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[Music] let's get into the heart of holism and holistic thinking there's so much material to cover here that there's actually going to be an additional part next week so stay tuned for that as always sometimes the best material i save for last as we build up but if you haven't watched already make sure you go watch my previous episode called what are holons where we lay the foundation for what will for what we'll be talking about today so basically at this point you should understand that everything in the universe is connected to everything else in case that wasn't clear but for a lot of people this isn't clear because they're looking at the universe through the filter of their selfish ego mind and this creates distortions and causes us to think unholistically and when people tend to think unholistically this leads to pathology disease and even evil in quotes evil and that's why this topic is so important and we'll be going into just exactly what the connection is between lack of holism and evil deeper in this episode but before we get to that first let's define holism in a formal way if we look at the dictionary the oxford dictionary definition says the following quote it's the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection such that they cannot exist independently of the whole or cannot be understood without reference to the whole which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts end quote so that's basically what it is the key there the key the whole key behind holism is this idea of irreducibility you can't just reduce reality down to a collection of independently existing parts because in fact everything that exists exists together as a unity it can't exist otherwise for very deep metaphysical reasons that i've explained elsewhere and that i will elaborate upon some more as we keep going here but this is the key see it's not just that reality is a collection of loose objects what really matters is the relationships between these objects not just the objects themselves it's the relationships and how they interconnect and how they flow and merge into and out of each other and also the different various levels of subordination and super ordination that they are in relationship in the various hierarchies which lead to our keys and so on so holism is the opposite of reductionism or atomism reductionism or atomism is the idea that you can treat nature as just a collection of discrete individual objects and this reductionism is actually an implicit sneaky hidden part of the materialistic paradigm which we've talked about in the past when we talk about metaphysics and we talk about epistemology the maturistic paradigm is the idea that the universe is is real and it's material it's out there it's physical it's external it's objective it doesn't depend upon the mind and these sorts of ideas a lot of scientists subscribe to this sort of paradigm well it's not just that it's also the idea that you can just boil everything down to something like atoms such that a human is nothing other than just atoms and the planet is just nothing other than atoms and that everything ultimately is just physics and then if we can just figure out physics at the quantum scale or whatever then we will understand all of the universe and that's going to be it and everything else is just some sort of epiphenomena or just some sort of uh second order third order fourth order effect from the molecules bouncing around it's this kind of idea and then we tend to approach everything in life that way and it creates all sorts of problems because this is an unholistic way of thinking and ultimately leads to many dysfunctions and pathologies as we'll be talking about so it's this idea that if we want to understand what a frog is what we do is we go into the swamp where the frog lives we yank the frog out of there we put it into a in a glass terrarium and then we study it for a few days then we throw it into a blender blend it up and we study the juice of the frog and that's the real essence of the frog to understand the frog you gotta blend it up and study its juices under a microscope and there you see the little molecules and proteins and then you break that up even further you put it into this sort of uh centrifuge machine that separates all the different cells and molecules into different layers based upon their size and weight and density and so forth and then that's how you really understand what the frog is the frog is really carbon atoms and nitrogen atoms and oxygen atoms and that's what it is this is a very uh unholistic approach to doing science and this is where science creates a lot of problems for itself you know people sometimes say leo why are you so anti-science i'm not anti-science i'm actually very pro science but i want science done in a holistic manner because the spirit of science is to understand reality as a whole not to understand little bits and pieces because the problem is that just because you understand one bit or one piece of reality does not mean that you have the same kind of understanding as the whole of reality you can't just stitch together a little bit of you know oh someone blended a frog here and someone did something there and someone understood some molecule there and then we just we just stitch all those together and then we understand reality you can't understand reality that way and if you think you can that's an implicit part of your epistemology and metaphysics that you're sneaking in which you did not actually validate or prove no scientific study has been done to demonstrate that this is the right way to do science or that this is the only way to do science or that this is how you get to truth or the highest understanding we've discussed this in my series deconstructing the myth of science part one two three go check that out if you're interested more about the the deep epistemology and metaphysics of how science is done and the various corruptions that exist within science so you see like look at how much is missed when you blend this frog and you only study its juices what about how the frog lives what it eats how it interacts with the frogs how it relates to the environment it's a part of to even think of a frog as this separate discrete object separate from the swamp in which it lives separate from its other members of its species and its mates and its society or community that already is a deeply reductionistic unholistic highly problematic way of understanding a frog you might think that just by yanking that frog out of its habitat and then studying it inside of a terrarium that that would be better than blending it in a blender and you're right that is better maybe you play with the frog you feed the frog you learn something about the frog that you don't understand by blending it but even that doesn't really capture the whole of it because if you really understand frog you got to go into the swamp where it lives and study its natural habitat because the frog is going to behave differently in your lab terrarium than it will in its swamp and it will behave differently depending on what season it is what time of day it is wha how the rainfall is whether it's mating season or not and you might say okay leo fine i'm gonna i'm gonna spend more money and i'm gonna go into the into the swamp i'm gonna set up a little uh cubby there camouflage in the swamp and i'm gonna study those frogs that way but even there you're not understanding the depth of the problem because just you being there in the swamp next to the frog studying the frog that already influences the frog's behaviors and you might say no but i'm camouflaged so it can't see but you're assuming that the frog has the primary mode of seeing you through its vision but what if the frog's got other senses that you don't even know about maybe it can hear you maybe it can smell you maybe it's got some six or seven cents that that we don't even know maybe it can sense your magnetic signature or your infrared radiation or whatever you don't know see you haven't thought about these things very deeply because your whole approach is very reductionistic and so ultimately the the fatal flaw of most scientists is that they they underestimate the entanglement problem we've talked about that before the integral problem that exists between the scientists and the subject or object that he's studying see in a sense you're entangled with the frog your understanding of what the frog is and how you think about the frog this is all really it doesn't exist out there in the frog it exists in your mind how you think about the frog just the fact that you think of it as this separate isolated creature is already a sort of a category in a projection and a bias that you're imparting upon the thing you're studying and then you make various kinds of assumptions about whether you can study this frog in a blender or in a terrarium or in the natural environment or however see now it's understandable why scientists do this because reductionism makes your life a lot simpler you can pare down the problem to some convenient little box and then study it within that little box this makes it easy to do science but also it's a it's a sort of a crippled version of science because your understanding then becomes very compartmentalized and limited too you see and so understand that there's different gradations of science you can have low quality science you can have very high quality science but then the higher quality science is more difficult to do that's why it's not done requires a lot more money it costs a lot more money to go out into the swamp and live with the frogs there it's not very comfortable and convenient it's a lot better from a scientist's point of view to study the the frog in a lab but you know what a lot of the stuff that is studied in labs isn't actually how it works in the real world which creates blind spots and biases and it creates bad science you know a lot of scientific research and studies they are literally done with like college students why is that because most act most scientists and academics they live in a university setting and of course what do they have an abundance of and overabundance of uh eager free fodder in the form of undergraduate students that they can do surveys on polls on research studies they can drag them into a laboratory you know pay them a little bit of money to be lab subjects they're little guinea pigs and then they experiment on them but you know this leads to biases because when all of your research and surveys and studies are done on on college students that's a very narrow unrepresentative sample of the larger population we're talking mostly about uh western kids between the ages of like 18 and 25 that are at these universities these tend to be affluent they tend to be more white they tend to be more secular non-religious if they're going to a university they tend to be more liberal more progressive as opposed to conservative they tend to not represent all sorts of segments of the population they tend to be within a very narrow band of spiral dynamics stages of development uh they tend to have similar cognitive moral spiritual development and then so when you do research on these types of people you get a very narrow result back but then scientists tend to just extrapolate that out say well if it if it's true for my undergraduate students then it must be sort of true for the whole human race which of course isn't the case for example if you wanted to as a scientist to research uh something like meditation well the problem with that is that you might conduct you might design an experiment and then you might recruit some some of your undergraduate students to participate uh in that but the problem is that none of them are going to be very expert meditators at that age in that cultural uh in that sort of cultural uh bracket in that level of cognitive and spiritual development in western culture they're all going to suck at meditation you see so you're going to get very skewed results if you really want to understand the effects of meditation you got to go like to india and find advanced yogis who are living in caves who have been meditating for 20 30 years their entire lives and then you got to study them and see what they can do now there you'll get totally different results than you will on your undergraduate students you see but is the scientist is the academic really thinking this holistically and even there of course if you just do it in india you might get skewed results too you got to go and do it in different countries all around the world if you really want to understand how spirituality works how meditation works and so on so it's tricky the reality is that it's because reality is so infinitely complicated it's very difficult to do good science on it holistic science so usually we get rather crummy limited reductionistic science and as we're growing up and we're going through the education system were really indoctrinated into this materialism and this reductionism this kind of linear analytical way of thinking school academia science medicine business healthcare government all of these institutions are infected with this sort of reductionistic linear analytical thinking they all have a bias towards analysis and division and you see as it turns out your mind can work in different ways the mind can be very analytical or divisive using your mind to carve out various categories within reality that's mostly what you're taught in university and in school if you remember back or the mind can be used in a more unitive fashion in a more holistic fashion where you're trying to synthesize and draw connections between things this is a very different approach and we're generally not taught this approach in school and in university it's de-emphasized because most of our institutions have certain biases in school and academia and science and medicine and business and government a lot of times we're using analysis to achieve a certain survival result we have a certain agenda and we're not really interested in a holistic understanding of reality we're interested for example in our department figuring out like if we're working within quantum mechanics we're only interested in quantum mechanics very narrowly we're not interested in biology or chemistry or how they all interconnect with each other so we compartmentalize into literally a university you'll have all these different departments with various sub-specialties but then what we have is we have a ton of narrow specialists and analysts in the world but we have very few holistic synthesizers and this creates a big problem because we have a lot of people with good technical expertise who seem if you look at it on the surface they seem like they're very responsible well-educated professional people you'll see them on tv you'll see these pundits and experts you'll see scientists with phds with nobel prizes they will seem very authoritative it might be a doctor in a white lab coat it might be a lawyer it might be you know a judge or whatever and you think well surely these people are like the top intellectuals they understand what's going on in reality we should listen to these people and just follow them but the problem is that most of these people even though they do have uh certain technical expertise uh it tends to be very narrow and unholistic and this gets us into a lot of trouble because we have high technical expertise but very little wisdom and wisdom check out my episode what is wisdom i said in that episode it's a holistic thing that's one of the features of wisdom is that it's holistic and we'll explain a bit more about that as we keep going so you should start to get a little bit of a sense here why holism is important really that's one of the biggest lessons from this episode is just start to see how important holism is and how little it is stressed in most institutions and areas within society and you start to understand why we have so many problems in our society and in the world both individually and collectively so but let's uh let's really stress this point uh as to why holism is so important because this is this is the major lesson here for you even if you say well yeah i already know it's important no you don't know how important it is and you don't know how much you're lacking it because again holism isn't just a binary thing you're either holistic or you're not it's there's there are many degrees of holism and so our work here is to to help you to elevate yourself to the higher degrees and to show you how to do that which we'll be doing so but here's a few examples of why holism is so important so imagine for example that there's something wrong in the body like with your heart and uh and let's say i'm the ceo of this corporation is a pharmaceutical company and i want to help people to uh to heal their heart but in fact more likely it's like i want to actually earn a lot of money that would probably be my first priority if we're realistic about how ceos are on these companies which is a unholistic way of thinking in and of itself but let's just focus on on healing the heart so let's say that we want to create a drug that reduces cholesterol and plaque in the heart okay great so we think that you know i tell my scientists focus on finding me the right chemical that we can manufacture and patent to reduce cholesterol go find it that's your number one priority that's all we care about just focus on that and some scientists says well but what about what about other effects of this drug i say no it doesn't matter we just need this drug by next quarter to you know drive up our stock prices that's what we need uh damn everything else focus all your energy on just finding this chemical and so the scientists go they obey because under capitalism they have to to uh you know not to starve so they they obey the ceo and they they do this and they find the drug that will do it this one chemical and that they test it and it seems to work in these double-blind placebo-controlled studies works cures people's heart disease and so forth great right except what if this chemical creates cancer in the kidneys or in the liver see in order to catch that you would have to think more holistically you'd have to think of this chemical not only affecting or curing one part of the body but also not only does it have to cure the heart problem it has to also not cause other problems in the body and there are thousands of other problems it could potentially cause and it would be difficult to study all those problems and to eliminate them as side effects sometimes the drug can have worse side effects than the disease that it's curing but that's not all see you might say well okay fine if the ceo is a little bit more holistic in his understanding he's a little bit smarter he has to he has to tell his scientists don't just look for a drug that heals the heart but also doesn't damage any of the other parts of the physical body well that's better that's certainly a better approach uh and through that method we might find some new chemical which both heals the heart and doesn't cause cancer or other diseases anywhere else in the body okay good but but notice how limited this still is because see when you're manufacturing a drug it's not just about the physical body it's also about the mind and if you have a very materialistic approach very reductionistic approach to to human health you might think well damn the mind i'm not in the you know as a ceo i'm not in the business of healing people's minds i don't care about their minds i care about their bodies that's my business everything else that you know that's for psychologists to think about the mind that's for their guru to worry about that that's not my job okay but then what if this drug that was invented it doesn't harm any of the body but when you take it you get depression after a few months and then this depression becomes very bad and maybe even this drug has some addictive qualities such that even after heart disease you still keep taking it and then this leads people to commit suicide from this depression now the ceo might compartmentalize this and say well that's again that's not that's not my concern that's not my business let him go to a therapist and work out his depression but what if the chemical is actually causing the depression and also there's addiction there see if you're thinking he's not holistic you can compartmentalize that problem you can ignore it and you can deny it and you can make a lot of money selling this drug but if you have a more holistic approach you might say oh damn i mean we could have earned 10 billion dollars selling this drug but we can't we have to we have to look for something else because this drug causes depression in people and i care about that because i'm a more holistic sort of leader and ceo how many ceos would would make that difficult decision not very many not these days not to say they couldn't but they just as part of their culture they wouldn't because their responsibility is more for driving up stock prices than it is for caring about people's psychological well-being but it doesn't stop there it's also about how we market this drug even if this drug is is is fine and doesn't cause depression and so forth the way we market it very aggressively how we price the drug pricing out people who don't have the money for it for example or marketing it so aggressively that people who don't need the drug end up taking the drug and it causes bad effects in them so it might heal those people who are actually sick but then it causes more disease and problems in those who aren't sick but we push the drugs so hard through television ads and various kinds of free giveaways that they do through doctors and so forth that we create harm that way and then there are all sorts of secondary and tertiary cascading effects from that you see it's going to affect your country your citizens your neighbors your community that you live in such that maybe you sell this drug to somebody who doesn't need it they get addicted to it they get depressed from it then they go by a ar15 then they go shoot up a school and it turns out that that school is where your daughter was going and she gets shot and see now you can fully appreciate how everything in the universe is deeply interconnected and that you can't just treat it as though it's not your problem in a sense everything is your problem and so part of what it means to be a holistic thinker is that requires taking much more responsibility for all of your actions and all of the secondary and tertiary consequences but the way that many leaders and business people operate these days is very much unlike that because it doesn't serve them it doesn't serve their survival it doesn't serve their pocketbook to be this holistic because then you have to take a lot of responsibility for your actions of your business you see so this is just one example of how deeply problematic this sort of lack of holism can be and also it shows you why there is a sort of a perverse incentive for people to be deliberately unholistic in their thinking you'll find if you start to practice holism that the more holistic you become the more difficult it is to actually do certain things in life because you can't do them for the fact that you're conscious of how responsible you are and what collateral damage this would do to everyone in the universe that you feel connected with and the more beings in the universe you feel connected with the more carefully you have to tread through the universe you can't just you know walk through a forest stomping on every creature that's under your foot without giving a damn that makes it difficult to walk through a forest or to drive your hummer through a forest you know trampling squirrels and bugs as you go here's another example of why holism is important and this one is uh is uh about star wars if you're a fan of star wars like me at least the original trilogy or the second i i liked all the lucas trilogies i mean there were problems with the with the um with the prequels but still way better than what disney has done with the trilogy so if you've if you've seen what disney has done with the with the star wars trilogy and i haven't actually even watched it i've just watched the reviews because i knew they were gonna butcher it and break my heart so i didn't even bother watching it but uh the whole problem with the disney trilogy it's a total mess because see the original star wars was designed by one visionary george lucas and he had sort of a overarching vision a holistic vision for what star wars would be and uh in fact it was it was so much material such a long story they had to break it up into multiple episodes that's where the trilogy came from so it sort of evolved organically from the sort of quality and depth of the story he wanted to tell but with disney why did they want a trilogy did they even know no they just bought it from from lucas and they just wanted to maximize the profits that was like their only concern they didn't have a holistic vision for what star wars could be or how it tied in with the old trilogy or what it'll how it'll tie in with future trilogies they didn't care about anything in fact they couldn't even construct one overarching story arc for the trilogy they gave each episode in the trilogy to other different directors and different writers such that there was never a single cohesive vision i mean it's it's the height of of stupidity to do this with your brand probably one of the most popular brands on the planet with loyal fans who will get their hearts broken if you don't treat the trilogy properly and you know have an overarching vision for what the episodes are going to be a nice arc with nice conclusions none of that was done for the star wars trilogy why not because they don't have a holistic approach to to this creative challenge right that's one of the functions of a visionary is that the visionary brings to a project this overarching holistic sense of direction of what they're doing of vision and without that you just have a bunch of people doing stuff slapping stuff together hoping that it'll lead to something magical and beautiful and usually it doesn't so notice how various forms of entertainment you know fall to this problem maybe some of your favorite brands or your favorite franchises have fallen prey to this whereas originally there was some higher vision that led to some sort of magical beautiful game or story or set of novels or a or a set of movies or a tv series or whatever and then later that visionary died or went off doing his own thing and then the people who took over it they have no vision and they're just slapping stuff together and when you slap a bunch of characters and and things together like with star wars if you just slap some laser swords and some uh you know some jedis and some evil sith people you slap them all together it does not equal the same thing as the original star wars you can't just reduce star wars that when you do you lose something that's greater than the sum of its parts you see or consider another example of why holism is important consider who wins or loses at chess if you're a bit of a chess fan like i am i used to play it a lot when i was younger not so much these days but i still enjoy a good chess game or even watching youtube videos of some of the classic you know chess games of grand masters there are some beautiful games you can watch what are the most beautiful chess games the most beautiful chess games are those in which some sort of a deep sacrifice is made only to come out with a checkmate at the very end despite the sacrifice so for example sacrificing your queen to lure in your opponent to make him think that oh he he has outsmarted you but actually that's all part of a larger plan you have to outsmart him so in chess the one who wins is the one who has a more holistic the most holistic understanding of the board in that particular game that's who wins so really chess in a sense is a battle for holistic understanding of that particular scenario and those who are geniuses at it and the most beautiful games you can find online and so forth of the grand masters you'll see this you'll see that they're thinking 10 15 moves ahead and they're they're making these gambits and making these brilliant plays which are highly intuitive and intuition of course is is directly related to holism which we'll elaborate upon a little bit more later in this episode but uh they're using this profound powerful intuition in order to synthesize all the possible strategies and then to come up with this sort of a brilliant overarching strategy that is supposed to lead to a checkmate so we see this uh over and over again with uh with various situations in life where in a sense people who are unholistic they paint themselves into corners easily just in the way that you can paint yourself into a corner uh if you're sort of a fool at playing chess you can be easily uh fooled like there's there's actually something called a fool's mate it lures you in you think you're gonna quickly win something and then actually you lose very fast like that and so what i'm talking about it might sound like what i'm talking about are these large societal problems with science or with health care or something like that but but a lack of holism is also a problem just in your personal life because you easily paint yourself into a corner in your personal life as well by a lack of holistic thinking but now we get to the heart of this episode here's what i really want you to learn this is the most important part i'm going to give you two equations here these are the sort of master equations that explain all of life these are very profound you should write these down in your notes and contemplate them for years because you will get payoff from this so i'm going to give you the two equations and then i'm going to go to a lot of elaboration upon the terms because i could talk about these terms and how they equate with each other for hours but we don't have that much time so we'll have to summarize all right so the first equation is this holism equals wholeness equals health equals healing equals unity equals oneness equals the infinite equals harmony and balance equals goodness equals love equals god equals selflessness equals wisdom equals beauty equals holy equals heaven equals bliss and then the second equation which is the flip side of the first equation a lack of holism equals division equals fragmentation equals partiality equals brokenness equals a lack of harmony and balance equals limitation equals the finite equals selfishness equals the ugly equals evil equals hell equals suffering all right so now let's explain so when we're talking about holism what we're really talking about is seeing the biggest picture or the highest hole we're also talking about health because as it turns out health is nothing other than harmony or balance within the highest whole so for example when we say that the human body is healthy or it's not healthy it's diseased or it's broken what are we really saying a healthy human body that's nothing other than to say that all the different parts in the body are in balance with each other and working synergistically in harmony for the greater good of the whole of the body and if some part is out of order out of harmony doing something selfish it's misbehaving then we say that's a broken body there's disease in that body one part of the body is fighting some other part of the body like with cancer or with autoimmune or whatever there's literally division within the body the body is at war with itself it's divided against itself as in the case with cancer these cancer cells are selfishly in a divisive partial broken way trying to multiply themselves but eventually what happens if that keeps going it ends up being self-terminating because the cancer overtakes the body destroys the good parts of the body that are needed to function and then of course that also destroys the host and the substrate that the cancer itself needs in order to live and so not only does the cancer kill all the rest of the organs it also kills itself at the very end and so this is a pathology this is brokenness it's unsustainable it's a selfish strategy we might say uh the self the cancer in this case is is being too selfish it doesn't want to limit itself to play well with the rest of the body and to keep itself in check it's out of balance and so what does it mean to heal the body to heal the body literally means to bring different parts of your body into balance with themselves to remove the divisions into a unity or oneness you see similarly what does it mean for a human being to be evil or pathological within society see disease can exist within your body but disease can also exist within society at large a disease within society is when certain human beings or groups of human beings are behaving in an unbalanced unharmonious way a selfish way where they are dividing and fragmenting society leading to brokenness leading to suffering which makes the society unstable and eventually could destroy the society for example think of adolf hitler what does it mean to say that adolf hitler is evil a lot of people would call him evil he's not really evil evil is just uh as i've talked about in the past evil is just a relative designation what does it really mean to say that adolf hitler was evil it wasn't that he was some you know morally demonic person it was just that he was very selfish he got indoctrinated with a very limited partial divisive ideology when he was growing up in germany at that time and it was a challenging time for for germans in that in that era after their defeat in world war one and so the german population felt demoralized they felt victimized and so various kinds of toxic ideologies were developed that were anti-semitic that were anti-marxist anti-communists and so there was a sort of a swing of the pendulum very far to the right within german politics and hitler got wrapped up in this propaganda he read a lot of these sort of magazines and listened to these radio programs and whatever and got involved in this sort of uh toxic ideology of nazism and this led to a lot of it was filled with racism and hatred and all of this and uh and this was a very selfish way of thinking about reality right why is it selfish well because it's like it's me and my people the german people the pure people versus those dirty others over there who are depraved and evil and it's you know it's the jews and the and the communists who are trying to you know degrade the germans and infect our german blood with their you know bad genetics and whatever else and they're bad ideas and so it's this us versus them this divisionary fragmentary uh very broken way of of seeing reality and then when you project the divisions of your mind onto reality which is what hitler did then that's how you see because you know your reality is intertwined with your mind such that whatever you think influences what you see out there and then so this leads to a very fragmentary worldview and then that leads to very fragmentary actions and so of course that's just what world war ii was it was just a series of of divisive and fragmentary and selfish actions that destabilized the whole world brought it out of balance and then had to be put back into balance by ultimately defeating hitler and it was ugly people called it evil for for many who suffered through it it was hell it was hell both for the germans who had to fight it was hell for uh the jews it was held hell for the russians and and and the americans and and the british and everybody else who fought in it it was hell for many uh folks it was felt hell for those at hiroshima and nagasaki uh you know it was hell in the east it was hell in the west it was full of suffering it was ugly it was brutal it was broken that's what selfishness leads to at the individual level i mean hitler was not a happy guy it wasn't that there was just brokenness within the german society it was also he was a broken guy so the the brokenness of the german society was a reflection of his own inner brokenness but consider how it could have gone it could have gone where hitler recognized maybe somebody told him he watched some actualized videos or something somebody told him that hey you know you've got these fragments in your mind the way that you're thinking about reality when you're fragmenting reality into you know the germans versus the non-germans the non-aryans you know the semites versus the anti-semites of the communists versus the nationalists when you're when you're doing this you're creating these divisions and this is actually disunifying reality and leading to disease what if instead we healed these divisions in your mind such that your mind was unified and you weren't at war with the rest of the world and maybe that would have to start by healing the divisions within you maybe there are aspects of you that you have disowned and denied and demonized that need to be loved maybe you need to give up certain selfish attachments and fears that you have and as you do that you become more selfless you become more in balance with your own self you become a better human being a more compassionate human being who is cognizant of how one's mind influences what one sees and and what one receives back from reality and you think more holistically about the kind of beliefs and ideologies that you've been programmed with you let those go and as you do that you experience more unity more love you literally become healed your body becomes healthier various kinds of ailments and diseases that you have will go away as you do that as you fight less with yourself and then you will fight less with others around you as well because you'll recognize that they are just a part of a larger system that we're all a part of that we're all in the same boat together and that none of them are really your enemies and as you do that you will see the beauty of life more and instead of experiencing suffering you will start to experience moments of temporary moments of bliss and heaven and eventually if you keep going and going and going you raise your consciousness more and more and more you become more conscious of of how much everything in reality is interconnected at some point your conscience will actually go from finite to infinite as your your mind becomes completely unified and healed into a into a oneness and you will realize that you're not just a part of the universe you are one with the universe you are the universe and when you recognize that furthermore your consciousness goes even more infinite and you realize that the universe is actually you as god dreaming up this dream in your own mind and when you recognize that you realize yourself to be holy and everything around you becomes holy and that's the discovery of spirituality true spirituality that's all that spirituality really is is a it's a it's a healing of divisions and biases and partiality within your own mind to such a radical extent that eventually your mind becomes completely unified and one such that even the division between subject and object me and you us and them all these divisions get so healed and so unified that literally you merge into the universe and you realize that the whole thing is god a holy absolute unity or infinity or love and then you align your life with that most holistic of consciousnesses or you could go the other directions you could go into the selfish direction that was the selfless direction you could go into the selfish direction and you could just double down on your partiality your biases your selfishness your desire to survive and to dominate others and then you can live that very limited way of life and you become more and more entangled in selfishness and then you suffer more and more from it and then your life becomes a living hell and then eventually you might even need to kill yourself the way that hitler did once uh you know he's backed all the way into the corner that he painted himself into this is it i i just gave you the two master equations of life this is what all of reality and all of life is about consciousness can have various levels of holism to it really it's an infinite scale from infinitely unholistic and fragmented and divided to infinitely unified and everything in between and depending on where you are on this scale is going to be the quality of your life and how beautiful and holy life seems to you as an individual but also us collectively as a species as a species the more unified we are the more holistic we are uh the more beautiful our societies will be the more beautiful our cities will be the less war we'll have the more peace we'll have should have really included peace as part of this first equation because all of that stuff equals peace that's how you get peace through unification but see it's tricky because there are many orders of unification unification needs to happen not only at the individual level also at the family level also at the local community city level also at the level of your state at the level of your country at the level of the globe at the level of all races at the level of all species so you see we're going through the whole lawns that we talked about in water holland's episode we're going through these hollows higher and higher and higher until we reach an infinite unity and this is what human history has been about for the last 10 000 years is that we've been unifying at smaller scales you know at first we unified as tribes then we unified as city-states then we use it unified as nations now we're starting to unify as the globe but a lot of people are resistant to this idea of a unified uh global collective of humans people are nationalistic they want to just unify only with their with their nation and this of course leads to war and genocide and all sorts of other problems because the reality is that anything short of infinite unity is going to lead to suffering ugliness and limitation so the whole point of spiritual work is to let go of all your partialities all of your divisions and that means becoming more selfless but of course that's the most difficult thing to do and when you become completely selfless if you ever achieve this then you realize that you're god because god is nothing other than infinitely selfless consciousness whereas the reason you don't realize your god right now is because you're in a divided highly fragmented highly partial sense of consciousness so you think you're a little human that's separate from the universe that's separate from other humans that separate from other animals that separate from other planets and solar systems and things that's that's the level of consciousness you're at right now that can change changing that is the function of spirituality powerful stuff right make sure you write down these equations and you contemplate them deeply i'm telling you how to heal the world right here i'm telling you how to heal yourself you know there are entire mental disorders that have to do with just fragments severe fragmentation of one's psyche like schizophrenia or multiple personality disorders there are people who literally have like multiple multiple personalities multiple egos you think having one ego is bad they have multiple egos fighting uh inside their skulls and of course this leads to very dysfunctional ways of living and so what's the solution to these sorts of disorders well again it's to unify is to unify the various parts of your psyche and don't think that these are just extreme people who live in psychiatric wards you also suffer from a certain degree of multiple personality disorder because your ego is not fully unified your ego is fragmented and this is very easy to tell because you know one day you're all gung-ho about meditating and self-actualizing and eating healthy and going to the gym and then the next day you're lazy and you don't go to the gym and you eat a bucket of ice cream and you don't want to self-actualize and you have a giant ego backlash what's going on there well there are multiple parts within your psyche that you haven't harmonized yet there's that part of you the reptilian brain part that wants food and sex and pleasure and to be lazy and then there's that part of you that's aspirational the spiritual part of you the higher self that wants to self-actualize that wants to eat healthy that wants to be successful that wants to be spiritual that wants to pursue the truth and beauty and it wants to love but then this part of you is too afraid to love and so now there's a war between which one will allow well one day one wins out another day the next one's out that's why you have fights with your family or with your loved ones with your spouses and girlfriends and boyfriends that's why you struggle to self-actualize and to grow because there's this tug of war within you there might be wounded parts within you maybe you gotta be bullied as a child or abused or ridiculed and then that wounded part of you is is has like fragmented and been severed from the rest of your psyche such that normally you function pretty well but then something once in a while will trigger you and then you will regress back and then that that little part of you that's been wounded it'll come out like a monster from its cage and then it'll it'll overtake you know the normal uh reasoning part of you it'll overtake that and it'll turn you into a monster for a day or two and that will keep happening until you learn to to heal this part literally see and the mistake that's made here is that people people say oh well that part of me is bad and evil so i'm going to just hit it and punish it i'm going to guilt myself for having that part you know i'm gonna guilt myself for wanting food and sex and i'm gonna i'm gonna you know i'm gonna force myself never to have sex again and i'm gonna never masturbate and i'm gonna never eat bad food and i'm just gonna be perfect all the time but then this this doesn't work because what you've done is you've demonized and actually further fragmented the good part of you from the bad part of you so you've created this good versus bad dichotomy and now this just perpetuates the division you didn't actually harmonize the situation by guilting yourself or shaming yourself over this and so how do you fix this well with love love is what heals love is that which can understand and recognize and incorporate and accept integrate through acceptance through a higher understanding right you might for example recognize that yeah that part of me when i was little was bullied at school and i still live with those wounds but you know what i'm going to accept my wounds i'm going to still love myself despite those wounds i'm going to try to be understanding about you know the situation i was in i was sent to a bad school and there wasn't really a lot i could do and as you try to do that work you might even forgive some of those people who bullied you out of a sense of love and holistic understanding and then you integrate that and then after some years of doing that kind of therapeutic work shadow work um speaking of which i still have to release that episode on shadow work but yeah you do that work and then at one point you heal it you heal it so much that it it merges back together and then you're whole again and then you can love yourself again i just told you how to do shadow work i'm gonna have don't worry i'm gonna have a dedicated episode on shadow work with more detailed explanations and exercises but but this is the essence of shadow work shadow work is just recognizing parts of reality that you've disowned by expanding your consciousness a more holistic understanding of that situation incorporating it integrating it loving it accepting it unifying it until there's no shadow um god is that which has no shadow because it's infinitely conscious of itself and when you're infinitely conscious of yourself and you recognize that you're infinity you're one you're the entire thing there's no more shadow and there's no more warding with no no more warring with yourself or with others because really warring with yourself and warring with others it's actually the same thing that's what you recognize and the higher your consciousness goes the more unity you experience the more blissful your life will be the more loving you will be with others in your life and with yourself the more you will accept yourself the more happy you will be so really you should add happiness to the first equation as well because this is how you attain true happiness and if you take this far enough your conscience becomes infinitely unified you actually will experience literally heaven paradise that's what heaven is and what is hell hell is just the absence of love the deepest hell is when your mind has been or consciousness has been so limited so constrained so fragmented so divided that it has completely severed itself from god's love such that you don't even believe there is a god or that there is any love when you're in the deepest hell so when you tell somebody who's in the deepest tell about love he doesn't understand it he doesn't believe you because there is no love in the deepest hell and there can't be because love is literally unity and in the deepest hell there's only division making sense these are the equations of life so unholistic thinking creates duality and division that's the problem let me give you a few examples of how this works have you heard this ben shapiro quote of facts don't care about your feelings this is not just popular amongst ben shapiro fans uh but it's also uh it's also sort of attitude that even many scientists take many atheists and rationalists take this sort of attitude that you know science doesn't give a about love science doesn't care about emotions science is just brute numbers and calculations is just pure truth well of course this is absurd the idea that the rational part of you is separate from the emotional part of you is one of the biggest unholistic ways of thinking about the human psyche and it's completely false and it leads to all sorts of terrible pathologies the fact is that your facts are very much influenced by your feelings especially in the case of someone like ben shapiro or someone who follows him but even with scientific type people this is still the case see you think that rationality is superior to emotions and that emotions need to be subsumed under the authority of rationality but if you live your life this way this is going to create all sorts of divisions and problems for you in a sense it's sort of like severing your head from your heart and in fact that's how many of these people live and then you you literally can develop diseases in your body this way see we tend to treat the body as though like we can almost cut off the head and stick it into a vat hook it up to a computer and the head can just function i can just keep being me just if if we save the head but the reality is that you can't really do that because even if you could do that something important would be lost because a lot of who you are is in your body not just in your head a lot of the emotions and trauma that you carry is in the body and that's actually what secretly drives you in most cases it's not the head that usually drives you it's your emotions and wounds that drive you which are all subconscious very deeply subconscious and then the only part of it you understand is the rationality and you're using irrationality to in fact uh justify and rationalize a lot of stuff that would change if you took care of those issues in your body that's why people see a lot of benefit from yoga from various kinds of bodywork energy work and so on that's an important facet of personal development personally that's not one of my strengths i'm a very heady guy so i don't teach a lot of those sort of energetic body techniques i have one episode called body awareness so you can go check that out where i talk a little bit about that but um again it's not my strong suit you can find other teachers who will teach you about these sort of more bodily techniques there's like bioenergetics there's yogic practices there's uh obviously physical various kinds of physical exercise i mean i did uh share the technique with you called shamanic breathing that's one of these exercises and if you practice shamanic breathing breathing even for a few days as i showed in that video on shamanic breathing you'll see how much powerful stuff comes out of your body just through breathing so that shows you how facts don't care about your feelings or this idea that the rational is separate from the emotional this creates pathology and that if you want to be a fully well-integrated human you're gonna have to heal that that division you made in your mind and think of where that division came from it came from your culture it came from your upbringing it came from school in school they sort of taught you to separate facts from feelings and the objective from the subjective the rational from the emotional this is part of our education system it's part of the materialistic paradigm another example uh for how thinking creates division and pathology is excuse me is uh there's a popular duality that's been created lately within politics of globalists versus regular folks the globalist elite versus the ordinary little people as though such division really exists in the universe it doesn't this is the delusion of many both left-wing and right-wing populist movements is that they think that they can separate these two but in fact there's not that much difference psychologically between elites and regular folk in fact i would say that most elites are more educated they're more conscious they're more developed they're actually more loving people than regular folk that's difficult for many populists to swallow but if you don't understand this will actually lead to a lot of problems within your politics your politics simply won't work because see if you think the regular folk are actually better than the elites and you think that the elites are evil and they're bad and they're all sociopaths and they don't care about anybody except themselves all they want is money to rule the world if that's how you think which is a popular way to think some of them are like that but what you have to understand though is that the regular folk most regular folk are uneducated and they don't have a very high level of development cognitively morally spiritually if you take some regular folk and you put them into positions of power they will start to abuse that power even worse than the elites that you despise because the regular folk are less well-educated um they're more uh uh dogmatic and ideological in many cases or they're less open-minded in many cases and they don't even recognize how corruption can infect them so they become even more corrupt and we see this you see this especially with the with the recent uh populist uprisings on the right in america and in other part parts of the world uh these right populist uprisings they're very very low consciousness these people fool themselves into thinking that they're gonna take over the globalist elites and uh and they're gonna you know the ordinary people the the you know the ordinary right-wing folk are gonna like take over the government and things will go well no those ordinary right-wing folk are the most corrupt the most unconscious the most fearful the most hateful the most racist some of the most most of those in all of society so it's extremely dangerous to let those people take power and even though i say that that doesn't mean i necessarily you know defend uh some of these elitist capitalists i mean there's definitely deep corruptions within the elites themselves but the thing you have to recognize is that there's no matter how much corruption you see in the elites the corruption in the lower classes is way worse than it is in the elites and that's the key mistake that many trumpists um and supporters of trump and right-wing populism make and that's exactly really it's an analogous to the problem that happened with hitler see i mean hitler's whole spiel was that he was sort of taking over germany from the globalist elites on behalf of the regular folk that was hitler's whole appeal it's really not different from from trump's appeal or many of the right-wing populist appeals around the world these days it's just not i mean i'm not saying they're of equal severity they're not of equal severity uh trump is better than hitler but but uh but there are definitely deep analogies there and you see what happens when these right-wing regular folk take over bad stuff happens now that does not mean that when left-wing populists take over that stuff that doesn't happen either bad stuff happens all around like i said in my wisdom episode there's a lot of foolishness to go around on both sides right um so so take that into account how about this sort of division that's created between criminals and the good guys the upstanding people this sort of division creates problems and pathologies and disease within society because when we treat criminals as someone who's other than us we actually create a shadow those criminals are then people who we demonize and hate we don't treat them humanely and then that just increases their recidivism rates they get out of jail and they just become even deeper criminals because they're not really reformed especially for example in the american incarceration system uh some of it which is for profit and so forth uh they actually get much better results in the scandinavian nordic countries where they have uh much more humane prison systems where they actually do um rehabilitation rather than punishment and see if you think that these criminals are separate from you you're going to want to punish them and demonize them and hurt them inflict pain upon them but by hurting them that's just going to make them more pissed off and more criminal not very wise in the grand scheme of things uh because you know most those criminals have to get out of prison at some point and come back into society so it wouldn't be better to rehabilitate those people but to rehabilitate them to even want to build rehabilitate them you have to open your mind and think holistically about the fact that actually the criminal is not separate from you they have a lot more in common with you than you think and in fact if you want to be totally honest you yourself are a criminal how many crimes have you committed in your life how many laws have you violated so it's a complete hypocrisy to sit there demonizing criminals while i mean literally most of us are criminals in one way or another we did something criminal at some point in our lives if we're really honest about it if we're really holistic right if we're really even minded in the way that we think about things but see that's not convenient for many people for many people they just want to have somebody to scapegoat and they'll just scapegoat the criminals now again i'm not saying that the criminals are angels some of these criminals are bad people and they've got to be locked up not to hurt others so we don't want to be foolish in the way that we treat criminals but at the same time if you take a very holistic approach and you realize that there's not a separation between you and the criminal and that the criminal elements of society are literally just parts of your own psyche as as the universe or as god you start to treat things very differently with more love and more compassion and you get better results and you actually see this borne out in scandinavian countries how about the duality that's created between science and spirituality or science and mysticism this sort of division has been created in our universities where anything spiritual or mystical is seen as anti-scientific and it's really not allowed within universities it's treated as a joke it's treated as unscientific it's treated as some sort of a lack of rigor lack of truthfulness and conversely in many spiritual circles there's sort of the opposite problem is that these spiritual people become so new agey and so mystical and shmystical that they start to ignore rationality they stop thinking they stop uh trying to test their own theories and so right now we sort of have this schism between science and academia on the one hand spirituality and mysticism on the other hand and they tend to be two different camps they tend to not communicate well with each other and both suffer for that science suffers and academia suffers for lack of spiritual understanding and mysticism because for science to fully flourish and to really understand reality at the deepest level it needs spiritual insight insight from meditation and yoga and such things and it needs to consider deep metaphysical issues which are at the heart of science and which spirituality can shed some powerful light on for example the mind body problem can be resolved through spirituality it cannot be resolved through materialistic science but science doesn't understand that yet so they're stuck so science is suffering from a lack of unity spirituality is also suffering from a lack of unity because spirituality needs a lot more science behind it our spirituality would be so much better if we had rigorous science into psychedelics into yoga into different meditation techniques and we applied more scientific methods to these to these practices this would help a lot more people become enlightened so we really need a synthesis of these two but there tends to be an opposition where each camp gets stuck in its own you know bubble and they don't want to integrate and unify so as you can see unholistic thinking creates conflict fights violence war racism genocide slavery exploitation and uh even civilizational collapse can occur from this whereas holism interconnects everything and also what it does very importantly is it tells you what is important and what is meaningful in life so one of the consequences of this materialistic reductionistic attitude or paradigm that has been adopted by our culture in the west over the last 100 years especially through the 20th century and still to today is that it has in a sense tried to demystify nature too much and in so doing it has stripped life of its meaning or its spirit such that everything has just become sort of technocratic and analytical hyper-rational and pragmatic to the point where there's nothing more to life than just being pragmatic about everything and just building better technology and that's it that's sort of our only connection to life is with our technology that's sort of the attitude that western culture has adopted over the last hundred years and it becomes very pathological and problematic because of course when you take this sort of very narrow divisionary approach to life you lose sight of the highest most important thing which is holism and unity and love and your spiritual connection to life not just through your head but also through your body and through your emotional system and your intuition and your feminine side but see we've had this sort of schism between the feminine and the masculine and the feminine has been demonized the masculine has tried to dominate the feminine for a long time and this creates problems you're not a whole person this way so remember in my wisdom episode i talked about how wisdom is holistic and wisdom the essence of wisdom is that keem discernment well and that sense of priorities prioritizing the higher over the lower so the foolishness of our current societies that we've actually prioritized a lot the lower over the higher we've prioritized technology and materialism and money and um and pleasure and hedonism and just like raw data and facts and information and technology above everything else we've placed the lower over the higher whereas really like for example if you go into a university what i mean is this if you go into a university and you tell them for example that love is an important is the most important thing for you to study in your university they'll laugh at you they'll say oh love that's some sort of hippie-dippy stuff we're real scientists here we don't study love we study like quarks and atoms and stuff this is the definition of foolishness this sort of attitude to do good science you actually have to be able to feel into reality with great sensitivity and mindfulness not just think about it and see so when we have this sort of very rationalist reduction of science become the new religion sort of it's supplanting the old religions that's a step up in a certain sense because the old religions are very problematic i'm not saying that we should return to the old religions of centuries past but when science becomes the new religion otherwise called scientism this uh this creates all sorts of problems and pathologies and we're seeing those pathologies everywhere in medicine in business in universities in government we're seeing it now the solution is not to go back it's to find the next level the next level of synthesis and holism which starts to integrate the best from religion with the best from science finding a new higher synthesis of those two see without holism your life becomes petty mechanical utilitarian demystified and dysfunctional you lose your connection to life and that's why we have these epidemics of depression suicide opioid addiction because when you rob people of their spiritual connection they just become zombies and robots and then they kill themselves if they're not able to get the sort of success that they see people getting on tv you literally feel disconnected and alienated from people from society from nature from animals from spirit from goodness from the self from love from god that's what love is love is the connection to all those things the more connected you are the more in love you are with yourself with the universe what you want most of all is you want to feel infinitely connected to everything that's love that's what all human striving should be towards it is towards that the problem is that most humans don't understand it and most in most cases we're striving for a very limited partial love right so you experience dysfunction when you strive towards partial forms of love so when you go shoot up some heroin really what you're doing is you're finding a source to love but it's very partial when you are laughing at your political opponents and you're ridiculing them that's a form of love but a very partial unlimited dysfunctional form when you're chasing money and trading stocks that's a form of love you're actually chasing love but in a very dysfunctional manner that harms the rest of society and that doesn't really get you that feeling that you want what you really want is a feeling you don't want a fact you want a feeling think about it everything we seek in any domain of life is wholeness and unity that's what we seek for example what do all the world religions seek they all seek world domination every major religion wants to dominate every other to completely exclude it and destroy it such that it becomes the one monolithic religion christianity wants that islam wants that probably many many buddhists in secret want that see what they're seeking there is they're seeking wholeness and unity but they're seeking in a dysfunctional manner they're trying to access unity and wholeness through selfishness which is completely ass backwards and it will never work so the solution here is to recognize that hey we could have a unity where christianity dominates and destroys all the other religions and becomes the only one that can be sort of a monopoly or unity or we could actually as christians learn to appreciate the other religions see reality as being accessible through various different spiritual paths not just one not just christianity christianity is not the ultimate one it's just one out of many out of hundreds and we can we can see the richness and beauty and diversity of that and we can embrace that whole thing as part of our religion and so can all the other religions and then that will be the highest unity in love that will be the true religion the religion that loves all other religions see but that's a counter-intuitive move and to do that move you have to be very selfless you have to surrender yourself surrender your attachments and your beliefs in christ as being the ultimate one the one true savior or muhammad being the last prophet you have to surrender that belief in order to do what i'm saying and you have to stop judging people who are not the same as you and your religion and your ethnicity and you have to stop treating the bible as the only word of god but recognize there are many holy books that are also the word of god equally as beautiful as the bible and you have to be able to recognize and admit certain contradictions and errors in the bible and you have to be able to admit that christianity doesn't have all the answers it has some of the answers but other religions can have better answers in certain narrow domains and that they all offer some some valuable new perspective but see this is difficult to do the mind has to surrender so much stuff it has to be so selfless it has to be so open to do that that would be healing the world at the at the plane of religion but what about business in business business also seeks unity and wholeness that's what everybody business seeks every business seeks to be a monopoly that's the dream of every business person is they want to monopolize their their marketplace be the best crowd out all the competitors buy them all up if they're allowed to by the government and then once they've mastered one field of business they want to spread to other fields until they master every field and dominate everybody and then ultimately we will just have one company amazon that would own every other company that's sort of the uh the ideal of every business person of course it doesn't have to be you could recognize that this is actually a very selfish pathological way of achieving unity and it will never work instead you recognize that actually to achieve a healthier unity within business we have to recognize that it's healthy for us to have business competition and to have different sectors controlled by different companies and that we shouldn't be buying up and using various kinds of uh you know anti-trust methods to you know to collude and then to to to squeeze our competitors out of the marketplace and so forth but actually we want a healthy economy which has many different companies of different sizes that creates more innovation that will actually help to create a a better economy from for more people people will have better wages there will be more um inventions and it'll benefit everybody to do that way but see that means you have to surrender your grand megalomaniacal ambitions of being the world's richest person or the world's biggest company you have to think more holistically to do that how about in the family every family seeks wholeness and unity nobody likes these family fights over thanksgiving dinner but that requires holism why is it so difficult to achieve unity within the family because there's all these different actors with different agendas that are trying to do their own things and also at the same time trying to control each other thinking that others are doing the wrong thing and so there's fights how about within science science is trying to achieve unity and wholeness scientists are always talking about a theory of everything science's whole mission is basically a theory of everything science wants to understand everything but it thinks it can do that through the methods of science without realizing that it can't because science is not everything see it's so simple how can science understand everything when science isn't everything the only thing that can understand everything is everything not science science can understand some things but science is limited but science is so stuck in itself that it wants to understand everything only through science while denigrating any other kind of understanding or even denying that any other understanding is necessary beyond science well when it takes that approach it's self-defeating and in this way science will never have a theory of everything a similar thing happens in mathematics mathematicians want to try to understand reality only as numbers without realizing that they're just projecting numbers onto reality see you can understand a lot about nature through math that's good math has been very effective but it only gets you so far if you think you can use math to understand everything you're deluded that is not a healthy way to approach reality and in fact right now we're suffering pathologies of this science deeply suffers from this because in science basically current science and academia doesn't consider a thing true unless it can be quantified and put into an equation which is called formalization if you can't formalize something it isn't considered true which is just extremely unholistic extremely reductionistic extremely myopic and it leaves out the most important aspects of reality for example you can't quantify love which is what reality is you also can't quantify infinity speaking of which which is what reality is you can only quantify the finite not the infinite so uh yeah it's a very big problem for math infinity is not a math thing infinity is all of reality of which math is just one subset so don't confuse infinity with a number it's not a number it's not math now uh we also have this problem within geopolitics in geopolitics what do people seek they seek wholeness and unity but they can seek it in more healthy or less healthy ways if they seek it in less healthy ways they want unity by dominating other countries or by exterminating other countries and races and people or we can have a healthy geopolitics where we seek a unity through peace through alliances through mutual agreements where we respect each other's boundaries and differences and we don't try to dominate everybody else we don't try to create an empire a global empire and we don't try to put our country above all the other countries we recognize that every country is equally valid has an equal validity to exist different cultures have different pros and cons and they have a right to exist without being dominated by other cultures or undermined by other cultures this is part of the pathology of the trump policy of america first see when you put america first you might think well that's going to um that's going to be the best for america that's going to make for the strongest america right if we put america first and we're just very selfish this way but actually it ends up boomeranging and having the opposite effect because when you put america first everybody else in the world of which there are more people than americans americans are only like less than one tenth of the whole planet are americans that means that the other nine tenths of the planet are gonna rally together against these selfish americans they're gonna make their own trade alliances their own economic systems their own currency the dollar will lose its value in the long term uh america will lose its its spiritual standing in the world as the world leader and other countries will just organize themselves into a more selfless alliance that will ultimately be stronger and more powerful than america and america will wither away that's effectively what america first gets you in the long run that's what would happen if trump's policies continued for 50 more years luckily that didn't happen but see this is this is the short-sightedness of selfishness when you're very selfish you think you can get away with these kinds of things you think oh we'll just be america first we'll bomb anybody who disagrees with us their alliances we'll just force them to pay more and and whatever you know will manipulate their governments it doesn't matter but when you take this approach it comes back to you it's no different than being an at your workplace maybe for a short while being an at your workplace or being an in your relationship or in your family maybe that'll get you some short-term benefits but if you think more holistically you realize it's going to be a negative in the long run speaking of relationships what do you seek in a relationship you also seek unity you seek peace in your intimate relationships and you seek sexual unity and there are healthy and unhealthy ways of going about this as well what do you seek with your physical health unity what do you seek with your psychological well-being unity what do languages seek languages seek unity originally if you look at languages in underdeveloped parts of the world like in india they don't have a single language they have like a thousand different languages in india one of the challenges they face in india is how do you unify all the different dialects and sub languages into into one national language because it's much easier to do business with a single language than with just than with thousands more developed countries like in america and europe they have unified their languages just to be a single language like the russian language the japanese language it's it's singular there's not a hundred different japanese languages now there's probably dialects and so forth but they're they're so minor because they're it's better to have a unified language and right now english is sort of becoming the unified language of the world but if america keeps behaving like maybe it won't be english maybe it'll be chinese or something in the future who knows uh there there's a unification force within currency as well we have all these different currencies around the world but it's nice and more convenient to have a single currency the dollar is sort of the unifying currency right now but bitcoin is coming up people are saying maybe bitcoin will be the universal currency of the future every currency is trying to fight for domination and unification to see which one comes out on top this is evolution this is life we have unity and division unity and division unity and division in a fractal infinite fractal all the way up and down the different levels of the holocaust hold on within whole lawns within hold ons fighting each other unifying with each other fighting each other unifying with each other at all levels and scales up and down if you want a deeper discussion of that check out my episode called division versus unity where i go into a lot of depth on that and also check out my episode called understanding duality part one part two part three where i go and give you a giant list of hundreds of different dualities that the mind creates and how to unify some of those together that's a very powerful series especially part three of that series check that out so another problem with reductionism is that it's easily exploited by devils because it's very easy to be selfish by deliberately limiting the scope of your holistic understanding to something very small and narrow you carve out a little domain and then you externalize you create externalities outside of that circle such that you can benefit everything in the circle this is a classic strategy uh so we use our minds to carve up reality to tiny parts then it becomes easy for nobody to take responsibility for all the parts as a whole we can just take responsibility for one little part and from this leads all sorts of pathologies this is common for example within science departments where we have sub-sub-specialties such that a scientist will only care about one little narrow thing and anything beyond that he doesn't care about he doesn't study he's he doesn't get paid for that he views it as a distraction but really truly for science to understand reality it needs to interconnect all the different departments you can't have separate little departments biology is really not separate from physics separate from chemistry separate from psychology separate from philosophy this creates a fractured view of of nature it's the sort of a phone tag game you ever call a giant company like your phone company and you need something from them you have some billing error you call them up and the operator answers and you're like hey yeah i got a billing problem here you guys charged me too much last month on my on my phone bill uh who can i speak to about that and she's and the operator says well we're not the billing department here we're just the uh we're just the sort of operator department so i'll transfer you to billing so she transfers you to billing then you call billing and you know you talk to them and you you tell them about this and they say oh well yeah uh sorry sir but um this isn't actually a billing problem it's actually it's a it's a technology problem there's some there was some technology error with the way that they were calculating your bill so actually we got to transfer you to technology department so she transfers you over to the technology department and there you talk to them and they say oh no this is not a technology problem this is actually some other department's problems so they transfer to that one and then that one transfers you back to the billing department and you just go around in a circle forever and and you can't get anywhere because nobody takes responsibility for the whole of the problem see your problem is not about a particular department your problem is your problem it is what it is i've experienced similar problems for example within medicine and health i've been having some health problems over the last year and i've experienced this situation where i go to one doctor and he says oh i'm a generalist you got to go to a specialist because you got a stomach problem so you got to go to a stomach doctor so i go to the stomach doctor and he says oh well this thing you're having oh this is a psychology problem you got to go to a shrink and i said no i have a stomach problem you know you got to go to a shrink then if you go to a shrink then the shrink will say oh this is not a shrink problem this is a doctor problem you got to go back to some other specialist and so they just send you around in circles and you get nowhere and nobody takes responsibility for the whole problem and that's what is really important is the whole problem not just one facet of the problem it's very convenient for a devil to have the excuse that oh this is not my problem it's not my responsibility because it falls outside of my circle of concern and of course the devil deliberately draws the circle of concern extremely narrowly to serve his ego his ego is that circle of concern and it's usually a very dense narrow ego so the function of our work here and with spirituality is to expand that circle of concern until it becomes infinite and then you have no more excuses everything is your problem everything is your responsibility another example is how easily single-issue voters get misled for example in american politics this is a very popular way to manipulate people most people aren't very well educated about all the issues that are important to a well-functioning society instead they have a couple of pet things that they care about some hot button trigger issues for example i don't know how government works but i want my guns i don't know how government works but i care about abortion being illegal and so on those issues it's very easy for a devil to manipulate me in that case because all he has to do is fear monger to me about how they're going to take my guns away and then i'm gonna go vote for anybody who's pro-gun the most pro-gun without considering though the larger issues at stake even if let's say let's say that the second amendment was very important to protect but if you really think about it is it really that important like i mean it's important let's say it's important but is it more important than the health of the entire country is it more important than the economy is it more important than health care is important more important than the environment is it more important than anti-corruption laws is it more important than campaign finance reform is it more important than the judicial system right so i'm like obviously not even if you love guns just ridiculously much still you have to admit it's not more important than all those other issues combined so when you go to vote for president for example for a senator what you have to really consider is the totality of the situation not a narrow issue and so most people who vote they vote on a single issue that they've been galvanized or fear-mongered about whether it's abortion guns or health care something like that but that's not what is most important and so this leads to the political pathologies that we experience today to have a well-functioning democracy we need citizens that are so holistic that they care about the well-being and health of the entire country but not even just the country but actually the entire world and they have to vote in that manner and they have to be immune against fear-mongering and manipulation by devils on single narrow issues because a single issue is not important as all the issues by definition and hey i mean i understand when i was younger i i loved guns i was sort of a gun nut i mean my friend my friend was sort of into the military he went to iraq but like in high school in college you know we would hang out together we would we would create like fireworks and explosives and stuff we would blow up we would shoot guns we would go to shooting ranges we would talk about guns we would have magazines and catalogs of guns so like i get it and i grew up in california so in california we had the strictest gun laws and at that time i thought like well why can't i have a fully automatic gun like i want that that would be so cool but then as i matured and my circle of concern expanded my whole holistic thinking expanded i realized that you know i still think guns are cool i'll go to shooting range and shoot a fully auto i did that recently uh in vegas but i also understand that my passion for guns is a much lower priority compared to other issues we've got going on and no matter how much i love guns my love for guns can't outweigh the love that parents have for their children when they get shot in schools right so you have to balance this stuff out and what that required of me is that required more empathy increasing my circle of concern and setting aside my own agenda it literally required me to become selfless in that area where i had to say you know what as much as i love guns and as cool as it would be to own a fully automatic machine gun maybe if we want to have a healthy peaceful world that's not the right way to go and i have to surrender that for a greater good for greater harmony and balance because if i'm just going to be stuck on this one issue that's going to distort my entire thinking about politics for the rest of my life and think of how pathological that is yet this is exactly what we have going on with our politics these days so the way that a devil operates and by devil i just mean any deeply selfish organism is that it creates a very narrow circle of concern within infinite consciousness and then it defends that to the death and it externalizes every single how should i call it every single i mean it basically feeds off of its environment right when you draw that circle you're getting nutrients from the environment you're leaching those and then you're excreting literally you're out the stuff that's not useful to you into the environment this is how an organism functions at the highest level well that's literally how most of our corporations function how most of our religions function how most of our families friends and others function is like this this is called externalities these are sort of the excrements of life and it's these externalities you end up on others you know a good example of an externality is a when a bird shits on your windshield that was the bird's externality and then you're not happy about it because your windshield got shat upon you got to clean it up happened to me recently so uh but see this is this is how most humans behave they create these gross externalities whether it's a company or a religion or a political party or an individual person without being conscious or taking responsibility of the they put out the collateral damage they cause and then this creates a toxic commons for everybody to swim in we're all swimming in the same pool and everyone's in it that's fundamentally our problem as humans and so uh when you realize that that takes holism to realize right because if if you lack holistic thinking you can just think you can in the corner of the pool and everything will be okay but when you realize we're all swimming in the same pool you start to take responsibility for where you and then the pool becomes more enjoyable to swim in for you and for everybody else and it all begins with you because if you say oh leo i'm going to stop shooting in the pool only when everybody else does well then everyone else is going to say that too because they think just like you because they don't want to take responsibility they don't want to lead and then we swim in a shit-filled pool for the rest of our lives someone so someone has to lead it might as well be you and of course that means you have to be less selfish that's what leadership is leadership is nothing other than selflessness the more selfless you are the better of a leader you're going to be there's many other factors i have some uh older videos about leadership and i'll release some more videos in the future about leadership that's an important topic but that's the that's the spirit of of good leadership there's also bad leadership bad leadership is extreme selfishness and narcissism a la hitler or trump see self bias privileges one part of the universe at the expense of another go check out my episode self bias about that self bias is very important here because self bias is what creates the brokenness and is what creates the lack of holism so to be more holistic you have to surrender self-bias you have to recognize that your mind carves up reality not arbitrarily and not in accordance with the truth but in whichever way serves your ego best your selfishness narrows the scope of your perspective and this is the antithesis of holism so the reason that most people aren't holistic is simply because they're too selfish another problem with a lack of holism is that narrow expertise is vulnerable to recontextualization go see my episode called understanding recontextualization that's an important concept what i mean by this is that you can discover some facts about the universe but those facts it doesn't matter what the facts are it really matters what they mean to you and how you understand them and what you intend to do with them but how you understand them and what they mean to you and what you intend to do with them and how important they are in the grand scheme of things only makes sense when you have the grand scheme of things so a set of facts without its context doesn't mean very much and when you're very narrow with your perspective on the universe that is unholistic that means that whatever understanding you have whatever facts you have they're always vulnerable to a radical recontextualization because the context can be changed or expanded and that will completely change what your facts mean it could turn them inside out upside down 180 degrees and that's exactly what happens for example with science scientists grossly underestimate this problem of radical recontextualization if you understand more about that go see that episode so if you want a very solid robust science which is not fragile it needs to be immune to radical recontextualization and the only way you can be immune to radical recontextualization is by expanding your context until it's infinite which means you have to you can't narrow your field down to one thing you have to your field has to be the entirety of the universe as a whole think of it this way if you had a binary choice between understanding a single part of the universe or the whole of the universe but no individual singular part which would you choose so for example if you're a mathematician you could say i want to understand all of mathematics perfectly and if i was like a magic genie i could just grab that wish to you right now but if you understand all of mathematics perfectly you won't understand physics you won't understand cosmology you understand philosophy you won't understand relationships you understand anything else just math or you pick you could pick to understand all of physics or all of uh economics or all of psychology or you could wish for understanding the entire thing without understanding any particular one which would you choose can you see why it's wiser to choose the whole rather than any particular part you see there's a trade-off between understanding something in detail understanding it from the big picture the more big picture you're understanding the less detail you have the more detail you have the less big picture understanding it's sort of like zooming in or out of the earth you can zoom all the way out of the earth and you will see the entire thing but you won't see the ants on it you won't even know there are ants on it or you can zoom into the earth get all the way close to the ground and you'll see the ants but all you'll see is the ants and you won't even know that there's an earth that they're on so holism is zooming out although of course understand that these are not necessarily in opposition to each other you can do both but practically speaking your human life and your resources are limited so you have to be selective about which one is more important to you because you can't zoom in on every thing also notice that there's an interesting uh asymmetry here is that when you zoom out you only really zoom out once to see the whole earth whereas to zoom into the earth you can zoom in on a million different things you can zoom in on an ant on a cow on a human on a turtle you can keep zooming in on a thousand different things and you will still be infinitely far away from understanding the earth but if you zoom out that's a you see that's a single operation it kind of works like a cone as it converges it converges into a single unity whereas as it diverges it diverges into an infinite number of perspectives so there's something powerful about the ultimate holism because you get you actually zoom out so far that you you grasp the whole thing even though you don't understand all the details and that's what omniscience in a sense is so i want you to notice that there are two ways that you can use your thoughts you can use thoughts to divide reality and you can use thoughts to unite your reality and we in our education in our culture are biased towards divisive type of thinking so i could go around saying oh that's a that's a monkey that's a giraffe that's a rhinoceros and they're all separate creatures i could think of them that way or i could say oh that's a monkey that's a giraffe that's a rhinoceros they're all the same sorts of creatures they're all part of life they're all part of a single ecosystem divisive versus unit of thought take notice which kind of thought you use most of the time for example those are white people those are black people those are yellow people those are jews those are christians those are muslims they're all different or we can start to recognize how much they have in common which type of thinking do you think leads to more peace and which leads to more conflict and war and which one do you want do you want peace or do you want conflict and war how about in your relationships do you want to notice how much you two have in common or how much you disagree and which do you think will lead to more fights and which do you think will lead to more sex and which do you want fights or sex it's important to recognize that all thought is fundamentally dualistic and incomplete even unitive types of thinking still very good much better than divisive i would suggest but even unitive thinking even the most holistic of thinking is still thinking and thinking is inherently dualistic every thought divides reality in some way because every thought is a division within reality even a holistic thought is still divisive it's still only a part of the whole it's not the whole you can't use the part to grasp the whole but still there are degrees of quality to thought not all thought is equally good so what i'm suggesting is that you incrementally increase the quality of your thinking make it more holistic more integrative more unitive without surrendering your ability to do analysis analysis is still important so you got to have that flexibility and then eventually you want to get so high in your holism that you recognize that even thought itself is too limited and too unholistic and then you're able to transcend thought itself and the highest holism doesn't occur within thought it occurs within consciousness the highest holism is infinite consciousness which is beyond thinking but even though i say that thinking is still important because we don't really have an option in our society but to think and therefore it is important to talk about different qualities of thought and improving your thought so we're talking about holistic thinking here if you want to talk about holistic consciousness i've talked about in other episodes uh you get there through meditation through yoga psychedelics you don't you don't um get there through thinking so much but holistic thinking is still a good place to start see the more holistic you're understanding the better you can manipulate systems towards health and the highest good without them boomeranging on you so we can't create a healthy society without thinking and we can't create a healthy society without holistic understanding of the systems we're dealing with another feature of holistic thinking is that it can foresee the counter-intuitive twists and turns that reality takes for example in the way that freedom creates enslavement a lot of libertarians stumble into this problem they can't see the counterintuitiveness of freedom they think that just absolute freedom is going to lead to the highest good but it doesn't because if you minimize government completely you eliminate the state you eliminate all taxation and everybody is just free to do what they will and just to you know live on their land and own their own property as libertarians and vision but what's going to happen is that some of those people are going to use that freedom to enslave other people and you as libertarian would say no but that's not libertarian of them to do but they don't care because they have a different moral system so they will still enslave you and then what you'll realize is that your libertarianism and your cry for absolute freedom is actually foolishness because it boomerangs on itself freedom is not an absolute thing freedom as humans desire it has to be delicately balanced and harmonized with restrictions and regulations to ensure that your freedom doesn't turn into enslavement because that's literally what absolute freedom means absolute freedom means i have the freedom to enslave you and you have the freedom to cry about it and i have the freedom not to care that's true freedom but it takes a very holistic understanding to see that so complex problems require holistic solutions and holism generates more robust solutions than otherwise which is a practical reason for why you should care about it let's start to wrap up by talking about why the highest intelligence is holistic so intelligence itself i'm claiming is a holistic thing inherently when we say someone is intelligent or more intelligent than somebody else what we really mean is that their intelligence is more holistic in a sense you can think of intelligence as holistic pattern recognition which leads to insight which is also basically identical to intuition it's the ability to interconnect dots and to grasp the entirety of a situation in one single snapshot not in bits and pieces it's to see the whole picture of a situation for example you walk into a a room like let's say you walk into your mother's house and you see a gun on the floor and you see blood splattered on the on the carpet and you see the vos has been broken and you see the door has been busted in the window has been broken you see that and then intelligence is the ability to interconnect all of those separate elements and to recognize a crime has occurred whereas a lack of intelligence is to walk in there and to just kind of look around and to see these different things and to not be able to interconnect them all together and to be clueless about what's going on there are a few other features of the highest intelligence highest intelligence includes the ability to see context very deeply the ability to go meta and to transcend the ability to self-reflect the ability to take on multiple perspectives and higher perspectives the ability to be unbiased and selfless and equal concern for all levels of the holarchy i want you to contemplate for yourself why these things are the case as you contemplate what intelligence is and as you experience higher levels of intelligence but i'll give you some answers that i have come to in my own contemplations so why for example is seeing context so important for the highest intelligence well it's because if you don't see the context of a thing you can easily get fooled by a thing you can easily misunderstand what the true nature of a thing is by missing its context just because i cut out a single sentence from a book i can use that single sentence to completely misrepresent what that book is about to understand that single sentence i would have to read the whole book to really understand its context or at the very least read the paragraph or the page or the chapter that that sentence is on so there's no way that the highest intelligence can be non-context aware because that's how foolishness happens and the highest intelligence can't be foolish okay how about the ability to go meta and to transcend why is that an inherent feature of the highest intelligence so the ability to transcend or to go meta is to step outside of some system that you're thinking about or that you're in really we're talking about awareness self-awareness so the reason that it's important for the highest intelligence to be able to go meta is because if it doesn't go meta it's enrapt and entangled in the thing that it's trying to understand so for example i could be using language right now as i'm speaking and not be meta about it and then i would just be sort of using this language unconsciously whereas if i was using this language in a meta way i would be conscious of the fact that i'm using language as i'm talking about language this is creates a sort of a self-awareness loop and this is a feature of high intelligence because see if you're interacting in the world and you're treating the world as just some object that you're interacting with but you're not taking into consideration your own self in relation to that thing then you don't have an understanding of the entire situation and you're gonna make foolish mistakes so you need to be able to interconnect everything for the highest intelligence the more you interconnect things the more intelligent you are and so you have to be able to interconnect the fact that you are participating in the creative process of the universe so it's not just that i'm using language i'm actually constructing this language as i'm going and i need to be aware of that likewise when i'm doing science is not just that i'm doing science i need to be able to go meta on science and recognize that yes i'm doing science but i'm also creating the science as i'm doing it and i have to take responsibility for that and for that i need to be able to go meta and to transcend science i got to do meta science epistemology metaphysics why is the ability to self-reflect a feature of the highest intelligence basically for the same reason self-reflection is basically a form of going meta on your own self ultimately when you become completely selfless you realize that there's nothing but the self it's a sort of a strange loop and an inversion where it goes full circle you have the infinite self everything is the self when you realize you're not the human self that means that you're the universe that's what it means so if you are the universe if all there is is the self but nothing else that means the highest intelligence must necessarily be able to recognize and reflect on itself because if it's not reflecting on itself then what is it trying to understand you're always trying to understand some aspect of yourself no matter what you're trying to understand if you're trying to understand evil really you're just trying to understand more about yourself because you are evil if you're trying to stand good you're trying to stand more of yourself because you're good if you're trying to understand women you're trying to understand yourself if you're trying to send men if you're trying to understand a dog all of these are just aspects of consciousness it's the universe trying to understand itself so you the universe at its highest level of intelligence needs to be able to self-reflect and that's one of the characteristics of wisdom this is actually a feature of consciousness as its ability to self-reflect because consciousness is itself what about perspective why is it important for the highest intelligence to be able to take multiple perspectives because if you're only taking one perspective by definition that's a limitation of all the other perspectives that consciousness could experience consciousness has an infinite capacity to generate perspectives literally infinite perspectives it's a field of infinite perspective so if you're only taking one perspective on a thing you're seeing it from a very narrow limited angle similar to like if we were looking at an elephant and you only looked at it from a single angle you wouldn't see the whole elephant you'd only see one part of the elephant and that would not give you a deep understanding of the whole elephant to understand the whole elephant you really want to have one of those matrix cameras where you can just like circle all around the elephant from every angle even go inside of the elephant zoom in zoom out then you can appreciate what the elephant really is so the highest intelligence needs to be able to be so flexible that it can take all of these different perspectives this is why we talk about the sort of perspectival nature of reality go check out my episode called what if reality is nothing but perspective where i talk about that yeah one of the biggest problems with science is that science does not materialistic science does not really understand just how multi-perspective reality is and this creates all sorts of problems for it because science wants to remove the subjective element from reality but the reality is absolutely subjective so what are you trying to do you're fooling yourself and this problem happens because science is not able to self-reflect sufficiently and it's not able