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[Music] in this episode I'm going to show you an extremely powerful technique for how to derive deep existential truths about reality for yourself and also psychological truths as well not just existential ones and this is contemplation by using a journal it's a simple technique and I'll share it with you in a minute but let me just underscore the importance in this work of seeking the truth for yourself not through books not through videos not through belief systems or ideologies and not even through my own teachings but for yourself and this is something that I've been saying really for years now from the very beginning honestly I'm tired of saying it at this point and that is what I've been saying is that you have to seek the truth in your direct experience and not just take my word for it and not to believe me beliefs and ideology is the biggest trap in all of this self actualization business and really if I was doing the greatest service to you I would begin and end every single episode with a disclaimer all of my videos all 300 or so videos that I have each one of them would have a disclaimer at the beginning and at the end which would tell you that nothing that I say in these videos is actually true all of it is just beliefs it's all just mental masturbation and theory it means absolutely nothing for you unless you are able to go and to discover rediscover these truths in your own direct experience and that you are at a great risk of falling into the trap of ideology but you know it's boring for me to say this over and over again and honestly to me this is just obvious it's so obvious that this is like step number zero in any inquiry into the nature of reality or life or anything like anything you do in life must begin with step zero in that you are falling into beliefs and ideologies which are not your own that you need to make your own by going out there and actually tracing what's true in the real world and seeing if that matches up with what you were told in some video or in some book or by some belief system that is the essence of truth seeking so either you will do that or you won't if you won't I guarantee you that you will be diluted and you will make many grave mistakes and you will limit yourself and how high you will be able to develop and how conscious you can become and you will not find the ultimate truth and there will be many other truths now I'm not just talking to the ultimate truth there will be all other minor truths which you will also never find and be deluded about so you'll be deluded on many layers both the ultimate layer and all the intermediate layers as well so that's how important this is the reason I don't say this in every single episode is like I said because it's honestly it's so obvious to me and also because it's it's rather boring and monotonous to say this all the time so let's address this problem with this technique using a journal to contemplate now you might wonder leo but why should I contemplate when I can just get the answers from a video or from a book or from you what's the point of actualize that org if I can't use the answers that you're giving me it's just like with math with math to understand math you must actually do math it does not help to just watch a video about math you will not understand math that way nor will it help for you just to get the answers to a math problem you will not understand math that way you must actually go through the pain of doing the math and that's precisely what differentiates a deluded person from a self actualizing person from a conscious person the difference is that the conscious person actually goes through the word and it takes work and the reason that most people don't do it is just because they're mentally lazy it takes time it takes effort to actually derive answers for yourself most people are just like most kids in school what they do is they just copy answers from the back of that of the math book they don't actually go through the problems and of course because of that they're poor mathematicians except with mathematics it's okay you can be a poor mathematician and still do well in life but you cannot be poor at tracking the truth and do well in life you cannot so that's why you got to start to drive this stuff for yourself this is critical this is absolutely critical and this one simple technique which I'm going to show you here today can transform your whole life this is really the essence of self actualization right here so listen close how do you actually contemplate properly well first you need some method for contemplation now I have an episode in the past that I shot called contemplation where I went into depth about contemplation and there I just sort of assumed that you would be contemplating in your mind and that's a good way you can contemplate in your mind but the problem is that it's very easy to lose track of what's going on there you can get lost in monkey mind loss and your fantasies and ideas so what I have for you now is just a a more rigorous technique which is you will be using some sort of note-taking device either a pad of paper like this some legal pad this is just very simply go to Walmart and buy a whole box of these and some pens and pencils and and that's really good or you can use a digital format like if you're using OneNote like I talked about in my commonplace book episode maybe you want to keep your journal there but there's actually some important benefits to just having an analogue system in this case because with your wit with a digital journal system you're gonna be on your phone or on your iPad or something doing this it's not ideal because you have all those distractions notifications and games and apps and all this emails and all sorts of weird stuff when you're contemplating you just want to be all by yourself completely focused on your thoughts and that's why just a simple pen and paper system works so great that's what I tend to use rather than using my commonplace book which is what I use for most of my other forms of note-taking and various other journals that I have but I make a distinction between other journals that I keep and contemplation and you'll you'll understand that as I keep explaining how this works so you get your notepad and then you go and you sit down in a quiet place and you set aside a good chunk of time 30 to 60 minutes the reason you want to chuck a time at least that big is because you're gonna have to build up momentum and your mind is gonna be lazy and that's one of the biggest obstacles you'll encounter when you start to contemplate is that your mind is lazy its distracted it wants to run off and do other stuff rather than to actually contemplate and when you first start doing it you're gonna be rusty at it you're not gonna be able to just come up with answers right on the fly so it'll probably take you 10 15 minutes just to get in the groove so you've got to set aside that time and then what you do is at the top of your page you write the question that you will be contemplating for this entire chunk of time so to focus your contemplation here you're not just going to be contemplating and daydreaming random questions you're gonna pick one question what's one question that's important to you that you really want to get to the bottom of for example maybe you want to know what is a thought that would be a good example and then you're gonna start to contemplate this so I'll be giving you many examples I'll give you a whole list here of various questions you can contemplate but let's just start with this example to explain how this works so what is a thought you write us at the top of your page and now you start to wonder and think about this but very importantly you have to start thinking from Ground Zero which means you have to throw