Actualized.org Video Summaries!

[FlyingLotus]

• The most recent list of Summaries & Episodes is here
• ? Leo's Blog: Table of Contents ?
• ▶️ Blog Videos, Summaries & Interviews ▶️
• ? Actualized.org on Psychedelics ?  (has all resources on psychedelics)

 

• Leo’s "20 Dream Killers" article.
• There’s an Actualized.org Textbook.  It was assembled by @Cepzeu and others.  Summaries in the Textbook (v2) will say: (book pg XXX).
• You can also check out Leo’s Personal Development Blueprint.  It covers over 100 concepts in personal development.

 

     Actualized.org Youtube Episodes:

• The first 200 episodes have transcripts in the video section of Actualized.org
• If you want to contribute to this thread, select one of the episodes that still needs a summary and post it here

     Episodes:      1 - 249

 

1. [x] How to Invest In Yourself (pg 11)

2. [x] Why Life Coaching Works (pg 11)

3. [] Be Different to Be Successful

4. [x] Get Coached (pg 12)

5. [] Inner Game of Career Development

6. [] The Most Interesting Problem in Philosophy and Science

7. [x] How I Lost 65 Pounds in 5 Months (pg 12)

8. [x] Understanding Resistance (pg 8)

9. [x] Mastery (pg 11) (book pg 140)

10. [] Work Less to Accomplish More

11. [x] What's the Worst That Can Happen? (pg 16)

12. [] What a Roman Emperor Can Teach You About Happiness

13. [] The Number One Reason Why You're Not Succeeding

14. [] The Problem of Self-Control

15. [] The Art of Solving Problems Permanently

16. [] How You Must Think About Failure

17. [] Life Purpose - Critical Points For Finding Your Life Purpose ?

18. [] As Good As Your Life Will Ever Get ?️

19. [] How to Delegate to Your Subconscious Mind

20. [] Garbage In, Garbage Out - Watch Your Information Intake

21. [] The $100 Million Dollar Question

22. [] Positive vs Negative Motivation

23. [] How To Transform Your Entire Life

24. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Intro - Actualized.org

25. [] Personal Development - The Ultimate Vision of What You Can Be

26. [] Life Purpose - The Thrill of Creative Contribution

27. [] Success & Creativity - Why You Should Be More Schizophrenic

28. [] Personal Development - How Your Mind is Like a Rider Atop an Elephant

29. [] Personal Development - Tips About How to Give Advice

30. [] Create an Exciting Life - Your 5 Proudest Moments Exercise

31. [] Happiness & Success - Should You Work on Strengths or Weaknesses?

32. [] Personal Development - Professional vs Hobbiest

33. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Mission Statement

34. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Charged Life

35. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Top 5 Feelings

36. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Eliminate Addictions

37. [] How to Make Your Life Extraordinary

38. [] How to Do Real Personal Development

39. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Meditation

40. [] How To Become Successful - The Secrets That Everyone Overlooks

41. [] How To Get More Energy - An Approach Nobody Ever Talks About

42. [] How To Make A Guy Fall In Love With You - What Guys Really Want

43. [] How To Make A Girl Fall In Love With You - What Girls Really Want

44. [] How To Make More Money - Increase Your Income In Career or Business

45. [] How To Become A Life Coach - Every Part of the Process Revealed inDetail

46. [] Benefits of Meditation - Top Reasons To Start Meditating Right Now

47. [] How To Overcome Shyness - Transform Yourself Into An Extrovert

48. [] What Is The Purpose Of Life? - Use Purpose to Achieve Massive Success

49. [] How To Motivate Employees - Creating Ultra-Productive Workers

50. [] How To Feel Happy - Scientifically Proven Ways of Creating Lasting Happiness

51. [] Productivity Strategies - Are You Prolific?

52. [x] How To Increase Your Results From Self-Help Products by 10x (book pg 206)

53. [] Personal Development Blueprint - Information Intake

54. [] New Years Resolutions - How Getting Back On Track Is A Huge Opportunity

55. [] Self Expression - How To Express Yourself & Find Your Authentic Creative Voice

56. [x] How to Be Happy in Life - Happiness Bottlenecks (pg 13)

57. [] Overcoming Fear - How To Slay Your Greatest Demon

58. [x] Sensitivity - Why Personal Development Is Impossible For You Right Now (pg 15)

59. [x] How To Never Quit - The Key To Reframing The Toughest Obstacles (pg 15)

60. [] The Subconscious Mind - Using Your Subconscious Mind to Create Massive Success

61. [] Negative Thoughts - The Origin Of Negative Thinking & How To Eliminate It Forever

62. [] How To Succeed In Life - The 6 Key Elements of Phenomenal Success

63. [] Fear Of Public Speaking - The One Key To Overcoming It Forever

64. [] How To Change Your Life - Making BIG Life Changes Actually Stick

65. [] Fear Of Failure - Why We Have It & How To Deal With It

66. [] How To Change Careers - Dealing With The Fear & Transitioning Smart

67. [] How To Stay Focused - The Key To Being Extremely Productive & ClearMinded

68. [] Resume Writing Tips - The Secret Mindset For Writing a Perfect Resume

69. [] How To Stay Motivated To Lose Weight - The Psychology of Weight Loss Success

70. [] How To Stop Worrying - The Fundamentals of Eliminating Worry

71. [] How To Change The World - What It Takes To Have Massive Social Impact

72. [] Personal Power - How Personal Power Creates Success

73. [] SMART Goal Setting - How to Set Extremely Effective Goals

74. [] The Subconscious Mind - Using Your Subconscious Mind to Create Massive Success

75. [] What Is Ego - How Your Ego Dictates Your Entire Life

76. [] How To Get Motivated - Creating a Consistent Drive for High Performance

77. [x] The Law Of Attraction - How It Really Works & How To Use It (pg 11)

78. [] How To Stop Procrastinating - A Step-by-Step Process For Busting The Worst of Procrastination

79. [] How To Be More Confident - A Step-by-Step Process for Becoming Truly Confident

80. [x] Self Actualization - The Most Inspiring Self-Help Concept Of All Time (book pg 37)

81. [] Positive Affirmations - The Tricks of Using Affirmations to Transform Your Life

82. [] What Should I Do With My Life - How To Find Your Passion For Life

83. [] Peak Performance - How To Hit and Maintain Consistent Peak Performance In Life

84. [x] How To Stay Healthy - The Psychology of Maintaining Consistent, Effortless Health (pg 13)

85. [x] Overcoming Adversity - How To Handle The Most Horrific Life Challenges Ever (pg 15)

86. [] How To Become A Vegetarian - Practical Steps You Must Take To Succeed

87. [] How To Control Anger - The Shocking Truth Behind Your Anger Problems

88. [] Positive Psychology - What Is It & How It Can Transform Your Life

89. [x] Self Control - How To Develop Self-Control To Create An Amazing Life (pg 9)

90. [] How To Relieve Stress - Scientifically Proven Stress Relief Techniques

91. [x] How To Be Attractive - The Ultimate Attraction Strategy (pg 2)

92. [x] Why Am I Depressed? - The Shocking Truth Behind Your Depression (pg 12)

93. [x] Profound Quotes #001 - "All Of Humanity's Problems Stem From Man’s..." (pg 12)

94. [] True Vision - I Reveal My Life Purpose Until You Can Feel It ?

95. [] Willpower - Scientifically Proven Techniques to Increase Willpower

96. [] Redefining Philosophy - How To Become A Jedi Master

97. [] How To Become Rich - The Number One Reason You're Not Already Rich

98. [] Mindfulness - How To Actually Practice Mindfulness & Conquer Your Emotions

99. [] Profound Quotes #002 - "Specialization Is For Insects"

100. [x] What Is Happiness? - An Extremely Advanced Definition Of Happiness (book pg 60)

101. [x] Self Image - The Amazing, Absolute Key To All Personal Growth (pg 16)

102. [] How To Stay Committed To A Cause

103. [] Introvert vs Extrovert - A Deep Understanding Of Introverts And Extroverts

104. [] How To Eat Healthy - Create A Super Healthy Meal In 15 Minutes ?

105. [x] How To Be A Man - The Deep Core Of Being Masculine (pg 10)

106. [] Positive Thinking - The Key To Thinking Positive

107. [] Healthy Relationships - What You MUST Know To Sustain A Great Relationship

108. [x] Dream Life - What It Takes To Create An Extraordinary Life (pg 15)

109. [] Best Supplements - What You Must Know About Supplementation ?

110. [x] Optimism - How To Become Optimisitic Right Now (pg 10)

111. [] Letting Go Of The Past - How To Get Over The Past In Minutes

112. [] How To Find Your Passion - Why You Have No Passion & How To Fix It

113. [] Critical Thinking - Use Independent Thinking To Build A Powerful Life

114. [] How To Motivate Yourself - The Trick Behind Lasting Self-Motivation

115. [x] Emotional Intelligence - Why Your EQ Is More Important Than Your IQ (pg 9)

116. [x] Cause & Purpose - What Are You Willing To Bleed For? (pg 10)

117. [] Id, Ego, Superego - Understanding An Old School Psychology Concept

118. [] Self Help - How Self-Help Can Revolutionize Your Entire Life

119. [] Life Coaching - The Powerful Benefits Of Working With A Life Coach

120. [] How To Start A Business - Bootstrapping A Successful Business

121. [] How To Use Technology To Super-Charge Your Personal Growth

122. [] Time Management - How To Get More Time In Your Day

123. [] State Of The Union - My Camera Dies In Death Valley

124. [x] The Secret - The Truth They Didn't Tell You (pg 13)

125. [] Personal Development Plan - The Essentials Of Getting Results

126. [] How To Love Yourself - How To Like Who You Are Right Now

127. [] How To Feel Good - Re-Designing Your Life To Feel Amazing

128. [] How To Be Yourself - Become Your Authentic Self Right Now

129. [] True Value - How To Create Success Out Of Nowhere

130. [] The Power Of Routines - How Your Daily Routine Holds You Back From Your Dreams

131. [] Staying Hungry - How To Use Pain For Growth ⚖️

132. [x] Relationship Advice - The Master Plan For Creating An Amazing Relationship (pg 10)

133. [] How To Become A Millionaire - The Truth No One Tells You

134. [] Self Esteem - Understanding & Fixing Low Self-Esteem

135. [] Judgment - How You Ruin Your Own Happiness

136. [x] Profound Quotes #003 - "Children Want Candy; The Intelligent Want Self-Control” - Rumi (pg 9)

137. [] Whatever Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger - True or False? ?

138. [] What Women Want In A Man - 5 Factors That Hook Women Like Crack

139. [] How To Make A Girl Squirt - Give Your Girl An Explosive Orgasm

140. [] Positive Attitude - The 3 Pillars To Cultivating Positivity

141. [x] How To Exploit People To Grow Yourself - An Advanced Technique (pg 1) (book pg 269)

142. [] Stress Management - Permanent Solutions For Stress Reduction

143. [] Why I'm A Dick - And Why I Won't Change

144. [] Goal Setting - How To Set Goals Effectively

145. [x] Bad Relationships - How To Break Your Cycle Of Painful Relationships (pg 9)

146. [] Bad Habits - A Live Exercise For Dropping Any Bad Habit For Good

147. [] How To Get A Girlfriend - The Ultimate Guide For Landing A Hot Girlfriend

148. [] How To Forgive Someone - The One Trick That Makes Forgiveness Easy

149. [] Openmindedness - A Huge Overlooked Obstacle To Self Improvement

150. [] How To Make Friends - 4 Sticking-Points That Limit Your Ability To Make Friends

151. [] Good Vs Evil - Why Evil Doesn't Actually Exist

152. [] Communication Skills - The 6 Keys Of Powerful Communication

153. [] Low Self Esteem In Women - Why Women Have Lower Self-Esteem Than Men

154. [x] Visualization - A Powerful Technique For Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind (book pg 203)

155. [] Self Confidence - The Two Essential Avenues For Building Confidence

156. [] Why Women Use You For Money - And How To Never Get Used Again

157. [] Why Men Cheat - And 8 Ways To Keep Your Man Loyal

158. [] How To Follow Advice Without Betraying Yourself

159. [x] How To Master & Control Your Emotions (book pg 201)

160. [] Negative Visualization - An Ancient Stoic Technique For Creating Happiness

161. [x] How To Stop Being A Victim - The #1 Reason You Are Stuck In Life  (pg 15) (book pg 84)

162. [] Spirituality vs Religion - The No-Bullshit Guide To Spirituality

163. [x] Self Discipline vs Freedom - How To Create More Freedom In Your Life (pg 11)

164. [x] How To Deal With Depression - The Key To Breaking Out Of Depression (pg 3)

165. [x] How To Stop Caring What People Think Of You (pg 13) (book pg 199)

166. [] How Science Keeps You Stuck In Life - Exposing Problems With "Scientific" Thinking

167. [] Why Women Fall For Assholes

168. [x] Understanding The Authentic Self - Discovering Who You Really Are (book pg 197)

169. [] How To Deal With Difficult & Toxic People

170. [] Leo's List of Top 140 Self-Help Books ?

171. [] How To Stop Watching TV - Why You Must Eliminate TV Right Now!

172. [] Luck & Success - Is Luck Important For Being Successful?

173. [] How To Meditate - The No Bullshit Guide to Meditation

174. [] How To Manage Your Money Easily Using This Budget Template

175. [] The Biggest Thing You Should Fear - Halloween Special ?

176. [] How To Be An Attractive Man - Interview With Dating Coach, TrippAdvice

177. [x] How To Stop Being Lazy - Solutions For Short-term & Long-term Laziness (book pg 196)

178. [] How To Deepen Your Love For Life - A Powerful Exercise

179. [] How To Deal With A Breakup

180. [] Why The Most Successful People Don't Do Personal Development

181. [] How To Have Amazing Sex - Part 1

182. [] The Truth About Passive Income

183. [] How To Practice Gratitude - Xmas 2014 Special ?

184. [x] How To Stop Being Jealous - Techniques To End Jealousy Forever (pg 2)

185. [x] Responsibility vs Blame - Why You Are 100% Responsible For Everything (book pg 89)

186. [x] How To Study - The Keys To Acing School & College (pg 2) (book pg 214)

187. [x] Beware Of False Prophets - Stop Worshipping Human Personality (pg 11)

188. [x] What Is Karma? - The No-Bullshit Explanation Of How Karma Works (book pg 140)

189. [] Stop Demonizing People! - Why You Are Wrong For Calling Terrorists Evil

190. [x] Spiritual Enlightenment - The Most SHOCKING Truth You'll Ever Hear (book pg 98)

191. [] What To Do Next After Learning About Enlightenment

192. [x] The Happiness Spectrum - The Best & Worst Kinds Of Happiness (book pg 58)

193. [x] Paradoxes Of Personal Development (book pg 61)

194. [x] Spiritual Enlightenment - Part 2 - Understanding The Conceptualized Self (book pg 100)

195. [] The Secret Curse Of Being Human + Bonus: A True Spiritual Exercise!

196. [] How To Have Amazing Sex (For Women) - Drive Your Man Wild In Bed

197. [x] Enlightenment - Part 3 - Creating An Experience Of No-Self (book pg 101)

198. [x] Enlightenment FAQ - Part 1 - All Your Questions Answered (pg 2) (book pg 246)

199. [x] Enlightenment FAQ - Part 2 (pg 14)

200. [x] All Of Religion Explained In One Video (pg 2) (pg 12) (book pg 112)

201. [] How To Have Amazing Sex - Part 2 - Increasing Intimacy & Dominance

202. [x] Understanding Emotions - Part 1 (book pg 190)

203. [] Feminine vs Masculine Compassion

204. [x] How To Stop Backsliding - How To Stop Procrastinating (pg 10) (book pg 195)

205. [x] How To Become Enlightened - The Exact Step By Step Process Revealed! (book pg 102)

206. [x] How To Be A Leader - Leadership Secrets Revealed! (book pg 188)

207. [] How To Stop Being A Workaholic

208. [x] How To Meditate Deeper (pg 8)

209. [x] Science vs Religion - The Absurdity Revealed! (book pg 186)

210. [x] How To Create Your Dream Career - The Ultimate Life Purpose Course (pg 15)

211. [x] How To Unleash Your Ambition - Must-Watch For Ambitious People (pg 1) (book pg 82)

212. [x] How To Get Shit Done - The Inner Game Of Being A Results-Maker (pg 1) (book pg 80)

213. [] My Enlightenment Experience - Exactly How It Happened

214. [x] Lower vs Higher Self - Understanding Your Two-Faced Nature (book pg 184)

215. [x] Using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs To Self-Actualize (book pg 35)

216. [x] Masculinity vs Femininity - Psychology Of The Male & Female Mind (book pg 182)

217. [x] Meditation Techniques: Do Nothing - The Simplest Meditation Possible (pg 1) (book pg 124)

218. [x] Meditation On Steroids - How To Get The FASTEST Meditation Gains (book pg 127)

219. [x] The Grand Model Of Psychological Evolution - Clare Graves & Spiral Dynamics (book pg 52)

220. [] Being A Spiritual Seeker, Good or Bad?

