Anderz

Notice that the individual is not a separate island. The individual is a part of, and dependent on, society. So in a society at the personal stage of development a person at the transpersonal stage will still grow old and die. Therefore in order to truly have a transpersonal stage even society as a whole will need to be at that stage or at least support the transpersonal stage. As a speculation, there may be a population on earth with humans having eternal lives. Richard Dolan has suggested that there exists what he calls a breakaway civilization on earth, a group of people with way more advanced knowledge and technology than in the public society. If that's true then it's likely that the breakaway civilization is already at the transpersonal stage or even higher.

Even animals in nature, their bodies don't grow old, get sick and die because of some wear and tear or something like that. Instead the average lifespan of a species is determined by the populations' survival strategies and fit into their environment. For example a species of mice can have an average lifespan of 3 years while a similar species, the naked mole rat, has an average life span of 30 years. Animals can be seen as existing at a prepersonal stage of development. So if we humans were to regress back into a prepersonal stage there would still be aging of the body and death because of the struggle for survival. It's only at the transpersonal stage and higher that the struggle for survival is transcended. A personal at the transpersonal stage is one with the environment instead of a separate individual having to struggle against nature.

Money is a huge part of the crystallized ego. The heaviest tensions in the body are caused by money and those tensions slowly strangle the body so that it grows old, gets sick and then dies. And the love of money is those tensions, so it's the root of all evil. The reason for why money causes tensions is that society as a whole is a struggle against nature. And society has "outsourced" that struggle in the form of making people maintain the rigid structure of money as tensions in our bodies. In the body of a person at the transpersonal stage the tensions have dissolved. And instead of a crystallized ego, holding money as tensions, the fluid ego is more like cash flow, financial liquidity and high velocity of money, current-cy. You cannot serve both God and money. Either you are at the personal stage of development, which means that you serve money with your tensions, or you are at the transpersonal stage and you "serve" God and since there isn't any separate person at that stage, there isn't any you as a "servant".

I noticed that I still have a tendency of clinging on to my desires. That's natural at the personal stage. At the transpersonal stage desires are converted into preferences. And Buddhism is correct that desire is what needs to be transcended (along with fears). The problem with desires is that they are a part of the crystallized ego. There is value to desires and even to fears, but both desire and fear are limited perspectives based on a false belief in separation. So both fear and desire cause conflict. My practice now is to recognize that my desires are valuable but that they need to dissolve and be transmuted into preferences. And my idea is that reality has infinite intelligence so it will automatically sort out the complicated process of making the transformation of desires into preferences happen. Similarly fears need to dissolve and be replaced by fluid guidance. A simple analogy is that fears and desires are like training wheels for the self. They are necessary during the personal stage of development and need to be let go of when entering the transpersonal stage.

Is there another stage beyond even the transpersonal stage? Yes, I believe so. Leo talked about that in his most recent video. And my idea is that the stage after the transpersonal stage is a collective consciousness. And we can't cheat and skip directly to the collective consciousness stage from the personal stage since it's governed by the crystallized ego which is essentially the opposite of a collective consciousness.

The practice of noticing the Self as being one's whole experience is still at the personal stage an activity done with our crystallized ego. To reach the transpersonal stage of the Self requires that one's total experience becomes integrated into one whole indivisible sense of being. And then the effort of the crystallized ego dissolves into wu wei. And the crystallized ego turns into the fluid ego of Tao (Dao).

A simple practice I discovered for getting a sense of the difference between the personal self and the transpersonal Self is to first notice one's thoughts. And the next step is to notice that the thoughts are only a part of one's whole experience, which includes other things through sense perceptions and feelings. And the third step is to recognize that the Self is both the thoughts and also the other experiences; the Self is the whole experience. One's total experience, even at the personal stage of development, includes both thoughts and the other sensations through the five senses and feelings. And notice that the total experience is a seamless whole. Even consciousness is a part of the experience, even though it's what is making the experience possible. The Self is all of that wholeness.

In this short clip Deepak Chopra makes what I found to be a good explanation of the formless being that is missing in the personal stage and experienced at the transpersonal stage.

