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how open-mindedness works in this episode we're going to be revisiting the classic topic of open mindedness that I've talked about in the past I've referred to it as radical open mindedness this is the master key that you need if you care to understand reality to any significant degree this is your biggest obstacle this is the number one obstacle that people have when it comes to understanding reality and by understanding reality I mean everything all of it every aspect of reality holistically and how all of the different facets fit together and relate to you into your life so if you want to understand yourself at a deep level if you want to understand emotions at a deep level if you understand humanity at a deep level society at a deep level reality science religion spirituality metaphysics philosophy if you want to understand all of this stuff radical open mindedness is the key but what is open mindedness really let's take a deep look openness versus closeness these are features of the mind your mind can either be open or it can be closed and of course this is not a simple binary there's a spectrum of degrees here there are many degrees of open-mindedness and even if you fancy yourself an open-minded person I would challenge you to stick around and keep listening because it's not enough just to be open-minded it's a question of how open-minded are you like really how deeply open-minded are you and chances are if you're following along with me and you've been watching my content for years or for months even you're already you have to be a relatively open-minded person more so than the average person in society but that's still not going to cut it for you to really be able to understand reality at the levels that were interested in here so the I guess the key point of this episode is going to be more experiential than just theoretical I'm gonna give be giving you theory and insights about open-mindedness and so forth that's all good but the most important takeaway I want you to get here is is that openness has certain feel to it and closedness has a certain feel to it and I want to help you to experientially draw a distinction in your mind this is gonna be something you learn here today and you take away with you for the rest of your life if you learn it this distinction is an experiential distinction between the difference of when your mind is open and when your mind is closed and and see we're gonna be looking at the topic of open mindedness here now not just from a macro perspective but from a micro perspective what I mean by that is I'm not so much interested here in whether you're just a open-minded person in general like we could say all that person over there's some religious fanatic fundamentalist and he's close-minded and this person over here she's she's some sort of hippie and she's very open-minded well of course you can categorize people this way but let's get beyond that there's something more important let's get into the micro level of open-mindedness and closed mindedness because it's not that you're just open-minded on all topics equally it's that on every specific instance every situation that your mind comes in contact with every new idea and belief and worldview you're gonna be either open to it or close to it and we want you to be able to notice and to be aware of when your mind is doing what see so don't just rest on your laurels and tell yourself you know pat yourself on the back and tell yourself how open-minded you are because even if you're open minded about some things I guarantee you there's other things that I could tell you that you will be close minded to and it's it's that it's recognizing those cases which is gonna really start to make a difference in your life so let's start drawing this distinction with an exercise this will be the first of several exercises that we do here it's a simple exercise you ready roll up your sleeves try to do this right now all it requires is that you use your mind you're just flexing your mind here so I want you to open your mind to the possibility that your mother hatched from an egg can you do that do it actually do it right now and notice what it feels like to do it open your mind to the possibility that your mother hatched from an egg I'm not joking I want you to actually do it or if you fail to do it then notice that but at least try so what what am I really asking you to do I'm asking you to let go of the fact that your mother was conventionally birthed let go of that because that's what you I've presently believed let go of that as though it never even existed in your mind throw it away and now try on this new fact that she hatched from an egg and try it on seriously not as a joke and see how long you can hold that in your mind and carefully observe what your mind is doing as you're holding it observe how it feels are you open to this possibility are you closed to it if you're open notice how openness feels if you're closed notice how closed in this feels you're either able to do it or not and then of course there's a question of how long you're able to do it you might be able to only do it for 3 seconds or 5 seconds you open your mind of the possibility and then your mind shuts down and says oh well it's ridiculous that's crazy why am I even doing this as this isn't worth my time this is just silly armchair philosophy it's not true it so it can't possibly be true it's ridiculous okay then that's what happened so I want you to start to notice when your mind gets attached to an idea or a perspective or a belief or a worldview or a position just generally speaking this is one instance of it but your mind does this all the time with other examples and I deliberately picked an outlandish example here because I want to separate the content of the example from your ability to be open or closed about it these are two separate issues we'll be talking a little bit more about that as we go on here but I want you to notice what attachment actually feels like what it feels to be attached to an idea I want you to notice what resistance to an idea feels like I want you to notice any excuses and rationalizations that your mind comes up with - opening up to some idea so what does closed nough steel like you should feel a distinct sort of emotional attachment there should be a resistance a sort of righteousness and a sort of arrogance that comes with sticking to your old position when the mind is closed it doesn't even want to consider a new possibility and that's really all that open-mindedness means is the willingness to consider a new possibility and specifically what I'm interested in is the consideration of radical new possibilities possibilities that are beyond your conventional culture social norms and your paradigms of what's physically possible see and that's when the mind really becomes resistant and as it becomes resistant it becomes defensive and as it becomes defensive it erect Saul sorts of defense mechanisms one of which is that it becomes righteous so if you're not able to open your mind to the possibility that your mother has from an egg you get righteous about you say oh well that's that's just stupid Leo you're an idiot for asking me to even consider such a possibility it can't possibly be true so it's a waste of my time to even consider it there's a sort of righteousness and arrogance there also what she noticed that it feels dirty it feels impure it feels neurotic you get agitated you can even even get hot there can be sort of a hot sensation when it comes to opening your mind to a new potentially threatening possibility you can feel threatened you can feel offended these are all common defense mechanisms of course when you're closed it feels like an unwillingness to let go it feels like I have to drag you kicking and screaming towards a new possibility you don't want to go there willingly you demand that I drag you there you demand evidence and proof and you demand an explanation of why you should go to this new possibility another common defense mechanism which is part of the self-righteousness is people with a closed mind they they tend to go on the counter-attack because you know when it comes to the ego line the best defense is often a good strong offense as they say and so people who are closed-minded have you noticed that oftentimes they are the ones that then try to prove themselves or their position or their ideology the most to you they try to convince you that they're right so that's that's very characteristic of closed mindedness the mind will want to lecture me like leo let me tell you why you're wrong all the ways that you're wrong and why you're asking me to take on this OOP civility let me tell you why I shouldn't this sort of attitude it's an attitude of I'm right and that what I have as my old position is just a fact it's just reality like that so the closed mind tends to become argumentative it can become obnoxious it can become emotional because this is coming from a sort of emotionally charged sense of defensiveness and threat it becomes easily judgmental it's often loud mouthed it makes a lot of excuses it justifies it rationalizes it can become hostile it can become violent even when pushed into a corner it creates distractions it uses what about isms it loves to blame and it loves to engage in projection these are all classic symptoms of a closed mind so notice when I ask you to consider that your mother hatched from an egg first of all were you able to do it and if you weren't did any of these come up for you if it did it's okay you didn't really fail anything it's just that you got an experiential taste of what closed-mindedness feels like and that's very important in fact in a sense this is what I want here because some of you might be so open-minded that you might be able to just do this exercise and ace it but the problem then is that you don't get an experiential feel for the distinction between a closed at an open mind and we want you to get that feel so if this example won't do it for you there there will be others in this episode that might but you might also need to just pause and come up with your own examples of something some example of some intellectual position that you're just unwilling to open your mind to and just to see what that feels like see what that resistance that impurity that neuroticism what it feels like it feels there's something dirty about it there's something that doesn't feel quite right you might not be able to pinpoint it or put your finger or fully articulated but it just doesn't sit quite right with you that's close-mindedness now in contrast to that how does open-mindedness feel it feels light calm cool easy chill free unattached relaxed unafraid comfortable with letting go of the old position because it has nothing to lose there's a sort of a sense of a freedom of like oh sure I can just jump between different positions I don't need to cling to my old position let me just consider it there's a sort of a curiosity an innate curiosity and a desire to explore new possibilities so when I tell you to consider that your mother has from an egg it could be like rather than coming up with excuses for why you shouldn't an open-minded person might go oh that's interesting that's an interesting idea I've never even thought about that let me consider that and an open-minded person might even go further it might even say well that's very interesting because you know how do I even know how my mother was born did I ask her or did I just assume my entire life that she was born like other people what if she was hatched from an egg and I didn't even ask her and she never even and never even occurred to her to tell me see that's how it open-minded person would potentially react to such an exercise so notice that difference open-mindedness I want you understand here very important don't get lost in the content of the examples this is not about the content this is about the structure see my prior episode called content versus structure were I explained that distinction but basically open-mindedness is a meta skill it's an ability to feel when you're being closed and the ability to it's sort of an awareness you're aware of it and then you you can let it go rather than being driven by it see and this meta skill it doesn't have anything to do with a particular fact or the truthfulness of a particular statement or belief rather it's a it's a general skill that your mind can develop some minds are more closed others are more open those that are more open are able to let go of old positions and explore new ones without getting emotionally attached to them that's a skill that's a skill we want to develop you see and this skill is independent of what we're considering we could be talking about religion we could be talking about science we could be talking about politics we could be talking about sexuality or relationships we could be talking about aliens we could be talking about conspiracy theories or whatever and some of those things could be true some of those things could be false but this meta skill that's the key thing that you need in order to be able to navigate all of these different domains and much more in a an effective and truthful manner now of course many skeptics and so forth and rational people here will say but Leo I will only open my mind if you give me sufficient proof so Leah I'm all for open-mindedness but I'm not gonna be so open-minded that I'm just gonna consider such ridiculous things as my mother hatching from eggs or the earth being flat or some conspiracy theory or something like that if you're gonna make such an extraordinary claim you need to provide the proof and the evidence and then I will open my mind but that's closed mindedness that's what I want you to recognize that position that was just articulated that's closed mindedness see the key inside here that you're missing is that open-mindedness is independent of an actually prior to proof and truth see this is a very common and naive mistake that even many scientifically minded people make is they think that they should only be willing to open their mind to things that are cruel but this puts the cart before the horse and gets the whole situation backwards because if you aren't open-minded in the first place you will never accept the truth because you're not going to give it a fair chance you will never consider the proof and the evidence you're not going to accept it because to accept proven evidence first you have to be open-minded you get that that's very very important many scientifically minded and rationally minded and atheistic lis minded and skeptically minded people get this part wrong so even when we're considering a topic like Flat Earth for example you might say well provide the proof and then I'll open my mind no first you open your mind then we'll see and we'll look at the proof and the evidence and we'll evaluate a situation from an open-minded position you see because you're assuming that if I provide you with proof and evidence that you will just sort of be able to evaluate that evidence and proof fairly objectively and if it's true you'll be able to accept it but that's that's not a safe assumption that in fact is not what you're going to be able to do if you're closed-minded only an open-minded person is able to do that but you're closed-minded in this case so notice that a lot of times science masquerades actually as closed mindedness and there are of course many many examples throughout the history and epistemology of science if we go through the history of science we see many examples of scientists who behaved and very closed-minded way which [ __ ] the progress of science one such example of courses when it came to Copernicus into Galileo and other people in that camp who did groundbreaking research into the motion of the earth around the Sun it was conventional wisdom 500 years ago that the planet was stationary why was it considered stationary because all proof and evidence from our direct experience suggests that the planet is stationary it's not moving if it was moving we would feel it what could be more obvious and simple than that so of course most people's minds were closed to the possibility that the planet was moving especially at some ridiculous velocity which is how it moves so it actually took a very special kind of mind a very open mind to be able to see that despite the apparent proven evidence that the truth is actually the contrary it's the opposite see it took a genius scientific intellect and really back then it was philosophers who were doing this work science hardly existed back then it was part of philosophy is called natural philosophy basically and so philosophers which were the deepest intellectuals in Europe were sitting around and they were thinking really open-mindedly at least some of them were about some of these possibilities and they open their minds to the possibility that wait a minute what if it's moving at such a velocity that it's so constant that we can't tell the difference after all what frame of reference would we use see this is now requiring a relativistic conception of reality not an absolute istic one and so now we open ourselves to the possibility that maybe it is moving but we can't tell because we really don't have a good frame of reference and sure enough that's exactly how it works but you see people in that time would have argued against the motion of the earth by saying stuff like well but if I'm sitting in a carriage and I'm driving down the road which is how people got around back then or maybe out a horse there were no cars there were no trains back then and I'm moving I can tell it's obvious I can feel my motion so if the earth was moving I should be able to feel it too and clearly we don't feel it so therefore it's not moving but of course the problem with that sort of line of reasoning is that you know the carriage is not moving at a constant velocity now we can go into a plane or into a train or into a car which is moving relatively constant and isn't accelerating or decelerating and we don't really notice that it's moving at all so that was just you know that was just sort of a very simple naive kind of oversight that could be made based on direct experience so anyways the moral of the story and there are many of these sorts of examples throughout the entire history of science this is just but one a very classic one the moral of the story is that first you have to be open-minded and then there's a possibility for the proof and the evidence to convince you otherwise to get you to change your position see if you're immediately close-minded to it what are you assuming you're assuming that your entire sort of paradigm of reality is correct but that's precisely what can easily be wrong because you didn't actually spend a lot of deep time developing your metaphysical and epistemic framework of reality your worldview wasn't something you sat down and you carefully developed over decades and years of experimentation you just picked it up from your culture it's basically just dogma you assumed it and you never even thought or considered any alternatives and now you're just stuck on it defending it blindly and therefore of course you're closed-minded about it what I also want you to notice here is that it's possible to be closed-minded and right and it's possible to be open-minded wrong see for example you can be closed-minded about Flat Earth you can just completely refuse to even consider Flat Earth as a possibility and you might be right in the end that might be true the planet is probably round and so that instance then gets you to think like well okay so it worked here so I can just keep doing that and that turns into a trap and many scientists especially fall into this trap they think that as long as they're right and science is factually right in many instances that's why Sciences is so valuable and we appreciate it so much and we tend to give it so much credibility is because it has a lot of factual correctness to it but then we get lulled into a sort of a false sense of complacency thinking that well as long as science is always factually right we can just be closed-minded about it be dogmatic about science and therefore we're being scientific when actually we're not being scientific we're being uh we're being dogmatic it's also possible to be open-minded about something but then ultimately wrong for example you can be open-minded about Flat Earth you can consider it you can go and research it and even you can launch yourself into space and actually take a look is the earth round or flat and and you might be wrong you might think it's gonna be flat and it turns out to be round and you're wrong but the open-mindedness really was the important part so my point here is is that being open-minded is more important than being right because being right is just one instance of getting something correct whereas open-mindedness is a is a much broader attitude and meta skill which will be applied in many many instances for the rest of life so while sure you can get a few things wrong here and there you know factual inaccuracies happen even with the best of us that's not a big deal you can overcome various kinds of mistakes and inaccuracies as long as you're open-minded but if you're closed-minded and you get something wrong you're gonna be stuck with it for the rest of your life see so that's the more important factor here people naively assume that they can reach the truth even when their mind is closed a lot of scientists and materialists and atheists and rationalist and skeptics fall into this trap this is the trap that these debunkers fall into is they think that well if something is true then surely it must be so true that no matter how skeptical I am it will overwhelm my skepticism and it will just prove itself to me beyond a shadow of a doubt and my role in this process is irrelevant this is extremely naive and completely ignores the huge factor that psychology plays in discovering truth the reality is is that denial is such a strong psychological force that if you are willing to deny something if you are willing to deny the truth you can deny the truth successfully almost in all circumstances it's shocking how powerful the human mind is at denying truth you would think that well shouldn't there be a certain amount of proof and logic and evidence that will convince anybody and the answer is absolutely not if you want to be in denial you can be in denial for the rest of your life about almost any fact about reality that's how strong your mind is at denial and it's only when you appreciate that that then you start to see the importance of open-mindedness the if you get it stuck in your mind that something isn't true or something is impossible and that that's lodged in there and then you become a skeptic or a denier or a debunk ER or a rat you become rational about it you trying to develop logic that justifies why it's impossible why it can't be true then that's gonna become a self-fulfilling prophecy for you because your mind will reject and ignore all evidence to the contrary and no evidence will be able to get through to you see proof and evidence requires experimentation experimentation and exploration and these are only possible when you're open and willing to experiment and to explore which requires open-mindedness even something like the fact that the moon exists can easily be denied by a closed-minded person you would think well how is that possible the moon is up there you can just look and see the moon in the night sky there it is the full moon is so obvious who could possibly deny it aha but that assumes that the person you're trying to prove it to is open enough to actually be willing to tilt his head up and point his eyes and follow your finger to the moon and actually look at it with his eyes that's that's a big assumption because if someone is truly closed-minded you might say well there's a moon and all you have to do is look at my finger look I'm pointing at it up there there it is just look at it and the person will not do that and their rationale for not looking at your finger and looking up at the skies they will say that's preposterous there can't possibly be a moon up there so it would be a waste of my time to even look and in this way they're completely trapped and they will never discover the moon but they're so oblivious to this Mehta structural process to how their own mind is shutting them off from reality that that they think that they're actually being truthful and they think that they're actually being open-minded because in their mind the way they rationalize is themselves to say well but if there was a moon surely it must be so obvious that I would know it by now why don't I know it if it exists surely I wouldn't have to actually tilt my eyes up into the sky to see a moon if a moon existed right this is essentially how