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hey Leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm gonna be talking about how to raise Rockstar kids [Music] you by Rockstar kids of course I mean raising psychologically healthy kids who grow up into wise conscious adults and are able to tap into the higher consciousness facets of life which very few people are able to tap into so that's what we're talking about here now for the record I don't have children so of course it's perfectly within your right to question why I'm qualified to talk about this topic at all and in a sense I feel like I'm not qualified to talk about it because I think that there are a lot of elements to parenting which are counterintuitive and tricky and can only be discovered by having kids and going through that process yourself so I'm gonna tread carefully here instead what I've decided to let my limit myself to is to sort of the theoretical foundations of raising these kinds of children this is the kind of stuff that you might not hear about in typical parenting books although some of them might talk about this and my qualifications here are that I've spent the last five or ten years studying a lot of personal development a lot of human psychology and a lot of spirituality and I've also spent quite a bit of time doing a sort of post-mortem analysis of my own childhood and what worked and what didn't work there and in a sense it's kind of like coming full circle because one of the reasons that I entered into personal development in the first place is because I grew up in a rather dysfunctional family a lot of elements in my family were dysfunctional and me entering personal development was a way to address those issues for myself because I wanted to live a certain kind of life and I was reacting really against that dysfunction my family which led me to all this stuff and what was very interesting is that I as I was studying all this personal development material for my adult life reading these books I started having insights about all this would be really great to know for people raising their kids this is something counterintuitive that a lot of parents I see don't understand because my parents didn't understand this or they did this wrong or other parents I see doing this wrong and so I actually started having so many of these insights that I started keeping a list and for the last couple of years I've been compiling this list of insights and kind of fleshing it out more and more and more and now I feel like it's complete enough to be able to present it to you so what you're gonna get here is you're gonna get the very fundamental principles and you're gonna see after the fact that a lot of this stuff is very obvious it'll just make sense to you you're not going to be very skeptical about it once you hear it but then again as they say common sense isn't so common and so even though this stuff should be obvious to most parents that's far from the case which is precisely why we have so many dysfunctional parents who raise dysfunctional kids who then go on to become dysfunctional parents to raise more dysfunctional kids and so therefore the dysfunction and the low consciousness just perpetuates itself so good parenting is a is a key component to solving humanity's low consciousness crisis which is putting us at a really at a species wide threat now to understand what your job is as a parent you have to first understand what school is gonna do for your kids and what it's not gonna do for your kids so you're gonna send your kids to school now there can be different options private school public school home schooling we'll talk about that later in the end of this episode but no matter where you send them basically school is gonna do a good job of teaching them math reading language history and science if you sign up to a decent school they'll do a decent job but school will do a bad job and oftentimes a terrible job or zero job at all in the following categories which are the ones you really need to now put your attention on psychology philosophy art music spirituality consciousness personal development high-level thinking strategic thinking big-picture thinking holistic thinking creativity and thinking outside the box and what I mean by creativity is the actual process and all the tricks and techniques for being creative for being a highly creative person school does not teach this also existential thinking school does not teach this almost at all holism ecology and systems thinking school doesn't teach this business marketing wealth creation money management and investing these topics are virtually untouched by school nutrition socialization dating and male-female psychology the differences between those is not taught very well how to be good at sex is not taught at all self-discipline and self-reliance is also not really taught so that gives you a very very broad overview of some of the things you need to be worth worrying about now let me give you a list of the most important things that you need to teach your children it's all the stuff that they won't learn at school so at the top of this list as you might expect it's enlightenment and self inquiry teaching them about what enlightenment is and not just giving it to them as an ideology of course but basically getting them interested in questioning what reality is existentially and showing them how to do that what kind of questions are worth asking what kind of questions are worth thinking about how should you think about these questions such as what am i what are other people what is consciousness what is matter and what is energy and what is God and is there a God and what is science and what is language and what is the mind and what is thinking and what is reality as a whole so all these sorts of questions getting them to think about that and giving them some tools like self inquiry a very concrete process that they can use to actually contemplate these things and of course not just telling them to do it like a homework assignment but really getting them curious about answering all these questions and getting them thinking about these sort of paradigms that society and culture will just feed to them at school and feed to them through the television 3 to them feed to them through the text books that they're reading getting them to question all the very fundamental assumptions there that are that are involved with these paradigms the next thing is meditation and concentration practices if you can instill in them a habit of meditation or concentration this is going to be huge just absolutely life transforming for them and it's so much easier to do this when they're very young so meditation you should start teaching them at five years old you can start that young and you could just teach them some basic techniques you know pick and choose whichever techniques you like you can also teach them some concentration techniques when they get a little bit older probably not when they're that young because a lot of kids these days in school they have a Dede problems because they can't focus because they play all these video games and because our culture is just so distracting they're on their iPod or on their iPad and their smartphone when they're toddlers and then that just worsens the problem a lot more so having some concentration practices for them would be huge now with meditation of course the best way to really instill a value of meditation is not through lecturing to them but through bahding it yourself imagine that your child sees you meditate for 30 minutes or 60 minutes every single morning for for the next 20 years of its life so basically since it's a baby all the way till it graduates high school it sees you meditate and not miss a single day of meditation in 20 years just imagine what kind of effect that will have on the child psychology obviously if you're able to do that and that's no small feat especially when you have small children is to find that time but if you're able to do that think about what that communicates to the child you don't even need to lecture to them to say oh hey go go in your room and meditate you don't need to do that just doing it yourself and them seeing you doing that and seeing how important it is to you to find the time to do that they will naturally get curious about it they will naturally ask you questions about why you do it and then that will open up those conversations and then you can share the techniques with them and you could teach them to do it as well and you can frame it as meditation is a tool that you can use to calm your mind to control your emotions to contemplate any questions you have about life any problems you have you can kind of meditate them away or become very mindful of them so that they lose their grip over you that would be a huge gift that you give to your child that virtually no parent does think about how many parents do this less than 1% for sure and yet this is probably the single most powerful thing you can do for your kid is to teach them to meditate and if you do it very young it's gonna be easy and man by the tide that they turn 10 years old 15 years old 20 years old these guys can be expert meditators they can already have enlightenment experience as they hit before they even graduate high school imagine how much of a of a leg up that gives them also the next thing you got to teach them is how emotions work this is another thing that school is gonna be terrible at school is not going to teach them what emotions really are or how they work or the importance even of understanding emotions and this thing called emotional mastery so of course you're gonna have to learn what emotions are and how they work and a little bit of what emotional mastery means before you could teach it to them but talking about what all these emotions are anger sadness frustration depression hurt jealousy etc etc especially all the negative ones and talking about why these emotions arise what they're supposed to be doing what their function is how to think about them properly and also very importantly giving your child some tools for handling strong negative emotions there are a lot of tools out there you can read self-help books on this stuff there's the emotional freedom technique there's the Sedona Method which I actually highly recommend the Sedona Method it's very simple for letting go and releasing emotions you can also teach the mindfulness with labeling which is just a very formal but simple technique also for how to label emotions that come up become mindful of them so that they don't overwhelm you this will be huge for them when they become teenagers if you can get them to to learn some of these techniques and practice them by the time they're 10 years old or 12 years old then when they after high school and all the emotional stuff comes up or they go to college then they will have these tools already well under their belt and they'll be able to use them to handle a lot of stuff that would otherwise lead them down to some bad alleys in life teaching