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Hey, this is Leo, for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about the big picture of self actualization, the essential components of this path. So maybe you've been wondering, and you've been asking yourself, like Leo, give me a high level overview of self actualization. Because this word self actualization, or personal development, these are abstract labels, who really knows what it means? So is there something more concrete to it? Or is it just as abstract label? What is the essence of self actualization? If there is such a thing? And what's it really going to look like if I undertake this process over the next 1020 30 years of my life, and I change myself? What will I be changing myself into, because I want to get a good idea of that before I really commit to it and pull the trigger. So that's what we're going to cover here, I'm going to give you the high level components of this path. So because they're high level, they're going to be a bit abstract. Stay with me, though, there's value in abstraction, because you're going to get to see a very big picture overview of a lot of stuff here. And this will save you years, literally years of dead ends, going down various rabbit holes that you don't need to go down, because this is the essence of it right here. And I'm going to be talking about various components here, there's going to be quite a bit, they will all gel together for you, you'll probably recognize many of them already that you've been doing. And maybe you didn't even know you were doing them. But also, what I want to stress here is that the order of the components is going to be different for everybody. And even though I'm going to be articulating them in a linear sequence, that's not necessarily how it's going to work for you, right, I just need to speak them in some sort of sequence. So the sequence is rather arbitrary. But let's begin from the top, basically, where all this starts is with the component of a deep need for growth. So you need to recognize there's a deep need for growth in you. That's sort of the beginning of this path. And how you come to that recognition could vary, it could be that you just intuit that there's a lot more to being a human being, then society has told you that your family has demonstrated to you that your friends have been able to actualize so you sense that there's something more you Intuit it with your right brain, and therefore you want it and that's why you're here. Or the other alternative is suffering. Maybe you've tried all these different dead ends, you've tried becoming successful, you've tried earning a lot of money, you've tried having sex, and you've tried getting married, and all this stuff, somehow it felt flat, didn't really work for you. And now you need a in fact, not only their fall flat, but really, it's created a lot of misery for you, and you're so stuck in this misery that you're looking for any way out, and you're very desperate, and you'll take whatever you can get. So either way, you're recognizing a deep need for growth there, then what has to happen is the component of taking 100% responsibility for your life, so that you can't play victim games anymore, so that you can't blame other people for your problems anymore. So that you're taking control, you're taking ownership. And you're deciding, basically, that everything that happens in your life has been created by you, even without maybe you being aware of it. It was created by you, and that your life is pretty much a reflection of how you think, how you act, and the desires you have, and your entire emotional and psychological makeup. And that you have the power to change this stuff. If you take ownership of it, even though it might be difficult to change some of this stuff. So taking ownership doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. But that's an important component. The next really big component is to discriminate reality from appearance. This is a huge component. So this component we might call finding the truth, or undertaking a pursuit of the truth. Now, there's various levels of truth. There's truth to the lowercase t which is important. There is truth with the capital case T. The absolute truth that's also very important for this work. You're going to need to pursue both of those levels. And it's going to begin first of all with just massive self education. You need to commit yourself to lifelong learning and to be learning every single day, to be reading, to be studying to be taking notes to be getting the theory. Because see, the problem is, some people will say, well, Leo, getting the theory isn't, isn't important. In fact, it's a distraction. No, you see, it's very important, because without even the theory, you are like the average person, which is you're completely clueless, as to what you need to be doing in your life, you have no vision for your life, you can't envision anything, you don't know what self actualization means, you don't know the process that you're going to be going through, you don't know any of the traps that you're gonna be falling into. So you're just going to be stumbling around. To successfully navigate a landscape that is foreign to you, it helps to have a map. And the way you get a map is through massive self education. You need to figure out why the stuff in your life that you've been trying to do hasn't been working. There's very deep and good psychological reasons why not. And you need to start to learn to discriminate reality from appearance. Because see, most people are pretty naive. And they take appearances to be reality, then after a certain amount of time, the appearances don't work very well for you get lost in the appearances. And then you start to learn the importance of discriminating the appearances from reality. That means you have to take a sort of analytical process, to your appearances, all the appearances of life, appearances in relationships, appearances, in business appearances, existentially all these different appearances are everywhere. And you need to sort through that stuff, and discover how reality actually works. Discover how your mind actually works, how happiness actually works, how emotions actually work, how finances actually work, how relationships actually work. A lot of this stuff is very counterintuitive and doesn't work the way that you think it should work. You see. And that's a process. And no one can do that for you. And your teachers are not going to do that for you. I can't really do that for you. I mean, I try with actualize that org, this is what we're here for is to is to help you to build this conceptual understanding. Now some people say, well, conceptual understanding is just going to lead to delusion. Now, I'm not saying that conceptual understanding is where you stop. I'm not saying that conceptual understanding is sufficient for all your growth needs. No conceptual understanding is just the foundation. It's the launching point. So you know, the destination, you know, the right things, you know, the wrong things, you know, what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing. And then you can go deeper and further and then you can start to embody those things. But you can't embody these things unless you know them first. You see, unless you recognize all the appearances and all the stuff you've been doing wrong in the past. So a big component of self actualization is understanding how reality actually works, rather than how you've been told, or how you think, or how you want, or how you believe, based on your ideological predilections. That another important component, which is part of this discrimination of reality, for appearance is epistemic and metaphysical questioning. So not only do you need to learn the practical aspects of how reality works, like relationships, and emotions, and so forth, but then you need to get existential on this stuff. And you need to really ask some deep questions about what is the very fabric and structure of reality of myself of other people of life? You need to also be asking yourself epistemic questions, which I've covered a lot in the past in various episodes, about what it means to know things. And you need to really study various epistemic traps, and how your mind deludes you into closed mindedness into paradigm locks into various webs of belief and ideologies which prevent you from educating yourself and being able to discriminate between reality and appearance. It see, if you don't understand epistemology, you're going to have a really tough time just sorting through the wheat and the chaff of all the material all the information that's out there, because there's a lot of information out there these days. A lot of conspiracy theories and various religions and cults and and this and that, how do you know what's true, and what's worthwhile to pursue and what's not. It could take years for you just to discriminate that. See. After you've done that, and if you're doing a lot of metaphysical questioning as well, eventually you're going to break through to a glimpse of the Absolute, there is such a thing as truth to the capital T, it can be called the absolute. There's many other names for reality, God, and so forth. What that is, I'm not going to go into here, but suffice it to say that you're gonna get a glimpse of this thing. And it's going to be the most mind blowing thing you've ever encountered in life. And it's going to be the most rewarding thing. And you're gonna have an instant recognition that this is what life is about is the absolute. And that's a big component of self actualization is glimpsing the absolute. Usually, when you first get it, it's just a glimpse, it leaves you, then you need to pursue it deeper, that's when you get serious about this work, because you see just how amazing the potential here is. So once you've glimpsed the absolute, and even maybe if you've grasped the absolute for a while, then the work becomes about getting the truth, this absolute to penetrate through into all of your everyday experience. So that it's not just some state that you inhabit when you're meditating. But that it's your living being, you're embodying it, everything from the way you walk to the way you talk to the way you think, to the way that you relate to people, all of it is permeated by this absolute. That's the ultimate place that you want to get to. And then it's a matter of how do you actually do that. So let me give you some components that will help you to understand what it really means to get the truth to penetrate into your everyday experience. This truth is transcendent, you see, so really, this is what spirituality is about is getting transcendence to penetrate into your everyday experience. And this is why spirituality gets criticized a lot is because a lot of people who act spiritual or pretend like they're spiritual, don't actually manifest it or aren't able to embody it. Because they just, you know, they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. So the other component here is growth. What is growth, as far as self actualization is concerned, it basically it's raising the quality of your consciousness. If you want to boil everything down to this is basically the quality of your consciousness. Because what is the absolute, the absolute is consciousness, it's the one thing amidst all the vastness of all the appearances. So you're discriminating reality from appearances. And ultimately, you discriminate everything down to just one thing. And that one thing is consciousness. That's it. That's the only one thing that's reliable, everything else is appearance. You know, it's easy to state it that way. It's a very simple formulation. But the ram of the full ramifications of this will take years to percolate through your entire life. And it'll take work. Another component here is unconditional love, the ability or the capacity to have unconditional love in all situations, with all people. This is a tall order to fill. This is actually a very good litmus test of your growth. So as you're growing, if you're developing more and more capacity to be unconditionally loving, especially with people in situations that go against your agenda, that go against your ego, that go against all your selfish drives and motives. This is a real test of how much you've grown and how much you've self actualized. This unconditional love not only applies to other people in situations, but also of course applies to yourself. So a big component of self actualization is self acceptance. self acceptance is unconditional love apply to yourself. And what that means is that you accept yourself not in the way like some people think like well, I'm going to, I'm going to do all this personal development work and then my life is gonna be perfect. And I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna have my relationships and my business and my finances and my career and everything is going to be is handled and then because of that, you know, because now I get some some new haircut and I dress nice and I drive a fancy car and you know, I'm, I'm attractive to the opposite sex or whatever, that now because of that, now I can accept myself finally. No, that's not self acceptance. self acceptance means you accept yourself warts and all. Without needing to create a certain external circumstances for yourself all that stuff I was describing, that's all external circumstance. So that's unconditional love with yourself. You'll notice that as you're truly growing, if you're truly growing you accept yourself more and more and more and more and more, you care about what other people think of you less and less and less and less, until you feel complete, without needing to do or be anything at all. That's the ultimate level that you're trying to get to. Another component is detachment. This is a huge, very important component, and a very misunderstood component. What this means is, you will be detaching yourself from all experience, all thoughts, all emotions, and all actions. That means you're not attached to the fruits of your actions. A lot of people misunderstand attachment, which I'll have to shoot a new episode on in the future, because this is very counterintuitive. People will immediately object and say Leo detached, but that's not what I want. What I want is I want more feeling. It sounds like when you say detachment, I'm going to become some sort of like, Terminator cold hearted robot. And that's not what I want to grow into. But no, you see, that's a, that's a confusion right there. This is a very counterintuitive point. Actually, when I talk about detachment, that means feeling deeper, feeling more fully than you currently feel. It means lots of empathy and lots of compassion, but in a detached way. See, actually, the reason that you can't feel fully is because you're attached to stuff you're attached to experiences to having particular experiences the good ones, and you're attached to particular thoughts or ideologies, or belief systems, you're attached to certain emotions, of course, the good ones, not the bad ones, and you're attached to your actions producing particular results, because the reason you're taking action is so that you can manipulate yourself and your life and your circumstances so that you can then experience the emotions that you're attached to. And that whole mechanism of delusion has to be broken down and seen for what it is. And when you do break that down, then the next component is going to be being the capacity simply to be versus doing or having. And this is a 180 degree switch in your orientation towards life. Right now, if you're like the average person, your orientation is doing and having, you're doing stuff, and you're trying to acquire stuff, so that you can get those emotions, or those thoughts or those experiences that you're attached to. If you let that go, then you'll be able to actually be the the other orientation is just the being orientation, where you derive a lot of satisfaction, pleasure from just being in the present moment. And here you're able to deep to deeply feel, and really savor existence. And this is the most beautiful and rewarding and satisfying thing that there is, this is where true satisfaction comes from. You don't get satisfaction from doing it from having, even though you might think you do you do but only for a very short period of time. And then you always crash. It's like a sugar high. So instead, what you want is you want to steady consistent satisfaction derived from the being level. And then also, this feeds into the self acceptance. Because when you're just being you feel complete, you don't need to do anything to accept yourself. Whereas when you're doing and having that becomes a never ending cycle of you doing stuff in order to feel valuable, to feel worthy to feel significant, to feel lovable, to feel complete. And that never ends because the only way to end that cycle is to end it with being. But that requires some counterintuitive thinking. Because that cycle generally never ends, it keeps going to doing cycle the doing and having cycle never stops. You see people who are in their 70s and 80s and are still caught in the doing and having cycle. See. The next component is developing the capacity for observation. This is very important. And this dovetails with that component about discriminating reality from appearance. The way that you do that fundamentally and the way that you learn and the way that you understand is simply really through observation. very precise, very objective, very dispassionate and careful and steady, long term observation. You just sit there and you observe whatever you're interested in. You observe it very carefully. And you especially most of all, observe yourself, your own Self, you very carefully watched yourself as if you were studying a chimp in a zoo. Like a scientist would study a chimp in a zoo. And you carefully observe how your mind works, how your emotions work, and you especially watch out for all your self deceptive, mental tendencies and your self biases. So your self agenda, what is it that the ego in you wants out of life, and all the little sneaky stuff that it does to manipulate you, and getting you to go along with that. So you have to just carefully observe that and you have to become a very good observer. So a sub component of this is developing mindfulness. That's why mindfulness is such an important component. That's why meditation is such an important component, because what are these things, also self inquiry, also contemplation in a sense, these are all ways of building your capacity for just observation. Not for analysis, per se, but observation. There's a big difference. A lot of academics are great at analysis, but are poor at observation. And they go astray. Si, B, because when you get caught in analysis, you get into mental masturbation, you come up with all sorts of theories about how reality works. But you haven't observed the facts enough, yet, you haven't really studied direct experience enough yet. And you haven't done that, because it's not easy. These are capacities that need to be developed and cultivated over years and decades. You don't just sit down and observe yourself for 10 minutes, and then you're done. You need to observe yourself over and over and over again, day after day after day for years, to see what's really going on with you, with society at large with people that you relate to, and so forth. The next component is undermining selfish impulses, you have all these selfish impulses, once you observe them, for a long time you become aware of them, then it becomes time to start to undermine them. restrict yourself and all your lower consciousness tendencies and desires. And ultimately can be purging and weeding those out. The next component is honesty. Honesty is huge. When you're trying to pursue truth and sought out reality from appearance. Honesty, not just with other people. But with yourself, especially this work requires brutal self honesty, you need to be really honest about how you deceive yourself, how you lied to yourself, all your secret desires, all the ways that you manipulate people and situations. And why you do what you do, why you really do what you do. Not the excuses that you give yourself. Which leads to the component of surrendering control and giving up manipulation. So most people, when they do personal development, when they first start for them, it's a process of hey, let me get more control over my life. Because the problem has been the reason I'm not happy is because I don't have sufficient control. If I had more control over my finances, and over my career, and over my relationships, and over myself, then everything would be solved. But that ends up being wrongheaded. Because this is a very counterintuitive process. So instead, you need to surrender control. If you're really growing, it's not about acquiring more control. It's about recognizing that really, there's no one in control, and that the more you try to be in control, the less satisfied you're going to be. Because control feeds into that whole attachment cycle of the doing and the having When you surrender your changing orientation into the being. surrendering control and manipulation, why you control and manipulate well, to get the emotions and experiences that you are attached to, that you want to cling to. And then of course, you suffer because you realize, ultimately that you can't have control and you can't cling to those things forever. Everything great that you're clinging and chasing is going to end. I hate to break it to you. But you got to face that. And that's another important component of this path is facing some harsh truths. Facing your death, facing boredom facing emptiness. And not getting depressed and bummed out about it. facing them in a in a sort of stoic and sober way. Another component here is identifying fear barriers that you have and your characteristic defense mechanisms. All of us have different It's mechanisms. It's the way that we keep ourselves stuck where we are. And we all have fear barriers, fear about money, fear about losing security, fear about losing a relationship. And our defenses are like, well, but I have certain ideologies and certain beliefs that I have about how life works, all those are a part of my defense system. So you need to identify those and then just start dropping them, or undermining them in some way. Because those are all keeping you stuck. Another component here is raising the quality of your motivations and desires. So most of the things that you're motivated by, and that you desire are low costs and stuff that you've been programmed with by culture and society. And it's not healthy. And there's no way that you're going to become happy when your motivations are things like money, sex, success, fame, popularity, approval, getting love from external sources, security, these low consciousness sort of desires, also the motivation and desire for stimulation. That's a big one. That right there in a nutshell, describes most people's lives, those five or six motivations that I just listed. And even there, they're motivated in negative ways to pursue these things. It's terrible. Not only do you have low consciousness desires, but you're also trying to use negative motivation to pursue them, it's completely absurd, this will never work. Another component is becoming a creator. Which means for me, what that means is life purpose, finding your life purpose, getting clear about what you actually want to contribute to this world, what impact you want to have, specifically with your career. Because like it or not, you need to be here, you need to be productive as a human being, otherwise, you're not going to be able to pay your rent and feed yourself. And so that's a very practical matter. But also you want to be able to pay your rent and feed yourself in high consciousness manner, in a way that is allowing you to fulfill your full potential, and to experience the joy of being a creator of being an artist. And I use the label artists here pretty broadly. So that's finding your life purpose, I have a whole course about that. So I can't go into it here. It's a very deep topic. But basically, you want to become a creator. Because if you don't become a creator, what's going to happen is you're going to get something by default. And what you're gonna get by default is just a lame, boring nine to five job, which is really low consciousness, where your boss, guess what your boss, he's not going to be a high consciousness enlightened, you know, Buddha, your boss is just going to be some jerk who wants to drive a Lamborghini, and who wants to, you know, bang more girls, and he's going to be running his business in that fashion. To get him more girls and more Lamborghinis. And when you are able to discriminate the truth, from appearances, you will see through that whole thing through that illusion. And so at that point, you don't want to be working for that person anymore. You want to be doing something meaningful with your life. See, another component of this work is reconciling evil, suffering and ignorance. This is an important component for unconditional love. See, a lot of people really get hung up on misunderstanding, evil, suffering and ignorance. They think that other people out there are evil. Well, you need to discover through careful self observation, and brutal self honesty is actually that you are the evil one. Nobody out there is evil or than you. You see, you're the evil one. And that takes, that takes a lot of guts to swallow that. To start to understand what evil really is. To start to start to understand what other people's suffering really is, where suffering comes from, where ignorance comes from, see, it's easy to be hating other people, calling them evil and ignorant and so forth. When you haven't really looked deeply within yourself to see the evil, suffering and ignorance that is residing within you. Once you see it deeply within yourself, you're never ever going to criticize anyone else for it. Because you're really going to have a holistic understanding of the whole evil suffering ignorance mechanism. That's what I call reconciling these things. It'll take you years to really think about this stuff. And puzzle it out. Another important component here speaking of holistic understanding, is pursuing big picture understanding. So part of this process of discriminating reality from appearance is that you're going to need to go for the big picture, to really understand things at the big picture level, in life, in relationships, and in psychology at the existential level, you know, big picture, holistic understanding. It's not enough just to discriminate in some little narrow analytical fashion. No, you need to get the big picture, where a lot of intelligent people go wrong is that they lack holistic, big picture understanding, because they don't really pursue it, because mostly, they're pretty left brained in their approach to understanding reality. Which leads to the next component of this path is that as you develop, you're going to notice yourself going more from your left brain, to your, to your right brain, in the way that you operate. Left brain thinking is very logical and analytical and calculating, and right brain is more emotional, it's more holistic, it's more integrated, it's more spiritual. In fact, there's a lot of interesting neuroscience that's been done. But your ego basically resides in your left brain, the left brain is inhibiting the holism potential of the right brain, and enlightenment. Where does that occur? Well, enlightenment itself is an absolute doesn't really occur anywhere. But insofar as it permeates your mind and your brain, it occurs in the right brain. Right? Because enlightenment is the ultimate, the ultimate form of holism, non duality, everything is non dual, everything is one to see that requires the use of your right brain, not your left. That doesn't mean you never use your left brain anymore, you can still think and you can still be logical when you need to be. But you don't use logic to run your life. See, use your intuition to run your life. And you use your logic to serve your intuition. That's going to happen to you as you grow. There's no way that can happen to you. It's a good metric. And then another very important component is what I'm going to call creating a sonic lifestyle. Sonic what does this mean? This is a Hindu term basically. The way it's how can I describe this? Well, basically, it means living a sober sort of lifestyle. That's what it means. Because most people what kind of lifestyle we live in these days, we're living an intoxicated lifestyle, the opposite of a saatvik lifestyle, which is where you're always distracted, intoxicated by all this stuff in our culture, our culture is very decadent. And it's very easy to lose yourself in video games, movies, tabloids, the news, conspiracy theories, so on and so forth, you know, food, drugs, alcohol, stimulants, stimulation of every kind, this is what we mean by intoxication. To create a psychotic lifestyle, it means you have to let go of that stuff purify your mind and your physical body. This means becoming addiction free, free of all the different chemical addictions out there. And of course, by addictions, I don't just mean chemical substances. I also mean, a lot of the stuff that are stuff like addiction to porn, addiction to video games, addiction to YouTube and social media, in your smartphone and all that you also need to become distraction free. Because right now your mind and your life is so distracting, that you can't sit down and you can't discriminate the truth from appearances and toxicity free. So you put so much toxic stuff into your body and into your environment, from your food, to your water to the things that you are drinking, to the things that you're watching to the things that you're listening to the information that you're receiving, to the people that you surround yourself with. There's a lot of toxicity there that needs to be eliminated. And also your physical body and your energy body. We might call it your energy body. But there's a lot of there's a lot of blocks in your body that are psychosomatic in the sense that it's sort of like the physical and the psychological coming together. So you actually right now probably if you're like most people carry a lot of energy blockages, physical energy blockages in your body, which will be removed if you do deep psychological work, because you carry various stresses and tensions and fears and anxieties and neuroses and all that stuff it manifests physically in your body. Don't think that all that stuff just is held here in the brain? Not at all. So some people are so blocked up energetically, that they they actually destroy their bodies. They can't even function physically, they can't get out of bed in the morning, or they can't go to sleep at night because they're so stressed their mind and their body is so overstimulated and toxified. That, how are you going to really grow yourself and do all this subtle discriminating work? How are you going to develop all this understanding and have the discipline to really change yourself, if you are living this intoxicated, decadent sort of lifestyle, it's just not going to happen. Another important component here is undoing social conditioning. There's a lot of stuff that your culture has filled your mind with various ideas, beliefs, various paradigms, various morals and standards, and rules that need to be questioned and done away with. And that means overcoming a lot of childhood programming, a lot of school programming. A lot of the stuff that I'm talking about with actualize that org runs counter to many of the things that you've been taught, with your spiritual tradition, with your religion, with your school, with your family, and so forth. And you need to really sit down and question a lot of that stuff that's really part of your ability to discriminate the truth from appearances. Another very important component here that we shouldn't forget is non manipulative, relating. You need to, at some point, become very honest with yourself about how much you manipulate other people in your relationships, and that most of your relationships are a manipulation games. I don't just mean intimate relationships, I mean, your family, I mean, your, your children, I mean, your co workers, your boss. I mean, where does it end, every person that you're relating to, you're relating to in a very manipulative manner. And it's gonna take you a lot of self observation, work to realize all the ways in which you manipulate because your manipulations are sneaky, they're so sneaky, that you yourself are not aware of them yet. But as you grow, you will become aware. And as you become aware, you will need to let that stuff go. Let it go, let it go. Let it go, let it go, let your ego go let yourself agenda go so that you're not manipulating everybody around you. That's not easy to do, requires a lot of awareness to do that. requires courage to because as you stop manipulating, if you're a relationship oriented person, you derive a lot of satisfaction and pleasure from relationships, then you're probably going to want to this is going to be threatening to you, right? Because, hey, the reason that I'm manipulating people is so that I can keep I'm in relationships intact. What happens if I stopped being manipulative? Well, maybe there's a risk of me losing some of my important relationships. But see, I'm caught in a trap in the cycle of being attached and cleaned to all my relationships. So I need to keep being manipulative. And so it just becomes this never ending cycle of manipulation. And very ironically, this ends up souring and ruining all your relationships. Your relationships can only really flourish, when you stop using them for social for selfish gratification, and in a manipulative fashion. That requires a lot of awareness and self honesty to accomplish. So those are the components that I really wanted to share with you. I'll just throw out a couple of final ones. Basically, as you're self actualized, and you're going to be coming, you're going to be becoming very strategic, very decisive, very proactive and visionary in the way that you approach your life. Most people are not these things at all. They're the opposite of strategic, decisive, proactive and visionary. There's going to need to be a deep recognition in you that this growth takes serious work. This is not going to happen spontaneously. It's not gonna happen. By accident, one day that bam, you have some sudden epiphany, and all of a sudden, you're in line and everything is fixed and boom, you got all taken care of, it's not gonna happen like that. There's no pill you can buy there's no you know, there's no secret meditation technique that will fix it all for you. This is going to take some discernment, some real digging into the details, right? The devil of this work is in the details. And also, you're going to need to be building your infrastructure, which I've talked about before setting up the right environment for you. Make sure part of your being strategic means set up your environment so that you have the resources and things that will enable you rather than hinder you to accomplish all these things that I've been talking about above. And that's it That's the essence of this path. Now, like I said already, it's not necessarily going to happen in this order. This is a messy process, I laid it out in a sort of linear fashion. It's not at all going to happen in this order, all the components could happen simultaneously, or one by one, or they can be spread out 10 years, across time, you see, it's all going to depend on you where you are, what your capacities are, what your resources are, what your environment is, you know, a lot of different factors go into this. Now, I know that what I said here is rather abstract. And what you would like is you would like more specific ways of accomplishing these things. So for example, you might be wondering, well, Leo, this sounds good. And I have a sort of a big picture understanding now. But how do I become more unconditionally loving? And how do I face my death and emptiness? And how do I reconcile evil and ignorance? And how do I pursue holism? And how do I have a more Sofic lifestyle? How do I do all this stuff? Well, I have a lot of episodes that do cover those in detail. But also, there will be more in the future where I get a little more specific and concrete. And I give you the low level details. Here, I wanted to keep it abstract. For the purposes of the big picture, the value of having the big picture is that now you can use this to really guide yourself, you can go find the techniques, there are many, many, many hundreds, hundreds of techniques out there that can be used to accomplish all this stuff. I don't even know all the techniques, it would take decades to study and research all the techniques. So that's going to be part of life. Part of your process is researching and trying different techniques and seeing which ones work for you and which ones don't. Different techniques work for different people. What I want to conclude with is just I want to underscore here that you are not a special person, you are not some unique snowflake, who has special needs that are different from all other human beings. You need to recognize that you are a machine, you're a biological, human machine. And as this machine, this body and this brain and this mind, and everything that comes along with it, the psychology of a human being is pretty well understood, it's been pretty well understood in certain parts of the world for 1000s of years now. It's just that culture has done a terrible job of informing you. Your culture, mass culture, mass media, Western society does a terrible job of informing you of what the needs are, of this machine that you are of what's best for it. It doesn't give you an operation manual. In fact, culture does worse than not give you an operation manual. It seduces you into doing all the wrong stuff, It intoxicates you not just in the chemical way. But in a lot of psychological ways that intoxicates you. And unless you seriously make an effort to go against this trend, you're just going to go with the flow. And if you're going to go with the flow, you're going to do what 99% of people are doing, which is that they're just continuing, continuing this cycle of intoxication that our culture has filled them with. But here, you have gotten the keys, you know better now, this is a rare opportunity for you. Most people never get this big picture. They never really understand what growth is about what their potential is what they should be doing. And so now you have been informed, but of course you're still intoxicated. So this is a problem because now you need to start to work on removing your intoxication, and aligning yourself with this process. By the way, it doesn't really matter whether you are a Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or a Muslim, or an atheist or whatever fashion wish you want to be growing and developing yourself spiritually or otherwise, doesn't matter. All of this is going to be basically following this path that I outlined for you. There's a lot of different ways to grow a lot of different schools and traditions and techniques out there and they will use different language, metaphors and descriptions to explain what I just basically explained here. If there is a tradition out there with just generating true growth for you, it's going to be having these key components, which I mentioned here, it might be talking about them in different language, it might be emphasizing different things, it might be giving you very different techniques, you might not see that all these techniques are basically pointing towards the same thing, until you do a very deep and broad holistic survey of all the stuff that's out there, and then you start to see the commonalities. But it doesn't matter. If you're going to be growing yourself as a human being, then this is basically how it's gonna work. These are the components. If you ignore some of these components, you're gonna be missing important pieces. And a lot of teachings out there, they are missing important pieces. They make you think like they're complete, and that they're whole, but they're actually not, they only give you a partial perspective, which is why I really like the approach of studying many traditions, many schools, many different techniques, many different teachers, I study hundreds of different sources, so that I make sure that there are no gaps in my understanding, and I have the biggest possible picture that can be assembled. And so basically, what's going to happen is that you will either follow this process, and you will install these different components into your life, or you won't. And if you won't, then I'll guarantee you one thing is that you're going to fail as a human being. And by the end of your life, you will know that you have failed as a human being. And there will be a lot of suffering for you. So that's just the reality of how this works. Because you are this human machine and this machine has certain needs, not just physical needs, but certain psychological and spiritual needs. And there is a proper way to run this machine. And mostly the way that you're running it is not the proper way. So take that to heart. And get excited by the possibilities here. Might seem sort of negative. But in accepting some of these harsh truths, there was a surrender that happens. You surrender to them, and then you get to work, you take responsibility, you start to do the work. And as you start to do the work, you start to experience the true satisfaction that comes from this work, not the flimsy satisfaction that you're getting from your attachment cycle that you're running through. See, and when you start to get glimpses of that at first, it's sporadic it's rare. You want to stabilize it, but you can't it just it's a little glimpse. But even those glimpses those are what hold you over while you keep doing working hard every single day. All right, that's it. I'm signing off, please click the like button for me, post your comments down below. And come check out actualize that org right here. This is my website. On the website, I have various resources for you. You can browse the videos easier. There is a mp3 downloads of all my content. You can get it for free there. There's the life purpose course by bookless. There's a forum, there's my blog. So there's a lot of stuff and I'm going to keep adding more content there. So go make sure you use all these resources. But most importantly, just stick around with actualize that org because in the future, we'll be going deeper into the specifics of how to actually follow through on this high level. process of self actualization. In fact, I'm planning a new episode in the future, which is going to be specifically called something like how to get started with self actualization, because a lot of people have been asking me, well, Leo, you talk about a lot of this stuff, but I don't really know where to start. You have hundreds of videos that I need to watch, you know, where do I start? What are the first things that I should do? What's the order of priorities? And how do I really get the techniques down? So I'm going to have a practical episode which will take this abstract, abstract stuff we were talking about today, and really drill it down into concrete details so you know how to get started. Alright, that's it. Hope you stay with me and I'll see you soon with more.