Word count:15166
Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about my secret for how I do research and the key to developing the biggest picture understanding of life possible. What I find on a very practical level, is that very few people have a very big picture understanding of life, and what they're doing here in life, and the reality and much less so an accurate, big picture understanding of life. So the question that I always had is, how do I develop such a picture? What do I need to know? What principles do I need to follow? What traps must I avoid? Because if it's such a rare thing, that must mean that very few people are able to succeed at it. And why would that be? That's the topic that we're going to cover today. My secret to how I do research, how I discover all this information, bring it to you. And how I've been doing this for for over a decade now, in my own life, is quite interesting. The secret is not some gimmick or some technique, or some gadget that I use, where I can just like speed read through books, and that that's how I do it. That's not how I do it actually read pretty slowly. The secret is not a gimmick, the secret is having the right epistemic Foundation, which very few people have. And this is why people fail at developing the big picture. And this is why you too, will fail. Unless you make an extraordinary effort to understand what the right epistemic foundation is. Even very intelligent people, even highly enlightened people still fail, because they fail to study what the right epistemic foundation is for really acquiring the understanding and avoiding all the traps. And by the way, this is true in most areas where people have deep success is that the success is not some flimsy gimmick or technique. It's a structural thing. It's how they approach the entire problem. It's not just a flimsy add on. So my own story goes back to high school into college. And I've talked about this before, but I was kind of obsessed with philosophy and epistemology, epistemology of the field of philosophy that is concerned with theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? A lot of people like to talk about how they have the truth, or they know what's true, or they understand reality. But they've never investigated how it is that people come to know anything. That's a very deep field of study. Human beings have been studying it for over 2000 years, with mixed results with a lot of blunders. So you got to be very careful. This is a very delicate field. A lot of nuance here. So as I went into philosophy, and I do a lot of philosophy, I became aware of a couple of things. First is I became aware of myself doing philosophy. So this is kind of like what I would call meta philosophy. As I'm sitting there doing philosophy, I become aware and conscious that, hey, I'm doing philosophy, and I'm doing it according to certain rules and certain following certain principles and making certain assumptions. And that's worth investigating in and of itself. So I started kind of doing meta philosophy, philosophy on philosophy, asking questions like, well, what is philosophy? How does philosophy work? What is it working towards? And by the way, what I use the word philosophy for you, if you don't like that word, you can just substitute it with seeking understanding or seeking truth. That's basically what the aim of philosophy is. And then how successful is it at actually delivering on that promise? Well, that's a mixed bag. Depends on how you do it. Also, what I became aware of is I became aware of the role of psychology within philosophy. It's not as though we're just sitting on our chair and doing philosophy. And we're discovering stuff about reality. It's not like that psychology, our own personal emotions, desires and biases, end up playing a huge role in the way that we do philosophy or the way that we go about seeking truth or seeking understanding. And this is an element that many people miss even very intelligent philosophers. So I became aware of that, and also I became acutely aware of the limits of philosophy and of reason. And that there are some things that are outside of philosophy and outside of reason. And it's important when you're doing philosophy to realize your limitations. And not to assume that you can just use philosophy to solve every problem. So those are some of the things I noticed. And as I was studying and researching all this stuff, I went pretty deep with it, and basically my epistemic foundation gelled. And then I use that epistemic foundation to do an amazing amount of research in the last five years, a lot of it I've been sharing with you, a lot of it I haven't even been able to be able to share yet because some of the stuff is quite difficult to articulate. Some of these concepts are very nuanced, easy to misinterpret, easy to misunderstand. And it takes time for me just to do the research in my own mind to understand it before I can come up here and deliver it to you. But anyways, the important thing that I want to share with you is my epistemic foundation, I think that's the most valuable thing I can really offer you in this entire field of personal development. Because you can learn about techniques here and there from other people, what boat very few people teach you is the epistemic foundation, you need to really develop an accurate big picture understanding of reality, and to avoid all the traps that people fall into. And I didn't know this, but by going through this process, I developed almost like the superpower, the epistemic foundation became like the superpower that I had been able to use to grow very quickly and to discover new fields that I would never, ever, ever have been able to discover, other than through accident. And even then I would not be open to them, I would not even consider them or take them seriously, let alone do the work to actually live and embody them in my own life, if I did not have this foundation. So let's talk about this foundation. Let me give you a recap of some of the biggest lessons that I learned from studying epistemology. The first lesson is that the first position that every human being is in when they come into this life is that we don't know what's true. We don't know what's true. Here I am, starting this process of understanding, trying to get the big picture, tried to know what all this light is all about. And the first position I don't know what's true. Now, that might seem obvious, but then again, nobody admits this. Nobody really takes this seriously. They always come into it with all sorts of assumptions about like, well, but yeah, that's sort of like theoretically, maybe you're rightly Oh, but you know, we know this is true. We know that is true. And science has told us this is true. And you know, some stuff is just obvious. Some stuff is just self evidence, some stuff is just like it couldn't be otherwise. No, what I'm saying is that you literally don't know what's true. That's your starting point in this inquiry. And if you don't really understand and appreciate and accept that, you've already made a huge mistake, because you're gonna bring a lot of assumptions and biases into this inquiry. And there's a corollary to this idea that you don't know what's true, the corollary is that literally anything is possible. And a lot of people don't appreciate this corollary at all. Because as soon as they start to do philosophy, as soon as they start to investigate, immediately, they have all sorts of preconceived notions about what's possible. And what's worthwhile to investigate. It's like, Well, I'm not gonna go read that book, because obviously, it's false. I'm not gonna go study that field, because it's all bullshit, I'm not going to go investigate that thing over there, because that can't possibly work. See, and already, you have crippled yourself in this process, just by not understanding these two basic points. It's very important that when you start a research program, that you're open to every possibility. Because you have to start from the place of admitting that you don't know where the research could lead to. You might think that some research Avenue might be a dead end, and actually it turns out to lead very far or vice versa. And so when you really understand this principle, then you have to understand that everything warrants investigation. You cannot prejudge anything. You can't say, well, that thing over there, I'm just not going to worry about it, because it's obviously false. No. grasp the significance of the first position is that you Don't know what's true, when you don't know what's true, that means you also don't know what's possible to be true, and what's possible to be false. And you don't know which principles you will use to assess what's true and what's false. That's how deeply you don't know. You don't know what is gonna come out of this investigation, maybe nothing at all, maybe it's gonna be a giant waste of time, or maybe something glorious will come out of it, you don't know. And you're not sure how you're going to get there, you don't know what the path is going to be. You're just kind of stumbling around in the dark completely. This is very important to understand. You cannot rely on the knowledge or information that other human beings have sort of mind for you and supply to you in books, because how do you assess which books are correct, and which are not? There's a lot of conflicting information in books. Same thing with experts, there's a lot of different experts in every field, who conflict with each other and tell you the opposite things. So how are you going to know which experts to rely on which books to rely on which fields to study and which ones to ignore? And the reality is that you don't. And to admit, that is very important. Because most people assume that, well, I have a good gut feeling that that field over there is a stupid field. And I have a good gut feeling that that book over there is a bunch of bullshit. And I have a good feeling of that, that expert that that Guru over there is full of shit. And as soon as you get stuck in that sort of paradigm, you've lost it, you failed, you will never ever recover from that. So that's an important point. Another lesson I learned is that self deception is the number one enemy. In doing research, and developing understanding, self deception, you are your own greatest enemy. What this means is that you have