Joseph Maynor

That's kinda what Yellow is. Just like Red, Yellow is interested in solving problems and making things happen. Yellow is like a cerebral, more conscious Red.

But Enlightenment is paradign shattering as well. I still recall my first Dark Night of the Soul and how brutal that was.

Yes and no. That’s why it’s tricky. It’s not one or the other. Yes in the sense that it can get you focused inwards. No in the sense that it can cause you to become massively addicted and distracted. People who think weed is not addictive have really sold us a goose egg for whatever motivation they have to do so. Weed is incredibly addictive and can lead to all kinds of distractions as well. But there are some amazing things about weed that can can help you with Personal Development Work. Weed makes you very introspective. I call weed the Philosopher’s Drug. You can do self-inquiry like a champ on weed. I’m ready to stop smoking weed 100% now, but I’ve gotten the full benefit from weed. Quitting is a very personal choice. It’s not like weed is either all good or all bad, it depends on the context of who you’re talking about. And then even in that specific life you’re talking about, weed has its pros and cons. Weed can also get you very distracted into art in various forms from playing video games to playing a musical instrument to just sitting around watching TV even. Weed draws you into Thought and Experience a.k.a. Maya and therefore can function as a tool of the Devil.

Oy oy oy oy oy! People think creativity is such a valuable thing. You’re gonna have a real shocker when you realize that creativity and Ego are bosom buddies.

ON COURAGE Courage comes from letting go of Ego paradoxically. Courage just is being 100% honest all time. Courage is no bullsh*t. When you realize Maya can't hurt you, all fear is lost. The more you need courage is the more you're attached to Ego. The most courageous thing you can do is not lie. When you realize Ego is illusory and can't hurt you, you're not gonna cow-tow to it.

Great answer. The idea that the true Self has a linear control over Thought and Experience is the bad assumption. There is a certain tangential, non-linear sense in which keen Awareness has an effect on the illusion, but it’s not specific or linear at all. That’s why the illusion is the illusion and why the true Self is outside the illusion.

Ego is a problem because it’s an illusion that leads to suffering. Reality doesn’t contain Ego. Ego is a forgetting of the true Self. Ego should be fully seen through and not identified with. That doesn’t mean you try to fight Ego with Ego though. The way to fight Ego is to see through the illusion of Ego very keenly through self-observation and keen-mindfulness work. The way to solve the problem of Ego is to fully realize the true Self.

But that one doesn’t have the annoying meme font that everyone seems to use.

Make a keep log where you record your go to sleep time and wake up time for 30 days. Don’t start time when you go to bed but rather when you go to sleep.

Meditation is primarily a means to an end of mindfulness work. If you get too attached to the feelings of meditation but you’re not doing the mindfulness work while you’re meditating then that could be a problem. If you are doing the mindfulness work when you meditate, then I would say there are much worse addictions to have — like virtually all addictions.

Instead of giving you an ‘answer’ which means nothing, this is the sustainable answer that I wanna respond with. This came outta my Journal. HOW TO DO ENLIGHTENMENT WORK Self-observation and keen-mindfulness are the way to do it. Always be asking yourself, ‘what is literally here vs. what do I take to be real?’ You’ll start to see the discrepancy between those and thus the illusion of Thought and Experience will start to unravel like an ingenious magic trick — but an illusion nonetheless. Always ask yourself this: ‘What is real?’ Not what is reality, that’s too abstract. But ask rather, ‘what is real right here right now in this moment?’ And then look, don’t rely on Thought to tell you. You gotta have a very literal observation. Thought fills in a lot of gaps in that literal observation. Thought is what creates ‘out there’ when all there is is ‘in here’.

