Can A Way To Live Follow From Understanding The Truth?

[Joseph Maynor]

It doesn't seem as though enlightenment can be prescriptive at all.  In other words, all prescriptions are dualistic.  Enlightenment only bespeaks silence.

Any privileging of normative claims would be dualistic, and would be a perspective, not God's perspectiveless perspective.

If you want a way to live, don't you by necessity embrace the ego?  Maybe a more enlightened embracing.  

Any way to live would involve dualistic claims, thinking, beliefs, language, thought-stories, and would therefore violate the wholeness of reality.

Saying non-duality includes duality doesn't really fix this problem.  Reality doesn't play the game of shoulds.  Only egos engage in shoulds.

Perhaps the solution is to follow your enlightened intuition.  But even there, all of us have a nest of should statements we are laying in, which all appear to be existentially groundless.  

 

Edited August 6, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[SLICKHAWK]

Duality is the matrix of our 3 dimension world.. Our ego is only as big as our desire. 

If you enter the higher self you pull from that energy and out shine the lower self. The lower self of fight or flight mode and all natural desire leads to the sins of man. 

Enlightenment is only a comfort word found in absolute solitude. Be aware in highest conscious above and the ego will shrink.

[Joseph Maynor]

The purpose of life is that there is no purpose.  It is what you make it.

 

[TJ Reeves]

On August 5, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Joseph Maynor said:

It doesn't seem as though enlightenment can be prescriptive at all.  In other words, all prescriptions are dualistic.  Enlightenment only bespeaks silence.

Any privileging of normative claims would be dualistic, and would be a perspective, not God's perspectiveless perspective.

If you want a way to live, don't you by necessity embrace the ego?  Maybe a more enlightened embracing.  

Any way to live would involve dualistic claims, thinking, beliefs, language, thought-stories, and would therefore violate the wholeness of reality.

Saying non-duality includes duality doesn't really fix this problem.  Reality doesn't play the game of shoulds.  Only egos engage in shoulds.

Perhaps the solution is to follow your enlightened intuition.  But even there, all of us have a nest of should statements we are laying in, which all appear to be existentially groundless.  

Yes, a way to live can definitely follow from enlightenment(s). That is essentially the whole book i'm writing is about. (except not -- it's actually a book about nothing)

It is true that the solution is to follow your intuition. The hard part is in separating intuition from egoic confusion, however. 

Here's an excerpt from the section called Neo-Advaitan Confusion and another section on Core Values. 

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“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” – Abraham Maslow

Some people think that connecting to Pure Being means literally doing nothing – especially nothing to help themselves. Maybe they listened to Eckhert Tolle’s Power of Now. Or maybe they want to “go with the flow,” because they saw it on a Bruce Lee poster and think that trying to do anything is a problem.

Do not confuse the fact that you already are the truth with meaning that there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. That is bullshit.

I have never, ever met or heard of anyone who does absolutely nothing 100% of the time (that’s not dead or a vegetable.)

Enlightened masters still do stuff:

·      Jesus sacrificed himself for his own reasons

·      Peter Ralston writes, teaches, and Kicks people in the face for his own reasons

·      Siddhartha Guatama talked to people about their problems for his own reasons

it's not like they said "oh I'm enlightened now, fuck it there's nothing to do." Indeed, they're enlightenment  specifically helped them take action. (Although one must be careful to separate enlightenment from transformation!)

What we conventionally think of as us is actually a pattern of behaviors and stories exhibited by a seemingly constrained the universe itself. The ‘real’ us doesn’t even exist in the spacetime continuum.  What’s important about that fact is that no one behavioral pattern is you because all behavioral patterns exist within spacetime.

So, there’s no reason to identify with any one behavioral patterns. If you smoke, then no, it’s not Absolutely True that “you are smoker”– so, you don’t have to judge yourself so harshly for smoking and you don’t have to accept it as capital-T True that you will always “be” a smoker “no matter what.” 

Moreover, if you can correctly identify your unhelpful patterns, you can begin to change them to more helpful ones. Wakeful people have set strong behavioral systems in their life to help them follow their core values. As a result, they access pure being with less and less effort until it approaches becomes zero mental effort.

So yes – there’s nothing we “have to” do, in a sense the only thing you have to “be” is yourself. But no – there’s plenty of work left; the life you’ve been living up to now is nowhere close to what your actual self is about. And even more no - there are internal pulls toward higher values that still pull  one toward living up to their greatest potential.

Unless you wake up every morning and have absolutely no struggle whatsoever to live your deepest values in-and-of-themselves every single moment of every single day to such an extent that you literally don’t care if you die at any moment because life is that good, then no, you’re not there yet. 

It’s easy for people to run around claiming that they’re enlightened just because they “understand” that there is no self. Its not like we can hop into their mind to see if they're lying. 

But look at what they do. Look at what they concern themselves about behaviorally. Look at what they stand for. Look at how they handle conflict. In particular, ask if that their actions connect to their deepest, most transcendent values 24/7 365. If not, then sucks-to-suck: they're probably not nearly as ‘enlightened’ as you might think. Enlightenment does not equal transformation, but it most certainly will help.

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The Main Point: Balance theory with practice. Someone who truly ‘gets it’ will access pure being as much as possible. Their actions will reflect that fact, as they constantly live their core values for they'll realize that there's not much else to do anyway.

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What are the cores value?

The core values serve as internal "stars" for navigation. Or to put it another way, if you look deeply enough, the core values will feel like magnets that pull you in the appropriate direction.

In truth, the core values do not "exist" in the "real" world. They are inexplicable and irreducible, only understandable from pure intuition. 

But who cares if they're "real"? Life is a game and the fun is in trying. You will never embody any core value perfectly, but the pursuit of our core values automatically helps us transcend life's distractions and remove our conditions-for-happiness. Thus, the main byproduct of our core values is Pure Being and Pure Happiness.

It’s unnecessary to reinvent the wheel when it comes to figuring out what’s valuable. You are human and the core values are common to all humans, so you can perfectly well look at other humans to figure out your own core values. 

 The following list comes from my own personal insights as well as research from Abraham Maslow, who called them Being Values. If you don’t believe me, good! I don’t want you to believe anything I say – I want you to investigate each idea for yourself. It’s through the investigation that you will help yourself aim at each value with laser focus.

A person in Pure Being cognition will a life in accordance to the following core values:

1. 100% responsibility

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“When we become responsible for our own values, we no longer have to struggle to make the world conform to our needs, rather we can adapt our own values to fit the circumstances that confront us in the world.” – William James

“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.” ― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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Taking 100% responsibility for everything that happens to you in life is the cornerstone of all personal development. It’s the well-spring for self-sufficiency and self-efficacy.

No matter what happens, you always have a choice in how to respond. You have a response – ability.

Specifically, taking responsibility means choosing to forego distractions in favor of solutions and figuring out how to transcend your conditions for happiness.

Other words: autonomy; independence; not-needing-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence; separateness; living by its own laws

 

2. Truth, Wisdom, Curiosity, and Exploration

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“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” – Albert Einstein,

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We all have an inner pull to find out what’s true: a willingness to see what lies in the unknown, an openness to insight and the discipline to put insight to use.

Indeed, the pursuit of truth is by far the most powerful journey a human can take.

To go on this journey, take it as a given that you’re at least partially wrong about life and work to make yourself less wrong. Keep exploring until you finish.

Then, when you think you’re finished, take it as a sign that you have gone the wrong way, for you’re never finished.

Other words: honesty; reality; nakedness; simplicity; richness; oughtness; beauty; pure, clean and unadulterated; completeness; essentiality

 

3. Aliveness, Richness, Beauty

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“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.”-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We are each pulled toward having complete experiences of the world.

We want to not feel “used to” the “mundane” objects of reality.

We want to look into our lover’s eyes for the ten-thousandth-time the way we did for the first time.

We want to find, observe, and appreciate beauty. We want to look in awe at what’s possible for the world of color, smell, and taste.

And we have a pull to feel fully functional – connected to both our animal intellect and human intellect.

I think this is the magic behind movies – they suck you into the experience completely so that there is no thought – only observance.

I also think this is the reason some people do things like Cocaine – they want to feel the buzz of total pure sensory experience.

The final note is that part of pursuing aliveness, richness, and beauty is the motivation to go out to nature. Wakeful people love going to nature.

Other words: process; non-deadness; spontaneity; self-regulation; full-functioning; differentiation, complexity; intricacy; rightness; form; aliveness; simplicity; richness; wholeness; perfection; completion; uniqueness;

 

4. Simplicity, Space, Orderliness, Elegance

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“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Life is simple, but we insist in making it complicated. Simplicity in this case refers to taking out the unnecessary junk from out lives – our schedules, our rooms, and our psyches.

Space refers to space in our schedule to remain flexible. It also means having time to breathe and relax.

Keeping things orderly, without becoming neurotic about it, contributes to a person’s mental health and well-being. A clean room is a clean mind.

And in mathematics, a theorem exhibits elegance if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of code to great effect. Similarly, some of the greatest personal wisdom has elegance to it.

Finding elegance in your understanding is a sign of growth. Embodying elegance in our lives is the ultimate form of mastery.

Other words: honesty; nakedness; essentiality; abstract, essential, skeletal structure; minimalism

 

5. Authenticity – Vulnerability - Worthiness

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“The closer you stay to emotional authenticity and people, character authenticity, the less you can go wrong. That's how I feel now, no matter what you're doing.”

- David O. Russell

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Authenticity is all about being real.  Genuine, not an imitation.

It means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable;

It means exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle;

And it means nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough.

Emotional richness comes from authenticity and vulnerability, for we have to allow ourselves to open up to whatever may come.

Other words: realness; openness; genuineness; emotional availability;

6. Benevolence, Justice, and Empathy

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“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We want our work and our lives to raise the lives of our brethren.

We all want to know we help. We don’t even care if others know, we just want to know that we do.

Justice is about keeping the world in karmic balance. It goes beyond tit for tat. It also goes beyond doing unto others what you’d like to have done to you. Justice is ultimately about creating a better world through fairness.

Empathy has four key elements                        

o   To be able to see the world as others see it.

o   To be nonjudgmental

o   To understand another person’s feelings

o   To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings

Remember: the natural, happy state of the human is a giving one.

Other words:  fairness; orderliness; lawfulness; "oughtness; rightness; desirability; oughtness; honesty; goodness

 

7. Wholeness – Direct Connection -  Integration – Relative Perspective

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 “You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.” – Alan Watts

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The truth is that we are not separate from the universe, we are the universe. Our greatest suffering comes from forgetting this fact.

Wholeness refers to making a direct connection to universal oneness. We want to feel connected to our fellow man, our fellow woman, our pets, the trees, and the stars themselves.

Achieving this connection simply feels better than anything else. It is the purest form of pure being. This is why we value sex so much. For most people, sex is the closest they will ever come to the ultimate connection.

Integration means alignment of mind, body, and spirit. It also means taking imbalanced parts of our psyche and re-balancing them.

Black and white thinking, or dichotomy thinking, lies at the root of many struggles. The universe is filled with paradoxes, and we want to become comfortable with those paradoxes.

 

8. Mastery -> excellence, effortlessness, and challenge

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“A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.”

― Miyamoto Musashi

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We want to put forward work that we can genuinely feel proud of. We want to make music with just the right rhythm. We want our paintings to have just the right amount of color.

And we want to enjoy the process of creating that work. We don’t want to strain to take the steps in the right direction. We want our work to flow out of us like nothing.

Then again, we also want challenge. We don’t want to feel bored. We want to constantly grow our skills and grow our abilities. If we set a world record, fine – what’s more important is to set a personal record.

Finally, we want to finish. We want to actually complete things instead of leaving them hanging. No one likes to quit if they know they can finish.

To quote Robert Greene, “Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you.”

“The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”

Other words: ease; lack of strain, striving or difficulty; grace; perfect, beautiful functioning; necessity; just-right-ness; just-so-ness; inevitability; suitability; justice; completeness; "oughtness"

 

9. Dispassion, Equanimity, and Nonneediness

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“What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.”

– Ryan Holiday

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We want mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in difficult situations.

We pursue coolness in our society as a false way of approaching this peace.

We want the ability to let the pain flow through our bodies and purpose flow through our actions.

We want to not need anything. We actually want to give up the plucky level of passion shown by amateurs and take up the stoic dispassion of professionals. We don’t want our hearts dragged this way and that by the random external forces.

To quote Ryan Holiday, “passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous.”

Put simply, we want emotional discipline.

Other words: composure, calm, level-headedness, self-possession, coolheadedness, presence of mind; serenity, tranquility, phlegm, imperturbability, equilibrium; poise, assurance, self-confidence, aplomb, sangfroid, nerve

 

10. Telos -> purpose, progress, completion

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“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” ― Viktor E. Frankl

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We want transcendent meaning without having to delude ourselves. We want the ups and downs of our days to add up to something bigger.

We want to have a story that counts. We want to have some action, some drama, some romance, and some comedy in our lives.

We want to have goals to aim for, a path to walk, and feedback for that path.

Ultimately, we want a vocation – a calling, summons, or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action with an almost religious zeal. We don’t want to just work for work’s sake: we want work to become part of us in the best of ways.

Other words: necessity; just-right-ness; just-so-ness; inevitability; suitability; justice; completeness; "oughtness"; ending; finality; justice; "it's finished"; fulfillment; finis and telos; destiny; fate; feedback; meaning

 

11. Playfulness-Creativity-Uniqueness

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“The opposite of play is not work — it’s depression.” - Brian Sutton-Smith

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Play is something done for its own sake. It’s voluntary, it’s pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time, and the act itself is more important than the outcome.

The fact is that none of us must take life so seriously. I don’t care if you’re the president of a major country, an open-heart surgeon, or a kindergartener: Play is part of the healthy human experience. Period.

Play doesn’t just give us mental rest, it also grows our level of genius and self-efficacy.  This is why many mammals play – it the most fertile ground for practice and mastery. It is through play that the lion cub becomes an elite hunter. Similarly, it is through play that the apprentice becomes an elite master.

One form of play is creativity. Specifically, creativity means playing with in the unknown as you bring skills or ideas together in a novel manner.

We all have a pull toward creativity, but shame may cover up that influence. Do not let this happen to you – it would mean giving up your godly power.

Let it be known that you are god essentially because you have (better yet are) the power of imagination. There is nothing else in the known universe that has the ability to pull things from imagination other than the universe itself. The universe needs you to create and express your unique perspective.

Other words: fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance; effortlessness; idiosyncrasy; individuality; non-comparability; novelty

 

12. Unconditional Happiness

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“Unconditional happiness is the highest technique.” – Michael Singer

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It’s simple: if you value your true self, then you must value unconditional happiness.

Why?

Our true nature is unconditional happiness.

The unconditional happiness that is our true nature is always there, no matter whether good or bad things are happening - it's the essence of what and who we are. We are universal observers and we love everything we observe!

This happiness has no reason for it. It simply is. Everything else is just dress up or an excuse to allow ourselves to feel what’s already been there. 

Denying the possibility of unconditional happiness is a sign of delusion; a sign of denial of reality; a sign that you're playing yourself. As such, let it be known that we are all deluded at times.

And that is why we must keep reminding ourselves of unconditional happiness as a virtue.

Other words: self-transcendence; nirvana; heaven; pure being; pure joy

 

13. Death

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“Death never takes a wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.” – Jean de la Fontaine

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This is about as counterintuitive as humanly possible – I mean, our entire intuition is to go move away from death, is it not?

Don’t think that valuing death means literally putting your life at risk 24/7 a lå the flying Wallandas or Travis Pastrana. Although, if that’s how you want to live, more power to you.

Instead, valuing death more is about recognizing that the option to not-live is always near and that death gives life some much needed urgency. It’s about being thankful for the chance to be alive and the chance to take everything in through the wonderful window of perception that is you. It’s also about coming to terms with your legacy and not living with regret. Ultimately, valuing death means becoming friends with the all-consuming Nothingness that permeates the universe.

Are you unsure of what core values you value the most? Death will help you get that straightened out real quick – just think about what you’d like to do if today was your last day, this year was your last year, or the next five years are the last chance you’d have with your parents.

Here are the main points to consider about death:

• Death is inevitable
  • Everyone has to die; your lifespan is decreasing continuously; the amount of time you have for spiritual practice is small
• The uncertainty of the time of death
  • human life-expectancy is uncertain; there are many causes of death; the human body is very fragile
• The fact that only spiritual practice can help you at the time of death
  • your loved ones cannot help; your possessions and enjoyments cannot help; your own body cannot help

Other words: making peace, pre-mortem, life-as-a-preparation, becoming friends with nothingness, knowing that this too shall pass

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The Main Point: Live a life of Responsibility, Truth, Freshness, Simplicity, Benevolance, Vulnerability, Wholeness, Master, Telos, Equanimity, Playfulness, Unconditional Happiness, and the embrace of death – watch your happiness skyrocket, for free. 

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One last point about the core values: do not confuse them with morals. They are simply what a person in the healthiest mental state will naturally pursue. They're what happens when you give a person time, room, space, energy, and time to do whatever they'd like however they'd like for as long as they'd like. Again, they're called core values because you feel them at your core and they're nice to live up to in-and-of-themselves. 

Edited August 7, 2017 by TJ Reeves

[Real Eyes]

@TJ Reeves  What an epic post.  Thanks for sharing.

[ajasatya]

@TJ Reeves you're a wonderful human being. thank you for being exactly the way you are.

you've been inspiring me since the first post of yours that i saw on this forum. the book you're writing is a true gem, a gift to mankind. i know it.

your answer is aligned with what i wanted to say. i was going to talk a little about virtues, which is a closer word to me than core values because of my native language, which is brazilian portuguese.

Edited August 7, 2017 by ajasatya