Joseph Maynor

I'm not sure. What I do know is that it's not me because the *conscious me* can desire the stereo to stop and the stereo defies it. I'm starting to *believe* that the entire egoic life is like this stereo -- running on its own! The egoic self is like an animal -- and the only way that you get the animal to shape up is to trick the ego to kill itself.

Meeting people is fine. But remember Personal Development has to be done by you. Nobody can do your push-ups for you. You can do this stuff without meeting others. It's probably best not to meet others personally. Just watch the videos, read some books, do the work and exercises, and participate on here. Ask all your questions on here. Many people are too afraid to fully participate on here. If you don't ask, you don't get feedback. That's what really slows you down. Your best knowledge is going to be epiphanies not theory anyway. You need to experience those shifts that come from exposure and hard work over a period of time. Personal Development is a life-long pursuit. I wouldn't even call it a marathon. Marathons are too short. I've been doing personal development work heavily for 4 or 5 years now. I've been doing it longer, but I want to be conservative. There's a difference between dabbling in personal development and doing heavy personal development work. You need to be doing heavy personal development work to get sustainable change, results, and success. Dabbling here or there might pique your interest, but it's not going to engage you in the way you need to be engaged to make sustainable changes in your life. The results you want in life have to be caused by your actions. So, you need to become the person that loves to take those actions. It's really that simple from a big-picture strategy standpoint. But you can think about this all day long, and dream about it, but that's not enough -- you gotta wake up every morning hungry to create it, that's the crucial difference. All the theory is supposed to lead you to becoming hungry to take the actions necessary to cause your dream life to become a reality. Video on point to watch:

They go together. You want your life purpose to be natural, to flow out of you. But you also have to construct your life purpose and commit to it everyday. Life purpose will flow out of the authentic you that you are discovering with your enlightenment work. Listen to your intuition. Try to find out what your top values are. Try to go inside and listen to that intuitive voice inside of you that knows a lot about what you could do with this life. Not everybody needs to become a monk. You can be enlightened and be a normal person. Leo is biased towards being a yogi, and that's fine, but realize that. You are not Leo. Don't try to copy him in all respects. You need to find you and then do you. Not all enlightened people need to sit in a cave and meditate all day. You can be enlightened and run a business like me or Leo or anyone else. You just gotta find yourself and hone your life around what you find. You don't really know yourself well yet, that's your biggest problem. Enlightenment helps you clear away some of the debris from getting clearer about who you are. But don't get so addicted to enlightenment work that you ignore life purpose work and the more traditional self-help work. There are three legs to the Personal Development stool -- (1) enlightenment work, (2) life purpose work, (3) traditional self-help work. You gotta cultivate all three of these areas to get your life together and moving forward. A sturdy foundation for your life rests on the cultivation of all three of these areas. Videos on point to watch:

I started realizing more and more that the Mind-Matrix, Monkey Mind, and Ego are not part of me as I once thought they were. The Mind makes you think it is you. It hunkers down front and center in your Being, imposing itself by setting up rabbit-holes everywhere, causing what we call "Monkey Mind", setting up the Ego Paradigm, and tricking you into thinking "the voice" is you. I discovered this doing "Do Nothing" meditation when I saw that there are times that thoughts disappear, yet I still exist, so I am not the Mind. The Mind is not me. The Mind is more like an intruder. You gotta be mindful of how the Mind augments Being. Be mindful of these augmentations and how they are attached to or clung to. Video on point to watch:

A lot of people ground their need to know and need to believe in Enlightenment, which turns it into another dogma. Spirituality is best when it is free from all that clinging. You wanna be unmoored spiritually, not trying to set an anchor. That will make you miserable and defeat your purpose.

Science is concerned primarily with testable theories, which puts it squarely within the arms of the Mind-Matrix. This is not bad, it's just pragmatic. The Mind-Matrix evolved to be pragmatic. Problems can arise when the Mind-Matrix tries to solve non-pragmatic problems.

I used to sit for hours and hours solving math problems. I loved it. I almost majored in math.

I don't talk about it with anybody. Only on here.

Curious. Video on point to watch:

I am making a lot of progress in Enlightenment. I am living as Being more and more. Being in the sense of being mindful of reality and the variety of mental augmentations. Being able to separate the two. I feel totally liberated and happy. I'm also doing heavy personal development work, but I've been chasing the rabbit-hole of Enlightenment too. Awareness alone is curative. Let the shifts happen. It's amazing.

Any hypothesis is a thought, not Being. You gotta find Being stripped of all thought. Can you locate that? Find that. Hint -- you can find this when you meditate. Notice that there are times where reality sticks around even when all thoughts go away. Being is not dependent on thoughts at all.

Enlightenment is liberation from the Mind. It will blow up the outside world and the inside world. Make a distinction between what though is versus what it's pretending to be. Be able to pull the Mind-augmentation out of Being so you can see them side by side. Awareness alone is curative.

You don't want to conceptualize things in advance. The key is to just Be. If you conceptualize too much in advance, you will set up too many presumptive judgments, dualities, and limiting-beliefs. There is no you to act. But paradoxically, you exist as Being, so the Tao that flows through you is your act. Let Divine Creativity flow though Being, through the Tao. Reside in the Tao, lose the small Self. When you act without being tricked, limited, or constrained in advance by the Mind -- you will have no more perplexities. Being lacks no knowledge. The Tao needs nothing.

Awareness is used in two different ways. There's a difference between awareness in the sense of paying attention, and awareness as a synonym for Being. Sometimes I hear people use awareness to mean Being, which is very different to the sense of awareness meaning something like mindfulness.

Curious. I think this is one way that going back to the oldies kind of trips us moderns up. Indian Philosophers thought that true existence had to be unchanging. The idea that the Self needs to be unchanging is a duality. Being just is. No thought could issue such an order on Being, or define or limit Being in this manner. The Self does not *need to be* unchanging. This is existentially false and a dualistic trap. This is an example of where Epistemology needs to trump tradition. But of course, I don't cling to this opinion too tightly. Video on point to watch:

You gotta get to the point where the mind works in your service, not the mind using you for its service. So, conceptualization isn't the problem, it's how conceptualization or duality is clung to, attached to, or interpreted that's the problem. Guns don't kill people, we do. Knowledge is needed, and so is knowledge of knowledge. This is where Philosophy can become helpful in navigating these balancing acts. You do the mind, don't let the mind do you. You do duality, don't let duality do you. You do conceptualization, don't let conceptualization do you. You do you, don't let you do you. Don't get trapped in the Mind-Matrix. The Ego is very tricky. God has no distinctions or limitations. You do the Mind-Matrix, don't let the Mind-Matrix do you. Use the Mind-Matrix as a CAD program to design your life. This is possible. Make awesome lemonade out of the lemons. This is the best strategy. The Mind-Matrix is an awesome simulator for designing and programming-in your entire future. Conceptualization can be good. Watch your presumptive valuations. Duality is neither good nor bad inherently. You use duality, don't let duality use you. Video on point to watch:

There is an intuition guiding you if you have ears to hear it. Clarify that. Let that guide your Spirituality. That is where your Muses live. I've always had very strong intuition and have followed it well. Intuition is the voice of God. So, you have to realize that Being is *alive* and fine-tune your ears to hear it. Intuition speaks -- find it and track it like a bloodhound. Videos on point to watch:

Being cannot be put into words, but I'll bite. Keep in mind that all language is a duality, and so is all thought. Imagine seeing all of the ways that the mind augments reality, and then imagine *living in* the residue when all of that is released or clung to much more loosely. It's hard to *see* Being if you are tightly stuck in the Ego Paradigm. You have to understand how the mind colors reality, and then you have to separate *yourself* from all of that coloration. The end result of this work is Being. And Being just is. Trying to explain Being in words is like trying to communicate the joy of eating a candy bar to somebody born without taste buds. And the attempt to do so may cause more harm than good because people would cling to the ideas of Being, which is 100 miles away from what Being is. Even to use the word Being or to say that Being is, we are dealing in dualities. Being is no-thing. But this is a duality too. If we're gonna communicate in language, we have to use the limitations of the mind. Duality is the limitation of language and of the mind when we are pointing thought at Being. It's like 2-dimensional space trying to capture 3-dimensional space. By arms-lengthing the mind, the Ego dissolves into Being. This is accomplished by raising Awareness. Awareness is seeing through all of the Ego's traps like a magician seeing through his own magic tricks -- understanding how the Ego works to conceal Being. When the ego expands outward by opening up enough, it dissolves into Being. Let the Ego Paradigm crumble due to its own weight, and feel the relief and release from that. Then, you might be at the doorstep of fully *seeing* and appreciating Being. You get to Being by breaking through Ego. Videos on point to watch:

