Joseph Maynor

Allow me to preach to the choir SOUL: Detachment from belief allows freedom. It allows authenticity. You do beliefs, don't let beliefs do you. Instead of letting beliefs imprison you, you wear the pants in the relationship with beliefs. Beliefs have the power and certainty that you give them, and no more.

Find your life purpose, become enlightened, and get out of your own way. That's the key to success. I'm not kidding!

Any statement of the form 'Life is X', where X is a conceptualization, is false. This is an important principle to get. Some people seem not to grok this yet. Unless it's 'I am hungry', where you might be pointing out an actual feeling of hunger, so this statement wouldn't be false. It's pointing to something real, namely the feeling of hunger. As a pointer to the feeling it isn't false. But if you took it literally -- I am hungry -- that is false. So, pointers are not the same as beliefs. It's the identity beliefs that are false, and those are what we should be worried about.

Love is the result of removal of ignorance.

Damn this is wise!

You don't do anything -- because you don't exist. All beliefs about you doing something are false. Imagine you are a Sun that is covered up with a bunch of garbage. Enlightenment is not about the Sun leveling up to improve itself. Enlightenment is about removing all the garbage off your Sun, so that you can shine as you are, not as you fantasize you will become. And all that garbage is beliefs that are foolishly, but understandably attached to. See? You need to get out of your own way paradoxically. Stop thinking you are controlling anything.

@Shanmugam The problem with these kinds of moves is that you are doing exactly what you are saying not to do -- judging others and trying to control others -- and trying to control reality. Why do you assume that reality should proceed according to your values? See? I had a discussion with homeboy the other day about this exact same issue. It's a trap. You don't get to control reality, accept that. I know you want to though. Let other people decide for themselves. Why should you get to make the rules -- your own Egoic desire enforced on the community?

Ok folks. This is long and rambly -- so you don't want to listen to all of it. Just listen to these two passages: 1. Hinduism and Buddhism: 00'10'25' to 1'45'50'. 2. The Six Orthodox Indian Philosophy Schools: 5'26'20' to 6'19'25'. 3. The Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana: 6'33'55' to 6'57'32' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shankara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_vedanta

Oh yeah. People can become enlightened here if they do the work. Lots of different perspectives here, people willing to help, etc. Spoon-feeding haha.

Why believe there's a rabbit-hole to go down? Are you guys trying to burn out the Mind? You don't need to do that. You don't need to try to kill the mind or kill the Ego. That won't work and it only causes pointless suffering and no real progress. You're just confusing yourselves. And you're basking in that confusion, not realizing that that's a manufactured state, and not reality. "Reality is simple, clear, and unitary. There's nothing mysterious about it. Enlightenment is the most simple perception" -- Adyashanti Video on point to watch:

Haha. I'll give it a crack. That's funny though. I disrupted my stillness to answer this.

Me too. The only two famous ones that resonate with me so far are Adyashanti and Ekhardt Tolle. All the others that I've explored don't quite rise to that level.

Do both. Both are powerful. You want to have results from both to work with.

Ok boys. Time to collect yourselves. You don't want to parade your ignorance.

Maybe Leo's best non-Enlightenment Video:

Emerald did a great video addressing this issue:

Here's another video to watch. This video had a profound impact on my thinking about how to regard beliefs in this work.

Watch this video:

It means that conceptual-truth is not existential-truth. The map is not the territory. The meal is not the menu. It is a belief. You're right. It's counter-weight theory. I can cling to it loosely. I prefer to do this, however: suspend belief.

ENLIGHTENED PEOPLE DO NOT LACK EGO -- THIS IS A REALLY RAMPANT MYTH Enlightened people do not lack ego. That's a deep myth. So many of us do not yet grok this. Enlightened people are subject to the same egoic taunts, they just don't attach to them as much. They're more conscious of them, whereas a lot of people are not even aware of the Ego. Enlightened people have discovered a space between themselves and thoughts: a space that can be widened through work and meditation. The ego might be illusory if it's not attached to. In other words, you may perceive ego that's not in fact there. If my behavior is categorizable by you as egoic, and I'm not attaching to egoic thoughts -- then I'm not acting egoically since I'm not attaching to what's happening. It's just what's happening. This is kind of a puzzling issue. In other words -- someone may act egoically and yet be detached from ego.

Leo explains it so well.

"The leader is the proxy-visionary for those who lack vision" -- Leo Gura

This is a really good technique. I'll share how I incorporate these ideas in my Journal when I am ready. I'm still experimenting with it.

DON'T DUMP YOUR INTELLECTUAL LIFE SO FAST IN THIS WORK There's an intellectual component to consciousness too. There's experiential awareness and then there's cognitive awareness. And actually both of these are happening simultaneously. Being conscious means that you have a huge shore of reference, that you are as studied as much as you are aware of the present moment experientially. We don't talk about this much and nobody ever seems to explain this right. They just want to focus on experiential awareness. Well, a baby has experiential awareness, but that doesn't make the baby very aware, if that makes sense. What the baby is missing is cognitive awareness. You need both to be conscious -- experiential awareness and cognitive awareness. And cognitive awareness uses concepts, thoughts, the Mind. AN INSIGHT ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT -- LOOSEN THAT GRIP ON BELIEFS ABOUT REALITY The point of Enlightenment is to get you to detach from conceptual beliefs about reality, including the attachments of the Ego. You can use beliefs in the moment as needed, but err on the side of avoiding thinking that truth is to be found via belief. Ground yourself in Existential Truth, surrender to reality fully, and be what is fully, without clinging to any beliefs. You want to live with an empty cup of beliefs not a full cup of beliefs. Do not let the Mind fool you that conceptual truth is Existential Truth. Being emotionally affected by conceptual contradiction implies the Rationalist Paradigm is being accepted implicitly. The conclusion is not that I conceptually know -- it's that I conceptually don't know! Just be in the Now and stop trying to conceptually know. Conceptual Truth is not the filet-mignon of Truth as the Mind thinks it is -- it's actually observation in the moment that is. One of the worst traps of the Ego/Mind causes us to believe is that conceptual truth is Existential Truth. This is our worst trap! BREAKING THROUGH TO AWAKENING Enlightenment/ Enlightenment work isn't what you think it is. That's the reason why it's so confusing to teach and to learn. And that's why you have to keep banging your head against the wall until one day -- ah snap, you'll get it -- all of it -- not intellectually, you'll have an epiphany. And at that time the search will be over. The work won't be done, but the search will be over. And after that time you may call yourself Enlightened if you wish. You’ll realize the ridiculousness of all teachings after that point, so why not. As long as you don’t attach strongly to that, it’s fine. Enlightenment is the loosening of conceptual beliefs -- all conceptual beliefs. Beliefs will still arise as part of what's here in the moment, but that doesn't mean that you need to identify with them. And with that, conceptual beliefs become much less important. One of the tricks of the Mind is to reinforce the belief that conceptual belief is SO IMPORTANT. It's like -- crawl into this Matrix, it's so real! That conniving little Mind. But once you see through this fully, you'll have an epiphany that is impossible to reverse. And it's got nothing to do with psychedelics. You can't unexplode a grenade. That's what the shift is like. It's one of those oh! Damn! That's what it is. It's a shift that happens to you, an epiphany. It's not a conceptual understanding, but a shift in perspective to use a word. It's not a paradigm-shift, as that involves shifting beliefs. This shift is not a shift in beliefs. It's like an anti-paradigm shift, to use a phrase. And you can't force it, it just happens when it happens. It takes a lot of work to convince the Mind that beliefs are not the truth. So, you do need to do a lot of work in Enlightenment. Whatever it takes to get the big crack for you. Beliefs are not good or bad. They are simply here in awareness. The issue is how beliefs are attached to -- how the Mind is trying to connect that belief to you and to reality. That mental relation is the problem. You can still have beliefs. Don't repress your beliefs. Just don't make them YOUR beliefs. This is hard to communicate in language. You gotta see what I’m pointing to. You're still clinging WAY too much and too hard to belief. That's what you got to fix. You're attaching to all those concepts that the Voice is raising. That's what you're gonna stop doing when you get the big crack. Enlightenment theory is counter-weight theory. You're not supposed to believe the counter-weight theory. It's there to loosen up all your beliefs so that the Mind can finally come to see that no beliefs touch Truth. You wanna have the shift that comes from that. And only the Mind can make that shift, you can't consciously make it.

THOUGHTS, BELIEFS, CONCEPTUAL-TRUTH WILL LOSE THEIR ALLURE TO YOU THE MORE ENLIGHTENED YOU BECOME It's hard to realize the limitations of beliefs without exploring that domain thoroughly. I studied all that stuff too. But the point you wanna get to is where you don't cling to beliefs at all. Sure, beliefs are going to come into the Mind, but they will not have the importance to you as they do now. The reason they are so important to you is because the Mind needs to realize that all beliefs are inherently false. That takes a lot of exploration to come to that epiphany. Due to our deep Western Philosophy, we do need a lot of COUNTER-education to become Enlightened, especially if you're a thinking-type of person who clings readily to thoughts with a strong faith in the paradigm of conceptual-truth. What you should be focusing on is existential-truth. The Ego is doing everything it can to keep you from doing that. Why? Because that's the death-knell for the Ego; namely, the day you start privileging existential-truth over conceptual-truth. It's like this. A young man is really attracted to females right? He wants sex and all that. An older man is less driven by sex and less attracted to females. It's like that with thought. Right now you are the young man with thoughts. Thoughts look so luscious to you, right? But you will reach a point that even the most amazing thoughts can move past you and you will not even take notice of them. The thoughts will lose their allure for you, their spell over you. You will see through the mirage of thoughts, beliefs, and conceptual-truth as you become more and more Enlightened.