away all your preconceived ideas and beliefs any cultural teachings that you acquired anything you learn in school or university any books you've read and including even all of my teachings whatever you've heard for me about what thoughts are throw all of that away the point and the essence of contemplation is to sit down all by yourself and to think about a topic or a question completely from scratch not relying on anything from any external source so you're going inside and you're really working through the problem in the same way that you might be working through a math problem or a logical proof and so you start to question what is a thought and as you do this it's very critical that you don't just speculate or philosophize about what a thought is but that you ground yourself in your direct experience and in concrete examples so what do I mean by this let's really go through this so if I'm thinking what is a thought the first thing that I need to do is I need to ground myself which means I need to actually find an example of a thought in my direct experience now with thoughts fortunately it's very easy because hey what is the thought is itself a thought so as I'm thinking what is a thought well I could say to myself oh is what is a thought a thought oh yeah it is okay so that's the thought so I already got an example to work with right there and even to say that I have an example to work with that's another thought so now I got two thoughts to work with and in fact I can come up with thoughts right on the fly I can think of a a red apple or a tall tree and all those are thoughts and that's good and see what you're doing there is you're actually grounding yourself you're not speculating you're not coming up with some theory of what a thought is so a mistake in contemplation would be to start to like bring scientific theory into this and to say well I know from stuff that I learned in college about neuroscience that what I thought really is the thought is just some is it's just neurons in the brain and there's there's chemicals and I read all this stuff about myelination the nerves and different neurotransmitters like epinephrine and norepinephrine and serotonin and dopamine and all this and this creates a thought and the neurons are linked in some way and then something happens bla bla bla bla bla that is not contemplation that's you regurgitating stuff that you've learned so we're really pushing ourselves to think from scratch as though you are the first person ever in the history of mankind who has ever thought about what a thought is and if you put yourself in a position then you realize you can't rely on anybody else you can't rely on a text book or some religious teaching or some scientific thing you you saw on some documentary or in some video so all you really got to work with is direct experience you have a thought sink of a red apple okay that's a thought right there so what is that and then you question and you sit and you kind of stew in it and you let your mind observe what a thought is be careful not to go too quickly or to jump to conclusions the key with proper contemplation is that you are raising a question you're bringing an example to mind right now in your direct experience you're training your awareness upon that object like the thought of a red apple and then you're just observing you want to observe the mechanism of what that is notice how a thought is arising in your mind to do that you don't think about thoughts you observe thoughts that's a very important distinction if you start to think about thoughts you're you're off into speculation territory whereas if you're observing thoughts that's where you're actually learning what a thought is and this right here is really the essence of science maybe you were taught and maybe you think that science is some sort of grand theory building exercise or it's an exercise in doing laboratory work or maybe you thought it's like posing a hypothesis and then proposing an experiment and testing that validating and falsifying it none of that is really the essence of science the essence of science is what we're doing here in contemplation you are taking an actual object in the real world as it is occurring without any opinions or ideas about it and you're just observing what it is how it arises and what it's doing and the difficulty with that is that you have to be able to set aside all of your own stuff and baggage and your emotions and your projections and all that to observe an object just precisely as it is and it can require a lot of observation of a very simple object to finally get to the bottom of what it really is so I might think of a red apple and then I might just sit there for a minute and just kind of keep bringing that red apple back into my mind because I bring it up that it disappears I bring it up it disappears so I just maybe keep doing that for a minute and I just wonder what what is this red apple and then maybe I bring to mind some other example I think yellow lemon and I bring that a couple of times it to mind it's like okay so that's another type of thought so we've got two thoughts we've got a red apple and a yellow Apple or a yellow lemon okay so are these are these different thoughts or is there only one kind of thought how many kinds of thoughts are there and so then at least the next questions I think now I think about that and so I now have to bring to mind all the different kinds of thoughts that there are there are thoughts about physical objects there are thoughts about intangible things like love and there are thoughts about all sorts of things right so I start to think about that and then I start to wonder if I bring to mind a red apple right now then I bring to mind a yellow lemon then I bring to mind a red apple again so that's two red apples so was the first thought of a red Apple was that diff was that a different thought then my second thought of a red apple or are they the exact same thing what's the difference and then I don't speculate about that again I sit and actually observe in my direct experience what's the difference so maybe I'll bring up a red apple a third time and a fourth time and a fifth time and I'll wonder are they really different or are they the same thing and what really differentiates spots from physical objects is a physical object also a thought there's an idea that's interesting or is there really a boundary there so what is the boundary what's the difference between an object and a thought can we say that an object is or that a thought is a kind of object that's interesting and see you can take it into a million different directions you could ask all sorts of ancillary questions like where do thoughts come from and you don't speculate about where thoughts come from because look a thought is something you have therefore you don't need to speculate about where it comes from it's happening in your direct experience right now you're thinking thoughts every second of your life so where do thoughts come from you don't ask me you don't go look in a book or watch a video you check your direct experience and if you can't get it in your direct experience no book no video no cheating is gonna cure that because you've got the most pure form of it already happening inside your mind you have direct access to your own thoughts so if you can't figure it out that way you ain't ever gonna figure it out and no amount of teachings will we'll fix that for you see this you see why contemplation is so important then you start to question any assumptions you have about thoughts like maybe you have an assumption that thoughts occur inside the brain and then you have to ask yourself is that true do I actually find in my direct experience that thoughts are occurring inside the brain or is that an idea that I just acquired from my culture or from my