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[Music] how do we discover what's true that's what I want to spend this episode looking into and unlike previous episodes where I just gave you the truth told you the truth or just delivered a bunch of statements to you about how reality is in this episode we want to do an exploration an investigation we're less interested in the final answers and we're more interested in the process the actual reasoning so this episode we're doing something a little bit different I'm just shooting this totally off-the-cuff and I want to guide you through a bit of how I do existential inquiry or investigation I'm not talking about self inquiry and if you just want to know what the truth is go watch my episode what is truth or I explained all that in detail here this is actually more valuable I want to take you through the thought process the logic that goes into questioning reality and life and really this is the heart of the work that I do this is the kind of work that I've been doing since I was 16 years old like deep philosophical investigation not by reading books or by grabbing information from other sources but deriving it simply through your own inquiry through your own contemplative process thinking for yourself I think this will be valuable for many of you because most people don't know that this can be done and they don't know how to do it because there's no examples of this that are taught to you in school or in university like this is rare stuff so what we're interested in here is truth what is truth how do we find out the truth about reality about life the ultimate truth that's what we're interested in why would we be interested in truth well and like you might even start the investigation like what is truth what does that even mean to go looking for truth and why would anybody want to do it now I'm gonna be talking a lot here almost as I'm talking to myself and that's exactly how it should look you're gonna be talking to yourself throughout this process so kind of try to do this vicariously through watching me talking to myself and talking to you we're gonna be kind of combining those two together but this is kind of like how it should go in your own mind so here I'm going to be posing a lot of questions to myself and also to you and then sometimes answering them or sometimes not or sometimes you know waffling on them so there's a difference between me delivering just nuggets of truth to you as a lecturer versus me actually going through the process myself as I sit down and do it for myself these are very different things because when I deliver nuggets of truth to you as like a student teacher to student sort of situation then that means I already went through the process myself years ago and now I'm just regurgitating my conclusions to you but when I'm going through it myself this is a dirty process that that means that sometimes I come up with wrong answers I say silly things so forth I make mistakes I come up with various kinds of examples maybe they make sense maybe they don't right it's a rough it's a much rougher process through this process though is how you ultimately get to the those golden nuggets of insight then I often share with you guys so I'm trying to put myself back in that state that I was in when I was like 16 years old and I was really interested in truth probably the most that I ever was in my life and I guess what really began my inquiry is that I had an intuitive sense that there must be a truth there is some way supposedly that reality is right there there must be some ultimate way that reality is and if the conclusion is that there isn't such a way then that would be how reality is you see so you can't sort of escape there being a truth there has to be a truth at least that's sort of how we start this inquiry there has to be some way that reality is but we're not sure which way exactly reality is like what is reality is reality just a mechanical process is it just the Big Bang was there something before the Big Bang will there be something after the Big Bang is there a point to reality why does it exist where did it come from where is it going how is it is there an objective reality or as reality subjective what role does the mind play in reality is reality independent of the mind or is it wholly dependent on the pop up on the mind so these sorts of questions you know ultimately I just wanted to understand what reality is and why it is and for that we need truth of course because because look if you're gonna be searching or trying to understand reality and what you have is not the truth but falsehood then is that gonna satisfy you are you gonna be satisfied by having a false model of the world of course not you want an accurate model of the world you want to know reality the way it really is not your fantasy about it and of course if we've studied even a little bit of history we know that people have had all sorts of crazy models of the world all sorts of crazy views of how reality is only later a hundred years later or a thousand years later for that to be revealed to be total nonsense and fantasy so we don't want to end up like those people for example maybe the ancient Greeks or Romans or the early Christians had this view that the that the earth was the center of the universe and that stars and planets they rotated around the earth in perfect circular orbits and these there was like seven or eight of these specific circles each circle was larger like one nested inside the other so there's this sort of Ptolemaic model of the universe and thousands perhaps millions of people believed in this model and thought that that's exactly how reality is and then of course all of that was shattered and it was shattered not just once it was shattered over and over and over and over again by various kinds of scientific discoveries first the earth was dethroned from the center of the universe then we discovered that the earth actually moves as well not only is it not in the center but it also moves around orbits around then we discovered that even the our Sun is not the center of the universe the way we might have assumed and that is just one out of billions of other Suns and then now there's there's new discoveries that the universe is expanding and then there's stuff like dark energy and dark matter that we don't even know really what it is we've only really come to grips and understand about 5% of of all the the mass of the universe the other 95% scientists don't even know what it is and then what if there are universes beyond our universe you know so it just kind of like every every century there's new stuff that gets discovered that dethrones old models of of the world and sometimes reveals them to be totally wrong but then we can have even more outlandish questions like well what if we're living in a simulation what if we're living in some kind of matrix or what if mankind was created by aliens or what if religion is true what if Christianity is true what if Islam is true what if Buddhism is true how do we know after all there are so many different views of what reality is and what we should do about it of course what you think reality is informs how you act what motivates you and what you think is right and wrong and what we should do so there's all these different philosophical systems religious systems scientific systems which one do you choose how do you know which one is true different teachers teach different things it's not like you can just say well science is true obviously so let's just believe science but how do you know science is true unless you've done a deep investigation into the foundations of what science is and how science works and then furthermore we have to wonder like well even if we say okay Sciences is the truest of all of these which of course is still highly suspect because we haven't really done any investigation yet we have to determine whether that's true or not see we don't know from the outset when we do our inquiry we have to be very careful not to assume anything here that's the problem that people make is that they just take for granted that well science is obviously correct or Christianity is obviously true or whatever we can't take that for granted if we really care about finding out how the universe is we need to be willing to investigate how it actually is you see and that means that if the way that it really is contradicts the way that I want it to be or how I think it is I need to be willing to admit that I've been that I've been wrong that I have wrong assumptions or that the way that I want it to be is not how it really is and that can be a painful admission for me to make you see so already what we're trying what we're discovering here in this inquiry process is that we have to be very careful about being objective and unbiased and we have we see that it's very easy to fall into the trap of believing or holding the universe to be a particular way because we want it to be that way and because that suits us but of course we're not really interested in what suits us were interested in the way it actually is if we're serious about truth see so like I was saying though even if we accept science as the ultimate method of arriving at truth which science which scientists are you gonna believe and in what period of time science is not just a simple monolithic thing like oh yeah science no I mean science is comprised of thousands tens of thousands of different individuals that hold different views and different models of reality many of them conflict and disagree many of these scientific theories are disproven in fact probably the majority of scientific theories are disproven or flaws are found within them and of course science advances and changes so science is different every century every millennia so who are you gonna believe it's not so simple you see and that's assuming that science actually will lead us to truth what if science doesn't lead to truth we have to be also open to that possibility to see so already we're starting to see here just by beginning this little bit of common sense reasoning and that's all that this inquiry really is we're just using common sense here but we're we're being very objective about it we're not playing favorites we're not trying to defend any existing worldview you see this is so important because if I come up here and I say well ok I'm gonna do this inquiry but of course it has to come out that Christianity is true it has to come out that the Bible is correct and it's not contradicted to see already that's a that's a gross conflict of interest that distorts our inquiry to do this inquiry properly we have to be totally neutral and agnostic and indifferent really about the result whatever it turns out to be maybe the truth will turn out to be a beautiful amazing thing maybe it'll turn out to be exactly the way the Christians talk about it maybe it won't maybe the truth will turn out to be a hellish terrible thing maybe I won't like the truth maybe the truth will endanger my survival maybe the truth will endanger my career and my children maybe the truth will reveal that everything I've been taught in school in church in university in the media is all which brings us to the next important point in doing this inquiry we are admitting to ourselves and really denying ourselves reliance on external Authority for truth that is the whole point of this inquiry and I want to explain a little bit of the the logic behind this because look we're gonna start from scratch we're gonna start to investigate reality from scratch without assuming anything if we do that that means we can't accept any external authority figures word or hearsay for what the truth is so maybe there's some charismatic guru who speaks to us in some video on YouTube and tells us what the truth is but our problem is how do we know that what he's saying is true how do we know we can trust that guru how do we know he's not deceived deluded dogmatic leading a cult or whatever again because there's millions of gurus and experts out there in the world professors academics scholars scientists researchers mystics gurus cult leaders businesspeople artists philosophers and they've existed since this dawn of civilization for ten thousand years so which of them are we gonna believe they all say very contradictory things at times see so if we really care about the truth we have to acknowledge that we can't just blindly go accept somebody's word for it see we have to take full responsibility here we have to be our own authority we have to somehow in this process use common sense and reason or maybe some other faculty maybe intuition maybe experience maybe consciousness whatever may be a laboratory testing you know there are mint methods we could potentially use to get to the truth and right now where we start is we start from Ground Zero which means that we don't know which methods are valid or not valid maybe we'll discover that voodoo is a valid method of