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[Music] i want to share a simple but powerful principle with you that will help you to make sense of all human behavior for the rest of your life the problem is that this principle is so simple and so deeply counter-intuitive that you're not going to want to believe it it'll take you a long time of really contemplating this and looking for it out in reality to notice its truth it's gonna seem kind of stupid at first but anyways i hope your mind is open the principle is this that every human being acts with good intention that's it every human being acts with good intention this includes the most evil quote-unquote evil humans that you think exist out there and act with bad intentions all of it is actually action from good intention so this is a point that so many people misunderstand and especially when it comes to understanding things that are happening in the world you you pop open the webpage and look at the latest news and what do you see on the news you see a page full of evil it's like a catalog of all of mankind's evils every single day that's what the news effectively is and then um you argue and debate with people ideologically over differences in politics or worldview or religion or about science or about reality or about spirituality all of these debates and differences in in in perspective and uh it becomes very difficult for the human mind to make sense of these differences in perspective and rather than taking on the burden and the responsibility and taking extreme ownership over making sense of these relativistic differences what the human mind does is instead it demonizes and it ascribes bad intent to these other actors when you can't understand somebody's actions and they do something that goes against your own agenda the naive mind naturally ascribes to that actor a bad intention in the worst case scenario you call that person evil or you might even say he's uh possessed by satan or something like that or some sort of demonic forces or maybe you'll call him crazy i want you to resist that temptation this is a very counter-intuitive move that you make and it takes a lot of personal responsibility and intellectual integrity to to make this move even if you're the type of person that doesn't believe in satan and devils and demons and dark entities possessing people and so forth reptilians and whatever else even if you're a secularly minded rational person you will still ascribe evil intentions and motives to lots of people and organizations around the world and you will use this as part of your sense-making paradigm and it's very counterintuitive even for people like that to let go of that and to take on more responsibility for making sense of the situation and to really try to see the relativistic difference in perspective between different actors and agents and yourself and the reason this is so difficult is because we have our own survival agenda that we're dealing with we have our own biases we have our own perspective and paradigm that we're locked into and so part of how the ego works and you should you should see this and feel this in your own life if you are practicing introspection see my episode called developing introspection which tells you how to do that but if you're practicing that through deep self-reflection introspection what you should notice but as you're studying the the psychodynamics of your ego mind what you'll notice is that whenever you're acting in the world you see yourself as a good actor always always always you always have good intentions isn't that funny shouldn't that make you suspicious how is it that you're such a good person all the time because objectively if we look at you objectively you're not a good person you've done all this in your life you're extremely selfish you're biased you're fearful you get angry you're emotional you're needy you're attached to all sorts of things you manipulate you scheme you lie all the time you do this no matter who you are and yet you're such a good person according to who according to you ah it's funny it's a joke it's a cosmic joke what you're doing you seem so good to yourself even if you hate yourself you still basically think you have good intentions well what needs to be seen and recognized is that everybody is this way there's nothing special about you that gives you good intentions above everybody else everybody behaves this way because that's just the dynamic nature of the ego mind the ego mind distorts reality and consciousness in such a way as to make itself become the definition of good the very notion of goodness is relativized and co-opted by the ego mind after all what does it mean to say that something is good when you say it when a person like you says it when an ego says something is good all that means is that it's good for that ego that's what the ego means good is defined relative to your ego and so the key here is to see the profound relativity behind all human actions and if you don't do this you will forever be perplexed and confused and angered and upset and disturbed by all the ongoings that you see in the world by various human actors you actually will not be able to make proper sense of it so what i'm telling you is that all of the stuff that you consider evil terrorists rapists political enemies that you have thieves and criminals and con artists racists and misogynists and homophobes and transphobes and grifters of various sorts you think these people are acting with bad intentions they aren't they're all acting with good intentions elites this is a popular trap that people are falling into now there's this sort of uh duality that's being set up now in the media especially on non-mainstream media about the the populists the ordinary little people versus the elites and the elites are the evil ones the corporations are the evil ones they have bad intentions leo obviously the military industrial complex has bad intentions obviously the tobacco companies have bad intentions obviously big pharma has bad intentions obviously the deep state has bad intentions the cia has bad intentions no all of them have good intentions just like you they're just selfish just like you from their point of view their ego mind has twisted consciousness in such a manner that what they're doing is justified in their own minds with good intentions and they see it legitimately as them acting from good intentions so they have complete plausible deniability for their actions so when a terrorist chops someone's head off in his mind that is done with the best of intentions this is a bit disturbing to accept because of what it means for you he said here you were navigating through life believing that you're the good guy believing that your your tribe and your team and your side and your political party and your company and your race and your ethnicity and your country that that you're all the good guys and then those others over there whether it's the corporations or the military-industrial complex or the oil companies or the pharma companies or the elites or the the muslims or the christians or the jews or the atheists or whatever that they are the bad guys they're the ones who have bad intentions they're the grifters they're the con artists they're the thieves they're the abusers they're the racists but that is just how your ego mind has twisted and distorted consciousness to suit yourself to really understand what i'm talking about here you're gonna have to go watch my episode called understanding relativity reli relativism which is the same thing as when i say relativity really i i wish i retitled that episode it should be called understanding relativity i didn't title that because i didn't want to get confused with einstein's relativity so i called it relativism um to differentiate it a bit but uh so yeah so that episode you got to watch that and contemplate that deeply uh and also you need to watch my episode called self bias that's a foundational episode so when you understand those two things then you can start to get a bit of a clue that it could be the case that literally everybody is acting with good intentions but you might wonder but leo how could these people be committing such obvious acts of of evil and inflicting so much suffering onto others it's so obvious what they're doing well it's obvious to you from your point of view it's not obvious to them the challenge here is that it's really difficult to see outside of one's own perspective it's one of the most difficult things in the world so there's sort of a optical illusion of consciousness that takes place where it's very easy to see the obvious mistakes of other people in the government and corporations and elsewhere