How To Develop A Big Picture

Understanding

In this episode I'm gonna be talking about my secret for how I do research and the key to
developing the biggest picture understanding of life possible.

"What is your aim with philosophy? To show the fly out of the bottle." A quote by Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

What I find on a very practical level, is that very few people have a very big picture
understanding of life and what they're doing here in life, and of reality. And much less so,
an accurate big picture understanding of life. So, the question that I always had is how do I
develop such a picture? What do I need to know? What principles do I need to follow?
What traps must I avoid? Because if it's such a rare thing, that must mean, that very few
people are able to succeed at it. And why would that be? That's the topic that we're gonna
cover today.

My secret to how I do research, how I discover all this information, bring it to you, and how
I've been doing this for over a decade now in my own life is quite interesting. The secret is
not some gimmick or some technique or some gadget that I use, where I can just like
speed read through books and that that's how I do it. That's not how I do it, I actually read
pretty slowly. The secret is not a gimmick. The secret is having the right epistemic
foundation, which very few people have. And this is why people fail at developing the big
picture. And this is why you too will fail, unless you make an extraordinary effort to
understand what the right epistemic foundation is. Even very intelligent people, even highly
enlightened people still fail, because they fail to study what the right epistemic foundation
is for really acquiring the understanding and avoiding all the traps. And by the way, this is
true in most areas where people have deep success. It's that the success is not some
flimsy gimmick or technique, it's a structural thing. It's how they approach the entire
problem. It's not just a flimsy add-on.

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So, my own story goes back to high school and to college, and I've talked about this
before, but I was kind of obsessed with philosophy and epistemology. Epistemology is the
field of philosophy that is concerned with theory of knowledge. How do we know what we
know? A lot of people like to talk about how they have the truth or they know what's true or
they understand reality, but they've never investigated how it is, that people come to know
anything. That's a very deep field of study. Human beings have been studying it for over
2000 years with mixed results, with a lot of blunders. So, you gotta be very careful, this is a
very delicate field, a lot of nuance here. So, as I went into philosophy and I was doing a lot
of philosophy, I became aware of a couple of things.

First is, I became aware of myself doing philosophy. So, this is kinda like what I would call
metaphilosophy. As I'm sitting there and doing philosophy, I become aware and conscious
that: "Hey, I'm doing philosophy. And I'm doing it according to certain rules and following
certain principles and making certain assumptions. And that's worth investigating in and of
itself." So, I started kinda doing metaphilosophy, philosophy on philosophy, asking
questions like: "Well, what is philosophy?" "How does philosophy work?" "What is it
working towards?"

And by the way, when I use the word philosophy, for you, if you don't like that word, you
can just substitute it with 'seeking understanding' or 'seeking truth'. That's basically what
the aim of philosophy is. And then, how successful is it at actually delivering on that
promise? Well, that's a mixed bag. Depends on how you do it.

Also, what I became aware of is I became aware of the role of psychology within
philosophy. It's not as though we're just sitting on our chair and doing philosophy and we're
discovering stuff about reality, it's not like that. Psychology, our own personal emotions,
desires and biases end up playing a huge role in the way that we do philosophy or the way
that we go about seeking truth or seeking understanding. And this is an element, that
many people miss, even very intelligent philosophers. So, I became aware of that.

And also I became acutely aware of the limits of philosophy and of reason, and that there
are some things that are outside of philosophy and outside of reason. And it's important
when you're doing philosophy to realize your limitations and not to assume that you can
just use philosophy to solve every problem.

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So, those are some of the things I noticed. And as I was studying and researching all this
stuff, I went pretty deep with it and basically my epistemic foundation jelled. And then I
used that epistemic foundation to do an amazing amount of research in the last five years.
A lot of it I've been sharing with you. A lot of it I haven't even been able to share yet,
because some of this stuff is quite difficult to articulate. Some of these concepts are very
nuanced, easy to misinterpret, easy to misunderstand, and it takes time for me just to do
the research in my own mind to understand it, before I can come up here and deliver it to
you. But anyways, the important thing that I wanna share with you is my epistemic
foundation. I think that's the most valuable thing I can really offer you in this entire field of
personal development, because you can learn about techniques here and there from other
people. What very few people teach you, is the epistemic foundation you need to really
develop an accurate, big picture understanding of reality, and to avoid all the traps that
people fall into. And I didn't know this, but by going through this process, I developed
almost like this superpower. The epistemic foundation became like this superpower, that
I've been able to use to grow very quickly and to discover new fields that I would never
ever have been able to discover, other than through accident. And even then, I would not
be open to them, would not even consider them or take them seriously, let alone do the
work to actually live and embody them in my own life, if I did not have this foundation. So,
let's talk about this foundation. Let me give you a recap of some of the biggest lessons that
I learned from studying epistemology.

The first lesson is, that the first position that every human being is in, when they come into
this life, is that we don't know what's true. We don't know what's true. Here I am starting
this process of understanding, trying to get the big picture, trying to know what all this life
is all about. And the first position is, I don't know what's true. Now, that might seem
obvious, but then again, nobody admits this. Nobody really takes this seriously. They
always come into it with all sorts of assumptions about like: "Well, but yeah, theoretically,
maybe you're right, Leo, but you know, we know this is true, we know that is true and
science has told us this is true, and you know, some stuff is just obvious, some stuff is just
self evidence, some stuff is just like it couldn't be otherwise." No, what I'm saying is, that
you literally don't know what's true. That's your starting point in this inquiry. And if you don't
really understand and appreciate and accept that, you've already made a huge mistake,
cause you're gonna bring a lot of assumptions and biases into this inquiry.

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And there's a corollary to this idea that you don't know what's true. The corollary is, that
literally anything is possible. And a lot of people don't appreciate this corollary at all,
because as soon as they start to do philosophy, as soon as they start to investigate,
immediately, they have all sorts of preconceived notions about what's possible and what's
worthwhile to investigate. It's like: "Well, I'm not gonna go read that book, because
obviously it's false. I'm not gonna go study that field, because it's all bullshit. I'm not gonna
go investigate that thing over there, because that can't possibly work." And already you
have crippled yourself in this process just by not understanding these two basic points.

It is very important that when you start a research program, that you're open to every
possibility, because you have to start from the place of admitting that you don't know
where the research could lead to. You might think that some research avenue might be a
dead end and actually it turns out to lead very far or vice versa. And so when you really
understand this principle, then you have to understand that everything warrants
investigation. You cannot prejudge anything. You can't say: "Well, that thing over there, I'm
just not gonna worry about it, cause it's obviously false." No. Grasp the significance of the
first position, that you don't know what's true. When you don't know what's true, that
means you also don't know what's possible to be true and what's possible to be false, and
you don't know which principles you will use to assess what's true and what's false. That's
how deeply you don't know. You don't know what is gonna come out of this investigation.
Maybe nothing at all, maybe it's gonna be a giant waste of time, or maybe something
glorious will come out of it. You don't know. And you're not sure how you're gonna get
there. You don't know what the path is gonna be. You're just kind of stumbling around in
the dark, completely. This is very important to understand.

You cannot rely on the knowledge or information that other human beings have sort of
mined for you and supply to you in books, because how do you assess which books are
correct and which are not? There's a lot of conflicting information in books. Same thing
with experts. There's a lot of different experts in every field who conflict with each other
and tell you the opposite things. So, how are you gonna know which experts to rely on,
which books to rely on, which fields to study and which ones to ignore? And the reality is,
that you don't. And to admit that is very important, cause most people assume that: "Well, I
have a good gut feeling, that that field over there is a stupid field. And I have a good gut
feeling, that that book over there is a bunch of bullshit. And I have a good feeling, that that

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expert, that guru over there is full of shit." And as soon as you get stuck in that sort of
paradigm, you've lost it, you failed, you will never ever recover from that. So, that's an
important point.

