Joseph Maynor

Instead of meditating once per day, meditate 4 or 5 times per day, spaced out, at 15 mins each. No pun intended on 'spaced out'.

What is clear to an enlightened person is gonna sound vague to a newbie. So, some of this is necessary. Vagueness is often a function of how long or short a person's shore of reference is. To a child, even traditional self-help concepts will sound vague. To an enlightened person, certain vague sounding words or sentences will be clear.

Freedom from identification with the Mind and emotions. Direct perception of reality without all the mental filters. A feeling of total liberation.

San Francisco

"What am I?" is better. A who is a perspective. A what is a thing -- or no-thing. This is what Neti-Neti gets at. Not this, not that. What am I? Am I this feeling that I am a thing? No, because there are moments of Being where that feeling is absent. Am I this wacky, conceptual Mind? Well no, because there are moments where I experience no monkey-mind or thinking. If Being exists without something, then that something is not me. Stuff that can fall away and leave me be is not me. Get into a state of flow and watch all your distinctions vanish. Notice that you become uncentered too in a flow state -- your boundaries about where you start and end disapear (causing a feeling of expansion, a feeling of one-ness with everything). This is because you have arms-lengthed the Mind-Matrix. Most of the time the Mind-Matrix has you by the balls (or ovaries for women reading this). But get into a state of flow and just observe from that place. It will change your life as it did mine. Notice how much the Mind-Matrix interferes in Being when you settle-out of the natural state of flow -- where you start to want to look at reality as a duality instead of its natural non-duality. Flow gets you pointed in the right direction to see how much the Mind-Matrix rubricizes reality and augments reality. Instead of realizing these are overlays on top of Being, we believe they are Being itself. The Ego uses the Mind-Matrix to paste the illusion of duality over non-duality. When you are in a flow state ask -- what am I? Where am I? What is real? How does the Mind influence what is real by adding in beliefs to Being? How does the Mind carve up Being in arbitrary, human ways? Also ask, Is Being physical? What is physicality? You'll see that the Mind overlays physicality on top of Being. Start to look at reality as it is, not as the Mind is telling you that it is.

When you take the mental filters off, then you can freely know and act. The Mind is a great tool, and it should be used as such. The problem is that the Ego promotes conceptual knowledge too highly, to the point where we forget what it's like to know in more natural ways -- like when you are in a state of flow: knowing without knowing and doing without doing. In flow you know without knowing and do without doing, You can also express it like this which reveals the illusory mental dualities: not-knowing knowing; not-doing doing.

Do you feel expanded at all? When you discover Being, it's like all your boundaries float away from you and you expand out to everything and nothing at once. You'll feel it. It's not a casual moment. It's an oh shit! this is what it is! moment that you need. You're rooting around in the right pasture though. Keep exploring.

Maybe you are overthinking too much in advance here. Steve Jobs didn't know he was gonna build the IPhone at the infancy of his career. The Ego is sabotaging you with all this Mind-Matrix stuff. Just put something together and start moving forward. Let the path give up insights as you traverse it. Don't get so hung up on paralysis by analysis. Be an explorer.

When the ego melts away there is still true intuition. (True intuition as distinct from egoic intuition). True Intuition can be channeled. True Intuition is not linked 100% to the ego. You never get rid of the ego entirely either. What you want to do is have one foot inside the illusion and one foot outside of it if that makes sense. Too much Yin turns you into a lazy slug. "Spiritual purification is the entire process of purifying your identity of your cravings, of your fears, of your deepest held beliefs and worldviews, and your sense of self-importance, your life story. Dropping all of that. Purifying all that away. Burning it away. So what you're left with is an empty vessel. And then you become a vehicle of the intuitive voice inside of you. You become a vehicle for the Muses." -- Leo

Keep doing self-help regardless. But you gotta do it, nobody can do your push-ups for you. Go to the shrink too, why not?

I'm not sure. What I do know is that it's not me because the *conscious me* can desire the stereo to stop and the stereo defies it. I'm starting to *believe* that the entire egoic life is like this stereo -- running on its own! The egoic self is like an animal -- and the only way that you get the animal to shape up is to trick the ego to kill itself.

Meeting people is fine. But remember Personal Development has to be done by you. Nobody can do your push-ups for you. You can do this stuff without meeting others. It's probably best not to meet others personally. Just watch the videos, read some books, do the work and exercises, and participate on here. Ask all your questions on here. Many people are too afraid to fully participate on here. If you don't ask, you don't get feedback. That's what really slows you down. Your best knowledge is going to be epiphanies not theory anyway. You need to experience those shifts that come from exposure and hard work over a period of time. Personal Development is a life-long pursuit. I wouldn't even call it a marathon. Marathons are too short. I've been doing personal development work heavily for 4 or 5 years now. I've been doing it longer, but I want to be conservative. There's a difference between dabbling in personal development and doing heavy personal development work. You need to be doing heavy personal development work to get sustainable change, results, and success. Dabbling here or there might pique your interest, but it's not going to engage you in the way you need to be engaged to make sustainable changes in your life. The results you want in life have to be caused by your actions. So, you need to become the person that loves to take those actions. It's really that simple from a big-picture strategy standpoint. But you can think about this all day long, and dream about it, but that's not enough -- you gotta wake up every morning hungry to create it, that's the crucial difference. All the theory is supposed to lead you to becoming hungry to take the actions necessary to cause your dream life to become a reality. Video on point to watch:

