[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 we talk about.
You know, sometimes I'll spend an hour or two or three talking about some very narrow topic,
which is important, but that's only covering like maybe one principle out of many, many principles.
So here we're going to talk about close to 65 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 going to be learning from.
Any spiritual teaching, any philosophical system, any political theory, you know,
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 going to 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 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 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 going to 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 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 going to 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 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 enlightened masters, traveling around the country, traveling around the world
to various places to learn, studying hundreds of different perspectives, literally hundreds of different perspectives,
hundreds of different traditions from Easter ones to Western ones, from 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.
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 their sticking points are, talking with friends around the country
about what their various sticking points are, 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 what the most important principles for living a good life are.
And this is something that I've 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 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 actualized.org 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 that 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 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.
It's very easy to fall into some kind of ideology because that's what society feeds you is 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.
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 freedom.
Freedom of your mind.
And so the problem with ideology and dogma is that 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 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 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 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 talk 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, 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 trumps 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 possible levels and are you concerned about that over all the technical details?
That's like one of my greatest strengths is big picture thinking.
The technical details 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 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.
So 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 going to give you all these 65 principles for creating a 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 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 bullshit that culture and society and people feed you.
And also for cutting through your own bullshit.
The bullshit 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 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 own mind.
The next core principle is self experimentation.
Actualize.org is all about self experimentation.
How do you discover what really works?
What is true 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 experience is king that we also realize that we need to 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 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, what it means is that you're going to go out there and you're going to experiment with various solutions.
You're not going to 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 approach to solving any problem is always going to be one of, okay, let me experiment and troubleshoot this and try different things until something works.
So you're going to go maybe read some books on relationships.
Maybe you're going to go hire a therapist and talk to them.
Maybe you're going to go see a life coach.
Maybe you're going to go do some psychedelics and contemplate the nature of your relationship and your sticking points while you're on psychedelics.
Or maybe you're going to do some journaling or maybe you're going to 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 going to 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 going to be, OK, let me try this stuff out and see what's going to what's going to 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 going to 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 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.
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 idea, 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 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 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 actually 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.
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 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.
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?
But of course the mind is very tricky so the mind will say, "Oh, Leo, 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 bullshit."
That line of reasoning itself is the bullshit.
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 yourself, "Wait a minute.
Have I actually experienced this thing that I'm going to 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 needs to be questioned even more so, doubly so, triply so.
Question especially the most obvious stuff, the stuff that people would think that you're crazy or insane to question.
Question that.
Question whether the world even exists. Question whether you even exist.
Question everything.
The more fundamental you're 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 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 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, what's going to happen is 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 really no soul 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, 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 is fine to a certain degree, but you need to go way beyond that.
Something deeper.
And you'll notice that that's one of the things that differentiates actualize.org 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 to have, 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 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.
Whatever you gotta do, if that's what's required to get at the truth, then that's what's required.
And you're gonna accept that cost because you have a genuine intent and desire and curiosity for the ultimate truth.
Without this, 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 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 oftentimes is 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 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 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.
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 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 and bring them all together 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 dogma 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 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 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 going to be exploring hundreds of points of view 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.
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 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 like all the problems are out there in the world and all the suffering is created by the world outside of me.
And that 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 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 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 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 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've 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 two hundred books over the next five or ten years.
This is going to 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, to things you haven't ever heard about anywhere else.
The quality and detail of information that's presented in books, a 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 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 can find in-person seminars and workshops, which are super important to go to.
There's a very big difference between watching a workshop or seminar online in video form and actually going to one live in person.
You'll get ten times more from going to the exact same workshop or seminar live rather than watching it as a 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 $1000 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 going to have various techniques and ideas and principles that you're learning, vocabulary words, all of this.
And you're going to 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 anyone would ever imagine.
Which is why you can spend years and decades doing very careful and painstaking observation.
And 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 observe for you and then to 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 grain distinctions in 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 really be able to embody the things that I teach with actualize.org you need to do an enormous amount of observation.
Years of observation on everything that I talk about.
So, the things I talk 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've observed that it works differently than what he said. See?
