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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to make a critique of rationalism. Man, I'm so excited about this one, I'm really, almost kind of gloating inside. Because I'm really going to enjoy talking about this, I've spent a lot of time in my life researching the foundations of rationality and the foundations of human knowledge. This is a kind of been a pet project of mine for for years now for years. And it's as much to say, in fact, I'm probably going to write a book about this at some point, I've already started outlining a book about the limits of rationality, and the limits of certain schools of thought, that are like the scientific, the materialistic ways of thinking, the physical mystic ways of thinking that are very, very common in today's society in the West. So right now, we live in what spiral dynamics calls stage orange, that's kind of where American culture and Western culture in general, in first world countries is that what this means is rationalism, scientism, and the materialistic frame of mind. The success of science has made us blind to the limits of science. Because in the last 500 years, we've developed many theories and ideas that have been well tested now, and have given us kind of mastery, technologically speaking over our, you know, the physical plane. And that's all well and good, there's nothing wrong with science, science is great, and it's useful, and I love it. And I love to study science. And I've spent years of my life studying science, I enjoy science. But there are limits to science, which most rational people do not understand. And even hardcore scientists do not understand. Because science is a framework. And what scientists really hate to hear is that science is the framework. Now, if you're a really high quality scientist, actually, you recognize this, and you've actually studied this, you actually become conscious of the framework of sciences. And you're very modest with the claims that you make as a scientist. But this is not most scientists, most scientists are actually quite arrogant in the claims they make. And the claims they think science is able to make about reality. And this gets them into trouble. This creates a blind spot, this blind spot is further exacerbated by the failure of religion that has occurred in the last 500 years. So at the same time, as science has ascended, religion has sort of descended. And we've kind of seen through the, just the sham of organized religions, and the real corruptions of it, and the abuses of it and the limitations of it. And so we've kind of swung our pendulum from like the really religious, to the now really materialistic and rational based way of looking at life. And this has created the blind spot and made it even worse, because it feels like Well, there's only these two poles. And what's left, I mean, we've kind of explored the extreme, extremely religious pole. And we found that that's no good. So now we're exploring the extremely rational scientific pole of the spectrum. And that looks great look, I mean, we're evolving, we're advancing life is getting better because of all the technology we're developing, so on and so forth. And this creates a kind of cultural blind spot. But what I want to show you is actually that there's some limits here, and that there's something beyond just these two poles that you can access, and that this is the next stage for you. If right now you're rationalist. So this is going to be a critique against rationalism. Now, what is rationalism? Who am I talking about here? I'm talking about people who are basically buying into the standard scientific model. And what's called Naive real realism. naive realism is basically the idea that well, the world is pretty much how we perceive it. There's a physical external world, its objective, it exists even independent of us, independent of our proceed perceiving it. If I look away, the tree is still there. The tree has certain properties. Properties are inherent to objects, the colors and the sensations that we experience. These are subjective things that are basically informed by objective reality. And so through our thinking, and conceptualizing. We can explore and understand this reality. We can come up with accurate formula and models that tell us exactly how this reality works. And once we found those formula and models, then we have a clearer picture of how or, quote unquote, God thinks, we've kind of dissected and broken down God into just basically a series of formulas, physical laws, and so forth, and determinism and these kinds of things in quantum mechanics, we've kind of broken it all down, and we now understand everything there is to understand. And of course, we'll, we'll explore the universe more. But basically, we've kind of got the foundation of the universe figured out. And we're going to use rationality to do all this. This is our tool of heavy lifting. And we expect to act rationally in our lives, we expect people to act rationally. And we expect argumentation to be clear and precise and laid out and very mathematical like terms, so that we can find any contradictions. And as soon as we see a contradiction, then that means that we're off on the right on the wrong track. And when we don't have any contradictions, that means we're on the right track. And we're gonna go look for objective evidence to prove our point. And we're going to look for, you know, peer reviewed research studies and so forth, to get to the truth of reality. So this is kind of like the rationalist perspective. Let me tell you, though, what the rationalist doesn't understand the limits of rationalism. So, have you recognize this, that rationality is a small subset of reality? If all of reality is like a giant field, like a big canvas, you might say, that stretches out in all these different directions, what rationality is really is just a small subset within this larger field. It is not the entire field. It is a small subset. Rationality is a human feature, not a universal feature. Have you ever thought about the fact that rationality depends upon you having a mind and a brain? That's what makes rationality possible. Now rationalist, tend to assume that kind of like the whole universe is rational. I mean, why would it not be? But have you actually questioned that? Have you actually proven to yourself that the universe is rational? Or could it be the case that the universe is not rational, that only the human mind is rational? And that's a tool that the human animal has to look on the world with. But this does not necessarily have to be the case that most animals are not rational. They're not irrational either. They would be more like a rational. existence itself. You have to wonder, existence itself. What is that? Is that a rational thing? And if you sit down and you look at it shouldn't take you long to realize that existence itself has nothing to do with rationality or logic. I mean, existence, actual existence. I'm not just talking about theories here. I mean, actually, right now, you're listening to me, you're hearing my words, you're sensing your own body, you feel like you're conscious, whatever's happening to you around you. That right there are sensory experiences, that's existence happening right this very second. If none of that existed, there would be nothing. There'll be nothing. So just existence itself, this thing? What does it have to do with rationality or logic? Is it rational or logical that something exists rather than nothing existing? What's the connection? If all human beings were killed, and that's where rationality resides, and human minds, if all the human minds were destroyed, would rationality exist any longer? Now, of course, what the rationalist will say, is it no believe the universe is rational? Of course, you know, we theorize about it, but you know, you destroy our brains, and you destroy the human race, but the universe still operates rationally. No, it doesn't. Not at all. What you're failing to appreciate is that what you call rationality is just like a projection that you've made onto the universe. The universe actually operates completely a rationally. Not irrationally, but a rationally, which means that it's just, it's a non sequitur. The operation of the universe and existence itself has nothing to do with rationality or logic whatsoever. Rationality and logic is a higher order emergent property of an a rational All universe. How does rationality actually arise? How does logic arise? What are these things? If you make a deep study of this subject, very self, honestly, what you'll realize is that rationality itself and logic has to be grounded in something a rational, namely existence. See, existence doesn't depend upon logic. But logic certainly depends upon existence. Because without existence, you can't have logic. Logic and rational thinking is an activity that's going on in your mind. You can actually be aware of that happening to you as you're doing it. Before that can happen, there has to be existence and there has to be awareness. It is very easy to prove to yourself that one of these is more primary than the other. Because you can have existence without logic, but you can't have logic without existence. And existence itself has nothing to do with logic. There's no logical reason for existence. Impure empirical facts themselves are not something that require rationality or logic for them to exist. Any empirical fact, in fact, needs no argumentation. Nor can it be argued for or proven with thoughts. I'm talking about the brute raw, empirical facts. So for example, that snow is white is a brute empirical fact, no amount of argumentation or reasoning can demonstrate that snow is actually white, there is no reason why snow would have to be white. In other words, snow happens to be white, because that's what it is. There is no logical reason why the sun should exist, the sun exists. And if you want to demonstrate this to yourself and prove it, then you go outside during the day, and you look out, and you see the sun and it's shining, and therefore, you know, it exists. If you sit down you think and logically try to analyze whether the sun should or shouldn't exist. You're not going to get very far. You have to recognize that empirical facts have nothing at all to do with rationality, they are completely a rational. Rationality is something we do with empirical facts. See, and this is what science is up to. What science is up to is that it says yes, okay, we got all these empirical facts. Now, let's make sense of them. And the mistake, the blind spot that happens here is that you think that when you're making sense of them, that you're kind of like, really uncovering the deep existential truths of reality. I mean, like when I make sense of how a projectile moves through the air, or if I toss the ball up into the air, I can calculate and theorize and figure out the exact path of motion, I can calculate and run numbers and come up with equations. And I can figure out that there's a law of gravity and, and special relativity and general relativity, all these theories, and I can explain perfectly why the ball moves in the way it does. Or we can launch a satellite up into space. And we can predict exactly how it's going to orbit around the different planets very accurately. But just because you can do that. Do not make the mistake of thinking that you somehow like, got into the guts of the universe, and you figured out actually the laws by which the universe works. No, what you did is you made a human projection, you analyze the facts, which were completely irrational. And now you came up with some human model of how all that stuff works. And if you do that successfully, then they give you a Nobel Prize, and people praise you for it. And they tell you all you're really smart, you understand how the world works. But don't forget, ultimately what happened there is that you made a human projection onto how the world works. There could be 100 other equally valid explanations for these exact same hard empirical facts. You might claim yours The best you might claim yours is the simplest, Occam's razor and so forth. But that ultimately says nothing about how and why the world actually works. The way it works is the totally disconnected. It's just a projection of your mind. Which is created by mental labels and images that happen in your mind. A real problem that rationalists have is they give undue importance and weight to mental labels and images that are happening in here, inside the skull. These mental labels are what we use to construct models, scientific models out of. And we think that we're really getting to the core of reality when we do this, but actually, we're not, what we're doing is we're constructing an artificial human matrix, conceptual matrix of labels, and images, and concepts. And we're just combining them all together into a very rich and very elaborate system, which then helps us to make approximations and predictions about the future. And sometimes we do this successfully, and we do it successfully, we call this good science. And when we do it on successfully, we call it bad science or mythology or something like this. But see, as soon as people have a little success in the real world, and they are able to predict something, they actually assume that they understand what's really going on, like they've gotten into the guts of how the universe really works. And they stop recognizing the fact Oh, this was just mental labels that I came up with mental labels, I can actually see them functioning in my mind, you know, mental labels concepts, I actually see that the law of gravity is not something out in the world, it's something I project out onto the world, gravity doesn't actually exist. This is preposterous, preposterous to claim that gravity actually exists, just the concept we came up with. Same thing for all the other scientific cons of conservation of energy, this is not exist, this is just a concept we came up with. Now, of course, it's a useful concept. And I'm not questioning that it can be used to, to do some good stuff technologically. I'm just trying to draw the limits and boundaries. To be very, very careful about what we're actually doing when we're doing science, or what we're actually doing when we're using logical rationality have to be clear about this. So in general, rationalists don't acknowledge and they don't recognize that what thinking and logic are, is that there are language. And languages are very tricky and complex things. Fact, there's something called philosophy of language. And you can study languages, not just learning like Chinese. I mean, like study linguistics, study the deep structure of what language is what you do, if you study that what you recognize, is that language functions, thanks to symbols. And symbols are really, really tricky things. A symbol is one thing that bears absolutely no connection or resemblance to another thing, but claims to represent it. So for example, I can use the symbol Apple to represent an apple, a real red shiny apple, juicy apple in the real world. And you can understand me, because we've trained our minds to associate the sound, Apple, which has nothing to do with apples. But we've trained that connection to the point where we now actually can create this label of apple and confuse it with the real thing. And you know, with just one simple symbol like this, it's easy to see that oh, well, you know, I know that Apple is not an actually an apple, that's well and good. But the problem is that when you start to create symbol upon stumble upon symbol, and string them together, and sentences and paragraphs and pages, and then entire theories get created and concepts get created, models get created over hundreds of years and 1000s of years and all combined together, one supporting the next that is very easy to construct a labyrinth of the mind, a labyrinth of symbols and to get lost in this labyrinth and just think that this labyrinth now is reality. What starts to happen is that you overlay this matrix of virtual reality on top of real reality and then you do it so much and so often because it's so helpful for you that you stopped seeing that it was a projection the whole time. What started off very innocently, perhaps in the caveman era. has now become this runaway effect. And it leads to real problems when we don't acknowledge that the map is not the territory. Alfred Korzybski came up with his very famous statement, use a lot in NLP, I think it's one of the most important concepts that humans have come up with greatly underappreciated. More people should study, the map is not the territory. What this means is that we can construct maps of reality, using symbols and language and thinking, mental labels. And these maps can be very rich and robust. But they are never, ever, no matter how accurate they are, they are never the territory. The map is never the thing that is representing never. And the most dangerous mistake you can make in your life, is to believe that the map is the territory. And you think that oh, you know, Leo, I can avoid that mistake? No, you're so deep in this mistake right now. That it would take me 100 hours, to reveal to you all the areas in your life, which are screwed up and totally backwards. Because you've made this mistake of mistaking the map for the territory. This doesn't just apply to scientific thinking, this applies to your personal life, to your emotional life, to your relationships, to your relationship to money, to your relationship to the opposite sex, to your relationship to different races, to your beliefs about politics, and academia, and how to raise children, everything else in your life. All of those things are maps that you've created in your mind. And you've mistaken them for the territory. And now what's happening is that there's a real sickness in your mind. Because you've came up with so many maps, that these maps after a while they start to conflict, and contradicted ultimately, they have inherent limitations. But you can't see those limitations when you really believe the map is the territory. And then you also get defensive about the map on top of all that, you get defensive about the map. And when someone tries to correct your map, as I'm trying to do here, you get all defensive about it, all emotional, all ego about it. And you just want to cling to that map, because the map is the territory for you. It's not for me, but it is for you. At least if you're rational. See, rationalists don't make the distinction between thought. And awareness is a very, very fundamental and critical mistake is to not distinguish thoughts versus awareness. The rational thinks that he can just think his way into whatever he wants. And that's basically the only tool it's kind of like, you know, what's that old saying that if you have a hammer, all you see is nails, all you see is stuff to hammer in with, right? Because you just want to use it so badly. It's your only tool. But actually, there's more tools in the toolbox. Besides thought you've got awareness. And in fact, awareness is primary thought. Have you noticed that thought happens in your mind. And that thought, basically what it is, it's not some spooky, mysterious thing. It's internal mental sounds, words that you say to yourself, which are symbols, and also images, internal mental images, faint images, which are also symbols. And the combination of both of these creates thoughts. That's what thoughts actually are. But it takes a lot of mindfulness work, to develop yourself to the point where you can actually resolve and see what thoughts actually are, as you practice that we should also understand is that awareness is something very different. What happens when you're not thinking? What happens if your mind is completely shut off, and it doesn't think what's left? Well, that's actually hard to do for the average person, because we're so addicted to the monkey chatter in our minds and we can't shut off even for a few seconds. But if you do shut off your thoughts, what's left is awareness. Awareness is all the other stuff. Of course, you've got sensory data coming in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, feeling, emotions, all this kind of stuff occurs is within you. And you're aware of it. You're aware of it as is happening to you in this very moment. Of course, thoughts also arise there, and you're aware of the thoughts. So awareness is necessary in order to even have thoughts. Because if you had a thought, but weren't aware of it, what would it be to you, it would be nothing. Awareness is the thing through which everything must pass, for it to be anything of relevance to you. Because if it doesn't pass through awareness, it basically doesn't exist for you. And thoughts, and awareness are developed independently. So if you want to develop your thinking skills, then you can go to school, you can get a PhD, you can become a physicist or a neuroscientist or whatever. And you're going to develop real good thinking skills, you're going to become a real good rationalist, a real good scientific thinker. And you would assume that, okay, so that's good. That's it, I've kind of mastered life, I understand what's going on in the world. No, actually, you've mastered this thing called thinking, but you haven't mastered its master. The master is awareness. Because all thinking occurs within awareness, master that. And very people, few people have tried to really master awareness because of mastering words is a very difficult thing. And it's a totally different, almost, diametrically opposite approach. And method than mastering thoughts. You don't master awareness by thinking more you master awareness by shutting up. And the most important shutting up you do is not here, not in the mouth. This is just an outlet, a trumpet, the source of your talking is in here. That's what needs to be silenced. If you can silence your mind for a little while, then you just have pure awareness, you can bask in that. And as you do that, more and more, you develop your awareness higher and higher and higher. What's crazy, though, and what most rational, Stoner understand is that awareness can be developed, not just a little bit, not just double or triple what you currently possess, but dozens of orders of magnitude beyond what you presently have. If right, now you have a level of awareness, let's say a level of 10, you can develop it to a level of 100,000 or a million or 10 million. It's almost like you have a microscope. And you can increase the resolving power on the microscope more and more and more, you know, 1x 2x 5x 10x 100x 1,000x 10,000x, and so on. And the more you do that, the finer detail, you're able to resolve in whatever subject you're studying. That's very handy in science for us to be able to look very, very closely as something will likewise with our minds, the most important element of your mind is how much awareness that has, this is like a muscle you can build. Most people's awareness is so low, that they are not even aware that awareness can be raised, let alone how much it can be raised, let alone the qualitative effects that occur with raising of awareness. It seems like well, raising awareness. Yeah, that sounds nice Leo and Meo. Maybe I'll do a little bit of meditation or something to help me do that. But what does this have to do with anything? Well, so you don't appreciate what happens when you raise your awareness from 10x to 100,000 apps. It's not just that you now start to see and feel things more clearly. You start to see and feel things that never in your wildest dreams that you imagined could exist. In the same way that when you take up a microscope with 100x resolving power, and you look down on something, you see a whole new world, you see creatures and bacteria, and you see cells and organelles within the cells, you see stuff that you couldn't have even imagined was there until you sat down and looked with a good enough microscope. And see the rationalist fails to understand this, because he hasn't developed his awareness very highly, because he's only developed his thoughts. And he thinks that his thoughts are good enough. That that's the best tool that there is. That's a huge blind spot right there. huge blind spot. Because with such low awareness, there's kinda like a catch 22 When your awareness is this low, you're not aware of what thinking actually is. So from a low position of awareness, it's feels like thinking is all that there is. And that thinking is great. And it's a powerful tool for understanding reality. But the higher you raise awareness, the more you realize that thinking is a system of symbols. And that symbols are actually by definition, not the things they represent. And so this gulf between the map and the territory just goes wider and wider and wider and wider, until you see that the map is just a complete fiction, a complete illusion. And what you need to be concerned with is the territory, not the map. And as soon as you make that visible and aware to yourself, then at that point, you suddenly have this break, and you start to realize the gross limitations of thinking, in understanding reality, because every thought you have, if you're highly aware, you recognize what it actually is. It's not the thing it points to, it's what it actually is. So Einstein's theory of gravity is not revealing some deep existential truth about the world, what it actually is, is a set of sounds and symbols written on a piece of paper. That's what it literally is. Except your awareness is too low to actually see that. And so what happens is, you get sucked into the content of the thoughts. And you don't see any problem with that. Because to you, All there is is content. You don't see the larger context within which the content is occurring. This is a real deep problem, real deep problem. When I see rationalists, criticizing some of the things that I say, it becomes immediately obvious that they're falling into this trap over and over and over and over again. Because they're critiquing me on the level of thoughts. Because they're lost in thoughts, and they have no other recourse but to do that, when they need to see that I'm speaking on the level of awareness, which is a much higher level that you need to develop yourself towards. And that's not an easy thing to do. It really takes a lot of work to develop yourself to that level. Really does. rationalists also don't make a good clear distinction between the irrational and the a rational. So they assume that well, Leo, what are what are you talking about here? Are you a proponent of irrational thinking? That's a straw man argument. No, make a distinction between the irrational and the rash, the a rational, the irrational, you might say is just like, dumb thinking. I'm not arguing for dumb thinking. Rationality is preferable to irrationality, and to emotionality. And, you know, like working off of your emotions, but the distinction is a rationality, a rationality, that a means that it's not, it's not that kind of like atheism, or a political, if you're a political, that means you're not political. It's a non sequitur. Existence is a non sequitur, to rationality, there are completely independent variables. They have nothing to do with each other. You can have existence without any rationality whatsoever. This does not mean that existence is irrational. It just means that it's a rational. That's something that most rationalists don't really, like, wrap their mind around. I don't see them wanting to even wrap their mind around this. They don't want to make this distinction. Because if they did, it would, it would undermine a lot of the foundations that they claim to also rationalist don't admit the limits of logic. Logic is touted as this thing that's kind of like unshakeable mechanism for arriving at truth. But really, logic has no teeth. Even if you're a master logician doesn't really mean anything. Because logic never proves anything. What logic is logic is a system, a system of shuffling and manipulating symbols. But what are you manipulating? You have to have a premise to do a manipulation of that premise to get to some kind of conclusion. But it's the premises that are really the things doing the work, not the logic. You can have perfectly sound and valid logic, but your premises can be completely off and you arrive at an invalid conclusion. And this is where rationalists get into a deep trap is they they feel like well, but I'm so rational, you know, I've studied the laws of rationality and logic. And therefore, you know, I've ensured that I will have an accurate picture of reality. But this is, this is quite silly, because it's the premises that you have to be looking at. And the premises if you take a real close look at your premises, you'll see that no premises ever really certain or justified. premises are taken on faith. And on assumption. Doesn't matter how good you think your premises are, they're ultimately all taken on space. And I got news for you, and most of them are very, very wrong. Even the ones that seem very, very solid and in do bootable. Rationality itself is founded upon irrational premises. Ask yourself, how you can have rationality? What creates rationality? What are the premises that make rationality possible? Rationality doesn't just exist out in the ether. It has to be grounded in something. What's the grounded in? What are the laws of rationality, take a deep close look at those, what you'll find is that they're irrational, irrational premises, create rationality. Another more practical problem that rationalists make, is that they greatly overvalue reason, in everyday life. It's almost assumed like we can just kind of like, sit in an empty room and just kind of reasoned through stuff, and be very logical. And then this is how life works. And we can base our decisions and operate from this place. But this is completely ridiculous. This is the fantasy of ignoring the effects of one's psychology. On living life, life is a dirty thing. And if you've noticed 99% of your behaviors, and even the way that you think, is informed by emotion, not by logic. When you have to go take a crap, there's nothing logical about that. That's an a rational behavior. It's not irrational to go take a crap when you feel like it. But it's not rational either. Can we agree on this? When you're hungry, there's nothing rational about hunger, you feel a certain emotion and you go and you stuff your mouth with food, until it disappears. There's nothing rational about this. It's not irrational either. It's just a rational. When you decide to marry your wife, or your husband, this is an emotionally driven choice. There's nothing rational about this. Now you might sit down, you might do the pros and cons and say, Well, should I marry her? Or should I not? Well, you know, here's the pros of marrying her here, the cons of marrying her. And then you kind of sit there and wait a decision. But ultimately, all of that is happening for you. All that's happening, a rationally, you've got circuits in the mind that are firing off, these circuits are not themselves rational anyway. And then ultimately, they come up with a conclusion for you. And then you take that conclusion, then you go do it. And that's in the most rational scenario. You know, most people don't even get married that way, most people just get married based on instinct. And I would suggest that 99% of your behaviors are exactly like this. They have no logic in them whatsoever. So your ability to be rational, logical, has very little influence on your actual results in life. Life is much more grounded in emotions. People who tend to be very rational, what I noticed in them is that they're actually disconnected from their body. And they have low emotional intelligence. They're not really in touch with their emotions. In fact, they're kind of afraid of emotions. They're emotionally repressed people, their anal people, or their borderline autistic minded people. You are people that are so hyper rational and logical that they think that this is the only way to interact with life, when actually it's kind of a crippled way to interact with life. And you can actually learn this is something I've learned over the last 10 years of my life. I used to be very logical rational, because I learned how to connect with my body more. And I'm still working on that, by the way, and I've learned how to connect with my emotions. More. And what this does is instead of making you irrational, which is what the rational is sometimes fear with this stuff, actually, it makes you a more full human being. The reality is that you're already emotional. Even if you're the most logically minded person in the world, like I said, 99% of your behaviors are already emotional. The problem is that you're denying this, you're resisting it, you're not aware even of the fact that you're denying it. And of course, you're not aware because like I talked about earlier, you don't have the resolving power, your awareness level is so low, you can't even see all the emotions that you're denying that that's what's so damning about having low awareness is that you don't even see what you don't see. You don't know what you don't know. And rational people just assume that well, you know, we don't need any of that emotional stuff. I don't need to get in touch with my body. What are you talking about Leo, I can just keep plowing and plowing and plowing with my theories and my models about the world. And that's going to be enough. But that's not enough. Not by a longshot. And what's really ironic is that a rational people are actually very dogmatic about their rationalism. They cling to it, they're emotional about it, they're reactive. They're not really objective with their rationality, not at all. Take a look at high profile, scientists take a look at them debating religious people, fundamentalists, and so forth, you can see that they react emotionally, not objective, not at all, they have their own agenda. And they push their own agenda, as if not even more emotionally than some religious people do. What rational people are emotional against is non rationalism, anything that they perceive as irrational or a rational, they have a knee jerk reaction against, and they're reactive against it. Because their ego is built upon this model of the world as being rational. And anything that comes into conflict with that causes them cognitive dissonance, and they don't want to hear it. And so they shut their ears and eyes, and they don't want to listen. Which is very ironic, because the rationalists biggest gripe with people that are faith based and traditional and religious, is that those people shut their eyes and ears to evidence from scientific circles. And that they're not being reasonable. Well, how reasonable is the rational person being, he himself is not being very reasonable. Because he closes his eyes and ears to the a rational because he demonizes it and labels that as irrational in a knee jerk fashion as a reaction. In general, for rational sort of failure to acknowledge the egos role and thinking. It says though, the rationalist assumes that well, we live in this objective cleanroom scenario. And if I just work from this objective, clean room, where everything is nice and pristine, I can just apply the laws of logic to facts about the world. And I can come up with a clearer picture of what reality is. But this is a fantasy, you can't actually do this, there is no clean room, that rationality is happening within your mind. And your mind is infested with psychological biases. With emotions with feelings, you cannot escape this. You cannot ignore your own psychology the way you've been assuming you could up to now. Your rationality is highly affected by ego. And psychological biases is something you can make a real deep study of it'll take you years to learn all the ways in which is affected years, not to mention, then decades to undo all that stuff. It's really a lifelong work. But in order to even begin that process, you need to become aware that this is even possible, and that it's a real serious problem. I don't think that rational people do is they demonize post rationalism. So what I'm talking about here, is I'm talking about post rationality, as opposed to pre rationality. Pre rationality is all the religious stuff you don't like all the faith based stuff, all the mythological stuff you don't like from that then humanity has moved to rationality, which was a step up, I admit. But now from this place, we have to move up to the next step, which is post rationality, but what rationalists do in their knee jerk way is that they react against that, because they are threatened by it. And they think that post rationality is the same thing as pre rationality. So they lump the two together, they put them on the side and they say, oh, all you post rational people are actually just religious people in disguise. And then this way they preserve their paradigm and their place life. And then they can say that, Oh, we're as good as it gets. Because there's nothing above us because anything above us is below us. Actually. This happens through kind of a demonization process, which itself is highly psychologically biased. And it's all wrapped up with ego. But their awareness of so low because they haven't made the awareness versus thinking distinction, that they can't see this. This is called the pre rational post rational fallacy. Ken Wilber talks about this a lot in his books. So be very careful about that. And in general, what I see with rational people is that they have not really mastered their own personal lives. Because it's not possible to master your personal life through rationality. Because to master your personal life, you would have to master emotions, and you'd have to master awareness. And these are things that the rationalist discounts turn his back on. What do I mean by not mastering your personal life? This might sound almost like an ad hominem attack, like I'm attacking rationalists based on their characters. No, I'm not. I'm critiquing rationalism, because it really is like a fractured mind. And it leads to a fractured life. A person who's highly rational and logical, will not master his relationships, he will not master his relationship with money, he will not master his health, he will not master his ability to empathize, and to even feel his own emotions and his own passions, he will not be able to work on his own shadow and the inner demons that he has, because all of these things are not very rational. They're mostly emotional based, or they're based in the body somehow. See. So what you find is you find these brilliant scientists who have uncovered amazing things about quantum mechanics. But if you actually take a look at their personal life, what you see is that they are, you know, terrible with relationships, they have a bunch of divorces, they are bad fathers, and they don't know how to raise their kids properly. They can't control their emotions, they're on antidepressants. They feel bad about their research, because they're unsatisfied with life in general, because the more research they do, the more stuff they discover. They can't get enough and it's not nothing is ever satisfying anymore. You can win five Nobel Prizes, but you're still going to be unsatisfied fundamentally inside, because you don't understand the fundamentals of your psychology, you haven't studied so you haven't mastered that stuff. Mastering the stuff is not just thinking about it. But actually mastering it embodying it, which is a totally different thing. In general, the rationalist he likes to think he likes to do mental masturbation on these topics. And you know, mental masturbation can be useful, it can win you the Nobel Prize, but it doesn't mean you're gonna know how to live life. You're not going to master life and you're not going to master yourself. And in general, if you take a look at any highly rational person's life, what you discover is that this person has not made a deep study of the following topics, the following subjects, he has not made a deep study of epistemology, philosophy of science, non duality, psychology and meditation. These are fields of life that need to be studied in depth, not just Theoretically, yes, theoretically but also practically to embody these things, especially psychology, non duality and meditation. These are things that the average scientist or rational person is completely ignorance of. totally ignorant of and closed minded to. I want to see scientists and rational people who have spent a decade doing meditation, a decade studying psychology, practical psychology, not some academic bullshit, I mean, practical psychology that you're applying in your own life. And I want to see, scientists rational people have spent a decade studying non duality, and practicing non duality, enlightenment, consciousness work, stuff I talk about in other episodes. What I see is that rationalists will often debate with me and I have a topic that I talked about, like enlightened And, and then some rational person will come in there and post some comment to me or start some kind of rational debate with me how I'm wrong. And this doesn't make sense Leo and this is a contradiction, yada yada, yada. But I look at this person, I can see clearly just from the way he's writing his comment that he has no awareness. It's like I'm trying to talk calculus to a dog, the dog can't understand calculus. That's what it's like, when someone with awareness is talking to someone without awareness. It's just like night and day. The person without awareness, he can call all he wants, he can chase his tail all he wants, but he's not gonna understand calculus. because there hasn't been this deeper study, a very open mind to study, because you've been indoctrinated with rationalism. And make no mistake, your rationalism is indoctrinated into you, in exactly the same way, using the exact same psychological mechanisms of the mind and brain that are used by religion. And other kinds of brainwashing. No different. The content of the brainwashing is different. But the the mechanism is exactly the same, the mechanism that a suicide bomber uses to you know, and the reasoning he has to go blow up a building, or kill civilians, and the mechanism that a fundamentalist religion religious person uses to go Convert and proselytize other people into joining his religion is the exact same mechanism that very intelligent scientists used to prove their theories of space and time. And whatever else they study, exact same mechanism, just different content, which is what's so weird and really scary if you start to dig into this. Just how powerful these mechanisms are, because you start to see that wait a minute, these mechanisms are also operating within me. It's not just the scientists, and it's not just the religious people in the suicide bombers, it's me too. It's got me. That's how tricky the mind is. See this point about awareness. Here's a good way to illustrate it. Imagine that you're a scientist, and you're working really hard. And you're living in the universe of the matrix, you know, the movie, The Matrix. So you're living in the matrix universe, where Keanu Reeves was when he first started out. And you're so you're living in this world. And it looks like the real world, and you're doing all this science, you know, you go to the lab, and you do all your double blind experiments, and you want a Nobel Prize. And you get, you know, you got a textbook published and all this stuff, and you're this famous professor, and you really understand how the laws of the matrix work. And then just some kid comes to you, and they said, Hey, dude, you're a great scientist, and I admire your effort. But did you know that you're living in a matrix? Are you aware of that? And what does the scientist do? The scientist, he pulls out his PhD and his Nobel Prize, and he starts talking about his theories. No, kid, you understand? I mean, look, look, let me tell you about the laws of gravity. And let me tell you about how this thing works. And let me tell you about the how rationality works. And let me tell you about all these theories and all the signs, go read my textbook, and you'll understand what I understand. Let's see, he failed to appreciate the love the paradigm difference between him and the kid. The kid might not know anything about science and all the technical stuff. But as long as he's aware that he's in the matrix right now, then that trumps everything else. Yes, you understand the laws of the matrix? But do you understand that you're in the matrix? Do you understand that you can get out of the matrix? Do you understand there's something above and beyond the matrix? Do you understand that the matrix is just an illusion? And that what you've been studying your whole life is an illusion. Do you understand that? Do you understand that you're using the matrix to study the matrix there? You're using illusion to study illusion? Do you understand? Are you conscious of that? And if you're not God help you. Because you certainly can't help yourself. You're completely stuck. And there is no substitute. The only way out is through awareness. You cannot substitute lack of awareness with anything else. One day, either will click for you or it won't. If it does, you'll get on the track to increase and build your awareness throughout the rest of your life and If it doesn't, you'll stay lost in concept land, with justifications and ideas and symbols that you use, because you think that that's all there is because that's all you've been indoctrinated with, in exactly the same way that a religious fundamentalist Christian will stay in that philosophy for his whole life, believing that he's really got a handle on reality, when in fact, he's just doing mental masturbation. So if you're giving undue weight and importance to thinking, then you are stuck in the prison of your mind. And this is the case for 99.999% of people, they are stuck in the prisons of their mind. Because their awareness is so low, they don't even recognize that they could increase their awareness, and how important it is. Thinking has to lose its primary status for you. For the rationalists, this is the core thing that defines him is that thinking is his modus operandi in life. And it's very counterintuitive to drop that whole thing to drop that paradigm. It's a real radical paradigm shift. And to one day, just say, wait a minute, how do I know that thinking? Is all it's cracked up to be? Who told me that thinking leads me to understanding reality, more thinking. And you trust that thinking? Why? Because there's more thinking telling you that you can. And you trust that thinking, why? Because your mind just comes up with some more thinking that tells you that you should. And why do you trust that thinking? Where does it end? Can you see that? It's just a vicious circle? Can you see that you're begging the question all the time? Can you see that you're, you're rationalizing your own rationalism, with more rationalism, which is completely irrational. But of course, you hide the whole thing from yourself, so you don't see it? Because you don't have awareness to see it. Because you've never bothered developing awareness. Because all you think there is a thinking, because thinking tells you all there is a thinking because thinking tells you that awareness is not important. But why do you trust our thinking? It's almost as ridiculous as asking a rapist if rape is good. If you ask a rapist, whether rape is good, he'll tell you it's great. Let's go rape some people. Rape is great. Why? Because he's a rapist. That's all he likes. That's all he understands. That's how he thinks. And that's exactly your situations rationalist. For you, the most challenge, the most emotionally challenging bullet that you're gonna have to buy, is to knock thinking off its pedestal so that it stops taking primary status. Now, does that mean you stop thinking and never use thinking again, no, don't make that strawman argument. You can still think and you will think and you can use thinking for practical stuff. And it's useful at times fine. But don't give it that primary status that you currently give it. And this is going to be very difficult for you to do because this is exactly what's dogmatically resisted. egotistically resisted by rationalist philosophers moralists, academics, scientists, historians, theorists of all stripes. And by the way, also neurotics and religious people, and fundamentalists of all stripes, no difference really whatsoever between these people. These people are all on the same playing field. same playing field, just different ideas, different beliefs that they're defending, but they're all defending something. And they don't recognize that there's a step up. There's a new playing field you could be playing on. And these people all assume that they're playing on the higher playing field, but actually, no, they're all playing on the same playing field. That's just a trick of their mind. That's how the ego tricks itself. Here's a really huge issue that every rationalist must answer, and I encourage you to sit down one day just lock yourself in a room and just sit down and don't get up until you've answered this question very, very self honestly and satisfactorily. And the answer is this. Why is contradiction a problem? Why is contradiction a problem? This is the core, the mother of all assumptions of rationalism. Contradiction is like the NoNo word. When you face a contradiction within your reasoning that tells you something is wrong. And then you go busy yourself with straightening out the contradiction. But have you ever wondered, what tells you that the law of non contradiction is actually true? Might say this might seem like well, how can you even question that, Leo? But no, I'm serious. Sit down and ask yourself. What tells you that contradiction is the problem? Is it more thoughts? What What's your evidence for that? What's that grounded in? If you sit down and you look, honestly, you'll realize that non contradiction, the law of non contradiction is just completely groundless. Completely groundless, has nothing to do with existence or reality itself. If you look at reality, reality is exactly as it is. And you never see contradictions in reality. Never, ever, you've never seen one. The only place you see contradictions are in your own mind. contradictions are a function of the language game that you play. They are what happens when you use a lot of complex symbols. And then these symbols, they clash and crash into each other. In the same way that imagine if I walked around the world was a label maker, you know, one of those digital label makers, it prints a little white label with some black text on it. And I just slap those labels on things, you know, this is a lamp, this is a car, this is the cat, this is a coffee cup, this is a table, etc. You just do that. And then one day, you know, I put a label of car on my car. And then the next day, I come over and I put the label bird on my car. And then you come up to me is hey, you know, we're playing this label game. Everything's going great until you label that car a bird. Why are you labeling that car? A bird? That's a contradiction. Contradiction. We can't have any contradictions. That's not part of the language game. And you get a bowl and, you know, get your panties and twist. Because this is a real problem. Real problems is a real affront to to reason and logic and science. We can't have a car and hold the bird. That's absurd. The whole system comes crashing down. But of course, you know, to the rationalist. That's the problem because the rationalist is just so emotionally invested in language game. But to someone who's post rational, you know, like, like me. It's preposterous. Ridiculous. These are just labels, you're attaching labels to things. The contradiction doesn't matter. The contradiction is not something that happens in reality, reality, don't give a shit if you're conflicted and contradicting yourself. It doesn't care. Reality is the same always. It does what it does, whatever our labels are, whatever we project on, it doesn't matter. That's what's cool about reality. See, so, to a post rational person, you know, they can see that if stuff contradicts that's not a problem, really. That's a problem of this game of modeling that we're playing. We're constructing these elaborate maps and approximations of reality. And of course, you know, when we have a lot of complex maps, we try to combine them all together and stitch them together so that they make sense. So we have this overarching theory of everything, we're going to see all sorts of things that don't quite fit and maybe some contradictions here and there. But it doesn't really matter, because that whole thing is just a map. It's not the territory itself. Rationalism is not any different than religious fundamentalism in the way that it holds the law of non contradiction. For the religious fundamentalists, you know, his thing is God, that's the thing he defends. What the rationalist defends is the law of non contradiction. What the rationalist defends is all his models and his belief that models can actually represent reality truthfully. He can't give that up. In fact, he will claim to that more than a religious person will cling to God. Because he knows that well you know, these models believe these models are so good look, we've used these models to land a man on the moon and to send satellites into orbit and, and so forth. And this is the danger of the model getting so good that it stops looking like a model. There is a great code that I liked that I got from why it would small. And he says, the better the model, the bigger the problem is, the better the model, the bigger the problem. Why? Because when you have a shitty model, you know, it's a model. Like, you know, if I have a, if I have a shitty painting of New York City, I know it's a shitty painting, and I would never confuse it with actual New York City. Now, when I have a really high definition, photograph, New York City, now, you know, for a second, I'm still not going to be confused and trick, but just for a second, I might look at it. And I might actually think that I'm in New York. But now if I build a virtual reality, thing, like, you know, virtual reality goggles, and I strap you into those, and I build a really high resolution model of New York City there, and I stick you in that thing, and I hook you up to all, you know, the feedback and sensors. All of a sudden, now this model starts to get into the place where it's too good for its own good. And now you can actually get tricked and convinced that this digital representation of New York is actually in New York. And you could even imagine that it goes to such a degree, that it becomes such a good replica, that you can't even tell the difference anymore, between the real New York and the fake New York. And now put that puts us in the matrix situation, doesn't it? That's the danger of the matrix. Because you can no longer tell illusion from reality. And that's exactly the problem with modelling. The better the model, the bigger the problem, because everyone forgets that it's just a model. Because most of us, we just care about practical stuff, we care that something works, we don't care if it's true, we care that it works. And contrary to what scientists will tell you, scientists don't really care about what's true, what they care about is what works. So if a, if some theory proves something unexplained something away, and it can actually be demonstrated by facts, that means that it works, it doesn't mean that it's true. Very big trap. Very big trap. Just because your model is proven true, or you know, proven accurate and able to be reproduced does not mean that it's actually true. If that is not true, no model is true, by definition, because it's not reality itself. You cannot model reality, because to model reality, you would need at least as complex and larger model as reality itself. And you will need to include that model in reality itself. And you will need to include the model of the model of the model in reality, the reality itself, and it will have to go to infinity. So, when you think about that, you realize that the most accurate representation of reality is reality itself, you cannot represent reality more accurately than reality is. See, models are useful in that they're a simplified version, there's something that are limited human intelligence are limited human mind can use to make some quick work and some you know, some practical stuff happen in the world. That's useful. But it's not true. Spend some time really thinking about all this, I don't want you to just believe me and take me on faith. Sit down, spend a couple 1000 hours thinking about it all. But don't think too much. Also build up your awareness. Because thinking alone, like I said, is a catch 22 It's dangerous. Gotta build your awareness at the same time. Otherwise, you'll be stuck. Sometimes rational people say Billy Oh, look at this. Look at what you're doing. You're standing here. You're talking to us rationally? I mean, aren't you being rational here yourself, Leo? So aren't you contradicting yourself? And of course, yes, of course, I'm being rational with you, as I'm speaking, not because I particularly hold it as important. But simply because you know, I am playing the language game I am using language. Language is a tool. Without it. I couldn't really communicate to you. And it's because it's really the only thing you understand, I have to use your language to get to you. If you're stuck in the matrix, I have to go into the matrix to talk to you. I can't talk to you from outside the matrix. You see, but when I'm talking to you inside the matrix, You have to be smart enough to understand that, hey, I just dipped into the matrix for your sake, to help you, I'm going to, as soon as this conversation is over, I'm going to go out of the matrix, you're going to still stay in the matrix. But if you're smart, you're going to connect the dots, you're gonna see all maybe this guy came into the matrix, he communicated something within the matrix. But there's some higher thing like I can read between the lines of what he was saying. And I can maybe now intuit that there's something outside the matrix, because he seems to be very convinced that there is what might that be? I mean, is he lying? Is he full of shit? Maybe, or maybe he's onto something that I could go discover for myself as well. And what that is, is post rationalism. Post rationalism is getting more in touch with your body and your emotions and raising your awareness. Most importantly, it's raising your awareness. This is the whole path. This is the path of spiritual work this the path of non dual consciousness work. Ultimately, path towards enlightenment, the escape of the matrix is enlightenment, is the realization that the self is an illusion. And that thoughts are illusions as well, that there is no external physical reality. That that's just a concept. A huge paradigm shift, and I talked about in other episodes, won't really cover it in depth here. But what I'll tell you is that when you're moving towards post rational, you know, out of rational to post rational, be careful not to assume that there's a step backwards, it's gonna feel initially like a step backwards, because you're gonna be afraid the ego is going to be afraid. You push through that anyways, what happens is not that you abandoned rationality, completely, no, you transcend rationality. But you also take it with you, in a sense, you see, I haven't become irrational. Actually, I consider myself quite a rational person. I can speak very rationally, to the most rational people when I want to. But then also inside my mind, when I'm speaking rationally to you, I know that it's silly, I know that it really means nothing. These are just symbols I'm spewing out at you, they don't have any significance to me, my ego is not attached to them. Because I've did a lot of work, to go from rational to post rational, I did a lot of work. And I'm continuing, that's not a done deal. For me, that's just, I'm still in the, you might say, the baby faces of that. I'm going to go much further with that. But I'm at the point where I'm not bothered by these things anymore. I'm not bothered by contradictions, I'm not bothered by some of these things that rationalists are bothered by, and I can, you know, I can see all the potential that's there for me, going forward, and you know, how I can develop my life and amazing ways. Because I've got rid of this ball and chain of rationalism that's been tied around my ankles since I was a kid. So the key here is that you don't just transcend and ditch, you transcend and include, you will still be able to be rational, so don't worry about that. And lastly, I just want to talk about the the idea of how this applies to your life. So you might say, well, Leo, you know, you're talking about this very philosophical stuff. I'm not really sure what this has to do with my personal development. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with, with anything, it seems very philosophical. Are you just kind of arguing for argument's sake? And the answer is no, actually, I'm very interested in practically improving your life. The issues that are central to the quality of your life, your relationships, your career, your passion, your your mood, and your emotions, your health. All of these things, your levels of confidence, for example, the beliefs you have about money, and about business, and so forth. These things all impact the quality of your life. That's what the quality of your life is composed of these different facets. But all of these are linked to your ways of thinking about life, and your attachment to thoughts. And when you're extremely attached to your thoughts, and you're behaving dogmatically, without even knowing it, and you're not willing to raise your awareness, then you're basically stuck. And so your life is not going to be very great or very satisfying. You might build some great intellectual achievements, you know, with your theories and models, but your life is going to be rather miserable and you're going to die frustrated. and dissatisfied no matter what you achieve intellectually. Wouldn't it be nicer to live a really rich and fulfilling life? A fully human life, tapping into your full potential in life, which means tapping into your emotions, and ultimately transcending the ego and tapping into things like unconditional love, and amazing levels of creativity, and amazing mastery over your emotions. And your mind will not be even cooler. And if you want, you can still have some intellectual pursuits, you know, but you're just not going to take them too seriously. Because you recognize that there's way cooler stuff, way bigger fish to fry than just that. So this issue is very important. Because a lot of rationalists, they just get stuck. They're dogmatic, they get stuck. They stick their head in the sand. And then they're not opening themselves up to the higher learnings that they need to learn to really self actualize. I see it all the time. And they think that they're superior. And they think that no, Leo, you know, you're talking all this airy, fairy New Age stuff. And you know, I'm above you, because, you know, I'm a very rational person. Now, that's just your ego defending itself. I'm not here to get you to believe some new age beliefs that I have. No, that would be the pre rational post rational fallacy committed on your part. I'm here simply to show you that there's, there's really powerful stuff you can discover for yourself without having to believe me in a very scientific manner, but you have to be much more open minded than you presently are. And you have to relinquish this clinging to like this, this theory building aspect of science, you know, true science is not theory building. True science is just observation of empirical data. That's the real essence of science. So take that to heart. And take that attitude of skepticism, you can keep your skepticism That's good stuff. Keep your skepticism. And also, stay true to this core scientific idea of staying true to empirical facts. Take that with you as you explore your awareness. That's what you're going to need to reach enlightenment. That's what you're going to need to really mastered all the different practical areas of your life. And perhaps, even more importantly, than just your personal life. The reason this issue is very practical is because right now the world is on the brake. Modern society is really at an inflection point where we don't know what's going to happen in next couple 100 years, we could go extinct as a race. That is a very real possibility. might not happen, but it might happen. And if it does happen, the reason it will happen is not because of excess. religious thinking, it's probably going to happen because of excess rationalism, excess materialism, excess scientism, when the mind schemes and plots and the ego is in full force, and there's no recognition and no awareness of this. And because science has created all these powerful technologies that enable this ego to wreak havoc on the world, that's when you really create a calamity. A real calamity. So what we really need in the world is we need to start shedding the excess rationalism that's there, the excess materialism that's there, not to go back to the Dark Ages. But to move beyond where we're currently at to the next level. And the next level is the level of emotions, intuitions, relationships, empathy, compassion, and higher consciousness. And these are all actually very tangible things that you can develop in yourself. This is not airy fairy talk. This is not new age talk. This is all real hard stuff. But your mind has to be very open to the point where you can start to do the work, you need to start to tap into the tangibility of these abstract New Age sounding concepts that for you know, if you're being introduced, for the first time to these ideas, they're going to sound sappy and soft and kind of like oh, Leo, this is not what are you talking about? No, you know, I want you to just to be practical and scientific, you know, Don't go this route. Yeah, that's how the ego feels when it's being pulled from orange to green. In green is the next stage for you. And then after green comes yellow, and then turquoise, and then there's even stuff beyond that. And these stages come to us from science, spiral that amorous comes to us from Clare graves, Claire graves was a great scientist. He's a very empirical scientist. So, really, science gets integrated with humanity. Because right now we have science that kind of just runs amok. And it's kind of cold and heartless, and it's used by fucking corporations to sell you shit. That's what modern science is. It's what it is. We need to integrate that science more with humanity, and see where that takes us. So a lot is this fake. Take the stuff to heart. Go research this stuff. Study these topics that I'm talking about. There's a lot of research you can do. And not just mental masturbation theory, you can start there, but then go into the actual practice of it, until you start to see changes in your own life, and the raising of your own awareness. All right, that's it. I'm done. Signing off, go ahead, please click like button for me. Share this with a friend, post your comments down below. And lastly, come check out actualize that org This my website, I have a free newsletter on there that keeps you on track. With all the new material that I release every single week, I'm committed to releasing new self actualization material, which is going to be advanced concepts that you're going to need to move to these higher stages in your life. How do you actually do that? Very few people tell you how this can be done. Very few people talk about these subjects, because most of society, even people in the self help field are not really very advanced. And I'm not trying to say that I'm like the most advanced or anything. By no means, you know, I have a lot of growth to do that I will do. But I can tell you one thing is that my commitment is to get to the most advanced stage as humanly possible. So that's kind of like my personal commitment just for myself. And of course, as I do that for myself, I want to take you along for the ride with me. So if you are interested in this, and you can kind of start to intuit some potential here, then sign up, stick around. Every week, you'll get more updates. And that will keep you on track. And in a couple of years, a lot of your old paradigms will break apart and new paradigms much more powerful and rich paradigms will come and take their place which will free up your life you're going to feel a lot happier than you were able to ever possibly be under the old paradigms that you lived under. Alright, so sign up. Stay tuned and I'll see you soon