Anderz

ACIM Journal

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I still think it's true that much shadow material needs to be removed until the surrender control practice becomes powerful, but that can be done with the gradual approach. Then the shadow and the ego are treated as the same separate self and dissolve together.

I will take a look at this video to learn more about the shadow:

 

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The practice of giving up ego control can be confusing to the subconscious. It's like "don't think about a pink elephant". The subconscious will come up with the thought of a nice pink elephant regardless whether the conscious mind actually wants it or not.

So as an alternative the practice can be turned into cultivating inner peace in the present moment. That makes both the ego and the subconscious working together. That's control and at the same time a form of control aligned with the Holy Spirit.

Quote

"The Holy Spirit asks that you offer Him a resting place where you will rest in Him. He answered you, and entered your relationship." - ACIM T-19.IV.

 

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Shunyamurti said that the ego is tricky and produces suffering in order to escape an even deeper form of suffering. I came to think of how the deepest suffering is the death drive. And in turn the death drive is just a disconnect, including a disconnected heart. For example I read in a medical article that we cannot feel pain in the heart! So that's even a physical/neurological block.

And since everything is connected, the death drive disconnect itself is a trick, a deception. Cultivating inner peace will be difficult as long as the death drive remains. I will therefore experiment with awakening my heart together with cultivating inner peace, to see if the death drive can be healed and removed.

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Indeed, Shunyamurti said that the deeper suffering is fear of non-being, which includes death but is even more than that. And that causes anxiety, which he said is deeper than fear. And he said that the ego lacks courage, a word derived from the word heart. The ego is disconnected from the heart, he said, and is a false self that lacks being.

So the ego is a lifeless construct! And the deeper fear of non-being is an incredible trick, since the ego is already lifeless. Fear is at least about some particular things while anxiety is less specific. A good approach therefore is to become aware of the actual cause of anxiety which is a disconnected heart.

Shunyamurti's explanation of the ego is very similar to A Course in Miracles. Carl Jung's definition of ego is more about how it is a necessary sense of self. And the integral perspective is that the ego needs to be transcended and also included.

The ego's defenses keep blocking the heart. So that's another tricky part. An open heart means defenselessness. To the ego that means senselessness. So one should not underestimate the immensity of the transformation needed to turn the ego into a true self.

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"Defenses are the costliest of all the prices which the ego would exact. 2 In them lies madness in a form so grim that hope of sanity seems but to be an idle dream, beyond the possible. 3 The sense of threat the world encourages is so much deeper, and so far beyond the frenzy and intensity of which you can conceive, that you have no idea of all the devastation it has wrought.

You are its slave. 2 You know not what you do, in fear of it. 3 You do not understand how much you have been made to sacrifice, who feel its iron grip upon your heart. 4 You do not realize what you have done to sabotage the holy peace of God by your defensiveness. 5 For you behold the Son of God as but a victim to attack by fantasies, by dreams, and by illusions he has made; yet helpless in their presence, needful only of defense by still more fantasies, and dreams by which illusions of his safety comfort him.

Defenselessness is strength. 2 It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you. 3 Perhaps you will recall the text maintains that choice is always made between Christ's strength and your own weakness, seen apart from Him. 4 Defenselessness can never be attacked, because it recognizes strength so great attack is folly, or a silly game a tired child might play, when he becomes too sleepy to remember what he wants.

Defensiveness is weakness. 2 It proclaims you have denied the Christ and come to fear His Father's anger. 3 What can save you now from your delusion of an angry god, whose fearful image you believe you see at work in all the evils of the world? 4 What but illusions could defend you now, when it is but illusions that you fight?" - ACIM W-pI.153:4-7

 

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Then what about the need to meditate? Shunyamurti talked about that. I find it too tedious to do formal meditation. The good thing is that cultivating inner peace through mindfulness practice is similar to meditation. And mindfulness can be practiced anywhere and anytime during the day, including when standing in line at the grocery store, which is a good opportunity to detect anxiety and restlessness within oneself, and even in relation to feeling stuck and the subconscious anxiety related to money and death.

Also before going to sleep I find it useful to practice mindfulness by simply feeling the inner body. And even when there is anxiety and restlessness, after a while my inner state becomes more calm and I fall asleep that usually results in a good rest. So mindfulness is a very flexible method. Formal meditation might be more effective, but for me simple mindfulness practices will be sufficient I think.

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How much mindfulness practice is needed? Does it take 10,000 hours of inner body awareness practice to achieve significant results? I think it depends. For those of us in the front line, the pioneers, well the pioneers were probably the sages thousands of years ago, but for us early adopters, it might indeed take a lot of practice to achieve significant results.

There is probably also a kind of 100th monkey effect, and a collective morphic field so that when some people have mastered inner body awareness, it will become easier for others to achieve the same results. Isn't that unfair? Should those of us who struggle more be matched or even surpassed by others who put in very little effort? Haha. That's fine, because we want all of humanity to rise in inner peace as fast and efficiently as possible.

And also, I'm open to the idea that miracles will boost the inner peace in us. As time progresses, the level of complexity increases. Actually, what the Law of One calls density increases. And that can result in sudden evolutionary leaps, both individually and collectively.

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I have notice some automatic relaxation in my spine. That's a miracle! Because it's outside ordinary experience and it's not something that I practiced at the moment. Another thing I came to think of is that fundamentally automatic happenings and conscious volition are the same one reality. There is a difference between voluntary action such as taking a conscious breath and the usual autonomous breathing, but seen from all of reality it's one whole process. So I will experiment with recognizing conscious and automatic actions as a whole movement.

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Aaron Abke has an interesting take on desires in his new video and explains that there are different kinds of desires. That's a new idea to me that I will think about.

 

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A curious practice I discovered which is almost like meditation is to unite conscious and subconscious breathing. The way I do it is to wait for the automatic breathing to take an in or out breath and then I join from there with my conscious volition of breathing.

This kind breathing exercise feels a bit awkward in the beginning for me. I will try it some more to see if it's useful for bringing harmony between the conscious mind and the subconscious.

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Does the law of attraction have any real effect? Leo said that when we focus on negative outcomes we tend to make those happen, even catastrophic ones. That made me think that if we focus on our own death we cause death to happen. And what is the average Joe always focusing on? His or her own death! Career, family, retirement plans etc, are all based on the belief in inevitable death.

The belief in inevitable death is then a self-fulfilling prophesy that causes us to die. That would explain why no spiritual teacher, not even the most enlightened ones, has any solution to offer when it comes to death other than cop out slogans such as "die before you die" which has nothing to do with physical death but is only some mental thing claimed to be profound pure awareness or something like that.

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Why does A Course in Miracles say that our current world is so horrible?

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"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. 2 The homes you built have never sheltered you. 3 The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. 4 Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. 5 Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired and ready to return to dust even as you made it. 6 This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. 7 You could not give it that, and so although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads away from it into another world." - ACIM T-13.VII.3. 

In general I think ACIM is talking about the same thing as the fallen world in Christianity and Kali Yuga in Hinduism. And one horrible idea that came to me is that when babies are born their hearts are already hijacked by the ego and it's causing tremendous pain! So the babies scream until the pain in the heart becomes numbed out, and after many repetitions of this cycle, the pain in the heart becomes disconnected by the nervous system in a process of self-preservation.

The result is that the pain in the heart becomes subconscious in the child and continues that way throughout the person's life until death. The physical body is literally tortured to death subconsciously. And the ego has to put on quite a facade, a persona, to at least hide some of that grim reality within.

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Even when people say that their soul or consciousness is eternal, they still behave as if their physical life is the only thing that's real. People are terrified of loneliness and they can't be sure that death will solve that problem. People say rest in peace when someone has died. Rest in peace in heaven? Sounds boring as hell.

So the ego is completely fake and phony when it comes to claims about death, except that to the ego only death and taxes are actually real, to exaggerate a bit. Even spirituality becomes a schizoid endeavor for the ego. The ego is materialistic and a product of material reality so the belief in inevitable physical death only drives the ego more insane than it already is.

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The coronavirus crisis is still going on! That seems to indicate an incredible shift after all, marking the death of the world "caterpillar". I still believe that things will return to normal soon but the claim that it will be a new normal is likely true, and society will take a new direction such as global development even though things will remain basically the same as before the crisis when it comes to practical everyday living during the next few years.

The G20 meeting in November will give hints about the future global direction.

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"BRUSSELS, July 9 (Reuters) - Global powers should cooperate better on monetary and fiscal policy to tackle the COVID-19 economic crisis, European Union finance ministers and central bankers will tell their G20 counterparts at a meeting next week.

