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[Music] happy new year 2022. this is how we do new years in vegas now pay attention though because this is a serious topic despite appearances of course appearances can be very deceiving so this topic is a topic of the fear of truth or the avoidance of truth this is actually one of the highest insights that i've received recently from a super conscious state of god realization and awakening and that is the fundamental avoidance of truth that all of us humans have this is a fundamental principle of life is that you fear truth and everyone around you fears truth and by understanding and studying this principle and seeing it in action in your own life and also all around you you start to get a very good idea and understanding of why humans behave the way that they do and all of the disastrous consequences that are the natural consequence of that so let's explore all this so what i want you to start to realize is that you spend a lot of time and energy running away from reality in many different domains we'll be giving you a list of these domains running away from yourself because after all what is the difference between reality and self there's a deep connection there that most people don't quite yet understand so truth is the highest value why leo isn't that just a subjective opinion that you have like maybe for for you leo truth is a is the highest value but for other people it isn't they have some other kind of value so leo why are you saying that truth is the highest value no truth is the highest value absolutely that's what i'm saying and to appreciate this you need to become directly conscious of what truth is which is not actually what this episode is about if you want to understand the metaphysical absolute nature of what truth is that's a deep topic and i addressed that in my video called what is truth go see that we're not going to be talking about that here what we're going to be talking about here is actually not the absolute level that's what that episode is about but more the relative domain the more practical this is a more practical episode about how you avoid truth in practical ways in your life but fundamentally the reason that truth is the highest value absolutely is because truth is the only thing that's real truth is reality itself and everything else simply isn't at all if it's not true it is not it isn't so that turns out to be pretty [ __ ] important uh but anyways what i want you to notice is that most humans don't care about truth for its own sake they only care about it as a means to an end towards survival and if it serves their pragmatic purposes this is otherwise known as pragmatism in fact pragmatism literally defines truth as that which is practical or which has practical consequences and if it has no practical consequences it's as though it isn't even real so it doesn't even exist which is a complete perversion of of what truth is and i've talked about that elsewhere i've talked about pragmatism and the problems with pragmatism and how science has permeated by problems of pragmatism so we've discussed that before and i'll probably have a whole episode about pragmatism in the future again because it's it's just it's worth isolating that problem and focusing on it but again we're not gonna we're gonna dwell on that here so the bottom line is that if you want an exceptional life you have to cultivate a deep value of truth you have to really care about it in a way that most humans around you don't so the way that you apply this this principle that everybody is avoiding truth and afraid of truth is that every day for the rest of your life make the seeing of truth in every situation a top priority for you forget about how you feel forget about chasing pleasure forget about chasing money forget about chasing sex and love and whatever else make truth your top priority in whatever situation you find yourself in whether it's going to be a relationship situation or a business situation or whether you're in academia in education or you're writing a book or you're working on your art or in your spiritual work whatever you're doing and even when it stings you and that's the thing is that truth the seeking of truth will sting there's a sort of a bittersweet quality to it it's not all sweetness and this is what turns a lot of people off from the pursuit of truth or from even caring about truth in many situations and if you follow this one principle and you keep applying it every single day you keep remembering and reminding yourself that really your top priority every situation is truth uh this will make you a very unusual person it might also make you a rather unpopular person see because most people avoid the truth for years and decades which ends up snowballing into a tangle of self-deception fantasy and dysfunctional coping mechanisms and is that not a perfect articulation of the lives of most of your friends family co-workers and acquaintances isn't that their life in a nutshell a tangle of self-deception fantasy and dysfunctional coping mechanisms is that not a perfect description of your own life i mean hopefully you've made some improvements since watching my content um but honestly i mean isn't isn't this how you came into self-help in this situation and many of you are still stuck in this situation and hey i'm not above it too you know i i have plenty of this going on myself that i'm that i'm tackling too in fact the reason i had this insight was because i was i was dealing with my own avoidance of truth and so i i have plenty of areas in my life where i avoid truth because it stings and it's not comfortable but so again like like we've talked about in the past you know the theme of the counterintuitiveness of life the counterintuitive nature of life i've whole episode about that um what's so counter to about life is that you've got to open yourself up to the unpleasant truths to the difficult aspects of reality that's really what makes you a good and healthy person a functional person and then the extent to which you avoid that is the extent to which you're you're a bad evil devilish and dysfunctional person and that's very counter-intuitive it's counter-intuitive to pursue the truth without a clear explanation of what it's going to get you how it's going to serve you but of course the power of truth is precisely in that it's not about what serves you it transcends the serving of the self that's both the [ __ ] of pursuing truth and also it's radical power truth allows you to cut through [ __ ] and a lot of what you see and encounter in the world as you're growing up in your teens and early 20s and 30s is your you're basically bombarded by human [ __ ] all of the [ __ ] that has been spun by society you're bombarded by constantly in the media in the news via entertainment via your friends when you're socializing via your family and so forth in business and so when you set truth as your compass and your highest priority this this gives you a a a subtle power a subtle unspoken power it gives you depth it gives you groundedness that most others simply don't have and it's a subtle thing it takes years for that pursuit of truth to start paying dividends but when it does it really does take your life to a new elevated level that other humans cannot access and there's no shortcut to get there this is one of those things the pursuit of truth is one of those things that i've talked about in the past where like you make a deep investment into this commitment towards the pursuit of truth on a daily weekly monthly yearly decade-long basis really for the rest of your life and and it transforms you in a subtle way that's impossible to then get with any kind of magic pill there's no pill you can buy there's no amount of money that you can spend at the store to give you the kind of fruits and benefits towards your life and your well-being and health and happiness that you get from living a life committed to truth you see that's not something you can read in a book it's not something somebody can give you it's not something you can get in a video even this requires daily investment little bit of investment until it snowballs over years and decades and then you're living a life aligned with truth that's very powerful and nobody really teaches you how to do this i mean like religion is supposed to teach you how to do this but religion has been so corrupted and it's so untruthful that of course the way the devil reworks we've talked about this see my episode what is the devil the way devilry works is that the devil precisely co-opts and inverts the very core of of truth in any situation and so of course the first thing that the devil does is corrupt and invert and pervert that teaching mankind through religion how to live a life in alignment with truth religion doesn't really teach you that these days in fact it's it's usually quite the opposite so i want you to start to notice when you are subtly avoiding a truth and then this is done through introspection see my episode called developing introspection so you develop a certain mindfulness and in inner attunement towards when you are avoiding a truth and you can actually feel it i'll give you a whole list of examples and things will start to click right now it's a little abstract um but anyways you feel when you're avoiding a truth and then you your mind and your body naturally wants to recoil away from the truth and turn towards a different direction to distract yourself or to think about something else and what you do is you say ah that's the trick and then you're gonna make the counterintuitive move to face the truth head on and to face that that sting of the truth and that's the process you're going to be doing essentially here uh over and over and over again for the rest of your life and this is what i suggest will create the good life for you now again by truth i'm not just talking about the absolute domain like god i'm talking about many relative domains so for example i'm talking about business career and life purpose how much truth alignment is there in your work in your career in the way you conduct business in the pursuit of your life purpose in the impact you have on humanity and others with your work other domains that are very important are relationships family and communication the way that you communicate the way that you relate to others whether it's intimate relationships or just friendships or family how much truth alignment is there there another domain is with your emotions and your motivations how truthful are you about the emotions you're feeling and what is actually motivating you we lie to ourselves so much about emotions especially with with painful difficult negative emotions uh we don't want to deal with it so what we do is we fool ourselves or we suppress these emotions and um we really avoid the difficult emotions for example you might feel jealousy but jealousy or envy is a very sneaky emotion it doesn't broadcast itself to you when it arises within you as this is jealousy or this is uh envy uh a lot of times with the emotion of hurt being hurt by somebody else or by a situation this is also a sneaky emotion because you feel hurt but you you don't want to admit to yourself that you're actually hurt so a lot of times what happens is that the hurt is masked over by anger so instead what happens is that most people they just get angry and then they lash out when something hurts them because really that veneer or that sort of armor of anger is actually preventing a a truthful recognition of a deeper vulnerability inside of you in that you were actually hurt by this person or by this situation you see and so by being more truthful you can you can cut through some of that armor and some of those other like defense mechanisms that you have also a lot of your motivations you're not truthful about what really motivates you to do what you're doing and clearing up your motivations such that they are true and in alignment with truth that's a big that's a big improvement you can make to the quality of your life because if if you're living based on untruthful motivations uh you're not clear about what your motivations are or you're fooling yourself you're deceiving yourself about why you do what you do that's going to screw you up in a lot of you know big ways and also subtle ways another relative domain where this comes up is with your rationalizations your opinions your worldview basically your epistemology your political positions very few people are truthful about their worldview where it came from why they're defending it the evidence and proof that they bring forth to support their political positions or their worldview or