Another lesson I learned is that self-deception is the number one enemy in doing research
and developing understanding. Self-deception, you are your own greatest enemy. What
this means is, that you have to watch your personal biases and weaknesses like a hawk,
because they are the number one factor that will lead you astray. And of course, what do
we do, in our infinite wisdom, what do we do when we start to go on this process of
research and understanding? We immediately start to point fingers at other people and
say: "Oh, that guy's full of shit. And that's bullshit. That's a lie over there. That guy's
deluded. And look at this nonsense over here. Look at those Mormons. Look at those
Christians. Look at those foolish scientists from 200 years ago. How could they have been
all so foolish?" And as soon as you, again, take that sort of attitude, you've already failed,
because you've oriented yourself outward at pointing out other people's self-deceptions,
meanwhile, neglecting your own. And your own is the only ones that you really should be
worried about.

This requires a lot of emotional labor, to watch your own personal biases and your own
weaknesses come into play as you do the research. Cause what would happen if you
need to go research some topic that will trigger fears in you, that will trigger your deepest
insecurities. That's gonna require a lot of emotional labor to grapple with some of these
nuanced ideas. It's gonna require sort of stepping outside of your perspective and outside
of your paradigm, putting aside your own biases and what you want to be true, in favor of
seeing what actually is true. What's gonna happen when you hit that fork in the road? Well,
I'll tell you what's gonna happen, if you're not very vigilant. You will side with your own
personal biases and weaknesses. You will succumb to them and you will ignore what's
actually the case. And you'll make a huge epistemic blunder, as most people do.

Another lesson that I learned is, that every position, no matter what position or perspective
you take on reality, has hidden assumptions behind it. That is a very deep epistemic truth.
And in a sense, the assumptions define the position or they define the perspective. To
even have a perspective on a situation like 'What's your perspective on religion', 'What's
your perspective on science', 'What's your perspective on abortion', 'What's your

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perspective on what reality is', 'What's your perspective on philosophy?', 'What's your
perspective on what human beings are here on earth to do', 'What's your perspective on
what life is about', 'What's your perspective on the origins of life and evolution', to have a
perspective about that, and you probably have many of those perspectives. You take
positions on these things and you're very adamant about your position. But to have any
perspective on anything at all requires hidden assumptions that are very difficult to root out
and to become aware of. And then what most people do, is they take a position or a
perspective and they don't understand that there are assumptions there, that they've never
even questioned or thought about, almost like axioms or premises, which define the
paradigm or the perspective from which they look at the world, and that that shapes
everything, because that's the first step, it's the assumptions. From there, everything
becomes like a chain reaction, and when you get the first assumptions wrong or you aren't
clear about what they are exactly, or you've never questioned them, then all your other
reasoning and all your justifications, and everything else that comes on top of that, is on a
rotten foundation. The assumptions are the foundation. So, it's very important to look at
these hidden assumptions and to root them out and to become very clear about what they
are. So, a lot of people go wrong right here.

Another lesson that I learned is that all perspectives are partial. The biggest trap you can
fall into is this idea that: "Hey, you know, let me go find the right perspective for me and
then I'm just gonna adopt that perspective and live from that perspective." You are not
gonna develop the biggest picture understanding of life by doing that, because no matter
what perspective you adopt on whatever position, it will only be partial. It'll only be a partial
truth. There will be a lot of other things that you ignore. A lot of nuances from the other
side. So, one good way to avoid this problem is to study many, many, many perspectives
and to be impartial to the perspectives, and to see that your job is not to adopt a certain
perspective, but really to jump around perspectives and explore them all, sort of like you're
at a buffet. You don't commit to any one dish, you sample the whole thing. So, that was a
lesson I learned pretty early on.

Another lesson that I learned is that a model is not reality. Thinking about reality is not
reality. Coming up with a schematic representation in your own mind of how something
works is not the actual thing in the real world working. And while models can be useful,
you cannot substitute them for reality. This becomes a huge trap. And in a sense, the

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better your models become, the more likely you are to mistake them for reality. And this
becomes very dangerous. And this has been one of the key pitfalls of good science, that
nowadays our science is so good and so accurate at manipulating reality, that we think
that: "Oh, okay, that's it then. We got the models. We've got reality figured out." And that
becomes a huge trap.

Another lesson I learned is that your web of beliefs, which is the entire collection of all the
beliefs you have about everything that's true or false in the world, that this web of beliefs is
like a representation of reality and that it's under constraint. And this is true for every
human being. This is the nature of how the web of beliefs works. Which means that we
have a few number of hardcore facts, that we might say are facts about reality. And then
you have this giant web of beliefs that you build, which is only loosely connected to the
facts. Which means that you can build different kinds of webs of belief to explain exactly
the same phenomenon. Which explains why we have this diversity of perspectives and
diversity of opinions and ideologies around the world. It's that we could have the exact
same facts, but because people interpret the facts in different ways and they have all sorts
of other elements to their web of belief that are not based on fact at all, they just have their
own biases and their own preferences, that those get mixed in there, and so you can have
a web of belief, which is one way explaining one set of facts, but then somebody else has
a totally different web of beliefs, explaining the exact same set of facts. And this leads to a
lot of confusion. And you got to be able to see through that. And you got to be able to see,
that other people are doing that and that you yourself are doing that. And you got to be
willing to question those beliefs that are not connected to the facts themselves, because
there you've got this sort of fudge factor. And one thing that you love, your psyche loves,
or your mind loves, is to have this fudge factor, where it can fudge things around and it can
concoct its own stories and theories about how the world works. It loves that. We're
addicted to that, cause human beings are sort of modeling animals.

Another lesson I learned is that foundationalism is false. Foundationalism is the idea that
you can take some theory you have about reality and that you can ground all of it down
into one fundamental truth that is indubitable. This is something that philosophers have
been trying to do for over 2000 years. They've been trying to take their philosophy or their
notions of the world and how the world works, and they have to say: "Okay, so, we have
these higher level understandings of reality, but let's kind of boil it down to the essence.

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What is the essence? What is indisputably true, that is completely justified and certain."
This is something that René Descartes did and many other philosophers that followed him
did, and every one of them basically failed. And if you study the history of philosophy, you
see the history of foundationalism failing over and over and over and over and over again,
because there is nothing that you can ground your theories in absolutely. There is no such
thing.

Another lesson that I learned is that rationality is far too limited to use as your only tool to
explore reality and to understand reality. If you think rationality will be sufficient, you are
wrong and you will fail and you'll make many epistemic blunders. Reality goes far beyond
rationality. And this actually makes a lot of sense, because if you think about it, what is
rationality? Well, rationality is only one element of reality. Rationality itself is a subset of
this larger superset, which is reality. So, of course you shouldn't expect that rationality can
encompass the entire superset. A subset cannot encompass the superset. Rationality has
to arise out of irrationality. Before there was rationality, there was irrationality. Rationality
had to be evolved, if you take the standard scientific understanding of it, you know. There
was no rationality until complex mammals evolved, and then we had primates, and then
we had human beings. There was no rationality before that. And to have evolved to this
place, and then to look backwards and to backwards rationalize it and say: "Well, but you
know, yeah, we need human brains to be rational. But you know, let's just assume that at
the beginning of the universe, the rationality was still there." No, it wasn't. Human beings
and human brains took billions of years to evolve. So, after billions of years of evolution,
you got rationality. Before that, there was no rationality. So, you can see, if you take a look
at it from that perspective, you can see just how much of the universe has no rationality in
it whatsoever. And that should humble you as far as your attempts go at rationalizing the
whole universe. You have to be open to the idea that maybe the universe can't be
rationalized in principle, and that your attempts to do so, leave a lot of stuff unexplained.

Another lesson I learned is that paradox is good. When you encounter a paradox in your
research and in your attempts to understand the world, that's a good thing. That's not
something to be afraid of. That's not something to run away from. That's something to
embrace. And again, you got to be open to the possibility, that reality might be paradoxical
at its very core. In which case when you run into paradoxes, that's fine. That means, that
that's what reality is. So, don't worry about that. Also, paradox might be the fallout that you

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get when you try to rationalize all of reality. So, if you're attempting to rationalize
everything and you keep getting paradoxes, that might be a sign telling you: "Hey, stop
trying to rationalize everything!" There's more to reality than rationality. So, paradox is
something to be embraced.

Another lesson I learned is that direct experience is the truest thing we've got. So, of all
the things we can rely on to begin our investigation, we could rely on expert authorities like
the Pope or some scientists like Einstein. We could rely on authority, but that's not a very
high quality way to do this investigation. We could also rely on various other things our
thoughts, our reasoning abilities, our intuitions and so forth. Or we've got just direct
experience. So, what do we start our investigation with? Well, I don't have time to go into
why I came to this lesson, but the lesson I came to is that direct experience is the truest
thing you've got. If you stick to that, you're gonna avoid a lot of traps. If, however, you're
gonna go with different authority figures, different writers and speakers and authors, that's
gonna be very problematic. You're gonna run into a lot of traps there. Or if you go with
your own reasoning abilities, well, that's even potentially more dangerous, because your
mind is a very tricky thing, it's like a labyrinth, that you can very easily get lost in. So, I'm
not saying that you need to now discount expert authorities and your own reason, and your
own intuitions. No, all those things are important factors, so we're not throwing those
away, but I'm just saying that the truest thing you've got is your own direct experience. And
that's a good starting point for this investigation. Now, once you go further and then
investigation, you might wanna come back and revisit this axiom or this assumption, that
direct experience is the truest thing you've got, and you might want to question that. But as
a starting point, it's a good principle to go with, cause you gotta start somewhere. Right?

It's not possible to start this investigation from ground zero, because you've already got
certain beliefs, you've already got certain assumptions. To do this investigation in practice,
not in theory, but in practice, you have to make certain assumptions. The key is not to get
locked into your assumptions. The key is to be flexible enough to come back and revisit
those assumptions in the future. Cause you know what? Every assumption that you
started with might have been false and you don't know until you really check. Check it out.
That might take a while.

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Speaking of direct experience, another lesson I learned, and this is something I learned
more recently, is that there is a huge spectrum of possible direct experiences. Huge, way
larger than you ever imagined possible. What you think of as reality and all the
experiences you've had in your whole life, that is a tiny little sliver of all the vast possible
and weird experiences that are possible to have in this world. And so, seeking out new
experiences becomes hugely important, if you accept the axiom, that direct experience is
one of the truest things you have in this inquiry. Cause if you have a very narrow slice of
this entire spectrum and you're using that slice to create your models and your
understanding, well, you can see how that can go very wrong, because you're missing out
on so much of the larger spectrum. You're not accounting for the whole thing. And by
definition that means you're not gonna have the biggest picture. To have the biggest
picture, you need to explore more of the spectrum, cause the picture is explaining the
spectrum. And a lot of people, the reason they don't have a big picture and they don't care
about developing a big picture is, because they've committed themselves to a little tiny
sliver of the spectrum. Like, they grew up in the same city, in the same state, in the same
country, they speak one language, they haven't studied history, they're not very worldly,
and so they haven't experienced much of life. All they do is they just go to their nine to five
job at Starbucks, they punch the clock, they do the work, they come home, maybe they
have a relationship, they have a kid, and that's it. And their experience of life is very
limited. They don't study science and history and religion and philosophy or any of this
kind of stuff. And so, then, they have very little that needs explaining. To them, they
understand everything, because yeah, they understand everything that's just that little
piece of life. But once you start having more diverse experiences, you start interacting with
intelligent people, you start having altered states of consciousness, you start learning
about personal development, you start learning about weird paranormal phenomena that
people talk about and you start investigating all this stuff, and all of a sudden you have a
lot more experience to explain, and all of a sudden your old big picture, what you thought
was the big picture explanation, doesn't work anymore, doesn't work to account for the
whole spectrum. So, pushing your spectrum out to both ends is very important.

Another lesson I learned is, that the practical level still matters. It's very easy to get lost in
just armchair philosophy and just theorizing stuff. But it's important to keep in mind that the
reason we're doing this, is so that we can move forward and that we can be more effective
in our lives, so we can be more happier, so we can master our emotions, so we can be

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more successful in the things that we want to accomplish. So, if this entire investigation is
not helping you to do that, then you're losing yourself in theory and in academic disputes,
that are really not relevant to you living the kind of life that you want to live. So, this entire
investigation, one easy way to see if you're doing it right, is that your life should be
improving. Gradually over time, in the long run. Not in the short run, but in the long run
your life should be improving. Cause in the short run you might discover some things in
this investigation that kind of freak you out, destabilize you. So, that's okay. But in the long
run you should start to see improvement. That's the practical level. You got to keep the
practical level in mind.

Another lesson I learned is that the best position to take is no position at all, to not desire a
position, to not have anything to defend. That's really when you know you're doing good
epistemology. When you can just admit to yourself that: "You know what, I just want to get
to the bottom of understanding what's true here. I don't care what's true. I'm open to
whatever. I'm not gonna be defending any position. I'm not gonna be an ideologue. I'm not
gonna be a crusader. I don't care about debating with people. I don't care about proving
my point. I don't care about writing a book. I don't care about being famous with some idea
that I hold. I don't care about getting more followers and recruiting more people to my
cause. I don't care about holding some rally or some riot or, you know, getting people to
pull out their pitchforks. I don't care about any of that. All of that is a distraction. What I'm
interested in is just getting to the bottom of understanding what life is and how I should live
it. And in that respect, I have no position. I don't need a position. A position is something
that people need to feel comfortable, like a baby blanket, and I am more mature than that."
That's a really healthy attitude to take.

Another lesson I learned is to seek understanding rather than truth. So, the trap with
seeking the having of truth is that we think of truth as this tangible object, some sort of holy
grail, that "I will go and I will find the holy grail and I will bring it back and I will put it on my
trophy case at home." That doesn't seem to work very well. If you take a look at the history
of science and philosophy over the last couple thousand years, very few people have
succeeded in bringing home the truth holy grail and putting it on their mantle. Instead, what
you should be more interested in is just the looser project of developing understanding.
So, it's not that I want to grab hold of something and then claim it and show it to the world
as 'this is the true thing', not like that. But instead it's like 'I just want to understand'. "I want

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to understand the different fields of life and how they work. I wanna understand the
mechanics, I wanna understand the traps, the pitfalls. So, I wanna understand maybe how
business works. I don't wanna take a stance on what's the best way to do business, I just
wanna understand what are the different ways to do business", for example, "and what are
the different pros and cons, what are the different mechanics, what's going on at the metal
level." That's what I call understanding. And the same thing with every other field: personal
development, spiritual development, relationships, health, and any other kind of field you
want. It's not about grabbing hold of something there and saying: "Okay, now I understand
it." It's not like that. Understanding is more of a loose thing. It's sort of like you see how all
the parts are moving and why they're moving the way they're moving. And you're sort of
like looking at the situation from a bird's eye view, rather than being a crusader stuck on
the ground level fighting for some specific position.

