Anderz

Member
  • Content count

    4,020
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Anderz

  1. The personal stage is about a conceptual self. A concept is basically a label, a seemingly separate object representing something else. And actually all thoughts are concepts. Every thought is a representation of something, i.e. a concept. Leo talks about direct experience vs concepts in this video. As an example he went through a practice of simply looking at one's hand. That's direct experience. In the personal stage we observe the world including ourselves as concepts representing what we observe. That creates a layer of separation between ourselves and direct experience. One practice I came to think about is to observe one's thoughts as being a part of the direct experience. Instead of observing reality though concepts in the form of thoughts, both the thoughts and the direct experiences are combined into the same perception. The idea with this practice is to heal the separation between concepts and direct experience into a transpersonal perception.
  2. Shynuamurti said in this latest video that in Jainism which is a peaceful religion they wear face masks to avoid harming bugs and things. That's true! I saw images of that earlier. And surgeons wear face masks, and the COVID-19 crisis is forcing a symbol of purity on people, he said. Interesting point. He also said that the ego is a mask. Very good point! The coronavirus crisis (corona means crown b.t.w. which means halo) is like symbolism for the personal stage. And a halo represents holiness, which means whole as in the transpersonal stage.
  3. The personal stage has a lack of Self-Love. For example hardly anyone is satisfied with his or her physical body. And I came to think of how that's necessary! Because if we had beautiful physical bodies then there is a grave risk of remaining stuck at the personal stage of development. One idea I have is that our physical bodies will become beautiful when we are at the transpersonal stage. I know that this is a very radical idea that hardly any spiritual teacher talks about except perhaps a few New Age gurus who most people think of as woo woo. The physical body is I believe only an appearance in consciousness so it's the level of mind that determines the state of the body. Going to the gym, diets, plastic surgery and so on are actually then from the bigger picture delusional methods of improving the body. The mind makes it real, so for example eating too much food will likely make most people fat for example. So it's not something that can be changed by wishful thinking. With the mind as the true cause, and actually Mind being the true cause which is nonduality, it means that even the personal mind being a cause is a false perspective. So we can't enter the transpersonal stage by personal effort on the level of the separate self. Instead the effort has to be to allow the separate self to dissolve! Otherwise the crystallized ego blocks the development of a fluid ego, which is necessary for truly actualizing Self-Love. What I mean by Self-Love is the universal self recognizing its own infinite capacity for intelligence, evolution, creation, beauty etc. I think that is at least similar to how Leo explains Self-Love in this video:
  4. Ouch, I'm not entirely sure but I suspect that the whole structure of the personal mind has to be replaced by a hugely more complex structure of mind. The reason is that the personal mind is way too limited, narrow and selfish to function in harmony with the whole of life, which results in lots of conflict and suffering. As an example, the way I think about my own finances is the same as how everybody else thinks about their finances. The differences are in the details, the content, while the structure is shared. And at the personal stage we all share the same fundamental crystallized ego structure. And it's a very tense, rigid and heavy structure. With mindfulness practice it's possible to feel the structure of the personal stage as tensions in body and mind. And in my experience it's absolutely incredible how deep and tense the structure is. The more mindfulness practice and inner body awareness, the more tensions are revealed that previously were hidden from conscious awareness. I believe that the crystallized ego structure is shared between all people and that's why it's so heavy. It's a morphic field with nonlocal scalar field connections. Well, that's my current guess. I have to start with some assumption. And the transpersonal structure is a collective mind field! So the personal structure needs to dissolve and be replaced by the collective mind structure while the personal content is preserved. Leo has this video about the difference between content and structure. He talks mostly about particular structures but the same principle applies to the whole personal structure and the personal content.
  5. The Bible says that the body of flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God but that in the twinkling of an eye our bodies will change. But wait a minute! What is the body of flesh? It's a concept! The body is just an appearance in consciousness along with everything else material and immaterial. So our physical bodies are already avatars. In the personal stage we experience the physical body as a separate object. That's a false view. So in the transpersonal stage the experience of the body is as an avatar, one with the whole universe. I even suspect that such simple shift, in the twinkling of an eye, will actually make our physical bodies immortal and capable of increasingly amazing stunts. Will we experience physical death even at the transpersonal stage? I don't know, but maybe not! Goodbye horrible gravestone. Leo has an interesting explanation of death in this video:
  6. Can the crystallized ego do anything? No, that would be absurd. It would be like the word 'car' being able to move by itself. Not even the physical human body can do anything. Everything physical is an appearance without the ability to do anything. The same with everything mental. In the personal stage we believe that the crystallized ego can change the direction of the universe by using free will. It's a delusion that leads to suffering. Also the fluid ego is equally unable to do anything but at least the fluid ego is moving as the totality instead of as a belief of being separate from the wholeness of reality.
  7. At the personal stage confusion leads to fear and desire which then turns into thinking. Fear is for protection and desire for directing actions. Desire is sneaky and it seems beneficial while in reality it is conflict. Desire is conflict because it's based on the false belief in a separate self. So the desire leads to thoughts about a separate self (the crystallized ego) wanting something. And that causes conflict! Because the wants produced by desire are isolated to a separate self that has to struggle against the world including other seemingly separate selves. This is similar to the four noble truths in Buddhism: Life is suffering. The cause of suffering is desire. Suffering can end. There is a path to end suffering (noble eightfold path). I don't know much about Buddhism but that sounds similar to going from the personal stage (suffering caused by desire) to the transpersonal stage (suffering ended).
  8. The self-deception at the personal stage is huge. Leo explained how it controls everything we do. And that's correct according to my view where the crystallized ego is a growing bundle of self-deceptions. The crystallized ego starts as a belief in being a separate self. That seed is itself a self-deception since the truth is that reality is an unbroken wholeness. And that seed, because of being false, produces confusion which the mind turns into fear and desire in a growing and very tense heap of self-deception. As I mentioned previously, fear is a false belief and even desire is a false belief, and those are forms of self-deception. Melting the crystallized ego and transmuting it into a fluid ego is an enormous task. One clue is that confusion is the fuel for the crystallized ego. And instead of the mind continuing to build a stronger crystallized ego, mindfulness of the confusion in oneself is one method of reversing that trend.
  9. A transpersonal fluid self means it's free from tensions. I myself cannot melt away my inner tensions, because I am those tensions (crystallized ego)! What I can do is to observe the tensions dissolve automatically using mindfulness practice. And that's possible with the knowledge that it may be possible to transcend thinking (conceptual cognition). Then there is a willingness of the mind to allow the tensions to dissolve even when it involves dissolving the ability to think! Self-deception is prevented by measuring how much actual inner peace is increased and how the inner tensions actually dissolve. I will take a look again at Leo's videos about self-deception to check if there are other deceptions I have overlooked. Here is the first part:
  10. Instead of trying to understand what all the different nuances of my emotions mean I came up with a radical approach of combining all the negative ones into a single category of suffering. The idea is that the important thing for transcending the personal stage regarding emotions is to identify where the blocks are and all negative emotions indicate some kind of imbalance. So I think for me at the moment it's more important to train myself to sense and recognize subtle suffering than trying to interpret what each different kind of feeling means. They all suck! Haha, well, actually they all also are useful as pointers to where further development is needed. And it's also useful to sense increase of inner peace which is a sign of moving into more fluid cognition.
  11. Something that I found very interesting that Leo said in his new video is that at the strategic stage I think it was, there is a recognition of subtle distinctions of emotions and ways of using even negative emotions as telling us something instead of only being some nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of. That's still the personal stage yet learning how to interpret emotions definitely can improve the development into the transpersonal stage I think. So I will experiment with examining my own emotions more and see if I can learn something from that and improve my own personal development.
  12. If desires are transcended in the transpersonal stage how are they included? An integral approach is about both transcending and including previous stages. Some spiritual teacher mentioned that desires become preferences. That's a good way of looking at it I think. Desires are unfulfilled wants, so desires are problems basically. Preferences on the other hand can be used in more flexible ways. When there is a desire for ice cream for example then if it's a preference then the wanting can be more harmonious instead of as in the personal stage where there often are conflicting desires, such as the desire to eat ice cream and at the same time a desire to remain slim and to avoid eating ice cream. An inner conflict! With fluid cognition and preferences the situation sorts itself out harmoniously without the need for fixed ideas about what to do.
  13. Leo mentioned that there is a RationalWiki article about him. I found this passage in that article: I think the RationalWiki article fails to grasp Leo's fundamental point which as I interpret it is that subjective experience is more fundamental than objective reality. Why? Because objective reality is appearances in consciousness! And it can be directly verified in one's own experience without the need for theoretical models which themselves by the way also are appearances in consciousness. Interestingly, I didn't find any RationalWiki article about nonduality but one article about transpersonal psychology: I don't know enough about transpersonal psychology to evaluate that article but it's interesting that it claims that transpersonal psychology says that a disconnection from God/energy/transcendent/soul has left everyone sick. Very good! There is truth to that, not in an absolute sense since the personal stage of development is necessary and actually healthy but in contrast to the transpersonal stage it's valid to call the personal stage sick.
  14. Leo explained how at each personal stage of development the structure of the mind is the same while the content can be different. So for example a fundamental Christian and a fundamental Muslim have the same mind structure with different content. That structure of the mind together with the personal content I came to realize is the same as the crystallized ego! This means that in the transpersonal stage instead of having a rigid structure of the mind, the ego becomes fluid. So that's a key difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage. And the crystallized ego has to dissolve while the personal content is preserved. The fluid ego is similar to "empty your mind and become like water". Because the personal content has the rigid shape of crystallized cognition and needs to become fluid too.
