Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

My break is already over! Because I realized what the main problem is. It's that the crystallized ego grows and hardens by gathering more and more conceptual knowledge. The solution is to be aware of how the crystallized ego operates and reverse the trend by inner body awareness. And then gathering more information such as from the internet is fine.

It becomes a trap when the mind is absorbed by conceptual knowledge and is getting harder and harder, with ever more crystallized information gathered as memories and tensions in the body. Leo pointed out that tension means lower consciousness. I think that's correct. And the tendency at the personal stage is to be increasingly trapped in thinking so much that the tensions get numbed out and unconscious. Very dangerous!

[Anderz]

Something I find suspicious or at least indicative is that the spiritual teachers lack inner peace! At least that's how it appears to me. They only have contrived or poised serenity.

In fact, nobody has inner peace! It's absolutely incredible. There is some incredible nervousness and agitation inside us at the personal stage. And even the people who may be at the transpersonal stage, even they look agitated, at least on the surface behind their canned mannerism.

So one hugely important goal is to achieve inner peace. Or else we're screwed basically, haha. It's almost funny if it wasn't so sad. And it can be a good idea to reach the stage of inner peace within oneself, both for oneself and as a means of improving the collective field.

[Anderz]

To think that thinking is a separate cause is a sin. And a sin means to miss the mark. True cause is systemic in the sense of totality of reality causing things. The belief that effect follows cause is incorrect. It's more correct to say that the future causes the past.

Even to say that the future causes the past is incorrect, but the future contains more information than the past so it's closer to the truth than the usual belief in that the past is causing the future.

For example an oak tree is the cause of it having been an acorn in the past. It's not the acorn that's the cause of the oak tree. Similarly, the choice made by thought is the cause of the thought. It's not the thought that is the cause of the choice.

[Anderz]

To use my simple analogy again, systemic causality can be illustrated by the constant Pi = 3.14159265... and the value of say the fifth decimal. The cause of that value is the whole constant Pi itself!

Similarly, the cause of things is a result of all of reality, both past and future. The belief that the past can cause the future is an error. In the Pi example, if we start with the first decimal 1 and then try to predict the second decimal, then we can only guess the value of the second decimal based on only the number 1. The same if we know the two first decimals with values 1 and 4, the value of the third decimal can only be guessed unless we have the answer already or a formula for how to calculate it which is more information than merely the numbers 1 and 4 alone.

Choice, therefore, is caused by the whole of reality and not by the past. And since reality as a whole is changeless, choice is an illusion. So choice is sin. Which is that, as J. Krishnamurti said, choice is confusion.

 

[Anderz]

A conventional and erroneous belief is for example that the cause of the body of an adult person is the baby in the past. A more correct view is that the adult body is the cause of the baby.

Then later when the person grows old and dies, gets cremated and the ash spread out into an ocean, then it's still correct to say that that the ash is the cause of the baby. And it may even be that the ash is related to more information than the baby since the ash is in the future and the baby is in the past. The future contains more information than the past. But the correct and full truth is that the cause of both the ash and the baby is reality as a totality, similar to the Pi analogy.

At the personal stage we think of cause and effect primarily as being from the past to the future. And we even believe that we can cause things, that we have control, and that thought can cause change. At the transpersonal stage all that form of separate control is recognized as being an illusion.

[Anderz]

Then what if the mainstream view is correct that neural activity in the brain causes consciousness, and in turn that the neural activity is a result from cause and effect from past to future? My claim is that my model is much simpler so it seems more plausible to me.

With my model it's accurate to say that neural activity can be correlated with consciousness. But to say that the neural activity is the cause of consciousness is false according to my model.

The same with thoughts, It's correct to say that thoughts are correlated with results, but to say that thoughts are causes of effects, that's a false view according to my model.

