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[Music] if you've been following along with my work for any significant period of time you've heard me mentioning this concept called meta or going meta i've used this concept a lot in the past but i've used it indirectly obliquely implicitly without formally defining what it is and so i think it's worthwhile to do that here today because this is a concept that we use recurringly if we're trying to understand life or reality at a deep level or if we're trying to understand the nature of science or we're trying to understand religion we're trying to understand spirituality we're trying to do personal development at a deep level to do these things you really have to come to terms with the notion of meta and even though this notion of meta it's actually being used even by kids these days by teenagers i hear the young ones the kids are using it in school and so forth to say meta this meta that but they don't really understand what they're saying and even many scientists and computer programmers and so forth who should have a deeper grasp of this notion they still don't really understand the significance of what meta means so it really is worthwhile to spend a couple hours discussing this notion in depth explaining why it's so important and giving many examples so let's begin so what does going meta mean and usually when we say meta we attach to other domains or concepts like metaphysics meta data metacognition so once you start to think along these lines you realize that you've probably heard this concept used many times before and i'll give you way more examples than this as we keep going but the dictionary defines it formally as the following quote showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category cleverly self-referential or as more comprehensive transcending or transcendental or situated behind or beyond end quote that's from the merriam-webster dictionary so that gives you a bit of an idea it has something to do with self-reference and self-reference is a is a very powerful concept that is also the depth of it is not fully understood by science and by philosophy and just how deeply ingrained it is into the very fabric of reality itself we'll be explaining that as we go so really though what it means to go meta is it means to step outside or to zoom out or to transcend a thing to make it the subject of one's awareness it means self-reference it means self-reflection it means self-consciousness all of these terms should be very familiar to you if you've been following my work i've used all these terms a lot and each of them has its own subtle connotations but also we want to we want to develop a sort of vocabulary as we're doing this work so that we can use these different terms to refer to different nuances of consciousness what we're ultimately exploring so meta essentially is when a thing becomes self-aware and to become self-aware you have to step outside you have to zoom out to transcend a thing otherwise you're too close to it to be aware of it sort of like for a fish swimming in water for it to go meta would be for the fish to step outside of the water crawl up on the shore let's say or get fished out by a hook and then maybe the fish now has enough distance from the water to realize oh i've been swimming in water this whole time and now it's gone meta on the water whereas most of its fish friends who have never been outside the water they haven't gone meta on the water so to them even the notion of water doesn't really make sense you see also what it means to go meta is that as you're doing something to notice that you're doing it another term i have for that is self observation to observe oneself this is a lot of what spiritual work involved meditation is about self-observation so for example you might be using language and normally you just use language to tell somebody something and you wouldn't be aware of the fact that you're using language to do it although of course if someone asked you you would say yeah of course i'm using language to communicate something to you know get my get my restaurant order in or something like that but you haven't really gone meta on the situation because there's a sort of a level higher where you can actually place your restaurant order and as you're placing your restaurant order you can also simultaneously be conscious of the fact that you're using language and be wondering what is language which normally people don't wonder after using it so you see that creates a difference and as you're doing that you're observing yourself you're still you're sort of and that that's taking up mental resources it actually requires consciousness to do that your conscience sort of has to split between part of your conscience is going to using the language and then part of your conscience is going to observing yourself using the language so it's a little harder to do it's like juggling two balls instead of one what else it means to go meta is to step outside the frame of a thing and to observe it so almost everything within reality that we can talk about is framed in some way or comes in some kind of context like when you're playing a video game the frame of the game is the game world and we might say the tv screen that's displaying the video game or if you're watching a movie at the theater the frame is the screen that's being projected upon and then to break out of that that would be to go meta another term for this is called breaking the fourth wall in cinema this concept is is used whenever a character inside of a tv show or a movie speaks directly to the audience which usually these characters wouldn't do and they do it in sort of a self-aware way where the audience now understands that the character in the movie understands that he's just a character in a movie and he's stop talking to you about the fact that it's a movie so he's gone meta he's broken through the illusion of the sort of context or frame of the movie world so you might even take this to a further extreme where for example a movie might be set in ancient roman times and the character would literally knock on the tv screen and say hey hey you over there in the 21st century watching this right now how's it going and that shows you sort of uh self-awareness of even the fact that even though he's in the frame of ancient rome he can break out of that frame break the reality of that and to connect it to the 21st century so he's aware this character is aware that actually this is a movie happening in the 21st century so uh another way to phrase it is that to go meta is to go one level above in abstraction one level higher in abstraction and perhaps the best way to illustrate this is imagine if you were playing super mario brothers on your tv and mario all of a sudden woke up inside of super mario world he knocked on the screen and he started having a conversation with you about the fact that hey i'm mario and i'm made of pixels and i was programmed by nintendo programmers and yet here i am running around in this world and i know you're outside playing me and i'm aware that i'm just character of pixels in this pixel world but i'm also cognizant that you're playing me and you're some other entity sitting outside of me observing me and here we are that would be a very a very radical level of going meta and you would see that if that happened to you imagine just imagine for a moment that that actually happened to you the next time you were playing a video game imagine how shocked you would be you would be the hair on the back of your neck would stand up if that happened to you and it's not outside the realm of possibility that this will happen i mean of course not with the old school mario games but in a future mario game maybe in 50 years and 100 years something like this is feasible can you start to see how powerful that is and why this concept of going meta could be so important and so significant to give you a little further hint as to its power imagine that you are like that mario character right now one who isn't aware one who isn't able to go meta stuck inside the frame of super mario world unaware of the larger context of what's really going on that this is a video game and then imagine that something clicks one day and suddenly you're able to go meta and you're able to pop outside of the frame of the video game imagine how groundbreaking that would be for you see this wouldn't just be another thing like a belief you adopt it wouldn't be some ideology like oh you became a a conservative or you became a liberal or you adopted islam or you did some science no no this would be this would be a completely new dimension to reality that you didn't even know existed and that none of the other characters in the movie or in the game recognize as being real it's almost like entering the fourth dimension or the fifth dimension that's powerful you see and as it turns out if you're trying to do serious personal development and serious spiritual development and you're trying to really get a handle on what reality or life is it turns out that it's impossible to accomplish that without going meta and the number one mistake that all religious people political people and even scientific people and logical people that the biggest mistake they make is that they're always operating within the same dimension as they've always operated and that their mind is not able to jump out and go meta into a higher dimensional perspective and because of this they're not able to resolve the enigma of life and they're not able to solve the majority of their serious structural existential problems they're only able to solve the problems within that single plane that they're working in whereas certain problems can only be resolved by jumping outside of that frame into a higher dimension and the the whole challenge here is that it's extremely difficult to communicate the existence of a higher dimension to someone who is stuck within a single plane because to them when you're talking to a two-dimensional character the idea of three dimensions it's like a fantasy it doesn't compute until one day something clicks and it does compute and then they discover the third dimension or some other dimension we're not just talking about spatial dimensions that's just an analogy we're using here so before we start to get real existential on this stuff let's uh go through a list of examples here are some examples of going meta so there's a famous painting by renee magritte a surrealist painter called the treachery of images it's a very simple painting of a pipe that says this is not a pipe which of course it isn't because it's just a painting how can a painting be a pipe on the other hand it is a pipe because what else are you looking at here but a pipe so it is a pipe and it isn't a pipe which is true well it depends sort of what level of perspective you're at that you're looking at it from another example of course of going meta is meta data within emails your email has the subject of the email which is the message that usually you and the person you're sending your emails between and communicating with cares about you know your name and the body of the text but then there's the metadata of the email this is the stuff that usually like the police will track the nsa is probably tracking the metadata of every email in the entire world and that metadata includes the ip address the email was sent from the servers it went through the geograph you know the geo locations of the of the recipient and the sender probably what computer an operating system it was sent from what web browser what email client was used and who knows what else is in that metadata so email metadata is data about the content of the email and you can't get that data by just reading the body of the text of the email it's always something outside of it something beyond it likewise we might also think of there's an analogy here even with physical mail with physical mail there's a sort of also metadata and it's implied it's never made really explicit but when you get a letter in the mail what would be the metadata of that letter let's say the actual data would be the content of the letter but the metadata would be stuff like the actual envelope it came in was it a cheap flimsy envelope was it one of those sort of scammy marketing envelopes what is was it a glossy envelope was it one of those brown manila folder envelopes did it have certain stamps on it did the post office put a postmark stamp on when it was sent and when it was received and other sorts of information like that who it was from where it's going to uh things of that nature that would be the metadata and that can give you clues about where the letter came from or other stuff there might even be and of course there is on every letter there's fingerprints you could you can closely analyze the fingerprint signature on every letter and that might even tell you some information about who wrote it who sent it who touched it who delivered it and so on you might even be able to do a dna analysis of the saliva on the edge the sealed edge of the letter if it's one of those old-fashioned ones that you lick you can analyze the saliva and you can use that in a sort of sherlock holmes way to to see who actually sealed the letter maybe the person who wrote the letter isn't the same as the person who sealed the letter and that can give you some more clues and information and i'm sure the police and forensic departments around the world use this sort of data you know to catch criminals and whatever else pretty cool right and so this is sort of what we discover at a deep philosophical level about reality is that any time anything is made explicit like we have an explicit scientific theorem about gravity or we have a scientific explanation about evolution or something else or or really anything of that nature there's always more than is ever being said or made explicit and i've discussed this in quite a lot of depth in my episode called explicit versus implicit understanding go check that out for more but see we're tying this episode with that episode together because these are closely related concepts so what i want you to realize is that the nature of reality is such that there's always more that is not being said and in fact the most important elements of reality are