Word count:7680
hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about grasping the illusory nature of thought what is a thought exactly what really is it this is one of those kind of questions that everyone thinks that they know to the point where they don't even bother investigating it or they take it as some sort of philosophical question that has no pertinent application to their everyday life and nothing could be further from the truth one of the most important questions you can ask in your life is this question of what is a thought because after all you do think quite a bit so if what you think a thought is is not what a thought is then wouldn't that be embarrassing wouldn't that be a source of potentially many problems in your life if you were somehow fundamentally mistaken about really the true nature of thoughts after all you're using thoughts to think about your life and you're using thoughts to analyze reality and you're using thoughts to grasp truth and yet you've never really bothered to grasp what thoughts are you've always taken them for granted pretty much always from day one you've taken thoughts for granted and your thoughts are a very odd almost quasi magical mystical thing because they're not physical objects out in the physical world they're happening inside your mind so to speak but what exactly are they the nature of thoughts is illusory and most people do not have awareness over what thoughts are in this them into so much trouble the difference between knowing what a thought is and not knowing what a thought is is the difference between living in a self constructed mental prison a hellscape in which you suffer all the negative emotions that you suffer all your anger your sadness your frustration all the difficulties you have in relationships with money with business with your health and all that stuff because all those problems are largely conceptually created they're taking place in your mind it's the difference between living in that kind of mental health scape and the opposite of it which is living in a sort of a freedom and getting to a self actualized kind of life which is what I'm here to help you to do so if you want to self actualize life you should really concern yourself seriously with the question of what is a thought and I don't mean just thinking about it in some philosophical manner or reading what a thought is in a text book or looking up in a dictionary I mean getting a experiential direct awareness or consciousness or mindfulness over what thoughts are in your experience because it doesn't matter what you think thoughts are it doesn't matter what you believe thoughts are because actually that's just more thinking so see you can't escape this problem by thinking about it more what you got to do is you got to actually become aware of what thoughts are in your direct experience so that it's functioning for you so that the knowledge is functioning in your life and it's making a difference you see and it's not just another belief what does it mean to say the thoughts are illusory well I'm not saying that thoughts are not real a lot of people hear me talking about consciousness work or meditation or maybe some enlightenment topics and I talk about thoughts and how thoughts are tricky and they're deceptive in their losery and say oh well yeah of course yeah thoughts are so thoughts aren't real then but that's not what I'm saying at all thoughts are very real thoughts are as real as the car the tree the house your body but there's a wrinkle to it see thoughts are like chameleons the problem with thoughts is that what they appear like on the surface is not what they actually are or rather it's vice-versa thoughts as they appear are exactly what they are but you take them to mean a lot more than they really are you attribute a certain depth to them that normally you shouldn't attribute to them not if you were fully aware there's a great story that I like about Picasso and Picasso I don't know if you know anything about him but basically he was a kind of a radical avant-garde cubist painter and all of his paintings are not very realistic looking in fact it's hard to even see what the paintings are about sometimes you can have a painting of a woman and then you look at it doesn't even look like a woman so this is kind of like abstract type of art and one day as the story goes Picasso was travelling in a in a train and he was just a passenger and there was a man sitting near him in the cabin and they're traveling together and the man he recognizes Picasso's is oh your Picasso and Picasso's like yeah and the man says oh you know I don't I don't like what you do I don't like your work you know the art that you do isn't very good and because it says what do you mean the man says well what I don't like about your work is that it's not realistic why do you go to all this lengths to paint these paintings which have nothing to do with life they're not realistic at all and Picasso looks at him kind of puzzled and says what do you mean they're not realistic show me an example of what you mean and the man he opens up his wallet and takes out a photograph of his wife it's a little 2 inch by 2 inch little square black-and-white photograph of his wife and he shows it to Picasso it says here look look look at this look this right here this is real why don't you paint stuff like this that would be more useful than what you do and Picasso he looks at the he looks at the photograph he takes in his hand he kind of looks at it like this brings a closer space he turns it to the side kind of like looks at at the back of the photograph then he tells the man you know your wife she's awfully small and also she's very flat so