Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

Hmm... Shunyamurti said in this latest video that developing the ego is to move backwards. It will just create more karma he said. Yikes, that's true! So it may come a time when personal development becomes a hindrance instead of a means towards progress.

And Shunyamurti's explanation fits with nondual science. Karma is the result of individual causality which in turn is a result of a false belief in separation. So, developing the ego, as in the personal stage, only makes the false perspective worse.

 

[Anderz]

Does nondual science include conventional science? No, because nondual science is itself a dualistic model. All models are dualistic. Instead nondual science can be seen as a pointer to nonduality.

The belief in separate causes is a necessary stage of development. And the crystallized ego is a product of society which itself still is at the personal stage of development. So ego development is useful up to a point. It's only when the trick of separate causes has been recognized where ego demolishment becomes useful and necessary.

[Anderz]

Shunyamurti quoted a guru who said that desire is a disease. That sounds similar to Buddhism. And with nondual causality it becomes apparent that desire is a disease, for desire is the belief that a separate cause (the desire) can have an effect. It can't. Also, desire needs suffering as fuel in order to function. When there is contentment, desire ceases to function.

Inner peace heals the disease of desire. And inner peace requires transcending fear. As long as there is fear, which also is a false belief, there will be suffering. Practicing this can be tricky. When the practice is done by the crystallized ego, that is more desire. Instead the practice is to test the idea of nondual causality and to question separate causality.

[Anderz]

In our reality, nondual causality is intelligent. That has amazing consequences for how reality actually works. When a billiard ball hits another ball and makes it move in a certain direction, that's just the intelligent nondual causality in a limited action. There is no such thing as mechanical, unintelligent causality. All causality is intelligent.

And as a practical consequence, the tensions in the body are a result of causality being stuck in a rigid and limited form. The tensions and the belief in mechanical and separate causality reinforce each other. And the idea of intelligent causality can be experimented with. I will examine my own tensions in body and mind and see if they can start to relax along with a recognition of intelligent causality.

[Anderz]

Causality is infinitely intelligent, yet manifested reality evolves. So manifested causality become more intelligent as time progresses. And the move from the personal stage to the transpersonal stage is a result of the evolutionary process of increasingly intelligent causality.

And a collective consciousness is simply a consequence of causality getting more intelligent so that our individual selves become integrated into a larger structure, a larger holon.

[Anderz]

It may seem that a collective consciousness would be inflexible and inefficient because of the combination of the minds of many people. How would such consciousness even be able to function or do anything?

However, with infinite intelligence it means that the collective consciousness is simply an opening up of more of that intelligence in the form of causality. So the collective consciousness is enormously powerful, flexible and capable. And also, people remaining in individual consciousness are controlled by the same nondual causality so they can't hinder the progress of the collective consciousness.

[Anderz]

Wait a minute! There is no difference between thoughts and material objects. Just as what Leo pointed out in his latest video. So all the spiritual teachings are basically wrong. They all make distinctions between things.

Everything is content in consciousness. So there is no fundamental distinction between a thought about a unicorn and an iPhone in your hand. They are both the same substance, made of the same and one akasha.

[Anderz]

I now realized that spiritual teachings are very useful as stepping stones. It's just that we need to question them all and avoid taking them as dogma to get stuck in.

Even the major religions are very useful and I believe contain profound predictions. Although the same problem exists of course in religions as in the mystical traditions, that there is a risk of getting trapped in dogma.

My own approach at the moment is to use the idea that everything is content in consciousness plus that causality is nondual and infinitely intelligent. And then to use direct experience to verify or falsify that idea.

[Anderz]

If everything is akasha experienced in consciousness, then the crystallized ego is nothing more than a bundle of akasha that is inflexible and rigid. So the ego tensions are then a result of akaska trapped in a rigid state. That reminds me of the Tao Te Ching where it is asked if we can become supple like a newborn baby. The crystallized ego is an enormous bundle of karma however, and everything is interconnected so to melt the crystallized ego is a huge process. The good thing is that if the akasha has infinite intelligence then it can easily resolve even the crystallized ego and turn body and mind into a supple and fluid state.

 

[Anderz]

I was contemplating visualizing a supple body, but that felt phony. Instead I started using a method of questioning the current personal stage that we have been conditioned into.

We have been trained to take things like external healthcare by authorities being necessary for granted. What if that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy? A form of collective psychosomatic delusion? Radical thinking, but I think it's worth examining.

[Anderz]

Akasha can turn empty space into gold, and that's why the love of money is the root of all evil. Money is a ridiculous made up form of value and when we believe that money is more valuable than dirt we are missing the mark which means sin.

Akasha can also turn a human body into a coffee table. Literally. It's doubtful that smoking Salvia will turn us into coffee tables, but it can give us an insight about that being possible.

[Anderz]

I like how Shunyamurti describes the problem with the entire ego like in this new video. It's something that I will look into. But I also think that there needs to be a transcend and include of the ego. And regarding time, the timeless state that Shunyamurti mentioned reminded me of my idea of time as a ray. A ray is a line that has a starting point but no end. So instead of a timeless state I think of time as flowing from the now and forward.

 

[Anderz]

Even when going to the gym frequently or even doing Hatha yoga, the body often remains rigid and clunky. The same with jogging, team sports and things like playing tennis. Several spiritual teachers have talked about having consciousness awareness of the body even in everyday ordinary activities. That's something that needs to be added I think for the body to become flexible and fluid.

In my experience that's easier said than done. My mind drifts away from the body awareness practice. One idea I got is that one has to reach a level where the inner body awareness practice becomes pleasant. Then the mind will want to remain grounded in the body. So I will experiment with the intent of making my body awareness practice pleasant.

[Anderz]

In a satsang today Roger Castillo had an interesting point about how we are too trapped in doing things according to fixed schedules. It makes us mechanical and slaves to calendar time.

Roger recommended doing what we feel like doing. I will experiment with that and question the need to follow calendar time.

[Anderz]

In this video Brian Scott reads what Manly P. Hall said about the Akashic record. It's an East Indian term he Hall said. The word akasha means mental matter. I found that very interesting. It's similar to how I have speculated about akasha being all content in consciousness, so in a sense that's mental matter. This together with Leo's videos about science inspires me to examine akasha from a scientific perspective.

 

Edited November 12, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Can I make my idea of akasha match mainstream science? Not exactly, but in the Wolfram Physics Project they use a model that is a simple network of interconnected nothingness one might say. That's exactly compatible with my idea of akasha. What is missing is that the Wolfram model is mechanical in the sense that it follows computational rules. My model of akasha is that it is "controlled" by infinite intelligence.

But I can modify the Wolfram model and make it exactly the same as akasha! Instead of having the network expand according to a fixed rule I can have it expand according to infinite intelligence. My model is still purely atheistic because the intelligence is in the structure of the network itself, not some external being or other divine intervention.

Does my model remove God from the picture? No, because I can define God as the intelligence of the network of reality. To religious and spiritual people that might seem like a cop out since my model is still atheistic, but I think it's a useful definition of God. And that's why I put the word "controlled" in quotation marks, because it's not an external God controlling things, instead God is the control itself.

[Anderz]

It's useful when a scientific model can make predictions, and some may even claim that it's necessary. One prediction my akasha model makes is that in theory it is capable of producing all kinds of miracles. Shapeshifting a human body into a coffee table for example is possible, literally, physically. Lol, that's even more radical than most far-out New Age ideas, but it's a real prediction.

Should more and more miracles manifest in our world, that's consistent with my akasha model. However that is still NOT proof of my idea being correct. Because there can always be other explanations. And it's tricky to falsify the akasha model since the akasha can "play dumb" as in behaving like ordinary physical matter following simple natural laws.

[Anderz]

One curious difference between the akasha model and traditional science is that we ourselves are the akasha. So we can't for example experiment with akasha without experimenting on and with ourselves.

And we can't communicate with akasha other than talking to ourselves, haha.  This seeming wacky situation is actually consistent with nonduality. And as Leo has pointed out, even in mainstream science what actually happens is that we are doing even that science within our own subjective consciousness perspective, not as something external and objective "out there".

[Anderz]

The death drive (thanatos) is the crystallized ego being a contracted bundle of akasha. We are akasha which is changeless at its foundation. Death, as in extinction, would mean that we would turn from akasha to something that's not akasha. Impossible.

So death is an illusion, but there can be the experience of the body dying so I'm not ruling that out. However in theory it would be possible to overcome even physical death since everything is akasha, for any afterlife would be akasha too, so physical death may be unnecessary.

[Anderz]

I'm not sure about falsifiability but I think it's a valid claim to demand that a hypothesis should be falsifiable. This means that a case must be shown where the idea can be proven wrong (or at least strongly indicate that it's wrong).

One idea I got is that I can add to my model so that it becomes falsifiable. I don't mean ad hoc modifications, but making the model more specific. One such addition is that akasha is structured as holons. I doubt that I can make the model falsifiable that way but it's a start. I will try to come up with more constraints to add to make my model falsifiable.