social network that you use to manipulate and to extract wealth out of society you do that by increasing your fame your status your political connections and you do that through yes things like being on a golf course on a Sunday playing golf but while you're playing golf you're not just playing golf you see you're maintaining your entire way of life because on that golf course you're hobnobbing with your friends you're building deeper social connections you're using those to create new partnerships new business opportunities new business ventures then those are used to exploit the poor people you see how it works so yes very much you're gonna need to buy that golf membership very much you're gonna need to drive of course if you buy a golf membership for $200,000 you know you can't show up in your Toyota Corolla you're a Country Club you need something fancier you need at least a Mercedes you need at least a BMW but maybe even something better maybe you need a Bentley or maybe you need a Maserati you know to one-up your friends because when you drive in there with a Maserati people think all your successful I want to do business with that guy when you're driving there with your Toyota Corolla they think who is this schmuck driving in here I'm not gonna do business with him see and then of course you need a yacht because you know once the golf course gets worn out or maybe it's too cold outside to play or it's too hot you got to take your friends on some yacht in the ocean and entertain them wine and dine them out there and then get your business deal get your political connection and all that which is going to help you to land some government contract which is going to help you to earn millions of dollars feeds that whole cycle see survival this is survival so structurally survival is survival no matter if you're rich if you're poor if you're black if you're white if you're a dog if you're a human if you're an alien you're engaged in survival if you're a physical being at least so that's a very deep structure that might be worth studying but see the problem is that most people are so absorbed in survival you're either absorbed in survival as a poor person or as a rich person and you're oblivious to anything else you're hypnotized by the content of your survival and as a poor person you're so hypnotized by it that you hate the rich people as a rich person you're so hypnotized by it that you look down on the poor people and you have a whole ideology about how although the poor people don't work hard enough they don't really deserve it I earned my wealth I deserve all this but the poor people don't because they're because they're lazy bums they didn't work as hard as me so forth right you're stuck in the content you're not seeing the structure for examples as a rich person you're not seeing how structurally unfair and absolutely rigged the economic system is in America for example but in most other countries as well it doesn't matter to you because you're not interested in going Metta you're not interested in fairness you're not interested in truth you're not interested in love you're not interested in goodness or not interested in consciousness you're not interested in understanding anything you're not interested in you're only interested in survival another example I have for you is Nintendo games I've I've studied the structure of video games for most of my life cuz I I want to be a game designer and I I was a professional game designer for a short while so I studied a lot I still sometimes you know will read an article here or there about the structure of a game or watch some video about breaking down the structure game to be interesting and recently actually not that long ago maybe a few years ago there's this this one article I read about Nintendo Nintendo is like probably I would say it's like the most successful single game company it's amazing how successful they are N and a lot of their success has to do with the structure of how they maintain their company and how they make the games they're really good at the design of their games better and more consistent in almost any other game company it's quite amazing and they have a long track record of like 50 years doing this it's it's quite remarkable considering how many game studios go corrupt and they make terrible games after they get bought up by some other students so forth anyways so I was reading this article and like the reporter was complaining to one of the Nintendo designers or bosses he was saying well you guys make the same games over and over and over again it's all Mario games all the damn time like you're making Mario games in 1970s and you're still making them today so what gives and I was kind of empathetic with that point of view and I'm like yeah I said I was critical of Nintendo in that same fashion I was thinking to myself yeah what like you got to change it up like enough of these Mario games make something [ __ ] new and then this this is what shocked me is that the the design the Nintendo guy he said but we don't make the same games we make different games every time the Mario brand is just a rapper every single Mario game is a totally different game has totally different structure totally different design mechanics totally different gameplay we just put a Mario wrapper on it so that people play it because people know Mario is just a branding thing because of course people are are so wrapped up in the content that they're just gonna go out and bar by any random Mario game they don't really bother to look at the structure of a game before they buy it cuz people are naive they're not very structurally minded see and it just so happens luckily for them that Nintendo generally delivers a pretty good game regardless and so yeah there's so many different Mario games structurally different like there's Mario soccer games tennis games racing games platforming games but even the platforming games are all different there's so many different mechanics within them and so it when I when I heard this and when I realize that I'm like oh yeah I've been making this mistake and I was a designer at this point so I had a sophisticated design understanding of videogames but even I sort of got swept up and hypnotized by the content of Mario rather than really looking at how different the structure is between different Mario games now of course don't get me wrong a lot of Nintendo's games are literally rehashes of the past so I'll structurally of course they do pump out a lot of similar Mario games but also there's there's quite a lot of diversity there as well so to me that that's a perfect little encapsulation of the difference between content and structure and how it's easy to confuse the two and misunderstand things success is often deeply structural big companies like Microsoft Google Facebook Amazon Netflix what do they all have in common they're not just successful because they work hard they're successful because of the structure they found the right structure structurally they're monopolies and that's basically what every giant corporation tries to be and do because that is how you become massively powerful and successful as a company that is how you ensure your survival you need to win the game structurally not at the level of content it's not because Microsoft produces the best operating system that is so successful it's not because Google does everything the best that they're so successful it's not that Facebook is the best that they are so successful it's because of the structure they have the best structure to make sure that they dominate everybody else and squeeze out all possible competition that's why they're so successful and then that gives them the funding and resources they need to then do a lot of research and invest a lot in themselves and then they can they can do some really good stuff they can be the best at certain things but really a lot of is just structural a lot of what wealth and power is and fame is highly highly structural and this is something that a lot of wealthy people are in denial about they don't want to admit that their wealth power and fame is highly structural and so when they make the argument that oh well others can just pull themself up by their bootstraps just work hard and you'll become a millionaire or a billionaire - no no no no no no you can't become a millionaire or a billionaire without betting benefiting from the right structure and the structure of course is such that it's not a it's not a universally sustainable structure see there can't be 300 million millionaires or billionaires in America to have millionaires and billionaires the system has to be designed as a hierarchy as a pyramid see my episode called escaping wage slavery where I talk about this a bit in depth it has to be structured as a pyramid scheme that's the only way you can have millionaires and billionaires in a society and this is what the millionaires and billionaires do not want to admit because then their whole identity and their whole sense of self-made Nastase myth of being the self-made millionaire billionaire this would be shattered they would feel so guilty and bad for how they acquired their wealth that they would have an existential crisis and a mental breakdown and they certainly couldn't continue doing it to continue doing it and getting more millions and more billions you need an ideology which makes you oblivious to the deep inequities and this hierarchical arrangement of the economy and how corporations work its structural millions and million heirs and billionaires are that way structurally now I'm not saying you can't exploit this structure or that you can't build on top of this structure or that you can't you know rise from being poor to being a billionaire you can but the way you'll do it is by exploiting and using this structure it's a highly unfair structure it causes a lot of suffering so you're gonna have to come up with an ideology or a method for being unconscious to the suffering that you cause while you climb this hierarchy because of course by climbing it you also need to then maintain it it's not enough that you climb it you have to then once you're on top you have to maintain it because the tendency is for this hierarchy to collapse but you have to keep propping it up all the time with political donations and ads ideologies books that are written think tanks that are paid for all this has to be it's a it's an active process maintaining this structure otherwise it would collapse and it's constantly collapsing on its own anyways but uh it's sort of like maintaining a tyranny you have to have to you have to really do it by force cuz it's not it's not all that natural and most people aren't all that happy about it but see if you're gonna be maintaining the structure you need an ideology that's gonna make you feel good about yourself while you maintain it so you're gonna have a sort of mythology about how you're a self-made millionaire or billionaire how you deserve it all and how you're the smartest you're the best and all this in there you go and again why does this happen because you're so hypnotized by the content of being successful of being wealthy of being famous of being powerful your stipend ties by it that you don't want to go meta by not going meta of course by being stuck in the solution you caused yourself a lot of suffering and you cause those around you a lot of suffering if you want to be a powerful creator become good at understanding and solving structural problems if you want to be good at business or art become good understanding structural issues the ability to step back from the contents of consciousness is a superpower that you want to develop this ability to go meta this is a superpower and right now you're very poor at it so if you want to really change your life become good at this ability consciousness which is what you use to go meta allows you to step outside of content allows you to see big structural met apat urns and to detach yourself from content this is what allows you to transcend of course what counts as content versus structure this is a relative matter there's nothing absolute about it there's no firm lines saying that this thing here is content and nothing there is structure it all depends there are nested orders of content and structure for example we might say that ideology is a structure the content of which one content of which is religion is one kind of ideology but then religion is also a structure for a specific type of religion which is the content which would be Christianity within Christianity we could say well Christianity its content but it's also a structure because within Christianity we can have the content of prayer it's a specific method within Christianity we might say and then within prayer prayer is a structure certain kind of method and then within that prayer we can have the content of the prayer what are you praying for there's a lot of fun things you could pray for within the structure of a prayer you could pray for health for wealth for whatever for evil on your enemies to forgot to smite your enemies so forth see so it all depends on kind of how you're looking at it and all of that that I just said ideology religion Christianity prayer the content of prayer all of that is happening within the larger structure of mind all of that is mind the most meta structure of all is consciousness everything ultimately is content within consciousness there is nothing which is not content within consciousness this includes religion science language logic reason physical reality the Sun the earth the moon human history sexuality relationships because of social activities video games movies all of it is happening within consciousness it's all content so with that being said understanding the structure of mind and consciousness is the master key that resolves and unlocks all of life so if you really want to master life and you want to have control over life and not just be a slave to life then what you need is you need to study the structures of consciousness you need to go betta on all of life you need to sort of you need a making-of or a behind-the-scenes documentary about consciousness because all of life is content within consciousness if you don't understand consciousness you can't understand life and you will be a slave to the various content types that are subtypes within consciousness and conversely without understanding these structures of mind consciousness you will forever be lost in an infinite sea of content like a leaf blowing in the wind to and fro left and right north and south bewildered by the whole thing and always puzzled and suffering because you're at the whims of the winds this way and then you're at the whims of the wind that way you're at the whims of the structure the structure is controlling you and you're not able to accomplish the things you want to accomplish and do the things you do because you haven't gone meta enough you're trapped in the content so let's go through a list of some more examples to illustrate the difference in content and structure so we've already talked a lot about the different religions basically different content but same structure science versus religion there's a lot of ways in which these are structurally the same both rely on Authority a lot both rely on belief systems a lot there are differences for example science does tend to be more open to evolving and changing itself it does tend to be more empirical and more interested in running experiments whereas religion is less interested in that so there's there's some differences there but not as much as many scientists like to believe with liberals versus conservatives here it's sort of the opposite problem the general prevailing notion when it comes to liberals versus conservatives is that they're basically just two sides of the same coin and that they're just equal and polar opposite and that there's no structural difference really between them it's just a difference of content it's like do you want good control or don't you are you for climate change or are you against it are you for immigration against immigration and and so on and it's treated often as though like wow you just kind of pick one or the other and whichever one you pick it's just difference in content but actually there's a serious difference in structure the psyche and mind of a liberal is different than the psyche and mind of a conservative and I've said this again I guess not popular say I've talked about this in Maya conscious politics series four part series go check it out but what people aren't denial about is that the liberal psyche is more cognitively and spiritually morally developed than the conservative one and this seems very counterintuitive is it's a controversial point because of course conservatives don't wanna admit it it also goes to liberals heads cuz liberals then to think that we're the best and that we can't do any wrong well that's not true either there's still plenty of delusion in you don't get me wrong but uh but relatively speaking remember it's all relative relatively speaking on average your average liberal is more cognitively morally and spiritually developed and I'll also add sexually developed more sexually developed to then a conservative not by a whole lot so I'm not saying it's a massive you know difference but by a significant amount which affects how how these different content policy differences are you know separated out how the two sides kind of sort themselves I'll have a whole separate video about that I want to do a video in the future about the difference between liberals and conservatives we're all go into a lot of depth and I'll all justify right now I'm not really citing a lot of evidence I'm just giving you this as a sort of fact but in that in that episode in the future I will present a serious case for why this is true and it's not just my own personal political bias it's not just because I happen to be a liberal there are metal reasons there are structural reasons for why liberals are more developed than conservatives again it doesn't mean that liberals are morally superior in the sense that they're they're good they're the good guys no no no I'm not looking at it from that simplistic perspective there are some very deep factors involved it has to do with with consciousness ultimately so we'll talk about that in future the next example is cults cults have there's a lot of different kind of cults difference in content of course what the cult indoctrinate see you with can be very different some cults believe in aliens some cults believe in the devil some cults believe in God some you know some are Christian cult some are Mormon cults some are whatever Buddhist cults I don't know but they have a lot of structure in common oh why it's a shocking amount of structure between cults in fact I have a whole series two part series called psychology go check that out if you want to understand the structure of cults once you understand from those two episodes the structure of cults you will never be able to be fooled by a cult ever again because what that two-part series does is it takes you so mad on cults that actually not only will will you be suspicious of cults and be sort of immune to cults but you're you're also gonna start to even go so mad at that you even go beyond cults and and now you're gonna start to escape and transcend culture by realizing that mainstream culture is the biggest cult that there is and in part two of that series I explained a lot of the common structures between the classical virulent dangerous cults that we usually think of and mainstream society how mainstream society works see and you can only understand that by going meta not only from the perspective of different types of cults you also have to go meta on culture itself on society it's mainstream society on religion on science on politics on government on economics on political parties all of it we're trying to go metal on all of it it's what