people think I mean it's preposterous in this example I'm exaggerating but it's really not that far off same sorts of problems were encountered by Galileo when he said that there were moons around Jupiter his fellow intellectuals and philosophers didn't believe him he told him looking to this telescope that I invented looking the telescope and you'll see the moons and do you think they looked in that telescope of course not they denied the validity of a telescope and of course that still happens to this day I tell people go take some psychedelics you'll discover some truth then of course people tell me oh but psychedelics it's all just a hallucination why would I take psychedelics and they never do because they're getting this whole thing backwards if you want to understand something like psychedelics you can't understand it from the position you're currently in first you have to open your mind then you have to realize that oh it's a new kind of experience I have to go experience it then I can judge it after the fact the problem is you're judging it before the fact which means your mind is closed see proof requires experimentation and exploration which is exactly what your mind doesn't want to do how can you do the work to prove or verify a thing which you believe is impossible which your paradigm tells you is impossible which your metaphysics or your epistemology tells you is impossible are you gonna will be willing to invest time and energy and money and resources into into doing that proof now of course not and proof and here's another thing that that many so-called materialists and scientists and rationals and skeptics don't really understand about the notion of proof is that proof often time requires a lot of work proof doesn't always come easily sometimes you've got to work for years to prove a thing sometimes it costs millions and billions of dollars to prove a thing so actually there's very good reason why many things that are true haven't been proven because proof is hard work and are you willing to do the work to prove a thing that you think is impossible or highly unlikely no and that's exactly how the truth hides from you because you're being lazy and you're being close-minded and you're assuming a bunch of stuff see if you know for a fact that God is a man-made myth you can never test God if you know for a fact that Christianity is the best truest religion and Jesus Christ was the was the highest profit you can never test the truth of that if you know for a fact that reality is a material objective system that exists independent of your mind you can never test that see you have to open yourself to alternative possibilities what if God is not a man-made myth what if Christianity is not the best what if Jesus Christ didn't even exist what if material reality is just something you're imagining see if you open your mind to those possibilities now there's a possibility of you going and testing and maybe finding some proof for it but keep in mind that necessarily happen easily might take years may take decades I take a lot of work it might be difficult emotionally and in other ways as well so let's consider some more examples here we're gonna go through maybe a dozen examples in a sort of rapid-fire all I want you to do is I want you to just open your mind to as many of these as possible if you can and if you can't that's okay just try to open your mind and notice how it feels to either succeed in opening your mind here or resisting it and closing down okay some of these examples will be easier some of them will be harder some of them will be quite outlandish on purpose alright so try to do this and you could always rewind and come back and do this over and over again so number one open your mind to the possibility that Australia is a hoax by which I mean that if you actually take a plane and fly over Australia to where on the map you would normally suppose there was Australia it will just be ocean there would be no land there you couldn't land consider that possibility and if you're Australian and you live in Australia well just pick a different country pick at your pan or pick Greenland and just consider that they're hoaxes and that if you flew over those countries there would be no land there so can you do that try notice any resistance or excuses for why that can't be true next example consider the possibility that trump is a secret genius and that actually he's highly intelligent he knows exactly what he's doing and that every all of his bumbling and mumbling and all of his shenanigans that you see ought to be all of it is just an act and he's just acting that way in order to guide mankind to the next evolution some of you Trump supporters you you're already in total agreement with me on that one right well for you consider the opposite possibility that Trump is a total [ __ ] [ __ ] has no idea what he's doing hoping your mind at that possibility notice what resistance you have open your mind of the possibility that World War two never happened open your mind to the possibility that the Egyptian religion was the only true religion on the planet and that all other ones are false now let me just pause here to really explain what I mean by taking this on as a possibility when you're taking on this Egyptian religion example as a possibility like you're really opening yourself up to the fact that this is true that's what I mean when you actually do this and your mind is capable of doing this there's a sort of a shift that happens you used to see the world in this one way and now you open your mind to this alternative possibility it's almost like an alternative reality or an alternative universe where it's like whoa wow that would be amazing what if what if the Egyptian religion was the only true one wow if I like seriously consider that for a moment that feels very different then where I was just a minute ago with my old position now of course it may not be true but that's a separate factor we're not interested in what's true we're only interested right now in showing you what it feels like to open your mind you see that's separate from whether something is true or not a thing doesn't have to be true for you to open your mind to it that's the critical distinction that I'm trying to teach you open your mind to the possibility that you can become a millionaire not as a theory not as a hypothetical not as a pipe dream not by winning the lottery but actually you can you really feel yourself being a millionaire that that's realistic for you that you can actualize that try that see how that feels for many people that's a radical possibility can you open your mind to the possibility of attracting a really beautiful girlfriend or boyfriend for many people that's a radical possibility they have all sorts of excuses and reasons for why it's just not possible but forget all those and just open your mind for the next minute to the possibility that you can do it how does that feel notice whether excuses or resistance comes up notice your mind closing down open your mind to the possibility that God exists or doesn't exist whichever is the opposite of what you hold right now so if you feel that God exists I want you to open your mind to the possibility that God does not exist and if you believe that God doesn't exist open your mind of the possibility that God does exist open your mind to the possibility that you're fundamentally mistaken about God notice how that feels of course it might be taboo in your culture or in your religion or even in your academic institution to take on this position that I'm asking you to take on if you're a respectable scientist working in some major university taking on the idea that God might exist might be threatening to your career it might be very taboo in that subculture notice that of course here if of course if your Islamic taking on the idea that Allah doesn't exist that's also very taboo but do it anyways drop the fear or just open your mind to the possibility see next open your mind to the possibility that UFOs are real and that they are flying around out there and that they're actually inhabited by aliens there's aliens and those crafts open your mind to the possibility that science and atheism are fundamentally wrong about reality you see closed mindedness is not just a problem of religious fanatics we all know religious fanatics are closed-minded what else is new well what else is new what's more news to people is discovering that actually scientists and atheists are very dogmatic and closed-minded as well there's a lot of things that science is not willing to open its mind to which actually inhibits Sciences ability to do new high-quality science because fundamentally science is not about taking one position science is about the exploration of reality and discovering whatever possibilities are out there but you can only explore those possibilities seriously if you're open to them and there's a long history of of ignorant closed-minded scientists who resisted exploring new aspects of reality and therefore they held back science it took some new scientists to come along to challenge conventions and to to really question to really be open-minded to make the new breakthroughs open your mind to the possibility that evil does not exist at all that is just a fabrication of your mind that means that the most evil thing you can imagine imagine that it's not actually evil open your mind of that possibility next open your mind to the possibility that your memories are imaginary that means your memory of childhood all that time you spent with your mother and your father and your brother and your sister and whatever that all of those are just imaginary you're just hallucinating those they didn't actually happen can you open your mind to that now open your mind to the possibility that your country is evil whatever country you're from whatever country you love what if your country is actually the most evil country on the planet open your mind now to that possibility how does that feel there might be some resistance to that one next open your mind to the possibility that you will get reincarnated after your death as a rapist consider that possibility can you just sit with that without resisting it open your mind to the possibility that Hitler was actually a force for good in the world consider that possibility seriously consider it like what if that was actually true what would that mean you see here part of the challenge with this open-mindedness business is that sometimes to be open-minded to such a significant possibility what it does it makes you have to reevaluate your entire scheme of the world because here you are you grew up thinking that Hitler was the the evil one and you know he started World War two for all sorts of selfish reasons and then he was defeated and all of that was good and you know good prevailed over evil bla bla bla bla bla you believed all these stories and now all the sudden you discover or you just even open your mind to the possibility that Hitler was actually a force of good and in the world and now whoa it's like wait a minute if if that's true that means all the other stuff I thought was true is wrong are somehow mistaken I got to go back and figure that out what what is really going I gotta think through my history think through my schooling got a question society question culture question a lot of stuff and see that's exactly what you probably don't want to do which is why you just find it much easier to close off the possibility that Hitler was actually a force for good in the world of course I'm not saying this is true all I care about is opening your mind to this possibility next imagine the possibility that Jesus Christ never existed that he was just a fictional character that was invented by other people whoa does that change your perspective on things does that change your perspective on spirituality on Christianity on enlightenment on awakening next consider the possibility that the Buddha was not fully enlightened oh that's not possible but how do you know how do you know did you meet the Buddha are you yourself fully enlightened how do you know what full enlightenment even is you just assume didn't you isn't that all you did is you just assumed the Buddha the Buddha was fully enlightened now I'm not here saying he he was or he wasn't I'm just interested in opening your mind to this possibility so those are our list of examples of course you can keep doing this exercise forever