arriving towards the truth see so we can't be prejudiced when we begin this process we can't be begging questions we can't be reasoning in circles we can't be assuming the thing we're trying to discover it might seem for example to you the way you were raised maybe you were raised in a relatively atheistic scientific rationalist household where your parents were rather scientific and maybe the way you were raised you were raised with the sort of idea that ooh voodoo voodoo and witchcraft these are obviously nonsense you can't use voodoo and witchcraft to arrive at the truth everybody knows that see but you got to be careful if we're really beginning this investigation from scratch from Ground Zero we have to be so careful not to just dismiss something like voodoo or witchcraft because again look there's a lot of very subtle question banking that goes on here there's a lot of subtle assumptions and things that are taken for granted for example with witchcraft it might seem like oh well Lia obviously everybody knows that you can't use witchcraft to get to the truth everybody knows science is better but how do you really know that have you done witchcraft to test it you see your culture tells you that witchcraft is some sort of hocus-pocus nonsense but remember we said we can't just blindly trust our culture we can't trust some authority figure so if some Harvard professor tells me that witchcraft is [ __ ] okay I can I mean I can listen to him I can take his opinion into account but ultimately I have to decide for myself whether that's true because when I'm beginning my investigation from zero I don't know who to trust because you know if I ask a witch whether witchcraft is worthwhile and can maybe give me some deep in that into reality the witch might tell me yes let me teach you some witchcraft come learn with me now if I ask a college you know Harvard professor about that he'll say oh no witchcraft is all nonsense come to Harvard learn with me so how do I know who's right but you see this is very challenging to distinguish because it requires direct experience of witchcraft and direct experience of the Harvard way of discovering truth and whatever that might lead to and then comparing those two carefully and then seeing which one actually weighs out but see most people they don't they're not able to take this neutral investigative stance rather what they do is they just make a knee-jerk assessment like oh well witchcraft is nonsense I'm gonna go to Harvard or the opposite or whatever or maybe you just think oh well I'm just gonna read the Bible but you see why are you placing trust in the Bible why are you placing trust in Harvard why are you placing trust in witchcraft if you're honest and you think about it you realize that well it's just because that's what I've been taught it's the thing that I prefer the method of an investigation that I prefer is simply that which I grew up in so if my household was Christian I'm probably gonna gravitate towards the Christian way if my household was atheist rationalist scientific I'm gonna probably end up going to Harvard or some University and trying to get truth that way or if if I grew up with a bunch of witches in my family then I'll probably be open to its craft you see but here's the problem just because you were born into a particular household at a particular time in history in a particular country into a particular culture into a particular religion these are all accidents these are not guarant ores of any kind of truth what if you were born like if you think for example that Christianity is the right way to discover the truth well just consider what if you were born a Muslim into a Muslim household that means that you would just gravitate towards Islam and then you would believe in Islam and do Islam and convince yourself that Islam is the right way to arrive at truth and according to your own Christian worldview the Muslims they're deluded so in this case you would be deluded isn't it really suspicious that you just happen to be born just into the perfect household as a Christian how lucky for you that you were born a Christian into a perfect Christian household and that Christianity of all the different philosophies is the run true one see this should already make you extremely suspicious that you got this fortunate because if you are really honest and you look around and you think that well there's there's probably at least over a thousand different religions philosophies and epistemic systems that exist or have existed throughout human history what are the chances that I will be born into the right one and there certainly are a lot more deluded ones and false ones than there are true ones so how do I know that I was born into the right one chances are that I wasn't not that I was I would have to be very naive and foolish to think that all well I just got so lucky I was born into an atheist scientific household that happened to believe in evolution and therefore and it had just happened that that's all true no no no if we're serious about truth we have to be much more rigorous we can't we can't play favorites here we have to take seriously the possibility that we were born into a background of culture and teachings that might have been false and those might have been programmed into us from a very early age to the point where now we have a bias and a sort of a personal preference for that worldview even though that worldview is very false see and so already what we're starting to notice is that there's a very important an inescapable psychological component to the inquiry into truth because it's not merely like some some might think it like oh well truth is just a wrap purely rational purely scientific endeavor we're gonna go out there we're gonna run our tests our lab results we're gonna get objective evidence we're gonna get the facts we're not we're not gonna have any any kind of emotional distortions or anything like that and we're just gonna we're gonna grab the facts we're gonna look at them and we're saying okay here's the fact here's what it is and then we're just gonna report it and then we're gonna be done know already we can see that it doesn't work this way because who's doing the inquiry here I am you are we are if I'm doing the inquiry already I can see that my own personal preferences and biases and my own emotional weaknesses are going to be a huge distorting factor you see there might be a resistance and emotional resistance to letting go of old programming and teachings and we know that human beings are easily psychologically manipulated and brainwashed and indoctrinated we know this from examples of cults examples of religion examples of mass hysteria and delusion that have happened in the past from Nazism to various kinds of sects and religions that went corrupt we know this even from science there were many intelligent scientists who believed in crackpot theories that were crazy we know this from medicine there were many doctors throughout history who had all sorts of quack cures that they thought would work but actually they actually made the the patient's conditions much worse resulting in death and and so forth we know that businesses can have policies and worldviews that are shaped by their economic agendas and interests such that they might not speak the truth to us because it's not in their financial interest to do so for example you have some giant oil company is that giant oil company gonna want to do research into climate change if there is such a thing as climate change probably not because why would it be in their interest to do so if some giant oil company discovered that the climate is being seriously negatively impacted by their business are they gonna report that are they gonna be honest about it you see you have to become much more savvy about how how difficult this truth investigation really is it's not as simple as going out there and just finding the facts we have to contend with the fact that our own emotional system our own psychological weaknesses and preferences and biases all make this process much harder than it first appears so already what we're discovering here that is if I am serious about discovering the truth I have to be very serious about being introspective and conscious of my own biases preferences my own psyche my own fears my own attachments and my own worldview because it's not like I can start this investigation from ground zero as though I was born yesterday no no we're starting this investigation when were 16 years old 20 years old 25 years old 30 years old maybe you're 40 maybe you're 50 years old maybe even older when you'd be in this investigation but even if you're very young like I was I began this when I was probably 16 you might say oh that's so young but that's 16 years of programming that I got before I was starting to reason it out for myself see by that point I'd almost finished mice my entire schooling that's 12 years of being indoctrinated with all sorts of belief systems from society about what's true and what's false how do I know that those were actually true and not false so now I have to be very careful about my own expectations what do I expect the truth to look like what do I want it to be what am i attached to already cuz it's not like I'm just a blank slate and I'm indifferent to what the outcome of this investigation is now I have ideas I have my best guesses I have my own theories about what the truth is and these theories now skew the investigation because I only have so much time I only have so much mental energy and the world and the universe is a vast thing and there's me let's say thousands of different philosophies and worldviews out there I can't possibly explore them all and even if I could I would have to have some sort of prioritization system I have to begin somewhere for example if I have to test ten different philosophies between Christianity is atheism science and witchcraft and something else if I have to test all those where do I begin I'm probably gonna begin with the one I think is most likely to be true right because if I just start testing them at random and I start testing a bunch of false ones there's probably a lot more false ones that are true ones I could spend the next 50 years of my life investigating false philosophies and and get nowhere and in fact I could get indoctrinated into some of those and fool myself that I've made progress what actually I didn't but you see already the problem is how do you decide which one to start investigating first you might think that well Sciences is clearly the best option to start with first but is it how do you know that where did that idea come from did it come from you did it come from your own line of inquiry and reasoning or did it come from culture see if you're honest here and again this requires self awareness and self honesty two very important qualities in this work you have to admit that well my preference for science probably is the result of cultural conditioning that I got because I grew up in the sort of scientific society or a scientific culture or a scientific household where I went to a scientific school where they programmed me with this idea that science is the best way and we have to be suspicious of that we can't take that for granted because here's the bottom line if we really want a question from scratch and that's what we're trying to that's art like our ideal that we're shooting for we're trying to question as much from scratch as possible without any external influences because why these external influences can be corrupting and we want to find the truth for ourselves why well because supposedly if something is true it must be true independent of somebody else telling it to me right other why's what what use could the truth have if the truth is true simply because some hardware professor told it to me that it isn't worth very much the whole point of the truth supposedly and this is still something we need to verify but you know to get this investigation on the ground we do have to make some assumptions we can't just make no assumptions because assumptions are how we get ourself bootstrapped but you know we have to be careful about the assumptions we make but I think it's safe to make at least this assumption for now that truth has to be independent from human beings from what human beings tell us which mean that which means that if if the truth can be written down in a book that's well and good perhaps that's possible to write it down in a book but also maybe it's not possible but let's say it's possible the truth can't depend on the book itself rather the book itself has to depend on the truth you see which means that if other human beings could discover the truth because of course a book is written by a human being so supposedly how did that human being who wrote the book which supposedly contains the truth how did that human being find it out there's only one of two ways either from another human being or from the truth itself directly somehow whatever that means if he found it out from some other human being well we were just pushing the problem back one level and so again we can ask well if he learned it from his master or from his teacher okay fine but then how did that master or teacher get it again one of two options either from some other master or teacher or from the truth itself so let's say we pushed this back a hundred steps let's say there was a chain of a hundred people who learn from a hundred other people what the truth is but we want to go back to the very first person who learned it how did he learn it the first person he didn't have books he didn't have other teachers there had to be at least one point in human history we were somebody discovered the truth for him or herself and then wrote it down or then taught it you see otherwise what are you teaching and writing down we're just making something up you see so that's sort of one of the interesting characteristics of truth is that and that's one of its values is that it's it's external to human activity and perhaps we could here's sort of the longer vision if we could discover the truth perhaps we could ground ourselves and the truth rether than always navigating by human constructions because you know books are human constructions universities are human constructions even science is a human construction religions are human constructions if there is truth in any of those books experts masters religions science universities it has to be grounded in something outside of all that prior to all that see or maybe not we have to be open to that possibility as well see now we got to talk a little bit about assumptions we're going to be making assumptions to bootstrap our inquiry process we just have to otherwise we can't move at all but we have to be very careful about the assumptions we make because every assumption we make recognize we don't really know if it's true or not it might seem reasonable it might seem plausible it might seem likely it might seem obvious but again how do we know what's obvious how do we know it's reasonable how do we know what's likely again notice that we're judging that based on the cultural background that we're in the century were living in the country were living in the religion that we're a part of as a culture by the technology that we have which limits our ability to investigate and to explore more of the universe so we have to be very careful if we do make an assumption we have to make a mental note or even better write it down on a piece of paper that we made an assumption here we're gonna keep doing our inquiry just to get ourselves going but we have to remember to come back at some point Andrey questioned that assumption because the assumptions we make very early on they can have a significant effect on how how far we diverge into some wrong direction because every wrong assumption we make at the very beginning you see we build on top of that it's almost like building a skyscraper if you get the first floor of the skyscraper totally wrong the hundredth floor is gonna be way way wrong you probably aren't even gonna be able to get to a hundredth floor if you don't make sure your first 50 floors are really straight and accurate so you see you see how challenging this this is becoming we we began here with such an innocent question and it seems so simple and now look at all these complexities that are arising our mind is is being pulled in a hundred different directions we don't know which which way to go that's right that's why this is so challenging this is why so few people do this inquiry but we're we're determined and we're eager and we're passionate about the truth so we're gonna keep going and we're not gonna take anything for granted we're not even to take reason or logic for granted you might say well we're just gonna be reasonable and I'm gonna use reasoning out of the truth but we have to wonder how do we know that reason leads to the truth you might say oh well of course it's it's obvious it's obvious everybody knows that recent leads to the truth how do you know that where did you get that idea did you derive that idea for yourself did you prove it to be correct and true or are you just assuming it and you just got it from your culture and you're taking it for granted that that's the case are you just agreeing with that because everybody around you agrees with it you see there's enormous peer pressure here it's not like we're just doing this inquiry by ourselves like we're some low individual living on top of a mountaintop without friends or social connections or contacts we don't listen to the news we don't watch TV we don't read the newspapers like we're completely isolated and all alone if that's how humans lived then this process might be a lot easier but we live in a herd we live in giant herds of millions of people we live in giant cities we go to clubs and schools and churches and we listen to media all this feeds into our mind and programs us with ideas many of these ideas have been proven throughout history to be wrong so it's quite likely that many of them are still wrong also consider the possibility that of course the media and school and society and business might not be interested in the truth their agenda might have nothing to do with the truth maybe they're more interested in money or sex or survival or promoting their ideology maybe Christianity is more interested in the survival of Christianity than it is in truth science - maybe science is more interested in the perpetuation of science rather than in discovering the truth these are all possibilities we have to take seriously because we're admitting the most fundamental thing we're admitting when we begin this inquiries that we don't know this is where it all begins you have to honestly admit that you don't know what the truth is it's not enough to fake it and just say well yeah okay leo I don't know what it is but it's probably science like in the back of your mind like probably sighs probably it's gonna be in the direction of science no if you think that way then you haven't really admitted that you don't know you have to really like right now I want you to get right now to try to get this in your direct experience that if you're truly honest you don't really know what reality is why it's here and what it's doing isn't that isn't that true couldn't we start with that little nugget of truth right there that we just we don't know we just don't know when we begin this inquiry we don't even know if reason will deliver us the truth because look what would it take to know for sure that reason will deliver us the truth we would have to actually go and do a lot of reasoning and verify that every bit of reasoning that we do leads to truth and never leads to falsehood and if even one bit of reasoning is discovered that happens to lead to falsehood already that undermines the entire premise that lis that reason can lead to truth you see you see how tricky this is so if I can find one case in human history where some human used reason to lead to a false worldview that's it reason is no longer reliable we have to be skeptical about reason and of course you can find a million such cases people just assume that reasonably it's the truth no doesn't more often than not reason leads to delusion Fawcett it's very easy for the mind to rationalize whatever worldview it believes in already see this is called begging the question there are so many outlandish examples of this that an entire book can be written just about example after example after example of foolish reasoning now you see aha Lee oh yeah of course of course reason can be misused of course there have been many examples of foolish reasoning in the past but Leo what I'm talking about is not foolish reasoning but correct reasoning ah but you see this brings us right back to the very beginning how do you distinguish correct reasoning from foolish reasoning that's the very problem that we began with because this is the question of truth what you're really saying when you're saying well there's foolish reasoning and then there's correct reasoning is you're saying well there's falsehood and there's truth right that's sort of where we began there's supposedly falsehood in the world and there's truth in the world how do we discover the truth so what you're really saying is that well Leo we'll all discover the truth through some truthful method okay but how do you know which method is truthful you're back to square one see how do you know that the truthful method or the true correct reason that you're using is actually true and correct you can't just take that for granted because there have been numerous examples of people throughout history who have justified their crazy worldviews under the pretense that is true and reasonable these days many atheists tically mine is scientifically rationally minded people tend to sort of assume that reason leads to truth and because is you know it's a part of science they tend to lump together science and reason and that religion and witchcraft and all that that's all the unreasonable stuff no no this is you justices this is just historically incorrect if you look at human history and what humans have believed and you don't have to be some brilliant historian to to know this just a bit of of high-school history will suffice religious people have always considered themselves to be reasonable people a religious person doesn't believe that he's unreasonable from his point of view his worldview is very reasonable and consistent he doesn't think himself of a fool or an idiot or some wishy-washy hocus-pocus type of person he thinks that his Christianity or his Islam or whatever that is the truth and he thinks he arrived at it through a truthful reasonable process he believes in God for example and he thinks that is highly unreasonable to disbelieve God he will create logical arguments for why God must exist and it's not like idiots only idiots and fools believe in God or in religion because many of our most intelligent humans of all time have believed in God and subscribed to various kinds of religions so you can't just simplistically dismiss all of that after all what if they're right how do you know that they're wrong did you actually go and deeply study and personally investigate what they believed to verify to test whether it was right or wrong or are you just assuming because you know your culture tells you that all Christians you know they're deluded and yours you're just accepting that see it's very very tricky you have to really press your own feet to the fire here and not take anything for granted you have to really question all of these cultural assumptions that have been given to you based on whatever culture you grew up in you have to be very very suspicious of all those so that's what we're doing or maybe maybe Sciences this is the method I don't know how do you know have you tested it how much science have you actually done this will freak you out especially if you're a big fan of science and you fancy yourself a rationalist and you don't like the dogma of religion okay the dogma of religion seems to have resulted in a lot of problems in the past but what about science what about the dogma of science how much science have you actually done be honest I don't mean how much you've read in high school I don't mean how many scantron tests you filled out or how many lectures you've listened to and taken notes on that isn't really science that is all hearsay that is supposedly other scientists passing on their discoveries to you and not even that because you were taught science by real scientists you were taught scientists by non scientists you see because your high school chemistry teacher she didn't actually do any science when she taught you chemistry she just taught from a book that was given to her so she wasn't a scientist most likely see so how do you know you are literally trusting the authority of those textbooks and those teachers who passed it on from others and others and others and others and others science is a highly social hierarchical bureaucratic system really not much different than religion because if you're a Christian and you believe in God and Christ and all this how do you know how do you even know there was a Christ and see right here we reach an interesting point because if you're a Christian and you want to do a serious inquiry into truth and you're not willing to open your mind to the possibility that Christ didn't even exist you've already failed already failed why because you've completely given away your authority and responsibility for discovering the truth to some other human you see notice the following point the only thing you know about Christ you learned from other humans because of course you have no direct experience of Christ the only reason you know about Christ is because other humans existed who told you about it and you blindly believed them and assumed that