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[Music] you I'm really excited about this topic of self-deception because I personally think that this is the most important topic that I have ever covered throughout all of my episodes this is the one this is the mother topic for me this is the one topic that spawns all the other topics your mind is inherently self deceptive if you are a freshman philosophy student in university one of the first philosophers that you'll hear about and probably read about is Rene Descartes he was a 16th century French philosopher mathematician and scientist he amended the Cartesian coordinate system that you use in geometry he invented analytical geometry but he was also a pretty influential philosopher in fact probably one of the most influential European philosophers even to this day most of the last 400 years of philosophy in the West has been a sort of a debate back and forth with Descartes and that's why they talk about it with freshman philosophy students but the reason I say that is because see Rene Descartes did a very interesting thing and that he began his philosophy by doubting absolutely everything or at least that's what he claimed so he would sit down and he would question everything he would question sense-perception he would question the external world he would question the existence of God he would question the existence of himself everything absolutely everything would come under doubt under skepticism and his idea was that he's gonna create a philosophy that overcomes that if it's possible built on a indubitable foundation and so one of his chief doubts is what's called this evil diamond doubt and this is that he imagined an evil demon who can tinker with your brain and he can program your brain with all sorts of ideas he can basically screw around with all your perceptions and all your thoughts and everything so that what you're seeing out here maybe it's just an illusion maybe you're just in the matrix and this evil demon has you completely under his spell so if that's the case what can we really know and he says ah but there's still one thing that we can know even if we assume that there is this evil demon and that one thing is that cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am which really means that if I'm able to doubt the very fact that I'm doubting means that there has to be one who is doubting so the evil demon can deceive me about all sorts of things but he has to be deceiving somebody after all that's what it means to be deceived is that you're someone who is deceived or at least that's how we thought now there's there's problems with that line of reasoning as you know if you studied non duality but the point here being is that see philosophers like to hypothesize about all sorts of crazy and outlandish doubts like this evil demon doubt and they will be skeptical about all sorts of things like well maybe we know this thing but maybe we don't know this thing maybe we're wrong about that thing but the one thing that almost no philosopher takes seriously is the most important thing to take seriously which is my number one most important principle of life and that is is that your mind is inherently a self-deception machine its job is to produce and concoct self-deceptions we don't need an evil demon we don't need a brain-in-a-vat we don't need to be in a matrix or in a computer simulated virtual reality we don't need these kind of outlandish doubts we have a very realistic and very plausible doubt right here the most important one which nobody takes seriously of course of course they don't because the whole point of self-deception is that you don't take it seriously otherwise it wouldn't be a successful self-deception your own mind is the evil demon that's it the extent of this self-deception is utterly total it's hard for me to put into words just how total it is I have to stand up here for hundreds of hours talking about all the nuances and intricacies of how your mind deceives itself and in a sense that's all that actualized at or really is and will be going forward in the future is just me talking about every possible way in which you deceive yourself and you going oh haha I see oh that's that's so enlightening because that's all that there is here to this game called life it's just self-deception within a self-deception within a self-deception within a self-deception and we don't need outlandish philosophical or science fiction scenarios like the carts or you know some people don't take the cart seriously and they say oh well it's just that's just mere philosophy but when you say oh well what about what if we're all living in a virtual reality and people take that a little bit more seriously because we've got computers now they're getting advanced there's more virtual reality systems that are pretty lifelike these days although this are pretty crude but they're getting better and so you can make an argument that well you know in in 50 years 100 years maybe we'll get there and maybe it'll be impossible to distinguish virtual reality from real reality and so they take that doubt seriously but they don't take the most important doubt seriously which is that your mind your mind has complete power over you and it always has since the very beginning of human history the number one biggest mistake in life is assuming that your own mind can be trusted this is not the case and in fact uh I started keeping a list of these what I call laws of epistemology because what we're talking about here is epistemology theory of knowledge how do you know anything how do you know that what you know is reliable and so I started coming up with this list of laws and the number one at the top of my list is that your own mind is inherently self deceptive that's the first law of epistemology your mind will use every opportunity to deceive you no assumption of your mind can be trusted no matter how obvious or self-evident it seems and in fact if you think that something is self-evident or obvious or it doesn't bother or doesn't warrant further investigation then you can be very confident that that right there is your self-deception the minds capacity for self-deception is total and in fact the breadth and depth of the self-deception helps the self-deception to remain a deception because if it was just a small little self-deception then you'd be easy for you to spot it and to say oh well look that's where I'm tricking myself that's where I'm fooling myself but when it's total when it's deep beyond your ability to comprehend and to imagine when it would take me hundreds of hours of talking or thousands of pages of writing on this topic to explain it all you can see how that actually helps the self-deception escape detection and that's precisely what your mind is up to your mind wants to construct a reality without you being aware that it meaning you is constructing the reality because your mind and you are the same thing so this is a very unique situation the way self-deception works because you are tricking yourself you are the very mechanism by which you come into existence a strange loop as it was as it were now a corollary of this law of epistemology is that you don't need to worry about other deception meaning you don't need to worry about other people deceiving you or tricking you you don't need to worry about Alex Jones types and conspiracy theorists or your boss or your government tricking you of course all those people can trick you and do and and will that's how reality works but the only way that they can trick you successfully is first if you trick yourself and in fact being worried about other people deceiving you is itself part of the self deception that is corrupting your own mind you see because as long as your own mind can fabricate enemies out there for you to fight against that's perfect because your mind then is oriented outwardly and that means it's fighting and chasing out they're completely distracted by all these red herrings conspiracy theories Flattr theories you know moon landing conspiracy theories whether kind of other conspiracy theories are popular these days you know all of that is just a distraction from what from realizing that you are your own greatest conspiracy theory your entire life is one giant conspiracy theory but of course nobody wants to look into that it's much more entertaining for the mind to go look at the conspiracy theory about the Flat Earth or about the moon landing or about aliens or something like that and I'm not saying that those things are necessarily false I'm just saying you have to get your priorities straight those are just baby deceptions even if all of those were true if we actually did live on a flat earth that would be peanuts compared to the conspiracy theory that is you and your life what I'm talking about here with self-deception is not just you personally bullshitting yourself here and there I'm not just talking about a psychological level of self-deception I'm talking about self-deception that goes all the way to the bottom it goes of course you know it includes all the personal self deceptions and [ __ ] that that you think and you believe and all the social and cultural [ __ ] that we believe but it goes way deeper than that it goes beyond psychological level beyond the sociological level to the physical level and even beyond the physical level to the metaphysical level it affects what you consider reality to be it affects the very fabric and structure of reality consider how easy it would be for your own mind to fool you this is something that people really underestimate they don't take this problem nearly as seriously as they ought to because they don't think it through so let's think this through how easy how easy would it be extremely easy once you see everything that the mind has control over it could construct an unbreakable illusion an illusion that would appear indistinguishable from reality how so well consider your mind holds all the power it renders all of your perceptions it governs your motivations your desires and your hatreds it governs your sleep your hunger your sex drive your need for safety it governs your logic and your thinking it governs your emotions it governs your sense of certainty and doubt it governs your memories your beliefs and your narratives it governs your interpretations it governs your judgments your criticisms it governs what you will and won't debate and argue about it governs your standards of evidence it governs how you assign probabilities to various truth statements it governs what you focus on it governs what you consider real versus illusory and it governs even your imagination so think about all of this stuff that your mind is in control of I'm not merely talking about cognitive biases here generally in psychology and within the self-help field we acknowledge that there are self I mean the cognitive biases and there's a list of them you can find them on Wikipedia 20 or 30 or so commonly known cognitive biases such as confirmation bias and self-serving bias also as biases like this and that's generally known within psychology and psychology generally agrees that yeah your mind is pretty tricky and it can it can deceive you to believing something but but that's not nearly as deep as what I'm talking about that's just at the psychological level that only scratches the surface of the depth of this problem what I'm talking about here is much much much deeper I'm talking about self-deception that goes all the way to the existential level that effects what you think you are who you are what the world is how reality works everything it affects physics it affects science it affects psychology affects logic it affects everything and make sure that you understand me here that I'm not just talking about non-duality here I'm not merely building up to enlightenment I've talked about enlightenment enough and quite honestly I'm bored talking about it so that's not what I'm talking about here with self-deception self-deception is a much broader notion than just me helping you to to grapple with enlightenment of course that a big part of it but that's not the only part of it your self-deception goes way beyond merely your unenlightened and your not knowing what you are and who you are existentially it affects your relationships your career it affects all your emotions it affects all your beliefs I like everything everything you call life he's affected by this every social institution every interaction with every human being your attitude towards every single object that you've ever encountered so we're talking about much more than just becoming enlightened here we're talking about like the operating system of the human mind and all of its functions so ever we're talking everything so notice that let's say let's just say as a hypothetical you're in a giant room and in this giant room there's a curtain and there's a giant elephant behind the curtain in fact this elephant is so giant that the curtain is only covering a portion of the elephant's ass the elephant's ass is so big the curtain does even cover the whole thing so to pull back the curtain and to look underneath and to see this elephant that would be like overcoming yourself deception and your minds job is to prevent you from ever pulling back that curtain and you might think well Leo if I really want to I can just go and pull the curtain back and just look at the elephant no problem there it's pretty obvious you can't hide such a huge elephant in plain sight in the same room with me but again you're under estimating just how much power the mind holds to see just when you get the desire to go over there and pull back the curtain your mind can just flip a switch and boom your desire falls away you don't have a desire to see the elephant anymore or you don't even care about the curtain now you have a desire to eat food and have sex and so you don't care about any elephants anymore you just care about eating insects or you tell yourself okay I can beat this I can beat the the eating in the sex so you're just about to go to pull across the curtain and all of a sudden now you get very sleepy and now you gotta go take a nap and then after you wake up from the nap you've forgotten all about this elephant and this curtain and in fact your mind controls all your memories so it can easily wipe away any memories it wants it can easily play with those it can select which memories it wants to remember so rather than remembering the elephant and the curtain and this whole procedure it will get you to think about some some other idea something you saw on TV so your minds gonna be filled with ideas about oh I saw this movie and I had sex with that person and wouldn't it be nice to go to some tropical vacation and so you have all this you're daydreaming cuz your mind can control all your thoughts and all your dreams it can also control all your emotions they can control all your motivations your mind can rationalize anything it wants to with logic in with thinking so your mind can say something like oh well do you really need to go and look at this elephant after all there's probably nothing special about this elephant anyways you've seen elephants in the zoo so what difference does it make whether you see this often or you don't ah don't worry about it let's go play video games and so off you go playing video games for the next five years do you see how much power the mind has the mind doesn't just have psychological power it even has physical psychosomatic power such that when you go and if you're really adamant like no damn it I'm gonna pull back that curtain and I'm gonna look at this elephant and as you're pulling back that curtain your mind can actually trigger your body to have a physical reaction it can give you panic attack they can give you a heart attack he can give you a toothache it can give you a cold it can reduce your immune system such that you catch a cold and then you're too busy with your cold to worry about the elephant see it has all the strings your mind is the ultimate puppet master over you when you think you're controlling it actually it's the one that's controlling you that's how tricky this stuff is ask yourself can I trust my own mind am i deceiving myself and listen carefully for the answer what does your mind tell you oh of course you can trust me of course why wouldn't you trust me after all I am you I'm looking out for you so if you can't trust me who can you trust everything's in order here don't worry about this is just philosophy this is just Leo and his stupid philosophy this is just a waste of time let's go back to living life why worry about these sorts of abstract hypothetical philosophical considerations but who said that your mind do you see the circularity here the whole problem is the circularity of this it's viciously circular when I tell people that maybe you're totally self deceived what do people do they go inside and they check wait a minute maybe he's right maybe I am self deceived they quickly check and they said nah no no I'm not really self to see other people yeah sure other people are self to see but not me I couldn't be self deceived after all if if I was deceived I'd know about it but who are you asking who are you listening to who are you trusting if we're suspicious of the mind is it enough that we just asked the mind hey can I trust you and then it says yes of course you can and then we said okay good I can trust you then is that enough to overcome this problem no you're not grasping the depth of the problem yet this is the same for all Elmas as asking the fox guarding the henhouse hey if I go on vacation are you gonna take good care of all my chickens what's the fox gonna tell you of course you go go enjoy your vacation yeah go play some video games go go laugh it up go go have a blast go have a party I'll take real good care of your chickens and you like a fool just believe him that's the problem here people think that like Leo if I was deceiving myself surely I would know it oh yeah how you might know it if you're assuming that you are deceiving yourself in a low fidelity way so you're assuming a low quality deception like if some fool was trying to deceive you he would do a piss-poor job of it and you would be able to spot it and say aha ah there it is that's a deception I see you but that's only with a poor low quality deception try to up the ante try assuming a high fidelity deception try to assume that the thing deceiving you is way more intelligent than you infinitely more intelligent than you imagine that this self-deception that we're speaking of was designed by God himself with infinite power and now you start to get a little bit of a taste of the depth of this problem because how can you know that you are not succumbing to that degree of self-deception a self-deception so good that it's literally indistinguishable from reality a degree of self-deception so total that there is nothing to compare it against such that it feels completely real completely objective you see the first rule of successfully deceiving yourself is to tell yourself that self-deception isn't a big problem and that if I was self deceived I would easily know about it and I would easily overcome it and so therefore there's nothing really to worry about that's how it begins that's how this whole thing begins that's like the kernel of this massive tree of self-deception that arises up out of your mind it starts with that little seed with you believing that self-deception isn't really a thing at least not for me yeah other people of course to see themselves but not me I'm smarter than those people I'm not a fool I'm not self-deluded like those religious nuts or those cults or those political leaders or those crazy people I'm not like that I'm different I'm intelligent I'm good at detecting my own self deceptions because I'm reasonable because I'm scientific because I'm rational because I'm logical or whatever other things you tell yourself that right there is where it all begins and then from that thousand other self-deceptions sprout you see the mind needs to tell itself this first thing because if it can get away with that look it can get away with almost anything because once you don't take self-deception seriously that means your own mind can just fabricate whatever it basically wants and you're gonna believe it and you're not gonna question it and you're not gonna self reflect to ask hey wait a minute did I construct this myself am i bullshitting myself you're not gonna check because you've already bought into the idea that you don't [ __ ] yourself because well you're just not taking this very seriously you're thinking of this as a philosophical problem as some abstraction something disconnected from your actual life but what if that's not the case what if what I'm talking about here is not a science fiction fantasy but this is the chief thing that you must worry about in life could that possibly be the case see this right here is true skepticism not the phony kind of skepticism where people point fingers at other people say oh you're full of [ __ ] and you're full of [ __ ] that's easy to do it's easy to point to others and to say that they're full of [ __ ] the question is can you point the finger back at yourself and really investigate the source of your own [ __ ] the mind has co-opted all of the tools that I talked about above all the the strings that it has it controls your emotions and your thoughts and your judgment and your memories and your perceptions everything it's co-opted all of those to serve you in a way it's doing you a favor it's serving you but the problem is that when it serves you it's not serving the truth and so we see that there's this fundamental disconnect between serving the self which is the entire process of life being alive to be alive means serving yourself all the time to keep yourself alive against the forces of nature which are hell-bent on destroying you versus the truth and perhaps the truth has nothing to do with you staying alive and maybe in fact these things are antagonistic and maybe they actually go against each other maybe there's sort of a tug-of-war between the two now you might say but leo why would my own mind be so tricky why would it need to deceive me it must have a good reason right otherwise what you're talking about here well you just can't take it seriously just sounds a little bit outlandish and a little bit abstract well yes it sounds outlandish and abstract if you take existence for granted if you take objective reality for granted if you assume that there is such a thing as existence and objective reality and that stuff just exists and just is the way that you think that it is then yeah sure why would the my need to deceive you but what if we consider a different alternative what if nothing really exists what if everything is relative what is what if perspective defines reality what if exists the self is predicated on fabrication and deception after all this is the entire problem of reality in a nutshell how does something come out of nothing where did it all come from why is it here how did it get here how is creation possible at all well most people take this completely free ranted but if you just go along with me here and consider this other alternative consider the alternative that actually there's nothing and after things to come into being they can only come into being through