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hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the topic of mind [ __ ] [Music] you a major theme of life is the mindfuck and I want to spend some time talking about this because this is one of the most remarkable things you'll discover in your life is that life is a giant mindfuck and that there are so many mind [ __ ] to be had in life and a lot of people what they do is they spend their lives running away from the mind [ __ ] and this just screws them all up and if you're gonna be a real student of this work you're gonna be encountering a lot of mind [ __ ] along the way so this is something I want to really highlight underscore emphasize for you on this journey that you should be kind of like looking out for them expecting them to come now what is a mind [ __ ] a mind [ __ ] is a surprise a shocking reversal like the plot twist in a movie or a giant Epiphany this realization that you had something totally wrong or when you see something in a new light and everything you knew before becomes recontextualized it's the Fight Club moment it's amazing to me that this is just a facet of life in a facet of reality a facet of what it means to be human is to encounter these mind [ __ ] and we have been encountering them as humanity for a long time all throughout history if you study the history of a philosophy the history of science the history of religion the history of just cultures and societies and governments you see humans coping and struggling to understand what reality is whether it's the Copernican revolution or discovering the new world the Americas and and dealing with all the ramifications of that and just how big of a shift that is in worldview for people when you discover there's this whole new half of the globe that we didn't even know existed or whether it's the Einsteinian revolution and that means for space-time and for quantum mechanics right so just all these mind [ __ ] you find it in science and philosophy and throughout human culture but why do mind [ __ ] happen why should reality be surprising well fundamentally you've got to understand what a mindfuck is fundamentally the way you get mindfuck is you have some expectations or know just about how reality should be like this and then you live your life this way thing that this is how reality is and then one day out of the blue you don't expect it something changes you run into some new fact that flips that on its head and perhaps reverses it 180 degrees and that's such a big shock because all your expectations have been crushed they've been undermined and from this happens the surprise but what sort of adds insult to injury is that a lot of people go through life not expecting that mind [ __ ] are possible and so they get a double dose of mind [ __ ] it's like not only do they get surprised but then they get surprised that they got surprised and a lot of people then kind of like run away from it or they deny it or they resist it and then that creates problems really what you want to do you want to open yourself up to the mind flux and a good way to do that is just to to talk about this topic and to think about why it exists there's a slew of reasons for why mind [ __ ] happen but perhaps most fundamentally it's because reality is so massive see when humanity came into existence it didn't know what it was doing here where it came from imagine being a caveman or a Neanderthal a hundred thousand years ago like you had no clue about anything about anything even the most obvious things like you had no idea about anything you're totally in and yet you had to survive in a very brutal world much more brutal than today you had a much tougher survival challenge than you have today and so at this as you're trying to survive in this rural world running away from alligators and snakes and spiders and and lions and all this sort of stuff trying to hunt for food and gather berries and not kill yourself as you're trying to do all that you're also at the same time wondering like what the hell am I doing here if you guys like there was a time where the first human had to have to have that thought like what the hell is this like animals don't ask themselves that question they just kind of go along with the flow but at some point in human history this happened whether it was the Neanderthals or even before that we're not sure but you got to figure somebody was the first to have that idea and even that already was a mindfuck but see the problem here is in my point is that reality is so massive but we come into the world so totally ignorant of anything that we don't even know that we're ignorant and what we do is we just make kind of assumptions we make tentative hypotheses about how the world works and we just kind of like scrape by we make the best of it that we can but then we kind of get caught up in the complacency of that and we think ok we basically got reality figured out after you live for 10 20 years you kind of think like you got to figure it out but do you really a lot of times you don't see what we see throughout history is that mankind has consistently underestimated reality its scope and size its depth its complexity its non-linearity and this is what produces mind [ __ ] because fundamentally what you're trying to do is you're trying to take all of Rihanna this massive thing billions and billions and billions of galaxies and star systems and planets and animals and species and plants and stuff in the world you're trying to take all this and you're trying to distill it down and and stuff it inside your skull basically to make sense of