that are happening in other countries and other ethnic groups and other tribes other political parties but it's very difficult to see one's own and the reason it's so difficult to see one's own obvious mistakes and blunders and collateral damage that one does is because it doesn't serve you to see it see that's what selfishness fundamentally is selfishness means you don't care about the collateral damage or footprint that your existence has upon others because if you did care if you cared too much if you were too empathetic it would be difficult for you to live it would be difficult for you to eat it would be difficult for you just to drive down to the grocery store and buy your groceries because on your way there at the traffic light you would see a couple of homeless people and you would so empathize with their miserable situation how hungry they are how hot they are out there in the middle of the baking sun in the in the summer heat how little water they have how what kind of mental illnesses they have how much they've been abused as as children all this if you truly understood their point of view this would move you so deeply that you would give them all of your money you wouldn't have any money left to shop for groceries because you would you would think about it but you'd say you know what i still have a pantry full of stuff i could probably use i don't need the money these people need it way more than i do i was just driving a grocery store to buy some ice cream or something you know i don't really need that ice cream relative to you know how bad the situation is for these people these people haven't eaten in a week and here i am driving the grocery store buying some ice cream you know how uh first world problems as they say you know how entitled am i how uh how selfish am i right so so because of this your mind literally has to block off empathy it's difficult to function in the world with too much empathy and yet this empathy is actually pointing you to the truth the truth is that there's no reason why you should live a more comfortable life than anybody else that's the truth i mean who are you kidding this idea that somehow you're entitled to a better life you're entitled to more money you're entitled to a house you're entitled to food to ice cream you're entitled to sex you're entitled to um to any kind of freedoms or democracy or anything it's a joke it's pure selfishness on your part you're not entitled to anything and coming to grips with this is challenging it's emotionally challenging it takes maturity it takes intellectual honesty most ego minds don't have enough intellectual honesty to take this on and they're going to say well what's in it for me leo how does this serve me well it doesn't you selfish it doesn't serve you at all but it is true when your life is built around just pleasing yourself the truth doesn't serve you very often and therefore there becomes a divergence between your life and truth and you might say well what's the problem well at first it's not a big problem but over time a divergence grows the gap grows wider and wider and you start living in your own isolated bubble your own fantasy your selfish fantasy and then that fantasy you see it becomes very fragile and vulnerable to getting bursted from the outside like a soap bubble and see now every word i'm saying every phrase i'm saying is like a needle threatening your little soap bubble and so the more selfish your life has been the more attached you are to that kind of lifestyle then the more it's going to hurt the more my words are going to hurt you and threaten you and that's why a lot of people will just turn this off at this point or maybe you're a bit of a masochist a spiritual masochist and you like being poked and paraded in which case welcome welcome to this channel subscribe you'll love it so you see what's really going on like you have to really care about the epistemology here right like do you really want to understand why people act how they act most people don't give a but if you do then here's the scoop right every ego is acting from good intentions but its actions are always limited by its awareness and perception of reality and the more selfish the ego is the more distorted and twisted its perception of reality is so a really selfish ego will believe convince itself that acting very selfishly is good because it is from its own point of view and then it will go out and cause a lot of destruction and suffering to others and even to itself while all the time convincing itself that it's doing good and it's being the hero of life to others from the outside looking in on that we will see it as evil and bad and monstrous behavior especially if we're more selfless and we're higher in our consciousness because the more selfless we we are the more compassion and empathy we have the more undistorted by ego our awareness is the easier it is it is for us to see the selfish actions of others and how they hurt others and how they're obviously self-biased so this creates almost a sort of a blind spot within reasonably conscious people is that conscious people can look at unconscious people and think that the unconscious people are evil because it's not clear to you know a conscious person that one could be so low conscious as some of these low conscious people so like if you're living in a first world democracy and you grew up in a suburb in america somewhere a relatively nice middle-income a middle-class household let's say you went to good schools you weren't physically abused by your parents your parents were there for you they were nice you know they gave you christmas presents and all this and you had friends you had birthday parties and things worked pretty well for you and now you know maybe you're 25 30 40 years old somewhere around there and see now when you look at let's say in the middle east some terrorist you know decapitating some westerner that he's kidnapped you look at that you say oh my god that's horrible how horrible that person is evil but what you're not appreciating is you're taking for granted so much of how easy life has been for you how privileged you've been to grow up in this first world democracy where you could just drive down to the grocery store and get yourself a bucket of ice cream and eat it and have fun and play video games and enjoy all the modern comforts whereas that guy who grew up in afghanistan or wherever that this is happening um like do you understand how difficult of a childhood this person had this person's parents were probably killed or raped or bombed their brother or sister might have been kidnapped and tortured or bombed um this person as a kid as a teenager just to survive had to steal from others otherwise he would have died or gone hungry or he had to steal just to provide for his family or for his sister and then he had to uh he had to join the local militia at age 12 or 15 because there was no other job opportunities in that area he couldn't have become a computer programmer he couldn't go to school there were no schools his school was bombed he couldn't go work at mcdonald's there is no mcdonald's he couldn't get a summer job he didn't have vacations [Music] his parents didn't supply him with the bank account and a credit card there are no credit cards so he joined the militia and to survive in the militia he had to be tough and he had to learn how to shoot a rifle and throw grenades and set land mines and so all of his friends were like him so you grew up with a group of friends who were like-minded and you adopted most of their beliefs and ideas uh like a sheep and he did the same thing there and his friends had a certain kind of ideology that was necessary for survival in that brutal environment and so he picked up that ideology it might have been some fundamentalist uh militant form of islam or whatever and he picked that up because he had to to survive and so anyways decades of that passed and now he's 30 years old and he's a he's you know he's a toughened uh you know militia member of of that you know tribe that's been surviving there for thousands of years they have a long lineage they've been fighting different uh occupying countries not just americans they were fighting russians and the british and the saudis and the whatever iranians you know they've been fighting there for decades and that's how they survive and so in that environment cutting off someone's head this is how they protect their land this is their version of good this is how they gain back their government this is how they gain their sovereignty from the oppression from outside forces that are way beyond their power this aligns with their version of you know their religious visions and ideas of