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[Music] we need to have a discussion about the dangers of spiritual work this is an especially poignant moment at which to have this discussion we've had it before but we need to have it again because recently we've been made aware on the actualized.org forum that one of the members there killed himself so i'm going to talk about that situation i'm going to answer many questions i'm going to then lead into a discussion about suicide and into my thoughts on that and we're going to talk about many of the traps of spiritual work and just many of the traps of any kind of system of beliefs or ideas in general so there's going to be a lot of very juicy and important information here so stay tuned with me and i'll try to answer all your questions and objections so now what happened uh well we're not exactly sure with 100 certainty what happened but the best that we can piece together and as we've been informed by the family by the sister of this individual and and his family is that a few weeks ago he got the idea to literally jump off a bridge and for spiritual purposes uh it's not exactly clear what his logic was for doing so what he thought he would really gain from it or why it would be necessary but somehow he got it in his mind that jumping off a bridge would i guess be a quick path to god or towards the afterlife or the next life or whatever and then he literally jumped off a bridge or so we're told again i don't have independent verification of this i'm assuming it's true let's just treat it as though it's true all right so let's say it happened so now what do we make of this because i take this very seriously sometimes people get the idea that i treat these ideas kind of casually or flippantly about enlightenment awakening and so forth um and my teachings in general uh very much no very very much no um in fact i'm going to point out repeatedly again and again and again how many warnings and disclaimers i've given how many times i've talked about the traps of this work this is a recurring theme if you watch my content through to the end you notice this recurring theme what we're always talking about is we're talking about the mind the ego mind and all of its wacky crazy ideas and how it survives and how it fools itself and how it deceives itself in many different ways including materialistic ways but also including spiritual ways as well and we talk about the dangers of ideology and belief systems and getting locked in a paradigm getting locked into a single perspective of closed-mindedness of cults cult psychology so we we've covered this topic so much i have videos for example about with titles such as the dangers of spiritual work the dark side of meditation act is actualized or occult which i just released actually recently in the last month or so i released that one and in that one you know some people criticize me and say that well leo you spend three hours that's a three hour long episode three hours explaining how actualized rig is not a cult but if you watch that episode carefully it wasn't just three hours of me selfishly defending myself it was mostly three hours of elaboration upon many of the misconceived notions people have about this work and spirituality in general and many ways in which it can be misinterpreted and misunderstood and in fact most of my episodes are so long in general precisely because i go into a lot of detail about the traps of the mind how easy it is to make mistakes in this work and to get things wrong to make sure that you're not misinterpreting something that's being said there's a fundamental problem here though in that the longer i make my episodes the less likely people are to watch them or to just they're more likely to skim them and when they skim them then they can actually skim over the disclaimers the warnings the traps the examples the rebukes that i give and the problem is that if i harp too much on the obvious things you shouldn't do in this work for intelligent people that's going to tune their mind out because they've heard it once they've heard it twice how many times leo do you need to tell me not to jump off a bridge isn't that obvious does it really need to be said that you shouldn't be jumping off a bridge that is not valid spiritual work and that has nothing to do with what we're doing here if the teaching was to jump off a bridge that's what i would tell you to do that's not the teaching you might say of course if you're reasonable and intelligent but the problem is that hundreds of thousands and millions of people watch out of all these people we're talking about so many people you have to keep in mind that in the united states alone there were 40 000 suicides in 2018 by the statistics only in the united states alone that's not counting the rest of the world so we're talking about literally millions of suicides every year and i have a global audience people watch me from everywhere around the world it's quite amazing my videos have received close to 100 million views in the last eight years and so from the beginning i was concerned that people can take these teachings and misconstrue them misinterpret them in whatever ways they will and misuse them and abuse them in fact i've talked about that in the past quite a lot oftentimes i ended my episodes with some sort of you know final word where i would say something like be very careful not to abuse these teachings in some particular way and then i might mention the way or explain what the traps are i do that for a reason because when you teach millions of people eventually somebody's going to get some stupid idea or is going to misunderstand something and it's very difficult to make these teachings foolproof so the challenge is that what i teach is rather advanced stuff and really it's not suitable for people who have mental disorders or who do not have a stable mind or who do not just simply have a good reasoning process who just don't have common sense right you can't get far with my teachings without common sense and basic reason and a stable life the ability to just survive in your life and one of the challenges that i face is that honestly i come from a rather healthy mindset myself i don't have a lot of experience dealing with seriously mentally ill people or very depressed people or suicidal people or people who just have weird ideas about life or reality and some people are like that they just have weird ideas they have a weird reasoning process you get people like that and by no means is this something special to actualize.org this is a general problem for all spiritual teachers and all spiritual schools and the more you teach the bigger your audience the more of a problem it becomes because what happens is that if you're a very specialized narrow teacher that teaches something very advanced and you get maybe 100 students a year coming to you you can have very tight control over that and the people who come to you tend to be of a much higher caliber they're not coming from just off the street the problem with youtube is that anybody who's doing any work on youtube their fan base if it's of any significant size let's say over a hundred thousand people is going to consist of some very intelligent people some a lot of average people um a lot of stupid people and then some really really stupid people or even not that but actually sociopathic criminal psychotic schizophrenic bipolar and god knows what other conditions depressive suicidal and and and even things you can't even really imagine you get some very fringe edge cases when you have a hundred thousand followers let alone a million followers you get a really wide distribution of that bell curve and overall it's fine except once in a while you get some extreme cases and what makes the situation worse is that within spirituality and personal development this area especially attracts people who sometimes are especially prone to having mental problems uh trauma that they're working through in their life sometimes mental illness depression or who are suicidal because that's usually the kind of person who wants some sort of health self-help advice if you're totally happy in your life you're usually chasing money and success and you don't even turn to self-help or spirituality so a lot of people come to spirituality with the purpose of escaping suffering and that already creates sort of a bias in the distribution curve because who suffers the most are the people who have the most chaotic minds they suffer the most and they probably need therapy and self-help and spirituality the most but they are also the most prone to misunderstanding or misusing these ideas so in general this is a problem that really goes back to the dawn of human civilization it's important to put this into context so i'm laying out a lot of context for you here so you understand the depth of the problem teaching truth or consciousness or spirituality at an advanced level where you have really deep insights of the nature of reality metaphysically existentially to the point of penetrating through uh life and death these sorts of of topics these topics have always been to a certain extent taboo within society and culture and there's a very good reason for that because these topics these types of questions when we start to deconstruct the mind or when we start to talk about and question the fabric of society of reality of social structures of gender of cultural norms of money of politicians of the economy of ourselves and our relationship to others in the world when we start to question what am i what is another is there even such a thing as another person or am i just imagining that what is death what is life is life even meaningful is death really scary is that a bad thing or a good thing like when you start to ask these questions and you don't just invent ideologies and belief systems about it but you really probe into it deeply and you try to reach some kind of truth of the matter through consciousness this is very threatening it's threatening to the entire social order it threatens the politicians it threatens the business owners it threatens the advertisers it threatens the the academic systems it threatens the school system it threatens your parents your family your friends your co-workers it threatens religion it threatens science so very quickly you develop enemies which is why historically these sorts of teachings were not mass available to a casual audience they were kept within very narrow specialized esoteric sects which were not known very well by the majority of people whereas the majority of people practiced exoteric forms of religion and spirituality which was sort of like advice for dumb people it was dumbed down mysticism effectively which just gave you some rules to follow like don't kill people don't steal don't be an [ __ ] don't judge people don't jump off a bridge these sorts of things need to be told to normies because you're sort of gearing the teachings to the lowest common denominator so there's a tricky trade-off between how advanced your teachings are and then who they're geared towards and then how widespread they can be like a lot of times i will teach something about the nature of fear or survival or religion or the origins of religion and things like this and then people write in the comments section people tell me all the time like leo oh my god why isn't this taught in school well the reason is because ideas can be dangerous and i've said this in the past that ideology is not just fun and games ideology is deeply connected to your survival and survival people don't appreciate how deadly serious survival is survival is as serious as cancer as a heart attack as a bullet to the brain now if you want to take the position that none of these things matter from an absolute absolute perspective because it's all just a dream yeah you can take that perspective but you have to also be very careful here because you can say that or take that perspective while you're sitting at home on your couch listening to a video and it's all very comfortable and easy but then when someone runs over your dog with their car if someone robs your grandmother as she's walking home from the grocery store if uh you know if a burglar breaks into your house while you're asleep with your children with a gun are you still going to be able to hold that lofty metaphysical position of it's it's all just a dream yes it's all just a dream of course but how do you want your dream to unfold and what are your attachments to the dream i bet you have some attachments i bet there are ways your dream could unfold that you would really hate to see happen and hey i'm not wagging my finger at you here i also have attachments to the dream again people get this so wrong they think like oh well leo since you say you've you know you've realized god and other such things and and you've said you say that everything is a dream that means that you don't care what happens in your life right no of course not of course i care because i have relative goals for example one of my relative goals that i'm pursuing in my life is that i teach that's what i do that's my life purpose is to teach this stuff to spread this wisdom and these insights so look at how this works it's a bit paradoxical because on the one hand the wisdom and the insights tell us that all these attachments that are all just illusory standard buddhism right all these attachments to life are just illusory at your attachments to money to your children to your family all illusory and is that true yes of course it's true from the absolute perspective it's true but at the same time just to be able to teach that to people requires that one be alive the buddha can't teach you unless he has air in his lungs food in his belly and a comfortable place to sit the buddha can't teach you without food water air a safe environment a climate controlled area where it's not too hot and not too cold he can't teach you on the surface of the sun he can't teach you in the middle of a of a desert where you're dying of thirst so very narrow conditions are required for survival and for the propagation of spiritual teachings and work or any kind of life for that matter this is obvious stuff but it's worth thinking about in this context so for example for me to teach the things i want to teach i have to be concerned by very petty mundane issues that most people would think well leo surely you should be above this like leo you're so awake and so forth you should be above concerns for money but no see if i was above concerns for money i would literally not care about money and if i literally didn't care about money then i wouldn't even check my bank account and if i didn't check my bank account it would run out eventually and once it ran out my electricity would shut off my cable would shut off i wouldn't be able to power this camera that i'm recording this video on and i wouldn't be able to upload it anywhere you see how that works so it's actually perfectly okay for me not to care about money but then there are consequences the mistake that naive people make is they think oh well it's all just sort of a dream and i could just like stop caring about these things and everything will just be okay like god will guide me through life not so fast what kind of life do you want god is not something above you that is guiding you through your life this is god your thought process itself is god so when you think to yourself [ __ ] i gotta put more money in my bank account so i can pay today's electricity bill so that my electricity is not shut off so that i can do my work tomorrow when you think that that is god doing its work that's how god works that's not the only way god works but people overlook that that is how god works god works not just in supernatural ways god works in very practical ways in fact mostly that's what's happening in your life so if you care about your children not suffering see maybe you're above suffering and you might say oh leo i've i've become so enlightened that i'm not even worried about suffering anymore okay but you have children are they as enlightened as you do you care about their suffering now maybe you say leo i'm so enlightened that i don't even care about their suffering okay and that's possible that is perhaps a valid state of consciousness you could one day reach although i highly doubt any of you have reached it but let's say you've reached that point okay fine but then your children will suffer and die are you okay with that now if you say yes then what's the problem well technically there is no problem but the problem is that you're not going to be okay with it see you fool yourself telling yourself that you'll be okay with it but actually you won't be so that's where you have to be very careful so what you have to understand is that ideas inherently are dangerous things we tend to treat ideas as mere philosophy some sort of armchair stuff that we do and frankly a lot of what you see on youtube in terms of the sort of idea sphere on youtube is that it is just armchair philosophy it's it's ideas that have little real world consequences but even in those even in those areas it's still not true i mean look look at what's going on in our culture in our society for example with ideas within politics there are dangerous ideas within politics both on the left and the right now i would say that there are more on the right than there are on the left but hey you could say that i'm biased whatever but you can certainly find some very dangerous ideas for example if you wanted to on the radical right and that's not to pick on the right wingers but just like honestly there are some really toxic and dangerous ideas and ideologies floating around within conservative circles the extremes of conservative circles nationalism racism xenophobia people who want to start an ethno-state people who are happy with ethnic cleansing and they spread these ideas online and they gain traction they're sort of a battle over these ideas going on recently in the last five years online um that is not to pick on right-wingers here that is just to point out that ideas can be dangerous and this has always been the case throughout human history we tend to have reached this very point of luxury today in first world democracies where we tend to consider free speech as the highest goal and right and that you know everything is okay with free speech free speech makes everything good but it was never that way never to get to this point human civilization had to be built on deep restrictions on speech and on ideas because some ideas are corrosive to the very fabric of society and they're threatening to social hierarchies and to the economy and other such things for example an idea like that that the dollar is imaginary seems like an innocent idea right it seems in fact so obvious that the dollar is imaginary i mean if you if you corner anybody with this question they will admit to you that the dollar is of course imaginary we imagine it's value and the only reason it has value is because we collectively agree that it has value and then we're going to use it but if for example one keeps questioning the idea of a dollar more and more and more and more until literally everybody in the world stops believing in the dollar that can crash the entire economy that's the power of one idea and spiritual ideas are a special class of ideas which are the the trickiest in a sense they're the trickiest precisely because as we've talked about in the past a lot of times the human psyche all that it's doing as part of its survival function is that it is constructing various worldviews and perspectives and ideologies taking on various beliefs and it's using these to navigate its way in the world that those ideas shape how you see reality and how you interact with people animals things family members how you view your life whether you even believe your life is worth living this is all based upon ideas as soon as you get the idea that your life is no longer worth living that's the doorway for you to suicide and 40 000 people in america do that every year so ideas are very very powerful especially your ideas about yourself and especially your ideas about the structure of reality and so the problem though is that when you start to get closer to truth by deconstructing various fantasies and illusions and ideas what happens is that the ego gets very threatened and so there's pressure put upon the ego the closer it gets to truth to squirm away and to come up with some sort of fantasy or illusion or deception to again cloak itself in more ideas that's what the mind is doing that's how the mind survives and it had to be this way for you to be sitting here listening to me otherwise you'd be dead and i'd be dead if you and i and our ancestors for the last 100 generations were not like this so we're all like this nobody is immune to this so the problem fundamentally is this how do you teach deep truths about spirituality without people misconstruing it or weaponizing it or demonizing it or going into ideology belief worship messiah complexes spiritual ego and you know taking it too far in that direction because there's there's a problem with both sides on this side you have extreme skepticism and cynicism and sort of demonization so these are sort of like the people who don't like the ideas at all to begin with their minds are so closed that they just find any excuse imaginable to attack the ideas as false they smear they demonize whatever they can even do violence that's sort of the skeptical end of the spectrum and a lot of times the most skeptical people of spiritual ideas are the scientific and the atheistic and the rationalist people so you create enemies out of them when you teach this stuff uh but then there is uh the other end of the spectrum which is people who who love the ideas so much they get so enamored with the ideas that they stop thinking critically they lose common sense and they start to turn it into an ideology and they become cult-like about it they start to worship the teacher or the guru they hang on every word and then from that all sorts of problems can happen but that's not all the risks and dangers in a sense those are easy to control the stuff that's really difficult to control is that when you have people starting to engage in large numbers in serious spiritual work by doing meditation yoga psychedelics vision quests shamanic breathing exercises even stuff like going out and camping in nature i mean like look if i give you some advice like you know hey i went on a on a camping trip into the wilderness and i just sat around there all day and meditated and had a great time and i became peaceful and very spiritual i felt one with the universe you know out there in the in the forest and then you go try to emulate that and do it i mean that's in general that's great advice right you should be out nature more great advice but what if you go out there and a rattlesnake bites you what if there's a bear and you're not prepared what if there are wolves what if you get bitten by a spider what if a tick with some sort of disease bites you and infects you right so there's there's a lot of ways you could screw up your camping trip what if you get lost in the woods what if you get snowed in and run out of food and water you could die up there on in the mountains in the forest if you don't know what you're doing what if you're hiking up there and you break your leg or your ankle twist it somehow and you don't have any help what do you do well yeah there's dangers with doing that and you see it's difficult to give any kind of advice without without like over qualifying all the dangers because if you give the advice for a million people to go camping over the weekend uh a few of them are gonna break their ankles a few of them are gonna run into bears a few of them are gonna get bitten by snakes and god knows what else happens up there and of course i'm very well aware of this when it comes to doing meditation and self-inquiry and various kinds of spiritual work which is why i have those two videos i have a video called the dark side of meditation where i talk about all the downsides of meditation that normally you don't hear about very much from spiritual teachers and uh i talk about uh in my other episode the dangers of spiritual work i talk about many of the other kinds of dangers of spiritual work not just with meditation you see so actually a lot of people who get into spirituality are not aware of the risks of spirituality there's quite a lot of risks and in fact it would take a couple of hours to articulate all the risks and even if that was done you would still likely fall into these traps because it's not enough just to hear them really you don't appreciate their significance and depth until you're in the thick of it i want to share some of these with you here i mean i've shared them in the past but i want to share some more poignant stories because i really want to get it through to you because one of my biggest concerns is that my teachings are not corrupted or misused or abused in some way this is not just something new that i've adopted yesterday this is something that if you uh if you're a long-time listener of mine you should be aware this is something i've been doing for years now perhaps not as well as i as i could do and recent events are now getting me to think much deeper about what are all the precautions and safeguards that i could put into place within reason uh you know to reduce harm because the general rule with my teachings is this right like if you're ever confused here's the general rule and i think i've said this in the past as well is that if you're applying my teachings and that is leading you towards something that is harmful or leading to to your own suffering and suffering of others or endangering yourself and others especially physical bodily harm then you should immediately stop and ask yourself wait a minute why would leo teach that and you should recognize that ah maybe that's not what he taught maybe i'm misunderstanding something or i'm misapplying something because it doesn't make sense that leo would teach that these teachings are about improving the quality of your life fundamentally so if these teachings are not improving the quality of your life that's a immediate common sense sort of litmus test that you get to use to realize that either this teaching is not right for you you're misapplying it you're applying it at the wrong time in your life in the wrong way in the wrong place you misunderstood something about it you got to change how you're applying it or maybe just this particular technique is not right for you you need a different technique common sense common sense basic common sense is absolutely required in doing spiritual work but that's not enough common sense is not enough you also need care and you need intelligence and wisdom you need the ability to see how your own mind is fooling you when it is you need to have awareness of different traps that people commonly fall into in this work so within spirituality there's a a phrase actually coined i think it's by stan groff if he didn't coin it he popularized it it's called a spiritual emergency spiritual emergency uh stan groff teaches holotropic breathing he's a psychiatrist he's written many books upon various problems that are encountered with people who undergo serious deep spiritual purification work he was also an early pioneer of lsd research back in the 1950s before it was banned and so he's been working with with with people for his entire career for like 50 years either through psychedelics or through sort of this shamanic breathing method in workshops and so forth and uh and basically what happens is that quite a few people who who do serious spiritual work will have these spiritual emergencies what is a spiritual emergency it's when basically you sort of deconstruct the mind so much that your reality starts to melt and you're not sure what's up and down anymore and then you get very emotional you get very confused maybe you have a mental illness and that feeds into it and makes it even worse uh or maybe you have some sort of trauma from your childhood that bubbles up and now is making you irrational and so you start to behave in confused and paranoid ways and and you're not sure what's happening to you maybe you're starting to experience mystical visions for example from doing lots of meditative work or breathing work or whatever and then you're not sure how to interpret those visions or what they mean these visions can be demonic in nature if your mind skews in that in that direction and so on and so there are so many different possible permutations see the difficulty is accounting for all those possible permutations i've been for example on meditation retreats where i had a meditation partner we would you know we would partner up i had a meditation partner i remember on one retreat it was sort of a classic 10-day vipassana retreat and we you know we were just chatting about he told me he was going to this retreat for the last 10 years and i was kind of impressed that was my first time there he was going there for 10 years in a row and i sort of asked him like well what were your experiences early on like and he said like man you know on some retreats on some years i would go so deep into the meditation that like stuff started happening to me i thought i was losing my mind in the middle of the retreat i had to actually like leave the retreat and physically pay for a taxi to drive me to the nearest bookstore into their like psychotherapy section i would just sit in that aisle for the whole day and just read books on you know psychotherapy conditions to try to explain what was happening with me from all this meditating i don't know exactly what was happening to him he had some kind of visions or you know hallucinations or whatever and he was starting to feel like he's losing his mind his his reality was collapsing around him and he wasn't handling it very well because he was sort of like a normie he didn't have a very good foundation theoretical foundation for what could happen and then and then so that happened and then you know he got over it and in that case he was successful but that could also turn out very negatively he could for example after his meditation retreat is over you know and he's in that very fragile state he could end up going back home and then um you know shooting himself in the head because he doesn't know how to handle it he doesn't know what's happening and he's spiraling out of control and maybe he has a sort of a a borderline mental disorder that he didn't even realize he had it was triggered by the you know intense meditation and that happens i'll give you another example uh i was at another retreat it was like a consciousness workshop that i was at some years ago and i specifically because i you know i'm a teacher of this stuff so i was very curious i asked the facilitator he was sort of a master you know enlightened master i asked him um you never talk about this but like i mean you've you've taught for like 40 years you've taught awakening and enlightenment and no self and these sorts of things you know very very advanced stuff and i'm just curious in all these years of running these workshops have you ever had anybody like lose their mind or lose their [ __ ] or you know something bad happen and he kind of looked at me rather dismissively and kind of flippantly and he just kind of said no i was i was rather surprised now this wasn't a teacher who taught like hundreds of thousands of people he taught in very small groups and most of his clients are rather advanced elite clients they pay a lot of money to go there so that weeds out a lot of the riff raff and the crazy people um but even so i was surprised because other spiritual teachers i talked to they do talk about these sorts of like edge cases where things go horribly wrong and but later later i actually like a year or two later i talked to one of the one of this facilitator's assistants i talked to one of his assistants and just to kind of like you know get a little bit of behind-the-scenes scoop of you know what what happens what goes on there and then the assistant told me oh like oh yeah one yeah i asked him like you guys ever get like crazy people because you know i'm like sometimes i get crazy people like emailing me and stuff do you ever do i can't believe you guys don't get that and he's like oh yeah actually we uh just the other year we had we had someone come to our workshop and and then when i looked in his eyes i could just tell he wasn't all there and i'm like wait a minute he wasn't all there what does that mean and he's like well well he was basically like a psychotic i'm like psychotic what happened and then he's like well as we went deeper it was like a week-long workshop as we went deeper and deeper into this workshop um the the person just became more erratic and more erratic and uncontrollable in their behavior to the point where you could look at him and try to like communicate with him but you could see it wasn't registering in his eyes he was off like living in his own reality and i said well what did you guys do and he said well eventually we just had to call the police called the police they they came over and just took him away they didn't like arrest him but uh just you know um basically he he had they had to evacu evict him from the workshop and then and then what happened after that well the police just kind of drove him off i guess back home or somewhere wherever he came from yeah that kind of stuff happens another example i'll cite to you is um there's these enlightenment intensives i've done several of them three or four different ones around the country around the world um of these enlightenment intensives and there was this one interesting anecdote i was talking to one of the facilitators of this enlightenment intensive and just kind of picking his brain about you know what kind of crazy stuff happens at these intensives they're called intensives because they're they're [ __ ] intense people lose their [ __ ] at these intentions they start to yell and scream i've personally experienced this where like you're in a you're in this quiet intensive it's like it's almost like a meditation retreat and then somebody just stands up with this violent almost homicidal rage and just starts yelling and like throwing [ __ ] across the room because they were they were doing some deep self inquiry you know that came up some trauma came up or somewhat of some rage came up whatever and then they encourage you to not to hold that back but to actually express it in a safe in a safe way but it can also get out of hand uh like in one of these intensives the facilitator told me that uh uh you know he was you know the facilitators are supposed to look after everybody in the intensive you know there's like usually 30 50 people at an intensive you know people everyone's doing their own thing it's sort of like herding cats and so the facilitator you know he was hurting the cats and doing all this stuff and then there's like lunch time and so lunch time comes along and everybody sits down at the dinner tables or the lunch tables and they're they're eating their lunch ordering their food and then he notices this one lady who was just kind of quiet the whole day and you know he he he kind of saw that there was something weird about her he was kind of keeping an eye on her the whole day but he notices that you know she's just got this like stole stone cold look on her face and and and he sees her like in the corner of his eye he sees her walking into the kitchen the back of the kitchen where you know students aren't supposed to go that's just for the staff and then he just kind of gets curious and he walks back there just to check up on her see maybe she took a wrong turn somewhere and then he sees her and she's standing there with she takes a a giant chef's knife from the uh from the kitchen you know the kitchen you know prep area there where the chefs were making the food for everybody she takes that knife and then and she's walking out out towards the kitchen area and he just kind of asks her what like hey what are you doing what do you think you're doing with that knife and she says i'm gonna go stab somebody and she names the person she's gonna go stab and she just says it very calmly like i'm going to go stab this person very commonly as though nothing is happening she's sort of like in a trans like a zombie like trans and so the facilitators you know he was very good they they train you if you're a good facilitator you don't you don't like fly into a rage you stay calm and he just said no you don't want to do that here give me the knife hand me the knife you know she refused for a minute and he's like he's like hand me the knife you don't need the knife she handed him the knife and he's like okay now go back go back in the kitchen area and sit down and eat your dinner or your lunch and that's it that's it that was the whole story so what does all this mean what this means is that spirituality has inherent dangers to it it's not easy work and honestly many people are not suited for this work because their minds are unstable their lives are unstable they can't even handle the basics of life like keeping a job or paying their bills or not being addicted to booze and whatever else and then they get into serious spiritual work and they get in way over their head and they also probably lack the theoretical foundation because honestly how many people have enough time and patience and wherewithal to sit through 300 hours of my talks not many and i would say that even if you did sit through 300 hours of my talks it would not be enough to cover all of the edge cases all of the possibilities you would really need to also listen to other teachers read a bunch of books like on my book list watch a bunch of other videos you know attend workshops and go to retreats and do all this stuff and only then would you be in a position where you can sort of guide yourself down this path another story of a lady i've told this story in the past there's actually a book about this on my book list this lady who who was part of the transcendental meditation movement back in like the 1970s and she became one of their sort of teachers and facilitators and she became so advanced as a yogi uh and a meditator that she was invited to like the highest levels somewhere in europe in switzerland or some place where they would do these advanced yoga trainings with with the master yogi who you know who pioneered trends on transcendental meditation i don't remember his name yogi magesh or mageesh something like that i forget his name anyways um she became very advanced with the practices it came effortlessly to her but but this spiritual school at the time like transitional meditation they didn't give you a lot of theory they didn't tell you about what all the different states of meditation and yoga are what all the possibilities are they didn't really even explain what enlightenment was or awakening or no self or god they didn't explain any of this stuff really they just taught you a technique so she started doing this technique doing this technique and then and then she quit and she got married and years a few years passed she she had a child with her husband she got married she she even stopped meditating by that point she was sort of out of it but she did spend like five years there you know in europe meditating but then she came out of it and then and then she's just literally walking out of the bus at the bus stop doing her chores as you know a mother does and then suddenly she had an instant enlightenment where she lost all sense of self and she was completely dumb struck and paralyzed by this occurrence because she had no reference point for what it was she lost her sense of self entirely as though it never even existed and then she kind of came home to her husband and she's just telling him like i have no more sense of self and he's like what do you mean where to go what does that even mean to not have a sense of self right a normal person doesn't understand these things this was some time ago this was before youtube this was like back in the 80s or something i don't know um so there wasn't a lot of literature available about this she didn't have a lot of information and then so she struggled for he for years with the sense of no self she was terrified she she thought she was having some sort of mental disorder she started going to therapists and shrinks who also didn't understand what was happening to her they didn't know what awakening was they didn't know what no self was they didn't understand what yoga and meditation would do to a person uh you know advanced stages and so uh and yeah she she got depressed she got she had panic attacks every night she couldn't sleep she was stressed this went on for years for years and years and years and years until finally she accidentally ran into some kind of new therapist who had some sort of understanding of non-duality and awakening and was able to actually introduce her to some sort of spiritual master who then was able to explain to her like oh what you're going through this is just a these are just the early stages of classical you know buddhist awakening nothing to be worried about this is normal in fact it's a good thing that you lost your sense of self and that completely reframed everything that was happening for her and then she could be happy again it took her a while but she could be happy again um after a certain point people like to talk about eckhart tolle as though he's a sweet lovable innocent little man just sitting up there he's being so sweet to you telling you sweet little things this little little eckhart tolle german man but what people don't realize they don't connect these two simple dots using common sense is that the reason eckhart tolle is this sweet little innocent man sitting there before you now is because in his like early 30s or 40s i don't know how old he was the dude was massively suicidally depressive for years he was on the brink of killing himself the way he writes it as i remember it that he was basically to the point where he was gonna kill himself like today and then in his mind it's sort of something clicked and said like his mind said something like well either i'm going to kill myself today or i'm just going to completely surrender and stop resisting and then he just surrendered and stopped resisting and he had his awakening now people hear that and say oh well how lovely how wonderful and all that yeah it's lovely and wonderful but you don't know how it felt to go through years of the depression that led up to that and you have no idea how close he came to killing himself you see because um see for eckhart tolle now in retrospect you look at him you see his whole life it looks beautiful and wonderful and all this but i want you to try to imagine how many people there are in the world like eckhart tolle who have been depressed and suicidal for years and then they reach the point where they've had enough and that's it they're right on the break and then maybe they're gonna have their awakening but they don't and end up killing themselves with pills or with a gun or something and see you don't hear about those people nobody ever tells you about those people those people don't go on oprah winfrey and they don't write a book that sells 50 million copies and their face isn't all over youtube and everywhere else and they're not these sweet people they're [ __ ] dead or they're criminals or they're in an insane asylum and you never hear about them again these are some of the dark realities of spiritual work and it's important that you be aware of these also of course it's important that you understand that we shouldn't fear monger about spiritual work so even though there are these rare edge cases and things can go horribly wrong things can go horribly wrong with almost anything if you do it enough things can go horribly wrong with airplane travel with car travel with marriages with relationships with sex with business with investing in wall street things can go terribly wrong it's just that these tend to be more socially acceptable and they're not threatening to the ego therefore there's no incentive to play up when there's this kind of screw-up see when an airplane crashes it's tragic people you know mourn the loss but we quickly move on because there's no incentive for the ego mind to latch onto they say ah you see airplanes are evil look how bad i told you how bad it was flying in airplanes is a cult people in a cult flying airplanes are [ __ ] crazy that's what's really going on see there's no incentive for the ordinary mind to do that with airplanes because airplanes don't threaten the ordinary mind but with spiritual teachings there is that incentive and so the mind becomes very selective in how it cherry picks its data and what it emphasizes and what it doesn't now even though i tell you all this it might sound like it's some kind of excuse it's not an excuse and i'm very much committed to sharing honestly with you these sorts of edge cases and other traps and helping you to avoid them and honestly many of them can be avoided simply through awareness of them and discussions like these the problem is how do i make sure that everybody who watches my content listens to this episode and watches it all the way through again the more detailed i get the longer the video runs the fewer people will watch it and also many people in fact some of the craziest and most reckless people they're not concerned about safety so when they hear some disclaimer from me or they see a video from me which is sort of safety oriented are they going to listen is a criminal going to listen to my warnings about not turning these ideas into some sort of justification for his criminal actions for example you've heard me say in the past that morality is absolutely relative there is no right and wrong what is considered criminal and legal and illegal these are relative social constructions they are that's the truth now someone hears that and says ah okay so that means leo says that i can go rob a bank and it's not bad yeah it's not bad in any absolute sense but you have to consider the consequences see uh what are the consequences of you doing that first of all what i said the truth has no prescription to it it's non-prescriptive it's not normative and this is a general point about any truth all truth is non-prescriptive what that means is regardless of what is true what you do about it that's on you that's your responsibility you can't derive an ought from an is so just because robbing a bank is socially constructed and relative does not give you license to rob a bank nor does it excuse you from the consequences of your actions when you rob a bank god is not going to punish you but your fellow humans will you see you're not punished by some sort of external rule or moral system which tells you that something you're doing is bad you're punished by the action itself when you cheat lie steal kill rape do violence to when you manipulate exploit corrupt when you're doing those things when you're being selfish there's a natural consequence that comes from being selfish it doesn't come from god it's challenging for me to preempt and to pre-envision every way in which people can misconstrue and misinterpret what i say i try to address many common traps but there are many extreme edge cases which don't even enter my mind because i'm not even that creative most of the time for example it never even occurred to me that someone might get the idea that jumping off a bridge is a legitimate spiritual technique because the way my mind works that's so [ __ ] stupid that it would almost be an insult to my own intelligence and to the intelligence of my audience to be mentioning in a video that you shouldn't jump off a bridge as a spiritual technique but hey apparently some people find that a valid spiritual technique i often see all my forum people coming up with just stupid ideas for for doing things and i can't personally monitor all of it for example i remember one time i caught a guy on my forum who sort of came up with this technique of of uh i guess his baptism um so he would fill his bathtub and he would like put ice in it and stuff like ice cold water and then he would attempt to like drown himself in that ice cold water to the point where he was like totally out of air so when i saw that i mean obviously obviously that's dangerous and then he was trying to like promote this as a technique to other people and you know i contacted him and i told him like i mean you're doing some crazy stuff there in a very hardcore in a certain sense that's admirable that you're willing to go to these lengths to you know to awaken yourself or to i don't know what you're trying to prove there um but uh but like we can't have this as a technique for the rest of the people on the forum people get crazy ideas people get desperate and the the real difficulty here is that the mind is so constructed that it can literally take any truth or any teaching and twist it and distort it into its polar opposite very very easily it almost takes no effort for the mind to do this for example like you might say well leo but aren't all these problems just showcasing the fact that new age spirituality whatever you teach let's say it's new way of spirituality that this is all this is all sort of newfangled unexplored territories all dangerous stuff that's why new age stuff is dangerous so you should go go to the classical religions that's where it's safe in the classics in the classics you know christianity catholicism judaism buddhism islam but see this is this is a this misunderstands the depth of the problem you see an ignorant mind will find a way to make almost anything dangerous and the amount of people who are actually killed as the result of christianity catholicism islam and other religions is way more than new age spirituality if that's what you want to call what i teach although i myself wouldn't call it that um new age stuff is actually something separate and i'm not i'm not a big fan of the new age for you rationalists and atheists and debunkers in the audience i'm not a new ager i have many critiques of new age thinking and there's many problems with it but also they get some stuff right so it's a mixed bag but um but i mean really think about this you think christianity is so safe it only seems safe because it's culturally accepted and just normalized in the same way as that airplane example it's not actually safe uh think about how many people commit suicide because they have homosexual urges but christianity tells them that homosexuality is a sin and these people they try and they try and they try to be heterosexual you know they do these sort of conversion therapy on themselves and it doesn't work because they're just gay but they can't admit it to themselves so first of all they're living with years and years of guilt and it's corroding their mind and ruining their life millions of people like this around the world exist but that's just you know never mind that kind of suffering which goes on for years and years and years and then some percentage of those people actually kill themselves maybe one percent but since there are so many christians and catholics who believe this stuff seriously one percent of all those is still going to be thousands of people maybe they they have some sort of gay affair because they were trying to suppress their you know sexual urges they have a gay affair and then their family finds out that they that they had this fair then they can't live with that shame and they kill themselves same thing in islam too it's probably even worse than islam for example the catholic church tells you that if you if you repent your sins to god god will forgive you and you will go to heaven sounds like innocent advice right what what could i mean beautiful beautiful loving advice this is advice from jesus right this is what jesus taught what could be wrong with this well so does that mean that if i murder my my neighbor and rape his wife and then i go to confessional and confess it to the to the priest he forgives me god forgives me i get to heaven right is that what that means you see if i have the kind of mind that thinks that way i can take that crit the most powerful and beautiful of christian teachings and messages christ's message of forgiveness and redemption and heaven for for all and i can abuse that into a justification to rape my neighbor's wife because i will be forgiven and god doesn't judge and everyone who repents even the worst sinner is saved or how about let's say i've been a good person my whole life and then what does the christian church tell me if i've been a good person my whole life and i die in a car accident i'm going to heaven right so i go i ask my priest hey you know father i've been a good person no i've gone to church i've been faithful to my wife i've been a good provider for my kids what if i die in a car accident tomorrow am i going to heaven he's going to say of course you are son okay and then i say to myself you know i walk away from me and i say okay so that means that if i jump off a bridge i'm going to heaven why wait why wait for the car accident why wait for my life to end why don't i just jump off a bridge i'm going to heaven after all it's heaven it's beautiful up there why would i want to stay in this earth here i would be an idiot not to go to heaven and so i go jump off a bridge you see even very innocent teachings can be horribly abused and twisted because that's the mechanism of the ego mind it can twist anything into whatever it wants it's constructing reality it's constructing fictions and illusions it's justifying whatever it wants to itself it can justify murder rape terrorism suicide bombings hatred racism slavery all of these things have been justified using spirituality and religion for over 2000 years so now here is where the scientifically minded rationally minded atheistically minded person comes in and says ah leo well you're just proving our point is that all of this spiritual new age old age religious mumbo-jumbo all of it is [ __ ] all of it leads to all sorts of evil so let's just throw it all away okay let's do that and then what do you got what do you got what do you replace that with you replace it with materialism reductionism scientism and i don't mean just materialism in the sort of atomic realm i mean materialism in the because there's a there's a going to be a there's going to be now a pragmatism that comes along with this and now your whole life is just about running around earning money also no moral code no ethical code you don't believe in ethics you just believe in maximizing profit and doing whatever you can get away with practically speaking whatever technology you can build let's build that technology there's no limits on what technology you're willing to build who you're willing to sell it to uh and so you've got this capitalistic materialistic system very pragmatic no no spirit no soul to anything this means you can cheat on people you can be sexually promiscuous you can objectify the opposite sex you can use them manipulate them exploit them you can start to experiment with drugs recreational drugs and pornography and all this stuff and alcohol so all of the classic stage orange excesses and so you go into that for five or ten years and what happens you become even more suicidal even more depressed than if you were classically religious or new age and then you kill yourself the majority of suicides don't actually happen from religion they they happen from a lack of meaning a lack of purpose a sort of a hopelessness a nihilism that people get drawn into a sort of a hollow materialism where you just acquire more and more and more wealth and then eventually you realize that there's no amount of wealth in the world that will make you happy and then you end up in a situation like anthony bournein or avicii both of whom killed themselves some years back so first of all you should recognize that the the problem of suicide is a very general problem it is not confined to religion or to spirituality or to the new age it's a it's a very broad problem next you should recognize that actually religion and spirituality when done properly and responsibly saves thousands of people from suicide it does because it gives people a sense of direction in their life it saves a lot of drug addicts from overdosing you know that's that's one of the most effective ways to save a drug addict from overdosing because most drug addicts they're sort of spironic stage red what comes after red blue so many drug addicts and actually criminals too for that matter you know violent criminals if they can get reformed and you know it's rare but it does happen some percentage of these people maybe five ten percent they do end up reforming themselves and becoming you know well functioning members of society what happens is that they move up from from red to stage blue and what that means is that they find god they find religion now it's not a very advanced you know kind of thing that i teach it's it's a kind of a crude dogmatic religion but just the fact that they start to go go to church they're part of a community they have some rules to follow you know some simple basics they do the jordan peterson thing that gives them a sense of direction and grounding in their life and allows them to kick the addiction the opioids the heroin the meth have a family saves thousands of lives and also the same dynamic sort of exists on the transition between orange and green a lot of orange people they dry themselves crazy with their endless materialistic pursuits and then when they you know when that endeavor exhausts itself and they get no satisfaction then they start looking towards you know what else is there and then they find some sort of new agey stage green spirituality some meditation some yoga practice some vipassana retreat they go to maybe some psychedelics you know then maybe they start micro dosing some mushrooms some lsd it starts to help them a lot of people cure their depression and their anxiety with with mushrooms there's actually going to be approval clinical fda approval of mushrooms and mdma soon for treating depression ptsd anxiety other such disorders legitimate therapeutic uses the science behind this is undeniable at this point absolutely undeniable it works it's very effective it works better than antidepressants and other things you know ketamine very effective for treating depression so this is we're on the cutting edge of this now i'm actually very excited about this these possibilities for psychedelics um so there's that transition from orange to stage green where at stage green you do open yourself up from the rationalism and the scientism and the materialism to something higher something more spiritual and you know maybe you smoke some wheat or whatever and you have a little bit of insight opens your mind opens your heart a bit and uh and then that can save you from from suicide and depression too because again you find something higher so there's a sort of a isomorphism between the transition from stage red to blue and from orange to green and personally i get emails from people quite often who tell me that they were suicidal then they you know were desperately searching on youtube found my content started listening and then now they're free of that they're free of their depression their their anxiety they have a sense of direction in their life and that literally actualize or save their lives and it's very rewarding to to receive those emails thank you for sending me those i've i've gotten dozens of those over the i don't even check my emails that much if i check them all there would probably be hundreds of them like that now of course i also get emails from from crazy people i do get sometimes emails uh from people who say that you know they started going down this rabbit hole and now you know their life is less stable than it used to be they're less happy than they used to be they're suffering more well part of that of course is just the nature of the spiritual journey there has to be a cost you must figure there has to be a cause for awakening because if there wasn't everyone would be awake what is that cost that cost is this massive dip of of nihilism and spiritual turmoil that you go through in order to finally break through and i wish i could say that everybody you know is sort of everyone gets a happy ending and everyone goes through the dip and then just comes out the other end all happy and awakened but that's of course not the case some people will go into this dip of nihilism and it'll spiral out of control and they're going to end up in a mental institution or they're going to make some very bad reckless choices in their life or in the worst case scenario they'll kill themselves how do you prevent that what do i say to prevent that it's challenging because you're sort of you're damned if you're doing damned if you don't if you stop teaching then the net result of that is that actually that hurts more people because the teachings help more people than they hurt significantly more orders of magnitude more but there's always those few edge cases that make you wonder what could be done to make the teachings more robust more clear more foolproof one of the things i want to do is i want to i want to make people more aware of the what they're getting themselves into so one of the problems is that sort of like youngsters come along they don't have any foundation in their life and then they they go down this rabbit hole of awakening and they start learning about these advanced insights that i share and honestly my work is designed to be advanced this is not entry-level work it's advanced advanced stuff i talk about stuff that's very psychologically threatening especially some of the latest stuff i've been talking about and it can get misunderstood by people who just adopt it as a belief system and don't have a direct consciousness of it which is why grounding all these insights in direct experience is so crucial and i keep stressing that all the time but no matter how much i say it people are going to take it as an ideology anyways but one thing that i will do going forward is i will try to stress and disclaim more when a topic that i'm talking about is sort of an advanced topic and that it can it can it has the potential to destabilize your mind part of the challenge for me is that see you see the way my my mind you probably should understand this by now but my mind doesn't work like a normal mind my mind actually enjoys it literally enjoys the process of deconstructing reality to me it gives me pleasure to do this now not always i i experience plenty of suffering and sometimes i hate it sometimes i get an insight that you know bothers me um and i struggle to integrate it that does happen to me but in general i enjoy deconstructing reality but that's not all people and actually it's taken me a long time of teaching and getting feedback to start to understand that about others see part of the part of the biggest challenges of being a human is that whatever you are whatever your strengths are you just tend to assume that everyone has that strength you just sort of assume that that's just a innate human ability for example my strength of being radically open-minded that's like an innate ability that i have that i see that it took me many decades of experience to realize that most people don't have that and so i have to take that into account when speaking to them well well likewise with this idea of deconstructing the mind i love this idea i'm very passionate about this idea this is what i teach i will continue to teach it because that's my area of expertise and where i can help people the most i feel but it's important you understand that deconstructing the mind is a very long and deep slippery slope and so on the surface many of my episodes will start to help you deconstruct the mind here at the beginning of the slippery slope but then you're gonna start sliding down and you're gonna if you take it seriously you're gonna deconstruct more and more and more and then once you sort of get to the to the lower third of the slope that's where you have to be careful because you can deconstruct your mind in a sort of a dangerous way what do i mean by that well let me give you an example a good example is with fear you know i have episodes for example that talk about how fear is an illusion now is that true yes in the absolute sense all fear is illusion and ultimately the fear of death is illusion um and the reason i say that is because it's true and my priority is to say what's true but the problem is that people can misinterpret that because someone could say well if all death is illusion then i got nothing to fear so why would i inhibit myself in any way from doing anything so for example why should i worry about pressing the the the brake pedal on my car in fact why don't i just saw the pedal off my car i don't need a brake pedal only cowards press the brake pedal when they're driving i only need a gas pedal and then if i tell you no no you need a pedal you should have a pedal a brake pedal on your car you might respond to me as like but leo you told me fear is an illusion what are you afraid of leo what are you afraid is gonna happen you afraid i'm gonna crash oh that's ego that's ego in you leo it's only the ego that's afraid you see a lack of basic intelligence and common sense will get you into a lot of trouble very quickly with this work the things i say are advanced they're nuanced they require oftentimes years of contemplation on a single insight to really understand it for example the insight that self and other are the same the self other distinction is the same you can collapse that distinction that's something i've talked about that's a that's a core tenet of non-duality there cannot be a distinction between self and other if there is you've got a duality so now when you say that in the abstract of people you can say it in sort of an innocent sense where people hear it and they kind of a little bit understand it and then they say oh yeah okay i accept it i buy it makes sense to me but they have no idea how radical that insight is they're not conscious of that they're not conscious that self and other is a conceptual boundary within one's mind and then see they hear a lot of other sort of more soft neo-invited teachers teaching this same truth but in a very sort of casual milk toast way they hear it and it just it's all it sounds all lovely and beautiful but then oftentimes when i teach it and i go really deep on it i will go so deep on it that i will really make you feel the solipsism of it and this is where a lot of people struggle is with the solipsism of it because then at some point it hits you that wait a minute if there's no difference between self and other that very much seems like i'm everything and this is all that there is and it's solipsism and solid system is bad right and then we go down that whole road um and i'm not prepared to talk about solipsism that's a separate topic i want to shoot a video on i've been planning that video for a while now to address it in detail i'm not going to address it here my point though is that many of these insights are very challenging to integrate and to accept fully when you get to the rock bottom of it whereas on the surface it seems nice and and wonderful when you really feel it it's a totally different animal like i remember the first time that i became conscious like really deeply conscious that there is no boundary between me and anybody else and when that happened i i freaked out i couldn't believe what i realized i i it was so radical because what happened there for me was that i literally became conscious that my parents were imaginary when i became conscious that my parents were imaginary it threw me for such a loop it was such a mind [ __ ] that it it took me a few days of sort of just like sitting there like that in disbelief wondering like was that did i get that right i can't it can't possibly be right i must be mistaken but then the more i thought about it the more i realized i'm not mistaken it's just something that's so radical like i need to figure out how to how to integrate this and i'm not sure how it even got to the point where i i i actually uh i messaged one of the moderators on my forum who who's conscious of these sorts of things just just to get some some input and some feedback about that just to kind of check myself you know am i going crazy or not um and that's me i have a i have a rather unique and not to brag but i have a rather rather strong mind strong in the sense that like i love these kinds of insights to me when i realized that my parents were imaginary on the one hand it's like kind of horrific to realize that on the other hand it's the greatest joy it really depends on how you look at it and i can see it both ways in fact i do um and you know now i love it now i love it it's good um but you know again that's me like see it's hard for me to get into your mind and to see how you would react to that i imagine that most of you would react quite badly to that uh it might throw your life into disarray you might even feel like you're losing your mind you might feel like you're going crazy a bit and i've been there like i mean i've i've taken psychedelics that that sent me into a into a full-blown madness full-blown man like i know what madness feels like uh i've been there it's a very good experience in retrospect now you don't want to be stuck there um and i integrated it but how many of you are going to be able to integrate it or not i don't know so in these kinds of situations i want to give more warning you know pre pre warning for folk that this is sort of like deep waters where you could get yourself into trouble and i've done that a lot with psychedelics you know i talked positively about psychedelics a lot but actually before this incident happened with the forum i actually i already recorded i have i have in my render pipeline right now i have a episode about the dangers of psychedelics where i go through all of the risks and dangers of psychedelics very methodically um because i was looking i i'm always looking on my forum for instances where people are misusing psychedelics because i'm i'm very touchy about that because to me one of the most important things about psychedelics is precisely because they're so [ __ ] powerful and so important as a technology that the misuse of them this is one of the greatest this is one of the greatest tragedies and problems that we that we have collectively that needs to be solved so for me anytime i see somebody on the forum misusing psychedelics even something as simple as like not weighing a dose just eyeballing it i'll generally you know chime in there and i'll all sort of get into space about it i'll make him feel bad for doing that but leo isn't everything good didn't you say everything is good and perfect in the world why is anything bad of course everything is good and perfect in the absolute sense but in the relative sense in the survival sense if you care about surviving then you have to ask yourself how do you want to survive do you want to survive in a in a society that's crazy and chaotic and people are slitting each other's throats or do you want to survive in a comfortable society that treats you so decently see so it very much matters and it has always mattered to me the practical effect and influence of these teachings on ordinary people's lives that has always mattered to me and in fact you have to understand where i began i began this whole thing from personal development i was a personal development teacher i didn't even know about spirituality or awakening when i started this thing actualize that org eight years ago i learned along the way what you see with me is you see my own evolutionary process unfold in these talks and a lot of times what i'm sharing with you is insights that i've had recently and sometimes i'm figuring these insights out and you have to understand that i am fallible i don't always say the right things sometimes i speak just because i'm sloppy sometimes i misstate a factual statement here there on occasion um sometimes i misanalyze the situation i get it wrong sometimes i have an insight but the insight isn't fully baked it needs more time to bake it'll take two more years to bake it but i still share it with you because it's part of my process and because i expect you to be verifying all these things for yourselves as i've said multiple times and as as i stressed in my three-part series called self-deception that's one of the most important series i have is the three-part self-deception series it really addresses a lot of these straps here and really the core issue that we're talking about which is self-deception because that's how you get yourself into trouble is through self-deception uh i said at the end of that series that i am not immune to self-deception nobody is immune to self-deception i don't care how awake you are how enlightened you are you're not immune to self-deception i've seen even the the most respected of enlightened masters deceiving themselves in one way or another i've seen it it happens trust me you can trust me on that um and if you don't want to double check it for yourself like you should with anything i say so an important safety feature of all of actualize.org is this idea that you have to verify the things that are said to you through your own direct experience i don't know how many times i can repeat that anymore it's tiring to repeat it that's part of the problem with these disclaimers it gets tiring to say them and then those people who are smart and wise and conscious they get tired of hearing them because they don't need it said because it's obvious but the safety feature is that you gotta run it through your own direct experience and verify and cross reference these things with other teachers teachings books and so forth to make sure that you're interpreting things correctly you have the right view and if your view is leading you down a road which is socially irresponsible which is going to cause social damage damage to your family to your loved ones to yourself to your bank account to your health then that's a clear sign to you that you're misunderstanding something there's nothing about these teachings which should be causing anybody physical harm or damage and when i talk about awakening and i talk about god and i talk about love and i talk about death when i talk about ego death this does not mean any kind of physical harm to your body or to anybody else this is not a license for suicide obviously i want to shoot a separate episode about suicide and people who are suicidal there's there's a lot that i could say on that topic but for now what i'll say is that the entire point of awakening is to make you appreciate the beauty and gift of this life that you have this life is a gift all of my teachings are predicated upon the premise that you are conscious of the fact that your life is a precious gift and that it's because of this that you self-actualize it's because of this that you develop a life purpose it's because of this that you develop responsibility and discipline you see i don't teach you just how to transcend the self and and go into some sort of you know spiritual abyss a lot of my work is very practical and just teaches you the foundations of how to put your life together i teach about responsibility and open-mindedness and reading books and studying and doing spiritual practices and uh getting your finances in order having a life purpose being creative with your work relationship sexuality this is all positive life affirming stuff the reason we're interested in all this is to get you mastery a basic level of mastery with survival i talk about that i don't dismiss the importance of survival survival is important so long as you are interested in surviving and i assume you are and i am i'm not above survival in case that wasn't obvious at the very least because teaching can't be done without surviving spirituality cannot be taught without surviving and also because people aren't ready to learn spirituality unless they have at least the basics of their survival handled so the whole point of this work is first you have to recognize how amazing your life is most people don't recognize that they take their life for granted and that's why they don't self-actualize and they don't put a lot of work into their life you cannot put a lot of work into your life unless you really value it so why would you then squander it by jumping off a bridge when i talk about ego death we're talking about a conceptual death of the self not the body now you might say leo but doesn't nonduality mean that there's no difference between a conceptual death and a physical death because now you're drawing a line between concept and material stuff physical stuff and technically speaking from the absolute point of view there is no boundary between conceptual death and physical death in fact to be perfectly frank physical death does not exist it's purely imaginary but that only applies if you're ridiculously conscious and you don't care about survival you're not attached to survival now again some people will take this and they will misconstrue this and they will come up with an excuse to use this to justify their suicide and with regards to suicide i'll say this you know is suicide good is it bad should you do it what are what are leo's thoughts on this well first of all it doesn't really matter what my thoughts are what matters are what your thoughts are because whatever my thoughts are yours are going to actually determine whether you do it or not not mine but i'll share my thoughts with you anyways maybe it'll set your head straight my thoughts on it are that ultimately it doesn't matter in the absolute sense it doesn't matter if you want to end your life you can it's your choice it's not morally wrong in any sense and in fact if you were in deep enough suffering you would kill yourself any of us would if the suffering got deep enough i guarantee you'd kill yourself that's just a fact of life um but fortunately the majority of us will never be in that much suffering to do it um and the desire or even the thought just the mere thought of wanting to kill yourself already shows you that your mind is not pure there's something impure about your mind now if you're thinking to yourself well leo but if i kill myself i will reach the godhead sooner and faster and deeper i will become infinitely conscious i will merge into god with love and all this good stuff that you talk about isn't that true isn't that what you've said yes death is infinite love but this dream that you're in is also infinite love it's also god this is it here don't go looking for it somewhere else it's here in fact there's nowhere to go there's here even when you're thinking about your suicide that already is fantasy land you're fantasizing you're not grounded in the present moment in what's absolutely true and if you were you would have no need to kill yourself the thought wouldn't even arise you would be so enraptured and in love with the beauty and majesty of this present moment god is right here look at your hands look around you look at the trees look at the birds it's pure [ __ ] beauty where are you running off to where are you going to go to see what this is it the point of the work is to recontextualize all this as the absolute beauty that it is and then you can enjoy it there's no other purpose to life or to being than the enjoyment of it and by enjoyment of it i mean to love it see love is not something you enter into when you die although of course it is that but love is your love for what is here right here do you love this can you love this that's the challenge there's no challenge in loving everything when you're dead that happens automatically there's no challenge the challenge is precisely to figure out how to love this the stuff that is limited and difficult to love it's the thorn in your side that's difficult to love now if you say well leo but why i don't want to play this game why can't i just uh have it easy the easy way out well look in the end suicide is your prerogative as a living being nobody can ultimately stop you some people can tell you it's bad some people can tell you it doesn't matter some people can tell you it's not bad but you shouldn't do it for the sake of others or because you're being selfish or whatever but in the end you're going to do whatever you want to do and nobody has a right to tell you what to do so i'm not going to sit here and moralize to you about suicide i just want to point out to you that if you have a craving for it that itself you should notice is not a healthy impulse something is out of whack in your mind now if you're in really really deep suffering because you had some terrible chronic you know you're in a car crash and you broke your spine and now you're in miserable pain 24 7 that's a separate situation we can talk about that that that's almost like we can talk about that as like euthanasia and we can make some ethical points about the validity of doing suicide in in that situation and i'm not going to talk about that here for the majority of people who commit suicide that is not their situation for the majority of people what it is is that their mind is tricking them in some way and yes many people of course do suffer i totally acknowledge that but what you have to realize about the suffering is that your suffering comes and goes and it ebbs and flows on some days and i mean i'm not immune to this i've had suicidal thoughts before i'm not perfect um in fact in the last year if you've been following along with my health issues with my stomach i've had some i had a very tenacious gut infection in my stomach that has been very difficult to cure i've tried all sorts of antibiotics that have not worked um and i'm still trying to figure that out but it's caused me so much suffering and misery and pain over the last year and a half i've tried so many things i like i was at my wit's end with this thing i went to all these doctors and all this sort of stuff so much suffering it like it shot the quality of my life down from like if we say it was 100 now it's at like 20 and there were moments in that period where i was suffering so much with no hope in sight that i had suicidal thoughts and i would think to myself well if if if this keeps going i can't live like this because there's no way to enjoy life in this state but what you have to understand is that even when you hit those lows those are usually temporary lows and your mind will play a trick on you where it will get you to think like well it's going to be this way forever but then of course i know that it's not going to be this way forever so the key thing to remind yourself when you're in this kind of depressive mood is that first of all you make a commitment not to harm your body ever and to take good care of your body just making that commitment which i've recommended in the past in my is actualized or occult episode i talk about making a commitment not to harm your body on this journey it's a very important safeguard so make sure you do that you make that commitment um and then you just what you do is you sort of commit to suffering it out through life no matter how bad it gets and on some days it'll get really bad but what happens is that when you commit to suffering it out no matter what this is actually what purifies you and saves you and grows you later in life you will remember that those lowest points were some of the most important for your growth and for your spiritual work but i'm not gonna lie some days it'll be very difficult and your mind will try to fool you into thinking like it's never gonna get better and really when a person decides to commit suicide is that moment when they decide that there's no more hope there's no way this can be improved every avenue has been exhausted it's really i think only when you feel that way and you get yourself to believe that fiction it's then that you actually decide to commit suicide because as long as you maintain at least one avenue of hope one possibility you can try tomorrow to improve your situation one way that things might get better or turn around for you as long as you maintain that then you can keep going but if you lose all hope then you're as good as gone and on some days you will lose all hope and your mind will be so uncreative that you will not be able to imagine a better alternative or any alternative you're going to think you're stuck this way forever and that's what i want you to remember me telling you that it's just a temporary trick of your mind it's not true there's always something else you can try there's always some additional hope and therefore it's worth toughing it out because tomorrow your brain will reset your mind will reset you'll get it you'll catch a second wind you'll get a little bit of relief you'll get some more ideas you'll get some new people in your life who can help you or who can suggest new things to you you'll read a new book that'll have a new technique or whatever and then you'll come out of it and then that will let you appreciate life more really really appreciate what you have here you've been given this incredible unique opportunity to be yourself you're the only one who's like this in the universe in the entire universe you're the only one here who's like this like you exactly the way you are and the game of life is for you to figure out how to live that in a beautiful way in a way that is harmonious with the rest of what's here how to tap into your discover and tap into your special strengths and gifts and the unique contributions you can make to mankind it's very challenging sometimes life gets very very very challenging to a suicidal point that's why i want you to make a commitment to never physically harm your body in fact that's not even enough if you're following my work then you should know that my work is not just about maintaining your body but it's about improving your body health is very important you should be taking better health of care of your health and coming soon i will have some episodes about how to improve the health of your brain improve the health of your body cure gut problems like i've been dealing with i'll share that with you very strategies that i've discovered i've discovered a lot of stuff in the last year about nutrition and health and so forth these are all these are all important take care of your body take care of your health one of the things that i learned in the last year and a half suffering through this health problem that i had with my gut is how foundational health is to anything else you do in life a lot of times spiritual teachers will make you believe that like oh well health isn't so important as long as you're just awake enough you can you can power through any kind of health problem you won't suffer no i don't think so your health is ridiculously important and the only way you can have such a flippant attitude about your health is if you have good health and it's extremely easy to take health for granted when you have it and you've never lost it it's only when you start losing it like i have in the last year and a half that you really start to appreciate and become conscious of how foundational health is to everything including your consciousness including your consciousness that's the twisted paradox of consciousness is that on the one hand consciousness transcends the body on the other hand your consciousness is so limited by what is going on in your body if i give you a glass of mercury to drink and you drink that mercury your consciousness is going down the [ __ ] you are not going to be this this blissful happy uh super woke above it all person no your conscious will crash back down into a condensed state as that mercury leeches through your body and into your brain and disrupts the functioning of your neurotransmitters and neurons and all of that that it'll happen and all of that despite the fact that your brain is imaginary there's no contradiction because it's all consciousness so taking care of your brain health and your body health is very important and even your gut health you might think well the gut has nothing to do with consciousness oh yeah try going through what i went through in the last year and a half with my gut when you get some nasty bacteria in there and then every time you eat food that nasty bacteria releases toxins into your bloodstream through your gut and it feels like a anti-psychedelic psychedelic raises your consciousness you can feel it you know you take a tap of lsd and then 15 20 minutes later you can notice your consciousness is just elevating and it's beautiful well when you have a gut bacteria and then you eat some food it has exactly the opposite effect you take it and then you just notice rather than your consciousness rising you notice your thoughts start to get scrambled and chaotic and you get washed over with this wave of chemicals that are just like they feel toxic and you get brain fog and you can't concentrate and you can't meditate you can't do anything you can barely think straight and you're in pain that's what i went through for the last year on many days it was very humbling and very challenging so in general what i want you to understand is that this work is a lot more complex than you ever imagined and i feel like that's one of the hallmarks of what i teach is i teach the complexity of this work a lot of other teachers oversimplify this work now there's pros and cons to that of course there are negatives to to making everything too complex um but the reality is that life is infinitely complex survival is infinitely complex even spirituality is ridiculously more complex than you ever imagined if you truly start exploring it all of its different facets and so it's easy to get lost in that complexity that complexity is what allows your mind to fool itself because you think you got something figured out but actually later you realize you didn't you might think it's a good idea to jump off a bridge because it'll bring you closer to god but maybe that's not the right way to get closer to god so anyway going forward in the future i will be putting more disclaimers and warnings into my videos i haven't yet decided on what format that's going to take it might be right at the front of the video maybe towards the end of the video i don't know um i also have to think about putting it into the audios because people don't watch they listen you see so there's a lot of complexity here i'm we're definitely we're going through and we're changing all the disclaimers in the text boxes for the videos to make them more robust um we've already been doing that for for the last few weeks um and we're gonna kind of go back and and retool some of the old videos for that purpose um unfortunately youtube doesn't allow me to change my old videos if they did i would have changed a lot of stuff already a long time ago but they don't like allow me to insert slides or anything into into videos all i can do is just edit like the text descriptions um so there will be some of that coming forward in the future you can look forward to that but also i i will simply just be talking more about various traps and dangers and stressing them more like i said and pointing out where the advanced stuff is and where you can get go go wrong and maybe potentially harm yourself but also i want to say another thing here which i haven't touched upon yet which is that like i said very powerful and truthful teachings and wisdom has been demonized throughout all of human history and so one of the greatest things that concerns me here with this incident is that as tragic as the incident is there's also the consideration of the actualize our brand and i'm concerned that people will take this incident and twist it into some sort of weapon to discredit the brand and the teachings there are a lot of people out there who would love to do that because that's historically what is done with powerful and truthful teachings is that the ego mind the collective mind will look for any excuse they could find to to demonize it discredit it or weaponize something against it which is why it's very important to put it into proper context and so i've laid out a lot of that context here today so that anyone who's reasonable and objective can can weigh and understand the um the full complexity of the situation that we're dealing with here for example i know saad guru faced some [ __ ] when his wife committed mahasamadhi at least that's what he says his wife had a child she was a yogi she was in her early 30s good health and then just poof mahasamadi there were reports in the newspaper that assad guru killed his wife there are websites right now online you can go and type into google saad guru killed his wife and you'll find websites you'll find something like saadgurukilthiswife.com which will post news clippings and theories about how he killed her and how he lied and manipulated and this sort of stuff so um this is the kind of thing that i find very distasteful and that i am defensive about because it happens there are people out there who will smear in this way uh and a lot of times they just it's simply because they don't understand right so the things that i teach like try to imagine this from the point of view of somebody who's sort of like a normie who's a materialist who is an atheist who is a rationalist or whatever and uh they hate all this stuff and all these ideas are sort of an affront to their entire world view and they have no interest in any kind of spiritual stuff and they have no interesting kind of nuance about it in their mind they just know that all this stuff is just pure [ __ ] that some cult leader is spinning to earn money from gullible fools that's how they see me that's their view of reality that's how they see actualize.org and they're not conscious of that they don't really understand what they're doing or how their own mind is playing this trick on them they don't understand projection they don't understand self-deception they don't understand the limits of materialism they haven't had profound mystical experiences they don't believe they're even possible they just think that love and god is just some new age mumbo jumbo [ __ ] and this is all just about money and so of course when they see me and this work in that way then they can't help themselves but to go into some sort of attack mode and look for any kind of sort of gotcha and so uh that's that's virtually inevitable by the way with with most teachings spiritual teachings uh there was a you know there's actually um well everybody knows the story of christ um nailed to the cross but uh there was a there's also a similar story with the buddha where like there's a story in buddhism that that goes you know after the buddha became awakened and he was teaching people and he had like a little cult following going there of his loyal disciples there was like one one of his students or villagers or disciples i don't know who it was who was disgruntled with the buddha and you know thought that what the buddha was teaching was like all [ __ ] and stuff and then um and then the story goes he he unleashed there's like an elephant that was tied up there in the village he untied this elephant and unleashed it and kind of you know goaded the elephant onto the buddha to like run towards the buddha and trample him as the buddha was walking down the path um and then the elephant ran towards the buddha and the buddha just like put up his hand and the elephant eventually um stopped and bowed before him so um the only reason i bring that up not to compare myself to the buddha but just to say that um there's a there's always a tendency to suppress truth and to manipulate it to distort it to corrupt it to demonize it to outlaw it to discredit it because the job of the ego mind the job of the devil is to muddy the waters so much that ordinary people around him cannot distinguish truth from falsehood anymore in all the mud and they just equate truth and falsehood they throw their hands up and they say well it's just all a wash who really knows we don't really know what's true so let's follow this guy who happens to be the devil and then they follow the devil and he leads them off a cliff there are many ways to lead people off a cliff not just physically but there are much worse ways war capitalistic exploitation genocide ideological battles back and forth partisanship that lasts forever and leads to endless gridlock riots and protests and insurrections so what's to be done about all this is there a a solution there's no algorithmic solution to the truth falsehood problem the only way to distinguish truth from falsehood is through careful conscious investigation through personal experimentation through direct experience there's no algorithm for it it takes intelligence and there's no algorithm for safety either people often look for an algorithm for safety they say like well the ten commandments are like the algorithm for safety just stick with the ten commandments you'll be safe oh really will you be safe or will that lead to a genocide or a holy war you're not safe following some ten commandments because reality is far too complex for that and the dangers are far too complex for that see there's no commandment that says don't jump off a bridge so if you're foolish you might say well i follow the ten commandments there's no commandment telling me not to jump off a bridge so i guess it's okay by god's standards i guess i'm going to heaven you see there's no amount of rules you can invent no amount of algorithms that will prevent ignorant people from doing ignorant things the only way to cure ignorance is to cure ignorance and to do that you need consciousness which is what i'm trying to teach but for you to learn consciousness you can't just hang on my every word and trust what i say you have to do consciousness you have to be consciousness you have to be intelligent intelligent comes intelligence comes from being conscious and being conscious comes from studying your own mind and doing these practices carefully and only in this way by cultivating consciousness and intelligence will you then be able to avoid all the many land mines and traps that are out there for you in the spiritual and even in the material landscape there are plenty of material traps that people fall into all the time and the way you avoid those is by com by building up your consciousness and being more intelligent about how you go about things being more responsible and one of the things that i learned by doing this work and by going through these uh situations and uh scandals and so forth is that i'm also learning like how to be a leader as well so one thing i'm realizing is that it's it's it's quite challenging to be a leader there are many things as a leader like that i don't want to do or don't care about but then they're kind of thrust upon me that i have to start to care about otherwise i'm not being a good leader and then people don't want to follow so what this incident is teaching me is how to lead more responsibly more carefully and so you're going to see better leadership for me in the future as a result of this and honestly i'm still processing and deciding what this means and how i should change if anything about what i do and how i teach but what i definitely know is that the teachings are important and so i'm going to continue doing my teachings as i always have because i believe in this work and you know some people don't believe in this work and aren't interested in this work or or don't like the way in which i teach this work in which case i recommend you don't waste time don't waste your time you don't need to waste time hate watching me um just go go develop yourself in whatever way you want that works for you if it's a non-spiritual way do that if you want to do purely materialistic self-improvement go do that if that's what you think is the best thing go do that don't waste your time with me or if you want some other approach to spirituality go do that don't waste your time with me or you know explore many perspectives as i've always recommended from the from the very beginning um and then cross-reference everything and then find out your own system in the end basically what i teach is hopefully what you get from me is how to sort of build your own system not my system but build your own system based on principles that i teach you the principles are very broad once you learn the principles then you can apply them in in a way that that tailors and fits to to the way that you want to do this work and this work is just sort of honoring your life and building out a great life and that includes both personal development and spiritual development both of those are about building out a great life just in different ways there are different aspects to life that need to be built out material and and spiritual both the material is spiritual it's just a lower level of spiritual it's important if you're young and i've said this before but i'll say it again that you develop some survival foundation in your life you need some mastery of survival before you go hog wild into spirituality so work on the basics make sure you have that handled make sure you have a good common sense i remember that uh i read a story about yogananda and his guru sree yukteshwar and they were discussing like you know under what conditions does does the guru take an apprentice and the conditions that were pretty strict the conditions were that yuktaswar's sort of conditions were that he would ask basic questions of of his you know disciple prospective disciple before they sort of locked in the relationship he would ask him like well what are your grades like in school how are you with your friends and your family are you fulfilling your family obligations are you able to do that um uh are you able to support yourself to feed yourself to cook food to clean laundry do these basic things or do you struggle with these things and if you said you struggled with any of these things then he wouldn't take you on because you're not ready because how can you do that stuff when you can't handle the that's the basic stuff of course the challenge with our communications here virtually through youtube or whatever through the internet is that this is not a guru disciple relationship i'm not your guru and it's really important that you understand what i am because people get this very wrong about what i am what function i serve i am literally a guy on youtube who is sharing his philosophical insights about life that's all that i am and you should treat me as such i don't know you personally i can't read your mind i don't know what's going on with you in your life and each one of you of the thousands and millions of you out there have your own stuff going on some of it very weird that i can't even relate to that's not even within my my general ballpark of what i know and understand about life some of you got very weird lives and that's fine weird is not bad per se it could be great um but in the end all i'm doing here is i'm sharing ideas with you ideas can be very powerful a single idea can change your life but a single idea taken the wrong way can also destroy your life so you if you continue to listen you have to be very careful about how you make sense of these ideas how you apply these ideas and in the end i don't know how you're going to apply them and what kind of twisted way you're going to imagine something's going to happen in your life i don't know remember that truth absolute truth is not prescriptive in any way that means whatever i say the absolute truth is or whatever you discover the absolute truth to be it doesn't mean anything likewise with love when you discover absolute love infinite love god's love you might fall into the trap of thinking that it means something it means you should do something in the material survival world it means you should hug your kids more it means you should have more sex it means you should get a divorce it means you should get married it means you should have sex with your mother i don't know what you think it'll mean but whatever you think it means it doesn't mean that why doesn't it mean that because everything is love so when you say oh i'm gonna do this because it's love well what you're not realizing is that the opposite of doing that is also love so when you say i'm going to hug my kids that's love okay but if you don't hug your kids that's also love and if you hate your kids that's also love everything is love that's infinite love absolute love it's very radical what this means is that the ego your little ego cannot control or manipulate or use or justify with this love anything that it wants to do so take ownership of that rather than concocting these elaborate justifications for like oh i did this today i went to the grocery store because of love and i did this to my kids because of love you didn't do that because of love you do that because you're selfish and you're surviving that's why you did those things and then you and you invented some stories about love to make yourself feel nicer and sweeter to you to your own self truth and love make you free they don't constrain you to a limited set of options you have to use intelligence and consciousness to figure out very skillfully in a very nuanced way what would be the most loving expression of your love in any particular situation and you could always be wrong about that you might think that oh this is going to be the best expression of love and then you realize i tricked myself that was actually selfishness masquerading as love you see that's self-deception inaction and i'm not immune to it don't assume you're immune to it don't assume your favorite guru is immune to it or above it they aren't this is the whole challenge of life you never solve this problem permanently this is something you're constantly juggling and balancing like on a surfboard you got to be dynamically balancing as you're on the wave and that wave is your life and as soon as you become too rigid on that board and you decide that well i'm just gonna i'm just gonna shift my weight to the right and just keep it there forever because i got it figured out now that's when you're going to screw up and wipe out you