schooling maybe you have some other assumption like that thoughts are something that only human beings have you got a question that is that true how do I know that only human beings have thoughts and you wonder about that you always keep grounding yourself in direct experience you keep bringing up examples concrete ones and you actually observe the mechanics of what's really going on try not to anticipate the answer but instead rather open your mind and start off by admitting that you don't know what the answer to the question is you don't actually know what a thought is you don't actually know what an object is you don't know what good and evil are you don't know what reality is you don't know what God is there's so many things you don't know but of course this is one of the one of the trickiest parts of contemplation is to get your mind to understand first and foremost that you don't know that is like step zero of contemplating because if you think you already know then there's not gonna be any genuine curiosity within you to contemplate a thing because hey you already think you know it so what's the point of contemplating Italy oh I already know what I thought is why would I waste my time why would I waste an hour of my day contemplating what I thought is right because you think you know but actually you don't what you'll be amazed to discover is that you haven't actually thought about any of these things almost ever in your life until you sit down with a pad of paper and a pencil and start to actually contemplate so let's go through a few other examples just so you really I want you to really get a sense for what I'm doing here when I'm contemplating so let's contemplate the question what is an object what is an object so first I'll write that down on my pad of paper and then I'll try to get myself to admit that I don't really know what an object is I mean sure I can bring up examples of objects apples and trees and cars and people and blah blah blah but what is an object really that starts to open up some room for me to wonder and then I'll start to ask other ancillary questions about what objects might be and I'll bring to mind a concrete object for us to work with so maybe I have a pencil in my hand the pencil that I'm using to to take these notes so I'll look at this I'll look at this pencil and I say wait so is this pencil an object yes this pencil is an object okay what else is an object so I'll look around the room well there's a couch there's a table there's a glass of water there's a lamp there's there's a cat there's something else there's a human being sitting there whatever okay so those are all objects so what is the common denominator between all those and I'm not gonna speculate I'm gonna actually I'm gonna give myself a minute to really wonder about that's a profound question what is the common denominator between all these things that we call objects is it their separateness like the lamp is separate from the coffee table but what is separateness let me wonder about separate separation I mean who determines what is separate from something else like for example on my coffee table I might have a bottle of vitamins now is this bottle of vitamins is it one object or is it a hundred objects because the vitamin bottle has a bunch of pills inside let's say it has a hundred vitamins inside so what is that who is determining whether we count this as a single object everything that that's encompassed by the bottle or a hundred different objects all the little individual pills inside so then you will wonder so our objects a subjective notion or an objective notion mmm that's very interesting could it be that my human mind is actually projecting the notion of objects out onto the external world and that they don't really exist where does one object begin and another one end so for example you might say well the coffee table is clearly separated from the lamp and that's how we distinguish those two different objects but there's air connecting the table and lamp so is the air then a third object and speaking of which air air is an interesting example because how many objects of air are there one are you gonna say there's only one object of air in the entire world meaning the entire atmosphere so that means that the air in this room is the same object as the air in the next room as the air outside as the air in Australia in China in Antarctica in Europe and everywhere else is that what you're saying and then where does that object end because we know the air goes up high to the atmosphere many miles but then at some point it ends but where precisely does it end and so what distinguishes the air object from let's say the vacuum of empty space and as the vacuum of eppy space is add an object or is that something else and if it's something else that means what we have now two types of things in the world we have objects and we have other stuff what could be other than objects and then you might wonder what about a thought is a thought and object are there tangible objects and intangible objects how do you distinguish those two and again you don't speculate you actually bring to mind examples so bring to mind an example of a tangible object that's easy let's say a lamp or a table and then an intangible object like let's say the number one or the thought of a red apple that would be an intangible object or it may be air or maybe a vacuum something like that or maybe the mind what is the mind is the mind an object is consciousness an object see so you sit there and you think about all this you can you can see that you begin with this one question simple question of what is an object and then it starts to flower into clusters of other questions ancillary related questions and you start to wonder about all those and what that's generally what you find with contemplation is that one question leads to ten more and each one of those leads to attend more and so starts to expand very quickly and you can kind of get lost in the weeds but remember to kind of keep your mind on the ball which is the original question so don't stray too far keep going back to what is an object but also keep bringing up these different examples and and these other questions just to kind of help you to understand what an object is and now you might sit there and do this for 60 minutes but you might not feel like you've resolved this question that's okay don't expect to resolve it in 60 minutes it could take you a year to really get to the bottom of what an object is the key here is not to get to the bottom answer as if there is some sort of simple answer that you can write as a sentence like an object is blank and you can just fill in a blank with something and then you got the right answer it's like you passed some sort of test that's not what contemplation is about the real value of this work is in having your mind go through and explore the nooks and crannies of all these different questions and all the different possible answers and even if you don't come up with some ultimate answer to this question that doesn't matter because you've still extracted the value you still groan your mind will have matured because just you simply spent an hour to exploring this question let's consider another example what is evil so I will write that down at the top of my page and then I will think about it I'm gonna make sure that I don't fall into the trap of just going into mental verbal diarrhea where I just start to write a bunch of stuff on my page right paragraph after paragraph mindlessly that's not contemplation contemplation is you sit for a minute or two and just think about the question you bring a few examples to mind you bring a few more ancillary questions to mind and only after you've pondered a little bit then you can write down some answer then you could think about that maybe write