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[Music] the nine stages of ego development part two so we're continuing on here with our three-part series on cognitive development and yes there's going to be a part three because i looked over all the content that i want to cover in the later stages and there's just so much more to say so much more value to extract from the later stages because after all that's what we're focused on so it's going to be worth your time to stick around for part three as well in fact the most exciting part of our work the most important part of our work will be in part three but in part two you're also going to get a lot of value here so don't think that this is some sort of uh weak sauce episode this is powerful stuff this episode alone can change your whole understanding of mankind and your own development in relationship to it so i'm really excited here to get into this material for which i should credit once again suzanne cook greuter because she's done some amazing brilliant work articulating these different stages her articulation her wording uh is is just superb go download her free research paper it's 90 pages long i recommend you print it out read it highlight it study it in addition to listening me talk about it you see this material that we're covering here is so deep and so profound and so potentially life transforming that it's not that you just watch one of these episodes or even the whole series and then you say okay yeah i got it leo and then you just go about your everyday life it's like no you study this over and over and over again you're gonna have to watch these episodes three five times in order to fully get all the juice that's here and you have to watch them again throughout the rest of your life as well because there's just so much stuff here so anyways let's get into it a very quick recap of the stages we've already covered we've covered the symbiotic the impulsive the opportunist the conformist the expert and the achiever all in part one we've covered that that's most of the people on this planet the vast majority probably 80 plus percent and then now we're going to be talking about the post-conventional stages and i'll explain what post-conventional means here in a few minutes so hang in there if you don't quite know what that jargon means but the post-conventional stages are roughly 15 to 20 percent of the us adult global popula i mean yeah of the us adult population but globally it's going to be a lot less than that so if if you're looking at third world countries underdeveloped countries it's going to be way lower than 20 percent so here in the post-conventional category we have the pluralist stage which is roughly 11 we'll be discussing today and then we also have the autonomous slash strategist stage which comes after that at roughly five percent of the u.s adult population and we'll be discussing both of those today and then next time in part three we'll be concluding with the construct aware and the unitive stage which are very rare and but also the most important really to our work here so a few general points about this model remember it's a scientific model or at least it claims to be so what that means is that every scientific model has its limits sometimes i see people taking models like spiral dynamics or this ego development model trying to apply it to animals or characters within movies like you have to understand that that's not what these things that's not what these models are are designed to handle you can try to stretch it but also beware of trying to go stretching it too far and then it goes into some ridiculous absurd category where you're trying to you know fit something into into some place where it doesn't really belong to fit another general point is that remember that each stage here has the capabilities of the earlier stages underneath it sometimes people get the idea that you completely outgrow a stage and you leave it behind and you never tap into its capabilities ever again like i used to be in a conformist and then i became an achiever or i was an achiever and then i outgrew that and i stopped achieving no that's not how it works it works more like grades in school each grade builds on top of the next grade you know fifth grade incorporates the information you learn in first grade and second grade and third grade you're still able to read you're stable to able to do math you're still able to reason you still understand history it's just you understand it in a more nuanced more sophisticated more advanced form and oftentimes when you understand it in a crude form you make mistakes you fall into various traps you swing your pendulum too much into one direction or some other extreme and you get into unhealthy territory but usually as you explore a stage fully embody it learn it experience it master it over a period of five or ten years you become familiar with it and then you exhaust it and once you exhaust it then you begin to move into the next higher stage but just because you sort of exhausted it doesn't mean that you don't ever tap into those capabilities you still do like even advanced stages can still conform in a group environment in fact it would be dysfunctional if you didn't know how to conform but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of conforming and so also it's important to note that none of these stages are good or bad you have to be very careful about falling into this trap of thinking that well a lower stage is evil or it's it's toxic or it's bad no most of these stages are necessary they're a necessary part of human development just like being a child or being a teenager isn't inherently good or bad it's in fact it's it's necessary you can't blame a child for going through puberty it's necessary if you wanted to become a healthy adult but there are more and less healthy ways of going about it so really our our job here is to point out the traps and many of the unhealthy ways and to try to encourage healthy development at every stage and every stage has its usefulness and its purpose remember again depending on how you're fitting in with your environment so it's all about the fit between the organism and its environment in many parts of the world the environment is such that very advanced stages even if they could exist like you could maybe fly someone from an advanced country into a primitive country he couldn't really thrive or survive in that primitive country because his mindset is too advanced for that kind of environment right you can take a yogi and throw him into a war zone and he's he's not going to fare too well another general point is that what's what's so amazing about these different stages remember like you're you're sort of each stage is its own reality but the higher stages are a higher reality that incorporates the lower reality so the higher stage can understand the lower stages because it went through them and it has more experience of them and because it's able to take a higher perspective remember moving up stages basically gives you more perspective so with a higher perspective you can see the lower perspectives sometimes it's challenging like it's it can actually be challenging for a high level person to see and fully understand uh what it's like to be a low level person but generally they can do it but what tends not to work is that the lower stages cannot fathom the higher stages and in fact usually there are there's a whole host of defense mechanisms that the lower stages use in order to deny that the higher stages even exist because of course even to admit that there are stages and that you're at the lower end of the spectrum rather than the higher end of the spectrum for many uh low-level people this itself in itself is already a problem because it's extremely threatening to their ego because it says well hey you mean i'm not the best i'm not as good as i thought i was yeah that's basically what i'm telling you that's bad news the good news of course you can become a lot better but the bad news is that to become a lot better you have to first admit that you're not as good as you think you are and again remember lower stage people will have this kind of defense mechanism and say oh leo so you're saying i'm bad no i'm not saying you're bad i'm just saying that the development of your mind is not as advanced not nearly as advanced as it could be as some of the highest most developed humans that have ever lived so this is just a radical amazing possibility that's being presented to you with this model at the higher stages see you have to be humble enough to admit when there's something above your understanding that can be very difficult so even though you might hear the higher stages one of two things will happen usually you're going to deny that these are even possible or that they're real or that they're beneficial anyway oftentimes you'll just dismiss it as woo-woo or as nonsense or as just fluffy airy and practical stuff or it's just philosophy or whatever those are common defense mechanisms another common defense mechanism is that you will [Music] it'll just the information will just go in one out one ear and out the other ear and it like won't even register in your mind because to really understand the higher stages you have to develop through the lower stages first it's sort of like a first grader is not going to understand 12th grade mathematics it just it won't compute you have to have a certain foundation established to be able to enter a 12th grade you know calculus class or something and to understand what's being talked about to a first grader a calculus class might seem like gobbledygook and like woo nonsense you know what are all those scribbles on the chalkboard it means nothing you guys are insane doing all this scribbling yeah that's that's what it looks like to a person who has no foundation in mathematics so it can just be aware that it can seem that way analogously it can seem that way about the higher stages that we're going to be talking about they can seem kind of outlandish and they could not make sense that just means you haven't gotten to them yet try to keep your mind open uh also a common misconception is that people tend to think that well if it's a higher stage that means it's perfect and a person at a higher stage needs to be like a saint not necessarily there are dysfunctions even at the higher stages not you're not immune from dysfunction or pathology or self-deception at any stage although it does tend to improve as you go higher so there's there's some correlation but it's not a perfect correlation so this sort of simplistic idea of like oh well that person did something that i think is morally wrong therefore he can't be as high as some stage x no it just means that maybe he is at stage x maybe he is very advanced but sometimes he makes mistakes sometimes he fools himself sometimes he has a false belief here or there sometimes he does something immoral according to your standards see again it's your standards that we're talking about here uh also keep in mind that you do tend to regress stages when you are threatened or stressed so that's important to understand uh also understand that awakenings and mystical experiences are possible at any stage so mysticism is not just exclusive to the highest stages it can happen at any stage but what's important to understand is that when it happens at the lower stages it's going to get interpreted through that low level of cognitive development the mind is going to be rather crude and so like when a fundamentalist christian has a legitimate mystical experience he can misinterpret it or just i guess there's no misinterpreting here it's just he will interpret it in a way which is going to be very sort of christian very fundamentalist very medieval and very exclusive so it's gonna be like yeah i experienced jesus jesus came to me delivered a vision to me and that just demonstrates to me that my religion is the only true one and all of you other guys you buddhists and muslims and and hindus you're all devils and of course there's some truth to that there's still a legitimacy to that mystical experience but the mind because it's so simplistic it's interpreting in a sort of black and white moralistic way that a conformist would so really what we want here is we don't want just mystical experiences and awakenings we want them of course but we want them at the highest levels of cognitive development that's where things get really really good and then there's less dysfunction so there's more likelihood of dysfunction and devilry and unhealthy behaviors at the lower stages of spirituality than the higher stages of spirituality because remember spirituality occurs at all these different stages in different ways all right so let's talk about the post-conventional so what is post-conventional as that category as that label what does that mean it's the beginning of deconstruction so up to this point basically the ego was busy constructing itself as the conformist and as the achiever and as the expert uh there was all this construction going on by the mind the mind was in a sense constructing reality and wasn't aware of how it was constructing reality and it was so busy constructing reality for its own survival purposes trying to be an expert trying to earn money trying to put on a show for people trying to be a good boy or girl to conform to your society in your family and so on uh so you're so busy doing this that the mind it never even occurs to the mind that a deconstruction process might be beneficial to it so there's sort of like this arc that happens in this nine stages of development you start off the first half of the arc which we already covered in part one all of those stages uh that part of the arc is the ego developing itself constructing itself and then you sort of reach the apex of that construction process right at post-conventional the pluralist stage as we're going to start talking about here in a minute and at that pluralist stage that's when the mind becomes open to the possibility of deconstruction what do we mean by deconstruction well it means turning your focus inwards into your own psyche and mind starting to analyze it and starting to really question yourself starting to reflect about your beliefs your ideas and starting to realize the socially constructed nature of reality so a lot of the stuff that were that previously the mind would consider as objective as material as real as scientific as absolute like the word of god or the holy bible you know the holy bible is considered the absolute and you don't question it now you start to question it now you start to deconstruct it but not just the bible you also start to deconstruct rationality logic science uh government politics maybe the capitalist economic system under which you were raised or if you were raised under a socialist one then you maybe start to deconstruct that one you basically start to deconstruct all aspects of your culture you start to question it and you start to ask yourself well is this really true for all people everywhere or is it just something local and sort of rather arbitrary to my little culture my little sub subgroup my family unit my my corporation my religion or something like that so relativity is a huge theme of the post-conventional stage relativity becomes acknowledged whereas before it wasn't for the mind to be able to think relativistically this is a huge leap in cognitive advancement and there isn't just a sort of an on off switch of like relativity or no relativity uh rather there's many degrees of relativistic thinking and usually people are capable of some degree of relativistic thinking but it's very minor and so as you move through the post-conventional stages it really ramps up you become much more relativistic in your worldview and then it gets really radical at the later stages the very last few stages that we'll be talking about next time in part three so there's a realization at the post-conventional level that the meaning of things depends on one's relative position in regards to them on one's personal perspective and interpretation of them there is deep self-reflection that is beginning to happen awareness of one's own unexamined beliefs becomes a uh almost painfully uh brought into one's consciousness you have to wrestle basically with with old beliefs that you've been programmed with in childhood and by your religion by your culture by science and all this in school in university now you start to examine these beliefs more critically rather than just accepting them as a given or taking them for granted the mind also opens up at this