Joseph Maynor

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.

Everybody loved his fake, tough-guy Godfather talk when was running for President. He had a certain rhetoric.

There are 3 ways to deal with a perceived threat to your worldview: 1. Not give a shit. 2. Turn inward and examine your own beliefs. 3. Turn outward and attack the threat itself.

I had this same question myself recently. It’s often the things that seem obvious to us that we take for granted the most. How much of your recollection of the past actually resembles what occurred in the past? That’s another question. Memory of the past is a model of the past. We construct a past in our thoughts and then carry that with us.

@cetus56 A picture paints a thousand words! Even the baby’s eyes are bulging out haha. That’s too funny.

Advice to new folks is gonna be different from advice to advanced folks. That’s why teaching personal development is tricky. All hinges on who you’re dealing with.

I can appreciate this in spirit but not in the details. The problem with getting on the soapbox and telling everybody else how to think is -- you gotta offer them better than what they already have, or you get ignored pretty quickly. It's like a dog bark, it doesn't have much carry over. It sounds serious, but is quickly forgotten about. If you wanna offer people a way to think better -- you gotta pony up. You can't just say, there's no answer! That doesn't work. Plus that's an answer too, right? It's a dogmatic externalization of your preferred way of thinking. You can't force people to share your way of thinking.

Haha. It's not let me tell you who you are! It's let me tell you who I am. Watch this entire video. It's brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbj4nLOPN8o&t=127s

I think the best way for Leo to make money is to do a LP 2 course titled “putting the rubber to the road” designed for people transitioning to their life purpose as a career. A course that actually guides me through that process of career transition. I’m gonna do it anyway — but I just see that this is a course that would actually be valuable to me. It could help nudge me along better than I will do otherwise. What’s great about this is that this LP career transition is something that Leo actually did himself — so it wouldn’t be talking out of one’s ass, it would be real deal guidance coming from someone who did it! That’s an idea for Leo if he’s looking to make some money plus continue to help people enormously.

I think the key to the success of the movie Fight Club is it wrapped up deeper spiritual issues in the shallowness of fighting, which made it hard to ignore. This is the same reason the News always covers violent stories — they grab our attention! That movie, unintentionally or not, made use of that same marketing tactic. Violence captures our attention. Everything covered in the News is what captures our attention. You could use the News as a sounding-board as to what captures the low-consciousness mind.

In my opinion Leo has nothing to do with other personal development teachers. His approach is totally unique. I think it waters down his brand to partner with other teachers. Meeting in Vegas seems to be the best first choice. Keep it simple.

A picture paints a thousand words. I love imagery. Plus imagery stirs thinking in a way that giving someone sentences often does not. People are often skeptical about sentences — but who can deny the power of this image!

You can even get to the point where you lose the causal relation. Thoughts and emotions don’t cause anything. Cause is a thought ‘about’ reality not reality itself. Cause is a story.

Growth is not necessarily enjoyable when you’re going through it. I have plenty of scars to prove that myself. Having your Ego ripped out of you is not necessarily a pleasant experience. But you gotta have faith that the process will benefit your life long-term. And it does! After pursuing Enlightenment very heavily for a couple of years now, I can say it does pay off. It’s an investment in your happiness. It’s the best investment you can make in life. I can honestly say that I need almost nothing to be happy now. Could I say that 5 years ago? Absolutely not. I can be perfectly happy now just BE-ing. My attachment to life is much less neurotic now.

The subconscious mind is a model about reality. It’s thought ‘about’ reality. Sometimes it helps to frame explanations in terms of mind, but we need to keep in mind that when we use these kinds of models we are speaking metaphorically. What reality is is not encapsulated by our labels and concepts. What our labels and concepts do is spin a tale ‘about’ reality. And that’s fine! I’m not knocking that — but we just gotta see what we’re doing so we don’t mistake the menu for the meal. The menu ain’t the meal right? It’s a model ‘about’ the meal. The menu doesn’t capture the meal. Put the menu in your mouth and you’ll quickly find that out! We don’t notice this so easily with thoughts ‘about’ reality versus reality itself, but it works entirety the same! There is no mind in reality. That’s mistaking the map for the territory. It’s convenient to talk that way — but it’s metaphorical. Language operates metaphorically. We don’t see the true depth of this. This is not you, this is everybody! We are programmed to take metaphors literally by default. That’s how conceptual-truth works. But it causes a lot of confusion too. Reality and conceptions of reality are two different things. It’s not always so easy to keep them separate, but you can! Through awareness you can. My ability to do this has skyrocketed over the past year. It might be the number one key to my growth — noticing the difference between reality and thought ‘about’ reality. It almost sounds trivial, but it’s the key to Awakening. What you’re gonna find is that all your beliefs ‘about’ reality have the same relationship to reality as a menu does to a meal. Most people can understand this conceptually and agree with me — but do they live it! Do they really grok the ramifications of it? Not really, right? It stays conceptual and superficial for them. Really, the guru’s job is just to prod people to become much less superficial about these issues. These issues are not just conceptual! A mature appreciation of these issues will shift your furniture around regarding what you think existence is — the fantasy will drop out of reality for ya.

How about you give us a piece of advice! That’s your final exam. Blow us away with what you’ve learned from your time on here. Let’s see a paragraph from you. Impress us. How have you grown on your personal development path from your time on here? You answering that will help you more than any ‘advice’ coming externally.

Life gets easier as you age because you can play the game of life without getting so emotionally affected by it. When you’re young you take everything so personally. When you get older you stop expecting things to be fair. You make them fair to you, without being emotionally affected by it. Sometimes you have to fight a little bit. That’s ok. You’ll watch yourself fight. That’s life. Fighting is a part of life — just don’t identify with it Egoically.

Sounds like you grew another notch. Good for you. You’ve put in the work. There’s no magic bullet to growth. It’s a cyclical thing.

You’re assuming Infinite means something like all knowing. Why are you assuming that’s how Leo is using the word? I’m not saying it’s bad necessarily, but you might be off on a lark very far away from ground-zero as to what Infinity is.

Here's a meta-question: What are you expecting knowledge to look like?

I’ve been done let go now for a while!

I agree. Enlightenment starts once you start questioning what the self is. You could go years and years through life without questioning what the self is. But once you start to dig into the question — what am I? Most people probably never sat down and asked — what am I? Not who am I, but what am I? This is a very specific question. And once you deal with this question seriously, at some point you’ll enter the Path. You’ll realize that what you currently think you are is a Cultural construct — it’s merely a set of beliefs ‘about’ reality. The ‘little you’ in the Dream just is a set of beliefs about reality!

It challenges thinking of matter as a substance. It also challenges the Materialist Paradigm. It shows us that our metaphorical ways of explaining things do not actually correspond to the way reality is.