down a little bit more but see it goes slowly you're not just filling up page after page after page with with mental verbal diarrhea you need to what gain what I call traction your mind has to actually track reality so the way we do that with this question is with what is evil we would say okay so what is evil well the Bible says evil assisting and society and my culture says that evil is something else and science maybe say maybe says that evil doesn't even even exist so who's correct well all of that is just external sources forget all that let me focus on what's actually in my direct experience is there evil happening in my direct experience right now maybe probably not if you're just sitting contemplating okay so what's the next best thing if evil is not happening right now can I bring some evil to mind what is some evil that happened to me in my life where I thought something was really evil so let me go back into my mind and actually go through my past find a specific example or maybe somebody who broke into my car and stole my things and that to me seemed like evil or maybe there was some politician that I saw on TV who was charged with corruption and bribery and I consider that to be evil okay so let's go with that example this bribery case that was clear evil who says so am I saying that bribery is evil or is my society saying that bribery is evil is evil found as an objective law of the universe or is evil something that human beings have created and are projecting in other words is evil subjective or is it objective if it's objective how so where is that law actually written in the universe is there like some deity up in the clouds that is holding this law in place or is it like a physical law the way you might imagine the law of gravity or something or some Newtonian law something Stinney in law what is it or is evil something that we just come to as a social consensus so you think about all these things and maybe you write down some answers but then you ask yourself that answer that I just wrote down is that actually true how do I know that's true could this just be a cultural thing that I picked up as I was growing up could it be that in some cultures bribery is actually not considered evil mmm then you start to think about that and you sort of think about the role that culture plays then you might say are there any examples I can think of that our evil cross culturally in every single culture maybe you'd say murder is is that but then you might wonder what is murder after all murder happens every single day in every single country all around the world and in many cases this murder isn't considered evil there are many examples of murder which isn't considered evil murder in the name of self-defense murder in the name of fighting some war to defend your country a pre-emptive attack or even things like euthanasia doctor assisted suicides or for example putting a dog or a cat to sleep who's sick take them to the vet put him to sleep that's not considered evil by beddy-bye many cultures and many people so what are these distinctions who is making these distinction than you think about all that and you think about are there degrees of evil or is evil just a binary thing and if there are degrees who determines what these degrees are and is evil for a human being the same thing as evil for a lion or for a dog or for an ant or for an alien in outer space why does the concept or notion of evil exist at all what is that about could the notion of evil be serving some sort of hidden purpose or agenda could i or my mind be using the notion of evil for some purpose what is the purpose of evil what would happen if I removed the notion of evil from my mind and so all of these things are just kind of pondering and thinking about and you keep jotting down various answers to it and don't be afraid to write down a wrong answer this is a very kind of rough imperfect process this contemplation oftentimes when I'm contemplating I'll write down an answer then just even as I'm writing it I'll immediately realize all this is nonsense but still it can be useful to write it out write out the nonsense because it's very useful to write out the nonsense and then to look upon it and to realize no this doesn't this doesn't make sense this is contradictory or it's just silly or I can come up with examples that invalidate what I just wrote and that's good that's exactly what you want that's how your learning is by writing down answers and then realizing that no these are way too simplistic and they don't actually shop with what I'm experiencing in my direct experience let's consider a third example what is personal development and by this question I don't mean personal development as a feel like the self-help field I mean what does it mean to actually develop oneself as a human being what does it mean to grow what is the difference between an undeveloped person and a developed person now can you see the power of knowing the answer to that question or of just exploring that question after all if what you're trying to do in life and the reason you're watching all these videos of mine is because you want to develop yourself personally yet you have no idea what personal development actually is other than maybe stuff that I've told you then what are you really doing you're pursuing something you have no idea what you're pursuing so of course you're gonna be very inefficient at pursuing it so you write down this question the top of your page and you start to think about it and here you have to be very rigorous not to speculate because you've got a lot of ideas about stuff that I've said about personal development but you need to actually bring to mind in your own life examples of personal development and work with those rather than things that I've said so you might maybe bring to mind an example of an undeveloped person in your mind maybe a friend of yours from from high school or something that you think was a very undeveloped person and then you bring to mind some other person who you think is very developed person and now maybe you compare both of them and you say what's the difference between these two and then you actually you look you see well the undeveloped person acts like a jerk and maybe they're very ideological they're closed-minded they're not very contour not self reflective they don't introspect yada yada yada what about the developed person what are some of the qualities that make him seem developed well he's not emotionally reactive he's more open to new ideas willing to admit that he makes mistakes he's able to say that he's sorry bla bla bla whatever right and so you compare this and then you see okay so what's the cut what's the common thread what is the essence of personal development like if I wanted to increase my own degree of personal development by 10 percent what would have to happen what would that look like and then you write down your answers and you keep exploring this question keep asking these ancillary questions like are their degrees of development how many degrees of development are there is there just one component personal development or there multiple components dispersed development mean like becoming a more loving human being is that it is that is that all that person of all it boils down to is just becoming more loving or does it also boil down to other components like education reading books can you develop yourself without reading a single book can you be personally developed but not loving and you think about that and you bring examples to mind and so you try to kind of like play in your mind with all these different scenarios and you try to get to the essence of what this thing called personal development is so that's how you contemplate this process of actually sitting down and doing this is where the rubber meets the road this is where you get your results this is where you get your understanding you do not get understanding from merely listening to me you do but it's a miniscule amount compared to how much you will when you start to go through this contemplation process especially using a journal you'll feel it you'll feel when your mind gets what I call traction with these issues and it will feel amazing because in 30 minutes by sitting there with this notepad and thinking about one of these questions in 30 minutes you will get more traction and more understanding and clarity than you did in perhaps 5 years or 10 years of your life on this question and that's simply because you've never actually bothered to systematically rigorously think through the question maybe you've had it in the back your mind but you never actually sat down and thought it through here are some starting assumptions for contemplation assumption number one you are full of assumption number two nothing your mind says can be trusted assumption number three all beliefs and teachings are false assumption number four only direct experience is true and assumption number five the truth is not fragile which means that you're not gonna hurt the truth by questioning you're only gonna clarify the truth with rigorous questioning so you don't need to be afraid about doing something wrong in this contemplation process you can do no wrong all you can do by asking questions is just get more clarity and anything that's false will get purified in the light of awareness and questioning now you might say leo but how do I know that all these assumptions that you said these five assumptions that they're actually true and their answer is of course you don't I gave them to you as assumptions an assumption is something that you used to start your inquiry because you got to start somewhere and your starting place is always imperfect so you can start with these assumptions but then that doesn't mean you take them on faith that means you can question them too in fact you could sit down for an hour and write this question at the top of your page am i full of and spend an hour thinking about that is it true that you're full of what are all the ways in which you are full of is that a good assumption to ground your self inquiry in or in this case you're contemplating in and that's how you test if what I'm telling you is correct if these assumptions are correct now maybe you discover after a few hours and think about this to actually know I'm not full of and that will be a discovery for you but to go through that process is important if you just say no leo I'm not full of you're full of if you say that then you haven't see you're just defending yourself you're just playing ideological games you haven't actually gone through the process you haven't done any work you see so what I'm really trying to get you to do here is I'm actually trying to get you to do some work but of course you're lazy and you don't want to do any work so that's the whole game that we're playing here all the time with actualize that already I keep trying to get you to do work and you keep trying to come up with reasons excuses for why you shouldn't do work or why you don't need to do the work because you already know everything and because nothing really can be changed in your life see how the game is played let's clarify what contemplation is not contemplation is not speculation and guesswork contemplation is not justifying your existing beliefs which is very tempting to do contemplation is not building new beliefs these answers that you're deriving from all this questioning it would be a mistake to say okay Leo I did an hour of contemplating I got my answer and now I'm gonna believe that answer as though it's the truth that would be a mistake that's not the point the point is actually to go through the process and to see how complicated a nuance all these questions are and while you might get some clarification that clarification is good but clarification is different from belief make sure you're not using contemplation to build new beliefs or to build some grand narratives and theories that's another mistake that's not contemplation building theories that's something else that's a constructive process contemplation is more of a destructive process you're breaking stuff down contemplation is not daydreaming fantasy or imagining stuff contemplation is not proof or coming up with arguments or debates against critics maybe there's someone you disagree with philosophically politically ideologically economically maybe there's somebody you disagree with about enlightenment or about spirituality maybe you disagree with me and so you think that you can sit there and you can write some kind of argument against me to rebut me to debunk me that is not contemplation contemplation is not opinion izing or justifying existing opinions and contemplation is not the pursuit of success or practical advantage so especially if you're a stage or type of person then you're really into a pragmatism and you're really into personal achievement and success and so you might say I'll leo yeah I like the idea of contemplation how can I use contemplation to become more successful to improve my business and to have more sacks and to be better at speaking and to do this that's not contemplation contemplation is about pure understanding of what a thing is you're interested in just what it is not what it can do for you not how you can become enriched and by it but just by what it is you have a trust that in having a deep understanding of what things are at a fundamental existential level that this will resolve many of your existing problems in life your problems in life don't come from lack of chasing after success for the most part for some of you it does but for for the most part it comes from a lack of deep understanding of what things are and in fact if you're gonna use contemplation to try to pursue success you're actually gonna do the opposite of seeking the truth and understanding you're going to be trying to use contemplation to somehow find better ways to manipulate reality and that is actually one of the major sources of all of your problems in life is that you're such a manipulator and you're always looking for practical advantages but happiness doesn't come from practical advantage it also doesn't come from success and if you doubt me about that then contemplate what is happiness so let's reiterate what contemplation is contemplation is observation seeing how a thing works its deconstruction breaking down ideas and beliefs it is awareness and what I call going meta that means that as you're contemplating you're also observing the process of contemplation itself and as you're observing the process of contemplation itself you're also observing that so you're sort of observing yourself observing yourself observing yourself you're observing yourself thinking you're observing yourself deconstructing things contemplation is self reflection you are always kind of like looking at your role what is your role in understanding these questions so it's not like you're just asking these questions in a sort of objective manner as though you're floating above the whole universe looking down upon these questions know you're intimately involved with these questions if you're asking a question like what is happiness that that that's a very intimate question you see you're not above and beyond that because if you're very honest you will notice that you care about your own happiness very much very much you're completely attached to your own happiness but that takes self-reflection to see that contemplation is questioning assumptions contemplation is questioning beliefs teachings and culture contemplation is thinking completely independently for yourself and it's the desire to know the truth at any cost and that's very important you're going after the truth even if you're afraid of what the consequences will be and when you really go deeply after the truth there will be some scary consequences because all of us spend a lot of our time being in denial suppressing and repressing all sorts of truths that we don't like about ourselves ugly things things that we lie to ourselves about things that we don't want to admit to ourselves things we've done wrong ways we've been selfish ways we've been dirkson and so that's ugly stuff that you're not gonna want to discover about yourself but in this process if you're really pursuing truth all that will come out and so if all you care about is pursuing the truth only when it's pleasant then as soon as you get to the really deep truths the true that can actually transform you you see you're gonna stop because those aren't gonna be pleasant truths so keep that in mind okay so let me give you a list of things to contemplate I gave you an even larger list in my other contemplation episodes you can go check that out here I want to give you two some very practical questions you can get started on right now maybe this entire month you can start contemplating these what is meaning what is science what is evil what is ego what is a concept what is a belief what is truth what is evidence what is a symbol what is language what is fear what is happiness what is identity what is thought what is conflict what is duality what is a boundary what is reason what is culture what is judgement what is an object what is value and that's just tip the iceberg I mean there's hundreds of questions like this that you can keep asking yourself you could spend the next 20 years of your life every single day doing this one practice and if you do you will completely transform your whole life I deliberately left out the really hard questions questions like what am i what is reality what is God because I want you to avoid these for now I want you to just build a habit of just doing ordinary level contemplation not self inquiry self inquiry for me is is separate from contemplation now you have to understand that this word contemplation different teachers and different traditions use this word in different ways what I mean by contemplation is that you're sitting down and yes you are thinking you are using your mind and I don't just reserve this for the purposes of attaining enlightenment some traditions will talk about contemplation for the purposes of enlightenment in which case really they're talking about something like self inquiry and that's good there's nothing wrong with that I advocate that in other areas that's a very powerful method but really you got to build up to that most people are not ready to do that kind of level of contemplation that's like the deepest levels of contemplation those questions like what am i what is reality what is God I deliberately want you to avoid these for now because to really answer these questions you have to actually have a profound mystical experience an expansion of consciousness you're not going to answer these questions just by coming up with verbal answers and it can take you years to really get to the bottom of these so we don't want you to get stuck we want you to start with easy ones and as you get good at just ordinary contemplating then you can go and maybe tackle some of these really deep ones I want you to also understand that there's a lot of different stuff that you can contemplate there's not just one purpose to contemplation like enlightenment that might be like the ultimate purpose per se but even if you become enlightened that doesn't mean that you've answered all the smaller questions that doesn't mean you understand what an object is or what culture is or what science is or what let's say reason is or what language is see those need to be deliberately contemplated in and of themselves independent of whether you're pursuing enlightenment or not and there's value to understanding what those things are which is why there's more to this work than just the pursuit of enlightenment now you might wonder Leo how his contemplation different from self inquiry when you're doing really profound self inquiry you're going to need to transcend your mind you're gonna need to transcend thinking and of course transcend writing even whereas with the contemplation that I'm talking about I'm talking about a more general notion of contemplation for me contemplation just means thinking about how life works or some facet of life and that does involve the mind now maybe if you really contemplate some facet of reality very deeply you could transcend the mind you can kind of go into this very hyper intuitive mode and maybe even beyond that just kind of mystical experience about it but but generally what I'm saying here is something much more simple and basic you can get enormous benefit to your development just by doing ordinary contemplation using ordinary thinking using the mind and you know some spiritual teachers will say the mind is evil the mind is bad you got to transcend the mind that's true when you're going like balls to the wall for enlightenment that's true you do got to transcend the mind and the mind will be a big obstacle but before you get there you got a lot of work to do so I mean if you're at the point where you are ready to transcend the mind by all means don't let me stop you transcend the mind but probably you're not at that point and there's probably a lot of growth you can get from just starting to use your mind properly people make this mistake of thinking that all transcending the mind means that I don't think about anything no that just makes you stupid transcending the mind means that you you learned how to use the mind you know how to use the mind but then you can also go beyond the mind on command so to speak you can then have some sort of trans rational experience mystical experience then you can come back you can still use the mind to figure stuff out in your life and to think about existential facets of reality that maybe you didn't access with this mystical experience you can think about that you can think about what science is what languages you can think about what did that experience mean for my life and for politics and for society should be structured and for all the sort of stuff right that requires the use of the mind so um so yeah I've first learned to use the mind properly before you you go transcending the entire thing here's some additional questions that you can ask these are more personal I would call these more psychological questions whereas the other questions I gave you were more existential so question like how am i full of how am i lying to myself what truths am i refusing to accept how am i evil how am i corrupt what do I fear what do I whine about how do I play victim how am i self biased what are my conflicts of interest how do I cling to my culture what beliefs do I hold sacred how am i a hypocrite how am i arrogant how am I being a weak human being and so on and so forth you can help with all sorts of psychological questions to ask yourself here's what successful contemplation requires open-mindedness radical open-mindedness fearlessness brutal self honesty careful observation impartiality the ability to step outside of your agenda that's what I mean by impartiality holding no ideas sacred you should be really willing to question any idea especially all of your pet ideas all of your pet philosophies and your pet scientific theories and your pet ideologies and your pet economic beliefs political beliefs social beliefs beliefs about men and women and gender and all of this stuff successful contemplation requires not knowing really getting into a place where you start to become conscious that you don't know the answer to these questions it requires radical self-reliance