reconstituting their religious order that has fallen into decay and from their point of view all these different secular governments that are coming in there and meddling with their affairs these are secular heathen governments that don't believe in allah or whatever and therefore literally they're committing sin so cutting off the head of a devil is that a good thing or a bad thing from your cushy perspective sitting there eating a bucket of ice cream watching youtube for you it's a bad thing for them for that person it's a good thing that's relativity to nutshell and now what i want you to do is i want you to open your mind so radically that i that i want you to be able to see that this relativistic dynamic is going on literally with every single human actor on the planet not just individually but also collectively with every organization every government every nation every tribe every sports team every uh charity every non-profit every political party this is going on and the chief delusion that's also plaguing everybody on the planet is that almost no none of these actors see this relativity they can't believe this radical degree of relativity therefore they all end up demonizing each other so the american thinks that the afghani is evil the afghani thinks the american is evil the muslim thinks the jew is evil the jew thinks the muslims are evil or the palestinians are the evil ones with bad intentions the little guy thinks the corporations are are evil the corporations think that the bigger corporations are evil or that government is evil government thinks that something else some other government is evil and this is going on all across every actor and even if you don't think they're evil you think they have bad intentions well consider the radical possibility that nobody actually has bad intentions they have bad intentions from your point of view but from their own point of view they're doing good they're doing good according to their level of consciousness their level of selfishness and what they perceive as good for them because that is how the ego defines good good for me it's not an absolute good so what the us government calls good is good for it for the us government it might be terrible for the russian government or for the chinese government what exxon mobil calls good is good for it it might be terrible for the environment it might be terrible for you and me as ordinary people might be terrible for the birds and the bees and now you look at that you say well leo but they should know better they should know better exxon mobil should know better and they should care not just about exxon mobil but they should also care about the birds and the bees and the regular people too after all don't the executives of exxon mobil live on the same planet we all do so don't they all breathe in the same fumes and pollution don't they all also experience the same effects of climate change and so on that all of us do won't the sea level rise affect them too well of course it will but it doesn't affect everybody equally you see if i'm the the ceo of exxon mobil i don't really care how much the sea level rises because i'm going to always have enough money to just build walls or live on mountains so it doesn't matter to me how much the sea level rises so i can ignore that now you might say leo but that's so selfish that's so myopic that's so sociopathic but look at you look at how you live your life it's actually no more myopic or sociopathic than the way you live your life this is what you don't want to realize you do the same thing just in different ways structurally exxonmobil and you have the same same problem which is self-bias you're both self-biased but just in different ways into different degrees that's all you say no leo but i'm really different i'm not like exxon mobil i care about the environment and the birds and the bees i wouldn't be so selfish yeah maybe you're a little bit less selfish but fundamentally you're still a selfish and you're still so self biased and the way you live your life is so entitled and you cause so much collateral damage just by the fact that you breathe air and you eat food you've killed hundreds and thousands of animals and creatures just by your existing on this planet by driving your car by flying airplanes by eating these creatures uh by uh even if you eat vegetables even if you're a vegan you still you've caused the suffering of of thousands of animals through farming methods through the pesticides that are used on your apples and your lettuce and so forth the chemical runoff um from this has killed millions of fish and other sorts of animals and insects like you don't but you don't care about any of this from your point of view you're just a good little vegan and you actually believe that and you actually believe you're superior to others and that you're actually the good guy and that your intentions are pure whereas leo the intentions of the elites that are running exxon mobil their intentions are not pure because they're after money and money is you know evil in this sort of no this is just a relativistic difference of perspective actually the intentions of a ceo running exxon mobil the the sort of the scary thing to realize is not that the people running exxon mobil have evil nefarious intentions but actually that they have good intentions they actually have convinced themselves that they're doing good for the world because hey you know they're doing the necessary um work of exploring and mining out the natural gas and and oil around the world and selling it to people so that you can pump your you know some mother can pump her uh her car full of gas and drive her little sick child to the doctor and save his life when he has an asthma attack and if he didn't have the gas and if she didn't have the gas in the gas tank that morning to drive her son to the hospital he would have died and so from the point of view of the exxon mobil ceo the way he thinks about it might be something like you know how many children did i save today by pumping out all of that crude oil from the middle east or wherever from the arctic how many children were saved because that oil lubricated the machinery that runs modern society from airplanes to cars to factories to electricity generators there are people right now in a hospital near you who are on life support they would die without the life support systems and the lice those life support systems are run by electricity from uh you know crude oil generators but you and your myopia when you create this us versus them mentality of like the populists versus the elite the the evil elite corporations and so forth you don't see all of the profound infinite interconnections of these complex systems all you see is that exxon mobil is pumping in pumping gas you know emissions into the atmosphere and you know they're drilling in the arctic and so and they're lobbying congress and they're you know corrupt and all this this is what you see so from your point of view they really exxonmobil really looks evil but if you actually saw the full picture what would happen is that you realize that they're not evil they are behaving in the highest good that they know how from their vantage point given their finite capabilities just like you are the only difference is that you're not close enough to exxon mobil to actually see all of that infinite interconnected web of goodness that results from their activity whereas you are close enough to yourself to see your own innate goodness flowering through you in your life so there's actually sort of a an additional mind that comes from this it's sort of a mind within a mind so at first you start to see how just how selfish you are and you might start to feel bad about yourself because you realize how much you've been fooling yourself with how good you are relative to other people but then when you go even deeper and you have some really deep spiritual awakening and you really see the infinite interconnectedness of all of these systems what you actually realize is that the entire universe what it's doing is it's manifesting maximum goodness through every individual finite incarnation of itself such that actually all of the selfish stuff you do that even you don't like about yourself all the lying and cheating and manipulating and stealing and what other other nasty things you've been doing all the collateral damage you've caused what you ultimately realize is that all of that collateral damage is necessary because you're just a finite aspect of the universe and that your own finitude can't help but act in finite manner and be selfish in the way that it is because if you weren't selfish you couldn't be alive and so at first it might seem