their beliefs about god or science or atheism or whatever so people in general are very untruthful in how they rationalize their own perspective and worldview and then the way that they elevate and put on a pedestal their own worldview relative to the other worldviews that exist out there that are possible right you have a natural bias in favor of your own opinions over the opinions of others and over time this snowballs and this turns into a into a very deep epistemic problem uh such that your worldview becomes so self-biased and selfish and and closed that you're not able to open your mind to higher truths into higher dimensions and to higher possibilities it closes you off from genuine spiritual pursuits and other deep topics for example that i talk about with actualize.org most people if you know if they just come in cold to one of my advanced videos and they just listen to it for five ten minutes the things they're gonna hear me say are to trigger or offend them so much because they're going to just butt up against their own personal opinions beliefs their paradigms their rationalizations and worldviews and their you know political positions and all that their sort of naive epistemology it's going to it's going to um be in such conflict that they're gonna turn off the video and they're gonna leave and they're not gonna get the possibility of all the growth and you know insight that they could get for example from these videos and this content another domain where truth is important is with health diet and fitness i'll give you some more examples as we go about how you lie to yourself about the kind of stuff that you put into your body the kind of food you eat and so forth and um and then lastly i would say with spiritual practices a lot of people get into sort of like a new agey form of spirituality and they think that now they're being all you know truthful and seeking god and all this sorts of stuff but really it's just another layer of of fantasy and self-deception and bullshitting yourself and really not being truthful with yourself about your own spiritual progress and then you can develop a spiritual ego or you can develop a certain sort of a spiritual um like facade of you being this new ager type uh but really your consciousness has not expanded into the deep realizations that would constitute true spirituality so i want you to notice that a lot of times you enter into a new domain of life like maybe you're starting to take your fitness seriously for the first time you're starting to go to the gym or maybe you're starting to take your you know your dating life seriously for the first time you're starting to go out and socialize to clubs and bars talking to other people flirting with people or maybe you're entering business for the first time or you're entering self-help for the first time or you're entering meditation or spirituality for the first time and what i want you to notice is that you enter these domains full of fantasies full of ideas of how you think things will go what kind of results you'll think you'll get what you think will work what you think won't work and a big obstacle to your success in all these fields is simply cutting through all of your sort of like i would call them newbie fantasies and hey i i was very guilty of this with all these domains that i entered i had so many newbie fantasies when i entered business i had so many newbie fantasies when i entered marketing learning to market uh i had so many newbie fantasies when it came to dating and sexuality and understanding women i had so many newbie fantasies about uh even what enlightenment is uh what god is what spirituality is newbie fantasies about how to get results at the gym or what kind of food is healthy right so this is just the the nature of things you're naive when you enter one of these fields and it takes a lot of experience and usually trial and error and research to figure out uh what your fantasies are and um and so you can you can take one of two tacks here one is that you're going to be sort of a realist and you're going to let reality pummel you you're going to fail over and over and over again you're going to stick with it and persevere in one of these domains and you're just going to let reality just pummel you and completely destroy all of your newbie fantasies that's painful though it stinks it really stinks um like for example especially in business really stings when you first enter business and you think oh yeah i know how business works this is easy and then very quickly the marketplace bludgeons you over the head with truth about how business really works or for example if you're trying to date women as a guy and you know you're deficient in this area and then you know you start going out there and start talking to girls and getting phone numbers and stuff and setting up dates and very quickly you'll get bludgeoned over the head with the realities of how that works you know girls won't be texting you back they'll be flaking on you they'll be doing this they'll be doing that you won't understand what's going on all of your fantasies about what your close rate should be what kind of girls you can get and all this sort of stuff like um they're all going to get destroyed but that that's painful that's a painful process because literally parts of your mind have to die parts of your ego yourself have to die as you're getting exposed to reality and that's really what you fear that's really what you're avoiding is you're avoiding the pain of the loss of parts of your mind you thought you should relate to women in this way and it turns out no that's wrong that's exactly the opposite of how it needs to be for you to have success in that area or you thought you should do business in this way and it's like no that it doesn't fly it doesn't work you thought enlightenment was about this and then you realize no it it's the opposite of that that here you see and then you have to you have to let that go or you thought religion was about this you thought god was this and then it turns out god is exactly the opposite of that or you thought this emotion that you had here was was was about something and then it turns out to be about something else or your motivations you thought you were motivated by this and then you actually realize oh [ __ ] no i was lying to myself i'm actually motivated by that so this is very practical stuff i'm sure if you've had any success in your life where you have sort of like built yourself from the ground up in some domain of life you must have experienced this where your newbie fantasies were crushed and that was painful and a lot of people rather than going through the sting and the pain of having their newbie fantasies crushed what they do is they um they just quit because they can't handle it their mind can't handle that and so they would rather stuck in their old be stuck in their old paradigms than let those paradigms go and reconfigure their mind to think about this domain in a different way and a lot of times that's what it takes to really become successful in something is you have to learn to think about it in a different and very counter-intuitive way and you simply might not want to and therefore you're going to stay a failure so here are some practical examples real world examples of how you avoid truth for example avoiding going to the doctor or to the dentist have you ever had this where you're supposed to go for a checkup but you keep procrastinating it and keep delaying it because you're afraid you know what happens if this test comes back like let's say you're gonna go get an std test but in the back of your mind you're afraid what happens if it comes back positive see this is what i mean by the avoidance of truth so as i'm giving you these examples the purpose of these examples they're very specific ones is i want you to recognize them in your own life and then i want you to draw sort of a a more abstract broader principle from this is that this is happening all over the place in your life and you're usually not noticing it until i'm pointing it out to you all right how about this um i've actually encountered this one uh with my mom um like for example sometimes i'm filling out some forms for my mom helping her like with her you know social security forms or you know helping her sign up to some doctor or something you know sometimes they ask you that what's your height what's your weight so i asked her like on the form okay so what's your weight and she's like oh i don't know my weight i'm like well bye i need to tell them your weight and she's like am i i'm like how do you not know your own weight and she's like oh well but um i don't even want to get on the scale to look at my my own weight because i'm not happy with my weight so i don't even get on the scale and i'm like good god you see the level of avoidance here like it's just it's it's such a stark example of the avoidance of truth because after all you know getting on a scale to look at your own weight does that change your weight does that make you fatter no you're still the same weight whatever weight you are right now is the way you are getting on the scale that's just like looking in the mirror that's all that is it's literally just self-reflection i've talked about self-reflection before but think about getting on the scale is just another form of self-reflection you're getting some info about yourself but if you're not happy with your weight then you might not enjoy the reflection that you see in the mirror and so you avoid even looking in the mirror and then the more you avoid it the worse it gets because that scale keeps you honest if you see a high number on that scale if you see that you're 10 pounds heavier than last year and then 20 pounds heavier than two years before and 50 pounds heavier than you were five years ago that's that's good feedback that's telling you that you're letting yourself slide but if you don't stand on that scale for five years then you can just slide and keep sliding and sliding and sliding and you don't confront reality really you're sort of like living in a bubble of delusion about your situation and then you don't have to worry about going to the gym or eating healthier or seeing the doctor or you know making whatever kind of changes because that would be painful and you just want to avoid it and you just want to like keep living life the easy way now now notice here this example of not getting on a scale maybe you you've done that yourself like i remember when i was um overweight for much of my life i was overweight i've posted pictures of myself on my blog when i was 70 pounds heavier than i am now um i didn't even like looking at myself in the mirror i was that overweight and disappointed with my own uh appearance and um and even photos i remember i never took photos with like friends or with family when i was overweight because like i just didn't like looking at my own photos i was disgusted with them but there was a sort of an avoidance there too because i was like avoiding looking at myself because if if i just stood there and looked at myself i would feel so bad about myself that either it would put me into sort of like a depressed state where i would feel like a victim it's like oh i'm fat and i can't do anything about it or it would that pain would motivate me to like want to go to the gym and so forth but then i would have to like work really hard towards that and i didn't like that either so i was stuck in this place between being a victim and between wanting to change something and then eventually i you know the the tales the scales tipped and i and i made some big changes but see you can probably relate to this um almost all of us has probably struggled with this kind of problem um but see not getting on the scale being afraid to get on the scale this is just this is just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger dynamic do you see that that's what i want you to notice here how about this example avoiding looking at how many calories per serving are on the box of whatever junk food you're eating like maybe you got a a nice bucket of ice cream there some haagen-dazs and you want to eat the whole bucket but you're even afraid to calculate you know maybe there's like four and a half servings per bucket and each serving has like 300 calories and you're afraid to even do the math of how many thousands of calories are in that bucket so you just kind of shut your mind off from that no you can actually notice yourself playing this little game where you're just sort of like it's almost like you're just sort of like blinkering your own self you're putting blinders on your own self so you don't even look at the back of the box and you just sort of like in blissful ignorance eat the ice cream while covering it up with your hand you know the back of the back of the carton so you don't even read it or you might even go further and you might start to rationalize to yourself like oh well you know yeah sure it's 300 calories per serving but i'm only gonna eat one serving when of course you know you're gonna eat the whole bucket not just one serving or you might even say oh yeah you know i only ate one serving but actually you ate three servings so you're lying to yourself you know how deep to the bottom of the bucket that you get you might say oh well you know i only ate a third of the bucket actually you ate half the bucket or two thirds of the bucket and then you call that a third or you call that a half see it's these games you play um or you might even say something oh but this is this is you know dairy free this is coconut ice cream see this is not normal ice cream it's coconut ice cream so it's yeah it has a thousand calories but it's coconut ice cream it's dairy free it's all vegan and all natural it's organic ice cream like that um or you might you know justify yourself like oh yeah okay yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna eat this whole bucket but you know tomorrow i'm gonna go to the gym and work extra hard tomorrow and of course you don't tomorrow you miss the gym it's this kind of stuff that i'm talking about um how about when you eat a donut or some other kind of greasy junk food and then you avoid the physical effects that this has on your mood and on your body so what you should start to notice is that when you eat junk food you feel bad within the next 30 to 60 minutes your stomach might hurt you might get sleepy you might get some brain fog you might feel nauseous from the kind of you know greasy food you've eaten or whatever overly sugary food and and then your body is sending you these signals like oh stomach doesn't feel good i'm feeling kind of nauseous i'm kind of feeling lazy i don't want to work it you know for the next hour and so forth uh but then but what you do is you kind of shift your mind you distract your mind away from actually feeling that negativity in your body because you don't want to deal with those consequences and instead like you turn on a movie or you distract yourself with a video game or something else so that you don't you don't you're not even conscious or aware of these negative effects that this food has on your body and then and then you keep doing this day after day after day for years and for decades to the point where you become this numb zombie where you're eating this junk food and you're not even aware of how this junk food is affecting how you feel and then you might feel depressed you might have brain fog you might have chronic fatigue and other sorts of problems and you'll be wondering like why do i feel so bad and you won't even connect in your mind the dot that the dots that uh like these these are the consequences kind of food you're putting into your body because you're so in denial about it because you want to keep putting that food in your body you want to keep eating those donuts because if you connect the dots too deeply in your mind between the donut and how it makes you feel and the effect it has on your health then you're no longer going to be able to eat that donut you see and that's what you're avoiding because you want to keep eating those donuts or you're going to feel guilty and then you don't want to feel guilty about it so be especially aware of your rationalizations and justification i'm going to have a whole episode about just rationalizations and justifications because it's such a huge and important topic so we won't go into it further here but just be aware that a lot of the avoidance of truth is accomplished through your rationalizations and this is why i'm so critical of rationality and logic is because most people do not comprehend the depths to which their rationality and logic has been co-opted by the ego mind in service of falsehood not truth people just tend to like naively assume that rationality leads to truth when in most cases it's the opposite of that rationality resides and comes from mostly the left hemisphere of your brain if you're right-handed and vice versa if you're left-handed and and it is uh it is not an honest actor most of the time and it's very very difficult to spot yourself bullshitting yourself with rationality and logic and in fact there's a whole game of truth avoidance that highly rational and logical people play with themselves it's the game of pretending as though rationality and logic is the end-all be-all and that it is truthful inherently they play this game which of course is false this is why these people can get very heated in arguments and debates and they can present you with all sorts of logical facts and scientific facts and they can they can play this very kind of like logical persona but the reality is is that they're bullshitting themselves just as much as most other people are bullshitting themselves but they're they're just doing it in a more sort of like sophisticated sciency sort of way and so i i've been very critical of that in the past and people wonder like leo why are you so anti-science again it's not that i'm anti-science it's just there's there's a lot of [ __ ] within science you gotta understand a lot of rationalizations and um it's mostly ego games you gotta see it as that it's not really about truth how about like when you're watching television and then maybe some uncomfortable ad comes on maybe it's like you know you see one of those ads from like some non-profit group in africa trying to feed poor crippled african kids or something and so they're like they're living in this abject poverty and they're showing you pictures of these little african kids you know missing limbs and this and that and they have these sad faces and um you know they're asking you for donations they're kind of playing on your emotions uh and then what do you do you you quickly change the channel i mean i don't i don't watch tv anymore but i remember when i when i used to watch tv when i was younger i would i would switch the channel when those ads came on because i didn't want to like deal with that difficult reality like there are people living like that meanwhile i'm sitting here watching my you know fiber television on a big flat screen eating a bucket of ice cream and being lazy and playing video games all day like i'm doing that and then there's like some poor crippled african kid with one arm and one leg that's like mining uh lithium in some african mine that they're showing me on television like see this is avoidance of truth or maybe you've seen an ad that shows you like these animals these poor animals that are homeless and like uh being abused and in animal shelters and they're asking you for donations you know same thing or maybe you you've seen a video on youtube for example like of factory farming sort of the evils of factory farming like you know the behind the scenes sort of documentary about factory farming or about global warming maybe showing pollution and maybe even the the video or the documentary is showing how your own actions are contributing to this factory farming or there's global warming or maybe sweatshop labor or something like this and you see this in i mean it's it's horrific but at the same time it's also true but at the same time you want to keep eating your bacon you want to keep eating your steak you want to keep eating your chicken uh and you keep want you want to keep driving your suv car and you want to keep buying your you know your your products from walmart and from amazon which many of which are like coming from sweatshop labor around the world from third world countries so you just change the channel or you switch off the video to something fun you you switch to a music video to a cat video to some comedy see it's it's too real it's too much responsibility you don't want to integrate the full scope of what reality is and reality is a brutal thing that's why we call it reality you know one of the sort of implicit definitions of reality is like oh that's we say like that's real what we mean when we say that that's so real is it's like it's [ __ ] brutal like it's it's non-negotiable it just is what it is even when it doesn't suit you it's uncomfortable and that's reality and so a big part of your work to become a good human being and to live the quote-unquote good life is to open yourself up to the full gamut of reality as it is not as you need it to be to feel comfortable see another example of truth avoidance is avoiding looking a homeless person in the eyes have you done this i'm sure you've done this you pull up at the stop light and you're standing there it's a red light there's some homeless people on the corner there he's looking you in the eyes but you like want to like look away because if you look him in the eyes long enough it's going to trigger empathy in you it's going to make you start to think about your life and about how selfish and greedy you are how entitled you are how comfortable you are here you are complaining about some stupid [ __ ] in your life like you didn't get you didn't get the playstation this year see you're pissed off about that while you're sitting in the car like i can't find my playstation and this guy over here is sleeping in the middle in the middle of uh freezing you know freezing winter homeless hasn't eaten in a week addicted to heroin or whatever else and here you are complaining about not being able to get a playstation for christmas see but hey you want your playstation you just want to play your playstation in blissful ignorance in obliviousness because how are you going to enjoy your playstation when you know that really that money should have gone to that homeless person to get them some shelter how about avoiding checking your phone your text messages or your email or your voicemail i'm sure all of you have experienced this i've experienced this one a lot sometimes you're expecting an important phone call message text or email from somebody whether it's a an employer a job you apply to maybe it's your girlfriend or your your husband or your children or you know your mom or whatever they're supposed to send you an important message uh but you're afraid of receiving the message you're afraid of the bad news because it could either be good news or it could be bad news and you want it to be good news but you don't want it to be bad so you're afraid to check your phone like uh sometimes i've had it like where i will text like i met a girl the other night right a great girl very attractive whatever you know we decided we're gonna go date we're talking about dating or something like that then you know i text her and then after i text her i'm afraid to check my own phone because i'm afraid she's not going to respond to the text or she's going to respond some sort of negative manner to the text like you know i might text her like you know when are you free this week and then she either doesn't respond i'm afraid of that or she responds like um in you know some sort of dismissive way where basically it's not going to go anywhere so but i mean this is just one example i mean you've had this example with your phone so just notice that notice the next time that you're sort of anticipating some kind of message from somebody and then it's alright maybe you see the like i've had it where an email has arrived in my inbox and the title of the email says something that i already know i'm afraid to double click on that and so i just procrastinate i leave that email unread for like a week because i know that you know clicking on that thing is going to be scary it's going to be difficult i'm going to deal with whatever [ __ ] is going to be you know in that in that email and i want to deal with it have you ever had that so so the reason i'm giving you these very sort of like micro examples is because i want you to actually use these kinds of micro examples find them in your life and then use it to actually develop a introspective capacity to introspect and to notice what it feels like to be avoiding truth otherwise it's just going to be like an abstraction i don't want this to just be some principle in your life that's just a pure abstraction you got to actually find it and notice what it feels like to be avoiding truth and you can start doing that in these little micro examples and then from that you will learn what it feels like in the in the larger macro examples example would be avoiding an audit of your business finances it's scary to audit your own business finances because you might discover some you know some irregularity there you might discover that your business is not doing as good as it could be for example um i i notice that i'm avoidant of every quarter i have to kind of like go through my finances my business earnings and so forth my profits and and you know tabulate them calculate taxes see how many sales there were total how many refunds blah blah blah blah right and so i i'm always a little bit avoidant i notice myself being avoidant of of doing that every quarter simply because it's like well what if the business isn't doing so well this year what if what if rather than increasing my sales my sales are decreasing what if my web traffic is decreasing what if my view count is decreasing what if my subscribers are decreasing so sometimes i'm avoiding i notice myself being avoidant of checking those stats and numbers and yet see on the other hand if i keep avoiding that and avoiding it and avoiding it and procrastinating and pushing it off what ends up happening is that actually you can destroy your business this way because if you are losing sales if you're losing customers if you're losing subscribers and viewers that's important feedback you want to receive that feedback immediately so that you can adjust and make course corrections and you have to do that in business every business has to be adjusting to changes in the marketplace and a lot of businesses what they do is they become successful but then they get sort of complacent and they're no longer looking at new trends in the marketplace and they miss out on those trends and then they get out competed and a lot of businesses go bankrupt this way because their leadership is not on top of the ball and is not being hyper vigilant about you know new threats and new opportunities that are arising in the marketplace and so in this way you can slowly slide and slide and slide your way into bankruptcy as a business then this leads us to the example of addiction of course all addiction any kind of addiction is basically just a coping mechanism and avoidance mechanism for truth that's fundamentally what addiction is about whether it's food addiction drug addiction sex addiction you're using it to avoid painful emotions difficult emotions difficult realities in your life maybe you have a shitty job maybe you have a shitty family situation maybe you're getting shitty grades at school and maybe or maybe you're you're overweight and you don't have any um opportunity for dating people that you want you don't feel attractive and so because of this see you could buckle down and force yourself to really change in each of these situations and to to get some sort of positive results or what you could do is you could um you could look for sort of an escape hatch a release valve for dealing with the difficulty of those situations those difficult emotions you what you're really avoiding is difficult emotions and so instead you're going to find a distraction which becomes your addiction it could be sex porn food television internet phone drugs alcohol and so on sugar um but i've talked about addiction elsewhere so i'm not going to dwell on that another example is avoiding um facing trauma in your life old trauma childhood trauma trauma is difficult to process really this is the work of therapy is dealing with old trauma kind of reliving it looking at it from different points of view integrating it forgiving people who traumatized you understanding it that's difficult therapeutic work and so most people just want to avoid that and again the avoidance of trauma is basically what leads you then into addiction because facing the trauma means dealing with negative emotions that are difficult and most people don't want to do that instead they just want to have fun and positive emotions and so you get that from some addictive substance like alcohol cocaine or food or video games whatever another avoidance of truth example is avoiding facing your personal deficiencies and inadequacies so you can probably relate to this there are deficiencies and inadequacies within your personality maybe you're too arrogant maybe you're too much of a pushover maybe you're a doormat maybe you're an [ __ ] a jerk um maybe you lie maybe you brag maybe you cheat maybe you steal like whatever um and so rather than actually looking for a root solution to that and changing your own personality to address those deficiencies and inadequacies what you do is you come up with rationalizations or distractions and then that that just preserves your deficiencies and inadequacies and then you get defensive about it you create sort of armor to defend yourself because other people will criticize you for your deficiencies and adequacy then you'll come up with rationalizations for why really those people are wrong and that you're right and actually you're not deficient that people should love you for who you are and blah blah blah blah but you're you're fooling yourself you're you're not facing the truth here and you know facing your own deficiencies and inadequacies this is difficult to do because a lot of times we don't want to admit when we're inadequate in something like maybe you thought you were better at your job than you really are and then it's difficult when your co-worker tells you or your boss tells you that actually maybe you're not as good at your job as you thought you were this conflicts with your own sense of self your own self image because here you are you thought you were the best in the field and now evidence is showing you that you're not the best in the field and then maybe you're actually mediocre this threatens you and so you get defensive and you avoid actually admitting that you know maybe maybe my boss is right maybe i am inadequate in this field if i admit that i can then maybe study and work harder and train myself and then become as good as i thought i was but see that's bad news you don't want to work for three years to only become as good as you already thought you were this whole time but on the other hand if you don't do that then you're never going to become good and then you're going to spend the next 10 20 years of your life playing this act as though you are as good as you thought you were and that you're not really inadequate but that really you are and so you're going to be overcompensating all the time and this is going to lead to all sorts of dysfunctional patterns you see how this works how about this example avoiding facing when your actions hurt others so a lot of times what we do a lot of what evil is in the world is people just have selfish needs cravings and desires and then we go about satisfying those and then as i go about satisfying them to satisfy my own cravings and desires there's going to be collateral damage that is done to others but since i'm selfish and i just want to satisfy my cravings and desires the most effective way for me to do that is to avoid literally avoid seeing the hurt that my actions cause to others in the pursuit of satisfying my own desires and so i will block out all the collateral damage that i do so that i can just in blissful ignorance satisfy my desires and pretend as though the satisfaction of my own desires isn't causing harm to others and this is a lot of what businesses do this is a lot of what happens when you're very ambitious about pursuing money or success is that you're so ambitious about money and success and material pursuits that you're going to basically stab any anybody in the back step on anybody's toes do whatever it takes to you know climb the corporate ladder or to get your result and sure you get you get your result in your success but but actually you're avoiding the truth which is that you're hurting a lot of people in this process and in this process you basically become so sociopathic in the pursuit of your ambitions and material you know cravings this also happens with sex if you're a very uh craving of sex and desperate for sex you are going to cause a lot of collateral damage in your pursuit of sex and you're going to rationalize to yourself that oh actually you know i'm not causing any damage they're the sensitive ones they're they're being unreasonable but actually it's just because if you admitted to yourself and you actually became conscious of how much suffering you caused others through your sexual conquests and pursues you would have a lot less sex and that's precisely what you don't want to face that's the truth you don't want to face another example is avoiding facing your physical appearance maybe there's something about your physical appearance you don't like you don't like your big nose you don't like your crooked teeth or whatever you don't like some mole on your face and you can notice yourself when you're looking in the mirror sort of actually avoiding like your mind is so sneaky it will look at your face and it'll avoid that part of your face or your body or whatever that you don't like and it's like you you wish it was different but the reality is it's not the reality is that your nose is the way it is your teeth are the way they are that mole is on your face or wherever and um and you don't like it that's the reality and so you avoid facing that and you can also avoid facing it by demonizing it and by hating it so even the hatred of it you might say well leo i hate my big nose therefore i'm not avoiding facing it i faced it and i hate it but that's not really true when you hate your big nose you're actually not you're not truly facing the truth of your big nose actually what you're doing is you're avoiding it by hating it see if you if you really faced it and accepted it and there would be an acceptance there there'd be a surrender to it to the truth of your big nose or whatever else and then a sort of a peace and a love would actually come from that not a hatred so hatred is not is not the facing of truth so be careful about that how about avoiding uh facing your hair loss for you guys um maybe you play this game you look in the mirror like am i losing am i starting is my hairline recidivity am i starting to lose my my hair and then you're like ah no it's probably okay it's just i'm imagining things but actually in the back your mind your hair you know your hair your hairline is receding but then you [ __ ] yourself like ah well it's not it's not so bad i can i'm just imagining things like this or maybe you even avoid looking too closely at your hairline because you're like just like oh well i'll it'll be okay it's probably okay i don't need to look at it too closely or hey you know even the fact that you're hating it again the hating of the receding of your hairline that is not facing the truth understand that it's very sneaky how you avoid truth how about the example of avoiding facing some deep problem you've been procrastinating on in your life like maybe you know that you have been cooped up in your home too much you need to go out there and socialize and start dating the way i've talked about in my series how to get laid maybe you know that that's the right move for you but you just don't want to start doing it it's too uncomfortable you're too afraid to start going out to talk to strangers to talk to girls to start to flirt you're just too afraid of opening that whole can of worms so you procrastinate and you make excuses and of course you have to demonize you have to say like oh well leo this will never work i'll never get laid it doesn't work you know pickup doesn't work those things you've talked about it doesn't maybe it works for guys with a good looking jawline but it won't work for me see you rationalize like this and this is avoiding facing truth the truth in this case is that you have to do an enormous amount of work on yourself to turn yourself into a social person to become good at dating for example as a guy you have to do a lot of work and what you're really avoiding is the doing of that work therefore you subscribe to various kinds of black pill red pill in cell uh mgtow sorts of ideologies you spent hundreds of hours on online forums or watching various kinds of you know like black pill anti-feminist anti-sjw videos on youtube just so that you can distract yourself from actually going out of your house and going talking to a girl and maybe getting rejected and so you're avoiding facing the truth that hey maybe maybe you're going to be rejected maybe you're not as good as you think you are maybe you're not going to get laid as much as you you know as much as your friends get laid and maybe that's going to make you feel bad and so you're avoiding that nobody says that everybody gets laid equally some people get laid more than other people get laid whether