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[Music] welcome back to the ultimate guide to dealing with fear part 2 make sure you go watch part 1 where we laid a lot of foundation otherwise let's crack right into it firstly I want you to recognize that without fear you'd be dead you wouldn't be alive right now without it so appreciate that because it's easy to follow to the sort of trap of thing that fear is bad and fear is evil you start to demonize fear and you start to try to reject fear but really you have to appreciate that fear is there to serve you to help you to be here right now you couldn't be here to pursue awakening or spirituality without fear fear is necessary for base survival and everything else is predicated upon base survival you being alive all of your spiritual pursuits they couldn't work otherwise but of course there's also a way of living life beyond fear so what we're interested with our work here with actualised is we're interested in not just base survival for that you don't need to watch videos you can just go and do base survival there's people all over the world doing base survival you don't need to be educated on how to do it you can go grab a gun you can go rob people you can go manipulate people you know whatever you got to do to survive but but here of course with our work we're interested in going beyond basic survival so this is where things get interesting also I want you to recognize not to follow this trap of blaming other people for being afraid of things as you go through life you will encounter many people who are afraid of many different things some of these things you'll think are silly and ridiculous even you know how could that person be afraid of that it doesn't make sense to you but recognize that this is all relative what you're afraid of is relative to what you identify with and also relative to how you were raised what part of the world you're living in what kind of environment you're in what kind of situation you're dealing with what kind of upbringing you had what kind of parents you had so based on all these factors than many more and based on your genetics and on your personality and on a million other factors yeah people can believe in some silly things and the reason that is is because there's no such thing as like a legitimate fear versus an illegitimate fear it's relative it all depends and what I want you to notice furthermore is that whatever you fear is generally completely irrelevant to somebody else notice that for example what's the greatest thing that you might fear in your life if you're a parent that's probably the death of your child make sense but also notice that I don't fear the death of your child at all likewise you probably don't fear the death of someone else's child at all you don't even think about it yet when it comes to your child you're so concerned about it it keeps you up at night it terrifies you have nightmares over it how can this be well of course precisely because the very nature of fear is to be completely self biased go check out my episode about self bias where I talk about that in great length but see this is how selfishness operates it's not interested in what's true because if if the fear of your child's death was actually true in some deep sense then everyone would fear the death of your child but nobody does except you how can that be because the fear is completely relative to what you identify with see notice that it might seem like this is sort of obvious stuff it might seem like well like so what Lea who yeah of course I fear my child's death but other people don't so what not so what this is a very important fact about your fear it tells you something that about your fear thee that you don't recognize which is that your fear is basically imaginary you're projecting that onto the situation its relative speaking of of ridiculous and relative fears there's a funny story I remember when I was a kid I was maybe 10 years old and my grandmother who passed away since then I mean now she's passed away but but back then this was like maybe 20 years ago even maybe 25 years ago she would come and visit us and she would stay at her house and a couple of times this happened and when I was a kid I had this I had this favorite rubber snake toy that I got like at school somewhere I forgot where I got it it was a very lifelike snake but still sort of cartoony it wasn't too lifelike you could tell it was obviously not you know you'd never confuse it with a real snake but it had this really cool like rubber material that it was made of so it was very lifelike when you wiggled it around again in a sort of a cartoony way I guess it was almost an over exaggerated version of a snake and some some reason I was playing with this thing I discovered that my grandmother was just deathly afraid of these snakes she had it like a terrible phobia over it and whenever she saw this rubber snake that I was playing with she would just freak the [ __ ] out if she was in the same room with that thing I found this so amusing and of course it you know I couldn't understand how anyone could be afraid of this thing because I to me it was a toy and of course this goes to show the relative nature of fear but she was so afraid of it that I would love my favorite thing was to play this gag on her would I would I would sneak this snake into like her bed or into the toilet or other places in the house where I knew she would be and she would kind of like find it there and when she found it she would just start screaming and just like hitting it with a pillow like she would freak out like it's a real snake and I just found this to be so ridiculously amusing this was like my greatest amusement was was tricking her with that snake because it didn't make sense to me how anyone could be afraid of this damn snake is obviously a toy and yes she was having this these real reactions to it which again just goes to show you their whole relative nature of this and how much your imagination plays into whatever you fear now of course if we go back into her childhood and her upbringing maybe she had like a bad encounter with a snake I don't really know I never asked her what the deal was but maybe you know maybe she saw real snakes and maybe a snake bit her or whatever that made her so fearful of them so let's sort of get to the really fundamental core of what fear is about let's go even deeper than we went in part one existentially what is it that you ultimately fear I don't just mean a particular fear you have but I mean fear in general when you're fearing anything what does it all ultimately boil down to ultimately it all boils down to fear of yourself oddly enough that's very counterintuitive you might wonder well why would I fear myself and after all Leo if I'm if I'm fearing something like a snake or if I'm fearing somebody killing my child or whatever how is that fear of myself this doesn't make sense except it does once you have a proper understanding of what a self is and what you as the self ultimately are see the problem is right now you have a very limited identity a very limited notion of what a self is so if you take yourself to be this physical human creature sitting here then yeah in this sense it doesn't make sense how you could fear yourself but what I'm talking about is the self with a capital S I'm talking about the ultimate awakened enlightened self your true self what is that that is the entire universe you are consciousness manifesting itself as the entire universe not just this physical body everything including inanimate objects and other people animals planets stars everything and way beyond that way more beyond that and of course if you take this very expanded infinite sense of self your largest identity then that thing that thing includes everything that you hate and that you fear all the stuff you don't like about reality all the evil stuff it includes the murder and the rape and the theft and the genocide and the terrorism and the war and the environmental destruction and the the the violence and the carelessness and the way that people treat each other in such bad ways the manipulation the scheming the various power hierarchies giant corporations religions cults closed-mindedness all of that evil [ __ ] that you don't like about the world that you're afraid of and that you want to keep at an arm's length away from you that all of that is yourself now of course that's still not all of yourself that's just a little part of yourself you're much much bigger than all of that but that's what your ultimate ly terrified of sea consciousness is terrified of itself because what consciousness is is it's infinite it's everything it's unlimited which means it's the good it's the bad it's the beautiful and it's the ugly it's all dualities it's everything you can imagine and much much more and since in the end the highest truth is oneness or non duality that means that nothing exists but you the self is the only thing that exists you do this work long enough you become conscious enough you realise that but there's nothing in this universe but you because you're the entire universe and so due to this all fear ultimately boils down to self fear what you fear is your own scope your own infinite scope terrifies you and that's the whole challenge of life existentially speaking is that you're born and you start to identify as this little creature this weak fragile little human creature this baby this child and you're growing up and then you're still identifying with that then even as an adult you're still identifying with that and you're stuck with this very limited identification and you're terrified of all the stuff around you you might be scared of the dark you might be scared of snakes you might be pretty scared of airplanes but as you grow more and more and more through life you you know your childhood fears you outgrow them you're no longer scared of the dark the way you used to be maybe you outgrow your phobia of snakes maybe you get over your fear of airplanes maybe you get over your fear of being poor you get over your fear of the opposite sex you get over your fear of marriage you get over your fear of children having children and all of this and this you're growing you're experiencing more of life and you're you're coming to accept more and more of it until you reach a point where you realize it's not just that you're becoming less fearful it's that what's actually happening that entire time is that your entity is expanding and expanding and expanding and you're accepting more and more and more of reality as it actually is rather than denying it or resisting it or rejecting it or judging it or hating it you're embracing more and more of it until finally you realize that what you really are is you are infinity itself the infinite universe itself you are all of the stuff that you hated and were afraid of and at this point what happens is that the distinction between self and other disappears and you merge back into the entire universe the limited becomes unlimited but that process of the limited moving towards the unlimited and finally breaking through and accepting it and merging into it that entire process that is what we call life that's what's happening to all people and then the only question is how smoothly does that process work for you are you resisting it and are you being like a stubborn mule as life is pushing you towards realizing your full infinite self but you're resisting it and holding on to areas ideologies or you're denying it in some way because you're scared see it's very scary to recognize what you are and so ultimately what's happening here in life is that God is becoming aware of itself you are becoming more and more aware that you are God and that you created this entire universe and you are being forced by the truth to accept your true nature which is the infinite universe which includes all that ugly stuff that was threatening to you when you were younger and so you need to be very strong and courageous in order to be able to accept what you really are whereas most people are in denial about what they really are they don't want to accept their God it's too much of a responsibility it's too threatening it's too scary to their limited little identity and so for most people what they do what they have is they have a very fixed sense of other theirs like myself and then there's the other out there and you know myself doesn't just include my body but includes my family my tribe my nation my religious identity my culture and all that and then everything that's not that is other and then that's what's being defended and so fear arises precisely because that sense of other has been created but see to realize that you are God means that you have to shed this notion or sense of other and that's what life is all about how you define self versus other and this we're told that this is a physical thing but there's a physical boundary between myself and then the other but of course this is purely an imaginary boundary and that's the thing that freaks you out to discover this is why when people take psychedelics and that boundary between self and other is dissolved it scares them it scares a [ __ ] out of them they think they're going crazy too they think they're losing their mind they're thinking they're having some sort of psychotic break you're not having a psychotic break actually your psychosis is thinking that there is a difference between you and other that's the psychosis the truth is that there is no such difference but that's very scary so as it turns out fear of self is identical to fear of other is identical to fear of reality is identical to fear of God it's identical to fear of consciousness is identical to fear of truth and it's identical to fear of love because all those things ultimately are identical and that's what you really fear you fear the enormity of what you are because what you are is so epic and so enormous that it's difficult for consciousness to accept itself going from the very limited form to the totally unlimited form so ultimately how do you transcend fear by expanding your sense of self and that's what this work ultimately boils down to that's all we're doing throughout all these videos is we're trying to expand your sense of self and as you do that you should fear less and less until finally you reach a point where the difference between self and other completely collapses and when this happens all feel all fear will disappear but that's a very radical state of consciousness to get to most people will never experience this in their life so of course in practice they have a lot of fear God is the total absence of fear it's total self-acceptance it's the total absence of other in other words God is identical to oneness infinite love to truth to selflessness to freedom to consciousness to immortality and to liberation and to peace that's what God is its consciousness which has totally accepted itself while you're in human form while you're in the ego mind you are consciousness which has not fully accepted itself its consciousness which isn't conscious of what consciousness is whereas God is consciousness which is infinitely conscious of what consciousness is that's the only difference so right now you are God but you don't know that you're God you're not conscious that you're God you're not conscious that you're designing your entire body and that you're dreaming up this entire scene that you're sitting in this entire room is something you're dreaming up right now it's something you're hallucinating but you don't experience it as such you're not conscious enough to experience that nor are you conscious enough to realize that you are me talking to you there's no leo here you invented me your mind is inventing me right now and it's inventing all these words and so really you're just talking to yourself and it's this that you're afraid of realizing at a very very deep level and you can realize it at ever deeper levels the deeper you go the more fear you will shed and then until ultimately you will reach a state where you will be totally fearless because you will have completely transcended any kind of limited identity so if you're wondering is it possible to be totally fearless the answer is yes but not in your current state of consciousness it requires a radically expanded non-dual state of consciousness it requires a deep awakening more than one multiple deep awakenings and then even then even after that it requires a lot of follow-up work because when we're talking about being totally fearless we're not just talking about having an awakening we're also talking about rewiring your entire mind all the habits from birth you know decades of habits this is this is very challenging to do even after our own awakening most people will still experience fear because your mind has not been rewired now begins the process of emotional mastery which which is even harder than awakening so in practice realistically the only people who will ever transcend fear entirely are hardcore mystics like Jesus or Buddha and even in their case I don't know how much they totally transcended fear it's hard to know personally I've been in states of consciousness that had no fear in them whatsoever there was no fear of death there was no fear of pain there was no fear of suffering all the worst stuff that you think would be natural for a human to fear it was completely gone but that's not a state of consciousness that's easily sustained the thing here though is to not get stuck on being a perfectionist you might hear me saying this you might say well leo then then it won't be you make it sound like I'm never gonna achieve this this is something super rare well first of all it is super rare how often do you find a totally fearless person almost never so of course it has to be super rare and as far as you not achieving it you probably never will but that's not important because what's more important is not to reach some sort of Jesus Christ level of consciousness but simply to improve your situation and your situation can be improved a lot when it comes to fear right so even though you might never reach a point in your life where you're totally fearless it's okay you can still improve a lot and that will reduce a lot of suffering in your life make your life a lot better mmm make your survival a lot easier a lot smoother so that's what we're really talking about here I don't want you to get caught on this trap of perfectionism the reason that it's unrealistic for the average person to transcend fear is simply because as long as you think that you have something important to lose in life you will be afraid basically if you want to be fearless what you have to do is you have to completely surrender your whole life everything you have to surrender every single desire every single attachment that you have you have to stop caring about the about whether you live or die if the stop caring about whether your children live or die you have to completely detach from everything and the average person simply isn't willing to do that nor are they willing to put in the decades of practice that are necessary to actually rewire themselves to reach that point it's an extremely radical decision to make in your life and then to actually do it it takes a very special kind of character the average person is not going to do this even the average person who watches me and listens to me is not going to ever do this it's too much to ask for but nevertheless it's good to put this out there so that you understand that it is a possibility so you know don't let me limit you if you're really serious about becoming a Buddha or a Christ you can do it but you're gonna have to devote your whole life to it and realize that the cost it's not something that you're gonna be able to do while maintaining your old life as it was this is gonna be a complete transformation of your whole life you're choosing to to willfully surrender your whole life are you interested in that see probably not I'm just laying it out in realistic terms for you so that you're not kidding yourself because a lot of people to get into this awakening work and then they think oh well I'm gonna become this this Jesus or this Buddha figure I'm gonna be fearless and I'm gonna be invincible and immortal well are you willing to sacrifice for that are you willing to make the ultimate sacrifice which is stop caring about whether you're alive or not that's what it's gonna take so you know it's very radical understand that it's radical also this explains why it's so rare why most people think it's impossible it's not impossible it just seems impossible because it's so radical that so few people do it that for the average person it might as well be impossible because they're so attached to life as they've lived it to the way that they were raised to their friends their family to their religion to their culture to their science to their beliefs to their ideas they're so attached to this stuff that it's it's a it's a joke to even talk about fearlessness with these people these people will always be afraid because they always have something that their claim to that they're afraid of losing you might wonder well Leo what about you do you ever experience fear or are you totally fearless now and of course the answer is yes I experienced fear I experienced plenty of fear but then you might wonder well Leo then doesn't that make you a hypocrite and how do you really know that it's even possible to transcend fear if you haven't even done it yourself well first of all recognize that I'm still in the early stages at this work I'm working on myself all the time I'm doing various practices and so I have a lot more room for growth I've not maxed out by any means but secondly I've been in states of consciousness where I have transcended all fear and I have seen through fear as an illusion all fear is ultimately untrue in the absolute sense so that's how I know that it's possible but I don't live from that level of consciousness 24/7 I'd have a lot more work to do to achieve that so I'm nowhere near that but of course again it's not about being perfect it's not so much about living from that state of conscious it's just about improving your situation I'm a lot less fearful of life than I was ten years ago or five years ago and that's really the most important thing and this is where this stuff gets practical right for most people becoming a Buddha or not practical but becoming a lot less fearful in your business in your relationship in your career and so forth that's very practical and we're gonna talk about that in this episode coming up here recognize their many degrees of fear right you know some people are so afraid they're afraid to leave their house some people are so afraid they're afraid to look another human in the eyes some people are so afraid that they don't even like approach a stranger and ask them for help or they don't even talk with their neighbors because they're afraid of social situations or they're afraid of approaching some woman that they that they see at the grocery store that they are attracted to but they're too afraid to approach her and just start a conversation you know there's this sort of basic stuff this this we can really work on or like you're afraid to go off and start your business or start working on that life purpose of yours this is stuff that we can work on and this is very practical and this will improve your life a lot you should also distinguish here between overcoming specific fears versus transcending fear as a whole these are really different pursuits because you have many unique specific fears hopefully did that homework assignment from part one and you've identified and you're more familiar with the various fears that you have and you can tackle fears individual like maybe have a fear of snakes or a fear of airplanes or a fear of going broke you can work on each of those individually but no matter how many of those you squash you will still not transcend fear as a general dynamic in your life because to transcend that requires doing very deep existential work having various awakenings but nevertheless it can still be useful to work on specific fears that are holding you back in life like maybe you have some fear within your marriage or within your relationship that's ruining your relationship and by fixing that you can make your marriage or your relationship work much better that's great but recognize that you're sort of in a sinking ship and you're plugging one hole at a time and new holes are being created every minute so that you're playing a game and you're never really gonna win so long as you're doing that you're still basically stuck in the loop of survival by squashing one fear at a time most people will go through life and they will resolve certain specific fears they've had and you're probably like this they're probably fears that you had 10 years ago that you don't have anymore and now you think about them you look back at the situation and you laughing like all its it's funny it's it's crazy that I used to fear this thing which now I no longer fear you can probably think of some of those but notice that your life is still dominated by fear you have hundreds of micro fears every day and then you have still many macro fears and this will keep happening and in fact what I'm saying is that no matter how many fears you squash there will still be more fears for you to squash because the problem is that you're not tackling the root of the problem you see you're dealing with specific fears finite fears but the problem is that reality is infinite so there's gonna be an infinite number of stuff for you to fear so by coping or resolving each one individually you know like maybe you fear airplanes so you fix that okay now you fear snakes so you fix that but then you fear aliens and you know may humans