Anderz

But the owner of WeChat, the Chinese company Tencent, isn't that just a puny little tech firm? No: If it's business threats Trump is worried about then he should take a look at the Chinese companies Alibaba and JD who probably already are bigger than Amazon. Oh, wait a minute, Trump is probably already writing a new EO.... Hahaha.

Yikes, Trump battling the Chinese giants Huawei and Tencent might only be half of the story. At least in the long run. Because I now found a Chinese company called JD that I think will become huge, maybe even internationally. Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon, is bigger but JD could become huge too.

I found a few news articles about this:

Shunyamurti said in his recent satsang that it's the ego structures that will dissolve rather than the earth evolving. That's an interesting difference. So moving into planetary stage Purple is then first about removing the ego structures, including our personal egos.

How to enter planetary stage Purple? We can think of it as all of humanity as a huge tribe. And all members in the tribe being in peaceful relationship with each other. Then it become clear how huge that developmental leap is even though it's just stage Purple. In practice I think it can be achieved by personally having the intention to enter planetary stage Purple and then that will connect us with the other people who have the same intent, and our behavior, actions and choices will reflect that state so that the planetary stage Purple starts to develop.

I was thinking of how the developed world is at stage Orange/Green in Spiral Dynamics but I think of the whole planet as still being at stage Beige. And that we need to move into stage Purple as a planetary civilization. It's a new holon level where earth becomes a whole, and today we are still at stage Beige from that perspective. And Leo said something related to this his new video. He even used the term Gaia although it was in relation to libertarianism I think it was.

Leo posted this new video about Spiral Dynamics stage Purple. I haven't looked into that stage much. It's interesting how the stages alternate between being collective and individual. Purple is the first collective stage I think.

Wow, Gautam Sachdeva said in a recent satsang that karma is related to the sense of personal doership. He said that the word karma means action. And when the sense of personal doership drops then the experience of karma changes. That made me think that karma IS memories contained by a sense of personal doership. So karma is a mistaken perspective gathered as personal memories and as past lifetimes. Even without the belief in reincarnation, there is genetic inheritance, epigentic inheritance and even cultural inheritance. And all of that is contaminated by the sense of being a separate doer and that others are separate doers. Freedom from karma then means cleaning that whole heap of personal memories and inherited sense of separation.

Technological progress will also level the playing field for countries around the world. And due to the accelerating progress both in terms of capacity and price/performance, the third world countries of today will become "first world" countries. In a sense, the current U.S. - China "cold war" is already like an archaic relic from the past. Technological progress will spring up from below and swipe away the current world system together with the situation where countries are fighting each other like little children at Spiral Dynamics stage Red.

In the past, only scientists in white lab coats could operate computers. Today even little kids can use a tablet. The same will happen with software development. Today trained programmers and other experts are needed to develop software. In the future, little kids will develop software just by playing with AI devices. And more and more physical products will become information technology. Actually the reality of the situation is even more radical than that. We don't really know where the acceleration of technological progress is taking us, but as a part of evolution as a whole, technology "indistinguishable from magic" will I think inevitably happen.

In terms of software development it may be that the U.S. is still way ahead of China. I doubt it, but at least in terms of revenue the U.S. software industry is by far the biggest in the world. But future software development will I believe be done by artificial intelligence (AI)! The video I posted earlier showed how an AI developed a Pac Man game by only watching the game being played. Very crude game yet very impressive, because the progress of information technology is exponential meaning accelerating. So we can expect that already within a few years from now, more and more actual software will be developed by AI. So the key to software preeminence in the future is AI development. And when it comes to AI development the U.S. might be the leader on paper although I suspect that the actual situation may be that China is already the leader in AI development. For example it's not certain that all Chinese AI research is published officially, or even most of their research.

U.S. politicians are waking up to reality, alas likely too late, so although it may seem that Trump is making it harder for the U.S. semiconductor industry to make it independent, that's probably only a surface explanation. One expert said that efficient research and development of microchips is dependent on having massive manufacturing facilities. And that makes sense. Armchair research and development and the so-called fabless semiconductor industry lack actual real experience and expertise of microchip manufacturing.

It seems clear that Trump is destroying the U.S. tech industry. I see two rational reasons for that 1) the U.S. has already lost the tech race, and 2) China is allowed to take over the lead in order to catalyze globalization. Western experts and leaders are too arrogant, naive, self-centered, overconfident, lack long-term thinking and have a tunnel vision view of the world. They believe that the U.S. is way ahead of China in terms of semiconductors. The actual situation is more likely that China is already ahead of the U.S. when it comes to the semiconductor industry. It's similar to how western experts and leaders in the past probably believed that the U.S. was the leader in electronic consumer products and that Asian countries were nowhere near in terms of being competitors in the consumer electronics markets. Today the U.S. doesn't even manufacture television sets. History repeating itself.

The ego believes that things can go wrong. And that's necessary or the ego will become reckless. The ego has a too narrow concern that needs to be modulated through fear. Impermanence to the ego, even in spiritual terms, means things can be and are being destroyed. A Course in Miracles says that nothing real can be threatened. Does this mean that our world is Maya, a form of Lila manifesting as an illusion? No, the world is real, it's just that the world is always changing because of expanding information. The information is always permanent. The illusion is the appearance of destruction and things going wrong.

Here I found a short video with an excellent explanation of what the ego is by Shunyamurti: The ego is a colonization of external forces, Shunyamurti said. Similar to what ACIM says. I see the ego as a necessary development, but yes, it's external conditioning by society as a larger ego structure. Our society has a false foundation and our own ego is a part of that whole falseness.

Here is a new video by Jim Newman with the extreme kind of nonduality teaching that Tony Parsons has. I find it useful in combination with other teachings. This time I got the realizations that all objects are the same! A diamond ring and a candy bar and a flower, those are the same as a car. It's a nondual perspective.

One indication of ego tensions being collective is that one personal problem can cause a lot of worry and then later be replaced by a totally different problem causing the same kind of worry. That's highly suspicious! Because how can the mind so easily switch from worrying about one problem and then later worrying about another unrelated problem? So there must as I see it be some deeper worry foundation that is unrelated to the actual personal problems. And that foundation becomes connected to different kinds of personal problems. Dealing with personal problems one by one is then like a whack-a-mole game; whack one problem and another pops up. Therefore I will experiment with feeling the deeper foundation of worry and examine if it can be dissolved.

The expert in this video says that it's unclear what the Executive Order means for the operations in China. Either way, I think the Chinese market for Apple is toast. The Apple stock price will pancake on Monday!!! Well, maybe not, but it looks shaky for Apple, with the additional potential threat that China may stop manufacturing Apple products. I'm starting to wonder what Trump really means by Make America Great Again. It's like he now has chopped off one leg of the U.S. tech industry. First the Pentagon complained that the Huawei ban will weaken the American semiconductor industry, and now with the WeChat ban Apple is hit by a massive blow.

And also, an iPhone without WeChat in China is like a smartphone in the U.S. without Facebook, Instagram and Twitter combined. Actually it's even worse than that, since WePay in WeChat is together with AliPay what almost all Chinese citizens use for payments. So expect Apple's sales of iPhones and iPads in China to drop like a rock.

Fear in A Course in Miracles is a property of third density in the Law of One. And fourth density is love. I have also described it as fear belonging to our planet as an unfinished holon and love as a result of our whole planet forming a single holon. The Great Awakening is then us becoming Gaia, the whole planet earth as a single being. Because otherwise it would be a puny awakening, haha. But the situation is even bigger than that, because Gaia can't pull herself up by her own/our own bootstraps. What is needed, then, is the pull from an even larger holon, which in our case is our galaxy as a single holon. So it's the Milky Way galaxy as a collective consciousness that pulls Gaia into a single conscious holon. One spiritual practice for this is therefore to deliberately enter a state of psychological depersonalization where the self becomes a detached observer, to allow the galactic consciousness to enter into and awaken Gain within oneself.

Steve Wozniak is a co-founder of Apple and is now suing YouTube, I guess it means suing Google. But the problem is larger than just YouTube, Wozniak said. The problem is that tech companies fail to deal with criminal activities. I think this will lead to a problem-reaction-solution! And the solution is some form of legal surveillance structure on the government level.

In this video Eckhart Tolle talks about how concepts are lifeless. He also quoted Ken Wilber and mentioned the term flatland to describe the perception of reality without depth. Tolle also said that we need concepts. That made me think about how concepts are related to nondual causality. An example of a concept is the word "tree". The word tree is different than an actual tree. The word tree is a label, a concept. From a nondual perspective it's misleading to say that a concept is lifeless, because from a nondual perspective everything is life. And it's even false to say that the word "tree" is caused by real trees when using nondual causality. So that's a new perspective for me that I found interesting. So do we need concepts? From a nondual perspective and causality that's an invalid question, because everything has to be taken as a whole interconnected web. Very puzzling! I will do mindfulness practice using conscious confusion and examine what happens to my conceptual knowing.

Rupert Sheldrake presented some interesting new results, such as epigenetic inheritance. It's still duality causality though. Nondual causality gives the largest possible perspective. I discovered that it's also useful to add three aspects to the nondual causality: 1) it's deterministic, 2) it produces larger and larger holons, and 3) it's always constructive. It's difficult to prove those aspects but they can be added to improve the conscious confusion practice I mentioned earlier. If the belief is that the causality can cause accidents or always will lead to deterioration, then that's a false belief in my opinion. And as A Course in Miracles says, nothing real can be threatened. And to dissolve habits of confusion the belief about causation needs to be changed into a constructive one.

The belief in causality being from past to future also affects everything in society. Especially how we interpret reality as being machine-like, mechanical. Even essentially all of science today is based on this misperception. Rupert Sheldrake has a new edition of his book about questioning many beliefs in science today. He talks about that in this new video and it will be interesting to hear if he mentions something about causality:

Ha! Confusion in the mind is caused by misperception of causality! I still have the view that confusion is caused by ego tensions, but more simply the confusion is a result of the belief in cause and effect from past to future. This could be a powerful insight for mindfulness practice. Confusion feels awful, and confusion is worse than fear since at least fear can be used for protection. I now invented a practice called conscious confusion, which is to be mindful of confusion and rest with one's awareness in the confusion. It will feel nasty but with the knowledge about what the confusion actually is, it should result in the confusion together with the unpleasant feeling melting away. Conscious confusion is a form of subjective scientific empirical study. The mind cannot fool itself and believe that the confusion has dissolved because that means peace and clarity. A phony mental construct of believing that the confusion has dissolved will reveal its falseness by agitating thoughts and emotions instead of peace and clarity. In fact, building that kind of false certainty is how the ego operates. That creates a buildup of fear leading to tensions, insecurity, anger and other derivatives of fear. Conscious confusion starts with the idea that causality is nondual, meaning the cause of things, situations and events is the whole of reality itself. This means that it's impossible to point at some separate thing, person or event and take it as being the cause. The true cause is knowable as totality and unknowable in detail. The second step of conscious confusion is to do the mindfulness practice which simply is to observe the confusion in oneself dissolve.