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[Music] this is a more personal meta episode that's going to go into the behind the scenes of this work that i do so feel free to skip it if you're part of my core like hardcore fan base then this episode is for you and for those of you who are just new and want to consume just practical advice type of content watch some other video of mine all right so this is going to go a little bit into like my thought process of how i'm going to be evolving my teachings going forward and where things are headed so half the point of this episode is just to inform you my core audience of that where we're going and how i'm thinking about evolving my teachings and the other half of this episode is to clarify just for myself my own aims and intentions and to draw a line in the sand for myself as far as what my standards are for what i'll be teaching going forward so it's time that my teachings significantly mature that's the conclusion i've come to i've been reflecting a lot on my role as a teacher and how i can best serve my life purpose over the last year i've been you know looking at almost 10 years of work there's been a lot of growth and evolution that maybe some of you guys have noticed if you compare my my earliest videos with my current ones you know quite a lot of um stuff has changed for me i've grown a lot i've matured a lot but now i need to go for the next level the next level of maturity and so i want to explain what that means here you might have noticed that over the last year i haven't been putting out as much content as i usually do i like to put out one episode a week i've been taking more breaks and there's actually a list of reasons why i've been putting out less content last year uh one of which is that i only really want to be putting out the highest quality stuff that i really believe in no filler content no easy content which means like sometimes i skip a week because uh i just am not satisfied with the content that i'm working on at that at that time or i don't feel the insights are particularly good and it just needs more time to marinate right because like i have to i have to do research for all these episodes like i have to sit down and like think it through really deeply and i have to generate genuine insight right so all my episodes are built on genuine insight that means i have to generate that i don't just read it in some book i have to generate it and then it has to be good sometimes it's good sometimes it's not good it needs more time to marinate in my mind sometimes i work on an episode for for months or even free for over a year just kind of brainstorming ideas loosely until something coheres that's worthy of a of an entire episode sometimes there's a topic that's kind of vague in my mind i know it's an important topic but i haven't fully articulated it even to myself i'm not sure how to communicate it it's something slippery and abstract and i need more examples and then some of the examples usually the initial examples that i come up with are kind of not the best i have to really brainstorm to come up with the juiciest examples i have to think about how could people misinterpret what will be said to come up with you know advice for the traps that people fall into so all this kind of stuff right this takes time um and it's hard to do that on on a schedule but anyways that's my work i'm not really complaining about it other reasons is i've been facing chronic health problems over the last two years and so i've been dealing with fixing my health stuff that's been taking a lot of time and energy away from from the actualized work um so there's that getting that under control has been challenging it's also been emotionally very taxing on me and so forth so i've been working on that um i've also been just getting burned out you know doing youtube for 10 years very consistently tends to burn you out so i've been taking more time off to work on my personal life and i've been also working a lot on my dating life on my intimate personal relationships on my friendships that's stuff that i've put on the back burner for the first 10 years of of actualize.org and now i'm uh i'm i'm getting back into that um just because it's something i personally need in order to be able to actually do the actualized work at the next level i need to work on that stuff i can't neglect it so i've i've talked about that a bit in my episode called burning through karma so i've been devoting quite a bit of time to that and as i devote time to that that does take away energy and time from the videos uh i've been integrating also some very crazy awakenings uh the awakenings that i have lately are so profound that i don't know how to communicate them um and they just kind of stopped me in my tracks yeah i just they'd leave me i don't know what to say um but i've been working on integrating those and then thinking about how to teach those in the future and how to guide people towards that that's something i'll have more to say about that at the end of this episode and also in the next episode to come uh also what i've been doing is i've been shutting off my mind part of integrating these deep crazy awakenings was this um necessary period of just like shutting off my mind and thinking a lot less and the downside of that is that that takes away from the videos because the videos require a lot of contemplation a lot of insight a lot of like relative type of ideas um and in a certain sense the awakenings the crazy awakenings take you beyond all that they take you beyond all the videos all the content all the linguistic logical stuff they take you way beyond all that and so um i've been learning to operate more from a mind set of just like no mind shutting off the mind and i've also been applying that in my relationships and my dating life and so forth um that was very necessary for me but that does come at a trade-off in terms of my work and i'm finding like a a way to balance those because if you completely shut off your mind that that turns off the spigot of insights which is not ideal um and but if your mind is always active that's also a problem because then you're like you're lost in mind all the time so finding that balancing point is something i've been working on over the last year and uh now finally i'm starting to to reach that that balancing point i've also been rethinking my whole approach to teaching like what do i really want out of being a teacher i started thinking about that more because at this point i have 10 years of of my body of work out there i've taught a lot of stuff um like what what comes next am i just going to be doing this for another 10 years i don't want to be doing the same old thing i want something new i want to evolve it to the next level or i've been even thinking about moving on to other things if i can't evolve it to the next level so i'll be talking more about that as we keep going i've also been investing a lot of time just working on my own personal development working on myself personal stuff reflecting about my character trying to polish up my character make improvements or just even thinking about what kind of improvements do i want to make to my own character and just rethinking in general like what do i want out of life i'm going to be approaching 40 soon i'm 37 now i'm gonna be 40 in three years that's going to be coming pretty soon and i'm almost feeling like a sort of a midlife crisis of like well i've lived basically half my life already if i'm lucky half maybe even more than half um and really the best half i have lived the best half the half where i'm the healthiest the most mentally sharp i have the most energy that half is already gone so now i'm thinking like okay what's left for me right and i've already accomplished a lot but also i'm thinking like uh what do i want for the second half of my life how's my life really gonna end what's the like what's gonna be my legacy all that kind of stuff so i'm thinking about that a lot and that requires also not just thinking about it but making adjustments to my work over the years putting out content for me has gotten harder and harder because my expectations for myself have become so much higher basically as i've become more conscious through all the awakening and spiritual work and development work and all the research and study uh it's really quite painful because i become conscious of all of my own tricks my own ego all of my own flaws limitations my own finitude and all the mistakes that i make all the ways in which i could be better like i clearly see all the ways in which i can be better and it's kind of painful because then it's hard to live up to that so with a higher consciousness comes a higher responsibility and so i'm feeling the the burden of that responsibility and then i have to adjust my life to that and i feel like i have to mature myself like really mature as a teacher to rise to to the to the kind of consciousness that i want to ultimately embody so there's two aspects to this evolution of my teachings going forward that i want to talk about aspect number one is refactoring my own models and understanding of reality so over the last 10 years i've shared many different models with you about spiritual stuff personal development stuff how to be successful and all that kind of stuff and just in general my views about reality and how you should think about reality right well my latest awakenings are so radical that it's forcing me to rethink all of my models and all the ways in which i frame and teach things and even the way art i articulate things to myself uh the way i'm thinking about it right now it's almost like i need an upgrade to the core operating system of my psyche and how i teach and how i model reality like i need a new architecture uh it's almost like if you think about game engines you know you have like unreal engine 4 and then you have the next generation unreal engine 5 which is like a a whole new leap in rendering and graphics processing and physics and all that kind of stuff right you're you it's like a new generation like every every 10 years maybe a new game engine comes out that transforms the whole game industry that's happening right now with unreal engine 5 that's coming online so i feel like almost like i need to go from unreal engine 4 in my own mind to unreal engine 5 and what that would look like and that means rethinking some things and framing things in different ways it's not that all the old stuff is wrong it's just that it has to be it can be made better it can be solidified deeper connections can be made it can be made higher quality it can be made more nuanced more accurate and it can be deepened so that's something i'm going to be working on and aspect number two of the evolution of my teachings is becoming a better role model so see i could have the best models and the best explanations of reality that's one thing let's say i get that right but then what kind of role model am i that's a separate thing right likewise you can be a great role model in life for others but then your actual models of reality your understanding of reality could be flawed or bad or not as good as it could otherwise be so both these aspects are important so this this aspect number two being a better role model um this is perhaps an even greater challenge because i don't really doubt my ability to refactor my models and my understanding of reality that i'm really good at that that's sort of like my bread and butter uh being a better role model that's that's much more tricky uh i need to change my teaching behavior and the delivery to make it more mature and aligned with the highest truth and love so i need to be teaching from a higher integrity place i need to be teaching with greater artfulness and more intelligence in order to have the kind of impact that i want to have on people now let me go into some more depth about both point number one and point number two so back to point number one about refactoring my understanding of my teachings and upgrading my sort of game engine after some deep awakenings that i've recently had it's come to my attention that i need to revamp my teachings to make them more solid more accurate more direct to deepen them also it's become very clear to me that i need to go through a process of purging teachings that i picked up from others over the last decade or two so that all of my understanding of everything that i teach is my own really comes from myself because you know i've read hundreds of books i've gone to many workshops and seminars and i've looked at many courses and i've literally tried to integrate hundreds of perspectives from some of the best teachers masters gurus yogis and experts across many different fields and i encourage you guys to do that and that's that's a very good approach so i'm not saying you shouldn't do that you should but after a certain point you wake up so deeply that you realize that a lot of that that you got from others even though it was great and useful it still wasn't really grounded in your own direct experience and ultimately what you need is to ground everything in your direct experience and what i've noticed with my deepest awakenings is that i notice more and more of the things that i got from the sort of multi-perspectival approach that i love uh more and more like the little nuggets that i got here and there that many of them just aren't true to my direct experience and so i need to purge all the stuff that's not true to my direct experience and teach from my direct experience i've actually awoken to a lot of stuff that contradicts and goes way beyond classic non-dual teachings and spirituality and so it's becoming more and more clear to me all the the [ __ ] and the games and um just the the limited ways in which spirituality was taught and taught to me and let that go and invent sort of from the ground up something fresh something new i call this wiping the slate clean i really want to wipe the slate clean and develop my teachings uniquely based on my own awakenings and experiences and not be concerned about what other people are teaching or have taught or trying to integrate with them and all that kind of stuff just do what i got to do so i have to shed the old start from a blank slate uh otherwise that baggage holds you back sort of like you know you have an operating system installed on your computer for a long time for many years that operating system over the years you use it you know it gets clogged up with junk files and old stuff and some viruses are in there and some trojan horse stuff is in there and some some bad programs and stuff's malfunctioning sometimes i mean it still all works but it's not like smooth it's not as good as installing a totally new os besides which the new os you're going to install is going to be like a higher version os that's going to allow you more features and it's going to be faster it's going to have more bandwidth it's going to have new capabilities that your old one didn't have so that's kind of like what i'm doing with my own understanding of myself and reality and all these teachings these sort of ancient foundations that you start life with they get old and they start to hold you back and so once in a while you have to just just you know sit down and say okay like maybe once every 10 years you sit down it's okay i'm just going to wipe the whole slate clean throw away all of the all of the old teachings all the beliefs all the stuff just like throw it all away and let me just start from scratch that's a really good principle to adopt if you can adopt it maybe once every 10 years do that wipe the slate clean and rebuild anew because those crummy old foundations you know they get rotted out and then you're stuck with that and then you're building on that rotten foundation and after a certain point you can only build so high on that rotten foundation you got to go back and redo the foundation so you can build higher now of course this doesn't mean that you throw away everything you learn it's not like i'm telling you to forget everything you learned you couldn't do that anyways you're not going to forget it all uh it's sort of like a a mental exercise you do where you kind of wipe this light clean and then of course you never forget the stuff you really learned um mostly what you're throwing away is theories hearsay beliefs stuff that wasn't in your direct experience the stuff that's in your direct experience that's mostly going to stay with you those insights those life lessons those experiences those aren't going away i want to purge my understanding of reality of all human ideas that i acquired along the way towards awakening really the way that humans make sense of reality is incredibly problematic because it's very human centric and human biased it's all about being human surviving as a human doing human things and human ways of looking at the world in order to act human that's fine for being human but then when you transcend being human and you realize you're not human and you want to go beyond being human then you got to shed all those ways that humans traditionally make sense of reality those i need those ideas were necessary to get you this far but now you need to let them go and operate from direct experience and from things that transcend humanity as much as possible at least that's what i'll be doing for myself now there's a concern here when you're doing this is that you're going to seem like you're contradicting yourself and you guys might think that i'm starting to contradict myself and you know in a certain sense my teachings do contradict themselves and the reason that is is because my teachings were always about my own evolution and so when you're evolving and growing you basically have sort of a choice you can be consistent and stay the same or you can be inconsistent and evolve when a caterpillar is turning into a butterfly it's contradicting contradicting itself it can't stay a caterpillar and turn into a butterfly it has that that that has to die it has to change it has to admit that its old form was inferior and that there's a superior form that it needs to evolve to and that's all part of the growth process so you might notice that some of the things i talk about in the future are going to contradict things i've said in the past and you might wonder why is that well because because i'm evolving and the reality is is that reality is such a complex thing that there's no way that you can be born and just nail it on your first try what's going to happen is you're going to make many many mistakes in making sense of reality modeling reality many many self-deceptions many mistakes and you need to adopt an attitude of admitting those as soon as possible and then correcting yourself even if that means that you're going to contradict yourself it's better to contradict yourself than to be wrong for the rest of your life and yet be consistent don't fall into this trap of sort of a foolish naive consistency what you want is evolution and really ideally what you want is that every year when you look back upon your life you want to be saying my god how stupid i was the year before and how stupid i was the year before that and you want to be doing that every year this means you're growing and i really feel that like when i look back at my episodes that were done five years ago i cringe like it it it's cringe-worthy the things i said and how i behave are cringe-worthy and that just shows how much i've grown because if i look back at my old episodes from five years ago i'd be like yeah that's awesome that means i wouldn't have grown you see so the lesson here for you is that this isn't just happening to me this is also going to happen to you if you're growing along with me your understanding will will significantly ripen and solidify and change over time and you need to be comfortable with that your friends your family might think you're inconsistent your students your clients might think you're being inconsistent but actually what you are is you're growing the mind loves to invent narratives and construct sense making and then as you awaken and you do this deconstruction work that we do here you become more and more aware of your own mental constructs and how your mind is constructing reality and those constructs that need to be let go or they need to be changed or upgraded to better constructs this is what we call construct awareness go see my episode called the nine stages of ego development especially part three where we talk about construct awareness so i'm becoming painfully aware of construct awareness at this point like it's it's really bad see to be able to teach these things i have to i have to construct mental constructs to give to you and they're useful they're like training wheels but these mental constructs then become their own limits and they also need to be transcended and upgraded to better constructs and so on and so this will be happening going forward i will be inventing better mental constructs going forward upgrading the old ones right so you never want to cling to your mental constructs too much you want to always remind yourself that oh this model here or this explanation of something there this is a mental construct it's not absolute truth therefore we can always adjust it improve it throw it away find something new etc so yeah mental constructs can contradict and conflict with each other as you grow over time and the narratives you create also will require retooling as you develop and your mind basically operates on narratives what you have of reality is not absolute truth what you have is you have a bunch of narratives and these narratives are biased limited finite short-sighted they're only as good as how much experience you've had how awake you've become um what states of consciousness you've accessed what kind of information you've fed into your mind what kind of perspectives you've heard of and haven't heard of yet as you hear more perspectives your narratives will change as you acquire more life experience your narratives will change as you awaken deeper your narratives will change and honestly it's been very challenging to figure out how to talk and teach my deepest awakenings there's little precedent for how to do that and i'm unsatisfied with the way that most spiritual teachers teachings and schools have done that in the past so i have to invent my own way going forward and there's no road map for that it has to just be invented as we go along and as you're inventing stuff you're kind of experimenting you might come up with one model one example one mental construct it might be great or maybe it's going to be something else you'll find something else better not you know next year that's how it doesn't find it works for me so that process will be continuing now on to point number two which is about the character development aspect of my teachings so i noticed that after about 10 years of doing this youtube stuff i've had a lot of success i've been happy with that but i've also the success has has made me grow somewhat complacent self-absorbed and insensitive the grind of putting out the content every week the routine of it um i'm very sensitive to routines because i'm a very creative person so i can get stuck in a routine and then that robs me and my creativity and so you know as they say power corrupts and i'm not immune to corruption so i always have to keep an eye on how am i being corrupted by my audience trying to please them on youtube just by the grind of putting out consistent content uh you know the potential for money and fame and status all this kinds of stuff there's a lot of ways you can get corrupted as a teacher and so i've been thinking about that i've been really reflecting on the impact that my work has on others how i perform and behave as a teacher i'm becoming a lot more self-aware of the impact that my work has on people and actually that's not something that's obvious it's not obvious because i'm so deep in the work that i'm too close to it and it's hard for me to have an objective sense of how the work actually impacts others and especially through an online medium you know the majority of people whom my work impacts i don't ever speak to them i don't ever see them and so i'm just sort of guessing and so and a lot of times i'm guessing based on comments that i get but the comments that i get the emails the feedback that kind of stuff that's not an objective representation of the impact that my work has on people because there's like disproportionate amount of trolling or disproportionate amount of ass kissing both in the positive negative direction it's distorted right so um the majority of the impact that i have on others i never get feedback for so i have to just sort of guess and those guesses can be wrong and over the last 10 years you know i've been i've been looking at that and thinking about what my impact is and as my impact has grown you know i recognize that i have a lot of positive impact on people i also negative but realize that these teachings can be dangerous they can be misused and that there's some negative impact that i have on people i'm painfully self-aware of the immaturity and corruption in my teachings it's not that hard to see it what's hard to do is to change one's behaviors an entire character to get rid of those right that's not something you can just that's not fixed just by seeing it that requires uh years of like reprogramming work so i want to clean that up i'm painfully aware of how people use me as a role model for their behavior that's one thing that i've really noticed and become very sensitive to every word that i say every action that i take you know thousands of people watch me look up to me and then they try to emulate me because human beings were just like monkeys and i noticed myself doing that with teachers that i look up to you know everything they do everything they say i just you know instinctively want to emulate like a monkey and i notice that for example every time that i say [ __ ] someone's gonna think oh leo says [ __ ] a lot therefore it's good for me to say [ __ ] a lot or every time that i criticize or judge somebody uh somebody in the audience is going to think that it's it's a good idea to judge and criticize people or every time that i act a little bit close-minded in some capacity or fashion somebody else is going to act that way or every time that i act in an unloving way somebody else is going to copy that so that's something i want to improve i recognize that i have been very lucky to get this public voice with significant reach on this youtube platform which most people will never get i'm very grateful for that opportunity and i understand that i have a responsibility to use my voice and this platform in the name of consciousness selflessness and love and this needs to be modeled not just spoken of but actually embodied and modeled this means leading by example this means not just talking consciousness selflessness and love but doing it showing it and all the little behaviors little micro behaviors that express or exhibit that need to be aligned and made correct and what's funny is you would think like oh well if you're just you know awake or you have a bunch of awakenings or enlightenment then all that stuff will just auto correct itself right and the answer is no it won't that stuff getting all little micro stuff little micro behaviors into place that requires a lot of additional training in programming that's not just going to happen automatically now to some degree some of it will automatically improve and correct and that has happened for me over the years but uh but then to really get it down right is going to require a lot of training which is what i'm committing to here i really want to model and embody spiral dynamics tier 2 cognition not just at the intellectual level but also in my tone in my delivery and in my style i feel i could improve in that department still i want to be a better leader i want to show and demonstrate what conscious leadership looks like so i'm going to be working on that a lot and actually the next episode that i'm going to release is going to be a demonstration of what conscious leadership looks like we'll get to that next week hopefully i've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a conscious leader a good leader because in history we see so many bad leaders and even we don't even need to go back deep into history we could just look at current times current news current events we have so many bad leaders behaving in various devilish ways and so i want to make sure that i'm not modeling that and instead modeling the other possibility which is conscious leadership which is which is rarely found out there there there there are conscious leaders out there but um they're not explicit about it all the time because they're usually doing something else they're not teaching you how to be a conscious leader or why you should be a conscious leader and also it's just rare it's just rare to find this i'll have an episode in the future about conscious leadership that will be a very important episode i want to be a better cheerleader for the highest potential that i know there is in you that's ultimately what my leadership will boil down to and being a good leader a conscious leader is hard because it takes a lot of responsibility and selflessness that's why it's so rare and frankly it's a responsibility that i never really signed up for i never wanted it um the way i began actualize that org i didn't think to myself oh i want to be this conscious leader and that a bunch of people will look up to me right like i didn't start that way all i thought when i was starting actualize.org was just like i want to release cool insights that i know there are about how to develop yourself and how to create a amazing life there's all these amazing insights and concepts that i feel are not getting enough spotlight in the news and in the culture and in the media and so i want to create this catalog of cool insights and concepts that can help you to live a deep life uh i didn't i didn't realize that at that time that i would have to like how deeply i would have to embody those and where they would ultimately lead me towards and how much responsibility would come with that which now i'm much more aware of because now i'm you know 10 years later i'm much more conscious i had no idea really where this was going i sort of intuited that it was going in a in a powerful direction but i didn't realize how powerful and i didn't realize the responsibility would take from me but now at the level that i'm at now in my consciousness this sort of um you know shirking of responsibility or not knowing about the responsibility that i have this can no longer fly things are not going to be so simple as just having a catalog of cool insights and concepts for people it's way deeper than that now so rather than shirk my responsibility i want to accept this responsibility i want to put it to best use and set the best example that i can i have a responsibility to use my influence and platform to model the highest levels of personal development which is what i'll be doing going forward i'm painfully aware of the ego laced throughout my past teachings but also it couldn't be otherwise see because in this work you know i didn't start out awake i didn't start out enlightened i didn't start out god realized that's like the end of the path it's not the beginning of the path so what makes it so difficult is that you start from a place of deep ego and then you work and work and work your way slowly out of that but regardless i'm not using that as an excuse i want to take as much ego out of my teachings as possible i want to remove as much noise from the signal that i'm communicating and that's an important concept noise versus signal we'll be talking more about that in the future and i want to do that so that my teachings are pure for posterity one of the things that that pains me the most is when i look at one of my old videos and i can see i can see i can see the beauty and the brilliance the insight the intelligence in the teaching but i can also very clearly see the noise the corruption the ego and it's like having a beautiful painting like you know imagine a mona lisa painting or something by picasso hanging in a museum with like ketchup splattered over it dirt stuck to it that's what i feel like my past teachings are like and that really doesn't sit well with me and i also don't know that it couldn't be otherwise so i'm not going to be too harsh on myself you know i can only do as good as i can i can only create work up to my level of consciousness and my level of development i can't go beyond that unless i raise my consciousness more and develop more which i'm going to be doing um so it's all fine it's all good but like going forward when i think about my work and the legacy that i want to leave behind i want to i want to get to a point where my my work is very like clean very pure spotless and so that requires a lot of work that i need to do on myself now you might be thinking but leo if you're admitting that you make mistakes and that you're corrupt and all this kind of stuff then why should i listen to you because you're not reliable here's the thing though is that every public intellectual that you would listen to will make mistakes in fact most public intellectuals out there say some very stupid things they say some very egotistical things and many of them are very corrupt without even realizing it most public intellectuals have deep flaws in their world view and they're so stubborn about it that they're never going to change they're going to keep those flaws in their world worldview for the next 20 30 40 years they're going to go to their grave still maintaining their ideology and their flaws i don't want to be one of those most public intellectuals are deeply biased and self-deceived i don't want to be one of those many spiritual teachings and teachers are limited biased and very partial i don't want to be one of those so this is my effort to correct that to preempt that in the future in a sense it's good that my teachings are not perfect because actually it forces you to work on yourself now that might sound like an excuse it's not an excuse i'm going to try to make my teachings as good as i can make them but i've actually been thinking about this and kind of wondering like let's say i'm able to make my teachings just perfect and spotless is that even going to be a net positive for people because if even i reach that point by the time i reach that point people are going to be so in awe of the teachings and are going to be so like enraptured by that that they're going to stop thinking for themselves when you have teachings like that you stop thinking for yourself and you offload the responsibility just onto the teachings the teachings become the next dogma it becomes the next bible it becomes the next quran sort of thing and i was actually thinking about this um like how good would it be if in the beginning of the bible the very first page of the bible it said something like this this book contains many important truths however we have deliberately sprinkled in 10 percent falsehood into these pages 10 percent of the information in this whole book is complete horseshit you figure out which 10 or horseshit and which 90 are the gold that's on you use your critical thinking skills to figure it out this was done by design so that you don't turn this into a blind dogma imagine if that was the first page of the bible or the first page of the quran that would be the most important page in the bible and the quran it would completely change how people take those books and those teachings and that wisdom i call this the poison pill strategy i've actually deliberately thought about in the future placing poison pills into my videos deliberate falsehoods literally telling you false things on purpose that i know are false you know maybe up to 10 worth um so that and then informing you of that so that you you be forced to think for yourself and to verify these teachings for yourself right this would be like a a safety measure against these teachings being turned into a dogma because that that's that was my number one concern when i started all this and still is to this day it's like people turn this stuff into a dogma they don't really think about it critically and that's very dangerous so maybe in the future i'll put some poison pills in there but you know uh i've been fortunate that since i'm not perfect you know i don't need to deliberately put poison pills into my teachings throughout my old teachings you'll find things that i said that were mistakes or that were wrong or that were corrupt you'll find that i would say probably maybe five to ten percent my to ten percent of my teachings just naturally just given my level of consciousness ego and development when i created those videos five to ten percent are are wrong and you went to a leo then why why would i follow your teachings then well um good luck finding some teachings that are 100 percent unbiased 100 impartial 100 free of corruption and ego good luck finding such a teacher or such a set of teachings and even if you do you're going to start to worship that teaching so much that you're going to turn into a dogma and then what will happen you're not actually going to be embodying those teachings so very realistically how can you expect any human teacher to be perfect like think about this this is a silly and dangerous expectation be careful that you don't expect too much from your spiritual teachers the point is not to fall in love with your spiritual teacher the point is to take the hints the pointers the nuggets and apply it to your own life and then to rise to the level be to a level that your spiritual teacher was at or even beyond your spiritual teacher that's the point right it's not to worship the teacher speaking of being a spiritual teacher i've had to bootstrap myself as a spiritual teacher nobody licensed me nobody ordained me nobody taught me how to lead or how to teach no one taught me how to talk about god or how to model god truth love selflessness consciousness i had to figure this stuff out along the way as i struggled through it you have to understand that when i started actualize.org let me think when i started it i knew about the concept of enlightenment but i had never experienced it yet and i didn't even talk about it at that point when i started actually working i didn't talk about enlightenment i i vaguely knew about it and i knew that i would be going that direction but like i had no idea where it was really going to lead i knew it was going to lead to good things but like i had no idea really so like there was so much evolution a lot of my work is documenting in a sort of implicit way it's documenting my own evolution and of course it's showing you what your evolution would look like as well the evolution that you go through just from learning about you know let's say you get into self-help then through self-help after a few years of doing that maybe five years of self-help and success type of basic stuff then finally you you learn about spirituality then you start kind of like sniffing around the spiritual field and then you try a little thing here there you do a little meditation you do a little bit of a retreat here there do a workshop you know whatever watch a few videos then you get more serious about it you know this whole evolutionary process you know it's going to be very messy very chaotic you're going to have a lot of wrong ideas about how all of it works you're going to have silly and stupid expectations you're gonna trick yourself and fool yourself you know your first awakening you're thinking oh my god i've awoken fully and all this and then you're gonna realize that you're just kidding yourself right like and this would just go on and on and on and on and you'll fall into all sorts of spiritual traps along the way it's a messy process and so what's been happening with my work is that i've been building the airplane as we've been taking off the runway you don't start off life with a with a fully built perfect airplane you have to assemble it as you're taking off and there's a horde of barbarians chasing you so if you don't take off they're gonna get you that that's kind of like our situation here and i've had to do this with plenty of ego obstructing and being in the way what matters when it comes to spiritual teachings or any teachings basically or really any information content that you consume online is what matters is the signal to noise ratio i'm going to have a whole episode on just signal-to-noise ratio but basically you want to stop thinking of teachings as either right or wrong good or bad and you want to start distinguishing what is the signal and what is the noise in the teaching so i would say that my teachings have a lot of signal in them the signal is the good stuff it's the pure stuff the noise is the corruption it's the the ego so i would say that my teachings have like 90 to 95 signal and maybe 5 to 10 noise that's pretty good considering you know what's out there these days online a lot of the stuff you find online is like you know 50 signal 50 noise or even worse like sometimes you get 90 noise and like 10 signal so start thinking of teachings in that respect now what causes noise in my teachings fundamentally it just boils down to my own lack of consciousness my selflessness my selfishness my biases my ego my limited life experience my youth and immaturity my arrogance my cravings my bad habits that i've picked up over the years basically all of that my ignorance and this goes for any teacher or any media you consume out there basically that's what the noise is the less consciousness you have the more selfish you are the more bias you have the more ego you have the the less life experience you have the fewer perspectives you've experienced and contemplated and come in contact with the more arrogant you are the more cravings you have the more bad habits you have the the noisier the teaching will be the only way to learn from life is to make mistakes really so you have to be willing to admit your mistakes and to forgive yourself for them so even though i recognize various mistakes that i've made in my delivery of these teachings um i also don't beat myself up over it or feel too guilty about it because i realize that really it couldn't be otherwise right there's uh there's always stuff i'm not conscious of uh like i've said in the past i i'm not i'm never immune to self-deception i always have to be vigilant about that i'm not immune to corruption either and so it's a messy process and you just gotta like you can't be perfectionistic about it you gotta do the best you can do and uh allow yourself to make mistakes it's okay to make mistakes what's not okay is to make the same mistake over and over and over again for years and for decades and to not change so i don't want to do that so i allow myself to make mistakes but then i want to learn quickly from my mistakes and that's what this episode is about and even though i say all this going forward in the future i still reserve the right to be wrong and to make mistakes and i still don't hold myself as immune to self-deception or to corruption all of that stuff will be operative for the rest of my life i never expect to be immune to those things i can get better and better at them as i become more conscious i can become better at avoiding that corruption and that noise but it's never going to be perfect and so you have to set your expectations realistically don't expect perfection for me and don't expect perfection from yourself and don't expect perfection from from your gurus uh i want to speak a little bit about arrogance i'm aware that i come across as arrogant sometimes and that's because i i am arrogant and that's something i want to improve on going forward um but also i was thinking to myself you know why am i arrogant where does this arrogance come from and i kind of look through my life and looked for it and basically i i've always been arrogant um since a teen is just it was there and i was like asking myself why why is that arrogance there for me the arrogance has been a tool that i use to actually cut through the [ __ ] there's so much [ __ ] in society so much [ __ ] from teachers professors philosophers that i've read um you know friends that i've talked to in business and marketing within religion within science on online from public intellectuals there's so much [ __ ] out there that basically i've used arrogance as a weapon to cut through the [ __ ] basically the way i've used arrogance is it's like um you're not going to tell me what to believe i'm not just gonna adopt your perspective or your worldview i'm gonna hold my worldview as sovereign um and i'm really gonna stay true to what makes sense for me i'm going to stay true to my intuition to my direct experience and so from that came this arrogance and also because i've been extremely ambitious since i was young and my ambition and my vision for what i knew was possible in my own life and life in general for others you know what can be made out of life i saw people living such mediocre lives and making such small things out of their lives and getting stuck on such petty human [ __ ] that for me you know that ambition coupled with like a a real um honoring of my own sovereignty of my own creativity uh of my own intellect uh led me to this arrogance and it's funny because you would think that like arrogance you know it's very anti-spiritual you know traditionally that's true uh but actually this arrogance is is this arrogance coupled with this ambition is the thing that ultimately allowed me to punch through all of the [ __ ] out there within science within religion within philosophy within you know politics within business within marketing within relationships within within all of that to cut through all of that and ultimately get to absolute truth now i'm not saying this in order to justify continuing arrogance going forward i'm just sort of explaining you know the deep psychology behind in a certain sense i'm very grateful for it because you need that because the reason you kind of like you have to really be able to respect your own intellectual autonomy and sovereignty because in the end to reach absolute truth you have to do it through your own direct experience you can't do it by trusting somebody believing some spiritual guru and so my my arrogance has allowed me to stay intellectually independent from everybody else right i never adopted a guru and the reason that is because i was too arrogant i never i never subscribed to any spiritual school like buddhism or hinduism or vedanta because i was too arrogant i never believed any spiritual teacher too much i never put any spiritual teacher on any kind of pedestal and thought of them as perfect i never kissed their ass and in that respect it was perfect it was exactly what i needed to get me to the highest levels of awakening uh but also of course i realize the obnoxiousness of it i realize the corruption it creates within my teachings and my my manner i realize how it rubs people the wrong way turns people off it's not the most intelligent and artful way to teach and this is not a kind of behavior that i want to model for others to emulate although maintaining your intellectual sovereignty is something that's very important so i'm just you know sharing some some insights i had about my own character flaws here um again this is not an excuse it's something that i definitely want to correct going forward as my teachings mature another point that i want to address is exaggeration i've noticed that i'm prone to exaggeration and i was asking myself why because otherwise i'm very like interested in truth but then if i'm exaggerating on some point then that's like it's taking the truth into the falsehood and i start asking myself why does that happen to me why do i have this character defect and then i realized that the reason i exaggerate is because when i'm communicating what i'm trying to communicate is not the letter of the law so to speak but the spirit of the law sometimes i exaggerate a point because i'm trying to be true to the spirit or essence of a thing the emotional impact of a thing rather than its technical accuracy i'm trying to get across the emotional significance of something that's more important in the big picture because what i've always resented and disliked about some teachers and teachings is when they understate things like something huge like awakening you know they just say it in a very sort of like it's a false humility this sort of like false humility understating it it's like oh it's no big deal it's you know it's just a little a little thing it's just it's just ordinary it's like no it's not ordinary it's the most radical thing you could possibly imagine right so like when i speak about awakening sometimes it seems like i'm exaggerating something when i'm speaking i'm actually doing that deliberately i'm doing that to communicate it's emotional significance to you and to me that's more important than technical accuracy honestly i don't really care about technical accuracy very much and you can find technical inaccuracies and things that i've taught in the past and you'll probably find stuff that i teach in the future and um the reason it's never bothered me or never cared about it very much is because look here's the here's the problem is that i noticed early on in academia that a lot of academics are so focused on technical accuracy that they have perfect technical accuracy but in the end everything they're teaching everything they're studying is deeply deeply partial narrow and will never lead you to absolute truth and so there's this funny trap that you can fall into where you're so academic that you're technically accurate on anything uh you're technically accurate on everything that you talk about but in the end you're fundamentally epistemologically and metaphysically and spiritually ignorant you have no idea what's really going on and nor will you ever you will never awaken because awakening is not about technical accuracy and so it's actually possible to lie and to deceive yourself and others through technical accuracy because you create this veneer of oh look i've got everything it's all technically accurate it's all scientific like all the numbers add up all the logic is perfect and even though that's true maybe um you're missing the bigger picture the bigger picture is always more important than technical accuracy you can always lie with statistics with numbers you can always deceive this is the thing that many logicians and academic types don't understand it's way too narrow of a way to to conceive of reality to try to understand reality and also the sort of academic style where you know in academia it's frowned upon to exaggerate and it's it's frowned upon to stress the emotional significance of a thing like for example if you discover some you know some great important new discovery within science the culture of science teaches you or the culture of academia is to like report it in the most driest technical sort of objective way possible in the most like neutral way possible such that when when people read your discovery their eyes glaze over the problem is that when that happens people read the discovery they don't understand the significance of the discovery it doesn't really touch them it doesn't move them the spirit of it doesn't hit them this is a critique i've had of academia for a long time in my own mind and so with my work i deliberately try not to do that i don't literally try not to get lost in technical minutia or to win technical arguments or debates or to overwhelm you with data and facts and studies because you can easily lie with data facts and studies you can find a study that will lead you to to come to conclusions that exact are exactly the opposite of what's true so then what good are your studies what good is your logic what good is your data what good are your proofs when they can be so easily recontextualized undermined and flipped upside down so again this is not an excuse for exaggeration uh sometimes i take the exaggeration too far but actually sometimes i don't exaggerate enough for example when i speak about awakening when i speak about the highest god realization the highest god realization is so good that your human mind cannot imagine that level of goodness any level of goodness that you imagine the highest god realization is infinitely more good than that and it might seem like i'm exaggerating but actually i'm not that's that's actually the most accurate way to describe the highest god realization it's absolute good it's infinite good you can't conceive of such a good it's not possible and if you ever reach that you'll understand what i'm talking about but it might seem like i'm exaggerating and sometimes i do just exaggerate something a little bit you know here there i do value accuracy i do want to be accurate and precise in the way that i speak about the things i speak about but also i want to stay true to communicating the emotional significance of things like when speaking about awakening for example i hate it when teachers do not communicate the emotional significance of it how radical it is when they downplay it this is i feel like this is such a disservice to students now sometimes i can't tell are they doing it because they actually haven't had the highest awakening therefore they don't understand its significance and radicalness with some people it's like that with other people i think they have had it but then they feel like they just have to like really play it down this sort of false humility but this is not accurate actually you know when something is deeply emotionally significant to communicate it without equal emotional significance is actually a lie to say that god realization or awakening is ordinary is a lie it's not ordinary there's nothing ordinary about it and to feed that idea into students minds to me this is a deep disservice to students so this point about exaggeration is a little tricky you can go wrong in both directions you can become arrogant and you know overly exaggerating certain things but you can also take it in the other direction where you're you're too humble and you understate things so here's a list of the aspects of my teachings that i want to improve very specifically first i want to change the tone of how i teach to be more solid and more what i call tier 2 cognition see my episode spider-dynamic stage yellow for more on that uh i uh i feel like i'm very well grounded in in in tier two but i feel like my tone often times comes off as tier one so it's a tonal shift it's not that i like i think in tier 2 all the time but i don't always speak in tier 2 i can get better at that speaking of speaking the next point is i want to be more careful with my use of language i want to be more precise with my use of language that's something i want to work on more the next point is i want to be less arrogant less talking down less finger wagging less self-righteousness and less shaming i use a lot of shaming techniques if you haven't noticed now for some people it works great you know for a certain level of consciousness shaming shaming it works really well but then for a higher level of consciousness shaming might actually scare those people off so i'm cognizant of that and i want to improve on that along with that is less ridicule less belittling and more accepting of people and intellectual positions and so forth i tend to ridicule a lot again ridicule can be a powerful weapon uh but it can also be taken too far it can turn people off too um [Music] so i i'm i'm more cognizant of how the manner in which i communicate these teachings turn some people off and i want to correct that so a lot of this list is about that uh the next point is i want to be more careful with judgment and criticism because anytime i express judgment or criticism i'm actually i'm out of alignment with truth and love and also i'm modeling that out of alignmentness with you and then people people then get infected with that judgment and that criticism and then they become judgmental and critical that's a problem so i need to correct that uh the next point is i want to exhibit more respect for my audience less be less dismissing of them more respect for your sovereignty more assuming a highly intelligent audience sometimes i fall into the trap of assuming that my my audience is dumb now this is tricky because again actually you know if we're going to be technically accurate the majority of my audience is dumb i'm not saying that as a judgment or criticism or belittling people that's just the case the majority of mankind is stuck in a profound ignorance that's just the dark ages that mankind is in right now we're in a profound ignorance collectively um so it's tricky so do i speak in a way where i'm speaking to the lowest common denominator because like if i randomly just make an assumption about who's listening to me right now chances are it's an ignorant person sorry you know um but uh i also recognize that a lot of you who are listening are very intelligent and when i speak as though everybody who's watching me is ignorant that does a disservice to those of you who are very intelligent and by definition if you're a fan of my work and you watch a lot of these episodes then you're way more intelligent on average than most people and i want to honor and respect that in you and i want to encourage more of that intelligence in you so it's a little tricky to get this balance right um because here's the other problem if i speak assuming high intelligence on everybody who's listening to me that's also that's also a problem because you might say well leo why don't you just be like magnanimous and just assume that everybody who listens to you is very very intelligent but if i assume that then the way in which i teach for highly intelligent people you see the problem is that if in reality a lot of ignorant people are watching me they're gonna easily misinterpret the intelligent things that i say to those intelligent people that i'm assuming they are and then they're going to do very unintelligent things with those intelligent insights for example when in my mind i picture that somebody who's listening to me is is stupid i have to issue a lot more warnings for the things that i say for example if i'm talking about psychedelics to highly intelligent people i have to qualify a lot less of what i say but if i assume that you know some some 18 year old [ __ ] is listening to what i'm talking to what i'm saying about psychedelics then i have to say okay look be careful with psychedelics make sure you're careful with your dosing make sure you don't get yourself into legal trouble make sure that you don't you know do it when you're on a balcony so you don't jump out of a window make sure you don't jump off a bridge make sure that you don't kill yourself don't make sure that you don't have a loaded gun near you right to explain all these things to a highly intelligent person is insulting that person's intelligence because he would think that leo that's so obvious why are you wasting time on this you're wasting my time but the reality is that many people who watch thousands of people who watch this stuff are not intelligent enough to understand all those basic things so it's see it's not so simple just assuming that your audience is highly intelligent just because you want to be magnanimous and generous this is not necessarily in their benefit really what's necessary is an accurate picture of your audience and part of the problem is that i honestly i don't know the full breakdown of the intelligence of my audience some of my audience is very very intelligent some is not and i'm not sure you know the full proportions of it um you might say well leo then don't assume but you see the problem is that when you're teaching and you're speaking to an audience you do have to make assumptions about your audience you have to assume what your audience might know and what they might not know you have to assume what traps they might fall into which requires assuming their level of experience their level of wisdom their level of intelligence their level of consciousness their level of development so sometimes i sort of like have a rough idea of what the average level of intelligence or development or consciousness of my audience is but i could be wrong about that that's very hard to predict that because we're dealing with these sort of gross averages how do you really know i don't have very good feedback on that and in truth i probably have a very diverse audience and then so when you have a very diverse audience audience from all over the world and uh different ages different development levels different spiral stages like how do you speak to all of them at once it's hard it's tricky but still i want to improve on that that's not an excuse um i also want to give more acknowledgement of spiritually advanced listeners sometimes i speak as though you know you're spiritually you're spiritual [ __ ] and a lot of people out there are just spiritual morons that's okay you know we all have to start there um but many of you i also know are spiritually advanced and i want to honor that about you also i want to be less sexist and more friendly more female use more female friendly examples sometimes i use overly male centered examples sometimes i say somewhat misogynistic or sexist things so i want to i want my teachings to be equally accessible to male and female even though the majority of my audience is predominantly male like 95 my audience is male so that's part of the reasons why i use mail examples however it kind of like it kind of goes both ways it's two-way street because maybe it's because i used so many mail mail examples that most of my audience is male but honestly on youtube online the majority of audiences for this kind of content are going to be male and also just because i have sort of a masculine style of teaching i have kind of like a brash style of teaching um which is going to rub many females the wrong way but hey those of you females who are into that thanks for sticking around i appreciate you i also want to be less heteronormative sometimes i use examples that kind of exclude lgbtq people so i want to i'm becoming more sensitive to that i can improve on that um sometimes i use like heterosexual examples rather than homosexual examples stuff like that um or i just like assume that the audience is heterosexual which is generally true but not always true the next point is i want to aim for more technical accuracy more precision i can improve on that less exaggeration as i've talked about i want to be more professional in my style in my manner i want to use less profanity and less vulgar examples sometimes in the past i've taken that overboard i've been trying to dial that back and i will continue dialing that back going forward i want to be less pushy with my worldview and my agenda because there's sort of like a reverse psychology thing going on the more pushy i get with enlightenment or with god then the more resistance you're gonna have to it so i have to like pull that back sometimes i'm a little too pushy with that stuff um and that can turn people off it can give kind of a tier 1 flavor to the teachings rather than the tier 2 flavor that i want a lot of this stuff is kind of stylistic it's more style than substance but style is important because people who come to these teachings you know within five seconds they they make a judgment about me about my style about the way that i teach the language that i use and so that turns people off and i don't like that obviously i want to be more compassionate and more loving going forward in these teachings that's very sort of you know love that's very general um a general thrust of improving my teachings is they're just going to be more loving going forward i want to be more inspiring more hopeful and more encouraging sometimes i feel like i'm not encouraging enough like i'm maybe being a little bit too realistic on you or a little bit almost like too harsh or too pessimistic without really inc like encouragement i can do a lot better at encouraging you that's that's gonna you're gonna notice that in future teachings uh i want uh more recognition of the god in you that you don't yet see in yourself so i want to recognize that more in you i want to treat you like your god but you don't yet realize that about yourself as opposed to treating you as just some stupid human some monkey less straw man objections sometimes when i pose them sort of like but leo sort of objections to my own arguments and to my own teachings those objections sometimes they're a little too ridiculous um they're not like the strongest like i want to rack my mind to come up with strong objections to the things that i teach and then so that i can address those better less reactivity to criticism of my work sometimes in the past i've gotten hung up on you know people criticizing trolling me and then i would kind of get like triggered or reactive into that i've gotten a lot better at avoiding that and in the future that's gonna like i'm gonna completely eliminate the kind of reactivity towards criticism of my work because that creates a lot of drama and distraction and it just makes me look bad and honestly at this point i just i've stopped care how i've almost stopped caring about criticism of my work not completely but um especially all the trolling type of stuff and sort of silly objections and critiques i just want to like let people do that and just not care and not be reactive at all basically um the lesson when it comes to cr you know criticism if you're a public intellectual or something is just like just don't be reactive just ignore it and just do your work and that's what i want to focus on just doing my work doing the best that i can and the criticism it's all irrelevant i want to let's make less absolutistic statements rather than saying stuff like every and all same instead most or many like rather than saying that you know something like all women love players rather than saying that say that many women love players that's a more accurate way to say it right or rather than saying that uh all men will say anything get laid rather than saying that it's better to say most men will say anything to get laid that's more accurate all right um rather than saying that all politicians are devils it's better to say most politicians are devils more accurate um i want to be more generous with giving credit to other teachers and people who inspire me with insights a lot of times i'll listen to some teacher about this or that and then that triggers an insight in me i should give more credit to those sources where i get insights and inspiration from i also want to be less critical of other teachers and public intellectuals and very careful not to straw man their positions i've been a bit guilty of that in the past i want to correct that going forward i want to be more cautious and issue more disclaimers for the mentally ill one of the things that i discovered in this work over the last let's say three or four years is just how prevalent mental illness is honestly it's pretty shocking i didn't realize when i began this work how many mentally ill people are into self-help and spirituality they're attracted to it like moths to a flame uh i didn't realize how much of my audience suffered from mental illness honestly because i've never suffered from mental illness so to me this was not really an area of interest i haven't studied it very much until recently and um and so i just assumed it was something rare that i didn't have to deal with it but now i understand like that you know probably 20 of my audience has some kind of mental illness and they're in deep suffering they have a lot of trauma and this sort of psychotherapeutic stuff which is really not my forte it's not really what my teachings are about but i have to be cognizant of that and i have to adjust my teachings for such people issue the right disclaimers otherwise these people can easily abuse these teachings take them the wrong way and so you know that's something i had to learn just through kind of trial and error um [Music] again in a certain sense i was assuming the best about you guys i was assuming the best about my audience which was sort of like that the majority of you are not mentally ill which is true the majority of you are not mentally ill but i was assuming that like 98 of you are not mentally ill but actually like maybe only 80 of you are not mentally ill the rest of you are and look i'm not judging you like i totally understand how difficult that is i feel very grateful that i don't suffer from mental illness and i don't have a lot of deep trauma in my life some of you have gone through horrible life situations childhoods you know have been abused in various ways or traumatized i i totally understand that that's valid and that that's needs to be treated seriously but also you should understand that that is not the focus of my work there are other teachers and therapists and you know techniques and methods that you can find out there that that can help you more with that that's not my forte that's not my wheelhouse even though i can have some profound insights for you on those topics it's just really it's not really something that i'm very passionate about and the reason that is because i just don't have a lot of experience with that i don't i have not been a lot around of been around a lot of mentally ill people in my life um in general i don't tolerate them very well like in my own personal life like i i wouldn't be friends with a mentally ill person no offense to those of you who have it it's just that i have very high standards like for the kind of drama that i'm willing to tolerate in my life i don't i don't allow drama because that drama distracts me from doing the work that i need to do right and one of the biggest problems with this mental illness and this trauma that you have is that like it makes your life so chaotic and so dramatic you're always in some kind of drama you're in these whirlwinds of drama that you can't really self-actualize properly you can't do the work you can't do the spiritual work because you're you know you're always like uh in some new storm of drama and i totally understand that that's where you're at uh but also like to do the kind of high-level work that i do i can't allow that in my life so i don't i don't allow that like near me and as a result i don't have a lot of experience dealing with that now i i totally appreciate other people teachers and therapists who specifically actually work with that and they want that near them like they want to work with mentally ill people and people who are in deep suffering and trauma that's great that's a very noble very very like incredible life purpose to have is to to help those kind of people heal but don't expect too much of that for me like i'm getting better at that but that's not again that's not my forte and that's not my specialty because i'm i'm thinking about much higher stuff than that so now you understand how that go works um the next point is i want to be more concise shorter and more direct and more potent in my teachings sometimes i can ramble on too much or give too many examples i'm gonna in the future i want to try to like condense stuff down sometimes i just go a little bit overboard and that's because sometimes you know i like to hear myself speak too much i'm going to improve on that going forward really it's don't judge the quality of my videos by their length really judge it by the potency by the density it's like how much insight can you pack into as short a time as you you can so if the video is only an hour long but still manages to pack in three hours worth of content and insight into one hour that's a better video than a three hour video so the quality of my videos is not just based on its length don't judge it based on that the next point is i want to be true more true to my own direct experience i've already talked about that at the beginning of this video um the next point is i want to be more careful before giving specific advice to people in general i've been pretty good about not just you know giving too much advice to people like very concrete advice um but i want to get even better at just saying i don't know a lot of times people ask me for advice in their dating life in their spiritual work whatever and the honest answer is a lot of times i don't know i don't have all the answers for you a lot of times you have to figure that stuff out yourself i have general principles i can give you but that doesn't mean i know what you should be doing specifically in your you know life situation because there's so many details that come into play there and it also depends on your personality type and what your goals are and your motivations and your strengths and your weaknesses which vary from person to person and i don't know that about you the next point is i want to be more responsible for what i say less irresponsible with my words because i'm more sensitive and cognizant of how words can hurt people words can be used as a weapon so i want to be careful about that i want to be less abrasive less confrontational less aggressive i tended to be more aggressive in my early videos i've i think i've softened up a bit i'm going to soften up more i want to be more gentle and more kind in my manner i want to be less opinionated i want to be more honest and vulnerable less posturing less pretense i struggle with vulnerability sometimes in certain ways i can be very vulnerable in these videos in other ways uh i also notice certain pretense that i put on certain kinds of posturing and a sort of a phony vulnerability so that's something i need to work on going forward i also want to listen to people better better and deeper with less judgment and more charity especially when they have a significantly different point of view than mine less dismissive of divergent points of view this would be modeling more of a tier two manner in style and lastly i want this work to be less about me and more about the insights the truths themselves that are being communicated and not my truths but just truths so it's not about me these really shouldn't be my teachings these are just insights of the nature of the universe i don't own these insights i didn't even generate these insights the universe generated these insights through me since i am part of the universe and i don't really deserve credit for the insights the insights are universal if they're true and if they're not true then what good are they now you might say well leo it sounds like you're sort of like trying to soften yourself to become more politically correct and wouldn't that be sort of a sort of like selling out to wokism because you don't want to get canceled or something like that but that's not really my motivation here nobody is pressuring me into changing or threatening to cancel me this is more about me recognizing that i want to be a better role model and a more conscious leader and to me when i think about the kind of leader i want to be in 10 years this list that i just ran off all these improvements need to be made to my teaching and to my style tone and delivery in order to to match my own ideals of where i want to be let's say in 10 years basically i want to live and teach with higher integrity and this is what that looks like for me so i've already been doing this over the last six months but i'm going to be doing it even more as i you know i'm gonna be watching myself like a hawk any kind of acting out or emotional reactivity i'm gonna be looking for that like a hawk i'm just like i'm becoming so aware of my own emotional reactivity to anything someone criticizes it's like oh i can like immediately become aware of like oh i have some emotional egoic reaction to that criticism and then i can kind of like rather than acting on it just kind of like you know cut it cut it off rather than acting from that place or i can become aware of like when i'm getting a little self-righteous or arrogant and then kind of like tamp it down rather than acting it out so this is what happens when you become more conscious you become more aware of these little subtle like egoic dynamics that are subtly corrupting all of your expressions and behaviors with all the people around you because you're always in this state of emotional reactivity in one way or another you know something is threatening your survival you get reactive about it so a lot of what this process of improving myself is going to be in the years to come is just like really carefully watching myself and then cutting cutting off the emotional reactivity and not acting out like sometimes i would give myself just carte blanche or license to act out but then when i do that i notice a negative impact that it has on my audience my students someone that i'm communicating with that i don't like and so i realize that i have to become more careful about that so does all this mean that my previous teachings are junk now should you not go and watch the old stuff no that would be a mistake there's a lot of useful and profound insights in those old videos like i said i consider at least ninety percent of what i teach to be signal and only five ten percent noise so that that's still a pretty good ratio also remember it all depends on what level you're at actually you know like for many people who are at the lower levels of the spiral they will resonate better with teachings that are a little bit more aggressive a little bit more shaming a little bit more critical uh a little bit more vulgar and use a little bit more profanity that kind of stuff because it meets them at the level that they're at the most advanced teachings are not necessarily the best for you right now and also one of the things that i want you to see i think one of the most valuable things i can demonstrate to you and teach you is just how much growth happens in this process there's an evolutionary process that's that's going on here and it's one thing to learn from a teacher who's like 70 years old and has gone through the entire evolutionary process but you saw none of it all you see is the end result some old guy sitting on a chair you know like i cartoli teaching you about awakening and you don't see any evolution in him because you know he's already he's very old he's very mature that's not a criticism of him you know great good um but that can give you a distorted picture of what it's going to be like for you for a lot of people it's going to be hard to even resonate with someone like eckhart tolle because he's just this like soft spoken humble quiet little you know german gnome looking man sitting on a chair um you know softly slowly speaking to you he's not really kind of like matching the culture you grew up in the kind of friends that you probably have the way that your intimate relationships are the way that your family situation is where you're yelling at each other fighting with each other you know there's a lot of drama going on it doesn't match that and also when you see him like that like it's hard for you to connect the dot between like um the dots between where you're at right now let's say in your 20s or 30s and where he is in his 70s it's like what's going to be the process of getting you to that what are all the intermediate steps you're gonna have to go through so with me what you're getting um there's trade-offs right um i'm not as mature as eckhart tolle maybe i'm not as emotionally grounded as him or whatever uh maybe i act him out more maybe i'm more arrogant okay fine but you have to realize that that's actually kind of like closer to where most people are and and also that that's where you're going to be at my age most people at my age are going to be at that level or worse and so what's going to be the process of getting of getting to your highest self to your most mature self well it's going to look like this process that i'm sharing with you here and that you're seeing through all of my episodes starting 10 years ago to today and beyond that's what it looks like and so if you want to go through that process you can kind of like see what that's going to entail for you it's going to entail you going through a similar sort of process that i'm going through here and all the struggles that come with that and also a lot of suffering and pain from looking at your own shitty behavior from the past i mean that's a lot of what this is like the way you improve yourself is you look back and you realize oh that was ugly and i said this ugly thing and i did that ugly thing and i behaved in this weird way why did i do this and why did i say that it's like oh my god i'm ashamed of myself it's like oh ugh it's embarrassing it's cringy yeah that's growth that's how you grow if you don't experience that then you're going to just stay the same for the rest of your life you're not going to mature so it's very important to confront your mistakes be honest with them and then forgive yourself for them because honestly you couldn't do better you can only do as good as your conscious right now and your stage of development you can't go beyond that this shift in my teachings and in my style is going to be subtle at first so don't expect some you know dramatic change starting next week it's going to be subtle i'm going to be working on it for the next year and beyond it's going to grow and develop slowly over time such that majority of people who watch my stuff won't even notice it unless you're like a hardcore fan and you've watched 100 episodes then you'll start to see it going forward but you know for the average person who just watches a few videos they're not even going to notice that this is happening which is why i'm shooting this episode to explain it to you i want to make it explicit because i want you to see like the nitty-gritty of what personal development looks like it's not clean it's hairy it's messy it's dirty a lot of times it's shameful so that will be happening going forward hopefully you'll be able to sense a little bit of it every week a little bit more every week and uh i'll i'll still probably fall into old habits because those old habits have been ingrained over 10 years of teaching and it's going to take me some time to you know to adjust and to change because the mind and the brain doesn't change overnight it takes weeks months years these stylistic changes will apply not just to my videos but also to my posting on the blog and on the forum it should also be said that learning how to be a good spiritual teacher is something extra beyond just being spiritual it's one thing to just do spirituality for yourself it's another thing to then become a role model for spirituality and dealing with you know hundreds and thousands of people and leading them that's an extra step beyond just your basic awakening so keep that in mind for those of you who are watching who want to become spiritual teachers or who want to be conscious leaders and role models that's extra that doesn't come automatically with having your awakening that's extra work you got to do to be able to be artful at that developing that skill just because you can understand something in your own mind doesn't mean you're great at articulating it or teaching it to others conveying it to others that's a separate additional skill you have to develop and what's going to happen here is that as i succeed in holding myself to this higher standard that i'm setting for myself now i will also then after i transition more into that maybe let's say in a few months and beyond is i will then hold my audience to that higher standard as well that's part of the reason that i'm doing this and talking about it i don't want to just hold myself to a higher standard i want to hold you to a higher standard but i want to lead by example so first i have to do it then if i do it then i feel like i will be in integrity to ask you to do it what i can't do is ask you to do it before i've done it that would be out of integrity so that's why i'm doing this and talking about it and one of the reasons i'm motivated by this is because it's less even for me than it is for you um like it's not so much that i want to enforce the standard on myself as i want to enforce it on you but to enforce it on you i have to force it on myself and especially especially those of you who are on the forum some of you trolls and bullshitters on the forum who are acting out um and being devils um you know sometimes i'm a devil on the forum you know social media tends to tends to bring out the devil in us um but those of you who are on the forum acting out uh watch out because my behavior on the forum will improve over the next six months let's say and and then i will be asking for better behavior from all of you as well i grow fast that's one of the things that i'm good at like um i make plenty of mistakes in my life but the one advantage i have is that i learned quickly from my mistakes and i love to change i recommend you adopt that same attitude i recommend you make these changes with me so that we grow together otherwise we're going to grow apart and i'm not going to be waiting for you to catch up like you gotta get on it right get on it do the work do your homework grow yourself now hopefully it's obvious to you that even though i've been talking a lot about myself in this episode making it all about me me me me me actually all of these lessons apply to you as well as you go on to be a conscious leader whether you're a spiritual teacher or not a spiritual teacher you're going to be in some sort of leadership role going forward probably especially if you do this work you're going to be in a position to be a conscious leader at work within your family amongst students in your relationships whatever and uh all of these lessons and problems will mostly apply to you as well so really i'm telling you not just what i'm doing but what you'll be doing if you're going to go all the way with this work i've realized recently just how much of a rare privilege i have to model the highest truth consciousness development intelligence and love with the position that i'm in right now this is the next level of my life purpose the next level for me is to become my teachings not just to teach but to become my teachings now i've been doing that you know for the last 10 years but like really emphasizing that going forward i've redoubled my commitment to this work going all in on my teachings here's what's coming next for actualize.org uh currently i'm working simultaneously on 100 new episodes this is like my roadmap for the next two years basically i at best i can release about 50 episodes a year at best so i'm working on about 100 of them brainstorming them outlining them i bought like 10 white boards that i'm working on simultaneously developing all these ideas interconnecting them like working from the big picture down to individual episodes so expect a lot of very practical deep topics and episodes coming in the future not a rehash of the old stuff but more new stuff believe it or not yes there's still hundreds of totally new topics that i haven't covered on covered yet and that are going to be important and that you're going to stick around for so stay tuned for all those and then also what i'm committing to and i'm getting really serious about is courses specifically i'm working on two courses one course is going to be on how to program your mind reprogram your mind rather and the second course is going to be on how to access the deepest levels of god realization and also on psychedelics how to use psychedelics for those purposes so um those two courses i'm going to be working on and i hope to release probably one in 2022 this year and then um the next one uh a year after that so again this is sort of like my road map for the next two years uh these courses are going to be life-changing courses the first course on reprogramming your mind is going to be very practical and it's going to work for everybody who's into any kind of self-improvement or spirituality and then the the second course which is going to be on the the highest levels of god realization that's going to be my most advanced material uh totally life transforming stuff i'll show you how to access levels of consciousness that are completely unimaginable even to those people who have been studying spirituality for decades uh and there i'll share with you my my deepest my deepest realizations and i'll help you to completely deconstruct your mind and reality that's like for the most serious of you um so that's coming now when it comes to these courses i'm not going to be marketing them to you i'm not going to be chasing you down to buy these courses and so i'm going to expect that you're going to be wise enough to follow along with me long enough that when these courses release you're going to find out about them because if you just watch a few of my videos and then you leave you're never going to hear from me again you're never going to even know these courses came out and you're going to miss these courses which is going to completely transform your life this is going to be some of my best work and i think it's going to be some of the best work that there's going to be within spirituality and within self-help very life-changing stuff but i'm not going to be chasing you asking you to buy this stuff so what i recommend you do is either subscribe to this channel if you're on youtube and or go subscribe to my newsletter i have a newsletter that is specifically used just to make big announcements about courses or big stuff that i release i don't release some sort of like fluffy [ __ ] every week kind of newsletters like literally i'm gonna send out one email when my new course comes out and then another one a year later so i'm not to be spamming you with a bunch of emails this is a way to ensure that we don't get disconnected because you know even when you subscribe to youtube sometimes youtube doesn't send out the notifications or you might miss a video or your your youtube feed is is full of a bunch of people you subscribe to and so you just might miss the announcement for a new course so if you want to make sure that you don't miss these courses like i'm really committed and serious about these courses um if you're serious about developing yourself go to actualize.org slash newsletter i'll have a link down below actualized newsletter put your email in there and your name sign up to it i promise you're not going to get spammed use a legitimate email address not some [ __ ] one that use for spam when the course is ready and only if the course is ready and i'm fully satisfied with the course because i'm not going to release a course that i'm not satisfied with then i will send you an email that it's out and that's going to be some serious some serious personal development and some serious spiritual development for you so i'm hyping this up right now because i'm really excited about it like i've i've redoubled my effort here with actualize.org with all the hundred videos that i'm working on and these courses i'm planning it all out simultaneously so i have sort of a roadmap for the next two years and part of the way in which i want to lead more consciously is i want to give you a larger vision of where we're going together in this work so it's not just like you're getting a one-off videos like oh leo help me how to be more decisive or help me how to get laid or help me make some money it's like no we're doing something much much much bigger than that with this work you know the level of depth at which i teach almost nobody teaches at this level of depth my courses are going to be even deeper than that this is your chance to make a decision that can alter the whole trajectory of your life going forward and i also want you to start thinking about your development more long term than just watching a couple of random videos here and there like really stick with me for this journey we're not here for a few episodes we're here for the next decade we're here for the next 100 episodes we're here for the next two courses we're here to show you how to reprogram your whole mind we're here to get you to the point where you reach the highest levels of awakening humanly imaginable that's possible but that takes some long-term commitment and vision which is what i want from you i don't ask very much of you i don't advertise much to you i don't pitch to you and do a bunch of sponsor deals and [ __ ] like this these courses are a way for me to sustain myself you know survival um to sustain actualize.org without having to sell out to corporate sponsors and a bunch of [ __ ] ads and all sorts of gimmickry like this i've been very careful to avoid that kind of gimmickry with my channel and with my website um these courses are really how i sustain myself and how i sustain these teachings and all the free content that i do i couldn't do this free content otherwise in fact last summer youtube killed about half my business in a single day just by tweaking their algorithm i lost about half my views in a single day and forever from that day forward also lost half my revenue in a single day and forever from that point on uh i'm not blaming youtube i'm not saying they demonetize me or anything like that no just algorithm changes right youtube is always changing their algorithm tweaking stuff so i get less traffic i'm not mad at them or anything like that it just this is just how business works this is how youtube works youtube is maturing as a platform and so forth uh youtube is more competitive than ever now you know everyone is chasing after tick tock tick tock is the hot new thing now youtube is doing these youtube shorts where they're doing these like short little videos that are under a minute long my content can't compete with that i need to do hour long two hour long three hour long episodes that's what i need i'm not going to be doing stupid tick tocks right um it is getting more challenging for me to survive and for these teachings to survive in this kind of environment people's attention fans are getting shorter and shorter and people are getting stupider every year i don't know in 10 years if there's going to be many humans left who can even sit and watch an hour long video anymore it seems like everything's transitioning to tick-tock style videos um again i'm not i'm not angry or bitter about that it's just it's just how things are um and so um [Music] it does help a lot for the success and survival of this work in this channel that you guys buy the courses the courses are how i sustain all the free free content i can't do free content otherwise and in return for that support of buying the courses what i'm committing to is to make some really amazing courses so that whatever you pay for the course you're going to feel like it was a steal or a bargain at the end of the day i love to over deliver on content i love to over deliver on the courses i love to make the courses very practical that's what i'm committed to so if you're interested in that go to actualize.org newsletter subscribe subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed stick around we've got amazing stuff my best work is yet to come i feel like my understanding of reality is finally reaching a level after 10 years that i've just dreamed of right in the beginning of this work for me the vision was that i would be able to reach this profound level of interconnected understanding of reality and then to be able to share that with others it's taken so long it's taken so much longer than i thought because reality turns out to be so much deeper than i thought so much bigger than i thought but finally i'm starting to reach that point and i'm just so excited to share the next hundred videos that i'm going to be releasing are going to be amazing amazing content and then the courses are going to be even better than that so i hope you stay tuned for that and thank you for your support the last thing i want to say is this you i hope you realize that you are a diamond in the rough that's what you are the brilliance inside of you is waiting to be unleashed but this diamond it's rough you yourself may not realize that you are this diamond yet because this diamond needs to be cut and polished and there's an art to cutting and polishing a diamond correctly so that its full brilliance can shine you got to cut it at the right angles you got to polish it with the right materials and so on and then you've got this beautiful brilliant diamond that's what you are that's your full potential and this work is about cutting and polishing yourself year after year after year after year in more sophisticated and nuanced ways until you get to the point where you start to shine with your brilliance your inner brilliance shines and it shines and it inspires everybody else around you to do the same for them and this is the highest joy in life this is really the sort of meta life purpose whatever your specific life purpose is that's great but then the meta life purpose for everyone that applies to everyone is to realize that everyone is this diamond in the rough and it's just about finding ways of correctly cutting and polishing yourself up over a period of years and decades to allow your brilliance to shine and the saddest thing is the majority of people have no idea that they're how brilliant they are inside if they would cut and polish themselves up and they confuse themselves for just ordinary stones and rocks when really they're diamonds that's your true nature you're a diamond of infinite brilliance and that's what this work and these courses and this spiritual stuff this will this is what it will teach you and this is where you get the highest joy in life is when you are able to shine with your brilliance and this brilliance becomes infectious and infects everybody close to you in your life and that's ultimately what we're working here towards we are not working towards just helping you to improve some little aspect of your life our goal is total it's the total transformation of your life into brilliance in your unique way that brilliance will be different for different people you know depending on what your career you're going to choose and what kind of relationships you're in and so forth but this is what is going to keep you from becoming depressed and nihilistic and cynical and bitter with life is to find that brilliance and that's where you find meaning in life the meaning in life comes from polishing yourself up until you're shining and infecting others and that fills you with joy endless joy a joy that is better than any amount of money you'll get or sex or any of the material pleasures that you can have although you will get those naturally along the way so this is not a replacement for that you'll get those things too as you're polishing yourself up you know why because the more brilliant you become the more value you put out into the world the more attractive you get to other people and also the more you start to attract opportunities to yourself and good things materially and money and all of that that all comes with discovering your own inner brilliance and that's basically all there is to life you