we're doing with this work nationalism is a great example of difference in content there are Hindu nationalists there are Pakistani nationalists there are mmm white nationalists of course he heard of those there are black nationalists Asian nationalists Japanese nationalists there's literally a nationalist movement in every single country in the entire world over 200 oh why is that because because people develop an identity with their nation and all these different nationalists whether they're Nazis or or KKK or whatever they all have the same structure they think that they're doing something very unique and different no you're not when an American nationalist is demonizing Islamic nationalism like Wahhabism jihadi ISM and so forth he's doing the very same thing structurally as the Wahhabist or the Islamist is doing the Islamist nationalist is doing relative to the West it's just a Content difference see the Islamist believes that Allah and Islam should be the highest principle in the whole world and the the white supremacist in America believes that the white race should rule the whole world because it's the highest value system and that the Christian God and Christ are you know the highest value system the most true and that they should rule the world and they use very similar tactics and strategies and ideology ideological mechanisms and structures to advance their nationalist agenda clan warfare is an even more primitive example really than nationalism we don't really have a lot of clan warfare in modern developed countries in America or in in Europe for example but there's still a lot of clan warfare that goes on in less developed countries especially in the Middle East there's a ton of clan warfare in South America in Asia there's still a lot of clan warfare going on because in tribal cultures where people are living in small tribes they haven't even developed into cities and nations yet they're too primitive for that just clans these clans are like lot larger set of families which have hundreds or thousands of people in them and that turns into an identity and then these clans can can go to war tribal warfare it can happen like in African someplace for example between two different neighboring villages that hate each other can go on for hundreds of years they can hold grudges they can have entire mythologies and ideologies about how they're they're evil enable neighbors are our Devils and how they need to be killed and how they're they're a threat and all this how do you resolve the problem of clan warfare you can't resolve it by thinking that your clan is the best and it needs to dominate and kill and exterminate the other clan because there's always other clan even if you kill this clan here well there's gonna be a new clan over there or your own clan will split in two in a hundred years and then there'll be two clans again so the solution clan warfare is to go meta and to realize that oh this is just content to sides in a clan warfare battle they just have different content the structure is the same the structure is that they both think that all my tribe is the best they are the devil's over there and if I don't kill them they're gonna kill me and so I got to go kill them first and they did something wrong in the past that justifies why I should hate them this is also of course explaining a little bit of the situation with Israel and Palestine that's sort of a basically clan warfare on a larger scale it's also nationalism it's see once clan warfare gets to a certain advanced point where it involves tens of thousands and millions of people and entire nations then it turns into national ISM another example a great example of why the structure and content distinction is so powerful is when it comes to fighting evil the problem of eliminating evil in the world is a structural problem evil is not a Content problem but most people don't understand this most people think that all we do to remove evil from the world is to kill all the murderers rapists predators abusers you know criminals and thieves if we kill them all or if we like launch them to the moon on a rocket ship then we're good we've solved the problem of evil no if you do that that itself is evil evil is such a deep structural problem that man it deserves a video of its own or not of course I have I have many of those probably the most important one here is what is the devil go check out that episode what is the devil best ones where I talk about the mechanics of evil and how structural it is but anyways the point here in a nutshell is that the reason that evil is so prevalent in the world is not because people are doing evil things it's because people don't realize that their mind constructs evil evil isn't a material fact in the world evil is a matter of perception it's a relativistic matter so to really resolve evil you would have to understand relativity very deeply you'd have to start to understand how your mind constructs evil projects it into the world and how the very mechanism you're trying to use to stop other people from being evil is the very mechanism that creates that evil because everyone who stops evil or tries to stop evil tells himself that he's doing it in the name of good nobody does evil in name of evil all evil is done in the name of good so when you think that oh well I'm gonna stop all those evil people out there that's exactly what they're thinking when they're doing their evil onto you so again it's sort of that clan warfare situation to solve evil you to go so meta that you realize that your own mind constructs evil and then when you awaken so much you become so conscious you realize that evil never even existed it was all a projection of your own mind and just a function of your own selfishness and lack of self-acceptance and lack of self-love and your limited ego identity as human when all of that is realized and you transcend your identity as a human you stop caring whether you're alive or dead anymore you stopped completely judging and you have direct consciousness of infinite love when you realize all that then the problem of evil is soft and then you understand that that is what is necessary and then you understand that oh well this is why evil is so prevalent is because almost nobody has done everything I just said structurally they're trying to fix evil on a Content level we'll think they can just eliminate evil by passing laws or by judging people or by locking people in jail or by killing people or by demonizing people and none of that works because all of that is evil you understand you're using evil to fight evil which only perpetuates more evil and makes you with the evil this is a very very deep structural problem probably the deepest structural problem there is and yet people think it's content people get mad at murders for being murders without understanding that it's purely structural there is no need to get mad at a murder in fact when you get mad at a murderer you're committing evil because your judgment and your anger and your fear that is the very source of evil that is selfishness you are projecting your own selfishness onto that murder now I'm not saying if the let murderers run loose but there are compassionate and loving ways to deal with murders which don't involve demonizing them and trying to exterminate them but is is more understanding of the structural problem behind why their murders in the first place of course this is all deeply unpopular and of course I would be demonized for defending murders by just by saying this precisely because people are really attached to demonizing and judging murders and so they don't want to go meta on murder they don't wanna go meta on evil they're attached to the identity of crusading against evil it's very addictive to be a crusader in the name of goodness and truth and love against evildoers this is one of the most addictive identities you can have you can get so hypnotized by this content of being such a crusader that you will become the biggest evildoer of them all and yet of course you will be so in denial about it because you think you're so good and so righteous that you won't even know you're doing it and that's how evil is made ah ha ha there's your solution evil another example that I like is from from pick up and dating if you've done pick up if you try to attract girls as a guy and you struggled with it as I have in the past you're trying to figure out what do girls like how do I attract them and you know how do I get laid one of the things you learn from pick up after failing a lot a lot a lot a lot you know you try to attract a lot of girls you try to tell them different things to get them to like you and a lot of things you say don't work and then what you realize it's not what I say it's how I say it it's not the content it's not the pickup line that I use this is the common mistake people think that all what's the pickup line I gotta say what do I gotta that's some magic pick-up line that's gonna make her sleep with me there is no magic pickup line that's gonna make her sleep with you it doesn't matter what you say the words that are coming out of your mouth do not matter when you're talking to women I mean I'm exaggerating of course they matter you know if you come up to a woman and you say that I am a rapist and I'm gonna rape you that's probably not gonna work very well for you so you know of course there are things you don't want to say which are just egregiously bad but for the for the most part it's not what you say it's how you say it it's the sub communication behind the content which is what the woman is unconsciously assessing all the time which is determining whether she finds you attractive or not and whether she finds you honest authentic and credible or not trustworthy or not valuable enough in her eyes or not see so actually and this is why you can't you can actually now I don't recommend this okay please don't get me wrong here I'm not recommending you do this because this can get you in a lot of trouble but