Joseph Maynor

No. Practice both. They do different things. Meditation has nothing to do with Sedona. Sedona is a tool to bust though internal resistance: 1. Could I do X? 2. Would I do X if I could? 3. When will I do X? 4. Visualizing starting to do X. 5. Allow yourself to start to move. You will! This is the magic of Sedona. That resistance will give way and you'll start to flow automatically into action. Allow this to happen and ride the wave as long and as deeply as you can. This is called flow or being in the zone. When the wind is at your back exploit the heck out it. Bam bam bam, get it done.

Maybe these tips will help you. Don't feel bad, I struggled with this until very recently. Now I am excited to do my life-purpose actions everyday. That's your ticket-out. But it takes quite a lot of personal development work to achieve that. Start the process. Success doesn't happen by accident! 1. You have misplaced priorities. Get all your juices flowing in the right direction and get stoked to take the actions you wanna be taking by doing some life-purpose work, and work on getting excited to take actions that will REALLY MASSIVELY improve your life as your tasks and days open and close. Aim to turn your work into play. That's how you'll take massive action without it being grindy. The Holy Grail of life is when your life-purpose implementation work becomes fun. Your life will then take off like a rocket. 2. You have internal resistance. You need to dissolve that internal resistance. There are a lot of nice personal development tools for this. Anti-procrastination tools like 5-minute rule, strategizing your day, task-binder, visualizing starting tasks, Solera Method. Get your daily-routines wired. You're gonna suck at personal development until you have powerful daily-routines that work your actions you need to implement your dream-life and emotional-mastery. Study enlightenment. Do roles-work and shadow-work. Basically you've got a lot of limiting-beliefs and homeostasis going on in there that you gotta unclog and dislodge. And you can! But realize that emotional-mastery work has gotta be a side-goal that you need to be working on while you crystallize your forces and passion around your life-purpose work. 3. Create a powerful morning-routine where you meditate, read your mission-statement, eat a healthy breakfast, and visualize your day. I find that by visualizing your day in advance you're kind of buying-in or agreeing on what you are gonna do. The ego doesn't like to be put-upon, so if you let it know in advance what you plan to do, it tends to curl-up like a lazy dog and half-falls asleep for ya. 4. Eliminate time-wasting distractions. You gotta ruthlessly gut these from your life. They are killing your dream-life. And they are causing, in part, your misplaced priorities. Everything you do -- everything -- should be in service of your life-purpose or emotional-mastery work. Don't make your life harder than it needs to be. Focus only on the relevant task-at-hand. Cultivate focus. Without focus you can't get anything done and you aren't gonna see any massive results. Nothin's free. If you want a dream-life YOU gotta earn it, every single penny.

@Wouter You need some concrete action-plans. Start to take some baby-actions on a daily routine. Sounds like you are like me a little bit weighted on the thinking side of things. That can be a trap. Consistent daily actions directed at your purpose is key. I would lay the theory down for a while and focus on baby-stepping in some daily-routines that will let you explore around with these matters. Be an explorer. You don't need to nail-down the plan before you take action. In fact, that strategy might slow you down and cause limiting-beliefs to sprout and fester. Push past theory with practice for a while. Let theory catch up later. It will. Watch Leo's video on "Balancing theory and practice."

This is an enlightenment issue. What I mean is that people are clinging to identity and beliefs in a certain way. Studying more about enlightenment is what you want to do to get at the core of what is going on here.

