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[Music] a quick note before we get into the main topic i've recently launched the actualized clips channel which is a second brand new actualized channel which contains short snippets of my long content so if you're having difficulty keeping up with all the overwhelming long-form episodes that i do go check out the clips channel i've been getting a lot of positive feedback from people on it people seem to love it so maybe that's for you go check that out it's free all right and you'll find a link down below to that all right so let's get into the main topic so the topic here today is this misconceived notion that i see a lot of people subscribing to and it's very self-deceptive it's the notion that if you can't explain a thing concisely and simply then you don't understand that thing have you heard of this notion before a lot of times people will use this as an excuse to dismiss certain ideas that they hear because especially like my content i'm very sensitive to this because my content tends to be very long and people have such short attention spans that they say well leo surely there's no need to sit around and talk about the nature of science for five hours or for two hours surely if you can if you have such a deep understanding of science you can explain it to me in five minutes or for example like well you've got a leo you've got videos about god explaining what god is like a three-hour long video on the nature of god and that's just part one and then there's a part two as well surely god can't be that complicated if you really knew what god was then you should be able to do a five minute video on god and explain it to me so leo that proves you don't really know what you're talking about this is a very common line of defense that the ego mind takes and i'm not just saying this from sort of a personal perspective like i'm coming from some butthurt place about this no it's just it's a common defense tactic that i've seen used elsewhere not just with my work of course my work is is particularly prone to this kind of attack it's a false attack and we're going to deconstruct it here but it's particularly prone to that because my bias is for going very deep on these topics that's my whole thing in life it's like i want to i want to have the deepest understanding of reality humanly possible that's my whole thing that's what i've devoted my whole life to and so you should start to perhaps suspect that maybe if what you're after is depth of understanding that that's going to be a little bit more difficult than what you can achieve through a five or ten minute video or five or ten minute explanation i want to explain to you why that is and it's actually interesting because this kind of defense is oftentimes used by rational people scientifically minded people atheistically minded people and so on especially when it comes to more philosophical topics and questions and more spiritual or mystical topics and questions and issues is that they tend to think that like oh well if this guy really knew what he was talking about this mystical stuff if this mystical stuff was really true then it should be very simple to explain well but why would you assume that because after all let's really be even-handed about this let's really make sure we're being neutral that we don't have double standards that we set for science versus the mystical stuff or for philosophy or for any kind of inquiry into the nature of reality look at it like this you spent 12 years learning mathematics in school 12 [ __ ] years of misery and pain and torture racking your mind trying to understand even something as simple as subtraction multiplication and division try to think back into your past first grade second grade where you were struggling just to understand how subtraction works and think of how many hours of lecture you received from your teachers from your tutors if you had tutors from your parents if they had to help you with your homework assignments think of how many hours you spent doing homework assignments think of how many subtraction problems you've solved in your entire schooling career hundreds thousands so now you understand subtraction and maybe a few higher level ideas within mathematics tru just try to fathom how challenging that was for you to grasp that hold on got something stuck in my throat right so now imagine if i came to you and i was completely ignorant of mathematics and you let's say you graduated high school and maybe hopefully by the end of high school you learn a little bit of calculus at the very least or in university you did uh and i start asking you what's calculus tell me tell me what calculus is tell me the essence of calculus i want to understand what would you what would you tell me where would you even begin with that question you see how tricky it is now you let's just assume that you are a calculus whiz you aced all your calculus tests and that in fact you became a calculus professor and you do it for a living so your understanding of calculus is just amazing you understand every nuance of calculus the history of calculus you can solve these equations with your eyes closed but that's not the problem the problem is me the problem is my ignorance when i ask you about calculus because you can't start talking about calculus you gotta you gotta go like down one level and first you gotta teach me addition and subtraction and then multiplication and division and then equations with variables x's and y's and z's and then the quadratic equation and then geometry circles and squares and lines and this sorts of stuff and then analytical geometry charts and graphs and the unit circle and then trigonometry and then more advanced concepts polynomials and functions and all the different kinds of functions that exist and how they work and then maybe now we can have a discussion about calculus and even then it's not going to be a five-minute discussion you can't explain calculus in five minutes and now i hear you saying but leo i can find a youtube video right now of somebody explaining calculus in five or ten minutes that's only because yeah you can find a video like that you can always do a truncated explanation of anything the problem is is is it going to be meaningful to the person learning it and what level is the person learning it at if you're like if you're in 12th grade math class and you've done all those other lower classes and you've done them well then yeah we can do a 10-minute little intro into calculus but i mean is that going to be enough for you to really understand the essence this the spirit the core of calculus no i mean yeah you can do a little a little general explanation but you're not going to really deeply grasp what derivatives are what integration is and all these other concepts from calculus because the way calculus works is that it or mathematics in general basically is that it builds it builds and builds and builds on top of itself that's why it's so challenging because you have to get the first layers right and if there's any misunderstanding or confusion in the first layers you can't go on to the next layers which is why if you're failing your tests in school they hold you back a grade because they know you won't be able to understand the more advanced material in the next grade unless you can have at least a basic level of comprehension of certain things and so this is true of all science science is very deep and dense and you got to learn it in little bits and pieces over hundreds and thousands of hours over years and decades and then you can have some sort of intelligent conversation about the function of nature or some aspect of nature people take this for granted people take this kind of schooling that we get for granted we just sort of assume that these would be ideas that you would understand even if you didn't went to school but you wouldn't so any time that you're trying to ask a deep question about the nature of reality or yourself or life the problem is how much foundation do you have to hear the answer i can give you some very quick answers to very profound questions because i do understand some of these topics but the problem is not that the problem and this is really the thing that i spend the majority of my time racking my mind over in my life is how do i bridge the gap between where i am and where you are because if you were where i'm at you wouldn't need my explanation by definition so if you're if you're trying to learn from me by definition that assumes that i know something you don't know otherwise why are you listening to me and by the way if you feel that you know more than me then please stop watching please stop wasting your time listening to me i know some of you like to hate hate watch me or whatever and maybe you do that for entertainment's sake but i would encourage you not to waste your life on that don't don't hate watch anybody don't waste your time watching stuff that you think is stupid if you think what i'm saying is stupid or false or delusional or you think that i'm wrong and that you know better than me about any of these questions about science about god about psychedelics about religion about spirituality about non-duality about enlightenment that's your prerogative that's your perspective that's your right to take that sort of position but then why are you watching me don't waste your time go build your life be constructive what i want for you is i want you to eliminate those aspects of your life that are not constructive and productive towards your life purpose or towards your happiness or towards your well-being or the health of yourself and everyone around you and society see so be very careful not to fall into this trap of hate watching stuff on youtube i know i fall into that trap too sometimes i'll hate watch some you know some conservative political pundit or something just because it's so stupid it's like looking at a car wreck you know it's just like you can't help but look at it but recognize that that's a toxic tendency within your mind and that you can let that go and you you should be as you're self-actualizing you should be spending more and more of your mental energy concentrating it towards constructive productive aims whatever those are whether it's your spiritual work or your business or whatever but anyways that was a tangent so getting back to things so where was i um yeah so i can give you short quick answers to very complicated advanced questions but the problem is that you're not going to understand the answer so this sort of little simple adage that well if it can't be explained quickly and and simply that means the person explaining it doesn't understand well that's one possibility consider the alternative possibility which is that things can be explained very tersely concisely and simply but that's going to pack a lot of information into a very dense symbolic form whether it's a thought a word an equation whatever but then for you to really unpack that that very much assumes that you you already have a very deep foundation as i do and then we can communicate with with very few words in fact really if you were as conscious as me we could literally just sit and look at each other and that would be all that's necessary nothing would need to be said for example someone might ask okay leah what's so what's uh what is reality tell me what reality is i want to know what it is and where it came from and how it how it works and why it's here ah you say you know so why don't you tell me tell me tell me simply tell me quickly okay i can grant you your wish reality is infinity that's it that's it that's the whole that's the whole answer nothing more needs to be said reality is infinity but do you have any clue what that actually means no most of you don't even if you think you do you still don't you have no clue how deep the answer is and how deep the question is so this is a this is a very common trap the mind falls into is that the mind underestimates the depth of reality and it tends to think that it can answer and understand questions about reality with simplistic answers and then as you start to study these things you realize just how little you knew so this is this is just a general trend that you should notice throughout your entire life this has happened to you it's happened to all of us we go into a situation and we think we know everything about that situation the simple situation is simple it's easy we know all the answers and then we start to study and the more we study the more we realize bam i was so deluded i wasn't even close to understanding this issue i of course didn't have the answers at all and the more i study the less answers i have the more questions i have the more confused i get think of a time that this has happened to you it especially happens when you try to accomplish something in life like for example business or for example with capitalism a lot of stage green socialist type people who lean towards sort of the socialist ideology they will criticize capitalism a lot and business owners and ceos and executives and this sort of stuff but these people have never i mean the socialist type people have never actually started their own business and so when they do go to start their own business they quickly realize just how difficult it is to start a business how fierce the competition is how much of a game of survival it is and then you have two choices either you will say ah [ __ ] it all this business stuff is just evil nonsense and i'm not even gonna participate in this game and then you just quit and then you go just work for some employer and then you're you're pissed off that this employer is exploiting you and you know not paying you your fair share and all this sorts of stuff or you could you can actually have a a moment of epiphany you can realize wait a minute the simplistic ideas i had about socialism and capitalism and that i'm being exploited and all this sort of it's not so simple because actually to succeed in business requires a sort of brutalness it's a game of survival it's very much like being a a lion out on the safari hunting for zebras or antelope that's that's a brutal that's a brutal business it's a business of survival and just because you go work at starbucks or some other place for some employer that doesn't mean you've escaped that problem you've just sort of ignored taking responsibility for it actually because see now you can be pissed off at your boss for being the evil capitalist who exploits you without realizing that the boss has to be doing the things he's doing otherwise the company's going to go out of business because of the competition so if you actually take on the responsibility to challenge you might say ah you know i had some overly simplified ideas about what socialism and capitalism are and maybe capitalism isn't so evil and maybe profit is not some evil but it's actually sort of a necessary thing in order to run a successful business and maybe business and corporations aren't evil in their