Word count:16204
[Music] you welcome to this episode on understanding impermanence impermanence is a concept that I've been wanting to share with you for a long time and now it's finally the time to do it impermanence is a fundamental teaching of Buddhism and Hinduism I want to introduce you to this concept and this term because I'll be referencing it again and again in the future because it's very fundamental to living a quality life and it's a concept which unfortunately isn't very well understood in the West so in pali the language pali which of course is buddhist related to buddhism they have a term called Anita Anita which means impermanence and literally you can break that word down into its two components ah which means none and Nietzsche or Nika which means constant so Anisha is non constant or impermanence but then there's also a parallel word from Sanskrit which is more connected with Hinduism and the term there is Anita on nitya which also means something like non constant of course these are just Eastern traditions Buddhism and Hinduism don't think that this this concept of impermanence is only coming from these two traditions this really this concept is a spiritual concept that comes from and is present in most of the world's spiritual traditions whether east or west although of course in Western traditions oftentimes some of these concepts become very corrupt or they get relegated to the sidelines as as these religions become about power more so than about transcending the self so what's so important about this concept impermanence simply means that all form is non constant it's always arising and passing away and by this term or word form just to be clear what form is form literally means everything form is a more broad word even than object so when I say object you think of a car a tree a human a dog etc that encompasses a lot of stuff but the word form is even more broad and universal than that because usually for example when we say object you don't think of a of a thought or an emotion or a feeling or something nebulous like that as being an object object is a rather materialistic term whereas the word form encompasses feelings emotions and all sorts of nebulous non-material type stuff that is also a part of reality so form is everything so what we're saying here is that no single form can be frozen in reality it's a question of time how long the form will stick around but they always pass away there's always a moment of arising and a moment of passing away and this is true of all forms now this seems almost like a truism you might say well okay leo sure you're probably right sounds right but so what this seems like such a simplistic truth that it can't really help me in my life well that's why we have to spend an hour or two talking about impermanence giving you all sorts of examples and convincing you of just how powerful this this idea is and then also we're gonna have to give you some homework assignments to actually practice impermanence to be able to see the power of this concept but it does it does benefit us to spend some time just thinking about why reality is impermanent at an existential sort of level what is so special about impermanence why must reality be structured this way and not some other way and the reason that is is because God is a shapeshifter God is a shapeshifter but here I'm introducing the concept of God we have to be careful because there's a lot of misconceptions that people have about God so make sure you don't fall into the trap of thinking that I'm introducing you to some sort of religious or ideological notion of God I'm not I'm talking just about your true nature I'm talking about the entire universe when I say the word God I mean this present experience you're having right now and the universe as a whole for more on that go check out my two-part series called what is God where I explain it all in a in a simple rational way and I answer a lot of questions and objections that people commonly have a lot of misconceptions and myths around what God is God is you God is that thing sitting there right now listening to me that's God and God is me sitting here speaking to you God is everything God is consciousness this is all consciousness everything you think is physical is actually consciousness but as I talked about in my episode called Astec non-duality remember that one where I talk about Toyota Toyota is another word for God the Aztec word for God so in that episode which is one of my best ones go check it out it's a really good one I put a lot of work into the research of it with a lot of quotations and so forth it's a beautiful description of non-duality and spirituality and God from the Aztec perspective in that episode I talked about how to yodel is a shapeshifter well we're coming back to that idea that's a very powerful idea most people when they think about God to think about God is a static object some bearded man in the clouds but that fundamentally misunderstands what God is God is a shapeshifter and of course by that what I'm saying is that you are a shapeshifter and of course I'm also saying that the universe itself is a shapeshifter reality itself as a whole is a shapeshifter right now you are that God which itself has no form God is totally formless but it takes armed different forms as a shapeshifter and right now it happens to be taking on the form of that human creature sitting there right now listening to me or sitting here right now speaking to you so the nature of a shapeshifter though is that it doesn't have any form it's like the Invisible Man who can take on and put on different disguises the disguises don't define him because he can just take it off put on another one so this is why reality is fundamentally impermanent because consciousness which is what God is consciousness is empty and takes on different forms and the reason that is is because consciousness is infinite go check out my episode two-part series understanding absolute infinity if you don't understand what infinite means really when I say infinite I don't just mean it's big in size I'm not just talking about its length and depth and breadth its physical dimensions I mean infinite infinite actually infinite infinite consciousness you can't really know what that isn't unless you have some deep awakenings but anyways consciousness is an infinite and because it's infinite it's trying to maximize its diversity and love it's trying to maximize as creative output that's what infinity is it's an infinite expression of creativity for it to do that for it to be everything for it to be unlimited God must constantly keep changing forms in the same way that a TV screen fundamentally the function of a television screen is not to display one image it's to be flexible enough to display any possible image and in a sense if a TV screen ever displayed only one constant image then it would be a dysfunctional TV screen it would be a bad TV screen because you want to I clip the channels on a TV screen you want to be able to see any picture right but what that means is that the TV screen itself must be unattached to any particular picture can you imagine if you were like flipping through the channels and then your TV screen had a mind of its own and it clung to one particular image like you were flipping through the channel and you got to some porn channel and the TV screen was like a whole I liked this porn and then it gets stuck on that image and it only displays that one image that it loves it pulls one image out from from all the porn you watch and the NASA thing it displays well you would say that this is this is a malfunctioning TV screen you see because you want to be able to flip to other channels sure the poorness is fine it's nice but then after you're done watching it you want to be able to switch to something else except now it's getting stuck if it gets stuck it gets limited you see if god got stuck on one particular form then all of its attention would go to that form and then it wouldn't be as diverse and as infinitely loving and creative as it could be if it kept moving on but to move on it has to let go of the thing that it created see so in a sense God is like a blank canvas on which all of reality is drawn but then it has to be wiped clean you might almost think of it like one of those etch-a-scketches you know those little sand draw thing where you you turn the knobs and it draws on the sand and then you can shake it side to side and then it clears the whole thing and then you can draw again that's the nature of reality now by the way I want to point out that this this notion that the only constant thing in reality is change itself is a very powerful idea of that notion I introduced to you in the past in my episode called the theme of things going full circle where I give you a bunch of examples of ways in which these sort of dualities like constant versus change how these dualities collapse and they circle back around into each other see if you go through so much change that it's infinite change eventually that infinite change is the one constant of the universe the universe is a perpetual motion machine actually not in theory not a science fiction but the universe as a whole I'm not saying that a part of the universe is a professional motion machine that seems to be impossible given conservation of energy and various other physical laws that we know of but when you take the universe as a whole that consciousness or God that itself is an actual Peschel motion machine it's always in motion forever to infinity but if the universe was at a professional motion machine then it would get stuck and get bugged out sort of like a computer or like that TV screen that we were talking about the trick though is noticing this and accepting this it's difficult for living organisms and humans who are selfish to accept that this is how the universe works it's difficult for limited beings to accept impermanence because impermanence is an unlimited infinite quality and so humans what we like to do because we're selfish is we want to make that TV screen or that computer gets stuck according to our self biased needs go check out my episode on self bias to understand what that concept means it's an important one that we need to leverage here so here's a good way to explain it imagine you have a daughter and you love your daughter very much she's beautiful to you and perfect in every way and now imagine that you were given the power to freeze her forever as she is you were able to make her immortal she could live forever nothing could ever harm her she could never suffer she would exist for a billion years you just had to push this one red button if you oh [ __ ] she's gonna become immortal and she's gonna stay in