And that can 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 going to be seriously observing, observe some things about the things I talk 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 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 habit. 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 going to be meditating for one hour every day for the rest of your life.
This is not negotiable. You're just going to do it and you're going to 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 experience as king.
What is meditation? It's just pure 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 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 though to your body and your mind and 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 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 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 a 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 and 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 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.
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 tricks you.
You need to get very very very good at seeing your own self-deceptions.
Not so much the self-deceptions of others but 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 and to falsehood.
So that's your greatest obstacle is your own mind.
And of course this connects with the earlier principle of that 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 is self-bias.
You need to recognize and be able to see within yourself your own selfishness and your own self-bias.
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 going to serve yourself.
And therefore your perceptual system is self-biased, filled with conflicts of interest and double standards.
So a very simple example of self-bias is that, you know, 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.
Which is why judges have to recuse themselves if they have any kind of material connection with the case that they're trying.
Because otherwise self-bias is going to 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. They are very subtle examples of how self-bias works.
Basically all of your ideologies and beliefs and everything you perceive out there is always biased by your own needs.
Your egoic needs, your survival needs.
So your relationships are self-biased, your business is self-biased, your attitudes politically are self-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 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 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 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.
It's to try to demonize others or groups of people or entities or organizations.
Somewhat of a related principle is that reality is 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 woo woo wishful thinking at enormously high levels of consciousness.
So it will 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 going to have to take my word for it.
But this is a powerful principle because you can use it to change and grow yourself.
So anytime 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 or 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 Leo says, but I can intuit something about that.
And so 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 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.
Raise 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 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 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 and to pick and choose and to not like the ugly stuff and to only like 1% of the full spectrum of all the 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 where 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 for your whole life.
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.
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 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?"
I mean, it's beautiful. Like the construction signs, there's certain beauty to them and people working, you know, the way they're constructing this off-ramp or on-ramp or whatever it is.
There's a certain beauty to that and then you kind of just see that, "Oh, this is 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 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, if that takes you doing more travel, then do that.
And 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.
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. Your metaphysical connection.
And what that means is that means realizing that you're not just some creature, some mammalian meat bag,
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 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 really just about connecting more and more with yourself as the entire universe.
And being more conscious of that.
The next core principle is counter-intuitive-ness.
This is such a profound point and topic. I'll have a whole episode about it in the future.
What it means is that reality is deeply counter-intuitive.
Almost every facet of anything worthwhile that you want to accomplish in life,
you're going to notice the counter-intuitive-ness of it.
That means that reality is going to 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 counter-intuitive 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 to unlearn that naive intuition that you had and to learn how it really works.
Another example is 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 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 days, what's going to happen is that actually you're going to fail.
It's much better 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% of the entire population.
And you would think that but Leo, that means I'm alienating 99% of people.
Yes, but you're going to convert that other 1%.
Whereas if you try to appeal to everybody, you're going to convert nobody.
And that's just one of the many counterintuitive things that you'll have to 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 almost stupid as it sounds.
Do the 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 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 and do the opposite.
Are most people meditating? No, so I'll meditate.
Are most people taking psychedelics? No, so I'll take psychedelics.
Are most people working hard to discover their life purpose? No, so I'll do that.
Now of course you can find exceptions to this so I wouldn't recommend applying this in a robotic way like,
Leo, so by this logic does it mean that most people aren't taking heroin so I should take heroin? 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 work like this,
but I also know that reality is so fucking counterintuitive.
And I've been burned so many times before by the counterintuitive of things.
Let me just now do the opposite thing first and see if that works.
And often times it will work the first time. See, you learned that lesson.
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, non-human, living, non-living, 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 bullshit.
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 as you keep observing deeper and deeper,
keep meditating, keep contemplating, keep having mystical experiences,
all of 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.
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.
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 really be explained, or imagined, or communicated, but it is possible.
Through mystical experience, through lots of observation.
Again, that's very important, it's a 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 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 episode called "Life is a Dream" where 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 disidentify 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.
Otherwise you're always going to be haunted by this dream and the stuff that happens within it.
In the same way that 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 principle is 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 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.
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...
Understanding Absolute Infinity, part 1 and 2.
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 that you are a God and you can do anything you want in the world.
And you can be an asshole and be arrogant. 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.
A 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 going to 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 the devil.
Well the value of it is that you stop seeing evil and being bothered by evil so much.
Because you realize that all the evil you see out there, there is a higher intelligence behind it.
It exists for a reason.
It's part of infinity.
It's part of all the stuff that you need to love and to embrace.
And also calling it the devil.
The reason understanding 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.
It will change your whole understanding of this, this duality.
Is 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 one deceptive motherfucker.
And in fact that's how reality comes into existence.
Is through various forms of deception.
And that's why 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 and to embrace.
Otherwise you will actually be yourself pathological by denying those aspects of reality.
Another very 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 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 identify with your job,
all of these identities that you have, they're all relative.
They're all constructions of your mind.
They're not absolutely 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, create identities,
all of these identities that are being created, this is all part of ego, the ego mind, individual ego mind, collective ego mind.
And this is all part of how God and the devil work, is through creating these identities.
It's why you feel that you're a living creature.
But all of these identities are rather arbitrary.
And they're malleable, they're changeable.
And this is a very good news because it means you can change what you identify with,
which means you can actually dis-identify 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 that 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's extremely important to understand because otherwise what's going to happen is that you're going to get lost
in the delusions and asleepness of all the other people who are surrounding you.
It's precisely because all the other people are so asleep that you can't look to them for advice or for 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 that,
"Oh well, that means I should be doing what they're doing. I'm weird for not doing what they're doing."
And you actually know they're the weird ones. They're the deluded ones.
So, keep that in mind. This is why you won't get a bunch of confirmation from science and from the 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, no, 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,
where they would use leeches and other sorts of crude techniques in order to cure people,
that actually 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 society,
where we tend to think that, "Oh, well, we've already gone through the Dark Ages and now we're out of the Dark Ages,
now we're very technologically advanced and we have planes and cars and phones and all of this computers and stuff,
and because of this we know everything." That's just a facade. Don't get tricked by it.
And the reason it's important to realize that we're in the Dark Ages is because, again,
that explains to you why you're not getting all this confirmation from your society.
It's because you're assuming your society is far more advanced than it actually is.
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 have nothing to do with how to live a good life.
It's actually all the opposite against this 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,
are 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.
You want to awaken from the dream that you're in,
but also you need to learn how to master 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 you don't awaken, you will get lost in the dream and you will suffer.
If you only awaken but you don't develop, then you're not going to 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 going to need a certain amount of development before you can even think about possibly awakening.
To really seriously awaken, 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 going to 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 principle is figure out who you are and what you want out of life.
This is super important.
And it's not as easy as it sounds.
You're not just going to sit down for ten minutes and in ten minutes figure out who you are and what you want in life.
This is something you're going to have to work on, think about, contemplate, journal about, talk with coaches about, talk with therapists about for years, for decades.
You're going to keep honing and honing and honing and refining your understanding of who you are and what you really want from life.
You need as much clarity as possible about what you want from life.
Absolutely important.
This allows you to make decisions and allows you to channel your energy and your focus towards those things that you want.
If you're not clear about what you want, if you're wishy-washy vague and ambiguous, you're going to get nothing.
That's the default thing that you get is nothing and mediocrity.
You're not just going to randomly get a bunch of good stuff and a good life by not knowing what you want.
You have to be very clear and decisive about what you want.
You want to awaken? Then be fucking 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 about that.
You want to have a girlfriend or a spouse? What kind do you want? Where are you going to find them? How is it going to really work? Do you really want them?
You have to be very clear about all these things and about 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.
A lot of what society programs you with is reasons and incentives for being inauthentic.
You see all 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 taught to be inauthentic as a survival strategy.
Such that you don't even know what it means to be authentic. How that really feels. You're so out of touch with who you are and what you really want and how you should authentically hold your body.
How you should behave. How you should speak. How you should smile. 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. You 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.
What else? Your relationships with your family and your spouses and your girlfriends and boyfriends that needs to be authentic.
But for you to be able to do that, to achieve that, you first need to discover who you are and what you really 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 going to lose? Are you going to get rejected? Are you going to be lonely and miserable? Are you going to be judged?