those which are not being said those which are left implicit and to really master reality to master business to master marketing to master philosophy to master science to master spirituality you have to be very attuned and wise enough to be able to read between the lines and read the hidden clues in a sherlock holmesian sort of way to see that which is not being said because if all you take as real is the explicit stuff that's being said you're going to be pretty dense and dumb in your understanding of reality and human beings and politics and economics and many other domains of life and there is a sort of tendency a cultural tendency within science and other certain domains where we have a bias towards making everything explicit and if it's not made explicit then we treat it as though it's unimportant as though it's unreal as though it's got nothing to do with truth and we have this sort of latent assumption that the truth can always be made explicit and this turns out to be false for very deep existential reasons which i've explained in the past when i talked about kurt goodall's and completeness theorem and i'll elaborate upon a little bit more here after we're done with this list of examples so going on here how about in a video game uh meta elements of a video game might include the hud elements on the screen like the health meter and score points and other things these are sort of outside of the frame of the actual game itself the the graphical user interface any online strategy guys that you use any cheat codes you enter in the game these would all be meta elements outside of the actual content of the game and cheat codes are a very interesting example because look at how powerful cheat codes are there are things that you can do with cheat codes in a game that allow you to violate all the the physical we might sort of say the physical rules and laws of the game world by using these cheat codes and look if you were a character inside of super mario world and you were operating by the traditional rules that were programmed and then all of a sudden one of the characters in that game discovered the existence of cheat codes as with it and was able to use those cheat codes to gain extra lives extra continues to live longer to gain superpowers and invincibility and god mode and all of this literally that character can become godlike within that world but the other characters who did not go sufficiently meta to understand these cheat codes then to them it would appear as though magic like how is it possible for you to be invincible in super mario world that's impossible nobody's invincible unless you go meta and you use cheat code and of course computer hacking is another great example where this is constantly happening there's a sort of a battle between the software companies and the black hat computer hackers who are always looking for loopholes and exploits within software and the way that they're able to to break operating systems and you know crack government servers and all this sorts of stuff that you you know we see every day in the news every week we see new hacks by different governments and different hacking groups what are they doing they're analyzing the code and they're figuring out ways to to to kind of use the code against itself to go meta on the code and then to break it in ways that the designers of the code never even anticipated and so that revolves a lot of meta thinking and going meta another example is self-referential humor meta humor meta humor is humor about humor so a lot of times you could say a joke which isn't even funny uh and then the audience doesn't laugh but then you simply point out the fact that oh i would that you were actually that that was a joke a poorly timed joke or whatever and then that's what becomes funny is not the original joke that you flubbed but the meta joke you made about the fact that you screwed up your joke and then that's what causes people to laugh and in fact there are certain comedians who make their entire comedy routine just this sort of self-referential meta-humor of course another classic example of going meta is lucid dreaming when you're dreaming ordinarily you're not aware that you're dreaming you're stuck inside the frame of that video game we might say or the dream and then if something clicks and for some reason you recognize that you're dreaming inside of your dream that's called lucid dreaming and then you've gone meta and then that now gives you almost again sort of this cheat code god mode ability to be able to manipulate your dream in ways that normally you wouldn't be able to do now that you've simply become aware that you're dreaming and this is like a super power that you gain entire books have been written about how to how to practice lucid dreaming and how to use lucid dreaming to have sex with beautiful women and to go on roller coasters and eat great food and go on adventures and do all sorts of stuff or even personal development there are books that have been written about how to do personal development or even spiritual work after you're lucid in your dreams you can go find some of those books and read them and try it it's powerful stuff another example of going meta is meta learning so usually when we're learning in school for example we're just the teacher tells us to read a book or to to do some project and we're just working on that doing some homework but when we're doing that we're not usually aware of the fact that we're learning or how we're learning or what is creating the learning but what's really powerful to become a really powerful learner you want to become a meta learner which is to learn how to learn that means the next time you're learning something you need to take half of your attention put it into learning take the other half of your attention put it into the fact that you're learning how to learn and then as you're doing that you can spot yourself learning something new and as you're doing that you can ask yourself the question how did i just learn that what caused my learning to happen and then if you observe that over time you will develop principles that will allow you to become a powerful meta learner such that you will learn how to learn and you will get better at learning and this turns out to be one of the keys to being really good at learning you're not just learning you're learning how to learn with language this is also the case most people use language simply to get whatever they want in life but they're not paying very much attention to how they're using their language or how language shapes their thoughts or their world view and when you start to pay attention to that now you get into metal language language about language and now language starts to become self-aware and you start to recognize holy [ __ ] my language has such a significant influence on how i think such that language and reality are not two distinct things but are actually deeply interwoven and what i consider reality is not just reality given to me from the outside it's very much shaped by the language that i use and how i think about reality and even the thoughts that i can think are shaped by the vocabulary that i have as i expand my vocabulary and i take responsibility for building up my vocabulary and i develop new concepts and new distinctions which i attach labels to such as the concept of going meta when i develop that distinction and i attach that label to it and i make it explicit now that becomes part of my lexicon now i can use that vocabulary to communicate in a much more robust manner with myself and also with other people and this is an extremely powerful thing and yet at the same time i can become aware of how language limits me so in certain ways making these linguistic distinctions empowers me and us as a collective community if we develop these distinctions collectively it also limits us as well because however we define that term or that distinction now we're going to start to see the world carved up into this the distinctions that we have learned and of course we haven't learned all the possible distinctions there's too many we only learn certain ones and we have certain biases towards certain ones and not others and of course that all shapes our worldview and so this is really when exploring reality becomes interesting is when you become cognizant of how language shapes reality until you've reached this level that i'm talking about here you haven't even begun to to think seriously about existence you're just operating blindly using the very limited linguistic categories that your particular culture has handed down to you and you just use those and usually you don't even consider that there could be much more powerful ones or the limits of the ones that you've been given and then of course we can start to talk about the different pros and cons of various languages the fact that the english language has a certain set of restrictions a japanese or chinese language might have a different set of restrictions and also possibilities and strengths and then to be able to jump between those that's very powerful see as you're doing this whole thing you're going meta on language and then you could even start to connect to to even more abstract languages like logic and like mathematics and you can go meta on those as well and then you might even maybe one day we discover aliens or ufos and we meet with them and they have an even you know more robust language you might imagine than any of the human languages and then imagine what it would how powerful it would be to learn their language which would be orders of magnitude beyond human language to learn that from them and then to go meta on on that as well and now you start to see some some radical possibilities emerging another example of going meta is with science this is something i'm really passionate about i've spoken a lot about this in my episode uh my whole series of episodes called deconstructing the myth of science where we really get into the epistemology and metaphysical foundations of science but in general most scientists when they're doing science they're doing science without doing meta science which means that they're not actually doing a science of science they're simply taking science for granted as a given and they're using that scientific method whatever it is they're just using it as though it couldn't be any different and they think they're just whatever results the method gives them is just reality very few scientists invest the time to really think about wait a minute where did the assumptions and the methods of science come from and were those themselves scientifically derived by which i mean empirically derived or are a lot of them just dogma and belief and how do we know that the actual foundations and methodologies of science itself are valid when you start to ask those questions of course you get into something that's beyond science itself these questions are now getting into the realm of philosophy one of the problems with modern science is that modern science doesn't like to associate itself with philosophy it likes to create a distinction between itself and philosophy because philosophy is sort of a stuff that doesn't have any strict quantifiable answers whereas science deals with the hard facts of reality equations and calculus and quantities but as it turns out there is no such sharp distinction and it turns out that asking these meta questions of science is actually the most important work that a scientist can do because as it turns out for one to do science one has to depend upon epistemic principles and assumptions and also metaphysical principles and assumptions which are not themselves given by science this is necessary otherwise science wouldn't be able to accomplish any work any time you run a scientific experiment there's always dozens of assumptions that are made about how the experiment works and about how the world works and about how the universe is structured in order for that experiment to be possible to run it all for example you have to assume certain basic things about the nature of causality and time and space even to run the most basic scientific experiment but a lot of these assumptions about causality time and space and other things these are not actually scientifically derived or scientifically proven these are just conventions these are our best guesses because the fact is that we began exploring reality from a position of total ignorance that means we never even had a scientific method we had to invent the scientific method as we went along and of course as you're inventing the scientific method how do you invent it which method do you use to invent the method that you're going to use to explore reality how do you know that the method you used to derive the method was itself a valid method you see it creates a circularity problem so if you really want to do high quality science you've got to go meta on science and do meta science but then of course you're wondering will leo but then if it's possible to do meta science wouldn't it be even better to do meta meta science the science of meta science and of course the answer is yes and then you wonder well where does it end and of course the answer is that it doesn't end that's what makes it so tricky that's what makes reality so interesting is that it doesn't end you can always go more meta and that's difficult for our minds to do every extra level of meta becomes more and more challenging requires higher levels of abstraction ability within politics for example within political debate you can go meta on a political debate which would mean that you notice yourself being ideological defensive and closed-minded so let's say that i'm a progressive and i'm arguing against a conservative we can be arguing on content like i might believe that abortion is is good and the conservative might believe that abortion is evil and we might start to hash it out and we're we're getting lost in the content of this debate and then what could happen is i can really realize wait a minute we're fighting on this single plane of content but what's really going on here is that he has his position i have my position he has his perspective i have my perspective both of our perspectives could be partial and incomplete and we could be speaking past each other and therefore