to watch your personal biases and weaknesses like a hawk, because they are the number one factor that will lead you astray. And of course, what do we do? In our infinite wisdom? What do we do when we start to go on this process of research and understanding? We immediately start to point fingers at other people and say, Oh, that guy's full of shit. And that's bullshit. That's a lie over there, that guy's deluded. And look at this, this nonsense over here, look at those Mormons. Look at those Christians. Look at those, you know, foolish scientists from 200 years ago, how could they have been also foolish. And as soon as you again, take that sort of attitude, you've already failed, because you've oriented yourself outward at pointing out other people's self deceptions. Meanwhile, neglecting your own and your own is the only ones that you really should be worried about. And this requires a lot of emotional labor to watch your own personal biases and your own weaknesses come into play as you do the research. Because what would happen if you need to go research some topic that will trigger fears in you, that will trigger your deepest insecurities. That's going to require a lot of emotional labor, to grapple with some of these nuanced ideas. It's going to require sort of stepping outside of your perspective and outside of your paradigm, putting aside your own biases, and what you want to be true in favor of seeing what actually is true. What's going to happen when you hit that fork in the road? Well, I'll tell you, what's going to happen if you're not very vigilant, is that you will side with your own personal biases and weaknesses, you will succumb to them, and you will ignore what's actually the case. And you will make a huge epistemic blunder as most people do. Another lesson that I learned is that every position no matter what position or perspective, you take on reality has hidden assumptions behind it. That is a very deep epistemic truth. And in a sense, the assumptions define the position or they define the perspective to even have a perspective on a situation like What's your perspective on religion? What's your perspective on science? What's your perspective on abortion? What's your perspective on what reality is? What's your perspective on philosophy? What's your perspective on what human beings are here on earth to do? What's your perspective on what life is about? What's your perspective on the origins of life and evolution? To have a perspective about that, and you probably have many of those perspectives, right? You take positions on these things and you're very adamant about your position. But to have any perspective on anything at all requires hidden assumptions that are very difficult to root out and to become aware of. And then what most people do is they take a position or perspective. And they don't understand that there are assumptions there that they've never even questioned or thought about. Almost like axioms or premises, which defined the paradigm, or the perspective from which they look at the world. And that that shapes everything, right, because that's the first step is the assumptions. From there, everything becomes like a chain reaction. And when you get the first assumptions wrong, or you aren't clear about what they are exactly, or you've never questioned them, then all your other reasoning, and all your justifications, and everything else that comes on top of that, it's on a rotten foundation, you see, the assumptions are the foundation. So it's very important to look at these hidden assumptions, and to root them out. And to become very clear about what they are. So a lot of people go wrong right here. Another lesson that I learned is that all perspectives are partial. All perspectives are partial. The biggest trap you can fall into is this idea that, hey, you know, let me go find the right perspective for me. And then I'm just going to adopt that perspective and live from that perspective. You are not going to develop the biggest picture understanding of life by doing that. Because no matter what perspective you adopt, on whatever position, it will only be partial, it will only be a partial truth, there will be a lot of other things that you ignore a lot of nuances from the other side. So one good way to avoid this problem is to study many, many, many perspectives, and to be impartial to the perspectives. And to see that your job is not to adopt a certain perspective, but really to jump around perspectives and explore them all sort of like you're at a buffet, you don't commit to any one dish, you sample the whole thing. So that's a, that was a lesson I learned pretty early on. Another lesson I learned is that a model is not reality. Thinking about reality, is not reality. Coming up with a schematic representation, in your own mind of how something works is not the actual thing in the real world working. And while models can be useful, you cannot substitute them for reality, this becomes a huge trap. And in a sense, the better your models become, the more likely you are to mistake them for reality. And this becomes very dangerous. And this has been one of the key pitfalls of good science is that nowadays, our science is so good and so accurate, and manipulating reality that we think that Okay, that's it, then we got the models, we've got reality figured out. And that becomes a huge trap. Another lesson I learned is that your web of beliefs, which is the entire collection of all the beliefs you have about everything that's true or false in the world, that this web of beliefs is like a representation of reality, and that it's under constrained. And this is true for every human being. This is the nature of how the police works, which means that we have a few number of hardcore facts that we might say are facts about reality. And then you have this giant web of beliefs that you build, which is only loosely connected to the facts, which means that you can build different kinds of webs of belief to explain exactly the same phenomenon, which explains why we have this diversity of perspectives and diversity of opinions and ideologies around the world, is that we could have the exact same facts, but because people interpret the facts in different ways. And they have all sorts of other elements to the web of belief that are not based on facts at all. They just have their own biases and their own preferences, that those get mixed in there. And so you could have a web of belief, which is one way explaining one set of facts, but then somebody else has a totally different way of beliefs explaining the exact same set of facts. And this leads to a lot of confusion, and you got to be able to see through that and you got to be able to see that other people are doing that and that you yourself are doing that. And you got to be willing to question those beliefs that are not connected to the facts themselves. Because there you've got this sort of fudge factor. And one thing that you love your psyche loves or where your mind loves, is to have this fudge factor where it can fudge things around. And it can concoct its own stories and theories about how the world works. It loves that we're addicted to that. Because human beings are sort of modeling animals. Another lesson I learned is that foundationalism is false. foundationalism is the idea that you can take some theory you have about reality, and that you can ground all of it down into one fundamental truth. That is indisputable. This is something that philosophers have been trying to do for over 2000 years, is they've been trying to take their philosophy or their notions of the of the world and how the world works. And they have to say, okay, so we have these higher level understandings of reality. But let's kind of boil it down to the essence, what is the essence what is indisputably true? That is completely justified and certain. This is something that Rene Descartes did, and many other philosophers that followed him did. And every one of them basically failed. And if you study the history, philosophy, you see the history of foundationalism, failing over and over and over and over and over again, because there is nothing that you can ground your theories in. Absolutely. There is no such thing. Another lesson that I learned is that rationality is far too limited, to use as your only tool to explore reality. And to understand reality. If you think rationality will be sufficient, you're wrong, and you will fail and you will make many epistemic blunders. Reality goes far beyond rationality. And this actually makes a lot of sense, because if you think about it, what is rationality? Well, rationality is only one element of reality. Rationality itself is a subset of this larger superset, which is reality. So of course, you shouldn't expect that rationality can encompass the entire superset a subset cannot encompass the superset. You see, rationality has to arise out of irrationality, before there was rationality, there was irrationality, rationality has to be evolved, if you take the standard scientific understanding of it, you know, there was no rationality until complex mammals evolved, and we had primates, and then we had human beings, there was no rationality you before that. And to have evolved to this place, and then to look backwards, and to backwards, rationalize it and say, well, but you know, yeah, we need human brains to be rational. But you know, let's just assume that, at the beginning of the universe, the rationality was still there. No, it wasn't human beings. And human brains took billions of years to evolve. So after billions of years of evolution, you got rationality, before that there was no rationality. So you can see, if you take a look, look at it from that perspective, you can see just how much of the universe has no rationality in it whatsoever. And that should humble you. As far as your attempts go at rationalizing the whole universe. You have to be open to the idea that maybe the universe can't be rationalized in principle, and that your attempts to do so leave a lot of stuff unexplained. Another lesson I learned is that paradox is good. When you encounter a paradox, in your research, and in your attempt to understand the world, that's a good thing. That's not something to be afraid of. That's not something to run away from. That's something to embrace. And again, you got to be open to the possibility that reality might be paradoxical. At its very core, in which case we do run into paradoxes. That's fine. That means that that's what reality is. So don't worry about that. Also, paradox might be the fallout that you get when you try to rationalize all of reality. So if you're attempting to rationalize everything, and you keep getting paradoxes, that might be a sign telling you, hey, stop trying to rationalize everything. There's more to reality than rationality. So paradox is something to be embraced. Another lesson I learned is that direct experience is the truest thing we've got. So of all the things we can rely on to begin our investigation, we could rely on expert authorities, like the Pope, or some scientist, Einstein, we could rely on authority, but that's not a very high quality way to do this. And that's negation. We could also rely on various other things, our thoughts, our reasoning abilities, our intuitions, and so forth, or we got just direct experience. So what do we start our investigation with? Well, I don't have time to go into why I came to this lesson. But the lesson I came to, is that direct experience is the truest thing you've got. If you stick to that, you're going to avoid a lot of traps. If, however, you're going to go with different authority figures, different writers and speakers and authors, that's gonna be very problematic, you're gonna run to a lot of traps there. Or if you go with your own reasoning abilities, well, that's a that's even potentially more dangerous, because your mind is a very tricky thing. It's like a labyrinth that you can very easily get lost in. So I'm not saying that you need to now discount expert authorities, and your own reason, and your own intuitions. No, all those things are important factors. So we're not throwing those away. But I'm just saying that the truest thing you've got is your own direct experience. And that's a good starting point for this investigation. Now, once you go further, and then investigation, you might want to come back and revisit this axiom or this assumption, that direct experience is the truest thing you've got. And you might want to question that. But as a starting point that that principle to go with, because you got to start somewhere, right? It's not possible to start this investigation from ground zero. Because you've already got certain beliefs, you've already got some certain assumptions to do this investigation in practice, not in theory. But in practice, you have to make certain assumptions. The key is not to get locked into your assumptions. The key is to be flexible enough to come back and revisit those assumptions in the future. Because you know what, every assumption that you started with might have been false. And you don't know until you really check, check it out. That might take a while. Speaking of direct experience, another lesson I learned, and this is something I learned more recently, is that there is a huge spectrum of possible direct experiences. Huge, way larger than you ever imagined possible, what you think of as reality and all the experiences you've had in your whole life, that is a tiny little sliver of all the vast possible and weird experiences that are possible to have in this world. And so seeking out new experiences becomes hugely important. If you accept the axiom, that direct experience is one of the truest things you have in this inquiry. Because if you have a very narrow slice of this entire spectrum, and you're using that slice to create your models and your understanding, well, you can see how that can go very wrong. Because you're missing out on so much of the larger spectrum, you're not accounting for the whole thing. And by definition, that means you're not going to have the biggest picture, to have the big picture, you need to explore more of the spectrum, because the picture is explaining the spectrum. And a lot of people the reason they don't have a big picture, and they don't care about developing a big picture is because they've committed themselves to a little tiny sliver of the spectrum. Like they grew up in the same city in the same state in the same country. They speak one language, they haven't studied history. They're not very worldly, and so they haven't experienced much of life. All they do is they just go to their nine to five job at Starbucks, they punch the clock, they do the work, they come home, maybe they have a relationship, they have a kid, and that's it. And their their experience is very of life is very limited. They don't study science and history and religion and philosophy or any of this kind of stuff. And so then they have very little that needs explaining to them. They understand everything. Because yeah, they understand everything. That's just that little piece of life. But once you start having more diverse experiences, you start interacting with intelligent people, you start having altered states of consciousness, you start learning about personal development, you start learning about weird paranormal phenomena that people talk about, and you start investigating all this stuff. And all of a sudden, you have a lot more experienced to explain. And all the sudden your old big picture what you thought was the big picture. Explanation doesn't work anymore. Doesn't work to account for the whole spectrum. So pushing your spectrum out to both ends is very important. Another lesson I learned is that the practical level still matters. It's very easy to get lost in just armchair philosophy and just theorizing stuff. But it's important to keep in mind But the reason we're doing this is so that we can move forward and that we can be more effective in our lives. So we can be more happier. So we can master our emotions, so we can be more successful in the things that we want to accomplish. So if this entire investigation is not helping you to do that, then you're losing yourself in theory, and in academic disputes, that are really not relevant to you living the kind of life that you want to live. So this entire investigation, one easy way to see if you're doing it right, is that your life should be improving. Gradually, over time, in the long run, not on the short run, but in the long run, your life should be improving, because in the short run, you might discover some things in this investigation, that kind of freak you out. destabilize you, so that's okay. But in the long run, you should start to see improvement, that's the practical level got to keep the practical level in mind. Another lesson I learned is that the best position to take is no position at all. To not desire a position to not have anything to defend. That's really when you know you're doing good epistemology. When you can just admit to yourself that you know what, I just want to get to the bottom of understanding what's true here, I don't care what's true. I'm open to whatever, I'm not going to be defending any position, I'm not going to be an ideologue, I'm not going to be a crusader. I don't care about debating with people, I don't care about proving my point. I don't care about writing a book, I don't care about being famous with some idea that I hold, I don't care about getting more followers and recruiting more people to my cause. I don't care about holding some rally or some riot, or you know, getting people to pull out their pitchforks. I don't care about any of that. All of that is a distraction. What I'm interested in is just getting to the bottom of understanding what life is and how I should live it. And in that respect, I have no position. I don't need a position. A position is something that people need to feel comfortable like a baby blanket, and I am more mature than that. That's a really healthy attitude to take. Another lesson I learned is to seek understanding rather than truth. So the trap with seeking the halving of truth is that we think of truth as this tangible object, some like some sort of Holy Grail, that I will go and I will find the Holy Grail. And I will bring it back, and I will put it on my trophy case at home. That doesn't seem to work very well. If you take a look at the history of science and philosophy, over the last couple 1000 years, very few people have succeeded in bringing home the truth, Holy Grail and putting it on their mantle. Instead, what you should be more interested in is just the looser project of developing understanding. So it's not that I want to grab hold of something and then claim it and show to the world as this is the true thing. Not like that. But instead it's like, I just want to understand, I want to understand the different fields of life and how they work. I want to understand the mechanics understand the traps the pitfalls, so I want to understand maybe how business works. I don't want to take a stance on what's the best way to do business. I just want understand what are the different ways to do business, for example? And what are the different pros and cons? What are the different mechanics what's going on at the metal level? That's what I call understanding. And the same thing with every other field, personal development, spiritual development, relationships, health and any other kind of fields you want, right? It's not about grabbing hold of something there and say, Okay, now I understand it's not like that understanding is more of a loose thing. It's sort of like you see how all the parts are moving and why they're moving the way they're moving. And you're sort of like looking at the situation from a bird's eye view. Right, rather than being a crusader stuck on the ground level fighting for some specific position. Another lesson I learned is to seek holism in whatever you're studying or investigating, and this is as opposed to what a lot of academics do, which is become hyper specialized, and get lost in the academic minutiae of some argument or debate, nitpick everything and, you know, study the hell out of some little tiny element which has nothing to do with how you're living your life. It has no bearing on your relationships, your ability to improve your happiness levels, your emotional mastery or your The overall sense of consciousness, it has nothing to do with that. It's just some little minut academic thing that maybe you can write a paper on and get it research published in some research journal, or you could use it to hit someone over the head with as like a means of saying, Oh, I'm right, I'm right. Because