Another lesson I learned is to seek holism in whatever you're studying or investigating.

And this is as opposed to what a lot of academics do, which is become hyper specialized
and get lost in the academic minutia of some argument or debate, nitpick everything and,
you know, study the hell out of some little tiny element, which has nothing to do with how
you're living your life. It has no bearing on your relationships, your ability to improve your
happiness levels, your emotional mastery or your overall sense of consciousness. It has
nothing to do with that. It's just some little minute academic thing, that maybe you can
write a paper on and get it researched, you know, published in some research journal. Or
you could use it to hit someone over the head with, as like a means of saying: "Oh, I'm
right. I'm right, because, see, look, I won the debate because of this little minute academic
point, that I was correct on." To not get lost in that academic minutia is very important. And
that just means to have the desire to really integrate everything. The goal is not to
understand your little field, the goal is to understand all of life, which encompasses every
field that there is. Of course, some fields you're gonna be more interested in others, but
overall, you're trying to understand 'what the hell is going on in life' and 'how should I be
living my life'. These are the really important questions, not some little nitpicky academic
point in some philosophical journal.

And then the last lesson that I learned is that argumentation and debate and justification,
that these are tools of the ego and that they do not serve truth finding. If your objective is
to find truth and your objective is to understand, then you have to let go of argumentation,

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debate and justification. Stop doing these things. They're holding you back. They're
sucking you into ego. They're sucking you into this paradigm of defending some kind of
position. And the more you defend a position, the more stuck you become. And this is the
biggest trap that people make, it's that they choose a position, they become loyal to it and
then they defend it to the death. And that's what happens. They die holding the same
positions that they held when they were still teenagers. And that's a real shame. And they
never developed the big picture that they could have developed.

So, those are some of the biggest lessons I learned. I didn't go into how I derived these
lessons, because that would take hours and hours and hours to explain. But you can take
these as principles. Don't just blindly believe them. Take them as axioms, use them for
your investigation and you'll discover, that you will progress very fast and into deep and
very uncharted territory. And that's how you'll know that they're working. And anything that
isn't working, question it. And maybe I'm wrong. So, you got to question even the stuff that
I'm telling you, because the first position is that you don't know what's true and you
certainly don't know if what I'm telling you is true, just based on the fact that I'm telling it to
you. Cause that would be the problem of just believing authority.

The next question that I wanna talk about is, so, if we zoom out for a second here and we
ask ourselves the big question, which is: "What's the best method for understanding
reality? What methodology or what attitude should I adopt, if what I care about is having
the biggest picture understanding of reality?" Well, let's explore this. There's a couple of
positions or a couple of basic approaches that you could take.

The first approach is what I call the default position, which is just going with the flow. This
is what will happen if you don't do anything else. This is the majority of cases of human
beings on earth. In fact, 99% of all human beings follow this 'just go with the flow'-attitude.
Which means that they don't really question life very deeply. They don't probably even
care about developing any kind of big picture. And that's because they generally assume
that they've already got it figured out, they already have the big picture, because what they
did is, they just absorbed it from their mainstream culture, whatever their parents believe,
whatever their teachers told them, whatever they see on TV, whatever they read in the
magazines, whatever their basic, naive intuitions are about reality. They just say that:
"Well, that's good enough. That's all I need. It's functional. I can just use that and go to

13
work and have a family. That's all I basically need." And that's the default position. The
problem with that though, of course, is, that it's not a big picture understanding at all.
These people hardly understand anything. They don't understand where their anger
comes from. They don't understand where their depression comes from. They don't
understand how to be happy and they fail at it every single day. They don't understand
why they have relationship problems and keep breaking up. They don't understand why
they have problems with people pleasing. They don't understand why they have financial
struggles, like they can't get a good job or they can't please their boss. They don't
understand why religion exists or why there's a debate between science and religion. Or
the opposite approach. They don't understand why scientists are undermining religion. So,
there's all these things that they don't understand and that they just keep struggling with
and struggling with and struggling. For their whole life, they struggle with this stuff. They
don't master themselves. They don't live life in a masterful way. They are not joyful people.
They're generally sour, bitter, depressed people who are just going through life just kind of
like toughing it out, thinking that if they just wait long enough that eventually happiness will
come through some sort of acquisition of money or relationships, or a house, or something
like that. And that will be like the peak of their life when they get the stuff that they want.
And then after that they can retire and then hopefully die at painless death. Like, that's
their general sense of how life works. And of course these are people who haven't really
studied personal development at all. And as soon as they do start to study personal
development, they start to see, that their big picture just completely breaks down. It
doesn't explain anything. They see all these contradictions. They see all these things they
can't explain about themselves once they become a little bit more aware. And then that's
when the existential crisis starts to happen. So, that's the problem there.

The other approach you could take to developing your big picture is the academic
approach. And I already sort of touched on this, the problems with the academic approach.
The academic approach is this narrowly specialized approach. It's like: "Well, I'm gonna
pick one field. Like, let's say, if I wanna understand psychology, I'm gonna pick some very
narrow field within psychology. And I'm gonna study the shit out of it. And I'm gonna read
all the past authors. I'm gonna network with all the other academics in my field and just
research, research, research, research, research, read books, and do a couple of narrow
experiments and studies and that's how I'm gonna really understand. There is room for
that kind of work, it is important, but it's not gonna lead to any kind of real big picture

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understanding. And it's certainly not gonna really be that useful in your own life, to live a
great life. Even if you can apply some of the things you learned in your research in this
narrow academic field, that's only gonna tackle one little facet of your life and all the other
facets of your life are largely gonna be misunderstood. And that's why you can have
someone who's very intelligent and knows a lot about psychology in an academic sense,
or a lot about philosophy in an academic sense, but he has no mastery over his anger, his
depression or whatever emotions he's having. He's unfulfilled in life, he doesn't know how
to get happiness, he doesn't know how to embody love, doesn't have much consciousness
and all this stuff, because he's spent his whole life stuck in a library reading books or doing
some kind of research on lab rats. That becomes way too narrow of a specialization.

Another approach you have to developing a big picture is to pick one spiritual tradition out
there, from the many that are there, and just to stick with it and to follow it in a very
focused way. So, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga and all the different
subsect within all those. Pick whichever one you like, commit to it and just follow it, do all
the practices, study all the theory and tell yourself that you're gonna get the biggest picture
of the reality. A lot of people do this. Some people do it in a very dogmatic, like
fundamentalist Islamic sort of way, which of course we know isn't healthy. But a lot of
people do it also in a kind of more new age sort of way. It's like: "Well, I'm gonna become a
Buddhist. You know, Buddhism isn't Islam, Buddhism is nice and peaceful, so I'm just
gonna become a Buddhist. And you know, the Buddha seems like a guy who really knew
what he was talking about. So, what could possibly go wrong, if I just followed the
teachings of the Buddha?" Of course, the problem with this, and not just with Buddhism,
with any one of these spiritual traditions, is that, again, it's a partial perspective. It got a
specific set of assumptions. It got a lot of cultural baggage that comes with it. It's a
paradigm, it's a way of looking at the world. And maybe it will work to get you to
enlightenment. Maybe it won't. That's a mixed bag. Maybe the techniques you choose will
work for you, because they fit with your personality. Maybe they won't. That's again, you're
kind of just shooting in the dark there. That's a probability thing. But no matter what, even
if they do work, you will still develop a narrow, sectarian view and your big picture will be
distorted. Even in the best case scenario, even if you enroll like in a Zen monastery and
you go to a Zen monastery for 20 years and you learn everything there and you ace all of
their little tests and you do everything perfectly, you will wind up with what?
Enlightenment? Yeah, maybe. Maybe you'll wind up with enlightenment, but still, your

15
understanding of the world will be limited and it will not be the biggest picture possible and
you will run into many epistemic traps there, even if you attain enlightenment. So, that's
the danger. And of course most people won't even get to that. Most people, they'll pick a
spiritual teaching. And that spiritual teaching will, because they don't study all this
epistemic stuff, that spiritual teaching, they will distort it, they will misunderstand it, they will
not follow through on it and they won't even attain enlightenment using it. They'll just
become dogmatic about it. They'll have debates and little arguments and stuff and they'll
believe in it and yada-yada-yada. So, all the problems will happen that we've already
talked about.