[Anderz]

In this video Sadhguru talks about how thought is just a small part of existence. We can use thought to create certain things he said. Is Sadhguru at the transpersonal stage? I don't know but yes it's possible that he is. And he may know that from the larger reality perspective thoughts don't create things, but he has to talk to us at the personal stage level or most people wouldn't even take him seriously.

I learned recently that causality is debated in philosophy! Not even the mainstream experts know what causality is! And in science they just take causality for granted without explaining it. What I call systemic causality explains it. Or I also call it nondual causality. It may sound like just another amateur armchair philosophy speculation, but the Pi analogy I used makes it logically very clear in my opinion.

 

[Anderz]

Aha! Now I caught a brief and what I believe significant comment by Sadhguru from 4:50 in this video. He said "All thoughts are just junk."

This is of course huge confirmation bias on my part but I believe that this comment by Sadhguru is the truth from the transpersonal perspective. Thoughts are junk precisely because they don't cause anything, they become noise at the transpersonal stage. I am still only theorizing of course but it makes logical sense to me. It's rational as f.

[Anderz]

That comment by Sadhguru about all thoughts being junk made me think of him as the leading guru in the world today. There may be other spiritual teachers that have more clear teachings that I don't know about yet, but Sadhguru is addressing huge, even mainstream, audiences which an amazing task. Byron Katie has a similar approach with her method The Work where all thoughts are questioned, but Sadhguru went one step further and dismissed all thoughts as junk. So then there isn't even any need to questioning one's thoughts. It's "just" a matter of recognizing that all thoughts lack causal effects.

I will take a look at Sadhguru's recent talk. And check if I can find more such what I think of as transpersonal comments.

 

[Anderz]

Sadhguru said that we need to feel well inside instead of focusing on external things and events. Leo actually says something very similar in this video where he talks about how even people who we usually think of as being successful are mediocre when it comes to their internal mood and emotional state. Leo also said that we underestimate the power of our mind. That seems to contradict the idea that thoughts are powerless, but I will listen to the video again to learn what Leo meant by the power of the mind. Leo probably means mind as consciousness which he talked about in most recent video.

 

[Anderz]

Leo used a metaphor of how we need to change our minds like jailbreaking a phone. So not just installing new apps or replacing old apps. Not even only to change the operating system but to make changes at the core bios level.

My new metaphor is that we need to replace the entire phone! Haha, that's a radical change. The whole thinking mind must be replaced. But isn't thinking necessary? Yes, everything that happens is necessary, but imagine thinking to be like crawling. A baby probably has to crawl on the floor before learning how to walk. So in this analogy thinking is like crawling, necessary ..... for a while.

[Anderz]

My plan is to participate in the personal stage world to build the caterpillar cocoon! The COVID-19 situation is starting to look so extreme that I suspect that it may be the beginning of the end of the caterpillar stage of humanity. The "caterpillar" in this case is an analogy for the personal stage of humanity and it has become bigger and bigger through continuous economic growth. COVID-19 looks like a halt of that growth.

What will happen now I believe is that we will enter an era of increased automation and also increased surveillance and control. At first it will start in China and then later a similar trend will happen globally. The surveillance and control society might seem horrible, almost like the second beast in the Book of Revelation, but it's precisely the cocoon stage. And the cocoon is necessary for the development of the butterfly and is also a form of protection.

[Anderz]

The transpersonal stage is to be one with reality. Unfortunately, I now suspect that there first needs to be a separation where the personal stage in oneself individually is outsourced to the collective personal stage in the form of the "cocoon" I mentioned in my previous post.

In practice this means that the tensions of the crystallized ego are moved out into the external world. This will produce a transpersonal seed within oneself, but it will be isolated at first. So in a sense, instead of becoming one with the world, there will at first be an increased sense of isolation and separation.

Shunyamurti talked about the isolated individual state in his previous video. He also has this new video about ego death which I now think of as the process of outsourcing the tensions of the crystallized ego.

 

[Anderz]

Haha! Now this is scary. Shunyamurti said that desire is a problem. And my current view is that desire is not problematic because it's unlimited, but because it's limited! Desire is limited to the crystallized ego's isolated perspective of separation. So desire and fear are the bundle that produces the agitation and tension in the crystallized ego.

But desire is not so scary. The scary part is that Shunyamurti said that by opening the heart we will at first feel all the pain and horror of all the ego's fragmentation. Yikes, I have actually suspected something like that but this is the first time I have heard a spiritual teacher talking about it.

[Anderz]

Is there a way of opening the heart without feeling all the pain and horrors of the ego? Yes, I think there is. When outsourcing the tensions in oneself, it can be recognized that the tensions are valuable! It's just that those tensions need to be outsourced to the cocoon of the external world.

So a loving approach to one's own inner tensions makes the awakening of the heart a harmonious process. In practice this means that personal worries need to be let go of and handed over to the external world. And the focus instead should be on awakening a peaceful feeling in the heart chakra.

[Anderz]

One Advaita teacher said that the ultimate reality is beyond time. It's neither past, present or future, he said. That sounds like a trans-transpersonal stage of what to call it, because even at the transpersonal stage there is the experience of time.

J. Krishnamurti talked about how time is thought. That's another interesting perspective. So trans-conceptual awareness then means transcending time. Tricky. I guess one has to actually reach those levels of consciousness to be able to grasp it.

I will take a look at Eckhart Tolle's most recent video to get a sense of what he calls presence.

 

[Anderz]

Eckhart Tolle talked about how karma is old patterns that go far back into the past, even way beyond our current lifetime. Exactly. The crystallized ego consists of structures that go all the way back through thousands of years of social evolution and billions of years of biological evolution.

So the heaviness of time is not only thoughts on the conscious level but also all that crystallized karma that we carry around. Karma is an important concept in Buddhism, but also in Hinduism. I will check out what Sadhguru says about it.

 

[Anderz]

But then what about all the different kinds of karma? People can react and behave very different in similar situations depending on their karma. I think it can be looked at in terms of content vs structure that Leo has explained. The different kinds of karma, that's content. The fundamental structure of karma is the same, a result of billions years of survival struggle.

Sadhguru said that a cocoon of the past is holding us. And we allow it to do so, because it makes us feel safe, he said. There is safety, but in safety there is also imprisonment, Sadhguru said. That to me is the crystallized ego. Can I just stay in the present and become enlightened? Not a chance, unless I have a spontaneous spiritual awakening, and those are rare and often followed by severe trauma. Karma is a massive structure.

[Anderz]

Oh! Now I found something interesting. Karma can be seen as the same thing as sin in Christianity.

Quote

"Mary Jo Meadow suggests karma is akin to "Christian notions of sin and its effects."[156] She states that the Christian teaching on a Last Judgment according to one's charity is a teaching on karma.[156]" - Wikipedia

Most scholars however consider the Last Judgment to be different from karma it says in the same Wikipedia article. However I think as a structure karma can be seen as being the same thing as sin. Karma in my opinion is a result of struggle for survival, and that is sin! That's a pretty radical view, but sin means to miss the mark, and the belief in being a separate entity is a false perspective and is therefore to miss the mark.

Also, the Last Judgment and the second coming of Christ can in my opinion be seen as transcending all karma, meaning transcending sin. And this also explains why all sins can be forgiven, because it's the structure of sin that is dissolved, irrespective of content, such as different kinds of sins. And the Pope agrees with that view:

 

[Anderz]

Is there bad karma and good karma? I think it depends on the perspective. From the nondual perspective all karma is good since everything that is, is necessary and good. From a relative perspective at the personal stage there is good and bad karma.

From the transpersonal perspective the karma is good yet it's bad that we carry it around. To use a computer metaphor, we need to store our memories in the computer cloud instead of locally in our computer. Or to use a New Age metaphor, to move our memories to the Akashic records and then we can still access our personal memories and also all kinds of other memories and knowledge.