one mechanism deception deception isn't just something you do to trick other people or to trick yourself deception start to think of this as not a psychological mechanism but an actual physical mechanism or a metaphysical mechanism it's the mechanism of creation how does God create the world not by arranging a bunch of atoms and molecules not like that God does it through deception through self-deception now you might wonder well Leo why would God need to deceive himself well think about it how does God come into being and if there is only one thing which is reality or the universe because reality to catch-all term for everything which includes everything including God then God couldn't be separate from reality itself so if there's just one thing how does that one thing differentiate itself into a billion trillion infinite number of other things by tricking itself into thinking that it's not one thing but that is a individual thing that it's not the whole but that it's the part and so through deception God creates infinite form including you and me that's the trick that's the magic trick it's really the only way God could create everything including himself and it has to be a self-deception notice it's not that God is deceiving you is that God is deceiving itself because there is no you and God that would be two things there's only one thing this one thing can take on many forms only by tricking itself into thinking that it's limited that it's finite rather than infinite and so through this process deception literally becomes the mechanism of creation and it must be self-deception notice God can't deceive someone else because God is all there is because one thing is all there is reality is all there is reality can't deceive something outside of itself reality must deceive itself to come into existence so what we're talking about here is is not just psychological stuff we're talking about how the entire universe came into being how you came into being and of course we're not just talking about how you came into being but we're also talking about how you live your life and why you live your life the way you do because when your entire sense of being is predicated upon deception then of course your entire attitude towards reality is pretty is is based on deception and therefore that's how you live you self deceive every single day there are big self deceptions and little self deceptions one self deception within another within another within another it's a giant nest of self-deception in a sense that's what you are your whole body and mind and everything is just built out of self-deception that's like the material of which you are made at least that's what you get if you stop assuming that reality is objective-c because if you assume there is such a thing as objective reality then none of this makes sense you don't need any of this but when you stop assuming that then all the sudden this very interesting new possibility opens up to you it's that self-deception is much more powerful of a force than you ever assumed it wasn't just about lying or cheating a little bit here and there manipulating someone over there you know pulling someone over pulling something over on someone over here it's not just this little stuff it's it's much more than that you're actually changing reality itself with your self deceptions that's how powerful this could be and of course the greatest self-deception is that you are real important and must survive that's the mother self-deception that's you literally you are the chief self-deception and then all the other self deceptions are built upon that because hey without a self there is nothing to deceive without a self there's nothing to do without a self there's no one to care so of course if the mind was trying to deceive you and the only way you came into existence is through a deception then what's the last thing that you're willing to admit is a self-deception the self which is precisely the problem that Rene Descartes ran into he doubted everything but he couldn't doubt the self and that's because he had too limited of imagination he was looking too far into some outlandish theory about evil demons and you know there's no evil demons we don't need evil demons all we need is we need the mind the mind does it all and we need a good reason for why the mind needs to do it and that reason is existence creation how does creation happen how does something come out of nothing this is it this is the mechanism and then on top of that is built the entire web of lies that is the rest of your life consider the possibility that lying is actually much more useful than truth in many situations we like to tell truth as something Noble and idealistic and something to aspire to but what most people don't understand is that really they only like truth in name the only like truth so long as they think it's serving them and of course to pull off a successful self-deception what does my need to do the mind needs to get a hold on this notion of truth ideally if you really want to deceive yourself what you would do is you would flip truth and falsehood completely around such that what was false you would call truth and what was truth you would call false and so you would actually make a big show of loving truth you would be a lover of truth a defender a Crusader of truth when in fact the thing that you call truth is actually falsehood you see how this works the mind just flips everything on its head why do people lie to get what they want it's because they're pressured they're put into a corner and they could be advantaged if they lie in that situation to save themselves to earn more money to have more sex to get a little bit more pleasure to save a few dollars here or there that sort of stuff that's why you lie because it serves you the mind lies because that's what you need to stay alive and after all if you're not alive then what is there there's nothing see see it's the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy it generates its own meaning life generates its own meaning this way just by the fact that you are alive you need to stay alive and therefore all of life becomes meaningful now at least there's an illusion of meaning because now there's this cycle of staying alive because as soon as that cycle stops well all of a sudden you know if you're dead you don't have the ability to worry about being alive or not or anything else so as long as you are alive all your attention goes on staying alive but what if there's something beyond living something beyond staying alive we'll see most people they never access that because they're so preoccupied with just being pragmatic and just living and that's why people dismiss philosophy and self-help and spirituality and just say oh well that's all just airy-fairy stuff let's just get down to earth let's just be scientific let's just be concrete let's not talk about all this sort of you know speculative stuff after life death and life and I mean who really knows leo this is just all philosophy let's just be pragmatic what I know is that when I'm hungry I want to eat and what I know is that when I'm horny I wanna have sex and what I know is that money gets me freedom and what I know is that if I have a good job then that's happy that makes me happy and if I have a good family that makes me happy that's what I know that's real down earth stuff that's how most people think or maybe that's just part of a larger lie the lie of being alive see the problem with lies is that they always backfire they only work in the short-term they're never sustainable so people who are hyper pragmatic and want to live very pragmatically it might seem like that's a good strategy at first because you're avoiding all this mental masturbation but are you really or are you just gonna drown slowly in all of your own lies and self-deceptions as you're living this pragmatic lifestyle of course you are and then what that's gonna lead to is ultimately depression lack of fulfillment frustration emotional problems neuroses all that stuff because all that stuff is linked to all your self-deception and just the fact that you're denying that you're pragmatic way of living is untenable and ultimately unsustainable well just because you deny that well that's just more more of yourself deception you can deny it all day long but you're gonna suffer for it because you're fundamentally disconnected from reality from truth see your minds job is to keep you alive and I don't just mean to keep you alive physically in fact primarily your minds job is not to keep your body alive the way that people think but to keep the idea of you alive people think that the body is more fundamental than the idea of you because they think that the idea of you resides in the body no the idea of you is far more fundamental than your body all sorts of stuff can happen to your body but what the mind really cares about is the idea of you and preserving that at all costs preserving your self-image which is precisely why you can find examples throughout history and different cultures where people abuse and mutilate their own bodies do all sorts of stuff to their bodies which are physically painful and even harmful and counterproductive to physical survival make you no physical survival harder but yet they play into the self image the idea of them because really the body is just another part of the idea of you because what you are is not a body but this conglomeration of conceptual ideas which is why people become martyrs you might think like oh I becoming a martyr that's such a selfless act no it's not becoming a martyr for most people is a very selfish act because actually the reason they become a martyr is because they have some idea of them that martyr ship plays into so they see themselves as being a modern how they will live on in the memories of their followers and their fans in the history books and maybe in some afterlife they will live on as the idea of them being a martyr and that to them is more precious than actually remaining physically alive so they will go and martyr themselves for that and they will do it happily because it's not about the body survival is about surviving the idea of you make sure that you understand that I'm not merely talking about enlightenment here yes of course we're talking about enlightenment but that's just like the most obvious example and actually in a sense this itself is sort of a red herring because as you're focused only on enlightenment you're not hearing all the other things that self-deception is applying to in your own life and I'll point out some of those to you after a quick intermission so I'm gonna take a little break you don't go anywhere and I'll be back notice that most of the things that you love in life are self-deceptions here's a quick list money and wealth ownership security laws and rights history movies love porn time language religion science good and bad fame power confidence meaning and purpose ideologies of all stripes family corporations Nations equality rank status friendships culture videogames what is all of this but self-deception let's pick out a few of these and talk about them so for example ownership the concept of ownership is the most absurd self-deception ever you actually believe that you own your dog that you own your house you will actually pull out a certificate of title that you own your house or you own your car and you'll point to this piece of paper as though it means that you own something as if ownership is actually possible as if it's possible within reality for one piece of reality to own some other piece of reality it's complete absurdity and yet we take ownership so seriously how about security security and power this one's very interesting people think they have security they buy a lot of guns that's popular these days people buy an arsenal of 2030 guns because they want to feel secure and they want to feel powerful and they think that this this leo this surely this is not some abstraction this is tangible power and military dictators and rulers and governments they have mass power they have tanks and they have nuclear weapons and they think that this is power this is tangible this is a complete self-deception there's no such thing as security all of us are going to die all of us are going to end up in exactly the same place there's no security to be had you can't predict what's really gonna happen to you and in fact the more power you think you acquire the more insecure you become you know who the most insecure people the dictators the people with the biggest Arsenal's that's why they have the biggest Arsenal's to begin with is because they're insecure because they think someone's gonna take them out and they can't go to bed to sleep at night because they're worried someone's gonna stab in the back they can't eat their feet their favorite food because they're worried something's gonna poison their food take a look at Donald Trump in the news that came out recently that he at heats at McDonald's why is he at McDonald's because he's worried that someone's gonna poison his food you see it's insecurity it's all insecurity all power is based upon insecurity it's a complete self-deception you think you're gonna get more powerful by amassing more guns or something no you're just very insecure and you're fooling yourself because no matter how many military planes you have or how many bombers you have or how many nuclear weapons you have you've still got to worry about someone taking you out you got to worry about a COO look of Vladimir Putin he has arguably the largest wealth of anyone in the world he's estimated to be one of the richest people in the world over two hundred billion dollars in private wealth and he's got a pretty powerful army and all that and he's got a pretty strong stranglehold over the government Russia but then again this guy has to be extremely insecure because he knows that if he takes his eye off the ball even for a minute somebody else is gonna come in and take all his power lock him in jail seize all his funds so he's got to keep an iron fist on that thing otherwise he's all gonna unravel and of course that's how it always is and in the end it always ends up unraveling the only question is will will he be alive for the unraveling how about laws and rights Human Rights moral rights legal laws or entire legal systems is all based on self-deception there's no rounding these laws but human consensus there's no such thing as human rights this is an invention to make you feel more secure because see it's all about self survival and because you want to survive and feel secure you invent or we as a collective society invent this notion of human rights there's no such thing we just came up with it we invented the whole thing and yet we've convinced ourselves that this stuff is actually real how about movies what are your favorite movies you like star wars you like Lord of the Rings what do you like you like TV shows Game of Thrones what do you like it's all fiction it's all deception you're sitting there watching pixels on a screen believing tricking yourself into thinking that this is actually real you get sucked in for a few hours and then you come back out and you say oh man that was an amazing self-deception of course you don't tell yourself that but that's basically what's happening is the self-deception how about novels fiction novels same thing how about porn same thing you're sitting there drinking off two pixels on a screen convincing yourself that this is real tricking your body and your mind using your imagination and it's just a virtual simulation it's a self-deception you're literally jerking off to pixels of light how about science oh man is that a can of worms full of self-deception it's all I need to shoot a whole separate episode just about the sub deceptions of science so we'll skip that for now how about Fame talk about self-deception what is fame fame has no substance to it ask yourself what fame is this idea that somehow you have more value than other people and somehow you're more important and that just because people like you and because people can recognize your face on the street or on a magazine somewhere that somehow this adds to your value into your satisfaction and to your enjoyment of life subserved it's a complete fiction how about confidence confidence is just all a con game it's all self-deception to be confident you just have to deceive yourself that you're gonna succeed in it you're gonna you're gonna do it you're gonna make it how about family oh man even family is a complete self-deception think of what family really is you have actually convinced yourself that there is some kind of special connection between you and those other few human beings which you selected out based on some kind of genetic similarity based on DNA do you think that there's some sort of special connection there and then you got to treat them in some special way rather than the way that you treat all other human beings or even the way that you treat a coffee table there is no more connection between you and your mother than there is between you and a coffee table it's all one thing it's all that of the exact same substance there's nothing special about your family that's just an illusion that the mind creates because your family is a very big and important component of your ability to survive how about Nations and corporations what are these but fictitious entities you think you're American you think you're Japanese you think you're Australian you think you're Norwegian you think you're German you think you're African all these what are these these are these are just completely fabricated identities completely fabric even the very country itself the border of the country is just an imaginary line that someone sitting in a room drafted up how about equality you think equality is real do you value equality and fairness and egalitarian ISM and democracy these are all self-deceptions there's nothing equal about reality reality just is what it is and then you try to equalize well that's your thing that's your agenda the reason you want equality is so you get to live a better life for yourself that's part of your pragmatic agenda of course I shouldn't need to tell you how rank and status social status military status any kind of titles that you get all of this is just self-deception and of course culture culture is self-deception everything about culture is self-deception and video games you like video games what is that you're sitting there at a TV screen playing some game for 10 hours some RPG you're so engrossed in this virtual world that you believe you're actually inhabiting it that you're inside of it you're failing to distinguish between the virtual and the real and of course the more real it looks the better it feels to you because that just heightens the depth of the self-deception which is why video games are having bigger and bigger budgets ballooning budgets cost more and more hundreds of millions of dollars to create because everyone wants photorealistic graphics which drives the whole market why because that deepens the illusion everything in life is about deepening the illusion and so that's what's happening in all of these categories so we're not merely talking about enlightenment here I want you to see that this this notion of self-deception is is just so broad it's so broad and it's so deep you could spend years studying self-deception in each one of these categories and there will be some valuable stuff for you to discover there so also it's important to point out that even the sources of knowledge that you would think are actually aligned with truth are also really just serving the pragmatic survival agenda and they are thoroughly corrupted by self-deception so science logic and mathematics are corrupted by self-deception so is philosophy psychology and medicine and history and government and economics and business and marketing and even personal development and of course religion and spirituality and of course of course non duality the very process of talking about self-deceptions is itself riddled with self-deceptions because that's what's needed to pull off a successful self-deception you see the mind has to cover its own tracks it has to fudge its own loose ends so you can't see how the magic trick is made that's precisely what makes it such a compelling magic trick if you see how the magic trick is happening that Rob's it of its magic so in a sense you want reality to trick you that's what creates all these illusions that's why you can sit there playing a video game and actually think that it's real that's why you can sit there jerking off to porn and think that it's real you actually want that deception you don't want the truth that would ruin your jerk-off session if always in the back of your mind you kept telling yourself I'm a man but these are just pixels on a screen that would ruin the fun same thing with playing a video game or reading a novel those are just letters on a page you don't want to know that you want to be wrapped up in the story in the illusion and knowledge itself is part of the self-deception it has to be you see because knowledge is a dangerous thing because there's really two types of knowledge there's your ordinary conventional knowledge which is all the stuff they teach you in school in university on your job and other places like that and that that knowledge is not too dangerous the mine doesn't care about that knowledge generally lets you get away with that but what the mind really does care about is it cares about self knowledge it cares about meta knowledge knowledge about the very mechanism of how knowledge works otherwise known as epistemology it really cares about that so see the mind is extremely careful to withhold all meta knowledge from you such that you use knowledge to grasp onto content out in the world so you can have knowledge of computer programming you can have knowledge of of some government thing you could have knowledge of some way to cook a recipe so this is just all harmless knowledge but the real knowledge is the knowledge of how you're acquiring this knowledge and why you're doing all that that's what I call meta knowledge that's the mechanism of knowledge itself that's self reflective awareness and that's what the mind really withholds from you and that's what society with holds from you and if you wonder like well Leo why don't they teach this self actualization stuff in school in university why doesn't the government run programs and free courses and educate everybody about this stuff because the government is part of the self-deception society itself is one collective self-deception we've come together and agreed to deceive ourselves for our own self survival that's what society is and of course it's not going to tell you that because the whole point of it is that you don't know that's what makes the self-deception so successful because it's so total you look at your neighbors you look at your co-workers you look at another country and you see all everybody is doing the same thing I'm doing oh that means how what I'm doing must be true because the whole the whole way that you get a very successful self-deception is that you leave no or no alternatives to consider and then you also [ __ ] the the minds imagination such that the mind is not able to imagine the alternatives it's very much like being in North Korea they're so brainwashed as a society in North Korea that they don't even know what it might be like to live in any other kind of government any other kind of country they don't even have an idea of what true democracy might look like even a corrupt one like the u.s. democracy it's a very corrupt democracy but uh you know it's uh it's not perfect but it's but a lot better than North Korea but you know they don't even know that that's not they can't even imagine that because their imaginations are crippled from birth because that's how they get you they get you from birth they indoctrinate you from birth ah sort of for your own benefit because the truth it's a scary thing do you really want to know the truth well be careful about that you say you do but do you really what if the truth is difficult to stomach a lot more difficult than you ever thought let's talk about some of the evidence for self-deception how do you know that what I'm telling you here is not just philosophy but that it's real that I'm not bullshitting you well I'll give you five important points exhibit a is your own lying and your own double standards so if you turn inwards and you self reflect you should start to notice that you deceive yourself a lot you rationalize all sorts of silly things to yourself you rationalize all sorts of selfish and evil ways that you have all your manipulative behaviors all your own lying you have all these double standards you criticize all these people and all these ideologies and all these teachings for all sorts of reasons but then do you apply those same criteria to yourself of course not and if you're very careful you should start to notice this and that's actually something I'll talk specifically about in future episodes because it's has a very very deep topic so hopefully as you've been doing self-actualization work conscious work meditation and this sort of stuff self inquiry you've been noticing this and you've been catching yourself and that's how it happens you catch yourself you catch yourself having these double standards like someone cuts you off in traffic today and you get pissed off and then next month you accidentally cut off someone else in traffic and do you criticize yourself do you get pissed off at yourself of course not you let yourself slide and maybe the first ten times that happens in your life you don't notice it but then on the 11th time it's like wait a minute why do I get pissed off at that person but I don't get pissed off at myself for doing the very same thing oh is there a double standard there am I really serving true there am i serving myself here with all my emotions and all my thoughts and all my rationalizations for why that person is such an evil and bad person for cutting me off but then I don't think of myself that way so that's Exhibit A that should start to clue you in on to self-deception that's seeing it personally within yourself Exhibit B is have you noticed that people in the world believe lots of crazy stuff hopefully you have but see a lot of people notice this but they don't see the significance of it they don't see it as a sign of self-deception they think of it as oh yeah well those peas are just crazy and those people just right-wing nuts and those are just left wing nuts and those are radicals over there and those are just communists over there and those are just some cult leaders over there and those are some conspiracy theorists over there and yeah they all believe all sorts of crazy stuff but you know I'm just like a normal person and so those people are just crazy you just explained it away by saying it's crazy no what you're really saying there is you're saying that all of those people are deluded or self deceived but also at the same time notice what you're saying you're saying that everyone else billions of other people are self deceived but of course you're the exception you're not self deceived how self-serving is that but notice the the irony of this sort of logic because if you truly believe that billions of people around the world are self deceived like religious people are self deceived or maybe you think atheists are self deceived of which there are millions or you think some you know people who subscribe to some kind of political ideology or capitalist or communist ideology they're all self deceived of which there are millions then what you're actually noticing there is you're noticing a very important fact about the human mind you're noticing that the human mind is very prone to self-deception and delusion the only problem is that you're not taking the lesson all the way you're noticing it in others but you're not noticing it in yourself the deep irony is that if you truly believe that billions of people around you are so self deceived as to believe all this crazy [ __ ] you should be very concerned that your own mind is doing the same thing to you after all there's no fundamental difference between you and all those other people there's a lot more similarity than difference so that to you is a very big clue I don't know about you personally but for me when I see a really deluded person on TV or something I immediately turn back on myself and then goddamn that could be me how am i doing all of that to myself that's the kind of step that you got to take this extra step of turning it inwards self reflecting which most people don't do don't worry about other people being self deceived worry about yourself being self deceived see when you start to worry about others you try to cure and fix others watch out that in itself is a self-deception because as you're focusing outward you're not focusing inward and therefore your mind has accomplished its objective it's distracted you your minds job is to distract you from ever self-reflecting because if you ever do well that might lead to the unraveling of your entire life and we wouldn't want that would we that wouldn't be in your self-interest Exhibit C as evidence for self-deception is all the disagreement that exists between people so much disagreement so much arguing and debating have you noticed this every single group of human beings argues and debates endlessly every ideological system every scientific system philosophical system psychological system every religious system arrey every mystical system every non dual school every single one of them argues and debates endlessly with each other always disagreeing about reality why is that have you wondered that's not just a little byproduct that is a that is a core feature of reality that tells you something very important about reality the whole dynamic of an argument or a debate what is that that is just utter self-deception here's what it really is person a and person B person a holds one belief person B holds the exact opposite belief now they're gonna argue with each other person a is self-deceived person B is also self-deceived but of course since neither one of them wants to really turn inwards and reflect about their self-deception what they do is they stage an argument or a debate so here's what a debate is about person a will point out all the self deceptions of person B to person B meanwhile ignoring his own self deceptions person B will do the exact same thing in Reverse he will point out all the self deceptions of person a while ignoring all of his own self deceptions and so they will bake her back and forth and each one will accuse each other of being a bullshitter without recognizing that they themselves are the bullshitters bullshitting to themselves and so they will do this indefinitely and they will get very emotional about it why do they get emotional about it why are debates heated because there's something much deeper at stake what's deeper at stake is recognizing and noticing your own self-deception and the danger of being in a debate is that you might catch a glimpse of your own hypocrisy your own double standards and your own self bias and of course you wouldn't want that would you so because of this you project all of your own double standards and lying in self bias as your project app onto your enemy and then he does the same thing to you and now you're just gonna argue back and forth pointing fingers at each other neither one actually taking responsibility for what's really going on in the inside both of them blind to the meta mechanism of what's going on debating minutiae rather than really getting to the heart of the issue which is self-deception Exhibit D as evidence of self-deception is the way that human beings treat evil and the way that you think of other people is being evil have you noticed this very interesting phenomena you see us throughout history one nation or group of people thinks that some other group of people is evil and then that group of people thinks that the other people are evil so both think that each that the other is evil and so what they'll do is they'll call each other evil and they're really believed if the other people aren't evil and then they will use this to justify all sorts of attacks on each other and of course this happens collectively it happens individually like maybe your spouse thinks that there's some co-worker who is their enemy who's trying to sabotage them and therefore they are evil and then that co-worker Mitel might think the the exact mirror opposite of that see and then they become enemies with each other and they both think of themselves as actually being evil this whole notion of evil where does this come from this is a notion invented by the human mind to advance its self agenda and why do people call other people evil precisely because it's an externalization of the evil that's within them what is evil evil is just selfishness that's what it is and of course you are thoroughly evil thoroughly selfish that's what life is about life is about being evil if you weren't evil you couldn't be alive you would be dead but of course you don't like to look at the reality of life and what it takes to survive you do all of this evil [ __ ] to survive and yet you deny it and you like to tell the whole world that you're this good upstanding moral person and that you are different than all those other evil people out there that you're above everybody else but in fact you're the most evil [ __ ] there is everybody is just as evil as you are but of course to deny that what you do is you project that out and you call the terrorists evil Nazis evil those people evil that thing evil everything is evil except yourself have you noticed this this tendency to want to call other things evil everyone is called evil but you why is that because the whole notion of evil the whole point of the concept of evil is precisely so that you can use it to label someone else's evil and once you've labeled them as evil then you can just trample over them with your self agenda you don't need to be compassionate or considerate about their agenda you can just be selfish towards them you can annihilate them evil gives you that excuse which is why people are so adamant about this notion of evil and they insist that Noah leo evil is objective it's absurd the Nazis really are evil the only reason the Nazis are evil to you is because they threaten you they threaten your agenda that's the fact that's the harsh truth have you noticed how this evil thing works it's ironic and funny to notice that in other people between two nations for example that are not your nation but when your own nations involved when your own families involved when your own self is involved you're not gonna notice it you're not gonna notice it because it's gonna be part of the whole self-deception you're gonna be thoroughly deceived by this evil and you're gonna actually believe that those people over there are really evil of course you will because that's the minds job is to be an advocate and attorney on your behalf damn the truth the mind doesn't care what the truth is the minds job is to keep you alive and there's nothing wrong with that per se I'm not saying that's wrong I'm not saying you should stop I'm just saying that's what it is that's what it means to be alive and it's helpful to start to become honest about that rather than lying to yourself about it and Exhibit E as far as evidence for self-deception is the history of science philosophy and religion as a whole the history of human civilization as a whole have you looked at this what is this I hope you are a student of history and I hope you've noticed by studying history that the overarching theme of human history is one group of people behaving like barbarians towards another group of people wonder of people believing crazy ridiculous delusional ideas and then the next generation of people come along and they look back at those people and say oh look how advanced we are relative to those people we've overcome all their obvious barbarity and self delusions and that we are no longer prone to self delusion because after all Leo we live in a 21st century we've got modern science we've got physics we've sent satellites into space we've sent men to the moon and so now we've figured most of the stuff out sure there's little details we don't know yet but most of it we know and so of course we are so much advanced then scientists or philosophers or theologians of a thousand years ago but what is that but just more self-deception every generation says that every generation thinks that it's immune to the self-deceptions of the previous generation and of course usually the new generation does escape some of the old self-deceptions but only to run into a new set of deceptions an even deeper set of self-deceptions because as you mount all this evidence of all these prior generations and all this progress that makes you think that now you're finally at the top finally we've progressed to this point of perfection and infallibility and true knowledge and truth and real understanding but that's just the self-deception deepening deepening and deepening that's what that is so study all those and you'll get all your evidence you'll start to collect the evidence once you start to look for it start to look for self-deception everywhere around you but be careful not to get too distracted by pointing it out in other people because it's very easy to see some perception in other people it's very easy to turn on the TV and to watch Trump and to see this man completely and utterly wrapped up in his own self-deception and not know it super easy the question is can you do that with yourself cuz you're probably not as blatant about it as Trump is can you see that Trump is completely blind to his own self deceptions of course but that's not just Trump I mean Trump is a is a particularly egregious case of it and it's great to point to him and I actually like him having having him as an example because it's just it's so easy it's so blatant basically what Trump represents is he represents the exact opposite of everything that actualized org is about so if you want to learn how to have the best life possible do everything that's the exact opposite of what Trump does and a self actualization a nutshell so in that sense is very easy it's a very good example but also it's it's kind of misleading because you know he's so egregious that is it's tempting to say oh well he's just an exception and he's just like a cartoon character and then you think that he's somehow different from you no no no no no when you're sitting there judging him just in that very act you are falling prey to the very self-deception that you are judging within him which you're not seeing within yourself that's what judgment is it's the self-deception and that's just the tip of the iceberg it goes much much deeper this problem of self-deception is not a problem of a lack of intelligence or a reason because see some people get really tricky here and they some say something like oh well yeah Lee of course of course most people are deluded but I'm different I'm a very rational reasonable person I'm sort of like a Sam Harris I think everything through very logically methodically in this spock-like manner and everything is very clear in my mind and I'm very intelligent and I have a PhD or I'm an academic or I write books or I'm a professor or something like this and therefore I'm immune to this problem no don't you see that reason itself is the chief tool of self-deception the mind has co-opted reason first and foremost reasons are used to justify yourself agenda reason doesn't get you to truth why do you trust reason why would you trust it ask yourself how do you know that reason that reason is is trustworthy what are you listening to your own mind how do you know your mind is right just because you believe it you take it on blind faith there can be no reason without blind faith that's the irony reason reasonable people and the reason that reasonable people and rationalists they like to argue and fight and wage Crusades against people who are faith-based is precisely because they are ignorant of the very faith that grounds their reason the hypocrisy the irony of it is is just absurd it's absurd which is plenty why they have to project out they have to go and wage a crusade and a campaign against everyone who is unreasonable because what they're not doing is they're not turning inwards and realizing that reason itself is based on faith and that it itself collapses and Edith eats its own tail this problem is much deeper than reason or intelligence that's not gonna solve it this is a problem of conflict of interest this is a problem of lack of self honesty this is a problem of self bias and reason will not solve this reason actually will only make this worse this problem is emotional and pragmatic not logical you can't just think your way out of this problem it's not like the way that scientists assume that you can just sort of investigate your own psyche in the same way that you can investigate lab rats in a maze like you take a lab rat you can dissect him very objectively you're just sitting there dissecting a rat it's just a rat you know there's no problem cutting it open and and looking at its guts and doing this some sort of objective analysis on a rat no no this problem here is much more personal that's what makes us so difficult it's a personal investigation it's very much like if you were a lab rat doing the investigation on yourself so imagine that you're a lab rat that has to dissect itself with no anesthetics so you have to take that scalpel and cut your own stomach open and muck around in your own guts now you start to see the real problem it has nothing to do with objectivity there's no such thing as subjectivity here it has nothing to do with logic it has everything to do with emotions and your own deep personal investment in life you see your very life is at stake here in this investigation this is not an intellectual philosophical abstract investigation that we're doing here when we're talking about accessing the truth for ourselves we're talking about subjecting ourselves to intense suffering merely from the process of looking at the truth the truth is so blinding and bright that it actually Sears itself into your eyes and into your flesh when you look upon it you really cannot handle the fallout of full self honesty if you were fully 100% self honest with yourself right now if I was able to just magically snap my fingers and all your self deceptions would be revealed to you you would actually faint and collapse to the floor with a panic attack that's how emotional this thing would be you would be in shock you would be convulsing on the floor foaming at the mouth and how much you've been lying to yourself manipulating yourself how evil you are how deluded you are how foolish you are everything you see and Trump all the foolishness and Trump you would see all of that times a thousand within yourself it's just that there are these subtle layers layer upon layer which are masking that from your awareness right now and this process is slowly a process of peeling back the layers and this is a very threatening process this threatens your very survival your very existence is at stake which actually reminds me of a story I traveled to a different country for a meditation retreat and sort of a consciousness workshop there that I did and this was a very remote location up high in the mountains in the jungle it took about a three-hour drive to get up there and I didn't have a car so I was hitching a ride with another participant who was a veteran of these workshops and he was going there pretty often because he lived in that area he was a local so he was driving me up there and as we were driving we were just talking about spirituality and personal development and all this and so I asked me know how did you find out about this and yada yada yada and then he says oh yeah you know I just kind of randomly bumped into this whole spirituality do you think and before that he didn't know anything you know about personal development psychology self-help self actualization no I knew well he didn't know anything about this stuff he just kind of like stumbled into this you know blindly and so he drove up there one time by himself a while back and this was his first time and the Guru or the teacher dropped some deep truth on him and started to talk about non-duality and the ego and the mind and self-deception all this stuff that we talked about with self-actualization and non-duality work you know so he dropped some deep truth on him and this guy spent the next few nights vomiting in a toilet all night long in this retreat because he couldn't sleep he was so disturbed by all of his own [ __ ] and self-deceptions that were revealed to him this guy was a successful young guy he you know he had a nice car in nice house had a nice girlfriend he had a nice career he had money and wealth and all this and success but then he realized that all of this everything he was building is just a house of cards made out of [ __ ] it's all self-deception and he spent the night vomiting in a toilet that's how real this stuff is this is not mere hypothetical philosophy I'm not kidding that's what it's like that's why you can't self actualize in a week or in a month or even in a year it's too much for you to handle it's too distressing you have to do it very very slowly if you try to do too much too fast you got an ego backlash and then you actually regress even deeper into all your unconscious habits you probably notice that happened to you before if you've been on this path for a few years you've noticed that your entire mind-body organism will revolt against the truth it will revolt against self reflecting and noticing its own self deceptions you will actually become physically ill you will become depressed angry fearful guilty lonely you will start to crave sex and food and video games you'll just want to go grab a greasy burger jerk off to some porn and play your favorite video games for the next month to forget all about this conversation that's the power of the mind that is the self deception at work every time you try to change yourself you try to improve yourself what happens you fall back the mind tricks you it has all these little tricks that it plays you make plans to start meditation tomorrow and then what happens to your plans they fall through you don't stick with it you make plans for your new year's resolution what happens they fall through you don't stick with it of course that's homeostasis that is the mind helping you to maintain yourself and you might think that you want change but do you really do you really understand what change entails change entails a death of the self even a little change even a little change like losing 20 pounds that involves killing the old 20 pound overweight self so yeah it's difficult this is a very personal process very personal and that's why there can't be any one approach to spirituality or to personal development because everybody is different everybody needs to take this process at their own pace everyone has their own personal problems they have to overcome their own personal demons and your own personal demons they're purely your own they're a complete illusion so they don't make sense to anybody else so for example you might be deathly afraid of talking to girls or you might be deathly afraid of starting your business or you might be deathly afraid of something else and these fears that you have they're completely irrational complete illusions so when you talk about them to somebody else like when a shy person asks advice from a confident person it doesn't click because of the confident person it makes no sense why you would be shy of course because they don't have that inner demon that you have as a shy person of course not so you got to go find the solutions that will work for your particular inner demons that's why I encourage a broad and diverse approach to personal development because I don't think that any one technique or style fits everybody you need to customize it which makes it complicated which means that I can't give you all the answers and neither can anybody else you got to put the pieces together yourself you can't outsource this process your own self deceptions are your own and only you can know what they are I can't really know what they are sometimes I can just by looking at a person but you know not not the really deep and subtle ones that are really the biggest drivers in your life those only you can know and a scientist can't tell you there's no scientific way to know this stuff this can only be known by turning inwards so the scientific methods not going to help you clinical studies or not gonna help you clinical research is not gonna help you you got to turn inwards yourself roll up your sleeves and face your own inner demons and of course what does the mind hate the most investigating a cell and self-deception of course of course of course because the devil has designed himself in such a way that the devil never looks at his own devilry that's what it means to be a devil because if the devil actually truly looked inward and saw his own devilry he would get so disgusted by it that he would stop and therefore he would become an angel not a devil the only way you can stay a devil is by being blind to the fact that you're a devil and then you're denying that you're a devil so of course you deny you're a devil Trump denies he's a devil I deny that I'm a devil everybody denies that they're a devil that's just the nature of the mind there's this powerful analogy that I really like which is jailbreaking your mind in the same way that you might jailbreak a smartphone and I'll actually probably shoot a dedicated episode just about this jailbreaking analogy because I think it's very powerful it sort of frames self actualization and non-duality very nicely for me at least I don't know if you've ever tried jailbreaking your smartphone because you wanted to get some better performance out of it you wanted to install some apps that that could do things that couldn't be done on your manufacturers operating system so you have to jailbreak it you have to hack through the manufacturers system but then of course the manufacturer installs software that is anti hacking software that is designed to prevent your jailbreaking so then the hackers have to design a even better hacking system which will out hack the anti hacking systems installed by the manufacturer and so it's this sort of game and that's exactly what this process of unraveling your own self-deceptions is like for me it's like trying to jailbreak your own mind but it's actually much more interesting and much more tricky than that because when it comes to your phone again you're not personally involved so if you break your phone yeah that's dangerous and that might set you back 500 bucks a thousand bucks you bought the new iPhone you know thousand dollar iPhone and you're trying to jailbreak this thing and then you end up breaking it man that's a that's gonna sting for a few days but still not nearly as much as it will sting to get to the bottom of your own personal self-deceptions within your own mind you see because the problem when it comes to your own mind is that you are your mind it's not like there's a you here and a mind here and there's separate things there one thing so really when you get the bright idea to jailbreak your mind that's actually coming from the mind the mind is trying to jailbreak itself which is this very twisted strange strange loop because how do you jailbreak yourself the mind knows all of its own attempts to jailbreak itself and it can easily stop those so it's the sort of tug-of-war this conflict within yourself you're trying to out hack yourself how do you do that it's sort of like you're trying to play chess with yourself but you know all of the secret strategies that the other side will use against you because you are the other side and it can't be any other way because that reality is non-dual so it's one the self is one thing so it's this very twisted strange loop and yet nevertheless it is possible you might think that well that means that leo it's impossible to jailbreak the mind no it is it's possible it's just that the final straw that breaks the camel's back that will not actually come from the mind you will use your mind to try to escape your mind but eventually whether you actually make the final leap outside of your mind that would be enlightenment that's not gonna come from you that's gonna come from outside of you that's gonna come from beyond your mind and beyond the ego which is why enlightenment is so frustrating because really you don't have control you're just sort of sitting there waiting for lightning to strike and maybe it will and maybe it won't but of course don't take that to mean that effort doesn't matter effort matters a lot if you go up high on a hill in a thunderstorm with a long tall metal flagpole and you're waving it around there's a good chance lightning will strike you so you can certainly increase your odds of getting a good solid lightning strike and that's what you're doing when you're meditating yourself inquiring or taking a psychedelic or something like that so that's what self-actualization is about it's about jailbreaking your mind that's what enlightenment is about but it's not only enlightenment that we're talking about here again don't think that with enlightenment your mind is completely jailbroken and now you're completely immune to all self-deception no that's not how it works that's way too simple and in fact that itself is a self-deception people who just pursue enlightenment single-mindedly thinking that's gonna solve all their problems in life and that's gonna make them immune to all self-deceptions these people become Zen Devils they become very diluted because there's nothing quite like a few enlightenment experiences to make you feel like now you've got the truth now you've seen God and the absolute and now you're invincible and now everything you do and say is right that's the ultimate source of self-deception right there you can see how the mind will use that against you even after enlightenment the mind will still be there it'll still be sneaky and tricky it'll still get you with all your emotions and all your old habits and all your addictions those will not magically just go away it'll help enlightenment helps with becoming more conscious of that it's a really big step towards becoming non self deceived but it's not the its ultimate it's not like the ultimate magic pill solution you have to take into account what I'm talking about here and you have to be much more nuanced it has to be much broader than just merely enlightenment because your self-deception extends way beyond just your perceptions of the world it extends to your relationships to the way you run your career and your business to how you interact with your co-workers to your family and your children to everything everything so in a nutshell what is the mind up to it's trying to prevent self-reflection and why would it do that because everything is an illusion and because for the illusion to feel real you need to not see that it's an illusion how do you see that it's not an illusion or how do you not see that it's an illusion well you just fail to self-reflect and you're attached to reality you want reality to be real you don't want reality to be revealed as an illusion so therefore you are going to do everything in your power not to self-reflect it's sort of like you're a magician who has tricked himself with his own magic trick by erasing his own memory that of how he accomplishes the magic trick such that heat while he's doing the magic trick he is both the magician and the audience at the same time that's what's going on here you are God deceiving itself into thinking that it's not God but that it's you said uh that's what's really going on here sometimes atheists will pose the following question to theists they will say oh well but if God exists and you say God is all-powerful at all infinite then riddle me this could God create a stone that he himself could not lift supposedly he should be able to because he's all-powerful and yet if he can't lift it that means he doesn't have the power so which is it it's a contradiction which means that there can't be a god it's way stranger it's way more [ __ ] up than this the situation is as follows God is so infinitely powerful that he has the power to deceive himself that He is God so that's precisely how you came into being is that you are God shrieking yourself thinking that you aren't God but that you're a finite little human being sitting there right there that's how you got here that's what's going on here and for you to keep playing that role you need to keep yourself in the dark it's a very twisted thing you're tricking yourself and you might wonder how is it possible that God could trick itself if God is all-powerful but then you realize that what it means to be all-powerful is precisely that you can do that if God couldn't trick himself he wouldn't be all-powerful that's what infinity means infinity includes all the finitude of which you are one as this little mortal human being but simultaneously are also the infinite it's paradox it's a strange loop of course as it must be because everything is one so what's the solution to self-deception self-reflection very simple and what does self-reflection mean it means questioning everything you hold as certain about yourself and about the world without getting distracted by all the red herrings out there what will happen at the end of this self-reflection process if you accomplish it the melting away of all your illusions and what they call liberation that's what liberation means the end of self-deception so in a simplistic schematic here really what all personal growth boils down to is moving from a place of maximum self-deception to a place of minimal self-deception so imagine that at this end we have the worst possible life like a heroin junkie who's on the brink of suicide just cannot help himself at all let's say that he's at 99% self-deception and if he starts to work on himself cure himself of his addictions and then go on working more and more and more and doing self-actualization work and then spiritual work and non-duality work and all this sort of stuff he's gonna be moving more towards this end and at this end we might have the let's say the the enlightened yogi and he might think that the aligned yogi is at 0% self-deception and ideally that's where he would be but in practise that's not the case in practice most Yogi's are still deluded still self deceived most enlightened people still have many self-deceptions because they're they're not aware of this larger dynamic that I'm talking about and so and so even there he might be enlightened but he's like 10% self-deceived still cuz he still got all his mind stuff there's still mind stuff there's still cultural dogmas and beliefs and ideas and there's still a bunch of stuff all right just because even becoming lion doesn't mean you transform your entire mind and get rid of all the self-deception they're still there so ideally you'd be moving closer and closer to 0% self-deception and the more you do that the less suffering you will have in your life because the suffering is a direct consequence of misalignment of your life to truth which is why you know that someone like Donald Trump must suffer a great deal even if he doesn't admit it to himself because you see that he lies constantly he can't avoid lying because that's his whole mode of living he's more on this under the spectrum and then of course not only does he suffer but all the people around him suffer and the whole nation will suffer for it of course as it must because that's what you get with lying that's what you get when you're fast and loose with the truth that's just the nature of the self that's the nature of being a devil when you're a devil you are so much a devil that you don't even know that you're a devil or that there's any other way and in fact because you're so adept at lying of course you're gonna use that lie against yourself to lie to yourself to tell yourself that you're not the devil and that actually you're not even suffering but that actually this is the only way that life can be and that actually you're enjoying life because you're rich and you're famous and you're president and you're all this and so therefore hey this is great I'm actually enjoying myself this is exciting this is stimulating but actually deep down there's just this ocean of suffering which if this person ever actually glanced at it would utterly horrifying some people are so far gone that they're never gonna be able to look upon that ocean because there's there's just such a deep history deck decades of lies upon lies to see that to come to grips with that that would be so painful that they would rather die than do that and that's why people do commit suicide rather than self actualizing it's a real thing happens all the time or they just keep lying to themselves until they die of natural causes that's also a common way out of this problem you see that takes care of all problems but wouldn't it be nicer to put an end to it yourself while you're still alive cuz then you can enjoy life without your giant ego without all the suffering that comes from being a self being lost in the self so that's how this process works if you ever get the idea that you're immune to this process you're immune to self-deception for whatever reason whatever justifications your mind spins up you can be sure that you're totally self deceived if you ever get the idea that you've become enlightened and now you're you're at full Buddhahood and now you're immune to self-deception you've fallen right into it self-deception is not one or two things it's not one or two traps self-deception is a mind field it's a it's a thousand mile long minefield with millions of minds and just because you've avoided stepping on one don't get too eager don't pat yourself on the back too much because there's another one just a few feet in front of you and if you get all giddy and think oh look look I've avoided this landmine right here look I've avoided it and you started jumping around prancing around skipping around you're gonna step on the next landmine so be very careful be careful not to think that just because you heard me talking about this that all the sudden now you have all the tools and equipment that you need to avoid self-deception in your life not a chance not even close you're not even 1% of the way to understanding what's being said here and pointed to nor should you get the bright idea that I'm saying that I am above self-deception and that because I'm talking about this topic that all of a sudden I must be the expert I must know all the traps and therefore I must be immune of course not that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying what I'm saying is that all of us are equally well not equally some of us more so but all of us are highly vulnerable to self-deception including myself and there have been many times in my life where I've deceived myself and there will be more in the future and I don't ever anticipate getting to a point where that will ever stop nor should you this is something that when you understand how deceptive the mind is it it AHS you it's awesome it's incredible it's a work of art this is God's art God's artistry is in the fact that he is able to deceive so artfully and skillfully and subtly and and it's beautiful it's a work of art when you start to see it but at the same time it's sort of a horrifying work of art because you see that it's not this artwork is not just hanging on a wall it is you you are it and it can be ugly sometimes this is not the kind of art that's just sugary and sweet this is sort of bittersweet art which can look horrified and terrifying from certain angles especially when you first glimpse it you have to develop a taste for God's artwork it tends to be rather brutal and rather brusque you know it doesn't coddle you in the way that you want in the way that your ego wants because it's perfectly impersonal it's not about you it's not about protecting you it's not about serving you it's not about your family it's not making it about making you rich or making you live longer or making you feel better or making you have a nice self-image it's not about any of that it's about everything coming into existence it's about being it's about something much much larger than any individual self could ever be it's about infinite diversity inveted intelligence infinite evolutionary capacity which utterly Dwarfs you and your self agenda and everything that we have going on on this planet in this solar system in this universe it Dwarfs all of that all of that is just like a little speck of sand a little grain of sand in the larger scheme of things and yet at the same time it's not separate from you it is you it was all engineered by you you've just tricked yourself into thinking that you're separate and that it's not your doing precisely so that you could experience the Marvel of discovery of how amazing reality is because if you knew all of reality it would lose its magic to you in a certain sense there's something nice about being able to discover it for the first time as if for the first time the problem generally is that people's imaginations are too limited to imagine all the ways in which they deceive themselves they totally underestimate this phenomena your number one concern in life should be curing yourself of self-deception that's basically it almost nothing else matters everything else is peanuts compared to this if you can accomplish this you'll get everything you want and infinitely more and if you fail to accomplish this then no matter what you get no matter how much success you have you're gonna be unsatisfied this is the key and that's really what actualize that work is about is helping to point out these self-deceptions to you your goal is to jailbreak your mind and my goal is to help you to jailbreak your mind and also to jailbreak my own mind and so we're all in this process together trying to jailbreak our own minds but of course no one is really perfect at it so we're all fallible including myself therefore you have to maintain a certain attitude of humility but you do have to carry on with this process you don't want to just shrug your shoulders and say oh well if we're all self deceived then that's just how it's supposed to be and there's nothing to do and there's no improvement possible no there's a lot of improvement possible if you just move from 99% self-deception to 20% so that's going to be a huge transformation in your life that will be the difference between going from a suicidal depressed life to a miraculous life a life where you're you're walking around in tears because of how beautiful everything is I'm not really done with this topic we've just started I'm actually writing a whole book on this topic of epistemology and self-deception and I have hundreds of pages of notes detailing in in very specific ways various patterns that I found that the mind deceived itself so I'll be sharing more of those with you in fact there's gonna be a part two to this series here about self-deception coming next week where I will talk about some of the top self deception mechanisms that I found these are very concrete ways in which you deceive yourself I wanted to use this episode to sort of set up the framework because I'm gonna be referencing this concept of self-deception a lot going forward in the future and of course if you look at my prior episodes you should also see that if I don't mention it explicitly I'm still talking about self-deception implicitly and many of those episodes but I'll be talking more about it explicitly and in part two next week I will talk about these self-deception mechanisms I've been studying these four years keeping careful logs monitoring myself monitoring other people monitoring society at large humanity at large looking through history try to find these self-deception mechanisms it's how your own mind gets you to believe in all sorts of nonsense and how it tricks yourself this is meta knowledge that you're getting here this is the very type of knowledge that your mind does not want you to get so make sure that you stick around for that but for now that's it please click like button for me and come check out actualized org I have some exclusive stuff on the website that you won't find anywhere else like on the blog I'm posting new videos these days that are exclusive to the blog you won't see them on YouTube or on iTunes or anywhere else so check that out check out the forum check out my life purpose course check out the book list the book list has a lot of important books on it that you need to read if you want to get a handle on this self-deception thing these books will point out the selfs accession to you within science history philosophy psychology medicine and spirituality within yourself within society at large these books will help to point that out to you what I'm talking about here is sort of like a larger framework and now you need to fill in all the little details and so as we go forward in the future I'll be helping you to fill in those details like with part two of this series but then also even going beyond that you're gonna see my video is becoming more epidemiological becoming deeper focusing more on these core issues of how the mind tricks itself because that's all that really I can do to help you is I can sort of point out the traps and the landmines and then hopefully once you see a lot of those you start to catch on to the patterns of your own mind you start to see how tricky it is and then you you get better and better and better at at overcoming many of these obstacles so that's coming stick around you