65 Core Principles Of Living The Good Life

0:03 [Music] in this episode 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 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

0:50 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 perspective my own experiences in life and my own style so in an important sense there's a sort of a stylistic component to any teacher that you're gonna be learning from any spiritual teaching any philosophical system any

1:37 political theory you know there's there's a sort of like a 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 absolutely 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

2:24 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 really be able to embody it and to have this principle functioning in your life and even just to 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 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

3:09 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 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

3:56 experience doing business all of my experience trying to figure out my own life dealing with my own neuroses and problems and sticking points 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 literally 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

4:42 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 working 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 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

5:27 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 what the most important principles for living a good life are and this is something that I really 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 but this one is so important maybe it does deserve to be number one is no ideology and no dogma of any kind

6:18 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 goes 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 mistake that almost everybody makes scientific people make this mistake atheists make this mistake skeptics make this mistake political people make this

7:03 mistake very intelligent people make this mistake it'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

7:49 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 freedom of your mind and so the problem with ideology and Dogma is that it it sort of anchors 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

8:35 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 actually 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 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 it would just be do 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

9:22 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 this 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 really going on at the highest

10:07 possible levels and are you concerned about that over all the technical details that's like one of my greatest strengths this big-picture thinking the technical details of of things I'm not really that good at that's actually 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 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

10:53 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 energy on that it doesn't matter and if you get a few technical details wrong here or there it doesn't really matter so the big picture like in this example with this episode is we're gonna we're gonna give you all these sixty-five principles

11:39 for 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 to creating a great life and notice that these principles they don't depend on technical knowledge we're talking about very broad ideas here the next core principle is that direct experience is king direct experience is king experience is really the only thing that exists and the only thing that is real right now your experience whatever

12:25 you're experiencing right now that's what's real that's what's actual 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 own mind feeds you your own 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

13:14 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 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 own mind the next core principle is self experimentation actualized org is all about self experimentation how do you discover what really works what is true

14:00 and which principles will lead to the good life by believing me by reading a book by listening to some PhD 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 principle really is a corollary of the idea that direct experience is king so it's because we realize that direct experiences is king that we also realize that we do a lot of self experimentation because it's only by going out and

14:48 experiencing different things trying different techniques that we will discover what really 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 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 to solving any problem is always gonna be one of okay let me experiment and troubleshoot this and try different

15:33 things until something works so you're gonna go maybe read some books on relationships maybe 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 and your approach is gonna be looking let me try this stuff out and see what's gonna what's gonna solve it and if you have money problems same thing you're gonna try various self

16:20 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 basically you solve all of your problems in life is 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 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

17:10 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 actually it's the opposite open-mindedness doesn't mean that you

17:57 are gonna 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 realise just how true and powerful they are which means that we need to remain open-minded

18:44 during that time otherwise if we're closed-minded then what's gonna happen is that we're gonna just gonna 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 gonna do all this but we're not actually gonna 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 exploration means you don't know what you're gonna find sometimes you'll find great stuff sometimes you'll

19:29 find ugly bad stuff the next core principle is that you do not judge things which 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 really that was just a self-deception and I didn't really 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

20:17 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

21:03 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 actually 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 question everything question everything there is no idea too sacred not to question in fact anything that is sacred

21:49 needs to be questioned even more so doubly so triply so question especially the most obvious stuff the stuff that people with think that you're crazy or insane to question question that question the world even exists question whether you even exist question everything the more fundamental your questioning 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

22:37 your own assumptions and all of your own 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 be 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

23:22 matters most people do not care about these because they think that there's no practical application there is 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 gonna happen that you're gonna get lost in the transactional pragmatic nature of mundane everyday life of business of doing chores and you're gonna get so lost in that and there's really no soul

24:08 or spirit to be found there there's nothing deep or profound to be found in just 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 really 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

24:54 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 differentiates actualizado 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 have how to get you a particular specific result and while that 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 next core principle is genuine intent

25:40 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

26:26 what's gonna happen is that you're gonna 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 gonna get sucked into the lesser things in life you're gonna 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 gonna end up deluding yourself very deeply in life you're not gonna really understand what life is at the highest level because you never made it a genuine intent your priorities instead were chasing material

27:14 stuff which has nothing to do with truth and often is actually aligned with falsehood oftentimes the easiest way to make money is through falsehood not through truth the easiest way to attract a sexual partner and oftentimes us through falsehood not through truth 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

