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It’s hard to escape your conditioning, but that is the only way to see the truth. Today, I need you to let go of everything you’ve been taught to believe about selfishness and selflessness. At the core of this episode is a question: Are we, as individuals, the means of society, or are we the ends of society? What I mean by that, brothers, is, should we be sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society, or does society exist so that we can achieve fulfillment? This question is such an important one because whichever one we believe to be true will give us an entirely different idea about how the world should be structured compared to someone who believes the opposite to be true.
Tune in today to hear why I think the commonly used definitions for selfishness and selflessness are problematic. In this episode I share how we can reframe these concepts, and how doing so will allow us to shed our beta conditioning and truly embrace our alpha state.
Brothers, what you are, the world is; the truth is within you and only within you, you will not find it by looking outside of yourself. That is why I cannot give you an answer to the question I have posed and I encourage you to look deeply within yourselves to find what resonates with you. I implore you to rid yourself of the opinions and influences of those around you, and decide how you want your life to look. Life is a puzzle, and every journey of discovery is necessary and important.
Want to know more about what I do and how I can help you? Sign up for a free 45-minute session with me, and I’ll show you how this works!
What You’ll Learn from This Episode:
- The range of outcomes that occur as a result of selfish and selfless behavior.
- Why the common framings of selfishness and selflessness are problematic.
- Two different states of conditioning; individuals are the means of society or the ends of society.
- How the world should be structured if individuals are the means of society.
- What the function of society is if individuals are the ends of it.
- The law of cause and effect.
- Impacts that individuals can have on society which society cannot have on individuals.
- Why I am not going to give you an answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this episode.
- How the way you define selfish and selfless behavior depends on your conditioning.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- Enroll for the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Academy here.
- Sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the Alpha mindset.
[INTRODUCTION]
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:32.7] KA: What’s up, my brothers? Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. I am still in California, the weather is amazing, I’m soaking in the environment, the atmosphere and the energy from this part of the world and I’m heading to Mexico in a couple of weeks.
Now, I got a lot of content I want to get in with you guys today but I do want to tell that some of the reasons why I travel all over the playground we call planet earth is because I love it, it’s because I want to, it’s because I can, and it’s because it allows me to taste the different vibrations of various parts of this living planet.
Let me explain that. When I was living deeply in my conditioning, which was only a few years ago, brothers, understand, this was like half a decade ago, this was like five to six years ago, I was deeply in conditioning for most of my life before that and I was only experiencing the unconscious limiting beliefs in my head and it was preventing me from engaging with what is.
Instead, I spent my life engaging only with the thoughts I was thinking. I was engaging with those thoughts, I was believing that they were facts, these stories, and I was creating my results based on those sentences. I was living in the world, but only existing in a prison of my own mind. I couldn’t connect with the vibrational field that exists around us and through us.
[0:01:59.0] You understand that? I was only connecting with my own mind, my mind was kind of creating an inner loop that wasn’t letting me connect externally or with the external world to connect with me. I was asleep, I was unconscious or I was in my beta condition, depending on which path you’re on, you may have a different name for that zombie-like state of existing that prevents you from experiencing the truth of life.
One of the results of the deconditioning process is that you begin to allow your thoughts to move through your mind in observation, rather than in interaction, and you start to emancipate your own truth and that will engage with the vibrational energy of the humans, the animals, the plants, the environment that you’re in. Now, the reason I bring this up is to, first, I love you guys, you guys are like my extended family, you’re out there.
I don’t always get to talk to you but I know you’re out there, my mastermind is like my inner circle, the academy is like my immediate family, which is getting pretty big by the way, and it’s so amazing to see the evolution coming from that program, how these guys are evolving, it’s amazing.
You guys out there in the pod waves are like my extended family. I do want to tell you, when I have the chance, what I’m doing, where I’m going, what’s happening in my life and I’m buying real estate in Mexico because I love the jungle, in the Yucatan peninsula and buying real estate because there’s so much life in the jungle, there’s so much energy, there’s so much life. I can’t even explain to you the difference, being in different parts of the world and how amazing being in the jungle is.
[0:03:42.7] There’s the life there that I have, I can feel that energy and so because of that, I feel surrounded by this powerful vibration, it’s just amazing. That’s what I mean when I say, “Taking in various parts of this living planet.” There’s lots of life, there’s lots of living in the jungle.
