Joseph Maynor

People don't like to have their precious beliefs challenged. It's the collateral-damage of playing the role of the philosopher. I get punched all the time. Oy oy oy! I can take it. Socrates was killed. The philosopher questions everything and doesn't cling to any beliefs tightly without good cause determined by a particular context. And the true philosopher has the balls to publically question things even when it puts his own life in danger. The true philosopher is only beholden to truth and to nothing else. And even under the threat of gun and knife, he will give his life in service of his only master, truth itself. Most people will not do this work in life and that's why they don't play the role of the philosopher. It's a special-calling that a person might have in life. You have to be ok with being the party-pooper, with potentially the entire world staring-daggers at you with crest-fallen face. Probably not a good life-purpose for somebody who cares about what other people think about them haha. Note it. The ego wants to make hearth-and-home using beliefs, like a homeless man building his castle out of cardboard boxes.

Watch Emerald's great video on point.

Do you know (by belief) or do you know (by being)? That is the question. Can you tell the difference? This has huge ramifications for being the Truth. You are half-right. Why would you pooh-pooh this crucial point? Not to belabor this, but what I am saying here has big BEING ramifications -- the potential removal of a limiting-belief/ dream-killer. All beliefs must be examined because they're all existentially false. This is a *discovery* I recently made in my self-inquiry work, not some mere mental-masturbation exercise. And I had mind to share it on here, that's all. I could have kept it to myself. But I wanted some legit feedback. And I wanted to share the insight. One of the greatest things enlightenment did for me was to unscrew all my limiting-beliefs out of my psyche. Listen to Leo's Dream-killers videos for more info about limiting-beliefs. They're in his audio downloads section of his website. There are 21 videos and they are all excellent. No free-will is a limiting-belief. That's the upshot. It's existentially false. And the belief in free-will is existentially false too. Reality just is. All of our distinctions (including all of our beliefs) about the Absolute are egoic monkey-mind limiting-beliefs. And yes, even this belief must eat itself. You anticipated this correctly! I'm glad. Know by being the Truth not by conceiving the Truth. This is SO hard to explain in oral or written discourse. And I give props to Leo for trying to *teach* this to people. It is super-hard to communicate in thoughts because thoughts are the problem. It's also frustrating as hell to write about it, but it must be done. That's our only way to ever come to *learn* it. We pass the ladder to each other like a baton in one of those running races. Use the ladder to get out of your own hole and then pass it on to the next person. And don't marry the ladder! A cowboy doesn't marry his horse. (Last sentence borrowed from one of Leo's videos.) So, you're right. Blah blah. But blah blah is the ladder. Without the ladder y'aint ever gonna get out of the hole! The ladder is necessary but ultimately expendable. Someone else buys the ladder from you at your own garage-sale with wide-eyes and bushy-tail. And you say, take it! I no longer need it.

If you're asking us I'm already suspicious. You should know yourself deeply, am I right? What is your life-purpose? Give us a succinct statement of it. Have it come out of your soul-portal. Life-purpose has nothing to do with anybody else. What is your calling? What is yours and yours alone to hone and deliver to the world? What are you willing to work your ass off to do in this life? Leo is irrelevant to that. Life-purpose isn't some Luke-warm thing. It's your life's PASSION. It's gotta be. That's what will give you the motivation to get your whole life handled and then some. Don't rush this.

Lao Tsu, more modernly written Laozi

@Mr Memposito This video shows why it's important to do your research before criticizing someone publically like this. Sand carelessly thrown in the wind comes back to the thrower's eye. If you don't have something nice to say about someone . . . make sure you say it very well! Haha. Don't quote me.

I'm seeing now that I need to visualize my life like at least 2 years out. And that visualization needs to be detailed and definite. And I gotta review it every day. Visualization is the sustainable strategy for making every mundane task that you do during your daily-routine make sense and seem interesting. After all, you see why you're doing it and the exciting things it is leading to and building to. Like looking through a calculus textbook when you are taking intermediate algebra and dreaming about the interrelations and exciting journey ahead. And also appreciating all that will need to be learned through hard-work to arrive at the calculus textbook. The why of everything you're doing then becomes clear. We need to create this effect in our lives. And I think visualization is a way to do it. I'm gonna rig in something and play around with it myself.