them existential questioning is ridiculously important and this is something that nobody no school is going to do this for you you have to get them really curious and interested about thinking about life and trying to understand what life is every element of life get them to question it teach them the the value of radical open-mindedness show them that just because some adult thinks that something works this way or says that something works this way doesn't mean it actually does teach them that science can be wrong teach them that adults can be wrong teach them that social institution institutions can be wrong and that they have been all throughout history so that they're clear that they are clear that they need to learn how to think for themselves and that they can't take anything for granted that they pick up from culture from society if you do this when they're young this will program their mind for open mindedness which is the exact opposite of what our culture generally does is it programs us for closed mindedness and it doesn't admit that it makes certain fundamental assumptions about how reality is all these assumptions you can easily start to question with your child when they are just like six years old you can get them to start questioning all this stuff so when they start asking you why is the sky blue and why is the grass green go with that make them question those things and go help them to find resources for how they can keep their mind open and questioning that rather than just giving them some fake little dismissive excuses you could actually tell them that what we don't know why the sky is blue or I don't know why it's blue you go find out and you come and tell me and then we'll see and then we'll think through it together and we'll actually see does the answer make sense let's see what the science textbooks say about why the sky is blue and then we'll actually think through it together and we'll see what the assumptions are that the scientists are making what kind of paradigm are they using to make those conclusions and what does it even mean to say that you have an explanation for why the sky is blue you see get them thinking along those sorts of lines very importantly of course you have to teach them and also demonstrate of course good nutrition this is something I learned the hard way growing up I had terrible role model both my parents were terrible role models my entire family was for for nutrition there was just no value of healthy eating whatsoever in fact the value in my family was the exact opposites like the more unhealthy it is the better that was the value and so I grew up fat and I struggled with that quite a lot and it led to all sorts of self-esteem issues confidence issues sexual sexuality issues so all sorts of problems come up from that of course not to mention health issues so this is a tricky one because nutrition is really a cultural thing and it's going to be very hard to just force your kids to eat vegetables and carrots when all their friends are eating pizza and soda and all sorts of junk like that and also at school were they gonna be selling or gonna be selling soda fries Pizza all that stuff so that's gonna be tricky in reality you're not gonna be able to stop them from eating that kind of chunk they'll still be able to buy at school they'll be able to buy it at the store they'll get it from their friend's house they'll order a pizza whatever but what you can do is you can teach them the fundamentals of nutrition which I was never taught I had to learn this stuff when I was like 25 years old even after I lost all my weight I still didn't didn't have the fundamentals of of proper nutrition down I just lost that weight by cutting calories so with proper nutrition get them some nutrition books read to them about what are the pros and cons of various kinds of food make them smart shoppers so that when they're going out and buying food they're looking at the back of the box or looking at the ingredient list they're looking at the labels to see if there any trans fats in there and all that kind of stuff and of course that means you have to learn up on nutrition so that if you know your nutrition then you can teach it to your kids and also a lot of it is gonna come down to how you're modeling it so if you're actually eating healthy and they see you eating healthy for 20 years of your life and they see you not touching pizzas and donuts and bacon and all this stuff when it's presented to you that will put a strong idea in their mind that hey there must be a reason why he or she hasn't been eating pizza for twenty years probably because there's some logic to that and then you can talk about that and also very importantly get them to see that the food that they're putting into their body actually affects not just how fat they are it affects how they feel it affects their energy levels and of course with kids is a little hard to to convince them of that because they have great health usually when they start off they don't have energy problems and so forth but still you can start to show them that their consciousness is affected their ability to focus is affected how they feel is affected based on what kind of food they're putting into their body and give them the idea that hey wouldn't you rather feel good have a lot of energy rather than eating this junk food and then getting bogged down and then you can't go play you can't go have fun you can't do other activities that you love to do as much it's very important that you teach them life purpose and mastery so everything in my life purpose course the earlier you can teach that to your kid the better you need to get your kids so start thinking about what do they want their life to be about get them to start planning from seven years old they should be already planning about what kind of career do they want what kind of things that they want to create with their life what kind of technical skills should they be learning in order to have that kind of impact in the world what are they passionate about doing the most is it art is it science is it language is it comedy you know whatever it is doesn't really matter and then help them to start working towards that and building towards it of course they're mine is gonna be scatterbrain they're gonna be all over the place they might not know what they want to do but the whole point of their childhood is that they should be figuring that out by dabbling in all sorts of stuff and you need to be helping them to dabble in that and teach them the theory behind the mastery process so that they have a clear idea in their mind what it takes to master a thing I know that for me personally this was something I really could have used in my childhood because there's a lot of stuff that I wanted to master like I wanted to become good at drawing or I wanted to become good at at programming or at designing or whatever and I just didn't have the the theory and nobody told me about the theory of mastery of like hey there's actually a process for how you master something and it's rather tricky it's counterintuitive and it's deceptive because your mind will get you to quit and you require patience and you require steadiness and you require going through these plateaus like I talked about in my mastery episode a long time ago so all these things you guys teach them early on if you want them to start building these skills and then of course you demonstrate it in your own life through showing them how you are mastering certain things in your life you're a career tell them about how you did it and all the struggle you went through it's really important they understand how much struggle and how much failure goes into mastering anything because as a kid it's really easy to just get an idea try to go do it but then you get one or two failures and then you quit thinking that oh well I'm not good at that like I'm not a good painter I'm not a good artist see as a kid I tried doing drawing and I wasn't very good at it but nobody told me that hey you're not born a good drawer you teach yourself you need to go through this mastery process and I didn't know that until it was too late also you got to teach them about the mind-body connection this is something that Western culture teaches very poorly not at all and in fact actively denies this we treat the mind and the body as two separate things and you got to show them the interconnection between this this is more the Eastern approach so a good way to do that is to teach them yoga but you got to teach them that their thoughts affect their emotions their emotions are physically located in their body they can become conscious of this and then of course how they feel in their body affects how they think so this whole thing is this interconnected feedback system and it's all interconnected in a holistic way and that if they're feeling bad their body that's gonna affect how they think and if they think poorly then that's gonna affect how they feel in their body I wish I knew that when I was much younger I remember I had these terrible stomach aches as as a teenager for years I would suffer through these stomachaches because nobody told me that it was how I was thinking that was creating stress that was leading to like irritable bowel syndrome and all the sort of stuff that I thought was just a physical ailment that I had until just through trial-and-error at some point early in college I realized that hey actually my thoughts affect what my stomach is feeling that was a huge discovery for me and I was I was I thought I was crazy that I made this discovery because like nobody around me was thinking about this sort of mind-body connection nobody was talking about it they didn't teach it to me in school and certainly wasn't written about in the textbooks all the textbooks treat the mind and body as separate things you also need to teach them about the deceptive nature of the mind and how beliefs work and the difference between direct experience direct consciousness and beliefs teach this to them very early on teach them the dangers of ideology the dangers of just blindly believing things the dangers of dogma the dangers of tribalism teach them the fundamentals of epistemology and teach this stuff as early as humanly possible this is super important and this will inoculate them against all sorts of bad belief systems and of course this is not licensed for you to imprint them with your own ideology you have to be very careful about taking sort of Socratic method where you are not filling their mind with concrete beliefs and ideas because that just contributes more to the problem but that you get them to discover how beliefs and ideas work make them very conscious of this so that they see what their own mind is doing and how its tricking them so that then can really avoid all those traps especially later in the teenage years when they're gonna be prone to all sorts of ideologies teach snow about the limits of rationality and the limits of thinking man I wish I wish some of this stuff was taught to me when I