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hey it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about understanding default positions [Music] you this concept of the deep position is an extremely foundational and critical concept which you need to understand because in all the future stuff that I talked about this will keep recurring this concept will keep coming back and back and back into the big picture of things and I want you to know what this concept means what default position means so that when I say that in the future you could be like oh yeah that's exactly what he talked about before and I can see how that fits into the larger picture and all the different examples of how this works so what is a default position let me give you a couple of ways to think about it one way to think about it is it's a position that you hold or person holds without acknowledging that it's a position also it's a natural position requiring no burden of proof or you can think of it as an overlooked assumption or a belief that one holds without knowing that it's a belief that one holds or you can think of it as a perspective that one has which masquerades as actuality and denies that it's just a perspective so as you can tell here we're going down into some epistemology theory of knowledge again and again we keep coming back to the topic of custom ology because it ends up being so critical to understanding the obstacles that keep you stuck in life that's why we keep coming back to it and we keep looking at it from different perspectives in philosophy also there's this notion when people argue or debate or use reasoning to try to make some sort of progress intellectual progress there's this notion that some positions deserve a sort of default status by which we mean that like well a certain position is just sort of obviously true or it just seems more true the face of it than other positions and therefore it doesn't require as high a burden of proof and so it's like the crazy wacky positions the oddball positions those are the ones that require a lot of proof but then there's these like these default positions which are just obvious to everybody and they don't require much proof and they're rather safe this is the notion that I want to debunk here this is a very dangerous notion and the way we're going to do this is with some examples in fact I'm going to give you a lot of examples here but I want to focus on three specific examples which I've identified as being just like the epitome of what I mean by default position and also the danger of not recognizing default positions that you hold so perhaps the best of these is atheism even though I'm going to rag on atheists here um basically I consider myself an atheist I was an atheist pretty much my whole life I was never religious or theistic in any kind of sense but I did study because I was an atheist I did study atheism in a lot of depth and I observed it within myself and I found some some things that most atheists don't find and that most atheists would find very unpalatable if they really explored the full depth of atheism so atheists like to position themselves as having no position and they like to say well Leo atheism is not a position the religious people the theists they're the ones who believe in stuff and therefore they have a position where as I as an atheist don't believe in in any of that kind of stuff and therefore it's not really even right to call me an atheist because that would be like just putting a label on me in fact I just don't buy into these silly notions of God or other deities or supernatural phenomena I just don't buy into any of that kind of stuff in the same way that maybe like you know a religious person doesn't buy into the Spaghetti Monster the Flying Spaghetti Monster and so in that sense the religious person is also an atheist but with respect to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and so in that sense I have no position not so fast to truly have no position is a very different thing than what your typical atheist is doing you also have to make a distinction between not having a position in theory and then also what actually happens in practice because it's very easy to create a rift between the two and to say for example well yeah in theory I have no position but then in practice you actually do have a position and your position is revealed most truly by your emotions and your behaviors and your attitudes and your dispositions towards people things and the way that you relate to life as a whole that speaks much more much more about your true position than your intellectual philosophical ruminations and the sort of armchair philosophy that you would do or the way that you debate maybe with a friend you see so the Atheist likes to say that he has no position actually he does have a position if he's very honest and looks within he'll see that he actually has an active belief there and the active belief is that there is no God that is the act of belief which is why of course we have another word to contrast atheists with theists and that is agnostics you might say okay Leo so what you're talking about here is agnosticism agnosticism would be like the true form of atheism in the sense that the agnostic really doesn't know he admits that well I can't know one way or another but you see even that is a position even the agnostic most agnostics like to think of themselves as agnostic but that's agnosticism in theory in practice they're not really agnostic they still hold a position because if we take the typical agnostic person and we like ask them to maybe consider Christianity and then atheism they'll say well it's a wash I don't really know maybe there is a God maybe there's a heaven maybe there's not maybe there's just nothing maybe there's just reality the Big Bang whatever and he kind of holds them as an equal that's what the typical agnostic does but then if we say okay what do you like believe in Mormonism do you hold it as equal as these two he'll probably say no or if we say well what about Scientology do you hold that as equal as these say no and even if he doesn't