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[Music] in this episode I want to talk a bit more off-the-cuff than usual about some of the dangers of actualised org and just the general dangers of doing this work that we're doing I'm talking about the dangers of taking personal development to the existential level to the metaphysical level to the spiritual level so many of you are following along you're listening to me talking about enlightenment awakening you're listening to me talk about the Buddha or meditation or yoga some of this sort of stuff and I get the sense that you're not really aware of what you're getting yourself into and so it can be good to talk about this and that's what we're gonna cover today so what are the dangers of actualized org sometimes I get criticized for my teachings being dangerous that's right but you have to understand that the very nature of these teachings is like what are we really doing here with these teachings we're not merely talking about how to make money or how to attract a a partner or how to improve some aspect of your life like your health and so forth this is ordinary sort of boilerplate self-improvement of course I've covered those topics a lot in the past and this is kind of a sort of a self-improvement which isn't very threatening to people you know this is sort of a Tony Robbins style self-improvement it's great you know I started off I cut my teeth on Tony Robbins nothing against them it's it's useful it's very useful but there's a deeper level there is the existential level that we're talking about and then you get into spirituality then you start to learn about non-duality and Awakening and enlightenment and all this and that's when it gets a little bit more tricky because there the teachings actually do have certain dangers I've talked about this to some extent in the past I have an episode about ego backlash go check that out understanding the ego backlash I believe it's it's titled and I have another another episode called the dark side of meditation where I also cover some of this stuff but there's more that needs he said so on this path if you're pursuing awakening you have to understand that awakening is not for most people you have to really question why you're pursuing awakening and the more I pursue awakening myself the more I study it as well the more I interact with other people and read their stories of how they've awoken or failed to awaken and the problems that have come from that and the ordeals and difficulties and obstacles that they encountered one of the things that I realize that Awakening is extremely unique the spiritual path is totally unique to you because it has to deal with your own fears limiting beliefs neuroses traumas that you suffer through and I think even beyond that of course it also have to deal with your own it has it take into account your own personality has taken into account even your genetics and your physiology has to take all of that into account I like for example with the spiritual process might be different for an introvert than for an extrovert that doesn't mean that an extrovert can't become awakened I'm not saying that I'm just saying it's different different techniques might resonate with different types of personalities but it goes even deeper than that ultimately what needs to happen is you need to be able to fully surrender yourself when we're talking to the deepest levels of awakening and then you need to be able to embody that and to really let go of all of your personal [ __ ] whatever that is all that personal [ __ ] that you've accumulated throughout your entire history in this lifetime a lot of it goes back to your childhood traumas and how you were raised you know what kind of ideologies were fed into your mind was it Christianity was it Islam was it some materialistic atheism was it skepticism was the cynicism you know all that stuff now you're you're having to question all those ideologies it's gonna be different for for everybody depending on where you were born what time you were born culture you were born in what kind of parents you had did they abused you how did they punish you how did they reward you they withhold love from you that did you get enough love when you were a child or not and did you get bullied in school and all of this right so all this makes this journey very personal first of all but second of all there's an even deeper layer and that is the one that I think honestly I think most people that are alive right now are not ready for awakening they just they won't their psyche or we might even say their soul is not ready to surrender materialistic existence that's most people on this planet there seems to be and I'm sort of speculating here but there seems to be a sort of a logic to how living beings evolved through life by which I mean that literally there's a sort of a a series of incarnations that consciousness goes through from lower life-forms to higher life-forms and then beyond and it really seems to me that most human beings who are alive right now it's not the case that all human beings are on the same level and that they're all equally capable of awakening and that they're all equally developed and they're all equally willing to discover the truth or to even care about the truth no it's just that doesn't explain it the majority of mankind are in such a low state of consciousness that even if you show them the truth even if you show them God even if you show them some of the stuff that I've talked about they won't be able to handle it because it's not right for them yet it's not their time yet maybe they need to live through ten more lifetimes before they finally realize they become conscious enough to see that really the highest way to live life is not materially and I'm saying this not as somebody who's completely above material existence but actually the opposite I'm saying it because I still feel within myself various materialistic attachments that I have sometimes to money sometimes to sex sometimes to whatever right and I see that I have a very clear vision of like what it would mean to be fully fully awake and to be able to embody that to live from God consciousness all the time but it's it's a beautiful incredible vision of what I could become and of course what anybody could become nothing special about me in this regard but but then in trying to actualize that I also see all of the Buddhists called call them defilements that I have and all of the spiritual purification work that needs to happen a lot of disciplining of myself and purifying myself in various ways purifying my mind purifying my body and and all this purifying my diet purifying the the new sources that I watched the way I entertain myself you know what do i what do i do for entertainment and relaxation like all of this stuff and so really they have some good models and theories about this in buddhism and also in the yogic systems you know like for example in the yogic systems they talked about if you consider seven chakras you've got your base chakras which is you know starting from the very bottom of your spine going upwards you know your your first chakra chakra one corresponds to your most basic needs like your knees to defecate and your needs to just be physically safe and just like very earthy type of needs you know basic basic survival needs without which you couldn't even be an organism and then you know you move up to second chakra second chakra would be your sort of genital area it's responsible for that of course controlling your sex drive so if you're for example a person who's addicted to sex all the time and you just you can't get sex out of your mind and it's just this constant thing that's always like your whole life is dominated by and the need for sex in the pursue love sex and you you invest thousands of hours into this you know planning how to get more sex and you know all this sort of stuff if that's what your life is about then you're kind of like living at that shock or two level and that's kind of like where you are in this life time and then you can evolve beyond that to chakra 3 which is more of your your navel area and then you know that corresponds to certain things as well and then so you kind of move up and you move on to the heart chakra or the throat chakra and then you know the third eye and then ultimately the crown which corresponds jilt and liberation and I guess you could say to total Buddha nature total God realization so that's an interesting model it's it's it's pretty useful as far as talking about this see so a lot of people are stuck people who get into the self-help they're stuck at those let's say those first three chakras so teachings which are talking about the higher chakras they fall on deaf ears it's like in one ear and out the other or even if they resonate with you to some degree you're so stuck on your lower chakras that you can't really actualize the higher ones maybe you can you know take a psychedelic and it'll show you a peak experience of a shock or six or chakra seven you know some visionary mystical state or full non-dual God consciousness you get that on a powerful psychedelic that's great but then you fall right back down into chakra - and you're addicted to sex and you're addicted to junk food and you're addicted to porn and you're addicted to TV and whatever else you youtube these days I get us I guess it is with you guys but hey you know I'm guilty of that too I don't I don't actually have a TV but uh but I so watch my little bit of YouTube so anyways the point of all this is that you know some of you I get the sense that when you hear me talking about awakening so much then you get interested in awakening simply because I'm talking about it and then it's like you get this sense that well the point of my life is to awaken everybody needs to awaken and that's not quite right that's a mistake first of all there's no there's there's zero normativity behind awakening so never have I said nor will I ever say that you must awaken and that awakening is the one right path for everybody and that there's a good reason for you to awaken there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to awaken other than that you want to you want to discover the truth you care to experience God or you care to understand reality if these things are interesting to you then pursue awakening if you're tired of material existence and you feel dissatisfied with it and you're looking for some way out of the rat maze pursue awakening but if you just entered the rat maze if you just started your material existence and you're still not fed up with it and maybe you're not really interested in truth like if you're honest like do I care about the truth no I mean Leo talks about it but I don't care about it I would just care about like having a nice career and having a nice family and having a nice spouse and you know hanging out with the family and just doing fun stuff and whatever like if that's honestly what you are driven towards pursue that rather than lofty metaphysical topics that I talk about see I talk about these topics because I'm passionate about them because I care about them because to me really my highest drive in life is just understanding for its own sake I don't really care about success I don't really care about money I mean I do to some extent but all this is secondary I don't really even care about living per se I don't care about doing social stuff I don't care about having a family I don't care about socializing with people small talking with people you know going to parties having cars and doing this and going on with fancy vacations around the right I mean of course I can enjoy these things and sometimes I do get a little bit sidetracked by one or two of those things you know I'm still interested in sex and so forth but generally what I care about is understanding for its own sake in the abstract right so that's my bias you might not have that bias and the reason I might have that bias like you don't know like you don't know like if we take the sort of past lives model seriously and I'm not saying that that it's literally the case but you know it's an interesting theory sort of like you have past lives and then you live through these lives and in each life you experience enough of it that some some wisdom some kernel of wisdom is developed in that that kernel actually survives your life until you know you then you incarnate into the next life form and then from that one you're still tapped into some of that old there's some of that old residual wisdom that's left it's not a it's not / it's not like in some verbal form it's not like you retain some some teaching that I told you through this video in your next iPhone now so what I mean I mean that overall once you've lived your entire life you've you've sort of what happens is what I notice is that you exhaust certain motivations and needs have you noticed this in your own life for example that like when you were younger maybe when you were a teen or when you were in your twenties there was something that you were super passionate about that was so important to you whatever it was might have been family might have been relationships might have been religion might have been science might have been scepticism might have been rationality might have been success might have been money might have been health might have been working out whatever but then you do that thing for five or ten years and then you kind of just like get over it and then one day it's almost like it's almost like you've become a new person or a new being in the sense that you've transcended that like you've gotten it out of your system and you don't feel motivated by that thing anymore like you as a certain point you've earned enough money where it's like okay I've done that I've done enough business to the point where starting a new business doesn't excite me anymore it would just be the same old thing I need something new to satisfy my soul yeah maybe you've experienced this in some capacity I think all of us do I think for some people you can take them entire lifetime or it can take them decades to get something out of their system in some cases you might be so stuck on a thing that you never get it out of your system in this one lifetime like maybe you're so stuck on sex that that's all you're concerned about and your whole life will be devoted to that to the pursuit of it and you're never going to get it out of your system no matter how much sex you have in this lifetime but from that process what I'm hypothesizing here is that you could learn some sort of deeper Metta lesson a lesson that goes beyond just this one lifetime which will stick with you with your spirit let's say if you want to say call it that such that in your next incarnation you're not going to be so driven by the six you're going to just quickly get over it's not like you know you'll still have some sex but it's like your life's not gonna be about that it's gonna be a little side dish you know a little garnish on the side whereas your main thing in the next lifetime will be something more something deep or something higher something more consciousness and then maybe from that position you can then pursue awakening more seriously so I want you to just to double check yourself are you pursuing awakening because maybe you're just like a monkey monkey see monkey do and you hear me talking about it so much that you've just internalized this as some goal that you need to have when in fact you don't need to have it here you have to be very honest with yourself this can be painful to admit because maybe you've already invested a few years into meditating and yoga and all this stuff and you've been pursuing awakening but now I'm telling you like wait a minute maybe that's not the thing you should be doing and now of course that's kind of throwing a wrench into your works and this could this could be this could be feel threatening to you because you know you don't to be robbed you know you you feel like you've already been on this path and now you want to go but it feels like now I'm taking that motivation away from you making you doubt yourself well that's part of this work a huge part of this work in life is figuring out what you want from life what are you really motivated to do sometimes a lot of times actually because of the media we watch or because the ideas we hear from our teachers professors our parents our rabbis and our religious leaders and so forth we get certain ideals into our minds like well I should be a good person I should be like Christ I should be like a Buddha I should become a monk I should follow what Leo says I should awaken and I should do all this stuff when really if you were honest you would admit that I just want sex I just want money I just want pleasure I just want a big house with a fast car and I want to go fly around the world and party and do this sort of stuff see that can be hard to admit in this sense ideals can be dangerous because they can be inauthentic often our ideals where do we get them from we just absorb them from our culture and then we think that they're our own goals and desires and motivations but actually they're not and it can be difficult to admit to ourselves that wait a minute this ideal that I've been chasing it's just been sort of a fantasy that I picked up because you know I went to ten years of Sunday School and you know they drilled it into my mind that I need to be christ-like and that sex is wrong see but that's an inauthentic conditioning that you've been programmed with see and you can spend your whole life kind of stuck it like trying to be christ-like but it's like really you're shooting above you're above your paygrade I guess you might say we're mixing metaphors now but you're kind of you're you're punching out of your weight class see because if your level of development of consciousness and maturity is like down here but you're trying to act all christ-like it's actually gonna create huge problems because you're gonna in your mind you can have this idea of trying to be christ-like but you're always gonna fail to live up to the idea that's gonna create a lot of suffering for you and you're not gonna be confused cuz you don't know like well what's wrong with me on something I'm defective I'm broken I'm wrong you know why can't I be christ-like and then maybe you look to some monks who have done it and you say well why can't I do what they are able to do and the reason might be that you know they spent 30 lifetimes pursuing that whereas you are just you've been pursuing it for two lifetimes but you're just not conscious that right now and so it's actually totally normal that you're struggling through this stuff because you don't know what those monks suffered through and struggle through you know what the Buddha went through what Christ went through how many how many lifetimes did Christ lived through like you don't know this stuff if we're gonna take this kind of past Lies model seriously you don't know or if you wanna if you don't like the past lives model and you want to you know instead think of it in terms of genetics you couldn't think of it in terms of genetics it really doesn't matter like the details of it like you can just make this all very scientific if you like and you can just say well some people are genetically inclined and predisposed to you know to have a sort of personality type that makes them interested in truth and metaphysical topics and spirituality and other people are not you could couch it that way it doesn't really matter what matters is for you to kind of discover authentically what it is they that you want and then to pursue that because otherwise what will happen is here's where we kind of get to the the original topic we kind of went on a tangent never coming back of the dangers of this work when if I mean if you're serious about awakening what you're talking about here understand this is the most radical and hardcore thing you can do okay so if my teachings seem dangerous yeah because we're talking about life-and-death issues here we're talking about the the software that is running your entire life and not just that but beyond that we're literally talking about the software that crew that that creates a sense of physical reality for you so when I'm talking about awakening we're talking about becoming conscious of all of that and transcending all of that see this is very threatening for most people this might mean the loss of friendships and family connections this might mean you have to abandon your family this might mean you have to abandon your business this might mean you have to abandon your house this might mean you have to abandon your country this might mean you have to abandon your religion this might mean you have to give up your your national identity and this is still just the tip of the iceberg of of what might be required here in the end you're gonna have to give up your whole life basically for this and if you're thinking well Leo then why would I do it why would anybody do it well then you're not ready you see if you're asking that question you're not ready you don't have enough innate wisdom and consciousness to realize why somebody would want to pursue the truth despite all of those costs see if you were really at a certain level of development and spiritual purity you would want the truth no matter what see you wouldn't be held back by these things you wouldn't be so interested in these things you wouldn't be so attached to these things you would want to know what the truth is you'd want to know what God is you'd want to know what life is you don't want to know what reality is just for its own sake and if you're not there then you're not there and it would be good to admit it rather than to fake it because if you're gonna fake it the problem is is that look sometimes this path will get dark it can get very dark if you're meditating a lot stuff will come up issues will come up you'll have phases where you're depressed you might have phases when you're suicidal you might feel like life has lost all meaning you might doubt yourself you might doubt whether this was the right path to go down you might have mystical experiences or you might take psychedelics and you might misinterpret what is shown to you because you still have so much ego and you're still working from the lower chakras let's say and so maybe God is revealed to you but because you have so much ego and you're working from the lower chakras you will corrupt and misunderstand or misinterpret remember because you're always sort of filtering any psychedelic experience or any mystical experience you're having you're always interpreting it the mind is still there and it's still interpreting through your past experiences your personality you know through the filter of who you are as a human you're interpreting all that and then corruption can happen there have been cases and in fact I have I have some books on my book list in in one particular book the reason I put on my book list in the spirituality subcategory is because this entire book just explains the sort of gut-wrenching experience of one woman who accidentally basically awoke without even knowing what awakening is in her youth she did some when she was like in her early 20s and in her college days she did some some yoga practice and she did some meditation so forth but when she was doing it nobody really explained to her what awakening is what non-duality is she did know anything that she didn't really understand what God is there anything she didn't have the enough theoretical foundation you know the kind of stuff that we've built here with actualize that org if you've been watching for a while she had none of that she was just taught some meditation techniques and she basically did that and then one day even after you know she stopped doing them but then one day just something clicked in her while she was walking down the street and she awoke but this completely terrified her and she thought that something had gone terribly wrong she thought that she was broken and dysfunctional she thought she had some sort of mental illness she spent the next 10 years going to therapists and doctors trying to fix herself because you know she would go to a therapist or a doctor and she would tell the doctor like I don't have a sense of self there's no me it's like I wasn't even born and the doctor would look at her like she's crazy now of course she was totally right the problem is though she didn't have the right context she didn't have enough theory achill foundation and she didn't have the kind of environment that could support her in that because all the people she hung around with including her doctors and therapists they were all clueless about non-duality and Awakening and so you know it's probably a little easier now because you can go online and just google it this was probably before the age of the internet where you could google this stuff easily but eventually what happened was it it took her many years and it was gut-wrenching you know she couldn't sleep she had bad nightmares she was stressed she was anxious she was like she couldn't lead a normal life for for many years and it almost drove her nuts until eventually by accident she she found some people you know some meditators and some folks who knew about non-duality who actually helped her out and gave her some guidance and helped her to to recontextualize that sense of no self and to make more sense of it and to realize that there there's even deeper you can even go deeper into that awakening and to realize not only is it no self but it is the self the god self she wasn't understanding that there's the god self in addition to the no self really it's just another additional facet but she was missing that facet she was missing other important facets like the facet of love and so forth so the reason I'm telling you this story is just because so like this kind of stuff could happen that's one example of the dangers here other dangers might include that you get depressed and suicidal and then you actually act that out and you know I've had some dark phases in my journey and it's difficult sometimes you're all alone and you've got nobody to talk to nobody who can understand what you're going through nobody who can help you that's all part of this path see like I said at the beginning this is a hardcore path this is the kind of path that you have to be sort of up you have to be able to lead yourself you have to you have to be able to figure stuff out you have to be able to troubleshoot your own problems you have to be able to think independently you can't ultimately when you're trying to totally awaken you can't rely on anybody to help you not even your guru can help you you're gonna be totally alone at the very end of it now don't worry once you get past all the all the humps and so forth it'll be it's wonderful so I'm not trying to discourage you by telling you that Awakening is all negative and bad it's not the problems that your ego is in the way you see you have defilements you're operating from lower chakras you're not spiritually purified and who knows how much of that work you've got to do that's a gut wrenching process this spiritual purification business and a lot of it gets kind of not advertised by spiritual teachers they make it seem like oh yeah you just sit down you just meditate for a few weekends or you do a few retreats and then BAM enlightened that's not really how it works even when the so called spontaneous instant total awakening happens who do you want to cite Eckhart Tolle or Robin to Maharshi or something like this you want to say Oh leo is spontaneous instead awakening no work no effort no thousands of hours of meditation nothing just BAM it happened no this is this is a pipe dream it didn't just happen Eckhart Tolle was at the brink of suicide he was gonna kill himself by some fluke luck he awoke rather than killing himself see so that's hardcore that's serious think about how many people in our society rather than awakening they they do kill themselves more than those who awaken I'll tell you that that much see so that's not that's not a very good path to take now I'm not saying this to say that it has to be this way for you I'm just saying that you know there's there's a whole range a vast giant range of possibilities because you're gonna have to conquer your own ego and what does what does that entail for you for everybody it's different you know for some people their ego is addicted to alcohol and that's their biggest demon and they're gonna spend the next 20 years conquering that struggling with it and then you know for others like me for me alcohol has absolutely zero appeal zero appeal like I just not I don't care about alcohol I'm not attracted to it whatsoever so for me it's so easy to stay away from it but for some people is very difficult or with sex or with money or with whatever you know so what is that for you the problem is not actually having an awakening experience per se that's almost the easy part although it's still hard for most people the problem is actually accepting the truth accepting it and then not just intellectually accepting it although of course that is still a problem for most people you know most people for example they don't want to admit just something as simple as the fact that your birth was imaginary with that science is imaginary or that reality is imaginary most people don't even want to admit this on an intellectual level but even if you do it's not enough to just admit that intellectually then you have to you have to go to the next level you have to say okay well now how do I need to change the way that I live how do I need to change my habits my thoughts and my emotions to align with that truth you see because right now your habits actions and emotions and your whole life is aligned with the opposite truth it's aligned with the truth that reality is real not imaginary and so that that's that's challenging see you got to be you got to be able to kind of guide yourself through this process now of course you can rely on other people there are great teachers out there and you know you can rely on certain things that I say to help to guide you but not too much you can't totally rely on the things that I say or other teachers say because in the end you gotta sort of figure this puzzle out for yourself that's the that's the magic of life is that nobody can really solve your puzzle for you we all have our unique maze that we're running through like I talked about in my life is a maze s ode so you're gonna have to solve your own maze you can't look at what I'm doing and then cheat the way you know used to doing in first grade or something you would cheat at your friends test you know look at the answers then just copy them that doesn't work because we're not all working on the same test questions it's not so simple so yeah if you're gonna go all the way be prepared for all sorts of stuff that comes up inner demons definitely depression there will be moments of that for sure for sure because you're gonna have to come face to face with meaninglessness if you're gonna awaken you can't avoid that because meaning is what your ego projects in order to survive and to do it's ego stuff meaning is imaginary and at some point in your awakening process you're gonna have to accept that all meaning is imaginary and created now to the ego that's gonna feel very negative and bad it's not actually negative it's not actually bad it just feels that way and it's interpreted that way by the ego there are a lot of pathologies in the awakening process and I'll have an entire separate episode in the future where I talk about the pathologies of awakening their pathologies pre awakening and there are pathologies post awakening this is ways in which see it's almost like the ego is one of those horror film creatures where you like you've got to kill it all the way to kill it because if you just kill it half way it's still half alive and you know it'll come in and it'll grab you and it'll get you so that's the thing is you know you have these awakenings but then usually there's a closing down and there's a sort of a returning a regression back to the lower chakras it's usually hard for people to just kind of like go all the way up to the top chakra and just just stay there forever and never regress down usually it's a sort of oscillating process of up and down up and down and up and down it's gonna be very trying it can be painful it can be uncomfortable for example you can not only is this happening at the psychological level physically things can happen to you you could have for example Kundalini awakening energetic awakenings in your spine in your body where like you can't sleep you're having nightmares you're restless all the time you have too much energy or you have too little energy or you know the opposite you're too sleepy you're sleepy all the time you might have some psychosomatic issues that come up for you you might have nervousness and panic attacks I know on the forum one one fellow on the forum took some five mio DMT and and you know had a pretty big revelation of God consciousness but it seems like he wasn't really ready for it so it scared the [ __ ] out of him and then you know like for the next month he had difficulty sleeping uh because you just have anxiety going to sleep because of the sort of the nothingness I don't know exactly what he was afraid of but you know something along the lines of like afraid of the void or afraid of losing your mind that's another one that comes up and you know some of these fears and concerns and dangers they're legit I'm so what I'm saying here in this episode is it's not just all illusion you do have to take some of these dangers seriously and you have to be able to figure out what you can tolerate and what you can't sometimes for example we get it in our minds you know we read some book about some advanced meditator who went off into the Himalayan caves and sat there for six months straight and barely ate anything and start himself half to death and you know became awakened by meditating twenty hours a day for six months straight and it sounds so cool and it sounds so macho and it sounds so like oh wow that's that's the ultimate ideal and then like I'm gonna try to go do that and then you go do that and you can't do it that's right you know doing something like that very very few people can do something like that to actually pull that off they have to be it's not just a matter of a certain physical conditioning or certain mental conditioning it's like they have to be at the right place in their life they have to be they have to have a certain proper set of motivations they have to be a certain level of development and maturity to pull something like that off so you just aping them it's probably not gonna work you have to figure out what your path is gonna be and what's gonna work for you because you know you might try to go do that and you might actually kill yourself sitting there in some Himalayan cave in the ice cold in the middle of winter and then you know a blizzard comes and then and then you freeze to death and then we hear about you in the news you know frozen like an ice cube sitting in a cave tried to be a Buddha you know yeah that is a danger or you know if you're getting involved with psychedelics of course there's a whole set of dangers that come with psychedelics and I've been honest about the dangers of psychedelics from the very beginning since I started talking about though of course they're there you have to be extremely careful about psychedelics the way that I see most of you doing psychedelics I think is completely reckless and dangerous and irresponsible gives it a terrible name to psychedelics and is gonna harm you and it actually [ __ ] your path the way many of you do psychedelics is not how I do psychedelics I'm very very careful about psychedelics precisely because I appreciate the dangers so we're having this conversation because I just want to make you aware of these dangers so that you're more cautious and you try to figure out what you can tolerate here and you know if you're finding yourself where you're on this path you're meditating your ass off and so forth and you're just like you're you're in a deep depression some deep dark night of the soul type of deal and you know what do you do in this case well some people will say [ __ ] it just push through it and everything will be right in the end well you have to be careful that might have worked for them given where they are at you know what their past lives were if you want to say that what their genetics are and a ton of other things what their physical health is like you know all of these factors play into it you might not be able to do that so you have to be you have to be willing to let go and take a step back you know there's some there's there's one of my favorite Bond movies I've watched all the bottom movies I'm pretty big fan especially the old ones you know the new ones I'm not so interested in anymore it seems like they've kind of degraded but but some of the really old classic ones the Sean Connery ones and so forth I loved to watch those when I was younger and there's there's one that um they used to run on HBO like all the time never say never again it was actually one of the last Sean Connery Bond movies he came back to do it I think it's one of one of the best ones and the the villain in that movie is great I don't know who the actors name is but there's just one scene in that in that Bond movie somewhere towards like the the third the first third of the movie where of course this was all set like in the seventies er yes probably in the 70s or 80s and so Bond is facing off against this Bond villain and this Bond villain the students this was a time of arcade machines and video games were just coming online so this Bond movie actually featured some like an arcade and there was just like classy like Hotel you know in Europe somewhere where this Bond villain you know he was he made his own like arcade game and it was this game of world domination and so he challenges James Bond to sit down to play this game of world domination with him and it's this kind of interesting it's almost like a ping pong table but it's got this like digital screen instead of a net and they're both sitting on two ends of this ping pong table sort of arcade machine and they're they have these two controls it's almost like airplane joysticks but they have two of them each you know the Bond villain over here holding him and the blonde character over here holding him and now you know they're playing this this game and we're looking at it from you know from the audience's perspective and so but but there's a twist because you know of course he's a Bond villain so it just can't be this simple it can't just be a video game so what he did to make this this you know the stakes high in this game is that there's an electrical shock that comes through the joystick handles and the way the game works is that if if you're holding the handles and you're playing this game but you know as you do worse in the game the shock gets worse and worse and worse to the point where it'll kill you if you if you lose the game uh you know it can happen to both sides depending on how good you play but you always have the option to let go of the controls and if you let go of the controls you basically lose the game you forfeit the game but you save your life so now now the stakes are high now it's interesting right so now bond is sitting there playing and the the villain is sitting there playing they're both playing and you know the villain is scoring points on bond and now it's shocking him and you can tell like this is hard to take you know this is getting to dangerous levels and then your bonds starts to win the game and then you know now the villain is getting the shock and you know he understands how this whole thing works and there's this brilliant moment at the very end of this scene which which I always I always found had like a deep wisdom to it which is that the Bond villain is getting to the point where you know he's gonna lose because James Bond has figured out how to beat him in this game at his own game and like he's getting the point where like everybody's watching and they think he's you know the Bond villain is is gonna get electrocuted to death and at the very very end he just he just lets go he just lets go and you can tell that like right there if he did if he held one second longer I would have killed him but you know the Bond villain he was smart right that's that's what wisdom is and in life you gotta you gotta understand your own self so well that you know when to let go sometimes you just gotta let go and what I mean here specifically is like you might be shooting for Awakening and you might be doing some meditation retreat and now you might be in such deep depression and misery and you got to know like okay now I'm at the point where I just gotta let it go stop this let me just go back to my old life let me stop the meditation for a while let me take six months off or a month off or whatever let me quit this retreat because I'm I'm just not ready I thought I was ready I put in my best effort but I'm not ready see and rather than taking it to some dangerous level where I actually hurt myself physically or psychologically or traumatize myself I'll just let it go knowing that I can come back to it you know there's no there's no immediate need for you to get awakened right now you can do it in a week you can do it in a month you can do it in a year you know you've got quite a long life to live and what you might discover from one of these retreats is you might discover that there's more basic stuff you got to handle before you're ready to fully surrender your material existence see and that's okay sometimes people email me or send me private messages through my forum and that you know they share some dark moments they're going through they feel all alone or they feel depressed or they feel like life is meaningless or they're having some Kundalini symptom you know they can't sleep they're having anxiety whatever what's the solution to this stuff well there's no there's no way I can give you a concrete answer it all depends on your specific situation and really the solution is for you to to better know your own self not to ask me or some guru but to dig inside of your own self into to be honest with yourself about where are you at what can you tolerate is this healthy is it unhealthy there are healthy ways of pursuing awakening and doing meditation and there are unhealthy ways of doing it if your meditation practice is making you more neurotic if it's making you more of an [ __ ] and less compassionate if it's if it's destabilizing your life or you feel like you're not able to go to work and just do the normal stuff you got to do then you might be doing in a dysfunctional neurotic unhealthy way in which case the lesson there is what would be a functional and a healthy way of doing it see and only you can figure that out for yourself of course you can glean ideas for me and from other sources and people have come before you but ultimately you got to figure that out for yourself and you got to know when to quit sometimes not permanently but just you know sometimes you get defeated sometimes you lose a few battles that doesn't mean you lose the war it just means you've lost a few battles sometimes you need to make a strategic tactical retreat because sometimes what can happen is actually you know you push yourself too far you overextend yourself and then you kind of you could make the path even longer for yourself like you might go do a retreat the retreat will be so brutal to your ego that after you are done with that retreat for example you'll you'll have such a huge backslide that you'll stop meditating for a year and you won't go to another retreat for another five years because you were just so traumatized by this you know you've been off more than you could chew or maybe psychedelics do you take too much psychedelics this can definitely happen to you and then what happens is that see people think that all well psychedelics Leo I'm just going to keep upping the dose and upping the dose and taking a large dose look I did four tabs five tabs of LSD I did 10 grams of mushrooms you know I did 30 milligrams of 5 Meo but then what happens is that you get freaked out one of these high doses on one of these high dose trips and then and then you swear off psychedelics forever and you're like oh well psychedelics are terrible and evil no they're not terrible and evil you misuse them and rather than being wise about and going slowly you try to do it all in one shot and of course you failed miserably and then you tucked your tail between your legs and ran away and then and now you're terrified to go back and try it again yeah of course this is this is the mark of an amateur an amateur gets way in over his head into something to the point where he can't handle it and then he has to back out run away and never face it again this is how you fail if you want to succeed you got to take the slow tortoise approach you know the tortoise wins the race slow and steady in this work if you're starting a business this is the right approach you don't just go and invest all of your life savings into some outlandish idea that you have for a business just to see it all fail because it probably will fail your first business will probably fail but rather you take a slow methodical long-term approach where you're thinking five ten years down the road and you're thinking like I'm not just gonna start one business I'm gonna become good at business in general I'm gonna I have many business ideas I'm gonna try this thing I'm gonna try that thing if this doesn't work I'll keep try and I'll keep trying and then maybe by your fifth or tenth business idea something will work well same thing with relationships same thing with you know starting a family if you get to in over your head it's gonna fail or any kind of project some art project I know I had this problem when I was doing video game design when I was younger you know I I trained myself to be a video game designer and developer and the way I did that is just through projects I would basically come up with some idea for a game and then I would start it and try to program it and do the art and design for and so forth but of course one of the problems with video game design is that it's so easy to get way over your head and bite off so much more than you can chew you you underestimate how much work is involved to implement some idea so one of the keys to creating a video game or a movie or any kind of big project is to just know your own limits and to be very careful about the scope of your project if you're the scope gets way out of hand you have too much stuff you need to do you're never gonna be able to do it and then you're gonna get demoralized of course you're gonna quit so I've had plenty of projects like that and then those projects were I succeeded those were projects would very limited scope where I was very careful and I was clear about my own limitations and I said you know I can only work so many hours a day and this project can only take so much you know I have to complete this within the next six months or 12 months because I don't have forever I can't spend five years on this so I need a project I need to scale down my project to make sure that I can do it in this amount of time and and all that and even then still it's hard still you can fail so the same kind of logic needs to apply to your spiritual pursuits as well to avoid the dangers of this work now there's other dangers I've only begun to really to scratch the the surface of all the different dangers there are with this work one enormous danger is turning this work into a dog mount or into an ideology I think I've talked about this plenty in the past but it's such a big trap that people still you know don't get it as much as I talk against ideology and the dangers of it it's it's it's really really hard to avoid turning this work into an ideology and into a religion and into a dogma into a moral system into a set of rules and Commandments something that you do mechanistically this isn't just a natural tendency of all spiritual work I present a lot of wisdom and insights and models and I make grandiose statements about truth and reality here and it's very easy to misconstrue that as me being an ideologue as me sitting here and preaching my ideology of God or truth or consciousness to you that's not what's really going on it's very easy to confuse genuine teachings with ideology or to turn genuine teachings into ideology see because your mind wants nothing more than a set of like bullet points that he can just memorize and then execute but that's that's not spirituality that's the opposite everything that I teach you and anything you learn from anybody about spirituality you have to hold very loosely it isn't the truth it's just talk about the truth talk about God isn't God well it also is but but it isn't what's being pointed at see don't confuse the pointers with the thing that we're pointing at for example I present spiral dynamics and you know once you learn spiral dynamics and it becomes a good model that you you know you're like oh well this is a cool model it look it explains what's happening on the evening news look it explains what happens in religion look it explains what happens in history it explains what happens in my family and in how it explains what happens in business yeah it does explain a lot of those things but like I said before the Metta the better the model the bigger the problem see it can become such a good model that you then use it exclusively and you can't think outside of it and you can't consider other models and everything now is judged through the lens of Spile dynamics and that becomes a danger or like you get into spirituality other you know common danger is that you get into spirituality through one school one path one teacher and then you think that that is the whole of spirituality is that whether it's at car tolay or Buddhism or some branch of yoga some guru that you have seen on YouTube somewhere or something like Jed McKenna and his sort of nihilistic approach to to non-duality you know you get into one of these usually when someone learns about non duality that or spirituality they learn about it through one source that kind of resonates with them but then they get to attach that source they think that that sources is somehow the pinnacle and then they you know they limit their spirituality to that one source and of course that becomes a big problem it's very easy to misinterpret various high insights about God about truth about reality about consciousness it's very easy for the ego you know cuz it's not fully purified and dead yet it's very easy for it to kind of like use try to use awakening or non duality to to further its own agenda in a sort of a sneaky deceptive way where you know and I've seen this you know where people like people talking about spirituality but yeah at the same time they go they go to the club and do pickup and then they they justify their pickup through their spiritual practice for example or the reason that they meditate is because it helps them to do pickup of course a very twisted reason for meditation so yeah I mean you can you can use spirituality that you know other travel spirituality is that you develop a whole ideology or a whole a whole mental scheme in your mind of how spiritual you are because you're doing all this spiritual stuff you're going through the motions of meditation and you're going to retreats and you're listening to videos and reading books and just doing this sort of stuff but but really you're just doing it outwardly inwardly none of the work that needs to be done has really been done really you're avoiding the actual emotional labor of spiritual purification see that's that's the heart of this work is the spiritual purification of your body and your mind that is that feeling you feel this is the emotional labor it's the feeling you feel when you're sitting there on your meditation cushion and you're meditating even though your ego wants to go eat some ice cream or watch some TV or jerk off to support your you're still you're sitting there and you're meditating anyways and you're feeling you're feeling like the pain the suffering of your ego kind of shriveling and contracting as you're sitting there kind of forcing it to be conscious and not to give in to temptation and in that moment that's suffering your fear your feeling that is literally like the devil leaving your body that's the feeling of the devil leaving your body the problem is that there's a lot of devil in you and it this is not something you have to do once this is something have to do over and over and over again for years the devil slowly leaves your body as you do these practices if you're doing them right but it's easy to do these practices in such a way that the devil never even begins to leave your body because you just trick yourself into think that you're doing the practices but really you're just sitting there daydreaming and you're calling it meditation or something like that you're not really confronting the emotional labor of it there's so many traps here and you should expect that there would be all these traps and you should expect that there should be enormous emotional labor involved with awakening and with spirituality and with God realization because if there wasn't everyone would be walking around God realized and they would be acting like Christ sir like the Buddha and do you see that on noose do you see that with celebrities do you see that in the business sector do you see that amongst your friends and family no they're all Devils just like you so you should expect that there's an enormous cost or some sort of a barrier there must be a barrier against awakening because if there wasn't everybody would be awake and we wouldn't be here talking about it but less than 1% of people are awake so the barrier must be enormous and that barrier is unique for different people and confronting that barrier you know you can confront that barrier in a you know unhealthy dysfunctional way like there are safe ways of doing psychedelics and there's dangerous ways of doing psychedelics there are safe ways to do yoga and dangerous ways to do yoga you have to also understand that just by the nature of this work this is psychological work that we're doing in spiritual work there's always going to be some portion of the population who listen to me who are going to end up hurting themselves no matter what I say no matter how many warnings and caveats I give because a lot of times people who are attracting this work are people who are already going through depression they are already neurotic they already have various traumas that are dealing with they're looking for solutions to that see in and whether some of my techniques work and help that person or not who knows you got to be careful see person like that could try some psychedelic and lose their mind it's possible in theory mm-hmm and then you know you can you can date you can harm your own life in the sense that you know maybe right now you have a good career but you spent 10 years building up that you're happy with maybe you got a wife and a family and a husband or whatever that you're happy with you got a house that you're happy with and so forth and then you learned about awakening then you go on this journey to do stuff that I say and then what ends up happening is that you find out that everything is meaningless maybe take some LSD whatever find out that everything is meaningless and then you leave your wife and husband and you you abandon your kids and you abandon your house and you stop going to work because you find it meaningless in all this and then by the end of it you find your whole life ruined and maybe you had a large savings and you say oh well money's stupid so you just give all that savings away to some charity and then you end up with no money and then at the end of all that you realize oh wait a minute I probably didn't eat that money probably not I'm not smart to give all my money away because I do need to survive somehow see and then at the end of that you could find yourself like having ruined your own life so do be careful about if you're doing this work there are gonna be phases expect that there's gonna be highs and there's gonna be lows and usually after a high comes alone so expect that be careful about making rash decisions be careful about making decisions like quitting your job giving away all your money leaving your family you know this sort of stuff you know think those through give yourself time find yourself maybe one or two people who are also into this work that you could have a conversation with in the worst case scenarios when you're feeling really bad considering consider hiring a life coach and working with a life coach that can be also effective to help you to have somebody to rely on or a therapist if you want although many therapists are not going to understand what you're going through and in fact they might try to discourage you and they might say all your you're losing your mind or this the the stuff that Leo told you isn't true and all this well because of course you have to you have to try to find people who are are pretty conscious themselves already to be able to appreciate the things you're learning here and to understand the stuff you're going through of course it helps to read books to give yourself a nice theoretical foundation I can't stress that enough especially if you're gonna be tripping real deep really helps it helps to create a sort of a context to tell you like what's normal what's not normal what's healthy what's unhealthy you can figure that out by reading some books mmm check out my book list I got like close to 50 books on spirituality non-duality on there which explain a lot of these nuances a lot of traps a lot of pathologies a lot of ways things can go wrong stories that people share about how their awakenings went wrong and how they fixed it or didn't fix it so forth research that and still I feel like I'm missing other dangers that I need to tell you about but this is what's come to mind so far I think you get the idea now right so yeah be careful on the one hand really doesn't matter what happens in your life even if you die it's all gonna be okay that's from the absolute perspective now that doesn't that doesn't help you at all from the relative ego perspective from the perspective of your own little personal ego and your own personal life and relative to your suffering that you're gonna experience you can really paint yourself into a corner in life where you do some some dumb things and then hurt yourself physically mentally psychologically and you just make the thing longer than it needs to be see sometimes when you go slower you actually end up getting there faster than when you try to rush sound of one of those counterintuitive ways in which life works see not always is the fastest speed the quickest way to get to where you want to get to all right that's it for this one please click like button for me and come check out actualize that all right I did recently launched on patreon so you can also go to patreon.com/scishow and you want to chip in a few bucks a month to to help me to upgrade equipment and to maybe do some advertising in the future get more subscribers and other improvements that I have planned that helps so thank you for your support but on on my website you will find the blog where I post content exclusive videos and things quite frequently you'll find the book list that I was talking about you'll find a life purpose course which can help you to get a sense of direction in your career and in your life basically it's all the principles life purpose course what it is first of all it's completely exclusive content all-new not anything that I've talked about in my normal videos that you've seen so there's that second of all in the life purpose course we talk about new topics topics I haven't talked about anywhere else and then thirdly basically I give you principals and the the the blueprint that I use to create my own career in my life and not just actual as I work but even before that with various businesses that I've worked on so I'm not just telling you how to do what I do it's not about that as much broader than that is helping you to figure out what your what your ultimate dream in life is what you want to be doing what you're passionate about how to turn that passion convert that passion into an action plan to then build a real career out of it that earns you money so it's a very practical course it's not abstract and airy-fairy it it tells you it guides you step by step how I did it and how you could do it and those principles I developed myself by just trying to figure it out for myself because this is one of the things that occupied the first 25 years of my life maybe even 30 years of my life basically is figuring out how I could build a passion and career for myself because I knew that that's what I wanted and needed in order to be satisfied with my life and it was a struggle I I I failed many times before I figured it out so those principles are in the course and what am I forgetting yeah the book lists the course the patreon that's basically it the last thing I want to say is that this work requires nuance nuance nuance nuance you have to be very careful and very nuanced in how you go about it you can't be sloppy here you can't just take the things I say for granted you have to think them through do they actually make sense do they correspond with your own experiences can you validate the things that I say it's not about believing me it's also about being being being careful not to misinterpret the things I say sometimes the most important thing I say is the thing that I don't say to really understand a teaching you oftentimes have to understand what the teacher isn't saying not just what they are saying see your ideas of God or love or consciousness or awakening chances are they're very wrong you might think you're understanding everything I'm talking about but you don't so be careful assuming that you understand the things I talk about there's many many layers to it easy to misunderstand of course because your ego is always lurking behind the scenes interpreting things in a way that serves it rather than the way that's actually true so you gotta be careful with self-deception denial distraction projection these are all very common defense mechanisms and ways in which you can misinterpret teachings and you also have to recognize that I can make mistakes to see I'm not immune to to these various defense mechanisms the only immunity you have is just your consciousness how conscious are you how vigilant are you so you need to verify everything I talked about for yourself simply for the fact that you have no idea what I'm wrong about even if I'm right 90% of the time that those other 10% of the time which are those you don't know am I wrong about God am I wrong about love am I wrong about meditation am I wrong about yoga am I wrong about past lives am I wrong about aliens am I wrong about psychedelics am i long wrong about imagination am I wrong about hallucination am I wrong about relationships you don't know it's almost guaranteed given how much I talk that I'm wrong about some of this stuff or maybe I'm perfect but how do you know from your point of view you don't know so you can't just take my word for it cuz I could be wrong about that even if I told you that I am perfect well what if I'm wrong you don't know so you got to figure all this out for yourself of course you can use my work as sort of a launching point it can be helpful in that sense but don't get too attached to it hold it loosely don't get ideological about it be very nuanced about it because understand that reality itself is far more nuanced than anything that can be said about it everything we say about it is the oversimplification and over generalization it's a way of talking about it it's a partial perspective it's a truth from a certain point of view as obi-wan Kenobi told Luke so the things I tell you really you got to always remember they're not absolute truths there are truths from a certain point of view and that's what you'll discover as you go through and you try to verify some of the things I talk about is that you'll discover like oh well this is what Leo was talking about all that time here it is but it it's not like what Leo said it was was he lying was he wrong and then maybe you'll discover that I was wrong or maybe what she'll discover is like no he wasn't wrong he wasn't lying per se it's just that he was explaining it from a certain point of view from his point of view yeah how else could anyone explain anything but from their point of view given their biases given their prayer differences given their filters and other things like that no one is ever gonna deliver the raw absolute truth to you through language in in some pure unadulterated form there's many layers of corruption there's the corruption that comes from my own mental filters and then there's a corruption from your mental filters so the teacher can be corrupt and the student can be corrupt and oftentimes both is the case and then a lot of distortion happens in this way so keep all that ninth stick around because there's going to be a lot more content in the future about new topics that I haven't covered yet you