that's just a great little anecdote that I like which shows us the problem with images is that images have a certain like allure to them and they're able to suck us in into their own reality without us being aware of what the image really literally is as in the case of a photograph it's a piece of paper with some black ink on it that's what it literally is but what the man makes it out to be in his mind is his wife of course the photograph is not literally his wife but it's really easy to get lost in such my new show because the mind is very good at abstracting and it tends to consider things that aren't really the thing it thinks it is as something that the mind imagines because the mind likes to abstract stuff there's actually a great painting classic painting by Rene Magritte he was a surrealist painter maybe you've seen this one it's called the treachery of images and what it is and I'll show it to you right here what it is is it's just a very simple canvas with a picture of a pipe and then it says I believe in French it says this is not a pipe kind of cool I like that one so uh what's the significance of all this well I want to give you some analogies for the treachery of thoughts so a photograph is not the thing depicted right pretty obvious I mean this isn't rocket science the is that we just tend to ignore it we tend to ignore the significance of such a simple little distinction that a photograph is not the thing depicted because here's the problem is that if you think that a photograph is the thing depicted for example I can show you a photograph of a pizza a delicious mouth-watering pizza and if you actually believe and confuse the photograph for the real thing then you might actually delude yourself into thinking that this photograph of a pizza will be able to ease your hunger you might actually pack for a trip let's say to go mountain climbing and you need to pack some food and supplies and instead of packing actual food that's going to give you sustenance and allow you to live on that mountain for a week what you do is you just pack a box full of photographs of food now if you did that that would be a fatal mistake now of course this is kind of preposterous exaggerated example and you say well Leo I don't really do that in my life but I beg to differ this is exactly what you do in your life you're just not very aware of it yet and I want to help you to draw this out in your experience so some more analogies if I show you a three-dimensional drawing of an object actually that's not a three-dimensional object it's a two-dimensional object represented in a three dimensional way which kind of creates a certain kind of illusion which draws you in and makes you believe for a moment that it's actually three-dimensional pretty common example another great example is a book have you ever just taken a book and opened it up into something I encourage you to actually go and do pause this recording and actually go do this after I tell you pick up a book and just kind of flip through it and notice that all there is in this book is just black markings on white paper that's literally what a book is it's paper many pages of it with a cover and black markings the story that you think is in the book like let's say this is a a mystery novel or a romance novel or some sort of serious textbook on physics or mathematics doesn't matter what the content is that's what we're calling the story there is actually no story in the book the story is something your mind creates out of the black markings on the white pages you see it's really useful to just to get that ship actually get this ship directly in your experience because when you normally pick up a book you're like oh yeah that's a sentence that's a word immediately your mind without even thinking out your mind starts to interpret these markings the mind doesn't recognize that these are just markings because the mind says well yeah of course they're markings I know they're markings let's get beyond that let's see how these markings can actually be useful to me and the use of the markings to me is that they tell me a story or give me some sort of information so let me just go and jump straight into the information now that's not a problem with books but it becomes a problem when this analogy gets applied to your mental process I'm just giving you analogies right now I'm going to tie it in with how this fits in with your life in a minute also think about language what is language language is just arbitrary sounds of course your mind immediately interprets meaning and assigns that to the sounds so the sounds sound like they're actually words and that the meaning in the words is inherent to the words but if I spoke to you for example busca music eeeh llamo Gustavo des Guevara 8et bhagava eat pie you ski Metheny boo she made me a so it is ook is not just unless of course you speak Russian and then you can understand and decipher what those sounds mean otherwise those sounds are just gibberish to you total gibberish that's what language is it's just gibberish sound which your mind then deconstructs and creates some kind of meaning out of it so those are some analogy now how is this possible how is it possible that meaning can be contained within just gibberish sounds or just markings on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen the way it's possible is through symbols and a symbol is a really fascinating thing it's it's remarkable what a symbol is look at this look at the genius of what a symbol is a symbol is a thing that represents something that it itself is not did you get that really think about this a symbol is by definition not the thing that it represents that's pretty freaky if