Joseph Maynor

I don't know what the equivalent for women is to a man growing a beard is. Hmm?

I respect any man who can grow a nice, thick beard. it's cool. Mine gets kinda scraggly when it gets longer and I have to trim it,

Yep. I didn't burn through that until I was around 39 years old.

Thanks for this. I will consider this carefully. Nice insight.

Your life. Only your life is right under your nose.

Areas that you might do personal development work in. Lemme list my 10: (In no certain order) Enlightenment Work Diet Exercise Scheduling Small Picture Life Purpose Work* Big Picture Life Purpose Work** Conceptual Understanding Work Projects International Cultural Travel Relationships *Small Picture Life Purpose work deals with identifying your Actual Problem Situations (APS) in your own life and setting up a daily routine that targets those. **Big Picture Life Purpose work is about aligning or re-aligning your career (your way to make money) with your strengths, passion, and life's calling.

I think all this stuff is only relevant to the extent that it improves the quality of your life, including but not limited to Enlightenment work.

I get it, I just don't see how it's relevant to Enlightenment work.

I'd be interested in a comparison of how Leo's metaphysics compares and contrasts with Teal Swan's metaphysics. I can't help but see a strong similarity in personality between the two of them.

Yeah. Me too. Belief actually means very little to me. Friendship and kindness means more to me now than belief. And of course, all relationships require tolerance, which I'm learning about as I enter more and more relationships with the aim to make them healthy and last. What you feed a tree is more important than what you say to it with your mouth. And I make sure my trees have the vitamins and the sunshine they need to love me back and flourish. Anyway, I'm getting a little mystical here, sorry. I have a few trees in my house that are like my pets. They don't have a mouth, so they don't ask me any questions, but they still tell me what they need somehow. Usually it's more sunshine, vitamins, or water. Sometimes they tell me they need to be rotated so the sunlight hits them evenly all around. Sometimes they tell me that they need their dead leaves removed.

Good chatting with you. I like your respectful and thoughtful vibe. It inspires me to be more that way myself instead of a know-it-all ass, which I can be sometimes haha.

Yeah, I admit I find the Zen approach very complete. And I didn't even know about Zen until relatively recently, but my views were already very much in line with Zen when I started learning about it. It was like this weird thing where I realized, "oh sh*t, there's a teaching that actually resonates with how I think about Enlightenment right there under my nose." And this is weird because for most of my life any philosophy I've encountered has been wrong in some sense. But Zen was right in line with my approach to Enlightenment -- I don't wanna use the word "view" of Enlightenment.

I didn't say it's impossible, it's just irrelevant to Enlightenment work. The same way that mathematics is irrelevant to Enlightenment work.

I don't think reconciling perspectives has anything to do with locating being and transcending the Ego-Mind. That's that Ken Wilber metaphysics -- this idea that everything needs to be "integrated". That's a noble project, but it doesn't have anything to do with Enlightenment work in my view.

Clinging to metaphysics makes it almost impossible to transcend the Mind. It's like living in a liquor store while trying to quit drinking.

What do you mean "being has no beginning"? See, that's more metaphysics. Mouths and Minds love to talk about being as if it's a coffee table or something.

See, I don't like this phrase "includes everything within it". That's a kind of idealism, a kind of metaphysical thing to say -- it's a belief. Being just is. Any though is spoken by a mouth and at best can be a kind of talk about being. There's this assumption that the Mind can know these very fundamental, essential truths about being, which is like trying to capture air in a net. It's just not necessary at the end of the day. I could see if it were pragmatically useful to cling to such beliefs, but it's not. It's actually a way for the Mind to cling to beliefs that block transcendence of the Mind.

I wouldn't even call it a state. It's just that I can see where the Mind interferes in things. I'm hypersensitive to the influence of the Mind.

I resonate with more of a Zen approach which is a transcendence of the Mind-Matrix. In Zen, clinging to metaphysics is looked at as a trap. Leo is very into clinging to metaphysics. He thinks reality has a logos to it. That's metaphysics. Thinking of reality as a mind is metaphysics. In Zen, that is looked at as delusion -- as being trapped in the Mind-Matrix.

You and Leo seem to share a similar view about Enlightenment, at least on that point.

Yeah, but I don't really see Leo ever think in terms of paradox. It's always his very linear way of presenting his beliefs. He thinks he has very specific linear truths about reality. Hold on, I wrote down a couple of things that Leo actually wrote: "The most amazing thing about reality is that it is intelligible. Nothing is arbitrary. Human logic is a tiny splinter off God's logic. It's not just patterns and survival. I'm talking about understanding the metaphysical structure of reality and why it is the way it is. There is no accident or randomness to it. It has a logos." -- Leo Gura "Things are just as they are. They are a very specific way, a very deliberate and intelligent way. Everything is intelligible. It is possible to become conscious of why every hair on your arm exists exactly as it does and not otherwise. It is possible to understand why the whole universe exists. Profound awakening required of course. This is no ordinary reason. You must penetrate the very structure of God. It has a logic to it." -- Leo Gura There's no paradox in any of this. This is "I know what's what and I can tell it to you very clearly in linear statements." This is the kind of knowledge that you could write a textbook on and say, this is the "one right answer", as if Enlightenment is like Chemistry or something.

This looks like you're solving some kind of math problem Leo. Just look at the feel and vibe of what you're doing. I wanna write Q.E.D. after your "proof". I studied Engineering too for a while man -- I took all those math classes. Y'aint gonna prove being with no syllogism. Somehow you seem very trapped in a logical mind Leo. It's almost like you're experiencing a huge Ego-Backlash but don't realize it yet. It's like your Ego is saying, "f*ck you, I ain't going nowhere." That's ironic because I know you made the below video railing on the Rationalist Paradigm. This one: And I almost feel you kinda forgot about this video, where I thought you were on the right track:

This is kind of pretentious, no? Whose "more and more"? That's like saying, "that's alright bubs, one day you're get it."

It's interesting to me that in Leo's earlier videos he seems to be against religion -- yet now he seems to have turned religious. It's almost like he's always secretly wanted religion and has now found it.

There are no doubts within silence indeed. There is no "need to conceptually know" within silence either.