Joseph Maynor

@How to be wise I don't think so. What hinders enlightenment is closed mindedness and lack of awareness, not high self esteem.

FILL IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE FOR WHAT I HAVE BOLDED AND POST IT 3 Step Formula to Be Ruthlessly Effective at Anything Find one tactic that works extremely well and then you’re going to exploit it. 1. Select your domain. Find and set a deliberate and clear intention for what it is you want to be ruthlessly effective at: Being the best, most effective freelance paralegal. This is my mission and what I’ve set out to do for myself. 2. Notice one exceptionally effective high-yield technique that generates tangible results. You’ve proven it to yourself. Daily marketing: Cold-calling and mailing brochures. Provide a good service to get repeat business. 3. Set up a daily habit to use this technique every single day without exception, and make a 100% commitment to use this technique no matter what.

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You need to fight bad illusion with good illusion so concepts are necessary for enlightenment theory and practice. Don't fool yourself. The key is that you have to know when to get out of the theory and set yourself free so you can transcend YOUR ego, which is where the rubber meets the road with enlightenment, not further study. Has anybody become enlightened without concepts? I don't think so. Having a lot of theory will expedite your enlightenment, assuming the theory is good theory. What would otherwise take 50 years may take 5 weeks. So, theory is important. What is important is to not cling to it tightly. You gotta learn how to hold theory and beliefs loosely. That's the ENTIRE problem. It's not theory, it's how we hold the theory that is wrong. We wanna cling too hard to theory. Like a baby clawing for its comforting blanket.

Regular Life 1. Egoic self. The small Self. Self-Transcendence 2. The Higher self. Still egoic but tries to act selflessly using awareness. Enlightenment 3. Brahman. Self-aware reality without distinction.

This is one thing that the epicureans did that was cool. They understood the importance of friendship and other social aspects of life Watch this video for some context of what I am talking about. Another awesome video to watch on point. I love this one a lot. Epicureans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

Like an immune system ridding the body of disease? Does that explain need to grow in life? Why did we become unpure to begin with? Leo said reality needed to explore itself, and that's where the finite perspectives came from.

No. Meditation is the gateway to Being. The nap-time for the monkey-mind. The crystal-gaze of the Self upon the barren portals of experience. The surveying of a sliver of God's potential.

@Truth Magnanimous.

@ZenBlue I hear ya. That's what I need to do now too. Get my business running smoother. I'm so glad I have such a strong background in enlightenment now so I can do that without stressing out about it. You can tell Leo was already experienced with enlightenment before he shot his first video. All the early videos are just as much about enlightenment as the later ones. He just got more focused on enlightenment in the later videos. So, yeah I think Leo was into business, but he was doing it all along while living an enlightened life. He didn't really change at all, not from a teacher standpoint. He just got more focused on enlightenment as time went on, but that was presupposed all along it was just not made so explicit in the earlier videos. All of the videos fit together nicely. I watched all Leo's videos 3 times, that's how I know. I'm sure he learned some details, but he knew what he was doing from the giddy-up. That's the way to start a business. He had a lot of knowledge to pass on. A solid value proposition.

Curious. Don't give me some kosher bs theory answer. Look within to answer. I'm starting to resist the theory more and more; the dogma. Am I God, am I a pissant? Am I superior to both and neither? Am I inferior to both and neither? How can I attach any trait to me good or bad? Am I glory or nothingness? Bigness or smallness? Strength or weakness? Purposeful or purposeless? Necessary or random? A great video on point.

From page 56 of the book "Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought" by Peter Wilberg. "[T]he essential principle of 'non-duality' [is the] principle of inseparable distinction -- understanding pure awareness as neither separate from the world of experience and its differentiated contents of consciousness, nor merged in indistinct unity with them."

Sounds like you have a slight fear of growth. You shouldn't be scared to watch any of Leo's videos. None of them are really more advanced than others. Every element of personal development is necessary.

