Actualized.org Video Summaries!

[Nic]

Here an excellent one:

All Of Religion Explained In One Video  Summary

Surpassing The Dogma

So, the core problem here, between this religion vs. science debate, is that human beings are extremely, extremely dogmatic. Dogmatic, that’s the key word here — dogmatic. What does dogmatic mean? Dogmatic doesn’t pertain to religions, or to science, or to any particular thing.

Dogmatic means that you cling to a particular world-view or belief. When you do this, you don’t tell yourself that you’re clinging to a world-view or to a belief. What you tell yourself is that you have the facts and that this is just a fact and it’s true. It doesn’t feel like you’re clinging to anything.

But, in fact, what you’re doing is you’re clinging. And this closes your mind down and doesn’t permit you to do a very exhaustive, open-minded search, right? So, the trick here is not only — are we dogmatic? — but we lie to ourselves about being dogmatic.

We don’t honestly tell ourselves that we’re dogmatic. We just behave dogmatically and we do this unconsciously. And we will defend, often to the death, our dogmatism. Deny that it’s dogmatism. So, this is not a problem of religion. This is a problem of the human psyche.

Because, when the human psyche takes on a core assumption or a belief, no matter what it is, whether it’s a religious one or something totally different, it doesn’t really matter — you cling to it, you make it a part of your self-identity. You make it a part of your self image. And when you do that, you identify with it and you feel like you need to defend it

 

This is a very common mistake that I see atheists making.

They think that, just because they are an atheist, they are not dogmatic. Well, what I find in practice is that most atheists are actually very, very, very dogmatic. And this upsets them to hear because they like to use it as a separation between themselves and religious people. But, actually, you’re on the same side on that point.

The difference you have with religious people is that you have a different kind of dogmatism.

Ideas Behind Religions:

Why does religion exist? Not just one, but many, many religions? They seem to have a lot of common elements and threads between them. Even though superficially they might look very different, also, from a big-picture point of view, they all sound, and start to converge, and look very similar.

one explanation, you might think, well, religion is just primitive stupidity. Primitive cultures, thousands of years ago, they really didn’t understand life, they didn’t understand themselves, they didn’t understand how the mind works, or science. 

Nor do I think that tradition is a good explanation for what religion is and why it originated.

Nor do I think that this explanation of religion as a social, political, controlling mechanism is a satisfactory explanation.

while I think that that’s definitely been done in the past, that political leaders and religious leaders have used religion as a controlling mechanism for social engineering, and to profit themselves and other such things — to gain power, to maintain power over people — that certainly happened. But it doesn’t make sense that that was the origin of religion.

there is an absolute truth and this absolute truth is accessible to human beings. And here’s the really nasty bit that you’re not going to like: it’s not accessible to the rational mind. It is not accessible to the rational mind. The scientific, rational mind, hates this. It hates this idea. This idea is not something it wants to accept.

So, what I submit to you is that, if your mind is rejecting this idea and it’s not even open to this possibility, than what you’re being is dogmatic

The Sense Of Self

You’ve got a sense of self, of personal self. You believe that you are a body, and you believe that [you're] this mind and the brain inside the body. And you’ve got this personal story: you can remember the time that you were born and the way that you grew up, and where you are now. And you believe that you’re going to die, and yada, yada, yada, right? And that all makes pretty good sense. Except there’s one problem.

And that problem is that, if you look really carefully and really deeply, what you’re going to realize is that this sense of self that you have is an illusion. And that there is no such thing as a sense of self. Thing that you call you, the thing that you think you are most certainly, when we say your name — the thing that points to — well, that thing is actually a big confusion and a big mistake in your mind.

So, what’s possible then is that it’s possible to, basically, jail-break your brain.

the self that you believe that you are, everything you believe that you perceive, is actually not being perceived by a “you”

the true self is nothing. And this nothing is a very special thing. This is not something to be dismissed lightly.

Nothing, here, I mean literally. You are literally nothingness. This cannot be believed or logically understood. It has to be directly experienced. You are the nothingness, so you are it. Once you realize it, you can actually be it.

And that is, answering existentially: what is existence? Have you ever wondered about that? What the hell is existence? How can existence even exist? Ever wondered about that? What turns out is that you can have an enlightenment experience that will reveal to you the absolute nature of existence. And what that absolute nature is — is nothingness.

Existence and nothingness are the same. They arise out of each other. Or, more accurately, existence arises out of nothingness. And that nothingness doesn’t go away, it’s always there. This is referred to as the Void in certain Buddhist traditions or, maybe, Zen traditions. They call it the Void.

And the absolute truth is, basically, that existence arises out of nothing. This nothingness, this ultimate void, is God. The word “god” refers to this nothingness. Because it’s the source of everything, right? It’s not a personal god. It’s not a god with a beard.

It’s not a god as “him” or “her”, but it’s god in the sense that it’s the source of all reality. And this nothingness is a unity, it’s a One. And it has no space, it has no location, it has no distance, it has no size, because nothingness doesn’t have any of those qualities.

What we’re talking about here is not an idea of nothingness, which is something. But we’re talking about, literally, nothingness. And what you discover is that you are nothing, and God is nothing, and so, because of this — you are God.

That right there is the core of every major religion. All major religions are grounded in the truth of no-self.

Christianity is founded on this, as is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, even Sufism and yogic practices in India and in the East.

All of these different religions are, really, different ways, very roundabout ways often, to explain what I just explained to you. Now, there’s an additional, really big wrinkle in this whole thing: what I explained to you is just like a vague, vague, vague, story. Still a story, not reality, about what reality is.

Different Approaches

when you think about nothingness, it’s already something. What is the one thing that you cannot intellectualize about? It’s nothingness. You can’t intellectualize nothingness, because when you’re intellectualizing, that’s something.

So, the problem here becomes that, if you want to get at the nothingness, you can’t do it through your conventional, practical, every-day logical thinking. You can’t do it through scientific thinking. You can’t do it through language. And, by the way, science is language.

You can create a model of how reality works, and that’s what science loves to do, and that’s what we do with even non-scientific pursuits. We create models. Religion creates models, too. We create models in our everyday life. We create maps of reality and all this kind of stuff.

It helps, creating these models. So, you can create models and concepts, and you can think about reality. That’s one way to understand reality. A second way, arguably even better and more direct, is to actually experience it with your own senses. First-person experience. Who can doubt what they actually see?

any model that you want to create — otherwise, that would be a fairy tale — it’s actually a model that’s pinned down by experience, right? So, it’s limited, it’s constrained. There’s a verifiability built into it. So that’s really cool.

And then what we do is we say, well, that’s pretty much all we’ve got, right? You’ve got experience and you got your conceptualizing of experience. That’s how we know stuff and that’s the end of the story, right? Well, what if it wasn’t?

The Third Way

Well, what if you could actually be the thing itself?

Because, the problem is that, when you’re identified with yourself, and you believe that you are this right here, this body, this mind, and these thoughts, then you’re stuck. And you can only be this, you can’t be anything else.

Now, though, if you jail-break your brain, if you really dis-identify from everything in your experience, including your body, and your thoughts, and everything else, this gives you the freedom to be everything and anything.

I’m not saying this figuratively, I’m saying it quite literally. So, this sounds pretty crazy, and it sounds like, well, some sort of myth or something like that. But what I’m saying here’s that you can actually do this in your own experience. It’s not a myth, you don’t need to go read a Bible, or whatever, to do this. It can be done.

Now, the trick, though, is that it’s difficult to do this. It’s not quite easy. And why is that? Well, because you’re extremely attached to your self, to your self-hood, to your self-image. And so, this process of jail-breaking your mind from the brain, this is a very serious physiological undertaking.

This does not happen easily, because everything in your psyche resists.

– so the only way to get and use this third alternative of being is to actually do the being yourself.

See, the problem is that it’s so difficult to actually jail-break your own mind. When you talk about these things to other people, what they do is they construct stories, and they turn this stuff into belief systems, right? And then, those beliefs, they turn into myths.

And a lot of times, the way that people talk about these things is true analogy, because that’s the only way you can talk about it. You can’t talk about it directly. To talk about it directly would be to be the damn thing yourself.

For example, if you want to write about mathematics, you can write some formulas in a book, and you can explain everything, and then you can print a million copies of this book, and send it around the world, and create classrooms full of calculus books, or whatever, that will teach calculus . And problem solved.

Now, how do you communicate the truth of no-self? Well, you can write it in a book. But the problem is that the person reading that book, just by reading that, that doesn’t jail-break his mind. So, he still believes he’s the self. And he’s so dogmatic he doesn’t understand he’s dogmatic. So, what he does is: he conflates reality with a belief system. And he thinks that just believing it is enough.

And so, the only way that you can mass-spread the truth of no-self is by turning it into a belief system — which makes it necessarily false.

You can turn it into a myth. If you want to stay true to the truth of no-self, the only way to do that is through silence. You can’t say anything. So, this presents a really big problem because it turns out, then, that you can’t mass-distribute the truth of no-self. This is one of the few truths that cannot be mass-distributed, unlike most of science and all the other stuff we know.

Historical Perspective

therefore, people resorted to mythology, and story-telling, to talk about this truth of no-self. Now, how did this work in practice? Well, you have some extremely, really fucking hard-core guys, maybe one in a million, or out of ten million, that will breakthrough and see the truth of no-self by jail-breaking their mind.

These were the mystics, these were the yogis. These were the Jesus Christs and the Buddhas. These were the sages, these were the swamis. There are so many different names for these kinds of people, right? These were the Zen masters, before there even were the Zen masters.

some of them remain silent and say nothing.

But some of them want to share with others, because it’s like: “Oh, my god, you’re living in a fucking dream. You’re living in a fucking dream, you’re mistaken about how your whole life works and you don’t even know it. I’ve broken out of the matrix. I want to help some other people break out of the matrix.”

And so, what I do, is I try to explain it to you in the way that I can. But again, I can’t explain it directly. I need you to experience it. But the problem is that it’s pretty difficult for you to jail-break your own mind.

And if we tell it in Europe, it has to be told in a European way, and if we tell it in the Middle East, it has to be told in a Middle-eastern way, and if we tell it in India, it will be told in an Indian way, and in Africa it will be told in an African way, and so on.

The Sugar Coating

So, if you want to explain this stuff to them, you have to really tailor it in such a way that their mind, their limited mind will find it palatable. Palatable, right? It’s like giving someone a pill that tastes bitter, but to make them swallow, you have to coat it in sugar. Sugar-coating the pill.

So, in a sense, that’s what religion tries to do. And also, in a sense, no matter what explanation you give of no self, it doesn’t really matter because every explanation is wrong. It’s not like there’s one right explanation. The only right explanation is to actually have the person become the truth themselves and get it for themselves. Everything else is already wrong.

 the truth of no-self is very radical and it’s very mainstream. You can’t mainstream it by definition. It’s completely individual. It makes the spread of religion impossible, it really does.

That nothingness can’t be somethingness. That you can’t perceive nothingness because the perception of nothingness would be something and not nothing.

When you start to learn about the problems with conceptualization and the fact that, to think about something, you have to use a language system to think about it, and that language systems inherent biases and problems and challenges. When you start to look at this stuff, you start to se from a very, very clear perspective: “Oooh, of course! Of course there are these religions! Of course they work the way they work! Of course people buy into them!” Of course.