her current form she's not gonna grow she's not gonna grow old her teeth are not gonna fall out her breasts are not gonna sag she's just gonna stay exactly as she is right now perfect and beautiful as you love her all you have to do is push that button so the question I have for you is would you push that button and of course most egos would push that button because that's what attachment is you're attached to that particular form of reality you don't want your daughter to change you don't want her to grow old and to die and to have diseases and to get saggy skin and have all sorts of other problems you want her to stay as perfect as you want it to be but that's you being selfish in my Opik you see when you're thinking this way you're only thinking about that one part of reality and you're ignoring everything else you're not considering how pushing that button would affect other human beings how it would affect the universe as a whole see because you're biased you're only thinking of her as your daughter you're not thinking about other human beings you don't see how pushing this button would hurt the rest of creation would diminish the rest of creation because you don't care your responsibility is not to the whole of creation your responsibility as a parent is just to that little itty little bitty tiny piece of reality that you've identified with and taken responsibility for but see God as the intelligence which is running the entire universe can't think this way it can't be self biased and selfish like you it has to take into consideration everybody else as well and as much as you think that you love your daughter and that the reason you're doing this and pushing this button is because you love your daughter more than any else in the world actually you're deluding yourself because God actually loves your daughter more than you and it's actually because God loves your daughter more than you that God will not allow you to freeze her because to freeze her would be detrimental to her and to the whole of the universe because you see while you are attached to her being in her current form what God understands is that this daughter of yours is actually God itself is the entire universe so to lock God into that one limited form because God is a shapeshifter you confining her to that one form would actually be the greatest evil you could perpetrate upon your own daughter because if she was locked into that form that means she would stay that way forever that means she could never die that means she could never awaken to her crew infinite nature as a shapeshifter she would be stuck in that one particular form in the same way that if I locked my TV screen to one particular image I would ruin that TV see but if I loved that one particular image so much you can see how I might be tempted to be able to lock that screen into that image forever like burn it in there permanently so here it's very counterintuitive because it seems to most parents for example if their child dies or something bad happens to a child it seems to most parents that oh my god why would God be so cruel and allow my child to go through all this you know to to grow up and to get abused and to to face the evils of the world and then to have cancer and then to die why would God allow all this but the reason you're confused is because your vision is too narrow you're too attached to your child but you trick yourself into thinking that actually you love your child so much no your love for your child is extremely limited if you fully loved your child the way that God loves your child you would let her go see that would be true love love is a very radical and counterintuitive thing go check out my two-part series what is love part 1 in part 2 where I explain some of this stuff so actually God loves your daughter more than you and that's precisely why your daughter must be impermanent and your job in this life is to surrender enough of your own self so that you're not so attached and so limited with your self biased perspective that you take on the perspective of God and you realize that ah to really love my daughter as much as God loves my daughter I would have to let her go and I would have to appreciate her impermanence of course not just her impermanence but the impermanence of everything and including my own my own physical body as well so ironically clinging to your daughter is a limited form of love whereas letting her go is the unlimited form of love see unlimited love is a very radical thing because it doesn't cling it loves indiscriminately see the problem is that you love your daughter only under certain circumstances you love her when she's beautiful you love her when she's not sick you love her when she's not abused you love her when she's not dead but God loves her under all conditions and of course what God wants the most for her is for her to go through all of the possible incarnations and to experience the infinity of what she is you see but this is such a radical thing that of course it involves suffering and pain and disease and death and aging and rebirth and all this which is a lot for a parent to accept it's a lot for an individual to accept you can't accept it in your own life so therefore of course you fear the same for your daughter you project all of your personal fears onto your daughter you teach all of your personal fears onto your daughter you've taught your own daughter that death is evil that's what you've done in your own ignorance because you don't know any better because you don't know that you're a god yeah it's very counterintuitive stuff so it might seem like the loss of beautiful and good things is evidence of evil in the universe or is evidence somehow of God's imperfection like for example some you know some fundamentalist religious preacher might lose his daughter to cancer and then he might have a a crisis of faith where he starts to question his Christianity for example and he starts to question whether God is even real because you know if God was real how could God allow for this my daughter to die of cancer but what he's not understanding is that that that death of the daughter by cancer is the very evidence of God's perfection and love loss is not contrary to the perfection and goodness of the universe loss is evidence of absolute love you just need to really understand what absolute love is you need to radically recontextualize what loss means and of course that's impermanence so this is why this concept is so important you see because whether you realize that right now or not as you go through your life you're gonna face all sorts of crises and problems diseases health dysfunctions evils of various kinds and you're gonna have to face them one way or another even if you're a scientifically minded person even if you don't believe in God and you don't believe in spirituality you think it's all nonsense you're still gonna have to somehow explain evil to yourself and to your loved ones because you're gonna encounter evil in the world whether you like it or not whether you're scientifically minded or not you might even be so scientific that you might even say to me well leo evil doesn't really exist but see that is your explanation to yourself of evil as you say it doesn't exist but see it's one thing to just in the abstract say that all well evil doesn't exist but what happens when it actually happens to you you might not ideologically believe in evil but when evil is done to you some great horror is done to you like you have cancer in your life or someone close to you dies or suffers greatly or whatever one of these sorts of things maybe somebody Rob's you of a bunch of money somebody behaves unjustly towards you attacks you viciously violently smears your name whatever if one of these happens to you you're gonna feel very upset by that it's gonna disturb you greatly it's gonna affect the quality of your life it might even lead to an existential crisis for you see so rather than waiting for that to happen and to be able to and in effect reacting you know sort of a knee-jerk unconscious way when this evil happens to you what I'm proposing is that you actually train yourself to properly understand what evil is by understanding impermanence really most of the things that you call evil are just examples of impermanence you perceive it as evil because you've attached yourself to one particular form and you want to freeze that form and you want reality to just stay like that forever but the truth is that everything is in constant motion so you had no right to expect that thing to stay frozen whether it's your daughter or your bank account or your life or your husband or your career or whatever and the reason you attach yourself to these different things and you try to freeze different parts of reality is because that's literally what survival is about check out my my series on understanding survival it's very important episode see true love is so deep that it cannot cling to any one particular thing because it loves all things equally how are you gonna choose you see that by loving your daughter you're limiting your love such that all of your attention goes to your daughter but then what about all the other daughters in the world why don't you love them see God can't just worry about your one daughter God has to worry about all living beings in every possible universe across all time you see so the considerations that God has for how to design the universe and what needs to happen and all that it has to take in far far more than what serves your personal little egoic needs and your agenda sometimes what that means is that your daughter will have to die from cancer for the greater good of the universe but of course that doesn't that doesn't soothe you that doesn't console you when you're a parent and you're attached or your daughter because you don't want to sacrifice your daughter for the greater good of the whole universe you want her to live and so of course then you blame God and you say oh god how could you you're not you're not good and you're not perfect because you weren't able to save my daughter from some terrible evil like cancer because supposedly hey you know Leo if God is infinite shouldn't God be able to construct a universe where nobody dies of cancer see that's the kind of logic that an ego takes because it doesn't see the bigger picture of things you know this reminds me of a story when I was young when I was about 10 years old or so I really loved animals I mean I still love animals but I was really into it I like I wanted to get every animal as a pet pet rabbits and snakes and fish and cats and birds I've had a bunch of different kinds of animals throughout my life but at that point I was really into rabbits and there was this pet store that we would always go to buy my house and there was a pan of rabbits there all the time you know like most pet stores have rabbits or let the cheapest pet and there was like usually 20 rabbits or so in this kind of open pen with straw in there and shavings and stuff and you can just pet them it wasn't a cage or just a pen with an open top and I would always my mom would take me there and I would go with her and I would like run in there and I'd be so excited to to pet all the rabbits and my thing was I don't know why it got in my mind but like I felt bad that all the rabbits didn't receive the same love and attention like I saw that some people would be petting like the prettiest rabbit or the cutest rabbit but then ignoring the other ones and I felt like well if these rabbits are sitting in this cage essentially the whole day like the one consolation they get is like they get petted so to me it was like well petting them is like is what they want so I in my mind I thought of it as like all the rabbits need to be petted equally with no one rabbit getting extra special love or a ten and so like when my mom would be petting one rabbit I would force her I would tell her noe if you pet that one you have to pet all the other 20 ones and so every time we would go in there I would force her to pet every single rabbit in the pen and not leave anyone like unloved unpaid internships work now what I realize is that what I was doing there is I was literally trying to embody unwittingly embody God's unconditional love that's the difference between loving you know in a sort of a narrow way versus loving in a kind of a broad Universal way now of course this can also become dysfunctional when you know you try to love everybody in the end the problem is that is you know it's very hard for a mere mortal a limited human being to love everybody and everything equally really only God can do that you have to be totally formless and infinite to be able to do that but luckily you are God and you are formless and infinite so you are able to do it but only when you're in that state of consciousness not in your usual state of consciousness that you're in like right now not in your dualistic human form so here's a key insight for you devilry occurs when you try to make the impermanent permanent go check out my episode what is the devil where I talk about that devilry is a self biased clinging to reality so by definition what the devil does is try to freeze reality in different ways so one of the challenges of the design and architecture of the entire universe which is the brilliance of God's design is that God has to arbitrate and mediate between all the different Devils that exist the different partitions of God that exist and somehow make sure that they all function in some sort of harmonious way because if everyday got his choice then for example if every parent was able to freeze their child in one particular form then what would happen 7 billion people on this planet would all push that red button all the parents would turn all their children into these frozen forms that could be immortal that would be immortal and would never die and therefore all of the human race would come to a stop human evolution would come to a stop societal evolution would come to a stop because the evolution of society depends on human beings being born and dying and new generations arising if you froze everybody in place this would be a net negative for the whole universe see so it seems good in the short term but it would be terrible in the long run which is why it can't be done tah-dah see God doesn't really allow you the power to be a devil forever you can only be a devil for a short while devilry is temporary only God is permanent a devil is what God becomes when it limits itself into a particular finite shape or form and the reason we call it devilry is because once you've attached yourself to one particular finite limited form that form then goes into survival mode and manipulates lies cheats steals and does all sorts of quote-unquote evil to maintain that form so by pushing that red button you are accepting the devil's bargain and thereby committing the very evil that you wish to protect your daughter from you see because you see the death of your daughter frees up all those atoms and molecules all that energy that is in your daughter's body it frees all that up to create new life this is the cycle of life if every human body was frozen to maintain its current configuration that means that energy and those molecules in that matter couldn't be used to feed the worms which grows the grass that grass grows the cows and other animals and the birds and then those birds are eaten by humans and this whole cycle continues and new life evolves and then you know we have apes and then from apes we've got humans evolving and beyond humans will have something else evolving right this whole chain of evolution the cycle of life it's it's always continuing but if you if you froze it imagine what would happen if some species froze itself a billion years ago when it was in a very primitive form then there couldn't be more beautiful creatures there couldn't be tigers and lions and there couldn't be dinosaurs and there couldn't be Apes and ultimately there couldn't be humans all of that beauty all of that creativity would be lost because some species a billion years ago pushed that red button and froze itself in his current configuration because it was so selfish and it's thought that it was already at its best form why do you think your daughter right now is at her best form are you thinking a million years into the future of what your daughter will become after a thousand incarnations when she turns into some other species on some other planet no of course not anything about any of this because you're completely locked into this very myopic limited human perspective you're not even thinking about like the next generation of humans you're not even thinking about bye-bye pushing this button you will take away or Rob some future human being of his birth or her birth because there's only so much matter on this planet there can only be so many humans on this planet so if your daughter takes up one slot let's say let's say there's a hundred billion slots for humans on this planet that's like the carrying capacity of this planet Earth well if she takes up one of those slots that means she's stealing that slot from somebody else who could have been born and of course so are you that's the nature of survival that's the nature of coming into reality as a form by being a particular form you're you're robbing some other form of being in your place you see that this is very important in this case we're literally talking about a zero-sum game the weird thing about reality is that even though it's infinite when you're in coordinating as a particular form it's finite and it's a zero-sum game so for example for you to have been born a human that means you couldn't have been born a kangaroo you couldn't have been born a panda you couldn't have been born a space alien you couldn't have been born as some other human you had to be born as you to be born as you that robbed somebody that robbed consciousness of some other possibility see appreciate that therefore you have to appreciate that you're gonna have to surrender that you can't make that permanent and to try to make that permanent is the very definition of devilry and of course as a devil you want nothing more but a way to make it permanent you want a red button that you can push to keep yourself alive forever as a finite form but God will not allow you to do that because if he did that would undermine the infinity of the entire universe and would actually rob you of the greatest gift which is the realization of your own infinitude so I want you to contemplate for yourself the following question which forms am i trying to freeze in my life it could be people animals things ideas stuff about your personal body your appearance your own life your finances whatever it is make a list of the forums you try to freeze and try to identify the ones that you are most attached to freezing because that is literally what is creating evil in the world if every human stopped trying to freeze different aspects of their life all evil on earth would be extinguished in one day so this is a powerful exercise of course until don't expect that to happen cuz nobody wants to do this exercise nobody wants to let go of trying to freeze certain things they want to make exceptions they want to say well okay we all let this go and I'll let that go but I won't like this I won't let this thing go this thing here I need right and that's what makes you a devil so don't be surprised when there's a bunch of evil in the world because the reason the evil happens is precisely because everybody makes that kind of exception just like you did they say well I'm willing to let everything go except I'm not willing to let go of my position of power or I'm not willing to let go of my money or I'm not willing to let go of my of my business for example some you know some some oil executive is you know ruining the environment by by extracting oil in environmentally friendly ways and then you ask him well can you let that go for the sake of the environment and he says no I won't let it go right cuz that's his baby that's his daughter so when we ask you to let your daughter go what are you gonna say are you gonna say yes are you gonna say no you're gonna say no you're not gonna care about all this theory you're not gonna care about god you're not gonna care about love no you're a selfish [ __ ] you're a devil you're gonna say no and then you wonder why there's so much evil in the world look in the mirror there's your answer fundamentally impermanence happens because of oneness impermanence is one of the consequences of oneness of non-duality one this means that reality is one thing if reality is one thing that means that no part of reality can gain an absolute monopoly over any other part because all parts are equally powerful not at one moment in time but across all of time see so for example right now there might be some corporation which is extremely powerful because it's in some sort of industry which is doing really well maybe Google you might say is a very powerful corporation has billions of dollars doing really well because online search is a very powerful and valuable thing in 21st century society but there will come a time in the future where Google as a company will die because the times will change the circumstances will change what used to be important and powerful will no longer be important and powerful or there will be some better tool some better way to search the internet or there will be something even better than the Internet which transcends the internet and makes the internet obsolete or makes internet search obsolete or makes Google obsolete so even though Google might have a monopoly on internet search right now and it might seem like that will never end it only seems that way because you take a very short time horizon you're only thinking in terms of decades and maybe centuries but if you start thinking in terms of of millennia and even beyond that you start to see that this forum called Google can't persist it must die and the reason that is is that because over time when you take infinite time when you look infinitely far to the future what you see is that all parts of God have the same power so what the universe is doing is it's like God armwrestling with himself or playing chess with himself that's what oneness means that means that there can't be one part of God which is more powerful than some other part of God so even though God can't arm wrestle with itself and sometimes it'll win you know sometimes this arm will win sometimes the other arm will win in the ultimate big picture it must all balance out and no one part of God can be all-powerful and dominate the other parts but of course every part of God is trying to do that and that is the very mechanism of devilry see devilry is when one part of God tries to overtake all the other parts and to create a monopoly of power see but fortunately this can never happen but of course from the parts perspective when I say fortunately I'm speaking from God's perspective from the perspective the whole but from the perspective of the part it's very unfortunate from your perspective it's very unfortunate because you call that death you call that mortality and for you mortality seems very unfortunate for the devil mortality seems very unfortunate but from the bigger picture perspective you want the devil to be mortal you don't want the devil to be immortal and that's exactly how the whole thing is designed at first glance impermanence will seem depressing and negative to you because you're a devil and you're selfish but actually impermanence is a great gift and that's what I'm trying to your mind too here to teach you here and that's what some of the homework assignments that I'll be giving you will be about is teaching you the great gift of impermanence so the way that we reform devils and cure them of their evil and devilry is by showing them that actually impermanence is not something that you fear and resist and manipulate your way to avoid but something that you embrace and that's what spirituality boils down to is to the the embrace of impermanence not only does impermanence liberate you in the end and reduce suffering it also heightens appreciation love enjoyment and beauty of the formed world start to notice that the best things in life that you love the most are so good precisely because they're temporary it's their impermanence that makes you appreciate them so much here are some examples ice cream or caviar or your favorite food why is it so good it's precisely because you have it so rarely if you ate the same ice cream ten times a day for a year you would be so sick of it you would find it disgusting if you ate caviar every single day for a year and it was your only meal you would find it disgusting very quickly you know have you ever ate caviar I'm talking about real sturgeon black caviar really good stuff the Russian stuff I'm Russian and I remember times when I was younger when my dad he would travel to Russia on business and so forth and he would come back and oftentimes he would bring back a big kilogram a kilo tin it was about this round and about this tall so imagined a tin like this of just a solid tin of like the best black beluga caviar this this [ __ ] is expensive and this was back maybe 15-20 years ago when it was still legal to import this stuff and even then of course it was still expensive but you can get it much cheaper in Russia than you can in the States but still a tin like that would cost I don't know four or five hundred dollars I think nowadays it's illegal to actually import into the US and they have a really big problem with poaching and they're endangered these sturgeons it's it's pretty bad in Russia they're totally over fished but these ten nowadays a kilogram 10 of Beluga black caviar would probably run you definitely over $1,000 maybe $2,000 would be $5000 I don't know what it costs now but that [ __ ] is delicious if you've never tried some you're missing out it's delicious so it's it's it's worth the price but you know even that as delicious and rare as that is the reason is so delicious part of the reason that is so delicious is because you have it so rarely there were actually old Russian stories of like peasants who used to live on like the Volga River one of the major rivers and Russia is called the Volga and they have a lot of sturgeons they were at least they did until they over fished them all but like two hundred years ago you know the repents who just lived there their were so many sturgeons back then because they weren't over fished that there were stories of how these peasants they they would have nothing to eat except there'd be so much sturgeon that they could just fish sea sturgeon and they would literally have buckets of caviar for breakfast buckets of the best black caviar but they would but precisely because they would eat buckets of this caviar every single day they were sick of it to them they want something like like meat you know to them meat was a luxury because there was no no meat but there are so much caviar so that's how life works why is childhood so precious and uh and beautiful because it's so fleeting you have fond memories of your childhood hopefully unless you have some abusive childhood you should have some good memories there and and then you look back on it with fondness and nostalgia precisely because it's impermanent and it's gone now your family you only really appreciate your family due to impermanence otherwise you know if your family is constantly in your life it actually grinds on your nerves if you have to live with your mother your whole life that would be hell you have to kind of keep a safe distance from your family so that you see them occasionally but not too often to the point where they get on your nerves and it just becomes too constant and then of course their death as sad as that is to you and as much as you would hate to have that happen ultimately you need it to happen so that you can appreciate them more you're only gonna really appreciate your parents after they're gone or your children after they're gone your pets same thing you only appreciate them because you can only have that pet for so long and you know that going into it there's a time limit on your pet how about video games movies films all forms of entertainment songs and so forth they're only wonderful and exciting and awesome because they're not constant if you constantly have to watch the same movie all day long for a year that would be hell if you had to replay the same video game if there was only one video game in the universe and you had to replay it over and over an organ let's let's imagine that the only video game that existed because somebody some devil push that red button was the original Mario game Super Mario Bros on the NES you know that one the classic one so let's say that you know after that game was invented by the designers at Nintendo and then you know they had a button and said okay this is the only video game that's ever gonna exist we're just gonna freeze it like this we don't want other video games to compete with us we're gonna have a monopoly on video games and every video game must be a Mario game and it's gonna be this exact Mario game we're not even gonna add any more new levels we're just gonna keep printing this game over and over again on every computer and game system this would be this would be terrible it would destroy the diversity and the flowering and the creativity of the entire domain of video games that you love if you're a gamer same for movies same for books and for everything you see so so from the big-picture perspective what God is trying to do is try to maximize the creative diversity of life and it can't do that when one species tries to gain a monopoly over all of life which is one of the problems that the human species is doing right now is we're we're overcrowding the planet to the point where we're killing off species by the hundreds and by the thousands and this situation can't last see humans can't just be so selfish that we occupy the entire Earth and populated only with humans see after a certain point of doing that we would actually start to see the detrimental effects of it which of course we're already starting to see something is lost by losing the diversity of life this this notion of diversity is a very profound existential component of reality one that many people who are anti diversity don't understand and don't appreciate you know especially ethnocentric people people who really love their one culture or their one race you know like that sort of white supremacist philosophy of like well the white race is a superior one and we want to just like purify the nation of any brown people and black people and weird people and whatever we just want it to be just like pure white European as' the sort of Hitler mentality you see that's devilry literally that's devilry and why was the result of Hitler's philosophy the sort of destruction and evil that we saw precisely because his agenda was to freeze that sort of white Aryan identity that he glorified to freeze that and to to promote that sort of philosophy around the world but it couldn't have worked you see it couldn't have worked there was no way that Hitler could have sustained that even if Hitler could have won World War two maybe let's say the Germans invented a nuclear bomb before others did and they have so much military power that they could have just like dominated Europe and even America and so forth it still couldn't have lasted eventually it would have had to collapse from within because no monopoly can be maintained no racial monopolies no species monopolies no monopolies of any kind because the nature of reality is impermanence your own life itself the reason your life is exciting and juicy and fresh is because it's short and you realize that you got to make good use of your time if you were gonna live forever your life would get very boring and stale and it would quickly devolve see you wouldn't even know what to do with immortality if you got it it would make you such a devil a kiss for example is made so much better by the impermanence of it you don't want to kiss that lasts forever short kiss short kiss that leaves you wanting more that's really what you learned you want to be teased by life you don't really want all of your desires satisfied you think you do but really you don't you want to be teased so there's always something over the horizon the next thing to look forward to because you only really appreciate differences you only really appreciate things when they're gone you appreciate not having a thing and then getting it and then losing it like you're poor then you earn a lot of money and then you lose that money and you can appreciate that whole cycle because when you go from being broke to having some money that's it's like a huge relief and it's so nice and it's so wonderful but then if you bask in that wealth for too long it corrupts you it turns you into a devil it makes you complacent and lazy and you don't work hard anymore you're not creative anymore so it's nice that you gain your money but then you lose some of that money so that you have to work again you have to be creative again you have to start a new business you have to you know you have to get off your ass otherwise you're gonna turn into some creature like a job of the Hut who just sits around and stews in his own wealth and in his own crapulous in his own obesity and all that in his own luxury say and then it actually makes them evil so train yourself to appreciate the beauty of loss this is the cycle of not of life the death of one thing creates room for the life of something else the only reason you're able to be alive right now is because all the other humans and animals who lived generations before you had died if they hadn't died you couldn't be here to be alive the loss of a beautiful thing only underscores how beautiful that thing was which brings us to the jab concept of moto no owari or just a soiree for short aw ar e like aware but pronounced al are a here's what wikipedia says about a soiree and here I'm quoting Wikipedia which is quoting Fiona McDonald it says quote Moe no no owari is the ephemeral nature of beauty the quietly elated bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life knowing that none of it can last it's basically about being both saddened and appreciative of transience and also about the relationship between life and death and then wikipedia says quote awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing end quote so hear another word for this uh soiree is just melancholy that melancholy feeling you feel when there's a sort of a loss of something in your life and this is a very important skill to develop the ability to be able to enter into melancholy without going into depression or into anger or bitterness or nihilism if you make that distinction in your mind between the two maybe you can think of a time when you experienced some loss in your life but you didn't take it personally you didn't get butthurt about it you didn't cling to it but you just sort of realized that yes it's sad to lose this thing but it was time for this thing to go that's melancholy that's a healthy form of coping with loss whereas an unhealthy form is you're so attached to it that you get butthurt about it you start to cling to it you want it back you ruminate and think about all well if only I could get this thing I would be happy and I'll never be happy again and you get suicidal and bla bla bla bla bla for example I had a I had a Siamese cat that I got when I was in fourth grade and I loved I loved her probably more than then I mean as much as as you would love a child like I I nurtured her she was like my baby I slept with her like I had her for for 17 years and then she started getting old she got sick her kidneys stopped functioning properly and eventually she just like it was clear that she was on her last days and we had to take her to the vet and euthanize her and I remember the moment that I had to do that and at the on one hand it was it was very sad cuz it was a 17-year relationship like that I built with her literally I felt like she was my daughter that was the depth of the connection there but at the same time when I took her to the doctor to get euthanized and went through that whole process as sad as it was in the back of my mind I thought like well she lived a good life 17 years a lot of great experiences memories like I don't know what more can you ask of in life she basically had it all she she played and we had fun and we cuddled and we slept together and she went outside she you know she hunted for rats and for birds and for this and she wasn't cooped up in the house all the time she was outdoors a lot and all this and she lived through a lot of stuff and all these experience ort of journey you might say of life and so I felt like nothing was really cut short and that if I was clean to hurt if I was just saying well but why can't I just get one more year with her what if what if she could have lived to 17 or to 18 to 19 to 20 what if we could have kept her on some sort of medication and what if we could have made her and more like for this see if I started going down that road this would have been the road of devilry and it would have created suffering whereas I sort of just entered a state of melancholy for for a while it was a healthy way of coping with the situation and it's fine that's what you want to cultivate and develop that's a soirée as the japanese call you know another good example of a soiree is that movie lost in translation with Scarlett Johansson and with Bill Murray a really good movie recommend you go check it out because that whole movie the theme of that movie the really what makes it so good is it's got this mood to it it's got this melancholic sort of mood and I don't know if this was done consciously by the director or not but it captures that sense of a soiree and speaking of loss of translation that's a really good title for spirituality because that's what spirituality is all about that's what life is about that's what God is all about God is lost in translation God is that which you can't put into words you must experience it for yourself and a soirée is the as an important feature of God and of course of yourself when we're talking about God we're just talking about you so what impermanence means is that you will lose your family you will lose your fame your status your wealth you will lose your good fortune you will lose your health you will lose your youth and your good looks you will lose your sharp mental faculties if you have them you will lose your memories you will lose being the strongest and the best at whatever you're at you will lose all of your skills and all of your mastery that you've developed throughout life every relationship you have will die every religion will die every corporation will die every organization political parties social movement and cult will die every fad and trend will pass every language will die every scientific theory will ultimately die every spiritual teaching will die and become corrupt every book will be lost and forgotten every person will be forgotten every city and country will die every civilisation will die every culture will die every tradition will die every species will die and go extinct humanity will die and go extinct even continents die and go out of existence because they transform to something else every physical object will die every atom will be destroyed every star and planet will die even the universe will be extinguished every victor will ultimately end up defeated every monopoly and concentration of force will be up ended and overturned every part will be made whole every duality will collapse every devil will merge back into God that's what oneness means that's what impermanence means because life and death is a duality and so the cost of being born is death that's how it works you see but a lot of people are in denial about this they spend a lot of time trying to seize on one of these things and to cling to it and to defend it at all costs think about especially for example religions religions tend to be very Orthodox oriented and very traditional and they want to be very rigorous in preserving the original manuscripts the Scriptures the Bible the holy book the teachings of the founder but the irony is is that religion itself needs to teach that religion cannot survive as it was at the founding it will always deviate splinter sects will arise and those sects will become corrupted and they will die spiritual communities will come and go the religion will be over thousands of years bastardized and transmogrified into something totally different than what it was at the founding he might even turn into the opposite of what it was which is what we see with Christianity especially but most other religions even with Buddhism even if you think Buddhism is a good religion well which Buddhism are you talking about there's at least three major branches but really every one of those has uh you know a dozen more sub branches within it and you see the the desire to cling to one true canonical religion to say well you know Mahayana Buddhism is the best one and the Vajrayana Buddhism that's the inferior one and this other Buddhism this inferior one and my particular sect of Mahayana Buddhism that's the the one true one and we're just gonna memorize this Buddhism we're gonna write it down it's just gonna be perfect like this it's gonna be taught in this one two three step way and this will be the one true religion no this is delusion this is devilry by doing this you bastardized religion I was arguing with somebody on my forum about sadguru's spiritual school and this guy was really into Sadhguru you know look at the famous YouTube guru and I got nothing against Sadhguru I like him he's a smart guy I think he teaches good stuff overall as far as I know but I was telling this guy don't cling to it because everything's gonna die everything is gonna become corrupt including Sadhguru stitching's and he was saying no sadguru's teachings are the best the most perfect teachings they're never gonna become corrupt it's never gonna die because Sadhguru forces everybody to memorize all his teachers and students they have to memorize how to teach it have to teach it like by a script and all of this this preserves the purity of the teaching and it's the best and done it up no it's not gonna stay this way see in fact the very attempt to try to codify Sadhguru x' teachings into some sort of perfect system that you have to memorize this very mechanism is the very thing that the devil will co-opt in order to corrupt the teaching see because by blindly memorizing things is very easy for you know rewriting a couple of lines then people just memorize the wrong lines it's like a game of telephone you know over the next hundred years two hundred years long after Sadhguru is dead a thousand years will pass and then people will be memorizing stuff that's how a guru never even said or taught Sadhguru will be rolling in his grave at the things that are done and said and practiced in his name in the same way that Jesus must be and basically all all spiritual teachers face this problem see that's because their students didn't fully integrate and understand the notion of impermanence it's not enough just to understand it intellectually you have to really grasp it at a cellular level and that's why this whole desire to to be very strict and formal about your religion or your spirituality it ain't gonna work you're just clinging or for example you know some conservatives they will cling to a language and they'll say well the English language it has to be this way there's one proper way to speak English you don't want to be introducing new words that's corrupting the language but the language that we're speaking now the English language that you hold as the canonical one where'd it come from it came from a process of evolution it wasn't just birth that way go read some Shakespeare you'll see the English language and Shakespeare is is monstrous you can hardly understand it so what's the one true language there isn't one there never will be one in a thousand years if the English language still exists it will be very different than the English language of today the mistake is trying to preserve the current English language as it is tried to fix it trying to freeze it that's the mistake corporations often follow through this trap a lot of times there are corporations that were very successful in the past because they were writing some sort of technological trend or wave but then that technology that trend played itself out and now it's in its downward phase but these corporations because they're fighting for their survival basically like a tumor they just want to keep growing and growing and growing they don't want to accept that it's time for us to maybe shut our doors time to accept that this technology wave has passed and I'm thinking about corporations maybe like Kodak Polaroid blockbuster these sort of corporations you know that went out of business but they went out of business for good reason because they had bad business models because they didn't keep up with the technology and that's what happens but the problem becomes is when a corporation tries to cling to its to its business even after it's been shown that the business is dysfunctional for example right now we have corporations who are selling cigarettes long after we've discovered that cigarettes cause cancer and our you know ruining people's health and contributing to unconsciousness in society but these corporations they still claim to it why because it's a good return on investment still even still cigarettes are like last time I checked it was like an eighty billion dollar market worldwide for cigarettes huge market but see really these these companies they need to admit to themselves that you know guys and one-point cigarettes were acceptable but at this point they're not acceptable we need to quit we need to find something new to do we need a new business but they you know they keep clinging to it they just keep investing you know these cigarette companies now they're investing in e-cigarettes and vaping and all this and now of course vaping an e-cigarette so you've seen the news now there's health concerns with that they seem to be even worse than cigarettes in certain cases and so now now the vaping companies now they're gonna be clinging to for dear life and survival because you know once you've built up this successful vaping company you don't want to admit that you're vaping that you're vaping is killing people and it's bad for people's lungs and so forth see devilry this is the very definition of devilry I want you to notice how you contribute to this how you do this see it's easy to criticize others for claiming to stuff except when now it's your ass on the line notice how much you cling when it's your ass on the line that's because you're scared why are you scared because you're attached to your identity you fear loss of self go check out my two-part series on how fear works part 1 part 2 so foolish people try to cling and freeze reality into certain forms wise people make the counterintuitive move from my episode called the counterintuitive nature of life we're talking about counter to boobs well here's one more for you add it to the list one of the biggest counter tudi moves is to teach yourself to embrace impermanence rather than manipulating your way out of it except that the cost of life is death not just at the individual biological level I'm talking about all levels we're not just talking about biology here we're talking about corporations we're talking about religions we're talking about ideas and languages see how it goes way beyond biology evolution goes way beyond biology which the biologists don't fully appreciate the cost of being a form is that eventually you must change form and really that's all the death is it's just a change of form you're changing into something else you're not really dying you're a shape-shifter you're shifting your shape you've just deluded yourself by attaching yourself to this one shape and oh my god I'm gonna die no you're not I die you're just gonna change your [ __ ] shape get over it immortality is impossible through attachment to form this needs to be understood that's one consequence of impermanence and oneness it will never be possible so I'm actually making a very scientific and empirical prediction here when I say this what I'm saying is that even after a million years of technological development from today if mankind is still alive a million years from now just imagine how much amazing technology will we will have invented in a million years there will still not be a method for immortality through technology but immortality is possible by detachment from form and for that you don't need to wait a million years or some fancy technology some cryofreeze or some genetic modifications or some technological uploading of your brain into some computer or some [ __ ] like this you don't need that all you need to do is you got to surrender everything and realize that your true nature is out of a shape-shifter this impermanence brings with it good news and bad news the bad news is that everything good that you gain in life will be lost but the good news is is that everything bad that befalls you will also be lost and will not be permanent which means that this is your safety valve see God created a safety valve into every life and that safety valve is death so if you're trapped in life and you're suffering terribly and all this and there's no way to escape it at all well the consolation is that it won't last it's impermanent but of course the flip side of that is if you're bored it's some beautiful life you're bored to be a billionaire with a golden spoon in your mouth and you live in the best part of the world and everything is is perfect for you well that too won't last one comes with the other it's two sides the same coin and that's a very important consequence I want you to to remember here this will help you when you're in very difficult times remember that hell and suffering cannot be a permanent state all suffering must be temporary because it's limited all suffering is finite you cannot get stuck in unconsciousness forever eventually all beings must wake up and return to God and to awaken to themselves as God and this is the safety valve is God's love and mercy that's the intelligence of God's design of the entire universe is that this safety valve has been built in the only problem is is that you're terrified of this safety valve you've labeled the safety valve the greatest evil that's the irony of it you've labeled God's infinite intelligence and and love and mercy as the greatest evil precisely because your mind is limited and can't see the full infinite perspective of the design you're to self biased you're too attached to see it and spirituality is about detaching yourself enough gaining enough elevation and transcending enough self bias to be able to see it and it's this which saves you it's this which makes life beautiful and allows you to appreciate how amazing life is without this life starts to seem evil and terrible and depressing and pointless and cruel what we're talking about here in other terms is attachment attachment creates suffering and disappointment and what the Buddha taught was how to transcend attachment and to liberate yourself but of course not only did the Buddha teach this but every great sage and mystic all around the world from Christ to Mahavira to the Jews and the Yogi's in India all of them taught this to transcend suffering you need to realize that nothing in life should be clung to your key mistake is that you have mistaken yourself for a human being that's not what you really are that's a false identity your true identity is that of an infinite shape-shifter so what you need to do if you want to live the good life is to realize and take back your identity as an infinite shapeshifter see when a shapeshifter clings to one shape or one form it suffers precisely because it's untrue to its identity to what it is see you're like a TV screen that got stuck on one image and that's why you suffer and the point of our work here is to get you unstuck to get you to surrender your human identity to realize that your human identity it's there but it's temporary it will be lost you cannot preserve it no matter how much you want to so you have to let it go and one thing you should have noticed already in your life as evidence of what I'm saying is that your identity has not been constant throughout your life your identity has always been changing in a sense you've already died too many times in your life if you're 30 years old right now if you're 40 50 60 think back compared to what you are I mean compare what you were when you were ten years old to who you are now totally different some stuff seems similar but you can't even remember how different you used to be we trick ourselves our mind tricks us to to convince us that well I didn't really change I was the same my whole life no you changed enormously even if you didn't do self-improvement work even if you didn't do spiritual work you still changed so much that it's hard to even call you the same person your body has changed every cell in your body has has died and been reborn in this time multiple times this happens to you at least once or twice a decade all of you of all the cells in your body reincarnate we might say your belief system has changed your career has probably changed your likes and dislikes have probably changed see you're constantly going through this process because you're shape shifter and that process will continue and then of course it'll get more and more radical over time as well especially if you do this work so while your temporary human identity can be lost and it will be lost it must be lost your identity as a shapeshifter as an infinite shapeshifter that can never be lost that's the only permanent thing there is impermanence impermanence shape-shifting these are just synonyms for the same thing as an infinite shape-shifter you are immortal but you have to really it's not enough to hear me say this you can't just take it on as a belief you have to actually become an infinite shapeshifter that's what Awakening is about and I want to read you a quote here about shape-shifting from Xena Shrek she says quote shape-shifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are if you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity you can be virtually anybody you can slip in and out of different shells even different animal forms and dating forms and quote and that's exactly how it works now you might wonder but Leo isn't impermanence versus permanence its self a duality so it seems like you're setting up a new duality in this episode between these two and of course you're right because as I've told you before in my three-part series about understanding duality I told you that language is inherently dualistic the only way I can speak to you or communicate to you or even think is by creating dualities so of course when I'm communicating I must distinguish between permanence versus impermanence and this is valuable this is how we learn but also you need to be able to read between the lines go meta and to transcend this and look at the thing that my finger is pointing at not just look at my finger so yes even though I'm talking about the difference between permanence versus impermanence ultimately you have to recognize that these are gonna come together and they're gonna go full circle and they're actually gonna be identical so here's the paradox of it on the one hand we have Maya samsara or the world of form as the Hindus and Buddhists refer to it this is the relative domain of all the humans stuff that we do this is all impermanent on the other hand we have the Godhead emptiness nothingness formlessness Nirvana this is the permanent true self we might say this is the thing you think that we're gonna move you towards as you're doing this work in your Awakening and your liberating yourself right go here this is supposedly but true enlightenment is when you realize that these two things are really identical Maya and samsara is Nirvana form is formlessness and that's what the highest Buddhist and Hindu teachings teach you is precisely that but that takes not just one awakening to realize that takes multiple awakenings because in your first awakening what you're gonna realize is the distinction between Maya and Nirvana between form and formlessness your first awakenings will be you moving out of form into formlessness and that's gonna be a huge epiphany for you because for the first time you'll discover that not everything is form there is something beyond form formlessness the Godhead and that will be amazing but they're still gonna be a duality between the two in your mind and you're still not gonna be fully awake until you awaken even deeper and you realize that ah but this formlessness what is this distinction between formlessness and form ah that also is a relative imaginary construction which must also collapse and then you have the full unification to the point where you realize that Nirvana is not someplace that I go to to escape this this place here but you realize that this place here is Nirvana and has been Nirvana in the whole time and that God is not somewhere out there far away from the mundane world but that God is the mundane world this is God right here I can't reach God because God is everywhere already that's total oneness so really in this work you're realizing oneness at more deeper and deeper or higher and higher levels however you want to look at it now another thing that I've commonly accused of when I talk about these kinds of ideas as well Leigha aren't you just stealing ideas from Buddhism and then pretending like you're saying something profound but really this Leo this is just Buddhism the Buddha already said this you're just copying you have to be careful here because not everything boils down to Buddhism Buddhism is just one way to frame things and Buddhism nor the Buddha had a monopoly on the truth the Buddha was not the first awoken person in the world nor the best nor the most get the silly idea out of your mind before the Buddhists there were Hindus and before the Hindus there were others so you know the Hindus also like to say that all of alio this is just all Hinduism you're just copying advisor or something no I'm not copying anybody per se of course I do read and take ideas from different places sure and there's a lot to be gained from Buddhism and from Hindus and so forth but don't get don't get caught on these traditions long before there was Buddhists and where Hinduism mankind has known about this stuff all cultures have basically derived this independently in one fashion or another for themselves in South America and North America in Africa they knew about this stuff the aboriginals in Australia they know about this stuff because they've been using psychedelics for for tens of thousands of years and they've been doing spiritual practices and they've been meditating and they've been contemplating and they've been doing darkroom retreats and going into caves and doing spiritual quests and vision quests and doing this and starving themselves and going through all sorts of ascetic practices doing this stuff this truth is not of human origin see so it's not that one tradition is copying another tradition it's that we're all really kind of deriving it independently for ourselves I knew every generation derives it anew and it has to be this way it can't be a tradition truth can't be a tradition truth must be derived right now from the present moment in the same way when you're doing a mathematical proof for example when you're you know you're doing the Pythagorean theorem proof and you're like reasoning through it and you're trying to see like well like a squared plus B squared equals C squared why is that because there's like set you can kind of draw a little squares and you can add them all up and see that they're the same when you're doing that every new generation of humans who does that they have to reason through it for themselves they can't just take Pythagoras as word you can't just go into a book from 2,000 years ago you know dig up some dusty Pythagorean book or read what Pythagoras wrote and just say okay I agree with pythagoras pythagoras invented this by the way Pythagoras did not admit the Pythagorean theorem it existed long before him the ancient Egyptians and so forth they knew about this stuff the Babylonians and the Sumerians and so forth they knew about all this stuff the Pythagorean theorem so you know it's funny that even the Pythagorean theorem it's not really the work of the original work of Pythagoras so so don't get don't get too clingy and attach to various kinds of traditions and so forth it's just you know the whole point of truth is that it's totally democratic anybody can access it at any time and in fact you must you must access it for yourself as though for the first time as though you're the first human who's ever accessed it that's the only way that you can access the deepest stuff that I talked about because it's right here right now it's not found in the words of humans it's not found in books right here right now is where you find it that's how truth works you're pulling from the same source right it's sort of like if you go to Egypt and you ask them does the Sun exist they'll say yes and if you go to Japan and you ask them does this one exist they'll say yes and if you go to Africa they'll also say yes why is that is it because the Egyptians invented the Sun no because the Sun is universal to every creature living on this planet and so they all recognize the Sun because it's so obvious so that's exactly how impermanence works if you just observe reality for a little bit even as a child you realize oh yeah everything's changing all the time pretty obvious not rocket science here so now let's talk about what you can do about impermanence how do you apply this wisdom it's not good enough for you just to know about impermanence intellectually you must deeply observe impermanence and practice in your own life otherwise nothing I say here will really stick it will just go in one ear and out the other and that's basically true of everything I say and teacher train your mind that everything fades observe how you cling and how this clinging to permanence try to freeze reality how this causes suffering for you you need to actually observe yourself doing this at a micro level also observe how others cling and the kind of calamities and suffering that this causes observe how people on the television cling up preserve how politicians cling to their power observe how wealthy millionaires and celebrities cling to their fame into their wealth and how this ends up actually leading to their downfall and gradually surrender more and more attachments this is the process that will take you years to do it's not something you accomplish in a week so here are some of your action steps write some of this down do not leave this as an abstraction you must start to observe impermanence every single day you must practice it like meditation so here's your homework assignment for the next week you're gonna observe impermanence every single day at a micro level at a micro level you're gonna notice how everything is changing all the time your experiences what you're feeling in your body right now maybe you have an itch on your face and then in five minutes it's gone right now maybe you feel comfortable sitting here and then five minutes you start to feel uncomfortable notice that maybe you're scared you're in fear right now because of something someone said to you notice that and notice that in an hour later your fear is gone and now you have anger and then you have anger for 15 minutes and the anger goes away now you feel horny and then you feel horny for 15 minutes you jerk off and now you're not horny anymore and you're satisfied and you're meditating or doing something else notice this at a very granular micro level and notice yourself wanting to cling to a state like you're having some pleasure you want to keep that pleasure for as long as possible well let that go like when you're eating some food notice the food it tastes really good but then also let it go rather than trying to get more and more of that food like you you take a few bites of ice cream and then just let it go rather than having to eat the entire [ __ ] carton try to enjoy the impermanence savor in it bask in the impermanence notice that like yeah now this ice cream tastes good but also it's good to just let it go and to not have that ice cream in my mouth that also is good and then notice that difference between the two and how that actually makes the ice cream what it is makes it better see do this very mindfully with a lot of precision and awareness and it would help for you to have some sort of meditation practice in order to be able to do this and as you do this notice how you start to appreciate little things more little things that come up for you you start to now appreciate whereas normally your default tendency would be to try to like structure your entire day in order to cling to some sort of source of pleasure or stimulation or excitement or something like that whereas here now you're not structuring your day to get some sort of big juicy payoff like a hit of heroin in your veins it's not that now you structure your day more loosey-goosey and you're just you're you're more spontaneous and you're just willing to go and roll with the punches of the day the ups and downs you're able to sort of enjoy the positives and negatives you're able to enjoy the peaks and the exciting moments and also the quiet moments you get a wristband like this stick it on your wrist like this and this will be your reminder for the next week every time you notice this with your eye it catches your eye remember to pause for a few seconds and to remember that you're doing this exercise of trying to notice the impermanence and you should start to notice that it as you do this more every moment becomes more precious and more special and this is the essence of true happiness this is what true happiness is not the kind of chasing of pleasure that you typically do and this is the essence of spirituality notice the spirituality is the opposite of wishful thinking the way that people commonly misconceive spirituality is being you know there's this myth in popular culture that all spiritual people are just the ones who are brainwashed they're the ones who are like those hippie New Agers who just want to be positive about everything you know they want to engage in positive thinking they want to fill their mind with fantasies about how they're gonna you know live forever and all this but it's exactly the opposite true spirituality is facing the brutal nature confronting a soirée confronting impermanence and training yourself to notice it and to let it go and to roll with the flow that's true spirituality in fact it's the scientifically minded people who are wishful thinkers who don't want to face the truth for example somebody like Ray Kurzweil who has this ridiculous idea this fantasy alien of this technological singularity where in the next 50 years we will build computers and Ray Kurzweil will just be able to plug in his brain and upload himself into a computer in live forever this is this is an absurd fantasy that he has he will never attain immortality in this way the irony is that immortality is right here right now if only he would give up on that [ __ ] technological fantasy of his and start practicing spirituality see so it's exactly the opposite of what many skeptics and atheists and scientists think they are the ones who are living in fantasy land you're never gonna achieve any kind of technological immortality because technology is form all form is impermanent this is fundamental to the very structure of existence and the sooner you can realize that the better not as a Dogma I'm not telling you to accept this as an ideological tenet of your worldview I'm saying got to become consciousness directly consciousness and then you'll really be able to appreciate what life is all right that's it I'm done for this one please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that is my website I do have a website that has additional free exclusive content on it so do use that resource some people you know they they only watch me on YouTube and they never even bother to click on the website you'll find my blog there where I post exclusive content and insights you can find the book lists there you can find my life purpose course there you can find the actualized forum there where you can ask questions and chat with people who are into this work which is pretty rare most of your friends aren't doing this work and the final thing I'll say here to wrap it all up is this sometimes people fall into this trap of thinking like well Leo isn't all this philosophy you're just wasting a bunch of time talking about philosophy how is this gonna help my life but your very desire to skip over philosophy to manipulate your life to get a little bit of pleasure and happiness and money and whatever else you want sex and so forth that very tendency is the very problem you see of why your life is not as good as it could be what your life is lacking is depth depth you're living life at such a shallow level one of the most important things I'm doing with my work is I'm trying to introduce you to the depth of life and that's something that you don't see in most places on YouTube other websites even within the self-help industry rarely do you see people teachers and so forth introducing you to the full depth of what life is life is a very very deep thing it's amazing it's infinitely deep it's also infinitely wide so that's what we're trying to show you with this work at times it will seem like it's just philosophy it's just abstraction zand ideas and it can't possibly change anything and it doesn't have any real-world consequences well that's because you're not doing the work and also because you're not patient enough it takes patience depth and breadth takes patience it might take you a few years of listening to this stuff just to start to realize the significance of what's really being said and you haven't even maybe convinced yourself yet to even start to do the homework yet to do the practices you're not even there yet it'll take you a few years just to get there then you start maybe to in the practices because you realize that all maybe there's something here and then you do that and then you start to see the payoff a few years later from that and then you know it builds it all builds it snowballs this is the sort of a slow burn process is not a sprint this is a marathon that we're running here together and I've told you this from the very beginning if you've been following me for five years or even more than I've been releasing this content you know this was the intent from the very beginning I knew from the very beginning of releasing my first video that there was so much stuff that I wanted to put out there so many profound topics and ideas but it's taken years literally it's taken over five years to build myself up to the point where I could share this stuff at the the level and quality that I'm satisfied with now and still there's there's much that I haven't shared with you I'm only able to share maybe five or 10% of everything that I want to share with you because it's just too much it's too much it's too much work to organize all this stuff it it hurts my brain to talk about all this stuff so much you know it's too much to explain and it's it's too much for you to process and to take in you're gonna have to literally work on this content for years watch my videos for years in order to get the full juice of what's here but this is the best way to move not waste but use of your time if you're concerned about wasting your time what you should be concerned about is all the other stuff you're doing in your life when you're not listening to this depth of content compare the depth of content and conversations that we have together through these videos with everything else that's happening in your life I guarantee you nothing else is gonna be as deep as this not your time with your family or your friends or at work or the books you read or the YouTube videos you watch nothing is gonna be this deep see and this is exactly what you need you need to be questioning reality at deeper levels you need to be asking deep questions about yourself your life your environment about society about politics about religion about government about science nobody is asking the deep questions it's amazing nobody's doing it why not because it's not popular it's not marketable it usually doesn't earn people lots of money doing this stuff I could hurt a lot more money by doing shallow stuff you know I I have had the idea of just like quitting actualize that org and starting a video game channel cuz you know I could earn a lot more money and frankly my life would be a lot easier my job would be a lot easier if I don't have to research all this [ __ ] every single week you know carefully organize all this stuff and instead just like play [ __ ] minecraft 40 hours a week put that [ __ ] on Twitter or whatever or stream it on YouTube and earn millions of dollars I could have done that from the very beginning but of course again we're playing a much longer deeper game here than just that we're interested in getting to the very bottom of reality exploring its full depth and breadth and who else is doing that but us is TV mainstream news doing it is science doing it is religion doing it no they're not doing it they're focused on a very little narrow sliver of reality even all the spiritual schools they're focused on this much of reality compared to everything that there is see so don't worry about wasting your time here this is one of the most valuable uses of your time there can be but it'll take time for this for this apple tree to start to bear fruit you're just planting a seed you know the tree needs to grow for a few years then the fruits will start to grow and it'll start to fall down they will shower upon you don't let your friends and family and and other naysayers convince you that somehow watching this content and spending time thinking about this this is a waste of time it's exactly the opposite of that they're the ones the ones who are accusing you of wasting your time are the ones who are wasting their time asking deep questions about life is the best use of one's time in life what so are you gonna do you got a better idea if you have a better idea of what you can be doing with your life instead of watching and thinking about this material please post it in the comments down below I'd love to hear your suggestions you