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The mystical traditions unite the different religions into a common transpersonal understanding. In the personal stage religions although having the same kind of spiritual mystical core are very much stuck in materialism. And materialism itself is almost a kind of religion it seems to me and Shunyamurti talks about something similar in this new video:

Is it possible to speed up the development into the transpersonal stage? No, because first there is the prepersonal stage, then it's necessary to go through the personal stage in order to develop conceptual cognition and an individual personal sense of self. And only after that does the transpersonal stage become available. However it seems to me that with the coronavirus crisis, the material personal stage collectively for our civilization is coming to an end, and I speculate that an increasing number of people will enter the transpersonal stage in the coming years. And even though things like psychedelics only give temporary and often chaotic it seems, experiences, psychedelics can probably act as catalysts and speed up personal development, especially into the transpersonal stage. Personally I don't use the psychedelics approach but it's interesting to learn about it such as in Leo's video:

Sameness is a conceptual comparison. The deeper reality is that everything is different. For example A is different from A because those two letters are located at different positions on the screen. The transpersonal self is different from other selves. But what is the transpersonal self if turning the self into an object (crystallized ego) makes it at the personal stage again? My view is that the true self is a unique, eternal and changeless point. So the transpersonal self is a no-thing, empty in itself, and is only a unique point of observation within reality. I even call such unique point a human soul. I think that my view of sameness vs difference is influenced by Leo's definitions or even the same as his explanation in this video:

In the transpersonal stage everything is appearances in consciousness. That's difficult to make sense of at the personal stage. The idea that everything is the same "stuff" seems incomprehensible. For example Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's email server are the same stuff. A memory of an apple is the same as a physical apple being eaten in the present moment, which in turn is the same as a drawing of an apple and is the same as an iPhone. The perspective of everything being the same thing can get really crazy yet it's still the actual case. My physical body and the Ganges river are the same thing which is the same thing as the emotions I feel at this moment. The holy Bible is the same as the noble Quran which is the same as a porn movie. Isn't that blasphemy? Blasphemy is the same as CNN which is the same as Donald Trump. The Pope is the same as Donald Duck.

As an example, let's say that a woman named Alice was whacked by a stick on the butt in the past. Now that event is a memory in her mind. It's also a mild form of trauma stored as tensions in her body. And the event did actually happen, it's a historical fact. Then how can it be that sticks can't hurt a person in the transpersonal stage? It's about a shift of perspective. When is Alice's memory of the incident remembered? The answer is that Alice remembers the past event in the present moment. What more to the past event is there other than what exists now? Nothing! The past event is real, yet it's only information in the now. Even when someone for example has a scar from having been stabbed by a knife, all the past is still only information in the now. And information in the form of appearances in consciousness in the present moment is all there is. Time existing outside of the now is a projection by the mind in the form of concepts. Remembering a past event, that's the mind turning memories into a concept which then is experienced. And thinking about the future is a similar conceptualization where memories are used to come up with future scenarios.

The transpersonal perspective is very different from the personal perspective. And indeed I think that what Leo described in the perception video is exactly the transpersonal perspective. Just to illustrate how different the transpersonal perspective is from the personal perspective: Sticks and stones can't break my bones, nor can words ever hurt me. Why? Because first of all the "me", that's a concept. Secondly, stones, that's a concept. And of course words are concepts. Even hurt is a concept. A concept can't harm itself or harm another concept.

One simple difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage is that in the personal stage there is the experience of a separate self perceiving the world. In the transpersonal stage there is consciousness and the appearances in and of consciousness, and that's all there is to it! I guess Leo describes perception as something similar to the transpersonal stage in this video:

In the personal stage emotions are a trick basically. Imagine someone remembering a happy moment and is enjoying the memory and then in the next moment he or she remembers a loved one who died a year ago and great sadness is experienced. That might seem like a natural and everyday experience of emotions, but looking deeper, the emotional content is exposed as a hoax! Why? Because the mind is playing emotions along with what kind of memory is remembered. One moment there is happiness and the next moment there is sadness, or anger or glee or boredom etc. It's a totally flaky situation! And the emotions only appear to be valid because the mind plays the appropriate kinds of emotions depending on the type of memory or experience. In the personal stage the is a tremendous exaggeration of the importance of memories due to the heavy emotional content that the mind plays like old tapes. One practice is to observe the emotions that go along with thoughts and also to feel the emotions without connecting them to the thoughts! That causes the emotional content to become severed from the thoughts so that a transmutation can start to happen into transpersonal emotions.

In this second analogy I have added a letter D to the previous example. The letter D represents the individual self, the crystallized ego. And now it gets interesting because what is D? The answer is that D is an appearance on the screen along with A, B and C. And this second analogy represents the transpersonal stage. Not only are all experiences recognized as appearances in consciousness, also the separate self, the experiencer, is recognized as being an appearance in consciousness too. The experiencer itself is an appearance in consciousness. Likewise the observer is an appearance in consciousness, so the observer is the observed.

Just to experiment with a crude analogy, In this analogy the letter A represents thoughts, B represents emotions and C represents physical objects. And the screen on which the letters exist represents consciousness. The screen can exist without the letters A, B and C while those letters cannot exist without the screen. This illustrates how consciousness is more fundamental than what appears as experiences. And also, even though A, B and C are different from each other they are also all appearances on the screen. And similarly, thoughts, emotions and physical objects are all the same "mind stuff" in and of consciousness.

Now I got an idea of what the difference between the transpersonal stage and spiritual enlightenment is! Of course it depends on what definitions are used, but Ken Wilber said that there can be spiritual enlightenment at different stages of personal development. With the definitions I use there is indeed a difference. Trans-conceptual awareness as I define it includes fluid cognition of experiences including of the self. Spiritual enlightenment on the other hand can happen even at the personal stage of development, before fluid cognition of the self has been development. And then the enlightened person experiences himself or herself as consciousness yet still operates with crystallized cognition!

Another deception in the personal stage - in addition to a false perspective of separations - is that thoughts appear fundamental and absolute. If thoughts are just appearances in consciousness, then how can they appear so dominating? Because the thoughts come with huge amounts of emotional content attached to them. And it's the emotions that primarily drive the personal stage, not the thoughts as in some objective detached form. In the transconceptual stage the trick of sticky emotional content is seen through. No longer then can thoughts hijack all of our awareness through emotions attached to them. The emotions become an integrated part of the whole transpersonal experience instead of being separate carrots and sticks for the crystallized ego.

In theory the transpersonal stage is really simple. In the personal stage we are identified with our thoughts, even the self is experienced as a concept, a separate entity. Entering the transpersonal stage is merely about taking a step back into consciousness, and from there thoughts including the separate self are recognized as appearances in consciousness. Is the transpersonal stage the same as spiritual enlightenment? Maybe not, because as Ken Wilber has pointed out there can be spiritual enlightened at different personal stages. But I myself have no way of verifying that so I will stick to the term transpersonal stage. To make it easy I defined the transpersonal stage as trans-conceptual awareness. Trans-conceptual awareness is a direct result of stepping back into consciousness. In practice however this is a huge step since the entire personal stage is an immense heap of identifications with memories and a separate sense of self. And the crystallized ego cannot itself step back into consciousness because the ego is an appearance in consciousness.

Notice that all thoughts are separate appearances in consciousness. Even emotions have a locality to them, such as experienced in certain areas of the body, at least within or near to the body and not experienced as belonging to the entire external world (in the personal stage at least). And even the external world, that too is made of separate appearances in consciousness! And since all those appearances are separate, they lack independent existence. It's impossible to have something truly separate and still be within the same one reality. Consciousness is a unified whole and therefore consciousness is the "container" and the physical world is appearances within the container of consciousness. I have quoted from the Bible and from the Tao Te Ching. Even more clearly transpersonal perhaps is the ancient scripture Ashtavakra Gita: To know oneself as consisting of consciousness and distinct from the body. Why distinct from the body? Because the body is a concept. There is no body as a separate object. And even the concept, the word 'body' is distinct from the changing process we experience as the physical body. The physical body is a shifting appearance in consciousness just as everything else experienced is appearances in consciousness. There are no actual separate objects, not even separate bodies or separate thoughts.

In the personal stage our awareness is trapped in thinking. To the point that we even turn consciousness into a thought, a concept. And then we try to explain consciousness as a concept. But consciousness itself is not an object! The word consciousness is a concept while consciousness itself is necessary for there to be awareness of that concept. So in the personal stage the mind tricks itself to become trapped in thoughts which it experiences as the foundation of the self. And consciousness becomes something that the crystallized ego has, such as an epiphenomenon produced by the brain. That's a misperception of reality since consciousness is the awareness of the thoughts and is therefore the foundation of the self. The transpersonal stage includes realizing consciousness as the foundation instead of as in the personal stage where the material world is experienced as the foundation. In this video Leo explains what consciousness is:

Also traditional mindfulness practice is limited in the same was as ordinary body awareness practice is limited. When there is nonjudgmental observation of thoughts and emotions, then it's still the crystallized ego that is doing the nonjudgmental observation. At least that's how I have been doing it. So the trick for entering a fluid ego state is to recognize that the crystallized ego is still the center of one's activities and experiences. Even the practice of abiding in the I Am can easily become trapped in the crystallized ego. Fortunately it's probably enough to be aware of those traps for there to be a true transcendence into the fluid ego and the transpersonal stage, since that transition is an automatic process.

The "meditation" technique presented by Bentinho Massaro in this new video is an interesting alternative to body awareness practice. He said that body awareness practice is useful but there is then still a separate self having attention in the body. The technique he described here instead takes the perspective of including all of one's experience seen from the I Am consciousness. I will experiment with combining this I Am awareness with body awareness, so that even the "external" environment becomes a part of one's "body". Me as a crystallized ego cannot become a fluid ego, but I can learn to recognize the crystallized ego from the I Am perspective.

Aaron Abke has this new video where he explains the crystallized ego with the constant I-thought that is a part of the personal stage:

A concept is a lifeless label. A concept cannot do anything yet in the personal stage there is the belief that there is a separate person able to do things. And therefore because of that misperception there is a lot of effort, friction and conflict in the personal stage. It's a necessary delusion for the purpose of developing unique individuals. In the transpersonal stage it's recognized that individual action is an illusion and therefore the friction and conflicts are removed while the actions become more efficient than in the personal stage. Here is another example of the transpersonal stage:

How is it possible to love one's enemies in the transpersonal stage? First what is meant by enemy must be defined. And that's easy to do. An enemy is ..... a concept! And it's easy to love concepts, which are useful labels and harmless and empty in themselves. And if someone slaps you on the right cheek, what to do? Here the same reasoning applies. Who is this 'someone' that if he or she slaps you would cause you concern? Again, the someone, just like for the enemy, is a concept. You can't be slapped by a concept. So it's about an extreme shift of perspective, a radical recontextualization, from a perspective based on identification with concepts (the personal stage) to another perspective (the transpersonal stage) where the concepts are recognized for what they actually are: empty labels.

How can the transpersonal stage as I mentioned be free from conflict? That may sound utopian. But the answer is simple. In the transpersonal stage there isn't any crystallized self and therefore no conflict! Then why is there conflict in the prepersonal stage? Because then, even though there isn't any crystallized conceptual self developed yet, it's on an instinctual level based on individual survival. So the prepersonal stage lacks both a conceptual self and fluid self. In the transpersonal stage the fluid self is connected with, and therefore in harmony with, all of reality instead of as in the previous stages where it's about individual survival needs. Here is an example of the transpersonal stage: My interpretation is that "serving God" means the transpersonal stage (trans-conceptual awareness) and "serving money" means being stuck on the level of concepts (money is a primary example of concept) and represents the personal stage (conceptual awareness). In the personal stage, money is what holds society together while the personal relationships are shaky because they are based on conflicting concepts (each person has relationships only with his or her own mental images [concepts]). Money on the other hand is a concept that everybody in the personal stage agrees on what it represents and therefore is the main social "glue" in the personal stage of development.

The Wikipedia article about transpersonal also mentioned a prepersonal stage. I will use pre-conceptual to define the prepersonal stage. Trans-conceptional requires complete personal development. Pre-conceptual on the other hand means that conceptual thinking hasn't even developed yet. Interestingly this is similar to the pre-trans fallacies Ken Wilber has talked about. In a prepersonal stage people can behave instinctually and impulsively, such as acting without careful planning, and in the transpersonal stage action can appear like in the prepersonal stage without planning yet it's a totally different form of action. Because the prepersonal stage is full of conflict whereas the transpersonal stage has transcended conflict.

How to develop a fluid self? In the personal stage the self is clunky, crystallized, rigid and mechanical. At the same time there is a sense of individual free will in the personal self. That's necessary or else we would feel like mechanical robots. My assumption is that life is automatic. So the sense of free will is only a necessary trick for the personal stage to develop. And in the transpersonal stage the sense of free will is transcended and replaced by trans-conceptual awareness. The experience of free will requires a conceptual self in order to work. With a fluid self, the sense of being a separate entity has dissolved and the experience of individual free will is replaced by fluid cognition. Therefore my idea is that being aware of the transpersonal stage and recognizing the personal stage is enough for transcendence to happen. And it's an automatic process. So my strategy at the moment is to learn about both the personal and the transpersonal stages (even that is an automatic process) and then through that I will move from a crystallized self to a fluid self.

In psychology there is a distinction between crystallized cognition and fluid cognition. The crystallized kind is the use of stored knowledge and the fluid kind is formless cognition. What I meant by flex-flow personal identity is that the sense of self becomes fluid cognition. In the personal stage of development the sense of self is always crystallized into a fixed identity.

The conceptual identity as a self in the personal stage is held as tensions in body and mind. It's a constant effort of holding on to all the content that makes up the personal identity. This insight adds a new dimension to body awareness. The tensions are more than just repressed emotions and past traumas. In the personal stage of development the tensions are the whole sense of an individual self. Notice that when we think, then thoughts are held in our awareness. And in the same way, in the personal stage the self is a thought that the mind holds on to all the time. In the transpersonal stage the concept of self relaxes into a flex-flow identity which transcends the need for being held constantly as tensions in body and mind. Because at least as I have defined it, the transpersonal stage is also trans-conceptual.