you think about that symbols are actually completely arbitrary anything can stand in as a symbol for anything else for example I can represent the moon with any symbol that I want I can represent it with a refrigerator I can represent your mom with a fish I can represent the money in your bank account with five chicken eggs I can represent your entire life story with a can of coca-cola you know like there is no limit to what the symbol can be a lot of times we think like well the symbol sort of has to resemble the original thing and no it actually it doesn't not at all in fact most of the symbols we use most of the English language uh both spoken and written has nothing to do with the meanings when I say the word cat that has nothing at all to do it has no resemblance whatsoever the actual animal cat you ever notice that kind of funny it's like totally arbitrary right totally uh portrayed and yet our mind is able to decipher it because all that's necessary in our mind just a mapping the mapping in the mind is just like well cat equals the actual animal cat that's all the sensor and you can change all those meetings around if you wanted to can teach yourself new languages or you can even reinterpret what an existing language means right now all this might seem kind of obvious but also just notice how unconscious this makes you because you're born into this world and just after a couple of years already you're just taught language you're taught language your mind is primed for learning language and then this language is what you use to think with so your thoughts are arbitrary symbols and your you think in language you also think in images but largely your thoughts are just kind of arbitrary symbols which acquire meaning over time and what the human brain is is a magnificent mechanism for shuffling around all these symbols and then creating all sorts of meanings and interconnections between these symbols and then see what happens after a while after you do this for 10 20 30 years what happens is that you start to create all sorts of weird twisted meanings in your mind where something can happen in reality and then it can make you feel depressed or it can make you feel angry or pissed off it can make you cry it can make you yell I can make you fuming mad full of rage it can make you kill somebody because of the meanings that your mind assigns to certain symbols it's really quite remarkable that this is even possible it's amazing the symbols even exist but you have to also start to become conscious that meaning what it is is because it is arbitrary it's completely arbitrary that meaning is an illusion and meanings are some of the most meaningful things to you what's the meaning of money to you what's the meaning of a relationship to you what's the meaning of love to you what's the meaning of sex to you what's the meaning of your car to you or your house or your career or your job or how people think of you whether they think of you as a good person or a evil person all of these things are meanings that are spun by the mind but also you're not aware of what they literally are because a thought has two components to it so to speak there's the content of the thought or the story that's contained in it the meaning in other words and then there's literally what it is so if you ever get to the point in your life where you're feeling bad and depressed or you're having some kind of negative emotional reaction you're suffering one thing that might dawn on you if you are conscious enough is that all of these meanings are not actually true how can this be the case I want to show you with some practical examples and I'll give you some exercises here but just recognize now the significance of this breaking free from your mind requires that you become aware of what meaning is and it's a losery nature gaining mindfulness over your thoughts this is one of the keys to all self-improvement work the more mindful you are of your thoughts the less reactive and the less distressed you will be by them because distress and suffering is only contained within meaning there cannot really be any suffering without meaning you might think there can be like you might think that there could be extreme pain and stuff like this but that's not really the case almost all of your suffering comes from meaning and yet at the same time meaning is illusory so you seeing the significance of this extremely significant this is not philosophy this is not just some like interesting linguistic theory that I'm giving to you very practical I want to teach you a little technique that I kind of came up with myself I call it flattening the illusion and I want to train you how to use this technique so first we're going to train on just some very simple examples that aren't very applicable to your life so the first example I'm going to show on the screen right now go ahead take a look at it so you see a picture now what I want you to do is I want you to flatten the illusion as I say flatten the illusion so notice the meaning that's there and notice whatever your mind is kind of projecting and perceiving of the image and now what I want you to do is how I should just flatten it look at it literally what is it literally so literally it is not a three-dimensional cube literally it's some flat markings on a flat surface of course you could go even more literal you could say well they're just pixels on a computer screen that you're looking at that would be an additional level of literalness but we can even just kind of ignore that and just pretend like you're looking at on a piece of paper or something but look at this literally right it's just some flat markings on a flat surface there's nothing