they were telling you correctly but there are interesting possibilities here like that those people could have been deluded could have been lying to you could have been mistaken just honestly mistaken because how did your parents learn about Christ obviously they didn't meet Christ so they learn it from their parents and how did their parents learn it well from their parents and now how far do we have to go back well if to go back like a hundred generations or so that's a lot of generations that's a lot of hearsay a chain of 100 here says over 2,000 years and you're gonna trust that Wow you're very gullible you must you must really you must really have a high faith in in in humanity to believe that see now I'm not particularly saying here that Christ never existed all I'm saying is that I want you to notice in yourself if you're a Christian and you cannot open your mind to the serious possibility that Christ never actually existed you're done you're [ __ ] you've already failed this process your mind needs to be open enough to be open to literally any possibility and this brings us to the the key point of existential investigation is open-mindedness radical open-mindedness I stress this point a lot but people still don't understand the significance of this you will only appreciate what radical the mind this is when you begin this investigation into the truth and when you reach a point where you realize that holy [ __ ] I don't know anything and I can't rely whatsoever on any external human source or any hearsay to help me in this investigation which means I have to derive it all for myself which means I have to be completely objective and I have to be completely impartial and if I'm completely honest and completely impartial I admit that I don't know anything that means I have to be open to absolutely every possibility being true because you see if I tell you that the universe was created by a space kangaroo and you say oh well Leah that's that's horseshit that can't possibly be real you've already failed in this work you've closed your mind see because when you admit that I don't know what that really means and there's so many layers of death to this I don't know we've only scratched the surface of it what it really means is that you don't [ __ ] know it means you cannot assign probabilities to what the truth might be you might say well leo the probability yeah maybe maybe I'll allow a 1% chance that the universe was created by a giant space kangaroo because it seems kind of far-fetched you've already failed you've already felt you can't do that you can't assign probabilities because to be able to a probability to an outcome means that you already are assuming that you know what's true because what are your probabilities based on your begging the question you don't know what's true you don't know what's far-fetched or not you don't know what's possible or not you see how deep this goes because your ideas of what's possible or what's probable or what's likely or what's far-fetched or not or what's weird or what's crazy or what's impossible all of these ideas are completely derived from your culture maybe also a little bit from your direct experience because it you know in your direct experience to be honest you know you've never seen a space kangaroo so you might say that well the probability of there being a space kangaroos is quite low because I've never seen one okay well fine but that's that's very poor logic because there's a lot of stuff you haven't seen you've never seen a billion dollars doesn't mean that it ain't out there you've probably never seen Jupiter doesn't mean it ain't out there there's a lot of stuff you believe very firmly that you've never seen and after all hello your your your view on reality is so narrow obviously it's so narrow you've seen so little of reality you've seen so little I'm not even talking about other planets you've seen so little of planet Earth you've seen so few cities how many cities on this planet have you been to a dozen a couple dozen probably at most maybe a hundred there's there's hundreds of thousands of cities on this planet most of them you've never been to yet you assume they exist there and of course there's most of reality 99.99999% of reality you have it seen so what does that tell us that tells us that you're clueless it tells us there's there's so much stuff out there that could surprise you you have to be open to surprise that's a very important aspect of this open-mindedness deal that we're talking about to be open minded is to admit that I don't really know and my assignment of probabilities to outcomes are really ultimately groundless if I want to be honest about it and so I have to be even open to things that might seem crazy or absurd like giant space kangaroos creating the universe it's a little counterintuitive and tricky here because you might think like well leo but if I open my mind to all sorts of crazy possibilities like giant space kangaroos and stuff like that what's to stop me from getting totally deluded it seems like Leo you're actually opening Pandora's Box here to all forms of delusion shouldn't it shouldn't I be more s'more more grounded shouldn't I be more rational and more scientific and more conservative in this process like I shouldn't open my mind to all these crazy possibilities but that's exactly wrong you would think that opening your mind to a giant space kangaroo would lead you away from truth but actually it's the opposite because to be conservative and to be very strict with with what you allow in your inquiry assumes that you already know the truth because how are you disallowing something from your inquiry think about that so for example I tell you about the giant space kangaroo and you say no Leo I'm not even gonna think about that I won't I refuse to read books about giant space kangaroos because they aren't real how do you know that have you searched the entire universe for space kangaroos and come up short if you have okay you're on solid ground but you haven't you haven't you haven't even searched this planet for space kangaroo maybe there's a space kangaroo living under your bed you haven't even searched there you don't know it's very important to recognize here that we cannot pre judge our inquiry we cannot assume what the conclusion might be we have to actually do the search we have to go through a discovery process we can't just say oh well there's probably no spanks can you under my bed no we have to actually look under our bed for the space kangaroo in fact if you want to take this process seriously go pause this video right now and go look under your bed for a space kangaroo that will be the first bit of existential inquiry that you probably done in your whole life go look under your bed you probably won't find one there but hey you know at least you're doing the work now and you're understanding a little bit of what it takes now here already were running into one of the chief problems and objections that people have one of the chief obstacles to this inquiry is that people say oh holy ah but this is this is becoming so hard I thought this was just gonna be some fun armchair philosophy where I get to sit around I just get to think about stuff like whether I'm in a matrix or not or I get to cope with cool ideas and I get to you know play around with my pet theories and rationalize my own belief system and now you're telling me I got to go check under my bed you know I got to go and do this this is this is hard work I gotta like bend my back I got a peek under they're gonna grab the flashlight at this real dark under there check to see you know and after all you know how many beds do I have to check I mean if I check this one bed but there's a million beds on this plan you have to check under every bed for these space kangaroos this is gonna waste my whole life it's too much work it's too much expense why am i doing all this let me just go back to living my ordinary life that's exactly the reasoning that people use to not do this work and you can't really blame them because when we begin this inquiry we have no idea whether it'll be worthwhile or not maybe we're gonna the next hundred years checking every bet on the planet for giant space kangaroos and will find nothing and we will have wasted all of that life and we could have used those hundred years to have sex to buy houses to do drugs to watch TV to travel around the world and to drink champagne and drive fast cars and yachts and build businesses and all this and make children and raise families and all this and we will have sacrificed all of that just to find nothing yeah that's right that's the cost of finding truth so if you don't care about the truth if you don't care about knowing how reality actually is remember that's what we're really interested in how reality actually is if you don't care to know that then you're done you'll never discover the truth now you might wonder well Leo but what if it's not even possible in theory to discover the truth what if there is no truth to discover what if all this is just mental masturbation yeah that's possible but also notice if that's true then that is the truth but you don't know that that's true to know that that's true you would actually have to go and exhaust every possible avenue of inquiry look under every bed on every planet in every solar system for space kangaroos and find nothing and after all of that you would discover that okay maybe you'd finally after you've exhausted searching the entire universe maybe you'd come to the conclusion that okay it's not ever possible to reach the truth and that would be the truth that you reached but it would take you a trillion years to search the entire universe or maybe there's a faster way maybe you and stumble upon some way to get to the truth that will deliver it to you within a year or within a month or within a week or within a day you don't know how would you know if you already knew that you wouldn't need to begin the inquiry you see our undertaking the inquiry has to admit and acknowledge that we don't know it could be a giant waste of time or maybe maybe finding the truth will be the most remarkable life-changing life transforming experience of all time maybe it will result in an orgasm of ecstasy and $100 bills will shower from the sky maybe maybe it'll make you immortal maybe you will become a god who can control the whole universe maybe I mean sounds kind of far-fetched but who knows we don't know because we have it we haven't finished our work we've barely begun our work and yet we've already spent an hour talking about it and that's of course with the benefit of me having spent literally thousands of hours doing this on my own so now I'm kind of guiding you through this process and it actually kind of seems kind of reasonable and pretty efficient to the way I'm explaining to you now you know I only took an hour to get this far this hour that we just spent together talking about this this probably took me thousands of hours to get this far on my own when I begin when I was 16 years old so of course I'm I'm guiding you now with the benefit of hindsight having discovered the truth and I'll spoil it for you I did discover it and it is possible to discover a spoiler so of course the only reason we're talking about it cuz it is worthwhile but but you have to understand that that is only my point of view now that I've done the work when I began work I had no idea that it was possible which shows you how much commitment you have to have this process because when you begin this work if you're truly doing this work and you start from a position of I don't know you don't know if it's gonna be possible or worthwhile now here's your problem is that what I know is not what you know so even though I've discovered the truth that doesn't help you at all because even if I tell you the truth how do you know I'm not lying to you how do you know I'm not deluded how do you know that you should listen to me you don't you see because from your point of view I am just another authority figure which we already talked about and said that we can't listen to see so in this process you're all on your own I can guide you I can help you but you're gonna have to do this reasoning for yourself I can't do it for you that's one of the tricks with truth is that the truth must be discovered by every individual for him or herself that's what makes truth difficult you can't be lazy here and just expect somebody to deliver the truth to you on a silver platter your teacher your professor your rabbi or some book cannot deliver you the truth it delivers you hearsay it delivers you opinions perspectives and beliefs but that is not the truth or rather the problem is is that you don't know how to differentiate between one belief one opinion one perspective over another to distinguish them you would need to know the truth first see the mistake that people make is they start to distinguish between different belief systems and