Mindfulness of beliefs and Self-inquiry. Start to notice your beliefs and start to notice the stories they tell. Then start to notice how you cling to these beliefs as if they are true. You cling to these beliefs too tightly. Notice when you connect beliefs to an identity -- to a me. Become more mindful of your thoughts in general. Beliefs are a type of thought that you take to be true about you or the world or reality. I find enlightenment work to be, not entirely but a big chunk of it, becoming more mindful of beliefs that we cling to. We don't even realize all the thought-stories we cling to. And stories are fine, if there's a reason in a moment to cling to them and then release them. Our problem is that there are many beliefs/stories that we cling to all the time -- without sensitivity to utility or benefit in a moment. That's where we snare ourselves with beliefs. We are not mindful enough, in general, about how we treat thought in our lives, and we are not mindful about how we should treat thought in our lives. So we gotta investigate these issues in our lives. And that's one road to enlightenment. Thought is a tricky thing because it doesn't exist out in the world, so we are half-confused by thought. And we stunt our lives by limiting ourselves with our own thought-stories. We hold ourselves back -- It's a travesty what we do to our true life-potential based on our confusion about how to manage thought-stories in our lives. This is why doing personal development work is mandatory work if you wanna live to your fullest-potential in life. To do what makes you proudest in your heart-core -- to gift the fruit of your unique path to the world that only you could give, that only your path alone could rightly yield -- the soul-stamp of one individual. Bad beliefs stand in the way of this dream, your dream-life. So you gotta go on a journey to nip this problem in the bud so it doesn't railroad your dream-life.

Depends on where you want to go. All work is contingent on purpose. And purpose is not existentially groundable. In other words, Reality has no concern about how we choose to live and work. You gotta get clear about what your unique purpose is in your life, then your work becomes clear. You will then know what it is you need to do when you have an end in mind, YOUR UNIQUE end in mind -- that you worked hard to discover and half-dreamed up for yourself by doing life-purpose work. And this purpose ain't never gonna be the same for everybody. We're all unique little hair-roots searching for the Sun. Get to understand your little hair-root so that you can take care of it properly. So you can nurture and grow that little bugger into whatever you fancy, whatever your half-discovered, half-created life-purpose dictates. Bonsai tree? Huge redwood tree? It's all up to you. You are the music-maker, and you are the dreamer of your own dream-life. Don't give that away to ideology or cling too tightly to beliefs, unless that is what you should be doing pursuant to YOUR purpose in a moment. I only know my life and purpose. And you only know your life and purpose. This perspective might resonate with you, but it's only a story that resonates with you or not at the end of the day. Same with your story. We ain't truth-tellers so much as storytellers. But stories are highly useful scaffolding, depending on what your purpose is in a given moment. So work hinges on purpose and purpose ain't the same for everyone, and goals and situations change with passing moments. I notice your attitude is common with people too attached to the enlightenment stories. Stories aren't existentially true. Do the stories don't let the stories do you. Enlightenment ain't about belief so much as it is about being. But this is a story too. See? Reality just is. It duddn't have a word to say about how "you" or "I" should live or what we should determine our life-purpose to be. That would be bringing in "should statements" and trying to augment reality with these beliefs. That's a massive trap! A common trap I see. Need to know, need to find right answer, and need to be right -- is the underlying problem. This is where enlightenment is turned into ideology to satisfy these "needs". What you might investigate is a permanent solution to the underlying problem of clinging to those illusory "needs" in the first place.

This is a thought-story, so take it loosely and don't cling to it too tightly. Its just one person's overly crystallized perspective. But you asked for an answer, so I'll bite with that caveat. Ideally enlightenment would be deeply perfected in your life before implementation of your life-purpose work. In a perfect world. But do we live in a perfect world? Figuring-out what your life-purpose is has little to do with enlightenment. So work on that very hard now and maybe do enlightenment work soon, but at the right time for you. Enlightenment is what gives you the emotional-mastery to execute your life-purpose. But then there's a bunch of other personal development theory that you need to learn too to attain emotional-mastery when you're acting in the world, not just hiding from the world. We don't wanna be hiding from the world. That's a trap that you gotta watch out for. We want to be acting out into the world, penetrating the world with our seed. Mastering our harvest by mastering ourselves. Complete self-control and self-mastery are our only path to our true full-potential. And those require complete emotional-mastery to implement. But, see, hold this story loosely because someone else could totally disagree with everything I said here and have an equally "valid" story. We could literally do a round-robin of storytelling on this forum on just this question alone and never resolve or need to resolve anything.

