Joseph Maynor

I’ll bite. There are so many good ones. 1 2 3

Be careful you don't turn that dream idea into a belief that you then cling to as "true".

This is an interesting question. It’s a yes and no answer. Yes in the sense that you can’t really genuinely love outwardly unless you care for and love yourself. No in the sense that contributing your strengths to help others is the highest form of love. So you really need both self-love and a love of others.

I would start by writing out a list of pros and cons.

Don’t try to eliminate thoughts. Instead try to understand why the Mind is using thoughts the way it does in certain contexts. Thoughts aren’t just entirely random. Ditto for emotions. Thoughts and emotions are triggered by the mind looking out for your Ego.

Take care of your health.

When Enlightenment Work becomes more like Meditation and less like Philosophy you’ll know.

I think this is a fascinating question because it’s only a question that each person on the Path can look back at their own Path and answer for themselves.

Keep participating on here. People will chime in to help you.

Here’s a thing that’s even crazier — even the actual is a concept.

Exactly. It’s hard to communicate what being is. All you can do is kinda edge around it using concepts.

Calling ourselves God is a concept too. Truth is also a concept. For me Enlightenment included a transcendence of the concept/issue of Truth.

This is natural.

I think you have a tendency to get caught up in these disempowering narratives and you don’t realize you’re stuck in them. You don’t realize that you're stuck in all these stories about your life. Enlightenment is supposed to help you get out from underneath those kinds of debilitating narratives. I’m surprised that hasn’t really clicked for you yet. Your mind has you by the balls. You take every negative thought and emotion personally! You compound your own suffering by clinging too much to the mind and getting personally offended by reality. That is exactly what Enlightenment Work should be fixing in you. And until you can do that you don’t really know what Enlightenment is. Enlightenment will take away your neurosis, that’s the first tell-tale sign that somebody is getting it with Enlightenment Work — they become calmer and more grounded. It could be that psychedelics could help you. I think what would help you though is just to get out of your own limiting-beliefs and shitty stories that you cling to about yourself. You’re obsessed with the mind’s stories, and you keep re-recreating them too. Your mind is trying to protect you on some level, so if I were you I would try to find out why your mind is always trying to hold you back. The best thing to do is realize that what the mind is doing is trying to protect your Ego. The mind is like a very over-protective neurotic mother that you gotta keep at arms-length. You should be able to better detach from your mind at a certain point in your Enlightenment Work.

Take all your goals, tasks, and projects that you want to do and just get all of that into one single list first. That’s what I’m calling a list of 50 objectives. Most people never do this kind of consolidating work. When you have one document with your top 50 objectives it will be worth it.

Good. Turn that into a list of 50 objectives. And then take that list of 50 objectives and turn that into a projects binder.

Ego is just one lens and only one useful lens to look at what you are through. Enlightenment provides you with a No Ego lens to look at what you are through too. Now, what you are is not a lens. The lenses of Ego and No Ego are there to allow you to balance your life in the Now as you live life. But what you are is not Ego and it’s not No Ego — however, it can be useful to look at what you are through the lenses of Ego and No Ego as the proper context arises.

Enlightenment can be twisted into a cult pretty easily because Enlightenment is notoriously unclear and difficult when you’re first starting out the Path. And also with Enlightenment all kinds of things can be promised because the person doesn’t even know what Enlightenment is at first.

What you are can even transcend asking “what am I?”

@Viking Have you done enough to find what you're passionate about exploring or working on with your time here on this Earth? I can feel my passion. I literally know what my passion is. This is because I've done a sh*t-load of Life Purpose Work. If you can't feel your passion or know where it is, then you're gonna suck at finding things to do in life that align with your passion. So, you gotta find that passion. This is like the Life Purpose equivalent to finding the True Self in Enlightenment Work. Find that passion! And then pick things to do with your time that align with your passion. This doesn't just happen automatically, you gotta enforce this, create this for your life.

Highly recommended to watch. This interview changed my life I think. It had a big impact on me.

Thinking doesn't stop but you stop clinging to thinking like a baby clinging to a baby blanket. The idealism of thinking is seen through. It's really just a transformation in how you ARE or how you BE, that's what Enlightenment is. It snaps you out of a certain kind of getting lost in stories mentality that a lot of people are trained with and don't know any better.

I love this. That's what happens too.

I don't think I've ever personally talked to anyone about Enlightenment who didn’t already know something about it. It's never actually come up for me.

Good for you.