say no in practice if he hears about Scientology or something like that he'll just have a gut reaction to say no that's just a bunch of [ __ ] I'm not going to even entertain that you see that's the true position there that reveals what agnosticism really is the Atheist actually has an active belief that there is no God I know because I've held this active belief I've kind of been on both sides of the fence on this issue right so this is what I mean by a default position is what the atheist is doing is that he's saying no Leo I have no position you don't understand but that actually is a position you actually do have a position you're just not conscious of it you're not conscious of your position and you also hold it as a default in the sense that whatever you're debating with theistic people you say well you guys believe in some sort of God therefore and I don't therefore I am like the minimalist here let's go with Ockham's razor i'm the minimalist my position doesn't require any proof any there's no high burden of proof for my position to clear as an atheist whereas for you as a theist there's a high position of the high burden of proof too to overcome in order to to believe in God now this might sound like I'm arguing in favor of theism don't make that mistake I'm just trying to make you more aware of how default positions work I'm not interested here in reconciling or debating between one ideology and another I'm interested in going much deeper than that so that's the example with with atheism I'll give you another example of default positions which is the the the notion of not the notion rather but the mindset that most people have about psychedelics this is very interesting because this is one I only learned recently in last year as I started talking about psychedelics too to ordinary people after having used them and it was very interesting for me the reactions quite honestly I was quite shocked and some of the reactions I got from my viewers and also from other people that have that I've talked to kind of more privately about this this topic if you take the average person who has not actually done any psychedelics and you start talking about psychedelics and some of the amazing revelations that are possible like the mystical experiences that are possible and various deep existential insights and so forth even when you get past they're very common a negative reaction just to psychedelics in general because psychedelics are lumped in with other drugs hard drugs and so in general there's just sort of like stigma around psychedelics just from a kind of cultural perspective because we've been taught in school not to do drugs and and that drugs are evil and bad and they'll just destroy your life so there's that whole element but even if you set that issue aside and you get someone who's quite open-minded and then you start talking to them about psychedelics and some of these mystical experiences they'll say well Kayleigh oh yeah you're talking about some of these amazing mystical experiences and I'll admit maybe psychedelics do give you some of these amazing mystical experiences but how do you know they're not just hallucinations they're just like a hallucination you want me to take this psychedelic but what's going to be the point because I'm just going to be like whisked out of this reality into some dream or some fantasy and it's just going to be an illusion I'm just going to come back to ordinary reality and an ordinary reality is just going to continue the way it always has so why should I even bother with that see the default position there though the default position of your typical person about psychedelics who hasn't tried them is that they assume that this right here is the actual reality that's a huge [ __ ] assumption huge assumption they think that this right here is the real reality and that wherever you go there's just a dream but consider the converse of that that this here is the dream and that wherever you go might be more real than the dream you're in right now you see that's the default position there and it's very subtle and it's very hard to see this default position until you've actually exited it first so once you take the psychedelic you'll often immediately very quickly recognize oh my god that was my default position and I held it for four years four years four years why didn't I try this earlier I didn't even anticipate that such a reversal was possible you see and that's exactly what happens when you hold a default default position without recognizing that it's a position you open yourself up to some big surprises and some very big epistemic blunders because it could be revealed to you in an instant under the right circumstances that what you held as reality just a moment before was actually a conceptual position that you had see yeah it's interesting I was talking to my mom about psychedelics and I wanted her to try it because there's some amazing experiences and I think it would actually help her to grow and to get some healing done but yeah even though she's not close totally close minded about psychedelics she doesn't want to try it she doesn't want you why not because she doesn't recognize that she's holding the default position that this here is not a hallucination she's like well yeah psychedelics will just caused me to hallucinate I don't want to loosen it I want to be in reality but this what is this here this is a hallucination right here I don't just mean that metaphorically I mean it literally and that's what's I could also reveal to you literally so if she ever takes a psychedelic she will instantly know the error of her epistemic reasoning but of course the tragedy of it is that because of the air of the epistemic reasoning she will probably never ever take a psychedelic and never be able to correct the situation that's the irony of this whole thing that's why I'm stressing this so much because this stuff is so pernicious it traps you so completely in the illusion and the third final example that a really strong example that I want to give to you a default position is death now this one can really blow a lot of people's minds death is a default position that you hold you actually believe that you will die you see you actually believe you will die and you probably have specific beliefs about what you think will happen at death so you will either think that nothing happens you just kind of go asleep into a dark nothingness probably if you're atheist you believe that like that or if you're more spiritually inclined you'll probably think that your soul floats off to somewhere to some purgatory or to have it or to hell or to some other dimension or some other realm and something like that happens maybe you think you'll meet God maybe you think you'll become enlightened by dying you know you have some kind of ideas about what's going to happen a death it's not the case notice that it is not the case that you have no opinions about death whatsoever my claim is that not only do you have theoretical beliefs about death but also you have very practical ones in the sense that if I take a loaded revolver and I stick it to your temple and I am about to pull the trigger and you think that I'm going to pull that trigger there's going to be a whole set of emotional physiological mental reactions going on with you and they will be very sharp they will not be subtle which betrays your belief in death you see you are not neutral or agnostic about death you actually believe that death will happen and that it'll probably be a negative thing you don't want it to happen and you probably believe something about how it's going to happen and what's going to be on the other end even though you might have a little a little bit of a sort of open-mindedness met you might say well yeah we don't really know we don't really know yeah but you behave when I put a gun to your head you behave as though you really know you behave as though it's a bad thing you're not wishy-washy about it when there's a gun to your head or to your child's head you see now you might say holy Oh death yeah death I mean we all die so what's the default position there no you see death is a default position that's a belief that's a conceptualization is holding the ocean of death is a specific position that you hold and notice that you hold a second-order position on top of the first-order position and the second-order physician says something along the lines of there's not even an alternative there's not even a possibility it would be ridiculous and silly to think that I don't die under what circumstances could I not die how is that even possible it makes no sense death is really the only option now how I'm going to die and what exactly is going to be at the other end of that I don't really know but that death will happen a certain so let me be very clear here what I'm saying is that that death will happen to you is not certain at all and that that's a position that you hold that you've probably never seriously thought of as a position you don't think of death as a perspective you see you hold it as a brute fact and that's the second order part of this position is that not only do you think that death will happen to you and that'll have in a specific way and the stuff will happen at the end of that but you also hold it that's the brute fact when that's not true at all you see are you starting to fathom the depth and the the crazy ramifications of really understanding what I'm saying not just in theory but so that it percolates down into practice for you see let me give you some more examples the kind of quick list of examples that I won't go into into a lot of depth because I just don't have the time of default positions so one default position is naive realism I've talked about that at length in past episodes another position is that everything in the universe is rational I've also covered that in my what's wrong with rationality episode another default position very common is that reality is made out of discrete separate entities or objects that are physically demarcated and separate from each other as though the world is composed of objects and that these objects are inherent and are real and are somehow absolutely defined in the sense that you know I see a table my children see the same table my wife sees the same table my cat and dogs see the same table even a robot that I create sees the same table and is able to use image recognition to to locate that table and to maybe move around it successfully and therefore I conclude that that table actually exists as a physical separate object within reality see that's a position that you hold that you probably never consider as a perspective that's one perspective it might not be true at all even though it seems like it's the only perspective see when you only have one perspective it always seems like that perspective is the reality because there's nothing to contrast it against there's no alternatives as soon as you have two or more at least two that's why getting that second perspective is so critical once you get the second perspective all of a sudden your mind opens up to the possibility of infinite perspectives which is why a lot of religions and cults and stuff like that they really get you to just buy into one perspective because if they can do that they've got you they've got a monopoly on your mind and of course this isn't just religions and cults science culture society nutrition business theory military strategy you know there's there's a whole gamut here of areas in life where this happens the position that time is absolute that's a default position that virtually everybody held until a hundred years ago until Albert Einstein came along and and said otherwise and even now even though Einstein and most modern physicists understand that time is not absolute in practice most people live their life as though time were an absolute when it's not we know our best scientists know it's not and yet we still live that way another default position is that energy is always conserved this is a popular one in science which I think eventually might be debunked by science itself anyway it's a position even if it isn't going to be debunked for a long time or maybe it may be is it being true but but it's still a default position in the way that it's held because it's held as just obviously true when in fact there's nothing obvious about it another common one like that is you can't get something from nothing how many times have you said heard people arguing that way well you can't get something from nothing oh yeah how do you know that's a default position right there or Occam's razor that's a really a terrible default position there's no reason why explanations of reality have to be simple they could be as complex as reality itself skepticism especially false skepticism as I've talked about in Prior episodes is commonly held as a default position you think like well most skeptics think like well questioning everything and doubting everything that's that's just natural that's just like what we're supposed to be doing without recognizing that maybe by doubting everything you actually delude yourself so that's a the problem with false skepticism is that you take the position that all other positions are false except the one that you took leads to a lot of delusion the position that modern science is true because it works that's a very pervasive modern default position people are so bought into science and technology and to the benefits of it that they never really question this and then this creates a lot of damage the default position that consciousness is in the brain probably 99% of the world's populations believe this if not explicitly then implicitly right you believe that your consciousness is tied to your brain and any belief other than that sounds ridiculous people really think like no but that consciousness happens in the brain and there's a brain process that that is just a given you know there's no burden of proof that that has to clear if you want to leave if you want to argue that consciousness somehow outside the brain or separate from the brain or independent of the brain you to provide very good proof for that see that's the trap that I'm pointing to you here that you are the body is another default position that you believe you're the sickle body another one is that physical pain has to inherently be painful and that it's bad that's a default position that many people hold that you have free will or control over life and yourself and your circumstances this is the very common default position what's funny about this one is that even people who do not believe in free will people who are determinists people who will argue against free will in theory in practice they will still believe in free will in practice they will still feel that they are the controller and doer of life because that's what ego is about you see so it's very it's very interesting to kind of risk that the mind can create between the theory and the practice and what's more important is the practice rather than the theory most determinists are actually firm believers in free will because they act as though they have it when they lose control over some circumstance in their life to get upset see if you actually believed you didn't have free will you would not be upset about a situation where you have no control you would be surrendered to it but that's a very rare state of affairs very few people are actually surrendered to those kinds of sin those kinds of you know tough situations when I put a gun to your head you're probably not going to be surrendered to that you're probably going to try to attack me of course even if you did attack me that would still not be evidence of a free will you attack me because I've put a gun to your head in the same way that you know a robot can attack you when you try to unplug it from the wall or something you could easily program a robot to attack a human being does it prove that it has free will another default position is a lot of the mainstream cultural norms that we have so like getting married if you believe that you need to get married or you have a certain pressure feeling like I need to get married that's the default position you have you probably have default positions about sexuality for example you probably believe homosexuality is maybe unnatural or unmanly a missile EO how could you say homosexuality is how could it possibly be manly of course it's unmanly right that's your default position you see you never bothered to ask for proof for that position you just took it on faith you took it as just a given see that's the danger of the default position is that it just sort of slides under the radar of examination and it never gets examined because it just feels too obvious to be examined that's what all these examples have in common is that they just feel so obvious when you are holding these positions and on the other hand when you're not holding these positions they seem so ridiculously blind so unconscious another position is that the education system teaches truth a lot of people believe that another position is that enlightenment is an experience that one has watch out for that one light amount of experience watch out for that one another default position is nihilism the idea that life is inherently bleak and meaningless and hopeless and depressing and sad and just full of suffering this is a position the nihilists mistake is that he doesn't recognize that nihilism nihilism itself is just a groundless default position that he stumbled into and now doesn't know how to escape uh if you struggle with depression watch out for this default position which is that most people who are depressed hold the depression is something that happens to them like cancer or something it's just a play upon me whereas the alternative to that is maybe that depression is something that you're causing something that you're doing actively depression must be actively maintained most depressed people have the default position that no depression is the default state like unless I'm always cheering myself up I'm going to be depressed that's their default position happens to be false as well actually peace and bliss are more of the default state for the human system for a healthy human conscious system rather than depression depression something you're actively creating all the time you just not aware how you're creating it but you can become aware and that ends up being the ultimate solution to depression not pills you might have a default position like letting my kids watch TV or playing with the iPad all day isn't really bad for them it's okay no problems and if you do hold that position it's probably not explicit it's not you go around telling your friends like oh yeah it's okay for my kids to watch a bunch of TV and play a bunch of games on the iPad all the time it's okay you never probably explicitly say to anybody not even to yourself do you acknowledge this position unless you really go in there and start to look another very common default position which is leading to a lot of problems is this this one about humanity as humanity is somehow highly evolved and that we have exited the dark ages maybe not another default position is that society is healthy and this is another one that's totally under the radar most people in society believe the society is healthy of course because if they believed otherwise they would not really be able to to function as a cog in the machine that society is one of the biggest i opening mind [ __ ] of all when you start to get into this deep self-actualization work is you start to see more and more just how dysfunctional and how unhealthy society is and it blows your mind it's like wow it blows your mind and it doesn't stop blowing your mind it doesn't just happen once it's like over and over and over and over again it's just like it doesn't stop like every year I'm seeing how [ __ ] dysfunctional Society is that's um that can be yes that can be emotionally laborious to notice that over and over again can be kind of shocking but most people don't recognize that they just assume a society is healthy I mean this is this is the norm this is how society is supposed to be right it's not even thought about and the last one I'll mention is the default position that happiness comes from external conditions this is a huge default position that a lot of people hold which really screws them up and prevents them from ever finding happiness so notice that often default positions really turn out to be special case constraints so what do I mean by this for example gravity we assumed up until like five hundred years ago we generally assume that gravity points downward and that objects fall downward like you can read some treatises from the Greeks and Romans and they they actually believe that objects have an inherent tendency to fall down that's what their explanation of gravity was until of course Newton came along and then we went into outer space and we saw that actually gravity is a omnidirectional it doesn't just favor stuff falling down that just is a special constraint upon gravity when you're you know dealing with a very large spherical object that looks flat and you're out sitting on top of it then it appears as though yeah gravity is always downward but when you're out in outer space it doesn't look like that anymore right so gravity beam galleries of special constraint in the same way with Euclidean geometry Euclid assumed that parallel lines at 90 degrees always you know runs can run forever and never intersect and of course the default position there that he was assuming that he was unconscious of is that that's only on a flat surface if you're talking about a spherical or hyperbolic surface then that's no longer true right so Euclidian geometry is a special constraint on the larger field of possible geometries that exist and you know now we know better because we have non Euclidean geometry and that's one of the developments that allow Dine Stein to then revolutionize our understanding of space-time because space time is four dimension you know model that is four dimensional non Euclidean another example would be absolute time are kind of talked about this but you know until Einstein there is this notion that time is absolute and it's the same for everybody and then we find out that that's not true that absolute time is really just a special constraint which only works for human beings when we are at relatively low speeds under the speed of light if we go faster approaching the speed of light than absolute time starts to break down doesn't really work right so it's sort of a simplification so a lot of what the human mind does is make these simplifications but then these simplifications come back to bite us in the ass because we mistake our simplifications for reality and we think that our simplifications explain everything when is that there's a lot that they don't explain so all of these are positions everything I talked about above these are all positions that are being held often without knowing that they are being held and a lot of times what these positions do when it's pointed out to you that it's a position is that you deny that it's a position the position denies itself it's not really you it's really a position is almost like a virus infecting your mind you want to think about it that way and then that virus defends itself you see and for the virus the best defense mechanism is to go completely unnoticed so it's really in the virus's favor that you're never aware that it's present at all see the virus is smart the virus doesn't come out and showboat and do all this flowery stuff I mean sometimes it does in some people but most of the times your most deepest beliefs that get you stuck the most they are completely unconscious to you they are not premeditated at all they weren't chosen by you you don't even know that they're there until you do a lot of digging and I want you to be really cognizant that many of the positions you think you hold in theory are actually quite different in practice you don't just hold positions in theory you also hold them in practice and a lot of times there's this sort of disconnect this rift you want a really good example of this of something that you actually hold in practice very very deeply you hold that reality is actually real like think of what I'm saying here you actually have a position and it is a position that this reality that you have been a part of your whole life that it's actually real and then you have a second-order position on top of that which says Leo you're [ __ ] crazy what you're saying here because it Israel what else is more real than reality see and that's something that even if you're a philosopher you've probably never actually sat down and thought to yourself oh well yeah I have a default position that reality is real no not even if you're a philosopher have you probably even done that not unless you've gone really [ __ ] deep right because this stuff is and it's just it seems so obvious and that's exactly how it hides from you is through its obvious nacelle what I want you to take away from this episode is that there are no Givens everything must be empirically investigated and anything that's not empirically investigated watch out you're really setting yourself up for some disasters they're disasters of very tragic proportions notice interestingly that from a mechanical point of view it's hard for the eye to see itself it's hard for you to see where is your standing okay because the place you stand is hidden by the fact that you're standing on it you see that's sort of like the mechanics of life and reality is facing this problem of how does it become conscious of itself reality is facing this problem on many levels so you probably don't even appreciate yet and yet it's challenging because when you identify with a thing then you're standing on top of it right and then you don't really see it it is looking out on everything else doesn't really see itself and it takes a lot of effort to circle back around to really see itself properly this is sort of a mechanical problem imagine if you were an engineer trying to design an eyeball that could completely see itself from all angles as well as the rest of the world that would be a tricky engineering challenge see and you might even wonder well why why do I do that what's the point don't we just want the eyeball looking outward never looking inward why does it need to see itself from every angle well maybe for an eyeball that's not a big problem although you know if you have a a tiger creeping up behind you it's it's nice to be able to see back there see but for human beings who are very complex organisms we need to be much more self-aware otherwise we create all sorts of disasters and problems for ourselves both individually and collectively is because you know we don't really have a 360-degree panoramic perspective of how we behave as human beings mostly we just have this tiny 5 degree view out into the world which with which we interact and which to which we relate but that ends up being a way too limited of a perspective default positions are a key mechanism for self-deception because what they allow is they allow the mind to make a construction a conceptual construction without acknowledging that it's a conceptual construction it allows constructions to be created and then regarded by its creator as inherent to reality this creates projections this is how you can concoct some sort of story or whatever almost anything you want you can basically create a fantasy and then that fantasy becomes real for you now you might say well that's a very dangerous mechanism and it is and you might say well Lea we don't want to live in a fantasy we want to live in just reality but see you got to see both sides of this because reality is very ingenious for reality to create itself which is what it's doing all the time reality is creating itself it's the only thing there is so it has to create itself to do that it has to there has to be a way for an illusion to appear like reality because that's actually what creates reality that's actually the fabric of reality is illusion in the same way that the substance of a magic trick is the sleight of hand without sleight of hand you could not create an amazing magic trick and what is more amazing of a magic trick than this entire universe you see so there's a very deep interconnection between constructions getting constructed but then not being aware as constructions that's why most people believe in all sorts of constructions but they will never admit that they are constructions they will argue to the death that they are reality and another secondary component here of this self-deception mechanism is that active maintenance has to happen of these constructions which doesn't get acknowledged so the best example of this is with depression a depressed person not only will they generally not acknowledge the depression as a construction but they will especially not want to acknowledge that they are actively maintaining their depression they like to think that depression is just like something that they're stuck in as if it's like the the most natural state for the human being or niya let's think this way right nihilus don't understand that they are actively maintaining their nihilism and that they could stop so the danger here is that with these default positions they create paradigm lock I've talked about in the past they prevent self inquiry and observation especially self observation they lead to unexamined self biases they lead to closed mindedness and dogmatic debating and they lead to you to delusion of otherwise highly intelligent people so what I'm talking about here especially applies to highly intelligent people because see in their hubris highly intelligent people assume we understand all this stuff already when they don't and then that just makes it even worse so you've got layer upon layer upon layer of self-deception going on here which is why we need to spend all this time really talking about the examples going through them in a lot of detail over and over again so you start to see the significance of this all right so you might say okay Liam so what do I do about this what is required to see my own positions how does the I see itself well basically three things awareness raising your awareness there's a lot of ways you can do that which I've talked about in the past from meditation to mindfulness practice to many many other things also though self-honesty developing the capacity to be more self honest and objectivity developing the capacity to look at situations including yourself and not giving yourself any special privileged position so first what you want to do is you want to acknowledge your positions as positions as much as you can acknowledge your perspectives as perspectives and not as absolutes super-bored don't engage in debates with people where you start to defend yourself based on this bogus notion of certain positions as being self-evident and default and then playing this game of burden of proof it's like well you have to provide burden of proof to change my mind don't do that instead be much more honest and to just say yeah you know this is my position I'm an atheist and that's my position and I believe that after death there will be nothingness and that's my position I believe that reality is real and that's a position that I hold and there could be alternatives but see the whole game that the mind is playing with itself is that it's trying to close down possibilities for alternatives that's why the mind doesn't generally like to hear this stuff much less actually work to implement it be very vigilant with yourself watch yourself like a hawk and just stop giving your beliefs special status watch how you will attack and criticize everybody else's beliefs and then when it comes to your own beliefs you'll be like that's okay I'll just let myself slide a little bit it's okay we'll just fudge some stuff here and fudge some stuff there now you got to apply the same rigorous standard of criticism to yourself as you do to all the other silly nonsense beliefs that you find out in the world and then what you'll discover is that actually you're part of them and that there's no real difference at all and then that's what gives you the motivation to then step outside the whole game and then play this game on a whole different level now you're really exiting the dogmatic paradigm and you're entering the non-duality paradigm at that point and non-duality is actually not a paradigm hi Veronica Lee it might seem like what I'm saying here is that everything is relative you know everything's just open to speculation you can just anything goes it all comes out in the wash doesn't matter what you believe everything is equal no that's not what I'm saying at all actually this relativism which sounds like relativism will come full circle and it will turn into the absolute and you will arrive at the absolute but the absolute will not be anything like you think from your dogmatic relative relative perspectives because it's the absolute it's not a perspective you can't squeeze the absolute into your perspective but that's that's the discussion for another time so in conclusion I just want to tell you to be very suspicious of any ideologies that limit your ability to observe because observation here is the key the key to raising awareness is observation that's basic what awareness is is just observation but most people don't want to engage in observation they want to engage in position taking observation is very threatening to the mind that's why it refuses to observe it's very stubborn about observation it'll only want to observe the things that really perpetuate its survival and its current web of beliefs and it doesn't want to observe the stuff that runs contrary to that and then that gets us into a lot of trouble all right that's it I'm done here I'm signing off please click a like button for me post your comments down below come check out actualized other work as well this is my website right here I've got my blog I'm releasing new stuff on my blog all the time I've got my life purpose course the book list the forum there's a lot of resources come check it all out most of it is free and stick with me for more you might think that oh well Leo you've already covered so many topics and all the important topics it sounds like you've already covered you're just like rehashing stuff over and over again no no no no more foundational topics are coming completely new stuff that you haven't heard about before it's on the way I have lists lists of hundreds of episodes that I need to shoot but if it sometimes seems like I'm rehashing stuff I'm actually very cognizant not to waste your time repeating the same things in new episodes if if it seems that way it seems like there's overlap it's because that overlap is either natural and organic to this assembling of the big picture or it's because it really needs to be stressed for you to get it right one of the dangers with shooting these videos with no overlap which is actually what I try to do no overlap between episodes is that that means that if you miss an episode a foundational episode you don't watch it that means you have like a huge missing gap in your understand of reality in life and so the burden is then on you to make sure that you watch all the episodes and piece it all together so sometimes there's going to be some overlap between certain concepts for example you might think like well default position how are they really different from paradigms ah there's a lot of overlap there true but also I want you to have that that label of default position I want you to have that concept in your mind with all the Associated examples so that in the future when I talk about default positions you could be like oh yeah that's it and that's it and that's it and I can see how it all interconnects see so there's this process of interconnecting everything which is what is my deepest passion here is to give you a really integrated biggest picture possible understanding of yourself and of life that's challenging to do and very few teachers or people out there do it because it really requires you to stretch your mind and then it also requires you to spend quite a bit of time putting all the puzzle pieces together see but man having that big picture understanding of life is incredible it's incredible it's the most amazing thing it's the thing that I'm the most passionate about in life is getting this big picture understanding and I'm really excited to give you more of the foundational building blocks in the future to do just that so stick with me for more you