The next core principle is that you need to develop a life purpose. I have a whole 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 your career and merging those together 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 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. Take full responsibility.
If you don't take full responsibility, anything less than 100%, that means you're going to be a victim in those areas that you don't take responsibility in.
Which means you're going to feel stuck and you're going to feel miserable and depressed and bitter and annoyed and frustrated.
And that's 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.
To studying them, to 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, they just come up with excuses and blame others for why the problems can't be fixed.
It's actually 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 life, you become alienated and you just kind of like go through the motions robotically.
And that's when you lose touch with that one of those core four purposes of life, which is feeling alive.
You no longer feel alive because you're not actually taking challenges head on because you've instead opted to be a victim.
The next core principle is be a leader.
Lead yourself, lead others around you. Don't wait 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 is being a leader, being proactive, being decisive, taking some risks.
Which leads to the next core principle, which is 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's cars you could engineer, airplanes, new technology.
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 of 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 do I contribute to society, improve the world?
That's part of life purpose.
That's very important because if you are lacking this component in your life, you're going to feel empty.
And also what's going to 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.
So then what happens is that people become Nazis or they become terrorists.
Or they become some right wing fringe guy who posts on some forums, some racist stuff.
Like this kind of stuff, right?
Why do people get sucked into these kinds of low consciousness ideologies?
It's precisely 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 they focus their 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, then the way you're going to...
It's not like you're never going to have sex.
You will have sex.
It's just it's going to be probably in very low quality forms.
Like drinking off into a plastic cup.
See?
So it's the same sort of thing with life purpose.
If you neglect life purpose, you're going to 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 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 artist, and wrongheaded 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 who's reasoning.
This is what I mean by the self-deception and by self-bias.
See, you're self-biased to your own 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, in order to justify your egoic agenda.
That's the real function of 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.
Any time you hear that, any time 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 about 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 going to solve everything.
You should be immediately suspicious and you should expect that that moralizing person has skeletons in their closet.
And they're actually not moral.
Well, the same thing with reason.
With these people who tout reason as a sort of ideology or a solution to everything.
If only we were all more reasonable than mankind would get along.
Be very suspicious of that.
The next core principle is to embrace paradox, confusion and not knowing.
Again, this is one of those 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 that model is perfect, it's consistent and it's airtight and super logical.
It's that 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 Goetl's incompleteness theorem if you want to understand why that's impossible.
Kurt Goetl actually proved that truth is larger than proof.
Very counterintuitive discovery.
The next core principle is 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 Leo, that sounds good. I'll just be hyper rational.
I'll be this unemotional, detached person who's above it all."
That's not emotional mastery. That's a suppression or repression of emotions.
To develop emotional mastery you need 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 like unemotional and robotic.
And I want to be more emotional."
No, what I'm talking about is how to be more emotional.
Emotional mastery does not mean that you stop experiencing emotions.
It actually means you experience emotions deeper but you're more conscious of what they actually are.
And that's what gets you mastery and control.
What should also be distinguished from outbursts of negative emotions.
So somebody else listening here might say, "Oh Leo, so what you're saying here, to become an emotional master I have to let all my emotions out.
And be fully authentic with my emotions.
That 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'm being authentic and I'm expressing my anger.
And this is developing emotional mastery." No, that's not emotional mastery.
That's actually a smokescreen from fully feeling and observing your own emotions.
Yelling at people, outbursts, anger, violence, expressions of negative emotions.
These are often just smokescreens from really self-reflecting and feeling your own emotions.
An angry person doesn't really feel their emotions.
They just act them out robotically.
And you want to read books about emotional mastery and about how emotions work.
Because emotions are so sneaky and so tricky.
And speaking of reason and emotions, these rationalists, they think that reason is superior to emotions.
But actually it's the other way around.
It's emotions which are dominating your reasoning process.
Those people who are hyper rational, they're not hyper rational really.
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.
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 backwards rationalizations.
Your left hemisphere actually confabulates these reasons later to justify whatever you're doing emotionally.
Whatever's driving you emotionally.
And to live the good life, you're not going to be able to do that through reason.
You're going to have to do that by becoming 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 lean more masculine or more feminine.