28:00 and ethnicities have all sorts of different points of view and usually what 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 really 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 own point of view is not the most important or the best

28:46 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 really 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 Nazism radical Islamic terrorism and others that you would think have no redeeming qualities you can find a kernel of truth

29:33 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 really 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 own points of view this is really 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

30:20 so it's the opposite of integral the opposite of holistic and therefore people with with this limited perspective they they understand so much less of life then the otherwise could and so just I want you to keep this core principle in mind that every point of 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

31:07 discover what is the truth that they are so passionate about what is that and very importantly 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 gonna 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 in fact 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

31:55 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 the next core principle is that everything basically boils down to inner game the quality of your life boils down to your psychology this means that all problems and all suffering is 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

32:40 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 actually all of those external problems that I think exists 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 actually an aspect of my own inner game that's actually 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

33:28 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 now you have so much power now there's all this potential that opens up now you're no longer a victim whereas in the other case there's very little you can do you get stuck very easily the next core principle is lifelong learning and self education you need to become a lifelong learner you need 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

34:14 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 principles 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 in fact 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

35:01 next five or ten years this is gonna be absolutely essential it's through these books that you will learn various perspectives techniques traps mistakes lessons principles you'll be exposed to new ideas to new cultures to history things you haven't ever heard about anywhere else the quality and and detail of information that's presented in books the quality book will be much greater than what you see in a video or on television or on some social media website and you need that you need that solid high quality reliable information to get you started these are like your

35:48 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 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 actually going to one live in-person you'll get 10 times more from going to the exact same workshop or seminar live rather than

36:33 watching it as the video do not be cheap with your self education it's because you recognize that this principle is so important 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 this lifelong learning we're still talking about just this one principle of lifelong learning is 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 gonna have various techniques and ideas and principles that

37:19 you're learning vocabulary words all of this and you're gonna 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 commonplace book that's my system that I use the next core principle is observation 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 of time very patiently very methodically over and over and over again the power of observation is enormous way more than

38:06 anyone would ever imagine which is why you can spend years and decades doing very careful and painstaking observation an observation is the solution to the problem of ideology and dogma and various kinds of belief systems that you get trapped in observation is the antidote to being lost inside your own 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

38:51 report the results to you you need to become a keen observer of life and of reality observe everything observe people observe animals observe nature observe trees observe your own behaviors observe your own 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 process you will learn about yourself you will learn about the world you will learn about mankind you will learn about business anything anything you observe you will make finer grained distinctions in and you will learn how that thing works so observation is related of

39:44 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 really 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 actually 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

40:29 see and that could happen because you know what my observation is not perfect by any means there's 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 gonna 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 closely related principle is 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

41:16 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 have 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 really 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

42:01 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 own 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

42:47 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 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 piano player has that makes him a master and so now apply this dough to your body

43:35 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 own mind and body this 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 which run counter to all your

44:21 ideologies and beliefs and all the programming you got when you were younger and that freaks you out and then when you become really good at meditation that 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 you ego is the sense that you were born as that human being right there and that you will die one day that your identity

45:08 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 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 principle this one principle basically 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

45:56 self-deception is the biggest thing you need to be worried about in life how your own 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 own mind trips you you need to get very very very good at seeing your own self deceptions not so much the stuff deceptions of others but

46:41 of yourself because you see if we're trying to get to the truth if we're trying to really 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's your greatest obstacle is your own 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 basically stem for various kinds of self deceptions that are running inside of your mind which you aren't conscious of yet the next closely-related principle

47:28 is 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 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 example of of self bias is that you know

48:16 if if I'm a criminal and like I robbed a grocery store I can't be allowed to be my own 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 house of bias works basically all of your ideologies and beliefs and everything you you perceive out there is always biased by your own needs your ego ik needs your survival needs so

49:04 your relationships are self biased your business is self biased your your attitudes 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 which will save you so much suffering all fear judgment evil anger and

49:52 suffering is 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

50:37 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 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 related principle is that reality is

51:23 perfect there is nothing at all wrong with 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 actually is wrong or it actually is bad or it actually is evil reality is literally perfect but you can only appreciate that and it will only start sounding like something that's real and not just rule wishful thinking at enormous ly 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

52:08 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 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 like Liam says but I but I can Intuit something about that and 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 powerful principle that you can use to to change your feelings about things now the next four principles that I'm going

52:54 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 basically 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

53:42 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 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 beauty of that pencil of that lamp of

