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[Music] welcome to this two-part series on integrity we're going to talk about in part one what is integrity the nature of integrity and its importance and then and we're gonna get pretty deep metaphysically on that point but also we're gonna cover practical aspects and then in part two we're gonna talk about how to actually develop integrity within yourself so let's get started i'm actually really excited about this series because first of all it's it's extremely foundational this is sort of the core of personal development work here so you got to understand this idea in order to really make something of yourself in your life and uh also because i've been wanting to actually cover this topic for years now has been on my to-do list and i just haven't been getting around to it i've been procrastinating with other topics so now it's time to get in all right so integrity is extremely important it's probably way more important than you think it is it's more important than most people think it is and it took me a while myself to start to understand the significance of what integrity really is for human life for living a good life and the problem i had with it is this is that when i was growing up i basically sort of skipped over a lot of the religious indoctrination where a lot of our moral systems come from like stuff like family values and morality this sort of like to me this was nonsense i could clearly see the problems with an absolutist judeo-christian moral ethic or whatever culture it's coming from so i was sort of intellectually cognitively beyond that but uh that sort of lays a little trap for us here if we're gonna be very scientific and atheistic and skeptical the way that i was when i was younger is that you tend to poo poo everything that has to do with any sort of system of morality or anything that smacks or even whiffs of religion or the kind of moral systems that religion promotes and so i was just instinctively averse to that and because that i sort of dismissed this whole field and then it took me it took me years and decades to come back around to it so if you're a scientifically minded person if you're an atheist if you're a skeptic if you're a cynic you might also think like well integrity that sounds like some sort of uh thing that maybe some like mike pence christian would say and then we know they're all hypocrites and all this and we know that morality is actually relativistic and blah blah blah and so um what value does integrity integrity truly have what does it even mean to say that someone has integrity or doesn't uh after all isn't just a matter of opinion personal opinion i mean it's not like a scientific fact right well keep your mind open because there's something deeper to integrity and to this whole idea of religious values and morals then it first seems when you especially when you hear it from religious people or in church or something like that so i'm not going to be filling your mind here with dogma or ideology but we're just going to be taking a real good hard look at this concept of integrity and you'll see how powerful and important it is all right so integrity is paramount for living a good life if you're interested in that success psychological health and ego development which we've talked a lot about in the past in my series on spiral dynamics or on the susan cook reuter ego development model so those different stages of development that one goes through as one self actualizes and matures integrity is crucial for that and the higher you go the the more integrity is required it's extremely important and paramount for spiritual work which of course i'm always talking about here and for discovering truth and because truth of course is love as we've talked about in the past these two are identical uh you can't have love without integrity so these are all pretty important things don't you think the good life success psychological health and development and truth and love i mean what what more is there in life but these things you gotta want at least one of these things right hopefully all of them all right so the self-actualizing and spiritual person really without integrity is rather pathetic and broken and there are plenty of these people around and believe me i'm not speaking from a position where i'm trying to say that i have the highest integrity i i struggle with integrity myself in part two of this series i will share with you some of my own struggles with developing integrity and and areas in which i'm still working on myself so by no means am i saying that um i'm above it in fact i'm very cognizant as i grow myself as a teacher of this stuff of of how much of a responsibility puts upon me to really walk my talk because it's very easy to sit up here to just blab her mouth and in fact that's what most youtubers are doing they're just blabbermouthing stuff it's it's like the easiest job really it's the easiest job in the world just to talk and talk and talk um but then does your talk actually get embodied in your life that's that's the really difficult part and there's a lot of spiritual teachers and even non-spiritual teachers just personal development teachers and business gurus and and so forth um pick up coaches psychotherapists even who will you know tell you how to live your life but then when you look at their life are they really in integrity a lot of them are very pathetic and broken that's because they don't have the integrity of the things they speak about and i've certainly been guilty of that and i still am guilty of that in certain respects but anyways enough of that so the question is why is integrity so paramount that's something i want you to start to contemplate if you start to agree with me that integrity is so important why is it so important that's a homework assignment for you right there so i'm going to try to guide you towards an understanding of that a deeper understanding all right so think of a person in your life who you've personally known who's had a significant influence on you not just a a celebrity or something on tv or some youtuber but someone you know close to you maybe a parent a friend a teacher a professor a family member who had low integrity surely you've run into a person like this in your life face to face not just virtually so bring up an example like that of somebody with low integrity how do you feel about that person what impact did that person have on you if you know about that person's life intimately how well does their life run how smooth is their life how happy is this person what kind of results does this person get in their life are they a highly successful person are they very spiritually developed are they a very loving person and now to contrast that think of a person who you've personally known in your life face to face who you would say had high integrity surely you must have encountered at least one such person in your life a teacher a friend an intimate partner maybe one of your parents maybe a sibling of yours a co-worker a boss now bring to mind how that person makes you feel when you think about him or her what kind of impact did this person have on your life and if you know anything about this person's personal life how did their life run was it smooth was this person happy successful had a lot of friends loving trustworthy so this starts to get your mind thinking along the right track so what is integrity really well it's helpful to turn to the dictionary and the dictionary merriam-webster specifically gives us a couple of nice definitions to get us going here in our inquiry the first definition is quote firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values secondly quote a refusal to lie steal or deceive in any way thirdly quote incorruptability and then the oxford dictionary has a nice one which is a little bit more abstract i really fell in love with this definition when i read it because the ordinary definitions are what i just kind of gave you and then this one really makes it spiritual and metaphysical here and and we're going to get real deep on this one in a little bit later in this episode but it's this quote the state of being whole or undivided um that should ring some bells for you shouldn't it if you've seen my uh holism and holistic thinking episodes then you should start your mind to start to connect some dots here whole and undivided what does being whole and undivided have to do with integrity and with living a good life why would these things be connected good things to think about so integrity basically means honesty character morality uprightness virtue goodness wholeness trustworthiness walking your talk keeping your word and it's important to understand that integrity is not just something you're doing externally for others it's not a facade of being a righteous person that you are erecting for social purposes to gain some social advantage or to fit in or to be religious in fact we might say that that's the opposite of integrity if you're doing it for those reasons integrity is really who you are when you're not trying to impress somebody or manipulate somebody or put on some sort of facade because if you only have integrity externally but not internally you really don't have integrity that itself is already a split do you see because there's now sort of the outer face you show to others then there's the inner world that you live in yourself and this creates a sort of schizophrenic uh reality that you live in and many of us are dealing with this kind of situation it's how we survive is when we're living in in difficult environments where it's difficult to survive we have to sort of create a false facade that we put out there for others this is part of the social game that we play our social survival and this of course creates all sorts of challenges we'll we'll get into that a bit later here uh now let's uh mention what is the opposite of integrity i think you know one word the best way to sum it up is opportunism but there's a lot of other great synonyms corruption devilry evil sin villainy wickedness badness hypocrisy [ __ ] the willingness to lie cheat steal exploit deceive mislead manipulate cut corners untrustworthiness in a sense opportunism or of course ego right ego all of these are characteristics of what a very dense fearful insecure ego that is trying to survive by any means possible see the logic here becomes very crystal clear and simple once you think it through a little bit and clarify this stuff in your mind so really our objective here is to help you to develop integrity but before we can get into that proper which we'll do in part two the first step towards developing integrity is really just to start to understand what it is and why it's important and how it interconnects with all these other aspects of life so that you see that when you're acting without integrity this produces suffering and negative consequences in your life a lot of them which are longer term which don't come to fruition for sometimes for months for years for decades and then your mind doesn't connect the dots and doesn't see how your lack of integrity is contributing to the problems that you have in your life because this idea of integrity is like sort of an abstraction right but then in your everyday life you face very tangible concrete mundane problems like you argue with your spouse your friend is angry with you you um you have trouble in business you're not able to earn the money you want to earn clients are buying from you for some reason you have problems with your children your your children aren't listening to you they're not following your instructions they're not disciplined they're unruly they're getting bad grades and you're not able to discipline yourself you have difficulty meditating and you have difficulty staying on a diet and you have difficulty motivating yourself to follow your life purpose and so you have these tangible problems and it's not clear to you immediately unless you contemplate it and do this inquiry that integrity might be sort of uh sourcing many of these problems so as you contemplate you should make those connections let me ask you this do you want to for example buy a product from somebody who has low integrity or high integrity do you want a business partner who has low integrity or high integrity do you want to give your email address to a company of low integrity or high integrity do you want to play golf with someone of low integrity or high integrity do you want to eat a supplement from a company with low integrity or with high integrity do you want to have sex with someone with low integrity or with high integrity do you want to be married to a spouse of low integrity or high integrity do you want to be ruled by a politician of low integrity or high integrity do you want to work for a boss of low integrity or high integrity if you were following someone into battle would you want him or her to be of low integrity or high integrity if your life depended on them following through if you're going to debate if you were going to debate an intellectual would you want him to be of low integrity or high integrity if you were going to go to a doctor to a surgeon to a lawyer to an accountant would you want one of low integrity or high integrity if you had a friend would you want a low integrity friend or a high integrity friend if you were getting your news your evening news from some journalist or news anchor would you want this person to be of low integrity or high integrity and if you had a spiritual guru or a mentor or a teacher who you relied upon to guide you in life would you want him or her to be of low or high integrity see integrity is important in many crucial domains of life in business in career in life purpose in art in creative work in education academia science medicine in family in relationships and friendships in marriage with raising children with charity or nonprofit work in advertising and marketing in philosophy spirituality and truth seeking in politics in governance in community building if you're part of a community do you want to be part of a low integrity community or high integrity community it's important in leadership you should notice historically if you're a student of history that low integrity leaders almost always crash and burn in the end they don't make it for very long why is that why is it that people don't want to follow low integrity leaders and that some of the world's greatest leaders who amassed the greatest followings were actually some of the most integres human beings who ever lived think of maybe jesus the buddha mahavira um gandhi mlk now i hear you saying oh leo i can i can point out problems with gandhi and i can point out problems with mlk he was he didn't have that high of integrity fair point some of these leaders didn't have perfect integrity but i'm not talking about perfect integrity i'm just talking about a fairly high degree of integrity it's very hard to to find a human being with perfect integrity so be careful with this sort of perfectionistic cynicism so what you notice is that actually people don't want to follow a devil long term such leaders aren't sustainable now you might say but leah what about hitler and what about trump and what about other devilish leaders who have amassed big followings and deceived many people and have very low integrity and you know their philanderers and their cheats and they don't pay their taxes and they are racists and whatever else uh yeah there are also very many low integrity leaders out there and they can paradoxically become very successful but also what you should notice is that their success is usually short-lived and again like i say they crash and burn so before they crash and burn they can have enormous success shocking levels of success and wealth and sex and fame and all of these things but usually it's not sustainable usually there's a price to be paid for it see integrity is not a short-term value it's more of a long-term value it tends to pay the greatest dividends over the long term and so if you're not thinking long-term then you probably don't see the value of integrity and you can find many many examples of successful business people wall street types and so forth who have achieved a lot of success you know material success with very low integrity in fact because of their low integrity so uh i'm not painting a a simplistic uh overly idealized romanticized notion here that good people prosper in the world and that the devils and the wicked uh you know they all they all crash and burn no not necessarily a lot of devils in the wicked they skate by in life and they get away with a lot of stuff trump comes to mind of course um it's amazing all the stuff he's been able to get away with in his life all the criminality all the uh you know the affairs and the the schemes and the manipulations and the lies and all of this it's it's amazing um how good he's able to get away with him but also um there are consequences there are consequences for his actions and you know by the end of his life maybe he won't be able to get away with all of it like something so also where integrity is important besides leadership is with health with nutrition with fitness with sports with games even with video games do you want to play against someone in an fps match who's a cheater online games have a huge cheating problem these days these giant companies like blizzard and activision and so forth like they have entire teams devoted just to preventing gamers from cheating in these competitive online games it's like it's a huge there's a whole industry it's like a billion dollar industry just preventing cheating using third-party software and bots and god knows what other things they use macros and things see so think of all of these different fields that i've mentioned and i want to specifically stress here um your creative work this is one of those things a lot of people overlook it's not really talked about anywhere i don't see it talked about very often in society but usually when when we talk about business or career or work you know obviously if you're cheating at your work or you're cutting corners it's kind of obvious to see the problems and the lack of integrity that that creates um but there's there's a sort of even deeper lack of integrity that i see all around business in the business world in the corporate world it's that people are just opportunistically doing the work that earns them the most money or material rewards and not really following their passion or their life purpose or their true creative calling their art their work is not their art and the reason that is is it's not because they're not artists right you when i say art i mean in a very broad abstract sense it applies to you even if you're an accountant or a doctor or a scientist or a or a manager or a ceo or some financial type of person who normally you would think well that's not an artistic person but that can be your art if you make it your art but to make for it to be your art it has to be more than something about the material gain has to be more than just opportunism there has to be some spiritual component to the work that you're doing your creative work and so a lot of what i'm trying to have you guys embody is a life purpose and some kind of creative contribution that you make to mankind to me this is this is core to building a good life if you're not really doing creative work first of all you're missing out on such a huge and beautiful and delicious and rewarding aspect of life like at least half of the meaning of life is lost if you don't have some kind of art form that you're working on whatever it happens to be um but also you're spiritually disconnected with your work you're not going to be at the top of your game at your work if you don't have this and uh and and the reason many people don't have it is because it's difficult it's really difficult to be an artist because art requires integrity when you're doing art you're doing something beyond mere opportunism or personal gain it's a quasi-spiritual experience depending on how far you take it and if you take it really far it becomes a full-blown spiritual experience if you really know what you're doing and you integrate all of these various ideas that i share with you through actualize.org so your work work can happen at many different levels from the very lowest work where you're working at starbucks at a job you hate and you just resent it every single day to something a little bit higher than that where you actually have a decent career with some you know decent salary and some prospects for growth and some creative freedom and so forth but i mean that's a lot better um but then there's really high levels of doing your your work where it becomes your life's work where it becomes an art form and that's something that i teach in my course the life purpose course if you are interested in that check that out it's like 25 hours explaining how to set up your life in that in that way and how to find your life purpose so um yeah we just zoomed in onto this one particular domain because i found it uh relevant and i mean um i guess there's still some something more i wanted to say it's it's this is that see nobody in our society like when we're growing up we're going to school our parents and so forth nobody really instills in us the importance of artistic integrity and in fact we can be mocked for that if you have any kind of sense of artistic integrity just naturally intuitively the way you grew up maybe you have an artistic mind or artistic sort of spirit and you you know what i'm talking about the importance of artistic integrity but it's so difficult to maintain that especially amidst all your friends family and colleagues and even fellow artists who are cutting corners and are low integrity they don't have any principles by which they're living their life they don't have any principles by which they're doing their work their principle is just hate whatever works whatever is the path of least resistance but this is not how you build a great life this is how you get the kind of mediocre results that everybody else around you is getting so integrity is about having kind of values and principles above and beyond just bear survival or what happens to work and then the difficulty is staying true to those principles and values when things get difficult there's a cost to integrity it's more difficult than just opportunistically doing what works you have to put more consciousness and thought into your relationships your marriage your education the way you advertise and market the way you do business in order to do it with integrity a business with high integrity is actually a pretty rare thing because most business people just want to make money and so they're willing to to take the path of least resistance to doing that and they don't want to exert any work beyond that their business is not turned into a sort of an art form or just into a into it has no spiritual connection and yeah businesses should have a spiritual connection i recommend if you do business then you do it in a spiritual way your business should have a soul that means it's more than just about earning money and see so nobody really talks very much about how important this integrity is or if they do they talk about it from a spiral dynamic stage blue perspective where they just give you dogma and ideology about which morals and values you're supposed to follow that's not what i'm doing here integrity is not something that can be turned into an algorithm integrity requires consciousness that in fact it requires an open mind it requires letting go of dogmas and following rules but it does require some principles and some values that you should be clear about with yourself that means you gotta get clear about what you really want out of life what's important to you what's meaningful to you and then you gotta be willing to pay the cost to enforce that so if you're running a business most of your employees are not going to be interested in integrity or your values or ideals or the artistry of your business they're just going to be interested in just doing a bare minimum sort of job to please you as the boss to get their paycheck you got to lead them and inspire them to also get interested in your ideals and values and you got to communicate them and then of course in order to um to really get these values if you really value something it's not enough for you to just value it in your mind you gotta also you you want to see it realized actualized in the world right it's no good to to to have this ideal of a business but then in reality your business is is doing some shady stuff like if you really want your business to be an art and a to have soul then you're gonna have to like work extra hard to find the kind of employees who also care about those things you got to pay them more because those people are rarer and they're going to have more they're going to need to be more skillful you've got to pay them more that means you're going to have to earn more you're gonna have to be more creative with your budget and so forth to make that work and then you're gonna be competing against other businesses who are not doing that who are you know hiring employees for cheap offshore and so forth uh don't care about integrity who are scamming their customers and so forth and they might even be outselling you by doing that because they have shady low integrity advertising and marketing strategies and you don't wanna you could use those marketing strategies but you don't want to you could do clickbait titles you could do scammy sorts of sales pages you could do spam email lists and you know there's a lot of shady marketing stuff you could do but if your business is about something higher than than just the quantity of your sales then you may not want to do those those tactics in fact you might be conscious of how those tactics are actually corrupting the entire epistemic ecosystem of our society and our culture and the kind of toxic in impact this has on the health of of our culture and our society is he that makes your business and marketing harder now you gotta find more conscious ways of doing advertising and marketing how do you do that well how many people are teaching conscious advertising and marketing strategies almost zero compared to all the gurus who are teaching you the most low consciousness advertising and marketing strategies by the way if you want a a really deep profound discussion of marketing and advertising go check out my older episode called the deep problem of marketing it's it's one of my most underrated but most important episodes there's some very profound insights there about that so my point is is that really if you're gonna be integris the only way you're going to do it is by wanting to do it yourself no one's going to push you into it you have to adopt that idea yourself and in fact you're going to be fighting the whole world because the whole world is going to be trying to lure you in with shortcuts and traps trying to get you to back down from your artistic values right like if you're an artist most employers you go to work for they don't give a [ __ ] about your artistic values and principles they just want you to do their work for them and then that's probably going to involve even sacrificing some of those and then the question is are you gonna take that job or are you gonna reject it and if you reject it then how are you gonna feed yourself you see so of course it's all wrapped up with survival there's a good reason why integrity is a rare thing and when you find a friend or a teacher or a mentor or a guru or a scientist or a doctor who has high integrity or a spouse or friend who has high integrity you really value that person there's something special about that or or a business think of right now some business or company that you've done business with in your life that was like really high integrity and it impressed you and you're you're happy to go back to them years later and to pay them even extra because of the integrity with which that company is run and then of course think of the opposite which is much easier because there's more examples of it think of a think of a company that was that had no integrity at all how do you feel about that and if you want to be a leader what kind of leader do you want to be high integrity leader or low integrity leader consider how they crash and burn the low integrity ones and then being a high integrity leader that's one of the most difficult things you can undertake in your life because that means you really got to walk your talk and you can really only lead people up to the level of where you are at developmentally and consciously so any bottlenecks within your own consciousness and ego development are going to that's going to be as high as your leaders can i mean as your followers can follow you you can't really lead them beyond that and so then it becomes a matter of what do i got to change about myself to make myself more integrated integris so that i can lead people to higher levels of integrity and the higher levels of integrity you want to lead people to the more challenging it's going to be and the more burden and responsibility will be placed upon you