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[Music] understanding survival part 2 let's jump right into part 2 go watch part 1 otherwise you're gonna be very lost I hope that you actually did your homework assignment from part one it was an extremely important homework assignment because when we're talking about survival here I want you to really understand that we're not talking about theory or philosophy or just cute ideas and it doesn't matter what conclusions you come to about survival or how much you understand it intellectually what really makes the difference between whether this information is gonna change your life is if you actually observe it happening in your life you need to do a lot of observation work to be able to understand the things that I'm talking about here otherwise it's just gonna go in one ear and out the other so do that homework hopefully you did in which case let's move in I have a few other points I want to address here before we properly get into part two so first of all a note about part 1 where I mentioned the part the part about squirrels being oak murdering machines and some people in the comments responded and they say well below squirrels you know yeah of course squirrels eat a lot of acorns but also the squirrels they gather the acorns they bury them in stashes and then the squirrels forget about the stashes and then those Oaks grow from those stashes once the squirrel forgets about it so in this sense the squirrel is not being selfish but it's actually helping the oak trees and yes that's true there is an element of that and one thing that I want to illustrate with this example actually it's really good is that survival can be symbiotic it's not always the case that when you're engaging in survival activity you're always only doing something for yourself and never helping anybody else so in this case as in the case with many dynamics within nature within the ecology between predator and prey and so forth you see a lot of these kind of semi symbiotic relationships but here's the key point that I was making with that squirrel example is that the squirrel does not know what it's doing whether it's being selfish and murdering a bunch of oak trees or helping sometimes to plant a new oak tree by accident all of it is mechanical and the squirrel has no idea what it's doing it's just running on autopilot see and that is the key point and that is exactly what's happening in your life as well see in your life you're not a purely selfish machine that only does stuff to benefit itself and nobody else know you of course benefit your family in various ways you benefit your friends you benefit your co-workers you benefit society in various ways but a lot of times you don't and so it's a mixed bag it's a combination stuff the key is you're not conscious of what you're doing or how it's happening and also I want to point out that remember ultimately we can't have a duality between selfishness and selflessness you can't just separate these two as though they're water and oil and they never mix no there they're constantly mixing in ultimately when you get to the to the root of reality you need to become conscious that really selfishness goes full circle and it becomes selflessness the highest good that you can do for yourself ultimately becomes the highest good that you can do for others as well when you realize that self and other are actually one now of course a lot of people are far from that but I expect you to be able to see the Beast these two things are gonna have to come together everything is gonna have to come full circle here when you get to the rock bottom of it so keep that in mind don't don't hold that as a duality don't hold survival as some sort of duality as in like survival is bad over here and then selflessness and love is good over here it's not that simple it's much more complicated also I want to point out that unlike animals humans off you skate survival so with animals it's pretty easy to see how most the stuff they do is survival like you go outside you look at the birds one of the birds doing their flying around singing songs looking for bugs attract mates maybe taking a bath in a puddle or something that's what birds do all that is survival but see with humans we get very sophisticated and fancy with our survival such that then we forget that it's even survival we somehow think that the stuff that we do is so advanced that it's beyond survival when really it's just a more evolved complex form of survival and what you see all throughout the animal kingdom and and of course up through humans including humans is that the more evolved and complex the life-form is the more sophisticated its survival strategies become so you know if you take a little worm it doesn't have super advanced survival strategies but you take a snake it has more advanced ones and then you take a chimp it has more advanced ones then you take humans and of course we take it to to a whole new level but don't let all that complexity off you skate what's really going on because what's really going on is rather simple you're just surviving yourself also understand though that just because in organisms survival strategies complex and elaborate and full of deception that that organism is conscious of what it's doing it's not it needs are two very different things most humans have elaborate sophisticated highly intelligent survival strategies but they're unconscious of them they don't even realize that that's what they're doing and that's a very important distinction to make because sometimes people make this misconception they say well but beliya I'm good at survival as though like being good at survival means you're conscious of your survival strategies that's not the case for example Donald Trump is very good at survival he's been surviving his whole life by hook or by crook you know scheming and manipulating every sort of way but that does not mean he has a clue as to what he's doing and why he's doing it he's doing it all on autopilot see that's very different those those two are very different things so it's not enough for you just to become good at survival what we're talking about here is what's even more important which is you becoming conscious of how and why you're doing survival these days notice that it's it's it's very easy to take survival for granted because society outsources and hides survival the complexity sophistication brutality of survival is obvious gated and justified and rationalized with complex social systems such that most human beings don't even understand what goes into their survival like you think you just go to a grocery store and just pick up some bananas or some meat and that's how you fulfill your basic food needs but you don't understand the sophisticated logistical chains that these grocery stores have developed in order to provide you with these bananas and this meat at the cost that it's being provided at the inspections that go in to this the imports and exports the tariffs the various political systems and orders that need to be erected and also toppled in order to get you these bananas that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get from halfway around the world the shipping logistical chains you know they have to be shipped bite bite by sea and by truck and like is this extremely complicated sea but none of that is is seen by most human beings and so it's easily taken for granted and in a sense this becomes very dangerous because it disconnects us from our survival like if you were just living by yourself in the rainforest or in Alaska somewhere you would be connected with your survival functions because you have to actually like go fish for some fish hunt for some squirrels or for some rabbits or whatever you'd have to maybe grow your own vegetables build your own cabin and so in this sense your survival would be very kind of simple straightforward and honest but in modern society our survival becomes very convoluted and filled with all sorts of deceptions and ploys and facades and fake fronts my nose is a dream today and so you got to be you got to be clear-eyed enough to see through that you see especially like within business business off you skates survival so much most people they just go to a job they work they're doing some sort of grindy secretary work or whatever and then they get a paycheck at the end of the month but they have no idea how they fit into the entire machine that that business is and what that business is actually doing maybe your secretary for some giant a military industrial complex company like Lockheed Martin or something and you have no idea that actually the work you're doing is leading to the bombing of civilians halfway around the world you see and so this makes us irresponsible about how we survive and in this way a lot of devilry and quote unquote evil can arise because everything is so compartmentalized and siloed that you don't ever see the big picture of what you're really doing when you're working for that company that's problematic another thing I want to point out which I mentioned in part one but I didn't I don't think I I stressed it enough I want you to really start to appreciate how intelligent survival is it's unbelievably intelligent like it's it's brilliant beyond comprehension your survival or even the survival strategies of of simple animals it's incredibly intelligent like it's unbelievably intelligent but just because this intelligent does not mean that the animal is conscious of it the intelligence is sort of just a force of the universe it's the intelligence of evolution which we'll talk about another time but now let's move on so here's a key insight for you about survival of the more central that an object is to your survival the more emotional and upset you will become if it's threatened so just consider a couple of different categories of thing your children your parents your pets think about how upset or emotional you get if one of them is threatened versus if your car or your house or your bank account is threatened versus something rather small like if a towel that you use is damaged or you get a flat tire or you lose a shoe so these CC these are these are three categories of of centrality of these objects to your life you will react very differently to losing a child into losing a shoe why is that well it's because of how central the child is to your entire survival strategy so of course you get much more emotional about your children your pets and your parents than you do about lost shoes because the more energy you invest in a thing the more you need to defend it because it's central to your survival and like I said in part one we tell ourselves all sorts of elaborate fantastical stories about why something is so important to us or why we're so emotional about or so upset about it without admitting to ourselves the true reason so like if you ask a parent well why do you really care about your child what it what's wrong if the child gets kidnapped well you know the parent will will come up with all sorts of flowery stories but the bottom line is that it's central to the parents survival it's because the parent has invested so much energy into that child that's really why it's not out of love because your love for your children is not unconditional parents love for their children is extremely conditional so that's a lie see what we do is we tell ourselves these flowery stories about how the stuff we do in our lives we're doing for the good of mankind or we're doing it for the good of our children are out of love and all this other sort of stuff when in reality a lot of times this is just [ __ ] you tell yourself [ __ ] that society helps you to tell yourself because Society has already pre-made stories and narratives about why you do the things you do see we've concocted these together to make our human actions look much more Noble and selfless than they actually are and then we wonder how come our life isn't working well maybe it's because you're living your life so selfishly but then you say oh no but I'm very selfless you tell yourself that you're selfless but you actually selfless cease we've got to be brutally honest with ourselves here another key insight just because a survival strategy fails does not mean that it's not a survival strategy this is important people get hung up on this for example going to the grocery store is a survival strategy and it still is a survival strategy even if I go to the store and accidentally buy some spoiled lettuce and get poisoned and die from it that was still my survival strategy I just happened to be unlucky in this case I chose my lettuce poorly and and then I died yeah that that happens a lot survival strategies fail frequently or for example robbing a bank is still a survival strategy even if even if I get killed in the process now you might say believe didn't you just say that survival strategies are highly intelligent but what's intelligent about robbing a bank it seems like any fool should understand that robbing a bank would would be a terrible idea because it would endanger one's life so how come this person is doing it out of survival well there are many degrees of survival strategies and there are many degrees of intelligence to survival strategies even the stupid ones that we would call the so-called stupid ones are still rather intelligent you know a lot of intelligence gets put into robbing a bank even if you don't succeed still requires a lot of intelligence to do that and to execute that but of course there are many self-destructive survival strategies there are both short-term survival strategies and long-term survival strategies in a lot of times when someone is in a sort of a needy State a very fearful state and they immediately need money or resources because they're in such a tight bind or they have mental issues or whatever of course they can devise all sorts of unhealthy and toxic and self-destructive survival strategies and we'll be talking a lot more about that as we keep going here so that's extremely common in fact that's usually the case it's usually the case that you get stuck with some survival strategy which is actually dysfunctional and counterproductive and is actually damaging you but the problem is because you're unconscious you're running the survival strategy on autopilot and so therefore even when it hurts you you still stick with it because also understand that survival remember is not simply about physically thriving it's more about surviving whatever you were so for example for a bank robber like a criminal a criminal is a certain state of mind the criminal maintains that state of mind to be a criminal mind you have to keep doing criminal stuff it's an addiction it's hard to break that so someone who's robbing a bank he's probably been robbing cars before that and probably been robbing grocery stores before that and so on all the way back to his adolescence you know I had to start somewhere so that that program that sort of way of looking at the world of like how do I rob somebody how do i exploit some system that sort of way of looking at the world that's a that's an entire worldview and that's very difficult to change and it's that worldview that is truly being survived in the case of somebody robbing a bank see it's not merely just about getting a bunch of money and then having food to eat it's a lot more complex than that because we humans our survival goes way beyond simply putting food on our table and keeping the the lights on it's a lot about our our personal identities remember that also for example smoking is still a survival strategy even if it gives you cancer in the end and kills you how is it a survival strategy well consider how most people get into smoking usually they do it when they're teens and why do they do it well usually because smoking is something new is something hip it's something cool it's a way to to challenge authority to challenge parents to challenge teacher so in school if you're if your friends are smoking and you're the odd one out you don't want to smoke then see that's that's part of your survival agenda is you don't want to look weak in front of your friends you want to look cool too you want to be accepted you want to be part of the group so part of being human is being part of the group so activities which make you part of the group automatically become important survival activities so you guys listen to the same music and you talk about the same stuff and you wear the same clothes right it's a it's a bonding activity and then maybe being cool helps you to get attention from the girls helps you to get laid whatever that might be so that's all survival social survival and that's mostly what teenagers are struggling with during that part of their life is how do I survive not just as an individual but within a collective amongst my friends and peers teens are learning how to do that of course they make many mistakes and then once you are hooked on this on the tobacco then later in your life it's a survival strategy to keep smoking because now you're physically addicted your brain has been changed and altered by the nicotine and so now when you stop smoking you get restless you get stressed you have withdrawal symptoms all this and so now of course it serves your survival because survive big part of survival is comfort psychological comfort so smoking a cigarette gives you that psychological comfort now of course you might say well Balea but you wouldn't even need that psychological comfort if you didn't start smoking in the first place so it was stupid to start yes of course but the person wasn't looking that far ahead when they started and now that they have become addicted to it well now it's certainly a survival strategy to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day or whatever it is even though it's wasting your money and it's ruining your health and it's ruining your teeth and all sorts of stuff see but then you actually a smoke or a long-term smoker will actually develop a certain kind of identity about being a smoker and then they will actually bond with other smokers and you know they'll see a smoker in the airport and they'll say oh yeah and then like automatically there's a kind of an automatic rapport that's built even though these people never met or just because they're two smokers and so it becomes it becomes a certain lifestyle and really a certain kind of identity likewise depression is still a survival strategy even if it leads to your suicide in the end how can depression be a survival strategy well just think about it what is depression really about depression is a certain emotional state this emotional state is actually a very important signal that your subconscious mind is creating based on in the situation you find yourself in so for example maybe you're working in a nine-to-five job that is ruining your potential in life you're just wasting your life there and you're feeling miserable and eventually you get become depressed that's a signal from your subconscious mind telling you hey buddy this is not the job for you you need to move on to something else something bigger there's bigger stuff for you to do out there in the world but maybe you're too scared to act on that maybe you're too lazy to go find a new job or to develop a new career from scratch it's hard and so you just kind of stick with it you say that I it'll it'll improve it'll improve I don't need to change anything but it just gets worse and worse and worse you get more and more depressed until eventually maybe you kill yourself so this was a survival strategy in the sense that you were surviving as that lazy self that's scared self they didn't want to go out there also the depression was a signal you weren't listening to it see it was telling you to wake up and to do something new and to change but you didn't listen to it and then eventually got you two or got you also it could be that you develop a certain identity about being depressed and you can turn that into a whole victim identity getting attention from other people and so forth and then that becomes your survival strategy same so hmm it's very very sophisticated especially your entire emotional system is very sophisticated in how it sends you signals that help you to navigate life and you know a lot of people they are depressed but they never tell themselves what happens is that there pressed for a few years or so forth and then finally they admit to themselves that okay this is enough I can't do this anymore I got to go to a therapist or I got to stop drinking or I got to stop smoking or I got to stop whatever I'm doing that's contributing to this depression and they do they change the career they maybe they quit a bad relationship which was depressing them and then their depression lifts most depression of course doesn't end in suicide speaking of suicide suicide bombers that's a that's a survival strategy right there now you might wonder but believe how seems like it's the opposite of that seems like it's destroying your whole case here for survival but not at all because look a suicide bomber he's got very strong religious convictions and beliefs he believed believes in an afterlife he believes in Allah he believes in in the importance of defending his homeland against foreign invaders or whatever it might be or against the corruption of the West against the Great Satan so this guy who's doing the suicide bombing he's got a very strong ego and a very strong self-image about being a loyal Muslim who's gonna be a martyr and dying for the cause and then he does so and by doing that he believes he's gonna go to an afterlife and and all that good stuff and that is what's being survived not the physical body the physical body is not what's primary and actually it's you who's judging this person for being foolish you know cuz in the West we look at that and say well how stupid to think that there's an afterlife and and that you can go to heaven for blowing yourself up but actually joke's on you because what do you think happens to the suicide bomber after he dies he becomes infinite he becomes Allah so he's not wrong about that what he's deluded about is thinking that the suicide bombing is a is is is somehow necessary and not hurting people is somehow necessary in order to reach Allah that of course is not at all the case and that's that's a very self-destructive and counterproductive but you know these survival strategies can be very very twisted is what I'm trying to say many of them are self-destructive and that's precisely why we want to become more conscious of them because the survival strategies we pick up when we're young and from our culture and from our environment they tend to generally be quite self-destructive and that's because they're picked up unconsciously they're programmed into us either in school or in our church or by watching television or from our parents and friends or whatever is here's another very important insight about survival which is that there is no such thing as the one best survival strategy there are millions of unique survival strategies because there are millions of unique selves in fact each human self on this planet seven-plus billion of them has unique needs of course we have a lot of common needs we all need food and water and so forth but then I'm talking about that ego self what does your ego self need that's unique for every individual and what most people don't understand is that the survival strategy that works for them is not going to work for others this is a common mistake that people make because they're so stuck in their perspective and they're so not conscious of their own survival and also survival in general how it works they think that well if if being a Christian works for me it must also work for the Muslim and it must also work for the Jew and it must also work for the primitive tribal peoples living in the Amazon so let me go and start a missionary work and doing missionary work and starting to spread the message of Christ because it's gonna work for everybody no that's just your personal survival strategy it's rather arbitrary and it only works within a certain text in a certain environment in a certain time in a certain culture given certain geopolitical conditions you see there's no such thing as a survival strategy independent of one's environment there needs to be a perfect match between what's going on in your environment and then your survival strategy that's what survival amounts to in the same way that there's no such thing as the one best animal in the animal kingdom right there's no best animal it's always a question of what environment is the animal living in and how well fitted or suited is the animal to that environment so if we're talking about the Congo rainforest a gorilla or a chimpanzee might be perfectly suited to that environment maybe even better than a human if we're talking about some Arctic Circle type of environment then maybe penguins or polar bears are perfectly suited for that and so you can't take a polar bear and put them in the Congo it's not gonna work and you can't put a gorilla into the Arctic Circle so a lot of what the kind of very simple and obvious mistake but most people don't understand is that that people that humans have been making throughout history is we've been trying to push our own personal survival strategies onto others of course your parents have been doing this to you since you were a kid at a teenager which is why you rebelled against them but also your culture has been doing this to you and your culture has been doing it to other cultures so this is where we get the culture wars and especially when you get stuff like you know when the West is trying to interfere with Middle Eastern affairs for example and then it all goes to [ __ ] why does it do that well because it because there's a clash between the environment and the culture that's already there and the survival strategy that you're trying to enforce upon them you see it's foreign it doesn't work it's like trying to stick a polar bear in the Congo of course it's not gonna work you need to become cognizant of that but you can only become cognizant that if you're able to step outside your