Secret Life Principles that Successful People Hide

I want to lay out the core principles for a good life. How do you see the biggest-picture level? What my style of personal development is.

If we think of these principles as a philosophical system then what are the core tenets of this system? I wanted to lay those out for you. It can be very useful to be able to zoom out and see the big picture.

So, here we're gonna talk about close to sixty-four different principles for creating the good life. This is what I feel is necessary for a person to live a good life. Now of course this is informed by my life experience, my own biases, my perspective, my own experiences in life, and my style, so in an important sense, there's a sort of stylistic component to any philosopher that you're gonna be learning from any spiritual teaching, any philosophical system, any political theory.

Since this is based on personal experience it may not resonate with you. Now even if it doesn't fully resonate with you, you can still learn stuff from it.

I must say that some of these principles are such rock-solid principles that I'm very tempted to say that they should be true for a large percentage of people, so it's not just purely style there's there's a lot of profound wisdom in these principles.

Now it can take years to be able to fully implement one of these principles. Sometimes these principles sound very simple; they can be stated in one or two sentences but to be able to embody it and to have this principle functioning in your life and even just to be able to understand why this principle is so important can take years can take decades.

Because here we just have to kind of list them all out and give you a big-picture perspective. Now I'm not gonna go into explaining why each of these principles is true that would be way too much work and way too much detail for this overview that we're doing here.

I'm just offering these as suggestions, not as Dogma, not as beliefs that you take blindly but ultimately why they're true. How do I know that they're true? It's because of all of my life experience, all of my experience doing business, all of my experience trying to figure out my own life dealing with my neuroses and problems and sticking points my pathologies.

All of the enormous research I've done theoretical research reading hundreds of books, studying hundreds of different perspectives, hundreds of different perspectives, hundreds of different traditions from Eastern ones to Western ones modern ones to ancient ones.

Read lots of self-help books trying to experiment with all these techniques myself and seeing what works, what doesn't work, what's important what's not so important right so from all of this and all of my meditating and contemplating and journaling and thinking about this and all of my five years.

Various sticking points are you know working on improving various limitations in my own life, health, nutrition, and fitness, and my inability to socialize when I was younger. My introversion and my shyness so working through all of this stuff right of it is sort of getting compiled together and is informing my understanding of reality and what's important to live the good life.

Studying and learning have been very instrumental in informing me about what the most important principles for living a good life are and this is something that I have been interested in for probably close to 10 years back in high school. I was just interested in what are the principles of living a good life so without further ado let's get into these principles principles

1) One is no ideology and no dogma of any kind

Most teachings are filled with a lot of ideology and a lot of dogma stuff that just want you to accept. In another newsletter, I can go into a lot of depth about the dangers of ideology, the dangers of dogma. Do not make the mistake of thinking that ideology and dogma is just a mistake that religious people make. This is a mistake that almost everybody makes. Scientific people make this mistake, atheists make this mistake, skeptics make this mistake, political people make this mistake, and very intelligent people make this mistake. It's very easy to fall into some kind of ideology because that's what society feeds you.

Various kinds of ideologies and one of the most difficult things to do in life is to question and undo all the ideologies and dogmas that you've been filled with growing up in whatever culture you grew up in. Whatever family you grew up in, whatever school system you went to, they all filled your mind with various kinds of programming and beliefs and ideologies so questioning and undoing all of that and living a dogma-free ideology-free life is very challenging and can be a little difficult to understand why that's even important; but the reason that it is is that the thing you're ultimately after is the highest truth which leads to freedom.

Freedom of your mind and so the problem with ideology and Dogma is that it it sort of anchors your mind down and doesn't allow your mind to explore all the nooks and crannies of reality that it needs to be able to explore to understand what reality is and to live the good life you see these ideologies are like grooves that your mind gets stuck in and then it keeps going down these grooves it keeps thinking down these grooves and looking at the world through these lenses and that shapes and distorts what you're able to see and how flexible you're able to be and how you're able to change your life.

People who are very ideological and dogmatic have a hard time changing themselves. This is what we need to do we need to massively change ourselves to create the good life and all of my research and and philosophizing into the topic of epistemology or the theory of knowledge.

If I could boil all of that down to just one simple principle it would just be do not be ideological. It's just that simple. That's a very very simple principle and this grounds pretty much everything that I ever talked about in any of my content I stress this over and over and over again because it's so important and it'll take you years to realize how important this is but if you can follow this one principle in your life this will save you a lot of misery and trouble and a lot of going down dead ends and various kinds of ideological traps.

2) The next core principle is that big-picture thinking.

 Is greater than technical knowledge and always Trump's technical knowledge. That's another thing that I stress in my work all the time is big-picture thinking do you understand what's going on at the highest possible levels and are you concerned about all the technical details?

That's one of my greatest strengths this big-picture thinking the technical details of things I'm not that good at that's sort of a weakness of mine and sometimes when I'm delivering some piece of content it's in the technical details that I can screw up and get something wrong here.

My focus is always on the big picture and that's because what I saw when I was younger is I saw the opposite of that I saw everybody around me including my teachers and society and culture at large my professors and so forth.

They were so focused on technical knowledge and yet they had very little of the big picture and because of this, they were living the wrong kinds of lives. See you can have all the perfect technical knowledge you can be an expert in your technical field but have no idea of the big picture and your life will be miserable and highly dysfunctional and pathological whereas if you get the big picture right and you're focused on nailing the big picture the technical details you don't need to waste a lot of time energy on that.

It doesn't matter and if you get a few technical details wrong here or there it doesn't matter to the big picture. We're gonna give you all the principles for creating the good life. That's a very big picture so if you just follow these principles intelligently not robotically then you should make very good progress in creating a great life and notice that these principles don't depend on technical knowledge we're talking about very broad ideas here.

3) The next core principle is that direct experience is king. 

Direct experience is king. Experience is the only thing that exists and the only thing that is real right now experience whatever you're experiencing right now.

That's what's real. what's actual is what exists everything else is fantasy, and everything else is imagination this is a very powerful principle for cutting through all the illusions culture, society and people feed you and also for cutting through your self-deception the self-deception that your mind feeds you your imaginings and musings and theories and philosophies and ideologies how do you cut through all that by grounding yourself in your present direct experience.

That's what's King if it's not present in your direct experience it's not real that's very powerful and you need to use this principle over and over again as you're inquiring into reality to help you sort the wheat from the chaff to sort the actuality from all the concepts and beliefs that you will be learning from books and so forth and coming up in your mind.

4) the next core principle is self-experimentation.’

It’s best to experiment and to discover what works what is true and which principles will lead to the good life by believing me by reading a book listening to some PhD professor who has a Nobel Prize and trusting him or some guru who's sitting up on a pedestal.

No, it's through self-experimentation you won't know what techniques will or won't work for you or will or won't resonate with you until you try them and this principle is a corollary of the idea that direct experience is king so it's because we realize that direct experiences are a king that we also realize that we do a lot of self-experimentation because it's only by going out and experiencing different things trying different techniques that we will discover what works for us so what this means is if you have some kind of problem

Let's say you have a consistent relationship problem in your intimate relationships so the self-experimentation principle is what it means that you're gonna go out there and you're gonna experiment with various solutions. You're not gonna come and trust me or somebody else or try to get the answer from someplace you can experiment now of course this means you can listen to people you can get advice from people.

You can read books of course and you should but self-experimentation means that your to any problem is always gonna be one of Okay let me experiment and troubleshoot this and try different things until something works. So you're gonna go maybe read some books on relationships maybe you're gonna go hire a therapist and talk to them maybe you're gonna go see a life coach maybe you're gonna go to do some psychedelics and contemplate the nature of your relationship and your sticking points while you're on psychedelics or maybe you're gonna do some journaling or maybe you're gonna have a serious one-to-one conversation with your loved one or your spouse or whatever to try to resolve this relationship thing.