it's their looks or their innate personality or whatever and you have to you have to accept that that doesn't mean you can't get laid it just means you're not going to get laid as much as you know brad pitt gets laid and you have to accept that and that's difficult to accept because it's unfair it's like well leo but i should get laid why does brad pitt get laid more than not than everybody else why can't i get laid as much as him that's unfair yeah that's a truth you have to accept reality is not fair in that way and so you're avoiding facing that another example is getting angry at the messenger who delivers bad news so this is the classic shooting the messenger uh you shoot the messenger because you don't want to deal with the actual substance of the news that was delivered to you so you get angry at the person who told you the message another example is of avoiding facing how long a project will actually take and how much work it will take to complete a project i encounter this especially a lot in business various kinds of business projects get themselves into a lot of trouble when they fool themselves about how long a certain project will take or how much work it will take almost always when you're starting some kind of business project you end up underestimating how long it's going to take how much work it's going to take and then you avoid facing the truth of that because you want it to kind of be faster you want it to be easier because if it's if if at the beginning of the project you truly understood how long it would take and how much work it would take you would probably never even begin the project so in a certain sense you have to like lie to yourself in order to just kind of just get into the project and then later like the sunk cost fallacy will just take hold of you and and you know keep you in the project uh but you know yeah there's a lot of things in my life that that were so difficult to do that if i was told the full extent of how difficult it would be to do it that i would never have done it which is sort of like an interesting paradox so so actually by lying to yourself and being overly optimistic about something you ended up being successful and so i'm not saying that the avoidance of facing truth and that these fantasies and lies that you tell yourself are not useful they can be useful especially for example if you're trying to be successful that's why people lie so much because lies can be very effective towards survival but you have to understand there's always going to be karmic consequences to that so you know it's going to boomerang on you another example is avoiding other worldviews and perspectives which would contradict your own worldview or threaten your worldview a lot of religions do this a lot of cults do this a lot of people within you know political idea basically every ideology does this every ideology as i've explained before in my epistemology episodes it tries to create sort of a a hermetically sealed bubble which we call the world view or a paradigm and it tries to lock you in and it it it's very sneaky in how it prevents you from looking outside of the bubble because if you look outside the bubble too much it'll burst the entire bubble this is exactly what what religion does for example in the classical sense but for example materialist science does this as well so this is not just some you know naive religious fundamentalists that are guilty of this very intelligent rational scientists are guilty of this as well and so i want you to notice this within yourself when you hear some sort of different perspective maybe you watch some youtube video or some some public intellectual telling you something that conflicts with your worldview uh a lot of times what you do is you just shut that person down you demonize that person you marginalize that person dismiss that person laugh at that person ridicule him whatever but really that's just an avoidance mechanism from facing some kernel of truth now maybe what he's talking about is not 100 true but there's some kernel of truth there and that is the thing that you're actually afraid of allowing into your own worldview because it would destroy your worldview eventually another example would be avoiding listening to feedback from others a similar situation you know certain feedback can be so painful to integrate because it's so profoundly true and other people can see things about you that you can't see about yourself because of how self-deception works you know when you're deeply wrapped up in self-deception somebody else can just pierce through your bubble of self-deception very quickly with like a single sentence they can just cut right to the core of the truth of how you're bullshitting yourself and then when that happens like it it terrifies you and then you can notice yourself getting angry lashing out at that person demonizing that person shutting that person down ridiculing that person all these sorts of coping mechanisms just to avoid getting your own little bubble punctured but actually if you accept it if you were more open and not so avoidant of truth you could actually accept that feedback and then integrate it and that would grow you but of course it would also kill a part of you because then you'd have to admit to yourself that well yeah that person was right you know i was being arrogant i was being a jerk i was being a devil or something like that and so that's why a lot of people are very touchy and not open to feedback and hey you know i'm guilty of that too i'm not above that um all of us are so flawed and so selfish that basically and we're all so self-deceived and full of [ __ ] and fantasies that it's very easy to cut a person down if you're very perceptive you can kind of observe a person you can just you can tell them a single sentence that will just go right to the heart of his [ __ ] and just cut that person like to the core um and of course if you do that that person will usually get very defensive and make an enemy out of you they're not going to be like oh thank you for cutting me down to my core thank you for cutting through all my [ __ ] and self-deception no they're going to hate you when you do something like that right because it's it's so threatening a lot of times we we fool ourselves so thoroughly that we think that not only have we fooled ourselves but we fooled everybody else around us too but then it can be kind of shocking to realize that oh wait a minute i've only fooled myself i haven't successfully fooled everybody else around around me they can see through my [ __ ] and then that can make you feel very vulnerable and threatened and afraid another example of avoiding truth is that something is going wrong in your life in some situation but then you're in denial about it and you pretend as oh no no nothing's going wrong it's all going to work out it's going to work out you know a good example of this would be the united states military interventions in in the middle east for example afghanistan or iraq you know we go into there and we we kind of fool ourselves into thinking that oh yeah we're going to defeat everybody with our superior military technology within a few months and then they're going to be all happy that we defeated the evil tyrants and terrorists and then uh you know yeah we'll be able to leave in a year well two years to ah maybe three years tops we'll we'll we will be out of there and then we're still there 20 years later and we're in denial about it and then when people point out oh you know it's going wrong you know we're not we're not winning over there and then people are in denial about it because they don't want to admit that it was a mistake to go in there in the first place so think about how that happens in your own life uh another example would be with relationships sometimes you know that your relationship is basically unsustainable you reach a point in an intimate relationship or in a friendship where you know that this is not going to work out and that really the proper move is a breakup but you don't want to break up because it's going to be painful because you're going to miss the sex and you're going to miss the intimacy and the friendship and whatever else you got from that relationship and so you end up just kind of like lying to yourself about yeah maybe this relationship can work ah you know maybe it'll maybe it'll just work itself out but deep down you know this is not the right match for you you know this person is not going to be your ultimate life partner or whatever it's just not going to work you know that deep down but you [ __ ] yourself and you're lie to yourself because it's too painful to deal with a breakup and a lot of marriages are like this you know it's even worse once you have kids and once you're married it's so much worse and i think a lot of people are stuck in in these sort of dead-end marriages when where they know the marriage is is already dead but uh they can't deal with the sting of admitting to themselves that they're gonna have to go through this horrific divorce and deal with all this [ __ ] um to finally be free and so they just sort of uh suffer quietly for years for decades and then as they do this this this makes them jaded this makes them disengaged from life this makes them bitter and hateful and resentful uh and just puts them in a depression all this and it you know it gets bad it gets real bad and they're they're simply avoiding truth here that's the problem another example would be avoiding looking at corruption within your own company or political party you're identified with your company or your political party so much or maybe your religion or maybe your academic institution that you're working at you're so beholden to that entity you're so a part of it it so aligns with your personality so identify with it that you can't admit to yourself that actually that corporation or that entity is corrupt and so you deny the corruption you turn a blind eye to it this would be an example for example of uh you know the sexual abuse problems in the catholic church if you're a priest and you devoted your entire life to the catholic church and you depend on it for your livelihood and you also your whole spiritual path is connected to that church and then when you learn about corruption sexual abuse in that church are you going to report it are you going to take it seriously or are you going to try to sweep it under the rug and pretend as though it doesn't exist or as though it's like oh it's just it's just one bad apple it's not the whole church it's just one bad apple see that's how you're going to rationalize it in your mind because you don't want to face the truth that it's more than just one bad apple the entire institution is corrupt and in general the example here is avoiding facing reality the reality of a situation so sometimes there are certain just like difficult truths or facts about how reality works uh so for example if you're a woman when it comes to you know dating and relationships uh it'll be difficult for you to stomach the fact that most men are attracted to young women and as you get older that's going to be a difficult truth for you to accept that that's just like how men are wired it's going to be difficult for you to accept that men are predominantly attracted to physical appearance youthful physical appearance in women that's going to be difficult for you to stomach if you're not that if you don't have that now if you have that you're going to love it but if you don't have that that's going to be very difficult for you to accept the reality of that situation but conversely you know for for men if you're a man it's going to be difficult for you to accept what women are attracted to in men women are attracted to status and strength predominantly in men that's going to be difficult for you to accept as a guy if you don't have that if you have it you're going to love it but if you don't have it you're going to be bitter and resentful and you're going to try to like avoid facing that that reality this is just one example within like the dating domain but there are a lot of examples where you just avoid facing the reality of a situation sort of the stark reality of a situation whether it's in business or in politics or in the way money works the way investing works and then um if you avoid facing this these these sort of stark truths then you're going to be living in a fantasy land and then you're not going to be effective the cost of that fundamentally is that you're not effective you're not going to be able to reach your goals and you're going to you're going to hold on to these fantasies and then you're going to try to be effective in the world and you realize that i'm not effective in the world then you're going to start to feel like a victim a lot of times the problem with victims is that they have a certain paradigm or lens through which they see the world and then they don't want to change that lens or that paradigm and so they feel like a victim they feel like they're always going to be a victim that they can't change because they refuse to admit that it's the lens that they're holding onto and looking at the world through that is creating that victim situation and surrendering that lens that is very difficult for people to do that will require changing your mind and dropping a part of yourself so anyways those are some of the examples uh i want you just to use these to find more within your own personal life so notice that it is temporarily easier when you lie to yourself but the effect of that is sort of like taking out a credit card loan if you're short on money yeah it's nice to be able to take out a credit card loan and buy the things you want to buy but then you're going to repay it with high dividends or high interest uh in the months to come and so that's sort of what's happening when you're lying to yourself in all these situations i'll give you another example this is more of a collective example now political example probably pissed some people off but um look at the republican party in the united states look at it in terms of like what's been happening in the last 20 30 years with the republican party and especially in the last ten to five years with the republican party because the republican party is deeply dysfunctional and the republican party has a serious fundamental problem with avoiding truth they have been avoiding truth for decades now and they keep avoiding it and avoiding it but they're too arrogant to actually admit that they're avoiding truth and so they're clinging and they're doubling down and tripling down on their avoidance of truth and this just spins them deeper and deeper into delusion to the point where now we have the rise of trump and magga and all this but really where did this come from this came from a trend within the republican party that really started with you know george w bush and even before that where they are just uh deeply avoiding the truth of the changing of society this is the fundamental problem of conservatives and and traditionalist sort of people is that society is always evolving and changing there's new technologies uh culture is always changing and evolving religion is always changing and evolving language is changing and evolving sexual norms are changing and evolving and um and fundamentally conservatives don't want change they don't like change they're scared of change and so they're avoiding the change and they are um putting the brakes on every change basically that they're uncomfortable with uh in the hopes that that they can stop it and they could sort of like keep things the way they were you know it's that trumpian maga fantasy of you know america was was you know make america great again the way it was in 1950s or whenever of course it was never great in the 1950s or ever in that sense it's just a fantasy but um uh but you know there's just like certain truths that are being avoided like for example um the truth that the demonization of homosexuality and transgender people that this was based in delusion and um and selfishness and closed-mindedness that's the truth of that situation uh and so you know now now that homosexuality and trans stuff is is more acceptable uh generally speaking we sort of acknowledge the the limited small-minded way in which we used to think about those things the same thing with like racism you know racism used to be more acceptable now it's not acceptable but for for a lot of conservatives then like they're not comfortable with with me with admitting and facing these these difficult truths um [Music] which is not to say that liberals and progressives don't also avoid facing difficult truths they do they do so don't get me wrong here that i'm only picking on the republican party but if you don't see that the amer the republican party in america has an especially bad case of avoiding truth you're [ __ ] blind you're [ __ ] blind and this is why trump is so appealing is because trump came along and trump just said you know what um you guys love avoiding the truth that's what you guys vote for well [ __ ] if that's what you're gonna vote for you know i'm a master i'm a master at avoiding the truth that's what i spent my entire life doing i can help you guys avoid the truth um to the hilt like there's no limit to how much i can help you guys avoid truth and then the republican party is like yes perfect perfect because we're not going to admit that we're wrong in any way we're not going to actually reflect about our behaviors we're going to actually change our mind we're not going to change our mind on religion we're not going to change our mind and abortion we're not going to change our mind on on you know race relations we're going to change our mind on gay and trans rights we're not going to change our mind on global warming we don't change on anything so yes please somebody come along somebody like trump some some some media enterprise like oan or fox news come along and tell me everything i want to hear and tell me how i can avoid facing the truth that's the function you're going to serve in my life and i will happily vote for you i will be your most rabid supporter this is the republican party in a nutshell and it's all blowing up in their face it's literally destroying [ __ ] democracy this is how democracy is destroyed by people who don't want to face the truth the changing reality you know the changing reality of a globalizing world the changing reality that america is not the best country in the world anymore the changing reality that many other countries in the world have better health care systems have better economic systems have better human rights have better education systems have better governments have less corruption the reality that the climate is changing and that we can't keep polluting the way we've been polluting for the last hundred years the reality we have to wean ourselves off of oil the reality that our military interventions abroad and american empire that has uh been functioning for the last 50 to 100 years that that is also unsustainable the reality that leeching resources through capitalism from third world countries via imperial exploitation the way that america has been doing for the last you know 80 years or so that that that is also unsustainable and that that basically is devilry see the republican party doesn't want to face these things the reality that our politicians are so corrupt and bought out by uh you know capitalism run amok through unlimited campaign donations and so forth and lobbying and that these things need to change uh the the the the truth the difficult truth that the constitution as it was formed by our founding fathers is no longer completely relevant and sufficient to address the problems that we have in society today thanks to technology and other factors and changing culture that that the constitution itself has to change new amendments have to be passed the constitution needs to be rethought like conservatives do not want to face any of these and so we have the problems that we have now again this does not mean that democrats and progressives don't also have certain delusions they do they also avoid certain difficult truths they do socialists avoid difficult truths too they do but it's it's particularly toxic right now within the republican party it doesn't have to be that way they could change but it's going to be a cold day in hell before they change they keep doubling and tripling down another example for you at a collective level is with china and the authoritarian censorship that's going on in china like literally think about what's going on in china in china the chinese communist party is so afraid of facing truth that they have created their own private sort of internet and cut off the chinese population from the world wide web as as it exists for most other countries and folk around the world because they're too afraid of what their population would read if they could access easily access the world wide web so instead china has their own sort of like curated private chinese internet where it's super censored and um you you can't really get the facts about certain historical situations certain atrocities things that are actually have happened within china like tiananmen square and so forth and so what is that fundamentally it's an avoidance of truth and you can tell that that's unsustainable there is no way in hell that you can sustain that for a hundred years there's no way that that that that that is going to be the ultimate state of the chinese society is that that is going to hold it's not going to hold these are temporary stop-gap measures to allow certain chinese you know communist leaders to stay in power but eventually it's all going to collapse that's not going to work eventually china is going to have to open up to the world wide web without the censorship that they're doing right now without all their sort of firewalls and blockades and and so forth and that's going to be a very difficult situation for them when that bubble bursts when chinese people finally get access to the world wide web and they learn about the truth of many things that they were denied um they're gonna they're gonna be pissed off they're gonna rise up there's going to be revolutions and revolts and political stability and chaos which is exactly why the chinese communists are so scared of giving them access to the world wide web and in general this is how all tyrants are tyrants have to control information very tightly in their society because if they let information flow freely then people will realize that the tyrant is abusing the population at large and they will organize and they will overthrow the tyrant this is how it's always been this is why tyrants are so tyrannical and very touchy about letting people organize or speak to each other or just even speak truthfully about historical events or things that are happening within the country because fundamentally tyranny and authoritarianism and totalitarianism is founded on falsehood it's devilry so of course the devil's number one job is to prevent the spreading of truth because as soon as truth spreads too much then devilry becomes untenable so delusion and falsehood always has a serious cost but the cost is usually delayed so here's a principle of life for you is that you cannot get away with falsehood forever it's going to come back it's going to come back and bite you so uh part of developing the good life is having a long time horizon looking into the future and not just you know into the near term and and therefore by looking into the far term you start to take truth seriously as a value even when almost nobody else around you does and almost nobody arou else around you will you will automatically make yourself unique and different by seriously valuing truth and committing your life to that people around you are not going to applaud you for doing this for the most part um they're going to be resentful they're going to be bitter they're going to lash out at you and they're going to try to like you know crabs in the bucket they're going to try to pull you back in the bucket as you're crawling out they're going to try to pull you back into their fantasies and their delusions and their falsehoods and you need to have the conviction to crawl out of that bucket despite people pulling down on you that's why it's so difficult that's why there there's so few truthful people out there and um you know rarely when you see a very truthful person as a leader he or she has a has a challenging life and they get a lot of stones thrown at them they even get killed and assassinated or imprisoned by uh by their fellow man why because i mean truth tellers have to be killed and imprisoned because otherwise they're going to spoil the fantasy of society at large so there is a pain in proactively seeking out truth every day but this pain is relatively minor and manageable compared to the pain of avoiding truth for decades and letting that fall asl and delusion snowball it's better to pay the cost a bit every single day than it is to have it all blow up in your face a decade later so rather than avoiding the relationship problems that exist in your marriage day after day after day and just sweeping them under the rug for a decade until your marriage just becomes completely toxic and untenable and ends up in a nasty divorce rather than doing it that way how about you just proactively work on being more truthful in your marriage all the time then maybe you can actually have a successful marriage a decade later you see but that requires you actually doing work and incurring a little bit of sting every single day within your marriage uh you know most people just want to like have marriage be easy and then if you do it that way that it's gonna blow up in your face so start to notice where in your life you avoid facing truth notice the excuses and defense mechanism your mind employs to avoid facing truth study these defense mechanisms within yourself and other people and go against the force of primordial avoidance you have a primordial avoidance of truth and there's a very deep spiritual metaphysical reason for why that is because your entire identity is a fantasy and a falsehood your human identity your finite identity so use introspection to notice and feel that primordial avoidance of truth within you here are some powerful questions for you to contemplate that will help you to do this to stop avoiding truth so question number one is where am i avoiding truth question number two how am i avoiding truth number three how can i become more truthful number four on a scale of one to ten how much do i value truth in every situation number five how could i increase my valuing of truth number six what costs have i paid for avoiding truth you want to reach a level not just where you accept truth begrudgingly but where you actually start to love truth and you start to love this entire process of seeking the truth unraveling the truth and you even develop a sort of a more sophisticated mind and palate shall we say for the bittersweet aspects of pursuing the truth it's like you feel that sting but it's sort of like when you're going to the gym you know when you first start going to the gym that that burn in your muscles you feel when you're pumping iron as they say is um it's kind of uncomfortable and painful and you want to avoid it but really to be a successful weight lifter you got to do sort of like the arnold thing where you flip that around you actually you actually turn turn that that you know that that sting of stretching your muscles and really working your muscles to exhaustion you have to turn that sting and that burn into something you love and then you can become a successful weight lifter well it's the same thing with truth i want you to envision 10 20 years from now you're gonna reach a point in this process of you know pursuing truth so much on a daily weekly monthly yearly decade-long basis that you reach a point a decade from now where you're just like you actually are in love with tracking down the truth in every situation in life that you're in and you've built up such a momentum of doing this as though you've been going to the gym really hard every single day for a decade that now you're so strong your capacity to handle truth is so strong that you're becoming untouchable it becomes difficult for anything in reality to phase you anymore because you're just you're so you're so good at stomaching truth to the point where rather than it hurting you or offending you or triggering you or causing you to be afraid or to recoil or to to turn into some sort of victim you're so strong that it actually it expands you and it deepens your love for reality and it is your spiritual path and process try to imagine how good that would feel how strong you would feel how grounded you would feel how reliable you would be as a human being how much others would look up to you and depend on you and trust your leadership if you develop this capacity but you're only going to develop this capacity from a sort of a daily weekly practice for years and years and years and decades here's a question for you what are all the areas in your life where you have been avoiding facing the truth sit down with that one for uh for an hour just contemplate sit down with a piece of paper and a notepad and just contemplate that for an hour make a long list and then also ask yourself why have you been avoiding truth in all these areas and of course the answer is fear you fear what you will find if you go looking at the truth you fear that the truth will shatter your fantasies and you don't want to give those up now you might say leo but i thought you said love was the highest value and now it seems like you're talking about truth as being the highest value which is it well of course like i said before truth is love and love is truth so they're identical and they're both the highest value to understand this go check out my episodes what is love part one part two and other episodes where i talk about love but in a nutshell basically it works like this to value truth is to love a thing exactly as it is that's the connection between love and truth it's not really enough just to like i said before begrudgingly open yourself to certain difficult truths you really gotta love the truth you're opening up to to value truth requires acceptance and surrender to a thing to value truth is to is to see the beauty in the way a thing actually is rather than your fantasy or desire for how it should be in order to suit you so as you grow and develop this muscle over the decades ultimately the whole point of all this what it's all going to cultivate cultiva culminate in it's all going to culminate in you being so strong and so accepting and so open to reality that you will see things exactly as they are you will cut through all the [ __ ] and you're going to be in love with that and you're going to be in love with reality exactly as it is and that is the highest power and the greatest gift is to see the beauty in things exactly as they are rather than in how you need them to be for your petty selfish purposes you see and that's the ultimate strength because what you'll find is that reality rarely aligns with what you need it to be but reality is always identical to what it is how it is for itself rather than for you and so if you could just start to love reality not for how it serves you but for how it actually is then in a certain sense you've conquered the whole challenge of reality now you can be filled with love because if if your sort of conception of love is that reality has to be the way i want it to be and then only then will i love it then you're gonna hate life that's a recipe for hatred of life but if instead you say ah that's not going to work because i got a bunch of finite fantasies and i'm a selfish biased [ __ ] so i shouldn't expect reality to to suit you know my my selfish biases and instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to i'm going to transform myself and expand myself in order to suit reality as it actually is your reward for doing that will be endless love you're going to literally fall in love with reality and reality is such a gargantuan and stark thing that it's difficult to fall in love with it that's the challenge that's the whole challenge of life how do you fall in love with life exactly as it is that's the challenge that's what all spirituality boils down to that's the core of spirituality the less truthful you are the more fearful you're going to be so another benefit of pursuing truth for decades is that you're going to become fearless the more fantasies you subscribe to the more truth will threaten you this creates avoidance dynamics within you and it creates dysfunctional patterns within you and then living with these avoidance dynamics and dysfunctional patterns this is not a pleasant life this is not the good life and in general whenever you experience fear this is a clue to falsehood fear betrays falsehood in a situation if you're afraid of something then that's a that's your clue that somehow you're not seeing the truth of the situation because the truth is that all fear is coming from bias and from selfishness fear is not inherent to reality fear is your response to reality not suiting your own selfish needs here's a list of common ways that people avoid truth religion science philosophy drugs and alcohol food media entertainment video games humor comedy sex relationships romance socialization family work career business making yourself very busy communities tribes groups and cults you fear facing truth because what it might mean for how you must restructure your life see that's the that's the rub here is that when you commit yourself to facing truth all the time that truth is like a signal it's feedback basically from from the universe it's a it's a feedback mechanism from the universe that is telling you how you need to realign your life and then if you do that and you listen to those messages and you keep realigning and realigning and realigning your life more and more and more with truth you have to restructure your life that's difficult but if you keep doing that work then this is how you build the good life so to speak so for example you fear quitting your career if you realize that your career isn't serving the highest good you have to quit you fear ending a relationship if you fully see the dysfunction in the relationship you fear giving up a guilty pleasure you fear giving up your coping mechanisms you fear losing your religion you fear giving up signs and rationality you fear admitting you've been wrong you fear admitting you were a fool you fear your true motivations you fear admitting your dark side you fear looking at your own selfishness and devilry of how you contribute to corruption and evil you fear doing serious work you want to be lazy you fear realizing that you're not as developed as you thought you were that you're not as spiritual as you thought you were you fear seeing how you've been using spirituality to actually boost your ego and to be more of a devil you fear realizing how much time you've wasted in your life doing stupid selfish things you fear seeing the collateral damage of your actions and way of life you fear empathizing with the suffering of others you fear not knowing and uncertainty you fear facing your biases and hypocrisy and giving that up and by forcing yourself to confront the truth on a daily basis it's going to force you to realign your life restructure your life in all these different ways and then your life will become wholesome and pure and then you will fall in love with life and you will you will see the beauty of life because you will realize that the whole the whole secret to living a good life always was living in truth and the reason your life is so dysfunctional and problematic is that you were not living in truth and nobody in society really showed you how or told you the importance of aligning your life with truth you were just living for convenience for comfort for the easy life for pleasure just kind of like going along with the herd and as it turns out you can't live a good life that way surprise surprise a good life must be built on a foundation of truth but society is mostly built on and run on illusions fantasies and convenient constructions so society and culture will pull you towards falsehood therefore a life based on truth is going to be rare and difficult because you're going to have to go against the grain of society and culture it's going to require independence of mind and courage and it's going to require fearlessness society and following the herd will not make you a truthful person uh and therefore people who are blind followers don't ever tend to have great lives notice that the history of mankind is the history of games played to avoid and suppress truth ask yourself why why has this been a recurring pattern throughout human history regardless of culture regardless of what continent it's happening on what regardless of what age whether it was a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago or five thousand years ago this is the recurring pattern of human history avoiding and suppressing truth entire careers are made out of suppressing and distorting truth and these careers are some of the most lucrative ask yourself why is suppression of truth so lucrative why are people willing to pay so much money for the suppression of truth we've spoken about devilry in the past and here i want to give you a different or another angle on what devilry is you can define devilry as an elaborate means of avoiding truth devilry is a collection of mental gymnastics that are performed in order to avoid truth another aspect of not avoiding truth is intellectual integrity maybe i'll shoot a whole episode about this in the future on intellectual integrity but intellectual integrity is crucial and basically a lot of people simply don't have intellectual integrity and those people who do not have intellectual integrity do not deserve to be taken seriously at all a lot of people in the news or in the media or public intellectuals and so forth they simply don't have sufficient intellectual integrity to be deserving of being listened to seriously so you should become good at judging a person's intellectual integrity and if you realize that a person has low intellectual integrity you simply stop listening to that person and taking anything they say seriously you immediately dismiss that person because if you take that if you take the words and ideas of people with no intellectual integrity seriously actually what you're doing is you're opening yourself up to devilry you're literally listening to a devil this is why someone like trump you know who has zero intellectual integrity he needs to be dismissed immediately from from public consciousness and from public intellectual like um discussion like nothing out of his mouth should be taken seriously or should have been taken seriously basically from day one as he announced to be president his intentions to be president because it was very obvious from from immediately when he you know when he slid down that escalator to announce his run for president back in like 2000 what it was 15 14 i don't know what it was back then like to anyone who takes truth seriously it was immediately obvious that he had zero intellectual integrity that was obvious before he even became president and yet people still listen to him and and took him seriously and people still listen to him and take him seriously as though like things he says should be taken seriously like no no a person with zero intellectual integrity if you take that such a person seriously you're just allowing him to gaslight you that's all you're doing you're debasing yourself you're basically allowing this person to intellectually abuse you don't don't allow that have have higher standards there's a lot of people in the world who you know talk about stuff but they shouldn't be taken seriously at all for example the hosts of you know fox news they have zero intellectual integrity so that means anything out of their mouths should not be taken seriously ever at all like that person is done like in my mind these people are done like never in my life would i ever listen to anything that comes out of their mouth seriously it's not serious they're [ __ ] clowns they have zero intellectual integrity so what are you listening to they're [ __ ] devils again this is not limited to any one political party you can find people with low intellectual integrity you know wherever it's not confined to one party this is not a partisan discussion just look for people with low intellectual integrity and do not listen to them ever in your life because they're they're only going to corrupt your mind so if society seduces us away from the truth is there a proper function to society or to a community what would a what would a healthy society or community look like well actually there is a a proper function which is that in a healthy community the community can work to assist each other in keeping ourselves honest because it's difficult actually to keep yourself honest other people can be valuable mirrors to show you your own deceptions and dishonesty they can give you different perspectives so you're not locked into your little you know paradigm so that is possible unfortunately our society right now is sort of like the opposite of that it's not a healthy community it's a very toxic and dysfunctional community where actually we're not so much helping to keep ourselves honest we're actually bullshitting ourselves collectively if you avoid truth for years and decades then it's going to make it almost impossible to phase the longer you avoid it the worse it becomes and then you become a wretched person don't become that wretch catch yourself in the moment when you're avoiding the truth and stop yourself and the cost for the highest life is facing the pain the fear and the inconvenience of facing truth this is a lifelong commitment you can begin right now to start cultivating a love for truth and that's what i suggest and the upside is that by facing truth every day in small ways you will become extremely grounded solid real unshakable powerful free of drama happy and healthy and the most powerful way that i have personally discovered for facing truth the most direct way is a combination of psychedelics and contemplation when you combine psychedelics and contemplation it will reveal to you all of your lies if you have that intention if you have actually the intention of pursuing truth now a lot of people who take psychedelics they don't really contemplate much and a lot of people think psychedelics they're not interested in truth very much so it actually is possible to take psychedelics and still be diluted and have all sorts of problems and dysfunctions but if you have that intention if you listen to this episode psychedelics plus plus contemplation as a combination that is a crazy powerful tool and if you trip hundreds of times throughout the next decade and you contemplate and you are pursuing the truth then basically all of your lies and fantasies will be laid out before you because some truths and some some lies and fantasies are so deep that it's really honestly it's difficult to access them in in a sober state so this is one of the prime functions of psychedelics psychedelics are truth revealing and this is why psychedelics are outlawed and demonized by society at large because society at large is in the business of constructing fantasies so truth revealing substances this this is the most this is the most dangerous thing to a toxic and uh self-deceived society and what is the ultimate truth that you're avoiding what does all this culminate and all these little truths don't they culminate in some ultimate thing that you're avoiding well of course the ultimate thing you're avoiding is love love as i've defined it elsewhere um i'm going to give this definition to you again it's a very profound definition love is the realization that there is no difference between anything so that's what you're actually avoiding you're avoiding realizing that there is no difference between anything and this is the same as to say that you're avoiding infinite selflessness because if you realize that there was no difference between anything then it wouldn't matter what any anything that happened then you would be infinitely selfless so that's what you're avoiding or in other words you're avoiding god because that's what god is all fear is fear of the infinite self and the infant itself is just identical to truth and to love here are some questions to help you face the truth how am i being selfish how am i being biased how am i avoiding truth how is fear and greed limiting my love what trauma am i avoiding facing what am i avoiding facing because i fear it what if true would i find impossible to accept how am i avoiding admitting i was wrong what parts of myself are untruthful what parts of myself am i afraid to surrender which of my behavior patterns are fundamentally misaligned with truth what changes can i make to my life to align it more with truth contemplate all those questions with a notepad answer them there's a good book that i recommend that will supplement the things i said in this episode called radical honesty it's on my book list check that out but the trick with that book is that you read that book and you start to think well i should be very honest with everybody i talk to like really vulnerable that's not the key though the key is not being honest with others the key is really being honest with yourself that's the key that's more important than telling people your your deepest secrets that's not what i'm telling you to do here really um you don't need to tell people your deepest secrets um you can keep some of your secrets to yourself but what's important is that you don't keep secrets from your own self and i want to give you one warning here one mistake that people commonly make is that when we talk about facing the truth by facing the truth i am not here giving you license to use truth as a weapon or a bludgeon against others be careful here this is a easy trap to fall into because you might think ah okay leo leo said i fear the truth so now i gotta go you know tell the truth to to everybody and so um you know let's say oh that girl has a big nose normally i wouldn't tell her she has a big ugly nose but i'm going to go tell her the truth because leo told me to be truthful so you walk up to this girl and you say you have a big ugly nose and you make her cry and you say yeah i did it i told the truth i'm courageous and strong it's like no that's not what i told you to do see in this case you're you're using truth as a bludgeon against others you've weaponized it as you yourself face more and more difficult truths and it stings you and it burns you you realize how difficult it is to face truth you also gain an appreciation that you can use truth to burn others and that this is not in alignment with the highest truth and love and so you have to appreciate that different people are at different levels of capacity for tolerating truth and so as you raise your capacity you know you go up here you can let's say bench press 500 pounds after a decade of pursuing truth in this process but then most people are going to be down here they can't even bench press a hundred pounds so when you throw 500 pounds at them you're actually going to hurt them and you got to be cognizant of that so realize that there are certain truths that you're going to become very comfortable with at an advanced level of this work but then you should not go bludgeoning others with that truth instead you got to appreciate that people are at different levels of their development and that you should only give people as much truth as you think would be of benefit to them this is actually in alignment with the highest love the highest love is not to bludgeon people with truth to make them cry about it and to to make them traumatized with you know scary things uh the highest love is to like stretch them try to open them to higher truths try to stretch them but don't just don't traumatize them with truth because you can traumatize people with challenging truths and your ego can grab hold of truth and use it as a weapon against others and then that becomes actually untruthful you'll realize later that that itself was untruthful and so finally i want to leave you with this is a quotation from david hawkins the late great david hawkins spiritual teacher he says quote healing always involves facing truths we'd rather not face and accepting responsibility we'd rather not accept end quote and that is because truth is health there's a profound connection between truth and health and falsehood and dysfunction or disease and i've actually talked about that in my videos see my videos called holism and holistic thinking holism and holistic thinking part one and part two where i give you sort of a master equation about equating holism with health with truth with love and healing and and more there's a it's a big equation i told you that was a very profound that was a very profound equation that you need to you know write down and to memorize and use that for the rest of your life and so here you're seeing that recurring again the connection between truth and health and so how can you have the good life if you're not healthy and by health i don't just mean physical health i also mean mental spiritual health health in all the ways i even mean health in terms of our society the institutions you're a part of the relationships that you're part of like is your marriage healthy is your relationship with your children healthy is the corporation that you're a part of is that healthy is the nation that you're a citizen of is that a healthy nation a healthy society is the religion that you're a part of or the spiritual group that you're part of is that a healthy group see is your emotional system healthy are your finances healthy is your relationship to money healthy is your relationship to sex healthy is your relationship with psychedelics healthy see is your relationship to other people healthy so the good life would have you having health in all those areas and the only way you're going to get health in all those areas of course it also means physical health too what you eat how you take care of your body to be healthy in all these different areas how can you achieve that without truth can you see that so there you go i hope that all makes sense happy new year 2022 is here it's coming and i don't know yet we'll see what kind of uh interesting topics lie ahead you