So, there's that way. Another way is to strictly stick to your direct experience. So, this
would be a whole different methodology. Here what you would say is: "Okay, fuck it. I'm
not reading any books. I'm not watching any videos. I'm not talking to any gurus. I'm not
listening to anybody at all. Because the only thing I know for sure is my direct experience.
So, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna lock myself in a room for ten years and I'm just gonna do
direct experience and nothing else, and everything else I'm just gonna throw into the fire.
There's that approach. That might seem like maybe that's the best approach, because
then you can eliminate any distorting outside influences, which are so ubiquitous. They
come from every corner and angle of the spiritual marketplace, the personal development
marketplace and just society at large. Basically what you're doing there is you're cutting
yourself off completely from culture and from any other sources of human knowledge, and
you're trying to derive everything from the ground up. And you might think like: "Well, that
seems like a hard path. But it also seems like that would be the truest path. Except here's
the problem. Remember, that with epistemology, the number one danger is self-deception.
The number one danger is not others deceiving you, although that can be a big danger, it's
self-deception. So, when you lock yourself in a room for ten years and you think that you're
gonna go through direct experience and just be very strict about it and not listen to
anybody, it might work, but also what's very likely to happen is that you will get lost in the
labyrinth of your own mind and you will tell yourself things, and you'll come up with
theories, and you'll have certain experiences, and you'll misinterpret these experiences,
and you will not develop the biggest picture possible. You will end up tricking yourself into
thinking that you did. But actually you didn't. And there will be things again that you fail to
know. And again, you're gonna miss out on a very important element, which is, that if
you're only sticking to your direct experience and you're not listening to anybody else out

16
there, you have to kind of assume that you're gonna be the most motivated, the most
strict, the most self-honest human being who's ever lived. And that you're assuming that
it's like you can discover everything about reality all by yourself. That's what you're sort of
assuming. That becomes very problematic because again, you can limit yourself to one
narrow band on a large spectrum. And when you're not coming into contact with other
people from other spiritual religious traditions, from scientific disciplines, different
philosophers, when you're not looking back into history and you're not learning from the
lessons that humanity has committed throughout history. When you're not learning from
science, and you're not learning from mysticism, and you're not learning from gurus, and
you're not learning from self-help authors. When you completely cut yourself off, man, that
might be the most dangerous path of all in a sense, now that I think about it. Because it's
like, I couldn't even imagine how a human being could avoid all the blunders and traps that
are possible in this inquiry, without learning from the lessons of others. So, for me, that
becomes a no-go. This method doesn't work for me.

And the last method is studying lots of perspectives and lots of sources. So, what I could
do is, I could tell myself: "Okay, so if there's all these problems with all these other
methods, what I could do is, I could just go and like read all the books, watch all the
videos, listen to all the gurus, and then I'm gonna have the biggest picture." the problem
with that though is, that yes, you can do that and that might be fairly effective. You're
certainly gonna get a very broad secondhand understanding and appreciation for the
spectrum of experience possible. But if you only do that and you only read books, and you
only watch videos and you don't have the direct experiences, you're not gonna go very far.

It's gonna actually become sort of like the academic approach. It's too much theory and
you're not gonna know what the theory and the models and the gurus are talking about,
cause you haven't had the direct experience. So, then you will again fall into a deep
epistemic trap.

So, each of these methods by itself doesn't work. It's too limited. So, let me share with you
my approach. How do we practically overcome this problem? "Which method should I
actually use? Leo, it sounds like you're telling me that any method I use is gonna be
faulty." Well, in a sense, that's true, because there is no foolproof just color-by-number
process for how to develop the biggest picture. If there was, everyone would have the

17
biggest picture. So, you sort of have to suspect, that there isn't one, that a lot of judgment
and care and vigilance and attention to detail is required, if you want to successfully
navigate through all the different landmines that exist in this long research project. So,
here's my pragmatic approach. If you follow this approach, I think that this is the most
powerful epistemic approach that you can follow and it will not entirely eliminate all your
problems. It's not foolproof. But it's gonna give you your best chance. So, here it is.

First, what you do is you fully commit to understanding versus position taking. So, you
make a vow to yourself: "That I am not gonna be taking any positions, and that I'm gonna
be super mindful about this, as I go forward for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my entire life.
I'm gonna be very mindful of how I debate and argue my position. And every time I notice
that I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna cut it off. I'm gonna be very mindful of defending any ideas
that I have about reality, myself, how the world works and so forth. And anytime that I
notice myself trying to defend some ideological position, I'm gonna cut that off, as soon as
I notice it. Also, I'm gonna see and look past the semantic squabbles that exist between all
the different perspectives out there, because I will be going out and studying many
perspectives, hundreds of perspectives. But in doing that, I recognize that a lot of these
perspectives are talking about similar things, but in different language. And I'm gonna look
past the language, I'm gonna read between the line, and I'm gonna get beyond the
terminology, and I'm gonna really go for the root of what those teachings are pointing at,
with the intent of experiencing it in my own life. Not just to learn it theoretically, but to live
it. I'm also not gonna nitpick sources, I'm gonna be charitable. I'm generally gonna assume
that the things that people are teaching me, if they're reputable people, not just some bum
on the street, but if it's a reputable teacher, I'm not gonna dismiss them as being diluted or
liars or charlatans. I'm gonna be charitable to them. Even if a perspective that I encounter
is very radically different than mine and it seems at first like it's complete nonsense, I'm
gonna stay open-minded, I'm gonna be charitable and I'm gonna take the burden on
myself to understand that perspective. I'm gonna step into that perspective's shoes, so to
speak, and I am going to live from that perspective just to get a taste of what it's like. And
then maybe I'll bounce off of that and go to some other perspective and some other
perspective and some other perspective. But I'm really gonna take the effort to step
outside my shoes and to change perspectives. Also what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull
from hundreds of sources. So I'm not gonna be content with just reading ten books and
then saying: 'Okay, I got it all figured out.' I'm gonna pull from hundreds of sources and I'm

18
gonna combine that with my direct experience. So, the stuff that I'm pulling from all these
different sources, it's good, but it's only the starting point. It's giving me leads on the stuff I
gotta follow up with in my direct experience. So, if I hear somebody over there talking
about something that sounds cool and interesting and important to my bigger picture
understanding, okay, I'm gonna take that on as a hypothesis, and then like a good
scientist, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna test it out. And then when I hear something over
there, I'm gonna do the same thing, take it on as a hypothesis, test it out. And I'm gonna
keep doing that and I'm gonna keep doing that for my whole life. And I'm never gonna stop
and I'm never gonna settle on any position."

That's basically my pragmatic approach.

"And what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna cross-reference the different perspectives. So, I'm
gonna go like study with a Buddhist master for a month, and then I'm gonna go study with
a Hindu master, and then I'm gonna study with a Islamic master, and then a Christian
master. And then I'm gonna, after I did a month of study with each of them, I'm gonna
come bring those together, cross-reference them, and then try to triangulate. What are the
common elements? What explains everything that's going on? And I'm gonna gut check
that with my intuition. So, any conclusions I come to, I'm gonna check them with my
intuition to see: 'Okay, does this have a ring of truth to it?' So, it's not just a logical thing I'm
doing, it's like a deeply intuitive thing."

As you start to build your deeper, bigger picture, your intuition is gonna get stronger and
stronger and stronger, and you're gonna find that truth just stands out, like a diamond in
the sand. You can just see it, it sparkles. There's something about it that you just kinda
like: "Oh, there it is, of course." And you just pull that little gem out there and then you pull
a little little gem out from here, from that teaching, from this teaching, from this
perspective, from that perspective. And you do the sort of pulling process. But you don't
just pull theory, you pull the theory to come up with a model, but then you go and you
directly experience it.

And also you be careful to notice the minor discrepancies, which might be important or
might not be, as you're comparing the different perspectives. You can't just throw out all
the discrepancies, because you might be missing something important. The discrepancies

19
are like leads, you have to follow up on those leads and see where do they take you. "You
know, that teacher over there, he talked about something very weird that this other teacher
didn't talk about. Well, let me go follow up on that little lead and see where it takes me.
Maybe it'll take me to a dead end, maybe it'll just be a waste of time, or maybe it'll lead me
to an even broader, deeper, more interesting perspective."

So, you do that, and as you're doing all this, everything is held as provisional. So, your
understanding is like a building that's being constructed, that will never finish being
constructed. It's always provisional. Some stuff might be taken out. "You know, that thing I
learned here a year ago, that doesn't apply anymore. That thing I learned five years ago,
that's bullshit now. This thing I'm learning today, okay, that's great, that's the most amazing
thing I've ever learned. But five years from now it might be bullshit." So, you hold
everything as provisional. You don't cling to anything. You don't have any favorites. Like:
"Oh, but this thing here that I learned from this teacher, you know, I gotta keep that. This
thing, I can't die without it. Gotta keep it for the rest of my life." None of that.

Also, you got to be open to being very wrong. Which means that at any point, somebody
can come to you, tell you something, and you gotta consider what they told you. And then
it's like: "Yeah, you know what? This whole thing I've been doing here, maybe I was just
diluted. Maybe I just spent the last five years of my life going down some path, which is
leading to a dead end." And then you gotta realize that and say: "Okay, yeah, that's fine. I
knew that could happen from the very beginning, because I recognize that, you know
what, the original position is, that I don't know anything. If I don't know anything as the
original position, that means that I don't know anything. I don't know where this is leading.
It's like I'm walking around in the wilderness, not quite sure where I'm going, but
nevertheless, I'm still going somewhere." So, be open to being wrong, very wrong. Not just
on the surface wrong, but deep down wrong. Like so wrong, I want you to be so open to
being wrong, that maybe everything you learn about enlightenment is wrong. Maybe there
is no such thing as enlightenment at all. Maybe it's just a ruse. Maybe it's just another
delusion. Maybe it's a dream within a dream, within a dream, within a dream. Maybe. How
do you know? You don't know. You have to be open to being very wrong.

But at the same time, you also have to have a positive outlook, generally speaking. This
positive outlook is, that understanding is possible, that there is something larger that you

20
can understand about reality. And not just theoretically, but it is gonna be of practical
value. You sort of have to trust that it will be worth it in the end. And how do you develop
this trust? Well, I don't know. I've kind of always had it. I've always just assumed that the
investigation is worthwhile, even if it doesn't particularly yield the fruits that I hoped it
would. And you know what, if I keep going with the investigation, maybe it'll yield fruits that
I never even imagined possible in my wildest dreams.

So, you gotta have this generally positive outlook, because what I see people doing
committing this other mistake is that they say: "Well, yeah, Leo, so it sounds like you're
saying that all this stuff is just impossible. There's all these traps and all these mistakes
that one could make. So, why not just not do any of that?" And my response to that is, no,
you don't have that option. Because by not making a choice, you've made a choice, you've
made the choice to do the default position thing, and the default position thing is, that
you're gonna be just absorbing your paradigm from mainstream reality. You don't have this
option of not doing the investigation. You're just gonna be ignorant. You're gonna fall back
into ignorance. That's all that's gonna happen, if you don't do this investigation. So, this
notion that: "Oh, well, Leo, there's nothing to understand about reality and truth is an
illusion, it's just a myth. All this is pointless. Just stop it. Just stop it." No, if you do that,
you're gonna wind up in the worst situation of all. That's the worst thing you can do, to do
nothing. And this sort of 'do nothing' is very different from the meditative Zen 'do nothing'.
The meditative Zen 'do nothing' is actually a very serious 'doing something', that's a
conscious 'do nothing'. What you do, when you become this defeatist and you say: "Oh,
well, nobody really knows what the truth is yada, yada, yada." That's a defeatist attitude.
That is not gonna get you very far. That's the worst of all. And that's the majority of people.
That's what the majority of people are doing. So, if you take that attitude, you will get what
the majority of people are getting. It's not gonna be very great.

The other thing you need to do is to not become loyal to any one teaching. That's what
makes this method different from just picking some one spiritual tradition and just following
it through to the end. If you become loyal to any one tradition, you will not develop the big
picture, I pretty much guarantee it. No matter how far you go in that tradition, you will not,
because you will become a loyalist of that tradition. And in fact, the more results you gain
from that tradition, the more loyal you'll become to it. You see, you will use the fruits of
your dedication and loyalty to one teaching, and I'm not saying there won't be fruits, there

21
will be fruits, but you will use those fruits to become a sectarian of that tradition. That's
what you'll do. How else could it be. Because you haven't explored all the other
perspectives possible.

Another thing you gotta keep in mind is that reality can be absurd, outrageous, irrational,
shocking, and counterintuitive. This is something you have to be open to, like really open
to this possibility, that everything you thought about reality could be turned upside down.
That there could be weird, shocking plot twists and reversals, that make Fight Club looks
like child's play, in this work. There might be some days where you discover something so
shocking, that it leaves you speechless for a week. You gotta be open to that kind of thing,
as you're doing this investigation. That's a huge element. Because a lot of people, they
limit themselves by saying like: "Well, if it's absurd, then it's not worth investigating and it
can't possibly be true. And if it's so outrageous, it can't possibly be true. And if it's irrational
and it's not logical, it can't possibly be true. And if it leads to this weird paradox, it can't
possibly be true, it's not worth going any further down that direction." And that becomes a
huge barrier for discovering what's really true.

And also, don't worry too much about lack of utility in your investigations. Cause another
big trap is that people say: "Well, but I'm doing this investigation, but it's not like improving
my life immediately and it doesn't seem like it's gonna help me get more sex, or it's not
gonna help me get more money. Leo, if this got me more money than I would do it, but it's
not going to. So, why should I do it?" You have to see the bigger picture. You have to see
that this is a game that's being played with a long time horizon. This is not something you
do for a year or two, this is something you do for your whole life. When your time horizon's
a year or two, yeah, you can't motivate yourself to do this work, because it's not going to
yield to more money or more sex or a bigger house or a better career in just a year or two.
But it will, if you do it for 10, 20, 30 years, it definitely will. The foundation of your life, when
you start to change that around, it takes a while for it to percolate up to the surface of your
life. See, most people are concerned so much about the surface of their life, that they
neglect the foundation, because they think the foundation is disconnected from the
surface. No, there's just a delayed reaction. Might take you five years for the real fruits of
the foundation to percolate up to the top. But when they do, your life will become amazing
and people around you will be asking like: "What did you do? What's your secret? What's
your technique? What's the magic pill?" And inside you'll kind of laugh and chuckle

22
because you'll be like: "Well, it wasn't a magic pill or technique. It's not something you can
take a shortcut to. You can't do it in a week. Took me five or ten years to build a
foundation and to cultivate and to nurture it, to baby it, so that it becomes mature and that
it ripens and it fruits." And that's the kind of success that's really solid. The kind of success
that nobody can steal from you. You don't lose it through bad luck or having a bad
economy or getting fired from your job or something like that. That's really deep rock solid
success, that's rooted in your being, rooted in your being level. It's who you are, not some
surface possession that you have, like a nice house. Cause you can always lose your nice
house.