it's not a matter of him being right or me being right it's a matter of me going meta and realizing that what this whole debate is about is about him defending his own personal biases his ego and me defending my personal biases and my ego i'm defending the beliefs that i've been indoctrinated with in my liberal family when i was growing up and he's just parroting ideas that he learned from his conservative family who was religious that told him that abortion was evil and all that's happening here is we're just clashing our biases together without any kind of higher awareness and that's like a light bulb going up this is a earth-shattering revelation when you realize this then you go meta on the whole debate and you realize ah i see this is not going to be resolved at the level of defeating his ideas or him defeating my ideas and it doesn't matter who wins this debate because this is all just an ego game and then i can look inside of myself and i can realize oh yeah i can actually use mindfulness to penetrate into my own body become aware of my ego at work inside of me generating this ideology and then defending it and being closed-minded about it and refusing to look at the situation from a higher perspective i can actually feel my body getting hotter i can feel myself getting angry or defensive when he's making a good point i can also start to notice the various manipulative tricks that his ego is using against me in this debate and then i can notice myself using those tricks against him and i can notice the double standards that i have and i can notice my own biases and i can notice his biases and i can notice the fact that the only reason i'm arguing with him is because i have a certain survival agenda that i'm trying to defend with my ego and i can notice that he's doing the same thing and when all of that is noticed the entire game of this debate collapses that would be going meta can you see how powerful that is can you see how liberating that is you see this is the kind of higher dimensional move that needs to be done to solve this particular political problem not just between me and him on the issue of abortion but everywhere across society when it comes to political debates whereas most people spend their entire lives just fighting back and forth on the same plane without realizing that there's a higher dimension involved and of course this doesn't just pertain to political debates it also pertains to scientific debates debates between science and religion atheists and theists various debates within philosophical schools such as realism versus idealism or any of the schools of philosophy that you've that you've read about or might have studied in college that's that's the power of this concept of going meta you see it it really is the master key to resolving the majority of mankind's problems the majority of our problems cannot be solved on the same plane in the same dimension that we've been trying to solve them at which is why the problems are so sticky and so seemingly irresolvable liberals and conservatives have been debating with each other for centuries maybe for millennia and they still continue to do it so that should already clue you into the fact that we're going to keep fighting unless we realize there's a higher level likewise mankind has been going to war with each other for millennia we've been killing each other and starting wars so and we're still doing it now in the 21st century this is not something that used to happen it still happens today there's going to be more wars tomorrow so when you realize that you you start to ask yourself the question like well wait a minute what is the what is the the root structure here that is causing us to get entangled in these wars and you might even notice yourself getting embroiled in one of these wars supporting one side versus another side and then you ask yourself well wait a minute if i get entangled and everyone's getting entangled we're just all going to keep getting entangled forever is there a way to make a meta move to to switch to a higher dimension such that we're no longer getting entangled in these debates and wars and battles and you realize there is and you can also realize the same thing in your relationships too if you keep fighting with your spouse or your romantic partner or with your family members you know your mother or your father you keep fighting with them your children see the solution to a relationship problem or a marriage problem is not to fight harder to get what you want even though that's the most intuitive thing that's that's what you it seems like hey you know if i could just force her to give me the sex that i want everything would be a-okay and she thinks well if i can just force him to start to you know say nice things to me and tell me how much he loves me then everything would be a-okay and of course that's not it that's not going to solve the relationship problem the relationship problem has to be solved at a meta level so we see this all throughout mankind's problems individually and collectively see you can go meta on religion too let's say i was born as a fundamentalist christian and i'm growing up that way until i reach my early twenties and then i look around maybe i'm in university i notice that my friends and others that i'm you know i have a diverse group of friends and they have their own ideas and beliefs some of them are hindus some there are buddhists some of them are jews whatever and then one day i notice wait a minute what if my religion is not some special one the one right one what if my religion is just one perspective out of all other possible perspectives that mine is not any better than any of the other ones and the only reason i believe mine is because that's what i grew up in and that's just what felt natural to me i was like a fish and water i didn't even question it because i was so young i was brainwashed with it just like all of them were and that that's all that it is and now i'm attached to it and i could let it go and see if you realize that that would be going meta on religion think of how powerful that is think of the effect that has on liberating one's mind to be able to do that of course easier said than done speaking of going meta in a in a relationship like when you and your spouse are in a fight together you can go meta in the sense that you can actually notice yourself creating the fight contributing to the fight because usually when you're in a fight you're so enmeshed in the fight you have no distance from the fight and therefore you know you're just thinking about how do i throw the next good punch like you know she told me that and i i'm gonna i'm gonna you know i'm gonna tell her something nasty and mean about what she did last week and that's gonna hurt her you know get her back like that but then you can notice yourself and you can stop it and say ah oh i look at that i was just about to say something nasty and mean to her which would have just triggered her and then she would have responded with something even nastier and meaner about me and then i would have had to respond with something even nastier about her and then we would have just you know been escalating rather than going down that road which you know we've probably done many times before why don't i stop and ascend one level higher and try something totally different which doesn't involve fighting i can notice myself contributing to the fight that is how you stop a fight consider meta chess if you're a fan of chess a little bit like i am see in a normal chess game it's very linear in the sense that the rules of the chess game are all well defined and they don't change but imagine if we were playing to speak the cliche something like a four-dimensional chess where you had the normal chess board but with every move of a piece you know you can move your pawn or your rook or whatever just like normal but every time you do every player that that makes the move gets to also make a modification to the rules of the game now that would be interesting chess so let's say i move my pawn and then i also make a second move which is a meta move where i change one of the rules and i say that from now on pawns instead of moving one square at you know at a time they can move five squares at a time from now on and so now we make that move and we write it on a whiteboard and now the next player you know the next the next guy who my opponent now all his pawns are going to be moving five steps ahead instead of one but then when he moves his piece he gets to make a move too he can either reverse my move my meta move about the pawns or he can come up with his own he can say that from now on for example that knights move in a diagonal the way that bishops usually do and bishops now move like knights think about how much more interesting that game becomes see that's metachess uh how about meta art meta art is art that critiques other art or tries to change how art is done or if you want to go really meta with art you can make art that makes the process of making art into an art itself that would be interesting or think of uh you know actually these are pretty common these days uh meta movies these are hollywood movies that make critiques to the hollywood movie industry or think about a meta tv show where two characters inside of a tv show are talking to each other about how the audience is watching them and the two the two characters might be wondering like huh i wonder if the audience who's watching us if they're eating popcorn right now think about a meta meeting that would be a meeting to discuss the parameters of the meetings that we're going to have like how should we hold our meetings how long should they be should we have food what kind of food should we have healthy food pizza soft drinks we can have a meta discussion a discussion about how to have discussions what is a valid discussion and what isn't to set those parameters of course you've probably heard of meta analysis and meta-studies a meta-study is a study of all the studies that are relevant that you want to to analyze and find data for so for example you can do a meta-analysis of every study that has been done on the paleo diet let's say if you're into nutrition you know what are all the studies there's probably been hundreds of studies done on the paleo diet well you could take all hundred of those studies combine them together into a meta study into a sort of a meta-analysis where you analyze the data of all those studies and synthesize them together and what is the ultimate conclusion of all those studies and that can be more powerful than any single study by itself in mathematics and in logic they have metatheorems which is a theorem about a theorem meta theorem you can have a meta worldview which is a world view about all world views and in fact most people have an implicit meta worldview so for example i could ask you of all the different views that exist all the religious ones the scientific ones the philosophical ones what do you think do you think that there's only one world view out of all those that is correct and the all the other ones are wrong and diluted or do you think that each one is partially correct and do you think that they're all equally partially correct or that some of them are more partially correct than others and do you think that absolutely everyone is partially has some partial truth to it or do you think that some have no partial truth to them whatsoever at all like for example do you think that nazism has any validity to it whatsoever even if maybe only five percent or do you think that nazism has zero validity whatsoever as a worldview see you probably have some opinions about that but then we can go met and we can ask well how do you know that is that something you've scientifically tested how would you know did you explore all these world views see the problem is that most people have very strong opinions about other world views and yet obviously they haven't explored them which is very easy to verify simply by asking them a few basic questions factual questions historical questions about a worldview very few people in the world have have seriously studied for example feminism socialism capitalism buddhism hinduism judaism jainism zoroastrianism and that's just eight world views right there very few people have studied that many worldviews and yet if you ask most people about these worldviews they're gonna have very strong opinions interesting huh so one of the most powerful strategies in life is to not get stuck in any one world view but to go meta on all of them and to explore them all as many as you can without clinging to or getting biased into any particular one and trying to make sense of them and trying to you know sort out which ones have some validity and which ones don't have any validity at all that is one of the most valuable things you can do in your life if you want to understand life and reality and yourself at a deep level virtually nobody does this and the reason is is because you would have to be able to go meta so this ability to go meta it's very powerful it's difficult almost nobody does it and the rewards you can get from it are huge if you actually do it but it takes work it takes emotional labor it's not easy to do the reason is is because we get attached to a particular frame right we get stuck in these frames it's very difficult for our minds to pop out of a frame and to discover that higher dimension to transcend notice that in all these examples we're really talking about some kind of transcendence how about if we had an argument or a debate about what constitutes a valid argument see a lot of people will argue about stuff but really how do you know what constitutes valid argument you might say well logic but how do you know logic is a valid way to argue and which kind of logic there are different kinds of logics many different kinds of logics so we can start to debate that and then of course that's going to devolve into a meta-meta debate about the meta arguments because the meta arguments themselves will be groundless and we'll have to ground those in something and on and on it goes and this is why argument and logic and debate is uh not very productive most of the time because the bottom line is that it's not grounded in anything it's arbitrary for the most part it's