What Is Wisdom? - The Ultimate Guide To Wisdom

[Music] welcome to the ultimate guide to wisdom but what is wisdom and what is the opposite of wisdom we're going to look at these questions in a lot of depth today give you many answers and we're going to explain how to develop wisdom in yourself should you desire to go down that path down the path of philosophy after all philosophy is the love of wisdom so what makes for a philosopher and why do philosophers pursue the things that they're pursuing now wisdom wisdom is interesting because wisdom is different than information it's different than knowledge it's different than book smarts a lot of people go to university but they're not necessarily wise academics with phds they can be good scholars but they aren't necessarily wise people with high iq also aren't necessarily wise so what is wisdom what distinguishes it from everything else and why is it so important so here's how we're going to tackle this topic i actually sat down and i spent several days contemplating what is wisdom of course i've been contemplating it on and off sort of casually for years but like specifically for this episode i just sat down and contemplated for a few days straight and came up with a lot of stuff um but the the issue here is that even though i'm going to give you all the answers of the results of my contemplations really you need to contemplate for yourself what wisdom is only when you generate your own answers will it have the kind of value it needs to have for you but here's probably something that will get your mind jogging and think it in the right direction now i have a long list of characteristics of wisdom and wise people that we're going to cover here and we're going to sort of do it in the order of most importance because there's sort of an essence to what wisdom is so when you're contemplating what is wisdom you can ask yourself what is the essence of wisdom and when you first start doing it it's it's rather vague and nebulous and it's hard to articulate exactly what it is and i tried many different attempts and there's a lot of stuff i have to say about it but really when you boil it all down what is wisdom so here's what it is it's a keen discernment it's good judgment it's having proper priorities that's really what it boils down to there's certain sets of values that are lower values and certain sets of priorities and values that are higher and the wise person puts the higher above the lower which is how it should be and then when they live their life according to that according to the higher over the lower then they live a wise life and this is a person that you would call wise and if they do the opposite then they are not wise so i know that's kind of vague but then again wisdom is sort of a nebulous concept and just what what generates this keen discernment what does that really mean this keen discernment is this something that you can develop how does it come about how come some people have a keen discernment and good judgment and good sense of priorities and others don't you've probably noticed some people have this and other people don't in fact most people don't so those people who have it how do they get it well we're going to be talking about that as we keep going here and i'm going to be listing other characteristics of what wisdom is so wise people are deliberative and thoughtful in the way they approach life they rely upon contemplation and they ask powerful questions they self-reflect and they introspect they're curious about themselves they don't take themselves for granted wise people are existentially oriented what does that mean that means that they're asking questions and thinking about and interacting with reality in such a way where it's more than just their personal survival or how to meet their personal pleasures or how to make life most comfortable and easiest for themselves they realize that there is an existential dimension to life and they are interested in this existential dimension and in fact it's this existential dimension that is the higher set of priorities and values which they place correctly at the top and then all the other values go underneath that and are a lower set of priorities this is actually pretty rare most people don't live their life this way most people are not existentially oriented and from this ultimately stem all of their problems wise people exhibit an existential humility rather an epistemic humility an epistemic humility which means that they take the problem of knowledge seriously what does it mean to know something how do you know that something is true at all they don't take this problem for granted they take epistemology seriously they understand that to come to know something is not a trivial matter a lot of times we think we know something when in fact we don't really know it we're tricking ourselves we're deceiving ourselves wise people take the possibility of self-deception seriously whereas most people don't as part of this epistemic humility wise people are exceptionally open-minded because you need to keep an open mind when you realize that there's a lot of stuff you don't know those two naturally fit together wise people take seriously the possibility that they are fooling themselves whereas most people don't wise people are experienced and that's an important way in which wisdom is developed is through massive exposure to life to experience experience is the ultimate teacher and the more experience you accumulate and the more consciously you accumulate it and the more you reflect upon it the more you contemplate it the more you question it the more you think about it the deeper your wisdom tends to get for example relative to children adults most adults are wise we could say they're wise of course there's many foolish adults out there but uh but like i said relative to children why is that primarily it's because children lack all experience they don't know how cruel the world can be they don't know how tricky the world can be and they simply lack experience in all these different areas of life like in relationships with sexuality with business with how to make a living with health and diet and other things like this and so they make many mistakes children do and adults are necessary to impart wisdom upon the children so the children don't do something stupid end up killing themselves or poisoning themselves or harming themselves well just take that and then extend it out beyond just merely adults and children but most most of what we call adults are actually just grown-up children they're not really adults and so they also need wisdom they need wisdom from people who have been contemplating and thinking about reality and who have a deep base of experience with life from who whom these adult uh you know grown-up grown-up these grown-up children can also learn and who's uh whose counsel they can follow so that they don't get themselves into trouble politically sexually in business and elsewhere with health wisdom is also holistic and big picture a holistic understanding of reality and life now this issue of holism i actually have a whole deep episode that will come out in the next week or two about holism so we're going to talk about the issue of holism very deeply so hold on for that but just remember that wisdom is holistic which is one of the things that makes it different from just information or knowledge which tends to be very specialized and narrow you can be a technical expert an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a academic that's some sort of technical knowledge you have it's not a holistic understanding of life and therefore you're not able to use that knowledge to really orient yourself and develop that keen sense of discernment to make good decisions in life wise decisions wise people value the truth this is actually a pretty rare quality in humans most humans don't value the truth because they're too myopic to appreciate the significance of truth in fact to appreciate the awesome significance of truth and why it should be valued requires a lot of contemplation and wisdom to begin with to be interested in truth is already a sign of wisdom wisdom is non-judgmental the wisest people are the least judgmental wisdom is also a keen awareness of the counterintuitiveness of life we've talked about this in the past this theme that life is counter-intuitive and that to be successful in many domains of life requires being able to see the counter-intuitive moves that are necessary oftentimes life works the opposite of how you think the thing you think will get you what you want ends up backfiring and gets you the opposite you think that chasing pleasure for example will create the best life and you discover it's the opposite you think that getting a lot of sex will get you the best life and then it turns out to be the opposite you think that doing a bunch of drugs will get you the best life turns out to be the opposite you think that chasing some get-rich-quick scheme will make you wealthy turns out it makes you broke and to be able to see this that is wisdom you see the twisted ways the inversions that life takes to be able to foresee that without having to hit your face against it that's wisdom wisdom is also long-term thinking the opposite of myopia that also comes with patience wisdom is patient it's willing to wait to get what it wants wisdom is independence of thought to be an independent thinker to contemplate every situation through for yourself and to derive your own answers rather than just blindly accepting the answers that somebody else tells you because after all if you're wise you understand that how can you trust anyone to tell you anything because they could be wrong so you have to think it through for yourself wisdom is nuanced it's a way of thinking about life that recognizes the complexities and subtleties of different situations in life and that rarely are things black and white or as simple as they first seem remember as a child how simple certain aspects of life seemed to you only for you later to discover the complexities and nuances and then you realize how childish your thinking was how naive you were you wisened up through experience probably through making mistakes and hitting your head against the wall speaking of which wisdom wisdom doesn't mean you never make mistakes but wise people learn very deeply from their own mistakes and they never make the same mistake twice because they make the mistake they suffer for it they learn the consequences and how the suffering comes about because they're aware they self-reflect they contemplate why did this mistake occur what did i do to cause this mistake and then they learn their lesson and they generally don't make the same mistake twice wise people are mentally flexible and highly intuitive they're able to change their mind about things this allows them to correct mental errors or errors in their worldview whereas most people don't do that wise people can tolerate paradox paradox and contradiction whereas usually this shuts a normal mind down for a wise mind a wise mind understands that reality is paradoxical and works in these counter-intuitive and contradictory ways and they're capable of holding that paradox without being confused or paralyzed by it wisdom is objective neutral and unbiased most minds and intellects are highly biased whereas the wise mind since itself reflects since it values truth it sees through its own bs and its own biases and it becomes keenly aware of these biases and how these biases distort its perception of reality which gives it clear vision so it's the opposite of self-biased the more wise you become the more aware you become of yourself biases and the more you let them go see my episode about self bias for more on that topic wisdom is skeptical it doubts things a wise person doubts himself first and foremost but skeptical in a moderated healthy way because there are unhealthy versions toxic versions of skepticism where skepticism is weaponized i've discussed that in the past see my episode called true versus false skepticism that helps you to see that distinction between good and bad types of skepticism so the wise person by studying his or her own has a very keen nose for smelling out and therefore the wise person is difficult to manipulate and difficult to fool and to trick because he studied all the tricks and he's aware of how tricky the mind is how tricky life is how tricky humans are and yet at the same time this does not turn into a paranoia so the wise person is cautious when entering new situations and dealing with certain people who could be dangerous and deceptive but it doesn't turn into paranoia it's cautioned without the fear behind it and that's an important distinction especially these days a lot of people get trapped and lost in conspiracy theories and all sorts of paranoid thinking and this is the opposite of wisdom so caution but not fear the wise person is principled they have integrity they have a certain set of principles that they live by and they stick to those principles even when it's difficult which is pretty rare it's rare to find highly principled integris people without devolving into dogma and mental rigidity so there's a difference between being principled in integris versus religiously dogmatic for example just following certain rules that people programmed you with principles are things you develop yourself you derive these principles yourself these are not the ten commandments that you've read in a book somewhere and you've memorized and now you parrot them like a robot and act them out like a robot rather you through your own contemplative efforts through studying life and studying your own self you derive principles these principles are deep profound lessons that you learn from experiencing life and then uh and then you follow those principles these are the principles of wisdom and so wise people have these principles then unwise people don't or they're unable to follow their principles they might have a set of beliefs like maybe a lot of religious people will believe the ten commandments but then do they actually follow them no which means they're out of integrity and to even value having integrity that already requires a fairly high degree of wisdom why is integrity important that might not be obvious to you well you have to contemplate that and you have to experience what it's like to live life without integrity or to interact with people without integrity and then you'll learn the the lesson of why integrity is important wise people are willing to do the right thing when called when the situation calls for it wisdom is self-disciplining because one of the principles you'll learn as you go through life is that without self-discipline you can't live a good and peaceful life you're always going to be tormented and so wise people they have a intrinsic sense of motivation they don't need to be whipped externally by some task master to live a good life or to eat the right food or to abstain from certain traps and dangers in life they just do it through self-discipline and this they learn through experience and by making mistakes you learn the dangers of being undisciplined and then you learn to discipline yourself and then you are motivated intrinsically from the inside rather than from the outside you don't need to be paid a bunch of money or given a bunch of compliments to do the things you need to do to be principled because you value being principled in and of itself more than you value the money or the praise or the love or whatever you're getting from somebody else see the wise person has an internal locus of control as it's known in psychology the wise person takes responsibility doesn't blame others for their own inadequacies or problems or suffering in life the wise person understands that he or she is the central agent of life and therefore any problems in life they come through you through me and in that sense i'm responsible for them i'm responsible for how i'm gonna respond to situations the wise person does not avoid emotional labor but faces it head on does the difficult things that need to be done to live a good life that's closely related with the self-disciplining the wise person is able to abstain from and to control his or her cravings isn't a slave to cravings because if you're a slave to your cravings then you can't be principled you're just going to be doing whatever your cravings want you to do at that particular point in time and of course that leads to a life that's full of suffering and deep mistakes and regrets and errors and catastrophes and disasters the wise person highly values education and learns from the mistakes of others yes you can learn from your own mistakes of course and you should and that's going to be inevitable if you're going to become lies but wouldn't it be wise to learn from the deep history of mistakes that mankind has made before you you can read history books you can talk to your elders to your parents to colleagues and ask them what the mistakes they've made and learn from their mistakes so that you don't have to go through the same fall into the same traps that they fell into humans have been alive for hundreds of thousands of years we mostly face similar survival challenges and we fall into the same kind of traps so really there's not much reason for you to make mistakes in your life as long as you're able to be forward thinking enough to to read and to study lessons of history and then you can avoid many of those mistakes wisdom an aspect of wisdom is exquisite balance and moderation wisdom understands that life is exquisitely balanced on a razor's edge and that in almost any situation it's easy to go too far into one direction or the next whether it's in politics or in relationships or when it comes to money or to nutrition in all of these and many other areas in life it's all about exquisite balance finding that delicate balancing point and that this balance is dynamic i've talked about this in a previous episode called i forget exactly what it's called but something about the importance of balance in personal development i forget the exact title and you can search for balance actualize that or you'll find it and anyways so uh so wisdom recognizes that it's not about taking some extreme position it's about finding those balance points everywhere in life and so wisdom is the ability to do that whereas when you lack wisdom you tend to swing your pendulum too far to the left too far to the right and yet at the same time wisdom recognizes that balance does not mean that you're always going to split everything down the middle that is a foolish notion of balance so balance does not mean that you take uh nazis on the right and progressives on the left and then compromise between them and say well the truth is somewhere down the middle it's not not everything is symmetrical not every debate not every issue has two sides the truth between the denial of climate change and the reality of climate change is not somewhere in the middle and so wisdom understands that and in fact wisdom sees how this splitting everything down the middle evenly how that is in fact used by devils and manipulators and knaves in order to try to trick you sometimes you do have to swing your pendulum sometimes extremely to one side because the situation already is deeply out of balance and so you're putting it back into balance by swinging your pendulum to one side but then you recognize okay now i've got to swing it back because it's not going to stay there forever once you've corrected the situation then you've got a new situation that now requires a new application of that keen discernment that we started off with wise people are mature why people have high emotional intelligence wisdom can admit i don't know that's one of the hallmarks of wisdom and it usually takes many decades for a human to develop this capacity to say i don't know and to not judge oneself for it and to not judge others like oh he said he doesn't know that means he's stupid no when someone is able to say i don't know that actually means he's smart see that's one of those counter-intuitive aspects to life too many people are unwilling to say i don't know and that's what makes them unwise as socrates famously said uh the one true thing that i know is that i know nothing and that's what makes him so wise actually in fact i think the story with socrates is uh is that somebody went to the oracle of delphi in greece or whatever in i don't know yeah in delphi it was in delphi city in greece uh so they went to the oracle of delphi and they asked who is the wisest you know who is the wisest of the greeks and the oracle said socrates and then they asked the oracle well why socrates what's so special about him and the oracle said because he knows that he knows nothing similar to that along the same lines is that wisdom is able to admit when it's wrong wisdom doesn't mean perfection like i said wise people can make mistakes but the wise person is able to recognize quickly when he's wrong make a correction not get hung up on it not get rigid or dogmatic about it not try to cover it up and then of course a corollary to this is that the wise person is able to apologize genuinely apologize not as some sort of fake or cover to save face or to you know save one's career but to genuinely apologize for a mistake this takes wisdom to do that similar to this wisdom is able to forgive and to let things go wisdom is also very careful when giving out advice because giving advice is a great