Joseph Maynor

@Emerald And you just like Leo are making a career teaching this stuff which means you are always gonna be up to your eyeballs with the theory. You're never gonna be able to escape it. That's a hindrance to your growth paradoxically. I've advised Leo before to just take like 2 years off and go live somewhere where there are no books and just practice. Purge the ideas from his awareness. And just be. Like a fisherman fishing on a boat. Still as a Japanese pond. Being a teacher causes you to hit a glass ceiling with personal development because, paradoxically, you ensure you will never be able to do this. You stunt your own growth by necessity because you are always clinging clinging clinging to notions and theories. It's like your mind is being stung by biting flies all the time. What you really need to do is -- at a certain point -- is to get rid of those flies. And let your mind heal. And go be at peace from all those ideas. Like detoxing from them in a way. I never thought of it like that before until now. Because you are teaching this stuff, you are like a carbonated soda all the time, boiling-over with so many concepts, neurotically being mastered to teach other people who are at lower stages of personal growth than you are. You are reaching down all the time instead of up. You gotta cut that cord at some point and realize that the teacher is the true Bodhisattva, the martyr. She foregoes nirvana for herself to help others. That's a high price to pay though, and you might want to consider the costs of this. The person who achieves nirvana decides to cut the cord and take that selfish act. Let others fend for themselves at a certain point, and set your self free. It must be done. Martyrdom is too costly a strategy in the long run.

I think this is my very favorite Leo video, and in my opinion one of the most profound personal development hacks you can practice. The hack is called positive thinking. Watch the video to refresh your memory of this awesome strategy. And comment on it below, so I can get my hands dirty getting my own positive thinking strategies in place. This is work I wanna be doing now. It seems simple, but it is really advanced personal development work. It takes a lot of awareness.

@Prabhaker Ah Prabhaker. Another beacon of genuineness, just like Emerald. You know, I was tough on enlightenment and all this spiritual-striving in my previous post, but the day I had my ego-death experience, which was last March, was the first day of my life. It was the day I went from a caterpillar to a butterfly. I'll never be the same again. So, enlightenment is not to be underestimated. But I think there's a balance there you can find with this work. And that's what the wisest people find. That balance. That peace. That end to striving so much. A turning away from the burn and more towards love. Love and acceptance. You don't have to work that hard. Just be. That's what's I've discovered. It's like you discover the Tao. Wu Wei. Non-action action. Striving via love not force. A gentle steady wind versus a tornado. Tornados cause a lot of collateral damage, even to the tornado itself.

@Emerald Sometimes I feel that this enlightenment stuff is not necessarily 100% healthy. It is actually pretty neurotic at times. I've had to find a balance in my life. A peace. But at the same time I wanna be killing it on my life-purpose, which is huge. I'm writing a philosophy book, not necessarily a minor feat. So, it's kinda paradoxical. But you can get sucked too far down the rabbit hole of the enlightenment theory route, and kinda lose sight of the trail. You end up kinda off-center so to speak. A bit too radical. A bit too bought-in. You end up being a conformist in your quest not to be one. Kinda like punk rockers. Saddling yourself and guilting yourself with all that theory.

@Emerald Yeah I know. You beat yourself up a lot. I have a history of doing that too. I've kinda made shifts away from doing that in the last couple of months. But I can appreciate your striving. Just make sure you aren't being too rough on yourself.

It's not just a compliment. I don't know you personally, but it is like calling a spade a spade. That's not a compliment, it is a fact. You can take it as a compliment if you wish. I am very genuine too. Or at least I try to be. I can be ornery too from time to time though. Especially when my ego gets rubbed the wrong way. I'm very sensitive to criticism and get very competitive very fast. If I don't watch myself I will turn into a crazy person, a mad-man. But I don't do that as much anymore. I've burned enough bridges in my life.

@Emerald Sorry to butt in here. But Emerald, you strike me as somebody who really has an absence of persona. You are very authentic. Very genuine.

@Emerald Maybe you rub his ego the wrong way lol.

@Prabhaker Maybe he should work on the log in his own eye before he worries about the speck in others. "Do Not Judge! …For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye?…" Matthew 7-3 Damn that's wise eh! Jesus didn't suffer no fools. Oh lordy lord. Here's the King James version, a little more blunt -- Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

@Anna1 I'm beginning to think having an ego is the better alternative strategically lol.

@Nichols Harvey You never heard that? It's a way of saying don't fool yourself.

@Nichols Harvey Do you guys all know each other in real life? Seems like a small squabbling family around here sometimes. I never thought Buddhists could be so argumentative. The Buddha must be spinning in his grave! Rub the Buddha's big fat belly for some luck and peace folks. Life's not this hard. I thought I was an arguer. Man, I'm chill in comparison. You ever seen one of those tiny zen gardens? Maybe get one of those. With that little rake. Rake away your sins! Life is chill. Eat it up.

@askdfjnak It's the least we can do for Leo. We're enjoying all this for free.

@Nichols Harvey Not enlightenment per-se, but non-dualism. I got a big problem with non-dualism as a theory. And that doesn't mean that dualism is correct either. That would commit the false-choice fallacy. It's possible that both dualism and non-dualism are false. Enlightenment is real. I practice it. Not the concept of enlightenment that Leo has per se, but something with a family-resemblance to that. Enlightenment is life-changing. You don't need to accept the theory of non-dualism to be enlightened in some sense. They're totally independent from one another. Separate and distinct. Although, non-dualists would likely disagree with me about that. If they do, I would encourage them to argue with me about that so we can hash it out and take a look under the hood on that issue! Otherwise we're just clinging to theories rather unconsciously. Like dogmatists.

@Annetta This is more like extreme annoyance (or anger) than hatred to me. Hatred implies a flavor of a feeling of superiority. Like, I despise you kinda thought/feeling. When you despise somebody, it's hard to treat them well at all. You don't want to have anything to do with them really. I think you have anger as opposed to hatred. Correct me if you think my intuitions are off here.

@Fidelio Fidelio! What causes hatred? Give us your best response!

Emerald explains the basics really well here. Really, really well. This is what you need to know as kind of an overview for enlightenment. A great basic treatment.

@Telepresent Hi Telepresent: I'll deal with the issue of what judgment is in this post. Then later on I'll treat and defend my argument that the proposition "a judger exists" is reasonable to accept. That will be kind of a Moorean argument, just to foreshadow it. Are you familiar with G.E. Moore? He wrote a famous essay called "A Defense of Common Sense". You should read it. Moore was very influential to me epistemologically. That's mandatory reading for everyone by the way! I posted a link to the essay below! Moore had a huge influence on the later Wittgenstein. They were friends and collaborated on each others ideas. Moore basically attacked Kantian, Humean, and Cartesian epistemology. You're not a grown-up epistemologically until you study Moore. Kant's legacy in epistemology is disastrous, and similar to what a lot of non-dualists assume. You got before Moore and after Moore in epistemology. He's that important. One dude. Western Philosophy is important too, not just Eastern Philosophy. Non-dual epistemology is very Kantian. German philosophers were very cosmopolitan and worldy and had a long history of studying Indian Philosophy, because they had access to the books. So, the question of whether Kant was influenced by Indian Philosophy is an open question. Will Durant believed perhaps so. There's a stark similarity between Kantian epistemology and non-dual epistemologies, or epistemologies that you see expressed in Indian Philosophy in general. The idea that concept underlies everything and therefore produces maya and uncertain non-empirical judgments. I wanted to give you a little bit of this background first. Eastern Philosophy and Western Philosophy basically need to have a baby. That's the future of Philosophy. Integration between those two traditions, which have focused on different but complementary issues. Like 2 sides of a coin. Philosophy needs a synthesizer now more than ever. A new Kant in a sense. Kant synthesized the Empiricists and the Rationalists of his day. But without the erroneous Kantian epistemological notions which have polluted good minds for way too long! But I disgress. http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ana/MooreDefense.pdf So. Ok. Let's get started . . . Here are 3 of your points: (1) "I would suggest that this idea -- judgment is happening, therefore there must be a judger -- can be debated." (2) "To begin with, I have to wonder what judgment is." (3) "[D]oes this process require a judger? Well, maybe, but then whatever thing we point at and say "that's the judger" is just an object that is capable of going through this mechanism, right?" I Propose Kind of a Meta Argument to You Let's get very practical and observational. What is judging the above three quotes? Now, whatever that judger is is judging right now. This is not an abstraction. This is right now. You can simply take a look right now, you don't need to deduce the judger through analysis. Just look! I realize looking is gonna be kinda metaphorical because it's a mental looking I'm after. I take the position that judgments are mental actions. You're accepting (an act) or rejecting (an act) some proposition. The meaning of the proposition is a separate and distinct issue from judgment. (This is not the only kind of judgment we do, it's just a very important kind of judgment we do.) My contention is that judgment sits independently from any conceptual map or set of theories considered or accepted. Now, observe how you judged the prior sentence! Just look. What is that? You can determine judgment empirically by just looking inside. You can observe it. (We need to practice mindfulness of what judgment is by actually observing it in action. ) I don't hold the Kantian view that there is a built in conceptual map that filters at some fundamental level. Now, observe how you judged the prior sentence! In your mind, what's happening? Did you see an act of rejection there? An act of pushing this claim away? Like a full baby rejecting the feeding spoon by turning away? Not to belabor this point. But I propose that instead of trying to discover what judgment is by doing analysis, we simply just look! (Wittgenstein would often say this in teaching his anti-analytical theory of meaning. He would say, Just look how the words are used!) I propose that we gotta get really common-sensical and empirical to discover the nature of judgment, looking rather than analyzing. Now, observe how you judged the prior sentence! In your mind, what's happening? Did you see an act of rejection? An act of pushing this claim away? Or maybe you saw an act of acceptance, I doubt it though. Pick apart what I'm saying here and give me a more reasonable view than what I've proposed here. That would be a constructive thing that I would appreciate from you now.

