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hey it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about understanding meaning purpose and value because this notion is central to how you live your life [Music] you this is a very foundational topic it's going to be worth it to you to listen to this whole episode all the way through there's a lot of confusion that I see out there with newbies and even intermediate people in personal development who just don't properly understand where meeting comes from and what it actually is and this is especially a problem because of my life purpose course people either take the life purpose course or they hear me talking about the life purpose course and then they assume that what I believe is that there is some sort of life purpose out there in the ether floating around which you can discover for yourself and then your life is gonna be peachy if you just live according to that purpose but of course that's not what I mean by life purpose at all life purpose as I talked about it in the course and I say it there but I'll repeat it here it's about how to construct meaning in your life the key word there being construct it's a construction and it's very important that you're conscious that that's what you're doing is that you're constructing so what I want to help you to do is just to understand that all meaning all purpose all value is constructed by the human mind and that it's not found out in the world anywhere that's very important that might seem obvious in a certain sense it's very obvious but to understand all the ramifications of this that takes going down a couple of steps on depth here and we're gonna do that so all meaning all purpose and all value and I'm using these words interchangeably throughout this episode and I'll just be referring to all of it is basically meaning meaning is relative the problem is when people hold it as being an absolute now what's the difference between relative and absolute relative means that it's relative to other things and that it's a conceptual construction whereas absolute would mean that it's inherent to reality so people think that there's a lot of stuff in life that has meaning and when you talk to them about it they tend to believe that the meaning is not of their own making but is inherent to reality and that this meaning is therefore constant for everybody and this is a very very wrong way to look at life and they're not conscious how they actually create the meaning themselves for themselves and this gets them stuck with whatever meanings they happen to think are real without realizing that none of it is real and that they are constructing it all along you will experience massive growth and maturity if you realize this for yourself and all of its implications but before you get the fruit of that growth you're first gonna have to go through quite a bit of confusion depression and nihilism you're gonna have to go over this hump pass this hump and then you will experience the growth and the maturity and most people never do that in life and therefore they really have a backwards relationship to all the meanings that they create in their life so why is meaning relative well to really appreciate that well you need to do is you need to sit down and ask yourself what is meaning hmm what is meaning what is it existentially speaking what is meaning where does it come from why does it exist what is its purpose have you ever asked yourself that question in your life and I do mean that you ask yourself and actually contemplated it for yourself rather than getting the answer from somebody else to see the problem is is that we tend to even when we ask these questions we tend to ask it of somebody or we tend to get the answer from society somewhere like you right now I want to get the answer for me and of course I want to give you the answer but the problem is is that it's not enough for you to get the answer you have to derive the answer for yourself so that you see how the pieces fit together and why it works the way it works that's what actually grows you hearing the answer in and of itself doesn't really grow you believing the answer doesn't grow you either it actually gets you a sort of false sense of understanding so you seriously need to do this we're gonna sort of do it together here as best as we can but also you need to do it by yourself after this episode is done later this week whatever you want to do it you need to sit down ask yourself what is meaning and let a natural answer come up not something that you read about in a book so what we're gonna do here to get you started on that process is we're gonna look at an object you can take any ordinary object and just sit down with it here we've got a banana regular old banana mmm nice yummy juicy banana so here it is now as you sit there and look at it I want you to start to contemplate what does this banana mean what is its meaning what is its purpose what is the point of bananas what is this value is it a good banana is that a bad banana is it positive is it negative what is it why is it what does this existence mean and just sit there and actually seriously contemplate that and see what comes up you never know what comes up you start to ruminate about this and you start to ask yourself like well is what the banana means to me the same as what the banana means to you or to my dog or to God or to the universe or to itself if we just take humans for a moment and we ask ourselves what does a banana mean to humans well to us most likely it means food we tend to think of bananas that way after your are they're all pretty pretty pretty yummy they got calories in there we can use this to fuel our day but what if you take somebody who is allergic to bananas let's say there was such a person a banana could kill such a person if they were really allergic let's just imagine that so in that case what would be the meaning of this banana to that person would it be the same as it is for you let's say today you missed breakfast and you didn't eat anything all day and now you're watching this and now you're starting to go hungry your stomach is churning oh you really want this banana huh see so to you it really means one thing but what would it mean if you had an allergy to bananas what would it mean to you if you ever ate a banana in your life and you got sick just not even from the banana but you just happen to get sick after eating that banana maybe got some food poisoning or whatever people didn't wash it properly for you and you ate it what would your reaction be to bananas now after you had a violent reaction to some banana see you have a very different reaction it would have a different meaning for you which starts to get you to wonder like oh so the same object can have different meanings to different people not only that the same opps you could have different meanings to the same person if you just ate 50 bananas and I show you one more you're not gonna think of this as food anymore see but when you're starving you'll think of it as food if I show it to your dog your dog isn't gonna consider this food cuz dogs don't eat bananas neither will your cat what will they do they'll probably ignore it they won't care about it and if we show this to any other kind of creature like an ant or somebody like that they also probably won't care about it they won't see it as food to them it might have no meaning at all whereas to you it might have a very important meaning if you haven't eaten for days and this is your only meal see so already this starts to tray the relative nature of meaning what this shows us is that actually meaning all meaning can only mean something for a who I'm a who you're a who your dogs a who a who you can think of it as a perspective one perspective on life or an entity or creature or an organism only for that organism is there meaning there isn't meaning in the abstract there is only meaning subjectively for an individual now why is that because a thing can only be significant to another thing relative to which it is trying to produce a benefit or it's producing a negative benefit which is harm so see what meaning is about is about benefits and harms but benefits and harms are not absolute things there is no one thing in the universe that is a constant benefit to everybody or a constant harm to somebody it always depends on who you are what situation you're in so it depends on the context of the situation it's important to wonder who would arbitrate between what is significant and what's not significant within reality significance is the same thing as meaning it's not found out in the world significance