Joseph Maynor

I think there is a transformation but the danger of putting in language can cause someone including oneself to turn that into an ideology, which actually takes it away in my experience.

I'm not saying judgment is wrong, but it can be overstated in a way that is not conducive to relation.

I'm sensing an undertone of judging people and trying to hierarchize people from a certain perspective. I tend not to do this. I think when you make people feel judged, they tend to want to prove you right -- how you see them to you. It's a mirror effect. It's good for pitting people against each other to create drama, but not so good for relation IMO. This is a judgment call and is hard to teach anyone. You have to choose, is your role to create drama or to create relation, these are sometimes at odds, maybe. If you're surviving by creating drama, then you have to look at that. That has pros and cons.

One thing to consider in this project is who is deriving truth from scratch? It all presupposes a story of the self.

A lot of my work has been closing that gap and being ok with being a human. It's like I went really hard in the spiritual direction and then came back to being a normal human. And most spiritual people disagree with me about this I find. But inside I still have all the fruits of my spiritual work that factor in. So nothing has been lost.

Is the assumption here that letting go is ideal because the self (or ego) is an illusion and takes no action anyway?

Like a regular person but I tend to go into life coach mode when I see people suffering. Usually this comes off well. I almost never talk about spirituality with people in real life. I like to laugh with people and enjoy their company. I like to work on my self-help goals. I have no need to try to be seen a certain way in real life. My goal is to enjoy the company of others but also not interfere too much with people's time who are trying to work.

One issue I see is are you listening to music to contemplate or are you listening to music to listen to music?

You don't forget hey I'm not who I thought I was so easily. That's not an experience that is forgotten, so yes it can be recalled. I'm not in the cool guys awakening club by design.

Most of the time it is not. But if I think back to the trip I can recall what it was like.

If I were to describe that in a 5-Meo sense it would be realizing what I really am is Awareness.

I'm not sure what would qualify one to declare that they are awake or not.

The idea of dream is actually key here and it comes up in theory. But is direct experience the same as or analogous to a dream? That seems to imply an intervening thought.

Psychedelics are interesting because although they're thought, commonly, to be fantasy, they're actually direct experience. It depends on how we want to define direct experience.

I've only needed to do 5-Meo once. But nothing compares to that trip for me. It was enough.

The elephant in the room is there's a psychedelic connection to solipsism or to that insight anyway.

It seems to me this turns on what we mean by mind.

How so?

I agree. You have to look at individual philosophers. It's easy to lump them all into a class and then judge them all. There are a lot of great analytic philosophers. A lot of contemporary epistemology has in many ways been a project of analytic philosophy.

One technique I did is brainstorm into an audio recording on my phone for like 30 min to an hour. I just let myself talk which is like a brainstorm. Then I would listen back and try to outline what I said in the audio into salient points. Then I wrote those down on my whiteboard and made goals out of those principles.

God created your finite mind and body no? So by extension it seems He could do this for other finite selves.