Another element of this approach of mine is emphasis on wisdom and growth versus just
pleasant theories or even getting more money or something like that. So, I just said don't
focus too much on the utility of it, but also don't lose the utility aspect too. The utility of it is
important, in the sense that wisdom and growth need to be occurring as you're going
through this process. This process is not slowly increasing your wisdom and your growth
and improving the quality of your life. That's a good sign to reevaluate whatever you're
doing. You probably are doing this process wrong then.

Another element of this process is to do, or to use rather, meta-sources. What are meta-
sources? Meta-sources are other people who have studied hundreds of perspectives and
hundreds of other sources, and now you're using them as one of your sources. So, a
meta-source or a metaperspective is already a perspective or a source that takes into
account many perspectives. It's already a holistic sort of source. It's basically a source
that's using this method that I'm teaching you here, and it's been using it for many years to
develop a big picture. So, you take it's big picture and you now combine that with another
big picture from another meta-source, from another meta-source, from another meta-
source, and you combine it into your meta-meta-big picture. So, these are meta-sources.
So, you could use me as a meta-source, because I pull from literally hundreds of sources
and I also pull from meta-sources. So, I'm a pretty good meta-source. But you can also
find other meta-sources. And you can find meta-meta-meta-sources. And then you can
have your own meta-meta-meta-source.

And the last thing that you gotta keep in mind with this approach is, that there's way more
to reality than meets the eye. There's way more to understand. There's way more to

23
explain. The bigger picture when you finally get it, is gonna be much bigger than you ever
imagined possible. And it's always gonna be in a state of adjustment and construction.
You're never gonna have some monolithic big picture, which is just like: "Okay, that's it. It's
locked in stone. Here it is. Here it is. Let me put it on my display case." It's not gonna be
like that. It's going to be an ever evolving process to the last breath you take in this life. But
it just might be more worthwhile and yield to amazing results, far beyond anything you
imagined by just taking some truth and putting it on your trophy display case.

So, what I've shared with you here is sort of my meta-research approach. This is my own
personal philosophy and the principles that I follow to develop my own big picture, to have
my own insights about life, and then to share them with you. The value of developing this
bigger picture is indescribable. It's really tough to articulate. I struggle to articulate it,
because there are subtleties that I can only articulate to somebody, who has gone through
this process and who has studied hundreds of sources. Since most people don't do that,
because they're fucking lazy, since they want to take the easy way out, by just sticking with
one tradition or by just adopting beliefs from their culture or their family or whatever other
trap they want to fall into. Because they want to take the easy way out, it's hard to
communicate these subtleties. Some of the most delicious facets of life will come from this
process. It'll be delicious on an intellectual level, it'll be very satisfying and fulfilling. But it'll
also be very practical, in that you will live your life in this amazing way where people will
look at you and they'll say: "Damn, there's something different about that guy or that girl,
because the way they're living their life, like, that's so different. What is it about that
person? I wonder where their secret is." And your secret will be so deep and so
foundational, that you won't even be able to explain it to them. Cause look, it's taken over
an hour for me just to gloss over this stuff and I've just glossed over it. You better believe,
that I could spend ten hours on this topic and there would be still more that needs to be
said. There's a lot, a lot to what I'm talking about here. This is really the foundation of
personal growth right here. Even though it doesn't seem like it. Even though it seems that
sort of abstract and maybe you're not sure exactly how to go out and apply it tomorrow.
This is the foundation.

I want to read you a quote, a metaphor that I really love for how this process of big picture
construction works. It's a quote from Otto Neurath, who was a philosopher and logical
positivist of about a hundred years ago. And here's what he wrote:

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"We are like sailors who are on the open sea and must reconstruct their ship, but are
never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away, a new one must
be put in place at once and for the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using
the old beams and the driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by
gradual reconstruction."

So, what he's talking about here, is he's saying that this process of rearranging your web
of beliefs, is a recursive process. You can never take your ship, you can never take your
rotten ship and just drag it ashore. The ship is always at sea. There is no shore. There is
no foundation. There is no safe place. There is no one assumption that you can make
that's foolproof and that you never have to question or investigate. You start with this
rotten ship, and your object in life is to construct a healthy structurally sound ship. And so,
the way you do that, is by standing on one plank, while you're fixing the other. As you fix
one plank, then you get on the other plank and you fix the one you were just standing on.
And you keep doing that by moving and fixing, and fixing, and fixing, and fixing, and fixing,
and fixing. And through that process, you will have a beautiful ship in the end. But you can
never take for granted, that everything on your ship is fixed. Because there might always
be some sneaky little plank somewhere, there might be some termites in some corner of
the ship, that you failed to take into account, which might destroy everything. So, this
means that you always must be vigilant, you can never take any of this for granted, and
that your web of beliefs has to be in constant and perpetual construction. And this requires
energy and effort and vigilance for your entire life.

And now the question for you is: Will you see the value in doing that? Can you envision
that? Cause you gotta have a long time horizon here. We're talking about the whole rest of
your life, basically. Can you envision the value of this? Because you don't know what the
details of the value will be. You don't know specifically what this will result in. But you can
have an intuition, about that maybe this would be an unorthodox approach to life, that very
few people take, and maybe this will produce some extraordinary results. Maybe. And then
you gotta ask yourself: "Am I willing to commit and to follow all these principles and to
watch myself like a hawk, to make sure that I follow through on it. Year after year after
year, decade after decade after decade?" And that's something only you can answer for
yourself.

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All right, now let me address some objections here to everything that I said.

First objection is: "But Leo, won't doing all this research lead to stuff like researching stupid
things like UFOs and God knows what other kind of new age nonsense?"

My answer is: Yes, it will. That is the nature of research, that you don't know where
research might lead. So, if you wanna do a open-ended search, you can't know ahead of
time what's worthwhile to investigate and what's not. Otherwise, you run into catch-22 and
it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think that something isn't worth researching, you
don't research it, and therefore you have prejudged it and you have no opportunity to ever
be corrected on that. Because you already think that what you know, you know. When in
fact you don't. So, will this lead to you wasting your time researching some stupid stuff?
Sure. That's what research is. Research, a lot of it is you wasting your time going down
dead ends. But that's okay, because you're not gonna be lost down every dead end
forever, and you don't need to research every single thing on earth, just the things that are
relevant to your big picture, understanding. So, will you run into some dead ends? You
certainly will. You have to see the bigger picture of this process and you have to kind of
trust that things will gel in the end and that your time, even though it might be wasted in
the short term, will not be wasted in the long term. That's what a good researcher does, is
to take that attitude.

Another objection you might have is: "But Leo, where do you draw the line? I mean, you
start talking about UFOs and conspiracy theories and this and that and all sorts of crazy
stuff. And then where does it end? It sounds like I gotta research for the rest of my life, all
this stupid shit. Most of it's gonna be false. So, what do I do?"