to go meta sufficiently to understand that subjectivity is all that there is to reality there's nothing else but subjectivity um and so because of this science is not operating at the highest level of intelligence the highest level of intelligence would understand this but the only way to understand this is to go meta to self-reflect and to see reality from all these different perspectives and now finally why is the ability to be unbiased and selfless so crucial to the highest intelligence because ultimately everything is yourself ultimately everything is one so really ultimately it makes no difference whether you like that thing or that thing or hate this thing or hate this thing all of these are just biases these biases are what selfishness is selfishness is saying that well i like this part of consciousness but i hate that part of consciousness this part of consciousness serves me that part of consciousness doesn't serve me but look at look at it like this if you recognize that you are the entire thing then how can anything serve you or not serve you how can you really care about one thing more than another thing it makes no sense that only makes sense from the limited limited egos perspective so the only way you can really be selfish and biased is when you fool yourself into thinking that you're some limited aspect of consciousness and not the entire thing if you realize you're the entire thing then all the biases become groundless and unjustified and that's the highest intelligence the highest intelligence in the universe is selflessness and a lack of all biases and that's what god is god is infinite consciousness infinite intelligence infinite selflessness because if you were infinitely intelligent why would you ever be selfless it's stupid the only reason you're selfish is because your consciousness is limited if your conscience was unlimited you would never be selfless i mean you would never be selfish because selfish just selfishness just creates suffering and it's a limitation of love and if you were infinitely intelligent why would you be anything or choose anything else but love are you getting this this is deep stuff this is like advanced calculus level stuff to understand this on the other hand it's all very simple when you finally experience it the problem is that you're not conscious enough to experience it yet maybe try a psychedelic to get it so here i have a picture for you i love this picture of what intelligence looks like and what holism looks like so we have two circles one of the circles is very filled in with a lot of interconnections and the other one has a few interconnections but mostly dark black space so this actually comes from a study that they did on psilocybin mushrooms magic mushrooms those people who take the mushrooms experience these deep interconnections and those people who don't take the mushrooms the placebo the sober state the quote-unquote sober state the state you're in right now if you're not on mushrooms is the one with the very few interconnections this represents your mind this is sort of a semantic map of the mind different parts of your mind become more and more interconnected on psychedelics and that's why psychedelics are so important to this work and are so powerful because all that they do is they basically just change the neurotransmitters uh upgrade them to ones that offer more interconnections and they just interconnect more and more of your mind together to the point where ultimately the interconnections become infinitely dense and you can imagine that when your consciousness becomes completely infinite every corner of the universe interconnects with itself infinitely such that this circle becomes just a completely solid glowing white orb of pure interconnectedness and this is god love intelligence beauty infinity eternity the self that's what you are that's your true highest self at this level of interconnectedness and holism literally the boundaries and physical divisions of everything in the universe collapses it's what you might imagine the universe was before the big bang when every molecule was smushed into every other one literally the boundary and difference between you and your mother and your father and hitler and trump and dogs and cats and aliens and planets and stars and love and hate and good and evil all these boundaries are completely meaningless because you're so conscious that all of it is you equally you without any bias or partiality or favoritism and that's the godhead that's infinite consciousness that's complete awakening to yourself as god and then there are many lower scales of this sort of consciousness all the way down to humans as you are right now and then down to cats and dogs and ants and lower and lower lower and lower so it goes as low as you want then it goes as high as you want and this this complete interconnectedness it's it's it goes on forever you might think it's a static object but it's really not a static object it's like a infinite well down which you fall it's an infinite well of love and you just keep falling deeper and deeper into this love it becomes more and more interconnected forever pretty cool huh and you you can experience that for yourself what i'm talking about now i'm talking from direct experiences that i've had this is something i've experienced this is something meditators and yogis have experienced this is something that you can experience on psychedelics or through various other ways so that's it this sort of shows you the highest level of of holism now of course most holism is much lower than that holistic thinking is far shy of this completely solid sphere of infinite interconnectedness but it points in that direction just so you know now if you love actualize.org you probably love the holism of it and that has been one of the guiding drives behind my work is holism when i started to actualize that org one of the things that motivated me so much to do all this content in such depth is that i really didn't see any deeply holistic books teachings or teachers everything i saw when i started to learn about self-help and personal development it always underwhelmed me i mean there was great stuff i read and studied and it was all important but it always left me feeling lacking like there's something lacking it's not holistic enough for me i wanted the highest holism and i just didn't find it anywhere in books or in science or in religion or in philosophy everywhere i looked i never got enough holism and then only now in hindsight can i understand why that is because really what i wanted was i wanted infinite holism i didn't know that's what i wanted but i intuited it somewhere deep down that that's what i wanted and so i just started creating actualize.org content in that direction not really understanding where it would ultimately lead me to and ultimately led me to that infinite white ball of solid love and that's ultimately where i hope it leads you to as well but it's a long road to get there so we're breaking it up into chunks here um but there's a cost to holism see it doesn't come free if if holism is so rare you might wonder why is it so rare what's the cost that people are not willing to pay well here are a couple of them one cost is that you can't break holism down into bite-sized chunks very easily it's hard to do episodes of holism it's hard to do 10 minute videos that's why my videos are so long and they require because see they require putting a lot of pieces together and holding them in your mind at once there's a lot of moving pieces to reality and so my episodes are long because i'm trying to bring them all together into your mental ram so to speak so you can capture it in maybe an hour or two you're not going to be able to hold it for very long maybe for a few hours you'll hold it then you'll drop out of it it's also mentally overwhelming to keep all these moving pieces in your mind i mean it's a lot easier to just be like a physicist and to only know physics stuff and nothing else life is so much easier that way you can you can be such a devil and you have such plausible deniability for being a devil you can avoid responsibility that way you can avoid the struggle and difficulty of putting all these contradictory worldviews and perspectives together which is challenging and confusing and frustrating as but you don't get to see the big picture and what you really want especially if you're a physicist is you want to see the big picture you want to see this big white ball of love that would be the culmination of all your physical study that is the ultimate physics but you're so myopic you don't even understand that if i told this to a physicist in some university he would just dismiss me as a as a fool so that's one cost another very great cause to holism is it requires selflessness a selfish needy person can't be concerned about anything very far beyond himself and holism requires a transcendence of one's survival of one's biases because at the highest holism you are completely unbiased conscious is completely unbiased at the highest level of holism there literally isn't any difference between you getting raped and you getting tortured and you getting a birthday cake there's no difference between these things at the highest level of holism this is very threatening to the ego this is very threatening to people even to say this already some of you listening will take offense at what i just said because it's a threat to your ego and i get that but then again we're trying to be holistic here see holism requires surrendering yourself until ultimately you surrender yourself so deeply that there's nothing left to surrender and then you die you literally die for the sake of holism that's if you want to go all the way you don't have to go that far you can stop far far short of that most people will but if you want to go all the way that would be going all the way but even just to increase your holism even if you don't go all the way just to increase it still requires surrendering something to be holistic within the field of religion requires you surrender certain prejudices you have about your favorite religion to be holistic with the science you'd have to surrender certain biases and prejudices you have for science maybe you think physics is better than biology well you have to surrender that if you want to be holistic with science maybe you think science is better than spirituality well you'd have to surrender that if you're going to want to integrate those two together if you want to be holistic within politics you're going to have to surrender all sorts of political biases you have and prejudices this is tough work and almost nobody wants to do it because most people are just so selfish they're wrapped up in their own survival and they think that there's nothing more to do in life well i'm presenting you with a an alternative possibility the selfless life not selfless for the sake of others selfless for the sake of yourself paradoxically you're not doing it for anyone else but you that's the tricky thing about selflessness people misunderstand they think that well oh i'm being selfless just so that i could feel good because other people think i'm selfless no that's not it that's not true selflessness that's selfishness true selflessness is when you honestly want to surrender every bias you have about how you see reality think about that think about that possibility imagine if just you forgot about everything else that was important in your life the money the sex the drugs the business the the career the house the children surrender all that forget about it it's not important anymore the only thing that matters to you is to be completely unbiased in how you see yourself that would be true selflessness and that would lead to the lead rather to the ultimate love because you see the reason you can't love everybody and everything is because you're so partial you're always judging everything as being good or bad and that's because yourself needs to survive as that little thing that it is and so as you can see what happens is that as you surrender more and more of your partialities and biases you have to surrender more of yourself and as you do that the distortions that obscured your vision of yourself and of reality they fall away they clear the fog clears the clouds clear and what you see is you you approach closer to truth you become closer and closer and closer to truth until finally at that moment when you completely surrender every single bias you have and every single personal preference for good and evil and you completely surrender yourself at that moment you die and you become the truth and the truth is complete selflessness love and that's god and at that moment you become god realized you realize what god is and then everything makes sense but the cost is everything you held dear the cost is all of your selfishness so the reason people don't realize god is because they're just too selfish and when people suggest hey you can realize god by being less selfish they say but but leo why would i why would i choose to be less selfish what would i get out of it leo tell me the benefits i will get from being less selfish and maybe i'll try it see you can't cure a person like that there can't be a reason for pursuing selflessness because if there was a reason that reason would be selfish that's the whole point and power of selflessness is that it has no reason you don't select to be selfish or rather you don't select to be selfless because it's going to do something good for you you select to be selfless because you want to be selfless and that is its own reward that is the highest wisdom is to see that this is the most counterintuitive thing about the universe is the decision to become selfless because everything in your body and in your mind is screaming for you to be more selfish you think that by being extremely selfish you're going to get everything you want and that's going to be the best survival strategy for you and actually it ends up being the opposite so now you understand why holistic thinking is rare all right there's still more to say though so make sure you stick around for the next part coming up next week where we will talk about actually a little bit more practically we're going to talk about how to develop holistic thinking we're going to go into some more examples and problems with a lack of holism and how to apply some of these things to social issues so stay tuned all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org right there that's my website on the website you will find my book list which will help you to develop your holism make sure you read some of those books it's really important for this work that you don't just watch but you also read books it's not enough just to listen to me you can find my life purpose course which helps you to develop holism within your career track and your business and your profession and then you can find my blog where i post exclusive video content go check it out i recently posted a few exclusive videos there some deep ones don't miss those you can only find those on the blog and you can find the forum there and other things that i'll be releasing in the future and then finally if you'd like you can support me at patreon.com actualized that's it here for here um stay tuned for the next part next week