it actually is possible if you're in a loud nightclub definitely don't try this at daylight in the streets if you're at a loud nightclub where people are rowdy and having fun it actually is possible to walk up to a woman and to tell her I'm a rapist and I'm gonna rape you and make her attract it to you by saying that why you would think that's impossible because you're saying the most disgusting vulgar atrocious illegal thing like you would think like well it's completely against her self-interest to accept that and to be attracted to it but that's if you assume that content matters what really matters though is the structure the sub communication so if I walk up to her and say that with a smile with a nice little wink if I do it confidently without fear or creepiness if I don't do it as some sort of creeper where I'm kind of creeping in and like tapping her on the shoulder and like trying to say this as though I'm like really gonna do it you know if I'm not dressed like a rapist if I'm dressed nice if I smell nice if you know I'm shaved nice and all this and I have some friends around me and it looks like I'm having fun and like that's what she's really reading off of you whereas of course if I come up to her and I'm all by myself and I'm sort of like meek and creepy looking and haven't shaved and I smell terrible and I'm wearing a ripped shirt and then I say it to her in some sort of creepy way yeah that's when you get really in trouble that's when she'll call the police on you and you know so that's that's what makes the whole difference with pickup pickup is all about the structure the sub communication it's about how you look at her it's about the state you're in it's how you feel even the mood you're in is gonna affect your whole interaction so there are there are sometimes things that I can say that would normally work but then they don't work because I'm in a bad mood I'm not congruent with the thing that I'm saying and then sometimes the most absurd lines work lines that you would think would never ever work because you're in a good mood you're having fun and the context is perfect for it and it comes off as cute or funny or irreverent and she giggles at it she likes it and she gets attracted to it and in fact it gives you bonus points and her eyes because you say something edgy or bold and you know it's hard to pull that off so if you're able to pull that off consistently then women will reward you for it that's that's the counterintuitive nature of Attraction like it's it's so so counterintuitive but again be careful I don't recommend that you that you test some of these extreme cases you know start small start with simple huh with simple approaches and then you can see how far you can push it and again you got it you got to be very it's all very context sensitive so for example you know loud noisy nightclub where people are drinking and having fun doing drugs and stuff listening to loud music in that environment it's very socially acceptable for example to come up and to hug a girl or to even slap her on the ass again you gotta be careful with it can get you into trouble even there but it's a lot more acceptable to do that sort of stuff at a loud nightclub than it is like in the mall during the the middle of the day where nobody's drinking and nobody's yelling and partying you see so that sort of context sensitivity that sort of social awareness is extremely important to pull some of these more edgy things off and again that's a structural thing see and the only way you can learn what's appropriate and what's not and what these structures are is through massive experience it's almost impossible to learn it by reading a book or watching a video you got to really get out there and go through trial and error and learn what the structures really are but then you can get very good and women women will actually appreciate that you're good and that you're not creepy about it because most guys who aren't experienced there they're quite creepy so actually women appreciate when you're able to be very socially aware and you're able to to do edgy things in such a way where you push the line but you don't cross the line and you don't creep them out or freak them out and you're still a cool guy and you still understand you know her comfort level and you know how to kind of calibrate to what she needs that's not easy to do that takes massive experience another example is money in politics money in politics is a structural problem it's not a Content brought it's a structural problem both Democrats and Republicans liberals and conservatives are very susceptible to money because very basic survival resource and so you know people will follow to the traveling at all well the Republicans are the corrupt ones they take all the money or the Democrats are the trouble is they'll take all the money now both Republicans and Democrats they both take quite a lot of money and it's a very big structural problem and they both resist campaign finance reform they both resist taking money out of politics for selfish reasons and that's basically corruption now of course they're not equal at it generally liberals are again more evolved than conservatives so they're gonna be less prone to bribery and corruption but they're still pretty damn susceptible to it it's a problem in politics another structure content conflation is for example have you heard of the conservative talking point about how all well the Scandinavian countries is socialism and it's just like Venezuela Venezuela socialism so we shouldn't have socialism America because we're gonna be like Venezuela I'm gonna be eating dogs and cats off the streets that's socialism but again this is a Content conflation when conservatives think this way they're just looking at the content they just hear the word socialism it's like well socialism Scandinavia has it Venezuela has it it's the same thing they don't look at the structure of it the structure of Scandinavian countries is it very different from the structure of Venezuela there at totally different levels of the spiral they're different cognitively they're different morally than if it's spiritually they're different infrastructure you know Venezuela is basically a dictatorship or a tyranny it's not it's not a a well-functioning democracy and it never really was it lacked massively lacks infrastructure so of course when you introduce socialist ideals into that kind of system it's completely unsustainable in it results in problems because they have to grow through a capitalist phase first but then a country that is post capitalist like scan a navy that has already grown through that and they actually have a thriving capitalist market in an economy they have infrastructure they have a court system they have rule of law they have a constitution they have a Supreme Court they have all this stuff they have low corruption levels they are they are non ideological non-dogmatic they tolerate minorities all this sorts of stuff that does not really exist in Venezuela they're basically staged green on the spiral and even shades of stage yellow tier two so in that kind of situation when you introduce elements of socialism against skin a name is not even fully socialist but when you introduce elements of socialism then it works and it works better than capitalism so that's very important and then when you consider America structurally whereas America well structurally America's a lot closer to Scandinavia than it is to Venezuela so there's this this right wing talking point that like Barney Sanders will turn America into Venezuela it's it's completely absurd it it completely misses the structural understanding of what's really going on in government in politics and economics it's a deliberate straw man and of course the people who make this straw me and they have no interest whatsoever in analyzing the structure because they're just they're they're wrapped up in the content they're just defending their conservative ideology and for that a straw man is perfect the truth is irrelevant here this is survival this is this ideological survival this is an identity that's being defended another example is with religious schools and how they indoctrinate so religious indoctrination is the same structurally regardless of the religion Catholic schools Protestant schools Muslim schools Jewish schools Buddhist schools it's all indoctrination of course there's different degrees of indoctrination so some Muslim schools are really really bad at it probably more much more so than than a Catholic school but but still the structures are the same just different degrees so if you're stuck in content you might and you're Catholic let's say you might say well Lea while Catholic school is not indoctrination the reason it's not a doctrine ation is because Catholicism is true from your point of view that's exactly how I look because your paradigm locked but then you look at a Muslim you know some Muslim madrasah in Iran or in Pakistan or wherever and you might say oh that there look there indoctrinating the children into some crazy Muslim radical Islamist ideology structurally though it's the same as you sending your kids to Catholic school it's no different if the degree is a little bit different you know in Pakistan it will be more extreme than it is in a suburb in America but when you kiss send your kids to it to Catholic school that this is exactly what you're doing but due to self bias see my episode called self bias during Portland due to self bias you're excusing the Catholic and dr. nation because it's your kind of indoctrination is kind you like he's the kind you were indoctrinated with whereas the Muslim you know when the Muslim parent sends his his child to some madrasah religious camp he justifies it by of course saying that Allah is the one true God is Lama sizz true and so this indoctrination isn't really indoctrination it's just education into the truth and if you're a scientist you do this too you might send your kids not to a religious university but to a very technical scientific university you might send your kid off to become an engineer at Caltech or MIT and you'll say well Leo that's not my tea is not indoctrination this is high quality education what are you talking about but it is indoctrination your indoctrinating him to be a materialist academic scientifically rationally minded person and this is indoctrination just because it happens to be your flavor and of indoctrination doesn't make it any less indoctrination watch out for yourself bias see for it to not be indoctrination you would have to truly allow freedom for this child to to choose for themselves and to research and to inquire for themselves without forcing them to go anywhere without getting them into any particular paradigm without biasing them against religion or Catholicism or Islam or science or anything else but you don't care about that you just care about perpetuating the kind of stuff you were indoctrinated with when you were younger whether it's science atheism or anything else another great example that I like is a string of bad relationships have you encountered this or maybe somebody close to you has a relative of yours or a friend where they just keep getting into a bad relationship after a bad relationship after bad relationship and they keep complaining about it like the same girl keeps getting together with another abusive guy another alcoholic guy who keeps abusing her keeps cheating on her keeps hitting her keeps doing this treating her badly she stays with him she keeps justifying it and then finally she breaks it off or even he breaks it off cuz he gets tired of her whining and then and then she finds another guy exactly like that why does this keep happening she tells herself well I'll just changed the guy the guy is bad I'll just get a new guy but it ain't the guy of course the guy has problems do if he's doing this but he ain't the guy because the guy in this case is just content changing content by changing a guy or changing content but the problem is structural the problem is in her low self-esteem the problem is in her depression the problem is with her substance abuse the problem is with her certain fantasies about reality or certain fantasies about relationships her dependency her her neediness her feeling unattractive her feeling worthless her feeling unlovable these structural psychic problems within her these are what allow for these sort of codependent abusive relationships to materialize in the first place if you're a needy person who thinks that you're unattractive and you're depressed and you have low self-esteem you will tend to attract people who will sustain that for you and that's not gonna change until you make a structural change in your psyche but of course that's hard work she usually won't want to do that now of course guys have this problem as well I'm not just picking on women here just happen to be using a female example because it's a very classic one that we've all probably experienced at some point through friends and family so yeah so you can only fix this through structural change by going meta this means you have to rise above all your relationships you can't just look at one relationship in isolation from another you have to look you know you have to take the 30,000 foot elevated perspective bird's-eye view you look down and you have to ask yourself okay what what is the common thread the structure behind all the bad relationships if I've been in why do they keep happening why do I keep attracting these kinds of guys and then you might notice something about yourself something meta and of course this whole thing is made much worse because you're hypnotized by the guy if this is happening to you as a woman you're falling in love with these guys head over heels and you think you can change him and you think that you're so good together and you think that you're not gonna get a better guy this is he's the only one for you and if you know if only this one little thing could be changed about him then everything would be perfect that's how you rationalized yourself you love the sex you're addicted to the sex you're addicted to his masculinity or whatever else he makes you feel at times you're hypnotized in the content and you don't want to break that illusion it's like a romantic dream that you're in you're in this hypnotic romantic spell and you don't to break it you feel comfortable in it it makes you feel safe and secure at least at certain points and breaking that illusion is very difficult but it's the only way you'll be able to escape that sufferings by going meta so the question is how much are you willing to suffer before you wise up in you go meta another good example is being at the effective emotions versus being aware of emotions as a structure so being at the effective emotions is content emotions are content I want you to notice this in your body you feel different things you feel anger happiness sadness depression guilt fear blah blah blah blah blah all this emotional content stuff and usually this is all controlling you and you're just like a marionette pulled by strings all day long all year long by these emotions so to master your emotions you have to go meta you have to realize it's not about the particular emotion that I'm feeling it's about the structure of what these emotions are doing at all it's about becoming mindful of emotions getting detached getting distanced from the emotions becoming a witness to your emotions so you can observe them and you can analyze them and you can see the structures the meta structures that cause them and once you snip those structures once you become so conscious of the structures of emotions that's what allows you to transcend emotions and ultimately master your emotions and it appears that as though you can control your emotions you're not really controlling them you are just observing them from a much elevated perspective and in fact it's possible to have such an elevated perspective so much consciousness that you observe it emotion and the emotion cannot even arise because you're too conscious to let it arise you're not suppressing it you're not denying it you're just so [ __ ] conscious that it can't even arise or if it does arise then you can quickly let it go but this requires an enormous amount of training going really really really meta that's not easy to do don't think you'll accomplish this in a month or even in a year another example I like here is Sam Harris he's a great example of a guy who's stuck on content he's really stuck on harping on the content of Islam and on the content of religion overall cuz he's built an identity out of being a rationalist that's his whole shtick that's his whole career and it's his whole his whole ego is about that but in in being so wrapped up and so critical of the content of Islam he misses this the deeper structural problems which are really the the cause of terrorism and problems in the Middle East so sam harris likes to attribute terrorism and Islamism and all the sort of stuff to what is written in the quran and his idea is that well the quran is particularly bad religious book yes the bible is bad but the quran is worse because it's more violent the actual content in the quran encourages violence that's his sort of argument and the problem with that is is that that really misses the point the the thing that's really running the show that's responsible for terrorism and radical Islamists doing bad stuff is low cognitive moral and spiritual development on the spiral which of course is prevalent in the Middle East and the reason it's prevalent in Middle East is not because of the Quran it's because of a long chain of historical geopolitical factors that go back thousands of years which are independent of the content of the Koran and simply because their spiral development hasn't been given enough time to rise to stage orange or green or yellow or turquoise most the Middle East many of the the poorest countries in the Middle East are still stuck in spiral dynamics purple and red and maybe if they're developed blue and like if they're really developed a little bit of orange but mostly it's a lot of purple and Red's - a lot of tribalism going on there but you know this has to do with a lot of geopolitical factors has to do with the temperature the climate that they live in has to do with the geography the mountain Rangers has to do with the animals that live there has to do with the farming the agriculture there's so many factors so to reduce all this to bad phrases within the Quran is quite ridiculous it ignores the historical context it ignores the structure of small dynamics it ignores the problems of ideology in general the problems of Islam Islam are not limited to the Quran or to the Islam these are in general well-known ideological problems these are basically this is basically cult psychology at work cult psychology is that work not only in Islam it's it's at work in America in Christianity but not just in Christianity in science so while sam harris is overly focused on islam he's missing the structural similarities between Islam Christianity and science and atheism and himself which is of course the whole point of what he's doing because the whole point is to separate himself and his culture and his ideology from that of Islam and to put his own on top that's the whole underlying never spoken or admitted agenda which is fueling everything he's doing of course none of this can ever be admitted because to admit it you'd have to go very meta just to see it and it would be very painful to admit that probably ruin his here so it's not in his interest to admit that Dada that's the Harrison how about Trump is an example Trump is a great example to use because see the whole trap that Republicans have fallen into the defenders of Trump they fall into this trap where now they're for a damned if they do and damned if they don't on the one hand they love Trump at the level of content they agree many Republicans agree with his financial policies with his immigration policies with its gun policies environmental policies and so forth some Republicans disagree with the fact that Trump is kind of crude and he tweets and does this cuss you know stupid stuff on the surface I guess many many even Republicans don't really think that that's wise or beneficial to their cause but they put up with it anyways because generally they like the content they like the conservative judges they love the rules he's passing the deregulation he's doing the tax cuts this is content stuff but what they're not aware of is the structural corruption of Trump they're so eager to get there they're content that they want that they're attached to that they completely are willing to overlook Trump's corruption illegality criminality his terrible history his sex scandals his moral depravity the fact that he's not really successful in business his scams with Trump University and his scams with his charity his his connections with foreign governments which are very sketchy his violation of the emoluments clause his conflicts of interest around the world from his businesses his connections with Russia his connections with Saudi Arabia like this is also this is all the deep structural stuff which is what contributes to corruption but to a conservative Trump supporter they're so hypnotized by the content of conservativism that they don't care about the corruption they don't care about the structure they haven't gone sufficiently meta to see that the very swab that they want Trump to drain is the very swamp that Trump is burying into office and of course Trump doesn't see this as well Trump is so clueless he doesn't think structurally about anything he's too impulsive and short-sighted and selfish that he thinks he's gonna go in there and he honestly believes that he can just like drain swamp by deregulating stuff and doing the stuff he wants to do making these content changes it's not gonna work because he himself has brought the structural corruption into everyone he's surrounded stuff in his administration is is basically roughly around his level of development and they are so prone to corruption which is why everybody around it keeps go to jail and getting in trouble and there's bribery charges and mismanagement of falak funds and all this this is this is how corruption happens you can't fix corruption if your psyche has the same structure as that of the people who do corruption changing the people doesn't matter because it's the psychic it's the psyche structure that matters and right now Trump is the biggest corruption in Washington since probably the last century and most of Republicans don't see it because they're in denial about it because they're stuck on the content they don't want to look at the structure that's what's going on right now see if people were aware of iodine Amex they would clearly see that Trump is is at a low center of gravity around stage red which makes them very impulsive narcissistic and very prone to corruption see he he has no qualms with corruption as long as it serves him that's what selfishness is selfishness doesn't care about applying anti-corruption measures to itself selfishness excuses itself for being Karan and blames everybody else for their corruption that's devilry 101 structurally Trump's psyche has more in common with Kim jong-un or Putin or Hitler or Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein or the Chinese leader Xi zan with European leaders or leaders of Scandinavian countries or leaders in Japan or leaders in other kind of developed first world countries because the leaders in European countries are roughly around stage green orange green maybe even a little bit of yellow but the leaders in in underdeveloped countries dictatorship countries like in Russia in China in India in especially North Korea these these people are staged red maybe blue maybe a bit orange but mostly I like especially kim jeong-hoon why does Trump get along so well with the North Korean leader because they're both basically sage red they're perfect for each other they should get married and the media is all surprised by there's nothing surprising about this this is completely predictable if you understand violent image another interesting example evangelicals share more and common structurally with Nazis and Islamists than they do with Christ isn't that funny of course they would never admit this this is the most offensive thing you could say to an evangelical Christian is that a Christian has more in common with a Nazi or an Islamist than with Christ and yet that's precisely the case if you look at the situation not in terms of content but in terms of structure see if you're only looking at content it's very easy for the evangelicals they won't but I am like Christ because I about Christ I go to Christchurch maybe there's even Christ in my name maybe I view a name Christian I pray to Christ I try to emulate Christ by believing the things Christ believed and saying the things Frye said but that's all content none of that matters what matters for you to truly be Christ like the thing that was most remarkable about Christ and the only reason we know about Christ and we speak about Christ 2,000 years after the fact is because of the remarkable structure that Christ had that was so different and so far above and so far meta beyond anyone else of his time and anyone own and many people of our time yeah of course you can reach that same level of meta structure as well if you want but that's that's that's a tall order to fill and evangelicals are nowhere they're the structure of the evangelical psyche is much closer to the structure of a Nazi or an Islamist psyche its dogmatic its tribalistic its nationalistic its its spirituality purely at the level of belief and indoctrination he doesn't care about going meta doesn't understand consciousness let's understand what love is it demonizes it tries to fix evil - at the level of content see Christ wasn't trying to fix evil at the level of content Christ solved the problem of evil at the level of structure he realized that there is no evil there is only love that was his message but you can't teach love at the level of content because love is not about content love is about structure love is the most meta thing that there is but all of this has lost on evangelicals because you can't get there through dogma you'd have to completely renounce and go meta above your your Christian dogma and indoctrination to truly be christ-like so actually the more do you believe in Christ unless Christ light you are you can't be christ-like through belief or by going to church it'll never work actually odds are much better that you'll become christ-like by quitting Church and not reading the Bible ever again that's what's so counterintuitive about spirituality another example is religious materialism you know people often say that well like there are scientific materialists that I like to rail against a lot the materials paradigm and then there's the religious people and they like oh the religious people are supposed to be the immaterial ones the ones that don't care about material matters because they're they're worried about heaven they're worried about the afterlife whereas the scientists and the materialist and the atheist and the rationalist they're worried about the ordinary world so in this sense it seems that they're so different but this is this is a facade structurally both are materialists religious people like that evangelical I was just talking about he's a materialist he believes in an objective external material world he believes that God is some human being like entity that sits up in the clouds he believes he's going to heaven which is a physical place he believes that when he goes to heaven there will be physical benefits bestowed upon him there will be riches and wealth and there will be beautiful women or whatever you know I'm exaggerating a little bit here but hey many many Muslims believe in whole 72 virgins thing as their first of heaven you know it's extremely materialistic because that's that's the level of the psyche a materialistic psyche is a materialistic psyche regardless of whether it believes in scientific content or Christian content or Muslim content hmm if you care about wealth you care about it independently of whether you're a Muslim a Christian a Jew or an atheist that's a structural thing you're not conscious enough yet to realize the limitations of materialism and wealth which is why there are have you seen these Christian evangelical televangelists that preach about the prosperity gospel where they talk about how oh you can become so wealthy by by sending me more money and then they buy private jets they fly around these preachers they plop fly around the country they have giant congregations and they milk their their their flock for money you might wonder well how is that possible when Christ's one of Christ's main messages is you know as he said a rich man has better as much chance of getting into heaven as passing through the eye of a needle well Christ was telling you that materialism won't get you into heaven let go of your materialism why are these Christian televangelists flying around in private jets because it's a structural problem they don't see the structure of it what they just see is that hey if I am in a private jet but I'm praying to Christ on my private jet that's good enough but see that's a Content that's a content matter that's not a structural matter the problem is not that you're not praying to Christ on your private jet the problem is that you care about having a private jet that's the structural problem let go of that desire and then you will become more christ-like you won't need to pray to Christ you won't need to worship Christ you won't even need to think about Christ and just relinquish your desire for a private jet and that will automatically make you christ-like at a structural level a little bit now you'd have to go