perspectives and world views and opinions yet they've never discovered the truth so all their distinguishing is predicated upon assumption which are mostly false but they are not conscious enough to realize this they think what they're doing when they're when they're judging different opinions and worldviews they think that they're being truthful and they think that they are doing this inquiry they're not doing this inquiry they are begging the question they are using past assumptions to adjudicate future situations but their past assumptions they never actually validated those they just picked them up from the culture that's what distinguishes what most people do from what we're doing here right now from existential inquiry it's a huge difference what most people do is conformity they conform to the belief system and worldview and perspective of their culture that's what 99.9% of people are doing including scientists intellectuals academics Nobel Prize winners and all that and then a very very tiny percentage less than 1% of people are doing what we're doing here which is they're you're actually thinking for themselves through this stuff so we sort of set this situation up that was good now where we go from here well we have to wonder what are the different methods that we might use for discovering truth let's brainstorm some possibilities well we could use reason we have the reasoning faculty in fact we've been using it already just to get this inquiry off the ground we've had to use some reason and some very basic common sense not any kind of formal logic book you know just basic common sense we also have had to rely on history because notice I've brought in examples of history that was important because we do look to the history of the human race to see where mistakes made that's very helpful but of course remember history is very problematic because again how do you know anything that you learned about history is actually true because history is all hearsay secondhand accounts you have no direct experience of of most of the history that you know but you know we'll give that some benefit of the doubt for now we'll allow some history for now of course we'll have to question it in the future so we have reason we have history we could read books but again reading books how do you know which book is correct there are so many contradictory books you can read a book on science you can read the Bible you can read the Koran which one is correct how do you know you have intuition that's an interesting faculty and vehicle towards truth throughout your life you've used intuition you used gut feelings and sometimes your intuitionist has panned out and delivered some truthfulness or some accuracy to you helped you to make decisions in the right way or help you to avoid danger maybe you're walking through the forest and you have an intuition there's there's a bear around the corner and and what do you know you know you spot the bear before he spots you and then you run away and you're safe whereas if you didn't he would have eaten you that's that's valid so we have intuition and you know humans have have talked about intuition fur fur since the dawn of civilization so we might assume that there's something to intuition we might use science now of course science is a very complicated thing we just say the word science that that drags in with it the entire history of science and all the different methodologies of science so there's so many methods there you know what counts as legitimate science just looking through a microscope count just looking through a telescope count is using sort of particle collider count does my direct experience count as science what is science really now that's a extremely deep question which we can't go into here I'll I'll have separate episodes about how science really works and what it is in the future so that's a long tangent but okay we got science that we could potentially use maybe we can do some sort of laboratory experiments maybe we can get some some rats throw them in a maze and maybe we can discover some truth by little by observing rats maybe or maybe we can do sort of the sort of jane goodall approach where we go to the jungle and we live with the chimpanzees and we hide in the bushes and we peek through the bushes using some binoculars and we watch we observe the chimpanzees doing their chip stuff and then maybe we learn some truth from them maybe or maybe we send out satellites into space and we we photograph things and we can learn the truth that way through photography maybe maybe we we mix some chemicals in a jar in a beaker and we stir it around and then we do we find some truth through some sort of chemical laboratory testing maybe maybe we we do sociological sort of studies where we get a bunch of group of people together we get like a hundred people on a college campus together and we run some clever experiments on them we give them some placebo drug or whatever and then we test them we do a control group we do another group that we give the real drug to we test them then we find the truth through that process maybe how about witchcraft how about voodoo how about astral projection how about psychedelics how about meditation how about contemplation all of these are potential avenues of truth but we don't know how reliable they are and of course the problem is is that if we ask somebody well ok so which method should I use which method is reliable you see the problem we're back to square one we can't ask that question because if we're gonna ask somebody who are you gonna ask depending on who you ask you'll get a different answer so how do you know who to ask and which answers are correct and which people to trust and not trust you don't the only way you could know that is for you already knew the truth so if you go and ask your college professor whether voodoo is legitimate he'll tell you no but can you trust that isn't he biased after all he works in a university he spent his whole life in a university he's been indoctrinated in school since he was a baby his parents were probably scientists and professors and so forth so can you really trust him maybe maybe not you don't know how about direct experience can you trust your own direct experience can you trust perceptions maybe perception and direct experience and our awareness of the present moment can lead us to the truth now that's a rather interesting and unique case direct experience and by direct experience I'm just mean literally the perceptions you're experiencing right now after all how do you know you're alive and that's that's a good tack to take here when we're investigating reality at the most fundamental level we can try to ask the question of like okay of all the things that I think I know about the world what do I think I know which is the most unquestionable is something that's so basic so fundamental so unquestionable that if this thing was wrong nothing else would matter and nothing more could be done and so if you think about that for a moment you might conclude that the one thing that you know for sure is that you exist right now that you're alive right now isn't that true is there anything more certain than that you're alive right now how do you know that you're alive right now how are you certain to that is that something I told you is that something you read in a book is that something your college professor told you is that something your parents taught you is that something you read in the Bible or learn to church that you're alive or is there something more primordial and fundamental that makes you aware of your aliveness something that is non-human a nonhuman source for your aliveness what is that source well we might call that direct experience because after all notice that if you weren't alive right now there could be no church there could be no Bible there could be no professor there could be no university there could be no humans there could be no planet there could be no universe there could be no teaching there could be no concept of truth there could be no thoughts there could be no intuitions there could be no voodoo no witchcraft no science no reason no rationality nothing think this through just accept what I'm saying check for yourself whether what I'm saying makes sense and is true so it seems already we've made some pretty good progress it seems like we've found something more fundamental than witchcraft and science and universities and churches and Bibles we've found that it seems like you know if you think throughout all of your life what's the one thing that you've always had with you throughout all that because you know sometimes you were at church but other times you weren't sometimes you were doing science but other times you weren't sometimes you were using your reason and other times you weren't but what's the one thing you always had throughout your whole life the sense that you're alive we might almost jump to the conclusion that reality is nothing but your sense of being alive and then everything else just details everything else is just what happens within that frame but then that raises interesting questions like well so does this mean that there's nothing outside of my own life or other humans real cuz after all if I'm dead they don't exist before I was born there were no humans from my point of view so is my point of view all of reality or is reality something beyond merely my own point of view and my own little life hmm interesting I don't know we don't know not yet but there's interesting possibilities here some of these possibilities might seem outlandish and far-fetched like that space kangaroo but remember we don't know we don't really know could it be that I'm the only thing alive in the whole universe could it be that the entire universe is just what's happening in my life right now after all that has been literally how it's felt since my birth after all it does feel from my point of view that the entire universe revolves around me so it's not an unreasonable possibility do we know that there's something external to this life do we know there's a objects outside of direct experience if what we're calling here is direct experience do we know that maybe we assume it may be our culture tells us that there is but how do we know maybe there's nothing but this direct experience right now and in fact how do I know that the memories I have my childhood that those are actually not just something that's happening right now in this present moment did those memories of childhood actually happen or are they just something I'm imagining right now is there even a difference I don't know we'll have to investigate all that now there's an doubt here that we have to throw in which is well sure we have perceptions colors sounds and so forth but after all perceptions what our perceptions aren't perceptions just a byproduct of evolution and the human physiology we know that rattlesnakes perceive differently they can sense infrared when humans can't we know that other creatures see different colors some creatures only see in black and white some creatures have entirely new senses of smell or or even senses that humans don't even have beyond our five senses so we can kind of surmise it's a pretty safe assumption at this point to notice that probably other and organisms experience reality a very different way some of them might not even see colors so how do we know that if we're gonna say the direct experience is the only we're not the only but is like the the most fundamental Avenue towards truth which it seems so far that's sort of been our conclusion but we don't we don't know that it's still shaky right we're not jumping to conclusions here but it seems like our sense of aliveness comes before religion and before science and before reason because we first have to be alive in order to get those things and after all you know for me to have science for me to do reason for me to have religion I have to experience them how do i interface with science at all how do i interface with rationality it's through direct experience notice that if if I eliminate all of my direct experiences science flies out the window there can't be science without direct experience there can't be religion I can't read the Bible unless I'm experiencing a Bible I can't know about Christ unless I have an image of Christ in my mind and the word Christ which all of it is direct experience so seems like direct experience is pretty fundamental but there is an additional doubt this is a classical doubt that philosophers have had since the ancient Greeks and Romans are probably even before that which is that how do we know we can trust our perceptions after all perceptions seem quite ilusory you can like poke your eyeball and you're gonna start to see weird colors that weren't there before you can cross your eyes and then you're actually gonna start to see double of certain objects you can be in a desert you can see a mirage you can be underwater or you can