three-dimensional about it even though it appears three-dimensional so we might say that the content appears three-dimensional that's the illusory nature of it the reality of it literally is that it's just some two-dimensional ink on a surface okay good now let's go on to the next example so take a look at this example this one might be a little more tricky for you especially if you have a phobia on this issue so take a look at this and now notice immediately notice if you have any kind of emotional reactions in your body or in your mind and what I want you to do is I again I want you to flatten the illusion so make a distinction between what's literally there on the screen that you're looking at and what your mind is projecting onto it what it's interpreting out of it this might mean any labels you assign to this object if you assigning labels to it or any kind of memories that come up or any kind of associations any kind of charged emotional reactions you might have any kind of feelings of disgust or fear or avoidance notice all of that is separate from what's literally there so flatten the illusion right now practices actually do it okay so you're seeing what's literally there and not the content of the picture notice that the content is an illusion okay good now let's go on to the last example of this series so take a look at this now immediately what I want you to do is to notice the difference between the content and what's literally there so flatten this illusion notice any kind of emotional reactions you might have had to the words written on the screen and how maybe you perceived it in some kind of a charged emotional way maybe you related to it in some way that offended you or made you feel bad or shocked you or whatever notice that that's - all your stuff that's not what's happening on the screen and also notice that the words and symbols written on the screen notice what those are the meaning of those is again projected and interpreted by your mind so flatten the illusion of the words on the screen to the point where you don't even see them as words anymore but just as symbols on the screen see the words and the letters for what they literally are not for what your mind thinks they mean okay so flatten that illusion okay great so now you got the hang of it right pretty simple now the trick though is to actually get good at flattening the illusion with your thoughts because your thoughts are just like words on a screen or images on a screen the problem is that you're not very aware of thoughts and it takes practice to actually develop mindfulness to the point where you don't get sucked in and reactive to the thoughts that you're having in order to flatten something what I mean by flattening the illusion basically you just ask yourself the question what is this thing actually what is it literally it's a literal way of looking at the world without any abstraction or projection or any kind of vagueness it's just whatever's there is exactly what's there and I'm not going to assume anything about it I'm not going to extrapolate any meaning out of it I'm not going to relate the thing that's there to me in any way I'm just going to see what's literally there so let's try some more real-world examples with your thoughts now flatten the following illusions think of your mother get a thought of your mother whatever it is might be an image in your mind or a story of memory whatever comes up for you is fine not very important the details so think of your mother and now flatten that illusion can you do it actually do it so that you resolve the thought and you break down its content and the thought loses its content and you can just experience the thought as a you might say just a sensation in your mind because that's what a thought literally is a thought is real in a sense that it has a certain feeling or a sensation to it like if you have an image of your mom's face that's real but it's not your mom's face you see in the same way that if I write a word like cat the word cat is real but it's not a cat this takes practice so let's do another one think of gravity whatever idea or concept you have of gravity bring it up to mind now if I ask you is gravity real you would say yes it is of course it is but now what I want you to do is just take this concept of gravity and flatten the illusion what is gravity actually you might say well gravity is a force in real life no what is actually the thought of gravity flatten that illusion notice what gravity literally is in your mind gravity is not a force in the physical world gravity is a concept in your mind now flatten that and see that go from thinking of gravity as a real force in the real world into seeing it as a sensation in your mind because that is what literally gravity is - sensation your mind and I don't mean the sensation of the weight of your body I mean the sensation of your idea of gravity because gravity is an idea that's literally what is okay now we'll try something a little trickier bring to mind your idea of the external world so think about the external world the fact that there is an external world that exists so if you close your eyes you think there's an external world right you don't think the world disappears do you probably not so bring to mind the external world now normally people would say well the external world is a real thing it's the most real thing there is but take a look at what the external world literally is flatten that illusion the external world is not an external world the external world is a thought in your mind it's a sensation in your mind that you experience so notice it for what it literally is got it good let's move on to the next one think of