arbitrary so mostly when people are arguing or losing logic all they're doing is they're just they're arguing to defend their biases and their biases are just something that arose out of their survival agenda as they were growing up there's nothing special or absolute or true about them how about a book about how to write books that's very meta how about making a video game about the business of making and selling video games that would be meta on my forum on the actualized forum we actually have a meta forum which is a private forum specifically for the moderators of the forum normal people can't see this forum it's a sub forum and but but those who are moderators and administrators they get to see that forum and that forum is for talking about the problems that exist on the public part of the forum very meta uh a great meta example is the abbot and costello skit who's on first if you haven't seen that search it on on youtube i'll post an example of it on my blog it's very meta sort of joke uh james bond has some meta jokes in it like in gold's finger [ __ ] galore it's a very meta joke um you can find a lot of great meta humor and meta examples in in movies for example in the tv show house of cards with kevin spacey he breaks the fourth wall a lot by doing those monologues you know he's doing something like he he commits a murder it's so over the top but he commits a murder let's say in that show and then he will actually turn and face the audience and speak to the audience about why he murdered so and so that's classic breaking of the fourth wall and actually that's that's one of the most interesting parts of that series so it's a nice little interesting touch that show wouldn't be quite what it was without those breaking fourth wall monologues here's a great example that some of you guys will like um so you know i i i used to do pick up when i was younger i kind of got into self-help and pick up at the same time and so with pickup you're learning all these principles and methods that are good for picking up girls getting them attracted to you what's interesting about pickup is that when you really deeply internalize pickup and this is what a lot of women don't understand is that if you're doing pickup effectively and you're not just using some cheesy pickup line but you really internalize the principles of pickup these are such honest signals of attractiveness in a man what happens is that even if you explicitly tell the principles to the girl as you're picking her up they will still work and so in fact i've actually tried this and it's one of the one of the most amusing and enjoyable ways to pick up a girl is to actually explain to her how you're picking her up as you're picking her up and as that's happening what you'll notice if you're doing it right and you're not just faking it that she will get really attracted to you because it's an honest signal because really what women get attracted to in men is they get attracted to confidence and authentic masculinity such that if you're trying to pick up a woman but you're doing it in an underhanded sneaky sort of way where you're trying to hide the fact that you're trying to pick her up then she'll notice that inauthenticity from you because she'll feel that something is sketchy about you you're trying to trick her in some way and she will get repulsed and you won't be able to pick her up she won't give you her number she won't go on a date with you but if you're picking her up and you're fully embodying who you are which is like you're you're playing up the fact that you're a player right you don't hide this fact you're open about the fact that you sleep with lots of girls that you're this guy and you're doing this whatever and you're honest with her about that you would think that all well she would not want to have anything to do with you actually the opposite because it's such a it's such a a powerful signal that you send when you're comfortable with that right when you can actually carry that and hold that that shows her that you're very confident that you're a leader that you're a man that you've got some balls that you don't apologize that you're not going to back down you're not going to be meek or weak and that makes her very attracted and so in fact what happened once is i i met a girl at a nightclub this was some years back a while now um she ended up being actually this was such a crazy coincidence and these happen when you go out a lot and you talk to thousands of girls this happens so anyways i bumped into this girl who was actually tony robbins's copywriter i didn't know that at the time i just bumped into her just literally grabbed her she was walking through the club um grabbed her number you know spoke to her for three three minutes grab her number then we went on a date the next night or something um in her hotel bar we were at the hotel bar and anyways uh i i kind of walk in there and she's like oh you know the way you were texting me the other night you know are you familiar with pickup and i i think to myself oh [ __ ] uh she knows about pickup what am i gonna do so i have to so i had to admit it i couldn't lie to her so i had to admit it so so i decided my strategy was gonna be just to own it right just own it and i'm like yeah i yeah like i just was kind of honest with her i'm like yeah you know i wasn't that good with girls in the past so i you know got into pickup then i got into personal development and she's like oh personal development i you know i do i do copy writing for personal development authors i'm like oh yeah really which ones and she's like you know tony robbins evan pagan and she started naming all these people who i knew and i'm like oh no [ __ ] i got all their books i read all their books i tell her and she's like oh really which ones and so we started so basically we had like we had this deep connection on the fact that we both were you know knowledgeable about this stuff and actually and so i asked her how do you know about pickup because you know most girls don't and she's like well because i was in this whole self-help world i also you know met and hung out with these pickup artists she actually knew mystery she hung out with mystery and neil strauss and like all the other pickup guys and i'm like oh no [ __ ] so we started talking about that and so we sat there for like a couple of hours just connecting on this but that's not the meta part the meta part is that after all that happened i'm like okay well i mean this is all good we're talking here but i mean i want to sleep with you but she was playing the game like oh i'm not going to sleep with you tonight i'm like no we're going to sleep tonight um and she's like oh no no i'm not i'm not the kind i'm not that kind of girl right so she starts playing her game i start playing my game but as i'm playing my game i'm narrating to her how i'm playing the game and i'm just telling her like and i'm actually making this explicit usually this would all be implicit but now i'm making it explicit because you know we've we've opened this can of worm so i start actually like every technique that i use on her i start just telling her what technique i'm using and i'm like okay we're gonna go walk around we're gonna go bounce around like to different locations in this in this hotel and she's like oh i don't want to leave my hotel i'm like okay well we'll just bounce around and she's like i know what you're doing you're trying to trick me and i'm like it doesn't matter and we just keep going and going and going and uh and so uh yeah like i will do my kino escalation on her like you know i'll touch her you know this part of the body that part of the body in a certain order you know the way you're supposed to like ramp up the physical escalation so as i'm doing that i'm explaining it to her and it's it's so hilarious she's giggling and laughing and she's getting more and more attracted by all this and so um yeah we spent like three or four hours doing that and i was trying to pull her from that hotel but you know she and her friend were staying in the same room in that hotel so there was like no opportunity to sleep with her in that hotel but uh but anyways like i was i was using like every trick i had to try to get her out of that hotel um in the end i started she's like no i got it it's like it's getting late it's like 4am i'm leaving town tomorrow so it had to happen that night just because she was leaving town and um and eventually we st we started kissing and started making out right outside of like her friend's room and like i was i was trying to think of everything i could and in retrospect um i knew exactly what would have worked now in retrospect i know it would have worked i should have just taken her down to the lobby and uh and actually rented a room in like a neighboring room in that hotel and then we would have been able to have sex but uh but actually the reason i didn't do that is because i was i was being very cheap and i had this sort of principle which was actually a bad principle it cost me it cost me multiple girls this bad principle that i refused to pay for any girl for anything i wouldn't buy her a drink i certainly didn't want to buy a hotel room probably would have cost like 150 bucks uh in that hotel but um but yeah if if i was more flexible on that one rule i could have paid 150 bucks and we could have closed because she was she was really into it it's just that the logistics of it were impossible because her and her girlfriend were literally sleeping in that same in that same room um there was one other possibility which is that i could have i could have actually gone into that room with her with her girlfriend there and then pulled her into the bathroom and had sex with her in the bathroom in that room while her girlfriend was uh in the room um you know outside the bathroom that would work as well um but it didn't happen but anyways that is just an example it's a long-winded way of saying that attracting females is not about what is explicitly stated it doesn't matter what you say verbally when you're trying to attract a female what matters is the implicit honest signals that are sent based on how strongly you're able to embody your masculine authenticity and the kind of confidence and humor and detachment from outcome that you're able to display this is one of the most crazy and unbelievable aspects of game when you learn to really game is that it does not matter what you verbally say it matters what you sub communicate and what you do and this is what most people don't understand about pickup and this is what a lot of women don't understand about pick up you know most women will say oh leo if you try to pull any of those stunts on me it wouldn't work leo it wouldn't work on me i don't care what you said it wouldn't work on me those cheesy pick-up lines that wouldn't work on me but what you don't understand is that it doesn't matter what's said what matters is how i show up how the guy shows up if the guy shows up and he's confident he's cocky he's humorous he's lighthearted he's detached he's cool he's suave it doesn't matter if he if you know he's a player you'll still get attracted that's just how it works it's unbelievable i mean these things i would not have believed if they were told to me unless i actually went out and tried it a lot and then actually experienced it working so if if you guys there are our gamers and you practice some game and you really practice it authentically not just cheesy pickup lines try it the next time you're picking up a girl it can be so effective to be meta about it for example one of my favorite techniques if i want to hit on a girl like at a supermarket at a grocery store one of the most effective openers because that that's always you know what you're wondering like how do i open how do i start this conversation what do i talk about what do i say i don't know what to say well that is your opener if you're authentic the authentic opener is to walk up to her and say you know i just saw you walking by and i just stood in the corner over there for five minutes thinking about what am i going to say what am i going to say am i like what can i tell her to impress her so just that's exactly what you're telling her this is what you're saying and like and you just tell her you know i wanted to come up and say something but i was nervous i didn't know what to say so here i am that's an extremely powerful effective opener but you have to again do it authentically because the tendency will be for you to want to open her that way but to still game it up and to kind of be fake about it and in which case it won't be very effective so so yeah authenticity like that is is very very powerful even when you're admitting a mistake you've made or you're admitting something bad about yourself just the fact that you're able to admit a mistake or the fact that you're able to admit something bad or negative about yourself that already sub-communicates in a powerful manner to the other person that actually this guy is honest and he has some balls and he's able to put himself out there because most people if they did something wrong or had something bad about them revealed they wouldn't be able to own it or to hold it and so people admire that so there you go it works on a sort of meta level another example is meta lying which is lying about lying see most people they don't just lie they met a lie they lie about the fact that they lie like donald trump it's not that she he's a a ridiculously prolific liar it's also about the fact that he lies about the fact that he's lying and he doesn't just lie to others he lies to himself that he's lying most liars do that likewise with deception we've talked about self-deception i have a three-part series called self-deception parts one two three go check that out very important series one of my most important uh we talked about deception there but really deception has a meta component to it which means that to execute a successful deception you also have to deceive about the fact that you're deceiving and to deceive yourself effectively you have to not only deceive yourself but you have to twice deceive yourself meta deceive yourself by then deceiving yourself that you've deceived yourself and denial has this meta quality as well whereas wherein if you are in denial you will also