The group of the world’s 20 most industrialised nations should also aim for a global deal on digital taxation this year and avoid rolling back planned and ongoing financial regulation reforms during the pandemic, an EU document seen by Reuters says." - Reuters, Jul 9, 2020

Global digital taxation? That's huge. It probably requires a global digital currency. And instead of being some Orwellian New World Order plot, it could be aimed primarily at corporations who today are able to avoid huge amounts of tax through all kinds of incredible legal stunts. But sure, it's a big deal even for us individuals and potentially Orwellian but I think it can be managed for great mutual worldwide benefit for all people.

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A Course in Miracles says that death is an illusion. Great! Because reality is one. So the Course says that death is an illusion, literally, including physical death. Because there isn't any heavenly realm that is a separate reality from the material world. Reality is one. So I take even physical death to be an illusion. A new earth without death in the Bible is the same earth as today, only in a higher evolutionary stage.

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"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. 2 Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? 3 We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. 4 It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. 5 This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. 6 The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path,--all this is taken as the Will of God. 7 And no one asks if a benign Creator could will this.

In this perception of the universe as God created it, it would be impossible to think of Him as loving. 2 For who has decreed that all things pass away, ending in dust and disappointment and despair, can but be feared. 3 He holds your little life in his hand but by a thread, ready to break it off without regret or care, perhaps today. 4 Or if he waits, yet is the ending certain. 5 Who loves such a god knows not of love, because he has denied that life is real. 6 Death has become life's symbol. 7 His world is now a battleground, where contradiction reigns and opposites make endless war. 8 Where there is death is peace impossible." - ACIM M-27.1-2

 

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Wow. This mainstream presentation about the death drive is really impressive. Some mainstream psychologists even deny the existence of a death drive, but this presentation clearly shows the effects of the death drive, including destructive behavior and extreme sadism. Is the world insane as ACIM says? I would call our world a young civilization instead of saying that it's insane. And even our universe is likely young if the multiverse is a tree with more and more branching. The recent universes are the most numerous in the multiverse tree, so the probability that our universe is young is very high.

 

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Kernberg said in the video that the death drive is a result of psychological affects. I found this paper:

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"The paper concludes that the concept of the death drive is clinically relevant, but that this condition needs to be traced to the general dominance of aggressive affects as the primary etiological factor; only under severely pathological circumstances does this dominance lead to a focused drive to self-destruct." - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19821849/

That's consistent with my idea of the death drive, which is the result of a disconnect and isn't a function in itself. And what is called psychological affects are the results of the disconnect. And my idea is that it's this disconnect, such as blocked heart feelings, that results in the whole ego construct. The ego is like a separate construct without any foundation (a disconnection is not really a foundation).

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I disagree with Jon Kabat-Zinn that it's good to catch anger when it arises before one acts on the anger and for example say something harmful or stupid. Because that's exactly the ego control conflict I have posted about. It's even worse, since it's the ego modifying its own behavior which is a double form of control based on an inner conflict. I understand that it's necessary in practice to catch anger, but fundamentally it shows a severe double conflict in the ego.

But he also said something interesting about experiments done where the activity of the brain is measured when people are trying to do nothing. Then there is a lot of activity in the brain, and it's thoughts and concerns about the self. A lot of energy and effort is spent on dealing with the self, he said. I found that interesting because it indicates a lot of friction and basically neurotic activities going on in the brain all the time. So there is a lot of potential for improvement through for example mindfulness practice.

 

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Not much from QAnon recently that I have found interesting, except a post about the Clinton Foundation and crimes against children. I don't know if those are connected though, but that made me think that John Durham may be publishing his report soon. It's time for a Spygate scandal I think.

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"Activity within the Justice Department indicates U.S. Attorney John Durham is working to bring the first indictments as part of a criminal investigation into the Russia inquiry, according to investigative journalist John Solomon." - Washington Examiner, July 08, 2020

 

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In this video Ken Wilber has an amazing explanation of shadow if I understood it correctly, where the shadow is a result of failing to include lower stages of development correctly. So then shadow work is then more about integrating the shadow material correctly rather than removing it.

 

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Not only the shadow, but also the whole ego needs to be included correctly when it's transcended. The ego is a very high level of development on the conceptual level, meaning the ability to think, basically. And artificial intelligence (AI) is taking conceptual understanding to a new level of order, and even future AI needs to be integrated along with the ego.

 

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