Joseph Maynor

My guess is that you have some self-image issues that you need to identify and work out.

There's an intellectual component to consciousness too. There's experiential awareness and then there's cognitive awareness. And actually both of these are happening simultaneously. Being conscious means that you have a huge shore of reference, that you are studied as much as you are aware of the present moment experientially. We don't talk about this much and nobody ever seems to explain this right. They just want to focus on experiential awareness. Well, a baby has experiential awareness, but that doesn't make the baby very aware, if that makes sense. What the baby is missing is cognitive awareness. You need both to be conscious -- experiential awareness and cognitive awareness. And cognitive awareness uses concepts, thoughts, the Mind. So, don't dump your intellectual life in this work so fast.

I love Science. But it took me many years to have a meta view of Science. You need that too. Otherwise it's tempting to think that Science just is the best knowledge, which is too narrow-minded. My favorite area of Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics

You don't really give a shit about other people outside of what you want from them. Little empathy or sympathy. Couple that with a manipulative personality that will con and harm people to get what it wants.

Paradoxically the Now is both always changing and never changes.

God help us haha.

List of gurus/ enlightenment teachers I found: Eckhart Tolle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckhart_Tolle Shinzen Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzen_Young Sadhguru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaggi_Vasudev Alan Watts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts Sam Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris Adyashanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adyashanti Mooji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooji Osho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh Yogananda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramahansa_Yogananda Rupert Spira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Spira Ken Wilber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber Sri Sri Ravi Shankar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Shankar_(spiritual_leader) Peter Ralston (No Wiki Page)

Nice! I've read some Seneca.

Thank you! I will read this.

Watch:

Am I gonna get the snake-oil salesman from the Little House on the Prairie haha.

Frankly, just curiosity. I want to see why these people are so famous.

Let me give another application to the need to seek and not seek paradox: A newbie like me who lives under the Ego paradigm grasps the same reality as Shankar. The only difference is that he has done more work detaching from the Ego. But if Ego is a feature of your reality, then that is reality! This is why Enlightenment is both unsought and sought. Reality doesn't change. What changes is your identification with it. But to the extent that Ego is a feature of reality -- then Ego is contained within reality too! This is kinda hard to get across. Videos on point to watch:

This might be the biggest area of disagreement in this work -- Is Enlightenment something that proceeds by degrees or not? I argue that reality doesn't change but Ego-dissolution is something that takes a course of time to accomplish. This is why there's the paradox that one must both seek and not seek Enlightenment. The only way that you’re gonna get detachment is if the Mind realizes that the paradigms that it's clinging to are not the truth. That takes some work to achieve. Not just meditation and self-inquiry – but finding counter-theories to all your paradigms so the Mind realizes that those paradigms are false and then releases them. You don’t release anything – the Mind has to. Because we have so much cultural-conditioning, you're gonna have a shallow Enlightenment if you don't do this theoretical work. This is where Leo's work is very on point and needed.

The more you detach from conceptualizations, the less monkey-mind the Ego will generate over time. Enlightenment is a life long practice.

I hear people espouse this idea, but this is just another thought -- and therefore untrue. The paradox is that reality is both a dream and not a dream -- and we can also detach from this paradox. And none of this affects reality one whit.

I think everyone would be well-served to watch this video again. It's amazing how well Leo lays out some basic principles of Enlightenment that even a lot of advanced students miss. I just watched it again myself, and I was amazed at how good it is. Invest an hour and fifteen minutes to watch this video today.

No, because that is a pointer. We can point without encapsulating. It's still a model, but much less encapsulating than a definition or 'this is like that'. I can say 'this' or 'this is like that'. The former is much less distorting than the latter. It still assumes a kind of individuation that is problematic. But, we refer to reality as an Idealism for that reason. As an idealism, it is by definition not definable in concepts. We gotta be able to speak. Language is inherently dualistic. But that doesn't mean that reality can be defined in concepts. That is empirically confirmable. That's what makes this kind of expression acceptable to us. We can confirm it empirically. Once you experience nothingness, you realize that reality is the antithesis of a thought. It is that which contains thoughts. But even this container metaphor is just a model. Reality must be observed in itself.

What I am implying there kind of irreverently is that reality cannot be encapsulated by concepts. That's why we use the term 'nothingness' to refer to reality. But we gotta live that not just say it. Saying 'reality is a dream' is like trying to encapsulate a 3-dimensional phenomena into a 2-dimensional model. Almost any statement of the form "Reality is x", where x is a concept, is gonna be technically false. Now, we can speak-loosely in many contexts, but if we're concerned with the highest level of truth, those statements are all technically false. This is why we call reality 'nothingness' or 'everything'. A common mistake I see is people give lip-service to this in theory but oddly forget about it in practice. All that does is cause a nasty trap that will haunt you in this work until you see it and go -- oh shit! -- I've been sloppy -- I got hoodwinked by the Ego/Mind again.

Wow, I didn't realize you had such substance. Why don't you share your wisdom with us more?

Go back and watch this video for nostalgia. Remember when we were first exposed to this stuff? It's been 3 years already.

I just watched the video again with more of an objective eye. It reminds me of when I trip on LSD. When I took 7 tabs one day, this is very much the kind of observations I made. Everything is in the Now, and the Now never changes. There is just emptiness and illusory change within that. You just have to accept reality in the present moment -- the Truth. Spirituality is about systematically removing barriers to authenticity. You're just an awareness of the content of being in the present moment. LSD is a hell of an Enlightenment teacher. As you said -- "perfect understanding of the present moment." Thank you for recording this and sharing it with us. It's funny how you start to take the keen-awareness of LSD for granted when you trip. You're like -- how could it not be like this? I get it! Then you come down, and you realize -- shit! I got a similar "decision-tree" observation while tripping too. I laughed so many times during this video because it rings so true to my experiences on my trips. // Here's a section from my 7 Tab LSD Trip Report for reference: So, I'm walking along these quaint streets in San Francisco around the Haight-Ashbury District where I was. And first off -- my sense of boundaryness was like completely gone. I had the distinct sense of being nothing and everything at the same time. And this isn't just some kind of theoretical mumbo-jumbo. I really experienced the sense of being nothing and everything at once, and it was right there in the Now. This wasn't some kind of idea thing, it was experience-able. I'm walking along towards my office and of course I'm tripping-balls. Everything is in high-relief and ordered as LSD so characteristically gives us. And I'm like really just being Authentic, no BS, no clinging. And I'm noticing all this shit basically filling all these input channels as I'm walking along. I steered my thoughts to Enlightenment and started to contemplate. And I realized immediately that the dirty-little-secret that nobody wants to talk about is that all of this Enlightenment ordering that we do -- with our Minds -- all of this arranging -- all of it -- is total and complete BULLSHIT. Ego-stroking at its finest. That was so clear to me. I was embarrassed. The 'I'm more conscious than you are' game is pure Ego. Pure unadulterated Ego. You and your rules. Notice that your rules always have your Ego on top. Always! That's as fixed as the Now, it never changes.

It cannot be encapsulated in words. Furthermore, paradoxically it is not an it. Language haha.

I have a degree in Philosophy. I would never have done anything differently. Just expect to create your own career and not to get much help job wise from your degree. If you have a love for Philosophy, you might as well take the opportunity. I was so happy when I switched my major to Philosophy, as I was studying it on my own for a couple of years before that. I had (and have) a passion for Philosophy. At that time -- Philosophy was all new to me and I felt like a kid in a candy store looking at all the philosophy books at the bookstore. I just remember seeing so many of them and thinking how I'd love to read all of them someday.

Great video from Emerald on point: