Anderz

Indeed, Shunyamurti said that the deeper suffering is fear of non-being, which includes death but is even more than that. And that causes anxiety, which he said is deeper than fear. And he said that the ego lacks courage, a word derived from the word heart. The ego is disconnected from the heart, he said, and is a false self that lacks being. So the ego is a lifeless construct! And the deeper fear of non-being is an incredible trick, since the ego is already lifeless. Fear is at least about some particular things while anxiety is less specific. A good approach therefore is to become aware of the actual cause of anxiety which is a disconnected heart. Shunyamurti's explanation of the ego is very similar to A Course in Miracles. Carl Jung's definition of ego is more about how it is a necessary sense of self. And the integral perspective is that the ego needs to be transcended and also included. The ego's defenses keep blocking the heart. So that's another tricky part. An open heart means defenselessness. To the ego that means senselessness. So one should not underestimate the immensity of the transformation needed to turn the ego into a true self.

Shunyamurti said that the ego is tricky and produces suffering in order to escape an even deeper form of suffering. I came to think of how the deepest suffering is the death drive. And in turn the death drive is just a disconnect, including a disconnected heart. For example I read in a medical article that we cannot feel pain in the heart! So that's even a physical/neurological block. And since everything is connected, the death drive disconnect itself is a trick, a deception. Cultivating inner peace will be difficult as long as the death drive remains. I will therefore experiment with awakening my heart together with cultivating inner peace, to see if the death drive can be healed and removed.

The practice of giving up ego control can be confusing to the subconscious. It's like "don't think about a pink elephant". The subconscious will come up with the thought of a nice pink elephant regardless whether the conscious mind actually wants it or not. So as an alternative the practice can be turned into cultivating inner peace in the present moment. That makes both the ego and the subconscious working together. That's control and at the same time a form of control aligned with the Holy Spirit.

I still think it's true that much shadow material needs to be removed until the surrender control practice becomes powerful, but that can be done with the gradual approach. Then the shadow and the ego are treated as the same separate self and dissolve together. I will take a look at this video to learn more about the shadow:

What Peter Ralston hinted at in his latest video is that dealing with fear is counterproductive. Because the ego is made of fear. So dealing with the ego shadow is then the same situation. Instead of attempting to remove shadow material it's better to deal with the belief in being a separate self. A Course in Miracles says:

The ego sets out to achieve something with dedication, determination, deliberation, willpower, focus, interest, personal responsibility, high moral standards, altruism and self-sacrifice. What wrong with that? First of all, there isn't such thing as self-sacrifice, and even if it were it would be a bad thing, so we are already starting to see what ACIM is talking about is correct, that the ego is totally confused about everything. And my belief is that there isn't even any achievement possible, since the future already exists perfect and whole. So it's a similar situation to that of the pre-trans fallacy about free will. The ego mistakenly believes it can do something, achieve things, and that's an illusion. And the way out of the ego delusion is not to go into a pre-ego state with resignation and a feeling of powerlessless. Instead it's about going trans-ego into a more intelligent state of being.

In this new video Peter Ralston talks about how instead of dealing with fear to deal with the self first:

For the A/B test to be easy, there needs to be a lot of shadow material already processed. The ego is filled with fear and protection so there is a lot of trapped energy which can come out as anger and other ego expressions. And with too much shadow material remaining the ego can't dare to let go of its control, such as self-control and manipulation tactics etc. Another way to approach it when lots of shadow material still remains is to do the A/B test gradually, starting with small and to the ego insignificant situations where the ego feels safe to let go of personal control.

Testing the idea that reality has more power and intelligence than the ego which is in a deluded state can be done by pretending to not be the ego. So when interacting with people and situations, the trick is to not do anything and let life happen automatically. That is still the ego choosing to not use willpower, choice or action. It's like an A/B test. Situation A is the ordinary ego actions, and B is actions without free will. If A is the true way life works, then the practice of moving into B will fail. And if B is the true situation, then A will diminish and B become more and more one's experience. In this way, if B is the correct situation, then the ego dissolves along with the move from A to B.