you can find thousands of such examples and I recommend you play around with this a bit more on your own but I just want you to notice for now with these examples notice what openness feels like notice what closedness feels like and draw that experiential distinction between the two truth is not the issue here but the issue here is resistance and denial the issue is how your mind distorts reality based upon preconceived prejudices and biases and what it needs to be true see when your mind needs something to be true it will fudge the facts and skew them and distort them to create the picture that you need to be true that's what scientists rationalists atheists and materialists and skeptics don't really understand that's also of course what religious people don't understand that's what New Age people and many spiritual people don't understand they don't understand the power of the mind to distort perception to create precisely the sort of image or scenario or worldview that you want you'd have to be very unbiased and objective in order to avoid those distortions see my episode called self bias for more about that topic it's important that when you're opening your mind to these new possibilities that you really take the possibilities as serious not just merely as mental masturbation or armchair philosophy but like actually consider it now of course the common objection that comes up here is but Leo open-mindedness this is so dangerous because you're asking me to believe in all this crazy stuff and then what am I gonna do I'm gonna become a flat earther I'm gonna become some kind of cult follower I'm gonna turn into a religious fanatic or some new ager or some loose minded person but actually these people are closed-minded they're not open-minded people a flat earther is not an open-minded person he's a close-minded person a cult follower thought an open-minded person closed-minded person think of examples from history of closed-minded people flat earthers religious fundamentalists cult leaders racist white supremacist bigots homophobes transphobes nationalists nazis hitler the spanish inquisition x' those who killed jesus anti-vaxxers climate change deniers conspiracy theorists libertarians right-wingers read pillars all sorts of bad scientists ignorant parents terrorists these were not open-minded people these are closed minded people do you want to be like these people or do you want to be open-minded open-mindedness this is the mistake people make is they think that open-mindedness means that now I'm gonna start believing in stupid things no believing in stupid things as closed mindedness see if you're open-minded you don't need to believe in anything very strongly because you're willing to just explore the entire intellectual landscape in a detached fashion coolly without much bias or prejudice you're willing to explore stuff and then what happens is that the truth can hit you whereas if you lack closed mindedness what happens is that you find the first one or two beliefs or worldviews that you resonate with you laugh Shawn to them you sort to believe in them you closed your mind around them and then that's it you're stuck for the rest of your life and the truth is never able to hit you open-mindedness really is a it means mental flexibility it means detachment and intellectual fearlessness closed mindedness is generated by fear attachment the desire for power survival and the ego mind closed mindedness comes from a certain agenda that your mind has whereas open-mindedness is free of agenda you're just willing to explore reality without needing it to be any particular way and it's really only through that process that you'll ever arrive at truth notice that the mind has an inertia to it it accretes over time like a snowball rolling down a hill it adds more and more mass it becomes bigger and it develops a sort of momentum of its own and then what happens is that once the mind is sufficiently big enough it struggles to change itself it's very difficult for the mind to then change itself fundamentally the mind can make changes on the periphery of the snowball but the very core of the snowball is so densely packed and it's so integral to the structure of the snowball that is very difficult to penetrate through to it and to change the insides of it I suggest that what has happened with your mind it took the first 20 years of your life or so to build up this snowball which was built up in a certain culture that you grew up in it was really just an accretion of cultural beliefs and opinions and assumptions you accreted all of those and then that formed the core of your mind and then from age 20 onwards you're basically living your life rolling downhill this massive inertia and now when it comes to really using your mind to be able to explore reality you can't do it because the mind struggles to change itself think of open mindedness as the minds willingness to change itself the minds willingness to explore new ways that it could be that it could see the world a closed mind doesn't want to explore new ways to change itself it doesn't want to see the world in new ways it's focused rather on entrenching and defending its existing ways of seeing the world because your life has actually been built upon the ways in which you see the world you see for example your career or your a marriage or your relationship with your children or your relationship to business or to politics or to science or to your religion or to your church all of these relationships these are real world relations it's not philosophy now we're talking about real world relationships and situations that you have upon which hinge your ability to earn money to have sex to have positive emotions to have friends and so forth all of these things hinge upon your worldview you see so we're talking about changing worldviews we're not just talking about armchair philosophy like we're sitting somewhere having a purely hypothetical discussion about something no we mean that if we change your worldviews sufficiently enough we're gonna change all those very real tangible aspects of your life you might no longer be able to live in the same country anymore you may no longer be able to in the same house with the same people you may no longer be able to be married to the same spouse that you used to be because now your world you has changed so much that you couldn't live with yourself to live with the same people in the same country in the same house going to the same job doing the same things that you did see so of course people are very resistant to changing their worldviews because they fear what this new world view what kind of repercussions it would have for their real life and they're attached to their real life you're attached to your friends your spouse to your children to your job to your house to your country to your religion to all this stuff and of course changing all that stuff is uncomfortable and changing your mind is uncomfortable admitting you're wrong is uncomfortable admitting that you've wasted 10 or 20 years of your life going to church praying to some false god that's uncomfortable admitting that you've invested 20 years into science studying some sort of scientific field which is fundamentally flawed based upon flawed metaphysical or epistemic assumptions that's very painful and uncomfortable and you don't know where that will place you in the future you don't know you're gonna have to quit your job and then what what are you gonna do you don't know how are you gonna support your family how you gonna feed your kids you don't know so you see all of this seems like just philosophy but it's actually much much more serious it's intimately tied with your survival see my critical two-part series called understanding survival where we talk about that so fundamentally open-mindedness is about the flexibility and freedom of your mind how free is your mind on a scale of one to ten how rigid or flexible is your mind and I want you to contemplate this is a bit of a homework assignment is what are the problems that arise from having a rigid mind see how many problems in society you can trace back to having the rigid mind how many problems in politics within religion within science within business how many personal problems can you trace back to having a rigid mind problems in your relationships emotional problems problems with money problems with your career problems with your weight loss whatever how many of those ultimately root themselves in having a rigid mind you'll see that most of them do then that gets you to now appreciate the the importance of flexibility of mind which now gets you to see the importance of radical open mindedness notice what it feels like to jump and explore between different points of view and perspectives without believing in any particular one this is a meta ability it's a rare ability that few human beings cultivate it's not really taught well in school or in church or in business usually our society teaches us some one preferred point of view one preferred philosophy one preferred ideology whether that be in business at school at work whatever because usually exploring different points of view this takes time it doesn't give you immediate payoff it's not immediately profitable for example if you want to become enlightened the fastest path could be to just go and pick one school of thought about enlightenment one spiritual school and just do everything they tell you to do and don't consider any other school or any other teaching just pick one teacher one guru stick to him and there you go and that's what most people do but of course you see the problem with this is that what if you pick the wrong one how would you know after all how would you know you've picked the right one because the only way honestly you could know if you picked the right one is if you've explored the ball then you're in a position where you can evaluate them you can contrast compare them and then you can pick the right one and sort of like shopping for a vacuum cleaner how do you know you got the best deal only if you shopped around at many stores then you can have a sense of the fact that you got the best deal but if you are just gonna go and buy only one vacuum cleaner the first one that you see that you lay your eyes on chances are pretty good you might get fleeced see and that's exactly how people get themselves into religious and spiritual cults is that they just assume that well this gurus right Juan this religions are i-1 they just go full in on all in on that they don't consider any other alternatives and then they end up getting themselves screwed and this even happens when you pick a relatively good and lightened teacher you could pick some enlightened teacher and follow him completely but the problem will still be that any limitations or weaknesses or biases that that enlightened teacher has they will transfer and rub off on to you because you're not thinking for yourself you're just blindly following him this is the problem that I have with people who just blindly follow the Buddha or blindly follow Christ or blindly follow Mooji or Rupert Spira or Eckhart Tolle it's not that Eckhart Tolle or Rupert spear are bad teachers or bad people they're not but if you think that they're going to give you the full scope of what spiritual work is you're in for a rude awakening they won't they're going to give you a partial picture and if you're not willing to explore if you're not intellectually curious and open-minded enough to consider possibilities like well maybe Rupert's spirit is not at the highest level of realization I mean maybe he is but maybe he isn't but if you're not open to that possibility you're stuck you see and there's no way you could know unless you go around and you explore and you try different things but when you do that there's a cost to that the cost is time energy and confusion it's confusing to consider many different points of view you don't get that immediate sense of certainty and resolution because if you just go devote yourself to one guru and you just say okay that's my guru and I'm just gonna do everything he says and just he's the most enlightened one and that's it and there's nothing there's nothing I'm gonna miss by by being fully devoted to him I'm that's gonna take me all the way to the highest awakening if that's what you believe from the very GetGo first of all notice that's just a belief it's just an assumption there's no proof for that you