@Prabhaker I don't accept any definition or theory of God. I have a personal relationship with God. Theory is just theory. God is God. In the same way that you are you, versus somebody's description of you. You are not somebody's description of you, although that description may be useful in locating you, or knowing something about you. And God is not a person. And you are not God. I know Leo says the latter and it bugs me. It's very ignorant. Non-religious people should not talk about God. They are blind to it. It's like a blind person talking about viewing a Rembrandt painting. Ridiculous right? We are not God. God is God. And we can't know God fully, only what God reveals to us. We are always gonna be partly blind to knowledge about God. The Quran is the best fairy-tale, as it were, for us to kind of get an idea, some kind of human analogy, of what God is. Scriptures are analogies when they pertain to God. But they're useful. They're vehicles to God basically. Roadmaps.

@Zephyr I love it. I read a lot about Sufism when I visited Istanbul a a couple of years ago. Istanbul is a wonderful city if you ever have a chance to visit. I loved hearing the call to prayer all the time. It was awesome.

Absolutely. Become a knowledge beast. Be a sponge. Go out there and soak up all the knowledge you can.

@Annetta Ok. So, what my first sentence means is that I'm talking more about a person who has hatred as a stable characteristic of their personality. Like a personality disorder, if you want to draw that analogy. Somebody who has a post-traumatic hatred based off a single event would fall outside of that because their hatred would be based on that event only. I'm talking about people that are racist. People that are narcissistic. People that are mean. People that are chauvinistic. People that are manipulative. But specifically with a flavor of hatred added in there. As a stable quality. Probably always been that way. That's what I'm talking about. And I know nothing about social psychology, so my knowledge only extends to humans, because that's all I've come into contact with. I don't like to speculate outside of my knowledge comfort-zone. I like to keep it real with my opinions. If I don't know, I say I don't know. And I don't know anything above and beyond people. Telescoping into abstractions is above and beyond my experience in this area.

As kind of like a stable phenomenon, not incited by a finite event? Ok. Lemme shoot -- Too much dwelling on the past + compensatory narcissism + victim mentality

@Christian You think positive thinking practice is easy or trivial?

Hi Leo. You mentioned doing a creative thinking course. Do that! Please. I forget which video you scatted some ideas on this. I was really impressed. Consider doing a course on creative thinking as you discussed.