Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

The personal stage is dominated by reductionist thinking. That's of course useful, but limited. And I came to think of how basically all our personal memories have this kind of predictable reductionistic patterns. And how we structure society is in the same predictable ways. Things like language, laws, money and calendar time are clunky, rigid, conceptual and predictable structures.

I will experiment with loosening up my inflexible thinking by allowing confusion to remain. The idea is that the confusion will blend with my crystallized ego and restructure it. And I believe it can be achieved by not clinging so much to thoughts. Especially "serious" thoughts about survival and how to cope with the future are prime candidates for becoming more flexible since they are especially hard and crystallized.

[Anderz]

Professor Robert Sapolsky talked in a video about a television program where people have three choices to get help with answers, 1) eliminate half of the choices, 2) call an expert or 3) ask the audience. And the best result is when asking the audience with 91% correct answers. I have heard about similar things, such as people guessing how many balls there are in a jar. The guesses are all over the place, yet when all the guesses are averaged it results in a very accurate answer!

Imagine the power of being able to access the wisdom of the crowd directly with our minds. And not only within a small group of people, but the whole world! At the personal stage we are disconnected and isolated to only our own personal knowledge. Basic information can be found on places like Wikipedia but much knowledge is more complicated and related to specific situations.

The transpersonal stage I believe gives us the capacity to access the wisdom of the crowd directly in our consciousness, and without the help of technology. As a simple analogy, the personal stage is like a standalone computer disconnected from the internet, and the transpersonal stage is like a computer that is connected to the internet.

[Anderz]

How to deal with bad things happening and unacceptable situations? I think Leo is correct that when looking at reality from the absolute and total perspective then everything is good. So a strategy to try is to judge everything as good. And that situations are bad in a relative way and will in the long run turn out to be good.

So instead of immediately trying to correct problems, my practice is to first question whether it actually is a problem, and if so if there are other ways to deal with it or simply wait before jumping into action trying to fix problems. It's similar to delayed gratification.

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"Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, describes the process that the subject undergoes when the subject resists the temptation of an immediate reward in preference for a later reward. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later.[1] A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence." - Wikipedia

Delayed gratification is only relevant at the personal stage I believe. At the transpersonal stage I think that the opposite is the case, that we then aim for instant gratification, not because of impulsiveness but because of understanding that everything is good.

[Anderz]

I suspect that worry is a result of the intellect striving to bring order out of confusion. I will experiment with allowing confusion when worry comes up.

The usual way the mind works at the personal stage is to try to come up with solutions to worry. Even if the intellect comes up with a solution it strengthens the crystallized ego and makes it harder. Allowing confusion to enter the mind dissolves the worry. That's the idea I will test by practicing it.

[Anderz]

Aaron Abke has this new video where he makes a clever interpretation of this passage in the Bible:

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"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30

The word 'yoke' can be interpreted as joining which is the same meaning as the word 'yoga'.

 

[Anderz]

Stephen Wolfram has talked a lot about combinators recently, such as in this recent video:

It quickly gets very complicated and over my head, but I recognize, similar to his physics project that the foundation is extremely simple. It's similar to information but more powerful. All information can be represented with binary notation. For example all information on the entire internet is just a bunch of ones and zeros. So why the need for combinators? What hit me is that the combinators combine all the information into a single unit!

Binary information is dualistic. It's just a sequence of ones and zeroes. The combinators on the other hand as I see it form an integrated wholeness, actually a holarchy which means a hierarchy of holons. Combinators include the interconnectedness between things into a single whole which can be seen as a nondual perspective.

The transpersonal stage is as I see it a larger holon than the personal stage. I will do some more research about combinators to see if they can be used for understanding holon structures and from that find how the transpersonal stage emerges out of the personal stage.

[Anderz]

The polar channel idea and entropy I mentioned earlier also applies to society vs individuals. At the personal stage this situation is scary. Society is like a "Matrix" that is sucking energy from the individuals in society. Much like how in the Matrix movie the machine world had turned humans into energy sources, like batteries to fuel the system.