it so of course it sort of makes sense from the very beginning you should sort of expect that ah that's that's gonna be tough to do to take such a large thing and put it into such a small thing and that's not even taking into account that maybe this thing isn't just large but maybe it's infinite and if it's infinite then that's like a whole nother level of largeness so as large as you maybe thought the universe was if you start to now think of it as actually infinite and you realize the full consequences of that it really becomes remarkable how can you possibly stuff that into your skull that whole thing and make sense of it in a way where nothing surprises you anymore so what I'm saying here in this episode is that mind [ __ ] are an essential component of reality they're like woven into the fabric of reality surprise and mystery and these shocking sort of fightclub moments this is what it means for consciousness to become self-aware is it becomes aware of how goddamn huge it is and how remarkable it is how intricate it is how complex it is in all the ways in which it functions it's really humbling to realize that you even if you are like a billionaire a richard branson type person and you travel all around the world and you you go to all the countries visit all the cultures eat all the food read all the books do all this sort of stuff that even if you do all of that you will live a very rich life for a good 70 years you will still only be exposed to Oh point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent of all of reality really much less than that much much less that's that's that's being generous that's a generous estimate right there so you you take this into account and then you of course you you have to realize like yeah of course there's gonna be mind [ __ ] because I'm only exposed to such a small slim of what reality has to offer and that's something that we don't appreciate I mean it's an obvious point but somehow humanity as a species as a culture and as an individual you just you ignore all this simply because you're going about living your everyday life and for the purposes of living your everyday life you don't need to to bother remembering that you only know a tiny tiny fraction of what there is to know and what there is to see and the reason that's important and this is something that a lot of people misunderstand and why they get so mind-fucked is that they underestimate the extent to which new information can undermine and reverse existing information this is a remarkable point about epistemology in the workings of the human mind that I see almost everybody miss miss appreciating under appreciating let's say I see religious people under appreciating this I also see scientific and rational people under appreciating this see never never underestimate how much reality can [ __ ] you over because reality is much bigger than you it's got way more sleep tricks up its sleeve than you do and what people underestimate is that they think that well yeah we've got some facts and information let's say from science in some field biology physics whatever or outside of science as well religion whatever whatever your field is whatever you think you know but then what you don't understand is that new information that can come to light can be such that it can it can recontextualize that information that you have whatever model or theory you have it can recontextualize that and that recontextualization when you put something into a different context that can completely alter the facts or the information that you previously had not just a little bit but entirely it can either make the information you had before the model you had before it can make it completely incorrect it can make it completely irrelevant and or it can actually flip it inside out such that the truth is the exact opposite of what you thought it was and this is something people don't understand people tend to just assume that oh new information will just accrete and it will be a gradual just kind of building up evolutionary process of kind of gradualism we're like well yeah we've got science we've got physics surely oh it's not perfect we're just gonna kind of like keep adding to it some details some fine-tuning and overall we're kind of kind of like build on top of what we already have and what I'm saying is know if you expect that you're gonna get mind [ __ ] what I'm saying is that what you should really expect other instead is you should expect radical shifts in contexts in the future you can't exactly predict when it'll happen but you could predict that it probably will happen people routinely underestimate how much context can alter content how much perspective matters how much holism matters and just how radical of an undermining is possible we see this throughout the history of human knowledge we stayed in philosophy we see it in science we see it in religion we see it everywhere else we see it in politics for example and you probably have examples from your own life when you were a kid when you're a teenager you have some view of the world which was one way and now it's probably completely the exact opposite because something shifted there but when you were a kid you couldn't even anticipate that and in fact you were very adamant that no your position will never change that you're totally right and then that might happen even again as you get older see people under appreciate this so other reasons for why these mind [ __ ] happen is because a key feature of ignorance is that it doesn't know that it's ignorant it's got this very interesting property so when you're ignorant you're really double damaged by it because not only are you ignorant but you don't even know that you're ignorant so you act as though you know everything and this is something that I've been observing in myself and other people it's really fascinating to me to observe how this ignorance works it's like this double blindness you're blind and you don't know that you're blind and then this this is not a trivial point this really makes the problem a lot worse because if people at least became conscious that they were ignorant that would be a substantial leap forward in consciousness that wouldn't solve all the problems but that would be a big step towards that because that would open the doors for a possibility of improvement cuz when you're ignorant you can say okay I'm ignorant I know I'm ignorant I got a lot to learn let me now make some plans for how to learn and correct my ignorance but most people are so ignorant that they're not even going to do that see they're gonna be very adamant that they're right and I'm gonna be so convinced by that they might even have you convinced that they're right because you as the one who knows he's ignorant will say well yeah maybe maybe I am ignorant maybe they have a good point I don't know everything but see they're gonna act like they know everything and so they're gonna have this sort of false confidence that might convince you another reason these mind [ __ ] happen is because we are so self-involved when it comes to life our number one priority is our own life our self the ego our self agenda that is like one direction that we go to and then the truth that's something else entirely we'd like to tell ourselves that these things coincide but actually it turns out they're in the opposite direction and when that ends up being the case and you're always pursuing your self agenda at the cost of the truth then really what's happening is you're pursuing falsehood at the cost of the truth and of course what is a mindfuck but the realization that a falsehood is false and actually the truth is something totally different so people sometimes ask well leo why is truth important why should I pursue the truth for truth sake well if you don't expect to get mind-fucked see because the more you pursue your own self agenda and the less you care about the truth the greater the gap becomes between what you think is right and what's actually right and the bigger that gap is well the greater the fall as they say see see how the higher the distance the greater the fall and there's something even much deeper about that which we can say which is that it's almost like the very cost of existence itself is predicated predicated upon a lie and in that sense just to come into existence is already to be set up for a mindfuck because there's a lot of assumptions that are needed to bootstrap the self to bootstrap you into being that's that's a tricky strange loopy sort of process and you have to just assume a lot of stuff and when you're a kid and you're just kind of like going through school you're learning stuff you're learning how to function in society you're making mistakes then you're also learning very quickly but still you have a lot of assumptions that you make and these assumptions are just like heuristic rules of thumb that you create just in order to get by in the world and there's nothing wrong with that in fact that's necessary that's the only way you can become a self a healthy decent functioning self but the problem with that is that then people just tend to assume like well hey it worked for me it works Leo it works so what's the problem but see yeah it works but it only works in a very limited context then when you have bigger questions about life when you want to know what existence is what reality is and stuff like that I mean you want to really correct some of the problems well you have to go reevaluate your assumptions but then a lot of people just forget that those assumptions were ever made in the first place so it's okay to make assumptions but you have to make a mental note of like hi I made an assumption back there 10 years ago and I've been sort of living based off that assumption building on top of it but you know what that assumption could have been wrong so that's okay you can make provisional assumptions and hypotheses but you have to remember to go back sometime maybe ten years later go back or rethink that assumption maybe something has changed so all these factors lead to a sort of false sense of complacency taking things for granted and when you do that that's when you really set yourself up and also I should add that your state of consciousness your ordinary state of consciousness and the ordinary average state of conscious that human beings have this thing is tuned for survival and utility it's highly pragmatic it's always thinking about the past and the future it's very future or as it's always planning thinking scheming manipulating it's always doing this you're living in this kind of conceptual state of consciousness you don't even realize it until you have ever exited and experienced some non-ordinary states of consciousness that this is the case but this ordinary state of consciousness that most human beings consider life this this is one of our biggest blind spots sets up us up for a huge mindfuck because we just completely take it for granted that this is just what life is is this one particular slice of consciousness but there are other other states of consciousness which are radically different and lead to very different experiences of life another reason that these mind [ __ ] happen is that the mind loves certainty it hates uncertainty and so when faced with uncertainty what the mind will do is it'll fudge the uncertainty and it will quickly confabulate some kind of story or pseudo knowledge and then convinced itself that now it's certain and of course that sets you up for a mind flock because in fact you're not certain but you think you are the mind also loves narratives so what the mind will do is it'll cherry-pick evidence to fit its narratives and of course its narratives fit its own agenda and so these narratives are built but then these narratives oftentimes have very little to do with actual reality or with truth and then at sets us up for a mindfuck see the mind is very tricky it's a trickster and therefore you need to start to expect that your own mind is your own greatest enemy and that it has a lot of tricks up its sleeve more than you do way more than you do it's a lot trickier than you it is you but it also tricks you that's what's so loopy about it now how does a mindfuck happen well it happens through a lot of different things it happens here's sort of a list of where you can spot mind [ __ ] you can spot it whenever you're acting arrogant or feeling superior arrogance is huge and one of the reasons that the ancients the Greeks and Romans they talked about hubris and arrogance this was a big theme for them precisely because arrogance leads to disaster leads to blunder leads to destruction leads to chaos and the reason that happens is through these mind folks because arrogance gets you believing that you're going in the right direction we're actually going the wrong direction ignorant sui vol Reddy talked about ignorance is ignorant of itself and therefore these mind [ __ ] happen another reason that it happens is under estimating phal ability people underestimate just how fallible they can be people convince themselves that they're certain and right by coming up with fancy theories and rationalizations and justifications and they say well but look he the logic of here's the statistics here's the proof so we come up with all this stuff and we build a rock-solid case but what we forget is that even if you have the perfect proof your proof could always be wrong in some place see even if you're the best logician in the world you could still be wrong you could still be fallible and people people lose sight of that and as soon as you start under estimating your ability to be fallible or some experts or some scientists ability to be fallible you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck anywhere that you're feeling certain very certain about something very confident you set yourself up for a mindfuck any assumption that you take for granted you set yourself up for a mindfuck anything you think is self-evident or obvious you're setting yourself up anything you know or think you know based on belief or hearsay hearing it from somebody else that always sets you up for a mindfuck because in fact you don't know whether what they're telling you is true it might feel true but you don't really know that's the problem with hearsay anytime that you're relying on Authority that you just blindly trust you're setting yourself up for a mindfuck this is a huge category of mind folks right here and by authority I mean stuff like do you trust your education system do you trust your professor do you trust science do you trust your culture do you trust your government do you trust the Bible do you trust the Koran do you trust some textbook that you read do you trust doctors do you trust a PhD do you trust a person on television do you trust a celebrity or an actor do you trust a guru a yogi these are all authorities and if you're a serious seeker of truth you realize just how big of a problem Authority possesses and that you can't basically trust anybody including me by the way you can't trust me either or if you do watch out you might be setting yourself up for a mindfuck you also set your from mine [ __ ] any place that you don't have direct experience of a thing anywhere where you have a vested interest you set yourself up for a mindfuck why is that because the problem with having a vested interest is this problem between serving yourself agenda versus the truth see if you have a self if you have a vested interest in something you really need it to come out some way like I really need my business to succeed in order to pay the bills so my kids don't starve and my wife doesn't divorce me if that's your mentality then do you care about the truth in that situation see no you don't you're gonna do whatever you got to do to feed your kids because in your mind that's the most important thing right there and the truth has taken a lower priority and so see the vested interest has divorced you from truth and now you have set yourself up for mindfuck anywhere where a context is ignored or underappreciated you set yourself up for a mindfuck anytime that you're doing analysis or you're fragmenting reality and you're working within a very narrow specialized field on a very small thing and you put your blinders on you say well I'm not gonna care about other fields other disciplines or how this fits is a larger picture I don't care about any of that I'm just gonna work on my little field anytime you do that you set yourself up for mindfuck because reality happens to be holistic and like I said before whatever results you get in your little field they're gonna depend on the larger context and if you ignore that then your results could lead you to believe one thing which is exactly the opposite of what the larger context will reveal and that's how a lot of scientists screw themselves over because they become hyper specialized which is why if you want to be a sage if you want wisdom in your life if you want to be an extraordinary human being and live up to your full potential as a human being you need big-picture thinking you got to be careful about not getting lost in the weeds anywhere where perspective is poo-pooed or mind as pooh-poohed or underestimated you set yourself up for a mindfuck what do i mean by this well a lot of people think that well it's just the facts léo reality just has some hard facts that's why we have science we crunch the numbers here's what is real here's what's not real we know the facts we know the numbers and perspective mind these things these are very subjective hippy new-age type of notions these don't matter what matters is the hard stuff be hard-nosed but see that's also just a perspective that's what you don't realize that's also just one function of mind perspective is much more important than people realize mind is much more important people say stuff like well Leo I just want like to build up my life have a good career a good family make a killing in the stock market have sex with with hot people all this material tangible stuff this has nothing to do with perspective or mind this is tangible stuff I either have a million dollars in my bank account or I don't it's not a matter of perspective when you take that kind of attitude you set yourself up for mindfuck life is much more perspective dependent than you have ever thought possible and that in and of itself that lesson to learn that lesson it's not enough to here for me you're gonna have to experience a mindfuck to learn that lesson that lesson in of itself is a big mindfuck that's a that's a paradigm shift for a lot of people and any time that you make appeals to this is just how reality is that sets you up for a mindfuck so what I want to do is I want to give you a list of what I came up with a round twenty or so of some of the top mind flux that you will encounter in your life there we go you think you're the body one day you will discover that that's not true and that will be a huge mind [ __ ] you think reality is real and one day you will discover in a rude awakening that that's not the case you think truth is logical and that it conforms to your rational principles you will be shocked to discover how wrong you are you think materialism is correct you will be shocked one day to discover how wrong you are you think religion is just superstition and myth you will be shocked one day to discover just how wrong you are you think your favourite ideology is correct I don't care what it is liberalism conservativism libertarianism and a million other ideologies that you have well one day you will be shocked to learn how wrong you've been you think your thoughts are trustworthy and that you can rely on your skepticism in your own mind and one day you'll be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think that society and culture is healthy and in that it has your best interest at heart one day you'll be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think success is equivalent to happiness one day you will be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think evolution is random it happens through a random process of atoms or molecules mixing around through random mutation one day you will be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think science has no blind spots and that science leads you to the truth one day you'll be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think the 21st century is advanced that we are out of the our cages one day you will be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think that what school taught you is correct one day you will be shocked to learn how wrong you are you think history is objective and that the history that you read in the history books that you see on TV that's how actually stuff happened oh you're in for a very rude awakening there you think that death is real one day you will learn that it's not you think evil exists you learn that that's not the case you think that you're a good guy that you're the hero of your journey a hero of your story one day you will be shocked to learn just how evil you are you think that other people hold you back from getting the success you want in life well one day you'll learn that it was all just you holding yourself back you think your problems are material like you need more money you need more sex you need a bigger house you need a better car if only you had a better job if only you had a hotter spouse if only had better children if only they went to better schools if only your business earned a little bit more money then everything would be going great all your problems would be fixed well one day you will experience the mindfuck that shows you otherwise you think your fears are real your fear of death your fear of poverty your fear of not being loved your fear of being abandoned your fear of being cheated on your fear of getting violence perpetrated upon you by some terrorists or some criminal well one day you'll discover just how wrong you are that's the list and by no means is that the end of the list that's sort of the beginning of the list I don't have time to go into just how all those things are the opposite of what you think they are I've touched on those issues in the past in certain episodes and I'll touch more about those in the future in certain episodes I want to give you a high-level overview here without going into the details fools believe appearances whereas the wise know that appearances are very deceptive and can't be trusted here are the lessons from this episode that I want you to take away never merely accept appearances realize that a basic fundamental principle of life is that life works through deception and through illusion as it must and through this realization you should start to expect that it will mindfuck you in many many different ways not just in one way many ways there's some epic mind [ __ ] out there there's some smaller ones that you will experience always investigate deeper wonder what am i taking for granted wonder what am i assuming in this situation develop a love for being mind [ __ ] you should expect to be mind [ __ ] but that's not enough learn to love it be curious about it so many people are led in the wrong direction in life because they somehow think that a mindfuck is a wrong thing that it's bad that it's negative somehow that reality can't be paradoxical that it can't be [ __ ] up or weird that it can't be absurd drop all those expectations if you think reality can't be weird and absurd beyond anything you can possibly imagine you're gonna be mind [ __ ] so start to love this I think that's one of the things that I stumbled upon early in life and one of the strengths I had in this work is that I just sort of assumed I always assumed that reality was a mindfuck and I actually enjoyed that aspect of reality and actually I actively went and sought out those mind folks and that's what led me to where I am today so that's another thing that I'll share with you as a lesson is go and proactively seek them out always be kind of wondering to yourself where could a mindfuck be lurking behind what corner where would it be best hidden what I tend to find is that the places that people never look that's where the mind [ __ ] love to hide the most of course so it's actually very easy to start to suss out the mind [ __ ] because all mind [ __ ] are is just like reverse psychology they're the exact opposite of what you would think it's this constant theme of counterintuitive nough stretching over again and again in all these episodes I keep giving advice and lessons and they're always counterintuitive everything is backwards and that's how it is you have to approach life as though everything was backwards it's like a reverse psychology game if you do the opposite of everything you wanted to do you will basically become the most conscious and greatest human being imaginable I mean that's a very general rule of thumb you can't apply that perfectly to all situations but as a general theme that's how I approach my life is I try to do like everything backwards everything opposite and the more I do that the better things are and the more I go with the herd the more I do the stuff that my culture tells me to do that I'm expected to do the stuff that seems intuitive the stuff that seems easy the worst my life goes the more hollow and meaning meaningless it is and the more similar it is to everybody else because I become just like the herd and of course that makes perfect sense you do what the herd does you're gonna go in the same direction that the herd goes and the herd is walking straight off a cliff and they're all gonna be mine [ __ ] in the end the biggest mindfuck comes when you think there can be no more mind [ __ ] it's when you think you're fully enlightened that's when you're in front mind [ __ ] it's when you think that oh surely I can't be mind [ __ ] anymore I've been mind [ __ ] so much already that's when you set yourself up for an even bigger mind [ __ ] see because you could just constantly keep under estimating the scope of reality start to think of reality as being infinitely broad infinitely deep infinite calm infinitely complex infinitely nonlinear and then you start to develop the sort of humility about your entire worldview and your approach to reality and how you think about reality what you believe about reality and and then that puts you into a better place and this is not to say that mind [ __ ] are something you should like strive to prevent like I said before mind folks are a good thing in my mind I like mind [ __ ] I like getting mind [ __ ] to me it's cool that's why psychedelics are so cool cuz that's the surest way to mind [ __ ] yourself right there and then you know that's why a lot of people don't enjoy psychedelics or they have these bad trips or they have a profound deep trip but then they can't integrate it because they just want their life to not be a mindfuck but you know what reality is a mindfuck so the only way your life cannot be a mindfuck when reality is a mindfuck is for you to live in a perpetual delusion when you think you've got it you don't got it when you think you're right you're wrong when you think you're good you're bad what do you think your lightened your not enlightened when you think yourself actualized you're not self actualized everything's backwards that's the nature of the mind that's the nature of reality learn to love it and go on this journey and then you will really savor these mind [ __ ] you'll savor them you'll appreciate them these mind [ __ ] rather than being bad trips or bad revelations these will be the most beautiful experiences in your life alright that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website check out my blog I'm posting a lot of new stuff there check out the forum we're having lots of good good discussions there sharing resources check out my book list I'm gonna be adding more books in the future cool books powerful books and check out my life purpose course and stay tuned in the future for more releases and more videos you