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[Music] you let's continue with our series on self-deception this is part two make sure that you watched part 1 which gives context to part 2 and what I'm gonna be talking about in this section is over 60 different self-deception mechanisms which I've identified and categorized and studied and I'll be presenting those to you and talking about them in some length there's a lot of material but before we get into that we need to do a little quick recap of part one so what did we learn in part one we basically learned that the mind is a self-deception engine and why would it be that because without illusion nothing can exist reality must be dreamed into being and that's done with your mind and this dream needs to be sustained and this dream is sustained through self-deception your mind's job is to construct reality to create this dream so that you can be alive and partake in all the features of life and it is not in your mind's interest to look inside at the machinery which is constructing the dream because that actually punctures the illusion of reality so how is this dream maintained its maintained through a lack of self-awareness through a lack of self reflection your mind keeps your attention riveted outwards externally on all the stuff within the dreamscape so that you don't turn inwards and really question deeply what's going on behind the scenes because that would rupture the illusion and in a sense you want to be in the spell inside the dream unless maybe you get the bright idea that you want to jailbreak your mind and see what reality is like outside of the dream that's it in a nutshell this entire topic I call epistemology and it's really part of a book that I'm working on which is gonna be all about the deceptive nature of the mind I've been working on it for over a year and really I've been collecting this material and thinking about self-deception for at least 10 years I've assembled thousands of pages of notes and quotes and my own analysis and examples that I find throughout culture and in myself and other people and throughout literature and throughout science and religion and history and everywhere and I have hundreds of audios that I recorded personally just for myself my own notes and thinking about this topic that's a very deep topic this is like my life's work here and what you're getting here with this two-part series is you're getting just like 1% of the research that I've done into this topic of self-deception and the trickery of the mind so this is some very very complicated and nuanced stuff which is why I love to research it because it does require a lot of nuance and that's something that my mind loves speaking of which let's consider deception not just within humans but also within nature at large I like to always put everything into like a bigger context so notice that nature and the animal kingdom actually loves to employ deception for the purposes of survival a lot of animals that you see on the Discovery Channel you see their amazing camouflage how remarkable it is and how helpful that is for them surviving their life depends on excellent camouflage some animals even have active camouflage like mimic octopuses and certain flounder fish and chameleons although chameleons use their pigments actually for communications more so than for hiding for predators but you can see that in nature there are many examples very remarkable examples of deception at work and one that I love perhaps the most is the cuckoo bird this is one of nature's most devilish examples of deception what the cuckoo bird will do is it will find a nest of some other bird some smaller bird because the cuckoo bird is pretty big so it finds some kind of a small nest like sparrows or whatever and it'll fly in there and it'll actually kick out one of the eggs in the nest while the adult birds are gone it kicks out one of the eggs it sticks its own larger cuckoo egg in there and the cuckoo egg is perfectly camouflaged so that it looks exactly like the other eggs even though it is bigger in size and then it flies away and then that cuckoo egg will hatch it'll hatch sooner than all the other eggs by design of course and this cuckoo bird this little baby cuckoo chick is born with certain features like it has little little hooks on the tip of its of its beak and also it has the ability to kick out the other eggs from the nest so you can see pictures of these cuckoo chicks who don't even have feathers yet they're completely naked they can't even see and yet they have a mechanism hardwired into their psychology that forces them to kick out all the other eggs in the nest so that it's the only one remaining and the adults the adult sparrows for example they are tricked into feeding this cuckoo chick because it tricks their mind into being so deceived that they actually think that oh I'm now bonded with this chick and this chick must be my child and so of course they're not gonna kick it out of the nest even though it's actually going to destroy all the other legitimate Sparrow chicks and so these sparrows will actually feed this cuckoo bird this large giant cuckoo bird which looks nothing like them but it's this see the Cuckoo's is exploiting this this sort of glitch in the sparrows psyche be sort of bonding that happens between adult and child such that they just keep feeding and feeding the cuckoo bird until the cuckoo bird becomes fully mature and then flies away to repeat this whole thing over again and you can actually see pictures of this gigantic oversized cuckoo bird which is almost bigger than the entire nest and it's the only one that's in there all the other chicks have been thrown out and it's being fed by these little adult Sparrow birds or similar kinds of birds it's an amazing and remarkable deception that Nature has thought up and why did nature think this up well of course for the purposes of self survival and now you might think all this cuckoo bird is such an evil creature for doing this but look at the situation a little bit more objectively what is the cuckoo bird doing it's just trying to survive this is how it survives and you might say ah but why is it do it in such an evil and selfish manner and that's precisely right because see in this example which are being shown is the sort of stark brutality of selfishness it doesn't care it doesn't care about the other baby birds it doesn't care about the adults it doesn't care about whether it tricks someone or doesn't it doesn't care as long as it works that's all it cares about and in this example even though the cuckoo bird might seem very evil for doing what it does but really it's doing nothing different than what you're doing what all of us are doing to be alive is to be evil is to be selfish it's just that with this example of the cuckoo bird it's easy to see because we're seeing it out there in somebody else but when these cuckoo mechanisms are pointed out within you that's something your mind does not want you to see because you see what happened in nature very interestingly is that there's a lot of stuff there's a lot of deception just regular all deception going on in nature but usually that deception is aurilla - towards tricking other animals but nature with humans because we have these advanced Minds which are able to conceptualize has gone one step further and has allowed us to turn this deception mechanism inside towards ourselves from the outside in such that now we are deceiving ourselves more than we're deceiving people out there although of course we still deceive plenty of people out there but you see to deceive other people out there can you see how it's really helpful to be able to deceive yourself first because once you've deceived yourself that means you can be extremely selfish in deceiving everybody else and that lets you get away with a lot of stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to get away with for example this cuckoo bird do you think this cuckoo bird would be able to survive if it had a sense of morality and if it had this sense of like oh well but I'm do I'm being so evil by kicking these other baby birds out of the nest no it doesn't have that sense precisely because it's not in its interest to have that sort of sense but human beings see we are social creatures we live in large groups so we need a sense of morality otherwise our large groups will start to break apart but nevertheless we don't want to be too honest with each other and with ourselves we want to still be able to deceive so human beings are some of the most deceptive creatures that exist for this very reason because we need to be deceiving while at the same time putting on the airs as if nothing's going on and what better way to do that than to deceive yourself in the process think of how much more you'll be able to get away with think of how sneaky you can be when you don't even know that you're being sneaky that's what's happened and it's really a work of genius its genius it's pure genius it's amazing this is not something to get depressed about this is something to marvel at it's really mind-blowing stuff the basic form that all self-deception takes is as follows you think you know things which you really do not know every time that you take a firm position on anything you open yourself up to self-deception so if you take