didn't actually derive that through experimentation and exploration you just assumed it why did you assume it because it's a very convenient assumption you need to do a lot less work now you can just blindly follow that person like a sheep and then you won't even know what you've missed because you've closed yourself up off to other possibilities so jumping around between different points of view is a meta ability it's a rare ability and it's something that closed-minded people are fundamentally incapable of they're incapable of switching points of view on a dime if they could do that they would be radically open-minded people and it can be confusing and disorienting to rapidly change points of view because the points of view they all clash and contradict each other and then you don't know who's right which point of view is superior to which one should I be using this point of view as the highest one or that one you don't know and who do you ask can you go and ask some guru to tell you which point of view is the best one well no because if you ask some guru that assumes that you take his point of view is the absolute one so see you're sort of left in this um in this sea of confusion in relativity and then most people don't like that because the mind loves certainty the mind wants a sense of direction something tangible that it can bite onto and so that's usually what it does is it it isn't it doesn't want to be swimming in this sea of uncertainty so it just picks a thing sticks to it and then convinces itself that that's the right course and I'm not saying you can't get results that way you can get results if you're lucky and you happen to choose the right person the right guru the right school maybe you will go all the way to full awakening or whatever maybe you'll earn billions of dollars if you choose the right business guru maybe you will have sex with hundreds of women if you choose the right dating coach or whatever but also you could choose some cult leader who will guide you towards something very harmful and how will you know who's the cult leader who's not only through the experience gained through exploring different points of view and being open-minded if you happen to be a rather open-minded person by default which you probably are if you're following my content then be careful with the following mistake this is a great mistake that open-minded people make this is a mistake that I've made in my life because I'm I tend to be rather open-minded by default is that as it open-minded person you tend to assume that other people are as open-minded as you are and you tend to assume that it will if it's easy for you to think relativistically and jump between different points of view that other people can do it too and here's that's the mistake no they can't the majority of mankind is that such a level of cognitive development that they are incapable of jumping between different points of view the way that you and I and that doesn't mean they're evil people it just is what it is and even if you are open-minded you can still appreciate that there are other aspects of life that you're not open-minded about like you could be open-minded within the realm of spirituality but then you're gonna be closed-minded within some other sphere you see like I said you have to really look at on a case-by-case basis get really micro with it one of the things I want you to take away from this episode I want you to start to feel and to notice in every instance where your mind is being closed you have to develop that feeling ability by going through these exercises by self reflecting by doing some meditation whatever some kind of mindfulness work it's especially helpful when you're in a kind of a ideological debate or an argument with somebody a friend a family member somebody on some online forum whatever here is some ideological debate it's really important to notice when you get wrapped up emotionally in that debate and you start to defend your position and then you start to notice so how it feels kind of dirty your mind is kind of closing down and you're just trying to defend that position even though now you can almost tell there's a deeper layer of your mind which kind of knows that you're you're being ideological and you're going too far and you're pushing your position too much you're not really hearing the other side you're not really considering the other point of view but you just keep pushing and pushing and pushing you've been there we've all been there even the best and most open-minded of us have been there and it's in those moments that I want you to awaken and to realize oh this is what I'm doing this is that close-mindedness stuff that Leo was talking about I'm being defensive I'm going on the counter-attack I'm being argumentative why am i doing that and then get curious about that and explore deeper that is what you got it that's the work that you do to become open minded I did a lot of that work when I was a teenager when I was doing philosophy just by myself and that's ultimately what allowed me to get to the point where I'm at today is doing that work most people cannot switch points of view easily in the same way that most people simply can't juggle they didn't learn how they never practiced it nobody taught them this stuff is generally not taught in school why does the mine tend to get closed because you have something to lose in letting go of a belief or a point of view your beliefs and points of views are not just frivolous things they are intimately tied with your survival so to let go of a belief or a point of view usually means a threat to your survival and of course when you feel threatened you get scared and when you're scared you get defensive and then by that point truth has completely flown out the window now you're not really following the truth now you're just defending some bias you have because you need it to turn out some particular way because that's what you need in order to keep feeding your family or to keep maintaining your friends or to sustain your marriage or whatever see once the mind constructs an identity out of a belief or a worldview then the mind becomes closed about it because anything you create an identity out of anything you attach yourself to it feels like it's you so if you take a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim and you ask them to stop believing in their prophet and in their holy book they can't do it they literally can't do it because it's such a huge part of their identity because it's been so brainwashing to them it's such a huge part of their identity losing it feels like losing a part of themselves and so of course their mind becomes closed to it and again this is not exclusive to just religious fanatics this is also true of scientists take a scientist like I don't know Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sean Carroll or Richard Dawkins take one of these scientists and and you'll see that they suffer from the exact same problem because they've created an identity out of science especially this guy Neil deGrasse Tyson he's created such a huge identity and career out of science that his identity his career his life his family his ability to feed his children if he has them I don't know it probably he does I assume all of them are this is all so intertwined his celebrity his fame his status his money his sex all of it is intertwined so much with this you see it's such an incestuous relationship that he can't seriously question science because if he ever seriously questioned science his whole world would crumble he would have an existential crisis he would find himself sitting in a dark corner in his room with a revolver playing Russian roulette because he would have such an existential crisis you see how are you that way in your life so Neil deGrasse Tyson's mind is closed to certain things now generally he's open mind about many things but he's also closed-minded to many things higher things I say mystical things non-dual things so his mind is closed [Music] because the enemy of the great is the good when you have a good worldview it's hard to drop it for a better world view for an awesome world view for an infinite world view for something beyond worldview entirely see because your life hinges on it the minds job remember is to construct reality the mind doesn't just think about reality the mind is actively engaged in the process of constructing reality so one of the reasons that it gets so rigid is in order to fulfill its function of construction in order for the mind to construct reality effectively it has to construct reality and then deny that it constructed reality why does it have to deny it because if it admits that it constructed the reality then what it calls reality doesn't really feel like reality anymore it feels like an illusion it feels like a fabrication see science a scientist doesn't want to admit that he's fabricating science he wants to say that no no no no Leo I didn't fabricate gravity gravity is something that's out in the world I just discovered it I'm just reporting facts that's not what's actually happening you are fabricating gravity in such profound ways you don't even comprehend how you're doing it but that's precisely the function of the mind is to do it but not know how it's doing it thereby you get reality if you knew how you were doing it it wouldn't be reality anymore it would be what it would be your creation if you knew how you constructed all of this everything if you knew how you created time space people animals planets stars galaxies universe's history future technology atoms molecules viruses if you knew all that reality would not look like reality to you anymore so you're playing games constructing reality while denying that you're doing so because it's a lot of responsibility to accept that you're creating reality that means you're creating your own suffering you're creating your own victim mindset you're creating your own hatred your own negative emotions your own depression your own sadness your own incapability you're creating all of that that's a lot to accept you don't want to accept it so you deny that you're doing it and honestly you're not conscious of how you're doing it so it's not just that you're lying you're lacking in consciousness - first and foremost you're lacking in consciousness so in a certain sense you're innocent but basically fear of letting go of mental positions creates a paradigm lock I've talked about paradigm lock see my older episode called how paradigms work I believe it's called important one I talked about the concept of paradigm lock paradigm lock basically just means that you have a certain paradigm or a certain entire worldview or system how you see the world and then every worldview has a sort of a locking mechanism that locks you into that world view the world view itself think of the world youths office is almost like a survival organism for it to survive it has to lock itself in and maintain its survival the way it does that is sort of by infecting your mind and then instilling you with fear that if you leave this world to you that something bad is gonna happen to you this is actually a classic tactic that cult leaders use is that they will program new members into the cult they will use mind-control techniques to instill deep fear of how terrible their life will be if they leave the cult and in this way they're able to sort of blackmail and hold cult members hostage because they've they spent months programming them with ideas like well if you leave this cult then you're gonna lose your family you're gonna lose your spouse you're gonna lose opportunities for sex you're gonna lose your income you're gonna lose everybody who loves you you're gonna lose all your friends you're gonna lose everything basically your whole life will be so bad that you'll want to kill yourself and then of course how can you leave once your mind has been programmed with all that fear and that's that's the same sort of dynamic by the way see my two-part series called cult psychology which is really profound goes into a lot of these sneaky tactics that that cults use and also part two talks about how it applies to more generally to outside of traditional cults and into more mainstream society because cult psychology is not limited to only cults which is sort of a perfect segue here because see every worldview in a sense uses some form of sneaky cult psychology to hold you hostage to it for example if