And the reason you say “of course” is because you recognize in yourself that dogmatism, that dogmatism that a fanatical, religious person has. That dogmatism is in you, it’s in you, you just deny it. Maybe you hide it a little bit better than that person. Maybe you don’t take it to some really far-fetched extreme. Maybe you don’t act on it as much, but it’s still there in you. And the way you can recognize it is just by actually feeling it, right?

You can feel that dogmatism when someone starts disturbing your world-view or your beliefs, maybe with a video like this one. What starts to happen is that you actually experience emotions, strong emotions.

Distaste, fear, anger, bitterness, feelings of discomfort, demonizing of the other person, burning the person at the stake, or whatever. Creating a straw man argument out of what they are saying. Closing your ears. Clicking the “off” button. Telling your friends how stupid the idea was that you heard. Or writing a nasty comment. Or whatever means you use to protect your world-view.

You notice inside, though, that this is a like a dirty feeling. Sometimes, it’s hard to pinpoint it, but if you’re very self-honest, you can say: “yup, there it is, there’s that dirty feeling inside me.” It’s inside you.

Atheism

 if you take that atheist and you actually give him an enlightenment experience for real, and you get him to feel directly, to be the nothingness, he is going to have a real difference of opinion. A real difference of attitude. A real difference of perspective. Things are really going to change for him. And it’s not going to be a typical kind of atheism that you see people talking about.

there’s a really big problem at he core of science.

Yes, science is very practical, but there’s a real big, core problem. And that’s the matter-qualia problem. And this is a problem that science has never addressed, it’s a problem that, really, science skirts all the time. And my current understanding is that science will never ever — ever be able to rectify this problem.

science has nothing about our perceptions.

So, the things that you are considering most real in your life: your feelings, your emotions, the colors that you see, the smells that you smell, the tastes and the sounds, and the qualitative aspects of all that — those things are not atoms, or energy, or strings, or quarks, or molecules, or anything else like that.

If we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the color orange in there. If we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the feeling of love or happiness in there. And if we cut-open your brain, we are not going to find the sound of a guitar in there. And yet, these entities, these experiential entities are very, very real to us.

The thing that science does with this problem is that is really skirts it under the rug, doesn’t like to look at it. Sometimes, it will deny the existence of qualia altogether. Or sometimes, it will come up with some ham-fisted way of taking matter and qualia, and somehow combining them together and explaining something away. But in the end, it doesn’t really resolve this issue.

The Key Concepts

Hell is where you presently live, hell refers to your current existence of being stuck and identified with your body. 

Heaven is the dis-identification of your self and your body, and becoming absolute nothingness.

what faith is, is your ability to open your mind up to the third possibility.

So, we have concepts, and we have experience, the third possibility is being.

you can have the faith to take that leap of faith and try to go for the direct experience. And actually get the direct experience. Actually be the thing and then see what I’m talking about for real, for you.

Evil is selfishness, evil is that identification with your body and all the actions that you do to live and perpetuate you ego.

 The devil refers to you. The way that you’re presently living your egoic life. So, you are the devil, right? Because you’re tricking yourself. The devil is deception. 

Good is everything you do from a selfless state. Good is when you become God, when you see that you’re nothingness. And therefore, you also see that you’re everything. And you start behaving in a good way. Why? Because, when you see that everything is you, you want to treat it well.

afterlife means understanding the absolute truth of nothingness, because when you understand the absolute truth of nothingness, then you are in the afterlife already. Why? Because you can’t be destroyed, you’re untouchable. Nothingness lasts forever.

Salvation means being saved from your wicked state. So, metaphorically speaking, if we say that you’re the devil right now.

The people who are the most religious are the furthest away from God. That’s the whole irony of this thing.

But, of course, that means that, if you just become atheistic, like the typical dogmatic atheist. That also puts you far away from God. So, if you really want to understand this stuff, and you want to be one with God, and you are God, then what you can do — because you’re nothingness — is that you can attempt to attain an enlightenment experience or two.

And then, in that process, you will become religious, but in a non-religious way. In a very non-dogmatic way. You are not going to hold a single belief. You’re not going to need to have any theory. You’re not going to need to partake in any ritual. You’re not going to need to pray, or to meditate or to do anything at all.

Because your absolute nature is nothingness. And that absolute nature is the same forever. And always. And it has no place, it has no space, it has no time boundaries, it has no problems whatsoever. And it’s the most beautiful truth that you can discover in this life.

 

[khalifa]

thank you guys

[Nic]

Enlightenment FAQ1

Resume

No Self-No Ego

There are a lot of these questions because this is a very nuanced subject. You have to be very careful about your mind jumping to conclusions about what the truth of no-self means. Your mind will want to jump to extreme conclusions and turn this Enlightenment thing into this black and white thing. But it’s not black and white ̶ it’s a very big gray area. So we have to tread carefully with subtlety and nuance and intelligent thinking and reasoning to think about this stuff.

Embracing the Experience

You’ve got to understand that can live from this place where you actually live and realizing that you are not a real physical entity in reality. You are merged with everyone and everything else in reality.

Until you get that shift don’t assume that you’ve got it. If the truth of no-self is so simple, if the truth is that there’s literally no self, and all there is are these perceptions and reality, than how come I can’t see it? Shouldn’t it be just obvious like you say? If it is that obvious how come I don’t see it instantly? Why do I have to spend a thousand hours looking and searching?

This is a really interesting question. It turns out that your entire psyche has been constructed from the point where you’ve born and enculturated and raised by your family and grew up in this culture. Your entire environment has shaped your personality in such a way that your psychology is prevented from seeing it even though you can logically understand it. And there is a very big difference between logically understanding it and actually seeing it.

This is a very counterintuitive, unorthodox way to look at life. You’ve never looked at your life this way before. What is required is a drastic paradigm shift. It is a bit like looking at an optical illusion and seeing it flip and in a sense it almost happens automatically. You can’t force it. And a part of a problem here is that you psyche doesn’t want to see this.

-What was fed to you when you were young is this idea that you exist and you are this personal entity who is experiencing life. To undo that takes quite a lot of work.

The Matrix

the self doesn’t exist. Does this mean that we live in a sort of a matrix? Like the movie The Matrix?

The answer is no

Imagine that what happened in the movie was that the matrix itself was real but that the person who is supposedly stuck in it is actually a part of the fiction. What you do to break of the matrix is to realize you do not exist at all. The matrix itself exists, the external world exists, but you, as a personal entity, do not exist. It is much more counterintuitive and freaky, much more interesting, much more intellectually fascinating, much more paradoxical than just breaking out of the matrix.

It is not like we are saying that your physical body doesn’t exist, because it does. It’s part of a phenomenal world. The thing is that the thing that you think is controlling and looking at the physical body and sensing the physical body, that that entity that you call you doesn’t exist.

It is a very subtle pint, so you have to go from the black and white to this gray subtlety.

Reality is just an illusion. Is that what you are saying? And the answer to this is no. we are not saying that reality is an illusion. Reality is in fact real. It exists. What you are seeing exists. All the physical objects that are in your awareness do exist. We are saying that there is not a you who is looking at those objects and perceiving those objects.

Philosophy or Religion

How is this different then religion or philosophy? Isn’t it the same? The answer is that it is very, very different.

What religion and philosophy are is a system of thinking about reality. They make certain factual claims about what reality is and how it works. They give you certain explanations and justifications. It is basically a model of reality. That’s what religion is. That’s what philosophy is. Some of them seem better than the others. Some of them seem truer than the others. Some of them seem somewhat reasonable and others very ludicrous and far out there and crazy. And it’s easy to confuse Enlightenment with some other crazy, wacky philosophy or religion. But, it is not.

It is really the antithesis of religion and philosophy. If you think that the science is the antithesis of philosophy and religion then I’ve got news for you ̶ it is actually not. Science is actually much closer to philosophy and religion than Enlightenment is.

Enlightenment is not a model. It’s not thinking about reality. It’s not theorizing or putting justifications out there. It’s not trying to make sense of reality. It is simply being reality. It is being one with reality itself.

Without mental chatter, the common thread between religion and philosophy and science is that there is a lot of theory building and mental chatter all the time. You’ll notice it that whenever you’re thinking about philosophy or religion or science you have to be thinking, and thinking is an active process. So, what is the opposite of thinking? It is not thinking.

Thinking is the way we progress. Thinking is the way we find truth. That is exactly the paradigm we are questioning here. What if thinking wasn’t the proper way of finding truth and thinking is, in fact, separating you from truth? Could that be possible?

The mind wants to theorize. The mind wants to build theories. The mind wants to claim certain facts about reality.

It is very difficult to stop the mind. When you do stop the mind something very powerful happens. Basically, you become enlightened. It is a very different thing from just another religion or philosophy. The trick is that you can very easily take Enlightenment and turn it into a religion or a philosophy. 

Even within science, the mind theorizes. It can’t just look at something objectively.

The process of Enlightenment is the process of removing all these preconceived notions, all these theories that you have about reality, so that you can actually melt into reality. When you finally melt into it, then you become reality itself. That is something that neither religion, nor philosophy, nor science can offer you. It is a very powerful, life-altering experience.

Isn’t this nihilism? Isn’t really what you are talking about nihilism? The answer is no. It is not nihilism at all. Nihilism is a philosophical system, and what nihilism says in the nutshell is somewhere along the lines of: life is pointless. There is no importance attached to one thing over another thing. Everything is basically neutral. Everything is pointless so you might as well just not do anything in life. There is nothing to believe about life. That’s what nihilism says.

Nihilism is not Enlightenment because nihilism is a philosophy. It is a way of thinking about reality. Enlightenment is a way of not thinking about reality at all. There are certain superficial parallels between the two, but one of the key differences is that nihilism leads to this bleak, dark outlook on reality, as though reality is meaningless and purposeless. Therefore, you should be sad and depressed because there is no point to living.

That is the dark nihilism. Enlightenment is in fact this very light, positive realization because what you realize is that, yes, there is no point and there is no meaning in life. But, this is actually a very positive and great thing because the fact that the life has no meaning itself has no meaning.

The enlightened person is not doing any mental masturbation. It does not matter in his mind that the there is no meaning because you are just reality. Reality just exists for its own sake, and this is a very beautiful realization.

you keep saying that philosophies and religions are offering stories about reality, but aren’t you in this video, and all the other Enlightenment videos, also giving us your story? So how come your story is true while all the others are false? It’s like you are taking some sort of authority, some sort of precedence over your story.

This is actually a very tricky aspect of the Enlightenment work. It is like everything I am communicating to you is just another story, just another belief. But you have to see that what I am trying to communicate to you is not that you should accept my story. It is that you should go off yourself and try to find what I am trying to hint at with the story.

We are using language and thought to communicate to you. Why? Because the only thing that you understand and know how to work with is thought. You’re stuck in the mental prison of the thought. Then, how can I do this for you? I can only do this through going inside and using the flawed mental models that you are under. I have to get inside your cage.

Imagine it like this. Imagine that you are stuck in a matrix, as in the movie The Matrix, and now I have to come and rescue you. And I am outside of the matrix. How do I rescue you if I am outside and you are inside? I have to get inside the matrix and use the falseness of the matrix to tell you that the matrix is false so that you can break out. But the danger is that if I get into the matrix and tell you: Hey, everything here is false, you have to recognize: Yes, everything here is false, and also he is false, and everything that he says is false. He is not real because he is just a part of the matrix. If I get outside of the matrix then I can see what’s actually is real.

It is analogous to what I am doing here. I use language and communication because the story is what you understand. The danger is that you will take what I am saying as another belief system and you are going to turn it into a philosophy or religion. You are going to stay stuck in the matrix.

To get out you need to think: OK, what is he trying to point to? All these words are just words. There is no truth in the words. What is he actually pointing to? What is he trying to communicate between the lines? Let me see between the lines and then go out there and actually experience what he is trying to hint at. It takes intelligence and subtlety on your part to understand this communication.

If you want to be black and white and simplistic you are going to say: Leo, everything you’re telling me is just another story. Every story is just a story. Every story is false. Therefore your story is false so I’m just going to stay in my current paradigm. What happens is that you are lost in your mental prison. It is like you are in prison and I come and give you the key to break out, and you look at the key and say: This key cannot possibly work. This is a bullshit key. And you throw it away, when in fact it was the real key.

Because you didn’t have belief and wisdom enough to see that it was the real key you don’t try and use it, and because of that you don’t break out. Be very careful about this common trap.

 

The Power of the Enlightenment

 if I get enlightened, will I become strong and powerful? I am doing personal development to become very strong and powerful in my life. Will Enlightenment help me become the strongest self? The answer to this question is interesting. The answer is yes and the answer is no. It is yes in the sense that you are going to be free of your mental prison. You are going to be free of thoughts that limit you and you are going to be free from the crippling emotions that sabotage you. This is the number one problem that people face in their life, no matter in what area, weather in relationships or at work or with health, these emotional and mental blocks that they have.

why would you want to become strong and powerful? You have to realize that this you is just an illusion. It does not exist.

This is the matrix we are talking about. There is no you to become strong and powerful. You are not going to gain magical superpowers. Why? Because there is no you to control anything. You have to realize that there is no possibility in reality for you to have any strength or power at all. So in a sense what we are going to do is strip you of all the power you are presuming to have. This is going to be very emotionally difficult for you, because you don’t want to relinquish your strength and your power. You want more of it, not less of it.

Counter-intuitively, what happens is that if we successfully strip you of all your notions of power and strength, and you realize that those are not real, that becomes the greatest strength of all.

What you will get is peace, tranquility and inner power. Not an outer power with which you will dominate other people but an inner power with which you get to relinquish your sense of self, so that in a sense you’ve conquered yourself. And that’s the greatest power of all, the power to conquer yourself.

The Truth about the Free Will

Are you saying that I don’t have free will? If so, it is obvious that I do have free will. In fact what we are saying is that you do not have free will. 

What exists is the illusion of free will so the big part of this enquiry is breaking down this illusion of free will that you have because one of the most common ways in which you prevent yourself from seeing the truth of no self is telling yourself constantly that you are in control of your life, that you have control over your hands, and your feet, and your mouth, and your thoughts, and everything else in your life. But the fact is that you don’t.

How can this be the case that you don’t, but you think that you do? It is what ego does and is a master of. It is because ego claims control and responsibility for the things that do not belong to it. That’s the whole game that the ego plays. This is the whole deception. It is that your entire life you’ve been telling yourself this giant story that you are this entity that gets to control everything and look at everything and experience everything. It turns out that this is all false.

The question is who is controlling your thoughts. Is it you, or is it something else? Am I controlling thoughts? Wait a minute, what am I? Aren’t I also a thought? Where did I come from if I am a thought? Did the thought I create the thought I, or is it something else? It turns out through the first-hand experience you can learn where thoughts come from. And it turns out that they do not come from you because you do not exist. 

 

The Meaning

what is the point of living? You’re telling me that there is no point to living, no purpose. The fact is that there is no point to living. The desire to have a point or a purpose for living is an egoist desire. This is something that creates a lot of stress and turmoil in your private life.

There is no even a who to have a perspective as to having a point of life. The fact is that reality exists, life is flowing. Life is one continuous river, and you are a part of that river.

So, what is the point? Well, it just exists. Existence doesn’t need a point. What’s the point of empty space? There is no point. It is just there. It just exists. The ego needs a sense of purpose because it makes it feel significant. This is a problem because whenever you feel insignificant you have this egoic emotional reaction. This creates a lot of distress and turmoil in your life.

The fact that life is meaningless and pointless does not turn that into an additional meaning of negativity like a nihilist does. With true enlightenment you discover that life is meaningless, and also that the fact that life is meaningless is also meaningless. It is really deep, profound meaninglessness. It is so profound that meaningless isn’t negative anymore. It becomes like a positive.

then why don’t I just kill myself right now? This is a funny question. First of all you have to recognize that this question is a part of egoic reaction. This is your reaction to some truth that you’ve heard. Secondly, you should recognize that there is no you to kill. There is no you to do the killing. So, when you say that you are going to kill yourself, we say that there is no you to control the process of killing you.

That is a kind of double fallacy. There is no you to kill yourself. There is no self to be killed. The self is an illusion. It does not exist.

So, if you say that you want to kill yourself, you don’t really want to kill yourself. What you’re saying is that what I’m telling you is nonsense, because, if what I told you was true everyone will kill themselves. In fact, it turns out not to be the case. That is just an emotional overreaction on your part.

 is doing a business or having a family life meaningless too if there is no point to reality? The technical answer is yes, it is pointless. What do you think is the point of a business or a family in the long run? Under your models of reality what’s your point of a business or a family?

You may come up with some point, but if you really track it into a very long term then you see that there really isn’t a point, because in the long run you are going to die. Your business is going to go bankrupt, even if you think it is going to fail five hundred years later it is going to fail. Your family is going to die eventually, too. Eventually the human species is going to die. Eventually the whole planet will be incinerated by the Sun. Eventually the whole solar system will be destroyed. Eventually the entire galaxy will burn out or will be sucked into a black hole.

Eventually, perhaps, the whole universe will meet the heat death and it will go back to a singularity which was the initial seed for the Big Bang.

The point only makes sense as a little trick that you play on yourself. You say: I want to build a nice business, I want to go and create a great family and I want to leave a great legacy. The fact is that no one in your family is going to remember you five hundred years from now, just like you don’t remember anyone from the past of your family who lived five hundred years ago. And, what is your business going to matter once you are dead? It is not going to matter at all.

The fact is that life has no point, but it does not mean that you should become depressed and not do anything in life. This frees you up to do whatever you want. It’s like a playground.

In reality, with enlightenment you can still go out and work on a business. You can still go out and have a family. And you do all these things because you enjoy them.

Once you realize that life has no point and you are not depressed about it, it would mean that you can now do whatever you want and you are going to do the things that you really want to do and not do things that you don’t want to do. You are not going to feel obligated and you are only going to do the things that are pleasurable for you, that are most meaningful for you, even though you recognize that this meaning is a made up one.

Emotions

Are you saying that I should get enlightened and realize the truth about no-self and become some kind of an emotionless robot who has no feelings for anybody? This is actually the opposite of what is going to happen. If anything, the emotionless robot is who you are right now. You are not able to presently fully appreciate these emotions because you are like a puppet controlled by your emotions. Your emotions tug and pull at you.

With Enlightenment you are going to have emotions. You can’t stop emotions. Emotions are a real phenomenon. They are not going away. Emotions are not an illusion. You are not going to become an emotionless zombie-robot. In fact, you are going to feel and experience emotions more richly, because you are going to be in the present moment. Now your monkey chatter is not going to be driving you crazy. It is not going to have you living in the future or the past or your imagination. You are going to experience your emotions for real.

Do you want me, then, to become a monk who goes off to meditate in a cave or somewhere? Is this the kind of life you want me to have? The answer is no. Becoming a monk is a caricature of Enlightenment. Not every enlightened person is a monk. There is no reason why you should become a monk if you do not want to become a monk.

Enlightenment is an inner realization. It is not a lifestyle. It is not any external behavior.

if you want me to learn mathematics does that mean that you want me to become some nerdy college professor? I don’t want to become like my college calculus professor. You can learn mathematics and still lead whatever kind of lifestyle you want.

Survival of the Ego

Aren’t the ego and the self important for my survival? You’re telling me to get rid of my ego, but I need my ego to survive in this world. Aren’t you threatening me and my survival here? The answer is that the ego and the self do not exist. A part of the illusion here is that you’ve spent your whole life believing that you are responsible for creating these great results and earning wealth and achieving all these goals and getting into relationships and surviving, fighting for yourself. The bitter pill you have to swallow is that there wasn’t a you there the whole time doing all this. So, the ego is absolutely not a part of survival because the ego is not real. So, it is not important for your survival at all.

This is a very counter-intuitive notion to accept. You don’t want to accept this. Why not? Because when we accept it we automatically undermine the entire ego structure and it does not like this. The way ego maintains its power is by saying that it is necessary. How does it say this? It says: “I am necessary for your survival.” What if this was just a story in your mind? What if it wasn’t true? It turns out to be the case that it is not true, but it is going to take some time for you to see it. You are not going to see it immediately.

In fact, what you are going to realize later if you go far enough is that the ego and the self actually threaten survival. How can this be? Well, because you do a lot of stupid things in your life because of ego. Bar fights start because of ego. Wars start because of ego. Violent crimes and thefts and criminal activity are all ego based. Those do not exist when you are enlightened. You don’t have a reason to do those things.

All those things are a mechanism to protect yourself. When you realize that there’s nothing to protect, you don’t have to do those things anymore. So, your survival will be improved. It is a very counter-intuitive and paradoxical notion.

It turns out that if you want to get to higher levels of living and thriving in life you need to abandon your clinginess to the need of survival. If you observe the most admirable persons in history, who were they? Were they clinging to their survival or were they people who were selfless and did not care whether they would survive or not? It was the people who didn’t care.

Counter-intuitively they thrived. Now, surely, some of them died. Gandhi was shot and Jesus was crucified. Martin Luther King was assassinated. There are a lot of bad examples, but there were also a lot of people with positive examples.

Ego: Good or Bad

The ego surely is not entirely bad. Surely there are good aspects to the ego, right? Again, this is an interesting question because ego does not exist. When you ask this question you assume that the self exists and you assume that if we remove the self, with the bad parts, we remove the good parts as well. It is like you are throwing the baby out together with the bathwater.

But, there is no baby and there is no bathwater. That is what we are trying to say here. There are no good qualities because it is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. 

Motivation

What will happen to my motivation levels if I become enlightened? Won’t I become this listless, useless slacker who just lies on the couch an does nothing all day?

First of all, there are many such people in society who are unmotivated and they are very egotistical. Your motivation levels and Enlightenment itself are connected in a very subtle and complex way. The fact is that you might become enlightened and that you might lose certain motivations in your life, but generally it does not make you this lazy slob. Enlightenment only clears away your neurotic sense of obligation to things in your life. 

Self-help

Doesn’t Enlightenment contradict self-actualization and self-help? It will definitely seem that way when you first start learning about this,

You have to understand that personal development is like a staircase. With many steps and stages, so that you’re moving up as you are growing and developing. We are talking here about some of the most advanced stages that you can get to. To get to these higher stages you need to work your way through the intermediate and lower stages. It is not that Enlightenment makes everything else that I’ve been talking about pointless.

For example, if I give you some relationship advice or if I give you some advice on how to earn more money you will say: Leo, isn’t it a sort of a fake advice? Well, yes, but what you are living is a fake life. False advice in a false world works in a sick kind of way.

If you are at the lower stages of your personal development and you’re having problems in your relationship or with money or your career you actually need self-help. Now you’re telling me to throw it all away. No, we are telling you to transcend it. Ascend to the higher stages.

Practice more meditation.

[nikolay]

How To Stop Being Jealous

 

What is jealousy: 

A very subtle emotion that often acts without you noticing

Examples: 

Relationship jealousy, 
Jealous of the status someone has 
The personality characteristics-confident, smart, charismatic... 

Jealousy tends to mask as other emotions(criticism, loneliness, frustration, anger, sadness)

When you are jealous, your identity(ego) is threatened. This sense of self is all believes about yourself. You think it is important but it is not. For example, you think you are a funny and outgoing guy but in reality people don't laugh at your jokes and you feel frustrated. This makes you defensive. You become critical of yourself and of others. And this is disturbing your self image. For example when you are jealous of someone stealing your girlfriend it's because you are not happy on the inside and you are leaning on this person for emotional support. 

Do not try to go out and solve this problem with this person, status or whatever. The problem is on the inside, so turn inside and see what is going on with your ego and self image. Know that jealousy is an ego game. You are not actually threatened in any way. 

The problem with jealousy is that it blocks your personal development and does not allow you to do personal work on yourself 

The solution: 

Just notice it. Don't judge or interfere. Start writing down your jealousy. Try to picture your gains from jealousy. What is going to happen as a result? Is it going to make you happy? What are you going to acquire from jealousy? Is protecting your ego going to give you happiness? 

Let's say you are jealous of someone's car. You think that by acquiring that car you are going to be happy. You are not. 

Let's say you are jealous of someone's social status. You think that by acquiring that social status you are going to be happy. You are not.

Let's say you are jealous of someone's girlfriend. You think that by acquiring that girlfriend you are going to be happy. You are not.

Let's say you are jealous when your girlfriend is speaking to other guys. You think you are going to be happy when you manipulate her into stopping talking to other guys. You are not. 

Moreover, other people can't give you value. Real value can't be acquired from outside. You are going to enjoy external emotions if you are already happy from the inside 

Jealousy can be cured by mindfulness, the practice of observing yourself without judgement. The moment you are jealous, identify it, don't try to stop it, just watch it without interference. Keep jealousy log. If you do this on a regular basis, it will eventually disappear. When you notice you are being jealous, analyse what exactly is happening. Why are jealous in this particular moment. What's gonna happen if you are not jealous. Why do you feel threatened? What is this thing that you are trying to preserve. 

Another thing you can do is to stop criticising and do the opposite: admire what you are being jealous about. For example if you are jealous of the other guy's car try to admire and compliment it

[DecemberFlower]

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS
-mankind has understood what consciousness is for over 5000 years(small percentage of people at least)
-you know you are conscious but you are not conscious of what consciousness is
-neuroscience cannot answear problem of consciousness cause neuroscience is occuring within consciousness
-neuroscience assumes that consciousness is an epiphenomenon and not fundamental to reality
-consciousness is fundamental and irreducible, more fundamental then atoms energy time space the universe brains even life
-counterintuitive to materialist paradigm which is main obstacle to grasp it
-consciousness is not emergent property of brain
-only way to grasp consciousness is to become conscious of what consciousness is by having awakening experience
-consciousness is not brain activity
-consciousness is not reason or intellect
-consciousness is not emergent phenomenon
-consciousness is not biological or exclusive to life
-not a subjective experience
-not a perception
-not a private thing what you own or have
-not occuring within space and time
-all this is assumed by materialistic science
-consciousess is not a thing it is actually nothing but not in a way that it doesnt exist
-consciousness is the only thing that it exist..existence itself existing as nothing..pure existence without content or attributes
-consciousness is substance of everything everything is made of it
-consciousness is emptiness it needs to be empty cause it has to be able to take on attributes of every possible thing
-consciousness is not localized it is universal and universe can be compared to one giant mind instead of dumb collection of atoms and molecules
-hard to assume for materialist cause it feels solid and consistent while minds are more "mystical and magical" even though reality itself always was magical  but we got numbed and used to it 
-you are the universe that is conscious of itself and its thinking(through ego) that it is a human being separate from it
-good analogy of consciousness is an infinite clay cause everything can be made of it except unlike clay consciousness doesnt have properties which doesnt limit it and they wont interfere with creation
-we can call consciousness a shape shifting substance
-consciousness is not software running on hardware(brain) instead consciousness is software which can run without using hardware
-unsolved problem of mind-body how can dumb matter can give rise to mind its subjective experience and qualia
-body is a feature of mind mind doesnt arise out of matter
-nothingness is not dumb empty space its "alive" intelligent conscious of itself
-distinction between first order and second order reality
-dream paradigm-first order reality is mind space where dream is hapening and second order is content of dreams
-tv paradigm-first order reality is pixels on the screen second order reality is things which pixels depict third order reality is story told by the movie made out of this things actors and dialogues in the same way first order reality is consciousness and second order reality are objects in the world made by consciousness and third order reality is "story" occuring in the world between things in it
-consciousness cannot be pointed to cause it hold all the pointers
-analogy of charachter of tv screen-can mario use his fingers to point at the pixels of the screen which he is made of?Obviously not.
 in the same way consciousness cannot be grasped by mind concepts or words cause all of it is in it
-nobody can show you what consciousness is you can only become to be conscious of it..models will never work cause they are occuring within it

Edited July 4, 2018 by DecemberFlower

[zoey101]

Thank you so much for this! It is so hard for me to sit and watch videos of any kind, so this will help me A LOT!!!

You're the best!

Would love a written version of the Spiral Dynamics Videos

Edited July 6, 2018 by zoey101

[vinett]

 Would anyone has any of the recent Leo's videos please? Thank you!

Edited August 30, 2018 by vinett

[SoothedByRain]

This is an epic thread. Cheers to everyone posting and sharing. I have wanted to ask Leo for lecture transcripts for a long time now but I figured  he might not give them knowing it would be better for people to listen and take their own notes, write their own summaries and wire it up with their brains more effectively. Nonetheless I can't not copy and paste these bad boys!

Does anyone have notes from Self Deception 1,2,3? That is a huge episode of pure GOLD and I would love to print out the list of all 60 self deception mechanisms. I've been meaning to go back, re-listen and take said notes for a while now. All three episodes equal to a good 3 hours plus if I remember correctly. Pretty please?

Cheers Leo you glorious being you  Your work is Pure Deep Solid Pure Gold Sir

 

[Nahm]

@Juan Cruz Giusto Brilliant thread, much appreciated, thank you??

[vinett]

I am also looking for a self-deception

[PhilGR]

I am lookig for self deception too and how ideology works

[Recursoinominado]

wow, great thread

[Hello from Russia]

HOW TO STUDY NOTES — THE KEYS TO ACING SCHOOL & COLLEGE:

 

—Studying is a skill and is something acquired and developed through practice.

—Approach studying with a growth mindset: you’re inherently just as good as anyone else, and what it all boils down to is practice, practice, practice, repetition, repetition, repetition.

—You CAN learn.

—It’s not about the grades. Stop focusing on the grades.

—Put all extrinsic motivations off to the side. Stop thinking about it.

—The important question is: why are you trying to become a great student? Answer: You want to become a great student, you want to learn how to study, because it is a critical life skill that literally is going to setup your entire life.

—This will be the difference between being happy, and miserable. This will be the difference between being rich and poor. This will be the difference between being neurotic and calm. Literally every area of your life that you want to have success in, or be happy in, will require study.

—This is not something that just happens spontaneously.

—Studying is about understanding life. Life is so fascinating. I want to understand it. This is one of the most important missions as a human being living here, as a life form, this goes really deep for me, is learning how the universe works. I’m observing it with my senses and dissecting and analyzing it with my mind. This is the foundation of all study.

—This is how every effective studier, every effective scientist, mathematician, approaches this problem. They don’t just sit down and study stuff. They’re genuinely curious and interested, and fascinated by the mysteries of the universe. Because this is a mysterious and amazing thing.

—THE KEY MINDSET #1 THAT YOU REALLY NEED TO BECOME AN EFFECTIVE STUDENT is to get in touch with the fact that life is deeply fascinating. I don’t care what you’re studying. Get in touch with the fact that you’re interested in ALL of it.

—One of the secrets to school is, of course, try to pick the stuff that you’re really fascinated about, and if there is stuff you are not fascinated about, you have to trick yourself in your brain, and say: what could I find fascinating about this? What could be interesting about this? Why is this important? Maybe I haven’t opened my mind to this subject yet?

—You CAN find satisfaction in learning almost about anything.

—Focus a lot of your discretionary time on actually studying the stuff you find fascinating, outside of the stuff you find fascinating for school.

—The secret to learning and to all studying is learning equals repetition. It’s just repetition. That’s all it is. There is little smarts that are actually required for learning. It’s really dumb. Learning is just repetition. Brute force repetition: Again, again, again, again, and again. Your brain is going to learn it NO MATTER WHAT, even if you’re the worst student.

—Study is not about memorization. What is important is the deep connections you build unconsciously. What’s happening is you’re immersed in the field of study, repeating things again, again, again, and again, and your mind just can’t help build those inner connections for you, and that process is actually really enjoyable.

—You have to enjoy the study. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to be a good student.

—It’s so important to convince yourself to enjoy a lot of the studying you do: be very intrinsically motivated.

—Combined with the principle of repetition, you can literally program anything into your mind, it’s just so dumb, it’s so simple the way it works. There’s nothing fancy behind it. No magic behind it. Then you have all the tools you need to learn anything. At that point it becomes a matter of DISCIPLINE and PRACTICE.

 

PROCEDURE TO ACHIEVE AMAZING RESULTS AND BECOME A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE STUDENT:

 

1.) Create a quiet place, free of distractions, where you can study effectively.

2.) Schedule your time. Build your schedule around studying. Have an exact set time during the day when you start to study (i.e., 6pm). Study Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, take Friday night off, take Saturday off, and study Sunday.

3.) Get comfortable and slow yourself down in order to study effectively. You can’t rush the studying process. Use brute-force: A lot of the issues that you deal with as a student, the things that you can’t understand, just brute-force them through repetition, and this repetition can take time. Also, you need to be patient with yourself, sometimes you’re not going to understand the problem right off the bat. Mull it over, mull it over, and that means sometimes it takes you longer, but that’s worth it, if you calm yourself down, get comfortable, slow yourself down and open yourself to absorbing this  information. This is where the love comes in. If you don’t love it, and what you’re doing is kind of rush studying through stuff just to learn it, like cramming for an exam, that’s just horrible. That’s horrible. Because you’re like a dog jumping though hoops. Don’t do that. Instead what you want to think about is this: this subject matter is really fascinating, let me study it more, let me learn more. You have to get really curious. Instead of thinking: okay how do I get this done faster, so I have more time to watch TV or play video games. No. You sit down and you say, oh this is a fascinating thing here that I’m studying about life, this is so much more rewarding, and has so much more value than watching TV or playing a video game. Connect inside to your own original motivations.