@Anna1 Here's what is confusing me. And it is on point with this question too. How can I be both part of reality and all of reality at the same time? How can I be the caterpillar's perspective of reality or the jellyfish's perspective of reality? If I am all of reality, I should have access to the perspectives of all creatures, to all distinctions. It seems as though I am a form in reality that mentally can (at least) partially transcend it's own default programming, at least to the extent that our Inquiry can accomplish. But that mental transcendence does not change the monkey that I am on the ground, what my body-mind actually is and will be while such a distributed system exists in reality. And it will not change the fact that a monkey is trying to self-inquire too. There are a lot of red flags with this too, if you think about this. We like to overlook this fact.

@Anna1 Does this video kind of get at what you are saying? Understood practically and less theoretically.

@Anna1 I take a very stark view. Existentially, reality is non-conceptual. It is just what is. It is to be noticed. Anytime the mind gets involved, that's where we lose this very genuine sight of reality. The mind screws up our understanding of reality. That's the basic problem.

@Anna1 The only real truth is that thought-stories have nothing to do with reality. And even this truth doesn't have to be formulated conceptually. We can confirm this empirically. It's just that trickiness of thought makes that hard for people to do without some instruction from someone else who has observed this difference. Everything else said is just scaffolding. Like little zen-stick slaps, nothing more. Little jabs to the monkey to keep it useful to some purpose.

Philosophy should make things clearer not more opaque. It's just a different language game. A different paradigm. All beliefs are paradigms. Reality has nothing to do with 99.9% of paradigms. But, if you wanna play the communication game about this stuff, you gotta pick your poison. Otherwise we could all just shrug our shoulders, smile, and this forum would no longer exist. Who has the audacity to conceptualize enlightenment here? haha. 99.9% (It's cool that I was able to use that twice.)

@Dodo The crazy thing is that this is just happening naturally for me by realizing that all of my beliefs are false. Not a single belief in my mind has anything to do with reality. Once I realize this fully, all my perplexities will fall away. Even all the non-duality theory is false. The only true fact is that thought-stories are not reality. And this is confirmed by direct observation. This doesn't have to be framed as a statement or belief either because it is directly perceived once the nature of thought is inquired a little bit into. Because we cannot see thought, it is a little bit confusing about what is going on with thought. Thought is a little bit slick, but with awareness you can grasp its true nature. The problem with thought is that it makes fantasy appear to be reality.

@Anna1 A concept is a thought-story, a meaning. It is the way that non-statement meanings are referred to in Western Philosophy, especially post-Kant. A statement is a meaning, belief, or thought-story that can be true or false (or fall into that illusory dichotomy prima facie). Concepts are usually not true or false. Concepts often correlate with words as opposed to sentences. Statements often correlate with complete sentences, although it is not necessary that they do. So we have concepts and statements as types of thoughts. These are paradigms that come from the Western end of Philosophy.

I gotta watch that one again. I've already watched it 3 times. It is amazing.

You're right. Great video on point.

I've come to the conclusion that even the higher self is an illusion. It is based on the perspective that we should maximize human life. That might be good, but it is not the absolute perspective. The absolute perspective has no interest in body-mind perspectives. But even if you were a monk living in a cave, you would still need to provide for the body-mind, so you might as well do that adequately and not deficiently. And so I can see why life purpose is a good thing to pursue. As long as you don't get too imbalanced doing it. Videos that allude to higher self. All great. Watch them all.

@Hero in progress I agree with everything except these two: There is no doer the body moves and functions in the world through the intelligence of The Self only. the nature of consciousness is not only formless & infinite but has inherent intelligence. There is no intelligence there. That's a thought-story. It is just Nature playing itself out. Reality has no rhyme or reason. It just is. The Self has no distinction, no intelligence. Intelligence is a human distinction, a monkey-mind projection. The Self is no monkey.

Realize that all your beliefs about reality are false and illusory. Start to inquire into each and every belief you have about what is real. This will lead you to realize that the egoic self and the external world are both illusory. The body-mind is illusory. All of this is thought-story. Though-story is never real. Reality contains thought stories just like a bookstore contains fiction books. But nobody would ever confuse the fiction books for the non-fiction books. The mind has you so hooked into its matrix of thoughts. Enlightenment is finding a loose string and then pulling the old, frayed linen apart by the seams. What you're left with is everything exactly the way it was before, but without the warped paradigm overlaying the Truth. The ego wants you to think that warped paradigm is the true paradigm. That's our problem -- egoic self-deception.