221. [x] One Simple Rule For Acing Life (book pg 49)

222. [] How To Be Funny - Comprehensive Guide To Developing A Sense of Humor

223. [x] Contemplating Your Own Death - To Stay Motivated For Life (book pg 181)

224. [] How To Deal With Criticism, Trolls, and Haters

225. [x] Avoiding Dysfunctional & Abusive Relationships - 30+ Red Flags (pg 15)

226. [x] Advice For High School & College Students - The Keys To Mastering Life (book pg 204)

227. [] Curing Perfectionism - How To Stop Being A Perfectionist

228. [x] Mindfulness Meditation - A Complete Guide With Techniques & Examples (pg 15) (pg 16)

229. [x] A Vision For The Self Actualized Life - Get Yo Ass Inspired! (book pg 21)

230. [] How To Overcome Creative Blocks & Writer's Block

231. [x] How To Deal With Strong Negative Emotions (pg 14) (book pg 43)

232. [x] Radical Openmindedness - How To Break Free Of Dogma & Beliefs (book pg 94)

233. [x] 30 Ways Society Fucks You In The Ass (pg 1) (book pg 54)

234. [x] How You Lie - All Your Dirty, Sneaky Lies & Manipulations Exposed! (book pg 135)

235. [x] 40 Signs That You Are Neurotic - Understanding Neurosis  (pg 1) (book pg 178)

236. [] How To Stop Judging Yourself

237. [] The Challenges Of Making Bold Life Changes

238. [x] Understanding Awareness - The Staggering Depth Of Your Unawareness Revealed (pg 1) (book pg 39)

239. [x] Free Will vs Determinism - Does Free Will Exist? (book pg 176)

240. [] A Rant Against The Pickup Community - Must Watch For All PUAs

241. [x] The Ultimate Model Of Human Knowledge - All Knowledge Explained! (pg 12) (book pg 66)

242. [x] The Most Important Commitment You Can Make + Huge Announcement (pg 1) (book pg 230)

243. [x] 27 Qualities Of All Successful People (pg 2) (book pg 209)

244. [x] The Enlightened Self - A Description Of Your Existential Nature (pg 1) (book pg 105)

245. [x] Fake Growth vs Real Growth - What If You're Just Tricking Yourself? (pg 1) (book pg 26)

246. [x] How To Stop Comparing Yourself To Others (pg 1) (book pg 227)

247. [x] How To Be A Strategic Motherfucker - The 7 Pillars Of Strategic Thinking (pg 1)  (pg 7) (book pg 76)

248. [x] Why Rationality Is WRONG! - A Critique Of Rationalism (pg 1) (book pg 174)

249. [x] The Power Of Self Acceptance - How To Stop Beating Yourself Up (pg 1) (book pg 173) ?

     Episodes:   250 - 506

 

250. [x] The Benefits Of Enlightenment  (pg 14) (book pg 259)

251. [x] 3 Step Formula To Be Ruthlessly Effective At Anything (pg 15) (book pg 219)

252. [x] Overcoming Addiction - The Root Cause Of Every Addiction (pg 1) (pg 4) (book pg 44)

253. [x] How Your Mind Distorts Reality - Needy vs Non-Needy Perception (pg 4) (book pg 90)

254. [x] Enlightenment Guided Inquiry - The Neti Neti Method (book pg 106)

255. [x] Grasping The Illusory Nature Of Thought (pg 4) (book pg 93)

256. [x] Lifestyle Minimalism - Renouncing Your Busy Stupid Life (pg 4) (book pg 47)

257. [x] How To Stop Being A Victim - Part 2 - What All Victims Fail To Understand (pg 14) (book pg 87)

258. [x] A Rant Against Morality - Very Foundational (pg 4) (book pg 167)

259. [x] How To Stop Moralizing - Removing The SHOULDs From Your Life (pg 4) (book pg 170)

260. [x] Meditation For Beginners (pg 4) (book pg 264)

261. [x] Awareness Alone Is Curative - How To Auto-Correct Unwanted Behaviors (pg 4) (book pg 42)

262. [x] Be Fucking Patient! - How To Deal With Lack Of Results (pg 4) (book pg 50)

263. [x] The Psychology Of Small Business Success - Top 5 Errors Of Aspiring Entrepreneurs (pg 4) (book pg 220)

264. [x] 10 Important Things You Don't Know You Want (pg 4) (book pg 138)

265. [x] You're Not Happy Because You Don't Really Want To Be (pg 4) (book pg 165)

266. [x] The 3 Levels Of Personal Development Work (pg 4) (book pg 31)

267. [] The Amazing Power Of Psychedelics - Leo Does Magic Psilocybin Mushrooms!

268. [x] How To Use Psychedelics For Personal Development (pg 11) (book pg 207)

269. [] Guided Meditation - The Next Level Of Meditation

270. [x] The Paradox Of Developing Self-Trust (pg 4) (book pg 244)

271. [x] How To Be A Man - Part 2 (Advanced Version) (pg 10)

272. [x] The 64 Most Fascinating Questions A Human Can Ask (pg 4) (book pg 160)

273. [x] What's Wrong With Ego? (book pg 162)

274. [] What Is God? - Leo Becomes Absolute Infinity (Aka God) - All Of Reality Explained

275. [x] 5-MeO-DMT - The Magic Pill To Enlightenment & God (pg 16)

276. [x] Low Quality vs High Quality Consciousness (pg 4) (book pg 24)

277. [x] The Dark Side Of Meditation (pg 4) (book pg 157)

278. [x] The Mechanics Of Belief (pg 4) (book pg 154)

279. [x] How To Harness Your Intuition (pg 4) (book pg 262)

280. [x] The Trap Of Projection, Especially Onto Teachers & Mentors (pg 10)

281. [x] A Rant Against Culture (pg 4)

282. [x] Money Psychology - The Inner Game of Mastering Money (pg 4) (book pg 222)

283. [] Using 5-MeO-DMT To Become Enlightened - Interview With Martin Ball

284. [x] How To Deal With Confusion (pg 4) (book pg 33)

285. [x] Becoming A Sage - A New Vision For Actualized.org & You! (pg 4) (book pg 23)

286. [x] Mystical Traditions Around The World - Nonduality Goes Cosmopolitan! (book pg 110)

287. [x] Becoming A Zen Devil - The Dangers Of Half-Assing Enlightenment (pg 4) (book pg 107)

288. [x] Uncovering Your Childhood Vows - Unwire Your Neurotic Personality (book pg 122)

289. [x] The Pre-mortem Technique - The Trick To Avoiding Project Failure (pg 4)

290. [x] How To Control Anger - Part 2 - Understanding Evil To Death (pg 4) (book pg 153)

291. [x] A Rant Against Naive Realism - Reality Is NOT Physical! (pg 4) (book pg 151)

292. [x] How I Do Research & Develop Big Picture Understanding  (pg 2) (pg 4) (book pg 132)

293. [] The Launch Of Infinite Insights - Leo's Blog!

294. [x] The Role Of Balance In Personal Development (pg 4) (book pg 63)

295. [x] Dropping The Roles You Play (pg 4)

296. [] The Gallery Of Absolute Infinity ?

297. [x] Build Your Infrastructure For Success (pg 4) (book pg 149)

298. [x] AL-LAD Trip Report - A Powerful Tool For Consciousness Work (pg 10)

299. [x] Understanding How Paradigms Work (pg 4) (book pg 68)

300. [x] Contemplation - The Most Important Tool For Sages (pg 4) (book pg 128)

301. [x] Concentration vs Meditation - How To Develop Concentration (pg 4) (book pg 126)

302. [x] The Big Picture Of Self-Actualization (pg 4) (book pg 18)

303. [x] True vs False Skepticism (pg 4) (book pg 72)

304. [] Leo's Super Healthy Blueberry Smoothie ?

305. [x] The Highest Hero's Journey - What It Means To Be Real Hero (pg 4) (book pg 130)

306. [x] Leo's Super Healthy Vegetable Soup ? (pg 9)

307. [x] Understanding Default Positions (pg 4) (book pg 147)

308. [] Leo's Solo Meditation Retreat - 90 Hours Of Nonstop Meditation In The Forest ?

309. [x] Balancing Theory vs Practice (pg 4) (book pg 29)

310. [x] How To Deal With Loneliness - Especially While Self-Actualizing (book pg 145)

311. [x] How To Get Started With Self Actualization - Over 40 Techniques (pg 16) (book pg 19)

312. [] 2C-B Trip Report - Experiencing Physical Death

313. [x] Intro To Systems Thinking (pg 4) (book pg 142)

314. [x] Why People Seem Crazy (pg 4) (book pg 119)

315. [] Subtle Addictions

316. [] Successful People Are Not Happy

317. [] Making Sense Of Paranormal Phenomena & Psychic Powers

318. [x] Understanding Absolute Infinity - Part 1 (pg 3)

319. [] Understanding Absolute Infinity - Part 2

320. [x] What Is Art? - Understanding The Essence Of Art (pg 8)

321. [] Setting Proper Expectations

322. [] Leo Hits Rock Bottom - EVERYTHING Understood

323. [x] Learning = Behavior Change (pg 4) (book pg 274)

324. [x] No Growth Possible Without Training (pg 4) (book pg 217)

325. [x] Understanding Meaning, Purpose, & Value ? (pg 4)

326. [x] Distraction - The Ego's Favorite Defense Mechanism (pg 9)

327. [x] What Is The Devil? - The Mechanics Of Evil (pg 3)

328. [x] How To Raise Rockstar Kids (pg 8)

329. [] Correcting The Stigma Of Psychedelics - Part 1

330. [] Learning = Observation

331. [] Correcting The Stigma Of Psychedelics - Part 2

332. [] The Topic Of Mindfuckery

333. [x] Advanced Tips For Self-Inquiry (pg 3)

334. [x] Building Your Existential Vocabulary (pg 4)

335. [] How To Keep The Ultimate Journal (Commonplace Book) + LIVE DEMO ?

336. [x] Comprehension Has Many Degrees (pg 13)

337. [x] Why Brains Do Not Exist (pg 7)

338. [] Reality Is A Strange Loop - The Beauty Of Paradox + GRAPHICS ? 

339. [] The Theme Of Things Going Full-Circle

340. [x] Motivational Speech For Building A Passionate Life (pg 4) (book pg 15)

341. [x] The Deep Problem Of Marketing (pg 3) (pg 4) (book pg 270)

342. [x] Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism & Nonduality (pg 4)

343. [x] All Criticism Is Untenable (pg 4) (pg 10)

344. [x] Self-Deception - Part 1 (pg 2) (book pg 231)

345. [x] Self Deception - Part 2 - 60+ Self-Deception Mechanisms (pg 2) (book pg 234)

346. [] Enlightenment Experience Happening In Real Time - LIVE! ?️

347. [x] Enlightenment Experience Explanation & Key Lessons (pg 3) (book pg 266)

348. [x] Self-Deception - Part 3  (pg 2) (book pg 237)

349. [] Hitler Reacts To Nonduality / Enlightenment - FUNNY!

350. [] Life Is A Dream

351. [x] How To Shop For Healthy Food (pg 3)

352. [] My Deepest Awakening Yet - Becoming Infinite

353. [] The Importance Of Real Yoga

354. [] Quantum Mechanics Debunks Materialism - Part 1

355. [] Quantum Mechanics Debunks Materialism - Part 2

356. [] Comprehending The Magnitude Of Reality

357. [] Metaphysical Implications Of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - Part 1

358. [x] Understanding Islam - What Most People Misunderstand (pg 12)

359. [x] Shamanic Breathing Technique + LIVE DEMO ??‍♀️ (pg 8)

360. [x] Collective Ego - Understanding The Egoic Dynamics Of Social Systems (pg 12)

361. [] Going Buddha - 30 Day Meditation Challenge

362. [x] What Is Consciousness? - All Questions Answered (pg 2)

363. [] What Is Intelligence? - Infinite Intelligence Explained

364. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Blue (pg 5) (book pg 275)

365. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Orange (pg 5) (book pg 275)

366. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Green (pg 5) (book pg 275)

367. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Yellow (pg 5) (book pg 275)

368. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Turquoise (pg 5) (book pg 275)

369. [x] Understanding Recontextualization (pg 3)

370. [x] How To Contemplate Using A Journal (pg 10)

371. [x] Sameness vs Difference - The Metaphysical Foundation Of Reality (pg 13)

372. [x] How Ideology Works (pg 12)

373. [] Life Is A Maze

374. [x] What Is Spirituality? - A No-Bullshit Intro To Spirituality (pg 3)

375. [x] How To Escape Wage Slavery (book pg 224)

376. [] Body Awareness - How To Relax Your Body

377. [x] What Is Love? - Advanced Spiritual Explanation (pg 2)

378. [x] 35+ Subfields Of Self-Help (pg 3)

379. [] What Is Actuality? - Distinguish Direct Experience vs Concept

380. [x] Mankind Is The Bullshitting Animal (pg 3)

381. [x] Nootropics - Top Supplements For Increasing Mental Performance (pg 12)

382. [] The Radical Implications Of Oneness (Halloween Edition) ?

383. [x] 65 Core Principles Of Living The Good Life (pg 3)

384. [x] What Is Perception? - The Metaphysics Of Perception (pg 4) (book pg 254)

385. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Important Insights & Nuances (pg 17)

386. [x] The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures - Zen’s Stages of Enlightenment Explained (pg 4)

387. [] The Counter-Intuitive Nature Of Life

388. [x] Understanding Ego Backlash (pg 14)

389. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Areas Of Application (pg 5) (book pg 276)

390. [x] How To Do Self-Inquiry (pg 10)

391. [x] Cult Psychology - Part 1 - How Cults Work (pg 7)

392. [x] Cult Psychology - Part 2 - The Big Picture (pg 8)

393. [x] What Is God? - Part 1 - A No Bullshit Explanation For Smart People (pg 4)

394. [x] What Is God? - Part 2 - Clear Answers To 70+ Commonly Asked Questions (pg 4)

395. [] Aztec Nonduality - Profound Life Lessons From Aztec Philosophy

396. [] Leaving On 30-Day Solo Retreat

397. [] Becoming God - Insights From 13 Back-to-Back Awakenings

398. [x] Understanding Duality - Part 1 - Master List of 250+ Dualities (pg 5)

399. [] Understanding Duality - Part 2 - Scientific Dualities

400. [] Understanding Duality - Part 3 - Existential Dualities

401. [x] Life Unfolds In Chapters & Phases (pg 6)

402. [x] The Power Of Asking Questions (pg 7)

403. [x] What Is The Point Of Life? - An Advanced, Life-Changing Explanation (pg 9)

404. [x] Understanding Survival - Part 1 - The Metaphysics Of Being Human (pg 7)

405. [x] Understanding Survival - Part 2 - Advanced Insights About Survival (pg 7)

406. [x] Understanding Relativism - Part 1 (pg 7)

407. [] What Is Reality? - A Radical Explanation

408. [x] How Authority Works - Where Does Truth Come From? (pg 5)

409. [x] Conscious Politics - Part 1 - The Deepest Political Analysis You'll Ever Hear (pg 5)

410. [x] Conscious Politics - Part 2 - Foundational Insights About Political Ideology (pg 6)

411. [x] Conscious Politics - Part 3 - The Core Principles Of Conscious Politics (pg 6)

412. [x] Conscious Politics - Part 4 - 100+ Specific Policy Proposals (pg 11)

413. [x] Self-Bias - Why All Worldviews Are So Skewed (pg 7)

414. [x] What Is Truth? - The Definitive Answer (pg 7)

415. [] The Power Of Letting Go - How To Overcome Clinginess, Attachment, OCD

416. [x] What Is Love? - Part 2 - The Brutal Nature Of Love (pg 6)

417. [x] How Fear Works - Part 1 - The Ultimate Guide To Dealing With Fear (pg 6) (pg 10)

418. [x] How Fear Works - Part 2 - The Ultimate Guide To Dealing With Fear (pg 6) (pg 10)

419. [x] Understanding Impermanence - Why Reality Is Always Changing (pg 6)

420. [] Announcement - Actualized.org Launching On Patreon + Vision For The Future

421. [x] The Many Facets Of Awakening - List of Top 30 Enlightenment Insights (pg 7)

422. [x] How Corruption Works (pg 6)

423. [] The Dangers Of Spiritual Work

424. [x] How To Discover What's True - A Deep Inquiry (pg 13)

425. [x] Content vs Structure - Going Meta Is A Super-power (pg 15)

426. [x] What Is Death? - How Immortality Works (pg 8)

427. [] Self-Love - The Highest Teaching In The Universe

428. [x] Division vs Unity - The Engine That Runs Reality (pg 8)

429. [] Why Reality CANNOT Be A Simulation - A Clear Answer ?

430. [] Reproduction Is An Illusion - Why It Doesn't Matter If You Have Kids ?

431. [] Total Awakening Live In Real Time - Part 1 ?