like i'm chastising you for being so selfish but then you go deeper into this realization and you realize that actually there's no there's no chastising there's no guilt to be had about this you're selfish because you're a finite manifestation of the universe and so is exxon mobil and so is the guy in the taliban in afghanistan and so is the president united states and so is the president of china and so are the communists and so are the capitalists and so are the jews and so are the muslims and so are the christians and so are the uh the scientists and so is everybody you realize that actually every living being in the universe is literally a manifestation of the universe's love and goodness which is an absolute but absolute goodness and love will always get corrupted and will always be less than infinite when they are squeezed through a finite hole imagine sort of like um you know those old i don't know if they still make them play-doh um machines where you got the play-doh that you play with you know like clay and then um they had this sort of extruder machine you would you would pump the clay in the top and then you would push this sort of lever and then you would have like a little template at the on the bottom and you can kind of move it and it would have different shapes you could have like a circle a square a star a crescent moon shape and then depending on which one you select it'll push the the play-doh and clay through that hole and make that kind of sort of extrusion that shape so this is exactly what the universe is doing infinite love and goodness in its purest absolute form has no form at all it's completely formless we might say it's like a giant lump of formless clay then if you want to manifest it as a particular form whatever the form is it doesn't matter that form is going to be finite so you extrude it through this shape let's say you select a square and you push it through there as you push it through it's gonna it's gonna take on the finite dimensions and characteristics of what it means to be a square or a crescent moon or a star and then it comes out and then it looks like what it looks like it's no longer the infinite lump that it used to be and therefore you might say that it's love and its goodness is diminished it's made finite in that process and so every human being is like one of those shapes and then universal consciousness is being pumped through that human being through that conscious agent to produce some specific set of actions behaviors beliefs attitudes goals ambitions intentions and so goodness is infusing the actions of every agent on the planet but some of these shapes can be larger or smaller than other shapes some of these shapes are very twisted and corrupted shapes and other shapes are are less so they're more holistic and so the net effect of all of that is that when you take absolute good intention and love and you pump it through a very corrupt shape what you get is a very corrupted form of love and that's exactly what somebody like a hitler for example is or in osama bin laden they're acting out of love they're acting out of good intentions but from a twisted perspective from a very self-biased and partial view of reality and you might say well leo but but where is the goodness and the love in hitler or in osama bin laden i don't see the goodness i only see the badness well because you're looking at it from your point of view if you look at it from their point of view and the point of view of the people for whom they were doing what they were doing with hitler for example he was doing it for the love of his people but what he defines as his people is very narrow compared to your definition so your definition i hope of what counts as people is everybody in the world if you're a hippie sort of person you want to love everybody in the world equally but if you're more conservative and the more conservative you get the smaller your circle of concern gets if you're deeply deeply far right wing then your notion of what counts as your people is very small it's going to be confined to just your country or your race or your ethnic group and then if you're even lower in your stage of development let's say your spiral dynamic stage purple it's going to be just your tribe it's not even going to be your country like for example in the middle east you're not going to have a definition of people you know the good people as all muslims that actually takes a relatively high level of development to think so unitively as everybody who's a muslim in the world is part of my tribe no no no in the middle east it's going to be much narrower it's going to be even narrower than a single country it's not going to be like well i'm an iraqi and i want all of us iraqis to do good no your love is too constrained to care about all iraqis all you care about is you care about the sunni iraqis in some particular little corner of that region of what we call iraq and uh your little tribe it might be a thousand people you only care about those thousand people because those thousand people are the limits of your world you didn't have the luxury of going to university where they taught you about different cultures and exposed you to japanese food and a you know uh asian history and and black people and and aboriginal people and native american people you didn't have this you have to understand somebody who grew up and barely survives in iraq somewhere in you know in a little village in iraq this person only knows their little little local tribe they don't know other groups of people they don't know other cultures they've never eaten sushi they've never they've never met an asian person in their life they've never met a black person like their their worldview is so limited and so that defines the scope of what they care about and what they can love and then also they're scared if and then later in life when they're when they are exposed to other cultures let's say they're watching television or they somehow they travel to a different country as a refugee they're going to be exposed to different cultures different cuisines different people different customs and different languages different religions different ways of doing business different ways of thinking different types of books different types of media this is going to be very scary and threatening to such a person it's gonna feel like a threat on his religion on his cultural customs on his language on his ideas of uh family of children of man and woman and how they're supposed to relate to each other his sense of god and allah because he has a very narrow version of what god is too it's not even the muslim god for this guy it's a much narrower version because see he's even going to be freaked out by other people who are muslims in other countries having slightly different versions and conceptions of islam or allah even though fundamentally all muslims believe in the same allah but to sunnis and shiis shiites uh you know apparently that difference makes a big difference to them now to us as westerners sitting in america looking at that we say well how silly you know sunni shia who gives a i mean they're all muslims it doesn't matter you're praying the same allah can't just get along and the answer is absolutely not because these little differences become what seemed like like mole hills become mountains when your sense of reality is very constrained and limited and then you get ethnic cleansing and you get war and you get genocide from this because people are misunderstanding each other and they are ascribing bad intentions to each other and we see this happening right now in american culture see this this problem doesn't just happen in the middle east somewhere in the middle of nowhere uh it happens in america too we're seeing it right now we're seeing huge polarization between the the right wing and the left wing right now in america and we're even seeing polarizations within those groups like within the right wing you have a sort of a polarization between the never trumpers and then the mega crowd or the alt-right and then you have a polarization in the left wing between the neoliberal types and sort of the corporate democrats and then the uh the progressives and the more socialist marxist type of folk and they're all fighting with each other and they're all ascribing bad intentions to each other even within the left wing you would think well well certainly all the people in the left wing should at least be able to see each other's good intentions how everybody in the left wing is trying to do the best for the country that they perceive according to their worldview and their beliefs and their limitations you know they're trying to do the best for the