They go together. You want your life purpose to be natural, to flow out of you. But you also have to construct your life purpose and commit to it everyday. Life purpose will flow out of the authentic you that you are discovering with your enlightenment work. Listen to your intuition. Try to find out what your top values are. Try to go inside and listen to that intuitive voice inside of you that knows a lot about what you could do with this life. Not everybody needs to become a monk. You can be enlightened and be a normal person. Leo is biased towards being a yogi, and that's fine, but realize that. You are not Leo. Don't try to copy him in all respects. You need to find you and then do you. Not all enlightened people need to sit in a cave and meditate all day. You can be enlightened and run a business like me or Leo or anyone else. You just gotta find yourself and hone your life around what you find. You don't really know yourself well yet, that's your biggest problem. Enlightenment helps you clear away some of the debris from getting clearer about who you are. But don't get so addicted to enlightenment work that you ignore life purpose work and the more traditional self-help work. There are three legs to the Personal Development stool -- (1) enlightenment work, (2) life purpose work, (3) traditional self-help work. You gotta cultivate all three of these areas to get your life together and moving forward. A sturdy foundation for your life rests on the cultivation of all three of these areas. Videos on point to watch:

I started realizing more and more that the Mind-Matrix, Monkey Mind, and Ego are not part of me as I once thought they were. The Mind makes you think it is you. It hunkers down front and center in your Being, imposing itself by setting up rabbit-holes everywhere, causing what we call "Monkey Mind", setting up the Ego Paradigm, and tricking you into thinking "the voice" is you. I discovered this doing "Do Nothing" meditation when I saw that there are times that thoughts disappear, yet I still exist, so I am not the Mind. The Mind is not me. The Mind is more like an intruder. You gotta be mindful of how the Mind augments Being. Be mindful of these augmentations and how they are attached to or clung to. Video on point to watch:

A lot of people ground their need to know and need to believe in Enlightenment, which turns it into another dogma. Spirituality is best when it is free from all that clinging. You wanna be unmoored spiritually, not trying to set an anchor. That will make you miserable and defeat your purpose.

Science is concerned primarily with testable theories, which puts it squarely within the arms of the Mind-Matrix. This is not bad, it's just pragmatic. The Mind-Matrix evolved to be pragmatic. Problems can arise when the Mind-Matrix tries to solve non-pragmatic problems.

I used to sit for hours and hours solving math problems. I loved it. I almost majored in math.

I don't talk about it with anybody. Only on here.

Curious. Video on point to watch:

I am making a lot of progress in Enlightenment. I am living as Being more and more. Being in the sense of being mindful of reality and the variety of mental augmentations. Being able to separate the two. I feel totally liberated and happy. I'm also doing heavy personal development work, but I've been chasing the rabbit-hole of Enlightenment too. Awareness alone is curative. Let the shifts happen. It's amazing.

Any hypothesis is a thought, not Being. You gotta find Being stripped of all thought. Can you locate that? Find that. Hint -- you can find this when you meditate. Notice that there are times where reality sticks around even when all thoughts go away. Being is not dependent on thoughts at all.

Enlightenment is liberation from the Mind. It will blow up the outside world and the inside world. Make a distinction between what though is versus what it's pretending to be. Be able to pull the Mind-augmentation out of Being so you can see them side by side. Awareness alone is curative.

You don't want to conceptualize things in advance. The key is to just Be. If you conceptualize too much in advance, you will set up too many presumptive judgments, dualities, and limiting-beliefs. There is no you to act. But paradoxically, you exist as Being, so the Tao that flows through you is your act. Let Divine Creativity flow though Being, through the Tao. Reside in the Tao, lose the small Self. When you act without being tricked, limited, or constrained in advance by the Mind -- you will have no more perplexities. Being lacks no knowledge. The Tao needs nothing.

Awareness is used in two different ways. There's a difference between awareness in the sense of paying attention, and awareness as a synonym for Being. Sometimes I hear people use awareness to mean Being, which is very different to the sense of awareness meaning something like mindfulness.

Curious. I think this is one way that going back to the oldies kind of trips us moderns up. Indian Philosophers thought that true existence had to be unchanging. The idea that the Self needs to be unchanging is a duality. Being just is. No thought could issue such an order on Being, or define or limit Being in this manner. The Self does not *need to be* unchanging. This is existentially false and a dualistic trap. This is an example of where Epistemology needs to trump tradition. But of course, I don't cling to this opinion too tightly. Video on point to watch: