To anyone doing research for their life purpose, mastering a skill set for their life purpose, or finally making strides to finish a project for their life purpose, please understand one thing: Embrace Not Knowing.  If there were any one idea that's important to understand about nailing your life purpose, it would be this one. Your level of success in any career field is directly tied to how well you can tolerate Not Knowing: If you will get paid If your idea is actually that good or you're just a crazy person Where you might have to go next in your career path Whether your career's assumptions are accurate  Not Knowing is the well-spring - the ground - the source for creativity and insight. Creativity starts with a question, with uncertainty, not with a cut-and-dried answer. You cannot ever have True Knowing without having Not Knowing precede it or, perhaps, be it.  Yep, I said it: True Knowing might just be Not Knowing. What you don’t know is what you don’t know. And it's not like pretending to not know changes the fact that you don’t know: It just means that you've deluded yourself into thinking you know, when indeed you don't. But herein lies the rub: You fucking hate sitting Truly Knowing Not Knowing. That’s why you buy the courses and the books and the videos and the seminars and the training courses that you waste so much time on. That’s why you distract yourself from what's right in front of you. That’s why you read my articles, Leo's articles, and any other idiot on this forum's articles. You just need something - the thing.  It's in your genes. If your ancestors wondered for too long whether that noise near the bushes was a predator or not, you wouldn't be here right now. Our brains are geared to make fast assumptions, and questioning them in many cases quite literally equates to death. No wonder we're so hardwired for confirmation bias. No wonder we need quick fixes. ---- I started watching Actualized.org Videos during my senior year of college. My success up to that point had nothing to do with my happiness and I was adamant that the same would be true in the future.This was pretty distressing to realize at the time. It meant that I didn’t know what lay ahead of me. Mainly, it told to me that my dream of becoming a doctor had nothing to do with happiness. My whole life up to that point was about becoming a doctor – what the hell would I do? I purchased the life purpose course, meditated, and came up with some pretty cool visions for the future. Here’s what I came up with: I could use my background in neuroscience to help create a technology that would link consciousnesss together. My vision included a search for what part of the brain created consciousness as well as technologies that would allow people to turn their brain into holodecks. Basically, I wanted to turn astral projection into a technological science that went beyond psychedelics or VR and went to mainstream society. My heroes at the time included people (read: chimps) like Elon Musk, Walt Disney, Tony Stark, and Barack Obama, amongst others. Almost everyone Leo listed off as someone not to follow, I followed. If you want to see my vision board, here you go: The Enlightened Warrior Sage of Bliss.pdf @Leo Gura advised me that though I was onto the right path, I would be wise not to put the cart ahead of the horse. So, with his perspective, I went back into the Hallowed Grounds of Not Knowing. Specifically, I had to understand what consciousness was before I even began raising it, especially with dangerous A.I. tech.  This meant researching a ton of weird areas that I would previously have never even begun to consider. If my militant-atheist, fundamental-rationalist sophomore or junior-year version of myself had heard of me these areas, he would have laughed before crying. I’m talking about things like: o   Lucid dreaming o   Astral Projection o   Psychedelics o   The Nature of Reincarnation o   Witchcraft o   The No Self o   Chakras o   Kundalini o   Shamanic Traditions o   And *gasp* books arguing against the logic of science amongst other things In Leo's video about the paranormal, he talks about the scientist who goes off to a cave, only to return with a truth he can't describe. Well, I am that scientist.  How do I explain to scientific advisors that we can't link consciousness together because it's already linked together right now as it is? How do I explain that I can't create A.I. consciousness because the A.I. would already be made out of consciousness? How do I explain that entire fields of science are straight up looking in thanks wrong direction?  But here’s the thing: the ability to rest in Not Knowing while doing research has paid off greatly. There’s a ton of stuff that I’ve recognized just in the past year that has saved me literally lifetimes of seeking. Amongst others: o   Perhaps I don’t need to be anything or anyone special o   Perhaps I don’t need to become rich and famous to be worthy o   Perhaps I don’t need to one-up my ex-girlfriend to get back at her – the goal that originally launched me into self-help material o   Perhaps I don’t need some big fancy life purpose that saves the whole world immediately. Perhaps its often the people who do that who mess up the world because of their narrow-minded unawareness.  o   Perhaps the Tao Te Ching is right in saying that the actions taken with the least damage are the wisest o   Perhaps what the world needs is to specifically not need to do or be anything other than what they are, as-is, and if we did that, everyone would be better off naturally. I’m not talking about me using that as an excuse to sit around doing nothing: I’m saying that 1) we all need to get out of our own way with our egos to 2) help others have enough and then 3) be able to sit around happily now that we’ve all as a species had enough. o   Perhaps That’s’ the only actual need anyone has: the need to have the ability to simply Be themselves happily. o   Perhaps You don't have to do anything to meet that primary need other than remove your own conditions for happiness o   Perhaps It’s just an assumption that consciousness is created by the brain. o   Perhaps it’s the other way around than from what I was taught at the world’s #1 medical university. o   Perhaps its consciousness that creates the brain. o   Perhaps there’s no need to chase around the holy grail of a “neural correlate of consciousness” like the thousands of other neuroscientists and neurosurgeons who’ve gotten nowhere. o   Perhaps the answer is right under the scientists nose and their culture and dogmatism prevents them from seeing it, not the data. o   Perhaps I don’t need to subject myself to some of the bullshit faced by academia to get ideas out there o   Yet perhaps no matter what path I choose, it’ll be filled with trial and tribulation unless I choose to see things otherwise. --- Do you get that each one of those realizations is worth a lifetime of understanding? I’m not exaggerating whatsoever. Just the first two bullet points explain how the entire Los Angeles Culture came about. The third is enough to get past 5 years of therapy. And the 4th would have saved Elon Musk 50 years of effort. And so on and so on. And those aren’t even all the insights I’ve had! There are at least 250 pages worth of insights scribbled in my journals. All – ALL – because of my ability to Rest in Not Knowing ---- After purging myself of some of my original pursuits, sense of self, and attachments, what's left?  I’m still left with my strengths: 1.     Wisdom/Opennness/Judgment 2.     Social Intelligence 3.    Love of Learning 4.     Creativity 5.     Zest/Enthusiasm/Optimism 6.    Humor 7.     Bravery I’m also left with the same tangible skill set as ever: o   The ability to recall information from +250 books on psychology, history, science, medicine, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and science fiction   o   The ability to research the shit out of anything using the internet, books, and good old contemplation o   The ability to gain a wide, nonjudgmental perspective during conversation and brainstorms o   Making unforeseen connections between seemingly unrelated areas of interest o   Digesting hard concepts into smaller, simpler ones o   The balls and enthusiasm to share my ideas while still listening to others I also got my MCAT scores back. After 550 hours of study, I killed it. Especially when it comes to psychology – I got a perfect score in that section! So here's the final question: What are my plans now? Fool, did you not read anything I wrote? I DO NOT FUCKING KNOW AND THAT’S PERFECTLY AS IT SHOULD BE. (More seriously, I am considering pursuing clinical neuropsychology. Specifically, there’s a chance that I take the energy I would have used on finding a neural correlate of consciousness and use it to figure out the neural correlates of Enlightenment. There seems to be an open niche regarding 5-meo-dmt in research and if I hop in now, I could position myself as the #1 person in the world on the topic of the Science of Enlightenment using 5-meo. See, Martin Ball didn't have Martin Ball to help show Martin Ball the ropes. But I do. I also see the possibility of creating psychedelic integration programs with biofeedback, journaling and zen noting techniques thrown in for the phase in between doses. But until then…) Goodbye Neurosurgery Goodbye Becoming the next Musk Goodbye One-upping my genius ex-girlfriend Hello Unconditional Happiness Hello Darkness, My old friend   and Hello Not Knowing, let's see what we come up with today.