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[Music] you welcome to part two of this two-part miniseries on cult psychology where we're gonna look at the broader epistemic applications of the lessons that we explored in part one what I want to really focus in on in part two is that cult dynamics are everywhere in modern society and also throughout all of human history if you just take a look so usually when we say the word cult people think oh he's talking about Scientology or Jonestown or the Moonies or Jehovah's Witnesses or some crazy outlandish fringe conspiracy theorist groups out there that believe crazy things and do crazy things that have nothing to do with me and have nothing to do with my organization nothing to do with my business nothing to do with my religion nothing to do with my sports team or anything like that but you probably don't think of when I say the word cult Buddhism yoga science self-help atheism rationalism materialism capitalism Wall Street academia politics libertarians pickup corporations consumerism marketing mainstream media mainstream norms and culture ethics morality abortion fashion language psychotherapy YouTube channels Twitter Facebook medicine family abusive relationships homophobia the church whatever church you belong to the military sports yet all of these areas of life are infested with cult dynamics and so while in part one of this miniseries what I wanted to focus on was sort of drawing a sharp distinction between a cult and not a cult and that can be very useful it can be very useful to have a strict technical definition of a cult which I gave you in part one so that you can you can really evaluate when a group is a hardcore cult but now we're sort of shifting almost to the polar opposite and now we're gonna look at cults not in this binary yes-or-no sort of way like you look at an organization you ask the question is that organization a cult and you just say yes or no rather looking like that now let's evaluate it in shades of grey in degrees of cult-like behavior and now let's really break down what it means to be a cult into subcomponents because the label cults it's like this one monolithic label which stands in for a lot of stuff it's rather abstract and there's a lot of sub components to it and so while most organizations in mainstream society would not be classified technically as a cult if you're going to pose this sort of binary yes-or-no question to it they will still exhibit a lot of the sub components and that can be extremely useful to see so what I want you to start to see is that there's no clear boundary between where a cult ends and where mainstream society begins and then in fact most cults are just offshoots from mainstream society and that really it's a difference of degree not in kind and yet while we're gonna be considering this differences in degrees here today I still want you to retain the old lens of looking at cults as this binary yes-or-no thing using that strict technical definition that I gave you still retain that you're gonna be using both of these lenses simultaneously as you're gonna be analyzing and looking around the world and also of course looking at your own life and looking at all the groups that you are a member of and how cult-like they might be really cults are not a new phenomenon cult behavior cult dynamics have existed I would guess for at least three hundred thousand years modern Homo sapiens recent discoveries are showing have been dated back to three hundred and fifty thousand years that's modern Homo sapiens that means they probably had very similar brain wiring and very similar cycle giggle mechanisms which drove that drove their behaviors so it's very hard for me to imagine that 350,000 years ago there weren't cults there were and the original cults are basically just tribes and you can still find them in underdeveloped parts of the world in Indonesia in the Amazon in Africa you can still find tribal people that live in small groups of a hundred and fifty or something people and basically what are these groups they're cults they have their own little cultures their own little sets of norms their own in-group and out-group and all this stuff that comes with that and they're very defensive about their rituals their religious customs their culture their language their way of doing things you know how many dialects of language there are in the world not just a couple hundred there's thousands of them thousands of different dialects of different kinds of languages some languages are so small and so remote that you've never even heard of them they're not even written about in books but they exist within ezel tribes literally a little tribe will develop its own language over time and of course what is modern society but just a bigger version of that we've scaled it up into the millions and billions but modern nations are really just like large tribes you can look at them that way now of course there are important differences but it's an interesting way to look at it and also every major religion regardless of what it is is basically itself a cult at some point in history in its history and it's an offshoot off of something else and every major religion has its own cults that shoot off from it so the Jews might consider Christianity a cult and then the Christians might consider Mormonism occult and then the Mormons will consider fringe fundamentalist Mormon groups also a cult straying away from mainstream Mormonism see there's no end to it reality is always splintering itself off like that and that's what people are doing that's how collective ego works one of the trickeries with the word cult is that in the mainstream usage of this word there's a common mainstream mistake that's made which is to think that well if I'm not part of some fringe ideological group if I'm not in a cult that means I'm safe that means the things that I believe in my views of reality are basically true and correct and that's not at all the case not at all the case because what you're doing there is you're judging the validity of your beliefs and worldview based sort of on majority rule of opinion it's like whatever the majority opinion is that's like the correct way to look at the world and if you live in a modern European style developed country like in America or somewhere in Europe then chances are that you're completely bought into this illusion that somehow mainstream Western civilization has the correct perspective on the world and that by sticking to that perspective you're somehow safe you're somehow safe by sticking to science or you're somehow safe by sticking with atheism because you're not gonna get sucked into some radical ideology not at all you can get completely diluted by mainstream thinking now of course there's sort of a double edged thing going on here with this with this point because at the same time I also want to say you should appreciate that mainstream culture and society does in a sense protect you from extreme and dangerous ideologies and ideas it does have a sort of moderating influence and that is because it's gone through a long evolutionary period of trial and error where a lot of radical ideas were weeded out ideas that would get you killed ideas that would destroy society those were weeded out through revolutions and bloody wars and through torture imprisonment and criminal trials and protest movements and civil rights movements and Democratic votes and this has been going on for thousands of years Society has been evolving so in a certain sense mainstream society is we're evolved it's much more evolved than if you go to some African tribe and look at what they're doing there they can believe some really crazy stuff but that still doesn't protect you and that still doesn't mean that your mainstream views of the world and of reality are correct in fact they're wrong mostly everything that means your society teaches you from a metaphysics standpoint from a truth standpoint is wrong because what culture is is this sort of reality bubble that we're creating collectively together to help us to survive it doesn't care about the truth it cares about helping you to survive and those are two very different things you have to distinguish living in these reality bubbles that we create really it's better to call them fantasy bubbles is what human beings do it's sort of like our our distinguishing feature among the animal kingdom is that we create these fantasy bubbles in which we live and there's so many different kinds of these fantasy or reality bubbles that you can create way more than you would think thousands if not tens of thousands of different kinds so the trick is figuring how which one of them is correct which one of them is gonna lead to a productive living which oh and which ones are gonna lead to craziness calamity suffering and suicide and torture and other sorts of things like this and then how do you get to the truth see most people what they do is they get stuck in their own bubble and they think that that's what the truth is it never even occurs to them the truth could be a meta thing maybe the truth is not one of these bubbles at all so it's not a matter of finding the right bubble it's actually about seeing the entire meta dynamic of how the mind creates these bubbles and why it creates these bubbles and why these bubbles are so addictive and why it's so difficult to step outside of bubbles and to take a sort of meta perspective the view from outside the bubble and what that might be you know so what happens is that most human beings live inside these bubbles it's very difficult for us to see the world outside of our bubble and then we tend to reinforce our own bubble because we need that bubble to help us to live and to survive it's literally a matter of life and death it's not just a matter of like oh yeah that idea is cooled I would like to believe this thing there all that sounds like a nice theory no no it's like your entire life is predicated upon surviving within one of these bubbles and so you're gonna now reinforce that bubble compulsively and pathologically and your own clinging to your bubble is then gonna create all of your suffering and misery pretty much in your life and you're not gonna know that because you're gonna mistake your bubble for reality so this is the larger dynamic that we're working with here these are epistemic dynamics dynamics about human knowledge and how do we know anything in the world how do we know what reality is how do we know what we can trust how do we know we can trust science how do we know we can trust atheism or Mormonism or Buddha's and them or anything for that matter how do you know you can trust anything that I say everything I say applies reflexively on everything that I say so I'm not creating a sort of a special privilege zone for me and my actualized philosophy as though it's somehow immune from all these factors no no no it's it's extremely susceptible to all this so you got to keep that in mind but anyways I don't wanna address too much on that let's talk about the various sub components that we see commonly throughout mainstream society that is cult-like and perhaps the most important one to stress here the defining characteristics of cult-like behavior is stereotyping judging and devaluing Outsiders this is like the epitome of cult dynamics and there's a lot of sub components to this one sub component so let's cover the sub components of this one sub component so if you notice when human beings come together in a group we tend to develop sort of herd mentality and we start to stereotype and judge and devalue Outsiders and this stereotyping and judging and devaluation becomes very addictive and it takes on a life of its own it takes on a reality of its own there's always a in-group and out-group that's created us versus them we're the good guys they're the bad guys and once that dynamic or duality is created then a lot gets built around that to reinforce that and make it seem very real until people buy into it and you can notice in your own life how you've done this with other races with other countries with other languages with with people who look different than you speak different than you I mean this is found everywhere throughout human history and it's not just something that existed fifty years ago with your grandparents no it exists right now today you're seeing it in the news every single day oversimplifying the other group and then demonizing them and creating the sort of polarity and then blaming them and scapegoating them for all of the problems that you have in life and that becomes very convenient because any anything that I'm creating my life I can just offload off to some other group out there a different religion a different racial group a different gender a different political orientation that people have you're doing this all the time and all of your teachers and mentors are also doing this and then what happens is that that that judgment and that stereotyping that oversimplifying the other becomes contagious for example I don't know if you've noticed this but take a look into your history your personal history when you were a child or a teenager notice were your parents very judgmental of somebody some group some group of people some religious people or some scientific people or whatever some political party some racial group what you'll notice is that if they were judgmental about something you then very likely caught like a virus you caught that contagion of judgment and now it's very difficult for you to stop judging in the same way that your parents judged because when an authority figure or somebody that you love or somebody that you look up to or someone that you're a friend with judges something you tend to try to align with that usually so notice notice that I remember my dad this is kind of a funny example um he wasn't racist or anything but he would judge Chevrolet he would always make fun of Chevy cars like they would have Chevy commercials and on the TV that their slogan Chevy slogan used to be like a rock that was their slogan and then for us it became sorta like a joke because we thought that Chevy's were kind of ugly looking like clunkers compared to other cars like Toyota's and stuff and so we would always kind of like when we were driving we've gone on long road trips up Northern California and into Oregon he was doing work and I was I was on the road with him and we were just you know talking we were pointing at cars a lot talking about different cars that we saw new models of cars and so we it was kind of like between him and me there would be this kind of like in joke of like oh look at that it's like a rock this ugly looking Chevy and so and so but I but see I adopted the I had I didn't realize it at the time but I got infected with that to the point where like I would become judgmental of Chevy's and then like later in my life mmm in my early 20s you know I would see a Cheviot and then Chevy like improved their line of products and they started putting out nicer looking cars but I would still have that judgment and I realized oh my god this is exactly how racism works this is exactly how it works this is what we mean by this kind of stereotyping judging and devaluating devaluate devaluing some other group out there and it really doesn't matter what it is it could even be cars it could be Apple products it could be windows or or it could be Xbox or Playstation you know you could be doing this with your friends and you don't even know you're doing it as part of this dynamic also what you do is you ascribe bad motives to others you tend to view others as evil and selfish and has like sometimes when you when you create this rift you can create the rifts so large that you look at that other a group and you say I don't even understand those people that they're insane they're crazy they're so evil how could they be so evil in their actions and the reason you can't understand is precisely because you've already created this rift and you've oversimplified an over stereotyped them as a group because that's a gross abstraction that you're creating that group doesn't really exist whatever you believe about black people or Asians or Jews or Christians or Mormons like this is complete fantasy there is no such thing as Mormons or Christians or Jews or or black people I mean these are these are constructions of your mind really now don't get me wrong that doesn't mean that their skin color changes the skin color is there but what you believe about it and and the stereotypes you create and those kind of stories you tell around that that's what you're constructing also another component that comes with this is ridiculing and humiliating that other group because you can't take their perspective on life seriously they have to be ridiculed and humiliated which is why you see a lot of this for example on YouTube have you seen these videos on YouTube which try to be controversial a lot of these political videos where it's like conservative eviscerates social just you know like social justice warrior feminists and makes her cry humiliates and ridicules and like that's the whole like it's so juvenile the way that a lot of politics on YouTube is done it really is just ridicule and humiliation without really trying to get at the other person's perspective trying to understand why is there this difference between us what am I not seeing that maybe they're saying how did life shape their experiences differently and why is their worldview different than mine could it be because they've had a different upbringing maybe they know something I don't know none of this none of this happens when you ridicule and humiliate the other side so you see a lot of belittling of other perspectives and straw meaning a lot of what the mind does is rather than doing the hard labor the emotional work and the intellectual work of going through somebody else's arguments and looking through that perspective and kind of trying to understand why does a person see the world that way rather than doing that the perspective is just straw man it's grossly oversimplified to the point where then it becomes very easy to ridicule and to humiliate it and then by doing that you don't have to seriously consider it and therefore you can't really learn anything from it and then that that gap is growing larger and larger and larger and then at that point once you've straw man the hell out of somebody's perspective then all you can do all that's left to do is just to call them crazy or to call them hysterical or to call them evil or deluded another aspect of this sort of stereotyping is the use of cliche pejoratives and we talked about this in part one of this miniseries where I talked about how cults will create their own jargon their own language just like tribes do they create their own language and of course the labels that are used are often stereotypical and grossly oversimplified abstractions which are baked in with the various prejudices and judgments and demonization --zz that the tribe holds so for example a really good example of this is the the pejorative cliche axis of evil that was used by george w bush and one of his speeches back in the in the 2000s and it was coined by david fromm served a speechwriter david fromm and this was so interesting to me does this this idea of the axis of you ever when I heard this like it just it made no sense to me the axis of evil like how self-righteous an arrogant do you have to be to lump three completely unrelated countries together it was this this label referred to Iran Iraq and I believe North Korea and it sort of like you simplistically lumped these different countries with completely different histories different ideologies different religions you lump them all together and you call them evil like how self-serving it is to do that and then to actually come up there to think that you're actually you have some sophisticated analysis of the world you have some sophisticated understanding of geopolitics by using this label of axis of evil and yet as silly as that sounds we do this all the time in mainstream culture here's a few examples the label socialism is a very loaded label there's a lot of pejorative negativity assigned to that label and a lot of times especially in America for example conservatives will use that label socialism and as soon as they hear that word like in their mind it's just like it triggers just sort of a knee-jerk reaction like okay that's just nonsense and it's just stupid and like the person who's holding that perspective is just an idiot like that's that's as far as that line of thinking goes just because that label socialism and of course where did that whole dynamic come came from well it came from our history with the Soviet Union and the Cold War and all of that and car theism and the whole Red Scare all that stuff and of course the legitimate there are legitimate concerns about socialism so don't make the mistake of thinking here that I'm trying to advocate socialism as though socialism is somehow pure and can't create problems in the world not at all I'm just saying that the way that most people in America think of the word socialism and I mean it's changing now socialism is sort of getting a renaissance these days but still a lot of people have a lot of negative associations with the word socialism and it's because they have this very simplistic stereotype of it I would I would bet a lot of money that most people who are triggered by the word socialism and have negative associations with it that they have never actually studied any serious socialist theory which is not to say that they have to agree with it I'm not saying you have to agree with it I'm just saying that these people they've never even bothered to study it they never even like bothered to go to Wikipedia and read through the Wikipedia entry on socialism from beginning to end like you know you would think that before you demonize something before you judge something you would want to like at least read through the whole Wikipedia page on socialism before you do that maybe like read through Karl Marx's works first before you start to judge it and that's not saying it's right it's not saying it's perfect it's not even saying that we should adopt socialism it's just that you got to see what your mind is doing with these simplistic stereotypical labels also another one that's very common these days is social justice warrior it's like as soon as you label someone that in a lot of people mind people's minds like immediately that just triggers like sort of an automatic response and then that person's mind immediately either is like even for it or against it either that person is on the right side or that person is crazy the deluded social justice warrior or the opposite the anti social justice warriors right and so it creates this very simplistic black-and-white narrative another common label that's popular these days is cultural Marxism this is a very disgusting label because most people who say cultural Marxism have no idea really what culture or what Marxism are nor the combination of the two feminism of course has a lot of cliche kind of negativity associated with it fascism also you know so I'm not just speaking from the left liberal perspective here a lot of a lot of liberals for example will do the same thing with the conservative perspective they will just say that all well the Conservatives are all fascists and they're all racists that's also not right that also takes away responsibility from really understanding the conservative mindset terrorism is another label that's used like that see it's very easy to just slap a label terrorist on somebody and then you could say well we can just torture that person cuz he's a terrorist or suspected terrorist but what does that label even mean terrorists what does that really mean this terrorists mean that you kill innocent civilians using bombs is that what terrorism means most people would say yeah that's basically what it means so you know what's wrong with that isn't that wrong isn't that evil well by that definition the United States government is a terrorist organization because we kill civilians with bombs all the time innocent civilians so now you're said well no look you know so we gotta we gotta flee oh we got to fine-tune that definition so it's not bad is it involves more it's like terrorist is like when it's done in the name of Allah or something that's a terrorist well okay but you know but who's drawing those distinctions and are you really studying the dynamic of terrorism what it really is or are you just lumping a bunch of stuff together you don't even understand you've ever studied and you're just saying well those people they like theirs they're different they're weird they're stupid they're wrong they're crazy they're criminal so to hell with them that's the whole point of the label terrorism is to say to hell with them that's the whole point of all these labels Muslim Jew I mean we can go on there's hundreds of these labels that that are used I'm just giving you a small little taste so these labels are then used to create these sort of simplistic black-and-white narratives of capitalism versus socialism the good guys versus the bad guys the Christians versus the Muslims the Western civilization versus all the other lesser developed civilizations and none of these narratives are ever true the deeper you study the the facts you discover more and more complexity and all of these narratives they they just dissolve and that's precisely why they're always accompanied with these sort of knee-jerk emotional reactions precisely because those knee-jerk emotional reactions keep you from investigating and questioning these narratives and this polarizes people polarize a society we're seeing it happening right now so when you stereotype the other side and you demonize them of course automatically you're going to lack interest in their actual statements you're going to doubt and you're going to be suspicious of everything they say you're not gonna be able to look at the world from their eyes you're gonna fail to consider what points they might be making that might be partially true and partially valid so again it's this sort of like debate is so oversimplified that usually it's like well whose right is it the capitalists that are right or the Socialists that are right and it's framed in such a way as though like only one of them can be all right or all wrong which is absurd because capitalism has so much different diverse perspectives within it there are many different kinds of capitalists and socialism also has a lot of diversity within it too and there's a lot of overlap between the two so they're not totally separate camps and there are governments in fact virtually all governments are a mixture of capitalistic elements and socialistic elements there's no purely socialist country and there's no purely capitalist country either it's always been a mix historically even in in China even in the Soviet Union it's always been a mix so it's not really a question of who's right or wrong it's a question of what is that delicate complex balance that needs to be struck which elements are correct which elements are confused and there's plenty of confusion within both of them which is not to say that there's an equal amount of confusion you have to actually go through all the details and figure out where where the confusion lies but but when you stereotype that perspective as other then you're not going to consider those partial truths that are contained within that perspective you're you're not looking at and also you're not going to consider the partial falsehoods or limitations of your own perspective and so by doing this sort of judging and stereotyping people don't critically look at their own position and that is exactly the whole point it's really just a smokescreen from looking at one's own position and also a smokescreen from looking at other interpretations so in a cult usually what's denied is that interpretation is happening at all a point of view is presented within a cult as though it's not a point of view at all as though there was no interpretation as though it's just factual just the facts and this is where I have a lot of criticism against science because science you would think well Leo surely the opposite of a cult is science and you would never find cult-like dynamics within science but what does science do as a collective body but present its perspective on the world as though it's the ultimate factual truth and that no interpretation is involved within science and that size is just an objective matter that's how science is presented now of course really high quality scientists know better really high quality scientists who have studied some epistemology they understand that actually science comes with a lot of interpretation and that most of reality presents us with various facts and this problem called under determination which means that the problem is that there's a lot of different theories and models that we can create for the exact same set of facts so which model and theory are you gonna choose this is what's called a reality sort of being under determined and and see most people don't understand this about science well if you understand there can be multiple interpretations and just how much interpretation is going on with them signs and this leads to a false sense of certainty because when you believe that