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[Music] we still have much more to say about holism and holistic thinking in this episode we're going to take a look at what holistic thinking actually is we're going to offer many examples many from the personal domain but also some from the collective domain of what happens when you're not thinking holistically and we're going to try to teach you how to develop it as well but before we get into that just a personal note i want to fast right now i'm doing a 14 day water fast this is day 7 which means i haven't eaten any food in seven days which uh so if i look a little bit uh thinner in the face that's why i lost about uh eight pounds so far from the fast and uh it's made me a little bit lightheaded and low energy i don't have a lot of energy and so we'll just have to see i've never i've never recorded one of these episodes not having eaten for seven days and it is it is challenging i've gone through a lot of suffering in the last seven days so i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do it let's let's just see how it goes uh it might even be better i don't know in some ways my mind is more clear than it usually is when i'm eating but in other ways i just have so little energy and you know the brain uses up a lot of calories and glucose to do all this thinking which these episodes are so it's a little bit challenging but let's get through it anyways all right so and and by the way if you want more info on my water fast why i'm doing it how to do it yourself and so forth i'm going to post a nice deep explanation of that on my blog in a few days so go check that out once it's available and i won't mention it here all right so also if you haven't watched part one of this series go watch part one if you haven't watched my episode about what our whole lawns go watch that those are necessary all right so let's get let's get going here so here's my question for you to get this ball rolling what does nutrition have to do with theoretical physics you might say nothing it certainly seems that way when you just look at the surface of the situation like what does nutrition have to do with theoretical physics it doesn't seem like much i mean maybe you can come up with some sort of explanation such as like well in the end the chemicals which are part of the food that you eat you know those are made of atoms and that's what theoretical physics studies but that's a very tangential relationship and see many theoretical physicists might take this approach but consider and this is especially true now that i'm going through this fast and i've been experiencing it myself you see the food you eat very much affects how your brain and your mind work and if you're a theoretical physicist and your whole life is all about thinking and using your brain and your mind to develop new theories make profound new connections have insights about deep aspects about the structure of the subatomic realm it's very important what you eat because like i've been fasting for the last seven days and it's it's it's amazing how differently my mind functions without food in some positive ways and in some negative ways but if you told the average theoretical physicist that nutrition is very important to science he might just dismiss you and not take that very seriously because the sort of traditional scientific materialist attitude towards science is that well but but leo me as the scientist i am not relevant to the issue of what's true and what's false and so if my science is good if my physics and my physical theories are valid it doesn't matter what i eat i could eat junk food and the theories would still be true yes in that limited reductionistic sense you're right but the theories that you're able to generate and even the theories that you're able to understand very much depends on your nutrition so if you're a theoretical physicist or any scientist i'm i'm we just took the theoretical physicist here as an example it doesn't matter what scientist it is it could be a biologist it could be a psychologist doesn't matter whatever scientist you are see when you're being taught how to do scientific method they teach you all about the method and how to do your lab work and so forth but nobody teaches you that in order to do high quality science you got to do good nutrition you personally because you see there's this sort of assumption this dualistic assumption that well the science is one thing and then you as a scientist that's a separate thing in fact we want to try to extricate ourselves from the science and act as this neutral third person observer we want to be objective we want to be neutral but actually there is no neutrality when you do this because if you're going to separate yourself from science and you're going to say well my personal life doesn't matter and nutrition is just part of my personal life but it does matter because the quality of your science depends upon it what your mind is able to understand how conscious it can be very much depends on nutrition which is why some of the most advanced sages and mystics and yogis from the dawn of time have practiced fasting because it has a profound effect on you on your on your consciousness what you eat and also why the most conscious people also tend to have the highest quality diets see in fact if you're a materialistic scientist and you think that all this mystical mystical stuff is all just nonsense and fairy tales and wishful thinking and [ __ ] the reason you think that is because you don't have direct experiences of having had mystical experiences or meditation you know breakthroughs and spiritual insights but the reason that could be the case is because you eat garbage and you're overweight and that junk food is clogging up your your your whole physiology your whole nervous system is affected by that and it's limiting your ability to be conscious and to recognize to have these profound experiences and so of course then you just dismiss them as fairy tales and nonsense and superstition but that's because you're not making a holistic connection so why are we talking about this holism right you need a holistic understanding of the situation to see the connection between high quality science and your own personal nutrition because you're not going to be able to understand the best science when your nutrition is bad and of course it's not just nutrition it's also exercise it's also the kind of toxins and medications you put into your body all of these things have an effect on you and of course not just that but many many other factors that i won't be labor here you get the point you see so this is sort of the essence of what i'm trying to communicate to you about holism is that when you adopt a holistic attitude towards all of life it's a game changer because many of the problems and obstacles you used to have you can start to see them from a higher elevation perspective and solutions become available that cannot be resolved at the level that you were thinking about them at at sort of reductionistic level many of your problems are literally stemming from a lack of holism but you don't always see it in fact often you don't see it and it needs to be pointed out to you which is why we're taking this time to point this out to you with ample exam uh examples and so forth because it there's sort of a shift that i want you to experience in your mind where you start to say holy [ __ ] holism is extremely important and people are not talking about it and taking it seriously enough when we say holism people can just say like oh well it's some sort of hippie idea of you know mother earth gaia sort of thing or it's some sort of holistic food idea or holistic medicine idea some sort of alternative medicine idea but it's not that those are just little offshoots and branches from the the massive tree trunk of holism that that i want you to really focus your attention on here right um when you adopt this holism attitude you start to see life in a very different way you start to see all these different situations a different way you start to make interconnections between things and you start to see how this domain of life and that domain of life are really connected but up until now you've been treating them as totally separate and distinct things and that's why you were not getting the best results here or the best results there or wherever and now when you're starting to interconnect them now you start to see how one informs and connects and affects the other one and then you can wrap your mind around the whole thing and then you can see ah now i see why i was stuck for all these years hitting my head against a a glass ceiling it's because i wasn't interconnecting things that are actually deeply interconnected but i was treating them as though i can just you know compartmentalize this from that you know science from nutrition nutrition from psychological well-being psychological well-being from my relationships i thought these were all separate things but it's like no they're not separate things that's the key thing i want you to understand all right now let's get into some more examples so here are some examples i have a list for you of problems that stem from a lack of holistic thinking and we're going to first cover the collective problems of mankind then we're going into some personal problems that you you yourself probably have all right so obviously the number one thing is the environment and the ecology if you care about the environment at all if you care about the planet of course that already assumes that you have a certain degree of holistic thinking because people who are completely unholistic they don't care about the environment or the ecology at all and this leads to all sorts of problems called the tragedy of the commons the best example of which is just people who litter have you ever seen a person just litters like they're maybe you're you're watching him you know a guy driving down the highway and he just throws like a you know a coke can an empty coke can after he's done drinking it he just throws it out his window that kind of thing and sometimes like to me it's baffling like how can somebody do that and i've actually spent some number of years puzzling over this like what is going on in that person's mind that they're doing that with such reckless abandon and of course uh in the end i realized all it is is that if they're at a lower level of consciousness and spiral dynamics development such that they're probably a stage blue or orange and at these stages there is no deep ecological thinking the ego mind at this level of development doesn't think in terms of ecology it doesn't think in terms of systems it doesn't think in terms of what effect am i really having on the world it's just acting selfishly blindly selfishly so the problems here are numerous pollution in the oceans and the rivers with plastic with chemicals with heavy metals with oil um overfishing is a huge problem uh when there's a lack of holism because everyone is just rushing to fish as fast as they can as much as they can and that kills the fishery in some cases the fish can go completely extinct we see this happening for example in russia with sturgeon because of the caviar trade and also because of the poverty of the country and the lack of development of the country poaching poaching of animals poaching elephants for tusks and ivory and animals are poached in in basically every underdeveloped part of the world in indonesia in africa in south america elsewhere sometimes these animals are just poached purely for meat because the people that are so poor they don't and of course these poachers they don't have any kind of holistic understanding of what they're doing and there are many more other ecological problems of course climate change global warming and yada yada you've heard all that stuff so anyways um and i'll also bring up the example of ecological collapse due to introduction of foreign species to an environment so this has been a problem in multiple countries i believe it's like in australia they introduced some sort of frog or some sort of other animals that were not indigenous and they just took over and now they're um you know decimating the local populations of whatever is there i know they've had this problem in hawaii as well like in hawaii i was in hawaii a few years ago and i saw this uh this weird creature running across the road and i asked them you know what is that weird creature and it was actually a weasel and i'm like really the weasel you got weasels here in hawaii and they're like yeah they were like introduced for an introduction and these weasels are actually terrible because they eat all the eggs they eat all and then basically in hawaii all the birds they they don't build their nests up high in the trees they build them on in like in the ground close to the ground because hawaii was such an isolated ecosystem that and there are no there are no serious big natural predators to birds on hawaii there's very few you know predators on those islands and so what happens is the birds were just able to build their nest low to the ground but now you introduce this weasel and the sweasel eats all the eggs well it eats all the eggs then there can't be any more birds so they have to fight off these weasels and i mean examples of this abound all around the world i won't waste time mentioning them all so see that's a deep um a very deep example of what happens when you don't think holistically about an ecological situation right see there are these kind of like subtle subtle aspects to how a system works then when you don't when you don't see all the interconnections you can easily overlook an interconnection thinking that's not important but actually it is very important so i mean at first glance you might say well how bad is it to have a weasel in hawaii just forget about it it's like not a big deal but then you realize that these weasels multiply and there are no natural predators big predators of weasels in hawaii which there aren't that means nothing is limiting these weasels that means there can be millions of weasels but if there's millions of weasels then they're eating all the bird eggs now all the birds die and then that leads to other problems and so the whole thing spirals out of control and so that's a very good example other examples include western medicine pretty much all of western medicine is deeply deeply unholistic and problematic um i've personally experienced this especially a lot in the last year as i've talked about on my blog i've been struggling with some health issues some digestion issues over the last year and i've been going to many doctors seeing various kinds of specialists and so forth and i've been very frustrated with the with the kind of attention and kind of utter utter lack of holism that these doctors apply to their patients like i mean it's almost criminal really in the future you'll be able to sue a doctor for behaving this way but today it's just standard practice i go to one doctor i tell him i have a certain problem he says oh well that's not my concern you got to go to a different doctor i got to go to this specialist so i say okay fine i'm going to go to that specialist and of course i'm paying for all this as it's happening so i go to the specialist pay him even more and then that specialist says oh well okay what are your symptoms i tell myself he's like ah well that doesn't sound like it's my problem go somewhere else and i'm like what do you mean i got sent here you're the specialist on this issue and he's like yeah but your symptoms your three symptoms don't match my list of criteria therefore you don't have a problem within my domain of expertise and i'm like no i definitely have a stomach problem and you're a gastroenterologist and he says no i can't help you but he still takes my money of course um and so in this way we go round and round in circles and nothing gets solved because essentially no doctor well there are there are some holistic doctors but the majority of doctors in american medicine they do they do not take a holistic approach to your health they will only look at what a very narrow band of problems that you have if it matches their list of symptoms they might help you if it doesn't if it doesn't fit the little narrow confines of the dogma they were taught in medical school you know 50 years ago then they don't even think that it's a serious problem i actually went to a gastroenterologist told him all my symptoms i had serious stomach problems and he actually suggested that i start seeing a therapist like a shrink because he said oh you're just making these problems up of course later i took it upon myself to do various kinds of blood work tests and so forth and eventually i find out that i do have an