Anderz

Can we make desire harmonious by being considerate and empathetic towards others and ourselves? No, not at the personal stage which has a too low level of complexity to achieve that. To put it more simply, at the personal stage we lack the capability to function in harmony with the whole of society and nature. What we can do at the personal stage is to recognize the limitation of personal desire and be open to the possibility that impersonal development will result in harmonious desire. And even if we don't yet know how that works, by questioning desire at the personal stage, as done in Buddhism, there is an opening up of being receptive to allowing conflict-ridden desire to be replaced by harmonious desire.

Then what about love? Isn't love also a unifying force just as fear is? I think love in the nodual context as all there is, and that's absolute love that includes everything, even fear. In the relative context it's more clear to me to contrast fear with desire. And the difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage is that in the former, desire is a disruptive force while in the latter desire is a unifying force where desire becomes harmonious and fear is transcended by no longer being the binding force in society.

Oh! I just got an insight. I haven't thought it through yet but I want to document it while it's in my mind. At the prepersonal and personal stages fear is a unifying force! Fear is the binding glue of society at the lower stages of development. Fear is like "one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them". And the world is still a holon held together by fear. Desire might seem like a binding force yet since at the lower stages of development there is the experience of separation, desire leads to conflict and is therefore a disruptive force. At those stages it's fear that is the overarching and unifying principle.

Leo said in this video that one of the most shocking insights he have had is the realization that all fear is imaginary. There is no substance to fear whatsoever, fear is literally nothing, there is nothing there at all, he said. That's a transpersonal perspective! It fits exactly with how fear requires a separate individual to attach to, and that's the personal stage of development. My current view is that fear starts from the very beginning of biological organisms. So it's a billions of years old mechanism necessary for survival at the prepersonal and personal stages of development. So, then, isn't fear something natural, and inevitable? No! As I have written about before I think that biological evolution is a cosmic trick basically, necessary in order to produce unique individuals and increase of complexity. Or rather, evolution is a result of increasing complexity. And with even higher complexity, fear can be transcended! That's my idea of the transpersonal stage and it matches Leo's realization about fear.

When doing the conscious suffering practice I noticed that fear is distinct from physical pain and mental confusion. Bruce Lipton has said that biologically fear causes cells in the body do disconnect from their environment and wall themselves off in protection. If that's true then the feeling of fear is not the fear itself! Because a disconnect is a lack of feeling. That could be true so I will experiment with sensing what the root cause of fear is and if the feeling of fear is a secondary phenomenon. Also, fear is connected to the ancient and instinctual fight-or-flight mechanism. Even psychological fear such as worrying about one's financial situation or about how to control the future activates the biological fight-or-flight system. That's totally irrational since that instinct is for physical survival yet the body reacts as if the mental worry is a physical threat.

I didn't find much information about the breakaway civilization in Jason's video about time travel. I did find another video with Jason where he talks about how Aristotle proposed that humanity is divided into people who are fit to govern the state and those who are not. And also those in power need to use constructive myths, white lies. At first I thought it sounded like Aristotle was an arrogant elitist. BUT, I think Aristotle by those fit to govern meant the breakaway civilization! Aristotle himself is a constructive myth created by the breakaway civilization I think, or Aristotle was one of their members. Those rulers are deeper than the so-called deep state. And I think that they are at the transpersonal stage and even with a collective consciousness so that they can act together in harmony, which we at the personal stage cannot, and they need to use constructive myths since they cannot reveal their civilization premature because it would harm our own development at the personal stage.

Jason has amazing knowledge! He talked a lot about time travel which I believe is impossible. But I'm so impressed by his knowledge that I will take a look at this video where he talks specifically about time travel. I didn't think I would be interested in a video about time travel, haha, but they talked about a breakaway civilization in the previous video, and to me it's possible to reinterpret "time travel" as the history of the breakaway civilization.

Here I found a new video about the technological singularity, the prediction that technology will result in an AI intelligence explosion within just a few decades. Jason said that he disagrees with Ray Kurzweil's reductionist view. That sounded interesting to me. I think that Kurzweil is correct about accelerating technological progress, but yes he is stuck in materialistic thinking. The transpersonal stage might actually need technological progress, but it's also and mostly about a new stage of consciousness.

Sadhguru has this new video where he describes the human intellect as tiny and causing enormous pain on the planet both to yourself and to everybody. He is describing the personal stage! And he compared it to looking through a window instead of walking out of the door. Into the transpersonal stage. That's my interpretation of his analogy.

Roger Castillo recently spoke about a practice of looking without focusing. I will try that. He also mentioned a practice when for example talking to somebody to be aware of the whole environment. He also talked about awareness in the heart (subtle body). All those practices sound like they are related to the transpersonal stage. At the personal stage we usually have a very focused and narrow awareness.

Here I found a video with a really interesting topic, the Kabbalah in combination with collective consciousness.

Actually, the confusion during the practice of not relying on memories is a tool for moving into the transpersonal stage. What needs to happen is that the personal memories gets reorganized so that they come to reflect the transpersonal stage. This means that the personal memories should be distrusted and the confusion welcomed. It's similar I discovered to what Leo calls radical open-mindedness. It's about entering a state of not knowing. That sounded dubious to me at first but the state of not knowing is very useful when the goal is to rearrange one's memories, instincts and habits. Knowing will still be there when it's needed and come from a new state instead of from the personal stage with the crystallized ego thinking about what to do.

Notice that at the personal stage not only is there a belief in separate control, all our memories have the same kind of belief in them! So when we think about what to do then that gets interpreted through our memories which firmly locks the personal stage and belief in separate control in place. One method I will try is to treat my memories as being a single chunk of false beliefs. Then that results in total confusion! Because the usual habit is to just keep churning one's memories around and around and attempt to cook up some actions to take from that soup. The confusion itself however is a result of the belief in separate control so the practice is to allow the confusion to be there and let it dissolve by itself.

Leo actually said in the second video about morality exactly the same thing about the future that I wrote. So then Leo has already covered that. But Leo also said that there is no destiny. That I have a disagreement about! Well, it's just my belief, but I think there is 100% destiny. It's just that it's impossible to predict the future, except in those cases where it's possible but that too is destiny! But I agree that there is no destiny as in cause and effect only from past to future. Nondual cause is the whole of reality as a single cause, which can include cause from the future and even seemingly out of the blue. So yes, there is no destiny as a mechanical predictable process that I agree with.

I want to make a distinction between should and shouldn't for past and future. What has happened should have happened, because as Leo pointed out, it happened! The future is a bit trickier. Should I eat a donut or not? The correct answer is: let's see what happens. If I eat the donut, then that's what should happen. And if I don't eat the donut then that's what should happen. So the future is unknown and it's impossible in general to say what should and should not happen. I will take a look at this long presentation by Byron Katie to get more information about it:

Leo's video about rant against morality is amazing. Very advanced stuff. Leo mentioned Byron Katie. I know about her method called The Work, maybe I should take a look at that again. And I found another similar video:

Interestingly I found that Leo talks about precisely the perspective of experiencing the whole world as one's body that I mentioned earlier. That's the transpersonal stage! Leo called it transcendent morality, from about 6 minutes into this video:

Another way of looking at it is that the personal self is a part of manifested reality. The advantage of this view is that it makes the personal stage ultimately the same as the transpersonal stage. The difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage is in appearance only, not a different consciousness. And instead of saying that there is no separate self, it can be said that at the personal stage of development there is a separate self as an appearance.

To make it really simple, the transpersonal stage is the recognition that manifested reality is a single unbroken appearance (nonduality) and then the actualization of that recognition. When the crystallized ego remains, then there may be a recognition but not yet an actualization of nonduality. The actualization involves the breaking down of the separations experienced at the personal stage of development.

What makes it appear as if there is a separate person is that the mind splits itself into an observer and what is observed. J. Krishnamurti said that the observer is the observed. I'm experimenting with if it's possible to recognize the observer as being an object. And also, to recognize that all objects are inanimate! As an example, when I remember what I did yesterday, the "me" in the past is an inanimate object, and the memories of what I did are inanimate objects, and also me in the now observing my memories is also an inanimate object observed in consciousness.

I have now invented the term Transpersonal Yoga. In ordinary yoga as I understand it there is always a person, an individual practicing something. In transpersonal yoga there isn't anybody doing anything. Instead it's about recognizing the person as being an inanimate object.

The most extreme nonduality teachers say that there is nobody and nothing is happening. At first that can sound super nihilistic and even crazy. But I think there is truth to it! Consider nonduality. Change is duality. Reality as a whole cannot turn into something else, because that would be what is turning into what is not. I believe that's why for example Brahman is changeless and in the Bible it says: "I the Lord do not change." Also, there cannot be someone plus the rest of reality, so there is nobody. But surely there is something. To say that there is nothing seems false. It could be that what the extreme nonduality teachings are saying is that there is no-thing happening, so it's not the usual sense of nothing like a void or something like that. Leo has said that it's not the usual nothing he means when he says that reality is nothing. So his explanation of nothing is the same as in the extreme nonduality teachings I think. One way of looking at the transpersonal stage is that it's a realization of nonduality plus the dissolving of the crystallized ego. And as I have mentioned before there can also be a realization of nonduality with the crystallized ego still remaining. At least that's possible in theory, and that would explain the claim that there can be spiritual enlightenment at different stages of personal development.

Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo said in this video that spiritual teachings can seem to say different things but that in reality they are ingenious ways of untying the same knot. That's a good point. He gave an example of one perspective where a tree has grown from a seed through a process of time, and from another perspective the tree appears instantly in the now from nothing, and both perspectives are two sides of the same coin. I even think that the example of the tree can be explained by saying that the past is real yet all the past is only information in the now. So both perspectives are correct. In another video Roger has mentioned that even within one teaching there can be levels where at first one thing is said, and then at a later stage another thing is said, seemingly contradicting the first claim! I have experienced levels of understanding even on my own, and have gone from doing practices such as mindfulness to more and more recognizing that my doing is itself a part of the crystallized ego. And my current approach is to focus more on understanding what the crystallized ego is instead of trying to change it which is just more of ego activity.

Shunyamurti talked in this video about a collective death drive. I think that's true! Because the collective death drive is simply the ego tensions we carry around in our bodies and minds. We carry the death drive of society collectively. But then he went on to claim that our civilization will end. That's an even wackier claim than my idea about eternal life, haha. But maybe he meant it metaphorically, that it's the "death" of the personal stage and the birth of the transpersonal stage.