The Psychology Of Being Wrong - Leo Gura (PDF)

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Enjoy!

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PsychologyOfBeingWrong.pdf

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“It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong. And I am not a big man.”

- Chevy Chase, as Fletch
 

“There is no serious growth without admitting you were wrong.”
 

Make sure you stick around for the second half of this episode where I'm going to give a detailed list of things I was wrong about. These are new things that I haven't discussed before, and they're going to be very nuanced, subtle, advanced ways of being wrong, which will be illuminating for you. Also, I'm sure you'll get a thrill out of that, so stick around for that. But before we get there, let's set up some foundation.

There's just one core idea in this whole episode: growth requires admitting that you were wrong. "I was wrong" is the simple magic phrase, and yet, as simple as that is, it's hard to get people to actually do it. This idea is so simple, but the trick is, how do you get it to sink into somebody's mind? That's the challenge here, and I've been racking my mind around that. In fact, this is something that comes up over and over again in all these episodes that I do. The challenge is that the ideas are often very simple, but getting them to sink in is the difficult part. Getting you to see the power and depth of them and all the ways in which they can be applied is the trick.

That's why a long discussion is necessary. Sure, you can do a 10-minute video that just tells you some of the basics, but it's just going to go in one ear and out the other. It's not really going to change how you think about these things, which is the whole point of watching this stuff. We need to communicate its power, all the subtlety and nuance, and all the different potentials for mistakes and psychological trickery behind these otherwise relatively simple principles. Then, that's what gets you to start to change.

The biggest problem in all this work is that you're sitting there watching, and nothing changes in your life. You get theory—empty theory. What good is this? So, anyway, "I was wrong" is the magic phrase. If you get good at developing this skill, and of course, also before you can admit you were wrong, you have to be able to notice that you're wrong. If you can develop that skill as well, the whole thing becomes the skill of "I was wrong." Let's call it that label. This is where you're going to see a lot of growth that other people miss out on.

You can have insight into how your attitude towards anything in life was wrong, and once you clearly see that, you can't quite behave in the same ways anymore. Just as a basic example—and we'll have a lot more coming here in a minute—a basic example is an atheist who has a mystical experience. As long as he doesn't deny that and really takes it in, he'll realize that he was wrong about all of religion. Like, fundamentally wrong, deeply wrong. It's not just a little mistake he made; he made a fundamental epistemic, metaphysical error, and now his whole attitude towards religion has to change.

So, there's also a burden that comes with admitting you were wrong. Not only does it bruise your ego, but then it requires work and sacrifice. As another example, just think of one of your old romantic relationships, one that is a few years old or more. You're out of it, you're over it, you're done, you're at peace, but see, now you can look back and ask yourself, "What are all the mistakes I made in that relationship?" You can clearly see the mistakes, and you couldn't see them at all before when you were in the middle of it. That tells you something. It's like you were in a trance when you were in this relationship, and now you're out of that trance. You can look back upon it with perspective, with the benefit of time, with the benefit of new experiences, more theory that you learned, which now helps you look back and analyze the situation sort of, we might say, objectively.

That's the trick. When you're in the thick of it, it's really difficult to see how you're wrong. What I mean when I say being wrong is not just identifying some false belief you have, but noticing your approach or attitude towards a thing or a situation, and noticing that that is wrong. For example, changing how you relate to women, changing how you relate to money, changing how you relate to criticism, changing how you relate to spirituality—if you really want to change these things, you're going to have to be admitting a lot of "I'm wrong" on these. The mind gets stuck in a certain orientation, a certain way of relating to these things, and then changing that becomes quite tricky. We need to undo that to get your mind unstuck.

Reaching the highest stages of development requires seeing things in new ways—fundamentally new ways—not just rearranging the little details of your perspective, but like really a 180-degree shift in your perspective on a situation. That's what we're after here. So, where are you wrong in your sense-making framework? See, everything we're talking about with this work is grounded in how you make sense of things. The mistakes all begin there because if you're not making sense of a situation or a domain of life properly, then all sorts of mistakes will fall out from that as a natural consequence. Then, you're not going to be able to fix those mistakes unless you track them backward, sort of reverse-engineer them, and get to the sense-making framework that led to those problems. This includes your biases, judgments, interpretations, core assumptions, core beliefs, your attitudes, and your way of relating to things.

In its attempts at making sense of reality, your mind is already wrong about many things; you're just not aware of it. Your mind is hiding it from you. This is a key thing for you to realize because most people, if you tell them, "What are you wrong about?" they're just going to shrug their shoulders, like, "Well, I'm sure I'm wrong about a few things, but I don't know, like nothing major." This is how most people would react to that. But what you have to see is that that is an illusion. That is a complete illusion. You are wrong about so many deep and fundamental things.

How do you actually get somewhere with that? Because if you just sit down and ask yourself, "How am I wrong?" you're not going to get very far, which is why we want to talk about this some more. It's very easy to see how other people are wrong. It's very difficult to see how you're wrong, especially in more fundamental ways. The more fundamental the error, the harder it is to see because the more consequences it has for your psyche and your life. It's very easy to distract yourself from this responsibility because it is your responsibility to figure out how you're wrong by externalizing the wrongness onto others in the world. Then, you're going to fall into the trap of going around pointing out everybody else's wrongness. But of course, that's just a distraction from searching for your own.

The counterintuitive move is to turn inwards, that search, that energy, because you're using energy. You only have so much time and energy in the day. What are you putting it towards? Now, of course, even though I said just sitting down alone in a room and asking yourself, "How am I wrong?" that's limited, but still, you should do that. I mean, it's better than what most people do, which is that they never even do that.

So, I do recommend, as a basic exercise, that after this episode is done or soon after, as soon as you have some time, sit down alone in a room for an hour with a notepad and just ask yourself, "What are all the ways I'm wrong?" You might be surprised at how many answers your mind just supplies to you. Of course, this assumes that you're open. You have to be open, you have to be honest. As you're doing that, notice how that feels. There will probably be some resistance to you doing that, maybe some procrastination to this exercise. That's not by accident. This is not one of those comfortable exercises. Also, notice your mind maybe even getting foggy. As you think back into your life, "What are all the things I've been wrong about?" you might even notice that your mind just stops working for some reason. It's like, "Ah, you know, I'm kind of tired, I'm kind of sleepy, I can't remember things so well." Of course, you can't. That's your mind resisting. So, notice that and just see how far you get. You should do this periodically in your life, maybe once every couple of years. Sit down and go through this exercise.

Of course, like I said, it's not going to be enough. It will take you years to find many ways in which you were wrong. Just doing it logically like this is not going to be enough. Realistically, what you're going to need is some emotional motivation, especially negative emotional motivation, some suffering, as it is otherwise known.

Now, beware that the mind will trick you, and it will use shallow forms of wrongness to avoid facing more fundamental and deep wrongness. You can be wrong in shallow ways and you can be wrong in deep ways. A lot of what people do in order to put on this air of "I'm a humble person," "I'm a humble spiritual person, so of course I can't admit that I'm never wrong," right? So, to be a proper humble spiritual person, I have to admit some of my faults. And so you do admit some of your faults, but they're like very shallow, ineffective; they don't really change you in a fundamental way. It's like, "Yeah, you know, I'm wrong in that I'm a perfectionist. I'm wrong in that I demand too much of myself." These are kind of like [ __ ]. Where are you really wrong? Where are you wrong in a way that threatens you, where you'd have to change how you live? That's what we're interested in here.

Of course, admitting you were wrong is very painful to the ego. There's a wall of resistance there. The mind is so averse to admitting that it's wrong, and that keeps you stuck. Then, there's a denial of wrongness, and that becomes the trap. The problem is that a lot of times when other people point out your wrongness to you, the ego is so stubborn that there's almost like a reverse psychology at play. The more people tell you you're wrong, the more the ego denies it and defends itself because it feels threatened. That's why sitting alone in a room is a better way to go about it. A lot of times, people will tell you ways in which you're wrong, and your mind just doesn't take it in because you get too defensive.

What you really want to do is avoid becoming someone like, for example, a public figure who is very wrong and stubbornly refuses to admit it. Many examples come to mind, but one is Professor Dave on YouTube. He teaches science, and man, is this guy stubborn in his materialism and scientism. He is like the poster boy for all the problems of scientism that we've discussed. I'm not trying to judge him or demonize him, but just don't become that guy. The reason we're having this conversation is that if you get stuck in some paradigm and keep doubling down, you can see the psychological mechanisms the mind employs to keep doing mental gymnastics, rationalizations, denials, and then acting out. Arrogance comes from that, and while I'm guilty of arrogance myself, the important thing is not that you make mistakes or that you're wrong, but that you admit it. Your willingness to admit it is crucial.

Sometimes you're unable to admit that you're wrong simply because of the way your life is structured. There's a structural dimension to this, which is where it gets deep and interesting. For example, if you work in academia, you have devoted your life to it. There are things wrong with the academic system that you will never be able to admit to yourself as long as you're in that system and it's writing you a paycheck. Another example is being trapped in a family situation with a husband and children. Let's say you're a wife with an abusive husband who earns money through criminal activity. You can't admit that to yourself because structurally, you're stuck. You want to keep your marriage for the sake of your children. Raising too much fuss over his ways may force you to rationalize and stick in there because, after all, marriage requires commitment, right? Admitting that you're wrong in that situation implies changing the structure of your life, which might lead to divorce, figuring out what to do with the kids, and potentially losing your children.

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My former girlfriend was in a marriage like that. She had kids and was in a Mormon cult. Think of how difficult it is to break out of that. Your husband's a Mormon, everyone you know is a Mormon, you were a Mormon, you have an otherwise happy family life with children, and then you realize all of that is corrupt and abusive. How do you leave that situation? In the end, she lost her children but left the situation. They took her kids. That's heavy stuff, not as simple as admitting an innocent mistake like being a perfectionist. It's about recognizing your whole way of life is wrong.

Another example of this structural problem is if you work inside the government, a very corrupt system, you can't speak out because they'll fire you and destroy your career. Or if you're wealthy and attached to a luxurious lifestyle funded by your rich daddy through white-collar scams, how do you admit that this whole lifestyle is wrong? Anytime you're paid huge amounts of money for your work, it's difficult to admit that work is wrong. The more money they pay you, the harder it will be. If you have a public persona to defend, like a public intellectual, author, celebrity, or social media influencer, what's going to happen when you admit that you were wrong? You fear the consequences.

The technique here for this work is to identify where you're wrong, face it, look at it, hold that wrongness in your awareness, admit it to yourself, and then explicitly say to yourself, "I was wrong in that situation." That will trigger a mini grieving process, or maybe a major one, where you feel your ego is bruised, start to experience some emotional stuff, probably some negative emotions, feel embarrassed, feel like a fool, and have regrets. You want to go through that grieving process, which is what's healing you. Give yourself time to go through that, spend time in self-reflection, and come to peace with it.

As you're doing that, ask yourself how your behavior will change going forward. Recognize that learning equals behavior change. This situation will be painful because you’ll recognize that you were a total fool, tricked yourself or were tricked by someone else, and it contradicts your self-image. Being wrong is embarrassing, especially if you've built up an identity about being very intellectual, wise, spiritually advanced, or an expert in some domain like Professor Dave. He has a lot invested in being Professor Dave, the scientist, the ambassador for science, the Neil deGrasse Tyson of science.

Ask yourself how you fell into this self-deception. Examine the epistemology that led to this situation. Consider the epistemic gaps in your sense-making that led to you getting this wrong. For example, if you're an atheist and realize that was wrong, you have to examine how you fell into that trap epistemically. Likewise, if you're into fundamentalist religion, you must examine the epistemic assumptions that led you there. Otherwise, you'll get into another problem, like escaping fundamentalist religion but falling into new age spirituality, repeating the problems. You must recognize the structure connecting various kinds of fantasy.

As you go through this process, recognize that this is what self-deception means. There's a difference between understanding self-deception as a concept and seeing where you are self-deceived. The process of admitting you're wrong will be easier if you do it for yourself. Don’t worry about admitting it to others or publicly announcing it. Just recognize that you were wrong in whatever situation, and that's enough to change you. Whether you admit it to others is an extra step, but it’s not strictly necessary and might put too much burden on you.

Now, here's a list of examples of things you could be wrong about, just to start getting you to see how this can be applied.

The nature of religion—you can be wrong about that. The very nature of what is the origin, purpose, and function of religion. This is, for example, a trap that I call the Sam Harris trap. He doesn't understand what religion is and why it exists. He thinks he does, but he doesn't. Maybe one day in his career, he'll come to realize that he was fundamentally wrong about the nature of religion. I'm not going to hold my breath, but for him to admit that to himself, that's going to be very difficult. Then, to admit that to all of his atheist fans, that's going to be very, very difficult because he's built a whole persona, career, and audience around this. What would Sam Harris's audience do if he came out and told them, "Guys, I was wrong about atheism"? That's tough. He has to admit that to himself first, which he probably won't do.

Next, you could be wrong about scientism, rationalism, and materialism—pretty obvious. We've discussed that a lot before. You can be wrong about political radicalism, whether left or right. Forms of political radicalism—you get sucked into it. You're not going to be aware that you get sucked in and radicalized. By the time you're radicalized, it's like you're in a cult, but you can break out of that. People have broken out of that. You awaken from the trance of that radicalization, and that's difficult to do.

In general, you can be wrong about all sorts of political views: on abortion, on climate, on war, on corruption, on taxes. You can be wrong in both directions. When I say that you're wrong on abortion, I'm not saying there's one right way to look at abortion and that's my way. That's like, "Leo's view on abortion is the right way to view abortion." No, you can be wrong from either direction on any of these issues. In fact, you can be wrong on these issues in even more complex ways than just being pro-abortion or anti-abortion. There's an even deeper way you can be wrong about that, where you're wrong from both sides. In a sense, we could say that both the pro-abortion people and the anti-abortion people are both wrong on abortion. It's like, "Well, how can that be?"

Likewise, with climate change, both sides are wrong about climate change. The left and the right are wrong about climate change. Likewise, with issues of war and taxation, it's not simple at all. There's a lot of nuance here.

Romantic relationships—there's a lot you can get wrong in romantic relationships. That requires a whole episode on its own, but I'm sure you've had realizations of ways in which you've behaved in romantic relationships that were wrong. Some of that stuff is pretty obvious in retrospect. Views of the opposite sex—you can be wrong there. Black pill ideology, various forms of misogyny—a lot of young men are falling into this right now, and it's going to take them years and decades to admit this to themselves. As they mature, as you get out of your 20s and into your 30s and 40s, once you're in your 40s, you'll see how much misogyny, as a young man immersed in online culture around this whole topic, you engaged in. It's going to be rather ugly to look at how you behaved in your 20s, for example.

Conspiracy theories—of course, there are so many ways to be wrong about conspiracy theories, and it's very difficult to admit to yourself that you subscribed to one of these asinine conspiracy theories. Whether it's flat Earth—imagine being a flat earther and then coming out of that. You're just going to feel so embarrassed. I mock conspiracy theories all the time, but there's only one conspiracy theory I can think of that I have fallen into, which is the hollow Earth. To me, for a while, the hollow Earth seemed like it might be sort of plausible. That's really the only one. In retrospect, it's embarrassing even to admit this right now, but hey, I'm trying to help you. So, I'm admitting things about myself that I would normally not admit because I'm trying to model it for you. You have to lean into your cringe, lean into your embarrassment, and that's the process here.

Really getting suckered into a bad investment—it's really hard to admit to yourself that you made a foolish investment and then to admit it to your family. Imagine losing your family's life savings by investing in some ridiculous crypto scheme, losing all of it, and now you have to go and admit it to them. That's horrible. On the other hand, the nice thing with a bad investment is that you can't deny a bad investment. Eventually, everyone's going to know you lost the money, so in that sense, it's kind of an easy one.

You can be wrong in criticisms and judgments of other people. You're going to be criticizing your parents, your children, leaders in public, wealthy people, celebrities, your boss. You're going to be criticizing and judging all these people very harshly. Before you seriously mature, in retrospect, you're going to regret many of those judgments and criticisms, but it'll probably take you a while.

You can be wrong about how success works. You could have wrong ideas about that, and maybe that's what's keeping you poor and unsuccessful. You could be wrong about being a victim, wrong about how to attract women. To get good at attracting women, you're going to have to make some 180-degree paradigm shifts in certain ways that you understand how dating and mating work. Some people call it the red pill, although the red pill has its own problems. You can be wrong in a certain sense, then you break out of that, and you say, "Oh, how was I so stupid for being wrong in that sense?" Then you break out of it, and you go into something new that you think is the right way, and that turns out to be wrong too, just in a more nuanced way this time. It's not as grossly wrong.

For example, a good example here is Michael Shermer. He's a public intellectual, a skeptic type of person. He runs Skeptic magazine, similar to one of these Sam Harris types or Professor Dave types. Michael Shermer used to be a fundamentalist religious Christian, like a born-again Christian. When he matured, he realized that's nonsense. He became a skeptic. He shifted from fundamentalist Christian to skeptic. Of course, that's an upgrade, but now he's stuck in skepticism, thinking that he's escaped that. He understands the spiritual situation, the religious situation. He thinks he has a handle on science and all this—it's preposterous. He has no idea. He's wrong about so many things, but will he ever realize that? No, because the way his mind works, there's either this or this. It's very binary, without appreciating that you can be wrong in subtle ways. Wrongness can be wrapped up with rightness in such a messy way.

Likewise, with the red pill, there are certain aspects of the red pill which are right and are better than, let's say, the blue pill, but then the red pill introduces its own errors that you're going to have to transcend as well. By that, I don't mean you're going to go to the black pill because the black pill is really bad, super wrong. Your mind has to be flexible enough to see not in binaries. The binary thinking here is really wrong. That's one thing you can realize.

You can be wrong about how politics and power really work. You can be wrong in your assessment of the motives of others. You can be wrong in your characterization and demonization of alternative perspectives. Maybe you've demonized in the past capitalists, hippies, new agers, Muslims, trans people, gays, liberals, and greens (environmentalists). Maybe you ridiculed certain people and ideas, and then in the future, you'll realize you're wrong about that. It's going to be embarrassing for you to admit because you were probably a jerk to these people. You probably posted some nasty comments on Twitter or wherever, called these people names, and then it turns out you're wrong, and they were right all along. How embarrassing.

Wrong in straw manning and misrepresenting some other point of view different from your own—so much straw manning going on online. Wrong in your assessment of where others are wrong. You say, "This person is wrong, and that person is wrong, and this is wrong, and that is wrong, and Leo is wrong," but then in the future, you'll realize that actually you were the wrong one for pointing out the wrongness in others. Of course, you could have been right in certain areas too. I'm not saying you're wrong across the board. I'm saying you're wrong in certain specific, nuanced ways. At least, I hope so. I hope you're not wrong across the board. There are people like that too.

Wrong in your understanding of terrorists and terrorism—that's a very common one.

I need to do a whole episode. I mean, that's it. It's hard to do that episode because, uh, the things that need to be said about terrorism, like, um, are very politically incorrect. But, uh, I should get to work on that one. Uh, wrong in what you think your true motives were for doing a thing, that's a big one. That's a subtle one, right? Like, you can fool yourself about what your true motives are for doing things. You can tell yourself you're doing it for some sort of selfless motive when actually there's a sort of a hidden selfish motive behind it, and that's good to recognize.

Wrong in your justifications and rationalizations. I'll have a whole episode in the future about justifications, rationalizations. That's a huge important topic. Wrong in your interpretations of psychedelics and mystical experiences. A lot of ways to misinterpret mystical experiences, turn them into fantasies, and you start to think that they mean things that they don't really mean. Like, let's say you take some mushrooms and you see Jesus in your trip, what does that really mean? That's tricky. You can be wrong in your understanding of Spiral Dynamics stages. You think you understand what Stage Green is or what Stage Yellow is or what Stage Turquoise especially is, or even Coral, dare I say? The higher you go up stages, the more likely you are to misunderstand them.

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And that actually works kind of in reverse as well. The lower you go down the stages, you also tend to misunderstand—like, it's easy to misunderstand Purple Stage or Purple and Stage Red just because if you're living in a developed part of the world, if you yourself are Stage Green-ish, which is where most of you probably are who follow my work, you're going to struggle understanding Red and Purple because just like you don't experience them around you, you don't have a frame of reference for it. So, watch out.

You can be wrong in pushing your values onto others, that's a tricky one. I'll talk more about that as I get into my own errors because I've made that mistake. Wrong in your stubbornness and closed-mindedness. Wrong in your understanding of Enlightenment and Awakening. Wrong in treating people transactionally. Wrong in dismissing some piece of advice that you were given by somebody wiser than you 'cause you thought you knew better. Wrong in your beliefs about your own capacities. You can both overestimate your own capacities and you can underestimate your own capacities. If you underestimate, that's kind of like the victim mentality, but then overestimate, this gets you into arrogance.

You think you know more than you do or you think you can do more than you can really do. You might say to yourself, "Well, how hard is it to shoot a movie? I can shoot a movie." You know, these directors that are making these crappy movies these days, you know, they're idiots. I'll make my own movie and it's going to be great. And then you make your own movie and you realize how awful it is and how difficult it is to really make a movie. And this, by the way, this generally applies to almost any high creative endeavor—starting a business, any kind of company where you want to create any kind of product, it's all going to be way harder than you thought.

You're likely overestimating your abilities to do these things. And with art—you know, writing a good song, making a good painting—these things are a lot harder than they seem and you'll quickly discover that if you try doing some of this, which is why a lot of people don't even try because deep down, they know they're full of [__] and they'll fail. Or they fail so quickly into the process they never even realize, right? Like, you start doing film, go actually try to make a good film, like, within a few days you'll realize how hard it is, most likely, and you'll quit.

Wrong in your online behavior, so many mistakes happening there. Wrong in trashing other people, eventually you realize all the people you trash, that was a mistake. Wrong in your approach to business and making money. Wrong in your ethical orientation of your business. There are a lot of unethical ways to do business which you'll realize as your consciousness rises. See, in general, if your consciousness is low or sort of average relative to the center of gravity of your society, a lot of these things you're not ever going to realize if they're wrong.

But as you go beyond the center of gravity of your culture, more and more of these things will become obviously wrong to you and that's where it gets difficult. You can be wrong in being too optimistic or pessimistic, too cynical, too skeptical, too trusting. Wrong in how you relate to your children. Wrong in bullying others. Wrong in being disrespectful towards others.

Wrong in judging your boss or superiors, this is a very common trap because, um, it's so easy to think that you know better than your boss, that your boss is an idiot and sometimes that's true but in most cases usually your boss knows more than you, has more experience than you, has more wisdom than you. Um, and in fact, your boss can know so much more than you that you don't even understand how much your boss knows because your boss is just too busy doing the things he needs to do to keep, you know, the corporation running and you, in your little lowly position as a newbie, you like, you have no comprehension of what it takes to run that business but you think you know, you think you could do a better job. And then a lot of times you may not understand some of the decisions your boss makes, they may seem cruel to you, they may seem heartless to you, like, let's say your boss fires somebody, it's like, well, why couldn't the boss be nicer?

But there's higher issues at stake that you will never realize unless you become a boss yourself and then when you do finally become a boss, you're going to say, "Oh my God, I completely underestimated what it means to be a boss, to be responsible for hundreds, for thousands of people working under me, that's an enormous responsibility and there's so many ways to screw that up, it's a miracle if your boss is doing most of it correctly because it's so difficult."

You can be wrong in oversimplifying situations, thinking of them too simplistically, lacking the nuance, thinking in a sort of a black and white way about a situation. For example, with the realm of politics, you can kind of oversimplify to the point where you think that one side or the other side has to be right and wrong all the time on every issue and that's really not the case. You will disabuse yourself of that notion if you study politics deeply and follow some of my political content. Wrong in taking your mental constructs for reality, mistaking the two, confusing the two.

Wrong in seeing a situation too narrowly, it's like, yes, you're not technically wrong, but your view is just so limited, so narrow that that's what makes it wrong because you're missing a lot more. Wrong in your understanding of capitalism or socialism. Wrong in dismissing another's subjective experience of reality. Wrong in trying to monopolize the truth.

That's a really sneaky one. Once your ego gets a hold of the truth, you want to have a monopoly on it. That's the classic trap that these religions fall into, right? Like Islam wants to monopolize the truth, Christians want to monopolize the truth—Jesus is the truth. See, they're trying to monopolize the truth, but the truth is not limited to Jesus. That's, again, a very narrow understanding of that situation. You can be wrong in your understanding of geopolitics and war.

War is a tricky thing to understand. I have an episode about war and conflict. Wrong in understanding the Middle East. The Middle East is a tricky place to understand, for example, it's easy to misunderstand why women have to be veiled in the Middle East. Wrong in how you relate to criticism. It's easy to get reactive when criticism comes your way. Wrong in how you relate to negative people, trying to debate with them and argue with them. Wrong with being edgy.

Wrong with your style of communication. Wrong in your blabber-mouthiness, just blabber-mouthing on social media without thinking. Wrong in idolizing gurus and teachers and putting them on pedestals or doing that even worse with celebrities. Wrong in copying and aping others rather than following your own path. A lot of young people are doing this. Wrong in gaslighting people. Wrong in shifting blame onto others. Wrong in thinking that someone else is stupid when you're actually the stupid one in the situation. Wrong in wasting years of your life doing something ineffectively. That's a very tricky one. Like, you can waste years of your life going to the gym and lifting weights ineffectively just because you think you have the right way and you don't want to learn from somebody else.

You're too proud or you're too lazy to actually learn or you're too cheap to actually maybe invest in a personal trainer and so you just keep going about it ineffectively for years, for decades, and then admitting to yourself that the way that you've been lifting at the gym or exercising at the gym is wrong, that's going to be very difficult because you have a decade now of ineffective practice. The same can apply, for example, for meditation.

You could be doing meditation wrong for a decade and then the longer you do it ineffectively, the worse it becomes because it becomes harder and harder to admit to yourself that you've wasted a decade of your life. This effectiveness topic is so significant, it really deserves its own episode. You can be wrong in getting carried away—just carried away with all sorts of things. You can get carried away with a romantic relationship, especially early on when you're in this kind of infatuation honeymoon period.

You can get carried away with some religious community, which ends up being a cult. You can get carried away with earning money, just you're in like a trance, a money-earning trance. You get carried away and you forget all about ethics, you forget all about consciousness, and the things that I said, and you just get carried away chasing money. Carried away with pickup, you know, you get into pickup and you discover that, hey, actually I'm kind of skilled at pickup and then you start doing it and you're getting results but then you just get like, get carried away with the whole pickup thing or carried away with some online ideology.

Like, this carried away stuff, it's very, very trappy. Here's a few very subtle examples. See, I'm trying to communicate to you the nuance and subtlety here, so the more nuanced our examples can be the better. Here's one: being wrong in how you create content, insisting, for example, that you need total creative control of your content and that you don't need any editors 'cause you know an editor is going to interfere with your creative genius or something like that, right? And then so you structure your life such that nobody can edit your creative content but then that actually makes your content worse. I've suffered from that.

My content could improve with better editing, so recently I've started to—I don't mean that I'm going to be editing my videos like after they're shot, I'm editing them before I even speak, I'm pre-editing this episode here, has already been pre-edited. It would have been longer and worse had I not realized that I was wrong in this specific way. So see, that's kind of a subtle one, like, it's really difficult to spot that right. It took me a long, long, it took me 10 years of making videos to get to the point where I realized that. I mean, yeah, I always knew my videos were long and kind of, you know, all that but I was fooling myself into thinking that actually longer is better, more content is better, you know, editors would make my content worse, but then I realized the value of editing.

So now I'm more ruthless about editing my content, pre-editing it, editing my outlines, cutting out all the extraneous examples, all the low-quality examples, all the fluff, all the um, all the intro, heavy intro stuff, like, really cutting it down to like, like nowadays I'm asking myself like what is like the bare bones, like the minimum, making it really powerful, juicy, potent. Here's another subtle example: being wrong in trying to impress people with sophisticated vocabulary.

That's a tricky one. I fell into that. Luckily with that one I realized that trap really early on. I realized that trap when I was about, uh, 24, 25. I got out of that trap 'cause I went to university and I was into all that academic heavy jargon, sophisticated vocabulary, right? These $100 fancy words that they use in academia, I was all into that [__] impressing people with that and then I caught myself and I realized, like, what am I doing? I'm putting on this front that's not how language and communication is supposed to be. Communication is supposed to be as simple as possible, as clear as possible, not words that people, average people, don't understand. I actually discovered that by getting out of academia and going into business.

[Agrande]

When I went into business, I would write, like, for example, when I was a game designer, um, at a studio, I would write these sort of academic-sounding, verbose, florid design documents and very quickly I was just abused of this kind of communication because when you're writing design documents for programming, for other designers, they don't want any of your fancy, you know, poetic [__] language, academic language, they want, like, really concise, you know, simple, straight to the point. And that, in a sense, that's actually more difficult, communicating with that, like, in a potent, simple, clear, list-like form.

That's that, in a sense, that can be more difficult, especially if you went through the whole academic system where you were writing these long 10-page essays on topics, which is how I was educated, you know, my idea of a good document is like a 10-page essay, that's terrible for the business world. So what's going to happen to you is that if you don't get good at admitting your wrongness, then your consciousness will get stuck.

That's the real cost. That's the cost of all this. Right now, people who are not actively pursuing higher consciousness, they don't even realize that this is a factor because they don't think about consciousness, they don't care about developing consciousness, they're not trying to access higher stages up the spiral, none of this kind. They're not trying to access God consciousness, and so for them, it's not a big issue. But if you really want to access higher dimensions of consciousness, this is why I'm pointing this whole topic out to you, is that your mind will get stuck.

Your mind is simply going to lack the open-mindedness and requisite variety and intelligence which is necessary to access the highest levels. See, the highest levels of consciousness are the most intelligent ones. Intelligence needs infinite requisite variety at the highest level, right? So the closer you get to God, the more infinite variety, the requisite variety your consciousness will require to understand the higher things.

And anything where your mind is wrong, anything where you have a wrong attitude towards things or you're afraid to admit that you're wrong, any place where you're in denial, that's going to be an obstacle to going any higher. And at some point, you're just going to max out. You're going to max out, you're going to stall for years. You're just going to stall until some breakthrough happens where usually some catastrophe happens in your life, some huge amount of pain and trauma, suffering rather, and then that might break you through. That might get you to realize how [__] stupid you were, how close-minded and stubborn you were, and that might bust you through. But also, this is a collective issue as well.

Don't think that it's all just on the individual. Right now, many of our political problems come from various groups and factions within society refusing to admit that they've been wrong. In fact, you can look at the entire conservative movement, especially—I don't know how it is in other countries but especially in American politics, which is what I'm most familiar with—everything the Republican Party is doing, everything the right-wing in America is doing, all the MAGA people and even the non-MAGA people.

Fundamentally, what's going on is conservatives are wrong about some very fundamental aspects of reality and society, and they're in denial about it. They're fundamentally unwilling to admit that they're wrong. From that, all the other disease is happening within the conservative movement.

Now, I'm not saying that all of the problems in politics are on the conservatives. There's also stuff that's going wrong on the left as well. But if we look at the conservative movement, think about what the conservatives are in denial about and refuse to admit that they're wrong about. Their denial and being wrong about climate change and environmental degradation, and just the fundamental carrying capacity of the planet - the human species has reached a point where we're burning up against the carrying capacity of the planet, and conservatives don't want to look at that. They're in denial about that fundamentally, and they don't want to change how they do business, how they mine for oil, how they mine for minerals, how the population is. They don't want to look at this stuff. It's difficult, it's expensive as well.

What else are conservatives refusing to admit they're wrong about? Fundamentalist religion. All of these Evangelical Christians, all of these hardcore Catholics on the Supreme Court - fundamentally, they're all in denial that fundamentalist religion is a bunch of fantasy and nonsense, denial of evolution. All this sort of stuff is still going on, and these people think they can get away with it. They think they can get away with it, and they're pushing. Then, see what happens is that when you're in denial of reality like that, you have to go through more elaborate mental gymnastics and political machinations. You have to bend yourself over backwards and do more and more devilry in order to sustain your position, your wrong position. You keep doubling down on your wrongness.

Conservatives are also wrong about the whole capitalist system, and that doesn't mean that I'm saying we should move to socialism, but I'm just saying they're in denial about the externalities of capitalism and the very serious problems this is creating, not just for the environment but democracy. Excessive capitalism, runaway capitalism, is undermining democracy because all these giant corporations have so much money, and there's such ridiculous wealth inequality at this point that the wealthy are completely corrupting the government. But the conservatives don't want to admit any of that because they're benefiting from that whole system. They're trying to conserve that whole system, but that system is beyond the point where it can be conserved, and so they're fighting a losing battle. And then, the more they struggle and fight, the more proud they get. They kind of rile themselves up, they energize their base by making them feel proud of all this wrongness.

And that doesn't mean that everything in the conservative philosophy is wrong. It just means that there's a couple of core pillars that are wrong that need to be rethought, and if you would just rethink them, then our politics could move in the proper directions. But this is destabilizing the entire American system right now. It's creating needless polarization and chaos. That's what this whole Trump thing is all about. And the root solution to that, if we really want to advance in our politics in America - it's funny to even say it this way because it's so preposterous, it would never happen - but what would need to happen is that conservatives would need to walk out and say, "We were wrong.

We were wrong on capitalism, we were wrong on the environment, we were wrong on religion, we were wrong on nationalism," and a few other points like that. And then we could have a healing and a moving forward, and then all the denial would go away. And this is what would actually heal the country and move it forward. But of course, if you tell that to a conservative, they're going to just point the finger and say, "Well, but what about the liberals? What about the progressives? What about the Antifa people? What have they been all wrong about?" And then they're just going to start this fight.

A few more of these kind of collective denials of wrongness is the capitalist class - the CEOs, the Wall Street people, the bankers, the business people, the marketers, the philanthropists, the lobbyists. All of these people are participating in this toxic capitalism, and they need to come out and say, "We were wrong." Literally, the head CEOs of these giant corporations - Disney, Google, Facebook, ExxonMobil - need to come out and say, "We were wrong for driving this insane income inequality with our lobbying the government and manipulating with all these devilish tactics." The bankers, with their derivatives and weird loan schemes, all this kind of stuff, they need to come out and say, "We were wrong." Of course, are any of these people ever going to admit they were wrong? No, never. Never. They earn too much money. As we discussed above before, that's one of the surest ways to ensure that someone will never admit being wrong is when they earn millions, tens of millions, and hundreds and billions of dollars from their wrongness.

Another one of these collective points is union busting and monopolization - the crazy tech monopolies that we have, the companies just buying up little companies, abusing their monopoly power, the union busting that Starbucks is doing and Amazon is doing, and all these corporations are doing. It's illegal what they're doing, but they do it anyways because there's no good enforcement, and there's no good enforcement from the government because the government has been bought out by these people, by all these corporations. This is completely corrupting our entire system. These people who engage in these practices need to realize - if you're engaged in union busting at Amazon or Starbucks as like one of the top managers, you need to come out and admit you were wrong. Likewise, if you're running a monopoly - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, whoever, Amazon - you got to come out and say that. You got to admit this shit. This is like, now we're getting to some juicy admitting you were wrong, right? This is not, "Oh, I'm a perfectionist, that's my mistake."

No, no, no. This is like, this is heavy, heavy admitting you were wrong. Entire industries need to come out and say that they were wrong - the food industry, the fast food industry, all this junk food that's being sold. All these people need to come out and say they were wrong - the healthcare industry, Big Pharma, Big Tech, the military industrial complex, all the oil companies. Now these AI companies who are stealing voices and art and scraping YouTube and all this for their content, the devilry of AI is just now starting to come online. These social media companies, all of them need to admit that they were wrong. And of course, they never will, and that's why we have all the chaos that we have politically speaking.

And of course, last but not least, the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the demonization of terrorism in general. If you want peace, you know what the real solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian situation? Israel has to come out and say that they're wrong. The Zionists have to say they're wrong. They're wrong for settling, for pushing their settlements, and they keep pushing it even today. They keep pushing it. Of course, this is the last thing they want to do, and so the conflict continues.

Again, just because I say that some of these groups and people and parties are wrong, that does not mean, don't assume that, "Oh, the progressives don't have any of these problems," or some other group, or the Palestinians, or Hamas doesn't have these problems. They also have those problems, right? This is just, I'm just giving you a cursory overview with some examples. This is not meant to be a comprehensive, balanced list. This is just some, like, this is just very obvious, obvious, obvious stuff. And yet, at the same time, stuff that nobody else is really talking about.

 

A hallmark of an immature mind is that it cannot admit to being wrong. Just again, look at Donald Trump. He's the best example of this, absolutely incapable of admitting any wrongdoing. And one of the corrupting influences Trump has had on our political culture - I mean, he's had a lot, but one of the more subtle ones is that Trump has started this trend, has kind of normalized this trend within right-wing politics of never admitting any wrongdoing at all. Just double down on all your mistakes. Even if a video comes out of you sexually assaulting somebody, you just come out there and you say, "You know what, I'll do it again next time too." It's like, it's preposterous. And the right-wing has just kind of bought this. And again, why are they buying it? Because they're in such a bad position on the fundamentals. They're wrong on capitalism, they're wrong on fundamentalist religion, they're wrong on the environment, they're wrong on nationalism, but they don't want - they have no capacity to admit it. So their only option then is to double down, to get aggressively wrong, to get all self-righteous about it, to get indign

Admitting wrongness opens the mind, humbles the mind, creates a state of not knowing, leads to greater awareness, leads to contemplation, introspection, leads to new perspectives, more requisite variety inside your mind, and ultimately creates maturity in you. That's what's good about it. That's what you get for going through the misery of admitting you were wrong. Yes, it's miserable. Yes, it would be very painful for the conservative party, for the whole conservative movement, to admit that they were wrong. That would be very painful, but think of the benefit. The benefit would be enormous. If Israelis admitted that they were wrong, we could have peace in that conflict. But as it is, if you're refusing to admit that you did something wrong when you actually did something wrong, there can't be peace, there can't be justice.

Now, you might say, "Well, but Leo, what about relativism, relativity, subjectivity? What does being wrong even mean in this case? I mean, aren't right and wrong just relative? Who's to say that the conservatives are wrong? Who's to say that the Israelis are wrong?" Of course, I'm not the one to say what I mean when I say being wrong is, by your own recognizance, you clearly see that you were operating under illusion, falsehood, self-deception, in an immature, unwise, foolish, unconscious, egoic, selfish, shameful, embarrassing, unethical, corrupt, ineffective manner - not because I said so, but because your own consciousness raised to a level where you can clearly see it for yourself, and you know you could have handled the situation better. Whether I think you're wrong or not is irrelevant. What matters is if you know you're wrong, if you can clearly see it.

In fact, it's even deeper than that. As you're raising your consciousness, you will feel that consciousness demands it of you to recognize your own wrongness. It demands it. Leo doesn't demand it, consciousness demands it. For example, if Trump wanted to raise his consciousness - let's say Trump wanted to meditate and be spiritual, which is of course preposterous, but let's just fantasize here - very quickly, he would run into this problem that he can't do these things without admitting a lot of wrongdoing that he did and that he's still doing, see? Consciousness would demand it of him, not us. It's not Trump isn't wrong because the majority of Americans don't like him or because the libs are annoying and, you know, social justice warriors, and they're just crying about everything, their snowflakes.

That's not why Trump is wrong. Trump is wrong fundamentally. When I say Trump is wrong, what I mean is by his own recognizance, he would admit he's wrong if he just pursued the raising of his own consciousness, of course, which he will never do.

[Agrande]

Others can't really tell you that you're wrong unless you admit it to yourself. I mean, they can tell you, but again, like with Trump, a lot of people have told Trump that he's wrong, but it doesn't penetrate. It doesn't matter what people tell him because he just has all sorts of mechanisms to deny it, to ignore it, to excuse it, to rationalize it, to go attack somebody or whatever. But it is possible that he himself could admit that he's wrong if he wanted to, but only if he wanted to.

If you became significantly more conscious, you would see all the ways you've been wrong, which is one of the reasons why people don't become very conscious because it's such a huge burden and a responsibility. People don't appreciate the responsibility that comes with consciousness. For example, you raise your consciousness enough, it's going to be hard for you to keep eating your hamburgers if you go and you watch videos of what happens inside of a slaughterhouse that produces your hamburger, which you so have loved your whole life, and then your culture is based upon it. You know, what are you going to eat on your 4th of July barbecue? Usually, you and your kids and your wife would go out there and broil up some hamburgers. Well, you can't do that anymore, see?

Sometimes your wrongness is so deep, you just cannot stand to look at it. It kills you inside, it's terrifying to admit, it's too ugly to look at. And some people are so far gone, you know, Trump being the best example. The reason I can so confidently say that he'll never do this process is because if he ever did it, if he realized the devil that he is and all the suffering he's created needlessly for the world, it would be so painful for him, he would want to kill himself. That's how bad it would get. He's too far gone, way too far gone. And a lot of people are not as bad as Trump, but a lot of people are too far gone - Wall Street guys, corporate tycoons and such, bankers, oil executives, pharma executives. They're too far gone. You're never going to get to them.

Imagine being so wrong that recognizing it will make you sick to your stomach, will make you throw up, and will make you hate yourself for the rest of your life. You know, that's realistically what would happen if Trump recognized how wrong he is. He would hate himself for the rest of his life. How would he live with himself? That would require such enormous levels of forgiveness, self-forgiveness, self-love. But then, of course, that is the healing process. I have a whole video about how to forgive anyone who's ever hurt you, and of course, including yourself. It's also very hard to admit you're wrong when you're succeeding. Usually, what's required is failure, suffering, catastrophe, and embarrassment.

This is actually what happened with Julian Blanc from RSD. You guys familiar with him? Julian Blanc got so much backlash back in like 2013, 14, 15, somewhere around there. This "Julian gate" happened where Julian was behaving in very immature, toxic masculine ways. Some videos came out about how he was abusing girls while doing pickup, and then this just blew up. It was all over CNN everywhere.

He actually did an interview on CNN with Chris Cuomo, I think, and Chris Cuomo just grilled him. He really grilled Julian, and Julian was just traumatized after that interview. It changed Julian's whole outlook on life, pickup, everything. He transformed - he stopped doing pickup, he got married like after that, a huge transformation. But he went through hell. It destroyed RSD, it destroyed an entire company, it destroyed the biggest pickup company in the world, RSD, at the time. It destroyed it. RSD doesn't exist anymore. It destroyed a whole community.

 

Yeah, and it took that because before that, Julian was doing all that immature, stupid stuff. Before that, people like me were talking about it. I have a video, my "pickup rant" video was done before Julian gate, I think, or it was done right around the time of Julian gate because I saw him doing like ridiculous, toxic stuff. But you know, he was so deep into it that it was beyond logical explanation. You couldn't logically get him to stop. What had to happen is just this blow up, this huge public blow up, and then, now I hope he's a better, you know, better man which seems like he is.

The more invested or attached you are to a thing, the harder it is to admit that you were wrong. Career is a big one, money is a big one, family is a big one - these are your top investments in life. And then your identity is a big one, like for example, your religious identity or your atheist identity in the case of someone like Sam Harris or Michael Shermer, Professor Dave. Massive suffering is the key. Massive suffering is undeniable, see? Your mind is really good at denial, but it's very hard to deny a catastrophe, a public catastrophe or massive suffering.

That's why I don't like this sort of Buddhist stuff about "oh, suffering is, you know, transcend suffering, escape suffering." Sometimes people ask me on the forum, "Why is there suffering? Why is the world so full of suffering?" Or they might even say, "Leo, how come you still suffer?" Because what you don't understand is that suffering is not just some annoying little thing, like a thorn in your side that you need to get rid of, the way that you might think from reading too much Buddhism. Suffering is fundamental to your learning process, to your growing process. There are things that you learn from massive suffering that you would never have been able to learn any other way.

What I like to say is that there are two top ways for learning: one is crazy levels of suffering, and the other one is crazy levels of love. That's what will get you to change. But getting crazy levels of love, that's difficult. Most people don't know how to get that level of love because love is kind of sweet, you know? Love is a positive thing. It's easy to, in a certain way, have lots of love become its own trap because the sweetness of it lulls you, whereas suffering is sharp. It stings, and it forces you to awaken to things you didn't want to admit, to things you can no longer keep denying.

And this is where the power of psychedelics comes in because psychedelics are one of the few, maybe the third pillar of that - you know, massive suffering, massive love, and then psychedelics. And of course, psychedelics can do both. A bad trip is massive suffering, and then psychedelics can also give you your highest forms of love too. So massive love, you know, the best way to get that, most reliable way to get that, is from psychedelics.

So yeah, psychedelics will open your eyes and get you to see many of the ways you've been wrong. But of course, even with psychedelics, you have to still have your mind open. You have to have that interest in consciousness and developing yourself and improvement and all that, then psychedelics can do a lot for you. But some people, you know, like I don't know, some people say, all my forum people have said, like, "Well, what would happen if we gave Donald Trump 5meo DMT? If we forced him to take it, what would happen?" And you know, honestly, I don't know. That's a very interesting experiment that we will never get to run. But it would be very interesting to see. It's like 50/50. On the one hand, maybe it would open his eyes, and you know, it would traumatize him for sure, but maybe it'll get him to, you know, maybe that's the only thing that would get him to admit he was wrong about anything in his life. Maybe that? But you know, his ego might be so dense, and he might be so far down that road that maybe even 5meo DMT would not do that for him, and he would just, you know, resist it like a stubborn mule.

 

And then that's that. Validation of perspective becomes easier than invalidation. Sorry, I misspoke - invalidation of perspective comes easier than validation. Invalidation feels bad, but it's actually good for you, and validation of your perspective feels good, but it's actually bad for you. So this is kind of a mind-fuck. It's all twisted. Most people seek validation of their perspective, not realizing this is actually bad for them in the same way that you eat too much food. It's bad for you, and then if you do a fast, it's actually good for you. You need to proactively compensate against confirmation bias. If you're a scientist, go study some new age stuff. If you're a new ager, go study some science and apply the scientific method to your beliefs and fantasies, see? And this is exactly the thing that none of these people want to do. It's the last thing you want to do, which is of course why it's good for you and why it grows you. The stuff that grows you is the stuff you usually don't want to do, unfortunately.

Another point here is that it's not enough to just introspect yourself because you're not going to be able to see your own blind spots, not all of them. You need perspective from others. And in fact, you know, I sometimes take a dim view of human beings and other people. You know, as Sartre said, "Hell is other people," and that's definitely true. However, perhaps one of the most redeeming existential qualities of having other people around you, like there's a lot of shit that comes with having people around you. You get drama, you get politics, you get idiots, you get psychopaths. That all comes with having a society of people, and it would be nice if we could somehow escape that. But there is one awesome benefit you get, and that is that you get new perspectives, perspectives that you would never have if you just lived alone on a deserted island, and that's super valuable for your growth.

So make use of that. Ask for serious feedback on you working on yourself as a person. In fact, here I have a very powerful exercise for you that you can try. Here's the exercise: if you have a romantic partner, have a serious conversation with them, sit them down and tell them this, "I want you to give me an honest, unvarnished evaluation of myself as a person, as a human being. I want your actual perspective of how you see me, good or bad, I don't care, just how you actually see me and how you evaluate me as a human being." That's powerful, huh? And then what happens is, if they're willing to do that, if you have a somewhat conscious partner and they're not just going to, you know, throw judgement and criticize you, but they're actually going to evaluate you in a thoughtful manner, that's going to be very valuable. And then what you do is you just sit, and you listen. You give them as much time as they need, if they need five minutes, 10 minutes, let them talk, don't interrupt them, let them talk. And you just listen, and when they finish, here's the key: you don't argue with them, you don't defend yourself, you don't justify anything, you just say, "Thank you," and you go, you walk away, and then you lock yourself in a room by yourself, and you sit there for hours, and you think about what they told you.

Of course, you could also do this with a family member if you don't have a romantic partner, but a romantic partner, if you have that kind of intimate connection, it might be a little easier to start there. Family, it depends on what your relationship is like with your family, but yeah, maybe you could do it with your brother, maybe you could do it with your sister, maybe your parents, you know ...just depends. Or if you have a good friend. But that, that's powerful, that's powerful.

 

Okay, we're going to take a quick break here, and I'll be back in a second. So now we get to the portion of this episode where I talk about all the things I've been wrong about lately. That's going to be very interesting. This is going to be some very subtle and nuanced stuff, some very personal stuff here. This came to me through a lot of pain and suffering. I haven't been posting much content over the last year, and I took a break from actualized.org. I went through like a really big integration period, we might say.

And you might wonder, well, what have I been doing during all this time? Well, the short of it is that I was going through, I was going through hell. I was going through enormous suffering, most of it brought on by health problems - some of them my old health problems, and then some of it new health problems, and then some of them is just, you know, just based on my genetics, and then some of it is self-inflicted as well. So there was a combination of both those things. I'm keeping it kind of vague because some of it is so, it's difficult to talk about, and some of it I'm not ready to talk about yet. I'll talk about it in the future at some point.

But anyways, I've been going, I went through multiple very difficult health problems which really made me go inwards and had to confront a lot of my own internal shit as that happened. So this is the power of suffering, is that it does that. I mean, at least for me, the effect it had is that I was going through so much suffering for physical issues, ailments, and then various fears and anxieties that were coming up from that. But then also, that led me to convert that kind of personal suffering into a more sort of universal compassion and understanding for the suffering of just all of the ailments of mankind as a whole, and of those of you in my audience.

And also, it just led to a lot of just like very deep self-reflection. And also the fact that I wasn't doing my normal schtick and publishing all this work, and you know, the work is not about just creating a video, it's about sitting there and really contemplating this material. So I was out of that. I just stopped doing all this kind of personal development, psychological, philosophical, existential, spiritual contemplation. I just dropped all that. And that created space, the space that I needed. And actually, I grew enormously during this period, even though I wasn't doing any formal spiritual practice, I wasn't contemplating stuff, I wasn't reading books, none of that kind of stuff. And that was very, very necessary because what I didn't realize, because the last decade of my life up until this point, is that I was pumping out content on almost weekly basis. And during that entire 10 years, it's like I was in a sort of trance state, like a very subtle trance state of doing this work without the ability to step back and observe it from a distance.

And then there was attachments of, and of course I knew that I had attachments to this work and to my career and to my business. But again, it's one thing to just kind of like know that intellectually, it's another thing to actually make the time to step out of your career, right? There's things you will never see while you're immersed in running your business or running your career on a weekly, monthly basis.

Alright, so let's get to this list of stuff that I was wrong about, again, this is going to be some very personal stuff, some of it was very challenging for me to admit even to myself. And the reason I'm putting this out there is not to get forgiveness from you or to get approval from from the audience, but because this is stuff that I've integrated over the last year. So I don't need that from you, but I wanted to put this out there for educational purposes so that you really grasp this point of what it means to admit that you're wrong, like really admit that you're wrong. This is really difficult stuff.

 

I was wrong in how I treated my girlfriends. I looked over all the relationships I had in my life and the most recent one, my most recent breakup, and I really did a lot of soul searching there. I just spent a lot of time thinking about and looking at how much I judged my girlfriends, how much I teased them, how much I didn't give them enough compliments, how I was too selfish - all the ways I was too selfish, all the ways I was immature, all the ways that I was avoiding and playing various kinds of games, fundamentally not giving them enough love, being too blunt with them with the truth, using truth as a sort of a blunt instrument on them.

Then I came to the realization that I lost every girlfriend I ever had in my life because I didn't love her and because she wasn't enough for me. I really looked at this for months. For months, I kept coming back and just looking at this and looking at this and looking at this. That was difficult to admit to myself. It's easy to admit now, but it was difficult to even look at it when I was reflecting on it myself. So there's that. That's a, I mean, you can get so much grist for the contemplation mill from your past intimate relationships. And by the way, if you want healthy relationships, any kind of healthy relationships going forward in the future is, um, I was wrong. That's the magic phrase you got to be able to say, "I was wrong," both people in the relationship got to say, "I was wrong" over and over and over again because as soon as that stops happening, your relationship is going to go dysfunctional.

It's ironic, right? You might say, "Well Leo, but you teach love and all this kind of stuff and that you're not able to love your girlfriends." Well, come because first of all, I'm a perfectionist. Second of all, it's because when I talk about love, you have to understand that my understandings of Love are very different from normal human conceptions of Love, romantic love and love for human beings. That's really not what I'm concerned about when I talk about love. I'm talking about a metaphysical kind of philosophical kind of love which can be difficult to then translate into the human kind of love. Now we've talked about that elsewhere, and it's not like I'm saying that I was some kind of monster to these girls. I wasn't. I'm talking about subtle ways, right? So you might think, "Well Leo, what did you do? Did you verbally abuse them, sexually abuse them?" It's like no, no, no, it's much more subtle than that, way more subtle than that.

Next thing is, I was wrong about pushing truth on people. As I went through my suffering and I went through this whole process of facing a lot of this difficult truth about myself and my own behavior and my own thinking patterns and all the areas I was wrong, uh, it made me very painfully aware of how painful truth is and how much more careful I have to be in terms of just kind of like bashing people over the head with the truth, whether it's a girlfriend or an audience member, you right? Originally, I sort of had this attitude when I sort of actualized that, or that it would be like pummeling people with the truth, being very blunt, and that worked to a certain extent. I sort of made that my style. There's certain advantages to that style; there's certain disadvantages to that style. And so as I mature in how I do these teachings, as I do more of the teachings, I look back upon the teachings and I see various limitations in the style that I adopted originally. But of course, that style over 10 years, it has kind of like become ingrained in me and it's difficult to to make a shift in that. However, I made, I had kind of like an internal shift here because I realized just like how inappropriate it is to use truth in this kind of way. Truth needs a lot more skill behind it.

Like originally, I would, I would think that like, well, people are under all these fantasies and illusions, and then my job as like the spiritual teacher is to shatter these illusions for them, and that this would benefit them. And now I had a, I had a real shift on that. My relationship to that changed, and so now I'm not so much interested in doing that anymore. I'm more comfortable with just letting people stay lost in their fantasies and illusions and not interfere with that, not pushing truth on them, having them show some receptivity first before just pushing it on them. So that's a shift that you'll be seeing in my teachings going forward.

I was wrong in trying to disillusion with the truth, of undermining people's fantasies. I was wrong in trying to get everyone to pursue truth, spirituality and awakening. What I see now more clearly than I ever saw before is just like how specific this whole awakening, spirituality, philosophy, truth seeking business is, and it's really specialized for certain kinds of people who value this kind of work. And most people do not value this kind of work, and um, there are different priorities people have in life, different values that they have, and those values and priorities need to be like, people need to be met where they're at, and those priorities need to be honored rather than like judging them for it in a subtle way where like you judge them for like, "Oh well, you have the wrong priorities, you should be pursuing what I'm pursuing."

And um, no, there's just a, there's just a lot more diversity of of ways that one can live life. And part of what you know I've talked about in the past, this idea of sovereignty of mind, respecting the sovereignty of others, people, other people's consciousnesses, and part of what that means is getting to know their values on their terms, not on your terms, not projecting my own values onto other people or onto you, and being very clear to distinguish that like, "This is my value set, that's your value set," and there's a, there's a difference there. And for my advice to work for you, there needs to be a sort of alignment of value sets, which there may not be. And in fact, for most people there's not going to be that kind of alignment. So for example, recommending truth seeking to everybody in the general population, this is inappropriate because they just have a different value set.

[Agrande]

So I'm, I'm going to be more careful in the future about about distinguishing between those things and also just about accommodating a more diverse value set in my audience cuz if you have thousands and millions of people watching, uh, you have a, you have the whole rainbow, the whole gamut of different value sets that people have. And in the past I would teach from like my own value set, of course, and it's difficult to see outside one's own value set. But that's what higher consciousness does for you.

That's also what suffering will help you to see. That's also what interacting with other people and getting feedback from them, or like you know in your relationships you'll realize that your girlfriend has a different value set than you do, your husband has a different value set than you do, your children, your parents. And so a lot of what relationship dynamics and problems revolve around is just these differences in value sets and also not appreciating a different value set than yours and trying to push and project yours onto them. And of course, you can do that with your audience as well.

I was wrong for assuming that everyone should be interested in my values. So in the future, I'm going to be making my teachings more, we might say, universal, kind of trying to accommodate or it's not like I'm going to be adopting other people's values so much, but it's like I'm going to be, I'm going to be um, underscoring that like, "This piece of advice is for this kind of value set," sort of thing. And also encouraging you to like be true to your value set because a lot of you guys who watch me can get sort of seduced by the charisma of all this and some of these cool advanced ideas, some of the truth in these ideas. You can kind of get seduced into that and then you can sort of like start to think that, "Well now I should be following Leo's value set."

Now of course, this is all going to be implicit, you don't tell yourself that explicitly, but implicitly you're just going to be trying to like follow my value set without even knowing what's happening. But then five years later you'll realize that this isn't working for me, and the reason it's not working for you is because you should have been following your value set, which is probably different from my value set. And even within spirituality, see, there's different even value sets within spirituality. What do you want out of spirituality? Don't assume that what I want out of spirituality is the same thing as what you want. Maybe what you want is to transcend suffering. Maybe what you want is loving relationships with humans in your life, um, maybe what you want is bliss.

That's not why I do spirituality, even though some of those things are are still good, um, from my point of view, but that's not where I'm coming from when I do this work. So that's something I'll be emphasizing more in the future.

I was wrong in teaching in a confrontational, judgmental, heavy-handed and arrogant way. That kind of style, that's the kind of style I adopted when I first started, and um, and the more I do it, the more I see the limitations of it. I realize more and more that it's inappropriate to and bully people into self-actualizing.

I was wrong for teaching for egoic reasons. I was wrong for getting egoic pleasure out of lording insights over my audience, and that just doesn't serve my audience and it corrupts my work. See, I started to reflect more and more on my work during this time off and really asking myself, "What are my true motives for doing this work? Why am I even doing it? Why am I putting out all this content? What am I getting out of it?" I'm not doing it so much for the money, so what am I getting out of it?

And then when I dug deep into that, I, I noticed certain egoic pleasures that I get, um, and then what I realized is that that had a, it felt like it was corrupting my work and that it really wasn't serving you. And then I sort of start to ask myself like, "Should I be doing this for my pleasure?" To a certain extent, yes, cuz like if I don't enjoy doing the work, then why, why do the work at all? But on the, the other hand, if, if, if I'm just like serving myself in this endeavor and it's not serving the audience, it's at the cost of the audience, it's not helping you to awaken, it's not helping you to get a deeper understanding of of existence, if that's not happening, then that's an error in the style, something needs to change, and that will be changing going forward.

I was wrong about what I'm going to call here "weak people." By weak people, I mean people in life who are struggling, um, maybe people with mental disorders, incels, people stuck in a like a deep victim complex, uh, just in general people who are suffering a lot in life. It's easy when you're successful, relatively successful, if you're in good health, which I'm not, but if you're in good health, um, and uh, you know, if you have, if you have some status in the world, if, if you're somewhat famous, if, uh, if you have a good financial situation, um, if you have a good emotional state of mind where you don't have a mental disorder or something like that, it can be very easy kind of like to turn a blind eye or to be dismissive to these kinds of people who suffer from these kinds of problems and who don't have these kinds of things in their life, and to not appreciate how difficult it is for them to create that, right?

Because everybody starts at a different place in life, uh, for some people creating financial success and abundance for themselves, it's going to be a lot more difficult for others just based on where they were born, what kind of family they had, whether they were abused or not, and like in this work, the spiritual work, the psychological work, you know, if you've been abused, that's a very different mountain you have to climb than someone like me who wasn't.

And so thanks to the suffering that I went through, like I made a connection, I made a connection with those kinds of people because I could, I could see, you know, I can see what it's like to be in a sort of an unresourceful, deficient state where it's difficult to help yourself, you feel helpless. If you have a serious health problem, you feel helpless because you don't know how to fix it, you try stuff and it doesn't work, it's kind of out of your control. Well, likewise, you know, if you're, if you're born in some awful third world country, it kind of feels like it's out of your control. Now that doesn't mean it's out of your control, there's still stuff you can do, of course, but still, that's very different than being born in a nice neighborhood in California. So I have more compassion for these kinds of people.

And in the past I would kind of speak down to that, and that was wrong of me to do. I was also wrong in speaking bluntly without tact and sensitivity to people's feelings and values, feelings and values. And uh, and basically the reason I did that is because I was so focused on this notion of Truth, and I was prioritizing that above everything else. And again, there's certain benefits that come with that, but then there's downsides. And so now I'm more sensitive to the downsides.

I was wrong in using too much profanity and crass and sensitive examples. As I mature, I look back at that and kind of cringe. I was wrong in my tone interacting with people sometimes. The tone that I would use would be too obnoxious, too harsh, too judgmental, too kind of like finger-wagging, which is wrong. It's just not effective, you see.

And it's a trap, you know, doing this whole YouTube shtick is a trap in the sense that there's a pressure to want to perform. It's like a performance when I'm up here. It almost feels like a performance. It's not just like a normal conversation, you know? I put a little bit of like acting into it, a little bit of like emotion, a little bit of like charisma in order to make it entertaining. But, um, but you know that gets in the way of truth, of course.

And, um, and then it kind of like it incentivizes almost like a creating of a subtle drama. And, and again, I mean the whole internet is full of this kind of drama, but then I started to notice, like, I mean it's, it's not like my content has very obvious drama in it, um, relative to what you find on the internet or on YouTube. But still, like again, um, some of these things that I'm talking about are very subtle points, and many people would just kind of dismiss it, overlook it, or say, "Oh, it's not a very big deal." But, um, but again, like the more advanced I get, the more conscious I get, it's like the very subtle stuff that starts to bug me about my work.

I was wrong in using violent communication. I'll have an episode about violent communication coming soon that's going to be powerful. It's like a shift when I learned about this concept of violent communication, and then I looked at how I communicate. It's like I saw a lot of things that I wasn't seeing before. That distinction of violent communication is very powerful. In a nutshell, what it means is a sort of inflammatory style of communication, but I'll elaborate more upon that in the future. So in the future, you'll see me using less violent communication.

And violent is not just in the word choices that there can be violence or inflammatory word choice, for example, using excessive profanity might be one example. Um, but then it's also about the tone, right? So it's a combination. It's the tone, it's the word choice, and it's also the intent, it's the intent and the motivation behind every sentence that is being said and every paragraph that those sentences add up to. And it's also the subtle judgments that are laden within that. So this is a very, very subtle topic.

I was wrong in viewing people as fools and idiots. What happened over time is that as I was figuring out more of these deep aspects of reality, um, I started to develop a contempt for human intelligence because, frankly, there's a lot of stupid stuff that humans do in the social domain, in the political domain, in the business domain, on in the social media domain, even in the spiritual domain, maybe even especially in the spiritual domain, right? There's a lot of stupid stuff. But, but then if you start to tell yourself that over and over again in your own mind, you kind of start to program your own mind to look at mankind with this kind of contempt.

And, um, and of course, that's because you start to look at people, you start to look down at people because they're not awakened, they're not construct aware, they don't know all of these sophisticated self-deception mechanisms that you now know. Um, but then this becomes its own kind of trap, you see? And so what I've been doing is I've been, um, I've been looking more at just very successful, talented, genius people in society across media that have their own kind of specialized, narrow intelligence. Like, they're really good. They have a sort of a genius at what they do, even though it has nothing to do with – they have no idea of what spirituality is, what awakening is, what construct awareness is. Like, they're not that sophisticated, but they're just interested in a different set of things, and they have a specialized intelligence in that set of things, you know?

Like, you can look at someone like, for example, a Steven Wolfram, like a really brilliant scientist. He doesn't understand some of these spiritual topics we talk about, but you can recognize the genius, the intelligence, in that narrow specialized thing that he's doing. And then what's important is to recognize that kind of genius all across the board within society, you know? People have perspectives; everyone has a perspective. All these perspectives are basically limited; many of them are contained fantasies and nonsense and garbage, a bunch of noise. But there's signal in that noise.

And so really, the more mature, the most mature way to go about this is to kind of recognize and appreciate this kind of narrow intelligence in everything people are doing. And, um, and valuing the uniqueness of these different perspectives and how they can contribute, right? How they can attribute to you, how you can make use of the signal in that noise? So you can take somebody that you disagree with, somebody that normally you would look down upon because they're not "woke" or whatever, and you can find that signal and look through the noise. That's tricky because usually what our mind does, our mind tends to focus on the noise, especially if there's more noise than signal in some perspective. We tend to focus on the noise. We demonize and judge based on the noise, ignoring the signal.

But then, if you adopt that kind of attitude, you know, you can find something wrong about almost anybody, even any spiritual teacher, you know? You could take a spiritual teacher, you can find, say, Guru and criticize him about some little thing he did wrong, and then you can get hung up on that. And you can do that for every spiritual teacher, and you can do that for every scientist and every philosopher and every social media influencer. But at the end of the day, after you're doing all that, what do you get? You get a sort of cynicism and contempt and a sort of disgust with humanity as a whole, which is which is not very effective.

It then becomes difficult to learn from these people, and fundamentally, it doesn't feel right. It doesn't sit right with you because what you want is you want to be out there experiencing and exploring all these different perspectives, and you want to be rather joyful about it rather than being moralistic and contracted in this kind of negative, judgmental mode. And so I was definitely falling into that trap, and of course, this is kind of the trap of arrogance, which, uh, I'm certainly very, very guilty of.

I was wrong in speaking about and assuming levels of consciousness of other people and spiritual teachers. You know, part of the thing that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, like, one of the things I regret the most about my work is that I can see, um, like little exaggerations that I just sneak in in certain areas. It's like 90% of what I say is powerful stuff, but then, but then my ego sneaks in certain little exaggerations or jumps to certain little conclusions, make little assumptions, you know, going just a little bit overboard, a little bit beyond what would need to be said if I was being strictly careful, strictly truthful.

And so as I'm trying to align my own mind more with truth, that kind of stuff is not acceptable to me anymore. And so I'm working through a process of trying to just make everything that I say as crisp and sharp and accurate, right? It's like it's a sort of a dedication to the accuracy of your speech. And so in that respect, you know, a lot of times people will ask me, "Well, Leo, what do you think about this spiritual teacher and that spiritual teacher? How enlightened is this person, and then how enlightened is that person?" And then, like, strictly speaking, I can't be inside the minds of any of these people, right? I can strictly speaking only speak about my consciousness.

So I have to make a leap. I have to kind of jump to a sort of conclusion, make certain assumptions and certain sort of interpretations and predictions, right? It's not, it's not some sort of absolute knowledge of somebody else's level of consciousness or development. I have to go out a bit on a limb to talk about that stuff. So there's, there's multiple choices I have there. I can just be quiet, which is always the wise choice. The wisest choice is always just to, you know, if you're not sure, just be quiet.

Um, but then, you know, there's a trap to want to speak about stuff that you're not quite sure about. And, um, and but see, it's not that simple, though, because most spiritual teachings don't actually consider the perspective of other spiritual teachers or people. What they do is they just present you a single perspective on spirituality from a certain teacher.

Part of what actually Leo does is that we consider lots of different spiritual teachers. We name them, we consider their perspectives, read their books, and we compare all this kind of stuff. And we try to figure out, you know, like we use one spiritual teacher's teachings and perspective against another in the sense that we try to use one to compensate for the gaps in the other. And so you're sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't in this situation.

Because if you're learning from any kind of spiritual teacher, first of all, you have to decide which one to learn from, and there's different qualities of them. So how are you going to judge as a student? You have to judge somehow, and somehow have some kind of sorting process for who you're going to listen to because you can't listen to all of them equally. And then also, when you start comparing them, you're going to notice that there's important differences in the detail of what they teach, and often times contradictions. And they can teach exactly the opposite things - one guy will say meditation won't make you enlightened, another guy says he got enlightened through meditation. So what's true? And strictly speaking, you don't know who's right because you can't get inside their heads, but you still have to make certain evaluations here.

 

So um, it's tricky, but I'm going to be more careful about just not leaping to judgments and conclusions about the levels of consciousness of others, even though, you know, again, it's like, man, I wish I could just not talk about it at all. But on the other hand, it has to be talked about because my own awakenings and understandings of consciousness and doing this work have led me to very important realizations about gaps in certain teachings and teachers. And I feel like that's important to discuss, even though when I discuss those things, it doesn't mean that I'm 100% certain that I know that teacher's level of consciousness. So keep that in mind.

I was also wrong in giving out too many answers without helping to facilitate people in discovering their own answers.

This is a huge sticking point for me, uh, going forward that like I have a tendency to want to give out all the answers. I've had this realization recently that, um, it's really limiting the power of these teachings because you're getting ideas in your mind, abstract ideas of things that should actually be experienced by you.

So, really, I'm thinking about how to help facilitate people more into discovering their own answers rather than just giving you all the answers. That's more powerful. The trick is that it's difficult to do that through this medium of just a video or an audio that really requires a kind of Socratic method, going back and forth, which just can't be done through this medium. But I'm thinking about how to, like, structure the content more so that maybe I'm giving you more exercises, maybe asking you more questions. It's difficult because I don't like the idea of just making a video where I just ask you a question and give you an exercise, and then it's on you to go and do it. It's like, um, but, um, that's still something I'm working out. I'm going to be working out over the next year or two how to make subtle changes there to make that better.

About my work, I was wrong in underestimating the intelligence and potential of my audience. I spent a lot of time thinking about my audience and getting inside their heads, their perspective, and it's difficult to do that because, of course, when you have an audience of a million, it's like you have every perspective out there, every value system, every level of intelligence. Frankly, some of my audience members are stupid, and some of them are brilliant, and everything in between. So, who do I tailor my content towards?

[Agrande]

That's always something that I'm wrestling with, and I need an internal model of my audience, how they think, what they know, and what they don't know, because based on what I think you know and don't know, I have to tailor my content in that fashion. Um, but in general, uh, uh, in the past, I've made the mistake of sort of talking down to you and sort of gearing some of my content to the lower intelligence rather than the higher intelligence. And as I was reflecting on all this, I realize that anyone that's willing to sit through one of my three-hour long ass videos on a deep topic like philosophy or God or consciousness, this is already a very exceptional, special kind of mind that is able to do this. The average mind is not going to be interested in this kind of stuff. It takes a very special value set for somebody to be able to sit through a three-hour long video like that, never mind 50 of them or a hundred of them, as some of you have done. And so, um, I wasn't appreciating that in the past, as I will be more going forward.

So, I apologize for taking you for granted, for being too dismissive of your intelligence and wisdom, and your commitment to this work. I really want to applaud those of you who've done that, who've sat through a hundred or more of these episodes. Like, that in of itself is an achievement, you understand that, right? You understand that like 95% of mankind wouldn't do that if you gave it to them. They would just turn it off and move on to watching cat videos or something like that. So, the fact that you did that, of course, just sitting through 100 videos, it's empty theory that doesn't mean it's going to change your life, but it's still a huge achievement. And those of you who did that, I want you to just acknowledge that to yourself. You're special for doing that, just for doing that. That means you have a lot of potential because, see, what that means is that there's a spark in you that recognizes the power of these ideas.

That's really what it is. It's not even me, it's not my personality that's keeping you here watching this material. It's the power of the ideas, which are not my ideas, these are ideas that are just of the universe, of the nature of existence. You care about the nature of existence, you care about psychology, you care about self-deception, even though you're flawed in how you pursue all these things, and you have a lot of stupid ideas and fantasies. But the fact that you're interested in this, this is the starting point, this is critical because this means you're a diamond in the rough, and that's something, you know, I can work with that. I can work with a diamond in the rough, and I need to appreciate that because there's not that many diamonds in the rough out there in the world.

I mean, in a sense, we could say everybody is a diamond in the rough, but some people are just so rough that you're not going to get anywhere with them. That's the majority of people, they're lost chasing, you know, sex, drugs, and partying, and drinking, and money, just like this kind of materialistic stuff. That's not you, though, because you would have been out of here a long time ago if that was you.

So, as I was thinking about, you know, how do I relate properly with my audience? Because I communicate with many of you, and I have since the very beginning. I've talked with thousands of you, but I still need to develop a mental model of my audience because I'm not sure where to target my teachings. And so now I have a realization that I need to target that diamond in the rough, and it's like, how do we polish you up? And what I want to do going forward is to be more supportive of that kind of audience member, of championing you more, encouraging you more, your growth, because you have so much potential, just this enormous potential, instead of what I was doing in the past, which was kind of like berating you sometimes, judging you, lording insights over you. Because that's just not what is going to help you to polish you into the diamond that you ultimately are underneath all that crap, all that rough, all that human bias.

See, it's very easy to judge people for their human bias, but how helpful is that for helping them to overcome it, to transcend it? That's what I've been racking my mind over. I was wrong in not appreciating my audience, and if I have an amazing audience because, you know what I did over the break is that I just would go and rewatch some of my old videos and read all the comments, you know, hundreds, thousands of comments, just reading it. And sometimes I read the comments, and it's just like so much, so much love there, just like so much love. Amazing, thank you for that, like I really feel it sometimes, and then other times I overlook it and take it for granted. But, like, you can really feel that love in some of the comment sections.

I also realized that I was wrong for projecting my own lack of compassion and lack of care for human things onto my audience, not caring about me. So this was a very subtle projection that I noticed about myself. It's like, see, my focus is not the human domain, my focus is the existential domain, the philosophical domain. That's what makes my work what it is, but there's tradeoffs to that, right? There's weaknesses that come with that because then interacting with the human then becomes more challenging because it's not a priority. You're prioritizing something above the human. Most humans prioritize the human over the existential. I have sort of the opposite problem, which can make me kind of blind to the human dimensions. And so that's something that I'm working on. In fact, that's what most of these issues that I'm talking about are really about. It's the deficiencies with how I interact and relate with humankind basically because, you know, frankly, it's just not my highest value, but I'm bumping into the limitations of that, see?

And so that needs to be addressed going forward. And what I notice is that a lot of you, just kind of simple human folk who are not very existential in your thinking, you have an advantage over me in the sense that you have a more kind of simple, just kind of basic human love. Even though I talk about existential love and all that, like I said before, that's different than just sort of a basic, you know, let's say you're walking down the street and you see a hungry homeless person, and you have an empathy and a care for them.

Like, what I would say is that most of you who are not super spiritually advanced, just normal kind of decent humans, probably have a deeper sense of compassion and love in that situation than I do. And the reason that is, is because I've deprioritized that so that I can focus on the existential, you see? But of course, you can't just live life that way, otherwise there's going to be problems, there's going to be limits, and I've been bumping into those limits. And then so sometimes what I would do is I would project that kind of callousness onto my audience when really it's not there, it's my own callousness that I'm projecting forward. So that was a mistake I made.

My profound awakenings made me arrogant and led to the development of a spiritual ego within me. This was necessary, but now it needs to be undone. So it's kind of like two steps forward, one step backward, right? It's not just two steps forward all the time, two steps forward, one step backward. The arrogance, the value of the arrogance, was that it allowed me to think in new ways and to not just conform to all the other ways in which spiritual teachers and teachings think. This allowed me to make innovations and new discoveries and new ways of thinking about this material and teaching this material, and even new kinds of awakenings that I don't think anybody else has really had that I've heard of. But, of course, as with anything, any one of these traits or qualities that you have, it's going to have downsides, and so I've been feeling the downsides, and now I want to correct for them.

I was wrong in being too reactive when criticized. I'm getting a lot better at dealing with criticism. That's something I've been developing as I mature. I was wrong in thinking that I was good when I was evil, overlooking my evilness in my own mind and overly focusing on my good qualities, because I have a lot of good qualities and you guys point them out to me, maybe too much sometimes. And then again, the mind is so tricky, it focuses on those to the exclusion of the evilness, so I've been confronting my own evilness and devilry during this extended break.

I was wrong in that, as I was going through this whole process of learning spirituality over the last 10 years, I adopted and picked up many spiritual fantasies and assumptions from reading all the books, from studying from all the teachers. And I really appreciate a lot more now just how fraught and tricky this whole domain is. And so now a lot of my work is about undoing many of those spiritual fantasies, and that's something that I think all of you should relate with, because you're going to fall into that same trap. I guarantee you, I guarantee you if you read all these spiritual books and all this Buddhism and non-duality material and all this kind of stuff, no matter which teachers you listen to, you're going to start to create fantasies around this stuff and various kinds of assumptions about them, about yourself, about what your results will be, about what spirituality is, what the potential of spirituality is, when you're going to be done, what that's going to look like. There's a lot more that needs to be said about that in future episodes.

I also noticed that I was wrong in this kind of subtle way where I had this kind of very subtle contrarian bias to all of my intellectual work, where sometimes what would happen is, in order to kind of have the most original and unique perspectives and insights about reality, I would sometimes dismiss otherwise valid truths and perspectives that were more mundane and ordinary, just mainstream.

Sometimes the mainstream is just right, and that going after some sort of exotic truth or exotic insight is actually not aligned with the truth in that situation. So I caught myself doing that, and I've been doing that really for, I caught myself doing that for my whole life. I've never been, I've always had a sort of an aversion to just mainstream thinking, mainstream perspectives, mainstream insights, because they just feel kind of too obvious. And, you know, a lot of times mainstream perspectives are very limited, and they miss a lot of the depth of reality. But also, at the same time, a lot of times, you know, the mainstream is just right on something, and you have to just face that and acknowledge it and surrender this desire to have a unique perspective on something.

I was wrong in using superlatives too much, stuff like, you know, if I'm talking about something, I say this is the best, or I say always, the, these superlative words, always the best, never, the only, all, everyone, no one, these kinds of words. See, when I put that in front of a sentence that I'm going to say, it makes it less truthful. For example, if you say something like everyone is going to be happy after awakening, you know that's not as truthful as saying that most people will be happy, or maybe even some people will be happy. So I want to be more careful about my choice of words there.

In the political realm, I was wrong in my faith in progressives and leftists. So I've sort of had a second political awakening. And I've been especially focusing a lot on the limitations and fantasies and delusions of the political left, which does not mean that I've gone to the right, it's not like I'm a right-winger now. But, you know, I've already, I have a few episodes in the past where I already discussed many of the limitations of stage green and leftist politics. But it's been really enjoyable for me over the last couple of years to just, I spent like four years after Trump 2015 or so, after Trump came into the mainstream, I spent about four years delving deep into leftist politics, just learning all the ins and outs, familiarizing myself with all that, and that was very useful.

I don't regret that at all. But over the last couple of years now, I've spent, now I'm spending my time kind of again undoing that. It's like two steps forward, one step backward, undoing some of that. And then what that allowed me to do is to reach a higher, a higher sort of meta perspective about politics, which I'm really satisfied with.

This is actually one of the areas where being wrong was easy to admit and enjoy for me, because I wasn't attached to leftist politics per se, and so I always knew in the back of my mind that there were limitations there, but I couldn't quite pinpoint them. So now I can see them much, much, much more clearly. And so I'm thrilled in the future to help those of you who are kind of stuck in leftist politics to kind of see beyond the leftist mind bubble, which does not mean that you're going to become a centrist per se, and it does not mean that you're going to become some deluded right-winger.

I was wrong in speaking as though life is good for everybody. I've been blessed to have a generally fortunate and good life from my childhood. But even through my adulthood, I've had some great business opportunities that I was able to capitalize upon. I've had relatively good parents and some great teachers throughout my life. All sorts of advantages, just the geography that I was raised in was a huge advantage, various kinds of health advantages, mental health advantages in the sense that I don't have any mental disorders or personality disorders or serious trauma. So, living in that way, life is pretty good. Just as a baseline for me, life has always been pretty cool. Of course, sometimes you have a bad day here or there, sometimes you're a little bit sick or whatever, but overall, life is pretty good.

You have money, you're not stressed out, you're not in a war zone, you don't have some abusive family member to deal with or anything like that. But as I went through my period of suffering here over the last year, I just saw profoundly how bad life is for many people on the planet. Many people are just living in misery, abject misery, whether it's crippling depression because they have some mental disorder or genetic defect or chemical imbalance, or because they were traumatized, or because they're in an awful, shitty third-world country with a horrible political situation which is just absurdly corrupt and they have to play and survive within that corrupt system. People who have been dealt gross injustices, like I've never been really dealt much gross injustice like that.

Maybe the worst injustice that happened to me is one of my old business partners years ago stole $25,000 from the business, which I never recovered. That was like the worst thing that happened to me in that regard, but some people lose their life savings, they get scammed, they get all sorts of injustices could happen to them, sexually abused, exploited, manipulated by some sort of psychopathic character that comes into their life. I've never had that, but people live under these kinds of conditions. Some people have a very difficult family situation because, for example, they have to take care of their elderly or sick parents, and because of that, they can't go to university, they can't finish their school, they can't pursue their passion because they just need the money so badly.

So what's happening with me as my awareness increases is that my capacity for even wanting to look at those negative aspects of life that usually, if you're successful, you don't want to look at those. If you're a successful CEO of a giant company or something like that, do you really want to know about some kid who lives in some war-torn part of the world, third world, who's getting abused and is dealing with horrific injustice and corruption? You don't want to know about that kind of stuff, right? Your mind doesn't have the capacity to even want to look at that because if you look at that kind of stuff, you can't keep running your business the way that you do. And so, of course, I have some degree of that kind of resistance as well because this is like ugly stuff to look at. I mean, you can go spend the next month just looking for videos of very ugly aspects of life to look at, just horrible injustices, corruption, violence, and evil, quote-unquote evil, and that will really black pill you on life.

And it's tricky because in a certain sense, you can completely ignore all that. Just stay positive, focus on the positive. In fact, for those of you who are just starting life and are kind of struggling to get going, developing yourself, I would say ignore all that and just focus on developing yourself. Be selfish, work on your love life, work on your business, that kind of stuff. Don't worry about the war that's going on in the Middle East or something like that. That's a distraction and it might make you negative and cynical in a way that you shouldn't be right now.

That's not resourceful for you. But eventually, at some point in your life, once you develop a certain degree of success and mental stability and spiritual progress and all that, you're going to want to circle back around to all that stuff you've been ignoring and come to face with the shadow of mankind, come to face with some of the evils of capitalism that is outsourced to the third world, you know, come to face with toxic pollution that is poisoning people, come to face with sexual violence, come to face with racism, come to face with some of these evils, we might say. But again, still be careful about that because, again, you could black pill yourself really bad. There's plenty of evil in the world. You look at enough of it, you can black pill yourself so badly that you're going to be depressed and you're not going to want to get up in the morning and do the things you have to do.

And then, or you might even get black pilled on spirituality. You might say, "Well, Leo, where's the love you're talking about, love and God and all that, and what good is that when all this evil in the world?" That seems like spiritual bypassing. Well, of course, both things are true, and in the future, I'll talk more about how to bridge this divide as I do it myself. But that's one of the beautiful things about suffering. See, suffering is the great equalizer. When you suffer a lot, this is what builds compassion in you for other people, and it makes you want to be a better person and it makes you want to help and to correct some of the injustices that are going on around the world, whether it's various kinds of wars or sexual misdeeds or the kind of destruction of the environment and problems that that causes or the excesses of capitalism.

So, this is all important. Just you have to do it in the right way, be careful. And in the future, I'm going to have an episode that deals specifically with helping people. I'm going to have episodes specifically in the future that will black pill the [__] out of you. I'm going to disclaim those, but I can black pill you like you want to be black pilled. I can do an episode that will just black pill you. You will be depressed for the next month. And that's all going to be true, by the way, too. But of course, it can't just be.

We can't just have that. I'm also going to have an episode where we talk about how to develop hope and optimism in the face of all that. And some of you are facing this because you watch a lot of the news and the news is so negative. But of course, the news, even though the negative stuff you see on the news, it's true, most of it, if you're watching a good news source, it's true. You know, the wars, the murders, and so on. But again, that's still a very narrow, cherry-picked sliver of what's really going on in the whole world. So, you have to be careful that you don't just exclusively focus on some of this kind of black pill truth stuff. And what I mean by black pill when I say black pill, I'm not talking about the sort of incel black pill.

I'm talking about a more general, broader use of this word. What I mean by black pill is just coming to realize deep truths which also have very negative, bleak, depressing consequences. For example, looking at the poverty in Africa, if you look at it a lot, it can black pill you. Looking at the corruption in countries around the world, that can kind of black pill you about human nature. You might start to think of humans as evil people, which of course they are, but you have to frame that in the right way. It's a very delicate way to frame that because otherwise, you might fall into cynicism and nihilism, which is a trap.

So, that's the common thread and theme to all these wrongnesses of mind. It had to do with really how I relate to human beings, how to speak to them, how to relate to them properly in my own mind, how to think of them, how to think of their perspective, how to frame properly certain negative aspects of them that are my own shadow, and how to properly balance between my existential interests, priorities, and values: truth, existential love, God, spirituality, philosophy, and how to balance that with some of the just more mundane human drama that goes on because to me, human drama is just like a distraction. It's existentially meaningless, but again, that's just one perspective, and that will have limits to it if I just live from that point of view. So, in a certain sense, I can't just be above human drama because I'm part of the human drama, so again, it's kind of like finding the balance there.

So, anyways, that's what I mean by admitting you were wrong. That's what I mean, all that stuff above that I said, some of it very subtle, and it will take you years to get to that kind of level of subtlety of seeing where you're wrong about stuff, and realistically, it's not just going to be enough for you to do this logically. You're going to have to suffer. And here's what I'll tell you about suffering: a lot of times, I hear people say, "Well, Leo, why did God create suffering? How do I just transcend the suffering? Give me a quick way to just escape the suffering." And I really don't resonate with that kind of Buddhist approach of find a way to transcend the suffering as soon as possible because the suffering is a mistake. I don't think that suffering is a mistake. I think suffering is your greatest teacher aside from the love that we talked about. Suffering is your greatest teacher. There's a lot of value in your suffering. So be careful not to just dismiss the gift that your suffering is because otherwise, see, if you're just going through incredible suffering and you're not getting out anything higher out of it, that's actually what's depressing.

If I went through the last year of suffering through all my health problems and I came out of it and then I said to myself, "Well, all of that was just for nothing, you know? Why did God make me go through all that?" That would be very disempowering and depressing, even though I wouldn't wish it upon myself again, but like, I'm thrilled that I went through the last year of suffering because of how much it forced me to think about these things and to refine my own mind and my own understanding of these things. And that's going to be like that. I had some permanent shifts that I would not have been able to have without that. And that's going to be like that for the rest of my life. These improvements that I'm going to make, they're going to pay dividends for the rest of my life. Otherwise, I would have kept making all those mistakes forever. So thanks for the suffering, right? This is critical, to be able to reframe your suffering properly is critical. I was shocked at how much I grew over the last year because I wasn't doing this during this period. I wasn't doing any formal personal development or spiritual work, and yet it still felt like I actually grew more in the last year than I ever grew in the past in a year because I had like a backlog of 10 years of wrongness to confront.

[Agrande]

So the key there was suffering, of course, but another key was just stepping out, right? Stepping away, taking that step back, taking breaks from whatever you're doing is critical because it breaks you out of your trance. You don't even know you're in a trance with your career, with your business. The more wrong you are, the more you're going to suffer, and the more you suffer, the more you see how wrong you are. Your corruption, the corruption of your mind is too deep to be fixed with logical understanding alone, although of course you have to begin somewhere, and you should begin by just logical understanding some of these things. So it's good that you're learning about all these traps and all these self-deception mechanisms, but that's not going to be enough to really change you into a very advanced developed mind. You're going to have to go through this ordeal, this ordeal of life.

Also, what happened to me over the last year is that I had this kind of shift in how I see self-deception. I see it now in a more nuanced and realistic way because in the past, you know, I had a very logical, intellectual, analytical understanding of self-deception because I've contemplated it so much. I've made such a deep study of it. I've talked about it with you guys. But seeing how it really operates within me in conjunction with the suffering that I experienced, like, that was key. Self-deception cannot be understood just in the abstract. You have to actually go through it. You have to fall into it, and then you crawl your way out of it, and then you look back and you say, "Holy [__], that was sneaky. That was so sneaky I almost didn't recover, but I did." That's when you're really understanding self-deception. And then you appreciate how deeply others are self-deceived and how deeply they're trapped and how difficult it is to get them out of that self-deception. How do you get someone out of such a self-deception where even you yourself with all the theory and knowledge and insight you've had and all the work you've done, and you still barely manage to make it out? What hope is there for everybody else? That's one of these kind of dark truths that you've got to confront. That's good for you, right? As long as you confront it in the right way.

All of this stuff that I'm talking about, this being wrong stuff, it all has to be framed in a positive, empowering way. This is all good stuff. None of this is bad. It's all good. This is what growth is about. Much of admitting you were wrong is about spotting your own hypocrisy and double standards. Go watch my episode understanding hypocrisy and double standards where we discuss that. But, for example, well, before we get to the example, I want to say this: you have to catch yourself in your own internal contradictions. Your mind is full of internal contradictions, and you're just not aware of them yet. It'll take you a long time to get them up to your awareness.

And so, for example, one of the big internal contradictions I caught within myself is with how I relate to feelings. As I went through this period of suffering from my health problems, I was suffering through that, yet still, I had this kind of attitude because I'm so focused on existential truth and philosophy that I have this kind of attitude that feelings aren't important. Dismiss your feelings, let's get to the truth kind of attitude.

Now, of course, again, this kind of attitude has its advantages. Sometimes you have to adopt that kind of attitude to get somewhere in life. But on the other hand, see, as I was going through so much suffering, the suffering was so great that I was forced to see that me being dismissive of the feelings of my audience, of other people sometimes — I don't always do that, but sometimes I do that — is, see, that's an internal contradiction.

Because if feelings are not important, then why am I here suffering in pain and so distressed by it? If feelings aren't so important, well, of course, feelings are very important. In fact, feelings motivate everything you do in life. So, this kind of Ben Shapiro nonsense of like, "Facts don't care about your feelings," this is pure nonsense. And of course, I always knew that.

