Reality Journal

[Anderz]

I titled this thread Reality Journal so that it can include all kinds of topics. And as Leo pointed out, Truth includes both true and false as concepts. Even illusions are Truth and in that sense and can be called reality.

[Anderz]

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.

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"Concepts are defined as abstract ideas or general notions that occur in the mind, in speech, or in thought. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition.[1][2] As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences." - Wikipedia

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.

 

[Anderz]

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:

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"If only you will remain resting in consciousness, seeing yourself as distinct from the body, then even now you will become happy, peaceful and free from bonds." - Ashtavakra Gita 1.4

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.

[Anderz]

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:

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"ego noun  the “I” or self of any person; a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from objects of its thought." - Dictionary.com

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.

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

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.

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"In the Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology, Scotton[2] defined the term as "development beyond conventional, personal or individual levels." It is associated with a developmental model of psychology that includes three successive stages: the prepersonal (before ego-formation), the personal (the functioning ego), and the transpersonal (ego remains available but is superseded by higher development).[2]" - Wikipedia

In this video Shunyamurti talks about the transpersonal stage from a spiritual perspective:

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

The mind turns concepts into separate objects. One term for that is reification.

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"reification noun  regarding something abstract as a material thing" - Vocabulary.com

"reify transitive verb  to consider or represent (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing : to give definite content and form to (a concept or idea)" - Merriam-Webster

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.

[Anderz]

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:

 

[Anderz]

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.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

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:

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

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.

[Anderz]

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.

 

[Anderz]

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.

[Anderz]

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.

[Anderz]

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.

[Anderz]

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.

[Anderz]

I found this article about the Wolfram Physics Project and consciousness:

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"The Wolfram Physics project is exciting on its own merits, but in addition to being a candidate theory of everything, it seems like it could also help explain the hard problem of consciousness, which would make us two for three!

But first, let’s back up a little.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist at UC, Irvine and known for two related theories:

• Multimodal User Interface (MUI) theory, which holds that our perception of objective reality is a user interface created by our consciousness to help us interact with the real world
• Conscious Realism, which holds that consciousness is the most fundamental aspect of reality and that everything we perceive as the physical world is emergent

It’s conscious realism in particular that has an intriguing similarity with the Wolfram Physics Project (WPP)." - Full article: https://veridical.net/conscious-agents-and-simple-rules.html

 

[Anderz]

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.

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"Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, Ocham's razor ... The idea is attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), a scholastic philosopher and theologian who used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles. It is variously paraphrased by statements like "the simplest explanation is most likely the right one". This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions,[3] and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions." - Wikipedia

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.

[Anderz]

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:

 

[Anderz]

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.

 

[Anderz]

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.