responsibility and different people face different situations so just because something worked for me that doesn't mean it's going to work for you and as i develop wisdom i see that and so therefore i'm careful not to just project my situation onto your situation and so the kind of advice that wisdom gives is not a kind of a specific abc one two three do these steps do you know follow the ten commandments and you will have a good life or you will get punished in hell that's not a good form giving advice rather wisdom guides the one who is asking for advice wisdom guides him or her to discover the answers for themselves so the socratic method is used or a form of guiding one or facilitating or coaching rather than just telling someone what to do and wisdom is careful not to push advice onto others not to give unsolicited advice wisdom is benevolent compassionate and selfless wisdom values solitude and silence and if you're familiar with spiral dynamics then wisdom we could say is something like spiral dynamics tier two cognition that's where really you develop wisdom because only at tier two do you really transcend the uh survival values and needs and start operating from the being values and needs and that now takes you into the sort of existential priorities territory now that's wisdom that paints a pretty good uh pretty good portrait for you there now let's talk about the opposite of wisdom what do you think that is what's the opposite of wisdom foolishness of course the fool so what is foolishness well foolishness is basically the opposite list of everything i just gave you but even though i tell you that i want to go and elaborate upon that some more because it's one thing to just tell you it's the opposite it's another thing to actually paint you a detailed picture of what the opposite looks like so let's let's do that and i want you to see here i want you to notice something this is sort of a meta point a little meta tangent of this uh of this episode so ostensibly here we're teaching you about wisdom but also we're going to teach you a meta point here about implicit and explicit i've talked about this in one of my episodes called implicit versus explicit understanding so so look if i tell you that foolishness is the opposite of wisdom that leaves it rather implicit you have to sit there and unpack that in your mind to really understand what foolishness is now let's make it explicit by going down this list and i want you to notice the difference between having it implicit versus explicit because when you make something implicit explicit that can be very powerful at the same time as i talked about in that implicit versus explicit episode some things can't be made fully explicit and that's okay too and it can be powerful to keep something implicit so uh how do you know when to do which well that's wisdom that's wisdom too all right so let's make foolishness explicit so the essence of foolishness is of course poor judgment and lack of discernment you know these kinds of people you probably have some of these friends in your life the kind of friends just have constantly bad judgment they constantly keep getting themselves into bad situations in their own life that they themselves created through how they make choices in their life they're making the wrong kinds of choices over and over and over again and they're not learning their lessons from this they keep doubling down on their mistakes that's a fool that's the essence of a fool a fool has a poor sense of priorities in life so the fool has life backwards has his priorities backwards the fool places the low above the high what do i mean by this well i mean something like rather than pursuing the truth which would be the high above the low low in this case might be something like sex or drugs or pleasure or money right see the wise will place the truth above all those things whereas the fool will place sex above truth money above truth fame and reputation above truth drugs above truth and truth is not the only high priority there are many other high priorities we could talk about that's just one example but this tends to be the fool's problem he places the low above the high and he's living his life backwards and of course because of this all sorts of uh craziness and calamity ensues and lots of suffering and the fool doesn't know you know why am i so unlucky why do i keep stumbling in all these problems well because you've placed the low above the high because the fool can't see the value of the high the fool can't see the value of truth of love of beauty of existential questioning of contemplation and of philosophy to the fool none of these none of these things mean anything because the fool is only interested in base survival cravings satisfying things like sex you know cravings for food and and for money and for for fame and for status and for material possessions and things like this the fool is also easily lost in minutia and pettiness because the fool is wrapped up in survival the fool has confused life for the game of survival and he's just like a hamster in a wheel running running running but always in place never getting anywhere it takes wisdom to see that hamster in a wheel mechanism so the fool often loses sight of the big picture of life and just gets so engrossed and mesmerized by the minutia of life that he could spend 40 years you know doing some petty stupid little thing thinking it's important when really in the grand scheme of things it's not important because again his sense of importance and significance and priority this is all backwards because he's not thinking existentially or deeply about life the fool is ignorant and proud of it the biggest fools are aggressively ignorant they will try to fight you over their ignorance to prove to you how smart they are and the more ignorant they are the harder they fight because the fool is unwilling to admit a mistake or to admit that they're wrong about a thing the fool thinks he understands everything one of the key characteristics of fools is arrogance the fool thinks he's smarter than everybody else the fool thinks he's got reality all figured out and that everybody else is an idiot the fool underestimates the depth of problems in life life has existential dilemmas that the fool is completely oblivious to because the fool is wrapped up in his little reality his little selfish petty little existence and the fool doesn't see anything beyond himself outside of himself he doesn't have a universal sort of perspective a meta perspective the fool is completely wrapped up in the in the in the content the little petty content of his you know survival problems in life and um he can't see anything beyond that and then of course that leads to a sort of a a vicious downward cycle of you know just engaging in the pettiness and minutia of survival and the more you do that the more you suffer and the more problems you have and then it just doubles down upon itself the fool tends to be anti-intellectual it doesn't value education because hey he thinks he already knows everything there is to know so why why read books why listen to experts why bother to go out there and find wise elders and sages to study with why do all that when i already know everything of course the fool doesn't contemplate or self-reflect this is key for the fool it's impossible to be a fool if you self-reflect a lot because the more you self-reflect the more you see how you act like a fool the more you see the consequences and the suffering that this foolishness creates in your life and then it turns into a sort of self-correcting mechanism self-reflection does but the fool is too busy he's too distracted by the externalities of life you know chasing pleasure and other external things doesn't leave any time to sit to reflect to contemplate to deeply think things through to ask questions the fool just wants answers the fool isn't willing to do the actual intellectual work to derive his own answers by asking deep questions the fool thinks that hey if you can just tell me the answers that'll just be a shortcut and that is in general the fool's folly is that he's looking for shortcuts in life everything you know how how can i make it easy how can i make it comfortable how can i make it most convenient and in doing that you know the fool thinks that by trying to have the easy life his life will be easy but counterintuitively the opposite happens when you try to go for the easy life your life becomes hard whereas if you just embrace the difficulty and challenge of life faced emotional labor head-on didn't avoid responsibility then your life would actually start to become easier the fool doesn't see value in truth the fool confuses truth with whatever serves him because the way the fool thinks if it doesn't serve me like if the truth what what is the truth going to do for me if the truth doesn't give me pleasure and it doesn't get me money and sex and it doesn't make me comfortable and oftentimes truth is uncomfortable if the truth doesn't make me comfortable does make me feel good immediately then what's the use of truth or the fool confuses his personal biases and beliefs and dogmas and ideology for the truth like the ten commandments that's the truth whatever whatever reinforces my existing worldview that's the truth that's a very foolish epistemic mistake of course the fool is generally unconcerned with existential questions feels that they're uh just philosophy just mental masturbation doesn't see the utility and existential questioning generally speaking the fool lacks awareness lacks consciousness that should be obvious given how much we've talked about consciousness on this channel the fool is oblivious to the problem of self-deception the fool externalizes deception as something that is coming from the outside so oftentimes the fool that's why the fool falls for things like conspiracy theories because it's very tempting to think that somebody else is fooling you when in fact the foolishness is coming from within you but because the fool doesn't self-reflect and doesn't study one's own self-deceptions the fool is ignorant of such things and therefore the fool has many enemies and people that he judges and hates and blames and scapegoats outside externally so the fool will apply skepticism remember we talked about the distinction between true versus false skepticism the fool will apply false skepticism weaponized skepticism at external enemies and not apply the skepticism correctly to his own worldview and to his own mind and this just reinforces his foolishness because of this the fool is gullible and easily tricked and manipulated because actually the fool has first of all first and foremost fooled himself once he's fooled himself thinking that he's all smart and all-knowing and that