Word count:20899
[Music] if you haven't heard already i released a second actualized channel called actualize clips with short snippets of my long videos make sure you go check that out subscribe if you'd like those link down below alright now let's get to the main topic of understanding and coping with nihilism so here we're going to tackle really two two strands of this problem first of all just what is nihilism understanding it culturally historically where it came from its meaning and then we're going to be taking a look at what nihilism gets correct about reality what it gets incorrect it's a mixed bag there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding that we're gonna address here today and then at the very end i'm gonna you wanna make sure you stay for the end because at the end after we cover what nihilism is and some of its mistakes and and proper understandings i'm going to talk about how to actually cope with it specifically i'm going to talk about how to deal with that spiral dynamic stage green relativism which leads to a sense of meaninglessness in life and how i coped with it in my youth and i'll share some pointers very practical pointers for how you can cope with it yourself and then get beyond it all right so this is not just empty philosophy here there's gonna be practical implications for all this stuff as always with everything i talk about so what is nihilism well nihilism is a very much misunderstood word in our culture it's often used pejoratively in a negative way to demonize or dismiss some set of ideas or beliefs and that's a problem because there's something deeply true about nihilism which we're going to explain but also there's problems with nihilism so it's not so simple it's not so black and white it's a gray area even most professional philosophers don't really understand the implications of nihilism it's treated too much as just some sort of historical artifact and no serious philosopher tells you how to actually apply it in your life and what you should do with it and also what the mistakes of it are so today we're going to clear this whole thing up all right so the common meaning of nihilism there's sort of like a two parts to the meaning there's like a a common meaning and then there's a technical definition you might get from a philosophy professor we're going to be going over both of those but the common meaning of the word the way it's used colloquially in our culture is to mean something like godlessness or meaninglessness or pointlessness to life the rejection of morality depression disillusionment negativity pessimism anarchy cynicism skepticism belief and nothing atheism indifference destruction isolation feeling lost even perhaps misanthropy and despair now a lot of negative aspects to that and that's actually one of the problems that our culture has with the word nihilism is that they tend to use it very pejoratively and negatively and we'll be looking at why that is there's there's some very deep psychological reasons for that here are some dictionary definitions of nihilism to get us started in the right direction the first definition i found is the rejection of all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless a second one is extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence a third one is a world view that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless and a fourth one is a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths so that gets you a pretty good sense of it but i also want to read some detailed descriptions of it from from wikipedia and from certain online encyclopedia sources because i in researching this topic i really liked what they had to say and it's going to set the foundation for everything we talk about and it'll show us some of the limitations of these definitions because even when you go to wikipedia or to the stanford encyclopedia philosophy or whatever and you read through their descriptions of nihilism they're going to give you more of like a historical account and then it'll leave you scratching your head as to like well is it true which parts of it are true which are false how do you fit it in with personal development work how do you actually make it useful and practical what are its limitations and strengths and uh what is it missing perhaps all right so wikipedia says the following quote nihilism from the latin neil or nothing is a philosophy or family of views within philosophy expressing negation towards general aspects of life that are widely accepted within humanity as objectively real such as knowledge existence and the meaning of life different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless that life is meaningless that knowledge is impossible or that some set of entities do not exist german philosopher friedrich nietzsche used the term to describe the western world's disintegration of traditional morality end quote quote for nietzsche there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it penetrating the facades buttressing convictions the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent every belief every considering something true nietzsche writes is necessarily false because there is simply no true world for him nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning nihilism is not only the belief that everything deserves to perish but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plow one destroys end quote and that's from the internet encyclopedia of philosophy so nietzsche's work is associated with nihilism quite a bit although really to call nietzsche himself a nihilist would be a problem because nietzsche's philosophy was a little bit more complex than simply that it wasn't about destroying all values and then leaving it at that really for him it was about clearing away all of the falsely constructed narratives and religious systems and so on from the past 2000 years recognizing their limitations and their artificiality destroying those but then what that leaves is a clearing on top of which one can build an authentic life and become what he would call a super mensch sort of like the uberman the superman and and then you're not living simply by somebody else's social conditioning you're living by your own values so it's not that nisha didn't really believe in values and he wasn't properly a nihilist he just believed in nihilism as a means to uh to an end towards actually authenticity and some sort of higher values that come after that which are not socially conditioned so um be careful about that it's easy to to forget that additional you know last step and really in that sense clearing out social conditioning that's a very good thing unless of course you're very attached to your social conditioning like if you have a traditional religious orientation then that might be a problem for you because you're attached to it and you don't want that cleared away and you might be kind of shocked at like well why would you want to clear away all social conditioning well one of the things you discover as you get deep into personal development work and self-actualization is that a lot of the social conditioning and values and norms and morality and religion that you receive from your society has problems to it and these problems have played themselves out for for thousands of years have led to lots of violence and hatred and judgment and and death and inequality and all sorts of things like this and also how can you just know that they're true for yourself if you haven't derived them from first principles then maybe they're false maybe they're illusions maybe they're constructions see now this last part of this uh quote that i read you you know where he says that nihilism is is sort of the belief that everything deserves to perish and you should not just kind of hope for it to perish but you should even push it it's like to to break things down to destroy this is a problematic rendition of nihilism i would suggest because after all here's the problem is that if everything is truly meaningless if you really believe that everything is truly meaningless then why would you want to destroy it you see that's an additional extra step the mind has to take and in fact to actively destroy something or even to actively dislike something or to hate it that is already to attract a negative meaning to it that's one of the problems with nihilism depending on how you know how you construe nihilism because if you construe nihilism as literally just complete meaninglessness to reality okay but then if you go one step further you say and because of that i have to destroy society and institutions and things that's a secondary step that i'm not willing to take with you and i'll show you why that's problematic that is problematic but before we get into that let's continue forward here because we have some more to read continuing from the internet encyclopedia philosophy it says quote the caustic strength of nihilism is absolute nietzsche argues and under its withering scrutiny the highest values devalue themselves the aim is lacking and why finds no answer inevitably nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective western mythos this collapse of meaning relevance and purpose will be the most destructive force in history constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis for humanity end quote so nietzsche was writing in the late 1800s and this was right at the turn of the century before world war one and world war ii and so what was happening in the western civilized world at that time is that all of the old fashioned christian values judeo-christian values and that worldview was starting to unravel it was unraveling from the philosophical perspective but it was starting to also unravel from the scientific perspective because science was becoming more and more advanced and materialism this was we're really talking about the birth of materialism scientific materialism here of atheism stuff like that it really started with with you might say with nietzsche and then flowered very very seriously in the next 50 years after that and then we're living with the fallout from that and so of course one of the questions back then was like well what happens if we lose all our judeo-christian values and worldview what happens if we as a society stop believing in god for the most part or at least act like god is not important or that god is just some sort of superstitious fairy tale from the past from our ancestors and we have sort of transcended that with our logic and our rationality and our science what happens in this kind of society and then some people claimed well it would unravel society and lead to war and to disaster and to all sorts of monstrosities and perhaps to a certain extent that is what happened world war one and world war ii of course there are many more causes to world war one and world war ii than just this but you could say that this is sort of like the backdrop against which world war one and world war ii occurred and all the stuff that you know the atrocities and other uh problems that occurred in between those two wars moving on here says quote nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated it is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence a true nihilist would believe nothing have no loyalties and no purpose other than perhaps an impulse to destroy in the 20th century nihilistic themes like epistemological failure value destruction and cosmic purposelessness have preoccupied artists social critics and philosophers end quote so what happened basically within philosophy and also in a certain sense within science as well just historically in the context of western intellectual tradition is that many of the axioms and assumptions and frameworks that existed for hundreds of thousands of years that went unquestioned started to be questioned philosophically language started to be questioned our notions of how language shapes reality euclidean geometry was questioned even absolute space and time was questioned by einstein and by quantum physicists the idea of even there being matter out of which this universe is made started to be questioned and so as this was happening and everything was being questioned all these fronts also in logic in mathematics there started to be questions about the nature of what mathematics is whether mathematics is even logical there were attempts to formalize mathematics that failed disastrously and conclusively there were failures within logical positivism within the sciences that failed so mankind's attempts at the at the turn of the century at the early 1900s mankind was basically getting to the point where we were getting pretty cocky we were thinking like okay i think we got this figure thing figured out we've got the world figured out we basically got physics figured out we've got chemistry almost figured out we've got biology pretty much figured out we've figured out evolution now with darwin's discoveries so we kind of know where man came from we know it wasn't from god so the story goes and uh we've got logic figured out you know in the next few decades we're going to have all of logic locked down we have all of mathematics locked down and then basically there's even quotes of uh a famous scientist saying something like we figured out 98 of of everything and the other two percent we're going to figure out in the next 50 or 100 years and then there's not going to be any more like even point to doing physics we'll have it all figured out and once we have physics figured out since we're just living in this clockwork universe and everything is perfectly deterministic well then uh we'll have everything figured out because everything just boils down to physics in this sort of reductionistic sense and then also on the cultural front things were being questioned like art molds were being broken within art with the impressionist movements in europe and then with picasso you know he was breaking the mold in terms of what art means then abstract impressionism came after that and then other sorts of weird art movements that completely broke the old classical and neoclassical traditions and they broke with realism and then of course the social norms and things were being questioned as well with the rise of of feminism early feminism the patriarchy was being questioned so all the sort of like the old structures of the judeo-christian world were being questioned um but then what happened within like within logic for example is that that attempt to formalize all of logic by people like god lafregae and alfred north whitehead and bertrand russell and others those were shattered by google's and completeness theorem which i have an episode upon where i discuss its metaphysical and epistemic implications and so that that crashed that endeavor you can't formalize logic you can't formalize mathematics there's actually an infinite number of different kinds of logics and also with physics we've discovered that we know a lot less about physics that we really do and so basically what it sort of opened us up to is this where before we were very well buttoned down a society and we thought we had it figured out really what we discovered is that no we were fooling ourselves we put a bunch of blinders up and we made all these constructions where we thought we understood more than we really do and now we realize how little we really understand in terms of language logic mathematics science physics and this kind of opens us up into this unknown chaos which can feel nihilistic and our sense of meaning and value is getting eroded as well because we're losing our faith in god we're starting to question gender identity and roles we're starting to question monarchies and other sorts of political systems and then where does that leave us as individuals and as a society where should society be headed how do we get all of these individuals to agree upon some direction for society in this new directionless nihilistic world wikipedia also says quote the term was also a pejorative for certain value destructive trends of modernity namely the negation of christianity and european tradition in general it was also in use during the middle ages to denote certain forms of heresy end quote and then from the encyclopedia britannica.com it says quote nihilism represented a crude form of positivism and materialism a revolt against the established order it negated all authority exercised by the state by the church and by the family it based its belief on nothing but scientific truth science would be the solution to all social problems all evils nihilists believed derived from a single source ignorance which science alone would overcome end quote so there's actually something very sneaky here going on in this particular formulation of nihilism again see here that what nihilism purports to be and how it actually behaves in the world can be two different things which can be actually contradictory with each other so for example if you truly wanted to deconstruct everything as a nihilist supposedly does if you wanted to destroy everything well then how could you say that then science will be what remains why didn't you also destroy science why would you rely on science to replace religion or good old-fashioned family values you see and if what you're concerned about is ignorance and you say that all of evil stems from ignorance okay i would agree with you but then what about science how can you say that science will allow you to overcome that ignorance isn't science part of that ignorance you see so there's a question for nihilus as far as how deep are you really willing to go with your nihilism there can be surface level formulations of it and there can be deeper level formulations of it and so i think this just varies upon how deep of a nihilist you are and uh what i see is that most people aren't really willing to go deep into nihilism and the reason that is for very good reason because it's not very useful to your survival to be a nihilist how do you live in the world as a nihilist and this is i think what what most ordinary people would say about nihilism and they would say something like well leo yeah sure i mean this is all nice philosophy and theory and stuff but in the real world if you have children you got to go go to work and feed them so who gives a [ __ ] about this stupid nihilistic philosophy it doesn't get us anywhere and you know it doesn't help me grow my business doesn't help me earn more money doesn't help me get sex so what's the point how is it useful it seems antithetical to usefulness and of course yeah nihilism is not useful um or maybe it is because maybe there are things in the world that need to be destroyed structures belief systems social conditioning social norms maybe these are holding us back and then destroying those might be useful maybe it might be useful to clear your mind of all social conditioning and all value systems maybe is it well it depends on how you do it so what we really had going here is we had a deep spiral dynamic stage blue and if you don't know what that is go watch my spiral dynamics series starting with stage blue we had spiraling stage blue that nietzsche came along and he was sort of at the forefront of stage orange which we would say is modern modernity so christianity gave rise after christianity exhausted itself and it became untenable you know after enough scientific discoveries after darwin after evolution after einstein after quantum mechanics after all these sorts of things after electricity and and uh and so on christianity basically became untenable for serious intellectuals which led to a sort of nihilism but then that nihilism very quickly was replaced with scientific materialism and the sort of mechanistic pragmatic approach which is stage origin and this was both good and bad it was good in the sense that we shed a lot of superstition dogma theocracy and very narrow ethnocentric thinking from the past we put an end to holy wars and religious domination of others we got rid of this idea that christianity is the one true worldview and that all other ones are heathen and need to be converted either by sword or by proselyte evangelical proselytation proselytized proselytization that's a that's a mouthful um so we got over that then came a sort of a period of brief nihilism but that nihilism that void to see the problems that nature reports a vacuum as they say and that void quickly gets filled up with with the world view of scientific materialism to the point where today people born today into the scientific materialist worldview they they they can't even imagine that there used to be previous worldviews that our ancestors and scientists and intellectuals of the past for example had idealist worldviews rather than materialist ones or christian worldviews and they took those worldview just as seriously those worldviews just as seriously as you take your materialism so um and then with materialism came sort of a sort of a pragmatic approach to reality you know like if there's no higher order values if there is no god and anything is allowed basically and we're living in sort of a moral relativistic landscape then what is life about then life is not about worshiping or going to church or working towards some beautiful afterlife or heaven or working to avoid the eternal damnation of hell which is what life was for people for thousands of years in europe for example now life is just about what it's about material acquisition it's just about carnal pleasure personal comfort success as much money and sex as i can get the business that i can build the science that i can do and just being practical and normal having fun it becomes about that and that seems like well that's a much better way to live well in a certain way it is in a certain sense but in another certain sense it's a very hollow existence and this is where someone like jordan peterson would come in and say if you take that too far your life just becomes about work and money and you lose touch of something higher than you you lose the spiritual component and then in a sense that is this sort of nihilism or this lack of direction in your life and then because of that society becomes dysfunctional you as an individual become dysfunctional because there's actually something deeply important that was there in the old traditions that is missing from this purely pragmatic materialistic way of living so we need to go back to the old myths and stories and extract the wisdom and lessons of our ancestors and then of course after stage orange like in the 1950s and 60s then came stage green came online and green was even more relativistic and it not only was it you know so far we've been talking about modernity but then it went even beyond that into post-modernity and then there was a lot of very deep questioning of of all morals and and even cultural norms like what does it even mean to be a man or a woman even ask her to be questioned is heterosexuality even correct even that became questioned and basically with sage green the relativistic stage all the remaining foundations of western civilization were undermined there was a loss of this sort of simplistic top-down authority not just of religion which already happened with modernity but now even with science so see a lot of what sort of normies don't like about post-modernism is that post-modernism doesn't just question the old traditions of the ancestors it goes a step further it questions modernity the idea of an objective reality the idea that physics is the one true interpretation and explanation for what reality is post-modernity questions that and a lot of folks in the hard sciences don't like this because they like the authority they have of the hard sciences they want to say no no no yeah this post-modernism stuff this is just from the soft sciences these people they're just kind of philosophers and social critics but what they're talking about this relativism sure maybe there's a relativism of different cultures of morals and norms a hard scientist would acknowledge that and and maybe you know western civilization is not the best civilization maybe there's value in eastern civilization in the middle eastern civilization and all this okay we'll admit that but let's protect the foundation of science the hard sciences physics chemistry biology mathematics and logic these cannot be questioned because these are the deepest source of truth in our society they produce all of our technology look we landed a man on the moon look at the satellites we launched look at the rockets we have look at the nuclear weapons we have you can't deny that that is real it's tangible you can't just say that's relative and so biology truly does say that there's a man and there's a woman and this is based on dna evidence and a postmodernist would say no even that is just a limited and biased way of looking at the world and it is not the absolute truth and it is not the most important and the most objective and so post-modernist for example with level critiques even at the hard scientists by saying stuff like well most of the hard sciences have been done by privileged white men for centuries for millennia and that presents a very certain biased view of the physical world for example when women do science they might have a different way of looking at the world they might have a different epistemology a different metaphysics a different emphasis on what's important to look at because it's not just that you're looking at the physical world as it is really what you're doing is you're picking you're cherry picking data and facts you're running certain kinds of experiments but then it's you who's determining what kind of experiments are worthwhile to run and how to interpret the data and how to frame the data and what it means and then how to decide what kind of society to structure based upon that data what kind of normative rules and guidelines to give to people in a society now of course the hard scientists they're at stage orange they're stuck in stage orange and so they will debate that and so now we have a debate between orange and green and i'm not going to go too deeply into that here because you can debate that for hours there's a there's there's valid points to be made on both sides but in general stage green is above stage orange and if you if you move to green properly in a solid way and you also integrate orange as you move to green then you should still be able to retain the truths of orange the partial truths of orange and then transcend them with green but with green comes a sort of a what ken wilbur calls it a perspectival madness basically when you move into green the reason people are scared of moving into green the reason there's so much backlash against green is because green is actually very difficult on you psychologically and i went through this when i was in in my late teens early 20s really more like late teens i went through it pretty early where i realized that all of the moral systems were just constructions and we're social conditioning and programming whether christian and even science i started to question even science the norms of science the method of science and i started just to see that all of these are just different and very limited and partial ways of of interacting with reality and looking at reality and that they're not absolutely true and when that happened i was left in this sort of uh what i would describe like in the middle of the ocean rudderless not knowing which direction to go because i had all these different perspectives and i couldn't determine which one was right because for me i became sort of a complete relativist and it was like well terrorists are are you know bombing 911 is that good or bad well who should say i mean after all as an american i have biases of course i don't like it as an american but if i was a lived in the middle east and i was an oppressed uh you know muslim maybe that would be a good thing for me and after all you know american capitalism has done a lot of bad stuff in the middle east so who's to say they don't even have a valid point that's one perspective you might take as a relativist um you know another perspective you might take is like well um like on war is the war in iraq a good thing or a bad thing and you can make sort of a case for both and so basically or like another example would be like with the left wing and the right wing at that point in my life when i was in my late teens uh i would watch basically both sides of the political aisle the left and the right and i would treat them totally equally because at that point i didn't have enough discernment to understand i didn't know about spider dynamics i didn't know that there were sort of lower and higher stages of development and so i thought that everybody was just equal and that the left and the right were just two equal sides of the coin and so i watched a lot of conservative media even though i didn't agree with it because i myself was quite quite liberal but like i would watch a lot of bill o'reilly sean hannity i would listen to a lot of right-wing talk radio for hours and hours and hours and even though i didn't agree with with their ideas ultimately i had to say like well but who am i to say that what i agree with or don't agree with is the arbiter of truth what if bill o'reilly is right what if sean hannity makes a good point and so i listened to that in retrospect now i realize how how foolish that was but that was a phase i had to go through because at that point i literally did not have a means for adjudicating or discerning between any kind of value judgments so i was very sort of neutral and i thought that neutrality was the closest to truth but it turns out that there's a there are higher ways of looking at things and that not not every not every side is equally valid so how to deal with this a perspectival madness or this multiplicity of perspectives and views and sorting them out and making sense of which views are more valid than others which ones are more truthful than others which ones are more beneficial and healthy and which ones are more toxic which ones are more in good faith which ones are more in bad faith this is what it took me a good five or ten years to learn of swimming around in this a perspectival madness and i think and it was it was difficult emotionally it was difficult uh you feel lost and i think that this is precisely why people who are raised into a traditional value system like judeo-christian the judeo-christian worldview or any other value system islam or something like that for it's so difficult to get them up into stage green from stage blue because in doing so they become unmoored and they become lost and they don't want to go through that and also you start to question everything you become very skeptical and that's really where i came to nihilism from is from a deep skepticism early in my teenage years i was just i just knew that everything had to be questioned i couldn't take anything on faith because to take something even one thing on faith would would open me to a possibility for deep epistemic error and so basically i questioned everything including science and see most people if they question the religious norms that's easy questioning the scientific norms that's really hard and i fell into that trap too for a while at first i started to turn my skepticism towards science because i suspected that something there was fishy but as much as i poured my skepticism into it i just couldn't crack the nut of science uh it's too strong it it it defends itself so it has so many ingenious defense mechanisms that get you to believe that it's absolute truth or objective truth or that it's the best method of arriving to truth that we have and it's especially difficult to challenge the hard sciences and i just couldn't wrap my mind around how to do it i wanted to do it as a skeptic but i didn't know how and it would take me probably another decade to succeed in that um but basically i tried to crack the nut of of of science and i couldn't crack it and as a result i sort of was resigned to the truths of science because i couldn't crack them and uh and i was sort of resigned to evolution and i was sort of resigned to atheism at that point because they don't really teach you how to crack the nut of science because our society hasn't progressed to that level yet although i mean they're starting to teach it with stage green in universities and that's precisely what all the backlash to stage green is about is because the stage blue people and the strange orange people the religious people and the scientific people the atheistic people the rational people they do not want their atheism and rationalism deconstructed and they're gonna they're gonna employ every single trick in their in their ego's mind to prevent that from happening so why is nihilism seen as so negative by society fundamentally because it undermines the ego the ego needs to construct meaning and value in order to orient itself and to survive that is what meaning and value are meaning and value are not things found in the outer world this is basically what nihilism is telling you and also to a certain extent post-modernism you don't find meaning and value in the outer world and i mean a good scientist will tell you this too science doesn't prove anything is valuable or meaningful strictly speaking all science does is it measures stuff that's all it does it makes predictions science can tell you where the moon will be next year that doesn't tell you if the moon is good or bad it doesn't tell you whether you should fly to the moon you should mine the moon you should nuke the moon settle the moon it tells you nothing about what you should do but you see us humans were caught in an extra in an existential bind for survival you don't really have an option as long as you're alive you're surviving and in fact not just having an option but you have deep instincts from a billion years of evolution for survival you're instinctually biased towards surviving and against doing airy fairy philosophy and deconstructing meaning you can sit here with me today and deconstruct all the meaning you want and you can even believe it you can even call yourself a nihilist but then tomorrow you're gonna wake up and go to work and earn your paycheck to pay your electricity and to feed yourself because you're hungry and the hunger will override any philosophical considerations of nihilism you see this is the problem so it's easy to call yourself a nihilist but then you don't actually act like it this is one of the deep problems with nihilism is that for you to actually live like a nihilist would be very very challenging and so a lot of nihilists they might call themselves that or might they might fancy themselves that way but that's just some sort of intellectual game they play they don't actually live that way and most humans don't live that way and most humans recognize that that's a bad way to live but nihilism is treated as negative by society at large because society at large is in the business of constructing a civilization it has a bias and the ego hates when its constructions are questioned because the questioning of these constructions which are very useful for survival threatens survival so for example if we start questioning money what money is and we start telling everyone hey you know the us dollar is just imaginary it doesn't have any value or meaning that's going to lead to the destruction of the economy and most people don't want that because most people aren't interested in knowing the dollars imaginary they just want to use the dollar to buy their food see western civilization as it turns out is a house of cards built on an unquestioned foundation of axioms assumptions both metaphysical epistemic religious theological scientific linguistic even the idea of a western civilization as a concept itself is a construction it's a house of cards not to mention the idea that western civilization is the best that too is a is a house of cards you will realize if you question it if you dare to question it and western civilization has this bias of construction or survival which means that western civilization if it finds some useful falsehood it would rather go with the useful falsehood than with the truth because the falsehood is useful whereas the truth what's it going to do for me so see if your attitude is very selfish and all you care about is your own comfort and what things are going to do for you then that opens the floodgates for all sorts of falsehoods fantasies and constructions and illusions and then the problem with that is that as you're building those and you're connecting them together the more of them you connect together the more your illusions take on a an air of reality but this is not true reality it's a pseudo reality it's merely that you're writing a novel and you're adding in so many rich details into this novel that you're writing that eventually you get so lost in your own novel you get so lost in your own [ __ ] that you forget it was [ __ ] from the very beginning that it's a fantasy it can be fun it can help you to survive but also the problem with it is that it becomes very vulnerable it becomes vulnerable to deconstruction and to prevent the deconstruction this construct which we might call western civilization it starts adding on additional lies and fantasies as defense mechanisms so for example science is the foundation of today's western civilization in the past it used to be christianity but now it's science and materialism and rationalism and logic and mathematics so that's the foundation if you start to question that you will get so demonized and so attacked because it's virtually impossible to deconstruct that foundation not because you can't and not because it's true but simply because people are so defensive about it that they won't even give you the time of day to listen to you and they won't even want to contemplate it because if you can unravel that you will unravel all of western civilization and i've i've done that in other episodes you can see me doing that see my three-part series deconstructing the myth of science where i go very deep into that uh but anyways see so what happens with nihilism is that nihilism is kind of like a for a very deep part of skepticism um literally literally leads to a disillusionment think of that word dis illusion meant it's the loss of illusion and the ego doesn't like to lose its illusions it doesn't feel good to the ego how do you think a scientist feels who invested 40 years into his phd work and research and into his academic career how do you think he will feel if he realizes that the entire foundation of science and academia is built on illusions and fictions and constructions it's going to lead to an existential crisis it's going to lead to a nihilism he would say and therefore he associates negativity with that but that negativity is not inherent to the nihilism that negativity is simply because you've been building this house of cards you've been constructing this ponzi scheme in your own mind you and collectively with all your friends and colleagues and then now it's getting unraveled and that threatens you threatens your survival threatens your livelihood maybe you won't be able to feed your kids anymore that threatens you that's very scary to you as a matter of life and death you've built your entire identity around this so good luck getting one of these scientists to really do a serious deconstruction of science or academia or logic and of course they're gonna have very good excuses for why leo no no it's not that i don't want to or i can't handle it leo it's just because you're some new ager who has a soft mind and isn't isn't a true scientist that's that's the real reason see you think you're being rational and truthful you're not you're playing games you're playing ego games even when you tell yourself you're being factual and objective and scientific and rigorous and logical and all of that you tell yourself that that's not ego stuff that's objective reality you're being very hard-nosed and what i'm telling you is that no all of that is a story you invented as a defense mechanism by your ego to prevent you from actually really doing a serious investigation and deconstruction of the foundations of your mind in reality and you will say no leah that's some psychobabble [ __ ] and i would just say that's yeah it's another story you come up with another defense mechanism see you have an endless amount of these defense mechanisms no matter what i say you have a defense mechanism against it so that's how the mind works you have an infinite capacity for denial and rationalization so you will rationalize away any critique i give because you're not an honest actor see you're not interested in truth you're interested in survival and i said no leo is a scientist i'm interested in truth but you aren't because if you were truly interested in truth you would deconstruct science and then you would realize science is not actually truth but no leo says truth well that's the social conditioning you were taught that you never questioned what if science is not truth see but you don't want to go down that road it's too scary the problem is is that you have no clue yet how scary it is to deconstruct science you think it's just like some philosophy here like it's oh it's all fun and games it's just cool ideas no no no it's not cool ideas this will radically send you into a a spiral a nihilistic spiral an existential crisis and then that will be very difficult for you emotionally to deal with the problem here is not not that you're not rational enough although that is a problem your rationality is actually very poor uh you're completely distorting and twisting rationality uh your ego has co-opted it as part of survival but that's not the the main problem the main problem is actually emotional emotionally you actually can't handle the things that i'm saying which is why you deny it all right so let's explicitly tell you how nihilism is right nihilism is correct in that life has no meaning and purpose that's correct how could it all meaning and purpose is relative and completely contingent upon one's ego and what one identifies oneself as all identity is of course also completely relative so what's meaningful to one will not be meaningful to another and this is so obvious just look at look at history look at how mankind behaves look at all the conflict and war it's completely obvious that like to christians jesus is meaningful but to a buddhist jesus is not meaningful to a buddhist buddha is meaningful to christians buddha is the devil not meaningful or meaningful and negative sense to a christian going to church and you know eating a wafer that the priest gives you like in the catholic church the eucharist or whatever it is that's meaningful has a lot of meaning to a buddhist or to a scientist or an atheist it looks silly what does eating this wafer have to do with being spiritual it's completely relative right you might even say well yeah maybe those things are relative those are like cultural things but but but leah what about like science objective truth isn't that meaningful what about um happiness what about living a good life what about life itself isn't that meaningful inherently and the answer is no why would it be why would life be any more meaningful than death why would a good life be any more meaningful than a bad life it's so it's all personal preference some people actually enjoy cutting themselves or suffering in fact most people enjoy their suffering and don't want to give it up as far as purposes in life well you can have whatever purpose you want i mean hitler had the purpose of exterminating the jews that was his purpose that got his juices flowing was that a wrong purpose was it a right purpose it doesn't apply it was a purpose that's what he liked somebody else might have a purpose to evangelize the world you know some christian missionary might travel to to polynesia and convert some heathens there into uh christians is that is that a good purpose is that a valid purpose is that a wrong purpose it's whatever you imagine it is some scientists might might have the purpose to to explore the galaxy and to discover new scientific truth is that a valid purpose i mean it all depends some scientists might have the purpose of building a nuclear weapon is that a good purpose again it all depends there's no good or bad about these purposes it's however your ego structures itself and conceived the world in the end all these purposes and meanings are just functions of the ego all value is created by the ego if you take a look at an object just sitting out an empty space like the moon the moon has no value is that obvious to you that the moon has no value it only has value relative to your ego's survival so for example if you're a a businessman and you want to have a mega yacht and you want to live in beverly hills you know in a 50 million dollar mansion on a hill with a nice view you might get the idea that you can mine minerals on the moon and then sell them to other humans because other humans want them for survival it's useful so you develop some rockets and a space mining you know facility up on the moon to get get it up on the moon there with the rockets and then you mine the minerals and you send them down you mine gold and whatever else is there you sell it and then if the moon becomes valuable to you because you want to extract stuff from the moon so that you can live in your nice mansion with you know you can pay for prostitutes um and you can have nice parties and you can drive a fancy you know mercedes-benz or rolls-royce and you can impress your neighbors and you can feel good about yourself and in that sense the moon is valuable to you but like is the moon valuable to your dog no the moon has zero value to your dog is the moon valuable to a tree no is the moon valuable to the universe as a whole like does the universe value the moon more than it values the earth no obviously not so nihilism is also correct in that all morality is relative because morality is basically just hinged upon value meaning and purpose so if those are relative then morality goes as well what's good what's bad it's it's whatever you decide and if you look through him in human history this is what explains all of the craziness of human history all of the evil and all of the finger-pointing and blaming and all the torture and all the pillaging and raping and and uh spanish inquisitions and all this why did all this stuff happen not only did it happen but all the people who did that stuff they thought they were being the good guys as they were doing it they honestly thought they were the good guys why because good is nothing other than what your ego thinks is good for it that's how you define good there is no absolute good without an ego how can something be bad if you don't care what happens to you see bad stuff only makes sense or has meaning when you define things you don't want to happen happen to you like you don't want to be tortured so you define that as bad but if you didn't care about being tortured then it wouldn't be bad literally people think that badness is baked into the torture no badness is just your reaction and fear and hatred of it or the pain it causes you you might say well leo but but can't we all agree that pain is just bad suffering is inherently bad and the answer is no absolutely not why would pain and suffering be bad if you didn't have pain in your life you would be dead pain is the mechanism you use to stay alive so is suffering so if you want to eliminate all the suffering in the world you're stupid because without suffering all the things you love would be dead they might say ah leo but then we can say death is the is the is the worst thing death is the bad one no who said that you value life because you're alive and you're selfish and that's a bias can you see that there's no reason why you should value life over death science has not proven that death is bad and moreover you can't have life without death so if you condemn death then you also condemn life you must say no no leo in the future science will be able to get us to a point where we will have eternal life and no death there will never be such a future i hate to break it to you everything finite dies the only thing that doesn't die is the infinite but the infinite isn't alive to begin with so doesn't apply the infant includes both life and death and it doesn't uh distinguish between the two and it doesn't value one over the other that's the point so so the idea that death is bad or suffering is bad or pain is bad this is not scientific at all it's also not rational so if you think you're being rational or scientific by holding these beliefs you're not you're just you just haven't thought through it science has no opinion if you do science properly science has no opinion about death or life or pain or suffering in fact science would tell you that pain and suffering these were where they come from through evolution why they evolved because they were useful for life also how nihilism is correct is that all of reality is relative there is no objective world there is no objective external world relativity goes down not just at the culture it's not just at the cultural level it goes way deeper than that it goes to the ontological level to the metaphysical level so you are hallucinating physical reality i'm not gonna explain why or how i'm not gonna prove that to you here i've talked about that in many other places uh we'll keep going down the list um nihilism is also correct in that the world cannot really be known in the way humans try to know it so this enterprise of science thinking that you can sort of just acquire more and more knowledge accumulate and eventually you'll know the whole universe no it'll never work because the universe is infinite and and your knowledge is always partial and limited all your models um are just partial perspectives and you will never get to the full perspective by an accumulation of all of those so epistemic nihilism this is called epistemic nihilism uh sort of a nihilism towards knowledge in particular the previous point was called we might call that ontological nihilism or metaphysical nihilism uh sort of a denial of the physical objective world of course all social institutions and norms are groundless and self-serving every social institution is is pure selfishness it doesn't care about the truth it's not grounded in anything it's just a house of cards built to perpetuate itself and to serve those who are associated with it and ultimately nihilism is correct in that all beliefs are ultimately untrue i've also talked about that elsewhere we don't have time to to go into an in-depth explanation of why that's the case but if you are skeptical enough you'll realize that all beliefs are ultimately untrue so so yeah so this is what most people would deny and this is what nihilism gets right but what about what nihilism gets wrong this is also very important so let's give a list of this the biggest way nihilism is wrong is that it gives meaninglessness a negative meaning you have to distinguish here between sort of meaninglessness with a lowercase m versus meaninglessness with the uppercase m meaninglessness with a lowercase m is a sort of meaninglessness which sends you into a depression and the reason it sends you into depression is because you give it a negative meaning which of course is self-contradicting because if you truly realize that the world was meaningless completely meaningless you couldn't be depressed about it you couldn't be negative about it and it would not be a justification for inaction do you see why because if you're depressed about it or negative about it or you want to now use it as a reason to destroy things but that means you're giving it meaning it means something to you that the world is meaningless but that's not meaninglessness that's meaning so the problem here is that the nihilism doesn't go all the way you need to take your nihilism deeper until there's a sort of a going full circle an inversion where you go from the lowercase m to the uppercase m where you truly realize oh it's actually absolutely meaningless that's not bad it's not negative it doesn't mean i should destroy things it doesn't mean even that social institutions are bad it doesn't even mean that constructions are bad see if you take nihilism as this sort of invitation to destroy things because things that are constructed are fictions and houses of cards and are illusions and that illusion is bad you don't get it if you think illusion is bad you're judging illusion you're giving meaning to illusion if you think the us government is bad because it's just a house of cards built on nothing but fantasies and you know fairy tales we tell ourselves from the money to the constitution that's written on a piece of paper to the language we used to write it you don't really understand how deeply meaningless it is it's so meaningless that you shouldn't be pissed off at anything if you're angsty about stuff if you're bitter about stuff if you hate stuff if you want to kill people if you're turning into a misanthropic person who doesn't like mankind all of that you need to recognize is not true nihilism it is a pseudo-nihilism it is negative meaning and that is the ego that is the ego and in fact it's a less functional and more toxic ego than the ego of those people who are actually constructing these illusions and houses of cards that is a problem and i think that that's in something that normal people even though that they won't be able to articulate this of you you know talk with them they have that intuition about nihilism is that your nihilism is like what is it going to really do for you it's going to send you into a depression and it's going to make you better at the world that's not a good way to live the world and they're correct about that you don't want to live you don't want to live in the world that way another thing that nihilism gets wrong is that you can't derive an ought from an is so if you say that reality is meaningless that does not mean that now you ought to do something like destroy an institution or destroy science or to kill somebody or to commit suicide no reality could be completely meaningless and you could enjoy it reality could be completely meaningless and you can buy a ticket to hawaii and go on the beach and sip your pina colada and enjoy beautiful women sunbathing on the on the on the beach that's perfectly compatible with true nihilism but see if you're doing a sort of a pseudo-nihilism a false nihilism then you might say no that's that's you're still part of the game and you know you're not you gotta actually destroy the system man no why why destroy why destroy anything why is destruction better than creation why is creation better than destruction see if you're truly annihilus you're truly left in this such a neutral position that it actually frees you up to behave in any way you want and now if you want to destroy if you genuinely want to destroy that makes you feel good i guess okay go for it but does it does it make you feel good is that really what you want if you think about it you'll realize no i don't want that it doesn't feel good it doesn't make others feel good so why would i do it now you can say well but if it doesn't make me feel good so what can't i be a nihilist and destroy stuff even it makes me feel bad and of course the answer is yes of course you can because nihilism completely frees you up to be any way you want but the question is do you actually want that in the end what it comes down to is just what do you want you're confused about what you want that's the problem if you cleared that up you wouldn't be destroying things or you would be very careful in what you destroy because i mean certain things do need to be destroyed like certain corrupt social institutions they need to be questioned and reformed parts of them need to be destroyed but this sort of like desire to take a wrecking ball to all of mankind and even maybe to yourself and even maybe destroy your own life this is this is not going to be a life that you yourself want so that's a dead end another thing that's wrong with nihilism is that it doesn't complete the deconstruction of the ego into awakening and god realization so the problem is again the same way that skepticism is often misused i've talked about this in my episode called false versus true skepticism oftentimes the way skepticism and nihilism is used is that it's used to destroy all of the stuff outside of you and it's not turned in towards you really what you should be doing you take the wrecking ball of nihilism and skepticism and swing it at yourself swing it at that giant ego of yours deconstruct that before you go deconstructing social systems and governments and even science deconstruct your own ego but see the nihilist doesn't do that almost every nihilus that i could run into i guarantee you they're gonna have a giant ego they're gonna have a nihilistic ego in fact nihilism itself will become the ego and the identity but they're not gonna be conscious of that so in fact they're contradicting themselves because see when the nihilism gets so deep the nihilism has to destroy itself too but most nihilists aren't willing to do that because that's too threatening for the ego to do so what the ego does is the ego co-ops nihilism is part of its survival strategy and then what i would say is that the survival strategy of nihilism if you're going to use it for that is very dysfunctional and in this sense normies are correct jordan peterson is correct nihilism as a survival strategy in life ain't so good it's not going to work out for you but there is a deeper truer nihilism which leads to awakening if you take it that far that means deconstructing your ego so another thing that nihilism gets wrong is that mostly what nihilism is as a philosophy is it's just stuck at the level of belief and concept it's not actualized it's also turned into a political ideology sometimes like maybe anarchism that's also an invalid use of of of nihilism nihilism doesn't make any political prescriptions truly if you think government is bad and evil you're not being a proper nihilist and finally what nihilism gets wrong is that it overlooks what happens when you reach the bottom of nihilism if you go all the way down down down down the rabbit hole of nihilism eventually what happens is that you awaken everything loses meaning but then after that you go through the dark night of the soul and then the ego dies and then you awaken to god not as a belief not as some christian fairy tale god has consciousness consciousness is the only real thing so what nihilism overlooks is that yes the christian versions of god were stupid and so are many of the other religious versions of god yes religion is pretty stupid it's filled with dogma and [ __ ] and so forth and the meaning it comes up with is a false pseudo meaning but it's missing the very soul and heart of reality which is that you're god that god is everything that god is beauty god is love god is divinity spirit goodness truth consciousness all as absolutes so the paradox of meaninglessness is that when it completely collapses you actually discover infinite love and absolute goodness which is everything and then you realize oh all these stupid nihilistic beliefs and philosophies i had all these philosophers i read the existentialist nietzsche and all this they were all deluded and i was just using them as a defense mechanism against the realization of what i am as god infinite love and then you're no longer you're no longer depressed you no longer want to destroy at that point at that point uh you so fall in love with yourself and with reality that you actually rediscover a higher purpose and the higher purpose is to help mankind to awaken not because you have to not because someone told you not because religion tells you not because it's a moral tradition or a norm but simply because that's what god would do that's what consciousness does consciousness is a self-awakening system everything that happens within consciousness is just a means to help consciousness awaken to itself in the absolute sense in the biggest picture sense and then you just when you relinquish your selfish needs and concerns you lose yourself and then when you lose yourself you just become a force of the universe for its own awakening in whatever means that might be it might be art it might be teaching it might be engineering it might be science it might be politics whatever there's a million ways that you could do that and then your life takes on the highest and deepest meaning but this meaning it's not a constructed meaning really it's you realize that all meaning is a construction but awakening is not a construction the universe awakening to itself that's not a construction that's an absolute and so what the nihilist is overlooking is the the existence of the absolute and that's a problem a lot of people have when i start talking about absolute truth many scientific and atheistic and rational people they they scratch their heads and they just can't open their minds to the possibility of the existence of an absolute truth but consider that you're wrong and that absolute truth does actually exist not as a concept or a belief but absolutely this is it you're in absolute truth right now you just don't realize it so criticisms of nihilism as with many things like i said before that distinction of criticism from above or from below a criticism of nihilism from below would be one coming from traditional values and it's fear-based it's from someone it's from an ego basically so like a christian or maybe someone like jordan peterson might criticize nihilism on the grounds that it's going to lead to a bad life uh a bad marriage and an inability to function in the world and it comes that comes from a place of fear because it's like it's going to be total chaos relativity is going to lead to total chaos and society will fall apart this is a fear-based shadow based uh criticism from below of nihilism this only comes because that ego mind that is making that criticism has not itself actually gone through the nihilistic process and you can tell because it's avoidant and is scared of that process that's why it's doing the criticizing the criticism is a defense mechanism this is why traditionally oriented people are very fearful of nihilism like if you have christian parents and you come home with a with a with a nihilist textbook you're gonna freak them out um but then there's criticisms of nihilism from above so i criticized nihilism a bit in this episode from above and the difference is that i've actually gone through the nihilism i was a nihilist with the lowercase n and then i became a nihilus with an uppercase n and then what i realized is that nihilism itself is self-defeating and it's conceptual and that there's something deeper than nihilism which is just infinite consciousness and love and god it's the thing that people like jordan peterson think they're defending when they're defending traditional values against nihilism but actually which is paradoxically the very thing which is keeping them from realizing god and love and from understanding religion so if i was debating a nihilist i could tell him all sorts of things he's got wrong about his worldview but it would be coming from above because i went through what he's going through i've been where he's been stuck and i can see how his nihilism is just another piece of clothing that the ego has adorned it's a defense mechanism from deconstructing the ego it's important before you critique nihilism that you first acknowledge its core truths the core truths of nihilism which are correct is that everything is absolutely groundless and relative the world is inherently devoid of meaning in a very radical sense and that all value is self-biased but the trick is that that all applies to nihilism itself too there's a deep twisted strange loopy self-reflection that happens here which most nihilists are not aware of so to get to the uppercase and nihilism from a lowercase nihilism you gotta do the self-reflection complete the loop do the strange loop and realize that your own nihilism eats its own tail or a boros style so the problem with nihilism is not that it goes too far is that it doesn't go far enough the ego is never fully deconstructed because the nihilism is kept at the level of philosophy see the ego is so safe with philosophy because it's just concepts the ego loves to take anything actual that will change your life and turn it into an idea or a philosophy or concept or a model so you got to take it below philosophy and into actual embodiment actual practice so the ego is never deconstructed the negativity of nihilism is not fully deconstructed survival itself is not deconstructed science and materialism are not deconstructed if you deconstruct all those now you're becoming a true nihilist capital n nihilist which is just to say you're becoming a mystic a mystic is just a nihilist who went all the way who took it from philosophy to embodiment it sounds so counterintuitive because like for example if i would tell that to jordan peterson that a mystic is just a radical nihilist i'm pretty sure he would disagree with me very vehemently he'd have a lot of defenses and excuses for why that's not true because it's just it's so unacceptable to a traditionally oriented person to a conservative that mysticism is literally just nihilism actualized for example to tell a christian that jesus was a radical nihilist which he was effectively this is the last thing they would accept in fact they would they would they would call me a a satan worshipper or something like that so spirituality is nihilism that's the thing everybody is missing they think that spirituality nihilism are somehow opposed to each other they're not they're spirituality just nihilism actualized you see most people's attachments to the material world and their to their ideas into their ideology and to meaning most of this is socially conditioned they did not create any of it consciously they didn't sit down and decide it and think it through rationally they were just born into it and this includes science and logic and mathematics and all this hard stuff this is all social conditioning the only reason you believe in science or an evolution or mathematics or logic or anything is because it was programmed into your mind like religion you didn't consciously choose it even if you're a scientist you didn't consciously choose it and so the value of nihilism is that it can wipe the slate clean of all the social conditioning it allows you to deconstruct everything and then the value of that and this is where nietzsche was right is that now you can from that clean slate develop your own meaning in life your own purpose your own system of values and when you do that that's going to make you more spiritual than any other person who professes to be spiritual under the social conditioning model because spirituality is not something you can be socially conditioned into spirituality only comes from your own consciousness and your own consciousness is hindered by all of the social conditioning so it's very paradoxical that by questioning and doubting and destroying christianity and hinduism and islam and even buddhism and atheism and rationality and science by doing all of that you will actually become truly deeply spiritual and you will become very authentic and you will become very grounded and strong as an individual you will become a powerful leader and you will start to become truly satisfied with your life because you can't be satisfied with a life based upon the social conditioned values of other people which are not authentic to you so spirituality is not only awakening and deconstructing everything but spirituality is also discovering what you truly value in life now you might say bilio but all the values are constructions yes but the difference is that once you go through the nihilism and you burn everything to the ground then and you become conscious that all of reality is imaginary then it's like you're in a dream right you realize you're in a dream you realize there's nothing to do in a dream but to play so you're going to be playing games now and you can play the game however you want and you and then and then you can be honest with yourself and ask yourself okay so how would i play the game if i was totally free and unattached and i wasn't coming at this game from a position of neediness or attachment or fear but from a place of love and now i can play the game from a place of love how do i want to manifest my love in the world according to my own personal preferences because you're still gonna have preferences the difference though is that you don't hold your preferences as absolutes you don't try to force your preferences on others see like maybe you don't like eating pork but now you're not gonna force others not to eat pork um you're gonna have sort of a a very detached hands-off approach to life you can have preferences and biases even awakened people do but you're not going to be normative about them you're not going to be needy about them you're not going to fool yourself into thinking that these personal preferences are absolute in some sense you're not going to fool yourself with the idea that western civilization is the best one or that my religion is the best one or that my god is the true one or that my science is the only way to look at the world or that logic is the only way to look at the world you're not going to be fooled and limited by these sorts of ideas anymore so you free yourself up you're literally liberating your mind and again remember when you do the nihilism properly you're not holding construction and illusion as a bad thing illusion has a negative connotation in our society but it's really not illusion is reality illusion is a dream it's a play you're in a play it's a drama for your own entertainment maybe this bums you out but you gotta get past that and then eventually you'll realize you'll come out the other end and you'll realize how beautiful that is this is the greatest gift the fact that reality is an illusion is not something to be bummed out about it's the greatest gift because that means there's nothing to fear it's a game play it enjoy it there's nothing else to do enjoy the [ __ ] game construct whatever meanings you want and be honest with yourself that you're constructing it construct it consciously rather than unconsciously that's the only problem that's really the key difference is that a person with traditional values like jordan peterson is not consciously constructing the value set it's been programmed into him and he's unconsciously defending it clinging to it now he intuits that it's pointing towards something higher and he's right about that but he's never going to reach that something higher until he's willing to let go of those social conditions and those beliefs and those concepts and ideas and the ego and identity that's been built around it this is how you become nietzsche's ubermensch the superman this is what the superman is the superman is living completely from his or her own core authentic inner core inner motivations that run far deeper than anything that society can program into you consciousness cannot be programmed it's not mechanical because it's not finite it's infinite it's an infinite intelligence so as the superman or superwoman you're living from this place of deep consciousness and living presence and intelligence which is the god within you that animates you that makes you passionate that makes you enthused which is spirit enthusiasm means to be filled with the spirit of god to be truly passionate about life to be driven by love this cannot be given to you by any human because it's a superhuman capacity when humans try to give that to you or teach it to you those are all poor substitutes and facsimiles of the actual thing you can't turn intelligence and consciousness and love into algorithms because they're infinite you can't encapsulate the truth in any system of human design because it's infinite so what nihilism deeply it is that all of the human constructions of society and morality and religion all this and science even is that it's all petty human [ __ ] humans take their own construction so seriously when really humans are just bullshitters that's what humans are they're bullshitting all the time even when they're scientists they're full of [ __ ] it's just that simple it's so simple it's so obvious once you realize it if you go into every human situation whether it's a business deal a relationship a marriage dealing with kids dealing with with friends entertainment art science academia government religion go into any of these institutions and activities and just go in there with the assumption that this whole thing is full of [ __ ] it's all [ __ ] and you will be right 95 of the time but but don't tell them that because because they'll kick you out they don't like being told that because it's too true it's profoundly true people don't like being called on out on their [ __ ] they get offended they start attacking you so here i'll also connect nihilism with uh what's a concept from uh from mythology and from joseph campbell and also some of the stuff that jordan peterson teaches is you know the hero's journey i'm really big on the hero's journey but but people people like jordan peterson and so on they don't even joseph campbell didn't didn't understand what the hero's journey was really about i have an episode called the highest hero's journey go check that out it's very important i also talked about it in my life purpose course go check that out it basically shows you how to do your hero's journey related to your career very powerful um but uh the hero's journey i explained it in that video about the highest hero's journey the hero journey has these very stages and steps that you go through hopefully you still remember some of those it's a long video that i long time ago that i shot that video basically the hero sets out on the journey then he faces threshold guardians it's difficult he gets defeated by the threshold guardians he perseveres he finds the wizard or the wise old man who gives him knowledge and wisdom and gives him a weapon or some sort of boon he takes that weapon or and that wisdom and he uses it to to face down the threshold guardians and defeat them one by one by one eventually he defeats enough of those and then finally he encounters uh the deepest you know his deepest obstacle sort of the monster that he's trying to destroy here like the final boss of the game you might say um he he tries to battle this monster this final boss he fails he's not strong enough and then he enters what's called the belly of the whale the belly of the whale is the lowest point in the journey it's your deepest turning inwards into yourself to really figure out do i have what it takes to defeat the final boss and to defeat the final boss which you need is you don't need a magic sword it's not the problem it's not that your sword is not big enough or that you don't have enough health potions or something material like that the problem the bottleneck ultimately is your own heart and soul your spirit is your spirit steeled enough for the battle ahead and it's in the belly of the whale that really the boss is defeated because physically the boss is out there you're in the belly of the whale by yourself alone facing your own self your own weaknesses your own ego what happens in the belly of the whale is that you you finally face your own inner deepest inner weaknesses and self-esteem issues and all that and you you come out of that you might call that the dark night of the soul and then finally you're spiritually steeled enough now to go fight the final boss and now victory against the final boss is guaranteed because the true victory was already won in the belly of the whale so nihilism is the belly of the whale but the problem is that the belly of the whale is the place where very few are willing to go that's the lowest point in the spiritual journey that's where the real spiritual work happens and so people invent all sorts of external excuses for distractions and doing stuff that is not actually going and taking them into the belly of the whale and people might demonize the belly of the whale they might say it's dangerous it's bad and it is from the standpoint of ordinary life if you're living your ordinary life you're not battling some giant boss monster then for you entering the belly of the whale is uh it's a bad thing it's difficult but if you come out of it then you'll be a true hero the hero's journey is just god realization that's what the whole thing is about it's it's a it's a myth it's a mythic archetype that shows you how to how to reach god realization how to realize your own true self as god so going through nihilism is necessary and it makes you stronger it makes your mind stronger so don't fear it just go go through it you have to be careful because you can go through it in a dysfunctional way where you end up killing yourself you don't want to do that i talk about in other videos some of the you know the different traps and mistakes you can make going on this journey i have a video called the dangers of spiritual work which explains some of the there are real dangers i mean it's dangerous being a hero is dangerous fighting a dragon defeating a giant final boss dragon monster is dangerous it's difficult it's a more difficult life than just living complacently in mediocrity going to your nine-to-five job just punching the clock and just doing what everybody else in society is doing that's the difference between not being a hero and being a hero so the tragedy for the lowercase and nihilus is that they never realized that god was nothing nihilism literally means nothing and what you realize at the end of the journey once you defeat the dragons and everything is that you're left with nothing god is nothing these nihilists were so close and yet they were so far and they don't understand what nothing is the nihilist idea of nothing is not what god actually is god is an infinite loving nothing which a nihilist usually doesn't comprehend the purpose of spiritual practice is nihilism meditation nihilism that's what it is you're trying to shut down your mind to zero so look at this nihilism in theory as a philosophy leads to depression angst negativity destruction and anarchy and chaos and a bad life and suffering whereas nihilism fully actualized not as a philosophy but actualized leads to enlightenment sainthood god consciousness love and truth and a playful joyful life it also leads to immortality by the way because nothing what's the one thing that can't die nothing by the way if you're confused here um when i say nothing i'm not talking about the nothing you think of and i'm not talking about non-existence nothingness is not non-existence it exists nothing exists non-existence does not exist there's no such thing as non-existence there's only existence so very counterintuitively meaninglessness goes full circle into liberation see my episode called the theme of things going full circle and also see my episode called the counterintuitive nature of life both of those episodes give many examples of this sort of going full circle effect which leads to a lot of counter-intuitive results and uh conclusions in life a lot of thing a lot of times you think you're going towards something and then it ends up actually leading you all the way back to where you started in a cyclical or spiral manner the really deep irony here is so interesting is that those who reject nihilism are actually the devils because the devil is the ego scared of losing all of its constructions go check out my episode called what is the devil where i explain that one of my best episodes it'll open your eyes as to how evil functions huh so ironically it's the christians and the muslims and the buddhists and the hindus who are the devils the atheists are also devils the scientists and and rationalists are also devils metaphorically speaking and that they're selfish they're not they're not willing to give up yourself they're not they're not willing to give up their constructions the devil is busy defending his constructions the constructions are always finite and they always separate the devil from god so the devil is just busy lurking in the shadows away from the light avoiding the light of god ta-da and of course the devil co-opts spiritual truths to put on a facade of spiritual work so some of the biggest devils are the people who portray themselves to be the most spiritual which is why you see these sorts of scandals with christian evangelicals and and other you know religious hypocrites and people don't really like religion for this reason because it's so obvious how hypocritical those religious preachers are um and that's the reason that is because they've got egos that they haven't deconstructed and their christianity and their religion didn't give them the tools necessary to do the deconstruction so god is nothing god is void god is groundless the ground was ground god is shunyata god is emptiness god is cessation god is nirvana god is mu god is consciousness now you might say but leo maybe that's true for the buddhists but it's not true for the hindus the christians the jews the muslims and so on um actually it is it's true for all of them what the christians call love it's nothingness actually what the hindus call shiva is nothingness what the jews call einsof their name for god is nothingness the muslims the sufis they refer to um to the deepest spiritual realization as fana alfana which translates as the passing away of the passing away it's a nihilism so deep that it even erases itself it's a self-erasing eraser fauna alfana that is allah and i have an episode called aztec non-duality where i talk about the aztec religion and uh tayotal if you still remember remember tayota um that's actually a really powerful episode go go watch that one it explains a lot about the nature of god um yeah toyota there it's explained i give a lot of quotes in that episode uh it's explained that tayota is a infinite shape-shifter that has no form of its own in other words toyota is nothingness or emptiness so ask yourself this why are you so threatened by nothing if your worldview is true as you believe it is like if you're a scientist and you believe your worldview is true then why are you so scared of deconstructing it if it was true deconstruction couldn't harm it and you wouldn't be so triggered and emotional about defending it the way you get to truth is you burn everything to the ground and then whatever remains is the truth the problem of course and your ego mind intuits this is that if you truly do burn everything in your life to the ground nothing will survive your science won't survive your religion won't survive uh you know jordan peterson's ideas won't survive sam harris's ideas won't survive your ideas of god won't survive your atheism won't survive the biggest challenge in this work is admitting that everything you knew was wrong it takes an enormous humility to admit that can you just see that the reason most people don't do this work is because they simply don't have the humility to admit that everything they believe is wrong now see sometimes people criticize me and say leo but you're so [ __ ] arrogant how dare you talk about humility i might come across as arrogant as though i'm talking down to you sometimes that's mostly just a stylistic thing what people don't understand is that deep down epistemically i'm extremely extremely humble leo that's outrageous how dare you say that that's so arrogant of you to say i realize the irony in paradox of it um how dare you say that you know you you give definitive statements about god absolute truth and about science you say you know all this stuff only an arrogant narcissist would say such things or consider or i spent 20 years deconstructing my mind and my reality coming from a place of deep epistemic humility questioning absolutely everything about myself to the point where i deconstructed it all and then what i was left with was absolute truth and you're and then you say but leo if you were truly humble you would even question that no that wouldn't be humility that would be stupidity you don't question absolute truth once you find it you've found it you've arrived that's it it's the end of your ideas of being humble or arrogant it doesn't matter anymore humility and arrogance these are just social games you play again your judgments of me as being arrogant or whatever this is just more defense mechanisms for you it's a convenient excuse for you not to listen to what's actually being said and pointed to which is not to say that i can't work on my delivery and make it more appealing and comforting to your ego and so forth and a little less arrogant and it's in a style a little less sort of definitive you see just because i say something definitively this doesn't make me arrogant ever say i'm the biggest skeptic that there is it's just that you don't see my skeptical process because it was done years ago i was i was doing skepticism and nihilism back in my like when i was 17 years old you don't see that today because this is what you get when you sort of come out from the other end of the belly of the whale okay so now let's get to the part where i actually give you some practical tips on how to deal with nihilism and relativity so if you're entering stage green and stage green is deep like i said before you can go very deep on stage green you enter very deep on stage green and you start to realize that everything is perspective you don't know is the left wing more right than the right wing is the right wing more right than the left wing what kind of economy should we have are the socialists right are the capitalists right who's wrong who's right you don't even know if if leo is right you don't even know if actually.org is right because if you're truly going through this nihilistic process then you might say well okay leo says all this stuff but he's just one guy he could be deluded he could be wrong it could be just a partial perspective what if leo is no better than a you know a fundamentalist christian or muslim what if actualize.org is just another one of those things what if it's whatever cult or whatever you don't know how could you know unless you have finished the process so you're in this place and then and then you also might think like well especially if you're young like college age you might be thinking like well what kind of career should i have should i be a writer should i be an artist should i be a business person i pursue money should i pursue my passions if i pursue my passions where my will my where will i get my money if i pursue my money then i'll hate it and i won't have my passions what kind of major should i major in what should i do in university should i go to university should i go get a job should i go into the business world should i go on wall street should i chase you know stock investing in cryptocurrency should i build up a big nest egg and then go do my passion or show you my passion now while i'm you know penniless what should i do and then you're lost so how do you handle this i went through a lot of this in late high school and early college basically your problem is that you need to find yourself and you can't find yourself unless you lose yourself and the reason most people don't find themselves is because they're too afraid of losing themselves and going deep into this nihilistic relativistic process the way that i handled it in my youth is i sort of came to this conclusion i was stuck in this multi-perspectivalism and neutrality non-judgment but then i realized okay we have to make a distinction between absolute truth and relative truth that's the distinction i made very early on in my in my teens and i basically said that religion science these sorts of things they're not absolutely true but they might have relative truths to them and even though it might not be absolutely true that for example right-wing talk radio conservatives are are more wrong than or right whichever uh then liberals and progressives so like maybe i can't adjudicate this this conflict of ideology and politics at the level of the absolute truth but i can look at it at the level of relative truth for example i can just look at what will make for a better society like for example i could ask myself the question when it comes to liberals and um conservatives i can ask the question of like well who should i vote for should i republican or democrat well in the absolute sense from absolute perspective you could say it doesn't matter and i can't know but from the relative perspective i can say like do i care about the environment do i want a cleaner healthier environment if i do that i should vote for liberals rather than conservatives because conservatives don't give a [ __ ] um do i think that there's a problem in our society if the middle class is shrinking from both sides and we have this gap between the very poor and the very rich at the top and that's growing over time is that going to lead to a society i want to live in that i will enjoy and my answer is no well which party cares about that the liberals the conservatives don't give a [ __ ] um and so this you're thinking more from a survival perspective and so basically um what i realized is that from the absolute perspective i don't really know the truth but from the relative perspective i still have preferences like there's things i want out of life i want to live a passionate life that's something i knew i wanted not because it's absolutely true not because some god is forcing me to not because i'm going to go to hell if i don't not because i'm going to go to heaven and afterlife not because science says so but simply because i want a passionate life and that in and of itself is valid it's his own valid thing and i and also another another point that i made this is very actually important very important lesson from this going through this nihilism is that you learn what it teaches you is you learn not to rationalize and justify your preferences and biases in terms of objective truths or normative statements so what i mean by that is that usually when an ordinary human is pursuing something in their life they're going to try to ground it in some absolute truth or norm they're going to try to make it objective they're gonna rationalize it in their mind so like if they're pursuing a family rather than just saying you know what i'm just selfish and i just wanna have a family i wanna you know i like playing with kids i think i'll enjoy that i like having a wife i like the companionship of it i'll just enjoy that and i'm just doing it for selfish purposes see instead of being honest and admitting that to yourself what most people do traditional people is to say oh well a family this is good for society god wants me to have a family and uh you know i we really need this family to maintain our civilization so they come up with all these [ __ ] rationalizations when really you just want to be honest with yourself about your biases you can have biases and preferences just admit them to yourself you might say well leo that makes no difference it actually makes a very big difference because when you admit to yourself that what you're pursuing in life is nothing other than your own selfishness and biases and preferences and you don't try to ground it in genetics or biology or some sort of story about how well i'm gonna go in business and i'm gonna compete against that business because it's survival of the fittest and you have this whole story about how actually it's the fittest who survived fittest deserve to win and this and that no just tell yourself you're selfish [ __ ] and you want money for sex tell yourself that that would be more honest than coming up with some sort of um you know survival of the fittest and perpetuating the species and and this is i mean this is it's [ __ ] ridiculous the reality is you're horny and you want sex it has nothing to do with evolution from your perspective and um and if you like if if you're going to be a christian be a christian but then say to yourself i'm not a christian because being a christian is the absolute truth i'm a christian because i was born a particular part of the world where christianity was popular i was indoctrinated with it i have these preferences now i'm stuck with them and i'm gonna go with it this is my preference it's purely arbitrary it's not about truth it's not about the bible this is just purely arbitrary i prefer these things over let's say hinduism and so i'm just gonna i'm gonna do that because i prefer i enjoy it i enjoy the christian god more than i enjoy the hindu gods why just because i'm selfish and i'm biased and that's what i grew up in see if you admit that that would be truthful and then you wouldn't have to play these defensive games anymore and you would have freedom from ideology likewise with science admit to yourself that science is just something you were culturally conditioned into and that you have a preference for it but that it's not the best it's not the truest there could be important truths in christianity that you haven't been taught in science and so forth and then you'll have a much healthier attitude towards science also an important way to to deal with this relativity and nihilism is to study lots of perspectives that's one of the that's one of the things you'll actually be doing when you're in this nihilistic funk and this period could last for two to five years of your life maybe more very much depends on you and how you go about it but during this period what you will do is you will read lots of books if you're doing it properly you'll watch lots of videos you'll study lots of teachers lots of different traditions and you will get different perspectives these perspectives will confuse the [ __ ] out of you in the beginning you won't know how to make heads or tales of these perspectives some of these perspectives will be bad some of them will be better and uh you'll have biases towards different ones and you'll have to just kind of like play around with them and not get married to anyone and you can play them off each other you can cross reference them sort of triangulate them to get closer to truth what should help you is if you make the distinction between lower quality versus higher quality perspectives because not all perspectives are equal that's the difficulty of really being lost in relativity is that you literally start to think that all perspectives are equal and even when i tell you that not all perspectives are equal you will say well lia that's just also a perspective and it's also equal to all the other perspectives so the perspective that all perspectives are equal and the perspective that all some perspectives are not equal to others that this itself is a sort of a meta perspective and that too is whatever i don't know how to make sense of it see here you get really lost in a perspectival madness but eventually you have to give you have to live your life and what you realize is that how you're living your life exhibits certain biases and preferences you have so you can't live life neutrally even if you say well i'm going to do nothing in my life at all because i want to align with perfect neutrality and perfect relativity i'll do nothing but that itself is a choice you've made that itself is an action so you're stuck in in life in such a way you're situated in such a way you're in such an existential bind that you have to act somehow and even non-action is action even non-choice is choice so when you realize that what you realize is well choices get made no matter what there's a default position no matter what if i do nothing something will still happen i'm not really at a blank slate i've already got ideas programmed into my mind whether scientific ones religious ones christian ones hindu ones buddhist ones whatever and that is what will be running the show if i make no changes and i pretend to just be neutral i won't actually be neutral by being neutral see when you really grasp this this now starts to help you to actually choose things because you realize that you can't avoid choosing things even if you're going to die starve yourself you're still choosing that so you can't escape making a choice and when you realize that then you have to realize that well what kind of choices do i want to make what will make for a good life and you realize that basically what you want is you want a good life that's the point of life is to create a good life you're free to create whatever life you want all of this relativity all of these perspectives in a sense is sort of like you're a little kid and i come to you and i dump a giant garbage truck load of legos in your room like literally a metric ton of lego pieces of every possible type and color and with these lego pieces you can construct anything and then that's how life is and then sort of life asks you what are you going to construct you might say well what difference does it make what i construct i can construct a castle or a spaceship or a gas station or uh a car whatever does it matter which one is one better than the other and if nobody tells me like you might as a child you might say well tell me which one is the best to construct and i'll build it and then what if there's no response what do you do well you could say well [ __ ] it then i'm not going to build anything okay but then that's what you chose you built you have built something you've built nothing is that what you want is that gonna make you happy if it is do that if it isn't why not do something that makes you happy why make yourself miserable in life so see by going through this chain of logic you realize oh yeah the only thing left to do in life is to make myself happy but then what makes me happy i don't know i don't know what makes me happy i think i might know but how do i know that what i think i know will actually make me happy and maybe i'll try some of those things and i'll realize it doesn't make me happy that could be useful feedback to figure out what does make me happy so the point of life is to basically play with these legos build different things and to realize like well yeah i've built this castle i don't like castles i built a pirate ship i don't like pirate ships i built this car i don't like cars i built this gas station on a gas station so at some point you build something you say oh i built something i built this unicorn oh i like unicorns i like animals so maybe now i should start building more animal legos so now you build a giraffe it's like oh i like the giraffe even more than the unicorn okay and then you build a dragon you're like oh i like dragons even more i like i like fantastical monsters so now you start to build uh you know chimeras and manticores and goblins and things and now and then and then you through this process you discover like oh this is what i love about life is building these mystical creatures and the more outlandish and mystical they are the more excited i get and this is what joseph campbell called following your bliss and through this process you discover your life purpose i talk about that more in my 25 hour life purpose course check that out um so you see and the trick is that you never fool yourself in this process that dragons and manticores and goblins are better than anything else because the other kids when they're playing with their legos what they do first of all they're playing with a very limited set of legos you're playing with like a a dump truck full of them and they're playing with like 100 pieces their pieces are very limited their colors are very limited so what they can build is very limited and all that they're building is what every other kid around them is building so if the kids around them are building castles they end up building castles even though they probably don't like castles but they build it anyways because everyone's building castles and if i don't build a castle people are gonna think i'm weird and i'm too weak to stand up against that and i haven't discovered what i really like to build and what i can build is so miniscule compared to what that kid can build with a dump truck full of different legos and when somebody brings some additional legos you know in addition to the 100 that i'm comfortable with they bring another 100 that are totally new and unique and different and different colors and shapes and stuff they bring that to me and i look at i'm like oh that's that's that's evil that's wrong that's that's not the kind of legos we play around with here those aren't castle pieces i only want castle pieces and then now there's a fight and a debate about why those are bad and these castle pieces are the best and these god has ordained these castle pieces he he hates the the pirate ship cat the pat the pirate ship pieces those are from the devil or those are irrational illogical they're too mystical these creatures like if if you're doing this from a scientific perspective you might be building like a spaceship right you're building a spaceship you're this science nerd logic nerd and then i come to you and i show you my like fantastical lego dragon unicorn manticore goblin creatures and you look at them and you're like oh my god what kind of airy fairy fairy tale woohoo stuff is that that's not scientific the only thing you can build with lego pieces is spaceships that's the only valid use of of lego pieces it has to be rational everything has to be perfect squares and corners it has to be scientifically accurate not these [ __ ] monsters that you build and then i go well here here's some here's some monster pieces that you can use to make like organic living ships and stuff and the guy's like no that's not how you build ships those aren't valid ships that's not scientific that's not rational i don't want to build your irrational ships i want to build my my little simplistic ships um the way that all my friends do see and so you artificially constrain yourself to a much narrower life and you get less joy from life and you know what the funny thing is is that you might not even enjoy building those spaceships you might actually want to build dragons but you're too scared and your mind is too paradigm locked to venture out into that space so anyways as you're dealing with this nihilism you want to be studying lots of different perspectives you have a lot of grist for the mill it's going to leave you very confused and that's okay i have an episode actually called how to deal with confusion confusion is when the ego mind doesn't know how to make sense of reality most people are scared of confusion and they they think it's a bad thing they think not knowing is a bad thing you're also going to be not knowing a lot of stuff and so the solution is to just embrace not knowing don't view it as a negative thing embrace confusion and just trust the process trust that as you're going through life and you're studying a lot of different perspectives first of all this is fun it's [ __ ] fun treat it as fun play with ideas play with perspectives and trust that slowly over time pieces like a puzzle will start to fit together and you will develop some criteria for adjudicating between lower perspectives and higher perspectives i can give you some of this criteria but again you can't just believe it you have to verify it for yourself so in a sense what you're doing is you're sort of building up your own epistemology from scratch by questioning everything this is very very healthy to do so what are some signs that a perspective is higher or lower fear hatred judgment violence rejection of certain parts of reality and dogma and ideology and clinging an attachment these are all telltale signs of lower perspectives lower perspectives are all those things are close-minded they're selfish they're fear-based they're hatred-based they're based on us versus them they're best based on denial of certain aspects of reality and the demonization thereof they also try to monopolize perspective in other words when a perspective says that ignore other perspectives just focus on me just me my perspective is the the best one all the other ones are stupid when a perspective does that it's a lower class perspective because it's being selfish how about the higher perspectives what distinguishes those well basically the opposite of that higher perspectives are open they're non-monopolistic they're interested in exploring more perspectives they don't lock you down into one perspective in fact they they imagine a perspective that tells you that you should study all the perspectives they're meta they have a meta quality they're selfless they're loving they're fearless they're courageous they're playful they're exploratory they're more nuanced and sophisticated they're more complex they're more systemic they're more holistic they're more self-aware in other words there are some perspectives that are aware that they are perspective whereas there are other perspectives lower perspectives that are not aware that they are perspectives they treat themselves as reality that's dangerous so you have to really be careful and watch for the how a perspective tries to lock you in even something like science see everyone kind of understands that religion will try to lock you in but most people don't understand that science is a perspective that tries to lock you in for example science will lock you in and try to prevent you from studying mystical or new age stuff or paranormal stuff or religion that already should clue you in on the dangers of the scientific perspective which is not to say you shouldn't study it also as you're studying all these perspectives try to find the good in all these perspectives try to steal man the perspectives so a low quality perspective will try to straw man other perspectives where it's incapable of steel manning them whereas a higher quality perspective is capable of steel manning all perspectives and it's not just being selfish you see the steel man straw man thing is just really selfishness so really the distinguishing characteristic between higher and lower is selfish versus selfless and also the higher perspective is able to make sense of and understand the lower but the lower is not able to make sense of and understand the higher this is a crucial distinction so for example a fundamentalist muslim probably doesn't understand and cannot make a steel man out of christianity and a christian probably can't do that with islam but you can find higher perspectives which actually are able to make steel men out of all the religions all the religious perspectives and they're able to explain them and find the good aspects of them but also be honest about the the bad aspects of them you can also find perspectives that are able to understand both religion and science but you can also find perspectives that only understand science but can't understand religion and you can find perspectives that understand religion but can't understand science so the more powerful perspective is the one that can understand everything beneath it basically it's more inclusive and so you're moving towards greater inclusivity also the higher perspectives are more intellectually rigorous and honest they have more integrity whereas the lower perspectives do not so for example one of the ways you can tell that right wing talk radio is a very low quality perspective is because of just how little integrity it has very little integrity the way they skew the facts the way they cherry pick data um the way they distort stories the sort of emotion they throw into it the the way they make it ideological the way they turn it into a sort of a battle um the way they make you hate the other side this these are all signs that this is a low quality perspective and that the people themselves speaking they have very little intellectual integrity which is why you find them saying one thing one year and another you know they're switching their positions all the time they use double standards all the time the sanders they apply to their party they don't apply to the other party as soon as the other party is out of power you know the standards completely change this is what you see and i'm not saying the left wing is immune to that it's not it has that but to a much lesser degree than right-wing talk radio that's some of the worst perspective you know some of the lowest quality lowest integrity perspectives you can find and you might wonder at this point well leo but how do i know that what you're telling me is true i mean all this you said is just one more perspective yeah that's right you don't know i'm telling you the conclusions i've come to after 20 years of doing this work if you're new to this then you don't know and you're gonna have to go through maybe a 10 or 20 year process to figure out and to come to conclusions that i came to or maybe you'll come to your own different conclusions but eventually if you're doing this process correctly you'll realize that what i just told you here is gold this is gold this is i'm telling you how to distinguish truth from falsehood in the end the biggest thing that distinguishes truth from falsehood is fear versus love that's the easiest way if a perspective is coming from fear it's false if a perspective is coming from love it's true because what you'll ultimately realize is that truth is love and then there's just many many degrees of it so in the end what you discover after you go through this nihilistic phase is that you discover that the best way to live your life is to live your life like it is a work of art live for beauty and live for love and live for truth and live selflessly not because you have to not because somebody told you to do it but simply because love is its own reward what do you want ultimately in your life you want to love your life you want love in your life you want others who love you in your life and you want others whom you can love in your life that's what you ultimately want even if you're a nihilist and so the only thing to do is just to surrender to love and to align yourself deeper with love and to find what are the authentic ways of you of loving for you of loving reality and life and put your focus into that love work towards that love with courage ignore all the distractions and the lower consciousness stuff and then what's going to happen is that you're going to come out of this nihilistic funk and relativity towards a a life that is actually very purposeful but it's purposeful in a sort of a higher order way in a meta way it's a meta purpose it's a purpose with a capital p beyond uh the lower p purpose it's your own authentic purpose and really your own authentic purpose is just your love for life expressed uniquely through you free of the distortions and corruptions of social conditioning and that is how you deal with nihilism all right i'm all done here please click like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website you will find on there my book list you will find the life purpose course that i mentioned you will find my blog you will find the forum you can support me on patreon.com actualized you can check out my new second channel called actualizedclips and then really what actualize that org is about is it's about guiding you through this nihilistic process but in a very practical and positive way because truly nihilism is [Music] the most positive of things when you do it properly the problem is that most people don't do it properly they get stuck and so i sort of pioneered this process for myself from a young age thinking about epistemology and metaphysics and philosophy very deeply and taking it from the point where it was just philosophy to the point where you're starting to implement it in your life and using it to change your life at a practical level and then it starts to change how you feel about yourself you stop being a victim you stop getting depressed you develop a sense of meaning in your life that is authentic to you you're honest with yourself about the meaning you're not fooling yourself you're not trying to rationalize it or grounded in some sort of social construct you're freeing up your mind more your mind gets liberated you're able to think more laterally more outside the box you're able to be more creative you're able to be a better artist and and then from this sort of foundation you can set up the rest of your life and then eventually you can you can awaken and you can reach god realization and you can break through into infinite love and then you can bring it back down to earth and exhibit it in your practical everyday life which is really what the hero's journey is about the hero is not defeating the dragon just for the sake of defeating the dragon the hero is defeating the dragon to acquire the holy grail which is literally immortality or god the hero is realizing god realizing love and then bringing that holy grail back to his villagers and helping them to drink from the cup of infinite love in his own way that is the hero's journey that is what's most worthwhile to do and that cup that love is nothing perfectly consistent with true nihilism you