When I claim that it may be possible to transcend even physical death isn't that precisely the kind of crystallized belief that's a sign of the personal stage of development? Yes! But notice that the same applies to the usual belief that physical death is inevitable. That too is a crystallized belief at the personal stage of development. The transpersonal stage is beyond beliefs since beliefs are conceptual constructs. I still find it useful to come up with a counter-belief to the usual belief in inevitable physical death. If people who are enlightened still cling to the belief in inevitable physical death their spiritual enlightenment might be real but they are then still stuck in the crystallized ego at the personal stage of development.

At the personal stage of development we are trapped in the relative context. And the transpersonal stage is simply about taking a step beyond the relative context into the nondual context. But isn't that just theoretical speculations? Yes, I'm still at the personal stage so I'm conjuring up ideas about the transpersonal stage. However if there is truth to the ideas, then one's actual experience will start to reflect that. So it's a form of testing and exploring possibilities.

If the nondual context is absolute, then what about impermanence? The answer is that in the nondual context impermanence is permanence. Again, it can sound crazy from a rational perspective but it's rational! It's just that one has to take a leap beyond concepts while at the same time using concepts. A simpler way of looking at it is that from the nondual context it's possible to take a step down into the context of change, time and forms, let's call it the relative context. And within the relative context there is impermanence without permanence on the level of form. Interestingly the Platonic forms are beyond the relative context. For example 2+2 = 4 can be seen as a Platonic form and a timeless unchangeable truth. It's a bit tricky. Notice that the text "2+2 = 4" is a concept that points to the Platonic form it represents. We can also use for example binary notation to represent the same Platonic form: "10+10 = 100".

I think the truth is known in human knowledge but that it's spread out, almost as if the true information has been deliberately compartmentalized. And actually, that would be sensical from a personal perspective because it's a stage where we need to be tricked basically. One example is that I found a term in philosophy, I don't remember the name, it was some fancy term, which says that only what exists now is real. So for example Donald Trump is real but George Washington isn't real. In my opinion that's almost a correct view! My view is that the past is real yet all the past is only information in the now, so for example George Washington is real but he only exists now, not in some past separate from the now. At the personal stage we cling to the past and almost live in the past. At the transpersonal stage the past is recognized as being only form in the now.

Something I find puzzling and actually suspicious is that virtually all spiritual teachers start with the assumption that the physical body will grow old and die. And then they go on and say that the physical body and the world are the same appearance in consciousness. Wait a minute, so my physical body (appearance in consciousness) will grow old and get buried in the world (the same appearance in consciousness)? That's absurd! So my physical body will get buried in my physical body (the world)? Has nobody ever questioned the absurdity of that?

The nondual context is described in Buddhism:

In the nondual context, formlessness is form. This short-circuits the conceptual mind. Because change requires form. In formlessness there is no change. So change and no change are the same. To the conceptual mind, the ordinary thinking mind, this makes no sense at all. And in the nondual context all paradoxes are resolved. A paradox is form which is the same as formlessness which in turn is the same as freedom from all paradoxes. The past is the same as the future. The word 'iPhone' and a physical iPhone are the same. The map and the territory are the same.

When the crystallized ego dissolves into the nondual context, the mind becomes trans-conceptual. At the personal stage we interpret our experiences within our personal context. At the transpersonal stage experiences are direct without the need for a layer of interpretations since the nondual context is the direct experience of reality. As J. Krishnamurti said: "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." That's the personal stage of development. The name of the bird becomes a part of the child's crystallized ego and from then on the bird becomes a conceptual experience that blocks the direct experience of the bird.

The crystallized ego is its own context. And it's a limited, narrow, self-biased and crystallized context. It's a tiny context compared to the nondual context. Conscious suffering aims at dissolving the limited context of the crystallized ego so that it melts into the nondual context. For example my crystallized ego interprets Donald Trump within my limited context and another person with a crystallized ego interprets Donald Trump from his or her own limited context. This causes conflicts, confusion and suffering. Also, the crystallized ego holds on to its context through tensions. So the primary conflict for the crystallized ego is an internal one. Conscious suffering reverses that conflict by focusing on the suffering instead of on the thoughts. And the suffering can be physical pain, emotional suffering such as frustration and mental suffering in the form of confusion.

To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings: One Context to rule them all, One Context to find them, One Context to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. The One Context here is of course the nondual context. And it's very convenient. For example if I invent a new word such as favidoliminium then within the nondual context that word is precisely defined. Why? Because it exists! If it exists that's all that's needed to define a word in an absolute sense by simply putting it within the nondual context. But is the nondual context useful, or is it nonsensical and useless? I think that in relation to conscious suffering it's useful because here it's the whole conceptual framework of the crystallized ego that is taken as a whole chunk. All the different kinds of meanings within the crystallized ego are of secondary importance.

The purpose of conscious suffering is to deconstruct the crystallized ego. To make it clear what that means here is a definition: Definition: The crystallized ego is the conceptual self based on the belief in separation. I'm not sure yet where I'm going with this, haha, but I'm working my way down from the top, and the crystallized ego is the main target.

To make the description of the conscious suffering technique formal I will start by defining what I call the nondual context. That Wikipedia quote says that a context is a relative concept. However I define the nondual context as everything. The nondual context is absolute. Notice that the term "nondual context" itself is a concept within the actual nondual context. Definition: The nondual context is all of reality. I wanted to try this approach because it's different from the idea that language is relative. For example with the nondual context the word "iPhone" is absolute. There are loads of different interpretations and meanings related to the word iPhone, yet the nondual context bunches all of that together, both past and future, into an absolute meaning for the word iPhone. The same with all other words.

At the moment I don't know how to integrate the physical, emotional and mental levels of the conscious suffering practice. But I remember what Teal Swan said that trying to bring balance is a form of control which itself imbalance. And in this video Shunyamurti said that we don't have to use effort to reach a state of delight which is free from the ego because it's our natural state before the ego starts to develop. So I will start with those two key insights that the conscious practice should minimize effort and control. And also it's important to keep in mind that moving back to the state of delight is not a regression back to the prepersonal stage as a baby. Instead the personal content needs to be preserved and integrated even as the crystallized ego dissolves.

I noticed that my conscious suffering method is very similar to Leo's explanation of going from Derrida's deconstruction all the way into nonduality. So I will experiment with making the method more ambitious and still keep it simple. The crystallized ego has a rigid and inflexible structure that needs to be broken down (deconstructed) all the way down to nonduality. I will make the conscious suffering method cover the whole personal stage which means the physical, emotional and also mental level. And it's an experiment, so my attempt might fail but even then I will have learned something.

I looked up a few more sources about Gurdjieff's intentional suffering and it's similar to what I mean by conscious suffering. I didn't fully grasp what Gurdjieff's method is or the reason for it to work. I guess I would have to read Gurdjieff's own writings about it but it seems too complicated for me so I will stick to my simpler method. And I will call it conscious suffering so that it's clear that it's different from Gurdjieff's intentional suffering. Conscious suffering is a method for dissolving the crystallized ego and is based on the following observations (guesses): The belief in separation causes confusion. The mind turns confusion into fear and desire. Fear and desire cause tensions in the body. The tensions produce constant pain. The mind numbs out the pain. With this chain of events the crystallized ego develops as tensions in the body. That's the personal stage of development. Conscious suffering is a method of reversing that chain back into wholeness, not back to the prepersonal stage but into a transpersonal stage,

I have an idea that physical pain is caused by tensions in the body. And the tensions are made of accumulated fear. When there is physical damage to the body there is pain too and even that can be seen as a form of tension where the body needs to start repairing the damage which causes strain. And I also think that the crystallized ego is producing pain all the time since it's made of tensions. But most of the time the pain is numbed out! So we are generally unaware of the constant pain caused by the tensions. Conscious suffering then (or intentional suffering as Gurdjieff called it) is then a means of lessening the numbness so that the pain becomes noticed and the tensions can dissolve. I'm not sure if that's the same as what Gurdjieff was describing but that's my idea about it. I will compare it to the explanations in this video:

The claims about consciousness in the heart are probably true I think because I have actually briefly experienced consciousness in the heart area myself. There are neurons in the physical heart, but very few compared to in the brain and I doubt that consciousness is dependent on neurons. Instead what happens I assume is that consciousness enters the subtle body! So that there is truth to the eastern spiritual traditions talking about subtler forms of bodies, such as energy bodies made of prana or chi which may simply be zero point energy. In the personal stage, consciousness is mainly located in the brain. It's reasonable to assume that in the transpersonal stage consciousness flows out into the whole body and maybe even beyond that and extends out into the environment.