essence but it's just actually how human beings survive at this point in our development and it's sort of a necessary evil and maybe i'm involved in this necessary evil in a much deeper way than i thought maybe i'm not separate from it and see now you get now you get a more real sense for economics it's not just simplistic theories that you learned in college by reading a few books now you're really in the thick of it well it's likewise with stuff like trying to understand consciousness or meditation or psychedelics or with science trying to understand what science is see most people think they know what science is and they're very cocky and arrogant about it and if i try to teach them a little bit deeper the complexities of science and some of the limitations of science they start to get very arrogant and defensive about it and of course that's projected like onto me as like oh leo you don't know what you're talking about yeah but see i spent 20 years contemplating the epistemics and metaphysics of science more than most professional scientists have um whereas you how many years have you spent contemplating the nature of science if i had to bet i would say less than a year so the challenge with me helping you understand what science is and understanding some of its limitations is you're missing 19 years of contemplation and study and reading i didn't just contemplate i read books i listened to lectures i studied science and thought about it deeply in in university i took philosophy of science courses i took logic courses and i struggled through all that for years for decades and then contemplated and then read philosophy and read famous scientists read about einstein read about descartes read about leibniz studied their work thought about their work considered the limitations of their work right how much of that have you done so if you haven't done any of that how do i communicate with you that's the challenge that's the bottleneck the bottleneck is a lack of foundation therefore my videos are oftentimes about building that foundation and building that foundation takes time and effort that most people don't have especially on youtube in general this is a general psychological principle of human beings is that human beings are very bad at building foundations for anything because building a foundation for anything requires a lot of time and forward thinking and patience and daily follow-through for you to understand some advanced mathematical concepts took 12 years of building a foundation and now you just take the foundation for granted and now we can have a conversation about some advanced mathematical concepts but that's not the case for example with consciousness you did not spend 12 years building a foundation of understanding what consciousness is or what psychedelics are or what science is now you might say leo no i spent 12 years studying science yeah you spent 12 years reading about scientific discoveries you did not spend 12 years doing science in fact i'm willing to bet you haven't done a single science experiment in your entire life now you say oh leo but but in in you know in high school chemistry class they made me do some experiments yeah they made you like a monkey follow through some steps that they wrote in a in a manual you went through those steps you did something you don't even remember what you did or how you did it or why it was even being done you did that just to get a grade and to pass the test you didn't actually genuinely do any science in your entire life and yet you think you understand science see and even if you did do some science that doesn't mean you've actually deeply contemplated the epistemics and metaphysics of what you were doing you can do great lab work like a monkey where somebody tells you that they need some chemical reaction made and you just you know you go look up in a book what of chemical reactions you look through a catalog of those reactions you find the reactions that are are necessary to achieve the result somebody wants your employer wants let's say and you go mix those those chemicals together and you generate a result and then you give it to them and then they're happy or whatever and good but while you were doing that you didn't think deeply about what are chemicals where did they come from how do they work how do we even know chemicals exist really maybe they're just hallucinations of the mind you didn't ask any of these questions because it wasn't relevant to achieving some results that you were paid for or some grade that you were supposed to receive there wasn't even time to ask these questions in fact if you were asking these questions this would get you a lower grade this would this would get you less money less success why because asking these questions oftentimes isn't practical and it slows you down if you have to question everything you're doing all the time at a deep metaphysical philosophical level it's hard to achieve anything because like if you want to go drive to the grocery store and you walk outside and you you're getting into your car and then suddenly it hits you like wait a minute what is a car where did this car come from who built it how did it get here where the technology of it come from and you start to deeply question this source of stuff and you start to question what is metal that it's made out of whatever where did the rubber in the tires come from you will spend a whole day just questioning this car and you will not drive to the grocery store and then your kids will go hungry you see so once you recognize that there's a big difference between doing stuff and actually getting to the bottom of it through contemplation thinking deeply about it the majority of humans don't think deeply about anything they don't think about anything they're just like monkeys walking around doing stuff that is acceptable in their culture and that their culture tells them to do so going back to the point of this problem that human beings are very poor at building foundations for things the only reason you developed a foundation for mathematics for science for language for other things you learn in school is because school is a system that forced you this was a system that recognize how powerful this is school is a bureaucratic system that was invented over a course of let's say the last two thousand years went through a a deep evolutionary process uh first maybe it started as tutoring uh like in ancient roman times in greek times it was just tutoring one-on-one instruction then classrooms were developed then these classrooms grew into larger schools then these schools grew into universities then these universities you know turned into entire businesses and corporations with giant bureaucracies and funding and a bunch of other things and there were all these different subjects and different experiments were done onto you know how do you teach kids which way which learning styles are are better suited to what people and then tests were developed and a base of knowledge was this took thousands of years to develop this and then we forced everybody to go to school for 12 years you didn't have a choice about that as a kid you just went and that forced this foundation upon you but imagine trying to achieve that with something that is outside of the school system outside the school curriculum by yourself imagine if you had to teach yourself mathematics completely by yourself without any support systems from your culture or your society imagine you grew up in a society where mathematics