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hey it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the egos favorite defense mechanism distraction [Music] why aren't more people conscious in a word distraction distraction distraction distraction is such a sneaky phenomenon it's amazing it will amaze you it will both amaze you and horrify you once you see the full depth of it as you get deeper and deeper into this work and you start to really go inside really work on yourself man you're in for some rude awakening it really is a rude awakening now the ego has many defense mechanisms and why is that the case because they're needed to keep the illusion of the ego alive now by ego of course I mean you you are the ego not some part of you but you the one that I'm talking to right now the one that I'm addressing the one that I'm pointing at that you what that thing is your entire self not a part of yourself but yourself the very essence of yourself that thing there that's what I'm pointing to that thing is the illusion and of course that thing wants to stay alive if an illusion wants to stay alive it has to use all sorts of slights of hand to make it happen you see so even though the ego has many defense mechanisms one of its strongest ones is distraction because it's so sneaky it's necessary because if you didn't distract yourself you would inevitably discover the truth about yourself which is that there's no you in there and that's unacceptable to you you see you see the irony here you see the paradox it's really quite a mindfuck now when I talk about distraction what do I mean I'm not just talking about video and Facebook as a distraction of course those are distractions that many people fall prey to but to think that I'm merely talking about you clicking on Facebook and wasting time playing video games and that that is the distraction that itself is the distraction to think that that's the distraction you see that's peanuts compared to the real distraction the real distraction is not that stuff it's your entire life your entire life everything you're doing in your life has the big picture goal of distracting you from discovering existential truth from turning inwards and seeing what you're really made out of that's what the business the busyness of life is about I'm talking about your work your career business pursuing success pursuing money family relationships friendships socialization talking thinking debating arguing trying to save the world doing good in the world education politics church religion technology science these are all distractions see the ego creates all these things in a sense I this is just I mean I have to be careful here cuz I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush because then people will say that all this is so ridiculous is so impractical look there are redeeming qualities to these things I'm not saying they're all totally bad and that they shouldn't exist I'm just saying that in the big picture what the ego is doing is it's using these as human shields to keep you from really doing the inner work that you got to do to become conscious in life you see there are very convenient distractions now people misunderstand this notion of distraction because they think oh well a distraction is a very frivolous thing no no no no to have a really high quality distraction you distract yourself not with a frivolous thing you distract yourself with the most important thing in the world things like your career money family talking thinking science politics religion all these things are held by most human beings as the most important things in the world I mean what is more important than that you see and that is the distraction it's a sleight of hand that the mind plays with your priorities in life which gets you to have the wrong priorities in life which gets you pursuing the wrong things in life that's what I'm talking about not just video games see it's easy to think of video games as a distraction of course they are distraction and many people waste their entire lives or their entire teenage years or whatever playing thousands of hours of video games and that's a big problem that keeps a lot of people from becoming conscious that becomes an addiction and there are many of these addictions and I've talked about them in the past I have many episodes where we've sort of covered this topic but we're hitting it from different angles because it's really goddamn important I have an episode called 30 way society you in the ass that's the chimp episode where I ranted a bit about the chimp time of society and how society really holds you back from doing this work so that's an important episode that ties in with this one if you can recall I also talked about minimizing your lifestyle in my lifestyle minimalism episode so you might remember that one overcoming addictions that's another episode that I have which sort of dovetails with what I'm talking about here but here I really want to focus on the distraction so that you start to notice this it's really beneficial for you to start to see and become mindful of the distraction that's going on personally in your life how your mind is creating the distractions they're always very well justified always always your worst distractions are the ones that don't seem like distractions at all that's what's so sneaky about it that is the sleight of hand which creates the illusion and then perpetuates the illusion what are you being distracted from from turning inwards from really facing existential truth and reality and that's something I've talked about quite a bit in my absolute infinity episodes and in my enlightenment episodes but it's not just enlightenment of course you're delaying enlightenment because that's sort of the culmination of all this but not just enlightenment but just turning inwards and interests beckoning living the contemplative sort of lifestyle the way the Greeks talked about is becoming more conscious about all sorts of facets of life becoming more conscious about how business works becoming more conscious about how money works becoming more conscious about politics about spirituality about your thought process right so there's a lot of facets in life where you need to become a lot more conscious not just enlightenment although that's important and so the distraction is to keep you from doing that