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survival shapes who you are that's the key to understanding yourself and we're going to go into a lot of depth on this point this episode builds on top of two previous episodes about survival called understanding survival part one and part two go watch those two episodes if you haven't already it's going to change your entire orientation towards life and how you see human beings and yourself and then this will take it just to the next level so first i want you to notice just looking at the animal kingdom looking at the shape of animals literally look at the shape that animals take why does a snake have that kind of shape that it has which is very different from the shape of a giraffe which is different from the shape of a kangaroo which is different from the shape of a bat which is different from the shape of an octopus which is different from the shape of a ant and so on as kids we look at all these weird animals like the platypus or something and we're amused by these interesting creatures you might even fall in love with some of them but we don't really see just how serious their shape is their shape is not just some arbitrary thing their shape is how they survive without that shape they couldn't survive and of course then we have to look at you what about your shape of course i'm talking about the external shape of your body but for us human creatures were a little bit more complicated and much of our survival happens at the conceptual level at the level of mind even more so than at the level of the physical body especially these days with all the technology and stuff that we have our external shape is becoming less important and what our mind's shape is the shape of our psyche this determines everything that unfolds for you individually and for us collectively as a species so let's explore that because there's there's so much detail here so who you are today was shaped by your early survival demands just like the shape of a snake was gradually formed over millions and billions of years of evolution of natural selection where the shape of the snake was being fitted with that of the shape of the environment that it lives in and there's many different kinds of snakes and many different kinds of environments and they have different kinds of shapes so the same with you so it uh your specific survival challenges and your youth and as you were growing up especially during the first 20 years of your life this shaped your psyche and it shaped how you think how you emote and how you act but the problem is is that you're not very conscious of this none of us are unless we do this sort of investigation that we're about to do right now and we completely forget how much we were shaped by all of the environments in which we were growing up when we were young many of the survival challenges you faced when you were 5 years old 10 years old 15 years old 20 years old now if you're in your 30s and 40s and later you've your mind doesn't even hold it can't even hold that much in its memory banks i mean it does deep down but it's not the at the top of your mind and it becomes easily forgotten and it's like uh layers upon which your psyche is built and those layers upon which it's built they're forgotten and you just assume that well this is how i am now this is who i am this just feels like who i have always been but if you look carefully if you do some sort of psychic archaeology in your psyche you know um dig in there and root around go back into your past you can actually see how the layers of your psyche were built over the first 20 years of your life and you can do some work there because some of those layers are dysfunctional and are still creating problems for you to this day but you've forgotten where they came from so let's look into that so i want you to start to really notice how much survival demands from your environment shaped you and the kind of survival strategies you had to adopt as coping mechanisms to deal with whatever situation you were faced with and we as humans we can look quite similar on the outside but the survival situations that we face are mostly cultural not just the physical environment so the culture you grew up in and whatever kind of family environment schooling environment work environment these all shaped you very much more so than whether you grew up in the in the arctic or in the tropics or in the desert although of course that also shapes you but um really it's the software that's even more important than the hardware when we're discussing survival here so i want you to start to notice how much human survival varies around the globe it varies enormously from country to country continent to continent but even more than that even within the same country and especially if you take a large diverse country like america there are so many different ways for humans to survive in america it's just it's staggering and we'll start to give examples of some of those here in a minute but you can already probably start to fill in some of the blanks yourself so uh your personal survival situation creates huge blind spots in your psyche it limits your ability to understand others it limits your ability to grow to succeed and to transcend to higher levels because really what we're talking about here is when we're talking about personal development or spiritual development we're talking about growing one's psyche and to grow one psyche we have to look at the limitations and blind spots that are present within the psyche that hold us back these are the obstacles and also as you were growing up you encountered from your environment as you were struggling to survive you you incurred wounds and scars karma samskaras the hindu traditions call it and these stay with you and influence how you behave they can be very corrupting they can corrupt your desires your goals your ambitions in life your fears they can make you insecure in various ways they can make you overreact emotionally to certain things they can give you certain biases and predilections and aversions and all of these fundamentally shape how your life unfolds and if your life is unfolding in ways you don't like with bad habits and addictions and you keep struggling and spinning your wheels and not getting the kind of traction success you want in your life well you have to look back and to see really what is sourcing that and it's probably early childhood uh survival situations that you didn't quite fully know how to deal with and you might have dealt with them in dysfunctional ways unholistic ways and then those became ingrained in your psyche and now you still keep acting from that place it's uh it's sometimes difficult to unteach yourself some of these bad habits you picked up or certain assumptions about reality or about people or about society that was just a function of how you survived when you were younger we tend to assume that humans have always lived sort of the same way like that a hundred years ago 500 years ago a thousand years ago 2000 years ago humans lived basically like we do today not at all when we're studying history in school it doesn't really sink in the teacher doesn't really teach us that it's not merely that you know the ancient romans lived a certain way the egyptians lived a certain way and then in the middle ages they lived a certain way and during the renaissance they lived a certain way and the chinese lived a different way than the europeans and etc it's not just that it's like when you're when you're reading history and studying history you have to really put yourself in the shoes of the people that were living in that culture in that time with that technology with the epistemic limits that they had at that time the limits of their understanding the limits of their science the limits of their religion that they were plagued with whatever you know whatever situation they were dealing with like you have to really understand that to live 2000 years ago was such a starkly different way of surviving than today and even a hundred years ago survival was so different for your great grandparents than it is for you today the culture has changed the language has changed the uh our understanding of mankind as a species has changed our understanding of sciences has changed even understanding of religion today's christians are not the same christians of 2000 years ago they're completely different and we don't appreciate that enough and the survival challenges of course that our ancestors faced were completely different than what we face today of course many things were similar there are common patterns but many things were very different and even just your survival strategies as a kid growing up were very different from that of your parents just a single generation is actually very significant but we tend to overlook all this and we tend to just assume that well everybody just kind of grows up the same way no not at all kids today growing up in in the digital environment with the internet with video games with virtual reality with smartphones from right from the cradle they have this stuff it's a totally different environment than like when i was growing up mostly in the 90s and even there i i am fairly tech savvy because i grew up in sort of in a sort of era where technology was all around me computers i was there for the early internet the early video game sort of uh the rise of video games and cable tv and all these sorts of things but uh but i wasn't there for example for social media i mean i was there but my mind was already formed you see the human mind and really not just a human mind but all animal minds work this way uh they're extremely impressionable during that phase from birth to adulthood and for humans that's around 20 years old your mind is being cemented and and set in stone stuff that is set in stone in the first 20 years of your life that stays with you and it becomes more and more difficult to change as you get into your 30s 40s and beyond so how your mind is set like drying concrete uh in in those first 20 years are absolutely crucial and if the concrete has cracks in it as it's still wet and drying if it has uh you know debris leaves fall on it twigs and branches somebody comes and rides his bicycle through it all those marks and things are going to be impressed and in ingrained into that concrete for the rest of its existence now of course with humans we're a little bit more malleable than that but it's actually quite astounding how difficult it is to change the human mind once it's set after those first 20 years it's it's it's pretty difficult possible but but difficult takes labor all right so now i want you to do this little visualization exercise with me uh i want you to imagine how different you would be today if for example your father was a drug dealer when you were growing up if you were raped by your father if you were a mormon growing up in a mormon family in a mormon community if you were gay or confused about your sexuality assuming you weren't if you were bullied in school because you were ugly if you were born an eskimo tribe somewhere in the arctic circle if you grew up in a foster home without parents just try to imagine how that would change your very identity and sense of who you are in the world we're not just talking about like oh yeah life would have been a little bit more difficult or some circumstances in my life would be a little bit different i would have had to adapt to that no no what i'm trying to get you to understand here is that you would be a different person imagine if when you were young you grew up with a chronic illness instead of like the healthy body that let's assume you have now or had in the past imagine how that would shape you if you grew up in a wheelchair if you went to school 12 years of school in a wheelchair imagine if you were a hot pretty girl and all the boys admired you and lavished attention on you and even the adults told you how beautiful and cute you were from a young age because you were just except exceptionally pretty you were just born that way you got a luck of the draw from the genetics lottery or if you grew up in a war zone imagine how that shapes your psyche to grow up in a war zone with bombs bursting around you as you sleep with your father waking up in the middle of the night telling you that we have to get out of the house because a bomb might you know blast through the roof then you got to get up and run or struggle to find food in the morning because all the shops are closed or bombed and as you're walking to the bazaar there's bullets flying around and you gotta you gotta crawl to avoid the bullets imagine how that shapes your goals in life your desires your fears and insecurities your political beliefs your religious convictions imagine if you grew up in a small rural village with no internet access no television no music no big grocery stores imagine if you grew up as a woman in saudi arabia imagine if you grew up in a royal family in a palace and you had butlers serving you from golden plates with golden forks your whole life driving you in rolls royces and such things and your family groomed you to be part of the royal family because they just expected you to fill that role imagine if you grew up seeing mystical visions as a child it wasn't something you tried to do or even practiced you didn't even meditate you just every time you went to sleep you saw mystical visions even while you were awake at school you would see mystical visions of weird entities and beings and aliens and things and angels and imagine how that would completely transform who you think you are what you think reality is and your relationship to it and of course this would isolate you from other children because they wouldn't see these visions and the adults around you they probably also don't see these visions even your parents might not have believed you when you told them that you saw these mystical visions and they just told you that oh you're just imagining things you have a hyperactive imagination maybe they even took you to a doctor and the doctor maybe even put you on some antipsychotic medications because the doctor of course a western materialist doctor doesn't believe in mystical visions he thinks that's all nonsense and he thinks that you're going crazy and so he puts you on antipsychotics and then those had maybe those uh numb your visions down but then they make you feel disconnected and they don't make you feel like yourself anymore and as a child you don't know what's going on you don't know whether to listen to these adults or not to listen to them maybe maybe you start to think that maybe these adults are right maybe i do have a