HOW TO DO ENLIGHTENMENT WORK Self-observation and keen-mindfulness are the way to do it. Always be asking yourself, ‘what is literally here vs. what do I take to be real?’ You’ll start to see the discrepancy between those and thus the illusion of Thought and Experience will start to unravel like an ingenious magic trick — but an illusion nonetheless. Always ask yourself this: ‘What is real?’ Not what is reality, that’s too abstract. But ask rather, ‘what is real right here right now in this moment?’ And then look, don’t rely on Thought to tell you. You gotta have a very literal observation. Thought fills in a lot of gaps in that literal observation. Thought is what creates ‘out there’ when all there is is ‘in here’.

Am I the only person who thinks the phrase ‘persistent non-dual Awareness’ is meaningless? Think about it. Forget about the 'persistent' modifier for a moment. What does ‘non-dual awareness’ mean? What does ‘dual awareness’ mean? Yet almost everybody now is parroting these exact same words as if they mean something about Enlightenment, which at the end of the day means they mean something about your Enlightenment.

Not to be rude, but this got caught in my ‘question more’ filter. How could you spot Enlightenment in someone else If you expressly claim not to be Enlightened yourself? That doesn’t make any sense. You would only know what Enlightenment is if you were Enlightened yourself. How would you know what to look for in your assessment of Martin’s Enlightenment without the requisite relation to your own Enlightenment? A guess is fine, but let’s identify it as such. The theory you quoted would only make sense if you derived it or generated it from your own experience. Enlightenment is not a theory or a conceptual test that can be applied externally like some kind of scientific diagnosis. The only thing you really know about Enlightenment is your own, and that has nothing to do with any hearsay theory. It would only be a ‘he’s like me’ kind of comparison that could be legit, right. You can only truly know Enlightenment from your own perspective of being Enlightened yourself. Enlightenment, unlike science, is unique in its resistance to being known through principles a.k.a. Thought. From the perspective of Enlightenment, Thought is an illusion and part of Maya.

I’m not saying this applies to Leo, it’s just a general statement: I take it that most people do not really want Enlightenment. That would mean they would have to give up Ego. Most people seem to prefer staying in the Spiritual Ego zone where they try to have it both ways — a little Enlightenment mixed with a little Ego.

Another great video on point to watch:

I'll let you argue about that.

This is a great video on point to watch:

The Egoic self is an illusion of Thought and Experience. The true Self is God Awareness.

The way I see it 'there is no me' means the Egoic self is an illusion of Maya, and illusion of Thought and Experience. 'Everything is me' means that the true Self is all that actually exists.

Good for you. I think everybody should do Leo's Life Purpose Course. I did it myself earlier this year. At least you'll have an idea of what your authentic career options are. What the Mind tells you you should go into and what your Authentic Self tells you you should go into can be worlds-apart. So, you gotta dig quite a bit to find your Life Purpose. And then there's a certain value in kinda knowing it with a sense of certainty too. It allows you to focus on other areas of your life because you kinda have that one handled. When you have no idea of what your Authentic Self is passionate about doing for career, that's a big handicap to have in life. And that's not to say that you'll end up doing that thing, but at least you'll have gone through the process which will build awareness. All this stuff adds up in your Personal Development, even if it's finding out that something didn't work out for you, there's still a takeaway because you'll still learn something. There's still new information about yourself on your platter so to speak that you didn't have before.

TEACHING PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT CAN CAP YOU OUT AT STAGE TURQUOISE IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT WORK I decided not to be a Personal Development teacher as a career after all. It kinda caps your own Personal Development at Stage Turquoise (maximum) because you gotta be constantly swimming around in Maya like a sponge soaking it all in constantly. I get it. But that’s a system that one can avoid with a different career choice, and all careers have their pros and cons. The Personal Development teacher is stuck in a game of their own creation, as are all of us. The only way you can be Enlightened is to exit the game in a very profound way like a monk does almost. The Personal Development teacher has gotta make a living so his hand is forced to stir the pot in all this stuff, which causes him suffering no doubt because he knows what he’s involved with. There are few clean ways to make a living, even if you decide to go the do-gooder route. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sit around and bitch about Donald Trump because I know everything is me. The best I can do is detach from Donald Trump and never think about him. I wish him well, but Donald Trump is laughing all the way to the bank while I sit around whining about him, see. It’s just not a scenario that I want to find myself in. Being a teacher keeps you a kid on some level basically. Nobody ever really thinks about that. You’re dealing with kids, so you kinda have to be one to deal with them as a teacher. You can’t pull yourself out of Maya as a teacher because you’re buried up to your eyeballs in the worst part of it — namely, the people most attached to Ego, young people and people with problems coming to you for help. That’s basically the burden that the teacher bears; the teacher’s sacrifice. I’m so glad I learned this because I was setting myself up for a career as a Personal Development teacher. I’d almost rather be a freelance plumber than a Personal Development teacher at this point. The best thing would be not to have to work for money at all, frankly. The second best thing would be to have a job that doesn’t impede your own Personal Development. The problem with embedding yourself in Maya is that everything gets reversed. Everything flips topsy-turvy in Maya. Even the go-gooder gets lured by the Devil and ends up in Hell when he attaches to Maya. The only sustainable solution to the suffering caused by Maya is to consciously pull yourself out of all it, out of the whole game, out of all Thought and Experience. Then you can be at peace, see. Trying to save the world leads to a life of suffering because you’re a do-gooder in Maya. You’re willingly putting yourself into Maya trying to improve Maya. See the problem there? It’s deep. I’m just glad I figured this out before I did the same thing myself -- and I just recently figured this out too. Turquoise doesn’t figure this out. You gotta move into Stage Coral before you start to fully see the trap of being a Personal Development teacher (or otherwise savior of the world) and why it leads to a life of suffering even if your intention is to do good in the world or change the world in some way. The martyr sacrifices his own Personal Development to help others basically. And that’s just a trade-off that I do not want. I’ll still teach in my life, I can tell, but very informally and only as a hobby. That way I can get away from it easily when I become too attached. At the end of the day, you’re just talking to yourself as a teacher anyway -- literally -- which I keenly see now. If it doesn’t help your Personal Development to teach, then teaching is worthless to you. I think of the poor community college teacher teaching the same math class every year — what a pity that job is! If you’re gonna teach, at least teach in a way that directly goes to your own growth because you’re the only thing in existence. The best that teaching others can do is teach you. If you're not teaching yourself in your teaching, then that's a red flag. Heed it or don't heed it, but it's a red flag nonetheless. The reason why is that the only progress you can make in Personal Development is when you focus inward or when stuff gets focused inward in a way that grows you.

It’s best not to use spiritual words like ‘Devil’ outside of a strict non-dual context. Otherwise that’s gonna cause a lot of finger-pointing and suffering. The reality is that you create the Devil, no one else does. So, the Devil is never ‘out there’, he’s always ‘in here’. And that’s great because it means you have 100% control to do something to eradicate the Devil and that is not to surrender to Egoic distractions. God and the Devil cannot exist in the same room at the same time. If the Devil exists that’s because you’re creating him. You create the Devil when you forget who you are; namely, God, the true Self. The Devil can’t do sh*t to God when God knows who He is. That’s the true sustainable solution to Devilry.

Interesting.

THE DEVIL IS NEVER ‘OUT THERE’, HE’S ALWAYS ‘IN HERE’ — THE DEVIL CAN ONLY EXIST IF GOD FORGETS WHO GOD IS — WORDS LIKE ‘GOD’ AND ‘DEVIL’ SHOULD ONLY BE USED IN THE CONTEXT OF TRUE SPIRITUALITY A.K.A. STRICT NON-DUALITY The only Devil is the Lure into having your Awareness enmeshed within Thought and Experience a.k.a. Maya. The Devil is not ‘out there’ he’s ‘in here’. You gotta flip that finger that wants to point externally around 180 degrees. The Devil can only exist when you’re distracted outward in Thought and Experience rather than being focused inward at the true Self.