Anderz

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  1. The COVID crisis is a great catalyst for ending the miserable personal stage of development. Society today at large cannot help us with transpersonal development. In fact, what society does is the opposite and uses the personal stage as a fuel source for maintaining itself and grow. Until now that is, since the COVID crisis is the beginning of the end for the "caterpillar" stage of humanity. And since society thrives on the personal stage its incentive is to keep us there which it does by making us value money more than valuing other people's wants and desires. To exaggerate a bit, society has turned us into sadists, separated from each other and deriving pleasure from experiencing other people's failures, misfortune, accidents and suffering. At the personal stage sadism makes logical sense, since other people's failure improves our own chances of success in a society held together though monetary rather than social values. It's also necessary at the personal stage to present a respectable front, a phony persona of giving the impression of being able to function socially even though the actual social intelligence at the personal stage of development is roughly at the same level as primates such as baboons in nature.
  2. Not only are our memories filled with conflict in the personal stage, also essentially all our actions lead to conflict. Only when situations are deemed beneficial for ourselves, our personal success, our political party, team, company, country, religion, role models, ideologies or belief system do we approve of other people or groups of people. And even in those situations, to remain free from conflict is virtually impossible. In all other situations when we are at the personal stage we even directly or indirectly want to push down other people! Because only by pushing down or even getting rid of other people's agendas can our own wants gain a better chance of succeeding. It's an absolute horror situation. The personal stage of development is necessary. It's impossible to skip levels of development. Yet at the same time it's urgent that we start entering into the transpersonal stage both as individual and collectively or the misery will continue.
  3. Another idea that now came to me is that it's possible to integrate integral and nondual teachings. For example Shunyamurti talked about how the entire ego needs to be recognized as a lousy film and gotten rid of, while Ken Wilber talks about how to include the ego in an integral way. So how to resolve that kind of tricky situation where one expert says get rid of your ego and another expert says integrate your ego? One solution is to use what Shunyamurti called trans-conceptual awareness and recognize that the ego is a concept related to a bunch of other concepts. In the personal stage we are identified with the ego and all the concepts it is connected to. The transpersonal stage includes trans-conceptual awareness which the self is grounded in instead of being trapped in concepts. So I will shift my practice towards trans-conceptual awareness yet with the conceptual keys in my previous post still in mind.
  4. I got an idea of how to enter the transpersonal stage. It's speculative and something that I will experiment with myself. The first key is to transcend physical death. Literally! And the second key is bring harmony within oneself as a part of one's whole experience. And the third key is to enter a collective field of awareness that is shared between all people in the transpersonal stage. My idea is that the personal stage is about conflict and the transpersonal stage is about harmony. To age, get sick and die, that's conflict! I don't care what excuses other people use to "accept" physical death, I totally reject all that. The personal stage involves a death drive (thanatos) that needs to be removed. And there is also lots of conflict stored in personal memories, so that needs to be resolved. And there is conflict in the body on a biological and neurological level and that needs to be healed. And there is conflict between myself and the "external" world, and that needs to be integrated into harmony.
  5. Ouch, transpersonal psychology is a difficult topic. It's even more messy than the transpersonal spiritual traditions since it compares all of them and combines it with conventional psychology and science. And there is also the integral approach that for example Ken Wilber talks about where the ego is transcended and included. I will start with the integral approach since it's inclusive. One idea I have before diving into that topic is that the transpersonal stage is something that develops around the personal experience so that there is an expansion of awareness while the personal self remains and becomes integrated with that larger new field of awareness. That's enough speculation for me to start with and now I will take a look at what Ken Wilber says about it.
