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[Music] all right let's talk about whether actualize.org is a cult i get accused of being a cult leader on the regular these days and i want to explain why that is now of course there's a lot of trolls who troll me and don't understand the work that we're doing here with actualize.org and so they perceive it genuinely they perceive it as some sort of cult work it's really not but i want to go into some detail to explain what this work is and how to distinguish it from cult behavior and there will be some very deep epistemic lessons here that are actually very important for you to know i'm not trying to communicate here with the trolls i can't reach the trolls they're not interested in having their minds changed their minds are closed but i am interested in communicating with those of you who are doing this work and are serious about it or maybe have just gotten introduced to this work and are wondering what it's really about and you're trying to make sense of like well is this legitimate work or is this going to take me down some bad road and you have legitimate reasons to be concerned because how do you know that what i'm saying is true are you supposed to just take this on as belief as ideology where's the proof for all the radical claims that i make and i do make some radical claims so there's a lot to discuss here let's dig into it so why do these teachings get labeled a cult why do i get labeled a cult leader there's a tendency in our society that when you encounter somebody teaching something rather radical which is outside of the conventional norm of mainstream thinking or materialism or outside conventional religious teachings or outside conventional scientific teachings or what's taught in universities or at school or outside the mainstream political spectrum you know there's there's a range in politics uh you can be you can be somewhat left leaning you can be somewhat right-leaning but when you go too far to either extreme or you adopt some totally different thing as a belief system as an ideology then you tend to get labeled as a cult so what happens is that there's a knee-jerk reaction that our mind has when it hears someone saying something which is very contradictory to the mind's view of reality because the mind thinks that its view of reality is true and correct this is true for religious people and scientific people theists and atheists and philosophers it doesn't really matter what part of the political spectrum you're on or what you happen to believe the core imperative and operating principle of your mind is that whatever your mind thinks it thinks that is reality your mind thinks it has reality figured out now this is not true at all but reality for for your mind is like 95 figured out and then you think that oh well okay yeah i'll i'll be a little bit humble and i'll leave five percent unknown five percent unknown no no no you got that backwards you got maybe five percent of reality figured out 95 not at all and that five percent you do have figured out a lot of that is wrong too but so what happens is that the mind though in order to maintain this illusion that it has reality figured out anytime the mind hears anything that would deeply question the foundations of its reality the mind is going to generally be closed to that idea is not going to want to go down that road is not going to want to genuinely explore that possibility because that requires a lot of mental work and it's also personally very threatening and so instead the mind needs to explain to itself somehow because the mind the mind's whole modus operandi is that it's constantly explaining reality to itself phenomena is happening and if some phenomena happens that doesn't fit your preconceived frame for what reality is you have to explain it away somehow like for example if you're walking down the street and a ufo flies across the sky and you see that but you don't believe in ufos and you think that that's all nonsense and you spent the last 20 years of your life debating ufo people and telling them that ufos are complete nonsense and then you see one going across the sky now for your mind this creates a serious cognitive dissonance you have two choices in your mind now you either admit that you've been wrong your whole life and all your debates and stuff were wrong or you make some kind of excuse and usually it's much easier to make some kind of excuse or go into denial and you might say something like oh well that wasn't a ufo that was just some uh it was a new military spacecraft ah yeah they're probably just testing some new military or or you might say oh it was just some uh you know a weather balloon or is it oh there's just some reflection off of some light source or my mind was playing tricks on me i must have been hallucinating or uh um or some kind of bird you get what i'm saying i'm not making any specific point about ufos i'm not telling you the ufos exist or don't exist i don't know about ufos i'm just using this as an example we're going to generalize from this example your mind does this in all sorts of scenarios whether it's a ufo or seeing a new kind of animal that you haven't seen before or hearing some kind of new philosophy or way of thinking about reality for example if you grew up as an atheist and you went to school and university to be a scientist under the materialist paradigm believing that reality is just a material uh physical system mechanical system with a bunch of unconscious atoms bouncing around something like this which many scientists subscribe to this kind of ideology so um when you hear someone talking about religious topics or mystical topics your mind immediately interprets that as odd those people are deluded see because your mind can't reconcile the possibility that maybe there are some things that religious people or mystical people are saying that might have some validity to them because that would be very threatening to your whole way of life in your entire philosophy right so you don't really want to question your philosophy or way of life you would rather just excuse that away somehow and usually that's done by demonizing the person or the source saying oh well that there's not enough proof there's not enough authority there's not enough double-blind placebo-controlled studies that's not coming from a university that's not coming from harvard so whatever you come up with excuses now i'm not picking on atheists or scientists here per se this is true of virtually all minds across the entire planet that have ever lived with their models of reality right so we're saying something extremely general and broad here it's a meta thing we're not talking about any one particular belief system or ideology and trying to disprove it or debunk it or say it's bad instead we're trying to observe all of them operating from a sort of a higher meta perspective and we're trying to see how in all of these cases whether you're a christian or a buddhist or a hindu or atheist or a nihilist or a postmodernist or capitalist or a socialist or a marxist or whatever you subscribe to there are general features of the mind which are at work these deep features and structures of the mind which are locking your mind down into that particular model or paradigm and nothing else wants to open up or break through and it's very difficult so the whole challenge of this work and what actualized.org is really all about the reason we're talking about this mind stuff is because these teachings you have to understand these are meta teachings that's what makes these teachings different than most other teachings that you see anywhere else most other teachings are trying to teach you specific content and they're trying to get you to believe or persuade you into a specific way of thinking about reality as opposed to others so whether you're watching some youtube video and the person trying to convince you that marxism is the right way to go and capitalism is evil or it's the opposite you're watching some conservative who's who's telling you that the communists are taking over and that that's bad see they're teaching you content they're trying to get you to subscribe to some particular line of thought and even with scientific sources that's also largely true they're trying to teach you a specific set of content they're not really looking at the epistemics or the metaphysics of the situation that they're talking about and so one distinction that's very helpful for you to make is whether the teaching that you're or teacher that you're learning from is teaching you content or is trying to reveal to you the actual structures of your mind and how your mind clings to content and uses content to wage war on others as a distraction from looking deeper within your own mind to see the the mechanisms that are really at work see what your mind is always doing is it's always in a process of constructing and imagining reality that's true whether you're a new ager whether you're religious whether you're uh not religious but spiritual in some sense whether you do yoga whether you don't like any of that stuff and you think all that is [ __ ] and you're a complete skeptic cynic atheist that's also your mind playing that game so the difference really between a cult and what i'm trying to teach you here is that a cult is interested in indoctrinating you into particular world view and locking you down into that world view and the entire structure of the cult is designed in such a way that it's trying to absolutize a very narrow partial self-biased way of seeing the world and then in order to do that it engages in what i would call devilish activity selfish egotistical activity in order to to create this reality bubble and to lock you into it because this reality bubble is very useful for acquiring money sex and power and that's what occult is really truly about money sex power and the sense that one has the truth a cult gives one a sense of purpose i actually have a two-part series where i go into depth about cult psychology and it's very useful to study cult psychology i specifically shot that series years ago i shot it because i wanted to inoculate people against cult psychology uh a lot of people get trapped in it especially these days on the internet there's a lot of problems with disinformation and online cults and things like that go watch my series called cult psychology part one and called psychology part two i'm not gonna rehash all of that especially in part one i i list in great detail all the characteristics of a classic cult and it really is worthwhile to study this not to call someone a cult leader but to actually study what does it mean to be a cult because again our mind tends to use that word as a defense mechanism so we have to be very careful now just because our mind has a knee-jerk reaction calls something a cult that it doesn't like that doesn't mean it is a cult but also it doesn't mean that it's not a cult it could be a cult some things out there generally are cults so how do you distinguish which is which well watch that series and you'll know exactly how to distinguish i give you a whole list a checklist you can go off and do the checklist so a few of the features on that checklist is that a cult is a hierarchical organization which is designed to serve some narcissistic charismatic leader who's usually interested primarily in sex money and power and then a cult puts a lot of its resources and attention into recruiting others into this hierarchical organization because really it's like a pyramid scheme the resources are meant to funnel upwards so the cult and the cult leader and the cult lieutenants who are serving the leader towards the top of the pyramid they are basically leeching resources from the very bottom of the pyramid and uh they do this unlike a traditional pyramid scheme which is just trying to get money from you here they brainwash you into a perspective a way of seeing the world you become so locked into that perspective that now you're willing to donate lots of money you're willing to support the cause you're willing to bend over backwards for the leader you're willing to uh you know engage in sexual behavior you wouldn't otherwise engage in you're willing to surrender your power you're willing to surrender the way you think and then you become like a sheep and you're very easy to control and to manipulate and that's exactly what the leader and his lieutenants want because then that gives them a lot of power they can use that and the ego loves power sex and money the more ego one has the more shadow one has the more one wants to wield uh power and acquire money and luxury and fame and sex there are many other features of a cult cults use psychological manipulation tactics in order to lock members in and then to make them paranoid about ever leaving that's one of the classic hallmarks of a cult another one is that they try to isolate you from your family and from your friends so that you're easier to control and so um this is the power of ideology and the power of the mind see most people think that the mind is just this silly innocent little thing you know you can have different ideas and beliefs and it doesn't really matter it doesn't really change reality but it very much does because if you can control people's minds you can rule the whole world that's basically how it works and it's a very very effective survival strategy for those who don't know how to earn money or acquire sex in legitimate ways for them exploiting a group of naive people by brainwashing them and locking them into a very narrow world view uh that is very self-biased and self-serving of course that's the whole that's the whole magic of being able to create a worldview is that when you create a worldview you don't just create any random worldview you create the worldview that will serve your ego and its survival the most you see so um it's an extremely effective survival strategy but it has serious consequences it leads to suffering and harm and perhaps the biggest problem from my point of view or from actualize.org's point of view is that it it leads one away from the truth it leads away from consciousness it re it leads away from genuine love and a lot of times it's tricky because these cults they don't advertise that they're doing this these cults portray themselves to be the good guys in fact a cult tends to create a sort of a black and white us versus them we're the good guys they're all the bad guys sort of frame such that anyone in the mainstream is portrayed to be a fool and that those who are in the cult are actually the ones who are in possession of the truth and the ones who are really the good guys the loving ones the saviors of mankind so it is very sneaky but also you can see past these uh delusions and these and deceptions uh pretty easily if you're aware of of what to look for which i outline in my two-part series called psychology part one and part two so uh the biggest problem from uh from my point of view with cults is that if you engage in cult thinking you're never gonna discover the truth and the entire purpose of actualize.org is to help you to have a clearer perception of reality then what is