encounter aliens let's say in the next thousand years and so you fear aliens let's say you fix that well then there's another species of aliens how many speeches of aliens are there that could threaten humanity probably millions of them given how many stars and galaxies there are in the universe and then maybe there are universes beyond that so I mean like you're always gonna have something you're afraid of you see so this is a never ending game unless you go to the root and you completely surrender your life and then then there's a chance that you can you can kind of grasp infinity as a whole and surrender to infinity as a whole and then at that point well there's the possibility of eliminating all of these fears in one fell swoop but of course it's not really gonna be in one fell swoop you're gonna do decades of work to get there and you're gonna surrender your whole life is fear a thought you might wonder obviously thought contributes to fear but are they the same thing and the answer is no I want you to notice through mindfulness work that fear is a feeling you feel it in your body it's a distinctive feeling it's distinct from anger it's distinct from happiness it's distinct from sexual arousal it's distinct from frustration it's fear that's what that word refers to a feeling in your body so the best way that you can get a sense for what fear is is to feel it in your body now of course thoughts contribute to that feeling when that feeling arises is determined by what you're thinking and how much you're thinking it and what kind of mental imagery you're conjuring up in your mind but ultimately those thoughts create that feeling now of course that feeling can also then create thoughts of its own which kind of creates a vicious circle but fear is a feeling so recognize that and try to distinguish it from other feelings this takes mindfulness practice and this is important to practice this because a lot of people will confuse anger with fear as though they're the same thing and so they're the one type of feeling they're not but you got to go inside and feel yourself in those different situations to distinguish those two another common question that comes up here with regards to fear is as follows is there truth behind fear or is all fear inaccurate perception what about situations where my fear is justified what if a situation is actually legitimately dangerous then isn't it legitimate that I fear it here's where it's important to distinguish between absolute truth and relative truths so in the absolute sense all fear is false and it's inaccurate perception but in the relative sense fear can be a valuable indicator of something that's going to be harmful or dangerous to whatever you identify with being so in that sense yes you can be justified to fear certain things and in certain other fears could be unjustified we might say for example if you're an American is it a justified fear to fear that America is gonna be invaded by some foreign country like Iran or Iraq or North Korea no because America has by far the largest military force of like the top ten other countries combined more than Russia China Brazil and India and Pakistan all combined the US has more firepower so the chances of America getting invaded are very small so this fear would be a rather irrational fear but now if you lived in North Korea is there al is it a justified fear to fear that North Korea would be invaded by a foreign country yes of course because North Korea is completely overpowered by China by South Korea and the u.s. relationship there's various kinds of powerful alliances that are aligned against North Korea so there's a there's a reasonable chance that North Korea might get bombed in the next 50 years by some American backed coalition so from North Korea's point of view that's a legitimate fear they have to be concerned about that see so it is important to make these kinds of relativistic distinctions but in the ultimate sense if we're talking about existentially speaking spiritually speaking even when a fear is justified so to say so to speak it's still ultimately untruthful because it's relative to your survival yes if you live in North Korea and you're let's say a dictator in North Korea yes if you want to if you want to maintain your dictatorship if you want to maintain your life relative to that identity that you have that you cling to yes then you should be very afraid of Americans and South Koreans and maybe the Chinese and so forth but but if you give that up then you shouldn't be afraid see now the problem though is of course nobody is willing to give up their life nobody is willing to give up their comfy little position no dictator is willing to leave his dictatorship of his own free will and oftentimes he can't because he'll be killed so in the situation to even entertain the idea of giving all this up is is a non-starter for most people unless they're interested in spiritual work in which case then it becomes a serious possibility and it's not just a joke another question that comes up is isn't it dangerous to eliminate fear if we eliminate all fear what will keep us alive well here's where it's really radical here's where you got to bite the bullet understand that when we're talking about eliminating all fear if you successfully eliminate all fear what this means is that you no longer care whether your life literally you no longer care if you still care you haven't eliminated all fear so as long as you're attached to life you will fear so even to ask this question like will Leo but what's going to keep me alive if I get rid of fear the answer is nothing and you have to accept that answer and you have to say okay well fine then I'm fine with that if you're still saying no that's terrible well Leo then I'm not gonna eliminate all fear because I want to stay alive if you think that way then you're gonna be afraid for the rest of your life you haven't understood how deep this goes you're too afraid of surrendering your life you see so of course you're not wanting to accept the the radical things that I'm saying here but there's there's a second little element here and even a third one which will kind of take the edge off so I'm not saying you have to literally physically die in order to eliminate this fear I'm saying you have to be willing to now to be willing to to surrender to the idea that you will die is different than actually dying you see so you can surrender to the idea of it without necessarily having to shoot yourself in the head for example and so this other element here is the thing that's going to keep you from danger if you get rid of fear is consciousness and awareness and wisdom these turn out to actually be more effective at safeguarding you than fear and that's what people overlook a lot of people think that well if I get rid of my fear then nothing's gonna protect me well that's because you've been living your whole life using this very crude way of surviving a very crude motivation called fear and it is work to some extent but it can only get you so far if you want to go beyond that if you really want to get good at survival actually what you need is not fear but consciousness and wisdom because it's more effective in the long run and so if you're wondering like well if some enlightened master like Jesus or Buddha if if he's eliminated all fear then how does he stay alive to a ripe old age well not Jesus of course but let's say Buddha Buddha lived supposedly into his 70s or 80s how did he do that well because of consciousness and wisdom you don't need to be terrified of a thing in order to avoid it you can just recognize that well that's like a dangerous object and I should steer clear of that thing I shouldn't stick my hand in a fire not because I'm terrified - not because it's gonna produce a bunch of pain but simply because I recognize that if I stick my hand in that fire then I'm gonna have a problem on my hands I'm gonna have to go to a hospital I'm gonna have to pay money to get my hand fixed I'm not gonna maybe it may be I lose my hand and I won't be as effective at doing the stuff that I need to do so it doesn't fit with my plans for the future of my life and through this consciousness and wisdom you can avoid sticking your hand in the fire you see it's more like a positive motivation than a negative motivation and it's much better to live your life from a positive motivation another thing that will keep you from harm is caution healthy caution and here we need to now make the distinction between fear and caution fear remember I said is a feeling in your body it's the feeling of being afraid caution is just the recognition the consciousness that something might be dangerous or harmful to you so it's the following difference I can be terrified of bears for example versus I can be cautious of bears when I'm walking through the forest you see the difference there if I was walking through the force and I was fearful of bears that means I would actually have the feeling in my body I would be tensing up out anxious I would have be having images of bears chasing me and biting me and killing me this would be legitimate fear whereas if I was cautious let's say for example I went hiking or camping for a week out in the wilderness in the bush in Alaska where there are lots of bears and I brought a gun with me because I was conscious and wise you know I read the books I read this and I read the newspapers I know that there's plenty of bears in Alaska so of course I bring a gun with me just in case just spook them off let's say if I see one in the woods he's coming at me at least I could fire the thing in the air maybe not even at him but just in the air just to to make some loud sound and spook him off and then in the last case resort I would shoot him in the face if he came close enough okay well see in this case I bring the gun not because I have a like a crippling fear in my chest but because preemptively I kind of thought about the situation I recognize the potential dangers that are involved here and I want to be able to survive this camping encounter I want to come back home after a week right I don't want to die there so I make a conscious decision that y'all bring some firepower with me that's the difference between fear and caution see I can be cautious without feeling fear caution is about anticipating likely obstacles and threats another example for you is using a condom you can put on a condom as a guide out of caution you don't need to be feeling fear in your heart or in your belly right before sex and then that's the thing that gets you to put on the condom you don't need that in fact most people I think when they put on a condom they're not deathly afraid they put on the condom as just a precaution because they know how this process works they know the danger of pregnancy and all this and so they just put it on contrast that now with somebody who didn't use a condom and then the morning-after you know they're terrified oh oh you know what happens if I got her pregnant and then now you're actually afraid now you actually experience the fear in your chest and your belly you're actually worried you're having images of this pregnancy that you maybe don't want and all these problems that comes with that all the hassles of it see that's the difference between caution and fear for example when I started actualised org I sat down and identified what are the various problems that I could encounter with my business that could derail my business and one of the things I came up with was that you know what if my computers were broken my hard drives crashed and I lost all my data because you know my business is very data driven all my videos are stored all my notes and all this stuff so a lot of important stuff is stored on hard drives so I identified that as a potential obstacle and threat and then I you know I wasn't afraid of this in some crippling sense I wasn't having nightmares over this I wasn't like feeling it deep in my belly I just identified it rationally as a as a serious potential obstacles you know computers crash hard drives crash sometimes that are stolen sometimes there's a fire or something so what I did is I just I installed a special backup system like a backup unit which sucks the data from my main hard drives into the backup hard drives so I installed that you know I paid a couple thousand dollars for it I need a lot of hard drive space to back stuff up it's not in the cloud it's my own system I had to engineer that thing I had to figure out how it all works had to set it all up so that it works how to test it and make sure that it's reliable so yeah that took some investment and it took some time and energy and all that and now I have that system so see this is a good example of caution versus fear you know speaking of fear and and bears in the woods actually one time I wanted to go tripping on LSD in the woods with my girlfriend at the time ex-girlfriend now and so we went on this