  6. Instead of learning about the transpersonal stage I think it's useful to first try to come up with my own take on it. Does a person in the transpersonal stage experience conflict? Yes, I guess so, but only in relation to people in the personal stage. In relation with other people in the transpersonal stage there is harmony, since the separate identities causing conflict have been transcended. Okay, that was my take on the transpersonal stage. Now I will examine what experts say about it. Shunyamurti said that there is a difference between transpersonal psychology and transpersonal spirituality. In spirituality the ego is transcended, he said. And I read in a Wikpedia article that in transpersonal psychology the ego is still a part of the self. Here I found a video about transpersonal psychology that I will take a look at to hear what an expert says about it:
  7. Darn! It will be tough to beat Leo's simplest explanation of reality: mysticism. Direct manifestation of reality. Talk about Occam's razor. Leo explained it in his video about brains from about 1 hour and 20 minutes. It may sound funny that mysticism can be used in relation to Occam's razor but I think it's valid. Only direct experience of reality actually explains reality. All other explanations are models which attempt to explain reality indirectly, while themselves being a part of reality. One might argue that mysticism as direct experience isn't a hypothesis, but mysticism is actually a concept that can be seen as a hypothesis, so then it's valid to apply it to Occam's razor.
  8. I found this article about the Wolfram Physics Project and consciousness:
  9. I think I will ask Stephen Wolfram or look at their scientific papers about if their model explains consciousness. Their model is an abstract graph, a no-thing one might say, so it's already compatible with consciousness. One simple solution is to say that the graph is an appearance of consciousness. And that consciousness is the entire graph observing the manifestation of itself. That's nonduality! And consciousness is then infinite while the manifested world is always finite.
  10. I have no evidence of time existing outside of the present moment. At the same time we experience a consistent history of the past as memories, experiences and in the physical world. I have a model for that but more conveniently the recently started Wolfram Physics Project has a model based on a simple graph. The graph starts from an initial state and then expands like a tree as time progresses. So time has a beginning in the graph yet no end. And since the graph is expanding there is an arrow of time and a foundation for evolution. All that's needed to explain time is to cram the entire graph into the present moment. I don't know if Wolfram and his team have done so or will do so but I think it can be done! And the result is that time began now and expands forever into the future, and all the past exists as the expansion of the graph in the now.
  11. Why theorize about reality anyway? Personally I find it interesting to figure out how reality works and there are potentially also huge practical applications for shifting the paradigm of understanding reality from a materialistic view to a new paradigm with consciousness as the foundation of reality. As I posted earlier, ancient spiritual traditions already described consciousness as the foundation of reality. So it's nothing new in that sense but today the materialistic paradigm still dominates society and contributions for shifting the paradigm can be useful. An example of a practical application is to examine the placebo effect within the new paradigm and if it can be utilized in more constructive ways than just as something the pharma industry finds inconvenient. Also on an individual level, moving into the transpersonal stage might require a shift of paradigm from the currently dominating materialistic view of the world to recognizing consciousness as more fundamental than physical reality. Leo's video about how brains don't exist is about that kind of shift of perspective of reality and this journal is an addition to that view.
  12. Then what about deep dreamless sleep where consciousness seems to be absent? Yes, I have a model of reality where consciousness is a feedback loop that can be on or off. But consciousness is not a separate object, field or substance. And I will challenge my own model here because the only evidence I have for deep dreamless sleep is memories, and a memory is no evidence for consciousness actually being absent. Actually, the opposite is the case. For me to experience memories requires consciousness. And to be pedantically strict I can't prove that in the future my consciousness will be absent. From a practical view I of course do believe that I will fall into deep dreamless sleep again but as a logical argument it lacks a verifiable foundation. Consciousness is not separate from experiences. That's a logically valid claim. And I only experience consciousness in the present moment. I have no evidence for time outside of the now. The logically consistent claim instead is that all the past is information only existing now and only in consciousness.
  13. What if the human brain produces consciousness? But then what is the brain? The brain is not a separate object. It's more valid to say that the brain is a process. But a process changes all the time, so to claim that the process is a 'brain' is a reification where the process is turned into concept. Therefore brains are concepts. Can a concept be conscious? No, because not even concepts are separate objects. Concepts are appearances in consciousness. I will check out Leo's video about how brains do not exist again and compare it with my claim that brains are concepts.
  14. How can an emotion be a concept (as I mentioned)? The sensation of an emotion isn't a concept, yet in personal identification, the mind reifies the emotion by combining the feeling with personal thoughts. It's important to avoid fooling oneself. For example, when anger arises, to tell oneself that the anger is in me but I'm not the anger can easily be the mind deceiving itself by splitting into a separate "me" that it believes is independent of the anger. The true transpersonal state as I define it here, is to recognize that the self consists of both a personal self and also a universal self, and that they ultimately are one self.
  15. What is the reality of the ego? In ego development what is happening is a progress on the level of concepts into more capable and inclusive perspectives. Yet it's still just concepts! Sure, there can be heavy emotional content in that but that too can be said to be a part of the concepts making up the ego which itself is a concept. This means that not only the physical body can be recognized as a concept but also all thoughts as concepts including the sense of a "me". And with mindfulness practice all these concepts can be observed. That's different than a psychological depersonalization disorder such as feeling loss of control over thoughts or actions. That's a split mind where one part of the self is observing the rest of the self. Transpersonal awareness instead is the recognition of the ego as being a conceptual construct. In this video Russell Brand interviews spiritual teacher Mooji where he describes the transpersonal state:
  16. What is the nature of reality? I guess that question needs to be addressed in a thread titled Reality Journal. I looked up the Wikipedia article about reality and there are many different views and interpretations. I want to approach it in a simpler way. What is the core of reality? My view is that consciousness is the foundation of reality. As Ramesh Balsekar said, the sense of being, the "I am" cannot be denied. It's possible to deny all kinds of claims but it's impossible to deny being itself while being honest. I heard that some experts have claimed that consciousness doesn't exist? To me that sounds like an absurd claim. There is a difference between a zombie without consciousness and a human being in the waking state. Also, with the assumption that consciousness doesn't exist, then surgery could be performed on people after only giving the patient a muscle paralyzing injection, and then the surgeon could start cutting into the body while the patient was paralyzed yet still conscious and could feel all the pain. Talk about horror scenario. What is the purpose of consciousness? From a nondual perspective reality has no purpose in itself, yet the manifested world has evolution into higher orders of being. And I propose that consciousness is necessary when evolution has reached a certain level of development for there to be further progress into even higher orders of being. Consciousness provides a richer feedback of information than when there is an absence of consciousness. As an example, there is a huge difference between a zombie or robot without consciousness performing a task and a conscious human performing the same task. Consciousness provides rich feedback of information in the form of experiences.
  17. Reaching the transpersonal stage of development isn't necessarily only about individuals achieving a higher personal level. It may also be a necessary foundation for a collective development of humanity, as a consequence of something Dr. Bruce Lipton calls fractal evolution. Lipton uses an analogy of humanity today as a "caterpillar" stage that will transform into a butterfly stage. And here is a newer video where the book of Zohar (Kabbalah) is described as including the same idea of a transition for humanity from a caterpillar to a butterfly stage:
  18. The mind turns concepts into separate objects. One term for that is reification. Even when we remember the past it's a form of reification where the mind turns memories into concrete experiences. The mind is playing memories as movies and our attention gets identified with those images. That's the personal stage of development. In order to truly reach the transpersonal stage this reification of memories needs to be realized and experienced as only one aspect of the self instead of as the whole self.
  19. One radical approach is to combine all the ego stages into one stage. And then the ego stage is the self as a concept. The ego is a concept. And the next developmental stage after that is the transpersonal stage. In this video Shunyamurti talks about the transpersonal stage from a spiritual perspective:
  20. Leo has a new video about ego development. Before I take a look at it I want to describe my own take on it and then compare it with Leo's explanation. What is the ego? I will here use a standard definition that I found: My view is that the purpose of the ego is to develop unique individuals. Without ego development consciousness would be in an undifferentiated state of oneness. What are the different stages of ego development? Edit: There are several models, one is Gilligan's stages of moral development.
