Joseph Maynor

Why so little detail about Coral? I could write a book on Coral alone.

What’s weird is the percentages thing never really resonated with me. I feel like I’ve made clean shifts into and out of every stage. There’s usually a beginning entry into a stage, a full flowering period, and then a period where you start to become aware you’re moving into the next stage. This whole idea of being 20% this 60% this and 20% that never comported with my actual experience. It’s more like a stair step than a percentage thing. It’s like a paradigm shift. You don’t straddle three paradigms — you move from one paradigm to the next paradigm.

Here’s the paradox. You gotta fill your cup completely before you can effectively start to empty it. That’s the necessary perfect circle of seeking. ⭕️. It’s the exhaustion of Ego that paradoxically causes Ego to burn away in a highly-conscious person. If I wasn’t so addicted to knowledge in my 20’s up until my late 30’s I would never be able to give all my books away and burn all my Philosophy freewriting at 39-40. See, people wanna do the emptying the cup part before they’ve exhausted the filling the cup part. This is like trying to be an old man when you’re still an adolescent. If you’re still clinging to books and learning — you’re not ready to empty your cup — you’re still filling your cup. A hungry man is not gonna swear off food. It’s the satiated man who says no thanks and gives his food away. Some people fill their cup with all kinds of notions of emptying their cup but never actually empty their cup, so watch out for that trap. That’s the person who gobbles up a bunch of Enlightenment theory but is not actually getting the results from it yet. For me, my cup started to empty on its own, it’s not something I forced. All of a sudden about a year ago I gave all my books away because I didn’t want to be distracted by them anymore. And then recently I realized that writing a bunch of essays was more about me emptying my cup rather than filling it. The writing was me letting go of my ideas. Before age 39 I assumed my writing was me preserving my profound insights; the writing was for clinging to my ideas not for releasing them. Stuff like that is how you know you’re on the emptying your cup leg of the circle rather than the filling your cup leg of the circle.

Such as? What are you insinuating or expecting people to say here?

Thanks for the book. I’ll read it.

Why are you scared to achieve your goals? Doesn’t that sound kinda odd to you? If you could snap your fingers and get all your goals met, would you be scared to snap your fingers?

Nobody seems to realize that both the cliff notes and the novel can both be useful. It’s not this versus that, it’s this and that. Our minds always want to say this or that when we can have this and that. Learn from everything. Be a sponge. Even the dumbest person can teach you something if you look for it.

Teal is the level after Coral. Coral is the level after Turquoise.

As to Leo, I think the nature of his job puts him in concept-land for better and for worse. It’s true that Enlightenment involves letting Thought and Experience go. If I were Leo I would go full tilt teaching Enlightenment stuff and stay away from the more topical videos. Stick to very pragmatic personal development material, that will be one way to let go of some of the heavy conceptual cathedral making — which I agree is a trap because your cup is too full all the time. Also, this stuff is not about art it’s about boots on the ground. One thing I liked about the early Leo videos is they were very boots on the ground and practical. Leo should make a two volume set of videos on advanced mindfulness work. That’s just one example of how you can make videos without getting so caught up in talk about everything topic under the sun. You can make a video on not knowing.

I don’t know what’s at Teal so good for him if he’s getting hits of Teal. He always was a hard worker like myself. I remember he used to post his notes on personal development on the Forum. People who work hard improve in Personal Development just like everything else. There’s a difference between Michael Jordan and the 13 year old kid playing hoops in his driveway although they’re both playing basketball. If he reads this, I say congrats man! Check out my extensive writings on Stage Coral in my Journal Vol. 8.

You sound so convinced you’re right.

Even though the circle leads back to the original starting point, that doesn’t mean the journey around the circle was useless. It’s a bit of a paradox. You gotta chase Ego to only find that Ego is an illusion and that you’re been watching yourself chase all along. The only way that you can discover no Ego is to thoroughly burn through Ego. So you don’t really want to pooh pooh Ego in this work. You don’t reject Ego, you see through it. And you only keenly see through Ego when you have a history of you being entangled in Ego to draw from. And Ego is not just for people other than you. Even people that are very ‘advanced’ on the path don’t fully understand Ego including myself (until very recently) — so I don’t exclude myself from this. But I can tell you this, I understand Ego a hell of a lot better today after watching myself run that circle. That’s the value and necessity of chasing — you learn. If you have high love of truth, you’ll learn from chasing. If your love of truth is not high enough, you’ll create a ‘Spiritual Ego’ for yourself. And maybe someday you’ll see through that but maybe you don’t too — everybody’s on their own unique Path. It’s like Emerald said in one of her videos, you don’t force a plant to grow by pulling on it. ⭕️

You gotta realize that Leo is talking to himself too in his videos. So maybe kicking us in the ass is a way for him to kick himself in the ass. I do that with my writing too. Everything that I write about is for me on some level. I can tell after watching all Leo's videos three times over that Leo, at least in his earlier videos, was primarily talking to himself. I can tell in the more recent videos that he's helping noobs more and isn't really talking about his own personal development as much as he used to. The newer videos don't seem to be tracking his own growth like the earlier videos did. I get the feeling that Leo thinks he's got it now and has basically assumed a teacher role for other people. The earlier videos were much more about his own growth. Even the psychedelics videos were like that. I miss that urgency that he had when his videos were tracking his own growth and when he was passionate about growing faster than everybody else. That is missing since the "Going Buddha" video. I think one of the things that made Leo inspiring to me is when he would sort of blog about his own personal development in his videos rather than play a teacher role. Yeah, he was playing a teacher role too, but you got the sense that he was bringing you along primarily on his own journey through this stuff. When I watch the earlier videos I see a guy passionate about growing and pursuing his own personal development. The newer videos seem to be for somebody other than me and don't really seem to be about him anymore either. In fact, I don't know much about Leo's personal development anymore because he doesn't talk much about it. I catch glimpses of it in his Forum posts which I try to comment on directly in the posts or indirectly in my Journal. I kind of get the feeling that the focus on Leo's personal development stopped and now all the videos are about something other than Leo's personal development. I miss hearing about Leo's personal development. I miss the guy who was passionate about his own growth and would love to share that in his videos. But you gotta keep in mind that I've been watching Leo's videos since mid-2014, and I've grown right alongside him. Watching Leo grow inspired me to grow myself. I want to make sure I never stop talking about my own personal development in my writing. The day I stop doing that, I'm gonna stop writing. Writing only makes sense when I'm teaching myself first and foremost. If I'm not talking about my own personal development and have shifted to primarily helping others, that's a red flag that I've gone from being a climber to a camper in this work. And personal development is not for people who want to set up camp. Personal development is for people who are constantly and passionately working on their own growth and working on their own lives.

Wait until the day you realize this stuff is dead serious and has nothing to do with play. Truth has nothing to do with play. Ditto for reality. Play is a distraction to Truth-seeking. A lot of people are using this stuff for Entertainment and for other purposes other than Truth-seeking.

To take that kind of stance you better be doing Michael Jordan level work yourself. Otherwise it's just talk. I could make a video pretending to be some kind of hard ass if I wanted to. To call other people out you need to be doing that from a place of obvious superiority. Leo had better be working harder than I do on this stuff.

This assumes Leo is as wise as the Buddha. It's really convenient to cover up for inconsistencies in your teaching to put the burden back on the student. Unless you really are as wise as the Buddha, of course. But I actually disagree with a number of things that Leo has said about Enlightenment, and I've actually written about most of them in my Journals. This idea that Leo can make inconsistency a problem that falls exclusively on the shoulders of his students is passing the buck. After all, it's hard to be consistent. To be consistent at something, you have to know what you're talking about forwards, backwards, sideways, and cross-ways. I recall studying Engineering at UCLA and I went to the professor to complain that a lot of his questions and answers in his book (the sh*tty little book he wrote) had errors in them. He told me my job is to find all the errors. How am I supposed to find errors in complex mathematical questions? I can see finding errors in the answers, fine. I felt like it was wrong for him to shift the burden like that on me, the student. All I needed was for his damn questions to be clear, and then let me figure out the answers. It wasn't my burden to fix his book -- he should fix his book. But see he turned that around on me. It became my problem not his problem.

The only Truth is God Awareness. Thought and Experience are fluxing Maya. But even with Thought and Experience we can separate what's actually there versus what the Mind takes to be there. God is not Thought and Experience. Leo seems to think that actual Experience without the illusion is God. I don't think that myself. God is not Experience. God is Awareness knowing fully what it is, including knowing that it is not Maya. God Awareness forgetting who He is and getting lost in Maya is Ego.

To me they're the same. What it means is that you're just being the atmosphere not the clouds and observing things happen. It's you resting as Awareness. You're just observing but not neurotically. You're non-neurotically being Awareness. And the reason why this is such an important practice is because that's what Enlightenment is. Enlightenment is non-neurotically being Awareness. Now, that's a bit of a gloss for someone not that far along the Path. Enlightenment isn't exactly like Do Nothing Meditation, but you'll see the similarities for yourself at some point. Don't cling to not controlling either that's a trap. Do Nothing meditation is a resting as Awareness not an opportunity for the Ego to try to do anything. You just watch Thought and Experience. Don't try to do and don't try not to do, if that makes sense. Trying to "do nothing" is Egoic and defeats the purpose of Do Nothing Meditation.

"The" moon? Whose moon? Your moon?

This is kind of a contemplation exercise where I am genuinely interested in your take. We have a Mind acting deceptively as a premise. What is this Mind? Who is this "you" that the Mind is deceiving and distracting?

This reminds me of this interview with Warren Buffet that I watched where he said in the right context he could easily be bear food nevermind his extraordinary skill in investing.

The great Philosopher David Hume famously complained that his new book "'The Treatise of Human Nature' fell stillborn from the press." Nobody wanted it. But it turned out to be one of the most influential books ever published. Most of the books that sell well nobody knows about in 100 years. It's just a bunch of rubbish. A big pile of steaming nothing. By the way, Hume wrote 'A Treatise of Human Nature' when he was 28 years old! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_of_Human_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

I think you can sell something genuine, but you're not gonna do it neurotically. The problem is need for money introduces a new variable in that. Let's say for example, I wanted to sell my personal development book. Ok, well it would make a difference if I were doing that as a side-hobby or doing that to put food on my table. If I were doing it as a side-hobby maybe I would be ok selling 20 copies or none at all. If I were trying to put food on my table with my book, maybe I would need to sell 2000 copies. If I write a book, I'll sell it, but at the same time I won't give a shit if people don't buy it too. The value to me has already been exhausted which was was in writing the book itself.

I don't think so. Paradoxically, it's easier to become Enlightened with a strong sense of self and your own values and who you are. Otherwise you're just not gonna do the work required. If you're a sheep, paradoxically you're gonna stay in Ego. It's people who transcend a strong sense of self that become Enlightened. And that's because Enlightenment requires a lot of balls and a lot of not caring what others think, and it also requires following the Truth wherever it leads, even if it leads you off a cliff.

And also please explain how you're using the ambiguous terms 'Relative' and 'Absolute'. Where is this word 'must' coming from -- in the sense of "'must' be one"? That sounds like covertly buying into what we might call a logical conclusion or logical necessity.