he has life figured out and then his priorities are straight thinking he's got all that figured out of course his whole view of life now is backwards and so now he's very easy to fool and manipulate because all he's doing he's just chasing pleasure and comfort and avoiding painful things and fear and so you can manipulate him very easily with these emotions of course the fool is inexperienced so the fool will often have very strong opinions about things that he has no experience in whatsoever like what kind of healthcare system should we have the fool knows that we should not have socialized healthcare well does the fool have any experience with healthcare no of course not but he knows that socialized healthcare is evil you know likewise you know what kind of economic system should we have well the fool knows we should we should go full-on socialist the fool knows that well this has the fool studied economics and how economies work no the fool just knows that socialism is you know capitalism is evil and socialism is good the fool just knows that um now i'm not endorsing capitalism here per se i mean there are foolish capitalists as well as foolish socialists there there are fools in every category of of ideology on health care on religion on science on theism on atheism on everything right so we're on economics so we're not um there are so many fools to go around you'll find them everywhere so we're not picking on any any one particular category fool here but just yeah general a general inexperience when people have strong opinions about things they have never read even a single book about like a lot of fools you see a lot of fools right-wing fools for example who will who will have very strong opinions on feminism and they saw feminism is destroying western civilization and blah blah blah blah blah and you just the best thing to do with one of these fools is just ask them how many books of feminism have you read and of course the answer is zero and yet have they have these strong opinions about feminism and how feminism is destroying society now again i don't want to pick i don't want to pick on these people just that's just one example right there's a lot of foolishness to go around in and don't think that i only reserve foolishness for right wingers i mean there's there's an enormous ocean of of foolishness within the right wing uh you know politics and so forth but there's there's plenty of foolishness in the left wing as well i'm i'm more than happy put to point out foolishness on the left but there's definitely more of it on the right the fool sees wisdom as foolishness so when a fool discovers this channel for example or this video he'll listen to this and say this is stupid this is foolishness why would i waste my time on this see of course because that's how the fool stays a fool and the fool is is deeply committed to staying a fool the fool is proud of his foolishness he's real open about it that's that's one of the hallmarks of fools is that when you're dealing with a really dense fool it's infuriating because you think someone so inexperienced and so ignorant and so unaware would at least have a little bit of humility but no no no they they blame you they gaslight easy the fool will gaslight you because the fool will will cast himself as the expert in the situation you know like the fool who has just learned about enlightenment or something like that or just learned about god the possibility of god or love will come to you and try to convince you someone who's maybe been studying this stuff for five 10 20 years you know doing a lot of work inner work going to meditation retreats the fool has not gone to a single meditation retreat has hardly read a single book about non-duality whatever but then the fool will come and try to lecture you about non-duality and act all proud about it yeah and then you have to suffer this fool and so the fool tries to get you down to his level it's like uh it's like that old saw about you know wrestling with pigs you never want to wrestle with a pig because uh you'll both get dirty in the mud but the pig will enjoy it so that's that's how foolishness is you know a fool tries to entangle you and it tries to entangle the wise into into a debate into sort of a mudslinging contest and if you're wise you have to be very careful to avoid that so as you become more wise you learn how to deal with fools in a wise way because if you they try to get you to act like them once you start to act like them then you're both fools together and then of course you lose and he wins because then he has company and fools love the company of other fools because then it makes them feel secure it makes them feel like they're right so one of the most dangerous things is to find a group of fools who all behave like fools together and who reinforce their own foolishness this has been the cause of wars and genocides and evil for as long as mankind has existed the fool of course is very close-minded the fool doesn't understand the importance and value of open mindedness and the fool will try to resist any efforts to open his mind and of course the fool will gaslight you the open-minded one for trying to open his mind by calling you close-minded for not accepting his close-mindedness the fool tends to be very judgmental this is one of the easiest ways you can assess the level of consciousness and maturity and wisdom of a of a being is to take a look at how judgmental they are the more judgmental they are the uh the more like an animal they are and the less judgmental they are the the more sage-like and saintly they are so there's a direct correlation between consciousness and understanding and uh judgment is inverse correlation the fool is rash impatient easily agitated and very emotionally reactive the fool is not willing to wait the fool wants quick results the fool has a very short time frame that he's operating within he's myopic he can't see very far into the future he can't plan very far there's actually a classic psychology experiment where they they take a bunch of kids like elementary school kids put them in a room and then they will put a marshmallow in front of the of the kid and they'll say hey if you can this marshmallow they put the marshmallow like in front of the kid on a table and they say if you can sit here for 15 minutes and not eat this marshmallow then we'll give you two marshmallows and then you can eat them both but if you eat this marshmallow within the 15 minutes then you're not gonna get a second one and they do this experiment with a bunch of different kids separately they test each kid this way and what they discover is a really interesting correlation is that those kids who are able to resist eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes and they get the second one so ultimately they come out with more in the end those kids end up going on and being very successful in school and generally in life because they're able to uh you know delay their gratification and those people those kids who can't resist eating that marshmallow well you can tell the kind of results they'll get in life not very good results so in in essence this this experiment is distinguishing between those kids who are fools and those who are wise now of course there's there's probably deep physiological genetic and other sorts of components that are involved in this you know how easily you're able to write regulate your your cravings and impulses this probably has genetic components and so forth so i'm not blaming these fools for being fools in fact if i was blaming people for being fools and being very judgmental about that then that would make me a fool right so cause that would be judgment and judgment is foolish so you have to understand that the majority of people are fools and then one of the burdens of being wise is that you have to tolerate these fools live with them have them as your politicians and leaders and bosses and and co-workers and friends and family members and you gotta yeah you gotta tolerate them and that's one of the burdens of becoming wise that's why a lot of wise people choose to live on a mountaintop somewhere or in a cave because they you know after a certain point suffering these fools isn't very fun uh but on the other hand it's a good test of your wisdom because if these fools can knock you off your center then that means you got more more conscious work to do of course fools are egotistical and selfish you could in a sense say that that's what foolishness ultimately is fools follow the mob they're tribalistic they're highly conformist because the fool doesn't think anything through for himself he is just pinging off his environment his culture he just believes his culture he believes his religion he believes whatever school taught him doesn't question any of it and even when he does question it he questions it in a toxic and distorted way so so here's the irony when it comes to conspiracy theories and fools is that uh the majority of conspiracy theorists are in fact fools yet they think themselves to be being intelligent when they're doing their conspirizing conspiracy theorizing because they think they're being so anti-conformist but actually they're being very very conformist when they're subscribing to one of these wacky conspiracy theories now i'm not saying necessarily that every single conspiracy theories is wrong per se uh if you want a more detailed understanding of my opinions on conspiracy theories see my episode on conspiracy theories and the trickeries involved there conspiracy theories are very tricky um i have a nuanced position on them i don't dismiss all of them per se but my key point when it comes to conspiracy theories is realize the majority of conspiracy theorists are in fact fools they're not wise people wise people don't subscribe to that many conspiracy theories and that's because conspiracy theories are actually a misuse of skepticism they're uh grounded in in in emotional reactivity and paranoia and they're in fact highly conformist you think you're being non-conformist when you conform to a conspiracy theory something like the you know nasa fake the moon landing you think you're being non-conformist actually you're being conformist in a non-conformist sort of way and so it's tricking you fools tend to be believers blind followers and they tend to be very dogmatic because they're mentally rigid and they're stubborn and they ground their sense of identity and reality in belief unproven belief and hearsay ideas that they got from their environment that they never questioned and that they're too afraid to question because it's it takes emotional labor to question all of your beliefs and of course the fool is trying to avoid emotional labor because the fool is looking for immediate gratification