Anderz

ACIM Journal

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Sadhguru has a new book with the title: Death; An Inside Story: A book for all those who shall die

sadhguru-wisdom-article-a-book-on-death-

Notice the subtitle: for THOSE who shall die. It doesn't say that everybody will die, haha. I think his book is about the death of Kali Yuga.

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And the ushering in of the next age: Satya Yuga.

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Edited by Anderz

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In Buddhism there are the concepts of emptiness and impermanence. I haven't checked yet how accurate the translation of those terms are, but I can explain them with my model. My amateurish interpretation is that Nirvana is the unmanifested reality, which is infinite and changeless. Manifested reality is a finite subset of the unmanifested reality. So manifested reality is nothing, or nothingness, in itself.

And manifested reality is an ever larger subset giving the appearance of change and impermanence. A subset is nothing (emptiness) without the superset. What ACIM calls God I have called infinite intelligence. And that infinite intelligence is a property of Nirvana, the unmanifested reality. And the Holy Spirit in ACIM is the Dharma in Buddhism. Dharma has many meanings but the main explanation for Buddhism in Wikipedia is:

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"In Buddhism dharma means cosmic law and order,[10] but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha.[10]" - Wikipedia

It sounds similar to how in Christianity the term Word of God can both mean the Bible and also the larger meaning given in John 1. And if Nirvana means the unmanifested reality, which is the same as the Word of God, and with Dharma as a different term, then the Holy Spirit can be equal to Dharma.

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The ego is the belief of being a separate entity. Instead of spiritual practice we can do a scientific experiment. Usually science deals with objective measurements but as the mainstream news article I posted earlier said, some scientists are now beginning to look into even subjective reality.

One subjective scientific experiment that can be done is to start with the hypothesis that the self is empty, such as the self being a unique perspective without substance and even without content! Within the empty perspective of the self things like personal memories and an external world appear.

And then the hypothesis can be tested through personal and subjective everyday experiences. If the hypothesis is true then our perspective and subjective experience will change, from a separate ego to a sense of being empty. Not in the dysfunctional sense of the psychological depersonalization disorder where the person experiences his or her own life as a passive observer. That passive observer is still the ego, with an even worse dysfunction! The true empty self is a unique perspective of the totality of reality and not something separate from it.

Edited by Anderz

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Spiritual teachers and teachings say that the ego is false. And that is correct when the ego is a belief in being a separate self. From higher logic the ego is real because it is True, it exists as the belief in being a separate self. ACIM of course has pages and pages of text explaining what the ego is. Here is one summary:

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"W-pII.12.1. The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death. 2 It is the "will" that sees the Will of God as enemy, and takes a form in which it is denied. 3 The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true.

W-pII.12.2. The ego is insane. 2 In fear it stands beyond the Everywhere, apart from All, in separation from the Infinite. 3 In its insanity it thinks it has become a victor over God Himself. 4 And in its terrible autonomy it "sees" the Will of God has been destroyed. 5 It dreams of punishment, and trembles at the figures in its dreams; its enemies, who seek to murder it before it can ensure its safety by attacking them.

W-pII.12.3. The Son of God is egoless. 2 What can he know of madness and the death of God, when he abides in Him? 3 What can he know of sorrow and of suffering, when he lives in eternal joy? 4 What can he know of fear and punishment, of sin and guilt, of hatred and attack, when all there is surrounding him is everlasting peace, forever conflict-free and undisturbed, in deepest silence and tranquility?

W-pII.12.4. To know reality is not to see the ego and its thoughts, its works, its acts, its laws and its beliefs, its dreams, its hopes, its plans for its salvation, and the cost belief in it entails. 2 In suffering, the price for faith in it is so immense that crucifixion of the Son of God is offered daily at its darkened shrine, and blood must flow before the altar where its sickly followers prepare to die.

W-pII.12.5. Yet will one lily of forgiveness change the darkness into light; the altar to illusions to the shrine of Life Itself. 2 And peace will be restored forever to the holy minds which God created as His Son, His dwelling place, His joy, His love, completely His, completely one with Him." - ACIM W-pII.12

 

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The idea of impermanence might sound bad to the ego, but we can look at impermanence as a constant influx of new information. The unmanifested reality is changeless so nothing is actually destroyed, ever. And emptiness as I mentioned earlier is because manifested reality is a subset of the unmanifested. A subset is empty in itself and only exists as a part of the superset, in this case the unmanifested.

And the unmanifested is infinite information arranged with infinite intelligence. So the impermanence is actually an inflow of more and more intelligence into our manifested reality. The ego only thinks of cause and effect from the past to the future, but the real causality is connected to both past and future. And the ego sees an increase of entropy (disorder, destruction) because of its limited perspective, not only individually, but the whole world in third density behaves like that. In reality what seems like entropy to us is actually perfectly structured information.

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It's also possible to use terms from Hinduism and then the unmanifested is Brahman and the manifested reality is Maya.

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"In Hinduism, Brahman connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe.[1][2][3] In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[2][4][5] It is the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[1][3] [6] Brahman as a metaphysical concept is the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.[1][7]" - Wikipedia

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"Hendrick Vroom explains, "The term Maya has been translated as 'illusion,' but then it does not concern normal illusion. Here 'illusion' does not mean that the world is not real and simply a figment of the human imagination. Maya means that the world is not as it seems; the world that one experiences is misleading as far as its true nature is concerned."[36]" - Maya (religion), Wikipedia

 

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I don't think mainstream science has a concept of the unmanifested, except Julian Barbour has proposed what he calls Platonia which is the same as the unmanifested it seems.

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"He investigates configuration spaces and best-matching mathematics, fleshing out how fundamental physics might deal with different instants in a timeless scheme. He calls his universe without time and only relative positions "Platonia" after Plato's world of eternal forms." - The End of Time (book), Wikipedia

And mainstream physicist Leonard Susskind as I have mentioned before said that the deepest physical law he knows of is that information is indestructible. And Susskind also said that entropy is hidden information. This is consistent with my other interpretations.

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The peace of God includes the future. The actual future. The ego can only use its past memories to try to concoct some guesswork future. If my ego really could see the future I could win the Powerball jackpot every time, and even if I had integrity enough to avoid playing the game for the sake of fairness, the power to pick the winning numbers would be there.

So the ego is incapable of sensing the actual future. ACIM even says in lesson 7 that the ego only sees the past. For the peace of God to fill the heart the ego habit of clinging onto only the past must be loosened up. And the ego itself can't do that but with the understanding of the ego limitation an opening of the heart can happen automatically.

Then what about randomness, and free will? How can the Holy Spirit know the correct move into the future if there is randomness or free will making the future flexible? My hypothesis is that there is neither free will nor randomness. And that hypothesis seems logical to me, because I can see how it would work logically. How would randomness work logically? Or free will? True randomness and free will seem like magic pixie dust to me. And ACIM says this about magic:

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"A magic thought, by its mere presence, acknowledges a separation from God. 4 It states, in the clearest form possible, that the mind which believes it has a separate will that can oppose the Will of God, also believes it can succeed. 5 That this can hardly be a fact is obvious. 6 Yet that it can be believed as fact is equally obvious. 7 And herein lies the birthplace of guilt." - ACIM, Manual for Teachers 17

 

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I find it interesting how the Law of One says that our world is ruled by the Law of Confusion and that ACIM says that the ego is confused about everything. Sounds similar. The Law of One also talks about levels of distortions. It even says that free will is the first distortion. And I think it also says that love is a distortion. That means ego love! ACIM calls it special relationships. True love is the holy relationship.

My interpretation is that the confusion is a result of the ego only seeing its past memories, and all those memories are based on the false belief in separation and free will, the Law of Confusion. Many people seem to believe that the Law of One says that free will is real, but I don't think they call it distortion and confusion for nothing. They (Ra) know that the illusion of free will needs to be preserved because the ego isn't ready to transcend that belief.

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Service to self (STS) in the Law of One means ego consciousness in my opinion. The ego's idea of service to others (STO) is self-sacrifice, which makes the ego a hypocrite because it doesn't want to sacrifice itself. That's why simplistic ideas such as game theory work because the ego acts in predictable selfish STS ways.

And I agree with the ego view that self-sacrifice is stupid. And soon we will have robots and AI doing the work for us, so no practical STO needed. Soon can however mean decades away because even seemingly simple tasks such as self-driving cars might be much more difficult in practice to develop than what people at first believed.

STO instead means a collective consciousness I believe. And the ego is incapable of that so it will always remain STS. If that is correct, the STS vs STO duality is then another case of the Law of Confusion, like the idea of free will. Just like how people believe that the Law of One says that free will is real, they also believe that STO means self-sacrifice. Both those views are wrong IMO.

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Many people even in ego consciousness genuinely want to serve others. Isn't that the service to others meant in the Law of One? No, that's not how I see it. It's still service to self. Anthony de Mello explains it like this:

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"Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. You say that it is very difficult to accept that there may be times when you are not honest to goodness really trying to be loving or trustful. Let me simplify it. Let's make it as simple as possible. Let's even make it as blunt and extreme as possible, at least to begin with. There are two types of selfishness.

The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. That's what we generally call self-centeredness. The second is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be a more refined kind of selfishness. The first one is very obvious, but the second one is hidden, very hidden, and for that reason more dangerous, because we get to feel that we're really great. But maybe we're not all that great after all. You protest when I say that. That's great!" - Anthony de Mello

It says in the Law of One that service to others actually also is service to self because all is One. But the ego experiences itself as separate so it mistakenly makes a distinction between service to self and service to others. That's I believe yet another example of the Law of Confusion.

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Brad has a new video about manifestations. I still want to manifest money on the material level and eternal life as a more long term manifestation. But I also believe that I as an ego cannot actually manifest anything. Still I think it's useful to think in terms of more advanced manifestations such as presented by Brad. Reality as a whole is much more capable I believe than what we have been conditioned to believe.