country but no even even that fails to land on many within the left wing it's very common to see progressives who completely misunderstand the the good intentions of the corporate democrats uh because they're angry at them and they don't really understand how somebody can be a corporate democrat like a socialist marxist type zoomer type who's maybe 25 years old can't fathom what it's like for a corporate democrat who's 80 years old like nancy pelosi or something her worldview can't fathom it so he demonizes her and attributes negative intentions to her and calls her a grifter calls her a sellout calls her corrupt all this sorts of stuff you've seen all this on youtube right and really believes that this marxist type of person really believes that and conversely someone like nancy pelosi when she looks at that marxist kid she doesn't understand where he's coming from and maybe she attributes some bad intentions to him i don't know um [Music] certainly the corporate democrats will demonize progressives to win elections and so forth right and that's just within the left wing supposedly these people should all get along they're all they're all really close to each other ideologically speaking now but you see what a socialist would say here's leo how dare you even insinuate that i would have anything to do with nancy pelosi oh i like she's disgusting to me i'm not i'm not in her camp at all how dare you lump us together you see but that's exactly what the what the shiite would say against the sunni and the sunni against the shia in afghanistan or wherever in the middle east you see it's going to be the same logic because your ego mind is drawing these boundaries and it's defining what group you belong to or don't belong to every group you belong to you need some enemy to just differentiate that group your group from that other group gives you a sense of purpose to fight against them and then this is this is survival and then of course the situation is even worse when it comes to like progressives trying to understand the right wing or the alt-right so they call them racists and they call them sexists and they call them misogynists and all the sorts of nazis and fascists and all this sorts of stuff all this language really it's just a cover for failing to understand the good intentions of the alt-right and if you think the alt-right does not have good intentions according to them remember there's no such thing as absolutely good intentions here it's all relative so when we say good intentions it's either according to you or according to them or according to me or somebody it's relativistic so uh the key delusion here is to think that there's some absolute notion of good intention there isn't there's no there's no such thing as a good intention without an ego mind who is interpreting that intention so what are the good intentions of the alt-right well they're trying to preserve their race their ethnicity their country from what they perceive as an attack why genocide and all this now i know hey i know it sounds kind of ridiculous if you're a progressive you know it sounds like well they're just making the aren't they just making this up uh uh ultimately what you got to see is they're not making it up any more than you're making your up see we're all making it up all the reality is made up so that's no excuse so what i'm trying to get you to realize is that this infinite clay this play-doh that is being extruded through these different shapes that that is what all human action is and the sooner you recognize that the more at peace you will be in the world and the the more the more the um the more clear your perception of reality will be you will see things more truthfully you will be able to understand others you will have more compassion and empathy for others see a progressive actually can't have empathy or compassion or love for someone from the alt-right because he just has demonized that person as a racist sexist fascist how can you love how can you love that you can't the these terms are in effect i mean it's not the same thing as calling someone a literal devil but in effect that's what it is when you call someone a racist or a fascist that effectively puts them in the category in your mind of like a secular version of a devil you're always gonna hate that person you're never gonna get along get along with that person and uh um you're always gonna misunderstand the person that's that's the problem now i hear progressives here um making sort of counter argument they say well but leo but why would i want to love the fascist and the racist why would i want to love him why would i want compassion for such a monster um i mean am i supposed to like hug a nazi kiss a nazi make out with a nazi no we got to defeat the nazis is what you might say and at a certain relative practical level yeah you got to defeat nazis if they're you know coming to town to actually kill you um but first of all you should notice that the majority of the alt-right are not actually nazis um so don't overblow it um that's one of the problems with this sort of black and white you know thinking in this demonization is that you take it too far you lose the nuance so first of all there's that uh second of all though is that you will never actually understand them and you will never have you will never have a truthful understanding of their perspective and that's what should bother you now i'm not saying that you got to go vote for a nazi or a fascist and i'm not saying that there's no problems with the alt-right there certainly are many problems and i i personally would never vote for an alt-right candidate for office and i would in fact speak out against it but uh there's a deeper meta issue here which is that regardless of how you vote and what kind of policies you you want and what kind of action you take in the world more important than that is your capacity to actually understand and make sense of other people's perspectives that's more important because as soon as you drop your intellectual integrity and you get sloppy with it and you start misunderstanding other people's perspectives this is the beginning of the end because you're detaching yourself from truth and from reality the divergence now is going to grow between your ego mind and your worldview and truth and reality and eventually it's going to grow so wide that epistemic blunders and catastrophe will happen and from this will result all sorts of evils violence and war hatred and so forth so what we're aiming for here i'm not saying something naive here in the sense that like we got to go hug and kiss terrorists and nazis and allow them to rise to high office and so forth i'm not saying anything that naive something something very challenging is required here on the one hand you have to be ruthlessly pragmatic and you have to be especially when you're talking about politics for example you have to see what kind of consequences various kinds of political leaders and ideologies will have in the world and you have to adjudicate between which ones will be better for the greater whole of mankind and which ones will be worse that's important to do but you can't let that pragmatism be the only thing that drives your politics or your life even more important than that is actually being able to understand other people and perspectives and worldviews and groups and so on otherwise you're actually not going to be able to to find holistic solutions and you're actually going to delude yourself and a lot of progressives end up deluding themselves about the motives of conservatives and right-wingers and um if you're a progressive you might say well leo who cares that doesn't really matter as long as we're we're voting for the for the right people we're voting for the good guys as long as we're enacting the right policy changes it doesn't matter if i misunderstand the intentions and you know uh perspectives of some stupid fascist it doesn't matter but it does matter you're being myopic you're not seeing how this will boomerang on you untruthful perception of reality always ends up mattering it's just a question of how long will it take to boomerang it may not make a difference in the next election cycle but eventually it will make a difference especially when this is done in a group as part of a collective activity because you see you're not doing it alone it's you and hundreds of other thousands of people like you millions of people like you who are going to be buying into similar kinds of perspectives which are all going to be distorted in various ways and then that's going to build upon itself and develop a life of its own and this delusion will develop a mind and life of its own it will become a collective