hyperactive imagination maybe something is wrong with me maybe i am going crazy maybe i am psychotic or whatever and that it takes you a long time to figure out what's what so humans survive in very different ways yet we judge others for how we survive we're very judgmental about the survival strategies of other people and that's precisely because our own survival strategy was so paramount in the shaping of who we are that how we see cert how we see reality itself how we define what reality is was so deeply shaped by these things that it's difficult for us to even step outside of who we are because we just are that now it's difficult for us to step outside of that to see that somebody else had very different influences and had to deal with very different uh much more difficult survival situations and therefore they had to adapt to those and they had to become literally a different person and to survive those situations they literally had to see reality in a different way to survive as a woman in saudi arabia literally requires that you see reality in a different way than if you're a woman in america otherwise you can't survive in that situation you might get beheaded this is no joke so be very careful about judging how other people survive you don't know what situations they faced what they had to do you assume that oh well they don't have to survive that way they can just survive the way that i survived no don't assume that because if they adopted your version of reality your worldview your belief system your assumptions your principles your values your fears your insecurities and and your goals and values if they adopted all those they might have gotten beheaded in the survival situation that they were in or they might have gotten raped or their parents might have hit them and abused them you don't know these are very common things that happen to millions of people and they have to adapt to that to survive through that and a lot of that happens to children we're talking about children that might be less than 10 years old and those children just think about how little a ten-year-old child understands about reality and about society and about the evils of the world and about how to survive because when you come into this world you're not given a survival manual you have to make it up as you go along and if you're lucky you have parents that can guide you who are wise who themselves have mastered the art of survival and they can pass on some wisdom to you but um that's that's often not the case a lot of times the parents are dysfunctional themselves they don't know how to survive or the way they survived no longer works in the situation that you know that they're going up because now there's a war when your parents were surviving there might not have been a war in in your country and now the parents are raising you in a war zone they don't they themselves don't know what to do to help you as a as a child to figure out how to navigate that situation and your whole life is writing on it this is a life and death matter this is not a joke and i want you to especially pay attention to how we're not just talking about physical survival here pay attention to how survival shapes the mind the psyche the beliefs the world views your morality your values that's the really important thing here here's an example with hitler so who hitler was and what he did as an adult was merely the reflection of his mind and hitler's mind was merely a reflection of the survival challenges he faced during his youth during the first 10 20 years of his life and it can be useful to actually pick up a biography of hitler and read it and i don't mean his autobiography i mean a biography written by an objective sort of neutral historian because when you're reading an autobiography it's being filtered through his own mind already which is not necessarily the truth especially with a guy like hitler can't really trust his biography but i mean his autobiography but you can you can you can you can get a lot of value of reading just a good historian's biography um i did some of that it gave me a lot of insight into into his behavior and into his ideology it's very illuminating to see for example how hitler participated in world war one before world war ii before he started world war ii there was world war one um and it's actually interesting to read what role he played in world war one and how he performed there and how that shaped his psyche and that wasn't the only thing that shaped a psyche after that i mean i'm not going to go into all the details but if you want you can read the biography and you'll start to understand what i'm what i'm alluding to here so those early experiences shaped his mind which then reshaped all of europe and the rest of the world and really human history that's how significant this stuff is now it's easy for us well not even that easy see i was going to say it's easy for us to see hitler's situation because we're not hitler so it's easy when you're looking when you're looking from outside it's easier to have perspective to see things objectively neutrally without self bias but really even for most people even even seeing hitler is is uh it's not so easy because most people just see him as evil or whatever and i'm not saying he was a good guy or anything i'm not trying to i'm not trying to whitewash hitler here or to make excuses or rationalizations for what he did i'm being very neutral about it i'm not trying to judge but the point being is that most people aren't even able to see that what hitler did was simply a reflection of survival challenges he faced in his youth see just to even see that will change how you see hitler how you see world war ii how you judge him and how you judge others but now the real work is applying this sort of logic to your own self so let's do that what are the core survival challenges that shaped your mind that's the key question so here's the exercise i want you to remember all the way back to your childhood to your early years and it really helps to really go back early i mean when you were just learning how to eat how to walk the earliest memories you have and try to recall the survival challenges that you face that you faced at that time and uh get up get a sheet of paper a notepad and list them out start do a little brainstorm here what did you struggle with and start with even the very basic stuff like food remember how you struggled just to put food in your mouth the majority of it ended up on your shirt i remember when i was like even when i was like seven years old i can remember you know eating sandwiches and i would always get food like everywhere on my shirt i remember had to like buy new shirts all the time because they would get like mayo stains on it grease stains and stuff from ketchup and mustard and burger juice and whatever else dripped on it and it took me like a couple of years i remember like from from age seven to maybe age nine it took me a couple of years to learn just how to eat so that i don't get food like all over my pants and my shirts and that was a struggle and see today i like unless i'm i'm doing this recording here for the purposes of educating you i haven't even thought about this stuff for for like 30 years and so you just forget about it and you probably forgot about it too like you probably forgot about these very basic things you struggled with just even maintaining your temperature was was a challenge figuring out how to keep yourself cool or how to keep yourself warm depending on whether you were in the winter time the summer time i'm about i would get these bad sunburns because i just wasn't aware of of the the sun's heat and i would you know stay out in the summer you know at the lake or something and it was scorching hot and i would get these terrible sunburns um or even like i remember it took me it took me years just to learn to wear warmer clothes when it was cold outside like it seems so obvious today right now now as an adult it seems so obvious you know if it's cold outside grab a coat but like that that wasn't even obvious to me and um and like the the family situation i was growing up with you know we had certain financial difficulties when i was growing up a lot of times we just didn't have money like i would need a coat i would need just like nothing fancy just like a a sweatshirt or a jacket i would need that but i knew for example that uh we were out of money certain times of the year it was weird you know my my financial situation my family had a big influence on me i'll talk about that a little more here in this later in this episode but like it was very kind of rocky so some parts of the year we had lots of money and we would even go to extravagant vacations and extravagant dinners and stuff like that and then other parts of the year we had no money at all they would turn off our electricity and we would have to use the candles or like even buying new shoes or buying a jacket would be difficult because my family would waste that money on like an extravagant dinner but there would be nothing left for just a jacket which was it was ass backwards but anyways that's sort of the situation i i grew up in and you better believe that shaped me very significantly it shaped my attitude towards money and towards towards life um even towards clothing uh think about sexuality how your sexuality was formed in the first 20 years of your life and what struggles existed there maybe with your sexual identity maybe with feeling guilty about sex because you were moralized too by your fundamentalist christian or conservative parents who told you sex was evil or masturbation was evil or whatever and you tried to hide it or you were embarrassed by it or you know whatever or maybe it was positive stuff too or maybe you had early childhood experiences i mean sexual experiences whether in high school or even in middle school or maybe with who i don't know what um your situation was and think about how that influenced your views of sexuality which are still with you today maybe it made you sexually conservative maybe made you very sexually open and liberal think about the even survival challenges like just hurting yourself or bruising yourself physically like i remember when i was younger i always had like bruises and cuts and scars because i would like ride the bike and i would you know fall off the bike and scrape my knees and this and that and i would always be injuring myself bruising myself against something on a skateboard or whatever um just like even kinesthetically physically learning how your body works even like how to chew and not bite your tongue or bite your lip or accidentally chip a tooth while you're chewing or something even that required struggle and practice and you got it wrong if you were like me and you have to learn it took you years to learn how to do it properly think about various dangerous situations you faced maybe with strangers that were trying to pick you up or with um with automobiles with bicycles with skateboards with you know whatever dangers existed in your environment with the weather maybe you grew up in florida and there was hurricanes and things and then that shaped you think about the situations when you cried think about all those times you cried when you were young between the ages of 0 and 20. what were you crying about i mean it was difficult think about it was difficult even if you grew up in a nice neighborhood even if your parents were were wealthy and you know gave you all the stuff you wanted you still cried about stuff what was that and how did that shape you what lessons did that imprint into you you see the suffering that you incurred when you were young and very impressionable that left deep deep samskaras or wounds in your psyche which you're probably still compensating for today think about the challenges of learning language that you faced i mean learning language was so difficult now we just use it it's easy effortless you don't even think about it but remember how difficult it was to use language properly or even learning what time was i remember when i was like five six years old my parents bought me a wristwatch with a little arrow you know the arrows it wasn't a digital one it was an analog one um and i i like i couldn't figure out what the what the arrows meant i didn't understand the arrows it took me a while to figure that out you know we take it so for granted or learning mathematics i remember i struggled a lot in like the first three four years of school just to figure out what the hell mathematics was or learning other aspects of life struggling through school think of how much struggle you went through in school that whole ordeal 12 years of that or the struggles that came with socializing with children of your own age and how difficult that might have been for you how traumatic that might have been for you depending on what kind of environment you were in maybe you were bullied or maybe you bullied others it all depends and how that shaped you remember getting in trouble all the rules you broke all the detentions you got all the scolding you got from your parents for being too rowdy or from your teachers or from your principal or whatever punishments they gave you and how that affected you the struggle of fitting in of being cool of making sure your peers thought you were normal and not weird and that they accepted you and approved of you that whole game you played you might have played it excellently or you might have played it very poorly and that very much affects you to this day shape your psyche think about academic achievement and what significant role that played in your life whether you were a good student a bad student and how you felt about your own sense of intelligence and knowledge and self-esteem related to that or your struggles with sports fights with your family think of all those what were those about and how those shape you rebelling against your parents or conforming to your parents whichever one doesn't matter it shaped you just the same how about trying to gain approval or love from your parents and friends think of how much that shaped you divorce if there was a divorce in your family that was a huge influence on you think about how your identity was forged how did you figure out who you were you probably played with different identities in middle school in high school and your friends as well and then how you had to navigate and negotiate that identity with them the various interests that you explored and how those influenced you and how you struggled with different hobbies and things some you loved some you hated some you were frustrated by remember how challenging it was just to learn different concepts or the struggle of being lazy or disciplined if you struggled with that disciplining yourself or being bored just think about how that might have shaped you being bored when you were a kid and then what you did in your spare time of course religion if you grew up in a religious environment think about how that shaped you for some people that was huge for other people not so much but even if you didn't grow up in a religious environment maybe your family was secular or scientific or atheistic and then that shaped you just as much as religion would have if they were religious think about various philosophical questions that you struggled with when you were younger like what is life what is death think about the first time that you became conscious of the fact that you're going to die or that your parents were going to die and how that affected you debates and disagreements you had with your parents elders and friends and colleagues mentors who influenced you in positive ways negative ways maybe you had a mentor who misled you music you listened to health problems you had lack of money or an abundance of money in your family situation other kinds of family dysfunctions you struggled with early romances you had pregnancy if you had that early abortion if you had that early being denied or rejected for things maybe you were rejected for a sports team maybe you were rejected for an early job position maybe you were rejected for a school or a university and then how that affected your psyche how did you adapt and cope with all of these things above how you adapted and coped it coped is who you are today that's the point there's a really great exercise that i used to give to my coaching clients to get a sense of of what they thought deep down about things and sort of how their psyche was shaped throughout their life it's a sort of a fill in the blank exercise so get a piece of paper and try this out it's very easy but it might reveal some things to you so on this piece of paper i want you to write the following fill in the blank statements and then spend some time if you want pause the recording and fill in the blank and don't rush it because these are valuable to really spend some time contemplating so the first one is life is blank and then pop i mean uh fill in that blank with what first pops into your mind and it can be multiple things in fact it's better if it's a couple of things not just one so for example life is beautiful maybe that's the first thing that pops into your mind or if you were abused as a child you might say life is that might pop into your mind or you might say life is pointless or you might say life is cruel or you might say life is unfair if you're feeling like it was unfair to you and see whatever you say it is i want you to recognize that it is that way for you because that's the attitude you adopted due to the survival conditions you faced and how you cope with them whether you were successful or unsuccessful and of course the more successful your survival strategies were the more positive your responses are going to tend to be and the less successful they were probably the more pessimistic and depressed and conservative and uh sort of uh coming from a wounded victim mindset your responses will be notice that so life is blank men are blank or women are blank fill in whichever is the opposite of your sex so if you're a woman then for you it's men are blank and if you're a man it's women are blank fill that in and don't overthink it too much you wanna you wanna kind of do this from your intuition there's no right or wrong answers it's just how you feel about it so go with your gut happiness is blank fill in that one maybe you think happiness is unattainable or happiness is love or happiness is sex or happiness is alcohol or happiness is getting good grades or happiness is having dinner with the table at the at the dinner table with the family the whole family there what is happiness to you chances are that's been shaped very much by how you grew up how you survived in some sense you equate happiness with some sort of successful survival however you've defined successful survival for you and all of us define successful survival in different ways because of course we had to survive in very unique ways so of course the next fill in the blank is success is blank what is success to you and where do your definition of success come from think about that what books magazines stories that you heard from your parents or role models parents teachers in your life that you emulated or looked up to that generated your ideas of success next is money is blank sex is blank science or religion is blank whichever one is the one you subscribe to spirituality is blank work is blank school is blank government is blank and finally i am blank actually i should probably add one more in there uh humans humans are blank so this reveals to you some very fundamental views you have that were shaped by or by your early survival situation so i'm going to keep going here but i encourage you to really pause this and spend a good 10 20 30 minutes just working on this exercise right here it will reveal a lot to you but i got to keep going so the key question here is how did early survival shape who you are today i want you to especially notice all of your likes and dislikes how those were shaped where they come from all of your beliefs convictions principles and and pet theories and firmly held opinions your worldview in other words i want you to notice your morality your judgments and the things you hate notice the source of that and how it came about as a function of survival and how it serves survival you see it's not merely that you have a morality or that you hate something just arbitrarily you never hate something arbitrarily you never judge something arbitrarily you never just have a moral system arbitrarily it's always in response in reaction to something such that it helps you to survive in whatever situation you were in and again remember it doesn't just help you to survive physically it helps you to survive as a psyche as an ego so don't just relate these things back to physical survival as your psyche accretes as your psyche develops certain likes and dislikes and aversions and predictions and beliefs and convictions and principles and judgments and morality these things create a sort of a object of their own all of these are sorts of amorphous conceptual abstract things which don't seem like physical objects that require surviving the way that a physical body does the way that a physical object might but once these things start to cohere together into a psyche or an ego mind this becomes a sort of an object of its own which then takes on a life of its own and it needs to survive even more so than the body itself it's like a system it's a system of meanings and interpretations it's your mind this is the ego mind we're talking about the origins and birth of the ego mind and your ego mind was not just born when you were three years old and you realized i exist that was an important that was an important milestone for you but your ego mind really was born in the first 20 years of your life by accreting more and more of this stuff i want you to notice your political and economic philosophy your sexual identity your views of men and women your social behaviors and tendencies and attitudes towards other people your career your strengths weaknesses fears and insecurities especially let's underscore fears and insecurities because fear and insecurity only comes from survival struggles if you didn't have any survival struggles you would have no fears or insecurities and you got plenty of them so you got to spend some serious time looking at those and where they came from and what those are about where they were sourced from what they were in reaction to and what they are coping mechanisms for also your defense mechanisms how do you protect yourself your values your life philosophy we might say all of us even if we don't explicitly call ourselves philosophers we all have a life philosophy like maybe your philosophy is that hey you know i'm not going to work too hard i'm just going to sort of coast through life path of least resistance or maybe your philosophy is that i got to work hard and i got to wake up on time every morning and you know otherwise bad stuff will happen maybe that's your life philosophy or maybe your your life philosophy is just oh take it one day at a time or maybe your life philosophies i got a plan 30 years ahead or bad stuff will happen i want you to even notice seemingly trivial and mundane things like the kind of food you you eat the kind of books you read the kind of media you consume the kind of work you do how all of this was shaped by early survival the way you react to strangers in social situations how social you are and how you socialize even the facial expressions you make when you are dealing with people in social situations the muscle tension in your body your darkest thoughts what kind of darkest thoughts do you have and how were those shaped by early survival challenges your dreams the kind of dreams you have when you go to sleep the kind of nightmares if you have nightmares what kind of nightmares do you have what are those about and how were they sourced by something uh like a of a survival challenge earlier in your life and then also your dreams in the more sort of aspirational sense like your highest goals your highest dreams for your life how were those shaped how you handle money are you stingy and frugal or are you very wasteful with your money and what is that in response to are you emulating the money behaviors of your mother your father or are you rebelling against their behaviors and you do the opposite so like maybe maybe your father wasted a lot of money so now you are very conservative with money or maybe your father wastes a lot of money and so do you because you're copying him it can it can be both ways even how you dress consider that where did that come from what kind of style of dress do you consider appropriate you like and dislike and what you guilt yourself for why do you guilt yourself for the things you guilt yourself for because there's certain things you guilt yourself over and there's other things you don't where did that come from so what i want you to notice about all of the above is that very little of it was chosen consciously and notice all of the above constitutes basically who you are i mean if you erase all that stuff i just mentioned that entire list from your mind what is left of you you're going to be unrecognizable as a as a human being as a persona as a psyche as an ego mind you won't be able to recognize yourself you'll look the same in the mirror let's say but but everything about you that you hold as the most important is gonna be gone you're gonna be completely hollowed out but also notice just how arbitrary all of these things are see we tend to hold all these things about ourselves as like who i really am my true self but is it really or is it just an accretion of a bunch of random stuff that happened to you as you were bumbling through life flying by the side by the seat of your pants just trying to survive by the skin of your teeth you see you're not as conscious as you think you are about who you are and where who you are came from and why you are who you are the mind is very good at rationalizing to itself that well you know i'm a christian and i have a certain moral system and i'm frugal with money and i'm conservative or i'm liberal for these very good reasons you know i'm a liberal because i value social justice or i'm a conservative because i really you know my parents were conservative and you know i value their traditions and all that and i really value my ancestors and all that but really you're bullshitting yourself all of those are backwards rationalizations that you make to justify the way you are to not question the way you are and then you see when we're talking about making changes to your life personal development or spiritual development we're really talking about changing your life to get better results but to get better results we have to change the more we change the better results we could potentially get now of course you could change things for the worst but we're assuming you can avoid that trap but i want to point out that you can change things for the worst about yourself so don't overlook that possibility but assuming that you're you're being wise about it and you're changing things about yourself in a in a beneficial manner to be more effective to be more successful more productive more happy and whatever else to sort of round the edges of your psyche um if you're doing that then the more you change about yourself the more change you will get the more positive change you will get if you're doing positive change right but but notice that if you're unwilling to carefully examine and change all of these things that i just listed up above about yourself if you're not really willing to change you at the core at the identity level then how can you expect to get any significant meaningful change in your life so if you really want a serious improvement in the quality of your life then you have to recognize connect the dots that that means there has to be a serious change about you who you are and that means you have to go the deeper you can go into who you are and the more you can change your identity the more change you can create the better your life will be if you do it correctly but also the deeper you go the more difficult it is and the more threatened you're gonna feel about it the less comfortable it's gonna feel because it's gonna feel like some part of you is dying and it's going to be counter-intuitive because a lot of times in life to really get a new result and some serious level of success or effectiveness in life you have to change something about yourself that you're attached to that you don't want to change about yourself and so half the battle is simply even noticing that and then accepting that that part of you has to change because you probably don't want to change that part of you because you're attached to it because you're so close to it because you're literally it so that's why we're doing this work and that's why we're trying to go in a lot of depth here because the deeper you can go the more change you can make the more results you can get notice how your choices shaped by which were shaped by survival demands so for example let's say you were forced to go to church when you were young so you started to hate religion because you resented going to church every sunday morning now of course it doesn't have to always be this simple one-to-one correlation for somebody else because nobody's survival situations are identical for somebody else they were forced to go to church and they ended up not hating religion but becoming religiously indoctrinated and loving religion so i'm not saying that just because your parents forced you to go to church that that's why you hate religion it might have worked that way for you but for your friend or for your brother or sister it might have just been exactly the opposite so don't over simplify these things this is very complex stuff a lot of times these these very branching paths that our lives and our psyches can take are extremely delicate and fragile and highly contingent and almost to the point of being arbitrary in the sense that like a little tiny is sort of like that chaos theory effect where you know a butterfly flapping its wings in brazil will cause a tornado in texas like everything is interconnected and sometimes a little a little you know da a little drop of heat something here or there in your life will will change the trajectory of your life radically these things accumulate exponentially and it's sometimes difficult to predict which which way are you going to end up hating religion or loving religion the difference between those two can be razor thin the difference can be as as little as a single word that comes out of the mouth of your mother father brother sister or preacher if they say one wrong word or one right word that's going to make the difference between whether you hate religion or love religion for the rest of your life now it's not always that fragile but sometimes it really is on a razor's edge like that balance on the razor's edge other examples might be like you got approval for example for acting the class clown for being funny and humorous so therefore you adopted this funny humorous persona you became very extroverted and social and you still are that way today and maybe today you survive that way maybe your whole career is built around that or for example you got approval for getting good grades in school because your teachers and your parents lavished you with attention and love when you got these good grades and then because of that you learn to now be an authority pleaser now as an adult you please authority figures and you try to please your boss and your whole your whole work life and your whole career revolves around just pleasing authority figures because that's how you learned to get love or let's say for example you got approval for being pretty and beautiful when you were young so you got obsessed with playing that up and so you started dressing up and you put a lot of makeup on and maybe you even get some plastic surgery and you're so you're up your life is obsessed about this and maintaining the sort of appearance of of beauty and being pretty and being girly or whatever because that was what you were trained into and that's how you learn to survive and that's how you got your sex that's how you got your approval that's how you got your love that's how you got your sense of superiority over other girls in school you know you felt good because the boys liked you more than they liked all the other girls that felt really good to you and you got more text messages more phone calls and more dates and more sex and more um you know men wanting to marry you higher quality men maybe or maybe lower quality men sometimes that attracts the lowest quality men and and you had maybe a string of of bad relationships with these men and how that shaped you and your sense of your sense of who you are your sense of self-esteem even maybe your career or how you earn money maybe you relied upon these men to shower you with gifts to drive you places to get you jobs to to you know connect you with others to help you to to move up in the world and that's become a way of life for you and you don't even know how to survive otherwise now i'm not judging you i'm not saying this is good or bad none of this is good or bad it just is survival so you should stop judging yourself because if you're judging yourself while you're doing this exercise you're trying to really unearth doing this psychic archaeology trying to unearth your survival if you're if you're judging yourself as you're doing it that's going to interfere with your ability to really observe what's there and where it came from in the same way that if some archaeologist was judging the thing he was excavating like let's say some archaeologist is digging in egypt and you know he he digs up some mummy or some skeleton and he's like oh that's an ugly mummy i don't like it um well then he can't observe it and study it objectively because he's he's biased against it he's too busy judging it so you got to do your archaeology neutrally that's one of the principles of good science and this is a science this is like we're doing science on you the science of you uology we're doing eulogy here paleo eulogy uh another example might be let's say you're a guy and your first girlfriend you know you fell in love with her in high school and you were madly in love with her and then she cheated on you behind your back and you found out about it with your best friend or something and then you became so bitter and then you developed an anti-feminist ideology now you hate you hate women you hate feminism and now you've built up a an ideology against this there's a lot of guys like this out there and sometimes it's so silly when you look back at it sometimes it's so silly um that something like this can shape your whole identity but it it sometimes does work in these very simplistic ways consider for example if your mom wasn't loving so you blank what did you do because your mom wasn't loving enough or accepting enough of you didn't give you enough approval or your dad your dad wasn't loving so you did blank you developed blank survival strategy blank coping mechanism blank fear blank insecurity and it stays with you to even to this day 30 years later it's still there see love is a very crucial one you should spend a lot of time contemplating who you are as a result of the love you didn't receive when you were younger there's a there's a profound correlation between those two i can draw if we sat down together for a couple of hours we could dig real deep do some sort of psycho psychoanalysis on you and and and just give you some profound epiphanies about why the you do today that is so dysfunctional is simply the result of a lack of love you received from your mother or your father when you were younger and sometimes it's simple sometimes it's very convoluted too and it doesn't have to make a lot of logical sense a lot of the stuff a lot of these sort of connections in your psyche are very illogical like your father wasn't loving to you so therefore you you became rebellious and you started to hate religion because your father was also religious let's say so you start to hate religion and now you're this um you know you're this hyper logical rational scientific atheist scientist you know astrophysicist nerd and maybe you work at a great university like at mit uh you're an astrophysicist doing this stuff and you might think that well your astrophysics has nothing to do and your you know your scientific materialist philosophy has nothing to do with the fact that your father wasn't loving to you you might say these are unrelated this is not leo none of this is that you're talking about none of this is scientific it doesn't make any rational sense and yet nevertheless simply because your father didn't give you the love you wanted and he was religious that led you down the path of this sort of scientific atheistic materialistic you know sort of a nerd identity that you adopted as a coping mechanism for that now maybe it turned out well for you in the sense that you got a good job and you love what you do okay great but still there's something there's a wound there that you haven't addressed and it's got very little to do with science or with logic it's got a lot more to do with love or lack thereof and you better believe you might think well leo so what i'm still doing good science so it doesn't matter ah not so fast you see because your ability to do science is actually going to be corrupted by the fact that you didn't receive sufficient love and therefore you're reacting against that and therefore for example you are closed off your mind is literally closed to studying religion picking up a religious book or even listening to someone like me even teach something that might smack of religion it might turn you off you might click the video off and you might not hear about non-duality or mysticism or awakening or other things or absolute truth or other things that are important for you to do your science well see if you can't tolerate the things i say then you can't watch my series my three-part series deconstructing the myth of science and then you won't be able to understand what science is and all of that because you didn't get the love you needed as a child and because of that you're going to be deluded as a materialist and you're never going to discover absolute truth which is really what you want as a scientist but you're going to miss it because your mind is closed and the reason it's closed because you didn't get the love you wanted and now you're in denial about it and now you've got coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms you've got layer upon layer of coping mechanisms and defense making them such that it would take hours for me just to break through to you just to convince you that this is the case and you might be a high iq highly rational highly logical scientific person and yet you're still being dense because there's something deeper going on in your life than science or rationality your life is not around that your life is around survival the survival of your psyche and your psyche can't survive without love you fool your life your life doesn't run on reason you don't you don't live for a reason you live for love and your reasoning is just uh various tricks the ego mind uses to to to justify how it gets love and various partial and biased ways it has of of loving or for example let's say your dad was a businessman successful businessman very busy and so the only way he gave you attention and approval and respect is if you also did business stuff he looked down upon religious stuff he looked down upon meditation he looked down upon artistic stuff so even though maybe you wanted to become an artist you didn't because to earn his respect you needed your father's love and respect um you also went into business and now you're running a successful business but you secretly deep down you hate doing business you don't like it and you don't mean you're feeling depressed and uh you're feeling like your life is not going well stuff in your business is not going well after a certain point because really it's not really aligned with what you really want because what you really want is you want to be an artist but you didn't allow that to yourself because you had to earn the respect of your father and all of this happened unconsciously automatically you didn't even think about it it happened years ago you forgot about it it was 40 years 40 years ago this this choice was made to become a business person in your life maybe when you were 15 years old you made this choice and now you're like in your 50s and yet still this this this thing is running your life and you won't be satisfied until you address it if you grew up rich think of how that shaped your life and who you are if you grew up poor think of how that shaped your life if you grew up white or black or asian think of how that shaped your life if you grew up fighting with your parents or divorced parents think of that how that shaped who you are if you grew up with animals think of how that shaped who you are if you grew up reading lots of books think of how that shaped you if you grew up watching tv lots of tv or playing lots of video games think of how that shaped who you are if you hung out with certain kinds of friends from this group here or from that group there think of how that shaped who you are if you were bullied in school think of how that shaped who you are if kids laughed at you for being short in school think of how that shaped who you are if your mother yelled at you and criticized you constantly think of how that shaped who you are if your father was a inept inefficient ineffective provider for your family think about how that shape who you are if your father was very critical of you how that shaped who you are if your household was religious how that shaped who you are if your household and your whole family ate junk food how that shaped who you are if you were an only child how that shaped who you are if you were less good-looking than average kids in school or if you were downright ugly how that shaped who you are all of this that i mentioned above creates biases in your mind and compensation mechanisms you have to compensate for all of these inadequacies that you perceive about yourself now some of these inadequacies could be legitimate like maybe you are very short maybe you were born very short and that's just the hand you were dealt the cards you were dealt um and you might and and that's just that but also some of these inadequacies and you might say that that's an inadequacy but also notice that just because you are physically short does not automatically equal inadequacy because there are very short people in the world who don't perceive their shortness as an inadequacy but you might so what is it about you that gets you to think that it is an inadequacy you see you might say well leo it just i don't think it's inadequate i know it's an inadequacy because i'm just shorter no it's more complicated than that because it's not really an inadequacy until you start to believe it is there are believe it or not short people who don't believe that it's an inadequacy you might say well they're just fooling themselves well that's see that's part of your part of your world view which is part of how you survived because you really believe it's an inadequacy but a lot of your inadequacies are not even as physical as just being short a lot of your inadequacies could be misperceptions you might think you're inadequate in some area and that might be a complete illusion that is sourced from something that happened in your life when you were young and you misinterpreted it or you didn't think about it very deeply and then you just took it on as that inadequacy and then that became a self-fulfilling prophecy over time and it snowballed and it fed it into itself and then it it manifested i'm not i'm not saying that all of your inadequacies and problems are just manifested in that manner but many of them are many of them are so look into that and then the problem is that when you develop these sort of perceived inadequacies and various biases in your mind and compensation mechanisms for how you're surviving see you're just when you're surviving in life most the time when we're surviving we're just we're just barely scraping by um we're just pulling together whatever we can whatever is at at our hand that we can grasp on like we'll grasp this thing there and that thing here we'll pull these two two things together and combine them and combine a third thing and if it just helps me to survive that's just it that's who i'm going to become and how i'm going to live for the rest of my life we don't consciously sit there and choose like well huh i could survive in this way or that way that's a healthy way that's an unhealthy way i'll choose that one or oh no that's even better i'll choose that one and then i'll swap these around later like most of us don't do this and we don't think about the long-term consequences of the things that we're using to do our survival because most of us are so desperate like we're going to take the first thing that will help us to survive like if if if smoking weed helps me to survive the sort of drudgery of school i'm just going to start smoking weed chronically and hanging out with my weed buddies and we're going to be doing that chronically and then that's just going to be my way of surviving and i'm not even going to think about other ways other alternatives or what the consequences are going to be or how it's going to affect anything or you know how that's going to shape me 20 years down the road and how that will distort your perception of reality you see that's the that's the real kicker here is that not only are you using all these ways to survive uh some of them can be very dysfunctional but since survival is such a serious thing it starts to then distort your perception of reality then it becomes very difficult for you to perceive reality clearly because you become your life become so hinged on surviving using these various biases and compensation mechanisms that you've adopted you don't even know how you would live without them and usually you can't adopt one of these compensation mechanisms or defense mechanisms without yourself or deceiving yourself in some way that's a lot of what our compensation mechanisms are they're ways that we hide aspects of reality or truth which is painful or uncomfortable to us things we want to avoid or not look at because they're too ugly or too painful or too stressful or too uncomfortable or too embarrassing or too shocking too scary like if you were born in a religious community and your whole sense of family and and pride and joy in your life is is that sort of community that's built around that religion for you then to to actually start to investigate the epistemic and metaphysical truth of that religion to seriously investigate that and then to start to discover that maybe it's not true do you see how threatening that is and do you see why you would never do it most people would never do it everything in your psyche would would scream and revolt and try to avoid that try to deny it so your mind would invent all sorts of defense mechanisms to avoid and deny really looking deeply into the sort of epistemics of your religious faith because if that were to crumble then the thing that it's supporting you know the community the family all that love you get and that that sense of camaraderie and friendship and all the meaning in your life all of that would crumble and it's too much for you to to even want to think about so you just click the video off you don't even want to hear this possibility this is what i mean by biases and compensation mechanisms and distorting your perception reality and now can you see how that distorts your entire perception of reality because these sort of defense mechanisms you create to maintain your religious worldview these defense mechanisms now have to now you have to play this sort of game of avoiding certain things within science you have to deny certain things in science you have to deny with certain things within spiritual teachings you have to not read certain books you have to not watch certain videos and you have to kind of play this this this this dance of hide and seek in your for the rest of your life in order to maintain that house of cards and you better believe that's going to distort your perception reality then your mind has to rationalize all this to itself it has first of all you have to deny that you're doing any of this then you have to rationalize why actually that scientific book is is actually bad or wrong and this is wrong and that is wrong and that person is wrong in this video you shouldn't watch and this channel is stupid and then start to judge and you should have to criticize it boom boom boom boom boom and then do you see how this multiplies in cascades the distortions cascade the lies and fantasies cascade don't think that this only applies to religious fanatics here this this example i could have easily talked about science instead or rationality or business or money or sex or relationships or marriage or children it's not it's not particular to religion here here are some examples from my own life so when i was young about six seven years old i moved my family moved from the ussr which was soviet russia back then communist russia to america this was right around the time when the soviet union collapsed we moved and the soviet union collapsed a few months later um and this this had a profound impact on my worldview and uh the work i do today and everything else um in in in many subtle ways and i'm still sort of struggling to understand exactly all the ramifications this had on me but there was a huge culture shock because you know the russian culture switching from the communist culture the capitalist culture it was it was a huge huge culture shock um it was a shock in terms of standards of living it was a shock in terms of going to school and dealing with language different language different culture different customs different ways of socializing and i struggled a lot with that especially like for the first five years i struggled a lot i especially started a lot to fit in socially it was difficult to fit in socially with all the other kids like in first second grade especially because i just i literally had zero of the english language no english language at all so i remember like in first grade i was barely even able to communicate with my teacher i didn't even know what she was telling me let alone like learning deep lessons or whatever like i didn't even know like when she was telling me i was doing something wrong i didn't even know that very i mean you could you can kind of guess from their emotions but like um you know she's yelling at you probably know you did something wrong but you don't know exactly what you did wrong um so that was a struggle but the the bigger struggle that was really fitting in with the with the american culture because all the kids were already at that age they're already kind of like so immersed in the culture they don't even know that it could be any other way but for me like learning some of the american culture was a real challenge and i had to sort of i had to i had to really mold my psyche in order to fit in i had to sort of pretend and kind of like go along you know sort of fake it till you make it approach was necessary in order to um to really survive socially in elementary school because otherwise the kids would laugh at me or you know i wasn't really bullied that much um there was no serious bullying but still like just mocking laughing ridicule just kind of like you know not wanting to hang out with you making you feel kind of like a loner or making you feel weird and different like a foreigner this these can be some of these things are very simple um and you might say well it's not a big deal you'll just get over it but you don't get over it because really what i had to do is i had to adapt certain social survival strategies um in order to sort of fit in and what i noticed later even really even to this day it's made me deeply insecure in certain ways like it's made me always like whenever i'm socializing with people um there's always like a second like when most americans just socialize just naturally you know they they do it unconsciously they just kind of like they just they just do it and it just kind of flows and it's natural uh for me it's not like that because for me there's like a secondary process that's kind of like going on in my mind given where you know my survival situation came from um and those sort of coping mechanisms i developed is that like there's sort of a secondary process which is like a sort of a self-reflective self-critical process which is always kind of observing my own self in a meta way and asking the question like am i fitting in am i being weird am i doing something wrong like is this cool you know like is this how people behave in this room in this situation this environment or not um and it's like it's really difficult to unwire that because this was wired into my mind from age like six or seven now of course i've done a lot of work and i've become a lot better about that i used to be very very shy and socially insecure i've done a lot of work i've talked about that in some of my pickup episodes and so forth that helped a lot but still i still have some of those remnants there some of these samskaras um and i noticed like sometimes i overcompensate sometimes i'm inauthentic because of this sometimes i'm people pleasing i have that kind of tendency sometimes i withdraw into my mind case that wasn't obvious and i can make a connection between my withdrawing into my mind and like being quite a solitary person pretty introverted person i can kind of draw that that i can draw that chain all the way back to you know to those early social survival situations uh i don't really enjoy being social probably for these reasons because i have sort of a negative association with it um in my childhood and so therefore my life is really not about that aspect like you might think that compared to other normal people for me socialization with like friends and with family and with intimate relationships of course i do i do some of that but like it's significantly diminished that aspect of my life is significantly diminished compared to most normal people what i've called normal people and there are pros and cons to that there are some very big pros to that and some very big cons to that um and i i don't even know if i had the choice to go back and to change it i don't even know if i would in a certain sense i'm sort of happy with where i ended up but also you got to be careful because of course you you're always going to be happy with what you're comfortable with and you're not going to want to change deep aspects of your psyche so there's there's that to consider but also in a certain sense uh you know it's given me a lot of advantages um it's made me very independent for example it's made me um able to avoid a lot of groupthink a lot of ideology that i would have otherwise fallen into it's made me a lot more unique more self-reliant um i would say even more successful in certain ways but also it it comes with certain limitations so there's trade-offs there it's made me question cultural norms and social norms a lot a lot of my work i simply could not do if i was social if i was social in the normal sense that people are because to be social in the normal sense that people are you have to you have to you have to like play the social game that everybody else is playing and if you're going to be playing that game you simply can't do some of the work that i do because it would be so jarring and so conflicting with with what most people believe or most people talk about um uh so again yeah there's trade-offs and pros and cons there but nevertheless that's sort of how my life unfolded it is what it is and i can always work to you know to improve those things so another aspect of my early life and survival that shaped me a lot today is with like i said earlier with my family's financial situation and instability there were specifically financial dysfunctions like deep financial dysfunctions with the the way my father earned money and in certain ways it was i'm grateful because he was basically always able to provide for us but it was very rocky at times and it was very insecure and very unstable and it led to various sorts of fears that were there even though like i didn't starve or anything and uh you know i even had a lot of luxury when i was growing up we went on great vacations sometimes and we ate at great restaurants sometimes and we we had nice cars sometimes then again other times our cars were repossessed our electricity was turned off i didn't have money to even buy a jacket or shoes when i needed them or i didn't have money to go to a dentist or to a doctor and so this left some samskaras in me for sure one thing is that it made me very financially conservative extremely financially conservative to the point where it it actually hurts me in certain ways it's helped me because it means that i like i really i'm very averse to wasting money i'm very very stingy because i saw how how wasteful my my dad was with money and the sort of horrendous problems this led to in our family it ultimately ended up destroying our whole family um so i saw that had a deep impact on me so of course the lesson i learned from that is to be very conservative and careful with one's money not to gamble not to waste it on stupid things not to buy stupid things and in a certain sense that was great i needed that because that allowed me to bootstrap some of my first businesses i had to be very frugal to do that i couldn't do it otherwise i had to save money be very very frugal but as i grew older and i developed wealth as a result of that i realized after a certain point that i had more wealth than almost anybody i knew in my family or in my friends in my social circle and so forth and yet i was stingier than all those people and i started to notice how that was hurting me and backfiring and so i started to realize like yeah i over compensated for that childhood situation i swung my pendulum too much to the conservative end and you know socially i'm very liberal but financially i'm extremely conservative and so like um i don't even like investing money in stocks because i'm so conservative that i'm sort of paranoid that the market's going to crash and then i'll lose all my money even though i've invested money in stocks in the past i've made lots of money in stocks i've lost lots of money in stocks when i was young overall i tend to sort of avoid it but anyways then i realized as you know i developed wealth and i grew older now i'm realizing that i have to i have to i have to dial it back dial the conservatives back and over the last year or two i was much more uh with my money in fact i wasted quite a bit of money in the last year that normally i would not have wasted just buying things i don't even need for example um simply because i've i was i was letting loose those reins that straight jacket that i put on myself for the first 30 years of my life i was letting that loose and as that was happening i started wasting money more and of course you might say well leo that's bad well actually for me it was good for me wasting a little bit of money is actually that actually grows me now for you maybe if you waste your money too much of course if you let that go too much you're going to swing too much to the other extreme and that's going to be bad and so now you know i've maybe even overshot to this direction wasting too much now i'm going to kind of dial it back and in this way you find your balancing point also this sort of financial instability that i experienced in my childhood it forced me at a young age when i was a teenager to get very serious about my life purpose my schooling and my career because basically the only option i had when i was like 15 years old to 18 years old in that range basically through high school and early university the choice for me was like either i get very serious about developing a career or i'm going to be forever in the situation of financial instability and i was so sick of this financial instability and financial dysfunction that i was already living under for the last 10 15 years that like the choice for me was a no-brainer so i got very very serious and disciplined about school because to me that was just the natural stepping stone you know if you're serious about school then you're going to be likely to get a serious career serious job i got serious about that so i got serious about both those things and i also became very pragmatic and utilitarian like i had to become very realistic about finances about how to actually do business how to make the business actually make money not fanciful ideas about this or that working out maybe something will work maybe something won't work it's like no it has to work right like very very pragmatic and a lot of my success i attribute to that but also it was in a certain sense psychologically dysfunctional because i sacrificed a lot i basically sacrificed my entire social life my dating life was non-existent my sexual life was not exist i sacrificed virtually everything for education and for my my career and my life purpose and i sort of was in that i was sort of forced into that situation now of course i could have made other choices i'm not i'm not saying that was the only way it could have gone but those were the choices i made and i made them because they made a lot of sense because i knew i knew the pain and suffering that would happen if i didn't do that if i was like all the other kids in high school who were just around or taking academics seriously and then all the kids in college who were also around going you know drinking and going to parties and this sort of stuff and having sex and doing stupid dating relationships that fizzled out and led to nowhere if they were doing all this dumb stuff they weren't really building their career they weren't thinking about their life purpose um to me it was like this was the stupidest thing i could have done because then i would have been in this deep financial instability for from for decades in my life and i didn't want that i wanted that part of my life just handled i didn't want to think about money ever again and that's what i achieved um now i still think about money but i don't really need to it's actually dysfunctional it's dysfunctional for me at this point to think about money because i don't really need to but i still do it because it's just a habit that i developed that i had to develop to get to the point where i'm at today if i didn't develop it i wouldn't be here talking to you there would be no actualized.org there would be none of these teachings these teachings are only possible because of the financial independence that i was able to develop through the sort of um overly disciplined paranoid um quasi-dysfunctional survival strategy that i developed when i was in my late teens and early 20s for business and for career and for life purpose so here we are so again there's trade-offs there's there's there's good and bad to it most of your life choices will have trade-offs like this another thing i noticed about my early survival strategies is that i sort of as i was getting into academic achievement i sort of started getting a lot of my love from the approval that i got from parents and educators teachers um for being really good with academics and so i sort of i fell into this trap of doing things for the grades to get good grades just to to get the approval that that generated now in a certain sense this this actually helped me because it made me really good at academics it made me smart it made me more educated than most the other kids and this has paid huge dividends um you know education pays dividends for the rest of your life so in a certain sense that was great but it was also dysfunctional in a sense is that i noticed that later when i even you know finished school and all that that my motivations were not fully intrinsic but extrinsic in the sense that i would do something for the accolades or for the approval that i would get from the customers or from my family or from friends or from just external sources and i started to realize that that there's there's something dysfunctional about that my motivation needs to be more internal and my sense of love and approval needs to be more coming from my own self rather than from outside because that was a that was sort of a dependency that i didn't want um and it wasn't healthy and so i did i did things to sort of rewire my mind and my psyche to remove that approval so nowadays i get a lot less of my approval from like you from the customers from the um from third parties from the comment sections like uh i actually sort of play a little game with myself like i read a lot of the comments i've read thousands of comments so whenever somebody gives me a positive comment in the comments section like oh leo is great or something or leo's a genius or whatever like i could read that and i could take pride it's like oh yeah leo's a genius i could i could read it that way or i could read it like like this and this is how i tend to read it nowadays is like um i mean yeah that's nice that that this person left this comment but i don't want that to actually change how i feel about myself because if if that comment makes me feel feel good then i'm going to want the next comment to also make me feel good and the next one and the next one and then my sense of identity and my sense of positive feeling is going to be about whether people call me a genius or call me good or call my work important or whatever and i don't want that so i want to sever that connection so in a certain sense it kind of makes me ungrateful towards a lot of the positive comments you guys leave me um um i mean i am i am grateful on some level and i i understand i understand why i leave the comments and all that but also from my point of view you have to understand that it's actually unhealthy for me to get all these positive comments um because it does it certainly when you read thousands of positive comments about yourself it certainly grows your ego um and it doesn't it doesn't really lead to true happiness so my happiness and life can't be predicated upon the comments that anybody leaves me even if they are deserved and of course there's plenty of negative ones as well that i read yeah so these are just a few examples from my own life that maybe help you to see use these examples to dive deeper into your own self and to figure out what it is for you that's why i'm sharing these examples with you so i want to clarify here who you are as an ego mind as a psyche is of course the survival challenges we've been talking about it is cultural programming also we've talked about that elsewhere but also it's genetics genetics plays a pretty big role so i don't want to dismiss that it's not merely that if if we place two people into the same survival situation they're gonna grow up the same no they're gonna have different genetics if we place you and me into the same survival situations we're still gonna probably come out pretty different because i have different genetics than you don't underestimate the significance of genetics but the thing with genetics is you can't really change that you got whatever cards you were dealt genetically so you got to deal with that it's not really a variable you can change very much um as long as you got your diet in place and so forth and there's there's certain epigenetic components but mostly your genetics are what they are so you just got to deal with it accept it and then what you can change though is looking at these survival challenges how you survive that's why we're talking about them so much so the next point is that consider this psychopaths sociopaths criminals narcissists multiple personality disorders schizophrenics alcoholics what all these people have in common just all these disorders if we want to call them that all of these are the result of survival situations people are these things because that's how they survived these are coping mechanisms much of your core identity was created around the avoidance of deep suffering so your psyche erected armor and defense mechanisms against the suffering so really what shaped you the most are two things two things the sources of deep suffering in your life deepest suffering during the first 20 years of your life and the sources of the deepest love in your life so whatever those were and those could have been the same sources like it could have the deepest source of suffering and love in your life could have been your mother or your father or maybe your father was the deepest source of suffering and your mother was a deeper source of love or vice versa and of course the closer someone is to you especially in your you know closest family members they were probably some of the biggest sources of your deepest suffering and love so really hone in on that contemplate that deeply and figure out what those were because that will that will sort of unravel this whole situation for you lay it bare clarify a lot of things for you and then see the the the sources of the deepest suffering they create insecurity and fear and senses of inadequacy and coping mechanisms to avoid that at all costs a lot of times your coping mechanism is dysfunctional and it's obviously dysfunctional you might even know it's dysfunctional but in your mind the way it's rationalized the logic of your mind is that well yes it's dysfunctional and it creates suffering but not as much suffering as i would have gotten if i hadn't created it and therefore that rationalizes it and it stays in its place because you fear that if you let go of this coping mechanism this armor then sure yeah it it ruins your life a bit and it causes suffering and dysfunction but in the back of your mind you know how much suffering would happen if you didn't have that armor and you're afraid of that of feeling that suffering again because you felt it once or twice and you had enough so you would rather hold that armor up for the rest of your life than to risk the possibility of letting it down and getting a little bit of that suffering so it takes courage to take your armor down and while also what you have to understand is that there are different kinds of armor so you can let this armor down you can find a better piece of armor so you don't have to completely open yourself up to deep suffering i'm not saying that that's the solution here although that's the ultimate solution but like before you get to that ultimate solution you can upgrade your armor and you could find healthier coping mechanisms healthier survival strategies so it's sort of a carrot and stick model this was the stick and then you got the carrot the carrot is the love and then this can also though lead to dysfunction because like i was giving you that example with the approval from my teachers on my you know grades and then how that led to me seeking approval through comments and other you know praise for my work and so forth that's the that's the that's the carrot that's the love so you have to be careful about where you try to get love from because you can try to get it from very dysfunctional places from authority figures from external sources ideally you want to be able to to feed yourself your own carrots so really you want to become self-reliant and give yourself the love that you are and that you want and that you need and that you feel you deserve because really the only one who could love you sufficiently is your own self but a lot of times we we don't realize that the most obvious thing and we somehow think that well it's not true love unless it's coming from somebody else well that in itself already sets you up into a very dysfunctional problematic uh situation that will never be resolved and so watch out where are you getting your love from um are you used to getting it from your parents from your co-workers from your boss from authority figures from your lovers or sexual partners from your work all of that is going to limit you and not allow you to develop to the highest levels that you can so take that into account you want to replace the ways in which you get love you want to replace the partial ways that you have developed for more holistic expansive ways which are not as partial and not as contingent right you see like if for you to feel love you need your sexual partner to tell you how much he loves you in the morning every morning and unless he says that you don't feel love do you see how you have made yourself a slave to that person why set up that contingency why not tell yourself that you love yourself every morning then you don't need this guy see you're using this guy to tell you he loves you when really you can just short circuit that thing and just tell yourself you love yourself now you're saying oh leo but that's cheating that that's not real love it is real love but you guys even deeper your love for your own self believe me will be a hundred times deeper if you do this work than any man's love for you but but it's gonna take some serious personal development work and spiritual development work to reach that point of true self-love see my episode called self-love and i have other episodes about love what is love part one part two i've talked about love quite a bit and we'll continue to do so so um so yeah but right now see right now you don't know how to love yourself that might take you five ten years to develop that and until you develop it you're going to be using this man in your life as a crutch and maybe you stay with this man even though he's not right for you because he does give you at least a little bit of the love that you can't give yourself and so this just perpetuates a dysfunctional survival strategy see so the bottom line is that you are confusing your survival patterns and strategies with who you are you become attached to them because you formed an identity out of them you have in other words become your survival this is a problem because survival always ultimately fails survival is losing game you can't win survival forever it only works in the short term and medium term but in the long term as they say we're all dead you can't win the game of survival so if you identify with your survival and that's all you think life is and that's all you think you are is this thing that needs to survive you've you've set up yourself to lose the game and you better believe that's a deep existential problem now of course you avoid it because you don't think about your death very much um but you can't avoid thinking about your death forever you're gonna have to face it at some point and when you do it's gonna be very painful so you might as well start to think about that earlier rather than later because there are things you can do to transcend survival so one of the points of this exercise that we've been doing here looking into your past is to show you just how contingent your worldview is how arbitrary how precarious it didn't have to be that way you could have turned out to be a very very different person with a very different worldview a very different political ideology economic beliefs a very different sexual identity very different beliefs about mankind just if your survival conditions were changed a little bit so when you recognize that this helps you to detach from your worldview and to stop treating your worldview as this special true thing you see your psyche tries to rationalize your worldview as the one true one the best one is so special and so important and then you spend the rest of your life debating it and defending it when really you should see through all that and realize that it's all just rationalizations you're not that special your worldview is not that special it's not that true most of your worldview is illusions and fantasies cobbled together held together by string and snot uh just just to get you barely to survive that's really what your worldview is about it's not about some ultimate truth the way that you tell yourself and it's not who you really are and it's not how reality actually is science is not how reality actually is science is a survival strategy you fool it's not deeply true it's not the only one it's not special it's not important it's a survival strategy that you're acting out and that you're denying you're so you're so acting it out that you're even in denial that it is a survival strategy you've convinced yourself that that this science is this like pinnacle of truth and reason and objectivity you're fooling yourself and if even science can't clear this bar if even science is a survival strategy then what does that say about everything else which is even worse even less rigorous about religion about your mystical beliefs about your new age beliefs about your um everything else about your economic beliefs your social beliefs your political beliefs it's for the most part it's fantasies and houses of cards you've built that allow you to survive barely barely you are acting out deep survival patterns which are deeply unconscious within you without realizing that you're doing so and you're justifying them as important true and real which they aren't they're a fantasy this is the key to understand about your psyche if you don't understand this you're going to be thoroughly self-deceived for the rest of your life and if you start to accept what i'm saying here this is the beginning of the unraveling of the self-deception but still just the beginning there's a lot of work to do you're still acting out many of these patterns it's going to take a lot of work to undo these patterns you're attached to them you're unconscious of them and you're defensive about it and you're in denial about it and i want you to start to recognize how your survival strategies limit you the biggest mistake people make is that they confuse survival with truth or with goodness or with love survival is a thing holding you back from truth goodness and love survival is the inferior crippled dysfunctional manner that you have cobbled together to get a little tiny sliver of truth goodness and love into your life it's the bottleneck we have to widen this bottle neck to get more truth goodness and love into your life and this is the process of widening the bottleneck that we're doing here the more seriously you take this process the more you do the exercises the more you will dilate that bottleneck anything that allows you to survive and to thrive especially thrive gets backwards rationalized by the ego mind as true valid and good this is the ultimate illusion that the ego spins the best examples of this is the grifting that you see people do on in the media politicians priests talk show hosts news anchors businessmen wall street types bankers academics youtubers many of these folk are grifters but the grift is so good the grift is so deep they don't recognize that they're grifters they don't believe or feel themselves to be grifting because they're true believers in whatever they're preaching or teaching or selling why because to sell to preach to teach to lie effectively to spin illusions effectively to sell fantasies effectively you have to buy the fantasy yourself otherwise there's too much cognitive dissonance within you it creates a sort of instability in the psyche when you are preaching something and you don't believe what you're preaching therefore the most effective preachers are completely deluded into the fantasies that they're preaching same thing with the news anchors the news anchors who are delivering the news to you they can only do that effectively consistently for long periods of time if they are fully bought into the world view from which they are delivering the news and the people who are running businesses these giant multi-billion dollar businesses that require enormous investments of time money energy and all that the only way these businesses can be run is if the managers and leaders who run these businesses have fooled themselves into thinking that these businesses are doing something good for the world it's always the ego's job to rationalize whatever it's doing as being good your mind is doing this every day and in a certain sense it's true all these things are good everything is good that's the ultimate truth everything is good which is why the ego can get away with this you see so actually it's it's it's really twisted you might think like well the ego is lying all the time that's really what you're saying but it's it's it's more subtle than that it's not that the ego is lying like for example when hitler is doing his evil stuff actually what he's doing is good everything is good there's nothing there's nothing bad in the world everything is good um but the way that the hitler's ego can rationalize that what he's doing is good is precisely because everything is literally good so anything you point to can be made to look good simply by focusing on it and sort of avoiding the collateral damage of the consequences that happen to other aspects of reality if you're unholistic you can get away with that and that's exactly what the ego does the ego is always biased and unholistic in the way that it looks at the world it always looks at it from a selfish lens in a selfish way and ignores all the collateral consequences and damage and so therefore by looking at it in this narrow way it's able to see it's oh it's sort of the eco is sort of carving out its own version of goodness but it's always a finite piece of the pie so if absolute goodness is the whole pie all of reality everything that could ever possibly occur that's absolute goodness the ego is saying well i don't like this piece of the pie i don't like that pie of the pie so it cuts out all those and it just cuts a little sliver of the pie that it likes for itself here so hitler basically said okay i only like this this much of the pie the rest of the pie i can you know them i just care about this pie here this little piece and then he eats that piece and it tastes good to him and he actually believes that this is the best pie this is the the best the pie can be and then you you carve out a different piece of the pie maybe your piece of pie is a little bit bigger than hitler's maybe twice as big and somebody else carves out a little bit a little bit bigger piece a little bigger piece people carve out different sizes of of pie but all of them are are still like one percent less than one percent of the of the whole um and then since we're carving different parts of the pie you know well your piece of the pie contradicts hitler's piece of the pie so you call hitler evil hitler's piece of the pie contradicts with your piece of the pie so hitler thinks you're bad and you need to be killed and so everybody is doing that carving up this pie into pieces but what nobody understands is that the entire pie is absolutely good and that's it it's just that simple and therefore everybody can get away with loving some part of the pie because the entire piece the entire pie is just love the pie is love itself it's infinite love it's an infinite love pie and then you're just cherry picking whichever part of the pie you like as the biased little ego that you are that you're trying to survive as because the entire pie is too big for you and it threatens you too much you can't love the whole pie because it'll kill you so you love little pieces of it that don't threaten you so here are some key questions how are your top fears and insecurities shaped by your early survival challenges how did your early survival challenges shape your values what strategies did you invent to get love in what ways are you still over compensating what are some outdated survival patterns armor and defense mechanisms you still act out today how have they served you well in the past that's important to acknowledge and become conscious of because they did serve you well at some point in the past otherwise you wouldn't have adopted them and how are they limiting you today now they've probably outrun their usefulness and you can find better ones and what would it look like if you let them go what are you afraid would happen if you let them go that's a very good question to contemplate so i want to underscore that you should have compassion for your early survival situations you didn't have much of a choice about them you were thrown into them from a position of total ignorance you had no idea how to cope with them and you just did the best you could and so there's no need to feel shame or guilt about it you did the best you could but you can do better now with more knowledge more experience more consciousness higher teachings that you didn't have see if somebody sat down and taught you what i just taught you in the last two hours when you were six years old you could have avoided a lot of these problems but nobody did and part of the reason is that when you were six years old you couldn't even understand the things i'm talking about nor would you be interested in them because you're a child all you care about is candy and video games um it's hard to even get you to eat healthy food let alone to watch something like this and to understand it and then to follow it for the rest of your life it's hard to even get an adult to do this let alone a six-year-old child but still some some young children are watching and they'll this will change their whole lives save them a lot of problems and it's easier to do this younger than it is older right like some of you who are watching who are like in their teenage years some of you guys watch me you're like 16 years old 18 years old so i've even read comments of like 12 year olds watching some of this content you've discovered like the secret to life here if if you only watch this stuff and then you don't turn into a dogma but you actually practice it the way i talk about all the time and warn you not to do not to turn into a dogma you actually practice it you don't just listen but practice and you apply for the rest of your life your life will like you will you will be orders of magnitude more developed than any of your peers and your life will go so much better so don't don't take this for granted but also as you have compassion for your own early situation have compassion for the early situations of others who probably had it worse than you they also had little choice about it hitler had very little choice about his early situation like i mean i don't remember exactly but i believe he was drafted he was probably drafted into world war one i don't know if he was like when you're drafted into war you have very little choice about that so whenever you see somebody doing something you don't like or that you hate or that you think is evil or disgusting or wrong or you think the person is a monster just ask yourself what was the early situation survival situation that he was cornered into where he was forced to learn these bad habits these dysfunctional survival strategies and and remind yourself he had virtually no choice about it he was cornered into these survival situations just like you were and he was ignorant he was totally ignorant about how to handle these situations so he might have made some bad choices just like you probably did in your life too which you probably regret and you would undo with the benefit of wisdom but uh wise teachings are pretty rare you don't come across these sorts of discussions very often within your family at work on tv in the media you were lucky that you found this information so can you see why people's world views are so different why people don't get along why people don't understand each other they had such different survival situations that you can't even imagine the survival situations that some people had to endure and of course this led to very different world views than your own and a worldview is just a survival mechanism that's contingent to one's survival environment just like the shape of a snake has to match the environment that it tries to survive in otherwise it dies so really all the evil people in the world that are doing stuff you don't like that you hate all they're doing is they're just surviving in the only way they know how the best way they know how if they knew a better way to survive they would do it but they don't they don't know you might say well leo but they should know they should know better no they shouldn't the only way they could know better is if their survival situation and their environment offered them opportunities to know more opportunities for education for spiritual work for personal development advice for these kinds of videos for mentors and gurus and teachers who are loving and kind and wise and truthful and unbiased and who could guide them but this is extremely rare extremely rare recognize how rare this is to have these kinds of people in your life it's much more common to have mentors and teachers and adults who abuse you exploit you manipulate you control you mislead you feed you fantasies brainwash you use you selfishly to serve their own survival that's much more common and how can you blame them because their elders and adults and parents and mentors also did the same thing to them so it's just a cycle of ignorance being perpetuated don't you see if people knew better they would act better but they don't know better and don't underestimate the significance of knowing better just knowing what the right thing is what the best thing is is that can take decades yes it's not enough just to know what the right thing is or the best thing is you also have to act of course you have to act and it's not just enough to listen and to to read a book or to listen to a video and just to know but also don't underestimate how important it is just to know something just to know what the right thing is what you should pursue and what you shouldn't pursue in life what the consequences of a certain choice or action are just to know that that is a very rare and valuable thing in and of itself if people knew that they would act a lot better there are a lot of obstacles to knowing that because the way your psyche is shaped is that all those defense mechanisms they become epistemological such that it even locks your mind off from knowing these things that's how bad the situation is when a person is deeply stuck in their survival patterns you can't even get through to them their mind is not open enough even to hear a communication such as this one they can't hear it they would have clicked the off button two hours ago and uh even more more to the point they wouldn't have even clicked on this video they wouldn't have even begun listening to it that's how badly brainwashed they are that's how badly their perception of reality is distorted by their survival coping mechanisms so in conclusion you are a robot acting out a survival script that's not all that you are but the way that you've currently been living that's what you basically are 99 of you is a robot acting out a survival script spirituality is about transcending that script and it is possible to transcend that script to radical degrees degrees you might not believe until you start doing some serious spiritual work once you see everyone is just acting out their survival script you stop taking things personally all the ways you struggle to survive as a kid left karma patterns scars wounds and insecurities in samskaras in your psyche and now you're left coping with those scars spirituality is about purifying and healing those scars and development is about finding more nuanced and functional ways of surviving so we're really talking about two things here we're talking about transcending survival altogether and finding aspects of life that are beyond survival that's spiritual work and development work is as important or even more important than the spiritual work it's not about transcending survival it's about finding better more functional healthier survival strategies because you still have to survive even if you're spiritual if you want to live if you don't want to live then you don't have to develop survival strategies also i want you to notice that every generation faces new survival challenges and develops unique coping mechanisms with unique blind spots and limits and trade-offs so the boomer generation which is popular to to meme these days the the okay boomer generation developed certain coping strategies and blind spots and we're living with those today many of our politicians are their minds are sclerotic with these blind spots and they're holding society back but don't think that you know it's all the boomers fault every generation will have its own form of this sort of mental sclerosis especially as it gets older and the previous generation dies so i mean gen x will have its own coping mechanisms and blind spots millennials which is my generation we have our own coping mechanisms and blind spots and zoomers those of you who are younger than me you will have your own they just haven't become a parent yet so it's it's a never-ending cycle of of growth into more consciousness and love and various limitations and biases and resistance that holds us back from doing that individually and collectively notice how most people around you are surviving reactively not consciously they're just scraping together barely some kind of survival strategy they're doing it from a position of weakness and reactivity not proactively consciously deliberately planning out how they're going to survive not deliberately comparing different survival strategies swapping them out trying different things experimenting trying to improve them upgrade them almost nobody is doing that so the key distinction here is between opportunistic reactive survival and conscious survival i'm trying to teach you conscious survival and then beyond that how to transcend survival altogether so i invite you to shift to conscious survival stop surviving opportunistically because down that road lies evil and devilry as we've talked about don't just do what's convenient and easiest and the path of least resistance and what's most lucrative and what gives you the most short-term pleasure follow a higher purpose live life for a higher purpose you will be rewarded for it there are trade-offs it's harder at first it's an investment it's a long-term investment you make a long-term investment and then it pays dividends for the rest of your life that's the idea are you going to be a wise investor in your own life can you think of a better thing to invest into than your own life what else do you have if you don't want to invest in your own life then what are you doing all right that's it hopefully this gets you a little bit of a better appreciation for the depth and importance of survival i can't stress this enough survival is one of the most important things you can understand in your life and almost nobody understands it so make sure you go watch my earlier two-part series understanding survival part one and part two combine it with this you could think of this as part three in a certain sense and this gets you a very very nice foundation and and then this is not enough now you got to do some of the work and i'll probably come up with new episodes in the future about survival because there's there's just so much that could be said about it there's so many interesting facets to it i mean it's basically what all of mankind is up to everybody in your life everybody around you they're busy running around doing what surviving in different ways and survival is so diverse there's so many different ways you can do it it can be so functional but it can also be so dysfunctional and that range is enormous and so spending time studying that is one of the most useful and practical things that you can do in your life all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me don't forget and come check out actualize.org that's my website on the website you will find some valuable and powerful resources that you can't get anywhere else for example my book reviews over 200 of the best books that i've read i review them all in audio format go check that out reading those books gives you the foundation you need to understand my work if you wonder sometimes i go where does leo get some of these ideas and it seems like he's just pulling stuff out of his ass and he's just you know he's telling me things that nobody else has corroborated no most of the things i tell you i don't just make it up um it's corroborated by hundreds of books just you gotta read them takes time takes work and i got a lot of unique and rare books on my book list that you won't find elsewhere so check that out the life purpose course i get so many positive reviews and testimonials for the life purpose i should really just like make a video at some point that's going to be an hour long just of testimonials that i get from people thanking me for the life purpose course and how it's transformed the trajectory of their life and their sense of direction their life over 25 hours of figuring out what your top values are and how to build a career around your deepest passion in life it's a very practical course it's not just theory and philosophy it's it's telling you the process i use to do it for myself and how you can do it for yourself also my blog i post a lot of exclusive stuff on my blog i put a lot of time and attention into my blog really more than it deserves so if you're not following along on my blog you're missing out on some of my best content make sure you watch that stay tuned i update it weekly i make new announcement that's there and so forth that you won't find on youtube come join the forum the actualized forum where you can ask questions and get a sense of community to help you along this lonely self-actualization journey if you'd like to support me on patreon you can at patreon.com actualized i appreciate the financial support the donations that helps me to stay financially independent and to fund new projects in the future i have various kinds of ideas for stuff i want to fund maybe new sorts of videos maybe some advertising campaigns i still because of health issues i've been sort of delaying on that but i'm not wasting those donations i'm going to be putting them to good use in the future and new announcement actualized clips is launching a new channel that features short five ten minute clips of my long ass videos so if you don't have time to watch all of these i have an editor who's cherry picking the best parts of all my videos and he's gonna be uploading those to the actualize clips channel it should be live now or it will be live in the next few days and those will be posted new clips will be posted on a on a daily basis probably even multiple clips per day we've basically got like over a thousand clips to to prepare and to post a long-term project that will take a couple of years to come to full fruition but we'll start pumping out those clips now so um subscribe to that channel as well if you uh if you want the the sort of juiciest cherry picked bits and the last thing i'll tell you to wrap all this up is since we've been talking about survival the majority of you listening to me what you're missing is survival handle your survival get good at mastering survival don't get too far ahead of your skis with the spiritual stuff i talk a lot about the philosophical the metaphysical the spiritual because you have to understand that from my point of view i've sort of reached a very advanced level in human development not to brag or anything but it just is the case that like literally i'm losing interest in most things in life that are just survival i don't really care about money so much i don't really care about raising a family i don't care about doing more business and launching a bunch of businesses like what really interests me is what's beyond survival but i know that there are a few people who are at that level so part of my job is not only to teach what's beyond survival and how to get there but to help you to reach the point where you can even care about what's beyond survival and i know you can't care about those things unless i help you with the basics of survival so you have to understand that i didn't just jump into spirituality at the beginning of my life i spent like the first 15 or 20 years of my life really getting a solid handle on survival and i still haven't fully done that i'm still learning things in that area there's a lot to learn about how to survive well um and more healthier ways of surviving so i encourage you not to rush too much especially if you're young if you're like in your teens especially but if you're in your 20s or even 30s and you haven't got a good solid handle on survival because you wasted your time smoking weed playing video games or you know hanging out with friends or whatever partying and stuff like you're going to need to spend a good solid 10 years just handling survival now that doesn't mean you can't start laying the groundwork for what comes next if you're genuinely interested in some of the spiritual topics i talk about and you're genuinely interested in awakening and psychedelics and whatever you can you can dabble in some of that stuff you can start to lay a little bit of a meditation habit maybe 30 60 minutes a day whatever start doing a few retreats a year you can start laying that groundwork as you're handling and learning about survival such that once your survival stuff is handled five ten years from now then you're gonna have a nice smooth natural transition into what comes next this way you don't get caught in the endless tail chasing game that is survival that's the danger with survival is that people who get too good at it and know nothing else they get lost in it for the rest of their lives thinking that it'll lead them somewhere but it won't you got to do enough survival to survive but if you do too much survival it boomerangs and backfires on you so my advice to you especially you youngsters is take the mastering of survival seriously study it learn it master it as much as you need to but don't don't go overboard and you can already start to lay the groundwork for what comes afterwards and that would be the proper use of these teachings and if you're at a point where you're already sick and tired of survival and you've got it well handled then you're right where i want you and that you're ready for the very advanced stuff that i talk about so stay tuned for more of that you