Joseph Maynor

The Illusion of Ego has free will or at least thinks it has free will. We live with the illusion of free will. So, it's only half of the story that there's no free will. There both is and is not free will. In fact, it's best to work both ends of the paradox between free will vs. no free will.

Yep. And the only relevant question is what's best for you to do with your life.

Because you don't really want to do that. Nobody wants to live that kind of a life. That's a shitty life. The key is to find that source for you that you can track that is a good life for you. Sure, you can live in a monastery if that's authentic to you. But the relevant question and the only relevant questions is, is that what's best for me? And only an individual can decide this for themselves. In other words, the answer comes only inside each person. And people who come up with a great answer for themselves are fortunate in life.

That's interesting. Yeah, what I'm saying is that you can be Enlightened without the theory. You can lose the theory. And that's a cool place to get to. You're not always trying to fit reality into a theory. In fact, people cause themselves a lot of suffering by trying to do that. You just let everything be the way that it is on the one hand, and watch Ego do its thing on the other hand keeping your ideal Vision in mind as a guide.

My vision is to run my life in a very authentic way where I'm creating all my authentic results that I want, and also to contribute back personal development information that I one day hope to get paid for.

Sure. People use Enlightenment and Non-duality to basically avoid going out into the world and turning ideas into results for themselves and for other people. It's can be a form of spiritual bypassing. It can be a way to remain in a comfort mentality in life.

Don't cling so much to your Vision that you start to beat yourself up. Let the lapses happen but always be aiming for better performance over time. Give Vision to Ego, but at the same time don't cling to Vision or to Ego.

On the one hand you are Enlightened, on the other hand the illusion of Ego persists. I find that it's best to work both ends of this paradox. This means that you feed Ego a noble vision on the one hand, but on the other hand you don't cling to Ego or Vision. And this is gonna flip out a lot of people out on here. Just as Life Purpose can be a distraction, so can Enlightenment. Enlightenment can be a distraction. Nobody talks about that. I've written one essay about it.

It takes a lot of systematic Personal Development Work over several years to even get a handle on what you want. But you do get to a point where you can put together a concrete Vision that you want to create for your own life and for others if you do your Personal Development Work systematically.

I find myself not having any interest to debate these kinds of issues anymore. I almost never argue now. What's crazy is that it's always the same questions, the same arguments, just different people. I swear to God, it's the same questions, the same answers, the same positions.

Hang in there. Depression is often temporary and a sunny day follows a cloudy day eventually.

Chess is a cool game. There's a reason it's survived as long as it has. I'm pretty good at Chess, but I get easily butthurt when I make a stupid move that I should have noticed was a stupid move. It's like, "How the f*ck could I have not seen that!" But, yeah, I play a little bit of Chess. I play like a game a week. Sometimes I'll play the computer, sometimes I'll play a friend. Ubuntu Linux has a pretty cool free Chess program that comes already installed with the OS.

Traveling to China taught me a lot about energy. The way they design their architecture is so in harmony with everything. Harmony is what you feel in China. They're tapping into a harmony that is lost on us in the West. In Beijing not only do you have harmony but you have the grand. You have huge architecture. It's like things in Beijing were designed for giants. The Forbidden City is a case in point. Tienanmen Square is another example of this huge, grand, wide open architecture. Also, you can see the Great Wall in Beijing. There's fantastic museums in Beijing. It's one of the few cities that I would like to visit again. If you're interested in Yin and Yang, the Masculine and the Feminine, I would highly recommend that you visit China. The whole culture and architecture and everything just radiates that. I would like to visit Xian as well. Xian is one of the ancient capitals of China. And it's cheap to go to China! It was not expensive at all for me comparatively speaking, and I stayed in Beijing for a little over 2 weeks. Expedia.com is pretty cool if you haven't discovered that yet. You can find out how much a trip is gonna cost and then save up for it. I think my Beijing trip cost me about $3,000 when it was all said and done. And that included everything from the flight to hotel to food to entertainment, etc. That's not bad for a 14 day life changing trip! Your money goes a long way in China. As long as you don't get ripped off or scammed. You should watch some videos before you go to Beijing about common hustles and scams. Try not to take any taxis or tut tuts, they'll rip you off, and they'll be pushy about getting you to use their service. The subway system is really good and logically organized, take the time to figure it out in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway

How so?

If you want success -- show up and you'll be ahead of 85% of people. Show up on time and you'll be ahead of 90% of people. Show up on time with a plan and you'll be ahead of 95% of people. Show up on time with a plan and put it into action and you'll be ahead of 100% of people.

You're an idealist not irrational.

Care to support your conclusory statement with reasons in support? Let me become your student.

Green is a good stage. Green people wanna feel good about the work they do. Green people wanna live with integrity and be real or be assertive as who they are. Look at punk rock culture. Green people wanna make a positive difference to the wider world. Green people tend to hate manipulative, crafty people who are always trying to weasel out something for themselves. Green is operating at a much more noble place than that, see. Green sees the foolishness of being fake and not respecting yourself and your own life first.

I was at Green the longest of all the stages. Say from like my Sophomore year in high school to like my early 30's. I started entering Yellow in my mid 30's.

Exactly what is consciousness? How many things in reality are conscious? Is Awareness conscious? Does every consciousness have an Awareness? Does it make sense to postulate more than one consciousness? Does it make sense to postulate more than one Awareness? Do different consciousnesses belong to the same Awareness? This is all good Contemplation Work for your Enlightenment Work.

You have to know exactly what it is that you want in your life and exactly how you want to contribute to the outside world. That puts everything else into context and resolves a lot of issues. Then there is no more wishy-washy. The only relevant question at that point is will you do what you promise to do. It becomes a question of, "Will you take your ideal vision and transform it into reality?" See, that's a very different kind of question. Notice it has nothing to do with theory at all.

When I was in Beijing China I saw a huge hole designed into a skyscraper for energy to move through.

That's a great video. I benefited by listening to it twice as I do with almost all Leo's videos. It's weird that as soon as you say anything about Buddhism all these people come out with their pitchforks. It's totally surprising but not surprising at the same time. People are clinging way too much to ideology in Enlightenment Work. See, people don't realize that teachings are only a guide for you to find the truth, not an ideology to wrap your life around. You might think of teachings as training wheels that come off at a certain point. Nobody rides a bike with training wheels on it forever, unless they have some other problems.

Yep. That's what makes it an illusion.