road trip to a big national park and this was a giant national park there was lots of forest lots of mountains high up in the mountains and so we drove around this thing and we found a good spot where we could try we wanted to do it like a nice trip throughout the the afternoon and so we found this nice little spot high up in the mountains those very secluded there was no people there it was like a little pond a little lake and there was a big forest and mountains there and all that and so I was cautious though because I knew that you know if I was tripping with her and I was in the middle of a deep trip you know this place has bears in it so I planned it out and I thought about like we're gonna do it like this we're gonna sort of set up old picnic area by the pond and we're gonna be rather close to the car in case we need to be and she's gonna get a full dose of LSD but I'm only gonna trip on like a quarter of a dose because I want to have my wits about me just in case there are bears so that I can I can have like some some sense and so that I could be capable in that situation be able to manage that situation and so that's what we did and we tripped all day long I only took a little a little minor dose so I still had my wits about me she took a big dose she had a great trip and throughout that time at moments I was a little bit scared that maybe the bear will hopeful creep up on us or something like that and and nothing like that happened and it was great and then at the very end of that day it was started the Sun is starting to set and our trip was almost over we were both coming down it was great it was beautiful and we just went and started to hike around we went up to on this little hill and we just kind of hiked up there and we were just talking and kind of walking and just getting ready to go back home and then we hear footsteps heavy footsteps in the bushes right in front of us and we both pause and we just kind of like look at each other like did you just hear that or am i tripping and she looked at me and I looked at her and we were just like we were transfixed and then the footsteps they keep getting closer and louder and this is like some big footsteps this is a big animal we don't see any animal we just see like and rustling in the bushes and it's coming closer to us and I'll tell you like at that point I was I was truly terrified like that was real fear that's real fear right there because I knew this was not good she was also quite terrified and we were still both a little bit on the LSD but this was definitely not some mere hallucination and then what I started to do I grabbed him I had a hiking stick I grabbed the hiking stick and I started to like hit a tree really loud and started to yell him to scream just to make a lot of noise and then we kind of like listened for the footsteps and they stopped for a while and then about thirty seconds later they continued and they're coming closer and closer to us and we were just so we're so terrified at that point that we just we just hauled all ass off that off that hill and we ran back and quickly grabbed all our picnic gear and all that stuff and we just ran back to the car and we made it out of there we never saw the bear but my guess is that it was probably a small prep small black bear probably not a grizzly bear a small black bear we never saw it but it was definitely there and if we stay don't stick around it probably would have come at us so you know that just sort of illustrates to you the difference between how fear and caution works so you have to be careful here so when we're talking about being fearless don't get the idea that you should be reckless and that you shouldn't take seriously certain relative obstacles when you're living life when you're trying to survive and that is what you're doing most of the time there are relative obstacles to your life that you need to watch out for sometimes it comes in the form of a bear sometimes it comes in the form of of a person that you need to be careful of because he's a dangerous person but you shouldn't be associated with or am I come in the form of a business danger that comes down the road for your business yeah you got to take some of these seriously as long as you care about your business as long as you care about your relationships as long as you care about your life relative to that so just realize that it's relative to that it's not absolutely true it's relatively an obstacle to that attachment that you have and that's okay cuz you're still gonna have many of these attachments most likely for a long time to come all right let's move on to some more questions but Leo doesn't God want us to fear him otherwise what would prevent us from sinning absolutely not any religion or spiritual teaching based on fear is a corruption is a falsehood is a delusion is ego is devilry God does not want you to fear him God loves you no matter how much you sin you might wonder well Leo why would God love me if I sin because God is conscious that it's you see unlike you who thinks that you are separate from God and that God is something other than you God knows that it's you so how can God judge you if God is you anything sinful that you do is God doing it and God is too conscious to judge or hate to hate itself so it can't hate you God accepts your sins as its own perfection so it's really you who is judging you for your sins not God you're projecting your own judgment of your sins onto God because you think God would judge you and the reason you think God would judge you is because you you've painted God to be a devil like you are a devil judges but God is not a devil so God doesn't judge now you might wonder but why do so many religions teach fear if God is all love because most major religions are corrupt there are about power they're not about truth they're not about love because of projection because the people who are running these major religions are themselves not conscious of what God is so instead what they're doing is they're just acting out from their ego from their ideas of what God is and their ideas God is just some bearded man in the clouds who looks down upon you and judges you this is a very childish simplistic and false notion of God it's a projection so the people who teach the organized major religions are themselves Devils and egos and they project their own devilry and ego and fear onto God they project their own judgment onto God so if some Christian evangelical preacher is afraid of homosexuality and thinks that it's evil and bad he judges he hates it he then projects his own hatred and fear of homosexuality onto God and then he teaches you that God hates homosexuals of course nothing could be further from the truth because God is homosexuals God loves homosexuals but you know good luck convincing the preacher of this and the reason the preacher can't understand this is simply because he's not conscious enough to know what God is he's not speaking from direct experience of God he's just speaking from the dogma and the ideology that he's picked up when he was a kid and now he's just preaching that so he knows not what he preaches he doesn't actually understand the true teachings of Christ because if he did he would never portray God as a judger or a hater or someone who punishes you for your sins because this is completely the opposite of what God is this is a bastardization of God this is actually a demonization of God and the reason the religions teach fear is because these religions have been watered down for egos for simple folk these major religions they basically understood that serious enlightenment is unattainable for the masses and so what we need to do is we just need to lead to water down the teachings of enlightened masters to ordinary folks but the teachings of enlightened masters are so radical the truth and love is so radical God is so radical that how do you teach it how do you teach you to close minded people how do you teach it to egotistical people how do you teach God to devils by turning God into a devil that's the only way that Devils will accept God is if they start to treat God as a devil and that's exactly what Muslims do Christians do Hindus do they've turned God into a devil because they themselves are Devils they have to turn God into something bring it down to their to their own level you see that's the that's the twisted irony of how religion works now when it comes to science you might think well scientific method surely is above fear but the answer is no it's not science fears many things contrary to this kind of silly naive notion of science as being this hyper rational objective activity it's not science is highly subjective and it's it's permeated by fear fear of what what do scientists fear they fear mysticism they fear magic they fear the paranormal they fear God they fear falsehood they fear losing credibility they fear psychedelics they fear idealism they fear relativity they fear subjectivity they fear emotions they fear irrationality these are all common fears that scientifically-minded people have now of course they will deny these fears they will try to couch these fears in rationalism as though it's like well leo but it's rational to not want these things I don't fear God it's just that God doesn't exist Leo I don't fear the paranormal is just the paranormal is [ __ ] but actually that's fear masquerading as rationality see here you have to be very careful about how your own mind tricks you into rationalizing your fears as something that's objective and factual and true when actually it's it's more emotional than factual it's more subjective than objective that's what scientists are largely in denial about they're afraid to admit of the subjective underpinnings of science a scientist you have to remember is committed to the survival of science that's his identity so you better believe that anything that threatens that identity he's going to fear and be defensive about and gonna be in denial about and that's exactly what corrupt science so the same stuff that corrupts religion also that those same dynamics corrupt science just in a different way you see in all of these cases what's happening is that and unlimited identity is being constructed whether a religious one or a scientific one and then whatever you construct and you identify with that's the thing that you're gonna be defending and the thing that you're gonna be scared to lose hmm now let's get to the heart of this episode which is remember I promised you in part one that I would give you the top ten tools for overcoming fear so let's do that right now in fact I'm gonna give you two extra ones that I've brainstormed since then so it's gonna be twelve twelve methods for dealing with fear method number one is to face the fear head-on to bite the bullet and to just do it do the thing you fear it's very straightforward it's not any kind of trick it doesn't really make the process any easier see the problem is that when you ask me for techniques really what you're asking me you're not really asking for a technique only you're asking for some way to make the process easier for you so when I tell you that you just have to bite the bullet and face the fear head-on you don't like that idea you want some way to escape the fear Leo give me a technique where I don't have to experience the fear or I don't have to face it well sorry but the whole problem with fear is that if you're avoiding the fear because you're afraid that just deepens your fear it makes the situation worse see so like if you're afraid of leaving your house because you have that kind of phobia and you don't feel safe outside what do you got to do in that situation do you need to look for some sort of chemical pill that you take that makes it easy for you or do you have to read some sort of complicated book about what to do no you know what to do what you have to do is you have to push yourself out of your house do the very thing that you've been avoiding that you've been procrastinating and just by doing that that brings immediate relief so it's simple but this is really the most effective method in a certain sense if you're afraid of the dark what do you got to do you got to go be in the dark it's just that simple number two method number two put yourself proactively to challenging situations what can happen in life often is that we get very comfortable we get into a certain groove we find our niche and we get comfortable in that situation to the point where we get lazy we get complacent we just get comfortable in our job we get comfortable situation even if it's very dysfunctional we still get comfortable in it and we don't proactively push our comfort zone so with this technique number two you're being bold on purpose you're sort of adopting this as a life strategy the way that you're making choices in your life you're making choices which are a little bit bold which are a little bit scary which are pushing you out of what