actual physical problem within my gut so i don't need to see a psychologist for this it's just that he he's not thinking holistically about this stuff see so because of this literally thousands of people die because of this this lack of holistic approach because again when you're treating the human body the human body is not divided into the heart and the gut and the bones and the teeth these are not separate things they're all interconnected for example you might have an infection in your tooth a chronic tooth infection which then agitates your immune system causes it to flare up which then causes your stomach because your stomach is like 80 percent of your immune system is in your gut which then causes problems in your stomach causes dysbiosis in your stomach which you know overgrowth of bacteria and then that causes further problems and see if you go to a traditional doctor he's never gonna he's never gonna look at the whole thing together he's only gonna you're gonna you know you're gonna go to one doctor who just looks at the heart one doctor who just looks at the gut one doctor who just looks at the immune system and none of them are going to be communicating with each other properly so he's never going to resolve that and since this is really a dental problem and see dentistry is not even considered part of traditional kind of mainstream medicine it's considered like a a tangent it's never even occurred to him that maybe you have a tooth problem because he only works on the gut or the heart or the immune system but not the teeth but the teeth are part of the immune system see because your body is a is a very well balanced fine-tuned hold on and it needs to be treated as such if you want good health remember in the last episode we talked about that holism is health you can't have human health health of the human body without holism and that's why many people millions of people today are sick with all sorts of autoimmune disorders and other things that uh that could easily be solved if only the doctors and the whole medical system was much more holistic in fact you know people who have uh cardiac problems heart problems due to high cholesterol clogging of arteries all this sorts of stuff the majority of these people we know how to heal them you can heal them through fasting you can heal them through plant-based whole foods diets these are all of these are proven to heal these disorders much better than any kind of medicine and we can heal them through mostly through changes in their nutrition and their exercise programs but of course the majority of cardiologists in america if you go to them with a heart problem they're not even to talk to you about changing your nutrition or exercise or fasting or switching to a vegetarian diet they're not going to talk about these things at all and if you ask them hey you know i have a heart problem why didn't you tell me that these things are solutions to my heart problem why did you write me all this expensive drug prescriptions and stuff that that has all these negative side effects what'll the doctor say he'll say well i'm not a nutritionist that's the nutritionist's problem i'm a cardiologist i don't i don't worry about nutrition that's the epitome of a of the kind of problems that result from a lack of holism and because of this literally thousands of people die millions of people die if you take the entire world into account like this of course big pharma has a lot of unholistic approaches and thinking we've sort of addressed that in the in the previous episode with some example there now let's talk about nutrition nutrition now there's a lot of fad diets going around these days and nutrition is a is a tricky topic because nutrition also needs to be treated holistically if you want to get health but a lot of times nutrition in these diets are not holistic in their approach and they're not really concerned with the well-being of the body instead they might be concerned with losing fat or gaining muscle or improving your sex drive or tasty food recipes or something like being vegan for ethical reasons of you know not harming animals and while that is a laudable ethical consideration by no means am i dismissing the importance of that you have to consider nutrition as a whole because nutrition is not just about any one of those things you see that which causes you to lose fat does not necessarily mean that it's healthy for you long term and even being a vegetarian or a vegan for ethical reasons that also doesn't mean it's healthy for you long term you can be a vegan the way most people are and you're eating garbage food potato chips and various kinds of sauces and fake cheeses and these sorts of things and a lot of sugar i mean it's all vegan sugar is vegan you can eat a pound of sugar it's vegan but i mean is that healthy for you so you see a lot of times people get stuck debating the minutia of these various diets they get tribal about it but they don't consider the bigger picture and of course the bigger picture of diet is not merely your own health you might be saying as a vegan you might be saying leo but my own health is not the only factor there's also the health and suffering of all the animals and the environment and all this and you're right that's an important consideration so not only are we talking about when we're talking about nutrition what's good for my personal health but also we gotta take whole on of the society of also of animals and other species what effect we have on them and also stuff like global warming because the farming of these animals contributes to that significantly and we got to consider things like overfishing that comes from eating a bunch of fish and soil depletion the cutting down of the amazon rainforest for growing cash crops like soybeans and things like yeah it's extremely complicated and you know who has time to think about all that stuff most of us are selfish we just want to have the food we want to have and we don't get too fat um yeah so you got to consider all of these things and it's tricky but see the problem is that if you're going to be vegan even when it's hurting your health it's tricky because like you might say well the the the well-being and non-suffering of animals is more important than my own health okay fine you can take that attitude but then what happens when your health gets so deteriorated let's say and i'm not saying this happens to all vegans i mean this is kind of a rare example but but let's say you're you're very ideological about your veganism but actually your health is deteriorating worse and worse and worse every year because you keep you know insisting on that and then eventually you get some sort of disease or maybe you even die is that really a net positive for the world or could you have actually accomplished more in the world by you know ethically eating some animal products and things maybe you could maybe you could i don't know you gotta it's a again it's all about balance right i'm not telling you what the exact thing is that's correct or what you should do rather i'm trying to show you how important it is to think holistically about these things and to take all these factors into consideration also as part of nutrition i see that a lot of these various diets they will sort of reduce nutrition down to either calories or carbs or protein or fat and so that's all there is to nutrition as though all carbs are the same as though all fats are the same as though all proteins are the same as all calories are the same but of course they're not and there's a lot more to the chemicals that are coming into your body through food than just calories carbs proteins and fat there's all sorts of pigments and antioxidants that come from from various fruits and vegetables from the color pigments in those plants there's all sorts of other you know there's there's many different forms of fat some of them are better than others there's different kinds of carbs not all carbs are the same you have starchy carbs you have raw sugar type of stuff you have corn syrup uh but then you have more healthy forms of carbs so and then and just beyond these categories there are just even things that probably haven't even been discovered yet that are affecting your health and so when you reduce nutrition down to these if you think that the only thing that matters are the sort of stats that are listed at the on the back of the box of potato chips that you're eating on the back of it you know it gives you maybe 10 different stats if you think that that's all that matters to nutrition i mean that's also the epitome of a lack of holism really that box if it was properly done in a very conscious society that box should be listing it shouldn't be just a little box it should be the entire back of the you know of the of the box and it should list like a hundred different chemicals and all their effects and their quantities and how it might affect your body and not even that but they should even list like depending on your age they might affect you differently carbs and fat and protein calories don't affect someone at age 15 the same way they affect somebody at age 70 and they don't affect women the same as they affect men and maybe they don't affect white people the same as it affect black people so i mean there's a lot of science and data there that of course would be too complex to list on any box but sort of in a hypothetical example you can see that how much how much more precise it would be to list all that data and uh and then how much more informed decisions you could make as a consumer of these of these products see but we're not there yet uh many restaurants still don't even list the ingredients or the you know the calories that of the meals that they serve let alone the percentages of carbs protein fat and a bunch of other things it'll take us decades just to get to the point where we mandate that every restaurant menu lists at least protein carbs and fat and maybe even the sources of where these items came from how they were sourced that's another huge issue you see most of us don't know like were these were these did these eggs come from a factory farm or do they come from a grass you know fed pasture farm that's not told to you in a restaurant of course so all restaurant eggs come from factory farms because they're all interested in the cheapest eggs but um but yeah i mean it would be nice to know these things and in general not just about food but just about anything like it would be nice to see for example when you buy some some running shoes at the athletic store it would be nice if on the bottom of the shoes or somewhere on the box it told you all the materials the plastics and rubbers that were used where they were all sourced from whether it's fair trade or not and and so forth to help you to make better decisions well maybe that'll happen in 100 years but we're not there yet okay another example is with capitalism and business so in general the very general critique i have of business and capitalism especially as it is in america but all around the world of course um also is that in general the way business is conducted today it ignores so many important and huge domains and aspects of human life it ignores art it ignores spirituality it ignores the environment it ignores health it ignores social well-being and cohesiveness it ignores the health of the society and it ignores the health of humanity at large it also ignores the impact that that that this has on on your epistemology and on your worldview so what do i mean by it ignores these things well i'm not saying that business doesn't participate in these fields it does business participates business has tentacles in every field business has is participates in art and spirituality environment health and society and humanity business participates in all this stuff the problem though is that the way it participates is that it's just looking to extract money from these things it doesn't actually care about these things for their own sake to most business people when you start talking to them about the value of art they'll laugh at you because to them the art is merely a means for earning money so even if they entertain your ideas about art it's only going to be to the extent that they think they can get money out of it like if you go to hollywood and you want to direct some very artistic beautiful movie that will have spiritual you know that will uplift people's souls and their spirits and will will get them interested in spirituality and it'll also talk about the environment and human health you tell them how important all these things are and about also about raising social consciousness you tell this to some of the you know studio executives uh and business people and they'll laugh at you and the only way they will listen to you or take you seriously is if you can tell them somehow how all of this will actually lead them to earning a bunch of money then they'll take you seriously but only to the extent that it earns money as soon as it's not earning the money they'll laugh at all your stupid stuff because they don't really care about what you're teaching what effect you're having on human souls and the society and the environment they don't care about any of that [ __ ] they just care about their money and if they can get there through art they'll do it but they don't actually care about art and so this has produced business which is very soulless the spirit of business has been ripped away from it because really if you were going to be doing business properly you would care about these things and you actually prioritize these things above business for example the work that i do with actualize.org i prioritize the impact that i have on people elevating people's conscious way above the business aspects of actions.org and much to my detriment because if i wanted to i could focus the majority of my resources and time just on the business and marketing aspects of of actualize.org and if i did that i would be 10 times more successful i'd have 10 times more viewers i would sell 10 times more courses and make 10 times more money and be 10 times more popular and more people would kiss my ass and more people would love me and i'd have more status and i'd get more invitations to interviews and i'd be more visible on tv and all this sorts of stuff and so i've had to make a conscious decision that's i don't want to do that because i want to put the majority of my attention on the actual content of this work and that is very much missing in the business world which is why i left the corporate business world i was in it for a while and it was so disgusting and soulless to me that i don't want to be part of that at all and the reality is that it's very difficult to actually do that within the corporate structure it's not just that there's some elite ceos that are preventing you from doing that it's the entire corporate structures this way is very very unhealthy and dysfunctional and it creates diseases within our society many many different diseases within our society and so for me the most important thing when i realized how dirty the corporate world was and how little it appreciated art and spirituality and health and these sorts of things i i had to leave the corporate world it was difficult to do that and i knew that i had to build up my own independent way of making a living and doing business and that's what i that's what i did for example i was a i was a game developer worked at a really great studio designing video games um but one of the things that bothered me so much about game development is that even though i loved game development uh there are many things that bother me but i'm just gonna focus on this one narrow thing which is that how unhealthy game development is the crunch the overtime the the the kind of garbage food that they eat for example every uh every thursday we would have like this game night and they would deliver all this pizza to the office and you'd play games i mean this probably sounds so obnoxious to some of you who wish you got that at your work yeah but like i mean um so we everybody in the office would be eating pizza there was no healthy food all there was like a pantry in the office that was stocked with the most unhealthiest unhealthiest of foods snacks and snicker bars and all sorts of [ __ ] sodas and everybody was just consuming this stuff and then working overtime and just killing themselves making this game and i mean um that's also the epitome of a lack of holism because many of these those people i mean i left i left within a year because i couldn't tolerate that but many of those people they will get cancer they will get autoimmune disease they will get all sorts of other problems they will burn out all sorts of other stuff is going to happen to them