Best Principles for a Successful Life

 

          Best Principles for a Successful Life

In this blog, I want to lay out the core principles of actualized org.               

what are we doing here at the biggest picture level what is my style of personal.

Development if we think of actualized org as a school or as a teaching or as a

Style or as a philosophy as a system then what are the core tenets of this.

The system I wanted to lay those out for you it can be very useful to be able to zoom.

Out from all the individual stuff that we talked about you know sometimes I'll spend an hour two or three talking about.

Some very narrow topic which is important but that's only covering like.

Maybe one principal out of many many principles so here we're gonna talk about close to sixty-five different/

Principles for creating the good life this is what I feel is necessary for a.

Human being to live a good life now of course this is informed by my life experience and my own biases my own.

The perspective of my own experiences in life and my style so an important

Sense there's a sort of a stylistic component to any teacher that you're going to be learning from any spiritual teaching any philosophical system any political theory you know there's

there's a sort of like an idiosyncratic style that comes along with it so you have to also determine for yourself

whether this style is gonna resonate with you now even if it doesn't fully resonate with you you can still learn

stuff from it so it's not like you should only listen to teachers or teachings that are fully aligned with

your style but do recognize that of course the things I say come from certain biases and experiences that I

have and that doesn't mean that they're true for everybody but at the same time I must say that

some of these principles are such rock-solid principles that I'm very tempted to say that they should be true

for a large percentage of human beings so it's not just purely style there's

there's a lot of profound wisdom in these principles now it can take years to be able to

fully implement one of these principles sometimes these principles sound very simple just they can be stated in one or

two sentences but to be able to embody it and to have this principle functioning in your life and even justto be able to understand why this principle is so important can take years

can take decades which is why I have a lot of individual episodes devoted to each one of these in many cases not all

of them, in the future, I'll be releasing more to make sure I cover as much of these principles as I can in a lot of depth

because we can't go into a lot of depth here because here we just have to kind of like list them all out and give you a big picture perspective now I'm not

gonna go into explaining why each of these principles is true that would be

way too much work and way too much detail for this overview though that

we're doing here but if you're curious about why these principles are true and

you want me to like prove it to you well, first of all, I'm not gonna prove anything to you that's your job

is to figure out what actually works in life and what doesn't I'm just offering these as suggestions not as Dogma not as

beliefs that you take blindly but ultimately why they're true how do I

know that they're true it's because of all of my life experience all of my experience doing business all of my

experience trying to figure out my own life dealing with my neuroses and problems and sticking points on my own

pathologies all of the enormous research

that I've done theoretical research reading hundreds of books studying with advanced teachers and light masters

traveling around the country traveling around the world to various places to learn studying hundreds of different perspective hundreds of different perspectives hundreds of different traditions from Easter ones to

Western ones for modern ones to ancient ones reading lots of self-help books

trying to experiment with all these techniques myself and seeing what works what doesn't work what's important

what's not so important right so from all of this and all of my meditating and contemplating and journaling and

thinking about this and all of my five years of teaching all of this and getting feedback from people and

coaching people professionally as I used to do work with clients one-on-one

seeing what they're sticking points are talking with friends around the country

about what their various sticking points are you know working on improving various limitations in my own life like

my health and my nutrition and my fitness and my inability to socialize when I was younger and my introversion

my shyness so working through all of this stuff right all of it is sort of getting compiled together and is

informing my understanding of reality and what's important to live the good life and of course, very importantly I forgot

to mention my pretty deep experience with psychedelics at this point has been

very instrumental in informing me about the most important principles for

living a good life and this is something that I have been interested in for probably close to 20 years all

the way back to high school I was just interested in what are the principles of living a good life so without further

ado let's get into these principles core principle number one and I'm not going

to list them in any particular order here but this one is so important maybe it does deserve to be number one is no ideology and no dogma of any kind

this is one of the things that makes actualize that work unique among many other teachings and schools is that most

teachings and most schools are filled with a lot of ideology and a lot of dogma stuff they they just want you to

accept and I have a whole episode called

how ideology works which go into a lot of depth about the dangers of ideology the dangers of dogma do not make the

mistake of thinking that ideology and dogma is just a mistake that religious people make no no no this is

a mistake that almost everybody makes scientific people make this mistake atheists make this mistake skeptics make

this mistake political people make this mistake very intelligent people make

this mistake's very easy to fall into some kind of ideology because that's

what society feeds you as various kinds of ideologies and one of the most

difficult things to do in life is to question and undo all the ideologies and

dogmas that you've been filled with growing up in whatever culture you grew up in whatever family you grew up in

whatever school system you went to you know they all filled your mind with various kinds of programming and beliefs

and ideologies and so questioning and undoing all of that and living a dogma-free ideology-free life that is very

challenging and it can be a little difficult to understand why that's even

important but the reason that it is is

because the thing you're ultimately after is you're after the highest truth

and you're after you you're after freedom of your mind and so the

The problem with ideology and Dogma is that it is sort of anchor your mind down and it doesn't allow your mind to explore

all the nooks and crannies of reality that it needs to be able to explore to understand what reality is and to live

the good life you see these ideologies are like grooves that your mind gets stuck in and

then it keeps going down these grooves it keeps thinking down these grooves and looking at the world through these

lenses and that shapes and distorts what you're able to see and how flexible

you're able to be and how you're able to change your life people who are very ideology ideological and dogmatic

they're not able to change themselves which is what we need to do we need to massively change ourselves in

order to create the good life and all of my research and philosophizing into

the topic of epistemology or the theory of knowledge if I could boil all of that down to just

one simple principle would just not be ideological it's just that simple

that's a very very simple principle and this grounds pretty much everything that I ever talked about ever in any of my

content and I stress this over and over and over again because it's so important

and it'll take you years to realize how important this is but if you can follow

this one principle in your life will save you a lot of misery and trouble and a lot of going down dead ends and

various kinds of ideological traps the next core principle is that big-picture

thinking is greater than technical knowledge and always Trump's technical knowledge that's another thing that I

stress in my work all the time is big-picture thinking do you understand what's going on at the highest

possible levels and are you concerned about that over the technical

details that's like one of my greatest strengths this big-picture thinking the technical details of things I'm not that good at that's sort of a weakness of mine and sometimes when

I'm delivering some piece of content or I'm talking about some topic it's in the technical details that I can screw up

and get something wrong here or there I've certainly done that plenty of times in past episodes but I'm never too

concerned about that because my focus is always on the big picture and that's because what I saw when I was younger is

I saw the opposite of that I saw everybody around me including my teachers and society and culture at

large and my professors and so forth they were so focused on the technical knowledge and yet they had very little

of the big picture and because of this they were living the wrong kinds of

lives see you can have all the perfect technical knowledge you can be an expert in your technical field but have no idea

of the big picture and your life will be miserable and highly dysfunctional and

pathological whereas if you get the big picture right and you're focused on nailing the big

picture the technical details you don't need to waste a lot of time and energy on that it doesn't matter and if you get a

few technical details wrong here or there it doesn't matter so the

a big picture like in this example with this episode is we're gonna give you all these sixty-five principles

creating the good life that's a very big picture so if you just follow these principles intelligently not robotically

then you should make very good progress in creating a great life and notice that

these principles don't depend on the technical knowledge we're talking about

very broad ideas here the next core

the principle is that direct experience is king direct experience is king

experience is the only thing that exists and the only thing that is real

right now your experience whatever you're experiencing right now that's what's real that's what's that's

what exists everything else is fantasy everything else is imagination this is a

very powerful principle for cutting through all the [ __ ] that culture

and society and people feed you and also for cutting through your own [ __ ]

the [ __ ] that your mind feeds you your imaginings and musings and theories and philosophies and ideologies

how do you cut through all that by grounding yourself in your present

direct experience that's what's King if

it's not present in your direct experience it's not real that's very

powerful and you need to use this principle over and over again as you're

inquiring into reality to help you to

sort the wheat from the chaff to sort the actuality from all the concepts and beliefs that you will be learning from

books and so forth and coming up in your mind the next core principle is self

experimentation actualized org is all about self-experimentation how do you

discover what works what is true and which principles will lead to the

good life by believing me by reading a book by listening to some Ph.D. professor

who has a Nobel Prize and trusting him or some guru who's sitting up on a

pedestal no it's through self-experimentation you

won't know what techniques will or won't work for you or will or won't resonate with you until you try them and this

the principle is a corollary of the idea that direct experience is king so it's because we realize that direct

experiences are a king that we also realize that we do a lot of self-experimentation because it's only by going out and experiencing different things trying different techniques that we will discover what works for us so

what this means is if you have some kind of problem let's say you have a consistent relationship problem in your

intimate relationships so self-experimentation this principle is what it means is that you're gonna go out

there and you're gonna experiment with various solutions you're not gonna come and trust me or somebody else or try to

get the answer from someplace you can experiment now of course this means you can listen to people you can get

advice from people you can read books of course and you should but self-experimentation means that your

solving any problem is always gonna be one of okay let me experiment and troubleshoot this and try different

things until something works so you're gonna go maybe read some books on

relationships you're gonna go hire a therapist and talk to them maybe you're gonna go see a life coach maybe

you're gonna go to do some psychedelics and contemplate the nature of your relationship and your sticking points

while you're on psychedelics or maybe you're gonna do some journaling or maybe you're gonna have a serious one-to-one

conversation with your loved one or your spouse or whatever to try to resolve this relationship thing or maybe you're

gonna go do a solo retreat in the woods for a week and contemplate the nature of your relationship you know so all of

these are different things you can experiment with and your approach is

gonna be looking let me try this stuff out and see what's gonna solve it and if you have money problems

same thing you're going to try various self-experiments to resolve your money problems and if you have some depression

you're gonna do more self-experimentation and so forth and this is how you solve all of your

problems in life are through self-experimentation the next core principle

is radical open-mindedness I've talked a lot about this in the past I have entire

episodes about open-mindedness and I'll have some more in the future but the

reason radical open-mindedness is so important is because we recognize that we enter this world not knowing

anything and that we need to be able to

fully explore every nook and cranny of reality without prejudging it so that we

don't accidentally cut ourselves off from great discoveries and amazing

insights and truths see and we also recognize that the mind the ego-mind

tends to love to be closed-minded to new experiences and to challenging new ideas

and so therefore we take the opposite step the counterintuitive move and we

open ourselves up radically so radically that it would shock most people that were this open this means you have to be

open to any ID any perspective any teaching no matter how ridiculous or crazy and untrue it

might sound at first this might seem

dangerous but it's the opposite open-mindedness doesn't mean that you

are going to believe a bunch of ridiculous things it just means that you're open to

exploring different ideas and perspectives and the reason that we accept this principle and we follow it

is because we recognize that if we're not radically open-minded then our mind

is going to judge prematurely and cut us off from all these other avenues that we

can explore and we also recognize that a lot of the deepest truths in life are counterintuitive and seem ridiculous and

silly on the surface until they are deeply explored and it can take a lot of

time to deeply explore these various truths and topics before we realize just how true and powerful they are which

means that we need to remain open-minded during that time otherwise if we're

closed-minded then what's going to happen is that we're going to just going to say oh well that thing is stupid that thing is

crazy that can't possibly be true that thing is irrational that thing is silly and religious and that thing is criminal

and we're going to do all this but we're not going to explore all of that it's much better to go and actually

explore all of that which again is not the same thing as becoming dogmatic

about any one of those things or clinging to any one of those things we're interested in exploration genuine

exploration means you don't know what you're going to find sometimes

you'll find great stuff sometimes you'll find ugly bad stuff the next core

the principle is that you do not judge things that you have not experienced

personally, this again is sort of a corollary to the radical open-mindedness

principle but it bears making explicit here because I can't tell you how many

times I've fallen into this trap of judging things that I hadn't personally experienced and

talking about it as though I knew about it and I understood it but that

was just self-deception and I didn't understand it because I didn't have any experience with the thing and

this is something that the mind loves to do all the time it loves to judge things

especially when it has zero experience with it so maybe you judge Middle

Easterners or Middle Eastern countries but the question is have you actually

been to a Middle Eastern country how many middle Easterner friends do you have

or maybe you judge psychedelics have you ever even done psychedelics see but of

course the mind is very tricky so the mind will say olio but I don't need to do that I don't need to go to Middle Eastern countries I don't need to do

psychedelics I don't need to try that food I don't need to explore that culture I don't need to study this religion because I already know it's

[ __ ] that line of reasoning itself is the [ __ ] so be very careful about

judging things you have not experienced you need to become very good at recognizing when your mind is about to

judge something and then you ask you to wait a minute have I experienced this thing that I'm gonna be talking about here in a second oh I

haven't then I should keep my mouth shut and I keep my mind open that's a very

powerful skill to develop very few people have developed that skill and I

still struggle with that one myself the next core principle is to question

everything questions everything

there is no idea too sacred not to

the question of anything that is sacred needs to be questioned even more so

doubly so triply so question especially

the most obvious stuff is the stuff that people think that you're crazy or insane to question the question that

question the world even exists question whether you even exist question everything the

more fundamental your question the better and especially become very good at questioning assumptions what are the

assumptions of this philosophical system what are the assumptions of this scientific model what are the

assumptions of this spiritual teacher you have to get very very good at

sussing out assumptions and questioning them and of course, questioning all of

your assumptions and all of your ideas so you don't just question skeptically on the outside you also

question even more so on the inside question every teaching question

everything I say but of course is careful not to turn this into a weapon

where you're just questioning and you're putting the burden of understanding on others the burden of proving things on

others you need to question in a way where you still assume the burden and

responsibility of finding the truth for yourself the next core principle is care

about philosophical and metaphysical matters most people do not care about

these because they think that there's no practical application there it's just that philosophical and metaphysical

matters are more abstract and therefore it takes more effort and more study to

find the applications there are very practical applications but it takes a

little bit more work if you fail to

follow this principle it's going to happen that you're going to get lost in the transactional pragmatic nature of

mundane everyday life of business of doing chores and you're going to get so

lost in that and there's no soul or spirit to be found there there's nothing deep or profound to be found in

doing business just earning money just being transactional in your relationships

the depth in life is found in having philosophical and metaphysical matters

questioned and resolved that's where the juicy and powerful work lies so

you need to care about that you need to cultivate a certain curiosity a philosophical metaphysical curiosity

which means that you're not just chasing practical self-help advice like how to

get laid how to earn a million dollars how to cure my depression all of that it's fine

to a certain degree but you need to go away beyond that something deeper and you'll notice that that's one of the

things that differentiate update work from a lot of the other self-help material that's out there is that most

of it tends to be just very very strictly transactional and pragmatic about having how to get you a

particular specific result and while that's sort of appealing on the

surface it's hollow on the inside it doesn't go deep enough into addressing

your root issues in life because most of your surface-level issues stem from your

deeper existential metaphysical problems that you're not even aware of yet the

The next core principle is genuine intent for truth at whatever cost you need to genuinely care about the truth with a

capital T as one of your highest priorities and values no matter what the

cost is to get at this truth it doesn't matter if you need to move to a

different city break up with all of your friends pay tens of thousands of dollars

work overtime you know whatever you got to do if that's what's required to get

at the truth then that's what's required and you're going to accept that cost

because you have a genuine intent and desire and curiosity for the ultimate truth without this

what's going to happen is that you're going to keep falling into falsehood and delusion

you see because if you're not willing to

accept the costs that come with seeking the ultimate truth you're going to get

sucked into the lesser things in life you're going to pursue money and sex and

comfort and luxury and these sorts of things and all of that is best pursued

with falsehood see and you're going to end up deluding yourself very deeply in life

you're not going to understand what life is at the highest level because you never made it a genuine intent your

priorities instead were chasing material stuff which has nothing to do with truth

and often is aligned with falsehood oftentimes the easiest way to

Making money is through falsehood not through the truth the easiest way to attract

a sexual partner and oftentimes us through falsehood not through the truth the

The next core principle is you need to have a genuine intent to understand every point of view one thing you notice about

life is that there are so many different kinds of points of view people have all kinds of points of view different groups

of people, different cultures and nations and ethnicities have all sorts of different points of view and usually

what the average person does is they just stay in their point of view and then they criticize and judge the

other points of view without genuinely caring to look at the world from the perspective of all those other people

and you need to do the opposite of that you need to get very curious and good at

jumping into other people's shoes and looking at the world from their perspective and that's because you

recognize that the world is nothing but different points of view there's no such thing as a

understanding of the world without a point of view and your point of view is not the most important or the best

you recognize that so when you recognize that you understand that hey I can learn a lot from looking at the world from

many points of view and that's one of the things that you become passionate about is exploring different points of