Maybe you're gonna go do a solo retreat in the woods for a week and contemplate the nature of your relationship you know so all of these are different things you can experiment with and your approach is gonna be looking let me try this stuff out and see what's gonna solve it and if you have money problems same thing you're gonna try various self-experiments to resolve your money problems and if you have some depression you're gonna do more self-experimentation and so forth and this is how you solve all of your problems in life Is through self-experimentation

5) The next core principle is radical open-mindedness.

The reason radical open-mindedness is so important is because we recognize that we enter this world not knowing anything and that we need to be able to fully explore every nook and cranny of reality without prejudging it so that we don't accidentally cut ourselves off from great discoveries and amazing insights and truths see and we also recognize that the mind the ego mind tends to love to be closed-minded to new experiences and to challenging new ideas.

Therefore we take the opposite step the counterintuitive move and we open ourselves up radically so radically that it would shock most people who were this open this means you have to be open to any Idea, any perspective, and any teaching no matter how ridiculous or crazy and untrue it might sound at first.

This might seem dangerous but it's the opposite. Open-mindedness doesn't mean that you are gonna believe a bunch of ridiculous things it just means that you're open to exploring different ideas and perspectives the reason that we accept this principle and we follow it is because we recognize that if we're not radically open-minded then our mind is going to judge prematurely and cut us off from all these other avenues that we can explore.

We also recognize that a lot of the deepest truths in life are counterintuitive and seem ridiculous on the surface until they are deeply explored and it can take a lot of time to deeply explore these various truths and topics before we realize just how true and powerful they are.

This means that we need to remain open-minded during that time otherwise if we're closed-minded then what's gonna happen is that we're gonna just gonna say oh well that thing is stupid that thing is crazy that can't possibly be true that thing is irrational that thing is silly and religious and that thing is criminal and we're gonna do all this but we're not gonna explore all of that it's much better to go and explore all of that which again is not the same thing as becoming dogmatic about any one of those things or clinging to any one of those things we're interested in exploration.

Genuine exploration exploration means you don't know what you're gonna find sometimes you'll find great stuff sometimes you'll find ugly bad stuff.

6) The next core principle is that you do not judge things that you have not experienced personally.

This again is sort of a corollary to the radical open-mindedness principle but it bears making explicit here because I can't tell you how many times I've fallen into this trap of judging things that I hadn't personally experienced and talking about it as though I knew about it and I understood it but that was just self-deception and I didn't understand it because I didn't have any experience with the thing and this is something that the mind loves to do all the time.

It loves to judge things especially when it has zero experience with it so maybe you judge Middle Easterners or Middle Eastern countries but the question is have you been to a Middle Eastern country how many Middle Easterner friends do you have or maybe you judge psychedelics.

Have you ever even done psychedelics of course the mind is very tricky so the mind will say I don't need to do that I don't need to go to Middle Eastern countries. I don't need to do psychedelics I don't need to try that food I don't need to explore that culture I don't need to study this religion because I already know its self-deception that line of reasoning itself is the self-deception so be very careful about judging things you have not experienced.

You need to become very good at recognizing when your mind is about to judge something and then you ask yourself wait a minute have I experienced this thing that I'm gonna be talking about here in a second oh I haven't then I should keep my mouth shut and I keep my mind open that's a very powerful skill to develop very few people have developed that skill and I still struggle with that one myself.

7) The next core principle is to question everything. 

Question everything there is no idea too sacred not to question anything that is sacred needs to be questioned even more so doubly so triply so question especially the most obvious stuff the stuff that people think that you're crazy or insane to question question that question the world even exists question whether you even exist question everything the more fundamental your questioning the better and especially become very good at questioning assumptions.

What are the assumptions of this philosophical system? What are the assumptions of this scientific model? What are the assumptions of this spiritual teacher you have to get very very good at sussing out assumptions and questioning them and of course questioning all of your assumptions and all of your ideas so you don't just question skeptically on the outside.

You also question even more on the inside question every teaching question everything I say but of course, be careful not to turn this into a weapon where you're just questioning and you're putting the burden of understanding on others. The burden of proving things to others you need to question in a way where you still assume the burden and responsibility of finding the truth for yourself

 8)The next core principle is care about philosophical and metaphysical matters. 

Most people do not care about these because they think that there's no practical application. There is it's just that philosophical and metaphysical matters are more abstract and therefore it takes more effort and more study to find the applications. There are very practical applications but it takes a little bit more work. If you fail to follow this principle it's gonna happen that you're gonna get lost in the transactional pragmatic nature of mundane everyday life of business of doing chores and you're gonna get so lost in that and there's no soul or spirit to be found.

There's nothing deep or profound to be found in just doing business earning money being transactional in your relationships. The depth in life is found in having philosophical and metaphysical matters questioned and resolved that's where the juicy and powerful work lies.

So you need to care about that you need to cultivate a certain curiosity a philosophical metaphysical curiosity which means that you're not just chasing practical self-help advice like how to get laid. How to earn a million dollars. How to cure my depression all of that it's fine to a certain degree but you need to go beyond that something deeper and you'll notice that that's one of the things that differentiates my work from a lot of the other self-help material that's out there.

Most of it tends to be just very very strictly transactional and pragmatic about having how to get you a particular result and while that's sort of appealing on the surface it's hollow on the inside. It doesn't go deep enough into addressing your root issues in life because most of your surface-level issues stem from your deeper existential metaphysical problems that you're not even aware of yet.

9) The next core principle is genuine intent for truth.

At whatever cost you need to genuinely care about the truth with a capital T. As one of your highest priorities and values no matter what the cost is. To get at this truth it doesn't matter if you need to move to a different city break up with all of your friends pay tens of thousands of dollars work overtime.

You know whatever you got to do if that's what's required to get at the truth then that's what's required and you're going to accept that cost because you have a genuine intent and desire and curiosity for the ultimate truth without this what's gonna happen is that you're gonna keep falling into falsehood and delusion. You see because if you're not willing to accept the costs that come with seeking the ultimate truth you're gonna get sucked into the lesser things in life. You're gonna pursue money and sex and comfort and luxury and these sorts of things and all of that is best pursued with falsehood see and you're gonna end up deluding yourself very deeply in life. You're not gonna understand what life is at the highest level because you never made it a genuine intent your priorities instead were chasing material stuff which has nothing to do with truth and often is aligned with falsehood oftentimes the easiest way to make money is through falsehood not through truth. The easiest way to attract a sexual partner oftentimes is through falsehood not through truth.

10) The next core principle is you need to have a genuine intent to understand every point of view.

One thing you notice about life is that there are so many different kinds of points of view. People have all kinds of points of view different groups of people different cultures and nations and ethnicities have all sorts of different points of view and usually what what the average person does is they just stay in their point of view and then they criticize and judge the other points of view without genuinely caring to look at the world.

From the perspective of all those other people you need to do the opposite of that you need to get very curious and good at jumping into other people's shoes and looking at the world from their perspective and that's because you recognize that the world is nothing but different points of view. There's no such thing as an understanding of the world without a point of view and your point of view is not the most important or the best you recognize that so when you recognize that you understand that hey I can learn a lot from looking at the world from many points of view and that's one of the things that you become passionate about is exploring different points of view.

11) The next core principle is integral thinking.

 You need to think integrally and what that boils down to is the realization that every point of view or perspective contains some kernel of truth no matter what it is. Even some of the most atrocious perspectives Nazism radical Islamic terrorism and others that you would think to have no redeeming qualities you can find a kernel of truth even in those points of view and less radical ones especially and so this is where open-mindedness comes in.

You need to be able to integrate all these different points of view and bring them all together and to see okay what's going on here what's sort of the meta-perspective the meta point of view when we combine all these other points of view what does that tell us about life? What does that tell me about myself? What does that tell us about humanity? What does it tell us about society and so forth from that you get so much more than just sticking to your points of view and defending your points of view?

This is the opposite of ideology and dogma because what ideology and dogma would do is limit your point of view and defend a rigid perspective on the world so it's the opposite of integral the opposite of holistic therefore people with this limited perspective understand so much less of life then the otherwise could and so just I want you to keep this core principle in mind that every point of view contains some truth and it's your job to discover what that is. It's not the responsibility of the other person to tell you or convince you of that kernel of truth for example it's not the job of a Nazi or a radical terrorist to convince you of their truth it's your job to go study them and discover what is the truth that they are so passionate about. What is that very important just because you're doing this does not mean that you have to become a Nazi of course or a terrorist of course not You're exploring points of view you're gonna be exploring hundreds of points of you throughout your whole life that doesn't mean that you have to get married to any one point of view.

Integral thinking is the recognition that every point of view is partial never the ultimate truth always partial so that's why we're exploring so many of them precisely because it's just a little piece think of every point of view as like a 1% perspective on reality so 1% is not a lot so you know we need to explore hundreds of them for all those individual ones to add up to something substantial.

12) The next core principle is that everything boils down to the inner game.

The quality of your life boils down to your psychology this means that all problems and all suffering are self-created and self-inflicted and this is very difficult for many people to believe because it runs counter to the idea that we are living in some sort of rigid fixed external reality. A material reality with unbreakable physical laws where it seems like all the problems are out there in the world and all the suffering is created by the world outside of me and then I have nothing to do with it so this is flipping that on its head upside down 180 degrees and realizing that all of those external problems that I think exists out there all the suffering that's created by the world all of that external material physical hard stuff that can't be changed.

But an aspect of my own inner game is a belief that I have that's a paradigm that I'm in and that itself is not an outer thing but an inner thing this is like the master key that unlocks all of your potential in life because it's only when you realize that the most important thing for determining the quality of your life and everything you do and solving all of your problems and suffering is mastering the internal software of your mind. When you realize that now you have so much power there's all this potential that opens up now you're no longer a victim whereas in the other case, there's very little you can do you get stuck very easily.

13) The next core principle is lifelong learning and self-education.

You need to become a lifelong learner you need to become passionate about learning and your education you've got to take full responsibility for it take ownership of it and be proactive about it don't wait for a teacher to get you to do some homework assignment or to read a book.

Don't wait for some program or some training to teach you something go out there and proactively learn about life the reason this principle is so paramount is because when you're born you have no information about the world. You don't know how the world works or what it is or what you're doing here so you have to start to learn and this process of learning will continue for the rest of your life.

It's not just school it's not just University all of that was just the beginning of your entire educational career which only really takes off after you graduate from University so of course this means reading lots of books you should expect to read a hundred or 200 books over the next five or ten years. This is gonna be essential it's through these books that you will learn various perspectives techniques traps mistakes lessons principles you'll be exposed to new ideas new cultures history things you haven't ever heard about anywhere else the quality and and detail of information that's presented in books. The quality book will be much greater than what you see in a video on television or some social media website and you need that you need solid high-quality quality reliable information to get you started these are like your leads.

These books are the source of leads for you as to what you should be pursuing what techniques can work for you and so forth and these books help you to understand what your problems are. See part of the challenge is that you have problems that you don't even understand you have yet to take a lot of reading just to realize that but also don't stop at books you also need to take courses. Seminars workshops many online courses are available these days on almost any topic that you would want to learn about you could find in-person seminars and workshops which are super important to go to.

There's a very big difference between watching a workshop or a seminar online in video form and going to one live in person. You'll get 10 times more from going to the same workshop or seminar live rather than watching it as the video does not be cheap with your self-education it's because you recognize that this principle is so important in lifelong learning that you are willing to invest in your learning. You're willing to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for courses seminars workshops you're willing to invest 500 to a thousand dollars every year in buying a bunch of new books and an additional point about this lifelong learning. We're still talking about just this one principle of lifelong learning you need to develop a system for taking notes and for organizing all of this stuff that you're going to be researching and learning because you're gonna have various techniques and ideas and principles that you're learning.

Vocabulary words all of this and you're gonna have to compile it together in some way a system.

14) the next core principle is observation.

Observation is one of the keys to life the essence of learning is observation. How do you learn anything? By observing it for a long period very patiently very methodically over and over and over again the power of observation is enormous way more than anyone would ever imagine which is why you can spend years and decades doing very careful and painstaking observation an observation is the solution to the problem of ideology and dogma and various kinds of belief systems that you get trapped.

Observation is the antidote to being lost inside your mind what you need to do is to observe and that's why science to the extent that science is successful and has some good benefits for society science focuses on observation but now you need to take that on as a principle for yourself.

It's not enough to have science observed for you and then to report the results to you you need to become a keen observer of life and reality. Observe everything, observe people, observe animals, observe nature, observe trees, observe your behaviors, observe your thinking process, observe your motivations, your fears, observe your problems and neuroses, observe when you suffer, observe when you're in pain, observe when you're happy, observe what makes you motivated, observe what makes you depressed.

Carefully observe all of that and through this process, you will learn about yourself. You will learn about the world, you will learn about mankind, you will learn about business, anything you observe you will make finer-grained distinctions in and you will learn how that thing works. So observation is related of course to our earlier principle of direct experience as King.

Observation goes hand-in-hand with direct experience and the opposite of that is believing what other people tell you so to be able to embody the things that I teach with actualize you need to do an enormous amount of observation. Years of observation on everything that I talk about so the things I talked about then you got to go and observe it in your own life and see that oh yes this is exactly how it works or maybe you'll realize no it's not quite how he said it works maybe he was only half right but the other half I have observed that it works differently.

He said see and that could happen because you know my observation is not perfect by any means. There's so much to observe about so many different facets of reality that it's hard to observe a hundred percent of all of it so you're bound to it. If you're gonna be seriously observing observe some things about the things I talked about that I was not able to observe and it's through observation that insights come.

15) the next principle is to plan to meditate for one hour every day for the rest of your life. 

Do you have a meditation practice yet? Meditation is one of the most important things you can do for your personal development. It's a cornerstone you need to install this habit don't start with an hour start with 10 to 20 minutes whatever you can but eventually you have to build up and you should already have the expectations in place that you're gonna be meditating for one hour every day for the rest of your life.

This is not negotiable you're just gonna do it and you're gonna enjoy it it'll take you a while before you start to enjoy it but you should already be envisioning that you're going to be enjoying it now. Why meditation? Well, because meditation is just observation when you're meditating you're just sitting there and you're observing the present moment and again that ties us back to the earlier principle of direct experiences King.

What is meditation it's just your direct experience of whatever is happening in the present moment that's all that it is you're just observing and you're observing the function of your mind various body sensations and emotions that you're having and it's only through this observation process through meditation that you're going to be able to understand yourself and how your body and mind work. Through years of careful and painstaking observation and this is why most spiritual teachings cannot be directly related to people and why you can't sell spiritual advancement and you can't sell psychological maturity and you can't sell wisdom.

You can't sell these things to people because the only way they can get those things is by doing the observational work that's required to have those insights and understandings to have that base of experience you see it's like no amount of money could you give me to be able to make you into like a master piano player. The only way you can become a master piano player is by going through all the direct experience practice and observation that a master piano player has that makes him a master so now apply this dough to your body and your mind in your life no amount of listening to me or paying me any amount of money will get you the experience.

The observational experience that you need to understand the functioning of your mind and body is critical this is why spiritual growth is so difficult because most people just don't do the observation work it takes a lot of time and energy and it's difficult and it's boring and sometimes it's painful and you suffer through it and sometimes you observe things which freak you out you observe things about reality which run counter to all your ideologies and beliefs and all the programming you got when you were younger and that freaks you out and then when you become good at meditation that enables you to access mystical States higher states of consciousness non-ordinary states of consciousness.

This is where all the really powerful gains lie and which is essential for developing a good life but it takes years to get there years of practice to get there for most people.

16) The next core principle is that ego is the root of all humans.