432. [] Total Awakening Live In Real Time - Part 2 ?️

433. [x] Explicit vs Implicit Understanding (pg 7)

434. [] How Psychedelics Work - Making Sense Of Psychedelics

435. [x] How Society Evolves - Introducing The World Values Survey (pg 9)

436. [] I'm Leaving To Pursue Awakening & Healing - March 2020

437. [x] Outrageous Experiments In Consciousness - 30 Awakenings In 30 Days (pg 8)

438. [] How Openmindedness Works - Exercises To Open Your Mind

439. [x] Life Advice For Young People - Part 1 (pg 8)

440. [x] How To Forgive Anyone Who Hurt You - A Powerful Trauma Release Exercise (pg 15)

441. [] Learning = Making Distinctions - The Secret To Rapid & Deep Learning

442. [x] Life Advice For Young People - Part 2 (pg 8)

443. [] The Ultimate Structure Of Reality Explained

444. [] Understanding Democracy & Authoritarianism

445. [] Why Libertarianism Is Nonsense - Deconstructing Freedom

446. [] What If Reality Is Nothing But Perspective?

447. [] Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

448. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Red (pg 9)

449. [x] Spiral Dynamics - Stage Purple (pg 14)

450. [x] The 9 Stages Of Ego Development - Part 1 (pg 9)

451. [x] The 9 Stages Of Ego Development - Part 2 (pg 9)

452. [x] The 9 Stages Of Ego Development - Part 3 (pg 9)

453. [x] The Trap Of The Toxic Life Purpose (pg 9)

454. [x] Developing Introspection - The Solution To The Problem Of Self-Deception (pg 9)

455. [x] The Sneaky Psychology Behind Conspiracy Theories (pg 9)

456. [] What Is Actualized.org? - The Big Picture of Personal Development

457. [] Guided Exercises For Understanding Infinite Consciousness

458. [x] Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 1 (pg 12)

459. [x] Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 2 (pg 12)

460. [x] Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 3 (pg 12)

461. [x] Should You Go To College? - Common Traps & Mistakes (pg 10)

462. [] What Is Goodness? - Good & Morality Fully Explained

463. [] Guided Exercise For Realizing You Are God

464. [x] What Is Wisdom? - The Ultimate Guide To Wisdom (pg 10)

465. [x] What Are Holons? - Understanding Holism - Part 1 (pg 10)

466. [x] Holism & Holistic Thinking - Part 1 (pg 11)

467. [x] Holism & Holistic Thinking - Part 2 (pg 11)

468. [x] What It Means To "Go Meta” (pg 12)

469. [] Is Actualized.org a Cult?

470. [x] What Is Integrity? - The Role Of Integrity In Life (pg 10)

471. [x] How Survival Shapes Who You Are (pg 14)

472. [] Is Gender A Social Construct? - A Profound Explanation

473. [] Making Sense of Jordan Peterson

474. [] An Advanced Explanation of God Realization

475. [] The Dangers of Misapplying Spiritual Teachings ?️?

476. [x] Understanding and Coping with Nihilism (pg 15)

477. [] How Modern Branding Exploits and Abuses You

478. [] Expose Yourself to More Experience

479. [] Not Everything Can Be Explained Simply

480. [] Why God Forgives Devilry

481. [x] How Your Mind Interprets Reality (pg 13)

482. [] Relative vs Absolute Truth

483. [] The Social Matrix - How Society Is A Mass Hallucination

484. [x] The Top Dangers Of Using Psychedelics (pg 14)

485. [x] The Root Solution To People Pleasing & Loneliness (pg 14)

486. [x] Satisfaction Meditation - How To Make Meditation Enjoyable! (pg 16)

487. [] What Does Awakening Feel Like?

488. [] Everyone Acts From Good Intentions

489. [x] Why Valuable Things Require Development Over Time (pg 16)

490. [] Understanding Bias - Bias, Love, & Mind Explained ?

491. [] Life, It's All A Mind Game!

492. [] Introducing 5-MeO-MALT - The Other God Molecule

493. [] Does Free Will Exist? - What Is Will?

494. [] What Is Paradox? - Why Does Paradox Exist?

495. [] Leo's Worst Bad Trips - Psychedelics Gone Wrong

496. [] Motivational Speech - Oct 2021

497. [] Assumption Is The Mother Of All F**k-Ups

498. [] Burning Through Karma - How To Exhaust Material Desires ?

499. [x] How To Get Laid - Part 1 - The Foundations Of Success With Women (pg 16) (pg 16)

500. [x] How To Get Laid - Part 2 - Outer Game Techniques (pg 16) (pg 16)

501. [x] How To Get Laid - Part 3 - The Top Principles Of Game (pg 16) (pg 16)

502. [] How To Detox Heavy Metals (Lead & Mercury)

503. [] Creation vs Destruction ??

504. [] The Avoidance Of Truth - Why You Fear Truth ?

505. [] Understanding War & Conflict - Part 1

506. [] How To Avoid Getting Scammed, Cheated, Exploited, Conned, and Screwed In Life

Edited June 30, 2022 by FlyingLotus

[FlyingLotus]

 

124.  Summary: The Secret - The Truth They Didn't Tell You

 

-This episode goes hand in hand with the episode The Law Of Attraction - How It Really Works & How To Use It.  Summary can be found here.

-The Law of Attraction is an amazing, powerful tool to advance your life, career, relationships and personal development.  (Leo does LOA visualizations like a religious zealot for 30 mins every single morning.)

-The Secret is a personal development movie that’s really about the Law of Attraction.  The movie is popular but somewhat controversial.  Leo rewatched it expecting to react negatively.  However, the movie was so powerful and resonant he had to admit that the overall gist of the movie was completely true.  (He even teared up watching it!)

-The Law of Attraction says whatever you focus on you will get more of, whether negative or positive.  So, instead of focusing on things you don’t want, shift your focus to what you do want. Visualize and focus on what could go right instead of agonizing over what could go wrong.

              Your attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy.  When you expect catastrophe you get anxious, insecure and fearful.  When you act from a disempowered state your actions are feeble.  When you constantly worry about your problems, they get bigger.

              Consistent positive focus improves the quality of your thoughts, which elevates your attitude, which energizes your actions and creates awesome results in your life.

 

Criticisms of The Secret

1) It focuses too much on materialism.

              The Secret shows people using LOA to manifest money, cars, diamonds, a wicked faberge egg collection and so forth.  That's actually the least useful way to apply Law of Attraction.

              LOA is best used for developing inner qualities, not manifesting material goods. Visualize being more confident, having a strong work ethic, a healthy body, a charismatic personality and more energy to fulfill your life purpose.  That raises your overall experience of life much more than having a bunch of stuff.            

              Building up skills and inner qualities is more powerful because it affects all other areas of your life.  High energy will affect your career, your hobbies, your exercise regime, your love life and relationships.

             Don’t pray for things.  Pray for yourself to become better to acquire those things.  Don’t pray for a million dollars.  Pray to become someone who thinks like a millionaire, then the money will flow naturally.  Don’t pray for a hot witch gf or a Chris Evans lookalike.  Pray to become someone who’s happy, confident and irresistible to a coven of hot witches (who preferably aren't psycho).

 

2) It says LOA should feel easy and effortless.  That’s VERY misleading.

               The Secret says “the universe will rearrange itself for you” and things will "magically show up."  That's not going to happen.  You need to take action.  (Besides, if the universe responds so strongly to thought, wouldn’t it respond even more to action?)

               They say the process should always feel super good, or else you're "out of alignment and not doing it right."   That’s totally untrue.  To setup that kind of expectation is to create failure.

               Even if you're a very grounded, very solid executor in life and totally on your life's purpose, you're still going to face a lot of challenge and hardship.

               If you want to become a millionaire, you're going to have to start a business, or climb the corporate ladder, or invest in something, or create multiple projects.   So visualize the goal, desire the goal, but realize it's gonna be a long process.  Sometimes it'll feel effortless and nice, but a lot of times it's going to be mundane brute force work.   So LOA and visualizing energizes you towards taking all those actions.

               Wishful thinking is not a sound life strategy.

 

3) It says LOA is caused by “paranormal forces.”

               The Secret uses metaphysics as a marketing gimmick.  It says there are thought waves blasting through the universe and out of your head and it pulls money to you magnetically.

               Ordinary mechanical laws are enough to create and attract what you want.  You interact with the world mechanically through your mind and body.  That's the only way you’ve ever interacted with the world and that's enough.

 

4) It gets quantum mechanics wrong.

               The Secret says LOA has been proven scientifically, which is nonsense.  There's a tendency to quote quantum mechanics because it sounds very official.  The leading consensus from scientists is that there are no quantum effects going on in the mind.  You don't need a quantum connection.  Mechanical laws and Newtonian physics are enough.

               Personal development happens on the level of psychology, not quantum mechanics.  You’re better off talking to a psychologist about personal development than a quantum physicist.

 

5) It says The Secret has been held back from the masses.

              The Secret isn’t really a secret. The Secret blames the elites for holding back LOA from the little guy.  In fact, it's been publicly available through books and various religions for thousands of years. 

               The only person withholding The Secret from you, is you. It’s you not believing the power of visualization or positive thinking.  It’s you not taking responsibility for your own life.  It’s you who’s constantly worrying about problems and attracting more of them into your life.

 

-After studying hundreds of books and hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal development material, Leo says the real secret to personal development is discipline.  Ultimately you need incredible discipline and control of your mind to totally transform your life and fully align with the Law of Attraction.  It’s not effortless, but it is one of the most powerful tools to get everything you want.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

On 6/25/2021 at 10:52 PM, Leo Gura said:

This is the best thread on the forum.

But hey, I might be a bit self-baised

Edited February 9 by FlyingLotus

[FlyingLotus]

“You wouldn't care so much about what people thought of you if you knew how little they did” — Dr. Phil

 

165. Summary: "How to Stop Caring What People Think of You"

-Why do we give so much power to other people?  Why do we allow other people to have so much control over the way that we live our lives?  It's because you’re trying to maintain your self-image (clip: Self-image).

The Noble Do-Gooder

-People pleasers have a self-image of being a noble, good and caring.  “I’m a good, nice guy.  I’m not some jerk who hurts other people’s feelings.”

-The problem with any self-image is you want it reflected and validated. You want evidence that your idealized self-image is accurate.  You want people to validate your caring goodness (mom, dad, boss, gf/bf, siblings, clients, random strangers, strangers named Chris Evans).  You want to be approved of and you want to be loved.

-You are working very hard to maintain this noble, good self-image.  That’s difficult to architect and destined to fail.

 

No Disconfirming Evidence

-You’re designing your life so that people give you the most approval possible, all to uphold your self-image.  You’re also avoiding any disconfirming evidence.

-Here’s a fundamental problem, you’re a living breathing organism who’s survival depends on a certain amount of selfishness.  It’s very deep-set by evolution. You’re not even in control of how selfish you could be if something important were at stake.

-Putting yourself last puts you in an adversarial relationship with your yourself and with own nature.  Your true nature is going to fight back.  So, being empathetic can be a trap.  Maybe it’ll take a few years, but resentment starts to build up, same with anger, tension, feeling unfulfilled, feeling inauthentic.  All that prevents you from building your dream life.

 

The Middle Way

               “But Leo, I don’t want to be an asshole.  I want to be the good guy. I want to be the white knight.  I want to be empathetic.  I’m going to make sure I do things well.”

-Don’t let your brain bully you. Don’t let your brain engage in black and white thinking.  “I can be a goody goody or I can be an asshole.”

-There’s a middle way. It’s being completely independent of the good or bad opinions of others.  Be grounded in your own values.  Those values are good and those values are right and that’s the end of it.  Whatever opinions are out there, it doesn’t matter because there is a path you’re walking and no one is going to derail you.

-This is the path that you’re going to have to take if you want an extraordinary life, the kind of life where you’re doing big things.

 

Your Dreams Get Sidelined

-People pleasing is not a sustainable life strategy. You’re not doing the greatest good.  You’re putting your own values and dreams off to the side.  Those dreams could be how you do the most actual good in the world.

-Here’s a paradigm shift.  What’s an opinion, really?  It’s a thought in somebody else’s head.  You’re letting a figment of someone else’s imagination control your life. 

               (Also, you don't actually know what they're thinking.  So it's your thoughts about someone hypothetical thoughts that are making you anxious.)

-It’s one thing to be influenced by somebody you really respect or who’s important to you, but most people are concerned with the opinions of complete strangers.  Like a customer you met once, an audience of mostly strangers, some random gal/dude from Tinder.

               You’re letting this dictate how your life progresses. Can you realize how ridiculous that is?

 

You’re Giving All The Power To Someone Else

-No one should have that kind of power over you but you.  You need to get grounded in your own values, what you think is right, and not care about the opinion of others.  When you know what you want in life, you go straight for it. That’s a powerful, awesome way to live.

-Every single person has their own agenda and values. They don’t know your vision, they don’t know your dreams, they don’t know what’s right and wrong for you.  How are you going to move forward if you’re constantly distracted by them?

 

What About Feedback?

          “But Leo, what about feedback?  If I’m making art, or music don’t I need to know if it’s good or bad?”

-If you’ve got your own values by which to guide yourself then you can take feedback. There’s no reason why you can’t listen to people telling you things. It can be a good source of information.

-The problem isn’t feedback. The problem with you is a lot more emotional and neurotic.  You’re don’t really want feedback. You want validation and approval.  You want to avoid criticism because you want to preserve that beautiful image of your ideal self.

-That’s ego mania, very subtle ego mania. Be careful about your ego telling you that you’re selfless. When your ego is telling you you’re selfless that’s usually when you’re being the most selfish so really watch out for that.

          “But Leo, these people in my life they keep me on course.  Maybe I’m doing something wrong and I won’t even realize it.”

-Sometimes it’s good to have people to hold you accountable, to do some sanity checks on your decisions.  But you don’t want that to become a way of life.  You need to install your own internal guidance system.

 

Praise is also Problematic

          “But Leo, what’s wrong with getting praise?”

-The problem is you’re neurotic about it. You need it.  You’re desperate for it. You desperately need it to prop up this beautiful ideal self-image that you’ve got which is a total fiction.

-Maybe you’re that kind of artist who’s not very confident until someone compliments you.  You can’t rely on that because you will not always get the praise you want. If you’re neurotic about needing praise, if you’re desperate, then not getting that praise makes you resentful, bitter.  You start to doubt yourself.  You judge that person too.  “Why didn’t they give me the praise I deserve? How could they be so insensitive? How could they be so cold and heartless?”

 

The Paradigm Shift

-You need to come to a realization right now.  You need to admit, right now, that the current mode of seeking approval for your self-image is a shitty strategy.  It’s time to drop it.

-This means when people praise you, you can take the praise, but it won’t change your trajectory. You’re not desperate for it. It also means if people criticize you or have a negative image of you, that’s also okay. You’re not going to be triggered by it.

-The game that you’re playing right now – this upholding of an ideal self-image – it’s a game that can’t be won.  It can’t be won because you’re trying to control other people’s imagination.

 

You Can’t Control Other People

-Opinions are very random in nature, very capricious.  A lot of times what people think about you says very little about you.  It says a lot more about them. (ep: Why People Seem Crazy)

-When someone criticizes you it might not have anything to do with your art, or work, looks, personality or value as a human being. (clip: Understanding Meaning, Purpose, & Value)  Maybe they’re tired.  Maybe they just had a bad breakup.  There could be a million different reasons for why they said what they said.  Maybe they don’t have a good sense of art so their opinion isn’t worth as much as you think.

-Do you want to put your dreams and life vision into the hands of randomness? Into the imaginations of hypothetical people, many of whom you don’t even know or even respect?  Why are you taking their opinions so seriously?  Your life is probably a lot less than it could have been if you hadn’t been such a people pleaser for so long.

 

Are You Getting True Value From Any Of It?

-Ask yourself, how much fulfillment am I getting from this praise?  From this review?  From this this nice comment or thumbs up?”  All that stuff is good, but if you’re a people pleaser you have to ask, “What’s the value in all this?  Can another person give me something that’s truly valuable?”

          “Of course Leo, other people give me value all the time. Someone gave me money, or sex or love or a marriage, or….”

-Think about it a little bit deeper.  Really, there’s nothing that another human being can offer you of true value.  Sure they can give you some stuff, but will that really fulfill you?

-This game of upholding your self-image will never fulfill you.  You get a nice compliment, but then a day or two passes, a month passes and you don’t even remember it. It was just a nice little hit.

-What’s more fulfilling is honouring your values, your vision, to be living your full potential in life.  To champion those.  What’s really fulfilling is creating your dream life, not these little compliments that you get here and there.

 

It’s Okay To Be The Odd One Out

-You have to trick yourself because this feels unnatural. Tell yourself,

          “It’s okay to challenge people.  It’s okay to hold an unpopular opinion. It’s okay to not fit in all the time. It’s okay to be abnormal.”

-If you get out there and experience more rejection, more criticism, you start to build a tougher skin.  You realize, “It just doesn’t matter that much. I’m going to be dead someday.  There’s more important stuff than the figments of someone else’s imagination.”

