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hey it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to deal with confusion so you're on this path of self-actualization and as you're on this path you're learning a lot of stuff and you're changing your life around and you're exploring different domains of life and basically what you're encountering over and over again is this problem of confusion and it can manifest in many different ways for example I see people talking about these sorts of things all the time when they give me feedback it's like leo I'm confused should I be pursuing my life purpose which you always talk about or enlightenment or leo I'm confused should I go to college get my degree or should I start my business instead or like leo I'm confused should I be breaking up with my girlfriend after some of the stuff you told me in one of your episodes or it's like leo I'm confused what is awareness you keep talking about awareness and consciousness but what is this I don't understand what this is or it's like Leo I'm confused what is God sometimes you keep alluding to God as though there's something to experience there but I don't know what this is you keep talking about it but it makes no sense or maybe Leo I'm confused you sometimes talk about me not having free will if I don't have free will then how can I self actualize and what's the point of all this content that you're releasing it's like Leo I'm confused you talk about meditation but which meditation habit or method should I use because there's a lot of meditation methods which one is the right one you talked about the do-nothing technique and the mindfulness technique and some other technique which one should I use it's all very confusing to me or maybe Leo I'm confused in this episode over here you said X and then I read this other book over here which said why and then I was listening to some other teacher over there he said Zee how do i reconcile all that stuff I'm confused and my response to all that is good good you have now discovered the bulk of our work here of course you're confused of course because you don't understand understanding is something that needs to be created you see the default position when you're born is ignorant which means no understanding you start off with life with zero understanding and then you build it up that's a process and self-actualization yes you're putting a lot of habits into place in your life yes you're working on your relationships and maybe you're earning some money and you're doing some of this kind of stuff and you're working both externally and internally but first and foremost what you're doing is you're developing understanding because you can't do outer work or inner work until you first of all have at least a sense of direction and understanding about what it is you're doing and why you're doing it you see um which is basically what all my content is about is about teaching you the understanding you need so that then you can properly guide yourself coach yourself to the kind of high consciousness life that you want see it all begins with understanding but you can't take that for granted understanding is a challenge it's a challenge and the bulk of our work here together is reconciling a bunch of stuff I throw um new concepts at you new techniques new ideas stuff that um is in conflict with what you're already doing with what you know to be true with what you've experienced in the past with what you believe what your parents believe what your culture is telling you all this sort of stuff and it's not just me anybody who's trying to help you raise your consciousness will be doing something similar so um yeah that's what's happening you this is a learning process right but see what most people do is that as soon as they get started with the learning process they're starting to increase their understanding but then they encounter what they encounter confusion uncertainty uncertainty leads to confusion and that feeling of uncertainty or confusion then leads most people astray to fall back down and to quit the learning process and to really not give the learning process their all because they're afraid of confusion they run away from it you see so what your job is first and foremost if you want to really create an amazing life is to get comfortable with navigating confusion this is something you gotta accept as your primary labor in life is reconciling stuff and sometimes it takes a while to reconcile something and reconciliation this can be an emotionally laborious process it can also be a lengthy process really I encourage you to reframe it as a lifelong process this is something you're doing from the moment you're born to the moment your debt you're going to be dead right throughout all that time you're going to be doing a bunch of reconciliation and in the meantime get comfortable with confusion so let's get a little better handle on what confusion is and why it happens basically your mind loves certainty and order that's like the thing that it's after when you have a mind which is certain about everything then that's a mind that can be at peace you can just kind of like relax let go chill and enjoy yourself and that's what your mind is always kind of striving towards except this can become dysfunctional like anything that you cling to so what happens for most people is that confusion arises and what that is is anytime that the mind is basically uncertain about something or is trying to reconcile two opposing two or more opposing intellectual forces right and most people are not able to emotionally tolerate uncertainty and what that leads to is that leads to a sort of knee-jerk impulse which seeks to immediately resolve the uncertainty and to move from a state of uncertainty to a state of certainty because it seems like well when I'm uncertain I'm not really comfortable I feel kind of agitated I don't feel at ease right because your mind has been sort of programmed by school and by culture for decades now to always have all the answers and for everything to be crystal clear I mean that's an illusion of clarity don't get me wrong clarity is a good thing but the trick here is that there's real clarity and then there's this sort of illusory sense of clarity the problem is is that when you have this knee-jerk reaction to resolve every single piece of uncertainty immediately what that leads to is a sort of mechanical behavior mechanical behaviors are the opposite of conscious behaviors it's a reaction and this reaction actually makes you rigid because basically what your mind does it says I'm not