Joseph Maynor

Intellect is a conceptualization of reality.

Stop judging and trying to control reality. When laziness is in your shadow you will naturally be attracted to it. If you allow laziness to be part of what is, the shadow will lose its force and power over your unconscious mind. Basically, hating laziness is what causes you to be lazy. Because you have formed an Ego identification against laziness, you’re gonna be unconsciously attracted to laziness because it’s a part of reality that you do not love and accept. Reality doesn’t like to be partitioned. So the shadow traits are always gonna be inclined to want to be loved and accepted by you, and therefore the shadow will constantly try to get laziness re-integrated in reality for you. So, in a nutshell, if you wanna stop being lazy, stop judging it as bad and accept and love your own laziness. It’s paradoxical, but there it is. Knowledge of the shadow is a very powerful tool in this work.

Self-confidence is where you don’t question reality so much. Lack of confidence rests on the illusion of control. Oh I need to control some thing! No! There is no you to control. So, confidence is none other than just letting reality do whatever it wants to without trying to control it. You’re just ok with whatever happens. You don’t try to self-censor. You don’t let your own beliefs and fears cause you to want to shoot a hole in your own boat when you are in transit on the waterway. Lack of confidence is evidence of a huge Ego, paradoxically. It’s a fear of being judged and rejected. How Egoic is that? There’s no you in reality! How does lack of confidence even make sense? See? It’s predicated upon an illusion, a thought-story about reality. Confidence is positively correlated with acceptance of reality without trying to interfere with it, judge it, or control it. What appears on the outside as confidence is on the inside just acceptance and the resulting peace that comes from that.

You’ve got the theory. Now you gotta put that into practice. You’re learning fast.

What do you mean by insight?

Congrats. I'm glad you've been doing the work.

You can't shed the tentacles of Ego by insight alone. "In reality, acquiring self-consciousness means long and hard work. How can a man agree to this work if he thinks he already possesses the very thing which is promised him as the result of long and hard work? Naturally a man will not begin this work and will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possesses neither self-consciousness nor all that is connected with it, that is, unity or individuality, permanent 'I' and will." -- P.D. Ouspensky

Insecurity only comes from clinging to the self-image or Ego. When the self-image is dropped, so is insecurity, in theory. In practice, it's much more work than that makes it sound. It takes a lifetime to detach from Ego. And it's a matter of degree, not some kind of binary thing. Nobody fully detaches from Ego. But you can de-center the Ego to a greater or lesser degree over the course of your life.

Clinging to the impermanent is foolish. Who said that? That was one wise dude! Be the atmosphere not the clouds. That's the same advice!

Skepticism is a word not a belief. It's what you make of it. It's a caution regarding belief, not a belief per se. It's a willingness to assume you could be wrong at all times. And this is a rare practice.

Yeah. The Mind is sneaky in its conceptualizations. That’s why we wanna be skeptics. Wise skeptics though, not stupid skeptics. Wise skeptics are ok with suspending belief because they understand the limits of the mind. But that doesn’t mean they don’t use thought when it’s useful. If they held back in that manner, it would only be because they are clinging to some theory that corrupts natural wisdom. No wise skeptic does that. They just aren’t sloppy, that’s all. And it’s knowledge that makes them not sloppy. Moksha is achieved through knowledge. Avidya, or error concerning belief, is the sole block to Enlightenment. Video on point to watch:

Folks I just watched the video again, and I think the biggest thing is that Leo seems to be too much in love with Metaphysics. He loves Metaphysics a little too much. That’s the issue. There are some good stuff in the video, but his Metaphysics makes it hard to digest. Metaphysics is and always has been highly problematic.

Beliefs will become much less important to you when you transcend Ego. They will lose their allure to you, like an older man losing his youthful lust. Beliefs once looked so important, so attractive, so pure, so natural. Now, you see through that issue like a 70 year old man sees through a teenage relationship. Beliefs are not what’s important. What’s important is detaching from beliefs, detaching from clinging to an Ego of beliefs, or a self-preserving system of assumptions about reality.

Stop trying to control. You have no control. Just rest as awareness and watch the movie play itself out. What this story points to is just be reality, which is awareness, or Soul. Soul just is God. Awareness just is Reality. Reality just is Awareness.

So true. This is what makes vacations great.

Absolutely. No World is one of the big areas of work in Enlightenment just as No Self. All there is is reality. If you can perceive reality instead of conceive it — you will take 100 steps towards Enlightenment. But there is no you and the object perceived. It’s stranger than that. Awareness of being just is reality. It’s the most obvious thing. If our cultural beliefs didn’t muddy this up, it would be the first profound observation of Science.

To me, the dark night of the soul means something specific. It’s the point where you first realize that the self is a lie, and your ego and shadow briefly unite like opposite poles of a magnet. The depression that follows that is you coming to terms for the first time of your now deceased self-image. It lasts a week max, and it feels like a death. You will go through the 7 stages of grief.

The idea of boddhisatva seems Egoic to me.

Don’t BS us. You think you’re smart, probably smarter than everyone else haha.

It depends on how dense your Ego is, and it’s in direct proportion to that. Oftentimes the densest Egos become Spiritual Egos, and they lose consciousness of being Egos. They think they are self-realized, but they’re actually not.

I think there’s a lot of confusion in personal development teachings that just make things more difficult than they have to be. I’ve heard the argument that it’s easier to break thru to enlightenment from a strong ego. I don’t know about that. That’s a cute story, but who knows, right?

I think you’re on to something here. People who don’t laugh enough take things too seriously, evidencing a dense Ego. Conversely, people who laugh too much are often using humor as an Ego defense-mechanism. So both extremes are probably dysfunctional — no humor and too much of it. The most self-realized person likely has drawn a natural mean between these two extremes.

It’s too dogmatic in tone and tenor in my opinion. That’s the main problem with it. One is left wondering what to make of it. But sometimes art has no point, especially 20th century art. The point is not to make a point. It’s like Baudrillard in Philosophy. Check out some of his writings. Some of that sh*t is really good — because the intent is to challenge paradigms. The Frank Zappa personalities among us basically. That attitude runs from Nietzche on through to today through the conduit of Postmodernism as we are led to term it. But we are too wise today to get hung up on things that tied up previous generations. Knowledge and intelligence do advance in the evolving culture we swim around in.

How can the world assess that if dude deletes his videos? See? You gotta have the balls to stand by your published work, all of it, as an artist. His insecurities got the best of him. That’s why artists have to be kinda ballsy and confident about their work, warts and all. As an artist, you gotta stick through to the end. He violated that. I wish him well though. But those videos were great. All of them were. I enjoyed them all and learned a lot. He was unfiltered, for better and for worse. But that’s his style, his personality. Don’t run away from your style as an artist — refine it as you go! It’s that style that makes you attractive in the first place. The trap he fell into was starting to doubt himself and his work. Put all the videos back up Rali. You’re a wise dude. Work on that insecurity problem you have. He’s young, so I get it. I stand here at age 40 with the wisdom gleaned from my youth readily at hand.

I think he took them down, though I’m not sure. I watched about 75% of them before he took them down. Dude was pretty wise and had an influence on me, quite profound of an influence actually. I missed the last 25% of his videos, his most recent videos, because I was watching them from oldest to newest. That sucks because I like to see how a guru changes on this path. He should put all of them back up. ALL. Don’t delete sh*t. If you wanna be an artist, you gotta live the consequences of your artwork for better or for worse. The public identifies with the art and makes it a part of them. Deleting art after the fact is not right because of that. I have a bugaboo with this. It’s a real problem that rarely becomes an issue because most artists don’t destroy their work after publication.