you are here all alone there's nobody to help you nobody's gonna give you the answers you are relying completely on yourself your own mental faculties to deliver the answers to you your severing that umbilical cord from me from books from teachers from YouTube and from culture and that can be a scary thing and lastly successful contemplation requires genuine curiosity you have to be curious about the question are you curious why aren't you curious these are profound questions what is a thought I mean you're having thousands of thoughts every day and you've had them for decades in your life and you still don't know what a thought is you still don't know what an object is despite the fact that you're surrounded by just all the time you go purchasing objects all the time you go chasing objects all the time and you don't know what they are and you're not curious about that you gotta find an intrinsic curiosity get in touch with that don't just contemplate some question because I told you that it's important to contemplate it that's not gonna work you have to want to answer the question you have to want to know what you are you have to want to know what science is that curiosity is the driver of this entire process even when you just go to to pick up your your notepad in the morning to do this process you already have to be curious you have to be excited about the fact that all I'm gonna I'm gonna discover potentially I can discover something new today here are some traps that are common to contemplation trap number one is taking things as self evidence leo it's self-evident that reason works or that science is true that's just self-evident it's self-evident that logic is great it's self-evident that one plus one equals two no it's not nothing is self-evident the only reason something seems self-evident to you is because you blindly believe it that's it that's the only reason or maybe you've done an enormous amount of contemplating and hadn't had many profound direct experiences and then something can seem self-evident to you because you've you've inquired about it so much but uh most people aren't there most people when they say something is self-evident they're just using that as an excuse not to question and investigate it another common trap is trying to work towards the right answer it's like maybe you're contemplating what a thought is but in the back of your mind you already know what the right answer is because you've watched so many Rupert spirit' videos or Mooji videos or my videos or whatever else so you read so many books that you already know and so now you're just kind of going through the motions to derive the answer that you already I know is the right answer that's a huge mistake because there you're you're robbing yourself of the actual discovery process you've got to discover it for yourself so drop all those right answers you might be shocked that what you think is the right answer is actually not the right answer at all if you would just go through the discovery process the way you're supposed to oftentimes the right answer that you get from me or from somebody else it's not framed in a way that it will work for your mind you see the right answer for me is not the right answer for you because the right answer fits in with my entire mental scheme of how I understand reality and of course you have a different mental scheme that you use to understand reality so for you the right answer even though it will share probably some similarities to to my understanding of a right answer to one of these questions it will still be unique to you that's why you can't just steal answers from teachers another mistake is relying on external sources videos books teachers religions and so forth another trap is thinking inside of your culture you need to get really good at going outside of your culture and starting to notice how a lot of the stuff that you think is self evidence and universal and just given and couldn't be any other way that no really it's just part of your culture and that there are many other cultures that are alive today or that were alive a thousand years ago who didn't believe what you believe what your culture beliefs they had completely different understanding of reality and what helps with that is actually it's a little bit paradoxical is to go study other cultures go travel go read books eat different types of food learn about different cultures so again I'm not saying that you need to stop watching videos I'm not saying you need to stop listening to teachers and I'm not saying you need to stop reading books you still got to do all that what I'm saying is that when you're contemplating you isolate yourself you sort of put yourself in in a bubble and you set all that stuff aside and yes it is possible to both yes is tricky of course all the stuff you learned from all the books and videos will try to come in there and will try to disturb your your pure isolated contemplation of course it will that's that's a challenge but hey you know what you can't escape that you can't go through life not reading books not listening to teachers not not watching videos that would be a terrible strategy for going through life so you're learning stuff all the time anyways even if you don't want to it's going to be happening to you so you can't avoid that so just develop the skill of being able to kind of isolate yourself in the bubble and to set aside all prior notions and teachings another big trap is trying to build grand theories of everything using this contemplative technique watch out for this you might start to follow this trap of like starting to say oh so now I understand what a thought is and now I understand what emotions are now I understand what God is and let me now write a book using my my journal here let me just start writing a book about how I think all this stuff fits together that is not contemplation that's theory building and that's a very dangerous thing you want to be very careful about that as soon as you're starting to construct a lot of structure in your understanding of reality immediately you should be very suspicious because the mind and the ego loves to construct these grand theories of everything and then get lost in them confusing them for the territory so watch out that's probably the number one trap of all philosophers especially Western philosophers another trap with contemplation is false skepticism rationalism and science and what I mean by false skepticism is that I have a video that I shot a while back called true versus false skepticism or I compare and contrast how skepticism is used by the mind in a in a partial way which makes it false skepticism and what that means that you question things but you're actually questioning the things you don't like and you're not questioning your fundamental foundations your own metaphysics you're not questioning your own skepticism you're not questioning your own ideology it's skepticism used as a weapon to deconstruct religion let's say you're a rationalist and you love to question religion well that's not gonna cut it yes of course there's meant a lot of within religion that's obvious what's less obvious is the within your own rationalism start questioning that start being skeptical of how you're using skepticism to cherry-pick and to actually build your own rationalist narrative that's what you really got to be skeptical about and the trap with science is is that of course science is good there's a lot of benefit we get from science but science fills us with theories and ideas which we just accept unquestioningly so be very careful about not bringing scientific rationalizations and justifications into your contemplating be careful about now bringing evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics and neuroscience and psychological studies you might have