Word count:11155
Hey, this is Leo, for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about the mechanics of belief. This episode is basically epistemology. 101. Epistemology means the theory of knowledge, how do we know what we know? How do we sort truth from falsehood. And this turns out to be a much more practical and important subject matter than you might initially think. One problem we have is that most people, I would say, like 99% of society does not have a clue as to how beliefs actually work. What they are, and what are the actual mechanisms by which we come to know things, to hold things as true or as false. Now that might at first seem like it's a philosophical matter. But actually, it turns out to be a very practical matter. Because if you accidentally mistake falsehood for truth, and vice versa, then you lead yourself in a very bad situation in life, you basically can't grow. And you can't raise your consciousness. So the reason, in a nutshell, why this topic is so important is because your beliefs restrict your ability to raise your consciousness. And they distort perception. And given the fact that you're prime directive in life, is to be raising your consciousness. What do you think, is the biggest obstacle to that? It's your beliefs. It's your beliefs. That is your biggest obstacle. Now, you might say, but Leo, I don't hold any beliefs, you might be talking about some religious people. And I'm with you on that. But how does this apply to my life, because I'm a rational person, I'm a scientifically minded person. Wrong. Wrong. That right there in and of itself, is a belief and a false one at that. Very dangerous belief, that one right there. That's actually what I call a meta belief. It's a belief about beliefs. I see a lot of otherwise rational, intelligent people behaving very irrationally, by not realizing that their rationality is grounded upon many irrational beliefs. And what's worse, is that they deny this, they vehemently denied this, when I tried to get them to look at this. So this is a very, very important topic. It applies to virtually anybody, I don't know anybody to whom this topic does not apply. Right now, your ability to raise your consciousness is limited by the beliefs you hold. And a vast majority of beliefs you hold, are completely off the map like completely off the mark, how can I say that with such certainty, because I know that the vast majority of your beliefs, you soaked up from your culture, and the culture we live in, is greatly diluted, meaning that you are greatly diluted. So let's begin from the beginning. We're going to tackle a lot of different issues here about the mechanics of belief. But the beginning begins with the fundamental challenge of life, one of the fundamental challenges is that you're born, and then somehow you need to start to distinguish between what is true and what is false. And this is not nearly as easy as it seems. Ask yourself, when you're born, how do you distinguish between what's true and what's false, and make that distinction accurately? That is not an easy thing to do. Because if what you're going to do is like what most people do, is they just blindly accept whatever is served up to them on a plate, then it's guaranteed that you will delude yourself and you will be believing many, many false things. Not only that, but your entire epistemic attitude towards life will be misguided. And I'll get to the end a bit towards the end. So generally speaking, people aren't very conscious. And so when they're born, and they're growing up as a kid, and even as a teenager, and then even as an adult. You They don't take this issue seriously of the challenge of distinguishing what is true from what is false. And also, it never occurs to them, that they themselves could be their own greatest enemy. And that the beliefs they hold, are actually taking a hold of them. And not the other way around. They don't take seriously the possibility that they could be deluding themselves. And that the that the greatest source of inaccurate perception, and false belief? isn't some con man waiting to trick you? Or scam you out of your money? It's not that it's you. It's yourself, you're your own greatest enemy here. And how is this? Well, simply because lack of consciousness, lack of awareness of the mechanisms of how beliefs work, and beliefs work in some very twisted ways. So what I'm going to help you do is to get awareness over these mechanisms, so that you can stop being your beliefs, Little Bitch, and you can become their master, rather than their slave. The fundamental trap with beliefs is the following is that we like to think that we can represent reality with our ideas. And so we have all sorts of ideas about reality, ideas about ourselves, or other people about life, about existence, about religion, about science, about politics, about economics, about our friends, about our enemies, and so forth. We have all these ideas. And we take these ideas actually seriously. Without recognizing that they are ideas. And that ideas, even though ideas are part of reality, they are not actually the truth. There's great limits on what you can represent with ideas. And a representation is not the real thing. And this is very easy to forget, as simple as it sounds. A lot of very intelligent people, a lot of very rational people forget this. When this happens, here's the danger is that you have a lot of ideas about how reality is or should be. And therefore, use stop being open to direct experience to experiencing how reality actually is. And so when you fill your mind with a lot of ideas about what's true, or what's false, that then obviates the searching for deep direct experiences. And that's where a lot of stuff goes wrong. Because if reality was simple, and not complex, and reality was intuitive, and not very counterintuitive, then this strategy might work. Because basically, it would work like this. I'm born, I have some intuitions and ideas about how reality works. And oh, what do you know, you know, reality just happens to work exactly how I thought it was. And that's it good enough. Problem solved. That would be fine. Except what humanity has discovered, time and time and time and time and time and time and time, again, is that reality does not work, the way we initially assumed. Reality is filled with very weird paradoxes, and facts that are completely contrary to anything we assumed. And that many of our speculations and our assumptions and our egoic intuitions about how people are, how life works, how happiness works, what I can achieve myself, and many, many beliefs along these lines, that this is that this is contrary to direct experience. And so what happens is that when your mind gets filled with a lot of ideas, then it's like a cup that is full. And when a cup is full, you can't add more to it. So the thing that's the most important, which is direct experience, actual reality comes to you only in one form, through direct experience, and through no other form. Your speculations and ideas about it are always suspect and could always be overruled by direct experience. Because that's the case. And I don't know how deeply you reek realize that some people they sort of agree with me on that, but they don't realize how significant that statement is. That direct experience is King It's primary, it overshadows every idea that you have. See, when your cup is full, you can't undertake a serious inquiry of life. You're living in IDEA land. And you don't undertake a meta inquiry, which is an inquiry into the process of inquiry. This is critical. Because to do an effective inquiry, you have to ask yourself, How do I do inquiry accurately, which takes you into the domain of epistemology. Epistemology is like the bedrock of what philosophy is about. Because if you want to make a claim about the world, a philosophical claim a scientific claim, a religious claim any kind of claim at all, you first have to ask yourself, by what process? Am I making this claim? How do I know that the thing I'm about to claim is actually true? And not false? How do I know it's not subject to my own biases, to my own egoic desires, to my own egoic fears, to hidden assumptions, to confirmation biases, to self fulfilling prophecy effects, and so forth? How can I be sure about that? And when you start to seriously ask those questions, now, you're really on the right track. Before you can do an effective inquiry into life, you first have to do an effective meta inquiry. And that's what I'm going to help you to do here. So what is a belief, let's begin there. A belief is basically just an idea, or thought of something that you think is either true, or false. So this is a very general definition. This covers a lot of stuff, hopefully, you can see how many examples we can come up here, with an idea of beliefs. There's different categories of beliefs, there's personal beliefs, beliefs you hold about yourself. There's social beliefs, beliefs you have about other people about say, there's political beliefs, scientific beliefs, epistemic beliefs, which are beliefs about knowledge, beliefs about beliefs, and metaphysical beliefs, which are beliefs about the very structure of reality and what reality is. So some examples of personal beliefs might be that I I'm attractive, or I'm ugly, or that I'm good at math. And maybe I'm bad at English. Or that I'm six feet tall. And so on, and so forth. There's a lot of personal beliefs you have. Some of them can be positive, some of them can be negative. There's also social beliefs. So you might believe something like, having a lot of friends is good and contributes to my happiness, that would be a belief. Or maybe you believe that's not true. That's also a belief. Just because something is false. Doesn't mean it's not a belief, as long as you affirm it, and you hold it as an idea in your mind, whether it's true or false. That makes it a belief. You might believe, for example, that men are assholes. Or you might believe that women are only attracted to men with money. So we have beliefs about relationships, and about dating and so forth. There's also political beliefs. Of course, you might believe that one party is better than another party, you might have economic beliefs such as you know, capitalism is good, communism is bad, or you have might have more nuanced economic beliefs, like tax cuts, are going to help the economy or maybe you believe that tax cuts don't help the economy. You also have scientific beliefs, like you might believe certain theories in quantum mechanics, you might believe Einstein's general theory of relativity, you might believe that the, the Earth rotates around the sun. You might believe that the Earth is round and not flat. Or maybe the opposite, hopefully not, and so on and so on, and so on. So many, many, many scientific beliefs, basically, scientific beliefs. Just think about science class, back in high school, all the high school classes, you took chemistry, biology, physics, and so forth. And all the ideas that you were taught about evolution, about matter about energy, about, about galaxies and stars, about molecules, about cells about chemistry. There's like just so much stuff and 99% of it you just took on faith. It's a belief, right? You didn't actually do the experiments to prove any of that stuff. You just took it on as beliefs. You also have epistemic beliefs, which are beliefs about beliefs. And I'll talk more about that as we continue. And then you have metaphysical beliefs. Like, if I asked you what is reality, you've got some sort of beliefs about that. You might say, reality is just a giant computer simulation. Or you might say, well, reality is what I see. Or you might say, well, reality is what God created. Or you might say, Well, in reality is just dumb, empty matter, which came out of the Big Bang. And then through the process of evolution, here we are, or whatever your ideas are about reality. You might think reality is finite, you might think it's infinite. You might think that reality was created by someone, or that it always existed, you might think that reality will end at some point, or that it lasts forever. And that's the turtle. And you have all these sorts of notions about what you think is possible within reality, for example, you might think that, well, obviously, spirits, and ghosts are not possible. That's only something we see in, in the movies, horror movies and stuff. And you know, unicorns don't exist. Even though maybe they could on a planet or something. You might also believe like, Well, yeah, aliens could exist on their planets. I haven't seen one. But my beliefs allow for there to be aliens, and other people might have beliefs that don't allow them to admit that there are aliens or could be aliens. So all sorts of beliefs exist, right. And we have very mundane beliefs to like, you believe that when you walk into a house and you flip the light switch, the lights will come on. It's a very practical, mundane belief, or you believe that when you go outside, tomorrow, the sun will still be there shining. So it just kind of goes on and on and on. So when people say, Leo, I don't hold any beliefs. That's, that's just patently ridiculous, because you actually hold 1000s of beliefs. You couldn't function without beliefs. Now let's talk about some important features of the mechanics of how beliefs work. These are important to start to become conscious of how beliefs trick you. So the first important feature that almost everyone overlooks takes for granted is that every belief held feels true. Every belief held feels true. Now that seems simple and obvious. But watch out, because you fall into this trap. If every belief held feels true, then how do I determine which beliefs are true, and which are false, then goes back to that fundamental problem. While most people assume that you can do it based on feeling and intuition, it's like, well, yeah, it feels true. But they forget that every belief feels true. Once it's held, of course, it doesn't feel true. If I tell you that Santa Claus is real, that won't feel true to you. Because you don't hold that belief, you actually hold the opposite belief. You hold the belief that Santa Claus isn't real. But if I came up here and started to argue to you about how Santa Claus actually is real, you wouldn't be open to that argument. Because you already have the belief that Santa Claus is not real. And I feel so true to you, that you will not listen to me, or to any evidence that I present, about how Santa Claus is real. Now, you might say, well, Leo, we all know Santa Claus is not real. So why should I be open to your silly arguments? But see, that just begs the question, because our original problem here is how do we identify what is true from what's false? And you might say, Well, we do it based on a bunch of evidence and reason and such. But actually, that's not how you do it. You do it based on a first come first serve sort of basis, which will start to become clearer here as I keep going down the list and keep talking to you about the different features, the tree features of beliefs. But what I would urge you to consider is that you actually don't hold most of your beliefs based on solid evidence and logic and reason. What you do is you simply latch on to the first belief that comes your way that feels true, that feels right. You latch on to that and then another one, and another one, and another one and another one without really looking deeply into them. And then after a while, you've got that 1000s of beliefs, you have a web of beliefs, and that based on those, you evaluate other new beliefs when you think about adopting them. So your criteria for judging beliefs is actually not their truth. It's based on other beliefs you hold. But now you can already start to see the danger of this. Because how did you adopt your first early beliefs? When this web was being constructed, when you were just a child, when you were first born, you had very little consciousness, and very little awareness, as of course, makes sense. Because when you're born, you don't know anything. You don't know what's true, or what's false. You don't even have this as an important priority in your life. It's felt like kids are born in the mist. Okay, my job here on Earth is to accurately distinguish what's true from what's false. No, that's not how a child's mind work. A child's mind works as a sponge, soaking up absolutely everything without a lot of questioning. I mean, yeah, it's true that kids sometimes question a lot. But also, it's true that kids are gullible. And generally, they will believe whatever you tell them. In fact, it's a lot worse than this. A lot worse, because there's a phenomenon called imprinting. This is a phenomenon that happens, for example, with animals, like you would take a baby duck, as soon as the baby duck is born, when it's young, when his mind is completely blank, it will imprint onto its mother, and that will have an image, it actually knows who its mother is based on what it was born, next to. Now, generally, that works fine. Except, of course, if the duck happens to hatch, not near its actual Mother, what will happen is that it'll imprint on a false thing. And the thing could be ridiculous. It could not even looks like a duck. It could imprint to a sock puppet. And they've actually done experiments like this, where they've gotten ducks to imprint the sock puppets, which sounds ridiculous to us. And we kind of laugh at them say, Oh, look, look at that stupid duck. But you gotta wonder. Because, you know, the duck is actually a high level mammal. It's not a bacteria or something, it's mind is actually quite similar to the human mind. Not as intelligent, much smaller frontal cortex. But when you are a baby, and you're just born, and your parents start feeding you beliefs and ideas about the world, and you're starting to soak it up from your school and your culture and all that stuff. Yeah, you question some of them? You question like 1% of them? 99% of them you never question. And so you build up your web of beliefs, that initial foundation, and then you use that initial foundation to judge all new beliefs as an adult. But did you ever actually question your web of beliefs that foundation? And the answer is no, you didn't. And when you consider that everyone in our culture, was born and raised in a similar fashion, now you start to see the potential traps that exist here. And what I'll tell you is that the traps here are far far, far, far deeper than you ever imagined. ever imagined. Like, it's way worse than your worst nightmares will tell you like way worse, humanity. And our culture at large mainstream culture has got reality so wrong, that it will shock you if you ever discover this for yourself. But that will be very difficult for you to do, because you're gonna have to weed through this vast quantity of completely taken for granted and unquestioned beliefs, which have some of these very sticky properties. So let's keep talking about the properties of beliefs. I want you to recognize that you don't consciously select your beliefs. It's not like you're born and then you look up into a book, the book of all possible beliefs, then you're like, Well, yeah, I've considered this one and this one and this one, this I consider all the alternatives, and I decided, You know what, I'm gonna believe I'm gonna believe in God. Or you know what, I'm gonna believe I'm gonna believe in evolution, or I'm gonna believe in matter, or I'm gonna believe in consciousness, or I'm gonna believe that the Earth is round. That's not how works, you're not really given a choice, you just absorb your beliefs from your culture. Do you recognize how fucking significant that is? 99% of your beliefs are absorbed from your culture, unconsciously, without any choice or input from you. And I'm talking about the most fundamental of the fundamental, the most possibly basic things that you take completely for granted, like the laws of logic, like mathematics, like that reality is a physical system like that you were born and that you will die that you are the child of your, of your mother of your mother and your father, like these very basic things that you would think okay, I mean, why should we even waste time questioning these things? Yeah, it's hard for me to even start to communicate, how deep this rabbit hole goes. What's even worse is that 99% of all your beliefs you've never actually directly experienced. Even all the scientific ones, everything you were taught in science 90% of it, you've never actually directly experienced, you've never derived it, you've never proved it. You just take it on faith. But it's not totally blind faith. Because like I said, what you do is you have this web of beliefs. And so you use that web of beliefs to evaluate new beliefs that come in, and your whole game in life is to maintain a reasonably tolerable cohesive web of beliefs. That's the game you're playing in life. So sometimes a belief comes in you change it, sometimes I believe, tries to come in, but you say no, that that definitely can't work. Because if that was true, then all these other things that I believe would have to be false, and that can't be right. So I'm gonna reject this belief. Another feature, that most people underestimate our beliefs is that they are very difficult to drop. Once you acquire them. It's like that baby duck. Who got imprinted? That imprint is not something the baby duck can consciously change. So whatever it happens to be is what it is. Now, you might think that human beings have the capacity to drop beliefs. And it's true, we do. But it takes emotional labor, it's a lot harder than you think. Which brings us to the next feature. The tricky feature of beliefs is that beliefs generate strong emotions. Have you noticed this in yourself, or in others around you, certain beliefs generate very, very, very strong emotions. What I found is that the deeper the belief is, and the more the belief is disconnected from direct experience, the stronger emotions, the belief will arouse. And in fact, beliefs are actually addictive. Not only do they arouse strong emotions, and also they fuel behaviors, but they are addictive. So that once you hold a certain belief, and you make it a pet belief of yours, something that you really want to be true of the world, then letting that go is can be very, very, very, very difficult. Much more difficult than you probably imagined. Because it's not a question of letting go of one belief. It's a matter of reconfiguring your entire web of beliefs. A lot of times, to let go of one belief that's at the core of all your web of beliefs, requires that you throw out and reconfigure the entire web. And that's very difficult because your mind wants to maintain homeostasis. And it generally wants to keep that web intact. It doesn't want to screw with the web. It doesn't want to screw with success, so to speak, but that ends up backfiring. Because what if your web of beliefs isn't producing the success you want? You might think, Oh, well, then I'll just change it. And I'll replace it with successfully But that's not how it works. Because the mind is stubborn. Now it's addicted. And it's getting strong emotions from the existing web of beliefs. And so what it'll actually do is that it will forfeit happiness, and success and truth in the name of just preserving homeostasis, even if that homeostasis is creating a ton of suffering, and lack of success in your life. That's the danger of stubbornness. Beliefs also have the feature of being self fulfilling, so that when you believe something, it tends to also reinforce itself and become true. What's an example of this? Well, if I believe that all women just want me for my money, and I go start dating women, that will become a self fulfilling belief. Because I will start to look for all the examples of how women tried to exploit me, and only like me for my money. And let's say that I'm very successful in my life, and I earn lots of money. That means I'm around lots of people and women come into my life and, and I try to talk to those women. Of course, I let them know how much money I have. And I kind of flaunt my money because I drive a nice car, and all this kind of stuff. So women kind of see it. And then of course, they start to take advantage of it. And because I believe it, it starts to actually become true. The self fulfilling prophecy like this happens with many, many beliefs, especially personal limiting beliefs that you have about your own life. It also tends to become true with scientific beliefs, and beliefs about the very core existence, that we're living in reality itself. For example, if you believe that reality is physical and composed of matter, you will only read scientific studies that verify and prove that reality is made out of matter. And its physical. And if ever you run across a study in some journal or some magazine, about how reality is non physical, perhaps you will disregard His hogwash. Of course, because you already know that reality is physical. So why would you waste your time reading a journal about how reality is non physical when you already know it's physical. And see this creates a self fulfilling prophecy effect. Even more tricky is that all beliefs are circular. All beliefs are circular. Which means that the only thing that justifies a belief is another belief. Now, you might think that some beliefs are justified by indisputable evidence, direct experience, hardcore facts, but that's actually technically false. That would actually be a metal belief, false medically, the reality is that every belief you hold can only be justified by another belief. And that one can also be justified by another belief, and buy another one, and buy another one, and buy another one and buy another one. And when you get to the rock bottom, there's nothing there. You might think that the rock bottom is the truth. But that's not the case. Because the truth actually has no direct connection to an idea in your mind, or a belief. Right? The truth is actually, in direct experience, the truth is independent of the entire structure. The scope of beliefs is something that we're constructing in our mind and an overlaying on top. And we think that our web of beliefs is actually like, closely mirroring the truth. But that's not the case. And you can discover this for yourself simply by questioning a belief that you have, take one belief you have, take something that you just are absolutely certain about, could not possibly be false. And then start to ask yourself, Why is that true? What justifies that, and what will happen is that you will not arrive at a fact or a direct experience, you will actually arrive at another belief. And then you can question that one. And you'll arrive at another belief and unbelief. Another belief. And if you do that, what you'll actually discover is that generally what happens a very common pattern is that the beliefs it's a chain might have five or 10 different beliefs in it, but it always comes back around in a circle. So the Problem of circular reasoning is not just something that religious people face, the problem of circular reasoning is the problem, the inherent nature of this web of beliefs. That's how it maintains structural integrity, the web of beliefs doesn't so much lien against reality as much as it leans against itself. And in that way, it creates this sort of self supporting structure. But it's just a house of cards. That falls apart very quickly. If you go to the very core of things and start to question very deeply. Another important feature of beliefs is that they determine what is possible or impossible for you. possibility and impossibility is based on your beliefs. So what do you think is possible you think it's possible to fly? Do you think it's possible to jump out of an airplane and survive? Do you think it's possible to run into aliens to have contact with them? You think it's possible? That what? You think it's possible to become rich to become a billionaire? Is that possible for you? Is that impossible? Do you think it's possible to attract your dream spouse, and to create a beautiful marriage and family? Do you think is possible to get enlightened or not? You think it's possible to be pleased with your life to be joyful and at peace? The majority of the time? Or do you think that these things aren't possible? That's determined by your web of beliefs. And of course, you can see how this has very practical implications. Not philosophical, but very practical. Because what you're able and willing to go out and try is always limited. By what believe you believe, is going to work, or isn't going to work? Or is real or is unreal. See, if I give you a technique, to sit on your couch, and practice for 30 minutes every day that will let you travel outside of your body and speak to aliens? Will you actually sit down and do that? Most people will not do that. Because they believe that it's impossible for one to exit their body and speak to aliens, because we are bodies and because aliens do not exist. And as one example, out of many, many, many, many, many things, you might believe that, hey, starting this kind of business that I want to start, there's no way I can make that work. I don't have the money, I don't have the skills, that business that marketplace already crowded, it's never gonna work. And so you never even go and try. C. or or you might be walking down the street, you see a cute girl, you want to talk to her chatter up and maybe start to date or you're really attracted to her. But you think yourself, ah, you know, she's such a cute girl. She's such a beautiful woman. She's probably already got a boyfriend. And if she didn't have a boyfriend, well, I'm not really dressed nice right now. didn't shave this morning. So probably she wouldn't be attracted to me anyways. So I might as well just not even bother starting a conversation. And then that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Because he thought it was impossible. And so therefore it is. Victims have a huge problem with this. Victims have a lot of personal beliefs like that. But this issue goes way beyond just victims. If you don't feel like a victim, I still guarantee you that you have many, many existential limiting beliefs. Which brings me to the next feature of beliefs, which is that there exist meta beliefs. Meta beliefs are beliefs about beliefs. And this is where things get really interesting and also extremely dangerous. Because it's the meta beliefs, which nobody almost ever questions or thinks about. And yet, it's these meta beliefs that can get you completely stuck because they determine what you think is possible or not possible to occur within the web of beliefs itself. It's the beliefs You hold about the web of beliefs. See, this gets very tricky. Here's a list of some very, very dangerous meta beliefs, these beliefs will completely stole your ability to grow your consciousness and life. One is, I don't hold any beliefs. You see, that's a meta belief. If you believe you don't hold beliefs, that's a meta belief. Another one is, most of my beliefs are accurate. Sure, yeah. Leo, a few of my beliefs could be wrong, but most of them are accurate. It's a very dangerous meta belief. Another one is, Leo, it's good to believe certain things. So yeah, I agree with you. I shouldn't just believe things blindly. That's a problem. But there's certain things that we can all agree on are very good to believe, for example, that murder is wrong. Like morality, for example, that's a good set of beliefs. Extremely dangerous metal belief that one. Another one is, some beliefs are safe, in that some beliefs cannot be doubted. Because they are so certain. Like you might tell yourself, you know, Leo, it's completely ridiculous. To doubt that the Earth is round, that's completely ridiculous. There's no point at all. It's just complete waste of time to doubt that. Or you might say, You know what, Leo? God is a belief that I will never, ever stop believing. That's a completely safe belief. Or you might say, No, you don't do science, the scientific method. That's the one thing that's safe, everything else can be doubted, but that one thing we shouldn't doubt. That's a super dangerous meta belief. Another one is, if I stopped believing x, then I'm committing a sin. If I stopped believing X, that I'm committing a sin, for example, if I stopped believing in God, I'm committing a sin. If I stopped believing in my morals, I'm committing a sin, if I stopped believing that my family is good, and that I should be loving towards my family. If I stopped believing that then I'm committing a sin or I'm doing something wrong. That's a very dangerous menabilly. Another one is, there are no alternatives to holding beliefs. So you might say, Leo, what's the alternative? All of us hold these webs of beliefs. So that's the best we can do. Very dangerous meta belief. Another one is dropping my beliefs isn't that important? That's a meta belief. Another one is that epistemology makes no practical difference in my life. Something like Leo, you know, you're talking about all this epistemology and all this abstract stuff, all these ideas, but what difference does it make in my life, it makes no difference. That's a very dangerous meta belief. Another one is, and I see this one, a lot of intelligent and rational people make this mistake is they believe that God does not exist isn't a belief. But actually, it is a belief. And the belief that God doesn't exist is not a belief is also a belief. That's a dangerous meta belief. Similarly, some people believe that science is not a belief. If you believe that science is not a belief, that's a meta belief, and a false one at that very dangerous. Some people believe that logic is not based on beliefs. Lead to logic. That's the most certain thing we have. If logic is wrong, then what do we got? We got nothing. logic isn't based on beliefs. Logic is logic. That's a belief, a very dangerous meta belief. You see, what makes meta beliefs like this dangerous is when they create some sort of safety zone within your web of beliefs, that becomes impenetrable, to alternatives. So fundamentally, what you're doing when you're holding one of these meta beliefs, obstinately is you're saying, Okay, so here's my beliefs, I recognize that a lot of it is arbitrary, came from all sorts of sources, I didn't really understand how to filter it very well. So yeah, okay. Certain aspects of it, I admit, could be fallible. But not this part right here, see this part, I'm going to carve out this part. And this part, I know for sure is correct. And there's no way in hell, you're gonna get me to reconsider that one. And that's the mother of all fucking mistakes. The Mother of All metal epistemic mistakes, is to carve out a little safety zone or beliefs. And to tell yourself that, A, it can't be false. And B, it wasn't a belief in the first place. It's a fact. When you miss identify a belief as a fact. That's when you commit the gravest sin. That is so dangerous. And it leads to so many problems. And if you think that you're somehow immune to this, guess, again, because you've done this in your web of beliefs, you, you that rational you, the one that's very vigilant about this stuff, the one that thinks it's got it all figured out. You've done this. You've done this, how do I know? Because it's so difficult not to do this. It's very, very difficult, you need to be extremely conscious not to do this. Because everything in your mind is pushing you towards doing this. And this is something that will just utterly astound you, when you really understand what I'm talking about. Like when you really get it, not just hearing me say once, but like 10 years from now, if you do 10 years of consciousness work, and then you come back and you say, Oh, my God, I got it. I can't believe it. This explains so much of what's wrong in the world. That will be a really powerful insight for you to have, but it won't come easily, you're gonna have to work for another meta belief that people commonly have something like, well, Leo, you know, no one knows anything for sure. It's all relative, in the end, who knows what's true. That's a belief. A dangerous, very dangerous meta belief. And the last one I'll give you here is that, Leo, I'm already aware of my limiting beliefs. I know what you're talking about here, I already took that into account. In my Well, beliefs. That's a belief. And it's probably false. And it's very dangerous. So now we covered the topic of meta beliefs. The last feature of beliefs that I'll tell you about is that beliefs are not looking out for you. Think of beliefs as foreign entities in your mind? Or in your body? Like memes, right? People like to talk about memes. What is a meme? A meme is like an idea that comes to you and it kind of resides in your mind. It almost has a life of its own. Well, beliefs are like that. Beliefs are memes. And they live inside your mind. And they reproduce. And they sort of hijack your brain and they are not looking out for your highest self, they are not looking out there. Number one objective is not to get you to grow. And to be an open, happy, successful, highly conscious human being that is not their objective. Their objective is to lodge themselves in your brain and tend to replicate into other brains. So just like a virus, that's what they're doing. And when you think the virus is your friend, and you start walking around running around coughing on people, because you think that the virus is actually you, it's actually something that's deeply important and true. Now you can start to see how all sorts of damage can happen both personally and collectively as a species. So why are beliefs so dangerous? Well, firstly, there's that self fulfilling prophecy effect, where what you believe has to manifest itself. And if you believe a bunch of negative stuff, which many people do, then you manifest a bunch of negative stuff. And so that ends up being dangerous. When you think that people are dangerous. When you think that people are, are evil. That's what you tend to see. And that's what you tend to perpetuate with your expectations and your behaviors. You see, which is ironic, because the people who believe in evil, they are the ones who usually want to stamp out evil. But the fact that they believe in evil is actually what tends to perpetuate more evil. See, very ironic, very counterintuitive and twisted. Also, beliefs are dangerous, because once you hold the belief, you tend to filter out contrary data. So you're not fully open to all the direct experience possible. Because basically, once you've held on to a belief, you want to defend that belief at any cost, which means you're willing to disregard direct experience, which ends up being disastrous in one way or another. Also, what happens with beliefs is that it creates paradigm lock. A paradigm is an entire perspective on reality. You can have a scientific paradigm, like evolution, that's a paradigm, you can have a religious paradigm like a supreme creator, that's a paradigm, you could have an economic paradigm, like you might think that having low taxes is really healthy for the economy. So that's your entire paradigm. It's kind of like a lens that you look at everything through. And the danger with paradigms is that they're constructed by usually a set of very fundamental beliefs that are never truly questioned. And they were not originally selected by you. If you take a look, and you do an examination of deeply religious people, or very adamantly atheistic people, or very dogmatic, economically, or political minded people, like Republicans or Democrats or libertarians, or capitalist or communist, you know, you find these people. And I will show you that that person didn't actually at all, select these very deeply held beliefs that they have. So the most hardcore and dogmatic Republicans, Democrats, communists, capitalist Nazis, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists, that these people, as loyal as they are to their belief systems, they are not conscious of the fact that they did not actually choose that belief system. And that that belief system was actually largely just a byproduct of the environment that they happened to grew up in. Just so happened, which is very, very ironic. You have to start to see what's going on here on the meta perspective, from the meta perspective. The danger with beliefs is not your going to hold wrong beliefs. It's that you hold beliefs that all you get that it's not a matter of, oh, you know, Republicans are wrong, and Democrats are right. Or communists are wrong, and capitalists are right, because they hold the wrong ideas. That's not the problem. The problem is holding any ideas at all. The holding is the problem, not why you're holding, it doesn't really matter what you're holding. What matters is that you are holding and you're not willing to let go. Because you're not seeing this from the meta perspective. And you're stuck in a paradigm lock. Another reason why beliefs are so dangerous is because they preclude seeking out radically new experiences. When you have a parent On, when you have your whole level beliefs arranged, you're not going to go out of your way to have a really radically different experience in your life. You're not, you're not going to go travel to some third world country to try to invalidate your ideas about capitalism, communism, you're not, you're not going to go travel to Africa, and interact with kids who are hungry, and have AIDS and stuff. To disconfirm, certain political or economic philosophies that you have, you're not going to do that. There's no way in hell you're going to do that. You're not going to go read a bunch of scientific papers and reports and textbooks, to invalidate your beliefs about God and about your religion. And if you're a scientist, you're not going to go study any spiritual texts, or do any kind of meditative work, or any kind of contemplative work to try to access an altered state of consciousness? Because your scientific paradigm tells you that reality is physical, and that there's nothing else. See? Another reason why beliefs are so dangerous, is because they create emotional reactivity, arrogance and inflexibility. Take a look at this from the historical perspective, take a look at what human beings have been up to for the last two to 3000 years. What have we been doing? It's been belief wars. That's what it is. It's not wars over land. It's not war over resources. It's not anything but ideological wars. That's what every war is. It's an ideological war. at its root, it's people fighting and killing each other over beliefs. And the solution is not to find the one right belief system and then spread it to the masses, as you might think. That is exactly the type of thinking that creates ideological wars, and arrogance and emotional reactivity and in flexibility. The solution is to drop the entire game, because you see it as a farce. The whole fucking thing is a farce. So at this point, you might say, well, Leo, wait a minute, aren't you being a hypocrite here? Aren't you just giving us more of your beliefs? So it sounds like you're finding some clever little rhetorical argument for how to sneak your beliefs Leo's beliefs into my web of beliefs. So how should I take this? Do I believe you you want me to just to believe you? And then how does that make you different from everybody else? You're engaging in this ideological war to know, that's the difference? The difference? If you've got enough consciousness, you'll be able to see this? Can you see this, the difference is that what I'm advocating is a completely change, a complete change in attitude. There are basically three epistemic attitudes that people have in life. The first, attitude is the worst, proudly defending your beliefs. Proudly defending your beliefs, this is what happens with religion, with philosophy and with politics, very, very commonly, is people just have some belief system, they just defend the hell out of it, because they want to be loyal to it. And they're actually proud of that. The next stage up, when you get a little more consciousness and you realize, wait a minute. The Game of Life is not about defending my beliefs, but about expanding my beliefs, refining my beliefs going out there and learning more and rearranging remote beliefs so that it's more truthful and more accurate, reflects reality more correctly. That's much better. And so you feel like yeah, I've evolved, I've evolved here. And now what you're doing is you're going out there, you're actually seeking out some new experiences, you're actually disconcert. disconfirming, some old dogmas that you've held and you're dropping some beliefs and you actually feel like all this is freeing me up. Look at this. I can do more stuff. I'm questioning various personal limiting beliefs that I've had. Look at this. All the sudden I'm able to have a relationship. I'm able to have a better business better financial life, better career, my kids are doing better. Great. I've done it I've reached the peak. But that's only stage two. You have yet to reach stage three. And stage three is the most radical leap of all here require is the most consciousness to make this final leap, which is to realize that reality has nothing to do with belief. And that reality lies outside of belief. And when you actually grasp that, really grasp it on a deep level, then what will happen to you is that you will stop this game of accumulating, rearranging and refining your beliefs at all, you will stop defending, you will stop being loyal, you will stop arguing other people, you will stop debating, you will stop looking for evidence. All of it will stop. And the only thing that will be left is just raw, direct experience complete openness, without any presumptions or expectations about how reality is or will be, or ought to be. And then you live from that place. So, the reason that what I'm proposing is different than the stuff that you're doing in your life, is that I'm proposing that you make this attitude shift to dropping the entire game not to adopt more of my beliefs. Because you're right, if you did that, if all you did was just to believe me right now. You wouldn't have actually increased your awareness, you wouldn't have moved up by level, you would just be a stage one or stage two. But we need you to get to stage three, to get to stage three, you actually have to listen between the lines of what I'm saying. Because actually, what I'm saying can't be said, because everything I'm saying to you is just ideas. You have to recognize that, oh, he's giving me ideas. But he wants me to go beyond ideas. Oh, how do I do that? I don't know. I've never done that before. Let me just struggle with it. Do some trial and error and figure it out. Maybe there's something there. Let me see if what he's saying has some merit. Not to believe, but to open myself just to raw direct experience, and to drop my beliefs. Wouldn't that be something? Here's a very important thing you got to realize is that believing things, even when they're quote unquote, true beliefs, is still very limiting. And you're not going to get to high consciousness by doing that. As an example, if you just believe that one plus one equals two. That doesn't do you any good. You might say, well, I should believe it, Leo, because it's true. One plus one equals two, if it's useful and valuable to you, if it grows, you, it's only to the extent that you've actually derived it through direct experience, and you experience it as true. Not that you blindly believe it is true. And there's a huge difference. To grow in this life requires that you undertake a never ending investigation. And that you keep all channels open. As far as direct experience goes that you don't block any channels that you don't say to yourself, well, this thing I know definitely can't be true. So I'm just going to dismiss it and never look in this direction ever again. Because it's just a waste of my time. Because clearly it can't be true. That's the fundamental mistake. You can't do that. If you really want to grow. If you want an excellent life. If you want to get to your maximum potential as a human being, you have to give up that whole attitude. So let's quickly talk about how to apply a lot of the abstract stuff that I talked about here. Firstly, take it on as your mission to learn to function outside of belief. Right now, you're functioning inside of belief and the process of transitioning from functioning inside a belief to outside of belief. That is a process that's not something you're going to do overnight. That's difficult. It's emotionally grueling work. Secondly, take epistemology Seriously, stop treating it as a philosophical, airy fairy. Disconnected from my practical life, endeavor. It's not. Thirdly, drop your pet theories, identify whatever pet theories you have, whether they're economic, political, religious, scientific, personal, social, sexual, whatever, dropped them. You don't need them. direct experience is as accurate as things get. When you have direct experience, you don't need pet theories. But that requires that you actually surrender yourself at some point in your life, you make a conscious choice and say, I'm surrendering myself to direct experience, even if it's not what I want. Even if it doesn't serve my ego at the moment, I'm still surrendering to it. Why? Because it's what's true. And I value truth. Above serving my ego, that's a very fundamental choice that you're gonna have to make in your life at one point or another, or you're just not going to be able to go very far in this work. Also change your attitude. From one of trying to rearrange your beliefs, to one of never ending investigation, it means that you will never ever reach a point in your life ever, where you can say, Okay, finally, I figured it out. Now I've got it. This is what's true. You have to drop that fantasy. A truly conscious person is so open, that they cannot do that. The investigation can never stop. And if it ever does, you've committed an epistemological error somewhere, somehow. Generally speaking, as you apply this, of course, question all your beliefs. That's the most direct method for overcoming this problem. question, question, question question. The most basic, the more obvious, the belief is question and especially questioning your meta beliefs, all your beliefs about beliefs, all your beliefs about reality, all your beliefs about epistemology question the hell out of those, you'll be surprised that what fruits that sort of inquiry can bear a lot more than you initially think. In practice, you will still hold beliefs. It's not like you can just say, Okay, I'm ditching all my beliefs tomorrow. And then that's it. No, you're still going to hold beliefs. So what I recommend is that you hold them lightly. You leave wiggle room in there. Rather than assigning probabilities of zero and one to your beliefs, assigned point probabilities like, well, this thing maybe has a 25% chance and I give that thing, 80% chance, but don't give anything a 99% chance. Because as soon as you start to go into the nine 9% Chance 100% chance that this is false, or this is true. You lock yourself down. Really think about what it means that direct experience is king. In that truth is found in direct experience only, and not in your ideas of it. That's a principle you can contemplate and ponder for hours and hours and hours and hours and not get to the to the real core of it yet. Of course, don't take anything I say as belief. Not in this episode, nor in any of my other episodes. I'm not really interested to come up here and to fill your mind with ideas so that you can become junior Leo. And then I have 1000 or 100,000 Junior Leo's running around they're behaving and believing just like I do know, my objective with actualize that org is to give you tools and to help you become more aware, situationally aware of what the fuck you're doing in your life. So that you can say, oh, yeah, let's look a little look what I'm doing with all this silly shit that I'm doing in my life. So I'm giving you concepts and tools for that. Many of the things I tell you, I don't believe because I'm not operating at the level of beliefs, I don't care about beliefs, it doesn't matter to me that these, these are, these are like, this is like scaffolding to build a building. Right? The scaffolding is not the fucking building, the scaffolding is not valuable, the scaffolding gets thrown away after the building is erected. That's everything that actually gives is just scaffolding. You throw it all away. Once you're done with it. You don't cherish it. You don't go proselytize to people about it. You just use it. And then you live in direct experience. And you realize that all direct experience has nothing to do with all this stuff I learned from actualised. Org, those were all just stepping stones, to get me to transcend it. So make a distinction when I tell you stuff between believing me, and just taking these things on as tentative hypotheses. So you might ask yourself, well, Leo, so how do I apply this stuff? If I don't believe you? That's like a huge paradox. No, it's not. In sciences, called adopting a tentative hypothesis, when you're going to do an experiment, you need to start somewhere. So you have an idea about how something might work. And then you go test it out. And you're not attached to your idea. So if it doesn't work, you throw it away. And even if it does work, you still remember that that's just a theory you had. It's an idea. It's a belief, it has nothing to do with what actually is true. Even if it was verified in your experiments. also uncover any implicit assumptions you have about life. This is a really good exercise, take a look at everything you assume. What are the things you assume that you've never thought you assumed about relationships about yourself about people about politics about reality, about religion, about science, make an effort to seek out new radical experiences. This is huge, since experienced King, seeking out new radical experiences will submit significantly open your mind and break down this whole game of manipulating your web of beliefs. You want to blow your mind and really make a dent in this web of beliefs. Go try some psychedelics, some high dose, really powerful psycho, that shit will completely mindfuck you to the point where you will look at your beliefs, and you're just like, What the fuck is this? This is just ridiculous. This is like kindergarten bullshit, compared to direct experience. And of course, this is why people are afraid of psychedelics, and why they're afraid of bad trips. You know what a bad trip is? A bad trip is just your web of beliefs getting fucked up. And of course, you feel like, Oh, I've been so hurt by this bad trip, because my beliefs have been so fucked up. But of course, that's exactly what you needed. And of course, it's exactly what freaks you out and keeps you away from psychedelics. Isn't that interesting? See, your ego is very smart at avoiding everything I'm saying here. It's very smart. Never ever, ever becoming conscious of this, because it's not in his interest. And remember that changing beliefs is not equivalent to growth. You think that you can just take your beliefs and replace them with my beliefs, with better beliefs with more accurate beliefs? And you think that that's going to grow? You know? It will not? Nope, you're just gonna get frustrated. With all this work. You did all these books, you've read all these videos you listened to, but then no actual growth in your life. That's going to be extremely frustrating. You're probably experiencing that already, aren't you? Right? Yeah, you are, because you harm making this mistake. You're operating at the level of beliefs still. My number one advantage in this work, and I think in my entire life over other people is not that I am more hardworking, or that I'm more intelligent, or that I'm taller or bigger, stronger, or any of this kind of stuff. My number one advantage is that early in my life when I was still like 1214 years old, I became conscious of the structure of beliefs. The mechanism of how beliefs work became apparent to me If. And when I saw that, I became willing to question every single belief, without exception, with no safety zones, with no sacred beliefs. And that one thing is what has allowed me to grow so quickly. And so much in my life. Because I'm able to explore domains that were completely outside of my family background, my cultural background. Everything I was taught in school, everything I assumed, like I'm able to surpass all of that, because I don't hold anything as sacred. Because I see what this game is about, it's a game, see. And if I could wish one thing for you is that you also adopt that sort of attitude in your life, not by believing me, because that won't do it. But by actually seeing the structure of how this game is played, to the point where you say, Oh, well. I know too much. Now. I know so much about the game, that I can no longer honestly participate in the game. Because the game can only be played, when you're not aware that you're playing the game. And you don't see all the damage that it does. Once you start to see all the damage this does. Once you connect it up to the historical perspective, all the damage that this has done throughout history, with religions, governments, politics, all of this all the hundreds of millions of people who have been butchered and murdered over this game, this silly little game, and how the only reason you play this game is because you're afraid of direct experience, you're going to stop. And when you can do that, you will open yourself up to true growth. What I'm saying here is a radical attitude towards life, do not expect anyone around you, not your friends, not your family, not your teachers to understand this, to agree with this, to support this. Because this is anathema to everything that society is up to. Society is an artificial bubble, a matrix that's created. So that together a collective fantasy could be constructed, so that our egos don't have to deal with direct experience. Because direct experience is threatening to the ego. And it's emotionally challenging to open yourself up to everything that directly spirits will show because it'll show you some things that are absolutely mind blowing. Just unbelievable. Unbelievable. And I what I want for you, what I wish for you is that you reach a point in your life, where you experience something that's so powerful that you see it right before your eyes. And yet you still can't believe it. You see it but you still can't believe it. Because some experiences in life are simply that shocking. And that awesome. It's beyond belief, way beyond belief. And I want you to be ready for that when that opportunity presents itself to you. All right, that's it. One thing I'm going to mention is that I have an exercise for you. For this whole thing. I have a worksheet. It's got a series of questions and exercises to help you start to dismantle this woman beliefs and this whole game that you're playing. So go click the link down below, there's gonna be a link below the video that will lead you to the worksheet that you can download for free. It's a PDF worksheet and do it that'll start to get you to implement all this abstract stuff that I talked about. Alright, that's it. I'm done. Please click the like button for me. Post your comments down below, share this episode with a friend and come to actualize that org and sign up to the newsletter, check out some of the resources, we have a forum there, I have a life purpose course I have a giant book list that will really open you up to some radical new experiences and some new ideas. So if you want to challenge your web of beliefs, read some of the books on my book list, man, this stuff will just decimate your web of beliefs. And stick around for this journey. What I'm offering you here is a completely radically different attitude towards life. I'm trying to take it much deeper than just self improvement. Most people who teach you self improvement, they do not go to these lengths. They don't really go to the core, which is why you don't get very significant results from traditional self help. You get little results. But you don't get nearly what you could you get like 1% It's like buying a lemon, and then just like squeezing a little bit, but then leaving all the juice still inside. So if you want to squeeze the entire thing, right, you want to get every last drop out of it and out of your life. You got to go deeper, takes more commitment and work from you. Takes more seriousness from you. Takes more emotional maturity from you. But hey, the the end result is totally worth it. So, if you stick with me, what I promise you is to take you all the way, like all the way all the way. So you have the deepest understanding that's humanly possible in the 21st century, that's what you will have. And not only will you have that you will have a practical mastery of it. And you will experience things that no human being hardly ever in the history of mankind has ever experienced. And this shit will absolutely blow your mind with its beauty and its awesomeness. So that's what gets me excited to wake up every morning to shoot more content. So I hope you stick with me and I'll see you soon more