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[Music] what is spirituality I want to explore this question especially from the perspective of someone who is scientifically minded rationally minded atheistic and would otherwise consider spirituality to be something woowoo and something irrational and something not worthy of serious study or consideration you know I was that way not too long ago as little as five years ago if I saw a video or a book that mentioned spirituality I would immediately skip on to the next thing because in my mind I knew the spirituality was just a label for this entire domain of fantastical and imaginary things which don't really exist which have nothing to do with science and rationality and therefore not worthy of serious consideration so I just skip it I was very averse to this word in fact I hated this word for a very long time for most of my life until I did more personal development work and things changed for me and I realized what spirituality really means and so I want to help you to wrap your mind around that so this is the no [ __ ] guy to spirituality why does the word spirituality exist at all what is it pointing to this word is pointing to something and it's pointing to something more than just a fictional realm of fairy tale creatures and biblical stories that's not quite what spirituality is in fact I hated this word spirituality so much that when I went through life coach training around five years ago and I graduated I got my certificate and I started to coach clients one-on-one start and make a little bit of money doing that and one of the first tools or assessments that they give you when you go through this Coast training is called the Wheel of Life and I would give this tool to new clients that I took on and basically it was just a simple assessment to help clients understand where they are in their life and maybe where they need some more work in their life some more personal development work and the way it worked was there like eight spokes on this wheel each spoke corresponding to a different domain or facet of someone's life so it might include family relationships sexuality maybe career business health and fitness yada yada yada and finally there was one spoke called spirituality I didn't like the word or concept of spirituality so much that I actually created my own wheel of life where I removed the spirituality spoke and replaced it with something else so that's how much I didn't like this word I was very averse because I was an atheist for most of my life so what does spirituality really mean a much better word and in fact I wish I had used this word in my past episodes more is metaphysics metaphysics metaphysics is actually synonymous and identical with spirituality these are the same pursuit of course most people don't understand that this is the same pursuit and of course metaphysics itself has taken on a lot of negative connotations in the way that spirituality has so for an atheistic aliy minded rationally minded scientifically minded person the word spirituality has a negative connotation in the sense that it's referring to an imaginary domain of wishful thinking and the word metaphysics also has a negative connotation because science split itself off from metaphysics maybe two or three hundred years ago historically speaking in the West and so now when a scientist hears the word metaphysics in their mind that refers to all sorts of abstract speculations about things which are unempioyed in which you can't possibly know and so that also supposedly refers to some imaginary domain of things that can't be tested or falsified and therefore have no practical value and are of no value to serious scientific inquiry now this is a very wrong notion of what metaphysics is that's not what metaphysics is what metaphysics really is is an investigation into the fundamental nature of existence and what differentiates metaphysics from science is that science actually stays mostly on the surface it questions physical phenomena and it tries to go out there and measure it and to quantify it and to put it into forms of equations and theories and so forth and that's all good there's nothing wrong with that but metaphysics is something deeper metaphysics is actually asking about the substance of things it's asking about what things really are it's asking questions like why does existence exists why is there something rather than nothing where did it come from and how could it have even arisen in the first place and what is energy what is matter what are atoms what are quarks if those are the things you think the universe is made out of or what is information what is it really not an equation don't give me an equation what is it really what is the equation what is the thought what is the brain what is the body what does matter what is physicality what is time what is space they're really deep questions now the mistake people make the mistake many scientifically-minded people make is they think well Leo that's all nice and good you can sit around and navel gaze all you want and you can philosophize til the cows come home but you'll never answer any of these questions really because these are meaningless questions sure they're entertaining to think about sometimes I like to think about them but really nobody can answer these questions human beings have been asking these questions for thousands of years we haven't made any progress and there's no empirical way to answer these questions and so therefore they're not objective questions they're not within the domain of science and so we shouldn't take them seriously it's just a waste of time but notice that that position right there is actually a truth claim and moreover it's a it's a claim you're making without actually having done the inquiry so actually what you're doing is you're making a none empirical unscientific claim when you dismiss metaphysics because to actually truly be able to say that metaphysics is useless and that it cannot be resolved what you would actually have to do if you wanted to be scientific and empirical is you would have to go and explore every single corner of the universe and every single thought everything every single philosophical system every single tool that's out there you'd have to explore all of that and only after that if you failed to make any progress only then could you perhaps conclude in a scientific and empirical way that metaphysics is not worth your time only then only after you've scoured the entire universe but of course those people who denounced metaphysics have never even bothered to take any of these questions very seriously let alone have scoured the entire universe looking for answers so already noticed that already there's a deep contradiction in trying to dismiss matific metaphysics from a scientific perspective because the dismissal itself is unscientific and unimpaired chol the truth is you don't know whether metaphysics is really worth your time or whether these questions can be resolved who knows maybe they can be you don't know until you've actually explored it so spirituality contrary to what many people think is not religion and it's not fairy tales and myths and this sort of stuff it's actually metaphysics it's a very serious pursuit it's the deeper pursuit than science now again if to be very careful here and make sure that you don't conflate spirituality with religion it's a very common trap that scientifically-minded people fall into there are many problems with religion I am no fan or defender of religion there's a lot of corruption in it and a lot of falsehood and a lot of delusion in it but that does not mean that it's the same thing as spirituality or metaphysics here's an initial stab at defining what metaphysics is metaphysis or sorry well spirituality the same thing really what spirit what spirituality is it's developing a deep metaphysical connection to reality developing a deep metaphysical connection to reality but what does that mean you might think Oh Leo you're just being airy-fairy and wishy-washy here and saying nice platitudes but what does it really mean to develop a deep metaphysical connection to reality well I'll tell you exactly what it means I mean a very specific thing the problem though is to get you to understand what I mean because the whole problem with spirituality and metaphysics is that we are talking about abstract things things which are not commonly experienced by most people living a mundane ordinary life so we're sort of going outside the domain of ordinary experience and that makes it difficult to talk about but because our entire language and our entire culture mostly talks about things that are within our mundane domains of experience so what I really mean by this deep metaphysical connection is I mean a connection to the wonder of existence itself to the wonder of nature and actually if you're a fan of science and you're a fan of deep inquiry empirical inquiry to the nature of reality then you should be actually quite familiar with this sense of wonder that I'm talking about let me give you some examples for example when you're out in nature perhaps at a national park and you're looking at some beautiful sunset over the mountains and it's amazing it's wonderful and during that moment your consciousness feels like it's elevated and you feel this sense of wonder I don't just mean a feeling a good feeling or a good emotion I mean something deeper I mean that you're actually connecting to the profundity of a distance itself and also to its beauty but again not in a superficial way of like oh that's a beautiful picture but I mean you're connecting to something within existence itself that strikes you as beautiful as awesome as wondrous as mysterious you connect to it or when you look up at the stars and if you're scientifically minded you know how many stars there are you know the estimates you know how many billions of galaxies and billions of star systems and billions of planets and all of this and you think about that as you're looking up at the sky and it just gives you a sense of awe and wonder and again which are connecting to there is that metaphysical connection of profundity you're starting to sense that there's something about existence which is way deeper than we conventionally talk about or think about in our everyday lives or for example if you're looking at the beauty of biology like if you're looking at a cell under a microscope and you look at that and you wonder and you think my god look at what's going on in that cell it's incredible the complexity of it the beauty of it or maybe you're looking at some physics formulas or some mathematical equations and the beauty of it strikes you the way that it does many physicists and mathematicians or you're looking at some art some fine art in a museum or whatever strikes your fancy and you can't you connect with the beauty of that or maybe even perhaps with the beauty of music of a really well composed artistic type of song or tune or even those of you who are video gamers out there you know you ever pick up a video game that you've been waiting for for a long time it's one of these epic triple-a titles some sort of massive open world RPG next generation amazing graphics amazing everything and you pop that thing in and you're you're looking through this world you're inside this game world for the first five or ten minutes and it's like amazing graphics amazing details amazing physics amazing art amazing everything you're just kind of walking through this new universe and you're looking at it all and it's breathtaking it's amazing that's more than just a game that's happening there again what's happening is that you're somehow connecting to something deeper something more beautiful more profound and that's the whole appeal of playing those types of games or sometimes maybe you go to one of those epic movies I know I get this when I go to an epic movie I don't go to movies that often anymore but when I did when I was younger I would go to a movie like I'm thinking something like Braveheart one of these you know epic or war movies maybe Saving Private Ryan or something like that and you watch the whole film and the beauty of one of these type of films is that it puts you after you walk out of the theater puts you in a certain state of mind it gets you thinking about the human condition and what's really going on and why are we here and how does it work like this and why is there so much suffering in the world and this source of stuff or maybe one of these kind of twisted movies like The Matrix with [ __ ] with your mind and [ __ ] with your sense of reality or a movie like Inception you know these kinds of movies they put you in a certain frame of mind that's what I'm talking about for those next 30 minutes as you're walking out of the movie theater you have that metaphysical connection or maybe you're a fan of space exploration maybe you're into NASA and you're into following all the latest NASA news how they're sending up satellites and Rovers to different planets and you're looking at the pictures that are being sent back for Mars and from the different asteroids that are being explored and all of that maybe you even have dreams sometimes of flying out into space like some of these millionaires and billionaires like to do and maybe you watch one of these space movies where you see someone flying through space and you see some beautiful Vista of the planet Earth and it's amazing and you look down upon the earth and you see oh my God look where look at where mankind has come in the last few thousand years and it's it's incredible that feeling of wonder with being in space why are we so interested in space travel as a race precisely because it connects us to something higher within us humanity then sees itself not just as a as a bunch of ants running around on the planet trying to survive try to [ __ ] eat and kill each other but there's something more to life right there's something higher and in fact that's why people become astronauts that's why people work really hard to become scientists they work for decades they work for decades to becoming astronauts and they're they're really serious about this because that's why they became a scientist in the first place because there's something about the pursuit of understanding which is essentially what science is its investigation of reality to understand what it really is but you know there's sort of like shallow levels of science and deeper levels of science the deeper levels of signs are the ones that actually connect you with this deep metaphysical spiritual connection and of course many scientists would admit this but now here is where they make the mistake is they say Oh leo well you're right I mean you're right I do have this emotional connection to my scientific work and I do I do wonder about the Stars and I do enjoy the sunsets and all this and you know I am a human being I'm not a robot but Leo I mean in the end aren't these just feelings isn't that what you're talking about yeah the sense of mystery and awe sure scientists get it but why why are you now jumping to spirituality there's no spirits here where where's the spirit in all this here's the thing what you're experiencing in all these examples that I gave you is you're experiencing a point zero zero zero zero one percent dilution of true spirituality it's a little taste a tiny tiny tiny tiny taste like if you took one little grain of sugar and you dropped it on your tongue and you barely felt something that's what you're getting there and what true spirituality is is really cranking up that connection until you got a really strong stream of it hitting you all the time such that it can no longer be ignored and it's not something that happens to you randomly accidentally sporadically because if you're honest for most people even for scientists and so forth even for philosophical people this kind of metaphysical connection that I was talking about with these various examples it happens very rarely it happens like less than 1% of your life like way less it happens point point zero zero zero zero zero one percent like extremely rare maybe maybe a handful of times throughout the year you experience this but most of the time you're just utterly sucked into mundane ordinary dull grindy experience of everyday life and what I'm telling you spirituality is about it's about taking that little minuscule amount of this connection that you get and amplifying it such that you feel it all the time such that