ego of its own it'll turn into an ideology and it will misunderstand reality and it will act from that place and from that place will be created evil and suffering it's a problem because of if you watch my episodes very important ones um about holism and holistic thinking part one and part two go watch that see what i talked about with in that episode i gave you sort of a master formula for how reality works and i told you we equated remember i equated consciousness and truth and health and holism and i equated more things but we'll start with those also love right the highest love is intimately tied with truth consciousness integrity holism and health you can't have these things separated because ultimately they're all one thing because reality is a unity love and truth point you towards that unity and i said that goodness is equivalent to all of that goodness is the ability to see unity so if you're as a progressive unable to see the unity that you share with a fascist with what you call a fascist and you don't see that fascist truthfully but in some distorted way then you can't love that fascist and if you can't love that fast you're gonna hate or fear that fascist and hate and fear is ultimately what's gonna lead you to act selfishly and to have various kinds of attachments and that's ultimately going to lead to a lack of holism in your perspective and a lack of holism is the very definition of what you fight against which is evil and oppression and injustice so it will boomerang on you the problem is that you're not conscious enough you don't have enough vision to see how it will boomerang and so you think you can get away with it but you're not going to get away with it there's going to be a cost and so it would be nice if you wised up to that i mean i'm not just picking on progressives here i mean the same problem even even more so applies to to how the alt-right for example c progressives or how they see socialist there's a lot of demonization of socialists that's going on now within the right wing in america and around the world and of course it's obvious why the right wing is doing that because from their world view their intention is good in demonizing the socialists because in their world view they truly believe and they see the socialists as just a rehash of the soviet-style mao style marxism of the previous century and all of the hundreds of millions of people that they believe it killed as an ideology and so they're really threatened by that and so they're literally willing to do anything to prevent that kind of thing from happening again so can you see how from the position of the alt-right or just even moderate conservatives this idea of everyone now talking about marxism and socialism and communism and demonizing capitalism and speaking negative about how this is freaking them out these people have not read marks they don't have a deep understanding of marxism they don't have a deep understanding even of capitalism there's a lot of stuff they don't understand but but see that ignorance is what defines that world view and you have to take that into account if you're a progressive you have to take into account that the people that you're demonizing are mostly just ignorant they haven't been educated the way you have they maybe they didn't go to school they didn't go to university or they didn't get good grades or they didn't study the things you studied they don't have a deep understanding of of marxism and so forth and so can you really blame them for being scared and for demonizing something that they don't understand if you actually understood that as a progressive this would actually improve your life so even though what i'm talking about here at first it might sound like oh leo you're you're being so overly philosophical none of this stuff is very practical how is this going to improve my life but it will improve your life because right now you're caught in this battle and by the way even though now this topic has gotten very political here i'm just using this as an example i want you to extrapolate this out way beyond politics you're caught in a battle with other people in your life whether it's with conservatives or with progressives or with corporate neoliberals or with libertarians or with socialists or with capitalists or with corporatists or with big oil companies or with elites or with some conspiracy group that you're you know fighting with so you're caught in this sort of battle and this is draining you of your life energy fundamentally you should be able to feel through an introspection capacity that you've developed hopefully by watching my introspection episode you should have you should be able to feel that this sort of negativity is actually robbing you of your life energy it's making you a bitter spiteful angry fearful person you should also see that this is polarizing society at a collective level so this is not just a personal problem it's also a collective problem because as all of us the more we start to demonize each other and attribute negative bad intentions towards each other not able to see the good intentions of all sides this makes us hate each other more and we can't operate cohesively as a society and then it might get so bad that society will disintegrate people talk about a civil war you see so it's a problem both collectively and individually and for you as an individual if you're a progressive let's say what it does is it actually puts you out of alignment with your spiritual center your spiritual center is love and goodness and positivity and creativity and being constructive and being compassionate and being empathetic and you as a progressive you value this you value empathy but you lack the empathy necessary to radically understand and integrate something like the perspective of a fascist and you justify that in your mind by saying that oh well leo that's not practical we know climate change is too important for us to to compromise with fascists and issues of lgbtq rights and animal rights and other things are too important to even care about understanding the fascist perspective this i suggest is a short-sighted perspective you're sacrificing a short-term victory in a single battle but even if you win that battle you might lose the ultimate war and you're so focused on winning that battle that you're not seeing the entirety of the war how it fits into the larger picture of things and you're not even seeing how it affects you individually how it robs you of your own spiritual center how it diminishes your love and your own capacity to be good and to be happy because you can't fundamentally be happy when you believe that there are all these actors in the world with bad intentions you're you're always going to be bitter and fearful and this is the karmic consequence of untruthful perception to him who is afraid every bush rustles every shadow is cause for concern and worry the point of spirituality is to raise the clarity of your perception to such a high degree that literally you expunge evil from the world and this is why i'm so how should i put it i'm so um antsy i guess i'm so anti-conspiracy theory i'm so anti-conspiracy theory because fundamentally what conspiracy theories do is they make you paranoid they make you believe that there are groups and cabals of people out there who are conspiring to do evil against you they make you feel like you're the good guy and they're the bad guy and when this is your worldview you better believe this shapes how you feel it actually disconnects you from the highest thing you can achieve in the world which is a recognition of infinite love you are literally severing your connection to infinite love and goodness and to god and to truth whenever you attribute evil intentions to other people or groups you cut yourself off from god not knowing that you're doing so and so the reason we're having this conversation is because i'm trying to guide you towards a realization of infinite love but how can you realize infinite love if you believe that there are actors in the world with bad intentions so i would like you to just try to adopt the following perspective put it on for a while put it on like glasses you know put this on like orange colored glasses wear them for a week and just see how it feels and then you can take them off if you like and go back to your old ways so i would like you to put on the orange colored glasses of for the next week everything you see on the news every everybody you argue with everybody in your life everybody that you think about every group all the political activity going on every government and so forth every corporation i would like you to see all of it as actions from the highest good and the most loving intentions but extruded through a very finite form so of course it's going to be limited and it's going to be corrupted and i also want you to see yourself in that way as well so we're not making any exception for you you and all of your actions over the next week whether you lie cheat steal manipulate or do some quote unquote traditional good things you know you do some charity work or whatever whatever you're doing in your life for the next week i want you to see that whether it's good or bad all that action is also coming from the highest love and goodness but it's being extruded through the limited shape of your ego mind that you are and therefore it gets corrupted and it comes out in a twisted fashion and so maybe you say something nasty to your spouse over the next week or maybe you leave some nasty comment in a youtube video over the next week or maybe you steal some paper clips at work because you're you're selfish or whatever or you're you're cheap you don't want to buy your own paper clips so you steal some from work you know whatever whatever you do all of that i want you to see all of that as love and goodness but corrupted finite and then i want you to connect these things such that what's being extruded through you really you see it as the same process the same structure as what's being extruded through the guy on the news or your political enemy or opponent or that corporation that you don't like and then notice notice what happens when you actually do this notice how it makes you feel there's going to be a shift an important shift and then if you're wise you could intuit the power and the truth of what i'm telling you here and then continue wearing these glasses for the rest of your life be on this one week you see you're going to try them out for a week try try seeing the world truthfully and with love for one week see if you can handle that and then carry on for the rest of your life and then deepen it too it's not going to stop there we're going to keep working on this i'll have more episodes in the future that will keep deepening this love until ultimately it's it's all working towards something uh ultimately this will help to inch you towards the realization of infinite love that reality is the manifestation of infinite love and then maybe you'll understand what what this is all about and then in retrospect you'll look backwards and you'll say oh my god how could i have been so selfish and so blind as to actually believe that there's any evil in the world that there's anything wrong with the world you'll realize there was never anything wrong with the world there was only something wrong with my vision of the world with my ideas of how the world should be the only thing that was wrong with the world is my selfishness and actually you'll even then realize in an even deeper self-embrace that even your own selfishness and all of your biases they weren't wrong they were absolutely necessary as part of what love is so actually counter-intuitively and paradoxically selfishness and corruption are absolutely fundamental to love you might think they're the opposite of love they're not they're only the opposite of love in a sort of dualistic sense when you fully awaken you'll realize that selfishness corruption are just as much a part of love as anything else because love is not just infinite love is also finite and so while you can think of the godhead as pure infinite love in its undiluted uncorrupted form when you see a human being walking around on the sidewalk you can look at that human being and you can say that is a finite form of love walking on the sidewalk it's going to express love in a finite way it's going to be biased it's going to be selfish because it has to be in order to keep walking if it wasn't selfish if it wasn't biased it couldn't walk it couldn't talk it couldn't do anything it couldn't be anything it couldn't have any form it would have to be a purely formless singularity of love now that's great the only problem with it is is that it has no form therefore it can't look like a human it can't be any kind of physical object it's effectively nothing so there's a there's there's a very profound trade-off here between the infinite and the finite and the reason that you don't find angelic human beings very often the reason human beings act like devils and they disappoint you and they're selfish and they're petty and they lie and they cheat and they steal and they manipulate and they are deluded and they are ideological and they're closed-minded and they're abusive and they're vindictive and they're fearful and they're petty and they're jealous and they're argumentative and they don't get along and they fight with each other and they go to war and they kill each other the reason all this happens is because it must happen because the only thing that can exist as a perfect unity is completely formless if it has a form it's going to be less than infinite which is going to lead to conflict and it's going to lead to suffering and this is just an existential trade-off between the infinite and the finite and that's something you have to swallow and accept and love and if you can manage that then you have completely integrated all of reality within yourself and then you're finally at peace regardless of what's going on around you now mind you even though i say all this you know i talk about love and peace and and beauty and so forth god that does not mean that the actual material conditions around you will automatically be peaceful we could all die in world war iii tomorrow so you might say well then leo what's the point isn't the whole point to prevent world war 3 no actually here's the point the point is that if we're all going to die in world war iii tomorrow i'm going to die knowing that it's love and you're going to die crying and suffering and being miserable of how the world went to hell that's going to be the difference and you might say well leo that's a who cares about that difference because we're both going to die so it's it's it has no difference except it does it does have a difference because the other thing you don't realize is that uh death itself is imaginary so you're not really gonna die you think you're gonna die that's not the difference between you and me i know that i can't die so the difference is that if you actually have clear perception of reality you can die in peace you're beyond death you've transcended death and you can die without regret and you can also live in peace and without regret and without guilt you can be calm because you actually clearly and distinctly perceive that reality is perfect that's the real key here that i'm trying to guide you towards ultimately what i'd like for you if you're following my work i'd like you to reach a point where you can just sit and realize that reality is completely perfect and that there's nothing wrong and there could never be anything wrong no matter what happens this is the ultimate power now the mistake that people make here is that when a materialist hears me talking like this they will say oh leo but this is just some sort of hippie new age that you've brainwashed yourself with i mean sure maybe i can sit down for a few years and if i watch enough of your videos eventually i'll i'll myself with enough of your ideas that i will start to believe like you that actually everything is perfect and that reality is all love and i can i can do i can fool myself with these sorts of illusions and fantasies but it won't be true but that's not what i'm telling you what i'm telling you is the exact opposite of that what i'm telling you is that if you go through this process it's a deconstructive process you deconstruct all of your self biases you deconstruct your mind you jail break your mind you do all this work you become more conscious and as you're doing so it's not that you're filling your mind with new age beliefs that are all positive no no no all you're doing is you're just clearing away the garbage and the ego smog you're clearing that away and eventually when you cleared it all away and your perception is perfectly clear what you realize is that the truth is perfection itself and love itself this is not something you are filling your mind with as an ideology it's an emptying of all ideology and what you'll realize the recontextualization mindfuck will come when you realize that oh all that negativity and all of my problems and all of my cynicism and all of my conspiracy theories and all of my demonization of others and including myself oh all of that was the layers upon layers upon layers of that my mind was filled with it's not that love is some new age belief it's that fear and hate and greed and pettiness and