you're born in Islamic country you're gonna be programmed with the Islamic world view the Islamic paradigm and and you know part of that paradigm is the fear of going to hell if you ever question the paradigm or if you ever dare to question Allah or if you ever dare to question Muhammad or if you ever dare to leave Islam see every worldview tries to not every there are exceptions there are some world views that are better than others so I don't want to paint too broad of a brush here but uh but most world views what they do is they have a locking mechanism that locks you in with fear that closes your mind down religion is guilty of this but science is also guilty of this logic is guilty of this the mainstream culture is guilty of this capitalism is guilty of this even the notion of sanity is guilty of this see what you consider sanity is actually a worldview a sort of a paradigm that you're locked into and to venture outside of the norms of what you would consider sane and others around you and your culture consider sane that scares you it terrifies you what would your family think of you if you went beyond the boundary of sanity what would you think of yourself if you went beyond the boundary of sanity see you're gonna be afraid and that locks you into whatever paradigm you call sanity but what is sanity sanity is whatever culture tells you it is so in order to really free your mind and to be able to go to the deepest levels of understanding you have to be able to bust through these paradigm locks which first means you have to be able to recognize their structure see them become aware enough of them then you have to be willing to jump between different paradigms not get attached to any one of them and you have to be willing to call a call the bluff of the paradigm see the paradigms Bluff is that it's telling you the hey if you leave Islam you're gonna you're gonna suffer in hell if you question science then you're gonna become some sort of Fringe lunatic and you're gonna lose your professorship if you question logic you're gonna become some illogical nutcase conspiracy theorist if you question sanity you're gonna end up in a mental asylum if you question capitalism you're going to become some sort of communist - you know radical and if you question mainstream culture you're gonna become some weirdo and nobody's gonna marry you or want to be friends with you you know whatever fear and you have to say oh yeah I call your [ __ ] bluff I call your bluff show me what you got let me challenge religion let me challenge science let me challenge logic let me challenge the mainstream let me challenge capitalism let me challenge sanity and let me see where it leads me and that comes with open-mindedness and how many people are willing to do that very very few see your mind is playing a self deception game see my three part series called self deception where I outline many self deception mechanisms of which this topic here is one the game that your mind is playing is that it tells itself that your mind is open and open to proof and evidence when it really isn't your mind is only open to proof and evidence on your terms you see here's one of the things that people don't understand about closed mindedness when you are closed-minded it's not that you're close minded and telling yourself that you're closed-minded you're lying to yourself about it so if you ask some Christian fundamentalist hey are you close-minded is he gonna tell you yes of course not he's gonna tell you no no I'm an I'm a totally open-minded person I'm very reasonable I'm very logical I'm very evidence-based that's what any ideological fundamentalist will tell you ask a capitalist are you open-minded of course I am ask Islamic rabbi or Islamic Imam are you open mind he'll say of course I am but what he really means is yes he's open-minded on his terms on the terms of his paradigm so he's open to evidence and proof so long as it completely validates his existing paradigm yes in that sense he's open-minded but that's not real up in - of course that's a perversion that's closed mindedness because to be truly open-minded means you're willing question your paradigm you're willing to consider proof and evidence which is outside of what you would even consider valid proof and valid evidence because after all what is valid proof what is valid evidence where did you get these notions are these notions that were handed down to mankind by God as to what constitutes valid proof no these are highly relative subjective and contentious notions what's valid evidence and proof to one person isn't to another that's the whole problem so how do we adjudicate this problem how do we know whose standards of proof and evidence are the right ones this is a very deep epistemic problem I've talked about in the past about my in my episodes about epistemology I don't recall all their titles at this point you have to go back and search through my catalog but they're there this is a very deep of a stomach problem so whatever paradigm you adopt your paradigm is shaping the fundamental criteria of what you consider valid and valid proof and evidence and legitimate and illegitimate right and wrong and good and bad and sane and insane and so forth see the paradigm is reinforcing itself it's sort of like a vortex spinning inside of a of a medium like like a tornado or like a whirlpool in your shower in your bathtub see and and you're kind of like a little particle stuck in that whirlpool and your job is to break free of it because that's not the only whirlpool there's many whirlpools in this giant sea this ocean of consciousness many whirlpools and you're just stuck in one of them and the only way you're going to break out of a whirlpool is by being open-minded and curious enough to explore go explore others and the more of them you explore the more it's gonna open your mind more and more and more and more and you're gonna see that oh man I thought I had everything figured out when I was in this whirlpool and then I went to this other whirlpool and it was bigger and grander and more interesting and now I have to to compare and then I went to a third one and it was even different and fourth fifth to 6 and each one opens you more and more and more see so what you really need to be open-minded to is not making surface level changes to your paradigm but fundamentally reevaluating the core of your paradigm which is exactly what most people are close minded to so the self-deception game at your mind is playing is that it's pretending as though it's open but it's only open on the surface it's open to surface level change it's not open to structural change it's not open to really questioning the paradigm so be careful when your mind tells you that you're an open-minded person consider the possibility that maybe you're lying to yourself after all it's very convenient to tell yourself you're an open-minded person cuz hey if I adopt the identity that I'm an open-minded person and I become very close minded about the fact that I'm an open-minded person and I believe I'm very open-minded but actually I'm just a fundamentalist Christian or I'm just a materialist scientist or I'm just a capitalist or I'm whatever but I fancy myself open-minded that's extremely convenient because that's part of my paradigm now is that I'm open-minded and that my paradigm is actually very open like science loves to fool itself to think that all science is totally open leo science is open to all evidence and all proof if it's true science will adopt it and accept it and and love it no it won't that's an extremely convenient feature of that paradigm which lets it get away with actually being closed because when you tell yourself that you're so open that means that when you're actually gonna close something off you have to deny it completely in your mind you have to actually shut it out of your awareness and so that becomes a super convenient feature of a paradigm to just completely block out all other possibilities it just the the paradigm basically it's almost like a parasite in your mind and then it and it becomes monopolistic it tries to monopolize your entire mind so the problem with something like Christianity or Islam isn't is not it's not merely that it's a mind virus it's a monopolistic mind virus it just completely overtakes everything it's like a cancer in your mind same thing with something like libertarianism or with right-wing ideologies also some left-wing ideology as well like Marxism sometimes it just completely monopolized as a person's mind to the point where they can't see anything but through a Marxist lens or they can't see anything but through a libertarian lens or through a Christian lens or through an Islamic lens or through a materialist scientific lens or through a skeptic lens or through a rational lens and none of that will get you to the deepest understandings of reality all of that is limited because fundamentally why you're monopolizing this and why your claim to all this up is because it's coming from selfishness it's coming from limited consciousness it's coming from attachment and from bias see closed mindedness is fundamentally a weakness it's fear and open-mindedness is fundamentally a strength it's love and these are two opposite forces that are at work in your life in many different domains and spheres this is just one of them this is in the intellectual sphere now we're talking about fear and love and the sphere of exploring one's intellect in the operation of the mind what is the connection between closed mindedness and self bias well closed mindedness is there to defend self bias it's because you have biases and by the way see my episode called self bias where I explained that the reason you have self bias is because you have a survival agenda because you're a living organism we need to survive as a finite thing as whatever you believe that you are that needs to be survived and defended so your self bias is of course they're all false they're all biases true that's completely unbiased so you're sort of operating from a position of bias and falsehood and therefore your mind needs to close off to defend those self biases from from what from from an assault from the outside by truth closed minuses is like the the moat around the castle that is built to protect the castle from getting assaulted from forces from the outside otherwise the castle would be destroyed and you might say oh well that's terrible why would I want my castle destroyed well but what if you're very confined living in a tiny little limited castle and there's a giant vast Kingdom and world for you to explore out there jungles and deserts and forests and mountains and all this but you're living just on this little island surrounded by a moat in this tiny little one-bedroom castle and that's your whole life and you only look outside the windows of your castle and what you see there is you you take that for what the world is but there's so much beyond that you haven't seen because you're afraid to leave your castle so in this case actually letting down the drawbridges and and dismantling the moat to let the forces from outside you know attack you and and destroy your castle it seems like it's a terrible thing but actually it's a good thing let your science get crumbled let your Christianity and your Islam get crumbled let your capitalist philosophies get crumbled and your libertarian ones get crumbled because that's not the truth that's not ultimate understanding see all worldviews are self biased and they all serve some survival function and because you don't want to admit that because you want to keep being self biased you want to keep being selfish that's why you close your mind because if you open your mind you would at some point have to admit oh my god my worldview is so selfish it's so [ __ ] selfish I have to relinquish it I can't live this way anymore with all these biases so the only way your self biases can survive is when you ignore them and you sweep them under the rug and you aren't conscious about them and the way you do that is through the mechanism of closed mindedness now a common refrain that I hear is people say Oh leo all this open-mindedness is good but but you're taking it too far after all we should be open-minded but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out right that's precisely wrong it sounds cute when you say it it sounds nice like oh yeah be open-minded but not so open-minded your brains fall out but actually