see, look, I won the debate because of this little minut little academic point that I was correct on. To not get lost in that academic minutiae is very important. And that just means to have the desire to really integrate everything. The goal is not to understand your little field, the goal is to understand all of life, which encompasses every field that there is, right? Of course, some fields are getting more interested in others, but overall, your understanding what the hell is going on in life? And how should I be living my life? These are the really important questions, not some little nitpicky academic point in some philosophical journal. And then, the last lesson that I learned is that argumentation and debate and justification, that these are tools of the ego, and that they do not serve truth finding. If your objective is to find truth, and your objective is to understand, then you have to let go of argumentation, debate, and justification, stop doing these things. They are holding you back, they're sucking you into ego, they're sucking you into this paradigm of defending some kind of position. And the more you defend a position, the more stuck you become. And this is the biggest trap that people make is that they choose a position they become loyal to it, and then they defend it to the death. And that's what happens is that they died holding the same positions that they held when they were still teenagers. And that's a real shame. And they never develop the big picture that they could have developed. So those are some of the biggest lessons I learned. I didn't go into how I derived these lessons, because that would take hours and hours and hours to explain. But you can take these as principles. Don't just blindly believe them, take them as axioms, use them for your investigation. And you will discover that you will progress very fast and into deep and very uncharted territory. And that's how you'll know that they're working. And anything that isn't working question. And maybe I'm wrong. Right? So you got a question, even the stuff that I'm telling you. Because the first position is that you don't know what's true. And you certainly don't know if what I'm telling you is true, just based on the fact that I'm telling it to you, right, because that would be the problem of just believing authority. The next question that I want to talk about is, so if we zoom out for a second here, and we ask ourselves the big question, which is, what's the best? What's the best method for understanding reality? Like, what, what methodology? Or what attitude should I adopt? If what I care about is having the biggest picture understanding of reality? Well, let's explore this, there's a couple of positions or a couple of basic approaches that you could take. The first approach is what I call the default position, which is just going with the flow. This is what will happen if you don't do anything else. This is the majority of cases of human beings on earth. In fact, 99% of all human beings follow this, just go with the flow attitude, which means that they don't really question life very deeply. They don't probably even care about developing any kind of big picture. And that's because they generally assume that they've already got it figured out, they already have the big picture. Because what they did is they just absorbed it from their mainstream culture. Whatever their parents believe, whatever their teachers told them, whatever they see on TV, what are they reading the magazines, whatever their basic, naive intuitions are about reality. They just say that, well, that's good enough. That's all I need. It's functional. I can just use that and go to work and have a family. That's all I basically need. And that's the default position. The problem with that, though, of course, is that it's it's not a big picture understanding at all. These these people hardly understand anything. They don't understand where their anger comes from. They don't understand where their depression comes from. They don't understand how to be happy, and they fail at it every single day. They don't understand why they have relationship problems and keep breaking up. They don't understand why they have problems with people pleasing. They don't understand why they have financial struggles, like they can't get a good job or they can't please their boss. They don't understand why. Why religion exists, or why there's a debate between science and religion, or the opposite approach. They don't understand why scientists are undermining real Listen. So there's all these things that they don't understand and that they just keep struggling with and struggling with and struggling for their whole life, they struggle with this stuff. They don't master themselves. They don't live life in a masterful way. They are not joyful people, they're generally sour, bitter, depressed, people who are just going through life, just kind of like toughing it out. Thinking that if they just waited long enough that eventually happiness will come through some sort of acquisition of money or relationships, or a house or something like that. And that will be like the peak of their life where they get the stuff that they want. And then after that, they can retire and then hopefully, die, painless death. Like that's their general sense of how life works. And, of course, these are people who haven't really studied personal development all. And as soon as they do start to study it personal, and they start to see that their big picture just completely breaks down and doesn't explain anything, they see all these contradictions, they see all these things, they can't explain about themselves once they become a little bit more aware. And then that's when the sort of existential crisis starts to happen. So that's the problem there. The other approach you could take to developing your big picture is the academic approach. And I already sort of touched on this the problem with the academic approach. The academic approach is this narrowly specialized approach, it's like, well, I'm gonna pick one field, like, let's say, if I want to understand psychology, I'm going to pick some very narrow fields in psychology. And I'm going to tell you the shit out of it. And I'm going to read all the past authors, I'm gonna network with all the other academics in my field and just research, research, research, research, Richard Read, read books, and do a couple of narrow experiments and studies. And that's how I'm going to really understand there is room for that kind of work, it is important, but it's not going to lead to any kind of real big picture understanding. And it's certainly not going to really be that useful in your own life, to live a great life. Even if you can apply some of the things you learned in your research in this narrow academic field, that's only going to tackle one little facet of your life, and all the other facets of your life are largely going to be misunderstood. And that's why you can have someone who's very intelligent, knows a lot about psychology in an academic sense, or a lot about philosophy in an academic sense. But he has no mastery over his anger, his depression or whatever emotions he's having. He's unfulfilled in life, he doesn't know how to get happiness, he doesn't know how to embody love, and doesn't have much consciousness and all this stuff, because he's spent his whole life stuck in a library reading books, or doing some kind of research on lab rats. See, that becomes a way to narrow specialization. Another approach you have to developing a big picture is to pick one spiritual tradition out there from the many that are there. And just to stick with it, and to follow it in a very focused way, so Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, and all the different subsets within all those. Pick whichever one you like, commit to it, and just follow it, do all the practices, study all the theory, and tell yourself that you're going to get the biggest picture of the reality. A lot of people do this. Some people do it in a very dogmatic, sort of like, fundamentalist, Islamic sort of way, which, of course, we know isn't healthy. But a lot of people do it also in the kind of more New Age sort of way. It's like, well, I'm going to become a Buddhist. You know, Buddhism is an Islam Buddhism is nice and peaceful. So I'm just gonna become a Buddhist. And you know, the Buddha seems like a guy who really knew what he was talking about. So what could possibly go wrong if I just follow the teachings of the Buddha? Of course, the problem with this, and not just with Buddhism with with any one of these spiritual traditions, is that, again, it's a partial perspective. It's got a specific set of assumptions. It's got a lot of cultural baggage that comes with it. It's a paradigm, it's a way of looking at the world. And maybe it will work to get you to enlightenment. Maybe it won't. That's a mixed bag. Maybe the techniques you choose will work for you because they fit with your personality. Maybe they won't. That's a again, you're kind of just shooting in the dark there. That's the probability thing. But no matter what, even if they do work, you will still develop a narrow A sectarian view, and your big picture will be distorted. Even in the best case scenario, even if you enroll like in a Zen monastery and go to Zen monastery for 20 years, and you learn everything there, and you aced all of their little tests, and you do everything perfectly, you will wind up with what? Enlightenment, yeah, maybe, maybe you'll wind up with alignment, but still, your understanding of the world will be limited. And it will not be the biggest picture possible. And you will run into many epistemic traps there, even if you attain enlightenment. So that's the danger. And of course, most people won't even get to that most people don't pick a spiritual teaching, and that spiritual teaching will. Because they don't study all this epistemic stuff, that spiritual teaching, they will distort it, they will misunderstand it, they will not follow through on it. And they won't even attain enlightenment using it. They'll just become dogmatic about it. They'll have debates, little arguments and stuff, and they'll believe in it, and yada, yada, yada. So all the problems will happen that we've already talked about. So there's that way, another way is to strictly stick to your direct experience. So this would be a whole different methodology. Here, what you would say is you say, Okay, fuck it, I'm not reading any books, I'm not watching any videos, I'm not talking to any gurus, I'm not listening to anybody at all, because the only thing I know for sure, is my direct experience. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to lock myself in a room for 10 years, and I'm just going to do direct experience, and nothing else. And everything else, I'm just going to throw into the fire. There's that approach. That might seem like maybe that's the best approach. Because then you can eliminate any distorting outside influences, which are so ubiquitous. They come from every corner and angle, the spiritual marketplace that first developed marketplace, and just society at large. Basically, what you're doing there is you're cutting yourself off completely from culture, and from any other sources of human knowledge. And you're trying to derive everything from the ground up. And you might think, like, Well, that seems like a hard path. But it also seems like that would be the truth path. Except here's the problem. Remember that with epistemology, the number one danger is self deception. The number one danger is not others deceiving you, although that can be a big danger. It's self deception. So when you lock yourself in a room for 10 years, and you think that you're going to, you're going to go through direct experience, and just be very strict about it, and not listen to anybody. It might work. But also, what's very likely to happen is that you will get lost in the labyrinth of your own mind. And you will tell yourself things, and you'll come up with theories, and you'll have certain experiences, and you'll misinterpret these experiences. And you will not develop the biggest picture possible, you will end up tricking yourself into thinking that you did but actually didn't. And there will be things again, that you fail to know. And again, you're gonna miss out on a very important element, which is that if you're only sticking to your direct experience, and you're not listening to anybody else out there, you have to kind of assume that you're going to be the most motivated, the most strict, the most self honest human being who's ever lived. And that you're assuming that you'd like you can discover everything about reality all by yourself. That's what you're sort of assuming that becomes very problematic, because again, you can limit yourself to one narrow band on a large spectrum. And when you're not coming into contact with other people from other spiritual religious traditions, from scientific disciplines, different philosophers, when you're not looking back into history, and you're not learning from the lessons that humanity has committed throughout history, when you're not learning from science, and you're not learning from mysticism, and you're not learning from gurus, and you're not learning from self help authors, when you completely cut yourself off, man. That might be the most dangerous path of ball, in a sense, now that I think about it, because it's like, I couldn't even imagine how a human being could avoid all the blunders and traps that are possible in this inquiry without learning from the lessons of others. So for me, that becomes a no go This method doesn't work for me. And the last method is studying lots of perspectives and lots of sources. So what I could do is I could tell myself, okay, so if there's all these problems with all these other methods, what I could do is I could just go in, like, read all the books, watch all the videos, listen to all the gurus. And then I'm gonna have the biggest picture. The problem with that, though, is that yes, you can do that. And that might be fairly effective, you're certainly going to get a very broad set second hand understanding and appreciation for the spectrum of experience possible. But if you only do that, and you only read books, and you only watch videos, and you don't have the direct experiences, you're not going to go very far. It's going to actually becomes sort of like the academic approach. Right? It's too much theory. And you're not going to know what the theory and the models and the gurus are talking about, because you haven't had the direct experience. So then you will, again, fall into a deep epistemic trap. So each of these methods by itself doesn't work. It's too limited. So let me share with you my approach, how do we practically overcome this problem? Which method? Should I actually use? Leo, it sounds like you're telling me that any method I use, is going to be faulty? Well, in a sense, that's true. Because there is no foolproof. Just Color by Number process for how to develop the biggest picture, if there was everyone would have the biggest picture. So you sort of have to suspect that there isn't one that a lot of judgment and care and vigilance and attention to detail is required. If you want to successfully navigate through all the different landmines that exist in this long research project. So here's my pragmatic approach. If you follow this approach, I think that this is the most powerful epistemic approach that you can follow. And it will not entirely, not entirely eliminate all your problems. It's not foolproof, but it's going to give you your best chance. So here it is. First, what you do is you fully commit to understanding versus position taking. So you make a vow to yourself, that I am not going to be taking any positions. And then I'm going to be super mindful about this. As I go forward, for the next 1020 3040 years, my entire life, I'm going to be very mindful of how I debate and argue my position. And every time I noticed that I'm going to stop, I'm gonna cut it off, I'm gonna be very mindful of defending any ideas that I have about reality myself, how the world works, and so forth. And anytime that I noticed myself, trying to defend some ideological position, I'm going to cut that off, as soon as I notice it. Also, I'm going to see and look past the semantic squabbles that exist between all the different perspectives out there. Because I will be going out and studying many perspectives, hundreds of perspectives. But in doing that, I recognize a lot of these perspectives are talking about similar things, but in different language. And I'm going to look past the language, I'm going to read between the line and I'm going to get beyond the terminology. And I'm gonna really go for the root of what those teachings are pointing at, with the intent of experience in my own life, not just to learn it theoretically, but to live it. I'm also not going to nitpick sources, I'm going to be charitable, I'm generally going to assume that the things that people are teaching me if they're reputable people, not just some bum on the street. But if it's a reputable teacher, I'm not going to dismiss them as being diluted, or liars, or charlatans. I'm going to be charitable to them. Even if a perspective that I encounter is very radically different than mine. And it seems at first like it's complete nonsense. I'm going to stay open minded, I'm going to be charitable, and I'm going to take the burden on myself to understand that perspective, I'm going to step into that perspectives, shoes, so to speak. And I am going to live from that perspective, just to get a taste of what it's like. And then maybe I'll bounce off of that and go to some other perspective and some other perspectives, some other perspective, but I'm really going to take the effort to step outside my shoes and to change perspectives. Also, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull from hundreds of sources. So I'm not going to be content with just reading 10 books and then say okay, I got it off. figured out, I'm going to pull from hundreds of sources. And I'm going to combine that with my direct experience. So the stuff that I'm pulling from all these different sources, it's good, but it's only the starting point, it's giving me leads on the stuff I got to follow up with, in my direct experience. So if I hear somebody over there talking about something, that sounds cool and interesting and important to my bigger picture, understanding, okay, I'm gonna, I'm going to, I'm going to take that on as the hypothesis. And now like a good scientist, I'm going to go and test it out. And then when I hear something over there, I'm going to do the same thing, take it on, as hypothesis tested out, and I'm gonna keep doing that. And I'm keep doing that for my whole life. And I'm never going to stop, and I'm never going to settle on a position. That's basically my pragmatic approach. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cross cross reference, the different perspectives. So I'm gonna go like, study with a Buddhist master for a month. And then I'm gonna go study with a Hindu master. And then I'm going to study with Islamic master, and then a Christian master. And then I'm going to, after I did a month of study with each of them, I'm going to come bring those together, cross reference them, and then try to triangulate. What are the common elements? What explains everything that's going on? And I'm gonna go check that with my intuition. So any conclusions I come to? I'm going to check them with my intuition to see okay, does this have a ring of truth to it. So it's not just a logical thing I'm doing it's like, a, a deeply intuitive thing. As you start to build your deeper, bigger picture, your intuition is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And you're going to find that truth just stands out, Like a diamond in the sand, right, you can just see it, it sparkles. There's something about it that you just kind of like, oh, there it is, of course, you just pull that little gem out there. And you pull it on little gem out from here from that teaching from this teaching from this perspective, from that perspective, and you do the sort of pulling process, but you don't just pull theory, you pull the theory to come up with a model, but then you go and you directly experience it. And also, you be careful to notice the minor discrepancies, which might be important or might not be, as you're comparing these different perspectives. You can't just throw out all the discrepancies, because you might be missing something important. The discrepancies are like leads, you have to follow up on those leads and see whether they take you you know, that teacher over there, he talks about something very weird that this other teacher didn't talk about, ha, well, let me go follow up on that little lead and see where it takes me, oh, maybe it'll take me to a dead end, may it'll just be a waste of time. Or maybe it'll lead me to an even broader, deeper, more interesting perspective. So you do that. And as you're doing all this, everything is held as provisional. So your understanding is like a building that's being constructed that will never finish being constructed. It's always provisional, some stuff might be taken out. You know, that thing I learned here a year ago, that doesn't apply anymore. That thing I learned five years ago. That's bullshit. Now, this thing I'm learning today, okay, that's great. That's the most amazing thing I've ever learned. But five years from now, might be bullshit. So you hold everything as provisional. You don't cling to anything. You don't have any favorites. Like, oh, but this thing here that I learned from his teacher, you know, I got to keep that this thing, I can't die without it. Got to keep it for the rest of my life. None of that. Also, you got to be open to being very wrong. Which means that at any point, somebody can come to you tell you something, and you got to consider what they told you. And it's like, yeah, you know what? This whole thing I've been doing here? Maybe I was just deluded. Maybe I just spent the last five years of my life going down some path, which is leading to a dead end. And then you got to realize that and say, okay, yeah, that's fine. I knew that could happen from the very beginning. Because I recognize that you know, what the original position is that I don't know anything. If I don't know anything as the original position. That means that I don't know anything. I don't know where this is leading. It's like I'm walking around in the wilderness. Not quite sure where I'm going. But nevertheless, I'm still going somewhere. So be open to being wrong, very wrong. Not just on the surface wrong, but deep down wrong, like so wrong. I want you to be so open to being wrong, that maybe everything you learned about alignment is wrong. Maybe there is no such thing as alignment at all. Maybe it's just a ruse. Maybe it's just another delusion. Maybe it's a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. Maybe How do you know? You don't know you have to be open to being very raw. But at the same time, you also have to have a positive out Look, generally speaking, this positive outlook is that understanding is possible that there is something larger that you can understand about reality. And not just theoretically, but it is going to be of practical value, you sort of have to trust that it will be worth it in the end. And how do you develop this trust? Well, I don't know, I've kind of always had it. I've always just assumed that the investigation is worthwhile, even if it doesn't particularly yield the fruits that I hoped it would. And you know, what, if I keep going with the investigation, maybe they'll yield fruits that I never even imagined possible in my wildest dreams. So you got to have this generally positive outlook, because what I see people doing committing this other mistake is that they say, Well, yeah, Leo. So you're it sounds like you're saying that all this stuff is just, it's impossible. There's all these traps, and all this, all these mistakes that one could make. So why not just not do any of that. And my response to that is, no, you don't have that option. Because by not making a choice, you've made a choice, you've made the choice to do the default position thing. And the default position thing is that you're going to be just absorbing your paradigm from mainstream reality. You don't have this option of not doing the investigation, you're just going to be ignorant, you're going to fall back into ignorance. That's all that's going to happen if you don't do this investigation. So this notion that oh, well leave, there's nothing to understand about reality. And truth is an illusion. It's just a myth. All this is pointless, just stop it, just stop it. No, if you do that, you're gonna wind up in the worst situation of all, that's the worst thing you can do is to do nothing. And this sort of do nothing is very different from their meditative Zen do nothing. The meditative Zen do nothing is actually a very serious doing something. That's a conscious do nothing. What you do when you become this defeatist, and you say, Oh, well, all this is just a, nobody really knows what the truth is, and yada, yada, yada, that's a defeatist attitude. That is not going to get you very far. That's the worst of all. And that's, that's the majority of people. That's what the majority people are doing. So if you take that attitude, you will get what the majority of people are getting, it's not gonna be very great. The other thing you need to do, is to not become loyal to anyone teaching. That's what makes this method different from just picking some one spiritual tradition and just following it through to the end. If you become loyal to any one tradition, you will not develop the big picture, I pretty much guarantee it, no matter how far you go in that tradition, you will not because you will become a loyalist of that tradition. And in fact, the more results you gain from that tradition, the more loyal you will become to what you seek, you will use the fruits of your dedication and loyalty to one teaching. And I'm not saying there won't be fruits, there will be fruits, but you will use those fruits to become a sectarian of that tradition. That's what you will do. How else could it be? Because you haven't explored all the other perspectives possible. Another thing you got to keep in mind is that reality can be absurd, outrageous, irrational, shocking and counterintuitive. This is something you have to be open to, like really open to this possibility that everything thought about reality could be turned upside down, that there could be weird, shocking plot twists and reversals, that make Fight Club looks like child's play. In this work, there might be some days where you discover something so shocking, that it leaves you speechless for a week. You got to be open to that kind of thing. As you're doing this investigation, that's a huge element. Because a lot of people they limit themselves by saying like, well, if it's absurd, then it's not worth investigating, and it can't possibly be true. And if it's so outrageous, it can't possibly be true. And if it's irrational, and it's not logical can't possibly be true. And if it leads to this weird paradox, it can't possibly be true, it's not worth going any further down that direction. And that becomes a huge barrier for discovering what's really true. And also, don't worry too much about lack of utility in your investigations, because another big trap is that people say well, but I'm doing this investigation, but it's not it's not like improving my life immediately. And it doesn't seem like it's gonna like help me get more sex or it's not gonna help me get more money. Leo, if this got me more money than I I'll do it, but it's not going to. So why should I do it? You have to see the bigger picture, you have to see that this is a game that's being played. With a long time horizon. This is not something you do for a year or two, this is something you do for your whole life. You see, when your time horizon is a year or two, yeah, you can't motivate yourself to do this work. Because it's not going to yield to more money. It's not going to lead to more money, or more sex, or a bigger house, or a better career in just a year or two. But it will, if you do it for 1020 30 years, it definitely will. The foundation of your life, when you start to change that around, it takes a while for it to percolate up to the surface of your life. See, most people are concerned so much about the surface of their life, that they neglect the foundation because they think the foundation is disconnected from the surface. No, there's just a delayed reaction might take you five years for the real fruits of the foundation to percolate up to the top. But when they do, your life will become amazing. And people around you will be asking, like, what did you do? What's your secret? What's your technique? What's the magic pill. And inside, you'll kind of laugh and chuckle because you'll be like, well, it wasn't a magic pill or technique, it's not something you could have, like take a shortcut to you can't do it in a week took me five or 10 years to build a foundation and to to cultivate and to nurture it to baby it so that it becomes mature and that it ripens in it fruits. And that's the kind of success that's really solid, the kind of success that nobody can steal from you. You don't lose it through bad luck or having a bad economy or getting fired from your job or something like that. That's really deep rock solid success that's rooted in your being rooted in your being level, it's who you are not some surface possession that you have like a nice house, because you can always you lose your nice house. Another element of this approach of mine is emphasis on wisdom and growth. Versus just pleasant theories, or even getting more money or something like that. So I just said don't focus too much on the utility of it. But also do don't lose the utility aspect to the utility of it is important in the sense that wisdom and growth need to be occurring. As you're going through this process. This process is not slowly increasing your wisdom and your growth and improving the quality of your life. That's a good sign to reevaluate. Whatever you're doing, you probably are doing this process wrong then another element of this process is to do or to use rather metal sources. What are metal sources, metal sources are other people who have studied hundreds of perspectives and hundreds of other sources. And now you're using them as one of your sources. So a meta source or meta perspective is already a perspective or a source that takes into account many perspectives. It's already a holistic sort of source. It's basically a source that's using this method that I'm teaching you here. And it's been using it for many years to develop a big picture. So you take its big picture, and you now combine that with another big picture from another meta source from another meta source from a limited source, and you combine it into your meta meta, big picture. So these are metal sources, so you could use me as a metal source, because I pulled from literally hundreds of sources. And I also pulled from metal sources. So I'm pretty good metaphors. But you can also find other metal sources. And you can find that amount of metal sources. And then you can have your own meta meta source. And the last thing that you got to keep in mind with this approach is that there's way more to reality than meets the eye. There's way more to understand, there's way more to explain the bigger picture, when you finally get it, it's going to be much bigger than you ever imagined possible. And it's always going to be in a state of adjustment and construction. You're never going to have some monolithic big picture, which is just like Okay, that's it. It's locked in stone, here it is, here it is, let me put it on my display case, it's not going to be like that. It's going to be an ever evolving process to the last breath you take in this life. But it just might be more worthwhile and yield to amazing results far beyond anything you imagined by just taking some truth and putting it on your trophy display case. So what I've shared with you here is sort of my meta research approach This is my own personal philosophy, and the principles that I follow to develop my own big picture, to have my own insights about life and then to share them with you. The value of developing this bigger picture is indescribable. It's really tough to articulate, I struggle to articulate it. Because there are subtleties that I can only articulate to somebody who has gone through this process, and who has studied hundreds of sources. And since most people don't do that, because they're fucking lazy, since they want to take the easy way out by just sticking with one tradition. Or by just adopting beliefs from their culture, or their family or whatever other trap they want to fall into. Because they want to take the easy way out. It's hard to communicate the subtleties. But the subtleties are some of the most delicious facets of life will come from this process. It'll be delicious. on an intellectual level, it'll be very satisfying, fulfilling, but it'll also be very practical, in that you will live your life in this amazing way where people will look at you and they'll say, Damn, there's something different about that guy or that girl? Because the way they're living their life, like that's so different. What is it about that person? I wonder what their secret is. And your secret will be so deep and so foundational, that you won't even be able to explain it to them. Because, look, it's taken over an hour. For me just to gloss over this stuff. And I've just glossed over it, you better believe that I could spend 10 hours on this topic. And there will be still more that needs to be said. Right? There's a lot, a lot to what I'm talking about here. This is this is really the foundation of personal growth right here. Even though it doesn't seem like it even though it seems sort of abstract. And maybe you're not sure exactly how to go out and apply it tomorrow. This is the foundation. I want to read you a quote, a metaphor that I really love for how this process of big picture construction works. It's a quote from Otto Neurath, who was a philosopher and logical positivists, of about 100 years ago. And here's what he wrote, quote, We are like sailors who are on the open sea and must reconstruct their ship, but are never able to start a fresh from the bottom, where a beam is taken away, a new one must be put in place at once. And for the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old dreams and the driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. And quote. So what he's talking about here, is he saying that this process of rearranging your web of beliefs, is a recursive process. You can never take your ship, you know, the ship here, you can never take your rotten ship and just drag it ashore. The ship is always at sea, there is no shore, there is no foundation, there is no safe place, there is no one assumption that you can make that's foolproof, and that you never have to question or investigate. You start with this rotten ship. And your object in life is to construct a healthy, structurally sound ship. And so the way you do that is by standing on one plank while you're fixing the other. As you fix one plank, then you get on the other plank and you fix the one you were just standing on. And you keep doing that by moving and fixing and fixing and fixing and fixing and fixing and fixing. And through that process. You will have a beautiful ship in the end. But you can never take for granted that everything on your ship is fixed. Because there might always be some sneaky little plank somewhere there might be some termites and some corner of the ship that you fail to take into account, which might destroy everything. Right? So this means that you always must be vigilant. You can never take any of this for granted. And that your beliefs has to be in constant and perpetual. Construction and this requires energy and effort and vigilance for your entire life. And now the question for you is will you see the value in doing that? Can you envision that? Because you got to have a long time horizon here. We're talking about the whole rest of your life. Basically. Can you envision the valley Are you this? Because you don't know what the details of the value will be. You don't know specifically what this will result in. But you can have an intuition about that maybe this would be an unorthodox approach to life that very few people take. And maybe this will produce some extraordinary results. Maybe. And then you got to ask yourself, Am I willing to commit and to follow all these principles, and to watch myself like a hawk to make sure that I follow through on it, year after year after year, decade, after decade after decade? And as something only you can answer for yourself? All right. Now, let me address some objections here to everything that I said. First objection is beliau. Won't doing all this research lead to stuff like researching stupid things like UFOs? And God knows what other kind of New Age nonsense? My answer is, yes, it will. That is the nature of research is that you don't know where research might lead. So if you want to do a open ended search, you can't know ahead of time, what's worthwhile to investigate and what's not. Otherwise you run into catch 22. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, you think that's something isn't worth researching, you don't research it, and therefore, you have prejudged it and you have no opportunity to ever be corrected on that. Because you already think that what you know, you know, when in fact, you don't? So will this lead to you wasting your time researching some stupid stuff? Sure. That's what research is research, a lot of it is you wasting your time going down dead ends. But that's okay. Because you're not going to be lost down every dead end forever. And you don't need to research every single thing on earth. Just the things that are relevant to your big picture understanding. So will you run into some dead ends? You certainly will, you have to see the bigger picture of this process. And you have to kind of trust that things will gel in the end. And that your time, even though might be wasted in the short term will not be wasted in the long run long term. Right? That's what a good researcher does is take that attitude. Another objection you might have is beliau. Where do you draw the line? I mean, you start talking about UFOs, and conspiracy theories and this and that also the crazy stuff, and where does it end? It sounds like I gotta research for the rest of my life, all this stupid shit. Most of its going to be false. So what do I do? Well, the reality is that you don't know where to draw the line. You don't. That's your position, you were born and you don't know where to draw the fucking line. If you knew where to draw the lines, you'd be done. You'd know everything. But you don't know everything. And you don't know where to draw the lines. So like I said, you're going to have to go down some dead ends, and just loosen your requirement for this thing to be very efficient, highly efficient process, where everything I do leads to some direct, immediate financial result for me or something like that. It's not going to work that way. So if you have that kind of expectation, don't even bother. Don't even bother starting. Another objection is, Billy, oh, isn't there a risk here with this process of believing all sorts of silly, wacky New Age things? Well, this risk is there, no matter what. You might think that just by sticking with mainstream culture, that you avoid the risk of believing silly things. This is not true at all. The only difference is that with mainstream culture, the silly things that you believe, are bullies believe by everybody around you, so they don't feel as silly, because you have the support of your culture. But if you take a look through history, you don't have to be a genius to see how many silly things mainstream culture has believed. And you better believe that today's mainstream culture still believes a lot of stupid shit that's flat out false and very unhealthy and toxic and damaging to to your life. So that this, this risk of believing silly things, this can't be avoided. This is the whole epistemic problem. This is why we're doing epistemology in the first place is because we want to minimize our believing of silly things. And so this process that I outlined for you is the Best process that I know of, at this point in my life, for how to avoid this, it's your best chance. It's not foolproof, you will still be tempted to fall into many of the traps I talked about, even though I've glossed them over here. Another objection might be what Leo? Isn't what you're talking about relativism, the idea that there is no truth and that everything is equally valid. No, not at all. What I'm talking about is not relativism, because even though I'm telling you to sample different perspectives, I am not telling you to take all perspectives equally. And to just come up with an average of all the perspectives you sampled, that would not be correct. We're not averaging perspectives, some perspectives you're gonna explore, you'll explore them for a couple of months, or even a