what you've got is raw your facts and that no interpretation no subjectivity was involved at all then it seems like well there could be no other possibility this must be the truth because you know science is not a perspective it's just the objective truth that's a very common trap that many scientists fall into of course part of this whole dynamic of stereotyping and judging is closed mindedness which we've talked a lot about in the past and also projection so what the ego is doing in all this judging and stereotyping is that really it's a lot of times offloading those aspects of itself or of reality that it doesn't like its shadow and it's projecting that unto others so for example with terrorism collectively what the American collective ego is doing is that it doesn't like to admit that the US military and various geopolitical maneuvering that we do as a country hurts a lot of innocent people kills a lot of innocent people we bond a lot of innocent people in trying to defend our borders as a country but see that's that's all sublimated that becomes our collective shadow the American collective shadow and then that's projected out onto the terrorists and so now we fight a crusade against the terrorists who are the ones who kill all the civilians and we say how evil they are for doing that and of course the terrorists aren't aren't angels they are Devils and in certain cases they need to be stopped no question about that but you got to look deeper at what is really behind behind the emotionality of this idea of terrorism and a lot of it is sort of the sort of unconscious projection of our collective shadow onto other nations calling other nations the axis of evil you know but take a look at how many civilians America has killed over the last 50 years compared to other nations and I would bet that we come up pretty high on the list maybe number one pretty high up there so yeah watch out for projection so all of these sub components that I was talking about was just sub components of the one sub component of cold dynamics called judging and stereotyping and creating this group of other creating the enemy out there so notice how your favorite group does this if you're part of an online forum a reddit sub group notice how you do this if you're part of a sports team notice how you do this if you're in a corporation notice how you do this against your corporate enemies the corporate enemy is out there you know if you're if you're an employee of Microsoft you do this against maybe Google or Facebook or Apple and vice versa notice that your political party does this notice how your religious group does this notice how your family does this there's a lot there to notice of course notice how you do it personally to another subcomponent now we're moving on so now the next sub component after judging and stereotyping is claims to absolute truth and denials of relativity this is something that cults do very characteristically but it's something that most groups do many people do this is they make claims to absolute truth and they deny relativity now of course you're gonna say Blio but you talk about the absolute truth so aren't you falling prey to this very same dynamic that you're speaking against well first of all you got to realize don't fall into the trap of demonizing all of these dynamics these dynamics are are not just really about cults these dynamics or dynamics of survival this is how the mind survives so I'm not saying that all these dynamics are certainly bad or that then they can all be avoided but also you have to make a distinction between those people who make claims to absolute truth who have not actually realized directly realized absolute truth and those who have now that might seem like well leo but that's a self-serving distinction cuz you're porting yourself into that category of people who have supposedly become conscious of the absolute truth and then the other people who haven't so how do you know how do we know who has and who hasn't directly become conscious of the absolute truth how do we know who's right and that's exactly my point is that you don't you will never know until you yourself one day stumble into the absolute truth and when it blindsides you and it mind [ __ ] you then you will know but you will never be able to convince anyone else or tell anyone else about it so it's like a black hole you go in there and only you know what's inside and nobody else will ever know that's how absolute truth works so I'm not asking you to believe me that I have the absolute truth nor am i saying that the things I talk about are the absolute truth because nothing I talk about is the absolute truth because the absolute truth can't be talked about so one of the ways you can distinguish between people who are legitimately in possession of the absolute truth and those who aren't is that those who are who are conscious of the absolute truth they will steer you away and they will tell you that absolute truth cannot be spoken of nothing can be said about it and that no belief is it no idea is it no Matt of talking will get you there and that it can't be qualified at any way whatsoever because that's what makes it absolute for that you need to have an Enlightenment experience but anyways I digress now back to the point is that notice your organization your group whether it's a religious group your family or whatever what is held as the absolute truths of your group of your community of your society of your culture that's not really the absolute truth never the culture never possess absolute truth but it sure does make a lot of claims to it so be very mindful that also be mindful of your own claims to absolute truth unless you've actually directly experienced absolute truth and you know what that word is referring to then you haven't experienced it and in that case you can't make claims to it and any claims that you may do make to it anything you do hold is absolutely true is not its relative another sub component is a sense of absolute self-righteousness uncertainty that often comes with of course the previous component of claims to absolute truth notice that the more cult-like an organization is the more self-righteousness it will exhibit and the more certainty it will have in its actions and behaviors and in its doctrines another sub component is that notice within cult-like groups how they tend to present one monolithic worldview that promises a solution to all of life's problems they don't acknowledge the importance of multi-perspective ilysm of putting on different lenses and looking at the world from different lenses and different perspectives almost never does a cult encourage that and so one way you can evaluate how cult-like an organization is is how much does it encourage the exploration of multiple perspectives and you can see in my own work I do that quite a lot I'm really passionate about that I love that and that's precisely what keeps you from getting locked into one perspective because see a cults whole purpose sort of is to lock you into one perspective it wants to monopolize the truth that's what the ego wants to do the ego loves to monopolize things and of course that's another dynamic while we're talking about it another subcomponent how you can evaluate how cult-like is an organization how much seek to dominate and monopolize whatever it's involved with and you can see a lot of examples of this within business for example businesses how monopolistic is your corporation how much do they want to dominate and eliminate all other competitors and you see many businesses are like that and you might say Lea all businesses like that no it's actually possible to run a business which is not monopolistic that would be a more higher consciousness business conscious capitalism that's sort of what I try to practice for example I make I make no aspirations to monopolize the teaching of self improvement or self actualization and I make no attempts to monopolize the truth or I know I make no attempts to try to monopolize the entire field because like to me that that's silly I'm kind of more conscious than than that I see how that would turn my organization into a cancer I don't want actually the hurt to become a cancer that's what a cancer does is it tries to monopolize everything it tries to grow infinitely for example you see many tech companies and big pharma companies doing this they create patents they try to seize these patents on these patents they try to lobby government in order to give them more power so they can they can not be regulated they can just spread themselves out everywhere so aunt Amazon is sort of doing this you know sticking its tentacles into every aspect of everything so like if we would let Amazon what Amazon would do unless it became conscious enough the leaders of it became conscious enough is that it would spread itself into every corner of society into every country across the entire world and he'll try to monopolize everything and basically enslave the entire world now and I'm not saying this against Jeff Bezos or against Amazon I'm saying that almost any modern corporation basically is trying to do this but of course it fails it doesn't succeed because actually the way that reality is structured it's not possible to monopolize reality um and that that's a deeper point that I'll talk about later but it's not possible because reality is structured in such a way as to maximize diversity so there's always a there's always this never-ending back and forth between monopolization and diversity and so what happens is that consciousness is always sort of trying to monopolize everything but then it also crumbles under its own weight and so eventually what will happen is that Amazon will get so big too big that other forces will come into play and it will break it apart government will crackdown on it you know people will start to resent it they will lose customers and you're already basically starting to see some of this starting to happen and also because they become so big they are unable to innovate they are unable to be creatively flexible in all this and so eventually smaller companies will actually over take them in certain fields and so this is how all of reality works is through a proliferation of diversification this is how species evolve and how life evolves how technology works how how business works how government works how nations work how races work this is very very deep point I'm getting a loft rack so so there's that watch out for this Tennessee within yourself and within your organization you know many religions try to do this and the way that you can evaluate the quality of a religion is how monopolistic is it does it try to convert everybody then it's a pretty low consciousness religion if that's his goal whereas not all religions are like that there are some religions that aren't like that they're not trying to convert the whole world like for example in fact this is one of the nice things about Judaism is that actually a lot of times like if you want to become a new Jew you want to convert to Judaism then you might go to a rabbi and the rabbi rather than saying okay yeah come on come on come on let's let's get people off the street to become more Jews and more Jews rather than doing that most rabbis if they're serious actually what they do is they'll try to dissuade you they'll say oh well why do you want to become a Jew being a good Jews not good what why prove to me that you really should be a Jew and maybe I'll think about it and a lot of temples do this as well like if you want to become a Zen monk one story I heard about how it works in Japan in certain temples is that you have to go there and you have to you have to knock on their gate if you want to come a new monk you have to come with a letter of recommendation from some from some previous monk then you have to knock on the gate you have to slip them the the letter of recommendation and then they make you sit outside the gates for 48 hours and you keep knocking and you keep asking like hey can I come in I would have come up and they say no go away you're worthless we're never gonna accept you and so they keep doing that and do you have to keep knocking and they keep kicking you out kicking you out until you know and know and no they don't they so they do this for 48 hours and then if you sit through all that finally they'll open the game to let you in so it's like the opposite of trying to proselytize and convert others that's the sign of a of a more evolved sort of religion another subcomponent of cults is that they love to emotionally manipulate and control people they love to intimidate to charm to seduce to withhold approval and love to shower people with disapproval and scorn to ridicule them to humiliate them finding ways to squeeze them to pressure them to leverage them to put them into an impossible position because this is what low consciousness egos do is they behave this way so notice how much your organization does this your company your boss your religious leaders your managers your political leaders you know the more they do this the less consciously developed they are this desire to control people is just like a dead giveaway of underdeveloped people highly developed highly conscious people do not have a desire to control or manipulate anyone and in fact manipulation and this specially psychological and emotional manipulation if you're doing it for example in relationships this is one of those things that it's just a dead giveaway that you have a lot more work to do because manipulation actually separates you from from truth and from being but more on that later there's a lot to say about manipulation but one other sub component is also the manipulation of lower emotions so a lot of times you'll notice corporations groups people trying to manipulate you specifically appealing to fear anger hatred guilt embarrassment because they know that these are the emotions that sort of get a knee-jerk response from you making you very easily manipulated to do that person's bidding so if I want you to attack someone for me or if I want you to donate lots of money to me or if I want you to to work long hours for me one of the ways I can do that is I can try to manipulate you by scaring you or by making you hate some other group out there or by making you feel very guilty and so you'll donate to me you see so you can see how from my perspective as the one who's doing the manipulation it would it would be very profitable and very lucrative in a in a set in a sense that it would significantly increase my odds of survival and reproduction if I was really good at manipulating lower consciousness emotions which you can see our current President of the United States doing very well