this is again what is this but fear it's fear it's fear that's what that is you want to be so open-minded that eventually you realize you don't even have a brain your brain is a hallucination try to get to that point become so open-minded that it kills you one day try to get to that point become so open-minded you have nothing left to defend intellectually people don't realize that attachment to ideas beliefs and worldviews is one of the greatest delusions and one of the most strongest forces in society and in life you think people get attached to their cars and their material possessions and people and things and children money of course they do but even more so they get attached to ideas beliefs and worldviews and it's really really hard to let those go it's one of the ultimate illusions of life because it's so central to how we construct our reality see you can lose a child you can lose a million dollars you can lose a car you can lose a house you can lose some material possession you can lose a spouse girlfriend boyfriend you can lose these things and it sure it'll hurt you it might even change you in some way transform you a little bit grow you but but it's not gonna like really shake the foundations of what you consider reality but that's not the case with beliefs ideas and worldviews there are certain beliefs ideas and worldviews that you can question so deeply and let go of so fully that it will literally change physical reality like I'm not kidding it's possible that you become so open-minded that you realize you don't have a brain open your mind to that possibility so closed mindedness is one of the top self deception mechanisms so this episode here will pair very nicely as a follow-up to my three part series on self deception go check that one out because this is all you have to understand that this whole topic is all within the context of self deception everything we're talking about here to really unravel what life is and how it works self deception is the key understanding self deception your own self deception is the key because you're constantly being deceived by yourself because that's what needs to happen for you to construct a reality here's the key insight that you should remember is that the truth requires no defending the more truthful you are the less defensive you are when you are really deeply conscious of the truth all your defenses drop away all desire to argue drops away all desire to prove others wrong drops away all desire to be right drops away it's not needed because you're so deeply grounded in the truth that you know the truth is completely unshakable and because it's eternal and it's completely unshakable is completely unquestionable it's completely absolute it needs no defending because nothing can touch it now the ego mind compensates for not having access to this absolute truth by being defensive arrogant strident obnoxious critical ideological and overly confident it's a sort of a facade of confidence this sort of macho facade if I'm right I have the truth when really all that just reveals is that you don't have the because if you really have the truth you wouldn't need to put on an act of how much truth you have you would just silently bask in the truth you wouldn't need to convince anybody of it you wouldn't need to go on some crusade or on some jihad now you might still be wondering but Leo can open-mindedness go too far what happens if I become so open-minded and then I go down the rabbit hole start believing all sorts of fringe theories and then just waste a bunch of my time and and so on well here's the thing open-mindedness has to be tempered by being grounded in direct experience and also by being honest when you truly don't know something so the difference between what I'm telling you here and something like a flat earther philosophy or some conspiracy theory that's like alex jones style stuff or david icke or whatever the difference between between what i'm telling you and that is that yes you're open-minded but also you're honest with yourself about what is actually truly in your direct experience so somebody tells you there's reptilians overlords who are conspiring to dominate mankind and all of this okay but are you conscious of these reptilian overlords are they in your correct experience if not then you have to be honest about that and then you have to say to yourself I don't know I don't know if there are reptilian overlords and then this is what now grounds you and it keeps you from floating off into all sorts of fantasy that is possible if you're open-minded but then you're you're you're not paying close attention to direct experience then you can veer off into fantasy and you can start believing into ghosts and UFOs and this and that and all sorts of crazy stuff and then you get lost now that becomes a distraction in and of itself and conspiracy theories are very toxic and very cancerous and problematic I'll probably cover that in several episode in the future so yeah you do have to be careful open-mindedness is not a license for wishful thinking wild speculation it's not a license for just guesswork we're it's like well I think that there's some crazy [ __ ] happening over there I haven't seen it I have an experience that I haven't verified any of it but I just all believe it it's like no that's fantasy that's not your direct experience so you do have to be very ruthless with keeping yourself grounded in direct experience but also open because your direct experience can change significantly so you have to be open to that open-mindedness is also not a license for us versus them fear-based conspiracy theories I see and here a lot of these lately were there some secret cabal of people some overlords and elites who are taking control of the earth and it's us versus them the little guys versus the big guys you know it's it's the populous versus the globalists it's the it's the progressives versus the neoliberals it's the whatever the humans versus the reptilians you know stuff like this this this just reeks of fear and us versus them you know sort of dualistic thinking so again is this really truly in your Gretsch experience are you just projecting these overlords and these lists how many these elitists have you actually met have you actually gone and talked to the CEO a fortune 500 company have you sat down had a three-hour conversation with that CEO and actually got his perspective about business and the economy and how to run a company and what kind of problems exist with running a giant corporation no none of this is your direct experience you just have theories and projections and you're just projecting your angst and survival needs on to what you see in the news and stuff like that this is not direct experiences is not true up in mindedness this is wild speculation and projection which is actually a form of closed mindedness which is why all these conspiracy theorists are actually really close minded people when you guys start to have conversations with them they get very closed you can actually feel that energy of them they get kind of hot agitated neurotic they start to attack they start to you know become unreasonable and calling you names and things and they start protesting and you know kicking and screaming and bitching and moaning all of these are signs of ego this is not how a conscious open-minded person behaves that's grounded in truth grounded in love grounded in consciousness grounded selflessness whose transcended fear all these conspiracy years are fear-based which is why don't track traffic in them so you also have to be careful because the ego loves says this to the devil yo devil same thing the ego loves to co-opt open-mindedness in order to spread its own ideology conspiracy theories and to fear monger so see somebody else will come here say oh well Leo you're not open to flatter you're not truly open you're making fun of flat-earthers but I'm a flat earther and I know flatter that's right and that's because I'm open minded in Leo you're see leo look at how hypocritical you are you're sitting up here and you're telling us to be open-minded but you leo you're actually closed-minded because you don't believe in my anti-vaccine theories and you don't believe in Alex Jones and you don't believe in David Icke and you don't believe in this and you don't believe in that but open-mindedness and does not believe that I does not mean that I'm going to believe and all the fear-based [ __ ] that you believe in see and also I'm not perfectly open-minded like I said in my series on self deception self deception is always operative no matter who you are how smart you are how conscious you are how enlightened you are it's always operative you always have to be on guard and careful with self-deception so I'm always capable of self-deception sometimes I am close-minded and I apply the lessons that I'm teaching you how do you think I learned these lessons by observing my own closed mindedness I didn't read this in any book I spent years observing my own closed mindedness and my own ignorance and have learned these lessons and now I'm imparting them to you and so even though I learned these lessons I'm not perfect at executing them sometimes I am close-minded about certain things so again it's not about a binary of being open or closed it's about how open-minded are you how well do you apply it how good are you at noticing when you're being closed and then opening yourself back up there's an emotional challenge that comes with open-mindedness and that's like I said it leaves you in a sort of a uncertain place where you're sort of like a leaf blowing in the wind without firm resolution it can be harder to make decisions because you have to constantly keep weighing things it's like well there's you know the Christians tell us this is true and the Muslims tell us that's true and the Hindus tell us this is true and then science tells us that that's true and some other scientist says the opposite thing and then somebody else does something else Who am I gonna believe and it's like well I don't know who to believe so I don't know what to do whereas if all you did was used to okay I'm just gonna believe in Christ and that's it and I'm just gonna believe in Christianity and I'm just gonna become an evangelical well okay that makes you very decisive you don't have to keep weighing all these factors it's it's a much simpler way of approaching life so what I'm talking about here is much more multi-dimensional and complex it's a spa dynamic stage yellow approach to reality multi-perspective oh yeah it's tier two much more complex than tier 1 tier one is you you choose one ideology one world you just stick with it and you go all in on it so this is stage yellow stuff more difficult more complex each stage the spiral becomes more and more complex if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about go check out my multi series multi-part series called spiral dynamics where I have different colored stages and explain those in a lot of depth see one of the benefits of having a closed mind is that you don't need to reevaluate anything it just constantly builds upon itself it doesn't take anything away never does any deconstructive work it only adds more so if you're a Christian you just add more Christianity on top of the snowball and it's just a giant growing snowball of Christianity which eventually you know after decades of that it turns into into something quite ugly veers completely off track from truth and consciousness and love whereas with an open mind you're constantly having to reevaluate yourself your constant having to consider whether you're fooling yourself you're considering considering other points of view exploring this stuff and that takes more energy more work but also there's payoffs to that here's other insight I'll give you how do you open someone's mind let's say you're dealing with an ignorant person let's say your mother or your father you're trying to explain enlightenment to them or something God or whatever you're trying to explain to them and they just they're not seeing it how do you open their mind in one word imagination imagination is an extremely powerful tool that most people overlook and poopoo because you know it's just imaginary but then again everything's imaginary so that just shows you how powerful imagination is so what you do to open somebody's mind is you get them to imagine a new possibility and you try to do it in a non confrontational