My reasoning for why this is so is the obvious fact that humans grow old and die while society as a whole survives. This might seem like a natural situation, and as a developmental stage it is natural, however it's also a situation where society is the noise-free polar channel and the individual people are the noise channel. Not good.

The transpersonal stage resolves this situation I predict by removing the lopsided situation between society vs individuals so that both survive instead of one side sucking the living daylight out of the other side. A balance is achieved when entropy is recognized as order instead of as in the personal stage where entropy appears as disorder.

[Anderz]

How to deal with the integration between the individual and society, so that it becomes a harmonious whole? One thing I noticed is that the crystallized ego is prone to struggling against life. Lots of effort caused by friction spent at the personal stage. So the key seems to be to lessen the frantic struggle of the crystallized ego.

Eckhart Tolle said that in what he calls presence (as opposed to be lost in thought) it's possible to do things fast and even run in some situations and with inner peace. And reducing friction is not about becoming lazy, at least not in the usual way which is still a form of inner conflict with life. Instead my practice will be to be restful and then have high energy activity when it feels right.

[Anderz]

Trusting people with credentials more than laypersons about a specific area of expertise is valid, but it's an incomplete approach! It's like how the word 'trustless' is actually good when it comes to for example decentralized systems. So what is the problem with trusting experts? One problem is that it's just second hand information, we don't have direct knowledge ourselves. Secondly, an expert could be lying! Either willfully or out of ignorance. Lots of corruption and manipulation schemes going on at the personal stage.

I predict that one major solution to this is that artificial intelligence (AI) will become extremely clever and will soon easily be able to outperform human experts in most areas. This can be useful as a transition from the personal stage based on trust in authorities to dropping that need of trust at the transpersonal stage.

[Anderz]

Why do people often put obstacles for people to struggle with instead of making it easy for others? I figured out that it's more than just a win-lose situation where when others are pushed down you yourself seemingly rise up, or at least have a better chance of succeeding in life compared to those who are obstructed.

The interesting deeper reason I found is that in order for creation to produce uniqueness it's beneficial for us to be prevented easy access to things so that with our own struggle we come up with creative and unique solutions. But that's only a useful strategy at the personal stage. When we see through the game, then it's game over. Haha. And then it's harvest time, meaning we deliberately bring the easy ways of doing things to the forefront and genuinely wish others to succeed easily, because we have as humanity been there, done that and got the bloody T-shirt as far as win-lose is concerned.

[Anderz]

Personal development is fine, but transpersonal as I see it means going beyond that. I'm looking into development of a collective consciousness. It's tricky since I expect that to be a huge leap of consciousness, from being an isolated individual to being a connected collective being.

There are hints here and there about the possibility of a collective consciousness, but mostly as hints in religious and spiritual teachings. Also some more scientific approaches such as Bruce Lipton's fractal evolution and Peter Russell's Global Brain idea.

[Anderz]

I looked into combinators, the simple principle that Stephen Wolfram presented recently. I didn't grasp it. It's a simple structure, but it gets very complicated quickly. They also mentioned that something called a NAND gate can be used to produce all forms of computation. So maybe there is an even simpler way than combinators by using NAND gates.

NAND gates can be seen as holons, wholes who at the same time are parts. And the parts can also be NAND gates! So one can construct a binary tree of only NAND gates which represents a holarchy with the root as the largest holon.

These are AND gates but the principle of a binary tree is the same:

It's not possible to produce loops with a tree structure like that, but the same result can be achieved I think by allowing the tree to become arbitrary large. I will think about if a binary tree like that can model reality. My current model can be represented as pure information, but it's just a string of binary digits without structure. A binary tree can possibly represent the structure needed. And static information can be encoded with NAND gates where no input means inputs of zeros leading to one as output. And to get zero as output two such NAND gates are connected to a third NAND gate. Really cumbersome way of just producing '0' and '1' bit values but the general NAND tree may be the most fundamental representation of computation possible.

[Anderz]

One curious thing I now realized is that the value of the root NAND in the binary tree in my previous post is possibly changing! In my model the unmanifested reality is changeless, like Brahman or as it says in the Bible somewhere: "I the Lord do not change."

Change happens as the unmanifested reality is manifested. Imagine such binary tree expanding infinitely fast. And with all kinds of complicated combinations of NAND gates. The value of the root NAND is unknown until it becomes manifested. And the infinite sequence of change is endless.

This is similar to the Thomson lamp paradox.

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"Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks.

Consider a lamp with a toggle switch. Flicking the switch once turns the lamp on. Another flick will turn the lamp off. Now suppose that there is a being who is able to perform the following task: starting a timer, he turns the lamp on. At the end of one minute, he turns it off. At the end of another half minute, he turns it on again. At the end of another quarter of a minute, he turns it off. At the next eighth of a minute, he turns it on again, and he continues thus, flicking the switch each time after waiting exactly one-half the time he waited before flicking it previously.[1] The sum of this infinite series of time intervals is exactly two minutes.[2]

The following question is then considered: Is the lamp on or off at two minutes?[1] Thomson reasoned that this supertask creates a contradiction:

It seems impossible to answer this question. It cannot be on, because I did not ever turn it on without at once turning it off. It cannot be off, because I did in the first place turn it on, and thereafter I never turned it off without at once turning it on. But the lamp must be either on or off. This is a contradiction.[1]" - Wikipedia

 

[Anderz]

Another interesting observation is that by choosing the value '1' as the default input the representation of constant binary values gets simpler to define. Because then one NAND gate with empty inputs produces the value zero as output. And by connecting that NAND gate one of the inputs of another NAND gate results in the value '1'. So only 2 NAND gates needed to represent constant binary values instead of 3 NAND gates as in my previous post.

And whoa! This determines what is '1' and what is '0'. Those are just symbols and we can choose any symbols, but the principle of 2 instead of 3 NAND gates is more fundamental in some sense and form an absolute principle even though the symbols used are relative.

[Anderz]

It's also easy to map my binary string of reality to the tree of NAND gates. A connected input can be given the value '1' and a disconnected input the value '0'. And the binary tree expands exponentially 2+ 4 + 8+ 16 + ... which can be mapped directly into the binary string.

In my model the expansion of the string is not exponential. The expansion is a result of the manifestation of differences, producing an interconnected web like Indra's net in Buddhist philosophy. The mapping of NAND gates can still be the same though and depending on ones and zeroes in that string the computation for reality is achieved.

[Anderz]

Shunyamurti says that we are in a historical shift at the moment. Could be true! I think the coronavirus crisis is a sign of that. Everything is connected, even chronologically, so things always happen for a reason I believe.

 

[Anderz]

I like to sometimes learn from New Age teachings to go beyond the mainstream and into fringe areas. Brian Scott has this recent video about Devas.

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"Deva is a Sanskrit word found in Vedic literature of 2nd millennium BCE. Monier-Williams translates it as "heavenly, divine, terrestrial things of high excellence, exalted, shining ones".[1][12] The concept also is used to refer to deity.[1]" - Wikipedia

 

[Anderz]

Here is another of Brian Scott's videos with what seems to be a New Age perspective on relaxation. I have listened to half of it and so far many things explained by Frank Rudolph Young's text which Brian is reading are difficult for me to tell if they are valid or not. But one amazing thing mentioned is that tensions cause toxins in the body! I speculated about something similar earlier, so to me that's a possible confirmation of true knowledge.

 

[Anderz]

I'm pretty sure that dissolving the tensions in oneself results in a detachment from the 'caterpillar' society. The caterpillar here represents society as a personal stage construct. And the butterfly represents the transpersonal stage society.

The hard tensions then become outsources to building the cocoon that will allow the development of the butterfly. This includes personal possessions both material and immaterial, even personal relationships. It doesn't mean stop using money or not having relationships or anything radical like that. It's simply about dissolving the attachment to those possessions and turning the crystallized ego with tensions to a fluid ego where the tensions have dissolved,

[Anderz]

Nonduality teacher Roger Castillo often points out that what he means by peace of mind (Ramesh Balsekar's concept) is NOT pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Life is sometimes pain and sometimes pleasure he says. I think that's correct at the personal stage. However I believe that the foundation of the transpersonal stage is inner peace and that it feels very pleasant compared to many of the nasty emotions at the personal stage.

Here is a recent satsang video: