This quote will make you question your ‘traditions’ | Vishen Lakhiani

Have you ever considered that you might be living your life based on dumb ideas or obsolete ways of thinking that were passed to you from past generations? There's a beautiful quote I saw on the Internet that says tradition is peer pressure from dead people. But as we live life, we tend to operate based on tradition that comes from religion, from culture, from society, from parenting that enforces a certain way of living onto us.

Ways of life that may no longer.

Be relevant in today's fast changing world. Now, I call these rules that we blindly follow from indoctrination brules or bullshit rules. But the question is, how do you escape this idea? How do you create a life that's truly original, where you're not boxed in or or shamed into following the conventional way? This is an extract from my upcoming program with Mindvalley called Be Extraordinary.

Now the question is, how do we take on these rules? Well, there are five ways we take on the beliefs that confine us. The first is childhood indoctrination. So when we are born as kids, we are highly malleable. Yuval Hariri, in the book Sapience, says something really interesting about human beings. He says that almost every animal is born as a tiny print of the adult animal, but not human beings. He says human beings are born like molten glass. This is why we can train and raise a child to be a Buddhist or a Muslim, to be a socialist or a capitalist, to be confident or to be broken. We are molded as children. One of the core parts of being human is the cognitive field, the field of thoughts in our head. And that, my friends, is implanted in us by our upbringing. So we often take on beliefs from parents, from teachers, from grandparents, and from the people who are around us as we are children. The second thing that implants brules in us are authority figures, primarily politicians. If you've been watching the news lately, you'll see that there are huge scandals happening in governments around the world where politicians have blatantly lied to win votes. Politicians have used Facebook ads targeting us to get us to believe things that are simply not true. So you want to be very conscious about how we take on blindly the ideas implanted into us by politicians. When human beings perceive someone as a leader, we automatically take on their beliefs. The third is the need to belong. Just this morning as I was reading the news, there was a video on CNN.com of a lady who escaped an alt right cult. And she was asked, what made you join this band of white supremacists? And she said that she thought that almost everyone who Got sucked into this cult, did this because they felt lonely and isolated. She said it was isolation. There's a lesson here. You see, we sometimes take on rules that hold us back because we want to conform so that we can fit in with a particular group of people. It may be the company culture of the company that hires us. It may be the religion, it may be the beliefs of the ethnic group that we want to belong to. But very often, while these groups give us a sense of belonging, some of these groups could have really dangerous rules. And you want to be aware of that. So our brains are not perfect, rational machines. When we are first born, we are highly trainable. And when we are adults, we tend to obey leaders. And third, we will often suppress rational thought to fit into a group. Keep these three ideas in mind because they will help you identify when you are making irrational choices and suppressing your own soul's desire. But there are two additional ways we take on rules. Social proof. You want to be conscious of this. Think about this. Why is it that billions of people across the world willingly put high fructose corn syrup into their bodies and consider this normal? I'm talking, of course, of Coca Cola. If you look at brilliant marketing engines like Coca Cola, they basically use social proof to sway you. Their advertising essentially says, look, everyone is doing this, so you ought to do it too. And they use all sorts of tricks of advertising. If you, if you watch any Coke ad, you see people happily chugging Cokes, running, holding hands down a hill. They associate Coke with positivity, and they suggest that if everyone's doing it, hey, you gotta do it too. Now, of course, beautiful thing is happening on planet earth. As we are waking up, we are starting to see how companies like this misdirect us. We already have seen this with the tobacco industry, and today, very few Americans actually smoke. However, the whole smoking epidemic started through the application of social proof to implant a brule into people's heads. In the early 60s and 70s, cigarette companies would pay Hollywood execs to show heroes smoking on the giant silver screens. That is social proof. If everyone's doing it, I ought to do it too. Be very attentive to how you. You sometimes take on behaviors, beliefs and practices because everyone else seems to be doing it. Now, the fifth way we take on a brule is through our own internal insecurities. This is the meaning making machine in our head. And as we go deeper into this program, we're gonna fix those insecurities. But here's how it works. You're at work. You do really good work. But somebody else gets the recognition because you are not fully yet unfuckwithable. You create a meaning I'm not worthy or I am not recognized, or My boss is an asshole, or you come up with an excuse that other person looked better and spoke up more. So that's why they got the praise. Life is unfair. Our internal insecurities make us create brules. And then we live under these operating systems without realizing that we made it all up. So when you pay attention to these five ideas, you learn to identify and pluck out the rules that you have irrationally taken on.

So if this Brule idea resonated with you, join my upcoming masterclass on mindvalley. It's completely free to go on to the next level, where I'm gonna be.

Talking about four levels of consciousness and.

How 99% of people are operating at level one, two, and three. But the real changes happen when you.

Move to level four.

Check out this masterclass because I think the ideas here are going to change the way you show up in the world.