didn't exist or it existed but only a few fringe people knew about it like maybe one in a thousand people knew about mathematics but the rest of them didn't your family didn't your friends didn't your colleagues didn't and then one of those fringe one in a thousand people tried to teach you mathematics how would that go how would he even introduce the idea of mathematics to you because in the world you grew up in people weren't even talking about it as a legitimate subject in fact maybe they were talking about as some sort of witchcraft or superstition after all what is mathematics it's some sort of woo ideas in your mind it's just philosophy and nonsense that you know some some stupid mathematician invented it it doesn't do anything it's just ideas and mental masturbation imagine if that was the attitude of your culture and then some mathematician came to you and started to actually seriously try to explain some mathematics to you like trigonometry how would that go can you anticipate how stuck you would be but imagine you you somehow you you recognize the validity and the the value and and importance of mathematics and you started learning it by yourself imagine how difficult that would be compared to the way you learned it in school because in school you had to go there was math class there was a bell that rang and you were like just like a you were like a like a herd animal you were literally like a factory-farmed cow just going wherever you know whatever path they led you down learning whatever they told you to learn you didn't ask any questions about why am i learning this should i be learning this is this even true what i'm being taught where did these ideas come from none of these ideas entered your mind when you were young you were just learning stuff blindly like a monkey jumping through hoops passing grades and tests but imagine you if you had to develop mathematics on your own this would mean you would have to set aside time every day where you would say okay for the next hour or two i'm just i'm learning mathematics i'm reading books and then i'm going to spend a few more hours later in the day doing homework assignments these different exercises i'm going to do 50 or 100 of these long division problems and then after you do that for a few weeks then you move on to the next chapter of the book and the next topic and then you learn that for another few and then you keep doing that and you and you do that for 12 years every single week for 12 years how many of you would actually succeed in that less than one in a million why because simply for us humans mostly what we're doing we're not doing anything original we're just following the herd whatever our friends and family and colleagues are doing is what we do and anything too far outside of that is extremely difficult for us to do because we have to isolate ourselves from the herd and devote ourselves to this task and be very focused about it be very serious about it and be very persistent with it despite failure and difficulty and you have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing yourself most people are so bad at motivating and pushing themselves or creating a long-term vision or plan for themselves they can't even plan one year into into the future let alone 12 years think about how much vision it takes just to say to yourself you know what i'm going to spend the next 12 years learning mathematics and maybe it'll get me somewhere maybe it'll have some value for me and that means i'm going to wake up every morning thinking about mathematics reminding myself to sit down for an hour read the book reminding myself to sit down later in the day do homework assignments even though they're painful and complicated and confusing and maybe i don't enjoy it that much but i'm gonna keep doing that for 12 [ __ ] years and it'll get me somewhere only one in a million people has enough vision and motivation and self-discipline and follow-through capacity to actually execute that to actualize that the only reason mathematics is so widespread is because there was a system that you went through like a sheep to teach you that to force you into that and you wanted to quit and if it was left up to you you would have quit mathematics very early on the only reason you persisted is because your parents forced you your culture and society expected it of you and you were given no other options it was not a choice you had and then in a sort of certain sense it became easy when you don't have a choice about something it's actually easy to do it but it's really hard to do something when you have an infinite number of choices and possibilities when you can go have sex socialize watch tv youtube play video games when you have all these options who's going to learn math nobody the only people are going to learn math are those who are forced into a system that forces them to learn it that's the only reason people by and large understand math and even so even if you went through 12 years of that your understanding of math is still piss poor for most of you the way that science and mathematics works is that it builds very much like a imagine a giant redwood tree a thick thick thick thick tree with many many rings that are built right and the way the reason that a tree has rings in it is because every year or so every season the tree expands kind of going from from the inside to the outside and it builds layers and it creates accretes layer upon layer upon layer so really what you have in an old tree is you have a sort of a nested a nested matrashka doll effect of smaller trees as it was growing out up and out of itself and you can't just have the outer layer of a tree that outer layer depends upon the inner layer and that one depends upon the previous one and so on and that's how human knowledge and science and mathematics and so forth work now the topics that i cover are topics that have been neglected by our education system topics like self-actualization philosophy metaphysics epistemology psychology sociology developmental psychology the philosophy and and methods of science consciousness psychedelics spirituality religion mysticism topics like success emotional mastery leadership creativity how to discipline and motivate yourself life purpose how to find your values how to self-reflect how to contemplate how to think deeply and independently about things for yourself how to deconstruct your own mind and reality love wisdom you spent virtually zero time studying any of these topics in school or in university you may say oh leo no but i took a psychology class in high school and i studied some psychology or sociology in in college and i did some study of physics and science in in college and i took a few intro philosophy courses in in college yeah maybe you did but all of that is just like it's it's it's so minuscule it's so miniscule and it was so poor in quality and the amount of effort and thought that you put into it was so little compared to what is necessary to really truly deeply understand these things so my job is to help you to understand these things that are outside the norms of our current education system and our education system is very limited precisely because it ignores these topics now you might say oh leo that that sucks why doesn't education just include these important topics if they're so important why wouldn't education include them leo isn't that an argument against their importance because i mean honestly if these things were so important like if consciousness was truly so important if love was so important if truth was so important surely there would be classes on these things early in school and all throughout but there aren't therefore these things must be [ __ ] or nonsense or unimportant but what you don't understand is that the education system is deeply political the things that the education system teaches i'm not saying it's political in the sense that it makes you a a conservative or a liberal i'm saying that it's political in the sense that ideas are dangerous and scary things threatening things they are threatening to power and they are threatening to social order so what you think of here these topics as just being ideas as just being philosophy as just being mere curiosities they're not that precisely what separates the topics that i just mentioned that i talk about so much and that i am passionate about the most is that they are deeply deeply functional they play a crucial role in one's survival and as a result they're very dangerous they threaten the social order and because they threaten the social order and they threaten power hierarchies um they threatened how society is structured they threaten the economy they threaten religion they threaten science they threaten technology they threaten the traditional family they threaten culture because they threaten these things it becomes virtually impossible to get the general population to agree to teach these things in school if the things that i taught would be taught in school the teachers who would be teaching these things would probably be at the very least outcast from society and demonized but they might even have violence done to them and even killed that's the seriousness of what we're talking about now sure you can teach these topics in a shallow way which is not too threatening but if you teach these topics in a very deep way and especially when you start to interconnect them all together in a holistic way to build a big picture understanding of what's really going on in reality and in life that's where it gets very very threatening and in general this is why school doesn't teach you to question anything deeply for yourself it's mostly just memorization that's mostly what school is it's just memorization and then regurgitation of what you memorized that's not a true understanding of anything it's not really learning it's just indoctrination and dogma it doesn't matter whether the content that you're being indoctrinated with is scientific or not you're still being indoctrinated with it and it's still there for dogma and belief now it's precisely because these topics are so important that they are not covered do you see because the most important topics are the ones that relate to survival the most important questions are the ones that most people in society don't want you asking because when the majority of your culture and your society is built upon constructed fantasies and illusions that are designed for the perpetuation of the human race for survival when that is the primary paradigm from which society operates when your concerns are things like money and sex and material advancement and technology and the preservation of your career and your family and your religion and your tribe when these are your primary concerns in life there can be no deep questioning because you're not really interested in truth you're not interested in understanding anything you're interested in just maintaining patterns of survival most people are not interested in questioning or deconstructing their religion or what their professors are teaching in university or the way that business is conducted or their tribe their political party their nation when they're teaching you history in school they're not interested in teaching you in an unbiased history which spans the entire globe they are interested in teaching you the history of your people that's what you were taught in university or in high school is the history of your people not the world you got a very biased history of your little starting from your little local region of the globe you didn't learn the history of australia if you're not australian you didn't learn the history of japan you didn't learn the history of china you didn't learn the history of new zealand you didn't learn the history of of most countries on the planet mostly just your own and then whatever entanglements your country had with other countries that's what you were taught and even that was taught from a very self-biased perspective where your country was placed on a pedestal and all the other ones were marginalized and diminished you see and now to go into the school system and to suggest hey let's let's change the way we teach history in america in american schools let's not teach about george washington and about thomas jefferson and the constitution the revolution let's not teach about that let's focus on the entire world evenly let's teach them about australia let's see to japan what would happen there would be an outcry there would be absolute outcry from the the parent you know the parent association that governs the school there would be an outcry like how dare you teach my children about those black savages in africa they need to learn about good old western civilization that's that's the response you would get in many districts across america you know how dare you teach australian history before american history because american history is more important than australian history that would be the kind of logic and it would be very threatening for the parents because whatever the kids learn the kids have to come back to their parents at the end of the day and then you know the kid is sitting at the dinner table and the the parent asks the kid of course well say what did you learn in school today and then and the kid is going to say something like well i learned that uh for example in in the middle east they had advanced civilizations that were more developed than western european civilization during certain periods like the you know islamic golden age they had more advanced mathematics they had more sophisticated universities and other things like that they were more open-minded more multicultural than then some of us even are today and then when that when the parent when the conservative you know parent who didn't learn these things hears about this stuff this conflicts with with the parents worldview and their worldview is a sort of nationalistic one of like you know yankee doodle dandy uncle sam you know we're the best you know america is the best america is the greatest western civilization the greatest this sort of they have that kind of worldview and now this clash is what their worldview and they say wait a minute what are these teachers teaching my children filling their mind with all this anti-american stuff about islam being great at one point this is all you know they're all a bunch of terrorists and stuff that's how that's how the parents might think if they're very ignorant and so the ignorance of the parents reinforces the ignorance of the entire education system because the education system can only be as open and advanced and as conscious and as developed basically as the parents and also the teachers who are teaching it and who are supporting it and who are paying taxes to fund it schools in america at least are funded by by local taxes local real estate taxes fund schools and if the schools are teaching something the parents don't like the parents will raise hell like hell i mean like in kansas they still have