 

You’re Going To Clash With People

-If you’re building a big life, you’ll have to impose yourself on the world.  Maybe you’re challenging the status quo, or clashing with people sometimes. As a people pleaser you want everything to be nice, proper and prim.  That’s not going to happen.

-If you’re building a business, or a relationship, there’s going to be tension between people.  Tension comes from authenticity.

-It may feel uncomfortable, but the other person doesn’t mind it so much.  What other people really don’t like is you being fake.  When you’re fake it’s hard to be attractive because it makes you so bland.  You’re hiding behind this vanilla mask and stuffing down anything that’s unique and special.  Self-expression is probably one of the biggest things that you’re sacrificing as a people pleaser.

 

Which Would You Rather Have?

-You have to decide between upholding some shiny self-image in your head, or building a beautiful dream life, doing something powerful with your life.  Which would you rather have, because there’s definitely conflict between the two.

-Assignment: For the next ninety days, for five straight minutes, you’re going to close your eyes and affirm to yourself…

“I am completely independent of the good and bad opinions of others.”

-You don’t presently realize how powerful this statement is.  Just repeat it over and over.  That’s going to reprogram your sub-conscious mind which, currently, doesn’t believe this at all.  You’ll be surprised at what a powerful effect this can have on your psyche.

 

You Need A Little ‘Asshole’ In You

-Don’t worry, you're not going to become some evil monster.  People aren’t going to hate you.  In fact, people will start to respect you because you’ve found your spine and you have some sense of direction.  Remember, even if you play this game perfectly there’s still going to be people that criticize you.  Realize how much of a losing game you’re playing.

-In fact the more you accomplish big things, the more attention you’re going to draw. As you’re drawing more attention, just by the law of averages, at least one person in a hundred is going to hate you.

-They’ll hate you for the most random of reasons (your looks, your sound, your ideas, your philosophy, your friends, your cat, your ongoing references to Chris Evans).  So, the more successful you become the tougher your skin needs to be.  That’s okay because that need to maintain your self-image is a fairytale you don’t need anymore.

 

The Final Exercise

-Become very aware of all the areas in your life where you’re being fake.  As a people pleaser your pendulum’s at one extreme end.  You need to swing it back to center.

-Assignment: Line up at Starbucks and when it’s your turn to order just stand there and look at the menu for a bit.  Feel the people behind you getting antsy. Stand there for a couple of minutes. It’s ok if people tell you to hurry up.  Stand there and get used to taking that kind of pressure.  (Bonus points if you do this in New York) ☕️

Edited June 28, 2021 by FlyingLotus

[Nobody_Here]

On 6/25/2021 at 11:52 PM, Leo Gura said:

This is the best thread on the forum.

But hey, I might be a bit self-baised

All of creation is just your own work reflected back at you

Ah, the SparkNotes thread! Because I don't always have three hours to watch a video.  This is the best thread on the forum if time is short (and for me, it usually is.) 

[FlyingLotus]

On 6/27/2021 at 4:25 PM, Nobody_Here said:

Ah, the SparkNotes thread!

Haha!  Sparknotes, the bane of english teachers everywhere.

You could also call this: Leo’s “I hope they don’t misrepresent my work thread!"

Edited February 9 by FlyingLotus

[Leo Gura]

These summaries are very accurate overall.

I am impressed.

[Preety_India]

@Leo Gura

"The Noble Do-Gooder

 

-People pleasers have a self-image of being a noble, good and caring. “I’m a good, nice guy. I’m not some jerk who hurts other people’s feelings.”

 

-The problem with any self-image is you want it reflected and validated. You want evidence that your idealized self-image is accurate. "

Is this really true ?

Some people might want to genuinely be good to others and not want to hurt their feelings without wanting validation ? Right ?

Could this be a solid projection from you ?

 

Edited June 28, 2021 by Preety_India

[FlyingLotus]

On 6/27/2021 at 5:56 PM, Leo Gura said:

These summaries are very accurate overall.

I am impressed.

Thanks!  That’s a relief.

On 6/27/2021 at 6:02 PM, Preety_India said:

Some people might want to genuinely be good to others and not want to hurt their feelings without wanting validation ? Right ?

I'd say the video refers to people whose people pleasing or approval seeking is hurting their life.  Healthy people are more than capable of wanting the best for others in a non-attached way, but that’s not who the video is really talking about.

You can also genuinely value goodness and want to be seen as a good, noble person.  It’s more of a both/and rather than an either/or.

Edited February 9 by FlyingLotus

[Preety_India]

13 minutes ago, FlyingLotus said:

You can also genuinely value goodness and want to be seen as a good, noble person.  It’s more of a both/and rather than an either/or.

That's what I meant. I think Leo should have included that it's not always the do gooder personality but people who genuinely want to seek good for others.

 

[FlyingLotus]

-This episode is 🤯 whoa .  It feels like a gypsy curse has been lifted from my psyche.

-The following is the condensed version of the summary.  It has about half the examples and fewer explanations.  External links were selected by me, for better or worse .

_______________________________________________

481. Summary: How Your Mind Interprets Reality

“There are no facts, only interpretations." —Frederick Nietzsche

 

-The full version of this summary can be found here in the forum.

-Interpretation is core to how you make sense of the world.  It’s going to take you a good ten years to fathom the significance of that.  This is a foundational epistemic episode.

-Every situation has multiple interpretations.  People fall into the trap of treating situations as though there are only one or two interpretations.

-Seeing Only One Interpretation.  The worst case scenario.  If you only have one interpretation it becomes your reality.  It’s absolute truth.  It’s not even an interpretation; it's taken as fact.  This is what most people are doing.

-Seeing Two Interpretations. You get a taste that interpretation is going on, that the mind is not just receiving “raw facts.”  But, now you get caught up in this tug of war, duality, tribalism, partisanship.  You see reality in a black and white way.

          This is all part of a larger theme of Self-Deception.

-You have to think very deeply about anything you call a fact.  Your mind doesn’t question “facts” so they become your reality.  You think a “fact” is something objective that exists independent of you, but they’re actually constructed by your interpretations.

           It’s important to notice that what most people call facts are actually interpretations.  By people I mean you.

           Facts alone have no value and no meaning.  They don’t tell you what's worthwhile or what you should do.  That requires interpretation.  So, the set of facts you choose to focus on is highly biased.  You cherry-pick facts to bolster your sense of reality, to confirm your worldview and to advance your survival.

           The tricky thing is there's always more than one way to make sense of facts, but people like to act like there’s only one way or “the right way.”  Epistemic blunders mostly lie in how you interpret facts and which facts you focus on, not in the facts themselves.

 

Going Meta

-This is an important concept.  Going meta means to step outside the frame of a thing and observe it.  To go one level higher in abstraction.  (clip: Going Meta (8 min) ep: What it Means to Go Meta).

-Don’t get lost in the content of these examples.  The examples are here to make the concepts concrete.  (ep: Content vs Structure)  The danger here is that you’ll focus on which of these interpretations is the “correct one,” but that's missing the point.  Leo’s trying to communicate something meta to you.

           Be aware if you’re getting stuck in the content of the interpretations and failing to go meta.  The larger, meta point with these examples is that there are multiple interpretations.  The need to have one right and the rest wrong is part of the problem.  See the structure, stay meta.

 

Why did the United States invade Iraq?

• 1st POV: to defend against terrorism.
• 2nd POV: because of greedy executives running giant military companies and defense contractors and oil companies for whom this war was beneficial.
• 3rd POV: because Dick Cheney was a war criminal and George W Bush was an idiot who was easy to manipulate.
• 4th POV: it was a collective psychic backlash to 911, a fear response.
• 5th POV: there were weapons of mass destruction or at least that's what people believed at the time.

-That’s five very different interpretations.  In politics, most people pick one interpretation and act as if it represents the situation in it entirety.  If someone believes that Dick Cheney is a war criminal and George W Bush is an idiot they don't see it as an interpretation, but as reality.  They don't see deeper levels of interpretation, like with the 4th and 5th options.

           There are different levels of quality to interpretations.  They're not all equal.  Some of them are very simplistic, some profound, some even go to a spiritual degree of understanding.

eg: The idea of “a collective psychic backlash to 911” is a very powerful interpretation.  Instead of looking at the US government as a group of evil people, you see the situation from a more compassionate, understanding and conscious place.

           Fear tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you fear terrorism, invading the Middle East with a poorly thought out war leads to a destabilization of the region that creates more terrorism.

-With the 2nd POV, if you believe the US invasion was because of some greedy executives who wanted contracts, that’s a whole way of seeing the world. It's an adversarial “they’re evil and corrupt and not good like us normal people.  They're manipulating us, those damn globalists…”  That way of looking at the world leads to certain consequences.

           It leads to you feeling and acting a certain way. If you think the world is run by a cabals of globalists does that make you feel empowered or like a victim?  Is that motivating you to be constructive, creative, and follow your life purpose?  Or does it make you feel you're being exploited and manipulated?  Ultimately you don’t care about facts.  You care about how you feel.

-Start to see the whole situation in a multi-perspective, multi-faceted way with multiple interpretations, seeing that each interpretation captures some element of the situation, but not the total thing.

-Even more importantly, you want to see how your mind is constructing these interpretations. Become aware of which interpretations you're missing.  There are different qualities of interpretation.  Saying some group of people does evil because they're monsters or idiots is one of the lowest quality kinds of interpretations.

-Even though there are low quality and high quality interpretations, we shouldn’t squeeze out all the lower quality povs.  Every interpretation contains some sort of partial truth even though it might be very twisted and distorted.

            Also, if many people are suffering from low quality misinterpretations, you need to understand that pov to address it effectively.  Their opinions might not be accurate, but they could be valid.  (eg: Just because there are a lot of Q-Anon people doesn’t mean their ideas are true.  However, the rise of so many angry people is important to know about and understand.)  Ideally, you want a compound perspective of interconnected and intersecting interpretations.

Religion exists because…

• a) it's a holdover from superstitious ancestors who weren't scientifically rigorous.
• b) it’s a tool to control the masses.
• c) it’s not scientifically or literally true, but these myths contain deep psychological lessons without which you can go astray in life.
• d) it points to absolute truth which is incommunicable because it's infinite and therefore it can never be articulated in a literal scientific sense.

-Do you see how different these interpretations are?  Notice the last two are more nuanced than just saying “all religion is bullshit.”  You’re going to react to religion and religious people differently depending on which pov you believe.

-Remember, we’re not interested in which interpretation is “right.”  We’re interested in the meta point of seeing how many different ways there are to interpret what religion could be.

Islam is…

• a) the highest religion and truth.
• b) evil barbaric and violent.
• c) used in both constructive and destructive ways.  How it’s used depends on how it’s read and who cherry picks which parts.
• d) contains profound truths that are more advanced than science.  However, its truths are corrupted by being taken too literally.  It also uses many archaic cultural customs from fifteen thousand years ago.

-a) is a devout Muslim interpretation.  This perspective probably thinks it’s “reality” instead of just a perspective.

-b) many Conservatives and Christians in the US feel this way.  They’re fearful and uneducated about Islam.  Also notice they don't hold that as an interpretation, but as reality.

-Notice that c) & d) are more nuanced perspectives.

Donald Trump is…

• a) is a true patriot, a secret genius.  A secret systems thinker who acts buffoonish to subvert the elite globalist media.
• b) an opportunistic grifter and con artist.
• c) actually God acting out of the highest good and love from his point of view.  All his actions are the seeking of love.

-Notice how radically different each perspective is.  How you frame Trump and how you behave politically depends on which of these interpretations you take.

Psychedelics are…

• a) drugs, which are bad and dangerous.
• b) just creating hallucinations in the brain.  If you experience some mystical truths they don’t mean anything.
• c) great for expanding consciousness and seeing higher truths.
• d) an immature shortcut.  Fake spirituality because it’s not permanent.
• e) the future of spiritual work.  They haven't caught on because they've been so stigmatized.

-Notice how some of these interpretations will exclude you from exploring psychedelics.  That's how powerful interpretation can be.  Also contentious issues often cause people to get close-minded and stuck in one interpretation.

Actualize.org is…

• a) a cult.
• b) not a cult, but self-deceived and teaches misinformation.
• d) offers some advanced perspectives and insights about the nature of reality, but is still partial.  It's not a complete picture.
• e) seems like a cult because it’s teaching advanced things that most of mankind finds threatening.  Therefore the most convenient thing for the ego-mind to do is just to call it a cult.
• f) it’s a communication from God.
• g) it’s you teaching your own self how to awaken.  It’s also the universe teaching itself how to awaken.

 

Quine’s Gavagai Example

-Imagine an American explorer finds a remote tribe that has never made contact with the outside world.  He tries to learn the tribe’s language.  No prob, right?  Actually, Quine says this problem is much deeper than it seems.  How would this actually play out?

Let’s say you’re sitting with a tribesman around the campfire and then a rabbit runs across the field. 

 

The tribesman says, “gavagai gavagai” and points at it.  What does the tribesman mean?  What is “gavagai”?

• a) a furry, living animal with long ears.
• b) the name of this particular bunny who is the tribe pet.
• c) God manifesting itself as the rabbit.
• d) a hallucination of a rabbit, which means the psychedelics at the campfire are working.
• e) a rabbit’s foot, which the rabbit’s using to wave hello, awwww….
• f) a rabbit’s foot, which the tribe thinks is the most delicious part ?.
• g) a safe, timid brown bunny, as opposed to those demonic white bunnies, thank goodness.

-If you think, “Leo, this is a silly problem.  What’s the difference?”  Quine’s point here was very deep.  Your notion of rabbit will be defined by your entire sense of reality.  There is a significant difference between seeing that rabbit as food, as a biological creature, or as consciousness.

eg: Buffalo Wasn’t Just Food(2min) Native American tribes view Buffalo differently than…many people today view cute buffalo at the zoo…or bison at the butcher shop.

           Your notion of anything is metaphysically and epistemically loaded.  You’re not conscious of those frameworks, but they shape how you relate to that rabbit.  So, your mind's way of holding the concept of “rabbit” is not the same as the tribesman’s or Leo’s or Alice in Wonderland’s or anyone else’s.

-The gavagai example shows that most situations in life are deeply ambiguous.  Quine’s point is that we will never fully resolve this problem within language.  We're basically guaranteed to have different ways of interpreting that rabbit because of the underdetermination problem.

• eg: an episode of Star Trek:TNG demonstrates this: Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra (1 to 6 mins)

 

The Underdetermination Problem

-The Underdetermination problem says: evidence available to us, at a given time, may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it.  Our way of interpreting and seeing the facts go way beyond what is merely there.

 

“Under determination refers to (Willard Van Orman) Quine's assessment that evidence alone does not dictate the choice of a scientific theory, as different theories —observationally equivalent— may be able to explain the same facts.” —Wikipedia

-We can also look at the same “facts” and perceive different things because of biology.

• eg: Yanny or Laurel.  The White and Gold Dress pic.

 

Science is Subjective

-Quine's point is that there is no such thing as scientific, because how you define “scientific” is part of the problem. (ep: What is the Nature of Science)

          Science is full of interpretation.  It’s not an objective, singular thing.  Can you use science to find the right interpretation of what science is?  That’s like a heart surgeon performing surgery on himself.  This is a meta-scientific problem.  Many atheists and materialists don't grasp the depth of the epistemic problem here.  Stop naively mistaking the constructions of your mind as reality itself.

           For each piece of data you gather you can come up with multiple alternative theories.  You can never have one theory that perfectly matches all the facts because every theory is underdetermined.  So this creates a an open-ended, infinite problem for science.  (This doesn’t even include invalidated theories that comfort your ego.)

• eg: Seven of Nine uses the same facts to accuse Cpt. Janeway and Chakotay of crimes that contradict each other.

 

Just a Word Game?

-“But Leo, isn’t this just a word game?  There's no difference between seeing a rabbit through a materialist lens versus an idealist lens.”  That's wrong.  There are ways to decide between them, but not at your current level of consciousness and not using materialist methods.

           An idealist will consider something like direct experience of absolute truth as possible.  The materialist is shut off to this because it doesn’t validate his worldview.  So it’s not just a “word game.”  Those words carry a lot of unquestioned baggage.

-The lesson here is that most situations in life are deeply ambiguous.  So, increase your capacity for handling ambiguity and a variety of perspectives.  Profound self-deceptions can be life-threatening.  It's not just empty philosophy.  We could destroy civilization if we don't get this right.

          Your mind wants reality to be one particular way that serves your survival.  The mind abhors a vacuum because it’s threatening.  Leaving things open-ended is a lot of work for the mind.

-With all these examples keep asking yourself: how would you know the difference between these interpretations?  Notice how many different povs fit the same “facts.”

           Also, Leo’s not trying to justify any action here, so don’t get lost in the content of the interpretations.  Focus on the larger, meta point: seeing each situation from multiple perspectives.  These examples show how ubiquitous the problem of interpretation is and how many real world implications there are. (49:20)

 

Situations & Multiple Interpretations

What is God?

• a)  God is a fiction created by irrational people who don’t or historically didn’t know about evolution.
• b)  God is a state of higher consciousness.

What is Mysticism?

• a) Mystics are wishful-thinking, loose-minded fools who just don't want to face death.
• b) Mystics have figured out how to access higher dimensions of reality.

-When you’re presented with these different interpretations, seriously consider this one as being possible and then seriously consider this other one as being possible.  If you can do that it will open your mind (ep: How Openmindedness Works).  None of this work works if you don't understand radical open-mindedness.

Science is…?

• a) truth.
• b) a set of mental constructions that help people manipulate reality for survival.

-How would you decide the difference between the two?  After all, if what you care about is survival and nothing else, you could easily conflate survival with truth, which of course you do.

Senator _____ won't vote for gun reform because…?

• a) he’s corrupted by the NRA gun lobby who bribed him.
• b) he believes gun rights are important and guaranteed by the constitution.

-A lot of liberals and progressives make this mistake.  They accuse certain senators or politicians of not supporting their policies because they've been corrupted, bribed or influenced.  That’s definitely true in many situations, but that's not the only reason.  Progressives overlook how many senators and politicians genuinely believe the Conservative worldview.  Many Conservatives grew up with the gun culture.  The NRA wouldn’t be so popular if a significant number of people didn’t love guns.

-If you want to be a good progressive you should care about getting this right.  There’s so much partisan polarization because each side strawman’s the other instead of stepping outside their own interpretation to truly understand a different pov.  That's the meta problem.

           Also, our financial interests are always deeply entangled with our worldview, our metaphysics, our values, our epistemology.  There’s never a clean division of these two things.  (Which is why it’s important to get money out of politics.)  Money is the distillation of survival.  Your world view is your world view because it helps you to survive. (ep: Survival I, Survival II)

Bill Gates is trying to…?

• a) control the population and get rich via vaccines.
• b) help humanity in the best way he knows how, but those ideas aren’t good.
• c) help humanity using good ideas, but his ideas aren't perfect because of limited knowledge and the complexity of humanity’s problems.

-Truly put yourself in Bill’s situation.  What’s the best way to help humanity if you had billions of dollars?  It's hard to help everyone in a way they agree with.  Everyone has different ideas of what kind of help they need or want.  The help you need is probably different from the help someone in Africa or Norway might need.

Person x is…?

• a) insane.
• b) understands something you don’t.

-It’s easy to demonize someone who understands something that’s not popular in mainstream culture.  Then again, there are some people who are truly insane.

So how do you distinguish these two things?  You have to deeply study epistemology and do contemplation for years, decades.  If you don’t do the research you won’t figure it out. (1:00:00)

Hitler was…?

• a) evil.
• b) trying to do good, but because his worldview and consciousness was so low he ended up doing a lot of bad.

Person X is…?

• a) evil.
• b) doing things for a greater good, using her higher vision that you are too narrow-minded to see.

-Mystics, sages and saints operate on such a high playing field that it’s easier for mainstream society to demonize them than understand them.  Some of the wisest, most conscious geniuses were put to death, jailed, tortured or crucified.  (Christ, Socrates, Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King Jr, Giordano Bruno, and so forth.)

Someone who criticizes science…

• a) is unscientific and likely a religious nutcase.
• b) might be religious, but is definitely deluded and attacking from below because science is truth.
• c) could be criticizing science from above in a meta-scientific way that’s more epistemically rigorous than science itself.

-Science often refuses to do epistemology and metaphysics.  They’re so attached to science they don't think there's anything above it. (The pre/trans fallacy by Ken Wilber)  However, there are things in reality which are meta-scientific, which science cannot understand or access.

People who talk about God…

• a) are dumb, superstitious ideologues.
• b) could have had direct experiences of God that are more genuine than science.

-That’s a radically different interpretation because most materialistic and atheistic people are not open to the possibility of having a direct experience of God.  To them, all experiences of God are just hallucinations in the brain.  So they are forever cut off from truly mystical experiences unless they open their mind.

Other people…

• a) exist.
• b) don’t exist because this is all a dream, like the people in my dreams at night.

-How would you know the difference?  Remember, Leo’s not trying to justify any action here.  He’s just trying to get you to see the meta in the situation.

Love is…

• a)  a mammalian emotion produced by the brain with no metaphysical significance.
• b)  a core metaphysical aspect of universal mind and consciousness.

Evolution is…

• a) solid proof that God doesn’t exist.
• b) the process by which God creates.

Cop X…

• a) is racist because he did so and so.
• b) is not racist, but his actions appear that way because he's acting under extreme pressure.
• c) could be racist.  Although the entire police system is affected by culture and both explicit and implicit racism, and being a cop is difficult in ways that cannot be appreciated by people who aren’t cops.

The Buddha didn't talk about love…

• a) so love can't be the truth because the Buddha taught the truth.
• b) because he realized that love is truth, and what he called truth was actually love.
• c) because the Buddha's nirvana is actually metaphysical, existential love.  Not just emptiness.

Obama's drone strikes…

• a) were evil war crimes.
• b) saved ground troops from going in, thus saving many American soldiers.
• c) were ugly but necessary.  They killed 90 civilians but also killed 10 hard core terrorists who were planning to kill 1000 American civilians.
• d) were still evil because 1000 hypothetical Americans don’t outweigh 90 Somalis and Yemenis.
• e) well, they do if you’re the American President.

-Leo’s not trying to justify drone strikes.  The meta point is to try on each perspective and appreciate the complexity of the situation.  (BTW, numbers in option c) and d) were made up to illustrate a point)

           The calculus is very complicated and so hairy that most people at the Pentagon probably don’t even know the answers definitively.  Most people take this simplistic attitude that drone strikes were evil war crimes.  You're not considering the greater evil of sending cruise missiles or even a nuclear weapon.  How many civilians are acceptable to kill with drone strikes in order to prevent destabilizing the region, or even nuclear war?  This also shows the Underdetermination theory at play.  Leo’s not justifying Obama’s actions, just pointing out there are no easy or good choices.

Absolute truth is…

• a) impossible to access even if it exists.
• b) possible to access.  You simply haven’t done enough work to access it.

-If you haven’t done the work it’s easy to confuse your personal laziness with something being impossible.

Liberals…

• a) have a mental disorder, like the bumper sticker says.
• b) are more conscious than you.

-Whenever you think you're more conscious than someone else, always consider that they're more conscious than you.  Maybe you're just projecting your unconsciousness onto them?

Conservatives are…

• a) racists.
• b) more prone to fear, survival and xenophobia than Progressives because of their neurology.

Capitalism…

• a) exploits workers.
• b) is not yet sustainable in an ethical way because humans aren't selfless and conscious enough to not exploit each other.

-Do you see how different a) is from b)  It changes your whole orientation towards capitalism.

Because animals suffer…

• a) I must not eat animals.
• b) it has no relevance to what I eat.

-The following are common views within the pickup community:

Women are…

• a) gold diggers who only want Chads with money.
• b) attracted to your money because you have nothing else to offer them but money.
• c) not attracted to you because your personality sucks and you’re too lazy to develop yourself.
• d) not attracted to you and aren’t even attracted to your money because you have none.
• e) attracted to qualities you could develop within yourself that have nothing to do with money, but you can’t see that.

Women are…

• a) cheaters.
• b) called cheaters by PUAs because they’re projecting their own lack of integrity onto women.  They expect women to cheat because PUAs are themselves cheaters.

Women are…

• a) selfish for not giving me sex
• b) not selfish.  You are selfish because you think women owe you sex and blame them because they have free will.

-Remember, how would you know the difference?  Really try on all options here.  Stay meta.

Life has no meaning so I…

• a) should kill myself because meaninglessness sucks.
• b) could construct whatever meaning I want.  This paradoxically gives life the deepest meaning possible.
• c) I am free from death because if life has no meaning, death has no meaning.

Those who reject Christianity are…

• a) working for the devil.
• b) rejecting Christianity because it was co-opted thousands of years ago and corrupted so that now Christianity is literally devilry.

-How would you know the difference?  Remember, don’t get lost in the content of the interpretations.  Notice how there are multiple ways of looking at a situation.

To be happy I need…

• a) lots of money
• b) to find a new mode for happiness

-Think about how this changes your entire approach to life.  Needing lots of money (or success, or babes, or validation) to be happy is not a fact, but an interpretation that you could change. It’s a lot easier to change interpretations than facts. That would be the wiser course.

Life sucks because…

• a) life is unfair.
• b) because you haven't been living by the right principles.
• c) life actually is fair.  It’s fair to those who follow the principles.  There's natural consequences and suffering which is what you're experiencing and then you call that unfair.

-Maybe life sucking is just a consequence of following the wrong principles.  It’s like when an idiot hits his toe with a hammer and then experiences excruciating pain, he blames that on the hammer and God and other people.  He doesn't take responsibility for his own decisions.

The Middle East is…

• a) less developed than the West because the people there are savages with an inferior culture.
• b) less developed because the Middle East was a harsher environment to survive in.  So historically those people have required more time to develop than those civilizations that arose in Europe and elsewhere.

-They will eventually develop to the standards of Western culture and beyond.  So it’s not some inherent, genetic inferiority or some cultural problem.  (“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond)

Women have vaginas and Men have penises…

• a) it’s a scientific fact.
• b) it’s not always the case.  The idea of penises, vaginas, men and women are abstract categories created beyond and outside of empirical science.

Logic is…

• a) what reveals truth.
• b) a rationalization mechanism co-opted by the ego-mind for the purposes of your survival.

The Constitution must be…

• a) followed because it’s the Constitution.
• b) updated.  It was written over 230 years ago and contains outdated ideas which need to fit with modern times, otherwise the nation will stagnate and perhaps even collapse.

I can't get laid because…

• a) I don't have a square jaw and a big dick.
• b) I don't understand female attraction, have cripplingly low self-esteem and don't socialize.

-If you've never seriously tried to fix yourself how can you know your dick and jaw size are holding you back instead of self-esteem issues, fear of socializing and ignorance about female attraction?

Feminism is…

• a) the reason I can't get laid.
• b) a scapegoat you invented because of your unwillingness to take responsibility for your results.

People think Jordan Peterson is a fascist because…

• a) his haters are snowflake SJWs who are threatened by manly greatness!!  Hail ?!!
• b) his detractors are attached to the Progressive worldview.  They don’t look at his work with nuance because they misunderstand the Conservative mind and feel attacked by stage blue.

-Remember, how would you know the difference?  Really try on all options here.  Stay meta.

Person X is a…

• a) lying hypocrite grifter.
• b) is just weak.  Like all of us are.  He failed up to live up to his own ideals and has been corrupted by money.

Slavery is…

• a) evil.
• b) only evil relative to today's cultural norms and level of development.

-Remember, how would you know the difference?  Really try on all options here.

Walls are…

• a) real, because I can't walk through them, which proves their reality.
• b) might be real, or I could be imagining walls that can't be walked through.

The number of stars and galaxies in the universe means that…

• a) life is very common.
• b) life is extremely rare.

-See how significantly different that interpretation is.  It just flips the whole thing on its head.

If the paranormal was real…

• a) science would say so, but science doesn’t so it can't be real.
• b) science would discredit the studies and outcast any scientist who dares to prove it.

God…

• a) will punish you for your sins.
• b) will not punish you for your sins.
• c) will love your sins as much as your goodness.  However, sins naturally produce their own suffering by disconnecting you from loving consciousness.
• e) sinning against another is just you punishing yourself.

Stage green socialism is…

• a) dangerous.
• b) being conflated with stage red and blue communism, which are not the same things at all.

Government regulation is…

• a) socialism.
• b) necessary for the harmonious balance of a society.  You can’t have a government without regulations.

Taxation is…

• a) theft
• b) makes the military, the courts, infrastructure and many other things you enjoy in a democracy possible.

Democrats want illegal immigration because…

• a) it gives them more voters.
• b) Democrats are more compassionate and less fearful because they actually care about the suffering of immigrants and don’t think it will destroy the country.

-To most Conservatives that interpretation doesn't even enter into their mind.  When you can't compute that possibility the only alternative is to come up with some idea that Democrats are doing it for their own selfish gain.

Communism was a…

• a) failure
• b) success that led to the greatest growth in living standards in the 20th century both in Russia and in China.

-If you actually look at the GDP growth and rise in living standards percentage-wise in Russia and China over the last century, it rose way more than in non-communist countries.  Leo’s not saying communism is good.  There are many problems with communism.  He’s just showing how these interpretations are much trickier than they seem.

Guru X…

• a) is a rapist and an abuser.
• b) had consensual sex with a bunch of groupies and one of the groupies got mad because the guru wouldn’t marry her.
• c) took advantage of his role as a teacher and confidant and used that to abuse and coerce girls who wouldn’t otherwise date him.

-This is a very common problem in spiritual communities.

Guru X is a rapist therefore…

• a) he cannot be enlightened.
• b) he could still be enlightened because who says enlightened people can’t be rapists?

-Remember, how would you know the difference?  Really try on all options here.

People voted for Trump because…

• a) they were racist.
• b) he appealed to their spiral dynamic stage blue and orange value set, which is the majority of the US.

The miracles of Jesus…?

• a) are myths and exaggerated fairytales to tell to children.
• b) are real because Jesus was so exceptionally conscious that he actually had those powers.

Disputes between spiritual teachers…

• a) are just differences in word and style, not in substance.  They’re basically word games.
• b) are differences in underlying substance, and consciousness.  Some teachers are actually more awake than others.
• c) are a blend of a) and b)

-Remember, how would you know the difference?  Really try on all options here.  Stay meta.

There is no proof of paranormal phenomena because…

• a) it's all bullshit.
• b) the methods of proof you're using are too limited for measuring paranormal phenomena.  After all, your method determines what you're going to get back.

I’m bad with women because…

• a) I'm short.
• b) I’m insecure about being short.

-You might spend your entire life thinking you're bad with women because of something you can’t change (your height) when the true cause is something you can change (your insecurity).

          One of the best guys Leo knew from pickup was a 5’5 Pakistani guy.  He would crush it.  He would do better than a six foot tall white guy.  At the club he was one of the most secure, brash and confident guys, the exact opposite of insecure, and his results reflected that.

 

Examples from Leo’s Life

Leo said something in a video that I also said, which means…

• a) he stole my work and didn't give me credit for it.
• b) that people can develop insights independently and still overlap with other people’s insights.  Not all ideas have one origin point.
• c) deep universal truths can be discovered by many people.
• d) he totally stole from you, and got away with it too!!

The backdrop of Leo’s apartment means…

• a) Leo’s purposely sending secret Illuminati messages to his followers who 100% carry out his every command (unless those commands include mediating, exercising, reading or delousing the clutter in their mind)
• b) Leo’s bad at decorating his apartment.

The symbol of 666 is…

• a) deeply significant.
• b) completely meaningless.
• c) the molar mass of the high-temperature superconductor YBa2Cu3O7, which makes it satanic.

Youtube/Influencer fame is…

• a) the most profound and fulfilling experience a human soul can have.
• b) a stream of babes and compliments, with maybe one troll every five years.
• c) a nonstop flood of people projecting their egos at you.

-Leo has experienced constant projection on a daily basis for the past decade.  It’s especially difficult because he stays open to feedback and valid constructive criticism.  However, it’s difficult to distinguish that from people’s projections.

          It underscores how everyone is projecting all the time and of course Leo does it to others too.  When you experience other people’s projections so strongly it makes you more aware of your own projections.  (It also shows fame ain’t all it’s cracked up to be)

Youtube’s spam filter is…

• a) proof it’s part of a globalist conspiracy to suppress free speech.
• b) trying to counteract bots and spammers that would make websites like youtube unrunnable.

Leo filters out comments based on….

• a) opinions he disagrees with.  Critiques of his work.
• b) slander, racism, extreme vulgarity, disinformation, conspiracy theories, spam, and so on.

Leo’s work is…

• a) a copy of other spiritual traditions and presented as his own truth.
• b) a result of discovering these insights independently on his own.
• c) triggering to people who are attached to their particular lineage or guru as the source of truth.
• d) fun to play in the background while you’re cooking.

-If that original yogi or mystic could discover the truth for himself, why can’t other people discover the truth for themselves too?

Leo doesn't want to debate others because…

• a) he’s afraid of being exposed as a fraud.
• b) he has become too conscious to be interested in debating anyone.
• c) he’d rather spend that time making videos for us ?!

Leo denies he is leading a cult because…

• a) he isn’t leading a cult.
• b) denying you're a cult leader is exactly what a cult leader would do, which proves Leo’s leading a cult!

-That’s circular logic.  I can play this game on you.  I can call you a cult leader and as soon as you deny it I'll say, “Ah ha!  According to your logic if you deny your cult leader that's exactly what makes you a cult leader!”  (Speaking of which, Kanye West says his greatest accomplishment is that he is the greatest)

That spiritual teacher…

• a) worked really hard to become enlightened.
• b) didn't have to work that hard because he was born with exceptional spiritual talent.

Leo didn't respond to my email (or my awesome LoA question  ) because…

• a) he doesn't like me .
• b) he didn’t see my email.  He gets tons of them 

      -Using the Spiral Dynamics model…

Trump is…

• a) stage orange with a bit of red.
• b) stage red with a veneer of orange.