Now, the second reason I bring it up is because I’m currently in California and my meditations have brought up this topic I’m about to get into on the podcast, while being here in Los Angeles, California, United States of America, I’ve picked up a vibration that has led me to the thought experiment I’m about to present to you and I’ve shared this with my mastermind as well and I’m excited to introduce this concept to all of you, especially since we are looking at living your purpose in the 1.0 academy program.
You guys, enroll in the academy this month, you’ll begin to work on living your purpose. Now, the concepts of selfishness and selflessness, or self-serving and self-sacrificing behavior, seem to be at opposite ends of a pendulum that swings back and forth in the binary human brain, causing a lot of range or causing a large range of outcomes.
Again, ranging from minor personal irritations to catastrophic global warfare. I mean, consider this, brothers, we know that selfishness and selflessness range, they swing. It swings back and forth on these major extremes and before introducing and moving into this question that I’m about to introduce to you, I want to offer that you utilize the skills that you’ve learned from this podcast to approach this concept from a mentally neutral space because I want to offer that you let go of everything that you’ve been taught, told or determined that you’ve wanted to believe.
[0:05:26.4] You’re going to look at the question, “Which came first, the seed or the fruit?” If you have any story that you’ve been taught by an outer authority, giving precedence to either the seed or the fruit, you’re going into this experiment with a bias, you will have a confirmation bias going along with it.
One of the problems that arose quickly in this thought experiment were the connotations around selfish and selfless because selfish, according to Google, is defined as a lack in consideration for others, right? Or concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure and Google even gives the example of, “I joined them for selfish reasons,” or “I joined this group for selfish reasons.” Right away, you can see this is a poor definition.
In fact, the two definitions given have no correlation with each other and the example given has no correlation with the definitions. The two definitions are like, lacking consideration for others and concern chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. Certainly, I can lack consideration for others in a very malevolent way and I can be concerned chiefly with my own personal profit or pleasure without lacking consideration for others.
There may not be a separation there and I can join for selfish reasons that doesn’t lack consideration for others or isn’t concerned with my own personal profit or pleasure, there’s really not a lot of correlation. However, I’m not going to digress into that because given that this is the working definition that we have, it makes the neutrality of this experiment just more difficult and after all, we haven’t even really been conditioned to believe that lack in consideration for others and being concerned chiefly with one’s own profit or pleasure is bad, right? That’s kind of where we come from.
[0:07:06.7] Instead of pairing off selfishness against selflessness, which we could do and I do believe and still reel in both words to release their connotation, view them objectively and seek inner truth through the thought labyrinth, through that cognitive labyrinth. I’m instead going to propose the thought experiment with a different cognitive inquiry in the form of which precedes which? The question is this, brothers, here we go, seven minutes in the question is this.
The question that confronts humans at a core level, a very basic level and yet a deep unconscious binary level that determines how we unite or divide as a species is whether the individual is the means of society or the end of society.
What I mean by that is that are you and I, as individuals, you and I as individuals, that’s all humans, as individual beings, are we, you, me, all people to be used to be directed to be trained, educated, controlled, conditioned by society in order to move society forward, to evolve society as a whole? Or – here’s the other, here’s the binary, or does society exist for the experience and evolution of the individual in order to move the individual forward and in order to involve individually, personally?
[0:08:28.6] This is the core cognitive questions that most humans will, when making their unconscious, every day choices, side on one way or the other in a selfish, and again, I’m going to use these terms, if we can remove connotation just to put them back into this new question, but there will be the selfish, which is that society exists for me to experience the fullness of my life, or selfless, which is the choice that sides on we must sacrifice ourselves for the greater good of society and species behavior. We have the selfish behavior, we got selfless behavior.
Now, this being the question, most of you will probably say both, right? Most of you are going to say, “We want to aim for both,” as in, “We want to live freely as ourselves and at the same time, make choices that serve the greater good,” and of course, ideally, that is true. I think most of us do want that intellectually, in this place of Utopian living, we kind of want to have this idea in our minds where both are happening simultaneously.
However, on a moment-to-moment basis, because we live in a world of duality, we live in a world of contrast, and on a moment to moment, on a day to day, on choice to choice, living as a human being, you will unconsciously side with your unconscious belief that will fall on one or the other end of this question.