and they don't see that because they're just myopically focused on developing the next game and then when you bring this up to the boss what does he tell you like i brought up the idea of crunch like can we do something about not doing crunch he tells you something like well it's just the industry standard that's what that's what we do that's how we make games without this we couldn't make a game it's just part of the culture you see it's so part of the culture that nobody even cares to consider it wrong or to change it and now i'm not arguing that it's difficult to change that it is very difficult to change that but it's a very unholistic way of doing business and that's just only one element there are many other critiques i could have of the game industry so i won't i won't go into that here of course um the next point is closely associated to business is marketing marketing as it is done right now is extremely unhealthy extremely toxic it ignores societal well-being it ignores the psychological ecosystem of human minds that it infects and corrupts with the mind viruses that it feeds i mean i personally i think that one of the greatest scandals of the last 50 years is the toxic effect that marketing has had on human minds and this is a scandal that nobody even talks about or even thinks about or understands at all how significant this is you're being brainwashed constantly by ads all over the internet on tv in the movies anywhere you go driving down the road and it's infecting you and you're it's shaping your desires and your tastes and your aversions and fears and your whole worldview is being shaped by this as you're growing up you know since you're a baby it's been shaping you and it's only getting worse now that our kids you know the the new generation of zoomers they are you know using computers even earlier watching tv even earlier and all this sort of stuff and they're all i mean like their whole world view and paradigm is being is being corrupted by the marketing system and these marketers they don't give a [ __ ] they act as though nothing is wrong it's like leo what's wrong with me pitching my you know my my latest soft drink you know what's wrong with me advertising fast food on tv what's wrong with me advertising cigarettes what's wrong with me advertising erection medication well what's wrong is that all of that combined together leads to that situation we talked about in episode one where you know you [ __ ] in the pool everybody else shits in the pool soon enough we're all swimming in a pool of [ __ ] and that's exactly what's happening but it's see it's it's so it's so subtle because uh marketing is not a tangible thing when there's a war going on and children are being bombed well that's very visceral we see that at the immigration you know centers when children are being locked up in cages we see that we feel that it's a material thing we react to it if there's a holocaust we react to that you know uh very emotionally and so forth but when our minds are being fed every day by this by this advertising it's hard to even point your finger at what the problem is you don't see it you're like a fish and water and of course the advertisers and marketers themselves are part of this ecosystem so they're not immune it's not like they're sitting above the system you know [ __ ] down below they're swimming in the same pool as all of us are and so their children are also getting infected no matter how much money you make through your marketing schemes if you have children well your children are going to go grow up watching tv and looking at the same ads that you helped create and then they're going to get infected by that and then of course whatever ads you create somebody else is going to create even more toxic ones to out-compete you and then your children will watch those that's going to corrupt their their minds and their entire relationship to life see so especially when we're talking about the health of society as a whole we need to be extremely holistic to take all of these factors into account and to find the proper balances how about in geopolitics a lack of holism in geopolitics leads to something like the iraq war not the first one but the second one so with bush and cheney bumbling their way into the middle east thinking that they would be greeted with with roses and bouquets of flowers and uh and that they would be able to establish a democracy there it just shows a complete lack of holistic understanding of all the subtle complex moving parts of the region the the developmental level and the consciousness of the region how they would react how many lives would be lost how much money would be spent and ultimately for what what did it accomplish whereas if if we had a president like al gore maybe who's a more holistic thinker than somebody like bush or cheney then you would avoid that situation because he would have looked at that situation he would have said i mean maybe there's a reason to go in there but also if we look at all the factors it's going to be a quagmire it's not worth it and there are many examples like this in geopolitics most of geopolitics is deeply unholistic and that's why we get war in a sense that that's what war is war is just a lack of holism because if you holistically understood the situation as as the ultimate supreme leader as the commander-in-chief if you understood the situation holistically you wouldn't go to war because you would see how ugly war is and you would look for other ways uh especially when you're not being directly attacked like i understand you know if there was a direct attack then you'd have to defend yourself but 911 was not a direct attack it was just a terrorist attack it was not a it was not a it was not a state attack on america and it wasn't even done by that part of the by that country so it i mean there's so many problems with the iraq war okay we'll we'll move on uh let's move on to some problems in science so within science we have a deep problem i've talked about many times times in the past where science ignores metaphysics and epistemology and dismiss these as unnecessary to the work of science this is extremely ignorant and extremely unholistic the scientist sort of assumes that oh well we can just keep doing science as we've always been doing it we don't need to question our deepest assumptions the epistemology the metaphysics that's not going to change the way that i do science but of course it will because the way that you do science the scientific method itself hinges upon an implicit metaphysics and epistemology that you have which for most scientists today is materialism but this materialism is just taken as the default position it's not even taken as a metaphysics or an epistemology it's just taken as truth of course it isn't it's actually falsehood but the way our education system trains scientists they don't know any better and when you try to retrain them and open their minds they say metaphysics epistemology is a waste of my time well with that attitude you're going to keep doing your materialistic reduction of science and you're going to keep getting confused as to why your science isn't progressing and why certain problems can't be resolved for example the mind body problem is easily resolved we've resolved it those of us who've gone beyond materialism we've resolved it but to academic scientists the mind body problem is still very very mysterious and very thorny and they keep waiting for when will we resolve this problem well you can't resolve this problem through science you can only resolve it through metaphysics and epistemology and spirituality speaking of which is another problem that science has is that science ignores consciousness and spirituality dismissing these things as unscientific and unworthy of scientific study or unexplainable by science of course that's untrue you can have perfect understanding of what consciousness is um but but most scientists are clueless to that because they're not holistic enough they think that science is one thing and spirituality is another thing they think that matter is one thing and consciousness is something else doesn't occur to them that matter and conscious could actually be the same thing another problem in science is that many of the best epistemic lessons and metaphysical lessons that were discovered 100 years ago in quantum mechanics science understands some of these but they're not generalized out to other domains enough stuff like entanglement subject object duality superposition and many other weird aspects of quantum mechanics most scientists when you tell them but let's generalize this out to other aspects of life like to the macro domains they say no no no that's not that's not real science that's not you're not you're not being strict enough you're being some hippie uh you know dippy uh deepak chopra person who's just bullshitting stuff and uh and using science to try to rationalize the spirituality or whatever but that's not strict science but you see that is actually the bigger mistake is to take that approach because yes there were very narrow specific discoveries within quantum mechanics but that does not mean it doesn't generalize to other domains but the scientist doesn't have enough holistic understanding to see how a generalization could happen or why it would even be important they just try to like stick stick to the strict science they tend to be very conservative these scientists but actually in being so conservative they fail to generalize it out and draw connections and lessons with other aspects and domains of life which would be very important and illuminating another example would be from mathematics a similar problem is google's and completeness theorem which i've talked about in my older episode called the metaphysical implications of google's incompleteness theorem mathematicians understand the theorem they understand the implications it has for mathematics and maybe logic formal logic but then when you try to generalize it out beyond that to other domains which i did in that episode that whole episode was me generalizing out to other domains implications from googles and compliance theorem when you try to do that with a mathematician or a scientist they will not even want to listen to you because their rebuttal will be that no no no google's the completed serum only applies to certain very specific narrowly defined logical systems and anything beyond that like human language other stuff it doesn't apply to that i've read entire books of mathematicians arguing this but this is horseshit because the problem is that if you want to be very narrow about its implications you can be but that doesn't mean that just because you want to be narrow about them that they themselves are not further generalizable they are uh which if you want to know more about that go check out that episode um in fact after google came tarsky and tarski developed more general theorems than even google that have even more broader applications and many for example logicians and mathematicians and scientists when they dismiss what i have to say about google's complaints theorem and its generalizations they they just leave out tarsky for example as though he doesn't even exist and you can generalize it out even beyond tarsky but the thing is that the more you generalize it out now the more disconnected it becomes with formal logic and verbal mathematics and formal science and that's right that's the whole point but the problem is that these mathematicians and scientists and logicians they are so locked into the little bubble that they don't care about anything beyond their formalized logic or their formalized subdomain and of course when that's your attitude then you won't be able to draw the interconnections and the you won't be able to generalize it out further to other domains so it takes someone like me to come along and who has a very holistic you know understanding of things or at least a desire to to understand things holistically who's not loyal to a logic or to science or to mathematics or to anything only someone with that kind of attitude can actually be able to generalize it out the problem though is that when you do that the people in their little established bubbles they don't accept you and they think you're nuts i'll leave it to you to decide who's right on that topic me or them the next point is psychology psychology is deeply unholistic reductionistic and dysfunctional in its current state because it ignores spirituality and nonduality it also ignores philosophy it ignores the importance of metaphysical and epistemic and existential considerations when treating patients that's why therapists doing talk therapy psychoanalysis this sort of they tend to have very poor results with curing patients and the reason that is because their patients usually have a deeper problem at the spiritual existential level at the epistemic metaphysical level and most psychologists are not trained for that stuff in fact they might consider those things to be nonsense and not genuine science not real medicine and so as a result the therapist the psychiatrist psychologist he ends up having an understanding of human psychology and human behavior at a very surface level because you cannot understand human behavior without deep spiritual work yourself personally because all human behavior stems from ego and ego is not just a psychological thing it's a deeply existential metaphysical thing so you can't cure someone with a serious psychological issue unless you're able to understand human psychology to to its bone and you can't understand human psychology to its bone unless you understand the ego and you can't understand the ego unless you do spiritual work so if you're a psychologist or a therapist or psychiatrist who's not doing spiritual work you're uh you're basically a hack you're negligent at your work and your patients suffer for it some of them kill themselves because you weren't able to help them see and of course you yourself are are psychologically sick because you can't be psychologically healthy without understanding those things so yeah and university doesn't teach these things the university only teaches a very narrow version of psychology that ignores all these other factors in fact speaking of psychology about 70 years ago there was a famous psychologist whose name was skinner he developed the skinner box maybe you heard of him and his his whole attitude and world view towards psychology was called behaviorism his idea was that the internal moods and feelings and attitudes and beliefs of living beings humans and animals didn't matter at all we can just treat the animal or the human as a black box there's some inputs and there's some outputs the inputs are the stimuli like you you shock an animal with a cattle prod you know electrocute the animal and then there's some sort of response the animal screams the animal runs away the animal you know opens its eyes sticks his tongue out whatever and so he said his whole approach to science and psychology was that we don't care about anything that's going on on the inside we don't care about consciousness none of that stuff we don't care about how it feels all we care about is inputs and outputs and all that science and psychology is as a field is the measuring of inputs and outputs such that like you can give a piece of cheese to a rat that's the input and then the rat uh you know eats it and then it uh you know it jumps up and down and that's the output and that's literally all that reality is that's all that science is uh well by by today of course the the absurdity of this gross reductionism is very obvious even to many scientists and psycho and academics but even though the absurdity of that reductionism is so obvious it's so limited it's so extremely limited this sort of reductionism is still happening all throughout academia and all throughout science in more subtle ways a similar sort of reductionism was attempted within the field of logic and mathematics during the early 1900s and this movement was called logicism it was spearheaded by uh gauntlet fergue and people like bertrand russell uh alfred north whitehead and hilbert uh and and others you know it was called like hilbert's project hilbert's project was to take all of mathematics and to formalize it into a simple algorithm such that every single mathematical truth and proof could be could be just churned out by a by a calculator that was the project it was the idea that mathematics is nothing more than uh the logic behind it and the shuffling of symbols logical symbols in a formalized sort of way they tried to reduce all of mathematical truth to that and they utterly failed miserably failed and then it took them about 30 30 years or so to ultimately realize that this isn't utterly impossible