Joseph Maynor

You have to take full responsibility for your Personal Development. You should subject Leo’s claims to the same degree of scrutiny that you would anything else.

Good job. Journal writing is a powerful tool in personal development.

Great topic for a video.

I agree. I’m enjoying observing the stir this is causing. It’s like disrupting an ant colony and then observing the effects like an impartial scientist. I’m watching carefully and reading all the comments, including the YouTube comments. It’s fascinating. This is the kind of content that hits a nerve. It gets people off their fake fence and empowers them to say what they really feel and think. That’s good! ‘Out the picture’ I always say!

The variety of views is what impresses me. People have such diverging views. I think we tend to think people have more uniform beliefs than they actually do. No! People differ widely in their details as this conversation reveals. The “difference model” is important to keep at hand. Video on point to watch:

I can tell Leo put a lot of work and passion into making the video. I like it. I value it highly.

It’s surprising to me that people look to the Pope to answer these kinds of questions in the first place. That deferment of one’s own ability to determine beliefs for one’s self bothers me. This idea that the Pope has a hotline to God. That must make people feel better in some way to believe the Pope has special insights that they can never have.

The thing that was hard for me being religious is I kept getting mad at God for allowing misfortunes to happen to me. I realized it was a huge script I was running — a cultural game that I was playing. It caused me a lot of false hope and suffering actually.

I used to think that the universe was in some way serving me. Now I realize that reality is not working quite like that. There’s no teleological sense in which this is my movie. Reality is bigger than the little me running around in the Dream. There’s no sense in which reality is bending my way or serving my interests. All of that is a very Egoic set of expectations to place on top of reality. Reality just is what it is. But it’s the Ego that wants to do the “for me” maneuver with reality.

I’ve gone back and forth with God in my life. Right now I am in a very atheist stage. I don’t see any need for God. Right now belief in God seems very unnecessary to me. It seems like a story we’ve placed on top of reality. The belief in God does no work for me. That’s a way to state it pragmatically.

I don’t think I paid much attention to the question “what am I?”. When I was a teenager I was obsessed with the question “Who am I?” The significant issue seemed to be identification. It was a very Egoic time for me. It was me fashioning me to the exclusion of things. I was very judgmental at this time. I wanted to be somebody. But I wanted to be me in doing so. I’ve always valued authenticity.

Yeah, learning how to have ideals but not try to enforce them neurotically is a hard thing to come to learn how to balance in personal development.

Thanks for writing this. It’s nice to get a peek inside someone else’s experience with Enlightenment. Yes, Enlightenment concerns the Non-Dual. But the most advanced stage of Enlightenment is when you can let the Dream be the Dream and sort of go back into the illusion, just not Egoically doing so. It’s an embrace without an embrace, so to speak. You step back into the illusion without clinging to it. You lose your fear of the illusion. When you’re in what I call the “la la land stage of Enlightenment”, you’re still kinda weary of the illusion. You’re hands-off, right? You don’t wanna have any part of it because you fear the illusion of Ego. However, at the advanced stage, you re-join the illusion, sort of. But you’re a different person in doing so.

Think about this. How much pain are you in for if you don’t work on personal development? You can see that pain on the faces and bodies of people all around you.

A new chapter begins! Embrace it. Think of the new possibilities.

Einstein had a hand in both relativity and quantum mechanics, which is pretty impressive in itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://m.phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html

Before Enlightenment: carry water chop wood. After Enlightenment: carry water, chop wood. I don't know if this resonates with the rest of you, but I kinda feel like Enlightenment is a full circle. When you're too much in la la land that is a sign that you don't quite got it. You're still in the mind about it. The la la land part should go away after a while. You should come back into the dream, but now your whole perspective on the dream is totally different. But it's not like you're stunned like you are when you're still trying to figure things out. I think it's normal to go through that stunned stage for a good long while -- maybe a year or more. That's the awakening phase. For me it was a little over a year.

You need to come up with a daily schedule. Start with the routines you already have, don't try to revamp everything at once. Start by making a list of things you wanna accomplish every day. Write this list down and cross off the items as you do them. Everything needs to get crossed off by the time you go to sleep. Put meditation as one of those items. Try to get stuff into a routine so it can become kinda automatic for you over time.

I've done it before when I've gone on vacation for 2 weeks. I've deliberately left my music at home. What happens is I'll start to hear songs in my head. I'll develop a radio in my head. There will be like one or two songs that will just get burned in my head and I'll play them over and over. And it will be like the most random song. Some pop song from the 80's haha. I think one of them was "We Don't Need Another Hero" by Tina Turner. I was sick of that song by the end of the trip haha.

Sounds like you could use a little bit of a daily routine. That way you can fit all your needs into your day without feeling like you’re depriving yourself. That will allow you to open up a space for your job where all you have to do is focus on that job during that time. Make time for all your other needs by fashioning a morning and evening routine that includes them. This will give your life balance. Otherwise you’re gonna feel resentful at work thinking you’re depriving yourself of what you really want to be doing.

I agree. And that's been very noticeable to people I've been around. They are all very happy with my more calm and grounded personality. But after studying philosophy for many years, I found out a long time ago that some topics are reserved for dinner conversation and some are not. It depends entirely on your company. People can get very judgmental when you start talking about ideas that conflict with their own. Even if your intent is benign in mentioning the ideas. I find that discussing the enlightenment ideas is extremely puzzling to people. I tried a couple of times.

I don't even attempt to haha. I reserve all my discussion for you all. It's hard to explain non-duality cold to someone who doesn't have any experience with these ideas at all. Yeah -- let's have a light conversation about the Absolute over lunch! Maybe we'll talk about the fact that there are no objective moral truths over coffee! Let's discuss both your immortality and the fact that you don't exist over drinks after work!

I was thinking about this today interestingly. I was wondering about the likelihood of a non-dual perspective on reality ever becoming the norm. Or is it doomed to be a kind of fringe thing? If so, the resistance is gonna be formidable to teach Enlightenment to the masses. It's just not ever gonna sell that widely. I'm not saying I endorse any of these views. These are just some thoughts that came to mind for further exploration.

Are we afraid of death itself or of dying? Or is it non-existence that we're afraid of? Is it the loss of our values that we fear? I'm not sure that we do fear death because it isn't clear to me what that means. Are we afraid of not being conscious anymore? Are we afraid of sleeping indefinitely? Are we afraid of some kind of result that will happen to our soul after death? My hunch on the matter is that we fear dying more than death. We fear the interval between knowing we're dying and death. And that's because our life loses meaning and becomes absurd. We fear an absurd life. And that's totally understandable, right? Everything we do is under the assumption that we're gonna continue to live. All of our values are life-sustaining values. Death is a huge threat to that outlook on life. When we're dying, all that goes down the toilet. On your death-bed all your values are meaningless. Your fame, money, legacy -- none of that matters when you're going through the death process. None of that is gonna save you from death! The fact that there is nothing that can save you from death is a freaky notion in itself. I'm assuming the default-position of the Ego Paradigm here.

What does Yoga claim? What criterion are we using to judge credibility? Is credibility even relevant? Exactly what factors are relevant in assessing Yoga? What is Yoga trying to do? Is there even one Yoga? If not, what Yoga are we talking about?