and why is there this distraction why is there this conspiracy it seems like I'm making a Sally a conspiracy theory well it's not really conspiracy theory your mind just has to work this way because it can't exist otherwise you see your very existence is predicated upon illusion it's almost as though you were a magician who whose life depended on him being able to fool himself into thinking he exists and to do that he has to be a really good magician now you might say Leo that's very paradoxical that can't how does that work if he's the magician creating the magic trick fooling himself that he doesn't exist but he doesn't actually exist and he's fooling himself that he does exist doesn't that prove that he actually exists and the answer is no it doesn't that's the illusion you can see through that illusion and that's the thing that requires turning inwards it's it is it is mind-bending it is paradoxical fundamentally what is a distraction a distraction works like this we make some noise over there so that no one looks over here and then we stall out the clock that's the egos game here to win the game the ego by which I mean you you not some part but you you merely need to stall out the clock so you distract yourself for 50 60 years of your life and then by that point you're too old you're too sick you're too stubborn you're too mentally rigid to care about anything and then you die and that's the end of the game and the ego won you won because you persisted as you that's the game that's being played here all the mind has to do is just stall out the clock with distractions see cuz you could easily spend 50 years of your life doing business chasing money chasing women having children going to school and going on vacations and playing video games and going to church and saving the world and doing all this sort of stuff but you never discover yourself I really want you two to grasp this let this sink in that 99 not just 99 percent but 99.99999% of all human beings on the earth die without ever discovering who they actually are that's a rather shocking statistical fact it's rather outrageous that thousands of years into human civilization this is still going on you would think we would have had some made some inroads over the last two to five thousand yeah I mean human civilization we think of it as 2,000 years old but actually it's way older than that big civilizations like ancient Egypt have been have been running for since five thousand years ago it's quite amazing and and we're making new discoveries all the time to keep pushing back the time where civilizations existed five seven thousand years ago and even before that really there were cities and this issue of discovering who you were this issue of enlighten this issue of consciousness is not a new thing this is not some new age thing this is the oldest these are the oldest truths that human beings discovered human beings discovered this at least ten thousand years ago if not way before that when we were still living in little huts and little tribes of 5200 people people knew about these truths but as civilization became more mainstream and it really blossomed and ballooned and now we have this population explosion we think that our technology is making things better but actually look at the statistics 99.99999% of people even very educated very intelligent very scientific I mean you name it people with the highest IQs it doesn't matter none of these things matter when it comes to discovering the truth of what reality is they die before they discover this truth which means that they are defeated by distraction that's what that means that's why this point is so damn important it's really worth reflecting on and this point about distraction I'm talking about it from the very macro sort of species wide perspective but also we need to drill it down to your particular path as your self actualizing which you're gonna start to notice is just how much distraction there is going on in your life and how sneaky it is then why it's happening and I want you to connect what's happening in you and why it's so difficult to to to see the distraction happening in you and then to resist it and then to see that in other people and to see that in the whole species then you see that oh my god as as a human species and as the human race we are just babies in this process see if we had like 60% of people failing but 40% succeeding in discovering the truth of who they were then we would say okay we're making good progress but right now we're at 99.99999 percent failure rate that's abysmal it's abysmal that should clue you in into the depth of the self-deception and the sneakiness and the sleight-of-hand involved just how strong and powerful of an illusion this is when something is set to be an illusion don't mistake that to be some flimsy thing this is a very solid illusion I'm talking about your entire sense of reality the fact that you think there is a physical reality that whole notion is an illusion and the fact that some people think that out what I'm saying here is somehow controversial or outrageous it just shows you how deep the illusion goes and even when you agree with me it doesn't help you to dispel the illusion the illusion is still there part of the illusion is agreeing with me it's nodding your heads and gastly oh yes this is also good I'm gonna watch more videos and let's keep doing all this and growing ourselves but see that's the part of the illusion it's all part of the distraction you've got to become very vigilant to the tricks that your mind can play on you there's this notion called the red herring have you heard this term used before in popular culture it's an interesting term actually had to look it up in in the United Kingdom I think it's where this term sort of originated from is they have actual herrings that they I mean herrings are our popular food there they're not popular in the US or other parts of the world so you got herring up there in the North right and what they do is they smoke it and they they salt it and when they do it gets a sort of a reddish appearance you can actually Google and see what a red herring looks like it's pretty interesting it looks very red but the reason that they call it a red herring and this notion came about is because the the herring is so smelly once it's smoked and salted that there's this story that