Ken Wilber has talked about pre-trans fallacies. I think ideas about free often fall into that kind of trap. The ego is actually a very high complexity and holon development. Also, consciousness allows for far more information high-level "sensations" to be processed than a zombie state without consciousness. So consciousness plus individuality with a sense of free will is a very valuable high level of development. And when the ego thinks of lack of free will it tends to freak out because it interprets it as a pre-ego state in the form of being an automatic puppet controlled by mindless physical laws and random events. So naturally, the ego instinctually dislikes the idea of having no free will. Even Ken Wilber falls into that pre-trans fallacy trap it seems to me when it comes to free will. My trans-ego interpretation of free will is that reality has infinite intelligence, is always making 100% correct choices, has constant progress in the form of evolution into higher complexity and is always completely safe and secure. Compared to that, free will is a disastrous ego delusion that would lead to a complete mess if it was real. Fortunately free will is an illusion.

I have learned a lot about reality from Leo's videos. But when it comes to time I think Leo has a mistaken view. Leo said from about 1 hour and 36 minutes in his first part video about what is God that the present moment has existed forever. According to how I see it, that is wrong. Because there is only the now. There isn't any past stretching back an infinite numbers of years into the past. Time has a beginning, now, and no end. So the correct way to say it is that the now will exist forever, not that it has existed forever. In mathematics it's called a ray:

@Leo Gura I meant the word absolute. The Absolute is Truth and contains everything, including concepts, including for example true and false. That's what I understand from your videos. So the Absolute contains absolute and relative. Of course all descriptions like that are still concepts, but as pointers I think they are useful. The Absolute, the Truth is the direct being including all one's experiences.

@Girzo That may be true from a nondual perspective but it's also important as Leo has pointed out to look at mainstream knowledge. Society has a huge inertia and needs to evolve as a wholeness. The Wolfram Physics Project is I believe a very important contribution to society.

Another thing in the Wolfram model is that they allow the time scale to get smaller and smaller: That explains how the amount of information in the universe can expand exponentially and higher, and still the appearance of length and time in our universe will remain stable. I think Leo mentioned an experience he had about zooming in into finer and finer scales towards infinity. That may be an actual experience of this principle.

Yes, relative and absolute are both concepts I realize now. Shunyamurti talked about trans-conceptual awareness. That means awareness beyond the level of concepts that in ordinary consciousness the mind tends to get stuck in. So I will abandon my rantings about absolute and relative. It's more useful to use the conceptual level to look at models of reality. I took another look at the Wolfram model and they define time like this: I like that. It means that when T gets smaller L gets shorter. And there is no limit to how small T can get. So that will work even for an insanely high "frame rate" (not some puny 240 Hz as in high-end gaming computers, haha). I will follow the Wolfram project to see what they come up with regarding this frame rate.

The ego is a structure. That's fine except for the belief that the structure is something separate. A Course in Miracles says: The nothingness of the ego ACIM talks about is the illusion of being a separate entity. And "a form that seems like something" is the ego structure. The structure is real but it's not a separate entity. The entity called the ego is nothingness! Transcending the ego is "simply" about realizing that it's an illusion. The difficulty, or seeming difficulty, is that the structure of the ego contains a lot of hardened conflict and a shell of protection. The ego is a fear-based structure. And as long as the belief in separation remains, the shell of fear remains.

Okay, that's an interesting point actually. I will think about it for a while.

Sorry, I couldn't resist: Yes, I have, and and I discovered that Brahman is a real number. Now I will stop.

Just one more thing: The claim that everything is relative, what does that say about that claim itself? An elephant can be larger than a mouse, but that's just a comparison, and the comparison is absolute, the elephant is absolutely larger than the mouse. The elephant is absolute and the mouse is absolute. And as an absurd yet valid example, if the mouse grows and becomes larger than the elephant, that's another comparison since it's about another point in time.

Consciousness is not some object, field or substance nor nothing. Consciousness is an on/off state. But I will stop now.

@Leo Gura You mean "my" consciousness didn't imagine reality correctly? Maybe my consciousness was in deep dreamless sleep so that someone else imagined reality for me.

I disagree with Leo that consciousness can imagine things. That's like claiming "God did it" or "consciousness has free will". Consciousness is a state of being aware of the manifested information. A state cannot do anything on its own.

Not according to the growing block theory: The future exists as unmanifested information, not as manifested information.

@remember The word "president" is just a concept. The menu is not the dinner, the map is not the territory, although from a nondual perspective the map and the territory are actually one. So it depends on context. And when the context is the Absolute, objects become absolute. Even the word "president" becomes absolute within the context of the Absolute.

Relativity is only a result of comparing separate objects. When each object is examined in relation to the Absolute the object is absolute. For example is Donald J. Trump relatively the current U.S. President? No, Trump is absolutely POTUS today.