a firm position on God you're opening yourself up to self-deception if you take a firm position on science or on some political ideology or about some government policy or about some sort of moralistic cause or principle or value so you're taking a firm position you're believing in it and then you're kind of staking your life on that thing and that's when you're prone to self-deception because if you didn't have any firm positions on anything well then you could just kind of be loosey-goosey but see having firm decisions or positions is actually very helpful for for your ability to survive and it also plays into your sense of identity so it's really hard to go through life without taking firm positions that's what most people do and that's precisely when they fall into all these traps of self-deception so we're gonna be talking about a lot of them now here they are in no particular order I specifically didn't like categorize them in in any like order of most to least important because this whole field is so complex there just isn't a simple list of like oh here's number one here's number two here's number three there's just a whole lot of them and of course different people will succumb to different self-deception mechanisms depending on their situations the time that they're living in the country they're living in and other factors like that but let's begin with these very basic ones which are common to to almost everybody number one thinking that you've basically got reality figured out because hey if you got reality figured out then why read books why listen to teachers why look at diverse perspectives why go out of your way to try psychedelics why go out of your way to travel to different countries why go out of your way to listen to diverse opinions there is no reason because hey you've basically got reality figured out and that's a huge self-deception that one right there basically cripples your ability to learn new things which is a big problem because then you get stuck with just being who you are and that's it with no opportunity for growth number two is believing that reality is just an objective thing and that the mind plays little role in this objective reality and that basically facts about the world exist independent of interpretation such that yeah you admit that there are certain opinions that people can have in certain interpretations but then in the back of your mind you really hold that there just are certain things which are just objective brute facts and you would have to be crazy or insane or mentally handicapped to not accept some of these given facts but you see when your mind gets it to by this line of reasoning then that means that your mind can inject whatever kind of facts objective facts it wants it can stick any thing under that category of objective facts and then you're gonna actually hold those as objective facts you see how convenient that is for the mind because the mind can sneak in almost anything it wants there it can sneak in God it can sneak in aliens it can sneak in conspiracy theories it can sneakin sneak in any kind of materialistic theories about the world basically anything you want can be snuck in there so that's a really tricky one the next deception mechanism is assuming that self-deception isn't a significant factor in your life it's like yeah Leo sure self-deception happens and mostly it happens with other people and even if it happens in me it happens like maybe 10% of the time or like maybe 20% of maybe 30 of the time it happens but that's about it it's not very significant do we really need spend all this time talking about it it's that kind of thinking that's the self-deception under estimating self-deception thinking that self-deception is easy to to spot and to uncover of course that makes self-deception really difficult to spot and uncover when you assume it's easy when you assume it's insignificant because then it can be very significant in actual fact but you won't know that because you're assuming it's not very significant the next mechanism is thinking that you can avoid metaphysics some people especially on a scientific people they poopoo metaphysics and they say all metaphysics that's for the philosophers that's something science to use to do 500 years ago but we've grown up now we don't do any metaphysics we're metaphysics free there's no such thing though as metaphysics free there is either you're aware and you're constantly thinking about your metaphysical assumptions and your metaphysical certain metaphysical facets of your worldview or you're not thinking about them but it's not that you don't have them just because you're not investigating metaphysics or thinking about metaphysics doesn't mean you don't have a latent defacto metaphysics everyone who thinks that they can just avoid metaphysics because it's just abstract airy-fairy type of stuff that doesn't really concern real-world life they're very wrong because what happens with them is they just end up picking up the de facto metaphysics of their culture of their peer group of their family of their religion or of their science and if you're a scientifically minded person if you're a scientist an academic really watch out for this one because I see a lot of very intelligent academically minded people who tricked selves with this thinking that they're not engaging in metaphysics because they're a part of the scientific method and that the scientific method is metaphysics free this is preposterous not at all there are many many assumptions that the scientific method makes many of them completely groundless and factually false and yet they are made nonetheless and what makes them even more deceptive is that these people are not aware that they are holding these metaphysical assumptions the next self deception mechanism is conceptualization this is huge this is a very broad category and I've spoken about this in the past and I will in the future but it's basically the mistake of confusing the map for the territory and that seems like a very simple mistake and it is a very simple mistake it's a very obvious mistake and when most people are told that hey you're confusing the map for the territory they will say oh yeah of course yeah I know the map is not the territory that's obvious dollie oh that's obvious so what but see it's one thing to hear the phrase the map is not the territory it's another thing to actually understand that it this applies to a lot of stuff you hold in your life you hold the map as the territory and again a lot of scientifically minded people make this mistake because science does a lot of mapping and a lot of modeling but then because science is always modeling modeling modeling modeling it's conceptualizing reality so much all the time that it forgets that it's conceptualizing and modeling reality and it forgets that there's the model and there's a territory and these are two very different things and in many ways the better your models become the the more problematic this problem becomes because the greater the the gap that builds up between the map and the territory and then you're very juicy and successful models are very easy to mistake for the territory and what a lot of scientists and academics do is they just forget about the territory entirely they get completely wrapped up in their Maps and that happens be of a lack of mindfulness over the entire thinking process in general people are very poor in our culture and society these days at distinguishing between a concept and direct experiences because this takes practice a lot of mindfulness practice a lot of meditation work hundreds and thousands of hours of mindfulness practice is required to be able to separate out your thoughts from your sensory perceptions and so that those things are not constantly being fused in your mind which is the problem that most people face most academic and intellectually minded people face this problem and it's a really big problem and this is why I say that for scientists and academics one of the most important things you should be doing if you really care about your career and you really care about discovering the truth with your scientific discoveries is you need to be meditating every single day like your life depended on it like your entire career depended on it because it does because if you don't do this if you don't develop this mindfulness practice every single day then you're guaranteed to get lost in your conceptualizations and in your maps and in your models guaranteed there's no way you're gonna avoid it it's just way too tricky of it of a thing that's why this is a really important habit but of course not just for scientists or mathematicians or logicians but really for everybody but for those of you who are in the in these kind of hardcore scientific fields if you're a physicist if you're a cosmologists if you're a molecular biologist if you're a computer scientist you have to be developing mindfulness over your thoughts because otherwise you're gonna get completely lost and self-deceived with your conceptualizations precisely because you're the type of person who has the personality and mind type which loves to conceptualize which is why you went into those fields in the first place and you set so many years in school and in university and getting your PhD and all of that the next self-deception mechanism is language and labeling this one is huge and I'll shoot specific episodes about language in the future and I already have in the past but see the problem with language is that it also is a sort of a component of this conceptualizing problem and we think that when we attach labels to objects in the world that we actually know more about those objects than we really do and if you notice scientists for example and academics they love to use big flowery words and complicated language and they write these papers and they write these books which are filled with a lot of technical jargon and this language becomes very tricky it's very easy to deceive yourself with it and with all the labels because it's not that you're just attaching a label to something the label also carries with it an infinite number of connections and ancillary meanings implicit meanings of other concepts that this labels attached to so your mind isn't just attaching labels to things it's forming these networks in your minds of meaning and then this can create all sorts of labyrinths in your mind that are very difficult to escape the next self-deception mechanism is a very broad one belief and hearsay so many people do not understand the distinction between a belief and direct experience of a thing because this is not taught in schools at all we're not taught to make this distinction even in science you might think oh well but in science everything is based on empirical evidence no it's not most of science is built upon concepts and models and beliefs size is a highly belief based system this is a mistake that very many rational people make is they think that science is immune to this problem of beliefs making it differ from religion no science is just as much for belief based as religion is because in science you have to believe a lot of stuff most of stuff you learned in high school and in college about science about physics about biology about chemistry is completely belief based you didn't derive any of it for yourself you just accepted it as blind facts and what's worse is that not only that but you also accepted the meta belief that science is not belief based and that these things are not beliefs that gravity is not a belief that the earth being round is not a belief that the Big Bang is not a belief that these things are our truth when in fact you have to be conscious that actually these are beliefs and how did you get these beliefs did you get them through personally deriving them through actually going and looking through a telescope to seeing if there's actually a Mars out there if there's a Venus out there if there's a Saturn or a Jupiter out there with so many moons circling around it did you actually and go and do that through a telescope chances are you probably didn't and yet you believe in these planets but what are these planets for most people for 99% of people these planets are purely beliefs hearsay information that you got secondhand from other people sure you got them from respected academics and from textbooks that have been written by PhDs and from Nobel Prize winners and from the Discovery Science Channel and this sort of stuff you got them from quote-unquote reputable sources you think but that doesn't change the fact that it's just hearsay and this blurs the line between belief and direct experience and the problem with that is that then you become very self deceived because when I start talking to you about for example contemplation or meditation or self inquiry deriving some fundamental truths about your own existence for yourself people say ah Leo but where's the proof for that where's the evidence and that just tells me right there that they're not conscious of what evidence is evidence is exactly what I'm pointing you to meditation is the evidence you're looking for when you're talking about things within your own psyche for example that is direct experience you can't get more direct than your present experience the only way you can make that mistake is by being so lost in beliefs that you don't even differentiate anymore between what is a belief versus what is a direct experience because in point of fact and it's one of the shocking things you can reveal to yourself is the 99% of everything you hold to be true is purely secondhand information passed down to you as beliefs and you just believe in it and you believe in it mostly not because you have direct evidence of it you don't have any direct evidence of Jupiter you've ever seen any direct evidence of Jupiter what you've got is you've got a sort of a cohesive story a web of belief that you've built belief propping up another belief propping up another belief propping up another belief and then based on this you get a sort of a sense of cohesion and then you say oh well yeah it sort of makes sense everything sort of fits together in my little world view but then what you don't understand is that there are many worldviews that can have cohesion but that doesn't make them true it's possible to create an infinite number of self consistent self cohesive worldviews it doesn't mean that they're right and that's another self deception mechanism right there is judging the correctness of your worldview based on how cohesive it feels that's a false metric you can't do that if you do that then riddle me this how will you distinguish one cohesive worldview from another you see that's the problem there if you have five different self-consistent cohesive worldviews which one of those are you gonna choose how are you gonna arbitrate between all of them you won't be able to is the point in fact you'll just pick the one that you grew up in the one that's closest to your personal preferences and you'll just believe that one and of course that's completely arbitrary but it won't feel that way to you it'll feel completely cohesive and that will be this sort of false sense of reality which your mind is created see what reality really boils down to is just a sense of reality a sense of consistency a sense of solidity these are appearances these aren't facts these are appearances and of course appearances can be deceiving another mechanism is the unwillingness to admit I don't know the human mind loves certainty and it hates uncertainty and unless your mind is trained otherwise it will always try to claim that it knows more than it really does we hate to admit that we don't really know when in fact we don't really know so if I ask you where did the universe come from are you gonna say I don't know probably not you're gonna have some kind of story it came from the Big Bang or Stephen Hawking says this or this guy says that or I have this idea but you're not gonna admit that you really don't know or if I ask you well where did the dinosaurs come from you'll say oh I know that when if they came from evolution we can explain it all away but do you really know and how did they die out oh we can explain that one too it's you know big meteorite came and it hits the earth and everything all the time big dinosaurs died you think that you believe that you've been told that it feels like that fits everything else you've been told but in point of fact you don't actually know these things there's a lot that you don't know and you have to retrain yourself to start to admit that if you want to make progress epistemic ly and notice that people hate admitting that they don't know because as an entire culture were conditioned to think that if we admit that we don't know that means we're deficient or stupid or there's something wrong with us another self-deception mechanism is childhood imprinting and indoctrination this is a huge one which bears a lot of conversation and a lot of explanation I'll just cover it lightly here I'll shoot I'll probably episode on in the future but have you noticed that children get easily indoctrinated literally the mind can get imprinted with ideas if you take a young child and you raise this child in a racist family that child has a almost 100% chance of growing up being a racist why is that is that an accident no because the mind gets programmed imprinted the mind will believe whatever its environment leads it to believe whatever the adults in the environment are talking about and saying generally speaking the child's mind will just pick that up adopt all those beliefs all those core assumptions and especially what the mind will pick up is any kind of religious beliefs or assumptions or metaphysical beliefs or assumptions so a child growing up in an atheist household is very likely to turn out to be an atheist and a child growing up in a religious household is very likely to hold the exact same religious views you're not gonna get a Jewish child born in a in a Muslim family it's not gonna happen and vice-versa it's not gonna happen either why is that because of this imprinting factor and this imprinting factor is so huge and significant that it's it's almost impossible to to articulate how significant it is you that I'm just talking about like other groups of people who get imprinted with ideas no I'm talking about you I'm talking about you and your family you have been imprinted I'm not talking about some bad family that abuses their children no I'm talking about you every single family imprints their child with all sorts of assumptions about reality and those assumptions are extremely