right now see that's his whole thing that's his whole shake that's all he does that's what he's done been doing his whole life he's a master at manipulating lower emotions and that's what demagogues do cuz demagogues usually they're not very conscious but they can certainly whip someone into a frenzy you know Hitler was great and whipping himself and his people into a into a you know a racist frenzy of fear and anger and hatred and blind and demonization and then you know when you do that then that can be very very motivating you can you can move mountains with that force of energy but it's also very toxic and pathological and self-destructive in the end as you see you know what happened so it works for a short time but then it collapses and you of course you see that happening with with the current administration in the u.s. do you see the presidency collapsing you see the Republican Party collapsing right now and that's why because unconscious dynamics are sustainable they only work in the short-term another sub component of cult dynamics is cults tend to be very materialistic and pragmatic in an odd sort of way so on the one hand cults can be very sort of idealistic and they can have lofty religious purposes and goals and a lot of religions have you know these spiritual goals and it seems like religion is the opposite of materialism or is it look at how those people actually behave sure they love to cloak themselves in lofty ideals and talking about Christ and the love of Christ and how how important it is to to be christ-like but then look at their actual lives and mostly what you see is that you see these very same people actually being extremely materialistic and pragmatic in their business endeavors in the way that they recruit people to their religion in the way that they even conceive of religion you know of a physical heaven that you go to of a physical God somewhere in the clouds with the beard who physically wrote a Bible this is all a very materialistic version of religion and it's actually very pragmatic like for example you look at the Catholic Church you would think that well the Catholic Church they're crazy and they're living up in fantasy land no the Catholic Church is extremely pragmatic they run that organization just like a business they they have bank accounts with billions of dollars they they have sophisticated infrastructure for handling donations axes i mean they have their own bureaucracy they have like basically their own government in the vatican they're extremely bureaucratic and pragmatic and super materialistic which is the whole hypocrisy and the whole ridiculousness of it anytime that a religious or spiritual organization becomes pragmatic and materialistic you can already tell it's gone off their own track i mean it's it's on the wrong track and so when this happens ethical principles fly out the window because they're violated in pursuit of success so look at how your organization does is to look at how your corporation your business does this do you really care about following ethical principles or you know is it success at any cost and he means most marketing works this way most marketing the way that it's taught it's like well if they get you the most eyeballs then who gives a [ __ ] do it doesn't matter and most large fortune 500 companies operate this way so like for example if there's a big pharmaceutical company and they're making an evaluation of whether to put some new drug on the market or not and then one of their scientists you know says but you know this drug has certain side effects that might kill a few people and then they might sue us and that would be bad and the way the business managers think about that the wall street types is they say well but okay so how many peoples are gonna kill okay so it's gonna kill only a hundred people okay so hundred people each one of them Souza's for five million dollars that's 500 million dollars okay but how much are we gonna make oh we're gonna make twenty billion dollars okay yeah just let's do it who cares I mean we're internet positive we're net profit-making so it doesn't matter we'll just pay the legal fees and we'll we'll you know we'll make some settlements it won't matter it's very typical stage large thinking also marketing through stimulation of fear greed and vanity how common is that look at how most marketing is done look at the buttons they're trying to push in you also marketing through controversy polarization click fake titles have you seen this I mean most of the internet most of main kriem internet is is predicated upon this most youtube videos the most popular YouTube channels they're all predicated upon what controversy polarization click big titles scandalous topics and scandalous thumbnail pictures tabloid type stuff so that's a cult-like dynamic that I want you to see look at how even the government does this it's not just business for example in wartime during World War two I've shown this before I've shows the posters of how the US government demonized the Japanese literally as demons with fangs and claws or how they demonized Nazis also as Devils and vice versa you know they do the exact same thing in the other country to us another sub component of cult dynamics is the lust for power money sex fame love meaning and purpose so how much does your organization lust after those things how much is it fueled by those things the more it is the more the more cult-like is gonna be another sub component of cult behavior is a heightened sense of self-importance and a belief in a divine mission and of course this divine mission then justifies any means so how much do you believe you have a divine mission and how much how willing are you to pursue it at any means do you have a divine sense of self-importance and mission such that if I said that all well you could you could kill that puppy over there and it would help if it would help you to achieve your divine mission would you kill that puppy and you would say yeah sure no problem it's all good as long as my mission gets minute well that's very cult-like now of course most people wouldn't do that but you know hey never underestimate the Wall Street types they probably would lower a basket of puppies into it until cauldron of boiling water if you know if it earned them a few million dollars so take a look at how much you do that as well also another sub component is pride taking pride that you are part of the good guys this dynamic is is very prevalent for example in sports and sports of course are extremely tribal have a lot of collective ego in them the whole point of almost watching sports is less about the sport and more about the pride pride in your country if it's the Olympics or pride in your city or in your state in your in your team it's rather ridiculous what do you think about all sports really do they'll appeal of sports it's just it's like it's preying on low consciousness pride another common dynamic with cults is that they tend to split off and form new sub cults and sub groups and as they do that they always demonize the old one that they left so you see this with the history of religion most clearly but it happens for example with businesses and corporations as well you see this all the time is sort of like it's almost like a bacterium you know splitting through through fission it splits apart crates little baby bacteria and the baby always like demonizes the parent sorta in this situation right because the whole point of this cult or this group is that it's trying to create its own sense of identity so oftentimes the best way to do that is to split off from some larger group create yourself but then of course because you're small you're still small you're not as big as the mama bacteria you're still small and you want to kind of assert yourself in the world and so the way that you do that because you're small and you're insecure and all this is that you actually attack the thing that you came from and of course a lot of children do this with parents do that's why children rebellions parents why teenagers do that because they want to establish their own sense of identity and what's the fastest way to establish your own sense of identity demonizing some other group and in your mind clearly drawing a line between this is what I represent and that evil stuff is what they represent of course oftentimes what that is the projection of your own shadow into that other so you see this you see for example a lot of let's take Christianity the fragmentation of Christianity so Christianity was basically a cult of Judaism then once Christianity took over became mainstream then you had sort of the split between Catholics and Orthodox Eastern Orthodox Christians which are still found in Eastern Europe and in that part of the world and then the Catholics themselves during the Protestant Reformation they split apart into the various Protestant groups and there was all so many different during process Reformation or so many different sub sects and cults of Christianity and then we had in America later we had Mormonism then Mormonism splitable why this was just kind of it just kind of fragments like this into this bouquet of diversity so I want you to notice how your organization does that or how you do that in your life that can be quite eye-opening and especially watch for the demonization part so it's not a problem to split off you know it's okay to for example be part of Microsoft and then come up with your own business idea and then start your own business that's okay nothing wrong with that and maybe you compete with Microsoft the problem where gets pathological is when you start to demonize see sort of demonize like all Microsoft they're the evil ones because they're trying to out-compete me and a lot like that and then of course the big group also falls prey to this dynamic so like for example a lot of times what happens is that the big group will then try to crack down on the little group so for example when the Protestants were trying to split off from from the Catholics the Catholics of course try to crack down and of course there was physical violence physical coercion various kinds of ink were started and probably many kinds of Wars resulted from from this because basically they didn't want the the diversity of Christianity they wanted to monopolize Christianity to there's one simple thing and basically the same thing happened during the civil war you know the Confederacy wanted to split off from the entire US and of course the entire US a union you know it didn't want to let that happen so there's a whole war about that so you see this everywhere in society everywhere in history look out for that another thing I told you is that subcomponent of cult-like behavior is that you're told to ignore your own perceptions notice how this happens in whatever enterprise you're a part of this is a very sneaky one for example science does this and most people would deny that science tells us to ignore our perceptions and yet exactly that's exactly what science does science is almost predicated upon the rejection of first-person phenomena so for example you tell a scientist that you had a mystical experience what's he gonna do he's gonna dismiss that and say oh well that's just first-person phenomena that's just perceptions doesn't matter perceptions could be confused you're just hallucinating or you tell a science it's about a psychedelic you say here take the psychedelic he says know what what's the point of taking a psychedelic because if I take this psychedelic it's just gonna be hallucinations and just experience sensory data sensory experiences and perceptions and we know that you can't pay science on perceptions first-person experience see science rejects phenomenology science rejects the subjective that Sciences shadow is the subjective and first-person phenomena which is of course the only thing that exists and the only thing science could be predicated upon but because science is in denial about it has to repress that projected outwards and then science demonizes religious groups and mystics and people who use psychedelics and all this other sort of phenomenal investigation science demonizes that because because that's sort of inherent to the enterprise of modern science because it's rejecting perceptions literally to be a modern scientist you have to clam it's crazy you have to ignore perceptions that's what you have to do to be a great scientist because you have to be completely absorbed and lost to compete with other side you have to be completely absorbed in lost within concepts within your imagination to create scientific theories the scientific theories our imagination concepts they're not perceptions you can't perceive a scientific theory you don't perceive gravity you invent gravity with your mind as a concept and as a theory and then you formalize it using equations and things and then have to convince yourself that all of those equations formalizations and models and maps that you made are actually real and that they were out there in the world and that you didn't actually create them and that they're more real than your first-person experience of life and that that stuff your imagination all your concepts and theories that that's what's objective and this this stuff here what you actually feel and experience actuality that this is this is all the flaky stuff this is all the subjective stuff it's a complete 180 devilry is what it is you're turning black into white and white to black all of modern science is predicated upon this notice this double check for yourself don't believe me another stuffed component is fear that the world is coming to an end and this this sense of urgency that motivates you to take action notice how common this is fear that the world is coming to an end see the ego always fears death that's what it's always struggling against and there's different versions of this so spawn dynamic stage blue people for example will fear that the world is coming to an end because the moral fabric of society is unraveling and it's all those social justice warriors and and gay people and minority who are taking over and it's all now becoming vulgar and no one has any moral upstanding anymore no one believes and reads the holy book this is what's gonna destroy society that's how stage blue things you know it's like God is gonna punish us and deliver Armageddon because of the gay people you can go find videos of preachers talking this way I'm not making this [ __ ] up that's rather a message blue-eyed ass brother name is sage orange it changes the fear of the world coming to an end is different now it's a now maybe it's gonna be more like a fear of economic collapse or maybe fear the world will come to an end