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[Music] the nine stages of ego development part three well congratulations if you made it this far then you've made it to the best part this is the most important part we have two stages two final stages that we'll be covering here we're going to jump right into that in a minute but first of course i want to give credit to suzanne cook greuter for her work in doing this research she has written up an amazing research paper it's 90 pages long go click the link down below download it read it most of the material that i'm presenting here is ripped directly out of her research paper and i guarantee you that if you watch this three-part series and you like what i talked about here her research paper if you read it it will give you additional insight more more insight than you get from my videos alone so it's definitely worthwhile to read it even if you watched this entire series and also i should note that i am adding my own commentary to her research in my videos right so sometimes i might say something that maybe she will disagree with maybe that wasn't in the original research paper that's because i'm again anytime i'm presenting any kind of external source to you guys what i'm doing is i'm filtering it through my understanding of reality and our mission here of self-actualization and uh i'm i'm adding to it or i'm removing things that i think aren't uh aren't right or that aren't you know helpful towards our ultimate objective here so just understand that uh i'm never one of these like strict scholars that tries to present you with some strict formulation of somebody else's thoughts if i'm presenting somebody else's thoughts to you it's always through my own lens through my own mind because there's a larger objective here we're not just studying the opinions or models of other people we're looking to self-actualize and we're using other sources as means towards that ultimate end all right so as far as these stages go we've covered the symbiotic the impulsive the opportunist the conformist the expert the achiever the pluralist and the strategist what's left what's left is one post-conventional stage that's called construct aware slash ego aware slash magician three different names for the same stage this is roughly one and a half percent of the us adult population and then the final stage which is beyond the post-conventional now into the post-post-conventional or you could call it the transcendent or the trans-human i like that label sometimes so in that category we have the one unit of stage which is about half a percent of the u.s adult population according to greuter's research so we'll be covering the construct aware and the unitive here right now but just before we get into that i want to go a few general points again about this model it can be very tempting and i notice people making this mistake in the comment sections and so forth after they learn about this model to want to rush through the stages because you get this idea that well if there are nine stages and the best ones are at the end then supposedly like we should just try to like leapfrog our way to the top and of course while in general that is our mission is to get to the top to these final two stages that's ultimately what we're trying to get you to towards with this work uh it can be counterproductive to want to rush this process it's easy to fool yourself to think that you can skip stages or that you're higher and more developed than you really are again we're dealing with the ego mind here and of course the ego mind because it likes to think of itself as superior and good and important and great and all this it will tend to evaluate itself as higher and more developed and more mature than it really is and it'll also especially earlier stages of the ego might want to get competitive and try to like you know be the best and try to just achieve you know that achiever ego it might want to go through those stages as quickly as possible to achieve the ultimate stage thinking that that's where the happiness is at the ultimate stage and that's not quite correct really life is about development your whole life is a developmental process there's an arc to your entire life if you're living it properly if you're self-actualizing and one of the things i especially learned in last year too is to not rush to get towards enlightenment or towards awakening or some of these highest stages that you hear teachers talking about because when you try to rush it prematurely without having gone through the lower stages and really exploring them fully what ends up happening is that actually you're not able to sustain the higher levels anyways and you just frustrate yourself because you you you sort of reach for them even though you're not up to the task it's almost like you're in fifth grade and then you're trying to learn calculus you're not going to understand calculus at fifth grade the proper thing there is to realize that mathematics is a deep feel of study and there's plenty of time and you don't need to feel bad for not being able to understand calculus in fifth grade just you know pace yourself this is a long process you've got many decades to your life so therefore you've got time to you know spend a couple of years on each stage at least maybe even five maybe even 10 years on each stage you've got time for that most of you do at least see so um don't be don't be in too much of a rush at the same time also of course don't dawdle and don't just sit around twiddling your thumbs and don't be lazy and complacent and not grow so of course if you feel like you need to go to the next stage go to the next stage and i would push you to to you know to get out of your comfort zone and push yourself into the next stage even when you don't feel quite ready for it yet but also not so much to the point where you are not fully experiencing the stage and not fully learning all of the material and insight in the stage because you want to skip it to get to the next one you see it's sort of like you want to skip geometry to get to calculus you want to skip trigonometry to get to calculus you want to skip algebra to get to calculus and if you do that you're not really going to have a solid understanding of calculus because it's built upon understanding algebra and geometry and trigonometry and all that basic stuff you see but at the same time you don't want to be studying geometry for five years either you don't want to get stuck on geometry so find that balance you have to find that balance it's a little tricky and it's hard to say you know whether you're going too fast or slow only you can evaluate that another general point is that use this model these stages to help you understand what kind of people you're dealing with in your life this is one of the most useful functions of this model before this model before spiral dynamics before you knew developmental psychology which is what this is you interacted with people in the world including your family your parents your siblings your colleagues and friends your co-workers your teachers and professors and various youtubers that you watch and others you know influencers and intellectuals you listened to all these people but you didn't really understand their character you didn't understand the level of their ego development but now once you understand this model especially once you go through many of these stages yourself you can look backwards and you can see very clearly where the people you're dealing with are at you know like maybe you're buying a car at the car dealership used car dealership with this model you'll be able to understand the level of ego development of the used car salesman that you're dealing with and that that will help you to understand where he's coming from and also maybe help you to avoid getting scammed and so forth if he's at a low level if you're going into business with a business partner and you're evaluating various potential people who might be your business partners well before this model you could have picked somebody who you kind of liked but they had a low level of development which was not at your level and therefore that would have destroyed the entire business eventually but now you can be cognitive of that and you can realize that ah this person is not quite at the level that i need him to be at in order to create this high consciousness business that i'm trying to create for example or of course in intimate relationships this is super valuable normally you would just sleep around and get into relationships with people based on their physical appearance or maybe how much you like them or so forth without very much conscious awareness of who you're getting into your relationship with now though you've got a much better sense and you can use this to filter out who are going to be good potential life partners for you people who you should get into long-term relationships with and then those that you shouldn't and then of course you have to discipline yourself also to actually to actually follow through on that and not just to sleep with you know the hottest person um or the most handsomest person or the most confident guy or or the most beautiful girl you know not to get seduced by those appearances but to look deeper beneath the surface to to see is this person really going to be compatible with me are they going to be at my level are they interested in self-actualization how developed is their ego because if they're if your ego is is this developed and theirs is this developed there's no way that's going to work and that is what leads to a lot of divorces and abusive relationships and you know wasted years and decades in that domain of your life so so use it for for that and you can use this again for all sorts of people that you deal with this makes it a lot easier to to make sense and to wheat to sort of sort the wheat from the chaff weed out all the bullshitters out there who are preaching to you teaching to you trying to convince you from a low level of ego development the nice thing about ego development is that it's very hard to fool you once you understand how these stages work it's very hard to fool you the ego tends to be quite transparent in the way that it manifests itself and so you can quite clearly see where people are at with their egos people don't really hide their egos too well part of the reason is because they're not even aware that they have an ego or what an ego is or how it works or what the level different levels of it are all right so this gives you a huge advantage in business and relationships and in family life like you're dealing with your parents uh chances are that many of your parents have a very relatively low level of ego development you need to take that into account that doesn't mean that these are bad people it just means you have to take into account you have to develop strategies for dealing with different types of people at different levels you see and then certain people you have to just cut out of your life because their level is too low for you that that's also an acceptable strategy now i'm not saying you do that all the time with everybody um because that itself could be a sort of a an egoic move uh but certainly some people are going to be such a low level that you're going to want to cut them out of your life and then the last general point here is that use this model to determine what kind of teachings you need so whatever stage you peg yourself at right now you need teachings at that stage and maybe one stage above that stage if you try to go for teachings that are below that or too high above that like two or three stages above where you're currently at it's not going to be as effective all right and honestly what i teach is very advanced stuff most of the stuff that i teach with actualized.org these days is uh the last two stages that we're going to be covering here right now and honestly for most people this is too advanced because most people are stuck at the conformist slash expert achiever stages and they need something that's maybe at that level or one step beyond most people what they're looking for on youtube for example most people are looking for self-help advice which was at the achiever level or at the pluralist level and there's nothing wrong with that advice i have personally read and purchased many books and courses and studied a lot of that kind of advice that's very important if you're at that level but then there's something beyond that see so maybe what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to come back to my teachings later on in your life after you spend some time shoring up and solidifying your achiever stage and the pluralist stage or even lower than that all right i do notice that some of you are falling into the trap that you have zero personal success in your life you're struggling just to find a job just to get some sex just to get some intimacy in a relationship just to get away from your family and go off on your own and be independent you're struggling with with these things um and yet you're talking about now enlightenment and awakening as though that is what you should be doing in your life this is this is too much for you you're biting off more than you can chew and the consequence of that is going to be that you're not going to you're not going to become this super advanced human rather you're going to stagnate and you're going to get very frustrated pursuing awakening when you don't have any sort of just basic survival foundation built up so i do recommend you focus quite a bit on the achiever stage make sure you exhaust the [ __ ] out of the achiever stage and you get everything out of it that you want or need that your ego craves burn through that karma so that you can get beyond it get it out of your system you see because if you're stuck on sex and money and financial security and this sort of stuff uh you know what what enlightenment is there going to be there's not going to be any enlightenment for you not realistically see unless you're a super super exceptionally gifted mystical person which some of you are maybe one or two percent of you are maybe five percent of you are but the rest of you are not so just just take that into account right and you can use this model to evaluate every single book you can go into a bookstore and you can evaluate in you know in the self-help aisle you can walk through and say okay this book you can flip through and read a few pages like okay this is the achiever book for achievers you can look at another book oh this book here is for pluralists oh this book here is now more more more of a sort of a strategist book and this book here is more of a sort of transcendent unitive book and so on and you can do that with youtube videos and you can do that with courses and seminars and workshops and you can do that with teachers you can peg teachers at different stages and you can see whether that teacher fits the stage that you need him to be at and if he doesn't or she doesn't then upgrade your teachers or maybe downgrade your teachers okay but of course also i always encourage you to push yourself so if right now you're stuck at the achiever stage uh sure of course and you're interested in awakening and you're interested in some of this deep metaphysical stuff that i talk about that's great too you can you can do both at the same time all right you can work on the achiever stuff and then you can also you know set your sights high it's always important to have a higher vision even if you're working on your business or you're just working on basic financial independence type of stuff you know sort of material basic self-help it's still always good to have a long-term vision of what you're going to be working on in five or ten years and to start to maybe chip away at that and start to lay the foundations you can use that to generate motivation to inspire you of like well if i handle my business affairs over the next five years then in 10 years i could be working on this advanced metaphysical stuff that leo was talking about see so um so it is important to talk about stuff that is beyond you as well it's just a matter of how much of it can you tolerate all right so enough of the general points now let's get into uh the first stage for today which is the construct aware ego aware slash magician this is one half percent of the us adult population so i'll be referring to this as the construct aware stage because that's really what the stage is about it's about becoming aware of the constructed nature of reality so basically what your ego and your mind is starting to understand now is that everything that you were learning in your life from childhood through adulthood all the stuff that you took as certain rock solid physical reality all the science all the human history that you just took for granted as true as a given as this external material physical world that exists out there independent of you independent of your mind this objective reality which is separate from feelings and separate from intuitions and separate from all the humanness you realize that there never was such a thing material reality and your mind are integrally interwoven in a complex entangled relationship such that they can't be separated and it's this realization that turns your whole perspective and relationship to life upside down inside out now you're starting to see how much your mind was playing a role in constructing reality and of course the biggest trick that your mind plays on you is convincing you that no no no i haven't been constructing reality that's just the facts that's just objective truth that's just science man science is not constructed by the mind sciences is the most objective thing we know well now at this construct aware stage you you realize that that's an illusion there's now a preoccupation at this stage with inner conflict around existential paradoxes intrinsic problems of mind language and ego you start to realize that life is not some objective thing life is a deeply subjective personal thing and that your job here in life is is to deal with these deep existential problems involving the mind language how you think about the world how you interpret the world various tricks that your mind plays on you various kinds of ideology and belief systems that you buy into you realize that all of this is is subconsciously underneath the surface of your consciousness has been constructing reality and shaping reality it's been shaping how you feel how you think the meanings you attach to things it's been shaping your ideas about good and evil right and wrong it's been shaping your political opinions your religious beliefs your scientific notions um your your notions about what is important in life whether it's sex or money or fame or status all of this was subconsciously shaped in a sense and so all of the world views that you developed you realize you didn't consciously develop your worldview your worldview is sort of an unconscious amalgamation of various things that you pulled from culture and mostly you've just been programmed with beliefs and ideas that were never truly your own and you did this because you needed to construct a sense of reality and without this where would you be what would reality be without this entire construction process so this is what you're starting to realize at this construct aware stage at this stage you're concerned about what it means to be alive and the significance of your existence existential questions become the most important and then questions about how to make money or how to survive or how to manipulate somebody or how to get a better car these they become very shallow questions you can still be interested in them to some degree because you still have to survive you know you have to pay your electric bill and you still have to go to the grocery store and buy food but this is all secondary tertiary stuff now and your life really becomes about exploring the the existential aspects of your existence there is now an all-pervasive uncertainty within you everything held as true up to this point is called into question once again you start to question all of your ideas about religion and science and the world and your place in the world and relationships and politics and society and culture and how you were raised and your parents and you start to question all of this all over again all of your judgments all the judgments you've made about people and life and about yourself you start to question all of this as well you start to wonder how much of these judgments are actually valid and how much is just my own mind bullshitting me playing tricks on me how much of my understanding of reality is actually just an illusion that i have spun if we think of of a spider as a creature that spins webs we can think of a human as a creature that spins narratives about reality that's like our thing you know the spiders have their silk and their web weaving and it's a beautiful sophisticated intelligent process the way a spider weaves a web pretty amazing uh but humans weave webs conceptually with our minds and now we're starting to realize that much of what we've considered reality and facts and science has just been us unconsciously weeping this web in our own mind and then confusing that for reality and so now we start to really get a deep understanding of this web weaving process that our mind is engaged in at this stage truth via symbolic representation is realized to be always partial perspectival geocentric human-centric and biased biased so this idea that mankind is somehow discovering universal truths about the universe this this this notion falls away there's nothing universal about mankind's understanding of the universe there's nothing universal about science these are all highly human-centric geocentric very partial limited ways of understanding truth and you become hyper aware of this of course one of the trade-offs here is that once you realize how much of reality is constructed by your mind reality starts to feel intangible and groundless because if you stop the constructing process or if you even do some deconstruction work what are you left with it seems like reality starts to lose its ground you don't know what's real anymore you don't know what's certain anymore you don't know who to judge you don't know whether that thing's bad or good anymore because all your criteria for what was good and bad all of that is being questioned as something that may not be certain and valid maybe it's something that you constructed for your own ego's benefit you see there's a keen awareness now of how the ego mind distorts reality and comes up with models of reality and understandings and narratives about reality to suit itself for the purposes of its own survival i go into a lot more depth on that in my two-part series called understanding survival part one and part two go check those out very important very foundational episodes so reality starts to feel groundless there's a realization that all objects are human-made constructions including abstract constructs such as purpose time and ego all are based on layers upon layers of symbolic abstraction even simple notions like bed or a cat or a man or a woman are seen to be gross over simplifications earlier stages would just take an object like a bed or a cat or a woman as just hey they're just givens you know the universe consists of beds and cats and women but at this stage you realize no these are all highly loaded highly biased notions that can only have meaning and only make sense relative to a deeper background set of assumptions and epistemic and metaphysical a sort of a framework that makes sense of all that and that in fact no two people on this planet have the same idea of what a bet is even though conventionally we act like we all know what a bet is simplistically we do a child can tell you what a bed is but really when you start to look into what is a bed you know is is it is a couch that unfolds into a bed is that considered a bed or is that a couch see does a bed need to have four legs or can it have three does a water bed count as a bed or is not a bed what about a hammock is that a bed you see so you start to you start to the boundaries between all these different concepts starts to blur and what before it seemed like a very clear cut objective reality now you start to see that it very much depends on how you look at things so literally what a bet is changes depends depending upon how you define it how you think about it how you contemplate that notion and you can have very simplistic notions of what a bet is you can have very complex notions of what a bet is and no matter how simple or how complex your notions are none of them are the same as an actual bed so there's a keen appreciation of the difference between the map and the territory as alf alfred uh korzynski famously said the map is not the territory and you start to appreciate the significance of that statement more and more at this stage at earlier stages you kind of heard that statement and it sounded interesting and kind of profound but here you really start to realize oh it's really profound it's way more profound than i ever realized you start to realize how much language shapes your reality and understanding of the world you become cognizant of the pitfalls of language as well as its tremendous gift to mankind so language is not bad language is not good language is a technology it's a it's a deep technology that most of us take for granted we don't even consider it a technology we think of phones and computers as technology we don't think of language as technology but language is a sophisticated technology which which shapes how humans relate to each other and to life how we even relate to our own selves and yet none of us has been taught have been taught what language is or how it really works in school nobody ever taught you what language is of course they taught you language they had they taught you how to use language to accomplish some goal they taught you grammar they taught you spelling they taught you vocabulary maybe they taught you a second language or a third language you know in high school i learned japanese i went to a community college and i learned japanese not very well i don't know very much japanese but that was my third language um but uh but yeah i mean um you can you can go learn japanese or chinese or whatever but you're still not gonna have a damn clue what language actually is how it actually works and how significant it is to shaping your view of reality see language itself comes with baked in implicit hidden assumptions and epistemic and metaphysical frameworks language divides and categorizes the world in different ways and different languages do it in different ways and therefore literally shaping what you can think about because you think using language mostly how you communicate and as it turns out the limits of your mind are are oftentimes the limits of language of course it doesn't have to be you can certainly go beyond language with your mind the mind goes way beyond language but for most people conventional people language is the limit of their mind and so their mind is straightjacketed by language and this continues even to the post-conventional stages and i mean languages is situated so deep inside of us it shapes us so deeply we use it so unconsciously we take it so for granted that we don't realize how much it shapes us but at this stage you're starting to realize that and so there's pros and cons to this uh so on the one hand you with language you're sort of like damned if you do damn if you don't you can't just not have language not use language because all of our societies built upon that you can't function without it but at the same time as you're functioning with it it limits you in various ways and so now you're becoming more cognizant of these limitations and now you're becoming more skillful as sort of playing with language and not getting stuck in various cul-de-sacs that language can create and you also appreciate language for its beauty for its complexity just like that spider web language is something very similar um even more beautiful and even more elaborate once you really start to contemplate it and i will have a separate episode about language in the future because it's a very very deep topic and i've touched upon it before in other episodes of mine especially the one about uh called jacques dereda deconstruction uh i forget it was a long title i gave it but it starts with jacques deconstruction non-duality something like that go search for it you'll find it we go in there we go i go into some depth there about language so you also realize this construct aware stage the arbitrariness of labeling reality uh and it's recognized how crucial this is to any knowledge endeavor including self-knowledge so of course knowledge is intimately tied in with language and of course knowledge is necessary for your survival and living life in this advanced 21st century society so again how do you go about acquiring knowledge in the correct way without deceiving yourself and also not getting trapped by language and not being limited by language it's realized here now that concepts only make sense in conjunction with their surround and their polar opposites so good only makes sense relative to evil tall only makes sense relative to short duality only makes sense relative to non-duality human only makes sense relative to the non-human self only makes sense relative to other and so forth i have a three-part series called understanding duality where i talk about hundreds of these different dualities i give you giant lists of them and explain how they work so you start to become very sensitive to the dual nature of all linguistic categories and concepts there's now an awareness of how abstractions and concepts get made by your mind and there's now a taking of responsibility see at the earlier stages people weren't responsible the ego mind wasn't responsible it wasn't willing to take responsibility for language for how it creates categories and concepts and abstractions these were just taken as as a given they were just adopted blindly from culture but now you sort of take responsibility for that this is both challenging it's also liberating because it opens you up to now explore new ways in which your mind can work outside of the limitations of your culture and your language this stage the construct aware stage is really hitting up against the the limits of the human mind and you would think that you can't go beyond the human mind because the human mind i mean we're humans right so and we have minds so how can a human go beyond the human mind but as it turns out there are minds beyond the human mind and that actually you're not a human the idea that you're a human is just part of a construct that you took for granted as part of your culture you never really questioned whether you were a human or not actually there's no scientific evidence that you're a human if you really think about that deeply you'll realize there's no such thing after all what is a human what is human what does it mean to be human why can't you go beyond human turns out you can and so now you're starting to realize these possibilities before such possibilities seemed like woo-woo nonsense seemed like airy fairy new agey unscientific pseudo-science [ __ ] deepak chopra type stuff but now you realize wait a minute there's actually something deeper something truer to what deepak chopra is saying and that there really is something beyond the human mind that you can reach you can access if you're willing to let go of your human identity but that's a big if but of course at this stage you're starting to let it go because now you're becoming aware that the human identity is just sort of a facade or a mask that you've been wearing and you can take it off and actually taking it off has many amazing advantages it allows you to to really let your mind flourish and go beyond the human whatever that is and at this point you don't really know what that is it's it's