Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

This new video by Shunyamurti made me think of the crystallized ego as a bundle of rules. That's the crystallized and inflexible structure of the ego at the personal stage. And I now think of the crystallized ego as a scaffolding necessary for the development of the transpersonal stage. One cannot just jump directly from a state of oneness (one with God in an undifferentiated state in the garden of Eden) and into the transpersonal stage. First a sense of unique and personal individuality has to be developed and that's the useful role of the crystallized ego.

Shunyamurti talked about how the ego structure of external rules needs to be removed. That's like removing the scaffolding for a construction even though that's just a crude analogy that I came to think of. I think what Shunyamurti describes as the Self free of the ego is what I call the fluid ego and the transpersonal stage which doesn't need the inflexible rules of the crystallized ego because it transcends and includes those rules.

 

[Anderz]

Something that might increase the chance of my prediction of Trump winning is that the recent hearing in Michigan seems to suggest that voting fraud has been going on in Democrat-controlled areas for decades! At least according to what I can glean from the hearing. For example, the witness testimony from 5 hours and 16 minutes into the video. And if true and revealed it will result in a colossal scandal. I'm still on the fence though, especially since these are enormous allegations. They will need extremely strong evidence.

 

[Anderz]

One horrible and almost funny idea I came to think of is the possibility that the Democrats always have had far fewer votes than the Republicans because people regardless of where on the political spectrum are greedy as f, lol. So the general public in general doesn't give a crap about anything other than low taxes and how much money they will get.

And the only reason then (notice this is just my speculation here) for why Democrats and Republicans are essentially balanced in number of votes over the decades is because the Democrats have systematically been committing voting fraud on an industrial scale, especially in urban areas.

[Anderz]

The personal stage is full of conflict and also full of deception and manipulation. And even when one works at reducing conflicts and tendency towards lies and manipulation in oneself there is a lot of subconscious material that needs to be resolved. Karma can be seen as both the conscious and the subconscious content at the personal stage.

I think proactive mindfulness is useful for gradually moving deeper into the subconscious and healing karma. And the proactive part can be simple, like questioning conflicts and agitating emotions and thoughts within oneself. So that's just a slight modification of the traditional mindfulness approach where inner conflicts are merely nonjudgmentally observed.

[Anderz]

I want to create a new method called transpersonal mindfulness. The starting premise is that the personal self is divided into ego, superego and id.

Quote

"The id, ego, and super-ego are a set of three concepts in psychoanalytic theory describing distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus (defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche). The three agents are theoretical constructs that describe the activities and interactions of the mental life of a person. In the ego psychology model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual desires; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic agent that mediates, between the instinctual desires of the id and the critical super-ego;[1]" - Wikipedia

I think it's great to have mainstream definitions to begin with. That makes it easy to plug my method into existing and established models. As a next step I want to add my own definitions:

Definition: The crystallized ego is a self divided into ego, superego and id.

Definition: The fluid ego is a self where the divisions in the crystallized ego have been transcended and included.

That's how far I have come so far. I will try to continue constructing transpersonal mindfulness in later posts.

Edited December 5, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Wow, I found that Leo has this old video about id, ego and superego which I will take a look at to get some ideas:

 

[Anderz]

Aha! I think I got the main idea. The ego is like the "blue avian" trying to tame the dragon in this clip from the movie Avatar. The dragon is the id, and the collective group of blue people watching is the superego.

 

[Anderz]

Jordan Peterson talks in this video about how Freud lacked the idea of integration of id, ego and superego. And also an interesting explanation of how the nervous system is actually distributed throughout the body.

 

[Anderz]

Now I've got a basic idea. The id, ego and superego separation is governed by reward and punishment. That's the typical personal stage mode of operation. Even at higher personal stages of development there is still the need to control impulses and urges bubbling up from the subconscious which is the domain of the id.

So then there is a clear path towards transpersonal mindfulness. The primitive reward and punishment mechanism needs to be replaced by an integrated state of being that transcends the need for punishment.

Quote

"And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." - 1 john 4:16-18

 

[Anderz]

I found this academic lecture that includes the id, ego and superego. I don't know much about psychology so this video can be a good start for learning about some basic models in psychology.

 

[Anderz]

Now I have yet another idea. While the functional principle of the personal stage is reward and punishment, the structure is based on personal possessions. So the divide between id, ego and superego is caused by personal possessions.

Loosely speaking the superego is related to the ownership structure in society and the ego is related to the personal aspects of that structure. I don't know yet how that fits into the id.

[Anderz]

Oh! I now realized that the id is the true part of the personal self. The ego is a construct of separation and so is the superego. So the id is - contrary to the usual belief - grounded in reality. Instead of the id being animalistic and primitive pleasure-seeking, from a transpersonal perspective the id is the connection to wholeness.

As a side note, the ego and the superego are of course also grounded in reality when seen from a nondual perspective. The separation is an overlay, a conceptual construct both in society and in the individual at the personal stage.

[Anderz]

Haha, Leo has a new blog post where he bashes Stephen Wolfram. I'm a huge fan of Wolfram but I agree with Leo in this case. The statement "the universe exists" is undecidable, Wolfram said. I think what Leo was pointing out is that direct experience of the universe is already direct evidence. Even the statement "the universe exists" is a part of the existence itself.

From a conceptual perspective Wolfram is probably correct, but it's a mistake in my opinion to remain trapped only on the conceptual level. Wolfram also mentioned somewhat of a nondual perspective when he said in the video "We are it!" referring to how computational equivalence makes everything having the same intelligence, from a rock to a tree to a human to a galaxy to a super AI and advanced ETs etc.

[Anderz]

Who is in control, the id, ego or the superego? Or does it depend on the person and the situation? The answer is that neither of them is in control.

So transpersonal mindfulness is simply about recognizing that nobody is in control.

[Anderz]

The transpersonal stage is like taking the foundation of the personal stage and flipping it around. For example a trustless person at the personal stage is something bad. A trustless person at the transpersonal stage has transcended the need for trust, so trustless then becomes something good!

It's similar to how in cryptocurrencies a trustless system is something desirable. For example Bitcoin is what is called a trustless system because it's decentralized without anybody in control over it. And so even there trustless means something good.

Quote

"A trustless system means that the participants involved do not need to know or trust each other or a third party for the system to function. In a trustless environment, there is no single entity that has authority over the system, and consensus is achieved without participants having to know or trust anything but the system itself.

The property of trustlessness in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network was introduced by Bitcoin, as it allowed all transactional data to be verified and immutably stored on a public blockchain. 

Trust exists in the vast majority of transactions and is a vital part of the economy. However, trustless systems have the potential to redefine economic interactions by allowing people to place trust in abstract concepts rather than institutions or other third parties." - Binance Academy

 

[Anderz]

One tricky thing with my idea is that not having control is horrible at the personal stage. It gives the impression of becoming a bleak and mechanical robot without willpower. So somehow personal control, individual sovereignty and freedom of choice need to be preserved. Ken Wilber's integral approach is absolutely excellent in this case. Instead of tossing out personal control it needs to be transcended and included.

I speculate that this integration will be achieved through moving from the personal stage as an isolated individual to a larger holon, a collective consciousness where we become that larger holon. And the integration will happen I assume by the larger holon pulling us into itself through the evolutionary process of nature. This means that personal control will be abandoned, but only when we are ready to take the step into the control of the larger holon. And then our personal control becomes integrated and included within the larger holon.

[Anderz]

Another speculative idea that came to my mind now is that confusion can be used as fuel for transmuting the crystallized ego into a fluid ego. At the personal stage we totally hate confusion, and for a good reason. At least with fear and aggression there is a possibility of taking actions. With confusion there is only complete inaction.

My reasoning for why confusion can be used as fuel for a personal transformation is the premise that our consciousness at the personal stage is very limited and isolated. That tiny and separate consciousness has to be abandoned. So turning to confusion and welcoming it allows for a letting go of the personal stage so that our consciousness can begin to move towards the much larger transpersonal consciousness.

[Anderz]

The personal stage is very much about manipulation. Sometimes the manipulation is even constructive. Trump said in a recent rally that it's an open secret that the Democrats have committed voting fraud for a long time. That's in line with my speculative idea that I posted about earlier!

Let's say that Trump is correct. I'm still on the fence, but for the sake of argument while I have the idea in my mind I need to start with the assumption that the Democrats have been involved in voting fraud on an industrial scale for decades. Is that ethical? It can be! Because if people are greedy then the Republicans will win all the time with low taxes and society remains at Orange as the highest stage in Spiral Dynamics. So in order to pull society towards Green there might be necessary for the Democrats to use voting fraud to prevent society from getting stuck at Orange. Maybe not entirely purely ethical, haha, but I can see a possibility for a constructive purpose.

[Anderz]

Hmm... I now read in a news article that Huawei uses something called polar codes in their 5G technologies. It said that information is separated into two channels and one of the channels ends up with lots of noise and the other with much less noise. That's useful for error correction in transmission of data.

To me that sounds similar to how bacteria use asymmetric cell division where one of the daughter cells becomes free from defects and the other cell gets all the defects. And bacteria have survived like that for billions of years!

I'm wondering if a similar approach can be used for personal development. Confusion I as posted about earlier can be seen as a form of noise. I don't know yet but I wanted to document the idea in case it can be used later.

[Anderz]

Wait a minute! Confusion is the noisy polar channel. And the crystallized ego is the noise-free polar channel. That's in line with the idea I posted earlier about how we at the personal stage see entropy as disorder. The additional knowledge is the polar channel model which explains how it works. The crystallized ego struggles all the time to keep itself noise-free. So confusion is something to totally avoid at the personal stage. Entropy which as Leonard Susskind said, is hidden information. So entropy appears as noise simply because we don't understand the meaning as the information is hidden.

My idea is that our manifested reality is actually perfect order. So confusion is only a result of a too limited perspective. One practical solution is to allow the confusion to merge with the crystallized ego. And a practice for that is to allow confusion without trying to escape it. The idea is similar to how a vibrational pattern briefly turns into a chaotic pattern before it reconfigures into a new pattern such as in this video:

It's also similar to how reductionism is a clinging onto one pattern and is unable to transform into a more inclusive and complex pattern. I found this lecture where Robert Sapolsky seems to be talking about something similar: