Word count:6761
hey this is Leo for actualised org in this video I want to talk about why you really need to stop demonizing others we're gonna start off this video with an exercise and you're gonna do the exercise now then I'm gonna talk and then at the very end of the video I'm going to tell you how to actually use this exercise and get a lot of value out of it so here's the exercise in a second I'm gonna pause the video I'm gonna have a blank screen for you you're gonna pause the video and then you're gonna do this you're gonna get a piece of paper on the top of this piece of paper you're gonna write the three people I despise the most are and then you're gonna write one two three and you're gonna write down the names of the three people that you despise the most in your life by despise I mean you really don't like them they really gall you maybe you openly despise them maybe you kind of secretly despise them you don't really even admit to yourself that you despise this person maybe you tell yourself that you're a person that doesn't think that other people are despicable that you like everybody well I'm gonna tell you that you should be really self honest on this exercise and really dig deep and see who are the people out there in your life that really gall you you're gonna pick three people now a lot of times when I say this people will go and pick the obvious most obvious examples of evil people like Hitler and Osama bin Laden as people they despise I'd say stay away from those for now instead focus on people you know a little bit more intimately these gonna be people that you know personally from your family life or your friends or your colleagues at work or your boss or it could be a celebrity that perhaps you kind of follow but you kind of despise or maybe a pundit on TV or something like that or maybe a person throughout history but just don't go with the most obvious examples I want you to really be accurate here after you write down these three names what you're gonna do is you're gonna write down also one quality for each of these people that is the despicable quality that you really don't like about them so each name one quality that's the exercise go ahead do it right now pull out a piece of paper alright pause the video now all right welcome back so if you've done that exercise good now put it off to the side you're gonna pull it out at the end of this video I'm gonna tell you what to do with it let me talk though about demonizing other people this is something that I see that I find extremely extremely ugly people demonizing other people and this is something you see a lot more often than you think you would see it and you do this too which is the relevance of this video to you so it's not that others people do it you do it you know it's interesting in 10th Grade I had one of the hardest classes that I ever took in my entire schooling career and that was ap European history and there I had a teacher who was a real kind of hard-ass hard-nosed teacher and really expected a lot of us and we work really hard throughout the entire year just preparing for the AP exam and I struggled the most in that class but I also learned the most in that class and one of the things I really learned in that class is my love for knowledge and my love for philosophy that's what I developed there at the very end of the class after we got done with all the tests and stuff we got a little time to relax and we were just sitting in a circle and the teacher would ask us questions we've gone around and certainly entire class all 30 of us or so would answer one by one and we would go around and around and round asking different questions and this way we'd get to know everybody little bit better and one of the questions he asked that I can remember to this day which was a very profound question he asked what's the most ugliest thing you've ever seen and we went around the circle and when I got to me I said conformity at that point I recognized the kind of evils and dangers of conformity but I think that now and I think about that question I'd have to say that even more uglier than conformity is the demonization of other people that I see out there to me this is one of the ugliest things about human beings and about society and about the way that human beings behave when they are in a group this happens because of fundamentally closed mindedness and lack of self honesty so in this video we're gonna go in we're going to talk about where the self on the self-dishonesty is exactly and we're gonna try to open your mind and open-mindedness it might sound like an kind of a abstract woo a kind of concept but I think that open mind this is one of the most important things that people are missing which is preventing them from doing the higher levels of personal development work that they need to do so this is a very much important for you to start to take this abstract notion and start to actually say oh this is actually important to my life this actually affects the results that I get in my life so people love to demonize people and the question is why why do people love to demonize other people so much before answer the Alice give a little taste of what we mean by demonization and who demonizes whom so you know very common to demonize dictators and bad leaders throughout history politicians and such so Hitler Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden George Bush Barack Obama or in whatever country you're living in you know the leaders there that you may not like or the opposition party that you may not like so that's extremely common also common to demonize and this is a little more closer to home is parents siblings spouses and girlfriends and boyfriends very very common to demonize the other person in this kind of relationship when you're not able to get along with them another category that's really popular is demonizing thinkers philosophers and religious leaders you can beat even izing the person themselves or you can also demonize their ideas you can demonize a whole school of thought you can demonize an entire religion so this is really common if you're student of history you know that this goes all the way back basically all of history is kind of like an object lesson and demonization as far as thinkers and philosophers and religions and ideas go also a little bit more closer to home to me is demonization that happens on the Internet this is super super common demonization on the Internet so YouTube comments people demonizing each other in YouTube comments but that's just a specific case of the more general problem people demonizing each other through internet forums and discussions that are happening online this extremely common what happens with the immunization is that you create this separation fundamentally between you and the other person and basically when you're demonize demonizing someone you're making a judgement and you're pointing at that person you're saying that that person is evil but for a true demonization happen not only are you pointing your finger at that person saying that person is evil but you're also denying the fact that this is a personal judgment of yours so when you really really believe that someone is evil and you don't even want to entertain the possibility that that is false then that is what demonization is that's my definition of it here's a truth that I want to tell you if you demonize anyone ever in your life if you find yourself doing this then you are definitely in the wrong you right not the other person but you are in the wrong the evil actually is within you not that other person now that person might have done something despicable so I'm not saying anything about that but what's more important is what you're doing that's despicable now you might say but no that person did something really really despicable and that's what the argument is about no the problem is not the other person the problem is you and it's you who's doing the despicable thing and what you're not recognizing there is actually you're behaving like that person if they are in fact despicable what you're doing these situations and you're very subtly this is a very subtle self manipulation that you do is that you're acting to preserve your own ego the the really fundamental problem with immunization is that we have this reality that we live in this you might call it a physical reality we live in this and this reality is very neutral and devoid of meaning and any kind of human additions that we make to it but what we do is we go around and we slap labels on things we slap labels on objects and people and situations and even ourselves we're always slapping labels on things and we do this with thoughts with thinking and so with slots we slap these labels on and what we're doing is we're all men ting reality we're going around we're all men ting reality and we're living in a very very mented reality which is happening here not in some computer science fiction but in here in your mind you're doing this but the problem is that you forget that you do this you don't admit that you do this and then you take these augmentations to be the reality itself and you take them very seriously and what this does is this creates a lot of problems for you down the road why does this create problems well because you end up living in a fantasy of your own creation without understanding that you're living in a fantasy and you confuse this fantasy with the reality and this creates a lot of your emotional suffering in life so people who demonize other people you might notice that these people these generally aren't happy people it's not possible for them to be happy because they're living a falsehood and this one particular person who they demonize that's just one manifestation of how they approach life to demonize someone successfully you have to augment reality with your own labels then you have to convince yourself that these labels are actually true when in fact they're not and so this can only happen when you're behaving unconsciously when you're not really aware of what's going on not aware of the manipulation that's happening on the inside you manipulating yourself you lying to yourself you kind of cheating yourself and so this creates a really fundamental problem in the way that you interact with all of reality and you might think that oh well it doesn't really matter in this case you know I think that Hitler is the evil and what's wrong with that but actually this is like I said this is just got one symptom of a much deeper problem the other thing is that when you separate yourself from this other person that you're demonizing is that you're not able to learn from that other person because usually the reason that you demonize someone in the first place is because you actually want to keep from looking at what is there in reality it's like a corner of reality that you don't want to face and so what you say to yourself and to others is that you point your finger at that person says you say that person is evil and in so doing you create this wall and you basically say to yourself I don't have to really examine that person his actions or that corner of reality I don't have I have to kinda I basically just kind of block it out I ignore it and I just say myself that's purely evil there's nothing to be learned there there's no reasoning there there's no valid arguments no valid points there it's just pure evil you see politicians doing this sometimes it helps them to avoid actually having intelligent on rational argument about a particular situation because if someone wants to ram a policy issue down your throat the best way to do it is just to say oh now the other opposition party is totally evil and what I'm saying is just correct right it avoids having a debate it avoids having to actually make nuanced distinctions and it basically relieves you of the burden of having to seriously consider some other some other position why do people do this well because when you have to take into account corners of reality that you haven't taken into account before that can be a strenuous and emotionally challenging thing to wrestle with in your mind you you have cognitive dissidence personally in my own life I love the feeling of cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance is the psychological term for when your model of reality comes into contact with actual facts in reality or some other you know potential model of reality and basically the two are contradictory and you can't figure out how the two can fit together and so what happen is that in your mind you suddenly start to question your own model of reality and when this happens you usually become afraid you can become angry can feel hurt but this doesn't happen consciously it kind of happens subconsciously you don't tell yourself that you're angry because your model of reality isn't accurate in this case and so what happens is that you kind of just shut down and you turn your head the other way and you don't want to look to me I've always loved the feeling of cognitive dissonance I think that's one of the powers that I have is kind of is the ability to go in there and look at something and say oh this this doesn't match with what I've got that's cool I like that because then I can go in and I can say to myself oh how can I retool my model of reality to match the facts a little bit better or how can I reach to a my model so that it fits with that model or maybe I can throw my entire model out and take on the other model but see what I see people doing is I see people not wanting to do this in general I would say that 99% of people in society do not like this and they always stick their head in the sand like an ostrich when it comes to to this cognitive dissonance and so they're not learning from examples from other people and this keeps them from really honestly looking inside themselves and this keeps their ego alive they're cute this keeps their ego going and this creates more and more problems for them down the road and these problems are so subtle that you don't recognize that these problems are stemming from this lack of open mindedness and from the stimulation that you do by the way it's different let's make a distinction it's different to demonize someone and to disagree with them so I'm not saying that you can't disagree with people it's okay to say that someone is wrong someone can be factually wrong you know someone can say that when you drop an apple gravity's gonna pull it up and set it down now that would be factually wrong and we can disagree with them on that that's fine the difference is when you demonize someone is you you call the person evil or you call their ideas evil so let's make that distinction clear also let's make a little distinction here I want to draw a spectrum for you between different kind of like levels of judgement and acceptance so on the very far end of the spectrum the spectrum that you don't want to be at the part of the spectrum you don't to be at is demonization this is when you do full-on proper demonization when you are calling someone evil and you believe that they're actually evil in reality then you can move a little bit closer to the better side of the spectrum towards the middle of the spectrum this is what I call judgment the judgment area so this is demonization area this is the judgment area in the judgement area this is where you simply make kind of more casual everyday judgments most of us do this a hundred times a day we might see a person we might think they're ugly we might see us you know read an ID in a book and say there's a stupid idea or making judgments there that's also an augmentation they're not as strong as demonization because usually when you're making a judgment you in the back of your mind at least you kind of recognize that your judgment it's not like set in stone you kind of understand that well I mean it's my opinion in this case right I don't like this idea maybe somebody else likes this idea okay I think that person's ugly maybe somebody else thinks that person's beautiful whatever so you make these judgments and these judgments make no mistake they also create lots of problems in your life I've got other videos that talk about that you can see my judgment video on that but you know still much better why is it much better because you're a little bit more open-minded to your judgments changing you might say well I have this one judgment here maybe I'll maybe I'll change that maybe a couple years later I'll think that this belief that I read in a book or this theory that I read but actually be true okay your judgment a little bit more flexible and then you move to this very end this far end of the spectrum over here and when you do that you come to acceptance acceptance is the accepting of reality exactly as it is without augmenting it in any way with your own labels without deluding yourself that these labels are real which is what you do even when you judge stuff when you just stuff you still tell yourself that the thing you're judging that this judgment is actually a part of reality that's why you feel bad when you see something ugly or you see something in your life that you don't like you judge that you don't like it you judge a certain situation as being bad for you and so you resist it all the time the acceptance part of the spectrum is when you accept everything exactly as it is and as you can probably tell very few people have a psychology that can allow them to do this because this allows complete openness of mind you have to be able to accept all of reality not just the parts of reality that you like personally and that's really what's happening here when you're creating these separations between you and other people and other other things through judgments and through demonization is that fundamentally they're carving out aspects of reality that you like and you're separating them and you're kind of pitting them against aspects of reality that you don't like personally right you're just one organism in this larger universe and so just because you don't like a particular thing doesn't really say much about reality itself just because you don't like something doesn't mean that somebody else needs to agree with you on that just because you don't like something or you think something is bad or evil doesn't make it actually so and this is a distinction that you have to draw on your mind but it takes a lot of intellectual honesty and self honesty to admit this it already requires a lot of openness of mind to admit this and a lot of people don't want to go there so someone like Hitler you might say but Leo what about someone like Hitler isn't this person truly evil aren't there truly evil like I understand leo I understand that sometimes we go overboard and we judge people and I do it - sure I'll admit that but you have to admit Leo that some people are just truly evil and when I'm telling you this video is no I'm not gonna admit that and in fact what you need to do is you need to come around and see that that's not the case at all the people that you think are truly evil are not really that that's a judgement you make that's a judgement you make based on certain beliefs you have certain preferences you have even your position in this world as a life form as a human being already predisposes you to think that certain things are evil and certain things are not evil anything that threatens your life you automatically tend to label as evil but if you think about it more objectively what does that have to do with reality itself what does reality care what does the universe care about your life it really doesn't care much about it at all so some threatens your life on a social level will say okay that's that's evil and on a personal level you'll say okay yada I definitely want that in my life I don't want to get killed that would be a bad thing we have to recognize that this is a subjective judgement right you recognize this is a subjective judgment even in the most heinous crime that you could imagine which you would say Hitler is a heinous criminal you still have to see the larger picture of it that in a really big picture in the ultimate objective picture actions are never good or evil actions are simply actions they are exactly what they are without your addition of judgment on top of them the addition of judgement you can see it happens in your mind you can actually sit down and notice the judgment happening it's a story that's been told in your mind it's a story a lot of people get offended by this when they hear this old Hitler but he'll Hitler's evil how can you say he's not evil it takes a big and open mind to be able to reason about these things objectively one little clue that you can use and you can use as a rule of thumb as you go through life and develop yourself is that in any situation where you get easily offended that's weakness of mind on your part that's a smallness of mind on your part that's not the situation's problem that's not my problem that's your problem if you get offended because getting offended what that means is that you're upset about reality being other than the way that you want to be you want to live in a fantasy but then you come in contact with reality and reality is different than a fantasy so you tell yourself that oh but Hitler is truly evil no see Hitler is a part of reality you want to deny this that this part of reality exists and you want this part of reality to not exist you want it to not have existed it exists it existed in the past now you can say it shouldn't have existed we can have a whole long debate about that and I would agree with you and I say yeah it's probably a good idea that it didn't exist nevertheless it existed so it doesn't really matter what you think about reality reality could go exactly opposite to everything that you want it to be like you can live a life where everything against you everything is against you everything wrong happens to you but that wrongness is still happening from your point of view in a larger point of view there's no wrong as being done is just life living itself who are you to say how life is supposed to run very arrogant of you to presume that you know the right way for life to to run and isn't it interesting that when you have ideas about how I should run it's always about you always about you it's always about how your life can be a little bit sweeter how your life can be a little bit richer a little bit more secure a little bit more comfortable a little bit nicer how convenient of you to expect that reality should conform itself to what you desire and to what feels nice to you so we have to get very real about this stuff right we have to get real about this stuff that when you're demonizing other people what you're what you're really doing is you're blocking off parts of reality and this is a deep mistake because reality is actually neutral your mind creates this separation because at the very bottom of it as a very root of it you need to feel like an entity like a self and so to feel more like a self what you do is you construct enemies around you in the environment you construct problems you do this not only with people but you do this with situations too is you construct these enemies and these problems in these challenges because you feel like there's something here that needs to be protected this is what we call the ego or the self you right now you can point your finger at you go ahead and nod your head right now nod your head that's you that's what I'm talking about that entity that you think is experiencing life that's that owns this life of yours this entity feels like it needs to be protecting itself all the time it needs to feel real to feel solid now you might say well leo feel solid it's already solid why would it need to feel solid now this is a very deep point that I'm going to cover in other videos especially my spiritual alignment video but actually at the very center of it it's hollow it's an illusion this sense of self it feels extremely real it feels extremely solid but actually it's a hollow illusion to keep this hollow illusion from unraveling itself what happens is that more and more layers of ego get layered on top and these layers are extremely tricky and self deceptive and so in practice what this means is that you go through your life creating separations so that you can feel like you're in a fight to survive life so that you're in survival mode when you're in survival mode what that does to your ego is it makes the ego feel alive and it makes that you feel real even if it's a negative situation even if you're scared or threatened or angry you might say but Leo I don't want that in my life actually on some level you do want that in your life because what it does is it creates a stronger sense of self you feel alive when you do that and you feel significant you feel like a somebody it builds up your story of self that you've been building up your entire life what would happen if we remove that story entirely and we shattered it to pieces you don't want to consider that possibility because if you actually sit down and seriously consider that possibility it's gonna scare you shitless because you don't know what life would be like without you you don't imagine that this is possible or desirable and so what you do is you cling to your ego you attach yourself to certain situations in life and you also deny other situations in life and you demonize people that's where the demonization comes from and you create enemies and you point your finger at situations and people out in life and you make enemies of them because what it does is it actually allows you to create a partition this way see because the evil that you actually sense in those people if you think it hitler is evil the evil you sense in him that's actually an evil within you you understand that that's an evil within you because you're feeling it right it's your mind is happening in your mind but to deny that what you do is you point your finger at him and you external eyes it you project it on to something out there and you say me I'm here Hitler's over there and there's a separation between us and so what he is is not part of me but actually what he is is you but see you're denying this you're not accepting this you're not allowing this this is intolerable because your worldview doesn't allow for this possibility your worldview is based around your entire ego and your worldview is based around the idea that you're a separate entity from the rest of reality which just turns out to be a complete falsehood and so you're living in falsehood all the time and you might wonder at this point well Leo this is getting very deep and profound but where how does this connect to my everyday existence well you're living this falsehood all the time you're not accepting reality as it is you can't even sit down right now and be happy in the moment if I tell you to sit right now and close your eyes and just sit in silence for 10 minutes you're not going to be able to do it you're not going to be happy you're gonna be frustrated gonna be agitated why is this the case because the ego it needs to be in motion all the time is like a shark if it's not swimming through water it's gonna suffocate and die it needs to be swimming to oxygen oxygenate itself so motion needs to be created separation needs to be created enemies need to be created problems need to be created because of this you can't just sit and be inside of reality as it is look reality is exactly the way it is right now no matter what you think about it what you like about it what you don't like about it whether it's favourable to you whether it's not favorable to you whether your life is in danger or it's not in danger that doesn't matter on the grand scale of things because that's reality right we live in a reality where your life can be in danger we have live in a reality where you can die tomorrow that's just reality we live in a reality where there are murders where there are rapists we live in a reality where there's a charity being done well there's acts of kindness we live in a reality where there's acts of hatred we're like well let me look we live in a reality where we have acts of terrorism we live in a reality where we have ignorance and bigotry and racism we live in a reality where we have scientific advancements we live in a reality we have lies and falsehoods we live in a reality where we have countries like the United States and European countries Western countries that are advanced we live in a continent in a reality where we have very underdeveloped countries and very kind of countries that are still stuck in the dark ages like North Korea or countries in certain countries in the Middle East in that part of the world we learn to come in in a world where in a reality where we have poverty and also extreme richness and extreme abundance so we have all these you know all these kind of polar opposites and all these extremes within reality and that's just a part of reality now what you want to do is you want to say but all this all this stuff on this side all the poverty and all the rape and all the murder and all the genocide all that that's evil but to say that you need to say that that's a part of reality that I don't want you're trying to live in a fantasy not into the real reality because of this you're not literally able to just sit and be happy because there's always something about reality that you wish was otherwise you see that this is very deep and it doesn't just apply to extreme situations like genocide and and rape and murder and stuff but it applies to the things that are happening your day-to-day Liston's so tomorrow you're gonna wake up and things are gonna be happening in your life that you wish weren't there you wish you didn't get that email you wish your boss didn't yell at you you wish your wife was a little nicer to you you wish your husband would kiss you in the morning or at night you wish all these things see but what you're doing there's you're living the fantasy because of this you can't sit and be happy because there's always some thing that you wish would come in and secure your happiness well that's never gonna happen never gonna happen you have to start to understand that these enemies that you're creating out of your husband out of your girlfriend out of your boyfriend out of a political figure whoever or even out of impersonal situations in life right with your money problems with your bankruptcy with your business or whatever that these are internal enemies that you are externalizing to prevent yourself from doing the real inner work of looking inside and this is why this is the ugliest thing ugly as a judgment this is why this is the ugliest thing that I am that I've seen because it's because people demonize and it's because people are closed-minded it is because people judge they keep themselves in an unconscious cycle and they're never able to develop themselves above all these problems because if you develop yourself long enough which you recognize is that these problems were all created in your mind and these problems can dissolve that's the positive message here it might sound like everything I'm saying is being depressing because I'm forcing you to accept a reality which to you seems negative but actually when you accept all of reality you don't see it as accepting the negative evil aspects of reality what you do is you remove the distinction between good and evil entirely and contrary to what you think right now when you remove that distinction what happens is actually all of reality becomes sweet even what you think right now is as evil and as despicable to you you open yourself up to it and it actually isn't as despicable and sour tasting as you thought it was and at that point when you do that when you move totally to acceptance you might think of leo I don't want to be totally at acceptance well you don't want to be because right now you're unconscious when you actually develop a little bit of consciousness you realize I want to be at acceptance well I don't want to be at acceptance because I want to be happy no matter what life is doing I can't really control life a lot of stuff in life happens outside my control so what I can do though is I can strengthen myself enough to literally be happy with whatever is going on but to do that I need an extreme openness of mind and I need to stop demonizing other people and other situations and I need to take responsibility for the inner demons that I have rather than projecting them all out into the world what you think terrorism is about what do you think terrorism comes from it comes from a demonization and what do you think the other side right European governments American governments the wars that are created there all this this tension happening with terrorism stuff or you think that's that that's coming from that's also coming from the demonization right you might say but terrors are really evil the people who are I guess the terrorists are also evil why are they also evil because they're projecting their demons out into the terrorists they're not facing them on the inside and this is a big promise to be a problem for you personally in your life but see your personal problems also expand out and create all the social problems that we have so all the social problems we have they come from this problem of demonization that we've been talking about here and this closed-mindedness all right so in wrapping this up let's get back to the exercise that you did well I want you to do now I want you to take out that piece of paper those three people that you despise and at the top of the paper you had written something like these are the three people that I despise the most I want you to cross that whole phrase out right now with the pen and I want you to write these are the people and qualities that I will work to accept and to integrate into my life these are the people and qualities that I will work to accept and integrate into my life and then your job is to work to integrate this into your worldview because right now your worldview is disintegrated this integrated parts of reality that means that parts of reality are being denied so start accepting those parts of reality that you've been denying even if it doesn't feel pleasant to you right now to do it alright this is Leo I'm signing off I'm gonna give a credit to eben pagan for this exercise that's where I got it from one of his seminars and I believe he might have gotten it from Nathaniel Branden who wrote six pillars of self-esteem but I'm not quite sure on that one go ahead leave me your comments down below it's kind of a controversial video I like to hear what you guys think click the like button share this video post it on Facebook and finally come and sign up to my newsletter right here at actualized org click this button sign up to my newsletter a lot of free goodies and exclusive videos that you can get there I'm gonna have more content coming out for my subscribers it's all free you should sign up because I'm really curious and interested about going deeper and deeper in these topics as my videos you know I've already released close to 200 videos as I keep releasing more at this point I'm getting into deeper and deeper topics of personal development and we're gonna go really really deep if you're fascinated by this stuff you're fascinate by philosophy if you're fascinated by how human beings work how they think why we have all these problems in our lives collectively but also personally how you can get your own life into shape you want to stick around so sign up right now you