conventionally possible through regular school science academia conventional political discourse almost any other source that you can learn from in society is not going to be sufficient to get you crystal clear perception of reality and even when i say crystal clear perception of reality even that is is a sort of a term that is is difficult to understand the significance of that because most of us think we have it and most of us think we can get it if we could just keep doing more of the stuff we've been doing like if i just read a few more books i'll i'll have a crystal clear perception of reality or if i just do a little bit more science i'll have a crystal clear perception of reality no that's not how it works to get a crystal clear perception of reality what has to happen is you have to turn deeply inwards and you have to start deconstructing your mind and you have to start to notice how your own mind deceives you i have a whole series specifically on that called self-deception part one part two part three where i go into various self-deception mechanisms so see the difference between what we're doing here in a cult is that a cult actually actively uses these self-deception mechanisms to deceive you whereas what we're trying to do here is we're trying to reveal to you these self-deception mechanisms and to show you how you're deceiving yourself so as to make you conscious enough to inoculate you against not only the deceptions of others but yourself and if i were ever to deceive you to try to deceive you you would have the tools to be able to recognize that and to not be deceived now of course you can always claim well leo but isn't couldn't that be turned into a cult too couldn't you make a cult about how you're not a cult and then how you're teaching people how to avoid cults and yet that becomes a cult yes you could but you see what i care about is i'm not interested in power i'm not interested in money and i'm not that interested in sex i mean i am interested in those things to the degree that i need them to survive like i need some degree of power i need some degree of sex because my body craves it to some extent i need some degree of money in order to feed myself and live a comfortable life like most of us want but my work is not about those things my work is not even about me personally a lot of times people get this confused because i tend to be charismatic and i tend to teach this stuff in a in a kind of a personal way really what you need to what you should understand about my work is that my work is is totally not about me it's got nothing to do with me i'm sharing certain deep understandings that i've been able to attain as i've been contemplating the nature of reality that's all that i do is i just sit around and just contemplate life at a much deeper level than most people do most people don't do this and quite frankly it surprises me it might sound like i'm trying to portray myself as someone special here in a sense i am special but i'm only special in this sense that i'm extremely open-minded i just sit around and i constantly contemplate reality like constantly 24 7 for my entire life so in that sense that's special and i only recognize now in retrospect that it's special just because of all the people i've interacted with who don't do it it took me a long time to recognize that i thought that everybody did this see when i recognize that nobody almost nobody in society is doing this that i'm like well i could create a channel where i i you youtube channel where i could share these insights with people and they might be valuable to people and so here we are uh but there's nothing special about me none of the things i say hinges upon me or my beliefs these are things i've discovered you could discover them for yourself by doing the contemplation of course now the trick is that most people don't want to do the contemplation they're either not interested in it or it threatens them and it's it's very tricky work it's very tricky work and i think i have some talents in this respect but nothing that makes me super special i mean anyone can really do it if they really wanted to some people could be more talented at it some people less talented probably depends on the structure of your of your brain of your mind how you were raised and genetics and many other factors so the trick here is that i was always aware from the very beginning when i started actualize.org i was always aware of the problem of ideology and epistemology really and i and i've been teaching it the problem is is that how do you get people interested in epistemology it's a very nerdy airy fairy sort of topic that doesn't seem relevant to people most teachers who teach self-help and that's sort of how i started this channel is with just basic self-help teachings they don't talk very much about metaphysics or epistemology because frankly it's not very popular it doesn't earn you a lot of money um it's difficult to talk about most people tune it out they don't see the relevance of it but i was teaching epistemology from the very beginning because of how important i knew that it was to get us to the kind of deep levels of development that we want to reach uh and i've been warning against ideology and belief systems from the very beginning i've been warning about paradigm lock i've been warning about getting locked into a single perspective i've been warning about going out there and studying a diversity of sources not just my own i've been sharing with you the various mechanisms that the mind uses to trick itself and to trick others i've been trying to inoculate you against cult psychology and against ideology and against various political left or right belief systems and materialist belief systems and religious belief systems and even new age belief systems and beliefs in general i have episodes that cover all of these topics if you go back through my body of work and so why did i do that i did that precisely because i'm very cognizant enough how easy it is for humans to fall into ideology and into cult dynamics if this stuff is not explicitly discussed then cults and ideologies will happen and in fact these mechanisms are so dangerous and so pervasive that even if this stuff is discussed it will still happen we should still discuss it and we should still take measures and aims to uh to avoid it as much as possible but it still generally tends to happen because the majority of people do not possess a deep enough consciousness of these self-deception mechanisms and so really when something is called a cult the problem here there's a deeper problem than just a specific very narrow small organization most cults tend to be rather small and limited in their scope that's not the real problem the real problem is what i discussed in my cult psychology part two it's not the strict cults it's the more pervasive and subtle cult psychology which permeates all of society and the reason it does is because really what we're talking about is we're talking about the human mind not understanding how it works not understanding its own mechanisms being unconscious to itself and therefore when these minds which are selfish and egotistical and self-biased don't do any personal development they're low in their level of development cognitively morally spiritually spiral dynamic stages red blue orange green these tier 1 stages these kinds of minds when they get together they can't help but start to behave like cults sometimes to a very extreme extent but other times in more subtle ways this is even true within academia within science within medicine within government within schools amongst your friends within corporations within non-profit organizations this group think this paradigm lock is very common and the whole thrust of my work is to correct that i've devoted my entire life to correcting that it's not so much for me about how to help you to earn some more money or to improve your personal life although that is a consequence that can happen from from doing this work um and sometimes we we cover those topics but for me the real point of this work the reason i wake up in the morning and i'm excited to do these episodes and i put so much effort into them and someone do so much research and so forth is because it's it's painfully obvious to me that the biggest thing that holds back and re retards mankind slows down mankind in other words is it's almost as though think of mankind as being stuck in this thick molasses and this molasses is the lack of proper epistemic understanding and this molasses permeates every single facet of culture and society and it has for the last 10 000 years and it still does today you find it in the military in all scientific institutions academia medicine everywhere you find it you find it within families you find it within churches and all of this then leads to the collective stupidity of mankind and therefore mankind is not able to understand itself and the world and its relationship to the world and therefore mankind suffers in all the ways that it does every single political problem every single war every single um uh scientific problem even every medical problem like i mean this goes so deep every social problem we have and many of the personal problems we have are simply due to a lack of clear perception of ourselves the world and our relationship to ourselves and the world and each other so for me the most impactful thing i can do with my life is to communicate to mankind the mechanisms that are responsible for that why this is happening and how to prevent it within your own self but the problem of course is that changing this is extremely threatening it's threatening at an individual level and it's threatening at a collective level you might wonder well why are we stuck in this molasses for the last 10 000 years surely someone would have seen it pointed it out and then we would have just solved it within a generation or two but this deeply under-appreciates the seriousness of our problem we are collectively constructing reality as humans that's what we're doing but we're not conscious that we're doing it and we will deny very vigorously that we are doing this and if we can get away with this denial then we can construct any reality we want essentially that's the mind's game it's a game the mind is playing and to escape this game is extremely difficult because your entire survival hinges upon your mind continuing to play this game so it might seem innocent at first like oh okay yeah leo this sounds like a good idea let's let's just let's just grab mankind by the hair and pull everybody out of this molasses and free ourselves of this delusion collective delusion that we're all in that sounds nice but have you done it yourself to yourself because see what you have to do here when you recognize what i'm telling you is you have to you have to recognize that you have to grab yourself by the hair and pull yourself out of this molasses you might say that's impossible well it's almost impossible and when you start doing it you start to realize difficult it is because what you realize that oh we're not just talking in abstractions here we're really talking about my personal life and my own personal survival because i survive not as an individual but within a larger social construction i have a job i go to there's a boss i have to follow rules there's the police i have to worry about i have to not break the laws otherwise i'm going to go to jail or get shot i have to you know fall learn those rules follow those rules i could play so social games in order to get the sex that i want to get the food that i need all the things your body needs to survive you have to play various social games to get those things whether it's in government or in the corporate world or however you get it even within science or academia you might say well those are are pure pursuits of truth no they aren't every scientist and academic and scholar is deeply tied in with the survival situation of whatever organization they work for whether it's their university or their non-profit group because they got to feed themselves too and then it's those ways in which you have to feed yourself that then create yourself biases because you're not able to then truly deconstruct reality because you need those specific constructions that you've constructed in society has constructed that actually feed you with food water oxygen sex shelter you know the basic needs that you have and then furthermore they feed your higher needs too they feed your needs for creativity your needs for human contact uh your needs for some sort of reputation and a sense of of doing good in the world and they feed your even your needs for self-actualization they feed those you see so while it might seem like it's possible to just go and explore reality and find the truth and see it clearly uh with clear perception and there's there's no problem you just got to go do it it's not so it's not so easy because what you discover as you're starting to realize how this whole thing is structured is that reality has your nuts in a vice and as soon as you start to question reality too much that vice gets screwed tighter and tighter and your nuts are in it and they're getting crushed and so most people when they feel that crush they just go back to their illusions to their ideologies to their paradigms there's a cost to jail breaking your mind and that cost is the thing you hold most dear your personal comfort your survival these things become threatened so how do you convince eight billion people to surrender their survival agendas and their personal biases whether they're christians buddhists hindus atheists materialists scientists academics skeptics how do you get them all to surrender that that's our predicament so i've taken great lengths actually to make sure that actualize.org never becomes a cult let me explain some of those measures that i've taken first and foremost just teaching this stuff and explaining it in very clear fashion really focusing a lot on epistemology that's that's perhaps the biggest measure that i've taken uh but other measures that i've taken is that i've actually sacrificed the the my own personal success in the successive actualized.org in order to not have it turned into a cult at the level that i'm at with youtube with the amount of subscribers i have and how many views i can get i can easily create shallow content that will funnel people into a hierarchical structure if i wanted to i could create a whole organization around this work if i really wanted to i could get i could i could trick millions of people if i really wanted to into joining this organization building this pyramid scheme funneling the resources up i could select a few lieutenants you know five ten people who would be my loyal lieutenants who would also get some of the perks and benefits i could pay them nice salaries i could pay myself a huge salary i could ask for huge donations charge for all sorts of stuff i could publish you know merch and t-shirts and coffee mugs and doormats and and then i can do sponsorship deals and i can do course upon course upon course i can funnel you into courses that will cost a thousand dollars five thousand dollars