Joseph Maynor

Well, there's only one way to find out, and no one has come back from it to tell us what's what. So, here we are.

You can say whatever you want, that won't stop your death. Death is a funny thing that way, you can't take anything with you. It's the Great Wiping Away.

You will indeed die, make no mistake about it. There's two certainties in life, death and taxes.

You guys crack me up for all the wrong reasons lolz. Oy vey. Hehe. Oy.

A belief is a linear statement (a type of thought) purported to be true or reasonable to accept by the Ego-Mind; or a linear statement that the Ego-Mind has a vested interest in assuming is true or reasonable to accept for whatever reason.

@Zetxil I always capitalize Mind, Ego, Enlightenment, and Ego-Mind. But for some reason I never capitalize being which is odd. It's just how I roll.

The Ego is a concept but it has utilitarian use or what you might call a "cash value" because it can be used in actual situations to raise consciousness about what happened or what you’re doing. It’s a concept that may not be true per se, but it’s useful so we stick it in our knowledge grab-bag and bring it out every now and again to solve actual problems situations in contexts.

Yep, because He’s a concept — or more accurately, a family of often more or less but not always related concepts.

Yes, but in many matters and in many contexts reasonable persons can arrive at different conclusions regarding the same issues. The Mind likes to think of truth as this oversimplified thing, a quality that the Mind projects on a lot of concepts and scenarios. The Mind likes to abstract this “truth” as an analogy to very specific empirically verifiable facts. But there’s a hidden analogy being used by the Mind there. It’s that abstraction and projection that the Mind does.

What is truth? Another word with associated meaning(s) that you decide to cling to or not?

Common sense is not so common. I still appreciate your answer though. I will say this — you decide how to use words and their associated meanings.

Sometimes you can chose the result. If you choose to cut a carrot in half, that will result in that carrot being cut in half. If you choose to go talk to a pretty girl, that might be more of a gamble. It could go either way, right. So this depends on the situation and the context. If you choose to run for president, that would be more of a gamble than the pretty girl. That one you can probably bet on losing. But who knows, you might win too right. Look at Donnie Boy Trump. That proves that anything is possible, right?

You have a certain charisma that's charming.

You can do it too. It takes a couple of years of working on it though. I can attest that it is possible to make progress. I didn't like Enlightenment when I first heard about it, I thought it was hogwash. But then I just kept coming back to it and coming back to it, and every time I would come back to it I would get a little shift that would excite me more about it, and then more and more shifts, like that. It's not one big shift, it's a series of small shifts and small insights that pile up over time. But then after 3 or 4 years, it looks like one big shift, but it didn't really happen like that. It's definitely kind of a journey that ones goes through.

No, I'm actually a freelance paralegal. I have my own little self-employed business. But I do intend to do a career change to become a personal development teacher. I actually enjoy working in and studying law, but my passion is more aligned with working on and teaching personal development. I actually study law on my own a little bit every day because it's so fascinating to me and very useful to know.

Very nice list. Leo exposed me to Enlightenment work in 2015 and I kind of just worked on it and worked on it for a few years now and have made progress which has kept me interested. Sure I have Ego flare-ups, but my level of peace of mind is so much better than it was before I started doing Enlightenment work. I used to be one neurotic dude, with monkey-mind always chattering away. Now I experience a lot of my day with no Mind at all. My Mind is very tame and drowsy now, it likes to sleep. I used to be caught up in the Mind without realizing that I didn't need to be. And I think that's the thing that causes a lot of neurosis is that people don't have a space between themselves and their Mind. They don't know that there's such a space. And I think that alone is one of the great insights that one can learn by doing Enlightenment work. It just takes you out of that whole Mind-Matrix so you can have some peace of Mind. And then if you want to go into the Mind you can go into the Mind, but you can do it more consciously without being trapped in the Mind.

Very nicely put. This is an area where I find that a lot of people studying Enlightenment do not seem to understand well because the Mind likes to have only a single "one right view" and cling to that view in a context-independent way which defeats flexibility and nuance and context-dependence. I look forward to writing more about this issue myself.

Thank God. The whole tone and vibe of this place is elevated when Leo is around.

I agree with this. Surprisingly, it's these very simple things that a lot of people don't understand because they're not taught well by Enlightenment teachers. You can't explain away right action with Enlightenment Work. That's like trying to explain away your cardiovascular system with Enlightenment Work.

Well, ok. You don't need a thought to know you're breathing per se, but there does need to be a kind of awareness on breathing for breathing to even be noticed. This is actually a very seemingly nuanced issue that I need to think about more and observe about more.

Yeah, but are you really conscious of breathing unless the thought of breathing is also present?

Careful. Surrender can also be a clinging to surrender. Surrender and no surrender is a mental duality. You don't want to cling to either horn of that artificial mind-engineered and mind-created dilemma.

Teachings are like place-holders for the Ego-Mind as you work to (1) locate being, (2) transcend the Ego, and (3) transcend the Mind. You don't learn to ride a bike straight away, you need training-wheels to start. Teachings are like those training-wheels. You can't omit the training-wheels, they're necessary. But eventually, when you transcend the Mind especially, the training-wheels can be removed and you can just ride the bike by almost a kind of magic.

No, but I think Ethics is not understood right in the way Enlightenment is currently taught. Zen has some insights here that I hope soon to be able to explicate in my writings. On the one hand there is no Ethics, that's true, but on the other hand there is. In Zen they talk about this as the contrast between soft and hard teachings. Right action can be real. In many contexts it's legit to consider right action. But you have to be smart and not cling to this in the wrong way. This is worthwhile to listen to as a little introduction:

I agree with this. But there comes a time when the training-wheels need to come off the bicycle.