God whether you do believe or God in God or don't believe in God doesn't matter just bring to mind the idea of God or whatever you think God is okay now flatten the illusion of God notice what God literally is notice that you might have a resistance to flattening the illusion of God you may not want to see God as what God literally is because you've been telling yourself part of the illusion of God is that no God is real God is out there God's not in my head God's not an idea that one might be tricky for you if your atheist that's a really easy one for you because you already believe that God is an idea but that's a whole can of worms I'm not going to go into here okay and now what I want you to do and this is the trickiest one of all be real careful about this one think of yourself you not just the thought of you but literally you who are you what are you think of yourself the most truest sense of yourself that you have bring that to mind okay got it now flatten the illusion of yourself mm yeah that's a tricky one you might have some resistance to doing that one that one's even harder to do than God cuz you do think you're yourself and part of the illusion of being yourself is thinking that you're not an idea but that you're really yourself you're real but what is yourself really literally look at this very objectively don't let your mind you flatten the illusion of yourself okay got it good now that one might take you some more practice to really get down it's a really tricky tricky one so anyways these are all exercises that force your mind to see reality literally and to deconstruct your thoughts into what they literally are versus seeing the story the content or the image of the thoughts I really like to draw the analogy between what we're doing here and what artists are taught to do when they learn to draw so a good artist and if you go to a art class what they'll teach you if you want to become a good drawer is they'll sit you down though it's going to be like a still-life like it's going to be a maybe a flower pot with a vase and maybe a bowl of fruit and it's going to be nicely lit and you're gonna be sitting there with the whole class you're going to be drawing this thing they're going to ask you to draw that as accurately as you can just with a pencil and piece of paper you know very simple and the instruction that they'll give you to make you a good drawer is they'll tell you draw not what you think is there but literally what you see and that's kind of what we're telling you to do here don't think abstractly about what God is or what your mom is real gravity is what you are but literally just become mindful of what exactly is happening in your experience in order to even render the story of God gravity external world yourself or your mom see and a good artist at first it's very difficult because you might think that when you're drawing something it's like well yeah I already know what's there but what you quickly realize if you go to one of these classes like no you don't know what your drawing is you're kind of drawing your idea your image your abstract fantasy of what's there when you literally draw what's there it's a totally different experience even though the thing you're looking at didn't really change it's the same thing with becoming more mindful of your thoughts so this entire episode what I'm talking about is how to become more mindful of your thoughts and hopefully this is starting to show you the power of mindfulness now mindfulness doesn't just apply to thoughts you can apply mindfulness to feelings sensations emotions all sorts of stuff sights and sounds but the most important thing that you can apply mindfulness to is your thoughts because your thoughts construct all the meanings in your life what would your life be without meaning it would be unrecognizable to you and all the problems you have in your life what do you think those are those come from meaning without meaning there cannot be a problem to understand this a problem is a meaning is a specific type of meaning that you assign to a specific type of situation and then you tell yourself well the meaning is baked into this issue you know I'm angry because that person did something to me or I'm afraid because I really don't have enough money in my bank account to pay my mortgage next month you tell yourself that but that's just more layers of meaning you see it's like meaning masking meaning masking meaning masking meaning that's what's so dangerous about thoughts with the picture is really simple to see that a photograph of a piece of pizza is not going to feed your hunger that's easy enough to see but with thoughts you can't see this because the thoughts just come one on top of the next on top of the next on top of the next and you just believe every single thought that comes without questioning them without looking at them very carefully and so pretty quickly you're overrun by thoughts and you're just lost in the middle of a vast ocean of flaws and then you start to drown and you really believe because you're surrounded completely by thoughts that your reality becomes thoughts you live in an augmented reality and then from this many of your problems in life come if you're shy the only reason you're shy is because of thoughts thoughts make you shy the real world doesn't make you shine doesn't make anybody shy if you're afraid of something the only reason you're afraid of something is because you're lost in a sea of thoughts the real world rarely like if a lion jumps out at you from the middle of nowhere yeah you're going to have some kind of like really um a low-level reptilian brain response to that so from there you can have kind of a chemical fear