some guy used the red herring to distract his hounds from chasing some rabbits with the pungent smell of this red herring and so that's what the notion red herring means red herring means it's a distraction it's something that I flash in your face some sort of flashy object I flash it over here you get so preoccupied with looking at that thing that you don't look at the elephant in the room and that's what happens is that people go through their whole life very successful people very intelligent people I mean our universities our top universities are filled with such people and yet they'd never see the elephant in the room which is the nature of who they are and what reality is they miss it because well one of these distractions is intelligence IQ university credentials if you're a professor or a scientist people just tend to assume that oh well that that saves me from this problem no it doesn't it only makes the problem worse whenever you think you've avoided the tricks of the mind watch out that's when the mind has succeeded in tricking you one of the ultimate examples of a red herring in this situation is the religion huge red herring the sneakiness of religion is astounding it's astounding at how successful religion is at misleading people from discovering the truth of who they are precisely because the whole function of religion in a name is to get you to the truth that's why religion is there that's why I got created in the first place it wasn't created in the first place by some woowoo people it was created by people who discovered the truth but the way that religion evolved and morphed and was bastardized by the ego to serve its own ends turned it into the ultimate distraction trap so that people can go and start doing religion and they can get really into it and then they think and they feel as though they actually are getting to the truth and really they're headed in exactly the opposite direction you see that's how sneaky this stuff is just when you think that you have got one up on your mind your mind has one up on you it's amazing it's amazing when you start to pull these layers back in your own psyche and you start to see this actually at work and then you connect it to everything that's going on in society and you start to see what our society really is it's just amazing if you start to do self inquiry if you start to get serious about this you start asking yourself questions like Who am I what am I you start meditating which you can immediately notice is that even when you make a little bit of progress maybe even especially when you make some good progress in this consciousness work you will fall off track something will come up in your life something important something will come and distract you and this is the most amazing phenomenon because it just happens over and over and over again on this path it's not that you're gonna get distracted once twice or three times you're gonna distract it dozens hundreds of times in this whole process this whole awakening process is you just constantly being tricked over and over and over again and seduced and distracted with red herrings away off the path you have to wonder if 99.99999% of people don't get to the truth why is that it's because the mechanism of the mind has so many red herrings to distract people that it's almost a miracle that anyone gets there at all it's like you're being asked to walk through a minefield that's ten miles long and it's just littered with mines you would be very lucky to come out alive through ten miles of walking in that minefield see what happens in the awakening process is that you awaken by one percent then you fall back down and you forget then you remember a month later and you awaken by another 1% then you fall back down backslide and you forget maybe for a whole year then you remember you again like oh yeah I used to be awake and I want to get back to that place and then you work on yourself you meditate yourself enquire and you wake up 2% and then you forget something distracts you society distracts you that's his job that's religions job that's your careers job is to make you busy to chase your tail in a circle you just taste it around chase it around until you're dead that's what it means to be yourself that's what it means to be you that's what you are the false you the you that thinks that it's separate from me thinks that it's separate from the whole world that one which he'll discovers that there are infinite distractions in society even if you just go on a solo meditation retreat when you're outside of society and you just sit there and now you're saying okay now I'm gonna meditate or now I'm gonna self inquire you're still gonna have infinite distractions at your disposal all the tricks your mind's gonna say oh well let's go for a walk it's a beautiful day outside so you'll go for a walk and that'll be your distraction and then your mind will say oh look at that cute squirrel that you see on your walk oh and then you're gonna look at the squirrel and that's gonna be a distraction see the distractions can be very micro they can be very macro but they can also be very micro your thoughts can be a distraction you might be sitting there you might even spend ten days all by yourself in a cabin in the woods but what are you to have there but a cyclone of thoughts thought after thought after thought each one of those a distraction and they're so sneaky and they're so juicy they're so addictive basically your mind will do anything to avoid looking inwards it has to look outwards that's its modus operandi then it can function and then it can survive your very life depends on this you see this is a high stakes game for you at least you feel that way until after you awaken once you awaken and you look back in retrospect then you see oh my god I see the shame this whole thing but when you're in the middle of the storm the ego storm when you're right the eye of the EO storm it really feels like oh man this is this is how life is is this just how life is and it's very scary just to to want to walk out of it because you are facing your death there your mind tricks you into chasing after career business success money family relationships sex reading books preaching to people trying to save the world arguing criticizing intellectualizing philosophizing educating yourself getting involved in political debates getting involved with drama with tabloids with sex with porn I mean like the drugs like it doesn't end you see how many options society gives you and the more our society advances the worse this problem gets it doesn't really get better it gets worse wait till virtual reality happens right now virtual reality is still but in 10 20 years when virtual reality gets good oh boy watch out watch out imagine virtual reality porn imagine virtual reality Facebook imagine virtual reality internet imagine virtual reality video games humanity's gonna be really if we don't if we don't prioritize consciousness above technological growth people don't realize for example that your entire career could be one giant defense mechanism one giant distraction or red herring from discovering the truth your entire career people right now who are billionaires who have devoted their entire lives to building corporations and companies and earning lots of money they don't realize that that is a red herring they missing the elephant in the room which is truth which is consciousness which they should be pursuing a great example this also with careers that are red herrings is a conservative talk show hosts people like Rush Limbaugh or folks you see on the Fox News Channel and I'm not saying liberals are immune to this as well I mean liberals also fall prey to this but but these conservative talk show hosts they make their entire careers and lies about talking and bloviating endlessly about their ideology and that becomes a whole career for them making are lots of money like Alex Jones comes my loss of money doing this your entire career can just suck you into this and you don't see that you're missing the elephant in the room and that you're just chasing a red herring and you those people are gonna die those people will die not even knowing what they missed they're not even going to know they're not it's gonna be completely clueless about what they missed which is the saddest and most tragic part about this as great as your life might seem if you're just living it in the ordinary fashion you cannot even comprehend what it's like to awaken and one of those amazing things that when you do awaken even a little bit even just get a glimpse for a few hours that's good enough to get you to realize like oh my god I came this close this close to missing it if not but for a few fortunate circumstances in my life I would have been just like everybody else I would have missed it and how sad that would have been I would have missed the whole point of life Society is a collective ego distraction that's its function many of the mechanisms society are designed to keep your ego perpetually stimulated and chasing its own tails which is precisely why many Yogi's and monks choose to go live in caves up in mountain tops or build mana Terri's far away from society they become ascetics Hermits recluses and in mainstream society we have a negative stereotype about this so when I tell people all I want to go live in a cave sometimes haha I put that out there as a fantasy of mine and then people have these negative reactions like Oh leo well if you're talking about living in a cave that's so far out there that's so radical that's so anti life it's so anti what I want my life to be but have you noticed the knee-jerk reaction that you have against living on a mountaintop in a cave a lot of people just have a negative reaction against this and the reason that is is not because living in a cave is bad it's because you've been brainwashed by society into this thing called life life as you know it is life within mainstream society you don't know any other kind of life to such a degree that it's ridiculous for me to even suggest to you that hey maybe your life would be improved by going living in a cave now the problem is that as soon as I bring that up is that even a thought experiment the typical mind recoils at that notion because it loves all his creature comforts and it says stuff like well leo are you really saying that I must go live in a cave to become enlightened what about Eckhart Tolle what about somebody else what about this guy here he didn't go live in a cave he seems to be a normal guy I'm not saying that you must live in a cave I'm merely put in putting this out there as a thought experiment as an illustration to see the extent of the distractions that are in your life and also so that you notice some of these negative characterizations that mainstream society puts into your mind because mainstream society tells you that if you go outside of mainstream society that is bad out there it's terrible it's a it's a wasteland out there you can't be happy without your cell phone you can't be happy without internet and without porn and without alcohol without parting without girls without guys without children without family you can't be happy with any without any of that stuff you need all that stuff you see and then you believe it and then now you're stuck playing this game not realizing that it's a game also I put this example out there about living in a cave is because I want you to see that actually your process of becoming conscious if you are interested in becoming conscious and also be still staying within mainstream society that your process will be much more difficult than it is for Yogi's and monks who go live in caves it might seem like well the Yogi's and monks you know they're very hardcore they spend their all all day meditating and and not eating very much and living in these very Spartan conditions it seems like torture in a certain sense yes but also in a certain sense once you're in that situation and you acclimate to a little bit and you extricate yourself from the bubble of mainstream society you're gonna you can experience a flip or it's actually gonna be the opposite you're gonna notice that how much more difficult it is to be conscious living as a householder with a family with a business with pursuing sex and drugs and partying and all this stuff that's the really difficult thing is becoming awakened while still doing all of that it's virtually impossible now I don't want to say that you need to go and live in a cave in order to become enlightened or to become more conscious that's not true it's possible I'm just saying it's almost impossible and how do I know that because 99.999% of people are in mainstream society