And 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 to understand what it really 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 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 actually 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 going to become masculine but you're going to have the feminine shadow or vice versa.
And that's going to create all sorts of relationship problems for you.
And also you're not going to 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 non-manipulation.
If you do a lot of observation of your behaviors you will notice how much you manipulate.
You manipulate all the time.
The ego mind that's sort of its whole role is to be constantly manipulating everything.
You're manipulating your thoughts, your face, your body, your posture, your relationships, and in your work, and in your career, and all of this you're constantly 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 next core principle is that everything is relative.
What this means is that anything except the absolute, the ultimate truth of the capital T, is relative.
That means that it's only known in relation 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 goes on and on and on and affects everything that you know.
Everything you know is basically relative. All perspectives are relative.
Your entire understanding of reality is relative.
All truth claims unless they're the absolute which is not really 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.
Relative to what? Relative to the human mind.
If the human mind is changed, if the chemistry of the human mind is changed, all science flies out the window and all changes.
All of them are relative.
See? What you see, what you experience, what you know, politics and government and business, it's all relative.
It's relative to the particular circumstances and 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 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.
Context is the background within which the facts are situated.
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 absolutely 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. Diversify your portfolio of knowledge and information just like you would stocks in a stock market.
For exactly that same reason because you want to avoid getting locked into some one thing.
Some one terrible paradigm which is very limiting.
And what will happen if you study hundreds of diverse perspectives,
which is one of the core principles of actualize.org, is that I do this very seriously,
then 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 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 an episode that I released 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 gotta 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 twenties,
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, they just spent their whole childhood playing video games
and watching movies and just like dicking around in school with their friends and stuff, smoking weed and this kind of stuff.
And then by the time they're twenty and maybe they finish even university,
they get out into the real world and they have no idea about how to actually survive or make a livelihood.
And then they start thinking about some of the high lofty things I talk 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 business. Learn how business works. Learn how money works.
This is absolutely 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 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 learn a living in the savanna,
the modern day savanna that humans live in and grow up in, which is cities and suburbs.
See, a lion needs a certain set of skills to be able to survive in savanna and a human in the 21st century need a certain kind of skills and 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 really working on developing a way for 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 worrying 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 gotta figure that out. If it takes you 5 or 10 years, that's okay. Figure that out.
That's basically what you need to be spending your teenage years and all of your 20s up through your 30s doing.
You wanna solve that by the time you're 30 ideally, if not sooner.
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 gotta pick one thing though and do it. This jack of all trades thing where you're just dabbling in a bunch of shit 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.
The lion is a master at chasing down antelopes. Master at hunting.
This gives you certain stability. It also gives you enjoyment because really your work, which you're gonna be doing most of your life,
the enjoyment that you get from that depends on how much of a master you are.
It takes 5 or 10 years to become a master in something. So you gotta pick one thing and do it.
So that you could produce excellent work and so that you could be a creator and you could be a massive value provider to society.
One of the biggest things I think young people are screwing up on these days, millennials and so forth, is that 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. One thing that you really enjoy.
And it is important that you 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 right now if you're playing a 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 at programming, sure you can go dabble in guitar and you can go dabble in painting. It doesn't matter.
Because 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 really 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 be 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 Ego's 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, porn, video games, internet, social media, various kinds of ideologies, and family can be a distraction, kids can be a distraction, chasing material success, business, money, drugs, all these can be distractions.
So you gotta be very careful. This is all part of the self-deception nature, self-deceptive nature of the ego mind.
The next principle is systems thinking. You need to become a systems thinker. 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 on my book list. That's a pretty deep topic.
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 has one root cause or something like that. Where 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.
Often times you're trying to change a system, the thing you do to change the system actually ends up worsening the problem rather than improving it.
So it's because of this that this is important. This is going to help you to actually make the contribution to the world that you want to make.
Because almost anything that you're going to be interacting with in the world that's of any interest is going to 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 be a good citizen and be conscious of your ecological footprint.
You are part of a larger whole. You are 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 the entire 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 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 an ice cream, what are you going to do with a wrapper? Are you going to 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 being 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?
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 Motherfucker".
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, 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 really want and you need to have some short term goals, medium term 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 something is over here and they're over here.
They don't see a path to get 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 going to require multiple stepping stones to inch your way towards them.
You're not going to 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 for not being happy. It's actually 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 really lock in your happiness without enlightenment.
You don't even know what true happiness is without enlightenment.
But also what this principle demonstrates to you is why enlightenment is so important.
Because what you ultimately want is happiness and the only way you're going to get it is through enlightenment.
So don't put enlightenment off for too long.
Another related principle is that no material possessions will ever make you happy.
This is impossible. This is like a law of physics.
This is like more certain and reliable than Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's equations of E=mc2.
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 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, the much better your life will go.
If you haven't yet understood this principle you're going to be chasing for many many years. You're going to waste decades of your life.
The next related core principle is be 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, really.
That are distracting you from doing the inner work you gotta do to just be happy sitting there by yourself on a couch for an hour or two or a whole day or a whole week.
The next core principle is keep 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 anytime 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 that out.
Minimize your life so 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 that you can work on everything we're talking about here.
Everything we're talking about here, the implementation of all these principles requires a lot of free time and work,
which most people waste on various kinds of frivolous activities.
Don't buy a house too big that you don't really need, because you're going to waste time cleaning that house,
maintaining that house, doing all this stuff, when really buy a smaller house instead,
so that you waste less of that time doing that and instead 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 palatial 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 much results.
Like 95% of your results will come from the practices and exercises 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've discovered.
Very simple, I'm not going to hold them back from you.
Psychedelics, meditation, meditative yoga, journaling, contemplation, visualization and solo retreats.
These are the most powerful techniques that I've discovered in the last 5 or 10 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.
Some of the biggest transformations come from these techniques.
And notice that most of these techniques are inner techniques.
Even psychedelics seems like an outer technique, but it's an inner technique.
It's an outer technique which triggers an inner process.
And the final principle and a very important one is do not turn actualize.org into an ideology.
Actualize.org is not meant to be an ideology. It's not meant to really 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 65 principles that I gave you like the 10 commandments.
Nothing like that, because that would violate principle number 1, 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 can still turn what I say into an ideology or into a dogma.
And in fact, that's what most people do.
So you have to be very careful not to turn actualize.org into another religion.
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.
It's not a formula that you just kind of follow. It's not a robotic thing that you do.
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 actualize.org teachings have certain limitations.
It's still a perspective, even though I cover hundreds of perspectives and I compile them together.
It's still a perspective. It's still coming from me. It still has certain limitations and biases that I have.
And stuff that I got to work through. And of course, 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 actualize.org.
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 out some important stuff like physical health, fitness, nutrition, and other things like that which are still important.
But as far as actualize.org goes, these 65 principles I think encapsulate a lot of what I teach.
Alright, that's it. I'm done here. Please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org.
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 some one 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 going to 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.
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 of 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 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 and of itself will take you a couple hours here at least.
But that's not enough to actually 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. That will take years and decades.
But hey, that's why you're alive and that's why you got 80 years to live.
Is that you can do this. 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 or ten minute episode just like what?
It's not going to make a dent in the real issues you have in your life.
It's only going to be rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
And I want to really help you to get to the root of things.
To get to the ultimate peak experiences, those mystical experiences.
You know, to handle all the bottom of the pyramid, to get to the very top of Maslow's pyramid and to go even beyond that.
That's where, oh man, that's where life gets really good.
That's what I'm really passionate about teaching and experiencing for myself.
And then of course you take that wisdom and you bring it back down to the bottom of the pyramid and you infuse the bottom with the top.
And then that's when your life really becomes something special.
So we're going to continue talking about that more and more.
That's what all my episodes are geared towards.
Hopefully now you have a good understanding of what Actualize.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 really make a commitment, you can change the entire trajectory of the future of your life in an amazing way.
But it's not enough just to make that commitment.
You're also going to have to remember to work at it every single day from now on as well.
Yes, it's challenging, but that's why Actualize already exists.
I keep releasing new videos to release more insights for you, 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 really want.
Because it's very easy to forget and to fall back asleep in with all your friends.
And then before you know it, 10-20 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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