but most of your fears are not like that most of your fears are these higher-order fears that are coming from conceptual interpretations of reality same thing with anger and depression frustration and annoyance and every other emotion you don't like and similarly with the positive emotions a lot of those are stemming from the meanings that you assign to objects and situations in the world so can you see the potential power of gaining mastery over the way in which you assign meaning to things very powerful the trick is it requires practice this is not something you just kind of like watch a video about it or listen to me talk about it for an hour so and it's like yep I got it leo and now I can go and apply it and now I don't have any more fears or anger any a depression earning like that it's not going to work that quickly for you because you've got so many meanings you've got this giant web of meanings wrapped in another web of meanings wrapped in another web of meanings that you're just totally lost you're totally lost and it's going to take you practice to unravel this web of meanings that you've created but can you see the potential value of making this investment in practicing and learning how to do this you might not immediately resolve all your problems but can you see that over time if you spend a few months or a few years practicing this that over time you're going to develop the mental facility or ability to kind of become the master of your own mind and your own meanings and you can become extremely good at this you can become so good at this that literally you can melt problems away just completely dissolve them but that'll take some doing so how do you do this how do you practice this well let me give you an assignment what I want you to do over the next week if you accept this challenge is I want you to commit to the following I want you to flatten 50 illusions that actually occur in your everyday experience so regular stuff not just made up examples kind of like what I made up here but real stuff 50 illusions over the next week and by illusions I mean thoughts thoughts that you have you're going to flatten 50 of them and each one you're going to write down carefully and accurately in a journal so let me give you three examples of how this might work so let's say tomorrow I go to work and something happens at work and I really hate my boss so I really feel like oh I hate my boss he's such an okay good so number one so I write to my journal number one I hate my that's what came up as a thought I noticed it okay I wrote that down now what I want you to do is to break that down into two components one component is the content and the other component is what it literally is so I hate my boss what's the content of that well the content of that is the meaning I assigned to it so something like my boss is a complete idiot and I wish he was fired like that's the content that's the story but what is it literally literally in your mind as it's happening what is it so there you might write down something like image of boss with a stupid face image of boss getting fired feeling in my chest of contraction and heating because that's the emotional component right so a charge thought is not just a mental image but it's also like probably a constriction in your body somewhere some kind of tension so write that down as well that's literally what that is so that's an example of flattening the illusion now let's give you a second example let's say that you're going about your day and you're in a crowd of people and all of a sudden you feel shine insecure what's the content of that so you write that down number two I am shy let's say that that's your thought what's the content there the content there is that it's something like well I'm always insecure in groups you know I really feel bad about being shy all the time I wish I wasn't shy that's the content what is it literally literally it might be something like butterflies in your stomach ah feeling the pumping of your blood through your veins and your arms and in your neck and it might also be a kind of a feeling of sadness and depression and an image of you being weak and awkward looking and everybody laughing at you you know maybe have that kind of image in your mind and also the sound of I am shy or why am I so shy why was I born this way that might be literally what this thing is okay got that and then the third example is something like let's say you're going about your day and you have this idea like oh you know I'm listening to all these actualised old videos and I really have a plan for my life I'm going to be rich I really want to be rich I have this goal of becoming rich I want to be a millionaire and I want to drive around and BMW okay so you write that down number three in your journal I am going to be rich write that down that's your thought and now what's the content of that the content is something like I'm gonna have a million dollars and drive around in a BMW okay and what's literally going on there in that thought well you probably have an image of you with the big stack of dollar bills or maybe it's in a briefcase or maybe you're picturing digits in your bank account like seven digits in your bank account and also you're picturing yourself driving down the coast on you know of California in a BMW and it's kind of like silver colored red colored whatever color you want and also you've got this kind of like positive light bubbly feeling somewhere in your chest kind of that's kind of like the happiness component because this this is a bowl you're so it probably makes you happy to to picture yourself this way so that's literally what this thing is notice that there's a big