to be impeccable with your own integrity but then again that's what mankind needs the most what we need the most right now to lead us out of all of our problems including the climate change problem the pollution problems the economic problems we have and many many others is we need high integrity leaders and look how rare those are and even of course when they do come think of one think of one right now think of a modern not someone who died years ago but something of a modern high integrity leader that you've seen or heard chances are they're not the most popular person because of course as your integrity gets really really high and you're leading people towards such a high ideal it becomes harder and harder for people to follow because they would have to completely change their own psychological makeup in order to follow you there and integrity is is an honest signal you can't really fake integrity you can try to erect a facade of integrity but it's gonna break down and you yourself are gonna know it's fake deep down if not consciously then at least subconsciously the ego is gonna know it's gonna be playing these games and so it's going to come through pretty clearly and people with high integrity clearly see people with low integrity but people with low integrity have a difficult time seeing people with high integrity and or low integrity and making that distinction you see this is one of the core things of the of the sort of trump phenomenon that happened is that to anyone with hot with us with any moderate degree of integrity or high integrity it's just utterly obvious that trump is a con artist and has no integrity whatsoever he's like the least integral human that i've seen in a long time publicly right but a lot of his followers the maggot people can't see this because surprise surprise birds of a feather flock together they also don't have high integrity they don't know what integrity is they've never contemplated it they've never developed it they've never faced the the real challenges that come with developing it and a lot of the people who follow them are just stage spiral dynamic stage blue religious dogmatic people and and for them they might think they have integrity but they don't really have integrity and we'll cover this a little bit later in the episode they don't have true integrity what they have is they have an aping of integrity which is that they have the moral facade that they've erected through religion but that does not mean one actually has integrity in fact oftentimes it means the opposite of that yeah so um so it's easy for a con man to fool other people with low integrity see our con man can't fool someone with high integrity because the high integrity purses just you can smell it if you have high integrity you can just look at trump for 30 seconds giving a speech or talking about something answering a question and you can just smell the [ __ ] coming out of his pores you can just see the ego pouring out and you would never follow that person but more naive people who are at lower levels of spiral and ego development and moral development spiritual development who haven't done a lot of you know self-actualization work or spiritual work they they can't see it and in fact they admire what they see because it reflects themselves back to who they just see themselves in it and then of course the ego just assumes that hey i'm great so anything that's like me is also great but it's a very dangerous assumption the assumption there is that i'm great well maybe you're not so great so anyways my question for you is how grounded is your life in integrity how about the projects that you work on whatever project you're working on right now is it grounded integrity how much rate it on a scale of one to ten or are you just being opportunistic and are you just doing whatever works and you're just following the path of least resistance with with your project whatever that is your project could be your marriage your project could be raising your children your project could be teaching children in school maybe you're a teacher educator something like that your project could be doing science or medicine or healing people or art music whatever kind of media you're working in see people with low integrity are very predictable you can predict and you can bank on the fact that they will lie cheat steal deceive and exploit at any chance they get it's like a law of physics that's how predictable it is right it's completely predictable that the trump administration would be filled with people who are very much like trump and that's exactly what we saw over the four years of the trump administration it's not that that was that trump himself had no integrity and that's it and then he hired other you know people who were good and so forth no because the only people who would want to follow trump are other low integrity people which is why we saw in the trump administration so many scandals with all of his administration members and we saw sex scandals and racism and wife abuse and alcoholism and this and that like because these are the kinds of people who would follow trump and of course most of them were grifters they were doing it for the publicity for the book that they were going to write for the fox news gig that they were going to get for the lobbying donations or jobs or opportunities that they would get after the fact and and then they were all backstabbing each other too in the administration they couldn't even trust each other of course that's the whole problem when you're dealing with low integrity people is that it comes back to bite you in the ass and it came back to bite trump in the ass many times uh if you follow the news cycles you know a lot of people were leaking on him backs having his own people like his own closest aides would would leak would backstab each other would you know gossip about him and yeah that's what you get when you have a community of low integrity and you have that kind of culture and integrity is not just something we have individually but then also institutions have it collectively or don't have it it's a culture thing and so all this was very predictable to you now people blame me for saying oh leo why are you so biased against trump why do you keep making everything so political it's not about the politics i don't care about the politics of it i'm just bringing up these examples because they're so poignant and they're so illustrative and in this way like i use trump trump has been a gift to me because over the last four years in the sense that like for me as a self-actualization teacher as someone who tries to teach people how to become more conscious and more spiritual and more loving all i got to say is do everything the opposite of what trump does and then you got the gist of what i'm trying to teach you so in that sense it's not political it's just there's there's deeper dynamics here than politics it's not partisan it's not about democrats or republicans it's it's really about what what the psyche is to how the psyche behaves and the fragmentation of the psyche you see so really now we're starting to get a little bit more metaphysical here is that this the mind the psyche it can have different degrees of holism or integration or fragmentation if it has extreme levels of fragmentation it gets so bad that you can literally have a split personality disorder you might have seen some movies about this or some documentaries you can find them on youtube i'm sure or you know extreme examples of psychosis and schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder where you literally are like talking to yourself different voices in your head like really schizo and uh how how are you going to live a healthy life that way but see even if you integrate your own mind and you don't have multiple voices and things like that even if you do that still you're fragmented from the rest of mankind from animals you know depending on how much spiritual work you've done the more spiritual work you do the more your your sense of identity expands and includes animals plants the earth man other races and aliens whatever is out there right um you start to care about all of it more and more you become more holistic and as as you do that you you start to approach god consciousness more i won't go too deep into that here because i covered it in much depth see my episodes about holism and holistic thinking part one and part two or go real deep on that but see the problem is that a person with low integrity is corrupt and has a fragmented psyche and this kind of fragmented psyche is going to have serious consequences a lot of suffering both to oneself but also a lot of collateral damage done to others as this psyche bubbles through life cassie a sick fragmented psyche what is it really looking for it thinks it might be looking for money or for sex or for pleasure or for drugs or for fame or for status this is sort of like what the trump psyche thinks it needs and this is what it's mostly pursuing but what it doesn't understand is that really what it's seeking is not those things it's seeking wholeness it's seeking completion it's seeking a transcendence of itself it's seeking integration and it's ultimately seeking love that's what's really being sought but it's being sought in these limited partial twisted ways which never fully satisfy and lead to more cravings and more so it's an endless chasing of your tail chasing various sorts of cravings and ways of trying to heal yourself but the the way that a very broken psyche tries to heal itself is itself broken so it's applying brokenness on top of brokenness which is sort of like trump's whole life um um and it never really integrates and it never really heals because to truly heal requires consciousness and a willingness to accept and to face the costs of integration so the problem with the trump psyche is that it does it's not willing to face the costs and accept the costs and the burdens of true integration and so it's at war with itself and it's at war with the world and it's creating polarity and it creates war between factions and society and it fragments society and so we've discussed this this before in my holism episodes we've also discussed this in my episode about corruption see my episode called how corruption works because corruption is deeply connected with this issue of wholeness or lack thereof and with integrity or lack thereof and ultimately the the biggest problem with with your lack of in integrity is that it simply leads to an inability to love because love is god love is another word for god and uh love has many degrees to it the more integrated you become the more god like your consciousness becomes the the higher ability to love becomes and the more satisfied you are with yourself because you're you your consciousness cannot be satisfied with it with itself if it's not able to love very deeply that's really what you're after in life even if you think you're after success or money or fame or sex you're really after love that's just a particular limited narrow manifestation you're not you haven't connected the dots yet enough to understand that you don't really know what love is yet you haven't become conscious of it yet you think love is some sort of hokey new agey spiritual idea from hippies or something um and then it's not tangible or scientific or material but you're wrong and if you want to know more about love then check out my episodes what is love part one part two and other areas where i've discussed love i've discussed it quite a bit by now um so uh yeah so this inability to love is really a problem because from that stems all the devilry the reason you need the devilry and all the manipulation the lying and the cheating and the stealing and and the exploiting is because you don't know how to find love those are substitutes poor poor substitutes for it see and finding love is difficult because to find love you got to really change yourself grow yourself love is also sort of an honest signal you can't really fake love and you see this with trump as well see uh it's quite clear that trump is incapable of love true love even with his family and his children you see that his form of love for his children i mean he has some very narrow twisted version of it but it's so distorted and really when you get into the the gritty details of it it's it's it's quite ugly and perverse it doesn't really inspire you you wouldn't want to be his child see this this is really this is this is the ultimate sort of litmus test of uh of how conscious you are is if i ask you the question would you want to be trump's child and if you say yes that just that that shows you that you don't see you don't see any of the stuff that i'm talking about you have a lot of growing to do and if you say [ __ ] no leo i'd rather be dead than be trump's child um because i would grow up to be so um so psychologically damaged and wounded if he was my father now then you you understand some things you feel moral conscious um so yeah so love is just basically your connection to god the less you're able to love the more disconnect from god you are and the and the worse your life goes uh and then of course much of psychotherapy is about what bringing your psyche into wholeness and integration we've talked about this as well before we lie to ourselves constantly even if you're not as bad as trump if your psyche is not as twisted as his and wounded his uh you still got wounds and twists in there and you still lie to yourself plenty you're still dishonest with yourself and you're still at war with yourself within your own mind and so we gotta heal that within you by raising your integrity now see here's something you got to understand sort of metaphysical about the ego because there's um there's a deep relationship between love truth integrity wholeness and ego so let's explain these relationships so you see really when we get down to it what we have is we have truth we have absolute truth which is everything that exists as it is that's absolute truth this this everything you see and hear and touch and feel is absolute truth that's what is that's what absolutely is that's what's absolutely true in the universe this state that's happening right now is what's absolutely true about the universe otherwise it wouldn't be happening now that's a very deep issue i won't go into here i have separate episodes about what is truth go check those out if you really want to get deep into it but to summarize here truth is everything that is it's how things actually are that's truth and then falsehood and deception is you pretending and playing games about how things are it's