  15. The same statement can give different meanings depending on in what stage of development the statement is interpreted. For example to ask oneself in a situation "What would Jesus do?" often means at the personal stage that Jesus is a separate person and I am another separate person. From a transpersonal perspective even Jesus becomes transpersonal and Christ then represents a universal principle rather than a separate person. Even within Christianity itself there are different interpretations, and even the Bible itself says that Christ is the Word and the Word has created everything (John 1) which is a nondual perspective. And perhaps controversial but proposed by Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is the idea of Christ as the Omega Point which kooks like a transpersonal perspective:
  16. @Megan Alecia Thanks. Leo has a new video about ego development and I hope my ideas are the same or at least similar to what he presents. Leo has much more understanding about personal development but I find it useful to come up with my own view to understand it more and to make it easier to evaluate others' information about it. The personal stage is driven by fear and desire. From the transpersonal perspective fear is false since that would mean that the universe was afraid of itself. And desire is false because that's a belief that the universe is incapable of fulfilling itself and that it needs extra separate egos to help the universe to do the right things, haha. Leo said that there will be a third part, so this part may still be about the personal stage of development:
  17. Reality has infinite intelligence, yet since there is progress and evolution, the past appears less intelligent than present times. And so will (and does) our situation appear less intelligent than the future. For example a lion killing an antelope is not natural, it's just stupid and cruel. Or to use another perspective, everything is natural, even an iPhone. Similarly today humanity is just cruel and stupid compared to the future. That's why it says in the Bible that the lamb and the wolf will live together and that there will be no more death and suffering. That's intelligence.
  18. The complexity of reality is always increasing. This means that the latest moment in time is the most intelligent. In the personal stage we use old plans and strategies from the past which have less intelligence in them and try to manage the present moment through that crystallized conceptual cognition. This always leads to a struggle against life and a buildup of subconscious hatred and fear. In the transpersonal stage it is recognized that the future is already determined so not only is the use of past strategies and knowledge inadequate and leads to struggle and conflict, it's also redundant! So the transpersonal stage instead makes use of fluid cognition as a part of life instead of crystallized cognition against life as in the personal stage.
  19. It's easy to overlook how heavy thoughts are at the personal stage of development. At first we may believe that thoughts are not such a big deal and that we can easily dismiss thoughts if we want to. No we can't! Not as long as we remain at the personal stage. As an example, think of your personal finances. Notice how extremely heavy those thoughts are, how much survival instincts and emotional content that go along with thoughts about money. Warning, here comes an even more extreme example. Think about what your gravestone will look like, what will be written on it and its geographical location. Those are incredibly heavy thoughts at the personal stage. The practice, then, for moving into the transpersonal stage is to make those kind of thoughts, which all are just concepts yet heavy as mountains, to become light as feathers and then dissolve like snowflakes into an ocean of peace.
  20. Ah! I got in insight. The reason for why evil and hatred become real experiences is because in the personal stage our conceptual cognition becomes so heavy and solidified, crystallized, reified so that the conflicts become very real. The transpersonal stage transcends conflict by recognizing the concepts for what they are, empty labels and therefore the crystallized cognition is replaced by fluid cognition, even for the personal sense of self and of others.
  21. In the transpersonal stage there is love for everything. That might at first seem like an outrageous claim. The personal stage is based on the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". So in the personal stage there is love and hate opposing each other. How is it possible to love everything? I quoted Jesus earlier about he said that we should love our enemies. And that's easy because the enemies are concepts! So the recognition of concepts makes it possible to love everything. As I wrote earlier concepts are empty and harmless in themselves and useful and therefore lovable. There can still be hate of evil deeds and still be love! Because the evil deeds are concepts and can be loved and can also be hated which is fine too, and behind the concepts there is the universal Love. In this way the love-hate duality is transcended and included in an integral way in the transpersonal stage.
  22. I don't feel that there is much love in the world at the moment. However, the personal stage is necessary so in a sense even fear and suffering are a part of the larger universal Love. The transpersonal stage is an increase of love through the personal stage growing out of fear into more love. There is evolution into more complexity, meaning more intelligence and therefor more love. And universal Love is the driving force of creation. I have defined love as wholeness in harmony, and evolution reaches larger and larger levels of harmonic wholes in the form of holons. Leo explains what I call universal Love in this video (and there is also a part 2):
  23. I think that the world today is sufficiently complex and interconnected to withstand even a prolonged coronovirus crisis. But yes, there will be some kind of big shift in society as a result of the crisis probably. And the spiritual capital that Shunyamurti talked about is the same as the transpersonal stage it seems. And even if as I believe that society will return more or less to normal soon (or at least in 2021) moving into spiritual capital seems like a good strategy because that's a robust state even in shaky situations.