For most of us, it will be whichever side we’ve been conditioned to because most of us are not fully conscious, aware and living in our alpha state, we’re living in that beta condition. We’ll most likely fall on whatever side we’ve been conditioned to go with.
[0:10:01.4] As you listen to this podcast, brother, allow yourself to be neutral in the expression through form and let’s get to the bottom of this to see if we can determine the truth. That’s what we’re after, we’re only after the truth and let’s be honest when we do this.
This is an important question, especially in these times. In the year 2021, I think it’s a really important question for all of us who are serious about living consciously, living as alpha men, really concern ourselves with. A lot of what I coach students through is this conditioning of people pleasing and external validation seeking.
What I find so fascinating is that there is nothing wrong with people pleasing and external validation seeking. It is a way, it is a path, it is a journey, it is a lifestyle, many people are on that journey, many people are living that lifestyle, you could choose to live your life that way and it wouldn’t be wrong, you see?
There’s no right or wrong, it’s all neutral. This is why this question is so important. Is the individual a means or an ends of society? That is the question. Are we to be the means of a society where we sacrifice self to push society itself further for the idea of the greater good, right? Are we trying to evolve society as a unit, as an entity in and of itself?
Or, are we the end of society, where society has built and exists for us as a playground to express ourselves individually, selfishly and allow others the same freedom to be who they are individually and selfishly? Really, just allowing “I’m going to be me, you be you and we’re not going to get in the way of each other.” That’s kind of the move, right?
[0:11:35.9] Which way is it? If it is the former, right? If the former is true, if we say this is true, we are a means to society, the human beings only exist to push society further, to push our progress deeper, to evolve as a species more, then society as an entity is more important than the individual, right? When we follow that cognition is true, our behavior is to give up individuality and work for the growth of society.
Our whole system must be built for the growth of the species, for the growth of society itself. Our education system, our government, our workforce, everything, all of it must be designed to bring the individual away from individuality so that society moves as a unit, like a shoal of fish avoiding a predator.
I don’t know if you guys ever seen that, how these shoals of fish move as they’re kind of – they’re actually kind of herded by these predators. Predators sweep by and they move together. Or swallows – have you seen swallows fly, how they move together?
They all move as this unit and there will be a lot of sacrificing in those shoals because the fish on the outside or in those groups of swallows because on the outside, that’s where the predators, that’s where they’ll pick off the individuals, right? There will be some self-sacrifice.
Now, if the latter is true, that humans are the end of society, then the function of a society is to maintain as a priority, individuality, such as to never make any person, any human conform to any pattern of thought or behavior.
[0:13:09.3] But instead, urge the individual towards a sense of freedom, towards a sense of self-expression. This would mean that all of our structures, in form, everything that comes from this side of the belief of the question would exist for the function of self-expression from the individual.
Now, I know that I’m getting a little deep into this episode to be saying this. I want to remind you that all of this is subjective, right? Now, I may be using analogies and adjectives to describe the opinions and outcomes of the thought experiment but the truth, the answer is not dependent on any ideology, it’s not dependent on any political opinion, religion or education.
I’m not talking about the subjectivity of how we choose to think about the word, how we choose to think about the behavior, how we choose to think about the neutral action. What I’m talking about is just for you to look at this question for yourself, this is all I’m asking, for you yourself to look at this question, to go into this, to contemplate this for you, from your alpha state, with yourself, for yourself and not bringing with you all the baggage from your past.
When I say baggage, brothers, I mean, memories. I mean beliefs, I mean opinions, choices, thoughts, ideas, concepts, propaganda from outer authorities, from the other people. That is your conditioning.
[0:14:42.2] If you are dependent on the conditioning of other people for your opinions, for your truth, you will be dependent on their opinion and you will never find the truth. The truth is within you. If you are looking without, if you are looking outside of you to find your truth, you will never find it. It doesn’t exist with an outer authority.
You will not find your truth, you will not find the truth for you outside of you. It doesn’t come from another human, it doesn’t come from any authority, even if it’s a book, if it’s an organization, an institution, anything that comes from outside of you can’t be the truth for you because it is by definition an opinion of another, so you have to first let go.
That’s the first move, is always letting go of everything that everyone else has ever said. Let go of the opinion of the political narrative of the left and the right, which is the way we do politics in the US. By the way, we are a two-party system and we label parties on the right and on the left, and that was just for my international brothers listening, right?
