Joseph Maynor

You gotta create your own meaning. That’s what Leo’s Life Purpose Course is perfectly designed to help you with. I did the course myself, so I can vouch for it. Meaning is something that takes work — it’s not gonna come find you, you gotta go hunt for it!

Why not add Leo’s voice to the chorus of voices you listen to? Why do you assume there has to be a single right perspective on these matters that you want to cling to? None of these ideas are pre-conceptual reality. You can’t be harmed or helped in essence by any of these ideas because all unchanging Awareness cares about is awareness in the present moment. Why are you getting defensive at all in a serious way? That’s a sign of Ego. You’re clinging to conceptual-truth about reality while being unchanging Awareness. See the absurdity in that? All conceptual-truth is a map to the territory of BE-ing. Have fun with the diverging ideas and your ideosyncratic preferences thereof. Reality laughs at the conceptual-truth project that aims to encircle and capture it. All arrows point to BE-ing.

What do you think the distinction between being and consciousness is? Why do you think you need to draw such a distinction? How do these ideas link up to your actual experience in the present moment?

What’s your exercise routine like? You sound like you need to increase your horizontal momentum as I call it.

Great story. What's great is when you need no more God period. Reality does not need to be divinized. That's an idea put on top of reality. Reality just is what it is. To me reality is enough. I don't need anything more than Awareness. I don't need a Pantheistic story on top of Awareness. It's illusory and superfluous. God is a very problematic label. I don't think Spirituality is served by clinging to the concept of God. These are just my ideas, I welcome alternative views, I'm not here to shove my views down other people's throat. I could be wrong too, right? But my intuition is not very warm to the idea of God. Quite the contrary. It looks like a red herring to me, an unfortunate distraction. Acceptance of pre-conceptual reality is what you wanna BE in the moment. What that is is beyond conception, including our silly labels like God. Compared to reality, all our ideas are like a young child irreverently drawing on a wall with a crayon.

Without roles our society would fall apart. Roles are what keep people in line. Well, maybe not entirely. Even after Enlightenment you still adhere to culture. The little you in the Dream still lives by a lot of rules, they’re just not Egoically clung to.

You believe in free will?

@Akim Is it proper assume Islam is a monolith? When you say reinterpret Islam, whose conception of Islam are we talking about? Is there really an essence to Islam? And is that conception of Islam even relevant to the thesis that Leo is advancing? Let’s say Leo is painting a picture of Islam to make a deeper point, does his “different” conception of Islam invalidate his deeper points? What are Leo’s main points in the video?

You have to take full responsibility for your Personal Development. You should subject Leo’s claims to the same degree of scrutiny that you would anything else.

Good job. Journal writing is a powerful tool in personal development.

Great topic for a video.

I agree. I’m enjoying observing the stir this is causing. It’s like disrupting an ant colony and then observing the effects like an impartial scientist. I’m watching carefully and reading all the comments, including the YouTube comments. It’s fascinating. This is the kind of content that hits a nerve. It gets people off their fake fence and empowers them to say what they really feel and think. That’s good! ‘Out the picture’ I always say!

The variety of views is what impresses me. People have such diverging views. I think we tend to think people have more uniform beliefs than they actually do. No! People differ widely in their details as this conversation reveals. The “difference model” is important to keep at hand. Video on point to watch:

I can tell Leo put a lot of work and passion into making the video. I like it. I value it highly.

It’s surprising to me that people look to the Pope to answer these kinds of questions in the first place. That deferment of one’s own ability to determine beliefs for one’s self bothers me. This idea that the Pope has a hotline to God. That must make people feel better in some way to believe the Pope has special insights that they can never have.

The thing that was hard for me being religious is I kept getting mad at God for allowing misfortunes to happen to me. I realized it was a huge script I was running — a cultural game that I was playing. It caused me a lot of false hope and suffering actually.

I used to think that the universe was in some way serving me. Now I realize that reality is not working quite like that. There’s no teleological sense in which this is my movie. Reality is bigger than the little me running around in the Dream. There’s no sense in which reality is bending my way or serving my interests. All of that is a very Egoic set of expectations to place on top of reality. Reality just is what it is. But it’s the Ego that wants to do the “for me” maneuver with reality.

I’ve gone back and forth with God in my life. Right now I am in a very atheist stage. I don’t see any need for God. Right now belief in God seems very unnecessary to me. It seems like a story we’ve placed on top of reality. The belief in God does no work for me. That’s a way to state it pragmatically.

I don’t think I paid much attention to the question “what am I?”. When I was a teenager I was obsessed with the question “Who am I?” The significant issue seemed to be identification. It was a very Egoic time for me. It was me fashioning me to the exclusion of things. I was very judgmental at this time. I wanted to be somebody. But I wanted to be me in doing so. I’ve always valued authenticity.

Yeah, learning how to have ideals but not try to enforce them neurotically is a hard thing to come to learn how to balance in personal development.

Thanks for writing this. It’s nice to get a peek inside someone else’s experience with Enlightenment. Yes, Enlightenment concerns the Non-Dual. But the most advanced stage of Enlightenment is when you can let the Dream be the Dream and sort of go back into the illusion, just not Egoically doing so. It’s an embrace without an embrace, so to speak. You step back into the illusion without clinging to it. You lose your fear of the illusion. When you’re in what I call the “la la land stage of Enlightenment”, you’re still kinda weary of the illusion. You’re hands-off, right? You don’t wanna have any part of it because you fear the illusion of Ego. However, at the advanced stage, you re-join the illusion, sort of. But you’re a different person in doing so.

Think about this. How much pain are you in for if you don’t work on personal development? You can see that pain on the faces and bodies of people all around you.

A new chapter begins! Embrace it. Think of the new possibilities.

Einstein had a hand in both relativity and quantum mechanics, which is pretty impressive in itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein https://m.phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html

Before Enlightenment: carry water chop wood. After Enlightenment: carry water, chop wood. I don't know if this resonates with the rest of you, but I kinda feel like Enlightenment is a full circle. When you're too much in la la land that is a sign that you don't quite got it. You're still in the mind about it. The la la land part should go away after a while. You should come back into the dream, but now your whole perspective on the dream is totally different. But it's not like you're stunned like you are when you're still trying to figure things out. I think it's normal to go through that stunned stage for a good long while -- maybe a year or more. That's the awakening phase. For me it was a little over a year.