and they are not conscious and you can see that just by turning on fox news or any news channel I'm not saying FoxNews I mean Fox News this is a particularly good example but even if you turn on CNN and stuff like that you still see it okay you still see it people's entire careers on CNN very reasonable people centrist people they're not particular radical xur right-wingers your left fringe is very centrist people on CNN their entire careers are still red herrings as though reporting on the news is what your life is supposed to be about you see once you get caught in a cycle of reporting on the news and getting paid millions of dollars for it you'll do that for the rest of your life it's the same as hooking up a rat to a little morphine injection and giving him the button he's gonna be pushing that button until he dies you know they did they've done these experiments in labs where they actually do this with a rat that rat will push that button until it kills itself with an overdose and that's just exactly what's happening with very successful people I'm talking about the wealthiest the most powerful celebrities businesspeople most intelligent scientists they're all just rats pushing that button it's quite remarkable to see this now a very important objection that comes up here is people people say the following when they hear this is it well leo it sounds like you're bad-mouthing family and religion and you're bad-mouthing business and you're bad-mouthing success and you're bad-mouthing sex and relationships and you're saying that all this stuff is evil and it's a sin and now I feel like I'm being moralized too and that all this stuff is bad don't get me wrong there is nothing bad at all in the world nothing is bad that doesn't exist no action is bad go play video games if you want there's nothing wrong or bad about playing video games you don't need to stop doing anything in particular but watch out because when I say that what's gonna be the most likely thing you do you're gonna fall back into your or mainstream cultural habits and conditions and just go about doing all this stuff unconsciously without seeing the elephant in the room and you're gonna waste your entire life you're gonna piss away your entire life if you're not very very careful right here so even though technically nothing is bad and nothing is wrong and you can do anything you want you can go murder people if you want from an absolute perspective there's nothing wrong with it but from a practical perspective there's a lot wrong with it because what you're gonna end up doing is creating a miserable sort of life you are the one who is paying the toll for the life that you lead I mean other people are too if you go around murdering people of course they suffer but what people don't see is that you suffer and that you're missing something way bigger in life you're chasing the really small fish when there's a whale to be landed land the whale don't lose sight of the big picture by getting sucked into your career or into your family or into your relationships or into sex or into pickup or into Wall Street money chasing and whatever hobbies of whatever stupid sort you know collecting a bottle caps or whatever don't get sucked into this which is not to say you can't do it if you want to go collect bottle caps coke collect some bottle caps but just put it in perspective make that an ancillary aspect of your life the problem happens when you make it the primary feature of your life you become a bottle cap collector then you make a career about bottle cap collecting and you start to spread bottle cap collecting as an idea throughout society and you saw it sell of bottle caps and you become a millionaire and then it seems like you well look I've a slight no you haven't aced life you got distracted you lost track of the big picture so I'm not moralizing to you here I'm not telling you that you shouldn't do anything you can do whatever you want but be mindful of the consequences of where that will lead you your actions have consequences and then you are the one who mostly pays for those consequences here's a good metaphor for really illustrating this point imagine you're in Disneyland and it's fun there you're with your family and your kids and you're all there together and you're going on the rides and you're eating the good food and all the greasy food they got and it's so fun and exciting and all that's happening it's like your first time there and then I run up to you and say hey guys we got to get out of here stop these rides stop eating this food put all this down there's a giant hurricane coming giant hurricane is coming and you listen to me and you're like ok a hurricane but Leo are you saying are you really saying that the rides in Disneyland are bad are you saying that this churro that I'm eating is bad and that my kids and my family is bad it sounds like you're you're dismissing this whole thing what's so wrong with going to Disneyland and enjoy myself leo it's just fun what's wrong with fun what's wrong with some adventure just relax man relax don't be so anal about it but you see of course I'm not telling you that there's anything wrong with being in Disneyland per se if you want to go to Disneyland go to Disneyland that's fine enjoy the rides there enjoy the greasy food whatever enjoy your family but realize that there's a hurricane coming what is the hurricane it's the end of your life as you will die you realize that and it'll come much sooner than you think and when you're on your deathbed what are you gonna have to show for it how are you gonna feel what's your connection to life gonna be when you're going through that process as your aging your getting to your 60s and 70s and 80s what's gonna happen there what's your whole life going to be about most people when they get to that point if they're still lucky to have some width left they're gonna realize that they have been in Disneyland gorging themselves on churros and riding these rides incessantly to the point where they just got sick of them and now the hurricane has come and now they're screwed and what I want you to realize is that all these rides they are fun society is an amusement park for the ego as I've said before but the hurricane is coming and it is possible to prepare yourself for this hurricane and the way that you do that is by awakening by doing the consciousness work by doing all the stuff that I've talked about and all my other hundreds of videos that's what this is about getting that ultimate big picture is very important and making sure to prioritize your ultimate big picture over everything else is very important if you get it sort of but then you prioritize it low on your list like number five number ten you don't got it to really get what I'm saying here you prioritize this to number one number two and number three all those top three slots are filled with this and then everything else can still happen you can still go to Disneyland but that's like number ten or number fifteen on your list in Islam they have a very interesting concept called forgetfulness which I like do you know why in Islam they they pray they're supposed to pray five times a day that's a lot you pray when you wake up you pray like mid-morning you play in pant pray in the afternoon you you pray in the evening then you pray right before you go to bed that's a lot of brain every single day that's quite a hassle why they do that the logic of it is is that if you don't take precautions to think about life and an existential level or to pray you know if you don't take those precautions every single minute of the day you will forget because your mind is that tricky and it gets that easily distracted so they came up with five times per day I actually heard a story I don't know if this is true or not I'm not a scholar of his law or anything but I heard a story that originally - to Muhammad when he had his mist experience with the angel Gabriel that's supposedly how he how he wrote the Quran is through this sort of channeling process that he sort of like went up to Gabriel and asked them okay so what do I need to do to to be spiritual and somehow he got the answer that well you need to pray in this way and you got to wash your hands and wash your face and you know so that he got all the kind of the minutia of how to of how to structure Islam from that and how to structure his his spiritual practices but the story is from what I recall is that Gabriel told him something like well you got to pray like a hundred or thousand times a day and maja mand with Mohammed like a thousand times day I can't pray a thousand times it asks too much I wouldn't have any day left to do anything else I can't just be praying 24/7 I gotta like eat and feed my family and you know do this stuff human beings got to do and so somehow there was like a negotiation process I don't know this is actually true or not but this so it's a nice little story so there's like a negotiation process between him and Gabriel's like well game is like okay well a hundred times and moms like now a hundred times is still too much you can't do a hundred times it's not practical it's like okay fine let's get it down to five so eventually they got it down to five times a day so this this little story I liked because it just goes to show you that really you should be doing it a thousand times a day you should be waking up you should be meditating all the time you should be mindful all the time you're taking a you should be mindful taking a shower you should be mindful brushing your teeth you should be mindful this is so hard because we forget see the problem with talking about Islam and so forth and living in a cave is that people tend to hate religious abstentions like when they are told no sex no alcohol no drugs no partying none of the fun stuff and then they think oh well these religious people they're so uptight that they're just anti fun they demonize all the all the cool stuff in life let's see there's really two different ways or two different kinds of abstention wine cut one kind of abstinence is when you do it because you're told to do it from an external authority so when your Bible tells you no sex no alcohol no pork no shellfish no drugs no partying and so forth or when you're you know rabbi tells you this whatever and then you do the out of obligation that's a very low consciousness unspiritual way of going about this the reason that religions and mystical traditions all around the world have these various abstentions and they're found in all religions including Christianity Buddhism Hinduism Judaism whatever Islam is because if you're serious about spirituality like the hardcore mystics were who ultimately sourced these religions you have to find a way to work around the distractions of your culture which includes sex drugs party alcohol so the worst of the distractions you have to find a way to minimize those and you see that those distractions are actually they're not just distractions there are also low consciousness activities which are really antithetical to pursuing the elephant in the room and therefore as you become more conscious you will naturally discard these things you will tend to discard them not entirely not in a rigid fashion but you'll just gravitate away from them you're never gonna see them as a sin it's actually gonna be the opposite you're not gonna see sex as a sin or alcohols listen nothing is gonna look like a sin everything is gonna look like beautiful life but to get to that point you're gonna have to abstain from stuff because otherwise you're never gonna awaken see there's a very big difference from looking at the world from a position of pre awakening versus post awakening a lot of the mistake that people make when they're thinking about pursuing consciousness and awakening is they tend to listen to teachers who already goddamn awake awake as and have been for forty years like these spiritual masters they listen to them and they think oh well I'll just do what they're telling me but that master is talking from forty years of post awakening not from a pre awakening perspective from a pre awakening perspective you got to be working your ass off and abstaining from a lot of stuff practically to awaken for a post awakening perspective you can just say oh well you've everything is fine you can do whatever the you want you don't have to practice anything you're already enlightened everything is fine there's nothing to do and nowhere to go that's only from the post awakening perspective you don't have that luxury when you ain't awake yet you see so watch out none of these things are bad that's what makes them so tempting you can't say that these things are bad I would actually