Joseph Maynor

Only the contents of my own Journals would be worth that, and not even those.

Good. That sounds like Stage Turquoise metaphysics. If you live that, very good. What you wanna be doing now for everything in your Thought and Experience is to ask to what extent is this real, to what extent is this actual? Try to find out the grab bag of all stuff that the Mind sort of assumes is there but isn't actually there.

Who has ever survived suicide to tell us what Thought and Experience comes after the deadly act? Does Awareness survive suicide? Now you have yourself a great contemplation topic my friend. Look into it.

What do you think Enlightenment is? Gimme a paragraph.

Give us some reasons to support your conclusory statement. You never give any reasons for your conclusory statements.

(1) Give reasons to support your claim that I'm doing a Straw Man; and, (2) Answer my initial question about your claim that I've misrepresented Leo. You completely evaded this question. I'm not gonna play games with you. I've been there, done that with you. I'm not gonna waste my time engaging with you unless and until you can give reasons for your claims and rebuttals.

Why the thought control in the first instance though? That's the elephant in the room here. Look, if somebody's trolling or otherwise violating the basic forum guidelines, that's a different issue. But what Leo and you seem to be talking about is banning people who disagree with Leo's opinions about metaphysics. That's religion bud. It's religion that turns metaphysics into an ideology that people wanna fight for. Leo shouldn't be clinging to any ideology at all. And this isn't a moral should. It's a should that comes from realizing that clinging to ideology is an illusion, it's Maya. It's pointless suffering. You thinking you've got metaphysics figured out and clinging to that is you being stuck in Ego, stuck in Samsara, stuck in Thought. Remember, what reality actually is has nothing to do with Thought or Experience. Don't cling to Thought, don't cling to Experience. Just detach and watch this stuff and try to help others on their paths, wherever they are on their path. And try to learn from people to try to advance on your path. But I welcome diversity personally. I want the people on here who disagree with me. As long as you're not an abusive troll, I have no problem with you. And the few truly abusive trolls on here seem to have nine-lives too, which is paradoxical.

I referenced Leo's actual quoted language which I cited, but you've failed to even say what exactly you're alluding to. Give reasons for your conclusions and maybe we'll have something tangible to discuss.

I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way and I don’t want to be banned, but the above statement raises a big red flag for me for several reasons including but not limited to the following: not everybody shares the same meaning for the word ‘God’. And actually the word ‘God’ is optional anyway. If you’re coming from Ego you’re gonna think of the word ‘God’ as pointing to something ‘out there’ and not ‘in here’. The above quote also sounds very characteristically Stage Blue thinking to me. Are you trying to protect people from misleading ideology? That sounds like religion to me. Anyway, it seems out of character for a Stage Green, Yellow, or Turquoise person. The Green person would value the diversity, the Yellow person would be interested in discussing the matter extensively, and the Turquoise person would try to help the person on their path very gently and compassionately. But this banning idea sounds very Stage Blue, very ideological, very rigid to me. It’s also kind of heartless. Put yourself in the shoes of someone getting banned for disagreeing with you. There needs to be more empathy there which seems to be conspicuously absent, which actually surprises me with your new video on ‘Love’ where you talk about being compassionate and loving. It’s one thing to talk about love and compassion, anybody can do that. But do you practice love and compassion? See, the practice is what’s actual.

Truth is the true Self that sees through the illusion Maya a.k.a. The illusion of Thought and Experience. Truth is very real, it’s not just a mere concept. Truth is actuality. Truth is God Awareness.

Exactly! That’s a great insight. Be mindful of what those imaginings actually are.

Why so little detail about Coral? I could write a book on Coral alone.

What’s weird is the percentages thing never really resonated with me. I feel like I’ve made clean shifts into and out of every stage. There’s usually a beginning entry into a stage, a full flowering period, and then a period where you start to become aware you’re moving into the next stage. This whole idea of being 20% this 60% this and 20% that never comported with my actual experience. It’s more like a stair step than a percentage thing. It’s like a paradigm shift. You don’t straddle three paradigms — you move from one paradigm to the next paradigm.

Here’s the paradox. You gotta fill your cup completely before you can effectively start to empty it. That’s the necessary perfect circle of seeking. ⭕️. It’s the exhaustion of Ego that paradoxically causes Ego to burn away in a highly-conscious person. If I wasn’t so addicted to knowledge in my 20’s up until my late 30’s I would never be able to give all my books away and burn all my Philosophy freewriting at 39-40. See, people wanna do the emptying the cup part before they’ve exhausted the filling the cup part. This is like trying to be an old man when you’re still an adolescent. If you’re still clinging to books and learning — you’re not ready to empty your cup — you’re still filling your cup. A hungry man is not gonna swear off food. It’s the satiated man who says no thanks and gives his food away. Some people fill their cup with all kinds of notions of emptying their cup but never actually empty their cup, so watch out for that trap. That’s the person who gobbles up a bunch of Enlightenment theory but is not actually getting the results from it yet. For me, my cup started to empty on its own, it’s not something I forced. All of a sudden about a year ago I gave all my books away because I didn’t want to be distracted by them anymore. And then recently I realized that writing a bunch of essays was more about me emptying my cup rather than filling it. The writing was me letting go of my ideas. Before age 39 I assumed my writing was me preserving my profound insights; the writing was for clinging to my ideas not for releasing them. Stuff like that is how you know you’re on the emptying your cup leg of the circle rather than the filling your cup leg of the circle.

Such as? What are you insinuating or expecting people to say here?

Thanks for the book. I’ll read it.

Why are you scared to achieve your goals? Doesn’t that sound kinda odd to you? If you could snap your fingers and get all your goals met, would you be scared to snap your fingers?

Nobody seems to realize that both the cliff notes and the novel can both be useful. It’s not this versus that, it’s this and that. Our minds always want to say this or that when we can have this and that. Learn from everything. Be a sponge. Even the dumbest person can teach you something if you look for it.

Teal is the level after Coral. Coral is the level after Turquoise.

As to Leo, I think the nature of his job puts him in concept-land for better and for worse. It’s true that Enlightenment involves letting Thought and Experience go. If I were Leo I would go full tilt teaching Enlightenment stuff and stay away from the more topical videos. Stick to very pragmatic personal development material, that will be one way to let go of some of the heavy conceptual cathedral making — which I agree is a trap because your cup is too full all the time. Also, this stuff is not about art it’s about boots on the ground. One thing I liked about the early Leo videos is they were very boots on the ground and practical. Leo should make a two volume set of videos on advanced mindfulness work. That’s just one example of how you can make videos without getting so caught up in talk about everything topic under the sun. You can make a video on not knowing.

I don’t know what’s at Teal so good for him if he’s getting hits of Teal. He always was a hard worker like myself. I remember he used to post his notes on personal development on the Forum. People who work hard improve in Personal Development just like everything else. There’s a difference between Michael Jordan and the 13 year old kid playing hoops in his driveway although they’re both playing basketball. If he reads this, I say congrats man! Check out my extensive writings on Stage Coral in my Journal Vol. 8.

You sound so convinced you’re right.

Even though the circle leads back to the original starting point, that doesn’t mean the journey around the circle was useless. It’s a bit of a paradox. You gotta chase Ego to only find that Ego is an illusion and that you’re been watching yourself chase all along. The only way that you can discover no Ego is to thoroughly burn through Ego. So you don’t really want to pooh pooh Ego in this work. You don’t reject Ego, you see through it. And you only keenly see through Ego when you have a history of you being entangled in Ego to draw from. And Ego is not just for people other than you. Even people that are very ‘advanced’ on the path don’t fully understand Ego including myself (until very recently) — so I don’t exclude myself from this. But I can tell you this, I understand Ego a hell of a lot better today after watching myself run that circle. That’s the value and necessity of chasing — you learn. If you have high love of truth, you’ll learn from chasing. If your love of truth is not high enough, you’ll create a ‘Spiritual Ego’ for yourself. And maybe someday you’ll see through that but maybe you don’t too — everybody’s on their own unique Path. It’s like Emerald said in one of her videos, you don’t force a plant to grow by pulling on it. ⭕️

You gotta realize that Leo is talking to himself too in his videos. So maybe kicking us in the ass is a way for him to kick himself in the ass. I do that with my writing too. Everything that I write about is for me on some level. I can tell after watching all Leo's videos three times over that Leo, at least in his earlier videos, was primarily talking to himself. I can tell in the more recent videos that he's helping noobs more and isn't really talking about his own personal development as much as he used to. The newer videos don't seem to be tracking his own growth like the earlier videos did. I get the feeling that Leo thinks he's got it now and has basically assumed a teacher role for other people. The earlier videos were much more about his own growth. Even the psychedelics videos were like that. I miss that urgency that he had when his videos were tracking his own growth and when he was passionate about growing faster than everybody else. That is missing since the "Going Buddha" video. I think one of the things that made Leo inspiring to me is when he would sort of blog about his own personal development in his videos rather than play a teacher role. Yeah, he was playing a teacher role too, but you got the sense that he was bringing you along primarily on his own journey through this stuff. When I watch the earlier videos I see a guy passionate about growing and pursuing his own personal development. The newer videos seem to be for somebody other than me and don't really seem to be about him anymore either. In fact, I don't know much about Leo's personal development anymore because he doesn't talk much about it. I catch glimpses of it in his Forum posts which I try to comment on directly in the posts or indirectly in my Journal. I kind of get the feeling that the focus on Leo's personal development stopped and now all the videos are about something other than Leo's personal development. I miss hearing about Leo's personal development. I miss the guy who was passionate about his own growth and would love to share that in his videos. But you gotta keep in mind that I've been watching Leo's videos since mid-2014, and I've grown right alongside him. Watching Leo grow inspired me to grow myself. I want to make sure I never stop talking about my own personal development in my writing. The day I stop doing that, I'm gonna stop writing. Writing only makes sense when I'm teaching myself first and foremost. If I'm not talking about my own personal development and have shifted to primarily helping others, that's a red flag that I've gone from being a climber to a camper in this work. And personal development is not for people who want to set up camp. Personal development is for people who are constantly and passionately working on their own growth and working on their own lives.

Wait until the day you realize this stuff is dead serious and has nothing to do with play. Truth has nothing to do with play. Ditto for reality. Play is a distraction to Truth-seeking. A lot of people are using this stuff for Entertainment and for other purposes other than Truth-seeking.