you've been used to doing so for example you make the decision to quit your job and to start a new business that's a bold decision that most people would not make because they were just rationalize themselves well I can just stay in this job after all I just paid me a good paycheck after all does have nice medical benefits after all I am sort of reasonably happy here it's not so bad it could be worse you know with that kind of logic you're never gonna leave your job you're never gonna start your new business whereas if you're adopting the strategy of being a little bit more bold and putting yourself into challenging situations then you would recognize that wait a minute if I stay at this job even if it's kind of comfortable I'm gonna fall into a rut I'm gonna get lazy and complacent I should push myself just because I'm too comfortable here I should just push myself to quit this job and to start something new try something new by starting this new business I'm going to experience new challenges that's gonna require more of me as the human it's gonna require me to grow it's gonna require me to face various other fears that I have and to overcome those and overall that's gonna make me develop more self-esteem it's gonna build confidence in myself and this eventually will make me less fearful in life overall that's a very good strategy in fact I did that 10 years ago when I became an entrepreneur and I started my first business I did exactly that I quit a reasonably good job that was paying good money that I was comfortable in that I could have stayed in for another decade but I knew I just knew I had this intuitive feeling that I need to push myself and to be bold and I did that and that was one of the best decisions I ever made and in that process I overcame a lot of various fears that I would not have been able to overcome had I just stayed in my old job and I could have still been there 10 years later another example of this might be to commit to a relationship that you're afraid to commit to a lot of guys have this problem where they don't want to commit to it to a serious relationship that's a fear be bold push your comfort zone come into this relationship try to see how far you can take it and if it blows up if it if if it goes wrong well so so what accept that bite that bullet and just go into it see what happens conversely maybe you have the other problem maybe this is often a problem that females have is maybe you need to be bold by breaking a dysfunctional relationship maybe right now you're comfortable in some dysfunctional relationship that's providing you with some of the benefits of being in a relationship but ultimately you know that this can't last it's not the right guy for you but you're afraid to break it my suggestion here if you're following this method number two is push yourself be bold have the courage to leave this guy have the courage to to go it alone for a while have the courage to raise your standards have the courage to find a new guy another example of being bold might be if you're a guy and you're at the grocery store and you see some cute girl they are at the produce department you're attracted to her normally what would you do you wouldn't approach her you're too scared so in this method number two you would push yourself and you tell yourself well now that I'm scared I have to do it it's precisely because I'm uncomfortable that I have to do this let me push my comfort zone let me go over there and talk to her just to see what happens let's just see what happens if she rejects me well oh well she'll reject me if she thinks I'm stupid and ugly and that's what will happen let me just put myself out there let me see what happens and you'll do that and that will grow you and that won't let make you less scared overall such that the next time it happens it'll be a little bit easier and if you do it again the next time it happens it'll be a little bit easier and in this way you can erode a lot of your fear of approaching women other examples might include asking your boss for a raise be bold push your salary see how much you can get or pursuing your life purpose or your dream or moving to a new country be bold move to a new country like for example I have a friend who lived in Austin Texas and last year he really sort of just got too comfortable and too fed up and he just wanted something totally new he had a very nice software engineering job in Austin he basically had a nice life there but he pushed himself to move to Columbia and he just quit his job got up and left and moved to a totally new country and lived in Columbia for six months and last time I talked to him he loved it there see that was a bold bold move how many of you would make a bold move like that you see and as he did that of course he overcame various kinds of fears he grew himself he challenged himself and in this way traveling around the world living in different places this is a very good way to grow yourself and you can come up with many many other examples of how to be bold in your life so just be more bold but of course there's a fine line between being bold and being reckless so be bold but not in a stupid way where you're going off and doing dangerous things that could get you into trouble or that you might regret so make sure you make that distinction okay method number three for overcoming fear is training lots of training this is really the point of training this is how people get really good at whatever music singing speaking lawyering doctoring competing boxing playing tennis playing golf how do they get good at it through training and what is training training is nothing other than massive experience over and over again at a thing massive exposure to a thing so if you're afraid of something consider the possibility - the only reason you're afraid of it is simply because you haven't been exposed to it enough for example if you're afraid of sex it's probably because you have had a lot of sex you have very little experience or training in sex if you're afraid of talking to strangers it's probably because you've talked to very little strangers in your life we could probably count on one hand how many strangers you've started conversations with by yourself in your life if that's the case for you of course you're gonna be afraid of talking with strangers so what's the solution there it's not some elaborate metaphysical enlightenment technique it's just simply expose yourself go talk to a hundred strangers I can almost guarantee you that by the time you initiate a conversations with strangers you will no longer be afraid of strangers if you're afraid of of approaching and and chatting up beautiful women what's the solution there is it to meditate more no the solution there is to go talk chat up with a thousand beautiful women expose yourself to beautiful women have interactions with them and then by your thousandth one you're gonna be so exposed to it that it's gonna be impossible to be afraid at that point or your fear will just be very minimized if you're fearful if you're afraid of flying on airplanes what's the solution there go fly on a hundred airplanes now of course that cost a lot of money but you know over your life you fly a lot the more you fly the more comfortable you become with airplanes if you're afraid of public speaking what's the solution to that go join Toastmasters give twenty speeches as Toastmasters by the time you give twenty speeches you're gonna be quite comfortable in front of a small crowd just simply through training and exposure but also I want to point out a little nuance here is that often times exposure alone is not enough the real key to overcoming fear is exposure plus mindfulness so you're not just exposing yourself to something you're exposing yourself to something mindfully consciously see so the difference here is like let's say let's use the example of public speaking and I think in fact fear of public speaking through surveys it's been found that it's one of those common fears that people have so this is a great example so how would you actually practically tackle this fear in your life you would join Toastmasters it's an organization that you can go to they're located all around the world they have different chapters it costs very little money you you join that little group you go there and every week once a week you meet almost like Alcoholics Anonymous and you give a speech people take turns giving speeches small speech just five minutes ten minutes long and as you give your speech there's like five or ten people sitting there listening to you giving you feedback it's a very supportive kind of atmosphere they're not judgmental they don't criticize you they they give you pointers so as you do that though you aren't gonna be afraid the first time you stood up step up even in front of ten people in a small room where everybody is supporting you you're still gonna be afraid you're gonna be afraid of miss speaking you're gonna be afraid of forgetting your speech and looking stupid and so forth so as you stand up there and you're about to give your speech the extra little twist that I would act that is do that but feel that fear feel into the fear as you're about to speak in the middle of your speech feel into the fear feel it in your body where is it located get get comfortable with that fear feeling and continue with your speech and if you do that 10 20 times you will probably make a significant dent in your fear of public speaking technique number four is rigorous mindfulness practice this is something that I explained in my episode called mindfulness meditation go search for it so with this method and this is one of the most powerful methods for addressing fear over all not just one specific fear but just fear in general at the existential level what you do is that you closely observe fear inside your body as it's happening and you practice feeling very deeply into the fear and not just fear but just all sensations and all bodily feelings whatsoever so it's not necessary that you're feeling fear right now in order to practice mindfulness you can just start to practice mindfulness every single day using your ordinary body sensations so right right now we do practice it feel the soles of your feet right now you feel that put your attention on that for a moment just feel what that's like and now shift your attention to the feeling of your palms don't move your palms just keep where they are and feel how your palms feel and now shift that attention to your face and feel how the front of your face feels and now shift your attention to your ears and feel how the ears on your head feel see that's it that's really all that this practice is but you're doing it consistently you're setting up a chunk of time 20 minutes 30 minutes 60 minutes a day to do this rigorous practice and this will help you enormous ly with overcoming fear over all the long-term in your life as you practice this then you'll be able to feel fear more when you're actually in a fearful situation and you're gonna be mindful in that situation rather than just reactive and specifically what I want you to notice is that when the feeling of fear comes up for you that feeling itself of fear is the key sort of feeling which is going to be resisted so what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to be mindful enough to notice when that feeling of resistance to the ickiness of the fear is coming up and to feel into that resistance and to let go resisting such that you allow yourself to actually experience the fear see the problem is that most people when we get afraid it's not that just we just get afraid we get afraid but then that that fear feeling is kind of so picky that we want to escape from it as quickly as possible and with this mindfulness practice what you're gonna do is actually you're gonna linger in that fear you're gonna let that icky sensation you're gonna allow it to permeate your body and you're not gonna resist it and you're not gonna try to manipulate your way out of it or to escape it you're just gonna marry in it and through this process you're gonna gradually expose yourself to that icky feeling of fear you're gonna become more comfortable with it and then over time what this will do is make you less reactive to it and ultimately if you do this practice enough seriously enough you can completely nullify that fear and become so comfortable with it that it no longer affects you in the way that it affects normal people the fifth technique is to be totally present just totally present so when fear comes up for you next time if you're able to be totally present which of course probably requires you have some meditation skills and abilities that you've been practicing then what you can do is you can notice that your mind in order to be fearful what it's doing is its jumping into the future and it's projecting images of bad stuff that's gonna be happening in the future and what you can if you can