Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

Wow, I can now hardly find any new information about Trump's U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit. I think it could be hugely important! Because setting a precedent allowing all states in America to change laws outside of what is legally allowed seems dangerous to me. Or I have missed something. I'm a total amateur when it comes to this.

Not even Trump himself has tweeted about it, at least not recently as far as I can tell. Well, in Januari things will be cleared up. I'm eager to find out who will be the U.S. President. And I still believe Trump may have a chance of winning. I actually hope Trump will win, haha, so that there will be a lot of draining the swamp action. That's useful for building the global personal stage 'cocoon' I believe.

[Anderz]

There is something seriously wrong with the information on the internet. From a nondual perspective there are no mistakes or wrong information, but compared to the transpersonal stage the information available at the personal stage, which means almost all information on the internet, is heavily manipulated, wrong or absent. I will disconnect from the internet for a while.

[Anderz]

Now I came up with a strategy for how to deal with society and the internet. And that is to treat it lightly without detaching. And also to look at alternative information and sort out what is true and what is woo woo. Also, similarly with mainstream information and be skeptical about it instead of trusting authorities unquestioningly.

I will try this approach on Brian Scott's recent video:

 

[Anderz]

Vernon Howard has a lot of good spiritual teachings.

Now interestingly, Brian Scott has this new video about Vernon Howard:

 

[Anderz]

Shunyamurti talks about the ego and free will in this new video. I have a new approach to free will. My new approach is still based on the idea that we don't have free will. But instead of trying to realize that there is no free will, a better approach I found is to realize that one cannot realize that. So it's a form of double-renunciation of free will. The first step is to realize that there is no free will. And the second step is to realize that one cannot realize that, unless the realization happens by itself.

 

[Anderz]

I find it useful to have a model of reality even from a nondual and transpersonal perspective. I looked into category theory earlier and expected to find it incredibly complicated, but the foundation of category theory is actually really simple. The NAND-only model I described earlier is I believe even simpler, but there might be lessons to learn from category theory and something called homotopy type theory which is mentioned in this lecture:

 

[Anderz]

Homotopy type theory seems to be fairly simple at the foundation and can be applied to the NAND model which only has NAND gates and where the only type is binary digits 0 and 1.

And a NAND gate is a simple addition of two binary digits into one binary digit: 0 and 0 = 1, 0 and 1 = 1, 1 and 0 = 1, 0 and 0 = 1. That's it!

I will look into type theory more to see if the NAND model can be squeezed into an extremely simple version of homotopy type theory. And my model doesn't even use loops so I can use what I read on Wikipedia is called "1-dimensional" intensional type theory. My idea is that since NAND gates can do all forms of computation and bits can represent any information as ones and zeros, that should be enough for a fully general yet simple homotopy type theory. The advantage with having a homotopy type theory is as I understand it that it can be used for automatic theorem proving and for other powerful methods.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Unfortunately it looks like type theory only makes the NAND model more complicated than it has to be. As for automatic theorem proving I believe it's trivially simple in the NAND model.

Quote

"The logic or Boolean expression given for a logic NAND gate is that for Logical Addition, which is the opposite to the AND gate, and which it performs on the complements of the inputs. The Boolean expression for a logic NAND gate is denoted by a single dot or full stop symbol, ( . ) with a line or Overline, ( ‾‾ ) over the expression to signify the NOT or logical negation of the NAND gate giving us the Boolean expression of:  A.B = Q.

Then we can define the operation of a 2-input digital logic NAND gate as being:

“If both A and B are true, then Q is NOT true”

" - electronics-tutorials.ws

Then why isn't something this simple method used instead of the type theories which quickly get very complicated? My guess is that for historical reasons when math is done manually it would be extremely cumbersome to use only NAND gates. So to get more powerful methods for manual calculations and for higher abstractions, things like type theories have been invented.

However, when using computers, for example a proof made of only NAND gates can be hideously huge with millions of NAND gates connected together in intricate ways, and for humans that would be infeasible to deal with but for computers it's a piece of cake, so I think it could be very useful to use a NAND-only approach and let computers do the heavy lifting.

[Anderz]

In this video from last year, Shunyamurti says that there can be traumas at different levels. He identifies 7 levels of trauma for what as I understand it is at the personal stage of development. Those seem to be a massive heap to deal with. He also talked about breaking into the Self and I see that as the transpersonal stage. And I believe that it's possible to break through all personal stage traumas as one single bundle and enter directly into the transpersonal stage. It might require one helluva breakthrough though compared to dealing with separate levels of traumas one at a time.

 

[Anderz]

To break through into the transpersonal stage may require a radically different approach than the usual spiritual practices. Nonduality teachings often have a different approach, and especially Jim Newman who I believe "learned" it from Tony Parsons, has a radical and nihilistic-seeming nonduality approach presented in this video:

 

[Anderz]

An insight I got from Newman's talk, not something new but I came to think about it again and that is that memories are extremely dominating at the personal stage. That's a real super power that we usually take for granted. By accessing memories the mind projects a very convincing and immersive presentation of the past.

The actual direct experience of memories is that they are experienced in the present moment. Always. Yet since the mind has such powerful projection capacity it makes experiences of memories appearing almost as real as what is happening in the present moment.

