Joseph Maynor

Thanks for writing this. It’s nice to get a peek inside someone else’s experience with Enlightenment. Yes, Enlightenment concerns the Non-Dual. But the most advanced stage of Enlightenment is when you can let the Dream be the Dream and sort of go back into the illusion, just not Egoically doing so. It’s an embrace without an embrace, so to speak. You step back into the illusion without clinging to it. You lose your fear of the illusion. When you’re in what I call the “la la land stage of Enlightenment”, you’re still kinda weary of the illusion. You’re hands-off, right? You don’t wanna have any part of it because you fear the illusion of Ego. However, at the advanced stage, you re-join the illusion, sort of. But you’re a different person in doing so.

Think about this. How much pain are you in for if you don’t work on personal development? You can see that pain on the faces and bodies of people all around you.

A new chapter begins! Embrace it. Think of the new possibilities.

Einstein had a hand in both relativity and quantum mechanics, which is pretty impressive in itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://m.phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html

Before Enlightenment: carry water chop wood. After Enlightenment: carry water, chop wood. I don't know if this resonates with the rest of you, but I kinda feel like Enlightenment is a full circle. When you're too much in la la land that is a sign that you don't quite got it. You're still in the mind about it. The la la land part should go away after a while. You should come back into the dream, but now your whole perspective on the dream is totally different. But it's not like you're stunned like you are when you're still trying to figure things out. I think it's normal to go through that stunned stage for a good long while -- maybe a year or more. That's the awakening phase. For me it was a little over a year.

You need to come up with a daily schedule. Start with the routines you already have, don't try to revamp everything at once. Start by making a list of things you wanna accomplish every day. Write this list down and cross off the items as you do them. Everything needs to get crossed off by the time you go to sleep. Put meditation as one of those items. Try to get stuff into a routine so it can become kinda automatic for you over time.

I've done it before when I've gone on vacation for 2 weeks. I've deliberately left my music at home. What happens is I'll start to hear songs in my head. I'll develop a radio in my head. There will be like one or two songs that will just get burned in my head and I'll play them over and over. And it will be like the most random song. Some pop song from the 80's haha. I think one of them was "We Don't Need Another Hero" by Tina Turner. I was sick of that song by the end of the trip haha.

Sounds like you could use a little bit of a daily routine. That way you can fit all your needs into your day without feeling like you’re depriving yourself. That will allow you to open up a space for your job where all you have to do is focus on that job during that time. Make time for all your other needs by fashioning a morning and evening routine that includes them. This will give your life balance. Otherwise you’re gonna feel resentful at work thinking you’re depriving yourself of what you really want to be doing.

I agree. And that's been very noticeable to people I've been around. They are all very happy with my more calm and grounded personality. But after studying philosophy for many years, I found out a long time ago that some topics are reserved for dinner conversation and some are not. It depends entirely on your company. People can get very judgmental when you start talking about ideas that conflict with their own. Even if your intent is benign in mentioning the ideas. I find that discussing the enlightenment ideas is extremely puzzling to people. I tried a couple of times.

I don't even attempt to haha. I reserve all my discussion for you all. It's hard to explain non-duality cold to someone who doesn't have any experience with these ideas at all. Yeah -- let's have a light conversation about the Absolute over lunch! Maybe we'll talk about the fact that there are no objective moral truths over coffee! Let's discuss both your immortality and the fact that you don't exist over drinks after work!

I was thinking about this today interestingly. I was wondering about the likelihood of a non-dual perspective on reality ever becoming the norm. Or is it doomed to be a kind of fringe thing? If so, the resistance is gonna be formidable to teach Enlightenment to the masses. It's just not ever gonna sell that widely. I'm not saying I endorse any of these views. These are just some thoughts that came to mind for further exploration.

Are we afraid of death itself or of dying? Or is it non-existence that we're afraid of? Is it the loss of our values that we fear? I'm not sure that we do fear death because it isn't clear to me what that means. Are we afraid of not being conscious anymore? Are we afraid of sleeping indefinitely? Are we afraid of some kind of result that will happen to our soul after death? My hunch on the matter is that we fear dying more than death. We fear the interval between knowing we're dying and death. And that's because our life loses meaning and becomes absurd. We fear an absurd life. And that's totally understandable, right? Everything we do is under the assumption that we're gonna continue to live. All of our values are life-sustaining values. Death is a huge threat to that outlook on life. When we're dying, all that goes down the toilet. On your death-bed all your values are meaningless. Your fame, money, legacy -- none of that matters when you're going through the death process. None of that is gonna save you from death! The fact that there is nothing that can save you from death is a freaky notion in itself. I'm assuming the default-position of the Ego Paradigm here.

What does Yoga claim? What criterion are we using to judge credibility? Is credibility even relevant? Exactly what factors are relevant in assessing Yoga? What is Yoga trying to do? Is there even one Yoga? If not, what Yoga are we talking about?

Definitely not Communism, I can tell you that.

I think what we fear is the space between finding out we are dying up to death — like if you got a terminal diagnosis for example. This is because all your values must dissolve. You can’t value life anymore because yours is coming to an end. I think what we fear with death is the loss of our values. When you’re dying you can’t value anything because you can’t take anything with you! It makes your entire existence absurd. Another way you can say it is — death isn’t scary, dying is. It’s you knowing you’re dying and gonna be gone soon that’s scary. Of course I’m speaking from the perspective of the Ego Paradigm here, which is the perspective on reality most people are coming from.

Have a good routine that you execute daily. Very little drug or alcohol use, if any. No News, no Infotainment. Watch the Internet and Phone use. Stay offline except during specified times. Make a goal list. Keep a task list that gets updated everyday. Keep your daily routine list, goal list, and task list in a separate manila folder from all your other papers. Start to keep a personal development journal on here. Do some exercise in the am. Do sets of pushups and situps during your day. Give yourself a nice morning routine. Jump on projects right away, don't give procrastination a chance to set in. Try to fall in love with the process when you do projects. If you can fall in love with the process, your projects will complete themselves. Keep a clean diet. Get plenty of sleep. Don't shortchange your sleep, that's gotta be solid. If your energy is screwed up, your performance is gonna suck during the day and you’ll feel like crap too. You wanna avoid that trap by prioritizing your sleep.

Each map has its own domain of applicability and utility. Also, there are better and worse maps. But that's for each individual to find out for his or herself. You can't avoid the seeking aspect of this work. There is no sense in which an answer can be provided in advance to resolve this problem. You just gotta jump into the Philosophy pool, and there is no shallow-end. You just plop yourself in and fake it until you start to make it. Otherwise you're gonna be full of second-hand platitudes about theory, which is a cheap way to look at theory. The only way you're gonna find out about theory is to dive into them yourself and tinker with them. You can't hand-wave Philosophy away so easily.

You’ve set yourself up in a False-Choice Fallacy situation. There’s a third option called Enlightenment. Be careful with this either-or way of thinking. Sometimes it works, but in this case it doesn’t. You’re gonna set yourself up in a trap.

Yep. Doubt all your beliefs about what you think is true and how you think you should live. You’re running a lot of scripts that have been programmed in you by learning. Now that you’ve reached the age of reason, you can open the hood of your mind and see what’s in there. You’re lucky to be able to see that you can do this. A lot of people never even notice they can do this! They’re too trapped in culture. They think culture is reality. You can peel culture off of reality.

When you have no more neuroses. You’re at peace regardless of what happens. You don’t let life affect you deeply or in some personal way. You are one with life — flowing with the waves — rather than trying to be a pillar in the midst of waves occurring all around you. And when you let go like this, you can open yourself up to becoming more authentic in your life. Your life will sort of automatically adjust to what is best for you. What you think is best for you is not what’s best for you. So you gotta trust in that process of letting go and seeing how your life settles in automatically. That’s a process that letting go of Ego causes to happen. It’s a fascinating change in perspective on life. You’re gonna find the deepest authenticity you can discover in life — plus constant peace with life. You’re not gonna be fighting anymore. You’ll watch your own death when it happens like a dispassionate scientist observing the leg of a flea under a microscope.

A Zen Devil is typically someone who is generally a narcissistic jerk who finds justification of their behavior through the lens of Enlightenment Theory. It’s like a narcissistic, shark-like businessman wearing the clothes of the corporate culture in order to say he’s acting reasonably, normally, and even honorably. The sociopathic guru is a great example of the Zen Devil. The guy you can tell is hiding behind spirituality — he’s clothing himself in the robes of spirituality — but he’s not really a nice person or a good person. He’s a jerk in priestly clothing. He’s using spirituality to conceal his true personality and motives. And if you pay attention, you can see the cracks yourself. Exposure long enough to them with a keen eye can reveal lots of little contradictions. They are acting a role — like a wolf in sheep’s clothing going to sit with the hens in the henhouse.