the fool can't control his cravings tempted by immediate pleasure doesn't see the value in doing emotional labor wants a shortcut wants a shortcut in business wants a shortcut in relationships wants a shortcut to sex with a shortcut to money what's a shortcut to health you know the fool is the one who you can convince that hey if you if you subscribe to my all bacon diet all ice cream diet you're going to lose weight the fool is the one who will buy one of those devices that you just strap it onto your stomach and then you press a button and it gives you instant abs while you're sitting watching you know reruns of seinfeld or something the fool is who buys one of those and of course if you haven't noticed this already most of society and the entire advertising industry hundreds of billions of dollars every year go into the advertising industry it's all designed to prey on fools politics is all designed to to prey on fools to get the votes of fools many structures in society are designed for fools and why is that because the majority of people are fools and fools are very easy to fool and to control and to manipulate and to extract value from to exploit fools leave themselves open to exploitation so of course there's giant multi-billion dollar industries devoted to the exploitation of fools how about the media take a look for example at how fox news and the entire right-wing media basically nowadays the entire right-wing media in america talk show hosts youtubers conservative youtubers and so forth i mean what are they doing they're exploiting fools that's their that's that's what they do for a living that's how they earn millions of dollars doing this their their followers and subscribers are are gullible rubes the fool chases money sex pleasure and fun the fool is undisciplined the fool avoids responsibility oh that's a huge one the amount of responsibility you take on is directly proportional to how wise you are the fool is like an eel squirming his way out of responsibility as much as possible and the more foolish a person is the harder it is to convince him of the importance of taking responsibility for a problem see the fool doesn't want to take responsibility for his problems and therefore his problems keep recurring and he wonders like why am i so cursed well it's because you're not taking responsibility for your problems but of course he externalizes all his problems so because he doesn't self-reflect he doesn't connect the dots between how the problem out there is actually related to the problem in here with himself because he thinks he knows everything um and so therefore of course if you know if i know everything then the only problem that can exist is out there the problem is with you not with me because i already know everything and i'm i'm i'm i'm the good guy i can't be the bad guy that's how the fool thinks and so of course now all the responsibility is thrown out there then the problems can't be solved because all problems ultimately boil down to you basically the fool is self-biased partial and partisan the fool cannot see past his own self-biases again see my episode about self-biased very foundational episode super important concept the fool takes reality and things for granted the fool tends to be very entitled tends to just expect things to come easily doesn't appreciate the cost of things for example the fool just expects something like good government to just be there and to work for him the fool doesn't understand that good government doesn't just exist it didn't just grow on a tree good government comes from conscious citizens creating and participating in that government and reinforcing it and maintaining it and safeguarding it against fools but the fool just sort of assumes that all government good government has been around forever no good government is a very recent invention and it's rare even now in the 21st century but see the fool takes such things for granted very characteristically the fool lacks balance and moderation the fool is always swinging his pendulum to one side or the other all sorts of extremes ideological extremes or gets stuck in something the fool doesn't understand that balance balance requires wisdom and balance also requires flexibility because balance is a dynamic notion not a static notion so while for example some degree of uh let's say some degree of religion or spirituality can be a good thing when you push it to its extremes and you turn the spirituality or the religion into some into some dogma or some power structure and you just believe it blindly that becomes a radical form of it and then that turns into a bad thing so for example the fool doesn't understand that maybe the ten commandments were effective two thousand years ago for the people who lived two thousand years ago that was a good sort of a general list of guidelines that they should follow but 2 000 years later now in modern society applying those 10 commandments and holding them religiously that's not balance balance would be actually to rethink those rules for modern times but the fool doesn't have enough mental flexibility to do that because his mind has just been programmed with those 10 rules and he's just being robotic about it of course the fool doesn't learn from mistakes doubles down on his mistakes and ignorance and also doesn't apologize unable to genuinely apologize the fool is immature the fool has a short attention span is that easily distracted by things spends most of his time distracted by minutia and not focusing on the really important stuff in life the existential stuff in life gets lost the fool can't keep his eye on the ball the fool does not invest in himself long term uh i guess you could boil it down to this you know like when winter is coming the wise person works hard to prepare for winter whereas the fool parties and has fun and then when winter comes he has no shelter no food and he suffers through the cold long dark winter while the the wise person has built himself a comfortable little nest that he can use during the winter the fool avoids emotional labor looking for shortcuts like we've said already the fool cannot admit i don't know the fool thinks he knows everything about everything no matter how little he's read or studied the fool holds grudges and can't let things go the fool characteristically talks a lot without thinking which is called blabbermouthery loves to just talk and talk and talk endless talking the fool can talk for hours loves to opine on things takes his own opinions so seriously as though they were the truth you see this with certain political commentators radio talk show hosts they just blabber mouth and blabbermouth about things that they have no expertise in haven't read any books about they're just spitting their ideas out there as though their uninformed opinions really matter very much fools love to engage in gossip and speculation the fool will push advice upon you unsolicited advice and usually their device is black and white such as like my advice to you is that you shouldn't do x y and z because they're bad wrong and evil and this is true for everybody and if you do these things you're going to hell so don't do them that's the fool's version of advice the fool doesn't understand the relativity of advice that people have different situations there's different contexts people need different types of advice at different times the fool is not sensitive to any of these things because the fool is so selfish and wrapped up in his own self that he just assumed that everybody else is just like him and therefore what works for him will work for everybody else of course in fact his own advice doesn't really work for him but he doesn't understand that either because he doesn't self-reflect enough to see that even his own advice that he's following that he got from the bible or wherever even that isn't really working for him but yet he's passionate about pushing it upon others because that's just a distraction from looking inwards to see that actually even his own vice advice doesn't really work for him because he doesn't really have a deep understanding of himself or of reality or of life but he needs to pretend like he does so he spends a lot of time trying to convince others it's a sort of a compensating defense mechanism the fool makes a lot of excuses and rationalizes a lot justifies a lot without realizing that these justifications and rationalizations are just very convenient narratives that the ego mind constructs it's part of the self-deception that one needs to self-reflect and to become aware of these justifications are actually deeply self-biased and are distorting one's view of reality the fool just assumes that his view of reality is reality is the truth without recognizing the the divergence that's possible the deep divergence that's possible between those two oftentimes being hyper rational and hyperlogical actually makes one a fool this is one of the counterintuitive things you would think that well if i'm going to be hypological throughout my life that's going to safeguard me against foolishness and actually it ends up being the opposite because you swing your pendulum too much to one side the rationality becomes too extreme and too straight jacketing and too limited such that you're actually not able to develop wisdom wisdom is not hyper rationality the way that some highly intelligent overly intellectual overly cerebral people think because the head the left hemisphere is just one part of part of life uh sort of the masculine cognitive approach to reality analysis is just one aspect of life there's also synthesis there's the feminine side there's the emotional side there's the intuitive side there's the right hemisphere and uh and in fact those are more important even than the than the left but when you're hyper rational you don't understand this you don't appreciate this and that makes you a fool and if you're familiar with spiral dynamics then basically tier 1 cognition is various gradations of foolishness so stage red is more foolish than stage blue stage blue is more foolish than [Music] than orange and orange is slightly less foolish than the ones underneath it and so as you go up the stages you become less foolish you become more wise so what are some examples of fools well i gave you a few already but uh especially right now in the recent political climate that we're in uh the best example of a fool is donald trump he is the king of the fools and of course it's no surprise that his mega followers all the people who believe in trump who defend trump who think that trump is some sort of three-dimensional chess playing strategic stage yellow genius these people are the biggest fools of them all it's it's a movement of fools led by a fool that's what trumpism is and this was obvious if you were wise this was obvious to you before trump even became president this was obvious but uh but if you weren't ridiculously wise it should have become obvious to you a year or two into the trump administration and then if you were even a little less wise then maybe it took you four years until trump lost the election and if you were a little less wise it took you until january 6 with the insurrection and then if you're a total fool then even after the insurrection you still think that trump is some sort of genius and savior and see yeah fools fools think that their foolish leaders are actually geniuses and that's exactly what you see in the magazine that's why you see they subscribe to all these ridiculous conspiracy theories that's why they're prone to violence to emotional reactivity projection denial scapegoating blaming they're very judgmental the entire the entire list that i gave you they check every box see and if you're wise you could have seen that from a mile away others other examples of fools stage blue religious people spiral dynamic stage blue so these can be like orthodox jews christians muslims hindus they're pretty big fools that doesn't mean that their traditions and their spiritual teachings don't have deep wisdom within them there's deep wisdom to be found within christianity within islam within hinduism within judaism but for the most part the people who believe in that wisdom see what they do is they a fool will take wisdom and turn it into a rigid set of dogmas that they're inflexible about they don't don't they haven't derived they haven't contemplated they haven't implemented in their own lives they just adopt them as beliefs and ideas make an identity out of it and then see the fools took the wisdom and they turned into foolishness so i'm not criticizing the original wisdom i'm criticizing the fools and what they've done with that wisdom and this has been the problem of religion since the very dawn of human civilization is that very wise people articulated very wise principles for how to live life but then because the majority were fools they took those principles they misunderstood them they turned them into dogmas they turned them into biases and they started wars over them even though the whole intent behind the wisdom was to make people more peaceful and loving and compassionate towards one another and to realize the oneness and sameness of of uh of mankind and all living beings but this is lost on a fool see one of the trickeries with wisdom is that you can't just teach it by rote through memorization wisdom is a sort of a a living dynamic creative force within you that you cultivate it's not wisdom is implicit you can't explicate wisdom you can't turn wisdom into a set of ten commandments as soon as you do it stops being wisdom it turns into foolishness because wisdom is the ability to have that keen discernment and to be adaptable you see and a set of rigid principles isn't adaptable because situations change time changes new technology evolves mankind is going to be altering its dna soon and all sorts of things like this computer technology transhumanism you know man machine interfaces this is all coming this is going to lead to huge changes in how humans interact with with reality and themselves and this is going to require totally new ways of thinking about life and ourselves and nature and gender and society and all this sorts of stuff but fools are rigid and they don't want to change their ways of thinking because to change your ways of thinking you have to contemplate and you have to self-reflect and you have to derive new answers to new challenges and problems but the fool doesn't do the fool is just acting like a robot the fool is unconscious other examples of fools are drug addicts and criminals conspiracy theorists folks like alex jones so alex jones is a gigantic fool he leads a kabbalah fool so everyone who follows alex jones is a fool it's another example of you know a giant fool leading a bunch of other fools off a cliff which is so there's not an accident why alex jones and his audience there's a huge overlap between that and donald trump and his audience because they're both uh herds of fools uh in general any time you see a mob of people it's it's gonna be it's gonna be foolishness absurd foolishness and uh spiral dynamics stage green progressives leftists are also prone to some of this foolishness now stage green is not as foolish as stage blue but there's still quite a bit of foolishness going on in stage green so don't think you're out of the woods just because you're green or just because you're progressive or a leftist be very mindful of that another example that comes to mind is sports fanatics the tribalism of sports this is tailored to fools the entire sports industry multi-billion dollar industry of sports selling of all the jerseys and the and you know the the stadium ticket seats and all this and the sort of tailgate parties and all this sporting fanatic stuff that society has invented it it's a mechanism designed to extract money from fools now if you appreciate sports per se that doesn't necessarily make you a fool i mean i can appreciate some of the athleticism and the talent that goes into actual you know performing sports feats i can appreciate that i'm not saying everything just because if you like sports you're automatically a fool i'm saying something more nuanced than that i'm just saying the industry itself is built upon catering to fools through the tribalism of most sports even the olympics you know the idea that different countries around the world will will gather together and try to outdo one another in lifting some weight or you know going down some ski slope but then taking taking deep pride in that and then trying to you know trying to um denigrate the other teams like this this is this is foolishness examples of foolish behavior gambling smoking drugs hedonism not using a condom gossip tabloids junk media the entire right-wing media ecosystem chasing get-rich-quick schemes cheating people cheating on people criminal behavior staying in toxic relationships anger blame scapegoating joining cults and ideologies conspiracy theories tribalism wasting your life smoking weed and playing games and uh conformity in general conformity because conformity is the opposite of thinking something deeply through for yourself and deriving your own answers now it's important you understand that there are two types of fools oh yes two types now the first type is the type that you're probably thinking of this is the uneducated rube we're gonna call him these are your maga types these are your your stage blue religious type of people who just you know believe you know some fundamentalist islamic you know person believes in sharia law as the divine word of allah and so forth and just is stuck in that and that's it and you won't convince them otherwise so this is sort of the uneducated group these people have not gone gone deeply to school they have not read many books they have not go to gone to university um their basic problem is they're just uneducated and ignorant and then everything else basically stems just from that and in a sense you feel sorry for them because the majority of mankind is the uneducated rube they have not been educated and this is not per se their fault a lot of times it's simply because they were born into a situation you know many parts in third in third world countries uh many parts of the world simply don't afford opportunities for education these are our relatively recent developments and i'm very grateful that i was born to a family that grew up in a part of the world where education was available and i went to good schools and so forth and i understand that easily that could not have been the case where i boarded some other country right so uh so yeah so education education is extremely important and we need to make it as freely available to as many people as possible but of course part of the problem with fools is that they don't want that so when you when you try to offer free college education to these rubes like trump supporters they actually get offended by this idea oh free college education they call it socialism and of course that's because they are energy in fact they demonize education they're anti-intellectual uh many of the right-wingers and conservatives they're deeply anti-intellectual because their entire world view is an affront to the intellect so of course they have to demonize the intellectuals and the uh uh the college professors and so forth call them crazy socialist liberals and whatever and uh it's tragic because they're demonizing the one thing that would actually be a fundamental solution to the problem so so there's these uneducated rubes and then here's what's a little trickier is that you have fools who are educated shrewd and ambitious materialists and because they have been educated and because they fancied themselves to be very clever and strategic they think that they have somehow avoided the problem of being a fool they can't be a fool you know how can i be a fool if i went to harvard how can i be a fool if i work at goldman sachs if i work on wall street if i'm a ceo of a large company how can i be a fool leo i'm no fool i'm very strategic i plan things out but you are a fool fundamentally because you're still disconnected your priorities are disconnected from the existential this tends to be true of these silicon valley types the ceos various kinds of materialistic professionals wall street hedge fund managers these types of people really if we want to be honest these people are fools they're fools but they can be very successful fools they can have high iqs they can make a killing on wall street they can be good at doing business banking loans some technology stuff even they can be real good at that and so that creates the illusion that they can't be fools and yet they are because these people they are lost in materialism and they're spiritually disconnected from existence and in fact they're leading mankind technologically off a cliff where we have very high technology but very low wisdom and when that happens when the when the degree of technol of technological power increases but the wisdom of mankind stays low or even decreases thanks to things like social media these days and and so forth this is very dangerous it's a situation that's getting out of balance their priorities are backwards they're still placing the low above the high maybe it's not drugs maybe it's not dogmatic religion but it could be sex it could be technology it could be money it could be success and ambition and fame for their own sake because usually these people are are spiritually clueless and disconnected and so i wouldn't call these people