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[Music] you I want to bring to your awareness this profound theme that I stumbled upon over the last year and this is a theme that I see all across personal development and really all across life many different domains of life will fall under this theme some of the most interesting questions and topics in life will tend to go full circle now what exactly I mean by full circle I'll explain here in a minute but what I don't mean is I don't mean a strange loop so don't confuse this topic with the strange loop topic which I talked about recently in my mind these are two separate things although maybe there's sometimes a little bit of overlap here and there but generally I consider them different so there's two meanings really in my mind for going full circle the first meaning is the more conventional one and the one that we're really not interested in here and then there's a second meaning so the first meaning is something like the hero's journey where a hero starts off at an origin point like his little village then he goes off into the woods he goes off to a new town a new territory he fights monsters and guardians and and Dragons and he conquers the dragon in a faraway land and then eventually he makes his way back to his original little village and sort of comes full circle and there's a lot of examples like this many people's lives like that can go full circle like maybe you grew up in little town rural area of the country and then you become a big-shot businessman and you travel all around the world and you do all this big stuff and then eventually you come back to the same little town and that's where you retire and ultimately die that's a nice little neat way to wrap up your life puts a bow on things that's why it's a it's a common trope in in movies and in stories and books but that's not what I mean by going full circle what I mean is something a little bit more interesting and paradoxical the second meaning of full circle is if you imagine a spectrum and on this spectrum you have two polar opposites let's just use black and white the colors and then you have all the shades of gray in between usually what we assume is that the way the spectrum works said it's kind of linear like you can go from black to gray to white and get to pure white and then there's like a a wall that you hit there at pure white you can't get whiter than pure white and you're certainly not gonna get black by going further down that road and the same thing by going in this direction towards the black you're not gonna get blacker than pure black and what I mean by going full circle is that actually you can so imagine if we take this spectrum and we connect the ends such that gray is the top white is down here and black is down here right next to each other basically at the exact same point and then everything in between here is is a gradient such that if you start at pure black you go all the way around to the top of gray and then you come back down towards pure white and you go further you're gonna go full circle from pure white to pure black and that's a really interesting dynamic because if that's possible and I'm not saying this is possible everywhere I'm saying there are instances where in life you tend to find this that's a big shift you see there's an inflection point there it's almost this gigantic discontinuous jump because here you are you're just moving through shades of gray on both sides but going from pure black to pure white Wow that tends to be a mindfuck that tends to be unexpected and that tends to be a big gear shift in your life so it's worth thinking about where these kinds of situation my situations might lurk in life so let me give you some frivolous examples of this some cute ones that I thought of so what I mean when I say going full circle is the following for example a work of art that is so bad it's good a joke that's so unfunny it becomes funny a life that's so easy it's hard allies so bold everyone believes it a plan so crazy it just might work a pain so great it actually becomes enjoyable a war so devastating that it brings lasting peace a truth so strange it's easier to tell a lie than that truth a person so well educated he's stupid getting so much rest that it actually makes you sick a fact that's so obvious it goes unnoticed a strategy so crafty it looks foolish an insight so simple only a genius could have it a letter so concise it took days to write a guy who's such a jerk you can't help but love him that one's for the ladies you know what I'm talking about or how about this one someone you disagree with so much that you can't stop listening to him that might be true of some crazy right-wing radio show host how about a prohibition that's so strict it makes you want to break it like if you tell a child whatever you do never look inside that box never look in there of course he's gonna want to look in there how about this example a man so masculine he's not afraid to look feminine a motivation so strong it's paralyzing or this one if you've ever been in the in a serious car accident you have so little time to think that time stands still and you have all the time in the world a situation so tragic it's comical an incidents so unremarkable it's remarkable a plant so soft it never breaks a man acting so ordinary he arouses suspicion a star so massive it collapses into a black hole a loss so significant you stop caring so those would be some cute cheeky examples that I thought of these aren't the the real bulk of the examples that I want to share with you which I've been collecting over the last year at first it started off with just a few examples but then I was using this sort of lens this filter to look at this theme of going full circle and out I was looking at all the stuff I was studying in different fields and I just started to see it popping up again and again and again all this stuff keeps coming full circle and some of the most profound stuff works this way it's quite amazing it's rather paradoxical it seems like reality is able to invert itself to flip itself inside out in counterintuitive ways and of course as you've heard me talking about a lot in Prior episodes this theme of counterintuitive nough salsa tends to be a very significant theme within all of personal development and a lot of people get themselves cornered in life because they do the intuitive thing and not the counterintuitive thing and a lot of success in business in dating in spirituality in personal development in all this sort of stuff depends upon you seeing the counterintuitive move and being able to make it so what I hope is that by pointing out these themes to you you then develop the filter to see and find your own examples and then make the interconnections and then you become much better at predicting how life really works and then of course you can more easily design the kind of life that you want so that's the ultimate goal with talking about this stuff so let's move on to my list of examples I have a lot of them I have dozens of them but perhaps the most prototypical of all the one that epitomizes this entire theme of going full circle in atheism versus theism and a long time ago maybe a year ago or so on my blog actually posted a post about this I drew a diagram and it was a circle and what it showed it showed atheism and theism as two poles on the spectrum but then it loops back around and what the atheist and the theists do not understand is that really one flips into the other and that they are not as opposite as it would seem see the atheist thinks that there is no God the theist thinks there is a God and they think that nothing could be more opposite than that but actually they're both half right and they're both half wrong and both of them end up getting mind [ __ ] because of this um coming a full circle that happens so the atheist believes there is no God mmm but what the atheist doesn't understand is if you take atheism all the way past past that inflection point then what you discover is that there is a God but that God is nothingness now the atheists will say well Leo that's already what I believe in thought I what's the difference between believing there is no God versus saying God is nothing this isn't that the same thing no not at all they're actually almost opposite now the theist will say wait a minute leo but what are you saying here so there is a God so then I'm right as the theist no actually as a theist you're wrong because see the theist believes that there is a God but the theist has silly notions of what the God is believes the God is some kind of form thing well the theist doesn't want to accept is that God is nothing because to the theist to accept that God is nothing well that would be no different than atheism and of course the theist is not an atheist he doesn't like a theism he's opposed to that so of course there must be a God and God could be anything but he can't be nothing see but the to actually go full circle when you become Sophia sztyc that you they have direct experience of God you will realize God is nothing and that will be a huge mindfuck for you on the other hand if you're atheist and you become even more atheistic and you have a direct experience of nothingness true nothingness not your ideas of nothingness not your beliefs and no god that's not nothingness actual nothingness you will discover that that's actually God and that there's a good reason why it's called God and not nothingness although both names are appropriate they highlight different facets of the same thing and this has actually been a real problem for both atheists and theists for theists it's a problem because actually there's a there's examples of Christian mystics who lived in monasteries and they were just monks before they were mystics before they became enlightened before they experienced God and so they just had a bunch of Catholic beliefs let's say about God and then they go pray and they do all their meditation and prayer like practices there they live an ascetic lifestyle they're very hardcore about how they live they closer themselves and eventually through this practice because it's almost like they're meditating so much that they break through to a direct experience of God but they discover that there's nothing there it's completely nothing it's completely blank is completely empty reality's groundless God is completely groundless that's what God is but to them this is such a horror a shock because what Christianity has taught them is that God is the opposite of that see so this doesn't make sense to them they don't see how God could flip back around into nothingness and likewise for the atheist if the atheist ever has a direct experience of what we're calling God here not a man in the sky but God the real deal which is possible to have for example if you take 30 milligrams of 5 Meo DMT you'll have this experience and if you're an atheist what'll happen to you is a very similar thing that happened to me is that you will flip back around and go past the inflection point but from the other end that the Christian mystics do see so you will experience the nothingness but the nothingness will be so full and so infinite and so godlike not as a man in the sky with a beard but so godlike in other qualities like in the quality of infinite love and the quality of consciousness and infinite intelligence in the quality of being eternal of being sentient and all these other interesting qualities that you would not think consciousness or nothingness or could have and then you realize that all your atheism was just nonsense so you can have this experience so this would be the perfect example of what I mean by things going full circle another really good example is hedonism versus asceticism so the hedonist thinks of himself as on the opposite end of the spectrum from the ascetic I mean after all what two people could be more further apart the hedonist is chasing sex food travel fast cars and and and hot girls and strip clubs and parties and drugs and alcohol and and all this sort of stuff and the ascetic is the exact opposite the ascetic locks himself into a cave for a decade or more and just lives by himself doesn't have any friends doesn't do anything isn't doesn't shop doesn't buy anything doesn't have sex takes these strict vows doesn't eat any fancy food and it would seem like to the hedonist that's terrible way to live life because after all you've only got this moment we should live up this moment and make the most of it to be as happy as possible cuz that's the ultimate end of life is to be happy right there's no afterlife knowing that Nelson it's just let's live for the moment and be as happy as possible but what is the hedonist discover if he does that he actually discovers that if he follows through on that strategy he ends up being the most miserable person in the world he gets depressed he gets lonely he's never satisfied every single thing that he does never satisfies him the best food the hottest sex the the most expensive cars they all just feel empty in the end and so eventually he he goes through a lot of suffering and he ends up being one of the most miserable people in the world what happens to the aesthetic it would seem like the aesthetic maybe he is even in a worse situation because he's locked himself in a cave actually meanwhile what happens with the aesthetic is that he becomes so introverted and so self-conscious of his true nature and of the nature of reality that he passes the inflection point and actually he experiences the greatest joy humanly possible in fact the joy that the ascetic experiences just by sitting and doing nothing is greater than the joy that a hedonist experiences if he is shooting up heroin or having the hottest sex or eating the bestest food or driving the coolest car those speak experiences for the hedonist are little blips on the radar screen of happiness for the aesthetic the aesthetic nose peaks of happiness that the hedonist couldn't dream of in a million years but he has to go through that inflection point of course he has to work for it it doesn't happen automatically and so this is another example of things going full circle it's very counterintuitive you see because you might say that the hedonist strategy is actually to pursue happiness no no no no no the hedonist strategy really is to pursue misery he just calls it happiness the ascetic strategy is to pursue happiness he will actually get it but the problem is is that to most people the ascetics strategy to pursue happiness even though it's a real strategy and it will really actually work to them it looks like a recipe for suffering and so they never even bother to consider it for themselves or take it seriously interesting how that works it's pretty powerful to understand that it isn't it it certainly puts a lot of stuff into perspective it shows you how wrong people can be people could just have a strategy that's a hundred percent the opposite of what they think it is and they could waste years decades pursuing that strategy and be wondering how come this isn't working well of course because you don't understand this nonlinear dynamic within reality how about this other example selfishness versus selflessness it's rather similar to the previous example so selfish people assume that the way that they become the happiest in life the most secure is by being very selfish by being very greedy so in their company they will acquire all the resources they will make schemes they will manipulate to get the best position to rise to the top to become the CEO and one sort of CEO they try to get as much money as they can the most stock options all that sort of stuff or if they get a position in government then they're gonna be corrupt they're gonna take bribes you're gonna take as much money as possible they're gonna line their own pockets as much as they can after all who cares about selflessness I mean by being selfless that's like a recipe for a bad life if I'm selfless people gonna walk all over me people are gonna abuse me there's no real joy in that that's how the selfish person thinks but actually turns out to be the exact opposite to be selfless really truly selfless is the greatest joy that you can experience in life and that's something that is very difficult to appreciate for a selfish person almost impossible you have to really experience it for yourself to see that your life is so much more rewarding when you're not living it for your own personal gain or for money or for saktia for anything like that but that you're living it to contribute to the world to just do good for for goods sake to help people to love to be creative to whatever in in the purposes of something larger than yourself and also a lot of people get this wrong is they think that oh well Leo if if I'm gonna be selfless then that means people get to walk all over me but see what they don't realize is that the selflessness it can be that way but then eventually the inflection point is that actually when you get past that inflection point you're so selfless that actually you acquire some selfish tendencies which is like you don't let people walk all over you you actually have boundaries because your boundaries are there precisely so that you can be effective in being selfless see because if you were selfless with no boundaries you actually couldn't be effective it at contributing to other people because they would walk over you and if they walk over you then you're not effective at being selfless and then of course selfishness can also loop back around for some people they need to go through this entire process of being extremely selfish in life and only later in life after years of selfishness and greed and corruption all the sort of stuff finally they hit this inflection point where they realize it oh my god I've been so extremely God to have selfish that now one day you just wake up and like that's it I surrender I'm gonna be truly selfless from now on and from that point on their life becomes beautiful their life becomes about contributions no longer about themselves and this is a reformed person this is a born-again person but see most people don't realize that that inflection point is there to be crossed from both sides now not always is the inflection point crossable from both sides in some of these examples it is in some of these examples it only kind of works one way it's asymmetrical let's take a look at the next example freedom versus discipline this is a really interesting one of course everyone loves freedom freedom is so easy to love you want to be free you want to have your own time to do whatever you want to do you don't want to work for your boss you just want to sit at home and do anything you want you want the freedom to travel anywhere think anything do anything say anything buy anything but that's not true freedom people who like that kind of freedom are usually very opposed to discipline and they think of it as being a linear spectrum with freedom here and discipline here and there the polar opposites but is that really how it works what if by being disciplined you actually develop more freedom see when I tell you to do stuff like set up a daily meditation habit read books eat healthy food self inquire contemplate you know do all this other kind of stuff it sounds like oh man Leo that's discipline you're telling me to discipline myself pursue my life purpose wake up every morning and do the mastery process and do the deliberate practice and all this other kind of stuff you talked about but what about being free leo that stuff is all like so grindy and it seems like so force I just want to be free that's how life is meant to be but see when you go straight for freedom it's the same problems with the hedonist actually that strategy fails you become lazy and soft and and ultimately your entire life collapses and you find yourself just having to like struggle and stress to even get the basic aspects of your life to work whereas if you're disciplined and you put in all these practices meditate habit and your life working on your life purpose and eating healthy going to the gym and da da da da doing all this stuff working hard following through on things you got to follow through on what you find is that you actually find a paradoxical freedom in that not at first but the more you go down the circle and then you get closer to that inflection point eventually didn't come to the point where you become so disciplined that in that you get a ridiculous level of freedom that the person who is chasing freedom cannot even imagine let alone realize they're interesting how that works how about empiricism versus mysticism a lot of scientifically and rationally minded people would like to think that empiricism and mysticism are two ends of a spectrum and that we have like hardcore science on this end and we have fluffy airy-fairy mysticism on this end and then something in-between but what the empiricist doesn't realize is that actually all that mysticism is is empiricism take in full circle when you become so empirical when you become so hyper scientific that you question every single assumption and you become so conscious and so aware of every single experience that you're having right now that all concepts start to dissolve and break down the past no longer exists the future no longer exists atoms no longer exist an external world no longer exists a brain no longer exists because you realize these things are all just concepts all of it breaks down because you're becoming so hyper conscious and so hyper empirical that eventually hit the inflection point and there's this moment of inversion where you go from empirical to mystical and everything that you thought was material and physical it just in an instant becomes magical divine and mystical and spiritual and that's all the spirituality is is just hyper empiricism but the scientific and rational mind doesn't understand that because it thinks in terms of this linear spectrum it doesn't anticipate the paradoxical curving back around coming full circle that is actually possible now this would be an example where it doesn't work in both ways it works on this end of the circle but not really on the other end you don't become so mystical that then you become empirical I don't know if that makes any sense so it's definitely sort of asymmetrical in this example the next example have for you is nihilism verses meaning so again these are set up on a spectrum and people think that there's nihilism on this end which is dark and brooding and depressing and it's like existential angst and and like philosophers like Nietzsche and stuff like that who believe that there is no meaning to the world and nothing matters and everything is the same you could kill people and rape people and it's all it is none of it matters and then you have on the upper opposite end you have the the people who are really into meaning and and purpose and these might be like the the stereotypical religious people like maybe your church pastor or something like that and this guy's all about meaning he finds meaning in his family he finds meaning in religion he finds meaning in God he finds meaning in in his government he finds meaning in his nation in his patriotism he finds meaning and rooting for his sports team and you know he finds meaning in all this sort of stuff and it seems like they're totally opposite but what if you take nihilism all the way all the way past the inflection point what will happen you become so conscious that there is no such thing as meaning that everything in one moment flips upside down and all the sudden everything becomes extraordinarily meaningful how can that be well because see the problem with nihilism is that it's really just a half-assed enlightenment the nihilist thinks that nothing has meaning but that's just a thought that's just a belief he has and then he interprets that negatively he gives it a negative meaning without realizing that he's doing it so he gets depressed and he gets lazy and he thinks there's no there's nothing to do and life isn't really interesting and it's not beautiful because he just had this stupid belief that everything is meaningless and then he interprets it as being negative which is what that's a meaning so actually he's not realizing that he's not taking meaninglessness to his ultimate conclusion if he did he would eventually circle back around past the inflection point coming full circle to realize that actually you know what being has way more meaning than meaning could ever have and then he derives all of his meaning from just being and that becomes so much more powerful and amazing that it appears from the outside to other people that he finds so much meaning in everything in life but really what happened is that he truly became conscious that nothing matters and that there is no meaning at all and to the person who was really into meaning this doesn't compute because to them you know they find meaning in all these material and physical and spiritual ideas and concepts and things but what they don't realize that all of that is just a fiction all the meaning you derive from your religion from your country from rooting for your sports team from rooting for your political party from from tribalism from all your ideologies from your family all that meaning all of that will get wiped away and it's very easy to wipe it away and you can do that very easily just by destroying the guy's family destroy his business destroy his political party destroy his nation he is gonna become hopeless and dejected more than the nihilist because really all his meaning was just a mental fiction and he didn't realize that what he need to do is to let go of all that actually move around towards nihilism complete the nihilism don't just half-ass it and then eventually you break through and then everything becomes being which is million times more meaningful than meaning ever was that's a really interesting example that a lot of people don't understand how about a morality versus morality I've alluded to this before my morality videos so again they're put on opposite end of the spectrum you have the really moral people which is usually the more religiously inclined people and then you have the sort of a moralistic people which are more of like the rational scientifically minded atheistic Allah minded people the really moral religious people they believe in a strong sense of good and evil that good and evil are objectively true and the amoral people the atheistic people to them they recognize that yeah good and evil these are subjective notions human notions culturally dependent notions it's more relative for them whereas for the more or less it's more absolute but actually what both these people don't realize is that this goes full circle so if you take your a morality completely full circle and you realize that actually truly there is no good and evil everything will become good for you now the atheists will say well Leo I do recognize that I don't believe in a absolute good and evil but see that's just lip service you're just paying lip service to a morality that's not true a morality because if I steal your car if I abused your son and daughter if I do something nasty to you if I piss in your soup what's gonna happen you're gonna call me evil very very quickly you're gonna think of me as evil that's why you're gonna get angry and upset and offended and hurt and sad and all this sort of stuff that's why you lashed out at mean that's why you'll call me names of course you will because even though in theory you don't believe in good and evil in practice of course you do because you taking your immorality full-circle if you did what you would discover is that actually evil is literally impossible and that everything that you think is evil is actually good and this notion is so difficult to understand for most people that they think I'm just kidding here or they think this is impossible they think that's insane no it's just you have to cross that inflection point that's a big hurdle to cross but when you do cross it you know what you become you don't become Hitler you don't become a terrorist you become a saint people don't get this what do you think a saint is do you think a saint is someone who subscribes traditional morality who is behaving saintly because the Bible told him so because God told him so because it was passed down from above no a true Saint the only way you can be a true Saint is if you realize that everything is absolutely amoral and that you are free to be any which way you want and then what you do is you decide I'm gonna be good just from the goodness of my own heart for the sake of being good just because everything is good there is no such thing as evil in the st. sighs that's why he can be so good precisely to the most evil people to whom you could not be good otherwise because if you think someone is evil you can't be good to them which is why you can't be a saint which is why ordinary people are not Saints because they're not conscious enough to be Saints to be a saint is not just to be a nice person to be a saint is to be conscious that literally nothing can possibly ever be evil or bad that's what it means to be a saint now the moralistic person doesn't get this to them this sounds absurd they think they can get to sainthood by just putting layer upon layer of rules and should statements and morality upon themselves because they think that morality is something that you have to obey in order to get it to heaven in order to get treats and prizes and or not to be punished but that's not true morality that's actually a morality masquerading as morality all of that is a fiction so what the moralist needs to do is actually he needs to surrender his morality go towards a morality complete the full circle come back around go past the inflection point and then he has a chance of discovering what true morality is true morality is what I was describing with the saint it's when you realize that actually everything is good there is no evil no matter how you behave and from that realization then you will tend to behave in a very saintly manner although you're not gonna be bound by it you're not gonna have to you're gonna want to which is the whole difference between someone like Jesus who was a true Saint who had true transcendent morality and your typical priest or preacher or Pope who doesn't have this because that guy did not go through the same inflection point he didn't come full circle the way that Jesus did so they're they're emulating Jesus but the way they're doing it is completely backwards and they don't understand this and they don't know why it's not working and of course then you look at the Catholic Church and why why Catholic priests abuse and molest children that sort of stuff why aren't they moral because they're going about it the opposite way they're telling themselves I should not have sex know what they should do is to say I can have sex all I want and nothing's wrong with sex and then they'll come full circle then they need to go even further past the inflection point and then they could actually really be the kind of Saints that they strive to be but there's no way they can do it now it's really not a matter of will it's a matter of consciousness which they do not have the next example no purpose versus strong purpose I talked about life purpose a lot and some people criticize me and say olio but there's no such thing as purpose so why are you talking about life purpose in fact you made this whole course of life purpose but is your whole course delusional because there actually is no such thing as purpose again what you don't realize is that before I even created the course I knew that there's no such thing as purpose it's not a mistake I didn't make a mistake what we're doing here is we're going past the inflection point when you realize that there is no purpose in life you would think that all that means I'm so lazy I got nothing to do I'm just gonna sit and watch TV all day I mean you could that is an option but generally what happens when you fully realize that then it flips back around and you suddenly realize hey I can design my own purpose oh that's way more powerful than going out there and finding a purpose written down in some book people think of it as though like because I created a life purpose course people think that the way the life purpose works is like this it's like there's a god somewhere and he has a database and in this database God has two tables one has your name a name of every human being that ever lived and the other has a column there with with the life purpose matching up to the name and that what you're gonna do is you're gonna go like take the course and then match up your name to to the database column and row with the with the life purpose and then you've found it but of course that's not what I'm saying that's not how it works at all life purpose begins with the recognition that there is no such thing as purpose that all pads are pointless they all ultimately lead to nothingness and that's not a problem that's not a bug that's a feature that means you get to choose your own path you choose the path you love the most the one you're most passionate about and then you commit your whole life to mastering that path and counter-intuitively by realizing you have no purpose you develop a very strong sense of purpose people say so if I thought olio but enlightened people they don't have a purpose are you kidding enlightened people have the strongest purpose who are the strongest visionaries and the strongest leaders throughout history that have been remembered for thousands of years who are they Jesus Buddha Mahavira Gandhi various kinds of Saints and mystics throughout time they've had the strongest purposes which is no accident do you think those people realize that their purpose is completely pointless of course they did of course that's precisely why their purpose was so strong next example weakness versus power a lot of power hungry people out there in politics and business in the military and they assume that they can get power over their people and that to get powerful what you need to do is you need to acquire more force more capital more money more more military arms more weapons that sort of stuff more technology but what they don't realize is that that's not true power because they think of power as being here on this end of the spectrum they think of a weakness being over here but actually the way that it works is that you know how you become the most powerful human being in the world you relinquish all desire for power that's the trick because as you become more powerful actually you find yourself being quite weak think of it a dictator who has total and absolute control over his country he's he powerful is a weak can he sleep well at night or not he can't because he's worried he's gonna get assassinated he can't even eat his own food he needs someone to taste his food for him first because he's afraid he's gonna get poisoned that's what power gets you counterintuitive isn't it on the other hand when you relinquish all your power what happens you surrender everything so much that you have nothing to lose when you have nothing to lose you are the strongest position of power that you can possibly have the more you have to lose oddly enough the more can be taken away from you but when you have nothing to lose what can be taken away from you nothing a couple of stories from history come up to in mine here to illustrate this point well first of all you've got Gandhi and the incredible movement that he started with his non aggressive nonviolent protests and how powerful that was he brought down the entire British government through just sitting around going on hunger strikes and that's it he just sat around and went on hunger strikes that was his whole power he was sitting around in a loincloth and just a white a white sari or something like that ate basically nothing had no weapons had nothing yet he was able to mobilize hundreds of millions of citizens of pandu citizens to ultimately overpower the British rule there and the British had weapons and guns and power and all this sort of stuff and eventually it all crumbled there's also the story of Diogenes and Alexander the Great and one day die and Diogenes which just was basically a philosopher who lived out in the streets in a bathtub in Greece and then Alexander the Great who is this great emperor and great king he strides through town Diogenes is just sitting outside of town and Alexander the Great stands before him and and he asks him like something like so are you the the famous philosopher Diogenes who lives in a bathtub and he's like and he tells Alexander the Great he says you're blocking my Sun because he's sitting there under the Sun he's trying to some some Sun raise some suntan I guess and and now examiner's like how dare you it'll speak to a king or to an emperor in this way and I oh geez just doesn't care he doesn't care cuz he's a he lives in a [ __ ] bathtub with dogs surrounded with donkey lives in filth he doesn't care he has nothing to lose at all reminds me of a similar story from from Japan or I guess it might be China probably more like China Zen a Zen parable where there's a this Chinese emperor who's who's a warlord and he's ransacking and conquering all the territory and then he conquers one territory adds it to his Empire and he's the the race and everybody is submitting to him all the lesser warlords are submitting to him and he conquers this one territory with this little of Zen temple and he asks all the priests there to submit to him and to pledge loyalty and one of them refuses the Zen master and so the messengers come back to the Emperor and they say well this guy he's being an idiot he he's not submitting to you and the Emperor says what this fool I'm gonna go there with my sword and cut off his head myself and so he goes he goes to the temple and he finds the design master sitting there in meditation and he tell us this in Messick you fool you dare to to defy the emperor I could cut off your head without blinking an eye and the Zen master replies I could die without blinking an eye and at that point the emperor gets it he realizes that the true power lies with being able to die not with being able to kill that's what takes real courage and so he relinquishes his whole kingdom and he becomes a disciple of this and master say so power and weakness work in very counterintuitive ways the next example is introversion versus extraversion this is an interesting one people tend to think these are opposite and that they don't connect but actually what's possible is that you become so introverted that it circles back around and actually you become completely extroverted how does that work well you contemplate and you self reflects so much that you actually become conscious that there is no mind or no interior T at all to human beings see as an introvert you think you're stuck in your head all the time you think you're self-conscious you think you're stuck in the mind whereas for extroverts they're out there they're in the physical tangible world but there actually is no interior T to the mind the thoughts and emotions that you're having they're part of the external world so when you realize that when you realize that there's nothing on the inside it's all outside then you actually become literally an extrovert because you live completely out here your thoughts if you have them your emotions that you have them you don't consider them interior things you're not hiding inside of them back there somewhere in your skull they're actually they're out here they're part of the physical world you see but all these dualities of inner world outer world physical world non-physical we'll all these dissolve and what you're left with is just one thing and you might say well that changes nothing then but actually changes everything because for an introvert they're stuck in their head and they actually believe that's real they think that a whole world is real and it's not and I'm speaking as an introvert I'm a very strong introvert but I realized that it's possible to actually go past this inflection point to extraversion and that's also actually the ultimate solution for introverts is go all the way around of course you can also try to go this way as well you can push yourself to become more an extra virtuous by pushing yourself to talk to more people and I've done that too and that's a that's a great strategy so by no means am I saying you only have to kind of explore one end of the cycle you can explore multiple ends sometimes in some of these situations how about the divine versus the mundane people think that there's like everyday life which is mundane and then there's divine supernatural stuff which either doesn't exist or if it does exist is some lofty airy-fairy thing out there but again they don't realize that actually these are exactly the same thing how do you get to the divine you examine the mundane so much that it stops being the Monday and you stop taking it for granted and at that precise moment you pass the inflection point and the mundane everything you see around you the most ordinary things a a piece of trash on the sidewalk becomes filled with the light of God it becomes divinized it becomes spiritual people don't get that people think divine means somewhere up in heaven in the clouds in the afterlife nothing could be further from the truth everything that's experienced right now everything right here everything you're seeing this is pure divinity happening right now the question is are you conscious of it or are you just so asleep that everything to you is just ah it's just like every other day see when it's like every other day you're not seeing the magic of reality the way you do when you were a child for example that's just because you've become so acclimated to it you take it now for granted life and death also cycle back around you think that life is the most important thing and death is the worst possible thing nothing could be further from the truth your death is the greatest thing that could possibly happen to you and the sooner you can die the sooner you can start to live people don't realize that people who are pure up preoccupied with life actually spend most of it trying to avoid death and so their life is miserable how about duality versus non duality oh boy this is a really interesting can of worms this is a real mind [ __ ] people think that these are two things on a spectrum two poles you've got duality here non duality here but what is that but a dualistic way of looking at the world you see that itself is coming from the perspective of duality from the non dual perspective this loops back around from the non dual perspective there is no difference between duality and non-duality you get that if you're into non duality and you're opposing non duality with duality you're actually not being non dual you're actually being dual you get that it's really easy to trick yourself to be truly non dual is to be accepting of duality as well to realize that duality is literally non duality they're the same thing it's a matter of perspective whereas from the duelists mind everything is always a duality they can't see the non duality and anything how is that possible you everything is everything is dual everything is separate everything is this it's its inner world outer world it's black it's white it's exists at non-existence all that see they can't see past that they can't see the commonality and shallow forms of non duality like if you're doing consciousness work you're doing enlightenment work maybe you had a few glimpses you think you've seen non duality and maybe you have but still you're putting them in opposition it's like well my amazing mystical experience that was the non-dual and this thing here now I'm in the dual and so there's a non dual in the dual and I'm in the I'm in the dual and I want to get to the non dual how do I get to the non dual see but that's all dualistic when you're in the non dual there is no difference between the dual in the non dual they cycle back around how about knowing versus not knowing people spend most of their time trying to know more and more and more acquiring knowledge and I think by by knowing more that's the best thing and then opposite of the spectrum is not knowing by not knowing you're admitting a weakness that's like something is wrong with you but what they don't realize is that actually the more and more and more you know actually the stupider you get in a sense and if you would actually turn that around and go and start to unlearn let go of stuff that you think you know let go of all your models all your ideas all your beliefs unlearn all that stuff empty your cup completely which you'll get to is that you will get to a point where you're not knowing is so great that you then become conscious of the only thing that can be known which is that everything is unknowable and that is the ultimate place to be and you cannot get there through knowing you can only get there through unknowing how about the duality that people create between the personal and the impersonal so maybe you've wondered is life personal or is it impersonal if you're a religious person you tend to think it's personal you have a personal connection to God you have a personal connection to other people that sort of stuff God cares about you whereas if you're an impersonal scientifically minded person you think that oh well it's just all atoms and molecules it's just a materialism there is no personal God nobody cares about you the universe doesn't care about you there's nothing personal about reality don't take things personally to take things personally it would be subjective human bias but what both these people don't realize is that in truth reality is so impersonal that it's utterly personal it goes full circle so if you take your impersonalism all the way around you will realize that everything is truly so impersonal and then you go past the inflection point that then the impersonal nature of reality becomes very personal to you if you develop personal relationship to the impersonal aspect of reality and that's really what the religious person is trying to get to but doesn't understand that you can't get to it through this side of the of the circle you want this personal connection to reality but what you don't understand is that that's your ego that's the thing that's actually blocking you from getting to what you want you surrender the ego you get rid of everything subjective you get rid of all your self biases all your petty ego clinging all your ideas and all that stuff and then you wind up being so impersonal but then you realize oh my god all of reality is truly impersonal and then that becomes your one true personal connection to everything how about the distinction people make between subject and object I think they think that these are two opposite things like that's an object over there that chair and I'm a subject over here so the subject is looking at the object and there's like the subjective experiences and there's the objective world this sort of duality is set up but what people don't realize there is that again they connect behind the scenes and actually it's possible for your experience your subjective experience of an object to become so subjective that it flips back around and you actually literally become the object that you were looking at the subject disappears the subject and object they collapse and therefore everything's subjective becomes objective and scientifically minded scientifically minded people they wonder about this they say well Leo your ID of God and all that aren't they just subjective that's because you're you're thinking in this linear fashion you're not realizing that it connects back around yeah my experience of reality has been so subjective that I've been able to experience the absolute by actually literally becoming the object which is the absolute so through absolute subjectivity I've gotten to absolute objectivity or as actually you as a scientific person who thinks he's trying to be objective with your empiricism in all your tests and all this sort of stuff and your double-blind experiments that's actually the most subjective that's a completely subjective human species specific method that you're using and it will not get you to objective truth you want objective truth you can only get to it through pure subjectivity if you try to get to objective truth through objective methods like science you don't get to objective truth what you get to is you get to human truth which is what science is it's a human centered way of looking at the world which scientific people don't understand because they're under the illusion that is subjective when really it's not sure would be helpful to realize this wouldn't it for many scientists how about saw lips is Emilio and light and that's just like solipsistic about no brains you're talking about everything being hallucination other people not existing that's like salep TSA's polish you don't realize that solid system goes full circle so salep says that you are the only one who exists in the world and you cannot be sure about the existence of other minds and other consciousness as other human beings but the reality is far stranger than that the reality is that even you aren't really real and that there's no difference being you and other people so when you discover that you yourself aren't real your solemn vows soulful Circle that you discovered that oh I'm not real and everyone else is also not real so were the exact same nothingness so literally for nothingness in me is the nothingness in you so it's not that there aren't other people it's just that all people are all couched within the same nothingness the same nothing this is looking through my eyes as is looking right now through your eyes at me but to realize that you gotta take your solipsistic 'l how about skepticism i've talked in the past how people misuse skepticism very easily skepticism goes full circle most people they like to be skeptical but not really they don't take their skepticism to the absolute level if you take your skepticism all the way it comes back full circle you become skeptical of your own skepticism your own skepticism defeats itself but see most people they don't really self reflect enough to see and become skeptical of their own skepticism and then that becomes a trap for them how about being ordinary versus being unique a lot of people tried to be unique and special and counter-intuitively in trying to do that actually you become quite ordinary that's like those kids in school who try to be nonconformist altogether so they come up with their own little group which ironically all conform to the same stupid things and the opposite of that is that if you actually try to be ordinary completely yourself completely ordinary that will actually make you very unique because most people are trying to be unique and special and the one thing they can't accept is that actually they're ordinary how about the example of the true self versus no self people who study mysticism religion and non-duality and enlightenment they get very confused by this some schools like Zen and Buddhism talk about the truth of no self there is no such thing as a self and some schools like advised Vedanta or some Hindu traditions talk about the true self so which is it it seems like they're polar opposites are are there two different truths no it's the exact same truth no self is the true self when you realize that there is no self what does that leave that leaves behind nothing and that is the true self conversely if you realize the true self which is nothing what do you discover that it's nothing no self exactly the same thing how about nothing versus infinity as a as a distinction that people make which is false they think that nothing is over a year non-existence over here an existence or infinity everything is over here so either you can have nothing or you can have everything can't have both actually they're identical they're exactly the same thing when you truly have nothing it's so empty that it's infinitely full and when you have infinity it's so full that it must be empty in the same way that if you take all the positive integers and all the negative integers and combined them together you get zero but inside that zero are contained every possible integer it goes full circle how about relativity versus absolutism people like to rag on relativity and they say oh well there's moral relativity and that's bad and there's a cultural relativity and valid people talk about relativity post-modernism talks about everything is relative everything is just you know different cultures different values but no one set of values is better than another set of values and then the opposite of that is absolute just so much does you think that all this is the absolute there's the absolute truth there's these absolute values there's absolute right and wrong there's this absolute way to live life that's the best what's the truth well the truth is that everything is absolutely relative reality is so relative that it cycles back around past the inflection point goes full circle and you discover the one thing that is truly absolute about reality which is that it's completely relative and people don't get that people want to be absolutists or they want to be relativists but they don't take their relativity far enough and when they're stuck in absolutism they refuse to acknowledge that reality is groundless and so they get stuck there when really what they need to do the absolutist needs to go from absolutism to relativity beyond relativity transcend relativity and cycle it back around to absolutism but this is a different kind of absolutism for example I've experienced the absolute and the absolute I know is that reality is completely relative but that's very different my version of absolute is very different from your fundamentalist Christians version of the absolute or your fundamentalist Muslims version of the absolute it's difference being the absolute in practice and the absolute in theory because when you realize that everything is relative and nothing is truly absolute but relativity itself then you don't cling to you don't need to defend it which is the whole problem with absolutism is that people who are absolutists in ideology they need to defend their ideology whereas when you really experience the absolute relativity of reality all of that flies out the window how about this example doing nothing versus taking action some people who really love success and our ambitious business people they are eight type personalities they don't like doing nothing you don't like meditation they don't like sitting around they don't like contemplating they don't like philosophy they like to go out there and take action and do this and build a business and kick people in the ass and dot it on and on and all this and and as you're doing all that taking all that action what are you telling yourself that you're accomplishing so much but counter-intuitively the more action you take the more you spin your wheels if you would actually sit down and do nothing if you would just meditate if you just look inside if you would just look at the being that is right here that would be the biggest action step you could possibly take in your life but see people think doing nothing is just being lazy or watching television that's not doing nothing I mean truly doing nothing truly doing nothing is some of the hardest work you can do in your life I dare you to sit for one week and do nothing from morning to night for seven days straight that will be the most you've grown as a human being in the last ten or twenty years will be accomplished in those seven days just by doing absolutely nothing and also notice how difficult it is to actually pull that off very very difficult very counterintuitive how can you accomplish so much by doing so little and conversely how can you do so little by doing so much interesting paradox how about this other example egodeath versus strong personality some some people don't like enlightenment because we talk about ego doesn't they say oh well the self is gonna die and I'm gonna realize there is no me and no self and they think okay so if that's the case then that good there goes my personality there goes all the stuff that I love in life there goes my charisma and all of that what they don't realize is that actually to experience ego death you go full circle and your personality flowers people who go through ego death have the strongest personality the most charisma they're the most spontaneous they are the first to laugh and not to take life seriously and taking life seriously versus not taking life seriously another one of these examples because what people say to me sometimes as they say like leo but aren't you taking life so seriously why taking life so seriously like relax man just have some fun but you don't understand what I'm pointing you towards I am pointing you towards exactly that the person who is relaxing and having fun and all this this is actually the person who actually is the one who takes life too seriously because would hit when [ __ ] hits the fan for you you'll get serious real quick whereas the enlightened person the person who actually works on himself seriously does the self actualization does the conscious work he will become so conscious that everything will become an illusion to him everything is a hallucination so there's nothing serious to take so you can laugh about anything you can laugh about death you can laugh about all the evil and corruption in the world you can laugh about it you cannot do that when you take life as a joke because as soon as someone pisses in your soup or steps on your toe or encroaches on your ego you're gonna get very serious very quickly the only way to accomplish that is to go through ego death how about masculine versus feminine this very interesting this is actually a little insight for you guys doing pickup trying to get better with girls see when you get it to pickup you think that oh I suck at attracting girls the way I'm gonna get good at attracting girls is by being more manly more macho that's what girls love and you try doing that and you notice that actually it doesn't work and if you do pickup for a long time eventually what pickup leads you to is to the realization that all that pickup is really doing is that it's teaching you how to act more like a girl that's it surprise girls are actually attracted to girly behavior here's all of pickup boiled down to one thing act more like a girl and girls will flock to you what does that mean be more emotional be more charismatic be more spontaneous be more flirtatious be more outrageous be more unpredictable be more moody show your emotions more wear them on your sleeve love stuff hate stuff be expressive that's how girls are don't be self-conscious that's how girls are but see that's not what you like you as the guy I think you're gonna stroll into the club and you're gonna act all macho or like some James Bond guy you're the James Bond guy here so cool and so suave you don't smile you're not spontaneous you're not flirtatious and then you wonder why the girls don't flock to you of course they don't of course not because to really be truly masculine is to be comfortable with your feminine side and being able to express it and girls love that they love it girls hate a serious guy this next example attachment versus detachment this also goes full circle best example of this I would say is neediness when you are truly needy and you really need something your chances of getting it are actually diminished and when you're detached and you don't need anything actually your chances of success and getting that thing increase a lot this is true when you're negotiating it's true in business it's true with attracting girls it's true with many facets of life how about success versus failure it's very interesting that if you want to be very successful you need to fail a lot fail so much that you succeed and conversely oftentimes when people get very successful they get complacent they get lazy they start taking their success and their practices for granted and then that leads to their failure it's oftentimes very hard to keep up success how about this other example of rationality versus paradox rational people assume that rationality is over here and on the opposite and spectrum is paradox and contradiction and irrationality but as we've talked about in the strange loop episode actually these two come together if you become so rational that you become conscious of the mechanism of rationality rationality becomes conscious of itself rationality recognizes that actually rationality contradicts and undermines itself and that rationality itself is a paradox when rationality recognizes that rationality transcends itself and goes beyond rationality rational people have a very hard time getting this because they're stuck in their rationalism and they don't turn the rationalism in on itself in the same way that the skeptic fails to do that and get stuck in skepticism how about suffering versus peace this is an interesting one people assume Authority for many people in life they have to go through a lot of suffering to ultimately get to peace and a classic example this he probably knows Eckhart Tolle you know how he became enlightened you know his story he was on the verge of suicide he was so depressed and so miserable had so much suffering that it ultimately led to his ego death she would pass the inflection point and now he's in total peace now I don't recommend that as a strategy that's a very painful strategy and it doesn't always work but for some people you know their path through life is a path of deep deep deep suffering and then that's what they got to go through to ultimately get to peace and if that's you hey that's fine you can do it that way I don't recommend it I think there's easier ways that's personally not my path I don't want to go down that road but you know there's many x addicts for example who have gone through very tortuous paths in life loss of suffering and ultimately came out very wise and peaceful in the end how about stupidity versus wisdom seems like these things should be polar opposites and yet a lot of wisdom seems like stupidity to most people that's why Zen masters and Yogi's and and Saints and mystics they usually keep it themselves because if they start talking a lot they start sounding very stupid and people misunderstand them and I see that all the time people are my forum post stuff like oh this yogi said this and this guru said that but it sounds ridiculous it sounds stupid it sounds crazy yeah because you're not nearly conscious enough to be able to decipher the profundity of his wisdom so to you it looks like stupidity so in most of these examples as you can see the mistake is often not going far enough like with skepticism the skeptic isn't going far enough with a skepticism the introvert isn't going far enough with his introversion the person who is suffering isn't going deep enough into his suffering the person whose rationale isn't going deep enough into his rationality to discover the paradoxes that lie within the person who's committed to empiricism isn't being empirical enough to realize it actually empiricism leads to mysticism the deconstructionist doesn't realize that his deconstruction is only linguistic and that it needs to go further to deconstruct itself as well the person was being philosophical isn't realizing that his philosophy doesn't go deep enough he's just philosophizing in his mind his philosophy isn't touching his way of life his behavior his very being the nihilist isn't going far enough to realize that nihilism ultimately becomes enlightenment the atheist isn't going far enough to realize that his atheism ultimately becomes God a person doing nothing doesn't realize that he's not doing enough do nothing the person who's failing doesn't realize he's not failing enough to get the success he's after there is this tendency for us to think of life as being linear like these simple spectrums but actually life is much more interesting in that life tends to twist back on itself it tends to reverse itself it's tends to have surprising twists in it tends to be counterintuitive tends to be mind [ __ ] and your mind and the purpose of this whole episode is to make you a little bit more open to being flexible enough with your mind to embrace paradox see the problem with ideology is that it sets linear expectations for example the religious person will tell me but Leo I can't be God you're talking about the self me being God you say you're God yeah I am God and you are God of course you are but for the ideological religious person this this can't work because their notion of God is a very linear notion of God they have these expectations so for them God could be anything but it can't be me and that's exactly what God is or likewise they'll say well Leo surely God can't be nothing because see that's a linear expectation set by their ideology but of course God can be nothing what else could God be but nothing nothing is infinite nothing is eternal nothing is the source of everything of course God is nothing but those linear expectations that have been set by your ideology prevent you from being flexible enough with your mind to realize that and a scientifically minded person will say well Leo empiricism can't be mysticism empiricism rules out mysticism again it's a very linear notion of what empiricism is that's what they taught you in school that's what they taught you in university but all they taught us how to think inside of a box you need to be much more flexible to see the non-linearity of life same thing with logic it's like Leo logic can't have paradox and contradictions in it what kind of logic is that that's not logic at all yeah because you're thinking of a logic inside of a little box because your mind up to this point hasn't been flexible enough to deal with the twisted reality of what logic is and if you investigate all of these things I talked about very very deeply to the very periphery of them you will discover this looping back round that I've talked about you will discover that your little box which society has given you to think about all these things it's um it's just like a it's a little handy rule of thumb it's good in many circumstances but it's not good enough to get you to the most deep and profound aspects of life and that is that please remember to click the like button for me if you liked this episode mmm and come check out actualize that or guess my website you can browse videos easier there my blog is there and posting a lot of stuff my book lists the forum the life purpose course all those resources and more resources to come in the future that you'll want to check in with periodically to see as I update the website I'm working on it all the time and the last thing I'll tell you is just um to really take this work to the next level you got to start to read books yeah my videos are good but it's not enough not nearly enough it's just an introduction what I talked to you about is just an introduction I want you to go read the top 100 books on my 200 over 200 book list read the top 100 that will completely change your life that will take everything I talked about and make it so much clearer for you so much more persuasive and it'll give you and show you tools and techniques for actually how to start working on this stuff so if you're watching my content and you're feeling lost and you don't know what to do and maybe you're even feeling kind of lazy and you don't know like well I don't want to go out there do something really big and difficult but you want to start doing something so at least start reading some books now if you're already reading books then I encourage you to push yourself to the next level and maybe start a meditation have and so forth but if you're just starting off and you're feeling stuck and you're feeling like you're procrastinating and nothing is working nothing is clicking go read a high quality book books are not frivolous things books are powerful powerful things where do you think I got most of the stuff I talked about with you books I don't just read a book and then just regurgitate the information that's there I think about it I contemplate I try to do exercises I practice it I get ideas I get inspired by and all that stuff comes together in this kind of concoction or soup in my head this melting pot in my head and then eventually you know new insights for him and everything cross-pollinate so you got to get that process working for yourself if you are too lazy to read a hundred books in order to master your life to master non-duality to understand personal development to understand how business works how emotions work our relationship work if you're not gonna read a hundred books you've got no chance you have no chance of making self-actualization work for you you cannot make this work just purely by being lazy and watching my videos or for that matter watching other people's videos alongside mine that's still not enough you got to read the books there's there's detail and depth in those books that could never translate into a video or even a series of videos so add that to what you're doing and then start taking action on the stuff in the books get inspired by that stuff of course take notes on those books using your commonplace book which I hope you have set up now and see you're gonna start to see all these pieces coming together and then my videos will just be like commentary and extra bonuses on top of the stuff you're reading in your books and all the other practices you're doing and then that's how you actually start to get the really juicy results that are possible here so go and at least start doing that you