  21. I read that Ashtavakra Gita is a very ancient text of Advaita Vedanta which is a nonduality philosophy. Here is one quote from that text: At first it appears that this verse describes how we are not the body. And then it gets tricky because, wait a minute, if the self is separate from the body, isn't that duality? Then the interpretation can go even one step further and examine, what is the body? And then it's recognized that the body is a concept! And concepts are empty. There is no body as a separate object. In this way there are (at least) three possible levels of interpreting that quote: 1) Consciousness is separate from the body and the text is correct, 2) Consciousness and the physical world including the body are one (nonduality) and the text is incorrect, and 3) there is no body as a separate object and therefore the self is distinct from that notion and the text is correct.
  22. Words are concepts. And concepts are labels which by themselves are empty. And even when concepts describe objects, those objects are themselves empty. There are no actual separate objects. For example the word 'apple' applied to a particular apple existing in physical reality, that apple is not a separate object. Nonduality teacher Ramesh Balsekar used to say that what anyone has said at any time, whatever any guru has said at any time, is a concept.
  23. What problems does A Course in Miracles solve? Here is an explanation: Lesson 79 is a trick! Why? Because there are no problems other than as concepts. Therefore there isn't even a problem of separation. Problems only exist as concepts and concepts just are, they have no problems in themselves. But then what if a problem as a concept points to a real situation where the actual problem is? The answer is that the problem as a concept is all there is to it. No concepts point to anything as actual separate situations, beings or objects. The whole ACIM text is a trick. It starts with the statement that "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists." and then it goes on describing the unreal! Is ACIM therefore deceiving people? No, because it says: The course does NOT aim at teaching the meaning of love, which is the only thing that's real. And therefore it teaches about what is unreal. So the whole text is like the lists of tasks to do, that they give children, haha. The first item on such list is "Read through all these instructions." and then it goes only listing all kinds of things for the children to do, and the last instruction is "When you have read all the instructions, sit down and wait." And when a group of children is given the list, some of the children start performing all the tasks in the list, jumping up and down etc, while some of the children sit down and wait. So I'm done with A Course in Miracles! Because I found out what the purpose of the text is. It's similar to Jnana yoga where the intellect is used as a tool for going beyond itself. It was necessary for me to learn a lot from ACIM. Why? Because it happened. Everything that happens is necessary. I don't know if I should continue to post in this thread or start a new journal.
  24. This is a journal about A Course in Miracles (ACIM). I will compare ACIM with an idea I have come up with called Lazy Yoga. It's a general journal, so feel free to post your own comments, criticism, experiences, questions, etc about ACIM. "A Course in Miracles (also referred to as ACIM or the Course) is a 1976 book by Helen Schucman, a curriculum for those seeking to achieve spiritual transformation. ... The Course consists of three sections: the "Text", "Workbook for Students," and "Manual for Teachers". ... The "Workbook" presents 365 lessons, one for each day of the year" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Course_in_Miracles More information about ACIM can be found here: https://acim.org/ Definition: Lazy Yoga is about automatically overcoming entropy. "In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. ... it is often said that entropy is an expression of the disorder, or randomness of a system, or of the lack of information about it." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy Instead of elaborating on what Lazy Yoga means in more detail I will start comparing it directly to the lessons in A Course in Miracles, starting with Lession 1: ACIM Lesson 1 - Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything. 1. Now look slowly around you, and practice applying this idea very specifically to whatever you see: This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything. This pen does not mean anything. 2. Then look farther away from your immediate area, and apply the idea to a wider range: That door does not mean anything. That body does not mean anything. That lamp does not mean anything. That sign does not mean anything. That shadow does not mean anything. 3. Notice that these statements are not arranged in any order, and make no allowance for differences in the kinds of things to which they are applied. That is the purpose of the exercise. The state­ment should merely be applied to anything you see. As you practice the idea for the day, use it totally indiscriminately. Do not attempt to apply it to everything you see, for these exercises should not become ritualistic. Only be sure that nothing you see is specifically excluded. One thing is like another as far as the application of the idea is concerned. 4. Each of the first three lessons should not be done more than twice a day each, preferably morning and evening. Nor should they be attempted for more than a minute or so, unless that entails a sense of hurry. A comfortable sense of leisure is essential. https://acim.org/workbook/lesson-1/ Key insight from Lesson 1: The key insight here is that meaning is only possible within limited situations. When looking at life as a whole it's impossible to define meaning. Detailed explanation Life is a process that creates meaning. This is an obvious fact in practice since things have meaning. To make a somewhat formal analysis the term meaning needs to be defined. Definition: The meaning of something is an attribute of that something determined by a particular context. When looking at the big picture and using that definition of meaning, at life as the manifestation of the totality of reality, a statement like: "The meaning of life is to create meaning" is a logical fallacy since totality has no larger context to give it meaning. And Yoga means unity: "The Sanskrit noun योग yoga is derived from the root yuj "to attach, join, harness, yoke"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga So from a perpective of Lazy Yoga as the unity of total reality, it is true that nothing has meaning in itself. Only within particular and separate (not unity) contexts do things have meaning. ACIM Lesson 1 is therefore consistent with Lazy Yoga which in turn is logically consistent with the given definition of meaning. The same is true in a general sense even for immaterial things. Any description, concept or information only has meaning within a particular context. One can argue that the totality of reality is itself the largest context which gives meaning to what's in our reality. However attempting to give meaning to reality itself fails because it is itself the largest context and has no larger context to give it meaning. Practical example There is meaning to things and events in our daily life such as calendar time. Today it's Thursday and tomorrow it will be Friday. That meaning in turn depends on the context, in this case earth's orbit around the sun and the rotation around its axis. And it's clear that even such global meaning is local on this planet and even culturally dependent, such as different calendar systems. Personal consequences Recognizing that meaning is dependent on context allows me to see meaning as something that can change over time and that meaning is local instead of universal. Global perspective The global perspective is here described within the context of the global ego. Definition: The global ego is our planet struggling against entropy. The global ego has existed for the entire officially known history of planet Earth including all its geological record. And since this is a comparison with ACIM the term miracle is useful to define. Definition: A miracle is an event that transcends entropy and classical causality. As an example of a miracle, consider an untidy room. The messy state of the room is a form of entropy. And in ordinary daily life we would have to put in effort to clean the room. A miracle in this case is if the room cleaned itself without the help of external means or effort. From a global perspective the aim with Lazy Yoga and I assume also with ACIM is to transcend and include the global ego. And during earth's entire history and even today meaning has been formed out of this struggle against entropy. Even from a global perspective meaning has become limited to exclude miracles on a secular consensus level within mainstream science, in academia and generally in our whole civilization. Integral change Integral change here means transcend and include such as described by Ken Wilber with his AQAL model and by Clare W. Graves in Spiral Dynamics among others. Humanity has been living with a rigid and absolute framework of meaning. Starting to question and examining the meaning we have attributed to things, events and relationships opens up the possibility of developing new sets of meaning. It is even possible to become flexible enough to be able to move from different perspectives giving various forms of meaning to the largest perspective of all-that-is which transcends meaning altogether.
  25. David Hoffmeister said recently that it's about taking a step back from one's own mind. That gave me an epiphany. In ordinary mindfulness practice there is also a stepping back from one's own mind, BUT there is then still observation of one's thoughts and feelings and thus a focus on the ego mind. Taking a step back from one's own mind means bypassing the ego mind! Instead of as in mindfulness practice where the ego mind is observed, taking a step back from the mind means observing reality directly instead of observing one's thoughts. Of course in practice I still experience a lot of thoughts but I can sense that it's also possible to experience reality directly without the need for the ego thoughts.