ten thousand dollars i can do mastermind groups i can charge thousands of dollars for those i can create exclusive an exclusive tier that you can join i can start to get you to recruit others to create the sort of affiliate program i know how to do all that i do none of it i sell a book list i sell one course that's all i sell i have some advertisements that are just uh a natural part of youtube that's it that's that's all the monetization i've done because the majority of my attention goes into producing substantive work for me it's not about building this organization in fact i have no employees you think that's an accident you think i'm just what i'm stupid or i'm lazy and i don't understand that i could turn actualize that org into a into a 10 20 50 employee company i could easily do that i don't and it costs me it costs me power i have less power because of this it costs me money i have less i could have millions more if i did this and it cost me sex too i could get laid so much more and the quality of of who i get laid with could be so much higher if i did this because i could just you know pick out the best from the from from this giant group um so there's so much that the ego could gain from from from doing such a thing and a lot of youtubers that's what they do once they get pretty successful you know they get over a million subscribers or whatever and then they start to you know hire employees they start to you know get serious about it they do merch they do sponsorship deals and all this sorts of stuff right why do i not do this i deliberately resist hiring people i have more work to do there's a bunch of stupid work that i don't even like doing that i have to do simply because i don't hire people because i'm concerned that if i hire people then i'll want to hire more people then it'll turn into organization then i'll have i'll have more mouths to feed i'll be responsible for feeding all the people in the company then that will require me to sell out on my work to do more of these sorts of tactics and turn this more into a business than it is just me sharing wisdom with you one on one i deliberately try to keep it small because once these ideas are turned into a business that will then start to turn into a cult those are just the natural pressures that any spiritual teaching falls under and not really just spiritual teachings but even if you don't like the idea of spirituality and you fancy yourself just a materialist scientist atheist academic academia has this problem too once you join academia once you get paid from academia you're part of the university system that's it you're part of this pyramid scheme that is the university system and all the devilry that comes with it all the over overpriced textbooks and yearly edition updates that universities do which are just a pure scam the scams that they do with the student loans and the whole thing of just pressuring kids into these universities even though you know they shouldn't go or that they would be better off just learning by themselves no you're going to take on tens of thousands of student loan debts that you'll be paying off for the rest of your life you know it's it's a pyramid scheme that's what academia is and even if you're working at harvard let's say or mit or caltech one of these very prestigious universities and you're working and you know you have your phd and you got your 10-year position the only reason you're able to have that 10-year position and do the work you do is because these universities have this pyramid scheme structure and basically you're leeching off of your students and then of course they have giant endowments like for example harvard you know has a multi-billion dollar endowment of where these monies come from these monies these this money comes from businesses and corporations which basically bribe harvard in order to keep churning out harvard graduates such that these harvard graduates then occupy the top positions of power in business and in government and in society you see it's a even though it's academia oftentimes it's sort of masquerading as though it's above survival and it's just teaching you truth it's the truth is is like a tertiary concern of academia in academia the primary concern is the fundraising and and maintaining the reputation and getting their graduates into higher positions of power within society because that reflects better on the university the university is surviving the university has a collective ego see my episode called collective ego where i talk about that corporations have collective egos it's not just the ceo of amazon or microsoft or apple or google or whatever company you might hate facebook at z verizon whatever it is disney it's not just that the ceo is some greedy capitalist who's trying to you know make himself wealthy no no no you don't understand the depth of the problem the depth of the problem is is that the corporation itself has taken on a life of its own beyond the ceo no ceo controls any of these giant corporations anymore these corporations are like frankenstein monsters that have taken on a life of their own beyond any individual employee and these are these corporations they're they're trying to survive because they're fighting with each other in the same way that animals try to survive in the jungle or in the forest at each other's expense in the same way that you try to survive as an individual it's just happening at a higher level with organizations corporations government entities the military non-profits even spiritual communities they all have collective egos so see what i do is i don't at least i have it at this point i haven't given any opportunity for a collective ego to develop at least as part of the actualize of our official organization now of course we have a forum where we do have some collective ego going on as all forums do um and we have sort of a loose community of people who follow this work and of course you guys you know chat with each other in the comments sections and so forth um so of course there's that but i mean what i want you to understand is that these dynamics are so deeply ingrained into how humans behave that they're virtually inevitable you can try to hold it off as much as you can but in a sense it's beyond your own individual ability to hold it off i do what i can so i i've deliberately not hired anybody um such that no organization of this kind can form now that doesn't mean i won't hire people in the future the reality is is that to run to run this business and channel properly i do need to hire people probably at some point but even when i do i'm going to keep it very small and i'm going to try to minimize as much as possible because i don't want it to turn into this sort of collective ego situation so again also don't get me wrong i'm not saying that businesses are bad organizations are bad society is bad none of these things are bad you just have to understand the dangers that come with them and you have to do them responsibly sort of like if you're going to have children you can have children consciously responsibly or you can just accidentally you know get drunk one night and then impregnate somebody and then and then you're stuck so it's not that having children is wrong it's just that having them unconsciously is probably not very wise likewise you can you can start an organization it's okay there's no problem with starting an organization just be very mindful of how easily your organization will lead to devilry if you're not very conscious in leading that organization and then also keep in mind once you're dead even if you did everything perfectly once you're dead that organization's going to take on a life of its own and you won't be able to control it so this has been true with every single spiritual teaching ever in human history christianity judaism buddhism hinduism jainism none of them are above this but it's also been true for every university every academic pursuit every scientific organization every non-profit organization every government it's also been true so don't get the idea that only you know religious nut cases and fundamentalists are vulnerable to this problem no all humans are vulnerable to this problem this is the human problem and it's not just humans in the abstract that are vulnerable to this problem you specifically are highly vulnerable to this problem and you're doing it and you're not conscious of how you're doing it so here's a good question for you to contemplate if you're really serious about this work contemplate how you're contributing to cult psychology how you're getting wrapped up in it regardless of what ideology or belief system or worldview you subscribe to in fact when you in a knee-jerk fashion call something that you disagree with or someone that you're threatened by you call him a cult leader or you call that a cult when you say that without really bothering to study or think deeply about what a cult is that is you engaging in cult behavior ironically because you see the cult of mainstream society has taught you that anything that contradicts mainstream society's perspective must be a cult that's what cult your culture has taught you mainstream society has defense mechanisms because mainstream society is the giantest collective ego of them all it makes corporations and non-profits and religious groups pale by comparison the cult of mainstream society has very powerful defense mechanisms to get you to stay locked within that cult so another thing that i try to do to inoculate you against this cult problem is that i try to teach the relativity of all perspectives and i try to expose you to many perspectives i don't just teach from the buddhist perspective or the advaita perspective or the yoga perspective or some hindu perspective or some christian perspective or some scientific perspective i've taught you a little bit from all of them but more importantly i've we've gone meta on all of these as well right so that you can you can see the world through all these different lenses and i keep pushing you to explore more and more lenses to see the world from because the more i know that the more of them you see the more you'll realize like oh these are just lenses one is not better than the other per se i can become good at swapping out these different lenses and looking at the world different ways and then i can sort of go meta and even ultimately the hope is if you're going to jailbreak your mind fully you will be able to look at the world without any lenses at all and see what that is like but the problem is that most people think they're looking at the world without a lens when actually they are they're just not aware of the lens they're looking at it from through but there is a possibility of seeing reality without any lenses and that's that's such a radical possibility that really that's why people call me a cult leader is because i have made some radical claims about god about the nature of existence about the nature of the self and others and uh some of these claims when taken completely out of context out of the entire body of my work which is you know over 300 hours of content and by the way these 300 hours of content is still just the tip of the iceberg of of what i really understand and want to teach about reality it may be maybe i've put five percent of my understandings down on video the other 95 are not are not recorded yet and maybe never will be because some stuff is just too subtle to record or to even communicate with words but anyways uh you know but even that tip of the iceberg 300 hours you know you have to really get deep into this work it's easy to take a you know a fragment here a statement there and then take it out of context and make it seem like it's some sort of a you know crazy teaching uh well reality is a radical thing yeah sometimes my style is that i put things very bluntly and provocatively i deliberately like to provoke because it gets the mind out of its dogmatic slumber as kant would put it and so um so yeah uh as it turns out when you get a glimpse at reality without any of your lenses without any of your models without any of your belief systems without any of your ideologies you go meta on all of that and you see reality absolutely to see reality without any lenses is to say that you see reality absolutely when you see reality absolutely and that is possible that's such a shocking and radical thing that when you put it into words it sounds insane to ordinary people to people who are just normies we might call them part of just mainstream the mainstream society it seems insane to scientists it seems insane to academics it seems insane to politicians it seems insane to doctors and researchers it seems insane to religious people too it even seems insane to to new age people i was dealing with some health issues over the last year and i tried everything i went to to all the conventional doctors i went to a bunch of alternative doctors you know trying to fix my um my gut issue i had some bacteria infection in my gut and so before i figured out what it really was i was going to all these different doctors trying to figure out what the hell was going on i wasn't feeling very good um and i did some experiments i went to some psychics and to some really new age people right because i wanted to to experience that end of the spectrum because you know i did all the traditional doctors they didn't really help me so i went i did some very extreme kind of new agey stuff um and it was a great experience because it taught me actually a lot about how new agers think and the various traps they fall into but you know i was sitting in the office of this um new age sort of psychic healer type of lady she was like in her 60s or late 50s or something and uh and you know she was she was trying to help me with my health stuff we were kind of going through various ideas i thought maybe she could give me some idea that i could you know maybe run with that maybe she could help me in some way so i did that and um and then somehow we got on the conversation of god and she was telling me about god this god that and i'm sitting there kind of smiling at her and i'm like i'm just like and this is going to sound kind of arrogant but i was like oh you mean you mean me i'm god she's like no you're not god i'm like yeah i am i'm god and she's like no you're not and then and then rather than getting into a debate about about it i just said okay you're right you're right i'm not um but i mean um but see even to a new ager psychic person when you when you tell them that they're god they don't accept it they can't accept it they think that they're a part of god they don't realize that they are the full god they can't accept it so um so yeah radical things like that you discover radical truths so the whole challenge of my life my work is that i've been able to become conscious of some very very very radical truths that are so amazing that if you became conscious of these you would you would you would [ __ ] yourself in enjoy it would be the most remarkable discovery you've ever made in your life it would be the single highest peak of your life everything else you've done in your life would be worthless compared to this level of understanding that's how remarkable this understanding is and i'm trying to share that with with people but the challenges how do i share that with them when they are so wrapped up in this molasses of cultural indoctrination that all of us were you know born into and grew up in and i'm i'm not immune to that i was also indoctrinated into that same molasses and i still am every day every youtube video i watch is trying to indoctrinate me into some world view so my problem is how do i get people to this incredible level of understanding when everything in their psychology is preventing them from doing that everything in your mind is going to fight against it and what's worse is that you don't understand that this is what your mind is doing so i understand it but you don't understand it so how do we even begin to get you to understand it now this might sound arrogant like i'm trying to place myself above you but it's not at all arrogant it just is the case now i'm not claiming i'm the only one who understands these things plenty of people in society do but um the majority don't 99 of people don't and there's many levels of depth to understanding this you can understand a little bit but not all the way so i'm trying to get you to the highest levels of understanding so how do we do that well the only way to do that is to teach you how to start to deconstruct your mind and to see how your own mind is fooling you with all these different worldviews and belief systems that you're subscribing to to help you to jailbreak your mind that's the point of this work and there are many many defense mechanisms that your mind will employ to prevent the jail breaking from occurring your mind has anti-jail breaking programming in it so every one of my videos essentially its purpose is to chip away a little bit you know episode by episode we chip away at your mind a little bit a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more over months and years we chip away until your mind starts to realize how it's fooling itself and once you're becoming conscious of that after a certain extent you can no longer fool yourself ever again in that same way but of course there's many other ways in which you fool yourself so it's not just a matter of discovering one or two delusions within your mind it's a matter of 50 or 100 different ways in which you deceive yourself that are very very sneaky and it's a matter of unraveling those and as you do that your sense of reality crumbles because ultimately what's going on here is that you you are god constructing the entire universe you've constructed human life there is no human life without you constructing it there is no society there is no culture there is no science there is no medicine there is no academia there is no government there is no such thing as money there is no such thing as anything unless it's constructed by a conscious mind there are no atoms and molecules until your conscious mind constructs them that is simply what's really going on reality is imaginary you're even constructing this video this video is imaginary being perceived by an imaginary human over there the problem is that you're not conscious of how you're constructing it because if you were conscious reality would dematerialize so if you want reality to feel rock solid and material and you want to feel scientific then you're committed to not deconstructing it because that's what that is to have a rock solid reality you have to be ignorant of how you're constructing it then it seems rock solid but the more you inquire and the more you deconstruct the less solid it gets until eventually it just completely disappears and that's what you're afraid of deep deep deep down in the depths of your ego mind it knows that if it goes through this process it will deconstruct all of reality and you'll be left with nothing and your ego doesn't like that so it's playing a game of defense against that happening and the entire functioning of society depends upon this without this constructive force there couldn't be government there couldn't be an economy there couldn't be businesses that couldn't be organizations there couldn't be a legal system there couldn't be police there couldn't be military there couldn't be war there couldn't be marriage there couldn't be religion there couldn't be science so if you are attached to any of those things existing you see you're more committed to their survival than you are to the truth or to seeing reality how it is or to understanding the nature of reality and that's how most people are most people are too committed to either the survival of their family their children their business their bank account their scientific theories their academic institution their military unit their government their nation their tribe their state and for these things to function the functioning of these things largely depends upon us believing that they're real and that they are not imaginary so see like money is is the perfect example of this because everyone understands intuitively like if you think deeply about it that money is a total illusion i mean what is money really it's just an empty symbol that's all it is digits or even coins it doesn't matter even if you have gold coins i mean it's what is a gold coin what is the value of a gold coin it's nothing it has no value at all what is value all value is imaginary but we need to behave as though it's real because our life depends upon it you see so the way that your mind tricks you into believing things are real is simply by attaching it to your survival because ultimately you believe that death is real so that's that's the biggest falsehood you've believed in so if you think death is real then of course anything that threatens your death is perceived to be very real as well and then of course from this you can construct anything and all of that of course is predicated upon the deception that death is real and it's not imaginary if you want to know more about death see my episode called what is death where i explain that so the trick here is that your mind is not playing fair you might think that your mind is interested in truth and understanding it's not you might think that your your mind is interested in in a genuine discussion about some topic whether it's scientific or mystical or mystical or whatever it's not your mind is not an honest actor your mind is a dishonest actor which is interested in avoiding death and why does your mind want to avoid death no reason there's no reason to to be alive or to be dead it makes no difference but the mind has the bias that it does make a difference and based upon this your entire life is predicated you see and then from this stem all of your problems and all of society's problems now of course just saying this already opens me up to the criticism that leo you're running a death cult because you know is it isn't it a common trope among cult leaders to talk about how oh death is not so bad drink the kool-aid you know on all this and then and then you know why don't you just kill yourself but that's not what i teach of course um to say that death is imaginary is not to say that you should kill yourself there's no self to kill this is not some sort of a nihilistic philosophy um it's just that you've never questioned the nature of what death is you've just always assumed that death is real right so don't get me wrong nothing i say nothing i say uh should be used to physically harm yourself so if you're watching all my videos and at some point it occurs to you that oh leo wants me to harm myself physically no you've misunderstood i've never said that in fact i think you should adopt the following rule is that as you watch this content whatever you do and i mean you're going to have ups and downs in your spiritual journey there will be moments where you are so down so depressed so miserable and so much suffering because of you're realizing how much everything around you is constructed by your own mind and you feel so lonely and misunderstood in all this that you might feel like you want to harm yourself physically and so here's the rule of our work here with the work we're doing the one rule you adopt is i'm willing to question deconstruct whatever but i will never physically harm the body in this process i will take good care of the body i'll feed it well i'll exercise it i'll give it the medicine it needs if it's if it needs medicine i'll go see a doctor if i need to see a doctor and i will take care of all that and then go about your suffering your existential suffering keep suffering go through your depression go through your dark night of the soul all that stuff um yeah go through your spiritual existential crisis um but don't harm the body you see because one of the ego's last ways of latching onto and holding power over you is that when you go deep enough in the spiritual journey there's gonna be sort of a fork in the road where here is ego death and here is physically harming the body and the death of the body and so there's going to be this sort of fork in the road and some egos are so dense that they would rather physically kill the body than to relinquish the ego and have the body free of the ego and so what we want to do is we want to cut off this this possibility of harming the body let the ego suffer until its own suffering destroys it but if the ego suffering gets so bad that the ego wants to lash back out at the body and project it all on the body and hurt the body you've screwed up the process see there's a difference between saying i want you to die the ego versus saying i want your body to die actualize.org all these teachings have nothing to do with the body per se but it is about the death of you the ego you the human you the biographical self so what i mean by ego is the biographical self it's the idea that you were born in a certain place at a certain time in a certain world to certain people in a certain family you went to a certain school that whole biographical story you're telling yourself that's the ego that's the false self so we're trying to deconstruct that without physically harming the body or ruining your whole life i have a another episode specifically devoted to the various problems and traps and dangers of doing spiritual work it's called the dangers of spiritual work go check that out i give some cautionary advice there because the truth is that this work is dangerous see people want to understand reality they want to do science they want to understand consciousness and they want to do it all in the comfort of their own armchair and have it all be safe but it can't be safe you see it has to be dangerous because we're talking about survival here the construction of reality is not just something you're doing just because you like to fantasize you're doing it for a very deliberate purposeful reason you're doing it to survive and danger is just a facet of survival what you call dangerous is that which you feel or perceive as hindering your survival so if you're using your mind to construct a fantasy within which you're living which helps you to survive of course the deconstruction of that fantasy will be perceived as extremely threatening by your own mind by you so to tell someone who was born in the middle east and grew up a muslim from from a little baby for 30 or 40 or 50 years he grew up in that culture to tell that person that islam is a fantasy this is one of the most threatening things you can tell to that person if he was to take it seriously so usually if you told him something like oh did you know islam is a fantasy he's not going to entertain that seriously for even a second because if he did he would have an existential crisis whole life would collapse because his business his family all his religious activities his social activities his friends his company his government everything his entire culture is is completely soaked through with islam so of course if i tell him something like that he'll call me a cult leader but this is much deeper problem than just islam it doesn't matter if it's islam christianity buddhism hinduism or materialism or science or atheism or skepticism or cynicism or nihilism or postmodernism it doesn't matter it all functions like islam the content doesn't matter your mind simply clings to any content that it was programmed with for its survival from birth do you see how this works why does the mind get attached to islam in a middle eastern arab culture because to survive in that culture this has been true for the last thousand and a half uh thousand five hundred years uh uh one and a half millennia it's been true that to survive in the middle east you had to subscribe to islam you affect you couldn't really have an effective survival strategy otherwise in that part of the world for deep historical reasons likewise it's true that for millennia to survive effectively in europe you had to be a christian if you were something other than a christian you were persecuted killed tortured raped you certainly weren't allowed to have the best jobs you weren't given the most power you weren't given the best sex or the best business opportunities and your family suffered for it as well this creates a very strong incentive to become a christian doesn't it likewise in america since america's founding even up to today uh being a christian in america is a very effective survival strategy now it's it's starting to break apart in the last 50 years especially but um for much of america's history that's been the case and you know if you live in india then you got to be a hindu to survive effectively there so you see what happens is that what part of the world you are born in and the era that you're born in the generation you're a part of there's a certain constructed fantasy that each of those cultures and eras have that are the sort of consensus fantasy that we all subscribe to in that part of the world in order to live effectively with each other based upon this collective fantasy we're able to generate some legal system some police some military some some economic systems some business rules and etiquettes ways of treating each other so that we you know don't all kill each other and then when you're born into it you're like a fish in water and you're forced to adopt it because if you don't adopt it you're not going to get food shelter sex love approval status reputation fame money business opportunities you won't get any of that you'll be an outcast most importantly what you won't get is you won't get love and that's the number one thing you need as a child i mean even as an adult as well but especially as a child in your first 20 years from zero to 20 what's the thing you need the most you need love if you don't get love in those first 20 years you're going to grow up to to be a a mentally ill borderline psychotic sociopathic um criminal if you don't get the the required love you need see so in a sense you're um like i said as soon as you're born your nuts are in a vice and then the people around you squeeze that vice they crank it a little bit more and more and more this happened to you in your family happened to you in school happened to you in high school happened to you in university as you