Joseph Maynor

Put together a plan and a vision for improving yourself. Everything that you can change you need to commit 100% to changing.

One of the side effects of growth is you make yourself different from others around you. You have to become more and more internally grounded to cope with this.

Nice. You’ve asked the same question I feel motivated to write about in my Journal tonight. I’ll post my answer here when complete. This is something I’m surprised Leo never made a video about directly. The self-fulfilling prophesy is something you gotta be fully aware of in personal development work.

Great video. This is why drugs are really only the tip of a larger addiction iceberg. If you wanna sustainably deal with drug addiction, you gotta deal with your addiction to dopamine from all sources, especially food and comfort. Every time we feel lousy there’s some fix we can draw from. Even the internet can be a huge source of escape and fix. Think of walking into a casino — that’s a huge dopamine hit. Eating a bag of chips — same thing. Drinking an energy drink — same thing. Listening to music even.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy in effect too. When you walk into a situation thinking that something is gonna happen a certain way, you usually create that outcome. And people can pick up neurotic energy off you too. That’s why it’s best to approach other people in a very centered I don’t give a shit kind of way. And then everybody is attracted to you because you're internally grounded.

The underlying problem is you care too much about what other people are thinking or doing. You wanna be internally grounded. This is something you’ll get fixed more and more as you do Personal Development work.

To me this jumps out right away as a thought-story. Not saying I’m right or you’re wrong, just pointing out a difference in how we see things.

Do you have a habit of telling the unvarnished truth? That will do it as most people don’t want to be straightforward and unguarded. I can see right now though what your underlying problem is. You need to figure out how to stop giving two shits what other people think about you. That’s causing you a lot of suffering.

My overarching goal is to take the work I would do as a hobby if I were retired and find a way to make sustainably adequate income doing that work. This is the vision behind my whole career metamorphosis strategy that I’m implementing in my Life Purpose Work. Video on point to watch:

Why assume the words we're using are even tracking the same meanings? You are assuming that other people are and/or that they should be tracking the same concepts/ideas you do when you use certain words. The way I'm using the word "rational" is very different from the way you are. I don't accept the idea that there's one right meaning or one proper meaning for words. Words have whatever shade of meaning that is given to them by the writer. That's the power of being a writer, to insist on your own meanings for your own words in a world where everybody else wants to tell you what you think and wants to interpret your words for you. That's the arena of ideas, the marketplace of ideas, the ego of ideas. Ideas jockeying for correctness and incorrectness, value or shame. And this is ultimately why ideology is dangerous, because it puts us in the position where we wanna have the right ideas and correct everybody else's ideas. But that is ultimately unsustainable -- because at the end of the day all that really matters is the extent or degree to which your ideas are benefiting your own life. Seeking consistency of opinion is unsustainable and irrelevant, it's a distraction actually. Ditto for wanting to have the one right answer to Enlightenment. It's that seeking or wanting everything to fit into my point of view that you gotta watch out for. That's the Ego of the Conceptual Understanding, which I wrote a lot about in my Journal Vol. 7 I believe.

No alcohol No smoking Lots of fresh veggies No crap food No caffeine Have a daily schedule or a daily routine that you're living where you're oriented towards navigating towards some life purpose

What is liberation? This isn’t so simple as it sounds. What exactly is liberated and what from?

This is another area where certain Enlightenment teachings can throw people off course. It’s a paradox — reality is both rational and arational. From the perspective of Ego, reality is rational. From the perspective of God Awareness, reality is fluxing Experience that has no real force and effect. God Awareness is not bought into Experience like Ego is. Because Ego is bought into Experience and wants to advance an agenda, rationality is a position that Ego takes on reality. But because you’ve got an Ego that stays with you like the Body, rationality is always gonna be a part of Ego just like health is always gonna be a part of Body. So, you’re gonna have to accept both rationality and arationality. Just like you accept both health and ahealth. Just because the Body isn’t mine or me doesn’t mean that I wanna be dragging around a sickly Body as part of my Maya or my illusion. Ditto for Ego. Just because the Ego isn’t mine or me doesn’t mean I wanna be dragging around a foolish and unevolved Ego as part of my Maya or my illusion. The mistake a lot of Enlightenment teachers make is this idea that you can or should kill Ego and Body. But see that’s just Ego trying to kill Ego and Body. God Awareness is not affected by Ego or Body — but both Ego and Body are part of Experience. It’s like a movie. All movies are movies but some movies are more tragic than others are. So you do wanna make room to feed Ego and Body as an Enlightened being. But you just don’t wanna attach to Ego or Body as me. God Awareness doesn’t have or need a Body and doesn’t have or need an Ego. But like I said, the illusion of Ego and Body are part of Experience and follow you around. So you do want Ego and Body to be healthy, you don’t want those to be f*cked up.

No way man! I know you're moving forward. We don't reach out unless we're going through stuff. Keep walking the path.

Good for you. I’m happy you’re getting some shifts.

No smoking, no drinking, no crap food, no caffeine.

For sure. It's not as simple as I state it. But at the same time the percentages thing can be taken too far too. All these rules that we learn have to be tempered by our own self-observation. And I agree, it’s a simplification to say that you move from stage to stage. But no more of a simplification to say that one is composed of a percentage of stages. Both of those are models, and they have their strengths and weaknesses. I explain it the way to do partly for ease of communication. Otherwise it's harder to reach people because you're bringing in a layer of complexity that they can figure out on their own as they walk the path. So some of this has to do with my style of introducing information as a communicator. I like to present a clear picture at first and then make it more complex as the path is walked. Other communicators like to make the path complex at first and then nobody even gets on board. So, a leader has to guide people on the path. My style is to keep things easy until they need to get hard when it comes to dealing with models. And that approach has its strengths and weaknesses.

Compassion is the effect of knowing the true Self. And this comes from reducing ignorance. Once ignorance is seen through it can be reduced and prevented. Compassion is the prevention of suffering that is enabled by reducing your own ignorance and helping to reduce the ignorance of others. Love is really not the issue it's compassion. Love is a little too vague. You can have love for many things. But compassion is about reducing suffering caused by ignorance of illusion and otherwise. Compassion is walking up to a person and saying "I think you're making a mistake and let me tell you why I think so." So, I kind of feel live love is not quite right as the concept for Enlightenment, it's compassion that's more accurate. It's once you know the truth you can reduce your own ignorance and the ignorance of others, which is compassion to yourself and compassion to others.

You gotta get your whole life handled to where you know why you're doing the work and exactly where that work fits into the overall strategy for your life. And then maybe you just don't like the work, but that's something you'll have to determine. There might be some other work where you should do a career metamorphosis with. A lot of people are doing the wrong work. You might want to check out Leo's Life Purpose Course. It will clue you in on certain ways that you might want to shift your career. Yo, because if you don't like the work you do, it's really hard to stay focused on it. It's a systemic problem that has to be handled much deeper.

i don't buy into the whole percentages thing. For me, each stage was pretty much a solid change from one to the next. For each stage it's more like there's a beginning, middle, and end of that stage. The reason why percentages don't work is because each stage is a paradigm shift. You don't really sit between two paradigms you're either in one or another -- or moving between one paradigm and another.

Often your dreams will be connected to something you saw or witnessed during the day and hours before the dream, or your dream will bring your past back in such a way that either something is satisfied that you wish were satisfied (often incompletely), or if it's a negative dream, it's usually outlining some anxiety or fear that parallels something that you're going through in real life. What you don't realize is that you're always dreaming, not just at night.

I like these kinds of metaphors. They're very instructive. You go have different kinds of people functioning in different kinds of contexts and scenarios. Here's the best one: The quitter, the camper, and the climber. (1) The quitter is the dabbler. The person who doesn't stick with anything long enough to ever get leverage. (2) The camper is the lazy-fuck. Typically these people demonstrate some skill at something, but they top out at a level that is below their capacity. (3) The climber is the performer. This is the guy who's all in and makes it look easy.

Know exactly what quantum of work you need to be doing everyday to execute your small picture and big picture life purpose. Realize that thinking and planning for the most part do not get any actual work done towards those ends. This is a seeing. The mind likes thinking, so you gotta see that thinking is useless because the mind will make thinking feel like it’s the most important thing in the world to do in the moment when you’re engaged in thought.

You’re the single unchanging Awareness in reality. That’s the true Self.

You might go through Green quickly and hit Yellow. I went through Turquoise pretty quickly and hit Coral. It all depends on where your maturity sits. You may burn through Green within 4 or 5 months. Not saying you will though, that depends on where your maturity sits. You gotta be set up to receive Yellow to enter Yellow fast. Otherwise you’ll catch just the very beginning of Yellow.