a false perception of how things are so truth is integrity truth itself must be integris why because truth is whole truth is what it is and it can't be anything else truth has no room for non-truth within it it's so absolute it's so all-encompassing what is is for example like this my finger is here right now you're looking at it if you're watching this or you're hearing my voice if you're listening to this as a podcast so this is truth it's here right now it is what it is now to call it something else to call it a wing or a tentacle or a flipper or whatever a tree that would be falsehood that would be out of integrity with what is true in this particular case all right so truth must by definition and tautologically must be integris with itself so truth literally is integrity that's the pinnacle of integrity it's just absolute truth and then any kind of stories you make up about it and tell yourself and lies you make and this sort of stuff that's you're you're getting further and further away from what is and us humans we live in our fantasies mostly we don't really care about the truth very much mostly we live in our fantasies and we care about spinning narratives and fictions within our minds about how things are how we believe reality is but our beliefs and our ideas and our models of reality are not the truth itself they are facsimiles at best and gross distortions and pure falsehoods at worst so the pinnacle of integrity is just absolute truth itself which in other words you can call that god of course it's the same as love i've explained before that truth and love are identical why is it love because truth is itself and in a sort of a almost it's almost too obvious but you see the truth must love itself it's kind of weird to say that because usually we don't think of truth as truth as an abstract concept we think and then we think that well truth is an abstract concept so how and love is an abstract concept so why would truth need to love itself doesn't make much sense love is something humans do biological creatures do love no wrong consciousness does love consciousness does love consciousness does the universe consciousness does humans humans don't do consciousness consciousness does humans so love is something consciousness does consciousness either accepts itself or it rejects itself to various degrees there's infinite degrees of self rejection or acceptance so if consciousness is accepting itself accepting the ac accepting the present experience for example if if you're having sex you're you it probably feels good for you under normal circumstances and you ex you love it you accept it in other words you you don't just accept it a little bit you accept it a lot like you accept it so deeply you fall in love with the experience of it in fact we call it love making love right so you're you're really accepting that experience but the problem is that the ego mind is fragmented and impartial in which experiences it's willing to accept and which it isn't so if you're experiencing like a toothache that you don't like you don't like the toothache you don't want to accept it consciousness is rejecting the toothache why is it rejecting it because it wants to manipulate circumstances to eliminate the two things so for example you you want you reject the toothache so you go to a dentist he drills it he fills it and now you're happy again so this is what your mind this is this is the entire mechanism of your entire life i'm describing here it's not just two things everything so um so see in that case consciousness is literally rejecting the toothache now you might say well leo is that wrong no it's not wrong per se but it just means you're always going to be running around your life you know accepting and rejecting stuff in this partial fashion and that's survival uh the only problem with is that there's no satisfaction in it you can do that your whole life and you will and you're never gonna be satisfied i mean you'll have brief moments of satisfaction when you get everything you want but most of the time you won't be getting what you want and then you're gonna be depressed and miserable and suffering but the point is um that's not the point what i was talking about here metaphysically speaking is that consciousness is truth because conscious is all there is and consciousness is what is happening at this present moment anything that's happening anything that's true is held within consciousness and if consciousness was completely unbiased and impartial and completely holistic it would completely embrace and accept all of itself what would it reject why would it reject it you might think of it as like this a human being doesn't enjoy the sensation of a toothache but the universe doesn't care and really we're talking about the universe's perspective here now metaphysically the highest perspective possible the most holistic perspective is the perspective of the whole universe the whole universe is conscious it's conscious of you right now you in fact are the universe conscious of yourself as a human and maybe you have a toothache maybe a backache maybe whatever is bothering an itch on your nose you want to scratch and uh and uh and so you're either accepting or rejecting these experiences and but from the universe's point of view it's so impartial so holistic that it so integrates that it just integrates absolutely everything and that's called love that's absolute love that's god's love that's the universal love so truth equals love equals wholeness equals a lack of deception and lies because the universe doesn't need to lie to itself can you see that only humans and egos need to lie to themselves to gain an advantage the universe has no advantage to gain because it's the entire thing what advantage would the universe gain over itself it is itself it loves itself it accepts itself what more does it need it needs nothing it's complete it's infinite it's unlimited it is exactly what it wants to be but a human wants to be something more than he or she currently thinks it is because it's a part a human deep down understands that it's a part of something larger the human wants to expand into being something larger whether that expansion is via money sex you know expanding your family expanding your society expanding your business and expanding your fame all of that is a form of expansion into something larger then eventually that leads to the ultimate expansion into everything so that is that but you see the problem is that since the ego is a fragment of the entire universe it's a fragmented consciousness literally the ego survival depends upon a lack of integrity that's why integrity is so rare amongst humans and if you're a high integrity person you might be shocked at like why is everybody else so low integrity well because they got egos and they're surviving and survival really requires a lack of integrity because fundamentally metaphysically to survive as a little part of the whole universe you have to be committed to maintaining that little boundary of who you think you are your identity your limited identity you have to be committed to maintaining that at any cost no matter what it does to the rest of the system and therefore you're committed to unholism and holism and integrity is one of the most threatening things to a condensed ego because it threatens that boundary right because your loyalty if you're a deep rigid ego your loyalty is to maintaining the boundary of you at any cost and then to let that go to surrender that to become more spiritual and more developed you're surrounding that boundary um and as you do that it's threatening it's very threatening to your survival you can't survive in the old ways that you used to be able to you can't cheat steal lie uh exploit seduce and manipulate people the way that you were able to before this in a sense this makes success more difficult in a world where the majority of people achieve success via these means it's difficult to win a political election without in some way cheating manipulating exploiting or lying which is why they say politicians are liars lawyers are liars well yeah it's difficult to win a it's difficult to be a lawyer without lying on behalf of your clients that's in a sense what lawyers are paid to do is to make up the best case lawyers are not paid to tell the truth in the courtroom they're paid to only tell a part of the truth the part that serves their client that's like their literal professional obligation is to do that a lawyer's professional obligation is to not tell the truth now that doesn't mean they go out there and lie deliberately explicitly because they can get you know caught in that line and the judge will reprimand them maybe even disbar them so a lawyer might not be able to lie explicitly but they can lie in subtle ways through manipulation through omission through the way they frame a situation for the jury and the judge the stuff they omit and leave out and don't say or the way that they emphasize a particular point in a way that it shouldn't be emphasized they overemphasize certain aspects so see the lawyer is not really interested in the truth and most professions are like this that's survival so as long as you're committed to survival of your little identity there's going to be some degree of lack of integrity within you and it's going to be a question of how committed are you like if you're really committed to the christian identity or the muslim identity or the atheist identity that commitment in and of itself you might think what's wrong with that well what you don't see what's wrong with that is that that commitment in and of itself to something so narrow and so limited by definition comes with a lack of integrity because it's not the whole you're not integrating the whole universe if you only think you're a christian or you identify purely as an atheist you're not integrating everything there is to integrate therefore you're less than the full absolute truth and therefore whenever your mind or ego or psyche comes into contact with something larger than yourself it's going to have to invent defense mechanisms and it's going to have to get sneaky it's going to have to uh in order to enforce the the the the smallness of your worldview you see and the reason you're doing that is because to admit of something larger than your worldview that that's admitting you're wrong ego doesn't like to admit that it's wrong to admit that you're wrong you have to admit that your view of reality is wrong that has a cost that has an emotional cost that's painful to do for a scientist or an atheist to admit that they're wrong about the fundamental metaphysics of reality is deeply emotionally disturbing and painful it's so painful that they would even deny if they're listening to you now you're going to even deny that what i'm saying here has any validity whatsoever but also the christian and the the the muslim and the democrat and the republican and the marxist and the fascists the problem is that all of these views are just too small and they commit you to a life of not being in integrity the core of integrity is intellectual and epistemic integrity and this also is not emphasized enough especially within the spiral dynamic stage blue religious schools and teachings because most people learn about integrity and morals from religion or they don't learn about them at all in many cases uh they're not but but religion doesn't teach you about epistemic integrity because religion wants to lock you into one paradigm one little reality bubble so it doesn't bother to teach you the epistemic tools that we've been talking about on this channel that you should be well familiar with by now so um why why is intellectual and epistemic integrity so important because your epistemology is how you know anything at all that's what that word means how do you know anything how do you know you're not fooling yourself about absolutely everything how do you know any of your beliefs are valid well that's a very deep and tricky problem philosophers have been wrestling for this with this question for thousands of years and many of them have not figured out good answers although there are good answers that i've shared with you in the past um and so uh so so yeah so see the problem is that it all boils down to epistemology and intellectual integrity because in a sense in order to have integrity within business or within art or within your family or within your relationships your marriage and elsewhere first and foremost you have to have a clear perception and knowing of reality you have to you have to know where you're fooling yourself intellectually you have to know where you're deceiving yourself because if you can't sort that out you're going to be fooling yourself within business you might be a tobacco ceo who genuinely believes that tobacco doesn't cause cancer because epistemically you you haven't really done any deep epistemic work so you're not seeing how your own mind is fooling you into believing that because it's simply convenient of course for you to believe that because you're earning millions of dollars from being the ceo of this company and selling this product and you know you couldn't sleep at night unless you believed that so and you know in your marriage similar things are going on um and with your art and so forth right so epistemic integrity is is crucial which is why i teach it and stress it so much and what that means is basically holding holding your lying mind's feet to the fire of reality and truth because what you discover after you get into your 20s or 30s and you start to really peek under the carpet of epistemology you know you you pull up you pull the carpet back and you look underneath what's in there and there's some ugly stuff in there you look inside your own psyche and you discover that there's so much [ __ ] lies and deceptions and things you were taught in school and elsewhere by your family and religion and science and so forth that is just false wrong misguided partial and uh that's painful and difficult to to to see to see all those deceptions and lies and why are those lies there well because that's how you survived the first 20 years of your life you were busy surviving surviving surviving using all these lies and they were convenient but you didn't even you weren't even conscious that they were lies so sometimes you know you're innocent in that matter you didn't necessarily construct them but they were just programmed into you from birth by parents in school and teachers and religion and science um and so now your mind has been thoroughly self-deceived and so to correct that that's a multi-decades-long process to clear