Wow. This is a great question. You should get Seneca's "Moral Letters to Lucilius" which is available in audiobook read very well, on Audible.com. One of the first letters is something like -- how to manage your time and prevent distraction. It's awesome. If you can get this audiobook it will be totally, totally worth it for you. There's so much wisdom packed in there. It's basically the philosopher/Roman senator Seneca instructing a friend on life-philosophy issues. And the letters are written like little essays, so they were likely intended for a wider audience, not just for Lucilius.

I don't think this is possible. You need a lot of theory-scaffolding to shape your thoughts, actions, and attitudes in specific circumstances. All theory is existentially false, but you need a lot of theory to form you into a way of being in the moment where you cling and don't cling in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. That dynamic balance needs a lot of theory-scaffolding and experience to perfect. It ain't easy to learn how to treat beliefs more realistically. The answer is more subtle than saying all beliefs are existentially false. Yeah ... and? That's only half the story. You need to be shaped to take right action, have right attitude towards beliefs, in specific moments, with highest consciousness, towards real goals. That requires a lot of molding, usually by a combination of theory-scaffolding and experience. Existentially speaking all theory is story so use it don't let it limit you. You are infinite. Stay that way by not clinging too hard at the wrong time to beliefs. Some contexts warrant clinging, but dump the raft once the river is crossed. Don't keep beliefs hanging around past their relevancy in certain moments. You will stunt and handicap your life by carrying that raft on your back instead of putting it down after you cross the river. Learn how to use tools at the right place and time, and when to cling and when not to cling. You can't learn that by reading a book. That requires embodying theory-scaffolding and using your experience to perfect your being in a higher-consciousness way in specific, actual moments. That doesn't just happen with one enlightenment experience. Enlightenment is a life-long practice. Don't lose sight of your life-purpose goals though and spiritually bypass in enlightenment. That's an unfortunate trap. You do enlightenment, don't let enlightenment do you. Remember, you are infinite. Just realize this fully and act accordingly in specific moments. Enlightenment is not an end, it's the true beginning.

Well, if we define Metaphysics as the investigation of being, then it is squarely-relevant to enlightenment. The problem is anything you say will be a story existentially speaking. If it has import concerning "being being" which is what is relevant to enlightenment, it will only serve as scaffolding to help you act, think, and be better (including how you "be" regarding clinging to and interpreting beliefs in specific moments). Investigate theory all you want, just don't cling to any ideology about enlightenment too-rigidly. Don't be too mechanical or ideological across-the-board, only if a specific moment calls for this. The territory laughs at the pretense of the map. The map is acting way beyond it's pay-grade! And it duddn't even realize this! That's our problem. Let the mystical-spark of being have the last-word over thought-story or belief staking their claim over your infinite-nature. Don't let thought turn you into something that is finite and thus not infinite. This all hinges ultimately on how "you" cling to and interpret thought in specific moments. Get this wrong, and you're gonna self-sabotage in life to a greater or lesser-extent. Get this right and you'll have emotional-mastery and freedom. Then you can do whatever you have mind to do without inner-obstacles resisting. Your actions and your will can finally both unify and dissolve into nothingness.

Enlightenment should make your behavior less antisocial, as a general rule. But if someone is a nut, enlightenment or no enlightenment, anything is possible. The reason your behavior becomes less antisocial is because you are more mindful and aware of reality and the consequences of your actions and the actions of others. Practical morality still has pull after enlightenment. These issues take a little groking to get the big picture right -- without it actually being a picture or theory. You don't want to be too mechanical, but you do need to learn how to balance practical morality without clinging to rules. This is subtle and takes a little experience to get right. Be mindful of how you cling to beliefs and mindful of how you interpret beliefs. Not being too mechanical with this, but not being nihilistic, is a delicate balance you need to use to guide your thoughts, behaviors, and actions in the moment -- without clinging to an irrelevant raft once a river is crossed. We struggle with how to interpret thoughts basically, and what to make of them. But the truly enlightened person doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding thought and knowledge. He or she just sees the situation (is the situation actually) in the highest-consciousness way. The magician knows all the plots and ploys of the magic-tricks. But he also makes illusion his bread and butter, as do we. What interests us are enjoying the magic-tricks, not a lame account of how fake they are. We want to be titillated and entertained. That's the spice of life, and there's nothing existentially bad with spices of life. Enlightened people are not allergic to the spices of life. He or she, again, just sees the situation (is the situation actually) in the highest-consciousness way.

Watch these two videos:

Depends on where you are in your personal development. I gain more from participating on the Forum than by reading more books. I've read hundreds of books (maybe thousands but I'm not trying to brag just trying to be accurate) all my life and I have learned more here in 2 months than I would have learned from reading many more books. Sometimes the human-touch is what is missing from books. Books don't tailor to your concerns like a forum does. So, it really does depend on where you are in your personal development. Right now I gain more from seeing what is actually believed in by real people and receiving tailored-feedback from real people than by reading more of what is crystallized for posterity in books. But you need both. Most people haven't lived their life in the books quite like I have. I spent damn-near all of my twenties and all except the last year of my thirties entrenched within the four-corners of books. So for me, I'm getting huge gains from participating on here. Reading more books for me ain't gonna do much. I don't think I would have ever learned about enlightenment as fast as I have had I not participated on this forum as much as I have (and having received the feedback I have received). And enlightenment is one major, if not the major, key to personal development. And that has allowed me to expand my personal philosophy in a way that I would have never thought possible from reading more books. Books train you to be a conceptual mind-dweller, so watch out. Real life is not in the books. There's good and bad in everything. What's appropriate or inappropriate depends on a specific person and their specific set of circumstances.

I like how you creatively formulated personal development tools into a PRACTICAL system that people can apply to their lives. This is a quality personal development tool that people can use to improve their lives. I will apply these ideas and see how they jive with my personal development systems. I look forward to experimenting with the rhythmic-breathing technique.

Everything you said here is just story. Enlightenment stories are stories too. A lot of people seem to be falling into the trap of clinging ideologically to enlightenment stories. Be careful! All beliefs should be held loosely, even enlightenment beliefs. This is a difficult thing to realize, and I just recently had this epiphany which really opened my eyes as to what enlightenment really is. Enlightenment is not ideology. Saying the ego is illusory is a thought-story and therefore not part of reality. Reality, untouched by our conceptual-fantasy-weaving (insofar as we can see reality) is unmarred and unaffected by our need to know and need to believe. Enlightenment is knowing how to arms-length the mind, the mind-matrix, and beliefs. This is what enlightenment is -- seeing everything as it is and being everything as it is. Not trying to pidgen-hole reality into a new ideology. Reality laughs at this very human activity -- this "need" to cling too-tightly to beliefs. Once you see things as they are, all your perplexities fall away and you can focus on your life-purpose without getting hung-up on a plethora of stupid issues that will stunt your growth and stunt your life if you don't learn what is important to focus on and what is not important to focus on in a situation. You'll be living a self-handicapped life, a diminished life. Enlightenment grounds you so you can actually do what it is that you know you should be doing in a situation. Enlightenment gives you both emotional-mastery and Truth. Don't pooh-pooh the former in preference to the latter. Video on point to watch: (I'm not saying Emerald agrees with anything that I wrote above by the way. This video made an impact on me.)

