Joseph Maynor

I think your brutal honesty is a good trait. You never conceal things and you just put it all out there, which is a really good trait to have in this work. A lot of people are afraid to be so open. But when you’re open then people can come help you. You’ve done a good job being open your issues on here.

I laugh at my own attempts at humor but I’m not really keen on being a funny dude because I think it’s a bit phony and manipulative. The more relaxed I am with you, the more I’ll show my natural humor. I’ve never really had the kind of up front humor that readily attracts women or anything like that. I’ve always seen that kind of patronizing personality as distasteful. Women don’t really see it as patronizing because they don’t understand what men are doing with humor — they don’t see the underlying motive. I realize a lot of men evolved and learned humor as a tool to attract women and to manipulate situations. I never even bothered to play that game. Laughing to me is great, but I’ve always preferred other things a bit more than laughing. Laughing too much to me seems like kind of a vice. Being too silly is annoying. I’ve been around too many funny dudes who neurotically feel the need to try to be funny all the time and it just gets to be too much. I see the manipulation side of humor more so than most people do I think.

The major trap to avoid with Ego is solipsism. Solipsism is a belief.

Good idea!

I’m so sorry to hear this happened to your family.

Yeah I did. It was my Change #1 a couple weeks ago in my Journal. The first 3 days were very hard and then it gets way easier after that.

Video games are an art-form like anything else. If you like video games and don't want to quit them cold-turkey, consider Compartmentalizing them in your Daily Routine/ Schedule. This means that you only play video games during a specified window in your day and you fully honor that. If 100% cessation is necessary, only you know that. If so, cut it out. But Compartmentalization is another option. Put playing video games into a box in your Daily Routine/ Schedule. That means you only do it in that box and you gotta enforce this on yourself. Video games and a lot of things have a tendency to bleed out of their own box and take over your whole Schedule. This is what Compartmentalization solves. For example, me with alcohol. I couldn't Compartmentalize alcohol, so I had to quit it 100%. But before I quit alcohol, I tried to Compartmentalize it, and that just didn't work. So, if Compartmentalizing video games isn't working, you gotta take that next step.

The desire to escape suffering using Enlightenment is a desire of the Ego. The Ego wants reality to cater to it and keep it nice and comfy and snuggy. Enlightenment only really eliminates one form of suffering, and that is the suffering that's caused by being an unenlightened Ego. But as an Enlightened Ego, you're still gonna perceive suffering. Suffering is a part of Experience. Suffering is your Ego not liking something that's happening in reality. So, even if you're an Enlightened Ego, you're still gonna suffer. The difference is you're not gotta be as ready to take it personally because you'll understand what's happening. I don't care how Enlightened you are, if someone killed your child in front of you, you would suffer.

To wake up on time everyday whether I want to or not.

Sages are mystics who have their heads screwed on tight. Just kidding, sort of.

Wait until you watch one of your parents get sick and slowly die and then come tell me reality is Heaven. No, actually reality is a mixture of Heaven and Hell and everything in between. That’s where we got those concepts from to begin with — from reality. We know certain times in reality can be Hell. Talk to a war veteran and ask them if reality is Heaven. Talk to somebody whose 24 year old son just committed suicide whether reality is Heaven.

Either changing or unchanging Both changing and unchanging Most minds seem to default to (1). This this what I call the ‘Exclusive Or’ Tendency of the mind. It has to be one or the other but never both! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or

Nice!

The Paradox of Teacher and No Teacher. That’s the one. And you gotta work both ends of it. This is a little bit different though than what I said to dude. I still need to write about the Paradox of Teacher and No Teacher in my Journal, I’ve been meaning to.

Well, we don’t really know what happens to consciousness after our body dies. That’s the gazillion dollar question. That’s what puts religion in business, speculating about that. But at the end of the day I feel like nobody knows. It’s one of our mysteries. We’re not gonna know until it happens to us. And unlike a lot of people, I’m cool to wait to find out. I don’t seek that answer because I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be the wrong answer. It’s gonna be some made up answer. I don’t waste my time. I’ll find out myself when the time comes for me.

Could be but could also not be. I’m a fan of creativity, but I don’t go overboard with it. We humans make up a lot of sh*t with our language. Ever see the fiction section in a large bookstore? That’s all us. The storytelling animal. Ditto for movies. We don’t know what happens when we die, and I think a lot of people can’t handle that so they make up stories to deal with that unknown. I’m cool with accepting the unknown. I’ll find out when I die assuming there is something beyond death and I’m happy to wait for that at that time. Death is freaky as f*ck just because we don’t know and we can’t stand that we don’t know, so we bullsh*t ourselves to try to get rid of this anxiety. But at the end of the day our human bullsh*t only goes as far as we are. And we’re all on the life side of death. It’s part of the human condition that we don’t know fully what happens when we die.

I’m glad to see you have a lot of interest and energy for this work. But remember, the greatest master is also the greatest student. There’s no getting around paying your dues in this work for a long time. And I’m not just talking about Enlightenment Work, I’m talking about Personal Development Work more broadly.

How does the concept of afterlife even make sense? Nobody knows what happens when we die. It’s like asking a fish what life is like on land. How could the fish know? Of course the fish could guess, but that’s not knowing.

Those who know for sure don’t come back to tell us.

I do agree with you that the animal lens is an interesting lens to look at ourselves from. I just found a book on Physical Anthropology that I've been reading lately.

Good. I'm glad you've started to get serious about getting a sustainable Daily Routine/ Schedule. I think my first course as a personal development teacher is gonna be on the topic of scheduling because it's rather complex and I've been wrestling and experimenting with it for many years. A lot of people just don't know how to develop a sustainable Daily Routine/ Schedule for themselves. How do I know this? Because I've been one of those people. I just stuck with it and kept plugging away at it for like 20 years, experimenting with all kinds of different things. But once I got a system for my Daily Routine/ Schedule set that was palatable to me and sustainable for me, it changed my life dramatically in terms of how I feel and what I get done in a day. There's a lot that goes into this. Video on point to watch:

What's the lesson here?

What is God? What’s the criterion for something to fit the concept of God? See, you just pushed the issue from one vague concept to another vague concept. What if I said Enlightenment is boobelyboobely. You wouldn’t buy that right? Somebody is gonna go around proselytizing that Enlightenment is boobelyboobely now haha.

I’m not so sure about that anymore actually. I think Enlightenment is a notoriously unclear concept, yet people talk about it pretending they understand it clearly. I’ve been around long enough to realize that. Do I get a cookie hehe? I’ve never seen people spend so much time preoccupied with something that they don’t fully understand as I have with Enlightenment. And I’m a fan of Enlightenment Work, so don’t get me wrong. It’s a little bit tricky though.

But don’t we need to know what criterion we are looking for to classify something? You wouldn’t classify something as cannabis without having some criteria about what cannabis is. You wouldn’t classify something as a giraffe without having some criteria about what a giraffe is. But then we ask is so and so Enlightened and we don’t even know what Enlightenment is or what criteria to measure it by. It’s like asking, Is John Doe boobelyboobely? How the hell would we know? You don’t even know what boobelyboobely means? You gotta know with a certain degree of definiteness what the category is to even be able to assess whether something fits that category or not. A snake is not a human. How do we know that? Because we have pretty clear criteria for what a snake is and what a human is and we can readily discern whether an animal fits one category or the other. An anaconda is an amazing animal but it’s not a human, we can see that without a second thought.