Transcript: Dangers of misapplying spiritual teachings

[Genius100x]

[ posted this for myself ] 

we need to have a discussion about the dangers of spiritual work this is an especially poignant moment at 
which to have this discussion we've had it before but we need to have it again because recently we've been made aware 
on the actualized.org forum that one of the members there 
killed himself so i'm going to talk about that situation 
i'm going to answer many questions i'm going to then lead into a discussion about suicide 
and into my thoughts on that and we're going to talk about many of the traps of spiritual work and just 
many of the traps of any kind of system of beliefs or ideas in general so 
there's going to be a lot of very juicy and important information here so stay tuned with me and i'll try to 
answer all your questions and objections so now what happened uh well we're not 
exactly sure with 100 certainty what happened but the best that we can 
piece together and as we've been informed by the family by the sister of 
this individual and and his family is that 
a few weeks ago he got the idea to literally jump off a bridge 
and for spiritual purposes uh 
it's not exactly clear what his logic was for doing so what he thought he would really gain from it or why it 
would be necessary but somehow he got it in his mind that jumping off a bridge would i guess 
be a quick path to god or towards the afterlife or the next 
life or whatever and then he literally jumped off a bridge 
or so we're told again i don't have independent verification of this 
i'm assuming it's true let's just treat it as though it's true all right so let's say it happened 
so now what do we make of this because i take this very seriously 
sometimes people get the idea that i treat these ideas kind of casually or flippantly 
about enlightenment awakening and so forth um and my teachings in general uh very much 
no very very much no um in fact i'm going to point out repeatedly 
again and again and again how many warnings and disclaimers i've given 
how many times i've talked about the traps of this work 
this is a recurring theme if you watch my content through to the end you notice this 
recurring theme what we're always talking about is we're talking about the mind the ego mind and all of its 
wacky crazy ideas and how it survives 
and how it fools itself and how it deceives itself in many different ways 
including materialistic ways but also including spiritual ways as well 
and we talk about the dangers of ideology and belief systems and getting locked in a paradigm getting locked into 
a single perspective of closed-mindedness 
of cults cult psychology so we we've covered this topic so much i 
have videos for example about with titles such as 
the dangers of spiritual work the dark side of meditation 
act is actualized or occult which i just released actually recently 
in the last month or so i released that one and in that one you know some people 
criticize me and say that well leo you spend three hours that's a three hour long episode three hours explaining 
how actualized rig is not a cult but if you watch that episode carefully it wasn't just three hours of me 
selfishly defending myself it was mostly three hours of elaboration 
upon many of the misconceived notions people have about this work and 
spirituality in general and many ways in which it can be misinterpreted and misunderstood and in 
fact most of my episodes are so long in general precisely because 
i go into a lot of detail about 
the traps of the mind how easy it is to make mistakes in this work and to get things wrong 
to make sure that you're not misinterpreting something that's being said there's a fundamental problem here 
though in that the longer i make my episodes the less 
likely people are to watch them or to just they're more likely to skim them and when they skim them then they can 
actually skim over the disclaimers the warnings the traps the examples the 
rebukes that i give and the problem is that if i harp too 
much on the obvious things you shouldn't do in this work 
for intelligent people that's going to tune their mind out 
because they've heard it once they've heard it twice how many times leo do you need to tell me not to jump off a bridge 
isn't that obvious does it really need to be said that you shouldn't be jumping off a 
bridge that is not valid spiritual work and that has nothing to do with what we're doing here 
if the teaching was to jump off a bridge that's what i would tell you to do 
that's not the teaching you might say of course 
if you're reasonable and intelligent but the problem is that hundreds of thousands and millions of 
people watch out of all these people we're talking about so many people 
you have to keep in mind that in the united states alone there were 40 000 suicides in 2018 
by the statistics only in the united states alone that's 
not counting the rest of the world so we're talking about literally millions of suicides every year and i have a 
global audience people watch me from everywhere around the world it's quite amazing 
my videos have received close to 100 million views in the last eight years 
and so from the beginning i was concerned 
that people can take these teachings and misconstrue them misinterpret them in whatever ways they will and misuse them 
and abuse them in fact i've talked about that in the past quite a lot 
oftentimes i ended my episodes with some sort of you know final word where i would say something like be very careful 
not to abuse these teachings in some particular way and then i might mention the way or explain 
what the traps are i do that for a reason 
because when you teach millions of people eventually somebody's going to get some stupid idea 
or is going to misunderstand something and it's very difficult to make these 
teachings foolproof so the challenge is that what i teach is rather advanced stuff 
and really it's not suitable for people who have mental disorders 
or who do not have a stable mind or who do not just simply have a 
good reasoning process who just don't have common sense right 
you can't get far with my teachings without common sense and basic reason 
and a stable life the ability to just survive in your life 
and one of the challenges that i face is that honestly i come from a rather healthy mindset 
myself i don't have a lot of experience dealing with 
seriously mentally ill people or very depressed people or suicidal 
people or people who just have weird ideas about life or reality 
and some people are like that they just have weird ideas they have a weird reasoning process 
you get people like that and by no means is this something special to actualize.org this is a 
general problem for all spiritual teachers and all spiritual schools 
and the more you teach the bigger your audience the more of a problem it becomes because what happens is that if 
you're a very specialized narrow teacher that teaches something very advanced and you get maybe 
100 students a year coming to you you can have very tight control over that and the people who come to you tend 
to be of a much higher caliber they're not coming from just off the 
street the problem with youtube is that anybody who's doing any work on youtube their 
fan base if it's of any significant size let's say over a hundred thousand people is going to consist of some very 
intelligent people some a lot of average people um a lot of stupid people and 
then some really really stupid people or even not that but actually sociopathic 
criminal psychotic schizophrenic bipolar 
and god knows what other conditions depressive suicidal and and and even things you can't even really 
imagine you get some very fringe edge cases when you have a hundred thousand followers 
let alone a million followers you get a really wide distribution of that bell curve 
and overall it's fine except once in a while you get some 
extreme cases and what makes the situation worse is 
that within spirituality and personal development this area especially 
attracts people who sometimes are especially prone to having mental 
problems uh trauma that they're working through in their life 
sometimes mental illness depression or who are suicidal because that's usually the kind of person who 
wants some sort of health self-help advice if you're totally happy in your life you're usually chasing money and success 
and you don't even turn to self-help or spirituality so a lot of people come to spirituality with the purpose of 
escaping suffering and that already creates sort of a bias 
in the distribution curve because who suffers the most are the people who have the most chaotic minds they suffer the 
most and they probably need therapy and self-help and spirituality the most 
but they are also the most prone to misunderstanding or misusing these ideas 
so in general this is a problem that really goes back to the dawn of human civilization 
it's important to put this into context so i'm laying out a lot of context for you here so you understand the depth of the problem 
teaching truth or consciousness or spirituality 
at an advanced level where you have really deep insights of the nature of reality 
metaphysically existentially to the point of penetrating through 
uh life and death these sorts of of topics 
these topics have always been to a certain extent taboo within society and culture 
and there's a very good reason for that because these topics these types of questions 
when we start to deconstruct the mind or when we start to talk about and question the fabric of society of reality of 
social structures of gender of cultural norms of money of 
politicians of the economy of ourselves and our relationship to 
others in the world when we start to question what am i what is another is there even such a thing as another 
person or am i just imagining that what is death what is life is life even 
meaningful is death really scary is that a bad thing or a good thing like 
when you start to ask these questions and you don't just invent ideologies and 
belief systems about it but you really probe into it deeply and you try to reach some kind of truth of the matter 
through consciousness this is very threatening it's threatening to the entire social 
order it threatens the politicians it threatens the business owners it threatens the advertisers it threatens 
the the academic systems it threatens the school system 
it threatens your parents your family your friends your co-workers it threatens religion it threatens science 
so very quickly you develop enemies which is why historically 
these sorts of teachings were not mass available 
to a casual audience they were kept within very narrow specialized esoteric sects 
which were not known very well by the majority of people whereas the majority of people practiced 
exoteric forms of religion and spirituality 
which was sort of like advice for dumb people it was dumbed down mysticism effectively 
which just gave you some rules to follow like don't kill people 
don't steal don't be an [ __ ] don't judge people 
don't jump off a bridge these sorts of things need to be told to normies 
because you're sort of 
gearing the teachings to the lowest common denominator so there's a tricky trade-off between 
how advanced your teachings are and then who they're geared towards and then how widespread they can be like a lot of 
times i will teach something about the nature of fear or survival or 
religion or the origins of religion and things like this and then people write in the comments section people tell me 
all the time like leo oh my god why isn't this taught in school 
well the reason is because ideas can be dangerous 
and i've said this in the past that ideology is not just fun and games 
ideology is deeply connected to your survival and survival people don't appreciate how deadly serious survival 
is survival is as serious as cancer as a heart attack 
as a bullet to the brain now 
if you want to take the position that none of these things matter from an absolute absolute perspective because 
it's all just a dream yeah you can take that perspective but you have to also be very careful here 
because you can say that or take that perspective while you're sitting at home on your couch listening to a video and 
it's all very comfortable and easy but then when someone runs over your dog with their 
car if someone robs your grandmother as she's 
walking home from the grocery store if uh you know if a 
burglar breaks into your house while you're asleep with your children with a gun 
are you still going to be able to hold that lofty metaphysical position of it's it's all just a dream yes it's all just 
a dream of course but how do you want your dream to unfold and 
what are your attachments to the dream i bet you have some attachments 
i bet there are ways your dream could unfold that you would really hate to see happen 
and hey i'm not wagging my finger at you here i also have attachments to the dream again people get this so wrong 
they think like oh well leo since you say you've you know you've realized god and other such things and and you've 
said you say that everything is a dream that means that you don't care what happens in your life right 
no of course not of course i care 
because i have relative goals for example one of my relative goals 
that i'm pursuing in my life is that i teach that's what i do that's my life purpose is to teach this stuff to spread this 
wisdom and these insights so look at how this works it's a bit paradoxical because on the one hand the 
wisdom and the insights tell us that all these attachments that are all just illusory standard buddhism right all 
these attachments to life are just illusory at your attachments to money to your children to your family all illusory and is that true yes of course 
it's true from the absolute perspective it's true but at the same time just to be able to teach that to people 
requires that one be alive the buddha can't teach you unless he has 
air in his lungs food in his belly and a comfortable place to sit 
the buddha can't teach you without food water air 
a safe environment a climate controlled area where it's not too hot and not too cold he can't teach 
you on the surface of the sun he can't teach you in the middle of a of a desert where you're dying of thirst 
so very narrow conditions are required for survival and for the propagation of spiritual 
teachings and work or any kind of life for that matter this is obvious stuff but 
it's worth thinking about in this context so for example for me to teach the 
things i want to teach i have to be concerned by very petty mundane 
issues that most people would think well leo surely you should be above this like leo 
you're so awake and so forth you should be above concerns for money but no see 
if i was above concerns for money i would literally not care about money and if i literally didn't care about money 
then i wouldn't even check my bank account and if i didn't check my bank account it would run out eventually and once it ran 
out my electricity would shut off my cable would shut off 
i wouldn't be able to power this camera that i'm recording this video on and i wouldn't be able to upload it anywhere 
you see how that works so it's actually perfectly okay for me not to care about money but then there 
are consequences the mistake that naive people make is 
they think oh well it's all just sort of a dream and i could just like stop caring about these things and everything will just be okay like god will guide me 
through life not so fast 
what kind of life do you want god is not something above you that is 
guiding you through your life this is god your thought process itself is god so 
when you think to yourself [ __ ] i gotta put more money in my bank account so i can pay today's electricity 
bill so that my electricity is not shut off so that i can do my work tomorrow when you think that that is god doing 
its work that's how god works that's not the only way god works but people overlook that that is how god works 
god works not just in supernatural ways god works in very practical ways in fact mostly that's 
what's happening in your life so if you care about 
your children not suffering see maybe you're above suffering and you might say oh leo i've i've become so enlightened 
that i'm not even worried about suffering anymore okay but you have children are they as enlightened as you 
do you care about their suffering now maybe you say leo i'm so enlightened that i don't even care about their suffering 
okay and that's possible that is 
perhaps a valid state of consciousness you could one day reach although i highly doubt any of you have 
reached it but let's say you've reached that point okay fine but then your children will 
suffer and die are you okay with that now if you say yes then what's the problem well technically there is no 
problem but the problem is that you're not going 
to be okay with it see you fool yourself telling yourself that you'll be okay with it but actually you won't be 
so that's where you have to be very careful so 
what you have to understand is that ideas inherently are dangerous things we tend 
to treat ideas as mere philosophy some sort of armchair stuff that we do 
and frankly a lot of what you see on youtube in terms of the sort of idea sphere on 
youtube is that it is just armchair philosophy it's it's 
ideas that have little real world consequences 
but even in those even in those areas it's still not true i mean look look at what's going on in our culture in our society for example 
with ideas within politics 
there are dangerous ideas within politics both on the left and the right now 
i would say that there are more on the right than there are on the left but hey you could say that i'm biased 
whatever but you can certainly find some very dangerous ideas for example if you wanted to on the radical right 
and that's not to pick on the right wingers but just like honestly there are some really toxic and dangerous ideas 
and ideologies floating around within conservative circles the extremes of 
conservative circles nationalism racism xenophobia people who 
want to start an ethno-state people who are happy with ethnic cleansing and they spread these ideas 
online and they gain traction they're sort of a battle over these ideas going on recently in the last five 
years online um that is not to pick on right-wingers 
here that is just to point out that ideas can be dangerous and this has always been the case throughout human 
history we tend to have reached this very point of luxury today in 
first world democracies where we tend to consider free speech as the highest goal and right and that you know 
everything is okay with free speech free speech makes everything good but 
it was never that way never to get to this point human civilization 
had to be built on deep restrictions on speech and on ideas because some ideas 
are corrosive to the very fabric of society and they're threatening to social hierarchies and to the economy 
and other such things for example an idea like that that the dollar is imaginary 
seems like an innocent idea right it seems in fact so obvious that the dollar is imaginary i mean if you if you corner 
anybody with this question they will admit to you that the dollar is of course imaginary 
we imagine it's value and the only reason it has value is because we collectively agree that it 
has value and then we're going to use it but if for example 
one keeps questioning the idea of a dollar more and more and more and more 
until literally everybody in the world 
stops believing in the dollar that can crash the entire economy 
that's the power of one idea and spiritual ideas are a special class 
of ideas which are the the trickiest in a sense they're the 
trickiest precisely because as we've talked about in the past a lot 
of times the human psyche all that it's doing as part of its survival function is that it is 
constructing various worldviews and perspectives and ideologies taking on various beliefs 
and it's using these to navigate its way in the world that those ideas shape how 
you see reality and how you interact with people animals things family members 
how you view your life whether you even believe your life is worth living this is all based upon ideas 
as soon as you get the idea that your life is no longer worth living 
that's the doorway for you to suicide and 40 000 people in america 
do that every year so ideas are 
very very powerful especially your ideas about yourself and especially your ideas about the structure of reality 
and so the problem though is that when you start to get closer to truth by deconstructing various fantasies and illusions and ideas what happens is that 
the ego gets very threatened and so there's 
pressure put upon the ego the closer it gets to truth to squirm away and to come 
up with some sort of fantasy or illusion or deception to again cloak itself in more ideas 
that's what the mind is doing that's how the mind survives 
and it had to be this way for you to be sitting here listening to me otherwise you'd be dead and i'd be dead 
if you and i and our ancestors for the last 100 generations were not like this so we're all like this 
nobody is immune to this 
so the problem fundamentally is this how do you teach 
deep truths about spirituality 
without people misconstruing it or weaponizing it or demonizing it or 
going into ideology belief 
worship messiah complexes spiritual ego 
and you know taking it too far in that direction because there's there's a problem with both sides on this side you 
have extreme skepticism and cynicism and sort of demonization so these are sort of like the people who 
don't like the ideas at all to begin with their minds are so closed that they just find any excuse 
imaginable to attack the ideas as false they smear they demonize whatever they can even do violence 
that's sort of the skeptical end of the spectrum 
and a lot of times the most skeptical people of spiritual ideas are the scientific and the atheistic and the 
rationalist people so you create enemies out of them when you teach this stuff uh but then there 
is uh the other end of the spectrum which is people who 
who love the ideas so much they get so enamored with the ideas that 
they stop thinking critically they lose common sense and they start to turn it into an 
ideology and they become cult-like about it they start to worship the teacher or the guru 
they hang on every word and then 
from that all sorts of problems can happen 
but that's not all the risks and dangers in a sense those are easy to control 
the stuff that's really difficult to control is that when you have people starting to engage in large numbers in 
serious spiritual work by doing meditation yoga psychedelics 
vision quests shamanic breathing exercises 
even stuff like going out and camping in nature i mean like look if i give you some advice like you know 
hey i went on a on a camping trip into the wilderness and i just sat around there all day and meditated and had a 
great time and i became peaceful and very spiritual i felt one with the universe you know out there in the in 
the forest and then you go try to emulate that and do it 
i mean that's in general that's great advice right you should be out nature more great advice 
but what if you go out there and a rattlesnake bites you what if there's a bear and you're not 
prepared what if there are wolves what if you get bitten by a spider 
what if a tick with some sort of disease bites you and infects you right so there's there's a lot of ways 
you could screw up your camping trip what if you get lost in the woods what if you get snowed in and run out of 
food and water you could die up there on in the mountains in the forest if you don't know what you're doing what if 
you're hiking up there and you break your leg or your ankle twist it somehow and you don't have any 
help what do you do well yeah there's dangers with doing that 
and you see it's difficult to give any kind of advice without without like over qualifying all the 
dangers because if you give the advice for a million people to go camping over the weekend 
uh a few of them are gonna break their ankles a few of them are gonna run into 
bears a few of them are gonna get bitten by snakes and god knows what else happens up there 
and of course i'm very well aware of this when it comes to doing meditation and self-inquiry and various kinds of 
spiritual work which is why i have those two videos i have a video called 
the dark side of meditation where i talk about all the downsides of meditation that normally you don't hear about very 
much from spiritual teachers and uh i talk about 
uh in my other episode the dangers of spiritual work i talk about many of the other kinds of dangers of spiritual work 
not just with meditation you see so actually a lot of people who 
get into spirituality are not aware of the risks of spirituality 
there's quite a lot of risks and in fact it would take a couple of hours to articulate all the risks and 
even if that was done you would still likely fall into these traps because it's not enough just to hear 
them really you don't appreciate their significance and depth until you're in 
the thick of it i want to share some of these with you here i mean i've shared them in the past 
but i want to share some more poignant stories because i really want to get it through to you because one of my biggest concerns 
is that my teachings are not corrupted or misused or abused in some way 
this is not just something new that i've adopted yesterday this is something that if you uh if you're a long-time listener 
of mine you should be aware this is something i've been doing for years now perhaps not as well as i as i could 
do and recent events are now getting me to think much deeper about what are all 
the precautions and safeguards that i could put into place within reason uh you know to reduce harm 
because the general rule with my teachings is this right like if you're ever confused 
here's the general rule and i think i've said this in the past as well is that if you're applying my teachings 
and that is leading you towards something that is harmful or leading to to your own suffering and suffering of 
others or endangering yourself and others especially physical bodily harm 
then you should immediately stop and ask yourself wait a minute why would leo teach that 
and you should recognize that ah maybe that's not what he taught maybe i'm misunderstanding something or i'm 
misapplying something because it doesn't make sense that leo would 
teach that these teachings are about improving the 
quality of your life fundamentally so if these teachings are not improving 
the quality of your life that's a immediate common sense sort of 
litmus test that you get to use to realize that either this teaching is not right for 
you you're misapplying it you're applying it at the wrong time in your life in the wrong way in the wrong place 
you misunderstood something about it you got to change how you're applying it 
or maybe just this particular technique is not right for you you need a different technique 
common sense common sense basic common sense 
is absolutely required in doing spiritual work but that's not enough common sense is not enough you 
also need care and you need intelligence and wisdom 
you need the ability to see how your own mind is fooling you 
when it is 
you need to have awareness of different traps that people commonly fall into 
in this work 
so within spirituality there's a a phrase actually coined i think it's by 
stan groff if he didn't coin it he popularized it it's called a spiritual emergency 
spiritual emergency uh stan groff teaches holotropic 
breathing he's a psychiatrist he's written many books upon 
various problems that are encountered with people who undergo serious deep 
spiritual purification work he was also an early pioneer of lsd research back in the 1950s before it was banned 
and so he's been working with with with people for his entire career for like 50 years 
either through psychedelics or through sort of this shamanic breathing method 
in workshops and so forth and uh and basically what happens is that quite a few people who who do serious spiritual 
work will have these spiritual emergencies what is a spiritual emergency it's when 
basically you sort of deconstruct the mind so much that your reality starts to melt 
and you're not sure what's up and down anymore and then you get very emotional you get 
very confused maybe you have a mental illness and that 
feeds into it and makes it even worse uh or maybe you have some sort of trauma 
from your childhood that bubbles up and now is making you irrational and so you 
start to behave in confused and paranoid ways and and you're not sure what's happening 
to you maybe you're starting to experience mystical visions for example from doing lots of meditative work or 
breathing work or whatever and then you're not sure how to interpret those visions or what they mean these visions can be demonic in 
nature if your mind skews in that in that direction and so on and so there are so many different possible 
permutations see the difficulty is accounting for all those possible 
permutations i've been for example on meditation 
retreats where i had a meditation partner we would you know we would partner up i had a meditation partner i remember on 
one retreat it was sort of a classic 10-day vipassana retreat and we you know we 
were just chatting about he told me he was going to this retreat for the last 10 years and i was kind of impressed that was my first time there 
he was going there for 10 years in a row and i sort of asked him like well what were your experiences early on like and 
he said like man you know on some retreats on some years i would go so deep into the meditation 
that like stuff started happening to me i thought i was losing my mind in the middle of the retreat i had to actually 
like leave the retreat and physically pay for a taxi to drive me to the 
nearest bookstore into their like psychotherapy section i would just sit 
in that aisle for the whole day and just read books on you know psychotherapy conditions 
to try to explain what was happening with me from all this meditating i don't know exactly what was happening 
to him he had some kind of visions or you know hallucinations or whatever and he was starting to feel like he's 
losing his mind his his reality was collapsing around him and he wasn't handling it very well 
because he was sort of like a normie he didn't have a very good foundation theoretical foundation for what could happen 
and then and then so that happened and then you know he got over it and in that case he 
was successful but that could also turn out very negatively 
he could for example after his meditation retreat is over you know and he's in that very fragile state he could 
end up going back home and then um you know shooting himself in the head 
because he doesn't know how to handle it he doesn't know what's happening and he's spiraling out of control and maybe 
he has a sort of a a borderline mental disorder that he didn't even 
realize he had it was triggered by the you know intense meditation and that happens 
i'll give you another example uh i was at another retreat it was like a consciousness workshop that i was at 
some years ago and i specifically because i you know i'm a teacher of this stuff so i was very curious i asked the 
facilitator he was sort of a master you know enlightened master i asked him 
um you never talk about this but like i mean you've you've taught for like 40 years you've taught 
awakening and enlightenment and no self and these sorts of things you know very very advanced stuff 
and i'm just curious in all these years of running these workshops have you ever had anybody 
like lose their mind or lose their [ __ ] or you know something bad happen 
and he kind of looked at me rather dismissively and kind of flippantly and he just kind of said no 
i was i was rather surprised now this wasn't a teacher who taught like hundreds of thousands of people 
he taught in very small groups and most of his clients are rather advanced 
elite clients they pay a lot of money to go there so that weeds out a lot of the riff raff 
and the crazy people um but even so i was surprised because 
other spiritual teachers i talked to they do talk about these sorts of like 
edge cases where things go horribly wrong 
and but later later i actually 
like a year or two later i talked to one of the one of this facilitator's assistants i talked to one 
of his assistants and just to kind of like you know get a little bit of behind-the-scenes scoop of you know what what happens what goes on there 
and then the assistant told me oh like oh yeah one yeah i asked him like you guys ever get like crazy people 
because you know i'm like sometimes i get crazy people like emailing me and stuff do you ever do i can't believe you guys don't get that and he's like oh 
yeah actually we uh just the other year we had we had someone come to our workshop and 
and then when i looked in his eyes i could just tell he wasn't all there and i'm like wait a minute he wasn't all 
there what does that mean and he's like well well he was basically like a psychotic 
i'm like psychotic what happened and then he's like well as we went deeper it was like a week-long workshop as we went 
deeper and deeper into this workshop um the the person just became more erratic and more erratic and 
uncontrollable in their behavior to the point where you could look at him and try to like communicate with him but you could see it wasn't registering in his 
eyes he was off like living in his own reality 
and i said well what did you guys do and he said well eventually we just had to call the police called the police they they came over 
and just took him away they didn't like arrest him but uh just you know 
um basically he he had they had to evacu evict him from the workshop 
and then and then what happened after that well the police just kind of drove him off i guess back home or somewhere wherever he came from 
yeah that kind of stuff happens another example i'll cite to you is um there's these enlightenment intensives 
i've done several of them three or four different ones around the country around the world 
um of these enlightenment intensives and there was this one interesting anecdote i was talking to one of the 
facilitators of this enlightenment intensive and just kind of picking his brain about you know 
what kind of crazy stuff happens at these intensives they're called intensives because they're they're [ __ ] intense 
people lose their [ __ ] at these intentions they start to yell and scream i've personally experienced this where 
like you're in a you're in this quiet intensive it's like it's almost like a meditation retreat and then somebody just stands up with this violent almost 
homicidal rage and just starts yelling and like throwing [ __ ] across the room because 
they were they were doing some deep self inquiry you know that came up some trauma came up or somewhat of some rage 
came up whatever and then they encourage you to not to hold that back but to actually express it in a safe in a safe 
way but it can also get out of hand uh like in one of these intensives the facilitator told me that uh 
uh you know he was you know the facilitators are supposed to look after everybody in the intensive you know there's like usually 
30 50 people at an intensive you know people everyone's doing their own thing it's sort of like herding cats 
and so the facilitator you know he was hurting the cats and doing all this stuff and then there's like lunch time and so lunch time comes along and 
everybody sits down at the dinner tables or the lunch tables and they're they're eating their lunch ordering their food and then he notices this one lady who 
was just kind of quiet the whole day and you know he he he kind of saw that there was something weird about her he 
was kind of keeping an eye on her the whole day but he notices that you know she's just got this like stole stone 
cold look on her face and and and he sees her like in the corner of his eye he sees her walking into the kitchen the 
back of the kitchen where you know students aren't supposed to go that's just for the staff 
and then he just kind of gets curious and he walks back there just to check up on her see maybe she took a wrong turn 
somewhere and then he sees her and she's standing there with she takes a a giant chef's knife 
from the uh from the kitchen you know the kitchen you know prep area 
there where the chefs were making the food for everybody she takes that knife and then and she's walking out out towards the kitchen area and he just 
kind of asks her what like hey what are you doing what do you think you're doing with that knife and she says 
i'm gonna go stab somebody and she names the person she's gonna go 
stab and she just says it very calmly like i'm going to go stab this person 
very commonly as though nothing is happening she's sort of like in a trans like a zombie like trans 
and so the facilitators you know he was very good they they train you if you're a good facilitator you don't you don't 
like fly into a rage you stay calm and he just said no you don't want to do that here give 
me the knife hand me the knife you know she refused for a minute and he's like he's like hand me the knife 
you don't need the knife she handed him the knife and he's like okay now go back go back in the kitchen 
area and sit down and eat your dinner or your lunch and that's it that's it 
that was the whole story 
so what does all this mean what this means is that 
spirituality has inherent dangers to it it's not easy work 
and honestly many people are not suited for this work 
because their minds are unstable their lives are unstable 
they can't even handle the basics of life like keeping a job or paying their bills 
or not being addicted to booze and whatever else 
and then they get into serious spiritual work and they get in way over their head 
and they also probably lack the theoretical foundation because honestly how many people have 
enough time and patience and wherewithal to sit through 300 hours of 
my talks not many and i would say that even if you did sit 
through 300 hours of my talks it would not be enough to cover all of the edge cases all of the possibilities you would 
really need to also listen to other teachers read a bunch of books like on my book list 
watch a bunch of other videos you know attend workshops and go to retreats and do all this stuff and only then would 
you be in a position where you can sort of 
guide yourself down this path 
another story of a lady i've told this story in the past there's actually a book about this on my book list 
this lady who who was part of the transcendental meditation movement back in like the 1970s 
and she became one of their sort of teachers and facilitators and she became so advanced as a yogi 
uh and a meditator that she was invited to like the highest levels somewhere in europe in switzerland or some place 
where they would do these advanced yoga trainings with with the master yogi who you know who pioneered trends on 
transcendental meditation i don't remember his name yogi magesh or mageesh something like 
that i forget his name anyways um 
she became very advanced with the practices it came effortlessly to her but but this spiritual school 
at the time like transitional meditation they didn't give you a lot of theory they didn't tell you about what all the 
different states of meditation and yoga are what all the possibilities are they didn't really even explain what enlightenment was or awakening or no 
self or god they didn't explain any of this stuff really they just taught you a technique so she started doing this 
technique doing this technique and then and then she quit and she got married and years a few years passed she she had 
a child with her husband she got married she she even stopped meditating by that point she was sort of out of it 
but she did spend like five years there you know in europe meditating but then she came out of it 
and then and then she's just literally walking out of the bus at the bus stop 
doing her chores as you know a mother does and then suddenly she had an instant 
enlightenment where she lost all sense of self and she was completely 
dumb struck and paralyzed by this occurrence because she had no reference 
point for what it was she lost her sense of self entirely as though it never even existed 
and then she kind of came home to her husband and she's just telling him like i have no more sense of self and he's 
like what do you mean where to go what does that even mean to not have a sense of self right a normal person doesn't understand these things 
this was some time ago this was before youtube this was like back in the 80s or something i don't know 
um so there wasn't a lot of literature available about this she didn't have a lot of information and then so she struggled for he for 
years with the sense of no self she was terrified she she thought she was having some sort of mental disorder she started 
going to therapists and shrinks who also didn't understand what was happening to her they didn't know what awakening was 
they didn't know what no self was they didn't understand what yoga and meditation would do to a person 
uh you know advanced stages and so uh 
and yeah she she got depressed she got she had panic attacks every night she couldn't sleep she was stressed this 
went on for years for years and years and years and years until finally she accidentally ran into 
some kind of new therapist who had some sort of understanding of non-duality and 
awakening and was able to actually introduce her to some sort of spiritual master who then was able to explain to 
her like oh what you're going through this is just a these are just the early stages of classical you know buddhist 
awakening nothing to be worried about this is normal in fact it's a good thing that you lost your sense of self and 
that completely reframed everything that was happening for her and then she could be happy again 
it took her a while but she could be happy again um 
after a certain point people like to talk about eckhart tolle 
as though he's a sweet lovable innocent little man just sitting up there he's being so sweet to you telling you sweet 
little things this little little eckhart tolle german man 
but what people don't realize they don't connect these two simple dots using common sense is that 
the reason eckhart tolle is this sweet little innocent man sitting there before you now 
is because in his like early 30s or 40s i don't know how old he was 
the dude was massively suicidally depressive for years 
he was on the brink of killing himself the way he writes it as i remember it 
that he was basically to the point where he was gonna kill himself like today 
and then in his mind it's sort of something clicked and said like his mind said something like well 
either i'm going to kill myself today or i'm just going to completely surrender and stop resisting and then he 
just surrendered and stopped resisting and he had his awakening 
now people hear that and say oh well how lovely how wonderful and all that yeah it's lovely and wonderful 
but you don't know how it felt to go through years of the depression that led up to that 
and you have no idea how close he came to killing himself you see because 
um see for eckhart tolle now in retrospect you look at him you see his whole life 
it looks beautiful and wonderful and all this but i want you to try to imagine how many 
people there are in the world like eckhart tolle who have been depressed and suicidal for 
years and then they reach the point where they've had enough and that's it they're right on the break 
and then maybe they're gonna have their awakening but they don't and end up killing themselves 
with pills or with a gun or something and see you don't hear about those 
people nobody ever tells you about those people those people don't go on oprah winfrey 
and they don't write a book that sells 50 million copies 
and their face isn't all over youtube and everywhere else 
and they're not these sweet people they're [ __ ] dead or they're criminals or they're in an 
insane asylum and you never hear about them again 
these are some of the dark realities of spiritual work and it's important that you be aware of 
these also of course it's important that you 
understand that we shouldn't fear monger about spiritual 
work so even though there are these rare edge cases and things can go horribly wrong 
things can go horribly wrong with almost anything if you do it enough things can go horribly wrong with 
airplane travel with car travel with marriages with relationships with sex 
with business with investing in wall street things can go terribly wrong 
it's just that these tend to be more socially acceptable and they're not threatening to the ego 
therefore there's no incentive to play up when there's this kind of screw-up 
see when an airplane crashes it's tragic people you know mourn the loss but we 
quickly move on because there's no incentive for the ego mind to latch onto they say ah you see 
airplanes are evil look how bad i told you how bad it was 
flying in airplanes is a cult people in a cult flying airplanes are [ __ ] crazy 
that's what's really going on see there's no incentive for the 
ordinary mind to do that with airplanes because airplanes don't threaten the ordinary mind 
but with spiritual teachings there is that incentive and so the mind becomes very selective in how it cherry picks 
its data and what it emphasizes and what it doesn't 
now even though i tell you all this it might sound like it's some kind of excuse it's not an excuse and i'm very much 
committed to sharing honestly with you these sorts of edge cases 
and other traps and helping you to avoid them and honestly many of them can be avoided simply through awareness of them 
and discussions like these the problem is how do i make sure that everybody who 
watches my content listens to this episode and watches it all the way through again 
the more detailed i get the longer the video runs the fewer people will watch it and also many people in fact some of 
the craziest and most reckless people they're not concerned about safety so when they hear some disclaimer from me 
or they see a video from me which is sort of safety oriented are they going to listen 
is a criminal going to listen to my 
warnings about not turning these ideas into some sort of justification for his criminal actions 
for example you've heard me say in the past that morality is absolutely relative 
there is no right and wrong what is considered criminal and legal and illegal these are relative 
social constructions they are that's the truth now someone hears that and says ah okay 
so that means leo says that i can go rob a bank and 
it's not bad 
yeah it's not bad in any absolute sense but you have to consider the consequences see 
uh what are the consequences of you doing that first of all what i said the truth has 
no prescription to it it's non-prescriptive it's not normative and this is a general point about any truth 
all truth is non-prescriptive what that means is regardless of what is true what 
you do about it that's on you that's your responsibility you can't derive an ought from an is so 
just because robbing a bank is socially constructed and relative 
does not give you license to rob a bank nor does it excuse you from the consequences of your actions 
when you rob a bank god is not going to punish you but your fellow humans will 
you see 
you're not punished by some sort of external rule or moral system which tells you 
that something you're doing is bad you're punished by the action itself 
when you cheat lie steal kill rape 
do violence to when you manipulate exploit corrupt 
when you're doing those things when you're being selfish there's a natural consequence that comes 
from being selfish 
it doesn't come from god 
it's challenging for me to preempt and to 
pre-envision every way in which people can misconstrue and 
misinterpret what i say i try to address 
many common traps but there are many extreme edge cases which don't even enter my mind 
because i'm not even that creative most of the time 
for example it never even occurred to me that someone 
might get the idea that jumping off a bridge is a legitimate spiritual 
technique because the way my mind works that's so 
[ __ ] stupid 
that it would almost be an insult to my own intelligence and to the intelligence of my audience 
to be mentioning in a video that you shouldn't jump off a bridge as a spiritual technique 
but hey apparently some people find that a valid spiritual technique 
i often see all my forum people coming up with just stupid ideas for for doing 
things and i can't personally monitor all of it for example i remember one time 
i caught a guy on my forum who sort of came up with this technique of 
of uh i guess his baptism um 
so he would fill his bathtub and he would like put ice in it and stuff like ice cold water and then he would attempt to like drown himself in that ice cold 
water to the point where he was like totally out of air so when i saw that i mean obviously 
obviously that's dangerous and then he was trying to like promote this as a technique to other people 
and you know i contacted him and i told him like i mean you're doing some crazy stuff 
there in a very hardcore in a certain sense that's admirable that you're willing to go to these lengths to you know to awaken yourself or to i don't 
know what you're trying to prove there um but uh but like we can't have this as a 
technique for the rest of the people on the forum 
people get crazy ideas people get desperate 
and the the real difficulty here is that the mind is so constructed that it can 
literally take any truth or any teaching and twist it and distort 
it into its polar opposite very very easily it almost takes no effort for the mind 
to do this for example like you might say well leo but aren't all these problems just 
showcasing the fact that new age spirituality whatever you teach let's say it's new way of spirituality that 
this is all this is all sort of newfangled unexplored territories all dangerous stuff that's why new age stuff 
is dangerous so you should go go to the classical religions that's where it's safe 
in the classics in the classics you know christianity catholicism 
judaism buddhism islam 
but see this is this is a this misunderstands the depth of the problem 
you see an ignorant mind will find a way to make almost anything dangerous 
and the amount of people who are actually killed as the result of christianity catholicism islam 
and other religions is way more than new age spirituality if that's what you 
want to call what i teach although i myself wouldn't call it that um 
new age stuff is actually something separate and i'm not i'm not a big fan of the new age for you 
rationalists and atheists and debunkers in the audience i'm not a new ager 
i have many critiques of new age thinking and there's many problems with it 
but also they get some stuff right so it's a mixed bag but um but i mean 
really think about this you think christianity is so safe 
it only seems safe because it's culturally accepted and just normalized in the same way as that airplane example 
it's not actually safe uh think about how many people commit suicide 
because they have homosexual urges but christianity tells them that homosexuality is a sin 
and these people they try and they try and they try to be heterosexual you know they do these sort of conversion therapy 
on themselves and it doesn't work because they're just gay 
but they can't admit it to themselves so first of all they're living with years and years of guilt and it's corroding 
their mind and ruining their life millions of people like this around the world exist 
but that's just you know never mind that kind of suffering which goes on for years and years and years 
and then some percentage of those people actually kill themselves maybe one percent 
but since there are so many christians and catholics who believe this stuff seriously one percent of all those is 
still going to be thousands of people maybe they they have some sort of gay affair because they were trying to 
suppress their you know sexual urges they have a gay affair and then their family finds out that they that they had this fair then they can't live with that 
shame and they kill themselves same thing in islam too 
it's probably even worse than islam 
for example the catholic church tells you that if you 
if you repent your sins to god god will forgive you and you will go to heaven 
sounds like innocent advice right what what could i mean beautiful beautiful loving advice this is advice from jesus 
right this is what jesus taught what could be wrong with this well 
so does that mean that if i murder my my neighbor and rape his wife 
and then i go to confessional and confess it to the to the priest he forgives me god forgives me i get to 
heaven right is that what that means you see if i have the kind of mind that thinks 
that way i can take that crit the most powerful and beautiful of 
christian teachings and messages christ's message of forgiveness and redemption and heaven for for all and i can abuse 
that into a justification to rape my neighbor's wife because i will be forgiven 
and god doesn't judge 
and everyone who repents even the worst sinner is saved 
or how about let's say i've been a good person my whole life and then what does the 
christian church tell me if i've been a good person my whole life and i die in a car accident 
i'm going to heaven right so i go i ask my priest hey you know father 
i've been a good person no i've gone to church i've been faithful to my wife i've been a good provider for my kids 
what if i die in a car accident tomorrow am i going to heaven he's going to say of course you are son okay and then i say to myself you know i 
walk away from me and i say okay so that means that if i jump off a bridge i'm going to heaven why wait 
why wait for the car accident why wait for my life to end why don't i just jump off a bridge i'm going to 
heaven after all it's heaven it's beautiful up there why would i want to stay in this earth here 
i would be an idiot not to go to heaven and so i go jump off a bridge 
you see even very innocent teachings 
can be horribly abused and twisted because that's 
the mechanism of the ego mind it can twist anything into whatever it wants it's constructing reality it's 
constructing fictions and illusions it's justifying whatever it wants to itself it can justify murder rape terrorism 
suicide bombings hatred racism slavery all of these 
things have been justified using spirituality and religion 
for over 2000 years so now here is where the scientifically 
minded rationally minded atheistically minded person comes in and says ah leo well you're just proving our point is 
that all of this spiritual new age old age religious mumbo-jumbo all of it is 
[ __ ] all of it leads to all sorts of evil so let's just 
throw it all away okay let's do that and then what do you got 
what do you got what do you replace that with you replace it with materialism 
reductionism scientism 
and i don't mean just materialism in the sort of atomic realm i mean materialism in the 
because there's a there's a going to be a there's going to be now a pragmatism that comes along with this and now your whole life is just about running around 
earning money also no moral code 
no ethical code you don't believe in ethics you just believe in maximizing profit 
and doing whatever you can get away with practically speaking whatever technology you can build let's build that technology 
there's no limits on what technology you're willing to build who you're willing to sell it to 
uh and so you've got this capitalistic materialistic system very pragmatic 
no no spirit no soul to anything this means you can cheat on people 
you can be sexually promiscuous you can objectify the opposite sex 
you can use them manipulate them exploit them you can start to experiment with drugs 
recreational drugs and pornography and all this stuff and alcohol 
so all of the classic stage orange excesses and so you go into that for 
five or ten years and what happens 
you become even more suicidal even more depressed than if you were 
classically religious or new age 
and then you kill yourself 
the majority of suicides don't actually happen from religion they they happen from a lack of meaning 
a lack of purpose a sort of a hopelessness a nihilism that people get 
drawn into 
a sort of a hollow materialism where you just acquire more and more and more wealth and then eventually you realize 
that there's no amount of wealth in the world that will make you happy and then you end up in a situation like 
anthony bournein or avicii 
both of whom killed themselves some years back 
so first of all you should recognize that the the problem of suicide is a very general problem 
it is not confined to religion or to spirituality or to the new age 
it's a it's a very broad problem next you should recognize that 
actually religion and spirituality when done properly and responsibly 
saves thousands of people from suicide 
it does because it gives people a sense of direction in their life it saves a lot of drug addicts from overdosing you know 
that's that's one of the most effective ways to save a drug addict from overdosing because most drug addicts they're sort of spironic stage red what 
comes after red blue so many drug addicts and actually criminals too 
for that matter you know violent criminals if they can get reformed and you know it's rare but it does happen some 
percentage of these people maybe five ten percent they do end up reforming themselves and becoming you know well functioning members of society what 
happens is that they move up from from red to stage blue and what that means is that they find 
god they find religion now it's not a very advanced you know kind of thing that i teach it's it's a 
kind of a crude dogmatic religion but just the fact that they start to go go to church they're part of a community 
they have some rules to follow you know some simple basics they do the jordan peterson thing 
that gives them a sense of direction and grounding in their life and allows them to 
kick the addiction the opioids the heroin 
the meth have a 
family saves thousands of lives 
and also the same dynamic sort of exists on the transition between orange and 
green a lot of orange people they dry themselves crazy with their endless materialistic pursuits and then when 
they you know when that endeavor exhausts itself and they get no satisfaction 
then they start looking towards you know what else is there and then they find some sort of new agey stage green 
spirituality some meditation some yoga practice some vipassana retreat they go to maybe 
some psychedelics you know then maybe they start micro dosing some mushrooms some lsd it starts to help them a lot of 
people cure their depression and their anxiety with 
with mushrooms there's actually going to be approval clinical fda approval of mushrooms and mdma soon for 
treating depression ptsd anxiety other such disorders legitimate therapeutic uses the science 
behind this is undeniable at this point absolutely undeniable it works it's very 
effective it works better than antidepressants and other things you know ketamine very effective for treating depression 
so this is we're on the cutting edge of this now i'm actually very excited about this these possibilities for psychedelics 
um so there's that transition from orange to stage green 
where at stage green you do open yourself up from the rationalism and the scientism and the materialism to something higher something more 
spiritual and you know maybe you smoke some wheat or whatever and you have a little bit of insight opens your mind opens your heart 
a bit and uh and then that can save you from from suicide and depression too 
because again you find something higher so there's a sort of a isomorphism between the transition from stage red to 
blue and from orange to green 
and personally i get emails from people quite often 
who tell me that they were suicidal then they you know were desperately searching on 
youtube found my content started listening and then now they're free of that they're free of their 
depression their their anxiety they have a sense of direction in their life and that literally 
actualize or save their lives and it's very rewarding to to receive 
those emails thank you for sending me those i've i've gotten dozens of those over the i don't even 
check my emails that much if i check them all there would probably be hundreds of them like that 
now of course i also get emails from from crazy people i do get sometimes emails 
uh from people who say that you know they started going down this rabbit hole and now you know their life is less stable than it used to be 
they're less happy than they used to be they're suffering more well part of that of course is just the nature of the spiritual journey 
there has to be a cost you must figure there has to be a cause for awakening 
because if there wasn't everyone would be awake what is that cost that cost is this 
massive dip of of nihilism and spiritual turmoil that 
you go through in order to finally break through 
and i wish i could say that everybody you know is sort of everyone gets a happy ending and everyone goes through the dip 
and then just comes out the other end all happy and awakened but that's of course not the case 
some people will go into this dip of nihilism and 
it'll spiral out of control and they're going to end up in a mental 
institution or they're going to make some very bad reckless choices in their life 
or in the worst case scenario they'll kill themselves 
how do you prevent that what do i say to prevent that 
it's challenging because you're sort of you're damned if you're doing damned if you don't 
if you stop teaching then the net result of that is that 
actually that hurts more people because the teachings help more people than they hurt 
significantly more orders of magnitude more but there's always those few edge cases 
that make you wonder what could be done to make the teachings 
more robust more clear more foolproof 
one of the things i want to do is i want to 
i want to make people more aware of the what they're getting themselves into 
so one of the problems is that sort of like youngsters come along they don't have any foundation in their life and then they they go down this rabbit hole 
of awakening and they start learning about these advanced insights that i share and honestly my work is designed 
to be advanced this is not entry-level work it's advanced advanced stuff i talk 
about stuff that's very psychologically threatening especially some of the latest stuff i've been talking about 
and it can get misunderstood by people who just adopt it as a belief system and don't have a 
direct consciousness of it which is why grounding all these insights in direct experience is so crucial and i keep 
stressing that all the time but no matter how much i say it people are going to take it as an ideology 
anyways but one thing that i will do going forward 
is i will try to stress and disclaim more when a topic that i'm talking about 
is sort of an advanced topic and that it can it can 
it has the potential to destabilize your mind 
part of the challenge for me is that see you see the way my my mind 
you probably should understand this by now but my mind doesn't work like a normal mind 
my mind actually enjoys it literally enjoys the process of deconstructing reality 
to me it gives me pleasure to do this now not always i i experience plenty of suffering and sometimes i hate it 
sometimes i get an insight that you know bothers me um and i struggle to integrate it that 
does happen to me but in general i enjoy deconstructing reality 
but that's not all people and actually it's taken me a long time 
of teaching and getting feedback to start to understand that about others see part of the part of the biggest 
challenges of being a human is that whatever you are whatever your strengths are you just tend to assume that everyone has that strength you just sort 
of assume that that's just a innate human ability for example my strength of being radically 
open-minded that's like an innate ability that i have that i see that it took me many decades of experience to 
realize that most people don't have that and so i have to take that into account 
when speaking to them well well likewise with this idea of deconstructing the mind 
i love this idea i'm very passionate about this idea this is what i teach i will continue to teach it because that's 
my area of expertise and where i can help people the most i feel 
but it's important you understand that deconstructing the mind is a very long 
and deep slippery slope and so on the surface many of my episodes will 
start to help you deconstruct the mind here at the beginning of the slippery slope but then you're gonna start sliding down and you're gonna if you 
take it seriously you're gonna deconstruct more and more and more and then once you sort of get to the to the lower third of the slope that's where 
you have to be careful because you can deconstruct your mind in a sort of a dangerous way 
what do i mean by that well let me give you an example a good example is with fear you know i 
have episodes for example that talk about how fear is an illusion now is that true 
yes in the absolute sense all fear is illusion and ultimately the fear of death is 
illusion um and the reason i say that is because 
it's true and my priority is to say what's true 
but the problem is that people can misinterpret that because someone could say well if all 
death is illusion then i got nothing to fear so why would 
i inhibit myself in any way from doing anything so for example 
why should i worry about pressing the the the brake pedal on my car in fact why don't i just 
saw the pedal off my car i don't need a brake pedal 
only cowards press the brake pedal when they're driving 
i only need a gas pedal and then if i tell you no no you need a 
pedal you should have a pedal a brake pedal on your car you might respond to me as like 
but leo you told me fear is an illusion what are you afraid of leo what are you afraid is gonna happen 
you afraid i'm gonna crash oh that's ego that's ego in you leo it's 
only the ego that's afraid 
you see a lack of basic intelligence and common sense 
will get you into a lot of trouble very quickly with this work 
the things i say are advanced they're nuanced they require 
oftentimes years of contemplation on a single insight to really understand it 
for example the insight that self and other are the same 
the self other distinction is the same you can collapse that distinction 
that's something i've talked about that's a that's a core tenet of non-duality there cannot be a distinction between 
self and other if there is you've got a duality so now when you say that in the abstract of 
people you can say it in sort of an innocent sense where people hear it and they kind of a little bit understand it 
and then they say oh yeah okay i accept it i buy it makes sense to me but they have no idea how radical 
that insight is they're not conscious of that they're not conscious that self and 
other is a conceptual boundary within one's mind 
and then see they hear a lot of other sort of more soft neo-invited teachers teaching this same 
truth but in a very sort of casual 
milk toast way they hear it and it just it's all it sounds all lovely and beautiful but then oftentimes when i 
teach it and i go really deep on it i will go so deep on it that i will really make you feel the solipsism of it 
and this is where a lot of people struggle is with the solipsism of it because then at some point it hits you 
that wait a minute if there's no difference between self and other that very much seems like 
i'm everything and this is all that there is and it's solipsism 
and solid system is bad right and then we go down that whole road 
um and i'm not prepared to talk about solipsism that's a separate topic i want 
to shoot a video on i've been planning that video for a while now to address it in detail i'm not going to 
address it here my point though is that many of these insights 
are very challenging to integrate and to accept fully when you get to the rock 
bottom of it whereas on the surface it seems nice and and wonderful when you really feel it it's a totally different 
animal like i remember the first time that i became conscious like really deeply conscious 
that there is no boundary between me and anybody else and when that happened i 
i freaked out i couldn't believe what i realized 
i i it was so radical because what happened there for me was 
that i literally became conscious that my parents were imaginary when i became conscious that my parents 
were imaginary it threw me for such a loop it was such 
a mind [ __ ] that it it took me a few days of sort of 
just like sitting there like that 
in disbelief wondering like was that did i get that right i can't it can't possibly be right 
i must be mistaken but then the more i thought about it the more i realized i'm not mistaken 
it's just something that's so radical like i need to figure out how to 
how to integrate this and i'm not sure how it even got to the point where i i 
i actually uh i messaged one of the moderators on my 
forum who who's conscious of these sorts of things just just to get some some input 
and some feedback about that 
just to kind of check myself you know am i going crazy or not 
um and that's me i have a i have a rather 
unique and not to brag but i have a rather rather strong mind 
strong in the sense that like i love these kinds of insights to me when i realized that my parents were 
imaginary on the one hand it's like kind of horrific to realize that 
on the other hand it's the greatest joy it really depends on how you look at it and i can see it both ways in fact i do 
um and you know now i love it now i love it it's good um 
but you know again that's me like see it's hard for me to get into your mind and to see how you would react to that i 
imagine that most of you would react quite badly to that uh 
it might throw your life into disarray you might even feel like you're losing your mind you might feel like you're going crazy a bit 
and i've been there like i mean i've i've taken psychedelics that that sent me into a into a full-blown madness 
full-blown man like i know what madness feels like uh i've been there 
it's a very good experience in retrospect now you don't want to be stuck there um 
and i integrated it but how many of you are going to be able to integrate it or not i don't know 
so in these kinds of situations i want to give more warning you know pre 
pre warning for folk that this is sort of like deep waters 
where you could get yourself into trouble 
and i've done that a lot with psychedelics you know i talked positively about psychedelics a lot but actually before this incident happened 
with the forum i actually i already recorded i have i have in my render pipeline right now 
i have a episode about the dangers of psychedelics where i go through all of the risks and dangers of psychedelics 
very methodically um because 
i was looking i i'm always looking on my forum for instances where people are misusing psychedelics 
because i'm i'm very touchy about that because to me one of the most important things about psychedelics is precisely because they're so [ __ ] powerful 
and so important as a technology that the misuse of them this is one of the greatest 
this is one of the greatest tragedies and problems that we that we have collectively that 
needs to be solved so for me anytime i see somebody on the forum misusing psychedelics 
even something as simple as like not weighing a dose just eyeballing it i'll generally you 
know chime in there and i'll all 
sort of get into space about it i'll make him feel bad for doing that 
but leo isn't everything good didn't you say everything is good and perfect in the world why is anything bad 
of course everything is good and perfect in the absolute sense but 
in the relative sense in the survival sense if you care about surviving 
then you have to ask yourself how do you want to survive do you want to survive in a 
in a society that's crazy and chaotic and people are slitting each other's throats 
or do you want to survive in a comfortable society that treats you so decently 
see so it very much matters and it has always mattered to me 
the practical effect and influence of these teachings 
on ordinary people's lives that has always mattered to me and in fact 
you have to understand where i began i began this whole thing from personal development i was a personal development teacher i 
didn't even know about spirituality or awakening when i started this thing actualize that org 
eight years ago i learned along the way what you see with me is you see my own 
evolutionary process unfold in these talks and a lot of times what 
i'm sharing with you is insights that i've had recently and sometimes i'm figuring these insights out 
and you have to understand that i am fallible i don't always say the right things 
sometimes i speak just because i'm sloppy sometimes i misstate a factual statement here there 
on occasion um sometimes i misanalyze the situation i get it wrong sometimes i have an insight but the insight isn't 
fully baked it needs more time to bake it'll take two more years to bake it but i still share it with you 
because it's part of my process and because i expect you to be verifying 
all these things for yourselves as i've said multiple times and as as i 
stressed in my three-part series called self-deception 
that's one of the most important series i have is the three-part self-deception series it really addresses a lot of these 
straps here and really the core issue that we're talking about which is self-deception 
because that's how you get yourself into trouble is through self-deception uh i said at the end of that series that 
i am not immune to self-deception 
nobody is immune to self-deception i don't care how awake you are how enlightened you are 
you're not immune to self-deception i've seen even the the most respected of enlightened masters 
deceiving themselves in one way or another i've seen it it happens trust me 
you can trust me on that um and if you don't want to double check it for yourself 
like you should with anything i say so 
an important safety feature of all of actualize.org is this idea 
that you have to verify the things that are said to you through your own direct experience i don't know how many times i can 
repeat that anymore it's tiring to repeat it 
that's part of the problem with these disclaimers it gets tiring to say them and then those people who are smart and 
wise and conscious they get tired of hearing them because they don't need it said because it's 
obvious but the safety feature is that 
you gotta run it through your own direct experience and verify and cross reference these things with other teachers teachings books and so forth 
to make sure that you're interpreting things correctly you have the right view and if your view is leading you down a 
road which is socially irresponsible which is going to cause social damage damage to your family to your loved ones 
to yourself to your bank account to your health 
then that's a clear sign to you that you're misunderstanding something 
there's nothing about these teachings which should be causing anybody physical harm or damage 
and when i talk about awakening and i talk about god and i talk about love and i talk about death 
when i talk about ego death this does not mean any kind of physical 
harm to your body or to anybody else 
this is not a license for suicide obviously 
i want to shoot a separate episode about suicide and people who are suicidal there's there's a lot that i could say on that topic 
but for now what i'll say is that the entire point of awakening is to 
make you appreciate the beauty and gift of this life that you have this life is a gift 
all of my teachings are predicated upon the premise that you are 
conscious of the fact that your life is a precious gift and that it's because of this that you 
self-actualize it's because of this that you develop a life purpose it's because of this that 
you develop responsibility and discipline you see i don't teach you just how to transcend the self and and 
go into some sort of you know spiritual abyss 
a lot of my work is very practical and just teaches you the foundations of how to put your life together i teach about 
responsibility and open-mindedness and reading books and studying and doing 
spiritual practices and uh getting your finances in order having a 
life purpose being creative with your work relationship sexuality 
this is all positive life affirming stuff the reason we're interested in all this is to get you mastery a basic level 
of mastery with survival i talk about that i don't dismiss the importance of survival 
survival is important so long as you are interested in surviving and i assume you are 
and i am i'm not above survival 
in case that wasn't obvious at the very least because 
teaching can't be done without surviving 
spirituality cannot be taught without surviving 
and also because people aren't ready to learn spirituality unless they have at least 
the basics of their survival handled 
so 
the whole point of this work is first you have to recognize 
how amazing your life is 
most people don't recognize that they take their life for granted and that's why they don't self-actualize and 
they don't put a lot of work into their life you cannot 
put a lot of work into your life unless you really value it 
so why would you then squander it by jumping off a bridge 
when i talk about ego death 
we're talking about 
a conceptual death of the self 
not the body now you might say leo but 
doesn't nonduality mean that there's no difference between a conceptual death and a physical death 
because now you're drawing a line between concept and material stuff 
physical stuff 
and technically speaking from the absolute point of view there is 
no boundary between conceptual death and physical 
death in fact to be perfectly frank 
physical death does not exist it's purely imaginary 
but that only applies if you're ridiculously conscious 
and you don't care about survival 
you're not attached to survival 
now again some people will take this and they will misconstrue this and they will come up with an excuse to use this 
to justify their suicide 
and

〰️〰️〰️

Quote

with regards to suicide i'll say this you know is suicide good is it bad 
should you do it what are what are leo's thoughts on this 
well first of all it doesn't really matter what my thoughts are what matters are what your thoughts are because whatever my thoughts are 
yours are going to actually determine whether you do it or not not mine 
but i'll share my thoughts with you anyways maybe it'll set your head straight my thoughts on it are that ultimately it 
doesn't matter in the absolute sense it doesn't matter if you want to end your life 
you can it's your choice it's not morally wrong in any sense 
and in fact if you were in deep enough suffering you would kill yourself any of us would if the suffering got 
deep enough i guarantee you'd kill yourself that's just a fact of life um but fortunately the 
majority of us will never be in that much suffering to do it um 
and the desire or even the thought just the 
mere thought of wanting to kill yourself already shows you that your mind is not pure there's something impure about your 
mind now if you're thinking to yourself well leo but if i kill myself i will reach 
the godhead sooner and faster and deeper i will become infinitely conscious i will merge into god with love and all 
this good stuff that you talk about isn't that true isn't that what you've said 
yes death is infinite love 
but this dream that you're in is also 
infinite love it's also god 
this is it here don't go looking for it somewhere else it's here 
in fact there's nowhere to go there's here 
even when you're thinking about your suicide that already is fantasy land you're fantasizing 
you're not grounded in the present moment in what's absolutely true and if you were you would have no need 
to kill yourself the thought wouldn't even arise you would be so enraptured and in love with the beauty 
and majesty of this present moment god is right here look at your hands look 
around you look at the trees look at the birds it's pure [ __ ] beauty 
where are you running off to where are you going to go to see what this is it 
the point of the work is to recontextualize all this as the absolute 
beauty that it is and then you can enjoy it there's no other purpose to life 
or to being than the enjoyment of it and by enjoyment of it i mean to love it 
see love is not something you enter into when you die although of course 
it is that but love is your love 
for what is here right here do you love this can you love this 
