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[Music] welcome to the topic of not knowing this is a very core topic as you can probably tell we're talking about epistemology here we're going to get into some deep stuff i've really been wanting to talk about this topic now for years but it's a tricky topic and it took me a long time to gather my thoughts on this topic and to experiment with it a lot and finally i feel ready to talk about it so let's go not knowing there's a lot to say about not knowing believe it or not the biggest obstacle to spirituality is everything you think you know about reality self and other notice something interesting something counterintuitive about life that the most ignorant people think they know everything and the wisest people are painfully aware of the limits of their knowledge i have an episode that i released in the past called what is wisdom where we compared and contrasted wisdom versus foolishness and this is one of the ways that you distinguish the wise from the foolish is how aware are they of the limits of their knowledge most people do not consider the limits of knowledge very seriously and they take it for granted they take for granted the very possibility of knowing itself as though knowing that it's even possible is just a given that's just like how the universe is constructed it's constructed in a way where we can just look at objects think about life and come to know it but that possibility itself must be questioned which is what we're going to do today i'd like you to consider the possibility that you actually don't know what anything is it's so difficult to get the mind to consider this because the mind thinks that it actually knows what it knows you actually think that you know things what they are but you don't and so here's where you're gonna have to do some work really think about this and if you do this correctly it should start to disturb you seriously disturb you what is anything at all for example what is a fork here it is now your mind is going to tell you that you know what this thing is it's a fork i mean how how hard could it be but what is a fork see that's the problem and notice that your mind is going to start to come up with stuff it's like oh well it's a an object that you use to poke at stuff put it in your mouth it's a food utensil it's a it's a metal object or it's a wooden object it's got a certain shape to it and all that but as soon as you start to go deeper into that and you start to analyze all of those you know sub definitions because basically what you're doing is taking fork and then you're subdividing fork and you're redefining fork in terms of instrument or metal object or food utensil or you know metal or wood or it's mad atoms whatever you think it's it is you're gonna have to sort of like break it down into more atomic elements and then you start to have to of course ask yourself what are those things right uh we're gonna get a lot deeper into this this topic just like for now if you can do this like take a fork sit there and look at it and sort of do a compare and contrast like put yourself into a knowing mode and into a not knowing mode in the knowing mode that's your normal mode it's like oh it's a fork okay that's easy we all do that all the time every day but then try to shift your mind into the not knowing mode where you're sitting there with this fork and you're looking at it so deeply and so from scratch as it were that you actually stop knowing what it is you see it it's before you but you you lose connection to all the conceptual baggage of what your mind tells you that it is and then just sit there sort of in the unknowing of the fork we'll practice this some more as we keep going but just let's begin there so actually what i want to convince you of is that you actually do not know what a fork is and in fact there's not a single scientist in the entire uni in the entire world that knows what a fork is that can tell you what a fork is that's pretty outrageous if you open your mind to this possibility now one option is that you don't open your mind of this possibility and you deny it and you say well leo you're just being dumb or you're just being overly philosophical here and that actually we do know what a fork is you could take that option or the second option is you can actually realize that something profound is being pointed out here and that maybe actually it is the case that no scientist on this planet knows what a fork is now if you open your mind to that possibility that's very interesting because then you have to wonder like why is that why is this so difficult fundamentally what is it about a fork that makes it so difficult to know is it is it a fork like am i saying that nobody knows what a fork is but people know what a knife or a spoon is is that the claim you know obviously not so there's nothing special about a fork that makes this so difficult to understand relative to any other object so so this this raises some interesting doubts in your mind about the very possibility of knowing what anything is and then you have to wonder like well do we not know what a fork is simply because it's impossible to know what a fork is or do we not know what a fork is because maybe we haven't figured it out yet we got to try hard like what do we got to do we have to do more science on it do we have to like look at it under a microscope to figure out what it is is it possible to know what a fork is you should wonder that maybe it is maybe it's not see you yourself don't really know that yet because you've never thought about it and then you got to wonder if it is possible how is it possible what what needs to be done to know what a fork is and why hasn't it already been done why is it so difficult to do or if it's not possible then you've got to wonder why is it not possible why can't such a simple thing as a fork be known and then you got to wonder if that's the case what does that mean for everything else that i think i know about the world because there's a lot of stuff more complex than a fork that you have convinced yourself that you know so what would it mean for you to realize that you don't actually know those things that you think you know now of course you don't know what a fork is you don't know what matter is you don't know what energy is you don't know what space is you don't know what time is you don't know what an atom is you don't know what red is you don't know what sound is you don't know what a man or a woman is you don't know what an orgasm is you don't know what language is you don't know what life is you don't know what death is you don't know what intelligence is you don't know what consciousness is you don't know what love is you don't know what meditation is you don't know what truth is you don't know what society is what beauty is what happiness is what science is what spirituality is what good and bad is what light is what mathematics is what sentience is what other is what reality is what understanding is and you don't even know what knowledge is in a interesting epistemic strange loop you don't even know that much in fact trying to figure out what knowledge is has been the core puzzle that has wracked philosophers minds and led to many controversial debates very complex advanced debates within western intellectual tradition since the dawn of western philosophy back during you know the time of socrates and plato and aristotle and all the way through up till today you know through modernism post-modernism and now post-post-modernism and still philosophers are disagreeing about what knowledge is and how to define it so obviously if you have an ounce of humility and wisdom you should recognize that there's something very tricky going on here with knowledge as a society and as a culture we treat all the things i listed above as known like when you start school nobody tells you that mankind doesn't know what any of the above things are nobody tells you like hey kid we don't know what space is we don't know what time is we don't know what energy is we don't know what matter is we don't even know what a fork is that you're using your food with so we treat these things as known and very quickly as you're growing up you get introduced to this social house of cards that we've constructed and then you play in this house of cards and you start to mistake this house of cards for reality and for objective truth and this leads to all sorts of subtle problems that you don't recognize because you're so enmeshed and engrossed in this house of cards this conceptual house of cards of knowing that uh you don't even know what you're missing or what the alternative could be and you get very attached to this house of cards and you start to defend it too so here's the the core idea of this episode most of your knowledge is constructed it's a highly constructed highly biased highly partial conceptual illusion designed to maintain your survival and sense of sanity and comfort it's not really grounded in a deep truth survival sanity comfort not truth those are easily confused by society you are not aware of how relative and biased your knowledge is and how quickly it can collapse under the right questioning prodding altered states of consciousness and so on your life is a conceptual fortress that is actually a house of cards which is actually why you and others if you haven't noticed yet act so defensively in debates arguments on online forums on twitter in social media comments people get very ideologically defensive politically religiously even within science even within science even amongst mathematicians and logicians if you notice even amongst the greatest intellectuals and academics and the greatest philosophers they all disagree with each other and they all get very defensive about their intellectual positions why is that you should start to suspect that something sneaky and mischievous is going on some sleight of hand why this defensiveness you might wonder if you're so convinced of the truth of your conceptual fortress why are you so defensive why are you so easily triggered why do you feel the need to lash out to criticize others to try to debunk others undermine others threaten others why do you get your fifis hurt so badly in intellectual disputes why even have intellectual disputes if you are in possession of the truth if you already know what you think you know or maybe you suspect somewhere deep down in your subconscious mind you suspect that actually you are living in a conceptual fortress which is a house of cards which can easily collapse and that is in fact why you have to be so defensive about it because if you're not defensive then the wind will just blow your fortress down and then how are you going to survive how are you going to maintain your sanity and how are you going to maintain your comfort in life see notice that these three are what you really want what most people really want as opposed to truth and when there happens to be a rift that opens up between survival sense of sanity and comfort versus truth you're very you're going to be very hard-pressed to stick with truth most people are going to side with survival sanity and comfort so what i'm trying to get you to understand is that you're fooling yourself about how much you know you think you know a lot but most stuff you know is very partial very biased and downright wrong and from this actually stem most of your problems in life the only problem here is though is that this is such a deep problem that when the actual problems in your life manifest they don't manifest with a warning label that says oh this problem like you know oh you got divorced or oh your girlfriend cheated on you or it's like oh you're having money problems or it's like oh you can't maintain a job or it's like oh you're depressed and suicidal see these issues when they come up in your life like oh you're obese or um you can't get your ass to the gym on a regular basis like these sorts of problems they don't come with the label of like your whole understanding of reality is wrong they aren't disclosed that way so you think that the problem is something usually you think the problem is something external it's like oh it's somebody out there it's that person you know she cheated on me it's her fault that's why it's happening you know i'm depressed because those politicians are you know destroying our country and you know i'm i'm struggling with money because of the capitalist system we're you know it's this kind of stuff usually you're like you're blaming it on some sort of shallow external force that is impinging upon you and your happiness uh but really you got to like look deeper and you'll see that it's actually because you're fooling yourself about the stuff you think you know and it's very difficult to get the mind to release its grip on the stuff it thinks it knows but doesn't actually know or it has a very partial twisted corrupted form of knowing of as to see knowing something isn't just a binary like you either know it or you don't know it there's many degrees of knowing a thing and so one of the tricks the mind uses like well i know i know a little bit about the fork and then you kind of just kind of like your mind says well if i know a little bit about it it's as though i know the whole thing it's like no you don't know the whole thing maybe you know one percent of it and even that one percent is very wrong in many cases so what i want you to start to notice is that the mind not just your mind but anyone's mind puts up fake fronts of knowing beliefs assumptions speculations theories hearsay deductions narratives ideology guesses intuitions but all of these are highly fallible and also highly partial also they are twisted to fit the needs of your ego which is the thing that is looking at the world right the ego is not looking at the world objectively the ego has a very strong slant towards survival and towards meeting its own needs and so it tends to see the world in whichever way meets those needs and so here sort of the fundamental question you have to ask yourself as you're trying to figure out life is do you care more about the truth or about being right because see most people would rather be right than go seeking the truth because to seek the truth you have to admit that you're wrong why well because nobody starts life with the truth why well because the society that we're raised into we get programmed with social conditioning immediately upon birth by parents siblings and then as we go to kindergarten preschool high school all this kind of stuff college right your first 20 years of your life you're not even thinking about truth for the most part you're just programmed you're programmed 24 7. and the stuff you're being programmed with is of course the stuff that works for the survival of the society again you can't assume that that is going to be aligned with truth so if you want to be a serious truth seeker and you fancy yourself as such then you better cultivate a habit of admitting the basic truth that you don't know a thing when in fact you don't know it this is just like very fundamental it's so fundamental that you'd kind of like want to skip over this step but that is the trick that is the trap society creates an illusion of knowing religion science history school professors books pundits experts leaders philosophers public intellectuals bosses businesses politicians documentaries that you watch wikipedia that you search and look through you know google searches all of this creates what i've referred to in the past as the social matrix go check out my episode the social matrix which dovetails nicely with this one but all of this creates an illusion like mankind knows more than we do the depth of mankind's ignorance is never acknowledged by mankind this is the fundamental epistemic folly of mankind and we have no one to call us out on our [ __ ] because there's no other like advanced species on this planet that we can communicate with if there was or if we encountered some aliens that we could talk to in a sort of a wide manner i don't mean some sort of secret aliens but i mean like you know if there was real contact with an alien civilization that was very advanced then they could kind of put us in our place and show us our [ __ ] although you know i suspect that what would actually happen if that contact ever did occur is that mankind would be very much in denial about our own [ __ ] and what we would do is we would actually project it out onto the aliens such that we would demonize the aliens because they would make us feel so ignorant rather than accepting our own [ __ ] and ignorance it's much easier for for us to just to demonize the aliens and then go to war with them of course realistically they'd probably be so advanced that we couldn't really attack them but nevertheless you know we could demonize them we could create conspiracy theories and ideologies about them and all of that would just be a defense mechanism from admitting our own [ __ ] our own you know centuries and millennia of [ __ ] religious [ __ ] scientific [ __ ] historical [ __ ] cultural political [ __ ] and so on now you would think that science should champion not knowing and that science in fact likes to admit that it doesn't know it's like you know leo science is not like religion it's like religion claims know everything but science doesn't claim to know everything absolutely science is humble and science admits that there's a lot of the universe that we don't know in that sense science is a little bit better than religion but still what many scientists and scientist people don't understand is the degree to which science only pays lip service to not knowing and even the stuff never mind the stuff that science admits we don't know okay you know that's good that's correct but but the stuff that science says that we do know that stuff itself i want to tell you we don't actually know and science is grossly overestimating its understanding of even the stuff that it thinks that we know and so there's there's sort of a game that science plays where it it plays this game of false humility and that actually even though science says that it's humble science is incredibly arrogant now that doesn't mean religion is correct religion is also incredibly arrogant in many ways even worse than science right there's there's degrees here it's not just a binary of choosing between science and religion now if you want to know more about the problems of the epistemology of science go check out my three-part series called deconstructing the myth of science where i go really in depth on that don't have time to go into it here again so i just want to point that out to you though uh that society and culture pressures us to make up [ __ ] when we actually don't know and not knowing is treated as a weakness as if knowing is trivial and easy and you should just blindly accept the things that humanity already knows because it already knows them it's treated as though not knowing isn't even an option however not knowing is actually often the best option is often an option that is rarely recognized and utilized and the point of this episode is to help you to see that and to make the counter-intuitive move in your life to start to actually exercise this very good option that most people refuse to exercise fundamentally people are extremely conformist and are too lazy to question from scratch so what people do is they just adopt whatever ideas work for the purposes of their survival in the time that they're living in the society and culture that they're living in because most survival takes place collectively for humans this is both a blessing and a curse because we can kind of create our own conceptual castles and allow ourselves to survive that way because you know if you invent the fiction of money and i'm at the fiction of money and we all invent the fiction of money then it's as though money is real this is a blessing and a curse because on the one hand it's a blessing we can construct this abstraction called money and use it to trade goods and services much more easily than we otherwise would on the other hand it's uh it opens pandora's box as far as self-deception and various sorts of trickery and shenanigans goes because now we can sort of manipulate this abstract concept of money we can confuse it with something real and tangible in the world the concept can get disconnected from real intangible things then we can have all sorts of manipulations of stock markets and currencies and um inflation and you know you could you can make money as quickly as you can lose money you can print more money magically with the press of a keystroke some government entity can just create money out of thin air how is that possible seems like magic well it is that's the power of of these kinds of abstractions but this this power goes in both directions can be used for good and for evil now the ancient skeptics the pyronians they try to tell us that knowing was impossible but in the western intellectual tradition we didn't take them seriously if you want to know more about that go check out a book called the outlines of piranism by sextus empiricus it's an old book nearly 2 000 years old it outlines arguments made by the ancient skeptics from greece but sexist empiricus was a roman he was writing about uh the greeks and also you know that that skeptical philosophy also carried over into rome of course because there was a lot of sort of cultural pollination cross-pollination between greece and rome um but there are some brilliant arguments laid out there by the pyronians as to why nothing can be known very powerful arguments and yet what mankind did is just sort of like skip over those arguments because you know the arguments are like airtight but mankind couldn't help itself because for mankind what we care about is not the truth of some argument what we care about is what's practical what works what's instrumental and so because knowledge was pragmatic and instrumental we just carried forward building and building and building upon our base of knowledge without seriously considering what is the cost of this you can do that you can use knowledge in a pragmatic and instrumental manner the way that science does for example the way that business does but with a deep cost what is that cost most people who are knowing about anything they don't consider this cost well the cost of knowing is closed-mindedness getting stuck in one's simplistic narratives ideology self-deception i have a three-part series on self-deception so this connects with that go check that out another episode called assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups go check that one out this connects with that very well as well another cost is confusing the map for the territory i'm going to have an episode about the map versus the territory in the future as well it'll connect with this episode here another cost is a distorted perception of reality becoming lost in fantasy that's fundamentally what's happened to mankind into individually and also collectively were lost in fantasy even science even mathematicians and logicians they're lost in fantasy science is a conceptual fantasy no different than religion it just has the flavor of something objective and tangible and material like science but it's a conceptual fantasy as is logic and mathematics and we forget that and the ultimate cost of pursuing this pragmatic instrumental knowledge is a disconnection from being consciousness and spirit and of course love truth because those are all identical the ego mind hates uncertainty it would rather have a false certainty than stand in a place of i don't know this is the the fundamental sort of driver of why mankind invents these conceptual fantasies whether they be religious ones or scientific ones or whatever logical ones is that the mind just doesn't like sitting in uncertainty the ego mind creates narratives to ground itself in reality and to help itself to survive if it didn't do this survival would be much harder and the ego might itself would have difficulty forming into a coherent identity a coherent self so this is very fundamental it goes to the core of who you think you are and what you think others are and what you think reality is these are not just philosophical metaphysical concerns that are just like you know so abstract that they're just purely academic like no no no no this goes to the very core of how you came into existence how you were born this goes all the way to the heart of your birth and also your death this gets very existential so your mind oversimplifies reality in order to be able to know it and the reason has to do this is because reality is infinite your mind is finite so there has to be a simplification process now if you're asking me well leo how do you know it's infinite maybe it's not infinite well i can't explain that here you have to take my word for it trust me that reality is infinite so a simplification has to take place and then these simplifications become their own realities you know like science is a simplification of reality you know like newtonian mechanics that's just over simplification of a more complex physical material reality even general relativity is an oversimplification of how physics actually works quantum mechanical models and so forth those are also simplifications scientific models it's all simplifications the complexity goes infinitely deep our knowledge makes reality feel more solid and objective than it actually is this is especially the case with science and here comes in one of my favorite quotes which is the better the model the bigger the problem i've talked about this before in the past the better the model the bigger the problem this is where science gets stuck knowledge has a constructive element to it that is taken for granted by most scientifically-minded people and logically-minded people you aren't just coming to know a static objective world the way that you think when you're in elementary school and honestly the way that most adults think of it what's actually happening is that your mind is playing a constructive co-creative process as it's coming to know the world it's also co-creating the world at the same time you're inventing as you come to know the world and so the world is actually entangled with your mind and your mind is entangled with the world we've talked this about this in the past um especially i've talked about it there's this concept called construct awareness that i mentioned in my episode called the nine stages of ego development part three especially i talk about one of the higher stages of ego development is reaching the construct aware stage there's multiple stages of construct awareness but as you become more concert aware you become more aware of how your mind is inventing reality as you're trying to come to know it so like when you're looking at a fork it's not just that there is a fork floating out in space then you you come along and look at it it's like oh fork of course it was always a fork and now i see it and it's still a fork and whether i see it or don't it's always been a fork and always will be a fork see this is just kind of like a simplistic materialistic scientific way of trying to understand reality but then as you become more sophisticated you realize that no there wasn't just a fork floating around an empty space and then i came along one day and found it and just gave it a name it's not that simple this fork is actually entangled with my mind in fact this fork it is your mind this is your mind i'm rotating your mind right now you see there's a lot that can be said about construct awareness and maybe i'll have some episodes about that in the future specifically but we have to move on so um that concept comes into play here i want you to notice that so this makes knowing a lot more difficult because if your mind is playing a role in constructing and inventing reality as you're looking at stuff and analyzing stuff dissecting stuff doing science on it how do you distinguish like what's there before the mind or is there even such a concept is that even a valid concept is there something here before my mind gets to it it's an open question so whatever enables your survival gets rationalized as true knowledge and how reality is that's simply because it works but the problem with that is that there's a lot of stuff that could work which is not actually true to how reality is which is why lying is so common and for example you know if you want a quick example of this look at newtonian mechanics we know that newtonian mechanics is not technically how reality works and yet it's still useful if you want to calculate the trajectory of a projectile to shoot a neighboring city you know shoot some artillery shells into your neighboring city that you hate because you're at war it works for that but that doesn't mean that's how reality actually is but there's an even deeper issue here which is that the mind has a primordial need to know itself there's a deep curiosity that runs throughout mankind as a whole throughout our intellectual traditions throughout our culture we want to know ourselves we want to figure ourselves out this is what mankind has been doing since the dawn of civilization we've been figuring ourselves out we've been figuring out the world we've been figuring out reality and of course reality is us and we are reality and you as an individual you have a curiosity to know too you know little children have a innate curiosity you know they ask kind of stupid questions like why is the sky blue and then if you tell them well it's blue because you know there's certain chemicals in the in the atmosphere and the sun bounces off at a certain angle and makes it blue and then they ask you well but why why are those chemicals there and then why why why a lot of the y's never stop it's that's what i'm talking about by that primordial desire to know itself mind has a primordial desire to know itself individually and collectively but most people don't understand what this primordial desire is we kind of think of it as something kind of frivolous like oh well we're just kind of curious a little kid is just kind of curious about the colors of the sky it's like oh well is there anything deep there going on it's like most people say i know they're just kind of like you know they're just being kids or even if you're like a a fancy scientist in a university you might say well no you like leo i have a deep primordial desire to understand the universe okay well my question to you is why why and you might say well it's because of you know natural selection you know because i evolved from a series of apes and other ancestors of ours and then you know knowledge was was very helpful for survival and those creatures and those tribes who understood reality better and deeper they got a survival advantage and therefore they out evolved and out competed and out survived all the other tribes and so here we are today and that's still going on and science is just a continuation of that that's a cool story but that's not really why you have this desire the reason you truly have this desire is because god or reality wants to know itself and you are god i'm not going to get in too deep into that i've talked about that elsewhere i'm just throwing that little nugget out there for those of you who are in the know you are god you are reality you're trying to know it's yourself um but you don't understand this yet and so you're struggling you know you're struggling to figure stuff out you're curious you don't even know why you're curious you just know you're curious you might wonder like well what's the big deal like why would reality want to know itself you know first the first problem here is that most people in fact most scientists materialist rationalist atheists and so forth they would deny that reality can even know itself they would say no leo humans want to know themselves and want to know reality reality itself doesn't doesn't care and doesn't want to know it it can't know anything how can reality know itself it's just a dumb material system it can't know itself well you're wrong there um you don't the problem is you don't really know what reality is you don't know reality it's a deep extent that you don't even know yet that reality can know itself because you're not recognizing that you actually are reality reality is not something other than you it's you so if you want to know yourself if you have curiosity that means reality has curiosity that's not a trivial point that's a very deep very deep point but to get that to get the depth of it you're gonna get some awakenings and some god realizations in there um so reality wants to know itself you might wonder why would reality want to know itself what's so important about that well reality is a infinite mind fyi that's news to you reality is an infinite mind and what else is there for an infinite mind to do but come to know itself ever more deeply that's the only business that god is in that consciousness is in the business of consciousness is self understanding self knowing self realization awakening to itself that's the motive force behind all of consciousness is that it's trying trying trying its damnedess it's struggling with itself to awaken and so your curiosity that primordial desire to know stuff you know you hear a noise in your basement and you're curious like what's that noise well guess what that's a little a little bit like a little a little tip of the iceberg like the reason you're curious about that noise it's not just to save your ass from some predator or some serial killer who could be hiding in your basement it is that to some degree you can use that knowledge to help you survive but something more primordial and fundamental is going on at the existential level and at the existential level the reason you're curious about these things is because you're god and you want to ultimately understand yourself and to awaken to the fact that you're god even though you don't realize that yet and that curiosity is how you're going to do it that curiosity is sort of the tether it's the thing that tethers you to god it's the thing that keeps you from being lost from god forever because you can use that thread of curiosity to awaken yourself if you follow it long enough the problem is that most people don't really appreciate what that curiosity can do for them and they don't follow it long enough deep enough to realize you know that thread will lead you back to god if you're curious enough about reality long enough deep enough seriously enough with enough commitment and passion you will eventually reach god by following that breadcrumb trail it's just that most people don't do it and also it's so counter-intuitive and it's so tangled and it's so convoluted that it's very easy to get lost and it's very easy to to fall into all sorts of traps and deceptions along the way and you'll get brainwashed by other people and knocked off track so you'll very easily lose track of the breadcrumb trail and so my job is to help lay out that breadcrumb trail for you make the breadcrumbs a little bit more visible than they normally are motivate you to go on the journey of following this breadcrumb trail and seeing where it leads you and where it will lead you to is infinity so reality's trying to know itself but reality doesn't recognize itself as infinite and keeps trying to grasp itself with finite concepts and it keeps failing and failing and failing and his curiosity is never fully satisfied so what i mean here the best example of this is with science right so science is trying to understand the universe supposedly and so every year science is doing more lab studies sending out new probes to different planets to the edge of space our solar system and we're exploring new planets and asteroids and we're looking through telescopes you know billions of light years into the future or into the past um to see you know what to you know what was going on in the early universe and so forth and we're constructing models and we're writing textbooks and we're creating these grand narratives of like we came from this big bang and then that exploded and then matter you know precipitated and then there were stars and there were explosions and supernovas and black holes and then there were planets and earth came along and then four billion years pass and then there were apes and mammals and and monkeys and humans and this like right so we construct these narratives and stories and and all the while we think as scientists that okay like we're getting close we're getting close to figuring this whole thing out but what we're not realizing is that we're nowhere near close to figuring it out because all these are finite concepts and what we're trying to figure out is infinity itself and it's not clicking in our minds that you can't get to infinity through finite any series of finite concepts no matter how long you keep doing that and we keep hoping that no mate leo maybe you know if we give science on 100 years they'll figure it out it's like no it won't work yeah but leo how can you be so sure you can't know that see this is where it gets tricky because you might say well leo you're contradicting yourself because you're you're telling us that you can't know anything you know not knowing not knowing you're stressing not knowing and here you are trying to like act like you know everything you you you say you know god and you say you know infinity and you say you know science can never figure it out and all this blah blah how do you know these things aren't you supposed to not know yeah it's a paradox um i'll grant you that before i answer i'll answer that later in this episode but before that we have to we have to do some work um so here's the key point reality is too profound to be knowable i'll say that again reality is too profound to be knowable if you think reality can be knowable you're deeply underestimating what reality is this is the fundamental error of science it's the fundamental error of logical people who think they can logic their way out of this problem you can't logic your way out of this you can however awaken to the profundity of what reality is and that is a step beyond knowing that's something deeper that's something more primordial we'll talk about that as we keep going uh so the bottom line is that the counter-intuitive move here remember i talked about counter-intuitive moves go see my episode called uh the counter-intuitive nature of life we're bringing a lot of stuff together here huh uh i'm kind of delivering on my promise to interconnect everything so we're connecting a lot of dots here in this episode uh in that episode i talked about various counter-intuitive aspects of life and moves you could make and you know how to make your way into a good profound life through counterintuitive moves well here's one counterintuitive move that will transform your whole life is stand in i don't know stand in it bask in it see where it leads you it'll lead you to places you could not have even anticipated i promise you that much but it's difficult to stand in i don't know because it's counterintuitive because the ego wants to know it takes a lot of humility honesty wisdom and seriousness to admit i don't know not knowing is scary and threatening and notice this the more you know the more you have to lose by admitting i don't know so this is an especially big trap for religious people but even more so perhaps for scientific people for mathematicians for logicians for computer nerds because these types of people public intellectuals authors academics these type of people have built their whole lives and careers on priding themselves on knowing more than everybody else i know because i've done that i'm somewhat of a public intellectual you know i've been interested in philosophy my whole life i've been very academic i've prided myself a lot on knowing more than others uh so i'm intimately familiar with with with the arrogance the sort of intellectual arrogance and pride that comes with that and maybe you're familiar with some of my my own intellectual arrogance and pride that came from that uh but i'm very well aware of that you have to understand um a lot of intellectuals are not and hey i'm not saying i'm perfect i also fall into those traps as an intellectual so the trick here is you have to muster the courage to not know and the way to muster that courage is to just recognize within your own self that's like it's better for me to admit that i've been wrong once than to forever spend my my the rest of my life uh pretending that i'm right and playing that game you know like for me personally it's much easier just to admit that i was wrong because i only got to do that one time it's just like a one day's worth of pain but living repressing and suppressing the truth that i was wrong for my whole life and acting as though my past beliefs and past worldview are right even though i suspect that they're not that's that's a recipe for pain for the rest of my life so for me it's pretty easy to to to admit being wrong um when you kind of frame it that way because this really the scales tip very much in favor of admitting you're wrong but you have to kind of like think think long term right most people aren't thinking long term so for them they just want to kind of save themselves from the sort of short-term embarrassment of admitting they've been wrong like here's an example that was kind of abstract let me make it specific like let's say you're a mormon it's a lot easier to just admit that mormonism is a basically a cult and that is deeply wrong it's a lot easier to admit that bite that bullet you know suffer through a few months of withdrawal and whatever else than it is to go on living your whole life within this mormon cult doing years and decades of mental gymnastics trying to you know square in your own mind why mormonism is right because you know that's a full-time job because mormonism is so wrong you're gonna spend the rest of your life justifying it to yourself just to maintain that belief system and hey i'm not picking just on mormonism here this will apply to islam this will apply to christianity and many other things but hey you know a lot of people would rather just dig their head in the sand and just pretend as though you know their belief system their worldview is right and ignore all the counter evidence and not think very deeply about it the nice thing about not knowing is that it sobers you out of fantasy and that's what mormonism is it's a fantasy that's what christianity is that's what islam is they're fantasies buddhism is a fantasy science material science is a fantasy physics is a fantasy these are fantasies not knowing is a powerful antidote to self-deception remember my series three-part series on self-deception if you don't go re-watch it very powerful series and i give you a list of various self-deception mechanisms i don't even remember having watched that in a few years i remember did i give you anecdotes in that series how to deal with self-deception well if i did if i did not then here's your antidote not knowing very powerful and that's not the only antidote to self-deception that's a very powerful one remember also i have an old episode called how paradigms work where i talk about this concept called paradigm lock where you get locked into a paradigm well what's the antidote to paradigm lock guess what not knowing that's one powerful antidote not the only one not knowing breaks you out of closed-mindedness go check out my episode how open mindedness works and also another one called radical open-mindedness i stress open-mindedness a lot in my work what do you do if you're close-minded well practice not knowing and then your mind will open but a close-minded person precisely does not want to practice not knowing so how do you get a closed-minded person to agree to practice not knowing well you can't force them only if they want to and most of them won't so i'd like you to start to become sensitive and brutally honest with yourself about when you really don't know a thing this requires introspection go see my episode called developing introspection you can develop an introspection with kind of a two-minute you kind of focus in words as i talked about in the episode you focus inwards and you kind of feel around in there when some topic comes up like let's say how old is planet earth you could just immediately parrot out some number that you heard some scientists tell you in some textbook like it's 4.3 billion years old you could say that or you could go wait a minute wait a minute do i really know how old the earth is you can introspect on that point you can realize okay i got i got some ideas from some book that i read that's one thing but truly i don't know you can feel into the i don't the truth of i don't know is deeper than the truth of what you read in some book that you know you instinctively want to pare it out as the good little scientist that you fancy yourself to be so that that's a practice you practice that for the rest of your life that's what i'm suggesting with this episode if you're wondering like leo this is so abstract what do i do with this you practice that you actually do that you introspect you stop yourself from just parroting stuff you've heard from other apes and you actually go into the i don't know now with i don't know it's very tricky because not knowing you can you can hold it as a theory or you can actually be in a state of not knowing these are two different things what you've gotten so far from me in this episode is just theory it's the theory of not knowing and you can sit there and you say yeah well yeah i don't know this i don't know that yeah leo i kind of i can kind of accept the idea that maybe i don't know as much as i thought i knew or that maybe some of the things i know are kind of wrong or self-biased or whatever um yeah i can agree with that leo okay what do i do with that that's theory that's the theory of not knowing that theory is not the same thing as actually being in a state of not knowing so you have to distinguish those two and so now the real goal of this episode is getting yourself into a state of actual not knowing not just the theory that i'm talking about here so towards that end let's do this exercise i want to take you through an exercise that will put you into a genuine state of not knowing if you're open to that so let's try that so i'm gonna have you close your eyes only do this if you're in a safe place sitting down you're not driving or in a place where you can hurt yourself so you're gonna close your eyes sit back relax this will just be a short exercise here short little kind of visual guided visualization so there you are comfortable sitting relaxed now we're going to try to create a state of not knowing i want you to erase from your mind the notion of a past or history anything in the past including all the wars you learned about in school all the events of human civilization mankind world war one world war ii ancient rome ancient people that lived in the past julius caesar and hitler and all this kind of stuff just erase all that from your mind instead of all that backstory we're going to call that backstory erase all that backstory and just leave a blank space of mystery and not knowing likewise let's do the same with the future notice that you have ideas about the future what's going to happen next year next week where you're going to be in 50 years what the world is going to be like mankind evolving in the future new technology flying cars and electric technology and we're going to be you know mankind is going to be on the planet mars and across the solar system you know in hundreds of years you probably anticipate something like that all of that future story just like the backstory the future story kind of try to grab it all at once in your mind and just dissolve that dissolve that out of your mind until it dissolves into just an empty space of not knowing and mystery where in that not knowing anything is possible the future is not pinned down in any way and also notice the difference of how this feels in your body when you just a minute ago you sort of had a back story and a future story that were kind of tangible and now you dissolve those away and now you're in in a state of not knowing relative to those notice how different that feels when you truly don't know the past and you truly don't know the future that just leaves you with right now with your experiences right now now right now you're sitting there with your eyes closed it's kind of dark probably you can feel your body you can see this blackness but notice you have a knowingness of the room or the space that you're sitting in you're probably sitting in your house or apartment somewhere but if your eyes are closed you don't actually see the room you don't see your house you don't see the roof of your house you don't see your car you don't see maybe some other family member in the room adjacent to you don't see any of that you don't experience any of that let's say so erase all those from your mind so that you're very in the present moment i want you to also even erase knowledge of your own body because with your eyes closed you have a self-image you have a sort of an image of the back of your head and your your whole torso and body the way that you would look in a photograph you probably have remnant images of memories from the past even though you're supposed to erase the past you probably have personal memories from the past that define who you are in the present childhood memories stuff that happened to you yesterday what you had for lunch this morning this sort of stuff erase all of that and replace it with just a state of not knowing also check if you have any ideas or sort of a a backdrop of scientific or religious metaphysical worldview by which i mean you know you think that you're sitting there made out of atoms that would be the scientific backdrop or you're made of cells your body's made out of bones and tissues and you have a brain that kind of stuff that you were born that you're an animal that you evolved through evolution over billions of years you know that's the scientific backstory or maybe you have a religious backstory of like you were created by god and this god you know maybe it's the christian god and you have an idea of jesus and mary and joseph and this kind of stuff you know all the bible stories like erase all of that maybe you're a buddhist and you have an idea of like all the buddhas of the past who became enlightened and who worked hard for mankind to teach you about buddhism erase that and so eventually you get to a if you do all this and you erase basically everything all you're left with is just the raw experience of the present moment and now i want you to deeply feel into the truth and now this is truth here this is not just some idea this is recognize that this is truth you don't actually know what any of the raw experience that you're having right now is you're hearing some sounds you're feeling perhaps your ass on the chair if you're sitting down maybe you're feeling some pressure on your feet if you're standing up maybe you're feeling some cold or some warmth just from the ambient temperature of the room maybe you're hearing some buzzing noises from the air conditioning or whatever get in touch with the fact that you don't know what any of this is and enter a profound state of complete not knowing imagine that you're like a little baby just born that you were just born this minute and you don't know what anything is you don't have any concept or words for anything you don't know yourself and you don't know any of the objects or the environment or the sensations and even if you're having some kind of emotion whether it's happiness sadness anger confusion you don't know what any of those are either so complete state of not knowing try to enter that try to create that and if you're saying yourself well leo i don't know how to create that just try it just do it just have the intention to create it will it into being try that and now contrast this current state of not knowing if you were able to do this contrast it with your usual state of knowing and also contrast it with the theory of not knowing remember i was talking about the theory of not knowing versus actual not knowing as a state so right now you're in an actual state of not knowing contrast that with just the theory we're talking about earlier and your usual mode of being where you think you know where you are and what you're doing let's say you're sitting in your house right now doing this exercise and you've entered what you would think is a state of not knowing actual genuine state of not knowing here's the litmus test if you still think you're in your house you're not an actually genuine state of not knowing because how would you know you're in your house how would you know what a house is right so take this as deep as you can go to the point where open your eyes now open your eyes and remain try to maintain your sense of not knowing and look around the room look around your house let's say look around your apartment but still in not knowing and the not knowing is so deep that you don't even know that you're in a house because how do you know this is a house you can't see the roof you can't see what's on the outer walls also you have to remove the idea that you're on planet earth how would you know you're on planet earth you can't know that from being inside of some room when you can get to that state that would be as close to what i mean by a state of genuine not knowing and in fact you can go even deeper than this but let's just cut it off here because we've got to move on to other points so you got that that's very practical right that's not a theory what just happened that was a shift in your state that wasn't a theory and so make that distinction between a shift in your state versus talking about not knowing because you can talk about not knowing until you're blue in the face but you're not necessarily going to get a shift in your state into not knowing right again like look let's say you're a christian if you're a christian there's actually a profound difference between just as a christian you know we might have a logical debate about christianity versus science and i might even be able to convince you that you know you know how do you know christianity is really true maybe the bible was just written by some you know some fraud how do you know jesus really existed and you might you might hear all those things you might even agree with me and eventually and say yeah you know leo i don't even know if christianity is really true maybe it's not true that's the level of theory right there's difference between that just admitting that there might be problems with christianity versus actually entering a state where you have no idea whether christianity is true now for you scientists it's going to be even harder though because see that same logic applies to youth scientists and materialists and atheists because you've convinced yourself that you're not doing the same thing that christian is doing you don't have anything to let go of as a scientist because your worldview is just as reality is right atheism is just as reality is i'm leo i'm not adding anything as an atheist as a scientist as a physicist i'm not adding anything like the christian is so i have nothing to let go no you're very wrong about that you have all of science to let go so for you scientific types there's a very big difference between sitting there and just for example listening to my three-part series where i talk about the myth of you know deconstructing the myth of science many of you guys have have listened to that and have even left me positive comments like oh my god this is very profound yes yes yes it's all profound and very good and you understand it all and you could recite it back to me that's all great but that's not the same thing as being in a state right now of complete not knowing to the point where you don't even know that you're sitting on planet earth do you see the difference or rather i should say do you feel the difference because this is something you should be feeling more than seeing like as i'm sitting here right now i can i can wipe away from my mind the idea that earth exists so like normally it just kind of exists in the background of my worldview but i can wipe that away such that when i'm sitting here i'm conscious that there is no earth that's true uh try to do that notice you're gonna have like resistance the ego mind's gonna come up and say oh no but leo what are you talking about the earth's not there like that's just some sort of fantasy of course the earth is there where else would it you know where else would i be sitting where else my house be located if not on earth that's how deep your story and fantasy goes so you have to work work on that like this is something that could take you years of work if you understand i've done years of work on myself to get to the point where i can remove earth from my worldview most people can't do that that doesn't just happen by by luck you have to work on that so keep practicing this and working on it but we have to move on to other things so anyways really get comfortable with not knowing putting yourself in this state tell yourself that it's okay not to know periodically what i should do is wipe the slate clean there's this notion that i'm inventing called wiping the slate clean which i mean i didn't invent that phrase but what i mean by that phrase is when you wipe the slight clean it's like you take your whole world to you and you just you just wipe it all away it's not you're not just like tinkering at the edges of your world just like oh well yeah i can adjust this little piece of my world view and this little piece like this is what scientists do it's like yeah they got a massive worldview and then what they do is they tinker around the edges you know adjusting little things here and there but fundamentally nothing has changed they still believe they're sitting on planet earth they still believe that a big bang happened they still believe that there's space and time they still believe that humans evolved like that their body's mad of atoms all that [ __ ] is still there and they're just tinkering around the edges i mean wipe the whole thing away and don't replace it with anything see you're gonna be like well leo if i if i wipe that away i gotta replace it with something no leave it blank that's what's counterintuitive here leave it blank for as long as you can the problem with knowing too much is that it prevents insights understanding and awakening from happening so this wiping the slate this not knowing state will create space you're emptying your cup creating space for new insights and understandings to come and for a potential awakening to spark that's why we're doing this there's this practical point all right now i've got one more exercise for you this one's going to be a little easier it's not going to be a visualization exercise i like you to get a piece of paper and i'd like you to admit of 10 things that you claim to know but that you actually do not know so at the top of the paper write down what are 10 things that i claim to know that i've claimed my whole life to know but that i actually don't know and never knew so for example is the earth 4 billion years old most people would claim yes if they're scientifically minded and now i want you to admit that you don't actually know that that's the truth see there's an additional point here a little kind of nuance a wrinkle when we're creating this not knowing it's not just that we're trying to like create a fantasy of not knowing we're actually trying to get to the truth of what you know in these situations and the truth is that you actually don't know like if you really like ask yourself what is the truth of what i know about the age of the earth the answer the truest answer you can muster is i don't know another example many of you guys may be like me take fish oil supplements right maybe you've been taking fish oil supplements for years now i want you to admit you don't actually know if fish oil is any good for you is it actually improving your health or is it actually harming you now you have a story in your mind if you take fish oil supplements that of course they're helping me but do you really know that is that really in your direct experience here's where you have to be very honest with yourself so again introspect and really dig deep and be extra honest and just admit to yourself finally that i have no [ __ ] idea if this fish oil is doing anything good for me in fact maybe it's causing cancer i just i don't know i have no idea and as you do that also notice that that's not a fantasy that's the truth that's the raw truth another example did jesus really exist again go inside really introspect be very honest with yourself and look for the truth of the matter and what you'll discover is that you you don't know here's another example a little bit more radical a little bit more scary do other people have consciousness can you handle that go inside ask yourself do other people have consciousness what is what is the rawest truth i have about this what do i ultimately know about this the consciousness of others and what you should notice is that the deepest truth you have about that is that you don't know another example is god real go inside really get honest with yourself what do you know about god now for some of you who've been doing this work this won't apply but for most of you who've never had a direct conscience of god and are not conscious of it right now for you the answer is you don't know and if you're an atheist guess what the truth is you don't know and if you're a christian the truth is you don't know notice that now these are just examples that i threw out there but i want you to come up with a list of 10 of your own examples where you do this as you do this you have to get very honest with yourself more honest than you usually are you're gonna have to notice when you're bullshitting yourself and you know you're going to notice in certain cases you know you ask a question of yourself like about the fish oil it's like it's kind of like ah but i don't want to admit you know i don't want to admit that i've been taking spending all this money on fish oil for the last 10 years and that actually the truth is i have no idea what it might be even harming me like that that's difficult to admit and that's just fish oil never mind you know maybe you ask yourself a question like do i love my own family and you might like usually you say yeah of course but you but if you really go deep down inside like get to the truth of do i really love my own family you might discover that you don't or you might discover that you don't really you're not sure if you love them that's that's see that's scary that's hard to admit it's hard to admit to yourself let alone to admit it to others this is a good exercise in practicing honesty go check out my video series called um the avoidance of truth which goes into that right so the the problem here with with really not knowing is that really it's sort of a defense mechanism against avoidance of truth and you're going to have to admit as you're doing this exercise you're going to write down these 10 things and then i want you to look over these same things and i want you to admit that you were posturing to yourself you were posturing that you knew these things you're you're you were putting up a facade of knowing when in fact you didn't know and i want you to kind of like call yourself out on that it's like i've been posturing that jesus is real but all along i didn't know and now i finally caught myself posture i've been posturing for 20 years and finally i've admitted that i've been posturing that's a huge breakthrough right there likewise you know i've been posturing that fish oil is good for you but i never knew and i've spent thousands of dollars on it and i've just been posturing all this time that's a huge admission so do that and then very importantly is i want you to forgive yourself for this posturing because you're going to want to feel bad you're going to guilt yourself and judge yourself for being stupid or foolish or ignorant or whatever for getting you know for tricking yourself or deceiving yourself but now you have to forgive yourself for posturing and for self-deception because hey the mind is very tricky and in the end your mind was just trying to help you to survive you were being a bit selfish and unconscious and now you're becoming more aware and you can forgive yourself you can understand how you were you know you're ignorant you're in denial and you can forgive yourself for being in denial and for posturing so do that exercise pause this if you need to and do that and the conclusion from this exercise is you need to get good at recognizing when something you think you know you don't actually know and start holding yourself to this higher standard ask yourself do i really know or am i just pretending like i know and a lot of times you'll be shocked to realize that i'm just pretending belief and hearsay is not real knowing direct experience is king you have to ground yourself in direct experience your mind has been filled with a lot of belief and hearsay and now it's time to admit that belief in hearsay while it might be correct a lot of times it isn't correct a lot of times it's wrong but it's ultimately you don't know whether the belief or the hearsay is true like you have a belief that the earth is 4 billion years old but you haven't verified that yourself it could be wrong science could discover something new tomorrow that would you know say that the earth is actually 5 billion years old or 2 billion years old you don't know that's the truth because you don't have any direct experience of the earth's age in fact you don't even have a direct experience of the earth if you're really honest at least not as this blue ball spinning in space the way that you conceive of it you're you have some direct experience of of the earth but it's very different than you know this round conception of this ball that you've seen on pictures so let's move on to the next point which is rather deep and important and which is that all knowledge is fundamentally second order what do i mean by second order all knowledge is about something it's about being being is first order knowing about being a second order right so the raw sensations of this fork are the being that's first order and then your knowledge of the fork including the fact that it is a fork and whatever fork is used for and what you think a fork is made out of where it came from where it's going and etc and the fact that it's called a fork and all the associated concepts that come with fork all of that is second order i want you to notice that you couldn't have all those associations and ideas about what to do with it how it works what it's for what it's made out of you couldn't have any of that if you didn't have the thing there to begin with i mean that's pretty obvious right this is not rocket science it's pretty obvious now here's the trick is that your knowledge of the fork makes you feel like you know the being of the fork which you don't you know what the fork can be used for you know how much it costs you know what will happen if you melt it down uh you know where it came from and so on but none of that tells you what it is you see that so you have to make a distinction between your knowledge of what you can do with things how you can use them versus what a thing is and so a lot of times that's confused and since us as humans like usually it doesn't really matter to us what the fork is what matters to us is what we can use it for so as long as we know what we can use it for as long as you can manipulate it you know with some skill and use it to get the things you want your ego wants then it's like well then i know the fork because hey i can use it i can use this to survive and that's all i care about and then the question of what is the being of this fork who even gives a [ __ ] that's not even a valid question anymore see it gets so bad that then some scientists will tell you that leo that's not even a valid question that's just some sort of metaphysical question like you know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of question but it's not that kind of question because the being of the fork is the thing that allows for everything else that you know about it you forgot that the being is first order see what you do is you get so focused on the second order and then what you can use it for that you just forget that there even was a first order the first order is irrelevant and then the second order by default becomes the first order because when you don't have the first order you only have the second order that is like the you know there's only one order at that point and you re label that as the first order and then you pretend like everything's fine you go on with your life because it seems to work so what i want you to recognize is that conceptual knowledge is a way of avoiding direct confrontation with the mystery of the first order the being another word for being is consciousness so here's one solution for you scientists to the problem of consciousness like you scientists are trying to figure out what consciousness is uh well you're trying to figure out what consciousness is at the second order but consciousness is first order so you're never going to figure out what consciousness is at the second order because it's at the first order this is consciousness so if you care about consciousness then you should care about the first order and notice if you stop caring about the first order you've stopped caring about reality because reality is nothing but first order this is the problem with pragmatism that i've talked about in my three-part series called deconstruction deconstructing the myth of science i believe i talked about it mostly in part two but maybe part three as well i forget notice something interesting notice that your being in your existence is prior to your knowledge of it you exist you are before you know about it because before you can know something about yourself you have to first exist this is not rocket science again but often overlooked you exist but you don't know what existence is or what exactly you are or how you came to exist you are alive prior to your knowing what life is the problem with symbolic second order conceptual knowledge is that it's so partial perspectival relativistic and finite and prone to recontextualization that it's very shaky ground it's not secure and it gets changed a lot what do i mean by prone to recontextualization see my episode called understanding recontextualization where we talk about that so this fork if you really do this work deeply eventually this fork will get recontextual i see right now you think this fork is a material metal object man of atoms eventually when you awaken you'll you'll this fork will get recontextualized as your own mind or as as god as consciousness as it'll also get recontextualized as infinity right now you see this fork as a finite object it'll it'll turn into an infinite object if you become sufficiently woke fundamentally knowing infinity is not possible why because knowing is second order you are infinity but infinity cannot fully know itself because knowing is a subset of that infinity which means knowing is is infinity the is-ness is so direct it's prior to being able to self-reflect or to grab around and grasp itself for the same reason that a hand cannot grasp itself reality or infinity cannot grasp itself because it is itself all knowing is explicit finite and a subset of infinity uh to get a deeper understanding and appreciation of this point go see my episode called explicit versus implicit understanding where we go into a lot of depth about that distinction being is inherently irreducibly mystical mysterious that's ultimately what mystical means see people have the wrong kind of connotation about mystical mystical can kind of mean like oh it's kind of like airy fairy or fantastical that's not really what mystical means truly what mystical means is that it's so it's something that's so fundamental that it's too profound to be known like i said earlier it's too profound to be known so not knowing is mystery and that's where mysticism comes from because it's mysterious and what does mysterious mean what does mystery mean mystery just means that it's infinite it's first order therefore you can't grasp it with a second order that's mystery this is why mysticism is correct because you can't grasp infinity with a second order or another way to put it is that you can but it's also good but the grasping of it will always be partial and finite and biased and therefore you will forever miss the infinitude its full infinitude this is why scientists cannot find god you can't find god because god is the totality of everything and the totality of everything cannot be grasped by a subset of that totality see a subset is not the superset that's what it boils down to the belief or assumption that reality can be explicitly explained that needs to be dropped that's the fundament fundamental error of science there is a fundamental entanglement between knowing and world mind and world and self and world i've also talked about this in my three-part series deconstructing the myth of science at root knowledge itself is being even though i tend to speak of a first order and a second order like there's the fork the being of the fork and then there's all our knowledge of it and it seems like our knowledge of it is not first order but that knowledge itself as it's happening in my skull or in my field of awareness that knowledge itself is is at the same level you know it's also an experience it's also got being my knowledge of the fork has its own being you see that so ultimately knowledge is being but it's one being pointing to another being so the being of the fork the being of the sensations thoughts in my mind are grasping and pointing at the fork that would be the knowledge of the fork but then if i want to know my own thoughts about the fork you see this presents another problem because how do i how do i grasp that i'd need to invent new knowledge about the knowledge i had about the fork this creates an extra layer see so we're creating layers and layers and layers like reality is unconscious kind of stepping back from itself back from itself back from itself to observe itself this is um this is the the problem we talked about in that episode called um what it means to go meta this is the going meta problem infinity is infinitely meta so in order to be able to see or observe something you have to step back from it and this stepping back from process is an infinite regress into infinity that's what infinity is it's an infinite stepping back process so ultimately the distinction itself between metaphysics and epistemology will collapse as you enter into not knowing what you'll realize is that at the deepest level all knowing is being and the only way you can know anything is through contact with being and the deepest form of knowing is a knowing so profound we don't even call it knowing anymore we call it being now see in the end you know a thing by being it by experiencing it so for example how do you know that you exist by existing by being sure you can sit there and think about your existence but that's second order you see before you can think about your existence you have to first exist and if you want to understand what you are at the deepest level you can't get there through knowing you got to get there through being that's what meditation does for you that's what self-inquiry does for you that's what psychedelics do for you so a state of genuine not knowing that we were practicing earlier in that exercise the first exercise this brings you closer to truth consciousness and god because god infinity self consciousness these are endlessly mysterious because they're they're endless they're infinite and so you can't grasp them through knowing now awakening itself when you have one comes with a profound not knowing because your knowing is replaced with being it's as though all the sense data in your sensory field becomes your way of knowing so you're not just knowing using your intellect or your mind you're not just knowing using language or words or english or concepts like for example when you when you wake up when you have an awakening you're not just going to know this fork by thinking about it the way you normally do it's like oh fork oh here it is okay cool it's an object that's not how you're gonna you're gonna know the fork much more intimately you're gonna know the fork by becoming the fork as as woo and zen is that sound it's like it's like i'm that guy it's like i'm uh what's his name chevy chase from caddyshack you know be the ball be the be the fork but that that is literally what's gonna happen when you awaken you'll become the fork and then you'll truly know what a fork is when you become it and then you'll really appreciate the difference between knowing the fork by being a fork versus knowing the fork by just thinking about a fork see ordinarily when we know things like within academia for example it's like if if an academic or a scientist told you to write a description of what a fork is um unwittingly what is being asked there of you is that you you know let's say some scientist says okay write me a five page analysis of of what a fork is and you sit down and you write it but what you're doing there is like you're looking at the fork and you're you're thinking about it and you're dissecting it with your mind conceptually it's like it's got four prongs on it it's maybe you know seven centimeters tall and one centimeter wide and it weighs so many ounces and blah blah blah right you can go on forever describing this fork you can do all that um but there's infinitely more detail that you're actually missing that's not going to be in your paper about the fork and your five-page paper report about the fork has no resemblance to the actual fork right the words on the page the sounds in your mind that those are not forks and even all your descriptions the mental imagery those are still not forks imagine imagine an intelligence so great that when this intelligence thought about a fork the way it did so was not like a human intelligence which you know comes up with words and mental images but literally there was a fork in your [ __ ] head imagine thinking in forks imagine like a alien super intelligence or a ai super intelligence where it became so intelligent so conscious that it thought in forks that means that it doesn't need to talk about like oh it's a fork it doesn't need th it doesn't need that four letter word it doesn't need a description of the fork because you see how all those are inferior if you could lit if i could take this fork and stick it in your [ __ ] skull so that you could fully experience the fork i would no longer need to call it a fork anymore i would no longer need to give any descriptions of it i would no longer need to describe its weight and length and all this sort of scientific stuff to you you just have a fork in your head and there it is bam you got a fork in your head like you understand what a fork is now see and now imagine doing that for everything around you not just a fork it would be a direct one-to-one right there would no you see how if we're using language there's like stuff is getting lost in translation because there's an interpretive process there's a second order we're talking about something and that's like inferior right like i could explain to a blind person what a sunset is and maybe he could get a little idea of it it's better than nothing at all but if i really want to show if i really want to get a blind person understand a sunset i would have to give him vision and then his eyes would open he would no longer be blind let's say we do some sort of like narrow operation on his mind on his brain i mean and then he opens his eyes for the first time he sees the sun whoa that's a sunset that's totally different than what you were telling me it's like well but what i was telling you you know a lot i can only tell you so much a lot was getting lost in translation so the only way to know what a sunset is is to experience a sunset and the only way to know what a fork is to experience a fork see and imagine that you were so conscious and intelligent that you were doing that with everything and if you were doing that with everything you would be living at the first order you wouldn't need a second order you wouldn't need language you would need to give labels to things you could but you wouldn't need it and so i want you to imagine like a a really sophisticated ai or let's say humans meet some aliens who have like heads that are 20 times bigger than ours let's say we meet such an alien race um 500 years into the future we meet such an alien race you might wonder like how much smarter would those aliens be and how would they communicate how would their minds work well here's an idea imagine that if two aliens with heads that are 20 times bigger than humans were talking to each other about forks they wouldn't be making noises about forks literally one alien would create a fork a physical fork in his head and the other alien would also create a physical fork in his head they would be identical forks and that's how they would communicate what a fork is i would literally be able to just pass the fork from my head into your head directly and in this way i would communicate to you what a fork is perfectly without any anything lost in translation because there is no translation that's pretty awesome right now you say leo that that's crazy that's like science fiction you can't do that oh really what do you think this is this is your mind this fork is your mind you're doing it right now you're just disconnected from it if you were awake you would already understand that this fork is your own mind anyways moving on i've talked about this notion of omniscience in the past omniscience people get confused about what omniscience is see people think when i say omniscience people say oh leo well you're just full of [ __ ] because if you were truly omniscient why can't you tell me the lottery numbers for tomorrow or something like that but that's not what omniscience is omniscience is happening not at the fir at the second order conceptual level of thinking omniscience happens at the level of being at the first order so like um usually when people think of omniscience it's like oh if i'm going to be omniscient that means i'm going to know everything conceptually that i could possibly want to know like leo i want to know um you know how many kangaroos there are in australia and omniscient should tell me that no that's not what omniscience is um true omniscience is you realizing that the kangaroos in australia how many there are whatever that that's an image in your own mind that's what true omniscience tells you it doesn't give you an answer to how many kangaroos there are it tells you that the kangaroos in your mind including australia are imaginary that's real omniscience right this fork right here this is omniscience the being of this fork is omniscience that doesn't mean that you'll be able to know how many atoms there are in this fork because omniscience will tell you that the number of atoms in this fork is something you're imagining so if you want to access omniscience you can't do it at the second order level you got to do it at the first order level so maybe that's important for you you might be wondering like leo why is this fortune order important why should i care about it well do you want omniscience it's like yeah leo i want to know how many kangaroos are on australia no that you're not going to get that that's not omniscience well then leah why would i want it well maybe some things you can't know if you want until you try them like how do you know you want some pizza unless you try some pizza first see that catch 22 there i can't prove to you that you will want pizza you just got to try some pizza and kind of just like trust me that the pizza is good but if you're so skeptical that you're like no leo i'm not gonna i'm not gonna try pizza until you prove to me that i should that the pizza is gonna be enjoyable to me well i can't do that if you're that skeptical then you're you're stuck your mind is closed ultimately when you awaken you will know nothing other than that you are god infinity and consciousness it's crucial that you reach a point in your development and your consciousness of total not knowing right so it's not that awakening will give you a bunch of conceptual knowing it'll do the opposite it'll remove all conceptual knowing it'll leave you completely in mystery endless infinite mystery you will know nothing but you will literally be omniscient you'll know everything that is worth knowing like you'll become this fork and that's all that's all you'll care about at that point you're not going to care about all the second order [ __ ] about a fork that's so inferior to actually be a being a fork that's what you've got to realize so if you have not reached a state of complete not knowing that's something you're missing in your development that's that's going to be a significant uh life-changing inflection point in your journey and that's a rather late stage development it might take you decades to reach that point but it's very worthwhile reaching that point and when you reach that point you're still not done there's there's a lot more you could do from that point but it's a good point to to reach at that point you're going to face the futility of trying to know infinity via the second order see most scientists and just people in general who are just curious about life and you know study a lot intellectual type of people if you're an intellectual you don't even realize how much energy you are wasting trying to grasp infinity using the second order in fact you could be wasting so much life energy doing this that it could be physically making you sick it could give you chronic diseases it could be giving you cancer it could be giving you depression and you won't even know it because it's just your you know your whole way of life is just like like honestly lately i felt like for the last 20 years of my life i've just been trying to figure out what reality is and like it's taken a [ __ ] toll on me it's stressful it's stressful conceptually figuring out reality trying to put all the puzzle pieces together piece by piece like what is god and what is christianity and what is buddhism is what is science what is this and what is that how does it all connect and what am i like i mean that's stressful that's stressful and as an intellectual you don't even appreciate the stress and you might justify to yourself as just like oh well that's just that just comes with the territory being intellectual yeah but that stress is slowly killing you inside because like you think that you're you're making progress but really you're just like treading water you're staying in place you think you're getting ahead but you're just you're staying in place you have a deep thirst for a fun to you have a fundamental curiosity that primordial curiosity to know yourself as god and that's not being quenched that thirst is not being quenched by these little bits of nuggets that you get from science or even from religion or even from some buddhist you know douchebag uh guru sitting there you know posturing us some buddhist wearing a rope those little bits of insights they're not like satisfying you it's almost like you're a person who has never had sex in your whole life and you're so sexually frustrated but you don't even like know what sexual frustration is because you've never you've never experienced the release of a proper orgasm from proper sex all you've done is you've gotten a little bit of like someone's tickle tickled your genitals for a few seconds here and there in life that's what science is doing that's what many of these youtube videos are doing even many spiritual videos spiritual teachers all the new age stuff what they're doing they're just tickling your genitals for a few seconds here and there you're not getting the full thing like you're not getting your brains [ __ ] out when it comes to understanding what reality is and you're never going to get that through those methods what you need is a full-blown awakening and then you'll realize like oh my god that's what all of my curiosity was driving me towards like i needed my brains [ __ ] out my whole life and i didn't know it and i've been suffering for that and finally it's happened and now i see what i've been missing and now finally there's that like relief is like oh my god it's like this giant weight has been lifted off my shoulders like i can [ __ ] relax now for a few minutes there's a piece that comes with that a deep satisfaction traditional religion philosophy and signs fail because they try to reach the ultimate via knowing which is not possible not realizing that all knowing is relative but the ultimate is absolute so this brings us to the issue of relative versus absolute truth i've talked about this many times i have a specific episode on it called believe it's called relative versus absolute truth so go check that out relative knowing is knowing something relative to something else like you know what a fork is relative to what a knife or a spoon is you know what a fork is relative to a non-fork you know dualistically you know what you can do with a fork and what you can't do with a fork you know this fork is small and then there's other objects that are big like the earth is big relative to a fork this is all relative knowledge but then there's a way of knowing the fork which is absolutely you can have absolute knowledge of the fork but what is that well for that awakening would be required and also you couldn't talk about it you'd have to become the fork so remember to make a distinction between knowledge of how a thing works and what you can do with it versus the thing itself very different now psychedelics produce very powerful states of not knowing in fact such deep not knowing is virtually impossible i would say otherwise you don't even know what a state of not knowing is until you've done some psychedelics a lot of psychedelics honestly psychedelics will take you into deeper and deeper states of not knowing which is why i consider them one of the most powerful tools in this work and i advocate for them so passionately because honestly you know i've been wrestling with this issue of not knowing for a long time i've known about it i've thought about it i've practiced it but like it's only when i got deep into psychedelics that i really started to appreciate what is meant by not knowing the utility of psychedelics is that they show you how fragile and relative your knowledge is they also show you the alternative to relative knowledge which is absolute knowledge most intellectuals of course are terrified of psychedelics and rightly so science history religion politicians business people are terrified of psychedelics because all those industries and endeavors are built upon these kind of like houses of cars of second order conceptual knowledge relative knowledge biased knowledge highly partial knowledge and psychedelics will obliterate and undermine all that deconstruct all that speaking of deconstruction deconstruction leads to not knowing and vice versa not knowing helps with deconstruction and deconstruction this is a concept i've talked about in the past quite a bit if you're not familiar with that go check out my episode called what is actualized.org where i i believe i go pretty deep into kind of like framing up what deconstruction is and why we're kind of like deconstructing the mind and what we're trying to accomplish with that by the way i need to give special thanks and credit here to peter ralston who's been um crucial for inspiring this whole topic of not knowing he has a book called the book of not knowing i'm a big fan of so check out his work he deserves credit for this topic um he's the first who kind of planted the seed of the importance of not knowing into my mind and then that seed has been slowly growing like an like an acorn like an acorn slowly growing into an oak tree in my own mind and just only recently like in in the last um in the last year have i really um started to appreciate the importance of not knowing and i'm getting better at working from not knowing and for me this has been challenging and you know a big trap because like i said i am very intellectual and so a lot of the work that i've done with actualize.org for the first you know eight years of of running this this channel in business is you know i had to put out a lot of like knowledge a lot of content and i still do put a lot of content um but now i'm getting kind of like more mature in my understanding of how to put out content and um well there's sort of a paradox that needs to be reconciled between like how is it possible that i put out so much content that seems to be so knowledgeable but at the same time now i'm talking about not knowing and i'm practicing not knowing well there is this paradox here that i want to point out to you this is the paradox of not knowing is that the mature minds the mature mind admits of not knowing more but ends up knowing things which the immature mind thinks are impossible to know so see the immature mind thinks it's impossible to know what reality is it's impossible to know what absolute truth is what god is what consciousness is what love is what infinity is it's impossible to know the paranormal and things like this right it's impossible to know these things it's impossible to know whether other people exist or not impossible it is when you know a lot of stuff about materialism and also religious dogma and stuff like that yeah then it's impossible because your mind is locked down within that paradigm but as you let that go and you you truly reach deep states of not knowing and you have and then you your mind opens up to mystical experiences and awakenings and so forth and maybe you start working with psychedelics and so forth then the paradox is that you're going to be knowing less and less but actually some of the most impossible to know things will suddenly become revealed to you in a very absolute direct manner and you will actually know absolute truth god conscious love infinity paranormal stuff you'll know it and you'll know it absolutely not just relatively and yet at the same time there's still going to be much you don't know and it's like well how is that possible yeah it's hard to explain how that's possible it's it's very mysterious it's kind of magical it's unexpected it's counterintuitive here's an important point not knowing doesn't mean you have to give up all knowing forever you can still use knowing in practical ways you have to be careful not to get lost in epistemic nihilism skepticism and cynicism to the point where you become inactive and passive you can kind of misuse this idea of not knowing in this way of like you know this sort of like false skepticism i have an episode called false versus true skepticism kind of an old one but an important one you know a lot of people misuse skepticism a lot of science folks do and you can say like well but leo nothing can be known that's what not knowing means or it's like leo everything is just subjective that's what not knowing means or it's like not knowing means that the absolute truth doesn't exist or not knowing means that you can't know god you have to be agnostic that's not what not knowing means that's a misuse of not knowing that's sort of a epistemic nihilism and notice that to claim that nothing can be known that's actually a definitive absolute statement of knowledge or to say that everything is subjective and that there is no absolute that's a definitive statement of knowledge you don't actually know that you don't actually know for example that truth doesn't exist you don't know that so it's tricky be very careful about how this can get misused also remember that you still have to consider survival and you're kind of like everyday happiness survival and everyday happiness in life requires activity and not knowing can be disruptive of activity so be careful that with adopting this state of not knowing that you don't use that to kind of like derail your whole life it's like well leo i was working on my life purpose you know i knew that my life purpose i wanted to become a musician and i knew that i wanted a family i wanted to get you know i wanted a hot girl and i wanted to have a couple of kids with her and i wanted to you know a nice house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and i wanted you know a nice uh you know mercedes-benz couple of mercedes-benz in the driveway that's what i knew i wanted and i knew i wanted to travel to the bahamas and you know have a nice vacation and i knew i wanted to play some video games that are coming up you know i'm looking forward to some new you know star field or something right uh it's like i knew i wanted these things and now leo you told me about not knowing and now i believed you and now i don't know anything and now i don't even know if i want the mercedes i don't know if i want that hot girl i don't know if i want my kids i don't know if i want my house i don't know if i want to go to bahamas i don't want i don't know if i want starfield well that's actually that's good for you be careful of starfield um but uh it's like and now and now it's like and leo and now i can't even get out of bed in the morning i don't even know if i want to get out of bed in the morning and now i'm depressed and leo you've made me depressed you see what the ego mind will do with this not knowing so this is very dangerous if it's misused so you're going to have to kind of like walk and chew gum at the same time here you're gonna have to enter deep states of not knowing and yet at the same time you're gonna have to keep executing in your life on the practical [ __ ] on the those principles those very fundamental core survival principles you know those things i teach about like your life purpose uh maintaining a work ethic uh eating good you know good food uh exercising going out talking to girls socializing um going to school getting good grades doing your meditation practice or your psychedelic practice if you do that or you know going to retreats doing doing some hardcore retreats you know reading books spending time with your kids not being an [ __ ] to your friends and your family uh working on your intimate relationship making sure that's going well communicating consciously and so forth um you know if you have employees you know being a good boss if you're if you're a co-worker you know being nice to your co-workers working on the stuff that needs to be working like all that [ __ ] those core principles you got to maintain all that for the most part and then still enter into states of deep not knowing and you might say believe isn't that a contradiction if i'm totally in state of not knowing then shouldn't i not know for example like what my life purpose is maybe now i don't know if i want to be a musician or an artist or a filmmaker or a professor or a spiritual teacher i don't know now i don't know there is a time to question even those principles and even your life purpose but you have to do that like consciously and you don't want to let your mind run wild with that to the point of like derailing you uh you should have a deep passion for what you're doing like if you want to be a musician or filmmaker you should have a deep passion for that that passion should run deeper than any sort of like conceptual knowledge or ideas and that passion should survive any states of not knowing like that's love right what you love your passion basically comes from what you love what you love whether it's your children your family whatever you know some of those things can be inauthentic maybe you don't love maybe you you realize you know you don't want to be a musician okay fine that's actually good now that's kind of kind of tragic maybe you have to give up that part of your life but then you move on and find something that you really do love so you can use not knowing to question all these things just like be careful not to like paint with too broad of a brush where like now you don't know anything and now you're just like demotivated um you can't get out of bed in the morning and you're feeling depressed and now you're eating junk food right it's like see what happens is like leo i don't even know if you know drinking celery juice um and um you know eating healthy i don't even know if that's good for me because you know just like the fish oil you know i don't know what if what if pizza is good for me leo what if heroin is good for me i don't know so now i'm just gonna you know use that as an excuse to eat pizza smoke weed do heroin and sit at home watch cartoons all day and just like get into a funk of deeper and deeper depression and nihilism to the point where now you become suicidal well you see obviously that's a trap obviously that's not what i'm telling you to do again in this work as you're exploring the truth and pursuing the truth your survival is always at stake it's always an issue yeah pursuing the truth questioning reality uh deconstructing aspects of your worldview this is gonna conflict with your survival of course if it didn't it what would even be the point because part of the reason that we're doing this is to enhance your survival to kind of purify your survival because the way that most people are surviving is is rather miserable and shallow so you want to sort of like kind of like inch your way up or bootstrap yourself in a way where you're using not knowing to question stuff but you're still motivated and doing the stuff the healthy stuff reasonably healthy stuff right you don't need 100 certainty about everything that's another trap here it's like well it sounds like leah was saying that unless i know something absolutely i shouldn't be doing it i know um if you're 95 sure you want to be a musician and you're passionate about it that's enough you don't need 100 absolute certainty you know you don't need god to appear to you in the clouds and tell you and write a stone tablet to you um with a with a 100 guarantee that your life purpose is correct you don't need that you're just going to be when it comes to survival most your survival is kind of probabilistic you're picking out of you know a lot of times you're picking out of like you have imperfect information and you're just kind of going with the best thing you know like for example maybe you have three ideas i want to be a musician or i could be a filmmaker or i could be an accountant which of those seems like i have more passion for it's like well definitely not an accountant and maybe a filmmaker but really i love music it's like well am i 100 sure i like music and i'm going to be a great musician not 100 sure but like maybe 90 sure okay and then how sure are you that you want to be an accountant it's like well 10 okay so that's pretty bad and it's like well what about being a filmmaker maybe like 50 okay but so your best bet is to go for a musician right because like you got to act survival and happiness requires activity action and when it comes to survival very rarely do you act on something with 100 certainty but you still want to act decisively towards something what you don't want to do is kind of like half-ass things where it's like well i'm only 90 sure that i want a musician so i'm just going to kind of like half-ass it i'm just going to like practice with half enthusiasm put half the energy into it's like no then you're all you've already failed you still have to be decisive i'll have an episode about how to be decisive so stay tuned for that that's a tricky topic so not knowing can be weaponized this false skepticism that i talked about you can start to use not knowing to say that oh well god cannot be known or you can't know what happens after death nobody can know that right leo surely you can't tell me that you know what death is or you can misuse it like well then you can't know what consciousness is nobody knows what consciousness is or you can say that x would you know fill in the blank x x cannot be known whatever it is x cannot be known these are all misuses of not knowing you can also misuse it within the political sphere you could say oh well leo talks about not knowing so leo you know you you've been an advocate for vaccines these coveted vaccines leo but but isn't it aren't you a hypocrite leo because you don't really know if these covet vaccines are safe how do you know but you're conflating uh absolute and relative considerations here right like when it comes to survival issues when it comes to you know a deadly virus that's moving through the population rapidly you don't have time to gather all the data you're not going to have you're never going to have absolute perfect knowledge of some new virus and yet you still have to act you still have to protect people otherwise millions of people could die so given the imperfect information all else being equal you know balancing all the probabilities and all that you come down you make a decision that you know you're going to go get a vaccine because it seems reasonably safe even though you don't know that's right because again if you act with strict adherence to not knowing you're actually going to die very quickly that's why humans are so addicted to knowledge because knowledge serves survival even though a lot of times it isn't true also this not knowing can be abused by others it can be weaponized against you for example you might enter a state of not knowing in the realm of politics and then you know somebody like steve bannon comes along and his strategy is flood the zone with [ __ ] literal quote from him flood the zone with [ __ ] so when you have bad actors coming into the epistemic ecosystem information ecology and start to pollute it with just ridiculous conspiracy theories and misinformation and just pure [ __ ] and then you're just sitting there and you're just kind of equivocating you're like well who's right the democrats are right or the republicans are i don't know it's all it's all up for grabs like it's all equal they're all equally full of [ __ ] no they're not all equally full of [ __ ] there are some bad actors who are deliberately pumping out [ __ ] and then there's others who are being fairly honest and truthful you know within the limits of a politician um and so a great mistake would be to use this idea of not knowing to put foolishness and wisdom on the same footing it's like leo why should i even listen to your you know principles of wisdom you know what's wrong with being a fool after all leo do i know whether it's better to be wise or to be a fool what if being a fool is better than being you know you can kind of like take it to this extreme and when you do this is the definition of foolishness you will become a fool and then you will quickly discover um you know life will quickly teach you survival will very quickly teach you by punishing you mercilessly for being a fool so do not put foolishness on the same footing as wisdom do not put inexperience on the same footing as experience it's like leo you know i don't know you know we we've got this giant country to run it's a giant bureaucracy and you know i don't know should we hire someone should we elect someone who's very experienced with managing complex systems and has a lot of experience with government all that or should we just get someone who's completely inexperienced just like a shot in the dark you know just roll the [ __ ] dice and someone completely who has no experience whatsoever i don't know i don't know so i'm just gonna go vote for you know the inexperienced one what does it matter this is idiocy so make sure that you don't turn not knowing into idiocy not knowing does not mean that you have to abide [ __ ] foolishness ideology propaganda false equivalency conspiracy theories and various kinds of bad actors who are gaslighting you remember this is all in the domain of survival and in the domain of survival there are jackals and wolves who will [ __ ] rape you so please don't go practicing not knowing when you're like you know you're walking down a dark alley where you could get raped and your intuition tells you you know i shouldn't be walking alone in this dark alley i might get raped and then you're like oh but leo told me that i don't know so you know i don't know so yeah hey walking down this dark alley might be just peachy might be peachy so i'll just do it and then you get raped and then you blame leo so you know don't be an idiot right um start with practicing your not knowing in more safer locations and in more safer contexts and then you can broaden it out and if as you get the handle for it you can try it in a more dangerous context but remember i mean your ass is always on the line so keep one eye on god and one eye or one eye on god one eye on truth and why one on one eye on survival um don't take all your eyes off of survival because you'll get [ __ ] um also not knowing does not mean you don't pursue education reading books going to school contemplation journaling insight wisdom consuming high quality podcasts and videos you should still do those things because see the ego might be like oh well not knowing that means hey great i don't got to read a book ever again in my life right because books are full of knowing and leo told me to do not knowing and so instead of reading a high quality book what do you do instead it's not like you're just going to sit there and meditate no what you're going to do is you're going to go on [ __ ] tick tock and watch stupid dancing videos or even worse you're gonna log into facebook and read some stupid me political memes that are gonna brainwash you with steve bannon's you know flood the zone with [ __ ] or russian propaganda like remember when you're not taking action by default society is programming you with its [ __ ] your friends your family all of that you know when when you decide to not go work towards your career of becoming a great musician what's gonna happen are you just gonna sit there doing nothing no you're gonna get bored and you are gonna turn on netflix and you're gonna go to the porn and you're gonna get addicted to jerking off and then you're gonna go hang out with your friends and then they're gonna give you some cocaine and then you're gonna start snorting [ __ ] cocaine because again you're bored and you've got no purpose you've got nothing to do and you're feeling suicidal so you know what why not right that's the only thing that's gonna motivate you to get out of bed in the morning at some point is just the cocaine or the alcohol that's why you got to maintain your healthy habits and when you're not maintaining your healthy food habits what are you going to be eating you're going to be eating [ __ ] your friends are gonna order a pizza and then you're gonna pig out on it why because you got nothing you got nothing no reason to do anything else so don't let this derail your whole life and your whole self-actualization life purpose hero's journey the hero's journey don't don't doubt that too much right recognize that there are parts of your life where you can apply skepticism and not knowing and deconstruction more than other parts some parts deserve a lot more deconstructing than other parts before you go deconstructing something like your life purpose or your family or your career or your you know your lover or your healthy eating habits first how about you deconstruct all the [ __ ] in your life all the bad stuff that's obviously bad not knowing isn't an option when you're in a survival situation survival holds a gun to your head and it says act or die and so there's an intense pressure to know when there's a gun to your head and it's this pressure it's only when you really experience this pressure kind of you start to appreciate it that you realize like oh now i understand why mankind is so addicted to knowing and why not knowing is so unpopular and so kind of like taboo and little practiced it's because most people are walking around every day they're waking up with a gun to their head that's most people's lives they're waking up with a metaphorical gun to their head they gotta like you know get the kids to the doctor get the kids to school quickly get to work please their boss pay the electric bill pay their car bill pay the mortgage pay the taxes do this and then do that every day and there's a gun to your head and as soon as you don't do it click it goes off and see they don't even have the space or the luxury to practice some not knowing that's the tragedy of this another paradox here is that even though you don't know what anything is you can still get very good at predicting reality through massive exposure to repetitive experience you can still develop very technical knowledge you can still become very intuitive and wise despite the fact that you don't know what a fork is like you don't need to know what a fork is to be able to use the fork and so don't let the not knowing of what a fork is at the first order level interfere with your masterful use of the fork you know to eat the healthy food you got to eat because you could be like well leo i don't know what a fork is and you're so lost in that that you forget to actually use the fork to you know put like some healthy food into your mouth and instead you just shovel fistfuls of pizza and pretzels and you know beer into your mouth that would be a mistake you might ask the question but leo if not knowing is the case how come you seem to know so much well um it's a very good question i i wrestle with that myself um i'll have an episode in the future about the evolution of my teachings coming soon where i'll get a little bit more into that for now i'll just say that the deeper i go into not knowing the more i question things i've taught in the past and it's not that those things are wrong per se it's just that i see the partiality of them i s i become highly construct aware i become very aware of how the things i know are are uh are constructed by my own mind that they're partial they're relative uh only valid within certain contexts and i'll be talking more about relativity as well in the future so i just noticed so many constraints and limitations like everything that i say you know if i had the time and you had the time to listen you know i would over qualify every statement that i made but a lot of times i don't have the time to do that it's exhausting to do that all the time um and so you know honestly um and again a lot of the things that i try to teach i try to make practical and so a lot of times i'm teaching something just kind of on a practical level not on a metaphysical level and in that sense it just works you know if i'm giving you dating advice for example when i give dating advice i don't get all metaphysical and kind of spiritual about it it's like my dating advice you could even say it's like very crude um yeah because at within the domain of dating you don't need to get too fancy for most people i mean you can if you want to get like very sophisticated but the most people they need is just like very basic like advice you know you don't need to get all fancy to talk to a girl you know you got to do some basic stuff like approach say see say a few you know things don't say certain other things and you'll get decent results um you don't need to get all philosophical with it um so a lot of my advice is just like that um a lot of my my knowledge is just kind of like it's practical wisdom um and you can have all sorts of insights minor insights about reality which is useful and practical but still you know only operative within a certain context still relative still partial still perspectival and so forth um and honestly you know i'm getting to the point where one day i'm just like i'm literally like i'm way i'm sort of like refactoring and wiping the slate clean a lot of my own with with a lot of my own models and world views like i'm i'm trying to like deconstruct a lot of stuff in my own mind um and it's challenging to do that while simultaneously doing something constructive intellectually you know through this work so i'm trying to like balance balance that out um um yeah but ultimately if you if you really press me and back me into a corner like ultimately like what do i really know ultimately like what i know is that reality is infinity that's what i ultimately know is infinity and then everything else is like the details of infinity how does infinity unfold there you know i can be fallible you know as far as the details of infinity those are endless and you can easily get those wrong and that's kind of where science comes in um and science is often wrong but like the one thing i know is infinity and that's what not knowing will take you towards is infinity and then everything else will be contingent knowledge and self-deception is still going to be operative all that stuff i've talked about in the past uh the next question you might be wondering is like but leo how can i act and create a good life while not knowing how will i know which are the right choices and moves it's a good question there's something very powerful about intuition and listening to your heart following your heart and it's not at that point so much about knowing as it is about almost feeling we can put it like this that your spirit or your soul has a love for various aspects of infinity and really your job is to honor that and to follow it like a almost like a metal detector you know those guys at the beach walking around sweeping with metal detectors like beep beep beep when they get closer to a piece of metal some treasure buried in the sand it beeps real fast so you kind of have this kind of compass in your heart uh your spirit is attracted to certain things in life um you also have you know what they classically call a conscience like you cut you can kind of just kind of like through gut feel you can distinguish between you know what's right and wrong like you know it's wrong to kill people you know it's wrong to steal from people you know it's wrong to you know to kick a puppy or to stab a baby you know you you got that um you know hopefully if you're not like a psychopath most people have that kind of intuition and conscience and um it's like it's you know the spirit's got a spiritual quality to it so gina you follow your heart you follow your kind of like gut instincts you get good at that at building up your intuition i have an episode called developing your intuition go check that out and then again your intuition is not perfect you can still deceive yourself with your intuition it's not always right you'll still make mistakes but you know it's it's basically the best tool you got and so you just kind of follow that and follow that um and uh trust it now you might say well how do i know i can trust it leo i don't know if i can trust it well in that case you're stuck okay fine so then sit there and not know anything and then just die do nothing don't even eat because you don't even know whether you should eat don't even [ __ ] because you don't even know if you should [ __ ] don't do anything and just don't even breathe because you don't even know if you should breathe and then just die okay fine if you want to that's if you want to gamble on that option then do that i mean it's your life live however you want you're going to be half you're going to have to life is going to force you to make imperfect choices you're going to have to make guesses trial and error try stuff out and see what doesn't work and in the end suffering will quickly teach you what's not working so how do you create a good life you know if you think smoking a bunch of weed every day watching 10 hours of netflix and then playing a bunch of video games and jerking off and eating pizza and drinking beer and doing cocaine if you think that that's gonna create a good life and you're like well leo that in my mind you know i don't know that might be as good as like working hard and meditating and drinking celery i don't know so i'm just gonna go with that okay go with it and let's see how you feel in a few months your feelings will quickly tell you that it's not a good life and you might say well leo how do i know i can trust my feelings well okay fine then then you won't mind when you're depressed and suicidal and in in pain and in torture and and all that then you won't mind right because hey how do leah i mean how do you know that you're you know your feelings of depression all that how do you know that's a problem how do you know your suffering is a problem why not just suffer suffer your whole life you see where this goes this kind of nihilism so in the end you have to make some choices and uh you'll quickly learn that the the principles that i talk about and the wisdom that i talk about that these are the principles that create for a good life generally speaking there's some exceptions around the edges all right so let's talk about how to apply all this how to apply not knowing first of all contemplate a lot the limits of knowing think about what knowing is how it's possible where it comes from how do you know anything at all what do you know what don't you know contemplate these things this is epistemology 101. and by the way i have a lot of epistemology episodes you can go check out uh number two question everything that is known like really question deeply get good at questioning in fact i have an episode called um i have multiple episodes about contemplation how to contemplate how to ask questions how to ask powerful questions another episode it's a really good one you should revisit uh question question question everything number three notice that you don't know the being of anything the being keep reminding yourself of that like over and over and over again number four work towards entering deep states of not knowing like we did in that first exercise keep doing that it's not enough to do it once or twice do that hundreds of times next make use of psychedelics to enter profound states of not knowing this is going to change your whole life if you do this huge but if you're going to be using psychedelics make sure you use them carefully and responsibly make sure you're not too young or too immature make sure you don't have mental illness and you're not on medications and so forth so follow all my guidelines for safe tripping procedures i have whole episodes on that next don't let others and society pressure you into having to know lot of times you might be at work you know your boss might be pressuring you like to predict what the next ad campaign is going to be you know what the results are going to be how what the profits are going to be and people will be pressuring you to deliver the facts the knowledge but the truth is that you don't know and nobody else knows so just like you have to admit have the backbone to say you know what guys i don't know you know your boss might ask you is this going to work and usually you'd be kind of like you just kind of lie and say yeah and here you just say i don't know that's the truth i don't know if it's going to work i don't know if it's going to be successful that takes courage to say that because they'll push back on you and say well you should know you know how dare you say you don't know that's unacceptable society will treat though treat your not knowing as though it's unacceptable to not know because they need you to know but just because they need you to know doesn't mean that's the right thing to do so build up that backbone to say i don't know you know even in school you know your teacher asks you some question that you're supposed to know the answer to and the teacher will kind of judge you for like not knowing like you know what year did you know world war two start in and the teacher you know needs a specific date and you're like well i don't know so so what i don't know so what will you kill me i don't know so just bite that bullet get more comfortable not knowing and basking in mystery appreciate the mystery until that mystery turns into a mystical experience also just literally practice saying i don't know a lot practice saying it you know people around you your friends or family and co-workers they'll ask you about your opinion about this and about politics and about abortion and about the economy and about what happened there and about history and about the future and this and it's like there's this temptation to start to gossip or to invent theories or to speculate to do armchair philosophy when really the truth is like i don't know who's gonna be president in 2020 or 2024 i don't know is joe biden still going to be alive in 2024 i don't know like is trump gonna be alive i don't know is he gonna be president i don't know i mean that's the truth right rather than inventing like stupid stories and then justifying them it's like well i think it's gonna be trump because of this and it's like yeah but you don't know that you're just making [ __ ] up all right save the time save the drama and just admit you don't know you can end a lot of debates and silly stupid discussions online just by saying i don't know and by the way i'll be doing that more as well that's something i got to work on for myself also contemplate what do i know for sure also remember to distinguish between belief and speculation on the one hand versus direct experience on the other hand distinguish between these things if it's just belief in speculation then call that i don't know if it's direct experience then maybe you can claim you know that periodically wipe the slate clean with your worldview just like one day just try to take your whole worldview and just like throw it all in the trash and just try to build a new one from scratch for example or better yet just leave it blank the other way you practice all this is remember to balance out the not knowing with action still take action be active in your life and carry on with your not knowing and lastly operate with deep intuition and implicit understanding enter the not knowing mode try entering it that exercise we did at the beginning try entering that mode before you begin meditation before you begin a serious bout of contemplation before you take a psychedelic before you do a brainstorming session or you're getting all creative with your art before entering a discussion or communicating with another person when listening to something controversial first enter a state of not knowing and then come from that place you'll see you'll get much better results in all these domains and experiment with other domains you could apply it in you know like let's say you're having a conflict with your spouse you two are arguing about something you know she's accusing you of something you're accusing her of something rather than just doing it the way that it's usually done um try this first take a few minutes and enter a state of deep not knowing and then listen to her and you'll notice things go very differently because to truly have a communication and not just sort of a back and forth accusation um where each side is trying to play the bigger victim instead of that like actually sit there with not knowing and listen to the to her grievances and her criticisms really not know and don't be like when you don't know then you're not going to be defensive so much because it's like well maybe i did do something wrong right you're gonna be more open you're gonna be open to the idea that you did do something wrong and then a communication could actually happen and then if you train her to also with you get into this state and you both of you two get into a state of not knowing that's when you can really have a high quality communication we'll be talking more about conscious communication later in a separate episode if you're listening to something like like a controversial perspective that's different than yours which i hope you're doing like for example if you're a progressive and you're listening to some conservative talk show or something when you listen before you listen to it first enter a state of complete not knowing and then listen and vice versa if you're a conservative and you're going to be listening to some progressive which i hope you're doing just to challenge yourself um listen to it with from a state of not knowing you'll see that you listen in a very different way if you're listening to some intellectual speaking and let's say you don't fully agree with this intellectual like let's say you're listening to jordan peterson or sam harris or somebody like that listen to them with a state of not knowing but also remember that doesn't mean you're just going to be some gullible idiot that accepts everything that is said from this state of not knowing you know just because they say something doesn't mean you have to then latch onto it like a pit bull and turn it into a dogma you can carry on with your not knowing while considering their perspective and hell you can do that with me too you can also apply not knowing it at a very mundane level so like let's say in your business you're going to be running some ad campaign on facebook usually you would like have all these expectations and ideas about how it's going to go and what's going to happen it's like you can just say wait a minute what's the truth here i don't know and then run your ad campaign from a place of i don't know let's say for example you're setting up a date with a girl you're texting her just you know to show up on sunday night at this place and it's like you don't like does she like me um is she gonna show up are we gonna have sex together what shirt should i wear what what's she going to wear is she going to drive eye candy like all this kind of all this like back and forth and then you're like you're over planning and over projecting and worrying and all this sort of stuff uh where you could instead just like come at it from a place of i don't know like is she gonna show up i don't know are we gonna have sex i don't know are we gonna get along i don't know am i gonna end up burying this girl i don't know let's just see let's see where it goes for example with investing a lot of times you get yourself into trouble with investing because with investing usually when you invest in something you build up a fantasy about how how much money it's going to earn you and a lot of times those fantasies end up just being [ __ ] and bubbles of various kinds so you know before you invest in something like crypto or whatever really ask yourself do i know is is bitcoin gonna be a hundred thousand dollars per coin do i know oh i don't know oh well yeah of course i don't know is is bitcoin going to go to zero i don't know maybe it will well okay now that kind of like modulates and moderates your kind of crazy expectations with investing maybe you're having a confrontation with somebody at work and usually you would you would kind of like project negative intentions to that person like you say oh well that person she's just jealous of me because i'm doing a better job than her and she's probably scheming with that guy over there to maybe demote me at my work and they're gonna conspire they're gonna go tattle to the manager and say some bad thing about me because they're the like it's like that right but then you can ask yourself like do i really know that person's intentions their motivations are they really out to get me or maybe they're just having a bad life you know uh like personal life maybe they just got divorced or something and then you you go into not knowing and you realize like oh i don't know i don't know is this person is it personal against me is it something is she offer medications is is there problems at work is there maybe something i could say that would fix this issue maybe we can have a communication um you know the not knowing opens up more possibilities or for example you might wonder will be there and act will there actually will there be an actualized.org video next week and the answer is i don't know we'll see see and as you do this you become more comfortable not knowing so part of this is just like accustoming yourself to living from uncertainty remember your mind is addicted to to certainty but the truth is that reality in life is very uncertain it's chaotic random things happen all the time we don't know what the economy is going to do next year we don't know what the stock market is going to do we don't know what the housing market is going to do we don't know what's going to happen in politics we don't know the direction of the country we don't know what kind of viruses will arise you know new viruses we don't know if there's going to be an oil shortage or you know all sorts of stuff like so just like that's okay you that's just the reality of life it's no use coming up with all sorts of like stories to just soothe yourself it's like well you know the market's probably going to be okay and this thing will do this and this will do that and i expect this here and it's like but these are fantasies why why like why do you need this become strong enough that you can countenance this uncertainty so as you practice this not knowing it will create a profound respect within you for the problem of knowing reality this is an existential problem it's really a metaphysical problem not just an epistemic one your commitment here shouldn't be to knowing it should be the truth and then if you can get some knowing alongside the truth fine and if you can't if the truth is that you can't know then that's what's true go with that don't forget that in most cases the truth is that you simply don't know so really your default fallback position if somebody asks you something is i don't know and then only if you're really certain about something and you got a lot of experience with it should you say maybe i know something but otherwise you should mostly just say i don't know fall back on that it's counterintuitive that you can actually operate better from a place of not knowing because you have less fantasies in the way [Music] less expectations less assumptions by acknowledging not knowing you put yourself in the now and it primes you with a sort of improvisational attitude like you know especially if you're having a conversation with me like if you're gonna like if you're a guy chatting up a girl at a bar or a club you would think like the best thing is for me to pre-plan a script of everything i'm gonna say then everything she's gonna say and everything i'm gonna reply with and if i just memorize that whole script that i'm gonna you know that's gonna be my best chance to ace that conversation but that's actually not true because the conversation is so free-flowing chaotic and complex and has so many different branching paths that are possible that you can't possibly memorize all that and do it authentically and smoothly so actually your best bet when you're walking up to like talk to a girl at a loud nightclub is don't plan anything at all literally like if i was doing that i would just shut off my mind completely because my mind is usually on if i'm walking up to a girl i just shut off my mind completely walk up and just start talking like just start yapping and let let like this is improvisation it's an improvisational attitude and at first it's very awkward and you don't know what to say but as you practice it more you get more comfortable with it and you're able to kind of like dance and tango you know poetically speaking not physically i mean you're able to kind of like tango conversationally with another person without planning anything and your conversations go a lot better than if you were to script them all out because you're actually more true to the situation in that situation neither party knows what they're going to say anything could be said and so you got to just be prepared for that and now extrapolate that to the larger domain of life it's um you're gonna be most effective in life when you're operating from consciousness presence and a responsiveness in real time i know i've struggled with this a lot in my life is like a lot of the ways in my life that i try to make myself feel secure which is also what the ego is always creating for is security i would make myself feel secure by like pre-planning everything in my life so that i had like contingencies and backup plans and if they did this i do this and if this happened i would do this and this and it's like this and it's just like it's a very heavy-handed way to live it's stressful and it it takes the joy out of life because like really the joy is being in the present moment flowing being responsive that's the kind of attitude you want to develop and start practicing that it it's going to take you some years to transition away from your old kind of scripted ways of managing life and being secure in life to get to the ultimate level where the ultimate level is you're so conscious and awake and uh experienced enough to be improvisational you're also very intuitive and kind of like wise you're operating on certain very abstract principles that they allow you to deal with a lot of chaos and complexity in a graceful manner even though you hadn't pre-planned any of it and then life becomes really fun and then you're in the flow and not knowing can help you with that all right that's it i'm done here uh please check out my website check out my blog check out the actualize clips channel check out my book reviews list check out my life purpose course contribute on patreon if you would and the last thing i'll say is this to admit to yourself when you're listening to these advanced teachings of mine and some of the radical claims that i make about god or whatever else spirituality love etc that you don't know that these things i teach are true this is a safety mechanism from having these turn into dogma right all the stuff i talk about you have to test out for yourself to see how true it is for you and some of the stuff i say may not be true for you because we're different people we have different personalities different genetics different life circumstances different contexts you know we're different ages so i might say something is true and it won't be true for you until you reach age 30 and right now you're age 20. you know that kind of stuff um i might say something that's true for a man but it's not true for a woman i might say something that's true for somebody in america but it's not true for somebody in africa you know these kinds of things like it's hard for me to consider all the contingencies all the contexts for all the people that are living all around the world at all the different ages and have all the different mental conditions and disorders you know there's a variety of different mental disorders people have different genetics it's it's a lot you know it's really hard to put out a set of teachings that applies to everybody at all times in their life for all genders in all countries in all circumstances there's very few things that could be said that would be useful for that are just so broad and so universal there are some things that could be said but generally advice is most helpful when it's very specific but the more specific it is the more context limited it is right it only applies to certain people in certain contexts like it's very narrow and then the more you universalize it the more the advice just becomes like a platitude like you know like i could tell you something like you know the golden rule of like treat others the way you would want to be treated you know something so generic that would apply to probably everybody on earth for the most part but it's like does that really help you not so much so the bottom line is the most advanced things that i teach you don't know for example is solipsism true for most of you the answer is you don't know and that's the truth for you right now so go with that so rather than sitting in your room alone it's like oh my god leo was talking about solipsism sometime and ago and then and you know oh it must be true and that means like oh my parents are imaginary and leo's imagining all this is imaginary and it's like oh my god now i'm depressed but yeah but but it's not your truth you see something that's my truth is not your truth until you directly become conscious of it so be very careful with that go with your truth but also be open to the possibility that your truth is just like a partial limited truth and there's higher truths that i might be talking about they haven't reached yet and so you'll be aiming towards those but don't live as though you've already got that as a truth right don't go living as though like for example i might say that death isn't real i've said that before death is imaginary okay that's my truth i'm conscious of that most of you are not conscious of that so don't go living as though that's true for you because the reality is like you might be terrified of death or you might have no idea how's it possible that death can be mad what that sounds ridiculous well if it sounds ridiculous to you then obviously it's not your truth but also be open to the possibility that even though it sounds ridiculous to you right now there might be something you're overlooking something you're missing something will get recontextualized as you do the work and then it will become your truth so stay open but also stay true to what's true for you and stick around for more you