54:29 the carpet of this room the beauty of society the beauty of mankind the beauty of even the ugly things that really is if you think about it the essence of a good life to live the greatest life possible is really 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

55:15 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 just going to work just punching the clock just earning some money just doing some business just taking care of the kids just 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

56:01 for your whole life yeah you're not going to be able to do that it'll take years to untrain yourself from 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 that's your work that's one of your highest purposes in life you know I was driving yesterday

56:47 late at night like I like to do I Drive around Las Vegas late at night just looking at the at the lights and just contemplating and meditating while I Drive actually 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 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 to deal with all this construction nonsense that's happening late at night but then I also realized like oh wait a minute why am I not taking in the beauty of all of this

57:33 I mean it's beautiful like the construction signs are certain Beauty to them and people working you know the way they're constructing this this off ramp or on ramp or whatever it is like there's a certain beauty to that and then and then you kind of just see that all this is a society it's sort of like almost like ants working on the little ant colony you know building something on the road and so like you see that beauty whereas normally I would get annoyed by that here I saw the beauty of it and it completely transformed that experience so you need to get good at doing that all the time in more and more difficult situations you know it's very difficult to see the beauty when you're dealing with a situation that is affecting your survival needs so that's where most spiritual work happens right

58:18 there and the fourth purpose of life is to feel alive every day to live proactively to not have a single day where you're just like I said going through some boring motions just kind of doing another typical day just kind of phoning it in and being robotic to actually feel alive that feeling of engagement you want to be passionate and alive so whatever that takes that that takes you doing more travel then do that and if if that requires you have a better job in order to finance your travel then do that but of course to feel alive also what that means is being more conscious being less robotic and less mechanical in the way that you live

59:06 the next principle is to build your metaphysical connection to reality I've talked about this explicitly in my video called what is spirituality so we can rephrase now this principle as just pursue spirituality or be spiritual and what that means is developing your connection to reality but your metaphysical connection and what that means is that means realizing that you're not just some creature some mammalian meatbag who is living on this rock that's rotating around the Sun but rather that you are the entire universe you're not an object that is within existence you are existence itself to

59:51 realize that I am the whole universe as I stand here that is only possible through all of the metaphysical contemplations and various meditations that I have done for many many years and that is starting to develop within me and it's only going to develop more and more and more and the more that happens the better your life becomes because now you feel like life is not just about living and surviving and doing chores for people but it's it's really just about connecting more and more with yourself as the entire universe and be more conscious to that the next core principle is counter-intuitive 'no such a profound point and topic I'll have a whole episode about in the future what it means is that reality is deeply

1:00:37 counterintuitive almost every facet of anything worthwhile that you want to accomplish in life you're gonna notice the counterintuitive nosov it that means that reality is gonna work the opposite of how you think it will work until you get a lot of experience with it so for example if you're a man trying to attract a woman a beautiful woman attracting a beautiful woman is very counterintuitive because you have to do the opposite of what you think you would have to do to attract her you would think that you'd have to go up and brag to her and show off your big muscles and all that and counter-intuitively if you do that you're actually going to repel her and that takes a lot of experience

1:01:27 to unlearn that naive intuition that you had and to learn how it really works and other examples for example business in business to earn money and be successful you have to do the opposite of what you would think like for example you might think in business the best way to earn a bunch of money is just to to market to everybody as many eyeballs as possible make my message as most generic as possible so it appeals to absolutely everybody but if you do that in business these what's gonna happen is that actually you're gonna fail it's much better to to narrow your niche and your focus and to only target your advertising and sales and your product to a very narrow specific group of people like less than

1:02:12 1% of the entire population and you would think that but below that means I'm alienating 99% of people yes but you're gonna convert that other 1% whereas if you try to appeal to everybody you're gonna convert nobody and that's just one of the many counterintuitive things that you'll discover in business relationships are also very counterintuitive happiness the pursuit of happiness is counterintuitive fear is counterintuitive emotions are counterintuitive like I said I mean literally like every aspect of life is so counterintuitive it works the opposite of what you would initially think how it would work and so actually a corollary principle to this is and this is a very powerful principle as as almost stupid as it sounds do the

1:03:00 opposite of what everybody else is doing I can't explain to you just how much leverage I've gotten out of following this one principle in my life sometimes I will literally just see what is the common thing people do and I'll just do the opposite just based on this principle purely on this principle and the reason that is is because I know that what most people are doing isn't making them happy nor is it making them successful what most people are doing is they're getting very mediocre results in all areas of life and so if I do what they do I expect I'll get mediocrity so almost as a default what I do is I just try to be a contrarian to the opposite our most people meditating know so I'll

1:03:47 meditate are most people taking psychedelics no so I'll take psychedelics our most people you know working hard to discover their life purpose know so I'll do that now of course you can find exceptions to this so I wouldn't recommend you know applying this in an in a in a robotic way like well leo so by this logic does it mean that you know most people aren't taking heroin so I should take care no of course not so you have to be intelligent in how you apply this principle but generally speaking it's because reality is so counterintuitive it's pretty smart you know after you realize how counterintuitive things are the next time you go into a fresh situation you almost start to expect that well I expect the situation should

1:04:33 work like this but I also know that reality is so [ __ ] counterintuitive and I've been burned so many times before by the counterintuitive things let me just now do the opposite thing first and see if that works and oftentimes it will work the first time see you learn that lesson hmm the next core principle is that non-duality is the ultimate truth reality is non-dual which means that all boundaries all categories and all distinctions ultimately collapse they're all relative there is no distinction between inside/outside physical non-physical me other good bad black/white human

1:05:24 non-human living nonliving organic inorganic scientific versus religious so all of these dualities all of these will ultimately collapse they don't hold if you follow them all the way this is a super profound truth and this one principle can help you to cut through so much [ __ ] and to see how the mind constructs all these categories and distinctions very very helpful to see how most of the things you were taught as a child all the way up through university have just been categories that were constructed by the human mind by the human race and that many of these distinctions are purely conceptual they're not absolute in any sense and that they will ultimately all collapse

1:06:09 as you keep observing deeper and deeper keep meditating keep contemplating keep having mystical experiences all this will ultimately collapse into one unity one ultimate absolute truth which leads us to the next core principle which is that absolute truth exists but it cannot be thought believed imagined communicated spoken written proven or argued this is very difficult for most people to accept especially many scientifically minded rationally minded people they tend to assume that if absolute truth does exist then it must be possible to prove it or argue it or communicate it or write about it or imagine it or think about it

1:06:57 but the fact is that it's not because all those are limited and the absolute truth is unlimited it's absolute that's what makes it so interesting and special and important so this is just a brute fact of reality mm-hmm you can go test it for yourself and if you discover the absolute truth what I'm claiming is that if you do the practices one day you will discover the absolute truth and once you do you will realize that it cannot be thought believed imagined communicated spoken written proven or argued and yet you will know about it more certainly than you know anything else in the world how is that possible well it can't

1:07:45 really be explained or imagined or communicated but it is possible through mystical experience through lots of observation again that's that's very important it's super important principle because a lot of people get stuck arguing and trying to communicate and imagine and think about absolute truth and you need to just know right off the bat that that's just not possible so stop wasting your time doing that you waste a lot of time doing that you waste years and decades doing that just stop it your life will go a lot better another core principle is that reality is not Material reality is not a physical object of any kind reality is a

1:08:31 giant mind everything you think is physical like walls roads cars planets solar systems it's all one mind these are all imaginings within a mindscape and there is nothing outside of mindscape mindscape is all that there ever is and again this is not something you believe this is something that you experience through direct observation lots and lots and lots of observation psychedelics help a lot as well the next closely related principle is that life is a dream and I have a whole

1:09:16 episode called life is a dream or I explain this but it just basically is what it sounds like life is literally a dream what you have here is just a dream there is no external world beyond this dream that you're in it's a dream just like the dreams you have when you're asleep at night and just like those it's possible to awaken from the dream so you can awaken from life this is a super important principle because it helps you to dis identify from all of your attachments that you have to this dream you start taking the dream less seriously and that's very important for living the good life to live the good life you must awaken from the dream

1:10:02 otherwise you're always gonna be haunted by this dream and the stuff that happens within it in the same way that you know a nightmare terrifies you only because you're not aware that you're inside of a dream but once you realize that it's just a dream the nightmare is no longer a big deal and you know here the next core principles that reality is infinite and that god is a real thing not the Christian God sitting up in the clouds with a beard judging you but the word God points to something that's very real it points to infinity and just what that is and how

1:10:47 it works that's complicated I won't get into that here it's also very controversial it's also much 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 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 literally you are God not in the egotistical sense

1:11:35 that you are a God and you can do anything you want in the world and you can be an [ __ ] and be arrogant not not that way I mean literally 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 it's very important that you do realize that you are God because only then will you take full responsibility for your life and only then will you really 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

1:12:21 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

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