and it was actually goods incompleteness serum that that finally put the nail in the coffin of that also russell's russell's paradox was also central to that so uh got lefrega right this whole wrote this whole book about how he was able to boil all of mathematics down to logic he wrote this book he was very proud he was just about to publish it um he has some like brilliant proofs in there for for his logic it was all perfect you know he's reduced it all down reductionism and then uh right before he publishes it um bertrand russell um sends him a letter uh a short letter that that contains russell's paradox i won't go into it here it's kind of technical you can go read about it on wikipedia but uh yeah he just he he gave this to to god lafrey russell's paradox and then when fragi read this his his whole life's work just collapsed instantly he spent his whole life developing the system it all collapsed simply because he didn't consider the paradoxical nature of consciousness and a symbolic understanding there was a similar movement around that time called the vienna school uh and it was called logical positivism it was this idea that all of science can also just simply be boiled down to simple statements about true or false statements about the nature of reality like is the sky blue true or false is the sun hot true or false is the snow white true or false and that that's all that science was that's all that reality was that's all that truth was um and of course it took them i don't know 30 or so years to realize that that doesn't work either and so today logical positivism of course is of course dismissed by serious academics and scientists because of because it's so ridiculously reductionistic and and ultimately self-contradictory and false but but at some point some of the greatest philosophers in the world believed in this see so what does all this have to do with holism well i'm talking about the history of western intellectual tradition and how deeply reductionistic it used to be and how badly that failed because reductionism fails that's the whole problem of reductionism it keeps failing and the reason he keeps failing is because reality is a unity if it's a unity you can only understand it as a whole not as bits and pieces and even though i'm saying these things and serious scientists and academics and philosophers might understand everything i'm saying here this is some technical stuff um most people most laymen don't know any of these problems uh but uh but they they still don't understand the depth of the problem what i'm saying is that these problems still persist within modern science this is not some sort of ancient stuff of idiots of the past century this is go all going on still today within science another example of which is how science ignores psychedelics treating it as though it's an unscientific thing as though psychedelics cannot be used to do much better science and i don't just mean that science is not interested in studying psychedelics there are more and more researchers and chemists and even psychologists who are studying psychedelics scientifically but they're still doing it from a distance they're not doing it personally uh the real breakthrough will be when serious scientists start taking psychedelics themselves and using that to see the limitations of science now that will be true holism right there but we're a long way from that within technology we have a problem in the technology field a lot of ethics are ignored a lot of technologies are just invented for the sake of inventing them for business purposes so technology and business are closely related but then the actual ethics of the technology are not taken seriously enough because that would require more holism than these people are trained to practice or care to know or is convenient for business to see it's much harder to do business holistically than unholistically you can make a lot more money unholistically uh another examples is einstein's relativity so einstein first developed the theory of special relativity which was a very narrow application of relativity to uh i believe it was just velocity in the same sort of direction so if you have like on one plane you have one train moving this way and another train moving this way at this in the same direction at the at different velocities then you could calculate the relativistic differences and so forth but that was just a very special case after einstein developed that he wasn't fully happy einstein said to himself something like well yes it's great it's a great breakthrough for this narrow case but i mean all of reality is much bigger than this narrow case what about cases when things are moving at different angles what about cases when there's also acceleration because in his special relativity i believe acceleration was assumed to be zero we were just dealing with velocities but then there's accelerations what about rotational forces what about the orbiting you know of of planets and you know the complex stuff of which our universe is actually made what about that so he had an intuition that actually relativity needs to apply to those things as well but he didn't know how to do it uh he didn't know the mathematics and so forth and so it took him some number of years five or ten years to figure that out have some breakthroughs and then he came out with his general relativity which is the theory that he's now best known for that became his sort of life's work and general relativity expanded that out so this is what i mean by generalizing out it generalized that narrow discovery to something much larger which is all moving objects and in general relativity is where einstein came up with this idea of space-time and that really gravity was just the mass exerting a distortion within space-time and you know four-dimensional space blah blah blah complex stuff so um so he generalized it out but see we can't stop there really if einstein was truly holistic in his thinking he would say wait a minute why can't we generalize relativity even more why is it only applying to physics what if we apply relativity the concept of relativity to everything in the universe including the human mind including science including religion including different cultures including the actual physical existence of objects including the physical existence of the entire universe what if all of that was relative and this would be what i call absolute relativity which is what awakening is so see if he was a little bit wiser and more holistic he would he would have awoken but he didn't because he was still stuck within the little domain of of physics and he had to break through that but he didn't because he considered himself a physicist and so that's that but see today if i try to teach scientists absolute relativity they're going to look at me like i'm crazy because they're going to say well leo absolute relativity you're talking about all these things like science and religion this is not within the domain of the little work that i do that's right i'm talking about the entire [ __ ] universe so of course it's it's way beyond the little work that you do in your little cubicle in your university in your little you know department whatever department you're a part of even if you're a philosopher it's way beyond your philosophy department even if you're in the religious studies department it's way beyond your religious studies department because we're talking about the entire universe so much for that if you want to understand more about relativity and how that works check out my very important episode called understanding relativism part one i'm also still planning to release part two hang in there for that one okay how about education education is so ridiculously unholistic today and this is also creating all sorts of social problems perhaps this is the biggest source of our social problems is our shitty education system so look at all the stuff education ignores education ignores personal development emotional intelligence love epistemology metaphysics spirituality nutrition health by and large education does not teach these things you can go through 12 years 20 years of education through our you know all the way through university and you could not learn anything about these things leading you to believe that these things don't even exist or that if they do exist they're unimportant because otherwise they would have taught me right i have a very deep critique about the education system and i also have a giant list of how to reform the education system that's going to be a long separate episode about how to reform education system and all of its problems so i i won't be labor that point here there's there's just so much to say about how deeply fundamentally flawed our education system is really what our education system should be focused on is everything that i teach with actualize.org now you might say leo you're just being self-biased here aren't you i mean how convenient of you to say that our education system should just be what you teach but uh you have to understand how i came here i came here because i had a very holistic attitude towards life and i was researching all this stuff and i wanted to know you know what's the deepest most important lessons that you can learn in life and through that actualize that org spawned rather organically um and so and also i didn't like invent these things i mean these things have existed long before me mankind has been teaching this stuff for 10 000 years it's just that they're not incorporated properly into our education system so it actually truly is the case that our education system should be teaching you everything that i'm teaching really if the education system was properly designed i would be out of a job but of course the other way you can see that is that this is the education system this is the new education system i am building the new education system that's what actualize already is it's the education system that there should be but there isn't because of all the systemic gridlock and problems and red tape that exists within our education system see i wouldn't be able to teach these things within the education system you might say leo why don't you just become a uh high school professor uh or high school teacher or why don't you become a university professor and i thought about that when i was younger i actually wanted to be a professor of philosophy at a major university and then i realized that i can't because the system won't let me teach the things that i really want to teach and therefore i knew i had to carve my own path and so that's what i did and so here we are and so even though of course actualize.org the trade-off is that actualized.org doesn't have the same reach it can't reach hundreds of millions of people uh the way that our education system can but uh but the but the upside is that we can really talk about advanced things to those people who really care about them and then what's going to happen is that over the next 100 years our current education system is going to incorporate it's going to realize it's errors and it's going to start to incorporate all the stuff that i've been teaching and of course it's not just me there's many people who teach advanced stuff like what i'm teaching so i'm not i'm not saying this egotistically as though like my my work is the only work it's like you know there's a lot of there's a lot of work to pull from and in fact my work pulls from hundreds of other people's work which you can see if you read some of the books on my book list but anyways so this is a lack of holism within education scientific studies in general i often see people quoting scientific studies as though they're the truth the problem with scientific studies is that they're extremely narrow and they're unholistic in the way they design these studies therefore they give you very narrow results and when they give you these narrow results these results can be so narrow they're so easily recontextualizable in the future by other data and other studies that it's almost worthless to actually base any kind of actions or behaviors on them which is why a lot of these nutritional studies and so forth they're so flimsy people tout them as they're like oh this study came out that says that coffee makes you live longer or red wine makes you live longer or something like that or saturated fats are good for you or bad for you or whatever it is and i just look at these and i say you can't you why are you taking any of these studies seriously they're so limited in their scope when what you're talking about is this holistic highly complex human organism and you have this very narrow study about red wine or coffee or carbs or whatever it tells you virtually nothing in fact it's misinforming you it's filling your mind with all sorts of simplistic reductionistic delusions that will actually end up harming your health more than it'll probably help you all right so that's the collective problems now let's talk about the individual problems stuff that you face so individual problems stemming from lack of holism includes stuff like living a hedonistic lifestyle eating junk food for example when you're eating that junk food are you holistically thinking about how this affects your longevity how this affects your health how this contributes to your ability to do your work to fulfill your life purpose to be able to love to be able to have sex to be able to raise children no you're just you're just picking out on some pizza same thing with when you're not exercising how about staying at a job that pays very well but it doesn't satisfy you and you keep staying at it and staying at and staying and procrastinating leaving and you just keep staying at it for 10 years you waste 10 20 years of your life and then by that point you're too uh jaded to even bother to make a change see if you were holistic in your thinking you would realize that yeah this job pays a lot but the fact that it doesn't satisfy me and doesn't align with my life purpose at my highest values this is the bigger problem this is what needs to really be addressed and no amount of money is worth that so let me leave even though i'm going to take a temporary um you know hit to my salary it's going to be challenging it's going to be difficult to leave and find a new job or to find start a business or whatever but it's going to ultimately be more satisfying in the end and that's what matters the most see most people don't think this way about their work how about crunching at work and leading a an alcohol a workaholic lifestyle a lot of people do this they work themselves to death until or until they get a disease or they crunch at work until they burn out and they have to quit or they're so tired they can't do good work anymore see crunching and being a workaholic seems nice at first if you're only thinking in a short term in terms of the next year or two but if you're thinking in terms of your career and your business and your productive output over your entire lifetime these things are laughably stupid and yet so many people do them because they're not thinking holistically right they're not considering how their work connects with their relationships and their marriage with their sex life with their health with their children with their relationships with their friends with their family all these things are interconnected and you need all those things to be in balance to have a happy life but when you just focus on the work you might think that it'll do something for you but it's probably going to make you more miserable than the opposite how about the example of avoiding going to the doctor have you ever done this you might think you have some disease or some ailment or something on your whatever growing on you and then you're like gosh i should probably go to the doctor but i don't want to because if i go i'm afraid of what he's going to say is it cancer is it a you know is it something nasty is it something expensive this is going to cost me ten thousand dollars i don't have insurance whatever and so you don't go to the doctor and you keep procrastinating for years not going to the doctor well that's obviously very unholistic and stupid of you it would be much better to just go and get it get it over with because you know just by not going to the doctor that thing's not going to go away by itself you're just sticking your head in the sand how about this example starting a project a work project but then losing track of the ultimate goal of what the project is about this is actually extremely common and it happens even to very smart and conscious people you can get so wrapped up in a project especially if your project is going to take multiple years to to complete that your original intentions behind the project they