Joseph Maynor

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.

You and Leo seem to share a similar view about Enlightenment, at least on that point.

Yeah, but I don't really see Leo ever think in terms of paradox. It's always his very linear way of presenting his beliefs. He thinks he has very specific linear truths about reality. Hold on, I wrote down a couple of things that Leo actually wrote: "The most amazing thing about reality is that it is intelligible. Nothing is arbitrary. Human logic is a tiny splinter off God's logic. It's not just patterns and survival. I'm talking about understanding the metaphysical structure of reality and why it is the way it is. There is no accident or randomness to it. It has a logos." -- Leo Gura "Things are just as they are. They are a very specific way, a very deliberate and intelligent way. Everything is intelligible. It is possible to become conscious of why every hair on your arm exists exactly as it does and not otherwise. It is possible to understand why the whole universe exists. Profound awakening required of course. This is no ordinary reason. You must penetrate the very structure of God. It has a logic to it." -- Leo Gura There's no paradox in any of this. This is "I know what's what and I can tell it to you very clearly in linear statements." This is the kind of knowledge that you could write a textbook on and say, this is the "one right answer", as if Enlightenment is like Chemistry or something.

This looks like you're solving some kind of math problem Leo. Just look at the feel and vibe of what you're doing. I wanna write Q.E.D. after your "proof". I studied Engineering too for a while man -- I took all those math classes. Y'aint gonna prove being with no syllogism. Somehow you seem very trapped in a logical mind Leo. It's almost like you're experiencing a huge Ego-Backlash but don't realize it yet. It's like your Ego is saying, "f*ck you, I ain't going nowhere." That's ironic because I know you made the below video railing on the Rationalist Paradigm. This one: And I almost feel you kinda forgot about this video, where I thought you were on the right track:

This is kind of pretentious, no? Whose "more and more"? That's like saying, "that's alright bubs, one day you're get it."

It's interesting to me that in Leo's earlier videos he seems to be against religion -- yet now he seems to have turned religious. It's almost like he's always secretly wanted religion and has now found it.

There are no doubts within silence indeed. There is no "need to conceptually know" within silence either.

I'm doing the Golden Triangle by myself for 2 weeks. I'll be staying in Dehli but traveling around too. I don't plan to meet with anyone on this trip. This is my first trip to India, so I wanna just soak it all in by myself. I plan to do a few trips to India during the course of my life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(India)

Thank you for posting this. You're a man of your word. I didn't expect someone to actually follow through with a promise, but you did.

I don't want to respond because someone might accuse me of being overly argumentative which has happened before on here. I'll leave this alone. Message me if you really care to know. I have no desire to be overly argumentative on here.

I don't believe in objective stages in Enlightenment work. That's all subjective. You can only really use your own Path as a metric, everything else is merely hearsay from someone else. All I can do is tell the truth from my perspective. If that sits well with you, then great. If not, then ignore me. But there's really no sense in trying to prove someone's perspective is right or wrong objectively. That's a pointless game that has a bad outcome. But at the same time I think it's useful for me to honestly share my perspective even if others disagree with me vehemently. Maybe I disagree with them vehemently too, but that's no matter to me. At the end of the day, I live within my Path and my perspective only. We can really only play show-and-tell from our own perspectives. And those perspective couldn't be more different from my experience if we tried to engineer them to be. It's called pluralism: acceptance and tolerance of perspectives that differ from one's own. I'm cool with pluralism -- it's actually a value that I try to uphold.

In my experience it's for noobs. I went through it. You're fine to disagree with me, but you can't really disprove me. I'm speaking from my experience.

That's funny that you said you were communicating with trees. I don't even want to tell you my story about my experiences with that same thing. Thank God it was a phase I went through right around the time I was losing my religious beliefs and doing my initial shifts in Enlightenment Work a couple of years ago. But I had some major mystical experiences like that around that time. I think there is a kind of mystical stage that you can go through when you're first starting to transcend the Ego.

I love this.

I'm surprised you are asking this. No, insanity is not necessary on the Path. Maybe for noobs, temporarily, who are first going through initial Ego Transcendence experiences.