@Moreira If that's what really resonates with you strongly, then include that in your life-purpose. But be careful that you are not just trying to hide from people. Maybe your deeper problem is to stop being annoyed at people, being afraid of people, or having social-anxiety. Once you get rid of that deeper, underlying problem, maybe a weekend trip to the woods might do instead of wanting to live in Nature. See? You gotta get very clear about what your motives are, and these can be subconscious motives. Why do you want to live in Nature? Write out a list. Now, for each of those items, see if it is genuine intuitive reason why you want to do it, or see if you are trying to run from something else. Actually do this little exercise. See how genuine this idea really is, or if it is just a way to avoid underlying problems. For the longest time I would hide-out in Nature myself to escape my problems and social-anxieties. I realized what I was doing after a while and put a stop to it. I would go to the woods every day and work on my philosophy book for years. I turned this into a life-style. And I realize now it was good in some ways and bad in others. The bad was that it enabled me to hide from my problems when I needed to face them head-on to cure them permanently. The good was that I did all the freewriting for the content-stage for my book writing process. So, the bottom-line is -- if you don't solve your underlying problems permanently, then they will stick around and fester in your life, and they cause you to make decisions that you probably wouldn't make if you had solved those issues instead of running from them or trying to sweep them under the rug. That is the error you should be mindful of avoiding. Don't move to Nature to run from something. Deal with that emotional-mastery issue instead if it applies to you. Maybe do some freewriting about life-purpose and what that could be for you. Just write 3 pages non-stop on the computer under the heading: What Could My Life Purpose Be? Write fast, don't worry about grammatical mistakes, and just write what comes to mind. (Or maybe record this as a voicememo on your Smart Phone if you don't like writing.) What you are doing is a little core-dump of your mind. There is genius in there you just need to tip your head, pour it out, and then take a look at what is there on the table with the probing rational-mind afterwards. This might steer your rational-mind into formulating into language some elements or key consistencies of your life-purpose that you might refine further later on. Discover your life-purpose by spreading you out on a canvas and see where some of the points converge into lines, planes, and figures. A faint-structure might emerge. A little budding-dream might reveal itself, a little hair-root searching for the Sun. (The second clause of the last sentence is half-borrowed lovingly from Gerry Spence, "How to Argue and Win Every Time.") Watch these two videos:

The key is not to philosophize about these in the abstract per se (although it could be conceptually illuminating) but to find ways to apply these ideas at the right place and time in your life to optimize your being, thinking, and actions in a specific, concrete moment. (You wanna be working on your personal philosophy story too, so don't take this rigidly as never conceptualize, everything said in language comes off as too rigid so keep that in mind, it's the nature of making discrete statements.) Instead of being stuck in the mind-matrix, get out of it and realize that ideas are not necessities but options in a moment. You're managing a distributed-system (You) that is trying to optimize its being, thinking, and acting in the moment. Thoughts are tools and considerations that may or may not become relevant depending on what you're trying to do in a particular moment. You should be trying to accomplish tasks (including building up your conceptual thought-stories) that converge on your life-purpose goals. Keep the end in mind. One thing about conceptual analysis is we privilege it too much without knowing why it is useful or for what purpose we are doing it. The way out of this trap is to always have a purpose in mind. Always know what it is that you should be doing at all times, and then everything you do will serve that end. And this will right the relation of cart and horse between your life and conceptual analysis. We are stuck in the paradigm that comes from Mathematics where we are looking for a conceptual principle that we can then go out and solve a bunch of pragmatic problems with. But Reality ain't Mathematics. True Dynamic-Balance, the Tao, laughs at the simple-mindedness of Mathematics. A lot of people are stuck in this trap. It's how Science operates too. We look for a conceptual principle that we can then use to solve a bunch of practical problems with. Personal Development, because it includes all of Reality, cannot work this way. Reality includes everything and doesn't subsume itself under any map. Reality is by necessary the territory, not any map, although many maps may be more or less useful depending on the actual, concrete task-at-hand in the present moment. So, you gotta change your perspective about how conceptual analysis should be used in your life. This takes some investigation, open-mindedness, and experience.

