Highway to Enlightenment

[Buck Edwards]

Saying too much, texting too much, not knowing when to keep your mouth shut, that's a trap.
Losing your temper when your girlfriend asks you if her butt looks big, boy is that a trap. Software
development, in software development, there's something called scope creep and feature creep,
which is a big trap. It can destroy your whole project. Speaking of projects, underestimating project
size, scope, workload, time, and budget, the sunk cost fallacy, that's a trap.

Living by the values of others rather than your own, that's a trap. Trying to be like others, like your
friends, like celebrities, rather than owning your uniqueness, that's a trap, especially for young
people who are too busy conforming. There's a lot of traps in just survival in the wilderness. I watch
a lot of survival videos, stuff like Survivor Man, Bushcraft videos, that kind of stuff. For example,
Survivor Man, he shows you a lot of survival situations that are very counterintuitive and trappy.
How about the trap of celebrity, thinking that being famous will make you happy? Fame is a big
fantasy. Another trap related to this, posting too much of yourself on social media. Being a fanboy
or fangirl mesmerized by celebrity parasocial relationships. This is believing people who promise
you or guarantee you things that cannot be guaranteed.

The self-improvement treadmill, getting on this self-actualization treadmill and just doing it, doing
it, doing it, and then it just becomes the next rat race for you and it doesn't really make you happy.
The trap of profit maximization, milking your cow to death, a lot of big brands do that with their
franchises. They just keep releasing more and more squeal after squeal, and they just get lower and
lower quality, cut more corners, till it turns to [__]. Brands can be a trap, of course. Brands can sell
you these sorts of fantasies and exploit you.

Legal contracts are often traps, NDAs, arbitration agreements, various sneaky clauses that the
lawyers and the employers stuff in there. The legal world is full of legal traps. Backlash to terrorism
is a trap. This is what America experienced after '91 with the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq and
with Afghanistan.

This was an irrational response to 9/11, and it led to the weakening of America. Right now, the same
thing is happening, the same mistake is being repeated by Israel with Hamas. They are reacting
emotionally, irrationally, and ultimately, they're going to hurt themselves in the process. It's not
going to lead to anything good for the Gazan people, and it's not going to lead to good things for the
Israelis as well because the violence is going to continue. You're going to have many more terrorist
attacks from people like Hamas in the future just from the war that is happening right now and the
war crimes and so on that are happening. This is a classic trap, and of course, terrorism is employed
to trigger that trap. Terrorism is the laying of that trap; that's what Hamas did. They laid that trap for
Israel, and now Israel stepped into it despite all of their excuses and justifications.

The next collective trap is the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is there's many
examples of it, but a classic example would be like a public toilet. Public toilets are nasty why
because nobody takes responsibility for the toilet. Everybody treats it as a public toilet, and that's
why your home toilet, you don't treat the same way that you treat a public toilet. This also leads to
classic tragedy of the common traps like pollution, overfishing, where everybody is acting selfishly
then collectively that adds up to destroying the fishing system, destroying the ecosystem, destroying
the environment, creating a toxic river system or whatever. So that's a trap.

The next trap is voting and lobbying selfishly for personal gain. Most people approach voting,
politics, and lobbying as like, what's in it for me? Every company is asking, how can I lobby the
government to change the laws to benefit me, the company, so we can maximize our profits even
more.

This is a complete mistake, and many voters vote this way too. It's like I'm going to vote for
whatever is going to benefit my religion, I'm going to vote for whatever's going to get me a better
job, I'm going to vote for whatever's going to reduce my tax burden a little bit. This is the wrong
way to think about this; this is a collective trap, really. It's the wrong way to think about
government; government should be about asking ourselves what is best for the collective and then
doing that. Because when everybody individually is just selfishly lobbying the government, this
turns into a corrupt mess, dysfunctional mess like what we have right now because nobody's
thinking about the larger collective; they're all just trapped in petty selfishness, short-term thinking.

They don't really care about the government; what they care about is just themselves, and then the
government is just a vehicle to advance themselves. But then that leads to the debasement of
government; government can only be good when you actually care about making government good,
but nobody cares about that for the most part because they just want what they want; they don't give
a [__] about the government.

 

[Buck Edwards]

 

Another collective trap is technology, this idea that we can invent our way out of problems that are
really human social, psychological, existential, political problems, and that technology will solve
this for us like AI will solve our lack of development, our immaturity. No, it won't. These things
need to be addressed more directly. Now, of course, technology can help with certain developmental
issues, especially technology can help us to meet our basic needs, technology can help feed
everybody on the planet and provide water to everybody on the planet, this kind of basic stuff.
Technology can also help to educate, especially now with AI, there's a lot of potential for education.
But what really matters is our immaturity, our stages of development, you know, our lack of
spiritual connection, this stuff, you know, our poor epistemology. And by and large, technology is
not going to fix this, which is why we have the kind of problems we have. Just thanks to Silicon
Valley who thinks that they can invent their way out of everything.

The next collective trap is trying to impose things from higher stages of development onto societies
of lower development. So this is the classic example of what happened in Iraq after America
invaded. This idea that we can just spread democracy to Iraq or this idea that stage green has that
we can spread feminism to Afghanistan. You're like but what about the what about the girls in
Afghanistan who can't go to school? The feminists will say or um some stage green people will say
well, you know um some people say well what about the LGBTQ rights in Palestine? It's like you
don't understand Iraq Afghanistan Palestine um these places are not developed enough to have
feminism to have democracy to have LGBTQ rights these people barely have food they barely have
jobs so this is the trap of you know trying to project your own development down onto others leads
to problems.

The next trap is political polarization tribalism of course especially what we've been seeing in
America lately. The founding fathers I forget who it was in The Federalist Papers it was was it
Madison or somebody like that in the Federalist Papers there's there's a there's a Federalist paper
that specifically talks about the dangers to America these Federalist Papers were written at the
founding of America and the founding fathers specifically identified that one of the biggest
problems going forward for America will be factions what they call factions in other words tribes
when when America breaks up into little fragments and factions and tribes that are then all fighting
against each other for selfish personal gain like the evangelicals are fighting against the um the
feminists and the feminists are fighting against the you know the Wall Street people and so and like
like this this kind of this kind of situation that we're seeing today especially on social media this is
what the founders identified as one of the biggest threats to American democracy and here we are in
the thick of it we've fallen into this trap even though it was identified for us 200 years ago.
The next trap is a never-ending growth mindset this idea that everything should be growing all the
time it's not going to be sustainable.

The next step is group thinking. Echo Chambers. The next step is a metrics fixation or
quantification, trying to, you know, trying to quantify everything. For example, the American
education system. We're killing our kids in the education system by forcing them to take tests every
year. It's like testing after testing after testing. You're measuring them all the time with these rigid
tests that don't really capture what education is really about. So you can then gain these metrics.

That's what schools do. They try to gain these metrics and they try to train kids to gain these tests
that the school can receive a higher budget next year for their education. And in the midst of all that,
kids are not getting high-quality educations because education is not about passing a test.
The next trap is the Trap of nostalgia for the past. A lot of times we can romanticize the past. That's
what Fascism and Maga is all about, scapegoating is also a trap. Communism, Marxism, socialism
are traps as we've seen in the 20th century. The Trap Of Constant progress narratives, this idea that
everything is always improving. That's not always true and I've been guilty of falling into this trap
myself especially, you know when you have a model like SP dynamics, you tend to think that well
every stage is above the next stage and we're always progressing upwards. Maybe I led you on
about that but the reality is more complicated than that, all right so that's the end of the social traps
we still have more to discuss.

I'm going to take a quick intermission here refresh myself and I'll be back in a second. The most
interesting traps I actually find to be the ones that are the most psychological and abstract and
epistemological as well. Here are some examples like, Rosie retrospection that one refers to when
you think about the past your mind tends to erase all the bad parts of your childhood or whatever
you're getting nostalgic over and then your past can look much better than your present. Another
one is confirmation bias, big bias of the Mind.

Another one is denial, denial is a huge psychological
mechanism defense mechanism that I'll have an episode about in the future. For example, the Trap
of grounding your happiness and Security in other human beings or getting fooled by your ego's
defense mechanisms and emotional reactions repressing your emotions or the Trap of reductionism
and unholy thinking. I discussed that one a lot in my two-part series holism and holistic thinking
postmodernism and relativism can be a very sophisticated kind of trap the Trap of thinking that truth
doesn't exist or is entirely subjective and relative conflating relative and absolute truths.
I'm going to have an episode coming soon about postmodernism. I also already have an episode I
released in the past about the issue of absolute and relative truths. Go look at that, "The Trap of Not
Caring About Truth". This is one that most people fall into, I find. See, what most people call truth
or when they say they care about truth, really it's not that they care about truth. What they're doing
is they're just taking their perspective and calling that the truth. That's very different than a real
commitment to the pursuit of truth.

The trap of avoiding facing truth, avoiding emotional labor, giving away your authority – check out
my episode "How Authority Works" or how that works projection, big big big tricky trap. So you
see, these are very classic psychological traps that they teach you about in psychotherapy. Another
one that I see that's popular now is treating gender as an entirely subjective concept.
This is a dangerous trap. Now, gender is not purely biological, but if you ignore the biology of
gender, then you're going to get yourself into trouble. People don't know what they're doing when
they're over-relativizing gender with this kind of postmodernist stuff. Which is not to say that there's
only two genders, but of course, there is a deep conceptual subjective aspect to gender. A lot of it is,
you know, fabrications of our own minds.

But again, see, fabrications of your own mind, that's a difficult concept to wrap your mind around
and to understand properly. Just like with that example that I told you about money being imaginary
and it's like, yeah, money is imaginary, but that doesn't quite mean what you might think it means or
it's easy to misunderstand the consequences of what that means.

 

[Buck Edwards]

Other examples of traps here are various kinds of limiting beliefs. When you believe that you can't
do something, that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and it can become true just by virtue of the
fact that you believe it, even though it may not be an actual reflection of your limitations. The
reality is that you don't really know what you're capable of until you try really hard at it.

Or something like telling yourself that it's too late to start. You know, it's too late to colearn art, it's
too late to pursue my dream career. Then that can become true for you and then that becomes a trap.
Another trap that's very interesting is not taking people's self-reports of their experiences seriously.
I see a lot of atheists and scientists doing this, like for example when people give them reports of
their psychedelic trips or their spiritual and mystical experiences. What these people do is they just
dismiss it as like, "Oh, it's just fantasy, it's hallucination, it's just delusions." That's a mistake, that
kind of attitude is a mistake.

Really what you want to do there is, of course, people can be deluded about all sorts of mystical
stuff, but you want to in general be more sensitive to how people report their direct experiences of
reality because what you'll discover if you take that stuff seriously is that people simply experience
reality quite differently from each other and from you.

That's a big revelation because if you assume everybody experiences reality as you do, as the
scientific materialist assumes reality is experienced, that's a mistake, that's a big epistemological
mistake and it prevents you from understanding reality at the deeper levels. And then that's why
you're so puzzled by all this mystical religious spiritual phenomena that people keep talking about.
Yeah, of course you're puzzled, it's not because they're deluded, it's because you have a very limited
conception of how conscious experience works. And then confirmation bias comes into play here
and then that gets you stuck in your materialist paradigm.

Another trap is repressing your problems with people and then acting passive-aggressively towards
them. This is the passive-aggressive trap. Another one is not communicating in relationships. To
have proper relationships, you need to communicate, exactly at those times when you don't feel like
communicating. Another trap is hearing what you want to hear rather than listening carefully to
what is being said.

Another trap is calling people crazy, deluded, and evil rather than seeking to genuinely understand
their perspective. It's so easy to dismiss a perspective by just calling somebody crazy. Another trap
is judgment. Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment is just like, honestly, the more I do this
work, the more I see that a giant chunk of the problems of my mind are just me judging reality and
judging other people. And it's so hard to stop doing that because it's just wired into our egos.
And then that brings me to the next point, which is the trap of morality. Morality is a huge can of
worms, and I'm going to have a new episode coming up on that as well. So yeah, morality is just a
trap. The whole field of morality is a trap, and then especially, I want to point out this kind of
feeling of moral righteousness and indignation that we get. That's a trap.