I might agree with you. It looks like I probably do. I'm talking about what Being and nothingness reference. But even that is a duality. Language is a duality. Rather than your "nothingness" -- I prefer "no-thing-ness." Nothingness sounds too much like a belief. No-thing-ness gets at the non-dual aspect of Being better than nothingness does. This is my preference of course, not the absolute truth. Belief is not reducible to thought or to duality. Even saying "Being is One" is a duality. Oneness implies a duality, it implies a not-oneness. Once the Mind-Matrix takes a slice with duality, even if it carves with the finesse of Bobby Flay, augmentation of Being is necessarily effected; fantasies are born.

Know How to Turn Your Goals Into Tasks, and Then How to Triage Those Tasks to Fit Into Your Days You need to keep and make a written task list that gets triaged and revised daily. The clipboard that contains this written list needs to become your new constant companion. Everyday, I do a 30 minute task triage session. I put all my goals and tasks on 3x5 cards and spread them out on my table. Then, I order the cards for how I am going to work that day. This is called triaging tasks. I also keep a list in MS Word of all my goals and tasks, which gets revised daily. After I do my daily triage session with the cards, I run to the computer to revise my goal list and print it out. The goal list then goes in my clipboard. The clipboard goes on my desk and guides my daily actions. When I complete something, I cross it off the list. This takes about 30 minutes per day to implement, but it is so important. Make sure to make new 3x5 cards and throw away completed cards as needed. The cards and the written list work in tandem. And you need a clipboard too. Keep that clipboard right next to you when you work. All your life tasks go on the list and cards too, not just your work. Anything that needs action taken is included in this system. The Ego wants you to be off-point: that's its best trap.

This is the battle between the Lower Self and Higher Self. This is the key dilemma of life. The Ego is in cahoots with the Lower Self. The Monkey Mind is in cahoots with the Lower Self. The Mind Matrix is in cahoots with the Lower Self. Your job is to say no to the Lower Self and yes to the Higher Self, and that's what Personal Development and Enlightenment enable you to do. This is what Awareness enables you to do. This is why you hear people talk about Raising Awareness so much. When you have high enough Awareness, all the power of the Ego, the Monkey Mind, and the Mind Matrix melt away. But this path to Awareness is a true path: You need instruction, you need a teacher, you need to want to raise your Awareness. And the only way for the Higher Self to take the reins of your life consistency and over the long-term is if you can jailbreak Being from the Mind. Think of Being as a cell phone and Mind as the operating system on the Phone. You need to jailbreak the operating system from your phone. That's a good way to describe what the process of Personal Development and Enlightenment is. Videos on point to watch:

I've done it. I'm going to start doing it again. Here's how I do it. Turn the heat up to pretty hot, then turn the water down all the way to cold. And stay under the water for 20 seconds. I would spin around under the shower-head so that water went all over my body, face, head, arms, back, etc. It was a good practice. Then I would go work-out after that. That was a good little routine I had.

Here's the key question: Are you Being right now? Can you be it right now? Forget about thoughts or memories. The Psychedelics might point you to Being, but Being should stick. I'm starting to worry that these drugs are giving wrong beliefs and notions about what Being is. Being is no-thing, the object of no belief. All beliefs that point at Being too literally die on the vine.

If you want to remain true to the truth of no self, you gotta be completely silent. Try this model on for size -- You are a self-aware field of no-thingness. Do you see the duality here, but also the pointing function of these words? When you know the destination, is is easier to appreciate all the *cute* belief-scaffolding we have.

It might be that the "strong ego" has more chutzpah to pursue Enlightenment. It takes a lot of hard work to get real enlightenment shifts. Of course, I pursued the non-chemical route. I don't believe you can become enlightened without a lot of hard work. You need a lot of theory, instruction, guidance, and sticktuitiveness to boot. If you are just sitting on your ass waiting for something to come to you, y'aint gonna get anywhere with Enlightenment. This is because Self-Inquiry alone takes a lot of work. And then you need to see the problem of duality fully, which is not something you can pick up quickly. Enlightenment has to stew in you for a while, and you gotta be stirring the pot the entire time. Ever make rissotto? Well, you gotta stir like that for as long as it takes.