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Hey, this is Leo, for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about understanding awareness. This is a very important, very foundational topic, if you care about self actualizing. Just as a quick side note, I'm changing up the video settings again, trying to improve the video quality, the lighting quality, the microphone quality, so you might notice some of that stuff changing in the next couple of weeks. But let's get to our main topic, which is awareness. Speaking of noticing things, man, this is such an important topic, I've actually thought about shooting this episode right here and talking about this topic for over a year. And the reason I've held back is because if I don't communicate this information right now, in just the right way, it will not get through to you, it will just go in one ear and come out the other and you're gonna fall right back asleep. So I have to be very careful about the words I choose and how I present all this stuff because your brain will just shut me down. The first thing I want to tell you is that right now you have no idea how important awareness is. No matter how important you think it is, it's woefully underestimated. In your mind, even after watching this episode right here, you will only appreciate understand perhaps 1% of the importance of awareness that it plays in your life, in your fulfilment levels, in your understanding of reality, and in your ability to be successful. And in your ability to self actualize. It's that important. It's incredibly important. And my goal here, pretty much the sole role of this episode is to just show you and convince you of how little awareness you have, how much more you could have, and how you deceive yourself about your lack of awareness. The reason it's so important awareness is because all lasting growth of any kind, whether you're growing in business or relationships, or your growing with your emotions. It all involves increasing awareness in one form or another. So I hope you can start to appreciate how absolutely essential This is. And we have a big challenge here we have several big challenges when we discuss awareness. The first one is that this word awareness, you know, awareness. This sounds like such a vague New Age word. Sounds like something hippies were talking about you raising consciousness raising awareness. But what does it really mean? And see, because of this, your mind has a tendency to easily dismiss these kinds of topics, or to just say something like, oh, yeah, Leo already know that. I already know that. You know, I read some Eckhart Tolle and I read something about awareness. And I meditated a few times I went on a retreat. I know what awareness is. Be very careful about that. Because actually, you don't know what awareness is. It's a very tricky thing. And knowing what it is, is one thing, actually having it is a totally different thing. What I want to start to show you and I will with additional episodes future episodes, is not just that awareness is very important. But that awareness is actually a very tangible, very concrete thing. It's not some new age, wishy washy language. It's very important, but it takes some time for you to start to, to like really see it and get it, because it's not an easy topic to discuss. It's a very soft, deceptive and tricky topic to discuss. In fact, this leads us to challenge number two. The second challenge we have with awareness is the catch 22 problem. What I call it the catch 22. And it's this when you're unaware, when you lack awareness, by definition, you're not aware that you're not aware. You get that this is huge. This is a huge point. Because this allows for a giant self deception trap to happen in your mind. It's like a huge blind spot in your entire worldview. Right here. Because see, right now, your level of awareness is probably at a one, maybe a two, maybe a three. If you've done a lot of consciousness work, it's at maybe a three on a scale of 10 million. On a scale of 10 million, you're out a one, maybe two, maybe a three. It's like you meditate, once in a while, and you watch a bunch of my videos, you're probably at a three at a 10 million. And here's the problem. Not only this, but to you, it doesn't feel like you're at a three, because of this catch 22 problem, when you're unaware, you're not aware that you're unaware. So what this means is that when you're at a one, you feel like you're at 10 million. When you add a two, it feels like you're at 10 million. And when you add a three, all man, you feel like you're at 100 million, you're like, oh, but look, I already progressed. So high up the up the chain here, look how high I am, I'm not a one or two, I'm a three, there's nothing higher. And this is the catch 22 problem. And it leads to the mother of all bad assumptions, which is the assumption that you are aware, when in fact, you're not aware at all. The mind tricks you into thinking that you're aware. And the last problem I would say that we have is that awareness cannot be taught. And it cannot be bought. You cannot get awareness from reading books. Or from buying it from somebody, or even from listening to me. Or even by sitting there and doing philosophy, or doing religion, that's not going to get you awareness. So how do you actually get awareness was a little tricky. We'll get to that perhaps. And I definitely will cover that in future episodes. But for now, I just want to focus on this idea of showing you how asleep you actually are. Have you heard about people talking about how you're in a dream state, you're asleep, you're not awake? Well, that is your situation right now. And I want to show you exactly tangibly what that really means. I want to make you feel it in your bones, it's one thing to know it intellectually is a totally another thing, when you actually get a true sense of like, Oh, my God, I am asleep. And to do that, I'm gonna be talking mostly about one guy here today. His name is Peter Uspensky. And he wrote a brilliant little book called The psychology, the psychology of man's possible evolution, he wrote this book nearly 100 years ago, it's a really tiny book, look at it, it's just a couple 100 pages really small, actually, less than 100 pages. Now, it's like 130 pages. And you don't even need to read the whole thing, just the first 50 pages are sufficient to really get you a sense and to open your mind to just how asleep you really are. By the way, a little background on Uspensky. Him and his buddy girge If they were really interested in enlightenment, but this was 100 years ago, before the internet before access to, you know many of the resources we have today. And they were living in, in Europe and in Russia. So it was really difficult for them to get access to this kind of information. So they basically went around the kind of like the Afghanistan, regions of like Southern Russia, and like the northern Middle East, looking for clues for how to get enlightened. And so they had some interesting adventure adventures there. But what I want to do is I want to, I want to talk about some of the really important points that Uspensky makes in this book. I read this book about three or four years ago, when I started getting really seriously involved in personal development work. And I was immediately struck by the importance of this book, so intuitively understood that yeah, I am asleep. And yes, there's these problems with my not having enough awareness. But now, four years later, after having done year, now a couple of years of consciousness, really deep consciousness work, enlightenment work, meditating for the last three years, every single day, going to lots of workshops and talking to enlightened people, and, you know, doing all this stuff really seriously. Even having an enlightenment experience of my own last summer. Wow, I read this book again this week, just to refresh my memory. And still, I'm reading the book, and I'm still recognizing that I'm asleep. Is the so it took me four years, and I still haven't really penetrated to the depth of what he's talking about here. I'm just scratching the surface. So I'm saying this just to stress this idea that there's something very important here that you're probably missing. You want to be very careful about how you listen to what I'm gonna be telling you. You want to listen very open mindedly because otherwise you're going to easily miss Sit. So the first thing I want to do is I want to give you an outline of some of the key points that Uspensky covers in this book. I'll give you a kind of a big picture what we're talking about here. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually quote you some long excerpts from him and give you some analysis about these excerpts. Because man, he's extremely eloquent in the way that he puts some of these things. So let's begin with the outline of expensive keys key points. First, he says that man, and by man here, we also mean women, he kind of talks the way they did 100 years ago, but he says, Man assumes that he knows himself. And of course, that means you, we're all talking about you here, we're not talking about some other man or some other woman, we're talking about you. So you assume that you know yourself. But man doesn't realize that he is the machine. What does this mean that man has a machine? Well, man assumes that he has will, and he has control over his life. And in fact, he does not. Man is unwilling to admit this to himself. And because of this lack of willingness to admit it to yourself, he cannot begin to correct this problem. Developing awareness takes long and hard work. And the problem is that you will not do this work if you believe that you have already acquired self control and awareness. So why would you go looking for awareness, and spending years trying to develop it, if you already feel like you have it? This is a very important point. And I'm just giving you kind of a summary here. But I'm going to go into a lot of depth on each one of these points that he makes. Next, he also says that you really need to appreciate how deeply asleep you are, before you will take up the quest for raising your awareness until this simply won't happen. And the whole trickier, he says is that because in your current state, you're asleep. And you don't have awareness, you cannot possibly even imagine how much more awareness it's possible for you. You can't even imagine I can't even begin to imagine what kind of states of consciousness exist not just a couple of notches higher orders of magnitude higher. This will blow you away when you actually experience one of these higher states of consciousness, because it will be orders of magnitude higher, beyond anything you could have possibly imagined. I've experienced this. It's quite remarkable. He also says, and I love this, as he gives us a definition of what psychology is, He gives us a three part definition, three ways to think of psychology as very counterintuitive and different the way he defined psychology than the way that regular psychologists do. First, he said that psychology is the study of man's possible evolution. What does this mean? This means that psychology is not about dysfunctions. It's not about diseases or disorders of the mind. It's about the highest of what a man can become. And not just success wise, and not in relationships. But how high can he develop his awareness and his consciousness? what's actually possible for man, if he says, Okay, I'm going to commit my whole life to just developing awareness, how far can I go with it? That's the proper domain of study for psychology. Notice that that is not what most psychologists study. That is not what most self help material teaches or talks about. Some of it does, but most of it doesn't. Most of it talks about success and relationships and stuff like this, or depression and problems you have in your life, these kinds of petty little human problems. What he's talking about here is not human problems. He's talking about existential questions. So it's kind of like the intersection between psychology and philosophy. And philosophy actually talks about these is a philosophy in the old school times 1000s of years ago, not modern day bullshit academics like philosophy, but old school like the Greek and Roman antiquity style philosophy. That was actually psychology because it was concerned with conscious evolution and awareness and existential questions. Secondly, he says that psychology can be divided as follows. It's the study of oneself. So specifically, of your machine like nature, the study of your machine like nature. And thirdly says psychology can be defined as the study of lying. I love this one. Sounds really interesting, the study of lying, what does that have to do with psychology? Seems like, even if that's a field of psychology, that's like a very small, esoteric, little piece of it. Why would it be mentioned here? Actually, it turns out that lying is extremely central to the study of psychology. Because lack of awareness comes from lying, and lying about the fact that you lie, and your lies are so subtle. And so in the dark, that you have no idea how much you lie, and how this affects your life. And we'll cover that in more depth as we go forward. He really stresses it is very difficult to convince to convince a man that he doesn't already possess self consciousness. So if I come to you to say, Hey, you're self conscious, right? And you say, of course, and I say, No, you're actually not self conscious. And you say, What do you mean, Leo? I am. I mean, you're talking to me right now. And I'm conscious, I'm self conscious look, here I am. I'm very conscious right now. And that's a really big trick that your mind plays on you. Makes you think that you're conscious, but you're actually not. And in fact, Uspensky gives us a self consciousness test. And I want to do this with you, it only takes about a minute. Make sure you actually do it. Because it's important that you do this. So that you actually get some conscious traction, so that you can see that you're asleep. Here's what I'd like you to do. You can either do this with me. Or ideally, if you have a clock or a watch with a second hand that actually moves, go get one of those clocks or watches. You can pause this recording, go grab it, right now, if you've got it. Good. If you don't have it, I have one in front of me here, which I'm going to use and I'll help you. Basically, the idea is this, you're going to sit there and you're gonna look at this second hand sweeping across the face of the watch for one minute. And as you do that, you're going to try to stay self conscious. So if I was doing this, in my mind, I would say something. Okay, here I am. I am Leo. I'm here. I'm conscious. I'm Leo, this is Leo. And you just got to kind of maintain that, that train of thought that this is Leo, use your name that he's mine. And just sit there and kind of be conscious of yourself for 60 seconds straight. Right, that's the test. So we're gonna go ahead and do it. Right, I'm gonna do it with you so Ready begin. And we're done. That was 60 seconds. So what did you notice there? You might tell yourself that okay, I was able to stay self conscious for 60 seconds. Actually, if you look much closer at what happened, you were not able to do it. You weren't able to do it, because your mind was wandering all over the place. And you could actually notice when your mind wandered off your self consciousness and wandered off into some fantasy about dinner, or tomorrow's party or going into work or answering an email or something like this. And furthermore, if you're still believing that you're self conscious here, and you say, Well, no, no, I was able to say subconscious for all 60 seconds. So I don't know what this test reveals. Pay attention to this, look at this. Be before I had to do the test, before you even turned on this episode and started watching and listening to it. You were running unconsciously through life. You were not actually self conscious. What happens is that your mind plays a trick on you. It has a memory and a thought in it says, Oh, well, no, I was self conscious this whole, you know, this whole day I was subconscious. What are you talking about Leo? But see, that's just a memory. You weren't actually conscious in the moment for most of your day. And in fact, right now, the trick your mind is playing on you is that it's saying but no, no, no, I'm conscious right now. But see, the only reason you're conscious right now is because I'm making you conscious, I'm talking to you about consciousness. What is that that's actually me triggering you, you didn't create yourself consciousness, I created it in you. Your computer created an interview, you're sitting there watching pixels on a screen, listening to some sounds coming out of a speaker. And now you say you're self conscious. Yeah, you're self conscious now. But when you turn off this recording, and you go about your day, how quickly you will you lose self consciousness very, very quickly. So that's just beginning to start to make the point that Uspensky is trying to make. The other point that he makes is he says that the only means of study. Because psychology is the study of oneself, the only means of study is self observation. That's how you study yourself. And the problem with this is that no one can do it for you. No one can create awareness for you really, I mean, I kind of triggered a little bit for you. And you can get a little hits of higher awareness by listening to spiritual teachers, and you know, people who talk about awareness and wise things. So it does help to read books and to listen to these kinds of videos and so forth. But generally, you have to do the hard, heavy lifting. The amount of awareness that I triggered in you right now is is minuscule. insignificant compared to the amount of awareness you need to build within yourself. If you really want to self actualize, and restructure your life to work well for you. All that heavy lifting will have to be done by yourself. It requires extraordinary responsibility, you have to take all responsibility for it. And there's no shortcuts, there's no magic tricks, drugs are not going to do it. Marijuana is not going to do it. Mushrooms are not going to do it for you, LSD is not going to do it for you. This is heavy lifting you have to do. It's emotionally difficult work. On top of all that. And lastly, you Uspensky says that there are four main features of your mechanical illness. One is lying to his imagination. Three is talking. You're always talking. Four is negative emotions. And I'll throw in two more that I think are very important that I've discovered myself, which is distraction, you're always distracting yourself. And the sixth one is criticism and judgment. You're constantly mechanically criticizing and judging other people. And this you're doing and holding yourself back from increasing your awareness. So these are all the different ways in which you act like a machine. You lie mechanically, unconsciously. You use your imagination to go into fantasy mode into stories about who did you wrong and what you're going to do tomorrow and all this kind of stuff. That's all your imagination at work. And this robs you of your consciousness. Also, you're talking all the time, instead of being aware, instead of trying to do careful, honest, self observation, what you're doing is you're yapping, you're talking to your friends to this, to this to that you're writing little stupid comments. You're always making little criticisms and judgments and all this kind of stuff through your talk. And you're not comfortable just being silent. You can't even sit face to face with someone and look them in the eye and not talk to them. It freaks you out. You're afraid of silence. That's not an accident, there's actually a really good reason for that. And the negative emotions, your negative emotions completely lose you in unconsciousness. Because when you're feeling angry or afraid, or sad or depressed, or any of this kind of stuff, you completely go mechanical, you have no more control over yourself, you're just running on autopilot. And of course, he gets into a lot of trouble. Distractions distractions are huge. You distract yourself with your entire life. Everything in your life is a distraction from a developing awareness, your career, your family, your children, your education, your work, your fitness routine, the food you eat, the entertainment, you watch, the parties, you go to the, the purchases you make, the alcohol you consume. All of this stuff is just a complete distraction. It's all mechanical distraction. And you're not even aware that you're doing this. You think this is just normal life happening. It's not normal life happening. This is a artifice, this is artifice of modern society. modern societies I've said before, is an amusement park for the ego. And what that means is, it's an amusement park of illusions. It's like a big hall of mirrors where you get lost. And then you stumble around in it for years and decades until you're dead. And then your criticism and judgment. So I've, I've shot episodes where I talk about the importance of watching out for yourself judgments, and your judgments of other people. Because when you're criticizing or judging somebody else, what this does is it takes all burden off of you to look inside yourself. You see this fundamentally, what you're doing when you're judging people, is you're turning all your focus and awareness outwards, rather than inwards? This is why we have political debates and religious conflicts and people, you know, pointing fingers at each other, you know, how could those Muslims and you know, how could those Jews and those Christians and you know, and those scientists and those Republicans in those Democrats and and that Obama, and you know, the and that bush and this person there, and you know, and all these criticisms? Why don't think this is happening? It's not an accident, this stuff happens. All of it is just a big giant Sham. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, while you're yapping, your life is expiring, and you're not looking inward. That's what's really going on there. Crazy stuff, when you start to see this, and you become aware of this happening in your life, it's crazy. It will shock the shit out of you. Alright, so that was just the outline. That was the big picture. Now what I want to do is I want to give you some of these juicy excerpts that I've got. I'm going to read you from spent skis writing. And then I'm going to give you some analysis interspersed with all these different quotes. These are really eloquent, really subtle. So listen, close, and you'll probably want to listen to them multiple times again, to really get all the juice out of them. Here we go, since he says, quote, why cannot all men develop and become different beings? The answer is very simple, because they do not want it because they do not know about it, and will not understand without a long preparation, what it means, even if they are told, in order to become a different being man must want it very much and for a very long time. A passing desire or a vague desire based on dissatisfaction with external circumstances will not create a sufficient impulse. The Evolution of Man depends on his understanding of what he may get, and what he must give for it isn't man does not want it, or if he does not want it strongly enough, and doesn't make the necessary efforts and he will never develop. Man must acquire qualities which he thinks he possesses. But what she actually deceives himself about and quote, so he started to talk about this problem. Why are not more people more self developed? Well, the reason is, is that they already believes they have what they're after. They already think that they've got it handled, they've already got it figured out. And they're not willing to invest the time in when they're told what it's going to require to invest this time, you know, I'm always up here preaching self actualization. I always say, you know, stick around, stay tuned, watch more episodes, it's going to build your awareness over time over the years. Most people can't stay on track with that. Because they don't see what the potential is. And therefore, they're not willing to invest the time. And they know people complain and say, well, Leo, why are your videos so long? Make them half as long make them 10 minutes long. See what that kind of attitude how far can you get? I'm already paring down this information very, very much to get it into even just a 45 minute or 60 minutes segment. And you're going to need hundreds of these segments to really struggle to understand what's going on. And even hundreds of my episodes will just be the, just the starting point of your journey into increasing your awareness. So you can start to see that this is a really serious endeavor. Now the question is will take Well, surely, Oh, does it really worth it? I mean, do we really need to do this? Why don't I just kind of like live normal? Like my friends? Do? You know, they don't do all this crazy stuff. They don't invest all this time. What's the point? Well, the point is, what you can get. And I assure you that what you can get by investing this time, is going to be worth orders of magnitude more than what you paid for it. And, you know, if you've watched my other episodes, I can I show you little examples little and give you little glimpses of kind of what's possible. Alright, let's keep going. He says, quote, Man does not know himself. He does not know his own limitations and his own possibilities. He does not even know to how great an extent he does not know himself. Man has invented many machines. And he knows that a complicated machine needs sometimes years of careful study before one can use it or control it. But he does not apply this knowledge to himself. Although he himself is a much more complicated machine than any machine he has invented. He has all sorts of wrong ideas about himself. First of all, that he does not realize that he is actually a machine. What does it mean? What does it mean that man is a machine it means that he has no independent movements, inside or outside of himself. He is a machine which is brought into motion by external influences and external impacts. We must understand that man can do nothing. But he does not realize this and ascribe to himself the capacity to do this is the first wrong thing that man ascribes to himself. And quote, okay, wow. So that's a big, juicy one there. What do we make out of this idea that man is a machine? This goes to this question of freewill. And this question of control. This is what the ego fundamentally is about. The ego is an illusion inside of you, the sense of self that you have, which believes that it has control over your body, and your mind and your thoughts and your life. You really believe you have control that you're actually doing stuff, that you're actually making important decisions, that you're actually moving your body, that you're responsible for these things, that you're thinking, your thoughts, that you're being creative, that you're going to work and, you know, making big contributions to the world and et cetera, et cetera. I hate to burst your bubble, but this is actually not true. What Uspensky means by man as a machine, is that he means that you're completely at the effect of life. Life runs you, it triggers you, when you have higher sense states of awareness. It's because someone triggered you into them or something did. When you're feeling sad, it's because something triggered you into it. When you're feeling happy. It's because something triggered you into it like you earn a lot of money. When you're feeling in love, you can create love. The love was triggered in you because you had sex with some hot girl or some amazing guy. This is a really difficult bullet to bite. Really, really difficult. I struggle with this a lot, really a lot. But as you do more consciousness work and you do some looking into enlightenment, what you discover is that there cannot be there cannot possibly be a self that is controlling all these things. And this is why you struggle so much. This is why you struggle for control so much. A really easy test, if you want to test for how this is true, is just sit down and try to stop your thoughts for five minutes. Can you shut off your thoughts for five minutes? Hell, can you do it for 20 seconds, you can't even do it for 20 seconds. It's amazing. You can't because you actually don't have any control over your thoughts. Your thoughts simply appear. In fact, what you are is you are a thought you're one of those thoughts that appears that's what self consciousness is. It's a it's an appearing thought, which then disappears. Pretty 3d thing, really difficult to buy into, because we're taught by society that we do have control. And it feels like we have control. There's certainly an illusion of control. It's a very strong illusion, it feels like I'm doing, you know, I'm standing up here, I'm talking to you. I'm doing this I'm creating all these cool ideas that I'm talking about. No, I'm not what I realized, now I'm at my level of awareness, and it's still very low. I'm not saying I have high awareness, not at all. My current level of awareness, you know, when I'm talking, I can, I'm aware that I'm not actually responsible for the words that are coming out of my mouth, the words are just coming out automatically. I have no idea even what the next word is going to be. These words are thoughts, I'm not thinking these thoughts, I'm not responsible for these thoughts. This is a cool thing to start to realize start to surrender yourself to, it's actually extremely necessary. Because one of the problems you have in life is that you're, you're neurotic, and you're anxious all the time, and you can't turn off your monkey mind. And your monkey mind gets only worse. When you believe you can turn it off. You actually have no control over that monkey mind of yours. That's why it's a monkey mind. And the only way you're going to tame that monkey mind, very paradoxically, is by realizing that you have no control over it. That actually quiets it down a bit. But we're getting into kind of, you know, very deep territory here, which I'll cover another episode. So let's keep going. Man, I got to talk a lot in this episode, my throat is kind of dry and still sore. So I got to make sure I can last through all this talking. Okay, moving on. Uspensky says man cannot move, think or speak of his own accord. He is a marionette pulled here and there by invisible strings. BE UNDERSTOOD understands this, he can learn more about himself. And possibly then things may begin to change for him. But if he cannot realize this, and he could not understand his other mechanical illness, if he does not wish to accept it as a fact, he can learn nothing more, and things cannot change for him. Man is a machine but a very peculiar machine. He has a machine which in the right circumstances with the right treatment can know that it is a machine. And having fully realized this, he may find ways to cease to be a machine and quote. So what does this mean? Well, we're continuing on with this theme that I've been talking about you are a machine that does not have control of itself. You were born to this world without an instruction manual. And you're an extremely complex machine. And we just kind of assume that, hey, we don't even need an instruction manual. We'll just kind of wing it. fly by the seat of our pants. Man does this get us into trouble really gets into trouble. At some point I'd like to sit down and say wait a minute. Maybe I need to figure out and construct my own manual for how this machine works. If I actually observe the inner functioning, mechanical nature of myself, my mind how I think how I react emotionally to situations, how I judge people how I lie. If I start to investigate all this, I can actually develop a working understanding of this machine that I am and as I do that, I noticed that my life goes better. It's much smoother, there's a lot less suffering, there's a lot less pain, a lot more peace of mind. I have more emotional control. I have more ability to take care of myself and to live in this world to be successful in the right ways. I can shed many of my neuroses as I do this. But see, to do that, because this is a long term project that requires serious investment of effort and time and emotional labor. I have to realize that admit, first that I am a machine that I am mechanical. That I don't have the control that I believe I have. I can't stop my thoughts. I can't control my depression. I can't control my anger. I can't control my judgments. I can't control my obsessive compulsive behaviors. I can't control my food addictions. I can't control my bad habits. If I could control these things, how come they're so difficult to change? How come my life is so screwed up? How come I can't quit smoking, or drinking or partying? Or having sex with the wrong people, or screwing up and sabotaging my own relationships? How can I struggle with money? How can I struggle to to get along with my children or my family members? How can I keep getting divorces? How can I keep judging people even though I know I shouldn't? How come I'm a perfectionist? How come? I'm a workaholic? How come I can't lose the 20 pounds of extra fat around my waist? Well, maybe it's because you're a machine. And you lost control of the mechanism. In fact, you never had control the mechanism. You only think you did. And you never really learned what this human machine is and how it functions. Because no one taught it to you. Because the people you grew up with, they did exactly the same thing that you did is they said, Oh, I know everything. I know, I know how to live life, I'm just going to go and wing it. And they winged it. And then they taught you those same strategies. They didn't invest decades of careful self observational study, and all the emotional pain and labor that goes into really raising their awareness. So they were unaware, and they taught you unawareness. And that's what happened to you, machines created machines. Let's go on with first he says quote, before man can acquire any new powers and capacities, he must actually develop in himself those qualities which he thinks he possesses and about which he has the greatest possible illusions. development cannot begin on the basis of lying to oneself or deceiving oneself. Man must know what he has and what he has not. It means that he must realize that he does not possess the qualities already described, which he ascribes to himself. That is the capacity to do individuality, permanent ego or unity. And in addition, consciousness and will. It is necessary for a man to know this because as long as he believes that he possesses these qualities, he will not make right efforts to acquire them. Exactly as a man will not buy costly things and pay a high price for them if he thinks he already possesses them, and quote. So again, we're just hammering on this point. That if you think you have freewill, if you think you are conscious, if you think that you are already aware of what your existential nature is, if you think you are this human body that's standing here talking to you, if you think that that's you. If you think like you're this individual sitting there if you think you really have control over your life how are you going to do the work to actually acquire those things because you don't actually have those things you only believe you do? You're not going to pay the price. And this is why people do not do personal development, generally speaking. Because they assume they've already got it figured out. Next to Spassky says quote, consciousness can be made continuous and controllable by special efforts and special study. With the right methods and the right efforts, man can acquire control of consciousness and can become conscious of himself with all that this implies what it implies we are present state do not even begin to imagine. Only after this point has been understood, the serious study of psychology become possible. The study must begin with the investigation of obstacles to consciousness in ourselves. Because the consciousness can only begin to grow, when at least some of the obstacles have been removed. We must understand now that psychology really means self study. One cannot study psychology as one studies astronomy, that is apart from oneself. And at the same time, one must study oneself as one study is any new and complicated machine, one must know the parts of this machine, its chief functions, the conditions of right work, and the causes of wrong work, and many other things which are difficult to describe. And quote. So it's really important that we start to study the obstacles to awareness, the obstacles to consciousness, what are they, it's all that stuff that we mentioned, it's the lying that you do is the judging you do the distractions in your life, the talking that you do, the criticism that you do all of that stuff, the negative emotions that you react to. The more you study that, the more the doors open for you to really get on this path. So one thing that actualised.org is doing, if you're watching a lot of my content, is it's shining a little bit of light, if you notice this a little bit of light on some of these major obstacles that you have in life, most people have your relationship here, your business problem there, whatever. But ultimately, just shining light on that so that you can finally get to this point where you realize like, oh, oh, yeah, I see what's going on here on the mental level, I'm having all these problems because I don't have enough awareness. And as soon as I raise my awareness in one of these situations, my life starts to improve just a little bit. But I still feel very, very last in my awareness is still very inconsistent. Maybe I should get on board and start to study myself on a metal level. Really get into the guts of how I work how my mind works. And then, you know, by that point, then you will start to buy in to stuff like meditation, and enlightenment work and some of these more kind of New Age concepts about not having free will and not having a self and all this kind of weird stuff. You know, then you start to be open minded to that. Until then, you're totally closed minded to it. Because you're you're asleep. That's when the study of self begins. That's when you really start to get into real psychology. That's a huge turning point for you and your growth. But also, you know, that's just the start. People think that okay, now I'm now I'm really, you know, doing something here. No, this was the start, you're on step one out of 100,000. You're just getting started. Let's go on, let me take a sip of water first. Okay. Uspensky says, quote, all the absurdities and all the contradictions of people and life in general, become explained when we realize that people live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and yet do not know that they are asleep. The first obstacle in the way of development of self consciousness and man is his conviction that he already possesses self consciousness, or at any rate, that he can have it anytime he likes. It's very difficult to persuade a man that he is not conscious and cannot be conscious, it will. It is particularly difficult, because here nature plays a very funny trick on him. If you ask a man, if he is conscious, or if you say to him that he is not conscious, he will answer that he is conscious, and that it is absurd to say that he is not because he hears and understands you, and he will be quite right at the same time quite wrong. This is nature's trick. He will be right because your question or remark has made him vaguely conscious for a moment. The next moment consciousness will disappear. But he will remember what you said and what he answered and he will certainly consider unselfconscious and quote. So this is exactly the catch 22 that I was referring to earlier. And you notice, you're going to do exactly this. Right now, as I'm talking to you about consciousness, you think you're conscious? You're actually not. You're totally asleep right now. Right now, even when you think you're most conscious, you're still totally asleep. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine if that was true? Would that be crazy? What could be outside of this dream state? What if you're in a dream state right now? What could be outside of it? I'm not being figurative. I'm not being metaphorical. I'm being literal. The state of consciousness that you're stuck in right now is the equivalent of being asleep is the same difference. So where you could be in your consciousness, compared to where you are now is the same degree of difference as where you are? When you're asleep in bed at night? And where you are right now? That's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy to actually consider that's possible. But what if it was possible? Either one, that'd be pretty bad news. Because like, oh, shit, I'm asleep. You mean, I'm asleep. But then on the other hand, it's actually great news. Because like, well, that means that you know, life is already pretty nice. Let's say for you. It's like, well, so you mean, I could be that much more conscious? Damn. That's cool. That's cool. That's a whole new world of possibilities that I didn't know existed. How do I get to that place? Where I have to do I'll do it? Because it sure seems like a significant thing. It doesn't seem like just a quantitative improvement. It seems like a whole qualitative improvement, like a vast difference. Right? There's a vast difference between being asleep in bed and being awakened life. And there's a vast difference between awakened life. And actually, let's say enlightened, but we're not even going there yet. It's hard to believe that this is possible. You have to have an intuition for it. This was called wisdom. Spiritual wisdom. Give me an intuition that this is possible. It starts with intuition. You got to take it on faith. And then you're going to do enough self investigation and self observation work to finally get there. That will take you years though. In the meantime, you need to have enough intuition to see that this. There's a little kintu truth here sounds kind of true. Sounds like it might be possible. Why would Leo be up here talking about it? Why would he develop an entire life purpose around it? Why would he commit his whole life to it? Why would he spend hundreds and 1000s of hours of his time developing such videos? If it wasn't important? Is he just oh, maybe he's just stupid. Oh, yeah, he's just some confused, stupid New Age hippie, you know? Yeah, of course. Maybe I'm a confused, New Age hippie. Or, maybe I'm onto something and other people are onto something. And you could be on to it to maybe. Let's go on. We suppose he says quote, in reality, acquiring self consciousness means long, hard work. How can a man agree to do this work if he thinks he already possesses the very thing which is promised to him as a result of the long and hard work? Naturally, man will not begin this work. And he will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possesses neither self consciousness nor all that is connected with it. And quote, as huge, that's huge. If you can reach this tipping point that's going to be the start of something really big for you down the road. If you can reach this tipping point, very few people will very few people less than 1% of 1% of 1% You may think you reach this tipping point. But see what happens is you reach it and then you fall back asleep. Like you're gonna listen to me. You're gonna hear all this interesting stuff and you're like, Yeah, Leon boy. Hold with you enlightenment Fuck yeah, let's go. And then what happens tomorrow you forget about it, you fall asleep, you just go back to work, you go back to your family life, you start worrying about the bills again, you're completely asleep. As soon as you finish watching this episode, you're completely asleep again. You could watch this episode 100 times, and you will fall asleep 100 times. That's how deep this problem is. That's why this whole episode is just me standing up here for over an hour, trying to convince you of how asleep you are. That's all I'm doing. That's all I'm doing here. It's, it's a force of nature. You're asleep. This is a force of nature, it's a really powerful force. The image that I like to conjure, in my mind for this latest metaphor that I have is, imagine the middle of the Pacific Ocean is giant ocean, you can't even see land to the horizon, because you're in the middle of the ocean, just as vast blue ocean that's stretches miles deep. And then imagine you are now given a shovel. And you have to dig a hole in this ocean to the very bottom, dig a five meter wide hole, straight to the bottom of the ocean with your shovel. That's pretty much the task that we're up against here. Every scoop of water you take just gets filled up with the rest of the water, right, you can't win this battle, it's really hard to win is a force of nature. And this is what your lack of awareness is like. Alright, let's keep going. He says quote, We cannot know the truth. But we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things about God about the afterlife, about the universe, about the origins of man about evolution, about everything. But in reality, they don't know anything, even about themselves. And every time they speak about something they do not know, as though they knew it, they are lying. Consequently, the study of lying becomes of first importance to psychology. And it may even lead to the third definition of psychology, which is this, the study of lying. Psychology is particularly concerned with the lies man says and thinks about himself. These lies make the study of man very difficult. Because man as he is, is not a genuine article. And quote I have an episode called how you lie, where I go into quite a bit of length, about all the specific and tangible ways in which you lie. I remember when I first read this part of the book was spent ski part of the book that I just quoted you I first read it about four years ago. And I kind of crinkled my nose, this idea that I lie and that everybody lies like, Well, man, this is such a negative view of the world like everyone's a liar. It's not quite like that. What he means by lying here is very different than you probably think. It really is more like a form of self deception. It's not like you're deliberately going out there lying to people, although you do, of course, do plenty of that. But it's more about the ways you deceive yourself the subtle ways in which you lie, how you lie about your emotions, how you manipulate with your lies, how you say things that are half true, that aren't genuine for you, in order to control your life a little easier, a little better. And then of course, you're not conscious of all these lies that you make, and you're not conscious of how they affect the quality of your life. You think that these lies are kind of innocent, and they're just normal? Everyone does it. It's okay Leo, don't be such a stick in the mud. You know, I'm not going to be a saint. You want too much. This is all silly. Let's just be practical and realistic. But it's just more lies. Lies fundamentally come from lack of awareness. So if we want to increase our awareness, one of the first obstacles that we have to tackle is this line that we do. And I cover that in that episode called how you lie. You might want to check that one out. It's pretty a pretty important one, I think. Let's go on he also says, quote, to know oneself. This was the first principle in first demand of old psychological schools. We still remember these words but have lost their meaning. We think To get to know ourselves means to know our peculiarities or desires or tastes, our capabilities and our intentions, when it really means to know ourselves as machines, that is to know the structures of one's machine, its parts, functions of different parts, the conditions governing their work and so on. We must study our own machine, as machines. The study is called self observation. There is no other way and no one can do this work for us, we must do it ourselves. And quote to know thyself, this was a supposedly written on the doorway to the Oracle at Delphi, back in antiquity, in the Greek and Roman times to know thyself. That's a very important principle of self development is to know thyself. But what does that really mean? There's a deeper level at which you need to know yourself. And that's the level at which you deceive yourself mechanically. What are all the specific ways in which you go unconscious? What are all the specific ways in which you lie, distract, judge and criticize, talk, yap away blabber mouth. Or get lost in fantasy and imagination. Get lost in your ego. Get lost in your negative emotions. Get lost in your passions and in your desires. This is the stuff of prime importance that you should be studying. And of course, if you're a longtime follower of actualize that org, then you know that this is kind of all the stuff that I cover. I've been covering this stuff for years now. Every episode gives you a little tiny glimpse and insight here and insight there about how you do one of these things in one way or another. And I've only been just begun to cover these things. I could shoot videos for the next 50 years. And I would still not cover all the stuff that needs to be covered. There's that much stuff to become aware of. Next, he says quote, slash observation observations will very soon give results. Man will notice that he cannot observe everything he finds in himself impartially. Some things may please him, other things may annoy him or irritate him or even horrify him. And it cannot be otherwise. Man cannot study himself as a remote star or as a curious fossil. And quote. This is a really important point. We're doing self observation. Self observation. This is extra tricky, because we have biases within ourselves. How do you observe yourself objectively, it's really hard. It's kind of like you're being asked to be the judge of your own murder trial. And you're asked to find yourself guilty. And you believed your the whole time that you're not guilty until one day you discovered Holy shit. I actually did murder that person. I just deceived myself into thinking that I didn't. And that should horrifies you, you didn't think that you were capable of that. That was part of the self deception. See, here's a really important point. A lot of academic people miss this a lot of rationalist scientifically minded people miss this is they think that you can just do science on human beings kind of like you know, well, Leo, give me some lab studies. Let's prove all this stuff with lab studies. You know, in a very objective, academic institution, give me some Harvard studies, some Stanford study this kind of stuff. Here's the problem with other studies in the reason that I don't really rely on studies very much. It doesn't get you awareness. All the studies in the world will not get you awareness of yourself. You need to study yourself. Not only that, but these studies are studying outer behaviors of human beings. They're not stuck they can't really get inside the human being. So it's a it's a whole nother ballgame. When you start to investigate yourself in general, modern science is really good at you know, making airplanes and cell phones and computers, all this kind of stuff. It's great at that. That's all kind of the the external world is terrible. God awful at studying the inside of the human mind, mostly because it actually denies its existence. Science as one of its paradigms and precepts, almost denies subjectivity. Or if it doesn't deny it, it just completely ignores it and says, You know what? subjectivity, that's just some woowoo. fuzzy stuff, you know, touchy feely, emotional stuff, we don't need to worry about that. Let's just focus on you know, how to split the atom and make an airplane and how to make a proton collider, something like this. So modern science has really been behind the ball on this one, it'll catch up, I think, but it will take some time. So in the meantime, you know, we have to do the work ourselves, all the heavy lifting has to be done from the inside, no one can observe you for you. And at the same time, when you're doing self observation, you have to do it objectively. Most people, when they go do self observation, they try to investigate their beliefs or ideas. They completely get lost in their own biases. Go take a religious person, like a Christian, or a Muslim, or any other religious person, and ask them to honestly investigate their own beliefs, they flat out can't do it can't do it. It doesn't even occur to them that their beliefs could have been handed down to them. And the only reason they believe a belief like God, or the Bible, or this or Muhammad or whatever, is because it was just fed to them when they were child like, that possibility doesn't even enter into their minds, because they had to block that off. Now those who are religious people, I can also bring up scientific people and give you examples of them doing exactly the same thing. You know, someone who's at Harvard, who's a, you know, an award winning psychologist, but has no actual control of his own psyche, has no awareness is totally asleep. Even though he has all these distinguished awards, and he's done all these studies, and he could have won the Nobel Prize, but he has no fucking idea about what what emotions are, what awareness is, who he himself is. His life is a fucking mess. He's neurotic, he drinks, he smokes, he's divorced, three of his wives. He can't get along with his children. And then he has all these fucking awards about how great of a psychologist he is. It's preposterous. preposterous, because all the logical understanding of the world will not get you awareness. Very huge trap. In fact, in a sense, you know, these, these rational, scientific minded people, I really have a bone to pick with them, because I was one of them for a long time, is because, you know, they feel like they're superior to the religious people. But in a sense, they've got their head up their own ass so far, that it's almost worse. It's almost worse than religion. I can excuse and forgive religious people. Because usually, they're kind of like, you know, they're not very sophisticated, don't really care about this stuff. They're not really into like, learning and knowledge. It's just like, they're just kind of like very ordinary people who, a lot of times, you know, they just weren't given the benefits of having, like a really good education or this or that. So it's just kind of like, yeah, they fell into it. It's kind of like a disease of the mind. But with these fucking scientists, it's like, Good God, you have a PhD, you've been going to university, you've been reading books, you've been taught how to think. What the fuck are you doing? pretty passionate about that point. All right. So that's everything that I wanted to read to you from Uspensky. What I want to do to wrap this up is I want to do an exercise to really drive home to you experientially, the staggering depth of your unawareness. How asleep you really are. Because what I've been talking about here is just all more intellectual stuff. You know, it sounds nice, but really, it's not gonna make you awake. You're gonna fall right back asleep as soon as the video is over. So, do this with me. Sit in your seat, get comfortable, back up straight and close your eyes and I'm gonna guide you to a really quick little meditation which will shine some light on your lack of awareness. All right, good. Close your eyes. Keep your eyes closed through until the end. Just take a nice deep breath exhale slowly just the darkness behind your eyes. eyes and just start to get calm and into the present moment I'm going to guide you through some through some various sensations that I'm going to want you to put your attention on your awareness on. Feel and become aware of the air on your face right now as you're doing that, I want you to also put your attention on the self image of your face that you have. You can't actually see your own face. But you paint a picture in your mind's eye, you have a fantasy of your own face. In fact, technically speaking, you've never actually seen your own face in your entire life. You just have a fantasy of it. So just become aware of that image of your face. Now I'd like you to feel the touch of your clothes on your body just put your attention on it don't move your body and also, because your eyes are still closed, I like you to also put your attention on the fact that you have an image of your body. This is a fictional fantasy image. It's not real in the sense that it's actually your body. But you think of it as your body just put your awareness on that internal image now I would like you to do is to feel the inside of your mouth. Don't move your mouth don't move your tongue. But just become aware that there are sensations in your mouth. They feel kind of interesting. You your tongue, your gums, your teeth, they have a certain weight to them they have a certain feeling and texture good and now also become aware that when you're feeling the inside of your mouth, you also have an image of the inside of your mouth. It almost feels like you can see inside your mouth for a little bit. Of course you can't not really it's just a fantasy but just become aware of that image good now what I'd like you to do is become aware and feel the temperature of your body gotta interesting that your body has a temperature effect, maybe there's different temperatures throughout your body just feel them good. Now, I want you to put your awareness and to feel the inside of your palms. Your hands the inside of your hands. As you're doing that, notice that you have a image again in your mind's eye of your palms, and maybe even your hands and arms. Those aren't really your hands and arms but you do have an image of them because your eyes are still closed just notice that now what I want you to do is to feel and become aware of the skin on your ears. So just feel your ears and as you do that, I want you to become aware that you have a self image, an image in your mind's eye again, of your ears. And not just your ears but also your head. It's almost as though you're looking down on your head from behind through a camera. But notice that this, again is the self image created in the mind, it's a fantasy. That's not really your head. Also, now I want you to notice, I want you to notice the sound of your inner voice. Notice that inside your mind, there is a voice that speaks to you. It's not my voice, it's your voice. At least you call it your voice. In fact, you probably think of it as you. This is how you think you talk to yourself. So just notice how much talking happened over the last couple of minutes while your eyes were closed, doing this exercise. And just become aware that there are the sounds that this voice makes. It also makes images. So you've been having mental images this whole time, I've been making you aware of certain mental images you've been having. But you've probably also been having some distracting ones, maybe you've been thinking about lunch or dinner, or a bird chirping outside, or the sun shining on you or something like this. Just again, put your awareness on that. Good. And we're done. So go ahead. And you can take another nice deep breath in, to put yourself out of that state. And go ahead and open your eyes and come on back. Good, welcome back. So what happened there? Did you notice that you started to notice and become aware of things that you were never aware of before? Did you notice that you were completely unaware of almost everything I took you through all these different phases and parts that I took you through, you were unaware of almost all of these sensations, and images and sounds, until I triggered them in you with this exercise. Right now, as you're listening to me, you're listening to me, but your attention and focus is split, you're not aware of certain things like the temperature of your body, even right now. Now, when I say it, of course, you can become aware, because I trigger you. But then you know, while you're feeling the temperature of your body, all of a sudden, you're not aware of the feeling inside your mouth. And if you're aware of that, then you're not aware of the error on your face. And if you're aware of that, then you're not aware of the skin on your ears. And if you're aware of that, and you're not aware of the image that you have of your hands, in your mental kind of your mental movie theater. And if you're aware of that, you're not aware that you have an image of your head. And that's not actually your head. You see what I'm getting at here is like this, these, it's like holding sand in your hands. That's what awareness is. It's like you're trying to hold sand in your hands and then just kind of slips through your fingers. And everything you do to try to hold on to it, it just slips through it more and more and more. This is what we're up against here. It's really challenging. really challenging. So this here was a little just taste a little tip of the iceberg, don't think that this is where it ends. This is where it only begins. There's so much more that you're unaware of. It would take me hundreds of hours to tell you all of it. And I will with time. But for now, I just want you to get the bottom line. This is all you need to get is that you are asleep. That's all you got to get. That's where it starts. If you can acknowledge that if you can admit that if you have enough self honesty and enough awareness to see this. That's a really big step forward. It might seem like it's not a big step, because you didn't take any action, you really didn't do anything. You didn't earn a lot of money here. You know, it might seem like it's not very practical. It's super important, I promise you is super important. Especially if you stick with me here and you keep watching more of these episodes and keep going along with this. The stuff we talked about here is incredibly deep, and you will not have understood most of it. That's okay. It will probably take you five or 10 years just to get to the point where you can start to really understand what was being talked about here. Five or 10 years of real serious work on your awareness and on your consciousness. Seems like a lot seems like a lot of effort. But you know what, if you do it, it will transform your whole life. I guarantee it, it will transform your entire life, how you live your entire life, how you feel about your entire life in a positive way, in a way, where you would say, oh my god, Leo. That that one video of yours I watched 10 years ago, and it really clicked for me, that changed the whole trajectory of my life, it changed the whole trajectory of my work of my career, my relationships, of my health, of everything, of how I relate to my children of what I teach my children of where I live, of how I live, of who I believe I am. But there's a trick. And the trick is that for you to actually get what I'm promising you, you need to not fall asleep, as much as you usually do. You need to kind of like stick around and keep waking yourself up, you will fall asleep. So don't get me wrong, you will fall asleep. But you know, you need to come back and kind of like wake yourself up once in a while, at least once in a while. Otherwise, you're just gonna fall back asleep. And never, never remember any of this stuff that I said ever again. So this is where I'm ending it. I want you to stay tuned. Stay tuned, because there's much more I got to tell you about awareness. I need to tell you about what awareness actually is. We can even talk about what it is what it actually is. I also need to share methods and techniques with you for how to raise your awareness. How do you do that? That's a really long and complicated topic. So you know, I'll break that down into episodes and show you in the future. So stay tuned for that. Hope you can see how important this is. You know, I'm committed I pretty much my whole life, to increasing my own awareness and to showing you how to increase yours. That's what actualize. org is here for. So stick around for that. More good stuff is coming. I'm signing off, go ahead, please click the like button for me, share this video with a friend post your comments down below. Come check out actualize that org sign up to the newsletter. There's a free newsletter, I release weekly, videos free. I also have some courses on there and I'm gonna probably make some more courses in the future. So you want to stick around this information will transform your life if you take action on it if you use it. If you just watch it once and you fall back asleep, then it won't change your life. But there's a really easy way to fix that sign up to the newsletter and you know you get one of those emails every week. That will keep you awake. Something as simple as that to help keep you awake. So I look forward to having you sign up and stay tuned and I will see you soon with more