That feeling, whenever it comes up, that's a trap. And the kind of moralizing you do to others, the
demonizing of others, the kind of virtue signaling that you do, whether it's politically based or not,
spiritually based, all of this is a giant trap. Crusading, the Lesser Jihad, this kind of stuff, moral
crusading, big traps, really. It's a kind of projection.

Another trap is thinking that you're good when actually you're evil. I want to do a whole episode in
the future, which is something along the lines of "you're not good, you're evil." I had this epiphany
myself lately. You know, I've thought of myself as a good person for my whole life and then
realized recently, just during my long extended break, I realized all the evil things that I've done
throughout my life and just how big of a fantasy this whole idea of me being a good person really
is.

Another trap is trying to save the world, having this kind of Messiah complex where it's like, "I
have to save the world, and if I don't do it, nobody else will, and the world will end in an
apocalypse." This is usually a delusion. Another trap is doing armchair philosophy, speculating, and
mental masturbation.

Another one is always taking the centrist view, taking the midpoint of any controversy, splitting the
difference between every perspective, as though the truth is somewhere down the middle. That's not
how truth works. If you have a pro-slavery position and an anti-slavery position, the truth is not
down the middle.

Breaking your integrity is a trap, and there's a lot of things in life that will lure you away from your
integrity and make you think like, "Oh, well, my integrity is not that important because I can get
some money, some sex, some this, some that, a promotion, some fame, some clicks on YouTube."
Excessive empathy is a trap. This is a trap that stay-AG, green Progressive leftists fall into.
Empathy, of course, is important, and a lack of empathy is its own kind of trap that the right wing
falls into. But the left wing falls into excessive empathy, and this can lead to problems.

Thinking that everyone experiences reality as you do, that's a trap. Overgeneralizing and projecting
your experiences onto others, that's a trap. Assuming that others have the same personality type as
you, strengths as you, and capabilities as you, this kind of simplistic idea that, "Well, if one man can
do it, then every man can do it, you can do it too."

No, that's just not true. A lot of things that great men and women in history have done cannot be
repeated precisely because they were unique genetically, they had unique personalities, unique
strengths, unique capabilities. That's what the world's geniuses, if they're true geniuses, are, a kind
of Albert Einstein, you know, the world's greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, musicians,
this kind of stuff.

An ordinary person doesn't have these capabilities, the visualization capabilities of a Nikola Tesla,
an ordinary human doesn't have the ability for Nikola Tesla to visualize an entire electric motor in
his own mind and prototype it in his mind before he even built it and then have it actually built the
way that he prototyped it in his mind.

That's beyond the capabilities of a normal human being, that's like alien levels of intelligence that
is, which is why he's revered as one of the greats of human history because he wasn't normal. And
you'll also find that that's true of many spiritual teachers, is that they're exceptionally gifted, they're
not just ordinary people who meditated a lot, they're way beyond that.
And that leads us to the next trap, which is assuming that everybody has the same spiritual
giftedness or level of talent. That's not true at all.

 

[Buck Edwards]

Of course, then there's the trap of ideology. It's a very broad general trap. I have an episode called
"How Ideology Works" that explains that in more detail. Ideology is antithetical to everything we're
doing here with actualized.org because it limits the functioning of your mind. Your mind is not
actually thinking originally for itself and having genuine insights and observations, but rather it's
just following some sort of laid-out trajectory or path and thinking along lines of conformity.
Regardless of what kind of ideology it is—left-wing, right-wing, religious, or scientific—irrelevant
capitalist, Marxist, all of it is limited and problematic.

The other trap related to that is being stubborn and close-minded. That's usually what you get when
you subscribe to any kind of ideology. The stubbornness and closed-mindedness come along with it,
and there's your trap, there's the cost. Another trap is taking your point of view as the truth,
confusing those two, taking your limited perspective as the best and truest perspective as absolute.
And then just a very basic epistemological trap is thinking that you are right and whoever else
you're dealing with is wrong. This is our default assumption in relationships and debates, whether
they're political, philosophical, religious, in various kinds of conflicts—political conflicts,
geopolitical conflicts—we just automatically assume that we're on the right side and they're on the
wrong side. This is a trap. I've talked about Paradigm Lock in the past, that's a trap, go see my
episode "How Paradigms Work."

Creating an echo chamber around yourself is another kind of trap, surrounding yourself with likeminded people.

This is really a sort of a variation on confirmation bias, not a paradox but a trap.
Because when you surround yourself with like-minded people, then of course, you're going to be
sharing your perspective and reinforcing it altogether.
Another trap is spiritual bypassing, which is using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing practical
responsibilities, real-life, and real-world business and uncomfortable emotions, shadow stuff, taking
only like the positive aspects of spirituality but avoiding the real difficult work that spirituality
should entail. Then there's the trap of happiness, pursuing happiness as a constant positive state.
Then there's the path of arriving, the attitude that one day in the future you will finally reach a point
in your life where you will be finally satisfied and at peace because you've achieved some XYZ
accomplishments. Then there's the trap of assuming that what makes others happy will make you
happy. Maybe that Hollywood celebrity is truly happy living that kind of life that he or she is living,
but that doesn't mean that you will be, that's the trap.

How about the trap of the perfect relationship, finding that perfect partner who will complete you
and finally you will be happy? There's the trap of pure rationality, which is thinking that the
problem of epistemology can be solved by just being hyper-rational and not seeing the limitations
of rationality itself. Scientifically minded people suffer from this one the most.
There's a trap of assuming that freedom is an absolute good. Libertarians fall into this trap. The
American right-wing also tends to fall into this trap, which is very ironic because they restrict
freedoms in many ways, so it's very hypocritical. Of course, the trap of positive vibes only, this is
sort of this kind of new-age spiritual attitude of like let's just be positive all the time, like you know
don't tell me that I'm out of money, that's negative, don't tell me I need to get a job because that's
negative, let's be positive about it, let's just look at the bright side of all these situations of not
having money and not having a job and not paying my taxes and just kind of like, again, this is a
kind of spiritual bypassing.

How about the trap of demonizing survival and selfishness because now you're so woke you've
supposedly transcended your selfishness to some degree and now you expect that of everybody
else? Well, of course, that's a kind of delusion there as well. So, these are some of the more
psychological traps that I personally find most profound to really contemplate and some of these
can be like the most advanced kinds of traps that will take you a decade to really appreciate.
Now, let's get to the topic of uh, let's stop listing out traps and let's get to the topic of how do you
avoid traps? So here are some tips for you. First of all, use this lens, this paradigm of traps that I'm
offering to you, so just that alone, making this explicit is helpful. Next, go in expecting traps.
Whatever domain you're going into, research that domain and study the traps that others have fallen
into and expect that every new domain has traps in it, especially newbie traps, that's where the most
traps are, is the newbie traps, but then there's like we said more advanced ones, intermediate and
then advanced.

The next point here is don't be a fool, don't expect free value. This is how you really get trapped is
expecting free value. Free value often comes with a hidden cost. Are you using Facebook for free?
Are you using some online service for free? Well, you better believe there's a hidden cost because
they're not doing it for free. Facebook's making a lot of money. Facebook is one of the most
profitable companies in the world, so where are they charging you? What's the hidden cost of
Facebook, of Instagram, and so on? Think about these things, businesses don't just do things for free
for you. In the end, a business does things because it thinks it's going to get more value out of it
than you will, that's how businesses operate. So if a business is offering some kind of sale, you
better believe that the business is earning more money on that sale than you are, so figure out where
they're hiding the cost from you.

Also related to this point is stop expecting things to be quick and easy, your desire to leech value
you and get freebies will be turned against you and then you're the one who's going to end up
getting screwed in the end. Beware of things that are high value but easy, free, cheap, quick, and
exciting and fun. See a lot of these traps are just fun, that's how you get trapped in there by them,
some of this stuff is fun and you might say well Leo if I don't, if I live my life avoiding all these trap
you know being paranoid about avoiding all these traps all the time where's the fun in life um you're
being a buzz kill, yeah in a certain sense I am, you know I'm sort of like that parent telling you to be
careful when you go outside well why do your parents tell you that because there's crocodiles
crawling around out there they might snatch you now of course in practice you know you don't want
to take it overboard and I'll have some more points towards the end about um you know the limits
of this traps paradigm because every paradigm has its limits every lens has its limits.

Another way to avoid traps is don't be desperate and needy. The more needy you are for sex, for
money, for power, for fame, for love, the easier you will be to trap, so live your life more
preemptively where you avoid putting yourself in these kind of compromising needy desperate
positions. Avoid traps by being a long-term thinker, short-term thinking is the mother of all traps,
learn patience, the get-rich-slowly approach rather than the get-rich-quickly approach. Another way
to avoid traps is get clear about your values and stick with them, don't betray your values.
That's a huge trap right there. Another way to avoid traps is to distinguish between what is truly
valuable and what is merely tempting or alluring. The distinction between fake value and real value,
or shallow value and deep value, is what you want to be going after. The real deep value probably
deserves its own episode. That distinction, just right there, also beware when people tell you, uh,
rather, beware when people are telling you what you know you want to hear. Salespeople, your
intimate partners, they will often tell you what they know you want to hear. Business partners will
do that, investors can do that, or people offering to bring you investments can do that in like
investment opportunities.

Another way to avoid traps is to contemplate. Just sit and contemplate the traps for every new
domain, make a list of them, make lists of traps in your commonplace book, and review it regularly.
Start with some of the ones I mentioned above in this episode, but then also find your own traps. I
mentioned some very kind of general traps, but then if you're going into very specific domains,
whatever you're doing, you'll have specific traps related to that domain. Make lists of those and then
review them periodically just to kind of refresh your memory because it's not enough to just look at
them once. You've got to remind yourself of it every year because you're going to get complacent.

[Buck Edwards]

Another way to avoid traps is what's called the premortem technique. I have an episode about the
premortem technique. A premortem is like a postmortem except a postmortem is something you do
after you finish a project. You look back on the project and you say, okay, what went wrong, what
went right, what are the lessons? Well, you can do that even without starting your project. Whatever
project you have in mind, you can sit down and visualize a premortem. It's basically okay, visualize
yourself failing at this project and then ask yourself why did I fail and what could have been done to
prevent the failures? When I started actualized.org 10 years ago, I did a premortem on what would it
look like if I failed at actualized.org. I discussed that in that episode, go check it out. It's kind of an
old one, but still relevant.

The other way to avoid traps is just by falling into them but then getting really good at learning your
lessons. Perhaps the biggest trap is not that you fall into traps but that you keep falling into the same
traps over and over again and don't learn your lesson. You'd be surprised how often people just live
their whole life this way. It's okay to fall into a trap as long as it's not catastrophic so you should
distinguish between two types of traps: those that are catastrophic and those that are not. If it's
catastrophic, those you really want to avoid because those can really mess up your life and even kill
you. But most traps are not catastrophic and they're actually presenting you with great learning
opportunities, but of course, that assumes that you have this kind of learning mindset approach.
Another way to avoid traps is to explicitly ask experienced people about traps. Seek out experts,
talk to them, pay them for advice. That advice will pay for itself and specifically ask them what are
the traps.

You can ask them what are the newbie traps, what are the intermediate traps, what are the
advanced traps? I bet you that most experts have never been asked that question so explicitly and
they'll be thrilled to hear you ask such an intelligent question because see, no newbie, like it's hard
for me to imagine a newbie like some new AG newbie coming to their spiritual guru and then
saying what are all the traps of spirituality? Like I've never heard that happen before. Usually, they
come in there with their eyes wide open, you know, all sort of mesmerized by the aura of the guru
and then they just blindly fall into all the traps by worshiping the guru and adopting ideologies and
beliefs and groupthink and all that kind of stuff. Of course, a way to avoid traps is to expose
yourself to massive experience. We've talked about that before. Severe inexperience is really the
mother of all traps and you really can't help it because you're born in life ignorant, completely
inexperienced, and then you just got to learn by making mistakes.

The next way to avoid traps is just to fail a lot. Failure is okay as long as it's not catastrophic. So fail
more, fail faster, but don't fail in crippling ways. That's the key. Sometimes a simplistic piece of
advice that might be told to people is like just fail a lot and don't worry about failure. Failure is
great, you know, I failed so much in my life and I came up to be a success. Well, that's not quite
correct advice because sometimes failure can be so catastrophic that it cripples you, it traumatizes
you, it kills you even, or it costs you in an irreversible way that you can never replace. So what
would be an example of a catastrophic failure?

Well, if you get your hand caught in a circular saw and you cut off your hand, that would be an
example of a catastrophic mistake. An example of a non-catastrophic mistake is let's say you make a
bad investment, you lose $10,000. Losing money, of course, is always painful and it can be quite
bad, especially if you need that money. But in the end, you know, you can make more money.
Money is fungible, it's replaceable. $10,000 you can make that up in your lifetime, it's not a big
deal. But losing your hand to a circular saw, that is a big deal, you can't replace that, there's no
replacement for that.

So if you're going into situations where there's a potential for a catastrophic trap, you know, identify
which traps, like if you're making a list of traps in a new domain, put a little star next to the ones,
there's going to be a few that are going to be like catastrophic that will kill you and mess you up,
mess your business or whatever, and then when you're dealing with those, be extra careful. And
then, you know, you can be very anal on those traps and the other traps you don't have to be so anal
about. This way you have some sort of like sense of priority because if you're just going to be anal
about everything, this is not going to be beneficial for you, it's going to actually trip you up.

Another way to avoid traps is reading a lot to know a little bit about everything. Read biographies,
history, business, memoirs, spiritual books, psychology books, philosophy books. This, you know, if
you read all the stuff that I have on my book list, this is going to give you a very nice foundation
where you're going to be aware of all the mistakes that humans have made in the past. You know,
history is really great for that, biographies are great for memoirs, and so on.
Also, adopt an attitude of facing truth. The avoidance of truth will land you into many traps. So, if
you're just facing the truth a little bit every week, every month, every year, and you're doing that
consistently, and you're valuing the truth, and you're not just stuck in an echo chamber, this will
serve you well for avoiding many traps. See my episode "The Avoidance of Truth," which discusses
that topic in depth.

The next way to avoid traps is seeking out diverse perspectives. Only having one perspective is
itself a trap. Don't have only one perspective on spirituality; you need more than that. Likewise, for
business and for relationships and so on.

The next way to avoid traps is context awareness. Becoming more context aware. See my old
classic episode "Understanding Recontextualization" for more on that.
The other way to avoid traps is reaching the construct-aware stage of cognitive development. This is
from that episode three-part series episode I have called "The Nine Stages of Ego Development,"
especially in part three I talk about this construct-aware stage where you start to become aware of
how your mind constructs your sense of reality. And this is very, very helpful for seeing some of the
more abstract existential, epistemological, psychological sorts of traps.
Then, I have this principle that helps me avoid traps, which is the principle of sustainability. When
you're trying to do something, do it in a sustainable way. If you're building a business, build a
sustainable business rather than an unsustainable business, because there's often solutions that are
not sustainable which are the easier solutions. Not sustainable means I'm not talking about the
environmental impact of your business here.

By sustainable, what I mean is how long will this method of business be able to sustain itself? For
example, if you have some sort of get-rich-quick scheme where you're flipping houses, how long
can you do that? You can do that for a year or two. How long will that last? Or if you're making
money off meme stocks, how long will that last? See, these are not sustainable ways of making
money. You want a sustainable business. And of course, sustainability in business, for example, will
mean that you need to actually offer value, not just leech value. The unsustainable methods are the
ones that are based on leeching value, like, you know, you can make a lot of money as a hacker, but
that's not sustainable.

And then, of course, relationships. You can have unsustainable relationships, you can have
sustainable relationships. Which ones do you think lead to true satisfaction and love and so on, and
which ones are traps? In the end, of course, there is no algorithm for spotting traps. You just have to
stay conscious and be intelligent and stay vigilant, keep your wits about you. Intelligence is your
ability to see traps. Strive to live in a preemptive way. Work hard to position yourself such that you
are not easily enticed into compromising on your values, your integrity, chasing after short-term
pleasures, unsustainable solutions, get-rich-quick schemes, and so forth.

[Buck Edwards]

Right, it's really about strategic positioning because anyone will fall into a trap and be easily lured
when they are very, very, very desperate. Like if you're broke and you have no money, yeah, you're
going to be lured into all sorts of shady business deals. And if you're in this position where you
haven't been socializing, you've been playing video games your whole life, living in your mother's
basement, yeah, now you're in such a desperate position for sex that you're going to be tempted and
lured in by all sorts of shady sexual schemes and offers.

So, it is about positioning yourself strategically such that you're not in these kind of compromised
positions. Then, of course, you can't avoid all of them, but you do the best you can. See, as you get
trapped, you get more desperate, and as you get desperate, your options get worse, trapping you in
even more. And it's sort of this negative vicious cycle. This can be sort of a cycle of addiction, like
maybe you were abused as a child and you got traumatized, so that's already made you kind of
desperate, emotionally vulnerable and so forth. And that makes you, of course, now, because you
don't have a healthy emotional state, now that makes you susceptible now to intoxicants and drugs,
and you start with a bit of alcohol, then you move on to weed, then you move on to cocaine, then
you move on to heroin, you see?

And this gradually makes you more and more and more desperate over time. And then, you know,
when you're at the bottom of that spiral, you're so desperate that it seems like you have no way out.
And in that case, what you need to do is you need to ask for help. You need to look for help from
other people who are, you know, who can, who are in a good place in life such that they have
abundant resources that they could help you because you're at the point where you've tapped
yourself out. So, be careful about those kind of compromising situations that you can put yourself
in. Traps are a mirror of our desires and fears. We fall into traps because they tap into something we
crave or wish to avoid.

Here's a quote that I'll read to you from an AI that I got from an AI. The Claw 3 AI says, "Traps are
a mirror that reflect back to us our own psychological and emotional landscape." I thought that was
a especially eloquent beautiful way of summarizing this whole thing.

Here are some exercises that you can do that will help you to get a better handle on traps and to
avoid traps. The first exercise is write down a list of 10 traps you've fallen into in your life in the
past and then ask yourself what led you to fall into each trap. What did you learn from each trap?
And importantly, in what way were these traps ultimately a gift? Don't forget that traps are not just
purely negative things unless they're catastrophic, but even some of the catastrophic traps honestly
can also ultimately be converted into gifts, and your ability to do that, your mental resourcefulness
to do that is a very powerful skill. And maybe that deserves an episode all on its own, how to
reframe this kind of negative stuff. In fact, I need to do an episode on reframing. That's powerful.

And here's another exercise for you. Write down a list of five traps that other people who you know
have fallen into. Friends, family members, romantic partners. And then ask yourself what led them
to fall into these traps and how will you avoid falling into those traps? And then, here's an extra
powerful question which is, what traps am I specifically susceptible to? What traps does my unique
personality and life situation expose me to? Because you see, we're all quite different. We have
different consciousnesses, different levels of development, different genetics, different personality
types, different strengths and weaknesses. And that of course influences what kind of things we will
be lured in by and susceptible to. So, you have to not just know about traps in general but
specifically what kind of traps you're vulnerable to.

Some people are much more vulnerable to alcoholism than others, genetically. You have to know
that about yourself. If that's true for you, maybe some people can just go out and drink every night,
and they're not vulnerable. But you're vulnerable, so you can't do that. However, you may have
other advantages that those people don't have. Here are some meta-traps, very high level traps:
Thinking that you're immune to a particular trap. For example, telling yourself, "Well, I would
never join a cult; I could never join a cult because I'm too intelligent." Of course, that makes you
more vulnerable to joining a cult if you believe that.

Thinking that you've escaped a trap. Sometimes there's a trap within a trap within a trap. You might
think, "Well, I've already escaped this trap, Leo, so it's not a big deal." But you don't realize that
there's a deeper, more advanced version of that trap that you still haven't escaped. Watch out for that
one.

Especially true when you're getting into advanced spiritual stuff. You might think you've awakened
to the max. But then, what you'll realize is that there's something beyond that. It's easy to overlook
because you might think, "Well, I've escaped the ego; I've already awoken. So, what more could
there be?" This kind of trap, in general, thinking that you're immune to self-deception, will be a
trap.

Criticizing, judging, and ridiculing others too much for falling into traps is a trap. Because the more
you judge and criticize others, the harder it becomes for you to admit when you fall into traps
yourself. Denying that you've fallen into a trap when you have is a big trap. If you can't even admit
you've fallen into it, like if you can't even admit that you're doing some of the things listed above
that are problematic, half the challenge is just admitting that you're doing some of these things
honestly. Because you're going to be in denial about it, which is a trap.

These traps can snowball and work together against you. Sometimes, you're not just dealing with
one trap; you're dealing with multiple traps. For example, you're in denial that you're an addict,
maybe using psychedelics but have turned it into an addiction now, and you're doing spiritual
bypassing with psychedelics. If you ridicule others for falling into traps and you think they're stupid
for doing that, automatically, that means you're going to think you're stupid for falling into traps.
And you don't want to think you're stupid, so you're not going to want to admit that you fall into
some of these traps.

Sometimes, you can look like a real fool falling into one of these traps, like joining a cult. You
might think you were just joining some sort of mild, good-mannered spiritual community, but it
turned out to be a cult, and you were really fooled by that. But you don't want to admit that because
you've been ridiculing others who joined cults. Another meta-trap is worrying about avoiding all the
traps and getting paranoid about it, which will make you very risk-averse, get you stuck in your
head, make you very indecisive, and then maybe you won't even take action because you are too
afraid to fail and make a mistake, and you think that everything is a catastrophic trap, which isn't
true. Getting paranoid about traps is itself a trap.

 

[Buck Edwards]

Judging yourself for falling into a trap is a trap. You want to have self-compassion when you make
mistakes. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake because that itself isn't a mistake. You just
have to look, you lacked consciousness, lacked experience, you were lured in by something that you
needed, you were desperate. That's the human condition. So, don't beat yourself up for that.

Ultimately, you have to get good at reframing your traps as gifts, opportunities to learn deeper. A lot
of times, when you go through your deepest suffering, you learn the most. So, of course, traps can
be sources of some of your greatest suffering. Life is a balancing act. It's all about finding balance.
Achieving success or goodness or truth in some domain usually involves having the right balance.
For example, you need to strike the right balance between being too cheap and being too wasteful
with your money, between working too hard, being a workaholic, and then avoiding work and
procrastinating, between believing in religion blindly and dismissing all spirituality. There's
something in the middle, the right balance. Trusting people too much foolishly or distrusting
everyone in a cynical, toxically skeptical way where then you can't relate to them properly, you're
too distrustful. Being too selfish on one hand and being too selfless and self-sacrificing on the other.
Engaging in too much theory or not enough theory. There is a balance there. Being too serious or
not being serious enough.

Of course, it should be obvious that I am not immune to all of these traps, and yet I should say that
anyway, just to reiterate it. How do you think I know about all these traps? Many of them, of
course, because I've just contemplated them and thought ahead, but a lot of them I've fallen into
myself, and I still reserve the right to fall into some traps in the future. If you see me falling into a
trap and doing something stupid, that's not a mistake. That's expected; I expect that of myself.
I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the value that actual art or content brings to its
audience. One of the functions of my content is that I try to point out all the traps to you of all these
various tricky domains. That's something that I'm passionate about, and notice that there's a lot of
value in that. It's actually very practical, rather than me waxing philosophical for you or filling your
head with ideology and various kinds of belief systems.

It can be a lot better to just point out traps to you, and that's really what I've been doing all along.
Going back for 10 years of this content, I've been implicitly pointing out traps. Now, we've made it
very explicit that that's what we've been doing. Now, I want to conclude this with a little bit of talk
about AI.

I started using AI recently and I discovered the power of it to supercharge my contemplations. This
is the first episode where I applied AI to my contemplations, and I have used AI to improve this talk
that I gave to you. This talk was run through the Claude Opus AI.

This doesn't mean that this talk was generated by the AI. I spent many, many, many hours and two
years compiling the research for this topic, brainstorming all the examples, and I got it to the point
where I would normally get one of my outlines. I don't write out what I'm going to say word for
word; I speak off the cuff, but I do make an outline.

I speak from an outline just because there's so much content here and it's so tricky that it's easy to
forget stuff, which we don't want to do. Also, it needs to have a nice, logical, linear order in order to
flow well. So, I arranged my outline, which was like 70 pages - 70 pages of outline for this talk, one
of my longest ones because there are so many examples, over 250 examples.

Then, what I did is I fed it into the Claude AI. I have a funny story about that, but we don't have
time. Anyways, I fed it into the AI, and then I told it to read through my whole talk and then offer
me improvements. So, that's what it did. It took just a couple of seconds to do that.
I asked Claude to find holes in my thinking. Right, I asked it for additional examples. Some of the
examples above that I mentioned were generated by Claude. Most of them were generated by me, but
a few of them were generated by Claude, maybe 10 to 20 of the examples.
Which was nice, I mean, it generated a lot of examples. I had to filter them through, so I'm not just
using every example it gives. It might give me 50 examples, and I'll pick 10 of those that I think are
the best. So, I'm using my judgment there.

Here's the magic question, here's where the power of the AI comes from: I asked it to find holes in
my presentation. So, here is the list of holes that it found. I'm going to read them verbatim.
Hole number one: a risk of oversimplification. Not every situation is a trap. Hole number two:
potential for excessive cynicism, mistrust, and paranoia. I've sort of addressed that; some of these
holes that it mentions I've already gone back and I've made some corrections to make sure that
people don't misunderstand things.

Now, hole number three is potential for blame and shame. It's important to not judge or blame
others too much for falling into traps. Compassion for others comes from understanding how
complex, deceptive, illusory, and intelligent reality is. Very well said.
The next hole is the potential for rigidity and dogmatism. The trap's lens can become a rigid
absolute perspective. Of course, that's a trap. The next hole is traps are context dependent. What can
be a trap in one context can be an opportunity in another. Excellent point.
The next hole is a limited exploration of the potential gifts of falling into traps. Our greatest growth
in insight comes from falling deep into traps. I've added that improvement already above because I
already mentioned to you some of the gift aspects.

When I was making this presentation, this outline, I was so focused on generating the best traps that
I didn't even think about the gifts of the traps. It's only after I ran this through the Claw AI that it
started talking about gifts, and I'm like, oh yeah, I was so focused on this one aspect of the topic that
I left out that other aspect. You see, this is the power of the AI, it can point out these kinds of little
blind spots, these kinds of little biases, and kind of like fixations that you have, especially when
you're working on something. You can get very fixated into one way of thinking about it, and then
this is where you need alternative perspectives. Remember I said that having only one perspective is
a trap.

 

[Buck Edwards]

So when I'm generating one of my episodes, you know that's me generating a single perspective,
and it's always great to have another perspective, but oftentimes I don't have anybody else to bounce
off of, but now I have AI. The next hole it pointed out was falling into traps should be reframed as
an opportunity to learn, not a personal failing.

The next hole it said is under the emphasis of systemic factors. Individual agency isn't the whole
picture. We did focus a lot in this episode on individual agency, what you can do about these things,
but of course, there are also more systemic factors. There's more collective factors. We touched on
some of those, but a lot more could be said about the political aspects of this, which we didn't have
time to go into.

And then the final point that Claude made is, it said, "Hold the framework lightly." And when I read
that, it was funny, I started laughing because it's like, "Have you been watching my videos?"
Because that's what I usually say. That's the kind of injunction that I usually deliver at the end of an
episode. So, I wholeheartedly agree with all these points. And the reason I present them to you here
is because I'm also trying to show you the power of this AI if you use it appropriately, of course.
Now, you can use AI to reinforce all of your biases and all of the gaps in your thinking, and AI is
not going to automatically fix the gaps in your thinking. You have to actually see if you're actually
interested in truth in understanding genuinely, not just as some platitude and virtue signaling, but if
you're really interested in that, and you don't confuse the truth with your own perspective, then you
will actually ask other people or an AI to point out flaws in your own perspective, limitations in
your own perspective.

And the reason I'm able to do that and to use the AI in this way, which is a little bit counterintuitive,
most people wouldn't use AI this way, is because I'm really interested in truth.
I'm not interested in just reinforcing my own perspectives. I don't need that. What I want is the
value of the AI. Finally, I have someone that's very intelligent—a very intelligent mind. That's what
this AI effectively is. Whether it has consciousness or not is irrelevant. It effectively serves the
purpose of a very intelligent mind. It's more intelligent than most humans. You know, a human
couldn't point out all these holes if given this presentation. But the AI could. So, that's a very
amazing technology.

The proper way to leverage that is to take whatever perspective you have, feed it to the AI, and ask
it then to play Devil's Advocate. So that's literally what I told Claude. I said, "Okay, play Devil's
Advocate with my outline here." And you know, initially, because Claude is very obsequious, so all
these AIs are overly obsequious. They love to blow smoke up your ass. Whatever you tell them,
they will say, "Oh yeah, that's a very good point you made," and then they'll slobber all over you of
how intelligent you are and how good of a point you made, especially if you're telling them
something of the quality that I would share with one of these AIs, you know.
But then, see, that's the trick. Your ego is like, "Oh yeah, yeah, Claude, tell me more about how
great my perspective is, how great my outline is." That's initially what it was telling me because it
was a great outline. But I knew that that was a trap, you see? And I knew that really to use this AI
properly, I have to ask it to play Devil's Advocate. So what I told it is I said, "Now play Devil's
Advocate with me and point out all the flaws and holes in my perspective." And so it did, and that's
the beauty of this technology.

So now, here you have a brand new Cutting Edge tool for how to identify traps in any domain,
which is AI. Amazing, right? This is a revolutionary technology that has only existed for like the
last year, really. You couldn't do this a year ago. And so from now on, I'm going to be running all of
my future content through AI to point out these kinds of holes for me. Now, of course, that can still
be a trap, you know, because I haven't used the saying that much, so I don't know what the potential
for the traps are.

But I can already foresee a few traps. Like I can foresee that it's possible to start to
get lazy because, you know, it took me a lot of work, manual contemplative work, you know,
months of contemplative work to slowly develop this outline. But in the future, I might get lazy and
I might just say, "Hey, I'm not going to skip all that. I'm just going to cut a corner here," which
would be a trap. And I'm just going to ask Claude to write the whole outline for me. And I'm sure
that a lot of people are going to fall into that very trap because why? Because they're looking for
something fast, easy, free, cheap, convenient, no emotional labor, no contemplative efforts, no
difficulty, right? Why spend months developing your own examples when you can just scrape and
copy and paste the ones from Claude? But that's not going to be the same quality, you see? So that's
a trap that I could potentially fall into in the future. We'll see. I don't know. I haven't done this
enough to really understand how alluring that will be. But of course, you know, saving time is
always alluring and avoiding work is always alluring. So you know that from all the traps we
discussed above.

[Buck Edwards]

Another way to reframe what Claude said about this whole presentation is that of course,
actualized.org can be a trap. Of course, it can. Of course, the very source of your highest
information, your spiritual Guru, you know, your expert, your Genius scientist, that very Source
itself can, you see, how that becomes a trap, all right? That's it. I'm done here. Please come check
out my website, check out my blog, check out the Forum, check out the life purpose course, check
out the book list. We've been having some technical issues with the actualized website over the last
week, but those have all mostly been resolved at this point. I apologize for that delay. We had some
problems with the server and the hosting company that's all being fixed. And I'm making
improvements into the infrastructure, migrating to better server and so forth in the future. Look,
final Point here is that I've been away on a very long break for almost a year. I didn't release any
content. This was necessary for me.

I haven't really talked about it. Why I went on this break and what happened during this break I'll
reveal some of that in the future. It was actually pretty tough but also a huge growth opportunity for
me. In the future, I have a lot more videos planned, a lot of deep stuff, a lot of stuff that comes from
the lessons that I learned over last year. I wasn't just sitting around Naval gazing. I was suffering a
lot and I was going through a lot and I I I integrated a lot of deep lessons and a lot of changes subtle
changes have happened inside of my own mind and how I'm going to be presenting content going
forward hopefully you can already see some of those in this episode I don't know they're they might
be pretty subtle at first but maybe you can pick up on some of those.

I'm also going to be working on some new courses coming soon although I don't want to promise
anything but hey you know I've made that mistake before and I'm sure I'll make it again so that's
kind of where we're at I'll I'll share more in the future and frankly some of the stuff that I went
through I'm not even prepared to share yet for you know a lot of it is quite personal but um I do
have a lot of deep insights to share with you on various topics the fundamental topics practical
topics political topics I have some deep stuff on politics that I have planned so stay tuned for that
and I want to leave you with one final thought this is a little reward for those of you who stick
around through this long three-hour long episode you know I saved a little tidbit for you towards the
very end and that is this the final thought is what is the ultimate trap in life.

Self. Self is the ultimate trap.

[Buck Edwards]

 

 

[Buck Edwards]

 

 

[Buck Edwards]

Feeling shame is a trap. It's one of the biggest traps. You cannot get out of it easily, it locks you in. It can make you miserable and turn into a vicious trap. Those have lived in shame will know it. 

Too much debating or arguing. 

The internet is a blessing as well as a trap. 

Validation is a huge trap. It's a poison to the soul. It's worse than addiction. 

 

[Buck Edwards]

I had a recent out of body experience. Obe. I had a lucid dreaming adventure. I was in the middle of nowhere and i felt like souls were leaving the body. It was surreal. These souls appeared like vanishing smoke, appearing and disappearing. I could hear giggling and cackling sounds. Like children laughing in the distance. Endless laughter. It was frightening sometimes, my head was heavy. It seemed as though fear was the only thing that bound our bodies to physical existence. Everything else was illusory. Nothing made sense. Our physical reality was warped. Everything was cloudy. Most souls were happy, giggling and laughing genuinely,effortlessly. The atmosphere was joyous. 

I'd like to research this obe in more depth. 

I could hear giggling sounds. Then there was interruption. Quite often in fact. I couldn't figure out what was real and what was not. In all of it, reality appeared meaningless. As if it were manufactured through space and time, it was man made and anchored by fear of existence, a real primal fear. 

Some souls were upset, sad, sinister and seemed to be under some karmic influence. It's hard to tell. But these were imprints. I don't know. But they were like dna imprints. Like finger prints and palm prints. That's how the souls appeared. 

It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad. The feeling of fear was awful. A gnawing sense of attachment. Pure existential fear. 

It seemed as though karmic influence was bad for the souls. 

The best way to describe the mental state was an unusual state of calmness and unaffectedness. 

It was like being in the middle of a bad psychedelic trip. It just didn't matter. Nothing mattered. There was no flow. No meaning. Only peace. 

Edited May 15 by Buck Edwards

[Buck Edwards]

The quality of sleep was compromised a bit with lucid dreaming. 

[Buck Edwards]

Compassionate delivery. Awesome. 

 

[Buck Edwards]

The highest wisdom is realizing that life is meaningless. Life and all it's contents itself are a trap. 

Edited May 16 by Buck Edwards

[Buck Edwards]

The inherent structure of life, the relentless pursuit of money, power and survival is meaningless

 But the purpose of life should be raising consciousness of all souls

That's not a meaningless purpose. The soul is starved of high consciousness experiences, we are our divine selves, the sooner we realize, the better. Our true selves resonate with liberation.. That's what it wants. 

[Buck Edwards]

How would you spend your perfect day off? What makes that perfect for you?

Describe yourself in ten words. Why do those words come to mind?

What makes you feel the most inspired?

What is your favorite form of self-care? Why?

What can you do today to take better care of yourself?

What comes to mind first when you think of what makes you feel safe?

What are five things about yourself you want people to know?

What’s something that makes you feel warm inside?

Explain what’s hardest for you in as many words as it takes.

If you were to improve something about your life, what would that be? Why?

Just some questions I can ask myself. 

 

[Buck Edwards]

What if I told myself that I should persistently stay in a state of bliss and that all of life is simply an opposition to it. That bliss, benevolence and compassion are our true nature. The divine-ness of being, the liberation of form. This is how I felt during my OBE(out of body experience). 

 

[Buck Edwards]

For a minute time stands still. 

For a minute there is no reality 

For a minute there is no good or evil

For a minute there is no survival 

For a minute there is no power or money

For a minute there is no fear

For a minute there is utter and pure resplendence

For a minute it's all loving tender grace

 

For a minute it's infinite giving and receiving – of only love. 

 

Edited May 16 by Buck Edwards