If you are not a US citizen listening, that is the way we do politics but you gotta let go of that. Let go of all of that, let go of economic beliefs, right? Let go of your ideas around capitalism or communism. Let go of the opinions of all the leaders, all the influencers, all the books, all the celebrities, all the propaganda, all the education, all the other people who claim to know what is best for all humans and you need to look at the question independently without prior opinion, without prior conditioning.
This is so important brother, because what you are, the world is, do you understand? That’s why this question is so important, that’s why you determining the answer for you, that’s why you finding the truth of this answer for you is so important because what you are, the world is. This is the universal truth.
[0:16:28.8] You bring forth from your energy mechanics the vibration that determines the world you experience. Thoughts determine results, our personal cognition determines our personal results. Our personal results determine our collective results. This is the law, this is the law of cause and effect and it is as consistent and reliable as gravity.
Now, as you know this law is static. This movement is static and it’s impersonal. When we move things into form with mind, this is done with creativity working upon a static field. It’s as if a sculptor is working with a mound of clay. The clay is not creative, it has no creativity in itself. It is the form. The sculptor is the creative, the sculptor is the creator, the thinker, the thought.
The individual is acting from the fluid creative upon the static impersonal, that is what we do when we act upon society. Society doesn’t work upon us, we work upon it. We are the creator, we are the creative. Society is static. Society needs us in a neutral circumstance. We meet society with a creative vibration of expression into the A-line of the model of alignment but our creative vibration is our cogno-emotive reaction.
It is our thought and our feeling. This is a one-way street. What you are, the world is, what the world is, you won’t necessarily become and this is because action is neutral. It is static, and has no effect on a creative force. The creative force is the mind, it’s the self. It’s the self, working through the mind. Consider this, brothers, because this is so important when you clear your mind.
[0:18:08.4] It’s so important when it’s clear for your mind and you clear your mind through it because society is the relationship between individuals. If there is no inner change from the individual, no inner expression of truth and individuality from the alpha, then society itself, which has no creativity, being static and being impersonal, imprisons the individual and makes him repetitive.
Society makes the individual habitual. Society makes the individual repetitive, conditioned, habitual, trained, programmed, this is our conditioning. This is us losing or abdicating the creativity of our alpha state into the beta condition to where we become a cog in the machine and yet, the idea perpetuates that there must be a movement in the static form first.
I know you brothers, I know you hear this. I know you hear that humans want to see a radical change in the society first, aiming at the result that humans will evolve inwardly from an evolution outwardly. I know that you are aware of this, that we want to see a change in external. We want to see a change in legislation.
Let’s change the law. If we change the law, then we can change behavior and if we can change behavior, then we can change belief. If we can change the way people do things, then we can change the way people think about things. This is the way our current society works, we want to aim to change this behavior.
You can see how cognitive dissonance quickly leads to the mental confusion manifesting in behavioral confusion because we have been conditioned to believe that we must place society, which is the desires of the whole, above the self and yet, this is constantly and consistently following with the collapse of the society itself.
[0:19:58.6] Why? Because society itself is dead. Society itself is static, it is objective mold. It is objective form. It requires the creativity of the alpha state. It requires the creativity of self to manifest it into movement and expression.
If we are not in our alpha state, if we are always working through our beta condition, then we are working from a place of non-creativity to a place of non-creativity and this becomes repetitive, cyclical, and ends up in the unconscious life that we end up living and perpetuating, which turns into confusion.
A human who rejects the self for the sake of society, rejects existential freedom for the sake of ephemeral safety and transient security. I become a cog in the machine, I become a number in the system. My personal desires and expressions are cast aside for the benefit of the invisible masses.
Here is where I introduce the momentous leap brothers because this is where and this is only where we can find the truth because when we look externally, all we find is illusion and we continue to seek through illusion and oscillating back and forth between self-sacrificing and self-interest, self-expression. We do our thing, we do a selfish act, we have a selfish paradigm and we isolate over to self-sacrificing paradigm, a selfless paradigm.
We do this back and forth always with our oculus-aimed externally and always through a state of fear and scarcity.
[0:21:48.1] To introduce the momentous leap, where in the beginning of the episode I told you that most humans will make a binary unconscious choice when considering their everyday decisions based on a core outlook they have on the world, which is whether you and I are here for society or society is here for you and I.
Before I go any further, what do you think brothers? What do you think the answer is? Do you have any guesses? Are you and I here for society or is society here for you and I? How is it? What is it? Well, the answer is actually for you to find out and I know that that’s a little strange, right? Kind of leaving you hanging a bit, right? Old Kevin A. of Alpha Male Coach leaving you hanging.
I am not leaving you hanging brother, here’s why. Here is why I say that’s for you to find out. I’m not trying to be condescending. I am not trying to be elusive. You see, I don’t know what the answer is for you. It doesn’t really matter. It has no – I can’t tell you.
For me to tell you what is best for you is to be making a choice from my own truth and saying, “Hey, this is my truth so it must be yours as well” or for me to tell you from my conditioning, which is to say, “This is what others have told me I should be doing, so therefore you should be doing it too,” and then all I’m doing is I’m conditioning you with that, either my truth or my conditioning.
It’s not that either way is right or wrong. It’s not that there is a better way of doing things. It’s only that the right way is a personal way. It is an individual way and it is your alpha way.
[0:23:19.8] In the academy, I will guide you into determining what is the true self, your true self, and helping you see your condition not self, so you can start to make the choices that serve your inner truth because only you know how to make those choices.
Other people can’t make choices for you, other outer authorities can’t tell you which path you’re on but this does help you lead a life of less resistance because you are not bumping into and attracting things that aren’t you, that are a part of your conditioning, that are a part of who you are not. They’re an unconscious mechanizing of the universal truth.
You’ve been conditioned to believe thoughts that are not you and then you are manifesting those thoughts in your life through the universal truth, that thoughts create results. In the beginning of the journey, there is a movement inward that can appear to be selfish, that can appear this way because the humans who are judging from a binary perspective are afraid of the change and they’re seeing from their mind.
This is okay. This is perfect. It’s a part of their path, moving through the necessary components of self-discovery can appear to be selfish by those who are locked in the conditioned response pattern of self-sacrifice. If another person has been told their entire life that you need to sacrifice what you want so that others can be happy or better or good or move forward, then they are going to see your behavior of self-discovery, of working on yourself, of doing things to discover who you are as selfish.
[0:24:51.7] It’s okay brother, what other people think about you tells you nothing about you and everything about them. After some work inwardly, there is a return to the world with eyes that can see for the first time and you do not live in isolation. The archipelago truth is an analogy for self-discovery, not an analogy for the human experience.
The human experience is one of relationship following self-discovery. Without the latter, the former is an illusion and the cause of great suffering. All I can offer you is to enroll in the academy and to find out for yourself who you are without the propaganda from the false external authorities. Wash away the lies of conditioning and live into who you are and have always meant to be.
You will also learn how to allow others to be who they are without the judgment from your beta condition and this is the result of the momentous leap. It is not that you take on both perspectives. It is not that all of a sudden, “Oh, well it’s both. I’m both selfish and selfless,” it is not that at all brother.
It’s that you live into who you are and allow others to be who they are without the judgment that comes from your beta conditioning believing the not-you stories that have been trained and taught to you throughout your entire life and when you get to this point, you recognize that there is no this or that, right or wrong. It’s all a part of the puzzle of life.
It is all necessary to create what’s necessary for the whole. In order for the beautiful picture, in order for the image of the puzzle to show up in perfection, we must all be our unique piece. If we are all trying to be the same piece, then it will be a blanket single color, right?
[0:26:39.2] We’re all trying to be the same, we’re all trying to be red or we’re all trying to be purple, we’re all trying to be one. We’re all trying to be this one homogenized belief system and that cannot be because it’s not who we are. We’ll be forcing ourselves into this, this does not work. We must be who we are, we must be our individual piece so we don’t take on both perspectives.
We don’t become both selfish and selfless. It’s that we’re neither. We recognize the necessity of all pieces. This is harmony, this is your alpha state. Selfishness or selflessness, neither, right? Elevate your alpha state brother. Elevate your alpha state and allow others to exist in their current alpha state. Maybe, it’s their beta condition, allow others to exist in their beta condition.
That’s okay, be who you are. Do not fear, fear or be ashamed of shame. You are an indomitable alpha male. Your path is true when you are moving through the self. The more we elevate our own alpha state, the more we engage with the creative force that vibrates like a shockwave all around the world. This is the first cause, this is the momentous leap.
That’s what I got for you this week. Until next week my brothers, elevate your alpha.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:28:01.0] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash your Alpha: Your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.
[END]
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