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hey this is Leo for actualize org and today I want to talk about the idea of what self development really is at its core and what self-regulation is and why self-regulation is actually a very tricky topic I think in nature overall and how it applies to maintaining a certain stability in your own life and also I want to talk about the parallels between that and how sub regulation is a problem even in in larger organizations like companies or let's say the American government so what is so what is the bottom of self development to me the thing with self development is that you've got your brain that's trying to regulate itself but this is a fundamental problem in that there's no stable way of doing this the way I like to think about it is that you even though you think that you are just you that there's only one you in fact as a human being you have trillions of cells within you in each one of those is basically a tiny little organism that has its own desire to survive in its own agenda and all these little organisms came together and they created you so you've got you basically as a human being is very analogous to America being composed let's say the American government being composed of 300 million citizens so very much the same in that there's certain elements that that want to cooperate and then there's certain elements within that group that don't want to cooperate and they have slightly different agendas and that tension leads to a certain lack of stability if you want perfect stability that's very hard to come by nature because I think nature is naturally chaotic to some extent and maintaining a perfect perfect balance perfect equilibrium which i think is ultimately the aim of personal development is if you take someone who's not personally developed at all whatsoever you take someone who is highly developed and enlightened the difference is going to be one of stability and you're going to it's going to be very very palpable difference but sometimes might be hard to articulate or put your finger on it and to me it's that that that person that is not developed is going to be well they're going to be all over the map right they're not going to be able to probably maintain a stable relationship or a stable job they're not going to be happy they're going to be addicted to to some sort of substance like food or drugs or television or shopping or sex or whatever else it might be and any number of things are not gonna have their finances in order so all the things that you typically think that constitute a happy life those come with a certain amount of stability that you have within yourself that then allows you to maintain those good things in your life and achieve more and and basically through a slow process you're going to add more and more good stuff to your life and your life is gonna get better and better and better and you're gonna become happier and happier and happier that's like the ideal I think for most people that is never actualized because they're inherently unstable they're mentally unstable they're emotionally unstable it doesn't mean they're psychotic or that they need to that they need a therapeutic help or whatnot but I think that the degree of stability that you have up here in your head ultimately dictates how successful you're going to be in life to a large extent sure you can get lucky sometimes but with that said I think there's also that parallel that can be drawn with government between government and human beings so American government generally seen as being successful in the sense that we live in a society that's fairly stable if you want to raise a family have it have a decent job retire and enjoy yourself you're able to basically do that in American society which is quite rare we take that for granted that has not been the case throughout most of history and that's not even the case for many countries around the world today countries in Africa or countries in Asia etc etc etc so what is it that allowed American government to be much more stable to produce a stable environment where other governments have not well there's a certain self-regulation that goes into it there's a certain stability there whereas other governments like you might think of some African governments are highly unstable because they get overthrown all the time direction shifts laws are not enforced it's difficult to just have even the basics of security and safety and and food and shelter and utilities and and basic human rights those are absent because there's not a good enforcement mechanism in place and a lot of times we tend to think and we tend to take for granted that there's some sort of absolute power out there that a government turns to to to get its authority from when in fact what we need to realize is that that authority comes from all the constituents within the government right there's no there's no higher authority that they that the American government can appeal to beyond itself other than the forces that are interacting with in this organism think of the government as an organism think of yourself as an organism as an organization of organisms and when you start thinking about like that you start to see that all the forces inside of it are what creates the thing itself and then there's nothing else that's being appealed to so one common objection to that might be well there's the US Constitution isn't that isn't that the authority that the US government is based upon and I would argue that that's not the case the US Constitution is there and I believe that there's somewhat of a myth built around behind it in order to establish sort of a foe stability but the fact is that the US Constitution only has meaning insofar as it's being it's being enforced and it's being honored by by who well ultimately there is no such entity as government it's all made up of individuals and maybe groups of individuals within society so if there's no police force to enforce the Constitution if there's no if there's no there's no judicial system to enforce it if there is no army to enforce it then the Constitution is entirely meaningless and I think that's the case in many countries where you have rampant corruption and constitutions are there but they're not enforced or they're there in name only and they can be changed at the whim of the current president or the current Parliament or the dictator whoever else is running it and that's really the trick is that there is no external appeal to Authority Authority is something that needs to be well you just get it through through consistent enforcement that's what Authority is and control ultimately comes from from some sort of source of power and traditionally I think throughout human civilization it's come through through through physical violence because it came through Wars that's how power was was exerted in the world and nowadays especially if you live in America it tends to seem like like that power is inherent in certain things and maybe it seems like that power is inherent in you like controlling yourself should be inherently easy but it's not because what you really have is you have a trillion neurons up in your head they're forming connections and they're forming various neural networks and those networks are causing certain behaviors and the more you do certain behaviors the more of those networks get reinforced the more you do others behaviors other networks get built if you stop doing certain behaviors certain networks atrophy and die off and ultimately what your brain is trying to do from a day-to-day basis from the very biological simple standpoint of like maintaining your temperature and maintaining your your fat and maintaining your calories and maintaining maintaining all the subsystems in your body that you need to live it's trying to maintain equilibrium in an environment that is sometimes hostile right like I can be out right now in the Sun in 110-degree weather and my body needs to compensate for that because if I don't stay in a certain at a certain temperature to sort of equilibria I'm simply going to die the body's not going to be able to maintain itself this this organization of little tiny organisms is going to it's going to disintegrate and so it it starts to to regulate itself and it up regulates so that it's able to deal with the temperature and then if I go into I go into sort of a cold environment then it's going to be the opposite effect the body's going to need to to again regulate itself in a different way in the opposite way and try to maintain and there's only a certain range of temperatures that the body is able to cope with when you're outside those ranges if you're out in outer space or you're jumping into a volcano their body can't do anything about that and so how does this relate now to personal development seems like we're getting very metaphysical here an abstract well I think ultimately what your body and your brain has in it is that it's running through patterns there are neurons that are firing off and there are there are channels and and connections being made entire networks of neurons being made in your brain and the more you get good at something the better you're reinforcing those connections and to be emotionally stable the way I see it is it's almost like you're building you have those networks and then as you're doing self development you're building an extra layer of neural network on top of it and that extra layer is adding more self-regulation to the whole system so that when one one network of neurons fires off let's say and that network fires off and let's say that's a network that has that has been that has been causing you to overeat right that's a network that you've been triggering for the last for the last few years and that's causing you to overeat every time that you sit down and have a dinner well in that case you're you're following a pattern and it's hard to break out of that pattern because you don't have you literally don't have the wiring in your brain to break out of it so it's a struggle you have limited willpower there right and willpower thing ultimately gets gets physically manifested in some sort of changes in how your neurons are wired together and that when you have more willpower what happens is that there's an extra layer of neurons in there somewhere that is that is like looping back on itself and it's observing the original the original the original layer of neurons and it's it's connecting multiple different networks together and it's like the overseer so it's like the manager of the employees so consider that every employee is some sort of pattern that you have in your brain maybe there's a pattern over eat a pattern to oversleep a pattern to not work a pattern or maybe pause those are all negative patterns there are positive patterns as well you know patterns to be nice to people patterns to to to say I love you patterns to you know to do whatever patterns to go to your job on time so all of that is there and that's just kind of like the basic Unseld factual eyes type of human being they run through life and they're going and they're firing off these patterns and then when you start to do a lot of self-development a lot of self-reflection and you start to become more conscious of your patterns what starts to happen is there's an extra layers are being built so now you have these employees in the company doing each doing its own little thing and sometimes when they're uncoordinated they'll cause the overall organization to do something stupid so if you have this pattern that's firing off that's causing you to eat overeat all the time eventually is going to lead you to be fat and now that might not be what's best for you in the long run and so what ends up happening is somehow the system starts to take control of itself extra layers are added on and now there's a manager there's like a manager there's that's overseeing everything and so the manager is now telling the employee that's overeating you know you got to cut that out because we're going to be dead soon or we're gonna we're going to end up in the hospital but we're just going to look bad or whatever and and then and then that manager also starts to oversee other other elements it'll start to see how your how your eating habits connect with your fitness habits and maybe how they connect with your overall thinking habits and you start noticing these patterns you start building connections and now all the sudden you get a little bit more control over yourself you're able to exercise more discipline more self-restraint and that's all well and good but the fact is that that manager that's managing all the employees all the different networks well it has no inherent Authority so just like you know that US Constitution that we're appealing to in some way it's kind of like a fake Authority it's only there and so far as it's being enforced and this manager who's to say that this manager this second layer is ultimately going to be able to regulate all of the employees and maybe it can but then who's going to regulate that manager so that manager might need another manager and that manager might need another manager and ultimately it's it builds like this pyramid this hierarchy of enforcement and regulation and I think that's definitely there in your brain if you're trying to do so if you try to accomplish stuff and you failed or you've succeeded you've noticed that there's some sort of structure in your head that that is resembling this this hierarchy and sometimes you'll notice that hierarchy works as it should and sometimes there are like gaps in hierarchy and sometimes there's corruption in there and things are not going always as smoothly as they should be going very true for government and very true for human beings and I think that the reason that ultimately is is because there is no easy appeal to just some sort of higher objective authority whatever whoever is the top manager of that whole pyramid within you that that manager ultimately has to not only regulate and monitor everything that's underneath it also has to regulate itself because what if that manager starts to slack off what if that manager starts to to do his job bad and he becomes corrupt well then the whole system is kind of screwed isn't it and I think that that's the inherent problem with control within nature in general in whatever organization were talking about whether it's the organization of your body as a biological organism or whether it's the organization of level government and governments a good example that I wanted to talk about because sometimes there's a tendency you know corporations have a lot of sway in American politics and it seems that a lot of what is happening and a lot of public policy in America is not really suited specifically towards empowering the individual a lot of it is because a corporation has got in there and has has changed the policy in a way that's convenient for the corporation or a lot of money now this is kind of bandit this idea is kind of bandied about here and there but all and then I got to thinking about I'm like well why isn't there more why isn't there more control for the individual in an American government why do these corporations have so much power wouldn't it be wouldn't it be great if we could just like cut the corporations out entirely and just have a government that was like really for the people by the people rather than these these entities that are money hungry and that ultimately looking out for anything but how much money they're able to return to their stockholders and what if you think about that more deeply I think that idea that you can just like cut corporations out is it's fairly naive because that assumes that there is like that authorities coming from some sort of magical ethereal platonic realm but that's not the case American government is what it is because of all the entities within it and all the forces that they're exerting and ultimately there's a certain stability that has been established over the last couple hundred years since the government was formed and that stability rests upon the US Constitution arrests about upon the voting that can be done by citizens but it also rests upon upon interests within within government so you have varying factions that are there people want different things people have different agendas those people then form groups that then have their own agendas and those groups then buy against each other for power and the ultimate example that is like Republicans and Democrats but then you have different special interest groups that are looking out for the interest of their particular little sect within society with an American Society and and then of course you've got corporations that are looking out for themselves as as really they should be because the corporation is what it's also an organism it's also a collection of beings that is having an agenda and then it's trying to really pursue that agenda to its maximum survival ability right because an organization an organization wants to survive really no different than then a human being wants to survive and so when you think about it like that and you think about the fact that you can't there's no easy way to just cut cut these forces out and get some sort of ethereal appeal to Authority that Authority's coming in coming about because you have these interests and the fact is that that corporation the reason it's able to have the pole that it has with the government is because frankly it has a lot of money and ultimately you can say that that's a form of corruption you know if a corporation can go and pay lobbyists hundreds of thousands of dollars to go do their bidding on their behalf and present arguments to the supreme court and to all the different politicians out there even if they're doing it totally aboveboard and completely legit I'm not even talking about anything illegal that's still an influence of power ultimately through money and what does that mean that means that as corporations earn a lot of money they earn power and that power is is tangible so there's a certain amount of power that comes with money and conceivably an organization or rather I mean a corporation if it really wanted who was rich enough I mean presumably it could it could raise its own army and take over the government if it wanted to do that it ultimately gets that power through the money it has so a company like Apple that has 20 or 30 or 50 billion however much it has currently in its in its coffers if it takes that that money and it really wanted to to raise a standing army in theory it could and no one could really stop them I mean the US government could try to stop them but ultimately that attempt would depend on the strength of government versus the strength of the company so if a company gets theoretically to too strong and becomes stronger than you government as a whole then it would be able to exert whatever kind of control it wanted and that's just a natural vying for power because in the end that power has to come through some means it has to either has to come from from a passive acceptance of all the parties or it has to come through domination and traditionally that's how power was one is through domination nowadays domination is not a key player in American society that much we tend to be fairly peaceful you don't need to generally come up to somebody in and Club them to death in order to to feed yourself you can go and and work for that person instead and turn some money or you could form a business relationship with them and it's kind of a win-win and that's great but it hasn't it hasn't always been that way and I think that element will never go away either because there's always going to be this idea that you can that you can exert power through through force and a lot of times that's still the case I think that's still the case that's still the reason why we have Wars and I still the reason why we're going to have Wars for a long time to come because the stability the there's nothing inherently to appeal to the stability that we're assuming is kind of that we're entitled to that we think that should be there well that stability is coming from a legacy of domination ultimately right now American society is is built upon a long history of domination over other cultures and that has historically been the case if you're a student of history then you see that that's kind of how how things play out and I think that what's really fascinating about this is that that's how your mind tends to work as well because there is no external appeal and as you're developing yourself what ends up happening is slowly you're building in those extra layers and those extra layers help to add stability now as much as I've kind of criticized the US government here for for potential corruption and all this power and all this nonsense I still think that American society is highly stable because it was founded on certain principles and those principles have been enforced and that the organism has been set up in such a way that there are forces that are opposing each other perfect example this is like Republicans and Democrats seems like every election cycle they bicker back and forth about all sorts of things but ultimately when it's up happening is that well one election cycle the Republicans win and maybe they stay in power for a few for a few terms and then people get disenchanted with that and there's a self-correction that goes on and then all the sudden Democrats are now put into power because people are fed up with the Republicans and they're not happy with how how policy has been policy has been managed and so now Democrats are in power and they might be in power for a few terms and they're going to be in power only as long as people are relatively satisfied with the results that the Democrats are getting and then as soon as that doesn't happen the Democrats fall out of power the Republicans come back and so there's just like back and forth up and down and ultimately it seems like it's actually like a steady state that's been reached and some people went might lament that in fact at times you know I've lamented it myself I'm I tend to be progressive and I tend to things like well wouldn't it be nice if we could just like get over this whole gate gay rights issue and some of this other stuff all this nonsense couldn't we just like settle that why does there have to be in this opposition but in the end the opposition is good because it's creating a steady state and if it was easy to just go and add gay rights into the Constitution and if it was easy to go in and to add a bunch of other progressive things in the Constitution it would also be very easy to go in and do the exact opposite of it so there needs to be a certain a certain balance between these forces and I'm not saying that that it's a dead even total draw I think in the end society is progressing but right now I think like American government has matured to the point where it's fairly stable like an example of this is the fact that come election time it's just generally assumed that the party that gets the most votes and gets the most electoral votes that that individual that presidential candidate can just come into power and transition into power well why is that happening why is there nobody questioning the fact that if I got as many votes as I did that now I just have the power just stroll into the Oval Office and be President that's because there's a precedent there there's a strong history of that having been the case to the point where nobody really even questions it whereas in other governments it's totally it's totally different you can win all the votes then some somebody can can overthrow you or there can be a coup or there can be a revolt or an uprising or there could be some sort of questioning and how the votes are counted and tallied in all that nonsense and so that just goes to show that there's a lot that we assume and we take for granted in terms of how how control is exerted in government and how control is exerted within ourselves so if you try to accomplish it up in your life and you try to make changes in your life you will notice that there are a lot of times there it feels like their varying parts within you varying like factions that are vying for power it might be two maybe three might before it might be even more parts like one part of you might decide that that you need to start going to the gym and then another part of you will decide that you're not going to the gym because you'd rather watch TV and you'd rather pig out on doughnuts and that's a very real problem because at one point maybe one one of those parts of you is in power and at another point maybe a few hours later that other part of you is in power and so there are it seems like there are there are like neural networks in your mind waging war sometimes and if you want to be enlightened if you want to reach that self-actualized state ultimately what I see this exercise as being is is developing a certain diplomacy within yourself and a certain steady-state where those varying buying various vying factions within you are are integrated and it's like it's basically like doing negotiation it's like bring two parties to the table and saying okay what do you want and what do you want what are your problems what are your problems where your concerns how can we find a balance between all of those things and ultimately when you build those extra layers of neurons you gain more awareness around what's actually happening here you start to diminish that violent reaction between the various parts they start to come together and they act holistically to get you to where you want to be with less struggle and less resistance who quite a deep topic I think that that topic goes pretty deep and I really I really like how how much depth there is in the personal in this whole idea of doing personal development I'm really passionate about it I hope that cleared up some maybe some some feelings that you had about it as you were trying to to get various results in your life and I've been struggling with that I know that to me this is a kind of very personal intimate topic you