it's open exciting territory to discover new and exciting territory for you to open up and explore at this stage uh the conventional belief in a permanent objective external world starts to be questioned literally the notion of a material world starts to break down the distinction between mind and body self and reality starts to break down i'm not a separate self who happened to be born into reality but rather i was always entangled and part of reality objective and clear self-identification starts to be questioned at this stage this stage has a flexible continuously deconstructing non-reified notion of self what does that mean well it means the self is not a physical object that was born but rather the self is sort of like a an amalgamation of ideas and beliefs and concepts and abstractions that were cobbled together in an ad hoc fashion sort of like a a snowball rolling down a hill or like a katamari demasi one of those katamari demasi balls just you know collecting stuff as it rolls along the ground getting bigger and bigger and bigger that's sort of like what the self is and so this self of course is not a permanent thing it's constantly changing as the ball rolls through the you know through town the katamari demacia ball um it it you know it clings on to couches and cats and dogs and fire hydrants and it accumulates at all trees and so forth and it becomes just just this giant tangled mess and that is the self but of course you're always rolling even right now as i'm sitting here my mind is changing my self is changing even as i'm teaching you by the time i'm done recording this i will have learned something about this material that i didn't fully realize or fully understand you know deeply yet when i started recording and myself will actually slightly change from having made this recording and then when i publish it i read all the comments and feedback that i get which i i do your feedback will further deepen my understanding of this material because i will hear from you what kind of stuff you like or don't like what you understand what you misunderstand i will hear all that feedback i will incorporate that and that will further change my sense of self it'll make me question certain things that i say or it'll make me you know it'll validate certain things that i said in my own mind it'll make me contemplate deeper this material and in this way i'm always changing and you are also changing by the time this episode is over your ears having received this information will have transformed your brain and your mind and your sense of self will slightly shift just from listening to this talk now of course that's just the beginning you have to do a lot more work to really change yourself but but hey in and of itself just listening to this material to advanced material like this in and of itself is is self transforming yourself is changing as you're watching these these videos because this is profound material it just is if it wasn't profound i wouldn't be talking about it at this stage there's an acute awareness of how life is an endless interplay of polar opposites the construct aware mind is good at cross-paradigmatic thinking it's good at integrating multiple systems and paradigms so for example it's at this stage where you can really start to appreciate and understand religion comparative religion you can really take a deep look into christianity and the various branches of christianity and then buddhism and hinduism and judaism and other types of mystical schools and you can take the exoteric religions and the esoteric ones and you can you can kind of lay them all out and you can look at them you can see ah so this is what they were talking about here and that's how they were talking about there and you can draw connections you can see how all of these things interconnect and interrelate and you can see subtle commonalities and subtle differences between them and you can evaluate all this without judging these paradigms you can shift from one perspective to the to the next you can see the world through a christian perspective you could take off that lens you could see the world through a buddhist perspective you could see it through both at the same time then you could take all those off you could see it without any of those perspectives you could see it through an atheist perspective and you can integrate atheism and theism and agnosticism and skepticism and rationality and mysticism all of it can be integrated together and it all works and this is both amazing it's very satisfying to be able to do this with your mind because you interconnect so much you integrate so much there's a sense of unity that comes about intellectual unity in doing this uh and no longer are you playing these games of demonizing various systems or worldviews because you're able to embrace them all and see them from a higher meta perspective and you're able to appreciate their strength their strengths and you're also keenly aware of their limitations and the ways in which they're corrupted in the ways in which they're deluded or self-deceived and you're able to go beyond them all while incorporating lessons from them as well the construct aware individual has a global historical perspective uh there's a stepping back and observing of meaning making from an even higher altitude and a bigger picture view than in the previous stages you take responsibility for the meaning that you give to the world into your life no longer the situations and people and things have inherent meaning but rather you realize that the meaning that they have is what my mind is projecting what my mind needs for its egoic purposes for its survival is what i'm projecting and i can change what i'm projecting if i'm willing to change myself that's a huge huge new way of interfacing with reality when you can make that shift but of course it takes a lot of responsibility taking which can be scary and uncomfortable and most people don't don't take they don't want to take that much responsibility so when your girlfriend or boyfriend leaves you or when someone insults you or when a terrorist attack happens or when you see some political news somebody won an election somebody lost an election before at the earlier stages you would tend to think that all these things have inherent baked in meaning like terrorism is bad and evil and you know when my girlfriend or boyfriend leaves me that's because she's being a [ __ ] or whatever and then and that's bad or you know when my boss says something some criticizes me all that's you know the boss is being critical of me blah blah blah and so you're playing these sorts of games but now you start to realize that this construct aware stage that oh wait a minute i'm assigning meanings to all these different things and i can change that such that i'm not being driven by this by this unconscious meaning making process but i'm more conscious about how i give things meanings and you can start to question the kind of meanings you give to things maybe some of the old meanings you gave to things weren't very resourceful or were very limited didn't have enough a big enough perspective and maybe now you realize that it was just all meaningless at this stage there's a realization of our human need for map making in trying to organize experience and knowledge into ever more complex matrices and meta theories at this stage as soon as one becomes aware of one's need to reify experience and to tell a good self-story with the permanent self as its main actor one deconstructs any such identification so at this stage you're not completely transcendent of the ego you're still mostly living from ego at this stage and you fall into traps of the ego at this stage but the difference is at lower stages when people are acting from ego they act from ego so fully they are so hypnotized by ego they don't even understand what they're doing but at this stage there's enough distance detachment and self-awareness that one is able to say oh yeah in that argument that i had with my girlfriend or boyfriend yesterday i fell into ego and then i constructed a story about how i was the good guy and and she was the wrong that she was wrong and i was good and she was doing something wrong to me and i blamed her okay i realized what i was doing that was my ego acting up again and i was creating a narrative about how i'm i'm the i'm the victim in this situation and i was creating this whole story about it ah now i'm aware enough to realize that that's something i'm doing i can take responsibility for it and i can tell myself to stop it and i can maybe apologize or i can sit down and have a communication with with my partner i can say hey you know yesterday i let my ego get the better of me and uh i started you know creating these stories and i started to act like a victim i fell into my old patterns but i realized that i was making a mistake so you know i'm going to make an effort to change that i'm not going to do that anymore and i realize that that that um that things are not the way that i thought they were yesterday you see and so in this way you can catch yourself you still make mistakes you still fall into self-deception but then you catch yourself and you relatively quickly make corrections this is a huge huge difference to be able to do this versus a person who's not able to do this this is this is huge this will change your whole life if you're able to do that of course not just in relationships but everywhere across your entire life so at the early stages of development you have no idea that you're deceiving yourself at the higher stages of development you start to get a little bit of an idea of how much you're deceiving yourself but you still are mostly clueless then at even higher stages of development you realize holy [ __ ] i'm so much deceiving myself and i'm aware how much i'm deceiving myself but i can't stop deceiving myself because i'm attached to it that's huge to be able to get to that stage um and you feel real bad because you can see yourself getting deceived by your own mind but you still can't quite surrender the attachment to the deception you don't really know yet how to escape this is the deception every time so and then at the very ultimate stages you will be able to just um you'll be so quick at seeing the self-deception you'll be able to stop it before it even starts but that's really going to be in the next unitive stage not not yet here not fully here at this stage you're becoming aware of the self at the center of this construction process of the mind right so the self is warping all of reality to suit itself so that it can survive as a self because the self is not a physical thing it's merely the amalgamation of all of its ideas about itself in a sense if you stop thinking about yourself you'll disappear as a self which is why the self is constantly thinking about everything including itself relating everything back to itself in order to construct a sense of self and this is how you construct your entire life this is how you were actually born birth is not a physical activity that happens to you birth is the process of thinking about yourself as a self and therefore you create the self and of course death is the same thing that is not a physical process of of physically dying death is a process of uh the cessation of thinking of yourself as a self yeah think about that think about what would happen if you went through your life never thinking of yourself as a self again never thinking that you were born never thinking that you had a past never thinking about your memories never thinking about you and what you want and your desires and your needs and how everything relates to you imagine if you just never engaged in that mental activity ever again what would be left of you would there be anything left so see at this stage you're starting to see the potential for this but you're not quite yet able to do it you haven't actualized this but you can start to see that this is the road you know this is the slippery slope that we're going to be sliding down here with this deconstruction as the deconstruction continues you're going to realize that it's going to destroy the self it's going to annihilate the self and that that can be challenging because you don't want to get annihilated that's scary you don't know what comes after self annihilation and you can get confused or you can have all sorts of twisted mistaken notions about what that's gonna mean for you um but of course that's the trick it's not gonna mean anything for you once you're gone it only means something to the self that the self is going to be gone if you didn't have a self it would mean nothing to the self that there is no self but of course that's theory in practice though you're stuck on yourself and you don't know how to get unstuck so at this stage you're constantly questioning your own questioning process very meta it's very meta stage there's a last-ditch effort by the ego to create the most comprehensive maps and models of reality possible ego thinks that well if i just if i just read a few more books if i just incorporate a few more things i can construct this grand theory of everything that will explain absolutely everything there's still this hope of the ego that it can do this but of course this is not going to work because reality is infinite and you can't encapsulate the infinite in the finite all maps and models are finite by definition so that's not going to work but at this stage you're not probably aware yet of the infinity of reality yet so uh you still think that you can maybe get away with them with a really nice complex very complex model some sort of meta model a model of all the models a map of all the maps the meta map and so at this stage you're constructing ever more comprehensive theories of everything of course i'm very guilty of this this is a passion of mine i love to construct theories of everything and models of models and meta-meta models i love that sort of stuff yes it's it's a bit of a of an addiction it's a sort of a mental masturbation it can turn into that but at the same time it's also useful it's useful to have meta models for example this thing we're talking about now these nine stages of eco development this is sort of a meta model a model of various models it's a sort of a map of various maps and uh on the one hand it's it's quite amazing it's quite accurate and it's quite powerful at helping us to navigate and understand humans ourselves and life and giving us direction in how we should grow on the other hand what you're going to realize once you reach this stage is that even this model itself and all such models like spill dynamics and so on any kind of models of enlightenment and awakening that all of these models still are gross over simplifications and ultimately are just a map and not the territory itself and you're gonna have to let these models go if you want to go even higher reach even higher levels going beyond the human mind but of course you're very addicted to these models because they're intellectually stimulating they're they're interesting they're powerful they're useful you can make money creating these models and selling these models and teaching humans and you can help a lot of people with these models but helping a lot of people is not the same thing as truth it is not the same thing as the territory helping people is still in a certain sense ego manipulating reality to get its needs met just in a higher way so now you're becoming aware of this of course this kind of puts you in a bind should i be learning these models or shouldn't i well yeah you're confused you're kind of groundless you don't know what to do you have to contemplate and do some deep soul searching you have to try various things experiment at this stage theories incorporate other theories and become ever more complex one's worldview becomes extremely complex at this stage which is one of the reasons why my videos are so long and tend to be so long-winded and complex because i have a very complex worldview because i live in this stage a lot most of my life is lived from this construct aware stage a sense of isolation that comes at this stage as almost nobody is able to understand you and your complexity everybody else seems so simple-minded and naive which is why you can feel lonely at these stages it can be lonely to self-actualize so you have to deal with with the loneliness problem find solutions to that which i've discussed in other episodes i won't go into that here pretty big topic in and of itself sort of dealing with the loneliness of the spiritual path dealing with the loneliness of self-actualization at this stage you begin to see the absurdity inherent limits of making ever more complex maps and theories you start to see that i'm gonna have to surrender them to get to the next level and you start to transcend the symbolic and the mental domain you start to get little glimpses of what it's like to go beyond language consciousness beyond language non-symbolic consciousness and of course as you're dealing with all this this can create a lot of suffering because you're hitting up against the limits of the human mind and you're not quite sure how to go beyond it and you don't have a lot of good role models or examples of people in your life who have done this and who who can talk to you genuinely about the real obstacles you know there are serious existential obstacles and questions that need to be addressed in order to go beyond the limits of the human mind but chances are that you don't know anyone in your life personally who's done this so you can't sit down with them face to face and really ask these questions and really dig in into it so you got to go read books you got to go watch videos you got to kind of struggle to figure this out for yourself you're not quite sure who to trust you realize at this stage that an altogether different relationship to knowing is necessary so you start to take epistemology very seriously you start to question what knowing is how anything can be known at all what are different ways of knowing what kind of ways of knowing exist beyond the rational beyond the human beyond the linguistic beyond beliefs beyond maps and models even how can a thing be known beyond a map or a model beyond science beyond symbols beyond words beyond numbers beyond quantification see that's mostly where science stops these days mostly science admits of the reality of things only if they're quantifiable if they're modelable if they're predictable easily predictable if they are kind of gross and brute and and anything that doesn't fit those requirements of science is not considered real but of course you realize that well why would reality be limited by those narrow human constraints i mean after all humans invented those constraints science was invented by humans didn't you know it didn't come to us from god uh so we invented it and so of course we invented its own limits how do you go beyond the limits of science there's an awareness at this stage that all meaning is invented by the self for its own purposes at this stage you viscerally get the absurdity of trying to understand reality via the human mind and representation you start to see that it's like a chasing your own tail sort of process you're trying to grasp reality with symbols and with the mind with models but you realize at this stage you're too aware and you see that the models in the and all the grasping that it's not actually succeeding in fully grasping reality and the reason that is because reality is infinite so it's always spilling out over any container or vessel that you try to put it in whether it's a human mind or a model or map or an equation it's always going to go beyond that and so now you're struggling with this sort of slippery notion or the slippery nature of reality and you're not yet quite clear about how to how to how to work with it you might have an idea that well if only i just try grasping harder i can grasp onto it and i could succeed of course that's not going to work but you don't know that you're going to actually try it before you realize that it's not going to work and why it doesn't work so the mind here still clings to maps and abstract meaning making but also here explanation starts to break down you start to realize what is explanation itself what does it even mean to explain a thing like if i'm going to explain the existence of that bed right there how am i going to explain that bed you realize that every explanation isn't sufficient it's always finite it doesn't fully explain everything how do you explain the entire universe you go back to the big bang okay well where did the big bang come from see so science is always dealing with this problem of explanation science is always pushing the problem back science has always started sweeping the loose ends under the rug to pretend as though um everything's okay if we just do more science we'll be able to explain everything without realizing that no no matter how long you do science if you do science for another million years you're never going to get any closer to explaining reality that's the problem with science that's the problem with all a linguistic knowledge or maps or models there's an acute awareness of all the ego's tricks and defensive mechanisms for self-preservation at this stage there's a realization that ego functions as the cpu for all incoming stimuli and as the central reference point for all identity formation literally everything you see every object every person every tree every car every color is all getting filtered through the lens of the ego mind and distorted by the ego mind you're not really getting a true objective unbiased view of reality ever even when you're looking at a bed you're not getting the the raw truth of that thing what you're getting is you're getting a sort of an object called a bed that has a certain human function that has a backstory that has all these conceptual overlays to it and how it fits in with your life and what it's good for what it's worth what it's not worth is it good is it bad what does it mean to me what doesn't it mean is it meaningless all of these things cloud the raw truth of what is there to begin with and so now there's a sort of a a possibility opens up of can i reach the raw truth of what's there prior to all of these layers of interpretation and conceptualization abstraction and self-bias and so now you're struggling to to bust through the ego to get to that raw truth but you're still not really adept at doing that at this stage there's an experience of one's full and inevitable egocentricity you realize how deeply you're stuck in the ego and how you're almost helpless and powerless to break out of it the ego at this stage starts to desire ego transcendence but it feels stuck even in its own desire the more one tries to break free the more one gets stuck and this becomes the sort of tricky paradoxical nature of zen or meditation work where you try to sit there and quiet your mind but the more you try to quiet your mind the more noisy your mind gets the more you try to get rid of the ego the more the ego strengthens itself so it becomes sort of this kind of a twisted counterintuitive process where the more you try to detach from reality the more attached you get because detachment itself becomes a new attachment and so you struggle with this you you have to just kind of grapple with it and go through it and experience what that's like as you experience that whole struggle consciously mindfully you learn to let go and to surrender and to and to sort of take a different approach rather than trying to control and manipulate everything you realize that i can't attain ego transcendence through the old mechanisms of the ego where the ego is trying to manipulate its way towards everything you can manipulate your way towards lots of money or sex or a big house or a successful business or whatever or a nice body with big muscles and things you can manipulate your way to all that but you can't manipulate your way towards ego transcendence so you need a new paradigm shift in your approach and what is that you don't know it's unknown there is now an awareness of the profound paradoxes and splits inherent to thought itself every time you think of thought you can immediately reflect back on and realize wait a minute that was so limited it was so partial it was so dualistic and split off from other parts of reality it was so incomplete so you start to be more suspicious of your own thoughts and you start to see the dualistic nature of your own thoughts how your intellect and mind is carving up reality with every single thought all conscious thought all cognition now is recognized as constructed and split off from the underlying non-dual territory even the concept of ego now becomes questionable there's a deep appreciation that the map is not the territory and this can be painful for the mind to realize and to accept there's an effort that is made to become fully alive and open to experience free of linguistic filters but it's difficult to do this because the mind is stuck with its linguistic filters how do you shut off those filters that's very challenging that's what meditation is for for example but uh most people suck at it takes a lot of practice usually takes years and decades of practice to be able to shut off those linguistic filters good and evil life and death beauty and ugliness are now recognized as two sides of the same coin which mutually necessitate each other lower stages usually tend to think of like well there's good stuff and there's bad stuff in the world if we can just get rid of all the bad stuff and increase all the good stuff that'll be great and then you realize no you can't have the good stuff without the bad stuff or you know some of these scientific materialistic oh well if we can just genetically alter our dna or if we can invent some new medicine or some some technology that will allow us to humans to live forever to become immortal that will be you know that will be a new revolution and that will solve all of mankind's problems it's like no you can't have life without death see death is is necessary for life if you don't realize that then you get yourself into all sorts of problems and absurdities and calamities there's a deep awareness of how one's automatic judging habit creates much unhappiness and suffering and so there's a lot of shedding and letting go of judging but your mind is so stuck on judging you're judging all the time in such subtle ways but now you're becoming aware of it and it can be very frustrating because now you realize how stupid judging is how much unhappiness it creates for you and suffering but you can't quite let it all go either at the same time that takes years of work to let it all go because suffering happens at very gross levels and also very very subtle levels a person at this stage seeks deeper compassion for self and others has a dynamic and multi-dimensional understanding of human nature and the complexities of human interaction a person here is living at the edge of meaning and meaninglessness you're sort of stuck in the middle you're damned if you do and damn if you don't if you treat life as totally meaningless that's going to create problems for you and yet if you buy into all the meanings blindly that's gonna create even more problems for you so what do you do well you gotta you gotta work through that dilemma there's an awareness of one's own emotional and rational processing patterns you realize how much your emotions manipulate you and also how much your rationality and your logic manipulates you and really you can't trust either yet at the same time you have to use them both you can't stop being rational you can't stop thinking and you can't stop emoting and you can't demonize these things because they're inherent aspects of you and they serve a valid function so what do you do well you have to integrate them somehow and learn to to deal with them in a mindful and skillful way there's a lot of this sort of sense of like well here my ego goes again here it goes again and you just kind of watch yourself you know you might be in an argument and you you watch yourself as you're arguing here my ego goes again or you might be on youtube typing some nasty comment and then you as you're typing that nasty comment you realize oh that's my ego typing this nasty comment i'm about to click submit click the submit button and just before you click it you realize all that look at look at what my dko is doing then you delete it or maybe you click that submit button it'll take you a few days to realize oh [ __ ] i need to go back and delete it whereas the earlier stages were so unconscious and so oblivious of this that that they couldn't even do that they were too arrogant to do that too close-minded so at this stage you must learn to live in a tension of paradox relativity meaning and meaninglessness all habits of mind thinking and theory making start to be seen as elaborate defense mechanisms against knowing the impermanence of the embodied self the predicament of living in language is felt and seen there's an awareness of the pseudo-reality created by words rational and objective explanation of reality and self are seen to be futile and impossible language itself is seen as a tool of the ego constructing and defending itself there's an awareness of the fundamental limitations of all rational thought and the limitations of language there's an appreciation the vital function of language in shaping reality and human affairs there's a capacity now to draw from and appreciate insight from non-rational sources this capacity significantly increases beyond earlier stages so there's now access to intuition bodily states feelings dreams archetypal and other transpersonal material increases these trans-rational non-rational non-quantifiable sources of insight and knowledge become more important than rational deliberation and logic you're becoming a more whole organism interfacing with reality by integrating feelings and intuitions and visions and dreams and uh hunches and also rational deliberation all of it gets integrated together to create the the best of of all those possible modalities and you're able to be sort of flexible and fluid in how you use that entire mechanism of understanding in different situations in reality you know if you're dealing with a relationship problem you might rely more on intuition or on feelings if you're dealing with a business problem you might rely more on rational deliberation but also still informed by some sort of higher vision consciousness right so you're not just chasing money now your rational deliberations are serving a higher conscious purpose of like maybe helping to improve the health of mankind or something like that at this stage there are momentary experiences where the knower and known merge and the personal self disappears so these are your first glimpses of mystical experiences unitive experiences non-dual experiences but these are usually fleeting temporary they're not permanent and there's of course now a desire for such experiences the ego gets you know the ego starts to fall in love with these experiences it wants more of course the ego doesn't fully understand what it's getting itself into here it doesn't understand how deep this slippery slope will slip uh experiences of non-ordinary states of consciousness are now becoming real through meditation and things like psychedelics maybe through yoga there are temporary moments of freedom from the ego's constant efforts at control but they're just temporary the ego can usurp transpersonal episodes and mystical experiences at this stage for its own perpetuation and glorification so there can be sort of a spiritual ego that gets developed here as leaders people at the construct aware stage tend to build their own novel organizations and to work alone to make the best contribution to humanity that they can they take the role of catalysts and transformers inside of organizations so at this level in a sense your job is to catalyze mankind to develop itself in some fashion that doesn't mean to become a self-help teacher or something there are many ways in you in which you can become a catalyst or a transformer many many different ways these people tend to be consultants mentors therapists and coaches of course you're not limited just to those things but these are common professions for people at the construct aware stage this stage is seriously open to not knowing unlike previous stages there's more comfort with not knowing more comfort with the mystery of life and reality if you don't know something you're much more likely to admit you don't know it and to be comfortable with that rather than trying to pretend or coming up with some belief or some some theory or some speculation to cover up that gap in your knowing there's a profound humility about the limits of knowledge at this stage there's a less of a need to defend yourself and to look good this this need for defensiveness starts to melt away there's an ability to be open and vulnerable about one's own foibles there's less of a need to impress others or to manipulate others depression at this stage is about man's existential aloneness and inability to create lasting meaning through the rational is sort of the depression of hitting up against the limits of the human mind this stage is capable of perceiving the structure of its own thinking and feeling habits the language that construct aware people use is much more complex vivid authentic and playful than previous stages it's more direct and raw responses of these types of individuals tend to have a stream of consciousness quality to them there's an attempt that's made to let go of conscious structuring of what one says or does you're starting to get into the flow of life the construct aware person catches himself in self-deception but then quickly catches oneself and autocorrects or self-corrects using this lapse as a growth opportunity so self-deception really is an opportunity for you to learn about how other people fool themselves if you didn't deceive yourself constantly you wouldn't know how self-deception works so in a certain sense it's a blessing every time you catch yourself deceiving yourself you catch yourself you correct yourself and then you make a lesson in your mind you record a lesson about ah that's the trap i fell into and that's the trap other people fall into and i can now use that information to help guide other people to avoid this trap see you're sort of jiu-jitsu or aikido-ing self-deception here to to serve a higher purpose ken wilbur often uses two terms here when when referring to this stage vision logic and the centaur so vision logic is a combination of logic and vision and intuition uh and the centaur what what is meant by the centaur is that it's you know half half animal half man half lower half higher so the centaur if we think of a view as a centaur if you're the centaur that means you're you're in touch with your animal side all of your animal impulses your sexuality your hunger your food your desire for money and approval and all that kind of basic human stuff so you're connected with that but then so half of you lives there and then half of you lives in the higher existential metaphysical realms the spiritual realms where you care about love and compassion and and god and consciousness and all these sorts of things and helping mankind you have a sense of purpose and intuition and you have art and beauty and morality all these things and so you're unifying these together into one cohesive being see where one is not at the expense of the other see when you're first learning this you tend to either have one half dominate the other half whether the lower dominates the upper or the upper down when it's the lower but as you become more integrated and whole the full centaur so to speak the two parts learn to coexist peacefully and to actually work together such that you don't need to walk around hungry you don't need to deny your sexual urges if you have them um you don't need to deny the the need or desire for money all these things are are normal and necessary functions of survival but at the same time there are lower functions and you don't want to have your entire life dictated by those you want to have the higher functions like your desire for truth and love and beauty and consciousness you want those to run your lower your lower function so there's a certain you have to have a certain hierarchy of priorities and it takes time to to find that proper balance at this stage one questions the need to make order out of chaos earlier stages were just fixed on order order order order because chaos was bad and evil but at this stage you realize life is about actually flowing with the chaos there's a sort of a a chaotic rhythmic nature to reality and this is not a this is not a bad thing it's not an evil thing not a problem you have to learn how to sort of surf those waves of chaos and it sort of turns into a sort of a semi-controlled chaos and you're basically learning to surf on the chaos this is one of the problems with jordan peterson you can see he has built a sort of a shadow side out of chaos in his books and writings and so forth he speaks of chaos as like the bad part and then order is the good part and so he's he's very fixed on order because he hasn't really reached this stage of his ego development yet where he actually integrates you know it's the yin and the yang it's the sort of a concept of wu way where you're flowing through life surfing on the waves of chaos at the ego construct or sort of the construct aware stage you're able to think of reality as an undifferentiated whole and there's a realization of the infinite interconnectedness of all things the more you examine and contemplate everything a car a tree a table the earth mankind politics morality terrorism whatever you think about all these things and you start to see how more and more they get interconnected all into one unified universal thing and that's amazing in itself that's a profound profound experience so overall this stage is extremely very very profound very very profound that's i think probably the biggest payoff to getting to the stage sure it's challenging there's a lot of responsibility taking you can feel confused and lost and and it can feel impractical sometimes but the payoff is that it's super profound and then of course it leads to the next stage which is the final stage the unitive stage so let's talk about that this stage can also be called the cosmic stage the ego transcendent stage the transhuman stage the awakened stage so here truth is imminent in the present moment and can be witnessed and apprehended but not grasped by the rational mind there's a direct consciousness of absolute truth at earlier stages the notion of absolute truth was taken as a dogma or as a belief like christians believe in god is the absolute truth or in jesus and muslims believe in allah is the absolute truth but now at the unitive stage you realize for the first time you become conscious directly conscious of what absolute truth is and that's a game changer that changes your whole life if you want to know what what truth is i have multiple episodes about that i have one episode called uh what is truth go check that out that's the direct answer to that question i have another episode called how to know what is true or how to discover what is true that's also a very powerful episode i have another episode called what is actuality which guides you towards the absolute truth so i have many episodes to talk about and guide you towards absolute truth but ultimately it can't be explained you have to you have to have an awakening to absolute truth to understand what it is can't be explained to you at this unit of stage there's now the ability to witness the whole song and dance of life uh and of prior ways of understanding and meaning making with compassion and equanimity you sort of see the whole process for what it is and you start to understand the ins and outs of it and why it's so complicated and why there's so many traps and pitfalls why it works the way that it works the previous ways of viewing reality solely from oneself's perspective and through the medium of language is now transformed you step outside of the human mind witnessing and being is the primary mode here at the stage without a need to defend or to justify any kind of experience all experience is seen as valid many different kinds of experience but none is better than any other one per se in the absolute sense and there's some value in experiencing any kind of experience even the bad ones even the ugly ones even the painful ones there's value to it still this is recognized and this helps one to navigate difficult challenging painful experiences at this stage you are open to fully experiencing whatever enters your consciousness you're not preoccupied with avoiding certain experiences at this stage you relish in the mystery of being there's a profound sense of awe and wonder that overtakes you reality becomes magical becomes mystical what was the mundane and the ordinary like a kitchen knife a fork a glass of orange juice a piece of bread a tree a dog on the sidewalk a car these things were all taken for granted at earlier stages but now with breakthroughs into mystical consciousness you realize the true nature of all these things and how miraculous and amazing they truly are and you stop taking them for granted so even the most mundane and simple things stop being boring they become interesting they become profound they become spiritual experiences for you you can look at a fork and and start to cry because you realize the how amazing the existence of a fork is lower stages of ego cannot even comprehend such a thing like a fork what's so special about a fork why would you cry about a fork see but you take the fork for granted you don't really appreciate what a fork is there is a cosmic perspective now at this stage which serves as the organizing principle of your entire world view and life at this stage you experience yourself and others as part of an ongoing humanity embedded in the creative ground fulfilling the destiny of evolution the unitive individual can take many perspectives and shift focus effortlessly among them and among many different states of awareness mystical and unitive experiences are no longer merely glimpses but steadily established peak experiences now have a familiar and comfortable quality to them rather than being scary or alien or something weird or foreign the peaks of earlier stages now become the ground everything becomes mystified from moment to moment only the present is real you're you're fully grounded in the present it's almost sort of a solipsistic state uh you also feel embedded in nature you feel like you're one with the universe you're part of the universe not something separate from it the unitive stage manifests a deeper security about being than is possible with a rationally generated identity so there's a deep sense of fulfillment and completion as a self you don't feel like you need other things to completely uh sorry to complete you you don't need a house to complete you you don't need the hottest clothes to complete you don't need fame and fortune to completely complete you you don't need a family you don't need a spouse you don't need sex you don't need money you don't need anything to completely to complete you you don't even need to improve yourself to feel complete because by definition you are the entire universe you are infinity and so you can't be more complete than you already are you just need to realize that uh the unitive person can perceive the concrete limited and temporal aspects of an entity simultaneously with its eternal and symbolic meaning from the unitive stage later stages are not taken to be better than earlier ones because all are necessary parts of an interconnected reality and the overall evolutionary process of mankind so at the unit of stage you don't judge those ignorant people at the very low stages you realize that they don't know any better and that's just their level of consciousness and so there's a deep deep acceptance of that from which comes a great peace because all the other stages are busy demonizing and criticizing each other and only really when you get to the ultimate stages here do you surrender that fully and let it go and go beyond that this stage is non-controlling it tends to have a lot of humility and grace it has a down-to-earth quality with simplicity on the other side of complexity your models become so complex and so overwhelming that at some point you you just drop them and you transcend them in a sense and then things become a lot simpler things become more zen there's an awareness at this stage that all of one's personal achievements and strivings are but one drop in the ocean of human endeavors and evolution so your life purpose is important as it is it's just a speck of a speck of dust in the cosmos and yet you still go about it with passion that doesn't mean you you get depressed about your life purpose you say oh well then i have to quit my job and quit my career and all that life purpose stuff that i was talking about it's all poor [ __ ] and illusion no uh as carlos castaneda beautifully writes and says and i'm just paraphrasing here um his character don juan talks about how having a a life purpose is a controlled folly he calls it a controlled folly he says the man of wisdom undertakes a conscious controlled folly which means that you're aware that your life purpose is completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things you're aware that your work your life's work and your career means absolutely nothing you're aware that your family and all the time you put into them and raising your children it all means absolutely nothing you're completely conscious of that and at the same time you make a conscious effort to be passionate about these things and to still do them because what's the alternative laying around on the couch getting lazy watching netflix eating cheetos that's the alternative you realize that that is not the way that a wise conscious person lives life so you live fully engaged with life you still do things you sell help people even though you realize that helping people is completely pointless and meaningless so if this seems like a paradox or a contradiction to you well yeah it is a paradox but that's just something that you're gonna have to deal with that's part of part of your work you have to work through that paradox and ultimately come to integrate it and to accept it and to be comfortable with it that will probably take you some years to do that personally for means it's always felt quite natural i never understood why people have a problem with this yeah i can i can i can create actualize that organ i can invest thousands of hours and all this energy and effort into creating all this material for people to help them even though that i know that it's all a complete [ __ ] illusion in the game of course it's all a game of course it's a game life is a game it's a video game but then again why the [ __ ] do you play video games you know that there's no stakes to a video game you know that a video game is just pixels on a screen it means absolutely nothing when you go watch a movie you know that the movie is a complete fiction it's just an illusion it's just light dancing on a screen and yet you get invested in you enjoy the movie so why can't life be the same way you enjoy it but ultimately you realize it's completely empty and meaningless and that's in fact that's not something to bemoan that's not a depressing thing this is the greatest [ __ ] way that life could possibly be structured because that i mean i never understood why people want life to be real the desire for life to be real to me that's insanity you want life to be unreal you want it to be an illusion that's the coolest way reality can be and that's what it is so just flip your mind around 180 degrees and everything's good don't get depressed about this this is see you would need to be depressed if life was real if murder and rape and terrorism and all these things if they were really important and they were really meaningful and getting your way in life was so important and real that's what would be depressing because then you'd have to be attached to it but the fact that it's an illusion and you can become conscious of that that's what allows you to detach from it you're you're living inside of a dream that you're attached to you call this dream material reality you're dreaming that material reality isn't a dream but of course that's the dream it's the dream of no dream you're dreaming that you're not in a dream which is the dream it goes full circle it's a strange loop so these unitive people at this stage can come off as aloof and detached as not engaged enough with goals pursuits achievements and human problems so people at the lower stage especially the achievers in the audience they will oftentimes criticize me for example for like oh leo it's all just mental masturbation it's all just philosophy it has no real world consequences this stuff isn't important blah blah blah blah so most people when they run across an actualized video they don't watch it they don't continue to watch it they don't subscribe and stay tuned for more content simply because it's too impractical the things i talk about are just too existential too metaphysical too epistemic too long-term because their concerns are just like how do i satisfy my needs for pleasure for the next week for the next month for the next year that's what most people 99 of people are only concerned about that so it's hard to recruit you guys to keep watching me um because um it's just at the stage you're at it's perceived as too impractical but then again practicality itself the desire for practicality you have to see that that's a bias why would the practical be more valuable than the impractical why should things be practical maybe your problem in life is that you're too practical you're too obsessed with the practical and you're living your whole life at the level of the practical at the level of the material such that you're missing the spirit of life literally your your your life is hollow of spirit spiritless a soulless life and that's what you see around you that's what your family members your colleagues your your friends your co-workers isn't that a perfect description of of their life they're living a soulless life literally completely detached from spirit because they're just preoccupied at the level of survival they're living like animals you see but then they turn that into a strength and when a teaching comes along that teaches you how to live like not an animal what's the most common criticism of that teaching but it's not practical that's right because you've defined the practical as that of being an animal so i mean if [ __ ] and eating and [ __ ] are what you define as as as life then anything that teaches you something beyond that you're going to think as impractical as woo as new age as mental masturbation as philosophy and and you're going to ignore it you're going to click the next button and you're going to instead subscribe to some channel or listen to some guru or teacher um who is sort of like a tony robbins style teacher who just teaches you about success how to be more successful how to be more of an animal see that's lateral development not vertical development i'm more interested in teaching you a vertical than lateral development as we talked about i think in part one of this series we made that distinction the unit of individual tends to act as a catalyst for shaping human lives these people tend to be concerned with global justice spontaneity existence and creativity these people have an intense non-demanding relationships with people regardless of their development age gender or any other identifications because all of these things like gender and age and things like this that others used to get stuck on the lower stages get stuck on all these different differences all of this is seen through as being irrelevant unimportant and so the unit of individual sees the dignity in all manifestations of life doesn't matter if it's a human black white asian latino gay straight trans young or old sick or healthy poor or rich man or woman animal bug ant spider whale elephant alien doesn't matter it's all seen as as in a sense from the absolute perspective it's all equally valuable equally valid ways of living life um yeah when you get to this stage and you see like a spider in your house whereas before you would just stomp the spider without giving you a second thought here you're gonna probably try to like get a plastic cup catch the spider in the cup and then throw them outside not to hurt them because you realize that there's no reason there's no there's what is the difference between stomping on a spider and slitting a human's throat what's the difference the only difference is your own egoic bias if you get rid of the biases the egoic biases there's no difference there's no difference between stomping on a spider and slitting the throat of your children but you like to pretend like there is also at this stage other people feel worthy and whole in your presence because you're not condemning them you're not judging them you're accepting them and loving them and appreciating them for exactly who they are you don't need to change them or manipulate them you're not trying to tell them to be different than how they are so the person feels very accepted in your presence and this is a powerful place from which to teach personally that's something i'm working on still i know i can be arrogant and condemning and cocky and sometimes i can browbeat you that's a bit of my style but i've been moving away from that if you haven't noticed in the last few years i've been moving away from that more towards uh this sort of more holistic more accepting more loving way of interacting with you guys because i can see the limitations of the old way of doing it i can see this this is a more powerful way to do it so as i'm moving more into the unit of stage i'm going to be doing uh more of that and my teachings you're going to see my teachings are going to soften up they're going to become more love centered they already have in the last couple years but more so i'm going to be able to embody that even more i'm still working on embodying it um you know there's there's bad habits i've got to get rid of you know like eight years of bad youtube habits of um you know being a bit cocky and condescending towards you guys um yeah but you'll see that that's gonna get corrected in the next five or ten years as i continue teaching that will you'll see all that go away as i am mature and fully enter into the unitive stage i'm still not fully living in the unit of stage i'm sort of outside halfway between unitive and the construct aware there's no longer these people are no longer driven by desires to be one way or another or to achieve one state or another there's a deep feeling of being complete a profound self-acceptance and self-love such people are are able to let go of unattained goals and desires and are able to rest in the experience of being just sitting silently feels like bliss just sitting silently and basking in your own being becomes the greatest pleasure you don't need drugs you don't need sex you don't need these sorts of things now of course that doesn't mean you can't have sex once in a while or you can't eat some good food once in a while you can do all these things but the more conscious you become the more satisfaction you derive simply from just sitting and being aware of awareness itself at this stage there's a non-attachment to outcome because it's seen as essential and as a liberating aspect of witnessing and um spontaneous insight becomes common you just get bombarded with insights from source from god we might say insights bombard you all day long if you sit in silence you'll get a bunch of insights about the nature of life yourself relationships people animals the cosmos evolution society government politics everything at this stage reality is seen to be a universal mind mind with a capital m mind as the only thing that exists everything is mind everything is consciousness there never was a material world there was only a mind with a capital m the infinite mind this mind is god this mind is what you are this mind is the universe this thing happening right now as you're sitting here listening to me this is mind and there is only mind because mind is infinite so there can be nothing outside of mind the universe is recognized not as a material clockwork machine but as a conscious alive intelligent sentient mind it's consciousness everything is consciousness a table is consciousness a chair is consciousness a fire hydrant is consciousness a car is consciousness there's nothing but consciousness at this stage you have a direct consciousness of god at the lower stages god was conceived as some sort of other as a bearded man in the clouds something separate from yourself something beyond you something that you're unworthy of something that has power over you and something that is different from the material world but here at the unit of stage because now you have direct mystical experience you become directly conscious of the absolute truth you realize that the universe is god you realize that the present moment is god and that you are god and now there is a deep ownership a process happens where you realize first you realize that god is real then you realize what god is and then you realize that ever deeper levels that you yourself are god and you take full responsibility and ownership of yourself as god which means that you are the creator of the entire universe this can seem absurd to the lower stages because they can't possibly conceive of how one could be god leo if i'm god how come my life sucks so much that's because you are god but you're not aware that you're god and you're not taking responsibility for your life so therefore you're leading your life in a very ungodly way and that's why you're being a devil and of course that's why your life sucks so much it's basically hell you're living in your own self-created hell yeah that's what happens when you're not conscious and you don't take responsibility for your life so yeah you start taking responsibility for that it's a staggering life transforming insight to realize that you're god this is not a belief see the lower stages can't understand what i'm talking about here in many cases because they think what i'm talking about is a belief system they think like oh leo has deluded himself into thinking that he's god because he's some sort of narcissistic uh uh a new age cult leader who thinks he knows so much about the universe and he though now and now he thinks he's better than the christians and the buddhists and everything and then and now he has crown of course his ego has crowned himself as the top as god but that's not what's happening at all there's sure there there is that as a trap that could be a trap i could be doing that but i'm not doing that what i'm talking about is i'm talking about you becoming directly conscious that you're god it is a fact that you're god you can become directly conscious of it or you can sit there and deny it now this is not a belief system it's not an ideology it's not wishful thinking it's not something i hope is true it's not speculation it's not philosophy it's you your god it can't be explained you have to become directly conscious of it if you want to know more about god check out my many episodes about god i have what is god part one and part two and then i have many others where i talk about the nature of god at this stage the unity of person marvels at the intelligence and perfection of all of creation the mundane becomes the supernatural the supernatural is not something that exists in some other dimension this is the supernatural ordinary life is the supernatural there's a deep appreciation of the fundamental mystery of everything you realize that nothing can be known because being and truth are prior to knowing you actually can't know the truth you can be the truth you are the truth truth is but the knowing of the truth creates a duality between the thing being known and the knower of it such that that already creates a split and therefore breaks the truth to get absolute truth you have to you have to heal that split to unify all possible dualities and splits such that there's only a single unity left when there's a single unity you can't quite say that you know it because there's no longer a knower and in it to be known you become it you merge with thing that you're trying to understand the thing that you've been trying to know your whole life you cease trying to know it you cease trying to grasp it with your mind but rather you become it you merge into it and then it's just one you realize you were it the whole time every object word thought and feeling and sensation and theory is now understood to be a human construct separating out creating boundaries where none exists giving names to experience and making distinctions is now seen as necessary for human growth study interaction and communication but at the source there is nothing to distinguish ultimately there's literally no difference between anything there's no difference between a taco and a kangaroo other than in your own mind reality only consists of differences that you conceive of or imagine in your own mind the unity person feels tolerance compassion and affiliation with all manifestations of life she respects the essence of others and therefore does not need them to be different from how they are she is in tune with goodness truth and beauty she has visionary experiences and comprehends things in holistic ways analog ways in addition to grasping them through the filter of the personal ego and rational thought the unit of person has great wisdom as opposed to high iq or specialized technical knowledge a lot of uh expert and achiever stage people they don't understand this distinction between wisdom and consciousness versus high iq and they tend to really value high iq uh but they don't realize that you can have a very high iq but you can also have a low level of ego development or you could have a high iq and you could have a low level of consciousness and wisdom or you can have a sort of an average iq or even a low iq but very high wisdom and uh very high consciousness and so this this preoccupation that we see online with people getting obsessed with iq scores this is very very unhealthy this is stage expert and achiever levels of looking at the world that's the wrong metric the right metric is how wise you are what we need is a wisdom test not an iq test and just because you have a lot of specialized knowledge in science or in physics or in computers or in mathematics or whatever this this is a completely separate variable from your consciousness your wisdom your capacity to love and your stage of ego development all of this is way more important than any kind of specialized technical knowledge the unitive person has the ability to channel deep insights and wisdom directly from source or universal intelligence you develop a personal relationship with source and universal intelligence it's almost like you're able to speak to god telepathically but of course it's even trickier than that because the one you're speaking to is yourself so it's not like god is up there in the clouds and you're you're imagining talking to god rather you yourself are god so when you're talking to yourself in your own mind you are talking to god but you can develop a sort of a high bandwidth connection where you are able to channel you know god can talk to itself in in sort of low fidelity ways and high fidelity ways so you can develop these high fidelity channels to tap into superhuman levels of intelligence wisdom insight that will just blow your mind it's really this is one of the most appealing aspects of this stage is to to is to be able to to develop this high bandwidth connection to universal intelligence it's almost like going from from the old internet of the 90s that used to be dial-up modems you you you young zoomers you probably don't even know what that's like to to dial up on the internet um to a website um yeah i'm just i'm just reminiscing about the good old days of aol and and how i would go to ebay log into ebay through aol waiting for that stupid dial up connection anyway so yeah so there's that that way of interacting with reality that's most people by the way 95 of humans have a dial-up connection to universal intelligence such that they don't even perceive it as universal intelligence and then some of us have a gigabit connection i actually i recently got gigabit internet in my in my house i got a new house with a gigabit internet connection uh and i before that i had a pretty fast high speed cable connection but when i upgraded to this gigabit connection oh my god it how it changed my life is amazing so this video right now on my old cable connection which was still high speed it would have taken maybe 12 hours to upload a two hour video now i can upload this video within 15 minutes on my gigabit connection it's amazing it's worth it totally worth it um so that's what it's like you can develop this gigabit connection to universal intelligence and then you can get all this wisdom and insight and that's why if you're wondering how can some of these teachers like you know saad guru or acharatola or whatever these mystics and so forth or maybe you wonder how leo where do you get all these insights it seems like you could just talk for hours and hours and hours and your insights don't end and you have just all this profound wisdom pouring out of you how do you do it well i just developed this connection it's completely intuitive you you become conscious enough that you develop this intuitive connection with universal intelligence and you just get it doesn't stop it's just like a torrent what you what you see for me what i'm able to actually communicate to you i don't even have enough energy really to to articulate all of my insights i get so many more insights i maybe only articulate five or ten percent of all the insights that i get on a weekly basis uh from universal intelligence i'm just bombarded with them it's it's so much i have hundreds of pages thousands of pages of notes of insights and even that all my notes are just a small fraction of all the insights that i get i get so many i can't write them all down so that's to me that's one of the most rewarding things in life is is that and one of the things i hope that actually already helps you to do is to develop this sort of connection it feels amazing it's really amazing and it's not coming from me you see anything that i teach you really anything wise or important or profound that i teach you you have to realize it's not coming from leo it never came from leo it was always universal intelligence speaking through me so it's a very humble process um i never like really take credit for it in my own mind i never think like oh yeah i'm so cool because i got this amazing insight no the way i see it in my mind is like no the universe is so cool because it's giving me all these insights but then of course i realize but i am the universe so in a sense i am generating all the insights so really i am so cool but not in the leo is cool sort of way but that the universe is cool sort of way see like um i'm as amazed by the things that come out of my mouth as you might be because in a sense i'm hearing them for the first time as you are and yeah it's amazing it's profound stuff now when i say my stuff is profound again it's not coming from an ego place it's actually coming from a very humble place because it's not really my stuff it's the universe's stuff these are the universe's teachings coming to you it's profound because the universe is profound not because leo is profound any profundity that comes out of leo is just the profanity of the universe but of course leo is just a manifestation of the universe to begin with so it's all one and it's all interconnected and so of course i'm profound because the universe is profound and because i'm connected to the universe you are profound you will be profound you will actualize your profundity once you yourself become conscious enough to realize that you're the whole universe and then you'll develop this profanity if you want if you want it you can develop it at this stage one of the reasons we call it unitive is because you feel interconnected and one with all living beings there's actually no distinction anymore between you and another human being or an animal there's literally no difference once the ego dissolves enough there's no boundaries anymore you are all living beings in the universe this is not a theory it's not wishful thinking it's it's absolute truth you got to become conscious of it people at the unit of stage tend to work for justice fairness and benevolence towards all such people realize that there are infinite numbers of different ways of being which are all valid in a sense every organism every creature in the universe is being in its own unique way and none of them are bad all of them are beautiful and so one's job is to embrace all the diversity and multiplicity of ways in which beings are a worm is one way to be a snake is another way to be a bird is another way to be a human is another way to be a nazi is another way to be a murderer is another way to be a drug dealer is another way to be an alien is another way to be they're all ways of being who are you to judge them the universe is the sum total of all ways of being and there are an infinite number of them and your job as god is to embrace all of that with love and compassion and understanding the unitive person starts to see that all conflict is a lack of perspective all conflict in the world amongst humans is a is a matter of a lack of understanding of differences in perspective there's a deep understanding of the ignorance of others the lower stages would condem others for being ignorant but at this highest stage you realize that this ignorance is absolutely inevitable necessary couldn't be otherwise now that doesn't mean an increment person can't grow and change but they can only grow and change when they are ready to grow and change until then they're ignorant and the reason you have a deep now compassion for ignorance is because you look back at your own trajectory through life you look at all these stages you ascended through and how difficult it was and uh you know sometimes you were depressed sometimes you were on the brink of suicide or whatever but you persevered and you realize damn that was you know that took me a good 20 years to accomplish all that uh and i can really appreciate how ignorant i was at the very beginning of this journey and maybe i'm still ignorant in many ways you can see that and then as you realize that then you get a deep empathy for the way in which people are stuck in their own ignorance now of course it doesn't mean you have to accept their ignorance sometimes people think that well leo then why do you ban people from your forum for saying stupid things shouldn't you just accept them no that doesn't mean i'm gonna accept people saying you know ridiculous things that doesn't mean i have to accept holocaust denial it doesn't have to mean i have to accept trumpism and other forms of stupid conspiracy theories and so forth which are obviously wrong and delusional and coming from a lower stage i'm able to separate those out and when need be i'm able to cut those people out of my life right because like if i wasn't banning idiotic people from the forum the forum would turn into into a uh a hive of villainy and depravity and devilry as most online forums do unless they're heavily moderated for quality at this unity stage spontaneity and straightforwardness or straightforward simplicity becomes an essential element of wisdom and ego transcendence the unit of person stands out outside the desperate need for meaning making that is common to all the earlier stages this person now has a vast mental space to roam the mind is jail broken and freed up when i talk about jail breaking the mind as i have in certain episodes this is what i'm talking about is getting getting to this place here becoming so aware of how your mind constructs reality that you're able to outwit your own mind remove all the fetters there's a following away of most defense mechanisms and manipulations at this stage there's a letting go of control the need to control circumstances other people and even oneself there's a sort of a it feels like free fall going into free fall there's there's a great quote i forget exactly who it was by maybe it was by thick nan han or one of these one of these modern like invited teachers and i'm paraphrasing here but he said it awakening feels like uh jumping out of an airplane without a parachute but realizing that there's no ground and so you're just in constant free fall for the rest of your life there is now a mindful non-evaluative attention to to what is now in the present moment you're able to just experience things without constantly judging them or interpreting them or trying to change them to suit you you just experience it for what it is finally your ego can handle that your ego can tolerate the truth where before it had to manipulate avoid deny and play various kinds of games at this stage there is usually a profound integration of the masculine and feminine sides of oneself whereas before like if you were a man you probably had a feminine shadow side and if you're a woman you probably had a masculine shadow side now you integrate the two you realize that the masculine and the feminine are just two parts of your own mind and then this this pacifies the whole gender war situation which is common these days at the lower stages so you're no longer at war with yourself that's one of the biggest fruits of this stage all the other stages are constantly at war with themselves with their parents with their co-workers with the opposite political party with the opposite gender with the opposite nation with the opposite ethnicity with the opposite race with whatever they're always at war with each other they can't get along because they're blindly acting out their own selfishness without realizing that the self is an illusion and so of course this creates a bunch of needless conflict and then they always they judge and blame each other for it because they don't want to take responsibility for the fact that they're creating the conflict to begin with but at this stage you realize that all conflict in a sense is self-created and you can take responsibility for that and therefore you can stop the conflict just by realizing that you're being a selfish [ __ ] and that's all ultimately what all conflict boils down to is just selfishness unconscious selfishness at this at this stage there's a collat kaleidoscopic response uh kaleidoscopic responses that bridge different levels and types of contrasts for example the difference between the concrete and the practical is bridged between theoretical and the philosophical between the personal and the global the serious and the humorous the mundane and the sublime the physical and psychological and the metaphysical all of these dualities and and rifts are healed and made whole the unit of person uniquely identifies as a participant in the evolution of the cosmos there's a cosmocentric perspective not just global but the entire cosmos all of creation creation with a capital c there is a disillusion of notions of evil and enemies at this stage you realize that evil does not exist it never existed because evil is nothing more than a projection of the biased ego mind if you get rid of all the biases in your mind evil will cease to exist and you will no longer have any enemies there is now a realization that the only solution to evil the only way to defeat evil is not externally but by slaying your own self biases and you realize now why evil seems to exist the reason evil seems to exist is because 99 of people are self-biased acting out their blind survival agendas and they have no awareness of this nor are they interested in introspecting to correct this fundamental self-deception there is a realization at the stage that all of reality is imaginary including the physical and the material there's no difference between dreams that you dream at night and your body or the wall or the chair that you're sitting on right now all of it is different levels of imagination nothing is taken seriously or personally anymore there's nothing personal about life life becomes impersonal that's an amazing realization to have is one day if in this work if you go far enough you will realize holy [ __ ] life is completely impersonal why did i ever take anything personally it's a total illusion taking anything personally is a total illusion and yet we all get wrapped up in it so easily this unit of stage is where you start to tap into true happiness true satisfaction tranquility and equanimity you don't even know what happiness is until you reach this stage at this stage of course is when enlightenment tends to occur awakening tends to occur the buddha mind as they call it that doesn't mean you can't have awakenings and enlightenments at earlier stages you can you can have mystical experiences at earlier stages in fact i would probably say most of the mystical experiences that happen in the world don't happen at the unit of stage they happen at the much lower stages at the conformist stages probably but again remember like i said it's going to get filtered your awakening is going to get filtered through your ego mind still and interpreted and expressed and manifested through the mind so if the mind is at a limited stage of development your awakening is in a sense not going to be fully realized as it could be you're still going to get stuck there's going to be going to be traps there's still going to be pathologies that can happen even if you do have awakenings and mystical experiences at the lower stages at this stage there's a realization that birth and death are imaginary there's a realization of absolute love you realize that reality is love you start to understand what love is for the first time in your life there's a realization that self is other literally self and other are identical and indistinguishable there's a realization of the aloneness or oneness of yourself you are the only thing there is you're one but contrary to how people frame it as solipsism it's not truly solipsism because solipsism assumes that there's a self but there's not even a self not only are there not others there's not even a self the self and others are one so it's not that others aren't real it's that others are the same as the self they're literally identical and indistinguishable therefore you have oneness but oneness is not in opposition to twoness oneness includes twoness and threeness and fourness to infinity so this is a meta oneness this is a one absolute one it's a oneness that transcends and includes everything down below it it's the reason you're one and you're so alone is because you're so together with everything imagine that if we took every living being in the universe and we completely smushed them together just one to one until every atom was in the exact same location of every living being so to speak uh what would we get we get one being but notice it's one it's alone but the reason it's alone is because it's so together so sometimes people get hooked or stuck on the aloneness not realizing that aloneness and togetherness are actually indistinguishable and the same um there is also a realization at the stage that all fear is an illusion there is a realization that all judgment is ignorance there is often an awakening of the heart you could have an awakening of the mind or you could have an awakening in the heart awakening of the heart in a sense is even more powerful and more important than awakening of the mind that's awakening to love there's a sense common at this stage of this is the end i'm done i've reached the end of life i've won the game of life there's also a realization and an understanding that the good life is simply to live selflessly that's all the good life is selfless living and the bad life is selfish living it's just that simple there's a realization that the point of life is selflessness goodness love and consciousness there's a realization of what reality ultimately is reality is ultimately infinity you can become conscious of infinity directly you can realize that consciousness is infinity there's uh an understanding of and compassion for all human suffering conflict argument war violence disagreement and evil because now you understand all of it and where it all comes from it all comes from the ego mind and from selfishness there's a complete understanding of why humans behave as they do human behavior is no longer mysterious to you you understand it because you've fully deconstructed your own ego you've fully penetrated the light of awareness through all of your self-deception mechanisms and all of your egoic biases and now you realize that it's just that it's all those biases and all that unconscious material that most people have not processed and looked deeply into that is causing all of their weird wacky insane and self-destructive behaviors and finally at this stage there is just silence profound silence the mind realizes that the universe is too profound to speak of and so whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent as the famous wittenstein quote goes all right that's it in conclusion here we have completed these nine stages now you understand the entire human development process hopefully that's clear to you there's a lot of material here congratulations for watching through it all if you have but this is still just the beginning you have a lot more work to do to really understand what was said here it'll take you probably years and decades to really understand the significance of just these three episodes in this little series so i recommend that you download that research paper by suzanne cagroider i recommend you read it i recommend you print it out i recommend you highlight it and underline it take notes on it i recommend you you re-read it at least once a year for the next five or ten years as you're developing i recommend you track your ego's development along this uh set of stages and uh i recommend that you actually use this as a roadmap all these things i said they weren't just interesting descriptions you can literally use each of these bullet points that i gave you to evaluate how good are you on this bullet point where are you faltering where could you use some improvement and you can actually deliberately work on each bullet point to rise yourself up through these different stages for example how good are you at tolerating paradox maybe not so good okay well that's that's a point you can work on how judgmental are you well maybe you're you find yourself being quite judgmental okay that's a point to work on how um for example um how good are you at connecting intuitively to universal intelligence versus just thinking logically and rationally about things well that's if you're weak in that area that's something you can work on now of course i hear you saying but leo how do i improve all these things well that's where some of the work lies i can't tell you every single way in which you can work on these things it would take me hours and days to explain it all it's too much material of course i cover that in certain other episodes that i've released and i'll cover more in the future we still have a lot more work to do with this model we're not done by any means using this model towards our growth we've just we've given you a foundation here now you can use this foundation but i will also talk in the future a lot more about um you know how to do some of these things and how to use this model and put it more into practice so uh but in the meantime again don't get hung up on how to do something if you don't know how to do something that's not the big problem the big problem is you not even wanting to do it or not even knowing that it's important to do so first just convince yourself of the importance of doing some of these things get motivated and inspired to do some of these things and then you won't so much be limited by how you can always find how you can go google it you can search for it you can find videos you can find books you can find courses you can find seminars you can take psychedelics there's a million different ways how you can find how to accomplish something that you don't know how to accomplish don't let that stop you from setting your mind to accomplishing it the vision comes before knowing how it's going to happen and then just be comfortable with not knowing how for a while trust that you'll figure it out might take you some months or years to figure it out you will figure it out don't expect me to tell you how to do every single thing in your life there are way too many things to do and you don't want to be that reliant on me we have to be careful here that i don't over explain things and i don't i don't make you codependent on me you in order for these teachings to be effective and to achieve the necessary aims that we have here you these teachings need to not feed you the fish but to teach you how to fish you see so so don't always just come to me asking for a fish sometimes i deliberately don't want to give you a fish i just want to point you in the right direction and have you figure it out for yourself the very process of figuring it out is how you grow if every single time you're facing an obstacle in your life and you come to leo or to some other person asking for an answer to how to fix that specific problem what are you why are you even alive at that point you're asking me to figure out and solve all your problems for you that's not how life works start taking responsibility for finding your own solutions my job is to give you very high level pointers and advice and then your job is to actually live and figure out the nitty-gritty details of your life i've got plenty of little details in my life that i'm figuring out every single day i got enough of my own little details to figure out to take on all of your details you got to be able to bridge that gap between the high level advice that i give you between wisdom and how to actually implement it in your life i'm not going to give you a step-by-step formula for how to implement it this is this would be counterproductive you think you want that you don't actually want that because your job is to actually be creative with your mind and to figure out how to implement this advice because the advice is necessarily general and abstract and for you specifically in your life you need to apply this advice in a way that fits you your unique personality strengths gifts talents inclinations desires predilections and whatever else and that's going to be different right so as much as you might think that you want for me a thousand page manual on how to live your whole life that's not what you really want what you want from me is some general pointers you want me to point out various traps and things um about how to not screw your life up certain directions in which to go certain techniques and ideas certain perspectives and and stuff like that you want me to open up your mind more for you but you don't want me to tell you uh you know those micro details you want you don't want me micromanaging your life so take responsibility for that now of course you're wondering is there anything beyond the unitive stage and actually there is there's a lot there's there's a lot beyond the unit of stage but remember this is a scientific model from susannah greuter she made this model using questionnaires that she gave to actual real people she surveyed them when you're using that sort of method and you're surveying the general population by definition what you're going to get back is you're going to get sort of a bell curve most results are going to be in the middle somewhere so you're going to have a bunch of average mediocre people giving you results you're going to have very few cases of the most advanced developed humans on the planet when we're talking about going beyond the unit of stage the amount of responses that she would get to that would be so small that it would be impossible to make a any kind of scientific model based on that to understand what's beyond the unit of stage what you need to do is you need to study the most advanced humans on the planet we're talking about one in a million one in 10 million types of humans uh of course i love studying that stuff i share much of that with you as i study it check out my book list for for more on that if you want uh so there's a lot more material beyond the unitive uh it's difficult to talk about you're not going to really be able to understand it or apply it if you're already not at the unitive or at least somewhere at the construct aware stage and um and really a lot of those stages the beyond the unit you have to explore those for yourself these are going to be transhuman highly mystical stages you can explore them through psychedelics and advanced yoga techniques and advanced meditation techniques um but uh but this is very rare stuff it's difficult to explain there's not a big audience for it personally i myself am limited in my understanding of those stages i mean i i will i anticipate i will have much more understanding of those stages in the next 10 or 20 years um i'm still figuring that stuff out and honestly mankind as a whole is still figuring that stuff out these stages are so advanced so rare that it's the cutting edge of of everything that mankind knows and so it's very challenging to figure these stages out but again don't get too far ahead of your skis if you can even reach the unit of stage by the end of your life that will already be a massive achievement and you will be in the top 1.001 percent of the global population but if you stay tuned with me i will share it i have shared some things that are sort of beyond the unit of stage so we'll talk about that more as we keep going all right that's it for me please click that like button for me come check out actualize.org that's my website on there you will find my blog the book list the life purpose course all of those can be powerful resources for you that can transform your life uh the forum sign up to the forum it's free come ask your questions um we have interesting discussions there we share interesting resources and techniques and it just it helps with that problem of feeling so isolated when you're doing this work the forum can help you find like-minded people maybe you can even find some local people in your town that you can meet up with and the final thing that i want to say here is that we are not really done with this model i consider this a foundation now for all the future content that i release i will be referring back to this nine stage model in various ways similar to how i do with spiral dynamics in a way i prefer this model over spiral dynamics i find it a little bit more nuanced especially at these higher stages i feel that the the the ego or sorry the um the construct aware and the unit of stages as described by this model are more accurate than the turquoise spiral dynamic like the turquoise and coral of spider dynamics um i feel this model is better in that respect and that is mostly what we're concerned with with this work so that's why i like this model more uh it feels a little bit more personal whereas biodynamics feels a little bit more cultural and a little more collective so i will be referring to this mod a lot more and i will be trying to help you to actually use this as a roadmap um i will try to make some future episodes where i actually break down every stage and i tell you like here are the actual steps you can take to move from the conformist to the expert from the expert to the achiever from the achiever to the pluralist from the pluralist to the whatever and then i will also point out sticking points and traps even more so than i did with this series because this was just what i consider an introduction this is just an introduction here all right so so much more uh work left to be done with that but you don't have to wait for me to do that for you you can you can get to work on that yourself already i think there's enough detail here and also in the paper for you to do that and uh and so now what i can tell you is this now see now you can understand the following thing that i tell you is that now you understand that actualize.org as a teaching is focused on moving you up into the post-conventional stages by jail breaking your mind that's what all of my teachings really were intended to be from the very beginning i'm not really interested in the lower stages i'm interested in getting you to post conventional and then taking you from post-conventional into the construct aware and into the unitive so we spend a lot of time on the construct aware stage with actualize.org we spend a lot of time talking about epistemology about how how the mind works about self-deception mechanisms and ways in which you fool yourself in various traps we spend a lot of time deconstructing various concepts and notions like freedom like morality like spirituality like religion like god you know we deconstruct all this stuff we talk about belief systems we talk about ideologies we talk about cults hopefully you can see now and you can appreciate what my teachings are trying to get you to do they're trying to get you to see how your mind is constructing your reality trying to get you to start to introspect and in that process jail break your mind such that then you can become open to mystical experiences and awakenings and the deepest existential questions about life and then you're going to be open to the most profound aspects of reality consciousness and love and uh develop developing this high bandwidth connection with infinite intelligence and so all of my work is trying to move you in that direction so i try to sort of catch you at the achiever stage maybe and then move you from achiever into pluralist strategist construct aware and then ultimately unitive and then maybe in the years to come we'll go beyond unity as well that's what all the techniques that i share are about whether it's psychedelics or meditation or concentration practices or journaling or shamanic breathing um that's why we take so much time sharing these different maps and models so that you can see how all the pieces fit together we're trying to interconnect everything show you the unity of everything at the level of mind but then once you get it at the level of mind my hope is that you're going to see the need to transcend beyond the level of mind and then once you start to get beyond the level of mind in a certain sense you're gonna go beyond my ability to teach you because teaching is inherently limited we're using words it's dualistic we're trying to be logical linear here the way teaching works is very limited ultimately you want to get to a point where you're able to teach yourself that's why psychedelics are so powerful because psychedelics are a non-linear organic hyper-dimensional infinitely intelligent non-trans-linguistic trans-human mode of teaching and communication you can learn directly from infinite intelligence itself from the universe once you discover how to learn from the universe itself once you open up a channel to god itself you in a sense won't need me anymore and that's ultimately where i want to get you to but don't worry you've got years and decades of work to do before you transcend my teachings so don't get ahead of yourself thinking that you've already understood everything no there's i guarantee you there's there's there's a decade more of content that you haven't understood so stick around for that there's still many many many advanced and interesting and mind-blowing topics that we're going to be covering in the future you