Word count:17638
[Music] what is love part 2 warning this is gonna be an advanced episode there need to be things that I need to say here about love which are going to be very controversial and which are gonna offend many people including maybe yourself and that's as it must be because the topic of love is a very radical one and it's very tricky to teach and it's very easy to misunderstand the things I'm gonna say here and to abuse them to use them towards various selfish ends so just be very careful and make sure you go watch what is love part 1 because there we lay a very nice foundation for what love is that I'm not gonna rehash all over again here I assume that you understand that stuff we're going to the next level we're going even deeper I want to tell you a story one time about four years ago I was at an Enlightenment intensive retreat this was a very isolated retreat in Canada where it was me and maybe 20 or 30 other people it was about ten days long and we were there we were going balls to the wall self inquiry and towards awakening and we were working at it as a group and we were going at it like 14 hours a day just completely devoted to that for 10 days straight it was very very intense I did not have an awakening but I learned a lot during that period and one of the things I learned that still stays with me today is the leader of the retreat he's he's kind of old and he's been doing these retreats for four decades and so he has a lot of experience guiding many many people towards awakening and one time some Buddhists came to him and they said we'd like to participate in your retreat and so he was of course open he's a very loving guy and he accepted them and he tried to guide them and they were there they were pushing towards awakening using his process and and one of the Buddhist women she was like a Buddhist monk I guess I I think they were like from the east not Western Buddhists Eastern Buddhists and towards the end of the retreat she actually had her awakening the problem was though that her notion of what awakening was was the very strict sort of awakening that is taught in Buddhism this sort of nothingness and void but what she had here during this retreat is she had an awakening into the nature of love the existential nature of love but because she had this Buddhist Dogma in her mind that there can't be love it has to be nothingness has to be emptiness otherwise it's not the truth so she argued with the facilitator who was trying to convince her that no you're having a legitimate awakening into the nature of love this is a beautiful thing except it embraces this is why you're here but she couldn't accept it because she had this one-track idea of what enlightenment should be this very narrow-minded idea and from that point on he said that I can't allow dogmatic Buddhists to come to my retreats anymore and you know these Buddhists they actually wanted to get up and to teach a little bit at his retreats as well and he can't allow it any more because because they're too dogmatic so the point of this is be careful be careful with Buddhism be careful with things like neo-advaita where you can get stuck in a very sort of a narrow formulation of what Awakening is you can read books and scriptures and so forth and you can you can even take quotes for masters but the way that you take it you take it partially you cherry-pick stuff to fit your idea of what awakening should be and in many of these paths they don't properly teach you what love is that's my point and one thing you're gonna notice for me with my teachings going forward is that I'm going to be emphasizing the existential aspects of love in my teachings going forward and sometimes people criticize me for this as though somehow this is a shouldn't of the teaching no no this is not a corruption of the teaching this is this is central to the teaching this is a deepening of the teaching is what you need to understand so just watch out for that be careful there's a lot more dimensions to awakening than people think learning how to love is your primary task as a human being and this is not some airy-fairy new-agey thing this is the very heart of the path this is not a distraction from the path this is the path love is not an emotion the way that culture has taught you to think love is truth love is an existential thing love is equivalent to being to nothingness to everything to consciousness to freedom to infinity to God to self to no self to creation to the absolute love is a distinct aspect of awakening and you may have an awakening here or there but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are conscious of what love is that you're conscious that love and truth are identical for this you need to go even deeper and you also need to go broader sometimes people go deep with awakening but it's too narrow so don't assume that just because you've had an awakening once or twice that you've gotten to the end of it and that you've awoken to what love is you probably have it in my episode what is truth I talk about truth as sort of working on two different levels there's first-order truth the truth of being itself and there's second-order truth with just linguistic or symbolic truth which is often confused with first-order truth well the same thing applies here to love there's first-order love and there second-order love and it parallels to what goes on with truth so usually when we talk about love and the reason people get so confused about you know Leo how can you talk about love what what does love have to do with reality and so forth isn't love just something humans do they're confusing second-order love with first-order so usually when we're talking about love in our culture in common parlance we're talking about second-order love like loving activities or loving emotions or feelings or being in a loving mood or being in a loving state this isn't really what love is about this is a second-order thing first-order love is the actual being or substance or the consciousness of which everything is made and I was thinking about how to communicate this and I came up with a pretty pretty nice example before you hear that i'ma show you an image of which is with Lego bricks LEGO bricks are great example of first versus second order so the first order of a Lego brick or of Lego as an activity is the bricks themselves you see without the bricks you have no lego activities at all the bricks are the foundation there are the atoms the molecules that make everything up and then out of these bricks you can make all sorts of creations now here's the here's the interesting thing so if we take the Lego brick itself as the first order the most fundamental level anything that you make out of Legos will include that first level by definition because this is if it's man of Legos it has to be matter of those bricks and then what we make now that is variable that can change a lot we can make something beautiful or we can make something something ugly you see we can make a castle we can make a pirate ship or whatever that would be the second order that's the thing you make out of the bricks so what would happen though if we used Lego bricks to construct a large Lego brick see now we're getting into this sort of interesting strange loop territory where we have us whoa all self-reflection we're using Lego bricks to now create a larger second order structure which now resembles itself a Lego brick and we what we can say here is we can say if we're able to make a large construction which resembles the actual little bricks of which the big construction is made now we can say that there's sort of a parallel or a reflection between the second order and the first order and we can ask the question how well does the second order reflect the first order so if we make a large Lego brick out of individual Lego bricks we would say that now we're sort of being true at the second order level to what a Lego brick actually is because if we build a castle on the second order you know a castle doesn't reflect as accurately what a Lego brick actually is a castle is sort of like an illusion that draws our attention to the shape of the castle making us forget that it's actually a matter of bricks whereas if we make a giant brick out of Lego bricks then our mind is drawn to the fact that oh it's all mad of brick so what does this have to do with love well there's a direct parallel here so when we talk about the love that we feel for a romantic partner or for our children or for some food that we love or whatever this is second order love first order love is the actual building blocks of reality itself the consciousness out of which you experience the full range of emotions just like with these Lego bricks so what needs to happen here and what I'm going to be trying to get you to see is we're going from the second order on which your mind is stuck you know that sort of Valentine's Day notion of love we need to go beneath that to the existential to the metaphysical level of love to the first order and at this first order here's where it's a little bit counterintuitive and tricky is that even when someone is hating you when someone is angry when someone's in a bad mood when someone is depressed even that still counts as love because it's still man of consciousness and that's what love is is it's consciousness at the first order and then whether or not we act in a lovey-dovey manner whether I kiss you or not whether I hug you or not whether I'm nice to you or not this is the second order stuff you see you need to be able to see that even if I'm not nice to you that's still an expression of love is that clear and the most important thing here is not to be acting lovingly in your life that's a second-order thing I don't really care whether you're acting lovey-dovey all the time 24/7 in fact it's unrealistic that's a improper expectation this is a foolish notion of love I'm trying to get you down to to a grounded version of love and for that what needs to happen is you got to go to the first-order level you got to have an insight into what love is that's far more important than it is to act lovingly now of course we're also gonna work on you acting more lovingly too that is important because we want the second order to reflect the first order in the same way that when we're speaking words we want our words to reflect truth but also we got to understand that truth at the level of words is only second order truth there's something even more important than that which is the truth that grounds all of existence again consciousness see so in order for us to actualize love at the second order level first is required understanding and consciousness of the first order level of love and then we can work on getting them to reflect each other we really need to work to get over this notion of feminine love which is how most people conceive of love in our society this is a sort of sweet sappy version of love we're here if you're loving then you're nice to people you're kind to people maybe you're even a dorm a doormat you let people walk all over you do whatever they want with you you're happy all the time you're smiling you're positive you're maybe even passive and submissive these are things we associate with with love so sort of think of your stereotypical image of what love would look like on a movie screen like if a movie director wanted to demonstrate that two people are in love what would what would they show that but see that that's a stereotype don't get lost in that that's very easy to see that version of love what's much more harder is to appreciate the masculine dimension of love masculine love can be ruthless and it can be brutal I want you to start to recognize that there's love in violence in war in terrorism and in the entire process of survival for example cutting off a bad relationship this might seem like a harsh move but that's an example of love or it can be or telling the brutal truth to a friend like your friend is [ __ ] up in his life and you normally you'd want to be nice and you want a tiptoe around the issue but then there's a certain kind of love can you see that there's a certain kind of love that comes from just being brutally honest with your friend and telling him exactly what he needs to hear cuz that could save his life that could get him back on track that could awaken him out of his rut we're doing something stupid or the love that's required to confront a bully that takes love or and sort of a very extreme example the love required to shoot your mother if she turns into a zombie think of that kind of love and in fact on this topic I'm reminded of a brilliant scene a great scene from the movie with Will Smith I am Legend have you seen that movie it's a zombie movie there's a great scene in that movie towards the very end where you know throughout the whole movie he has this his he's all alone basically it's a very sort of solitary movie he doesn't have any friends or family everything but he has his dog who's with him the whole time but then in the very end of the movie spoiler alert the dog gets bitten by some zombies and then the dog of course is now slowly turning into a zombie so Will Smith you know rushes the dog to some medical center and he's like in this abandoned medical bunker that has medicine and stuff and he keno he injects the dog full of this medicine thing that this will hoping that this will you know cure the dog and it still hasn't hit him that the dog is gonna become a zombie because like you know this is his only companion he's like the last man alive and this is his dog and he's sitting there and the dog is kind of like wounded and crying and he's holding this dog in his hands and as he's holding that dog you know kind of like cuddling it it's starting to turn into a zombie like right in front of his eyes and right in that moment he he realizes what he has to do he has to kill the dog he has to kill his own dog right his best friend and and it's it's like a very powerful couple of minutes scene where he's holding that dog and he has to choke it and strangle it the camera actually kind of like pans a little bit off to the side it has his face it has Will Smith's face he can't actually look down at the dog as he's killing the dog has to look away as he's doing it he can't watch himself do it but the cameras on his face as he's doing and it's showing the agony that he's going through doing that and it what it really shows there is the brutality of love what he's doing there is an act of love and it's that dimension of love which which is so easily lost on people because this is the kind of love that's too real it's too raw for the ego to accept we want a sweet sappy kind of love we want happy love and if you want I'm going to post actually a clip of this Will Smith scene I'll post it on my blog so if you want to check it out you can find on my blog I'll link to it it's a powerful scene and what that leads us to is the topic of the gravity of love the gravity of reality because see love and reality are the same thing love and truth are the same thing we're talking about all of reality when we're talking about love we're not talking about some narrow aspect of reality the happy good stuff no we're talking about the entire thing now this is love with a capital L here absolute love not relative love absolute is the first order relative is the second order so what I want you to understand is that there's a terrifying quality to reality which is the sheer brutality and scope of it it's infinite scope but most people don't understand that infinite scope is what creates this brutality most people most egos they just think like all well there's evil stuff happening in the world there's bad people there's bad guys you know like the rapists and murderers and terrorists and Nazis and so forth they're just the bad guys let's just get rid of all them and then life will be peachy but this is this is a cartoonish childÃs version of of what reality is and how love works right it's it's really a form of denial or it's it's a lack of perspective and a lack of consciousness when your perspective widens and expands radically and also it elevates its perspective and you sort of look down upon reality as a whole you look at it holistically from a very big picture perspective you start to realize that all of this brutality that goes on war genocide rape slavery and all of this nasty stuff that we usually demonize that all of this is actually inherent to the infinity of what truth and what reality are what consciousness is so what's really going on at the existential level is that consciousness which is the only thing that exists you are conscious right now this consciousness here is running into all different aspects of itself and some of these aspects are so brutal and so stark and so shocking that consciousness recoils in horror at its own self reflection and it has to deny that this is a reflection of itself it's sort of like imagine being so ugly that when you look in a mirror you can't even admit to yourself that that's you in the mirror you have to tell yourself that look at that ugly monster in the mirror and you spend your whole life calling that this ugly monster without ever admitting to yourself that that's actually you that's what you are so the same thing is going on with you not with your physical appearance I hope but I mean with reality as a whole there is this seriousness to consciousness which we don't want to admit because we want to sort of pretend that life is happy and sweet and we try to construct our life this way we construct our social institutions to be nice and kind there's this veneer of politeness and etiquette and all this but underneath that is this brutality which is always potentially there and this is something that of course is extremely threatening to the ego so it's understandable why you'd want to deny it I'm not blaming you for this I'm just getting you trying to get you to start to realize what you're doing there's also something that makes consciousness very stark and that is the relentless impermanence of all form all form changes and in the abstract that sounds like okay yeah that's okay leo so what but it's not so what this this this notion of impermanence is absolutely central to understanding reality love and and where evil comes from see most people they just they just call things evil without questioning and theme deeply about what that evil really is and why it's there why it's there is to a large extent because of the impermanence see because consciousness is so impertinent a constant state of change which of course is very threatening because you as a living being you need to cling to something you need to cling to your identity you need to cling to your house your shelter your family your identity your nation your company your money your bank account you got to cling to to something to ground you within this reality but the but the truth of what consciousness is that it's totally impermanent and everything you cling to is going to eventually slip through your fingertips like sand see this is not a mistake this is actually a feature of what existence is it's not a bug the mistake is trying to make the impermanent permanent this is where you get dysfunction and neurosis as a part of spirituality is is coming face to face with impermanence and accepting it which of course is all about accepting your own death in the very end that's ultimately what it boils down to see so like in this example of Will Smith with his dog what was that if you really zoom out and look at what that was that was an example of the relentlessness and the ruthlessness of impermanence you know he wanted that dog to remain being his his loyal friend the way it's been for for for decades keeping him company and all of that he wanted that so he wanted to lock that in he want to make that permanent but then of course you know life unfolds there are zombies and things and then you know they'll bite your dog and so when you get attached to your dog being your dog and not being a zombie then that's where the suffering comes from and then you ask yourself or you even ask God like God why did you create these zombies who bit my dog you know what kind of cruel existence is this and gods reply to you is impermanence recognize impermanence this is what consciousness is it's impermanence so real love absolute love is raw it's severe it's grave it's bittersweet it's uncompromising it's sober it's stark it's serious it's brutal its pensive its melancholic its relentless its radical and this is what gets people so confused about the topic of love they can't understand how if everything is love then how come we have all this crap going on in the world see but what's really happening is that you're confusing your own egos needs and fears which is distorting your picture of reality and you're not seeing the love precisely because you're attached to being some particular way you need love to be conditional and so when you experience unconditional love you misinterpret it in your mind actually as hate and as evil and the very notion that unconditional love is love revolts you or at least it does most people and what I'm telling you is that your job as a human being this is really your only job in life is to learn to embrace love as an absolute unconditionally not on your terms not in a way which would suit and please your ego or your survival but in its actuality to embrace reality as it is warts and all that's the hardest thing to do for a finite being to learn to love all aspects of yourself that's very hard to do because of the magnitude of what consciousness is infinite consciousness is terrifying because it includes possibilities which are threatening to any finite form but that's what love is love is infinite consciousness love is not some part of reality love is the whole thing with no exceptions this makes love twisted and very counterintuitive where things that don't seem like they're love actually are but you need to take into account the massive distortion that the lens of the personal ego self creates that distortion that creates an inability to truly see the love that is all around you at all times because you're so stuck in survival mode your mind is always looking for advantages and looking for ways to survive and the way you do that is you actually you have created a sort of egoic form of conditional love this is the sappy sort of sweet happy love that you've invented to make yourself feel good which is a survival mechanism you use that conditional love to manipulate reality to get what you want to survive and here I will refer you to my two-part series understanding survival so very important for understanding what I'm talking about here my notion of survival is much much broader than you think or that you understand that in fact in general what I noticed that even those of you who've watched those two episodes you still have a very poor understanding of what survivalists survival is such an important idea and yet all but almost nobody under really understands it so go back and watch it again contemplate what survival is there's an uncompromising aspect to reality which actually many materialists misinterpret as evidence of the fact that there couldn't be a god or the fact that reality is just totally indifferent doesn't give a [ __ ] about us but actually that that's a misinterpretation of of what love