is relative to your life to a life if you didn't have a life nothing would be significant to you things are significant to you because they can either help or harm your life significance is relative to survival and this notion of survival is a rather abstract notion it doesn't just mean your physical surviving every single day that you wake up of course it does mean that but it means more than that survival pretty much in entails everything that you do in your life it includes waking up it includes going to the bathroom it includes food it includes your career it includes any business that you do pursuing money spending that money pursuing health and all the social stuff that you do having sex having relationships having children all of that is what we're meaning here by the notion of survival that's your whole life so relative to that things have meaning or significance and then relative to somebody else's life there's a different set of significance that objects have now what's really interesting about meanings is that they can conflict with each other because since meaning is relative to the self I'm a self yourself your dog's our self let's say because the self is defined as the opposite of other we can get into conflicts of significance and of meaning so what do I mean by self defined as other well to say that I'm a self means that I'm not you as obvious as that seems people don't get that that's an important flip side of the coin is that they're self and there's other and that's relative so to you yourself and I'm the other for you and that's obvious but let's take the example of an asteroid hurling at the surface of the earth and it's a big asteroid it's gonna wipe out whichever city it hits it's not so big it'll wipe out the whole planet but just one city so it'll destroy everything in that city and let's say that it has to hit some city now it could either hit my city or your city but we live in two different cities and let's say that now we're sitting and we're waiting for this asteroid to hit the question is is this asteroid significant or meaningful well to us as humans who are living in these cities it very much so is because it's a direct threat to our survival that's the only reason it's meaningful if the asteroid was gonna bounce off the earth and not hurt anybody would it be significant no we wouldn't care about it we care about it because it threatens our survival and that's an interesting thing to notice about meaning and about significance is that the most meaningful and the most significant things in the world in your entire life are those which threaten your life which should already betray to you that meaning and significance are completely relative to your survival and to really nothing else and then the less that it threatens your survival or the less that it benefits your survival then the less meaningful it is until it basically winds down to complete irrelevance so if this asteroid is gonna hit one of our cities and let's say that we're gonna flip a coin to decide if it's gonna hit your city or my city so we flip the coin I win it's not gonna hit my city it's gonna hit your city I'm thrilled because I get to live to me this is a very positive meaning because otherwise I would have died for you on the other hand seized act opposite it's a very negative meaning because it means you're gonna die and if the situation were reversed it would be reversed so this just is a very stark example that starts to show you how much meaning and significance is connected to your survival now this is a very important point because we as self survival machines tend to be very biased and we tend to want to survive and this tends to make us blind to seeing reality for what it is because we have a horse in the race so to speak we care about whether we die or not and in fact our entire neural system our entire psyche is designed so that we care and so that we live our life this way and in fact there is no other reason why significance or meaning exists but for that function that's why it exists significance and meaning is not just something you find out there in the world significance and meaning is something that the human mind created so that it could navigate reality and not kill itself as obvious as that is a lot of people don't get this and they certainly don't get the full ramifications of this so let's try to help you to see why this is so significant ironic to say that it's significant when in fact we're saying that there is no such thing as absolute significance so when I'm talking about significance or meaning what that includes a lot of other stuff it includes all notions of good versus bad so start to connect what I'm saying to everything that you think is good and bad in the world cuz that's what I'm talking about I'm not just talking about abstractions philosophical abstraction here I'm talking about every single thing in the world that you think is good or bad is relative to your survival see it's biased by your desire to live and it's completely dependent on you it's only from your perspective it's not absolute also all notions of positive and negative all priorities that you assigned two things in life for example you might say well my children are number one priority if you have children they probably would be and then your business is maybe a number two priority and then washing the dishes is maybe number three priority C so you're prioritizing things in life now are these priorities real in the absolute sense of course not this is a projection of your mind which is helping you to deal with the stuff that you need to do as a survival machine in the world because your children your even washing the dishes these are all survival activities also this notion includes making sense of life all attempts to make sense of life so if you're sitting there at night look it up at the Stars and you're wondering what does this all mean what is the significance of all this why is this earth here and this creation and all this why am i conscious so you're trying to ascribe a meaning to it to all this and that's a subjective thing it also includes all notions of goals especially ultimate goals so you might have an ultimate goal for your personal life for your relationship for your family maybe for your business you have some ultimate goal maybe you want to retire somewhere move somewhere do something achieve something with your career maybe you're a scientist and you want to make some groundbreaking physics discovery which transforms humanity's understanding of the cosmos and you think that's a very significant thing and what I'm telling you is that you're creating that it's not the case that scientific discoveries are inherently meaningful you have created that for yourself and now you believe that and notice that when you believe that something is meaningful it's not simply that oh yes I created this that it's meaningful no no no the way that it works for most people is very unconsciously so what they'll say is it actually is me this is actually meaningful that's why I'm doing it I must do this because it's so meaningful so meaning is tricky in that sense is that when you start to hold something as meaningful you start to think of it as real not as something that you invented meaning also includes all notions of worth this includes self-worth other worth so what are people worth to you what are your children worth to you and I don't just mean monetary value although that also is included in meaning so all monetary values I hope it's clear that those are all relative it's not like a banana is worth actually ten cents or a hundred yen or 20 pesos yes I mean you see how it's it's arbitrary what does a banana worth it changes every single day even just given human conventions so in the absolute sense I hope you can see that a banana doesn't actually have any worth nor do you have any worth not monetary worth but not even self worth cuz self worth becomes a self-esteem problem for people they say like oh I'm not worthy I'm not good enough but where's that coming from does the universe know that you're not good enough or is that something you're making up something you're inventing but see when you invent that you're not good enough that's a big problem because you don't hold it as like oh yeah I invented that I'm not good enough no no no no when you think you're not good enough you're not attractive enough you're not masculine enough you're not feminine enough you're not pretty enough you're not smart enough whatever you're not enough you think that's real you think that's the way it is so you think that's absolute you don't think that's relative that's why it's a problem for you so the solution there is to realize you're doing it and also meaning includes all notions of better or worse so think about all the situations in your life where you thought oh man this is going so great this is such a good situation or all the situation really oh man this is terrible this is such a terrible situation it's so bad like maybe you got sick or maybe your cat got run over by a car and man that's such a terrible situation it's so bad it's so sad is so depressing you know death what could be more negative than death but even death is a relative thing in the absolute sense is death bad no of course not simply you're programmed by nature to avoid death you hold it as the ultimate bad because that is the the ultimate standard by which you judge everything else you see because meaning is designed to serve your life death is held as the ultimate negative meaning and to overcome that and to see that you're creating that that's not actually the case but that you're creating that that's where this gets a little bit deeper you see cuz when I talk about your death like let's say you go to the doctor tomorrow and he tells you you're gonna have cancer and you're gonna die in a couple months you're gonna have a very negative reaction to that all sorts of negative emotions and oh my god this is such a terrible thing you're gonna start to cry and all this is gonna happen even though intellectually you might say oh yeah well I know all meetings are constructed and yet here you are constructing this negative meaning from death when in fact does death have a negative meaning no not at all so what might it look like if you actually realized that death does not have a negative meaning that death is meaningless and that life is meaningless see this is where people don't want to go they're okay with thinking about a banana not having any meaning that's okay that's not controversial but when it comes to your death when it comes to your children when it comes to your family your country your God all your favorite ideologies money morality the environment do you care about the environment values such as freedom equality justice happiness health your car your house your beautiful spouse travel good food not catching diseases your favorite cultural icons literature love politics truth all of these you think these have inherent meaning what what might it be like to realize that these are all relative things and that their meaning is simply a creation of your own mind something that you project out into the world imagine looking at your children and realizing they have no meaning imagine looking at society and realizing it has no meaning imagine looking at science if you're a fan of science and realizing that it's completely meaningless see that's the level of depth that we're talking about here to see all the consequences all the ripple effects of what I'm talking about here that can be deep and a lot of people never want to go here but of course this is exactly where we need to go in order to get the biggest growth meaning versus meaninglessness is a duality significance versus insignificance is a duality why is that important because a duality means that you don't just have meaningful objects out in the world the meaningful object is always defined relative to a meaningless object that's how meaning operates you see it's a-- it's a system of contrasts and you need both sides of the coin for it to work like heads and tails in black and white and of course what you should already know is the truth of non-duality at least you should know it conceptually and the truth of non-duality tells us that everything is non-dual which means that all dualities must ultimately collapse into a unity and that's exactly what I'm telling you here meaning is the contrast between what is and isn't useful to you as a survival machine that's all that it really is and notice that there is nothing absolutely useful to anybody what's useful to you today might be useless to you tomorrow and harmful to you the next day what's useful to you to survive might be harmful to another creature for example we tend to think that well if an asteroid hits the planet and destroys all of humanity that would be a terrible thing perhaps the worst thing that could happen to humanity and yet that's only from our human perspective because hey humanity might die out but then other creatures and life-forms might now get a chance to rise to the top and to flourish and maybe they will take care of the planet better than we did but of course that's not a notion we like to entertain because we're very biased all right human species perspective and we want to survive not just individuals but also as a species but of course that's completely biased see so it's relative an asteroid hitting the earth might be a great thing for cockroaches and we forget that and this this distorts our perceptions of reality because we tend to think that well reality is there to serve us and of course it seems that way because mostly what people are preoccupied with in their lives is a self survival when your occupation is self survival and that's all you care about that of course you don't care about the truth there's no room for the truth because to actually discover the truth you have to be very objective you have to step outside of your personal agenda and even your species agenda and even the agenda of life even the agenda of evolution a lot of people make the mistake of thinking well life is just about survival and reproduction and then they they live their whole life that way but if you live your whole life that way you're not gonna have a very happy life because you are gonna be then dictated by just the force of what it takes to survive you're gonna have a very miserable life living that way and people think well but leo that's all there is there's nothing more well maybe there is something more you just haven't explored it because you're so focused on survival and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy you need to start to notice that your mind projects meaning on to reality the whole point of the ego and the whole point of selfishness is to overlay a weighted field of polarity on top of reality like a net which helps you to navigate and otherwise unnavigable terrain why is this important well you can really appreciate this if you think the way that a robotics engineer might let's say that we're engineering a robot and we want this robot to be a self-sufficient creature like let's say like your dog so how would we create this robot well first we need to give it perceptions it would need to be able to see hear smell taste touch etc but once we give all these to the robot it's got all the raw data that it needs it's got a connection to reality let's say but is that enough for it to survive no clearly not because let's say this robot sees a cliff and it just runs right over the cliff falls to its death is that a problem for the robot no of course not cuz for the robot you didn't program any meaning you didn't create this projected matrix of polarity of things that are more important less important it doesn't know good from bad positive from negative because these things don't actually exist until you create them so if you want this robot to actually survive you're gonna need to teach it how to recognize situations which are threatening to its survival cliffs and so forth and you're gonna need to teach us situations which are beneficial to its survival like how to get electricity so maybe this robot is gonna see a wall socket that he can plug itself into to get its juice and for it that will be like it's food and you could program it to be very appetizing so every time your robot walks by a wall socket oh man it's so juicy I just want to stick myself right in there charge up and that looks very appetizing and it gets its emotions revving up and any time it's running low on juice then it starts to feel some negative emotions starts to feel some pain in its belly so to speak and then it runs around looking for a wall socket and if anytime it's walking by a cliff then it experiences a deep terror and fear of death and it runs away from the cliff and what are we describing here we're describing the robot called you see your mind uses meanings to manipulate you that is why meaning exists that's the only reason it exists if not for that the notion of something meaning something doesn't make sense you can't just have a meaning out there floating in the ether as though like this means something to God or whatever no it only means something to you and even then that's always subject to change just depends you know some people might be happy if a city got obliterated with an asteroid there are people right now who don't like their neighbors one city doesn't like a neighboring city and they would be thrilled if one of their neighboring cities that they didn't like one of their enemy cities was destroyed by an asteroid just so long it didn't hurt them too much see that would be fine but then if an asteroid was big enough now to kill the whole human race well now we got a problem now all the sudden we have to band together to work to stop that you see so it's relative so the size of the asteroid will determine whether you think of it as a positive or negative a little one it's okay if it hits your enemy great I love it if it hits you or it wipes out the whole human race and you along with it oh man that's a terrible thing that's how it works you need to notice that you are a puppet of your minds meaning making apparatus it's got you by the balls or by the ovaries whichever one and it's dictating your entire life this is a very ironically again significant factor in your life is whether you realize this or not now you might wonder well what about from God's point of view doesn't stuff mean stuff from God's point of view people misunderstand what God is and what God's point of view is God's point of view is not the point of view of a person or of a who God is not some grand who sitting up in the clouds to whom everything is meaningful God is the absence of who God is the absence of personhood God is complete objectivity from God's point of view everything is 100% equal in weight there are no polarities for God God doesn't discriminate that's why people say God is all loving God is all loving because to him everything is cool she can't be hurt it's not a he isn't it it's not even an it we don't have a good a good reference for it but it is the closest thing we can get to God everything is equally insignificant or you could flip it around say everything is equally significant it doesn't matter because the only notion of significance that's of significance is when there's contrasts as soon as you eliminate the contrast the whole thing collapses into irrelevance from God's point of view everything is being and that should be the point of view that you aspire to is to see everything as being because being is all that there actually is meanings are illusions meanings are something we construct being is what actually is and what is being well being is what you see right in front of you you might say it's like the matter of which the universe is made out of but not your concept of matter I mean actual being the way you're experiencing with your consciousness being if you just stay very conscious and objective with being you'll notice that being has no meaning no purpose and no value nor does it need these things nor is it diminished by not having these things you might say that beings purpose or meaning is simply to be that's its job its job is to be and being what most people don't realize is that being is infinitely more profound than meaning people think that all meaning if I strip my life of meaning then what's what's that gonna be it's gonna be very miserable bad life no not at all it would be infinitely profound because you would then experience God's eye view of reality that's a very profound thing far more profound than meaning running around looking for meaning which is what most people do they chase meaning the reason they chase meaning is because they think that it's inherent to reality if they didn't think that they wouldn't chase it so much you see meaning is a sneaky mechanism and it operates like an illusion because that's his job its job is to get you to chase that's what it's there for and if you realize that it was an illusion then it wouldn't feel as real and a solid as it would otherwise and then you would stop chasing it and that would undermine your self survival reflex and some part of you is afraid to go down that road because you're worried about well how am I going to survive if i undermine myself survival reflex but see the problem is is that you've been creating meaning in your life way beyond what you need to survive to the point where it has become toxic and neurotic and actually this is the main reason why people become interested in personal development why are you interested in personal them because you want to improve your life why do you want to improve your life because some aspects of your life suck right you're not happy with them but why is that well that's because you created all these meanings as you were growing up your family and people around you we're all creating meetings the way you were your culture fed you with meetings so all these meetings were created and then you got a hot board with that and so you sort of creating meanings and you started attaching meetings to this and to that you thought that a marriage is good a hot girlfriend is good a nice husband is good lots of money is good this is good that is good and so you did all this you slapped all these labels on this reality you did this all unconsciously without realizing what you're actually doing you thought that that hot girlfriend actually was good and that that marriage actually was good and that money is inherently good without realizing that no you were just imagining that to get yourself into action and you were creating these meanings unconsciously and now you got so addicted to this process that now whenever you're not getting the thing that you were labeled is good and you're getting the thing that you label is bad or harmful that now all of a sudden all your negative emotions come up and you're hot and bothered by all this and now you suffer see and you can't stop the suffering because you literally believe that that good thing that you need isn't given to you so that you actually believe that's harming you and that bad thing you actually believe that that's harming you too and that's why you suffer and now if I tell you that that's all a construction of your mind you say well Lia that's crazy that's crazy you're telling me money's a construction of my mind no man I need money to live that's actually real that's not a construction of my mind and so on with everything else with your girlfriend and your boyfriend and your marriage and this and that and your house and and your children and all that your think that that's all real and that's why you're chasing it and you'll be chasing it until you're dead and you will never get satisfaction from that process because that process is not designed to satisfy you you wonder why you're not satisfied with life it's not because life is shitty it's because you've assigned all these meanings to things and you've disconnected yourself from being which is the only thing there is of life you're wrapped up in illusions and of course illusions are hollow and therefore your life feels hollow because you keep chasing phantoms which you can never catch they always slip through your fingers no matter how much meaningful stuff you get have you noticed that you always need more it doesn't matter it doesn't matter how many billions of dollars how many hotwives or great children you have it not if it matters you will always feel hollow inside so long as you're disconnected from being because all those things are illusions but people don't realize that there are two ways to construct meaning unconsciously and consciously if you construct meaning unconsciously you will have that situation that I just explained to you if you become conscious though of how meaning is created and you go through this somewhat painful process to discover how much you've been projecting and you develop the maturity to really take that on and to actually accept it and then you learn how your mind is actually creating meaning and then you take control of that mechanism you can do it consciously which means that you can create meaning and there's nothing wrong with creating meaning as long as you realize that you're creating meaning and also you think about why you're creating it for what purpose what do you hope to achieve by it and you realize the limitations of the process so I'm not saying you should cut out all meaning entirely but really just become conscious of this so you're not chasing phantoms okay that's it for right now I'm gonna do a quick intermission take a little break so my mind is sharp and then I'll be back here in a second don't go anywhere with some more all right let's do some Q&A and answer some objections because I noticed that a lot of people get stuck on this topic even though I think it's a very simple topic understanding what meaning is is not that complicated but for some reason it just does not compute in people's minds and they have all sorts of objections which keep them from embracing what I'm saying so the first objection might sound something like this but Leo isn't it the case that we see progress within evolution it seems like our universe is evolving life on Earth is evolving the entire planet is evolving governments societies cultures technology science it's all progressing it's all evolving it's all becoming more sophisticated more complicated isn't it all moving towards something some ultimate grand purpose or point like the singularity or something like that there's no denying that evolution seems to be progressing towards more complexity where that ultimately leads to we don't know yet we can speculate but we don't really know but it's very dangerous to fall into this rat race mentality and thinking that progress will get you to some ultimate state of Nirvana it won't your progress is always progressing just two more being more being more being more being more being at the end of the rainbow is just more being the entire rainbow is made of being the beginning of the rainbow is being it's all being progress is a relative notion progress is something that some organisms might want and think is favourable others may not is a subjective and relative thing being is just what it is even if progress is taking place it's still seeing place within being people these days get caught up in this rat race mentality in the same way that they do with their careers and retirement they think something like well if I work for the next 50 years really hard then I can retire and spend the next ten years of my life in the last 10 20 years of my life on a beach somewhere just chilling out and that's gonna be the perfect life but then what happens that when those people do get there they realize that all they're there is is just being and this being is rather boring to them because throughout those 50 years they never cultivated an appreciation of being a consciousness of being they thought they were gonna make it to someplace without realizing that all there is is just being all there was was just being and they could have saved themselves 50 years of drudgery and grind by accepting being right now rather than working towards some destination you can work towards a destination there's no problem with that per se just don't trick yourself into thinking that the destination is the whole point of the journey that's not the case when you become really conscious you realize it's all just being and a lot of very successful people fall into this trap I'd like to talk about Ellen musk and rag on him a little bit precisely because a lot of people hold him up as sort of the role model of what a really good high-quality human being should be doing it's like they should be advancing society the cutting edge of science and progress and inventing stuff and moving the human race forward and all that and that's life purpose there's nothing wrong with life purpose I did a whole course on life purpose I'm big on life purpose but you have to recognize the limits of that see a lot of people don't recognize that actually Ellen musk is not conscious of this being situation here he is very hooked on meaning for him there's a apparently a very big meaning and creating all these businesses and working very very hard to run them all and there's nothing wrong with that per se but he is disconnected from being which becomes a problem because it never ends you see that's why you need to create business after business after business no matter how many businesses you create and how successful they are you could fly yourself to Mars to Pluto to the edge of the solar system it doesn't matter it's never gonna satisfy cuz no matter where you get to all you have is being the meaning that you're attaching to the stuff you're creating that's illusion you created that and you need to become a conscious of that as quickly as possible in your life to avoid negative consequences the next objection goes something like but leo this is so negative you're stripping meaning of everything and this is gonna make me depressed negative is a meaning when I tell you that reality is meaningless and that all meanings are projections and you think that's depressing a negative that's you continuing to assign and project a meaning onto what I told you you get that meaninglessness isn't negative that would be a meaning meaninglessness is meaningless you get that you got to get that I mean it's pretty simple but for some people again it doesn't compute but I know it can be depressing I've gone through this you can a face an existential crisis here because what you do is you build up your whole life as about achieving meaning family career business science helping people in your community you know loving people compassion all this sort of stuff but you never realized that it's just a castle you built up in the sky the reason that this news is depressing to you at first and it might be for a while is because you've been avoiding being in your life he takes real maturity and consciousness to fully embrace being and the emptiness of being this is something that most people do not do they in fact actively avoid it by going around chasing more meaning see they come up with some meaning they don't even know that they constructed the meaning they chase the meaning they acquire it then they want more because meaning never satisfies you because meaning is an illusion so you chase more and more and more and you're never fulfilled and then when someone tells you that what you're doing is you're just like running around like a a mouse in a wheel that depresses you because you want more you constantly keep wanting more but you want more in the wrong direction see there's plenty to be had when you become conscious of infinite being being is absolutely infinite there's more of it than you can ever possibly want but meaning is completely illusory and non existent you can never get enough of something which isn't real so the harsh reality here is that there's nothing more than being being is all that there is that's the bad news the good news is that being is absolutely infinite and it's all you could ever possibly want and being is infinitely more profound than meaning people think that if all of an if I just lose my meaning then what am I going to do in life I'm gonna be so depressed no that's just the initial hump get over that hump and you realize that actually meaning was such a cheap thing compared to being being is so much better it's so much deeper so much richer it's so much more mysterious and amazing that there is being but it has no meaning and that it's groundless but you have to become conscious of that and it takes work to become conscious of that and most people don't do the work to become conscious of that because they're scared off by this initial hump of negativity or depression so don't get caught in that trap watch yourself for assigning negative meanings to meaninglessness the next objection goes like this but Leo how am I supposed to use this what you're talking about here just isn't practical I'm interested in building my business and creating an awesome kind of life and now you're coming in here and you're you're you're screwed up the whole plans you're not motivating me you're actually demotivating me well here's the thing about this what I'm actually telling you is incredibly practical you holding it as impractical is really just because what I'm doing is I'm undermining your ego-driven lifestyle of course to your ego driven lifestyle what I'm telling you is like putting a wrench in the works of that whole project it has very significant practical consequences it's just that you don't want those you want to continue your ego driven lifestyle so of course what I'm telling you seems impractical and it seems like it's moving you in the opposite direction well you know what that's why this stuff I say I keep saying is counterintuitive because a lot of times to grow you got to move backwards or at least it seems as though you're moving backwards your problem is not that you don't have enough meaning in your life it's that you assign all the wrongs meanings to all the wrong stuff and you're not conscious of the fact that you're doing this and that you are not really in touch with being if you were fully in touch with being it would give you infinite satisfaction you can just sit there all day and be happy on your couch you wouldn't need to go anywhere but that's not the case for most people because you haven't developed that yet you haven't realized yet that there's nowhere to go there's nothing to do there's nothing to achieve you can do those things but if you're doing those things because you think they're gonna make you happy which is why most people do them you're caught in the illusion of the rat race and you're gonna be constantly forever disappointed and you're not even gonna know why you're disappointed it's just gonna feel like your entire life is lackluster like it's always less than you thought it could be the reason that is is because that's what you get when you go around chasing illusions not realizing that they're illusions the nature of an illusion is that it's hollow so your life feels hollow because it is hollow the way that you're currently living in the other objection is but leo now there's no more reason for me to take action after all you just said I could just sit there on my ass all day and do nothing is that what you want me to do the reality is that there never was a reason for you to do anything reasons were inventions that society culture and your parents fed you to get you to be a good little monkey to do what they wanted you to do why so that they could survive easier and so you could survive easier that's why there was no other reason there is no reason to do anything there's no reason to stay alive there's no reason to live there's no reason to eat there's no reason to have sex there's no reason to do anything there's no reason to personally develop yourself there's no reason to pursue truth there's no reason to get enlightened there's no reason to be happy or to be sad but people get addicted to these reasons and then their whole life becomes about reasons without realizing that reasons or something you construct after the fact to justify what you did or sometimes you constructed before the fact as well in order to get yourself to do stuff that you probably really shouldn't have been doing in the first place see the reason you need your reason is because you're trying to do stuff that you don't really even want to do and then you need all sorts of reasons to motivate yourself but when you really want to just do something when you have an natural spontaneous desire to do something you're just gonna do it you don't need a reason to do it you don't need to rationalize it away most of your life you've been living it by acting out of delusion this is called attachment you've been attached to things that you thought you should or you have to do or that there are good reasons to do well what nobody told you is that all that is a crock that there are no reasons for anything and now what you're being presented with here is the option to act from truth which means the option to act from detachment where you don't need anything you don't need to do anything but you can if you want to if you have the genuine desire to and isn't that what you want in your life don't you want your whole life just to be you doing what you desire isn't one of the things you most resent about life is having to do things you don't really want to do see well that's all the stuff that has to do with reasons and meanings that have been created if you get rid of all the meanings and all the reasons then what you're left with is just you're free you're free to play the game however you want there's really two options here you can grind through life which is obligating yourself with all these meanings and reasons and having them run your life unconsciously or you can free yourself of those and then you can play the same way that a child plays in a playground if you see a child in a sandbox building a sandcastle you don't ask him well what's the reason why are you building that sandcastle there is no reason he's playing you see that child is still fresh his consciousness is still fresh he was recently born so he's actually closer to consciousness and to being than you are as an adult as an adult your mind filled with all sorts of nonsense and reasons and justifications and all this and all these cultural conditioning things and values and principles and so now you're just bogged down with this stuff where as a child can just play and a child enjoys himself generally speaking when he's playing so the choice is yours do you want your life to be a grind or it to be a play the next objection is but leo should I then have no values and no purpose seems like that's what you're saying no that's not what I'm saying meaning value and purpose is still useful in practice you will still have them in fact I think to really self actualize you need to construct a really compelling life purpose to get you out of bed in the morning life purpose is very helpful my life purpose course is very practical you just need to realize that these are relative things that these are constructions so that you're not attached to your purpose see so you don't become neurotic about it so you don't become a slave of your purpose so you're flexible that's we're talking about now you might say well leo so that's does this mean this is just a word game cuz I thought you were saying I have to get rid of values and meanings and purposes and now you're saying that I need to construct them so you're just playing word games I mean I already have values and I already have certain kind of meanings so what are you talking about here what is supposed to change no it's not just a word game because right now if you're like most people you believe in absolute meaning and the change comes when you realize that there is no such thing as absolute meaning and that all your meaning is relative and now you have more flexibility and control with that it might seem like a philosophical difference absolute relative what's the big difference it seems subtle when you intellectualize about it but when you actually experience it in practice when you actually real sit down and realize there's nothing to do there's nowhere to go like literally there's nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing has any meaning whatsoever including my continuing to exist has no meaning whatsoever and once you resign yourself to that that's a really big change then when you go and take action from that first you realize that really deeply then you start to go take action from it and it's a very different way of taking action it might seem like the action is the same you might still go to work you might still start a business you might still have a family but the reasons why you're doing those things are gonna be very different that's the key that's the difference now of course some people might think here below isn't this nihilism isn't that what you're really talking about nihilism says that nothing is meaningful there's no purpose to anything yes of course what I'm saying is nihilism spirituality is nihilism actualized that's all it is this is a counterintuitive thing though people don't like to hear this they think that spirituality is the opposite of nihilism because isn't spirituality about having all these higher consciousness values like love and goodness and consciousness and God and passion and all the stuff a lot of values a lot of values in spirituality but this is uh this is people who haven't really practiced spirituality these are people who only believe in spirituality what I said is that spirituality is nihilism actualized and there are a lot of people who like to think about nihilism and of course nihilism has a negative connotation to it but all those people are doing they're just believing they're intellectualizing about nihilism they're not realizing it even many nihilists self-proclaimed nihilists will not actually be nihilists in practice what I'm talking about is being a nihilist in practice enlightenment is absolute nihilism that's what it is and all spiritual values ultimately stem from nihilism now how can that be that seems like a contradiction nihilism says there's no values and yet spiritual values come from nihilism and spiritual people tend to act in the most responsible and the most moral ways well if they're really spiritual if they're spiritual then they act in very evil ways like the Spanish Inquisition and so forth so all the evils of religion of course that's nihilism on actualised this is a counterintuitive thing and I want to shoot a whole episode on nihilism specifically but the reason this works is that once you realize that everything is meaningless you are able to get in touch with being and when you get in touch with being that being is so profound and divine that it transforms you from the inside not through any kind of moralization God doesn't give you some Ten Commandments to obey that's not why you become moral simply because you realize that all being is infinite and remarkable in such a staggering way that you lose all sense of self-importance and that ends up being the key to truly moral behavior is losing a sense of self-importance see because meanings charge your perceptions when you remove all the meanings your perceptions are clear and perfect and objective and you see the magic of being the beauty of it the power of it and this ends up being not a dry philosophical sort of thing but a very a very human a very rich religious experience that's what's called the religious experience of course a lot of people misinterpret that and then they they they then build all sorts of moral systems around this but see because most people never actually reach true actualized nihilism they stay stuck at the sort of intellectual level of spirituality now there's the question of like but what about Buddhism and you know other mystical traditions which encourage love and compassion they don't seem very nihilistic that's because you have to understand that most mainstream spirituality cannot come out and tell you the truth about what it is firstly because a lot of people who do mainstream spirituality and teach mainstream spirituality are not themselves enlightened so they don't know what they're talking about that's number one they're just talking stuff they read it in a Bible or whatever or some dogma that got handed down to them through their guru they didn't experience themselves and secondly because even if they did they can't tell you outright what it is because then it wouldn't be mainstream the surest way to lose your audience and to make your teaching non mainstream is by stripping it of all meaning people just hate that the mind hates it it's an acquired taste which is why there are so few spiritual masters and gurus out there cuz people generally don't want this stuff so what teachings like Buddhism and Sufism and Christianity whatever else you know these teachings that talk about compassion and love what they do is they put the cart before the horse they try to teach you the fruits of enlightenment without actually having people become enlightened which is putting the cart before the horse it craze a big problem but in a sense they have to do this because otherwise they could not sell their ideology to millions of people because people just don't handle the truth the truth is something you have to have a really deep passion for and you have to go pursue on your own and discover on your own and then once you discovered absolute nihilism and it transforms you and then you become a mystic and you become loving as a result of that see then people will try to emulate you and they think oh I can do that too I can just be loving I can walk around and be loving but see what they don't realize is that with an ego you can't walk around and be loving as you're projecting meanings everywhere and you're afraid of your own death and you're clinging to all your possessions and you're clinging to your house and your car and your bank account and your wife or your husband or your children you're trying to protect all this stuff you're so wrapped up in your egoic lifestyle that there's no way you can truly be compassionate and one's that what ends up happening is that when you preach compassion to people when you moralize to them and tell them you can't do this you can't do that and this is what this means and God says the purpose of life is is to be good and not to be evil not to do sin and all this when you set it up like that then actually what you do is you set a person up for committing a lot of evil because you give them the idea that they can go out there and just be passionate I mean not passionate but compassionate and that they can be loving when in fact you're setting them up to fail they can't be loving they've never experienced unconditional love they don't know what a conditional love is they never experienced the truth they don't know where those moral principles are actually derived from because they never bothered to derive it for themselves so if you want to be like a mystic do what the mystic does don't ape the Mystics results do what the mystic did the core thing the mystic did is he found the truth and then from that came all the quote unquote good stuff and see the mystic always understands that there is no such thing as good that these are projections so even though he may act in a sort of good way that's how people perceive him in his own mind he does not think of himself as acting in a good way or as being loving or as being selfless he just has no self it's a very big difference between acting selfless that's impossible for a self to do versus actually not having a self that's possible because that's the truth take some work but it's possible and the last question here that I'm gonna answer is but Leo I just don't buy it life is here it must be here for a reason surely it has a purpose are you really saying that all of this life is just pointless what you're asking with this question is what is the nature of being what is the nature of all of existence that's what you're trying to understand without understanding that you're trying to understand it in the wrong way you're trying to give being a certain sense of purpose or point or meaning which actually completely underestimates the magnitude of what being is why is life here why does it seem to have a purpose it's absolute infinity you're inside absolute infinity you are absolute infinity like that like that is just infinity that's what it is and you're sitting there asking for its purpose that's only because you don't recognize what it is when you recognize what it is you're not gonna ask for its purpose it's going to be infinitely times larger than any purpose you could possibly imagine it's empty of purpose but that doesn't mean ironically that it's insignificant it's the most significant thing that you'll ever experience in your life but ironically even though it sort of feels significant it's actually meaningless that's the peridot paradoxical nature of the beast that we call reality now of course it's no good to just believe me on any of this stuff that I said and there are different levels at which you can understand and internalize what I've said first there's the intellectual conceptual level at least get it on that level but that's not nearly good enough what you need to do is you need to sit down and actually derive what I'm saying for yourself sit there with a banana or some object and think about what does it mean from whose point of view is it meaning and how am i projecting the meaning I see how you're actually doing it once you see how you're doing it that will start to loosen things up for you ultimately you need to get to the point where you feel the meaninglessness of life down to your bones not intellectually but down to your bones in a crippling sort of way where all your motivations are thrilled under the bus where you question everything who are you question why you're still alive today where you question why you don't shoot yourself where you question why you don't kill your kids where you question why you should still go to work tomorrow where you question everything why you should be good why you should be loving why you should meditate why you should pursue in Lineman or any of it and ultimately realize that there is no reason even the pursuit of enlightenment or the truth is completely pointless you need to come to that realization yourself and not just come to it and react against it but come to it and accept it in a mature way and resign yourself to it such that it it permeates your being and it rewires your entire motivational system this is not going to happen without a midlife crisis to really get what I'm saying here you will have to experience them in life crisis and maybe more than one and don't worry if this is not at the midpoint of your life if you're only 15 years old or 25 years old it doesn't matter have your midlife crisis as soon as possible I was figuring this stuff out when I was still in middle school that's when I really had my midlife crisis was in middle school and then that created the foundation for everything that I became after that he was very important that I got it out of the way early in life I realized the pointlessness of life back then and I surrender myself to it and it was a tough time tough few months to a few years expect that for a few months or a few years of of this process you will be groundless you will feel confused you will feel lost you might feel dejected you might be in a funk you might feel unmotivated but that process that's true growth happening right there just make sure you don't spiral out of control down to some sort of existentialist nihilist rabbit hole where you get depressed and bummed out and take everything very negatively right because this whole thing is meaningless so there's nothing negative about it and in fact once you come out the other end you realize that man this is the most positive thing ever because this means reality is totally free I am free to construct whatever meanings I want I'm free to change them anytime I want I'm free to do whatever I want I'm free I'm free I'm free and then from there you can begin to take action again you can still be very passionate about life I'm not saying not to be passionate in fact if you want to be the most passionate person you can be do what I'm telling you to do even though it looks counterintuitive but really think of it like this it's like popping a Boyle with a needle if you have a nasty old cyst on your finger or whatever and is filled with pus and it's it's just aching and aching and itching you take a hot needle you poke that thing yes that process is painful and nasty but you do that and all the pus comes out and then the thing heals up and now you're happy you're happy camper that's what this process is like it doesn't take days usually takes months or years so that's the reality of it that's why most people don't do it and then they suffer for it for the rest of the lives because then either they're stuck in this artificial matrix of meaning I'll warn you to watch out for a trap which is that even when you pop this boil and you realize the the meaninglessness of it all you're gonna get sucked back into the illusion just by the fact that you're living in our society in our society fill is filled with meanings artificial meanings that just get thrust upon you and so maybe you'll have a child you have a family you'll get a girlfriend a wife a husband or you'll get a better career or what a house and then that will become your meaning and what you got to be very careful of is not to get sucked too much into that meaning to always remind yourself that okay I've realized and understood that everything is meaningless that is the foundation for everything else I have to be very careful that I don't let the illusion then turn into the foundation because that can happen you can very easily forget so in practice you might need to face this midlife crisis over and over and over again until you actually grasp it for good and when you do have this midlife crisis you will then become much more interested in spirituality and meditation and self inquiry and vice versa the more that you do meditation self inquiry and spirituality the more it'll bring you to the brink of a midlife crisis so these two things go hand in hand that's not a mistake don't make the assumption that oh man something's going wrong with my meditation practice know if you're facing a midlife crisis that's very healthy that's very good that's exactly what you want so let me just paint a little final picture for you of what all of this that I'm talking about in this episode will look like in the end after it's all said and done after you go through this somewhat tortuous process here's what you end up with you will have realized that everything is absolutely pointless and that this is not a problem this is actually a great thing it will not disturb you in one one bit your focus will shift to being from meaning from having and from doing this being you will develop a very intimate connection with it you will develop your consciousness such that this being is a very palpable every moment of your existence and this being will give you unconditional satisfaction you will no longer need to chase circumstances in life but you will just sit there and be no matter what's happening and you'll be satisfied and you'll be deeply happy and you will be truly free to play life however you want without moralization without obligations without feeling pressured into doing it and you will actually become playful you will become spontaneous you will become more creative you will have much less stress you'll be much more relaxed you'll spend more time out in nature you'll be comfortable with solitude you won't need to have a bunch of people around you to keep you happy all the time you won't need to go to parties you won't need to chase career after career after career or business success after business success after business success and yeah you can still do that you just won't hinge your happiness on it you will be fully alive in every moment you won't be waiting to get to some moment where it's like oh yeah now it's great cuz you'll realize that all moments are equal they're all the same doesn't matter what moment you're in and so what that does that allows you to enjoy every single moment and if you think about it isn't that what you want isn't that why you're doing personal moment in the first place because right now in your life you have a few moments sprinkled throughout your week where they're really great but then 95% of the rest of the time it's kind of boring it's kind of lame or it's negative and it's causing you suffering and stress so what do you want you want all of your moments to be good moments right so how do you do that can you do that by chasing stuff can you do that by having a lot of money and just like like in the morning I'm doing drugs in the afternoon I'm going to a party in the evening I'm gonna go have sex then the next morning I'm do another kind of drug then the next afternoon I'm gonna have a big business thing then the next evening I'm gonna do something else then I'm doing something can you do it that way no you can't do that you'll you'll burn out even if you had all the money in the world you would burn out doing it that way that can't work and even if you did that it would not be fulfilling you would find that you would actually become very miserable you need to do in a much more mellow way the mellow way to do it is to to ground yourself in being and you will also stop clinging to moments so when you're having a good moment when you're with that amazing girlfriend or boyfriend or when you're with your kids or when you're in nature or when you're doing a drug or whatever that peak you're not gonna cling to it because you're gonna realize like oh yeah that's just one moment out of all the moments and all my moments are great moments cuz it's all being just different kinds of being you see you're not gonna attach too much meaning to anyone kind of being because you're have changed from the meaning centered orientation towards life to the being centered orientation towards life and that in nutshell is what all your personal development or your consciousness work should be leading you towards that's what it's about so in conclusion stop chasing after a meaning and start pursuing being alright that's it remember to click that like button for me come check out actualized org my website see all the resources I have for you there you can browse videos better there are mp3s available for download for free if you want to watch these or listen to them on your mobile device my blog the forum life purpose course book list more stuff to come and most importantly make sure that you stick around and make a habit of personal development watch every week's video I'm always releasing new stuff there's a lot of important stuff I still need to cover as we go forward a lot of foundational topics that I've never talked about I try to cover new topics every single week there's hundreds of stuff that we need to cover years and years of stuff make sure that you build your theoretical foundation that's very important because otherwise you're gonna be going down dead ends and doing stuff and falling into traps build your theoretical foundation and you do that by just watching the theory every single week and then once you've got a few years down under your belt then you're gonna be able to know how to navigate and know where to go know which things are worthwhile to do and which things are not worthwhile to do ironically right because I'm standing here talking about there not being meaning and at the same time all my videos are telling you what are the most worthwhile and meaningful things for you to be pursuing in life that's because I'm talking about relative meaning understanding that absolute meaning doesn't exist see so I speak from that perspective hopefully you can sit down and contemplate the stuffers I'll figure it out so that when you're I'm speaking you understand what I'm speaking about relative versus absolute you