Anderz

How can ACIM say that the world today is crap? Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo, who sometimes quotes ACIM, said in a recent video that he thinks that the world is both real and also mind stuff. Something like that. Roger's view is similar to mine. And I think that the world is very valuable, or from a nondual perspective equally valuable as everything else. Jordan Peterson said in a presentation that people defend their perspectives that Leo talked about, because if someone challenges their perspective that threatens their ranking in the social status hierarchy. And in the animal kingdom that means threat of survival; in society that equals to potential loss of money. The nothingness ACIM talks about is that people give different values to different perspectives. And of course, especially our own perspective, and the perspective of our group, that is most valuable of all. That's of course a fallacy when seen from a nondual perspective. That's mindless chimp stuff, no matter how "intelligent" and "successful" the person is regarded to be. ACIM may go even deeper than that in its explanation of the world, but that's at least one reason for why the world is delusional.

How to integrate material success with nonduality? High social status, academic credentials, professional expertise, business success, wealth and good reputation, are those things still valuable? What I have found in ACIM about material and social things like that is that they are all crap. And it seems that people who have those things still are miserable. One answer that came to me is that those things are important, but from relative perspectives. The problem appears when those attributes are taken as absolute possessions by individuals who believe they are separate. So it's like the rest of the ego structure, which is a high level of development but a delusional one seen from the bigger picture. So people who cling to their ego identity remain miserable no matter how much success they achieve on a material and social level.

I encountered an obstacle. I don't think it's a psychosomatic effect. It's probably a real hindrance. What I noticed is that when I tried to bring inner peace into my chest area I experienced a ghastly feeling. Horrible. That's the death drive. And an open heart is necessary for stable inner peace I believe. I don't know what to do about it yet other than practicing inner body awareness of the death drive.

In this video Leo has a great explanation from about 36 minutes about how it can be that we have been deceived into believing that we are separate selves. He compared it to how people centuries ago believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Today we no longer generally believe that, but we still believe that we are a separate self at the center. And a similar way of seeing it is to think of how people centuries ago believed that the sun orbited around the earth. Today we believe that the world happens around our self as a separate individual at the center. The correct perspective is that the individual is a conceptual construct that happens within consciousness.

I have been puzzled about how A Course in Miracles sometimes talks about free as something that we have. Now I understand it. Free will is a high level of development and should be included. And that's probably why the Law of One is so obsessed with the idea of preserving free will. Free will in the sense of ACIM means to be aligned with the Holy Spirit. Then the individual self and the Holy Spirit become one. I think of the Holy Spirit as an automatic process, but it's not some mechanical process. The process of reality includes the operation of free will as a guiding principle, even though it's ultimately automatic.

Oh! This is curious. I discovered that when some inner peace is activated within me I can then use my conscious volition to direct my attention into the body and mind to where the inner peace should flow. That's an act of free will! Not ultimate free will because that's impossible I think, but the sense of free will is a very high level of development and should be included! And this is also a method that prevents the psychological depersonalization disorder that can happen with mindfulness practice. Because there is conscious volition by the individual self; there is the sense of control and free will. From a nondual perspective the sense of free will can be seen as a property of reality as a whole operating within the person. So it's consistent with nonduality.

ACIM says that miracles should be involuntary. But I think that we can prepare a foundation that makes miracles more prone to happen. Is conditional inner peace a contradiction? No, it isn't. Because the condition for inner peace is a state of harmony. The ego is a state of disharmony relative to inner peace. So to the ego, inner peace can appear unconditional, for it doesn't fully grasp true harmony. And with this understanding miracles are invited. The recognition of the ego's inability to experience stable inner peace lays the foundation for miracles to happen that activate inner peace in us.