Problems and suffering and ego is just that sense of your ego is the sense that you were born as that human being right there and that you will die one day with your identity with that biological body in mind that you have and your personal story about the fact that you were born you went to school and you had all these problems and now here you are sitting there as this material creature that's ego and from that stem all human problems and suffering both individual and collective.

This is a super powerful principle this one principle explains all of yourself and all of mankind and there's so much to be said about this.

17) The next principle is self-deception.

Self-deception is the biggest thing you need to be worried about in life how your mind lies to you and tricks you and deceives you. The ego mind corrupts everything that it comes in contact with and even more so than you lie to others and that you deceive others you deceive yourself and I list many self-deception mechanisms that I've been studying over the last five or ten years it's how your own mind trips you you need to get very very very good at seeing your own self deceptions.

Not so much the stuff deceptions of others but of yourself because you see if we're trying to get to the truth if we're trying to understand reality at a big picture level that means that we have to contend with the biggest obstacle which is self deception.

Because self-deception leads to delusion into falsehood city so that's your greatest obstacle is your mind and of course, this connects with the earlier principle that the inner game is the most important thing for solving all of your problems because all of your problems stem from various kinds of self-deceptions that are running inside of your mind which you aren't conscious of yet.

18) the next principle is self-bias.

You need to recognize and be able to see within yourself your selfishness and your self-biases. You need to see how your ego mind or the self lowercase self distorts everything that it perceives because the whole purpose of the self is to survive and therefore you're always going to be looking and interacting with situations and manipulating situations in such a way that it's gonna serve yourself and therefore your perceptual system is self-biased filled with conflicts of interest and double standards.

So a very simple example of self-bias is that you know if I'm a criminal and like I robbed a grocery store I can't be allowed to be my judge and jury at the trial because I would have a self-bias of setting myself free. I would create all sorts of justifications and excuses for why I didn't commit the crime scene which is why judges have to recuse themselves if they have any kind of mature real connection with the case that they're trying because otherwise self bias is gonna creep in there but of course, this is just one little tip of the iceberg of how self bias works.

These are some gross examples there are very subtle examples of how the house of bias works all of your ideologies and beliefs and everything you perceive out there is always biased by your own needs your ego needs your survival needs so your relationships are self-biased your business is self-biased your attitudes politically ourself biased and so on and all of this is preventing you from being able to access the truth which you need to live the good life so you need to unwire all of those self biases or at the very least become very conscious of them.

19) the next core principle is that all fear all judgment all evil all anger and all suffering are delusion and falsehood.

This is huge is a huge principle that will save you so much suffering all fear judgment evil anger and suffering are delusions that means anytime you're experiencing those of course, you don't enjoy experiencing them and you want a way to not experience those anymore.

Well, you start to have to become more conscious and realize just how much of all of that is falsehood and it stems from falsehood so the reason that we want to pursue truth so much aside from the fact that we're just genuinely curious about it but it's also because if we do discover the truth then we will realize that fear judgment evil anger and suffering have all been false and that's precisely what we need to live the good life.

You can't live the good life while you're in fear while you're judging all the time. While you see evil out there in the world while you're angry and while you're suffering by definition that's the bad life so the bad life goes with falsehood and the good life goes with truth.

 20) The next principle here is not to demonize anyone.

All demonization is delusion as well anytime you think somebody out there is evil you're wrong this is one of the self-deception mechanisms of the mind is to try to demonize others or groups of people or entities or organizations.

21) The next principle is that reality is perfect.

There is nothing at all wrong with reality if you think that something is wrong in the world it's because of your inner game and how you're looking at it not because it actually is wrong or it actually is bad or it actually is evil. Reality is literally perfect but you can only appreciate that and it will only start sounding like something real and not just rule wishful thinking at enormously high levels of consciousness.

So it'll take you years and perhaps decades to have enough mystical experiences to ultimately realize that reality is perfect until then well you've sort of just got to take my word for it but this is a powerful principle because you can use it to change and grow yourself.

So any time in your life that you find something that is bothering you or annoying you and you think it should be otherwise and that this is wrong and that person is doing something wrong you can always remind yourself to wait a minute but I know in the back of my mind that reality is perfect maybe I haven't had the mystical experience yet to experience but I can Intuit something about that and so maybe there's something wrong with me.

The way that I'm looking at this situation the way I'm looking at this person how am I creating the imperfection out of the perfection that's already? there it's a powerful principle that you can use to change your feelings about things now the next four principles that I'm going to give you are very important ones and there are going to be four different ways of looking at the purpose of life.

What is the purpose of life? So the purpose of life there's a lot we could say about this and I've said stuff in the past about it but here are four different purposes of life. These are very overarching big-picture purposes which help to orient you as to what you should be doing in your life

21) so the first purpose of life is to raise your consciousness that should be something that you're concerned with every single day of your life from now on.

22) the second purpose of life is to raise your capacity to love to embrace the full spectrum of experiences not just the good experiences and the sweet and pleasant ones but everything raised your capacity to love everything and everyone.

23) the third purpose of life is to take in the beauty of life have you noticed how beautiful it all is of course there's also a spectrum of beauty and it's very easy to see the beauty when you go to a museum and you look at a fine Picasso painting or you go to some national park like Yosemite and you look at the beautiful mountains and trees and the sunset and that's beautiful.

That's the kind of beauty that's sort of easy to see but can you see the beauty of everyday life of the most mundane things can you see the beauty of your body or your hands can you see the beauty on the wall? Can you see the beauty of that pencil of that lamp? of the carpet of this room, the beauty of society, the beauty of mankind, the beauty of even the ugly things that is if you think about it the essence of a good life to live the greatest life possible is just none other than to see Beauty everywhere.

All the time and to be conscious of that but you have to train yourself because Society has trained you to be judgmental to pick and choose and to not like the ugly stuff and to only a like 1% of the full spectrum of all this stuff that there is to love that requires surrendering your ego. See the ego doesn't want to love and see the beauty of everything it wants to cherry-pick and so your job is to surrender that more and more and more and to take in more of the beauty all the time so that you don't have a day where you go by in your life or you're just going through the motions just going to work punching the clock earning some money doing some business taking care of the kids just cooking a meal.

But you're disconnected from the beauty of it all and that's what very careful observation and meditation will ultimately teach you they will teach you the beauty of the most simple things just like looking at your hands and seeing the enormous beauty in the design of your hands and how they function you know you can sit there for hours marveling at this but only after enormous training that doesn't come to you from a diet of playing video games and watching Netflix for your whole life.

Yeah, you're not going to be able to do that it'll take years to untrain yourself from that Netflix video game diet to be able to see the beauty of very simple things you know the average person when they're walking on the sidewalk and they see some dog poo they can't see the beauty in that and you need to train yourself to see the beauty in that and whatever it takes that you need to surrender to see the beauty in that's your work.

That's one of your highest purposes in life. you know I was driving yesterday late at night like I like to do I Drive around Las Vegas late at night just looking at the lights and just contemplating and meditating while I Drive I love to meditate while I Drive the most so I Drive I do this whole loop around Las Vegas it takes about an hour and a half it's probably like 80 miles or so I Drive around the entire city late at night and I was driving and there was like some part on the road where I usually drive where there was like construction going on and I got annoyed by that I'm thinking like oh I got this peaceful Drive and I have to deal with all this construction nonsense that's happening late at night.

But then I also realized like oh wait a minute why am I not taking in the beauty of all of this I mean it's beautiful like the construction signs are certain Beauty to them and people working you know the way they're constructing this this off ramp or on ramp or whatever it is like there's a certain beauty to that and then and then you kind of just see that all this is a society it's sort of like almost like ants working on the little ant colony you know building something on the road and so like you see that beauty whereas normally I would get annoyed by that here I saw the beauty of it and it completely transformed that experience.

So you need to get good at doing that all the time in more and more difficult situations you know it's very difficult to see the beauty when you're dealing with a situation that is affecting your survival needs so that's where most spiritual work happens right there.

 24) The next principle is to feel alive every day.

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

The next Life Principles will be released in part II of Secret Life Principles.