Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

And it's more than just psychedelic effects. Leo said that what we call material reality is pure mind. That's the same explanation as my model. I define mind as the content experienced in and as consciousness. And that's all there is!

So to produce changes such as healing and dissolving the ego it's then useful to take the perspective of physical reality as pure information. And information can change very quickly. Like in a video game where the world is information, although that's a second order form of information. The fundamental information is what everything is made of, including the hardware the game is played on and including the human body.

Leo maybe means that mind is prior even to information. It's still the same idea as my model with perhaps some differences such as the nature of change and time. In my model there isn't even any change from a nondul perspective. And time is a result of changeless information being manifested instantly. The appearance of chance is a result of the information being infinite so there is no end to time.

[Anderz]

It's difficult to verify what Leo says in the psychedelics video without having one's own direct experience of it. But Leo mentioned something that is very much in line with the idea of a collective consciousness. Leo asked to imagine what it would be like to become a beer bottle, a pine cone, a kangaroo or to turn into the entire human race, or the entire planet. Exactly! That's a planetary consciousness as I see it.

Peter Russell talked about a different yet similar idea in his documentary The Global Brain, from the 80s!

And Bruce Lipton said that we are not even humans until we create humanity as a single organism in what he calls fractal evolution.

Similar ideas can be found in all major religions as the prediction of a new earth and in New Age teachings such as the Law of One which describes the evolution into collective consciousness (social memory complex).

[Anderz]

Leo said that there must be death for there to be life. I believe that's wrong. And also impermanence as I see it is only a second order phenomenon. The foundation of reality is permanence and changelessness.

[Anderz]

External authorities are always second hand information. Even our internal "authorities" such as our beliefs can be questioned. And since the personal stage is built very much on deception, manipulation and lack of transparency, it's healthy to maintain a skeptical perspective. Also, many authorities are themselves subject to misinformation which causes problems even when they themselves believe they are sincere and truthful.

 

[Anderz]

Nondual causality is true I think, that causality is holistic and not just from the past to the future. But it's a very general notion, which allows anything to happen. So by narrowing it down it becomes a better explanation for how reality works. This can be done by defining an evolutionary causality which is the pull into larger and larger wholes (holons).

And evolutionary causality includes the simpler causality from past to future and also transcends it. Each moment is more evolved than the previous moments, and the causality becomes more complex as evolution progresses. In simple terms the cause of an event is what has happened in the past together with what is needed to evolve into higher states. So it's a both/and of the past being a cause and the future being a cause.

[Anderz]

I got a new idea about Christ and a collective consciousness! I wrote somewhere earlier that I think of the Body of Christ as a collective consciousness of humanity and not just the churchgoers. The new idea is that Christ suffering on the cross represents how Christ takes away our collective suffering.

Think of how much people suffer and imagine if everybody would share their suffering in a combined collective consciousness. That would be unbearable. It's hard to deal with only our own suffering as a single individual at the personal stage. Inner peace is needed for there to be a joining into a collective consciousness.

[Anderz]

A similar way of looking at it is that Christ suffering on the cross represents the structure of suffering at the personal stage while our own personal suffering as individuals is the content of suffering.

 

[Anderz]

I have been thinking that the ego needs to be transcended and also included. I heard an Advaita teacher saying that even gurus have egos, but it is in the service of the whole, something like that. Shunyamurti says that the ego has no right to rule our lives, it is an illegitimate pseudo entity that has no intelligence of its own, he says. Very interesting. I think that there is truth to the crystallized ego having to dissolve. And the valuable personal identity will be preserved but integrated into a higher state of consciousness, the transpersonal stage.

 

[Anderz]

Quote

"Through the particular to come to the whole, is false. ... The very perception of the false is the beginning of intelligence." - J. Krishnamurti

Quote from about 1 hour and 11 minutes into this talk:

The whole process of thinking is the crystallized ego churning away. So I think Krishnamurti has a point there. And that's a useful insight to have when doing mindfulness practice, to see, or at least examine the possibility of, the whole thinking process being false when it comes to transcending the ego.

[Anderz]

Quote

"Some claim the maxim comes from St. Ignatius Loyola himself. Yet the idea later proclaimed by the Jesuits is very old – give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life." - Psychology Today

Give us a child until he is 7 years old and he will belong to the church for the rest of his life. That's another variant of that Jesuit slogan. This means that a large part of the crystallized ego, and much of its foundation, is established in childhood. There is even crystallization before that, even as a fetus.