because terrorists will get a hold of a nuclear weapon and it's those crazy religious people you know it's all of the religion if we could just get rid of religion society would be perfect everything would be peachy and science would deliver us to to salvation that's the origin version of this Armageddon story and then the stage green version of this arm again story is is of course global warming and he cannot or ecological collapse that's the green version and and see see all of this this motivates cult-like behavior at every stage the spiral in a different way this gets the ego a sense of urgency now we can rally a group around this you know stage blue people will rally a mob you know fundamentalist religious mob stage orange people will you know rally some military industrial complex to go destroy the terrorists and the stage green people will come into a circle a drum circle to talk about you know global warming and stuff like this and then this will create a shared ideology between those people and then now we're off to the races now we have a group now we can create a structure around this now we can monetize this now we can you know create a whole collective ego around this now we can demonize everyone else that we don't agree with and then so people disagree about what's going to lead to the collapse of of the world and of course what that really is is just a projection of themselves it doesn't say so much about the world it says more about you whatever you're a theory of how the world is gonna end that says something about you so like if you fear that AI are gonna kill us all well that says something about you and where you are are at your level of consciousness and development and then when you're at the highest level you ain't gonna give a [ __ ] if the world ends tomorrow it won't matter to you you'll be you'll be sitting there with a smile on your face it won't matter because you realize it's all just a dream another subcomponent of cults is they create a sense of identity through being a good rule keeper don't underestimate this dynamic a lot of people find it very attractive to be the rule keepers in the world they really like they get off on this they love keeping the rules these are really the people who are like the military types the policemen of the world the firefighters the the religious moralists you know they get their whole sense of identity from being a rule keeper and so I'm gonna be the good one because I'm gonna enforce the rules against all those other evil people out there I'm gonna be the policeman of the world and of course is the policeman I'm the I'm the good one I'm the morally righteous one so notice how you do that notice how your group or business or religion or political party does that another sub component of cult behavior is loyalty and favoritism over competence notice how much your group or your boss or whoever does this do they tend to prefer competent people or those who are most loyal to them the less developed a person is the less conscious they are they're gonna go for loyalty and favoritism over competence because competence requires a certain objectivity and you have to stand off you have to separate yourself at least a little bit from your own personal egoic needs in order to be able to evaluate various people's competencies and then pick the one that's actually competent so like maybe you have three people who apply to your job let's say you have an important job and you will have an Asian person a black person and a white person apply and then you know you have you have a guy who's the boss who's making these decisions he's not very developed not very conscious and he's himself as white so of course you know he's automatically gonna show favoritism to the other white candidate like automatically because even though the it would be better in the long run for his business to really pick the most competent person let's say maybe the black person is the most competent one looking at the resume but that won't matter because the ego will be so selfish and so self-involved with its prejudices and stereotypes that it will it will discount that and pick the white one and it'll it'll convince itself that actually the white one is the one who's most competent and it'll create various kinds of stories and justifications to convince to convince that person that he's made the right choice see so to outgrow that you have to develop yourself and become more conscious become conscious of these self biases that you have and then learn to be objective but that's very hard to do if you're wrapped up in all these cult dynamics another common sub component of cults is indoctrination camps and trainings how many indoctrination camps and trainings have you gone to in your life and with which organizations your religious organizations Sunday school elementary school middle school high school university graduate school business trainings what is that but indoctrination camps also indoctrination of the youth that's a very common characteristic of religions and cults they want to get you early because that's the easiest way to to inject yourself permanently into someone's mind is to get that person early you know get them with that religion when they're still you know three years old baptize them real young start reading to them real young about the Bible about Jesus and all this right so um but don't think that this is somehow exclusive to Christianity or a religion this is exactly what happened to you with science for example or with atheism or with whatever kind of judgments that your parents taught you or with whatever kind of racial preferences you have it was all indoctrinated into you when you were still very young and that's fundamentally why this work is so difficult why histology is so difficult because it was hardwired into you when you were so young that you weren't you weren't independent enough to really have a choice and so now you have to you have to basically undo that programming that's very difficult to do because it's lodged very deeply inside your brainstem another common sub component is exploitation of workers cults love to do that how much does your organization love to do that how much do you love to exploit workers yourself also overwork is used as an indoctrination technique in many cults what they do is they overwork you to actually help to doctrine ate you because when you're so busy working you don't have time to really think for yourself or to become independent but then again how many non traditional non classic cult groups do this as well for example the US Army does this with boot camps many corporations do this many for example dr. residency's if you're trying to become a doctor in the United States they will work you to death many prestigious law firms will work there new lawyers to death in this way and you might think well that's just because you know they need to get a lot of work done well that's true on the one hand but on the other hand there's sort of a a much more subtle and sneaky and devilish motive actually behind this tactic is that by overworking you so much they make it easier to indoctrinate you and to make you part of their collective whatever that is you know so by putting you through the wringer of a military-style boot camp in the Army for example that get that gets lodged very deeply inside your brain and then that that will that conditioning will now run you for the rest of your life that's how a lot of our maybe people are and you know same way for a lot of these doctors and lawyers you know once you go through one of these brutal residency's as a doctor you know you're gonna be fully bought in to the Western medical establishment you're gonna be fully bought into that entire system it's gonna be very difficult for you to to ever leave that or to question that or to consider other non-western paradigms and of course that's good for the system that's good for big farm and that's good for the whole medical industry in the United States that's good for the status quo because they don't want you to have time like as a doctor you know they don't want you to actually have time to like question their practices they don't want you to actually question Big Pharma and question Western medicine and to actually ask the question like wait a minute I gave this pill to my patient but you know I sell a patient a month later and he didn't get better like if you're so busy working all the time you don't have time to check in with your patients a month later to see if what you actually did for them actually solve the root issue or not because most doctors I got kept so busy there just writing out prescriptions they're not even checking with their patient not even asking the patient like what the real issues are they're just right now prescriptions I mean it's insane and you know some fraternities and sororities have like hazing processes brutal hazing processes that they will put their members new members through precisely because that allows you to indoctrinate people better and then you know working together against some external obstacle that brings people together another common tactic is keeping a tight schedule so you're so busy that you don't have time to really ask questions and that's a lot of what schools do colleges do you know one of the most toxic elements of our education system right now in the West I don't know how it is in other places but in America I assume in Europe as well it's like we just we put students through the wringer of like taking more and more AP classes and just like more tests and more studying and it's like more more and more and then you need like summer school then you gotta take extra classes and this that is you're just so busy basically from the point where you enter high school to like the end of your university studies that by the time you're done with that like you had no time there for deep self-reflection and deep contemplation and really thinking through the theories and the ideas actually matching them up with your direct experiences and like working with them and like understanding them like almost none of that is possible because you're just constantly just trying to keep up with the school workload and memorization and tests and scantrons and multiple-choice questions and this and that and extracurricular activities try to get into college and trying to be you know the perfect student all of that that's basically a cult indoctrination technique right there another sub component of cult-like behavior is sophisticated PR campaigns and fake front organizations but this is not exclusive to cults companies do this oil companies do this they pharma companies do this political action committees and organizations do this all the time um you know the devil needs a fake front because he can't be looking like a devil he has to paint himself as an angel and that takes a lot of work you know there's there's thousands probably millions of people in the United States alone working for these PR campaigns and marketing groups and fake front organizations just to give a nice pretty face to all of the [ __ ] and egotism and selfishness that this corporation organization puts out and does to mask it you see so there has to be a an enormous self-deception campaign or just deception campaign going on and of course these these people who work on these fake fronts and all these marketing campaigns they convince themselves that actually what they're doing is they're just making a living and they don't see the larger dynamic that they're playing how they're contributing to the evil of the world through their marketing marketing is like the devil's favorite tool for for masking and spreading is evil doublespeak is another component of cults and what doublespeak is is just language which calls something the opposite of what it actually is so basically as a devil I'm gonna call black white and white black I'm gonna call whatever I'm doing good even though what it might be is evil so if I'm lying I'm gonna call myself honest you know if I'm cheating I'm gonna say that I'm actually not if I'm stealing I'm actually gonna paint myself as though what I'm doing is actually donating or giving or helping rather than stealing if I'm leeching off someone I'm gonna say that I'm contributing to them and helping them so cults create these kinds of labels these doublespeak like labels and so does society various kinds of euphemisms that we use to kind of whitewash our egotism collectively and individually so notice how you do that notice that your organization does that another sub component of cults is obedience to mechanical rules and norms you can very clearly see this within religion but you also see it for example within academia you see it in universities you see it in schools you see it in businesses you see it within bureaucracies and governments notice how you yourself become obedient and addicted to various kinds of mechanical rules and norms another sub component is impossible ideals so if you've noticed with traditional fundamentalist religion one of the problems that it puts up these high ideals of how you're supposed to be christ-like and how you're supposed to be super religious and all of this and how you're not supposed to be tempted by sex and tempted by money but then of course deep down inside these are all just facade these are just words just ideas and fantasies the person is not conscious or developed enough to actually be able to embody these ideals and so cults tend to have these impossible ideals that very few people can meet which of course makes you feel guilty it makes you feel you're not like you're not good enough ruins your self-esteem and that makes you even more susceptible to the cult or to the religion or to the business sources or whatever you know fill in the blank maybe your parents did this to you set you up with various kinds of impossible ideals and denied you love because you weren't able to meet these ideals and now you know you're still running around trying to get the approval of your father or your mother a big subcomponent of cult-like behavior is of course seeking comfort in certainty and authority that's one of the key things that a cult offers is certainty that you have the right worldview and an authority figure and don't overlook the appeal of an authority figure because very many people grew up in dysfunctional families without decent fathers or mothers who were negligent or absent or whatever and they never really had that father figure or that mother figure that they really wanted and oftentimes even if the father or mother was there they didn't love them or they were too idealistic with them or they were too disapproving of them they didn't approve your career