if you can manage to stop that by bringing your mind and grounding it in the present moment of just sitting here right now and not thinking about tomorrow not thinking about what's gonna happen with your child not thinking about what's going to happen with your relationship not thinking about what's gonna happen with your business but just cutting that chain of thought off and bring yourself right into the present moment and realizing that there's nothing to fear about the present moment that's a powerful technique the problem though is that in practice most of you won't be able to do this unless you've had a couple of years of meditation practice because your mind will just be too active and it will jump into the future way too much and you won't be able to be in the present so this is one of the reasons why we meditate is to be able to put ourselves in the present when were then in a fearful situation or an angry situation or whatever just by grounding yourself in the present moment this can eliminate Nega emotions but it takes some practice to get there now you might wonder like well leo but what if the present moment contains some dangerous thing what if there's a bear in the room right now and you're telling me to be present but if I'm present the bear will get me shouldn't I be like running away well first of all recognize that most of the time probably 99% of the time this isn't the case 99% of the time when you fear something you're not actually fearing something present what you're doing is you're you're fearing the future in fact technically speaking this is true 100% of the time which means that even if there is a bear in the room right now if you're afraid of this bear the reason you're afraid of this bear is not because there is a bear in the room presently you're afraid of the spare because your mind is creating images of what this bear will do to you in five seconds and that is an important distinction those five seconds of future is not the present so technically if there's a bear in the room and you're afraid of that bear it's because you're living in the future now of course this is this is sort of a more dangerous situation we're apt to recognize that there is a physical danger if there's a bear in the room but again this is where we have to go kind of very existential and metaphysical and absolute and we have to say that ultimately remember if you want to transcend all fear you have to be able to transcend fear even in actually dangerous situation it can't be like well yeah surely oh I can meditate and be fearless when there's no danger but then as soon as there's a real danger then I can no longer apply those techniques no actually what you have to do is you have to apply those techniques even more and you have to surrender the desire for life so in this situation to be totally fearless in this situation with this bear in this room you have to actually accept that this bear might kill you now of course that's hard to do of course you don't want to do that that's the last thing you want to do because you're so preoccupied with your survival I understand that but then again this is an episode about how to conquer fear so what do you want do you want me to tell you how to conquer fear or not see we can put you in more and more challenging situations and that will be a test of how developed you are how conscious you are most people even if they do meditate if we put them into a room with a bear they're gonna be afraid that's just a reality of it because that's how serious survival is and that's how difficult this emotional mastery is basically I'm trying to convince you that it's very difficult to totally eliminate your fear I'm trying to show you that fear is a very relentless and pervasive force in your life and that it dominates your behavior and it dominates your mind and of course that's true and this bear example shows it very poignant Lee but the mistake that people make is they think that well if the Bears in the room then there's no way that I could possibly transcend that fear and what I'm telling you is that yes there is a way but it requires you to make a very radical mmm admission to yourself which is that your desire for life itself is really mmm rather subjective and partial and untruthful and something that you could let go of with sufficient practice and consciousness okay technique number six for dealing with fear is psychedelics in fact I would say that psychedelics are one of the most practical and powerful tools for dealing with fear because psychedelics put you face-to-face with death and psychedelics erase all of your dualities and all of your boundaries between self and other so they sort of force you into confronting existential fear in a way that I don't know any other technique that would do this so poignant Lee so this has been demonstrated it's not just my opinion this has been demonstrated by clinical and scientific studies on psychedelics psychedelics are now recognized by more and more scientific studies to help with PTSD to help with end-of-life fears for people who are experiencing terminal illnesses like terminal cancer it's helping them to cope with that why is that precisely because with PTSD it's a fear problem and with with terminal cancer it's a fear problem as a fear of death in the case of terminal cancer and psychedelics are very effective for this and personally in my own life I'll tell you this I don't think any any one technique has helped me the most in facing my own fears more than psychedelics I don't think psychedelics can be your only tool here so don't think that you can ignore all the other techniques and just do psychedelics but psychedelics are a very very powerful tool especially because they'll they'll get you at the existential aspect of fear that otherwise most people are just not conscious enough you really need that change in consciousness which the psychedelic offers to be able to start to understand some of the more radical existential metaphysical aspects of this fear conversation that we've been having over these two episodes some of the stuff that I've said here like this distinction between self and other and how that contributes to fear or some of the stuff that I said about being able to transcend all fear or some of the stuff that I've said about how fear relates to love these are existential aspects that you will really only be able to fully appreciate on some psychedelics technique number seven is Kriya yoga I highly recommend this form of yoga what it does it rewires your whole mind and your whole nervous system obviously I can't go into how to practice that yoga here it's quite technical and involved we have a mega threat on my forum in the spirituality sub forum where there's a mega threat where we discuss Kriya yoga and various ways that you can learn in various books I also have books available on my book list I have three or four books that explain Kriya yoga beautifully and how to do it so you can start to do your own practice I also have an episode called the importance of yoga search for that one and there I talked about some of the importance of yoga and what it can do for you in your life by Kriya yoga I don't mean physical yoga I mean meditative yoga so that's that then we have technique number eight which is contemplation using a journal I also have an episode about that how to contemplate using a journal go check that episode out but specifically what you be doing here is you'd be contemplating your various specific macro and micro fears you would be contemplating what this fear is and why it's arising for you where it came from why are you really afraid of it what function is it serving in your life how is it connecting back to your identity to your ego to your self-image this sort of contemplative work is very good and it helps to use a journal to to keep you grounded on track I will give you a warning here though is that contemplation alone is not going to be enough to conquer your fear it's an important step I would even say it's necessary to contemplate your macro fears and micro fears but just contemplating them is not going to be enough fear is too powerful to allow you to just contemplate your way out of it you can't just reason your way out of fear that's sort of the whole point fear is prior to reasoning but still reasoning about it can help method number nine is the Sedona Method or the letting go technique I have an episode called the power of letting go where I explain this technique in some detail and I give you a lot of examples as simple as this technique is don't underestimate how powerful it is I think this is one of the most powerful techniques for dealing with fear in your everyday life all this technique requires is that you feel the fear identify the fear and then just literally let it go in the present moment and you keep doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that every single day for years on end and this will completely transform your relationship to fear and other emotions but specifically we're talking about fear here so this is such a powerful method like for example if you're doing pickup and you're going to bars and clubs and you're talking to girls and you know you're getting that approach anxiety right before you go approach a girl so try try the letting go technique like right before you're about to approach a girl feel that fear and then just let it go and then go do the approach and just keep doing that doing that doing that over and over and over again and you'll see it makes a big difference or for example let's say you have creative anxiety you're an artist or you're a musician and every morning you know you get to work you sit down at your computer or whatever at your workstation and but you have this creative anxiety what do you do feel into that creative anxiety and then use that method that I taught you in the power of letting go episode and just let it go and keep doing that over and over and over again every single day until you have a significant change it's gonna take a lot of work to do it but eventually you'll be able to use this technique to let it go and then you'll get so good at this letting go technique that of course you'll use it not just for fear and not just in this one specific situation but you'll be able to expand this technique out it's gonna become a universal technique which you can use for fear of public speaking for fear in the workplace fear in your relationship fear of mmm bad stuff happening to your family etc you'll expand it out and then of course you'll also expand it out beyond fear to include anger and other negative emotions that you have technique number 10 is breathing breathing consciously slowly and deeply as you feel your fear so this technique is nice and that it can dovetail with some of the other techniques that we've mentioned above so for example let's go with that example of you're getting up in front of a group of people to deliver your public speech at Toastmasters let's say you feel into that fear you feel it but normally what would happen is that your body would lock up and you would not typically breathe consciously so here you're gonna remember to consciously breathe just like that and you might even close your eyes and you might literally do that right as you're standing up there right about to deliver your speech everybody is looking at you and normally you know you would be sort of put on the spot by all those eyes staring at you expecting you to speak but here what you would do is you would pause and you would just give yourself the time to just to do that in right in front of your audience let them see it do that and then as you do that also relax your body notice the various tension held in your arms and your legs and so forth that's a very powerful technique and you can practice that of course not just when you're public speaking you could practice it in your car when you're going to work let's say you have an important meeting with your boss and you're anxious about it just practice that when you're in your car at the at the red light waiting for the turn green that will help you and for more about becoming mindful of your body see my episode called body awareness where I talk about being more conscious of your body that's a that's a very powerful method very simple but very powerful and effective because fear is physiological it's a physiological response it's something your body is doing you have to become much more mindful about the tension in your stomach muscles that holds a lot of fear various tension in your arms and your hands what you do with your fingers your palms how they sweat because you hold them like this when you're afraid or what you're doing with your legs that's it's a great great method combine it with the other ones that I mentioned above just from having done that exercise right now already my body feels a little bit more at ease than it was my mind is a little bit slower