Joseph Maynor

He'll get one of you haha. Make an example out of you!

Love is the prize in Enlightenment work. It's hard to believe it until it happens to your life. All of a sudden love is effortlessly the center of your life. It's like the Mind gets traded in for the Heart. In Chinese Philosophy they have a neat concept -- the Heart-Mind. The Mind becomes the Heart-Mind with Enlightenment. All of a sudden love is everywhere and the most important thing. It's like the air you breathe. And because you're tapping into that love, others now love you back because they're drawn to love too. It can be a really odd thing to have new people suddenly attracted to you who want to spend time with you.

Pseudo-gurus? Wow, that's a word. I think we all have different people that we think fit that label. Probably your guru is my pseudo-guru and vice versa.

That's a great answer. I love dogs. Man's best friend.

Mooji Sadhguru

I'm thinking maybe like accessorizing with exotic jewelry -- like chunky jewelry. Big, bold, exotic earrings lol. I had a girlfriend once who would wear these feather earrings that would hang down. Those were pretty exotic. They looked good on her though, and she was exotic too, so it was a nice fit. Maybe like wearing a big, chunky necklace made out of turquoise or something -- something making sort of a statement. A big, puffed-out beard on a man is making a statement. There's a rebellious vibe to it. Maybe big hair on an older woman. I've seen some older women who have very kind of exotic big hair that is intimidating -- a hair-do which kind of makes a distinguished, rebellious statement. I saw a woman like this a few weeks ago, she looked like a powerful, seasoned female attorney.

I don't know what the equivalent for women is to a man growing a beard is. Hmm?

I respect any man who can grow a nice, thick beard. it's cool. Mine gets kinda scraggly when it gets longer and I have to trim it,

Yep. I didn't burn through that until I was around 39 years old.

Thanks for this. I will consider this carefully. Nice insight.

Your life. Only your life is right under your nose.

Areas that you might do personal development work in. Lemme list my 10: (In no certain order) Enlightenment Work Diet Exercise Scheduling Small Picture Life Purpose Work* Big Picture Life Purpose Work** Conceptual Understanding Work Projects International Cultural Travel Relationships *Small Picture Life Purpose work deals with identifying your Actual Problem Situations (APS) in your own life and setting up a daily routine that targets those. **Big Picture Life Purpose work is about aligning or re-aligning your career (your way to make money) with your strengths, passion, and life's calling.

I think all this stuff is only relevant to the extent that it improves the quality of your life, including but not limited to Enlightenment work.

I get it, I just don't see how it's relevant to Enlightenment work.

I'd be interested in a comparison of how Leo's metaphysics compares and contrasts with Teal Swan's metaphysics. I can't help but see a strong similarity in personality between the two of them.

Yeah. Me too. Belief actually means very little to me. Friendship and kindness means more to me now than belief. And of course, all relationships require tolerance, which I'm learning about as I enter more and more relationships with the aim to make them healthy and last. What you feed a tree is more important than what you say to it with your mouth. And I make sure my trees have the vitamins and the sunshine they need to love me back and flourish. Anyway, I'm getting a little mystical here, sorry. I have a few trees in my house that are like my pets. They don't have a mouth, so they don't ask me any questions, but they still tell me what they need somehow. Usually it's more sunshine, vitamins, or water. Sometimes they tell me they need to be rotated so the sunlight hits them evenly all around. Sometimes they tell me that they need their dead leaves removed.

Good chatting with you. I like your respectful and thoughtful vibe. It inspires me to be more that way myself instead of a know-it-all ass, which I can be sometimes haha.

Yeah, I admit I find the Zen approach very complete. And I didn't even know about Zen until relatively recently, but my views were already very much in line with Zen when I started learning about it. It was like this weird thing where I realized, "oh sh*t, there's a teaching that actually resonates with how I think about Enlightenment right there under my nose." And this is weird because for most of my life any philosophy I've encountered has been wrong in some sense. But Zen was right in line with my approach to Enlightenment -- I don't wanna use the word "view" of Enlightenment.

I didn't say it's impossible, it's just irrelevant to Enlightenment work. The same way that mathematics is irrelevant to Enlightenment work.

I don't think reconciling perspectives has anything to do with locating being and transcending the Ego-Mind. That's that Ken Wilber metaphysics -- this idea that everything needs to be "integrated". That's a noble project, but it doesn't have anything to do with Enlightenment work in my view.

Clinging to metaphysics makes it almost impossible to transcend the Mind. It's like living in a liquor store while trying to quit drinking.

What do you mean "being has no beginning"? See, that's more metaphysics. Mouths and Minds love to talk about being as if it's a coffee table or something.

See, I don't like this phrase "includes everything within it". That's a kind of idealism, a kind of metaphysical thing to say -- it's a belief. Being just is. Any though is spoken by a mouth and at best can be a kind of talk about being. There's this assumption that the Mind can know these very fundamental, essential truths about being, which is like trying to capture air in a net. It's just not necessary at the end of the day. I could see if it were pragmatically useful to cling to such beliefs, but it's not. It's actually a way for the Mind to cling to beliefs that block transcendence of the Mind.

I wouldn't even call it a state. It's just that I can see where the Mind interferes in things. I'm hypersensitive to the influence of the Mind.

I resonate with more of a Zen approach which is a transcendence of the Mind-Matrix. In Zen, clinging to metaphysics is looked at as a trap. Leo is very into clinging to metaphysics. He thinks reality has a logos to it. That's metaphysics. Thinking of reality as a mind is metaphysics. In Zen, that is looked at as delusion -- as being trapped in the Mind-Matrix.