Joseph Maynor

Exactly. I think along similar lines.

This is true, but the problem is if you don't have the keen Awareness to fully see Ego, how can you avoid it? It takes quite a bit of work to get to the point where you fully know what Ego is. Sure, from the Perspective of Enlightened Stage Coral, your sentiment rings true without any further explanation needed. The statement you made is like Michael Jordan telling everybody that playing basketball is super easy.

Make sure the rest of your life is solidly handled and then you can go to work very mindfully. You can be mindful that you're playing a game. Make sure you're meditating every day for 1 hour in the morning. That's the most important habit you can have next to getting 8-9 hours of sleep per night. Don't be against work -- we all need to work. But don't attach too much to it either. Look at work as a vehicle for you bringing home food like a smart lion brings home food to his pride. A smart lion or lioness doesn't bring home a huge surplus of food. No, they bring home exactly what's needed by the pride of lions, no more no less. So, don't get too attached to career. Career is something that you must do in order to survive, but it's not something you should be too focused on. Money can't solve all your problems. And in fact, the few problems that money can solve are dwarfed by the many problems that having money causes! Most things you spend money on are not needed by you and are actually harming you. The things you need you have when you have no money. There's a small subset of things that money can genuinely help you with such as: buying a clean wardrobe, buying organic food, having a nice place to live, making sure your body is nice and clean, making sure you get to the doctor or the dentist, making sure you have a little nest egg saved away. But after this, chasing money is a poor use of your time. The best use of your time is to do nothing at all -- to just maintain God Awareness.

They have fewer cultural distractions that the rest of us do. Therefore, if they're smart they have less of a minefield to cross than we do. But my view is it's best to achieve high-culture and then renounce it. You need both horns of that paradox to become the most Spiritually advanced. The problem with low-culture people is they don't know what they don't got, and that can lead to a lot of very sophomoric traps. The electrician doesn't appreciate the breadth and depth of Electromagnetic Theory like the Electrical Engineer does. You can't skip Conceptual Understanding Work in Enlightenment Work.

Jordan Peterson shows that it's not just chasing money that leads to unhappiness, it's also chasing teaching/changing the world that does as well. Neurotically trying to change the world through a single perspective. Think about it -- how's that any less neurotic than trying to amass great wealth through a single perspective? In a way it's kinda the same thing. It's you trying to control Experience. See, the thought never crosses people's minds, what if I transcend Experience instead of trying to change it? And suffering is caused by entanglement in Experience and also by entanglement in Thought. The day you realize Liberation is you sitting around with nothing to do will be a major insight. Happiness, interestingly enough, is doing nothing. I totally understand now why people become Buddhist monks. Just having a job puts you asshole-to-bellybutton with trying to control Experience. The happiest you're ever gonna be is when you're maintaining God Awareness and looking down on and through Experience and Thought as illusory Maya. But oh no we can't do that because we need to be 'successful' right? Well, that's a Thought you're clinging to for sure. What's it gonna matter on your deathbed? You can't take anything with you. See, the only thing that's of true value is happiness right now. So, under the right circumstances and training, it's the person who does nothing in life that ends up the happiest in life.

Science is not a waste of time. Learn everything. That’s how you get into the Tier-Two Stages of Spiral Dynamics: Science, Art, Spirituality, Philosophy, Systems Thinking, Technology, etc. That’s what gets you into Stage Yellow and Stage Turquoise. Stages Turquoise and Coral (more so Coral than Turquoise) are only possible when you have a huge knowledge background that can then be transcended. But you can’t transcend what you ain’t got see. This is why a lot of people never make it to Stage Yellow — they aren’t intellectual enough. You gotta be Yellow first before you can be Turquoise and Coral. You can’t go from Green to Coral, although a lot of people probably fantasize about that. That’s because Coral understands exactly what they’re transcending and why. You gotta go through Yellow which is the systemic thinker and then Turquoise which is the synergistic collaborator first. Both Yellow and Turquoise are very advanced stages for Conceptual Understanding Work. Coral doesn’t lose that background, it just sees Thought differently than the other stages do. Coral begins to see the distraction aspect of Thought very keenly. But Coral can’t be Coral without going through all the lower stages first. You gotta be super Yellow and then super Turquoise before Coral even emerges in your consciousness.

All the ways of conceptualizing Enlightenment are like getting 100 cab drivers to write an essay on how to drive a car. Now, you’re given those 100 essays. What do you make of them? Do you get lost in them? Do you take notes on them? Do you form a religion out of them? What use to you are those 100 essays when you sit down to actually drive a car yourself?

I didn’t like it before but I find it useful now. I’ve had some growth between then and now. I don’t have to use it, it just fits very well. Stage Coral is where true Spirituality emerges so the religious language fits very well from a utilitarian standpoint. It’s almost impossible for me to not use religious words now. A lot of my earlier Stage Turquoise values, beliefs, and terminology has radically changed recently since I’ve been moving into Stage Coral. I’m not the same person as I was before, for better or for worse.