difficult to break because the way the mind works is that it's sort of like a blank slate when it starts it can get programmed with anything and so what it does is it just accepts whatever worldviews are given to it it's like the first stuff that you write on a piece of paper you know if you write something on a piece of paper it's completely blank you write something on it it's very easy the first time because the paper was blank now if you go back to it again and you filled your whole page you want to write on some more well now you got a problem because you got to write over stuff that's already there and you've been you've been writing in permanent ink in a sharpie it's really difficult to erase that stuff so literally what happens with most human beings is that they get imprinted for the first 18 to 20 years of their life from birth to 20 let's say they get imprinted with all this stuff their little piece of paper gets completely filled up and then when they get to me and I have to talk to them like I'm talking to you now about a lot of these concepts what do you think happens it's impossible to get any of these concepts to stick because anything that doesn't agree with what's already written on that paper is not gonna get accepted but you know the real trick is that the stuff that got written on the paper in the first place it got written there without any kind of evidence or justification you see people don't get this about the mind the mind isn't using any strong filters or logic to filter out what's written on the paper the first time around all this stuff written on the paper the first time around is just anything that you want if you want you can take a child and you could you could teach him to become a racist you could teach them to become a murderer you can teach them to become an atheist you can teach them to become a Jew a Christian a Muslim a radical a terrorist you know a Nazi what you want all of it is completely open and the child whatever you imprint him with he's gonna actually believe that as if it's reality and he's not gonna know any different because a child doesn't know any better there's no filters this is such a strong mechanism that societies and religions and even science has exploited this for for millennia there's always a battle going on within society about what are we going to imprint the children with and that's a huge political battle because another self-deception mechanism here which is related to this one is what I call this the need for contrast in order for the human mind to grasp something see the human mind cannot grasp something unless it has something else to contrast it against so for example if you're born into poverty that's just like what your mind is gonna take as reality your reality is gonna be a poor impoverished reality and if you're born into richness and wealth and luxury your mind is gonna accept that and it's not gonna know any different you see if you're growing grow if you were born into a society where there's no racism around you like maybe you're in a good neighborhood where there's no racism going on then because of a lack of contrast you're gonna grow up believing that there's no racism in the world whereas if you grow up in the ghetto somewhere where there is a lot of racism then your mind is gonna believe that there's a lot of racism in the world you see because you need the contrast and a lot of the way that humans learn is through contrast so maybe you've been living in a little bubble in your own little country for a long time and then you decide to go traveling to some other radically different country with a different culture and you get this culture shock it's like oh my god these people like eat with their hands and they they wipe their ass with their hands and then like they use chopsticks or they they speak this thing or they have these kinds of manners or this kind of etiquette like these people here bow to you those people eat there food sloppily and make all sorts of noises when they're eating you know all these different things they're all contrasting with what you know from your own culture and that contrast is what kind of shocks you and wakes you up it's the same problem as you know a fish not knowing that it's in water because there's a lack of contrast you take oxygen for granted why is that because most of the time you have plenty of oxygen it's very rarely when you're running out of oxygen like when you're locked into a small closet and you have no way to get out that all of a sudden you start worrying about oxygen and you don't take it for granted anymore because the mind requires contrast to be conscious of things and this is a very effective way that your own mind can deceive you because all it has to do is remove the contrast and then you won't even know that that thing is there for example if you don't have any contrast to reality then whatever you're experiencing seems like reality another mechanism is assumptions this is a huge very general category and there's thousands of assumptions that we make that are false and self-deceptive but the general mechanism of assumptions is the following is that we make assumptions but we're not conscious of the fact that we've made these assumptions so they turn into subconscious or implicit or latent assumptions which are just taken for granted taken as reality and based on this a ton of self-deception gets created specifically I'll point out a couple of really big assumptions that are made that are very self deceptive the entire materialist paradigm is an assumption that a lot of people in our society hold a lot of scientific lean people minded people hold the scientific method is also an assumption people take the scientific method completely for granted they don't think about what it is or why it works or what its limitations are they just tend to assume that Oh scientific method just is the way that we arrive at truth without ever investigating that any deeper and there's a ton of metaphysical and epistemic assumptions that every human being holds and what's really scary is that they don't even know most people don't even know what the word metaphysical or epistemic means so when these words are brought up it's aioli oh I don't have any metaphysical or epistemic assumptions I don't even know what those words mean that does not excuse you for having those assumptions though see this is just the tip of the iceberg you talk about assumptions for four hours there's so many assumptions that people make that deceive them the next mechanism is self evidence or a priori truths in Western philosophy if you've studied it at all then you've heard this word a priori this is a really toxic concept which has led to so much self-deception within Western intellectual tradition but even if you haven't heard the word nevertheless it's still a problem what this means is that it just basically means that there are certain truths that can be known because they're so obvious and so self-evident that they need no empirical investigation you might say that one plus one equals two is an a priori truth because it doesn't even depend on your ability to experience or your ability to run a scientific experiment this is sort of like a logical truth of the mind of course this is complete [ __ ] there are no such thing as a priori truths nothing is known a priori a priori you are completely clueless but the mind loves to attach this label a priori or self evidence to things that it learns later on through experience of course it likes to trick itself by saying oh well that could have been a priori this could have been a priori because that makes it feel more real see when you say something is self evidence that sort of means that it couldn't be any other way and that it's actually obvious when in fact in truth nothing is obvious even one plus one equals two you might think oh that's leo that's so obvious that's not obvious at all if you're very honest and you look back at your life you actually have to work really hard as a child to learn that one plus one equals two and two times two equals four and so on and so forth all that stuff had to be learned and it was challenging to learn and when you were learning it it didn't make sense to you so there was nothing obvious about it when you say something is obvious that actually makes you take it for granted more which is a big problem and this problem is rampant throughout all of science on their self assumption mechanism is emotions emotions are extremely self deceptive because what is an emotion trying to do it's trying to look ii mote motion the word motion is in emotion emotions are about putting you into motion and your body uses emotions to get you moving to save your ass that's why when you stick your hand in a fire you feel some emotion some pain it gets you to move your hand back and you might say well that's kind of like a reflex right maybe that is a reflex but you've got all these other emotions you've got all sorts of fear you've got anger you've got jealousy you've got boredom you got excitement all these emotions are moving you they're manipulating you your minds job is to use these emotions to manipulate you your mind doesn't manipulate you primarily through logic and reason but through emotions which are why emotions are some of the hardest things to master you can become