4.) When you read a book, you have to read it for understanding and excellence rather than trivial memorization of facts. The key is understanding. Get insights onto how the subject works. Studying is about understanding stuff, rather than memorizing, or using some trick or technique. Value excellence in the way you study. It should be important to you to understand something accurately. Don’t be a person who half-understands reality.

5.) Taking notes are really important. If you’re in class, learn to be a great notetaker. If you’re reading a book, learn to take notes. Develop a habit of taking notes. Start to enjoy taking notes. Keep a repository of your notes. Value the process of recording your insights, for yourself. That’s really important.

6.) Self-testing: THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT IF YOU WANT TO ACE TESTS. This is going back to that idea of repetition, repetition, and repetition. Go through the material you studied, and test yourself (i.e., practice questions at the end of a section in the textbook). Check your answer if it’s correct. This process takes time and slows you down, but it’s worth it. Keep testing yourself until you can produce a successful, quick, smooth, and silky recall. This is critical for memory, and learning occurs when what you do is a successful recall. This is very important. THIS IDEA RIGHT HERE WILL LITERALLY MAKE OR BREAK YOUR ENTIRE STUDYING CAREER. RECALL.

7.) If you’re not a good student now, you’re not just going to be a great student after this video. It takes time for you to build momentum, over the course of the days, weeks, months, and years. After a couple years or PRACTICE and DISCIPLINE, all of these techniques will integrate into your mind until it becomes so easy, that it’ll feel like you’re coasting through, really easy to study at that point, because you’ve built up that momentum, you’ve built up positive habits. This process of building up positive habits is not an easy process. It’s a little bit painful, and it will require discipline from you, but this is going to be an important skill that you’re learning because you’ll be able to apply this discipline and these habits that you learn now in high-school and college, and apply it to the rest of your life. The whole point of high-school and college is to setup the foundation to carry that studying through to the rest of your life. And remember why you’re doing all this in the long run. You’re doing all this in the long run because you really care about understanding reality, and all the cool things this will allow you to do in the future. It will allow you to design whatever life you want. Learning how reality works is one of the higher consciousness values of life. It’s one of the greatest fulfillments and joys you can find in life. A long term, smooth and mellow excitement. Develop a love for that in high-school and college. Have a vision for why you’re studying so hard. Keep the ultimate vision in mind. Never lose sight of that. That’s really important.

 

POINTS:

 

—If you’re studying really hard, you have to rest and sleep properly.

—Schedule your time properly, and you won’t need any “all-nighter’s.” Take naps almost everyday. Sleep your full 8-10 hours.

—No cramming. Cramming is ridiculous and stupid. Cramming is all about being a slave, and jumping through hoops for somebody else.

—Give yourself more time to enjoy studying.

—The pain of avoiding study is much worse than the studying itself. There’s nothing really painful about studying. Studying is enjoyable.

—If you adopt all these principles, mindsets, and some of these techniques, you’re going to be able to get a 4.0 GPA and maybe even beyond. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING HOWEVER, IS YOU’LL BE ABLE TO TRANSLATE ALL THIS AMAZING WISDOM YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL INTO YOUR ADULT LIFE.

[Hello from Russia]

 How I Do Research & Develop Big Picture Understanding Notes Part 1

 

Principles of research and developing a big picture understanding of reality:

 

 ⁃ Principle I: Anything is possible.

 ▪ The first position that every human being is in when they come into this life is that we don’t know what is true. We don’t know what is true! This means you also don’t know what’s possible to be true, and what’s possible to be false. You don’t know which principles you will use to assess what’s true and what’s false. That’s how deeply you don’t know. You cannot rely on the knowledge or information that other human beings have sort of mined for you, and supplied to you in books because how do you assess which books are correct? Which are not? The reality is, you don’t, and to admit that is very important.

 ⁃ Principle II: Every position, no matter what position or perspective you take on reality, has hidden assumptions behind it.

 ▪ In a sense, the assumptions define the position or they define the perspective. To even have a perspective requires hidden assumptions that are very hard to root out and become aware of, almost like axioms or premises which defines the paradigm or the perspective from which they look at the world, and that shapes everything, because that is the first step: making assumptions. And when you make incorrect assumptions, you’re reasoning stands on a rotten foundation.

 ⁃ Principle III: All perspectives are partial.

 ▪ No matter what perspective you adopt, on no matter what position, it will only be partial, a partial truth. This is why studying many different perspectives is important, as well as being impartial to the perspectives themselves.

 ⁃ Principle IV: A model is not reality.

 ▪ Thinking about reality is not reality. The map is not the territory.

 ⁃ Principle V: The same phenomena can be explained by different webs of beliefs.

 ▪ Your web beliefs, which is the entire collection of all the beliefs you have about everything that is true or false in the world, is like a representation of reality, and that it is under-constrained, which means that we have a few number of hardcore facts about reality, and you have a giant web of beliefs that you build, which is only loosely connected to the facts, which means that you can build different kinds of web of beliefs to explain exactly the same phenomena. Which explains why we have this diversity of perspectives and options and ideologies around the world.

 ⁃ Principle VI: Foundationalism is false.

 ▪ Foundationalism: Principle that you can take some theory you have about reality and that you can ground it all down into one fundamental truth that is indubitable.

 ⁃ Principle VII: Rationality is far too limited to use as your only tool to explore reality and to understand reality.

 ▪ Reality goes far beyond rationality. Rationality itself is a subset of this larger superset which is reality. A subset cannot encompass a superset. You have to be open to the Principle that maybe the universe can’t be rationalize in principle, and that your attempts to do so leaves a lot unexplained.

 ⁃ Principle VIII: Paradox is good.

 ▪ When you encounter paradox in your research, in your attempts to understand the world, that’s a good thing, and not something to run away from but to be embraced. You have to be open to the Principle that reality might be paradoxical at its core. Also, paradox might be the fallout that you get when you try to rationalize all of reality.

 ⁃ Principle IX: Direct experience is the truest thing we got.

 ▪ If you stick to that you’re going to avoid a lot of traps. If however you go with only different authority figures, that’s going to be very problematic. Or if you go with only your own reasoning abilities, that’s even potentially more dangerous, because your mind is a very tricky thing. Do not now discount expert authorities, and your own reason, and your own intuitions, because those are* important factors, but the truest* thing is direct experience.

 ⁃ Principle X: There’s a huge spectrum of possible direct experiences.

 ▪ Huge. Way larger than you ever imagined possible. What you think of as reality, and all the experiences you’ve had in your whole life, that is a tiny little sliver of all the vast possible and weird experiences that are possible to have in this world. Seeking out new experiences becomes hugely important if you accept the axiom that direct experience is one of the truest things you have in this inquiry.

 ⁃ Principle XI: The practical level still matters.

 ▪ It’s very easy to get lost in just arm chair philosophy and just theorizing stuff. But it’s important to keep in mind that the reason why we’re doing this is so that we can move forward and that we can be more effective in our lives, so that we can be more happier, so we can master our emotions, so we can be more successful in the things we want to accomplish. So if this entire investigation is not helping you to do that, then you’re losing yourself in theory and in academic disputes that are really not relevant to you living the kind of life that you want to live. So in this entire investigation, one easy way to see if you’re doing it right is that your life should be improving gradually over time, in the long run. Not in the short run, but in the long run your life should be improving, because in the short run you might discover some things in this investigation that kind of freak you out, destabilize you, so that’s okay. That’s the practical level.

 ⁃ Principle XII: The best position to take is no position at all.

 ▪ To not desire a position, to not have anything to defend, that’s really when you know you are doing good epistemology.

 ⁃ Principle XIII: Seek understanding rather than truth.

 ▪ Be interested in the looser project of developing understanding. Understanding is like you see how all the parts are moving and why they’re moving the way they’re moving. And you’re looking at the situation from a bird’s eye view, rather than being a crusader stuck on the ground level fighting for some specific position.

 ⁃ Principle XIV: Seek holism in whatever you are studying or investigating.

 ▪ And this is as opposed to what a lot of academics do which is become hyper specialized and get lost in the academic minutiae of some argument or debate, nitpick everything and study the hell out of some little tiny element which has nothing to do with how you’re living your life, it has no bearing on your relationships, your ability to improve your happiness levels, your emotional mastery, or your overall sense of consciousness, it has nothing to do with that, it’s just some little minute academic thing that maybe you can write a paper on and get it published in some research journal… To not get lost in that academic minutiae is very important. And that just means to have the desire to really integrate everything. The goal is not to understand your little field, the goal is to understand all of life, which encompasses every field that there is. Of course some fields you’re going to be more interested in than others, but overall you’re trying to understand what the hell is going on in life and how should I be living my life, these are really important questions.

 ⁃ Principle XV: Argumentation and debate and justification are tools of the ego, and they do not serve truth finding.

 ▪ If your objective is to find truth, and your objective is to understand, then you have to let go of argumentation, debate, and justification. Stop doing these things. They are holding you back, they’re sucking you into ego, they’re sucking you into this paradigm of defending some kind of position. And the more you defend a position, the more stuck you become.

[Hello from Russia]

HOW TO BE ATTRACTIVE TO WOMEN

 

Women as well as men want everything in their partner, they want the full package. But one thing is to want something and another thing is what they can get.

It's also useless to ask a woman what she wants in a man cause they usually don't even know it themselves and don't really look deep into science behind them. 

  However, there are some fundamentals principles\assets that are known to attract women more than anything else, they are dealbreakers:

1) Confidense - if you don't have confidense as a man you're pretty much worthless to woman. A woman won't date a man who has lower confidense than her, this is just isn't gonna be a match. Being grounded

2) Emotional stimulation - women are emotional creatures, they want emotional stimulation. Humor, laughing, smiling is very important. Adopting playful attitude is key

3) Detachment - women want men to be detached from them (even though they will probably tell otherwise). Having strong sense of life purpose and direction in life. They are not attracted to woman being a center of life paradygm. They don't want "needy" guys. They will dump needy guys in a second.

4) Edginess\adventuress - they like guys to be adventurous. She wants a sense of newness. Guy needs to be interesting and a little bit dangerous. She wants something excited. She wants a man who is out there and does stuff in the world. She wants a man who challenges them. 

5) Amazing sex - even though they don't admit it because of our culturing conditioning, women really love sex.

 

Not so important,  althought she would like it and it is what traditionally was considered as key elements:

1)Good looks

2)Financial security

3)Social status

4)Loyalty

[Hello from Russia]

27 QUALITIES OF ALL SUCCESSFULL PEOPLE

1. Passionate

 a. Inspired on some level by life, almost on a spiritual level

2. Hardworking

 a. Abnormally hardworking

 b. Obsessive about how they work

 c. Almost workaholics

 d. Can’t stop doing work

 e. Strong work-ethic is absolutely necessary

 3. Extremely Persistent

 a. High tolerance for failure

 b. Don’t take failure personally, don’t get depressed by it

 c. They plow forward every single time until they get to there goal

 4. Iconoclastic

 a. Rule breakers, do not follow rules of the society, the organization, the family unit, the religious structure

 c. Flexible with the rules

 d. Able to think outside of box

 5. Clever

 a. Abnormally clever, than the bunch

 6. Manipulative

 a. Good at manipulating situations and people to get what they want past through (e.g. maybe good at manipulating bureaucracy, manipulating a government system, manipulating their family, manipulating their friends, manipulating people in their company, manipulating giant masses of crowds, the way that politicians sometimes do)

 b. Manipulation is a tool or tactic, not necessarily evil—it’s an ability some people have

 c. Need to be clever in your manipulations

 7. (Highly) Creative

 a. Highly creative people

 b. Not just in the artsy, imaginative, or poetic sense (although that’s a great attribute to have)

 c. Fundamentally, you can create stuff (the ability to create), not just in the arts, but anywhere, in business, or anywhere else

 d. Successful people are creative people—they create lots of stuff

 e. Creative people generate massive value (i.e. impact thousands or millions or even billions of people, with their work, or with their ideas, or with their ideas speeches, or with whatever). You need to generate massive quantities of value in today’s world in order to become successful

 8. (Strong) Training In Technical Skills

 a. Willing to train hard to develop their technical skills in whatever field they are trying to master and become successful at

 b. Deliberately, methodically practice a certain set of skills over and over and over again until you master it finally. They invest thousands of hours mastering technical skills

 c. Most people are mediocre because they have mediocre technical skills

 9. A Value In Excellence Above The Mediocre People

 a. They really want to do excellent work, they take pride in their work, they have this sense of being the best at what they do, or doing something really exceptionally well that gives them a certain joy, and a certain satisfaction above the mediocre person

 10. Vision

 a. Visionaries, they see a big bright picture of what the future should look like, for them, for their life, for their followers, for their business partners, for their customers; they see into the future. That’s a very powerful skill to develop

 11. Leaders

 a. Because they have this vision, they lead people, they’re fundamentally carving their own path through life, they are on the cutting edge of their field, and they’re not content just to be followers, they break off on their own and do it themselves, their own way, and that usually means some new unique way that hasn’t been done before

 12. Intuitive

 a. Intuitive, they know how to use their intuition

 b. They’re guided by their heart and by their gut, more than just by their logical mind, they’re right-brain thinkers, they’re holistic thinkers, they can take in and assess multiple variable in a kind of complex holistic way, and then they can get this kind of big picture of what need to be done, and sometimes it just comes as a gut feeling

 13. Decisive

 a. Quick, firm, and very crystal clear about what they want

 14. They Don’t Do What They Do Because Of The Money

 a. It’s not about the money

 b. Motivated because they want to impact the world, want to have a positive contribution to society, maybe because they’ve got a big ego and they’ve got a lot of pride, and they want to grow and expand and aggrandize that ego, which is not necessarily a very healthy drive, but that’s still that’s superior than being driven by money, alone.

 c. Most successful people love the work they do, they’re passionate about it, so it comes more or less comes naturally to them, not because of the money

 15. (Highly) Focused

 a. Able to select one field or domain and invest years of time and build up a lot experience in that one field

 b. Like a laser beam

 c. Mediocre people are like a diffused light bulb, shining in all different directions

 16. Ambitious

 a. Have a desire to be the best, to be at the top of your field, to be the one who accomplishes something really great and extraordinary

 b. Almost an ego thing (not necessarily the healthiest drive)

 c. You need that, to rise to the top

 17. Have a Rapid Speed of Implementation

 a. As soon as they hear an idea, or they have a great idea, they go off and immediately start to implement that idea

 b. Have a bias towards action, rather than sitting and thinking (paralysis by analysis)

 18. Opinionated

 a. Have firm and strong opinions because they have firm and strong values and beliefs because of course they are decisive

 19. Have A Spine

 a. Stand up for themselves and their values, and their beliefs, and their ideas

 20. Optimistic And Hopeful

 a. Fundamentally they believe in themselves, they believe that they can, and they believe that people around them can, and they believe that society can

 b. Different from depression—a lot of people are actually quite depressed, a lot of successful people kill themselves from depression

 21. Courageous

 a. Willing to act in the face of fear

 b. Don’t let the fear paralyze or stop them or scare them away

 22. Value Knowledge And Learning (In Some Capacity)

 a. It doesn’t necessarily need to be book smarts, it could be street smarts, it could be learning from your coworkers, or learning in a social environment, or learning from brute trial and error experience

 23. Willing To Endure The Cost And They’re Willing To Make Sacrifices To Get Success

 a. Willing to sacrifice fun, socializing, sex, partying, drinking, doing a lot of entertaining stuff as much, spending as much time with family; their relationships could suffer. They select success over all this other stuff

 24. Highly Self-Motivated (Intrinsically Motivated Versus Extrinsically Motivated)

 a. Fueled from the inside, nobody has to kick you in the ass to tell you what to do, you do it yourself, you kick yourself in the ass

 b. Can become a neurosis

 25. Longterm Thinkers

 a. To be successful you need to spend at least 5 or 10 years developing some sort of proficiency or excellence in some kind of field

 26. Pragmatic

 a. Practical, more so than idealogical or idealistic

 b. Willing to align to the realities of the marketplace, the realities of the political climate, the realities of the time you’re living, the realities of the organization you’re trying to create change in

 c. Willing to compromise certain elements of your ideology, compromise your integrity a little bit, in favor of pushing something through, not always will you get it your way, not always will the perfect scenario just materialize for you and this is exactly how it’s going to be; rarely do you get the “perfect” when you’re trying to achieve something big. Usually you have to cut corners and you have to make sacrifices there, and this requires a willingness to be practical versus idealogical

 27. Work For Themselves

 a. They’re fundamentally advancing their own agenda

 b. The best leaders are a little bit egotistical, a little bit narcissistic, and they’re a little bit selfish, and these qualities turn out to be effective when you’re trying to reach the top

[Nic]

A big thank you Leo for that one. I've requested it I guess 2.5 years ago. It was well worth the wait! Probably as important as your "most shocking truth you'll ever hear" video. Yes, the people concentrate on the no-self and think that they already know what love is... To me, love is easier to get you to no-self than the other way around. Practice it every day, like going to the gym, you'll get instant results! By expending love outwardly,  the fear based inner dialogue vanishes and you become the infinite.

 

What is Love ? 

 

“Real love is to love them that hate you.” Mahatma Gandhi

“Accustomed long to contemplating love and compassion and I have forgotten all differences between others and myself” Milarepa

 

What you think love is, is what you got from your culture, if you are a scientist or atheist, love is a romantic or sentimental emotion.

But love is more fundamental than maths and physics.

The universe is a giant mind, it has capacity to love. Love is a universal property. Just like intelligence, love is a facet of the absolute. Truth, consciousness and love are the three components of the trinity of the absolute, in hindouisme Sat Chit Ananda. It is really one thing, but you can discover them individually or collectively. Enlightenment is having the insight of no-self, but not only, you have to feel infinite love too.

Of course you can have those emotions that are love based but what is love on the metaphysical level?

Truth is love. Why is truth not neutral? Consciousness, intelligence and love are not accidental by-products of the evolutionary process. They are qualities of the univers. You are not in the universe, you are the universe.

Love is infinite and unlimited. but the ego is in the way. Love is absolute acceptance of everything, it is to love all reality without exceptions, not being able to imagine what evil is, considering it as an impossibility. You don’t know what evil is anymore, you love everything so much, there is no more room left for evil to exist, because you have love the evil to death, you are conscience of the beauty of creation. It is the surrender of the self, the dissolution of all boundaries. The beauty of dissolving into infinity is greatest peace and bliss that you can imagine. Death is love, God is love. God meaning the univers or reality.

 

A good way to think about life, is to take life as a love simulator, where the goal is to be the most loving humain being possible, becoming conscious of the beauty of creation. This is the most difficult thing to do. But why is there so much bad stuff going on in that simulation? Because the goal of the simulation is to love everything, even the bad stuff, like a computer game where there are obstacles in the way, you got to be at ease with them. That is the most difficult thing to do because the obstacles are actually to get completely over yourself, surrender yourself, die to the truth and then you can die happy and peacefully.

Love cannot be purchase, their is no magic pill solution, you have to develop your capacity to love but also to the hard stuff. Most people love to love the easy stuff, like food family, people who love them etc… what about the rest?  That what fulfills you..

 

Here is an exercice to open the heart chakra:

Imagine something you love and magnify, expend out that feeling onto all of reality. Transmute that narrow love into universal love for all of existence for the privilege of being able to be here conscious and alive. Expend it out of your chest, like your are a fountain of love.

 

Love means practice, you need to trigger it on command, you are a creator of love, don’t wait to get it from external sources. The true test of your love is the ability to love evil and all the stuff that is against you, so that your love is unconditional. To love is to be not judgmental. The universe loves itself unconditionally, you got to align with that love.

Spirituality is the art of love. It is a set of practices and concept which helps you to increase your capacity to love with the ultimate aim to get to an infinite capacity to love. That is true spirituality!

Loving stuff that serves the ego’s agenda is what most people experience as what love is. The ego only knows how to love conditionally. The ego is always afraid of dissolving the bounderies of the separation it has created towards the infinite. You or your ego feels confortable being small and finite.

 

The opposite of love is: egotism, narcissism, fear, hate, judgment, unconsciousness, violence, intolerance, manipulation, tribalism, exploitation, ignorance, close-mindedness and division. You can’t love if you are preoccupied with food, status, sex, survival, success ideology, politics, money, addiction, drugs, religions or logic. Nobody wants to give up his ideology because we think we are right. That is what is in the way of being all loving. The religious people loves to hate the atheists and vice versa, white people loves to hate the black people and vices versa, christians-muslim, republicans-democrats and so on.

 

What is hate? In a sense hate is not the opposite of love, as love is actually everything. How to account for hate and evil then? It is simply excessive love of the self, the ego. Hate is a form of love. 

Love can have different aspect like water, the solid form would be hate, the liquid form the egoic love, and gaseous form would be the unconditional, divine love.

You love your family conditionally which means you love them because they serve you in certain ways. Every evil person acts out of love. Hitler acted out of love towards his ego. Hitler’s ego and Germany’s national ego which created this division between them and the world. Like a total narcissist. 

Because the ego is so fragmented, it is not able to love itself fully. A person who hates is incapable of loving himself, he denies and suppressed other parts of himself and then projects those out to the outside world. By rejecting the truth of unity in existence, a racist has to reject and demonize the people outside, and unconsciously, he also hates himself. 

What part of yourself do you deny or suppress, what part of your body of your personality don’t you like?

We need to rise above the survival game of outcompeting the other, and being willing to die if necessary.

The ego or the devil flips everything around. The ego or the devil convinces himself that by hating others, that he is actually doing good. And the devil has infiltrated all major religions, so that a lot religious people think that to hate others, non believers or else, is good and that to love their tribe is the point of religion.

Closed minded, opinionated, judgmental, superficial, addicted, needy, ideological, success oriented, arrogant, and fearful people cannot love.

 

Love in spiral dynamics:

Stage purple: tribal form of love, they love their tribe would fight for defending their tribe

Stage red: A twisted, a narcissistic form of love, which takes the form of violence, conquest, dictatorship, punishment, vengeance, power, which is not the opposite of love

Stage blue: The orthodox & religious state. Love your country, ethnicity, community, a love to hate evil and evil doers, following rules, law and order, idol worship, the man in the sky, a love for one religion, not all religions

Stage orange: Love of rationality, science, IQ, analysis, materialism, liberty, individuality, achievement and success, fun, money, sex, fame, libertarians…

Stage green: Love for all people, animals, races, cultures, femininity, environment, community, social justice, willingness to sacrifice for the community. Green sees the importance of loving oneself

Stage yellow: diversity of knowledge and system thinking, open mindedness

Stage turquoise: Love all beings, the entire ecosystem, you understand that you are God, you have the power of true unconditional love, you are able to love suffering, ignorance, evil, unconditional love, you love ego, illusion and Maya, you’ve experienced the truth and you love that global community.

 

To move from one stage to another:

-Do the exercice to open the heart chakra, visualise your self being more loving, fill yourself with love as you would do with a mindful relaxation exercice, feel more love. 

-Suffering, strong determination sitting, solo meditation retreats, psychedelics including bad trips, facing your fears, every fear you have is roadblock towards you being infinitely loving, and the ultimate fear being the fear of death. 

-Practice acceptance, non judgment and surrendering, being more kind, giving, caring and vulnerable, especially being vulnerable will help tremendously, build unconditional self-love, love your body entirely, feel love in difficult times like when someone hurt you, study role models like Gandhi, Christ, Zen masters and many others.

 

Being more loving doesn’t mean everything will go your way or that you will even stay alive, yes you can get hurt (Gandhi was beaten down). Allow yourself to cry.

When some people have a dense level of love, which means that they hate, they are going to hate you for your love. Your love becomes a threat to them! A lot of loving leaders got murdered that way. As an orthodox, you don’t want to admit that love and evil, God and the devil are actually the same thing. Your orthodox religion is corrupted by the devil. You were told not to worship idols, that the kingdom of heaven is within, to love your neighbor as yourself… what do think that means? 

 

Make sure when you love, you never do it because you have to or because you should.

You have to genuinely love reality, you don’t fake that. Be careful with the “fake it until you make it” approach, as long you have a sens of ego, you are not able to love unconditionally, the ego is by definition a division. The ego wants to build a protective castle and in doing so, you separate yourself from the world. You have to surrender all ideologies, beliefs, religion and beliefs in God, that is the cost. 

 

You can burn the candle from both end: 

-Pursue awakening on hand (self-enquirery, yoga, meditation, contemplation)   

-Practice to be more loving

-Practice to have a real smile vs a fake one. Practice make yourself feel the joy and happiness.

-Practice compassion.

-Total acceptance for the ignorance of mankind. Evil is always created by ignorance.

-Understanding that hatred is a form of love

 

A common person use 5% of their love. You want to transform the quality of your life? Tap into love! You can’t really do it because you are too weak, narcissist, scared, selfish, left brained, wrapped up in ideologies, opinions, judgments, fighting for social justice, as that race, for that religions, you have ennemies.

To be a powerful leader, you got to be a powerful lover, otherwise you become a tyrant and hated.

Love requires the greatest courage, it is something you have to work for. There needs to be a commitment to transform yourself as a more loving person.

Loving people have a great sense of purpose in their life, they don’t get abused and have strong boundaries so that they don’t let the egotism of others drag them down. To be loving you need to be up-lifting.

 

Your homework assignment: Look at how and why your love is conditional, look how you cherrypick. Make a list of your fears that are holding you back to be more loving with this person, with that situation, political matter… Why aren’t you able to love more? What are you afraid of? Is it the fear of what others think of you? When you see how much conditional your love is, you will start to see opportunities to turn that around.

[Nic]

1 hour ago, Nic said:

 

 

Edited September 26, 2018 by Nic

[Nahm]

@Nic ??

[Nic]

Self-Deception part 1/2/3

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman

“Self deception covers it’s own track”  Daniel Goleman

 

Your mind is inherently self-deceptive. 

René Descartes’s saying “I think therefore I Am” means that the fact that I’m doubting means that there has to be someone who is doubting. He came to the conclusion that it was not possible to live in a matrix or that some evil demons had the power over the human’s mind, as the demon in question would still have someone to deceive.

The one thing that almost no philosopher takes seriously is that the mind is inherently a self-deception machine. The whole point of self deception is that you don’t take it seriously, otherwise it wouldn’t be a successful self-deception. Your own mind is the evil demon, the self-deception is utterly total. All there is to this game called life is self-deception within self-deception within self-deception… We don’t need science-fiction scenarios like Descartes or that the world could be a simulation, the mind has complete power over you. The number one biggest mistake in life is to believe that your own mind can be trusted. That is epistemology, how do you know that what you know is reliable.

The mind will take every opportunity to deceive you. Your mind wants to construct a reality without you being aware that you construct it. You are your own conspiracy theory. The mind can construct an unbreakable illusion that goes all the way to the existential level. When you think you are controlling it, it is actually the one that is controlling you. You don’t need to worry about other people trick you but the only way that they can trick you is because you trick yourself. 

Ask yourself: Can I trust my own mind? Am I deceiving myself? And listen carefully for the answer. The whole problem is that the process is circular.

How did something come out of nothing? How is creation possible at all? Things can come into being only through one mechanism, deception! How does God (reality) create the world? Through self-deception. Why would God need to deceive itself? God creates infinite forms through deception, . God or reality deceives itself. This one thing can take on many forms only by tricking itself into thinking that it’s limited and finite, rather than infinite. Deception becomes the mechanism of creation. Reality must deceive itself to come into existence. This is how you and the universe came into existence. You whole body and mind is made out of self-deception. At least that’s what you get if you stop thinking that reality is objective.

The greatest self-deceptions are believing that you are real, important and must survive. Descartes doubted everything but he couldn’t doubt the Self. The minds needs self-deception for creation, on top of that is build the entire web of lies that is, the rest of your life.

Consider that lies are actually much more useful than truth in many situation as the mind likes to flip everything on its head. People lie to get what they want. As long as you are alive, all your attention goes to staying alive. What if there is something beyond living and staying alive. But the mind’s job is not to keep the body alive the way people think, but to keep the idea of “you” alive. People think that the idea of you resides in the body, but the idea of is more fundamental than your body, all kind of things can happen to it, and this is the reason why people mutilate themselves for spiritual reasons, as the body is just another idea, the idea of you. The “you” is not a body, it is a conglomeration of conceptual ideas. 

Becoming a martyr is not a selfless act, it’s completely selfish, they have some idea of them where martyr-ship plays into, how they will live in the memories of there followers and fans, and live on in the afterlife is more important than staying physically alive. So surviving is not about the body, it’s about surviving the idea of you.

 

Self-deception is not only about enlightenment… Most of things you love in life are self-deceptions: money, wealth, ownership, security, laws & right, religion, history, movies, porn, time, language, confidence, fame, power, what’s good and bad, meaning and purpose, ideologies, science, family, corporations, nations, equality, rank status, culture, video games… 

-Ownership: a piece of paper saying that you own your house or your dog is just ridiculous

-Security: The more power you think you acquire, the more insecure you become. The most insecure people are dictators. This is why they have the biggest arsenal to begin with.

-Human rights:  There is nothing holding this laws but human consensus, an invention to make yourself more secure

-Movies, novels, porn are all virtual simulations

-Family: You have convinced yourself that there is a special connection between people based on some genetic similarity. You got to treat them in a special way, rather than the way that you treat other human beings. There is no more connection between you and your mother than between you and a coffee table as it is all one thing. There is nothing special about your family, that is just an illusion that the mind creates because it is an important component of you staying alive.

-Nations & corporations: Are both completely fabricated identities, the border of the country is an imaginary line.

-Equality, fairness: Reality is what it is, you want equality for your pragmatic agenda, so you get a better life for yourself

 

Even the sources of knowledge are also serving the pragmatic survival agenda.

Are corrupted by self-deception: Logic, reason, science and mathematics, philosophy, psychology and medicine, history, economics, business, personal development, religion, spirituality and non-duality. The process of talking about self-deceptions is itself riddled in self-deceptions.

You actually don’t want the truth, you want to be wrapped up in the illusion, knowledge itself is part of the self-deception.

There are 2 types of knowledge: Conventional knowledge what you get from school and university. That is not too dangerous for the mind… And then there is self-knowledge, the meta knowledge, about the mechanism of how knowledge works, epistemology. The mind is careful to withhold all meta-knowledge from you, the mechanism of knowledge itself.

Society is an entire self-deception.

 

What are the evidence that self-deception is real?

-You have double standards, you criticize others but not yourself for example, for cutting people off in traffic, you don’t insult yourself when you do it 

-Have you also noticed that people believe a lot of crazy stuff in the world, they are all crazy, or self deceived but you. You notice that in others but not in yourself. Don’t try to fix others, worry about yourself, as you focus outward you are not focussing inward and therefore the mind accomplish its objective of distracting you. 

-The way humans treat evil. Evil is just selfishness. To be alive is to be evil. You deny it and pretend to be that good upstanding moral person. Everybody is just as evil as you are but you just want to push your own agenda. The only reason why you think nazis are evil is because they are threatening your agenda. 

There is nothing wrong with all this, but this is what it is to be alive.

 

Most of human history is about one group of people ruling over another group of people. A generation later we think we are better than they were as if we were immune to the self-deception of the previous generation. And if we don’t run into the previous self-deception, we run into a new one even deeper, thinking we are finally at the top and have reached perfection, we figured reality out, we know the truth.

The question is, can you see your own self-deceptions? By judging others, you are falling into the trap of self-deception. 

Reason itself is the chief tool of self-deception. Reasons are used to justified your self-agenda. The reason why rationalists like to argue about people who are faith-based is precisely because they are ignorant of the faith that they ground their reason in. Reason itself is based on faith. This is a problem of conflict of interests, self-bias and lack of honesty. Reason will only make this worse. You can’t think your way out of this problem. It’s a slow process. Your entire mind/body will revolt against the truth, against self-reflecting and noticing it’s own self-deceptions. Every time you try to change yourself, you fall back. The mind is helping you to maintain your self. Every one has their own pace, with their own problem. You have to turn inwards to find and face your inner demons. The mind hates this process a lot. Everybody denies that he is the devil, that is the nature of the mind.

You can jailbreak your own mind. But the mind knows all its own attempt to jailbreak itself and it can easily stop those. It’s like to play chess with yourself. But it is possible as the final leap will come from outside of your mind, that would be enlightenment, that is not going to come from you. But even after enlightenment the mind will still be there.

 

In a nutshell, the mind is trying to prevent self-reflection because everything is an illusion. You are God deceiving itself into thinking that it’s not God but that it’s you, a finite being. Why would God Trick himself? Because he can.