much further than that but that's a good start it's a good start but of course that would be hard to do and that would mean going against your survival needs see your ego doesn't want to relinquish that private jet your ego wants to hold on to the idea that I can be christ-like and have a private jet and that there's no contradiction and I can do both after all wouldn't Christ want me to have a private jet and lots of money wouldn't that actually help to spread his world his word around the world after all I can be a much better preacher I can convert more people to Christ message if I have a private jet I can fly around faster see the mind starts to feed itself this this this this ideology that it constructs it constructs whatever ideology serves its survival so if having sex with lots of young women is is what serves your survival as a preacher you will find a way to rationalize why Christ wants you to have sex with young women or marry multiple wives or abuse your wives physically hit them physically lock them up in a cage make them service you it's all very easy to justify as long as you're operating on the level of content and all you care about is the image of Christ in your mind because you know you can you can have a harem of women that you abuse and use as your sex slaves while you're a Christian preacher flying around on your private jet while you're praying to God and converting more people to to read the Bible you could make that work structurally though structurally that's devilry see when you're doing that you're not being Christ you're being a devil you're doing the opposite of Christ but you can put a picture of Christ over out of a veneer of Christ hood over it and make yourself feel good and you can make that work of course it's gonna produce a lot of suffering a lot of blowback cuz devilry you know always comes with it's karma so you're not gonna get away scot-free but you're basically gonna ruin your whole life doing that but you can do it people have done it people are probably doing it right now don't think if this stuff is all fantasy I'm giving you real-world examples of [ __ ] that actually happens so the key here I guess is that spirituality cannot happen at the level of content spirituality is about the structure of your consciousness this is critical for you to understand spirituality is about going meta meta meta meta meta meta you keep going meta until you go meta on absolutely everything and then you even go meta ongoing meta you're so meta that you go meta on life you erase yourself from life you erase physical reality reality ceases to exist when you fully go meta nothing remains nothing remains only emptiness remains nothing it's as though reality never even existed you're walking around and reality doesn't even exist for you really truly it's a you realize that everything is a hallucination everything is nothing and when that happens do you realize that your god and you realize what God is and you realize that God is infinite meta meta forever meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta forever and that's what you are and that's true Christ hood then you become Christ and then only then you can truly be a Crabby Christ like you cannot behave like Christ unless you've gone completely meta you must surrender all of your attachments all of your ideologies all of your judgments all of your moralization z' all of your ideals all of your beliefs everything you hold true everything you must even surrender physical reality the notion there is a physical reality you must surrender that everything must be surrendered you must surrender your life you must surrender caring whether you're tortured everything must be surrendered then you can be christ-like then you're immortal then you're invincible then you're fearless and then you discover infinite love then you also you conquer evil by doing this see but this is so hard to do this takes so much consciousness this takes a complete detachment from all absolutely all content all of life that almost nobody doesn't see and now you understand now you understand why nobody does it why Spa dynamics so powerful it's powerful because it reveals deep structures about humans individually and collectively you see structures you weren't able to see before where before you saw content after you learn Spile and AMEX really good from watching my series on it and reading books and so forth it's like a whole new dimension of life opens up to you but also I want you to recognize that structural thinking the kind of sometta stuff we're talking about here this doesn't really start to take place seriously until stage yellow on spiral dynamics it's really part of systems thinking and then even beyond that and it really only comes into into full flower at stage turquoise and then of course you go so many that you're even gonna go you're gonna surrender and transcend spy line Amex itself that's how a meta you ultimately need to go but before you get there you know don't don't give up file name is too fast a useful model use it while you're growing because most of you are not at turquoise yet but notice though that stage is purple red blue orange and green on the spiral they get stuck very easily in content differences so that's what you're seeing everything at Tier one which is green and below is people they don't see structure almost in anything they see content then wrapped up in content they're hypnotized by content and they're fighting with each other up and down the spiral over content differences and it's only when you get to green and above to yellow that you wake up you get to tier two you have a little bit of an epiphany and you go from trying to survive within and amongst content this infinite sea of content to finally realizing that it's not about the content it's about going meta and then your life becomes about transcendence and trying to raise your consciousness and trying to detach from content as much as possible and you start to do that and that's where actualize ever comes in as we're doing that together and as we're doing that we're detaching more and more and more we're getting more more meta and we're getting more and more christ-like godlike we might say but that's really hard to do you start to see how hard it is to do that it's much harder than you think and it'll take you much longer than you expect to do that but hey you might as well get started because there's nothing nothing better to do in life than doing this the more meta you can go the better but how do you go Matt oh well that's where the Devils in the details we got to talk about a lot of specific topics that's work more of my other videos come in we talk about how to go meta in various different ways meditation is one way to go meta psychedelics is another way to go meta visualization maybes another way to go contemplations other way to go journaling another way to go you know many of the techniques that I've shared with you shamanic breathing yoga there's a lot of ways to go meta reading books even learning Spalla dynamics that will help you to go meta and so on basically everything that I teach every video of mine tries to help you to go meta in some way sometimes a big way sometimes a little way there's a lot to go meta on it's not just one thing that you're trying to transcend here's a list of problems due to lack of structural awareness common social problems racism slavery corruption evil nationalism ethnic cleansing religious dogma intolerance violence indoctrination of children war the drug war the opioid epidemic we have here in America scientific closed closed mindedness and denial of the paranormal false equivalency between the left and the right capitalism run amok money in politics demonization of socialism and socialist economics labor exploitation income inequality the kind that we have here in America and in many other places in the world the key inside here is that these problems are not at the level of content this is why our politics is so dysfunctional is that many of our politicians are trying to fix these problems at the level of content and that's because our voters the people who vote the politicians in of course the politicians themselves as well they see the problems only in terms of content not in terms of structure most of our politicians are not stage yellow thinkers they're not systemic thinkers they can't see structure very well they don't know how to go meta they're stuck on content so most debates most religious or most political discussion ends up being at a very low level ineffective level of you know content disputes which is never going to really resolve the problems that we have because they're structural the problem is is is not just structural in the way that the government structures needs to change of course that is part of the problem there's an even deeper problem the deeper structural problem is how we perceive problems our worldview our piste Amala G how we look at the world our metaphysics these are the really true structural problems which create and reinforce all these other social problems that I've outlined above the chief problem we have is in how we perceive and frame our problems our problem is a meta problem and root solutions require structural understanding and structural change otherwise you just shuffle around content and you're just putting band-aids on things you're never solving the root issue the root issues are all existential ultimately a metaphysical they're tied in with your identity your mind your psyche your worldview they're tied in with what you think reality is that's really where these problems stem from from what you think reality is and what you think you are and unless you solve those problems they're gonna continue popping up in myriad ways here are the most important structures of the mind that you should be studying its most important if you're gonna be studying structure to study not the structure of government although of course that's useful with the structure of business