you're always connected to the profundity of existence without having to rely on any kind of external stimulation like a particular beautiful sunset or some movie or some new video game or something you see in a biology class under a microscope right because those are rare experiences you can't maintain them all the time but the fact is that you do exist so it is actually possible to develop this connection to the profundity of your existence at all times of course the rationalists the scientists here will still be very adamant and deny that what I'm saying here is of any real significance and they will say leo but I mean I hear you but aren't you just kind of romanticizing this aren't you just talking about emotions and feelings what does this have to do with reality this has nothing to do with the truth this has nothing to do with with you know the hard facts these are just feelings and surely oh I mean you could I grant you you could delude yourself with all sorts of fantastical ideas about your connection to physical reality and sure I even grant you Leela you could make yourself feel happier and and better and and maybe maybe you'll enjoy your life more but it's not gonna be true you're just filling your mind with all sorts of ideas and all you're doing is like positive wishful thinking and what I care about is the truth the hard objective truth which has nothing to do with feelings nothing to do with with with Wonder and awe and magic and mystery no no no it's just hard facts man hard facts like give me a spreadsheet of hard logical facts and and I'll be good and I don't care how I feel about it but of course this is extremely myopic what you're saying here because your life is utterly utterly utterly governed by your feelings not by facts and in fact your insistence on facts over feelings is itself grounded in feelings not facts you see everything you do in your life is utterly controlled by your feelings including your pursuit of science and your insistence on rationality you are irrational about your insistence and clinging to rationality that's the irony of what you're doing this deep metaphysical connection sure it manifests itself as a feeling but you have to look at where the feeling is coming from and why is the rising in the first place and that has nothing to do with feelings or sentimentality that has to do with how conscious you are of the ultimate truth of reality and answering these various metaphysical existential questions the more conscious you become the more amazed you become at just what reality and existence are and that is what fills you with this sense of awe and profundity and that's the reason why when you're doing scientific aspects pleurae ssin if you're mathematician and you're exploring there is formulas if you're physicist and you're studying various formulas it's when you really probe the nature of reality deeply with your mind that you start to have insights and these insights are what give you that sense of of beauty and profundity and those insights that is you approaching closer and closer to the absolute truth so what spirituality is about it's not about filling your mind with fantastical ideas it's actually the exact opposite of that it's removing all the ideas you presently have about reality questioning them so much that you deconstruct everything that you think and believe reality is until what you're left with is the raw objective so to speak truth and that is what blows your mind and what you discover is that actually the reason I wasn't awed by reality this whole time but only though during those rare moments was because my mind was filled with all sorts of garbage ideas for example like the idea of facts over feelings the idea of an objective external reality the idea of materiality and various other metaphysical presumptions that materialist science makes it's because I had all of those beliefs that were blocking me from the truth when you really get to the truth it's gonna be extremely profound and it's gonna shock and awe you and while you're sitting there and you're pooh-poohing all this and saying all the others are just feelings that's actually you filling your mind with fantastical ideas so it's exactly the opposite of what you think it is and spirituality is about developing this connection have you ever done philosophical inquiry this is the appeal of philosophy to is to do this inquiry into the nature of things and it can be profound it doesn't have to be religious or spiritual per se you can just do philosophical inquiry and the reason that's appealing to you if it is is because you're connecting with the profundity of existence in one fashion or another these are little hints and clues the problem is that people misunderstand what these clues are really pointing to they think that uh just some feelings bla bla bla no these are just the tips of some giant icebergs that you can go track down and spirituality is about tracking those down to the very bottom to see what there is and that certainly puts a different perspective on spirituality doesn't it all the sudden spirituality is not about worshipping somebody reading some Bible praying to some God thinking about some man sitting up in the clouds or any of this nonsense it's not about going to church it's not about rituals any of this it's about deep metaphysical questioning and connection to reality philosophy really is equivalent to spirituality these two are really identical in the West a lot of modern academic philosophers have completely lost touch with this they forgot that the aim of philosophy was actually truth with a capital T the search for the absolute the answer to what is reality why does it exist how come there is something rather than nothing how is knowledge possible what is the substance of everything what is time with a space and so forth this is the essence of philosophy not writing papers and debating about technical academic minutia and there's a long rich history of philosophers who have undertaken this enquire and have actually arrived at the absolute I'm talking about people like anaxagoras Anaximander Heraclitus Socrates Pierrot Epictetus platanus Spinoza Bishop Berkeley Hegel and others and then we're just talking about the Western philosophical tradition here that's a small list what do all these people have in common well basically they were all idealists not materialist idealism is spirituality idealism is what connects you to the ultimate nature of existence of course not idealism as a philosophy and his idea but as an actual connection so that's the next thing that people misunderstand about philosophy about metaphysics and about spirituality is that they think that all it is is just beliefs Leo you're just filling your mind with beliefs and making yourself feel good no no no no no you don't understand it's the opposite you're removing all your beliefs by removing the beliefs that's what's connecting you more and more to the metaphysical nature of the truth the truth is not accessed through beliefs it's accessed directly because it's the truth it's the truth therefore it exists so it is accessible a mistake that many materialists again make is that they think that Leo the truth can't be accessed directly yeah we can have formulas and models about it but we can't access it directly after all we're human beings and we have a perceptual system we have a brain and a mind and so therefore that's creating various kinds of distortions and delusions and so we never have direct access to the truth after all how would you possibly know if you ever did come upon the truth but again watch out because that's an assumption you can't know whether the truth is directly accessible or not until you make a serious effort at accessing it and if you do what you'll discover is that it actually is and that's something that a lot of philosophers in Western in the West intellectual tradition have misunderstood for example cot Emanuel can't make a distinction between new mana and phenomena and he said that we can access phenomena but we can't access the noumenon the noumenon is the truth in and of itself it's like we have access to appearances Bollea we don't have access to the absolute truth yes we do but it takes some work and it's tricky and it's counterintuitive it means you have to go beyond beliefs you have to go beyond symbols you have to go beyond models and maps you have to go beyond science beyond math and asks where spirituality comes in that's what spiritual practice is about so philosophy especially modern philosophies a little tricky it's pretty corrupted just like religion of course religion is very corrupted and of course many spiritual teachings are also very corrupted so corruption abounds so don't say that all spirituality I don't want to do spirituality because there's a lot of corruption in it no no no that's just the nature of how the mind works when it comes to the truth the mind is a really hard time grasping what the absolute truth is so it gets corrupted extremely easily now let me give you some alternative definitions for spirituality let's hit it from multiple perspectives because there's a lot of different ways to look at it and then you'll get a sort of a a synthetic compound perspective from multiple angles so it's developing a metaphysical connection with reality we said that it's also answering questions about the nature of existence we've also sort of said that it's also seeking of truth with a capital T if what you did right now is you committed the rest of your life to seeking the absolute ultimate truth directly independent of all belief systems and all ideologies that would be the most spiritual act you could take that is the essence of spirituality right there never mind how you do it just if you made that commitment that would be a spiritual path that is like the pinnacle the quintessence of the spiritual path spirituality is also having a personal union with the truth you could think of it as making love to reality having sex with reality that's literally what it is and that is the whole appeal of the spiritual path that's why people become monks and meta physicians if they do is because see most people who are so preoccupied with mundane life they think that the best life they can live is to go out there eat great food travel around run a business or a bunch of money and have sex with the hottest people they can the monk in the metaphysician though is a lot smarter a lot wiser so what he says he says you know what I'm gonna reject all that [ __ ] that I don't care about that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and have sex with reality directly why go through middlemen I don't need middlemen I don't need money I don't need a business I don't need women I don't need any of that I don't need fast cars all that is distraction let me go [ __ ] reality directly let me go have sex with the absolute truth and so you go do that and then you actually end up realizing that it's possible to have sex with the absolute truth you make love to it with your mind you actually penetrate it with the mind or rather it penetrates you in the mind and that is real sex you don't know what real sex is until you've had metaphysical sex and then you're in such ecstasy when you're having this metaphysical sex that everything else becomes ridiculous it becomes pathetic it becomes worthless compared to the value that you get from this activity union with the truth personal direct union with the absolute that's real spirituality how do you do that well we'll get there in a minute speaking of which when we're on the topic of sex here this is a really good analogy because for a lot of rashly mind scientifically minded people atheistic we mounted people they just can't understand what it means to have sex with the truth so think of it this way imagine that you this rationalist that you think you are that you'd like to proclaim that you are try to explain to me let's say I've never had sex and you try to explain to me why I should have sex and you tell me look Leo there's this amazing thing called an orgasm it's amazing you got to have it you got to try this this is really worth your time to check this out and I uh I'm an even more rational person let's say than you are I'm extremely rational I'm extremely hard-nosed and really grounded in the facts and what I tell you is well look orgasm what is this I've never never had any orgasm what What nonsense are you talking about orgasm this is this is fairy tales fairy tales and nonsense that you made-up wishful thinking look at how emotional you are look at how romantic you are I just care about the facts man I'm an objective and hard-nosed person there's no such thing as orgasms give me a double-blind study that tells me what an orgasm is until you do that I don't care about your orgasms I'm not gonna take them seriously how would you convince me that an orgasm is a real thing that's worth my while to pursue and to experience you see you see how you're not rational at all you're utterly irrational there's nothing rational about you having sex with people pursuing orgasms why are you doing it you're utterly irrational there's nothing rational about sex there's a certain rational to earning money there's nothing rational about having a sports car what the [ __ ] are you doing in your life everything you do in your life is utterly irrational run by feelings and emotions and then what you have is you have a little sprinkling of pretense of rationality on top of that which is complete horseshit and it's utterly irrational what you're doing because you're not even aware of the fact that you're being irrational it would be much more rational for you to admit that you're irrational then to keep pretending that you're so sort of rational [ __ ] you know objective truth seeker that's not what you are stop playing that [ __ ] game so spirituality is like that so in the case of an orgasm what you would do if you wanted to convince me of an orgasm you say go have sex experience the orgasm and see for yourself and then I would say but why would I do that these are just ideas and beliefs and you would say no no no no no an orgasm is not an idea and it's not a belief and sex is not a belief and it's not a fantasy this is something you can do and then something will result from that and that thing is an amazing thing don't try it and I would say ah no why would I try that these are just states in the brain just chemicals in the brain who cares I'll just go do drugs if I want joy why would I have an orgasm you see you see what with this hyper rationalist position leads to the absurdity of it the myopia of it the stupidity of it everything that you know in reality anything you cherish anything you value is grounded in experience and what spirituality means what metaphysics is is an entirely new domain of experiences along the lines of orgasms which you have never had nor have any of your friends or family members or anyone that you've ever interacted with for the most part therefore they are difficult to talk about and difficult to convince you of simply because orgasms everyone's had them and everyone knows them and they're also sort of biologically easily programmed into you at adolescence and so you have them very easily and so there's no doubt about them whereas spiritual experiences these take work and that's why it's a little bit harder to explain to people what spirituality is it's very easy to explain to people what sex is also because you can show people a video of two people having sex and that will immediately excite them and that's because there's the biological mechanism there which is very very sticky which which which gets you excited about it with spiritual truths and pursuits a little harder I can't show you a video of the incredible mind-blowing mystical insights that I've had into the nature of reality can't show you a video of it can hardly put it into words it's such a mind-blowing thing and because of that it's very difficult to communicate it alright let's move on to other perspectives to other definitions in spirituality it can also be defined as the raising of consciousness that's what it is you're expanding your consciousness beyond your ordinary consciousness that you're doing the consciousness that you use ordinary consciousness is specifically tuned by evolution so that you are constantly just fulfilling your basic survival needs that's what it's tuned for including if you're doing science including if you're doing math and even if you're doing philosophy academics