Joseph Maynor

For me, Enlightenment is seeing through the illusion of Thought and Experience (Maya) and becoming aware of the true Self.

Self-realization has a few different stages to it. You see these stages looking back on your own Path, it's not some kind of external map of stages that some people think Enlightenment has. The external map is only meant to remind you that you went through stages yourself. Focusing inward on your Enlightenment journey should show you that you in fact went through several different stages of self-realization. They don't need to be labeled, but you went through them.

I appreciate this comment too. It's important that we have Enlightenment teachers that understand the full responsibility of being an Enlightenment teacher -- where it comes from a very pure, honest place. This is because, at the end of the day, you should be helping others the same way you yourself needed help on the Path. If you want to play the teaching game, that is.

Correct.

This is one of the things that I don’t like about Enlightenment teachers, and I think it confuses people — this whole idea that Enlightenment can be explained in Egoic terms. This is why making money off Enlightenment causes a lot of problems.

If you’ve made a stage transition you should be able to tell me. The only knowledge you can have in this work has to be grounded in your own experience. Can you tell me based off your own experience something that confirms what I said in my post? See, that gets you thinking and looking inward instead of waiting for me to deliver the answer to you. Only your answers matter in this work.

Yes. The higher you go up the spiral the more adaptive you become as a problem solver and the wiser you become.

All it can be is a tool to help your own growth. The theory can only serve the practice of your life. Everything else is a distraction if it’s tangential to you living your life better.

Seeing trumps thinking. You can see that there’s nothing behind Thought and Experience. It’s not that Thought and Experience don’t exist, it’s that there’s nothing behind the scenes with it. So, the only thing that properly exists is Awareness that understands that it exists alone — and this is called God Awareness. Thinking about non-duality as not carving up Experience is trumped by seeing that Maya a.k.a. Thought and Experience are an illusion.

Coral comes after Turquoise. I’ve written extensively about my entering Stage Coral in my Journal Vol. 8.

Good points. Personal Development is corrupted like every other industry is by Egoic distractions.

Animals are part of the illusion as is the Egoic Self. Yes, the illusion is real but there’s nothing behind the scenes. There’s only one Awareness/Consciousness in reality.

You lose credibility with the above-stated hyperbole. I live in San Francisco. People love to hate on San Francisco, but few of those people could even afford to live here. That’s the reality. San Francisco makes most other cities and places to live seem like second-tier cities at best. That’s why people hate on San Francisco. Same reason people hate on New York City and other first-tier cities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

I’m so glad I don’t have to play the game of arguing about Jordan Peterson. I wish him well. There are worse ways to make a living than he is. And if you don’t like him — it’s a simple solution: ignore him. I’m sure he probably doesn’t like you either. But he’s getting paid and we’re not, so there you have it. We don’t wanna be a bunch of whiners lost in ‘poor me’ narratives. If you wanna say something about the dude, say it once and then let go. It’s not worth going into over and over. It just causes you suffering. Ditto for talking about Trump. It’s not worth your own peace of mind to even mention Trump. You gotta start to realize that you keep these demons alive by feeding them. I never watch the news, talk about Trump etc., and because of that I honestly wish Trump well because there’s no love lost. I couldn’t care less frankly! And that detachment is what allows me to have compassion for people like that.

A long life-long love affair with this work. Like my whole life. I’ve been doing personal development since I was literally 12 years old. That’s not to brag, it’s just a fact. Most kids were picking their nose at 12 years old.

That’s it. People aren’t focused enough on sniffing out illusion and distraction from ‘reality’. That’s what observational Metaphysics addresses. Most people don’t know squat about observational Metaphysics. Most people don’t look at ‘reality’ through the eyes of a genuine truth-seeker. Instead, they just lazily go with the appearances.

If you were a tenured professor (which I assume he is/was) — why would you be motivated to become a self-help teacher? Something doesn’t add up in that. There’s some demons he’s fighting within himself. Sometimes the people who become big into self-help are the ones who have the most demons.

I agree. He is fighting his own demons.

I think Jordan Peterson turned me off from wanting to be a Personal Development teacher myself.

I think so.

When you trip make sure you center yourself in Awareness and view your thoughts more like external entities. Don't get caught up in thoughts. They're not your thoughts. It's the Ego that thinks they're 'my thoughts' that is causing the problem. You'll get to the point where you can see through the literal illusion of Thoughts. You'll still have 'negative thought-storms,' as I call them, but you'll be able to not attach to them. I've never had a bad trip on LSD personally. You'll let them be and let them go. It really helps when you can see through the Metaphysical illusion of Thought.

Who is assigning these numbers to people?

The more intelligent/wiser you are the more you suffer because the more you see the illusion for what it is. Once you see the illusion for what it is, you don’t really wanna have any part of it. That creates a certain kind of suffering because you can’t just ‘be normal’. I’ve seen through the illusion of culture my whole life — it started when I was a kid. I was always a loner off by myself as a kid. I’ve always felt like an outcast. And even when I have had friends, none of my friends were ever on my level thinking-wise. It was like me tolerating them. The best friends I ever had were people that drew me out of my shell, and where we didn’t compete with each other. People who can bring my humor out are great for me to be around. And these are usually laid back, fun loving types. Ditto for girlfriends. It’s a disaster for me to have a girlfriend where I gotta be the one drawing her out of her shell. My best girlfriend was the one I had in college who just wanted to do fun things all the time. And she didn’t really care squat about my philosophical ideas. We got along great and she was always pushing me out of my shell. And I did it too because she was always wanting to do something fun. She would drag me out of my apartment literally. She’d say, ‘we’re doing this today’ — and I’d be like ‘ok.’ And after we broke up, all I did was sit in my apartment alone, and I was totally content with that too.

If you’re not Enlightened yourself, how would you be able to assess whether someone else is Enlightened? I’m not trying to be a d*ck here by the way, this is a legitimate Epistemological issue.

Nobody has ever accused me of having overly-simplistic thinking. Could it be that you just disagree with me? Why does there have to be some kind of ‘defect’ in my thinking? Maybe the only defect in my thinking is that you don’t agree with it. We should be less quick to find a reason why someone is wrong when we disagree with them. That becomes just as dismissive in another way. A better question would have been — Joseph, can you please tell me more about why you think that way? And then I would have been able to elaborate accordingly. But there’s no desire to even inquire further when you dismiss someone’s thinking as wrong. I don’t just say things for no reason. Everything I say has a deep rationale behind it, at least on my end. And I’m also careful to mean exactly what I say when I do say something. I’m not the kind of person who just pops off at the mouth and says something without thinking deeply about it first. Everything I say comes from years and years of deep contemplation. Dig a little deeper with me when you wanna get dismissive, I think you’ll be surprised at how deeply I do think through what I say. And even if you wind up disagreeing with me, you’ll appreciate how my mind works and why I see things the way I do. You’ll see, ‘that dude has his reasons for why he said that just that particular way.’ Anyway I’m not gonna say anything more about this to avoid a pointless argument.