be looking through a different colored lens and you're gonna see the world colored or shaped in a different way you could have lenses camera lense with different fields of view you could have fisheye effects and you can have very tight tight focuses which which result in very flat images so I like which of those represents the correct way to look at the world do we really want to say that colours sounds feelings and emotions are the most truthful thing we have is that what we really want to say cuz after all the sense of being alive what is that but a feeling it seems like so far we've reduced it all down to a feeling we're saying that a feeling is more fundamental and true than science is that true and how would we check that you see it's one thing to just sit around and speculate but we're not interested here in speculation we're not interesting in probabilities we're not interested in like well yeah I I think that there's like a 65% chance that my perceptions are accurate no no this is this does nothing for us we want truth for certain it has to be certain it can't be a probability it can't be a wild guess or a feeling or a speculation that we have like a it feels like this is right no if there is a truth and we're gonna find it we need to to be sure about it but how do we know that the thing we're sure about is actually the truth and not just something that's a falsehood that we've convinced herself is the truth these are all very thorny questions it almost seems hopeless how do we figure this out we want to turn to somebody for help but we can't we want to ask a professor we can't we want to read a book we can't we want to talk to some rabbi or priest or guru nope can't can't do it can't help us because for us to trust them we don't read you to have the truth we want to ask ourselves and we can't do that either see are you gonna ask yourself what the truth is but that already assumes you know what the truth is so why would you even ask if you already knew the fact that you're asking already demonstrates that you don't know so you can't even ask yourself so it seems impossible how are you gonna figure this out nope that's why so few people do the work because it seems hopeless you don't even know how to begin and yet I'm gonna spoil it for you here it is possible how well you keep questioning you keep investigating direct experience turns out to be a very good lead follow up on that lead keep digging into it try to find what's most fundamental in your life but you know you can become very very skeptical with this whole process you can even question something like your sense of being alive you could say well leo but the sense of being alive what is this is just a feeling could it be that we're not really alive what if it's an illusion what if we think we're alive but really we're really not what if we're like in a computer simulation after all how do we know what it feels like to be alive maybe my mind is tricking me maybe the way the brain is wired it does some freaky stuff and it creates the illusion of a human being alive but really it's nothing but atoms and molecules maybe how would we sort that out you see the very deep problem here what criterion are you going to use to adjudicate different cases of truth versus falsehood so any case I bring forth to you how are you gonna adjudicate it based on what any criterion you use will itself be in doubt and require a further criterion so if if I come to you with the question of what's what's more reliable your reason or your perceptions how are you gonna decide that based on what are you gonna use reason to adjudicate between reason and perception that can't work because that's already biased you're begging the question the point is that you don't know whether reason or perception is more accurate so if you're gonna use reason to adjudicate between the two you're already assuming that reason is more accurate and therefore the point is moot you've begged the question you might as well save your time and not even answer it because your your action already reveals your underlying bias but if you're gonna use perception to adjudicate between perception reason then you're biased in the other direction and you're begging the question so how could this possibly work it seems like an impossible puzzle what are you gonna use what can you rely on there's no firm ground to stand on everything is called into question but there's an even deeper wrinkle to the skepticism so skepticism is a funny thing when I started this whole process back when I was 16 years old I went down down down this very road that I'm sharing with you now and of all the different philosophies that I've read you know I just went online this was in the early 2000s when the internet was first born and there were still very little content compared to today there was no YouTube there was barely a Wikipedia and so forth but there was some semblance of a Wikipedia and so I think I went on Wikipedia or some website similar to that it was a philosophy website which just had a bunch of different philosophies they had materialism realism idealism and dualism and mysticism and solipsistic at log of like every different philosophical school I I've read through some of them not all of them there's two and I sort of was thinking about okay so which one of these how do I decide which was true and which one do I choose for myself at least temporarily if not permanently and and what I resonated the most with was skepticism the ancient Greek sort and I considered myself a skeptic at that point I started to question science by that point so much and I was into science you know I spent a good chunk of my my high school education way into science I took hard science classes chemistry and advanced physics and advanced biology and and all this were stuff I was fascinated in science I read Darwin's On the Origin of Species just by myself not as part of the school assignment cuz I was fascinated by evolution I toured around with the idea of becoming a molecular biologist I entered University studying aerospace engineering so I was very scientifically minded most of my most of my college classes were hard core calculus classes physics classes mechanics classes like pretty dry boring stuff I kind of reread it in retrospect but yeah it wasn't it wasn't very fun it's kind of dry and boring but you know I was serious about that stuff and I was interested in it but also I started questioning so deeply that I realized that I can't take science for granted is true so at that point in my investigation I literally placed science at the same level as religion because I had to admit to myself that even though I love science and I'm curious about it and it seems like science is much more reasonable than religion if I'm really totally honest I have to admit that I don't know I don't know if what religion says is false I can't just dismiss it even though it sounds kind of cuckoo I can't dismiss it because I I just don't know and yet still I leaned atheist at that point I was actually I was pretty hardcore atheist at that point because it just didn't make sense to me that God could be true it it seemed like a bass kangaroo it seemed totally outlandish but but deep down I knew that I had to be very objective about this so I couldn't call myself a scientist by that point and I couldn't call myself a religious person I was very averse to religion and so skepticism this very inquiry that we're doing here is skepticism that's what it is so I became an arch radical skeptic I questioned absolutely everything my mom would make fun of me and she would she would call me like the unbeliever the infidel the one who doesn't believe anything because I would question everything I would even question things like is is 0 times 2 equal to 0 I would question that I would question that like I would question 1 plus 1 equals 2 everything I wouldn't I wouldn't believe it in fact it almost became pathological because what started happening is that I started questioning even the most obvious and true things like just common sense things I would start to question to the point where it actually became kind of corrosive and toxic because it actually became difficult to function because certain things that you know other normal people who just take for granted as obvious I would I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't follow them into that and you know I at that point I was very averse to faith and so skepticism is sort of like the antithesis of faith and so to me faith wasn't just believing in God to me faith I saw faith everywhere I saw people in science taking science on faith I saw mathematicians doing mathematics on faith I saw people doing logic using logic on faith faithfully assuming that logic would lead them to truth and I couldn't do that so I was very very skeptical and I actually created kind of a skeptic identity and I enjoyed I enjoyed that it was fun to play that but then I started to question even deeper and that's when a really twisted thing happened which is that my skepticism went full circle and it hit a sort of inflection point and the way this happened is that one day I was sitting around and thinking about I guess how good it is to be a skeptic to question everything but then the thought came to me wait a minute what if all this skepticism is nonsense and it's leading me away from the truth ah this is what happens when you turn skepticism in on itself you become so skeptical that of course you realize that to be truly skeptical you must then apply your skepticism to your skepticism and doubt your own skepticism because there is a possibility and it's not an unreasonable possibility that this attitude of approaching life by questioning everything to death and doubting everything that this very attitude and worldview is itself a delusion after all how do we know that skepticism leads to truth we don't and when you realize that you realize that skepticism eats its own tail because to truly be a full skeptic you have to become so skeptical that you realize skepticism is untenable and then where does that leave you it leaves you in a sort of no-man's land you can't really call yourself a skeptic anymore because if you're fully skeptical then you have to admit that skepticism is untenable so then are you a skeptic are you a true skeptic or now have you gone beyond skepticism how do you transcend a skepticism and then where does that leave you does that put you right back where you began or does that take you to some even deeper or higher place answer that for yourself do it do it become skeptical about your own skepticism but before you do that first become skeptical first spend a few years being be skeptical then spend a few years questioning your own skepticism and see where that leads you to see as you're doing all this what should what you should start to notice is that there's something lurking in the background of your inquiry something you can't quite put your finger on you don't know how to describe it or what it really is but there's something there's something there and you're sort of circling around it but you can't make it explicit and you sense it in your reasoning process because you are using reasoning and sort of a sort of common sense to think through these questions to contemplate you are contemplating here you know you're posing thought experiments and maybe you're you're cherry-picking examples from life or from history or from religion or from science your cherry pings so you're processing all this mentally but as you're doing that you realize that in this very process there's there's some sort of nugget or kernel of truth that's there that's that's guiding this process if you're doing it carefully it's not just pure fantasy there's something there but you don't know what it is so for example when you're skeptical about everything there's a certain logic behind your skepticism there's a certain reason to it it's makes a certain kind of sense and then when you realize that wait a minute maybe my skepticism is just more delusion and it won't leave me to truth there's also a certain kind of sense and logic to that and then where it ends you in a sort of no-man's land where you can't quite say you're a skeptic and also you can't quite say you're not a skeptic because you know by realizing that skepticism is untenable that doesn't just make you a blind believer in every random thing so the opposite of skepticism is not just faith in everything it makes no sense the Optus is of the transcendence of skepticism is a sort of no man's land but also when you reach the snowman's land something interesting happens to you it affects your attitude towards the world this no-man's land there's something about it there's something truthful about it almost like there's something truthful about saying you don't know when you really don't know and there's something untruthful with claiming that you know something that you feel deep down inside you don't really know like when religious people claim that God exists but they didn't but you ask them like well have you met God and they say well no of course I haven't met God but I know he exists but do you really know he exists if you're very honest and you introspect you have to be very honest now and you know if you have to be able to transcend your cultural programming and biases you have to admit that actually you don't know if God exists unless you've actually met him likewise if you're an atheist you say Wow God God doesn't exist but do you really know that well if you introspect deeply and you're very honest with yourself you're gonna have to admit as an atheist no I don't actually know that it just it seems likely that he doesn't exist cuz I've never seen him but just haven't seen something doesn't mean it doesn't exist so obviously that's not good enough to rule out God and when you make that admission to yourself you feel better you feel pure you feel cleaner you feel more honest and truthful so see in a sense what you're doing with this inquiry is you're you're you're literally pulling yourself up by the hair by the bootstraps in this process you're sort of going around in circles with your mind but as you do that there's always a little bit of truth lingering in there somewhere it's almost like I've heard this good description of you're looking down a corridor alarm corridor and then as you turn your head to look down the corridor you see the tale of some mysterious wild animal quickly go around the corner and as you're turning your head to look at it you catch just the last couple of inches of the tail and it goes by so fast with that sort of motion blur effect that you you don't you don't know what that was it almost has the feel of a mirage or you can't put your finger on it it was too quick and too blurry but you know you saw something there but you have no idea what it was and the more you do this process of inquiry the more deeper you get into it the more you self reflect the more honest you become the more of these glimpses of the tale you catch at first you know you catch that glimpse of a tale once a month or once a year you know it's extremely rare you don't even think it'll see it again but then the more you keep at this process the more you see it and then like every times like what is that thing there's something over there and then as you walk to it down the corridor you see this is an infinite corridor it goes forever and so the closer you walk to the tail the tail is always the same distance far away from you this sort of weird spooky thing ah I'm being poetic here there's there's no literal tail that you see I'm being poetic but something like this so what starts to happen is that in this process of a logic Inge and thinking this stuff through you notice that there is at the forefront there is your logical mind thinking these questions through struggling with them may be coming up with tentative conclusions then discarding them looking for other ones so there's that happening at the forefront of your logical conscious mind and then in the background there is a what I call an intuitive Faculty there is sort of an intuition a deep intuition which is observing the foreground activity of your mental state it's that deep intuition which is sort of connecting all the dots and drawing a big picture of what's really going on with you in this process and it's from that intuition that you start to see certain connections and you start to see that example of what I was calling the tail rounding the corner catching a glimpse your intuition starts to catch these glimpses but of course they're still the lingering doubt in the back of your mind can you trust your intuition what's more reliable the foreground logical rational activity of your mind or that deep background of the intuitive seeing the big picture connecting the dots sore deal catching a glimpse of this tail rounding the corner what's more true of course at this early stage of the process you don't know you so you just work with it you see where it takes you supposedly there is some concrete definite way that the universe actually is that reality actually is and if there is that way notice we have to distinguish here between how it actually is and how I think it is how I believe it is how I want it to be how I imagined it to be how I fear arises it how I create mental imagery about it distinguish all those from the thing itself from reality itself so if I'm sitting here right now and I start to think like well maybe reality is like a giant sphere that's the whole universe is a giant sphere and it's made out of energy and it's got quarks bouncing around you know trillions and trillions of quarks that's from the Big Bang so it exploded like a Big Bang and then this happened and there was an inflation period and this is whole thing is expanding and then eventually maybe will happen is it'll it'll get so big the bubble will will start to contract and then come back together and all of it come back back into a little tiny kernel a little seed little mustard seed of all the quarks in the universe comes back and it all compresses and then it blows up again and then this is what it is that's the truth but notice that's not the truth that's your ideas of the truth so if if these ideas are actually pointing to something valid maybe they are maybe they aren't we don't know we have tested right we have to test it but let's say these ideas I have and I just explained they are actually what's going to happen and how it works that still isn't actually it you see these are simplified ideas abstractions theories models gross oversimplification which means that that isn't really it what we're after is it itself what is it how do you get to it is there even in it if there isn't it it's the truth if there isn't in it it's the truth that there is no it would then be the truth but if there is no it then what is all this what is this experience this perception this could this be it could I be it what is my relationship to it is there an itch and a me which came first did it come first or did I come first or did we come together maybe there isn't an I maybe there's only in it maybe there isn't an it maybe there's only an i maybe the it and the I are one of the same and maybe they're different if you're wondering will Leo the word truth what does that even mean aren't we just playing word games here maybe we are maybe that's all we're doing maybe all this is just word games and a waste of time but that again is what's happening right now a word game you have to be very careful in this process not to get lost in your own intellectualization and your own mind when we're talking about discovering the truth we're not talking about ideas or theories or philosophies we're talking about the most true thing that there possibly can be we're talking about reality itself how reality actually is so if you think that's all a word game be careful because when you say that what you're saying is that this very moment your entire life is nothing but a word game is that really a road you want to go down is that really what you believe see because a lot of people will say awful Asif II and all this stuff leaves talking us all just a word game but then they go right back to their ordinary life doing ordinary things and they don't consider their children a word game when your child gets cancer is that just a word game but you said it was but do you react to the news of your child's cancer as though it were a word game no you don't so that tells you there's a rift between what you believe or your worldview and how you actually interact with the world see so part of our work here is not only to convince the self are some sort of philosophical theory and then go back to ordinary life and do all the stupid things we've always done part of our work here is to discover the truth and whatever that truth is then to align ourselves with the truth so like for example if you really believe that God exists as a Christian sort of philosophy and you really believe that God is a vengeful God and he he writes down notes about who's been naughty and nice and he he will punish those who don't pray to Him and do evil things and who act like jerks and he will reward those who who spread his word if that's what you really believe and you think that's truth but then you don't act in accordance with it then what you really believe at an even deeper level is that it's not truth if you don't go to church if you swear and break the Ten Commandments and you have abortions and do all the stuff that's supposedly God doesn't want you to do then it's actually your actions which reveal what you really believe and the rest is just some fluff on top some ideology you've constructed see what we're interested in this work is we're interested in being brutally honest with ourselves and we're interested in getting past the fluff past the ideals and all the stuff we tell our friends that we believe and that we think is right into what actually shapes our actions what what motivates our emotions and our feelings so for example if you like to tell your friends that all well reality is just a simulation but then when your child gets cancer you get all freaked out and you run to your friends for help and you tell them how terrible it is and how much you're suffering well what what that tells us is that you don't really it's a simulation because if you really believe it is a simulation you wouldn't be so attached to this simulation because the cancer then is a simulation your child is a simulation so why are you so attached to it see so this person in this case has an ideology that autolysis a simulation but then in practice deep down what he really holds as truth is that life is real and that his child is precious and important and that cancer is evil that's his true philosophy hiding under the fake one so be very careful the human mind is very tricky it likes to create all sorts of fake flowery philosophies but then the way that we actually lead our lives that's what reveals the real philosophy running the show and usually that one is quite ugly and petty and nasty for many people the true philosophy running their show is something like that life is a dog-eat-dog world it's brutish its brutal it's short it's indifferent God doesn't give a [ __ ] about you there is no God evil Devils are running amok the world sucks life is [ __ ] miserable for many people that's their true philosophy everything is pointless everything is depressing so you got to be real honest with yourself here this is a painful degree of self honesty it's a self honesty that burns throughout this whole process you have to hold your own feet to the fire and and burn off your old ideas and ideologies all of your pet theories have to be burned off this process is ruthless it's unpleasant it's emotionally disturbing it can lead to depression it can lead to nihilism it can make you act weird socially it can make you reclusive it can make you feel like you're losing your mind because you're truly doing the work later when you finally complete all this work and you finally do reach the truth you will appreciate why so few people reach the truth it's because of the emotional labor and toil emotional toil you had to go through - to burn off all this fluff all this programming that you've been conditioned with and to Rack your mind for four years for thousands of hours trying to understand this stuff but you'll also understand that there's no way it could be otherwise you had to go through this process you can't short-circuit this process by turning to some expert to tell you the answer now in my own work here with actualize that org I tell you all the answers so in a certain sense of course I contradict myself but that's because I want to make a catalog of all the answers that's my own agenda here and the answers in a sense are easier to deliver than to guide you through this very subtle process of inquiry so really what's happened here we've just begun our inquiry into the foundations of human knowledge otherwise known as epistemology personally I think that this is one of the most important and underappreciated topics for mankind on this hinges everything this process is not taught in school it's not taught in universities is certainly not taught in religions it's not even taught in spiritual teachings it's not taught in books it's not taught in videos it's very challenging to teach this very few people teach it because very few people have actually done it Eenie even many people who have awoken or who have had success on a spiritual path they still have not really done this process deeply enough you can have mystical experiences even even fairly significant awakenings without having gone through this whole process and that's not a good thing that's actually a bad thing because what it means is that you're gonna have your awakening but it's going to be muddled by a bunch of ideology and cultural conditioning and stuff you and truly questioned and that will corrupt your awakening so this is a little introduction into epistemology hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned some lessons here I hope you actually went with me here on this journey and weren't just listening passively but we're working actively pausing between different questions trying to work this stuff out for yourself it this process is just like working a mathematical proof you need to go through the steps of the proof and have traction in your mind with the logic of it to see the steps how they interconnect to see the end result of course most people are so lazy they don't want to do any mathematical bruise but hopefully you're one of the ones who isn't lazy and you you really have a passion for truth and you want to you want to get to the bottom of it and you have some and I guess I guess this process requires some faith you need to have an overarching faith that this process will be worthwhile in some capacity you need to at least have the faith that even if you go through this whole process and you never discover the truth because maybe it doesn't exist or maybe you'll just never find it because it requires so much work but you still need to have the sort of faith that even if you don't complete this process it'll still be beneficial to you because if you don't have faith in that then you're never gonna invest the thousands of hours that are necessary to do this work you just won't you need to have some sort of vision now of course you might say well Leo but why should I have this faith after all I don't know if it's gonna be worthwhile that's right that's why they call it a leap of faith you don't know it's a risk but hey you know what all of life is a risk and by not doing this process that's also a risk don't forget that by not questioning yourself by not questioning your culture by not questioning your religion by not questioning science by not questioning your authority figures and teachers and gurus that's an enormous risk and this risk is not speculative this risk has been borne out throughout all of human history think of all the mass racism and war and genocide and evil cults that have existed Spanish inquisitions witch burnings McCarthyism Nazism and all sorts of ideologies and mass conformist culture movements like this that have all what's the one common element behind all of those people weren't thinking independently for themselves they were just being sheep so don't think that you're somehow safe by avoiding this process then you just consign yourself to be a sheep how do you think that's gonna work out for you probably not so good so there's trade-offs there's pros and cons there's a cost there's a benefit to either decision you'll do this inquiry or you won't or you'll do it for a little while then you'll quit then you'll come back when you're more mature and when you're more developed see if you're still at the point where you're like ollie oh but I don't know what what's the point of the truth I don't really care about it then you're not developed enough you're not mature enough you're not wise enough to see why someone would want to know what what existence is after all think of it this way the only thing you have is existence you know nothing but existence name one thing you know which is not existence or a part of existence even if you name something like a unicorn a unicorn is a part of existence in your mind at least doesn't mean that you'll find a unicorn on Mars it just means that in your mind a unicorn is still something even figments of one's imaginations must exist so existence is all there is at least from your perspective maybe there's something more but so far you've only experienced existence so existence is all there is don't you want to know what it is why is here or are you just gonna live your life like a like a chimp you're just gonna go on [ __ ] and eating and [ __ ] and working a dead-end job and then retiring and then what and dying that's what your life is gonna be you're gonna you're gonna live for 80 or a hundred years and you're never going to wonder what existence is so you're gonna care about raising a family and you're gonna care about making some money if you're gonna hear about getting some sexual pleasure and you're gonna care about going on a vacation you're gonna care about all those little my new show all that this is peanuts within existence because you see when you care about sex or when you care about religion or when you care about money those are instances of existence so you are caring about existence but in an extremely narrow form now what if you broadened your interest out away from those my new shippi nut stuff - the entire nut what is the whole thing in a nutshell the universe in a nutshell is Stephen Hawking would write you're not gonna care about that does it does it matter to you you're going to exist but you're not gonna care or know what existence is doesn't that strike you as a little bit negligent especially if people tell you that it seems like it's possible to figure it out people like myself who said to you that they figured it out and seemed to imply that there's some value to it you're just gonna ignore all that and you're gonna go chasing sex and pleasure food go [ __ ] what else do you have to do in life but to figure out what life is is there any better use of your time see it might seem like all this is just so abstract it's so far away from my everyday concerns Leo how is this gonna help me I just want to escape my depression I just want to stop feeling anxious I just want to feel good but what if all of that is in some roundabout way connected to your ignorance about existence what if your inability to choose a career or to choose a relationship or to be indecisive as you are to be lost and lazy and depressed and to feel a point let die at this point listen to and to make all these mistakes that you make in your life to waste your money on this thing to have sex with the wrong guy or with the wrong girl to marry the wrong person to have fights with people all this [ __ ] that you're dealing with on it on a daily basis what if all of this had something to do with existence itself after all those are instances of existence don't you think it might help to know what existence is maybe maybe not you don't know how can you know the only way you'll know is if you do it so I've planted some seeds in you here I've guided you on the beginning of this journey just the tip just the tip of the iceberg it's up to you now to continue this work this episode illogical existential inquiry I recommend you keep questioning what truth is keep going down the same kind of lines of logic that I've been taking you down in this episode and see where it takes you be patient with it have a long time horizon take it up as a hobby and maybe one day you'll find it to be worthwhile alright that's it for this one please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's where you'll find some additional exclusive resources like my blog where I post insights and videos that aren't found anywhere else and my book list where I had a lot of books that discuss this whole topic of truth and various spiritual topics and so forth that will actually they will help you in this quest towards the truth but I recommend you don't overuse them make sure you do plenty of your own investigation because remember books are just hearsay in the end you'll find a life purpose course if you want to help with finding a sense of direction in your life and building a career around that the life purpose course details principles that I use to develop my own sense of purpose and to be a leader and to develop my business and the work that I do and to be an artist all of all of the principles I learned and doing that for myself I spent about 10 years trying to figure that out I figured it out for myself now I'm doing it and then I'm put it into a course so you can you can check that out people seem to like it and then what else do I got I'm forgetting something oh yeah the forum check out the actualized forum and lastly of course check out patreon I recently launched on patreon if you like my work if you want to support it this work doesn't get that many views because these videos are long they're esoteric they're kind of deep so that money I will be using in the future towards marketing and expanding actualized and trying to bring more content and also bringing the existing content to more people so if you chip in 5 bucks a month that's very helpful I'm very grateful for those donations that you guys have been givin me that's awesome it's uh inspiring helps me to to to do this work because for this work I have to I have to maintain my independence above above anything else this this is real philosophy here see the philosophy they teach you in university that's [ __ ] philosophy this is real philosophy real philosophy when it's done right is life transforming stuff it's not sitting around navel gazing and speculating about things it's not coming up with ideologies it's the opposite of all that it's really questioning it's really introspecting it's learning various principles of how the mind works as you do this work if you do this inquiry work one of the main benefits you'll get is you will learn the trickeries of your own mind you know in it in a way that you can't possibly by reading some book you have to actually be tricked by your own mind and then unravel the tricks of your own mind to learn how the mind works this is something I've been studying for for probably 20 years now is how my own mind tricks me and that still doesn't make me immune to the tricks because the mind is extremely tricky but also what's what's amazing about this work when you do it long enough and deep enough is that you get to a point where almost no other human can trick you because you're so good at understanding your own tricks and of course your own tricks are the same as the tricks that other people play on you and play on themselves is that you almost developed this super power to see through people and to see through situations you can look at a situation where there's a political one on the news or you can read you can read a book or you can look at a a teacher or a lecture or a video on YouTube or somebody telling you something about life or about reality about themselves and you can just it's like you have x-ray vision you see through the [ __ ] you immediately know they're full of [ __ ] you know how they're tricking you or trying to at least and you know how they're treating themselves whether it's religious people scientific people or cult leaders or whatever this gives you a sort of x-ray superpower it's a it's quite useful actually in a very practical sense like for example you're doing business you can tell when someone's trying to screw you in a business deal you can tell the tricks they use because you are so good at spotting those tricks within yourself of course this also clears up your own perception of reality such that even if we're not talking about some sort of lofty metaphysical topics we're just let's say talking about business deals in a business deal you can you can tell when you develop that introspective capacity you can tell when you're bullshitting yourself in a business deal see cuz it's not only that someone bullshit's you in a business deal you also [ __ ] yourself you tell yourself things like all well yeah this is a really good deal that guy's giving me such a good break I would be stupid enough to take this deal you know your mind will tell you these things so this this helps all around because guess what all of existence is being filtered through your mind to get to you and whatever kind of distortive lenses your mind has whatever operations doing before it gets to you if you're not aware of it that's that's something that's a corrupting influence in your life here's another final thought I'll leave you with about the value of truth if truth is reality if truth is finding out how reality actually is that which is the case the truth is that which is the case what else is there that which is not the case that which is false dad which is a fantasy but by definition that which is not the case doesn't exist so if you think about it the only thing there is is the truth and there's nothing else but the truth so think of it this way if you don't find the truth what do you have you have that which is not the case you have nothing how are you gonna live your life when you're not clear about the only thing that there is and all you have is that which isn't do you think that would create some dysfunctions and problems in your life if you lived that way anyways that's some food for thought I only started you on this journey here I didn't give you any answers deliberately it's not about giving you answers you got to find it for yourself and of course if you want the answers I've got plenty of other videos which do give those to you you