Technically the only thing that exists is God Awareness. Relative existence is an illusion. You have God Awareness that exists and then the Maya of Experience and Thought which are both totally empty and illusory. The Metaphysics is very simple. But you have to get to the place where the Metaphysics becomes simple. When the Metaphysics is complex, that's you clinging to Thought. But see, Thought is all occurring within Consciousness. Thought is basically a sensation that we get mesmerized with kind of like a bird seeing another bird in one of those tiny mirrors placed in bird cages not realizing that it's looking at itself. Every Thought and Experience is basically just a sensation inside your Consciousness that your Awareness is potentially distracted by. And the downside of that is you lose sense of who you are. You still have Awareness, but you forget that everything is inside your own Consciousness without anything behind it -- which is why you don't have God Awareness. The Mind fills in the gaps and takes the Maya to be what's real 'out there' and the Awareness to be something trivial that exists 'in here'. It's entirely like getting lost in a movie. There's nothing behind the movie, yet it feels so real when we lose ourselves in one. Once your Mindfulness goes to a 10, you'll stop filling in all those gap and reality will look very different to you from that point forward. You'll realize that the only thing that exists is Consciousness a.k.a. God Awareness which is being constantly distracted by a bunch of lifeless zombie sensations (i.e. Thought and Experience). When you can look at those sensations and see exactly what's there, Metaphysics becomes very simple. The problem is that everything you care about in your life will die too. It will be revealed to be an illusion. Just like this -- imagine you're lost in a movie and the power suddenly goes out. That's what it feels like. What's left is you sitting there all alone just realizing that you're the Awareness sitting there staring at a blank two-dimensional screen. All your cherished Thoughts and all your cherished Experiences just died on the vine. Actually they were never there to begin with. That will cause your second great Dark Night of the Soul if you're anything like me. My first Dark Night of the Soul was when I first discovered that I wasn't the Egoic self early on in my Enlightenment Work.

Here’s a good sign that you’ve gone up a stage: All your old beliefs and values shift to new beliefs and values.

Low consciousness: Clinging to Thinking Clinging to Experience High consciousness: Maintaining God Awareness

It depends on how fast you grow. If you’re growing fast, you’ll switch stages much quicker than someone who isn’t growing or who is on a plateau.

BEST

I think we need to watch our addiction to the videos, myself included.

Turquoise doesn't realize that it's still very distracted by being enmeshed in Maya; namely, enmeshed in Thought and Experience. This is what Coral sees and moves beyond.

This is something to keep looking into. Notice what is actually there vs. what you wanna believe is there. You'll see that a lot of what you believe has to do with a filling in the gaps above and beyond what the actual reality presents itself as. You have to develop a keen mindfulness that spots all bullshit. Once you do that Thought and Experience will fall apart. What you're left with is that which never changes; namely, Awareness. You'll start to see that there's nothing behind Thought and Experience -- they're just sensations basically. They're jibber-jabber that we take way too seriously. Instead of focusing inward at what we are as Awareness, we're distracted outward at this jibber-jabber like a baby being drawn in and mesmerized by one of those baby crib mobiles.

Leo deserves a lot of thanks. From me as well. I wouldn't have achieved what I have without being so influenced by Leo. It's like on artist being influenced by another. I would not even know about Enlightenment had it not been for Leo. I don't think I ever would have stumbled on Enlightenment on my own. Maybe I would have, I don't know. Who's to know. I don't think so though. I was too into Western Philosophy and trying to solve problems in that milieu.

VIRTUALLY NO ONE WANTS TRUE ENLIGHTENMENT BECAUSE IT MEANS THE LITERAL DEATH OF A EVERYTHING EXCEPT GOD AWARENESS Enlightenment in its true form is virtually unsellable. Nobody wants to hear that they’re all alone as Awareness of Maya. That’s why I’ve discovered this paradox: Nobody wants to hear about true Enlightenment and nobody wants to teach it either. In order to make Enlightenment sellable you gotta fudge this truth to make Enlightenment more palatable to Egos.

Teaching is unconducive to growth ironically. That’s the price the bodhisattva pays. It’s hard to surrender Thought when you’re pounding it in so hard all the time trying to teach people and be consistent in your ‘teachings’. Your ‘ritual of terms’ as a teacher is like an anchor keeping you pinned in Maya. To God, all Thoughts sound like insignificant bird chirps in the forest. Drowning in Thought is one form of drowning in illusion a.k.a. Maya. Drowning in Experience is the other horn of Maya. To God, all Experience looks like a bad movie.

What does ‘shady’ even mean? What a slippery word that is. Maybe ‘shady’ just means ‘I don’t like it and not I now need to pin a word to it to make it sound somewhat objective’. My meal is shady. My bank account is shady. My life is shady. My face is shady!

Not true. Reading factors into Enlightenment. Your whole life experience factors into Enlightenment.

To me it was. I never had a chance to ask if it was worth it. I had a passion for it. I had no choice.

Having a good teacher that can get through to you is probably more effective than any psychedelic could be. But then that’s tricky too because your teacher has to know how to help you through your particular blocks. A lot of the time teachers are only sorta obliquely resonating with you. That’s because they’re speaking to you from their perspective. What you need is a teacher that groks your perspective. That can be hard especially if you’re a stubborn person like me. I had to figure Enlightenment out for myself by about 3 years of hard work. Sure I listened to YouTube videos, but I took most of them with a grain of salt. And then the final shift happened to me without any psychedelic catalyst at all. Enlightenment is very different than any description of Enlightenment, that’s what’s tricky about it. What psychedelics do is they increase mindfulness in a person who is properly trained on what to do with them. But I’m a little leery of the claim that any psychedelic is a ‘magic pill’ for Enlightenment. That ain’t true. Enlightenment took me over 3 years of almost constant work. Enlightenment is the realization that your life is 100% inside-out. What you think is alive is dead and what you think is dead is alive. That takes a long time to settle in — and the shift is not something you can force. It happens on you. It comes to you, you don’t come to it. But if you don’t do the work, probably it will never come to you. So, psychedelics are a tool in the toolbelt for Enlightenment work, but not a guarantee of any quick fix.