It's also important to not underestimate the momentum of the ego and that it is a high level of development compared to earlier evolutionary stages. The whole world is still almost totally dominated by ego consciousness. This creates a collective morphic field, a "Matrix" that we are trapped in. So, yes the ego is silly and delusional but it also serves a necessary function in society. Transcending the ego is a huge process. That I believe is why ACIM contains so much text about the ego and its hold on us, such as:

The ego has hijacked our emotions. Imagine the difference of emotions if you were to win a 10 million dollars compared to losing all your money and income. When we are in ego consciousness, that's a huge difference in emotions. Now consider the possibility that without the ego, life will work better for us. Now the ego no longer can jerk us around hither and thither through thoughts. Pleasant emotions arise without the silly monkey mind conjuring up ridiculous emotional states based on lifeless thoughts about past personal crap memories or fantasy future scenarios.

Leo said that thinking is like a dog scratching its nuts. Lol, that's a good analogy for trans-conceptual awareness, which for a human using thoughts is like a dog trying to do calculus by scratching its nuts. I don't know whether trans-conceptual awareness exists or not, but isn't it curious (or horrible) that thinking and nasty emotions seem to go together? What is this devilry of the ego mind having hijacked our sense of self? Are we living our own lives, or are we living fricken' chimp lives as slaves to and puppets of the collective ego structures of society?

If thinking is to be transcended, then what to do with for example the internet, which is almost completely conceptual? One idea that came to me is that thinking can still be useful for learning things even in trans-conceptual awareness. That's a transcend and include of thinking. When new knowledge has been learned I imagine that in trans-conceptual awareness the new knowledge becomes integrated into the non-conceptual intelligence. And it may also be that before we can enter trans-conceptual awareness, we need to have a high enough level of conceptual awareness, such as all the different stages Ken Wilber talks about. And for conceptual development the internet is very useful.

Notice that Ramana Maharshi mentioned observing actual clouds and letting the thoughts dissolve. That's different than the mindfulness practice where thoughts are observed like clouds passing by over a clear sky. Because then the thoughts still remain!

Paul Hedderman said in this video from about 17 minutes that there only is what we are. That's it! There is no what you're not, he said. That's a powerful nonduality pointer. There is only existence! There is no non-existence. For example when we make a choice, that choice is, and when the choice is made, that's what is too. There is never that which was not chosen. And the choice itself, does it make a difference by itself? Was the choice a cause for changing the direction of the universe? Maybe not. I think definitely not.

Ramana Maharshi may have delivered a complete teaching. I found this quote: Ramana also mentioned observing clouds passing by but only as a practice (from what I could find). He said that the practice is to observe the clouds until only one thought remains, about watching clouds, then when that thought too disappears there is the complete witness. The thoughtless zone, that sounds like trans-conceptual awareness.

Jim Newman delivers hardcore nonduality teachings, but one surprising thing is that it's not trans-conceptual awareness because he said that thoughts are still apparently happening. That's conceptual awareness. It's maybe not so surprising after all since what I have discovered is that no single spiritual teacher has the complete picture. They all have parts of the puzzle.

Sadhguru recently compared people wearing masks due to the coronavirus crisis to bank robbers. I loved that! Because it sounded to me that Sadhguru totally condemned wearing a mask because of COVID-1984. I have even started to think about a possibility that the coronavirus hoax will be exposed. Imagine the scandal! Haha, worst in history. Sadhguru may reflect what many honest leaders really think of the crisis. The reason for why COVID may be revealed as a hoax is that the alternative can be an escalation of power grab through using COVID as an excuse. That's actually corruption, and it is painting governments into a smaller and smaller corner of honesty. That's a bad trend.

Leo talked about different artists drawing an elephant in his new video. As a fun exercise I made this image:

I'm very impressed by A Course in Miracles. My current guess is that it was written by the breakaway civilization, a hidden society with way more advanced knowledge and technology than in the public society. And there is this: Is the CIA a front for the breakaway civilization? Well, maybe not exactly, but it stands to reason that the breakaway civilization is guiding society indirectly almost, to ensure that the future direction of humanity is towards higher levels of development. And interestingly, QAnon is a group within the NSA or similar, so even if the Q posts on the surface may look vastly different than the ACIM text, it's likely that it's the breakaway civilization having at least some input even to the Q movement.

A Course in Miracles has this passage which I believe is about how thoughts are not causing anything: To "make effect appear to be a cause" fits exactly with the idea that thoughts are effects and not in themselves causes. The belief in thoughts as separate causes also matches: "This seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes."

If all thoughts are just correlated with things happening and not actual causes of anything, then what is the purpose of thoughts? From a nondual perspective there is no purpose but from the perspective of the manifested reality purpose can be defined as the universe always developing larger and more complex holons. And thoughts are a very high development, very complex holons. And the purpose of thoughts is to move the universe into even higher stages of development. For example for me to buy a certain product requires thoughts in the form of desires to actually go and buy the product or to order it online, even though from a totality perspective those thoughts are not the cause of me buying the product. So thoughts can be seen as training wheels for even higher levels of consciousness. I think that's what Shunyamurti means by trans-conceptual awareness, and what Sadhguru and Eckhart Tolle have talked about: the state of consciousness that transcends the need to think.

Wait a minute, the idea that thinking is just a correlation might be more than just idle speculation. Because look at how complex society is starting to become. And even with the help of better and better artificial intelligence (AI) and information technology, the current way our minds work might be insufficient in a near future. Having AI taking over more and more of our thinking could be a dangerous direction for the future. Because we as humans want to remain maximizing our freedom, and with more and more AI control, that freedom risks becoming increasingly limited. So what Shunyamurti calls a trans-conceptual awareness and access to infinite intelligence might be something that soon will become necessary.

Leo has a new blog video about property rights. Mark Passio has a good point about natural law, that if it can be broken it's not a real law. But then Passio fails to apply that to property rights. What's natural about property rights? Unless when taking a nondual perspective and calling everything natural, there isn't anything natural about property rights. Property rights are, as Leo pointed out, something made up by us humans. It's useful for structuring society, but I'm thinking of the future when automation can do all work and products and services are free, then property rights will play a less important role. Ownership of land is tricky though, because even when we have Star Trek replicators, there will still be a limited amount of attractive land. Personally I wouldn't want to own land. It's too restrictive and limiting. It's just a tedious burden to own land I think, but many people may want to own land even in the future so that's something that needs to be worked out. And legal issues dealt with. Today probably China together with the British Crown, and maybe the Vatican probably own all the land in the world, haha (I read that the Crown even owns all land in the U.S.).

The idea that we need to think in order to achieve things, that's a perspective! It's similar to the belief that there has to be a brain for there to be consciousness. And that the brain produces thoughts and those thoughts are the cause of things happening in the world. A new perspective is that the thoughts are merely correlated with events that happen, and not the cause. Causality from a nondual perspective is the wholeness of reality itself, or it would be duality.

Leo recommended in his new video to walk away from all perspectives. That sounds similar to Shunyamurti's trans-conceptual awareness. I believe that's necessary in order to transcend the ego! Because concepts and ego go together, and when there is the belief that concepts are necessary in order to control reality, that's a mistake of believing that the ego has been transcended when in reality it's totally ego consciousness. Concepts and thereby thoughts, are a very high level of development. And that's probably what makes many spiritual teachers stuck in ego consciousness. They reject some concepts yet cling to other concepts. Concepts are perspectives. Personal memories are perspectives. And what is needed is to walk away from all perspectives and to learn that those are all just a redundant overlay in reality.

Even Eckhart Tolle is stuck in a pre-trans fallacy in regards to concepts, because he says that it's necessary to use the thinking mind for practical things, such as planning a trip. Also, Ramesh Balsekar and in extension also his followers such as Wayne Liquorman, Roger Castillo and Gautam Sachdeva, have a pre-trans fallacy of separating what they call the thinking mind from the working mind. That's a similar fallacy as Tolle is falling into by separating practical tasks from non-practical living, whatever he means by that. Even Sadhguru is stuck in a pre-trans fallacy because he said that often he doesn't need to think at all. The fallacy is that he separates thinking from non-thinking and believes that thinking still is necessary. That's ego consciousness.