this problem i don't even know today do they teach evolution in kansas i don't i don't even know if they do i think they they still teach intelligent design the sort of stupid christian version of intelligent design i think they they i think they're still teaching that at the very least they teach it alongside evolution as though these two are sort of equal you know present both sides why is that the case well because the the parents in kansas are conservative so you can't you have to i'm trying to get you to understand how deep how deeply the ignorance roots itself within human society we can't have very advanced schools and very advanced teachers teaching very advanced subjects because the majority of the population is too ignorant and too unconscious and too underdeveloped to appreciate the value of those things and in fact it will be directly threatened by those things just try to imagine would it be it would be like for example in saudi arabia in a elementary school in saudi arabia to teach children at an elementary school level to question the existence of god allah or the validity of the quran if you did this in saudi arabia they would kill you they would literally kill you for doing that as a teacher so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect when a culture is uh is steeped in ignorance and dogma then that dogman ignorance is reinforced in many many ways at the most extreme level it's reinforced by cutting your head off but there are many subtle ways that it can be enforced you can be fired lose your job you can be demoted you can be marginalized you can be outcast you can be demonized you can have your reputation tarred and feathered you can um you can be accused of of being you know a pedophile or something um you can be like the amount of ways you can be demonized and marginalized for your views if they're radical enough and conflict enough with the prevailing predominant culture is endless and we see this throughout all of human history this has happened the brightest most brilliant human beings the most conscious and the most developed of every era have always been demonized demonized marginalized had their power taken away from them and oftentimes imprisoned and killed why is that because the more conscious and developed you get the more truthful your perception of reality is and truth and consciousness and love these are antithetical to the ego and to survival so the most truthful people are the ones that need to be eliminated the soonest with the greatest vengeance and their reputation need to be tarnished the most because that's the only way we can maintain the fictions and constructions that our society and culture is addicted to because if we allow all these you know brilliant people to rise up and to start teaching what will happen is that culture all the constructions and fantasies of culture will will start getting deconstructed and questioned and contradicted and that becomes extremely confusing and threatening to the majority of the population who are not on board with that and they will revolt and they will kick those people out of power or kill them that's how it's always been done since the beginning of human history and it's still done today although in developed countries don't really kill people so much for that anymore but we certainly tarnish their reputations and we discredit them and we marginalize them as much as possible and we absolutely do not give them money and power to be able to have enough influence on the population because really what we're talking about here is a game of fighting for the soul and the mind of the population it's an influence game it's a survival game between different meme complexes like science materialism atheism or religion or whichever religion you know islam christianity buddhism whatever all of these different worldviews are fighting with each other for domination and monopolization of the the newest fear the mind sphere of of the population and based on how this mind sphere is manipulated and what kind of constructions are allowed or disallowed you can then build economies and businesses on top of that when you have a stupid population you can build businesses that extract wealth from that stupidity and so it's this very deep tangle of both the education system the political system the business economic system all of it is in entangled together creating the core of what we call society and you're in the middle of that and you're only now as i'm talking about this starting to get a little inkling into the fact that you're in the middle of that and how much you were indoctrinated by all this how unconscious all of this is all of this is occurring unconsciously this is not some grand conspiracy to keep you stupid it's just that people are deeply unconscious and it takes a lot of effort to raise our consciousness especially collectively making sense you see do you see how long it took me just to explain that and you still really don't understand what i'm talking about you're just only seeing the tip of the spear here and it's taking an hour just to get here and there was no way i could have communicated this to you in five minutes that you would understand that would have any impact on you i mean i can always condense my teachings down to shorter and shorter little aphorisms and statements but these aphorisms and statements will only have meaning to the extent that you have an ability to decipher and unpack them which you won't have unless you spend hours and hours and hours studying contemplating it and taking in all this stuff all this knowledge all this information here is one of the biggest tricks and mechanisms that the ego mind uses to maintain itself the ego mind and generally just in general even more broadly your mind is constructing all of reality but in order for it to feel like it's real and not a construction you have to be unconscious about the fact that you're constructing reality you have to deny it so the mind as it's constructing it immediately begins constructing constructions that deny construction is occurring and you have many of these constructions in your mind and so when i'm communicating with you the reason it can take so long and it can be so challenging uh and it requires so much in-depth explanation is because i'm not dealing with a blank slate your mind is already full of 20 or 30 or 50 years of constructions and programming from your culture and your society and you don't even know that that's there i mean you know it's there in the in the abstract sense but you don't know the full detail of it in the full extent of it if you did it would make you vomit immediately you would be disgusted with yourself you would have an existential crisis so you have all these defense mechanisms against acknowledging and admitting and even seeing the construction process occurring and you don't even know what these defense mechanisms are i do know what they are because i've studied them for years within myself and within others and so i'm trying to share some of them with you the problem that is though that you're playing this game of construction therefore the most threatening thing to you is any kind of deconstruction therefore if what i'm teaching is mostly deconstruction which is what i teach then your mind is going to be very resistant to that and you're going to have the full power of your intelligence of your mind is going to be devoted towards preventing the deconstruction from happening and so one of the ways that the mind creates a very solid