Joseph Maynor

You don't choose to believe.

There is no wanting to do. There is only what is.

Do some "do nothing" meditation for 30 minutes every morning.

We enjoy talking about Spirituality like a one might enjoy fishing, but that doesn't mean what we're doing is important. We don't have to judge it by any particular standard. You resonate with discussing these matters and find joy in it -- is there really more analysis needed? Nothing is more important or less important per se. You just want to accept reality as it is. And for you, reality involves discussing on this Forum. That's your movie man -- is it that bad? It could be much worse, right? You're lucky! Haha. There's nothing for you to do or say -- you just enjoy it! End of analysis. Enjoy life. People don't really know when to end an analysis, I often find. It's intuitive, I guess. Does there always have to be a reason for everything? Ya know?

A NOTE ON BELIEFS IN THIS WORK -- PSST! HINT -- YOU DON'T REALLY NEED THEM I try not to have too many beliefs about things. Just be reality. Rest as awareness. There is no need to believe. There is no need to do anything. You wanna get to the point where you're completely surrendered to not doing anything. Yet reality still moves by magic. Nothing changes after Enlightenment. That's the thing. You're already Enlightened, you're just programmed with erroneous beliefs about reality. You think that you can know and that you can control and that you can do, etc. That's all belief, or conceptual-truth as I choose to term it. And there's this underlying belief that reality mirrors the structure of our beliefs, or at least corresponds with them. But that's a pretty strong assumption on our part, isn't it? That's pretty much most likely to be false, isn't it? That just a pretty good-hunch based on our acquaintance with our huge library of fossilized-ideas cataloged in Philosophy. Ideas seem to have lifespans, but Reality is not limited in that way.

@egoless Why is conceptual-knowing about reality so important and valuable to us? What are we hoping to find?

Interesting. I like this. We choose to cling or not to cling to beliefs. We like to cling to one set of beliefs and then act all proud like we found something truly valuable. The stickiness of beliefs is incredible. Video on point to watch:

I don't believe there's such a thing. I haven't had a deja vu experience since I reached the age of reason, which was like age 15 or so.

People think Enlightened people are like Jesus or something. That's false. The point of Enlightenment is to free yourself from all ideologies. Reality is not like Jesus. Jesus is a story, a set of beliefs, a set of visualizations that we've been culturally programmed with. Jesus is a fantasy of the Mind. So, Enlightened people transcend value categories and aim to transcend them. Reality is what it is outside of the cubby-holes that the Mind desires to fit reality into. We think that the virtuous person is someone who tries to fit themselves into the virtue cubby-holes. That is a problematic paradigm though. It's unrealistic, in a word. It's all Egoic fantasy about trying to control reality to fit a thought about reality. And we don't realize that this is impossible. Most of us don't realize it. So -- no -- Enlightened people are not necessarily goodie-goodies. They're real. They're accepted their shadow traits and have re-integrated them. And they are conscious of their shadow traits. They understand how all of this works, how Ego works, etc.

What is you make your life purpose what you are doing already? Can you see a core in what you are doing already that you can make a life purpose out of? Reality is already doing exactly what it wants to do.

This is the kind of ideology that we're very accustomed to. This is Science, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion. This is the seeking for unchanging wisdom, or beliefs that are context-independent -- true across space and time.

What causes meaning problems is clinging to thoughts in ignorant ways. It's that simple. It's common-sense really. You don't even need a theory of the Ego to try and tell a story to explain that. We can use our more mundane and less sexy common-sense story. Bad ideas, bad outcome. Every culture in the world probably understands an equivalent story such as this.

It's 3 words. Or 3 sounds if you hear a vocalization of the words. A Kundalini awakening

One of the best knowledge materials I have found on Indian Philosophy. Very well written, and very well read. Get the audiobook! It's very good. https://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/Indian-Philosophy-Audiobook/B00GRATEMW

Yep. That's why seeking comes to an end. Once the unchanging Soul is located, there's no more seeking needed.

Awesome. Aristotle's Epistemology is based on Intuition too I just found out. Way cool!

Yep. Every individual has a unique Ego/Shadow fingerprint.

A DESCRIPTION OF THE EGO-SHADOW DYNAMIC -- AND HOW THE EGO PARTITIONS AND JUDGES REALITY The Shadow is the opposite of what you (the Ego) want to attach to. It's all the traits that are part of you but you don't like to look at. Oftentimes when we act from the Shadow we don't even see that we're doing anything wrong. And not all traits in the Shadow are negative. Shadow traits can be positive too. A good example of this is when the goodie-goodie gets stressed and then acts like an asshole -- and feels justified while doing it and not even realizing they are being an asshole in the moment. Right? The Ego doesn't want to think of itself as being an asshole, so the behavior will occur almost unconsciously. See how the Ego blots out bits of awareness? That's one of the worst things that the Ego does -- it creates blind-spots to reality. The Ego wants to repress bits of reality that it doesn't want to accept. Or the passive person who becomes a control-freak when stressed. Right? The Ego turns a blind-eye in these situations. There's not much awareness in the goodie-goodie control-freak in that moment, right? That's not a mistake. That's what the Ego does, it carves up reality into parts, but reality can't be divided like that. This is a problem with the Mind not reality. And it causes a lot of ignorance and suffering at the end of the day, the Ego does. That's how the Shadow comes out. You can't hide from yourself forever. The Shadow is always there waiting to be accepted, loved, and integrated into reality. The Shadow is you not accepting a part of reality. So, the Shadow always pushes to be re-integrated. This causes a lot of our suffering in life because the Ego never lets this happen. So, we get the attempt at reintegration, and then the Egoic shutdown every time. That causes suffering, but no growth. So, that's the hamster wheel-effect that the shadow-Ego oscillation causes. Or the preacher who goes and visits a brothel and then wipes it out of his mind quickly. He doesn't even see that he is doing anything wrong. The Ego won't allow it. Think of the Ego as like a fortress that only wants to allow certain traits in. The Ego wants to partition reality into good and not-good, me and not-me. The Shadow is all the parts of reality that the Ego doesn't like for whatever reason. He'll rationalize it away in some way and then bury it, right? The Ego will do everything it can to distance that part of undesired reality from acceptance. Everybody has Ego and everybody has Shadow. Frankly, I see a lot of people acting from their Shadow, and I think Shadow-Work would help a lot of people re-integrate their reality and dismantle the Ego from their psyche. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_repression These videos are good for Shadow-Work:

DON'T GET TOO CONCEPTUAL ABOUT REALITY -- REALITY IS VERY SIMPLE You might be getting a bit too theoretical; too clever by half; too much in the Mind; too beholden to beliefs. You are all that exists. But that doesn't mean that there is no movie. We all have movie. But movie, when beliefs are stripped of it, just becomes part of the pre-conceptual field of awareness that constitutes reality. So, there is a sense in which the dual is part of the non-dual, it's just illusory and not real -- it's just beliefs laid up on top of the pre-conceptual field of awareness. It's only by clinging to beliefs that we get movie, Maya. If you look at the pre-conceptual field of awareness, there's no 2 levels of reality. That's belief, Maya too, that 2 level theory of reality. Only beliefs cause puzzles, reality does not. Reality is very simple. Be very empirical and very honest and you might locate it. Reality has no paradoxes. Paradoxes are Maya.

The hard part about Enlightenment is to realize you're already Enlightened.

Make a list of pros and cons about staying in and leaving the relationship. Count the pros and count the cons and add them up. Look at the two numbers. Then, disregard the analysis and follow your heart. But this will get you huge awareness list by making the list. And awareness is what will give you the sense of knowing what to do. It will get you off the fence one way or the other.

Sounds like you went through at least that first stage where you realize the Self-Image isn't you. Part of you seems to die because you've been assuming all your life that the Self-Image is you, right? It's a deep experience at the early stage of the Enlightenment journey. I had my Dark Night of the Soul after that experience. That's when my Shadow collapsed into my Ego, as my Ego had lost footing because I had been studying Enlightenment for a while beforehand. About a week later, I was balanced out again, but with much ego-loss. Yeah, that was quite the experience. I call it my Ego Death experience, and it happened March of last year -- almost 1 year ago now! There's much more after that though. You gotta find the unchanging Soul and be it. It's that simple. But the actual path there ain't simple though for some reason -- it's full of twists and turns. But in hindsight, it looks very simple. Like -- what the hell was I doing all that time searching! Searching for nothing haha. Pun intended! I haven't vetted these readings very carefully, but they might be useful to some people on the path: https://lonerwolf.com/ego-death/ https://fractalenlightenment.com/28187/spirituality/7-signs-you-may-be-experiencing-a-dark-night-of-the-soul

Thanks for posting this. I'm listening now. I need to explore Osho.

Yep. Keep writing man. Write more on here. Open yourself up and just let stuff flow out more. You gotta trust it too. I think a lot of people judge what comes out, and that's a huge mistake. You gotta see what's there first. Don't let your insecurities sabotage your authentic content! It's important to see what comes out. Let it come out and just focus on capturing it, and then perhaps organizing it and presenting it. You can always make it more ordered and less chaotic; that's one of the great uses of writing -- one of the reasons why writing is such a great tool and technology.

ABOUT MY WRITING -- I'M NOT THE ORIGINATOR OF MY IDEAS -- I'M JUST THE PRESENTER OF THEM I don't know what I think until I write and and let it magically flow out. And it does just flow out -- that's what's amazing about writing. Just tidy it up after it's birthed out for you. Organize what Nature has delivered to you and present it well. That's the job of the writer. Paradoxically, when you try to write, that's when you suck at it. To be a great writer, just learn to organize, tidy-up, and present what the Soul releases through you. That's when you can focus on writing style. You don't need to think anything anymore, that just comes out on its own. Your job is just to present it through the art of writing as structured, easy to comprehend, and beautiful. I find that as a writer, all I do is organize and communicate the wisdom that seems to flow through me constantly. A lot of what fascinates me is the art of writing -- the art of revising my sentences and making them understandable and beautiful at the same time. There are some useful principles of good writing, and to put those into practice is really fun for me. But all I do is present through the cultural technology of writing, the content that is constantly flowing through me. I'm not generating any of the content. It's not like I'm sitting here and just thinking this stuff up. I'm just tidying up the material to make it presentable to others. I'm just a communicator really. That's the sense in which I'm an artist: I'm a presenter, using the artistry of writing as a medium.