Joseph Maynor

The only requirement to becoming a great sage is to help others grow because you are growing yourself — you’re just a few miles ahead of them and can swing ‘round to help them facilitate their growth. It can be a true expression of love — evidence of the breaking down of the ego. And it’s by helping others and teaching others that the guru achieves his or her extraordinary growth. You ever hear the expression, “If you really want to learn something, then teach it to others?” That’s the dynamic at work, and it’s a win-win dynamic if it comes from an authentic place. It can manifest as an upward-spiral of synergistic energy; of love. Be careful of the mind or the ego telling you what a sage is though. That’s gonna be false. A sage is a label, a distinction, a classification, a duality. All we have is authentic Being and awareness. A sage is just a highly-evolved, benevolent force of Nature — Nature loving and investing in itself basically.

Counter-intuitively, the more the ego is broken-down the more you will love in an authentic way that might be outside of any preconceptions of love that you or anyone else has. We need to make sure we separate authentic love from mental conceptions of love. One is true and the other is false. Authentic love just authentically flows-out without being forced or being guided by any rules. Unfortunately, we have a lot of conceptions of what love is that the ego will try to wrap its claws around. But that’s just mind. Your authentic love will transcend mind, so be prepared for it to manifest in ways that you did not expect. You gotta just let go and let the authentic self unfold on its own terms — outside of the rules and expectations of the mind. You will discover your authentic love if you do this properly. Beware of the mind commenting on what love is or is not! That’s a trap when dealing with love. You don’t wanna get stuck on rules or preconceptions. Just be and observe. Don’t force or try to control anything. That’s just gonna re-enforce the ego and build a nasty ego-shadow in its wake. Let the unique fingerprint of your love come into being without any sort of attempt to control it. Just watch it, be aware of it, be mindful of it — don’t judge it or manipulate it. The ego and the mind are gonna hate this, which is why you gotta numb down the ego for true love to start to flower out in you.

You can’t take the language literally. You gotta see that he is using language to point you to look within your own experience. Take what he is saying and self inquire over how it relates to your experience. Don’t try to believe, that’s a trap at this level of discourse. He even says so at the beginning. This is a well done story about enlightenment. But belief and being are apples and oranges, so you need to be reading between the lines too. Awareness is not a concept. The void is you. It’s an Awareness that can become “self conscious.” You are a self aware field of no-thingness — empty awareness. Look inside! You’re not gonna get any deeper understanding with theory on this point. You gotta look inside and just be aware more. Mindfulness over thoughts — being able to deconstruct the illusions — takes you far in this work I’ve found. How does what he is saying describe you? That’s where you’re gonna get the cash-value of the theory he presents. Otherwise you’re stuck in ideology mode, which side-steps the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is: you are that void he is talking about. This is not mere trading in beliefs. It’s a way of pointing you to observe yourself deeper. You are something very different from what you have assumed you are. Learn this by careful observation, careful mindfulness, at this point. The theory is useful, no doubt; but you gotta do the observing part a lot too. Lots and lots of observing, lots and lots of mindfulness. That’s what I’ve been doing for a while now myself — and man it’s paying off!

If you feed the mind fear it’s gonna riff off that. You need to figure out a way to dial down your fear. The mind is pretty stupid, it almost always riffs off what it is directly exposed to. Fear is tied to threat to ego. So, figure out how the ego is being threatened by what you are doing. You need to start getting into enlightenment work to numb down that ego, or else it’s gonna continue to cause you a lot of neuroses. The ego doesn’t like enlightenment work or meditation. It will fuck with you. You have to realize that this is part and parcel of the ego death aims of this work. You’re gonna be exposed to emotionally painful experiences along this path. But all in all your general happiness level steadily increases, so those are all temporary. Ride it out! Leo did a video on this topic: Watch:

Woah — have you been coaching Jesus reborn as a comedian Leo? Was he your last coaching client?

Lemme watch the whole thing so I can comment fairly. Gimme a few mins.

I have to say the anti thought/ word bias in Enlightenment is something that I find to be a regrettable dogma in this work. Everything has applicability someplace including thoughts and words. We don’t want to set a firm rule down like a principle. That is dogmatic. You don’t wanna be anti feet if you use your feet! Not very smart, right? The non-dual contains the dual. You gotta grok that. When you stick your head in the sand, reality eventually comes right back ‘round and bites you in the ass! And that’s foreseeable too, it’s not a coincidence. It’s called belief, duality, dogma. Reality laughs at those silly mental maneuvers characteristic of ego. The mind is used all the time! All the frigging time! Open your eyes! What we wanna avoid are the bad uses of mind. That’s the issue. It’s more subtle than get rid of words. That’s a ridiculous caricature of the true problem if you take the time to observe the true nature of it. Subtlety over this issue is often regrettably lost I’ve found. Why is that? The true skeptic is not dogmatic. Watch: Another vid on point: Watch:

There is no matter behind the scenes of your awareness. Watch:

It was a cool shift to realize I was never born.