they didn't approve your relationships we had sex with what kind of boys or girls you like in all this right they didn't approve how you dressed so imagine now what if you could find a new mother or father surrogate sort of authority figure and now this one will will offer you the answers to all of life and truth and now you don't need to actually go and explore the world you don't need to read a bunch of books you don't need to struggle through meditation and self inquiring contemplation studying a bunch of different perspectives this takes a lot of time a lot of money a lot of energy gets expended on this mental emotional labor you know it's difficult reconciling these paradoxes you're trying to sort through out through all this stuff you're confused so instead of all that you could just go find a father and mother figure some guru who you will outsource the seeing of truth to you will just ask them anytime you have a question about life you're not gonna question yourself or try to like introspect and find the answer within you you're gonna try to get the answer from them and then you're gonna of course start to worship their personality you're gonna get attracted by their charisma and their charm and their eloquence of course they're gonna be eloquent they're gonna be nicely dressed and they're gonna be you're gonna look up to them like a father figure or mother figure because this one you could actually choose you know your real mother or father you couldn't choose them but here you have to choose when you can find one that fits with your own wounds and emotional egoic needs and then of course you're gonna start to worship this leader and follow this leader and that becomes an addiction in and of itself is just to surrender to some leader who tells you what to do with your life and gives you all the answers to life there's a sort of a tendency in human beings to try to please powerful father figures both for men and for women a lot of men most of what they spend their life doing is just trying to like please their fathers and so so this tendency for an authority figure becomes very seductive so notice how this is happening not just in cults but this is happening in religions mainstream religions it's happening in politics it's happening in government it's happening in business it's happening within sports it's happening with actors and celebrities it's happening with YouTube youtubers you know notice how you do this how you create these sorts of leaders notice how you do that with myself there's a sort of a leader follower dependency fantasy that's created as though like you're following me and then you don't want to disappoint me and then I don't want to disappoint you and we get this kind of dynamic going and that's a lot of what happens within cults and then of course once this happens you start to idolize and lionize the the leader the authority figure because they are dispensing truth to you and they are a sense of direction in your life because you don't want to take responsibility for actually making hard choices you just want to be told what to do and then of course by that time now you start to believe that the leader can do no wrong because you you want to paint a simplistic picture of the leader as either good or bad black and white and this is what happens this is what this what's happening with Trump right now is his supporters see yeah he see him as not being to do any wrong not being able to do any wrong and then you know look at this happening in Islam with Mohammed Mohammed can do no wrong look at Buddhists with the Buddha Buddha can do no wrong look at the rajneeshees with Osho Osho can do no wrong look at the Pope in in Catholicism the Pope is infallible so notice how this happens outside of religion part of this the subcomponent of certainty and authority is also blaming whistleblowers so as soon as someone in the group stands up and starts just maybe badmouth the leader or whatever then oftentimes the whistleblower gets blamed and demonized and scapegoated look at for example what happened with Edward Snowden and the whole NSA spying wiretapping situations going on here in the US you know he was demonized basically um might even be executed in the future the u.s. gets its hands on him of course unwillingness to admit wrongdoing goes on in order to reinforce the sense of certainty and authority rejection of criticism and feedback of course no cults allow for criticism or feedback and many other kinds of organizations also suppress it so notice how your organization does that the more conscious and developing organization the more it's gonna allow for criticism and the various kinds of feedback and it's actually gonna solicit feedback and take the feedback seriously and of course avoidance of responsibility the whole appeal of joining a cult is that you get to avoid responsibility so notice how you do that with other kinds of groups that you join it helps you to avoid responsibility and independent thinking and making your own decisions another sub component of cults like we talked about in part one is that whole remember that pyramid structure that authoritative pyramid structure well I want you to notice more broadly in society all the areas that you see a pyramid structure that requires constant growth in order to sustain it that's literally the definition of a pyramid scheme so notice how many pyramid scheme like structures there are in society like the military industrial complex or the government's or corporations or Wall Street or capitalism as a whole requires for example never-ending economic growth which is absurd Wall Street requires company to grow faster and faster and faster they don't care about how much the company earns they care about how much the company earns more than it did last year so they want an acceleration of earnings every single year but of course it's impossible it's unsustainable it's a really kind like a pyramid scheme and it's waiting to collapse so notice how this this kind of structure happens and then also notice how people this is not a very prototypical cult dynamic is that people try to position themselves at the top of the pyramid in order to leech off of it that's the whole point of starting a cult for the cult leader is to leech off the top of the pyramid so notice how that's happening within government with lobbyists and corrupt political leaders in the military with corporations you know how many people are in corporations are trying to climb the corporate ladder to the very top because they know they can leech off of that because the higher they get the more power they're gonna have the more they can exploit the everyone below them that's the whole point of these pyramid schemes notice how even in universities this is their pyramid schemes and universities mmm most organizations yeah I'm not saying a pyramid scheme or just a hierarchy is necessarily wrong I mean hierarchies are actually very important and I'll talk in the future about hierarchies they do serve important structural functions within within nature and reality as a whole so we need hierarchies you can't just level every every hierarchy but I want you to specifically notice how people build these pyramid schemes with the intent to leech off of them and how maybe you are doing the same thing with your business or your corporation or your organization or your religious movement or whatever another sub component we talked about with cults is information control secrecy and lack of transparency so this is super common across all of business government and basically religion and everywhere filled with all sorts of secrecy and lack of transparency and that's because the ego and the devil you know does its dirty work in the shadows not in the light so notice how you do this or your organizations do this trying to conceal the true agenda of your business or your corporation or your your entity notice you know the skeletons that are hidden in the closet even within your own family for example notice how information is controlled house Christy in Maine is maintained and the lack of transparency that's their lack of open lines of communication in your intimate relationships notice how this goes on notice how much you withhold information and how secretive you are in your intimate relationship in your marriage that's cult-like behavior right there another common characteristic of cults is restricting contact with outsiders hanging out only with people you agree with hanging out with people only of your race or your religious orientation well notice how you do that in your life do you really surround yourself with the diversity of people and perspectives and employees if you're a boss for example or do you just tend to get people who reinforce your existing ideas and then you know a lot of corporations even make you sign contracts that restrict you from being able to go and work for another corporation in the same industry if you leave their corporation that's like exactly what cults do sign these non-compete agreements and so forth another common characteristic of cults is that they deny and excuse any collateral damage that their actions caused so notice how you do that notice how your government does that notice how your business does that notice how your industry if you're an entire industry notice how your industry does that if you're in the pharmaceutical industry notice how the farmers who do industry refuses take responsibility for its collateral damage and so do you maybe you're just a secretary working for a some you know big drug company and you don't make any big decisions but nevertheless you're part of this organization that causes a lot of collateral damage are you taking responsibility for that not in a way where you have to guilt yourself and tell yourself that you're bad but I mean like really becoming conscious of what you're doing in life and how you're fitting in to all these collectives that you're a part of and what these collectives are actually doing and how they're contributing to the kind of world that you either want or don't want very common component of cults is crusading or the lesser jihad as I call it externalizing your spiritual work being very busy out there without self reflecting in here or making your life purpose the defeat of other people that's like the definition of crusading and the lesser jihad make sure your life purpose is not predicated upon the defeat of somebody else or some other organization that would be a big mistake we also talked about a common stuff component of cults as being sexual manipulation abuse and irresponsibility so of course notice how much of that is going on around our society and government in your business and your corporation in the news in relationships and Families another stuff component is not acknowledging the importance of balance cults don't appreciate the importance of balance oftentimes what a cult does is it takes a good thing too far like yes maybe your religion does have some important wisdom and insights but when you try to take that and you try to convert the entire world to it that's when the evil happens you see so it's not that the Quran doesn't have some some beautiful insights some valid insights it does of course it does the mistake is when you try to make everyone in a Muslim that's the mistake you're taking a good thing too far or you're taking it too literally so like many religious books will have will have nice insights but also they're filled with some delusions and some antiquated notions and and stuff like that and they're filled with some bigotries and you know some racism and some homophobia in this so you know you're supposed to take the good stuff and leave the bad stuff but people you know they they take it too far they just want to say like well the whole the whole Bible has to be true the whole Quran has to be true like either it's all false or it's all true and so if it's all true we got to take everything and in a lack of discrimination taking a good thing too far it wasn't meant to be taken that way religious teachings were meant to be delicately interpreted consciously thought about an embodied in your life not just like read and then literally followed like a simple robotic one two three step manual that's not how religious texts were meant to be understood so so notice how you and your organization whatever you're part of doesn't acknowledge the importance of balance and takes it too far so it's not that you know drug companies are evil in the sense that you know we shouldn't have any drugs no we need drug research we need new drugs we that's all good but it's like you're taking it too far you know when you're trying to like market opioids to vulnerable people in the way that's been happening over the last five years or so in America you know that's an example of taking a good thing too far opioids are necessary morphine you know it's a good thing when you're at a life-and-death situation you're your scruciating pain it's great but then you know to hand it out like candy and then to incentivize doctors to do it through various kinds of sneaky marketing techniques that's when you took a good thing too far all right let's take a quick intermission here and we still have more to say so stick with me so I want to wrap up this episode and this whole miniseries by going through a list of cult-like organizations and events throughout history so we're gonna sort of run through human history here really quickly I've already been sprinkling various examples from this list throughout the first part here where I was talking about the various sub components but it's useful to just really get a sense for how significant these cult dynamics really are we need to take this out from the realm of theory and abstraction I want you to really see how this permeates and is characteristic of all human behavior and of course leading up all the way to the present so if you look at the origins of all religions they are just rife with cult dynamics and the only reason that any major religion today exists at all is because of cult dynamics it couldn't exist otherwise take a look at the Crusades what were the Crusades but various kinds of cult dynamics in action look at the conquest of South America and the new world with people like Cortes Columbus and Magellan they were pretty much motivated by cult dynamics and what went on with the founding of America and South America various South American countries that was all cult dynamics based the Spanish Inquisition called dynamics the French Revolution in the reign of terror called dynamics the 16th and 17th century European witch mania the hunting down of witches by the establishment Orthodox Church cult dynamics the civil war confederacy slavery racism ethnocentrism nationalism the KKK predicated on cult dynamics the Marxist revolutions of the early 20th century in Soviet Union in China in North Korea and Vietnam and other places call dynamics all the stuff that I talked about all those sub components you're gonna find many of them operating within these examples that I'm talking about Nazism and anti-semitism called dynamics misogyny and anti feminism called dynamics McCarthyism the Red Scare called dynamics the way capitalism currently operates in the United States and the entire wall street apparatus the military industrial complex the big pharma called dynamics the 60s hippie counterculture revolution with psychedelics and all that stuff called dynamics and also of course the crackdown on that revolution well the reaction against it was sort of the counter counter-revolution was also called dynamics and the demonization of psychedelics is called dynamics stock market bubbles called dynamics Trump the alt-right FoxNews Alex Jones the Rush Limbaugh and the Breitbart news this is all cult dynamics the alt-right is predicated upon cult dynamics what Trump is doing all of the the ways in which Trump motivates his base the way that he interacts with them the things he says to them the way they respond to him this is all classic classic cult dynamics so even though technically I wouldn't call the alt-right cult because it doesn't fit that technical definition of a an authoritative hierarchy in a sense you could call it a cult yeah I mean it's basically an online cult is what it is the various Russian manipulation campaigns that we saw in the 2016 election and that are still seemingly ongoing with Facebook and various kinds of rigging of polls and online media advertising and all of this the disinformation campaigns what is this the Russians are exploiting cult dynamics within the United States in order to sort of sabotage and so chaos and the only reason they can do that is because much of the u.s. population is ignorant about precisely everything we talked about in this miniseries I mean if if people broadly speaking just watched and understood these two episodes about cult psychology and they really not just intellectually understood it but saw in action their own life and they accepted it of course they have to agree with what I'm saying here which is a bitter pill for many people swallow but if that was the case this was part of our standard education in elementary school then a phenomena like the alt-right or Donald Trump or Nazism or the KKK would just not be possible that's why we're going to such detail about this because this has very practical effects and this is something that needs to be integrated this the understanding needs to be deeply integrated into our education system to inoculate people against this stuff and it will help to not only reduce hardcore cults it'll also help to reduce all sorts of other ideological and dogmatic phenomena and religious nonsense and even scientific nonsense and all sorts of stuff like that what about fads like beanie babies Pokemon Bitcoin the fidget spinner these are all based on cult dynamics about a year ago actually my brother he he's really into techy stuff and he was getting into Bitcoin and he bought some tens of thousands worth of Bitcoin I think and he was making good money out if this was right when the Bitcoin market was like at the very very peak with bitcoins were almost $20,000 per Bitcoin and I remember he was talking about bitcoins like back in the early days like eight years ago or so when bitcoins were just like a few dollars per Bitcoin now they're like 20,000 and then it dropped so anyways he was trying to get me to buy into them and invest like several tens of thousands of dollars in them because I was looking for an investment opportunity and I was kind of hesitant I was stalling and having an hawing but I was almost gonna buy in like at the peak at 20,000 per Bitcoin and then I just kind of waited and kept falling and falling and falling and it felt to me like it was a fad and and sure enough the market now has crashed the point where it's like I would have lost a lot of money on that so this stuff is very helpful another very interesting fad I don't know most people probably haven't heard of it it's called the 17th century Dutch tulip mania and this is detailed in a classic book about cult psychology and behavior of crowds is the extraordinary and popular delusions of crowds I think that's what it's called classic book where the author details all sorts of various kinds of herd mentality and interesting calamities that resulted but one of the cases was the 17th century Dutch tulip mania where tulips the bulbs of tulips they became like collectible items and they became extremely prized for no good reasons to the point where these tulips were being sold for thousands of dollars and even more to the point where some of these tulip bulbs were the most expensive objects on the entire planet at that time and so that lasted for a short number of years then in the whole market completely collapsed and like who even cares about tulip bulbs today so you can see how cult dynamics are responsible for that terrorism and suicide bombing is a cult activity also though Islamophobia is a cult activity and in case you think that Iraq too much on conservatives let me rag a little bit on liberals because liberals are certainly not immune to cult phenomena and I'm sad to see quite a bit of it in in in many liberal outlets so social justice warriors are certainly prone to it socialists and Marxists there's a sort of a resurgent like I said there's a Renaissance of socialism happening now but there are dangers with that of course because it's gonna get taken overboard too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing and so we're starting to see that happen certain liberal like YouTube channels that I like to watch for example of TYT if you're familiar with that one the majority report I like that one is as well but they also engage heavily in cult dynamics like one thing you see them doing a lot as you see them demonizing and stereotyping conservatives and this creates a further polarization and it oversimplifies the conservative perspective and calling all conservatives fascists and the like well actually it does a disservice and it only feeds into the sort of the prejudices of the audience and even though I like these channels I see them much more less more much more involved than Fox News for example or many of the alt-right sources you got to watch out you got to watch out because it creates an echo chamber with a lack of diversity of perspectives and that sort of judging demonizing stereotyping over some flying and straw Manning the other side and just even creates the idea of another side sort of a separation between you or uh sources the Conservatives or rubber or whatever and you got a you got to cut that [ __ ] out that's not gonna cut it if you want to go to the deepest levels of your development and consciousness so watch out you know it's hard to find really really high-quality new sources so what I recommend as far as news goes because most new sources are quite judgmental and polarizing these days is just really diversify the sources that you that you look at and sort of consider many different perspectives which is not to say that consider all perspectives equal that's also not the case so a lot of times even though these liberal new sources might demonize the Conservatives and not fully give them credit their surge generally more in the right direction than the opposite be careful with academia there's a lot of cult thinking going on within academia I mentioned wartime propaganda that's a classic example North Korean indoctrination I have a book on my book list about North Korea I highly recommend you read it that's like a case study of cult dynamics taken to the extreme and is really interesting because it's like North Korea is basically like a cult of classic hardcore cults scaled up to an entire nation it's quite amazing that they're able to to sustain it for as long as they have if you really want understand what the North Korea situation is all about you have to go read that book and and look it's gonna open your eyes to the kind of indoctrination techniques that they use in their schools like it's it's crazy like that stuff is like science fiction dystopian territory level of cult indoctrination and there's a lot of lessons to learn from that for me personally studying the extreme examples helps to highlight and helps me to then understand the more subtle versions of it that then I see in America or I see in Europe or I see in my own life various scientific and philosophical schools if you're student of science and philosophy then you know there's all sort of different schools and subgroups and subfields that science and philosophy divides itself up into and usually they war with each other there they're in conflict and they also tend to polarize and engage in cult dynamics and that hurts the enterprise of science and philosophy both and a lot of times the way philosophy is taught which I really don't like is it's taught as like one school versus other school it's like the materialists versus the idealists or the anti-realist versus the realists or the phenomenologist versus the analytical philosophers or versus the continental philosophers and this is just a bad way to frame it the phenomena of in cells pick up red pill and the Jordan Peterson stuff that's going on these days on YouTube and in the media very very cult-like be very careful about that because those basically are online cults new atheism was also cult-like with folks like sam Harris and and Richard Dawkins you see that the people who believe in that and who really are fans of that they become very cult-like in their in their commentaries and in their way of thinking that's also like an online cult it's sort of with the same here just interesting is like a cult of rationality which you would think like well rationality is antithetical to cults no that's not you could certainly create a rationality cult which he's done also with the occult magic witchcraft in various kinds of other new-age what we call the fields subfields these can get very culty so watch out for those if you're getting into that nationalism and patriotism is called behavior basically celebrities and rock stars Paris Hilton's and the Kim Kardashian's of the world and all this sorts of stuff it's all cult based on cult dynamics Western medicine very very cult-like watch out because that one could actually mean the difference between life and death for you if you get a serious illness or disease various kinds of cultural rituals that you might be attached to circumcision baptism female genital mutilation animal sacrifice even human sacrifice honor killings these are all cult dynamics and one really interesting one that I learned about just recently from Hinduism is called sati SI TI sati and what this is it's a cultural ritual which apparently goes back centuries maybe even millennia in in India where you know Indians are very family-oriented so if if the husband of the wife the husband dies and she becomes a widow then under this sati ritual sort of the ideal that the Hindu culture programs is that you're supposed to as the wife you're supposed to sacrifice yourself the wife is supposed to sacrifice herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband and even to this day even though there's laws in India against sati now but this was a very common practice just a hundred years ago even fifty years ago and even today if you go on the Wikipedia page and look up sati you will see that like every year even now in the two thousands every year Indian women commit sati and it's seen as like a sort of a prideful way to go out in life so it's very interesting and the only the only reason people do it is because of cult dynamics worshipping of various gurus leaders and presidents for example the way that the Conservatives in America tend to look upon Ronald Reagan and to quote Ronald Reagan is very cult-like even the way that we look at the founding fathers in the way we try to like whitewash the history of the founding fathers and idealize them is very cold like watch out for social media YouTube Twitter Facebook Instagram like I said all cult dynamics are moving online these days you know call cult dynamics are being modernized and and are evolving with new technology you know when VR comes out you're gonna expect cult dynamics and ER when massively multiplayer online games come out you're gonna see cult dynamics and those conspiracy theories are popular these days online flat earther ism and and all sorts of various kinds of theories what is that that's cult dynamics right there government censorship cult dynamics sports teams I already mentioned those the Super Bowl the World Cup the ridiculous amount of money and advertising that goes into that all the sales the salaries that athletes make this is all predicated on cult dynamics gender roles what are your opinions about male and female gender roles do you believe that male and female is a real physical biological category whether you do or you don't you probably have pretty strong opinions about gender roles and I want you to notice how those were instilled in you through cult dynamics and how they reinforced continuity hairstyles cult dynamics uniforms suits high heels fashion what constitutes luxury what constitutes very standards of beauty I remember when I was a teenager like in the 90s it was a spiky hair that was the best hairstyle for a guy's spiky hair and then it's like just the Justin Beaver hairstyle came in like or the early 2000s you know and it's always changing so what is that but cult dynamics gangs are an example of cult dynamics abusive relationships a lot of women especially ones with self-esteem issues get sucked into abuse and relationships Wiccan which can become very toxic and cult-like don't think that if it's just you and a guy to pee in a relationship that that is not enough to constitute a cult it certainly can and that's really sort of like the simplest way to start a cult if you want to sort of cult do it with your wife or your husband or your girlfriend or your boyfriend and you get to be the cult leader and they get to be the cult follower and you can certainly do that there's right now I'm describing probably millions literally millions of relationships in the world that fall under this category also though those can then turn into authoritarian and cult-like families so of course like let's say the father is I want to be cult leader so he sucks his wife into it and then of course they have some children and then they they turn them into a cult into a sort of a cult family and then you know you have authoritarian families that dictate down and then you see all the cult dynamics happening had a very kind of like micro local level right in that family and if you're in one of these families you came out one of these families you know how dysfunctional that can be you know how it's like a little bubble maybe your family was involved with criminal activity or abuses of various kinds manipulations exploitation you know all the stuff that I mentioned up above you're probably very familiar with those dynamics and it's precisely because of that that your life is so dysfunctional you can change that but it's going to take some work because unfortunately it's been programmed deep into you and you don't know any other way yet but we can work on that through more self-development and consciousness polygamy is a cult dynamic in our nation through television and advertising as a cult dynamic anti-vaxxers it's like sort of a cult dynamics and online forums can easily become very cult-like so that's the list I try to just pummel you with example after example after example because what you need to do with this work is you need to ground it I tend to talk about very abstract concepts and things and it's very easy for especially many of you newbies to not appreciate sort of how advanced some of these things that are being said are we're talking about very advanced stuff here very tricky stuff very self deceptive stuff that your mind will just it'll just like slide off your mind it'll go in one ear and out the other unless you find ways to practice it into two ground to ground the things I talk about ground the theory and your everyday experiences that's extremely important for you to do so I give a lot of examples so that you can see just how practical and applicable all this stuff is so that your ego mind doesn't just say oh well leo it's just theory it has nothing to do with my life and you know how can I possibly apply this stuff what could this possibly do for me well hopefully you can see just how far-reaching just with this one concept of cult dynamics and cult psychology is but really everything I talk about is like that to really understand what I'm talking about here it's gonna take you years of patiently carefully observing and studying yourself your family your friends your boss your co-workers your business you know your government your nation your religion your culture at large your everything the people you look up to celebrities you like and so forth so start doing that that's what you got to do with this stuff it can't just be an idea that like oh yeah okay I understand it that's way too intellectual yes you got to start with the intellectual understanding of course but then you got to like start to observe it and start to track it in everyday life and then of course you got to look inside of yourself and see it inside yourself it's not enough just to point your finger at say at all look look at that stupid person over there and look at that Trump and look at this Alex Jones and look at these extreme examples of bad people sucking others into cults no you got to see how you're doing it and that's where the real work begins is when you start to see how you're doing it because that's where it actually gets difficult that's where your mind gets really tricky on you and tries to get you to avoid looking at your own behaviors and your own thinking pattern your mind doesn't want you exploring and investigating this stuff but that's exactly what you need to do if you want to see results from the things that I talked about you know as a culture in the West in developed countries we talk a lot about truth and integrity and democracy but we don't teach people the actual underpinnings of democracy the epistemic underpinnings we don't teach people against the problems of authoritarianism yes we give people a few examples from the history books like Stalin or Hitler or whatever but that's not nearly enough what we really need is we need education of how authoritative ism is present in every ego and how that manifests in your life even when you're a child and you act like a little tyrant or a dictator or when you're a teenager and how it works in your family and all of this that's the kind of education that's necessary if we really want true democracy see because most people when you ask them oh do you like democracy they'll say yes do you like authoritarianism they'll say no but when they don't know how to spot Punk dynamics to get very easily sucked into a cult-like behavior by some wannabe authoritarian which then undermines democracy they don't understand the democracy to really have solid democracy you need to be able to be extremely conscious of your own self biases and your own tendencies to get sucked into these various kinds of ideologies and to see you'll see the bigger picture see all these interconnections businesses hijack cult psychology to make money politicians hijack cult psychology to gain power intellectuals hijack cult psychology to become famous and well-known and build their reputations which then of course also gets them lots of money and turns into a business see that happening see yourself doing it see the temptations of it notice the devil alive within you most people are devils and most people are Devils because their unconscious and if they seem good on the surface it's only because they're putting on a nice facade for you because that's what's necessary for them to slip under the radar and it's only working because most people have not acquired a lot of power Fame or money and so they really don't have a lot of opportunities to exhibit their devilishness and then of course we see with those people who are powerful and famous and have a lot of money then we see a lot of the devilish stuff that they do that comes out in the news see it all the time and there's nothing shocking about this it's just because we're not really taught how any of this stuff works and so you know most people are closeted authoritarians put them in power give them a lot of money give them fame give them sex and you're off to the races they will enslave you if you give them the opportunity so a conclusion I want you to start seeing cult dynamics everywhere be able to see cults in the sort of rigorous technical sense that I defined in Part 1 and also be able to see cult dynamics everywhere in society and within yourself and make sure that you don't demonize these things that I've talked about stop calling this stuff bad this is not bad this is how Maya works this is how devilry is devilry is not bad devilry is a necessary inevitable aspect of life and of reality and of the universe like a law of physics you don't get mad at gravity don't get mad at cult dynamics some of the stuff may be unavoidable when we're dealing with large of people organizations hierarchies herd mentality necessarily comes out but a lot of it can also be mitigated through really becoming conscious of how these dynamics work within yourself so that's what I recommend that you do alright that's it I'm done please click the like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website there you will find my blog what else the book list my life purpose course and the forum where you can come and talk about this stuff the last thing I'll say is that really I've only shared like 5% of my understanding of reality with you through actualized org so stay humble don't think you've got it all figured out and that all of it has been explained to you the majority of it I have not explained to you and that's because it's challenging to articulate this stuff takes a lot of work to really understand how many of these dynamics work mm-hmm and it's just like one of my greatest frustrations in running actualised org is the fact that I can only communicate a tiny fraction of everything that I've realized and understood and the most deepest stuff I can't really communicate because this medium is very limited even video is very limited even three hour long videos are very limited for the kind of stuff that we're trying to understand you have to understand that with actualize that org were like trying to understand everything we have a really a much bigger goal than science or religion traditional religion or psychology or philosophy like we have we have a very we've bitten off a lot of stuff here we're trying to understand the entire universe and not just theoretically but grounding it in our in our direct experiences and a deep exploration of ourselves as well so it's not like science where science is out there or I mean the objects of science are out there and then we're doing science over here so it's kind of like we're separate from the thing that we're observing using science usually no no this is a very intimate involved process where really you're you're running a mad science experiment on yourself on your own mind so there's there's still so much more that needs to be communicated I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to articulate it and the frustration of it is is that I'll never be able to put it all into words no matter how much I try because it's infinite but I want you to be smart enough to realize that and to realize that really with actualize that order no matter you know you watch a few of these videos maybe you start to get excited about some possibility your possibility for life purpose or you get a little glimpse of some mystical insight or whatever it's like it's cool maybe you have an improvement in your mood you have an improvement of your depression symptoms or whatever and it starts to feel like oh yeah there's something there and this is kind of cool I'm into it yeah let's do some self-improvement you don't even you don't even see one percent yet of this iceberg so I really want you to appreciate how much there is here to explore about life to understand about life and how practical and how significant it is right and the reason I'm telling you this is really I want you to I want you to become passionate about teaching yourself how to live not even through my teachings teach yourself how to live figure out life figure out why you're here figure out what motivates you figure out why your life is dysfunctional figure out how you're manipulated and controlled by your own emotional system figure out how to live healthily figure out how you're being manipulated and brainwashed by society by your family by your corporation in all of this figure all this out you can figure it out that's like your ultimate purpose is to figure it out and the rewards for figuring out are so stupendous and awesome and gargantuan that they can't possibly be communicated you can't possibly know how enormous the rewards will be until you're already deep into it so you need to sort of be able to intuit that because this work does take years it takes the gears it takes thousands of hours that's what I'm talking about here really I'm interested in getting you bought in to the idea that you should be spending thousands of hours doing this work and it's a little hard to do that because how do I convince you to do that when you haven't really felt the fruits of it yet I guess you got to either be smart enough to intuit it or you gotta have just take a leap of faith or whatever but hopefully you can see that if you are able to truly figure out life all of life not just on a social level or psychological level but on a metaphysical level you're able to figure out on all these different levels you're able to figure out how to live you can do that you know you can do that and you're not gonna read that in any book no book will tell you this no course will tell you this this is an intimate process because you are intimately at the center of your very life but I'm telling you that it's possible to do that this is the most worthwhile thing you can do in your life and you can verify that for yourself you don't need to believe me on that it would help if you started by believing me on that because you know if you're too skeptical then you're not gonna do any work nor any research and then your stocke but you need to go and verify the things that I say for yourself and then at some point it'll hit you it'll hit you the significance of this and even then you'll still not be at the bottom of the iceberg you'll still be only scratching the surface of it that's how deep this stuff goes perhaps the most amazing thing that I've learned on my entire journey of self-actualization for the last 10 or so years that I've been deliberately doing it is just how deep it goes it never ceases to amaze me how deep it goes it's I'm still my mind is getting blown every week by how deep it goes and I can see the potential of where I'm gonna be in in 10 or 20 years and it's amazing and I know that even all of that is still not even how deep it goes that's how deep it goes but of course precisely because there's so much depth to it precisely because there's so much here that can transform your life it's gonna take a big commitment from you it's gonna take work from you means you can't just be lazy and you can't just sit back and listen to me casually while you're washing the dishes or while you're taking a shower or taking a [ __ ] or whatever and then just like kind of like going back to life as usual you really got to reach a point in your life where it strikes you the significance of this that you devote your entire life to this this literally becomes your life this becomes your religion self-actualization but not in the negative sense of religion but in the true sense of religion what religion was supposed to be this is religion actualize that orga is true religion which ironically is the opposite of mainstream religion of course because the devil has co-opted mainstream religion so it has to be the opposite we talked about this in the catter intuitiveness episode so I encourage you to get engaged get engaged with life get engaged with living life excellently become a sage become a philosopher for real not as theories and ideas not as academic pursuit but as a way of living life because all you've got is this one life what are you gonna do with it you got a better idea what are you gonna do what are you gonna do you gonna earn money you're gonna chase sex you're gonna what you're gonna run around and join some religion and then proselytize people what what's worthwhile to do in life but this to understand what you're supposed to be doing how can you be doing anything when you don't know what you're supposed to be doing and the only way you gonna figure out what you're supposed to be doing is by figuring it out the journey and the process of figuring it out that's what this work is you