sorts of philosophy you're still basically in the exact same frame of consciousness as ordinary people as the guy walking down the street begging for quarters that's your level of consciousness but there are additional degrees and stages of consciousness which go radically higher and higher and higher and from there you experience reality in a radically different way so to be spiritual is to be pursuing the raising of your consciousness another way to look at spirituality is that it's the realization that reality is a mind and not a physical system it's a mental system this is the essence of idealism everything that's happening around you right now look around the room this is all mind stuff mental phenomena there is nothing within reality but mental phenomena not phenomena that's happening in the brain no I mean mental phenomena with no brain when you realize that everything that's ever happened in your life and everything that's happening to you right now is a purely mental phenomenon a construction of your own mind including the physical wall including everything that you think is real when you realize that all of that is a mental construction of your own mind that's when things get really interesting that's when a lot of new possibilities open up for you that weren't possible before under the dualistic materialistic paradigm again this is not a belief that you program yourself with as though I'm standing here believing that this is all the mind because I've programmed myself with that because somehow is supposed to make me feel better no it's the exact opposite what I've actually done is I've removed all my materialistic beliefs which have been telling me that this is a material system I've removed all those or I've rather deconstructed them such that now I can stand here and be conscious of the fact that this is all happening inside my mind a projection of my own mind and that is a very liberating thing because when you think reality is a dumb physical system then there's all sorts of inherent limitations to reality you think reality has to behave in a certain physical way and it can't be any other way but when you realize that all of that was just a belief and that you don't need to believe that anymore then you start to see oh without that belief now all the sudden reality becomes a lot more fluid a lot more flexible all sorts of weird stuff could happen that I didn't expect and precisely because reality is a mind what I tend to think tends to create my own reality so if I tend to think that reality is a physical system that's what I'll experience and if I start to remove that belief and now I begin to just open myself up to various kinds of possibilities I'm extremely radically open-minded now all the sudden I can start to experience non-physical things things that normally people would think our woowoo they now become real because hey guess what this was a mind all the time you were always in a mind but you were in a mind thinking you were inside of a physical box and so because of that you were inside of a physical box because that's what the mind does is whatever the mind believes is what gets created that's what creation is that's what reality is it's the mental construction so from this paradigm it's a very different paradigm from the scientific materialistic paradigm this is the spiritual paradigm from this paradigm now things become a lot more interesting and a lot more fluid now it's recognized that your mind plays a very important role in the construction of physical reality whereas before this was denied another way to define spirituality is that it's the realization that reality is irreducibly fundamentally mystical the problem with materialists and scientists and atheists is that they just assume and this is just an assumption it's all it is it's a completely groundless assumption they assume that reality is not mystical there's nothing mystical about it and in fact if we see anything mystical within reality our job is to demystify it that's the job of most scientists and this is precisely backwards when you're de mystifying reality all you're really doing is you're tricking yourself into not seeing the irreducible mystical nature of existence you're actually breaking and severing that connection with that metaphysical connection with existence and you're lying to yourself to do it of course you tell yourself that you're doing it in the name of objective truth but actually that whole spiel about in the name of objective truth all of that is a is just a fantastical beliefs because what you really don't want to admit and accept is that reality is irreducibly mystical what does this mean it means that actually it's impossible to know the nature of existence using your finite mind you would think then then will Leo then what's the point of me doing metaphysics if I can't know well there's actually something prior to knowing which is being so while you can't know the nature of the absolute the ultimate nature again reality you can become it because you are it because you're not separate from it because separation is an idea part of the materials paradigm which you're going to deconstruct at which point you will realize that all your attempts to explain reality as a chain of various linear causes and effects which is what science attempts to do this never actually gets you to the absolute it always leads you around in a circle and it will never stop because what you're doing is you're using a finite method to explore an infinite reality so when you realize reality is infinite and it's possible for you to realize that that's the case then you will also realize that because it's infinite you can't use various finite methods to encapsulate it or to capture it or if you do the way that sighs attempts you will always get partial solutions and never the final total whole solution and so when you realize that then you open yourself up to being reality in its entirety accessing it directly through consciousness because consciousness is all there really is because conscious all there is you can access everything within reality directly using consciousness because you are consciousness and you are the entire thing not this limited thing that you thought you were that was just a fantasy that you had which you believed was a reality another way to define spirituality is that it's escaping the matrix it's waking up it really feels like that it feels like you're breaking what was once physical reality you're breaking it down deconstructing it until you are totally free of it and it's difficult to explain to someone who's stuck inside the matrix what it means to escape the matrix but if you've seen the movie you've got a little bit of a taste for that or if you woken up from a bad dream you got a little bit of taste of what waking up is so it's that but it's that taken to the nth degree it's you waking up from this thing you call life another way to define spirituality is that's online it's aligning your life with the truth and with consciousness so the truth is a tricky thing you can become conscious to the truth but then most of your work will be not in becoming conscious of the truth but bringing the truth back down into your everyday life and embodying the truth that's where the real spiritual work lies so you might think that oh man I'm Lea I'm sitting here every day meditating doing yoga doing all this hard work for thousands of hours just to glimpse the truth and then you do that you think okay finally I've got it and it's like no you're only halfway up the mountain the real work now is aligning your everyday life changing all of your habits all your addictions all of the nasty programming that you got from your culture all of the false beliefs which are still there that need to be deprogrammed and deconstructed that's the real work spiritual purification needs to happen your ego needs to be broken down your mind needs to surrender to the truth in all the different ways you need to break down all of your resistances to the truth and you've got many many different internal resistances so seeing the truth wants is not going to destroy all your internal resistances another way to define spirituality is it's a dissolving of the ego it's a dissolving of your separate sense of self it's a conquering of your inner demons and your shadow this entity that you believe that you are this biological physical living organism that you think you are this is an idea not the truth science is actually never proven that you are a physical biological organism science has actually never proven that you are your body never never has it proven that because science cannot prove identity science can't tell you what you are science can't prove to you that you're not the table you're looking at I mean it's the obvious stuff that people overlook right science has ever proven the existence of a separate self nor will it ever because the stuff itself is just an idea just an illusion there's no objective truth to it it's a it's a conceptual creation just like Santa Clause is conceptual creation see Santa science can't prove to you that Santa Claus is real because he's not real so it doesn't even try to but it doesn't realize this science can't prove to you that you're actually separate from your coffee table nor has it ever nor will it ever what people just naively sort of assume that it does without thinking this stuff through if you are philosophically mining you wanted a little puzzle to work on think about this over the next week what kind of scientific experiment could you construct that would prove to you that you are not a coffee table think about it seriously I'm not kidding think about it I dare you another way to think about spirituality is that it's an expanding of your circle of concern the less spiritual you are the more ego you have the more you identify with being this physical meatbag here the more you care about just preserving this physical meatbag because that's what you think you are so whatever you think you are you're going to defend with your life because that is how you define your life but when your sense of identity expands and you realize that wait a minute there's no scientific reason why my sense of identity has to be attached to my body no reason at all it's like all the sudden oh my sense of identity is expanding expanding expanding expanding expanding until ultimately it becomes infinite it becomes everything it becomes completely Universal and so as this expansion happens as you work on dissolving your ego your circle of concern increases such that you care more about people and beings of all kinds animals and aliens and whatever you want to care about it doesn't matter right you're the larger your circle of concern the more the further out into the universe your your compassion and love extends such that when you're very egotistical all you care about is you and your immediate family when you're a little bit less egotistical you care about you your media family and your friends and maybe even a stranger here there may be a poor hungry person on the street when your circle of concern expands beyond that then you care about not just that not just your tribe not your just your nation not just your country not just your religious group but all human beings and all races on the entire planet independent of whether they're good or bad people you care about them all and then if it expands even further than that then you care about also all the living creatures not just the pretty ones not just the the bears and the elephants but you care about also the insects and the bugs and the spiders and the bacteria and the viruses you care about everything and then when it expands beyond that it expands beyond the earth and you care about all sentient beings everywhere and not just sentient beings but actually you realize that there is no boundary between sentience within beings and outside of beings and you realize that the entire universe is sentient and so sentient conscious intelligent and so basically you have indiscriminate care for all of existence another way to define spirituality is that it's a profound sense of universal connectedness you realize that you are connected physically connected to everything in the in the known universe that has ever happened or ever will happen is there difficult to explain and to articulate just how profound that is and how how significantly that changes your entire relationship to reality into human beings and animals into creatures and so forth this is huge what rationalists and atheists and materialists don't understand about this sense of universal connectedness is that they think again that it's an idea or a belief that's not what it is though it's actually a physical fact so it's not that you're gonna program yourself with an idea that you're universally connected with everything no no what you're gonna do is you're gonna remove the idea that you are this separate thing that's separate from everything else when you remove that idea what's left over infinite Universal connectedness as a physical fact as a raw fact of your consciousness another way to define spirituality is that it's altered states of consciousness there are many different kinds of altered states of consciousness so attaining these states exploring these days that's what spirituality is about as distinct from beliefs and ideas I mean actually new states of consciousness try to imagine what that means it's hard because most people have only been in one state of consciousness but again you know it's not that hard because you have been in altered states of consciousness you've been drunk you've been asleep you've been dreaming you've been having a nightmare maybe you even take a psychedelic and you got a little bit of something going on there that's an altered states of consciousness or maybe just you came out of a movie or you were looking at the sunset and I gave you an altered states of consciousness that's what we're talking about but much much deeper and radically more different than ordinary altered states of consciousness and the last way we can define spirituality is that it's non symbolic science so you might think well Leo this sounds very different from science in fact it sounds contradictory and antithetical de science no it's not what is science science is the pursuit of understanding of reality that's what it is you have to understand that science has had been evolving over the last 2,000 years really modern it's only about three four hundred years old since Descartes since Galileo since Newton and even since then it's evolved quite a bit every century it's pretty much different we're always adding new methodologies to science so right now the way that we define modern science is that it's it's the investigation of reality using quantitative measures and formulas quantifying reality so in that sense spirituality is not science because you're not gonna be quantifying anything but you have to realize that science is actually an elastic notion so what was considered science 200 years ago is not considered science anymore and vice-versa what wasn't considered science now is because science realized its own mistakes that's the nature of science so one of the mistakes that science will realize in next hundred 200 years is that there are non symbolic ways to do science conventional science the way that it's been done it's been symbolic using symbols like language models maps formulas equations these are all symbols and that's good it works you can make sense of little pieces of reality here and there by drawing these maps using symbols that's fine but there is an additional domain of science which is non symbolic science the investigation of reality in a non symbolic fashion and that's precisely what spirituality benefits our non symbolic which means you have to do it without using symbols and without using thoughts without using your mind so the problem though is that most atheists materialists and scientifically minded people are so thoroughly stuck in a paradigm that the only way to realize or to understand reality is through the mind that they are completely blind to ways of exploring reality not through the mind what might that be well we'll get there in a minute but there is such a thing as non symbolic science non-symbolic consciousness in fact this is a more direct version it's actually a more pure form of science so while the conventional thinking is that science is hard-nosed and fact-based and objective and spirituality is woowoo and fluffy and emotions based it's actually the exact opposite spirituality is a more purified form of science it's so pure it's so direct that you don't even have room to introduce symbols or models or Maps or equations because those themselves introduce distortion and falsehood and delusion into your understanding of reality it's a direct consciousness interface with reality not mediated by any middleman symbols so those are the various definitions of spirituality I have for you but what you really have to understand is that you won't understand spirituality unless you have a mystical experience for yourself in the same way that you won't understand when an orgasm is or what sex is unless you actually try it for yourself and experience it so we can talk about it all day long but you need to go experience it what is spirituality not this is very important to to mention spirituality is not religion dogma ideology or a belief system of some kind religion is in fact an aping of spirituality religion is what happens when you take direct consciousness and you convert it into a belief system and into an ideology and when you do that a lot of bad stuff happens so if you hate religion I'm with you I don't like religion either and and religion really is the exact opposite of spirituality it mimics spirituality but it gets people to believe rather than to go and experience for themselves you know what religion is religion would be like having sex without having sex it would be like believing in orgasms and believing that sex is great believing that sex exists without actually ever having sex that's what religion is and you can see how problematic that is because if what you do is you program people that sex is amazing it's good and you must believe in it you must pray to it every single day but you never give them the tools or even the understanding that hey you can actually go have sex most religious people don't understand how they can actually go do spirituality for real right so they get stuck in their beliefs they're just thinking and imagining about orgasms without actually having real orgasms and that's a very sad thing it's a real disservice to two people spirituality is not blind faith you're not being asked to blindly believe anything here you're being asked to do practices to actually experience the things that are being talked about in the same way that if I was telling you about sex I wouldn't be trying to get you to believe in sex through blind faith the only reason we're talking about sex is so that you could know about sex so that then you can maybe go out there and find a way to try it that's why we're talking about it not so that you believe it and worship it speaking of which spirituality is not worshipping of anything it's not worshipping of gurus people deities images icons or anything like that holy books preachers priests you don't even need to worship God to do true spirituality in fact worshipping is a big obstacle to spirituality spirituality is not obedience to Authority or following rules spirituality is not religious customs rituals or ceremonies like going to church spirituality is not acting moral like obeying the Ten Commandments or being a nice person being a nice person doesn't develop a spiritual connection a superficial one it actually becomes an obstacle morality becomes a huge obstacle to true spirituality spirituality is not irrational illogical or on scientific thinking it's actually trans rational trans logical trans scientific it's the next stage after rational scientific thinking a spiritual person can still do rational logical thinking can still do science perfectly in fact a spiritual person's understanding of science and use of logic and reason will actually be enhanced rather than diminished spirituality builds on top of science and builds on top of rationality but also goes beyond two realms beyond which the rational can't access because it's too symbolic and too indirect by the way you do realize that the only reason you believe you exist is because you are directly conscious of your existence you realize that so when you tell me for example that olio I don't care about feelings or experiences or emotions because all those are just hallucinations in the brain chemical states and all that I just care about the facts well you do realize that your facts your so-called facts are also just a hallucination in the brain a chemical state you realize that science is a chemical State you realize that you realize that comic science is happening within consciousness you realize this you realize that there is no scientific evidence for your existence you realize this unless you appeal to direct conscious experience you realize this try to convince someone that you exist run this thought experiment in your mind try to convince someone imagine that someone never existed but somehow you could still let's say communicate with them and you want to you want to convince them that you really do exist and that there actually is such a thing as existence how would you do it come up with a scientific experiment to prove to someone that existence is possible I dare you to try that one and see where you get spirituality is not wishful thinking and fear of death that's another very common mistake that a theistic rational people make is they think that well Leo but aren't you just coming up with all these reasons and excuses and stories just to justify your spiritual beliefs just because really what you want is you are afraid of death you are afraid of facing your own death and admitting that everything is meaningless you're afraid of that and so therefore you're just coming up with all sorts of stories and clever schemes to deny the obvious which is that you're gonna die and there's not gonna be anything special after you're dead hmm it's exactly the opposite spirituality is the facing of your own death actually it's the rationalists the Atheist the scientific person who is avoiding his own death that's what all your rationalist schemes are about you're avoiding your death but not in the way you think not your physical death what you're actually avoiding is your conceptual death because you think you're a physical thing and the reason you believe that is because that distracts and obvious kate's the truth that actually what you are is your conceptual construction and so what you fear most of all is the undermining of your conceptual foundations because if I dropped and really questioned if we sit down for five hours and I question your existence long enough eventually you will realize that you never existed in the first and that your existence as a as a as a human body was just a mental construction a belief wishful thinking and so the reason you spent your whole life avoiding doing metaphysical inquiry wasn't an accident it was very deliberate it was by design because when you do metaphysical inquiry you're actually going closer and closer towards the realization of your own death death is a concept you are a concept so your death will be conceptual but it will feel extremely real to you because you believe you're real so until you realize you're not real metaphysical questioning will feel life-threatening to you which is why when you sit down and you serious self inquiry serious deconstructions here is questioning your beliefs serious meditation serious yoga you will have experiences and people people post this on my forum they post it like you know they get a little deeper into this a few years of practice and then all the sudden they say holy [ __ ] leo I was sitting there meditating and then my heart started pounding and beating and almost beating out of my chest I was terrified something happened I feel like I was dying yeah you were realizing that your fiction of course you were facing your own death and now you understand why you were avoiding doing spiritual work this whole time it was all just a few stations all distractions for facing your own death it's hello mind [ __ ] it's exactly the opposite of what you've been led to believe spirituality is not praying for material things asking for God to help you with materialistic goals that's a that's a travesty of what spirituality is it is not crusading against other people's beliefs tried to convert them proselytize them make them believe in the truth or anything like that spirituality is not about creating or joining a cult cults or manipulative ego serving and dogmatic and actually they keep you from true deep spiritual insights spirituality is not politic it's not about trying to transform the world into a better place to save the whales and the polar bears and the environment and all that and to get to rid the world of racism and evil all those could be good things when done properly in moderation and you don't swing your pendulum too far and only react you know it's good probably to save the polar bears and global warming and end racism but this is all distractions from actually going inwards and investigating the nature of existence first do that then you can help improve the world once you know what the world is because most people they try to fix the world without knowing what it is and then they make a even bigger mess spirituality is not preparing for an afterlife there is no afterlife this is the afterlife right here there's nowhere else to go there's no other realm no other dimension right here you're just becoming conscious of what's right here right now at all times you're not flying to some mystical realm exploring some unknown territory some astral celestial around none of that right here you're just becoming conscious of what was here all the time you're becoming conscious of what your hands are of what your body is and what your mind is of what your thoughts are what emotions are you're becoming conscious of the most mundane things that's why it's difficult because people love outlandish ideas like flying into outer space and seeing aliens and astral realms and this and that and angels and spooky stuff and spirits this is all distraction from becoming conscious of what's right here existence is right here existence is happening at all times you just need to train your mind on it train your awareness on it and it will reveal itself to you over time do with it spirituality is not proving things proving things is a trap and it's a mistake it's actually impossible to prove existence to anybody and it's impossible to actually prove the absolute to anybody because all proof is indirect the truth the absolute truth actually cannot be proven truth is a much vaster domain than proof this is something people don't even scientific people don't understand this if you want to really understand this you need to study Google's incompleteness theorem I have a I have an episode about that the metaphysical implications of Google's and completeness theorem study that because what Google proved is that actually truth is larger than proof and that you can never prove the entire truth that's a pretty significant mind-warping discovery and what's even more amazing that he was actually able to prove it using logical symbols pretty pretty amazing stuff I'll talk more about that in the future why that why truth cannot be proven by definition it's impossible to prove truth because proof is always using indirect methods whereas truth also includes proof inside of it proof is a part of truth but it's a smaller part of truth it's a sub-domain proof as a subdomain of truth so that's important to understand spirituality is also not about constructing elaborate theories that's actually science and philosophy poor academic philosophies what does that not real philosophy spirituality is is not a subjective romantic experience and spirituality is not a chemical brain state now this one is the one that materialists and rationalist and atheists struggle the most to understand because let's say well leo all this stuff you're talking about it sounds nice but in the end astrologist mystical experiences just chemicals in the brain just a brain state no you don't understand when you're when you're probing of existence reaches such a deep level that you start to question what a chemical is and what a brain is and what a state is and what experience is what science is you will eventually come to a point where you will realize that all of those things including including chemical brain states and the idea that reality is happening inside your brain that thoughts and experiences are happening inside of the brain you will realize that that is a conceptual construction and when that happens oh boy oh boy that's a that's a profound that's a profound epiphany it's one thing to hear me say it it's one thing for you to understand what I'm saying conceptually it's a whole nother ballgame for you to actually grasp that none of this that's going on right here is happening inside of a brain you can become directly conscious of it you can become roughly conscious that a brain is actually a conceptual construction a thought that you're thinking that's something that's something that's deep that's deep and that thought is not happening inside of a brain hello it's a complete turning inside out of what you think reality is it's it's freaky when you get to this point it's freaky you actually start to think you're losing your mind because really what losing your mind means is that you're actually losing your grip and grounding on reality you can no longer distinguish between what's real and unreal anymore and you might think leo well but that that sounds like that's bad that sounds like it's not objective truth anymore no but that is the truth the truths that there is no difference between truth and fantasy reality and thought that's what it means to say that you're inside of a giant mind what you think is what gets created in a sense there are different kinds of spirituality let me list some of these for you there's nature mysticism shamanism various tribal forms of spirituality like voodoo these are commonly found in undeveloped primitive tribes in Africa South America Aboriginal Australia other places like that and it is a sort of authentic form of spirituality they do have deep mystical insights but also there's problems with it it's not very sophisticated pretty crude of course there's one who talks religion Christianity Islam Buddhism Hinduism so forth the Orthodox versions of it these are ideological and belief based and these people they can experience spiritual insights genuine spiritual insights using these Orthodox methods but it's it's really corrupt it's really problematic it's more of a problem and a hindrance than it is a vehicle towards true spirituality so I don't recommend it at all very very problematic it's very egocentric it's very ethnocentric it tends to be very much focused on good and evil and moralization a lot of distractions politics political issues it's a big hornets nest there's also meditative States and yoga this is really good this is this is some really high-quality spiritual practice stuff there's also visualizations areas visualization techniques you can use to develop a metaphysical connection with reality there's also psychedelics there's non duality and enlightenment which is like the purest form of spirituality that's what I highly recommend you pursue and then there's other versions of spirituality here which I could talk about but I won't because if I did it would be beyond your ability to believe and it would actually be a hindrance to you understanding what I'm trying to communicate in this episode because if you're listening to this episode the way that I intend and I really intend this to be sort of as an introduction for rationalists and atheists and scientists you're not at a place in your development and your consciousness where you can understand what I would want to tell you about some of these other kinds of spirituality they would seem so outlandish to you that you would never believe that they're real and it would hurt my credibility to mention them so we'll just skip those for now a little teaser for you let's talk about how spirituality evolves with society if you've seen my episodes about spiral dynamics then let me fill you in on that basically spirituality happens at every color stage in the spiral purple red blue orange green yellow turquoise if you don't know what these are go check out my mini-series like six episodes about spiral dynamics it's a pretty complex and nuanced model so don't worry if you don't know the colors let me just run through them really quickly so spirituality the way it works at purple is that it's tribal and very shamanistic and magical and kinda like voodoo at stage red which is their egocentric I don't even know what spirituality looks like a sage red I guess you could say like militant Islam might be stage red spirituality but mostly a stage red you don't you don't get much spirituality then at stage blue the next stage you've got Orthodox religion which is very conformist egocentric ethnocentric ritualistic literal interpretations of Bibles and holy texts it emphasizes worship of icons and it's a very materialistic form of spirituality and it's all about good and evil us versus them it's very tribal mmm nationalistic then we've got the orange stage which comes after that which is secular and scientific and rationalist and at this stage not much spirituality going on it's a rejection of religion there's a conflation of spirituality with religion so both of them are basically denied and not pursued seriously maybe an orange scientific person might get little tastes of that spiritual metaphysical wonder but they will explain it to themselves it's just a feeling a nice feeling and they won't make much of it they won't take it seriously so they won't pursue that path then the next stage up is you evolve into green and at green this is the hippie stage the New Age a lot of New Age teachings here neo shamanism comes back you've got people saying that their spiritual but but they're not religious they're making a distinction between spirituality and religion they are smoking weed and doing other kinds of psychedelics perhaps and that's opening their up their mind but not very deeply these people are all about peace and love and saving the environment saving the whales this sort of stuff they have an intuition that there's something higher some spiritual aspect to reality but they don't really do any serious practices so their spirituality is is usually pretty surface level but at least usually it's not some very violent or oppressive the way that it was it blew they don't try to push their spirituality on on the rest of society the way that blue did then they're staged yellow where you have some visionary scientists again maybe people like the fathers of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr Schrodinger Einstein Max Born who else am I forgetting yeah Arthur Eddington folks like that there are they're really kind of cutting edge scientists who are actually meta physicians they're not just scientists hacks they're not just academics they're actually serious metaphysicians they actually think about the nature of existence pretty deeply which is what allows them to be great scientists and they're starting to become idealist and they're starting to tune in to the fact that consciousness is fundamental and cannot be explained using physical phenomena and all of these people that I mentioned all these fathers of quantum mechanics they were all idealists and mystics and they all basically believed that reality was a mind a physical system Niels Bohr Arthur Eddington to some degree Einstein Schrodinger for sure they start to study Eastern philosophy they start to study advisor they start to study Hinduism you start to see their mind opening up to this but still they haven't really penetrated to the deep spiritual realms yet the deep spiritual insights precisely because they're held back by their rationalism and they're still trying to symbolize everything still trying to put it into formulas and numbers and then there's the final level which is turquoise and turquoise is where you get full-blown non-duality sages Yogi's folks like the Buddha maybe like Jesus I don't know if they were really trick wise but you know it's it's nice to think they were this is where you start to really tap into and develop this really deep metaphysical connection to reality you can be totally conscious of the absolute nature of everything and also you're tolerant of all the other spiritual traditions usually if you're doing this properly and your understanding is global and very holistic so spirituality is different depending on what level of development you're at and your culture is at so you got to be very careful the reason I'm telling you all this all this detail is because you got to be very careful not to think of spirituality as just as one bucket it's like this one monolithic thing and you eat you're either for it or against it it's like it's either religion or not this very black and white very crude conception that many atheists have some atheists are more sophisticated and they actually leave room open for spirituality other atheists like Richard Dawkins are more militants and more dogmatic and they are completely close-minded to spirituality and they see spirituality is somehow a threat to science or somehow fundamentally incompatible or splurt splurt spreading misinformation or delusion which itself that position is a delusion house fear - Audi practice there are far more methods than most people would imagine or lead you to believe most teachers will never teach you or tell you about the full list of methods because there's a lot of them few people have mastered all of them and usually people are so myopic and siloed that they only experience a small fraction of these methods rejecting the rest but these are all valid legitimate methods meditation concentration self inquiry contemplation various forms of yoga both physical hatha yoga but more importantly the meditative yoga that's popular in the East and within Hinduism Tantra and so forth various breath techniques like pranayama and holotropic breathwork pioneered by stan grof psychedelics a very powerful method I highly recommend it chanting mantras astral projection visualization darkroom retreats auditory driving which is what's primarily used for inducing mystical trances within shamanism not psychedelics but actually auditory driving is mostly used vision quests which is where you endure a horrible ordeal out in the desert for example with no food and no water for days for weeks and you suffer through that until you start to get mystical insides sweat lodges hard on the version of that fasting another version of that lucid dreaming Solo retreats like I've documented in various videos especially on my blog that I do on a yearly basis but Pastner retreats the Posten of meditation reading various spiritual texts this is important and believe it or not you can have mystical experiences while reading a high-quality spiritual text especially some of the non-dual texts that I have in my book list you should check those out yeah you could be reading one of those then it just hits you like a lightning bolt BAM it hits you all the sudden that science is just a belief system or hits you all the sudden that your physical body is just a conceptual constructions like holy [ __ ] and you get that while you're reading this book so that's a legitimate legitimate way so don't let people to think that reading books is all about mental masturbation no it's not not if you're doing it properly in fact it's it's very important if you don't read spiritual books and you try to do spirituality you are almost guaranteed to [ __ ] it up books are necessary to to reveal to you the traps that you will fall into and there are many many traps they will also reveal to you techniques that you couldn't learn any other way Tantra is in the practice shadow work is important part of spiritual work journaling can be really good practice workshops there are various workshops you could find around the world around the country that teach this stuff and help you practice this stuff I'll Prentiss Shipp programs you can actually go apprentice with a yogi with a sage with the master in various different traditions from zen to adviser non traditional non-orthodox apprenticeships and suffering suffering is a method for spiritual work in fact it's a very powerful method but I won't go into it here so these are the various methods there's definitely more than this but this gets you a good understanding of the the basics of it let's take an intermission right here so I can take a break catch my breath and I'll be back with some more insights for you you know when I was in my teens I used to do a lot of philosophical inquiry I was just one of those kids that was really curious about the nature of reality and I just asked myself questions about you know how does it all work and what does it mean and why does it work this way and not that way and so forth and sometimes I remember late at night in my room I would just kind of sit there after I did all my homework and all my schoolwork and all that stuff maybe played some video games then late at night I would just kind of sit there by myself in the dark and just ponder about some of these existential philosophical questions and that was right around the phase where I got interested in philosophy and I really enjoyed that it was just something I didn't know why I was doing it no one told me to do it my family wasn't into it I really wasn't taught to do it at school it was just something I just became genuinely curious about and I just sort of did as a hobby and I thought about life and I thought about religion and I thought about the possibility of God and I thought about evolution and I thought about all this sort of stuff and as I was contemplating this at night I would get this feeling this kind of satisfying feeling of not having the answers but just thinking about the the questions just thinking about them gave me a satisfying feeling and it sort of grounded me even though I had no particular answers I was very non ideological I just really was interested in what are the answers to these questions and I didn't really have a preference for which way the answers came out I was just doing pure inquiry for inquiries sake at that time I didn't understand that what I was doing was extremely rare yet this is something that almost no human beings ever do almost never and that was because the way I was raised I was I was raised in a in a sort of non ideological family where I wasn't I wasn't told to believe certain things or to partake in certain rituals I was just basically kind of like left to my own devices and for that I'm really grateful to my parents for that because that allowed me to stay open-minded and to keep my mind open to just doing questioning but the reason I mentioned that is because in those moments is when I developed that metaphysical connection to reality but very importantly I didn't connect the dots and I didn't understand that what that was was me doing spirituality I didn't understand that I thought spirituality was religion and that was something I didn't like at all in fact a lot of the time that I spent in the dark just enquiring being skeptical I really considered myself a skeptic that was sort of my identity throughout high school is I was the arch skeptic everything was skeptical to me I would question everything and of course religion I had some religious friends in high school and I just couldn't fathom what the [ __ ] they were believing and what their arguments were like it just made no sense to me it seemed completely irrational and ridiculous and of course it was irrational and ridiculous because that was religious dogma but see what I thought I was doing was just being a skeptic and juice doing philosophy what I didn't realize what it took me years decades to realize that actually what I was doing was true spirituality so the reason I want to bring that example forth here is because I get the feeling that some of you might be like that you might identify as skeptics and at that point I identified myself as an atheist that's because I didn't really understand I didn't connect the dots deeply enough so if you're one of these people who is philosophical who is skeptical who is interested in thinking about reality in a serious way not taking anyone's word for it not wanting to believe anything not trusting books not religious books not scientific books you want to really get to the bottom of it for yourself you genuinely care about the truth well understand my friend that you are following the truest most purest spiritual path that's what that is don't let all this religious nonsense confuse you because it's very easy to get confused speaking of confusion why is spirituality such a murky and Confused topic you might think Leo if what you're saying is correct and you're laying it out here so starkly and so simply and so directly then why is there so much disagreement all around the world from all the various different spiritual traditions if you're saying Leo that there's some absolute truth that can be directly experienced by everyone through some kind of direct consciousness then what's the big deal why is it so tricky why is it so misunderstood why are all be there all these religions why it's so corrupt why does all this all these problems happen why doesn't science just go investigate it figure it out write it down in a textbook and then just everyone will know about it without an answer to this question you're very easily likely to get tripped up the reason that this question comes up is because people do not appreciate just how significant truth is with a capital T you begin the inquiry by thinking that well yeah maybe I can access the truth somehow it sure would be nice if I could access the truth and figure out what the [ __ ] this reality thing is maybe I can't maybe I can let me take a stab at it and but then you go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and then eventually if you ever to get the chance to glance upon the absolute truth the truth of the capital T using direct consciousness and not symbols what you discover is that this thing is so [ __ ] gargantuan it's so radical it's so staggering that then you finally understand why you couldn't simply understand it the way you thought you could initially when you began your inquiry then you understand why your inquiry had to go so deep and take so many twists and turns and why all the other people around you got so confused and engaged in all these debates and disagreements and fights and arguments and there was all this corruption and misunderstanding about this topic because the truth of the capital T is I mean think about this when we're talking about the truth of the capital T the absolute we're actually talking about getting down to the to the origin of existence we're talking about answering the question of the or of existence now either you believe that's not possible or you believe it's possible if you believe it's not possible then you're a lost cause that's it you're done you've already failed there's no chance for you if you believe it is possible then there's a chance now you can actually do some work but even if you believe it is possible you still don't comprehend the size and magnitude of what you're really talking about this is a massive gargantuan thing this truth if you understood that from the get-go you would understand that the truth cannot be symbolized or understood or captured encapsulated with any kind of images models maps equations even thoughts or language of any kind to think that the truth can be symbolized can be proven can be communicated can be spoken can be written down in a text book and then read the way that you might read a magazine at your dentist's office while you're waiting for your appointment that's how a lot of people think about the truth with a capital T is they think oh well leo if there is this true the capital T what do you be beating around the bush for just tell me what it is man tell me what it is all accepted I'm a big man I can take it as if you're just like flipping through a magazine it's like oh there's an article on the truth let me just read that one and then you read it and like okay I'm done I understand I I just read about the the origin of all of existence yeah I got it I'm good now let's go let me go see my dentist now let me carry on with with life as I always have as if it would work that way no no you don't understand yet you don't understand that your entire life is hinged to this question of the truth of capital T we're talking about your very existence here and how you came into being this is a massive massive I know accounts first-person accounts with teachers that I've studied with face-to-face who told me that when they first glanced upon the absolute and it just struck them out of the blue a lot of times it's trucks you out of the blue you you might be sitting there meditating for it for days but then it just strikes you when you least expect it maybe you're going for a walk through the woods and bam it strikes you it strikes you so [ __ ] hard and knocks you to the ground on your ass from your walk in the woods that's the magnitude of this insight that we're talking about I've had other teachers who have studied with and had conversations with who told me that when they realized the truth for themselves that they secluded themselves took themselves out of society stopped work for years maybe stopped working for five years stopped talking with family and friends for five years just to sit and to bask in the magnitude of this insight that's how big the truth is when you really get it it's utterly life transforming its massive it completely changes everything you thought about reality it flips it inside-out it's radical to most people that would be horrifying terrifying life threatening this [ __ ] will derail your entire life it recontextualizes everything life as you know it is over after you've discovered the absolute and you've really understood it you've really got it you can get sometimes little glimpses of it here and there but then it escapes you you fall back to sleep but when you really get it you get it very deeply this is no little insight this is nothing you just hear in a video and then you just move on with your life as though nothing changed so it's precisely because the truth is so gargantuan it's literally infinite but see you have no appreciation for what the word infinite actually means you have some concept of the infinite that you got from mathematics that's not actual infinity you don't know what actual infinity really means you can't possibly know unless you become directly conscious of it so because of this you completely underestimate what this thing is you completely underestimate what existence is how counterintuitive it is how unlimited it is how big it is so the ego underestimates this and and so the ego just treats this as just some sort of simple little pursuit and the ego doesn't understand how tricky it is how tricky the ego mind is how self deceptive it is all the layers of self-deception that are at work to prevent you from seeing this truth it's no accident that you don't see the truth it's no accident that your friends your family members your college professors your teachers in elementary school your boss your co-workers that none of them have ever glimpsed the absolute it's no accident it's by the design of the way the mind is structured because as it turns out your very existence hinges upon you not seeing the truth the absolute because your existence as a human being is finite whereas the truth is infinite this creates a rather problematic existential problem how do you view using direct consciousness something that's infinite while you still want to remain and maintain your finiteness people don't get this this is I'm explaining to you why people misunderstand the truth so much and why there's so much confusion there's so much confusion because the truth is easily corrupted there's so much confusion because the truth cannot be symbolized and cannot be communicated at all because it's everything how do you communicate the entire universe to somebody with a formula with an image with a model think again doesn't work that way you might think that once you discover the absolute then you can just write a textbook about it and then share the textbook with all of humanity and they would all just understand and how wrong you would be if you did that what you would do is actually you would delude everybody with a model of the truth your communication of the truth which is limited finite symbolic and therefore not the infinite truth which is of course precisely what religion has tried to do for 2,000 years and has failed miserably so if you think you can write a scientific textbook about the absolute guess again you're just gonna start a new religion that's all it's gonna happen you're just going to delude people and yourself in the process there's also so much confusion because consciousness is a complex terrain even people who do spiritual work and NiO advise and so forth maybe they have a few glimpses of the truth they still oversimplify completely oversimplify this domain of consciousness studies which is what spirituality is and they think of it as just a simple okay I'm just gonna get the truth I'm gonna get enlightened BAM I'm done okay move on with my life everything's peachy that's not how it works there's so many facets and so many M nuances and complexities to the truth to consciousness so many different fields of altered states of consciousness and different ways to access them so it's a complicated terrain and this is why spiritual traditions have so much diversity and complexity to them so many different teachings and techniques different subtleties nuances and so forth it really is a complex terrain think of it like mathematics if you wanted to understand mathematics you couldn't do it by watching one video or hearing some one piece of advice or some one truth about mathematics no mathematics is a complicated domain which includes a lot of subdomains and subfields that can be their own fee of study you can spend the rest of your life you can spend 50 years of your life just studying topology or differential equations or statistics or you know set theory category Theory geometry trigonometry analytic geometry algebra various versions of algebra various kinds of bulan logics and so forth right there's there's so much to mathematics you'd be hard-pressed to find one professor who understood all of mathematics and could teach it to you even if they understood it how many hours how many days how many years do you have to learn it you have ten years to learn every field of mathematics that would be very optimistic to say you could do it in ten years even if you could find a professor who understood it all it's very complicated terrain this creates a lot of confusion because people don't like to think that there's a complex terrain they want to make it very simple like oh just Leo sit sit and do nothing there's nothing to do you're already it bla bla bla you're already enlightened bla bla bla bla bla why this kind of neo-advaita nonsense thinking that tries to oversimplify spirituality that creates its own set of traps and problems another reason why there's so much confusion misunderstanding is that human beings have different hardware we have different genetics we have different physiology different chemicals and neurotransmitters in our brains in different levels we have different childhood experiences growing up we grew up in different cultures so we're dealing with with different substrates so to speak that we need to spiritualize which means that different people will spiritual eyes that same substrate in different ways spirituality is deeply personal you're the one who has to realize it you're the one who has to dissolve your own ego and work through your inner demons these are deeply personal things all your obstacles are deeply personal and no two people have the exact same obstacles and in fact no two people I would submit have access to the exact same spiritual insights and there there are very many possibilities of of different ways that consciousness can be different degrees of consciousness different just different I mean people underestimate this but we do have different hardware so to speak just to work with despite the fact that I said that that Bray's are conceptual and hardware of course is still conceptual but we're just using this to try to explain that you know every individual needs to work through their own obstacles and issues for some people they're just born naturally more conscious more naturally more spiritual some people are born with a with a natural inclination to be really good at self-discipline which tends to be a really important quality force be able to practice some people are born and just are naturally born philosophers and are interested in questions of the metaphysical nature like I think I was and in that sense I was very lucky whereas most people aren't born that way a lot of people are born into terrible families toxic families who who brainwashed them from an early age with all sorts of religious and scientific nonsense which then is so hardwired into the human psyche so early on that by the time they're teenagers well good luck on wiring all that might take you a few decades to do that if you're lucky then you succeed at all so because of this different spiritual teachers and traditions have different teachings this creates confusion adds complexity to the to the whole game it's not just as simple as like let me take every human in the world and just tell them a couple of things and they're gonna become enlightened doesn't work that way it's much more complicated than that the teacher needs to be highly custom tailored to the student so that they can make sense of it especially because their mind is so tricky that their mind will find all sorts of excuses rationalizations and denials for avoiding doing the work another reason why there's so much misunderstanding and confusion is because don't forget our culture even though we are in the 21st century don't think that we're at the end of our evolution societally speaking we're still in the dark ages still in the dark ages yes we've sent a man to the moon and we can make jumbo jets and iPhones and we've got the internet and all these gadgets and stuff and we think that we're so sophisticated but really the level of cultural evolution is even more primitive than our technological level of evolution our cultures and societies are very very primitive science is still very primitive the scientist method itself is still primitive he still doesn't recognize for example non symbolic direct consciousness doesn't recognize it in the same way that 300 years ago science didn't recognize microscopes and telescopes as legitimate instruments for exploring and investigating reality just didn't recognize them so in the centuries to come our culture and our science will evolve and change in such a way that it will be easy for future generations in let's say 500 years it will be easy for them to understand what I'm talking about but only because I've talked about it and I've popularized these ideas and I was at the cutting edge helping to to promote these ideas along with many other people who are doing the same thing that I am and it's because of us because what we're walking around and kind of like blaring the trumpets about this thing called spirituality and Awakening and we're trying to show people how to do it properly so they don't delude themselves further like many people in the past have thanks to those people and maybe you'll be one of those if you get it one day then thanks to those people there will be evolution science will evolve spirituality will evolve religion will evolve culture will of all we will move up the spiral dynamic stages and all that good stuff and and then it will be easy the mistake people make is they just assume that well more than twenty first century we figured everything out pretty much sure there's some stuff science doesn't understand maybe dark matter dark energy but that's not very important mostly we've got a reality figured out we've got the scientific method figured out scientists know everything universities know everything it's all been written down in the textbooks nothing there's nothing really important to discover there's nothing that's gonna recontextualize my entire reality though so it's like no you're taking it completely for granted what you're doing is you're expecting culture to deliver truth to you on a silver platter but that's just not how truth works to expect that you can't just sit back play the skeptic be [ __ ] lazy and sit there and like a cynic criticizing everything not doing anything acting like a smart aleck rationalist and thinking that people need to come to you to prove the truth to you with that attitude you're never gonna discover the truth not even in 500 years when everybody around you discovers it because it's a deeply personal thing direct consciousness that means you're involved no one can do it for you you can't read it in a textbook so this immediately excludes 99% of people because 90% of people just are accepting knowledge that human society has discovered they don't actually do any independent investigation of anything because they're lazy and they believe that there's no purpose to do it leo if I can just go watch a video why would I even need to read a book people are so lazy these days that they come up with excuses for me to me about why they shouldn't read books that's the level of [ __ ] laziness and complacency that we're seeing right now in 21st century society and you're wondering how come you haven't seen the absolute you're too lazy to read [ __ ] 10 books coming up with [ __ ] excuses not to mention the thousands of hours of yoga or meditation that you might need to do to have a glimpse of the absolute you expect a video to deliver this to you get the [ __ ] out of here no video is gonna deliver this to you no teachers gonna do it for you no gurus gonna do it for you no one's gonna do it for you unless you do it so now you see that this excludes 99.99999% of people from ever accessing the truth immediately excluded because they're too [ __ ] lazy and they don't have enough vision to see why an independent inquiry is worth your time and effort there's also a lot of confusion misunderstanding because it does take hardcore personal practice to realize and to actualize spirituality hard self disciplined boring excruciatingly mind-numbing lonely you're all alone just sitting there for hours and hours and hours doing this practice again this all immediately excludes 99.99999% of people from ever accessing the truth they'll never do that immediately excluded they can't justify to themselves see they have so little vision they can't justify themselves sitting down to do these practices can't do it can't motivate themselves can't do it consistently cannot spend five years of doing one hour a day of meditation without missing a single day can't do it that excludes millions and billions of people right there just can't do that another reason there's so much confusion is because very paradoxically and unbelievably it's because the truth is simply too good to believe too good it's too good it's way too good the truth is so good good with a capital G so good that if I told you how good it was you would Sam [ __ ] you would say I'm exaggerating you would say I'm lying you would say I'm being a woowoo mm-hmm you'd say I'm being airy-fairy but it would still be a million times better than anything I could say that's how good it is so when you discover it one of the one of the first things that will cross your mind if you're like me is that you're gonna you're gonna feel unworthy you're gonna glimpse this truth you're gonna see how good it is and then you're gonna say oh my god this is impossible this cannot be possible I'm not worthy of anything this good and so actually a lot of what spiritual work entails is opening your self up having enough self-esteem building yourself esteem and self worth to the point where you're actually able to accept something so good how do you accept something infinitely good you might say alia that's not a problem I'll take the good stuff give me more good stuff I can take it no you can't you don't understand your ego is actually only used to a certain level of goodness that you can take in your life anything beyond that and actually what your ego will do it will sabotage you to actually drop out of that state of pleasure and ecstasy and goodness and joy and it'll drop you back down into your negativity into your pessimism into your all all that petty nasty negative stuff that your ego does so you got to raise yourself to be able to carry that a good metaphor that I've I've heard other teachers use is the lightbulb analogy so you know when you first start with spirituality and you start to help meditation so it's like Adelle X and so forth it's sort of like you're coming to a power plant with a little light bulb and you want to plug that light bulb directly into the power plant what happens you do that and immediately bursts because it's way too much power can't can't carry it so the next time you go oh [ __ ] that was a lot of power that was amazing but it lasted - too short so the next time you back with a bigger light bulb you stick that in there and then it lasts for a minute and then it explodes again you still can't carry the infinite energy that's being transmitted through it so the next time I may be a year later you come back with a bigger light bulb after doing a lot of inter work on yourself you've expanded yourself so now that is you becoming the bigger light bulb you screw yourself into the infinite source again and it fries your brain in five minutes and then you're like [ __ ] I got to go back to the drawing board and work on myself again so that next time maybe I can last 10 minutes and you keep doing this over and over and over again until one day maybe you get to the point where you're able to screw yourself in and then you never get unscrewed that energy will be coursing through you forever now you have become and merged into that energy that's what it's sort of like and that's what a lot of the work entails is opening yourself up to that infinite goodness that infinite beauty that infinite power that infinite intelligence the infinite creativity that's there the the infinite wisdom and insights the infinite compassion the Avi omnipresence the Omni the omniscience of it it's all there it's way too much for you to handle it's way too much for any mere mortal to handle unless they've done a lot of inner work and lastly the reason that it's so confusing and misunderstood and everybody misses the truth is because it is extremely threatening to your very life because after all your life is a conceptual fabrication so just try to imagine that if you were a conceptual fabrication what might be your greatest enemy what might be the thing you fear the most what does a snail fear a snail fears salt what does a fire fear fears water what does a shadow fear it fears light and what does a false ego fear it fears truth why is it because it spells the demise the light spells the demise of the shadow so what does the shadow have to do the shadow has to warp itself to convince itself that actually the light is the enemy that the light is the evil so the shadow will actually call the light shadow and call shadow dark or shadow light you see it has to it has to call falsehood truth and truth falsehood so most people simply resist the truth because they think it's falsehood and they stick with the falsehood because they've called it the truth this is the first trick that the devilish mind plays very tricky why is spirituality important and Leo how is it useful you're saying after all there is a sort of science and science is useful so how spirituality useful is it falsifiable does it have any practical implications in my life why should I pursue this stuff beyond merely the feelings that you're talking about again remember the feelings are just a symptom of you actually being connected with the truth so you're not really pursuing feelings in the pursuit of spirituality but you're pursuing is the absolute truth and then the feelings you get that's sort of the kicker the little side dish little garnish a little low you know cherry on top of your ice cream it's this sort of the reward for for being loyal to the truth but anyways there are some practical consequences first of all I want you to understand and this is a very big point that all human dysfunction comes from disconnection from the truth fundamentally that's what it is whatever problems you think you have whatever problems you think mankind and society and government has they're all connected to the fact that mankind in society is disconnected from the truth falsehood creates sickness and disease figuratively and literally most of the diseases that we have the physical hard disease I'm talking about cancer heart attack obesity depression schizophrenia various kinds of autism and mental disorders anxiety panic attacks fear anger craving jealousy pettiness theft criminality rape violence torture war genocide racism slavery corruption in the government gang violence white-collar crime what do you think all this comes from oh sure there's a million different causes but all of those go down to one root cause which is disconnection from truth a person who is connected to truth is not going to become a criminal it's not gonna become a thief or rapist or depressed or angry or even be fat and obese you know why you're fat and obese fundamentally the root problem yeah you could say you're eating too many calories and this and that I mean that's all true but fundamentally why because you're just gonna get from the truth you're using food as a substitute for truth to get the pleasure the pleasure that truth should be giving you you don't get so instead what you do is you go for food or you go for drugs or you go for TV or porn to some other addiction or you go for some white-collar crime to pay for your fancy lifestyle for your house and for your trophy wife and for this and that and cars and women and so forth see why do you think it cancer cancer is one of those diseases that's very preventable a lot of it has to do because you're disconnected with truth the way you live your life the way you use your mind and you would say Oh leo but cancer is about the toxins that are in the environment and this and that that's right and how do you think those toxins got into the environment who do you think polluted the environment and for what reason because they were disconnected from truth now I'm not saying that with spirituality you have a hundred percent chance to cure all your cancer and all this but uh but I mean certainly there are many many examples of people who have cured terrible crippling life-threatening diseases both physical ones and mental ones and emotional ones through deep spiritual work so even though there's no guarantee that your cancer will be cured some forms of cancer you know if you have terrible toxins and heavy metals in your body then that might not be something you can cure with spiritual practice but then again you know some cancers just come from stress over stress like you're going to work and you're dealing with all the crap at work for twenty years that could definitely cause cancer or the fact that you're going to work and then you're eating terrible food and and maybe you're living in an environment that you shouldn't be living in because you're not very conscious and you're too lazy to move out to change your environment and that gives you cancer and certainly things like fear anxiety anger craving depression all of these mental and psychosomatic issues chronic fatigue insomnia fibromyalgia various autoimmune disorders a lot of these aren't directly from your disconnection from truth because you see when you're disconnected from truth it's not merely that you're just going from truth and you just sit around all day and just enjoy your life no no when you're disconnected from truth you're empty inside so you're running around and chasing for some kind of substitute and whatever substitute you're finding it usually a very toxic and poor substitute whether it's video games porn heroin opioids whatever we've got a terrible opioid epidemic right now over 50,000 people every single year dying why is this happening you might say well leo it's the fault of the pharmaceutical companies by the way a lot of these over death overdoses don't come from heroin but from prescription pills that doctors are writing that's right I mean there is a lot of corruption within the pharmaceutical industry for sure and do we do need to create crackdown on that with Ray at various forms of regulation but the real root is that these people who are taking these drugs are just created from truth if you were connect to the truth you wouldn't need opioids you wouldn't need pills if you were conscious enough you would be able to transcend your pain and all your suffering even terrible physical ailments so that's extremely practical what we're talking about here is we're talking about happiness peace of mind and the elimination of suffering that's extremely practical and that's one reason why people take upon spirituality take on spirituality rather is not because they're metaphysically curious but simply because they're one of these rats who have been running around in this maze like I've said before and they come to a dead end in life which is so terrible so miserable so much suffering that they look for any escape any solution to the suffering otherwise they will kill themselves by the way we have record numbers of suicides every year as well in the tens of thousands of course that's because of disconnection from truth it's all these mass shootings we have in schools disconnection from truth and so mmm so this rats get gets stuck in this dead-end and is suffering so much that's simply out of desperation pure desperation as a last resort it turns to spirituality and maybe if it's lucky it finds a good spiritual practice and then it's able to break through but many rats aren't aren't able to do that simply because they don't they don't really know how to do a serious legit spiritual practice so what they do is they just end up in a dead end and they either suffer miserably for the rest of their life in some sort of dead-end job dead-end relationship abuse of relationship terrible career whatever they get saddled with all sorts of diseases and ailments that last them for the rest of their life or they just commit suicide they just come in suicide so those are some pretty good reasons to practice spirituality if it allows you to transcend all that and it does it definitely does in fact in a sense it's the only way that you can trend all transcend all that stuff because all that stuff is a construction of your own mind all that stuff is a consequence of the false ways in which you're living your life all the lies and self deceptions and all the manipulative ego games you play well that's all catching up with you the problem is that most people are playing this game so to the hilt so absorbed into this game but they don't even realize that all these symptoms are symptoms of the way they're playing the game they think that no leo this is just how reality is it has to be this way no it doesn't that's simply because you're playing the game that way that it is that way just that is a huge game changer to realize most people can't fathom how it is they create all their own suffering and all their own problems they think it's externally externally imposed upon them by by some horrible world and then you start to hate the world and blame the world for all the evils and problems that exist there are no evils and problems in the world it's all the construction of your own mind and it's all a factor and a function of how you've been playing the game so if you hate the world and you think life is terrible it's because you've been playing the game in the wrong ways and I'm not blaming you for it I'm just saying it is possible for you to wake up to that that's actually a very positive truth because it means you can awaken from it if only you're mature enough to swallow that bitter pill and then roll up your sleeves do some work another reason how spirituality is another way the spirituality is useful and important is that all of reality strives towards Union all of it not just mankind not just your mind but all of reality all creatures all businesses all governments all cultures everything that's what evolution is evolution is fragmentation striving towards Union the entire universe is striving towards the Union and so Union means truth so when you ignore that and you say [ __ ] Union I'm just gonna walk around fragmenting everything I don't give a [ __ ] about the truth what you're doing fundamentally is you are putting yourself on the wrong side of evolution and on the wrong side of history and you better believe you can get punished by that by evolution for that for that kind of arrogance when you align yourself with evolution with unification rather than fragmentation then you put yourself in alignment with evolution and with truth and then things go good for you in life not perfectly there could still be horrible mistakes and you know I'm not saying you're gonna be perfect but it's certainly a lot better than if you reject unification another reason and way that spirituality is useful is universal love and compassion and true morality if you care about these things then spirituality is basically the only way you can get it you cannot be a truly moral person without being highly conscious nor can you be universally loving or compassionate it's impossible the ego will make it impossible love is inversely proportional to ego morality is inversely proportional to ego morality doesn't depend on how strictly you control yourself depends on your level of consciousness so if your level of conscious is low but you control yourself a lot you're gonna fail to be a good human being whereas if you have a high level of consciousness but you don't control yourself at all you'll still be a pretty good human being if you care about peak human performance in sports in other domains in business and art and elsewhere this comes from consciousness peak human performance comes from being highly conscious within a specific domain which requires spirituality if you care about ecology and holism that requires consciousness if you want to be like a child again if you had a good childhood think back to what it was like to be seven ten years old those magical years of your life where everything was new and fresh and magical and beautiful and wonderful that's because your mind wasn't filled with all the materialist dualistic rationalist atheistic and cynical and other forms of beliefs and ideas including of course all the religious nonsense you even thought all the moralization that you've been taught all the things you've been told not to do all the rules all this all that that has robbed you of your connection to reality which you actually had as a child but then you lost through your teenage years through your rocky adolescence and through your early 20s and 30s you can get that back through spiritual practice so now you're starting to see why people might take spiritual practice seriously there are some people who take it really seriously who devote their whole life to it those are the smart ones because they realize just how significant this domain is actually it's the most significant domain of your life it can transform everything it can transform your life personally can transform society everything it's all there the problem is that nobody wants it or maybe rather nobody wants to pay the horrible to go it cost that it takes to acquire it let's wrap up by giving you this spirituality test that I've devised this is a test to assess how much spirituality is really right for you so it requires very simple answers on your part it's a simple questions so you're gonna be answering all these questions on a scale of one to ten one being the lowest ten being the highest so get out a piece of paper and just jot down your numerical answers to these questions okay so question number one is how much do you care about the truth on a scale of one to ten so if you care about it a lot you put a 10 you don't care about it at all but I want be honest how much do you care about understanding existence how much do you care about beauty with a capital B seeing Beauty everywhere everywhere you look is beauty how much do you care about goodness with a capital G being good and seeing goodness everywhere how much do you care about being universally loving with a capital L how much do you care about being healthy not just physically healthy but emotionally healthy psychically healthy and of course physically healthy how much do you care about living in a healthy society in a healthy environment how much do you care about overcoming anger fear anxiety depression loneliness sadness jealousy how much do you care about being authentic being authentically you without trying to please anybody else without trying to be self-conscious and worrying about what anybody thinks of you or how anyone judges you just organically naturally yourself how much do you care about joy and peace of mind how much do you care about being ultra creative having amazing and profound insights whether it's business art science philosophy spirituality or anything how much do you care about exploring reality whether it's physically externally or internally exploring your own mind exploring new realms of consciousness how much does that excite you how much do you love getting mind [ __ ] how much do you love wisdom how much do you care about reducing the suffering of mankind or even animals for that matter if you're a fan of animals how much do you love the feeling of being conscious thinking about some time in your life when you were really conscious just consciousness purely for consciousnesses sake is that something you love how much do you want to be like a kid again how much do you care about transcending dysfunction how much do you want to go beyond petty human issues all the mundane enos of life that you're in inundated with every single day how much do you want to transcend those how much do you want to be passionate about life that's the whole quiz so take a look at your answers if you have a lot of 10s and 9s and eights across the board then spirituality is for you and if you don't care about these things well then stay away from spirituality so again now you can see why spirituality is something that people pursue seriously that some people devote their entire life to this is a very wise strategic move if you're gonna be planning your whole life from the very beginning to the very end it would be a pretty wise move to say that you're gonna invest a lot of your points your skill points into spirituality but the problem is the sad fact is is that most people do I mean most people don't most people don't invest any points into spirituality they dump their points into food sex shopping TV YouTube video games porn etc etc and then they wonder why life sucks well there you go there's your answer because you invested your points into all the wrong areas and the one right area we should invest them you dismissed it as a stupid domain that wasn't worth your time well there's your answer there's your problem right there reallocate your points you can respect your character at any time it does get harder as you get older but hey better late than never right so now maybe you say Leo all this sounds pretty nice I guess it makes sense but I'm still skeptical I don't know I don't know it sounds kind of fishy you're you're saying some things that are pretty far out there how do I know you're right how do I know you're not deluded you want me just to believe you know you don't need to believe me at all that's the beauty of the work is that you do the work and in the work is the result which self validating this is after all a science which means that you're getting results and you're seeing with your direct consciousness what's really going on this is an inquiry skepticism is good you just need to use it in the right way turn your skepticism inwards on yourself and then begin the process of spirituality do the research and do the practices don't have faith in me you don't need to believe in any I say but you do need to understand that to bootstrap yourself in this process you have to like listen to some teachings right because like think about it if you're trying to learn a complex topic like let's say calculus and you sat there in class as the teacher was teaching you calculus and you cynically doubted everything the teacher said every sentence the teacher said you just doubted and you said well is that really true how could that be true prove it to me where's the double-blind study that this is true how do I know you're not full of [ __ ] how do I know you're not lying how do I know this isn't delusion how do I know this is just whoo-whoo stuff if you take that kind of attitude you're never gonna learn calculus you need to have enough open-mindedness to be able to actually do the research read the textbook go through the examples go through the proofs think it through for yourself and do the practices do the homework assignments only then can you learn so that's what needs to happen here research and practice your goal right now should be to have your first mystical experience this is a critical turning point in this journey have your first mystical experience only then do you know what we're really talking about and even then you don't know you just have a little glimpse of something but at least you have some idea now you have some inkling just like with sex you know you need to have your first orgasm then you discover the world of sex and that's an exciting world the world of sexual that's an exciting to discover but you haven't discovered it yet until you've had your first one and if you want to do that quickly and effectively what I recommend is LSD or mushrooms extremely effective for doing this if used in the proper manner that's an important qualification I have an episode called how to use psychedelics for personal development you can go check that episode out which goes through various points and important guidelines for how to use psychedelics properly to have legitimate mystical experience and how to interpret them properly I'll also shoot some episodes in the future about how to how to really go deep with psychedelics because I've been doing research on this a lot both personally and theoretically practically and theoretically and I have a lot of I think useful insights very very practical insights for how to take your trips really deep and so once you have that then you have had your first mystical experience and now you understand a little bit of what I'm talking about and now you're ready to to actually start to do the serious work so I'm not saying that LSD or mushrooms are a shortcut and that you can use them to get all the way I'm just saying it's a good entry point to having your first mystical experience then you start to understand then you start to take this stuff seriously then you will really be invested in buying some books watching some videos taking some courses traveling around the world meeting the right people gurus this practices yoga blah blah blah all these things and then then then you're good then you're good now you're on your way there can be no true spirituality without hardcore practice don't buy into the lies and simple solutions that the new invites try to give you where they say that there's nothing to do there's no practices there's nothing hardcore you just you're already enlightened don't buy into that nonsense if that were true then what the [ __ ] would we be doing here why am I here why am I talking about this stuff this is true of course in other sense it is true but you don't need to do a lot of hardcore practice before you realize that true from your point of view it's not true from their point of view it's true from an enlightened person's point of view that's true but not from an unenlightened person's point of view in the same way that for a calculus professor solving some calculus equation is really [ __ ] easy because I already know the answer it's really easy because they spent 20 years doing the practices and have figured everything out so for them is really easy but then when you give a child a calculus problem it's impossible it's impossible you got to work up to it now of course don't turn this into a limiting belief as though you have to work for ten years to have some your first mystical experience or something no I mean dude as soon as you can so don't waste your time it's gonna happen right now if it's ever gonna happen but also be prepared to put in the work and remember to educate yourself about this field it's not enough just to do the practices it's not enough to watch a few videos you need to do some serious research some serious reading you need to read at least 20 30 50 books on this topic to really start to understand the various traps that are involved in what you're really dealing with just conceptually to understand let alone I'm not even talking about actually experiencing it just to start to understand it because you're gonna be very confused when you start you're not gonna know who's right who's wrong you know mystical teachings can be notoriously murky and confusing and tricky and that's because that's sort of the nature of the beast that's not because the teacher is deliberately trying to mislead you or trying to be tricky or abstract that's just simply because we're working it with your mind here in your mind is a tricky Beast that's all that means so educate yourself properly read the right books and if you need ideas for that check out my book Lestat actualized that order alright so that's it we're done here please click that like button for me don't forget and then come check out actualize that org there you'll find my book list my blog were on posting interesting insights and videos additional exclusive videos will be posted there soon and my life purpose course is there come check out the forum you can ask various questions and get guidance and advice and the last thing I'll tell you is stick with me as I release more content if you do I'll promise you this if you take this work seriously you don't just dabble in it B take it seriously you will come out in a few years with a deeper understanding of reality than professors and academics and PhDs at MIT and Caltech and the best universities in the world you might say Oh leo but this sounds outrageous how dare you say such things this is so arrogant so cocky and egotistical of you to make such claims how can you possibly make such claims I'm not doing it from a position of arrogance I'm just trying to make you aware of the significance of this work the problem with these professors and academics and all these top-notch research universities is that they're extremely narrowly specialized and they're very siloed and they take a very analytical non holistic approach to thinking about their field and also they have consigned themselves to this bureaucracy to this system so really even though they might think that they're pursuing truth they're not and you might think that they're pursuing truth but they're not what they're pursuing is they're pursuing some narrow pragmatic scientific achievement within their narrow little subspecialty which has nothing to do with deep metaphysical existential truths so these professors whether they're doing quantum mechanics or evolution or biology or chemistry or anthropology or sociology or psychology whatever they surely have read a ton of books and they know a lot of facts they know a lot of technical minutia they could out argue you and they can out debate you and they can out cite you but what they can't do is they can't actually explain what reality they don't know they just don't know because they've consigned themselves to this system this bureaucracy this academic ideology this materialism this rationalism this desire to quantify all of reality this desire to demystify all of reality academic philosophy there's almost no serious metaphysics being done in universities today because it's groupthink it's a bureaucracy you don't get paid to pursue the absolute truth you get paid to deliver particular narrow results which help the ego to survive whether it's the business ego the academic ego or some other kind of ego mmm that's what universities are about and there's nothing really wrong with that we do need this technical knowledge so these professors we still need them just don't think that they're gonna be able to explain metaphysics to you because they don't understand it themselves because they have tricked themselves into thinking that it's worthless if there's nothing valuable valuable to be found there and that it's just delusion well that's their delusion is to think that metaphysics is delusion because they don't know how to do metaphysics properly and even the Philosopher's the ones and universities who are supposed to be good at this stuff and are supposed to get it they still don't get it this is rare stuff so the reason I'm saying this is not to brag but simply to remind you of the significance of what is on offer here on this channel with actualized work it's very rare and lucky that you found this resource however you did you probably just stumbled upon it blindly by accident and while that's extremely good fortune for you because many of your friends never will there's a risk the risk is that you've stumbled upon a pile of gold but you're so myopic and lack so you like vision so much that you are not going to be able to appreciate what's here and you're not really gonna take it seriously and act upon it and therefore you're gonna miss out on the greatest thing that you could find in reality so what I recommend is that you really think about what's on offer here for free all these hundreds of videos that I release for free that meticulously break down all these topics in a way that makes sense to scientifically minded rationally minded atheistic lis minded people skeptically minded people because that's a that's where I come from that's why I explain this stuff this way because I know how to communicate to you because that's how I think and that's how I thought and so what I'm doing here is I'm building a bridge between the spiritual realm and the analytical scientific realm that's what I'm doing so we're gonna continue to do that there's still a lot more topics to talk about they'll think that we've covered everything yet there's always more there's hundreds more I have lists of hundreds of topics that we need to talk about very important topics that you still have no clue about so we'll be covering those in the months and years to come for however long I'm doing this and if you stick with me you he'll I'm telling you you will develop a deeper understanding of reality of yourself of your mind of spirituality of metaphysics of science even you will understand science better than the top-notch scientists in universities that doesn't mean you're gonna understand their specific specialty better it means you're gonna understand science as a whole because you're gonna understand how the human mind works and the way paradigms work you're gonna understand that better than these professors and academics and if you are one of these professors and academics and scientists watch out be careful because there's a very good reason that this stuff is not taught in universities it's not compatible with what's taught in universities so if you think that you're gonna bring this into a university environment and watch out they don't tolerate mysticism they don't tolerate spirituality that's not by accident that's by design that's by design they're gonna tar and feather you and demonize you they're not gonna give you ten ER tenure you're not gonna have a successful career because you can't do this in a bureaucracy if you could religion would be successful can't do it truth doesn't work that way truth is a deeply personal thing and it's a very radical thing and you got to be a maverick to pursue the truth you know when I was really into philosophy I seriously thought about becoming a philosophy professor that's really what I should have been instead I became actualized that orient and I'm so glad I became actualized that'll work and actually this was done by design the reason I didn't become a philosopher professionally a professor philosophy is because I saw when I was about 20 years old and I was making a decision I very clearly saw that I would not be allowed to pursue the truth in its full glory in a university setting and so I said to myself well that answers the question about whether I want to be a flaw professor or not and so I didn't go into that because I knew that if I did I would consign myself to a life of misery and delusion and I'm really glad for making that choice the only reason that we can do what I'm doing here today is precisely because I'm independent precisely because I'm not beholden to any kind of advertisers or money interests or universities bureaucracies or anything like that because if I were then that's what corrupts the truth so you got to put the truth number one if you're a truth seeker which means that if you're gonna do that you got to make yourself independent so they're not somebody's little [ __ ] and you got to jump through their little [ __ ] Hoops in life earning crumbs so that you can just barely survive see most people consigned themselves to wage slavery in one system or another and then what happens is that they don't have time they don't have the luxury to pursue the truth because there's some one's a little [ __ ] for the rest of your life until they retire maybe and by that point they're too old it's too late their mind is too dull they don't care anymore they're so depressed and miserable that they're lost cause but anyways so now you understand what's at stake let me shoot make sure you stick around and more exciting stuff to come you