Joseph Maynor

You seem to be getting a lot out of it right now. That's good.

You might suffer from low self-esteem issues. You're like a crab that pulls yourself back down into the bucket. You know Leo's crabs in the bucket story? This is where when a crab tries to escape the bucket the other crabs in the bucket pull him back down. You seem to do that to yourself. You do these cycles where you build yourself up to a certain point, and then the crab pulls you back down into the bucket and you kinda self-destruct and then you kinda rinse and repeat in this cycle. It's like an oscillating cycle for you. You gotta find out what that crab is for you that keeps pulling you back down. And the reason I say this is because I've seen this pattern with you over and over again.

For me it was like a transformation that naturally happened to me. I never set out to get out of theory. It just happened. Once I realized what Enlightenment is, it happened. Because the theory is only a guide to becoming Enlightened. Living the theory is not what being Enlightened is.

The main problem is defining ourselves with linear statements which get turned into beliefs. Whatever language can tell us is one thing and whatever I am is another thing. It really comes down to an apples and oranges kind of thing. We have all these meanings that we think define me. Really? It's an unintended consequence of language. On the one hand we have useful knowledge (the pro of language), but on the other hand we try to define ourselves with our language (the con of language). The error is in defining ourselves with factual intention in language and then being programmed with beliefs that follow from that practice.

It works but it's very advanced personal development work. It's basically re-programming work. Once you understand the contexts in which it's reasonable to re-frame things, positive thinking follows from that. One of these, and this is not the only one, is there are pros and cons to everything. So at a minimum you can find the pros in any circumstance.

If you think about it, this is a personal development book. This book is very similar to Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Each of those bullets that Branden talks about is just a topic of Personal Development. The first one is "Be Conscious" or something like that. Well that's just your Enlightenment Work, right. That's your mindfulness work. And there's one on Self-Acceptance. That's a huge issue in and of itself. I think I did all the sentence completion exercises for the Self-Acceptance pillar. That was a major phase in my early personal development work.

Now you know how to rest as Awareness.

This is the danger of theory.

There are pros and cons to everything.

I would say about 4 years now I've been meditating and practicing mindfulness. But I was always a very mindful person even before I learned about Enlightenment. I was always very hyper-vigilant. I was always all eyes, I could see everything that was going on all around me. I was also meditating a lot before I even knew what meditation was. Sometimes I'd just sit there on the couch and "zone out" in meditation without knowing it's meditation.

My whole life. My own practices. I don't follow anybody. I have my own system actually. I don't like the word "teaching", it's pretentious. I have a system that I created to do personal development work and to teach personal development.

I think generally speaking yes. I feel like I'm always in a high state of awareness. If I get triggered by something I might get sucked into Ego temporarily. But the bulk of my time is keen awareness.

Check out my Journal Volume 10 for a my Daily Routine/ Schedule system. I laid it all out as I developed it. It's in the Personal Development Journals section of the Forum. This is not a project that you can get an answer for in a short paragraph. In fact one day I will develop a course on my Daily Routine/ Scheduling system because it does have some conceptual and logistical complexity to it.

Wow. This is a great question. This past year I've been working on a Daily Routine/ Schedule system that sustainably solves this problem for me. It's all about getting a daily routine set up and having a system to account for the things that have to be done.

Do the sentence completion exercises.

There are pros and cons to everything. The pros are you're being a sponge and learning and assimilating and growing. The cons are you start to think you're working when all you're doing is watching a bunch of videos. What you wanna do is maximize the pros and minimize the cons of watching the videos. Go ahead and write out a list of pros and cons of watching the videos. This would be a really useful quick exercise for you to do. You might surprise yourself with what you write down.

This is another example of the "exclusive or" tendency. Why can't you help yourself and help others simultaneously? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or

Why is it that thought either has to have value or no value. That's the "exclusive or" thing occurring there. Why can't thought both have value and have no value depending on context? If I told you I would give you a million dollars if you correctly give me the answer to 2+2, are you really gonna see the concept 4 in that context as valueless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_or

Aha! Now we’ve got a perspective you’ve never been exposed to before. It’s like a voice from the wilderness. A strange, new notion. How could it be?

Balancing Ego and No Ego well. Too much Ego is a trap, too much No Ego is a trap.

Enlightenment is a very tricky thing but a real thing. I’ve confirmed that in my own life. And there are different phases of the Path too. Some of those phases can be shocking reversals of prior phases. This is why you don’t really want to cling too much to beliefs about Enlightenment because you might prevent your own growth on the Path. Let Enlightenment do you and just see how that works without worrying too much about theory. This is almost impossible to do early and even during the middle part of the Path because one needs to cling to theory before they can let it go. You don’t break up with your girlfriend until after she’s been your girlfriend. You have to go through the whole process. Theory is part of the Path. I can see people who are at that part of the Path now. This is what I call the Spiritual Ego phase of the Path. This is the kid who suddenly becomes the Punk rocker in school. He was a nerd last year and this year he looks like the stereotypical punk rocker. He’s gotta go fully in that identity. Ditto for the hippy. Ditto for the preppy and the jock and all those identities. The pendulum has to swing into the identity stage and then it swings out later. Enlightenment is no different. People try so hard to be Enlightened, to appear Enlightened, to convince themselves that they are Enlightened. But what is Enlightenment really in your life after all that garb has been removed? Who is that kid underneath all that punk rock clothing? It’s the same nerdy scared little kid as before now seeking for a different identity. People do this with Enlightenment too. Now I get to be the Enlightened One — the Spiritual Ego. Now I have an identity. I got the Mohawk and the leather jacket with all the pins on it and Doc Martins and the wallet chain and the safety pin through my nose. Now I have an ideology too, a new lingo, and a new set of friends who are all doing the same thing I’m doing.

I think it's good that you have a sense of what you believe and you also seem to value truth enough to want to protect that even in the face of people trying to sell you on other beliefs. Keep doing the work. You can't really be Enlightened without a deep love of Truth, at least in the early to middle stages of the Path. Eventually even Truth is transcended on the Path. But you have to cling to Truth before you can let it go.