Is this normal? Now when I meditate, nothing really changes for me. I've been meditating everyday for a little over 1 year now. 1 hour each day, no missed days. Actually, why lie there were a couple of missed days in there. But never 2 missed days in a row. As I can recollect. Now, when I meditate, it's just a change of inputs, but the awareness is the same. My monkey mind is much calmer now. It used to be flapping all over the place when I meditated and otherwise. I still want to meditate very much, so I'm not saying meditation is useless. It's like a magnifying glass for awareness. Merely a restriction of inputs for awareness. That's it! Not a huge change for me anymore.

Don't cling too tightly to any story. Reality don't have nothing to do with stories. Learn how to dynamically balance the stories in your life to actualize your life-purpose. Don't cling too much to any story, including the enlightenment story. You do stories, don't let stories do you. You want to completely see the mind-matrix for what it is (and what it is not) and perfect your being, thoughts, and actions in the present moment. A mistake I see a lot more and more is people spiritually-bypassing in enlightenment stories. You get out there and do your life-purpose work! Don't let your ego hang you up with need to know. Act out into the world and get outside of the mind-matrix. Accomplishing a big life is scary work, and the ego would much rather prefer the comfort of dwelling in idea-land within enlightenment stories all day. So take heed of this trap. A lot of very smart people fall into this trap. Life is not to be lived in the head, in books, in stories. That's a way to hide from life. It's a comfort trap. The ego will work its ass off to convince you to choose comfort, and you'll rationalize why that path is good, which is the deadly combination, the trap of all traps. The story that there is no free will is just a story. You need to decide how to use this story in the moment, along with other stories in the moment to maintain emotional mastery and focus on your life-purpose. So, see, use the stories and hold them loosely to dynamically balance your actions in the moment. That's the big-picture. You ain't stuck in the mind-matrix sipping tea when you do this work. You're going out there, outside of your head and comfort-zone and you're killing it everyday taking massive action to implement your life-purpose.

You have a lot of beliefs you hold without even realizing it that you need to discover, examine, and then realize that those beliefs -- although practically-speaking may be considered true or false -- are all existentially false. The point of self-inquiry is to try to be reality stripped of all augmentation of these many beliefs, the content of which are all thought-stories. So you wanna be reality without thought-story to do enlightenment work. That's why Self-inquiry is essential. You gotta look at all your beliefs about yourself and the world. What's happening is that your reality is augmented by a lot of beliefs. Those beliefs need to be rooted-out one by one. And then you gotta change how you "be" or "are" in light of that belief removal. So, this ain't no mere intellectual tea and crumpets exercise. This is getting clearer about what is, and then being that.

You know what I'm realizing is that the people who think they are nice are often assholes and the people who think they are assholes are often nice. Trying to be less nice is what creates the asshole because the person over-does it. You gotta have huge emotional awareness and be emotionally grounded to try to be less nice without turning into a dick. Dicks lack empathy and are selfish or otherwise are compensating for some sense of inferiority they are running from. Niceness is good when it is genuine. Be sweet. You don't have to play the role of the tough-guy all the time. You will just come off as a callous prick to others. You'll build that reputation inadvertently. Most people want the opposite reputation. So this is tricky. The ego will act from the shadow creating effects in your life that that you really don't want. You will shit where you eat basically. No good.

This is a very pessimistic way to look at things. You might want to reconsider this. There is gold on this forum if you have eyes to see it. You have to be looking first though not dismissing in a hand-waving, dismissive judgment. Personal development is first and foremost a willingness to learn theory and apply it.

5% Leo! Thanks for the support. That's pretty harsh. Maybe that's just your opinion. That's a pretty bold claim. I guess 95% of us are wasting our breath on here. I didn't realize we were being judged so harshly. Oy! There's something to learn from every situation.

@carlos flores Tell her that you love her.

Think for yourself. Be very, very strong in your will to figure things out for yourself. Don't trust anyone. Test everything for yourself. You gotta do the work. You'll do it all your life. Set the habit now. Assume everyone has an agenda -- their perspective. You are the only authority, remember that.