This is going into my daily reading book. Damn good quote.

Sounds like you are ready to do some real personal development work. Congrats! This is where you're gonna see the results that all the theory is promising. This is where your life is gonna start to improve dramatically if you deep-dive and become a personal development junkie and start to implement the below modules. Get passionate about the potential of this to your life. 1. Be a creator in your life/ you are the music-maker and you are the dreamer of dreams. Become the artist where you are the art-work. Not painting, not drawing, not music, not poetry -- but YOU, all of you, your life, your contribution! Turn you into beautiful art. And focus primarily on that as an artist. This is your #1 priority in life, don't lose sight of this ball. 2. Do some enlightenment work to transcend all your limiting-beliefs. Leo calls these dream-killers. You can listen to his dream-killer videos if you log onto his website, there are 21 of them and they are excellent. They are in the audio-downloads section. Enlightenment work also dramatically reduces your fears, anxieties, neuroses, etc. and makes you much more emotionally-grounded. 3. Do some life-purpose work to turn your "have tos" into "want tos". When your dream is alligned with your work, the work becomes something you enjoy doing and thus becomes easy. Try to align your life-purpose with contribution to maximize the motivation super-charging effect that life-purpose gives you. Deep-down we all yearn deeply to make a great contribution with our lives and our works. It's in your heart of hearts to contribute something to the world. 4. Tame your elephant/ program the sub-conscious mind. The conscious mind is like a rider on top of an elephant which has a mind of its own. We can call the elephant the subconscious-mind. You need to get the ornery elephant on the same page as the rider by practing meditation, visualizations, affirmations, and by baby-stepping daily-routines into your schedule that implement your goals. 5. Be a great field-general in your life/ be a great strategist. Clarify your goals. Read your mission-statement every morning. Clarify your action-plans to achieve these goals. Break-down the work into stuff that can be fitted into a daily-routine and done daily. The way you build a giant, beautiful cathedral is by taking consistent action on it every day, one brick at a time. 6. Dump all your distractions and addictions. They are robbing you of focus, energy, and heart, which you need to be concentrated like a laser-beam on your compelling life-purpose which is your cause in life, that which you are willing to bleed and to die for. Baby-step removing this *shit* from your life so you don't get overwhelmed. Clean it out slowly but steadily.

Watch Leo's videos on What's the worst that can happen and the one on doing Pre-mortem analysis.

This is why I like to meet people in person. Great article. When I meet someone in person I can sense pretty quickly what they are about. Lack of empathy is a red-flag, although be careful with rushing to judgment. Another red-flag is feeling like the person is trying to manipulate you or control you. Motive is key. Why is the person involved in spirituality in the first place and why are they teaching it?

The idea of ego-transcendence is you just want to observe the ego for what it is. There's no need to destroy the ego or pick it apart. Awareness alone is curative.

There is no substance. There can be no grounding. It is itself. Grasp this with your being not just with the intellect.

Enlightenment is deconstructing what you know about yourself and what you know about reality. It's about getting out of the delusion of the mind. Thought-stories are abstractions laid on top of reality. The Self is omnipresent which means it's everywhere. Reality is what is happening right now, it's not impacted by any belief, concept, or theory. Start to inquire into each and every belief you have about what is real. Do this, don't try to bypass it with some easy answer. You need to see the truth not understand it conceptually. You can only see the truth by unraveling your beliefs about reality. You'll realize all your beliefs about reality are false and illusory. But that is not a conceptual understanding alone. It should shake-up the core of what you believe you are. If this isn't happening, your Self-Inquiry is proceeding in too shallow of a manner. Go on the journey. Grab the bull by the horns and dig into Self-Inquiry. You live in an augmented reality -- augmented by your concepts, images, fantasies, and desires. Enlightenment is like deconstructing a magic-trick. Once you understand the trick, you can't be tricked by it anymore.