is you know people say Leo what love are you talking about when there's war and genocide and all this but it's exactly the opposite of that they seem that uncompromising aspect to reality this is God refusing to soften reality to make it convenient for your ego and why is that why doesn't God just suit reality to fit you perfectly so that you're living in a paradise because life needs to work not just for you but for an infinite number of beings see you're so stuck thinking about how to make life good for you that you forget about the entire universe if God behaved that way the universe would be he'll see God on the other hand needs to take the biggest picture possible and to take into account all possible living beings what's good for everyone what's good for the universe as a whole which means that sometimes things are not going to go necessarily the best for you individually because you you have to recognize are just a tiny tiny portion of a larger whole and you need to accept where you fit into the grand scheme of things which of course the ego doesn't want to do because the ego is arrogant by definition the ego wants the entire universe to all revolve around it and therein lies the whole problem see it's not just about you so while you're complaining about war you might say well but leo but but you know my country got bombed so it's not about me it's about my country but still your country is still you it's still even thinking of reality in terms of countries or even thinking about reality in terms of the entire earth like you might wonder well Leo if an asteroid comes and hits the earth tomorrow and kills everybody the same way it did supposedly 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs you know how's that for the greatest good of the universe but you have to understand that you're looking at it from such a narrow perspective you're looking at it from the perspective of earth earth is like one out of trillions and trillions of planets and even all that is just still one tiny speck in the larger scheme of things see so you got to be very careful not to get caught up in your own little personal agenda it's very important to to consider the big picture perspective here and that's where we're going to be working on in this episode the most with some examples so before we get to the examples I want to introduce two two laws of the universe for you the first law of the universe is that everything that happens in the universe happens to maximize love sounds kind of hokey and you might wonder well Leo can you prove it how do you prove something like this this sounds kind of like a fairy tale but you can become conscious that everything that happens in the universe happens to maximize love the movement of every single molecule is there to maximize love but you need to be able to zoom out far enough to see it so a corollary of this universal law is that if something is happening and you can't see the love in it what that means is that your perspective isn't wide enough if you don't have enough elevation so you need to broaden and zoom all the way out and look at that situation from an even higher elevation until you're able to realize that that is playing into the maximization of love in the long-term in the evolution of the universe and and you might say well Leo isn't this a tautology seems like anything that happens then must be love by definition by the way that you're defining your terms and that's exactly right truth is a tautology love is a tautology the absolute is a tautology which means that it's absolute it can't be otherwise and then the second universal law is that everyone is doing good from their point of view given their worldview and given their life situation and circumstances everyone with no exceptions so that means another corollary here to this one is that if you see someone who you think is doing evil it is a bad person what you're not understanding is that from their point of view given their worldview in their circumstances they're actually a good person and they're acting in the name of love no matter how twisted their actions might be and it can get quite twisted they're still acting from love it's just that of course people can get very deluded they can trick themselves consciousness can get lost in itself it can get very contracted and very egotistical but it's still fundamentally acting from love no matter what it's doing or how its acting so these are some pretty radical claims that I'm making here so let's let's go into some detail and explore some examples to help to illustrate this so let's start off with a sort of easy one which is a lion hunting and antelope on the savanna in Africa how is this love and here I want to encourage you to actually pause the video and think about it before I give you my answers so pause right now and ask yourself how is a lion hunting an antelope how's this love how does this contribute to the overall love of the entire universe and of course this is survival 101 you have to understand that survival is not the opposite of love survival is absolutely essential because without survival nothing can exist you can't have life without survival you can't have life without death you need to be able to see how death is utterly absolutely essential for there to be life so all the things that you enjoy you know video games and sex and good food and nice vacations and beautiful sunsets and this and all of that the only way that that's possible is through death you cannot have any of that without death so how do we prove this well it's just very simple common sense logic here look the only way that you can see a beautiful sunset and go on some beautiful vacation or honeymoon somewhere to to some tropical island or see some beautiful sunset is first you have to be alive as an organism as it as a mammal how do we get mammals well you can't have mammals unless you have animals hunting other animals like a lion hunting an antelope there could not be mankind there could not be human civilization without the hunting of animals our ancestors couldn't have survived otherwise now some vegan might come in here say all leo but but you know we could transition all of mankind to eating soy and tofu and you know these these new technologies we can grow meat the lab so we don't even need to kill animals yes that's possible in the future we will have to evolve to that and notice it's going to be a very challenging evolution it's gonna take us hundreds of years maybe even thousands of years from today from the 21st century to evolve at that point but realize that we could only get to that point because there have been literally hundreds of thousands of years and even millions of years of evolution prior to that which has gotten us to where we are here today see even if you're a vegan right now you still have to admit that you probably weren't a vegan for your whole life you probably started out eating meat that's because that's how your parents ate that's how your grandparents ate and really veganism is just a luxury of modern times modern technology it wasn't possible in the past like if your ancestors lived in the north somewhere in Siberia or in Alaska they couldn't survive on vegetables you need animal protein animal fat to survive up there you're not gonna have enough calories otherwise see this lion is that the Lions fault that he needs to eat antelopes of course not this is part of reality so as brutal as it is hunting down an antelope and then biting its neck and having it bleed to death you might say well that that's horrible you know from the antelopes point of view this is so terrible what's where's the love in it only some sort of cruel God would invent a this sort of scenario when you think this way you're thinking very myopic Lee you need to zoom out and see the beauty of it in fact you can see the beauty of a lion hunting antelope in fact if you watch videos of it on you know on the BBC or something there are some beautiful documentaries about it and antelopes are beautiful creatures and lions are beautiful creatures and you know how that antelope got to be so beautiful through millions of years of natural selection you know how that line got so beautiful through millions of years of natural selection that means that thousands of lions had to die because they were not good enough to hunt the antelopes and thousands of antelopes have to die because they were not good enough to run away from the lions or they didn't have the right camouflage on their fur or their their legs weren't skinny enough or their horns weren't good enough for Farina they weren't sharp enough to to fight off the lion or whatever and all of that has led to this beautiful antelope that now exists and this beautiful line that now exists see but usually you don't think about any of this and of course from the antelopes point of view does the Antelope care about any of this does it know is it conscious of any of this is it conscious of millions of years of evolution that went into making it of course not the only thing the Antelope cares about in its selfishness is how to run away from the lion and of course you can't blame the Antelope for this it wants to live it loves life you see so what I want you to see with this example is that love love is moving through the entire dynamic of life all dynamics of life not just in the sense that all the Antelope loves life yes it loves life but the lion also loves life the lion loves its its cubs and it's you know it's got to raise its cubs and then all the natural selection that happens to create this beautiful creature called an antelope or a lion and then from that you know humans and then we humans we also had to hunt antelopes or some other animals and you see the love that went into that and then it's that love that then leads to the evolution of the human nervous system that human nervous system is then what's allowing you to look at a beautiful sunset when you're on your honeymoon to Hawaii or somewhere and you see that beautiful sunset why are you seeing that beautiful sunset and you able to appreciate it it's only because of the millions of years of natural selection and evolution that went into evolving your nervous system that now you can appreciate the love you see start to see the interconnectedness of all this this is this is absolutely crucial this is what this whole episode is about another great example is with tyrants you know when we're young we're taught history and we're taught about tyrants and dictators throughout history people like Stalin and Hitler and Saddam Hussein and various Roman emperors and and so forth maybe Genghis Khan and then in the history books like the way we're taught it it's so simplistic he's like oh well that person is a tyrant he was evil then he was overthrown through some revolution and then there was democracy and everybody was happy and yeah and then there was love and peace but the tyrant wasn't acting out of love or was he or was he what I want to convince you of is that all tyrants act out of love and for this I recommend you actually go and you read some in-depth biographies about Saddam Hussein about Hitler about Stalin about Mao Genghis Khan read about their childhoods read about where they came from read about their motivations what they wanted to accomplish read about their philosophy think about life from their point of view see the problem is that when we already have an advanced democracy like in the United States or in Western Europe it's very easy to look back a thousand years or look towards the Middle East for example it said I was saying you know you can look back into the Middle East recently and you could say well but you know he didn't need to be a tyrant yes he did yes he did the function he was serving in the Middle East in Iraq rallying together a smile dynamic stage purple society where there were tribes that were at each other's throats someone like Saddam Hussein was necessary some of that ruthless was necessary to unify the people and to create a peace now of course he was vicious and bloodthirsty and he was excessive and he was egotistical and his sons were we could say monsters and all this yes of course but also you have to see the bigger picture of it's like look at the look at the environment that his sons grew up in look at the environment in which he grew up and I actually I have a biography on my book list about said I'm saying it's very fascinating I loved reading that biography it goes in depth into where Saddam Hussein came from like his childhood what tribe he came from like grew up in a rural part of the of the country he was he was bullied when he was young you know he had to stand up for himself and just just to survive his childhood he had to stand up for himself against bullies and so forth you know a vicious environment most of us today can't imagine this kind of viciousness this kind of environment when we're living in such a nice part of the world you know if you grew up in some suburb in America you can't appreciate any of this you take all of that for granted so then when you see a tyrant you're like oh well he's just evil he's not just evil he's fulfilling a necessary function in that society and of course when his function is complete then he'll get overthrown but until then he's necessary and in fact you see the function that Saddam Hussein was filling in Iraq very clearly after the United States came in there and then overthrew his government you see the chaos that resulted from that and how many hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost by the overthrow Saddam Hussein but see but most people don't realize that they don't think this way they think that all well if we just overthrow Assad who sane then some nice guy will come to power and he will just be nice to people and and people be nice to him no they won't they're at such a low level of development and evolution that you need a someone like a dictator to unify those tribes the Sunnis and Shiites and you know they can't get along with each other now it doesn't mean it has to be that way in the future forever it just means that that's where they're at right now so tyranny is not an example of how there is no love in the universe it's exactly the opposite tyranny is the critical example which demonstrates the love of the universe see but you just need a very wide perspective to see it you need to realize how counterintuitive love can be it doesn't always manifest itself in this sweet lovey-dovey sort of version of love that you want if what you expect is you expect a valentine's day notion of love then yeah when you look upon the universe you will you will of course say that well leo of course there's no love in the universe of course not right because your picture of love is wrong change your picture of love how about us Imperial imperialism and the military-industrial complex people love to demonize this and they say well how how is this an example of love but it is everything is an example of love so of course it is so let's think about this you can pause the video and ask yourself how is US imperialism and the military industrial complex an example of love well these large military companies in the United States they employ tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people a lot of these people they're not fat-cat ceos of course some of them are but the majorities people are just you know hardworking people they don't even earn that much money it's secretaries its mechanics its engineers its computer programmers its accountants and these people they're not geniuses they're not awakened masters and gurus they're simple people living their simple lives you know it's like somebody works at a factory manufacturing you know landing gear for for some military drone he doesn't have any big picture understanding of how the the landing gear that he manufactures on a day to day basis when he comes into work you know he needs that job to pay for his children and to send him to college and so forth and to pay for his house he he doesn't understand the complexities of how all of this fits into like the landing gear that he makes goes into some drone then that drone gets sent by some corrupt politician to you know to bomb some some some innocent civilians in the Middle East he doesn't he can't put all those things together he's not intelligent he doesn't have enough that perspective to do that see and maybe even if he did what what would be his alternative he might live in a kind of place where he doesn't have any of the kind of job that he can get so him building this landing gear allows him to like buy groceries and Christmas gifts for his children on on Christmas Eve and then so when when his children gather around the Christmas tree in the morning on Christmas Day you know they're opening their gifts and their toys and all that do the children know that those gifts and toys were purchased by the building of landing gear for drones that that destroyed the lives of innocent civilians and they no [ __ ] idea this is what I mean by the complexity and the the the infinite scope of consciousness right see they have no idea how deep reality goes they're just enjoying their toys on Christmas Day and then this father who provided for righted these toys you know he's enjoying his children enjoying the toys and then that that's what we call the classical example of love but but where did that come from that moment of classical Valentine's Day love came from building [ __ ] landing gear and dropping multi-ton bombs on civilians in the Middle East which of course helps to / / to lower oil prices which then helps this you know the mother in this family to fuel her car to drive the children to school to drive them to - you know it's a basketball to tennis - whatever activities they need to do to drive them to the hospital when one of them gets sick and then you know to heal her children you see everything is interconnected without understanding this infinite interconnectedness of reality you will never understand what I mean by love and you will forever be at odds with reality you will be hating and judging and criticizing everything because you don't see the totality of it you don't see how everything interconnects how about the example of cancer Leo how has cancer love how has cancer not love where does cancer come from think about it pause and think about it think about how cancer is love most people who get cancer get it because of their lifestyle it's not just an accident that befalls us cancer is directly related to what we eat the chemicals we put in our food preservatives color additives the chemicals we put in our plastic bottles in our gasoline and other chemicals household stuff that we use the technology that we develop the cars and planes and all this sorts of stuff so who created this who created all these technologies who created all these chemicals well of course we did why did we create them to make a better life for ourselves why do we have gasoline why do we have cars why do we have planes why do we have cell phones why do we have a plastic bottled water why do we have McDonald's and Taco Bell why do we have fast food why do we have Gatorade and coca-cola all these drinks why do we have cigarettes that we smoke because we enjoy it we enjoy all this stuff we enjoy our greasy fast food which gives us cancer we enjoy having food that can last a long time because it's filled with preservatives so it doesn't rot within a day the way that produce tends to rot see we enjoy all these modern comforts and convenience that's love you love your ice cream and you love your fast food and you love your coca-cola and you love your car and you love your road trips which require gasoline you love plastic products you love the convenience of plastic straws and plastic forks and plastic bottles and all of this now of course you don't want to deliberately give yourself cancer but you enjoy it you enjoy all these products as a society we enjoy these products in fact these products we don't just enjoy the nice product save lives cheap food prevents people from being hungry even though that food might be full of chemicals and so forth might give you cancer in 50 years but you know what the greater urgency for for many people is not being hungry they don't care about cancer 50 years later let me just survive until next year that's what most people care about so we created it people love to smoke even though they know it's gonna give them cancer they still do it any might say well leo but if if the universe was truly loving wouldn't God create a universe where we couldn't get cancer no because actually the more loving universe is the one where you have the freedom to invent new technologies new gadgets new food new types of smoking and vaping and whatever else you want which yeah if you create stuff in a sloppy manner then you can shoot yourself in the foot and you can get cancer but see the larger love of God you might say here is that God gave humans the freedom to invent think about all the goodness that comes from being able to invent think of all the stuff that mankind has invented from the very beginning of human civilization writing machines buildings new materials metal and plastic and glass and ceramics and all of this something that was toxic some of it was radioactive some but gave you cancer but the geordie if it didn't give you cancer the majority of it works great improves our lives you know you have comfortable mattresses to sleep on beds and computer monitors don't look at all the amazing stuff we invent it most of it works quite great improves our lives saves many lives allows for billions of humans to thrive on this planet which otherwise would be impossible but you're complaining about cancer but that cancer is just an outgrowth of that freedom that we had to invent see in this way reality is radical because there's so much freedom that God gives you enough rope to hang yourself but then what people do is once they hang themselves then they blame God for giving them forgiving humans so much rope and they don't see the love of that in that see and then of course also don't overlook what cancer is at a cellular level as well again remember the love isn't just happening at one level you know we were just sort of talking about the social aspects of human evolution and human society and love in sort of in that chain of causation but then there's a like another level of causation happening simultaneously which is like the actual cells which create cancer what is that these cells have a certain type of mechanism in it you see this mechanism was necessary for you to even be here for me to even be here speaking to you and you for you to be there listening to me we both have to be biological organisms for us to be these biological organisms our cells have to be structured in such a way that they work in certain ways but also they're not perfect in the sense that they have limitations everything in reality has limitations because all form is limited so of course your cells they can start to multiply out of control if you feed them the wrong nutrients or you eat the wrong food or you think the wrong thoughts or you're overstressed or overworked or whatever it is you're doing see but don't get mad at the cells the cells have to be that way for you to even be here it's amazing that cells work as well as they do that they're able to to reproduce themselves and keep doing that for a hundred years while they keep you alive that's already amazing and there you are complaining about how how come there's cancer at all well maybe that's just one of the costs that you pay for being a human or for being a living mammal and if we restructure our environment and we remove some of the toxic chemicals and stuff as a culture then we can eliminate a large chunk of cancer now there might be still still some cancer left over some sort of you might say accidental cancer which isn't caused directly by food or other things but but even in these cases you have to understand that that's just a consequence even if the cancer is totally accidental you might wonder Oh leo how come I was cursed with this accidental cancer it was not the result of any of my didn't drink I didn't smoke I didn't eat anything bad I was perfect my whole life and I still got cancer how is that love it's still love because you have to understand that this this cellular mechanism which is responsible for you being born at all it is what it is it has its limits and maybe that means that 100,000 people will die due to improper cellular reproduction and division but look at what we get for that what we get for that is the rest of mankind so if your choice is between one and a hundred thousand people dying of accidental cancer versus not having any of mankind which are you gonna choose see when the choices like that then it's obvious that you're gonna choose mankind and a little bit of a chance of cancer you see and then also you're also overlooking the potential of what happens when you conquer your cancer how that grows you how that deepens bonds between people and so forth see so the love is happening simultaneously at all levels of reality how about the example of animal testing at first glance it seems kind of cruel that we test drugs and makeup and chemicals on various animals lab rats and so forth and am I saying oh my god it's so terrible we're so evil on the one hand yes but on the other hand what does the animal testing get you how many more people would have died if there wasn't animal testing testing various pharmaceuticals and drugs and chemicals on animals allows us to then know how it would affect humans otherwise we have to test it on humans and then humans would die or like for example say there's some new potential technology some pharmaceutical technology that might save people with Parkinson's disease or with cancer but it's far too risky to test this directly on humans because if the pharmaceutical company just tested directly on humans and one of the humans dies they'll get sued and the pharmaceutical company will just go out of business and of course then there won't be any kind of cure or medicine that could be marketed so instead the pharmaceutical company creates a lab with monkeys tested on the monkeys a couple hundred of these monkeys died in the process and that might seem very cruel and evil but on the other hand now we have a new cure for cancer for Parkinson's that will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people or improve the lives of hundreds of thousands people not just for a year but for the next 10,000 years of human development let's say so was that worth it a hundred monkeys for ten thousand years worth of improving human lives and saving human lives you see so while you might think that this scientist who's injecting this you know chemical into this rat or this monkey does he knows it's gonna kill this monkey but he's injecting it anyways you might say oh that guy is so evil and this isn't this is an example of love this is an example of hate and devilry but what I'm telling you is that that precise moment where he's injecting that chemical into that monkey that is the very the very embodiment of love if you can see it from a wide-enough perspective how about the burning of the Amazon recently in the news people have been upset about the Amazon being burned down how bad and evil this is and you know who's doing this farmers you know Brazil is not a very advanced in alt-country yet they're still struggling there are many poor farmers there it's a difficult country to live in it's a difficult country to raise your children in it's a very difficult country politically so on the one hand you can look at these burning of the Amazon you say oh this is so evil and so bad this is a counterexample - lovely oh how could burning the Amazon be love but it is precisely that it's love that's why the Amazon burns because the people who are clearing down those forests are doing it so that they could create plantations of soybeans so they can create grassland for farming cattle so they could sell those soybeans and sell that cattle and feed their children you know there's there's thousands of starving children in Brazil thousands of people struggling to make it in Brazil many of those farmers they're not millionaires and billionaires they might say only a but some of them are what about those really rich farmers or the giant corporations who are doing all this yes but those giant corporations also don't really understand what they're doing you see they don't have enough consciousness to realize that these fires are gonna lead to some sort of larger global problems they don't have enough development to understand that you do but just because you're that conscious doesn't mean that the executives of that corporation of that conscious how is it that you got so conscious but those executives aren't so conscious because you had better parents you grew up in a better country you grew up in a better situation you read the right books you stumbled upon some better YouTube channel that taught you how to meditate and all this and those executives didn't who are you blaming they're only doing the best that they know how to do all of these people were talking about at all times they're only doing the best that they know how to do given their level of consciousness they're loving in their own limited way and you're judging them for not being able to love in a bigger way that's what's happening how about cheating in a relationship can that be caused by love quite obviously it's caused by love of course this is very difficult to admit especially if you've been cheated on it seems like the opposite doesn't it if you got cheated on in a relationship it seems like leo that [ __ ] he cheated on me for some younger woman and this isn't love he was just some horny [ __ ] [ __ ] and you know he screwed up our family we had some children together and all this and he he had to go and screw it all up and how is this love but of course it's love what is it that caused him to get into a let's say a marriage with you in the first place he loved you right he was attracted to you what is it that caused him to take you on that first date and to have sex with you that first time what was that that was attraction where did that attraction come from from love he loved your body maybe he also loved your personality but then you know somewhere along the way you know the marriage deteriorated things got stale he got bored of course he's also horny and you know some some opportunity came to have sex with some other woman and so he did yeah because he loved her too that very same love that led him to to you now leads him to the girl that's love of course it's a very narrow constricted egotistical version of love highly conditional version of love but it's love it's the only love he understands it's the only love he's capable of if he was a stronger man if he was more conscious if he did yoga to purify himself and clear out his chakras you know all this sorts of stuff then maybe he could have resisted the temptation but he didn't why is that because that's where he was at that time that's what he was capable of that's the brutal truth of love now of course that's not what you want to hear that doesn't that doesn't align with your survival which is why you don't want to hear that but nevertheless this is the case and if you want to think of it even deeper here you can think of it as like um this version of love is what has led to the human race having seven billion people on the planet is this kind of love we're horny dogs both men and women we cheat on each other we dump each other we sleep around we get attracted to other people that's human reproduction and if you think about it it's been extremely successful because we're one of the most populous species on the whole planet now again it doesn't mean that it's gonna work out well for you but think of the bigger picture how about an example of a husband beating his wife could that be love of course of course it's love think about it why does the husband beat his wife because given his worldview that's the best he knows honestly that's what's going on he's not beating her because he hates her he's beating her because he loves her that's his version of showing love now you might protest you might say well he shouldn't be like that and that's evil that's wrong fine you can say all that but also before you say all that understand what leads him to do that actually trace through his history look into his history look into his psychology and ask yourself what caused him to do that because you know a person doesn't beat his wife for no reason there's there's a chain of causation that goes into that he has a bad job he drinks he's an alcoholic which of course alcoholism has a genetic component to it his own father might have beat him he might be depressed he might have a mental illness or a disorder he might have gotten bullied in school go back and look through every single factor in his life and what I'm telling you is when you understand every single factor that went into his psychology from the moment he was born up till him beating his wife today what she'll realize is that all of that had to add up to exactly what's happening right now see and that this is his way of coping with it now I'm not saying that this is necessarily the way he should do it in the future but this is what he did now and this is what led him to where he is now and that is what it is that's human psychology that's how it works human psychology is fragile if you take a human being and you beat him up when he's a kid you'd bully him you insult him you put him in a dead-end job yeah he might turn into that kind of guy who beats his wife that's human psychology but you know what that human psychology is the same human psychology which is in all of our minds and brains which runs the entire human race from the very beginning of human civilization it's that same human psychology which has allowed us to build all of human civilization and to enjoy all of the benefits of human life yeah that's reality that's the complexity of it you see it's not simple it's very complicated in fact it's infinitely complicated and it's only when you're able to take into account the full infinite complexity of reality that you're able to finally make sense of how all of it is love you can't deny that all of these things and I that I've been talking about as examples that all of these are necessary aspects of reality now you don't like them okay but they are necessary aspects of reality what she leads us to a law of the universe number three which is that everything that is is what must be and your job is to see why it's necessary and how it serves the greatest good now you have to be careful here not to confuse what I'm saying as a justification for maintaining future evil actions so what I'm saying is that if this guy is beating his wife that part is necessary because it already happened see you have to distinguish what has already happened well what's already happening right the second versus what will happen in the future now in the future he could change himself he could reform himself he could you know you can get some counseling and get some therapy he can he can do some meditation he can start to feel sorry for himself he could change his behaviors in the future all those are open possibilities but what's already happened has already happened and that is necessary that is a tautology the delusion is to think that what's already happened shouldn't have happened that's the delusion so be careful to distinguish the past from the future in this case I want you to notice that everyone is doing their best to survive in life and that all the stuff I talked about above these are nothing but examples of survival that's all it is and survival is a dirty business but then again you have to understand that without survival none of us would be here and none of the things you call love would be possible at all and this of course includes the collective egos and organizations which oftentimes we demonize you know we like to demonize oil companies and um various countries and nations and groups of people and lobbying groups and all this but all of this they're also just surviving a corporation an oil company is also just in the business of survival no different than an a lion on the savanna hunting an antelope or a child running away from his kidnapper it's all survival variations on survival so it's this complexity this infinite complexity of consciousness which hides the simplicity that all is love you see love is this infinite fractal of consciousness which is manifesting itself in all possible variations some of them quite brutal quite stark quite raw quite cruel and vicious quite brutal that's the cost of existence and that is the thing that you need to get in touch with to understand existential love but you see the problem with explaining love to humans is that these examples become so serious and so threatening that anyone who becomes a teacher of true love will be demonized for justifying evil see isn't that what you're doing with me right now as I've been giving you these examples in the back of your mind you've been thinking about Leo but how could you be justifying this it sounds like you're justifying burning the Amazon and you're justifying torturing animals and you're justifying beating wives and all this and you're justifying cheating no I'm not justifying anything but it seems that way from your perspective because the ego is just worried about you you see you want a society you want a world in which you are safe and that's all you care about you don't care about truth you don't care about actual love you care about getting your own way and getting your own way is what you've called love that is the chief delusion of the ego it doesn't even understand there can be love or truth outside of what's good for the ego because the ego self bias the egos distortion is simply that if it doesn't serve me what use does it have it has no use yeah that's the very definition of selfishness that's also by the way the very definition of devilry and that's also by the way the very thing which creates the thing that you hate because all of these examples if you hate the example or you hate the people in the example or you hate me for justifying this example it's precisely because this example is selfish but that's the exact same thing you're doing when you're criticizing these examples you see this is the distortion of self bias go check out my episode about self bias it's really difficult to teach love to humanity because humanity doesn't care about truth and as it so happens love and truth are identical so if humanity doesn't care about truth it doesn't care about love so what does humanity care about survival and of course as soon as you start teaching love and truth as absolutes to humanity this threatens their survival and humanity automatically demonizes that teacher for being a devil and that's what many people will do with me and my videos especially this one it's ironic that love true love is actually the exact opposite of some flaky new-age platitude you know a lot of times some some new-age author speaks about how we have to love the whole world and this hippie sort of idea and then they get laughed at by materialists and the pragmatists and the realist and say oh it's just you know love love the world doesn't really love on run on love that's so flaky it's so it's so wishy-washy such soft thinking it's such distorted thinking you know what is this flaky New Age hippie person even know they're not being real they're not being truthful and it's the exact opposite it's the person who is cynical about love that's the deluded one that's being untruthful because they're judging this New Age author talking about love or they're judging me talking about love from the position of love being this sappy sweet ego pleasing thing so yeah from that perspective the world doesn't run on love but that's not real love that's fake love that's the fake love of the materialist the irony is that it's the materialist who has a flaky sentimental emotional sappy ridiculous version of love and so then yeah when we have a conversation about love the materialist projects his own flakiness onto the conversation and then can't understand how reality could be love that is materialism shooting itself in the foot real love is as serious as cancer as serious as genocide as serious as rape that's real love but you see the materialist wants nothing to do with that kind of love the materialist wants to talk about love theoretically as a theory as philosophy but then when you get into your actual everyday survival all the sudden love flies out the window nobody cares about love when it comes to your daily sir Videl when it comes to your daily survival it's survival at all costs and it's that thing that needs to be transformed that attachment to survival at all costs at the cost of truth at the cost of unconditional love it's that which is ruining your life it's that which needs to change and it's that thing which you least want to change which is why you don't even want to have this conversation which is why you misinterpret and misunderstand everything I'm saying here you see because what I'm saying here is way too threatening and way too real you want this to be some flaky new-age platitude filled video where I tell you that love is happiness and joy and all this that's what you want as a materialist because then you can stick to your materialist idea that all the universe is just it's it's just you know you can be the cynic and you could say all the universe is just it's indifferent it's cruel there is no God I don't know but if you have to accept that the universe is love if you have to accept that this is what God is if you have to accept that God is cancer and genocide and rape and torture and husband's beating wives and cheating and all of this if you have to accept that that's too much for you you see that would mean you'd have to actually grow and change something beyond philosophy something beyond Theory beyond ideology and that's the last thing you want to do is to change in that way that would be real growth but you don't want that because you want to keep being a devil you want to keep being selfish see the most threatening thing I could tell you is to convince you to become selfless is to make you so conscious that your selfishness becomes unsustainable and the more you listen to me the more conscious you become of how selfish you have been your whole life and now all of your survival strategies whether it's within relationships within earning money within your career within your business within everything you do all of your survival strategies how selfish and limited all of that has been and how foolish you've been and how much growth you have to do and how difficult it's gonna be to change all that that's the last thing you want to hear see so this is why people ridicule and act cynical when it comes to love because real love this is this is the most serious and the most truthful pursuit I want you to contemplate especially these two critical questions number one how is survival crucial to love and number two how is devilry crucial to love right those two down and contemplate them contemplate them for for weeks for months for years contemplate them for the rest of your life this is part of your work because if you cannot reconcile survival with love and devilry with love you will forever be in an adversarial relationship with reality and you will forever not understand evil see you need to start to see evil as love until you do you're not really growing notice that without survival nothing could exist there could not be any human life there could not be happiness without a foundation of survival and of course devilry is just another word for survival destruction death suffering killing pain these are all necessary to life as much as you may not like them not liking stuff is also necessary to life that's part of your survival hating stuff is a survival function so you're not gonna transcend hate by hating some more you transcend hate by realizing that everything is love including hate once your love extends even to hate then you have transcended hate but leo you're making a mockery of God here you are talking about God saying that God loves evildoers no you are making a mockery of God by saying that God hates any aspect of itself how weak is your God if your God needs to hate anything hatred is a hallmark of low consciousness activity so you would have God be some low consciousness being you see if you had your way you would have God be a devil of course in your image you know there's this quote that I like which says something along the lines of if if triangles had a God their God would have three sides well if humans had a God their God would be a devil that's what your God is your God is a devil if your God hates your God it's a devil not real God real God doesn't hate real God is infinite love real God has infinite self-acceptance and self-love because how could God hate itself to hate itself God would need to be unconscious to certain aspects of itself it would need to deny aspects of itself it would need to deny aspects that it created because it created everything if it created everything how could it hate its creation it's almost like you're asking God to hate its own children infinite consciousness means that you're conscious that you're everything which means that there's nothing other than you nothing separate from you nothing which you didn't create which means that if you hated some aspect of reality you would literally be hating yourself which just would be foolishness the only way you can hate yourself or some aspect of reality is if you're not conscious of it but God is infinite consciousness so we can't hate it self self-hatred is only possible at less than infinite consciousness here's a universal law number 4 for you your love is directly proportional to your level of consciousness the more conscious you are the more love you have the more you accept yourself the more you accept others because you recognize that the distinction between yourself and other is imaginary and so a central aspect of this work that we're doing is we're raising our consciousness of course but also we're increasing our self love and our self acceptance and in so doing we end up loving the whole world and in this way is how we conquer evil evil is not something God created evil is something that occurs when your consciousness is less than infinite so you might wonder well why did God create consciousness which is less than infinite precisely because infinite consciousness must include all finite aspects of consciousness as well infinite consciousness means unlimited consciousness unlimited consciousness means limited consciousness it goes full circle love means hatred the hatred you find in the world is not a counter example to God's love it is the very epitome of God's love it's because God's love is infinite that people hate you get that but leo isn't that dangerous this whole conversation seems like you could just use love to justify any kind of evil you want you can cheat on your wife you can beat your wife you can burn the rainforest you can drop bombs on people and it's all for love yeah love is utterly radical and love is totally free that's freedom what you're running into here now is freedom absolute freedom it wouldn't be absolute love unless it was absolute freedom unless it allowed for evil see God is so selfless that he allows you to be as selfish as you want love is so inclusive that it includes evil love must allow for self-deception love must allow for ignorant love must allow for selfish justification love must allow for devilry the devil exists precisely because of the magnitude of God's love that's the paradigm of course it must be this way because of the soft reference problem and because of the nature of oneness and non duality the nature of infinity these sorts of paradoxes are the direct result of everything being one this is what this is what God is see it's not a problem for God but it is a problem for you as a human so how do you escape this problem by realizing that you're not really a human but that you're God when you realize that you are God then you escape this whole problem because you start to accept everything that you are without judgment including the devilry the ignorance the self-deception the selfishness the justifications all the games that people play now you might wonder below what is the use of love when it accepts everything this isn't practical that's right truth goes beyond practicality it's prior to practicality remember that practicality is survival so I'm not saying any of this is practical per se I'm just saying that it's true this work is not about practicality this work is about truth the catch-22 is that if you're preoccupied all the time with practicality that means you're stuck in survival mode when you're stuck in survival mode that means all you care about is yourself and you're being selfish when you're being selfish you're always scared you're never satisfied because you're always looking towards the future for how to improve your situation and in this way you become like a mouse in a wheel running round and round chasing your own tail for the rest of your life and you're never satisfied with anything and you never establish any sense of peace or groundedness in your life that's what practicality leads you to whereas if you transcend practicality and you go for truth and for love then what happens is that you can escape that whole rat race and you can find true peace and true joy so again the practical and the impractical also goes full circle by chasing practicality what ends up happening is that in the end it becomes very impractical your life becomes very impractical and dysfunctional whereas if you chase the impractical which is truth let's say then once you do find it it becomes very practical because it transforms your entire perspective of of a reality that duality between practical and impractical was never as separate as you thought see the problem with God is that God has so much love that no finite being can handle it it's like God is trying to share its love with you all the time but us humans were so terrified by the enormity and gravity of what love is of what infinite love is that we're always running away and we call it evil you see this delicious irony you can't appreciate infinity because you're a finite being you're identified with being a finite being so of course how can you appreciate infinite love you can't you've demonized demonized it in your mind and we've demonized it in our culture every time you judge or criticize evil what you're doing is you're rejecting God's love you're rejecting yourself you're hating yourself because all hatred all judgment is self-hatred and self-denial imited finite being but God is an infinite being so every time you try to eliminate you distort it you falsify it and you only deepen your problem the solution to being a finite being is not to take God and make it finite to match you but rather to realize that oh I'm finite there's something beyond me something infinite let me expand myself to infinity so that I could go up to God you see the mistake of a devil is trying to drag down God to his level that's what people are constantly trying to do because otherwise you can't handle infinite love it's too much it's too it's too good it's too powerful you would it would dissolve your limited human identity and you've called that death you've literally called God death and you've spent your whole life running away from it and now you wonder why you're so confused and why your life is so dysfunctional and and why the world is going to hell why everything is so crazy well it's because everybody is just like you everybody is trying to demonize God and run away from it and that's why mankind is so confused about this topic of God you know it's been thousands of years that teachers have been coming to mankind trying to explain to Matt cotton to mankind what love is what God is and mankind kept rejecting it and misunderstanding it why does this keep happening it's too radical it's too much mankind isn't ready to understand it yet you see and of course because these teachers and God itself is selfless they don't want to push it upon you you have to come to God you have to come to love love can't be pushed upon you you have to be wise enough and conscious enough to to accept it for yourself to be interested in for yourself that's the tragedy of this whole thing called life and this contributes and even deepens the love even further when you realize how tragic it is that for the last 5000 years the history of mankind has been mankind rejecting God's love over and over and over and over and over again leading to the deaths of thousands and millions and hundreds of millions of people to torture to suffering to rape to all this when you realize all this and you realize uh-huh that is God's love that's when it hits you that's when you really understand see God has been trying to reach out to you with this love your whole life but you've been too scared you've been running away from it because you're a finite being and of course it couldn't be otherwise it's a it's a totally necessary and it's a perfect tautology this is what love is this is what reality is is what truth is this is what consciousness is what is the connection between love and absolute freedom they're identical how so well absolute love has no restrictions so it has no need to change anything it accepts everything exactly as it is so you might wonder well why didn't God create a better universe the answer is because God loves it exactly how it is the question really is why do you hate the universe as it is why don't you change your perspective so that you love it exactly as it is so rather than you wanting God to change the universe how about you surrender yourself and realize that the universe is perfect how about that oh no Leo I don't want to do that well there's your problem there's your problem people don't appreciate how scary true freedom is total freedom total freedom means that consciousness explores itself to infinity into every nook and cranny that means consciousness will explore the Holocaust conscious will explore rape consciousness will explore murder conscious will explore cannibalism consciousness will explore incest consciousness will explore burning the Amazon conscious will explore greed and theft and slavery all of this conscious will explore all of itself all of itself until it's complete until it's total until its one it will not reject anything of itself that's God's point of view now you might wonder well why would God be loving because it's infinite intelligence because it's selfless because it has no needs it needs nothing it fears nothing so what do you do when you're infinitely intelligent infinitely conscious totally selfless you have no needs you have no fears that is the very definition of love imagine if you were a being like that what would you do you have no needs there would only be one thing worth doing at that point and that is to radiate love that's the only thing because you have nothing you need and you're too conscious to hate yourself see consciousness and love are identical you can't have one without the other let's do a little thought experiment a little visualization exercise for you to start to wrap your mind around what the love of God really is I want you to bring to mind what it's like to be you and to have lived your life think about your whole life as a totality think about all the different aspects of your life that you've loved and enjoyed think about being yourself do you love yourself do you love being you hopefully you do or at least at some points in your life you felt that way where you just thought to yourself man it's really nice to be me I love being me bring that to mind now imagine that sense of your whole life you know everything that defines you in your life your body all the stuff that's happened to you all of your memories everything your humanity even your biology all of it think of all that and imagine letting all of that go so that you completely stop being you and now imagine that you become some other person imagine that you become a crippled or a disabled person in a wheelchair imagine you become an ugly person and now as you become a mentally [ __ ] person imagine you become a murderer imagine you become a rapist imagine you become a cannibal imagine you become a tyrant or a dictator imagine you become a feminist imagine you become some alright white nationalist imagine you become a thief imagine you become a greedy criminal CEO who does white-collar crime and now imagine totally loving all of that without any exception whatsoever without even flinching having the courage to want to explore all of those possibilities of consciousness without any fear or resistance notice if there's any fear or resistance like I I don't want to be a thief I don't want to be some nationalist white nationalist I don't want to be some rapist that would be bad or I don't want to be some ugly person that would be bad I don't want to be a disabled person that would let all of that resistance go imagine yourself being so selfless and so free as a consciousness so unattached to your own body and to your own mind your own beliefs to your own preferences and ideas and wants you're so totally selfless that you don't even have any personal desires other than to experience everything you could possibly become that is God that is the love of God that desire for total freedom and total selflessness that complete desire to explore every possibility of what consciousness could be that is God and that is precisely how you were born how do you think you got here it's not because your parents [ __ ] it's because God wanted to explore all of the possibilities of consciousness of which your parents and you were but one instance and it's only because God's love was so infinite that they wanted to explore every possibility of consciousness that in it end up exploring all of life therefore imagining all of life therefore creating all of life therefore having all of this be here including your life the one that you're attached to the one that used so much love see that's really truly how everything was created it wasn't through natural selection it wasn't really through evolution it wasn't through physics it wasn't through anything it was through God's pure desire to explore every aspect of what consciousness is because God is an infinite mind therefore it had to literally imagine every thing that consciousness could imagine of which this very moment right here are you sitting there listening to me and me sitting here talking to you this very moment right now is being imagined right now by God because this is what God is because this is the very manifestations of God's love for itself for consciousness and that's why we're here right now having this talk God is talking and God is listening and God is imagining all of this right here tah-dah notice that all of this could only be possible through total selflessness non judgment and total self-acceptance so it's only because God is completely selfless that it was able to create this it's God's selflessness that allows you to be selfish it's because God was so selfless that it was willing to explore and to imagine what selfishness was that selfishness was created it's because God was so selfless that God imagined itself to be a devil and that's what you're sitting there being you're sitting there being a devil you're God being a devil now you might wonder but Leo if everything is love then how do I know how to be a good person because I can't distinguish now you know before I thought that like hitting someone over the head was bad and that was hate hateful and then giving someone a gift that that was love but now you're saying even hitting someone over the head is love so that now how do i distinguish what to do and the way you do that is by being conscious it's very simple just be conscious and also surrender your fears and your personal needs if you can do these three things you will never be an evil person you will automatically be a good person just be conscious surrender all your fears surrender all your personal needs notice that strips you free of all of your devilry of course easier said than done there are a few huge misconceptions here that I want to clear up first of all the misconception is that love means that nothing violent should happen in reality no that's not true love violence is something you need to learn to love violence is something you need to learn to see as a manifestation of love not to try to turn everything into a peaceful sort of hippie utopia that's a mistake another big misconception is that if you embody love then you must act in a certain loving manner this is also false you can embody love but you don't have to necessarily act in a particular way in fact you can be ruthless sometimes in fact sometimes you have to be ruthless to manifest love sometimes you have to do something difficult sometimes you have to make hard brutal decision which might involve many lives you don't always have to be smiling you don't always have to be kissing and hugging throw this silly idea out of your mind you don't always have to be in a good loving mood sometimes you can be pissed off you can be angry in all of that allow yourself to have a full range of emotions don't just try to turn yourself into some sort of happy love robot rather realize that when you're in your car and you're pissed to offer angry at somebody for some silly reason realize that that is a form of love it's contracted full of love but realize that that's that too is love and that will counter-intuitively help you to sort of break free of it love can be expressed in a million different ways in fact love is expressed not in a million different ways but in an infinite number of ways so be careful about limiting how love must be expressed for it to be love the ego will want to jump in there and say oh well that thing over there that doesn't count as a true expression of love and that doesn't count as a true expression of love because you didn't say I love you to me and because you didn't hug me and because you weren't smiling at me and because you weren't being kind to me therefore you're not loving and therefore this isn't true love Dada itself is ego right there so be careful with that trap it takes total selflessness to accept the unlimited multiplicity of love and all the forms that it comes in love as an absolute love with a capital L another big misconception is that if you embody love then you can't enforce boundaries and you must be a doormat and everyone can walk all over you and they can abuse you and exploit you know make sure you don't get that wrong that is not what I'm saying I'm not saying that you you let your husband beat you if you're an abusive relationship or you let your boss exploit you or you let somebody you know feve from you and you don't stand up to them know oftentimes love means the courage to stand up to a bully the courage to enforce a boundary the courage to create a conflict which goes back to the point about violence sometimes you got to be a little bit violent in your speech or even physically now I don't of course condone physical violence against people I would leave that as like a very very last resort but you know what the reality is is that violence is an aspect of reality if it wasn't there wouldn't be any violence right learning how to enforce your boundaries is important and in fact sometimes the most loving thing you can do in a relationship is to enforce a boundary by calling someone out for trying to exploit you or for being abusive or calling out someone's gaslighting of you this is an especially important point for you ladies and your intimate relationships a lot of women can get to me about enforcing boundaries and then this lets men exploit them so be careful about that and then the woman rationalizes in her mind of like oh well but I love him you're falling into the trap of too much thinking of love as a feminine sort of lovey dovey thing whereas you're failing on the masculine dimension of love it's very important that women learn the masculine dimension of love and it's very important that men learn the feminine dimension of love you need to balance both of those two out if you have too much of one but not enough of the other then you're gonna be out of balance and dysfunctional and then that's when problems arise you need to use the right one for the right context and situation it's very contextual ultimately I want you to get to a point in your life where something horrible is gonna happen with reality maybe you're looking through the news you see some horrible thing on the news or even some some horrible thing happens in your personal life and usually when you would recoil and you would get angry and upset about it and you would start to criticize somebody or judge reality or judge God for allowing this I want you to get to a point where you instead you realize oh this horror is the very essence of love this horror doesn't diminish love reality it actually heightens the love the horror makes it more real it makes it more raw it means that I have to be stronger the horror strengthens me it tests my love it tests how much my consciousness can accept and then when that happens and then you see at horn you say oh my god I finally understand I finally under the horror is God ah I see it now that's the moment I want you to reach but that'll probably take a lot of work and so to help you to get there I have a little worksheet go down below the video click the link there will be a link to a worksheet the worksheet will list maybe 20 different examples or so of horrible things that I want you to think about to visualize and contemplate and then I want you to actually write out in that worksheet for each one of those things how this horrible thing isn't actually an example of love and actually increases the love of the universe rather than decreases it so that's gonna be your assignment try to actually do it do it on paper actually write it out this will help you and then in the future I'm gonna have some more videos about love we're still not done with this topic there's more to say I'm gonna have one about fear versus love we still have a lot to talk about when it comes to fear because fear is the chief obstacle to love I'll help you figure that out and I'll also talk about some exercises some further exercises for how to actually practice being more loving and then you will become the love master the love Lord you really got to understand that all of my teachings really are about love helping you to actualize love in a radical way because there's really nothing else worth teaching and that's really where all of my teachings have been leading from the very beginning of course it wasn't always explicitly stated as such and you got to really get deep into the teachings before you start to see how everything interconnects and you gotta sort of have awakening experiences and of course it's extremely important that you have at least one awakening into the existential nature of love you have to become conscious of what love is otherwise what I'm talking about here is just gonna sound like empty philosophy it's gonna sound like some sort of hippie platitudes and so forth so that's important but all of my teachings going forward I want you to see them even if I'm talking about a topic where I don't even mention the word love like if I'm talking about life purpose or I'm talking about improving your nutrition or I'm talking about relating in a more conscious way to somebody or communicating or being a good leader I'm just talking about ways of being more loving without necessarily explicitly saying so or when we're talking about politics we're really talking about how to love the science of love this is a much neglect ectopic a much neglected domain that they don't teach you in school or in university of course and now you understand why because it's very radical and because it requires some serious awakening to appreciate all right that's it I'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that is my website you'll find the blog where I'm gonna post some examples of love for you check those out you'll find the forum you'll find the life purpose course you'll find the book list where I have some book books about love I have biographies that will help you to to study some of these tyrants and dictators that will show you how they act out of love and the last thing that I want to remind you of is that Awakening is not some dry cold heartless rationalist stoic pursuit the way that often Zen portrays it to be it's easy to get that misunderstanding that by becoming enlightened you're just gonna become immune you're gonna become like this terminator without any emotions and that this is supposed to be like the ultimate state that you're gonna reach and then and then you know in that picture yeah if you have that picture then where does love fit in it doesn't in that picture fortunately that's not how it works at all for many of you I suggest replacing that image with the exact opposite imagine awakening making you softer making you not less human but more human more coming from your heart more emotional deeper into feeling deeper into suffering and appreciating pain and and caring more that's sort of the paradox of it yes of course there will also be a dry cold stoic aspect to it as well it's really not one or the other it's both we're sort of unifying the masculine Zen approach with the more feminine you could call it the sort of Christian heart-centered approach or combining the two together and I think that that's personally for me that's that's a much more juicy path and a juicy way to do this work then just the the cold stoic Harless Zen approach you