I'm talking a little bit slow or it's kind of calmed me down it's kind of grounded me so just training yourself to do slow and conscious breathing when you're talking with people when you're talking with clients when you're at school right before a test very great stuff technique number 11 for dealing with fear is visualization and Law of Attraction so one way to deal with fear is to simply crowd it out of your mind with positivity overwhelm the fear with a positive vision so let's say right now you're having a difficulty paying the bills you're a tough spot in your life you need money you're scared you're worried you don't know where you're gonna get a job where the money's gonna come from how you're gonna make ends meet so one option you have is to keep going down that negative spiral you can keep visualizing it you can keep telling yourself how bad it is and how horrible it is and how no one's gonna hire you and how all this job interview that you went to they're probably not gonna call you back and etc and of course this would just create a negative spiral and you will just fear more and then out of this fear you will make bad decisions the other possibility is that you catch yourself and you stop yourself and you recognize that wait a minute yes my situation right now isn't good I need to figure out how to fix this but also worrying about it here and having all this negative imagery is not going to work let me come up with a positive vision let me start to visualize how I'm gonna I'm gonna get a job and it's not just gonna be a bad job it's gonna be a great job and this job is gonna have great great prospects for the future and maybe two years from now I can visualize myself you know living in a nice apartment and being able to pay all my bills ahead of time and not having to suffer through this ever again in my life having a lot of money in my bank account I can visualize myself having a nice car and I can visualize myself mmm-hmm buying the stuff that I want to buy and being able to afford it and so if you do this kind of visualization consistently this is a very good way of just crowding out your mind because your mind is only thinking of one thing at a time if you're thinking of negative stuff that's what you're thinking about negative stuff and you're feeling negative if you're thinking about positive stuff you're feeling positive you can't hold a negative and a positive thought or feeling in your head or in your body at the same time so the trick though with visualization and I do have a video old video about visualization go check that out it explains how to do the technique is that you got to do it daily a little bit of it goes a long way but you have to do it daily so you don't need to visualize for an hour you can just visualize for five or ten minutes on whatever thing you fear so for example if you fear approaching beautiful women visualize yourself for five minutes before you go out approaching beautiful women and then it goes great and that they love you and they are responsive and they give you dates and all the stuff that you want visualize that and you'll notice that helps if you're afraid of talking to your boss about getting a raise what do you do sit down and visualize for a week before you go talk to your boss every single day for five or ten minutes just visualize yourself talking to your boss and he listens to you he's receptive and he gives you a raise and then the whole situation works well visualize that now of course you're gonna wonder well Leo but what happens if I do visualize that and then I do go to my boss and it goes terribly haven't I just been fooling myself with these positive visions you haven't been fooling yourself you've been programming yourself see using these visualization techniques does not mean that your life will always go however you want that's not the point of it the point of it is that you're increasing your chances and you're also making yourself feel good while you do this so rather than spending a week worrying about how your boss is gonna reject you instead you spend a week visualizing how he's gonna actually like your proposal and maybe will give you a higher position and a higher salary now is there a chance that he won't yes but dwelling on that chance and worrying about that chance that he will reject you um that's not gonna help you that's gonna make you feel like a victim in fact if you think that way you probably will be too afraid to even ever go talk to him but if you program yourself for a week with positivity then you'll have more confidence they'll have more pep in your step when you go in there you'll have a bigger smile you have a more positive expectation you might even have some ideas throughout that week of what kind of things you should say to him that will that will work as you're visualizing you know in that visualization process you're gonna ideas will come to you positive ideas empowering ideas will come to you and then you can use those to create the kind of situation that you want so in this way you're being a proactive creator of your life rather than just sitting back and letting life happen to you and that's empowering and that's a great way to combat fear takes a bit of work though most of these methods take a bit of work which is why most people don't do them most people are just lazy and complacent and they just want to be fearless automatically well you know I guess what doesn't happen that way in life if you want to be fearless you don't have to work for it and the final method number 12 is love love is you might say the polar opposite of fear love is the ultimate solution to fear whatever situation in life that you're in where you're scared the most counterintuitive you can move you can make at that point is to practice and experience love in that situation but that's a rather tricky topic in fact I'm gonna have a separate episode in the future about how to do this so I'm just throwing this out there for you now is a bit of a teaser because there's a lot to say about how love and fear inter relate and we've still only scratched the surface of this topic here but a few ideas about love here so you can start to practice it a bit is first of all gratitude be grateful and more appreciative of life and all of the opportunities and situations that you find yourself in this is a form of love gratitude is a form of love and the more loving and conscious you become the more grateful you're become you're gonna become about just your ordinary everyday life the people in your life the situation that you're in even your financial situation you know you can be grateful for it when you're feeling gratitude in your heart there is no room at the same time for fear so you could have a gratitude practice where you spend five or ten minutes every morning just being grateful going through the things that you're grateful for in your life and actually feeling it in your heart that's one way another way to practice love is through selfless service so when you're feeling most afraid do something selfless for another person at your job through your business through your life purpose work or just help somebody help somebody in your family help a friend because see the whole problem with fear is that it's selfishness incarnated what's the solution to selfishness selflessness this is why having a powerful life purpose is so effective for grounding your life because your life purpose is the selfless service that you're doing for the world and that ultimately is coming out of love selfless service is not done as an obligation I'm not telling you to go work at a soup kitchen because you have to I'm saying find some way in your own life where your your work what you're doing with your work and with your time is contributing to the betterment of mankind in a way that you find meaningful and that you believe in and that is your expression of love for mankind and for yourself and for the universe and if you want a really detailed explanation of how all that works well for that you have to go check out my ultimate life purpose course where we have over 25 hours of explanation of videos of how to do all that by the way I should I should mention here I don't I don't I don't really upsell my life purpose course enough I think most people underestimate this all the content in my life purpose course it's about 25 hours of video all of that content is totally unique brand new content that you've never seen on the main channel or in the free material totally new content new ideas new concepts that I've never talked about so when you pay something to me for my word when you buy a course for me understand that you're always gonna get new content it's not gonna be just I'll rehash of the same old stuff I've talked about it's gonna be deliberate stuff that I've reserved for that course so that you're getting your money's worth and anyone who's paid the 250 bucks for this course and has gone through all of it you get your money's worth you see you feel how much work was put into that course a lot of work was put into that course way more than anyone puts into a Twitter $50 course and that course will pay for itself a hundred times a thousand times over throughout the rest of your life if you take it seriously and you do it seriously so go check that out anyways those are the 12 techniques that I know of that I think are the most effective for dealing with fear now let's move on to a sort of a different subtopic here which is the following notice that knowing somebody's fear allows you to predict their behavior if you really want to understand why people do the things they do whether as individuals or collectively study their fears what do they fear and get inside their mind and try to figure it out and if you can figure that out that gives you enormous power now of course power can be used for good or for evil so in this case if you know somebody's fears you can predict their behavior this allows you to help them or this allows you to manipulate them and to exploit them now of course I don't recommend going the second route as an example of this I bring up Latimer Putin again the President of Russia mm-hmm so there was a new story about a year or two ago where mm-hmm Putin had a meeting with Angela Merkel of the Chancellor of Germany and apparently it's well known about Angela Merkel that she has a fear of dogs because I don't know why it is but I think she was like bitten by a dog when she was young and so now everyone knows she has a fear of dogs and Putin in this meeting deliberately brought his like aggressive looking dog with him to the meeting because of course when he was trying to do as he was trying to exploit and manipulate this fear that she had of dogs now this is a textbook definition of devilry so I don't recommend you do that and the reason I don't recommend you do this is because when you manipulate people's fears to meet your own survival needs what this does is it creates bad karma devilry always creates bad karma devilry comes back to bite you in the ass it's going to create suffering for you if you act in a way that you're trying to manipulate people's fears all the time so I don't recommend that you go down this road in fact I recommend that you do the opposite I recommend that you seek to alleviate other people's fears get into the habit of assessing others people's fears for example you can do this exercise sit down with a piece of paper and ask yourself brainstorm what does your mother fear what does your father fear what does your spouse fear what does your boss fear what does your company fear what does your client or your patient fear what do scientists fear what do Christians fear what do Muslims fear what do spiritual people fear what do a theists fear and so on and so on in fact I'll have a worksheet for you that you can go and click the link down below this video to download this worksheet which has a bunch of questions it's like an exercise that you go through and you contemplate all these different possible fears that people have and what this does is it helps you to step into their shoes and look at the world from their point of view and as you do that that helps to explain in your own mind why these people behave the way they behave why they believe what they believe why they hold the ideologies they hold and then in this way you can become really good at understanding other people you can learn to communicate with others in a powerful and effective way by thinking through their fears and then coming up with solutions to their fears and then communicating the solutions to their fears in this way you can become a powerful leader you can develop a powerful business in the end what is business business is figuring out what is the fear of your client or what is something that people fear in the world and then coming up with a solution to that and that requires being able to see the world from their point of view like you might ask the