Joseph Maynor

There are pros and cons to everything. The pros are you're being a sponge and learning and assimilating and growing. The cons are you start to think you're working when all you're doing is watching a bunch of videos. What you wanna do is maximize the pros and minimize the cons of watching the videos. Go ahead and write out a list of pros and cons of watching the videos. This would be a really useful quick exercise for you to do. You might surprise yourself with what you write down.

This is another example of the "exclusive or" tendency. Why can't you help yourself and help others simultaneously? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or

Why is it that thought either has to have value or no value. That's the "exclusive or" thing occurring there. Why can't thought both have value and have no value depending on context? If I told you I would give you a million dollars if you correctly give me the answer to 2+2, are you really gonna see the concept 4 in that context as valueless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or

Aha! Now we’ve got a perspective you’ve never been exposed to before. It’s like a voice from the wilderness. A strange, new notion. How could it be?

Balancing Ego and No Ego well. Too much Ego is a trap, too much No Ego is a trap.

Enlightenment is a very tricky thing but a real thing. I’ve confirmed that in my own life. And there are different phases of the Path too. Some of those phases can be shocking reversals of prior phases. This is why you don’t really want to cling too much to beliefs about Enlightenment because you might prevent your own growth on the Path. Let Enlightenment do you and just see how that works without worrying too much about theory. This is almost impossible to do early and even during the middle part of the Path because one needs to cling to theory before they can let it go. You don’t break up with your girlfriend until after she’s been your girlfriend. You have to go through the whole process. Theory is part of the Path. I can see people who are at that part of the Path now. This is what I call the Spiritual Ego phase of the Path. This is the kid who suddenly becomes the Punk rocker in school. He was a nerd last year and this year he looks like the stereotypical punk rocker. He’s gotta go fully in that identity. Ditto for the hippy. Ditto for the preppy and the jock and all those identities. The pendulum has to swing into the identity stage and then it swings out later. Enlightenment is no different. People try so hard to be Enlightened, to appear Enlightened, to convince themselves that they are Enlightened. But what is Enlightenment really in your life after all that garb has been removed? Who is that kid underneath all that punk rock clothing? It’s the same nerdy scared little kid as before now seeking for a different identity. People do this with Enlightenment too. Now I get to be the Enlightened One — the Spiritual Ego. Now I have an identity. I got the Mohawk and the leather jacket with all the pins on it and Doc Martins and the wallet chain and the safety pin through my nose. Now I have an ideology too, a new lingo, and a new set of friends who are all doing the same thing I’m doing.

I think it's good that you have a sense of what you believe and you also seem to value truth enough to want to protect that even in the face of people trying to sell you on other beliefs. Keep doing the work. You can't really be Enlightened without a deep love of Truth, at least in the early to middle stages of the Path. Eventually even Truth is transcended on the Path. But you have to cling to Truth before you can let it go.

There's some truth to this. I don't really know anything about David Goggins, but I know he's a personal development teacher on some level. Yeah, I agree that adversity is what forces you to grow. The adversity of dealing with the death of a parent for example builds huge compassion, character, and gratitude (not gratitude for their death but gratitude for your life). Just going through that process changes you. It's hard to stay the same after you go through something like that. Take your dad for example. Someday you'll watch your dad get sick and die and maybe even be his caregiver in his final months of life. This process is so against your Ego that you're gonna get a crack, you'll break, and that's where you'll get growth. You'll see life differently. The way to stay a child in life is to remain sheltered against growth-causing adversity. My dad came back from the Vietnam War (and he was wounded in the war) and did very well in his career in civilian life after the war because he knew what hell was like in his early 20's, and when he came back to the States, he didn't take anything for granted. So, there is something to this idea that adversity builds character, it's what makes you an adult, it's what makes you not sweat the small stuff that people get caught up in. This is my whole point about the example of walking into a nursing home. I've been going to a nursing home everyday now for a month, and let me tell you, it's changed my life. When you see some elderly woman who can't even barely move just laying there like a lump of flesh on her bed clutching a doll probably given to her for comfort and you measure your life up against her life, you're gonna find out really fast what it means to be ungrateful. It's gonna be real to you. You'll look at your life differently. I've met some of the old people in this nursing home and they are just regular people kinda waiting to die. That's you and that's me in that nursing home, see -- maybe not today, but none of us get out of this life alive. Yet we have so many petty complaints with our lives. We don't even know what true complaints are. And this might come across as kinda arrogant the way I say it, but it is striking. This is why people don't like to go to nursing homes. The Ego wants to stay alive and the worst thing that could ever happen to your Ego is to face your own death or the death of somebody you love like a parent. That goes against every fiber of the way that your Ego wants the world to run. And the thing is that the world is not gonna change for your Ego, your Ego will be forced to absorb this kind of existential blow. And that's what causes growth. That's what forces you to change. You're forced to change due to the trauma that you're living through.

That's the story of most of my life so far. Try to make money when you could care less about working for money. I always wanted to be a philosopher. The last thing I wanted to do in my life is work for money. Other people seem to do that with such relish that I could never understand. This reminds me of a story. When I was going to college at UCLA there was a huge Borders bookstore in our college community, and I would spend a lot of time there. I would spend hours looking at the books. A lot of my college friends would swing by there -- it was a cool place to hang out, and there was an outdoor balcony that overhung the street, etc. So, I loved Borders, everything about it. Then I decided to apply for a job there. And I will spare you all the details and just say that that ultimately ruined my whole concept of going to that store. Sometimes when you turn a hobby into money you gotta think about that. If I'm gonna be a personal development teacher at some point, which I'm planning on doing, I'm sure my feelings about personal development won't be the same after that. Right now, I'm not getting paid to do any of this stuff, and it's all coming from the heart. But once you take this pure thing and you monetize that into a job or career, the danger is you change something about the way that you feel about something that you would do for free. I didn't need to work at Borders, I was fine just going there and hanging out -- I didn't need the money. I thought that because I loved the store so much that working there would take that to the next level. That didn't happen, quite the opposite in fact. That greed to try to make a job out of that pure situation ruined it for me. But at the same time, I do want to make a career out of Personal Development, so I'll have to navigate those waters very carefully. The last thing I wanna do is ruin my natural passion for Personal Development by trying to make a buck. That would be sad.

You need mind, heart, intuition, and courage.

You’re not always deluded, that’s the first thing. What you want to be able to do is remove delusions that are causing you unnecessary suffering in the moment. There’s a way you can spot and then see through delusions as they happen. You can hit the eject button to your mind and just watch the mind from a position of awareness. One thing to realize is most of the time the mind is trying to help your Ego. So, for example, take worrying and all the other ruminating you do. That's your mind trying to help your Ego. The mind's heart is in the right place, but it's reactions are often unduly emotional and distracting. But you can see how the mind wants the best for your Ego. So, what I do is I realize that and I let the mind do its thing. Sometimes I even thank the mind for motivating me to get on something that I was not prioritizing right.

Yeah it’s permanent. Enlightenment Work has a path to it, but once you get to a certain attainment, it becomes permanent. And that attainment has nothing to do with theory. It’s something that the theory helps bring about in you. Paradoxically, people stuck in Enlightenment theory are not quite there. The pendulum needs to swing into theory and then out of theory with Enlightenment Work. It’s when the pendulum swings out of theory and you see that your Enlightenment remains without the theory that you start to be able to get what Enlightenment really is and how Non-Egoic Personal Development mediates and complements Egoic Personal Development.

Your Ego loves it.

Sounds like a great goal for Leo.

Bingo!

You have turned Enlightenment inside-out. That’s what happens when you cling to the theory.

Let go of eating food too while you’re at it. Give that a shot and then come report to us your findings.

Yep

You are free to use any words you like and to object to any words you like. At the end of the day it's best to realize the buffoon uttering the words and realizing that this person isn't gonna change. I read somewhere that Nietzsche said that you have to account for stupidity in your worldview. Stage Green could really learn from that -- you have to account for stupidity in your worldview. Turquoise learns how to fix this by realizing that reality is a Network of Perspectives all at different stages of development. If a buffoon uses a terrible word, are we still arguing about language or is the problem a lot deeper? You can learn to give people the freedom to be stupid and to accept that. That's basically what Turquoise is all about. That doesn't mean that you take abuse from anybody though. It just means that you understand and accept and account and allow for stupidity in your worldview.

What does it mean to "be Enlightened"?

The best way to develop good habits is first to develop a compelling Vision for your life. This Vision is where you want your life to be ideally in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, etc. A Vision is something that you know you want. It's like someone says to you, "If you climb this mountain you can have the basket of gold bars at the top." All of your good habits should fit this metaphor. Your good habits are like the price you need to pay to get those bars of gold, however you define them. When your habits are aligned with your Vision that way, it's a lot easier to be motivated to do them. If you knew you were running every morning for 30 minutes per day so that one day you will be able to reach that basket of gold bars, that would change your relationship to the habit of running every morning! That's what aligning your good habits with your Vision does for you. Vision is something that you develop by doing Big Picture Life Purpose Work. Leo's Life Purpose Course (linked below) is a great way to get started on that.

I must say, I loved Beijing when I was there. I loved the Chinese people. I loved the food and the architecture and the long history. When you go to China you're seeing a culture that's been evolving for 5,000 years. China is one of the major sources of "philosophical civilization" in the world along with Europe and India. If you look at the three most important divisions in Philosophy it's Western Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, and Indian Philosophy.

Merry Christmas to the Forum old and new members alike!

There’s the Paradox of Opinions and No Opinions and you gotta work both ends of that paradox. Believe me, you care a lot more about opinions than you let on. Every Ego cares about opinions. Every system cares about opinions in the sense of making preferences on reality. If your hand was fastened to a burner on a stove and somebody turned on the flame — you would have an opinion pretty fast!

Merry Christmas to all of you!