wise even though they're successful and a lot of times in our culture these days it's easy to confuse success with wisdom or even academic intelligence with wisdom there are many i could name names but i won't to uh to keep from embarrassing them but uh but there are many even scientists and phds and professors and public intellectuals these days who i would consider fools though they're very smart and well-spoken and well-educated and they have great credentials and degrees but they're still fundamentally fools and they're misleading the people who listen to them and who are fans of them now of course being a fool or being wise comes in many degrees right so we're not just saying this is a binary so that's why we have all these different sort of levels and categories of fools and and so forth so again my my standards i have a bias here my standards for what i consider a wise person are very very high most people's standards are lower so therefore you might look at one of these scientists or whatever and think of him as wise and in a certain relative sense he is wise you know relative to a drug addict yeah he's wise relative to a rube who didn't finish high school yeah he is wise but is he as wise as the wisest of mankind no not even close what are some examples of those what are some examples of the wise greek philosophers many of them socrates plato aristotle marcus aurelius the buddha christ lao tzu confucius rumi mystics throughout the ages yogis sages saints zen masters the founding fathers of america the writers of the constitution the us constitution some scientists some exceptional scientists like albert einstein who were really more than scientists they were philosophers and then happened to be scientists as well some exceptional political leaders like maybe gandhi and others throughout the ages mostly it's the sages why is it there's there's a there's a correlation there seems to be between wisdom and philosophy and spirituality interesting contemplate that you might wonder what is the highest wisdom of all if we rank all the different wisdoms that there could be what's the highest the highest wisdom is infinite love the highest wisdom is selflessness the highest wisdom is that everything that occurs in the universe is an outflow of infinite love and infinite intelligence and consciousness the highest wisdom is god not the idea of god not the god you were told about in sunday school but actual god you as god god as the universe now there's a lot more i could say about that and i have go check out my episodes about such things as what is consciousness what is intelligence what is love um see my episode explaining the ultimate nature of reality i won't go too deeply into infinite love here but one day i'm hoping you will discover for yourself what infinite love is and how everything that occurs in the universe is an outflow of infinite love and so when you when you become conscious of that you'll understand why i say that the highest wisdom is that everything is love and that's why judgment judgmentalism is inversely correlated with wisdom and with consciousness is because the more wise you become the more conscious you become and eventually you become infinitely conscious when you become infinitely conscious you realize everything is infinite love at that point all judgment turns into pure delusion and ignorance and that falls away and then you realize that every judgment every criticism is uh is utter foolishness because of course reality is infinitely perfect and the inability to see that perfection is one's selfishness and ego which gets in the way so what is the source of all wisdom where does it come from is it the brain that's producing wisdom no wisdom actually comes from consciousness and everything is consciousness the universe is consciousness and the highest wisdom basically is selflessness so if you were infinitely intelligent imagine you had an iq of infinity what would you do how would you behave you would do the wisest thing that could possibly be done which is you would choose to be totally selfless and totally loving because you'd have to be an idiot not to because there's no point to existence other than infinite love because that's what existence is why would it be anything else if you think it's anything else it's just because you're you're not conscious and you're foolish and so then wisdom becomes aligning yourself with the truth with consciousness with selflessness with love and then living your life in accordance to that and that is the existential dimension see if your life is missing this existential dimension if you think that what i'm talking about here's just some woo philosophy stuff it's disconnected from the pragmatic aspects of life you're missing the existential core that's why you can't make wise decisions is because the the mundane everyday little petty survival stuff that you do has to be grounded in something higher something more fundamental that's what you're missing and that's why your life doesn't go so good and that's why you can't find peace and happiness because you're missing this this existential component which is why i say that these wall street types and successful ceo types that they're still fools because they're still missing this existential component because if they found this existential component they would leave wall street and they would leave their ceo job and uh they would do something else but of course they haven't found it so they don't know what they're missing now how do you develop wisdom practically speaking what do you do consciousness work raise your consciousness the higher your conscious the more wise you're going to be is this is a direct correlation here self-reflection introspection contemplation deep questioning of everything the more obvious the thing is the more you should question it derive your own answers don't ask others for answers don't take my answers as truth derive your own answers a deep curiosity about life which is necessary to fuel you to do all this questioning and contemplating another way to develop wisdom is through massive experience failure mistakes and suffering but you have to do this in a conscious way so if you're failing in an unconscious way if you're making mistakes in an unconscious way if you're suffering an unconscious way then that's not that could just make you more foolish so you have to suffer consciously make mistakes consciously learn from your mistakes go out there and deliberately design your life to give you massive diverse experience don't live in a single city your whole life or in a single country travel around explore talk to different people don't just hang out with christians if you were born a christian talk to muslims and hindus and atheists and whatever expand your range of experience read a wide variety of books study a wide variety of topics this all gets you experience this helps a lot with developing wisdom practice selflessness contemplate what selflessness is and why it's the highest ideal in value because wisdom is directly proportional to your ability to be selfless also simply value wisdom most people don't even value wisdom value it love it study it study wisdom study wise people follow wise people rather than following fools the majority of mankind listens to and follows fools so of course they're going to end up being fools themselves they listen to fools on the news they listen to fools and on the radio they listen to pool fools on through podcasts they listen to pool fools giving their uh political opinions so of course they're going to turn out to be fools themselves also importantly study foolishness study other fools the deeper you study fools the more you're you're shocked and amazed and horrified uh the more you see the the consequences of the foolishness the less you want to be like that also of course study yourself very deeply study your own psychology study the trickeries of your own mind see my three-part series called self-deception where i outline many self-deception mechanisms read high-quality books study history learn lessons from history explore diverse perspectives this is one of the biggest ways people stay fools is they get locked into one paradigm one way of seeing the world whether it's the christian version the hindu version the atheist version the materialist version none of these will suffice to get you to the highest wisdom so explore many perspectives try to go meta on all perspectives jump outside of these perspectives try to realize the limitations of every perspective another way to do it is observation without judgment i have an episode called learning equals observation go check that out that will explain this process observation is a critical skill for you to learn if you want to become wise and one of the best role models for this is leonardo da vinci the guy was sort of a genius of just pure observation a big part of his success was just purely observing things observing things as they are drawing them thinking about them and then yeah as you observe you don't judge the thing you just observe it you'll be amazed at how much you can learn how much wisdom you can get from just without any bias or prejudice observing a thing for a long time very patiently another way to develop wisdom is through self-education and lifelong learning so the most wisdom you'll develop is after university university doesn't really build wisdom it teaches you how to pass tests and memorize stuff if you really want to learn wisdom you gotta take your own education into your own hands take responsibility for your own education and spend the rest of your life educating yourself and enjoy the process of education highly value education and turn it into like a hobby that you do other ways include psychedelics of course psychedelics will skyrocket your your wisdom through the roof meditation as well solitude taking lots of time alone this gives you time to think and to reflect and contemplate solo retreats will skyrocket your wisdom and lastly stop chasing pleasure your cravings are distracting you from developing wisdom and they're keeping you a fool there is no good life without wisdom hopefully you recognize that if you're a fool and you're proud of being a fool you're going to be constantly tormented by life scrambling to survive agitated and never finding the peace and fulfillment that you know deep down you should be able to find but you don't know how to find that's because you're missing the wisdom you're missing that existential component you're missing philosophy see philosophy is not just some uh airy fairy ideas that that academics come up with that's a bastardization of philosophy philosophy literally means the love of wisdom the love of wisdom so if the things i've been talking about here resonate with you they make you feel good they give you sort of a warm fuzzy feeling when i'm talking about wisdom that is you resonating with the wisdom that i'm sharing with you that is your innate love for wisdom which makes you a philosopher which should make you interested in philosophy the study of wisdom but not just the study of wisdom the pursuit and the embodiment of wisdom it's not enough to read books about wisdom that's just the beginning then you got to start to actually implement it embody it and again philosophy is not about how many books you read or how many philosophers you've studied really what philosophy is about it's about contemplating deeply questioning reality for yourself deriving your own answers and connecting with the existential core of reality that i was talking about with truth with consciousness with love with selflessness so here's a few last points on how to apply the information from this episode spend time contemplating what is wisdom i've given you all the answers basically but that's not good enough you have to derive them for yourself because how do you know what i'm saying here is true you don't know unless you derive it for yourself so keep contemplating this question until you develop a very solid intuitive grasp for what wisdom refers to once you have that it's sort of a magic ability now it's almost like you've got this new magic concept or word that you can use to ask powerful questions for example but this only works when you know what wisdom means once you know what wisdom means you can ask questions such as you're in some situation you can ask yourself is this wise or what would be the wisest move in this situation or you could ask the question of like how am i being a fool in life or you could ask the question how can i become more wise or you can ask yourself a question in a certain in a certain situation let's say you're you're listening to some speaker in some video or at a lecture or whatever and he's telling you something you can ask yourself is the stuff he's saying coming from a place of wisdom maybe you're listening to a politician on tv is what he's saying coming from wisdom but this assumes you know what wisdom is if you know that you can ask that question that's a powerful question that will that will change how you see that person or that situation it'll immediately cut through all the is this coming from wisdom someone's giving you some advice your parents are giving some advice you can just ask yourself is that is there advice coming from wisdom you could ask the question what is the wisest way to live life for me specifically what is the why what is this the wisest way for me to live life and then as you contemplate that you'll get the answers what's beautiful about wisdom in this whole philosophy process is that it's a sort of a self-bootstrapping process that's what's empowering about it you don't really need anyone else's input i mean you will of course use other people's feedback and you'll learn from other people sure you'll read books okay but that fundamentally you don't need any of that all you really need is your own self turn the willingness to turn into yourself and to self reflect and to to work through this stuff i mean it takes work that's why people don't do it but the good news is that you can do it and in this way it makes you very self-reliant once you master this process you don't really need books anymore you don't need experts you don't need other people to give you advice and this is very empowering otherwise you feel like a victim all the time why are you coming to me to tell you how to live your life wouldn't it be nicer if you could just turn inwards and go to yourself to tell yourself how to live your own life wouldn't that be much more elegant well you can do that but you have to develop it you're not born with that ability you have to practice it over years and decades until you develop it and then you'll be amazed one of the most amazing things you'll discover in life is that the most profound answers are within you if only you bothered to go looking for them there stuff you don't even know is there is there but it takes time to mine it out and once you understand what wisdom is you have an intuitive grasp of it then all i got to tell you is just to remind you to if you want to live a good life follow the wisest course of action in every situation now you might wonder well that's very vague what is the wisest course of action in every situation well but if you know what wisdom is if you've contemplated it then you can always ask yourself what is the wisest course of action in every situation that i'm in with my finances with my relationships with my spirituality with whatever see you're going to develop this keen discernment this keen sense of judgment when i say keen sense of judgment i don't mean you're going to be judging people i'm using the word judgment they are more like a better word might be assessment or evaluation which is different than judging people for being bad people i don't mean that and just set the intention to be wise do you want to be wise if you do how badly do you want to be wise are you willing to set your intention to be wise and then to follow that intention every day for the next 30 years of your life if you do that you're going to become lies but you have to stick stick with it it's not enough just to set your attention once and then forget about it tomorrow you have to keep constantly reminding yourself this is my intention is to be wise and to be pursuing wisdom and then as you do that resources will come your way books you'll see books articles videos podcasts you'll find the stuff that helps you to find and locate the wisdom you need and try to identify sources of the highest wisdom you can learn to do this too if you're reading a book or listening to a teacher or a speaker you can always you can always ask the question how wise is this guy is he speaking from wisdom or not is this the highest wisdom and then of course gravitate toward towards those sources which your wisdom tells you is the highest wisdom now of course the problem is that if you're a fool you're going to tend to think that what you're listening to is the highest wisdom because it's just reinforcing your biases so like if you're some you know if you're some maga um rube and you're listening to some right wing radio talk show host who's telling you everything you want to hear you know just validating all of your prejudices and hatreds and judgments and um and so forth and then you ask yourself well is this person wise and you're gonna say yes of course he's wise because you're just you're it's just reinforcing right so so it won't work if you're a fool the advice i'm giving you will will only work if you spend a lot of time contemplating and studying what wisdom is it'll take you five ten years to kind of develop that intuition this is some advanced advice so don't delay get started contemplating what wisdom is just because you've watched this episode does not mean you understand what wisdom is you have to now contemplate it for yourself and if you want to some advice on how to do that how to contemplate i have multiple episodes on how to contemplate i have one called how to contemplate using a journal if you want to use a written form of contemplation i have other episodes explaining how to contemplate just in your mind see my episode called contemplation and how to contemplate i have i have multiples of them i have an episode on introspection that will also be very valuable introspections basically a form of self-reflection go check that out so i've covered many of these techniques in the past all right 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 will find the blog exclusive video content on the blog and other stuff that i link you'll find the life purpose course there the book list the book list has tons of wisdom books on it um you can support me on patreon.com actualized and the final note that i'll make here is what is actualize.org but a wisdom school that was the original intent behind actualizatory is to teach wisdom and if you like that org you resonate with it it's because you're a philosopher and because you can appreciate wisdom people who can't appreciate wisdom won't stay with this channel very long this is one of the most important and wisest things you can do in your life is to take that little kernel of appreciation of wisdom that you have and then to cultivate that over over the years patiently remember patience this takes patience this takes a long vision because you can't do this in just a few days or even a year it takes a long vision that you're gonna slowly graduate gradually cultivate your wisdom you're gonna turn cultivation of your wisdom into a hobby that you do for the rest of your life and then to chip away at that every day a little bit by reading a book by watching a video by doing some contemplation by going and meditating by self-reflecting by talking to a therapist you know whatever method you want to use taking some psychedelics whatever and then it adds up over the years it adds up it adds up it adds up and then you're so glad you did it it's the best investment you can do there's no better investment in yourself than to cultivate your wisdom and i challenge you to find a higher source of wisdom than actualize.org because my whole intention behind my work is i'm always asking myself like what is the deepest wisdom that exists within all of the works of mankind let me study all of those works let me contemplate all of the wisdom that's there to validate it because i can't just take it on blind faith let me read it study it compile it organize it contemplate it add to it improve it and then share it with you and so i i dare you to find a higher source of wisdom that's not to say there aren't really good teachers out there there are but also you have to you have to consider the breadth of the wisdom that is being offered here with actualized.org see we're not just offering the highest wisdom in a very narrow capacity we're also widening our approach such that it includes also an understanding of politics and economics and dating and relationships and health and society and all basically all of the all of the aspects of life what would happen if you had wisdom across all of those how valuable would that be to you what would that be worth to you is that worth working for if it is then get started what are you waiting for you

Channel: Actualized.org

Views: 113,224

Keywords: wisdom, what is wisdom, personal development, self help, self improvement, happiness, self actualization, psychology, actualized.org, leo gura, philosophy, spirituality

Id: FgS4l1heQTc

Length: 117min 39sec (7059 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021