difference between what it literally is and the content that you attribute to it the meaning of it big difference so those are three examples I want you to come up with 50 of these from your real life over the next week this will take some commitment from you because you'll easily forget so make sure that if you want to do this you really commit to it and maybe set a reminder for yourself so that you're not forgetting every single morning that you wake up that this is what you're doing and keep your journal with you throughout the day and write this stuff down take it to work or to school wherever you go I guarantee that if you do this 50 times over the next week you're going to have some pretty interesting insights and already this giant condensed web of beliefs you have in all these meanings about how bad your life is and how you can't do this and how you feel deficient in this area it's going to start to unravel not totally but you're going to start to see the potential of this and hopefully what it'll do is it'll just kind of get you to buy into the idea that mindfulness is important and that understanding what thoughts are important is important and maybe it'll show you how poor your mindfulness skills are maybe it'll demonstrate to you that man you know I thought I knew what was going on in my mind but really I have no freaking clue what's going on in my mind I'm not even sure what I thought is what is the flawed do this exercise 50 times and you'll just get to the point where you'll be like oh my god I can't believe I don't even know what a thought is and that's true you don't know what a thought is and doing 50 of these examples is not gonna reveal to you what a thought is that's going to take many hundreds of hours more of work but remember how powerful this is this is one of the keys to all personal development this is one of the keys to unlocking your entire mind so don't treat this casually don't expect this to come easy and effortlessly for you you're going to struggle a lot with this but also remember that you're shooting for something big here if you actually do ever become fully mindful of what a thought is that will be huge for you huge that will be more valuable to you than all the self-help books you could read in five years but it can't be a belief it can't be an idea can't be a theory of yours can't be an ideology you can't turn it into a dogma you have to actually practice this as a skill this is a skill no different than hitting a golf ball well or doing a good tennis serve or you know skiing excellently down a mountain without falling down these are all like physical skills and so is the awareness of your mind and of your thought process you could think of it almost like a physical skill like playing the piano and right now you're a horrible pianist therein lies one of your biggest problems in life the problem is that you have thoughts that tell you that you're an excellent pianist and that you don't need to learn how to play the piano because you're just a natural at it you were born good you were born knowing how to think so naturally you should know what thoughts are but this is a very dangerous thought to have and maybe one day you can become mindful of the fact that you have that thought and then you can flatten it and see what it really is yeah see that and if you want to take this to deeper levels read up on mindfulness I have some powerful videos and additional episodes that talk about mindfulness meditation how to practice it how to set up a habit of developing a little bit more mindfulness every single day you can also try different forms of meditation that can build up mindfulness you can also watch some of my other episodes that go into depth into revealing the illusory nature of your mind and how your mind really works you know I talked about what emotions are and how they work I talked about what thoughts are and how they work and many many other things like this so this is a whole field for you right this is just the beginning this is just the opening of a little door that leads to a very vast new universe which ultimately leads to freedom and to a self actualized life all right that's it I'm done I'm signing off please click the like button for me post your comments down below share this with a friend if you would and lastly come check out actualizado because my website have a free newsletter on there I'd like you to sign up because if you do sign up then you're going to get kind of like weekly reminders with new content new videos that I'm releasing all the time which are just going to take you deeper and deeper into realizing and mastering your mind because as you develop and master your mind in ways that you have not been taught in school in ways that your parents have no clue about your friends have no clue about the general popular culture has no clue about nobody will teach you this stuff really so it's really worth it to stick with me if you want to master your life you want to create the kind of life that you've dreamed of having and you know you've struggled and you didn't know how to do it well the reason you didn't is because you haven't mastered your mind yet and what I'm going to show you is how to master your mind to the deepest depths possible I'm going to take you so deep on this that you probably don't even want to go that deep but man if you stick around me for a few months a few years you're going to start to see huge changes in your perspective on life and what you think is possible in life and you're going to be able to accomplish many of the things that previously thought you never could so sign up to the newsletter stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you