that's the challenge there's no challenge in loving everything when you're dead that happens 
automatically there's no challenge the challenge is precisely to figure out 
how to love this the stuff that is limited and difficult to love 
it's the thorn in your side that's difficult to love 
now if you say well leo but why i don't want to play this game why can't i just uh 
have it easy the easy way out well look in the end 
suicide is your prerogative as a living being nobody can ultimately 
stop you some people can tell you it's bad 
some people can tell you it doesn't matter some people can tell you it's not bad but you shouldn't do it for the sake 
of others or because you're being selfish or whatever but in the end 
you're going to do whatever you want to do and nobody has a right to tell you what to do 
so i'm not going to sit here and moralize to you about suicide 
i just want to point out to you that if you have a craving for it 
that itself you should notice is not a healthy impulse something is out of whack 
in your mind now if you're in really really deep suffering 
because you had some terrible chronic you know you're in a car crash and you broke your spine and now you're in miserable pain 24 7 
that's a separate situation we can talk about that that that's almost like we can talk about that as like euthanasia 
and we can make some ethical points about the validity of doing suicide in in that situation 
and i'm not going to talk about that here 
for the majority of people who commit suicide that is not their situation for the 
majority of people what it is is that their mind is tricking them in some way and yes many people of course do suffer 
i totally acknowledge that but what you have to realize about the suffering is that your suffering comes and goes and 
it ebbs and flows on some days and i mean i'm not immune to this i've had suicidal thoughts before i'm not perfect 
um in fact in the last year if you've been following along with my health issues with my stomach i've had 
some i had a very tenacious gut infection in my stomach 
that has been very difficult to cure i've tried all sorts of antibiotics that have not worked 
um and i'm still trying to figure that out but it's caused me so much suffering and misery and pain over the last year and a 
half i've tried so many things i like 
i was at my wit's end with this thing i went to all these doctors and all this sort of stuff so 
much suffering it like it shot the quality of my life down 
from like if we say it was 100 now it's at like 20 and there were moments in that 
period where i was suffering so much with no hope in sight that i had suicidal thoughts 
and i would think to myself well if if if this keeps going i can't live like this 
because there's no way to enjoy life in this state but what you have to understand 
is that even when you hit those lows those are usually temporary lows and your mind will play a trick on you where 
it will get you to think like well it's going to be this way forever but then of course i know that it's not 
going to be this way forever so the key thing to remind yourself when you're in this kind of depressive mood is that first of all you make a 
commitment not to harm your body ever and to take good care of your body just 
making that commitment which i've recommended in the past in my is actualized or occult episode i talk 
about making a commitment not to harm your body on this journey it's a very important safeguard so make 
sure you do that you make that commitment um and then you just what you do is you 
sort of commit to suffering it out through life no matter how bad it gets and on some 
days it'll get really bad but what happens is that when you commit to suffering it out no matter what this 
is actually what purifies you and saves you and grows you later in life you will remember that those lowest points were some of the 
most important for your growth and for your spiritual work 
but i'm not gonna lie some days it'll be very difficult and your mind will try to fool you into thinking like 
it's never gonna get better and really when a person decides to commit suicide 
is that moment when they decide that there's no more hope there's no way this can be improved 
every avenue has been exhausted it's really i think only when you feel that way and you get yourself to believe that 
fiction it's then that you actually decide to commit suicide because as long as you 
maintain at least one avenue of hope one possibility you can try tomorrow to 
improve your situation one way that things might get better or turn around for you as long as you maintain that 
then you can keep going but if you lose all hope then you're as good as gone 
and on some days you will lose all hope and your mind will be so uncreative that you will not be able to imagine 
a better alternative or any alternative you're going to think you're stuck this way forever 
and that's what i want you to remember me telling you that it's just a 
temporary trick of your mind it's not true there's always something else you can 
try there's always some additional hope 
and therefore it's worth toughing it out because tomorrow 
your brain will reset your mind will reset you'll get it you'll catch a second wind you'll get a little bit of 
relief you'll get some more ideas you'll get some new people in your life 
who can help you or who can suggest new things to you you'll read a new book that'll have a 
new technique or whatever and then you'll come out of it 
and then that will let you appreciate life more 
really really appreciate what you have here you've been given this incredible unique opportunity to be 
yourself you're the only one who's like this in the universe in the entire universe 
you're the only one here who's like this like you exactly the way you are 
and the game of life is for you to figure out how to 
live that in a beautiful way in a way that is harmonious with the rest of what's here 
how to tap into your discover and tap into your special strengths and gifts 
and the unique contributions you can make to mankind 
it's very challenging sometimes life gets very very very challenging 
to a suicidal point that's why i want you to make a commitment 
to never physically harm your body in fact that's not even enough 
if you're following my work then you should know that my work is not just about 
maintaining your body but it's about improving your body

〰️〰️〰️〰️

health is very important 
you should be taking better health of care of your health and coming soon i will have some 
episodes about how to improve the health of your brain improve the health of your body 
cure gut problems like i've been dealing with i'll share that with you 
very strategies that i've discovered i've discovered a lot of stuff in the last year about nutrition and health and 
so forth these are all these are all important take care of your body take care of your 
health 
one of the things that i learned in the last year and a half suffering through this health problem that i had with my 
gut is how foundational health is to anything else you do in life 
a lot of times spiritual teachers will make you believe that like oh well health isn't so important as long as you're just awake enough you can you can 
power through any kind of health problem you won't suffer 
no i don't think so your health is ridiculously important 
and the only way you can have such a flippant attitude about your health is if you have good health 
and it's extremely easy to take health for granted when you have it and you've never lost 
it it's only when you start losing it like i have in the last year and a half that you really start to appreciate and 
become conscious of how foundational health is to everything including your consciousness 
including your consciousness that's the twisted paradox of 
consciousness is that on the one hand consciousness transcends the body 
on the other hand your consciousness is so limited by what is going on in 
your body if i give you a glass of mercury to drink 
and you drink that mercury your consciousness is going down the [ __ ] 
you are not going to be this this blissful happy 
uh super woke above it all person no your conscious will crash back down into a 
condensed state as that mercury leeches through your body and into your brain and disrupts the functioning of your 
neurotransmitters and neurons and all of that that it'll happen and all of that despite the fact that your brain is 
imaginary there's no contradiction because it's all consciousness 
so taking care of your brain health and your body health is very important and even your gut health you might think 
well the gut has nothing to do with consciousness oh yeah 
try going through what i went through in the last year and a half with my gut when you get some nasty bacteria in 
there and then every time you eat food that nasty bacteria releases toxins into your bloodstream through your gut 
and it feels like a anti-psychedelic 
psychedelic raises your consciousness you can feel it you know you take a tap of lsd and then 15 20 minutes later you can notice your 
consciousness is just elevating and it's beautiful well when you have a gut bacteria and then you eat some food it has exactly 
the opposite effect you take it and then you just notice rather than your consciousness rising you notice 
your thoughts start to get scrambled and chaotic and you get washed over with this wave of chemicals that are just 
like they feel toxic and you get brain fog and you can't concentrate and you can't meditate you can't do anything you 
can barely think straight and you're in pain 
that's what i went through for the last year on many days 
it was very humbling and very challenging 
so in general what i want you to understand is that this work is a lot more complex 
than you ever imagined 
and i feel like that's one of the hallmarks of what i teach is i teach the complexity of this work 
a lot of other teachers oversimplify this work now there's pros and cons to that of 
course there are negatives to to making everything too complex um 
but the reality is that life is infinitely complex survival is infinitely complex 
even spirituality is ridiculously more complex than you ever imagined 
if you truly start exploring it all of its different facets 
and so it's easy to get lost in that complexity that complexity is what allows your mind 
to fool itself because you think you got something figured out but actually later you realize you didn't 
you might think it's a good idea to jump off a bridge because it'll bring you closer to god but 
maybe that's not the right way to get closer to god 
so anyway going forward in the future i will be putting more disclaimers and warnings 
into my videos i haven't yet decided on what format that's going to take it might be right 
at the front of the video maybe towards the end of the video i don't know um i also have to think about putting it 
into the audios because people don't watch they listen you see so there's a lot of complexity here i'm we're 
definitely we're going through and we're changing all the disclaimers in the text boxes for the videos to make them more 
robust um we've already been doing that for for the last few weeks 
um and we're gonna kind of go back and and retool some of the old videos for 
that purpose um unfortunately youtube doesn't allow me to 
change my old videos if they did i would have changed a lot of stuff already a long time ago but they don't like allow me to 
insert slides or anything into into videos all i can do is just edit like the text descriptions 
um so there will be some of that coming forward in the future you can look forward to that 
but also i i will simply just be talking more about various traps and dangers and stressing 
them more like i said and pointing out where the advanced stuff is and where you can get 
go go wrong and maybe potentially harm yourself 
but also i want to say another thing here which i haven't touched upon yet which is that 
like i said very powerful and truthful teachings 
and wisdom has been demonized throughout all of human history and so one of the greatest things that 
concerns me here with this incident is that as tragic as the incident is 
there's also the consideration of the actualize our brand and i'm concerned that people will take 
this incident and twist it into some sort of weapon to discredit the brand 
and the teachings 
there are a lot of people out there who would love to do that because 
that's historically what is done with powerful and truthful teachings is that 
the ego mind the collective mind will look for any excuse they could find 
to to demonize it discredit it or weaponize something against it 
which is why it's very important to put it into proper context 
and so i've laid out a lot of that context here today so that anyone who's reasonable and 
objective can can weigh and understand the um 
the full complexity of the situation that we're dealing with here 
for example i know saad guru faced some [ __ ] 
when his wife committed mahasamadhi at least that's what he says 
his wife had a child she was a yogi she was in her early 30s 
good health and then just poof mahasamadi 
there were reports in the newspaper that assad guru killed his wife 
there are websites right now online you can go and type into google saad guru killed his wife 
and you'll find websites you'll find something like saadgurukilthiswife.com 
which will post news clippings and theories about how he killed her and how he lied and 
manipulated and this sort of stuff so um this is the kind of thing that 
i find very distasteful and that i am defensive about because it happens 
there are people out there who will smear in this way uh and 
a lot of times they just it's simply because they don't understand right so 
the things that i teach like try to imagine this from the point of view of somebody who's sort of like a 
normie who's a materialist who is an atheist who is a rationalist or whatever 
and uh they hate all this stuff and all these ideas are sort of an affront to their entire world view and they have no 
interest in any kind of spiritual stuff and they have no interesting kind of nuance about it in their mind 
they just know that all this stuff is just pure [ __ ] that 
some cult leader is spinning to earn money from gullible fools 
that's how they see me that's their view of reality that's how they see actualize.org 
and they're not conscious of that they don't really understand what they're doing or how their own mind is playing 
this trick on them they don't understand projection they don't understand self-deception they don't understand 
the limits of materialism they haven't had profound mystical experiences they don't believe they're even possible 
they just think that love and god is just some new age mumbo jumbo [ __ ] and this is all 
just about money and so of course when they see me and this work in that way then they can't 
help themselves but to go into some sort of attack mode 
and look for any kind of sort of gotcha 
and so uh that's that's virtually inevitable by the way with with most teachings 
spiritual teachings uh there was a you know there's actually um 
well everybody knows the story of christ um nailed to the cross but uh there was a 
there's also a similar story with the buddha where like there's a story 
in buddhism that that goes you know after the buddha became awakened and he was teaching people and he had like a 
little cult following going there of his loyal disciples there was like one one of his 
students or villagers or disciples i don't know who it was who was disgruntled with the buddha 
and you know thought that what the buddha was teaching was like all [ __ ] and stuff and then um 
and then the story goes he he unleashed there's like an elephant that was tied up there in the village he untied this 
elephant and unleashed it and kind of you know goaded the elephant onto the buddha to like run towards the buddha and trample 
him as the buddha was walking down the path 
um and then the elephant ran towards the buddha and the buddha just like put up 
his hand and the elephant eventually um stopped and bowed before him 
so um the only reason i bring that up not to 
compare myself to the buddha but just to say that um 
there's a there's always a tendency to suppress truth 
and to manipulate it to distort it to corrupt it to demonize it 
to outlaw it to discredit it because 
the job of the ego mind the job of the devil is to muddy the waters so much 
that ordinary people around him cannot distinguish truth from falsehood 
anymore in all the mud and they just equate 
truth and falsehood they throw their hands up and they say well it's just all a wash who really 
knows we don't really know what's true so let's follow this guy who happens to be the devil 
and then they follow the devil and he leads them off a cliff 
there are many ways to lead people off a cliff 
not just physically but there are much worse ways 
war capitalistic exploitation 
genocide ideological battles back and forth 
partisanship that lasts forever and leads to endless gridlock 
riots and protests and insurrections 
so what's to be done about all this is there a a solution there's no algorithmic solution 
to the truth falsehood problem the only way to distinguish truth from falsehood is through careful 
conscious investigation through personal experimentation through 
direct experience there's no algorithm for it it takes 
intelligence and there's no algorithm for safety either 
people often look for an algorithm for safety they say like well the ten commandments are like the algorithm for safety just 
stick with the ten commandments you'll be safe oh really will you be safe or will that lead to a genocide 
or a holy war you're not safe 
following some ten commandments because reality is far too complex for that and the dangers are far too complex 
for that see there's no commandment that says don't jump off a bridge 
so if you're foolish you might say well i follow the ten commandments there's no commandment telling me not to jump off a bridge so i guess it's okay by god's 
standards i guess i'm going to heaven 
you see there's no amount of rules you can invent 
no amount of algorithms that will prevent 
ignorant people from doing ignorant things the only way to cure ignorance is to 
cure ignorance and to do that you need consciousness which is what i'm trying to teach 
but for you to learn consciousness you can't just hang on my every word and trust what i say you have to do 
consciousness you have to be consciousness you have to be intelligent intelligent 
comes intelligence comes from being conscious 
and being conscious comes from studying your own mind and doing these practices 
carefully 
and only in this way by cultivating consciousness and intelligence will you then be able to 
avoid all the many land mines and traps that are out there for you in the spiritual and even in the material 
landscape there are plenty of material traps that people fall into all the time 
and the way you avoid those is by com by building up your consciousness 
and being more intelligent about how you go about things being more responsible 
and one of the things that i learned by doing this work and by going through these 
uh situations and uh scandals and so forth is that 
i'm also learning like how to be a leader as well so one thing i'm realizing is that it's it's it's quite 
challenging to be a leader there are many things as a leader like that i don't want to do or don't care 
about but then they're kind of thrust upon me that i have to start to care about 
otherwise i'm not being a good leader and then people don't want to follow 
so what this incident is teaching me is how to lead more responsibly 
more carefully and so you're going to see 
better leadership for me in the future as a result of this 
and honestly i'm still processing and deciding what this means 
and how i should change if anything about what i do and how i teach 
but what i definitely know is that the teachings are important and so i'm going to continue doing my teachings as i 
always have because i believe in this work and you know some people don't believe in this work 
and aren't interested in this work or or don't like the way in which i 
teach this work in which case i recommend you don't waste time don't waste your time you 
don't need to waste time hate watching me um just go go 
develop yourself in whatever way you want that works for you 
if it's a non-spiritual way do that if you want to do purely materialistic self-improvement go do that if that's 
what you think is the best thing go do that don't waste your time 
with me or if you want some other approach to spirituality go do that don't waste your 
time with me or you know explore many perspectives as 
i've always recommended from the from the very beginning um and then cross-reference everything 
and then find out your own system in the end basically what i teach is hopefully what you get from me is how to 
sort of build your own system not my system but build your own system based on principles that i teach you 
the principles are very broad 
once you learn the principles then you can apply them in in a way that that 
tailors and fits to to the way that you want to do 
this work and this work is just sort of honoring your life and building out a great life 
and that includes both personal development and spiritual development both of those are about building out a great life 
just in different ways there are different aspects to life that need to be built out 
material and and spiritual both the material is 
spiritual it's just a lower level of spiritual 
it's important if you're young and i've said this before but i'll say it again 
that you develop some survival foundation in your life 
you need some mastery of survival before you go hog wild into spirituality 
so work on the basics make sure you have that handled make sure you have a good common sense 
i remember that uh i read a story about yogananda and his guru 
sree yukteshwar and 
they were discussing like you know under what conditions does does the guru take 
an apprentice and the conditions that were pretty strict the conditions were that 
yuktaswar's sort of conditions were that he would ask basic questions of of his 
you know disciple prospective disciple before 
they sort of locked in the relationship he would ask him like well what are your grades like in school 
how are you with your friends and your family are you fulfilling your family obligations are you able to do that 
um uh 
are you able to support yourself to feed yourself to cook food to clean laundry do these basic things 
or do you struggle with these things and if you said you struggled with any of these things then he wouldn't take 
you on because you're not ready because how can you do that stuff when you can't handle the that's the basic stuff 
of course the challenge with our communications here virtually through youtube or whatever 
through the internet is that 
this is not a guru disciple relationship i'm not your guru 
and it's really important that you understand what i am because people get this very wrong about 
what i am what function i serve i am literally 
a guy on youtube who is sharing his philosophical 
insights about life that's all that i am 
and you should treat me as such i don't know you personally 
i can't read your mind i don't know what's going on with you in your life and each one of you of the thousands and 
millions of you out there have your own stuff going on some of it very weird that i can't even 
relate to that's not even within my my general ballpark of what i 
know and understand about life some of you got very weird lives and that's fine 
weird is not bad per se it could be great um 
but in the end all i'm doing here is i'm sharing ideas with you 
ideas can be very powerful a single idea can change your life but 
a single idea taken the wrong way can also destroy your life 
so you if you continue to listen you have to be very careful 
about how you make sense of these ideas 
how you apply these ideas and in the end i don't know how you're going to apply them 
and what kind of twisted way you're going to imagine something's going to happen in your life i don't know 
remember that truth absolute truth is not prescriptive in any way 
that means whatever i say the absolute truth is or whatever you discover the absolute truth to be 
it doesn't mean anything 
likewise with love when you discover absolute love infinite love god's love 
you might fall into the trap of thinking that it means something it means you should do something 
in the material survival world it means you should hug your kids more it means you should 
have more sex it means you should get a divorce it means you should get married it means 
you should have sex with your mother i don't know what you think it'll mean but whatever you think it means it 
doesn't mean that why doesn't it mean that because everything 
is love so when you say oh i'm gonna do this because it's love 
well what you're not realizing is that the opposite of doing that is also love 
so when you say i'm going to hug my kids that's love okay but if you don't hug your kids 
that's also love and if you hate your kids that's also 
love everything is love 
that's infinite love absolute love it's very radical what this means is that the ego your 
little ego cannot control or manipulate or use or justify with 
this love anything that it wants to do 
so take ownership of that rather than concocting these elaborate justifications 
for like oh i did this today i went to the grocery store because of love and i did this to my kids because of love 
you didn't do that because of love you do that because you're selfish and you're surviving that's why you did 
those things and then you and you invented some stories about love to make yourself feel nicer and sweeter to you 
to your own self 
truth and love 
make you free they don't constrain you to a limited set of options 
you have to use intelligence and consciousness to figure out 
very skillfully in a very nuanced way what would be the most loving expression 
of your love in any particular situation and you could always be wrong about that 
you might think that oh this is going to be the best expression of love and then you realize i tricked myself that was actually selfishness 
masquerading as love 
you see that's self-deception inaction 
and i'm not immune to it don't assume you're immune to it don't assume your favorite guru is immune to 
it or above it they aren't this is the whole challenge of life 
you never solve this problem permanently this is something you're constantly juggling and balancing like on a 
surfboard you got to be dynamically balancing as you're on the wave 
and that wave is your life and as soon as you become too rigid on 
that board and you decide that well i'm just gonna i'm just gonna shift my weight to the right and just 
keep it there forever because i got it figured out now that's when you're going to screw up 
and wipe out 
you 

Edited October 18 by Genius100x