Just meditate for 1 hour every morning. Start there. Baby steps. Meditation gives the most cash-value as a spiritual practice. You're like me, you like to deep-dive. But deep-dive meditation for now. Set aside all the other stuff for later. Put it on ice for now. Focus your energies on strategies that give the most for the least amount of effort and leverage those first. Meditation is one of those strategies. And believe me -- meditation will change your life enormously. But you gotta commit to doing meditation for 1 hour every morning and skip no days. If you skip days, you're not gonna get the results. It's gotta be every single morning to work its magic. Daily meditation has changed my life.

It's a lens or tool, so it's not gonna cover everything. But what it is going to do is make you mindful of your actual takeaways from your learning. A lot of what we talk about we gain no real traction or use from. So this lens just increases your mindfulness of when you are wasting your time in la la land with theory spinning your wheels not really getting much real value from the material. Use it with your personal development theory for sure though. You'll blast off! All personal development theory should trickle-down into practice. Otherwise it's just nice-sounding inspirational words. But personal development theory when applied, comes to life like a genie out of a lamp offering you any wish you want.

That's one of my favorite movies! There's a lot about ego revealed in that movie. And the contrast between lower-self and higher-self. And how to never quit. The difference between someone who is highly-developed and someone who is still a child inside.

This video has struck a deep-chord with me and has made me sensitive to what kind of adivice I give on here. We are all at different stages of the journey. I see this as a growth opportunity for me. The worst thing we can do as advice-givers is lead somebody away from what is good for them. Or perhaps to solidify some unfortunate belief through an idiosyncratic or hasty choice of words. But like Leo says, I believe in advice too, and I have benefitted by so many advice-givers in my life. But knowing that I come from a rather unusual perspective is humbling me in just spouting-off some hasty advice without considering the variety of perspectives in the audience reading. I'm not saying I treat things hasty over the norm on here, but I'm just more sensitive to the issue now. Isn't the first rule of doctors to cause no harm? That's a great standard that applies to personal development advice-givers too. It's a nice rule for all of us, since we all share opinions publically on here and are influencing many people with our words potentially. I want my words to help not hinder. Finally, I think it is healthy to examine our motives for giving advice. Just be mindful when you are giving advice and see what is there underneath you as you deliver your words to an audience of readers. This applies to me too of course. Try to see what is driving your behavior. Not what you think is there but what is actually there. The mind will hide the truth sometimes. Here's a cliche that will probably goose your ego a little bit -- those who do do those who can't do teach. I'm not saying this is true, but consider the source of who is giving you advice. Maybe the advice-giver is a 40 year-old sleeping in his mother's basement. It's a relevant issue to consider, that's all. And I'm not saying an unsuccessful person can't give good advice either. And I'm not saying every 40 year-old living in his mother's basement is a loser either. Maybe they are the smartest haha. Who knows. It's a case by case.

Yes. There was a 4 year period when I did virtually that when I wrote the content for my philosophy book. We are all at different stages in our personal development. Hiding away can be good. I know because I did it myself. I'm in a much more pragmatic stage in my life right now. But today I stand on the shoulders of that time where I hid away and consolidated my knowledge, values, and purpose together with my heart and will. When you're young you gotta explore. Take time to explore. When you get older the mission becomes more of settling-in. But good settling-in is predicated on great exploring. I explored so much between 25 - 35. After about 35 my attitude was forced to become much more pragmatic. I am now 39, so I've spent 4 years within this more pragmatic paradigm. And that's a helluva shift to make let me tell you. Especially if you explored like I did. Almost a 180-degree value reversal between those stages. One of the reasons I started watching Leo 4 years ago was because I was struggling to make this shift. In Indian Philosophy this is called making the transition from the Student Stage of life to the Householder Stage of life. Making this transition was such a bear for me to do. One of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And I'm still not optimized like I should be. I work on that everyday. But recently I have made huge progress by deep-diving personal development again and by applying some of the theory. Life-purpose is huge as a strategy -- it herds all your cats for you.

If we choose to remain here there are certain rules about this place. Why not exploit these rules to do it our way while at the same time maximizing the good out of the experience? That seems like the best strategy for us to follow if we choose to remain here. And we have all chosen to remain here. It's worth it to live well not badly. But we gotta be a little strategic to make it happen. The default-life is a shit life. A life of comfort, body breaking-down due to poor health, suffering, no real fulfillment, no peak-experiences, no excitement or creative-juices flowing, no hope, no real growth, no exploration, no true creative gifts to offer the world or lasting legacy. So heed this decision-point. It's real. Life is your oyster. You want to do this. Live a charged-life not a comfortable life, a life where you're living on your edge, fully-engaged, where you are excited to get out of bed in the morning to go work on your Muse. Where your work becomes more like play than a grind because you are growing yourself in every way by doing it. Personal development work makes this possible! But you gotta work the strategies. None of these nice results will just fall into your lap. Let's dis-abuse ourselves of that silly fantasy right now. You gotta go out there and obtain these results through hard-work, which cannot be bypassed.

I'm going to do the 30-day challenge starting tomorrow. I'm so glad Leo made this video. This is the right medicine for me right now -- looking at things from a more pragmatic lens. After all, how much do you actually recall from everything you were taught in school? Almost nada. Of course the journey was worth a lot. But what concepts do you apply today from all that schooling? Is it 20, 10, 5, 2, 1%? You can actually determine this by being mindful. Maybe keep a journal and write down every instance where you actually used some information that you learned about in school. You know what -- in spirit of this new video I'm gonna do this not just pose a great idea. I'll add this to my 30 day challenge. I have a tendency to go -- I came up with a great idea folks -- and then I never take the next step of deep-diving that idea to get at any cash-value inside of it. See? I am a huge mental-masturbator. Not to undervalue that entirely either. Every context has its own unique set of conditions and proper response. Sometimes mental-masturbation is good -- like when you're brainstorming. And there's cash-value there because that's when you're receiving creative insights. And you're then gonna use the sober-mind to organize that crazy, disjointed content to bring the sculpture out of the stone as it were. The madman becomes the architect on a dime. This is one of the secrets to great artistry -- knowing when and where to shift the hats between madman and architect. Now, how can you apply what I just said to writing your posts on here folks! Milk this little madman/architect dichotomy for its cash-value next time you sit down to create. Push the theory through practice and be mindful of the application/ utility or lack thereof. This is fascinating! Maybe it doesn't do shit for you, well but see you learned that! If you took no action you learned squat -- zero takeaway. And we do this all the time! It's our default, lower-self position. And that is true mental-masturbation. It's on our radars now to be avoided. Our personal development theories need to be deliberately and strategicallly milked by us, without getting too neurotic about this of course. We all possess a glorious, unopened toolkit. Let's open it up and actually use the tools inside of it instead of just looking at then through the packaging. I'm excited!

Now you get to feel right. That's what everyone else is doing too -- trying to feel right. The ego is all around us. We all got a bit of it in us. Look closely. You don't have any evidence that anyone left, you just made that up. Let's be careful about not elevating ourselves on a high-horse without good cause. We all suffer from ego. We should be compassionate not accusatory towards each other. None of gets to be the righteous one. That tack rubs me the wrong way because it is disingenuous. I also don't think Leo gets to be the arbiter of who is enlightened or not. That's a little bit pretentious assuming his *judgment* was not made tongue in cheek. Humility is a nice virtue to cultivate especially with enlightenment. The last thing you want to have is your ego wrapped up in enlightenment. That would be a really bad problem. Like trying to diet while eating chocolate-covered bacon.

The answer is that non-dual reality laughs at troll and real. Troll and real are ego. Reality ain't ego. Reality is a-conceptual. But even these beliefs need to eat themselves. Sorry. I think the lesson here is we gotta stop asking stupid conceptual questions about enlightenment. I'm not addressing this to anybody here. It's just an observation. And it used to be directed at me, so that's how I really learned it. I could be wrong. And I make no claim to know Leo's intention for the question. To even think that there is an answer or even a question is egoic. Reality just is and it is One. Non-dualism is just that -- not two. In non-dualism the question isn't how thin we should slice the baloney, it's where we should lock away the knife. I think it's really healthy to assume that we are all wrong about enlightenment. If nothing else, it prevents tainting the beautiful thing that non-dual reality is. Being humble about conceptualizing enlightenment is a good practice. I assume I am wrong in everything I say here. And it doesn't matter at all. What matters is BE-ing non-dual reality. So long as I can do that, I could care less what is said about it by me or by anyone else. It's all just like birds squawking in the background while I am sitting here trying to enjoy a nice steak dinner. Like that. I'd rather be reality than be right any day.

If that conclusion works for you, I have no reason to convince you otherwise. You seem to really want to believe in conceptual claims, as do most of us. Your argument doesn't fly with me though. Enlightenment is really good at telling you what you are not, but it doesn't do much to tell you -- conceptually -- what you are, or anything else for that matter. And Neti-Neti certainly does not prove-up all the positive claims that are made about enlightenment. Most of the claims about enlightenment are simply scaffolding, designed to guide you and to be kicked-away at the right time. A big problem I see is that people want to treat the scaffolding like beliefs. This is a huge trap. All beliefs are existentially false. The problem is that nobody wants to remain silent to be the Truth, they want to cling to knowing the Truth conceptually. I hope you see this trap. I do, and I'm not claiming that I don't fall into it either. But I am mindful of it. Thought-stories are not the Truth, they're egoic fantasies. But you've heard this many times before, I'm sure. And if you've not been sold on this by now, I assume it doesn't work for you. And that's fine. I don't assume my role is to twist your arm into my way of thinking about the issue. That would be really arrogant of me. There is more than one way to skin a cat. What enlightenment does tell you positively it shows you, and what you conceptualize from what it shows you it ain't. Boy I hope this makes sense. It is really hard to talk about enlightenment or to write about it I am finding. This is why I like the idea that enlightenment is about BE-ing the Truth. It gets at what I see as the most accurate pointer to enlightenment. Just BE non-dual reality. That's it! Reality is the non-dual whole. As soon as you say anything about it you poo in the beautiful pool so to speak. Let the pool stay crystal clear and just enjoy it without modification. It doesn't need to be anything other than what it is, anything more than what it is. But our monkey-minds hunger for conceptual truth about non-dual reality like a heavy-person might pine for a doughnut. We have a powerful craving to know. We lick our chops to know like a dog with a bottom-less pit stomach eats until it barfs. We're addicted to conceptual knowing. For what it's worth, and I'm not assuming I am right and everybody else is wrong -- clinging to conceptual beliefs about non-dual reality can set you 100 miles apart from enlightenment. Enlightenment is pre-linguistic, a-linguistic, a-conceptual. Just BE what is. I don't know, maybe I am on the wrong track, but it feels so right to me. This is how I practice enlightenment. This doesn't moot conceptual thinking as to other matters, it just moots beliefs trying to capture non-dual reality. Enlightenment is like going through the gateless-gate. (I stole this last sentence from one of Leo's videos haha. It's good.) I'm at this point with my enlightenment where beliefs about enlightenment don't really count for much. The stories are fun to read and get me thinking about enlightenment, but BE-ing reality is where the rubber-meets-the-road for enlightenment to me. But I never would have arrived at this destination without a lot of scaffolding to guide me here. The journey is worth as much as the destination in enlightenment. But I have found that at some point you have to kick away the theory training-wheels and just be the damn Truth. It's so trivial it almost seems like a joke. This is why the journey to get here is so important. The ego will not drop need to believe until it sees the Truth and understands the futility of trying to conceptualize enlightenment, so you gotta go on the journey to see with your entire being why this is True. You gotta feel it in the marrow of your bones -- like damn! this is never gonna work! It's an epiphany that I think Self-Inquiry, in part, is trying to lead you to. But I am still open to talking about and thinking about all these issues. I don't wanna be a dogmatist myself. Beliefs don't count for much from an existential standpoint. But this statement must eat itself. Now you know why I say the statement must eat itself -- all thought-stories stand at cross-purposes to non-dual being. Like the difference between drawing a cat and petting a real cat. The real cat might tentatively sniff at your nifty drawing, but it would probably show no interest in it otherwise.