construction such that it feels so real that most people can't even begin to entertain the idea that they're constructing this whole thing right here it's like leo my mind is not constructing what are you talking about if i was constructing reality how come i constructed this shitty life well precisely because you're constructing it unconsciously but leo if if i'm constructing reality how come i don't look so beautiful how come i look ugly well you believe you look ugly that's something you constructed you don't see your own beauty because society has created constructions that you adopted unconsciously as to what beauty is and now you're operating on those constructions without even realizing it so you can't even see your own beauty so you see anyways the way the mind creates this very lifelike construction is simply through sheer quantity it's not just a couple of constructions it's a construction wrapped inside of more constructions wrapped inside of more constructions inside of more constructions and it's just this never-ending twisted tangle of thousands of constructions all buttressing each other creating a sort of structure that seems to hold it's really a house of cards but you can find some some pictures and videos of people creating some amazing houses of cars look it up on youtube you can find some some like masterful houses of cards being built and they look very stable and they look very impressive but that's because every card is supporting every other card in this way such that it it creates a sort of a sense of integrity but it's not really integrity it's a it's a fiction it's a fantasy in the same way that if you want to write a really good novel sci-fi or fantasy what do you need to write a really compelling novel that that draws you in and is so lifelike and is so immersive that you just get lost in it for weeks you forget that you even have a normal life you stop going to work you stop seeing your children you stop having sex because this novel is just so engrossing you can't stop until you finish it how do you do that as a writer a lot of detail a lot of juicy detail you're constructing an entire world the sort of lord of the rings world let's say where you have all these different creatures and monsters and people and characters and they're doing things and it's dramatic and it's interesting and it's all interconnected and you can draw connections between like oh this person is related to that person and he came from you know he was the son and daughter of this person there and this and this and you build backstory and backstory and future stories and then you you do you know backwards projections future projections flashbacks and flash forwards and you combine all this stuff together and it becomes as though it's its own world and then to deconstruct that becomes very challenging because see like let's say i say oh well you know uh let's say you're really into lord of the rings or something and i come to you and say oh you but but frodo is just a character he's a fictional character and you say no he he's not what are you talking about leo frodo frodo is so real he has parents i can name him his parents his parent his mom was so and so and his dad was so-and-so and i say yeah but that's still part of a story and you say well no they're not part of a story lord lord of the rings has this like entire continent and world like middle earth it's an actual place i don't know what it is it's a planet or something i'm not familiar very deeply with the lord of the rings uh lore but you can i'm sure there's a deep lower there you can kind of go deeper and deeper into the lore and in fact there's probably a bunch of fan fiction lore even on top of what was written in the books because you know people go wild with this stuff and they start inventing stuff they probably have invented the name for frodo's mother and father and where she came from and where he came from and how they met and how they had sex and all this and where they're living and where middle earth came from what it was evolution was its entire history and and see when i start to try to deconstruct for you frodo you're going to drag in the entire fiction of the lord of the rings universe and you're going to keep pointing to every fiction in there to explain why frodo is real you're going to say the world is real i say no the world is not real you say but it is because people eat and people [ __ ] and people die so it's a real world but i'd say but yeah but that's fictional and you say no but it's not fictional i've read about you know um this character here he died and then that character there was born and then this happened there and this happened there there's a rich history of it and i said yeah but that's all stories and you say no it's not stories because you're so bought into it because it feels so lifelike you say there's trees and there's rocks and there's mountains and there's cities and they have names and it's so life like there's politics going on and there's a battle between good and evil and this and that and like i mean this is what game of thrones did so well perhaps an even better example than lord of the rings because lord of the rings actually isn't that realistic whereas game of thrones like really took lord of the rings and it made it so politically realistic and so kind of brutal and bloody and like you can imagine living in that world and people do and that's the whole appeal of this kind of fantasy stuff the mind loves imagination that's because it's constructing everything imagination is the only business that the universe is in there's no other business in town reality is imagination various gradations of it you're imagining this whole thing right now see that's a very simple explanation if you ask me what is reality i'll just say well it's all just imagination and you say oh well yeah i mean but that doesn't explain anything right because you're [ __ ] ignorant you have no foundation for what that means in the same way that if you ask if you ask me well what is you know you ask a scientist well what is uh what is matter and energy they can say well e equals mc square and you look at that and you say well this doesn't tell me anything it's just a stupid equation it says nothing right because to understand what e equals mc square means you need 12 years of school and then probably another few years of university you need to understand every term in that equation e m c squared what do these things mean what does the equal sign mean and then and what did and how does that explain these you know deeper things about the nature of space time people take all this for granted people expect easy quick simple explanations for things but reality is too complicated for that so you have to decide do you really want to understand these questions if you do then how serious are you these are serious life and death questions that's why they're powerful and important and worth investigating if all you have to devote is five minutes a day then you're not a serious person you're not serious about living and therefore how great can your life be it can't be great because you can't understand what life is with that little of a commitment you take life so for granted that you just want to cruise through it via the path of least resistance in a lazy way well if that's your attitude then your results you better expect mediocre results because life is such a thing that you only get from it what you put into it most people are so lazy investing in their lives that they're poor their whole lives and i don't mean financially poor although of course most people are i mostly mean they're spiritually bankrupt philosophically bankrupt epistemically and metaphysically bankrupt psychologically bankrupt to not be bankrupt in any of these fields you would need to be serious about them first you and then to be serious about them you need to be serious about life but you're not very serious about life are you you just want some sort of quick easy answers well consider the possibility that the quick easy answers you want are exactly the ones that are so shallow that they would not significantly improve your life which is why your life has not significantly improved how much your life improves is going to depend precisely proportionately to the depth of the questions you ask how deeply you want to live your life and how much passion and seriousness and effort you're willing to put into it you can't become great at mathematics if you're uninterested in mathematics and you're only willing to invest five minutes a day into mathematics you're not serious and so that's the result you get you're a poor mathematician well all of that works the same way when it comes to consciousness psychedelics philosophy metaphysics epistemology psychology sociology politics government relationships emotions love sex you only get what you put in it's a very fair structure actually why should reality give you more than you want for your own self why should reality cater to somebody who's so lazy and undisciplined and unserious and shallow as you there's actually a very deep reason for why you only get what you give from reality and that's because you are reality you're constructing reality there's not some other source within reality like a god sitting up in the clouds that can shower you with boons and toys and other things that you want you are reality if you don't create it for yourself if you don't furnish yourself with what you want then you won't get it if you don't have a deep desire to understand then you won't understand precisely because you are reality for reality to understand itself it has to care about itself if you don't care about reality you therefore don't also care about yourself and if you don't care about yourself then how can you have a good life how can you expect reality to care for you when you don't care for it i mean the logic of this is so clear and it's so simple the problem is that you've spent the majority of your life as a sheep as a human sheep just sleep walking through life going through the motions following the herd not thinking deeply about anything taking everything for granted and not fundamentally you're just not serious about life i mean that's what it really boils down to you're just not serious about life that's your problem and things for you will not change until you become serious about life when you really become serious about life you will gladly devote hours and hours into studying and reading and following up on this stuff you will look at my book list you will buy every book on my book list you will read the 200 plus books on my book list you will devour them you will take notes on them you will underline them you will read them multiple times you will ask me serious questions rather than just trolling and other [ __ ] that you do you will ask serious questions you will reach out you will find serious people serious teachers who have serious things to say and you will appreciate them and you will go on this journey and you will seriously study and you will do the work you will contemplate you will do your homework and you will do it all on your own without any support whatsoever from your society and from your culture and from your friends and from your family and from your professors and from scientists from academics from anybody you will do it all on your own that is intrinsic motivation right there but how many people will do that one in a hundred thousand maybe again it goes back to that example that we're really poor at developing our own foundation really what's easy in life is getting to a place where you're born and then you get to a place where the center of gravity of your culture takes you and then once you're at the center of gravity of your culture rising above that becomes increasingly harder and the higher you want to rise above the center of gravity of your culture will require more and more independence of thought from you more and more discipline effort seriousness purpose vision motivation and the ability to not get distracted by and discouraged by the rest of the herd because the higher you try to go from the herd the more they will call to drag you back in and they will use every trick in the book they will demonize the sources and teachers that you're using to advance yourself they will get you to question why you're doing this at all and that it's not important they will invite you to have sex with them and to sleep with them and to eat food with them and to go to church with them and to read the books they read and to watch the movies that they watch and they will demonize your goal if you share your goal or vision with them they'll say oh well that's so crazy that's ridiculous why would anybody want to do that in fact that's evil they will call it satanic or they'll say it's dangerous well they're right it is dangerous it's dangerous to venture outside the hurt so it's really all up to you how much do you want out of life you're going to get exactly what you put into it do you want a lot put in a lot if you take life for granted you're not going to invest a lot and you won't get a lot and you'll be just like the herd like everybody else you'll be mediocre and if you care about the deep questions such as what is reality what is truth what is consciousness what is love what is god are we living in a simulation what is science is science true what role does the mind play in constructing reality what is the function of philosophy what is religion about where did religion come from why does it exist what are psychedelics what is awakening how do i live the good life how do i be a good person why is there evil in the world what is my purpose in life what is the meaning of life what's the point of life does life have a point how do we know anything at all if you want to ask serious questions like this then you got to be prepared for serious work for serious answers and you have to be aware that the answers could frighten you and that it's not just a matter of doing a bunch of homework to get the answers the reason that these questions are rarely answered is not because they can't be answered it's because the process of answering these questions is so threatening that very few humans go down the roads necessary to get the answers and when the answers are revealed to them they don't have the stomach to accept the answers they reject the answers they are scared of the answers they deny the answers they avoid the answers they run away from the answers they demonize the answers it's not that the answers don't exist you can answer every single one of these questions absolutely definitively but do not expect the answers to be spoon fed to you by me or anybody else you have to work for the answers the answers will only be as good as your intentions to get them your seriousness your commitment your passion your curiosity these are the bottlenecks you are the bottleneck i am not the bottleneck in your journey of understanding existence you are so what are you willing to do about it you