I said that in the past. But again, there are various levels of knowing it, various levels of seeing, various subtle ways in which you can be dismissive, for example, of the feelings of others, but then you prioritize your own feelings. So, it's like when somebody else doesn't feel good, you dismiss it, but then when you don't feel good, well, you don't dismiss that, do you? Why not? Because now it matters to you. That's the contradiction. Everything you do in life, including how you see all facts and how you relate to everything, is governed by your feelings. In the end, the only reason you do anything is for the feelings of it, ultimately, if we want to be honest.

Also, what I discovered is that doing non-stop philosophy for public consumption for years definitely isn't good for you because it puts you in a kind of a trance.

It's very important to step back and step outside that grind to decompress, to self-reflect, and not to have the pressure of this kind of public work that I do. The doing of public work, any kind of public work that you do, creates a bias just in and of itself and warps your sense of reality. For example, if you're a journalist who publishes Daily News on YouTube, like you have some little show and you do the Daily News politics, you do a few videos a week, something like that. And you do that for years, just the process of you doing that, that's already going to warp and distort your sense of reality.

It doesn't matter if you're left-wing, right-wing, or down the center, it's going to do that. And if what you care about is jailbreaking your mind and really getting to the higher dimensions of understanding reality, you're going to have to, at some point—you know, initially it's going to be subtle, it's not going to be a big obstacle—but at some point, that career of yours and just the fact that you're doing that Daily Grind, that's going to become the obstacle to you getting higher, which means you're going to have to take a step back, maybe not quit but take an extended break, reflect, and you'll see if you do that, not only will you be able to gain access to higher dimensions of understanding of reality, but also you're going to have a new perspective on your work, and then your work is going to improve because you were too close to it.

I also went through a process that I didn't even talk about with you. I went through a whole process of basically surrendering my business, surrendering my career, surrendering my life purpose, which is this work actualized.org. I deliberately didn't publish anything so that I can kind of experience what that's like, 'cause for the last 10 years, I didn't have a sense of what it's like to not have a life purpose.

I went through a pretty deep sort of like Dark Night of the Soul, not a spiritual sense, but in a life purpose sense, where basically I lost my life purpose for a year. That was very interesting. It's like my life became completely meaningless, and that's something that I hadn't really experienced in like 20 years of my life, because even before I started actualized.org with that specific life purpose, even as a teenager back in school, I always had some sort of higher purpose that I was working towards. In school, it was about grades and getting a good education or doing philosophy, which I was doing back then.

And then after that, it was like game development, I was doing that, then after that, it was like business and becoming financially independent. So I had these kind of higher goals that were always motivating me every single day, so I didn't even know what it was like to lose all of that, all of your higher goals, just like lose them all and see what your life feels like. It's like zero meaning in your life. It's quite miserable, frankly, because like, again, I didn't quite appreciate how much happiness I derive from the higher meaning that is created by my various purposes and goals that I've been setting myself my whole life 'cause I was doing that intuitively. I didn't even know how to live otherwise 'cause to me, it would be such a miserable way to live.

Well, I went through that misery over the last year where I completely surrendered my purpose to the point where I didn't think I would come back, I didn't know if I would come back, and I didn't even want to think if I would or wouldn't come back. So basically, I was living as though I wasn't going to come back and I had no meaning in my life. And like, now I understand what it's like for many people who just live with no meaning in life.

Yeah, it's miserable. I can understand why you're so depressed and why you can't motivate yourself to do anything, to start a business, and why you're not passionate about life and why you're addicted to drugs and alcohol and this kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, because you have zero meaning in your life, your life is meaningless, you have nothing to live for. So that was actually a huge revelation for me. It's almost like, you know, if you took my life purpose course, maybe now you have a life purpose, I hope you do. And then before you took it, though, maybe you didn't have any life purpose. But think of it like I was living with a life purpose since I was like 7 years old, now it changed over time and it wasn't very clear. Like I said, in my youth, a lot of it was just my educational career, we might say, and academics was kind of like my life purpose, and understanding reality, a lot of what I did with academics was just I used academics as a vehicle for deepening my understanding of reality with basic stuff like just science, biology, physics, math, it kind of started there for me.

But yeah, I've always had a higher vision for myself, always had a higher sense of meaning for myself, and that motivated me basically through all my life. But I think a lot of people just somehow miss out on that, even they either they don't have those opportunities or they get some bad trauma in their childhood or whatever that they just they're not they don't have that kind of sense of vision and ambition, a lot of people just don't have a lot of ambition. So I think ambition plays into that. But yeah, it's a miserable way to live. I didn't know how bad it was to live without a life purpose because I basically had one my whole life. But see, now I empathize more with people that don't have it and I also appreciate the importance of my life purpose course even more now, which I didn't quite appreciate because I took it for granted.

See, a lot of times in life you have some advantage, either by genetics or just by happenstance, by just the fact that you were born into a good family or whatever, you just, or you went to a good school, you just have some advantage that you don't even know what you have. You don't know what you have until you lose it, that cliche is so true. Of course, admitting all of this wrongness is going to create regret in you, you're going to start to wish that you could go back and change things, you know, how I wish I can go back and re-edit some of my old videos to clean them up a bit more, to make them more truthful, more accurate, less crude and cringey. Like, I would love to be able to do that, it's too late, but YouTube doesn't really allow that. But, I would love to be able to do that. But, I can't, right? And I have to live with that, I have to live with that, that's hard, you start to think about all the good stuff you lost, whether it was a girlfriend that you lost or some money that you lost or an opportunity that you lost that you'll never get back, and then you start to feel very foolish and you can even start to hate yourself.

 

Here's where you have to be careful with this wrongness technique. If you're in a kind of a weak state and you start to admit all these things you've been wrong about, you put yourself into even a weaker state, you can start to hate yourself. Like I said with Trump, if Trump admitted to himself all the evil he does on a regular basis, he might become suicidal. So you have to be careful about that. And I am not offering this technique and teaching to you so that you can start to hate yourself, that's not right, that's completely wrong.

Speaking of wrong, that's what's wrong. You need to bring in self-love, compassion, self-forgiveness, you have to reframe the situation in such a way where you see this as an opportunity, as a gift, as a vehicle for growth. This is critical, of course you can't change the past and you're going to have to go through a grieving process here, right? You have to let go of fantasies, you have to accept your fallibility, your finitude, you have to accept your own selfishness and evil, that's all part of this process, that's what kind of makes it real, because you had all these fantasies about how good you were, and when you admit all these errors that you made, all this wrongness, well now you don't seem so good to yourself, do you?

It screws with your self-image, 'cause you didn't think you made so many mistakes, fell into so many self-deceptions, did so many cringy and embarrassing things. See, you already did a bunch of cringy embarrassing things in your life, you're just probably not aware of it yet. How are you going to feel when you become aware of it?

Well, that's tricky, so be careful not to beat yourself up too much. This process is meant to be empowering. How do you make it empowering? Well, one way is to tell yourself that this is a natural consequence, this process is a natural consequence of your commitment to truth. If you're committed to truth, which I suggest you should, even though that's not for everybody, every step where you're wrong brings you closer to truth, as long as you admit it to yourself. See, 'cause that's one less mistake, it's like you're cleaning out your mind by finding dirt in it and throwing it out, and so you're just plucking the dirt out of your mind and every time you do that, you're telling yourself I was wrong and you're facing the emotional labor of doing that, like if you were brainwashed with fundamentalist religion and then eventually you pluck that out and throw it out and recognize that it's a foreign object in your mind.

Of course, it's awful to think about how much time you lost in fundamentalist religion and the damage it did to you, but once you finally extract it, then you have to reframe that as a great thing, that's a great thing and great lessons were learned. Likewise, if you mistreated people in your life, that's regrettable, you're going to have a lot of guilt about mistreating people close to you, um, losing people, but again, you have to come to a point of peace where you recognize that look, you did the best you could, no matter what happened to you, you did the best you could, the best you knew, you didn't know all the stuff you know now back then, that's why you made all these mistakes and finally, you've wised up, that's a great thing. So make sure that you're framing this wrong stuff, all this wrong stuff properly, you're improving, you're making improvements, it's not that you're a fuck-up, right?

Don't frame yourself as a fuck-up or a loser or chronically incompetent, it's like you're improving and there's a lot of room for improvement, there's so much room, it's almost endless. Also, make sure you balance out admitting you were wrong with also acknowledging the things you were right about. For example, if you were brainwashed into fundamentalist religion and you became like a very devout believer in God, um, and now you're over that, well what's good about that? Well, what's good about that is that you were still right about certain things, in the end your belief in God will be validated so you weren't wrong about that, it's just you were wrong about what God is and the Christian versions of God and so forth, um, and there were probably other right things about that, right lessons and insights that you got, maybe for example your fundamentalist religion taught you to be a polite person, taught you to be respectful to others, taught you some humility and some humanity, and um, some charity and these kind of like old school Christian values which are great things, right?

You can appreciate them more now. So you're kind of like sifting the wheat from the chaff here, um, for example the way that I could kind of like console myself with all the fuck-ups that I set up above is that I can say, um, that even though I made all these mistakes they were ultimately made in service of what? In service of my commitment towards reaching higher Consciousness towards God realization. I was so focused on God realization and existential truth and existential love to comprehend what it is to understand that and then to communicate it to others that there were costs that were paid along the way and those costs are the things I mentioned above, that was the cost of achieving insane levels of God Consciousness, that's what it cost me, that's what it costs. Now I can really appreciate God Consciousness, what I had to do to get it. It wasn't like I took a puff of DMT and I got it, even though I did, but it's like it was so much more than that, right? It was like a 10-year period of all this shit just to claw my way up to God Consciousness.

And that doesn't mean I'm done, there's still more, there's more, this process isn't over, more mistakes will be made and that will buy me more consciousness, and of course that doesn't mean you have to go through the same process exactly, your process could be very, very different from my process but what I can probably promise you is that it's going to involve many of the structural elements that are going to be the same, which is the massive suffering and the many self-deceptions, fantasies, mistakes and wrongness that will come, that I can promise you. What exactly there those are going to be? Well that's all depends on you of course and the ultimate reframe here that I want to leave you with as we wrap up is this.

Look, ultimately you need to reach a deep recognition that wrongness is beautiful. It's existentially beautiful. Where's the beauty in it? Because we're dealing with the whole universe as a Giant Mind. This mind is dreaming up infinite dreams getting lost in these dreams and self-deceptions this is how all of reality is created. This is how you think you're a human. The very humanness of you is, in a sense, a self-deception.

You're wrong about that in a good way, right? As the quote goes there's a quote I forgot exactly who said it, but it goes “God is not averse to a deception for a good cause” so in the end, this is a grand deception for a good cause. What is that cause? Well, that cause is the construction of the universe. The universe is a kind of an elaborate illusion or deception with many sub-deceptions within it, and so we're kind of unraveling that as we go.

And so of course, that means you're falling into these deceptions. Try to kind of keep that context for all of your mistakes, for all of this wrongness. The wrongness are just like little bits in this larger, more elaborate flow of the universe, and so really, it's not personal. All your wrongness isn't personal, which is why ultimately it's all, in a sense, forgiven because it was never personal.

It was never like really you, it was just inevitable. All of these traps you fell into, in a sense, were inevitable and that's what allows you to forgive yourself and that's the beauty of the workings of the mind. See, it's because the mind is so infinitely tricky that it's such a beautiful thing to study and to interact with and to learn about.

If the mind was just simple, if the universe was simple and you could just explain it with a few words and a few formulas and it was just kind of like mathematical the way that some of the scientists think it is, it wouldn't be interesting. It just, it wouldn't be, there wouldn't be all this, like, I couldn't create this whole body of work, I couldn't sit for thousands of hours contemplating all this stuff, I couldn't have the crazy levels of awakenings that I've had if it was that simple. And ultimately, it wouldn't be love. Alright, that's it. I'm done here.

Edited May 27, 2024 by Agrande
missing letter

[Agrande]

Please come check out my website. On my website, you'll find the blog. Look, I publish a lot of good stuff on the blog. If you're not looking at the blog, you're missing out on great content. So, look at that.

Come check out the book list. Come check out the "Find the Life Purpose" course for sale on my site. If you don't have a sense of purpose, you're missing out again. You're missing out on a lot of potential meaning, just creating, you know. You're just leaving happiness on the table by not finding your life purpose.

Come check out the actualized forum. We have conversations there, interesting conversations.

And I'll conclude with just this: I wish I could go back and remove all the arrogance and immaturity from my body of work. I really regret that. But that's water under the bridge. The only thing I can really do is endeavor to produce cleaner work going forward. So, that's what I'll be doing.

And my intention going forward is to try to serve you better, which means to remove more and more of myself from the work. Because whenever I make this work about me, it's a disservice to you. And the purpose of this is not to inflate my ego, but the purpose of these ideas is to polish that diamond in the rough that you are, and to make you shine with that kind of brilliance that is your inherent nature.

[Whitney Edwards]

Thank you. 

[Agrande]

12 hours ago, Buck Edwards said:

Thank you. 

no worries, If you have access to a good AI model i'd appreciate if you could generate a good summary from this 

[Past-Philosopher-562]

@Agrande How did you get this pdf , it seems very neat and organized . Could you teach us how ?