View the next core principle is integral thinking you need to think integrally

and what that boils down to is the realization that every point of view

or perspective contains some kernel of truth no matter what it is even some of

the most atrocious perspectives are Nazism radical Islamic terrorism and others

that you would think to have no redeeming qualities you can find a kernel of truth even in those points of view and less

radical ones especially and so this is where open-mindedness comes in right you

need to be able to integrate all these different points of view would and bring them all together and to see okay what's

going on here what's sort of the meta-perspective the meta point of view when we combine all these other points

of view what does that tell us about life what does that tell me about myself what does that tell us about humanity

what does it tell us about society and so forth and from that you get so much more than just sticking to your own

points of view and defending your points of view is the opposite of ideology and dogma because

what ideology and dog would try to do is they try to limit your point of view and defend a rigid perspective on the world

so it's the opposite of integral the opposite of holistic and therefore

people with this limited perspective they understand so much less of life than they otherwise could

and so just I want you to keep this core principle in mind that every point of

a view contains some truth and it's your job to discover what that is it's not

the responsibility of the other person to tell you or convince you of that kernel of truth for example

it's not the job of a Nazi or a radical terrorist to convince you of their truth

it's your job to go study them and discover what is the truth that they are

so passionate about what is that and

very important just because you're doing this does not mean that you have to become a Nazi of course or a

terrorist of course, not you're exploring points of view you're going to be exploring

hundreds of points of you throughout your whole life that doesn't mean that you have to get married to any one point of view integral thinking is the

recognition that every point of view is partial never the ultimate truth always

partial so that's why we're exploring so many of them is precisely because it's

just a little piece think of every point of view as like a 1% perspective on

reality so 1% is not a lot so you know we need to explore hundreds of them for all those individual ones to add up to

something substantial in the next core principle is that everything basically

boils down to the inner game the quality of your life boils down to your psychology

this means that all problems and all suffering are self-created and self

inflicted and this is very difficult for many people to believe because it runs

counter to the idea that we are living in some sort of rigid fixed external

reality a material reality with unbreakable physical laws where it seems

like all the problems are out there in the world and all the suffering is created by the world outside of me and then I have nothing to do with it so

this is flipping that on its head upside down 180 degrees and realizing that

all of those external problems that I think exist out there all the suffering that's created by the world

all of that external material physical hard stuff that can't be changed

what is that but an aspect of my own inner game that's a

a belief that I have that's a paradigm that I'm in and that itself is not an outer thing but an inner thing this is

like the master key that unlocks all of your potential in life because it's only when you realize that the most important

a thing for determining the quality of your life and everything you do and solving all of your problems and suffering is mastering the internal

software of your mind when you realize that you have so much power now there's all this potential that opens up

now you're no longer a victim whereas in

In the other case there's very little you can do you get stuck very easily the

The next core principle is lifelong learning and self-education you need to become a

lifelong learner, you need to become passionate about learning and your education you've got to take full

responsibility for it and take ownership of it and be proactive about it don't

wait for a teacher to get you to do some homework assignment or to read a book don't wait for some program or some

training to teach you something go out there and proactively learn about life and the reason this principle is so

paramount is because when you're born you have no information about the world

you don't know how the world works or what it is or what you're doing here so you got to start to learn and this

process of learning will continue for the rest of your life it's not just school it's not just University all of that was just the beginning of

your entire educational career which only really takes off after you graduate

University so of course, this means reading lots of books you should expect

to read a hundred or 200 books over the next five or ten years this is going to be

essential it's through these books that you will learn various perspectives techniques trap mistakes

lessons principles you'll be exposed to new ideas new cultures history

things you haven't ever heard about anywhere else the quality and detail

of information that's presented in books, the quality book will be much greater

then what you see in a video or on television or some social media website and you need that you need that

solid high-quality reliable information to get you started these are like your

leads these books are the source of leads for you as to what you should be pursuing and what techniques can work

for you and so forth and these books help you to understand what your problems are and see part of the challenge

is that you have problems that you don't even understand you have yet takes a lot of reading just to realize that but also

don't stop at books you also need to take courses seminars workshops there

are many online courses that are available these days on almost any topic that you would want to learn about you

could find in-person seminars and workshops which are super important to go to there's a very big difference between watching a workshop or a seminar

online in video form and going to one live in-person you'll get 10 times more from going to the same

workshop or seminar live rather than watching it as the video do not be cheap

with your self-education, it's because you recognize that this principle is so important in lifelong learning that you are

willing to invest in your learning you're willing to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for

courses seminars workshops you're willing to invest 500 to a thousand dollars every year in buying a bunch of

new books and an additional point about

lifelong learning we're still talking about just this one principle of lifelong learning you need to develop

a system for taking notes and for organizing all of this stuff that you're going to be researching and learning

because you're going to have various techniques and ideas and principles that

you're learning vocabulary words all of this and you're goanna have to compile it

together in some way a system if you want an idea for how to do that check out my episode about how to keep a

the commonplace book that's my system that I use the next

a core principle is observation is one of the keys to life

the essence of learning is observation how do you learn anything by observing

it for a long period very patiently very methodically over and

over and over again the power of observation is enormous way more than

anyone would ever imagine which is why you can spend years and decades doing

very careful and painstaking observation is the solution to the

the problem of ideology and dogma and various kinds of belief systems that you get trapped in observation is the

an antidote to being lost inside your mind what you need to do is to observe

and that's why science to the extent that science is successful and has some

good benefits for society is because science focuses on observation but now

you need to take that on as a principle for yourself it's not enough to have science observed for you and then to

report the results to you need to become a keen observer of life and of

reality observe everything observe people observe animals observe nature observe trees observe your behaviors

observe your thinking process observe your motivations your fears

observe your problems and neuroses observe when you suffer observe when you're in pain observe when you're happy

observe what makes you motivated observe what makes you depressed carefully observe all of that and through this

the process you will learn about yourself you will learn about the world you will learn about mankind you will learn about business anything you observe

you will make finer-grained distinctions and you will learn how that thing works so observation is related of

course to our earlier principle of direct experience as King

observation goes hand-in-hand with direct experience and the opposite of that is believing what other people tell

you so to be able to embody the

things that I teach with actualize or you need to do an enormous amount of observation years of observation on

everything that I talk about so the things I talked about in the episode then you got to go and observe

it in your own life and see that oh yes this is exactly how it works or maybe you'll realize no it's not quite how Leo

said it works maybe he was only half right but the other half I have observed

that it works differently what he said to see and that could happen because you know what my observation is not perfect

by any means there's so much to observe about so many different facets

of reality that it's hard to observe a hundred percent of all of it so you're

bound to if you're goanna be seriously observing observe some things about the things I talked about that I was not

able to observe and it's through observation that insights come the next

a closely related principle is to plan to meditate for one hour every day for the

rest of your life do you have a

meditation practice yet why not how many times have I told you that meditation is

one of the most important things you can do for your personal development it's a cornerstone it you need to

install this habit don't start with an hour start with 10 20 minutes whatever you can but eventually, you got to build

up and you should already have the expectations in place that you're gonna be meditating for one hour every day for the rest of your life this is not

negotiable you're just gonna do it and you're gonna enjoy it it'll take you a while before you start to enjoy it but you should

already be envisioning that you're going to be enjoying it now why meditation well because meditation is just

observation when you're meditating you're just sitting there and you're observing the present moment and again

that ties us back to the earlier principle of direct experiences King what is meditation it's just

your direct experience of whatever is happening in the present moment that's all that it is and you're just observing

and you're observing the function of your mind various body sensations and emotions that you're having and it's

only through this observation process through meditation that you're going to be able to understand yourself and how

your body and mind work through years of careful and painstaking observation and

this is why most spiritual teachings

cannot be directly related to people and why you can't sell spiritual advancement

and you can't sell psychological maturity and you can't sell wisdom

you can't sell these things to people because the only way they can get those things is by doing the observational

work that's required to have those insights and understandings to have that

the base of experience you see it's like no amount of money could you give me to be

able to make you into like a master piano player the only way you can become

a master piano player is by going through all the direct experience and practice and observation that a master

the piano player has that makes him a master

and so now apply this dough to your body and your mind in your life no amount of

listening to me or paying me any amount of money will get you the experience the observational experience that you need

to understand the functioning of your mind and body is absolutely

critical this is why spiritual growth is

so difficult because most people just don't do the observation work it takes a

lot of time and energy and it's difficult and it's boring and sometimes

it's painful and you suffer through it and sometimes you observe things which

freak you out you observe things about reality that run counter to all your ideologies and beliefs and all the

the programming you got when you were younger and that freaks you out and then when you become good at meditation

that enables you to access mystical States higher states of consciousness non-ordinary states of consciousness

which is where all the really powerful gains lie and which is absolutely

essential for developing a good life but it takes years to get there years of

practice to get there for most people the next core principle is that ego is

the root of all human problems and suffering and ego is just that sense of

your ego is the sense that you were born as that human being right there and that you will die one day that your identity

with that biological body in mind that you have and your personal story about the fact that you were born you went to

school and you had all these problems and now here you are sitting there as this material creature that's

ego and from that stem all human problems and suffering both individual and collective this is a super powerful

the principle this one principle explains all of yourself and all of

mankind and there's so much to be said about this and I have said quite a lot about it throughout many episodes in the

past and basically every episode I talk about touches upon this principle in one form or another the next principle which

is closely related is self-deception is the biggest thing you

need to be worried about in life how your mind lies to you and tricks you

and deceives you the ego-mind corrupts

everything that it comes in contact with and even more so than you lie to others

and that you deceive others you deceive yourself and I have a whole three-part

episode series called self-deception where I list many self-deception mechanisms that I've been

studying over the last five or ten years it's how your mind trips you

need to get very very very good at seeing your self-deceptions not so

much the stuff deceptions of others but of yourself because you see if we're

trying to get to the truth if we're trying to understand reality at a big picture level that means that we

have to contend with the biggest obstacle which is self-deception because self-deception leads to delusion into

falsehood city so that your greatest obstacle is your mind and of course

this connects with the earlier principle of the inner game is the most important thing for solving all of your problems

because all of your problems stem from various kinds of self-deceptions that are running inside of

your mind which you aren't conscious of yet the next closely-related principle

is the self-bias you need to recognize and be able to see within yourself your own

selfishness and your own self biases you need to see how your ego mind or the self lowercase s self distorts

everything that it perceives because the whole purpose of the self is to survive

and therefore you're always going to be looking and interacting with situations and manipulating situations in such a

the way that it's gonna serve yourself and therefore your perceptual system is self

biased filled with conflicts of interest and double standards so a very simple

An example of self-bias is that you know if if I'm a criminal and like I robbed a

the grocery store I can't be allowed to be my judge and jury at the trial

because I would have a self-bias of setting myself free I would create all

sorts of justifications and excuses for why I didn't commit the crime scene which is why judges have to recuse

themselves if they have any kind of mature real connection with the case that they're trying because otherwise self

bias is gonna creep in there but of course, this is just one little tip of the iceberg of how self-bias works these are some gross examples there are very

subtle examples of the house of bias work all of your ideologies and beliefs and everything you perceive

out there is always biased by your own needs your ego needs your survival needs so

your relationships are self-biased your business is self-biased your attitudes are politically ourself biased and

so on and so forth and all of this is preventing you from being able to access

the truth which you need to live the good life so you need to unwire all of

those self biases or at the very least become very conscious of them the next core principle is that all fear all

judgment all evil all anger and all suffering are delusion and falsehood

this is huge this is a huge principle that will save you so much suffering

all fear judgment evil anger and suffering is a delusion that means anytime

you're experiencing those and of course, you don't enjoy experiencing those and you want a way to not experience those

anymore well you start to have to become more conscious and realize just how much of all of that is falsehood and it stems

from falsehood so the reason that we want to pursue truth so much aside from the fact that we're just genuinely

curious about it but it's also because if we do discover the truth then we will

realize that fear judgment evil anger and suffering have all been false and

that's precisely what we need to live the good life you can't live the good

life while you're in fear while you're judging all the time while you see evil out there in the world while you're

angry and while you're suffering by definition that's the bad life so the bad life goes with falsehood and the

good life goes with truth another closely

the related principle here is do not demonize anyone all demonization is

delusion as well anytime you think somebody out there is evil you're wrong

this is one of the self-deception mechanisms of the mind is to try to

demonize others or groups of people or entities or organizations somewhat of a

a related principle is that reality is perfect there is nothing at all wrong

In reality if you think that something is wrong in the world it's because of

your inner game and how you're looking at it not because it is wrong

or it is bad or it is evil reality is perfect but

you can only appreciate that and it will only start sounding like something real and not just rule wishful

thinking at enormously high levels of consciousness so it'll take you years and perhaps decades to have enough

mystical experiences to ultimately realize that reality is perfect until then well you're sort of just got to

take my word for it but this is a powerful principle because you can use it to change and grow yourself so any

time in your life that you're finding something that is bothering you or annoying you and you think it should be otherwise and that this is wrong and

that person is doing something wrong you can always remind yourself to wait a minute but I know in the back of my mind that

reality is perfect maybe I haven't had the mystical experience yet to experience that as Liam says but I but

I can Intuit something about that and so maybe maybe there's something

wrong with me the way that I'm looking at this situation the way I'm looking at this person how am I creating the

imperfection out of the perfection that's already there it's a powerful principle that you can use to change

your feelings about things now the next four principles that I'm going

to give you are very important ones and there are going to be four different ways of looking at the purpose of life

what is the purpose of life so the purpose of life there's a lot we

could say about this and I've said stuff in the past about it but here are four different purposes of life these are very overarching big-picture

purposes which help to orient you as to what you should be doing in your life so the first purpose of life is to raise

your consciousness that should be something that you're concerned with

every single day of your life from now on the second purpose of life is to

raise your capacity to love to embrace the full spectrum of experience not just

the good experiences and the sweet and pleasant ones but everything raised your capacity to love everything and everyone

the third purpose of life is to take in the beauty of life have you noticed how

beautiful it all is but of course there's also a spectrum of beauty and

it's very easy to see the beauty when you go to a museum and you look at a fine Picasso painting or you go to some

national park like Yosemite and you look at the beautiful mountains and trees and the sunset and that's beautiful

that's the kind of beauty that's sort of easy to see but can you see the beauty of everyday life of the most mundane

things can you see the beauty of your body of your hands can you see the beauty on the wall can you see the

the beauty of that pencil of that lamp of the carpet of this room the beauty of society the beauty of mankind the beauty

of even the ugly things that is

if you think about it the essence of a good life to live the greatest life possible is just none other than

to see Beauty everywhere all the time and to be conscious of that but you have to train yourself because Society has

trained you to be judgmental in to pick and choose and to not like the ugly stuff and to only like a like 1% of the

full spectrum of all this stuff that there is to love that requires surrendering your ego see the ego

doesn't want to love and see the beauty of everything it wants to cherry-pick and so your job is to surrender that

more and more and more and to take in more of the beauty all the time so that you don't have a day where you go by in your life or

you're just going through the motions going to work just punching the clock earning some money just doing

some business just taking care of the kids cooking a meal but you're disconnected from the beauty of it all

and that's what very careful observation

and meditation will ultimately teach you is they will teach you the beauty of the most simple things just like looking at

your hands and seeing the enormous beauty in the design of your hands and how they function you know you can sit

there for hours marveling at this but only after enormous training that

doesn't come to you from a diet of playing video games and watching Netflix for your whole life yeah you're not

going to be able to do that it'll take years to untrain yourself from that

Netflix video game diet to be able to see the beauty of very simple things you

know the average person when they're walking on the sidewalk and they see some dog poo they can't see the beauty

in that and you need to train yourself to see the beauty in that and whatever

it takes that you need to surrender to see the beauty in that's your work

that's one of your highest purposes in life you know I was driving yesterday

late at night like I like to do I Drive around Las Vegas late at night just

looking the at the lights and just contemplating and meditating while I

Drive I love to meditate while I Drive the most so I Drive I do this whole loop around Las Vegas it takes

about an hour and a half, it's probably like 80 miles or so I Drive around the

the entire city late at night and I was driving and there was like some part on the road where I usually drive where

there was like construction going on and I got annoyed by that I'm thinking like oh I got this peaceful Drive and I have

misunderstood with many traps uh this is also the same as talking about the absolute so you can see that there's a

problem talking about or communicating about it because it's the absolute but I have episodes I have a two-part

series called what's it called it's called um understanding absolute

infinity part one and two go check that out that explains a lot of what infinity

means and how reality could be infinite and what God is and I'll have future episodes about what God is explaining

that the next very important principle is that you are God so God is not

something separate from you you are God not in the egotistical sense that you are a God and you can do

anything you want in the world and you can be an [ __ ] and be arrogant not that way I mean you

created yourself you created the entire universe you are the entire universe this is a very advanced mystical insight

that you will only get from years and years of meditation and spiritual

practice but you can get there and you must realize that you are God because only then will you

take full responsibility for your life and only then will you understand how profound life is and what existence

is closely related follow-up principle to this is that God is the devil there

is absolutely no difference between God and the devil they are the same thing because again what non-duality tells us

is that every duality including the duality between god and devil is

ultimately gonna collapse into a unity so God and the devil must collapse into

a unity which tells you you know what's the value of knowing that God is nil well the value of it is that you

stopped seeing evil and being bothered by an evil so much because you realize that all the evil you see out there there's a

higher intelligence behind it exists for a reason it's part of infinity it's

part of all the stuff that you need to love in to embrace and also calling it the devil the reason understanding the

the devil is so important by the way I have a whole episode about what is the devil really good episode go check that one out I think it's one of my best ones

they will change your whole understanding of this duality that you know you need to understand

selfishness you need to understand where evil comes from you need to understand

why reality is so deceptive you need to

understand Maya in other words and you need to understand that this is part of God God is the one to self-deceptive

[ __ ] and in fact, that's how reality comes into existence is through various forms of deception and that's

why do we say it's all one mind it's all a dream and so one aspect of this dream is

that it's very hypnotic and it's very self-deceptive and it's very twisted and it can be very neurotic

and pathological at times that's all part of the entire whole that's not

something to cut out and to ignore that's something to understand into a brace otherwise you will be

yourself pathological by denying those aspects of reality another very

the important principle is that all identity is relative and fluid so literally, there is no identity within reality other than

oneness so any limited identities that you create like you as a body you as a

the biological organism you as somebody who was born to certain parents or maybe you

identify with your car or you identify with your house you're dead or how is your job all of these identities that you have they're all relative they're all

constructions of your mind they're not true and they're fluid and they can change and in fact, they have

been changing for all of your life and

that's very very significant to understand and any identity that other people take out there whether they're

individuals or entire cultural identities or political parties take identities companies created and these

all of these identities that are being created this is all part of the ego the ego-mind individual ego mine collective ego

mind and this is all part of how God and the devil work through creating these

identities it's why you feel that you're a living creature but

all these identities are rather arbitrary and they're are

malleable they're changeable and this is uh this is very good news because it means you can change what you identify

which means you can actually disidentify with your physical body and also your mind and identify yourself

with the ultimate with the absolute which ends up being the trick for

overcoming death and attaining immortality as preposterous as that

sounds it is nevertheless possible and it is true the next core principle is at

99.999% of people are deluded and asleep and they don't know about any of the

things that I am explaining here today and that are extremely important to

understand because otherwise what's gonna happen is that you're gonna get lost in the delusions and a sleepness of

all the other people who are surrounding you it's precise because all the other people are so asleep that you can't look

to them, for advice or guidance because you look over here you look over

there you see people doing stupid stuff you see people not doing this work and then you think oh well that means I

should be doing what they're doing I'm weird for not doing what they're doing but actually no they're the weird ones there to dilute it once so keep that in

mind this is why you won't get a bunch of confirmation from science and from

medical community from other traditional sources about the things that I talk about because they're not there yet

which leads us to the next closely related principle which is that society

is still in the dark ages yes we're the 21st century but stop thinking of the

21st century as being some kind of like highly advanced society no we are

still adolescents as a species we are

very very immature very unconscious very emotionally stunted very repressed very neurotic

very pathological very dysfunctional as a species and our understanding of

reality and consciousness and how to live the good life is very crude akin to

the kind of medical knowledge that existed in the dark ages or they would use leeches and other sorts of crude

techniques to cure people they ended up killing many people rather than curing them that's the state

of current society's understanding of spirituality psychology philosophy

science and many other things so do not get seduced by this facade that's

directed by the society where we tend to think that all well we've already gone through the dark ages and now we're out

of the dark ages now we're very technologically advanced than we have planes and cars and phones and all of these computers and stuff and because of

this we know everything that's just a facade don't get tricked by it and the

the reason it's important to realize that we're in the dark ages is that again that explains to you why you're not getting all this confirmation from your

society's because you're assuming your society is far more advanced than it is to see so don't expect

society to just give you these answers while you're on social media or watching cable TV the kind of advertisements

you're getting there has nothing to do with how to live a good life it's all the opposite again this is

one of the counterintuitive elements of life is that the things that you're

taught mostly in school and through the media and in the culture or precisely those things which lead to living a

mediocre miserable life which of course explains why everyone or most people are

living such a mediocre miserable life

the next core principle is development and Awakening not either or both of you

want to awaken from the dream that you're in but also you need to learn how

to mass star living in the dream and develop yourself within the dream, these are sort

of like two core avenues of growth that

you're working towards in your life you're developing yourself and then you're also awakening from the dream if

you only develop yourself but if you don't awaken you will get lost in the dream and you will suffer if you only awaken

but if you don't develop then you're not gonna have any mastery or excellence in living in the dream and so you might be

awake and that's great but then your development is stunted in certain ways and that's also not you living up to

your full potentials and getting the most juice out of life you want both and

you're gonna need a certain amount of development before you can even think about possibly awakening to really

seriously awake and you already need to be very developed in most cases it's very rare that someone just awakens

while they're completely undeveloped that's gonna be hard for you to accomplish a few rare people one in a

hundred million maybe could do that but I wouldn't count on that the next core

the principle is figuring out who you are and what you want out of life this is super

important and it's not as easy as it

sounds like you're not just gonna sit down for ten minutes and in ten minutes figure out who you are and what you want

in life, this is something you have to work on thinking about contemplate in journal

about talking with coaches about talking with therapists for four years for

decades you're gonna keep honing and honing and honing and refining your understanding of who you are and what

you want from life you need as much clarity as possible about what you want from life important this

allows you to make decisions and allows you to channel your energy and your

focus on those things that you want if you're not clear about what you want if you're wishy-washy vague and

ambiguous you're gonna get nothing that's the default thing that you get is nothing and mediocrity you're not just

gonna randomly get a bunch of good stuff and a good life by not knowing what you want you to be very clear and decisive about what

do you want to awaken then be [ __ ] clear about it I want to awaken

do you want to have a house what kind of house where should it be located how

much should it cost be clear that you want to have a girlfriend or a

spouse what kind do you want where are you gonna find them how is it gonna work do you want them if

to be very clear about all these things and your career and everything

which leads to the next core principle which is authenticity you need to be

striving every day to be more and more authentic in your life it's only when you're being authentic that you're truly

satisfied and happy and a lot of society programs you with is reasons and

incentives for being inauthentic you see throughout school and university and

when you were dating people and when you were at work trying to get a job and with your family and all this you were

you were taught to be inauthentic as a survival strategy such that you don't

even know what it means to be authentic how that feels you're so out of touch with who you are and what you

want and how you should all your body how you should behave how you should speak how you should smile like

all of this is so fake for many people so you need to get more and more in

touch with your authenticity strip away all the layers of social conditioning

that is preventing you from being authentic and all the fears that you have and worries that are preventing you

such that you're able to express your deepest being your deepest values need to be able to express that effortlessly

to have a good life and your career needs to be authentic your speech needs

to be authentic your eye contact needs to be authentic yeah what else do you know

your relationships with your family and your spouses and your girlfriends

and boyfriends that need to be off but for you to be able to do that to

achieve that you first need to discover who you are and what you want very clearly and also you need to

uncover the fears and incentives which

are keeping you being inauthentic see like what are you really afraid of what

are you gonna lose are you gonna get rejected are you gonna be lonely and miserable or are you gonna be judged the

The next core principle is that you need to develop a life purpose I have a cold course about that 25 hours long course

on how to develop a life purpose is so important life purpose is the sense of

what you're doing in your life again it's all about clarity it's about finding the right alignment between your

values and what you really want and you're career and merging those and then working on that and

building something of lasting value there that you can offer to the world so

check out my course if you're interested in that the next core principle is to take 100% responsibility for your life and

don't blame anyone observe yourself blaming people and stop doing it train

yourself to stop doing it and take full responsibility if you don't take full responsibility anything less of a

hundred percent that means you're gonna be a victim in those areas that you don't take responsibility for which means

you're gonna feel stuck and you're gonna feel miserable and depressed and bitter and annoyed and frustrated and ask the

definition of not a good life by taking responsibility you assume the burden of

solving every problem that comes your way and that makes you very resourceful

and creative because now you've committed to solving all these problems studying them doing self

experimentation trying different techniques turning to different sources reading books and videos and courses and all of this to solve your problems see

and it's only through this kind of attitude that you actually will end up solving your problems whereas most people just come up with

excuses and blame others or why the problems can't be fixed it's a

lot better to be able to fix a problem than to suffer through it for the rest of your life and it gives you a sense of

power and strength and self-esteem when you do that when you become a victim you

lose self-esteem and you sort of feel bad about yourself and you feel like you're weak and you're not able to handle life and then you  unplug from

the life you become alienated and you just kind of like going through the motions robotically and that's when you lose touch with that one of those core of for

purposes of life which are feeling alive you no longer feel alive because you're not taking challenges head-on

because you've instead opted to be a victim the next core principle is being a

leader lead yourself lead others around you don't wait for other people to inspire

you to motivate you to tell you what to do you do that yourself be proactive be

decisive take risks this also connects

with that principle of living a life and

feeling alive this is how you feel alive as a leader being proactive being

decisive taking some risks which leads to the next core principle which is to be a

creator tap into the joy of creativity

you have the power to be a creator and to create all sorts of beautiful things

art music film writing novels magazines websites you know entire philosophical

systems and schools and religions and spiritual groups like there are cars you

could engineer airplanes new technologies like there's so much stuff you can create pick something that you want to be a creator in and then do that

and enjoy that you do it because it's enjoyable because as god you're

participating in the creative process of all creation

and as a corollary here provide massive

value to mankind as the creator that's

something you should strive for how do I provide lots of value to mankind how to do

I contribute to society and improve the world that's part of life's purpose that's

very important because if you are lacking this component in your life you're gonna feel empty and also what's

gonna happen is that other people will come and seduce you with various kinds of low consciousness ideologies to get

you to fill that void of a lack of purpose in your life right so then what happens is that people become Nazis or

they become terrorists or they become some like right-wing fringe guy

who posts on some forum some like racist stuff like this kind of stuff right why do people get sucked into these kinds of

low consciousness ideologies it's precise because they lack a legitimate life purpose they are not taught how to

be powerful creators they are not able to provide massive value to the world so what they do instead is focus their

the energy on demonizing judging doing violence and other sorts of schemes and manipulation tactics to get their fill

of life purpose, it's sort of like if you don't have a quality person to have sex

with than the way you're gonna it's not like you're never gonna have the sex you will have sex it's just it's gonna it's

gonna be probably in very low-quality forms like jerking off into a plastic

cup see so it's the same sort of thing

with life purpose, if you neglect life purpose you're gonna pick up all sorts of dysfunctional life purposes

unconsciously that's like the default position the next core principle is that

reason cannot be trusted this throws a

a lot of people for a loop and this is very counterintuitive but reason and rationality cannot be trusted

all the highest insights and truths are trans-rational, not irrational not less than rational

but trans meaning beyond rational think

of it this way every single criminal terrorist murder rapist thief religious

fanatic con artists and wrongheaded

the scientist who did bad science every single political party every single

tyrant and dictator what do all these people have in common reason you might

think no leo these people are all unreasonable no every single one of these people has very good reasons for

why they do what they do and why what they do is exactly right and good and why they should continue doing it so how

can you trust reason by definition reason always feels reasonable to the

one whose reasoning this is what I mean by the self-deception and by self-bias

see yourself biased to your chains of reasoning and what you don't

understand is that reason is not a vehicle towards truth it was never

intended for that reason is concoctions by your mind by your lawyerly mind

mostly your left hemisphere for most people to justify your it going

addenda that's the real function of the reason so reason just like a good lawyer

will be able to craft a case and argument for any position any egoic

agenda that you have so reason cannot be trusted any time that you hear a speaker

who is making appeals to reason and is arguing and saying and kind of framing

the situation such a way that all those people are unreasonable but I'm the reasonable one and it's through reason that we get to the truth anytime you

hear that anytime you see a person trying to be extra reasonable that's exactly the

same as looking at a person who's trying to be extra moral you become immediately suspicious that the person who's

preaching morality and how good he is and how good everyone can be but how

they're all evil and how they should be as good as him and that morality is gonna solve everything you should be immediately suspicious and

you should expect that moralizing people have skeletons in their closet and they're not moral well the same

the thing with reason with these people who doubt reason as a sort of ideology or a solution to everything if only we were

all a more reasonable than mankind would get along be very suspicious of that the

The next core principle is to embrace paradox confusion and not knowing again

this is one of the very counterintuitive things most people think of paradox confusion and not knowing as bad things

as the opposite of personal development and the opposite of a good life but no

it's just the opposite the closer you get to the good life the more you will

embrace paradox confusion and not knowing and you will get comfortable with these things it's the person who

thinks he's figured everything out perfectly in this little model and put it all into a little model and he thinks

that model is perfect it's consistent and it's is it's airtight and super logical it's that

the person who's deluded you can't do that with reality because reality is infinite

and all your little models and schemes are all finite see my episode about doodles and completeness theorem if you

want to understand why that's impossible Kurt's stand proved that truth

is larger than proof area counterintuitive discovery the

a core principle is an emotional mastery you should be very interested in mastering your emotions you should be very

interested in emotions period and how they work and spend a lot of your time observing emotions now here's a mistake

that people make about emotional mastery it's when I say emotional mastery they think oh yeah that sounds good I'll just

be hyper-rational I'll be this unemotional detached person who's above

it is all that's not emotional mastery that's the suppression or repression of emotions to develop the emotional mastery to

feel deeper into your emotions and this is a lot of the type of concern that women have women can object to some of

my teachings they might say Leo but you're teaching us how to be unemotional and robotic and I want to be

more emotional know what I'm talking about is how to be more emotional mastery does not mean that you

stop experiencing emotions it means you experience emotions deeper but you're more conscious of what they are

and that's what gets you mastery and control which should also be

distinguished from outbursts of negative emotions so somebody else listening here

might say Oh Leo so what you're saying here is to become an emotional master I have to let all my emotions out and be

fully authentic with my emotions means that if someone cuts me off in traffic I will open my window and scream expletives at that person because

I'm angry and now I  know I'm being authentic I'm expressing my anger and this is developing emotional mastery no

that's not emotional mastery that's a smokescreen from fully

feeling and observing your own emotions yelling at people outbursts of anger violence expressions of negative

emotions these are often just smoke screens from really self-reflecting and

and feeling your own emotions an angry person doesn't feel their

emotions they just act them out robotically

you want to read books about emotional mastery about how emotions work because emotions are so sneaky and so tricky and

you know speaking of reason and emotions these rationalists think that

the reason is superior to emotions but actually, it's the other way around

it's emotions that are dominating your reasoning process those people who are

hyper-rational they're not hyper-rational they're emotional

they're just not conscious of the emotions that are fueling their reason you see their reason the reason that

they're so attached to reasoning is emotional and it's because it's connected with their ego-mind which is

full of emotions are much more powerful in motivating you and affecting your behavior than any reasons that you

have reasons come after the fact reasons are rationalizations they're backward

rationalizations your left hemisphere confabulate s-- these reasons later justify whatever

you're doing emotionally whatever's driving you emotionally and

to live the good life you're not gonna be able to do that through reason you'd have to do that by becoming a very

observant of your emotions and it's by curing your emotions that then your reasoning process will also get purified

along with that, the next core principle is you must integrate the masculine and

the feminine no matter whether you're a guy or a girl and whether you lead more masculine or

more feminine there's a whole spectrum there and people lean in different directions and so forth as of course we're all aware at this point but what

you need to do whichever direction you lean in so let's say you're a man that leans masculine like most men and you're a woman that leans feminine okay so what

you need to do as a man is you need to go deeper into your masculinity and understand what it is but at the

same time you want to make sure you don't create a shadow out of the feminine so you're not doing it at the expense of the feminine you also need to

dive into your feminine side and explore that and master that and integrate that feminine shadow into you and you need to

become sort of a synthesis of both and you know vice-versa for the woman

this is very important for you to be able to then relate properly with the opposite sex otherwise you're gonna

become masculine but you're gonna have a feminine shadow or vice versa and that's gonna create all sorts of relationship

problems for you and also you're not gonna feel as good just being macho

masculine or girly feminine without integrating the other side so like what

we're trying to become is full well-rounded human beings now that doesn't mean that you need to be down

the middle 50/50 so you know if you're a masculine man I'm not saying that you need to be half masculine half feminine

you can still specialize and kind of be predominantly masculine but you also need to integrate the feminine aspects

into your psyche and make sure you don't hold any kind of grudges or judgments

about the opposite polarity the next core principle is nonmanipulation if

you do a lot of observation of your behaviors you will notice how much you manipulate all the time

the ego-mind that's sort of this whole role is to be constantly manipulating

everything you're manipulating your thoughts your face your body posture

your relationships and in your work and your career and all of this your

costly manipulating and so one of the things you need to do if you want to live a good life is let go of that

manipulation more and more and more and more the less manipulative you are as a person the better your life will be the

The next core principle is that everything is relative what this means is that

anything except the absolute ultimate truth of the capital T is

relative that means that it's only known to something else and I'll

have a whole episode in the future about relativity and how that contrasts with the absolute but briefly here all

conventional understanding and even conventional experience that you have it's always relative so

an elephant is big only relative to a

mouse it's small relative to the entire earth and so on and so this is this goes

on and on and on and affects everything that you know everything you know is relative all perspectives are

relative your entire understanding of reality is relative to all truth claims unless they're absolute which is not

a claim at all it's something way beyond that all truth

claims in words all beliefs this is all relative all cultural norms all moral

standards it's all relative science is relative to what relative to

the human mind if the human mind has changed if the chemistry of the human mind has changed all science flies out the

window and all changes relative see what you see what you experience what you

know politics and government and business it's all relative its relative

to the particular circumstances in a context in which it's situated and if the context changes then the situation

changes your knowledge changes none of that is absolute there is no absolute external world physical world material

the world which leads us to the next principle which is context over facts most people

get very stuck on facts but they don't realize the importance of context is the background within the

fit which the facts are situated and I have a whole episode about context which

is called understanding recontextualization go check that one out it's a pretty profound episode with lots of examples that I won't go into

here the next core principle is to pull from hundreds of diverse sources this is

done so that you don't get stuck in any one perspective or paradigm this is critical as you're going

through life and you're doing this whole lifelong learning thing which is one of

your principles then you need to be gathering from a lot of diverse sources don't just read Western books read

Eastern books don't just read Hinduism read Christianity and read Greek philosophy and you know spread it

around diversify then fortify your portfolio of knowledge and information just like you would stock in a stock

the market for exactly that same reason because you want to avoid getting locked into some one thing someone terrible

the paradigm which is very limiting and what will happen if you study hundreds of

diverse perspectives and this is one of the core principles of actualized org is that I do this very seriously than the

the truth will get triangulated and cross-referenced from all these different sources and books you read you know you

read hundreds of books eventually, it all gets triangulated in it and then it emerges the sort of the big picture

emerges that would be impossible if you were only studying one particular school

or one tradition or one guru or you know

one discipline within a university you couldn't do that and it's only because

you're studying all these diverse sources that you learn about all the traps and you learn about the full diversity of this thing called human

life and human development and there's so much more there than you could have possibly gotten from any one school

teacher or teaching which of course applies to me you can't take me as your only source you need to include me as

part of hundreds of other sources that you study from the next principle is to satisfy your base needs so that you stop

craving this is very important I have a soda

that I release quite a bit ago called using Maslow's hierarchy of needs to

self actualize and what I talked about there is it's all about satisfying your

lower needs your basic needs for shelter and water and food and sex and this sorts of stuff and some friendships and

some self-esteem stuff like your career you got to handle that stuff so you're not craving it so that you can move

higher up the pyramid to this higher metaphysical existential stuff that we talked about this is so important

which leads to the next closely related principle of master your basic survival and livelihood this is utterly important

if you don't do this it's as though you were a lion on the savanna and you

didn't know how to hunt a lot of people these days especially young folks I see

this very often teenagers people in their early 20s you know they grew up in a cushy suburb somewhere in the United States or maybe

in Europe and their parents coddled them and so these kids just spent their

whole childhood playing video games and watching movies and just like [ __ ] around in school with their friends and

stuff smoking weed and this kind of stuff and then by the time they're 20 and maybe they finish even university

they get out into the real world and they have no idea about how to survive or make a livelihood and then

they start thinking about some of the high lofty things I talked about like consciousness and psychedelics and

enlightenment and this but it's like what enlightenment can there be when you don't even know how to hunt learn how to

hunt the modern-day equivalent for human beings of what a lion does on a savanna

is business learn how

business works learn how money works this is essential without

this you're gonna be crippled you need to be able to just handle the basic

basic things like paying your rent being

able to afford food if you can't do these things forget about enlightenment for now focus on handling that and of

a course that's all a function of your inner game so it's not because the economy is bad that you struggle with

survival and livelihood it's because your parents and your schooling and your childhood they didn't program you with

those survive the inner game survival skills that you need to earn a living in

the Savannah is the modern-day Savannah that humans live in and grow up in which

are cities and suburbs see a lion needs a certain set of skills to be able to

survive in Savannah and a human in the 21st century need a certain kind of skills in a certain kind of inner game in psychology to be able to

make a living and survive in a city or in a suburban environment that's super

important I spent at least probably 10

years of my life working on developing a way how to be independent and survive on my own

without depending on my parents or money from other places or anything like that so I can be self-sufficient and then

it's based on that foundation that then I could go and do the higher stuff that I do I couldn't do that otherwise like

if I was worried about how to pay my bills tomorrow I couldn't do this other work that I'm doing the higher stuff

because I would always be in this kind of cycle of fear not knowing what's next how to make ends meet this sort of stuff you got to figure that out if it takes you five or ten years that's the okay figure that out that's basically what you need to be spending

your teenage years and you're all of your twenties up through your 30s doing you

want to you want to solve that by the time you're 30 ideally if not sooner the

The next core principle is mastery you need to have something at least one thing in

your life that you are gonna plan to become a master in I don't care what it is there are millions of options you

could be a master at drawing painting music DJing weightlifting life coaching

writing programming whatever you got to pick one thing though and do it this

jack-of-all-trades thing where you're just dabbling in a bunch of [ __ ] that doesn't work you need one thing that

you're gonna master this is connected with your life purpose this is also connected with your thing that I just

said about survival and livelihood you know the lion is a master at chasing down and lopes master hunting this gives

you certain stability it also gives you enjoyment because your work

what you're gonna be doing most of your life the enjoyment that you get from that depends on how much of a master you

and it takes five or ten years to become a master in something so you got to pick one thing and do it so that you could

produce excellent work so that you could be a creator and you could be a massive value provider to society one of

the biggest thing I think young people are screwing up on these days Millennials and so forth is that they

they just don't pursue mastery they're not a master at anything they don't know how to do anything and therefore they can't provide value to

anyone and therefore you're stuck with some kind of waitressing job or working at McDonald's yeah that's what

happens when you're a master of nothing start by mastering one thing thing

that you enjoy and you must enjoy this thing that you're gonna be mastering because you're

gonna be putting so much time and effort into it so you better enjoy it a lot now this doesn't mean you can't have hobbies

I'm not saying that like right now if you're playing guitar just for fun and you're an amateur at it that doesn't

mean you have to become a master guitarist because hey maybe your field of mastery is programming so if you're a

master of programming sure you can go dabble in the guitar you can go dabble and

painting it doesn't matter cuz you're a master in programming you got at least that one thing but if you're not a master at anything and you're just

dabbling and trying a bunch of different stuff without selecting anything and being decisive and clear about it and

not being certain about what you want to master that's gonna come back to bite

you hard later in life and the older you get the harder it is to master things so start young but if you're old

still do it better late than never the next core principle is being aware of

distractions I have a whole episode by the way I do have an episode about mastery it's an older one you can go check it out it's called mastery I have

an episode about distractions it's called the egos favorite defense mechanism distraction go check that one

out where I list all the different distractions that the ego-mind comes up with to prevent you from doing this work

from creating the good life these distractions of course include stuff like TV pour and video games internet

social media various kinds of ideologies and family can be a distraction kids can

distraction chasing material success business money drugs all these can be distractions so you've got to be very

careful this is all part of the self-deception nation self-deceptive nature of the EO mind the next principle

are systems thinking you need to become a systems thinker and learn to think in terms

of systems learn to see systems at work everywhere and develop awareness for the

ecological interconnectedness of things I have a whole episode called intro to systems thinking which will do just that

introduce you to systems thinking and explain all of this stuff if you don't know what systems thinking is there are books you can read about it in my book

a list that's a pretty deep topic hmm people who aren't systems thinkers

aren't very good at solving bigger problems they tend to think of problems

in the world very simplistically in black and white ways and I think that every problem is just you know has one

the root cause or something like that we're usually in a system you have a lot of factors that are coming into play you

have various kinds of feedback loops that you need to think about systems tend to work in counterintuitive ways oftentimes you're trying to change a

system the thing you do to change the system ends up worsening the problem rather than improving it so it's

because of this that this is important this is gonna help you to make the contribution to the world that you

want to make because almost anything that you're gonna be interacting with in the world that's of any interest is gonna be a complex system of one form or

another especially if we're talking about large groups of people businesses

societies cultures those are all systems

another core principle is to be a good citizen and be conscious of your ecological footprint you are part of a

the larger whole you're like one ant in an ant colony and you need to become

conscious that you are an ant in an ant colony and that you're connected to a colony that your existence is not

something you do independently you do it as part of the entire collective that you're a part of and you need to seek to

educate yourself about how that works part of that is systems thinking because this colony is a system but also you

need to teach yourself about what impact are you having on the larger culture and the larger working of

this colony that you're in are you contributing to the lowering of its consciousness or the raising of its

consciousness are you contributing to the problems or are you helping solve the problems are you being a good

the citizen that requires a lot of education teaching yourself about politics and

governance and how collective ego works and how ecology works and your environmental impact even when you're

walking down the sidewalk eating icecream what are you gonna do with the rapper are you gonna throw it on the ground or

are you conscious of how you're contributing to that are you conscious of how when you're driving your car you're contributing to air pollution are

you conscious of how you know you are a citizen of the United States for

example contributes to the wars that the United States starts overseas are you conscious of your role in that

or are you just blind to that are you conscious of the kind of food that you eat and how that impacts the environment

and animals and other human beings are you conscious of the products that you buy and how that impacts third-world

countries where these products might be developed under sweatshop conditions right and you take responsibility for

that and you strive to be a good citizen otherwise what you get is you get a kind

of a crummy society that's unconscious, a kind of society that you don't want to live in another core principle is be

strategic I have a very popular episode called how to be a strategic [ __ ] it's one of my most

practical episodes that's why people like it I go into a lot of nuances there about how to be strategic but you need

to be able to be patient with your plans you need to lay out plans that have a long time horizon think 5 10 years down the

road plan stuff out in your life and be strategic about it so that you're moving towards the things that you want

and you need to have some short-term goals meeting from goals long-term goals etc you need to be able to go through

multiple stepping stones to reach some kind of goal a lot of people it's like they want something but then that's

something is over here and they're over here they don't see a path to there and they're not able to create the stepping stones to move their way up and

in fact, most of the biggest things in life that you want to acquire are gonna

require multiple stepping stones to inch your way towards them you're not gonna be able to just leap and get it in one

step the next core principle is that happiness is only possible with

enlightenment so if you're not enlightened don't kick yourself too much

not being happy it's not possible happiness comes with

enlightenment now that doesn't mean you can't improve your level of happiness, of course, you can and you should you should

work to increase your happiness as much as you can even though you won't be able to lock in your happiness without

the enlightenment you don't even know what true happiness is without enlightenment but also what this principle

demonstrates to use why Lightman is so important because what you ultimately want is happiness and the only way

you're gonna get it through enlightenment so don't put and light it off for too long

another related principle is that no material possessions will ever make you happy this is impossible this is like a

loss is exerting and reliable than

Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's equations of e equals mc-squared is this is more certain than that no

material possession will ever make you happy no matter what it is cars houses money yachts but not just that also the

stuff that you normally wouldn't consider a material like relationships family knowledge the acquisition of

knowledge travel you think travel is not material well I'm including all of that

under the label of material here none of that stuff will make you happy guaranteed impossible the sooner you can

accept that ah the much better your life will go if you haven't you

understood this principle you're gonna be chasing for many many years you're gonna waste decades of your life the

The next related core principle is being happy all by yourself train yourself to be happy all alone

just sitting doing nothing that doesn't mean you have to be a loner for your whole life you can socialize and have fun with

friends that's okay but if you can't be happy just sitting on your couch doing nothing you really can't be happy all

the other stuff is just temporary little boosts little shots of adrenaline and

excitement little drugs that are

distracting you from doing the inner work you got to do to just be happy sitting there by yourself on a couch for

an hour or two or a whole day or all week the next core principle is keeping

your life simple and Spartan don't over clutter your life not just with objects

but also with all kinds of social obligations and commitments family and a

bunch of kids and all this now that doesn't mean there's a problem with having kids and family of course you can have those things but just be mindful of the fact that any time your life sort of

frees up your ego-mind tends to want to fill it with just any kind of

distraction or activity what you want to do is you want to minimize your life and I have a whole video called lifestyle

minimalism check it that out minimize the life stitch that you have room

several hours every day to do self-improvement and to meditate and do spirituality maybe do some psychedelics

this sort of stuff so you can work on everything we're talking about here right everything we're talking about her the implementation of all these

principles require a lot of free time and work which most people waste on

various kinds of frivolous activities you know don't buy a house too big that you don't need because you're

gonna waste time cleaning that house maintaining that house doing all this stuff when buying a smaller house

instead, so that you waste less of that time doing that and it says spend more time working on yourself because

remember the really good stuff is the inner game-changing the inner game is really what's going to make you happy

and satisfied and get you all the other stuff that you want not having a big mansion-house the next core principle is

that without practice and exercises and techniques there will be no results

theory alone while important to know

what to do will not in itself produce many results like 95% of your results

will come from the practices and exercise and techniques not from the theory that doesn't mean the theory is

pointless the theory is very useful but you got to go beyond that and as far as techniques

go let me share with you the most powerful techniques that I have discovered very simple I'm not gonna hold it back from you psychedelics

meditation meditative yoga journaling

contemplation visualization and solo retreats are the most powerful techniques that I discovered in the last

five or ten years of doing this work for me now for you there might be other techniques but these are pretty solid

and consistent techniques these techniques have been proven by thousands and millions of people to produce some

of the biggest gains that you can get in your life so the biggest transformation

come from these techniques and notice that most of these techniques are inner techniques even psychedelics isn't it

seems like an outer technique but it's an inner technique it's an outer technique that triggers an inner

process and the final principle and a very important one do not turn

actualized unrig into an ideology actualize that work is not meant to be an ideology it's not meant to be

a philosophy or a system of any kind it's not meant to have any rigid principles or rules you're not supposed

to follow these sixty-five principles that I gave you like the ten commandments nothing like that because

that would violate principle number one which is ideology and dogma so I have to

be careful every time I speak that it doesn't turn into that and of course, I have to play my part but you have to

play your part because I can do everything in my power but then you could still turn what I say into an ideology or a dogma and in fact

that's what most people do so you have to be very careful not to turn to actualize that organ into another

religion see to be able to implement all

the stuff I talked about above you need to be very intelligent

about it and you need to be very thoughtful and mindful and you need to be very context-sensitive you see it's

not a formula that you just kind of like follow it's not a robotic thing that you do it it requires consciousness it

requires active participation every single day that you're implementing this stuff and also of course the reason

I say this is because updated work teachings have certain limitations it's still a perspective even though I cover

hundreds of perspectives that I compile them together it's still a perspective it's still coming from me it's less certain the limitations and biases that

I have and stuff that I got to work through and of course it has that which is why you got to be careful

and you got to look at other sources and not turn this into an ideology so those

are the 65 principles now of course I have left stuff out these are like the major principles of actualizing that work

there are hundreds of more minor principles which I've talked about in other episodes which would be too long

to include here but you know I've left has some important stuff like physical health fitness nutrition and other

things like that which are still important but as far as actual eyes that org goes be sixty-five principles I

think to encapsulate a lot of what I teach all right that's it I'm down here, please

click that like button for me and come check out the exercise that all right that's my website you'll be able to find my blog with various insights my book list

with lots of books the life purpose course and the forum where you can chat about all this stuff and finally I'll

just conclude by saying this last thing and this you might think of like

as the final core principle is that life is complex and challenging life is

extremely deep but also very broad there are many many many facets to it

so just because you understand someone or two facets don't get too cocky and think that you've got it all there's so

much here to explore it's gonna take you your entire lifetime to explore and you still will have much left over for

future lifetimes and life is challenging which means that you have to appreciate

that you know I went into a lot of depth here in this episode is it's

almost like a two-hour episode here and still, I've only kind of just glossed

over the surface of these principles, it will take you years to study and learn all these principles don't get

intimidated by that just realize that yes that's because life is so complex and it is challenging it's difficult to

learn all this stuff which is exactly why most people have a mediocre life because it takes a lot of work and

energy and time to do stuff to study all this stuff to verify for yourself that

it's true you know it's one thing to just listen to me and believe everything I say that in itself will take you a couple of hours here at least but that's

not enough to go and verify each of these principles for yourself to corroborate and cross-reference with

other sources to triangulate the truth to get other perspectives to see where I might be wrong in all of this and then

to implement all that in your life will take years and decades but hey that's why you're alive and that's why

you got 80 years to live you so that you can do this is this is the meat of life right here everything else that

you do is just a garnish this is the main course so try to structure your

life in such a way that you're focused

on the main course and not the garnishes of life and also this should alert you

to the fact that there are no easy answers see there's no one technique no one

magic pill no one method that will solve everything for you because life is just

too broad for that to work so you got to

be nuanced no black and white simplistic answers here that's why my episodes are so long because you know the kind of

stuff you could fit into a five ten minute episode just like what it's

not gonna make a dent in the real issues you have in your life it's only gonna be

rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and I want to help

you to get to the root of things to get to the ultimate peak experiences those

mystical experiences you know to have to it to handle all the bottom of the pyramid to get to the very top of Maslow's pyramid and to go even beyond

that's where yeah that's where life gets really good that's what I'm passionate about teaching and

experiencing for myself and then of course you take that wisdom and you bring it back down to the bottom pyramid

and you infuse the bottom with the top and then that's when your life becomes something special so we're gonna

continue talking about that more and more that's what all my episodes are geared toward hopefully now you have a good understanding of what actualize

that org is about and you can follow these principles to create a really

powerful life I hope you can see the value of what's being shared here do not

take it for granted this day today from this information from now on if you

make a commitment you can change the entire trajectory of the future of your life amazingly but it's not

enough just to make that commitment you're also gonna have to remember to work at it every single day from now on as well yes it's challenging but that's

why I eyes already exists is I keep releasing new videos to release more insights for you and more techniques

and also just to keep you motivated inspired and reminded that you've made

this commitment so stay tuned with me for more if for no other reason than just to have me remind you that this is

what you want because it's very easy to forget and to fall back asleep in with all your friends and then before

you know it ten-twenty years goes by and you've pissed it all away and you have nothing to show for it and you're more depressed and miserable and regretful

than ever

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