Joseph Maynor

The Dharma Bums (1958) by Jack Kerouac

This is kind of a slippery slope because we can say lying to kids that Santa Claus exists is not right, but this kind of lying is seen to be innocent.

These are people that I like to say are good introducers to newbs and also respected by advanced people. It's like Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Is it the best Jazz album? IMO no. But what it does is fascinate newbs to the genre and also elicit a respect by people who have deeper knowledge too.

Realize what a negative person does to slow everyone down to conform to their own comfort-zone. Listen to them, but don't let that energy cripple you too much. For some reason, other peoples' success bothers these people because they need to feel like they're winning with what they got, always.

Begin a timebound challenge. You can pick the time-frame. Maybe 30 days for you. Plan this a kind of deep work exercise and commit to it. Try to get motivated to do this. See it as kind of a little chapter or challenge in your life that you can get inspired to get behind. You're not that far behind, but you need to motivate yourself to meet a goal.

How about spirituality addiction? If we want to broach the issue of addiction, let's get real and do it all the way.

Nothing like experience when it comes to creating a great artwork in an artform. This is a great video that exemplifies what mastery looks like and explaining it very well in a particular area of creation.

I'll push back on one assumption here. Is all conceptual story-telling human created?

He has obviously had a huge impact on many of you, so that speaks for itself. I worry if he has too much of an empiricist approach. Reminds me of my same worry with Zen, although this can be good on the path too.

I think the way to frame this is to what extent can my contribution benefit the whole?

People want to project outward and stay invisible instead of manning up and taking full responsibility for their life, this is to be expected.

But I notice people were recommending him as I recall. Now we get a reversal.

I would read it but take it with a grain of salt. He's in the business of selling books.

I should be more forgiving of people who have a marketing-based business model.

Really?

I think his best book is "The Laws of Human Nature" which I read. I think he's overly cynical about human nature though which can taint as much as it can enlighten.

I think is what the Zen awakening gets at. You realize you don't need to cling to theory to be spiritual. But even this in my view is a reaction not a final resting place. It's basically the ability to pick thought up and put it down without that affecting Truth. You can realize you're creating thought.

But politics is inherently oppositional, so we need to make sure we're not imposing a pipe dream on a system that doesn't work that way like politics. It's trying to bury conflict in favor of order. Good luck.

The Feminine tends to look side to side whereas the Masculine tends to look front to back. This is just an insight.

Yes it is.

He gives a lot of advice which is about leveraging power, so I'm interested to see if he can transcend that to a degree. I'm not a huge fan of Robert Greene.

Is Omniscience a goal or a state? Both of these it seems cannot be true at the same time.

Correct.

Okay. I take you at your word. I'm just pointing out if we want to find a defect out in the world we will, and that will only distract us from focusing on ourselves. And that's what we might want -- which is unhealthy long term as well, because we get to laugh and scoff at something as a distraction to doing our own work.