non-threatening manner so rather than telling some Christian at all the Bible is [ __ ] cuz that that's just gonna further close his mind rather than doing that if you really want to open his mind present him with subtle possibilities that he can imagine better beyond his paradigm not too far beyond but a little bit beyond that pushed the boundaries of his paradigm so how might that look well you might say well imagine for example like where were you bored you might ask him where were you born oh you were born somewhere in Kentucky okay and you're an evangelical okay so what do you think would happen imagine what if instead of being born in Kentucky you were born in the Middle East would you still be an evangelical try to imagine that like really imagine it that's a very powerful exercise that will quickly open your mind of course he's probably gonna have defenses because the minds not gonna give up so easily but still you can you can kind of keep prodding like this with these imagination exercises if you're a teacher if you're a professor in a college or university if you're teaching young children in school or high schoolers or whatever middle school if you're trying to get your parents to understand something come up with ways where you can phrase it as the following can you imagine blank and then fill in that blank with whatever imagine this imagine that like for example let's say that there are some some libertarian types who think that this coronavirus that we're dealing with right now hmm at all well the coronavirus is not such a big deal let's just reopen the country everybody just going back to the beaches and schools and all this sort of stuff but then you ask so you can say okay so do you do you have a family do you have a daughter do you have a son it's like oh you have a daughter okay how old is your daughter oh she's she's eight years old okay and how do you love your daughter okay you love your daughter very much okay how would you feel if if when your daughter was in school your daughter's teacher for example went out to a club or to a to a bar at night she was just you know letting off some steam having some drinks after work whatever teachers can do that and then she caught the virus and then she she brought it back to school and then your daughter got it and then your daughter gets it and then imagine that you know you have a you know grandmother okay and then your daughter hangs out with your grandmother on the weekends okay imagine that she gives it to your grandmother imagine imagine your daughter lying in a hospital bed with a ventilator down her throat slowly suffocating while you're sitting by her bedside crying imagine that actually imagine that if you can get that person to actually imagine that that is what will change their mind you see the whole function of closed mindedness is to prevent the imagination so as long as you can get a person to imagine something that already expands the boundaries of of whatever ideology or paradigm they had because their ideology is sort of a mental thing it lives in the level of thoughts and beliefs and stuff but the imagination is actually more powerful than that imagination is a very powerful force but oftentimes because people are so bad at using it independently you have to guide them to it like really guide them step by step through all the details imagine have them imagine a scenario compelling powerful emotional scenario like that and then watch them get moved watch them watch their mind change watch their paradigm expand so this is this is part of what we might call spiral wit wizardry or you start to get good at dealing with other stages other people you kind of meet them where they're at see where their limitations are come up with a scenario that they could imagine that helps them to then open their mind to new possibilities that then they can then pursue you see you can't really pursue something until you can first imagine it you can't even go to the [ __ ] grocery store unless you can first imagine it you can't go to Australia you can't take a nice vacation in Australia unless you can imagine it and the more vividly and compelling your vision is gonna be the more likely you are to actually get online and purchase a ticket and actually fly there see and the nice thing about imagination is that it imaginary just kind of playful and usually you can get people to imagine so you can even get closed-minded people to imagine stuff like you can even take a you know some sort of fundamentalist Muslim and then just kind of walk him slowly through an imagination exercise where he really imagines the possibility that for example the the Quran was not you know the Word of God handed down by God but was actually written by by some guy you know if you kind of get him to really imagine through that that will kind of break down some of his beliefs of course there probably still be resistance but I'm not saying this is foolproof again there's no there's no there's no force on earth strong enough to overcome a mind that is in complete denial and it's so close that it doesn't want to budge there's nothing you can do about that but you can use tricks most people are not that closed-minded you can use little tricks to open people up and this this helps you to be a better communicator if you want to be a public speaker if you want to be persuasive if you want to argue well if you want to reason well with people if you want to convince people if you want to motivate people if you want to be a leader a great leader you have to give people vision powerful compelling positive loving vision of the future see and like for example if you're dealing with this Muslim person and you know he's really stuck in his fundamentalism and he's really struggling to let go and he's in fear you can you can guide him with a positive vision of like imagine the freedom you would experience if you actually surrender your ideology about Allah and then it's not that imagine that rather than imagining that you're gonna forsake Allah and then Allah will cast you into Hell or something like this and that you will be lost without Allah no no imagine this imagine you let go of the idea of Allah but then in its place what you get is an actual direct connection with Allah imagine that see now that makes it much more palatable for that person to consider stepping beyond the bounds of his narrow belief based ideology cuz you're you're taking away the idea ideology but you're giving him some replacement you're not just and you're not just blaming him for being an idiot or something like that see so similar like if you're a scientifically minded or an atheistic we might a person imagine this and now this finally leads to how I want to demonstrate this to you so this is how we're gonna end this episode and this is not just for scientists and atheists but really for all of you um this is your ultimate open-mindedness exercise you ready here we go I want you to open your mind to the possibility of infinity infinity not a number not a collection of numbers actual infinity open your mind to the possibility of unlimited consciousness up to this point in your life you've been living life conceiving of reality as a limited finite thing it has to be a particular narrow way it's bound to three dimensions or to time into space or to good into evil or to humans and animals or to plants and trees or to stars and our universe this is all limited stuff now I want you to drop that for just a moment you can pick it back up in a minute but just drop it for a minute and imagine a truly unlimited consciousness not a human not an animal it's not a physical object it's not a particle it's unlimited consciousness infinite consciousness imagine that the entire universe can be so conscious that it can be completely conscious of itself unlimited consciousness imagine an unlimited universe where there are no limits whatsoever zero limits anything is possible absolutely anything you can imagine is possible everything that can be imagined is possible pure infinite imagination without end without limits without restriction unbounded by time by space by logic by science by religion by fear by matter by limits of any kind infinity true actual infinity completely self-knowing completely omniscient completely all-powerful completely beautiful and perfect singular absolute endless existing forever eternal unconstrained by absolutely anything because it's everything it's absolutely total totality unlimited totality everything possible everything possible nothing is impossible open your mind to that that's truth that's reality that's love that's God that's see you that's this and that is what all open-mindedness leads to is the realization of infinity your infinite consciousness completely unlimited all limitation completely imaginary including limitations such as death imagine becoming so open-minded that you become completely omniscient your consciousness becomes completely unlimited and you literally become immortal as you realize the totality and unity of everything as you recognize and see yourself in everything as you become the entire universe as you realize what reality is is God infinite unlimited consciousness and why is it this way because what would limit it it's everything so there can't be anything outside of it that could possibly limit it is therefore it's absolute infinite perfection can you open your mind to that if not keep trying and as your homework assignment over the next week I want you to practice feeling when your mind is closed if you're on a forum in a conversation with your parents or your friends or whatever you're doing if you're watching the news and you see some latest shenanigan in politics happening and you notice your mind closing down I want you to notice it and then practice opening it up even if the thing that's being considered might not be necessarily true just practice opening up and noticing your biases all right that's it I'm done here thank you please click the like button for me come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll find my blog where I post exclusive content you'll find the life purpose course the book list powerful book lists that will start to get you on the same page as me you know a lot of the stuff I talk about I sort of expect that you you read the books on my book list in order to to follow along you really you can't just understand the things I talk about without reading the books on my book list so there's that you can also contribute to my patreon if you'd like if you like this in-depth content and you want to help me to build actualized org I will be using these funds in the future to help do a little bit of promotion and maybe do some new and exclusive type of content higher quality content increase production values so forth you can go to patreon.com/scishow something like that thank you very much for that and my final words to you are this open-mindedness has completely changed the trajectory of my life I have used open mindedness to discover total omniscience and immortality as outlandish as that sounds it's true so when I talk about this open mindedness I'm trying to lead you somewhere some were very powerful open mindedness will take you way beyond science way beyond Western philosophy way beyond anything you could have possibly imagined the fruits that open-mindedness yields are so rich and rewarding that they can't be described in words but they take time to bear fruit this is a seed that you plant this is a seed this open-mindedness seed is a seed I planted in my mind when I was a teenager when I was 16 or 18 years old this seed was planted in me and this seed has grown and blossomed matured over over decades and years until finally it it bloomed into an infinitely beautiful tree with infinitely many fruits that's the the real potential of open mindedness so now I want you to finally imagine the possibility that today we will plant this seed in your mind of open mindedness and that this seed will be planted and it's gonna be nurtured by you you're gonna water a little bit every day every week for the rest of your life and is gonna keep growing and growing it first slowly it's gonna turn into a giant tree over years and decades and it's gonna keep sprouting fruits forever for the rest of your life it's gonna keep sprouting more and more and more fruits until it completely changes the trajectory of your life open your mind to that possibility and I'll see you in the next one you