comfortable with this uncertainty I'm confused let me force a fit let me take this square peg and just Ram it into this round hole and get it to fit by force and as soon as it starts to fit that's it I can say look I'm certain now I'm comfortable and now I can be back at ease but this leads to a false sense of clarity and it really holds you back in or personal growth one hallmark of self-actualized individuals is that they are unfazed by uncertainty mystery and paradox and a lot of ordinary people are very easily fazed by uncertainty mystery and paradox I have a whole episode called the paradoxes of personal development encourage you to go rewatch that one if you haven't already because it dovetails really nicely with what I'm talking about here so um what do we do about this well we need to develop emotional tolerance within you for confusion and this is a very counterintuitive move especially if you pride yourself as being an intellectual sort of person the way that I do and you see intellectualism as like a strength of yours it can be very difficult to let go of this need to know the one takeaway if you take away anything from this episode should be this here's the key insight for today is rather than running away from confusion learn to embrace it train yourself to identify and embrace confusion how do you do that here's a simple five-step process alright so step number one is just awareness notice that you actually are confused when you are confused and this is not as simple as it sounds I mean it's simple but it can be a little tricky because it requires awareness and a lot of people don't have this awareness so you need to develop it how do you do that well by starting to feel into your body any kind of mindfulness meditation practice is good but you got to really feel for that confusion your body and find it where is it is it in your head is it in your chest is it maybe in your arms in your hands how does it manifest so start to notice that become very familiar with that feeling so that then we can move on to step number two step number two is labeling the confusion you feel it like you might feel it in your head right and then you say oh that's confusion and then you label it you say okay that right there is confusion I'm confused right now that's step number two now that might seem very simple and obvious but you'd be surprised that when you are confused I would bet that 90% of the time when you're confused you're actually recognized that you're confused instead what you do is you just mechanically act to minimize the confusion and that right there is what we're trying to avoid that's the counter to it move then we go on to step number three which is basically facing it and the way you can do this is with the following question ask yourself what's really going on here so I'm feeling confusion I have identified and labeled it as confusion what is it really why am I feeling this way and the answer you'll probably come up with if you're self-honest is something like well what this means is is that I don't really know I haven't resolved this yet so what might that mean let's bring in some examples so maybe you're trying to decide for example um if you should get married or not and you're confused about that should I get married or maybe not and here what you're doing in step 3 is you're just asking yourself okay what's going on oh I'm confused why because I don't know if I should or shouldn't get married I'm not certain about it and that's something that usually we don't like to admit to ourselves even though it's clear that we are confused when we are right but we just don't take that extra step of admitting it and that's more important than it might initially seem or maybe you're trying to decide like should I go back to school or should I just go start a business without any education without without my degree what should I do and you're confused about that and normally what you want is you want a resolution like well I should decide right now I should have an answer and you're not honest with yourself about the actual situation and the actual situation is that you're confused which means that you don't really know it's a mystery hasn't been resolved yet you don't understand okay so that's step three then you go on to step four which is allowing it and the way you can do that is with the following question just ask yourself can I allow myself to be confused and you can answer yes or no to that question the idea is not to force a yes answer but simply to make you aware of the fact that you're maybe resisting the confusion and maybe to open up the possibility that you could stop resisting it and then go on to step number five which is to actually enter a state of not-knowing and the way you can do that is by asking fall in question can I let go of my need-to-know this is the key right here this is kind of like the crux of the psychological heavy lifting that we're doing with this topic of confusion is we're basically surrendering our need to know which we have been conditioned with for decades by our culture and by all the habits that we learn from school and so forth right we're always told that we need the answers we need to be certainly to be decisive and so forth but that often ends up being in genuine when in fact you don't know something when you haven't reconciled it yet so let's just apply this process the five-step process here for a bracing confusion now let's apply it for example if you're doing enlightenment work let's say you're sitting there on your couch and you're trying to get your head around this enlightenment thing right and you've been working on it now for weeks and maybe for months and you're sitting at your I understand what is this enlightenment and maybe you're asking yourself the question what am i or Who am I and so you're kind of doing this process of self inquiry maybe you're sort of deconstructing the ego it sounds like what am i what am I don't know what I am and so you're kind of like looking everywhere and your awareness for what you are and you keep slipping and slipping and slipping and it's just like nothing is clicking and you're getting frustrated now and confused by this process now normally what would happen if you're doing this is that you would be unconscious to the confusion and you would tend to just kind of discount it and ignore it I mean in the back of mine you you know you're confused but consciously you don't really acknowledge it so here what I'm proposing is rather than just pushing through it and just saying aw screw that let me just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing if you apply this process of embracing confusion then you would stop for a second you'd say wait a minute what's happening here on the metal level what's happening oh I'm experiencing confusion why oh it's because I don't really know what I am I don't know what enlightenment really it's okay can I allow myself to just be confused without needing a resolution right now to it oh yeah okay that sort of frees me up and then you can ask yourself can I let go of my knee - no and then that frees you up even more and what I would suggest is that that is a better strategy for doing enlightenment work than the other way where you're just kind of like Ram your way through and to get the answer because enlightenment is this sort of counterintuitive thing where the more you push for the answer a lot of times you don't get it that's the thing that actually gets in your way so that's just one example with enlightenment now this topic of confusion doesn't just pertain to these advanced spiritual pursuits it also pertains like I already alluded to two very practical things in your life like which direction to take your business in what kind of diet you should eat you know if you're confused about that or you know should you go back to school or should you start a business or should you go with this life purpose here or that life purpose there right so these are very practical choices you face and usually what happens is that you're confused by them but then this this actually paralyzes you now let me stop here and address a couple of objection that I'm anticipating so one objection might be okay leo so I understand this but basically you're telling me to accept confusion and won't that make me stupid or ignorant cuz I pride myself on having an accurate model of reality truth is a high value for me and I am rather intellectual so I don't want to just resign myself to not knowing stuff because then I'm just going to be ignorant like everybody else um know what I'm suggesting here will not lead to that at all what leads to ignorance is actually what you're currently doing it's ignoring the fact that you don't know stuff it's having a false sense of certainty that's what really ignorant is ignorance cannot survive if you are in this open state of not knowing this is a very rare thing ignorant people can't do this you see ignorant people think they know everything so it's just the opposite of what you might think this is why this is such a counterintuitive move like I said actually what will happen if you embrace confusion you will become more robust and grounded intellectually and this will push you into the best position possible for a revelation now this is critical to understand we like to think that especially for very intellectual people we like to tell ourselves that you know we push and push and push and we get the answers it's like I come up with the answers I come up with the knowledge and understanding but that's not really true all the deepest insights and knowledge comes through Revelation not from your pushing for it not from having this neurotic need to know curiosity don't get me wrong curiosity is a great thing if you have curiosity and you're intellectually curious about a lot of stuff that's great but that's different from pushing and pushing and pushing and needing to know in a clingy sort of way what you really want if you want to grow if you want to put yourself in a position where you are honest about the stuff you don't know you acknowledge all the uncertainty and mystery of life and you let reconciliation happen organically okay that means for example if you have a life purpose and you're trying to decide between life purpose a and life purpose B and you're not sure which one to go with you might try to ram that through and try to force it right that would be like you try to get an answer from your ego as far as what your life purpose ought to be a or B a better position is to actually acknowledge that you don't know and open yourself up and let the reconciliation happen organically let it unfold and then what will happen is that you will get a more authentic and deeper answer you might say from your higher self or from the divine source or from nothing I mean there's different different labels we could use from where the answers come from that's not so important right the best answers don't come from you hopefully you're starting to notice that like if you're a creative person the most creative ideas they don't come from your ego they come from something beyond you okay so when you open yourself up to revelation this means a couple of things first of all this means you're going to require more patience because it's going to take longer you're not necessarily going to get an answer immediately might take months might take years and you have to be patient there and also what this means is that you're going to have to have a high tolerance for uncertainty and confusion because that confusion doesn't quite feel comfortable you feel a bit uneasy so imagine being uneasy for a couple of years about life purpose a or life purpose B but still moving forward you see still moving forward not being paralyzed by the confusion the way that people normally would sometimes people would just write me an email or post a message on the forum or something saying Leo should I go with a or B and what that tells me is that they're committing this mistake of not being open to the relevant revelation because they want me to make the choice for them which would be a mistake but the upside of doing this even though it takes longer and requires more patience from you requires more emotional maturity from you but what will happen is that the insights that you do get will come from nature rather than ego and the insights that come from nature are much more profound and truer than those that come from your eco a lot of insights that come from the ego are these shallow low consciousness self-serving insights which tend to make you chase after things that really won't fulfill you in life so you get that right now another objection someone might have here listening to all this is well Leo isn't it better for me to be adamant and to demand the answer because if I push for the answer I'll just get the answer and won't that be better than just being kind of open and uncertain about everything um it seems that way it seems that way but that's not true that's an illusion right that's your neurosis talking because see you really haven't resolved yet and surrendered to mystery to uncertainty to your need to know you got to drop your need to know because I'm telling you that the answers that your ego comes up with when you're forcing that fit and you're being very adamant are usually low quality answers there's high quality answers out there and so what you gotta become aware of is that this constant need to get the right answer and to not tolerate the confusion that that's actually a mechanism that's become unconscious and it's backfiring and it's holding you back how is it holding you back there's a a myriad of ways so firstly it's making you emotionally ungrounded you actually become reactive you're off your centre you're not solid and stable when you need to know it's kind of like you have a thirst or an itch that can't be quenched or scratched also I've talked in the past about your web of beliefs so one of the ways that this backfires is that because you don't embrace confusion you get sucked in deeper and deeper into your own beliefs and your weber beliefs solidifies and it becomes very rigid which then makes you defensive fearful clingy and ideological have you seen ideological people on TV or maybe some of your friends are it's not a pretty picture to see a couple of ideological people bickering with each other right these are two people who have very solid webs of beliefs and all they want to do is just kind of fight and clash with each other because really they're intellectually stunted because they're not willing to deal with uncertainty and with confusion right they're afraid of it and you can tell that they're afraid of it you can see it in their tone of voice in how they breathe how they hold their body the things they say the way they rationalize their position and so forth you don't want to be one of those people right so that's one huge drawback here another drawback is that the mystery of reality is artificially suppressed when you're not able to embrace confusion and reality is a very mysterious thing you know we have this bad habit nowadays in the 21st century of thinking that all science has mastered reality and everything is known and you know all the textbooks are basically correct and physics has figured everything out that's not true at all that's a false sense of certainty if we were more honest and more tolerant of confusion then we would admit a lot more of reality's mysterious then we normally claim and that would leave us open to exploring new possibilities exploring new states of consciousness researching new things that otherwise we would never research that's very important also another drawback here is that you become too logical when you always need answers and you don't really create room for your intuition to function and your intuition I have a whole episode I recently shot about intuition go check that one out which talks about how intuition is much more powerful and really a necessary tool if you want to develop a high quality life intuition is much more powerful a tool than your logical reasoning mind another problem is that by not embracing confusion is that you closed yourself off to the most profound insights that are possible in life the deepest insights need you to tolerate a lot of confusion for a very long period of time and many people are not willing to do that and so they don't get the most profound insights also you're not really able to explore topics deeply if you can't tolerate confusion um this is what I call research a lot of what I do these days is just research I research topics very wide and very deep so all research stuff from you know enlightenment to business to dating advice to psychology to emotions to happiness to psychedelics to weird meditative technologies other sorts of stuff paranormal stuff like I'll research so much stuff and the only way I can do that is because I have a pretty high tolerance for uncertainty and for confusion I'm Reese Engle researching all this stuff and I'm confused by it all because you know we're talking about putting together a really large jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces um and a lot of them I'm not really sure how to fit each piece together to get the big you know ultimate bird's-eye view of the whole thing that can take years to do that and that's what's happening with you if you're watching all my content or if you're a self-help junkie and you're reading a lot of self-help material that's what's happening with yous you've got all these sort of little like little pockets of information from this field from that field you're not quite sure how it fits together and it's all in your mind it's kind of confusing and you're not sure like well how do I take action on all this stuff it's just overwhelming me and I don't even know what to do I'm just like watching videos and nothing is changing in my life and then what that does is that confuses you and then you're paralyzed by it you basically quit or you stop or yourself with this this stuff doesn't work right and that means you're not really following through and doing really high quality research the way you're supposed to the way I want you to you're also not able to push past difficult decisions sometimes like I said already with life purpose example you might have a decision of like life purpose a or life purpose B and you can't decide and so then you say oh well this whole life purpose stuff doesn't really work and you quit whereas what you would really need to do is if you were comfortable and you embrace confusion is you say you know what I don't know if it's a or B but I'm still going to move forward somehow I'm just going to push forward past this and trust that eventually some reconciliation will happen and I'm okay if that takes a few years for that to happen I'm still moving forward see people who can't tolerate confusion quit very easily they also get stuck very easily right it may get stuck on some choice for a long time and then not take the action it's necessary and another big drawback here is that you're not going to be able to do quality meditation or enlightenment work if you can't tolerate confusion or uncertainty that's one of the biggest things that holds people back from successfully doing alignment work in fact I'll give you an example of how this panned out for me recently I was at a meditation retreat this year earlier this year and there I was meditating for over a week straight doing a lot of meditation reviewing pretty good and towards the end of that retreat I was consulting with the Zen master who was leading the retreat and somehow the topic came on to this issue of my need to know like one of the things he suggests to me is like you know what just let go of your need to know and I told him no I don't want to because that's like my greatest strength is this need to know I'm this intellectual person this is one of my greatest strengths this is what I'm contributing to the world as part of my life purpose and he said a very important thing that really kind of um well it inspired me to to shoot this topic because such an important point he said no you gotta let go of your need to know and I said yeah yeah yeah I know I know that I'm supposed to let go of my need to know and he said no no listen to me this will really [ __ ] you up in your life that's what he said those were exactly this will [ __ ] you up in your life if you don't listen to me right now and so when he said that I'm like oh okay let me pay this a little more attention he said this will [ __ ] you up in your life if you keep insisting on the need-to-know and so that got me to reevaluate cuz when is then Master you know when is then master tells you something like that then you really start to reevaluate your your thinking on something like this and so I start to real value and I realize like oh yeah you know I've been sitting here for almost a whole week meditating and doing self inquiry and working towards enlightenment um and I was really kind of like trying to get the answer right I really wanted to know I was being neurotic about it and really the right move is an emotionally difficult thing to do in the situation was not to push for the answer but actually to surrender and to let go of my need to know to admit to myself that you know what I'm just confused right now I'm confused about what I am about Who I am I'm confused which means I don't know which means I'm uncertain and to actually accept that to embrace that and to surrender myself to the possibility that I might never know and that was difficult for me to do very difficult for me to do because I've I've sort of pride myself I've plotted myself my entire life especially through college and through high school you know it was easy for me to get the right answer all the time and so I pride myself in being able to do that but with something as nuanced and as as you know tricky as enlightenment work um that doesn't work so well and so there I just had to recognize that oh yeah I'm running away from confusion I'm not really facing it I keep looking for little tricks and techniques for how I can avoid being confused I keep trying to ask the master for the answers and I notice a lot of people doing that who watch my cond is like Leo just give me the answer what's the right answer and in a sense I'm doing a disservice to you because I feel like I spoon feed you a lot I give you a lot of the answers but one thing you notice about for example um really experienced Zen masters or non-duality teachers or mystics is that they a lot of times they just don't want to give you the answer they're very Adam about not giving you the answer and they actually try to force you to be confused the whole Zen tradition of : practice where they give you this little riddle they have to sit there for for maybe a couple of years working on this one little riddle like what's the hand of what's the sound of one hand clapping that sort of thing right that's all come on so they'll give that to you and you're sitting there and you're confused by and you wonder like why confuse myself with the stupid riddle fer for years well because they want you to surrender to it and to get comfortable with it right that's why they don't spoon feed you ready-made answers so I felt that that's something that's important for me to communicate to you because I know how since I do spoon feed a lot of answers that it's very easy for you to fall into that trap right and as soon as you don't have the answer your you get stuck and you get lost right so now you know what to do just embrace it surrender to it and take it on that's your work here this is the bulk of the work I want you to open yourself up to this process of learning and discovery this is a lifelong process you're not just doing this until the point where you get enlightened then you can say oh yeah that's it I'm done the learning process the discovery process is over no it's never over there's always more stuff to learn you can never rest on your laurels that's the bottom line so open yourself to the up to the confusion become aware of that confusion and actually I want you to to do this try to do this this week I want you to find at least one or two examples in the moment of where you're confused and you're trying to run away from it and then instead to do the counterintuitive thing and to face it maybe for the first time in your life all right that's it I'm signing off please click the like button for me right now post your comments down below share this episode with a friend and lastly come check out actualize that world right here this is my website and the free newsletter sign up to the newsletter because I want to release more content in the future every single week I try to release more content that helps you to self actualize and to increase your consciousness and there's a lot of powerful stuff that I want to share with you in the future like I said I doing a lot of research these days in fields that I didn't even know existed just a year or two ago and some of the stuff that I'm discovering techniques and methods and technologies that are just incredibly powerful and effective I've already got a pretty good handle on the whole self-actualization field and how it works and personal development so I can teach that pretty easily but what I'm really interested these days is finding like the super super effective techniques and I've been finding more and more of those lately like I've been sharing five Meo with you and other stuff I have other powerful techniques that I must share with you in the future so I want you just stay tuned for those because this stuff is like life you don't have to wait years to transform your life you can do it in um weeks sometimes in just a couple of hours so I'm really excited to share some of that stuff with you and of course just more concepts and more theory because what I ultimately want you to have what's the most important thing to me even more important than you becoming enlightened or whatever is I want you to have a big picture understanding of life and how reality works and how you work and how you fit into that um to me that's what life is all about it's getting that understanding it's quite amazing so I hope you're with me on that sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you