be untrue so to say that alcohol or sex or whatever is a sin that's untrue to say you shouldn't do it that's untrue so in that sense many secular people are right because a lot of the problem that secular people have with religious people say well the religious people believe in all these archaic limitations towards life and you know what that's so stingy I don't like that it seems very anti human let's just be cool and kind of liberal with everything but the problem with that even though that is a step up from you know hardcore right-wing radical fundamentalism it's a step up from that but it's not that high of a step up because now you're stuck with all the sex alcohol drugs and partying and all that and now you're so distracted and chasing so many red herrings that you have fallen into the trap that the religious hardcore fundamentalist were trying to save you from now of course their way of saving you by moralizing to you and demonizing these activities that was not going to work it doesn't work that's why we see problems for example in the Catholic Church where these priests molest and abuse children because they are told that they can't have a wife they can't have sex with normal adults so therefore you know that drive because that drive is not made conscious and it's rejected and it's demonized as a sin it comes out even worse as pedophilia so you can't just deny these things the highest level of abstinence is not abstinence in a moralistic fashion or an ideological fashion you're not abstain because you don't agree with it ideologically you're abstaining because you see that you would rather have the truth than some some cheap sex just some cheap alcohol or some party to go to you see you develop a love for the truth a love for consciousness for being awake such that you don't want to tarnish it with very low conscious activities in the same way that right now if you're going to school and you're earning good grades let's say or if you're running your own business and you're earning some good money and you're getting some good progress from your business you're working on your life purpose maybe you have a nice family things are going kind of good for you and your life and now I give you a heroin needle and I say here's some heroin injected into your veins a person who has a happy life overall has stuff going for them they're not gonna inject that heroin you see why not is it because the heroin is a sin no simply because they have some degree of awakeness and they can see that if I inject this heroin it's just god I'm gonna spiral downwards it's not a sin there's nothing bad about doing heroin you can do heroin no problem but there is a problem in that it'll send you down this spiral of chasing lower and lower consciousness things and most normal people realize that which is why they wouldn't even do heroin if it was sold in their pharmacy but of course people who don't have a lot going for them they have nothing to lose so they do heroin and then they get caught in that trap but now replace heroin with your family your career the money the sex and all the stuff that mainstream society tells you is okay what are the takeaways from this episode very practically I want you to start to notice all the little distractions and big distractions that you experience every single day I want you to look at micro distractions as in just little things so like when you're sitting down meditate and then you're distracted by something maybe it starts to rain while you're meditating and then that becomes a distraction then you start thinking about the rain okay notice that ISM as a micro distraction also look out for the macro distractions macro distractions are things like thinking about having some children maybe when you shouldn't yet or trying to maybe you have a little business but now you're trying to expand it and you're having these dreams about growing your business bigger and bigger and bigger and now you might start to notice like oh that whole chain of never-ending business expansion that might be a macro distraction or getting caught up in in politics and maybe arguing and debating and becoming an ideologue and just notice that wait all this finger-pointing and criticizing and arguing that you might that be a macro distraction because I seem to be doing a lot of it just start to notice that I'm not even saying that you have to abstain from anything yet I'm just saying start to notice it start to wash it as it happens that begins the process of becoming aware as I talked about in my awareness is your awareness alone is curative episode just by becoming more mindful of these things the problem will start to fix itself slowly just slowly by watching it another important takeaway here is it's okay to get distracted I don't want you to demonize distraction because what happens you sure to notice the distraction you see start saying yourself all man I'm such a bad person I can't meditate I can't do anything Leo is saying I'm such a and then you try to feel a little guilty about it be careful about judging yourself you have to appreciate that this mechanism of the mind is what allows you to exist it's a very powerful mechanism your entire life hinges upon it so it's not gonna get disassembled and you can struck it easily it's gonna it's gonna employ a lot of tricks it's gonna take a lot of time probably years for this whole process to unfold so don't judge yourself if you make mistakes if you get distracted even despite your best efforts just realize that really it's not up to you this is a force of nature in the same way that if you were in the middle of a hurricane and you were getting blown over you wouldn't guilt yourself for that too much you realize that it's a Ford it's a very powerful force of nature a hurricane is much more powerful than you are well this distraction your own mind I'm telling you it's a more powerful force than a category-5 hurricane it's much stronger it's much more consistent it'll stay with you for the rest of your life unless you really make some some mindful efforts to overcome it the key is to stay mindful of the mechanism and not let your mind get turned outward too much just stay mindful if you can just stay mindful of how this inward outward process is going it's like some days you're so focused outward you completely forget about the inward aspect of your life