Anderz

The psychological shadow is a big part of the personal stage. Leo mentioned that he plans to do a video about the shadow. Teal Swan's newest video is about shadow work.

I did unplug from society. Because where is society? Then answer is that society is in my mind! So the trick is to realize that one's own mind is making all those kinds of separations. And that's why our civilization is still at the "caterpillar" stage, because everybody is running around with the same delusions of separations in their minds. That's the personal stage. There will be a massive transformation of society I believe but it will come as a result of us individuals shifting from the personal to the transpersonal stage, and that's a process that probably takes decades just to get started in any significant way. Although the process is I believe already going on and the coronavirus crisis signifies the end of the caterpillar stage.

Society is like a caterpillar and just like a caterpillar it's a necessary and valuable stage, but it's a temporary stage. Now we need to move on to build the butterfly, so I'm unplugging from society, including from most of the internet.

I have a radical new idea. We are already connected to everything including the Akashic records. And the body-mind tensions are likely the personal stage of the Akashic records. What is needed is a connection to a higher level of the Akashic records that Teal Swan talked about. On a practical level that means detaching from the personal stage, and the radical part is that it means detaching from the entire society! Because the whole world is still at the lower stage. A caterpillar doesn't look anything like a butterfly and with that analogy we can expect our civilization to be completely transformed. Not just gradual or even big improvements here and there but the emergence of an entirely new civilization.

Accessing the Akashic records at the personal stage needs to be done for reaching the transpersonal stage I think, not to access information from the personal stage level. This is especially so when accessing collective information. Imagine connecting to the personal stage for all of humanity through all of history. That's a nightmare mountain of suffering. And even if there isn't much transpersonal stage information for humanity on earth yet, the Akashic records are growing as time flows. So as I see it, it's more useful to connect to the Akashic records as a collective living mind than to access lifeless memories.

Then how to access the Akashic records? Teal Swan has this second video where she explains that. It's related to connecting with the heart which research has shown is aware of information before the the brain is.

Here I found more information about the Akashic records. I often look at videos first before reading articles because I find it more convenient, haha. But it's also a way of getting a lot of perspectives quickly. And if I want to dive deeper into a topic I may look at articles for more details.

Ralph Smart said that thoughts block access to the Akashic records. That's a good point. Because when we think that's our personal memories being rehashed so we are then only experiencing our own limited personal past. At least at the personal stage of development. And I think it's useful to question one's whole way of thinking. Spiritual teachers like Sadhguru and Eckhart Tolle even talk about a state of being where there is no thinking at all, and Shunyamurti talked about trans-conceptual awareness which requires going beyond thinking and is I believe a trait of the transpersonal stage of development.

From a scientific perspective the Akashic records is to me the same as the graph they use in the Wolfram Physics Project. The graph in their model is simply a network of "atoms of space" which I think of as points of nothingness. And the graph expands all the time so all the past is permanently "stored" as the graph itself. Here is a short clip where Stephen Wolfram explains the basic idea: What is a hypergraph? | Stephen Wolfram and Lex Fridman- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGNaRFEa8PI Alternative researcher Nassim Haramein has a similar model that he calls space memory.

An integral perspective is that progressive learning is necessary at the personal stage of development, and I think that's a valid claim since that's what happens! We learn and train for years. And what happens at the transpersonal perspective I speculate is that we have then maxed out the personal stage in terms of learning capacity and that a new capacity emerges which is the ability to know things instantly by accessing the Akashic records or something similar. And we cannot skip the personal stage and jump from say being a baby directly into the transpersonal stage. We first need to develop the necessary foundation and capacity for learning before we can move into the transpersonal stage. That's a both/and integral perspective of progress and learning. Ralph Smart has this video about the Akashic records:

Observing the crystallized ego can be done with total open-mindedness. For example, does it take years of practice to become a good violinist? Maybe not! From our ordinary personal perspective we think that of course it takes years and years of practice. But that's actually a close-minded perspective. I think Leo has mentioned something similar, but imagine if we could tap into the knowledge and experience of all of humanity, like in a form of collective consciousness or access to the Akashic records, or memories of the collective unconscious. Then in theory it would be possible to access the best skills of playing the violin immediately.

Yes, Jim Newman is definitely talking about the direct path. There is seeking and there is the end of seeking, he said. That to me sounds exactly the same as what Rupert Spira was describing, And it makes the crystallized ego very clear. The crystallized ego is that which clings to possessions, both material and immaterial such as personal relationships, skills and knowledge. The crystallized ego is a structure of the past clinging to other structures of the past. That's a delusional state since reality as a whole doesn't need to cling to itself. I as a crystallized ego will still practice things but I will shift focus to recognizing and examining the crystallized ego.

Aha! Embarrassing. I have (as a crystallized ego) been investing what Rupert Spira called the progressive path where there is an attempt to recognize our true nature by changing the mask as Spira described it. In the direct path the mask is changed by the recognition of the true self. And it matches my new idea about how even practicing mindfulness, body awareness and developing the ego are possessions added to the crystallized ego. I still think that practices like that are useful, but they can also become a trap I suspect now. I will take a look at this video by Jim Newman who definitely seems to be talking about the direct path:

Rupert Spira has this recent video where he compares the person to a mask. It's not the person that is the problem, it's the nature of the self behind the mask that needs to be recognized, he said. It's not about about getting rid of the body-mind, not about disciplining, changing or purifying the body-mind, Spira said, The body-mind will become purified by recognizing the self behind the mask of the body-mind, he said. The mask (persona) identified with the body-mind, that is the same as the personal stage of development as I see it. And what Spira said is the same as what I wrote earlier about how learning new skills only improves the person by adding more skills and knowledge to the crystallized ego.

The crystallized ego has a lot of possessions. The ego is "possessed" by those possession and becomes burdened, bogged down, tired, worn out because of carrying around lots of possessions all the time. And possessions are not only material things such as cars, smartphones and houses. A personal relationship is also a possession. And even knowledge and skills are possessions. So practicing to become more skilled is a subtle and very sneaky form of materialism.

How much practice does it take to reach the transpersonal stage? The answer is: no practice! Because the practitioner is the personal stage and so any practice will merely be yet another skill added to the crystallized ego. Even the practitioner itself is past conditioning and is a part of the crystallized ego. The fluid ego is the flow in the present moment and all the past is non-flow.

An advanced practice is to question one's emotions. Are the kinds of emotions that come with the thoughts really accurate? And to paraphrase Byron Katie: Are you absolutely sure that your emotions reflect the truth of the situation? The advanced part is to be completely open-minded when questioning the emotions. Even if some situation is judged as obviously bad, question the emotion! And if something is good, question that emotion too! Another advanced part of this practice is that it's also possible to bypass the thoughts by going directly to the emotions. Feel the emotions directly without thinking. The purpose of the practice is to loosen up the hard, fixed and habitual emotional patterns in the crystallized ego.

Leo said that feeling within is a skill that can be trained. I will refocus on feeling the tensions in my body and mind. And I will try a proactive method, similar to how Leo described how it's possible to focus awareness on the tensions and make them relax. It's a huge process but I think it's worthwhile to put in extra effort into it. I'm revisiting Leo's video about introspection to see if there are more keys to learn about it.

One huge difference I notice it that Leo describes writing the ultimate journal as information to be saved and be made searchable. That's similar to Stephen Wolfram who said that he has saved all his typing on keyboards for decades! That's more of an ultimate personal log than a journal but I take the opposite approach and forget about the information in my journals, haha. The reason is that I have noticed that the important information tends to stick in my mind so that I don't need to keep track of it. I do save some information as reference, but even that I have discovered is seldom revisited.

I was thinking that I maybe was doing this journal the wrong way because I put so much stuff in here from other sources instead of my own direct experiences and knowledge. But I found this video where Leo talks about making journals which can include all kinds of information. The Transpersonal Journal is a narrow version of that.

I wrote earlier that the map is the same as the territory. I thought that was funny and it's also true! It's true from the highest perspective where everything is content in consciousness. Map = content, territory = content, ergo map = territory. Q.E.D. In the relative context the map is of course not the same as the territory. And the mistake we make at the personal stage is to take our thoughts as being more than they are. And thoughts can have hugely different weights to them. If I for example think of a pink elephant, then that's a light thought without much emotional content. If I on the other hand think of my personal finances, that's an enormously heavy thought. And emotions are not just some airy fairly irrelevant nonsense. Emotions are what makes us take thoughts seriously. Without emotions my thought about a pink elephant would have the same impact and importance to me as the though of my finances. So emotions are connections to what is, or is believed to be, the actual facts or to illusions. The pink elephant is an illusion so the emotions in this case actually are airy fairy, but the thoughts about my finances, that's a whole different story, those are grave, grim, heavy and filled with fear and worry about my survival. To reach the transpersonal stage the thoughts need to be recognized for what they are. Peter Ralston has this explanation about thoughts:

The personal and prepersonal stages include the death drive (thanatos). I even propose that those stages are the death drive. And it's a result of struggle for survival throughout billions of years of evolution. The primordial struggle at those stages is a result of the belief in and experience of separation. What will happen when that separation is healed? My answer is that then the death drive is removed.

I got an idea that we have a lot of lower personal stages in us subconsciously. This is I believe because in stressful situations we regress into more instinctual and therefore subconscious behavior. Those ancient habits need to be reprogrammed too! So I will revisit Leo's video about the earlier stages of ego development.

What happens when I practice thinking pleasant thoughts is that the thoughts get weaker! I suspect that's because thoughts are fueled by suffering and when the suffering diminishes the thoughts get weaker. Eckhart Tolle talked about thinking with the whole body, and I heard Sadhguru saying that he is thinking with his whole body. That sounds like the transpersonal stage. So my next step is to practice thinking with the whole body to test if I can find if there is some truth to that claim.