were probably noble and pure they slowly get corrupted by the pragmatics of the work that you're doing you know the daily grind to the point where you forget even why you began this kind of work in the first place and then your goal just becomes something like rather than some lofty goal you know to create some beautiful work of art to influence people in a positive way your goal becomes something much lower in base or something like you know just to pay the bills or just to keep people employed or just to keep the company running or just to finish the project or just to keep doing the same stuff that we've been doing you know with actualized.org i constantly have to look back you know what were my original intentions for starting this stuff because it's easy for me to just get lost in the grind of pumping out more videos every week that takes up the majority of my like mental real estate uh but then i have to wonder like wait a minute should i even be making videos at all maybe there's some higher form of doing my work than videos maybe i should write a book maybe i should do workshops or retreats maybe i should just go live in a cave and meditate maybe that's really my work and so i have to think back to like why am i doing this right what's the ultimate goal what is this serving in in in the grand scheme of things of my life what is how is this serving me releasing these videos i mean sure it gets me some money it gives me some you know some pleasure to release this stuff and get feedback from you guys and so forth there's a certain satisfaction to doing work but ultimately i did not get into this work only for the satisfaction of doing work or for the money or even for the you know the positive comments or stuff i got into it because i wanted to have a very specific impact on the world and then i have to wonder like but is actually really having that impact or is there a better way to have that impact maybe there's a better way in which case i have to just maybe quit actualize every goal together shut it down because maybe there's a better way to do it but see that requires a very large holism to be able to do that it's very easy to get stuck in one thing another example is being cheap when hiring employees see if you lack holism and you try to hire the cheapest employees you might end up hiring also the worst least innovative most uh unskilled employees and then that actually ends up hurting your business might even actually lead to the bankruptcy of your business so maybe it would have been better to to pay more but then also to get more but that requires a long-term sort of holistic understanding of how business works how about lying in relationships that's a great example a lot of people rely on relationships thinking that well if i can just get away with this lie what's the big deal the problem is you get away with it the next time you also want to get away with the next one and the next one and where does it stop and then your relationship is built upon lies and then of course see if you're not thinking holistically you can think that you can get away with that but if you think holistically you realize that you know if i want a quality loving relationship which is probably what i want then it has to be built on honesty as soon as there's going to be too many lies between us that relationship is as good as gone it's dead and you're never going to bring it back but an unholistic person is not thinking about the relationship holistically uh most people are thinking about their relationships just flying by the sea of their pants just navigating using their pleasures and their aversions they don't actually think in sort of meta way about the relationship itself and how to sustain the health of the relationship see and then people wonder why does so many people get divorced and why uh why are most relationships so toxic and unhealthy well because to have a healthy relationship you'd have to look at it holistically not just from your selfish personal needs not just from what causes you pleasure not just from what causes you to feel love but holistically the entire relationship you don't just look at your own needs or your partner's needs but you have to almost like as though there's a third entity that is a third whole law that's even larger and more important than either you or her or him whatever it is uh there's there's a larger sort of third which is the relationship itself and how do you maintain the health of that thing as a coordinated dance between the two of these hold ons that you and she or whatever is and see that's a very different attitude towards relationship much more holistic and notice by the way how much selflessness that would require to approach relationships that way rather than report approaching relationships the way most of us do which is just like what am i gonna get what kind of sex am i getting at what kind of love am i gonna get and if i'm not getting it then i'm pissed off and i'm gonna fight with you speaking of relationships and sexuality and dating pickup the entire pickup community perhaps his biggest problem is that it's fundamentally ridiculously unholistic it's all about the male perspective as though the female perspective isn't even important and of course because of this even though many of these pickup people can get laid it's effective for getting laid but when it comes to actually having deep fulfilling relationships with women these pickup guys are are so far away from that being able to do that and in fact pickup makes you makes it even worse because it it trains you with this very very unholistic deeply self-biased attitude towards sex dating and relationships i've talked about that to some degree in my rant against pickup episode check that out uh how about this example of staying married for the sake of children sometimes i hear adults do this um but see the problem is that if you really don't get along with your wife or husband staying married to them just for the sake of the kids to sort of keep up appearances um this is going to backfire on you you're not thinking holistically holistically speaking i mean you too if you can't get along and you plan to live for the next 20 years together anyways for the sake of the kids i mean there's going to be so many fights uh so much demonization and judgment and hatred and toxicity build up it's all gonna flow to your kids and then your kids will get programmed with that for the rest of their life and they'll be traumatized by that you're not gonna be able to hide this from the kids maybe it would be better for you to separate you two to separate but then at least the kids won't have to watch you fighting all the time with each other that might actually be healthier in the most holistic sense i mean i don't know you have to you have to figure out the details for yourself i'm not telling you what to do i'm just proposing this as an example how about ripping off your customers if you're doing business it might seem in the short term that ripping off your customers is good gives you money but in the long term in the long term your customers will probably catch on they will get resentful and then you won't have many customers and your business will fail another example of lack of holism is dismissing the importance of theory some people take this attitude of like ah theory is all [ __ ] is philosophy armchair stuff not important let's just get down to work let's be very practical sounds good in theory but in practice what happens is that when you ignore theory your practice is very limited because theory shows you new ways to practice theory allows you to introspect deeply about your practice and to fine-tune it theory might tell you that your entire practice is useless you should be doing some other totally different practice see how do you know which practice you should be doing how do you know the practice you're doing is is the best one well only through theory can you figure that out see so the division between theory and practices is a deeply problematic and unholistic duality i have an older episode called theory versus practice or something along those lines search for it which is actually one of my most important episodes very underrated go check that out because this is so many people are confused about this duality between theory and practice and they're both important they're both very important but they have to be balanced very delicately loans and credit that's a super unholistic um economical idea both at the individual level also at the collective level and perhaps lastly the most problematic lack of holism is not doing spiritual work if you think you're just going to skate by in life without doing any spiritual work or any existential considerations and you think that you're just gonna live a good life well i got news for you you won't you're gonna suffer very deeply for this and in the end as you get older you're gonna have to start to face your death as you age and as you face your death you're gonna you're gonna experience the worst suffering because by not doing the spiritual work you haven't really realized what death is you haven't come to terms with it you're still living in your ego and those last few years or even decade or so of your life are going to be some of the most miserable years so maybe it's not so wise to not do spiritual work so holistic thinking can be applied at the individual level and also at the collective level both are important and in fact you should notice that this duality between the individual level and the collective level is itself a sort of brokenness fragmentation within consciousness so if you approach reality as though these two things are separate and as though one is important but the other one is not that can only lead to disease and brokenness and evil you should think of the individual and the collective as two strands of that you know double helix dna molecule you need both strands that are intimately intertwined and perfectly balanced with each other to create the dna strand that's that's in a sensible society is society is not just society it also isn't the the individuals that make it up and the individuals are not just individuals they're also the society upon which they rely without which they couldn't live so i would like you to contemplate for yourself contemplate how many problems in the world are the result of unholistic thinking and then also contemplate how many of your personal problems or the problems of people you you know are the result of unholistic thinking and that should get you a good idea of why it's so important uh beware of teachings and endeavors or projects which are not holistic for example success-based materialistic self-help teachings or business of that same nature or western medicine or physics or mathematics or philosophical schools or religions or even spiritual schools cults and political ideologies all of these things are deeply unholistic and if you buy into any one of these things too much and you take it as the ultimate truth it's going to lead to problems brokenness disease and suffering and ultimately evil now i was driving my car just the other day i had this whole episode planned out already and i was just thinking like what is the essence of what i'm trying to say here why is it that a lack of holism is so problematic and the thing that popped into my mind sort of as a eureka moment is that really what i'm trying to say here is that a lack of holism equals paradigm lock if you don't know what paradigm lock is sort of a termite coined you can find more about that by seeing my episode called how paradigms work but paradigm locks just means you're locked into a paradigm whether it's the scientific materialistic paradigm or the religious christian or muslim paradigm or the buddhist paradigm or i mean there's many paradigms the capitalist socialist paradigm whatever so you see your mind subscribes to this worldview or paradigm and this paradigm sort of forms the periphery of your mind and what reality is for you and one of the most powerful ways to keep you within a paradigm is by limiting your holistic thinking because if you think too holistically eventually you'll realize that the paradigm is just a little bubble that you're trapped in and you can break out of it for example if you're a fundamentalist christian almost everything within fundamentalist christianity is designed to keep you within the bubble like if you start asking too many questions they'll they'll you know reprimand you if you start behaving in ways that don't correspond to the pair of them they'll reprimand you if you start reading certain books that they don't like they'll reprimand you they'll excommunicate you or whatever all to kind of force you to stay within a little paradigm and they're sort of taboo stuff everything that's taboo is really the stuff that's considered false or evil basically to keep you in the paradigm the paradigm creates this notion of evil and of course evil is anything self-servingly because all these paradigms are very selfish evil is defined as anything which would break you out of the paradigm so taking psychedelics is evil because it would break out of the paradigm or you know doing meditation is evil from a fundamentalist christian perspective because it breaks you out of the paradigm studying too much science is evil maybe going to university is too evil because those are elitists they're trying to brainwash either marxists and communists whatever reading karl marx's works das capital and whatever um that's evil why because it might start to get you to question the whole christian paradigm and so but this is not just christianity this is true for islam buddhism it's true for science as well and so to break out of these paradigms your most powerful tool is holism because holism gets you to recognize that well wait a minute i'm a christian i'm in this bubble but there's also a muslim who's probably also in this bubble there's a christian army sorry an atheist who's also in this bubble and so wait a minute these are all three different bubbles is there something beyond that how do i integrate all of these bubbles into a single understanding and when you do that you break out of yours and you don't jump into any others you go higher you sort of create a higher bubble that incorporates all those three and then once you're you live in that for a while for a few decades then you realize wait a minute other people are doing the same thing as i am they're kind of going meta on all their paradigms but then they do it in different ways so wait a minute who's right me or them and then you realize wait a minute i have to go even higher and you have to create even higher bubble and so this continues and in this way you end up breaking out of all the paradigms and you end up jail breaking your mind i've talked in the past about this idea of jail breaking the mind i talked about it especially in my episode called what is actualized.org sort of the intro to what we're doing here with this work jail breaking the mind is what we're doing and to jail break the mind you need to be infinitely holistic that's how the mind jails you is by getting you comfortable in a less than a infinitely holistic way of thinking about reality another point i wanted to make here is about corruption you know a lot of people complain about corruption government and so forth but they don't really understand how deep the problem of corruption goes it's not just some elitist washington fat cats who are corrupt and it's not just you know bill gates and other ceos and jeff bezos who are corrupt uh corruption really is a lack of holistic intelligence that's truly what what corruption is at its essence i don't have time here to go into more depth on corruption but i have a whole deep episode about corruption so this ties in with that go check that out it's called how corruption works it's a very important episode one of my best also sort of underrated make sure you watch that because corruption is much more sneaky than you think it is so here's the catch-22 of holism you ready thinking holistically thinking holistically requires appreciating the value of holism because if you don't appreciate the value of holism why would you think holistically but to see the value of holism and appreciate it requires that you're seeing holistically that's the catch-22 so it's difficult it's difficult for me to convince someone to think holistically when he doesn't see the value in it which is why we're spending the bulk of this series talking about all the problems and the value of it so you can really grok at a deep level how problematic it is to not be infinitely holistic in your understanding of reality it directly leads to suffering for you and for all of mankind see but if you insist on being dense and not thinking holistically there's nothing i can do to convince you otherwise for example you might you might pose the objection to me like but leo haven't a bunch of people become rich and wealthy and powerful without thinking holistically so why can't i just live my life that way i mean it seems like you're you're trying to set me on this course of the holistic life but then there's this other course which is the unholistic life why wouldn't i choose that when i can get billions of dollars in hot girls and fancy cars and a bunch of gold and whatever else a yacht buy myself a yacht a private jet why wouldn't i do that well of course you could but can you see that even being attracted to that way of living the sort of opulent luxury lifestyle even to be attracted to that can you see how that already demonstrates a lack of holistic understanding because if you truly had a little bit of a holistic understanding you would see that that lifestyle even though you're going to get money and girls and yachts and whatever else jewelry um can you see how none of that that's just going to be a hedonic treadmill you're going to be running in you know in place thinking you're getting somewhere but it's not really going to satisfy you you're still going to be deeply dissatisfied with your life in fact maybe even more so because once you achieve those things there's not gonna be any higher to go once you get a yacht and a private jet and you've you know you've banged a hundred hot girls and you've got all the jewelry what's next where do you go from that more of the same thing can you see how that's not going to satisfy you you might even get suicidal from that so the sooner you realize that the faster you can just nix this entire path because this path leads you straight to hell this is a path to hell it also creates a lot of evil in the world to get your billions and millions to bang 100 hot girls and to have your yacht a lot of suffering needs to be caused to others there's a lot of collateral damage that comes with that so it would be wise of you to realize that this path the holistic path is actually going to lead to more fulfillment but that assumes you have some wisdom in you if you don't have wisdom i i can't i don't know what to say to show you the value of this path the the ultimate see if the ultimate end goal of this path is hell what do you think the ultimate end path endpoint of this path is here it's um it might seem like i'm being uh sort of like i'm exaggerating but it literally is what you think it is it's the opposite of hell but it's not easy to get there the holistic path is a difficult path which is why most people don't take it but it's also deeply rewarding and it's not flimsy and shallow like this path there's real depth and meaning to this path here many aspects of life and reality cannot be understood without significant holism for example understanding the dynamics between men and women sexually within you know relationships this cannot be understood unless you're very holistic understanding conflict and war like for example do you want to understand why war happens or why conflict happens between people between nations you can't understand that without deep holism understanding trauma and evil and corruption also cannot happen without epolism understanding how to create a healthy society can't happen without holism and these are just a few of the examples there's a lot more so if you really want to understand things and you value understanding for its own sake the way that i do personally i guess that that's that's the biggest reason that i personally subscribe so much to an attitude of holism infinite holism is because my highest values that i want to understand as much as possible that's my biggest payoff in life it's not money it's not releasing videos it's not my work it's just pure understanding my own it's kind of selfish just purely understanding things and so i realized that i can't understand everything that i want to understand unless i'm totally holistic about it and so that means i got to be holistic so here we are all right let's formally sort of define what are the components of holistic thinking so when we say holistic thinking what do i really mean because it's sort of a it's a very uh vague word very vague term so first of all it means taking all levels of being into account the higher and the lower that you you care about the ants you care about the stars and you care about everything in between and you take all those into account it also secondly means taking responsibility for everything it's a radical responsibility taking and that's why it's so challenging for example a lot of people simply get stuck and don't develop further in their consciousness because they just don't want to handle the responsibility you know it's much easier to just you know when you're sipping your coke can you just throw it out the window that's so much easier than actually taking responsibility for the fact that this coke can is gonna like actually create some litter and maybe harm some animals or whatever um then then you gotta like you gotta figure out what to do with this cocan you gotta save it put it in a bag take it out to a trash can when you stop you gotta stop your car that's much less convenient and most people simply don't want the inconvenience of taking this much responsibility but that's what holistic thinking demands uh thirdly it's uh awareness of your effect on the whole so are you aware of how you affect the corporation you work in the family that you're a part of the relationship that your intimate relationship that you're part of of the country that you're part of of the globe that your country is a part of as a living being within the entire universe uh are you aware of the effect that your food has on society or on poor people in another country are you aware of how the work that you do might influence other people you know are you aware of the toilet paper that you consume how that has an effect on the rain forest cutting down trees like all those need to be taken into account another aspect is internalizing externalities externalities are those things outside of your scope of survival concern that don't concern you and so um to be a holistic thinking you start to integrate those externalities like when you're driving your car usually you might not consider how the pollution from your car or the co2 emissions from your car are affecting to you know global warming or to cancer rates and babies or whatever you usually don't care about that but but when you become a holistic thinker you internalize that externality this carbon or this this pollution you internalize it and then the consequence of internalizing it in your mind is that next time when you go to buy a car you might think twice about the kind of car you want to buy maybe you're going to look for a more fuel efficient car maybe you'll buy an electric car maybe you'll use a bike instead of a car see so it's not just the theory theory then you know percolates into practice another component is that holistic thinking accounts for systemic emergent properties you realize that new things are emerging within reality so for example as all of the nations on the planet are getting together more integrated using internet literally we're wiring the globe i actually posted a while back on my blog a time lapse video of how you know cables are being laid fiber optic cable is being laid through all the oceans of the world interconnecting every city together into a giant internet you know almost like a hive mind as this is happening you got to realize that new things will emerge reality is not just atoms and molecules and humans and nations new stuff is going to keep emerging as we keep evolving and you have to keep your eye open for that it's very easy a lot of times to sort of dismiss the the new emergent stuff like maybe we could almost start to see that there is a an emerging hive mind of mankind which is coming online right now thanks to the internet and all this sort of stuff and and i'm not just saying that we have a bunch of interconnected computer computers and i'm not just saying that we have a bunch of humans talking to each other i'm saying no a totally new we might almost say consciousness is emerging perhaps out of the combination of all those things in the same way that you your consciousness is an emergent we might say of all the different cells and organs of the body but those individual cells and organs don't know that you are conscious we might say well we'll consider that possibility now with mankind as a whole pretty cool huh another component is that holistic thinking accounts for backfiring mechanisms and the counter-intuitive counter-intuitiveness and non-linearity of reality what do i mean by this as i talked about in my intro to systems thinking which you should go check out is related to this topic systems tend to complex systems that are non-linear tend to backfire a lot of times you make a change and the result is the opposite of what you want and so therefore they're very counter-intuitive so to be a holistic thinker you always got to be keeping your eye out for this non uh for this counter-intuitiveness and also what i call inversions a system or a dynamic can easily invert on itself and go full circle check out my episode called thing the theme of things going full circle where we talk a lot about this with many examples there's a lot of examples that keep recurring where things go full circle and they they boomerang and then this leads to very surprising counterintuitive results and so you need to always be looking out for that another aspect of holistic thinking is it sees how the part fits into the hole also it values not just the whole but also the parts you got to value the whole and the parts otherwise there's problems it also holistic thinking also sees how all dualities must always ultimately reunite and i've talked about that at great length in my episode called understanding duality especially part three where i unify all these different dualities together and so you got to be able to see how that keeps happening for example when someone tells you well there's individual problems or reflective problems and they're separate you as a holistic thinker got to be able to see that no wait a minute they can't be separate they're deeply intertwined like i said and ultimately they must unite and ultimately the difference between the individual and the collective there can't be a difference that difference is a relative difference in the absolute since there is no difference likewise when someone says well there's men and there's women and men are better than women when someone sells tells you that you should as a wholesaler be able to zoom out of that and say wait a minute men and women that's just a duality they must unite together and there must not be any difference between men and women at all at the absolute level only at the relative yada yada so forth holistic thinking requires a long time horizon that's an important feature you can't just be thinking one year ahead you got to be thinking decades ahead maybe even 100 years ahead maybe even ahead of your own death to be really holistic like with climate change i mean climate change is already happening we're seeing the effects of it some people are suffering from it but the worst parts of it aren't here and maybe the worst parts won't even be here within your lifetime so you might just say well okay then [ __ ] it then who cares about the environment and and global warming doesn't it doesn't matter because i'll be dead by then well then you're not thinking holistically and that's the level of development and consciousness that you're at holistic thinking requires you consider relevance priority context and balance these are very important you always have to be asking yourself as a whole thinking is this thing relevant how relevant is it is this the highest priority what do we really care about here is this thing important what is the context of this thing that i'm being told that i'm doing and how do i balance things out and holistic thinking requires considering the greatest good for all without selfish needs for yourself so what is the greatest good of all that's what you want to be aligning your mind and your life to now it's important to note that it's not enough to just be a holistic thinker you must also perhaps even more importantly be a holistic carer carer you must care about holism not just think it so here's my question to you do you genuinely care about the whole if you don't how can you ever be holistic are you willing to be selfless for the sake of the whole see the problem is that most people are so wrapped up in their personal struggle just to survive just to pay the bills just to hold their little toxic relationship together and their minds are so biased just fulfilling their basic needs and avoiding immense suffering that they don't have the mental capacity or resources to care about anything else but themselves and their own survival if that's you i'm not blaming you or judging you i understand that some people just have those situations in fact most people do and i've been there myself and i still have some of that in me as well you know we're all surviving in some degree or another but but if you're so wrapped up in survival that you don't have the mental space or the emotional resources to genuinely care about something larger than you then how can you can't be holistic so if you're like that and you want to become holistic the highest leverage thing you can do is to solve your survival challenges solve them permanently solve them in a healthy way such that you're not repeating the cycle of just surviving see the problem is that people when they try to solve their survival challenges most of them the way they solve them is they solve them in very unsustainable ways such that next year they have to do it all over again and then next year they have to do it all over again so they're stuck for the rest of their life just sort of treading water just to stay afloat well if that's you you will never be holistic and you will never reach the higher stages of life you've got to find some permanent solutions to that so that you have some free room and space and time to think about something larger than yourself now that does not mean that i'm giving you an excuse to be a selfish [ __ ] and to never think about something larger than yourself you can start thinking about larger stuff today even if you're stuck in some job that you hate or you can't pay your bills you can still think about this stuff i mean just try to see what you can get away with what your ego will let you go get away with but realistically your ego won't let you get away with too much thinking about others and improving society and so forth until you take care of your basic needs take care of your money needs take care of your food needs take care of your shelter needs take care of your sexual needs in healthy ways sustainable ways such that then you can move on to something larger now i want to give you an example here of different degrees of holism because it's important to see that there's degrees of it so for example let's take politics in a certain philosophical sense we might ask ourselves what is politics really about what's going on like if we if we totally zoom out of all the crazy political rivalry that's going on in america or in the world what's really going on well someone who's a very low level of holism might say something like well politics is about fighting off those evil other guys like if i'm a republican i'll say politics is really about defeating the democrats if i'm a democrat i might say politics is all about defeating the republicans or if i'm a muslim i might say paul politics is all about spreading islam and defeating the christians or whatever or the secular synfidels so this kind of is like the lowest level of of understanding what politics is really about um the next higher level of holism would be something like well politics is really about money power fame sex and domination i mean that's what all these politicians are doing it's just different factions vying for for who gets the most money the most power the most fame the most sex the most nomination there's some truth to that every level of this degrees of holism has some truth to it but it's not a very high level of truth there's a there's more distortion than truth in that but then we go up one more level and say well wait a minute what's what's it even more about what's the what's something even higher that we can say that politics is about well it's about creating a better society you might say a fairer society it's about reducing suffering i mean isn't that really what society is about ultimately we got together because we wanted to survive collectively rather than individually because it was easier and and now what we're doing every year is we're just we're thinking up ideas of how to improve society to make it better fairer less corrupt less oppressive you know we got rid of the kings and dictators so that we can have a fair society and we've got to keep doing that because there's still inequities and they're still suffering that's created in the system okay now we're getting better that's a slightly slightly more proper understanding of what society or what politics is really about but can we go even higher than that yes we can so if you zoom out even higher you can ask yourself so what is it above what's above that well and this is where you got where you got to do some consciousness work and you gotta have some spiritual breakthroughs you can realize that really what politics is about it's about elevating consciousness the consciousness of mankind and it's about increasing collective love it's about helping every individual in society to be able to be more conscious and more loving and as a result all of that feeds into society as a whole making it more conscious and more loving now that's pretty deep see look at how far we've come from thinking of politics as just you know fighting off the evil other versus now talking about how to unite mankind and consciousness and love this is a game changer and look the majority of our politicians and business people and the people who vote have no idea that this is what politics is about the kind of news media that you watch all the partisan tribalism you see on on everywhere on social media and traditional media it doesn't give you any sense that what politics is really about is about consciousness and love but that is what it's about can you see how important it is to understand that and can you see why our politics is so [ __ ] up precisely because virtually nobody understands this think of how profoundly this would impact your personal politics and how you participate in politics and if you got elected how you would govern if you came to it from the understanding that politics is all about elevating conscience and love versus someone who got elected believing that politics is about defeating and killing the republicans or the democrats but there's even one level higher so what's the highest level the highest level of what politics is really about it's about the universe becoming ever more self-conscious self-aware and interconnected with itself and that ultimately leads to infinite love that is the the true and proper context and frame for understanding what politics is the problem is that to understand this highest frame you would need to have a ridiculous awakening a ridiculous spiritual awakening probably multiple to realize this and of course nobody has hardly anybody has and so how do you even teach this to people see it's not enough to take some democrat and republican sit them down in a room and then tell them that hey you know what politics is all about the universe becoming self-aware and interconnected and infinite love it's about god creating itself that's what the universe is i mean that's what politics is all about they would look at you like like a donkey would look at you if you were trying to teach them some calculus it can't land they don't have the reference experiences and their their level of cognitive development is nowhere near capable of of understanding this and they're too selfish and too self-biased to even care about this they'll look at you and they'll say well yeah but so what how do i feed my kids how do i how do i kill those nazis or how do i how do i how do i kill those progressives that's those are their immediate concerns because that's the level that they're at a similar story goes for science you might ask the question of what is science really about at the lowest level you might say science is about manipulating reality like if someone is really selfish the only reason they care about science is because science can help them to manipulate something like if science can help me to build a bomb that i can throw at my enemies great that's the lowest level what about a higher level well you might say something like science is about measuring things now it's a little less selfish it's not about bombing somebody or what science can do for me it's more about like we can do measurements we can figure out some aspects of reality then there's the higher level which is science is really about understanding nature and all of its different phenomena it's about understanding lightning and rain and volcanoes and stars and planets and humans and everything well it's a little more profound it's a little better perspective on what science is you see that's better than just using science to manipulate and build bonds but is there higher you could say science is about expanding our understanding of physical universe you could also say science is about under expanding our understanding of life and consciousness that's a little bit higher because when you think of science as just the study of the physical universe that already is a very limited definition of science when you include consciousness and life into it that's a little bit deeper that's a little bit less materialistic and then the highest level is when you realize that science is the universe becoming conscious of itself as god and love and that science is identical to spirituality science is god exploring itself because it's curious about itself because it's in love with itself and so um now very few scientists see this big picture they're somewhere lower down the ladder but see when you put it this way this gives a very deep grounding for science and many scientists sort of intuit this even richard dawkins for example you know he talks about some of the spiritual aspects of science in the sense that you know you look up at the stars and you wonder it makes you wonder and there's this feeling of awe and reference yeah of course but but do you understand why that is because you're god's looking at yourself you're god experiencing its own creation that's where the awe and wonder comes from the awe and wonder is the awe and wonder of yourself as god of infinite consciousness and of course when you love nature and you love the stars or whatever what are you doing you're loving yourself but of course scientists don't understand that so anyways these are just two examples of the different levels and tiers of holism and of course this now apply this to any field for example if you're going to be making movies you can you can make movies from different levels of holism if you're making video games if you're making music if you're writing if you're whatever if you're making love you can do it at different levels of holism all right now let's talk about how to develop holistic thinking so first of all ask higher quality questions i've stressed this a lot in the past i have a whole episode called the power of asking questions it's a very important episode sort of underrated too go check that out i also have other episodes about contemplation how to ask questions using journals and not and i have an episode called the 64 most fascinating questions that you can ever ask check all those out so learning how to ask powerful questions higher quality questions is crucial you can expand your holistic understanding through our holistic thinking through psychedelics awakening god realization spirituality spiritual practice psychedelics are especially ridiculously powerful nothing will increase your holism more than psychedelics also developing your intuition is important because intuition is a holistic faculty of your mind i have an episode about intuition and i'll have more episodes in the future about how to develop your intuition more another way to develop it is don't settle for one-dimensional linear reductionistic dualistic answers a lot of times when you're asking questions in school at work or anyone you converse with they'll oftentimes give you very one-dimensional linear reductionistic dualistic answers don't be satisfied with those keep questioning keep wanting higher answers that will push you to explore new perspectives read books study stuff and then expand your holistic understanding uh speaking of which another aspect is study many perspectives you want as many perspectives as possible because that will just expand your holism and also it'll expand your appreciation for diversity of perspectives don't get stuck in a single perspective also very importantly deconstruct the materialist and mechanical paradigm that's straight jacketing your holistic thinking ability study systems thinking check out my episode intro to systems thinking also start to consider externalities and collateral damage that's very important read holistic thinkers spiral dynamics stage yellow and above people people like ken wilbur first off capra david baume einstein buckminster fuller and many many others you can find many of those on my book list and then there's still many beyond that you can find them on youtube and elsewhere step outside of your survival concerns we've already addressed that to some degree another way is to study your own self biases which i discuss in my episode called self bias and also my other episode called introspection you can use introspection to do that develop a long time horizon look for top down and bottom up and also sideways causal forces eliminate judging and criticizing as much as possible nothing will hurt your holistic thinking ability more than judging judging and criticizing and lastly adopt can wilbur's attitude of everyone is right can wilbur sort of popularized this idea the the the driving force behind his work of integral theory and integrating all this understanding he has some brilliant work is that he sort of started off looking at the world seeing that there's all these different people with all these different ideas and perspectives and paradigms and worldviews religious ones secular ones and everything in between and how do we know who's right and he had an intuition that told him everyone must be right in partial ways of course in different degrees so we're not saying that the nazi is as right as the civil rights leader but we're saying that there's value in every perspective something you can learn from every perspective and that even in a certain sense the nazi is right in a certain twisted way and it's valuable for you to study what that is and how that works and through this paradigm you can integrate stuff together and that is the most holistic way to approach this epistemic problem of a sort of an infinite multiplicity of perspectives that all disagree with each other all right now here are some questions to help you think holistically these are very powerful questions you can ask in in many situations in business in relationships and your personal life write some of these down and start using them so firstly how are x and y interconnected x and y can be any two things how are they interconnected for example how is my consumption of food interconnected with the health of the planet or how is my doing my marketing interconnected with the mental health of my children and at first the connection might not be obvious but as you think about ask this question it'll interconnect another question is what is the big picture here this one helps you to zoom out and to see the hole rather than getting lost in the details another good question is what is the larger context of this sometimes you hear something you have a teacher tells you something or you hear something in a video somewhere like a little snippet or something and you get so wrapped up in that you don't see the larger context what was what was that teacher or what is this book really trying to say what is this statement really trying to say see the larger context another question is what is the ultimate point of all this and by all this i mean whatever you're working on like you might be in a project sitting in a in a meeting with a bunch of people you guys have been talking for an hour and then you stand up and say wait a minute guys we're bickering back and forth talking about all sorts of bunch of [ __ ] what is the ultimate point of this meeting what are we trying to do or you might even say what is the ultimate point of our business why are we even here this clarifies a lot of things another question is why am i doing this at all it's a great one a lot of people don't ask this question like you might be in a in a toxic relationship and at some point you just ask yourself why am i doing this at all or you might be in some dead end job and you just want well ask yourself why am i doing this at all or maybe your boss or your business is is you know manufacturing some poison pill and you might just ask yourself why am i doing this at all another good question is how is this a part of something larger whatever you're doing how is it a part of something larger and what is that larger thing and a related question is how does this part serve the larger hole and you might discover that it doesn't in which case you're in trouble you got to change what you're doing also how is this part of a duality so you might be thinking about sexuality from the male perspective and you get so wrapped up in that because you're male let's say you forget the other half of the story and then you might ask yourself well how is this part of a duality and then you realize oh yeah women have their own reproductive concerns and so forth and they might be different and the two interconnect somehow and you might ask yourself further how will this duality collapse and unite how will this thing circle back around on itself how will this invert how will this boomerang another question to ask is what is best for the health of the whole what is the hot what is the highest good for the whole for example it would be nice if some of our top ceos ask this question more like i would i would like to ask i would like to have like the ceo of exxon mobil asked this question what is best for the health of the whole and by whole i don't mean his company and by whole i don't mean his shareholders another question is how should the parts be rebalanced for the good of the whole that's another question i want some of our business leaders to ask another question is which parts are out of balance leeching selflessly from the hole another question is how is this fragmented so enter any situation a company a classroom a book that you're reading a relationship that you're in and you can ask yourself how is this fragmented and how can it be unified and healed another question is how am i drawing the boundary of the system because you see a lot of unholism comes from the fact that we draw our boundaries too narrowly and too selfishly to serve our own interests leaving a lot outside the boundary of our concern and so in any situation you go into you can ask you know who is drawing the boundary how are they drawing the boundary why are they drawing the boundary the way they are of course the answer is that they're selfish they're drawing the boundary to their selfish interests but then you can ask the further question of well how can i redraw the boundary to expand the boundary you can also ask how am i involved in the situation you can ask as of any topic like when it comes to the destruction of the rain forest you can ask yourself how am i involved in the situation because usually we say well the rain forest i don't live in the rain forest so i'm not involved or like how am i involved in overfishing i don't fish for sturgeon i don't eat caviar so i'm not involved with the killing of the sturgeon and their extinction but you are in some way you are i guarantee it but you have to sit down and think about it and this question will help you to do that because a lot of times what the ego loves to do is to avoid responsibility for all sorts of things and to say well that's not my problem i didn't do it directly yeah but the whole thing is that reality is not always direct it's a lot of times indirect we're not just talking about the direct here the indirect is sometimes as important as the direct another question is how would god see this situation what would jesus do in other words how would god see the situation so for example if god was managing exxonmobil how would he manage it but for this to work you have to understand what god is so let me quickly tell you just a loose idea so at least you can start to use this question so god's thinking about a thing is unbiased selfless unattached fearless benevolent all-loving all-understanding non-judgmental self-accepting and seeking exquisite balance for the good of all that's the ultimate highest holism that's what god is that's god consciousness so this is this is the this is the kind of thinking that led to the creation of the entire universe that's why it works so well without hitch so now apply that perspective to any situation you're in that's very powerful extremely powerful is so powerful because this is the power that created the entire universe so just don't dismiss this question and lastly how can i better serve the greatest whole if you just align your life with that question you're going to ace life not easy to do but anyways so those are some of the questions for you now uh we're starting to get close to the to the end let me wrap up here with a few warnings so warning number one is that remember studying the whole in order to manipulate it for personal gain is not holism for [ __ ] sake you might say like oh okay leo taught me holism and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go and study the stock market or the crypto market or the business market i'm going to study the hell out of it and then i'm going to find a loophole that i can exploit and then i'm going to get rich and that's holism no that's not holism that's devilry that's evil see you're exploiting a system for your personal benefit that's everything that i don't that i teach against right see this is the problem with someone like trump so so uh you know sometimes people say trump is a brilliant systems thinker because he can uh you know he knows how to manipulate the media and he knows how to get his base riled up and voting for him he knows how to get them activated and motivated and all this he's a genius yeah he's a genius devil that's what he is but he's not thinking holistically about anything and he's not thinking systemically because if you were truly holistic you would realize that to use your understanding of holism for the purpose of manipulating the whole for your personal selfish gain is extremely unholistic and unhealthy and toxic and cancerous and evil that is the definition of evil you can't separate holism from selflessness they're utterly entangled now here's one more warning which is a little tricky watch out this is a trap that many of you will fall into so far the way that i've been presenting this holism idea is as though we have reductionism on this side and holism on this side and that reductionism is bad holism is good so adopt holism throw away reductionism judge it and condemn it and now just be holistic and only think about holes and that's it this is holism as the polar opposite of reductionism if you think this way you're actually not being truly holistic because there's really two versions of holism see if you can grasp this it's a little bit subtle but also it's pretty easy to understand so let's define the following distinction make this distinction in your mind there is holism with a lowercase h and there's holism with an uppercase h what's the difference the difference is that the little h holism is the polar opposite of reductionism creating a new duality which of course is unholistic so it's when you put it's when you act and try to be holistic but you're still not fully holistic because you have created duality between you and reductionism you haven't really you've drawn your boundary that still excludes some stuff whereas true holism with you know absolute holism with an ab capital h we'll call that absolute holism absolute holism is so holistic that it even incorporates reductionism into it and it incorporates and integrates the unholistic people and things that's going on everywhere so when you're operating under the lower case age holism you will see unholistic people everywhere and you will judge them and demonize them and criticize them and hate them and that's not very holistic if you're practicing uppercase h absolute holism you will see all those and you realize ah those are just people with low consciousness who don't know any better they haven't learned about holism and maybe some of them can be redeemed and in the end all those people are just action aspects of myself god as the whole universe and all of it is just love and when you take that approach can you see that that is the highest holism your holism is so high that it even integrates evil huh the lower case h holism still thinks that there is a good which is holism and then there is a bad which is the opposite of holism but that's can you see how that's limited if your goal was to truly be holistic actually not as an ideology or anything like that you would have to incorporate all of the evil and all the stuff you don't like and all the unholistic stuff you can't just say well i'm gonna be holistic and [ __ ] everybody else they can do whatever they want and if they're unholistic then they're bad and they're wrong and they're evil if you say that you're not truly being holistic so be careful making that mistake being holistic in an absolute sense is one of the most difficult things you can do because you can see how threatening it is to the ego you have to surrender so much to be able to accept all that evil and all that lack of holism in the world because you know what when you just because you decide to be holistic does not mean people are going to start to be nice to you you might be holistic but people will try to rob you scam you hurt you attack you maybe even kill you enslave you exploit you and you have to be so holistic that you realize oh yeah all of that is just an aspect of myself of the universe is just different manifestations of love at various densities and if you could do that then you would truly be holistic can you see now the ultimate form of holism isn't thinking at all we've been talking about thinking here a lot but there's only so far you can go with thinking the ultimate form of holism is pure infinite consciousness holism is actually a function of consciousness your state of consciousness determines how holistic you are more than anything that you think it's still important to increase your thinking ability but uh once you've done that and you're ready for more then you gotta go trans thinking trans-rational you cannot think your way to the highest holism which is why maybe some of the stuff i'm saying here sounds kind of kooky new agey and not rational or maybe it doesn't make practical sense to you like when i tell you that all the you know evil people are out there who are exploiting you they are just expressions of love you probably don't many of you probably don't uh understand why i say that that's because to understand that you have to go beyond just thinking about it to actual infinite consciousness change your state so the changing of your state of consciousness is actually the highest level you can pull to become more holistic which is why i said psychedelics are one of the best ways to do it because psychedelics are the most effective way hands down of radically altering your state of consciousness but there are other ways it's not just psychedelics but yeah that's one of the most remarkable things about about psychedelics is just how holistic they feel when you take them right i mean if you've taken psychedelics you know what i'm talking about it feels so holistic even if you've just done them recreationally like you took some mdma at a at a nightclub at a rave at a music festival um maybe you didn't really realize much but probably the one thing you did realize is uh is the holism of it all that's very powerful keep doing more of that although i don't recommend doing a lot of mdma it's not very healthy for you there's healthier psychedelics so in conclusion a fragmented mind creates a fragmented world to heal the world we must unify our minds if we don't unify our minds there's no way the world can heal i hope that's obvious to you and then the only question is do you want to heal the world do you want to take responsibility for that or are you just going to say that's not my problem i don't care every problem has both holistic and unholistic solutions so here you have to be careful because a lot of times you face a problem in your life personally or collectively and you're looking for a solution but sometimes you're so desperate you just want a solution you'll take any solution and you'll forget that there are different kinds of solutions there's not just one solution there are unholistic solutions and holistic solutions and so you have to be very careful here not to get suckered into unholistic solutions for example if you're broke and you got to pay your bills an unholistic solution might be go to go rob a bank or another unholistic solution might be to go you know take a course on wall street day trading and become a wall street day trader and to think that well oh this will solve my problems no you're just kicking the can down the road your problems will keep multiplying chances are you'll lose all your money anyways whatever little you have left and you'll be even broker than you are right now that's the reality of unholistic solutions or maybe you're feeling uh heartbroken after a intimate relationship collapsed of yours so you go you know you're looking for a solution to your misery and you go and you shoot up some heroin well that would be a very unholistic solution a holistic solution for example in the case of you know if you're broke you might get serious about starting a business and you might start researching that not a get-rich-quick scheme but a serious actual business where you generate value and work hard at it that would be a holistic solution if you're feeling bad after a you know a big breakup rather than splurging on a bucket of ice cream or some heroin you a more holistic solution might be something like you take a week off you do a solo retreat maybe treat yourself a little bit maybe maybe you can even afford to buy a plane ticket to hawaii just go there and just kind of bask in your misery while you're walking around the beach and looking at beautiful stuff and just you know contemplate why your relationship went wrong and what you're going to do next time and and just kind of make it a little bit meditative like that that might be a holistic way to go about that and what you should know is that if you encounter a problem in your life that you feel is impossible to solve most likely it's because simply because your approach to that problem was not holistic enough and this is a beautiful thing if you realize this because this gives can give you so much optimism and hope in your life like if you have a health problem if you have a business problem if a financial problem if you have a drug addiction problem alcohol problem overeating problem problem getting laid getting a date a problem meditating a problem with depression or your emotions a problem with your insecurity and low self-esteem and you've been trying to solve that problem the problem is that you've been trying to solve it within a certain narrow paradigm an unholistic approach you've been taking so if you really want to solve that problem you gotta ask yourself sort of a meta question here it's like hmm you know goddammit i've been trying to build this business for the last five years i keep failing and failing and failing i'm still stuck in wage slavery i don't know what to do is it just the universe is my am i cursed is this just am i is this just how it's supposed to be no ask the meta question how is my thinking not sufficiently holistic enough to crack this problem that's powerful and then you might realize something like wait a minute yeah i've been trying to work hard at this business but i've been working hard but i didn't study how business works enough maybe i got to go buy books or maybe what i really need you know i read a bunch of books already and they didn't work maybe what i really need is i need to find a mentor face to face he can point out my problems to me so maybe you go find a mentor or maybe you say like um the reason my business wasn't working was because the business i was working on i wasn't fully passionate about i didn't care about it as much therefore i wasn't motivated enough and then maybe you go take my life purpose course and then you find your life purpose and then maybe that helps you whatever whatever or maybe you know i've been trying to build this business but i was too focused on building the product but i wasn't focused enough on marketing maybe i could go study marketing so you go study marketing and that will be the key that unlocks that that problem very powerful so can you see that division fragmentation and reductionism is not bad it's only bad in the relative sense because if you're truly holistic nothing is bad everything is good and everything you think is bad is just a bias that you have that you need to let go of see good is equivalent to holism so if you want the highest good seek the highest holism and you'll find it and lastly just remember this he or she who is most holistic wins the game of life all right that's it i'm done here i'm very exhausted um that was challenging to do because i feel light-headed from this fast but anyways we got through it so there's proof for you that the brain can even work with when it's running low on glucose and i think this this episode is actually pretty good maybe even one of my clear ones in a certain sense i have i have very good mental clarity and i'm very calm and grounded from this fast but also like i feel very weak and lethargic and just like almost like i'm about to faint at any moment so it's this very odd place to be um and it's not particularly pleasant i'm looking forward to get some food in another week but okay this is it i'm done here please click that like button for me come check out actualize.org that's my website you'll find my blog with a bunch of videos i will post about my fast on the blog soon you can check that out it'll be a valuable video for many of you um actually quite important i post i post a lot of important stuff on my blog exclusive stuff you can only find it there it's free i don't charge you anything for it i could i could charge you hundreds of dollars for it i print out for free so don't be stupid and don't ignore that and what else is there the book list the life purpose course the forum come ask questions on the forum i answer so much stuff on the forum um other people there answer and provide good good answers as well participate join a community that helps you to stick with this actualization journey and the last thing is that i have a book recommendation for you but it's only for those of you who have purchased the book list so if you purchase the book list which is very cheap and affordable um go into the book list and look for a book use the search function control f search for david baume on that book list i think i have two books by david bowman one of them is called implicator not that one there's another one find that one and read it and study it deeply because it's all about this problem of a lack of holistic thinking and why holistic thinking is so important that book it's a it's a killer book in combination with this entire holistic thinking episode and if you haven't bought my book list and you haven't started reading the books on my book list you're really missing out and in fact this is what i'll end on is that look my videos are pretty deep and long and it makes you think that oh well i've watched so many of leo's deep videos and long videos that surely this is enough theory surely i don't need to read any books you do and i don't care how many other youtubers you watch or how many podcasts you listen to none of that is a substitute for reading books there's something you get from books that you can't get from any audio or visual source you must read these books there's detail in there that will interconnect many of the concepts and really my videos are just half of the equation the other half of the equation is to read all the books on my book list so to really start to do this self-actualizing stuff this business seriously you got to watch a lot of my videos you also got to watch a lot of other videos that are not mine that are talking about other stuff that i don't talk about and you got to read at least 100 books at least 100 books make the goal over the next five years to read 100 books from my book list this is one of the best things you'll ever do in your life it's one of the best investments in your life it's not expensive it'll cost you virtually nothing other than your time and effort yes it will take a bit of time quite a bit of time but but man this is gonna this is gonna help you understand so much stuff there's just there's just so much detail to these topics that we're talking about that you can't i can't possibly deliver it all to you as much as i try even through these long ass two three hour videos and these multiple episodes series it just can't happen so go read the [ __ ] books and then stay tuned for more you