ACIM Journal

[Anderz]

Yay! Leo's new video seems like a hardcore topic that I like. I haven't watched the video yet and want to log my take beforehand without being influenced by Leo's views in this video. The ultimate structure of reality in opinion is that it's infinite information structured as holons. And it's only the unmanifested reality that is infinite. The manifested reality is an ever increase of information into higher level of holons. I call it increase of complexity, and it's this increase that produces the arrow of time and the process of evolution.

 

[Anderz]

Really complex explanation Leo gives in his latest video. I like it! My explanation of reality may be the same since the effect is the same. Leo talked about the God-head as an infinite singularity at the start of creation. I have that too in the form of the unmanifested. And manifested reality is an ever increasing diversity and expansion. But I think of the expansion also as increasing integration into larger and larger holons (whole/parts).

So in my model we don't move back towards the God-head, we always move forward towards the God-head as infinite complexity/love/intelligence/unity in the future! As we ourselves expand in complexity we also increase our integration with the whole of reality. That's evolution. And it's also compatible with the different densities in the Law of One.

One difference between my model and Leo's explanation may be that I think of ultimate reality as changeless. The change we experience as time is a result of the manifested reality moving towards the infinite unmanifested, which is a single changeless block, the same as Ramesh Balsekar and Roger Castillo have described it. My impression of Leo's explanation is that the God-head can change or bring about things. In my model the God-head just changelessly is "I Am that I Am". Or to put it in another way: not even God has free will.

[Anderz]

Leo talks a lot about becoming selfless. I have been against the idea of selflessness. But now I came to think of how it works. When listening to Roger Castillo is occurred to me that I am not the doer, I am the doing! And the doing is the totality in motion. So there literally is NO self as an actor/agent to begin with!

Nor is there even an individual self as a pure observer, because then that's back into the idea of a separate entity except now it's even worse and it becomes a psychological depersonalization disorder.

I think of the individual soul as a unique and changeless point. That's from where we experience reality as each individual. But the soul is not a separate self. So the true perspective is as being selfless, not in the ego definition of selfless where a separate individual sacrifices himself or herself in a form of service to others. That's still to be trapped in the false idea of a separate self.

[Anderz]

What will happen from an integral perspective is that the separate sense of self will become integrated with a larger reality. However, that larger reality will as a first step be planet earth! So we will become Gaia, the whole planet as a conscious being, still with our individual personalities preserved.

Then, after I don't know how many years, but we can say 90,000 years according to the Law of One, we will take the next integral leap and become the Milky Way galaxy as a living being. Most likely Milky Way is already a collective consciousness, but we here on earth are still in third density and in a planetary quarantine, so we are a very young civilization.

Quote

"Questioner: What is the… can you even state the average lifespan in the fourth density of space/time incarnation?

Ra: I am Ra. The space/time incarnation typical of harmonious fourth density is approximately 90,000 of your years as you measure time." - Law of One 43.11

Ra in the Law of One is very tricky, and uses Law of Confusion language, and I believe that fourth density means a collective consciousness, called social memory complex in the Law of One. So what Ra is describing in the quote is I believe the time period for how long we as a planet will be in fourth density.

[Anderz]

Hmm... If the Milky Way galactic consciousness already exists, it may very well be that Gaia already exists as a collective consciousness in the making. And just like in an as-above-so-below fractal nature, our planet joining the galactic consciousness some 90,000 years in the future, so may we as individual humans join Gaia already today!

And people, and actually even plants and animals, even potentially inorganic objects, who are in Gaia consciousness don't reveal that because we in ego consciousness must break out of our ego shells ourselves. However I found this video where Gaia is channeled, which of course could be woo woo nonsense, but it could actually be actual channeling of Gaia so I will check it out.

 

[Anderz]

I'm fairly sure that ego tensions are caused by the mistaken perspective of being separate. Both collectively and as individuals. The personal ego tensions and the collective mistaken view of reality are one whole field of tension.

There is a deliberate purpose of the belief in separation. It's like how a video game is a "fake" additional layer on reality pretending to be real. Similarly our whole "fallen" world is like that! It's a cosmic trick for the purpose of growth and development.

Apocalypse means unveiling, like revealing the truth behind the fallen world, a revelation. And surely dissolving ego tension must be a part of the unveiling, a falling away of false beliefs and a revelation of the truth of reality. 

[Anderz]

As ACIM says, the ego is totally confused about everything. And the ego is a mistaken perspective. So beneath the confusion there is a BIG HOAX LIE! 

Much of the ego tensions are hidden and subconscious, but we can recognize the effect of the tensions through for example anger and irritation. The anger is a surface expression of preventing too much numbness caused by the tensions. Beneath the anger there is fear, and beneath the fear is confusion.

The confusion is simply a result of the false belief of being separate. That reminds me of my homemade teaching called Lazy Yoga. In Lazy Yoga the way of removing ego tensions is through understanding that the tensions have a false foundation and that will automatically start to dismantle and melt away the tensions in body and mind.

[Anderz]

I agree with Leo that understanding is an important part of spirituality. At least I find it useful to have intellectual understanding. There are several yoga paths, and for example Bhakti yoga is about devotion rather than knowledge. There is also as I have mentioned before Jnana yoga which is the path of knowledge.

Quote

"Jnana yoga is the path of ‘doubt-free intellectual knowledge.’ It is the study of the texts of Self-Realization and a deep inquiry into the nature of who we really are. This enables us to understand all the subtle nuances of the mind, its attachment to sense-objects, and how these create the veils of Avidya (ignorance/forgetfulness).

These veils cover up our astute inner-knowing that we are so much more than what our minds think us to be. We do this with reason and logic – using the mind as a tool to understand itself." - EkhartYoga.com

Here is a new video about Jnana yoga:

 

[Anderz]

Sarvapriyananda said that Jnana yoga is instantaneous and effortless, just understanding necessary, BUT it will take a lot to reach that level of understanding so even Bhakti yoga is necessary, he said.

Is it possible to effortlessly and instantaneously drop all ego tensions? No, that seems unlikely to happen. Because not only do the tensions hold things like money, calendar time and personal relationships but also deeper down even the death drive.

So the ego tensions are horribly hideous and totally ingrained in our whole body and mind. All our struggle for survival is bundled up in the ego tensions. It goes deep down into biological evolution of billions of years.

What makes me optimistic is that I believe intellectual understanding is all that's needed and it's just that the understanding needs to become realized, actualized and grokked within one's whole being. So that's the difficult part but it's an automatic and probably accelerating process to drop the ego tensions.

[Anderz]

One useful observation is to recognize that ALL personal memories are contaminated by the false belief in separation. The mind uses those memories to form a "me" and from that false construct it relates to other personal memories within the same distorted foundation in the mind.

A Course in Miracles says:

Quote

"A concept of the self is made by you. It bears no likeness to yourself at all. It is an idol, made to take the place of your reality as Son of God." - ACIM T-31.V.

 

[Anderz]

So, with out personal memories having a foundation in a false belief in separation, are our memories worthless? No, our personal memories contain a lot of value. And that's what the harvest in the Law of One is about! Harvest of our third density self is much about extracting the valuable content in our memories and recontextualizing it into a fourth density perspective. It's about a transformation of the individual self and not just about ego death, or surrender of self.

[Anderz]

Roger Castillo said something I found interesting. I don't have an ego, I am the ego, Roger said. He has also said that teachings about "I am not the body" are useful but only a step towards the complete picture which is that we are everything including the body. So with Roger's definition of ego, even enlightened people have an ego which is the part that contains the personal sense of self. That's a curious definition of ego. Of course it all depends on definitions and what we mean by ego and self, but there is a difference between Roger's definition of ego and many other spiritual teachings which are about removing the ego.

From a nondual perspective we can think of the ego as a second order structure. Roger didn't use that term but he gave an example of a house described as a pile of bricks. The description is correct, but to call a house only a pile of bricks is an incomplete description since the house is made of bricks put together in a certain way. Another example he gave was that of a poster made of pixels. We can say that the poster is just a bunch of pixels, but because the dots are arranged in a deliberate way it produces a picture.

Both the picture and the house I call second order structures. They are made of parts such as bricks and pixels but they are more than the parts. Similarly the ego is just a bunch of memories and habits, yet with a structure that makes the ego more than just the parts. And we can even call the ego a self, depending on how we define it. So from this perspective, there is a self as a second order structure, and spiritual realization is the recognition of our true nature which is the totality and not only the second order structure of the personal self.

[Anderz]

Another illustration I came to think of is that our egos are like leaves on a tree. When we are in ego consciousness we only experience ourselves as separate leaves and don't recognize the tree. And we then wrongly believe that the ego is individual and free while in fact it's very limited in what it can do as a leaf.

A liberated consciousness recognizes that not only are we one collective unit, we can also move as a whole, like flocks of starlings, and not just sit as leaves on a tree.

 

[Anderz]

Inner peace makes the ego lose its primary motivation for doing anything which is desire and fear. If the ego is content, peaceful and safe it just becomes a lazy vegetable, basically.

That's great! Because it means that inner peace can be used as a tool for transcending the ego. I will ponder on that to see if I can come up with some practice that is effective related to cultivating and establishing inner peace.

[Anderz]

Third density in the Law of One, and even ego consciousness in ACIM, can be thought of as the caterpillar stage of humanity. I have a theory that the "caterpillar" feeds on the death drive in us, which is also the fundamental cause of the ego tensions and of aging and death.

It's the same in nature where animals have "egos" in the sense that they struggle for survival. And for example two similar mammals can have very different average lifespans! Such as one type of mouse living on average 3 years and another similar species, like the naked mole rat, has an average lifespan of 30 years; that's one order of magnitude difference. My idea for why this is the case is that depending on the interplay between the environment and the species over millions of years the average lifespan adapts to optimize survival for the species. It's not about "wear and tear" of the biological body. It's about genetic, epigenetic and even behavioral evolution.

So, similarly, the caterpillar stage of humanity is like a single species that has produced an average lifespan in humans of around 80 years. The caterpillar stage needs the death drive in humans so that we die off within an appropriate number of years. But fourth density in the Law of One, what can be called the butterfly stage of humanity, and the going from fear to love in A Course in Miracles, doesn't necessarily need that kind of death drive since the "butterfly" operates differently than the caterpillar stage.

[Anderz]

One speculative new agie idea I have is that the death drive is caused by a blocked and disconnected heart chakra. And it's interesting that the Law of One talks about fourth density as involving green ray activation, moving from the lower three chakras up to the fourth chakra which is that of the heart and symbolized by the color green. It's also similar to how kundalini rises up from the base of the spine.

I believe that the kundalini energy needs to be connected through the heart chakra in order to move up, and also to be able to move down from the higher chakras to the lower. I haven't done much research about kundalini and will look into it. I found this video:

 

[Anderz]

Sadhguru talked about how the heart chakra is a connection point between an upward movement and a downward movement. Even the symbol for the heart chakra has two triangles pointing up and down, he explained. And reading halfway between the lines, I think he means that the heart chakra is also connected nonlocally to everything. That to me explains why it seems so hard to activate or open the heart chakra.

 

[Anderz]

I haven't listened to the whole presentation in this video yet and just want to document something the presenter said. Kundalini yoga and Kriya yoga both come from Laya yoga. I hadn't heard about that kind of yoga before and may look into it. He also said that the snake biting its tail symbolism is about kundalini! That's the ouroboros found all over in the ancient traditions.

Quote

"The ouroboros or uroboros (/ˌ(j)ʊərəˈbɒrəs/, also UK: /uːˈrɒbərɒs/,[2][3] US: /-oʊs/) is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon[4] eating its own tail. Originating in ancient Egyptian iconography, the ouroboros entered western tradition via Greek magical tradition and was adopted as a symbol in Gnosticism and Hermeticism and most notably in alchemy." - Wikipedia

 

Edited June 17, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Aha! Notice that in the Ancient Egyptian picture in the previous post the snake is encircling the heart and the head. It could indicate that the ouroboros symbolizes awakened kundalini energy between the mind and the heart, not between the 7th and 1st chakras. There are also pictures of pharaohs from Ancient Egypt with cobras coming out of their foreheads. The claim is that the cobra represents authority:

Quote

"The Uraeus (/jʊəˈriːəs/;[1] plural Uraei or Uraeuses; from the Greek οὐραῖος, ouraîos, "on its tail"; from Egyptian jꜥrt (iaret), "rearing cobra") is the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian cobra, used as a symbol of sovereignty, royalty, deity and divine authority in ancient Egypt." - Wikipedia

It's also interesting that the funeral mask of Tutankhamun has both a cobra and a vulture coming out of the forehead. Kundalini is often describes as two serpents coiled around the base of the spine. Wikipedia says: "the royal insignia of a cobra (Wadjet) and vulture (Nekhbet), symbolising Tutankhamun's rule of both Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt respectively." That may represent two different aspects of kundalini.

[Anderz]

In the previous kundalini video the presenter showed this short video by artist Alex Grey about kundalini awakening:

I like the art! And it also shows how the heart chakra opens before the kundalini rises to the higher chakras.

Edited June 17, 2020 by Anderz