@Nahm I don’t even know now if I was born — and now you spring this on me!

I could only watch 1/3 but this dude seems like he understands what’s up.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water regarding the mind! We use the mind all the time. The non-dual contains the dual. It’s more subtle than you assume.

Here’s one: describe which part of a thought is real vs. which part is false.

Self-inquiry needs conceptual questions which then prompt the mind to feel out awareness, which then causes certain empirical insights to be attained. This causes awareness empiphanies. That’s the dynamic or at least a dynamic. Watch — 3 great vids from Leo: Could’ve been a Trilogy. You gotta build your inquiry muscles like anything else in life that’s worth something. These videos will get you started. It looks like philosophy at first, but it has different aims. You’ll see as you go through it.

Yes. The issue is control. If the routines are authentically made then that’s one thing. But if they are made with the mind, then that will lead to trouble. Routines are good for intermediate personal development but not necessarily for advanced. If you have transcended the ego — then you wanna dump conceptual routines and rules. Routines are a form of control that will backfire unless authentically created and clung to very loosely and tentatively.

You have no control. That’s the mind at work. All you are is being the field of perceptual awareness. You are a self aware field of awareness. The problem is that thoughts are making stuff up that looks and sounds real but is not.

The imagery of other people is you. Think about it. You are everything in your perceptual field. All the sounds you hear are you too. The mind is what adds a little though in there that says ‘that’s not me’.

Anything that is not a direct perception of reality in the present moment is an illusory distinction, relation, or augmentation of reality. Even thoughts are perceived, but what their symbolic nature is aping is false. For example, you may see lots of shapes and colors in your awareness. But only the mind individuates and labels shapes and colors from the whole. E.g., you may see a two dimensional photo — but only the mind says that’s so and so in the photo. So, thoughts are real as perceptibles, but what the symbols are relating to or pointing to is false. The imagery you are perceiving in a daydream is true imagery, but those images are not reality, they are aping reality. What the images are being interpreted as being is false. Like the photograph example above. So, you can think of it like this — thoughts are a false distinction, relation, connection that the mind augments perceivable reality with. The symbols exist, but what the mind takes them to symbolize is false. The mind likes to surrender to symbols rather than reality because it keeps the illusion of ego alive. It distracts you from being: which is threatening to the ego. The ego wants you to live in the mind not in being. In that way the mind can be a handmaiden for the ego.

This is great. I think the only way to be a true guru is to speak from direct experience. Any kind of extrapolating or speculating just hurts people because it is misleading them under a pretense of knowing. The true guru is modest and cautious and is genuinely concerned about others’ growth.

I’d have to say yes and no in response to this. The mind is used all the time in enlightenment work. You just need to know when it is appropriate and when it is not. We don’t wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding conceptualization. There’s a taboo against theory in enlightenment floating around too to watch out for. There’s a time and place for almost everything!

Totally! That’s what I’m going through now. I’m gonna stop all reading too.

To me breathing is important when I’m meditating to kind of get my mind and body harmonized and re-integrated. When you meditate, you wanna be reconnecting with your body. Breathing is part and parcel of that. If you pay attention to this re-integration process — you can actually see it happening. It lasts a couple few seconds/minutes. The mind has sort of forgotten about the body and those bits of awareness need to be brought back into consciousness. Sometimes there are little sparks here too as this process happens — little jiggers of awareness bubbles, like carbonation zapping out.

I’m discovering the #1 distraction to being for me is reading, phone, internet. But reading is huge. We’re freaking addicted to reading! It is a distraction to being. Notice how you hide in reading. It’s so palpable once you start to build some awareness around this. Reading while living an enlightened life is like trying to quit weed while living in a cannabis dispensary. What we are trying to do is turn the mind off, turn awareness up, and let the authentic self do it’s authentic thing without interference. When you read, your mind is turned all the way up to 10. Reading, paradoxically, is a big problem: a huge trap.

In the sense that this just re-enforces the mind. I imagine some person living alone on a tropical island. Rising with the sun and falling with the sun. Silent lucidity amongst the crashing surf upon the beach rocks. Maybe this is the best formulation — avoid all non-essential meanings. Be a lean person not a glutton with meanings. Themes: Shutting down the mind. No overintellectualizing spirituality. No philosophizing. No mind. No reading. No studying.

You might be controlling yourself! That’s a trap. Stop trying to act enlightened and just let go. You might be like a quarantined dog that needs to run wild. Open the gate and let go. But be keenly aware as you do this. Don’t control, just be keenly aware.