Joseph Maynor

Those who know for sure don’t come back to tell us.

I do agree with you that the animal lens is an interesting lens to look at ourselves from. I just found a book on Physical Anthropology that I've been reading lately.

Good. I'm glad you've started to get serious about getting a sustainable Daily Routine/ Schedule. I think my first course as a personal development teacher is gonna be on the topic of scheduling because it's rather complex and I've been wrestling and experimenting with it for many years. A lot of people just don't know how to develop a sustainable Daily Routine/ Schedule for themselves. How do I know this? Because I've been one of those people. I just stuck with it and kept plugging away at it for like 20 years, experimenting with all kinds of different things. But once I got a system for my Daily Routine/ Schedule set that was palatable to me and sustainable for me, it changed my life dramatically in terms of how I feel and what I get done in a day. There's a lot that goes into this. Video on point to watch:

What's the lesson here?

What is God? What’s the criterion for something to fit the concept of God? See, you just pushed the issue from one vague concept to another vague concept. What if I said Enlightenment is boobelyboobely. You wouldn’t buy that right? Somebody is gonna go around proselytizing that Enlightenment is boobelyboobely now haha.

I’m not so sure about that anymore actually. I think Enlightenment is a notoriously unclear concept, yet people talk about it pretending they understand it clearly. I’ve been around long enough to realize that. Do I get a cookie hehe? I’ve never seen people spend so much time preoccupied with something that they don’t fully understand as I have with Enlightenment. And I’m a fan of Enlightenment Work, so don’t get me wrong. It’s a little bit tricky though.

But don’t we need to know what criterion we are looking for to classify something? You wouldn’t classify something as cannabis without having some criteria about what cannabis is. You wouldn’t classify something as a giraffe without having some criteria about what a giraffe is. But then we ask is so and so Enlightened and we don’t even know what Enlightenment is or what criteria to measure it by. It’s like asking, Is John Doe boobelyboobely? How the hell would we know? You don’t even know what boobelyboobely means? You gotta know with a certain degree of definiteness what the category is to even be able to assess whether something fits that category or not. A snake is not a human. How do we know that? Because we have pretty clear criteria for what a snake is and what a human is and we can readily discern whether an animal fits one category or the other. An anaconda is an amazing animal but it’s not a human, we can see that without a second thought.

What does it mean to be Enlightened?

Being highly organized.

Seeeing yourself as an animal is only one conceptual lens to look at yourself from. You can also look at yourself as being other than an animal simultaneously. You might summarize this as the Paradox of Being an Animal and Not Being an Animal, and you gotta work both ends of this paradox.

You seem to be getting a lot out of it right now. That's good.

You might suffer from low self-esteem issues. You're like a crab that pulls yourself back down into the bucket. You know Leo's crabs in the bucket story? This is where when a crab tries to escape the bucket the other crabs in the bucket pull him back down. You seem to do that to yourself. You do these cycles where you build yourself up to a certain point, and then the crab pulls you back down into the bucket and you kinda self-destruct and then you kinda rinse and repeat in this cycle. It's like an oscillating cycle for you. You gotta find out what that crab is for you that keeps pulling you back down. And the reason I say this is because I've seen this pattern with you over and over again.

For me it was like a transformation that naturally happened to me. I never set out to get out of theory. It just happened. Once I realized what Enlightenment is, it happened. Because the theory is only a guide to becoming Enlightened. Living the theory is not what being Enlightened is.

The main problem is defining ourselves with linear statements which get turned into beliefs. Whatever language can tell us is one thing and whatever I am is another thing. It really comes down to an apples and oranges kind of thing. We have all these meanings that we think define me. Really? It's an unintended consequence of language. On the one hand we have useful knowledge (the pro of language), but on the other hand we try to define ourselves with our language (the con of language). The error is in defining ourselves with factual intention in language and then being programmed with beliefs that follow from that practice.

It works but it's very advanced personal development work. It's basically re-programming work. Once you understand the contexts in which it's reasonable to re-frame things, positive thinking follows from that. One of these, and this is not the only one, is there are pros and cons to everything. So at a minimum you can find the pros in any circumstance.

If you think about it, this is a personal development book. This book is very similar to Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Each of those bullets that Branden talks about is just a topic of Personal Development. The first one is "Be Conscious" or something like that. Well that's just your Enlightenment Work, right. That's your mindfulness work. And there's one on Self-Acceptance. That's a huge issue in and of itself. I think I did all the sentence completion exercises for the Self-Acceptance pillar. That was a major phase in my early personal development work.

Now you know how to rest as Awareness.

This is the danger of theory.

There are pros and cons to everything.