Word count:12834
Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about understanding how paradigms work. And this very sneaky phenomenon of paradigm lock. If you want to experience massive growth quickly, and you want to get to the root of most of your issues in life, and you really need to study and understand how paradigms work, and this phenomenon that I call paradigm lock. This is a very in depth episode, a very foundational episode we're going to cover, one of the most important topics that you can possibly understand for understanding all of life is this notion of paradigms and paradigm lock. So stay with me, it's going to be a little bit abstract at first, but by the end of it, you'll see a lot of practical applications. And this is some very mind blowing stuff. So first, let's talk about what a paradigm is, in the second half of the episode, we'll get to paradigm lock and what that phenomenon is. So what is a paradigm, the definition of it would be something like a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind, including all of the assumptions and ways of thinking and ways of interpretation that one might have. So think of a paradigm as a self contained view of reality, like a lens, a colored lens that you look through, except the trick with paradigms is that they don't feel like they're just a view of reality, they don't feel like they're a lens. So most of the time, you're not aware that you're in this view, and you're not aware that you're using a lens, it just feels like reality, we call it reality, we don't call it a view. We don't call it a model. We don't call it a framework. We don't think of it that way, our mind just sees it as reality. And you can see how this leads to a lot of self deception possibilities, which is why it's very important to study the mechanics of paradigms, which is what we should explore right now. So it's interesting because this word paradigm has become quite popular in common vernacular. But this only happened recently. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, who's a historian of science, and a philosopher, he published the book, a revolutionary book, one of the most important works of philosophy in the last 100 years, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And this was groundbreaking stuff. And it was based on a very simple investigation, the investigation, you would have thought that we did this hundreds of years ago, but apparently no one did this until Thomas Kuhn came around. What Commons Kuhn did is he just said, Hey, you know what? I'm interested in understanding how science works. The process of science, what is science? How is it that it works? And rather than doing what most philosophers and scientists have been doing for hundreds and 1000s of years now, which is that they were speculating and theorizing about how science works. What he did is say, You know what, let me take a historical perspective. Let me actually take a look at how science has evolved over the last 1000 to 500 years, and see what the history actually tells us. Maybe the history of science tells us something other than what we assumed science is maybe can reveal some interesting stuff. And he found some very interesting stuff, which has revolutionized how we think about the theoretical foundations of science. Some of the stuff he found was rather shocking. It shocked the philosophical community and the scientific community. And from that, we got the word paradigm in our common vernacular. He popularized the term because his work was so groundbreaking. So what did he do? Well, he studied various scientific revolutions, for example, the Copernican revolution in science, the Einsteinian revolution, he studied Newton, he studied various scientific, more minor revolution that you probably heard, haven't heard of, in chemistry, and in other aspects of science. And he looked at just basically, how does science evolve? And what do scientists actually do on a day to day basis? And then what kind of changes lead to big breakthroughs in science? So he studied all that. And what he discovered is that science is a lot more conservative than people usually think. And that in practice, science work very differently than we think of it in theory. In theory, we like to put signs up on a pedestal. And we like to say, Well, science is the sort of ideal. It's this ideal process of investigation, this empirical, fact based, very objective investigation to the nature of reality, which yields certain inevitable truths. And sure there's fallibility in it. But generally, science operates on this kind of higher level, which transcends petty human biases and culture, and all that sort of stuff. But when Thomas Kuhn went through the history books, and he actually studied this stuff, what he discovered is actually no, science is highly subject to dogma, to cultural biases, and to clinging to old frameworks. And this notion shocked the scientific establishment, because scientists like to view the their work. And the whole process of science is very objective. They like to view it as a universal process, not a human process, not a cultural process, but universal, so that it's not even the human species engaged in this work, but something even higher, we're tapping into really universal truths with the scientific method. But what Thomas Kuhn discovered is that that's not how it works at all. In reality, most scientists are very closed minded, very dogmatic and very traditional. And he found four basic ways in which paradigms influence and inquiry. One is that they influence what is studied and what is researched. So depending on your paradigm, whatever your paradigm is, in whatever field you're working in, that will influence what things you study and research seems kind of obvious. Secondly, it influences the type of questions that get asked at all. Thirdly, it influences the exact structure and nature of the questions that are being asked in that field. And fourthly, it influences the paradigm influences how results are interpreted. So when you go on, or you run a science experiment, you get some data back. And usually we're just seem like, well, data is data, right? Everyone agrees on the data? Not so fast. What Thomas Kuhn discovered is that actually, the data the interpretation of data, this is a much trickier affair than we normally assume. And here's where your paradigm, your entire framework of the world, or your field, will heavily influence how you interpret the data, which data do you think is relevant, and which is irrelevant? You see, I'm going to add two additional points to how paradigms influence inquiry. One of my points is that the paradigm shapes what is allowed to be possible. And what is imagined as possible, is the very big point. So depending on what your paradigm is of biology, chemistry, physics, reality, or whatever field you're working in. Your paradigm tells you what is and isn't possible in that field. And it also determines how your imagination is going to work. And thinking about various possibilities, there are certain possibilities that you won't even imagine from within your paradigm. And this is where the paradigm becomes very constrictive. Because you can see how if your imagination is crippled, and your ability to think about the possibilities is crippled within your field, how much that will limit your possibility to make new discoveries. And that's exactly what Thomas Kuhn found, is that most scientists aren't outside the box thinkers, they're very traditional. And what they do is they just go through a very routine process of collecting data within the established paradigm of their time and of their culture. And only rarely do we have scientific revolutions where somebody like Newton, or Einstein, or Galileo comes along and flips the paradigm upside down on its head. That's very rare. Most scientists are not working like that. And the reason that these revolutions happen is because most of the time 90% of the time, the regular sciences, the majority of them are just working to collect data to validate the existing paradigm. And this leads to certain A phenomenon that I call paradigm lock. I'll talk more about that as we go on. Another bonus point that I want to give you here about how paradigms influence inquiry into the nature of reality is the assumptions that are made by the paradigm. And the things that the paradigm takes as self evident. What's interesting about paradigms, whether they be scientific ones, or religious ones, or spiritual ones, or secular ones, or economic ones, and I'll give you lots of examples of paradigms coming up here in a minute, is that each paradigm takes things for granted, and makes assumptions about what is self evident to that paradigm. There are certain things within mathematics, for example, the paradigm of mathematics that have taken us self evident. Certain things within science, certain things within religion, certain thing within within economics, and so forth. And this notion of stuff being self evident, man, this ends up being something that comes back to bite you really in the ass. This notion of self evidence, this is something you can see how this notion of self evidence allows the mind to get away with basically anything that it wants to get away with. This opens the doors for self delusion. That's a problem when you want to do a inquiry into the nature of reality. So the way that science works is we have long periods of them science of gathering data inside a paradigm and then short, rare periods of overthrowing the paradigm. The way that a paradigm gets overthrown, is when enough anomalies get collected, through the ordinary scientific process, that finally the existing paradigm becomes untenable. And it has to be rejected and somebody has to come up with a radical new scheme. And then once someone comes up with that, he usually gets a Nobel Prize. He gets a lot of credit, but only after his work has been subjected to a lot of skepticism, criticism, denunciation, and even demonization and rejection. So that's the really interesting thing is that most scientists are extremely closed minded. And only after the fact, after the entire paradigm has evolved, and went through that critical period of transition, and only after the revolution has completed itself, only then do we look back in retrospect and say, oh, yeah, that was obvious. You know, Albert Einstein's work in overthrowing the new Newtonian mechanical paradigm. That's obvious stuff. Now. It wasn't obvious then. And Galileo overthrowing the old paradigm of the Sun orbiting the Earth, it's obviously silly. Now, that's so easy for us to understand. But back then it was no joke. It was a life and death matter. So we have to be very careful about not taking history for granted. Another point that Thomas Kuhn made about paradigms that paradigms are a real mind bending thing, because he said that paradigms are incommensurate will. Which means that when you have two strictly different paradigms, you can't necessarily translate from one paradigm into the next. These paradigms, you can think of them almost as isolated bubbles. There's a bubble here and a bubble here, there's a way to interpret reality this way. And then a totally different way to interpret reality this way. And it's not always easy to, to communicate between these two different bubbles. And of course, there can be way more than just do bubbles. This he called it commensurability. Now, he was actually later challenged on this. Because people went and looked at his work and say, well, in commencer, is it really the case that one paradigm can't be translated into another paradigm? Is it really the case that when you're in a paradigm that you are in like a totally different reality, in a sense, that's what Thomas Kuhn wanted to say at the extreme. But some people have real bad back and said, No paradigms aren't really like that we can interpenetrate paradigms. So that's a more complicated issue, which I'll leave for another day. Maybe if I do an episode on the philosophy of science, that's where you would really get into that stuff very deep. But what I'm interested in here is taking this notion of paradigms and now showing you the enormous implications that they can have for personal development. Because I'm not just interested in coming up here and give you interesting philosophical theories. that's well and good, but we're interested in application here. So let me give you a list of paradigms. So you are clear about what I'm talking about with this word. And then we're gonna get into paradigm lock. With paradigm lock. That's where the application happens for personal development. So stick with me here, here's the list of paradigms, I want to give you a big list. So you're really clear about how significant this stuff is. This really affects all of humanity. All social systems, all scientific endeavors, philosophical endeavors, and your personal life. So here are some very traditional examples of paradigms told me these heavenly spheres model of the universe. So this is a 2000 year old theory comes from Tomi, which is the notion that the heavens are made out of the spheres and everything is rotating on a sphere that Earth is at the very center. So it's the sort of Earth centric model of the universe, and the stars are on these spheres. Sounds silly nowadays, but back then 2000 years ago, is really considered the best model, the Platonic forms paradigm. So Plato, if you studied him and lost the class, then he had this whole notion of these abstract forms that were like the essence of reality, and that our sense perceptions are at the essence of these platonic forms are the essence. So that was a paradigm, a sort of framework, a lens through which you saw the whole world, and you interpreted everything you saw, through that lens of Platonic forms or heavenly spheres, when you actually looked up into the night sky? Under Ptolemies model, you would actually imagine and see those spheres in a sense, they weren't visible, but you, your mind just kind of filled that in, right? Because our minds are very conceptual. Also, from the classic era, we have teleology. teleology is the idea which has really gone out of favor nowadays. But this idea that objects and things in the world have a purpose. For example, there might be examples from ancient Greeks or Romans, like philosophers, and they would say, well, the purpose of a horse, what's the purpose of a horse? Well, the purpose of a horse is to carry man or to carry load. That was his theological purpose, or the teleological sort of purpose of an acorn is to become an oak tree. That was his purpose. And that has kind of been abandoned. But that was an interesting way of looking at objects, you looked at them purposefully, like the purpose of a pencil is for you to write with it. And this was seen as something very essential, almost like, inherent to the fabric of reality is that all these different objects have these baked in purposes. Kind of interesting way to look at the world. Atheism versus theism is a paradigm. There's the atheist paradigm. There's the theist paradigm, the no god paradigm versus the god paradigm. There's the paradigm of Euclidean geometry and non Euclidean geometry, this is very interesting. This is actually something that then affected Einstein's work, in that he had the brilliant idea that maybe space is curved, which means that space is not Euclidean, but non Euclidean. And that was made possible by the discoveries of non Euclidean geometry was up, which was a huge paradigm shift that happened to just 100 years prior to Einstein's time, within the field of mathematics, whereas for the, for the past 2000 years, most people assume that the only kind of geometry that was possible was straight line, Euclidean geometry, until we discovered that, hey, there are complex surfaces beyond just the plane, there's the sphere, there can be spherical geometry, or hyperbola. geometries, which really opened up the doors that took a paradigm revolution, paradigm shift. The paradigm of Newtonian physics versus Einsteinian relativity, we've already alluded to that. But that was a huge paradigm shift, and came from two different totally different ways of looking at the world and seeing space and time in very different ways. The naive realist paradigm, I've talked about this in a separate episode about naive realism. The naive realist paradigm basically, is the notion of reality that people have an external reality, three dimensional spatial reality, a reality made out of matter, atoms, molecules, and so forth. That's a paradigm. But notice that you think that that's how reality is if you buy into that paradigm, you don't think of it as a paradigm. You think of it as reality. The paradigms of rationalism versus in Pyrrhus ism versus idealism. If you study philosophy even a little bit, then you should be familiar with at least those three basic paradigms. Those have been themes throughout philosophy for hundreds, if not 1000s of years. mathematics itself is a paradigm and within mathematics, different fields of mathematics, from calculus to statistics to number theory, to topology, they are also containing different paradigms. karma and rebirth is a paradigm comes from a lot of Eastern traditions, where they have this whole paradigm they see life as just this never ending cycle of rebirth, death and rebirth, death and rebirth, definitely rebirth a soul, this immutable soul that goes through this infinite process of rebirth. And karma is playing a big role in that. That's the whole paradigm in the West here, we generally don't think of life that way. Two different ways think about life, and death. Consciousness is brain activity, that's a paradigm, you probably think that consciousness comes from your brain. That's a paradigm that's not reality. That's the paradigm you have the triple paradigms that you're not conscious that you hold paradigms. That's why they're so sneaky. Quantum mechanics is a paradigm. The modern cosmology, the notion of the universe is a big bang that's expanding and inflating. That's a paradigm, as contrasted with a static universe is how we thought about the universe. Just 100 years ago, we thought the universe was static until we discovered that it wasn't. logic and rationality are paradigms. You better believe that's a paradigm. That's not a given at all. That's a paradigm that you're using. In philosophy, logical positivism is a paradigm. Darwinism versus intelligent design. Those are two different paradigms. Scientology is a paradigm capitalism versus communism, paradigm, liberalism versus conservative ism. How about pickup? Are you into pickup? Have you noticed how much pickup is a paradigm? Huge paradigm? One that blindsides a lot of people. Because most people who do pickup get into it, they get into it for sex. They get into it for ego. They don't usually know about paradigms, they usually haven't studied epistemology, or philosophy. So they're not aware of this stuff. And they get really sucked into that paradigm of pickup. And they see the whole world through this lens of pickup. And that becomes quite a trap for them. Success oriented Self Help is a paradigm, all the self help material that promises you to attract wealth, and cars, and houses and yachts, and just this whole notion that you're developing yourself to improve your life. That's an entire paradigm of personal development. There are totally different paradigms, you don't have to be developing yourself for those reasons at all. It's interesting that once you can see that as a paradigm, you can literally walk down the aisle at a bookstore, and just walk through the self help aisle. And you can see shelf after shelf after shelf of books that are just all within that one paradigm that are missing a lot of other elements. Of course, there's spiritual based self help, which is another different paradigm. And there could be crossover between those two, but often they're there, they tend to occupy different shelves in the bookstore. That's interesting, because the people who are into success oriented self help, oftentimes poopoo the spiritual or the self help. And the people who are into the spiritual self help they poopoo the successor into self help. Because these people occupy different paradigms, different bubbles, so to speak. Freudian psychoanalysis is a paradigm. It's gone out of favor nowadays. There's also union psychology, which is a paradigm. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is another psychological paradigm. There's a lot of paradigms within psychology, there's Gestalt psychology, and many, many others. If you study psychology, you can get into all those. And then you can compare and contrast which paradigms you'd like better, which are more effective at solving your problems. Entire cultures like Islam or Hinduism, becomes a paradigm. Buddhism becomes a paradigm. Of course, all the religions or paradigms. Eastern versus Western medicine is a paradigm. A lot of Western doctors are not aware of the fact even though they have spent years decades studying the medicine, they're not aware that they are operating within a western medicine paradigm, and that there are limits to that paradigm, very real limits. Western history is a paradigm. A lot of people study here Street for 10 or 15 years all through high school and middle school and elementary school and in college. And they recognize that that history is all shaped by paradigms. Modern academia is the paradigm, the university system and how it works. That's a paradigm. Conspiracy theories are paradigms. Astrology is a paradigm, vegetarianism, versus the Paleo diet versus some raw food diet, versus some sort of food combining diet versus some sort of like, low acid diet. All the different diets you see on the bookshelves at stores? Well, those are all coming from different paradigms to and you can see how paradigms compete with each other. There's paradigms within the paranormal. There's a cult paradigms. Shamanism is a paradigm witchcraft is a paradigm Voodoo is a paradigm. post modernism is a paradigm, relativism is a paradigm, realist art, versus impressionist art, versus post impressionist art, versus abstract art, versus post modern art. Those are all paradigms that evolved within the history of art. And if you actually study the history of art, it's very interesting because there's, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of artistic paradigms. Very interesting. And this whole notion of being avant garde, being on the leading edge of the paradigms within art, that in of itself turns into a paradigm. They're interesting. behaviorism is a paradigm spiral dynamics, is a paradigm phonology, measuring people's skulls, and then correlating that with their intelligence, that whole science which has now been debunked, that was a paradigm. Homeopathy is a paradigm. Thermodynamics is a paradigm, even within technologies. Within just practical technology, we have paradigms, we have the PC, desktop and mouse the graphical user interface, that's the whole paradigm. Someone had to come up with that touchscreen mobile devices, that was a paradigm really created by Apple. In fact, both these paradigms were really pioneered by Apple to a large degree. And then they were co opted by a lot of other companies, and push forward. These were very successful paradigms, which have, you know, had huge social ramifications have had huge economic ramifications. And the last one I'll give you is the paradigm of building your career by going to school, getting educated, going to university, getting a four year degree, and then going into marketplace, that whole mode of educating our public. Our kids go through that whole process, and then they become young adults, and they get a job, that whole paradigm that's just a paradigm, that's one way to do it. There's many other possible ways that we can educate our children to become good and qualified for their jobs. For example, in the old days, we had guilds. In the medieval times, we had guilds, we had apprentice programs, where you would go and you would live a child who actually live with a master. Like if you think about Michelangelo, he would go as a child to live with a master for 1020 years and learn to be a sculptor, rather than going to some university. Maybe that was a more effective model. I'll let you decide about that. But anyway, so these are all different examples of paradigms. Now let's talk about paradigm lock. Because this is where the application happens. So this is just a word that I came up with. And what it means is, when the mind gets stuck in a cohesive and circular framework, this sort of bubble until it's not able to break out, because it's committed to only using that framework to do all its interpretation, data collection. Do you see what I'm saying here? So here's a really, the crux of the matter. Here's my paradigms are so dangerous, is because once you get stuck into a paradigm, you get nice and comfy with it. Now all of a sudden, you're not open to exploring new perspectives. You're not open to acknowledging that you're inside of a paradigm. You're not open to the fact that you are adopting one perspective out of potentially infinite number of perspectives. You're not opening to questioning the self evident assumptions that your paradigm makes. And you place the burden of proof on others to convince you. Demanding that day. explain everything to you through your paradigm and your paradigm only. This is a common trap, for example, well, every paradigm basically falls into this trap. But I especially see it for example, with rational people, when you have a hyper rational person, and you want to discuss something like spirituality with them, and then you come to them to have a discussion, what they will want you to do. And they won't even realize that this is what they're asking you to do is they'll ask you to take all your spiritual insights, and to reformulate them. So they all make perfect sense within the rationalist paradigm. They will ask you for proofs. For logical arguments, they'll ask you for no paradoxes, no contradictions, they'll want double blind studies and, and this and this and that. And what that is why that's dangerous is because to not get locked into a paradigm, you need to be able to step outside of your paradigm. But what someone in a paradigm does is they don't realize that when I'm in this bubble, for me to really appreciate the next bubble, what I need to do is I need to step out of this one, and fully immerse myself into that one. And the danger that people make in this, what paradigm lock is, is that they're in this bubble, and they say, Okay, I'm in this bubble. Now, there's some stuff in those other bubbles. But I don't recognize my own bubble as the bubble. My bubble is reality. So those bubbles, that's like some some stuff I could explore. But it all has to be interpreted only in my model of the world. Because my model, the world is not a model the world its reality. And this is where you get locked, right, you get locked, because now you're committed to using those self evident assumptions that you made from the very beginning that you weren't even conscious of. Now you're committed to using them to interpret everything else. But you know what those other bubbles what defines a bubble is the collection of self evident assumptions and other premises and attitudes that one has. So to fully appreciate all the other bubbles, you have to be able to say, Okay, I'm in a bubble to let me not kid myself, I'm in a bubble too. And if I really want to appreciate the other bubbles, I gotta step out of my bubble, leave behind my frameworks, leave behind all the old analytical tools that I had. And really dive into this other bubble. And to see it from its own position, rather than interpreting it into my old paradigm. This is where the issue of incommensurability that Thomas Kuhn talks about becomes significant. It really is the case that you can't translate across every bubble. Or even if you are able to, something is lost in the translation, which is often what happens between rational and spiritually minded people, is that the rational person will really insist that all spirituality be boiled down into rational arguments. And even if we attempt to do that you might get some value out of that. But the essence of spirituality will be missing. Because you refuse to take the burden on yourself to step outside of your bubble, and really go and explore this totally different domain. It's almost as if you're sitting in a city, like, let's say, you live in Los Angeles. And you heard me talking about New York City. And you say, Yeah, you know, this New York City sounds very interesting. I would like to experience it. But please bring it here to Los Angeles, because I am too lazy to get an on an airplane and to fly to New York, that would be a huge inconvenience for me. So Leo, please bring New York City over to Los Angeles, and then I will enjoy it. And you can see that that's an absurd position. Right, you can see that that kind of person isn't really serious about inquiry into the nature of reality. He doesn't really want to explore the world. Yeah, he's willing to entertain certain new experiences, but only on his terms. So if I take a snapshot of the Statue of Liberty, and I mail you a postcard of it to Los Angeles, you can look at that picture and be like, Oh, this is pretty cool. And you might think that okay, I got it. I know what New York is all about just because I looked at this postcard. Statue of Liberty, or maybe I looked at a postcard of some other, you know, like Central Park or something, you might think you got it, but you haven't really got it until you've gone there and seen it for yourself because the Statue of Liberty looks very different in person than it does on a postcard. You see, so you have to be willing to travel a bit. And when people are not willing to travel, that's when they're in paradigm lock. And this is what we mean by closed mindedness. These are closed minded people. And make no mistake, that many scientists, many mathematicians, many philosophers, many of the most intelligent people on Earth, and throughout history, have succumb to this trap of paradigm lock. And they didn't even realize it. As simple as it is, right? This isn't rocket science. But it is tricky stuff. Some of the simplest stuff can be some of the trickiest. The problem is that when you do research only within your paradigm, based on your assumptions, and the stuff you think is self evident, then of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that you open yourself up to the bias of confirmation is called confirmation bias. Why is that? Well, because your paradigm is a collection of assumptions and frameworks about how reality is if reality ends up being different than what you thought it was. And you are always interpreting everything in a way to accord with your paradigm, then what's going to happen is that you're going to leave anomalies on the side, there's going to be all this anomalous data that you're just going to ignore and say, No, that's not relevant, that's not important. That's all just, you know, noise, it's all noise. And you're only going to confirm what you were looking for. And you're never going to really take seriously the stuff that you weren't looking for. This might work if reality was very orderly, and intuitive. That might work. But as hopefully, you've already seen through all the different episodes that I release, one of the most common themes in every episode, almost I tell you, this is counterintuitive. And that's counterintuitive. And this is counter to look how counterintuitive all this stuff is. So if we live in a counterintuitive reality, then adopting a paradigm in a rigid fashion, that's going to cause problems. That's big, a big, big potential blind spot. The tricky paradigms is that they're so all encompassing and wide, that they tend to block our imagination from imagining alternatives to the paradigm. It seems like when you're inside a paradigm that this is how things are, and that they couldn't possibly be any other way. For example, you might say, well, Leo, what alternative is there to rationality into Logic, or what's the alternative paradigm to mathematics or to science, all the other paradigms, they're just kind of hokey, and they don't even compare and quality, right? Wrong. That's a failure of your imagination, and a lack of your experience. To get the experience though, you first need to have the imagination. So when your imagination gets crippled by a paradigm lock, this is a very dangerous thing. Because you close yourself off from new experiences, radically new experiences, you are under estimating the degree of radical newness and counter intuitiveness possible with new experiences. That's because your paradigm is salt all encompassing, that you can't see it. You're like a fish in water. Without experiencing the alternatives, you get stuck in your mind. You get trapped. And without experiencing alternatives. Here's the real tragedy. You won't even have a desire to experience alternatives. This is the problem that happens when someone lives in a village his whole life. And he's lived in his little little village for 50 years, then you tell him, Hey, let's go travel to Hong Kong or to London or to Australia. And the guy's like, No, I'm staying in my village. This village is the best thing that there is and you tell them no. Well, how do you know the village of the best thing there is? Because I love this village. I've lived here for 50 years. Of course it's the best thing there is. And then you tell him well, what about Australia? Maybe it's better there and he's like Australia. Don't be silly. Look at this village, this village I have 50 years of experience with this village Australia. That's nothing. So he doesn't even desire an alternative. The more alternative, radical perspectives you experience in life, the more open your mind becomes, it's the sort of exponential growth effect, it snowballs. After a certain point, you reach a critical point where you start to realize that it's all just a collection of perspectives. And that clinging to any one perspective is very small minded, very short sighted. The more certain you feel about a paradigm, the more you set yourself up for a mindfuck. Because the more certain you are about your set of assumptions and how the world is, and the world ends up being very radically different than that, the more you cling to your little position, then the bigger the opposite will happen. You see, you're setting yourself for surprise, you're setting yourself up for pain. And you're putting yourself into a position where you're going to have to play the ostrich, you're going to have to stick your head in the sand. Because otherwise, the pain of admitting that you've been wrong, is going to become harder and harder and harder as the years go by. So you're gonna have to get very good at denial, and mental gymnastics. And so now you can see why so many people are so good at denial and mental gymnastics, and why the world is generally in a state of deep ignorance. And why spirituality can't penetrate into mainstream culture. Exactly because of this problem. The funny thing about paradigms is that you can construct semi self consistent and self referential bubbles that make sense of the world or some limited pocket of the world. And you can construct millions of these. Right? This is how cults happen, how religions happen, how mainstream cultures happen, how language has happened, how universities happened, how governments happen, how corporations and hospitals happen. All of these are like little bubbles. And who take a cosmopolitan big picture perspective, you see, hey, there's 1000s upon 1000s of bubbles that humankind has invented. Could I be living in one of those bubbles? Or am I outside the bubble? Or am I just kidding myself that what I'm in is not a bubble. When you really take seriously the possibility that you're inside a bubble, just like most other people are. That's real, real progress. That is the opening of your mind in a permanent way. Very few people get there. A lot of people like to think that they're there, or that they're getting there. But they're not even close to getting there. So when you have all these self consistent bubbles, the problem is, is that they really feel complete. When you're inside of it. It really feels like you're sad, you're a little universe. You know, if you were living in Amish country, and you were Amish, that little bubble of Amish SNESs, you would feel like that's the whole universe that would feel to you like the greatest thing ever. And if you're a Scientologist in that bubble of Scientology, you would also feel like that whole universe is like, that's it. That's the truth. That's the ultimate thing. That's the most meaningful thing in life. And same thing for everything else, including science, including mathematics, including your government type, including your economic preferences, whether you're a liberal or a conservative or any of that kind of stuff. And the problem is, when you've explored a lot of these bubbles, you have to ask yourself, well, which bubble is right which bubble is best? It's very easy to say that your bubble is right and best when you've only been in one or two bubbles. It's a lot harder when you've been in 100. Bubbles, you start to really scratch your head and wonder hmm, I don't know. I don't know which of these bubbles is best. Is it possible for me not to have any bubbles at all? And then that when you reach that point, now you're really getting into true spirituality? That's tricky. That's very tricky. Because as soon as you think you're out of a bubble, usually you're just right back into a new bubble. A little bit bigger bubble, right? Because you could have bubbles within bubbles within bubbles within bubbles. How do you break all the bubbles? Is that possible? Well, if you want to answer that question, you got to get really serious. A lot more serious than you are right now about epistemology, about metaphysics about non duality. That's a topic for another time. What I want to just point out for right now is that all bubbles have blind spots. And the reason that is is because they make assumptions about reality. And all assumptions you make about reality ends up being wrong they end up being wrong and limiting in some fashion. So here's a, here's the thing I want to point out, this is really interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. And you see the reasons, it's interesting, because you see this all across culture, anything that's outside of your paradigm or your cultures paradigm. It's always dismissed. And it's dismissed in very classical predictable ways. So here are all the ways I'm gonna list them out to you. This is like a complete list of every excuse making mechanism that a paradigm uses against other paradigms, because he to maintain a little isolated bubble of your reality or your view of the world, you have to exclude all the other ones, right? Because it's like this bubble is in a giant room with a bunch of other bouncing bubbles, and all these bubbles will collide and interpenetrate unless you have something that pushes on the outsides, and maintains the rigidity of this bubble. And so of course, every paradigm has methods. These are egoic methods that are used to dismiss the validity of exiting the paradigm and trying out other ones. So let's say I'm occupying the paradigm of atheism, or the paradigm of rationality, or the paradigm of materialistic science, or the paradigm of Scientology. What I'm going to do, because I'm sneaky, my mind is sneaky, is I'm gonna demonize in one form or another, all the other possible paradigms that are in competition with my own. Right. And here's how I will do it. I will label I'll use labels to label the other paradigms. So I'll say that paradigm there's impossible or contradictory. It's logically impossible. It's contradictory. It's paradoxical. See, once I attach those labels to a new paradigm, that means I no longer have to take on the burden of visiting that paradigm and exploring it. I no longer have to take that one seriously, because obviously, it's contradictory. And that was obviously impossible. So that's a waste of my time. Here's another tactical use all say that one over there is insane. That one That one's irrational. That one that was diluted, that one is foolish. And that one there is naive. Here's another set of labels I'll use, I'll say that one there is criminal. That one is treasonous. That one up there is heretical. That one down there is dangerous and harmful to our children. And that one over there. That one is antisocial. Another set of labels all these I'll say that one is weird, just downright weird. That one is comical. That one is ridiculous. That one over there is a fantasy. It's fantastical. That one over there's it's too abstract and philosophical. It's not grounded. It's not a realist. Another set of labels I'll use is that one over there is useless is just totally useless. I wouldn't have any use for that in my life. Even if it was true. That one there is just unimportant. It's not important. That one there is a waste of time. waste of my time. Why should I travel to New York Leo, when that would just be a waste of my time. Why? There's something I could possibly learn from that. I already know, because I'm already very familiar with Los Angeles. I'm so familiar with Los Angeles that I know that I'll never find anything of value in New York. So I just won't even go there. Just a waste of my money wasting my time. Why would I spend six hours flying across the country all the way to go to New York? Why? And here's the here's the most devilish of the excuses. That paradigm over there, I'll call it demonic. That one I'll call it site tannic. That one is a cult. That one is evil. Now what is just downright offensive, and that one over there is outrageous. I'm sure your mind has come up with even more labels and ways that you dismiss other paradigms. But this is a pretty comprehensive list. Now what I want you to do is I want you to think about what paradigms you occupy, what are your favorite paradigms, whether it be scientific ones, rational ones, theistic ones, religious ones, economic ones. And I want you to notice how you and your friends, all the people who occupy your little bubble, how you like to demonize and dismiss in all these different ways. All the other perspectives and what this practically accomplishes is that when you make these judgments These are really prejudices, right? This is the definition textbook definition of prejudice is when you judge something without having actually experienced it. So you judge Christianity without actually having been a Christian. You judge Buddhism without actually having become a Buddhist, you judge Scientology without having been a Scientologist. You see? Now, of course, you're gonna come up with an excuse to say, well, Leo, you know, why should I become a Scientologist? That's a bunch of bullshit. You want me to waste my whole life, exploring all these bullshit ideas and all these bullshit paradigms? But if you don't, you're prejudiced. You see. So one option there would be to reserve judgment and say, Well, I don't know. I've never been a Scientologist. So I truly can't judge Scientology. Because the only way I could really judge Scientology would be to step inside that bubble. Have I been in that bubble? No, I have only heard stuff about Scientology, which seems kind of negative the way it's portrayed a lot of times from within my bubble, to be honest, right? I've never become a Scientologist or Christian or Buddhist, for that matter. But nevertheless, I judged them. But how do I judge them, I judge them for my bubble, I don't actually step into their bubble. What you'll find, though, and you feel free to test me on this one, you don't need to just believe me, go enter the bubble, of any one of these paradigms that I'm talking about. And you will see that it looks a lot more appetizing. And a lot more reasonable. And a lot more sane than you thought it was when you were judging it from outside from your paradigm. Right. This applies to Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, science, and all the other stuff that I mentioning. So let me now give you an set of examples of paradigm lock. Because that's what we're talking about here. Christianity has a big component of paradigm lock. And you'll notice that every paradigm has a mechanism that ensures that it locks you into it. Usually, very rarely, is there a paradigm that says, hey, go explore all the diverse paradigms that exist. That's extremely rare. That is actually antithetical to the point of being a paradigm, the point of being a paradigm is to lock you in to its scheme. And of course, to effectively lock you in, it has to blindfold you, so you don't see anything outside of it. So Christianity, you know, you argue with a Christian, and you start to make rational arguments for a Christian, the Christian will then say, Oh, well, but then you know, the Bible contradicts that. And then you say, Well, how do you know the Bible is correct? Well, because the Bible is the Word of God. But how do you know that's true? Well, because it's written by God. But how do you know? Because God wrote it, see, it becomes circular argument. And then you can't really argue with these people. Because they take that as a self evident assumption, that's part of the Christian paradigm is that the Bible is indisputable. Right, that's taken on faith. Now, you might say, well, Leo, I'm above that I'm an atheist, or watch out, because here's the atheist paradigm lock. Right? You should argue with the atheist. And the atheist will presume that there is no God. And they can't know this, of course, and they'll say that they can't know this. But what they'll do is they'll they'll use some sneaky maneuvers, which are just as sneaky as the Christians tactics, will use mental gymnastics to bake it basically tell you that the default position is that there is no God, Celia, that's the default position. I don't need to be like a Christian because a Christian has to concoct gods, but atheist and atheism, it's just nothing. It's just the default position. I'm not concocting anything, when I'm an atheist. But actually, atheism is a belief. And most atheists, of course, don't realize this and recognize this because they're not conscious of it, that it's a belief. It is a position. They like to tell themselves, it's not a position, but it actually is. And that creates a paradigm lock for them. And then, of course, when you tell them some spiritual truth to talk to, to them about post rationalism, for example, you talk about the pre rational post rational fallacy that atheists commit with spiritual truths, and they'll deny that they will be closed off to it. Because part of the atheist paradigm is constructed in opposition to theism. So it's a sort of reactive thing, right? So they immediately have a sort of sore spot, they get triggered by anything that even smacks of the metaphysical, or of the, of the spiritual. And of course, that closes them in in their little bubble, and they're really not better off than the Christian is at all. Many philosophies that you find in The philosophy textbooks are like this. For example, de cartes philosophy of dualism is paradigm locked. The cart is paradigm locked. logical positivism is paradigm locked. empiricism is paradigm locked. Almost every ism is paradigm locked by almost by definition, that's sort of its point. That's his hidden point. Another paradigm lock is naive realism. And I addressed that in a previous episode. scientific materialism is a paradigm lock. The way that science is done in academia these days is very paradigm locked. naive realism is the idea that there is an external world. Like you actually believe there's an external world, which is not true at all. But that's part of your paradigm, and you interpret everything through that paradigm. And even when I tell you about it, you still can't shake it, because it takes an enormous effort to shake any one of these paradigms. Really, really serious amount of effort. reductionism, as a theme in science is a paradigm lock. skepticism, the way most people abuse skepticism these days, that's a paradigm lock. The skeptic locks himself into his skepticism. See, the skeptic is so opposed to absolutism, that he becomes absolute, with his skepticism. It's really funny. All these things are just comical when you really look at it from a big picture perspective, with some awareness. All this becomes a game, all these things that I'm talking about are just a game. It's such a silly game, and it's so easy to it's so easy to see through the sham of it. Once you have become good at recognizing paradigms, and paradigm lock, and then you free yourself to jump between perspective and perspective without being loyal to any one of them. Man, you're you. You can run circles around all these guys, right? And all these all these fields, all these paradigms generally have very intelligent people in them. There's intelligent Christians, intelligent atheists, intelligence, duelist, intelligent, naive, realist, intelligent, reductionist, intelligent skeptics, but their intelligence is really crippled by their lack of awareness. So it doesn't matter how intelligent you are. When you don't have awareness of what I'm talking about here. Your intelligence becomes a tool of evil, to serve your ignorance, your lack of awareness. Because awareness is much, much more important than any degree of intelligence, you have. Rationality and formal logic. These create big paradigm locks. Just take a look at all the academic logicians and mathematicians that you find in universities, they're paradigm locked. They can't think outside of formal logic and rationality. It's not possible to communicate with these guys. I've tried. It's funny. It's just funny. It's kind of sad, too, because they're so locked into it. thought itself is a paradigm. And it really locks you in. Because Have you noticed yet, that when you're thinking, you lock yourself into this whole paradigm of thinking, everything needs to be thought about? It's sort of like you're running around with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail to you that old adage. That's how thoughts work. That's how academics and intellectuals and philosophers really trapped themselves, the fly in the bottle. What is that? It's thought, thought is the bottle. Because you're trying to think your way out of thought. And you can only get so far, because thought has serious limits. You can't get to truth through thought. But that idea is lost on most people who are deep thinkers, of course, because the reason they became big thinkers because they were good at thinking and thinking serve them. And so now they want to solve everything through thinking, but they think they can't do anything other than think. Of course, that's false. But because they're in their paradigm, and they're using their framework to interpret everything, then they will take any evidence or suggestion you give them about anything outside of thought. And they'll convert it into thought, because that's what a paradigm does is it converts everything into its own language. And then they'll just say, Lea, look, it's just thought, you're just sharing your thoughts with me. Everything's a thought to someone who's addicted to thoughts. Everything is a thought even stuff that's not thought. That's the whole tragedy of it. That's what locks you in languages. And the whole modality of using language to describe reality, that's a huge paradigm lock. The self as a mother of a paradigm lock right there, yourself, the self, you as a human being are a paradigm. You're not a physical being you're a paradigm that's what you are your paradigm, at least what you think you are right Now, that is a paradigm, and you're locked into it. And you can't imagine anything outside of you until you actually break out of you. And you discover that there's something bigger than you, which is not a paradigm. But that's a topic for another time. Reality. That's a paradigm. And boy, does that one lock you in. What I'm saying, literally, is that reality, what you call reality, physical, the very fabric of reality itself, all of it, the notion that there is a reality at all, and that reality is real, is a paradigm lock, and you are so fucking locked into it. That he would take a sledgehammer to your head to knock you out of it. Maybe not even that. How could that be? How can reality be a paradigm? reality itself, the notion of a reality that it exists, is a paradigm. But see this, this doesn't compute in your mind, because from within the paradigm of reality is real. This makes absolutely no sense. And that's right, because you really have to think outside the well, you have to more than just think outside the box, you have to exit the box to discover that reality isn't real. And that it's a paradigm it was a paradigm the whole time. But how could you know that? See, so one thing I want you to do is I want you to start to notice, notice all the people around you are locked into paradigms. There's paradigm lock skeptics, and atheists and theists and academics and scientists and capitalists and communists and economists and politicians and shamans and occultists, and a whole list but the list is endless. Most people are paradigm locked in into many, many different paradigms. So start to notice that although don't judge them too harshly, because remember that you too, are paradigm locked. So the point of this is not for me to give you weapons to go and now make fun of all your friends. The point is to notice that the deep ignorance around you and within you, especially within you, the point of seeing the ignorance around you is to only deepen the appreciation of the ignorance within you. So how do we break out of these paradigms? Well, it's very difficult. Breaking out is very difficult, very difficult. Because the mind is tricky and self deceptive. Because of homeostasis. Because you're literally addicted to the paradigm, your entire identity is entangled with it. So to break out of a paradigm requires that you actually give up portions of yourself. You have to bleed your own blood. In a sense. It's difficult because of pride. The pride you have in your paradigm is difficult because of fear, because of uncertainty because of confusion because of the humility. Now not the humility, the humiliation, the humiliation that you will experience by having to admit that your paradigm has been wrong. See, that's scary. And then what does that leave you open to a new paradigm going to a new paradigm, it's like going to a new country, you don't know what's there. You don't know if someone's going to kill you rape, you murder you steal from you what's going to happen to you, you don't know. So of course, you want to stay comfortable in the paradigm you already are familiar with. It's also difficult because of the loneliness factor. See, when you try to exit one of your paradigms, everything in your environment is going to work to keep you where you're at all the people in your life your family members, your schoolmates, your co workers and your spouse so forth. They will not support you in breaking out of your paradigm. In fact, what they'll do is they'll pull you back in, they'll still they'll use all those labels and tricks that I told you about earlier. They'll say no, that thing you're doing Leo, you're pursuing alignment now that's, that's, that's evil, that's dangerous, that's harmful. That's anti social. That's insane. That's whatever right? All these words will be used or like you've talked about psychedelics with people, and what do they do? They of course, they immediately try to reject you and knock you down and pull you back in their paradigm. So they're living in a non psychedelic paradigm. When you try to open them up to the paradigm of psychedelics. What do they do? They say, Oh, it's just it's just drosha becoming a drug addict and this and that, you've lost it. You've gone crazy. You've gone down the deep end, you've lost it and Boo, right. So all this happens. Isn't that interesting? And then of course, that makes you feel lonely. It If you're actually trying to break out, it's going to take you some while to break out maybe months, maybe years to break out of your paradigm, but then everyone in your life is going to be pulling you back in, that makes it extra hard. And then of course, there's going to be disapproval, they're going to disapprove of you, they're going to reject you, they're going to criticize you, they're going to demonize you, they're gonna leave you, they're gonna threaten you. And all of that will go straight to your ego. And we'll go straight to the core of your deep psychological needs, and you will feel so hurt that you will fall right back into place. This is how you get disciplined into staying in your paradigm, you have to really want to break out to break out. And it's going to come with emotional labor and pain, some pain, some suffering, it's gonna come with it. And at the ultimate level, the thing that stops you from breaking out of your paradigms is death and insanity. If you want to break out of the paradigm of self, and reality, these are the two biggest paradigms that you're stuck in. You're going to literally have to face your own death and insanity. To do that. How many people want to do that comfortable, easy thing to do? Not for most people. Not ever, ever, ever, are they going to be open to that? Never, never, never never. So see now you're starting to see why growth is so challenging, because how can you grow when you're stuck in this bubble? Now let me give you a list of the most important paradigms to break for personal development. This is the sheet you got to break out of, to really transform yourself. And what I will say is that if you don't break out of these paradigms, you're not even going to tap into 5% of your full potential in life. You can forget about personal development, personal development, while staying within these paradigms is just window dressing. You heard not even touching the root of the issues. So here they are naive realism, which includes the belief in the external world, atoms, matter and space, all of this has to go. It's a paradigm and it's false rationality and logic, you have to throw that out the window, atheism or theism, throw that one out the window, science, throw it out the window, persistent objects as existing. So when you close your eyes and you believe that the lamp still exists, the tree still exists, whatever, you have to throw that paradigm out. It's false. The self, you as a separate self, a self that is separate from the rest of reality. That's a huge paradigm you have throw that up under the bus. The Life and Death itself have to be transcended, and seen to be the paradigms that they have always been. So we have to stop believing in life and death. Language, the entire mechanism of language has to be seen as a paradigm and done away with thought, the entire mode of thinking about all of life, and philosophizing about it, and making abstract conceptual distinctions about it, that has to be put to an end and stopped. The paradigm of Western psychology has to be thrown under the bus because it's very limiting mainstream culture, all the entertainment, all the stuff you love about mainstream culture, whatever culture you're from, whether it's American culture, Islamic culture, Hindu culture, or anything like that has to be discarded. Consciousness is brain activity. This is a paradigm you have you actually believe that your consciousness comes from your from your brain. This has to be discarded. psychedelics as chemicals, thinking of psychedelics as just chemical activity as just hallucinations, this needs to be discarded. Fear thinking that fear is something that's real. This needs to be discarded. Thinking of problems as real. This is a paradox. You actually believe that life has real problems in it. That's a paradigm you have needs to be dropped. The good and evil paradigm needs to be dropped. You actually believe that there's good and evil in the world. This needs to come to an end. It's a horribly limiting paradigm. The time paradigm needs to be really seen through which means that you have to stop believing in the future. And you have to stop believing in the past. And these have to be seen as conceptualizations for what they really are. So the time paradigm has to fly out the window. The success paradigm. Holding your entire life is this process of achieving success, material success, buying a house putting stuff together, building a great business how Being a wife and kids and go through that whole success cycle that needs to be stopped, you need to see that as a paradigm of Western medicine, you need to see that as the paradigm, the paradigm that emotions are happening to you, and that you have no control over them. That's a paradigm you have, which is false that needs to be dropped. You In fact, create your emotions, suffering and pain, as given things, that's a paradigm you have, you actually believe that your pain and that your suffering are real, that they are physical, and that they are inescapable, and that they are a core facet of life. That's a paradigm you have which needs to be dropped. It's not true at all. But because you think is true, it ends up being true for you. And it limits us severely. And finally, the paradigm that reality is real, the ultimate ultimate paradigm of paradigms, probably the most difficult thing to drop, you need to stop believing that this thing that you're occupying here, this reality that is has any reality whatsoever, you need to recognize that that is a paradigm. So to make the sort of breaks, to break paradigm blog, what this requires is a discontinuous jump. You have to jump from one bubble to the next, it's like entering a new universe. And you have to make sure that when you do jump from one bubble to the next, you don't drag your old remnants of the old bubble into your new bubble that's gonna fuck you up. That's the mistake people make is that they jump to the new bubble, but they drag all other stuff, other assumptions they want to take with them, they cling to it, that needs to stop. So what's really critical for you the two key skills you need to develop from this episode. These are your takeaways. Firstly, is the ability to spot when you are stuck in paradigm lock yourself. Of course, it's nice to recognize other people too, but that's easy yourself. As most importantly, stats ability to number one, develop that ability. ability. Number two you need is to make discontinuous jumps. Because once you recognize you're stuck, now you need to make a discontinuous jump. Right? What are some examples of discontinuous jumps? Well, here's a few. When you think and reason so much, that you finally come to a point in your reasoning, where you realize that reasoning, and thoughts will never lead you to ultimate truth. When you hit that point, you're ready to make the discontinuous jump into post rationalism. Another one is, is that when you realize that reality is non physical, that all all of this is a non physical thing. There's not a single physical thing about reality, when you realize that, that puts you in a totally different paradigm. Now everything you interact with every human being and every object you interact with, is no longer a physical entity. That's a huge, radically new way to see the whole world. Another discontinuous jump would be to realize that your emotions are something that you are doing and actively creating, rather than something that's just happening to you like a helpless victim. So that when you start to feel angry, or pissed off or jealous, or frustrated or depressed, or any other emotion, we're happy, for that matter. You're conscious in this new paradigm you're conscious that you're creating that you're creating that you might not know how yet but you at least you know that you're creating it. That's a totally different paradigm than most the way most people relate to emotions. Most people's paradigm of emotions is that emotions happen to them, and that they need to escape from these emotions or repress these emotions that they're good and bad emotions. This This gotta exit that paradigm as quickly as you can. That's a that's that paradigm is called hell. That's the whole paradigm. Another paradigm jump you can make is when you when you finally recognize that paranormal phenomenon are real. So you will exit the regular scientific paradigm that there are no paranormal phenomenon into a new paradigm where there are paranormal phenomenon. And they're not even called paranormal anymore. They're just normal paranormal becomes the new normal. That's a jump you can make. So how do you make these jumps? Well, that's, you know, there's only so much we can talk about is a really deep topic. So I have to just gloss over some of this stuff. So yeah, let me give you some tips for how to actually break out of paradigms. So here are some different ways. Question assumptions very deeply Get to the bottom of what your assumptions are about anything in life. Meditation, great technique for breaking paradigms, self inquiry and contemplation. Also very powerful techniques, psychedelics, the reason I'm so excited about psychedelics, because they will absolutely destroy all your cherished paradigms, very quickly, very effectively, very rudely. That's why you don't like them. That's why you don't like it, though, since the only reason is because they are so goddamn effective at breaking all your paradigms. That's why the government hates psychedelics, too, is because they will fucking break the entire social matrix. Alright, so we got to keep those away from the kids. reading and research are important ways for how to break paradigms. Because as you read and you research, you open yourself to new perspectives. Traveling, going to different countries, interacting with different cultures is a great way to break paradigms, especially a lot of your cultural and social paradigms. Philosophy is a good way to break paradigms, although you got to be careful because philosophy as you do it, you can jostle some paradigms, but also often you get stuck in bigger paradigms. So that's dangerous. This is challenging stuff. Really breaking down your paradigms takes a lot of work. It's not easy to do. It's mostly laborious, but it does produce some of the biggest leaps in your own growth that are possible. This is going at the root of things. Rather than just doing window dressing the way that most self help, advice wants you to do, I have a worksheet for you, that will help you to ground some of the stuff I've been talking about here and relate it to your specific life. So go, click down below, download the free worksheet and fill it out, make sure you do the worksheets. Those are very important. And I'm done here. In future videos, I will help you to tackle some of these very important specific paradigms that I just glossed over here. I will help you to break those down and show you all the hidden assumptions that come in those paradigms with those paradigms, and all the danger that these paradigms pose to you and how they limit you. But for now, just stick with the worksheet. And that's it. I'm done here. Post your comments down below. Please remember to click the like button for me if you liked this video, share it with a friend. And lastly, come sign up to actualize that org right here, it's my website, check it out. There's a newsletter there. So you can stay tuned with future stuff that I released. There's a forum, there's a life purpose course there's a book list. So there's a good resources there, too. Take you into this process deeper. It's not enough just to watch one of my videos, or 10 or 100 of my videos, right? You got to be more serious with this work. Because the reason I love this work is because of the profundity and depth that there is here. The tragedy of it, though, is that the more deep and profound something is, the more abstract it is, the more work it takes to get to it, the more it can revolutionize your life, but also the less likely you are to do the work to get there to get the results. So one of my biggest challenges is how to convince you to get on board with this process, so that you go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole until you get to some really profound stuff, the most profound stuff you can't just get to by watching a few of my videos. But at the very least, what you can do is you can sign up and just stay tuned. Make a commitment to this process of self actualization. self actualization is not just a video you watch here or there, you know, when you're bored at work or something. This is you recognizing that this is the whole fucking point of life. This is what life is about is you self actualizing that's why you're alive at all. That's what you're here for. But most people don't recognize that most people think of life is just I don't know what they don't really think about it at all. They think of it as some sort of like, I'm gonna grow up and have kids and then I'm gonna retire and die. That's where I'm going to work and then retire and die. That's their, that's sort of their their model of reality. The whole point of your life is to self actualize. And then ultimately, to self transcend. But you got to get sorted somewhere. So I present content that's sometimes very deep. For those of you who are down with that, but then a lot of you aren't down with us, we have to present some more shallower content to get you interested. So that at some point, eventually, maybe a year from now, two years from now you can get into the really deep stuff. And then you will be so glad that you did. But for that you need to sort of make a commitment to this whole process. One of the most important things that I did in my entire life is that when I stumbled upon self help, and I only stumbled upon self help when I was like 25 years old. Hold wasn't that long ago, less than 10 years ago. Until then, I didn't even know self help existed as a field. But as soon as I read my first or second self help book, I realized that this shit is the thing that is really important in life. This is what's really worth putting my time and energy and money into. And so I did, and I made a commitment that I'm, I'm not just gonna dabble, I'm not just gonna read a couple of self help books, I'm gonna fucking master the shit out of this whole thing. And I'm still writing that decision. That decision I made probably close to 10 years ago, less eight years ago, I made that decision. And I've been just working on that and chipping away on that. And the results I've been getting in my life have been phenomenal. And they just keep astounding, me more and more and more every year, my growth is exponentially just like snowballing. And it's gotten to the point where it's just ridiculous. It's gotten to the point where I can't even relate it to you in words anymore. I want you to get there. But you're not going to get there in just one or two years, that's going to require a little more of a commitment. So you got to hold that vision, that there's something bigger, something deeper, something very profound there that you will find for yourself. And it doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter what kind of work you do, or whatever. This these are the the core bedrock principles of all of life. And this stuff, nobody taught this stuff to you in school, or at work or in your family, you didn't learn this stuff. Your preacher didn't tell you this stuff. Why not? Because all of this is threatening to the very paradigms that those people were a part of, and that you were a part of right? Their mission was to maintain those paradigms. And your mission as someone who's self actualizing is to break the mold of all the paradigms and to discover reality as an absolute. And that is something that is not a pipe dream, that's actually possible. I've had glimpses of it and let me tell you that it's extraordinary. So stick with me on this journey. Watch me grow and grow along with me. And I'll see you soon with more.