deny the fact that you're in denial and so therefore to escape self-deception and to escape denial effectively what's required of your mind is to be able to do this double jump maneuver where you're able to realize that not only are you deceiving yourself you're deceiving yourself that you're deceiving yourself and that you're denying it and that you're double denying it only when you are conscious of all of that will you able to go sufficiently a level to be able to escape the self-deception very tricky another example of meta is when you accuse someone else of being selfish normally you would just make that accusation and it would stop there that would be the first tier like you know someone's being an [ __ ] and you tell them how selfish they are but there's a meta level when you become more conscious and you do spiritual work conscious work every time that you call someone out for being selfish like let's say you say oh donald trump he's such a selfish [ __ ] right okay but you know most progressives and liberals feel that way but what most progressives and liberals don't understand is that actually when you're calling donald trump a selfish [ __ ] even though that's true the only reason you're calling him a selfish [ __ ] is because you yourself are selfish you see otherwise if you weren't selfish why would you be bothered by the selfishness of others now you say oh leo but uh it's not because i'm selfish that i'm bothered by the selfishness of others it's that people being selfish they're hurting others and i'm bothered by the fact that they're hurting others because i'm selfless aha but the fact that you're hurt because other people are being hurt by selfish people that itself is an act of selfishness on your part and see to really go deep in your spiritual effort and development you need to be able to recognize all of this and you need to become so selfless that you're not even bothered by other people being selfish by recognizing that that is more selfishness within you you see anything that's bothering you by definition is your own selfishness and in this way you attain nirvana and you will never attain nirvana so long as you're bothered by the selfishness of others because others will always be selfish to the only way to transcend that is to realize that the selfishness of others only bothers me because i myself am selfish and so if i want others to stop being selfish i have to do the first and final move which is just to eliminate selfishness within me once i eliminate selfishness with me within me it doesn't even matter that others eliminate selfishness with them because it no longer bothers me and you might say leo but that's selfish and then of course i would say yes it is but that's selfish with a capital s yeah and there we're getting into sort of very very weird strange loopy non-dual um collapses between selflessness and selfishness uh and speaking spiritual work you know nettie nettie method the nettie nettie method of self-inquiry that you might have been taught seen some youtube videos about this probably i have a video about this myself nettie method you can search for it uh yeah the self-inquiry method is basically a method of going meta on everything on the entire world you say i'm not the body i'm not the hand i'm not the foot i'm not the face i'm not the brain i'm not the mind i'm not anything at all and then eventually through that you can get to awakening meta meta meta meta you keep going meta meta meta on everything until you awaken and you know how in the classic zen colons the zen masters are talking about the finger pointing to the moon well the finger pointing to the moon what is that that's meta see when the finger points to the moon and the fool looks at the finger he's not going meta but when the when the fool is able to see that the finger is not there for you to look at the finger the finger is there for you to look at the moon ah okay now i've gone meta i've gone meta on the finger to see that it's pointing to something that's going meta so that's my list of examples as you can see some of these examples are very trivial but some of them are very deep and significant in fact the most significant and there are a lot of domains where this is applied metaphysics meta-science metapolitics metaphilosophy metalogic there's a lot a lot i could talk about with better logic you know you could have a even a meta metalogic and a meta meta metal logic uh for that i recommend you read the works of douglas hofstadter gerda lasher and bach i recommend you check out my episode on google's and completeness theorem called the metaphysical implications of google's completeness theorem i have multiple episodes that touch upon strange loops and logic and the logic of infinity and things of that nature go check that out um some of those are very technical topics but basically what logicians and mathematicians learned in the early 20th century is that logic itself there's an infinite number of different logics logics are just axiomatic systems and there's an infinite number of them and that every single logic itself requires a metalogic to ground that logic in and then a metalogic requires a metametalogic to ground it in that's because all logics are ultimately groundless because all of reality is ultimately groundless and so anytime you're dealing with a closed system which is what a logic is there's always some larger system that that closed system has to be couched within some you know larger frame so every finite frame has another frame outside of it by definition that's what it means to be finite that's a very brief overview i'm kind of glossing over it here let's move on though to meta philosophy so meta philosophy is philosophy about how to do philosophy and that's what was most interesting to me when i entered the field of philosophy see when i first started doing philosophy around late high school early university undergrad days for me my problem was this is that i got an encyclopedia philosophy i flipped through it and i thought there were all these different philosophical schools there was idealism there was realism there was empiricism there's rationalism there's a solipsism there's uh buddhism and a million others so i looked at all that and i said okay well which one's true and there was no answer and so this this made me very concerned not about philosophy but about metaphilosophy because i didn't want to get stuck into some you know one bad philosophy i cared about how do i figure out which philosophy is the correct one which takes you into the realm of meta philosophy so then i started thinking about well what would it even mean to know which philosophy is better than another one or which one is truer than another one that got me into epistemology i started thinking about foundations of knowledge how humans know anything at all and as i started researching and contemplating all of that uh i started to to realize that it's all groundless and that it's all relative and that it's all based upon personal biases and that there really isn't any one right philosophy and that really the entire academic philosophical pursuit is really just a game it's just ego games of people arguing but never getting to any absolute truth um metapolitics what is metapolitics well it's what i presented in my conscious politics series part one two three four to me metapolitics means if conventional politics is you know dividing ourselves into tribes liberals and conservatives and then battling back and forth trying to win over the other one trying to dominate and exterminate the other one if that's conventional politics metapolitics is becoming conscious of that whole game and realizing that that's not gonna solve anything and that really what is necessary is we need to raise the level of consciousness of everybody involved in the game to the point where they can recognize this sort of tribal all these tribal dynamics and the way in which our worldview and our belief systems are shaping our biases and then we're fighting over these different biases and the fact that it's all just brute survival and that our survival agendas are arbitrary and that really we need to spiritualize our politics and make it about consciousness not about winning any particular policy battle it's not about abortion it's not about civil rights it's not about racism it's not about gun control really politics is about raising the consciousness of mankind and getting everybody to love each other that's what politics is really about and then when you realize that and you start to work with politics in that manner to understand politics in that manner then you're getting into what i would call metapolitics meta science already touched upon a little bit meta science to me means the stuff that i discussed in my three-part series deconstructing the myth of science it's basically thinking deeply and critically about the foundations of science and how we can make science better by questioning and deconstructing and then improving those foundations there's also meta business if conventional business is about figuring out how to earn the most money and how to monopolize a marketplace that's what it is meta business is about thinking about how to create a more conscious business it's about looking at how business is done as a whole what are the sort of externalities that businesses create and what kind of impact do businesses have on their environments and on their marketplaces how do businesses shape the consciousness of mankind individually and collectively how businesses are just functions of survival usually and then trying to look at business from this higher perspective uh you can have meta art you can have meta media media about media meta relationships basically if you want to have a effective relationship you need to do meta relationship the problem of relationship can't be solved with relationship only with meta relationship there has to be almost like three entities within a relationship there has to be you there has to be your spouse or partner and then there has to be the third entity which is the larger whole lawn of the two of you together sort of the relationship itself as a whole and both of you and her or him whoever got to come together and kind of merge yourselves and surrender yourselves to the higher unit and that would be meta relationship then there's meta spirituality which is if conventional spirituality is picking one school of spirituality and just doing its techniques blindly meta spirituality is the study of all the different schools picking the best practices out of all of them and trying to ask the question of like what are all of them trying to do why are they fighting with each other why don't the hindus agree with the buddhists agree with the christians and so forth and how do we align all those together take the best parts of all of them and just ask ourselves what are they all trying to do what's the essence of all of these different traditions to me that would be meta-spirituality meta work would be doing your work but while you're doing your work finding ways to do your work better there could even be meta sex when you're having sex and it's a little bit tricky because usually when you're having sex you want to be fully present and in the flow that's an important aspect of sex but also see most people the way they have sex is they just have sex they're not interested in improving how to have sex they're not interested in talking to their partner about how to please them better they're just unconsciously having sex like animals but imagine having sex in a way where you actually try to communicate with your partner to figure out what what turns her on the most or what turns him on the most communicating and then turning that as part of the intimacy sort of aikidoing that jiu-jitsu in that and converting it into part of the intimacy that you two have as the sort of meta relationship such that you're having sex but you're also figuring out ways how to please each other better and learning how to improve the quality of the sex and the intimacy and then that would be medisex alright so those are the examples now let's get into the real meat i want to explain i want to explain why this meta thing is so important so as we've seen many of our deepest problems can only be solved one level higher by going meta as i've talked about in my episode called content versus structure a lot of our problems are us getting locked into battles of content differences while not noticing the structure like for example we might have atheists and theists arguing with each other on content like one of them says god exists the other one says god does not exist and it seems like they're they couldn't be more different and one of them has to be right and one has to be wrong right no they're both wrong and they're both part right in certain ways um and they're both engaging in the same dogmatic limited paradigm locked perspectives in a certain sense and so we got to be able to to see the structural similarities between atheists and theists they're both dogmatic that's the structure it's dogma it's personal biases and then to transcend that you got to let those go then you can get to a higher level so i've just i've discussed and given many examples of this in my episode about content versus structure so see that another point here about why med is so important is that if you're going to do something well anything in life that you want to do really well you must bring the method of doing it or the process of doing it itself under scrutiny so what do i mean by this like for example if you want to do language really well you can't just walk around spouting language you also have to reflect about your language and you have to go meta on the language and develop a language about your language you have to think deeply about the language you have to observe very mindfully how you use your language otherwise you're not really going to be a master of language likewise if you're going to be doing art it's not enough for you to just do art you also have to think about art you have to do meta art you have to ask the question what is art how can i do better art why is this the case that the method or process itself has to be brought under scrutiny well think of it this way it's like trying to observe something with a telescope