were growing up happened to you at your first job that you got it happens so subtly that most of us aren't even aware of it we get locked into this reality bubble of our culture and the era that we're living in and then we take that as reality in the world and as truth we confuse survival with truth really this reality bubble is just how that particular group of people are surviving in that particular environment at that particular time in human history and of course we have all these different bubbles if you go to different parts of the world at different eras in history you will discover completely different bubbles compare the bubble of ancient egypt to the bubble of ancient greece to the bubble of ancient rome to the bubble of ancient china to the bubble of today's china to the bubble of america today to the bubble of europe today and all these different cultures and countries and of course these large bubbles have sub bubbles within them so within the larger bubble of let's say let's say modern 21st century japan you have a smaller bubble of a specific corporation maybe the sony corporation the nintendo corporation or whatever toyota corporation and they have their own little bubbles and they have their own little subcultures and so there's cultures subcultures within subcultures and it goes you know hellonically up and down the holarchy this is the structure of consciousness so the more you start to understand what i'm explaining here this meta stuff the more inoculated you become against cult psychology but it's still tricky you're never completely immune to self-deception nor should you expect that i am completely immune to self-deception as i've explained in detail in my self-deception series part one two three especially part three i really stressed at the end of that series that just because i'm able to articulate many of the ways in which we deceive ourselves and i'm able to articulate those things because i've studied them within myself a lot and also within society at large just because i'm able to articulate that that doesn't mean that i'm perfect at spotting my own self-deceptions in fact i told you that the whole key to self-deception is that you really mostly have to worry about your own self deceiving you that's the real key you don't have to worry so much about others deceiving you as long as you don't deceive yourself but that's the hardest thing to do and i have self-deceptions within me that i'm rooting out on a weekly monthly yearly basis you know i'm doing the best i can all of us are doing the best we know how to do we're just at different levels some of us are a little bit more experienced at it than others are so i can still make mistakes i can be wrong about certain things and i always have to be triple checking myself i'm always doing it you don't see me doing it on camera but when i'm off camera i'm always questioning my own worldview always this is this is this is so obvious that it it barely even needs to be said but it does because some people just assume that you know if they're like oh well leo has his own personal ideology and belief system he's just he's just preaching it that's all he's doing it's like no no i'm constantly reevaluating everything in my worldview constantly and just because i speak about the absolute or i speak about god or i speak about absolute truth that that doesn't mean that i'm an absolutist in and i've taken that as like an ideology this is sort of a pre-trans fallacy here because a lot of religious fundamentalists were talking about the absolute but they're they actually they they're not conscious of relativity that's the difference see my episode called understanding relativism part one and i'll do a part two in the future soon as well so um a key a key feature of my work here is relativity everything is relative right science relative medicine is relative religion is relative spirituality is relative it's all relative but even though that's the case there is an absolute when you speak of it it's always relative i'll have a specific episode about that because it's confusing to people it's tricky to explain um but the whole the whole point of relativity the power of relativity is that it it helps you to not get locked into any one perspective to not take any one perspective too seriously and that's precisely the opposite of a cult because the entire function of a cult is to create a system of defense mechanisms to preserve a reality bubble to the exclusion of all the other reality bubbles and that's the opposite of what we're trying to do here now of course the problem is that no matter how much i say this it doesn't mean that you will actually do it there's a difference between saying the things that i'm saying believing the things that i'm saying and then actually executing them so for example you very much could adopt the idea of relativism or the idea of you being god or the idea of self-deception you could adopt all of these as an ideology you could just believe in these things you could even create a church you know you could create the church of self-deception where you go every sunday and you discuss all the self-deception mechanisms in all the ways in which people are deluded but as you're doing that you're still not conscious of your own self-deceptions that's totally possible and i'm very wary of that situation which is why i take extraordinary measures not to do that i could create something like that i don't in fact i advise and caution you against doing that yourself this work we're doing here all of it could be turned into a belief system anything can be turned into a belief system god can be turned into a belief system the absolute can be turned into a belief system truth can be turned into a belief system and it has of times throughout history all around the world these things have been turned into belief systems we call these christianity islam hinduism buddhism and others and as soon as that happens the truth is lost god is lost the absolute is lost consciousness is lost you cannot formalize consciousness you cannot turn consciousness into an algorithm you cannot write a book that is the same as being conscious having beliefs subscribing to a worldview or an ideology mouthing certain phrases none of that is the same as consciousness even talking about consciousness is not the same thing as consciousness you can't systematize consciousness because consciousness is infinite and the systemitation the system is systematization of anything is finite so the fundamental problem here is that truth is always going to truth with a capital t is always going to escape any attempt at encapsulation and any attempt to encapsulate it to symbolize it to formalize it to make it into a technique or a mechanical method will always lead to evil and devilry because evil and devilry is the finite and truth and goodness and love is the infinite it's the difference between reading books about surfing having beliefs about how great and wonderful surfing is and how good you are at surfing and actually being on a board in a giant wave in the ocean maintaining your balance actively dynamically to stay on that wave do you see the difference what these teachings are trying to get you to do is to actually go out on the waves and learn how to surf that is what the finger is pointing to that's the moon that the finger is pointing to now if you're foolish you're going to get preoccupied on the finger that's doing the pointing the finger that's doing the pointing rather than the moon is your ideas about surfing your beliefs about surfing the ideology you created around surfing how great surfing is you might tell yourself in your mind when you're with your friends discussing how to surf that when you're reading books about it when you're watching videos about it all of that is not surfing which is just another way to say the map is not the territory right so technically speaking actualize the work videos when you're watching them and listening to them this is not the same thing as being conscious you could watch these videos consciously or unconsciously depends that depends on you you might be watching these videos while you're playing some video game or while you're cooking some food and your attention is distracted and you're not conscious that's you watching it unconsciously see the video itself does not guarantee consciousness within you it can help ideally it can help it's like a pointer but whether it actually lands very much depends upon you see what's even funny is that even when i talk about this stuff even when i'm in the middle of teaching right now even right now it's still not consciousness because i'm just teaching it right now i'm trying to get these words out my focus right now is not on being conscious my focus right now is in communicating the words properly to you these are two distinct pursuits and in fact when i am in the middle of a of a teaching like right now recording this this takes attention away from my ability to be conscious i'm not really fully conscious when i'm recording these videos because the opportunity isn't here i need to be able to tell you things when i'm most conscious is when i'm off screen you don't see me in my most conscious you see me in my least conscious what i'm teaching you might wonder like well leo if if you're so conscious and all this why do you charge money why do you sell stuff well again understand the depth of the problem you see to be alive is to have your nuts and a vice money is how we prevent that vice from closing all the way around our nuts as a society we've created that fiction and that's how it works so as long as you want to stay alive and i need to if i want to teach these things to you to teach these things to you i have to be able to support myself and feed myself as does anyone this is this isn't really this shouldn't shock you too much you see the same criticism can be leveled against any scientist or academic you can always criticize a scientist for saying why do you receive a paycheck and what's going to be his answer his answer is going to be well to do my work i got to eat i got to fuel my brain to you know think up these theories i can't do science if i have to work at mcdonald's to support myself and my family yeah exactly that's true for all of us the question isn't whether you're selling something everyone's selling something if you're working at mcdonald's you're selling something if you're uh in any job you're selling something even if you don't have a job and you're a housewife you're still selling something you're selling your reproductive ability as a housewife or sex or something like that companionship you're always selling something to get something else so that you can survive your survival is coming from somewhere whether you're you know hunting and skinning a deer to eat it to survive you could be surviving that way or you're working at mcdonald's or you're working at starbucks or your housewife or you're a prostitute or you're a drug dealer or whatever you're always doing something to survive you can't escape this it's just a question of how deeply are you wrapped up in your survival is your life all about survival or are you sort of doing a moderate level of survival and then you're using the rest of your time to actually maybe grow your consciousness understand a few things you know like the animals outside the birds outside all they do is survival nothing but survival their whole life us humans we have the luxury that we can do maybe half survival and the other half we can do something beyond survival um so i have to survive too i'm not somebody who's above it all i'm in the world i'm incarnated in the world i have to live by the rules of our physical world and the rules of our social world and so forth as long as i want to keep living and as long as i want to keep teaching and you're also bound by those rules many of the same rules and so don't expect your spiritual teachers to be above those rules they're in the mud with you playing by the same rules even though all these rules are imaginary since all of life is imaginary you got to play by the rules if you want to maintain your imaginary life i actually went to great lengths at the beginning of my career to establish my financial independence and this was crucial to the work that i'm able to do now i surrendered a pretty great budding career in game development in order to start my own business and become financially independent because i knew i needed that in order to do work that was uncorrupted by various social influences in the future i went to through extraordinary hell and suffering to create that for myself and this is perhaps one of the biggest reasons that many academics and scientists and scholars and philosophers aren't able to get as far in their understanding of reality as i've been able to get for the very practical survival reason that they are participating and earning money from these institutions whose agenda is very different from the seeking of truth originally i wanted to be a philosophy phd and professor that was my uh early goal in university but then as i was starting to do philosophy within the university pyramid system i very quickly realized it didn't take me long it took me less than a year to realize that if i consign myself to do philosophical work within the pyramid system of an academic university system i will never be able to reach the truth and that's what i cared about so when i realized that i said i can't be a philosopher within a university and so i sort of gave up on that idea only when i became financially independent completely free of any influence from any boss any customer any corporation any business only when i reached that level was i able to truly be able to do philosophy independently i didn't have to meet anyone's standards i didn't have to please a phd advisor i didn't have to read the books they want me to wanted me to read to write the things they wanted me to write i could i was completely let loose and this kind of freedom is extremely rare personally for me creating this freedom was the most important priority in my life in my in my twenties in my mid to late twenties so i went through a lot of effort to create that actualization helps me with that it helps to keep me financially independent and it might seem like oh that's a small thing what leo why are you talking about this actually it's crucial it's absolutely crucial because if you want to find the source of someone's biggest self-biases and blind spots simply ask where his paycheck is coming from and that tells you almost everything you need to know about that person's biases take a look at the survival agenda of the individual and the corporation or organization that that individual is a part of that is helping him to survive and defeat his family so take a look at what is the survival agenda of harvard of mit of caltech of the military of exxonmobil of google of apple of amazon of facebook of the nonprofit you're working for do they really care about understanding reality if you're honest do they really care about seeking truth do they care about consciousness do they care about love are these their highest priorities or is their highest