Jordan Peterson is…

• a) stage yellow with a green shadow.
• b) stage orange with some yellow capacities.

-Spiral dynamics has very interesting interpretive problems because it also suffers from the underdetermination problem. (ep: Spiral Dynamics)  It takes a lot of experience, study and application of spiral dynamics to be able to start to distinguish between these things.  Even the developers of spiral dynamics suffer from this problem.

Don Beck and Ken Wilber…

• a) are right about pushing towards stage yellow because we’ve already exhausted stage green.
• b) are seriously overestimating how evolved politics and culture are.

          -In the US, green is only prevalent in advanced universities.  The majority of society is still in blue and orange, even in developed countries.  We've got to move through green for many years before we can get to yellow.  We don't even have a green economic or political system.

          Spider Dynamics is an interpretation that you're projecting onto reality.  It can be difficult to know which interpretation to apply, which one is more accurate.  Clip: Spiral Dynamics (11 min)

People who believe in ufos…

• a) are idiots.
• b) aren’t necessarily idiots.  Scientists and skeptics are simply too close-minded.
• c) watched too much X-Files growing up.
• d) are right.  UFOs are hidden because there’s a conspiracy!
• e) are right.  UFOs are hidden because the government and people studying them can’t explain them properly.  It doesn't fit their worldview.

All spiritual teachings…

• a) are just different paths up the same mountaintop, leading to the same peak.
• b) are not different paths leading to the same peak.  There are lower and higher places along the mountain and it's not a single mountain.  It's a mountain range with many different peaks and not all paths lead to the same peak.

In a relationship, you could say…

• a) your partner is the problem.
• b) you are actually the problem.
• c) the two of you are not a good fit.
• d) one or both of you is wrong and evil.

All men…

• a) are shallow cheating pigs.
• b) aren’t shallow cheating pigs.  You just end up with pigs because of your low self-esteem problems.

The existence of evil in the world means…

• a) God is not good.
• b) God cannot exist because he wouldn't create evil.
• c) that “evil” is just an illusion created by your selfish biases.  You don't see the world’s perfection because your vision isn't perfect.

Consciousness is…

• a) impossible to know.
• b) possible to know because you are consciousness and consciousness is infinite, but you don't understand that yet because you haven't become conscious of it.

Leo is…

• a) wrong, because he hasn't considered whatever point I want him to consider.
• b) maybe right.  Maybe Leo has already taken that point into account and seen beyond it to points you have yet to consider.
• c) not perfect, but his epistemology is better than most people's epistemologies.   He’s spent decades doing the work.  Can the same be said for you?

-The notion of raw facts is a naive myth.  Your mind does so much interpretation and confirmation bias that your relationship to reality is less than one percent.  Your interpretations are are deeply distorted by your survival needs and insecurities.

 

-Key point:  Notice your interpretations.  Even deeper, notice yourself denying that your interpretation is an interpretation. How are you trying to retcon your interpretations as fact or science or “just the way it is”?  Also notice how rash and unconscious interpretations lead to self-deception and misunderstanding the world.

-Be aware that most knowledge, opinions and reporting you see in culture and media is actually an interpretation, but you’re not treating it as such.  You unconsciously swallow culture and media and their implicit frames which leads to deep self-deception in your life.

-The meta point here is notice all possible interpretations of a situation, rather than looking for the “right one” and defending it.

 

Tips for Application

1) There’s always dozens of interpretations.  If you can only see one or two, you’re being epistemically irresponsible.  That's your clue you're not being mentally flexible and curious enough, that you’re just fooling yourself.

2) Realize that your first interpretation is usually the worst.  The more contemplation you do of epistemology and metaphysics, the better your interpretations will get.  Overcome your self-deceptions.  Notice the ego games and the blaming in your mind (ep: Self-Deception I).

3) Get in the habit of looking for alternative interpretations.  Make it a little game you play with yourself.  This requires exploring multiple perspectives with an open-mind, without bias.

4) Seek more nuanced, high quality interpretations. The examples above have both crude and nuanced interpretations.  Notice the differences between them.

5) Generate novel interpretations for all sorts of situations.  For your relationships, your children, love life, sexuality, views about men, women, the government, and so forth.

6) Reinterpret your own self.  You have tons of negative interpretations of your capacities that you consider facts.  How compassionate and empowering are your interpretations about yourself?

7) Seek more charitable and loving interpretations.  Some interpretations are very fear-based, us versus them, tribalistic and polarizing.  Other interpretations are more compassionate, more inclusive. Steel man other interpretations instead of straw manning them.

8) Seek interpretations that understand and can accommodate other perspectives.

9) Question and discard fear-based interpretations.

10) Question and discard toxic, disempowering interpretations and victim mentality.   When you start to interpret yourself as a victim it becomes your reality.

           Notice how conspiracy theories and incel ideology use fear, hatred and judgment to make you feel like you're being empowered by the theory, but you’re actually not.  Their epistemology is very poor.

 

How is interpretation different from Recontextualization?

           It's a difference of degree. (ep: Recontextualization).  Recontextualizations are pretty rare, happening maybe once a month or once a year.  Interpretation is similar, but happening on a much more fine grained level. Interpretations are always going on in your mind.

 

Be careful about how you interpret these teachings

          There can be double, triple meanings to the words Leo uses.  Also, the more advanced a teaching is, the easier it is to misinterpret.  Leo’s concept of, say, ego death isn’t the same as your concept of ego death in your mind.

    Leo’s 3 hr episode about Relative truth means…

• a) Life is subjective, relative and full of interpretation, therefore Absolute truth does not exist.
• b) misunderstanding Relative truth causes a lot of suffering, and it co-exists with Absolute truth ?!

What you think he said might be the opposite of what he actually intended to say.  So be very careful when listening to these videos.

-Epistemology is at the core of all of your problems in life.  When you don’t take that seriously you misinterpret everything, everywhere.  The finite thing you believe you are is itself a gross misinterpretation of what you actually are.

-The real work is correcting the misinterpretations in your mind.  Fixing your epistemology fixes the foundation for your life.  The sturdier the foundation, the higher you can build your skyscraper.

Edited February 9 by FlyingLotus

[Bojan V]

These summaries are wonderful! Thank you!

[Ismael]

336. Comprehension Has Many Degrees

Summary by @AsafTheMagniv

https://youtu.be/Fh-BchpGXD0

 

Levels of comprehension:

1. Knowing the concept exist

 

2. Properly understanding the concept, Be careful not misinterpreting it

- A lot of people go wrong already in this step by misinterpreting the concept

- Most people don't even get to the point of properly understanding the concept

- The more deep a concept is, the more traps(misunderstanding) there could be.

For example, it took Leo 3 years to understand the concept of non-duality

 

3. Tracing the truth, tracing all of its ramifications, and seeing the significance of it ( still conceptually )

 

4. you get glimpses of the concept in reality, in your direct experience

- A big leap from level 3 that most people never even get to in their life

- To get to stage 4 you need to work/practice, you need to mentally work of contemplation

 

5. Starting to see these glimpses intermittently, on a regular basis

You start to understand how the concept affects and is affected in reality,

and you get this understanding occasionally.

At this stage you are still unconscious, mostly asleep

 

6. you see this concept constantly, you become constantly conscious of it to the point where it's difficult to not see it anymore

You start seeing the full ramifications not just in theory but in practice

You become very aware of all the traps in this process

You're getting better and better avoiding the traps, and even if you get trapped you easily wake up and understand that it's a trap

Most of the time there are 2 sides to a trap, you can swing too much to the right or too much to the left

For example in honesty: 1. you can be not honest and lie or 2. you can be too honest, brutally honest

and in the 6th stage, you understand the two sides and you do the between them to not get trapped

And Finally, you know how the flower will bloom, you know exactly how your concept is affecting reality and why it can't be any other way, and that's how you get peace

 

"you will never be at peace so long as you believe that things can be otherwise,

as long as you don't understand why it exists exactly this way and can't be any other way"

 

"derive your understanding from yourself"

 

 

Two high-level lessons:

1. There are many levels of comprehension to every insight

Which make it very worthwhile to dig deeper into every single one

 

2. You got to derive some of these truths and insights for yourself, and in fact, most of the growth lies here

Which makes it very worthwhile.

 

How to increase the depth of comprehension:

1. start taking ideas more seriously, don't take them as mere philosophy and mere ideas.

Ideas can be very powerful things

 

2. start to seek out true understanding rather than results, don't focus on results or on a particular problem you have.

seek to understand the situation, to really understand it means that you know how the mechanics of it come together and how they work and why they work

 

that's a change in your attitude, that's a change in your intentions to all of your problems in life.

 

most people don't go into their problems with a desire for true understanding

it's like why am I depressed?, I don't care about that but how do I fix my depression?

 

"The biggest sign that you don't got it, is when you think you got it"

 

 

Think before someone teaches you something if it's a trivial point or is it a cosmically a significant point, contemplate about it

 

Derivation and Contemplation is not an optional thing, they are a must in this work

 

"the deepest wisdom comes in tight simple packages" which makes it deceptively simple

Edited July 11, 2021 by Ismael
Episode number

[Ismael]

424. How To Discover What's True

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdrmdMhf_sY

 

"If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?"

--Dogen

 

Every century there's new stuff discovered that disproves old models of the world

How do we know? There are so many different philosophical, religious, and scientific systems. Different teachers teach different things.

How do you know science is true unless you have done a deep investigation into the foundations of what science is and how science works?

We have to be careful to not assume anything. We have to be willing to investigate how it actually is. (Objective and unbiased)

And if the way that it really is contradicts the way that I want it to be or how I think it is, I need to be willing to admit that I have been wrong. Have wrong assumptions or that the way that I want it to be is false.

 

If we assume science is the method to arrive at truth, then which science? Which scientists, from which era? Scientific theories are constantly disproven every century.

You are not playing favorites and not trying to defend any worldview.
We have to be totally neutral, and indifferent to the result. Maybe it'll be beautiful, maybe it'll reveal something unpleasant.

 

In doing this inquiry we're denying ourselves reliance on external authority. Investigating reality from scratch. No hearsay.

We have to take 100% responsibility here. We don't know what methods are valid for discovering the truth.

No knee-jerk assessments. You have to be very serious about being introspective and very conscious of your own biases, preferences, psyche, fears, attachments. (What do I want it to be?)

Did the idea that science obviously is the method to start with come from yourself or was it the result of cultural programming?

 

If something is true, it must be true independent of someone else telling it to me.

It's external to human activity. And perhaps if we could find the truth, perhaps we could ground ourselves in the truth rather than always navigating by human constructions. (Books, science, universities, experts, masters, religions. They have to be grounded to something outside of that, something prior to all that. Or maybe not.)

 

Assumptions: Make assumptions to bootstrap the inquiry process. Every assumption we make, we don't really know if it's true or not. It might seem likely, reasonable, obvious, but again, how do we know what's obvious, likely, etc.? We're judging based on the cultural background we're in.

Every time you make an assumption, make a note. If you get the first floor of a skyscraper wrong, the 100th floor is gonna be way wrong.

 

We can't even take reason or logic for granted.

Where it all begins is with admitting that you honestly admit that you don't know what the truth is. We don't even know if reason will deliver us the truth. (Because it's very easy for the mind to rationalize whatever worldview it believes in already.)

Radical open-mindedness is required. No hearsay, or external human source. Complete objective, completely impartial. That means you have to be open to every possibility.

Just because you've never seen something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. 99,999% of reality you haven't seen. You have to be open to surprises. You don't really know, and your assignments of probabilities to outcomes are really ultimately groundless.

To be very strict with what you allow within your inquiry assumes that you already know the truth.
How are you disallowing something from your inquiry?

We cannot prejudge the inquiry.

 

Methods we might use for discovering truth:

• Reason, basic common sense
• History. Which we'll allow a little bit for now. Of course, we'll have to question it in the future.
• Books. But there are so many contradictory books.
• Intuition.
• Science. There are so many methodologies.
• Witchcraft, voodoo, astral projection, psychedelics, meditation, contemplation.
• Direct experience. Perceptions. Our awareness of the present moment. It seems like that our sense of aliveness comes before reason, science, and religion. Like it is the most fundamental. After all, you have to experience them all. If I eliminate all my direct experiences then all the science flies out the window. You have to experience the Bible, and the word christ.
  • But how can you trust your perceptions?
  • If we find a truth it needs to be certain. No speculation.
  • Keep digging into it. It is possible. Keep questioning.
  • Every criterion will itself be in doubt because your action already reveals your underlying bias.
  • First, spend some years being skeptical, and then spend a few years being skeptical of your own skepticism.

 

There's a logical faculty and an intuitive faculty in the background. And from that intuition, you start to see certain connections. And the big picture is puzzled together of the deep background. Catching a glimpse of the tail rounding the corner.
But of course, you're always doubting. Can I trust the logical foreground or the deep background?
At this early stage, you don't know, so you just work with it, see where it takes you.

Distinguish your thinking about reality and the thing itself. (concept/thought vs direct experience) Abstractions, models, gross simplifications. How do you get to it? Is there even an it? If there is, that would be the truth. If no, then that would be the truth.

We're talking about the truest thing that could possibly be. Reality itself. It's not just a word game.

 

Through this whole process, you have to hold your feet to the fire and burn off all your old ideologies and pet theories. It's emotionally disturbing, unpleasant, can make you reclusive, feel like you're losing your mind, depressed.

This is just the beginning of the inquiry into the foundations of human knowledge (Epistemology)

Thinking independently for yourself.

 

The only thing you have is existence. Figments of your imagination also must exist. Don't you want to know what it is?

Keep questioning what truth is. Keep going down the same lines of logic from this episode. Be patient, have a long time horizon. Take it up as a hobby.

Real philosophy is life-transforming stuff. Not coming up with ideologies, but really questioning and introspecting. It's learning various principles of how the mind works.

Inquiry will teach you the trickeries of your own mind. In a way that you can't possibly learn by reading some book.

It'll give you an x-ray superpower to see through the bullshit of other people trying to trick you. Because you know your own tricks so well.

If truth is reality, and if truth is finding out how reality actually is, that which is the case. What else is there? That which is not the case. That which is false. And by definition, it's what doesn't exist. So the only thing there is is the truth and nothing else but the truth.
So if you don't find the truth, what do you have? That which is not the case.
How are you gonna live your life if all you have is that which isn't?

[Ismael]

371. Sameness vs Difference - The Metaphysical Foundation Of Reality

 

https://youtu.be/M5tWkG5SGcU

 

Every thing is the same, in that it is different.

According to sameness, there is no difference between sameness and difference;

according to difference, there is.

 

This episode is aiming to show how to take your contemplations really deep.

Many people still don't understand just how deep contemplation can go.

By end of this episode see what you assumed this topic was about in the beginning and then what it actually turned out to be after going through all the details.

 

Are you a "sameness person" or a "difference person"?

Is Coke the same as Pepsi? Are two Coke cans the same?

• Both have 475ml of liquid and basically the same ingredients.
• Certainly more similar than when compared to other kinds of drinks.
• Two Coke cans have different locations in space, temperatures, number of bubbles, volumes, unique scratches, and expiration dates.

Is an ant the same as an elephant?

• Living creatures, carbon-based life forms, have DNA, both made out of eucaryotic cells containing the same organelles. (Mitochondria, ribosomes, etc.)
• ~50% similar DNA.
• Both have legs, eyes, both can smell, probably both can hear, both have a brain, both have a nervous system, both can see color, both can die and are alive.

Is a chimpanzee the same as a human?

• Science says a chimpanzee has ~89+% similarity in the genome to a human being.
• Many people find the idea that we have a shared ancestor disturbing and feel the need to differentiate themselves from the chimpanzee.
• Same size, ten fingers, and toes, hearts, mammals, both born in the same way, almost identical nervous systems, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, similar teeth, grasping hands, opposable thumbs, both use tools, both have hair, we both care about our young, both live in tribes.
• There's a lot to be learned about the deep similarities between chimpanzees and humans. Many profound psychological and sociological lessons.
• We get scared by the same things, angered by similar types of things, both get jealous, cause violence to each other, attack each other and start small wars with each other, they have tribal warfare.

Is the number five the same as the number 25?

• Both numbers, both odd, both whole numbers, both able to divide the number 100.
• 25 is divisible by 5 and 25 is just 5x5.
• In fact, the similarities are infinite as well as the differences.
• So out of those two lists, which ones do you select, which ones do you focus on?

Are men and women the same?

• Same basic DNA, same species, hair, nails, fingers, same organs, can do the same things.
• But then we have different ways of thinking, psychologies, sexually attracted to different things, some have a masculine essence some a feminine essence.

Are all human beings the same?

• Could it be that it's a matter of perspective and that there's no such thing as an objective answer to this question in the way that most people think?
• Maybe reality doesn't actually know whether all human beings are the same or whether they're all different.
• How would reality know the difference?

Are you the same as a nazi?

• Same species, same organs, same brains, same mind, same basic ideas, pretty much same value system.
• It's actually important to study the deep similarities between your mind and the nazi's mind.

Is reality the same as illusion and fantasy?

• What if reality cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality?
• What would you use to distinguish between an illusion and reality?
• And that criterion that you're using to distinguish between reality and illusion…
• how do you know that itself is not an illusion?

Is good the same as evil?

• What's good for one person is precisely evil for another person and vice versa.
• Everybody feels they're right, what's the difference between right and wrong?
• Is that something that your own mind created?

Is Leo the same as you?

• Maybe ultimately Leo is just you telling yourself to wake up.

Is nothing the same as something?

• People take nothing as the opposite of something, some black void.
• Who's making that distinction? What if nothing is so nothing that it hides right underneath everything?

 

Sameness and difference is a matter of perspective more so than a matter of objective fact.

Episode: Understand Relativism

Relativity: Without a perspective, there's nothing there.

…There's no tree and there's no forest if you are not there looking at it, thus no "sound when a tree falls."

 

Inability to see the relativity leads to:

Racism, xenophobia, race wars.

Israel and Palestine conflict.

Christianity vs Islam.

Capitalists vs socialists.

Culture wars.

Gender wars. Feminists vs men's rights advocates.

"Me 2" movement lumping too many different kinds of sexual harassment into one category.

**Then again it's also important to recognize the commonalities.

Science vs religion.

 

Is the one thing everything has in common that it is happening in your consciousness?

Is there anything happening outside your consciousness?

**Check in your direct experience and contemplate.

 

What is sameness and difference really?

Notice that technically every single object is different from every other object.

Existence = difference. To be, to exist, is to be different.

 

To have two objects they must distinct by at least one measure of quality.

To have two particles, at the very least, they must be separate from each other in the X, Y, or Z coordinate, or in time, in their shape, color, etc.

Otherwise, you couldn't see it, it wouldn't exist.

 

At the same time, everything is sameness.

So which one is it?

Could that be the essence of relativity?

 

Blog video of child not being able to look past the differences. Object impermanence.

What if the kid was right and the object does disappear.

And you as an adult, for your survival, you learned how to trick yourself into believing that the object was still there behind the scenes.

To be able to look past the differences is to actually fudge the truth.

 

Sameness and difference are relative to context.

Ignoring one or the other is necessary for your comfortable survival.

…In order to exist as a self at all.

 

Are these the same or are they different?

 

It's precisely because they're distinct that you can count four of them.

There must always be at least one difference.

Everything is different.

 

Science

Science cannot prove difference or sameness.

Sameness and difference are prior to science.

Science is mostly looking for similarities between things, grouping things into various categories. (animals, elements, atoms, subatomic particles, people, apes, psychological disorders)

Science is deeply subjective. Your mind is creating them and they are not found in the world.

Modern science isn't conscious of the way that it's constructing these categories and metaphysical understanding of reality, sneaking in hidden metaphysical assumptions while denying that it's doing so.

Category: A collection of different objects which are similar.

Who gets to determine what counts as different and similar?

Who is determining that DNA is what should be the criterion that accounts for the similarity or the difference? Where does it come from?

How much DNA similarity does it take?

1%... 5%?

Science tells you that you're 99% chimpanzee, so why don't you call yourself a chimpanzee?

 

Categories are created by the ego-mind.

 

If it's the scientist who's determining things for you, then you're citing authority.

Deeply similar to religion.

Science wins through consensus, not through truth.

Precisely because categories are arbitrary.

Science is far from some objective pursuit of objective truth.

Science is about creating categories that serve the ego-mind.

Identity is not an objective fact.

Science cannot determine if two things are identical.

Because by definition if you have two things, they are distinct.

So that means there's no objective determination within reality for the identity 1=1.

 

Science also cannot tell you which two objects are distinct. Only your mind subjectively.

Your mind has to start making distinctions long before science is invented, creating a distinction between science and not science.

Science itself is a part of reality and for it to exist as a part of reality it has to be distinct.

Which is the reason why scientists get very touchy when their metaphysics is questioned because it dissolves the erected boundaries between science and pseudo-science.

 

To BE is to be a specific way.

If you remove all the differences you're killing it.

 

The ego & the self

"You, are not a body, or a creature, or an ape, or a living being, or molecules, not a brain.

You are an identity, a set of differences, you have differentiated yourself from your environment. […] And through that differentiation you actually came into existence.

And when you die the difference between what you thought you were, your identity, and your environment, will collapse and you will merge back into the totality you emerged.

And so your very life depends upon you being different from your environment and other people.

You being distinct.

If you stop being distinct you'll physically die."

The notion of identity is a very tricky business and much more significant to you and your mind than you ever thought.

You spent your teenage years and all your early twenties building up your identity:

Man, women, republican, democrat, American, Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Christian, good person, bad person, attractive, unattractive, tall, short, fat, skinny, successful, irresponsible, addicted to porn, love video games, like fast food, love sushi, etc.

You are differentiating yourself to create an identity.

It's like a snowball … accreting more and more stuff, and then it gains momentum.

And as it gains momentum eventually it gains a sense of mass and solidity until this giant snowball is so big and fast with such a force behind it that it really feels solid.

This is a force to be reconned with. That's your ego, that's who you are, your very life.

Now you can appreciate why self-actualization, getting some new result in some area, is so difficult.

Changing the trajectory of that giant snowball.

The reason you resist it so much is because fundamentally you don't want to change.

Because deep down you know real change is death.

You want the results you want without changing your identity.

But you get the results you get because of your identity. Catch 22 of all personal development.

And really all society sells you is serving your ego to build up your identity.

Because your ego will only pay money for that which builds up its identity. It doesn't want to pay money for breaking itself down.

 

Your ego will now twist everything around here and build a self-actualization identity.

Enlightenment = conceptual death of your identity = Happiness

The entire time you were infinite, everything and nothing, sameness and difference, and that there is no difference between sameness and difference.

 

"Until then you're going to keep struggling and keep trying to differentiate yourself. The ego needs this.

That's why it creates enemies. That's why it demonizes, criticizes, builds up ideologies, joins groups, cults, sects, philosophies, scientific schools, economic groups, political groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, national groups, family groups.

All of this is building the ego's identity. It needs to say 'I am different from you!'

If not, we're becoming closer and closer and closer until we literally join and become one.

And it's a big burden to realize that you are Hitler, Donald Trump, a terrorist... That you are everything you ever hated in your life.

See, the very reason that you hate in the first place is precisely because you are denying the very thing that you are.

And the reason you are unhappy is because fundamentally you're denying your true nature.

And your true nature is infinite. Indiscriminate. It's all.

But that's too much for you.

See the whole cake of reality is so big, and so delicious, and so beautiful, that it's too much. You can't eat so much fucking cake.

You think you want cake, but after you've eaten 50 slices of cake and there's still a million pieces to go, you're done with cake.

So you're drawing the line.

And the whole purpose of life is to go for the whole cake."

 

"The mind works by tuning into differences and samenesses like a lense. It can dilate and focus on whatever it wants to see.

And what does it focus on? It's never a question of objective truth or objective difference or sameness, but of what you select.

Based on who you are as an identity. Most conducive to your survival as the identity you have identified yourself to be.

It's not a matter of truth. Your mind doesn't give a fuck about truth. It cares about preserving your identity. And it'll cite all the scientific evidence, all the rationale, all the justifications, all the logic, all the religious scriptures, everything!

It will muster and marshal everything in its power to see reality as selectively as it possibly can such that your identity is preserved, despite the changing circumstances of the environment.

That's a struggle. Because the battle will always be lost. You are the whole and you can only remain the part for so long.

You have to be deluding yourself constantly, actively, that you are the part until finally the game ends and you merge in back with the whole.

And you cannot be other than what you really are other than for a short period of time which is what your life amounts to."

 

"The ego-mind is terrified of deep sameness. This is why it clings to ideology and to anything it identifies with."

A racist doesn't want to admit that we're all the same. And is in denial about it. His identity is built on being a certain ethnicity, it's a deep part of him.

So now to tell him that he's the same as a black person, a Chinese person, etc. that's going to threaten his identity in a deep way.

Which is why very conscious people very grounded in their metaphysical identity don't care and are not threatened by other races, their identity transcends all of that.

And you've sunk so much energy into building your current identity that you will not admit that it's a lie.

That's the last thing you want to do.

So you come up with justifications and further lies to explain why this is not true and that your lies are actually true.

 

If the ego wants to see difference where there isn't and if it wants to see sameness where there isn't it will.

Rather the reason it can do that is because sameness and difference are in the same place, they're always there at the same time everywhere.

Everything is different and everything the same. The ego cherrypicks whatever is most self-serving.

Everything socially constructed is based upon this fundamental principle of helping you to maintain your identity, both individually and collectively.

Bottom rung of Maslow's "hierarchy of needs". Sex, food, partying, entertainment, identity politics, ethnocentrism. Good sales & marketing is about riling up people's emotions, not truth.

Episode: The Deep Problem Of Marketing

 

"We live in a time of seeing differences."

The devil uses fragmentation to achieve his aims

"The devil is that which separated itself from God. The devil is the fallen angel. A true angel understands that the angel and God are really one. But an angel who is arrogant and denies that it is God, hates God, starts to criticize God, deny that God exists, what the devil does is the devil fragments, and the devil depends upon fragmentation because that's ultimately what the devil's very existence is.

The devil's body is made out of a fragment of God. So of course if the devil wants to stay separate from God, God will allow it as long as the devil keeps insisting on fragmentation.

And then the only way fragmentation can happen is through delusion, through lack of consciousness. So the devil has to limit it's own consciousness to maintain its devilry.

It's you. The fragmentation you create. The scapegoating, the demonizing, the hatred, the denying, the criticism, the crusading, the sects that you create, all the cherry-picking that you do, all the differences and samenesses you see that serve your identity rather than the truth. And of course, God is the truth."

One of the deep sameness' that we all have, we're doing this all the time, the only question is how conscious are you of the process, and the more conscious you become of the process, the less you'll do it.

 

"While materialism emphasizes fragmentation and seeing differences. True spirituality is the opposite movement.

An emphasis of deep sameness. And this is done through the right hemisphere. Responsible for intuition, integration, consciousness, and wisdom.

Taking all the fragments that materialism has left on the floor and piecing them all together.

Actualized videos are trying to show the deep sameness between everything. Whether it's religion and science, meditation techniques, etc.

Because the rest of society has already filled your mind with all the fragments & differences."

 

Deep sameness vs surface sameness

Ego likes to use surface sameness, sameness of appearances, instead of deep sameness.

Seeing the similar essence of all the appearances. That's what intelligence and genius are. Able to see deep sameness where others are only seeing differences & surface similarities.

Similarities that the ego deliberately uses to create an identity for itself.

Atheists create an identity for themselves by saying that all religion is delusion, a surface sameness. The deep similarity is enlightenment, awakening, God.

Conservatives call all liberals SJWs and Marxists, a surface similarity, thereby differentiating themselves to build their egoic identity.

 

"Deep sameness is about dissolving your egoic identity into your ultimate true identity as everything.

Wisdom comes with deep sameness. Wise people are able to see deep sameness."

Examples of deep sameness:

• Paradigm and paradigm lock present within religion and science. Both are dogmatic, both are ideological, both are sneaking in a metaphysics without realizing that they're doing so, both are locked into a certain paradigm without realizing that they're doing so.
• Start to understand where all the suffering in the world comes from and that it comes from selfishenss which is there present within you and all people.
• All living beings have equal worth.
• "If you want to really be intelligent don't bother taking IQ tests, don't bother reading textbooks, what you need to do is you need to develop your capacity to see deep sameness."
  • The wisdom and intelligence of geniuses, mystics, sages, visionary scientists like Leibnize, DaVinci, Einstein, was based upon their ability to make analogies between unlike things.
  • Newton making the analogous connection between the apple falling on his head, that meaning that there must be a force pulling it down, and then looking at the moon, realizing there also must be force pulling on moon, that means the moon is also falling towards the earth.
  • That's a deep profound similarity. Douglas Hofstaedter gives many more examples in his work.
• Applying lessons of history to the present and future.
• Integrating all of religion requires seeing deep sameness.

 

"The ultimate deep sameness is that everything is consciousness.

There are no two objects in existence which are not occuring right now within your consciousness.

They are made out of consciousness, they are consciousness, everything is consciousness.

That's the second half of the equation.

Consciousness is all the differences possible, infinite differences. And since everything is different that makes it all the same.

The deepest sameness is to realize that all of reality is alive and intelligent.

Intelligence and aliveness is not something human beings possess or that creatures possess it's a quality of the universe itself."

 

Love and compassion

"True love comes from seeing deep sameness. Whereas hatred comes from emphasizing differences between things.

Seeing differences is not a problem. You can see differences. Because technically everything is different.

What is a problem is when you make an identity out of your particular set of differences and then you need to defend it. That's where then hatred comes in.

Your capacity to love is directly proportional to how big your identity is.

If you want infinite love you need infinite identity.

That is why religious people are not capable of love and compassion.

It's because they can't. You can't get there through belief. Believing you can be like Christ and all loving while at the same time maintaining a small itty bitty identity.

Religion teaches you how to ape enlightened beings like Buddha or Christ. But if you were enlightened that would come without effort."

 

The broad applications of the topic of sameness and difference

• Historical analysis
• Medicine
• Science -- Lacks the ability to self-reflect and see how it's creating categories, subjectively. This limits science, it lacks holism because of hyperspecialization. Be an integrater, not a fragmenter.
• The legal system -- Drawing similarities or making differences.
• Politics -- Fighting for your built-up individual and collective agenda.
• Get good at noticing how both you and your culture draw differences, both arbitrarily.
• Gender wars -- Drawing samenesses and differences in a favorable manner will advance the egoic agenda of the people who're participating in these wars.
  • Identity is what everybody cares about most.
  • Problem =  a threat to your identity.
  • If you didn't care how you were, not even distinguishing living and non-living, would you have any problems at all?
• Religion and spirituality -- debating each other, criticizing each other, splitting off into sects, forming various groups, conspiring against each other… fragmentation.
  • Conflict = Not being able to see the situation from the other person's POV.
• Relationships -- let go of the differences and start seeing the deeper similarities.
• Finding new music, movies, books, teachers & gurus that you resonate with -- looking for samenesses in between differences. Many algorithms do this matching-up process for you. Shazam.
  • "There is no law in the universe that says that you are you, only you say that you are you, and therefore you become you, and so you are born. Tada! Identity is not found out in the world, identity is what you create it to be."
  • What you construct, you can also deconstruct.
  • What is your identity without any kinds of stuff added onto it?
  • What were you before that giant snowball even started rolling?

 

Applications of samenesses and differences with respect to self-actualization

• Integrating all spiritual schools and understanding why they originated in the first place.
  • The mind will select those problems which it needs such that it can create a differentiation between those people over there and us over here.
• Integrating science and religion.
• Understanding the blunders of epistemology -- the mind misusing beliefs.
• How evil, corruption, and conflict work -- we're too self-centered and don't see our own evil.
• Understanding human motivation -- all human beings are driven by exactly the same psychological drivers, which are grounded even deeper into existential motivation. Defending your identity.
• If you think natural selection & evolution explain all this:                                                   
  • "How does evolution know that something is a thing that needs to be perpetuated or survived at all?"
• Understanding all human suffering -- all suffering basically comes from one source, but it tends to proliferate in many different ways.
  • "Have you ever wondered why you never run out of problems in your life?
  • Could it be because you're creating the problems yourself, and all the suffering that comes along with it?"
  • Important note: Sameness is not better than difference or vice versa, both can be traps. There are tradeoffs with both abilities. Do both.
  • Difference is important for developing technical expertise in a field.
  • Sameness is good for holistic understanding and the big picture. The danger with that is overgeneralization.

 

Sameness pathologies

The early scientific revolutions and the discoveries of Galileo.

He made his own telescope and when looking out into the stars, Jupiter, and various planets and moons noticed the numbers he came up with while counting didn't correspond with the classical medieval notions that existed in his society.

Justification for why he was wrong by the church and prevailing intellectuals:

"There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warm, and to nourish it. What are these parts of the microcosm? Two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in the macrocosm, there are two favorable starts, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven." --Charles Taylor, Hegel

Reasoning based on sameness.

This wasn't really religious reasoning, this was the prevailing science of that time.

**Scientist meaning people who think about the nature of reality.

"Today we have visionary scientists just like Galileo who're advancing radical theories about the nature of existence, the mind, consciousness, psychic phenomena, psychedelics, etc., which are being roundly rejected by materialist scientists in universities and academia using similar kinds of ridiculous arguments as this."

The content is different but the structure is exactly the same.

"Intellectuals of his time told him that that instrument is the work of the devil and that nothing that could be seen through that instrument can be counted as evidence or truth because it's the work of the devil, so of course we're not going to look into your devil instrument."

Any evidence that gets presented contradicting materialism is false by definition because they believe in materialism first and foremost.

Nowhere is this more true than with psychedelics.

 

Science at large within academia and university confusing the map for the territory

The menu is not the meal.

Seeing the sameness between an equation and reality so much that you lose sight of the difference.

"Just as ridiculous as a pig believing that God looked like swine, with snout and bristles."

A mathematician isn't conscious that he's projecting mathematics onto the world.

 

Example from the social domain

Scandinavian schools trying to remove gender stereotypes between men and women by switching the roles in the magazines, showing girls playing with guns, and boys playing with dolls.

This will create a whole generation of boys and girls who are confused about how to be masculine and how to be feminine.

This is coming from good intentions and yes, not all boys want to be masculine and not all girls want to feminine. But it's also true that it's certainly not the case that boys and girls are indifferent to which toys they play with, their sexual preferences, and whether they have a feminine or masculine core.

We don't want to force masculinity or femininity on anybody, but maybe we could have a class on "how to be masculine" and "how to be feminine". After taking both they can decide which ones they want to adopt and what to leave.

In traditional and tribal cultures this was taught by the tribe to boys and girls. Our way of going about this doesn't lead to proper functioning.

 

Pre-rational/ trans-rational fallacy

Lumping together fundamentalist religion with mysticism. Both seem similar because they're both not 'rational' or 'conventional'.

 

Lumping together all forms of sexual harassment

Treating a serial rapist with the same outrage as someone who pats a women on the butt, with the same outrage who tells a dirty joke, etc.

 

Psychedelics

Lumping them in with hard drugs. Weed, mushrooms, LSD, DMT are listed as a schedule one substance, the same as heroin, cocaine, etc.

We stigmatize psychedelics so much that they're not taken seriously in the medical, scientific community, by the culture at large, thereby this powerful tool ending up going to waste.

These sameness pathologies are done by the ego-mind on purpose, precisely because it doesn't want the truth, it loves being deluded. Assuming it already has the truth.

 

Jordan Peterson

Lumping together Spiral Dynamics stage Green post-modernism in with soviet style marxism and communism and all the evils of the early 20th century.

He's criticizing post-modernism from below not above and advocates for a blue/ORANGE/green society. Overabundance of Orange and Orange materialism is destroying the entire planet, creating gross income inequality and other sorts of social problems, corrupting politics with lobbyist money.

We need more Americans who're stuck in Blue and Orange to start to open up and accept Green.

 

Calling all corporations evil

Stage Green people commit a lot of sameness pathologies because they tend to see everything as equal.

 

Assuming that all human consciousness is the same

Episode: Why People Seem Crazy

Especially if you've never experienced altered states of consciousness.

 

Difference pathologies

Literal demonization done during wartime

Google: "demonization poster WW2"

It's hard to kill other people without separating yourself from them.

~The 60s the CIA and U.S. government wanted to use LSD hoping to create "super-soldiers".

But the LSD expanded their identity so much such that they couldn't shoot the enemy.

 

Men's right movement

Pick-up, MGTOW, RedPill, Incels.

Guys who have dysfunctional problems with their entire relationship to womankind as a whole. They were raised in such a way that they didn't know how to attract women or were wounded by some women.

But at the same time, they have their biological needs and hormones while still having their secret hatred of women. Don't know how to approach women, what masculinity or femininity is. They end up externalizing the problem and don't take responsibility for educating themselves about it and solving it.

Pick up teaches guys how to attract women, but it doesn't really teach them how to understand women, this feeds their egocentric view of women as just sexual objects and how to have transactional relationships with them. There's still a hole in the PUA's soul, blaming women, an insecurity.

This is all creating a rift, a fragmentation, between themselves 'men' and 'women'. This turns into a whole political ideology. That's where Jordan Peterson comes in with a silver platter.

The problem comes with creating an identity out of the wound.

 

Sam Harris and Islam

Ranting against Islam saying it's "the motherload of bad ideas."

Islam falls into the trap of the "lesser jihad", externalizing the struggle instead of pursuing the "greater struggle" of going in.

Fundamentalism also exists in Sam Harris and within his whole movement. He's a rationalist fundamentalist, the deeper similarity is that the dogmas within Islam are also materialist dogmas that exist within Islam, especially his followers deeply subscribe to his rationalist cult.

He has a half-baked sense of awakening and chosen the "lesser struggle" by railing against Islam and other political things.

The very evil that Harris is railing against within Islam is the very evil he's committing.

Make sure you don't make an identity out of criticizing.

 

Richard Dawkins and himself vs creationists

There's a lot wrong with creationism. But he has a different flavor of religion himself, the scientism version of religion.

He talks pretty much like a religious person, just as dogmatic, closed-minded, oblivious to the truth of mysticism and non-duality, lumping them together with those of fundamentalist religion.

 

Ethnocentrism and racism

Thinking that your culture is a better culture than other cultures and cherrypicking the evidence to justify your beliefs. The reason for this is your identity and your attachment to it.

 

Not seeing one's own evil

The reason evil really exists in the world in the first place is because every individual thinks that they are different from all the evil people out there.

Focusing outward makes you lose self-reflection which leads to selfishness, thereby creating evil, blindness to one's own self-biases.

Assume that you're capable of the very same evils that everybody else is and therefore be careful about justifying your own selfishness to yourself using reason, science, logic, and all sorts of excuses and rationalizations. Awareness is curative.

 

Questions to use for the rest of your life in all sorts of situations:

How are these two things the same?

How are these two things different?

How are these two things deeply the same?

 

Homework: (for the next week 30 to 60 minutes daily)

Contemplate this topic of sameness vs difference from scratch.

1.) What is difference between any two objects?

     What is sameness between any two objects?

**Go with direct experience and resist theorizing.

2.) Find the two most distinct things and then find how they're still the same.

**See how radically you can pull things apart and then still find similarity no matter what.

 

Develop the ability to be able to both rely on external sources but then be able to isolate yourself for 30 to 60 minutes as though in a hermetic bubble and contemplate a topic that you have studied and read about from scratch.

Without bringing assumptions and without bringing preconceived notions or any baggage into it.

Become mentally flexible, see both difference and similarity, without needing a particular difference or similarity to be true. A process of letting go.

Goal: Nuanced and greyscale, thinker, not black and white.

Plus an ability to see the deep interconnectedness of things.

Integrate and distinguish.

And not using either of these to serve your egoic, self-centered, agenda of survival.

 

3.) Ponder: "Form is emptiness; emptiness is not different than form." --Heart Sutra

Edited July 9, 2021 by Ismael
Inserted picture.

[Loving Radiance]

Fantastic work Ismael

On 9.7.2021 at 10:03 PM, Ismael said:

366. Comprehension Has Many Degrees

336.

Hopefully you can still edit it.

Edited July 11, 2021 by Loving Radiance

[Ismael]

3 hours ago, Loving Radiance said:

336.

Hopefully you can still edit it.

Oh wow, I keep getting the numbers wrongs! ? 

Thank you for the reminders. ?

3 hours ago, Loving Radiance said:

Fantastic work

My pleasure 

[FlyingLotus]

84. Summary:  How To Stay Healthy - The Psychology of Maintaining Consistent, Effortless Health

“Take care of your body.  It’s the only place you have to live.” —Jim Rohn

-This is about the deeper psychology of staying healthy.  That’s way more important than the technical details of diet and exercise.

-Why do some people have excellent health and vitality, while some don’t?  In fact, most don’t.  Many people mistreat their body so badly they have miserable health or are headed in that direction.

             Excellent health comes from an excellent psychology about health. If you have an unhealthy lifestyle you probably have poor psychology about health.  You’re not in touch with why you want to be healthy.

-Why do you want exceptional health?  That’s the key to getting and staying motivated, to resisting temptation.

Awareness Of Health

-Getting healthy is hard, but we’re told it’s easy, which makes it even more difficult.  There’s so many distractions.  It’s very easy to skip the gym.  It’s very easy to eat junk.  There’s ads and access to unhealthy food everywhere.

             All of that plays on your psyche. It puts you in a very un-resourceful state, where you don’t even realize just how much your health can deteriorate if you don’t change.

-It takes focus and awareness to be healthy.  You have to prioritize your health, your workout regime, meal prep and shopping for nourishing food.  If you get careless you’ll default to what society makes easy, which is junk food and avoiding the gym.

Get Educated and Experiment

-Read about fitness and nutrition.  Watch workouts on youtube.  Research different types of diets.  There’s a lot of disinformation about nutrition and exercise.  So you need to experiment.

-Throughout this process you’ll start to see patterns emerge. It’s frustrating because there’s so much conflicting health advice out there. For every hundred youtube videos, half of them probably conflict with the other half.  That’s just the state of our understanding at this point in human development.

             However, there’s a lot of stuff that does work.  You just have to sort through it.  See what works for you.  Adopt the strategies that work for you and use them.  Discard the stuff that doesn’t work.  Even if a thousand experts say diet X is the best, if it doesn’t work for you—don’t do it.  Try something else.

-Pretty much all diets say cutting sugar and junk carbs is the fastest path to weight loss.

The Why of Health

The most fundamental question is: Why do you want to be healthy?  Why is that important?  Have you stopped and actually asked yourself that?  Don’t just dismiss the answers or take them lightly.

-Leo used to be fat Leo.  In college he lost about 65 pounds in five months.  It’s been a long journey for him, so he knows the process firsthand.  He started by wanting to drop fat.  He’d been fat for so long he didn’t know what his non-fat body looked like.  He didn’t even have an image of how healthy he could look.  It crippled his confidence and romantic relationships.  He couldn’t even wear nice clothes to go on dates.

-That’s a good place to start, but there are even deeper motivations that could fire you up. Leo’s health goals nowadays aren’t about looks.  It’s about truly valuing and caring about his brain and body.

Your Body Is A Temple

-The human body is one of the most amazing, complex machines on the planet. It’s beautiful, especially the human brain.  Having something so beautiful makes you want to preserve it.  Really soak that message into your subconscious, so that everything you do to you body is about improving it.  That’s how you create a health enhancing psychology.

          Do you want to live a long prosperous life?  Do you want to be active?  To travel the world?  To build a thriving business or career?  Do you want to have great relationships with your partner or kids?  To connect with people?  To motivate people?  Do you want to try out crazy hobbies?  Do you want to read books or learn new skills?  Do you think you could do any of that without good health or energy?     

• “Treat your body like a temple not like a wooden shack”—Jim Rohn.

-If you had a high performance vehicle, a multimillion dollar, one of a kind, collectible sportscar, would you put premium fuel into it?  Would you take it to a car wash? Would you do frequent oil changes using only the best oil?  You would, because you see it as precious.  Which car would you rather drive?  Start to envision your body that way.

Your body is even more precious than a sportscar because it’s the only place you have to live.

• Joe Rogan’s Workout Motivation (7 min).  Discomfort is your friend.

Reasons to Get Healthy

-The health of your body is the greatest enhancer or inhibitor  of your life.

1. Energy

-Good energy gives you the highest quality life possible.  If you’re feeling groggy, listless or your mood is down, you won’t be at the top of your game.

-Pay attention to how you feel after eating junk food.  Notice how it deteriorates you from the inside out.  Those unhealthy images will make it easier to avoid Big Macs and candy.

2. Longevity

-The healthier you are, the longer you’ll live and the better quality your life will be.  Do you want to worry about heart disease, diabetes, cancer and flights of stairs?  Or do you want to climb trees, fight criminals, do headstands on the beach, put your grandkids to work, contribute to your community and enjoy life?

3. Brain Health

• “Your mind is the most powerful weapon you have.”—Farengar Secret-Fire from “Skyrim”

-The mind-body connection is important.  The health of your brain is interconnected with the health of your body.  Do the research and you’ll see.

-If you’re an analytical person, or your job depends on brain power or creativity, you’ll want to get every mental edge possible.  You use your brain all the time, why not make it your biggest strength?  That’s your consciousness we’re talking about.

-Cut out anything that’s hurting your brain performance.  Do you want to maintain strong, healthy neural connections for the rest of your life? Or do you want to have brain tumours, memory problems and Alzheimer’s disease?

4. Looking Good

-Do you want to have an impressive physique?  Do you enjoy wearing nice clothes?  Do you like having stamina in the bedroom?  Or would you rather be some fat-ass trying to have sex?

5. Kids

-Getting your fitness and nutrition right will set a good example for your kids.  If they learn how to do it right they can avoid hurting their health or becoming overweight.   

-Do you want to live long enough to see your kids grow up?  Do you want to see them graduate, or get married, or crush it at their career, or have children of their own?

             When you choose Big Macs over your family, you’re short changing them and yourself on the experiences you could be having together.

 

Next Steps

-Those are just a few reasons to get and stay healthy.  So, why do you want exceptional health?  Write down your top reasons.  Do this right now, or at least sometime today.

             The key to motivation is getting clear on your vision and your why.   Start tapping into this.  This makes it much easier to resist temptation and stick to the path of living your best life.

 

Edited July 13, 2021 by FlyingLotus

[FlyingLotus]

56.  Summary:  How to Be Happy in Life - Happiness Bottlenecks

-Have you ever wondered what the secret to happiness is?  Have you ever thought: “If only I had ________, I would be totally fulfilled.”  That’s a very common thought, it’s also wrong.

-There isn’t one big secret to happiness.  Life is complex.  Happiness isn’t a light switch you flip once.  It’s more like straightening out a tangled up garden hose with weak water flow.  The flow is weak because all the kinks in the garden hose are producing bottlenecks in the water pressure.

 

Leo’s Journey As A Case-Study

-The reality is there are many areas in your life that you will need to work on to be truly happy and fulfilled.  So stop tormenting yourself expecting a silver bullet.

-When Leo’s first started personal development, he thought one thing would unlock the key to happiness.  This slowed his growth and made him doubtful and skittish about which path to pursue.

• “Maybe I have subconscious issues holding me back and I need therapy?  Then again, if I was more optimistic I wouldn't need to rehash my childhood with a therapist…Maybe if I were more ‘in the moment’ and stopped being so goal-driven and materialistic I’d be happy…?  Maybe I’m too impatient?  Maybe I need to adopt a mastery mindset so I don’t get discouraged…?  What if I’m just being lazy?  What if I just need more discipline?  Or, what if I have enough discipline, but I just have the wrong goals…?  What if I can't make the right goals because I don't have the right life purpose...?”

-He was confused because he didn't know which problem to tackle first.  The truth is you need to have a certain number of elements in place before you can really be happy in life.

 

The River of Happiness & Bottlenecks

-Think of your happiness as a flowing stream of water — a river. You have created, or continue to create, bottlenecks that restrict its natural flow of happiness.

-Some potential bottlenecks include: addiction (drugs, food, porn, internet, etc), pessimistic thinking, serious money problems, lack of education, lack of vision or goals, unhealthy relationship(s), health problems, etc.

-You gotta address the most urgent bottleneck first. Then that will reveal a new bottleneck afterwards.  So, what’s really clogging up your natural flow of happiness right now?

            What is holding you back right now from living your full potential? Sit down and answer this question!

-When you dig into this, you will see that there will be a successive string of bottlenecks.  This means you’ll be doing personal development for a long time if you really want to be happy and successful.

-Don’t get distracted by quick fix solutions.  Instead, see the big picture of what you’re doing.  Get excited about your life vision!  You are finally on a conscious journey to master yourself!  This is the greatest thing you can do!

 

Pinpoint Your Top 2 Bottlenecks

-Pinpoint your current bottleneck, and commit to solving it, whatever it takes.  Also try to predict what your second biggest bottleneck will be.

-What are one or two action items you can start doing right now to open your 2 biggest bottlenecks?  Write down your best answers and begin taking action.

 

Working Multiple Bottlenecks At Once

-You’ll need to chip away at some bottlenecks for months or years to get them fully resolved, so it’s nice to work on a couple at once. It’s like parallel processing in your computer!

-You can work on multiple bottlenecks simultaneously.  Be very careful that you don’t take on too much. You need to have enough conscious awareness to devote to each issue. If you see yourself constantly slipping, wipe the slate clean with a focus on just one bottleneck.

-Sometimes you have to sacrifice life balance to resolve a bottleneck through sheer force. This is okay. Go out of balance, then remember to come back into balance a few months later.

 

Research Solutions

-Without exception, every bottleneck can be resolved. So no excuses about how your situation is soooo bad that there is no hope for you. Stop this victim thinking. It is killing your results in life.

            Realize your problem is NOT special or new. Your problem is ultimately psychological, and thousands if not millions of human being have faced your exact same problem throughout the thousands of years of recorded human history. Solutions are out there if you just look.

-Start doing research for how to unclog your bottlenecks. You are not seeing all the options right now.  We live in an information-product age. There is literally a resource to help you understand and fix ANY bottleneck you’ve got, no matter how peculiar, odd, or shameful it might seem to you.

[Bodhitree]

This has been a good read, it’s opened up a few things. Kudo’s to all those who have contributed to the summaries. 

[FlyingLotus]

Your welcome!  I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy making oblique references to the best Chris.  Actually, writing up summaries helps me focus and reflect on what’s being said and how to incorporate it into my life.  I totally recommend it!

I even like the super early vids.  It has a lot of healthy stage blue and orange stuff even though I feel like I’m digging up Leo’s old high school yearbook.