couple of minutes. And you'll realize that it's, it's just wrong, it's wrong. It's false. It's stupid. And so you'll make that determination, you'll move forward. What I'm talking about is not relativism, right, you will find that some perspectives are a lot truer than others. And that is fine. Another objection might be billy-o, why bother with all this? After all, nobody really knows the truth. So is there a point. And I believe I've addressed this already, in that there is a point. But for somebody who has this objection of why bother at all, it just seems like a waste of time and energy, I could do much better things with my time in this life than wasted reading books and embodying different perspectives, and so forth. Well, it's gonna be very difficult for me to convince you because you're overlooking the subtleties. And the subtleties can be very significant. Once they stack up. What I'm claiming is that there will be a snowball effect that gets built every year, the snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as you do this work. And then the subtle effects will have accumulated so much that your entire life will transform, and you will look back on your life. And you'll be like, Oh my god, I can't believe that everybody isn't doing this. This was the best decision I ever made, is to adopt this approach to my life. But it's difficult to explain that to somebody who's just like, oh, Leo, why bother doesn't seem practical, difficult to convince that kind of person. Right? Because they have such a myopic view of their life. And they just want short term results. And that's generally why they won't be successful. Because they, they keep running away from the long view, in all the different things that they tried to do in their life, whether it's business relationships, or something else, you know, a person who has a short term view of things was myopic, he's myopic, everywhere, not just with epistemology, he's myopic, in relationships, and everywhere, and that's why his life is shit. Generally speaking, another objection might be billy-o, why not just pursue enlightenment? And let that solve everything? Why pursue this big picture understanding and taking all these perspectives? That's just all illusion? What's the point of exploring all these different illusions, when we know that enlightenment is the ultimate answer? Again, you don't know that. You don't know that. You think that's the case. But remember, the first position is that you know, nothing. So all the stuff you've heard about enlightenment, even if you've experienced a few glimpses of enlightenment, and all the Masters you've read about, and you've got all these workshops, and retreats, and this and this and that. You don't know, you don't know. Enlightenment could just be another dream within a dream with another dream to be another illusion could be a scam. As far as you know, I'm not saying it is I'm saying from your epistemic position. You don't know. Until you become fully enlightened, you don't know. And even after you become fully enlightened, you don't know. You don't know. If there's more. You don't know if there's some perspective you've missed. You don't know if enlightenment is really the full spectrum. You don't know if there's other practical things besides enlightenment, you don't know. You will never know until you just get on this process and you just follow this process. Right? You just don't know. So be careful about that. You're playing with fire. If there's one thing that enlightenment should have taught you. And I'm not even talking about you becoming aligned, I'm saying just if you learned about alignment, and now you kind of are a believer in lightning, say like, Okay, I know that alignment must be true, even though I haven't experienced it yet. If you're there, wash out. Because here's the law. so that a lot of people that are there are missing. And the lesson is, if enlightenment has taught you anything, it's that everything you thought before could easily be wrong, and you won't know why it's wrong or how it could possibly be that role. So, there could be huge plot twists in life. That's basically what you should learn from the existence of enlightenment. Now, the mistake people make is they think, okay, so if I just get in line that fixes everything. Not necessarily. Keep in mind that there might be another huge plot twist coming after enlightenment. You see that the meta lesson that you learned from enlightenment, it's not to go become enlightened. It's that you got to be really fucking careful about what you believe, and how firmly you believe it. And this notion, you have that okay, now I really got it. Now I really figured it out. Because as soon as you think you've figured it out, that's when you can you've open yourself to the biggest epistemic blunder possible. Now, it might seem as though I'm arrogant in the way I talk about some of these topics. And it might seem like well, Leo, you're talking about like, being humble and not taking any positions on things and being open to stuff and but then you come up here, and you rant about this, and you rant about that, and it seems like you're not following your own advice. Actually, I'm extremely epistemic ly humble. But that's difficult for people to see. Because that's not something that I flaunt, make a distinction between one's manner, the way one speaks, and acts and so forth, and what one actually does, in how they pursue their understanding. So the thing you don't see on the videos, and the thing that I don't talk about that much, is how fucking careful I am. In studying all these perspectives, and how vigilant I am and watching myself like a hawk, knowing that I am my own greatest enemy. I'm not worried about my critics, and people leaving me stupid comments and stuff. That's not what worries me deep down, what worries me deep down inside is myself. And the trickery that I know that I do below and the labyrinth of my mind. I'm acutely aware of all that stuff. So aware that I'm aware that there might be things I'm not aware of. And this makes me very epistemic, epistemic ly humble in practice, even though in outward appearance, I can seem kind of arrogant, and maybe even sometimes you can mistake this for me having a position or being ideological. That's not what it really is. Right? It's very difficult for me to communicate the epistemic humbleness, that I actually embody, this is my greatest strength, I think, is that I really am, I'm seriously willing to consider that I'm rolling on anything. And I don't really care about defending any position. What I care about is just seeing the big picture. I care about the meta perspective. I care about understanding. I care about growing my life in a practical way. I care about getting extraordinary results. And even with all these things, I'm still willing to evaluate and question all of it. There's nothing about myself, or my views of life that I'm not willing to question. Now do I have certain assumptions that I'm working on, of course, you have to, when you're building the boat in the middle of the sea, you got to stand on a plank. You can never land the boat on land. Right? You're always standing on some plank and that plank you're standing on might be rotten. And I'm very aware of that. And what this does, is that this this makes me extremely flexible. This makes me able to study perspectives that I see very few people being able to study. I've encountered quite a few enlightened people. And I don't even see that these people have the kind of open mindedness that I'm talking about here. I'm talking about complete, complete open mindedness completely willing to question everything. This I think is the safest epistemic foundation that one can have in a world where there are no epistemic foundations. So that's the paradox of it. Alright, that's it. I'm done here, kind of a long episode because, boy, this is a juicy topic. But I'm signing off, post me your comments down below, please click the like button for me, share this episode with a friend. And lastly, come check out actualized. Org right here, this is my website, and I have my newsletter there for free, you can stay tuned with new content that I release, I will be developing new forms of content in the future that you might not find out about, if you're just watching me on YouTube, for example. So the newsletter is the best way to, to stay open to all the new announcements, check out the forum there, check out my life purpose course check out the book list. The book list is a very powerful tool for you, if you want to follow up on what I talked about here, you should read at least half the books on my book list, which is close to 100 books. Because I'm not kidding, I do pull from hundreds or not just dozens of sources, I literally pull from hundreds of sources. And I feel like I'm only getting started. There are so many sources I want to pull from, I don't have enough time in the day to read, watch, listen and study and integrate all of them. I need like a whole team of researchers to do that, really. And that's, that's mostly what I'm about these days, you know, I'm not I'm not interested in coaching people one on one. I'm mostly just interested in research. I love to do research in this field of personal development, what are the best techniques, methods and frameworks and concepts that we can discover, to help people raise their consciousness. And so that's what I feel like I'm doing more and more of every single month is just diving more and more into research. And I have a lot of really interesting resource that I'm working on right now. It'll take a few weeks or a few months for me to distill it down and just start to share with it with you here. So, you know, stick with me, because what you will be getting here is you will really be getting a meta meta meta perspective on what life is about, and how to live it in an extraordinary and profound manner. And some of the research I'll share with you in the future will be mind blowing research. And if you think you've heard everything you think you've heard all the most interesting and fascinating and shocking things that Leo is going to say no, there will be plot twists and reversals and really weird oh my god mind blowing shit that will come in the future. So you just got to have faith and stick with me here because reality is a lot weirder and vaster than you ever imagined.