What Is A Meta-Source?

By Leo Gura - January 24, 2017

I briefly talked about this concept of a “meta-source” my latest video, but then I started to wonder: Isn’t every source a meta-source? Isn’t every source/teacher influenced by many sources itself?

This seems to be the case. But then what do I mean by meta-source?

While it’s true that every source has been influenced by many sources itself, there is an important difference. Some sources actively pull from much more diverse sources than others. Some teachers have clearly gone out of their way to study and integrate 100s of very diverse, high quality meta sources, while others have not. Some teachers take on the attitude of seeking out diverse sources to broaden their base of knowledge and experience, whereas other teachers are more insular, sticking to a narrower range of material. And this makes a big difference. You can usually FEEL when a teacher is REALLY going out of his way to collect new sources, vs a teacher who is perfectly comfortable following whatever he already knows.

So what I mean by meta-source, is a source who values big-picture understanding and who recognizes the importance of seeking out 100s of very diverse sources, especially meta-sources. So in effect, when you learn from this kind of teacher, you’re getting a synthesis of many meta-sources, because this guy has done what you’re doing: he’s synthesized many sources who have themselves synthesized many sources. So you’re getting a meta-meta-source.

Now, does this make the meta-source error-proof? Certainly not. Treat the meta-source just like how you’d treat a regular source. Don’t put too much blind faith in him. He is, after all, synthesizing all this information through his own cognitive filters. Those filters might greatly distort or dilute the original sources.

There is also a danger if you ONLY pull from meta-sources. Some teachings a very deep and technical. If you get a meta-source glossing it over for you, you’ll miss the core of the teaching. So the ideal is to that you rely both on meta-sources, which will tend to be more generalist, and plain old sources, which will tend to be more specialist.

And of course, verify it all yourself through direct experience and filtering it through your intuition.

Click Here to see ALL of Leo's juicy insights.