Anderz

Another obstacle to realizing that reality is automatic is that to the ego, the idea seems like a mechanical reality where the person becomes like a robot. The mistake in such view is that causality is not only from the past to the future. And the future contains more information than the past and cannot be fully predicted. And the person is not some separate passive observer but one with the whole process of life. Reality is not like some mechanical clockwork with separate physical particles with a predictable future as Laplace imagined it. Nor is there actual randomness in reality. What appears as accidents including natural disasters are predetermined events with total precision. This is the "old order of things" as the Bible describes it, ruled by the devil, the prince of this world. And that's the same as what the Law of One describes as third density and the Law of Confusion. In ACIM it's called the ego.

If reality is automatic, then why hasn't the ego realized that? After all, the ego is very clever and cunning. Even prominent scientists who claim that there is no free will still believe in things such as personal responsibility, accountability, pride, guilt and individual struggle for survival. One reason is that the global ego, in addition to producing valuable creativity and uniqueness, is very powerful when it comes to predicting and planning the future. Of course, ultimately even that is an illusion in an automatic reality, but since it's such dominating feature still in the world the ego becomes sucked into the false principle of individual doership. The predictive and controlling power of the global ego is a necessary consequence of the whole process of life. In ego consciousness it's necessary to control and plan for the future. According to ACIM the idea of the ego having any power to to anything whatsoever is an illusion, and this fits with the idea of an automatic reality. What will happen I predict is that more and more people will start recognizing the false state of the ego. And that realization will dissolve the ego both individually and globally. We will understand that individual control is redundant, that the ego is like a little child sitting in the backseat of a car with a toy steering wheel imagining driving the car. Except in the case of the ego, the person actually believes it has control.

The ego is like training wheels for the soul. This is true even for the global ego. All the structures in society, such as politics, financial systems, cultures, academia, business and media etc are an automatic result of evolution. Infinite intelligence has resulted in humanity being tricked into thinking it has free will and this is the "fall" of humanity in the Bible. This was a necessary development in order to produce a civilization with maximum creativity and uniqueness. Now we have reached a point in history where the global ego has served its purpose and our civilization has achieved a high enough level of development. In short, the training wheels can now be removed. This will become more and more evident as politics, media, science and even business and other areas will appear more and more cartoonish, because the whole foundation of society is based on an ego fiction.

Atheists seem to reject the idea of intelligent design. It's really easy to logically explain how there can be intelligent design. First think of our universe as just one out of an astronomical number of universes in a multiverse. And then consider the set of all possible multiverses. Then simply pick one of the multiverses with intelligent design as being our multiverse. Presto! Intelligent design without the need for a designer.

Lazy Yoga, which is my attempt to integrate all kinds of teachings including ACIM, describes reality as: Automatic Infinitely intelligent Finite changeless past The past included in the now Infinite predetermined future Generally unpredictable future Evolving as endlessly expanding complexity Oneness as Indra's net Duality as points in Indra's net Time as the manifestation of Indra's net Individuals as unique eternal souls Individual souls as a points in Indra's net And Indra's net here simply means difference. For difference to exist it has to split itself between 'this' and 'that' or it would be sameness. And that results in difference between 'this' and 'that' and the initial difference and so on in an endless expansion of differences all connected to each other.

Lazy Yoga removes the need for mindfulness practice through the following observation: Oneness in motion is the truth. Ego activity is an illusion. This means that realizing the One-mindedness that ACIM described automatically removes the illusion along with dissolving confusion and ego tensions.

Mindfulness and meditation expert Emily Fletcher said that mindfulness and meditation are different and at Ziva they teach meditation that is giving the body five times deeper rest than sleep. I only practice mindfulness at the moment because meditation, even though it probably can boost the practice, is too tedious for me. And ACIM expert Amy Torres wrote this: That sounds more like the way I'm practicing now. Except the "I need do nothing" part is too advanced still for me. I still practice mindfulness as an ego.

ACIM has this explanation about confusion: And in relation to mindfulness practice I noticed that thoughts that bring suffering such as worrisome thoughts, are produced and allowed to catch the attention of our conscious awareness because confusion feels even worse! In theory what needs to happen is that the confusion will start to bring less suffering than the thoughts of the ego mind. This will allow the mind to mindfully rest in confusion instead of being drawn back into the ego mind. The mind resting in confusion? That might sound horrible, but remember as ACIM says, the ego mind is already confused, so the aim is to uproot the whole confusion/tension body-mind construct. The goal is to dissolve the confusion and therefore having the mind resting in confusion is a deliberate practice method.