perspective and kind of like look at the big picture and also if you're able to respect other people's survival strategies and needs recognize that people have unique needs if you're a parent understand that your children will have unique needs from you of course they need food and water in the basics but they have a different personality type you might be artistic and they might be very mathematical or vice versa you might be very masculine and your your son might be more of a feminine type of guy and you got to understand that otherwise you're gonna be trying to like force him to go to the gym and force him to do masculine stuff but he doesn't want to do it I mean it's it's very obvious but people overlook the obvious also what people overlook is that all of us are at different stages of development this is where sprawl that Amex comes in this is why spiral dynamics is so good at helping us to solve various kinds of thorny sticky political problems social problems is because sprawl dynamics helps us to disaggregate D lump people from one group because before you learn Spile dynamics you think if everybody is just being the same after you look to learn smile dynamics you realize that no people are stratified in two different levels and these different levels they occur in in a certain sequence and so someone who's that stage red is not going to resonate with stage green survival strategies and vice versa see and different people are at these different stages so they need teachings and material and information and guidance which will be suitable for the stage that they're at and of course spiral dynamics is all about understanding survival societies and cultures are playing the game of survival at different levels consider the survival that's happening within the United States which is differ from the survival that's happening within Scandinavia differ from Russia differ from Africa differ from the Middle East different from the the rainforests or living in a prison these are all very different it's that require different survival strategies and that explains all of the cultural diversity that you see around the world all the major cultures and also all the subcultures they are all different survival strategies that uh see even just look at something like the cuisine of every country in the world maybe you've seen some Anthony Bourdain or something like that or you know the guy travels around the world showing you different cuisine and you're looking at it and so weird you know people eat such weird stuff in different parts of the world they eat stuff you've never even heard of in certain parts of the world they eat insects and they eat giraffes and rhinoceroses and who knows what else you know they eat all this weird alien stuff and it's amazing kind of opens your perspective because you're so stuck to your cuisine like your cuisine is so limited if you're only thinking about American cuisine or European cuisine compared to all the possible cuisines out in the world but why is this well if you look into it the cuisine always reflects the resources that are available within that culture so for example parts of the world where there are plenty of insects that are edible they eat insects and in parts of the world where there are giraffes they'll eat your ass so the reason we don't eat giraffes in the head States they don't live here see so it's all about working with like what you've got also I want you to notice that survival has co-opted all social institutions including the military businesses corporations nonprofits charities schools universities governments think tanks media Hollywood you name it every social institution is simply another level of survival because he knows see we we humans are very social creatures so we survive individually but then we slide survive collectively as well then our collectives become an extension of us so this complicates survival even more of course you can see this within the animal kingdom - like with ants individual ants care about their survival but even more so they care about the survival of their ant colony and in fact I have a whole episode called collective ego where I talk about collective survival it's one of the most most important and profound episodes so go check that out and it's because humans survive in a highly social way that's what makes us so powerful as a species politics become so central to human affairs a lot of people dislike politics and they say uh politics is just I don't want to have anything to do with it it's all [ __ ] but yeah it's central to survival all of these social institutions are filled with politics I'm not just talking about mainstream politics of the nation that's obvious but I'm also just talking about you know politics within your little corporation that you work in or politics within your non-profit politics within the military politics within a sports team it's all there the politics is there why is it there that's how you do survival in a social environment see that's the equivalent of going and picking fruit off a tree you know a chimp will pick some bananas off a tree politics is the human equivalent of that and of course even chimps have politics within their chimp troops actually quite sophisticated politics you can read about I have a I have a book on my book list which is really good talks about chimp politics and actually how remarkably it parallels human politics it's quite scary we truly are the third ape as we're sometimes called another key insight for you is because identity the thing being survived is a fantasy ideas and beliefs become central to survival not just objects and people or material goods defending your worldview is a huge part of survival as a human people underestimate this because we generally when we think of survival in a sort of a material physical istic sense of just like surviving your body biological sense then we tend to place too much importance on material objects and people and you know it's obvious that a car is a material object which significantly enhances a human survival ability extends it but even more important than a car is a human beings worldview because a car is still just a very local thing it's just an object you can change it you can replace it quite easily people go through many cars their lifetimes but a worldview this is actually imprinted into your mind from birth this is very difficult to change almost impossible to change if you're talking about just changing the entire thing your worldview is like your operating system which governs how you interpret and understand everything that's going on around you and of course human beings we take in all these ideas and beliefs and we're always interacting with other human beings through symbols through language through ideas through concepts through philosophy this is very much all wedded to your worldview how you interpret and think about the world this affects everything it's your operating system and of course the operating system is is more foundational than any individual app that is installed on it see so for humans defending their worldview becomes a huge part of survival and in fact you could battle someone to the death over a conflict of worldview you would think like well that's so silly why would people kill each other over a world of you but you're under estimating just how significant a world you is it's more significant than a car sometimes it's even more significant than a family member you know some parents would rather disown their children than give a part of their worldview that happens all the time around the world especially in in many developing countries where their worldview tends to be quite dogmatic it's by the dynamic stage blue or lower so for example your idea of what a family is or is supposed to be this is part of your worldview and it's very central or your idea of gender what gender is or what a male or a female is and suppose is supposed to be this is central to how you define yourself as male or female the idea of scientific materialism your metaphysics in other words you believing that you're living inside of a objective external reality that science can measure in a factual manner that's not relativistic that's central to your entire understanding of your life your religion your ethnicity all of these are part of your worldview and they shape you very much why do people get upset by the idea that their identity for example is a fantasy they get very upset by this because of course the whole point and premise of survival is that you need to create an identity manufacture it but then deny that you've manufactured it because you need to take it as reality II take it seriously so if you're conscious that you've manufactured your own identity this is this just in and of itself is very threatening and problematic for many people because then all of a sudden if you admit that then you have to kind of admit that your identity isn't real and if my identity isn't real more than why bother protecting it or surviving it and of course the answer is you're right there's no reason to bother surviving it but that doesn't help you to survive does it so of course this is what I meant earlier in part 1 where I said that survival is not rational it is its own end survival so in this sense if you can come up with some fantasy and then defend that fantasy and actually buy into it so deeply that you believe it's reality that literally becomes your reality and that's how you survive because if you didn't care being male or female or being a Muslim or a Christian if you were just kind of willy nilly about it like one day you're a Muslim the next day you're a Christian the next day you're you're something else you're a Jew like if this was your approach isn't it funny how nobody takes this approach like this is unheard of nobody does this why like when I was younger I used to think like why why don't people just like spend a month being a Jew and another month being a Muslim another one being Christian well it's because of course it's their identity they're attached to it it's precisely because they can't do this because if they did this they would literally dissolve and die as that you can't be a Muslim and then next month become a Christian because in a certain sense then you weren't a Muslim to begin with because what it means to be a Muslim is that you're completely certain that Islam is true and it's the best and if you're if you're gonna open your mind even a little bit to doubting that then you're gonna very quickly stop being a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or whatever you identify as you see so this is the core problem this is why people get so ideological and dogmatic all the time about all things is because they create these identities out of out of it and then that is what they're trying to survive and this is the chief obstacle to spiritual work because spiritual work reveals to you that all these identities are constructions but of course is precisely because it's true that people are so threatened by that they become hostile when you tell them this see people become very hostile when you tell them that physical reality isn't real why not because this calls into question everything you're basically mm-hmm it's like pouring salt on a snail you're going to dissolve their entire operating system and their entire sense of self this is very painful and scary for people so they react with hostility they get very defensive they start to project upon you they start to act stupid they they go into denial and all sorts of other survival strategies are used in order to maintain their identity they'll threaten you they'll they'll try to burn you at the stake as a witch or you know whatever they're gonna do they'll call you a liar they'll send you threatening letters that's what people do what do you think that like the Spanish Inquisition was about see it was a bunch of Catholics who wanted to defend their Catholic identities not because it was true but precisely because it was false see truth needs no defense your true identity as nothingness it doesn't need any defence at all what needs defending us is all the fabricated identities Christians Jews Muslims atheists as well atheists is a fabric an atheist is a fabricated identity a scientist is a fabricated identity don't think that just because you're a scientist or an atheist or a rationalist or skeptic that somehow you're immune to these identities those are all identities secular identities are still identities you can be some fortune 500 CEO who doesn't believe in God and doesn't care about any science or anything all you care about is just money and business that's your identity that's what you're defending and so when someone comes and tells you that all of your money means nothing you're gonna get very defensive and threatened and you're gonna be very hostile about this of course because it undermines your entire way of life why do people get hostile when you tell them that you are God or that they are God precisely because they've developed this belief in God this dualistic separate God this sort of authority figure and they have used God as an authority figure who sits and judges you and other people and they use this to build a moral system this moral system is their way of surviving because see they they've grounded their moral system in the judgments of God which means that it can't be questioned so it's divine it's God's divine judgment and and justice and so that allows them then to judge the rest of the world because they say no I'm not judging it's God who's judging and I'm just obeying God's rules or God's commandments or whatever see and then you tell them that know your God or I'm God you tell them that and they get they get very flustered they get very defensive about it and say no Leo how dare you god guy can't be God you can't be God this is blasphemy yeah that's your survival strategy for defending that identity and the reason that it triggers you or upsets you is precisely because it's false your identity is false and the truth is nothing the truth is that you're God but you're in denial about it why do people get hostile when you tell them that gender is a social construct for example which it is because they don't want to admit that's something like gender can be a social construct that's scary you're you're going down a slippery slope there see that might get them to start to think and question their own identity maybe that'll open themselves up to secret homosexual urges that they've had see they know what admit this stuff because their culture tells them it's wrong they have part of their identity is that homosexuality somehow deviant and wrong and somehow less than heterosexuality see it's a slippery slope because you know if if we start to admit that gender is a social construct that God and religion is a social construct even there I say science is a social construct and law is the social construct and government is a social concert well what's left is everything a social construct am i a social construct maybe you'll discover that you are and then poof those your whole life see it's very threatening because you're attached to surviving as a physical entity and maybe there isn't one see that maybe there isn't one so of course such people get upset and threatened it's only natural that's their survival strategy their survival strategy in these cases is denial judgment criticism hatred violence bigotry closed mindedness criticism I think I already mentioned that one yeah so it's all that projection that's a huge one it's all the self-deception mechanisms that I've talked about in my self deception three-part series go check that out here's another key insight for you you are totally oblivious to your survival and your selfishness because oddly enough it doesn't help your survival to be conscious of your survival strategy because becoming conscious of survival strategies if there are low consciousness survival strategies tends to interfere with them in the same way that for example if you're working on Wall Street and you're making millions of dollars every year by selling junky stocks to to old people let's say you're running some sort of hedge fund and you're you're fleecing people and you're manipulating and you're exploiting but you're earning millions of dollars doing it does it serve you to become conscious of all that all the trickery and manipulation that you're using it does it serve you to see that everything you're doing is just automatic robotic survival strategy because you're fundamentally insecure within yourself and that you're a greedy does it serve you to know this of course not because if you truly admitted this then you'd have to realize that I can't keep doing that you'd have to find higher consciousness survival strategies because it would be too painful and also you have to somehow admit to yourself that all the all the evil you've done in the past that that that was wrong or that it was selfish at least and so of course an entire culture on Wall Street has created to preempt becoming conscious of these survival strategies so see it's not enough that one person on Wall Street deludes himself about the kind of devilry that he commits every single day by working on Wall Street that's not enough there needs to be an entire culture all the people on Wall Street because they're in this together need to get together and create an entire culture a subculture really that justifies that what they're doing is actually necessary and for the good of the nation and so that's what they do not just on Wall Street but everywhere in the military in charity organizations in the government in the Republican Party the Democratic Party every social institution justifies to itself why what why it's saving its own ass is actually good for for everybody else because they want to paint themselves in the best light possible because that's what gives them the moral high ground see you want to take the moral high ground so it's simply not in most people's interest to become conscious of their survival strategies consciousness makes blind selfishness untenable that's the that's the problem with consciousness a lot of the unconscious stuff that you used to do you can't do anymore once your conscious consciousness comes with great responsibility when you're really conscious you can't steal from people anymore you can't rape people anymore you can't have slaves anymore you can't fleece people through scams and con artistry that's a problem for us people see cuz most people in the world are living in in in in such a desperate state that they need to do those things just to survive see so in practice high consciousness teachings become the enemy of the survival of the majority of people because most people are surviving is such a crude low level of consciousness that just the existence of high consciousness teachings and high consciousness people threatens them the very existence of it is threatening because it shows them that there's a higher possibility and that they're too afraid to pursue that possibility because they're too greedy or too fearful or too selfish or too hateful or too closed-minded and of course they need to deny that in order to stay that way how does a closed-minded greedy bigoted person maintain that by executing on on the greediness the fearfulness and the closed mindedness most people grossly underestimate how selfish they truly are because they're constantly bullshitting themselves about it and also because they distract themselves this is another key technique see my episode distraction the egos favorite defense mechanism most people distract themselves from their own selfishness by externalizing the problem and criticizing the selfishness of others and judging the selfishness of others this is a classic technique it's of course its its projection it's it's a very tricky and sneaky technique because if I invest all of my time for example building a career creating videos about how that person is wrong and this person is wrong and that person is evil I could spend the rest of my life doing that and hurt a lot of money doing that and that will be perfect smokescreen to avoid looking inside at my own selfishness and of course from this results all the war and chaos and and evil that were accustomed to seeing in the world which leads us to perhaps the most important next insight of this series which is this that what you call evil let's put that in quotes what you call evil is just somebody else's survival strategy I really want you to understand this rape slavery theft war poison murder cooze violence torture assassination exploitation lying manipulation backstabbing cheating blackmail prostitution threats plagiarism scamming con artistry child abuse selling drugs human trafficking corruption brainwashing propaganda terrorism kidnapping genocide abortion cults female genital mutilation crucifixion beheading homosexuals stoning people to death burning witches what is all this this is somebody's way of surviving all of these are necessary for people to be who they are now that doesn't mean we have to be that way in perpetuity all the way into the future we can change humanity can change and of course individuals can change I'm just saying that you got to see that all of these things it's not just evil that's somehow just happens or that it's caused by the devil no no this is this is all coming from everybody else being just as selfish as you and not being conscious of what they're doing and then justifying it to themselves as good proper and necessary so the key inside here is that you have to stop judging other people's survival strategies you have to go Metta and understand that there's no one to blame for survival when you're judging a rapist or a murderer or a warmonger or a Nazi really what you're doing it's as ridiculous as judging a crocodile for ambushing its prey or judging an octopus for changing its colors they're just surviving and even more here's an additional layer of mindfuck for you is that your judging of these different survival strategies which you call evil that itself is how you are surviving that's your survival strategy you see because you're demonizing survival by ignoring your own survival why would you judge certain survival strategies as being wrong bad or evil unless it was central to your survival to do so that's exactly what morality is about morality is all about taking the moral high ground so that you can deny other people their favourite survival strategies by making them feel guilty about doing it see so it helps you as the moralist that you think you are to think that you're above rape and murder and theft and all these things because then you can deny other people the legitimacy of doing so and then what you can do is you can get some other authority figure you could go tattletale on the rapist and you can say look that guy's a rapist look he's he's evil punish him for me imprison him for me execute him for me because he's a threat to me into my family of course that's the whole game is being played with morality now don't misunderstand me I'm not saying that we should legalize rape I'm just saying understand why this moral game is being played I'm not here saying rape is good or that it's bad I'm saying I'm just pointing out what it is it's a survival strategy and the reaction against rape is also a survival strategy and your reaction against me saying this if you're having a reaction if you think that what I'm saying is wrong and it's upsetting you that is also your survival strategy otherwise you wouldn't be upset why would you be upset about something that doesn't affect your survival you wouldn't be see survival isn't bad survival is absolutely necessary it's a precondition for all human life so you as the moralist that you are put yourself into a very adversarial relationship with reality when you demonize other people's survival strategies because while you're demonizing that person over there for their survival strategy you yourself are engaging in a survival strategy just the very fact that you're demonizing them is already a survival strategy so see when people judge Nazis or rapists or murderers or whatever they think that well but leo but but what's the problem like I'm not a hypocrite because I'm not a rapist and I'm not a murderer and I'm not a Nazi so there's no problem that that's true maybe on the surface level of course some people will actually judge a rapist and they themselves will be a rapist so that's that's a whole other level of hypocrisy and projection that all assume that you're not in that situation so let's give you the medal for the day that you're not like that but still you have a hypocrisy problem the fundamental hypocrisy problem you have is that all of these people at the big picture level are just engaging in survival and so are you and the reason that you're upset by all these people and their survival strategies is precisely because you're vulnerable and therefore you're gonna use any means necessary to survive including fabricating the worldview that what those people are doing is wrong evil and then telling yourself that you didn't fabricate it but that it's objectively true and real and unquestionable and that allows you to trick yourself and your community as well because you're not just doing this alone you're doing it as part of the community allows you to trick everyone around you into a collective hallucination of morality which then allows you then to to take the moral high ground and then to dictate laws and governmental systems which stop those activities that you don't want which then creates a society which is conducive to how you want to live now you might say well Leo isn't that good what's wrong with that there's nothing wrong with it I'm just saying it's survival and you're not conscious of how you're doing it and also you're not conscious that is a fantasy that you're creating it's a hallucination so you're outraged all of your moral outrage what I'm telling you is that all of that is [ __ ] because in reality there's nothing to be morally outraged about it's just survival is the gazelle morally outraged that a lion chases it no because the gazelle isn't sophisticated enough to be able to [ __ ] itself with complex conceptual moral systems it just runs away see it doesn't demonize the lion but if the gazelles could get together and create a worldview what would they do they would create a worldview where the Lions were the most evil ones in the in the animal kingdom because that's what would serve their survival and that's exactly what humans do it's not good or bad it just is what humans do it's survival survival is not good or bad it's just survival what unites all of life it's that we're all selfish as [ __ ] and what unites all humans is that we're all selfish as [ __ ] and we're totally dishonest about it to ourselves we don't admit it but also some of us are much more selfish than others so let's not pretend that all of us are equally selfish there are degrees of selfishness and it is important to take these into account the reason I'm telling you all this is because it's important as part of your growth process in your maturity process to appreciate the brutality of life and survival it's a very brutal game and it's important to integrate survival and spirituality you can't hold these two things as separate a lot of times people actually use spirituality as a sort of pseudo survival strategy and what they do is they use spirituality to either attain a moral high ground or a spiritual ego that they can use than judge people who maybe haven't gotten as high in their development and evolution but that's then itself become survival because if you're truly doing spirituality properly eventually spirituality will lead you to realize that the entire game of survival is a charade is a fantasy and that it must be transcended and ultimately that's what you'll do if you follow spirituality to its ultimate conclusion but of course most people are not cool with this most people only want spirituality as an enhancement to their survival strategy which is why we get religion that's what religion is Christianity Islam Hinduism Judaism even Buddhism in certain cases it's for most people to transcend survival is such a radical thing that they can't even open their mind to the possibility that religion or spirituality actually is leading them towards that instead they co-opt spirituality as just an additional tool that they can use to help themselves to survive that's why this work is so tricky because your ego is always going to co-opt these ideas even the stuff that I teach with actualize that org you've probably noticed that your ego constantly keeps co-opting the things that I say in order to actually build a sort of a spiritual self-actualization identity rather than actually transcending all of that and so self-actualization becomes part of your survival strategy watch out for that notice that it's a very tricky trap also it's important at the same time to realize that all survival is actually done out of love and this is what unifies selfishness and selflessness everything is made out of love every human action is done out of love even even every animal action is ultimately done out of love you know why does the why does the lion chase the gazelle because he loves life as a lion because the lion loves his family ultimately and the only way he can maintain his family is by hunting down a gazelle why does the bank robber rob the bank out of love out of love of money or out of love of being a criminal or out of love for his family if he needs to provide for them see it's just different degrees of love there can be very high degrees of love and kind of low consciousness degrees of love so all the stuff that you call evil that's a low consciousness degree of love it's a very partial love it's love only for a very limited self whereas the higher versions of love our love for self as the entire universe the universal self so that's the only difference between devils and saints they're both doing out of love but the devil is doing at a very partial limited divided form of love whereas the saint is doing it out of a universal form of love and also very importantly the saint understands that the devil is doing it out of love if you don't understand this pull then you can't really be a saint because the only way that the saint can truly love universally is by realizing that he is all the devil's as well and so the saint doesn't really fight the devil's because the saint just realizes that they are me and so really the saint loves the devil's to death you might say this removes the duality between selfishness and selflessness and always remember ultimately that the devil is God in disguise all of it is won all of it is God so make sure that you don't hold survival as bad and that's very tricky that's very hard to do because all of your impulses all of your survival impulses are pushing you towards seeing good and bad in the world good and bad that distinction is itself a core survival strategy see only people who have transcended survival can lay down the label evil and bad because they literally don't see it in the world anymore because those labels are a part of survival and so so long as you're surviving and you're stuck with in survival you haven't transcended it to anything higher then you're gonna have to keep using that label of bad and evil you can't help it you're stuck on autopilot that's what survival is you know what evil is really evil is anything that hinders your survival that's what you call evil and this explains why evil is relative and not any kind of absolute or objective fact and why everybody has a different idea of what constitutes evil oftentimes the reverse like you know in the Middle East they might say that America is evil and in America we might say that the Middle East portions the Middle East are evil who's right it is however it looks to you it's a perspectival relativistic matter precisely because evil just means that it's against my survival so from the United States point of view parts of the Middle East are evil because it hinders American survival and vice versa nobody's right or wrong because it's just a difference of survival needs difference of perspective but of course people don't even want to admit this because just to admit this already now places a big burden upon you because now you need to actually consider the other side you consider other perspectives you see so multi-perspective ilysm in and of itself is a dangerous notion for most human beings to allow into their worldview which is why multi-perspective ilysm is so rare it's a great burden and responsibility to take on to actually consider others people other people's perspectives as though they were as important as your own this is antithetical to what the ego and the self wants the self wants to only consider its own perspective on things you see notice that playing victim is a big survival strategy people love to play victim notice it within politics notice it within relationships in intimate relationships or if you have a conflict within your family what happens usually it's a game of one-upsmanship as to who is the biggest victim or who was wronged first or for example the israeli-palestinian conflict what does that conflict ultimately boil down to the Israelis claim that they're the biggest victim and the Palestinians claim that they're the biggest victim who's right same thing happens in your intimate relationships when there's an argument between you and your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend you try to claim that you've been victimized by them and they try to claim that you know no you you victimized me first you said this thing to me and that's why you're a bad person then and that's why you did me wrong and you say no no no but before I said that you said this other thing and you said it first so actually you're the wrong one and so I'm actually the victim and I have the moral high ground you see is this very twisted and counterintuitive because you would think like in a debate what people would want to argue over is who's the strongest one right they'd want to prove their strength but actually in these conflicts usually it's people are trying to prove that they're in the weak one he's like I was victimized I'm the weak one I deserve sympathy I deserve redress and retribution and and justice and you don't because you're the aggressor you see which is why every war that every nation has ever waged they've accused the aggressor the aggressor has accused the other side of being the aggressor see so like when the United States goes and invades Iraq we call Iraq the aggressor they force us to do it see how it works this is devilry inaction this is how the human mind works both individually and collectively start to notice this also start to notice that if you did not care about survival nothing would be evil to you which of course is precisely God's perspective because God is nothingness because God is infinite God is immortal it can't be harmed you can't harm reality and so to it nothing is evil or to put another way everything is love when you realize there's no evil then everything becomes love but you as a selfish ego who's busy surviving as this organism that you think you are you can't see infinite love because the stuff that's gonna kill you you can't hold it as love because you're you and you've placed you above love so really the choices you can have yourself or you can have love but you can't have both so which are you gonna choose the denial that evil is relative is itself a survival function how do you defeat evil by going meta and by transcending survival by realizing that all evil is actually done out of love and of course this is one of the most counterintuitive moves that you can make and people people are so scared of this notion because they're so attached to survival they can't see outside of themselves and their survival agenda that it doesn't even occur to most people in their entire life and they can live for 80 years and it never occurs to them that that the way to defeat evil is through love most people try to defeat evil by doing more evil they think that by judging evil this will stop evil and actually this just creates more evil which explains why there's so much evil in the world it's very counterintuitive to stop evil most people who try to stop evil actually create more evil so watch out about that you know because if it did it you'd figure if it wasn't this way we would have stopped evil thousands of years ago why would evil continue for thousands and thousands of years all the way into the 21st century only if it was extremely counterintuitive and nobody could stomach doing it that's the only way evil can persist and that's exactly how it works another key insight for you survival is absolutely relentless the ego is absolutely relentless so you might wonder likely oh why is life so hard why all this suffering why all this self-deception why are people so evil and why is awakening so hard it's simply because you're attached to survival and that drive is so utterly relentless that you know nothing else you can't help being evil you can't help being the devil that you are it's relentless this is not a a moral condemnation of you I'm not saying that you're a devil and therefore you're bad it's just ignorance you're just acting out of ignorance and unconsciousness and so therefore you're not morally responsible for this you're not bad at all you're just an ignorant devil if you knew better if you were more conscious you'd stop doing it but you don't know how to do that unless you do in which case you're not a devil or you're less of a devil than you would have been another key insight for you is that survival is so important that you the ego cannot be trusted with it so most of your survival functions are automatic precisely because it's too important to entrust to your conscious mind so its relegated to your subconscious mind so for example your heartbeat you know that's absolutely important if your heart stops beating for even a minute you're gonna be dead so of course that means we can't leave it up to your conscious mind it's all done automatically for you likewise most of your emotions work this way you're not conscious of how you get angry or fearful or why you get excited or horny or why you get lonely or depressed you're not conscious of any of these emotions they're acting you they're playing you this is how the body gets done what needs to be done is by playing you you're not playing it it's playing you like a piano with these emotional keys and chords that it strikes every day to get you to do what it needs to do and the stuff that's relegated to your conscious mind to your ego is some important stuff but a lot of it is not that important the most important stuff is is too important to leave to you because if you if you had to say about whether you get horny or not or whether you react with pain or not to getting you know stabbed in the foot or something like that you'd be dead long though you wouldn't be here listening to this you'd be dead already see this this stuff has to be relentless absolutely relentless and this is precisely what creates that sense of reality a physical reality a lot of people mistake pain and suffering for reality and I think well Leo if it's painful it must be real no that's actually precisely how the illusion of reality gets created is we create a knee-jerk automatic reaction from you against pain and suffering which prevents you from ever questioning it the less conscious you are the less you understand your own survival strategies therefore unconscious people behave like Devils they are obliviously selfish shamelessly selfish and of course the final twist that they put on it the the ultimate devilish irony is that they think that they are angels they think they're saving the world no Hitler thought he was saving the world from his perspective in his eyes he was an angel saving the world against Devils that's precisely how a devil sees himself of course unconscious survival strategies as I said before often short-term but I didn't say also that they were mostly they're often unsustainable and unequal because it actually takes a lot of awareness and consciousness to have ecological sustainable survival strategies therefore a lot of survival strategies which are short-term and very kind of opportunistic they end up backfiring in catastrophic ways and the reason this happens is ultimately because these short-term survival strategies when they come from pure selfishness lacking a larger perspective they are fundamentally dualistic because there's that separation between self and other and environment and so therefore when you separate what is ultimately one you stop seeing the holistic interconnections between you others and the environment and therefore you end up shooting yourself in the foot because in the end you cannot treat the world or other people as though they're separate from you you can't for example just be a rich person and say ah to hell with the poor people it doesn't matter as long as I have my yacht and my private jet and as long as I'm making a killing on Wall Street then it doesn't matter what happens to those poor people that's their problem because you see if you in the short term that works in the short term that works but in the long run doesn't work because eventually the people become so poor and so desperate that they rise up they'd rather pitchforks and they'd come for you in your mansion they'd bust down your private gate and then they they wrote they roast you on a spit and they confiscate your private jet and your yacht and everything else see so it only works for so long likewise you can't just be like some oil executive which says that oh well as long as I'm making my millions and billions selling oil [ __ ] global warming [ __ ] the earth it doesn't matter because I can just like live in my own little bubble I can build up I can have so much money I can just build an underwater city and live there and I don't care if if the global temperature rises a couple of degrees centigrade or if the ice caps no I don't care I'll have enough money to to just buy some nice property on some mountaintop or whatever that works in the short-term but it doesn't work in the long term see because you yourself are gonna suffer because you know maybe you're an oil executive but you still for example enjoy going to the coral reefs in Australia and maybe you enjoy going to Alaska and seeing some polar bears because you like wildlife people most people like wildlife and maybe maybe your children for example like the rainforest and maybe maybe your daughter becomes like a marine biologist or something and somebody else in your family you know isn't as rich as you so they live in a city like Los Angeles where the smog and the pollution just like you know keeps getting worse and worse and worse and eventually they get asthma or some sort of cancer of the lungs and then they die and then it affects you even if you're living in your bubble it's still gonna affect you because in the end the whole point of spirituality is to realize you can't live in a bubble you can't separate yourself from the world you're part of it you're the whole of it even if you do manage to separate yourself and some underwater bubble and live there all by yourself with no friends and no family and nobody else because you're all alone and you're all self-sufficient and you've got your billions of dollars well realize first of all the economy could collapse which would just all your billions of dollars but also in the end even if you have everything you want and you're sitting on a mountain of gold bars or a crypto coins or something in the end you're gonna be sitting that bubble all alone disconnected from the world you're gonna be spiritually bankrupt loveless disappointed lonely disconnected from mankind and from your environment and you'll probably kill yourself or at the very least you'll live a a miserable life full of suffering and you'll miss out on the greatest joy of life which is to realize the interconnectedness of it all and to work towards towards that truth rather than to work towards devilry which is fragmentation see but it takes a lot of consciousness and fearlessness and selflessness to realize some of these ideas that I'm presenting here then your survival strategy starts to change so the problem with selfishness is not simply that it hurts others but that because self and other ultimately one it hurts yourself so ultimately the devil ends up shooting himself in the foot and it's by awakening to that mechanic that the devil realizes that oh yeah my devilry it's not gonna work in the long run it only works the short term and it's not satisfying even for me so why keep it up and that is the beginning of true spiritual growth and the beginning of of a possibility of transcending survival it might seem that unchecked selfishness is the best possible strategy for surviving but this is not true because life is nonlinear and life is counterintuitive and there are twists and turns and things fold back on themselves so often unchecked selfishness works quite well in simple scenarios but as the environment and the system becomes more complex the selfishness becomes too counterproductive this is why for example Trump's america-first policy is so foolish from trumps point of view and his level of consciousness and the consciousness level of his followers it seems like it's a smart strategy because by America just being more selfish it's like yeah well we're not giving anything to the rest of the world we're just gonna sort of like be by ourselves and do what we want and flex our muscle and put us first and that's gonna get us the most that's gonna give us more jobs and all this other stuff but this is a misdiagnosing of the problem because our world truly is global and it is only going to become more and more interconnected and so this policy of putting your nation first this nationalistic policy is a dead end it can't possibly work and the further society advances and the more complex it becomes the more integrated everything becomes the advantages of the integration are so huge that to then go back to a policy of putting yourself first is going to be extremely counterproductive and in the end it's gonna lead to a net loss and so see if trump was a systemic thinker he would understand this but of course he's not a systemic thinker people sometimes argue with me and say Oh leo but but Trump is a brilliant systems thinker because he can manipulate systems no no systems thinking is not about manipulating systems I'll give you that Trump is brilliant at manipulating systems but that is not systems thinking systems thinking is about working towards the benefit of the whole system because one recognizes that everything is interconnected and that you are not separate from anybody else that's the that's the true meaning of systems thinking and of course Trump is is nowhere near that nor are most of his followers they don't understand this because they're they're not cognitively developed or consciously developed enough to see the interconnectedness of all things they think they can get away with just being devils and of course that's what they're trying to do but it's not gonna work it's it's obviously not working already and it'll only get worse the more you try to push it in that direction this is the problem with nationalism as human society evolves greater complexity unchecked selfishness will work less and less this is a very clear trend you can see throughout history your student history you know like for example tyranny and monarchy are no longer sustainable forms of government almost anywhere on the earth anymore or as they were just 500 years ago why is that because the world has become more interconnected and so there's less and less tolerance of tyranny and monarchy there's more respect for individual rights there's more respect for this idea that we're all part of a community and that you can't just execute people because they have a different religion than you whereas five hundred years ago that was totally normal it was totally normal in fact it was expected that you execute people who have a different religion than you because their threat they're a threat they're undermining your sense of identity but now our identities have expanded such that we no longer most of us I hope at least no longer feel threatened if somebody next door our neighbor is a different religion than us or as an atheist or as a homosexual we don't feel I need to kill them because we're more secure because our identity is now more global a lot of it has to do simply with the media the movies you watch shapes how you form your identity and the movies you watch are so international now that it's untenable for a person to be born in the 21st century and to really have a hatred and fear of Jews or Christians or Muslims or atheists or homosexual or whatever it just like it it's a non-issue but 100 years ago it was a huge issue on the other hand though we also have to say that being totally selfless also doesn't work because you die too easily so part of your job in life is to figure out the right balance between selfishness and selflessness there is no formula for this it's different for everybody because people are different and people live in very different environments in some environments like if you're living in a prison or you're living in some ghetto where they're a bunch of gangs running around you can't adopt the same kind of hippie lovey dovey strategy that you can adopt when you're living in some stage green or stage turquoise spiritual ashram like very different environments you see let me also underscore that survival comes in degrees like I said not all survival is the same so we've got to be careful here we got to make fine distinctions some degree of survival is always required some survival is harmonious some survival is pathological this is not a judgment right see I'm not making a moral judgment this is important when I say that some survival is pathological rather we're looking at how well does our survival strategy allow us to live in harmony with others and with our environment if it doesn't then it's pathological literally it's a cancer so some survival strategies are cancers that eat themselves alive destroy themselves so part of growing up and maturing as an individual but also as societies and governments as humans is for us to find healthier and healthier survival strategies we can't all just escape survival like that it's a gradual inching up process of bootstrapping process that has been happening since the very dawn of human civilization right we've been refining our survival strategies to be more holistic and harmonious and not always have we succeeded in fact right now we're sort of at a precipice where our survival strategies are very unharmonious threatened the entire planet in in a multitude of ways so by finding these healthier survival strategies you grow you become more conscious and you become more happy you become more peaceful extreme survival strategies equal excessive selfishness which equals unconsciousness which equals corruption which leads to chaos and a lot of upheaval which of course threatens life because life requires order and a certain degree of stability as a community we need to reach a consensus about which survival strategies are healthy and acceptable this is not avoidable so don't make the mistake of thing you know what I'm advocating for here is anarchy or no government not at all we just need to be very conscious about how we do government now here's another key insight for you survival is tail-chasing all survival ultimately cannot win all survival ultimately fails it's just a question of how long will it work 50 years 60 years 70 years 80 years a hundred years but it's got to fail every organism dies every organization ultimately dies or changes or involves to the point where it's no longer recognizable survival is fundamentally unsatisfying because it always ends in failure so wouldn't it be nice if we could transcend survival somehow why can't survival ever ever be one because because to do so would require freezing all of reality that's literally what it would mean to win at survival it means that you could rearrange matter in such a way that you can create a fixed static corner of the universe where it doesn't change anymore but if you did that that would [ __ ] the infinite diversity and beauty and goodness of the entire creation which is never going to be allowed under the grand design because the grand ultimate design is to maximize diversity beauty and goodness to maximize perspective to maximize diversity therefore you cannot gain a permanent monopoly over reality because as soon as that happened the flow and motion and creativity of reality would would be destroyed and this would produce for a lesser reality and reality is designed in such a way that it maximizes goodness through diversity because ultimately all reality is one one part of reality can never gain a monopoly or total power all over all the other parts of reality which is why ultimately all monopolies collapse and all life must die because you see if for example humans were able to make themselves immortal to never die well that means that by doing so we would in a sense not allow other humans to be born because you know we can only have so many humans so by by this generation dying we let a new generation come into being so we kind of share the experience of life with others but if we hoard it and we say no only I want to live only this generations gonna live forever [ __ ] everybody else [ __ ] the future generations then we're destroying future generations in that in that way you see and this this actually this actually lessens life this ruins life so life is is meant to be cyclical and impermanent that's a fundamental feature of reality is impermanence now by this point you're probably thinking well leo so what do we do about this this sounds all very bleak is there anything we can do can we escape survival well survival is inescapable so long as you want to live even an enlightened person must engage in survival you notice enlightened people still have to [ __ ] they have to eat they have to drink despite what some of them might claim they all do it they all engage in survival now their survival could be much more purified than an average person but they still engage in survival as long as they're in a body you know a body can only stay a body as long as it's engaging in survival but there is a possibility to change your relationship to survival to gain some sense of freedom and relief that is possible it's possible to improve your survival significantly that's possible there's also the possibility of Nirvana moksha liberation being and unconditional love which we should talk about now so in part one I ask you to think about as a bonus question what is it survival so let me give you the answer now it's tricky because most of stuff you do is survival but a rock for example is not a survival a psychedelic experience is not survival non-dual consciousness or being is not survival a meditative state of Samadhi of union is not survival unconditional love God's unconditional love is not survival truth God itself beauty and the absolute these are not survival so the best answer this question of what's not survivalist is simply being this requires that you actually have a shift in your state of consciousness out of the survival mode that you're costly in where your mind is projecting onto the world and you actually look at an object for the first time in your life and you see it as the being of the object rather than what the object is for you or what it means for you or how you're interpreting it so for example you can sit there and look at your hand like this just from looking at your hand for a long time until you start to see your hand as being not as a hand it's it ceases being a hand it ceases being an object which doesn't mean that it changes shape or color it still keeps its shape in color the raw sensations perhaps don't change so much but your interpretations the context within which you're putting this hand changes to the point where you look at this hand and you longer even recognize it as a hand or an object anymore it has no utility or function anymore you don't care about what happens to it anymore it doesn't matter if it gets destroyed or not you don't think of it as your hand anymore and literally if you do this long enough eventually you'll reach a state of Samadhi where actually the separation between you as the the onlooker the subject and the hand is an object that will collapse you will enter Samadhi and then all there will be is just like a hand floating and for the first time you will you will look at the hand as what it actually is pure being so of course this is not unique to your hand you can do with any physical object you can do it with the entire room that you're sitting in you can do with your physical body you can do it with anything you can do it with other person you can recognize the being of it by stripping it of all of your survival projections see the problem is is that even when you look at a rock for example when most people look at a rock that's still not truly an escape from survival because most people when they look at a rock in the back of their mind their subconscious mind is doing all sorts of sneaky stuff it's either putting value or meaning into the rock or it's saying that the rock is meaningless and unimportant or it's just calling in Iraq or it's putting that rock into some kind of context like for example you look at a rock and you might say oh well that's a that's a such-and-such a rock from such such a place such-and-such a time you know you're putting it into a context all of that is still part of your survival but to look at that rock and not even see a rock there anymore that would be you breaking through the veil of survival into being and of course this is what meditation is about this is what you experience when you do psychedelics psychedelics put you into that Samadhi state of pure being and it's just this magical state of where you look around the room for the first time in your life and you realize the magic of being and it strikes you as pure truth and beauty in God and that's right that's what it is and and that's a very sharp contrast to your ordinary state of consciousness where you're in survival mode where your mind is constantly thinking ahead about what you need to do what you need to say in order to survive the next day or the next minute or the next hour now it's it's a little tricky for example I wouldn't say that meditation itself is not survival because actually most people who meditate they're meditating out of survival and even the pursuit of enlightenment itself I wouldn't say that it's not survival because most people are doing it out of survival they're doing it because they're suffering and they want to escape suffering or they're doing it because their ego has some notion that they're gonna find the truth or the ego wants to co-opt that enlightenment for itself and turn it into an identity that's still all survival but you know we're not perfect we got to start with where we're at so it's perfectly fine for example to pursue enlightenment or to do meditation for egoic and survival purposes at first I mean you got to start where you're at you can't just become a saint overnight so it's fine you know most people start to meditate because of very selfish reasons like it helps them to relax helps to quiet the monkey mind which drives them crazy it helps to maybe relieve some some stress or some pain that's all fine likewise with psychedelics and a lot of people take psychedelics for very selfish survival reasons for example they take a psychedelic because they want to escape their depression or they're bored even you know bored in this survival so you know you're just bored so you take a psychedelic okay fine but see it doesn't matter how you get there once you get to being once you get to Samadhi whether it's your meditation psychedelic er or whatever else once you're there you're there it doesn't matter how you got there now you're in pure being now you're out of survival for the time being the problem is that these Samadhi zand these psychedelic experiences usually don't last very long and then you come back and you're back into survival and then you see oh man now I got to deal with all this survival nonsense again and you see just how stressful it is you see how it robs you of your joy and beauty and you feel disconnected from God when you're back into survival mode and that's exactly correct and that's why these states are so important for you to experience it's so important to have a few of these mystical experiences whether through psychedelics or meditation or the pasta retreat or whatever because at least then you have some new reference point of something beyond survival and you realize that survival is actually a small aspect of a much larger thing that's going on here and that can help you to then refine your life refine your survival strategies so that they become less selfish more universal more ecological this creates a better society improves your life reduces your suffering until maybe eventually at some point you might reach so I'm a very deep level of awakening but even if you do as long as you still want to be alive here as a human you're still gonna have to maintain some semblance of survival you can't just completely ignore survival unless like literally or you're prepared to die so that's just how how it seems to work the quality of your life defence depends directly on how much you've transcended your survival the wisest people are the ones who go as directly as possible to transcending their survival but this is this is pretty rare usually people aren't this wise here's another key insight survival has no meaning value or purpose in the ultimate sense how could it because the whole thing was predicated upon a fantasy to begin with there is and never was a reason that you should survive survival only appears valuable if you buy into it but of course there's no reason why you should buy into it you buy into it irrationally but at the same time if you didn't buy into it then you wouldn't be here thinking about it and I wouldn't be here talking about it so in a sense survival becomes its own end point meaning and purpose in this way survival is tautological it's a self-fulfilling prophecy it justifies itself it's selfish it invents itself which is of course how it must be cuz how else could anything exist if everything is one it has to invent itself it has to fabricate itself it has to pull itself up by its bootstraps it must be a strange loop and that's what it is the ultimate truth is that survival is an absurd farce and that you have an infinite number of lives and that actually you can't really die what you truly are your true identity of nothingness can't die it's immortal but so long as form exists and it wants to keep existing it has to struggle to maintain itself liberation comes by breaking this relentless cycle of survival by breaking your attachment to life and to maintaining yourself as any kind of form which means you have to recognize that your true nature is formless and that all forms are okay you can occupy the human form for a while nothing wrong with it nothing bad about it it's just that recognize that there are certain costs that come to maintaining this form a certain impact you need to have on your environment you can't do it isolated from your environment and also recognize that your form will end so don't get too attached to it and it's going to end rather soon a lot sooner than you expect so don't get too attached to it the more attached you are to it the more of a devil you will be in trying to maintain it and if you really want to end suffering and be ultimately happy free yourself from this whole burden and escape the entire cycle not by destroying your form but by realizing that you you never were the form you were the formless the whole time you've mistaken yourself for the form survival is the greatest obstacle to truth survival necessarily corrupts perception and reasoning because perception reasoning are central to one's ability to survive so it must be corrupted and co-opted which is why most human beings are actually incapable of doing good science or proper reasoning because they don't realize that their mind has been co-opted by survival what keeps you from awakening is your attachment to all your survival strategies and changing your survival strategies is hard by design because survival tends to be conservative it tends to maintain homeostasis because every survival strategy must work in the real world it has to actually stand the test of a reality you can't just concoct some survival strategy in your own mind and then it's gonna work it needs to be brutally tested against reality which is what evolution and natural selection does you might object and wonder here but leo you said that many survival strategies are fantasies and now it seems like you're saying that survival strategies have to actually work in the real world so then they're not fantasies which is it it's a little tricky survival strategies are fantasies for most humans but see there's an additional wrinkle because we're a collective of social creatures this allows us a very unique thing it allows us to create a collective fantasy which then becomes our reality so for example a bunch of humans can get together and create the fantasy of money we can agree that these green paper notes somehow have some sort of worth or value and if we all agree on it even though it's all a fantasy as long as we agree that it's real and we act like it's real it becomes real and it becomes very effective as a survival strategy because it allows us to now trade very easily in a way that wouldn't be possible if we were having to trade cows and houses and other things see so you can't just come up with any random fantasy your fantasy has to be good enough to convince others that it's real and that's actually not that easy to do you would think that well leo so so anyone can just sit and cope with all sorts of horseshit and then manipulate society that way not quite the the horseshit that you spin has to work within the entire already spun web of horseshit that humanity has been spinning for the last 5000 years or so right so it has to fit with that and so in that sense the horseshit becomes its own reality you see like Christianity has become its own reality Islam has become its own reality science has become its own reality and so now if you want to be a scientist you have to work within the fiction of science if you want to be a Muslim you have to work within the fiction of Islam and so forth so just because a lot of these things are socially constructed does not mean that they're not significant or serious there are very serious and sometimes you do have to conform yourself to them if you want to survive that's precisely the point is that they shape survival so much for example if you get too out of line with your culture a mob might arise and you know come for you with pitchforks so in that sense what the mob believes becomes real because they will ultimately rather pitchforks and come for you and that's gonna be real you're gonna feel that when they're poking you with those pitchforks alright so in wrapping this up let's give you your homework assignment I want you to compare the survival strategies of your mom your dad your brother or your sister your friends and even your cat and your dog and of course yourself hopefully you've studied your own survival strategy by this point keep studying that of course because you're you're nowhere near done with that project but but also I want you to compare especially within your own household because see now I want you to notice the differences I want you to notice how survival is very relative and contextual and different for everybody so even though if you're all living in the same household like your family you're literally in the same environment but still you have very different survival strategies for example your mom your dad versus yourself or your your brother or sister or your cat so notice that and study that notice what annoys your cat what annoys your dog what needs does your mom have that your dad doesn't have and vice-versa don't judge them just observe a lot of observing and compare that with yourself and then notice how that creates a lot of conflict within the family all of that that's where all your conflicts from where else why would there be conflict if not for differences in survival strategy and then if you want you can broaden that out to an exploration of of your company or your political party or your government or whatever I also want you to study the survival strategies not just of humans but also animals and for this nature documentaries are really good look at the survival strategy between a lion and a gazelle between a mosquito and a bird how differently they survive between a fennec fox and a jerboa I mentioned these specifically because I'm gonna post a video on my blog go check out my blog you'll see a video there a really great documentary like a short one of the fennec fox hunting the jerboa in the desert it's an amazingly shot a little documentary check it out and just take a look at how every part of the fox and every part of the jerboa are perfectly designed to work in that specific environment it couldn't work anywhere else it couldn't work in the rain forest it couldn't work in the Arctic it works in that particular desert it wouldn't even work in all deserts just that particular desert like the hairs on the feet of the tree boa the nose the whiskers on the fox and the ears that it has in all of this and how it all fits together the eye sight at night and all this and I would all fit together how one runs away the other one chases it and this is this is survival but then I want you to see that you are that your boa hopping through your life and the environment you're surviving in is not a desert but 21st century America or Europe or India or wherever you live your culture is the milieu in which you're trying to survive if a thing is alive at all it must have a sophisticated survival strategy which fits perfectly with its environment because if it didn't it'd be dead and in humans compare survival in different parts of the world for this documentaries can also be really good baby watch some vice documentaries of how different people live there are some great ones out there for example compare the survival strategy of someone living in New York City versus on a farm in Alabama very different and of course it's not just what they do for work it's how they educate their kids it's their world view it's their religion it's their culture it's their values it's their ethics it's their morals it's their political beliefs it's all of that or compare survival at a corporate headquarters or Wall Street versus survival in a prison or in a gang or in the Middle East compare survival in Africa versus Scandinavia versus Alaska I posted some videos in the past a long time ago on my blog about this great reality TV show about survival in Alaska I think it was called life below zero if I'm not mistaken great great show which shows you just how different survival is in Alaska it follows a group of individuals who live all by themselves in Alaska and just kind of like live off the wildlife live in the middle of nowhere off the grid and it's just amazing to watch because it just shows you how disconnected most of us are living in big cities from from our survival so just start to start to look at all this and put it all together put all the pieces together and you're gonna see you're gonna see what all of this life and self-actualization spirituality is all about and that's what I love the most is kind of seeing the big picture by putting all the little pieces together and I've told you from the very beginning that one of my biggest objectives with actualize that or ggest to help you to see the big picture in a way that few other channels or teachers do very few people do this because it takes a lot of laying of groundwork you know putting out hundreds of videos to ultimately be able to put all the pieces together and it's then that you get to really appreciate the the sophistication and beauty and intelligence of life by putting all these pieces together you notice just how amazing it is how it all fits together so intelligently how well-designed all of it is it's it's it's remarkable and that that's what makes me so excited about this work is seeing these big pictures and that's why we go into such depth and also so much breadth covering various kinds of topics because ultimately now as actualize that already sort of starting to reach a sort of pinnacle we're interconnecting a lot of topics and it's really the payoff now comes if you've been watching my videos for years the payoff now is finally starting to to come to fruition because now we're starting to interconnect all the stuff we talked about God and quantum mechanics and strange loops and collective ego and spiral dynamics and whatever else I've talked about so many different topics you know now we're starting to piece them together and we get to see the really big picture emerge but you can only get that if you put in the work of actually watching all this stuff diligently and keeping it in the back your mind and thinking about it doing the exercises following up with the homework and watching the videos and examples and documentaries and so forth and then piecing it all together this is a this is a multi-year long project but I hope that you get to see the fruits of that for yourself so in conclusion rewatched this two-part series on survival again later this year next year keep REE watching it because there's there's still I guarantee a lot of stuff got survival that you've you've overlooked because you really need to study it for yourself closely to start to appreciate all the stuff that I put in these two episodes become an expert on how survival works and that's it for today please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll find my blog where I'm posting new insights and ideas and videos and documentaries and bonus material you'll find the forum you'll find that book lists will find the life purpose course I recently updated the book list with amazing life-changing books rare stuff that you're not gonna hear or find anywhere else so be sure to check that out that update is free for those who bought the book in the book lists in the past I've updated the book list eight times now I think for free for those of you who bought it originally and of course if you buy now then you get all those updates automatically and the last thing that I'll say is you must do the observation work to be able to follow actualised org you're not going to understand the advanced stuff that I'm talking about unless you do the homework that's the cost it's not enough to treat this as entertainment the way you do with other videos this is serious stuff we're doing here this is not a joke we are developing the most sophisticated and advanced understanding of humanity and life and reality that has ever been accomplished in human history that's what we're doing that's a grand statement but that's what we're doing and it's different than Buddhism and Hinduism and other traditions it's way bigger than that way broader than that we're seeing a much bigger picture than you will see through Buddhism I guarantee you that it's different what we're doing here is new and different this is cutting-edge stuff don't think it'll come easily don't think that your friends and family will support you in this it will be emotionally difficult it requires investment from you that's precisely why it hasn't been done before this is not easy stuff to do this takes up my whole life doing this you see um but it's worth it it's worth it so start doing the work start actually observing don't speculate don't theorize don't disagree with me don't it doesn't matter about all that do the observation work the observation work will reveal what's true to you you don't need to believe me the observation work will demonstrate to you what's the case all that I'm doing is I'm I'm presenting the conclusions of various kinds of observation work that I've done and of course there's kinds of theory that I've studied and triangulated various conclusions from I'm just presenting that to you not as an ideology that you need to believe but as something for you to pursue and to realize for yourself and if I make any mistakes which I of course can make mistakes I'm not infallible then it's through the observation work that you'll discover my mistakes and then you'll correct those not through leaving me stupid critical comments and trolling in all this this this doesn't help do the observation work and of course you don't want to I know you don't want to I struggle with the - you're gonna procrastinate you're gonna be lazy you're gonna cope with all sorts of excuses of course of course you will because if you fully understand all the stuff that I talk about it's gonna it's gonna be the end of you but luckily there will be a new you you will be reborn rise out of the ashes like the Phoenix as they say but of course you're gonna resist that in the meantime so you know struggle with it push yourself get out of your comfort zone and make yourself uncomfortable and also just be patient be patient with this whole process it's gonna come together for you I promise you we're slowly putting the pieces together this is a hobby this is a long-term hobby that you're doing here you know some people like to collect bottle caps some people like to collect coins I like to collect concepts the deepest concepts about life and I like to piece them together and see life from higher vantage points that then other people have ever seen it from before and I like to look at it from different vantage points from different perspectives because there's not just one and that's my hobby and so I'm sharing that hobby with you and I'm trying to infect you with my passion for that hobby and in that process not only will you understand more of yourself in the world in humanity but you will hopefully also ultimately end up liberating yourself and that's what's going to make it all worth you