 

The solution to self-deception is self-reflections, it means questioning everything you hold as certain, about yourself and the world. What all personal growth boils down to is going from a place of maximum self-deception to a place of minimum self-deception, the more you do that, the less suffering you’ll have in your life.

By believing that you are a separate entity you have the ability to experience and to discover how beautiful and amazing reality is.

 

Self-Deception part 2 - 60+ Self-Deception Mechanisms

 

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself” Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Thought is always saying that thought didn’t do it” David Bohm

 

Recap: The mind is a self-deceptive engine because without illusion nothing can exist, reality must be dreamed into being. This dream needs to be sustained it is so through self-deception. It is not in the mind’s interest to look inside at the machinery constructing the dream. The dream is maintained through a lack of self-awareness and self-reflection. You can have the idea to jailbreak the mind and to see what reality is like, outside of the dream.

 

To be alive is to be selfish. It’s convenient to deceive yourself before you actually deceive other people, once you deceived yourself, that let’s you get away with a lot of selfish stuff. Would you think a coucou bird would survive by not kicking the other eggs of the nest of another bird if it has some sense morality? Human beings are social creatures, we live in large groups, we need a sense of morality, but nevertheless, we don’t want to be too honest with each other and ourselves and so we are some of the most deceptive creatures that exist. We need to be deceiving and at the same doing as if nothing is going on. What better way to this by deceiving yourself in the process. Think of how sneaky you can be when you don’t even know that you are being sneaky. It’s a work of genius, it’s mind-blowing! 

 

The deception goes like this: You think you know things that you really do not know. Everytime you have a firm position on anything, you open yourself up to self-deception.

Here a a list of the different mechanism:

-Thinking that you got reality figured out

-Believing that reality is an objective thing, that facts exits independently from interpretation

-Assuming that self-deception is not a significant factor in your life, underestimating it

-Thinking that you can dismiss and avoid metaphysics

-Conceptualization, confusing the map for the territory, distinguish between a concept and direct experience, separate your thoughts from sensory perceptions.

-Language and labeling, by putting names and labels, we believe that we know more about an object than we really do. Science and academics love to use complicated language. Labels contain a large number of connections and meanings of other concepts. That is forming networks in your mind of meanings and that creates all sorts of aberrance in your mind that are difficult to escape.

-Beliefs and hearsay, science is a highly beliefs based system, big bang etc, believing that this is not a belief, is a belief as well. Did you actually check the facts for yourself? Contemplation, meditation, this is raw experience. 99% of what you hold to be true is just beliefs.

-Judging the correctness of your worldview based on how cohesive it feels, but how do you differentiate one world view from another? You will pick the one that you grew up in, the closest to your personal preference, that will feel cohesive.

-The unwillingness to admit that “you don’t know”. We have always good explanations for everything but you don’t actually know much. Not knowing implies that we are stupid or that there is something wrong with us.

-Childhood imprinting and indoctrination, the mind will believe whatever its environment leads it to believe, especially religious or atheist & metaphysical beliefs.

-The need for contrast in order for the human mind to grasp something, the mind requires contrast to be conscious of things. By traveling you get the contrast of the different cultures. You take oxygen for granted because there is no contrast. If you don’t have any contrast to reality, then whatever you are experiencing seems like reality

-Assumptions, we make assumptions without being conscious that they are assumptions and build a web of beliefs around it.

-Self evidence or “a priori” truths, truth that or so obvious that they don’t need further investigations, like 1+1=2, but you are absolutely clueless.

-Emotions (what puts you into motions), the mind doesn’t manipulate you through logic and reasons but through emotions, and they one of the hardest thing to master. If your mind wanted to trick you, hide something from you, it would hide it behind a wall of fear, like the fear of death. The mind uses fear, anger, boredom to make you avoid self-reflection and they are extremely effective. Did you notice that reason and logic doesn’t help much when you are afraid of snakes or heights. Emotions are the minds primary way of controlling you. All notions of truth, morality, kindness, love fly out the window when you are angry, depressed and fearful.

-Not being conscious of your own ego reactions. Science doesn’t like to admit the entire influence of psychology and emotions upon the entire reasoning process, that would mean the entire process is corrupt, they’d like to believe that reason is the primary process, but it is the secondary process. Psychology, emotions and ego are the primary process. The mind hides all this to fulfill its agenda

-Projection is demonizing other people through denying that the problem comes from you. Look how evil and selfish terrorists are… you’d better look at yourself.

-Distractions (episode The ego’s favorite defense mechanism)

-Crusading, morality, atheist, science… distracting from self-reflection

-Addictions drugs, porn, food etc, are obvious but it’s more subtle when your addiction is overthinking, daydreaming, judging & criticizing, resenting people for their success…

-Believing that science has or will figure it all out

-Having pet theories, scientific like evolution or the big bang, even in politics or religion, you want them to be true. People give their theory a special treatment.

-Confirmation bias, cherrypicking evidence, narrative making. The minds tends to assume a thing and then cherrypick the confirming kind of evidences to bolster this narrative

-Underestimating paradigms, not being able to recognize that you are trap inside a paradigm

-Taking basic things for granted, like existence, life, money, matter, energy, space, time, government…. we don’t question them very deeply.

-Question begging, reasoning in a circle, it’s posing a question, answering it and assuming the thing you’re trying to investigate. Obvious with religious people, but it’s also a big problem in philosophy and science. Try to question a scientific person if the brain is actually real. They would say how can it not be real? We just open a skull and see there is a brain. But to open a skull and to see that there is a brain is not a proof, that is begging the question. Those neurons, as you are looking at them, where are they located? Are the neurons located in another brain? In the universe… how do you know there is a universe? Because that’s in your brain, in your mind. It is circular logic. You construct an entire reality from question begging.

-Judgement, criticism name calling

-Close-mindedness

-New Age bias, a particular form of closed-mindedness

-Dismissing the occult, mystical and paranormal phenomena

-Blaming, scapegoating, demonizing

-Playing victim

-Arguing and debating

-False skepticism and debunking

-Human species bias, taking the human perspective as though it were universal and the only one. Even maths, physics and science are a human specific way of understanding reality. There is no such thing as universal knowledge.

There is also no such thing as peace on earth, even if everybody would get enlightened. When we build another city we don’t care of how much insects and animals are killed in the process, life is inherently destructive. To have life you have to have death, evil and selfishness

-Dismissing all of this by saying it’s just philosophy

-Pleading that nobody knows the truth so that you can continue your life as it was.

-Cultural preferences. Ask yourself is your culture really the best one? Why do I think it’s the best one, could that be completely arbitrary, could I be imprinted? Cultures are collective egos

 

Knowing about self-deception doesn’t make you immune to it, it’s like walking in a minefield, you can’t avoid them all. Watch yourself as it is happening

 

Self-Deception Part 3

“Enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.” Lucretius

“It’s a trap!” Admiral Ackbar, The Return of the Jedi 

List goes on:

 

-Ignoring one’s own conflict of interest which includes the following subtopics: 

a) double standards; Science never proved that there is such a thing as an external world, do most scientists except to even question it? No because it’s part of the dogma of the scientific paradigm. So they are very harsh on the new age people, but the rationalist or the scientist don’t have conclusive proof that the universe is rational, do you have any proof that the Self exists, why do they believe in a Self? It’s just taken for granted and then a double standards is applied. To the mind it’s just reality. Same problem applies to spiritual groups. The loyalty of the person that belongs to one particular traditions or school, the school will come first, that’s the new ego that’s being defended. There is no objective comparison of which technic for enlightenment are actually the best. 

b) self-justification and excuse making; 

c) backward rationalization, confabulation; When the is rationalizing, it can rationalize anything it wants, like a good attorney defending a rapist or a corrupt politician

d) wanting or needing a thing to be true;

-Unwilling to make self-investigation; If you do research you got to be open to the fact that your mind could be change

-Assuming rigid dualistic categories or distinctions. Science vs religion, bad vs good, matter vs energy, light being a particle or a wave and so on.

-Being over logical and rational, it doesn’t help for not being fooled by your own mind at all.

-Thinking bias, taking thinking as the best way to understand reality

-Analysis bias, like braking matter, fragmentation, looking what composes matter and thinking that you understand reality that way. Emergent phenomenon is the fact that, arranging some pieces together doesn’t produce the whole, phenomenon that the sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts.

-Impossibility bias; assuming that your intuition about what is possible or impossible is right, but the future always surprises us. Give a phone to a man of the middle age…

-Mistaking truth with provability; The domain of things that are true is much larger than the domain of things that are provable.

-Expecting the truth to be thrust upon you and proven to you overwhelmingly against your own resistance, no, you have to meet the truth half way

-Assuming that reality is simple, intuitive and obvious

-Black and white thinking. After hearing about self-deception you might think that everything what is going on with you, is a self deception, that would be just more self-deception! No, the whole point of self deception is that is subtle, not like black and white, not everything is self deception, you have genuine motivations, desires and values within you, you have to investigate what is true or self-deceptive. Otherwise you convince yourself to complete inaction. Jailbreaking the mind requires nuances.

-Paradox bias, avoiding paradox, avoiding the weird or strange facets of reality.

-Taking your knowledge as obvious. A lot of people had to die hundreds of years ago for us now being able to take our knowledge as obvious

-Mindfuck bias, not expecting a reversal and in a trend, underestimating the possibility of mindfucks, reality is not linear

-Pragmatic bias, to only care about things that obviously seem useful. Saying “if it’s not useful why shall we care about it?” The stuff that is useful to you is the stuff that directly serves your ego. Some stuff can be not useful but nevertheless true. What if life is more than success or technology, don’t confuse these with truth. It’s not because something is successful doesn’t mean it’s true. A lot of technology are build based on Newtonian mechanics, but we know it’s technically wrong, still, it is useful.

-Underestimating the influence of business, marketing and culture in influencing your worldview, beliefs and desires

-Authority and credentials, trusting in experts and authorities in science but also in interpreting reality

-Morality bias, people who are very attached to their moral, comparing to and then dismissing wisdom because of your own moral standards, morality doesn’t come first

-Political ramification bias, same as the morality bias but with political ideology

-Historical meta-narratives, believing that the history of human beings is like we were taught in school. Human used to be quiet conscious before the age of agriculture, they were not savages, they made some profound discoveries just using their consciousness, they had good knowledge of plant and animal life, how to manipulate stones, constructing monuments. We ,might still be living in dark ages only technologize.

-Tribalism; racism, nationalism, political infighting, partisanship, spiritual groups

-Groupthink, when you surrender your mind to a group of people.

-Assuming that everyone has the same brain chemistry, that everyone has the same access to reality, that reality is the same for every one

-Preoccupation for the self-deceptions of other people, worry about your own self-deceptions, fix yourself, don’t point your finger at others, use other’s self-deceptions to recognize that you have probably the same self-deceptions.

-Talking and knowing versus embodying a wisdom

-Thinking when you are at the end of the journey, believing you have the upper hand on a situation, that is useably when the situation has the upper hand on you.

-Being arrogant, feel it as it happens, recognize how this arrogance hold you from enjoying life

 

To see a mechanism within you, doesn’t mean that you can just drop it, it’s a work in progress.