Joseph Maynor

I'm doing the Golden Triangle by myself for 2 weeks. I'll be staying in Dehli but traveling around too. I don't plan to meet with anyone on this trip. This is my first trip to India, so I wanna just soak it all in by myself. I plan to do a few trips to India during the course of my life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(India)

Thank you for posting this. You're a man of your word. I didn't expect someone to actually follow through with a promise, but you did.

I don't want to respond because someone might accuse me of being overly argumentative which has happened before on here. I'll leave this alone. Message me if you really care to know. I have no desire to be overly argumentative on here.

I don't believe in objective stages in Enlightenment work. That's all subjective. You can only really use your own Path as a metric, everything else is merely hearsay from someone else. All I can do is tell the truth from my perspective. If that sits well with you, then great. If not, then ignore me. But there's really no sense in trying to prove someone's perspective is right or wrong objectively. That's a pointless game that has a bad outcome. But at the same time I think it's useful for me to honestly share my perspective even if others disagree with me vehemently. Maybe I disagree with them vehemently too, but that's no matter to me. At the end of the day, I live within my Path and my perspective only. We can really only play show-and-tell from our own perspectives. And those perspective couldn't be more different from my experience if we tried to engineer them to be. It's called pluralism: acceptance and tolerance of perspectives that differ from one's own. I'm cool with pluralism -- it's actually a value that I try to uphold.

In my experience it's for noobs. I went through it. You're fine to disagree with me, but you can't really disprove me. I'm speaking from my experience.

That's funny that you said you were communicating with trees. I don't even want to tell you my story about my experiences with that same thing. Thank God it was a phase I went through right around the time I was losing my religious beliefs and doing my initial shifts in Enlightenment Work a couple of years ago. But I had some major mystical experiences like that around that time. I think there is a kind of mystical stage that you can go through when you're first starting to transcend the Ego.

I love this.

I'm surprised you are asking this. No, insanity is not necessary on the Path. Maybe for noobs, temporarily, who are first going through initial Ego Transcendence experiences.

You're the only person I've ever seen on here that has a full appreciation of thinking in terms of paradox. People give lip service to paradox, sure -- but they don't live it, not really; it's not part of their day to day thinking. This is like music to my eyes. I can't quite believe it.

You think? Common sense is not so common.

You can't love everything. But what you can do is accept everything that has already happened. The Ego-Mind can never be impartial and love everything, that's a load of horsesh*t. But you can definitely become much more tolerant than you already are by work transcending the Ego-Mind, which does not mean killing or removing the Ego-Mind -- it means seeing through the Ego-Mind.

Because you don't really have no free will. That's a mere thought only. The Mind loves to project that thought and think it's found something really profound, but it's actually irrelevant to your life. You'll still put your pants on one leg at a time like you always have before.

Giving the best you can to another while also giving the best to yourself within the connection of the relationship by sharing intimacy and experiences.

An entry that I recently wrote in my Journal that you might appreciate: Nobody wants a real Enlightenment teacher around. It's too devastating to your cherished beliefs and your Ego-Mind will resist it. Teaching Transcendence of the Mind is like asking to be on the business end of a horse kick to the mouth. What people want is either entertainment, distraction, or corroboration of their strongly held beliefs in an Enlightenment teacher. But these are not real Enlightenment teachers. A real Enlightenment teacher is a gadfly, a Socrates, someone who you probably can't stand, and somebody whose motive you probably misunderstand -- someone who eventually either gets killed or thrown out of the community. It's just the way things must be.

I resonate with this. You've got enough work to do on your own life. Shore that up first and then worry about other things. Never neglect your own life, that's what's right under your nose. That's what matters most. A lot of intellectuals hide out in theory because they are avoiding working on their own life. I know because I did that for many years in fact. I regret doing that though, sort of. There were pros and cons to it. Make your own day to day great -- and then expand outward from an abundance that spills out your own life if you have that abundance. But don't neglect your own life to save everybody else, that's a trap in my view. That's the trap of the martyr.

It's weird I've always kind of attracted criticism and almost relished people criticizing me. And I would always beat them in a debate and make them look like idiots. I don't do this much as I used to like in my 20's. When I was in college I was really bad like this. I would debate anybody and not care what they thought of me or what anybody thought of me. I had no shame. I only had shame if I thought I said something stupid or if someone actually proved that I was stupid or wrong. But I've always been way more intuitive than almost everybody else, so this has rarely been a problem for me. But people have been jealous of me and have always desired to knock me own a peg, but they always have to resort to taking a cheap-shot to do so. I used to raise my hand in class and say the most controversial things with no shame. All the other sheep in the class were beneath me insofar as I was concerned. I was a real Army of One. I've always been kind of a Socrates, kind of an iconoclast, kind of a gadfly.

I pay it no mind. I could give a sh*t less actually.

No. But performing in front of an audience can benefit from a healthy Ego otherwise you don't have the confidence needed to do performance art. Playing jazz is a performance art. You gotta have a lot of balls to stand on a bandstand and play jazz in front of an audience. The same holds true for any band or musician who plays live. Without a healthy Ego you're not gonna be able to pull that off well. And I'm speaking from experience from having played jazz trumpet live. Plus you're gonna catch sh*t from other musicians sometimes and their inflated Egos and comments, so you need a big Ego yourself to rise above that criticism. Otherwise you'll quit or go away. You gotta be prepared for people to tell you you suck or that they don't like what you're doing musically. It can be harsh.

Ooh. You found one of my favorite videos by Eckhart Tolle. That's a good one. I'll try to find another video to match that one. You're smart, I can tell. You're not getting caught up in all these mental traps that a lot of other people do on the Path.

I wish you would share that here with all of us. That would be most ideal.

No, I want you to tell me about it. I'm all ears. It's the elephant in the room regarding your whole belief structure.

How do you know all these things about God? Did you go up to the Mountain and get tablets? Maybe you had a little pow-wow with God up there.

I liked the old simple black tee. Those are my go to shirts. I have then in different colors. Very basic, cool, and classic. White looks good on me but man does it stain easily, so I don't really wear white shirts. The closest thing I wear to white is baby blue. I love baby blue in a shirt. It looks great on me too. You don't wanna over do it though. That's what I love about black, you can get away with overdoing black. Black is very versatile as a color, and it's probably my favorite color. Black is also a power color too without being a power color.