 

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Brad talked about the need to drop the ego, and even to drop the intellect, which he said is the stupidest level of intelligence. I like that idea. However in my view I cannot drop my ego since I AM my ego. What I can do is to relax my ego and my thinking and let my heart be filled with peace. And if it will happen it will happen! And there will be an automatic process of dropping my ego.

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Brad also talked about letting God in. Is that possible? Yes! Isn't that duality? Actually, it's about bringing oneness. The ego only sees the past, and the ego's future is projections made from past memories. Letting God in to me means letting the real future flow into oneself. That's the Holy Spirit filling the heart with peace and as ACIM says, the peace will then flow into the whole body. Brad talked about love, and I think of peace as the foundation of true love, so it's the same I think.

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The tensions in body and mind are a result of clinging too much to the past! Simple. The ego believes it is focusing a lot on the future, while in fact it's only focusing on the past. Even the confusion in the mind is a result of clinging to the past. And it's even worse, the past to the ego is a bunch of personal memories based on, and all contaminated by, the false belief in separate doership. The ego says about its personal memories: my precious my precioussss... haha when we should say: what a load of crap my memories are. More seriously, there IS value in our memories but that value needs to be harvested correctly and the dirt cleaned out.

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Psychotherapy will only work when the personal memories are taken as being dysfunctional. Not only the content but also the structure of the memories themselves. That's why ACIM goes beyond taking personal memories seriously and instead claim that they suck, which they do. There is value in memories but it's totally messed up and entangled with the ego. And Helen Schucman, the channeler of ACIM was herself a professional psychologist. That should tell us something.

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"Helen Cohn Schucman (born Helen Dora Cohn, July 14, 1909 – February 9, 1981) was an American clinical psychologist and research psychologist. She was a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York from 1958 until her retirement in 1976. Schucman is best known for having "scribed" with the help of colleague William Thetford the book A Course in Miracles (1st edition, 1975),[1][2] the contents of which she claimed had been given to her by an inner voice she identified as Jesus. However, at her request, her role as its "writer" was not revealed to the general public until after her death.[3]" - Wikipedia

 

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The world is becoming more globally connected. I believe there will also be an evolutionary leap into a collective consciousness already within a few decades from today. And it will be interesting the hear what Leo has to say about the evolution of society in his new video:

 

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It seems that ACIM has a correct view of society, that the world is insane. Eckhart Tolle has said something similar.

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"The world is full of interesting ideas, but none of these have saved the world from its madness. ... enlightenment, salvation, liberation, self-realization, the end of suffering, the kingdom of heaven, the pearl of great price—they all point to the possibility of transcending the ordinary human state of consciousness, which has been running the world since the beginning of history. In fact, almost all of human history is a reflection of that ordinary, and in many ways, dysfunctional state of consciousness. If there’s still anybody left who doubts the dysfunction of the human mind, I suggest two things: You can either read a book on 20th century history, or you can watch TV tonight. ... Now, for the first time, this enlightenment is happening on a larger scale, not just to one person in 10 million or less, as it did before. It is emerging now because it has to emerge: The planet would not survive another 100 years of the present human consciousness." - Eckhart Tolle

There is a method to the madness though, and I think, and Tolle also has said, that the ego has been a necessary stage of development for humanity. And there is great value produced throughout our human history and it needs to be preserved. That value needs to be harvested. Society has more or less reached its limit in the "caterpillar" stage and over the next few decades my guess is that the whole world will be radically transformed rather than experiencing a continued gradual evolution of society.

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Leo showed with factual data how society in the world has progressed from 1970 to 2010 with improved life expectancy, incomes, school attendance all over the world and poverty, illiteracy and mortality are declining globally, and war, crime rates and violence have been declining for decades. Steven Pinker showed how violence has been declining throughout the entire human history!

One difference is that Steven Pinker said that the decline of violence is not guaranteed to continue. I believe it is guaranteed! And Leo said something similar, that cultures and society is always progressing forward, even when there are temporary setbacks. I think Leo is correct, and that there is a larger evolutionary progress towards higher and higher consciousness, complexity and love as Leo said. 

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A new idea I have is that even our third density world will become peaceful, and after that it can move into fourth density. Some people say that fourth density has already started on earth and that could be true but on a small and not so visible scale. Without a peaceful third density world it will be difficult to have a fourth density development. Some people may think of fourth density as a split timeline and a different world, but I believe third and fourth density earth are the same, only with different vibrations.

But how to make our current world peaceful? I think it can happen with accelerating technological progress. And as Ray Kurzweil has explained, the technological progress is not only exponential in terms of capacity but also in price/performance. An example he gave is that the first mobile phones were very expensive and only the power elite could afford them, and today even most people in poor countries have much more powerful phones. We will have to accept mass surveillance I think, because many people will remain in ego consciousness for a long time, so there will be peace through law enforcement with powerful technologies. Only in fourth density will we become truly peaceful.

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