question what do most parents fear and one of the answers you might get is like well they fear their child getting kidnapped okay and then you can ask yourself the next question well if I wanted to start a business for parents to give them solutions to parents I could just take like the top five fears of parents and develop technologies or solutions for that so if the top fear of parents is that their child will get kidnapped or maybe the top the second top fear is that their child will get shot up in school because of these school shootings we keep having what kind of technology could I develop some gadget or some website or whatever to help with that and if I can help with a good solution then I know it's gonna resonate with those people because people are motivated by their fears now again of course you can you can do this in a positive way you could do this in a negative way you can start a business that exploits people's fears like for example you can start a business you might ask yourself well like what do conservatives fear in America well they fear brown people so I can cope with a business that you know fear mongers - conservatives that brown people are invading America and then I can sell them more guns well that would also be a business but again remember like I said when you're playing up to people's fears and your fear-mongering to people this ultimately is going to come back and bite you in the ass so it's not a good idea to go down that road rather inspire people be an entrepreneur or a business person have a sense of life purpose that inspires people that helps them to cope with their fears in a healthy way that doesn't exploit their fears if you want to be able to build rapport quickly with people maybe with clients for example get good at asking them about their fears and a good question ask them is hey what keeps you up at night and see what they tell you like if you're a doctor and you want to understand your patients better next patient you talk to ask them what keeps you up at night about your health and watch them talk they're gonna spill all the beans to you cuz no one's ever asked them that question it's a very powerful question or if you're in a relationship with your spouse ask them what keeps you up at night what are you afraid of what are your biggest fears about our relationship oh boy that's a powerful question it's gonna open a whole can of worms see but to ask this question you have to be really interested you have to want to know the other person's point of view and you also have to be able to take their fears seriously remember the fears they have might seem ridiculous to you like if you ask a Christian what's your biggest fear they might have some fears that are silly to you but they're real to them are you willing to listen are you willing to understand see by exposing yourself and understanding other people's fears what this will do is this will expose you to the selfishness of your own fears because you'll see that all these different groups of people have their own unique fears and you'll see how limited and selfish these fears are and how ridiculous they are which will help you to see your own fears as selfish and limited and ridiculous so this ability to understand and deal with fear and communicate about fear is very important if you're interested in good leadership and I have a pretty nice episode about how leadership works how to be a leader go search for that so we're getting towards the end now and in conclusion I just want to say that there is no magic trick to overcoming fear that's what your whole life is for really your whole life is for facing yourself for facing the universe remember the universe is you you fear you ultimately you fear your own infinite scope you are literally so awesome that you're scary that's what consciousness is doing here consciousness is figuring out how to grapple with its own enormity and the paradox is this the paradox about fear is that your whole life you think that you're afraid of various bad parts of life because they're dangerous and scary and evil but ultimately what you discover is the shocking truth is that what you've really feared the whole time was not bad and evil stuff but rather what you really feared is the realization that there is no such thing as bad or evil at all and that all of it is infinite love and what you really fear is dissolving into that love because that love is so Infinite and so indiscriminate that it leaves no room for you a little limited ego and furry little petty attachments and that's what you're really afraid of you're not afraid of evil you're afraid of love love is the scariest thing love is the most radical thing that's the paradox of all this this topic of fear is central to your life you will come back to it again and again and again all throughout this work all throughout your life at ever deeper levels so avoiding this topic of fear avoiding this work is really unwise it will have disastrous results in your life why does avoidance of fear not work because in the end the truth is that everything is one reality is singular the universe is singular you are the universe and you cannot avoid yourself forever that's why life happens as it happens that's why you're always being pushed and that's why you're always afraid because you're being pushed to realize and explore more and more of yourself but you're so big that it threatens you it threatens your old limit itself you're being pushed to expand into infinity see but you're too afraid to expand too quickly but the truth is that you're the whole thing so you can't keep yourself bottled up forever in your little limited identity your limited identity will ultimately collapse whether you do it consciously or unconsciously whether you do it in your 20s and your 30s or in your 70s and 80s when you're on your deathbed in the end your limited identity must collapse and the truth of oneness must prevail so this division that you made between yourself and others this splitting of like I'm over here I'm 1 and they're over there that's number two and one number one is separate from number two this sort of divisive mnestheus falsehood this is illusion this must ultimately come to an end and what must prevail is total unity and it's this total unity that you're terrified of that you've labeled death the surest way to fail at life is to allow yourself to be crippled by fear and to not be bold but to be meek and to make choices that are run by fear and to succumb to your own fears that's the surest way to fail in your relationships in your career in your business in your health in your personal life life is all about exploration of yourself when you're driving to some beautiful national park and you're looking at the trees in the mountains what are you doing you're not just exploring the earth you're really exploring your own self the entire Earth is yourself as you see different parts of yourself you take it in sometimes it's something beautiful sometimes it's something ugly and hideous but all of it is you and to take all that in requires and here I'm delivering on the thing other thing I promised you in part 1 which is the answer is the question of what is the most important quality you need to succeed in life it's fearlessness what you need is fearlessness that's how you live the good life if you said rather than fearlessness love or courage or consciousness those are all synonymous with fearlessness to be fearless is to be loving is to be accepting of everything is the same as having courage is the same as having consciousness imagine what would happen in your relationships in your business in your career with your finances if you were fearless imagine if you were bold and courageous with your life decisions if you had a strong vision that you said yes to every single morning there you go and why are you struggling in life why are not you you receiving kind of results that you want it's because you're scared it's because life is big it's challenging it's scary it's overwhelming it's so huge sometimes that you don't even know where to begin you're overwhelmed in your relationship you're overwhelmed with the prospect of starting a business you're overwhelmed by the prospect of finding your life purpose or you're overwhelmed by spiritual work you're afraid of taking a psychedelic you're afraid of meditation you're afraid of this you're afraid of that you're afraid of going back to school you're afraid of getting into this relationship you're afraid of talking to that girl you're afraid of confessing your feelings to that guy you see the problem life needs to be lived bold now you might say well believe if I live life bold I might die it might be dangerous and risky yes that's life fearlessness doesn't really mean that you never experience the feeling of fear fearlessness means more so that you experience the fear but you don't succumb to it you don't let it Dee spear at you you don't let it change your decision so like for example when I started my first business I was scared to start it it was risky it was dangerous and yet despite that I started it anyways that's what counts as fearlessness see when you see some cute girl the grocery store and you want to go talk to her it's okay if you have fear but you push yourself to go talk to her anyways that's still fearlessness what's true fearfulness is when you have that fear but then you say oh well then I shouldn't go talk to her at all that's when you succumb to your fear and in that situation that's when your life starts to go downhill so there you go that's one of the keys to life just as a final reminder as homework for you you can download the worksheet below do that and also remember to keep doing that daily observation work of daily observing your fear feeling that fear observe how fear runs your whole life do a couple of years of just observation work to get started here right because this is gonna pay dividends for you for the rest of your life I'm telling you if you can figure out how fear works at an existential level that's gonna be so valuable for you for for all situations can you see how universal this skill is it's not just gonna help you in one situation it's gonna help you in all situations across the board so if you understand that then you should understand that this is really a practice that's worth investing some time and energy into it's gonna pay itself off alright that's it I'm done here please come check out my website well first of all click the like button for me that helps the videos then come check out my website that's actualized org you'll find exclusive content on my blog you'll find the forum you'll find all if purposed course you'll find the book list where you can use those two to help you in various ways stuff that's not available in my ordinary free youtube videos and the last thing I'll say is this mastering your emotions is the hardest part of this work mastering your emotions is harder than waking up there's of course some overlap between the two waking up helps you to master your emotions and conversely mastering your emotions helps you to wake up people who have not mastered their emotions at all cannot wake up but usually waking up is not enough to automatically have all of your emotions mastered this requires more work so really we want to be doing both simultaneously do some work to wake up and do some work to master your emotions don't rely on one or the other to fix the other and be very patient with yourself here this is a lifetime's work this is not something you're not gonna master your emotions in one year we're talking decades here to really truly master your emotions significantly but also you know you're gonna make progress so you don't have to wait for 10 years to get the fruits of this work you're gonna be getting little bits of this work every week as you're doing it but also you know be be patient understand this is a long-term process a long-term investment into your life don't worry if you don't know how you're gonna master all of your emotions yet you don't need to know how just start doing the practices and start sort of like eating this elephant one little piece at a time right now we're working on fear in the future we'll work on anger or we'll work on jealousy or we'll work on sadness and depression will work on lowliness though there's a lot of different components to emotions fear is just one aspect of it here it's a very big important aspect but be patient with yourself this is what your whole life is about really is figuring out how to understand all of your emotions and how to make sure that they're not running you anymore so that you're acting out of consciousness and wisdom rather than just like a puppet a marionette controlled by strings which are usually emotions for people so as we go forward to actualize that org I will have more content more videos and even courses probably in the future which will help you to master your emotions you