some days you're focused inward you kind of forget about the hour sometimes a bit of both right so if you just kind of start to see this happening throughout your day throughout your week throughout your life watching that mechanism a lot will help you to become conscious over time you'll start to get a sense and a feel for what's really going on and why it's happening and actually you start to appreciate the raw power of these defense mechanisms of the mind appreciate them don't demonize them don't beat yourself up over falling into them they're very sneaky traps 99.99% of people in the world are trapped by them and they will never break free they will not even break free if you show them this episode they will still not break free they will not even break free if you show them all 300 or so of the episodes that I currently have they will still not break free in fact the episodes will just become another distraction for them because it's layer upon layer upon layer of distraction the distractions are woven into each other and they happen on the micro and the macro level and everything in between start appreciating that raw power it's actually a rather beautiful thing when you see it it's an ingenious design it's an ingenious design of nature that our minds work this way start to appreciate that another take away is to just be mindful of how these mechanisms are working in society notice the structures that are built by our society and by our culture and how they reinforce and play into these traps and that they make them worse again the mistake here would then be to demonize society or to demonize other people for inventing these things but you have to recognize that this is a much larger force than any one individual or even any one politician or any one government or any one culture these forces are much much much larger than that this is the overarching force of ignorance this whole process is a process of the universe becoming conscious of itself and it starts from a position of low consciousness and moves towards a position of higher consciousness ac it's sort of an evolutionary process and it's always a struggle and this is the struggle that you see throughout all of history throughout all of humanity throughout all of science throughout all technology throughout all of religion it's this business process and this process is not a straight linear upward line like this it's a wavy sort of up and down and jaggedy sort of thing but overall it's it trends upwards but it's like like this and you never know when you're stuck in the bottom here you see it takes takes thousands of years for this stuff to really shift so start to notice what society is and remember that I am not telling you to become a workaholic I am not telling you to become a moralist I am not telling you to be religious I am not telling you to be anal about life and to deny yourself the pleasures of life the whole point of abstaining from lower consciousness things is that you can get to higher consciousness things and then when you're at the very highest consciousness things and you have your awakening really a really deep one then everything in life becomes joy and you're not just cherry-picking the problem with low consciousness stuff is they have to cherry-pick and all your happiness becomes contingent on you successfully cherry-picking the right stuff like yeah if you have heroin to inject into your veins you're happy otherwise you're not you see that's a very limited ability to enjoy life your ability to enjoy life at that point is like this it's tiny whereas as you become more conscious by abstaining from stuff it might seem like well but I'm but I'm rejecting life yes at first it seems that way but then there's a sort of inversion the thing goes full circle and actually then everything becomes open to you and then you can just sit do nothing and it feels like you have heroin flowing through your veins so in a sense spirituality is really the most hedonistic way to live but it's a it's a it's the exact opposite of hedonism especially when you're trying to get it going see this tricks a lot of people because this is very counterintuitive it's like you seem like it seems like you're going one direction but you're going the opposite that tends to be how the mind works it works in 180 degree reversals like that of course I'm not immune to any of this I have a lot of distractions in my life and one of my macro distractions is actualized org actualize that really is a huge distraction for me I still think it's important and I have reasons for why I'm doing it and I'm not sure where it's gonna go in the future maybe it'll stop at some point maybe it won't I don't know it might evolve I might quit eventually at some point I mean totally at some point but uh but I recognize that it's a distraction a distraction isn't necessarily mean you need to quit it watch it become conscious of it and watch out that actualize that org doesn't become a distraction for you that's also very easy because on the one hand you do need the theory the theory is very important you also need the motivation you do need someone to inspire you and to help wake you up every single week there are important functions there that actualize energy serving but also it could easily be overused I hear about some people watching all my episodes three times over and over and over again that's probably too much probably too much don't turn this into a philosophical mental masturbation exercise but then again if you need to do that then do it you have to figure that out there's a flying balancing act here and like I talked about in my balancing episode the importance of balance and personal development no one can tell you what the right balance is for you that's part of this whole growth process is discovering what that balance is you don't even know what that balances until you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty all right that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualize that or work my website right here I have some resources for you there the forum which can be a distraction but it can also have some valuable content on there and some motivation and some help my blog the life purpose course the book list and I want to release more content in the future that's gonna be exclusively available there so stick with me for more you