Joseph Maynor

Meditation is amazing when done daily for months on end. 1 hour of do nothing meditation per day is what I do. I like to do it in the morning if possible. And then do my exercise routine and cook some breakfast. I'll eat a snack before I meditate (a couple of raw carrots usually, just enough to take the edge off hunger when I wake up). Meditation does a lot of very beneficial things for you on the Path. I'm a fan. I wanna meditate for the rest of my life. It makes you feel good and it builds your keen mindfulness. Video on point to watch:

Meditation is the best thing you can do as a daily spiritual practice. Then exercise (cardio and resistance), adequate sleep, and excellent diet. Those are the big four.

There is a downside to being a public figure even if you’re trying to do good. Like I said, working for money sucks anyway you slice it. You think you’re doing this great thing by becoming a famous self-help teacher, but really you’re putting your peace of mind in the meat-grinder.

I’m 20 years older than you are. Keep coming on the Forum. It’s a long road. But you can learn on here. The bottom line is you’re always learning your whole life. Being on the Forum can accelerate your growth though because you’re gonna see things that you’ll never see as quickly on your own. This is the place to hang out if you’re someone who has a passion to learn and a passion to self-observe. There are people on here that can save you time! If I came on here when I was 20 how great that would’ve been! There are people on here at all levels of growth from the very beginner to the insanely advanced. Not to sound too dorky, but what you wanna do is become part of the conversation and tap into learning from everyone on here. That's what I did basically. And now I'm one of the insanely advanced people on here. But I've been working on Personal Development since I was 20 years old -- so I've been doing self-improvement work for 20 years now. I've been doing Personal Development work since I was 10 but I don't wanna sound cocky. I had a childhood that required me attach to self-improvement very early for a few different reasons. By problem was I had to be my own teacher pretty much for a lot of that time. But I worked hard on my own, majored in Philosophy, etc. And the few teachers that I've learned from I milked dry. You gotta be a tenacious motherf*cker to become great at Personal Development. There's gotta be some suffering in your life to drive you. Think about it, if your life is fine, what use is Personal Development to you? So, I think people who become masters at Personal Development had some kind of suffering in their life's background driving them forward with this work.

The only relevant question is: What am I doing?

The Devil is lures into Maya a.k.a. lures into Thought and Experience. The Devil wants you to forget your true Self and get embedded in illusory Thought and Experience.

The book would have two words on only one page. The words would be 'Focus inward.'

What's odd is you would think this video would be one of the least controversial.

You don't want to face the literal death of reality. No one wants to. But with death comes new life.

I think one of the worst things we do is believe our own Thoughts. We cling to them. And that keeps us embedded in Maya, in Ego. An illusion of our own making. A prison of our own design. 'Thoughts are sticky', someone said that I recall. Whoever said that was a smart dude. Hell just is believing in your own Thoughts.

Working for Trump has gotta be insanely frustrating. I feel for anybody who is doing that or has done that.

Get a Rick Steves guide if you're going to Europe. Get a Pimsleur Conversational Language Course if you're traveling to place where English is minimal. Do as much Internet research as you can before your trip on things you wanna do or might wanna do. Kinda assume that you're not gonna be able to have Internet access where you're going. That will get you keenly prepared. Read up about the place you're going. Review the information you'll need to know about history, art, culture, and architecture to appreciate where you're going.

Try having ‘no paradigms’ for real. This is the same issue as the so called ‘relativist’ that I called B.S. on before. The real relativist is a myth, and so is not having any paradigms. If you had no paradigms, you would be at a very low level of functioning. I don’t even think it would be possible. These things are myths taken as real possibilities. Non-duality is not just a paradigm. First of all, you’re gonna go through several awakenings on the path. Each one of those awakenings can cause paradigm-shifts. But non-duality is much more than Thought. It’s realization accompanied by Thought. But the realization can be seen directly without Thought. The Thought is just a post-hoc story that’s more or less useful to maintain keen Awareness. Thought is useful to be able to get you to see — but seeing has nothing to do with Thought. Imagine you wanna see out a window way up above. Thought would be the ladder you use to raise your body up to the level of the window so you can see out of it. And then maybe after you see, you create Thought to remind yourself of what you saw when you looked out that window. Non-duality is about seeing much more than it is about Thought. Thought is just a tool not an end in Enlightenment Work. The end is the seeing. Those are your awakenings. Thought is a reminder of your awakenings basically. You have an awakening, a seeing, first and then you wanna spin a thought-story about it so you can preserve it. Non-duality is not merely a paradigm, that’s way oversimplified. Non-duality is more about keen mindfulness than anything if you wanna set it as one thing. It’s literal and careful mindfulness — a looking without Thought filters — a seeing what’s literally, actually there. Non-duality is about being very passionate about honoring and valuing literal Truth, no matter how painful the Truth is.

I wouldn’t say Trump is a moron. I think the words immature, crafty, and insanely competitive fit better. It’s not an intelligence problem, it’s an immaturity problem. To me, a moron is a dummy. I don’t think Trump is a dummy. Trump will do anything to win, including stooping lower than everyone else. For Trump, winning is the only end. That’s how I see it. Win at all costs mentality with no scruples, but then also being highly manipulative about trying to spin things to his advantage rhetorically so his reputation doesn’t get tanked by his tactics. Trump is highly socially manipulative. Talk about being entangled in Maya. His dad must have told him he was no good and wouldn’t amount to sh*t in life. What Trump does is try to sell winning — he makes you feel like you are part of winning by being on his side. He’s smart enough to know that works. He’s very conniving in that he wins at all costs while also getting people on his side to boot. That’s no dummy. That’s a very manipulative, competitive personality. A dummy would not be able to pull off what Trump does. He seems like a moron on the surface sometimes, I agree, but I think it’s more of a win at all costs and immaturity issue at a deeper level. Trump is also a master salesman of himself. I watched that during the campaign. He’s great with rhetoric and humor barbs too. He’s a character who knows how to schmooze and get people on his side. But he also creates a lot of enemies because of his take no prisoners style.

Haha. You caught it. I missed it.

Nice. I resonate with what you say here.

It's good to spend a good chunk of your day away from theory because it just gets pounded in otherwise. I'm exactly the kind of person who could benefit from this myself, and I realize that I gotta do it. I gotta let go of my beliefs and be ok without not having to constantly have Thought in my life. It's ok to dip into Thought mindfully, but this gluttony that we have with Thought just causes so much suffering because we start to see the world in the image of our Thought. Thought becomes a lens on reality; a false lens.

Yep. And you'll have more than one awakening if you're anything like me. And you'll have shifts after every one.

It depends on how you want to conceptualize it I guess.

Exactly. But there's Awareness though. There's keen Awareness. There's Awareness that's lost in Thought and Experience and then there's Awareness that knows who it is.

Think about how much time people spend staring at pages and screens.

I just watched the video again. I do get a whiny kind of Stage Green vibe in the video too (the first half of the video specifically). A 'poor me' vibe. Not trying to be rude, just being honest. That's the problem with trading in all these beliefs, you start to believe them. That seems to be the subtext of the video. It seems very Stage Green to me. Here's my opinion: Dude, it's all bad! Working for money is all bad -- sinner or saint, I don't care who you are. It's not us versus them -- it's the whole thing. It's all of it -- every bit. You can't carve yourself out as an exception in a sh*t-eating contest. At the end of the day, we're all in it. Be careful with how strongly you cling to how you interpret things. That's all Thought, and you're gonna turn it into a self-fulfilling prophesy. For every rule, there's an exception. Be the exception. Don't let your Thought do you. I used to think like this too when I was in my early 30's. It was my ultra-Liberal stage. Maya a.k.a. Thought and Experience is all a distraction away from keen Awareness. This is why it's important to stop pounding your Thoughts in so hard, you start to mistake them for reality! That's a trap that I see very keenly now. You define your own reality through clinging to Thought. That's called Maya, Ego, and all it does is cause your own suffering. Good or bad, it doesn't matter, if you're clinging to Thought at all you're causing your own suffering. It doesn't matter if you think you're God's servant helping to evolve the world, that's a fantasy, a Thought -- it's Ego. All clinging to Thought will do is keep you in Hell, in Samsara -- even if you think you're the good guy, the savior of humanity! The best your life can be is when (1) you know who you are as the true Self, and (2) you're not entangled in Maya a.k.a. Thought and Experience. That has nothing to do with achievement at all, see. The happiest you're gonna be in life is when you're God Awareness looking down on and through Maya a.k.a. Thought and Experience. That's called Liberation or Moksha or Heaven. 'Awareness = Freedom' as Faceless said. Our Faceless lol. I quoted him! The reality is you don't need sh*t as God Awareness.

Don’t worry about being 100% morally pure through what you do to earn money. The only way to be morally pure is to not work for money at all — to not do anything inauthentic at all. All of us are part of the system that you laid out in your new video almost by necessity. I appreciate your lay of the land in your new video, but it applies to ALL working for money. I think what we gotta watch out for is how we cling to our whoring ourselves out for money — and all of us are doing it, make no mistake about it. Even the Preacher, the go-gooder is whoring himself out for money. Even the artist is whoring himself out as well. It’s sick man. I think you’re right Leo in the sense that we wanna be moving in more healthy ways to make money — to me that’s where the beneficial teaching lies in Life Purpose teaching. But really, the healthiest thing is not to have to work for money at all, see. That takes you out of the whole system that you described in your new video quite well. All money-making has an Egoic aspect to it. It’s all a distraction, as necessary as it is. Striving to be morally pure by working for money is kind of an oxymoron. I’m not saying you said that by the way. I’m saying it.

I don’t know about that language, I’m not familiar with it. You gotta go through Turquoise before you can enter Coral. Coral transcends a lot of Turquoise though. Coral sees that Turquoise is still very distracted by Thought and Experience.