but study the structure of your mind and what do I mean by structures of the mind well I've talked a lot about them in the past especially in my three part series on self-deception understanding self-deception and so these are structures like projection denial ideology clinging to ideas and beliefs conform and biased cherry-picking paradigms question begging self bias justification moralization groupthink conformity cult psychology judgment and demonization the ego it's a huge topic emotions that's a huge topic meaning making and storytelling the various roles that you play I have dedicated episodes on at least half of that list that I just mentioned and I'll release more going forward in the future we still have yet to talk about more deeply about meaning making and storytelling and we have more to talk about justification and question begging and denial and projection so but then again I've covered a lot of the other ones as well I've covered self just to covered self bias I've covered moralization I've covered demonization and various other defense mechanisms self-deception Vic is in conclusion your biggest life problems cannot be solved by changing around content I hope you understand that by now and of course to be clear here you're probably biggest life problem is happiness right isn't that what everybody wants is that what you ultimately want is that your biggest problem so you don't have no happiness so how do you think you gonna solve that problem are you trying to solve the happiness problem at the level of content but it isn't working you play new video games doesn't work you watch new movies doesn't work you get more money doesn't work you play at a golf course it doesn't work you get a big house it doesn't work you become more famous you're still not happy you get a sexy girlfriend you're still not happy you're in a marriage you're still not happy you have children you're still not happy so what is it gonna take to make you happy well at some point you're gonna have to acknowledge to yourself that happiness is not a Content problem no amount of content will make you happy happiness is a structural problem more money fancy vacations mink coats fancy jewelry fame and success a career you want travel shop sex private jets and yachts even the acquisition of knowledge this is still all content you're changing around content thinking that it will satisfy you at one point and it never will because you need to go meta and realize that happiness is a structural problem you need to change the strip the structure of your psyche in order to be happy and that's why happiness is so rare and that's why you can't buy happiness with money and that's why you can't get happiness through a magic pill or a drug at least not sustainably because it's a structural problem even if a drug makes you happy for an hour or for 10 hours when the drug ends you fall back into your old structure the reason the drug actually made you happy is because especially like for example with a psychedelic no some of you who are into psychedelics you know that you can be extremely blissful and happy at the peak of a psychedelic trip what's going on there why are you so happy when you take a psychedelic it's not because you're being bombarded with pure pleasure that's not what's going on it's not like heroin or something where you're just getting a shot of of serotonin or some beautiful chemical that's making you all happy and giggly and whatever it's not that the psychedelic is actually expanding your consciousness and making you go so meta that the structure of your entire life expands and changes so you become so conscious of the structure and you're putting to a totally new state of consciousness that you're in a new structure and from that structure this expanded godlike christ-like structure you get a sort of a parting of the clouds and you realize how beautiful life could be if you were in that structure all the time but then of course the psychedelic wears off in ten hours the clouds close back up you is connect from God you fall back into your own state of consciousness your old structure nothing has really changed or a little bit of change but not enough and you're depressed again or you're miserable again you're suffering again and you wonder well where did it go why can't I be this happy all the time you've been shown a glimpse of the structural change you need to make in order to be that happy so consider yourself lucky that there even exists such tools such technology that allows you to even get that gloves because most people will never get that glimpse in their whole life they will never go that meta and they will never even understand what they're missing at least you now do now if you want to actualize it and embody it and stabilize in it you have to work your ass off for it but that's a topic for another day for now I just want to leave you with this wherever you go there you are wherever this structure goes there you are it doesn't matter if you're in Rome or you're in Paris or you're in Japan or you're at a party or you're having sex or you're at a famous university or you're on TV as long as this is here this is the main structure you're carrying around with you and it's that structure which is running the whole show and you can't escape that structure you can't escape yourself that's the highest truth all right that's it for this one please click that like button your likes helped to make these videos more popular and visible on YouTube and come check out my website that's actualize that org right there click on it I get the sense people don't click on this enough click there's stuff there that you want to see exclusive content that you won't find on youtube or elsewhere check out my blog check out my book list check out my life purpose course check out the forum all these are potentially life transforming resources for you so make use of it I've put a lot of time into my blog I put a lot of time to the forum I put a lot of time into making my courses I put a lot of time updating the book list I've updated the book list like close to 10 times now for free go get all those updates and if you like my work if you think that this is helpful for people and this is expanding mankind evolving mankind then support me on action on patreon calm patreon.com slash actualized there's a link down below you can click it chip in five bucks a month that helps to support the channel supports my work and in the future I can use that money to help to do advertising and to improve my equipment and hire more people and so forth to help you out the final warning I want to give you is this if you blindly accept the things that I say in my videos that's a structural problem there's a meta goal of actualize that org is not to feed you content of course I do feed you lots and lots of content but it's very easy to take it out on as content without really grasping the structure that's being pointed at all of my content is always pointing to deeper structures the trick with structures is that they can't always be verbalized and communicated and made fully explicit they can't always be written down in a linear sequence these structures are complicated and they require consciousness so beware of this trap it's very very easy to memorize a bunch of actualized content without actually going meta by doing so you're committing the very same error that that evangelical prosperity preacher is doing of flying around on the private jet and preaching but not actually changing his structure for you to get the results that this work is capable of generating you must make structural changes to your psyche that's all we really care about here we're not interested in money or sex or all that and stuff I mean we can be tangentially but ultimately we're interested in structural change and I want you to make a distinction between self-improvement videos and advice and books or even spiritual advice and books which is content-based and not structural most self-help books are talking about content changes making content changes which is not going to resolve anything deep and it's not going to lead to a deep satisfaction or a deep understanding of reality or a deep change in your circumstances which is why self-help sometimes gets a bad rap and people say all self-help is so corny nothing really changes to these self-help books really work they work if you're making structural changes and there are some good self-help books out there that talk about making structural change and those really will help you if you make those changes but these changes are not easy to make it's not about reading one book and then just memorizing it and then all the sudden the change has been done no not at all reading the book is like one percent of the work and most of you are too lazy to even read a couple dozen books and you're reading the wrong books you're reading the books that are about content change not structural change so how about you make this distinction and then of course you push yourself more towards making a deep investment in your own development and in your own life by focusing on books which are about content I mean sorry about structural changes which I have many of them on my book list if you need ideas go check that out and then you hold yourself to that standard whenever you're doing personal development work is you you're holding yourself to the standard of making structural this is such a deep point that even though you hear it right now and you think you understand what I'm talking about you don't come back and watch this episode again another half a dozen times over the next five years each time you watch it every year you are going to understand deeper and deeper what I'm talking about because right now it's just like in one ear and out the other this is the difficulty of this work you're not getting the structure of it you're just getting the content of the things I'm saying so be very careful about that trap and I'll see you in the next one you