Teal Swan has this new video about inner child work:

 

[Anderz]

Even mindfulness practice can become a trap. Because it's the crystallized ego doing the practice. That's a form of control. And the crystallized ego maintains itself as long as it has (the appearance of) control. How to dissolve even that kind of control? Krishnamurti has this to say about it:

 

[Anderz]

With social distancing and internet personalities it would seem that the world is getting more separated instead of developing a collective consciousness. So how does that fit my idea? I think it means that it indicates the death of the personal stage! So a collective consciousness will somehow emerge as a separate society. How that will work I don't know yet.

Curiously the Bible talks about this separation of people, which may symbolize the distinction between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage:

Quote

"All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left." - Matthew 25:32-33

 

[Anderz]

Not only the Bible hints at a radical difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage. In this recent satsang Roger Castillo talks about how the Self is a more true state and is the key to being in life in a different way. So there is I believe a clear shift that will happen to our perspective when we move from the personal stage and into the transpersonal stage.

 

[Anderz]

When listening to Roger an idea came to my mind, something different that he was talking about but who knows what clever messages the spiritual teachers can deliver subconsciously so who knows. The idea is to train one's mind to perceive the future in a radically different way than the usual projection of our memories into predictions and plans about the future.

Instead of using the past to try to manage the future, the idea is to consider the future to be set in stone. This then will cause the mind to remove its investment in the habitual future projections into something else, into another perspective of the future.

[Anderz]

I started thinking about the idea of the future being set in stone. And one deep issue that needs to be resolved is infinite time. The crystallized ego can easily freak out by the idea of endless time. So how to resolve that ghastly panic of the fear of eternity?

I discovered a possible solution! Consciousness is already connected to infinite time. Consciousness is the infinite reality observing the finite manifestation of itself. So for consciousness to be afraid of itself is a neurosis, to put it mildly. The correct perspective is that consciousness is perfect harmony since it is already and always a wholeness.

[Anderz]

If reality is set in stone, then what-if questions can dissolve. Reality is everything possible happening. What is not possible will not happen. It's an obvious tautology.

Tony Parsons says that nothing is happening. I think my explanation is clearer, that everything possible is happening. But it's pretty similar. I will check out this latest video from him:

 

[Anderz]

If only what is possible is happening and the future set in stone, then isn't it possible to understand that and drop confusion about what-if scenarios? No, it's only possible to drop confusion if that's possible, haha. Another tautology.

Quote

"tautology noun the saying of the same thing twice over in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style (e.g. they arrived one after the other in succession ).

- a phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words.
plural noun: tautologies

LOGIC
- a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form." - Oxford Languages

 

[Anderz]

What nonduality teachers capture that is missing in my idea of reality as "everything possible happening" is that they explain the illusion of the separate self, such as:

Quote

"All there is is nothing apparently happening

On the face of it this is a simple but paradoxical proposal. It is also radical in that it recognises that the concept of self is illusory, together with any belief in free will and choice. As there is nothing happening, there would be nothing to seek or to become.

And how can there be a meaning or a purpose in this apparent existence if there is nothing apparently happening? This proposal dispels any idea of there being a story or an agenda of any kind leading to anything better or worse.

So, if there is nothing really happening, then the nothing that is unknowable, and often feared, is also the very fullness and freedom that is longed for." - Tony Parsons, January 2021 https://www.theopensecret.com/

So on a second thought my explanation isn't clearer, just different. I need to somehow include the illusion of the separate self in order for it to be similar to nonduality. What I think Parsons is missing though is the evolutionary aspect of reality. But I admit that Parsons' explanation may be more correct from a nondual perspective. I think I will check out some of Ken Wilber's videos. He has an integral both/and approach.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Anderz

[Anderz]

I will listen again to Ken Wilber talking about the shadow. This is only the first part. The full episode can be found here: https://integrallife.com/integrating-shadow/

 

[Anderz]

Ken Wilber has a very comprehensive approach. I will try a lighter approach and call it Integral Light. I don't know yet what to include. At least the nondual perspective and the evolutionary perspective will be included.

My initial idea is that it's possible to practice methods for moving into the transpersonal stage. Just like learning a new language or how to play the piano. It's a bit trickier since nonduality as I see it means that there isn't anybody doing something as a separate individual. There is however doing happening from an individual perspective, so that's something that also can be included in Integral Light.