all the junk out from under under that epistemic carpet and really by doing that you're you're aligning yourself closer to truth and to even care to do that already requires enormous intellectual integrity you cannot achieve this this unwinding of self-deception or jail breaking the mind as i've referred to in the past you cannot jailbreak your mind without intellectual integrity and there's many degrees of intellectual integrity and it's really difficult to do intellectual integrity well very few people have have have it very few people even scientists and rationalists and some of these people professors and academics who are supposed to be like have high intellectual integrity they really don't because it's not enough just to to want high intellectual integrity you actually have to do the epistemic work to achieve intellectual integrity that means you have to study self-deception very thoroughly now here i'm referring you to my three-part series on self-deception which is foundational to to this work uh self-deception part one two three check that out but basically i list i give you a list of all the different self-deception mechanisms of the ego mind these are the double standards you have the rationalizations the justifications the self-biases the defense mechanisms uh that are all their projection and denial and the scapegoating and judging and i mean it's a laundry list of stuff go go go study that for a few years if you're not aware of all those then you're never going to be able to reach high levels of integrity because you're just going to be fooling yourself it's pointless to debate or to even have an intellectual discussion with someone who doesn't have a very high level of intellectual integrity because their mind is going to be like an eel it's just going to squirm its way out into rationalizing and justifying whatever position it wants this is what you see when you see a political debate or religious debate any kind of typical youtube debate atheist theist whatever neither side has sufficient intellectual integrity to really have a genuine inquiry into the truth it actually is possible for two human beings two minds to sit together and to do a genuine inquiry into the truth and to make some progress but this is not done virtually anywhere on youtube or on tv or in the media uh it's so rare because it requires such extraordinary levels of intellectual integrity and epistemic experience dealing with one's own self-deceptions but it can be done if you really want but there is a price to pay for it how much ego are you willing to give up how many of your pet ideas and beliefs and positions and intellectual attachments are you willing to give up maybe even you'll have to give up your job or your family depending on what foundation your job see the thing is is that it's people don't understand this but a lot of times it's easy to to construct a facade of success by creating success on a on a on a rotten foundation and that's mostly what people do when people create success mostly the way they do it is on a rotten foundation the problem with doing well there's there's an upside down side of that the upside to that is that you can get quick success that way and hey you know i'm not i'm not saying i'm bothered i've done this in my life so i'm speaking from experience i've done it both ways i've created success on rotten foundations and on solid ones and so i have a good appreciation of both in the pros and cons so the pros you can do it quickly and you can get good money and fame and so forth from from doing that but the con excuse me i got something stuck in my throat the con is that it's fragile and you're insecure about it it's a house of cards that could easily collapse with a little gust of wind and that little gust of wind comes by way of of ideas you see there are certain ideas that i can utter to you that would collapse the foundation of your business or your money-making strategy or your career or your pursuit of science or your religion or your political position or whatever and so of course your ego has to be very defensive and insecure about that the more solid your foundation is the more secure you are the less dogmatic you have to be the more open-minded you can be the more you can explore reality and the more you can handle the truth but people with very rotten flimsy foundations in all the different aspects of their life and especially with relationships with their family and so forth like most people have very broadened foundations like their life is held together with with with a little bit of you know masking tape and some snot that's mostly how most people's lives are held together it's extremely fragile and so they're extremely sensitive and insecure they get easily offended they get defensive they become trolls they lash out they attack they project all of this stuff why is that happening because actually their their life is not grounded on something true that's one of the most amazing and powerful things about absolute truth is that when you are conscious of absolute truth when you are conscious of absolute love it's so empowering because it's unshakable it's abso-fucking-lutely unshakable you're unshakable nothing can touch you you feel immortal you feel eternal you feel you feel complete you feel integrated that's the power of truth is that truth needs no defense if somebody is defending the truth they don't got the truth truth needs no defense truth has no insecurity to it because it's absolutely true it's exactly what is it can't be anything else and you're totally conscious of it and so you're completely certain of it not an egotistical narcissistic way but you're just completely certain of it by the way i don't know if i've mentioned but you should also check out my episode called what is the devil where i also talk about corruption and many of these dynamics because what we're really talking about here when we're talking about lack of integrity we're talking about what i facetiously refer to as devilry i sort of say that tongue-in-cheek um but it's a powerful concept don't don't dismiss the power of this concept of devilry you see it all around you and you see it inside of you so go check out that episode too it's one of my one of my best um okay so we've covered the core intellect integrity what else do we have here um so of course living a good life is founded upon honesty with oneself if you can't be honest with yourself then how can you possibly have a good life and a person who doesn't value integrity cannot be honest with himself first and foremost and it's difficult to be honest with oneself if you've tried in fact many of you listening here will say well leo what's the big deal i'm honest with myself that's already a lie you're not honest with yourself if you if it was revealed to you right now how dishonest you are with yourself you would you would be so sick to your stomach you'd run to the toilet to vomit you'd be disgusted with yourself you'd be depressed you'd hate yourself that's how dishonest you are all of us and that dishonest that self-dishonesty prevents you from achieving higher states of consciousness because why what's the connection between dishonesty and consciousness because consciousness is absolute [ __ ] truth and and your self-deceptions and lies these are falsehoods these are stories pleasant stories you tell yourself within your relationships within business about money about relationships about um your children about other people about evil and good and about politicians and economies and race and sex and whatever else lies lies and fictions and stories that you've invented to suit yourself to make it easier for you to survive just to hold your life together because to construct a life solidly on a solid foundation that's so much more difficult so you might wonder william why should i do it let me take the easy route well the problem is with the shortcuts with the shortcuts those also have a cost see everything has a cost you're damned if you're doing damn if you don't so it's a matter of choosing what kind of cost you want to pay and uh sometimes ironically paradoxically the costs of doing it the easy way end up being greater of course of course you would know that if you had a little bit of wisdom so it all revolves around truth why does everything in life revolve around truth because truth is the only [ __ ] thing there is by definition there's nothing but truth you say what about the falsehoods the falsehoods by definition aren't true so they aren't a falsehood is something that seems like it is but isn't so fundamentally epistemically and ultimately metaphysically the more your life is aligned with things that don't exist aren't true the worse your life gets the more manipulations you have to do to sustain that [ __ ] illusion and eventually your illusion collapses because you can't keep it up forever and then you suffer from that and from this come most of the collective evils of mankind so wouldn't it be better to just to to realize right here and now that that that path won't work forget that path and devote yourself to the path of truth which is the same as to say the path of integrity become more truthful become more honest with yourself even when it burns you that burning sticking your feet on the fire of truth as i call it that is a true signal and on a signal of the fact that you're growing it's painful but it's a good kind of pain see this other direction where you're you're going down the road of untruth that also brings you pain but that's not the good kind of pain that's the bad kind of pain because that pain won't grow you the way that this pain will this is a pain of purification this is the suffering of purifying your soul and spirit and this here is just the the karmic consequences of devilry which just leads to more devilry now of course sometimes you can go down this road long enough and then you wake up and then you you switch directions that's also valid it's valid being a devil is valid nothing wrong per se with being a devil as long as as long as you're okay with it the problem is that you won't be okay with it you think you'll be okay with it but you won't it's very painful being a devil and also you don't understand the beauty you're missing out on here and truth is a beautiful thing love is a beautiful thing really what your ego wants is your ego wants all of the benefits of this path while staying on this path and not changing anything about itself that's what you really want that's the kind of videos if i put those videos out there you would be paying me millions of dollars and millions of clicks for how to do that but i hate to break it to you that it can't happen you can't get the benefits of truth and beauty and love and god while being a devil there's costs there's trade-offs so if you care about truth you must care about integrity why because without integrity you're going to be opportunistically tempted into falsehood because the falsehood is always shorter more convenient easier more comfortable how can you ever reach truth when you're always doing what's most opportunistic you see if you're wondering what is this truth leo that you keep alluding to so vaguely it sounds like mumbo jumbo it's not mumbo jumbo it's a very tangible thing i assure you go check out my episode called what is truth and then the second episode called how to discover what is true or actually guide you through sort of a process of how to find the truth because you might be wondering that leo how do i find this magical truth you're talking about well go check that out how to discover what is true search for it it's a good good episode so the problem is that when you have low integrity you can't trust yourself and then this leads to low self-esteem and insecurity because deep down you know that your life is built on a house of cards and you start taking shortcuts and then these shortcuts lead to problems and then that pushes you to take even more shortcuts to deal with the consequences and then it just turns into this endless cycle and then if you lie to others you also have to lie to yourself you can't effectively lie to others without lying to yourself and when you lie to yourself you're disconnected from the only thing you have see you are the only thing that there is in life there's nothing but you this whole thing is you life is you when we're talking about life we're talking about you so the more disconnected you are from yourself the more you lie and try to hide from yourself you're just playing a game of hide and seek with yourself and that's ultimately what life is it's a god playing hide and seek with itself um dividing and united reuniting with itself disintegrating and reintegrating itself but all the lies and the dishonesty it corrupts your mind and you got to ask yourself why are you doing it why do you tell a lie why why is lying so common why do people lie because it's very effective for survival that's the only reason because you fear the emotional labor that would be entailed by not lying by telling the truth like if you cheat on your spouse or on your taxes see and someone asked you about it did you cheat you're gonna say no you're gonna lie why are you lying because if you said yes that first of all that would be painful for you to admit to yourself and to others it would ruin your reputation how others perceive you all those things you got to maintain but also there would be legal consequences perhaps or you would lead to a breakup of your relationship uh you'd have to work extra you'd have to pay somebody some money maybe you'd have to go to jail for a month or a year whatever um you'd have to deal with all the fallout from that and so to avoid that you lie i mean perfectly understandable why someone would do that but then of course if you had high integrity to begin with you wouldn't have cheated to begin with and then you wouldn't have to deal with all this fallout so the solution is to have high integrity to begin with and then the question becomes well how do i raise my integrity if i was coming from an environment with low integrity and see i totally get you there um and in fact maybe i'll talk about this in part two a little bit more get a little more personal but i actually came from an environment i was raised in a family where one of my parents was very low integrity and this had huge huge ramifications on my life the trajectory of my life why i even got into personal development um and my own deficiencies in integrity a lot of those were sort of inherited from my family situation growing up uh and so i mean people who grew up in environments and societies and like poor countries third world countries war-torn countries corrupt countries it's going to be much more difficult for them to have high integrity than those who grew up in in nicer areas simply because if you were born in a nice suburb or something like that and your parents were wealthy you have not you don't have much reason to lie to manipulate to cheat to steal but you grew up in some war-torn you know iraq where you're you know your house was getting bombed and all this sort of stuff and you know terrorists were knocking on your door and you know they were going to kill you if you didn't say the right things to them if you didn't lie to them then you were forced to lie you were forced to manipulate you were forced to exploit you were forced to be corrupt otherwise you couldn't survive corruption ultimately just survival so it is a real challenge to raise yourself from a environment of low integrity to high integrity you were very lucky most people don't appreciate if you had two parents who were high integrity or even moderate integrity if you didn't have a low integrity parent mother or father you were extremely lucky you don't know the kind of impact that would have had on you if one of your parents was low integrity and if you had two low integrity parents man you're probably psychologically [ __ ] for a long time and you're going to have to spend decades correcting that now don't uh don't don't get depressed you can correct that i'm not saying you're [ __ ] for life i'm just saying you got issues and that's going to require some serious work and i can empathize because i did have one parent who was very low integrity in in many ways and um i have a very intimate knowledge of all the problems that come with a low integrity life and it's difficult to unwire those habits because you pick those habits up as you're being raised for example in my family lying was very common it was not something that like was i mean it was just like a way of survival so of course i became a very good liar and to this day i'm a very good liar and sometimes i'm tempted to lie a lot um but then i have to hold myself back and say you know i could use that tool in this situation and i could gain an advantage but it's going to cost me down the road and i don't want to go down that road it's just like with doing you know heroin it's going to give you a great boost for now but it's going to cost you later the other problem with with low integrity is that it becomes difficult even for you to become successful sometimes sometimes it's possible to get very successful through low integrity activities like trump has i mean cheating on taxes and screwing people out of business deals that's possible but a lot of times i mean in some ways it's amazing what trump has done is how far he's come with such low integrity but for many people for many ordinary people like you it'll actually be difficult for you to even earn a million dollars without some integrity without raising your integrity because look to earn a million dollars realistically you got to work pretty hard you got to be disciplined you got to get up and do even if you're doing something shady and scammy even if you're going to be a car artist you got to work pretty hard at being the con artist even if you're on wall street you got to work pretty hard wake up early you know put in 12 hour days 80 hour weeks to to you know scam your money um the way that you do uh but but even to do that you got to be pretty disciplined and you got to be able to trust yourself like people who have such low integrity they can't even um trust their own words for example when you tell yourself you're gonna do something do you do it or do you fail and quit the next day like you tell yourself you're going on a diet and then you quit you don't have enough integrity just even go on a diet most people don't when you tell yourself okay i'm gonna work on this project and then you quit the next week because it gets tough well that's a lack of integrity see you keep telling yourself you're going to do all this stuff you're going to self-actualize you're going to meditate you're going to do a retreat you're going to do some psychedelics you're going to do some ayahuasca you're going to do this you're going to do that you're going to you know communicate better in your relationship you're going to be nicer to your children you're going to judge less you keep telling yourself all these things but then you go right [ __ ] back to what you were doing that's the lack of integrity and the more you fail to follow up on your own values and goals and ambitions and principles the lower your self-esteem drops your sense of self-efficacy you you start to feel like a victim in the world because you feel like every time you want to do something your life experience that well i want to do this thing i want to i want to be an artist i want to be a musician i want to be a movie director i want to be a video game designer i want to be i want to have a website i want to have a youtube channel i want to have kids i want to have a marriage i want to have great sex i want to go do pick up i want to learn how to flirt with girls i want to be funny i want to learn all these things i wanna meditate i wanna but then you you do all these things you keep failing and failing and failing because you're not persevering enough you're not disciplined enough and then after you've failed enough of these times you become a victim it's called learned helplessness learned helplessness and then you really believe like life sucks and you can't you can't really be successful in all this stuff leo you're talking about this is impossible or it's just fantasies you know my life doesn't work this way well this because you've fallen into this downward cycle of of negative self-efficacy to the point where you feel like you don't have much control over over life anymore because you failed so many times and part of that has to do with how you reframe failures i mean i failed so much failure is crucial failure's not a bad thing failure is is the greatest thing ever but what you have to do is you have to persevere and not get discouraged by the failure and keep going even harder after you fail so once you start adopting sort of cheating attitude towards life then you start to cheat everywhere uh but then cheating of course becomes counterproductive and it boomerangs like all selfish activity does all selfishness boomerangs that's karma in other words so paradoxically leading a life of high honesty and high integrity it might seem like leo you're saying it's so difficult i have to surrender the ego yeah but it's only difficult if you're really attached to the ego actually you could joyously sort of surrender the ego i mean it's still going to be difficult but it's a good sort of challenge it's like the challenge of you know lifting weights at the gym it's challenging it's a little stressful it's a little painful but it's good for you whereas when you're sitting on the couch watching reruns of lost or something and you're eating buckets of ice cream and you're getting fatter and fatter and fatter and lazer and laser laser have you ever done that and then you actually feel so bad you feel worse there's more suffering and pain from doing that than if you would have just gone to the gym that's what it's like be careful trying to live life the easiest way because usually people who are chasing life to be the easiest they end up having life the hardest so develop integrity i hope you can see is the core of self-actualization it's the core of spiral and ego development as we've talked about in the spiral models and the susan k greuter models it's the core of spirituality because spirituality is connection to god and god is truth love and wholeness therefore requiring infinite integrity and that's why a lot of times saints are revered and you know people often say well i'm not a saint so don't expect me to be perfect what they're really doing there is is they're they're creating an excuse for their own lack of integrity and why do we revere these saints because supposedly and of course a lot of this is just [ __ ] and stories and myths but supposedly at least some of these saints had exceptional levels of integrity and a human with exceptionally high levels of integrity is is a natural leader people look up to that they admire that why is that the case well there's actually a very deep deep reason for that and uh and we'll get to this to that to the answer to that here in a little bit of a roundabout boy but basically here's how i explain it so here's something you should notice is that when you encounter or see acts of high integrity they will actually make you cry tear up with tears of of joy and appreciation you probably experienced this watching some movie if you tear up during a movie braveheart or 300 band of brothers or you know some saving private ryan i don't know whatever movies to tear you up i don't know um uh what's going on there something actually very profound is happening that most people don't understand or for example you know people get inspired to tears uh christ's sacrifice on the cross of course that's the that's sort of the ultimate example of high integrity or um yeah i remember that that scene from braveheart at the very end it's probably going to make me tear up uh at the very like the very end of braveheart um you know already started when when they put mel gibson on the on the table and they're gonna like they capture him like the whole movie was about you know it was the british who were trying to capture the english or whatever they were trying to capture mel gibson finally they captured him they and then they're gonna torture him and then they they flame out on this on this table in public the whole crowd is watching and the king is there you know the king has been his enemy this whole movie and uh and and the king is on his deathbed he's about to die he's so old but like the king's last thing the last thing the king wants is just for mel gibson to like admit his his uh you know his rebellious that his rebellion was you know wrong or whatever and uh and then he can die in peace and so they time they'll give some to this torture table and they have this like torture guy with like all his torture implements and he's like starting to gut mel gibson and all he has to do they tell him they're explicit like all mel gibson has to do is just um is just admit that he's like wrong and apologize for leading this rebellion and and of course he just yells freedom freedom right that's what he yells and then they kill him integrity it's a movie about integrity so there are many movies like this why do these movies make us cry why do they make us emotional here's the magic here's the deep spiritual explanation because what's really happening with this occurs is that your mind and psyche which is really connected to a universal spirit which is god but it's clouded through layers of ego and survival and defense mechanism all this [ __ ] something pierces through this scene you're watching of mel gibson or jesus on the cross or whatever something pierces through all the veils of all that ego [ __ ] all the human nonsense and all the lies and manipulations cuts right through it and connects you to truth to love and to god what's really happening is that the thing that is animating the entire universe which is love has been fragmented and polarized through various limited consciousnesses and egos which are partial not infinite sort of like white light being polarized through a through a prism into the rainbow colors right so as a human you're one of those rainbow colors like you're yellow or you're red or whatever but then as the universe has god consciousness you're white pure white all of them integrated together and so what's really happening is that the god in you is recognizing your spirit is recognizing intuitively in a way that's much deeper than your conscious logical understanding it's it's intuiting that the highest good in the universe is love and your spirit recognizes selflessness and so when you see selfless actions or integris actions loving actions self-sacrificing actions when you see this depicted on the screen or you see it in real life it brings tears to your eyes because it shows you who you really are or who you could be if you did this work and cleared up all of your [ __ ] and you fully both actualized and transcended yourself and became god so the god in you recognizes the god in others and recognizes that connection and recognizes the good the good with a capital g if you want to know more about that check out my series or not series but episode uh what is goodness where i explain what goodness is so you are implicitly recognizing the beauty and majesty of reality at a metaphysical spiritual level when this happens and when that happens you're in touch you're you're in your highest self you're in touch you feel that love for a little bit but then usually you forget about it you fall out of it very quickly so really the whole point of spiritual work and the whole point of integrity is imagine imagine from now on you lived your life with that kind of integrity that the mel gibson character exhibited in braveheart if you just start thinking about that it'll bring tears to your eyes of who you could be if you did that start thinking about how you could impact people how you could lead people how you could move people how could you could connect and unite people this is how you develop the most powerful vision and sense of life purpose for your life and the deepest meaning this is what life is really about and there's not one way to do it you don't just do it through meditation there's a million ways to do it and it all of course hinges on truth and integrity how do you make yourself more integris but but yeah see it's difficult it's going to be difficult it's rare for a reason because it's difficult for a finite human to embody the attributes of the infinite that's really what we're talking about how do you turn the in the finite into the infinite and really you can't you gotta you gotta die the finite has to die to the infinite so really we're talking about the ultimate self-sacrifice to achieve this which of course is the greatest fear you have which is of course why it's so rarely achieved by people and when it is achieved it is deified literally deified as in the case of christ or the buddha there's a great quote that i found from thomas leonard which says it quote integrity reveals beauty end quote integrity reveals beauty and it does very high levels of integrity are beautiful why are they beautiful because what is beauty beauty with a capital b is truth and love and wholeness the most beautiful form of light we might say by analogy is white light pure white light because it contains all the other light within it integrated that's the highest beauty and on all the other colors they're also beautiful but not absolutely beautiful because they're partial and they leave something out if you got blue you're missing red if you got red you're missing yellow if you've got yellow you're missing green but if you got white you got them all integrity has a power of its own truth has a power of its own truth is powerful and i could cut through illusion that's the power of truth and that's why throughout history mankind rulers and politicians have always tried to control those who had high integrity tried to kill them tried to excommunicate them or imprison them why because people with high integrity are aligned with the truth and the truth is the most dangerous thing to a devil or to an ego it it it erases the illusions that many powerful rulers and business people and so forth devils and egos the illusions house of cards is that that they can construct in order to maintain their power like the illusion of a monarchy right a monarchy is pure fantasy pure illusion built on complete [ __ ] and lies that's what a monarchy is built on and it needs those lies in order to maintain itself so someone who comes along and starts to question the monarchy with truth you know asking questions and so forth he gets his head chopped off that's how it works we see this happening right now in russia with navalny versus putin you know navalny is a pretty remarkable high integrity um political leader and he's he's taken a real beating for it he might even get killed for it which is actually quite likely pretty amazing huge requires huge bravery fearlessness now i want to clarify a few things here about spider-dynamic stage blue so why do religious people stress stage blue values such as integrity character discipline family values morality righteousness honesty virtue decency goodness hard work honor loyalty responsibility surely you've heard religious people stress the importance of these and oftentimes they do it in a very sort of puritanical way they're very puritanical about it because and in fact they do it so they do it so puritanically and so dogmatically that it ends up backfiring such that reasonable scientific people and skeptical people who are not subscribing to that dogma they like i said earlier like what happened to me is they get a bad taste in their mouth just from these words like when i hear family values i want to throw up when some you know conservative on tv is saying them why is that because we we know the hypocrisy of it right we know the evangelical preachers who preach you know about virtue and righteousness and honesty and all this and then they're actually cheating on their wife with some you know gay gay friend in a parking lot and they get caught and they're lying about it so you know we've seen enough of these cases that we know the hypocrisy of it um and so we see enough of that hypocrisy and we start to think like oh well all that stuff is just [ __ ] well that's a mistake you got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water the the reality is that these characteristics are extremely important to living a a good life the problem is that these characteristics are easily faked and getting the genuine article is very difficult requires a lot of consciousness and work and it cannot be done ideologically or dogmatically or robotically or algorithmically you cannot follow the ten commandments to get integrity character and all some of these other values so a lot of what's happening is that spiral dynamic stage blue people they don't have a very sophisticated understanding of human psychology and epistemology and all these topics that we spent you know years talking about here in actual work they don't have this information uh it took mankind many thousands of years to get to this point to have this kind of information accessible as it is now easily for free and so forth through the internet you know before that you know a thousand years ago how did mankind tell itself how to live life well through these principles and they taught them very religiously robotically dogmatically and of course the majority of people who follow these principles their lives did improve but also not to the highest levels so really what was happening is that all these characteristics and virtues and values they were really pulled from the deepest most integres sages and mystics back dating back thousands of years who discovered these through god consciousness they discovered truth and love through god consciousness and profound mystical states and psychedelics and meditation techniques and yoga and so forth and then they tried to share this wisdom with the rest of mankind but of course the rest of mankind did not have enough integrity or consciousness to even understand what they were talking about and they just turned it into rigid rules to follow thou shall not kill thou should not steal thou shalt not cheat and judge and other things like this so the problem with stage blue is not that they have these values and that these values are wrong somehow these values are amazing these values are important the problem is that they don't really give you the tools and understanding necessary the depth of understanding necessary to really understand how to genuinely develop these values and virtues they just tell you to follow some script but a script is not consciousness and what they don't tell you is that consciousness is the key to everything because everything is consciousness truth and love is consciousness so without consciousness you can't you can't get these qualities genuinely so most religious people what they end up doing their whole life is because they've been brainwashed to believe that they have to be moral and value family and value honesty and decency and hard work and so they do these things into a certain degree and in certain sense it helps them uh but they don't really master them and they don't really understand what generates them or why they're important and so a lot of what they do is they just fake them even a lot of preachers and rabbis and imams fake these qualities they don't really have it because you can't have it because to have it you have to break down the ego to break down the ego you'd have to also break down christianity islam buddhism you have to break down all these ideologies too which of course they're attached to and they don't want to break them down you have to deconstruct everything to truly have integrity character righteousness and honesty and morality morality cannot be a formula and so the problem we have is that we have a lot of these uh you know stage blue versions of morality and uh people have grown gone grown sour on them and disenchanted with them rightly so but you have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and basically what we need is we need a version of spiral dynamic stage blue but which is totally open-minded totally non-ideological non-dogmatic inclusive holistic relativistic and meta epistemic metaphysical grounded and mysticism and consciousness and not partial to any any partisan or sectarian human invention or construction or organization and of course that's otherwise known as stage turquoise spiral dynamic stage turquoise so it's not that the religious fundamentalists are wrong per se it's just that they're very very partial and uh very limited in their way of going about aping genuine consciousness and love and holism they don't know any better they need better tools better methods but the problem is that their minds are so closed that they're resistant to to learning those tools and methods the problem with stage orange which comes after blue is that say george tends to overly dismiss and poo poo integrity and morality as quaint religious fantasies and wishful thinking enforced by some external god but see integrity is not enforced by an external god uh you are god and if you want to realize your god you're going to have to fully come into integrity otherwise you won't realize that you're god you don't have to nothing bad will happen to you other than the consequence of your own karma and suffering which is pretty bad it's punishment enough you see so there's a lot of truth in religion um but there's also a lot of [ __ ] and that's the difficulty of it is that it's so the the the truth and the [ __ ] in religion and even in spirituality and in new age teachings is so muddled together that for many stage orange sort of scientific rational people they don't even they're so disgusted by the whole thing that they don't even want to spend time disaggregating the truth from the [ __ ] and so they just throw everything out maybe with the bathwater and then that leads to the sort of lack of ethics and lack of morality of sage orange which we see on wall street in business in the business world with capitalism run rampant and amok and all this sorts of stuff so the fact that these stage blue people are often hypocrites that's not a that's that's not a refutation of the things that i'm talking about here or the importance of stage blue integrating stage blue it's very important to integrate stage blue it's just that they're aping you have to understand that they're they're they're doing the best it's like an ape seeing a human do something and then you know he's not he he doesn't have enough facility to to do what the human is doing at the same level quality so the the ape will just ape what the human is doing then it looks funny to us well that's what the religious people are mostly doing these christians and muslims and so forth and yeah it looks funny it looks sometimes it's evil at least to devilry it backfires the boomerangs yes of course and they're huge hypocrites um but you know this problem of hypocrisy goes so deep it's so difficult to not be a hypocrite even calling other hypocrites is already hypocritical because you yourself are a hypocrite all of us are to various degrees the problem with integrity is that we demand it from others but we make excuses for ourselves because of course that's just our selfishness and our self bias check out my episode by the way about self bias for more about that check out my episodes about survival part one part two very important episodes about how survival works so there are a few traps i want to point out here as we wrap up with developing integrity uh you see another point about the religious stuff stage blue is that um well see now you're probably wondering well leo so it seems so difficult how do i develop integrity well we're gonna talk about that in part two but part of the challenge is that it's just it's difficult to explain there's not a formula for how to do it so i can't just tell you some step step-by-step thing you follow and then you develop integrity magically easily no it's going to be a hairy messy process and there's a lot of traps a lot of self-deception involved which is precisely why the religions have a sort of a formula they give you they give you a rigid dogmatic formula because otherwise it's too difficult for most people to grasp at least with the formula you can kind of follow it and you'll get mediocre results but at least you'll get a little bit of something you won't be you know a rapist or a murderer hopefully if you follow the formula and you know they they try to instill it to you with fear like if you if you rape somebody you're going to hell and that's why you shouldn't rape somebody and then someone finds out that wait a minute leo you're saying that the all these morals and rules are relativistic and they're just constructions and that really i could rape somebody and god won't send me to hell you're saying god is all loving so why wouldn't i rape people if god still loves me and i won't go to hell even even for rape leo that seems wrong well no it's not wrong it's just that the idea is that your god and you're supposed to realize that raping somebody is not in the highest integrity and aligned with truth and with love see you're supposed to recognize that using your own consciousness it's not that some god sitting up above you is gonna send you to hell and torture you for not recognizing that if you don't recognize it you'll be a rapist and that's it and that that's that's that there won't be any further punishment for your raping other than you being a rapist and whatever you know however humans choose to punish you for that god is not going to punish you for that but you see under it's a lot it's a lot more uh nebulous and fluid it's difficult how how is the ordinary simple person supposed to work with that and actually use that to build integrity it's easier to build integrity by just telling someone if you rape somebody you're going hell and that's it so the person in their mind they supposedly just say okay well okay i guess i can't rip anybody okay i won't do it. and then many people just don't do it out of fear but that's an illusion that's a fantasy that's a fantasy that was constructed to help those are like training wheels to help you to not be a total monster and that was necessary for society because you know we don't want people running around raping and murdering people uh willy-nilly uh we want them to have some fear about that that's probably good creates a better society a little bit more order uh that's what stage blues about is all about creating order but they create a lot of fantasies and dogmas to create that order so that's the cost and then that locks down the mind the mind literally has to be straightjacketed to create that order for society and then higher stages of development releases that straitjacket the problem is that when we release the straightjacket completely how do you not become a [ __ ] monster and that's sometimes what baffles people about this work is you know i tell people i've said in the past it's on my um some of my episodes i've said stuff like you know um i've experienced levels of self-love so deep as i my consciousness became infinite that for example if um if i raped somebody or if i pushed a nuclear code you know button to launch nukes and to kill millions of people uh you know most people would judge me as a monster for doing that right you probably would judge me as a monster and never watch my stuff again but the levels of love i've experienced the conscious experience is so deep that i would i would not i would completely forgive myself for doing that and i would completely love myself after the fact even after i did that and for most people that doesn't compute in their mind because their mind is not flexible or open enough to to grasp this sort of thing um because they really believe that no that that's so evil how could you do and then you forgive yourself no you're supposed to feel guilty because guilt is something you've been taught as a mechanism to constrain your mind to get you to [ __ ] behave like a [ __ ] dog you see you were trained like a dog when you were growing up and when you took a [ __ ] in the corner they beat you for it metaphorically or sometimes literally and then you learned the lesson and now you're acting out of fear but what i'm talking about is not acting out of fear anymore but when you fully become conscious there's no more fear there's only love and there's truth so let me point out a few of these traps that exist with developing integrity here's a huge one be very wary of this beware the trap of the super ego judgment and moralization so what happens is that at first you start out you don't give a [ __ ] about integrity morality you poo poo the whole thing then maybe you listen to me talking about you and then you contemplate and you realize like oh wait a minute i was wrong leo was talking about some important stuff here it is important so let me start to become more moral myself let me work on my integrity so you start to develop integrity but then the ego latches on to integrity and says ah look i spent the last five years 10 years 20 years developing my integrity look how integris i am and then you want to show it off and then when you see somebody in the news you see trump on the news whatever and then you ah look at that devil look how evil he is look how little integrity he has and you criticize and you debate and you judge and you yell and you whine you do all this and of course as you're doing this you're falling really truly out of integrity because judgment brings you right out of integrity judgment is a low activity a low integrity activity so beware the trap of judging people with low integrity as your own integrity increases because the ego is going to want to play this game like i'm the good guy and those are the evil guys i'm the self-actualized one i'm the awakened one i'm god over here but those are devils over there and they're not doing spiritual work and they're not doing the things i want them to do and i'm the righteous one and they are the wicked ones and we got to fight those people over there and destroy them right this is the the basis for all holy war and not just holy war but a lot of you know outrage politics and all this sorts of stuff so be very careful about this genuine integrity doesn't judge others it recognizes how difficult it is to develop integrity will you truly develop your integrity by the time you reach the highest levels of integrity you're going to go through such a [ __ ] grind to get there and so much suffering and you're going to surrender so much of your ego that you're going to actually become compassionate toward those who don't have integrity because you understand how difficult it is for you how difficult it was for you to achieve your integrity the cost was staggering and so you understand of course that most people aren't going to pay that cost and of course many people didn't have the benefits you had they didn't have access to these videos they didn't have access to psychedelics they didn't have access to a good family or whatever that helped you to develop this high integrity so compassion for those with low integrity is very important this is also the mistake that many stage blue fundamentals preachers and religious people make is that they they they adopt this righteous ego of condemning all the wicked people down there who are not buying into their you know high ideals but they're just ideals they're just ideas their beliefs they're not embodied they're not at the level of consciousness they're just like scripts that these preachers have realized and then of course they're not able to follow these scripts even themselves also beware the trap of getting jealous and envious it's easy once you start to work hard on your raising your integrity to get jealous or envious of those people who don't give a [ __ ] about integrity at all and just running a muck out there and earning lots of money millions and billions of dollars donald trump style and then you start thinking yourself well why the [ __ ] am i working so hard on my integrity well well this [ __ ] out there is earning millions of dollars and having a bunch of sex you get envious and jealous of that so beware of that trap beware of the stage blue trap of morality and integrity which is a rigid following of some sort of rules trying to turn integrity into an algorithm where you don't have to be conscious you just have to follow rules that's not genuine integrity it's not genuine consciousness that's not going to work it's very crude it could have some it'll it could help you i'm not saying it doesn't work at all it does work it prevents like the worst of the worst scumbags the stage read from doing what they do uh you know it prevents some criminality and creates order for society but it can only get you so far it doesn't get you very far you got to go beyond that beware of course also the trap of guilt so you might start to think that feeling guilty is a good way of developing integrity and you'll probably start to feel guilty as you start to first develop your integrity uh but of course the problem is that guilt is also low consciousness and it's also going to backfire on you and you're not going to be able to reach the highest levels of integrity through guilt which is why i say that if if i ever do something really bad in my life um i'm at the stage where i i it's it's almost a little bit dangerous to say this where i won't even feel guilty about it now that doesn't mean i never feel guilt sometimes i still feel guilt but i'm also at the point where i've experienced such deep levels of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance and self-love that i could truly do something horrendous socially horrendous or monstrous and not feel guilt about it because i will forgive myself and for many people that's scary it's scary to those people who don't know how to control themselves consciously without the use of guilt right that's something that has to be developed that's pretty advanced a pretty advanced thing to develop is how do you how do you act like a loving caring decent person in the world without guilting yourself constantly most people are only able to do it through guilt and a lot of these stage blue people are so guilt-ridden and it just it ruins their whole ability to enjoy life because they're following all these rules it's not coming from a genuine intrinsic motivation it's an extrinsically enforced set of rules and then they feel guilty when they break something and they're living the whole life this way and they think that that's the only way to do it it's not the only way to do it in fact it's a trap you gotta transcend that but of course they're scared they start thinking oh leo if if i don't feel guilty for raping somebody then what's going to stop me from raping them well consciousness and love and selflessness and the transcendence of all of your egoic cravings that's what will not your guilt you don't need the guilt when you're truly loving and conscious you don't need guilt to prevent you from raping somebody you also don't need a prison sentence or some other kind of extrinsic you know punishment or the the the the notion of hell burning in hell you don't need this idea once you're truly conscious and awake not to rape somebody i know that's that's a that's a shocking i know that's a it's a crazy idea for some of you but yeah it's possible it's possible to be to not be a rapist and not live in fear or guilt about it and to not have a craving to do it that's possible but it might require some work so anyways to wrap up here it's very easy to preach integrity in fact it's very easy for me to talk about all this stuff the real hard part is after i shut off this video i gotta go back to my life and i gotta actually practice some of these things that i've said otherwise i'm gonna look like a huge hypocrite and then um i will be out of integrity and then that will make me feel bad and i'll be out of alignment with myself and with the truth and with love so you see that's that's the problem here is it's hard to practice this stuff but easy to talk about and there are serious sacrifices that need to be made really this is what the spiritual journey is all about so that's it for part one as your homework assignment i want you to contemplate the importance of integrity in your life think about areas where you lack it where you have it and what consequences it has and how everything interconnects all the stuff we've talked about all the different areas of your life business relationships family marriages sex all this how does integrity fit into all that and then do you want to get on the path of developing integrity and if you do stick around for part two next week where i will talk about how to do that i'll give some examples and talk about some of my own personal struggles and challenges for how to do it all right that's it i'm done here thanks for watching please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website right there you will find some exclusive content there you'll find my book list pretty important the life purpose course i've already plugged that pretty important check that out you won't regret taking it what else the blog exclusive content on the blog the forum come chat on the forum if you want to support me on patreon patreon.com actualized and actually something new is coming i'm gonna be launching a new channel second channel called actualized clips which will be these long ass [ __ ] videos that i do cut up into little five ten minute sections i hired a an editor he seems like a good editor who's going to be doing that managing the channel posting those up there so for those of you who are complaining about the length of my videos and you want something shorter and uh punchier more to the point without with less rambling and repeating myself and less examples i like to give a lot of examples then you will probably like that clips channel i will post an announcement when it's launched we're working on that now it should come out probably in the next few weeks month at the most all right and the last thing that i'll say is this so you might be wondering well leo you made a pretty strong case here for stage blue values and conservative values and you know aren't you like a very liberal social type of socialist type of person like progressive type of person and yet here you are acknowledging the validity of conservative values isn't this a contradiction no it's not a contradiction at all if you've actually deeply watched and studied my spiral dynamics series you understand that spiral stages build on top of each other and it's not about being orange to the exclusion of blue or green to the exclusion of orange but it's about integrating them all and building on top of each other so stage blue is actually a very important stage and in fact for many of you that's where your personal development needs to begin stage blue develops things like basic discipline and work ethic which many of you don't have how can you be successful in life how can you earn a lot of money how can you meditate how can you self-actualize when you don't even have the ability to discipline yourself to eat a proper diet or to work to have a strong work ethic to follow up on your life purpose or to meditate every day you can't so even though a lot of times i rag on conservatives or conservative values it might seem like or i speak down to stage blue well it is because i'm speaking down to it but i'm speaking down to it not because i reject stage blue it's because i mean i've integrated a lot of stage blue the beginning a lot of the beginning of my life in my teenage years all through my 20s you know i was i i worked a lot on developing a strong work ethic discipline how do you think i got here i don't get here by rejecting stage blue values i could of course do more to integrate stage blue values even deeper and i should and i i will do that in the future i could always use more discipline i could always you know polish up my my work ethic and so forth there's a lot of good stuff within stage blue the problem is that stage blue also and especially now in pop culture with right wing media has gone so far you know swung the pendulum so far towards the crazy toxic end of stage blue there is a healthy version of stage blue which is underrepresented in the media and especially in right wing media and it is important and um make sure you watch my spiral dynamic stage blue episode and you really develop stage blue don't skip it over that's gonna that's gonna really [ __ ] your self-actualization in your spiritual work you need to do very healthy stage blue while avoiding all of that toxic um culture war ideological dogmatic closed-minded [ __ ] that you see in right-wing media that is a part of stage blue but it you don't need to go down that extreme side of stage blue you can be on the healthy side of stage blue where you develop work ethic and family values and honesty and discipline and character and decency and hard work and honor and loyalty and responsibility these are these are very very good things you just have to distinguish between doing it in a healthy way and doing it in a limited rigid partial dogmatic way and then getting stuck in that for the rest of your life that's the real problem so there's no contradiction here and i don't spend that much time teaching stage blue i mean this episode is is unique in that respect but most of my time is spent teaching other stuff because a lot of the stage blue values and things are so basic really you should have learned this in the first 20 years of your life but of course i know that many of you haven't i have some deficiencies as well so we do have to remind ourselves to go back sometimes and work on the lower stages of the spiral it's not about about turquoise and yellow a lot of times you can't get to turquoise yellow until you spend a few years or even a decade really mastering blue uh orange and green and if you have no idea what these colors mean then you got to go watch my spiral dynamics series is a life-changing a life-changing series that will change how you see all of mankind and your relationship to it and where you will go in your development it's basically a map for human psychic development very powerful stuff all right that's it stay tuned next week for part two you