was younger it would have made life so much easier and life would have made so much more sense but see I went through school thinking that thinking is all there is rationality is all there is and most people do and most people even go through college thinking that and they end up being adults like that living their whole life as though rationality is the end-all be-all teach them that there is something called awareness something called consciousness which has nothing to do with rationality has nothing to do with thinking teach them to become aware of what goes on in between their thoughts when they're not thinking what's their what's in the gap between one thought and another thought see as kids they have enormous potential for consciousness for them it's going to be super easy as adults for you maybe right now consciousness work enlightenment work this existential questioning of your paradigms it's all very challenging why is that because your mind has been calcified with all this ideology all these ideas that you haven't questioned for a solid thirty years you took it for granted and now you're starting to question it and it's really hard but for their minds their minds gonna be totally fresh and they're gonna have a direct line to to consciousness just pure raw consciousness they're still gonna have that connection for the first 10 15 years of their life and if you just feed them a little bit of these nuggets and just kind of guide them in the right direction they have enormous potential for having all sorts of interesting insights for themselves about the nature of the mind and all this stuff even deeper insights that maybe you'll ever have teach them techniques like visualization and formations and show them that these are very simple techniques that they can do every single day to work towards whatever goals they might have teach them systems-thinking holism and seeing the world from perspectives this paradigm of seeing the world from different perspectives is huge so that they don't get caught up in any one perspective show them that a perspective just a partial way and it's just one way out of perhaps many ways there are not just two sides of the coin there are just two ways to look at every issue there are hundreds of ways to look at different issues and there are different pros and cons teach them subtle thinking rather than just black and white thinking and of course the best way to teach all this stuff is to demonstrate it for yourself in your own life and then as you demonstrate it they will pick it up off of you and then of course you can supplement by explicate the actual theory behind teach them strategic thinking teach them to think long term about their choices to think about the consequences of their choices and teach them that their choices might have counterintuitive consequences where they think they're gonna do this and that's gonna lead to some result but actually oftentimes because the mine is so self deceptive that actually it'll lead to exact opposite of result like they think they're gonna go and do that and be happy but actually it's gonna make them depressed and get them to start to think about that and get them to start to think about strategizing hope for their career strategizing with their relationships strategizing with their money and their finances all this sort of stuff this can be taught very very early on and what's what's cool about all these topics is that they're inherently fascinating and interesting so this isn't some boring lecture that you need to give to them is just like you got to teach them from the very outset that life is a very interesting system that they are studying after growing up this is what the whole process of life is all about is just about studying and understanding more and more and more about this magical thing that you're part of very importantly teach them how true happiness works teach them that success is not happiness teach them that oftentimes even when they get what they want they end up not being satisfied like they want a certain toy they want to go to a party they want to watch a movie whatever and you do that with them and they think oh now I'm gonna be happy but then show them a hey look are you still happy now after you played with that toy for five minutes and then they can see oh no I'm not happy actually I'm kind of disappointed because I played with this toy I thought it was gonna be great and now I'm not happy with this this game that I played or whatever right see and then show them how that's how life works it's very counterintuitive and then get them to start to understand well win um in my life am I actually truly happy when I'm just being when I'm not moving towards something when I'm not chasing something but I'm just being see so that they start to learn that being is where true happiness resides and they don't confuse it with success or money or sex or having lots of friends or being well-liked or having good reputation at school or getting good grades that none of that stuff is true happiness that will be a huge lesson that you can teach them teach them about backfiring mechanisms teach them that a lot of things that they do will backfire in their life that's precisely why they have to be much more strategic and they have to learn to outwit their own mind teach them about good versus evil and what those concepts really are teach them about what judgments really are teach them about what the devil is Tissot about what the ego is and what selfishness is teach them how business really works and how marketing works and of course for that you need to yourself learn how business really works and how marketing works there's a lot to learn there and a lot to teach but it's also very fascinating teach them how to build habits this is also one of those things that I didn't get when I was young I didn't know anything about habits or how to build them or why they're important and how challenging they are to build but also how beneficial they can be teach them about male and female psychology I have a whole episode about that which goes into the differences that are very important to understand both for males and females about the opposite sex because again this is something that's not taught in school and I know that when I was growing up for a long time one of the biggest problems I have with the opposite sex and I just didn't understand it and I thought that it was the same I didn't really understand that there was a difference in psychology I mean of course physically I knew we look different but I didn't really understand that that men and women think differently it took me quite late to figure that out teach them money management investing and wealth creation and wealth is not the same thing as money creating wealth and having money are two different things rather than having them chasing money have them understanding how wealth is actually built and for that you might need to teach yourself the difference between money and wealth and there are good seminars and courses and books that you can read about that this is huge because money problems for many people end up plaguing them as adults till the end of their life if a kid is not taught proper money management they will either waste their money way too quickly and they will overspend and they will buy a bunch of stuff on credit and screw themselves over really badly that way or the opposite they'll become very stingy and they won't know how to use their money to grow their money and how to use their money to invest in themselves to build the kind of life that they could build and they won't know how money and wealth is actually generated it's not just generated by having a job there's a lot more that goes into wealth creation and they need to understand that difference teach them the dangers of scammers con artists and all the traps that are there within mainstream culture there are a lot of traps in mainstream culture like gambling the lottery entering contest expecting stuff for free and it just kind of goes on and on all sorts of Ponzi schemes credit cards various kinds of loans payday loans and other sorts of loans it's like all these traps which can ruin your life if you think about it if you get caught in one of these bad enough you can ruin your life here just make them very aware of these not paranoid about it but just aware of them a lot of parents I think don't do this and then that's why their kids get caught up in these things that's why these traps exist because new people are born every single day and these new people have no idea that these scams are scams and so they get caught up with them because their parents don't teach them teach them about the corruption in our social systems teach them that our education system is not perfect that that has limits teach them that there's deep corruptions within our religious system within our political system within our government within university systems and just culture as a whole start to teach them that it's not just to be taken for granted it's not always their friend it's not always true and it's not always to their benefit in fact a lot of culture is very dumbed down and actually unhealthy and dysfunctional and that they need to be very careful because they're gonna be partaking in a lot of popular culture as kids of course will do you can't prevent them from doing that because all their friends are gonna be going to movies and playing video games and doing all this or low consciousness cultural stuff and so you can't you can't shield them to that from that too much but you can make them aware of some of the dangers there and teach them technical skills make sure they learn skills like programming Photoshop Web Design maybe music composition drawing tinkering with electronics building their own computers like teach them all that kind of practical technical stuff because first of all those skills are actually well-paid skills and they can get a pretty decent job with those skills rather than working in McDonald's if they know some Photoshop or some web design or some programming or some some tinkering that will that will make their career beginnings a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable and also because these skills I found that these skills are critical to be able to kind of just like bootstrap yourself in life I feel like a lot of kids don't develop these skills and then the only option they have is when they're in high school or college is that they like do babysitting or working at McDonald's just these kind of like very simple jobs which have no real growth potential they're not very well paid and they just like they don't contribute to anything whereas if your kids start to get passionate about programming or Photoshop or web design I can actually take them to a whole career or at the very least they'll have some skills that will serve as a foundation so they make they can never like go broke in the worst case scenario they'll just go and use those skills to earn a decent living and then anything else beyond that