enlightened but you ain't gonna master your emotions for another 40 years mastering emotions some of the trickiest stuff because emotions are our very self deceptive and because they have they have a real punch behind them you see when you're afraid of something so fear is an especially self-deceptive emotion when you're afraid of something then it's very easy for your mind to get you to avoid it so you see if your own mind wanted to really trick you if there was some truth that your mind didn't want you to see where would that truth behind a wall of fear easiest thing in the world take your fear of death you fear death so much that I could hide a hundred billion dollars behind your fear of death and you would never access that money because you would do anything to avoid dying see and your mind will tell you all but that's because if you die that's it that's the end see that's what your mind tells you but why do you believe your mind that's how fear works all fear is completely ilusory there's nothing to fear in life including fear of death and you can discover that for yourself but the only way you can discover that a fears an illusion is by actually passing through it you can't see it while you're on the other side so fear anger boredom these three emotions are especially self-deceptive especially so your mind uses them to manipulate you to avoid doing self-reflection and they are extremely extremely effective have you noticed that it's very hard to use reason to bust through fear and boredom and anger and depression for example it's very hard to reason your way out of fear if you're afraid of snakes good luck handling a snake while reassuring yourself through reason that this snake is not gonna harm me if you're afraid of heights good luck standing on the edge of a tall building all the while telling yourself all this is okay so no it's no big deal is that gonna work no of course not because this is like your Minds primary way of controlling you and it is damn sure that you're not gonna screw that just with some simple reasoning that would be way too easy that's why mastering emotions is so hard because they have this charge despont when things get really emotional all philosophy flies out the window for most people all abstract considerations all notions of truth all notions of morality propriety of kindness of love all that flies out the window as soon as you're angry as soon as you're fearful as soon as you're depressed or anything like that have you noticed that not an accident that's how your mind controls you another self-deception mechanism is not being conscious of your own ego reactions this is closely related to emotions but it's a slightly separate thing have you noticed that your ego reacts in situations where your self agenda is threatened anytime that there's a significant threat to your self agenda your ego reacts with all kinds of emotions it flares up it gets agitated it gets defensive it gets hostile gets angry gets offended it gets upset why is this well because your egos job is to maintain itself and to maintain you as you are and to not allow any kind of change and this doesn't just pertain to physical threats to your survival so it's not that if I just put a gun to your head that you're gonna get angry and upset and afraid of course that's obviously the case but it happens in much more subtle ways for example you could be an academic scientist and you could be working on a book you could be writing a dissertation you could be doing some very serious physical scientific like hard-nosed work maybe you're a physicist and you're doing hard physical work not physical work but I mean you know physicist work and and then you go to a conference and that this conference other physicists are talking some other physicist gets up on stage he starts talking about a theory which conflicts with your theory and all of a sudden you notice yourself getting emotional you're getting heated up you're getting afraid you're getting defensive you're starting to call him names in your mind starting to judge and criticize him and maybe you even want to stand up and shout this person how dare you say these things it's ridiculous what you're saying is ridiculous it's unscientific it's it's preposterous it's lunacy and why do you sort of feel that way because his model is threatening your model and you've been working on this model for five years your entire career is riding on it you've been writing a book for the last three years what's gonna happen to your book if your model gets disproven but of course your minds not gonna make any of this apparent to you the way your mind is gonna react is just with name-calling and criticizing and projecting and demonizing so you're gonna demonize that guy up on the stage even though he might be right because what's your mind really cares about is not the truth but defending your agenda and your agenda is to pay the bills to feed your children to support your wife or your husband with your career that's your primary agenda it's not the truth you like to tell yourself that you're the scientific person who loves the truth but that's a big pile of [ __ ] what you really care about is you care about defending your position and you also care about your intellectual defence of your intellectual positions so you've bought in as the scientist into this theory and now you really think the world works according to this theory so you're not just gonna give that up in a sort of cool rational objective manner not at all you're gonna be very emotional about it and the deception here is that people aren't conscious of this people do not generally acknowledge the egoic reactions which influence everything they're doing and science is especially bad at acknowledging these egoic reactions within science for example science doesn't like to admit the influence of psychology and emotions upon the entire reasoning process because that sort of admits that the reasoning process is corrupt and that it's not the primary process science likes to pretend that emotions in psychology those are secondary factors and that really reason is the primary process no reason is actually the secondary process psychology and emotions and ego that's the primary process but how many scientific books or how many philosophical books talk about ego talk about psychology talk about emotions very few very few and of course you should expect that because why would the mind talk about these things the mind hides all these things so that the mind can go about fulfilling its agenda using size to fulfill its agenda size not about truth size is about advancing humanity first and foremost truth secondarily another deception mechanism is projection this is a huge one projection is what you do when there is something within yourself that you don't want to admit to yourself so what you do is you deny that it's in yourself and you project it out onto others and therefore you demonize those other people for having that so for example people love to project onto terrorists and say all those terrorists look how evil and selfish they are but what about you how evil and selfish are you see you don't want to admit it within yourself so you project it Alun on to the terrorists or you project it out on to the Muslims or you project it out on to some other group of people or you project out on to me as the teacher as a teacher I've been really amazed to see how much projection happens on to me because I interact with thousands of people people write me comments and you send me emails and I read many of them I've read probably over ten thousand comments and pieces of feedback throughout my entire career so far and and wow it's amazing because I see people projecting all their own personal problems and issues on to me because that's what the mine does the mind tends to kind of work off of its own assumptions and its own issues so if you're afraid you're gonna project that fear onto me or if you're angry about something gonna project that onto me or if you're worried about some problem you're gonna project that onto me of course that's a huge self-deception trap especially when it comes to learning about spirituality or about personal development there's gonna be a lot of projecting that happens and you've got to be very careful about being conscious of that or you will not grow properly you're not gonna learn the lessons another mechanism is distraction and red herrings I actually have shot a whole episode about this go check out my episode about distraction and the subtitle for that episode was actually the egos favorite defense mechanism distraction that's right because distraction is so powerful all the ego has to do or the mind has to do is just to to dangle a red herring in front of you and you're gonna go chasing that red herring for five or ten years ignoring the truth ignoring self-reflection it's a very powerful mechanism and there's just so much to be said about it go go watch that episode it's a pretty in-depth episode about distraction crusading is another sub deception mechanism and it also has to do with projection and with distraction have you noticed these people who go on Crusades they love to be defenders of things like morality or religion or science or atheism or rationalism or whatever they're crusading for this they build a whole career around crusading for some kind of cause what is this but a self-deception what is this but a distraction from doing what from self reflecting from doing inner work because when you're crusading against those evil people over there or those deluded people over there what are you not doing you're not looking inwards at your own delusions it's a very sneaky mechanism how about addiction as a mechanism of self-deception a huge one I have a whole episode about addictions called overcoming addiction go check that one out it's also very in-depth episode about all the may can except addiction the real root causes of it and how addiction is basically just a form of distraction and there I talked about drug addiction and porn addiction and sex addiction and TV addiction or an addiction food addiction all these addictions and these are actually the least deceptive of them the most deceptive addictions are the subtle addictions and I actually have a separate episode about subtle addictions which most people don't even realize are addictions the psychological addictions which our society holds as just normal cuz see it's obvious when you're addicted to heroin it's obvious you're a heroin addict when you're due to alcohol it's pretty obvious we're addicted to porn it's also sort of obvious but what's not obvious is when you're addicted to overthinking when you're dictated daydreaming when you're addicted to judging and criticizing when you're addicted to resenting people for their success this sort of stuff very subtle addictions so check out my episode about that for more on that another mechanism is believing that science has figured it all out or that science will figure everything out if given enough time this is a huge one I see these days you know people just tend to say oh well science will figure it out or science has figured it out or you know size is just the best that we can do so Lea what do you expect for me science people just all have science science is the answer to all these questions to all these psychological issues no it's not there are certain things that science doesn't cover at all it's not within the domain of science design it's a limited domain thing it's not all encompassing and then the most important aspects of life science doesn't tackle at all like personal development I mean it can tackle it there's certain fields of psychology and cognitive science that do tackle some of these things but generally not nearly enough that you can actually use that information to actually grow yourself that's a that's a whole another level of of thing that we're talking about another mechanism of deception is having pet theories like that scientist I was talking about pet theories are a really dangerous thing because we overtime as we grow we develop these worldviews and then we tend to want our worldviews to stay the same it's actually uncomfortable for the mind to change worldviews so once I have a theory like evolution once I have a theory like the Big Bang once I have a theory about like quantum mechanics or some molecular thing or I have this thing or what is my pet theories I want them to be that way you know I want it to be true and it seems like it's true but then contrary evidence can come about with more research that starts to disprove these pet theories but of course I like my pet theory more than I care about truth or reality so I'm gonna stick with my pet theory and I'm gonna use rare various kinds of rationalizations to to cling to my pet theory this becomes a huge sticking point for many people a huge source of self-deception and of course not just scientific people do this but religious people do this people in government do this have you noticed how ideological politicians get and they have their pet theories about Oh raising taxes will do this or lowering taxes will do this or gun control will do this or not controlling guns will do that or helping out there you know starting this war is gonna do this and they they don't test any of that scientifically those are just all their pet theories and they just believe in them regardless of any evidence and then of course what they do is they give their own theories special treatment they criticize all the other theories but they don't subject their own pet theories to nearly the same level of rigor or critique and then that leads to self-deception which brings us to confirmation bias as the next soft deception mechanism confirmation bias cherry-picking evidence and also narrative making in general the way the mind works is that it it tends to assume a thing and then build a narrative to fit the assumptions and then it tends to cherry-pick evidence the kind that it wants not the disconcerning kind but the confirming kind to bolster this narrative and this is the classic cognitive bias called confirmation bias this is a huge huge thing I'll talk about it in a dedicated episode the next mechanism is under estimating paradigms and what I call paradigm blindness most people don't appreciate what a paradigm is and I have a whole episode about under staring parrot or how paradigms work go check that one out which goes into great length about the various kinds of paradigms that exist and this phenomenon called paradigm lock or paradigm blindness where you are stuck inside of a paradigm and you're not able to look at evidence outside the paradigm because you don't recognize that you're stuck inside of a paradigm this is a big problem for science a big problem for religion it's a big problem for for all ideologies the next mechanism is taking basic things for granted things like existence life matter energy space time government money people take these things for granted people just assume that oh well these things just are the way reality is couldn't be any other way what is there to know about these things they don't really question them very deeply but actually is questioning of these very most basic things that's that least of some of the most profound insights you could have about reality and it's within these taken for granted very fundamental building blocks of reality that the mind deceives you the most because it can hide so much stuff in these basic elements because it knows that you're not going to question it you're not going to question time you're going to question matter or energy or government or life or existence you're gonna question any of these things that's how your mind gets away with so much another mechanism is question begging this is huge huge and it's really obvious with religious people when they beg question question begins reasoning in a circle it's it's posing a question about something but then answering it and assuming the thing you're trying to actually investigate but it's also a very big problem for philosophy is a very big proper science for example try to get a scientifically minded person to question whether the brain actually is real they will tend to beg the question in that situation because you'll say well what if the brain isn't real and they say well Leo how can it not be real after all we can cut open your skull and we see some some neurons in there so there's the brain there we go proof that the brain is real but that's not proof of the brain is being real that's begging the question I'm asking you those neurons you're looking at as you're looking at them where are they themselves located are the neurons of the brain located and get another brain where are they located you will say oh they're located in a universe and where does how do you know there's a universe because it's in your brain because it's in your mind see it's just it's completely circular logic this is just one example of many other examples I could cite of how people beg the question it's a it's really quite a disgusting and very self biased way of reasoning and it's extremely self deceptive basically your mind is able to get away with with with murder with this sort of question bag and you can construct an entire reality from scratch through question begging the next mechanism is judgment criticism and name-calling this is huge it's not even possible to speak with most people about many of these concepts because they'll immediately judge criticize name call demonize and completely shut down their mind to having this conversation because most people are addicted to judgment and to criticism and our society reinforces that with everything you see on the news with all the political criticism you see around and all the people around you who are so critical and this leads to to the self-deception of closed-mindedness so people so many people are so closed-minded to new ideas that that's why I had to talk about radical open-mindedness so much when I was starting actualised org because like I knew that the idea is that I wanted to present to you guys were just not going to be accepted if it wasn't pointed out to you how closed mindedness works how open lioness works and how important open mindedness is actually being able to do investigation because you see if you're closed minded to something that means you can't seriously go and read a book about it or have a conversation about it or invest $1,000 to do a research experiment into it how are you going to do research if you're already closed minded to the results of the research to be a effective researcher and to be really in for the scientific method to really work it has to be approached with radical radical open mindedness which most people are not able to do if you're a scientific person radical with- is critical for you that's how all new discoveries are made within science and mathematics and logic and these sorts of hard fields it's the most open-minded people who make these discoveries despite all the closed-minded people that try to convince them that they're wrong have you noticed that that's how the history of science works and closely related to that is the next self deception mechanism which I call New Age bias this is the aversion that rational and scientific people have towards whoo New Age seeming ideas or concepts or religious type stuff it's like someone starts talking about chakras and immediately you're like ah chakras ah why are you talking about this stuff it's so on scientific it's and you get so judgmental about it oh it's so new agey oh that's so wishy-washy oh that's such a hippie thing to say that's just a particular form of closed-mindedness which a lot of people have these days and it really keeps them from advancing and growing to the highest levels of personal development you can't really get into spirituality unless you're willing to open yourself up to some of these woowoo New Age concepts because you know what some of them are actually true and some of them are actually really important they've just been sort of ridiculed so much in popular culture because our popular culture is at a very low level of consciousness our popular culture is extremely materialistic and very gross it doesn't talk about subtle stuff that's why when you hear subtle concepts but you're coming from this gross materialistic culture then it sounds like hippy new-age womb stuff and then you just dismiss it as oh it's just nonsense when in fact it's not nonsense you could really benefit from some of those ideas now I'm not saying all of them are true I'm not saying there's not [ __ ] in there there's some [ __ ] mixed in there as well but in general you have to be radically open-minded here if you want to not be self deceived so a lot of people to see themselves because they react against the new-age quality of certain teachings and another sub component of this mechanism is dismissing the occult and mystical and paranormal phenomena it's almost impossible for me to talk about paranormal phenomena with you guys because I will be immediately criticized for it and labeled a hippy and I'll be questioned and torn apart with logic and reason and arguments and all the asking for proof all of this as if this sort of phenomena is subject to that kind of gross arguing and this is sort of armchair philosophy that these so-called skeptics like to do doesn't work that way at all the fact is is that there is some validity to the occult and to mystical and paranormal phenomena again I'm not saying all of it is true but there's some validity there and it's worthwhile for you to be open-minded to that otherwise you're gonna deceive yourself how about the next mechanism blaming scapegoating and demonizing this is very common you see scapegoating done by societies throughout history someone is always blamed for society's problems it's usually a smaller group of people who can't defend themselves some minority group that's how the Nazis did it with the Jews and it was done back in the in the Greek and Roman Roman times and of course it's done to this very day what you're seeing in politics today is a lot of it is just plain scapegoating and that's because the mind hates to take responsibility for its own problems it hates to admit itself that it is the cause of all of its suffering it doesn't like to admit that so a low conscious mind will deceive itself and project outwards and find a scapegoat and then it will blame that scapegoat it will demonize that scapegoat and it will attack that scapegoat and that becomes a huge distraction from doing what turning inwards to investigate how am i the cause of this see and a subcomponent of this is also playing victim so if you're not scapegoating others and blaming others then your victim your playing victim yourself you're thinking of yourself as the victims like oh poor me why was I born with these bad genetics with this bad physical appearance with this low intellect with this problem here with that problem they're such a bad family and this and that I'm not able to do anything I'm not able to grow I'm not able to meditate I can't focus I have this problem I have that problem and then you're stuck and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's extremely self deceptive once you buy into all these victim narratives that you tell yourself and then your mind will use confirmation bias to cherry-pick all the evidence that's around you it'll scan all the disconfirming evidence it'll find all the confirming evidence to confirm all of your victim narratives to yourself the next self-deception mechanism is arguing and debating this one is a huge distraction in part one of this series I talked about the problem with arguing and debating so I won't cover it much here but just to point out to you that so many people distract themselves with arguing and debating that they never it never even occurs to them that they need to be doing work on themselves introspecting contemplating really looking inwards on themselves rather than going out there and debating other people that's the same problem as crusading the next mechanism is false skepticism and debunking a lot of people take on the identity of the skeptic the cynic or the debunker and so what they do is they play the hyper rationalist and they go around and they point out all the stuff that hasn't been a hundred percent conclusively proven with double-blind clinical studies and this so they said oh chakras debunked it's like oh vac you know vaccinations and autism run all debunked and this is debunked and that's a bug in so they just go around debunking everything and it's like acupuncture has been debunked and and meditations been debunked and this thing's been debunked and nothing's been debunked and they think that by doing this at they're defending truth but of course that's all in exteriorization of projection while they're doing that what are they not doing they're not debunking their own minds constructions they're not self reflecting see my episode called true versus false skepticism I cover that a lot of depth there the next mechanism is human species bias this is a this is a very profound self-deception trap then almost everybody commits and especially science prone to this human species bias is basically taking the human perspective of reality as though it were Universal and the only one for example many scientists believe that mathematics is a universal language and that if we can communicate with other alien species let's say there's an alien species some on some distant galaxy or star system we're not going to communicate with it with it in English we're gonna use mathematics and supposedly we can send it some mathematical formulas and we'll be able to figure it out because mathematics is universal there's nothing Universal about mathematics there's nothing Universal about science there's nothing Universal about physics all of this is a human species specific way of understanding reality it's highly contingent upon our neuro chemistry it's highly contingent upon our cultural assumptions our metaphysical assumptions and not only is human understanding not universal it's not even global humans can't even agree with themselves on what reality is and why it is the way that it is and what we should do about it even scientists don't agree with each other about everything so to say that this is universal knowledge there's no such thing as universal knowledge this is a complete taking for granted the only reason that that we tend to assume that our knowledge is universal is because we have it interacted with any other intelligent species in the universe yet and so because we have that long lack of contrast we have nothing to contrast our own opinions and models with we think that we're so great and it's so it's all universal well here's one prediction that I'll make if we ever discover aliens out there intelligent aliens in the distant stars and we make contact with them what we will be learning from them and we'll be shocked to learn is that almost everything we think we know about the universe and nature and reality is highly dependent on our human understanding our human biology psychology and our predispositions it's not at all going to be what those other intelligent aliens come up with their understanding is gonna be completely dependent on their brain chemistry on their culture and a lot of other factors and it will be completely different from us they will have another way of doing science they'll have another way of doing mathematics they'll have completely different ways of interacting with reality like ways you can't even imagine which are gonna be of course dependent on their physiology people don't grasp the significance of this people also sometimes say like Ollie oh but if if everybody in the world just becomes enlightened all the humans there will have peace on earth that's a complete self-deception based on the human species bias because notice what you're assuming there you're assuming that the only thing that really matters is the human species and that as long as everybody becomes enlightened and every human is is peaceful to themselves that that brings peace to the whole earth but what about the hundreds of millions of other species that exist on this planet that you're ignoring are you taking into account the cockroaches the ants the tuna fish the birds the elephants are you taking all of that into account how much violence and evil does the human species perpetuate upon all the other species but see we don't care about that we discount that it doesn't matter to us that when we build a new city we have to kill perhaps a hundred million cockroaches that doesn't matter to us at all so even if everyone's gonna be enlightened there's no way you're gonna just get peace on earth there's no such thing as peace on earth because life is inherently destructive Ferhat to have life you need death to have life you need to have evil you need to have selfishness and that's something you need to start becoming conscious of that's not something that's so easily mmm ended the next mechanism of self-deception is dismissing all of this as mere philosophy my mom loves to use that one on me all the time anytime our conversation gets even a little bit deep about any existential issue it's always like Oh leo but that's just mere philosophy what good is that gonna do me it's just philosophy is that gonna help me feed myself is that gonna help me improve my job no so it's just philosophy huge self-deception another one is pleading well who really knows Leo yeah you're right we can't be certain about anything it's all up for grabs it's all just a wash we can't know anything so you're wrong too everyone's wrong well everyone could be wrong and so we don't know what to do so I'll just go back to watching TV that's a huge self-deception this sort of muddying the waters the mind loves to muddy the waters so much that hey guess what I don't have to do anything I can sit back and watch TV and behave exactly the way that I've always behaved that's perfect for the mind that's the perfect self-deception because all of the mind wants to do is to maintain homeostasis how does it do that by getting you to just do what you've always done so any reason or justification for the mind to keep doing what it's always been doing is perfect because for you to uncover the truth that's something new you see that's new that requires a change a radical shift all the mine that has to do is just to prevent any radical shift or change from happening and it'll guarantee that you will never discover the inner workings of the mind and you'll never shatter this illusion that you're in and the last mechanism I'll mention here for now is all of your cultural preferences so when I was talking about indoctrination the way that happens one of the ways that indoctrination works is of course your culture programs you with all of your preferences the kind of food you like the kind of men and women you find sexually attractive the kind of entertainment that you enjoy television books comedy the kind of jokes that you'll laugh at the kind of religion that you prefer like do you prefer Christianity more or Islam more and you might say Oh leo but I'm an atheist I don't like any religion yeah but which one still if you had to live around some Christians or some some Muslims which one would you prefer see you have those preferences of course you do because your culture imprinted you with those and it's really hard to get rid of your cultural preferences a lot of that stuff is literally hardwired into your skull and it's really difficult to change which is why it's difficult oftentimes to teach non-duality to people because non-duality tends to be very culturally specific there's all these different traditions and schools of non-duality christian ones buddhist ones Taoist ones Jewish ones Islamic ones you know so many and yet every one of those cultures has a preference for its own way so it's really difficult to take a teaching from one culture and then to translate it into another culture it's oftentimes gonna reject it and then people get very closed-minded about that and this becomes a huge self-deception because they can't see past their own culture because your mind will just accept whatever culture was imprinted into it as the best one no one ever asks themselves wait a minute is my culture really the best one what if it's the worst one why do I feel like it's the best one could that just be our 'but rarey that I was just imprinted if I was like born in Australia wouldn't I believe Australian cultures the best or if I was born in the Middle East wouldn't I believe Middle Eastern culture is the best of course I would because that's how the mine works it just adopts whatever it's fed first it's really that simple but people don't get that they cling to their culture and it's like no we got to preserve our culture our culture is so important I read an article online the other day that the French president in this article he was extolling the virtues of French culture and the French baguette and he actually got like some World Heritage Foundation I don't know the name of the foundation but some like important world foundation has actually inducted the French baguette piece of [ __ ] bread the French baguette and the recipe for how to make French baguettes into they're like cultural archives to preserve that culture because we don't ever want it to get lost because to the French the baguette is so important I mean it's ridiculous that the French president would even be talking about this is ridiculous you know of all the things you could be talking about in the universe that you know of relative significance you spend your time talking about a French [ __ ] baguette and how important it is and of course I'm not picking on the French here I mean every culture does this American culture does this and Japanese culture does this Asian culture it doesn't matter what culture you are because cultures are highly biased of course they are because culture is our largest like collective egos and of course a collective ego also exists within every individual that's how the collective ego is maintained you are its host so to speak it's like the virus inside of you that's where it lives you're the medium through which it spreads so I have only covered about half of the list I still have about 30 more self-deception mechanisms to talk about but it's taking me longer than I anticipated so I think what needs to happen here is I have to shoot a part three I didn't want to I thought I get it all done in just two parts but I can see that there's so much more or left to talk about because um each one of these takes time to explain and even here I'm just breezing through them I'm barely even scratching the surface of each one of these so there's gonna be a part three coming next week so stay tuned for that and this is gonna be it here what I want you to notice as far as these self-deception mechanisms is I want you to start to notice them within yourself I want you to start to notice them around people who are around you within your culture notice them happening notice how sneaky and tricky they are notice how difficult it is to change your behavior such that you're not falling into these traps constantly over and over again you see it's not about just avoiding this trap once in your life many of these traps happen to you on a daily basis you have to avoid them every single day over and over and over again it's like walking through a minefield and it's a very long minefield to walk and it's very tricky so don't give yourself too much credit just because you hear me talking about all this does not make you immune to it this is like step one of you successfully navigating this minefield is just learning you're inside a minefield most people don't even know they're inside a minefield so yeah that's a very important fact to learn but that doesn't solve your problem does it now you need very accurate testing equipment a mine detector you need a lot of really good ones that you're gonna use to slowly get yourself through this thing so make sure you stay tuned for next week for more of these maps of where the mines are so you can navigate your way around them alright that's it for today please click the like button for me right there please come check out actualize that work as well look at the stuff I have on my website that's exclusive I've got the blog with exclusive content and some exclusive videos that I'm posting there you can't find anywhere else I've got the forum come check out that chat with people share your ideas share questions share your frustrations and confusions check out the life purpose course check out the book list the book list has a lot of information on it and books that will help you to navigate this minefield and lastly just stick around with me for a lot more in-depth coverage of each one of these elements so there's going to be a part three but then in the future you know in the next year or two as I'm shooting more content I will be picking out some of the most important of these self deception mechanisms just like I've done in the past and I'll be shooting dedicated episodes about those and that's gonna be very helpful to you so make sure you stay tuned for that you