Interesting. What I call perpetual mindfulness is something the monks in Thailand already do. The presenter said in this video from about 5:40 that a monk explained to her that they practice all the time, moment by moment, not just when they are meditating, but in every moment:

Now I discovered one major obstacle with the perpetual mindfulness practice. My mind still very much dislikes confusion. That's actually what to expect because the ego mind is incredibly heavily conditioned. That's I believe why ACIM contains so much text; pages and pages of hammering the intellect with explaining the difference between the ego and true perception (vision). There is a very strong habit of the ego mind to avoid confusion. ACIM says that the ego is totally confused about everything. That seems like an accurate description to me. So to me it's worthwhile to continue the perpetual mindfulness practice. And I will start focusing more on the confusion in my mind and how I feel about it.

I have now tried the perpetual mindfulness practice. Often my mind has jumped back into usual ego mode with being identified with my thoughts. And even when I have awareness of my thoughts it's still as if my ego is my real identity. Not very successful practice but I will give it some more time because it may take a long time for more significant changes to happen. Just to repeat, by perpetual mindfulness I mean observing one's thoughts and emotions all the time and not just during separate practice intervals.

ACIM is very good at explaining the ego but I haven't yet found that ACIM mentions the purpose of the ego. That's probably on purpose to produce a clear focus on describing the ego dysfunction. ACIM says that the ego has ZERO power. That seems correct to me. But why the ego in the first place? For a broader picture the Law of One is useful. And Eckhart Tolle gives a really excellent explanation of why the ego has been necessary in this video; Did The Universe Make A Mistake With The Ego? The same as I have written about earlier, although to be fair, I probably got those ideas from Tolle.

Huge almost monopolistic tech corporations such as Google and Huawei might seem like big threat to democracy, but these kinds of new companies are actually much better than the old school corporations who in the past and perhaps even today only focus on maximizing profit. Here is professor Huang Weiwei saying: "Huawei's business goal is to pursue rapid growth while ensuring a certain profit margin, not to maximize profits." I think Google's business strategy is similar. Of course there is a risk that giants like that become too dominating and a threat to democracy. But I think governments can handle that with regulations if necessary. I still like Google but now I'm more optimistic about Huawei. Amazing technological progress. And immense as these corporations seem, there is an even more powerful trend going on which is the general overall and accelerating progress of technology. This is as I see it a sign of the global ego as a caterpillar reaching full maturity. And I predict another process is going on at the same time which is as Bruce Lipton said the building of the butterfly stage of humanity. ACIM is like a manual for moving from the caterpillar stage to the butterfly stage. What will happen is that automation becomes more and more dominating in the world, not to make us humans slaves to technology but as a means of automating the caterpillar. And this frees up people to start focusing on the new butterfly stage in the form of fourth density described in the Law of One.

Some thoughts can actually be judged I now realized. Harmful ego thoughts such as the wish to hurt others can safely be rejected. Because that's ego activity. Nevertheless, the idea with perpetual mindfulness is to just keep observing all thoughts including judgments. Perpetual mindfulness can be combined with choiceless action so that after a while the state of mindfulness becomes automatic.

Hmm... I started practicing perpetual mindfulness, the use of mindfulness all the time. And I noticed that I actually don't know which thoughts are good and which thoughts are bad. Because reality is an interconnected immensely complicated web of utterly advanced synchronicities. My ego mind is incapable of making a correct judgment about what thoughts to follow and what thoughts to reject. Even when feeling the emotions behind the thoughts, it's still impossible for my ego to know for sure. Therefore to just nonjudgmentally keep observing all thoughts is a rational approach from a higher perspective. And it's directly in line with what ACIM says. The ego is deluded and confused about everything. So I will continue practice a bit more even though I suspect that my usual ego habits will kick in oftentimes.

I got a new idea about an almost funny practice. The idea is to use traditional mindfulness all the time. So what's the different between that and practicing mindfulness in the usual way? The difference is that with the new practice one's thoughts and emotions are observed all the time, nonjudgmentally as usual. And here is the trick: the thoughts are observed. So, what? One might think. Isn't that the same as usual mindfulness practice? Yes, but since the practice is all the time, it means observing one's thoughts nonjudgmentally even in everyday life. The thoughts are considered neither good nor bad. So then what thoughts to follow and what thoughts to reject? The answer is that the thoughts are observed, and only observed. There is no acting out of the thoughts. So the difference is that with how mindulness is usually practiced, it's as something done only occasionally. And the rest of the day the ego continues its usual mischief. With the new approach the ego's thoughts are observed without being acted on. Simple in theory but will produce a lot of confusion in practice in the beginning because we are so used to always follow our thinking in practical circumstances.

For example Alex Jones will probably say that Marianne Williamson is bad and Donald Trump good. A beta male soy boy on the other hand , will say about Trump: "Orange man, bad." And perspectives can change. I might like Donald Trump today and then if he does something too stupid even for my taste, then I may change my judgment. Is judgement always wrong? No, but judgment is dependent on context in the form of perspectives. I think Ken Wilber said that some perspectives are more true than others. And when it comes to the ego, ALL its perspectives are false when seen from a higher (and hopefully more true) perspective. The ego perspectives are still true however on their own level.

Aaron Abke has a great new video about the ego delusion:

Are all thoughts attack thoughts? Actually, yes. A desire for example is an attack thought since it contains suffering in the form of longing or even worse of frustration, fear, bitterness and anger etc. Even what the ego calls loving thoughts about another person, thing or event are attack thoughts, because those are special relationships. What ACIM means by special here is that it's a sin, a false perception. In order to have loving thoughts, the ego has to divide its world with judgment about what is loving and what is not loving. That division is sin made of attack thoughts. And through that false division, fear arises. Only love is real and the realization of that is vision and the holy relationship. Then what about evil in the world? Evil is a result of attack thoughts, causing love seemingly to be blocked.

Is there a root cause of attack thoughts? Yes, I have an idea about that. Is the fruit of the body armor fear? Only indirectly. The body armor, which is the ego tensions in body and mind, produces confusion. And the ego mistakes the confusion as a threat. So the ego mind takes the confusion and turns it into fear. There is logic to it, since fear is at least useful as protection whereas confusion is immobilizing. The problem is that this is what builds the body armor and perpetuates the attack thoughts. One practice, then, is to allow to feel the confusion in oneself with full force, and just mindfully observe it. The mindless way of doing it is to fuel a panic attack by turning the confusion into fear which leads to more confusion which in turn leads to even more fear and so on in a vicious circle. A panic attack is an ego response. The mindful approach is the opposite and to be curious about the confusion and to feel it fully and let it dissolve along with the body armor dissolving.

Here I found a good presentation of Lesson 26 about attack thoughts and a walk-through of practicing the lesson.

I pondered ACIM's concept of attack thoughts a bit and it's a huge topic. Very powerful concept. And then I realized that it will be very difficult if not impossible for me to drop my protection. And thoughts of protection are a consequence of attack thoughts. So what to do? I can't just live my life unprotected. And then I came to think of how it's not the job of my ego to drop my attack thoughts. The ego itself is made up of attack thoughts. Therefore my practice now is to be mindful of all my attack thoughts, especially in relation to my perceived need for protection. And then to become deliberately confused about thoughts of protection in combination with the practice of choiceless action. One can even say, I don't know if it's mention or not in ACIM, that thoughts of protection ARE attack thoughts. It seems like a contradiction to the ego. It's only from a bigger perspective that it's recognized that attack and protection are two sides of the same coin. That's why ACIM says that being defenseless is true protection. Otherwise we will remain stuck on the level of conflict. Oneness in conflict with itself? Only possible with attack thoughts.

If being defenseless is true protection, then how to achieve that? To the ego the idea seems absurd, and it will attempt to seek MORE protection, not less. One key is to realize that thoughts about protection are related to what ACIM calls attack thoughts. Without those attack thoughts the ego would lose its need for protection.

The global ego is the whole world. And it's the global ego that has shaped our individual egos. So when we dissolve the body armor, the global ego has a tendency to constantly rebuild and reinforce our body armor, also called the pain body and ego tensions. How to prevent the global ego from keep making our bodies and minds tenser and tenser? Becoming aware of this process is a first useful step. The next step is to do the opposite of the usual tendency of the ego to protect itself by becoming more and more defenseless. ACIM says that being defenseless is true protection.