Joseph Maynor

There's a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I don't remember verbatim but I'll paraphrase it like this -- every person has something that they know that you do not know and that they could teach you if you were open to listening to them.

Interesting. There is no one right path to enlightenment. I see it as simply as unhinging from beliefs at the existential level, and a way of living a more virtuous and self-less life. I think each person can be guided by theory, but has to kick-off the theory training-wheels at a certain point and just observe within themselves how this stuff really works. That is critical. That's when you'll get the answer you're really looking for, not by clinging to beliefs or ideology like your life (ego) depends on it (I'm not saying you do this, it's just said generally). Clinging too much to beliefs is at cross-purposes to enlightenment. You gotta make your own enlightenment custom to your own life. An enlightenment that works for you, that gives you emotional mastery, that grounds you, that leads to the happy, truthful, beautiful, abundant life that the world needs from you. An enlightenment that enables you to live your life-purpose and contribute back to the world, so you can live a comfortable, financially-independent life, and so you can contribute back to the world in a Big way as your life-purpose becomes a reality. Enlightenment is a side-dish, not the entire meal. If you want to specialize in the side-dish, fine. But you would be a specialist then. Personal development is the bigger picture: How do we shape you up so you can go out there and do something on-purpose with your life. Enlightenment is the tool to helping you accomplish this. Yeah, it's the existential truth, but that truth don't take any action. You gotta rise to the occasion, dust the ego off a little bit, and go out there and take massive action to effectuate change. I realize my view might be unorthodox, but that doesn't matter to me. I figured it out for myself. I trust my own intuition after listening ad-nauseum to everybody else opine and opine about these issues. I'm still open to feedback and try not to cling too tightly to any beliefs, including these that I have stated here. What good are these beliefs? How do they advance my ball to be doing my life-purpose actions in the moment? See, that's the real issue. I can't emphasize this point more. We gotta keep our wandering eye-balls on the big-prize. The big-prize is your life improving so much that it's almost sickening. The paradox of growth? Maybe. Hell, do it for kicks if for nothing else. Just easy on the belief-clinging. That's the source of 99% of our problems in personal development. The cowboy doesn't marry his horse.

Your paradigm. The only one that truly matters. It's a bit counter-intuitive. All truth is internal not external, personal not impersonal. Physics, or any conceptual body of knowledge for that matter, only matters to the extent that it matters to you. To the extent that you can take those insights and weave them into your ever-evolving worldview, that's what matters. Much of what we learn dies away. It's what we keep that is important. And that always comes back to your paradigm. That toolkit of concepts, heuristics, and expectations that you carry around with you and actually work with on a daily basis. What's in there? How can you improve it? How can exposure to Leo's ideas help you to improve that toolkit? Conversely, how can that bum on the street that tried to hustle money off you help you improve that toolkit? See, it's all you optimizing your knowledge grab-bag, your toolkit. It's all about your paradigm and taking responsibility for improving it, for honing it. It's all about what does this information do for you that is the relevant issue. Always. And then when you get a broad paradigm built, you might be so abundant that you condescend to advise others, because you've likely made every mistake in the book by that point and want to reduce suffering of others. This is, in part, what makes person want to be a philosopher or teacher or guru or whatever you want to call it. Mastery of that knowledge grab-bag and seeing that worldview for what it is. Nice! I got away with using a sentence fragment there.

You know what is a better question -- does he think he is enlightened. Not whether he would say so publically, but how does he feel about it in his own heart-mind? If he is satisfied with the answer, then the issue is moot. There is no objectivity in reality. Objectivity is still egoic. Enlightenment is a highly personal thing I find. Highly personal. You can half-objectify enlightenment, but at the end of the day the shoe has to fit the wearer. And that's what makes a great shoe. There is no objectively right shoe. There's room for variance built into enlightenment. A monkey's perspective is not the perspectiveless perspective. So, create and optimize your own enlightenment. You are toying with Maya either way. Don't believe the hype. There ain't no right answer. That's what is so paradoxical about enlightenment. Enlightenment is no-thing. You see all these books about enlightenment. And then you go -- yep, no-thing. When you have that realization it will hit you in a comical sort of way. You will still want to cling to the theory though, naturally. The ego wants to cling to theory. But just go -- yep, no-thing! That's hard to do. The ego has a need to know, need for certainty, and need for conceptual clarification. When you see that about the ego you can't unsee it. And you'll release all the judging and trying to cubby-hole enlightenment. I've heard the word "spiritual ego" before, and it may or may not apply to what I have said here. I'll let you decide if it does or not. All perspectives are existentially relative and dwarfed by the Absolute, the perspectiveless perspective, which laughs at all of our little distinctions. Good, bad, right, wrong, true, false. All ego. All illusory, myopic beliefs at the existential level. Now, in monkey-ville all of these distinctions have practical import, but monkey-ville ain't true reality, not even close. Even so-called enlightened monkeys still half-reside in monkey-ville, within our bodies, beliefs, and cultures.

Because it takes a life-time to mature. I am 39 years old and would you believe that in the last year alone I have grown so much. You will see that you will learn and grow your whole life-long. You will gain some knowledge, then gain some perspective. And this little engine will work itself your entire life. I feel like I am the same person I was when I was 20, but I just have a lot more knowledge and experience. You ever wonder why a lot of older people look so grounded and happy? That's knowledge and experience. I look back to how neurotic I was when I was 20 and younger. I am much less neurotic now. Don't worry about it. You are likely heads above your peers. Don't let that go to your head though.

@Shin I remember making the same observation myself about 5 years ago. When you read written text you will see that you are really reading aloud the words in your mind. So, it's the vocalizations that are more primary than the written marks. This even applies to mathematics. 2+2=4 is sounded-out. This is a major insight. You might read some Derrida. Derrida was an interesting and often misunderstood philosopher who was interested in these issues. This is a cutting edge issue, not much explored. Even Derrida was too focused on oppositions, which both helped him and screwed-him-up in equal measure. But he's worth reading. You'll clarify your own view when you see why his view is wrong.

You can discuss and debate, but hold your positions loosely and don't have your identity tied-up with your views or arguments. You shouldn't be getting worked-up in a discussion. That's really the test. And always assume that the other person could be right. Try and learn something about why they believe the opposite from you. That's fascinating. That's human variance going on there. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle anyway -- in some ethereal space betwixt and between your two positions. Humility really is a virtue, but don't be afraid to argue. For one thing, it's damn fun and funny sometimes too. It's better than watching flies fornicate or watching television even. It's probably better than half the internet stuff we do on a daily basis. You can learn something in every situation. And every person has something they can teach you. Your true takeaway is what is key -- not some misplaced egoic desire to win or to be right. Any run-of-the-mill enlightened person knows the foolishness of being a know-it-all. That's a big-trap that a lot of very smart people fall into. They wanna be right. But thats' illusion-city goin' on there!

@Loreena I don't know. My guess is it's the result of a lot of spirituality work.

That might be a good reason to back off the spirituality stuff for a while. Give it a breather. Too much of a good thing sometimes turns into a bad thing.

You know what's crazy, I don't even know what this is. Shows how out of touch I am.

True. Except the rare person might dream to become a yogi, teacher, guru, or philosopher.

Finding the dynamic balance in personal development is critical. You don't want to cling to any ideology. To get the picture right takes quite a bit of exposure to theory, and then you gotta make sense of it yourself and apply it to your life. Then you feel qualified to advise others based only on that experience. So, I have a perspective that works for me. But it's not the only perspective. It may or may not resonate with you. Watch all of these videos on point:

@Socrates You can both be and not be superior. Practically speaking, you can be superior, but existentially speaking you can't be. So, you can cling to the belief that you are superior, but just hold it loosely, and don't assume it is part of your identity. Just because you are enlightened doesn't mean practical good and bad go out the window. But just realize that even being a good, excellent, or virtuous human is a perspective on reality, an illusion at bottom. Reality is the perspectiveless perspective. But we half-live in the illusion, so thus the paradox: Be superior but don't be superior. Ain't nothin' wrong with realizing you are smarter or better than other people. Just don't cling too hard to that belief and don't assume it is part of your identity. Your identity is nothing (or no-thing) existentially. You don't exist existentially, and neither do other people. All reality is one existentially.

Create your own boot-camp for yourself. That's the way to go.

@egoless Yes. Enlightenment isn't any different from real life. The only difference is the enlightened person sees through many existentially false beliefs. Enlightenment is the key to emotional mastery, to resilience. You can't stop me if there's no me and there's no you. And I can't get offended if there is no me. I can't have any beliefs if there is no me. And that includes limiting-beliefs. I can't be depressed or neurotic if there is no me. I can't transcend the ego if there is no me. See? Nothing means nothing about a separate sense of self. Reality is one. You are entire reality believing you are a piece of reality. The illusion of ego is there, and none of us can escape it entirely. All we can do is see through the illusion. This benefits our little monkey lives in an assortment of ways. Most people lack emotional mastery because they cling very ignorantly to existentially false beliefs. This is why enlightenment is a key element and threshold-guardian for true self-actualization work. You gotta let go of your false beliefs about yourself which causes you to hold yourself back. Enlightenment is a tool I find. A tool for emotional mastery. But it's the existential Truth too, not just a tool. Emotional mastery and life-purpose enable you to go out there and do true emotional labor and optimize your little monkey life to live a full, abundant life, where you are so abundant that you give back to humanity in a very beautiful way. That's the view of enlightenment that resonates with me. There is no existentially true way to live. You are the music-maker with your life. You are the dreamer of dreams. Don't let anybody's theory of enlightenment make you forget that. Reality is but a dream. Reality is truly free. Reality laughs at our cute little beliefs and theories, even the ones about enlightenment. So watch out. There ain't no objectively right answer existentially. Reality laughs at the rationalist paradigm trying to understand and cubby-hole it. It's like trying to design a real human being via artificial intelligence. Ain't never gonna happen. Some engineers might believe this, but they are in la la land -- way off.

@How to be wise That depends on how we define science. In a way, self-inquiry is science because you are finding empirical ways to determine that beliefs you cling to lack foundation. It's applied phenomenology. Now, you can argue that this ain't science because hypotheses aren't verifiable by another person. But this is just semantics. The bottom-line is that self-inquiry work is at a minimum quasi-scientific in its aim at truth through direct experience. There's just no verifiability since we can't crawl inside each other's minds. However, we can assume we are all talking about the same stuff because we can talk about it, but without certainty. Science loves certainty. Self-inquiry has a lot of arrows pointing in the direction of being a scientific inquiry. But there's also some distinctions that can be drawn. Lack of verifiability by another person of the proposed hypothesis is a huge one. Science doesn't like that. Science likes the idea of above-board verifiability, no shenanigans. Scientists tend to think mystics and other wacky theorists (from the scientists' perspective) took one too many puffs off the magic dragon, if you know what I mean. Fantasy airlifting a dying reality to higher love. Cute, they say. Very cute. Keep dreaming junior, they snort internally.

@egoless The paradox of non-duality is that the practical truths still apply. You gotta be both ego and non-ego, and neither. Enlightenment is not divorced from egoic life. Enlightenment and ego are two sides of the same coin.

I found that it is a very useful tool to convert a have to to a want to. This is one solution to procrastination. I need to use this more.

@Afonso Great idea. I wonder how much work, time, and resources this would require. And then what the payoff would be. And what the ultimate value differential between upfront costs and practical benefit the app would create over like a 3 year period. Now, see, if Leo had that information, he could make an informed decision. It just requires the relevant research.

Enlightenment kills neuroses. I had a lot more neuroses before I got deep into enlightenment. The question is whether you can learn this stuff. If you can, you might get rid of a lot of your problems.

@Simon Håkansson No. that would be like becoming addicted to reality. Reality can be cool, but to say you could become addicted to it is probably not possible. Make sure you are distinguishing meditation from beliefs. Meditation ain't got nothing to do with beliefs. All beliefs are existentially false. Meditation is not true or false in that manner. Meditation is just nap-time for the mind and re-connecting with the Absolute, which is your True nature. You can't be addicted to being yourself, unless you are some kind of narcissist perhaps. Although God is you, don't go crazy with that.

1. You have to do life-purpose and enlightenment work to the point where you see that the addiction has got to go, there are no if-ands-or-buts about it. 2. Plan a date to pull-the-trigger to go cold-turkey that is like 2-weeks out. 3. Treat quitting like a little project. Say goodbye to your little friend. He served you well, but he's getting in the way now and has to go. 4. When the D-day comes, that's your last day playing video-games. So, see, do it as a 2 week process. Video-games were good to you, you don't want to just dump them like a turd. Give your friend a proper farewell. When you abruptly quit, the ego likes to move the addiction to the shadow and you get the "dry-drunk" phenomenon. Video-games are cool, they're just a distraction to you now. They're robbing you of your focus and attention which needs to be squarely on actualizing your compelling life purpose -- living a BIG, inspiring, rare, prolific-life. You ain't got the time to waste! Our finite-time is dying every hour. We gotta get serious with our limited time, energy, willpower, and focus. Every ounce of misplaced energy is a cryin'-shame. You owe it both to yourself and to humanity to accept the Hero's call, to follow the principle of right-action, and to welcome the emotional-labor required to actualize your compelling cause and life-purpose.

@Dodo I got off spirituality and am now addicted to personal development practice, not theory. Spirituality is a molehill compared to the mountain of personal development. Separates the men from the boys.

@Lynnel Read your personal mission statement, do 5 minutes of affirmations, meditate for 1 hour. Do negative visualization practice for 5 mins. Eat breakfast. I went so long not eating breakfast, but it sets up your whole day. Give yourself time in the morning, don't be rushing around. Nurture your day by watering yourself properly in the morning like a houseplant basking in the new day's sun. Your morning routine should tee up your entire day. Then you can go out there and kill it with your work.

Existence and non existence is a duality that the mind places on top of reality. Reality doesn't fit into that duality. Reality transcends life and death. Existence vs non-existence is a monkey-mind conceptual duality that reality laughs off. Life and death are thought-stories that are existentially illusory. Reality just is, and it is one.