one of my favorite ideas I learned over the last couple of years is the inner Citadel from Isaiah Belin do you know this mhm so Isaiah Belin says when the natural Road toward human fulfillment is blocked human beings Retreat into themselves become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil Fate has denied them externally that's a delusion often if you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire you must teach yourself not to want it if you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get this is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner Citadel in which you lock yourself up against all of the fearful ills of the world mutual friend Rob Henderson explained it in a simpler way if your leg is wounded you can try to treat the leg and if you can't then you cut the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued and I think that we see this everywhere well okay so you so imagine that you lay out a plan and it meets with an impediment and it knocks the slats out from underneath the plan okay now you Retreat okay now you have an option when you're retreating and one option is to construct a world in fantasy where you're taking revenge on those who wronged you and getting what you want that's that's a pathway to Madness so often people who develop serious delusions do develop um what would you so call them their their compensatory fantasies and then they start to dwell in them and often for hundreds of hours so the kids again who shot up the Coline high school they dwelt in a fantasy world for hundreds of hours before they undertook their Dreadful actions right but you can also flip back into yourself let's say and you can this is like this is like confession and atonement it's the proper way to think about it is you can think about what it is that you did wrong or insufficiently that led to the collapse of your plan right so that's the first investigation I made made some sacrifices I attempted to bring about a particular form of the future it didn't happen okay why well the world is set against me and the cosmos is evil and there's no God and I'm bitter and cynical that's one potential explanation right poor me right and and I'm not trying to be flippant about this because sometimes people's dreams are quite realistic and they still fail catastrophically you know it can be brutal you know maybe you did make a lot of good decisions and you suddenly got ill or someone in your family did and everything went to hell on you it doesn't have to be because you've done something cardinally foolish that you fail you know it's built into the structure of the world but doesn't matter you can also Retreat into yourself and you can say something like all right I need to retool my conception of strategy but also potentially my conception of goal you know maybe I'm looking in the wrong place maybe I have to look somewhere else and you can open yourself up to a revelation so there's a gospel statement that's very relevant to this so Christ tells us followers that if they knock the door will open if they ask they'll receive and if they seek they'll find and so it sounds like it sounds magical it sounds like the sort of thing that the new atheists would have a field day with but that isn't that's not an wise interpretation of that saying the proper interpretation is something more like a recognition of the way thought works so imagine your plans didn't work out okay now you sit down and you say to yourself I'd like to know even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was 95% the fault of external occurrences and other people what did I do that wasn't as good as it could have been and where did I fail to look so that the probability of my failure was higher now now to ask that question you have to want the answer that's that's what it means to knock or to ask or to seek this this is no joke it's like you have to want to know and it's a very painful thing to do because especially if you had given it you're all to the degree you were able and you have reason to be bitter you're going to be searching for the errors that you still made and discovering your own errors is always extremely painful right especially if they're errors that you're in love with and so you have to be willing to strip yourself down that's what humility means fundamentally and then but the advantage is this is why it's so useful to listen to people you might find out where you're stupid and then you could stop being stupid and so one of the reasons you confess your sins let's say is because you want to discover where you're insufficient now it's painful you know it's painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else's opinion that might show you where you're blind and ignorant or willfully blind even but the advantage to that is you can rectify the error and then as you move forward you're stronger you know one of the things I taught my kids and I hope Le at least somewhat successfully was that you should always ask a stupid question and and that doesn't mean the sort of question that someone who wasn't paying attention would ask if you're listening to someone and you don't understand what they're saying and you reveal that you're revealing your ignorance you know and maybe you're in a room full of people and you think you're the only person stupid enough to not get it which is very rarely the case by the way the thing is though if you if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person they can Rectify it and if you do that a thousand times you're not ignorant anymore and and this is a real Pathway to success too you see it you do this because you ask real questions in your podcast and Rogan does this kogan's always trying to be a little smarter than he already is and then that works iterated like if you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listen to the answer then you know a thousand things some of them deep that you didn't know before so that's the that's the advantage to searching your soul let's say for the for unrequited sins and attempting to atone that's not a delusion right it's an attempt to set yourself right it's the opposite of a delusion even though there can be a Fantastical element to it yeah the uh conversation around people who try their best do as many things right as they could and yet still fall short because the world is random and unfortunate things happen happiness as far as I can see it sits in the gap between your expectations and reality but the problem here is that people who have high standards often end up feeling a lack right how can people who strive like this avoid feeling despondent at falling short of their own high standards I've heard you talk about the Statue of David saying something like you are not all that you could be yeah and as soon as you posit an ideal you begin to compare yourself to that ideal so well part that's a good question I mean um the ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is is something against which you fall far short and that might be so painful that you can barely stand it but then what you do is you you you two things I suppose is you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your Poss of your potential and what do I mean by lower the ideal well if you're comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the Gap is so painful that it paralyzes you then you've created a dragon that you don't have the tools to master and so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size and you want to scale the dragon down to size until it's a size that you are willing to move toward however small that is now you know if you're here and your ideal is here and that Gap is unbearable then you reduce the Gap and you reduce the Gap and you're going to have to do that anyways because you're not going to move from where you are to perfect in one Fell Swoop right there's going to be incremental steps so you have to fill in that that hierarchy of progression with with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward and and then you should be butress there's another gospel comment that's very interesting it has to do it's called the Matthew principle and the Matthew principle is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken now it's brutal because it implies that reality works like this when you're moving up you go like this right and that's pretty nice that's a lot better than this but when you're going down you go like that right it's like downhill downhill Cliff okay so you want to avoid the downhill path well if the uphill path is like this which is like exponential let's say or geometric then what that means is that it doesn't matter how big the first steps you take uphill are even if they're trivial even if they're shameful in their in their size because you're so useless that if you're if you're disciplined in that you'll speed up extraordinarily rapidly and so that's the good news you might say is that you can take very small steps even ones that might be shameful in their size and you have to admit that to yourself but once you get the ball rolling it doesn't roll in a linear fashion it rolls in a geometric fashion and this is a really good thing to know because it can take the sting out of the realization of your own stupidity it's like yeah you know every everybody has their weak sides let's say things they're embarrassed about when I first started going to the gym I was like how old was I 1985 23 and I think I weighed 135 PBS and I was F 6 foot one very very thin a TW I WR 27 inch waist something like that I smoked like mad and I drank too much like I wasn't in good shape the first the first attempts forward I took in the I went to this swim sze class Jesus it was me and this like really fat guy young guy probably not any worse shape than me and like seven old women over 70 and they could outswim me like it was pretty damn humiliating and so I did a semester of that and got myself in somewhat better shape and then I started to go to the gym to work out to lift weights and that was also rough because you know I'd be underneath the bloody bench press trying to lift 75 lbs off the off the rests and you know some muscle-headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do it and it's like yeah thank you but you know it's embarrassing and lots of times people won't do things like go to the gym because they're so embarrassed about how they look or what sort of shape they're in and it's a pain to start at the bottom but you start at the bottom where you're weak and if you want to rectify what's weak you have to accept the fact that you're at the bottom and that the first steps are going to be painful you know I it took me about 3 years but I stopped smoking and then I stopped drinking and I gained 40 lbs of muscle in like three and a half years something like that I basically had to stop doing that because I had to eat like six times a day it was crazy but I got a lot more physically confident and a lot more coordinated cuz working out with dumbbells makes you coordinated right because it it exercises all the small ligaments and the tendons and so my lower body in particular got a lot more coordinated then I could dance so that was better when I was going out dancing because I did a lot of that in graduate school and but the point of all this is if you're going to rectify your weaknesses you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame now if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you you shrink that right we'll get back to talking to Jordan in one minute but first I need to tell you about element I've used element every single morning for over three years now it is the way I start every single day it tastes fantastic 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