heard elsewhere I'll be very careful about that those will skew your results and the last trap of contemplation is very simple one distraction I'd whole episode called distraction the egos favorite defense mechanism and man it's a very pertinent topic for this for this technique because when you sit down with just a blank piece of paper with one of these challenging questions your mind is gonna want to turn to something else you're gonna want to grab the phone you're gonna want to grab a book and read or watch a movie or talk to a friend do some texting look online do all the sort of stuff all of that is distraction I want you to be hyper aware of how you distract yourself from actually completing a full 30 minutes or 60 minutes of solid contemplating and try to fight that distraction when you contemplate properly it should make you feel scared and uneasy you should feel all alone like no other human being in the world can help you with these questions that's right that's good that's exactly what you want it'll feel uneasy at first but then you'll get your footing and then actually you'll kind of build a certain reliance and a certain independence and autonomy which is exactly what you want you want to develop intellectual autonomy so that you are the CEO of your life in all the different ways both in terms of your health and your relationships and your career but intellectually as well you got to be the CEO which means you're thinking this stuff through when you're doing contemplation properly it should feel like you're cutting through a lot of and at first that might feel uncomfortable and bad but actually soon you'll develop a taste for it and you'll actually feel good it's a really good quality developing in yourself as a human being is to be someone who cuts through not just other people's but especially your own where you can just kind of like reflect and you say yeah all this theorizing I know is just and you just cut it out this process will help you with that so what I recommend is you start contemplating today and do so for the whole week maybe you for the whole month start to get comfortable with this process the biggest problem that I find with contemplation is that the mind is just lazy and it doesn't want to do it and it makes up excuses by saying things like well yeah the contemplation sounds nice but really there's no difference we meet contemplating and me watching a video let me just watch a video so much easier to watch a video than just sit for an hour and contemplating and then you'll watch videos after video after video after video and never contemplate anything in your life and that would be a big trap so here's my homework assignment for you I want you to get a journal patent pad and a pencil or pen and contemplate the following question for the next week what is meaning where does meaning come from what creates meaning that's it that's simple but there's a lot to it there you can contemplate that one for a whole week for sure and get a lot of juice out of it a lot of profound insights so that's your homework assignment all right that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button and also come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll find exclusive content there that you can't find anywhere else my blog we're in posting lots of interesting videos and other kinds of profound insights go check that out the life purpose course the book list and the forum by the way I just want to say a quick thing about the life purpose course I hope you understand that my life purpose course is like 95% exclusive unique content that I have never spoken about anywhere else in all the other actualized videos I think a lot of people don't understand this they think that the life purpose course is just me regurgitating the same stuff that I talked about in the in the regular videos no that's not the case at all the life purpose course first of all it's extremely practical it's much more practical than my normal videos because here we have a lot of time to really dig into exercises a lot of exercises and techniques and it's all geared towards helping you find your life purpose which is a very practical thing and many of the concepts that I talked about there I haven't ever talked about ever anywhere else so that's done deliberately so that there's a point in taking the course so I don't repeat that material on purpose and last thing I'll tell you is that start to think of personal development and spirituality like athletics in athletics without training you get zero results and that's basically how personal development works imagine how good of an athlete you would be if all you did is you sat around and you just videos or read books about golf or tennis or skiing you would suck it doesn't work at all it doesn't work at all and after a certain point of watching these videos about skiing or golf or tennis you just get you'd get so inundated with all this theory that I would actually do you a great disservice cuz you could talk a big talk but you couldn't walk the walk so it's extremely important that you start to do the practices that I have talked about at nauseam really throughout my entire history of episodes I've given you so many techniques whether its various meditation techniques self inquiry techniques shamanic breathing psychedelics various ways to contemplate and many many others you know I've given you so many techniques visualizations affirmations reading books and this and that I mean there's there so much so much to do start doing that only by doing all of that do you really then set yourself up to gain value from these videos if all you do is you watch the videos you will just turn actualize that org into another religion into another ideology and you will trick yourself into thinking that you're growing when in fact you're not and that's a very big trap a very very big trap huge trap I fall into that trap myself I always have to be vigilant you always have to be vigilant the ego is always turning the practices into idol theory because that's what's comfortable and safe for the ego the ego doesn't want you doing all these practices it's uncomfortable it forces you out of homeostasis it requires you to face uncomfortable truths and change your lifestyle and change your relationships and like when you really start to do this work your life will start to change so quickly and so radically that it will be uncomfortable for you you have to start to pace yourself it's gonna be too much that that's a good place to be at those of you who just sit around watching and leaving comments and not actually doing the work you're gonna get very lost and these things that I say are going to sound two-seam they're gonna start to seem crazy to you the reason they seem crazy is because you're not growing with me you're not doing the practices and you're not going to be able to get to the most profound things that I want to teach you to get to those you got to do the practices that's where the real profound stuff is and that's what drives me to release all this content so really all this content is really just like dessert for those people who are doing their practices and it will deepen your practices it'll give you ideas and insights it'll make you more excited about doing your practices and for those of you who are new you got to watch some amount of theory too to just start to get like your bearings straight about what you should do in life so don't feel guilty about watching you know 20 or 50 videos to get you started because if you're completely new to this you're I mean you're just starting nowhere like you have no clue about what you should be doing and why you should be doing it so yes you do need some theory but then as soon as you do start to kind of get a sense of or what your bearings are then start to do the practice you