if you're so busy focused on the content of the telescope what the what the telescope is showing you right the thing you're looking at so let's say you're looking at the moon with a telescope if you're so preoccupied with seeing the moon that you never divert any attention to inspecting the telescope itself can you see how this is a problem what if your telescope has a crack what if the lenses are misaligned what if there's dirt on the lens what if the glass of the lens has a certain tint red green blue that's going to distort every object you look at the lens at the you look look at with that telescope see that's going to be a systemic corruption all the way through so likewise if you're doing art without looking at the method of how you're doing art if there's corruption or distortion in your method or lack of optimization in your method that's going to lead to bad art for the rest of your life unless you look at it step outside of it to look at it and then change it you can't step outside of it to look at it and change it if you're too identified with it like if you're too attached to using your paintbrush in a particular way so attached that you're not willing to let go of your paintbrush then you can't pick up a better paint brush you're stuck with that one see likewise if you're doing science and you're not gonna devote significant amount of time wondering if the scientific method you're using is itself fully valid or whether it has corruptions in it that means you're just going to use your method and if there's any corruptions in your method all of the science you do for the rest of your life is going to be corrupt and the only way you can know is by stepping outside of the science you're using observing it objectively from the outside and then changing it but to change it and to observe it objectively you would you can't be identified with it see because if you're identified with it then any mistake in it you're going to take too personally and then you won't change it likewise with how you do business likewise with logic with mathematics with philosophy if you're too attached to one philosophical school you can't see that philosophical school objectively you can't see its errors you're blind to its errors you have blind spots and therefore you're going to be stuck with those heirs for the rest of your life it's this which gets you to detach from your you know pet philosophy or from your pet science or from your pet religion the recognition that it could be corrupt and you don't know that it's not corrupt because you've never examined it if you're honest like ask any christian have you really combed through all of christianity to examine whether it's corrupt or not no of course not there's no way they could have done that that's a huge monumental undertaking that would take decades to accomplish and if they did it they would realize yes it is corrupt guaranteed likewise with science likewise with business likewise with art likewise with mathematics likewise with spirituality if you're too attached to doing spirituality one way ask yourself where did that one way come from where'd you get that way you didn't make it up yourself you got it from other humans you saw a youtube video you read a book your parents taught it to your rabbi taught it to you somebody taught it to you and when they taught it to you you didn't critically examine it because you didn't have that capacity if you learned yoga you didn't critically examine yoga if you learned meditation you didn't critically examine meditation you just took it on blind faith that the yoga the meditation the christianity whatever you learned that it's not corrupt and the person teaching it to you also wasn't corrupt these are just implicit assumptions that needs to be brought under scrutiny and i guarantee you once you bring it into sufficient scrutiny you'll realize it's way more corrupt than you could have ever imagined which is precisely why you don't want to bring it under scrutiny it's not that you don't want to bring it under scrutiny because it would be a waste of time because actually it's it's very pure and you don't want to waste time examining looking for corruptions where not exist no no no that's never the problem the problem is always that you don't want to look and scrutinize for corruption precisely because the corruption is so bad that if you truly looked you would be horrified that's the real reason that nobody bothers to do any scrutiny of any of the methods whether it's science or religion or spirituality or business the corruption is just massive in all of these fields in medicine too oh boy especially in medicine western medicine is one of the most corrupt of all possible methodologies so that's extremely important can you see that i'm going out of my way here to try to convince you of how important this is going meta creates detachment that's one of the super powers of going meta you see if you don't go sufficiently meta you're going to be attached to the thing because you're going to identify with it and of course the best example of that is your own body if you believe that you are this body if you believe that you are this mind this ego mind you haven't gone sufficiently meta in your consciousness to realize that you're you are those things but you're not just those things those are those are minor aspects of you you're way beyond that if you haven't done that meta meta move then you're identified with the body with your physical appearance maybe even with your youth with your beauty with your wealth with your fame with your status with your humanity with your culture with your religion with your nation you're identified with all that and then any time any one of those things gets threatened or destroyed you take it personally because you're attached to it you have to be because you're identified with it right like if you're identified with being an american and america gets attacked you're going to take it personally and then you're gonna act in dumb ways to defend that attachment if you're a scientist you're attached to being a scientist your whole career and your whole ego mind is invested in doing science you're invested into realism materialism rationalism atheism other isms you're you're so attached to those things that you can't even conceive of a reality otherwise and so you're stuck with that and you're going to suffer for all those attachments because all those attachments will end one day whether it's with your physical death or with something else maybe you lose your career maybe your your theory gets disproven maybe you write a book and then somebody writes a better book than you that trashes on your book and then you're going to be butt hurt about it why because you're attached to it so the whole logic behind spirituality or awakening is that you go meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta through the neti method you go so meta that eventually you identify with absolutely nothing and then nothing can hurt you you become literally immortal that's spiritual transcendence that is your truest nature your truest nature is infinite transcendence but of course this is what makes spirituality so difficult and so controversial and so threatening and so confusing to people it's confusing because your mind doesn't want a direct path towards complete detachment and transcendence and emptiness your mind wants to attach to stuff therefore it makes spirituality into this very complicated controversial difficult ordeal simply because your mind on its way to nothingness your mind just wants to cling to absolutely everything that it can so you personally suffer when you can't go sufficiently meta and also important domains of life like science logic politics religion they also suffer when they're not able to go sufficiently meta jail breaking your mind which again is one of our goals here with this work requires that the mind go meta the mind is always engaged in an active process of constructing reality but the mind is not aware that it's doing so and it needs to keep denying that it's doing so why is it necessary to deny the construction of reality because if you don't deny it you realize that reality is a construction in which case it becomes illusory and therefore it loses its reality so reality is really just a lack of consciousness of the fact that you're dreaming this whole thing up so the trick is to dream it up but then to deny that you dreamt it that's the whole game that's the game everybody is playing here your mom is playing this game your dad is playing this game muslims are playing this game christians are playing this game scientists are playing this game conservatives are playing this game progressives are playing this game marxists are playing this game capitalists are playing this game that's the game humans play we're always constructing reality to suit ourselves and that's why we're so touchy about it too you see because when you're constructing your reality to suit yourself it's very fragile it's very easy for it to break apart therefore the ego needs to get very defensive and very manipulative about how it goes defending that that's why it loves to argue and to debate and to troll to little nasty comments online and stuff like this and to wage crusades and holy wars those are all the tactics and methods that it uses to convince itself first and foremost that it's not constructing reality but of course that is the very evidence that it's constructing reality because if you were constructing reality why would you be struggling so hard to maintain it notice how hard you struggle to maintain it why would you get emotional about issues of god or science or logic or math or business or politics why would any of these things emotionally affect you unless your survival hinged on it unless these things were sand castles that could go at any any moment with the next wave you see the trick with science is that no amount of science can get you to realize that you're inside of a dream because science is happening within a frame see this is what scientists don't understand is that they think that science is just like this universal solvent this universal method that explains and touches everything but it doesn't science is just like a picture within a frame hanging on a wall in a giant museum that's filled with a thousand other paintings same goes for rationality rationality is not a universal solvent rationality is also just a single painting in a frame hung in a museum with a thousand other paintings the problem is that when you get stuck in any one frame this frame could be science rationality skepticism nihilism atheism christianity islam buddhism whatever if you get stuck in that one frame from your vantage point it will seem as though that frame is all that there is that's what a frame is it seems total but it's not total that's the trick to realize that it's not totally you have to be able to go meta if you can't go meta beyond something that thing ends up being the totality of your reality but really it's like you just confined yourself to a kiddie pool and you think that well this kiddie pool is as big as water gets no the kiddie pool is just some artificial thing you've been swimming in there's a giant ocean out there that's a billion times deeper than your kiddie pool but if you insist on staying in the kiddie pool that's all you're going to know and no amount of logic or debate will convince you that there's more outside your kiddie pool the only thing that will convince you there's something more outside the kiddie pool is the intuition that there might be something more and then your personal effort to step outside the pool and go find something more that would be going meta if you're uninterested in doing that if you're lazy and you don't want to walk outside the pool then you'll be stuck in there forever and you will be totally convinced that that's all there is this is why scientists can be so dumb this is why highly rational people with high iqs can be so clueless about the nature of existence and consciousness and spirituality why is meta such a deep feature of reality you might wonder what's so special about it why would reality be this way well as we've talked about in the past it's because reality is infinite see infinite means it has no limits it has no outer boundary it's completely open-ended infinite means there's always more no matter how much of a reality you've seen there's always an infinite number more of reality that you haven't seen that's the radical nature of infinity if you want a deeper explanation of infinity check out my two-part series called understanding infinity part one and part two and beyond those two parts i've also talked about it elsewhere as well so reality is one reality is infinite or infinity absolute infinity we could call it but see the problem is that us humans were finite creatures and we create lots of finite closed systems via language logic thought and symbols we're always trying to grasp some little corner of reality but every little piece of reality we grasp is not the whole thing by definition but then we take our little finite closed systems and we want to pretend as though they are the whole thing but every finite closed system has a boundary around it if it has a boundary around it that means there's an inside and there's an outside see infinity is that which has no inside and outside the inside and outside are the same but in every finite closed system there's always an inside and an outside and this is where the problem happens if you have a system that has an inside and outside that means you could be inside it or outside it so to go meta is to jump from inside to outside when you jump outside of it you can see it if you're inside of it you can't fully see it when you're inside of it it seems like it is the total thing when you're outside of it you can see that oh this is just one part of something larger right so since reality is made out of holons we've talked about that in my episode called what are holons go check that out if you don't know what a haul on is so since reality is composed of these holons you can always jump outside of one hole on to a higher one to a higher one to a higher one infinitely because that's what infinity means it goes on forever and why is reality infinite and not finite simply because uh there can't exist anything outside of reality that would constrain it or put a boundary around it because anything that's outside of it by definition has to be inside of it here's where it gets paradoxical and strange loopy because if you had two realities you might say well there might be there could be two realities but then those two realities have to be connected into one larger reality because what would be the thing separating the two any boundary between two realities to say that there's two realities that means you must say there's a boundary between between them what is that boundary matter is it mad at something real if it's not that means there's not two of them if it is that means that real boundary has to not be either one or two but a third thing and if it's real and this is real and this is real all three are real that means it's reality real one sit down and think it through with a piece of paper there's a pretty pretty simple logic to it it's not it's not that complicated most people just don't want to do the work so as it turns out truth exists truth and reality are identical and truth is infinitely meta truth is the whole of reality everything that exists is truth with a capital t and that truth is infinite it it spans forever it's endless and this truth is transcendental it can't be captured with symbols thoughts logic or any kind of closed systems or language anytime you try to capture the truth in a closed system you can capture a piece of it but the piece is never the whole it's an infinitesimally small piece of the whole therefore you can keep talking and talking and talking and talking but you're never ever going to be able to reach the end of truth truth will always remain transcendental truth always escapes symbolic and systemic encapsulation and if you want more on why that is the case check out my episode called the metaphysical implications of google's incompleteness there so why do smart people not understand god because god is not a bearded man in the clouds god is infinity god is truth god is infinitely meta to understand god your mind needs to become infinitely meta literally you need to be able to detach from the whole of reality every single one of your attachments and you have to grasp it implicitly you can't grasp god explicitly in a finite manner because god is infinite so you can't make god finite so this is the mistake that scientists and rationalists and other materialists and folks make is that they they keep asking like leo show us a proof for god but when you say a proof for god what you're talking about is you're talking about a a quantified formalized finite explicit symbolic proof via language or logic or mathematics or whatever but by definition that can't be god because that's finite see the problem is that you're not understanding you're not understanding that you're not understanding what you're asking for what you're asking for is impossible and you take the impossible thing you're asking for and you take that as evidence of the fact that god isn't real but that's just because you're asking for something impossible it's like you're asking for for me to show you uh you know a square circle so this this kind of impossible thing you're asking for gives you then gives your ego then a plausible deniability where you say ah leah since leo can't can't explicitly state it since leo can't explicitly state the truth that means the truth must not exist or he might not must not understand it or that the truth cannot be accessed no one can know the truth no that's not what i'm saying i'm saying the truth exists you can access it i've accessed it many people have accessed it you can access it too but you have to drop your foolish expectation to make the truth explicit you can't make the truth explicit you need to go meta see you're trying to get the truth while staying within your frame and i'm saying you can access the truth but not within your frame you have to pop outside your frame and the next frame and the next frame and the next room you have to pop out outside of every single frame and then you will get absolute truth and if you click to any frame at all you will not get absolute truth and because you're clinging to one particular frame somewhere in this infinite chain of frames you think that there isn't truth or there isn't god that's just because you're stuck that's all it is your mind is just stuck that's literally all that it is and all of our work here is just to lubricate your mind all of these videos all of my talking you might wonder what leo if if the truth can't be spoken how come you talk so much well because the words are only fingers pointing to the moon they're just lubrication for your mind for you to lubricate your mind such that these frames stop clinging and you can just keep going meta meta meta meta and not cling to anything at some point it's going to click in your mind that like you pop out of one frame religion then you pop out of the next frame science then you pop out of the next frame mathematics then you pop out of the next frame logic then you pop out of the next frame physical objects then you pop out the next frame time then the next frame space you keep popping out of every single frame until you realize they're all just [ __ ] partial frames and it doesn't matter what the [ __ ] content of the frame is it doesn't matter if it's religion or science or anything mathematics it's all imaginary and you keep popping out of it forever until you're [ __ ] dead and you realize in the end that the final frame that you have to pop out of is the thing you call your life and then you're awake but you see everybody is holding on to every single frame because if you truly were able to lubricate your mind sufficiently that the frames would just slip past and you would just fall out of them your life would be over your life hinges upon which frames you cling to therefore i'm trying to lubricate your mind but your mind has defense mechanisms which are resisting the lubrication and nobody can help you with that but you you have to want this it can't be done to you if you're too scared of the consequences of what's going to happen if your mind is fully lubricated and every frame is broken then that fear you have whatever level of fear you have that's exactly where you find yourself in life that's where your mind is stuck your mind is stuck by your level of fear the more of the fear the lower down you're stuck you'll be stuck somewhere in christianity or in islam if you have a little bit less fear you'll be stuck in science and atheism if you have a little less fear you'll be stuck in some spiritual thing buddhism or whatever you have a little less fear you'll be stuck somewhere higher up so really just ask yourself what am i clinging to intellectually what do i cling to in life which ideas which theories which ideologies and then let them go notice the payoff you get for the things you cling to like if you're a capitalist and you cling to your capitalist beliefs you get a payoff for that and that payoff it could be intellectual satisfaction like you might just feel like oh yeah i'm better than those those stupid marxists it could be like that that's one payoff another payoff is just millions of dollars in your bank account from the business that you run that could be another payoff maybe you're trading stocks maybe you're a landlord and you earn lots of money that way great payoff for you do you want to let it go no okay well then you'll be stuck where you are see you're afraid of letting that go what what would happen if you let go of wall street what would happen if you let go of running a business what would happen if you let go of your anti-marxist ideology the kind of satisfaction you get for hating marxists that's just one example if you're a marxist it's the same same [ __ ] the same [ __ ] on a structural level on a metal level it's the same [ __ ] the content is different but the shit's the same if you're a marxist one of the biggest juices you get in your day is haiti on capitalists you see a rich capitalist on tv and you just you just want to smack him in the face for being such a selfish [ __ ] and that that juices your ego up and you feel good about yourself because of this it's an addiction you have and then you get to whine and complain for your lack of success in life because you know leo i can't i can't be a millionaire because you know if i was then i would be one of those evil capitalists and so and all i do is i just sit online on some marxist forum and just you know talk [ __ ] about capitalism and that's what you devote your life to you know but if if if i would rather have you spending the next 10 years on a marxist forum whining about capitalism or actually being a capitalist i'd rather you be a capitalist at least you'll produce something of value for the world even if you end up you know burning some rainforests while you're at it at least you'll do something productive your stupid you know [ __ ] marxist posts on some forum on reddit or whatever isn't gonna do [ __ ] it's just gonna get more people um you know stuck in the same kind of frame of mind that you're stuck in so what if you let that go do you dare see that's that's the whole trick here is that nobody dares let this go it's very difficult to let let go of these intellectual attachments and they're not merely intellectual they also have real world payoffs like for example you might be a marxist and you might be married to a marxist and maybe the reason you and your girlfriend who's now your wife or whatever are you know maybe the reason you have you fell in love and even had children is because you were both marxist and really passionate about that and your whole relationship is built upon you know discussing political theory or whatever maybe i don't know for some people it might be that way and then see would you surrender that how do you convince the person like that to surrender it you see the more you invest in something in your life the more important it is to you the more it pays to you especially like for example your children your family your religion your military service if you go volunteering in some organization see these things you invest so much of your time and energy into these things that it's virtually impossible for you to let them go and then that's what you become stuck on now be careful i am not here saying that you should just throw everything out the window in a reckless manner that would be dangerous uh or rather i should say that would be reckless um see the problem with spiritual growth is that you it can't be forced upon you you have to come to it yourself so even though i want to push you to the highest levels because that's kind of what i'm interested in and what i'm here to teach but don't let me force you to go beyond what you're able to handle sort of like you know like if you're in fourth grade learning mathematics and i'm up here teaching calculus just because i'm teaching calculus that does not mean that i expect you to you know drop all your fourth grade homework and then just to come up to my level in a single month or whatever likewise i teach a lot of advanced stuff on this channel through these videos and many of you aren't ready for it for many of you this is just stuff for the future it's a road map of where you can go if you really want to go somewhere with your growth but that doesn't mean you have to do it all right now it means you can you can use these ideas and plan out a long-term plan for your maybe maybe maybe this is a plan for you for the next you know in 10 years or in 20 years you'll get there but right now maybe you still have to explore the lower stages maybe you got to start a business maybe got to go get the sex you need get a relationship have some children you know go do the stuff you're attached to burn through those attachments recognize that they're not all as great as you think they are and then come back and we can we can take you higher see so it really just is a matter of what you're comfortable with what is your ego comfortable with how much growth can you tolerate how much are you willing to detach from in your life if you're not willing to detach from sex and from hamburgers and from lamborghinis and fine jewelry well that's where you're at it would actually be a problem if you try to fake it and you try to act as though you're above these things but really you're not you see that's the trap here it's very tricky there's a lot of traps in this work so watch out for this one if you're trying to follow me make sure you're honest with yourself where you're at in your growth roughly how dense is your ego and just be honest about that if not to me or to others at least to your own self because there's this danger where you start to think like oh i'm all interested in awakening and i'm all interested in this meta stuff and god but actually you're not you're interested in sex and food and money well if that's the case then just be honest about that and work from there you have to work from an honest place and to be honest i'm not fully ready to detach from all this stuff i talk about this stuff because you have to plan ahead right like you can't just if you're if you're if your goal is to do something ambitious like fly to mars you got to plan this years and decades ahead and you gotta you gotta like have some ideals that you're operating under that doesn't mean necessarily that i'm ready to fly to mars tomorrow maybe i will be in 10 20 years but not right now but that doesn't mean i can't plan so that's kind of what we're doing here i still got attachments i got attachments to food i got attachments to sex i got attachments to business i got attachments to my work but the important differences is that you can be attached to stuff but you should already start to be thinking about how these attachments are limiting you so while a lot of people in the world are attached to stuff most of them have no idea they're attached to it for in the first place and most of them have no idea how much they're limited by that and they also thirdly they don't know what's beyond that what's possible beyond it this creates a very stuck situation with me i would say i still have plenty of attachments the difference is that i'm becoming more aware of these attachments and how limited how limited they are and i'm also already sort of laying the groundwork for what's coming ahead because i know that these attachments are not going to hold they're temporary so maybe you can maybe that helps you you can resonate with that i want to point out this interesting feature of going meta which is that there's a sort of thrill to it notice this thrill and the best example of this i read online when i was doing research for this episode is i noticed some father was discussing how his young child learned this idea of meta and he had a label maker so this child has a label maker and he used the label maker to print out the word label maker as a sticker and then stick it on the label maker and as he did all this he got a great chuckle out of it and he was very delighted in himself the child now this might seem like an innocent little example what does it really say but actually what you should notice is that throughout your life like this child you too have had encounters with going meta when you see the frame of a situation and you're able to pop outside of the frame and when you do this there's a certain delight that fills your soul i call this the delight of meta recognition you recognize that the finger is pointing towards the moon rather than just a finger that you look at you discover that there's something implicit that's being suggested and then when you discover that implicit thing it gives you delight it feels like you've discovered a hidden truth about reality it feels like an inside joke and that's what a lot of awakened people report when they awaken you know sometimes you can ask an awakened person so what was it like for you to awaken and uh they just laugh they chuckle or they so or they just say i get it it's it's god's cosmic joke why do they say that because there truly is a delight in recognizing this sort of secret mystery behind existence going meta has this ineffable slippery quality to it you can never fully articulate it in the same way that a really good joke has a strong punch line and you either get the punch line or you don't and if you don't get the punch line explaining the punch line to a person who didn't get it is not the same thing as just getting it right off the bat so notice that i want you to notice that and the next time it happens to you this meta recognition next time it happens i want you to notice that delight that appears and i want you to contemplate what is that delay why is this happening why do i enjoy this and i suggest that if you do enjoy it as you might notice that you should keep pursuing that and ask yourself the question of like well if i got some meta recognition here where else can i get some meta recognition where else can i go meta and you keep doing it and doing it and doing it and then as you do that you develop a sort of a love for it a delight for it and then maybe one day that'll lead to your awakening the ultimate delight see when you're going meta you're in some way touching the implicit touching the divine you're discovering the divine within the universe and if you're a bit of a logic nerd science nerd math nerd and you appreciate the works of douglas hofstadter and his masterpiece girdle escher and bach then one of the remarkable things about hofstadter's work is that it's so whimsical on the one hand it's this dense nerdy mathematical logical topic and it's hard to read through that book one of the most challenging books you'll ever read with all these math mathematical proofs but it's different from just other it's different from like the logical textbook it has this whimsy and artistry to it it has a cleverness um he writes at such a clever way he won a pulitzer prize for that back in the late 70s but uh but for a lot of guys who are like in the computer science community the math nerd logical community and so forth they can appreciate that whimsical nature to logic and that's just a little taste of what you get when you pursue spiritual work see you get more of that not within the logical domain outside the logical domain you get more and more of that and it's addictive it's not just a chore you do it's addictive and you can see a beauty and an artistry to it and that is one of the one of the charms of doing consciousness work is that sometimes it's difficult and grueling you go through emotional turmoil and ego backlashes that's all the bad stuff but then as far as the good stuff sometimes you get these moments of clarity and just this beauty and you see the the mystery awe and wonder and genius of existence and i would suggest to you that if you entered science and you're a serious scientist that that is really why you're doing science is for that reason that's really what you want out of science you don't want to do dry boring crusty old science you want science which is connected with soul and spirit so really we're completely on the same page the difference between what you might perceive i'm saying here if you're an atheist or you're a rationalist or a materialist or a realist or a scientist uh or a logician or mathematician it might seem like we're totally you know diametrically opposed actually we're not we're much closer aligned than you would think because you and i are both just trying to explore the mystery of nature right and the ultimate achievement of that is awakening not your math or your logic or your science even though those are little little tidbits of it little tidbits now as we're wrapping up here i have to end on this of course no episode about going meta would be complete unless we went meta on the topic of going meta of course so that's how we'll end i want to take you to the ultimate level of meta with a little demo so here is truly going meta see if you can follow this with me so throughout this episode i've been using language to speak to you to communicate about a concept called going meta in fact that's what i'm doing right now i'm conscious right now that i'm speaking to you using consciousness using symbols and language which is arbitrary which but which communicates certain powerful concepts so as i'm using language i'm thinking and as i'm thinking my thinking is triggering your thinking through this medium of language that's exactly what is happening right now become conscious of this as it's happening and notice that this is you and me together going meta but it doesn't stop there let's keep going you are watching this as a youtube video i am appearing in this youtube video i'm conscious that even though right now as i'm speaking i'm sitting here and i am not in a youtube video but when you're going to be watching this i will be in a youtube video and in fact notice that what i am is i am pixels on a screen so this entire video has been pixels on a screen talking to you about a concept called going meta using language but moreover you can notice that these pixels on a screen are actually just a fragment a figment of your own consciousness so actually this entire time what's been happening you might have thought that some human was sitting there talking to you about some concept really what was happening is that a fragment of your own consciousness manifesting as pixels on a screen through this thing we call a youtube video has been thinking and using language to trigger thinking within you and now you're becoming more conscious of that become conscious that the youtube video and this screen full of pixels is your own consciousness you are speaking to yourself and you are not a human speaking to yourself you are the universe speaking to itself the universe now as it is talking is also hearing these words and becoming conscious of itself as the universe you are the universe talking to yourself becoming conscious of yourself as the universe the universe is reminding itself that it is the universe because the universe forgot to put it another way what the universe is telling you the universe is telling you that you are god dreaming up this life and this very moment this room that you're sitting in that you think of as a physical room is actually a dream your entire life is a dream your childhood is a dream and the ideas you have of your death is a dream this everything you're experiencing right now what you are is god god talking to itself god being god god going meta in order to tell itself to wake up to the fact that it is god that's what god is is god is a universal movement of self-awakening which is happening in you right now if you are conscious and going meta along with me as i am speaking because actually i am you and you are me and if you can recognize that you're awake do you get it tada that's powerful stuff a powerful mind is one that can do this one that can become infinitely self-aware able to go meta on any finite part of itself and when a finite mind is able to go infinitely meta it becomes the infinite mind which is what you are whether you're conscious of it or not that's it i'd like to point out some related videos for you to watch that will dovetail nicely with this concept of going meta so the first one is called reality is a strange loop the second is metaphysical implications of google's and completeness theorem the third is explicit versus implicit understanding the fourth is called context versus structure the fifth is understanding recontextualization followed by how paradigms work and lastly developing introspection all of these if you watch all of these together you will get a much deeper understanding of all of them they will all interpenetrate and bolster each other to help you to crack the tricky mechanics of how your mind thinks about the nature of reality all right i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website you will find my blog you will find the book list you will find a live purpose course you will find the forum you will find other resources that i post there and future courses that i will be releasing that you should stay in touch with me about if you would like to support actualize.org you can do so at patreon.com actualized and the last thing that i'll say is just this that our work here is to build up core concepts within your mind that you can use for the rest of your life to make sense of reality so a lot of times i will publish these videos that have these rather esoteric impractical abstract seeming titles or topics and you might wonder well what does this have to do with anything what does this have to do with helping me in my life for example the concept of going meta when you just read that as a title it's like what is this going to do for me but but you see you have to be more of a long-term thinker you have to appreciate that we're doing something bigger here than what most youtube channels are doing when they're trying to teach you some self-help i'm really expecting that you see the value of this work long term and that you stick with me to build up the core concepts to build a foundation i'm much more interested in helping you to build a very deep solid foundation for making sense of reality than i am about anything else and i am about helping you to lose some weight or to get laid or to make some money or some other little thing like that because those things are all insignificant compared to the true value of this work which is which is laying that foundation this foundation unlike what some might say or think this foundation is not an ideology it's not a belief system i'm not programming you with like a christian foundation or islam foundation or even a buddhist foundation rather i'm trying to give you very powerful core concepts which are very abstract and you can use them in to apply to so many domains of life and these core concepts and principles these are not things you take on faith or that you believe from me or that we come up with a proof for these are things you test out in your life and you see if they work you contemplate them you see if they make sense if they do you adopt them if not then you you discard them and so only when we put into place some number of dozens of these core concepts will reality start to make sense to you will you have some direction and hope of ever understanding what reality and life are really about and how to put your life in order these core concepts really they should have been put in place when you were in elementary school and middle school and high school but because of the corruptions within our education system and the ignorance all around society the these core concepts are not taught so somebody has to teach them that's what this work is about so if you look around you and you see that most people in the world do not have a a good sense of what's really going on in life you can ask yourself the question you can start to wonder why is that or you look around you see a lot of people are bullshitting even scientists and doctors and philosophers a lot of them are bullshitting they don't really understand what's going on in life why is that you might start to suspect that it might be because they haven't really dug deeply enough and built a solid enough foundation of core concepts that are necessary nor have they even been interested in that kind of work they've been interested in something else and so if that's the case then you can start to take more seriously the importance of these core concepts and you'll get excited about learning new ones and putting them into place and then using them to make sense of of reality ultimately i am not the one who's making sense of reality for you only you can do that for yourself i'm just sharing with you possibilities my own conclusions and discoveries things that make me excited which would be fuel for you to inspire you to motivate you and i try to kind of give you the tools and techniques and directions in which to go and to explore and to do your own exploration in the end the only one who can make sense of life is you only you can do that but uh but even to get that idea in your mind that you can make sense of life at a deep deep deep level just that idea that's sort of my function here is to is to feed you that idea that that's possible just that possibility is a huge thing that most people are missing most people don't understand that this is possible or that it would be worthwhile to do this or how to go about it and that's why we're doing this work and if you're on board with me for that then of course stay tuned for more