it's just extra and also I found that a lot of these technical skills are critical for them to build let's say any kind of business they might want to start programming web design graphic design tinkering whatever that will all help them towards that end so give them some some courses take them to some workshops to learn all this stuff here are the most important values that you should your children firstly is truth that's the most important value and by truth I don't mean honesty that's something else I mean teach them to love and to value truth for truth sake which is not them being truthful to you it's them being truthful to themselves and them caring to know what the truth is for its own sake because they just want to know what's real this is where the existential questioning comes from when you care about the truth a lot that means you will invest a lot of time questioning reality simply because you care to know what's real for its own sake and the best way I think to teach this value is to have deep philosophical discussions with them about the nature of reality show them how fascinating it is show them how interesting truth is show them the possibilities of where truth can take them and show them the dangers of what happens to people when they don't hold truth as the highest value show them the dangers of valuing truth only for utilitarian purposes to get to some other ends show them what that leads to the next value is consciousness teach them what low consciousness is versus high consciousness how to distinguish those two teach them as some techniques for raising their own consciousness and for also scanning their environment for low consciousness behavior and high consciousness behavior and of course how to scan it within yourself as well teach them the importance of learning and understanding as the next value probably the most important thing you can do for your kid is to instill in them a deep curiosity about life and get them to buy into the idea of lifelong learning so that learning is not just something that happens within school it's not just about homework it's not something that's gonna end after the exit college it's something that life is about it's like you're born and you're here and now your job is to learn forever until you're dead and so your whole life is about learning and learning is not something that you just do in school because your teacher forces you to learning is is a privilege and it's one of the most interesting facets of life and it produces all the most important results based on learning and understanding everything else is built a good career good relationships good family happiness emotional mastery anything anything is built on learning it all starts there that's why this is one of the most important gifts you can give them teach them the value of wisdom the wisdom versus just knowledge or information or just trivia or just beliefs teach them what wisdom is teach them the value of passion and how powerful passion can be so they are passionate about life they're passionate about what they're doing they're passionate about their career they're passionate about their schoolwork don't have them just do stuff just to do stuff have them doing stuff which they intrinsically want to do teach them the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation so that they become self driven teach them the value of creativity and how one of the most amazing things about life is the potential that they have to be creative in whatever field they want to go into and that creativity is is a skill in and of itself and that this is a skill it can be cultivated it's not something you're just born with you can learn tools and techniques and theory behind creativity and you can become extremely creative in whatever field you want to become creative teach them the importance of compassion for other living beings and the easiest way to do that is to show them what it's like to live life from somebody else's perspective get them to do thought experiments about how hey what would it be like if you were that bum on the street corner begging for money try to think and imagine what would it be like to to live a day in his shoes see and teach them to step into the shoes of their enemies and people they disagree with with their teachers with their friends with girls with boys with people that they make fun of see so that they become really good at shifting perspectives and they become so fluent in that that you break down all these artificial barriers between us and them and me and other and lastly teach them the value of hard work and excellence in what they do get them to value a hard work ethic and show them that through a hard work ethic they can create the kind of life that they want and that actually being lazy is in many ways a harder way to live life than to just do hard work because by becoming lazy they will have all these problems with procrastination and they won't have money and then they'll be feeling guilty and so like all of all this stuff comes up in it's just so much more complicated to be lazy in life than to be passionate and hard-working all of this that I'm talking about is going to inoculate your kids against chimp behavior which will tend to crop up as soon as they get into their teenage years so this is all the stuff that parents dread and that parents fight with their teenagers over so it's like sex drugs partying not doing your homework not cleaning your room and and being lazy and she's like all this sort of stuff right this is a problem that really needs to be solved much much earlier in your kids development than in the teenage years if you're dealing with those problems in the teenage years then you fail to do a lot of the stuff what I'm talking about here because this stuff you do this stuff from the age of let's say 7 to 12 then this will inoculate them against the most unconscious behavior that leads to all the problems that of course as a parent you don't want to be dealing with that's all the chip behavior so if you make them conscious early on before they're even 10 years old then they will naturally of course not there's no guarantees here but they will naturally tend to see see you don't need to tell them not to do it they will naturally see that hey I don't want to behave like a chimp because there's like bigger things that I'm after in life whereas most kids they don't have they don't have the higher vision for their life so they just go behaving like chimps and then that leads to all the parenting problems and and all this back and forth that doesn't need to happen now of course your kids are your kids and they're are their own people and they have their own karma so there's no guarantees about what they end up doing they have to make their own choices and there's only so much you can do it's very important here that you don't go manipulating your children too much and micromanaging them telling them all you got to do this and you got to do that to avoid all this and so you're it sounds like if you miss apply my advice here that you're gonna be really anal about what your kids are doing that's not what I'm advocating at all what I'm advocating them is is instead get them intrinsically interested in this stuff not like force-feeding it down their throat but through demonstrating it yourself through living your own life this way and through having interesting discussions with them about all these sorts of topics pointing out different facets of life that they should become cognizant of they will naturally start to see this and then they will generally tend to behave accordingly another really good tip I have for you is stock your house with fun learning tools rather than buying them childish toys which a lot of parents do you know like stuffed toys and Sesame Street all that kind of crap try to buy them tools instead of toys and show them how much cooler the tools are rather than the toys it's like would you rather have a Barbie or would you rather have an electric piano that you can practice on or some cool art books or some puzzles or here's a microscope here's a telescope here's some painting supplies here's some cool computer program that you can use like computer software such as Photoshop 3d modeling software programming software I mean there's so much software available these days which is quite intuitive and easy to use and also there's a lot of tools and tutorials available or how-to for how to use that now of course you're gonna have to buy them some toys that's fine you can buy them toys but what I'm telling you here is create your house as an environment full of this stuff not so that you have to go out and buy it for them but that it's already there like you already have the microscope you already have the telescope it's all it's all there living in the living room see you have tons of books you have magazines interesting magazines about nature about dinosaurs about history about science about whatever and just set up this sort of playground so that they gravitates towards this rather than a lot of the sort of like time wasting cheap entertainment that society offers them instead and really importantly as part of this is assemble a giant library of course of physical books that's very important but also courses tutorials audio and video seminars and audio books so that this library is available and it has literally you can have hundreds of courses on there and tutorials that teach them everything from programming to Photoshop to drawing to singing to music composition you name it and so they could just click on that and access it immediately think about how how big of a difference that can man I wish I had that when I was a kid um the internet was just barely coming online it's so much easier to get that stuff nowadays it's cheap a lot of it is free you can just download it find it or buy it personally I have a huge collection of this already for myself and if I ever had a kid I would first thing I would do is I would share this massive library of all this cool learning material it would be just like years and years and years I could just give my my hard drives to a kid and that would that alone would be better than everything that they would ever learn in school that's how powerful the information is on these hard drives that I have and you could easily create these hard drives for yourself you know interestingly they did research on kids who thrive the most and do well in school the most and you know what they found they found that when they compared all the factors what correlates the best with kids who do good in school what they found is very surprising it's that the quality of the school that they went to was not as important as how many books were on the bookshelves of their parents houses so if you took a kid who went to the best private school and you compared him to a kid who had a parent who had a lot of books on his bookshelf the but who went just to a basic public school that kid would do better than the private school kid if the private school kid also didn't have a huge library of books at home see and what that shows you is the importance of the parent in their children's success because it's not so much just about having a bunch of books on your bookshelf it's the fact that a parent who would be the kind of parent who does have a bunch of books on their bookshelf that's a parent who is naturally curious and interested in learning and of course a parent who is naturally interested in learning will infect their child with that interest and it's that which actually fuels them to go out and to learn not whether they're in a private or public school that's not nearly as important as the intrinsic motivation that you put into your kid which is why setting up this sort of environment that I'm talking about is is such a good idea I would be very careful with letting them have smartphones iPads video games and television and in a way it's hypocritical for me to say that because when I was a kid I spent enormous amount of time playing video games and television there were no smart phones or iPads back then but it saddens me these days when I go to restaurants or I'm at the airport these little kids almost toddlers sitting in kids chairs at restaurants with these iPads or these Kindles and they're just playing games like non [ __ ] stop and they're like four years old maybe even younger it's just a terrible terrible disservice to your child to do that like you're just setting them up for a BD and for being addicted for the rest of their life to the Internet media and all this sort of stuff and I know that's really hard because for parents of course you know your kids drive you crazy so it's so much easier to buy them an iPad and just have them play games quietly while you enjoy your dinner rather than having them sit there and actually talk to you or ask you stupid questions or whatever or make jokes but man that's gonna make a huge difference I think that the next generation that grows up on these smart phones and iPads is gonna be mentally crippled they're gonna have an even harder time to do consciousness work than the past generation and that's a scary idea and with virtual reality coming online in the next 10 20 years it's only gonna get worse so watch out and this is very hard because all their friends are gonna have course iPads and phones so how do you prevent them from from from all this well it's it's hard I mean you're not gonna prevent it totally that's unrealistic and in a sense the more that you prohibit them from using it the more they'll want to use it and so that becomes a bit tricky but I think that by getting them more interested in consciousness work and having this sort of environment at home where you don't have a television but you have all these microscopes and telescopes and magazines and books and stuff like that that you'll nudge them in the right direction of course it won't be perfect they'll still come out of high school addicted to media the only question will be how much and then to this end also I think a really good tool for kids is taking them outdoors into national parks especially if you live in the US we have all these amazing national parks especially here in the West in California and Nevada and Utah and so on but it'd be all around the country they exist get them interested in nature get them interested in animals get them interested in dinosaur like oh there's all this sort of stuff that kids will naturally love so that they experience the joy of learning once you get them hooked on the joy of learning the way that I got hooked when I was in my early teens man that's gonna make all the difference in the world it's gonna make their schooling so much easier not gonna have to fight them to do their homework you're not gonna fight them to get good grades they will naturally just do all that stuff because they'll want to learn and then they'll go above and beyond all that when you give them all these cool tutorials and books and tools to do it of course you need to learn personal development and teach it to your children gradually if you have to like sprinkle that in over 20 years of their development and then when they get older of course you can actually give them some of the best person development books infect your children with a passion for life I see this as one of the biggest problems that teenagers have is it just they have no sense of direction their life is so easy their parents just provide them with everything but no reason to be passionate no reason to be hard-working no sense of purpose you need to help them to find their purpose in life this is a key thing you got to help them to dabble in different career paths to discover what they really want to do what they love who they want to be whether it's music writing art science philosophy help them just to go through that and eliminate all the things that they definitely don't want to do it's like well I've tried being a programmer I definitely don't like that I've tried doing art I definitely don't like that but maybe I want to do some writing so then they're kind of leaning in that direction and then help them to explore that and then give them an idea of what it would be like to have a career as a writer and is that something that they really want this is something that I see that most parents never do and then what their kids end up doing is just getting the most lame job they can and as soon as that happens that's that's sort of the end of the beginning of the end because by that point they have nothing in life to look forward to nothing to be really be passionate about other than just like entertainment video games and and maybe sex those sorts of low consciousness things expose your children early on as early as possible to multiple cultures this is really helpful for creating radical open-mindedness one of the things I'm most thankful for in my own development is that I wasn't an American I moved to America when I was 6 7 years old and that had a huge impact on my my open-mindedness because I never felt like I totally fit into the culture and I was sort of able to see through the assumptions of American culture without completely getting sucked into that paradigm that was huge I think that having your kids live abroad is very important and in fact if you want to move to a different country for a few years just to give them that experience that alone would be worth it that would be worth all the hassle just so they start to see that oh there's like one way to live in America that's one bubble and there's another way to live in France or in Canada or in Mexico that's a totally different bubble it's like a totally different world that shows them that oh this American bubble is just a bubble culture is just culture like there's so many different cultures out there and you can't take anyone too seriously and you start to see that oh that's just one paradigm here's another paradigm here's another perspective here's another perspective and they all have their own pros and cons and none of them is perfect set a good example for your kids by eating healthy and exercising by meditating by reading by journaling and taking notes by not criticizing people by not hating on people really watch out with your judgments criticism and hatred of other people or other groups because when your kids see you hating on religion or on science or on a certain philosophy or on a certain politician or in a certain group of people certain culture they will absorb that hatred and then that stick with them for a long long time teach them how to socialize this is something that school doesn't teach very well even though by going to school they will be socializing and that's really good that's a really important aspect of school but also teach them some of the theory behind socializing because school doesn't teach the theory of it like what is confidence how do you think about other people when they make jokes about you when they humiliate you when they embarrass you when they give you an attitude when they want to pick a fight with you when you don't feel very confident how do you build up your confidence socially how do you small talk how do you avoid gossip or any of that kind of stuff there's all this kind of theory that you can teach them about this which how would I love to have when I was a kid I had no idea about any of this theory until many many years later when it was way too late make it easy for your kids to eat healthy so eliminate junk food from your house try to have and this is hard to try to have good healthy snacks for them this is hard because you need to prepare them it's harder to prepare healthy food than it is junk food you got to go shop for it more shop for more vegetables and fruits and of course your kids don't want to eat that nearly as much as they want to eat junk food so that'll be tricky but you've got to find the recipes that they're willing to to eat and you got to find some stuff that's convenient and quick enough for you to make so that you're not tempted to just take them to junk food or order pizza it's very important that you respect your kids unique passions and tastes and that you just don't impose your own ideas for who they should be so that's why I said you got to help them to discover who they are help them to discover what kind of life purpose they might want not what you want them to be but what their own natural strengths and talents and inclinations are inclining them towards and that's tricky because your kids might be into some weird [ __ ] that you might think oh man that's that's got no chance of going anywhere that's not gonna work as a career that's silly that's ridiculous that's not that's not gonna fly but then your kid is still passionate about it and then you're critical about it that's not gonna work you got to be very careful about taking yourself out of the picture for me this was tricky because when I was a kid I was really interested in videogames I wanted to become a videogame designer when I was very very young and the problem though was is that even though I was very passionate about it that was in the early 90s when video games were still a very niche thing they weren't considered a respectable career they weren't even considered a respectable form of media like film or like music and so when I talked with my dad about it like he always kind of dismissed me and he always poopoo the idea like all video games you can't be a video game designer that's silly that's ridiculous those are just toys you don't want to make toys for a living and that was really challenging I had to work against that to become a video game designer ultimately I did become one and actually in retrospect he was kind of right cuz he told me that you know you're gonna grow out of your passion for video games and I didn't believe him I said no I'll be passionate about them forever and in the sense I'm still passionate about the art of creating video games but I've just found something much deeper which is what I'm currently doing instead but nevertheless it would have been nice to get some support in that career because it was really challenging to to find my own way through that and then if not but for some fluke luck I would have probably never been able to realize that career I had to have enormous passion to push through some of the resistance there so be careful about doing that with your kids kind of be open because sometimes your kids actually their minds are fresh they can see new ideas and new trends within society that you as an adult especially now your you're in your 40s or 50s as you're raising these kids you're not able to be as visionary as them like I saw how big video games we're gonna get when I was just a kid and I knew that I want to be a part of that trend but see there's no way that my dad or my parents could really appreciate that and so as a parent you have to see your own limitations you have a lot of wisdom especially if you're teaching them all this stuff you've got a ton of wisdom but also you have limitations there are certain things that your kids will know especially about what they really want and what they can get excited about that you can never know so you have to be very receptive to that and not just drown them out with your own ideas I would recommend de-emphasizing grades and Ivy League education I wish that this happened in my own life I got addicted to this whole game of getting good grades getting accolades from my teachers and for my parents and working to go to a fancy Ivy League university doing all that SAT prep and going through all the hard classes all that [ __ ] it was just so pointless in a certain sense it was good that I learned up study skills and I developed a certain love for self education in that process but what was bad about it was the whole chasing of grades and this whole idea that you got to go to a good university to to become successful in life or to be smart or to be wise nothing could be further from the truth and these days getting into these universities is getting more and more competitive more and more expensive and it's just to the point where it's ridiculous rather than having them play that game instead emphasize self education emphasize learning technical skills learning practical skills learning wisdom developing meditation practices learning psychology practically the stuff that they can embody in their own lives doing self inquiry this stuff is way more important it's going to stick with them for the rest of lives where as distil ivy-league [ __ ] is is just gonna actually move them further away from consciousness cuz once they go to a fancy Ivy League Harvard University something like that then they're gonna be caught up in that whole game of chasing status and all these reputations and prestige and going to the to the best jobs and the best law firms all I call this kind of this whole game and there is no fulfillment to be found there none at all and yet if you go it on your own and you develop all these practical skills and you actually become a very creative human being who has a life purpose and who understands mastery and you have emotional self control and wisdom and consciousness Wow you can start your own business you can be a valuable asset in any company you can build a great portfolio so there's gonna be no problem with the job opportunities there it's very important that you accept your children for who they are and the trick here is to balance everything that I'm saying with this component of acceptance and unconditional love because if you just lecture to your children and criticize them constantly about all the stuff that they're not doing not checking off every box on this list that I'm giving then you're gonna screw them up even more than if you never mentioned any of the stuff on this list so you got to be careful about how you choose to apply it it has to be done in a sort of collaborative manner where they are in on it with you and not that you're forcing them to do all this stuff in the way that you would force them to do homework or chores see and if they're not able to do some of this stuff then that's your burden to swallow that pill and to be cool with that to accept it anyways see because one of the worst things you can do is is to not accept your kids for who they are and then what that would lead to is all sorts of neurotic problems and this is some of the worst just stuff that bad parenting can lead to is neuroses there's many factors that lead to neuroses but I'll cover some of the biggest ones here by neurosis I also mean low self-esteem this is the stuff that goes to your kids beliefs about him or herself and what they can accomplish in the world and once these beliefs are eroded or they're not built up properly then this is the stuff that leads to dysfunctional adults dysfunctional relationships dysfunctional career patterns dysfunctional behavior substance abuse physical abuse violence getting caught up in gangs and the wrong type of people the wrong types of friends becoming a victim becoming a doormat for people to abuse you confidence issues sexuality issues just all this stuff comes up right depression and anxiety and so on and so forth and this can be very easily prevented by avoiding a couple of key things so be very careful first with your criticism of your kids try not to criticize them and if you do do it in a very kind of light and constructive manner make sure that you give them room to make mistakes and in fact they need to learn that failure is not a bad thing but a good thing and that in fact their strategy in life should be to fail as often as possible and that that's how they will ultimately succeed and you need to recognize that that if they're failing that's okay that means they're learning so be careful with your criticism obviously don't physically harm them in any way don't slap them don't hit them even small slapping and hitting will lead to long term neuroses and shadow problems that they will need to spend years in therapy as adults to fix and some of this stuff they will not even be able to fix after 10 or 20 years of therapy and thousands and thousands of dollars so be very careful if you're to create if you hit them too much if you humiliate them or you ridicule them if you let them get bullied if you manipulate them all the time if you withdraw your love for them as a form of threat for non-compliance all this stuff will create low self-esteem and neuroses which well you'll be dealing with that stuff for years to come and so will they so be careful make sure you protect them from older siblings if they have older siblings like a brother or sister they will get bullied so you got to watch out for the younger ones with the older ones of course they can get bullied at school but that's harder for you to to keep your eye on but of course you should keep your eye on that if you see it happening your job with your kids is to walk this fine line between sheltering them too much from making mistakes and just letting them roam free and then that might lead to the possibility of catastrophic mistakes so your job as a parent should be to prevent catastrophic mistakes don't let them kill themselves don't let them poke their eye out don't like don't let them lose a leg or an arm in a wood chipper right obviously that's very important but then aside from that basically let your kids roam free and create a little bit of havoc and learn from their own mistakes and suffer from the consequences of what they're doing this is very important because you need to let your kid build autonomy autonomy is sort of self Drive self motivation and also self reflection and self-governance so that your child is ever able to think about their own life independently and that they know that if they don't strategize right they will have to suffer the consequences of the fallout from that it's super super important that you don't use the withdrawing of love as a threat to manipulate your child into behaving in the way that you want him to behave a lot of parents do this it's like well if you don't take out the trash then I'm not gonna love you as much or if you don't do this thing here then see it's a sort of quid pro quo type of relationship and it's convenient at first because your kids can be Rascals and you want to keep them in line but you should never threaten them with comment cutting off love because if you do that then they will suffer from crippling self-esteem issues and that stuff once it gets imprinted into a young mind it's really hard to undo really really hard that'll take years of spiritual work to undo that stuff and it will be painful and it will be costly for your kids and also it'll lead to a lot of problems in their teenage years because if they got low self-esteem in their teenage years that's what leads them to joining all these sorts of bad groups of people and getting caught up in stupid ideologies and all all that kind of low consciousness stuff that that kids do drugs abuse and violence etc don't guilt them about sex don't do [ __ ] shaming don't demonize masturbation or pornography make sure that they understand that sex is a natural thing and that you are not like the cop teach them responsible and mature attitude toward sex don't solve their problems for them give them instead tools to solve their own problems rather than micromanaging them plant seed seeds for self-governance don't berate them for their mistakes show them that their actions have consequences and get them to feel a little bit of suffering and show them what suffering is all about and why suffering exists it's a tool suffering is a tool that your mind provides in order to show you that you're [ __ ] up this is a really good teacher it's really important that as a parent you understand that your kids are your own people their own people and that they have to make their own mistakes and that they can't just absorb your own life lessons a lot of people make this mistake a lot of parents is they think that well in my childhood you know I had this problem or I had that problem and now I'm gonna teach my children to avoid that problem but this ends up backfiring because the reason you learned to avoid that problem is because you actually went through the suffering and all the drama that came with it you see and that instilled the lesson in you and now when you're trying to communicate that listen theoretically to your kid the kid can understand it theoretically but that's never nearly as deep as how you understand it because you've gone through that process so you have to expect them to also go through this process of trial and error so reflect on your own childhood and how much trial and error and how many mistakes you've made to learn the lessons you've learned and now understand that your kid will have to go through that process you can't short-circuit that you can't cut their learning curve what you can do is you can kind of guide them a little bit in the right direction and provide them the right tools and the right theoretical foundations that you didn't have that you wish you had all this stuff that I'm talking about don't stress too much over providing them with material luxuries and private schooling I mean those things are nice but in many ways they can be a distraction really what you want to focus on is the fundamentals of building a high consciousness psychology within them and building character don't shield them too much from adult content when parents do this to me it feels like they don't respect the intelligence or maturity of the child it's like you're telling the child well you're just a child so you shouldn't know about some of these kind of adult topics well if you treat your child that way then don't be surprised that then they are an immature child don't give them fake explanations for things like God and birth and sex and murder and rape and violence and war and death these topics they can start thinking about when they're young from seven years old you can start thinking about all these topics what is death yeah you're gonna die and I'm gonna die we're all gonna die so what does that mean for your life does that depress you why does it depress you you see I feel like a lot of adults inoculate or I mean numb insulate their kids from these adult issues and then when the adults grow up they don't really have a very deep understanding of these things and then their life reflects that they live a very shallow sort of existence because they haven't spent a lot of time as teenagers thinking about death and war and violence and rape and murder and all this sort of stuff when really you should be because these are very foundational cornerstone issues of life when you think about them when you contemplate them it changes who you are and who you want to become and what you think is worthwhile to do in life and what's not worthwhile have philosophical conversations with them and a great way to do this is through taking road trips like if you take a long road trip to some national park you're gonna have hours in that car doing nothing rather than having them play on their gameboy and their iPad have a philosophical conversation about the nature of life and death that's a life transforming conversation one of the things I'm really grateful for in the way that I was raised I was generally raised in a very liberal sort of laissez-faire environment where my parents didn't tell me to do anything it's like I had nothing to do I had no rules I could do anything I wanted to and in a sense this was very powerful because I could make huge mistakes but also I understood that if I didn't guide my own life my life would go to hell and that would it would be [ __ ] because nobody was forcing me to do anything so this made me very very intrinsically motivated from the get-go and one of the things I'm really grateful for is that me and my dad had some interesting philosophical conversations on road trips I'll go with road trips too with him on road trips and we would have these interesting philosophical conversations about the nature of reality and that's what opened the doors for me to philosophy and to skepticism and to existential thinking and it was just very light because my dad didn't know anything about consciousness or about enlightenment or about anything like that but just the fact that he was interested in some questions about reality and then he kind of introduced me to that then I took it to a whole new level and then I sort of turned my whole life uh-huh in that direction and that was huge that was huge and that got me very curious about all of life basically and then from that everything that I've accomplished and everything that I've experienced sort of stemmed for them and I think that a lot of kids miss out on this component because you know in our culture kids are infantilized a lot you can play video games till you're 30 years old and that's considered actually quite normal most video game players or adults these days are not even kids but the problem with that is that it's it's like we treat our children like they're children even when they're 20 years old or thirty years old see and then the children themselves think of themselves as children till they're twenty or thirty years old when in fact in ancient cultures it wasn't like that when you're 12 years old in an ancient culture in some kind of like tribe in the Amazon you're already a man you're already a woman really your children become men and women as soon as they reach sexual maturity which is at around age 12 12 to 14 by 14 they are definitely men and women and you got to treat them that way and you got to make sure that they start to think of themselves that way this is really important and to this end one of the most important things you can do for your kid is to create a rite of passage this is something that ancient cultures used to do but modern cultures don't do very well especially in the West a rite of passage is a certain kind of like ceremony that you create which creates a clear line in their life which says that okay after today from now on you have become a man or a woman and you're no longer a child and I'm gonna treat you differently now and for example in Native American cultures they will have these rites of passages where they will send the boy on a Vision Quest or they will send the girl and they'll put her in some tepee and she'll have to sit there for for a week or whatever and the the boil have to go out on a Vision Quest and they'll give them some psychedelic some peyote or whatever he has to go out there and hunt for for some kind of animal a coyote and kill it and then he has to come back and drag it back to the village and then you know this whole thing happens then after this everybody in the tribe treats the man and the woman as a man and a woman not a boar a girl and they think of themselves now as having grown up and now totally different expectations apply to them now they're expected to be responsible and mature and all this and this is something that we don't do here in America for example and it's really bad because I know that when I was like 24 years old I still felt like a child in many ways because there was never like a clear line of when I became an adult sure yeah you turn 18 or you turn 21 you think okay now I'm legally of age but you don't really feel it especially because you spent your whole childhood watching TV and playing video games doing all this infantile stuff that you don't really feel like the responsibility of being an adult and I think a lot of modern teenagers get stuck in this because they never have that clear sense of Lin of when it happened and at the same time these teenagers of course they do think of themselves as adults because they start to rebel he start to have their own ideas and all this sort of stuff and then the parent see it's important to have a rite of passage for the parent as well because if you and your mind as the parent keep thinking of your kid as a kid until they're 30 years old or even beyond that you're really doing them a disservice because how you think of them is also how then they will think of their relationship with you and then they will rebel against that or as when you treat them in a mature way then they will tend to act towards that expectation see and then you give them more autonomy and as you give them more autonomy they don't have to rebel as much because they see it oh yeah my life is in my own hands and I really could [ __ ] this up and if I [ __ ] this up my parents aren't just gonna come in and swoop in and save me because now I'm an adult so like if I go steal something and they lock me up in jail my daddy and my mommy aren't just gonna come and bail me out I'm gonna be stuck in that jail see there has to be that sense of of consequences to your actions that they understand and of course that's difficult for you to do as a parent because as a parent you want to help them out when you can if they get into a mess you want to help them out but you got to resist that only help them out when they really are in a catastrophic situation where like their life is in danger but if they're just suffering from their own stupidity let them suffer that and that's hard to do because you have empathy of course for the time you don't want them to suffer but also you got to do it because if they don't suffer how are they gonna learn if you always bail them out it's also really important if you want to raise good kids to choose a high quality partner who you're gonna do it with so your wife or your husband you need to choose a loving mom and a dependable dad woe unto you if you choose a neurotic partner to raise your child with woe unto you if you guys are not compatible if you're not on the same page about how you want to raise your child this is one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they have children with the wrong people and then all hell breaks loose and then it's really hard to follow all the guidelines that I'm giving you here of course it is because if your partner is neurotic and they have a lot of their own emotional issues and baggage and they are fundamentally a chimp who is unconscious and you're the conscious one in the relationship that's not gonna work that's gonna create way too much friction both of you need to be into consciousness work both of you need to be into personal development into growth into learning into some of these values that I'm telling you to teach your kids you can't do that with a neurotic partner and it's very important in that respect to also have love between you and your spouse real love a lot of parents face this dilemma of getting divorced while they have kids and they think that well the divorce is so bad for the children that we need to just stay together no matter what but what they don't realize is that if you have no true love between you and you still stay married for the sake of the kids in many ways that will be worse than if you had a a clean cut amicable divorce if you just have a simple divorce without letting it get nasty and toxic that will be a lot better than what a lot of married couples do is they stay together even though they don't love each other anymore just because they think they have to but actually it backfires because you think the kids won't know but of course the kids are really sharp the kids know there's no love between you and you're not gonna be able to hide it for 20 years so it's gonna come out anyways it's gonna come out and how you look at your partner it's gonna come out and tell how you talk in your tone in the things you do or don't do together how you communicate all that stuff is going to come out so if your relationship is on the rocks and you already have kids consider a clean cut divorce and if you're gonna have a relationship with toxic love you got to understand that your kids will pick that up they'll absorb it and what you'll teach them is you'll teach them neurotic love and then they will be forever screwed up in their intimate relationships because of course they're gonna have your relationship as a primary example and all the lying and cheating and backstabbing and manipulation and dishonesty all that