priority the survival of that organization at any cost cost to the environment cost to children cost to students cost to the corruption of the mental epistemic web that all of mankind is hooked into through advertising through media through entertainment take a look at your church or your religious organization are they more committed to god and love and consciousness or are they more committed to the survival of your church this pretty much tells you everything you need to know when you understand this and so is it such a big surprise that academics and scholars and philosophers in these universities and scientists that they they don't have a very deep understanding of consciousness and love and god and life no it's not a surprise at all it's completely predictable in fact the biggest surprise is why would you be foolish enough to think that these people in these organizations with so much ideology and group thinking paradigm lock why would these people have a deep understanding of reality if you want a very deep understanding of reality you have to completely disconnect yourself from mainstream society not in the sense that you have to become a hermit or a recluse and not in the cult sense of like oh you have to disown your family and not talk to anybody no i'm not saying that i'm saying that you have to free yourself of that vice that your nuts are in because so long as your nuts are in that vice what chance do you have of really questioning things how can you question the university system when you're a part of it how can you question science when you're a scientist how can you question christianity when you're a christian how can you question islam when you're muslim how can you question uh the government when you're occupying a high position in it and your job depends upon you not questioning it how can you question your family when you're a part of it and you're committed to maintaining it see if your commitment to your family is greater than your commitment to truth or to law and order or something like that your family could be engaged in criminal activity and you would ignore it you would justify it as being okay or normal because if you go against that you're gonna break your family apart i know from personal experience it's broken my family bar that's the difficulty with seeking truth is that the only way you can find the truth is when you put it as your number one priority the only way you can understand anything in reality is when you genuinely want to understand it more than you want to manipulate other people or more than you want personal comfort for yourself more than you want money or sex or fame or love or whatever from others because as soon as you want one of those things rather than understanding pure understanding or pure truth these are these are completely different pursuits and here you might ask leo what's in it for me what's in it for the ego to pursue pure understanding and truth rather than all the selfish stuff i want the selfish stuff will the truth help me get the selfish stuff and of course the answer is very radical there's nothing in it for you the ego in fact it's worse than nothing it's suffering to pursue truth and pure understanding for the ego that's perceived as suffering by the ego so why would you pursue it leo why would anyone be stupid enough to pursue something that doesn't gain them any selfish advantage in life see if you ask that question you're already operating from a selfish paradigm and there is no way to get to the selfless paradigm from the selfish paradigm by trying to ask well what does the selfless paradigm offer the selfish paradigm nothing these are two different domains you can operate from the selfless paradigm or the selfish paradigm and you can't use selfishness to explain to yourself why you should enter the selfless paradigm what you could do though is you could notice that the more selfish you are and the more selfish people are the worse life gets see the trick with selfishness is it it's self undermining it's self defeating it's finite and the beauty you might notice of the selfless paradigm is that when you're in the selfless paradigm you feel the most joy precisely because you're free of the self because what you really want is you want the love of the selfless paradigm but you want to have it within your selfish paradigm but this can't happen because true love is selfless and as soon as you take love and you bring it into the finite selfish paradigm that love turns into devilry see true love can't have a reason when you're looking for a reason for love you've lost love and you've deceived yourself but to understand that requires consciousness the more conscious you become the more appealing the selfless paradigm looks to you the less conscious you are the more attached and needy you are the more fearful you are the better the selfish paradigm appears to you and then it doesn't compute why anyone would care about the selfless paradigm but when you're extremely conscious and you're totally selfless the idea that someone would prefer the selfish paradigm is so ludicrous it becomes it looks like insanity selfishness is insanity from the selfless paradigm now which one is better which one is right there's no such thing that's the beauty of the selfless paradigm in the selfless paradigm you're so selfless it doesn't even matter to you that other people are selfish that's how selfless you are and then that's what leads to the ultimate reunification the ultimate collapsing of this duality of selfish or selfless and selfish is when you become so selfless that you completely allow selfishness to flourish and that's why it exists it also goes the other way you can become so selfish that you experience so much pain from that selfishness that you you kind of loop back into selflessness because you realize that i can't live my life for selfishness anymore and you commit your life to selflessness so it goes full circle so my ability to teach these teachings very much depends on my financial independence and i'm not saying that because i'm asking for donations or i'm asking to buy my course i'm just i'm just saying this because this is a very important point for you to understand because for a lot of rational people it doesn't make sense how is it possible that some dude on youtube just some random dude with no phd on youtube could be talking about some of these kind of advanced topics that are supposedly if true you know if true contradict a lot of science and a lot of you know prevailing ideas within universities and you know top notch institutions like mit and harvard and caltech and so forth how is that possible it doesn't seem real realistic well i'm trying to explain to you precisely why it's very realistic actually the fantasy is you believing that these high echelon institutions are going to be sources of the truth these these institutions cannot be sources of the truth because for these institutions to survive they have to be mostly spending their time attending to the survival of those institutions which comes with a certain ideology and worldview and paradigm maintaining those institutions in all institutions are human constructions truth is not a human construction see if we had a healthier society i wouldn't be here on youtube as some you know lone individual some you know crazy nut case by himself teaching this stuff this stuff would be taught all in all universities to stop this stuff would even be taught in elementary school if we had a healthy education system but we're very far from that we're centuries away from that our education system is in the dark ages right now if we had a healthy society you know i would have become a professor because it would have been possible for me to pursue the truth in a highly conscious organization but i realize that that's not possible in a university system in the 21st century now maybe in in 500 years all that will change but right now we got the situation we've got so um so the reality is is that what you get from mainstream institutions schools universities governments non-profits corporations and so forth is you get the the center of gravity of the culture and the era in which those institutions exist so spiral dynamics wise the center of gravity in america for example most american universities their center of gravity is roughly orange slash green on spiral dynamics see my spider dynamics series if you don't know what those colors mean but for those of you who do that's the center of gravity so if you're going to be listening to authorities from these institutions whether they're scientists professors scholars philosophers public intellectuals and so forth you have to realize that their entire survival agenda is wrapped around this center of gravity so it's going to be roughly orange green so maybe a little bit yellow a little bit maybe some exceptional public intellectuals might be a little bit yellow but that's about where they max out and so if you're just going to be listening to them and just following them blindly without deeply questioning all these institutions and all of reality you're going to rise they're gonna lift you up to their level but you're not gonna go any higher to go higher you have to embark on your own journey you have to free yourself of all the attachments and all the limited thinking of that particular stage of development to go higher and and the higher you want to go the more radical your deconstruction is going to have to be and the more isolated you will feel not because i'm telling you that you should leave your family behind or anything but just because it will naturally happen you will become more isolated because it's like rising out of um you know like if you grew up your whole life as a pig swimming in mud with all the other pigs and then one day you got the idea that hey you know i could like be an eagle flying in the sky i don't have to be a pig and then when you decide to become an eagle flying in the sky you can look down at all your pig friends and family members and co-workers and faculty members all you know they're still in the mud and they're enjoying themselves in that mud but you're soaring high above and when you're high above there in the rarified uh you know upper levels just by definition since it's higher there's fewer people up there you might encounter a couple of eagles up there but it's going to be mostly a lonely existence it's not going to be like you know the same kind of fun you used to had rolling around with all the pigs eating all the [ __ ] that they swam in so it's going to be a little bit lonelier that's why a lot of mystics and aesthetics and sages you know live high in the mountaintops somewhere in some secluded retreat in a monastery somewhere in a cave or whatever now you don't have to do that i mean you can live in society i mean i live in society i don't live in a cave anywhere um but you know just there are some trade-offs just recognize that there are some trade-offs but also the higher you get the more you realize like i don't even miss being in the mud anymore why do i gotta be with all those pigs i mean do you really need a do you need do you need 10 20 100 pig friends or would you rather have a couple of eagle friends and just hang around you know fly up there with the eagles look down you can you can look down on the pigs but don't join them in the mud is the point so uh really here's a little bit of a deceptive aspect to my teachings is that i speak in a very casual blunt sometimes even obnoxious manner part of that's just my personality um and my style and really these same ideas and teachings could be taught in any kind of style there are many different styles to these ideas but i just happen to use this particular style because it just feels natural authentic to me but um but my style can make it seem as though the work is less serious than it is because see if i was speaking in a style like some crusty old boring university professor where i just you know stood up there with a suit and tie and i just spoke very properly and i just kind of gave you a bunch of notes in a very dry manner like a lecture if that was my whole channel well i would have much less of an audience than i have and to be fair i do care about having an audience uh i do want to spread these these ideas to more people so i don't want to make my teaching so niche and so abs you know abstract and so obstruct that that like only academics are interested in it um part of my strategy is that i don't target the academic crowd i target normal people well one of the reasons that is because the academic crowd is so deeply mired in academia that they're never going to reach the truth it's actually easier for me to reach an ordinary person who's not connected with academia with these ideas than it is someone who's in the academic system similar to like if i wanted to teach some cutting-edge health information or methods to you know the most educated doctors you would think well surely they would understand it no they wouldn't the most educated doctors who are working in hospitals they have the least opportunity they're the most closed-minded to understanding new medical methods and alternative medicines because they're so deeply embedded in the system so i deliberately try to target those people who aren't and the style i use is kind of casual and so it might make it seem like the work is not as serious you know like if i wanted to be very technical i could use very big language a lot of philosophers and academics do that it it's it's sort of a twisted irony that i perceive most academics and scholars and philosophers who use big words and complex sounding ideas the actual material that they're talking about is paper thin it's shallow and insignificant and it's not worth your time even reading their books even though they they fluff it up as though it's so important and rigorous and academic and scientific but the things i'm talking about in a very casual sort of obnoxious way sometimes using silly examples and making jokes and whatever else and you know being arrogant sometimes you know sometimes i'll say i'm god you know like an academic or scientist would never say that but the irony is is that the kind of casual method that i use is the most serious intellectual work you can do there is no more serious intellectual work than this what they're doing at caltech and mit and harvard that's that's kids games compared to this intellectual work now that might sound arrogant it might seem like i'm putting those people down there surely is great work that is being done important work being done at caltech mit harvard and other institutions they do some great technical work but when it comes to understanding the nature of life and existence itself that's nothing it's it's it's less than nothing it's it's it's [ __ ] and it's not serious it's not serious just because it's coming from harvard or mit or caltech does not make it serious this is serious but to understand how serious it is you have to be able to look beneath the surface appearances the outer style the language that's used you have to sit and actually think through every idea for yourself and evaluate it i'm not asking you to believe me by all means be skeptical you might think i'm not skeptical i am the most skeptical person in the world i'm so skeptical that i even became so skeptical of my own skepticism that i was able to deconstruct and collapse my own skepticism which is an important aspect of this deconstruction because skepticism itself becomes a very big attachment and paradigm lock in this work but still there's right ways to use skepticism i explained that in my episode called true versus false skepticism go check that out if you want more details on how to use skepticism properly but you should use skepticism use skepticism towards everything i say but use skepticism in a way where you're not just dismissing it and you're using it as a defense mechanism to deflect you know difficult truths i'm telling you but rather you're going to use the skepticism to then take the burden on yourself to validate these things and so as i'm wrapping up here i should just underscore this point anything that you learn from me if you cannot validate it in your own direct experience it isn't true that's the key that keeps this whole enterprise that we're embarking upon from turning into an ideology or belief system or a cult you must take the burden of proof upon yourself you must invest the time and energy and emotional labor into contemplating every point that i make resisting the urge just to believe me because i can sound persuasive i can be charismatic i can sort of bully you into believing these things your job is to resist that be skeptical yet open-minded and take on the burden to test these things and only those things that you've tested and that have revealed themselves to you to be true in your experience only those things are true so for example when i say that you are god when i say that i am god when i say that i am you when i say that reality is love when i say that reality is infinite when i say that everything including science is a hallucination when i say that psychedelics can reveal these truths to you when i say all these things all of that is only true if it's true for you if you are not conscious that i am god and you're not conscious that you are god and you're not conscious that reality is love and if you're not conscious that evil doesn't exist then that means i am not god you are not god reality is not love and evil exists if you're not conscious that death is imaginary that means death is real for you and no amount of believing that death is imaginary is going to change that situation in fact that's going to make it worse so it's important that you're honest about where you're at because some of the things i teach are way up here and a lot of you are down here and it might be tempting for you to you know as you're trying to kind of reach here you might be taking the fake it till you make it approach and you might start to convince yourself that oh yeah death is imaginary and and i am god and everything is love and evil doesn't because you might you might start to believe these things but you have no consciousness of these things actually you haven't experienced them for yourself they're not true in your experience and this this kind of fake it till you make it in a certain sense you have to do that you're you're you're trying to crawl your way out of a deep hole just by hooking by crook just you know through on your bloody you know fingertips you're climbing out of this deep deep rocky hole like a well um so in a certain sense it's a struggle and you can't do it perfectly you're going to make mistakes and you're going to struggle you're going to do the fake it till you make it but also as you're doing that recognize it's important to be honest with where you're really at don't fool yourself into thinking that you're up here when you're really down here so maybe a more honest place for you to start would be to say that well leo is sharing some far out there ideas who knows maybe they can be true maybe he's deluded maybe he's fooling himself maybe he's hallucinating maybe he's a cult leader i don't really know um could be could be that or maybe maybe he's onto something but i can't just believe that he's onto something because these are radical claims so what what can i do to resolve this situation how can i validate the things that he's saying and then do the work to validate those things and if you take that attitude then this won't turn into a cult uh now there's also a situation that happens where when i get criticized or actualizer gets criticized for being a cult those who are doing the work who are part of the actualized community they can come up and start to defend me or my work and then this creates a problem in a sense because it can feed into the appearance that it's a cult because then the person who's calling us a cult will say something like oh well but look leo look at all your blind followers who are just like sheep defending you that proves that you're a cult no it doesn't prove that i'm a cult you have to just understand how this dynamic works in social groups if you're actually doing this work and you start to validate some of the things that i'm saying if you reach some of those higher peaks and you get a glimpse of absolute truth you're gonna have some it's gonna be a life-changing positive influence on you when you experience that you too will sort of recognize the value of this work and you recognize that hey you know we should spread this this message across across society more it would help mankind because it helped me help my friend it would help others and so use the more you get into this work the deeper you get into it the more you start to appreciate it as you start to appreciate it you might become very thankful to me for sharing some of these ideas with you that's natural i mean we're thankful to people who provide us with a lot of value and so then when someone comes and just starts saying all this actualization stuff is all [ __ ] it's all a cult then of course it's very natural you can see that those people want to rise up and defend that they might even use not the best tactics to defend it so there's that element there's also a secondary element where some people who are not doing the work but are just turning actualization into an ideology there and then you know they're trying to turn this into a cult uh that they of course also rise up and try to defend not because they have a deep experience and understanding of the value and truth of this work but simply because they're just adopting these things as beliefs they've watched a lot of these videos and yes they will rise up and they will blindly defend some of this work and that is a problem so you've got a mixture of both of these elements combining together creating sort of a messy situation so nothing here is as clear-cut as it seems and finally i want to end on this is that this work is not about me because i'm charismatic and i mouth off a bit and i'm arrogant sometimes and kind of cocky it might seem like actualize.org is all about leo not at all what i want you to do is i want you to take the ideas that are being shared and work with the ideas this is a channel of ideas that's all it really is i'm just sharing ideas with you these ideas are not mine per se these are universal ideas i don't own these ideas it's not important that these ideas come out of my mouth or in my style or manner none of that is important just take the ideas you don't even need to tell people where you got the ideas from you don't need to attribute them to me you don't need to cite me this is not some sort of academic game where i'm trying to get credit for ideas or for research every idea i share with you is testable by itself in isolation from the other ideas independent of my own personal authority or credibility or what i say or my style of communication or who i am as a human you could find out tomorrow that i'm a murderer and that will not change the idea that for example death is imaginary or that reality is a hallucination or that 5mu dmt will give you amazing insights into the nature of reality or the truth that you are god or that i am god or that i am you or that evil is an illusion all of those statements i just made can be tested and validated independently of who i am or each other so this work is really not about me i do this work despite myself i teach these things despite all my limitations despite my health problems despite my personal inadequacies despite mistakes i've made in the past despite mistakes i'll make in the future despite my fears and worries i have all that human [ __ ] within me because i'm a human living in life at least within this this particular dream this incarnation so um that is that and none of the ideas care about that or hinge on that in the same way that we could discover tomorrow that albert einstein was a racist a rapist and a and a serial killer that would not change the validity of his scientific discoveries now that is not license for scientists or for spiritual teachers like myself to be devils or to behave in unethical ways if i behave in illegal or in ethical ways by all means uh you know i should be held up uh to to the agreed upon consequences for that i'm not immune from from any of the of of you know those conventional social norms and things like that and laws and rules and whatever just like nobody is but it doesn't matter ultimately for this work because what matters is the ideas and the ideas exist independently of me and they can help you regardless of my personal stuff and my personal stuff it does infect my teachings i wish that every video i recorded could be completely free from any personal stuff of mine my own emotions my own prejudices my own biases my own mistakes and errors and things i wish my work could be flawless in that way but i can only do the best that i can do that's what you see here what you see here is the best that i've been able to do now in the future it'll probably improve that's my hope but you have to you have to really separate the ideas from the person all right um and again i'm telling you this precisely because i want to preempt any possibility of turning this into any kind of personality cult as though these are leo's ideas it's all about leo leo is irrelevant and the last last last lesson i promise i'm getting to the end the last thing i'll say is this that um i really don't like shooting videos that are reactionary a lot of what youtube is about is about reactionary content whether it's left wingers reacting against the right right wingers reacting against the left atheists reacting against theists theists reacting against atheists scientists reacting against mystics mystics reacting and scientists like i don't want to participate in any kind of reactionary content creation or debate with anybody now some people take that as evidence of the fact that i can't defend my ideas let me just clarify what this is really about the depth of the work that i'm interested in doing cannot be resolved through reactionary back and forth youtube video debates or comment sections what i really want to do with my work is i want to focus completely on my work and deliver substantive content and as soon as i run out of substantive content to deliver i'm quitting youtube i'm not just going to hang around and look for easy low-hanging fruit and cheap content to put out there that's mostly what a lot of these youtubers do what they do is rather than going through the genuine labor of putting out some truly educational content about something or really pursuing the truth of something what they do is they just do you know criticism and reactionary commentary this is very low effort and i have zero interest in that kind of work so one of the most difficult things for me to do is to keep my eye on the ball of my purpose my life purpose helping people to understand how their mind works this molasses situation that i described so that's what my energy is focused on i don't care about comments i don't care about debates i don't care about criticisms i don't care about people who don't understand the work i don't care about arguing with anybody i don't care about proving anything to anybody all of that is [ __ ] compared to the actual doing of this work and the teaching of how to do this work to people that's a distraction right and so what egos do is when they are agitated and they don't like something that they that they heard something contradicts the worldview they will start to you know get their feathers ruffled and they will want to make a lot of noise squawk around create distractions distractions are one of the ego's sneakiest defense mechanisms i have a whole episode about that called distraction go check out distraction where i explain this so i have to be very careful not to get distracted by a bunch of uh you know people hooting and hollering so i that's why i don't get engaged in debates i posted a video recently on my blog that explains why debates don't work there's very deep profound reasons for why debates don't work and why they're a waste of time if you're looking for cheap easy youtube content that's sensational gets you a lot of clicks and views debates are perfect for that if you're interested in deep understanding of reality if you're interested in serious truth seeking that format is completely antithetical to such a pursuit which is why i don't want to engage in it maybe in the future some years down the road i'll engage in a few debates here or there mostly for publicity's sake it's not because i can't debate it would be very easy to debate any atheists materialist skeptic nihilist postmodernist whatever it doesn't matter it would be very easy to debate these people it would just it would it would be completely pointless other than for me to get views and clicks which does have a point it does have a point in that sense but um but the whole idea that you can arrive at deep understanding of reality through any kind of debate or even a dialogue you might say well leo why don't you have some conversations and dialogues why don't you do a bunch of interviews with smart people you still don't get it you can't get to deep understanding through talking it's all a distraction even your dialogues and conversations and interviews and podcasts and all this back and forth and all this it's all horse [ __ ] it's not going to lead to deep understanding you want some deep understanding take four grams of mushrooms alone in a room on a two week long retreat where you don't speak to anybody that will get you some deep understanding you will get more deep understanding from that one experience than you have from every debate and podcast you [ __ ] listened to for the last five years become very clear about what your priorities are what do you want do you want to entertain yourself with youtube videos about people debating ideas back and forth or do you want genuine truth and understanding do you want a genuine transformation in your state of consciousness because you ain't going to get that watching these stupid videos and listening to these reactionaries this is true not only of spiritual stuff or philosophical ideas this is true also of politics it's true of business it's true about the environment if you care about a thing deeply if you care about the environment if you care about business if you care about helping mankind if you care about some topic like science or evolution or religion or spirituality watching debates and discussions is not really an expression of your true concern for these things if you are wasting hours and hours and hours of your life on youtube watching this [ __ ] pretending as though you care about this stuff you're fooling yourself it's a distraction it's just one more defense mechanism if you really care about the environment stop basking in the negative [ __ ] you know do and gloom videos about the environment and go actually do something constructive for the environment that will show to yourself that you genuinely care about the environment don't just sit around and and mope about how bad it is that's too easy what action are you taking what are you doing to focus your mind on some specific thing you care about in life your life purpose as i much as my teachings mature i'm noticing that i have less and less tolerance for this kind of social human [ __ ] i call it human [ __ ] just be very cognizant of all the entire domain of human [ __ ] that exists everything is filled with human [ __ ] whether it's in science universities on youtube learn to spot the human [ __ ] and set that to the side and say okay what is my work what am i trying to genuinely accomplish what value am i creating for the world because there's all this noise the human [ __ ] that i can easily get distracted into i don't really like having to do these kind of defensive videos i would rather focus my attention on generating genuine content i have a book to write a massive book to write i have other projects and business ideas that i'm serious about i have i have a list of two or three hundred serious videos that i need to release to have the kind of impact i want on the world with epistemology that's what the majority of my time and mental energy should be going towards not arguing with anybody about anything my work is self-explanatory it speaks for itself if you can't understand what i'm saying through the videos you're never going to understand it through any kind of dialogue or debate you don't need a dialogue about this it's crystal clear i'm telling you exactly what to do do it experience the results or don't validate it or don't that's the end of the story there's nothing to debate there's nothing to argue about if you don't like my style or my method follow somebody else if you disagree with certain things that i say then they're not true for you what's the problem be careful not to get wrapped up in human [ __ ] you will waste your whole life this way if you're not careful in general i recommend that you devote your life to some kind of work some kind of substantive meaningful work that is not derivative of anybody else's work but as something knew that you're contributing to mankind it's not a reaction to something else it's not a critique of something it's your own constructive work you will be a lot happier if you do this and i'm going to be focusing more of my future into that rather than playing any kind of human nonsense games all right that's it i hope that explains why actualize that org is not a cult uh really there's no organization there's no hierarchy and we don't we don't keep you here there's a very loose community that we have on the forum and in the comment sections you can participate in or not in the future i have even considered maybe turning off the comment sections completely maybe i'll even close the forum at some point because in the end it's still a distraction but for now we'll keep it see how it goes uh i'm always very sort of leery of of what's going on in the forum keeping a very tight lid on things to not let it get out of control because any time you get a bunch of people together devilry is going to occur the less conscious they are the more adelaide will occur and to be honest a lot of people who watch me listen to me and follow me are youngsters who are still very immature very underdeveloped in their early 20s or 30s so of course i mean i even have people in in their teens watching this content so of course these people you know nothing against you guys but you know you're young you're immature that's totally natural and normal and you still have a lot of development you have decades of development ahead of you it'll probably take you 10 20 years of doing this work to really start to solidify in it to any significant extent and that's assuming you're even doing the work not just you know listening absent-mindedly while cooking or doing laundry um i'm seriously doing the work so uh so yeah the the reality is that the majority of people who follow actualize.org are not some enlightened uh you know highly advanced folks by definition that's going to be a small percentage of the population maybe five percent 10 something like that and in general the youtube platform is mostly geared towards younger people so the majority of my audience is younger and that's because i'm young you also have to understand that i keep rambling on here but you also have to understand that this work that i've done in the last eight years or so this has been work from age 28 to age 35. like if you think about it it's pretty amazing not to toot my own horn but to be doing this work from from age 28 to 35 you're you're basically seeing the tip of the iceberg of what my potential is with this work right it's still you're still watching it mature only like in the last year or two has my work really started to mature it was very immature when i look at my old older content like i cringe at how immature it was so i'm still maturing very much as a teacher and um a lot of that has to do with the fact that i had to grow myself very rapidly over the last eight years just to keep pace with the channel because there's a big responsibility on me not to mislead people right so i'm very cognizant of the fact that any egoic issues that i have and i do have them any shadow elements that i have any ignorance that i have gets all transferred to you my audience this can't be helped the problem is that i wish i could just snap my fingers and get rid of all those impurities immediately but it's a process you know it's been like a 10 year process for me to remove many of my ignorances and impurities and ego corruptions and that is an ongoing process so the work is becoming less egoic and better and more mature as i develop myself and as i mature and so really the best of my work is is is yet to come what you're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg of the work and really my best work is going to be not through video it's going to be through the the book the book probably multiple books that i'm going to be working on that are still years and years maybe decades into the future you have to really understand that when i when i plan out my life purpose i think very long term and my goal from the very beginning was not just to release a few videos and to make a channel that's popular and make some money it was never about that it was always about you know reaching to the deepest levels and it's taken a long time to build up to it i had to take you along on the journey with me and many of you are growing fast enough to really keep pace with me so you're getting left behind that's why some of the latest videos you might not find interesting or relevant to you that's just because you haven't you haven't reached it yet it'll take you a decade to get there but i have a responsibility to to develop myself at a much more rapid rate than i normally would because i'm cognizant of the effect that i have on you see and that's good because it helps me to grow faster if i didn't have this channel i wasn't burdened with this responsibility then i would grow slower and i wouldn't be as developed and as conscious as i am today i've grown so much from the last eight years of all the mistakes and all the comments you know i read all the comments mostly you know hundreds of thousands of comments by now uh a lot of it is garbage but some of it is good advice some of it makes me think so it makes me improve and my work is not above criticism if you want to criticize my curse of my work like seriously go ahead do do a serious critique of my work but don't don't engage in this sort of sniping um ad hominem smearing he's a cult leader this and that it's all [ __ ] or whatever like do take my points and seriously if you can deconstruct them of course you won't be able to because um uh you're not really interested in deconstruction if you're seriously criticizing my work now there could be minor criticisms of my work but you're not gonna you're gonna have any serious deep criticisms my of my work because in the end my work has no substance to it see i'm not constructing anything that's also what makes my work different from a lot of other work and from cults most organizations and even humans are trying to construct something science is in the construction business philosophy is in the construction business religion and new age stuff is in the construction business they're constructing mental edifices in a sense i'm not i'm sharing ideas and tools that you can use to deconstruct anything and by the way when i say deconstruction i'm not just talking about jacques deredaw's version of deconstruction i'm using deconstruction in a sort of in my own sense independent of any post-modernist uses of that word deconstruction is something much deeper than any post-modernist understands or has used it for so when i talk about deconstruction i'm talking about deconstructing the entire mind and all of reality that's that's my bias if you want to say i have a bias i have a bias towards deconstructing everything that's been constructed is that a bias yeah sure it's a bias and construction is also a bias one is not better than the other per se they just achieve different things construction is very good for survival and playing games and fantasy and deconstruction is very good for getting at the truth of things and for um breaking out of illusions and for jail breaking your mind so use whichever tool you want you see you might think that actualized already has some sort of core that's proposing like what i want to do is i want to deconstruct everything and then i want to turn deconstruction into my own philosophy and ideology and then that is going to be the new construction you might think that that's what actual drug is trying to do no if you think that you don't understand this work what actualization is trying to do is it's trying to deconstruct all world views and then applying it self-reflectively to itself in a strange loop fashion to deconstruct even the notion of deconstruction such that ultimately you're left with nothing you're left with absolute crystal clear perception of reality through pure direct consciousness with no lenses so the only way you can see what reality looks like with no lenses is to deconstruct everything deconstruct all the lenses and don't make a lens out of the deconstruction of other lenses because you could do that which is what post-modernists did and that is not good enough it's not good enough so so really what's nice about doing such an absolute deconstruction is that i have nothing to defend you see most other philosophies or world views have something that they're trying to defend marxists are trying to defend something capitalists are trying to defend something muslims are trying to defend something christians are trying to defend something scientists are trying to defend something atheists are trying to defend something even skeptics are trying to defend something their skepticism namely nihilists are trying to defend something their nihilism post-modernists are trying to defend something their post-modernism wouldn't it be nice to go meta on all of that and to just surrender the entire defense game have nothing to defend have no idea belief or ideology or worldview to defend see that's the genius counterintuitive move when you have nothing to defend intellectually you're free you're free you're completely secure you can't be phased you don't suffer anymore from a threat to your worldview or ideology you don't need to be afraid and you're so open-minded that you can understand everything every worldview becomes like a toy in your hands that you can just manipulate fumble around in your hands look at it and then just discard it as a toy and then move on to the next you can appreciate them but you never identify with them you never get wrapped up in the toy you never see it as more than just a toy which all world views really are and then you don't need to defend you don't need to get angry you don't need to debate you don't need to discuss you don't need to have conversations you're just free you're completely non-ideological so finally let's just end this right here with this this is the ultimate idea everything about epistemology did i say as complex and detailed as it is ultimately it all boils down to this one simple rule the one simple rule is be completely non-ideological about everything that's it be completely non-ideological about absolutely everything and of course self-reflectively this means that you will also not be ideological about being non-ideological i am not saying that you turn being non-ideological into a new worldview or belief system i am telling you to actually behave non-ideologically i'm not telling you to think that you're not ideological i'm not telling you to blame others for being ideological while you fancy yourself being non-a non-ideological i'm actually telling you something very simple which you can do it's possible to do this be absolutely non-ideological about everything you can do that you can also screw it up there's a lot of ways to screw it up and all my content is really just a way of guiding you towards not screwing it up pointing out the traps helping you along the way that's it and if you want to understand a little bit more about how ideology works see my episode called how ideology works where i explain this in more detail all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me come check out actualize.org that's my website there you will find the book list the life purpose course if you want to get your sense of direction in life in your career and your business however you plan to make a living you can find the forum on there you can find my blog on there where i post exclusive content and videos and links and resources you can support me actually not patreon.com actualized and i hope that addressed some of the concerns and doubts and skepticisms that you might have had about this work i hope it's clarified what this work really is because there's a difference between understanding what this work is versus just doing the work kind of blindly fumbling through it the first few years you're probably just gonna be blindly bumbling through it and then you'll get a little bit more clear about what this work really is it'll take some time for that to sink in and this episode is going to do a lot to speed that up for you i hope by making these things very explicit whereas before they were just merely implicit