evil these are the materialist beliefs that you've been indoctrinated into that you've never questioned you take them as reality you take them as physics but they're not physics they're just beliefs very bad very limiting beliefs and they're not true see materialists fooled themselves into thinking like well um leo i'm such a hard-nosed truthful person you know i would love to believe that reality is is all happiness and love like you say in god and all these beautiful things and immortality i would love to believe these things but i'm just i'm just too hard-nosed man you know i'm too scientific i'm too i'm too rational i'm too i'm too fact-based for you too fact-based and it's just not a fact that reality is this beautiful thing it's not a fact if only it were so but you know leo i i can't fool myself i'm so fact-based i can't fool myself into into believing everything is so positive like you say that sounds delusional i would rather be truthful than be even be happy if it means you know if i have to choose between truth and happiness and love i will choose truth and hard facts and objectivity over all that hippie dippy stuff but what you don't realize is that you don't need to choose the universe is so structured that all you have to do is choose truth but when you choose truth you got to choose truth not your ideas of truth you gotta actually question what truth is all the way to rock bottom all the way to rock bottom beyond anything you can imagine you got to choose truth so deeply that it goes full circle and then you realize when you actually discover truth that it is happiness and love what kind of sick do you think designed this universe that would make truth and love and happiness in conflict with each other that's the beauty of the design of the universe is that truth is love it is goodness it is happiness that is your salvation is that that is absolutely the case the only thing that's the problem is you not realizing that it's a bit like you're a millionaire but you don't realize you're a millionaire because you never check your bank account and the reason you never check your bank account even though i tell you hey go check check your bank account you know you're whining and complaining about being poor and you're struggling to pay your bills and you're so miserable you've been miserable for years complaining how poor you are and i keep telling you go check your bank account and you say but leo why i'm so poor there's nothing in my bank account there's nothing there it's a waste of time to even look and so you never look but i keep telling you just go look go go look in your bank account and you keep giving me stories about oh leo my bank account is so empty you don't know how bad it is and i just keep telling you go look just go look and you keep saying no leo it's it's hopeless it's it's it's a waste of my time and then only on your deathbed do you actually finally say okay fine i'm gonna die tomorrow so it i'll just go check i don't care how bad it is i'm just gonna go check anyways just to prove you wrong and then you go you look in your bank account and you realize your account is infinite all right that's it i'm done here hope you enjoyed please click that like button and come check out actualize.org that is my website on my website you will find my book reviews i've reviewed over 200 books some of the best most powerful books that you'll find in this field of self-help and spiritual work and psychology and epistemology and philosophy you'll find my life purpose course which will help you to get your life on track figure out your top values and how to align your life with that the principles in life purpose course are what i used to basically develop actualize.org not as a business but as my life purpose which is two different things even though there can be overlap there you can also find my blog you can also come check out the forum sign up on the forum it's free i have discussions there all the time i respond to lots of questions on the forum if you have serious questions you want to ask me come use the forum you can support me at patreon.com actualized i appreciate your donations helps me to stay financially independent and not to sell out sponsors and stuff like that which would corrupt my work and you can also check out and subscribe to my second channel called actualized clips which feature shorter 10-minute long segments i have a great editor who's cutting up all of my episodes going through my entire back catalog of episodes clipping them up into short segments and then posting those on the second channel so make sure you use that there's still more to talk about in terms of love we'll have more episodes about love and about fear and about connecting you with that uh ultimately like i just want to stress again i've stressed this in the past but i i i'm going to keep hammering on this point everything that i teach the entire purpose of all of these topics even the most abstract and the most philosophical and the most scientific and the most technical stuff that i teach all the stuff that seems like it has no practical purpose or that it seems like it's got nothing to do with love the only point of it is to help you to realize love what i want you to start to notice is that love is a much grander and more diverse thing than you've ever imagined your ideas of what love is are extremely limited and nobody in society has taught you the true diversity of what love is love is not just some hippie notion and it's not just a good feeling love is the most profound thing that there is and it takes a lot of work to be able to recognize it in all of its forms and the reason it's so difficult is because we're so afraid and we're so biased and we're so attached to our finite notions of love that we don't want to see the full spectrum of what love is it's too threatening to us so it's a process of opening your mind bit by bit so oftentimes i'm trying to guide you to love through an indirect means and so what's going to happen if you watch all of my content and you start to piece it together and you start to do the practices is that gradually you're going to start to see how all of this adds up to an overarching love for reality that's the point of all this we're trying to free your mind of all of the garbage that it's been filled with all the finite limited garbage it's been filled with limiting beliefs victim mindsets bad emotions fear uh bad ideologies that you've picked up wrong ways of looking at the world twisted and biased ways of seeing the world we're trying to clear all that up just to make room for what is the underlying ground of existence which is love infinite metaphysical love and then we can look at how it manifests itself through all the different aspects of the of of of life through your body through your emotional system through your mind through your thinking process through your intellect and through society through different organizations and corporations all of this is this is all different gradations and manifestations of love and so we're going to tie all those things together it's a deeply holistic process and i'm going to have a lot more episodes in the future talking about collective issues political issues helping you to understand these things because to me it's not about the politics don't get hung up on the politics it doesn't really matter what your politics are or whether you agree with my politics or not what matters is the meta the structure behind what's being talked about in these examples don't get hung up on the examples learn the deeper lessons and be willing to let go of various attachments that you have you see you're afraid your mind is afraid of letting go of intellectual attachments whether it's a political philosophy you have or your notion of what freedom is if you're a libertarian or even your your socialist ideas if you're a progressive it doesn't matter all of these things will become limits for you right if you're progressive and you fancy yourself this uh very politically evolved advanced being you're not you're not that advanced just because you're a little bit more advanced than the other guys doesn't make you that advanced you got higher stages to go to and i'm really excited to show you how to experience life beyond your progressive worldview and if you're concerned you've got a little bit more work to do because first you gotta evolve up towards progressivism and then you got to transcend that too so you got more work to do but either way whoever you are you've got a lot of work to do before you realize infinite love and a lot more episodes of mine to watch to interconnect all the pieces and fit them all together so make sure you stay tuned for that you