they will think that okay that's how relationships are supposed to work see well you need to make sure is that if you're having kids with your spouse that you develop very strong lines of communication between you two you need to have failsafe systems where you - because you're gonna disagree it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when and how many times so there's gonna be a lot of strong disagreements but you need to have ways where you can um or you could communicate that and work through that where you can purge this stuff so that it's not festering under the rug if you let it fester if you don't have these lines of communication open where you can work through these disagreements wow that's gonna explode and that's gonna do your kids are really big disservice and also suggest that you give your kids personality tests as soon as they're old enough the myers-briggs the big five traits psychological traits and there are many other personality assessments out there give them these assessments not to pigeonhole them but so that you help them to learn about who they are their natural strengths and inclinations are so that they can then try to develop a career around this in the future now as far as the topic of public schools versus private schools versus homeschooling just quickly what I'll say about this is that it doesn't really matter as long as you do all the other stuff that I said I mean a nice private school of course would be great but a lot of people can't afford that if you can't it's okay just send them to a decent public school move to a place where has a decent public school system and as far as homeschooling that's tricky I used to think homeschooling was silly and stupid but actually now after I've done all this conscious work I see the benefits of it and I think that homeschooling might be the most powerful of all these the problem with homeschooling of course is that it would take so much of your own time and energy that most parents don't have this time and energy to put into it so if you can do it but also the danger with homeschooling is the social element if you homeschool your kid he's gonna be really dysfunctional socially because he needs to actually be interacting with lots of kids in school and dealing with that social peer pressure and all that he's gonna be facing that later in his life and also dating and sexual issues and male/female issues all that stuff bullying he needs to he needs to get some experience with that he needs to suffer through some of that and you're just not going to be able to replicate that in a homeschooling situation so just for that reason alone it might be worthwhile to send him to a public school of course the problem in the public school is that of course they have terrible food and all sorts of terrible low consciousness influences and and so on so you're not going to be able to raise a perfectly high consciousness kid in our society in this century it's just not gonna happen what you can do is you can do the best you can sort of at home as far as all this other stuff that I was talking about which will minimize the damage that they experience out in our monkey minded culture now you're gonna be tempted to cut corners with everything that I said there's gonna be a lot of pressure on you as a parent to buy your kid an iPad with a bunch of games so they don't annoy you to feed your kids junk food because it's cheaper and much more convenient to try to outsource teaching them all this stuff to your school thinking that oh well school will just teach them all this stuff Noah won't all the stuff that I'm talking about school barely even scratches the surface of some of these things they don't mention at all like existential thinking or enlightenment or meditation none of these things will ever be mentioned in school or the other temptation with shortcuts is to manipulate your kids for short-term results solving problems for them rather than teaching them to solve their own problems see it's very easy to manipulate your kids to kind of do what you need them to do in order to make your own life easier but what that does is it yeah I get you your short-term result your life is easier but in the long run your kids don't build the right foundation and actually it'll make your life harder because later on your kids will get into all sorts of messes and trouble that could be avoided if you nip them in the in the bud here of course if it was easy to do all the stuff that I'm talking about then all kids would be rock stars so I'm under no illusions that it's easy to do any of this I think that parenting is very challenging I think it's a very serious commitment which is precisely why you need to spend a lot of time thinking about what would actually go into being a good parent and I feel like a lot of parents just wing it they don't think about this stuff very much at all because hey they themselves don't know almost any of this which is a lot of times why they have kids in the first place just by accident really because they don't know what the hell they're doing remember that you can't guarantee how your kids will turn out even the best parents have terrible kids you might do everything I say here and your kid might still become a heroin addict or a crack [ __ ] and in fact maybe you'll in a sense increase the chance of that because you know what tends to happen is that your kids tend to either align with their parents or to rebel against their parents and so you got to be careful that if you're pushing this whole consciousness agenda on them too much they might go in a totally opposite direction which is why sometimes I joke in my own mind I say that if I have a kid he or she is gonna either be the next Buddha or the next heroin addict or a crack [ __ ] because they're either gonna kind of agree with my whole agenda or they're gonna react violently against it and then I'm gonna regret that so that would be a bad situation which is why I'm a little uh a little hesitant about having kids obviously you're gonna have to align everything that I'm telling you here all this material that you need to teach them with their age so certain things you can teach them when they're five years old like meditation you can teach it very young and other things you want to hold off a little bit longer also don't take yourself too seriously here as a parent that's very important cuz your kid needs to see that you're being real and that you're not just setting up all these rules and all these ideals that you yourself can't follow and the fact is that over the next 20 years as you're raising your kid you're gonna break a lot of these rules yourself and you need to to frame this whole thing in the kids mind it's like it's not about following rules it's about kind of working with your own weaknesses and with your own substance EFT of mind to kind of do the best that you can understanding you're gonna make a lot of flaws along the way and of course that's just something you should keep in mind for personal development and I'd make your own flaws admit when you're lying admit when you're lazy admit when you failed to meditate for a day rather than try to hide that stuff because your kid your kid will will know how phony you are about all this or whether you're really embodying it and when they see you being authentic about it admitting a flaw here and there then that's gonna that's gonna go a long way because otherwise they'll just see it as preaching if they see you as just preaching and moralizing to them this whole thing is gonna backfire so you got to be very careful rather than preaching and lecturing to them try to have discussions use the Socratic method question them a lot rather than giving them answers ask them to come up with the answers tend to assume the way that we do with life coaching is that the client has the answers and that the coach doesn't need to give the client the answers the coach is not being paid to supply answers but really to ask high-quality questions that make the clients think and that's what you should do with your kids and the most important thing you can do to teach this stuff to your kids is to actually embody it yourself otherwise you're just gonna come off looking like a pretty hypocrite and then they will they will not listen to anything you say so in conclusion learning how to raise kids is hard work and actually raising them is hard work a lot of the stuff that I talked about you probably aren't an expert at yourself so how are you gonna teach it to your kids well you have your work cut out for you you really need to start learning all this stuff 10 years before you even decide to have a kid because it's gonna take you 10 years just to get your hand your hands around some of this stuff and to learn the basics enough to the point where you can speak about it and not be too much of a hypocrite but even then you're gonna have to face all these issues with balancing it's a fine delicate balancing act where you need to balance between letting them have fun and be a kid but also learning and hard work and work ethic see and balancing between micromanaging them and guiding them too much and controlling them versus just letting them roam free and do whatever the hell they want and finding the balance between letting them make some mistakes and not criticizing them for it but then also preventing them from making the most catastrophic mistakes that will [ __ ] their lives and then of course you have to balance your own energy levels you are probably gonna be working you have a business you're gonna be your own career you're gonna come home tired after work and yet you have to deal with your kids and you have to teach them all this stuff and read to them and provide them all this material so it's a lot of work and that's one of the reasons that I don't know if I'm gonna have kids I don't know if frankly that's right for me maybe I will I'm still not certain on it but when you really take a look at what it takes to create a rockstar kid and not have him come out neurotic it makes you think twice about having kids and besides which I already feel like I have six hundred thousand plus kids that I'm working on every single week so for me that's been a very fulfilling part of my life is being able to share all this wisdom information and I think it would be very fulfilling to have a kid to share it with in a sense I'm very excited about that but also in a sense I feel like my purpose is to be sharing it with with you my six hundred thousand kids and then you can share it with your own kids and then we can raise the consciousness of the world together all right that's it I know this was very long but there was a lot of stuff that needed to be said and I actually sped through it quite fast all right I'm done please remember to click the like button and come check out actualized org look at the blog look at the forum the life purpose course buy that for your kids learn it for yourself and then teach it to your kids and the book list and I'll see you more in the future next week you