level to uh something beyond rationality new epistemic modes new ways of knowing the world than just logic which was very popular in the expert and achiever stages which were the conventional stages conventional is very logical and then post-conventional is sort of post-rational which often gets con confused with pre-rational sort of the pre-rational post-rational fallacy conflating that distinction noticing of illusion and self-deception begins at this stage all problems become a matter of perspective and the mind so the problems aren't necessarily out there in the world maybe it's more about how i think and relate to the world there's an ever decreasing defensiveness and less blaming of others as we move up these stages and a lot of this defensiveness falls away in the post-conventional stages language starts to be questioned and it becomes complex so the previous stages basically took language for granted whereas now language because it's it's sort of the the medium through which the mind thinks and understands things that medium itself becomes transparent to its it's starting to become transparent to itself and it's starting to observe itself and language is kind of doing the sort of self-reflective looking in on itself and questioning itself and languaging about languaging so it kind of becomes meta and the language becomes meta materialist assumptions are starting to be questioned although not completely but they're starting to be the full illusion of materialism is not broken until even beyond the post-conventional uh for that you really need to get to the transcendent into the unitive which we'll be talking about in part three although objects are seen as permanent their meaning is seen as context dependent so remember we said that the ego is a meaning creating machine and so in the past the ego was creating meaning that that's what we mean sort of by that first half of the ark the construction of the mind it's constructing the world and its meaning of the world and while denying that it's doing so and then when the deconstruction process starts that meaning you start to think about wait wait a minute was that meaning baked into the objects and the situations or am i projecting that meaning out into the world because i have this ego that has certain needs and has certain biases and therefore it's projecting those biases on the world and that's skewing what is what it's seeing out there and sure enough that's exactly the case of course and you you discover ever deeper layers of that the boundaries of concepts are seen to be much more flexible in the post-conventional stage so what does this mean well uh concepts were before you know like a concept like science in the conventional stages science is just sort of thought of as a static thing well yeah science we know what science is we just take it for granted that science is just this static thing it's done a certain way people have been doing it you're either doing science or you're not doing science it's either science or pseudoscience or it's science or it's religion and then there's no like blurring of that boundary but then at the post conventional you realize wait a minute science what is science what defines the boundaries of science maybe science is not a a static thing maybe science evolves it morphs it changes maybe the boundary between science and religion is not nearly as sharp as we thought maybe there's a lot of similarities between science and religion as an epistemic mode how do we tell the difference between science and pseudoscience see and so and now the the science concept starts to sort of break down because the boundaries become flexible now of course people at the conventional stages they get freaked out by this they think this is a problem because like oh leo well this means that we're not being scientific anymore and we're going to devolve into some sort of religious fundamentalism again no it actually means that we're going beyond see science took us beyond religious fundamentalism but now we're trying to discover something beyond science and sure enough there is such a thing but you have to open your mind to it and you have to start to work with these different flexible boundaries but a lot of people just aren't open to this they perceive what i'm saying now as some sort of uh you know trojan horse uh you know cult way of uh of like skirting the rigors of science so that i can sneak in my own cult new age you know spiritual philosophy and then this is sort of like my new religion that leo is trying to push on people by talking about how science is flexible no that that's to misunderstand and that's to be stuck at the conventional stages so anyways another thing that happens at the post conventional is that the mind can look and compare whole systems of thought in organizations with increasing distance so you're able to step outside of your whole thinking system and to look at the world from different thinking systems there's an increased interest in uncovering hidden assumptions about oneself and one's society at the conventional stages there's just you you feel this there's just a lack of interest people like if you have conventional stage friends or co-workers or family members you maybe bring some spiritual ideas to them or you you talk about some epistemic notions that start to question materialism or start to question capitalism or start to question you know gender norms or whatever and to them thinking about these these hidden assumptions of science for example this is like they don't understand why this would be valuable they think it's nonsense uh they have all sorts of defense mechanisms and ultimately they just don't care they don't care to question any hidden assumptions and therefore their experience of life doesn't go very deep they can't really understand life very deeply because most of life is hidden with these with these assumptions that that you've been taking for granted your whole life that you have to start to self-reflect about it and to start to deconstruct uh the post-conventional is now able to look back at previous belief systems as systems seeing them as systems so like christianity you can step back from and say that's a belief system islam that's a belief system buddhism that's a belief system there's different kinds of buddhism different kinds of sub belief systems within buddhism see uh and so therefore of course my own belief system whatever maybe i was a buddhist or a christian that also is a belief system you're sort of stepping outside of yourself and you're able to sort of objectively evaluate yourself without being stuck in that system that's the crucial capacity here that the mind is bringing online with the post-conventional is that ability to to step outside of one's paradigm or one's worldview although there's a lot to that and it's not so easy and it's not perfect here don't don't think that even though i'm describing these things that some post-conventional person is going to be perfect at doing all of this no they're still going to make mistakes and fall into delusions and traps and illusions so you know this this breaking this whole quest of breaking out of illusion this is a very deep quest and there's many degrees of it so just because you've broken a few out of a few illusions doesn't mean you've you know you're you're completely 100 free of of illusions usually that's not the case and there's now an appreciation of the existential metaphysical psychological and epistemic issues and questions which at the conventional and lower stages simply didn't register did not compute people didn't care about them at those stages and that's why when you talk about my material the stuff that i talk about with most people with normies you know normies are basically conventional minded people they they see no value they don't appreciate any existential sort of self-development work they don't appreciate any metaphysical questions they think it's nonsense they think it's a waste of time they think it's impractical they would rather be out there earning money or having sex or buying a house or snorting drugs or driving a fast car but if you do care about these metaphysical existential psychological epistemic issues then that's a good indicator that you're at the post-conventional or at least moving into it all right so now let's talk about the first post-conventional stage which is the pluralist about 11 of the us adult population so at this stage there's a realization that things are not what they seemed to be at earlier stages because the interpretation of reality always depends on the position of the observer so this is basically relativity by the way if you want to go really deep on relativity check out my episode called understanding relativism part one and i still need to release a part two but we we go deep there relativity is a hugely important perhaps one of the most important things i talk about and also one of the most misunderstood things that i talk about is relativity so the pluralist realizes that there are multiple perspectives and exploring these perspectives now becomes fascinating whereas in the previous stages one entrenched oneself into one perspective like you just become a christian and you want to be more and more of a christian to hell with all other perspectives because they're evil and wrong here now the pluralist realizes wait a minute there's all these different perspectives all these different cultures to explore all these different worldviews this is very fascinating i'm not sure anymore which is true i can't be as absolutist and certain as i was when i was a conformist and so now i have to go and explore and there's so much to explore so your mind opens up to reading new books and experiencing new cultures trying new things and looking at the world in different ways and that process in of itself is is rewarding it gives you sort of a thrill to do that your mind feels like the the straight jacket has been taken off there's a realization that observation influences what is observed so objective judgment becomes impossible so this is actually very much like they talk about the observation problems within quantum mechanics and actually quantum mechanics is sort of a a post-modern model and a postmodern way of looking at the world and in fact in a sense we could say post-modernism was really ushered in with einstein's general relativity and then quantum mechanics which came shortly after it um and the the two key philosophical and epistemic deep lessons of of sort of the general relativity and quantum revolutions in world view is that we moved away from the sort of strict static newtonian world view where time and space and matter were seen as just these fixed given external material things and we could just take them for granted is true now with general relativity and with quantum mechanics you know einstein and niels bohr and others started to question is there even such a thing as reality is there such a thing as time is there such a thing as space is there such a thing as matter and energy and can we even does it even make sense to say that we are observing an atom or that we are measuring energy in some objective sense when we are doing science as it turns out no you can't do that because there's that entanglement that quantum entanglement problem which basically says that uh when you're measuring some sort of tiny subatomic particle or quark or whatever the problem becomes that the very mechanism that you're using to probe the particle itself is entangled with the result that that particle gives back to you so when you probe that particle one way is a particle when you probe it another way it's actually a wave it's not a particle so is there even such a thing as a particle well no because the notion of particle is already relativistic by saying there is a particle that already implies some way in which you're probing that thing that's there but then the question sort of arises well what is the thing that's there if it's not a particle and it's not a wave what is the what is it there until we probe it and uh to understand that go check out my uh two-part series uh called uh quantum mechanics debunks materialism where i go into a lot of depth explaining those sorts of things um so there's a realization of course now with this relativity that uh judgment becomes impossible because how do you judge a thing when you're aware of the fact that every judgment you make comes from some sort of arbitrary relative position and depending on where you're standing you're gonna be judging things in different ways because you're gonna be seeing them in different ways how do you resolve that problem who is the ultimate arbiter whose judgment is the best well a christian might say well it's god or a muslim might say well it's it's the quran you just look in the quran and you know there it is written what what are the right things to do but but that's the you know that's the conventional stages at the post-conventional stages you can no longer rely on some sort of book as an authority and you know even like an expert or achiever might say well it's science science adjudicates what is good and what is bad what is right and what is wrong what is true and what is false we can make scientific judgments but even that needs to be questioned at the post-conventional stage because you realize that well what is science how do we know that science has some sort of absolute understanding and judgment upon the universe isn't science just one way of looking at the world after all how can you say science is the best way of of discovering the truth when maybe there is meditation when maybe there's uh uh psychic abilities when maybe there is voodoo how can you say that voodoo is less legitimate than science this is what the post-conventional pluralist uh problem is it's sort of it's an epistemic problem that you start to face because now there's there's this before there was just like a single world view that you were locked into now it almost becomes the opposite problem now there's this proliferation once you open pandora's box of relativity everything becomes relative all these different views multiply and there's this sort of a cornucopia of different perspectives and at the pluralist stage you're struggling to make sense of it all because while there are all these different perspectives and views and cultures and lifestyles and cuisines and so forth yes that's all that's all interesting and good but at the same time life still places very concrete demands upon you for survival so the challenge for the pluralist is that while you're exploring all these views at the you also have to try to manage life and this can be difficult because when you become so relativistic that you stop judging things it becomes difficult for you to make decisions in your own life it becomes difficult for you to be able to distinguish between different levels and qualities of you because not all views are necessarily equally practical so one way that you can sort these views is on practicality does it work is it functional is it going to help to create a healthier life for me but but this sort of understanding really doesn't come online yet for the pluralists so the pluralist is going to spend a good five or ten years probably struggling with this and this can create a lot of confusion and uh turmoil in one's mind the pluralist also realizes that we cannot help but filter our observations through our personal and subjective lenses this is a very important realization for the mind it humbles the mind it makes the mind start to become aware of its own biases so what kind of lenses are you using to look at politics with to look at religion with to look at science with see at the conventional stages a scientist might say something a conventional scientist might say something well science is just the objective method of discovering objective truth and that's really all there is to science you're either doing it you're either doing it very rigorously or you're not you're either being rational or you're not but a post-conventional scientist would say wait a minute that's not all there is to the story even when i'm doing science how do i know which forms of science because there's not just one there's many different varieties of science many different ways to do science so how do we know which ways of doing science are better than others and does it even make sense to say that there's one best way to do science because after all don't we have our personal biases because the scientist is not some objective neutral impartial observer the way that conventional people think the scientist is entangled with the science that he's doing he has his biases and various metaphysical and epistemic assumptions that he brings to the table when he's doing his science for example isaac newton assumed that time and space were absolute that was just taken for granted and he did all his science based upon those assumptions and then einstein came along and he said wait a minute we can't take that for granted what if time and space are not absolute what if they're relative and that opened up a whole you know new domain basically for advanced physics advanced cosmology and so forth which has borne amazing fruit but it goes even beyond just the stuff that einstein was doing or niels bohr or something like that um this problem of of adjudicating and correcting for the biases in our own lenses when we're doing science this is a very deep problem and many scientists today if they're conventional they don't realize the depth of this problem they think that they're just doing science objectively without realizing that their mind and their state of consciousness is very much the lens through which they're doing their science which is distorting the science that they're doing so their version of science becomes very limited that doesn't mean that all the science is wrong or bad it just means that you can expand beyond it in the same sense that isaac newton's mechanics it wasn't strictly speaking wrong uh we still use it we still teach newtonian mechanics and physics classes in high school and even in college and it's extremely useful but it's again it's a scientific model which has certain limits and then what einstein did is he came along created a new model which was broader which had a higher elevation perspective which incorporated newton but then allowed us to understand even more about reality and so in general that's sort of what's happening here is that as your perspective expand expands it's not necessarily that you're invalidating and disproving everything that came before you you're just building on top of it and you're seeing it and recontextualizing it in a higher more relativistic perspective that's what's really going on and this can keep happening forever you can keep zooming out and keep doing this forever out and out now and that's what basically this whole process of of development is about there's an awareness at the pluralist stage of cultural conditioning you're starting to see how much your culture programs you and that you really are not in control of your own beliefs and values as much as you thought you were the pluralists can no longer disregard enorm the enormous diversity of people and their beliefs values and preferences so in the past in the conventional stages a lot of the reason that they worked is because this was a usually an earlier era where people lived in a less globalized society there was no internet there were no books etc and so you could just live in a little village or a little town your whole life somewhere rural in the suburbs or whatever and you didn't meet many diverse cultures and therefore you could maintain a very limited narrow world view based upon your community and your community usually all thought the same have the same beliefs same values same preferences but now when you can just buy a ticket and travel around the world uh very cheaply quickly or you can just skype people zoom people and um you can watch youtube videos of people from africa and from the amazon all this crazy stuff books are cheap and free available every everywhere all the time it's easy you can just download stuff you can watch movies all around the world from different cultures you can watch documentaries and 4k hd and all this and so this makes uh the diversity so blatant and obvious that you can't deny it anymore you can't just stay in your little bubble to stay in your little bubble you have to deny all of this stuff all these different cultures and different cuisines and so the more you travel around the world the more you interact with different diversities diversity people of different diversities what i meant to say uh then it it radically expands your worldview and oftentimes that's all you need to do to to move into post-conventional is just go travel around the world to exotic places i don't mean other like conventional developed countries but go travel play like if you're from a developed country from america or from from europe travel someplace exotic and different travel to south america travel to africa travel to asia and explore you know explore india i guarantee you it's gonna you're gonna that's not just gonna be an interesting experience for you it's not just gonna be cool or mind opening it's going to actually lead you to an existential and moral crisis because you're going to see things there you're going to see crippling poverty you're going to see disease you're going to see inequality you're going to see violence you're going to encounter laws and norms and people eating insects and other weird animals and things you're gonna see such weird things there if you bother to look that it's gonna it's gonna shock you you're gonna be in for a culture shock which will then lead to an existential and an identity crisis because you're going to start to ask yourself well i've been living in this little bubble my whole life and look at how the rest of the world lives it doesn't live the way that i live i've been living in this you know cushy uh american suburb environment maybe where i grew up and that's not how the rest of the world lives and you'll see also how backwards the rest of the world is and you'll also discover ways in which there's wisdom in in the sort of primitive cultures as well that we've lost touch with here in the west in more developed countries so again it's not all good and bad there's pros and cons to it but it will certainly jostle your worldview wide open the pluralist starts to now see all world views as seemingly equally valid and worthy of consideration this is both a good thing and a bad thing because now you start to think of like nazism as a legitimate valid worldview but is it really at the same level of world view as like the world view of a of a of a yogi or a saint yeah i mean on a certain absolute sense you could say they're equal who who you know who's to say that that hitler's worldview was any uh any worse than than jesus's or the buddhas but also there is a difference but that difference doesn't uh really become apparent until we go beyond pluralism the pluralist stage to the next stage so at this point the pluralists are sort of lost in this proliferation of different worldviews the diversity of worldviews and isn't clear how to adjudicate between them because that's sort of what relativity implies is that you're losing your criteria for judging different things because who's to say it's all relative um there's a desire in the pluralist to be fair and even-handed so the pluralist sort of naturally just wants to value and honor all ideas equally um the truth becomes very difficult to find at this stage become because everything starts to become relative and the pluralist might even deny that there is such a thing as truth very commonly a pluralist will say something like well that's true for you but it's not true for me and for conventional people when they hear pluralists saying that uh they can cringe at that because they say well but but what about the facts what about objective reality i mean are you aren't you going crazy with your relativism you're just saying that there's no such thing as truth anymore we can't even agree on a basic fact like can't we agree that that that that car over there is is red i mean isn't it red we all agree it's red right so what's wrong with that isn't that a fact of of nature well it's tricky because it would seem so but then when you go deeper in your consciousness and you go more post-conventional you realize that actually it's not so easy to agree that that car is red for example we have colorblind people who might not see the red car as being red and i mean that's just a very crude example there there's there's much more tricky examples of it so so the pluralists can fall into this trap of starting to believe that there's no such thing as truth and then they get rigid about it and they say well no there can't be truth because everything is relative but then isn't that a truth but see so they're still wrestling with this to them this is not clear at later stages you will discover that actually there is such a thing as absolute truth but it's not what the conventional people thought it was it's something else in fact the absolute truth is that everything is totally relative but uh we're getting ahead of ourselves here also the plural to the pluralist uh the mind can now stand outside the system it grew up in and observe itself and its culture from above so very good and important ability the pluralist is good at questioning hidden assumptions values and beliefs there's now a realization of self-deception as a defense mechanism so your mind uses self-deception in order to construct its reality and to convince itself that the reality it constructed wasn't constructed but that's just how reality is that's how reality is created i've talked a lot about this in the past in various episodes but specifically if you want to learn more about self-deception this powerful concept check out my my three-part series called self-deceptions part one two and three where i go into many many different self-deception mechanisms that the mind is capable of and how it tricks you into constructing reality and that that's a theme that i cover over and over again in various ways throughout all of my content as i'm sure you're aware now uh so with this realization of self-deception and again at this stage it's only just beginning so i don't want you to get the idea that oh well if i'm a pluralist that means i've completely eliminated self-deception because now i understand it no you're just barely beginning to open your mind to the possibility of self-deception you have no idea yet how deep it really goes you've just scratched the surface of self-deception whereas the conventional stages they didn't even take self-deception seriously as a thing the possibility that your own mind could be completely spin doctoring you this wasn't a thing at the conventional stages it just wasn't a possibility but now it's becoming a possibility there's an awareness of how easily the human mind fools itself and not just the human mind of other humans but of course the human mind means my mind because i'm a human see so while at the conventional stages of course people will admit that people fool themselves they will always make an exception for themselves see the mind is clever here so the game that the mind is playing is that he'll say well yeah sure there's lots of deluded people in the world in fact most of my enemies are deluded people people who are not like me are all deluded people but people who are like me are not deluded we're aware of the absolute truth now of course that itself is the deception uh as you come to realize at the higher stages so if if other people are so easily fooled what are the chances that you are one of those people fooling yourself thinking that you're an exception to this trend that everybody is so easily fooled see so now this comes into awareness and self-deception cultural bias become the greatest dangers now the greatest dangers of the post-conventional stages are not some enemies out there they are not the nazis they are not the terrorists they are not the you know whatever the uh the the satanist and the demon worshipers and the and the pedophiles and all this sort of stuff that's not the greatest danger the greatest danger is your own mind and the beliefs and software that were programmed into your mind that was taken for granted all the assumptions the hidden assumptions that you never questioned that you were indoctrinated with by your culture as you were growing up including religion science politics economics and morality and everything else all of that that's the greatest danger that's a huge realization if you can realize just this much you're in the top like five percent of people on this planet it takes a lot of work to realize the significance of what i just said although it's it's pretty simple and it's very obvious in retrospect but so many people are in denial about it because this will lead to an existential crisis for you the first time you start to realize this and it's not just something you realize once this is this is a process of years we're talking about years and decades of realizing how deeply you have deceived yourself how deeply your culture has programmed you there's a realization that things are always more complex than they seem at the lower stages it's very easy to act sort of arrogant where you learn a little bit about some topic and then you think you understand everything now at the post-conventional stages you realize that all of my opinions and all of my theories they're way too simple for dealing with the actual reality of the situation so when it comes to something like you know police brutality at the conventional stages you could sort of break it down into a couple of sides that got sort of a binary well let's fund the police more or less defund the police let's you're either pro police or you're anti-police sort of this sort of stupid binary uh but at the post-conventional stages you realize wait a minute it's much more complex than that there's not a pro-police anti-police this issue is complex it involves training it involves funding it involves systems it involves uh different cultural uh views it involves morality and it involves politics like it involves all this sort of stuff but there's no clear easy answer to the issue of how do you improve the police yeah you can blame and point your finger but blaming and pointing your finger at at different sides doesn't resolve the problem the pluralist mind is capable of venturing beyond culture this is huge there's an appreciation now in this mind of epistemology questions concerning the nature of knowledge how do we know what we know most adults never bother to wonder how do we know what we know how do we know anything at all how do we know science is true how do we know rationality and logic can be trusted how do we know we can trust religion how do we know we can trust spirituality or anything from the new age how do we know anything how do we even know that we exist for conventionally minded people these questions seem silly and abstract and stupid once you get into the post-conventional you realize how important these questions are in fact you realize that these are the most important questions that you should be asking so the pluralist is able to question how one comes to know and believe things now a distinction is starting to be drawn between beliefs and reality and that how we think reality is that's totally separate from reality itself and that even science when we're doing science that is not reality itself that is us thinking about reality which again is totally separate from reality itself which of course opens the the question or the door to the question of well then what is reality itself independent of us thinking about it and interpreting it and modeling it and theorizing about it and believing in it what is that well that's a very profound question which will require more stages to fully understand the pluralist realizes that all groups and societies see it as their mandate to mold the minds and hearts of their members and of course we're not just talking about other groups we're also talking about my group and my society so i am not immune to this that's the key difference between a conventional and a post-conventional mindset is that the post-conventional starts to realize that i am not immune to all of this brainwashing i'm very much a part of it so how do i break free of this brainwashing when even the books that i'm reading are just more brainwashing when i go buy a book about how to un-brainwash myself that book itself is the brainwashing that i have to br brainwash myself from see the problem here where we get into sort of strange loops and sort of these loops that feed back on themselves that's exactly right that's that's the problem of self-reflection which will only fully get realized at much later stages there's an awareness of how much society and environment has shaped one's point of view one's world view beliefs and values the mind is seen as completely contingent on historical context geographic place economic circumstance education the structure of society culture media advertising and language this is huge when you realize this see to most people most conformist people their mind simply cannot compute the simple fact that the only reason you're a christian is because you were born in a christian country to christian parents that's it that's the only reason you're a christian if you were born in a muslim country to a muslim family muslim parents you would be a muslim this does not compute to a fundamentalist religious person and like like likewise actually uh there's there's an even deeper level to this problem where for most atheists and scientific materialists it does not compute that the only reason you're an atheist scientific materialist or rationalist is because you were born in a developed country in the 21st century or the 20th century maybe uh at a certain era in history where materialism and science and rationality are taken as absolute truths and you've adopted those through the education system and so forth this does not compute in the minds of most scientists they can't see past this they think that actually the science and the materialism and the rationalism that this is the one true way relative to all the other religious mumbo-jumbo that's found in the history books that came before but they can't see that yes science is is more advanced and more correct so to speak than all the stuff that came before but then there's there's new levels to science there's things beyond science which science cannot comprehend because of the very nature and limits that science imposes on its own self by being science science blocks itself off from certain aspects of reality but most scientists can't fathom this because they're just at the conventional level there's also an appreciation of how media advertising culture all of this influences us there's a there's an understanding now of also how much language plays a role before language was taken completely for granted now languages seem to actually structure our thoughts we can only think the things that our language allows us to think the distinctions that our language makes are the distinctions that then our mind categorizes reality in projecting those distinctions and then sort of creating a feedback loop where we are using confirmation bias and then see our own projections and then to convince ourselves that that is what reality is actually like when it's just relative perspective you start to question the education system now you start to see that there's no such thing as some objective perfect education system every education system has certain biases and limitations in it whether it's a religious or a secular education and the structure of society now starts to be questioned where before stuff like um like capitalism for example in america especially you know we just take capitalism for granted that's just the way the natural way that governments work the way that economies work but is it really so natural you start to see how artificial it is you start to see how it's manipulated and changed and socially constructed there's nothing natural per se about capitalism at least not in the way that it's it's actually done in developed countries so you start to question that whereas someone who's a conformist doesn't question capitalism they just believe that capitalism is right and then again if you grew up in in communist china or in soviet russia you would think that communism or socialism is is superior and the right way to do it and you really believe it's the right way the funny thing is is that these people on like fox news these conservative types who rail against socialism and marxism and communism that these very same people the structure of their mind is such that if they just were born rather be more in america if they were just born in soviet russia 50 years ago they would be staunch communist party members vehemently fighting for communism against capitalism because again like i said in part one it's not the content that's so important it's the structure of the mind see yes a capitalist like a dogmatic capitalist and a dogmatic communist it might seem like these are polar opposites but actually if you're looking at it from a higher elevation you see that they're very similar to each other just their ideas are different the content of their mind is different but the structure of their mind is the same they're both dogmatic in the same way they're both failing to see the the pros and cons and trade-offs of the other system they're both stuck within their little narrow paradigm and they're both busy defending it without being aware of what they're doing they're both unable to step up to a higher elevation look downwards and to see how maybe the two could be reconciled as a sort of a yin and yang thing so at the pluralist stage there's a realization that the mind has far less control over being molded than you previously believed at the conventional stages yes you thought there was brainwashing but you didn't consider yourself to be brainwashed now the post-conventional stages you realize holy not only is there brainwashing but i'm the biggest fool because i fooled myself into thinking that there was no such thing as brainwashing and that itself was the brainwashing the brainwashing was that i am the only one who wasn't brainwashed which of course means i was the most brainwashed you start to see that see that takes a sort of a meta self-reflection you see how you need to take a higher meta perspective to be able to see that education itself is now seen as a source of self-deception even reading science textbooks and math textbooks this itself can become a self-deception because you're you're taking them as an authority and yes 99 of science is taken on blind faith through authority that's what you realize when you get to the post-conventional stages at the conventional stages you believe no leo science is not about authority science is not like religion science is totally different science is about facts it's about empiricism it's about studying things about being rational this is not based on authority then you realize actually 99 of everything you know about science is pure belief no different than a christian or a muslim believes in allah or christ or whatever else have you ever actually done any science yourself how much science have you actually done almost none all of it is belief based all the science you learned in school was all belief based that's just that's just how it is but of course people at the conventional stage are in denial about this because they need to draw a firm distinction between science and religion and this is very threatening to start to admit that maybe science is no better than religion maybe science falls into the very same traps and problems that religion falls into maybe science is also an ideology maybe science is also a belief system maybe science also takes certain things for granted yeah that's that's super threatening because then you have to wonder like well then how do i discover what's true if we can't do it through religion if the bible can't tell us if my culture can't tell me what's true if science can't even tell me what's true how then it must be hopeless then there's no truth and and yeah you're gonna have to spend some years or decades struggling through all that so understand that what i'm describing here is a long journey your mind needs to work through all of these questions and problems i'm sitting here after doing 20 years of this epistemic work now just spewing all this at you as though it was easy but i racked my mind over this for thousands and thousands of hours and now it's easy you know in retrospect it wasn't easy going through that process it's very very challenging which is why most people don't do it it's emotionally laborious it's confusing there's paradoxes and things you don't understand and then you know your ego doesn't want to admit that it was wrong and you start looking like a fool to yourself in retrospect you start to look back at your past at the arguments and conversations you've had with your friends and teachers and you see how stupid you were how all of your beliefs and all of your opinions and ideas that they were just childish childish uh fairy tales uh and yet you thought you were so right this is extremely threatening and very few people are willing to admit these things to themselves personally i've been doing this work this epistemic work i've been doing it since i was like 16 years old and honestly it shocked me that most people my age weren't doing it and then i later i learned that people even who are twice my age were doing it they're just not interested in it and now i realize that's because they're stuck in conventional and i was post-conventional i was post-conventional basically since like 16 years old um of course i still had to work through conventional stages i was just you know tapping into it again barely tapping into it you have to realize that all of these stages and categories and so forth there's a lot of depth to them so you can kind of tap into it at a certain age but that doesn't mean you fully understood it exhausted it or solidified yourself in it or that you can fully embody it really it's taken it's taken decades for me to be able to fully embody those original uh first glimpses and realizations i had when i was 16 years old or 20 years old of this epistemic stuff so at the pluralist stage there's also now a turning away from material achievements to inner experience and self-reflection the inner world becomes so interesting now that getting some money or some sex or a fast car these things become like child's play you start to lose interest in them and also probably because the stage prior to this was the achiever stage so you've probably achieved a lot of that stuff you probably did already earn some good money and you probably did already get your fast car and you had a house and you you had some sex and you did some drugs and you you went partying and you did all this stuff and you've achieved already a good chunk in your life and now you ask well what's more it seems like i've already achieved so much am i just going to keep achieving more of the same it doesn't really fulfill me anymore there needs to be some deeper dimension to to life and so now you're ready to go into the inner dimensions the dimensions of consciousness the psychological dimensions there's an ever deeper discovery of how one's subjective how subjective one's worldview is this is both liberating and confusing it's confusing because there's now unlimited ways of seeing the world and you're struggling to make sense of it all remember the ego's primary job is to make sense of the world and so now what we're doing is we're sort of taking the way that you were making sense of the world the conventional ways we're pulling that rug out from under you and we're not replacing it with anything and so you're left in a sort of state of vertigo for years and maybe for a whole decade you will be in a state of of vertigo trying to just reorient yourself and there's a very strong temptation to to regress backwards and just to cling to something you know let me go back to my religion let me just go back to science let me just find some way to anchor myself into some sort of cohesive way of making sense of the world and that is the trap if you really want to be courageous you have to let go of the need for any kind of anchors and let yourself be groundless and rudderless for a while maybe for a few years maybe for a decade uh as your mind is struggling to figure all this out and as you're exploring all these different perspectives so even though it's confusing and can be emotionally taxing it's also hugely liberating in the sense that now you have so many more options and possibilities you're not straight jacketed anymore to one way of doing things to one you know to one way of doing spirituality to one way of searching for truth now you have multiple ways and that's great some of them are going to be terrible but some of them a few of them you'll discover are going to be way better than anything you thought or had before now at this stage at the plural stage it becomes interesting just watching oneself trying to make sense of oneself you ever done that you're doing something and then you're just watching yourself doing it and seeing how like a monkey you are how you're just like a robot like a zombie just going through the motions of doing something and then maybe even the question enters your mind why am i even doing this thing in the first place i never even i never even questioned why i should do this thing why should i go to church why should i read the bible why should i wash my hands why should i uh read a book why should i do these now some of them are legitimate to do you know maybe washing your hands is a good idea especially these days um but then some of those things you realize uh the only reason i was doing it was because i was like a monkey imitating others who were doing those things and i thought they were smart and then i realized that they weren't smart they were just pretending to be smart because they were just copying other monkeys who were pretending to be smart but actually none of them were smart so who's really smart how do i even determine what smartness means anymore the pluralist now abandons purely rational analysis in favor of more holistic organismic approaches which take into account feelings intuitions and context this is huge huge huge you see this problem a lot on youtube you see a lot of youtubers who are in that spiral dynamic stage orange zone where they are hardcore scientific materialists i call them also rationalist atheists often they are and uh and they they love to criticize religious people uh they love to they love to criticize deepak chopra and all the woo stuff and teal swan and oh yeah they'll they'll just jump on anything new age they'll just jump on of course they they do the same thing to me this is the pre-trans fallacy that ken wilbur has beautifully articulated and labeled uh like if you go to if you go to the rationalist wiki there's a rationalist wikipedia uh it's it's com it's a complete mockery of rationality and science but but they pretend as though they're being rational and scientific but if you go there you can you can find me you can search my name in there you're going to find a terrible entry that that that completely misconstrues everything that i say in the name of course debunking me so they think that they can debunk me by just you know uh going through these scientific materialist rationalist talking points of how you know oh he's just some new age cult leader blah blah blah blah blah not realizing that they're just falling into the pre-trans fallacy um and i totally get it you know i don't really hold it against them they just can't do any better because they're stuck in rationality so uh the post-conventional realizes the limitations of rationality it actually realizes that intuition is more powerful than rationality and it starts to feel and to get a lot of wisdom and insight into reality from feeling from consciousness rather than through linear logical thinking or proof or analysis the idea that for a thing to be true it has to be formally proven this is one of the most toxic and unscientific ideas that exists amongst people who otherwise consider themselves to be scientific so the pluralist now is going from the purely logical into the psychological domain you see because actually what you realize is that one of the ways one of the chief ways in which your mind fools you and deceives you is with logic because logic can be used by the by the mind actually the left hemisphere is responsible for logic in right-handed people if you're left-handed then it's reverse the left hemisphere is responsible for logic and for the logical way in which the ego mind the ego basically lives inside of logic inside the left hemisphere and it's responsible for dissecting the world and for rationalizing everything in order to preserve the ego so this is what the rationalists and scientists and and atheists don't understand they don't understand that by just taking logic for granted that opens to sort of a back door for the ego to co-opt that logic and to use that logic to justify whatever it wants every evil and deluded person in the history of mankind has considered himself to be rational and logical and has used reasons and logic to justify his evilness and his delusion it doesn't matter whether religious or scientific theists or atheists or anything else everybody has logic the question is are you using your logic well and ironically when you're being very strict about your logic and you're demanding everything to be logical and you deny anything that isn't logical that is a misuse of logic the highest use of logic and reason is to realize the limits inherent to logic and reason and then to let it go that doesn't mean that you become illogical and irrational like a fool you can still do logic and you can still reason but you're careful about it now logic becomes self-aware at this stage or at least it's starting to it just it's starting to and in order for logic to become self-aware it has to become psychological psycho dash logical you have to now state start to take into account the various sneaky uh psychological ploys and tricks that your mind employs when it's doing logic there's now an exploration of experience and discovery is more interesting and important uh than reaching a goal or making a product so a pluralist would rather just explore different perspectives maybe travel around the world experience new people and relationships rather than just working like some achiever towards some money goal or to launch some product there tends to be a distrust at the pluralist stage of conventional wisdom and hyper-rational methods and this is a good and valid distrust because they can't be trusted scientific certainty and the judgmental frame breaks down pluralists like to scrutinize their own assumptions and they relish in the novel mental freedom that comes at this stage all values are now seen as relative but survival still demands making choices and judgments which the pluralist struggles with rather than solving problems one must figure out what to define as the problem at this stage see as the cliche einstein quote goes i mean it's cliche because it's really good it's very appropriate is that you can't solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that was used to create it and that's what you realize with the post-modern i mean the post uh post-conventional stages problems are now seen as an interplay between polarities neither one of which can simply be eliminated the conventional traditional mind thinks that oh all we got to do to make the world good is just kill all the evil people if we kill all the rapists murders and pedophiles and terrorists the world will be a paradise and then you realize no no that that attitude itself is exactly what makes the world evil you can't just kill all the criminals and rapists and terrorists uh first of all because in the process of doing so you yourself will become a criminal uh rapist and a terrorist um uh but also because the reason that these terrorists and criminals and so forth exist is actually a differences in perspective they have different agendas than you different perspectives than you and so who's to say who deserves to be killed you see when you think you can just improve the world by killing everybody else who is who you don't like who doesn't fit your perspective well but then everybody else also will think of the world and approach the world in that way you see so if a christian believes that well we should kill all the muslims and a muslim believes well we should kill the christians and a buddhist believes well we should kill those two then what do you got you've got chaos you've got war what's necessary is actually an understanding of the difference in perspective that all three have and to see that actually we can find common ground between these perspectives such that we don't need to kill each other we can mutually co-exist we can find a way in which we can actually find common ground work together and to do that we need to be able to see through each other's eyes rather than demonizing each other or thinking that the world would just be better if those people didn't exist and a lot of scientific people fall into this trap as well they convinced themselves that well if if religion just didn't exist the world would be a great place let's kill all the religious people or maybe they don't go that far but they'll say something like if we could just get rid of all the churches you know in 100 years all of religion will be gone i know because i used to think this way i went through a hard rationalist scientific materialist phase in my life an atheist phase in my life where i i would i would i remember i would tell myself something like in a hundred years all of religion will be gone and mankind will be freed up and there will be this this flowering of science and rationality that will transform society and everything will be peachy i had this fantasy i didn't understand that that's just that's just the same problem as you know a muslim thinking that uh just you know get rid of all the infidels and the world would be a better place it's not gonna work that way uh the pluralist enjoys paradox and contradiction without needing to eliminate them that's a huge step forward can the conventional mind cannot deal with paradox conventionally minded rational and logical people they don't understand paradox they can their mind cannot handle strange loops cannot deal with circular causality and that sort of stuff and in fact they take paradox as evidence of contradiction and in fact they use the paradoxes that result from post-modern and post-conventional thinking they use that as evidence on their side for the fallaciousness of post-modernism and uh post-conventional thinking when actually it's not this is not a that's not a bug this is a feature the post-conventional mind sees paradox as a feature not a bug and it can even relish in the paradox paradox can be seen as delicious and beautiful that's ultimately where you want to get to with paradox because paradox is the core feature of reality we might say and i'm going to shoot an episode in the future that's going to be all about paradox and how paradox works and i've already talked about a little bit in in a couple of episodes uh my googles and completeness theorem episode and also in my reality is a strange loop episode so check those out if you want to see more about that so linear logic gives way to a more holistic understanding not everything needs to be proven in order to be embraced at the post-modern stage at the pluralist stage value is placed upon insight and breakthrough like the kind of insights you get through contemplation or through meditation these are dismissed by the conventional mind as just being subjective hallucinations or something which is why many scientists don't take insight seriously when in fact insight is the is the core foundation of all scientific breakthrough but it takes a genius scientist to really be capable of understanding the power of insight and what insight is there's now a playful exploration at this pluralist stage and the imagination is set free because you've got so many perspectives and the more perspectives you explore the more creative your mind becomes and you you you see new possibilities new interesting combinations because creativity is basically a combination of of diverse source material and so now your source material exponentially explodes and so does your creativity and your imagination uh the pluralist now looks for connections and subtle clues rather than analyzing independent parts so the pluralist is all about connecting the dots that's going to be sort of the mode of understanding reality whereas at the conventional stages like the expert and the achiever their whole way of understanding reality was just to dissect it into parts and to think that the the parts once we dissect them all if we add them all together it's just going to be the same as if we split them all apart so the sum and the the separate parts that they're all the same but the pluralist realizes that the sum is not the same as the independent parts something is lost when you dissect an animal or you know you throw a frog into a blender and you blend it up and you you break it down into a bunch of cells and molecules that is not the same thing as a fully functioning frog you can't understand a frog by throwing into a blender and then looking at it under a microscope you can only understand a very narrow sliver of what a frog is by looking at it that way you also have to look at it psychologically you have to look at sociologically you have to look at it zoologically you have to look at it spiritually you have to look at it in a sort of a in a social way you have to look at it in a political way there's so many different ways that you can understand what a frog is and how it fits into the larger universe than just throwing it into a blender and dissecting it under a microscope useful information can now come from beyond science at this stage sources that used to be viewed with ridicule and skepticism such as intuition feeling dreams meditation self-reflection insight these now become highly valued and you can see this like the rationalist wiki uh if you go look at rationalist wiki all their different page entries not just on me but on everybody else that they that they cover the sort of debunking attitude that they take a lot of times what they're sort of doing is they're ridiculing and they're misusing skepticism in order just to perpetuate their scientific materialist conventional worldview without realizing that that is what they're doing they just take skepticism and rational ridicule as uh as somehow being you know the height of human intelligence when really it's not it's quite stupid check out my episode called true versus false skepticism where i talk about how skepticism is misused and weaponized by rationalists and how to use skepticism properly there's a lot of value to skepticism and i consider myself a skeptic that's how i started doing philosophy is with skepticism but but man you can really misuse skepticism and you see it all over youtube all over youtube these days it's so popular just to ridicule anything that doesn't fit the sort of traditional conventional rational scientific materials paradigm just ridicule it uh with this very flimsy false skepticism um you know people will ridicule insight they will ridicule meditation they will ridicule spiritual techniques they will ridicule yoga they will ridicule chakras they will ridicule various healing modalities they will ridicule intuition and they will ridicule feelings and emotions they will ridicule femininity they will ridicule holistic thinking because their mind just wants to dissect reality in a very linear analytical way and they don't know any other way to understand reality they have it in their minds that that's the only way when in fact it's just one way out of an infinite number of ways big picture thinking becomes important to the pluralist there is now a shift from being to feeling i mean sorry from from doing to being and feeling so the achiever was all about running around doing stuff and uh the pluralist is like no let's sit back let's feel let's let's get in touch with our being now of course oftentimes to a conventionally minded rationalist person this feeling and being stuff seems hippie and new agey and woo-woo and it seems like it's not real it doesn't seem tangible but that's because yeah it's it's a more uh it's a more advanced way of interfacing with reality than just logicing everything to death or grabbing something by the throat the way that you were used to the lower stages see as you go higher in the stages your consciousness becomes more abstract you're capable of doing abstraction at higher and higher levels and higher elevations and so therefore uh the reason this new age stuff can feel kind of airy fairy is because in a sense it is it's more spiritual spirit meaning breath meaning it's more ephemeral it's more abstract it's more purely conscious rather than grossly material you can't necessarily grab it with your hand but that doesn't make it any less real or any less true in fact actually it's more real it's more true the more abstract your insights get so this is something that a conventional mind doesn't understand there's now an awareness the plural stage of how emotions aren't just in the head but are diffused throughout the whole body so the mind-body connection is now recognized as a valid legit thing it's actually seen as very important and that actually what you discover is that while you were in the conventional stages you were so stuck in your head that you often had even diseases and ailments in your body because you were disconnected from your body you were carrying around anger sadness frustration uh trauma in your body from childhood you were carrying this stuff around with you uh and then and as you start to feel into it it starts to release but just that feeling in process itself can be scary it can be threatening it can feel alien because many many people in the world haven't even felt their bodies haven't felt emotions they've never consciously experienced anger or sadness uh because they just numb themselves out with television with porn with drugs with food and all this sort of stuff they self-medicate in all these different ways to avoid feeling and also because they think so much they're stuck in their heads that they they don't realize that these emotions are actually not in the head they're in the body and so when you start to realize the importance of integrating the mind and the body together this opens up a whole new domain of self-improvement work of spiritual work of healing work but of course a lot of traditionally minded people will think of this as just new age airy fairy nonsense and of course it seems that way from their perspective because they're stuck in their head they're thinking about it they're not actually feeling into it you can't understand feeling and emotion by thinking about it more you have to realize oh thinking about it is not how you actually feel let me stop thinking let me start feeling let me really become conscious of my emotions let me do some mindfulness practice but for that your mind has to be open see so it'll for most people like it was for me you're probably going to spend a good five years kind of resisting it and then it'll take you another five years uh to start to actually feel and it is gonna be a long multi-year process of gradually feeling into your various emotions and slowly opening up your body maybe by doing yoga or whatever maybe doing some shamanic breathing like i had an episode in the past and that will establish the mind-body connection and you will realize that how you feel in your body is oftentimes related to how you think whereas at the conventional stages if someone has a disease or someone has depression they will tend to attribute it to a material cause like oh i'm depressed because um of you know some material i don't have enough money that's why i'm depressed so uh let me either go get more money or let me go get some anti-depression pills which will solve my depression for me that's how it sort of conventional mind thinks whereas a post-conventional mind will start to say wait a minute maybe my depression is more psychologically based maybe there's trauma in the past i haven't dealt with maybe it's just the fact that i'm not fully feeling in my emotions let me feel where is the depression in my body maybe it's in my chest maybe it's in my heart maybe it's in my my hands maybe you know what what might be the cause of that and you start to explore that you start to maybe do some bodywork or you know bioenergetic type stuff or whatever yoga and then you start to establish that mind-body connection and then you realize that oh the depression wasn't some material thing it was more of a spiritual thing more of a psychological thing and then that opens up new ways of dealing with it healthier ways so there's a recognition at this pluralist stage that feelings thoughts and the body sensations all intertwine and affect each other how you think affects how you feel but also how you feel affects how you think what you put in your body affects how you think and how you feel how you use your body can expand your ability to be creative and so forth and this is not just airy fairy new agey stuff i mean it's real just go actually try this stuff and you'll see these very real connections between these things you can't separate the mind from the heart the logical from the intuitive or uh facts from feelings this this stupid binary idea of like oh there's facts and then there's your feelings man so like the rational people the same people they just go with the facts they have very distinction between facts and feelings that ben shapiro likes to use that itself is grounded all in his own feelings there's nothing factual or logical or objective or rational about what ben shapiro is doing he's being completely ideological and governed everything he's doing every show he does everything coming out of his mouth is completely governed by his ego which is all governed by feelings but he's so disconnected from it he's so robotic you can tell in the way he holds his body his his facial muscles all this stuff it's so you know he's you can see he's trying to hold it together to kind of uh play that good boy you know uh judeo-christian kind of like conformist stereotype of what a good jew has to be uh and uh and yeah it's just it's extremely predictable there's nothing intelligent about it it's just he's behaving like a robot and it's not there's nothing i'm not trying to pick on him it's just he's he's one good example of of millions of people who live this way they're very very repressed you know when you when you repress your sexuality you have to also have to repress your whole body your muscles have to be tight you have to you know you're denying yourself that's what a lot of christians and catholics uh muslims and so on they deal with the sort of the guilt and the the the pressure of constantly having to deny your animal urges but at the pluralist stages are sort of opening up and this is well you know where the hippies come from so the hippies very much were pluralists and so the hippies are into free love and uh they're into psychedelics their minds are more open they're into exploring different cultures and so on you know but then of course the hippies get demonized why the hippies get demonized who do the hippies get demonized by they get demonized by these hyper-rational people or the conformist people it's the conformists the achievers and the experts and opportunists i guess as well who all demonize the hippies because the hippies is that is that sort of that next quantum leap into from the conventional thinking to the post-conventional ways of thinking which is very threatening to them it takes a lot of work to become a hippie being a hippie is very advanced see that's what many of the rationalists don't understand they think a rationalist thinks like a rational scientist thinks he's more developed than a hippie actually he's not he's not unless he happens to be a scientist and a hippie then then maybe he is you can also do that at higher stages so uh logic and science are no longer absolutes but one and one out of many different valid episodic epistemic modes pluralists are concerned with making a unique and personal contribution to the world independent of any socially approved roles or tasks pluralists often withdraw into external uh from external affairs and company life to um or ordinary daily routines so they they like to live more unconventionally which of course also corresponds with hippies you know hippie doesn't want to be a square a square is basically a word that hippies invented for all the conventional thinking people who just go to a nine-to-five job and just you know punch a clock and work at a factory or you know work on wall street these are squares ben shapiro is a square don't be a square um the pluralist likes to turn inward instead and to search one's own unique gifts and answers to one's own burning questions that's what search becomes about it's about self-exploration and self-expression that's what hippies are into now of course also don't get me wrong when i say the word hippie i'm stereotyping it doesn't mean that you literally have to become that stereotypical hippie who has long hair and you know smokes weed and uh and is you know can't keep a job just be careful with the stereotype because there's a lot of demonization that has happened of the post-modern world view like a very common misconceptions i see is people say well if i be so i thought leo if i become a pluralist like you're saying here i'll become a hippie and that means i won't be able to have a job i won't be able to raise kids i won't be a responsible adult i won't have any money i'll be broke no it doesn't have to mean that those are all extreme stereotypes yes you can become a hippie to such an extreme that you become homeless and you live out of a you know a a 1960s style volkswagen van uh you know uh deal and pot on the side to you know to to make money to buy your you know organic kombucha and then you and you're going to music festivals and like that becomes your whole life and and you're wearing like a poncho like a dirty poncho reminds me that homer simpson's episode about hippies where homie homer becomes a hippie anyways yeah it like these are gross exaggerations it doesn't have to be this way at all a pluralist can be capable can be a computer programmer can maintain a job you know you can still maintain the abilities of the lower stages you can still have money as a pluralist and so on let's just be careful uh pluralists are good are good at finding novel ways of looking at problems uh they like to inspire others to pursue their own interests explore yourself man like that you know go on a personal journey go on a vision quest hippies will tell you that um pluralists can sometimes appear amoral because they seem so relativistic i'm commonly accused of that i think a lot of people when they watch my content think of me as some sort of amoral person because i can be extremely relativistic in the way that i speak about things like murder and rape and terrorism i can speak very relativistically about these things because i'm not attached to them i don't demonizing these things and that makes me look immoral actually it's a higher level of morality it's a sort of a transcendent morality where you're not you're not attached to demonizing anything and you you see the validity of every perspective even when you look at a rapist you understand the raper's perspective that's very threatening to many conventionally minded people because they've made a cottage industry and their whole life have been demonizing you know these bad people these criminals they've been demonizing them for so long that even in their own mind to be able to look at a rapist or a criminal or a terrorist relativistically without judging them that to them already is evil they judge themselves for not being judgmental and then they judge me and they judge others who are not judgmental uh enough for them they judge us as you know being evil and criminals and satanic and all this because hey you know leo if you were a good person you should judge rapists and you should judge hitler and you should judge nazis and you should hate them and you should hate terrorists no man that's just that's your square way of thinking i'm beyond that so i don't have to i don't play by your rules uh uh one of the chief anxieties for pluralists is integrating the different sub aspects of one's own psyche so you start to realize that there are different parts of your self there's a feminine side there's a masculine side there's a there's a hippie side to you there's a square side to you there's a rational side there's an intuitive side there's an emotional side there's a hyper stoic side and you have to you have to sort of corral it and make all these work together and so this is a big challenge for the pluralists because at the conventional stages this wasn't done these subparts were denied so once you start to allow them in to have a conversation with each other you know that that presents its own challenges because they all want competing different things you have to some somehow uh pacify them and and reconcile them integrate them for the pluralists there's a fear of being reabsorbed into the lower stages of the rat race those square stages are perceived to be the rat race there is a dread that one's work life won't allow for individual self-expression and creativity if you say that it can feel isolated at this pluralist stage you can feel isolated from others who don't understand the post-conventional mindset because most people are conventional so here you start to feel like you're kind of lonely you don't know how to find like-minded friends which just means you have to upgrade your friends to more post-conventional ones there can be relationship problems especially when one partner like you is post-conventional but your spouse or your girlfriend or your boyfriend is conventional and they don't understand your post-conventional ways they want to kind of drag you down to be conventional like them but you fear going back to that square way of living and to you just feels inauthentic and so you can't do that so there's there's no conflict although both of you are still probably not going to be aware enough to realize that that is what's causing the conflict there are a couple of traps here with this pluralist stage one is that it tends to judge all hierarchies as oppressive without recognizing the validity of some hierarchies two is it trapped that it tends to treat all opinions values and worldviews as equally valid when in fact they aren't equally all valid from a survival standpoint and in the end if you're here and you're alive you're gonna have to be making decisions and certain evaluations but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of making evaluations you can make evaluation without being judgmental about it another trap is that extreme relativism leads to indecision and false equivalency well that's sort of similar to what i was just saying and then another trap is that diversity and equality itself can become an oppressive position so this is sort of like some of those extreme extreme social justice warriors who just kind of go overboard with their egalitarianism and then they they start to go so overboard they want everything to be so equal and so diverse that actually ends up sort of backfiring and it turns into oppression some of the conservatives love to complain about this uh most the time they overblow this uh it does happen but it happens a lot less than right-wingers will portray on youtube that's for sure it's a lot less of a problem than someone like jordan peterson would like you to believe although he's made his whole career out of uh out of this like one point and many of the intellectual dark web type of people have made entire careers out of just uh over exaggerating the problem of of pluralism on this point of diversity and equality sort of the whole cancel culture stuff it's really a distraction from understanding the so that the the value that pluralism provides a world view this is a enormous leap in consciousness to get to pluralism and yet it's so dismissed and so demonized by the right it's quite disgusting and quite dysfunctional and problematic but don't get me wrong also these pluralists they're not perfectly non-judgmental they certainly will judge others who do not hold their egalitarian beliefs is that a contradiction of course it is but they are not yet conscious enough to see that contradiction nor are they spiritually developed enough their ego is not small enough to the point where they can just let go of all judgment including the judgment of those who judge and those who don't hold egalitarian hippie ideals the pluralist still doesn't fully appreciate that others are not as developed as they are they're generally very tolerant of diverse ideas behaviors and reactions and cultures but they can come off as dreamers and non-doers because they're not so concerned with material achievements as the previous stages because they're more deeply inter concerned with their interiors they tend to prefer to live on the fringes of society they are capable of entertaining contradicting ideas and they tend to have an attitude of well it just all depends man it all depends so if you come to to a pluralist and you ask them hey what should i do should i go to college or not should i get married or not should i leave my religion or not they'll say well it all depends there's no simple answer okay and with that we've spent way too much time on the player list let's move on to the autonomous strategist which represents about five percent of the us adult population so the strategist can take a system's view of reality a strategist can comprehend multiple interconnected systems of relationships and processes both internally and externally the first stage here this is the first stage that recognizes the need and value of all the lower stages so this is huge once perspective becomes so high that one's realizes that all the lower perspectives so to speak are all necessary and play their function in the same way that you recognize when you're an adult that kids need to go through different grades in school and that just because your kid is in fifth grade doesn't mean he's bad or wrong or evil he's in fifth grade because that's the age he's at and that's what he needs to you know that's the material he needs to go through to move on to sixth grade and the seventh grade into eighth grade and then ultimately to become like you so how can you judge and demonize them for doing that when you did it yourself when you see yourself moving through all these different stages when you remember how it was like to be a conformist and then to be an expert and to be stuck in rationalism at the achiever level and so on when you remember all this and you sympathize empathize with it then you have compassion for all these different perspectives and you realize that yeah people are stuck oftentimes in these stages but uh judging them for it demonizing them for it is not going to work that's a low consciousness way of dealing with the situation this is the first stage that really expresses and embodies the global worldview the pluralist stage that came before can express can talk about the global worldview but can't fully embody it yet because it's still too judgmental most of the world is not as developed as they are but the strategist is now even developing this capacity a truly global worldview an inclusive worldview the strategist can perceive systemic patterns and long-term trends there's a sense of oneself as part of ongoing history uh the strategist sees oneself through an evolutionary lens not just the self but society and the whole world all of us are going through this evolutionary process it's a messy challenging chaotic process that involves many different overlapping systems and we're all a part of it we're all entangled with it and the strategist is able to see that and to appreciate it and to kind of project forward the strategist can can look backwards at the evolutionary path of society and then the self himself herself uh one's culture as well and then project that forward as well we can project forward the the evolution of mankind of our society of our culture of our country of our family of our company and of ourselves thoughts and feelings can no longer be isolated forming a dynamic interplay the strategist can now make meaning autonomously independent of conventional ideas now there's an idea to actually generate new ideas and new meanings independently of culture or your society or what your co-workers are doing or what your teachers and friends are doing or what your family is doing to truly think independently this is such a rare ability and i'll talk about that i'll have a whole episode in the future about how to truly think independently it's a huge game changer if you learn to do it the strategist takes responsibility for their interpretation valuation and sense making and life stories this is huge most of the prior stages find clever ways to shirk responsibility and even the pluralist will still shirk responsibility but the strategist is taking a lot more responsibility and basically that's what going up all these stages are when you get to the very highest stages you become so responsible for everything uh because you realize that there's literally nobody to blame other than your own mind and so you take responsibility for how your mind is interpreting evaluating and making sense and meaning out of reality and this this this changes everything for you the strategist is consciously committed to making a meaningful life for uh herself and others through self-actualization the strategist has successfully integrated those sub-personalities and sub-identities that i was talking about with the pluralists just a few moments ago has already integrated those and so the strategist is more grounded there not so torn and confused as the pluralist was the strategist is what you become after you've gone through maybe a five or ten years of the pluralist sort of flailing around playing with different perspectives being kind of hippy-dippy and airy-fairy and wishy-washy and maybe sometimes not so practical and and then but then you kind of out of all that something starts to congeal and come together something more solid and that's what the strategist is the sense of self in the strategist is both differentiated and integrated at the same time remember i talked about how these stages oscillate between differentiation and integration of the ego self well this is now starting to to bear fruit as something cohesive and whole the strategist tends to have a a sense of transformational mission the strategist is not just here on this planet to enjoy himself to titillate herself with pleasures of the body or even the mind uh the strategist is here on a larger mission the strategist is infused with a grand purpose and vision of what could be of what mankind could become of what the world needs to move forward in the evolutionary process so the strategist is sort of a midwife to the birthing of a new humanity through this evolutionary process by understanding it and working with the various systems that are involved and by transforming oneself through self-actualization to uh become better in helping well to basically to become a better midwife for mankind in whatever way that is there's many different ways in which you could be a midwife for mankind don't take it literally uh it's a figurative abstract way of speaking about it uh the strategist worries most about failing to observe universal principles so they tend to be very principled people they they want honesty authenticity truth you know whatever principles they hold they will tend to want to walk their talk not just talk but actually hold themselves to that high standard and oftentimes one of their downfalls that they will guilt themselves for not being able to meet these you know high principles and high standards because it's difficult to transform the human animal the human chimp in order to fit in with these universal principles and ideals you know to be free of self bias to be always truthful to be authentic to be independent and not uh reactive to not be just blindly emotional to not just be strictly hyper rational you know to follow and observe these principles to up principles of universal justice and compassion and so on non-judgmentalism this is very difficult you got to really work for decades to train the human uh monkey mind to be able to actually walk that talk there's a deep appreciation now of how challenging it is to be a mature responsible adult and how rare one's capacities are so if you're a strategist you're in the top one to five percent of the population and what you've achieved is remarkable is very very rare and you're in a unique position now to be a leader and to help mankind to figure out all of the stuff that you've figured out and because you've gone probably through decades of inner work to get to where you are because you weren't born this way certainly not and you didn't just learn this in school you had to teach this to yourself if you got this far now you can help others to do the same unlike pluralists strategists have a more realistic sense of what it takes to actually change old patterns habits and systems so a lot of times these hippies airy fairy pluralists they will get some utopian ideas of how to transform society which will not work because they don't take into account the actual evolutionary developmental process that most human psyches have to go through and have not yet gone through but the strategist can now see that and the strategist can now manipulate and work with the systems in such a way that it would it will allow people to that old idea of moving up the spiral so this is sort of the spiral wizard idea you're helping others by meeting them where they're at rather than just assuming that that they will just buy into your hippie ideas i know that i heard a news report a few years ago some years ago probably five or more years ago where you know some hippie lady wanted to fly to uh syria and iraq this was right in the middle of the sort of the heyday of isis and beheadings and so forth she wanted to to fly there and to like to present her hippie ideas to them of peace and love and all this without realizing that these these these um these people in syria you know these warlords in syria and iraq they're not going to care about your ideas of hippie love and so forth they will kill you they will behead you if you let them so you know don't don't think that they're gonna like sit there in a drum circle with you that works with your hippie friends in san francisco uh or in austin texas or wherever in california um but it's not gonna work in syria and iraq and the pluralist doesn't understand that but the strategist does so the strategist plans for that and so in this sense the strategy is a bit more grounded and realistic with their especially with their political ideas the strategist wants to hone oneself as an instrument of change you see because you appreciate that to be able to lead mankind towards those ambitious visions that you have you need to work a lot on yourself because you realize that i'm not good enough to do it yet the strategist is very painfully aware of his or her own foibles and underdeveloped shadow aspects because you know the strategy is not perfect but the strategist is uniquely aware of his own imperfections which is a great thing that doesn't mean you fix them all but at least it means that you're aware enough to be sort of humble about it and also to have a sort of a plan and to see the importance of fixing that stuff in the future see like for example for me i know that if i want to lead people to amazing things that i know are possible for mankind in the future i need to work so much on myself and that's what i spent like the last five years doing i could have poured all this time and money into my business to earn more money to put out more juicy you know click-baity videos and so forth i would have had double the subscribers that i have now if i did that but i made a deliberate choice to actually solidify my content and really work on myself understanding this content deeply for myself such that when i speak and teach that it's coming from a from a deep personal understanding of this stuff rather than just stuff that i read in books and just regurgitating you know beliefs that i found elsewhere and so forth because i need to be able to actually embody this stuff otherwise the work is going to be phony and then it's not going to be able to serve people properly see the best way that i can serve you is to fully embody the things that i say and i say a lot more than i'm able to embody so sometimes people get the wrong idea that just because i talk about something that i'm able to perfectly embody it that's not the case at all first you have to be able to understand it and articulate it then it'll take you years and decades to fully live into it actualize it embody it so i work on that a lot behind the scenes you don't really see me struggling through it but i do i struggle through it every day and i'm painfully aware of of all of my inadequacies some you know people like to criticize me so much i've heard thousands of comments over the years of people criticizing me and telling me things uh that they think i don't know about myself it's like oh lee you're being arrogant and you're doing this and you're being you're doing this there and oh you're being self-biased here it's like yeah i'm already aware of all that so first you have to become aware of it that's a big step then the next big step of course is resolving the stuff you're aware of and then changing it that's even harder so you know i'm slowly chipping away at it there's a lot of work left to do but yeah it can be very painful to become aware of all of your own inadequacies um i don't just mean like inadequacies in the sense that like oh um i'm not good looking enough i don't look alpha enough i don't have big enough muscles like these sorts of these are the issues that a conventional you know achiever mind might be concerned with but at this strategist level the mind is more concerned of the sort of deeper existential inadequacies psychological inadequacies that one has because now you're not you're not worried about having big muscles or something or attracting girls at this stage you're more concerned about how do i help mankind and you're very aware of how limited you are in that and you're aware of how much work mankind's needs how much help they need but also at the same time you're aware of how much help you need but also you're aware of how much help you've already given yourself through you know decades of inner work and self-actualization and so forth and you're aware how challenging that is but you're also aware of how amazing it is and you're trying to guide people towards it and so it's just it's just it's a complicated thing and you're aware of also how complicated all this is and that it can't be you know there's no simple solutions that you can just give to people that will solve all this you're aware that this this is a maturation process that is uh it's tricky it's challenging there's so many traps there's so many ways to go wrong but on the other hand it's so valuable the strongest motivation for strategists is wanting to help others to evolve strategists oftentimes are people like humanists developmental psychologists coaches consultants thought leaders and conscious executives strategists makes very good coaches a lot of life coaches are at this stage uh business at the strategist stage now involves taking into account not just profits it's not just about maximizing profits like it was for achievers now it's about taking into account tangible and intangible outcomes so profits are still important but also now intangible outcomes are important the physical and mental health of the staff is important the aesthetic work environment is important work-life balance is important and serving the community is important and serving mankind and the globe is important the ecology is important so all these complex factors now come into play when you're doing business rather than just maximizing profits see if i ran actualize that org purely to maximize profits i would have hired a couple of marketing guys a long time ago and actualize.org i could milk this for for millions i could milk it for millions i'm not kidding you um but i just don't care to do that like it isn't it gives me no satisfaction in fact it would it would break my heart to do that to my own business to run it in such a profiteering way so i lose probably 80 percent of all the monetization potential of actualize.org i just i just literally throw it away it's like burning money literally i'm i've probably burned a few million dollars in potential earnings over the last five years simply because i just refused to like i refuse to sell merch i refuse to do to run sponsorships or ads inside of the videos there's ads at the start of the video but you know those are just like standard youtube ads um like i could really squeeze this thing if i wanted to but i don't because it's just my interest is not in that i don't care about that what i care about is uh developing myself and then helping others to develop and to understand the deepest aspects of reality and to me the money is is just there and it's nice i don't get me wrong i'm not complaining about the money i earn i i earn decent money from from my work i'm quite satisfied with it but um but sometimes i do wonder like man what if i just go back to milking you know what if i just go profiteering and milking you know i could buy myself like a much better house and drive a much better car and all this sort of stuff not that i i couldn't it's just like uh you know i could buy myself a nice car today but it's like i don't i don't want to it like it gives me no no satisfaction to do that to me driving a a twenty thousand dollar car versus a hundred thousand dollar car adds nothing to my life like nothing nothing it's a joke when i see people like you know picking out expensive cars it's a joke to me because to me it just looks like they're just wasting their life even the time you spend looking at fancy cars it to me is just a waste of life but hey you know that's just me you might have a different point of view maybe you'll get there someday maybe someday you'll see it as i do or maybe not i'm not saying there's anything wrong with liking fast cars or something i mean you can like it it's fine you can have your you know your hobbies and so forth but also stuff will fall away as you become more conscious and more developed strategists do have an attachment to others transforming themselves i'm certainly guilty of that uh you can be a little bit too attached to having others transform when they are not yet ready to transform not everyone is ready to transform i had to sort of learn that the hard way when i first started actualize.org i sort of was very aggressive with my you know pushing others to transform nowadays i'm a little more laid back and if i see that a person is close-minded or unwilling to to understand something if they're too argumentative i'm not going to argue with them i'm not going to try to open their mind i'm just going to let them bask in their own ignorance and and then they'll they'll either come around or maybe they won't and that's not on me that's on them where before i was placing that burden on me to change them it's really not my job to change anybody and so in this sense i become more detached but still there's some attachments of course left developmental thinking is now an aspect of cognition for the strategist strategist takes into account how the self and others evolve strategists are convinced that higher development is always better and should be fostered at all costs sort of just what i talked about that can be problematic if you take that too seriously um yes overall we want people to develop but we have to recognize that most people actually aren't ready to develop most people aren't ready for these videos most people aren't ready for spiral dynamics most people aren't ready for reading a 90 page paper on ego development most people aren't ready for awakening or enlightenment most people are just barely struggling to maintain their job and to pay their bills that's just where we're at developmentally as a species it doesn't mean we have to stay there but that's just kind of where we're at for the strategist every individual is now responsible for finding his or her unique style and actualizing themselves strategists are interested in psychological questions they now recognize natural hierarchies where before the pluralist didn't like hierarchies the strategist understands that hierarchies do serve an important function some of them can be oppressive hierarchies but other hierarchies can be healthy necessary and getting rid of them would actually lead to chaos and to dysfunction and to worse outcomes for all people so we have to tune our hierarchies and of course get rid of the ones that are antiquated or oppressive but a hierarchy is not inherently oppressive all the time in this sense jordan peterson does have a valid point but again he over exaggerates it as well um the strategist believes that all human beings deserve respect but not all are equally suited to doing a task and not all opinions are equally valid some opinions are really bad opinions some opinions will lead to chaos into disaster and therefore they shouldn't be taken seriously some opinions are highly delusional and self-deceptive whereas others are less so and in this way we can sort the good ones from the bad ones understanding while we're doing that that good and bad here is not objective it's still relative it's still perspectival um it's still not an absolute in any sense but still relative to the domain of survival we can make some distinctions and evaluations as to what is workable what is good and what is bad to the strategist life is seen as an open-ended journey of never-ending growth and self-actualization strategists are very aware of self-bias and they take it into account and they correct for it as much as they can although that doesn't mean they're perfect the strategist tends to find ordinary constraints of life stultifying such as making a living and working a eight-hour workday the strategist sees oneself as destined for greater tasks far with far-reaching impact strategists are aware of the performative contradiction of postmodernism what is that the performative contradiction of post-modernism is this idea that all world views are subjective and that none should be privileged over any other but then that itself becomes the privileged position that you shouldn't privilege any other positions but you're privileging your own position by saying other positions shouldn't be privileged and so in this sense you're you're you're creating um you're not being fully self-aware so the strategist is able to overcome that this this performative contradiction is is a feature of pluralism that we discussed there's an even greater increase of tolerance and appreciation of paradox at this stage uh strategists become very aware of how influences within systems are circular cyclical tapestry-like and very counter-intuitive this is part of systems thinking go check out my episode called intro to systems thinking for more about the counter-intuitive and cyclical nature of systems and the strategist is starting to understand circular causality and what i call strange loops or what douglas hofstadter to give him credit calls strange loops go see my episode reality the strange loop for more on that the strategist spends even less time and energy defending one's positions which a lot of the lower stages waste a lot of energy doing uh inner processes become fascinating complex and demanding to explore for the strategist the strategist needs a lot of privacy and time for self-reflection here the self is constantly experienced as tr as in transformation and it's constantly being reappraised so there's no static self anymore the self is always growing always transforming and you're always wondering like well what should the self become tomorrow or next year and here it's not about just acquiring more money it's about how am i actually going to change my mental models how am i going to change the way i interpret the world how do i change the ways in which i relate to the world this sort of a meta you're doing now personal development on sort of a very abstract psychological meta level rather than in the earlier stages where your personal development revolved around going to the gym and seeing how much you can bench press and you know buying more expensive cars and you know profiteering and squeezing more money out of your business that's what self-development looked like at the achiever stage the strategist takes responsibility for regulating one's thoughts feelings and behavior even more so than the pluralist the strategist holds that chances for self-actualization and self-fulfillment are essential for meaningful existence there's deeper life purpose and legacy issues life purpose becomes central to the strategist the strategist starts to acknowledge and re-own shadow parts of itself that it spent its entire lifetime denying the strategist tries very hard to keep one's act together and to come across as reasonable mature and self-aware to set a good example for others to lead by example the strategist tends to present oneself as an exemplar of humanity giving off a whiff of superiority i'm certainly guilty of that yeah i'm guilty of a lot of these strategist issues strategist has a very deep understanding of human nature but it comes with a trap of self-inflation you start to understand human nature so well that you get become cocky and you start to now get sort of a false sense of understanding you start to think well now i understand everything now i truly understand everything before i thought i understood everything but now once i start to understand a little bit of self-bias and self-deception i start to see it in me i start to you know integrate different shadow parts of myself and so on uh now i'm really actualized you start to think and you start to get a little um a little cocky and arrogant about that of course i'm very well aware that i do that uh i'm working on reducing that i think i've reduced it quite a bit in the last few years uh but i still got more work to do for sure so you guys aren't telling me anything new when you tell me that then i'm being arrogant i i know that i know that uh but part of the reason i do it is just because i do it as a form of entertainment self-entertainment hopefully it entertains you as well sometimes i do it just kind of tongue-in-cheek i be i'm like sometimes i'm so over the top arrogant that i'm hoping that you can see that i'm being like over the top arrogant without explicitly saying it so that it's kind of like a joke but also sometimes i truly am arrogant so i know that with a strategist strong positive and negative feelings can both be acknowledged within oneself so the previous stages tended to deny negative feelings as like bad stuff that we have to medicate our way out of or to escape from whereas now the higher you go at this stage you you become just more mindful of the negative feelings and you start to kind of i aikido them uh do sort of a jujitsu move on them where you take the negative feelings and you kind of find the positive in them or you you fully feel them feel into them and then that transforms their negativity and it's sort of like a a healthier coping strategy self and others uh are accepted as complex human beings with both positive and problematic traits and weaknesses so nobody is good or bad nobody is satanic or demonic or evil uh there's always trade-offs within personalities people who are very strong in one thing tend to be weak in other areas and that's just part of being human and you have to accept that about yourself as well you're not going to be this perfectly strong perfectly uh well-rounded human as you imagine maybe in previous stages you could be here you start to accept that you're not going to be like that it's always a never-ending process of slowly polishing yourself up but you're always going to have some rough edges the sort of idea that you will reach an end to self-actualization this starts to go away there's never an end it's endless one of the traps here for the strategist is identification as a transformer you can identify as being this self-actualizing person and that just becomes a new ego so you have to be careful with that strategists can show impatience with slow development of others certainly guilty of that to a degree um there's a discovery at this stage of non-possessive love that's a cool thing there's an increase in benevolence and compassion towards oneself and others there's a recognition of subtle distinctions in feelings and emotions so you're really starting to make subtle distinctions now between different emotions and feelings that you have you're able to feel into them and to distinguish them and to kind of uh understand the message that they're trying to communicate to you rather than just being at the receiving end of them rather than just being reactive against them the way that most people are strategists tend to place high value on authenticity your life becomes all about becoming more and more authentic how you walk how you speak how you relate to people how you do business how you make love how you make money it's all about making those things more authentic to your true self the strategist makes use of dreams fantasy imagination and vision much more so than previous stages that's powerful so your repertoire or your toolbox of ex of what you can use to explore reality and your own self expands dramatically at these post-conventional stages the strategist seeks solutions to large-scale and long-term problems problems that plague mankind so it's not just about earning a profit for me if i'm going to build a business my business has to somehow fix large long-term problems of mankind strategists seek sustainable solutions that address deep root causes so we're not just interested in some little surface level fix we want to go deep into the root of an issue and nip it at the bud so to speak or at the root even better than the bud nip it at the root the strategist is really able to think outside the box the strategist stops using blaming as a defense in relationships that's big notice how much you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse for all the stuff that goes wrong in your relationship and then imagine living a kind of existence where you no longer blamed them for the things that go wrong that's what starts to happen here there's a deep concern for the well-being of future generations strategist is going to be thinking generationally into the future it's not just about my own lifetime it's about future generations of humans and how they're going to live and what's going to be good for them and what we need to build what kind of infrastructure and systems we need to create for them uh the strategist sacrifices oneself for the greater good the strategist uh still has difficulty accepting what is they're not fully enlightened so to speak uh they still struggle with with difficult emotions and difficult problems in life that occur their spiritual goal at this point becomes to become enlightened these strategists tend to be charismatic moral leaders who inspire others to follow their great vision of an ideal world order for future generations sort of exactly what i'm doing with actualize.org uh strategists are able to forgive oneself leaving behind guilt and harsh self-criticism see my episode how to forgive anyone who's ever hurt you and then you can also apply that to your own self as well how to forgive yourself strategists tend to shift their humor to one that is non-hostile and more existential their humor becomes more lighthearted and directed at the folly of mankind rather than weaponized the lower stages will weaponize humor against their enemies whereas now as a strategist you realize i don't have any enemies and so my humor just becomes about the human condition overall that's still something i'm working on that existential humor ain't got to work on that one um sometimes i do still weaponize my humor and i'm trying to let that go because you you realize that weapon using humor as a weapon is another defense mechanism of the ego the ego can lash out that way can gain a sort of upper hand can make itself feel righteous by doing that so that's something you have to unlearn and you've probably spent decades learning that bad habit of weaponizing humor at the lower stages the strategist is dissatisfied with life when he or she feels that he's failed to live up to his unique human promise and to one's own vision of being an actualized self and what one expects of oneself that's that's definitely something that i've experienced a lot uh yeah that's one of the greatest pains maybe of this stage is that you know your potential so well but then actually actualizing that potential is so challenging that it can become depressing or very frustrating because you're sort of constantly dissatisfied because you're trying to become more and more and more of yourself but you realize it's endless where does it ever end you can't just sit peacefully the way you can in some meditative pose the way a yogi does at this stage yet strategists can face the problem that they feel like they've lost their sense of purpose after they retire because they're no longer needed because they've invested a lot of their time and energy into coaching and menting mentoring others helping others guiding mankind but then once you retire you've lost all that for a strategist they're able to have realistic appraisals of situations unclouded by dogma and personal biases that's one of the benefits of really understanding how bias works self bias see my episode itself on self bias very important one if you can really master understanding your own self biases the net result of that why you want to do that is that then you get an unclouded view of reality which is quite nice unclouded by ego smog as it's called david bohm called it ego smog the cloud of egos mock strategists tend to become visionary leaders with the capacity to see how systems interrelate and their long-term implications the chief anxiety at this stage is not to fulfill one's personal potential not to self-actualize failure to live up to one's universal principles and a loss of courage because one's vision and one's projects are so ambitious and in a sense you're going against the grain of society so it takes a lot of courage it takes a lot of personal uh willpower and responsibility to to live up and to actualize one's one's vision at this point and lastly the strategist uses differentiated psychological vocabulary so very sophisticated psychological vocabulary when speaking about people society cultures reality spirituality and so forth and so there you go that's the strategist now that's it for part two stay tuned next week i will be releasing part three where we will be talking about the rarest two most advanced stages the construct aware and finally the unitive stage this is really what we've been working up to i mean this episode we just did for the majority of you honestly this is the stuff you got to work on right here what i just talked about these two stages the pluralist and the strategist if you can master these two you're going to experience a complete change in your reality and then that's going to set you up for what we're going to be talking about in part three and if you can reach those stages that's really where life becomes incredible that's where you start to tap into something superhuman something transhuman which you couldn't even imagine was possible when you began this whole journey but for the majority of you what i just talked about this part two keep re-watching it keep studying it read these sections in the in the paper from suzanne cook greuter go actually print out that paper don't just download it as a pdf you have to actually print it out sit down with a highlighter actually create like a three ring binder when you print it out hole punch it create a three-ring binder that's what i did sit there underline it highlight it take notes on every every page of those 90 pages should be underlined to hell with notes in the margins and on the backs and fronts of these papers that you print out and then keep studying and keep re-reading it every year as you're growing and you will get more and more juice out of it and it'll inform you and direct you into what you got to be working on on yourself next all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me right there don't forget that helps me to get more views and to get this rare content out to more people which is what we need that's my mission basically with my work and then come check out actualize.org there you will find exclusive content stuff that i'm posting on my blog you'll find exclusive videos on my blog don't miss those check out my book list check out my life purpose course life purpose course i mean that is huge if you are a budding young pluralist or strategist life purpose is going to become huge for you you're going to need to find a way how to take your career and your work and the money that you're trying to make in order to pay your bills and to feed yourself and the eight hours every single day that you put into work that needs to be something meaningful for you that cannot be a factory job that cannot be working at starbucks that cannot be one of these crap jobs you got to take your gifts and talents and your high level of development and channel it towards the benefit of mankind in some way which of course also pays you back some dividends too so you can live a comfortable life so my life purpose course is like 25 hours of exclusive content new stuff that i haven't ever talked about on actualized in the free content in the course you will get access to that in video form and in audio form and with various exercises very practical that shows you the steps that i went through as a budding young strategist myself maybe starting 10 years ago to create this for myself and it'll it'll get you on track with that path so check out the life purpose course and i will be releasing courses in the future so make sure you stay tuned for that as well i have some courses that i that i've been planning to release now for a long time but because of some health issues that i've been dealing with lately that's sort of um put some delays into the process but i will be releasing new courses in the future that will be even better than the life purpose course even more powerful that will help you to develop up these higher stages uh and uh and you can also if you'd like support me on patreon go to patreon.com actualized and chip in five bucks a month that helps me to build a little uh nest egg uh funding that i can use in the future for a little bit of advertising or maybe hiring some people that can help me to take actualize.org to the next level all right stay tuned for part three do not miss part three this is the most important part of this whole series so if you stayed with me for this long you've got to watch part 3. that's where it's all going you