Well, the reality is, that you don't know where to draw the line. You don't. That's your
position. You were born and you don't know where to draw the fucking line. If you knew
where to draw all the lines, you'd be done, you'd know everything. But you don't know
everything and you don't know where to draw the lines. So, like I said, you're gonna have
to go down some dead ends and just loosen your requirement for this thing to be very
efficient, highly efficient process, where everything I do leads to some direct immediate
financial result. It's not gonna work that way. So, if you had that kind of expectation, don't
even bother. Don't even bother starting.

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Another objection is: "But Leo, isn't there a risk here with this process of believing all sorts
of silly, wacky new age things?"

Well, this risk is there no matter what. You might think that just by sticking with mainstream
culture, that you avoid the risk of believing silly things. This is not true at all. The only
difference is that with mainstream culture, the silly things that you believe are believed by
everybody around you, so they don't feel as silly, because you have the support of your
culture. But if you take a look through history, you don't have to be a genius to see how
many silly things mainstream culture has believed. And you better believe that today's
mainstream culture still believes a lot of stupid shit, that's flat out false and very unhealthy
and toxic and damaging to your life. So, this risk of believing silly things, this can't be
avoided. This is the whole epistemic problem. This is why we're doing epistemology in the
first place, because we want to minimize our believing of silly things. And so this process
that I outlined for you is the best process that I know of, at this point in my life, for how to
avoid this. It's your best chance. It's not foolproof. You will still be tempted to fall into many
of the traps I talked about, even though I've glossed them over here.

Another objection might be: "But Leo, isn't what you're talking about relativism, the idea
that there is no truth and that everything is equally valid."

No, not at all. What I'm talking about is not relativism, because even though I'm telling you
to sample different perspectives, I am not telling you to take all perspectives equally and to
just come up with an average of all the perspectives you sampled. That would not be
correct. We're not averaging perspectives. Some perspectives you're gonna explore, you'll
explore them for a couple of months or even a couple of minutes, and you'll realize that it's
just wrong. It's wrong, it's false, it's stupid. And so you'll make that determination, you'll
move forward. What I'm talking about is not relativism. You will find that some perspectives
are a lot truer than others and that is fine.

Another objection might be: "But Leo, why bother with all this? After all, nobody really
knows the truth. So, is there a point?"

And I believe I've addressed this already, in that there is a point. But for somebody who
has this objection of, "Why bother at all, it just seems like a waste of time and energy. I

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could do much better things with my time in this life than waste it reading books and
embodying different perspectives and so forth", well, it's gonna be very difficult for me to
convince you, because you're overlooking the subtleties, and these subtleties can be very
significance once they stack up. What I'm claiming is that there will be a snowball effect
that gets built every year. The snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as
you do this work. And then the subtle effects will have accumulated so much, that your
entire life will transform and you will look back on your life and you'll be like: "Oh my God, I
can't believe that everybody isn't doing this. This was the best decision I ever made, to
adopt this approach to my life." But it's difficult to explain that to somebody who's just like:
"Oh Leo, why bother? It doesn't seem practical." Difficult to convince that kind of person,
because they have such a myopic view of their life and they just want short term results.
And that's generally why they won't be successful, because they keep running away from
the long view in all the different things that they try to do in their life. Whether it's business,
relationships or something else. You know, a person who has a short term view of things,
who's myopic, he's myopic everywhere, not just with epistemology. He's myopic in
relationships and everywhere. And that's why his life is shit, generally speaking.

Another objection might be: "But Leo, why not just pursue enlightenment and let that solve
everything? Why pursue this big picture understanding and taking all these perspectives?
That's just all illusion. What's the point of exploring all these different illusions, when we
know that enlightenment is the ultimate answer?"

Again, you don't know that. You think that's the case, but remember, the first positions that
you know nothing. So, all the stuff you've heard about enlightenment, even if you've
experienced a few glimpses of enlightenment and all the masters you've read about, and
you've gone to all these workshops and retreats and this and this and that, you don't know.
Enlightenment could just be another dream within another dream within another dream.
Could be another illusion, could be a scam, as far as you know. I'm not saying it is, I'm
saying from your epistemic position, you don't know. Until you become fully enlightened,
you don't know. And even after you've become fully enlightened, you don't know. You don't
know if there's more. You don't know if there's some perspective you've missed. You don't
know if enlightenment is really the full spectrum. You don't know if there's other practical
things besides enlightenment. You don't know. You will never know, until you just get on
this process and you just follow this process. You just don't know. So, be careful about

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that, you're playing with fire. If there's one thing that enlightenment should have taught
you, and I'm not even talking about you becoming enlightened, I'm saying just if you
learned about enlightenment and now you kind of are a believer in enlightenment, you say
like: "Okay, I know that enlightenment must be true even though I haven't experienced it
yet", if you're there, watch out. Because here's the lesson that a lot of people that are there
are missing. And the lesson is, if enlightenment has taught you anything, it's that
everything you thought before, could easily be wrong and you won't know why it's wrong or
how it could possibly be that wrong. So, there could be huge plot twists in life. That's
basically what you should have learned from the existence of enlightenment. Now, the
mistake people make is they think: "Oh, okay, so if I just get enlightened that fixes
everything." Not necessarily. Keep in mind that there might be another huge plot twist
coming after enlightenment. That's the meta lesson that you learn from enlightenment. It's
not to go become enlightened, it's that you gotta be really fucking careful about what you
believe and how firmly you believe it and this notion you have that: "Oh, okay, now I really
got it. Now, I really figured it out." Cause as soon as you think you figured it out, that's
when you've opened yourself to the biggest epistemic blunder possible.

Now, it might seem as though I'm arrogant in the way I talk about some of these topics.
And it might seem like: "Well, Leo, you're talking about like being humble and not taking
any positions on things and being open to stuff, but then you come up here and you rant
about this and you rant about that and it seems like you're not following your own advice."
Actually, I'm extremely epistemically humble, but that's difficult for people to see, because
that's not something that I flaunt. Make a distinction between one's manner, the way one
speaks and acts and so forth, and what one actually does in how they pursue their
understanding. So, the thing that I don't talk about that much is how fucking careful I am in
studying all these perspectives and how vigilant I am in watching myself like a hawk,
knowing that I am my own greatest enemy. I'm not worried about my critics and people
leaving me stupid little comments and stuff, that's not what worries me deep down. What
worries me deep down inside is myself and the trickery that I know that I'm capable of and
the labyrinth of my mind. I am acutely aware of all that stuff. So aware, that I'm aware that
there might be things I'm not aware of. And this makes me very epistemically humble in
practice, even though in outward appearance I can seem kind of arrogant and maybe even
sometimes you can mistake this for me having a position or being ideological. That's not
what it really is. It's very difficult for me to communicate the epistemic humbleness that I

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actually embody. This is my greatest strength, I think, that I really am, I'm seriously willing
to consider that I'm wrong on anything and I don't really care about defending any position.
What I care about is just seeing the big picture. I care about the meta-perspective. I care
about understanding. I care about growing my life in a practical way. I care about getting
extraordinary results. And even with all these things, I'm still willing to evaluate and
question all of it. There's nothing about myself or my views of life that I'm not willing to
question. Now, do I have certain assumptions that I'm working on? Of course, you have to.
When you're building the boat in the middle of the sea, you gotta stand on a plank. You
can never land the boat on land. You're always standing on some plank, and that plank
you're standing on might be rotten. And I'm very aware of that. And what this does is, that
this makes me extremely flexible. This makes me able to study perspectives that I see
very few people being able to study.

I've encountered quite a few enlightened people. And I don't even see that these people
have the kind of open-mindedness that I'm talking about here. I'm talking about complete
openmindedness. Completely willing to question everything. This, I think, is the safest
epistemic foundation that one can have in a world where there are no epistemic
foundations. So, that's the paradox of it.

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