Vishen Lakhiani argues that language was the key factor enabling Homo sapiens to outcompete other hominins by allowing complex communication, social organization, and shared imagined realities. He contrasts the physical world (shared, observable) with the ‘human thought plane’ of constructed concepts (marriage, God, meditation) and cites Steve Jobs to illustrate that many social structures were invented by people no smarter than us. He invokes mimetics/social conditioning (citing Paul Marston) to explain how beliefs propagate, notes scientific support for meditation’s physiological effects, and describes his Consciousness Engineering project—interviewing extraordinary people to identify useful models and to expose and dismantle “brules” (bullshit rules).
Chapters
In the book Sapience by Yuval Hariri, Hariri talks about the interesting idea that at a certain point in history, we were not the only humans on the planet. There could have been as many as five different types of humans. Homo sapiens, of course, us. But Homo neanderthals, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo florensis, all of these humans, there's a good chance, coexisted that one survived. The one that survived, of course, was your early grandmother or grandfather, the first Homo sapien. Now, the thing is, why did Homo sapiens survive while other humans died out? Neanderthals, of course, were brawnier. They were bigger. They even had bigger brains. Yet Homo sapiens survived. Now, according to Hariri, the reason for our dominance was language. It was the fact that if you were to look at maybe an early Neanderthal or even apes today, they could make simple language patterns such as, look out, tiger. But Homo sapiens could say, hey, maybe you shouldn't go to the river until midday, because I saw a tiger lingering there early in the morning. See, this language gave us an edge. It allowed us to form villages, then tribes, then societies. It allowed us to create laws, to create relationships, to create marriage, to create mythology, then religion, then to go to war over this mythology and religion. Language gave us an edge. That language also did something else. Language allowed us to simultaneously live in two worlds. There's the physical world. In the physical world, almost all human beings, everywhere in the world, would agree that a particular piece of rock is granite. They would agree on the color, on the hardness, on the thickness. They would agree that a particular animal was a cougar. They would agree on the characteristics, the color, the type of animal. But there's this other world, this world of pure human cognition. In this world, there exist concepts such as marriage, calories, exercise, God, religion, meditation. Can you draw a calorie? Can we agree on what God is? Can you see meditation? Yet all of these concepts are real. They help us function in the world. God is not something we can see, but God exists as a syntax in the human brain. Meditation isn't something that you can touch, but we know that when meditating. Over 1,400 scientific studies show that it's influencing your body in positive ways. The thing to remember is this. In the world of the human thought plane, everything that we know of, everything you see, everything that you touch, isn't completely real and was made up by people no smarter than you. Take 30 seconds and watch this clip of Steve Jobs explaining this idea.
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
So the important thing is, everything you think about the world, all the ideas, your beliefs, your decisions, the things you do on a day to day basis, very often they were made up by people no smarter than you. But if many of these ideas are suboptimal, if many of these ideas were created by our ancestors, people no smarter than us, why is it that we blindly follow them? Well, the reason is mimetics and social conditioning. A scientist called Paul Marston said the evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviors, emotions, beliefs and religions. Not true rational choice, but true contagion. When we are unsure of how to react to a stimulus or a situation. These theories suggest that we actively look to others for guidance and consciously imitate them. So almost everything that you use to function in the world, all your beliefs, all your systems of living, you did not take on by rational choice, but it was implanted in you by parents, teachers, fathers, mothers, preachers, the media, and industrial age education system. Typically, most of this happened when you were a child, but you take them to be true and you act out in the world based on these beliefs. So my project is called Consciousness Engineering. What I'm doing is I'm interviewing some of the world's most extraordinary people. Billionaires, scientists, people in the leading edge of research, of the spiritual movement, in personal growth, people who are doing extraordinary things in the world. And I'm trying to figure out what makes them who they are, what makes them most successful, happier, what makes them such incredibly powerful contributing members of the human race. And I'm trying to see what are their models of the world, what is it that they do different? See, outside the rules of physics, outside the rules of law, all other rules are meant to be challenged. But to do this, you have to be able to see the patterns that you're operating in right now so that you can step out of these patents. I have a word for these patents. The word I use is brules. A brule is a bullshit rule. And we as human beings have created brules for every aspect of how we live life. Education, parenting, growth, love, meaning, politics, religion, culture, work. To truly be extraordinary, you have to learn how to see and how to break the rules governing your life. We'll talk about this in the next video.
