Joseph Maynor

What does it mean to be Enlightened?

Being highly organized.

Seeeing yourself as an animal is only one conceptual lens to look at yourself from. You can also look at yourself as being other than an animal simultaneously. You might summarize this as the Paradox of Being an Animal and Not Being an Animal, and you gotta work both ends of this paradox.

You seem to be getting a lot out of it right now. That's good.

You might suffer from low self-esteem issues. You're like a crab that pulls yourself back down into the bucket. You know Leo's crabs in the bucket story? This is where when a crab tries to escape the bucket the other crabs in the bucket pull him back down. You seem to do that to yourself. You do these cycles where you build yourself up to a certain point, and then the crab pulls you back down into the bucket and you kinda self-destruct and then you kinda rinse and repeat in this cycle. It's like an oscillating cycle for you. You gotta find out what that crab is for you that keeps pulling you back down. And the reason I say this is because I've seen this pattern with you over and over again.

For me it was like a transformation that naturally happened to me. I never set out to get out of theory. It just happened. Once I realized what Enlightenment is, it happened. Because the theory is only a guide to becoming Enlightened. Living the theory is not what being Enlightened is.

The main problem is defining ourselves with linear statements which get turned into beliefs. Whatever language can tell us is one thing and whatever I am is another thing. It really comes down to an apples and oranges kind of thing. We have all these meanings that we think define me. Really? It's an unintended consequence of language. On the one hand we have useful knowledge (the pro of language), but on the other hand we try to define ourselves with our language (the con of language). The error is in defining ourselves with factual intention in language and then being programmed with beliefs that follow from that practice.

I notice it now. It's plain to see. But I also realize that it's a necessary part of the Path too. You have to consume something so utterly that you get so satiated with it and bored with it that the Ego backs out of it and gets interested in something else. But in that you got a growth. It's like losing a religion is the best way I can describe it. Losing spirituality even. All that goes away and everything is exactly as it's always been. But this is the way we do everything. We consume everything. We go into it and then we come out of it.

It works but it's very advanced personal development work. It's basically re-programming work. Once you understand the contexts in which it's reasonable to re-frame things, positive thinking follows from that. One of these, and this is not the only one, is there are pros and cons to everything. So at a minimum you can find the pros in any circumstance.

If you think about it, this is a personal development book. This book is very similar to Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Each of those bullets that Branden talks about is just a topic of Personal Development. The first one is "Be Conscious" or something like that. Well that's just your Enlightenment Work, right. That's your mindfulness work. And there's one on Self-Acceptance. That's a huge issue in and of itself. I think I did all the sentence completion exercises for the Self-Acceptance pillar. That was a major phase in my early personal development work.

Now you know how to rest as Awareness.

This is the danger of theory.

There are pros and cons to everything.

I would say about 4 years now I've been meditating and practicing mindfulness. But I was always a very mindful person even before I learned about Enlightenment. I was always very hyper-vigilant. I was always all eyes, I could see everything that was going on all around me. I was also meditating a lot before I even knew what meditation was. Sometimes I'd just sit there on the couch and "zone out" in meditation without knowing it's meditation.

My whole life. My own practices. I don't follow anybody. I have my own system actually. I don't like the word "teaching", it's pretentious. I have a system that I created to do personal development work and to teach personal development.

I think generally speaking yes. I feel like I'm always in a high state of awareness. If I get triggered by something I might get sucked into Ego temporarily. But the bulk of my time is keen awareness.

Check out my Journal Volume 10 for a my Daily Routine/ Schedule system. I laid it all out as I developed it. It's in the Personal Development Journals section of the Forum. This is not a project that you can get an answer for in a short paragraph. In fact one day I will develop a course on my Daily Routine/ Scheduling system because it does have some conceptual and logistical complexity to it.

Wow. This is a great question. This past year I've been working on a Daily Routine/ Schedule system that sustainably solves this problem for me. It's all about getting a daily routine set up and having a system to account for the things that have to be done.

Do the sentence completion exercises.