Enlightenment is not about experiencing stronger positive emotions. Enlightenment is about accepting reality no matter what form it takes. When you become Enlightened you’re not going to be worried about manipulating emotions so much. You’re gonna be at peace with whatever reality projects on the screen. Don’t focus so much on chasing positive emotions, that’s Egoic. Just focus on resting as Awareness. Stop identifying with the changing Dream. You are the unchanging Awareness of the changing Dream. It’s your identification with Ego that is your deeper problem. Chasing positive emotions is like trying to self medicate with drugs. You’re gonna set yourself up to do some nasty tail-chasing. And you’re never gonna succeed because you can’t control reality. Control is an Egoic illusion. Acceptance and detachment is what you want. Those negative emotions are not ‘yours’. See? Your problem is deeper than you think. It’s a belief problem not a psychological problem.

I think we are using the word 'truth' in vague and ambiguous ways in this discussion. It's hard to argue about this if the thesis at issue is not put in a clearer way. There needs to be more guidance about your theory in terms of what you are trying to say. Otherwise you're just gonna get shots in the dark. Maybe you don't know what you're saying, and we don't know what to respond to. This is how certain philosophical debates go down in flames. This is one reason why people think Philosophy is useless. It's not that Philosophy is useless! The parameters of the debate and the points at issue are not identified clearly at the outset. This is the garbage-in/ garbage-out principle, not something endemic to Philosophy per se. Imagine trying to debate Quantum Mechanics without knowing what statements we are arguing about? It would be a mess. It would be a non-starter. The debate would be over long before it began, right? It would be an exercise in futility from the outset.

My life has been transformed. Not in the way I thought it would be when I first started doing personal development though. Whether or not a particular book or video is important depends on the person and where they are on the path. Everything depends on you. What are you looking for? Don't worry about anybody else, it's kind of a distraction. You're in this for you! You need to figure out what you want from personal development. And that's hard! The thing that makes this work hard is you don't even know what you want from personal development. It's kinda like being thrown into the middle of a lake with a blindfold on, not knowing you're in the middle of a lake -- and then somehow making it to shore and then having someone take the blindfold off. That's what personal development is like! You're gonna be swimming around not knowing what you're doing for a good long while. Expect that -- that's part of the path! That's not unique to you -- that's something everybody on the path experiences! That's what makes this work so challenging. And that's why persistence is so big in this work. A lot of people just don't pursue things doggedly enough to ever get the meat out of them. They're half-assers. What you work on is what you'll improve.

What's bad is Egoic knowing. It's neurotic clinging to conceptual-truth that's bad. Knowing in itself is a boon. Who could say that knowing is bad in itself? That's like saying money is bad in itself. What's bad is clinging to money in a certain way, right? Same holds for knowledge. People get confused by the maxim "Not Knowing" a lot. That's why I think there's always someone ranting against knowing like some kind of neurotic Zen Master on occasion. This whole tradition we have of Not Knowing is so confused. If there's one matter that needs to be cleaned up on the Path, it's this issue of how to properly interpret "Not Knowing". The problem with it is that it's tricky. It's kinda hard to explain, because Egoic knowing is different from Non-Egoic knowing. Non-Egoic knowing is a boon. It's Egoic knowing that's bad. Money in itself is not bad. Money is actually a boon if wisely used. Same goes for knowledge! Sorry for using the word 'boon' three times in this, I know that's borderline obnoxious! But I just woke up and haven't had my coffee yet! You can't spend life running from knowledge. That will not lead to happiness. I know some people want this to be the case, but it's just not true. It's one of the worst lies on the Path -- this pooh-poohing of knowledge as something to be avoided. It took me a long time to realize this advice against knowledge was ill considered because it's parroted so widely, you almost think it must be true! And of course people who lack knowledge say ill considered things! See? That's the trouble with being against knowledge. It's impossible if you want to teach to be against knowledge. And the Path is all about teaching -- you're teaching yourself. If you knew everything already, you wouldn't be on the Path. Haha, right? You wonder if some people ever notice this! I'm not singling you out by the way, this is a much deeper problem in our theory about Enlightenment.