This superpower of accessing memories is of course very valuable. The problem is that it sucks in most of our conscious attention and dealing with reality based on only the past is insufficient I believe, since according to my belief, the future has more information than the past. And memories are a large part of the crystallized ego. I think personal stage memories also contribute to the ego tensions. So a practice is to take memories more lightly than is the usual habit at the personal stage.

[Anderz]

Leo mentioned that the ego has too little requisite variety to deal with reality which has infinite requisite variety.

Quote

"Informally, practically, it says that in order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.

Ross Ashby, a pioneer British cyberneticist and psychiatrist, formulated his law of requisite variety in the context of regulation in biology — how organisms are able to adapt to their environment — and then, in quick succession, to aspects of Claude Shannon’s information theorem, and systems in general." - requisitevariety.co.uk

That's similar to my idea that clinging to the past is insufficient to deal with the future. And I believe that the solution is consciousness which always has infinite requisite variety since in my model consciousness is connected to the infinite unmanifested reality. The crystallized ego on the other hand is a narrow and limited individual perspective based on the past.

[Anderz]

I was listening to Tony Parsons and he talked about everything being nothing. That reminded me of Leo's video about something rather than nothing. To me reality being something is a result of what Leo said (I think it was in another video) that reality is difference. And why is there difference? That's a tricky one. I will revisit Leo's video to check for more clues.

 

[Anderz]

One clue to the question about something rather than nothing is that Leo said that reality is a perfect symmetry. Because otherwise, if it had some shape or substance it would only have that in relation to something else! So from a nonduality perspective reality is difference and nothing. Because nothing also lacks shape and substance.

I will see if I can get more clues from Leo's video, but that's a pretty interesting explanation. It's the both something and nothing aspect I haven't grasped fully yet. It's a duality which again needs to be combined into nonduality.

[Anderz]

One idea I now got is that reality is the difference between something and nothing. It's all one nonduality. I will take a look at these videos by Leo again:

 

[Anderz]

Leo also said that reality is actual nothing. That's a valid distinction. The word 'nothing' is of course a concept and is therefore dualistic (existing as a relative separate object). And the word nothing points to the absence of everything. Actual nothing is also a concept but it points to all of reality. Ordinarily the word nothing can point to a separate absence, such as "the bowl contains nothing".

And my idea of reality as the difference between something and nothing is also valid I think. Interestingly, Advaita means not two, and that's precisely what reality as difference is. The structure of reality is the trinity: something <- difference -> nothing. It's not two. It can't be two because that would be two separate realities. And the manifestation of reality goes from the initial trinity into an explosion of differences. From the trinity there are two more differences between the difference itself and to something and to nothing. And that results in more differences and so on towards infinity yet never reaching infinity.

[Anderz]

No! I just realized that the word 'something' is too arbitrary. My new explanation of reality is:

Reality is the difference between everything and nothing.

[Anderz]

I found this description of integral nonduality:

Quote

"The Bhagavata Purana, also known as Srimad-Bhagavatam, is entirely unique in that it propounds “integral nonduality,” or what in certain respects could be referred to as “post-nondualism.” Integral nonduality implies a transcendentally qualified nondual existent (aprakrta-visista-advitiya-vastu) that is both consciousness and conscious (caitanya–svarupa), that is of the nature of being, consciousness, and bliss (sat–cit–ananda), and that integrates within Itself the potencies (saktis) that are intrinsic to Its own being." - Navadvipa Dasa on the translation of Srimad-Bhagavatam

My version of integral nonduality is that we are consciousness and that we are also the the manifested world. So it integrates instead of separates those two. Some other ordinary nonduality teachings may also integrate the two, but I want to use the term integral since I want to include Ken Wilber's transcend and include perspective.

[Anderz]

I noticed that with integral nonduality I can also plug in the concept of evolution! That's often something I find missing in traditional nonduality teachings. And of course evolution from a nondual perspective is that all of manifestation, not just biological or technological evolution, is reality evolving as a wholeness.

Actually, Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns fits into integral nonduality.

Quote

"The Law of Accelerating Returns

We can organize these observations into what I call the law of accelerating returns as follows:

• Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As a result, the
• rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time. Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
• A correlate of the above observation is that the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time.
• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).
• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.
• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of–and a continuation of–biological evolution.
• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

If we apply these principles at the highest level of evolution on Earth, the first step, the creation of cells, introduced the paradigm of biology. The subsequent emergence of DNA provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of a species who combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (i.e., the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking. This hybrid will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains.

If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation. In this way, human technology is distinguished from the tool making of other species. There is a record of each stage of technology, and each new stage of technology builds on the order of the previous stage.

The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel–took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn’t exist at all a decade ago." - Ray Kurzweil, Mar 7, 2001

 

[Anderz]

I now know how to plug my model of reality into integral nonduality. It's extremely simple, but it also gets rather technical, so instead I want to look at it from a higher level perspective.

Evolution is an expansion of holons. And integral noduality includes the physical human body as a holon within the larger holon of planet Earth. And the human body and the planet are one unified whole! And my idea of the transpersonal stage is that we will include the whole planet as our identity of self and develop a collective consciousness that transcends and includes our personal consciousness.