ACIM Journal

[Anderz]

I find it useful to seek inner peace first before thinking about what to do etc. Of course, this is what Eckhart Tolle already often has mentioned. And Jesus said seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, which sounds like something similar.

A Course in Miracles says:

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"Peace is an attribute in you. 9 You cannot find it outside. 10 Illness is some form of external searching. 11 Health is inner peace. 12 It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without and capable, through your acceptance of miracles, of correcting the conditions proceeding from lack of love in others." - ACIM T-2.I.5:8-12

 

[Anderz]

Why do I focus so much on death? Because what if the death drive needs to be healed for there to be a stable inner peace. Look at all the spiritual teachers. They may be enlightened but I sense some agitation within them. And they all take physical death totally for granted!

So a possibility is that the death drive is the root of fear that needs to be healed. To only "accept" death could even be counterproductive and result in a severe split between a "spiritual self" and a hidden ego core of the death drive.

[Anderz]

Doshin Roshi is teaching integral Zen and is talking about personal responsibility in this video. I have only listened to the beginning of the video so far, and came up with the idea of how to integrate personal responsibility while at the same time transcending the ego, meaning transcending the sense of being a separate doer, which in principle means transcending personal responsibility.

It's probably an idea I have already heard others mention, but anyway my idea is that responsibility becomes included in the total movement of life. The responsibility becomes an intrinsic part of one's life, instead of being something one can have or not have. It will be interesting to find out if Roshi has the same understanding.

 

[Anderz]

Oh my gawd! The integral teachers like Ken Wilber and Doshin Roshi have fallen into a huge pre-trans integral fallacy. Not only the sneaky regression back into personal free will belief, but they fall all the way back to ego consciousness!

It's in my opinion a lack of integral perspective to do as they do to talk about nondual pure awareness in one moment, and then start talking about themselves and others as separate doers in the next moment. That's a lack of transcend and include. And it's also more than a pre-trans fallacy. It's sheer regression back into ego consciousness.

True integral transcend and include of the ego to me means actually transcending the belief in being a separate doer. And while A Course in Miracles may lack an integral approach, the kind of integral spirituality promoted today is worse than ACIM in this regard because of the regression back into ego consciousness.

I still think Ken Wilber and others have contributed with a very important and necessary element which is the integral approach. So it's still useful to learn about integral approaches, but I also think the recognition of fallacies like this is needed.

[Anderz]

Wow, in this new video Shunyamurti goes in the opposite direction of the integral teachers like Ken Wilber and says that the ego is our enemy. It's almost a post-trans fallacy, haha. But I like it. Shunyamurti's message is very much like ACIM. The ego structure is false, and that's true for the whole world for it is still a collective ego. I still think the world will remain basically the same, so I take a position somewhere between Ken Wilber and Shunyamurti regarding the ego.

 

[Anderz]

It should be possible to develop a new self! Not a separate self as the ego, but a self that is aligned with the Holy Spirit and therefore becomes a part of the Holy Spirit. It's just a matter of observing the ego and only move towards inner peace. The dysfunctional and delusional ego structures will dissolve because they are incompatible with inner peace.

In practice mindfulness can be used for the development of the new self. And the practice is to observe both inner peace and agitation within oneself. In the beginning there may be no inner peace at all and then the practice is to observe the agitation until some inner peace starts to develop. Since the inner peace is aligned with the truth and the agitation a state of delusion, the inner peace will more and more replace the ego structures.

[Anderz]

A modern day koan goes like this: Who is more powerful than Donald Trump? And the answer is: Nothing is more powerful than Donald Trump! Hint: think no-thing. 

[Anderz]

Leo has a new video about perspectives. What I came to realize is that the trans-conceptual awareness Shunyamurti has talked about, is a perspective! Trans-conceptual awareness is a perspective above concepts. In ego consciousness we are always trapped in concepts.

 

[Anderz]

Whoa, I now realized that memories are concepts! Even memories of feelings are concepts. Notice how extremely trapped the ego is in its own memories. Memories and thoughts, those are all concepts, including all meta perspectives.

One mistake I think Ken Wilber is doing, unless he is misleading us on purpose because "we can't handle the truth" or something like that, is to mistake meta-perspectives for trans-conceptual awareness. Wilber treats "pure awareness" as some separate state in practice it seems to me even though he talks about it as the ground of being, all there is.

No matter how lofty conceptual perspectives, fourth, fifth person perspectives and so on, it's still on the level of concepts. It's still to be stuck in ego consciousness, because concepts are seeming separations. That's a pre-trans fallacy of believing that concepts are the highest possible level of understanding.

[Anderz]

Even Eckhart Tolle is stuck in a pre-trans fallacy in regards to concepts, because he says that it's necessary to use the thinking mind for practical things, such as planning a trip.

Also, Ramesh Balsekar and in extension also his followers such as Wayne Liquorman, Roger Castillo and Gautam Sachdeva, have a pre-trans fallacy of separating what they call the thinking mind from the working mind. That's a similar fallacy as Tolle is falling into by separating practical tasks from non-practical living, whatever he means by that.

Even Sadhguru is stuck in a pre-trans fallacy because he said that often he doesn't need to think at all. The fallacy is that he separates thinking from non-thinking and believes that thinking still is necessary. That's ego consciousness.

[Anderz]

Leo recommended in his new video to walk away from all perspectives. That sounds similar to Shunyamurti's trans-conceptual awareness. I believe that's necessary in order to transcend the ego! Because concepts and ego go together, and when there is the belief that concepts are necessary in order to control reality, that's a mistake of believing that the ego has been transcended when in reality it's totally ego consciousness.

Concepts and thereby thoughts, are a very high level of development. And that's probably what makes many spiritual teachers stuck in ego consciousness. They reject some concepts yet cling to other concepts. Concepts are perspectives. Personal memories are perspectives. And what is needed is to walk away from all perspectives and to learn that those are all just a redundant overlay in reality.

[Anderz]

The idea that we need to think in order to achieve things, that's a perspective! It's similar to the belief that there has to be a brain for there to be consciousness. And that the brain produces thoughts and those thoughts are the cause of things happening in the world.

A new perspective is that the thoughts are merely correlated with events that happen, and not the cause. Causality from a nondual perspective is the wholeness of reality itself, or it would be duality.

[Anderz]

Leo has a new blog video about property rights. Mark Passio has a good point about natural law, that if it can be broken it's not a real law. But then Passio fails to apply that to property rights. What's natural about property rights? Unless when taking a nondual perspective and calling everything natural, there isn't anything natural about property rights.

Property rights are, as Leo pointed out, something made up by us humans. It's useful for structuring society, but I'm thinking of the future when automation can do all work and products and services are free, then property rights will play a less important role. Ownership of land is tricky though, because even when we have Star Trek replicators, there will still be a limited amount of attractive land.

Personally I wouldn't want to own land. It's too restrictive and limiting. It's just a tedious burden to own land I think, but many people may want to own land even in the future so that's something that needs to be worked out. And legal issues dealt with. Today probably China together with the British Crown, and maybe the Vatican probably own all the land in the world, haha (I read that the Crown even owns all land in the U.S.).

[Anderz]

Wait a minute, the idea that thinking is just a correlation might be more than just idle speculation. Because look at how complex society is starting to become. And even with the help of better and better artificial intelligence (AI) and information technology, the current way our minds work might be insufficient in a near future.

Having AI taking over more and more of our thinking could be a dangerous direction for the future. Because we as humans want to remain maximizing our freedom, and with more and more AI control, that freedom risks becoming increasingly limited. So what Shunyamurti calls a trans-conceptual awareness and access to infinite intelligence might be something that soon will become necessary.

[Anderz]

If all thoughts are just correlated with things happening and not actual causes of anything, then what is the purpose of thoughts? From a nondual perspective there is no purpose but from the perspective of the manifested reality purpose can be defined as the universe always developing larger and more complex holons.

And thoughts are a very high development, very complex holons. And the purpose of thoughts is to move the universe into even higher stages of development. For example for me to buy a certain product requires thoughts in the form of desires to actually go and buy the product or to order it online, even though from a totality perspective those thoughts are not the cause of me buying the product.

So thoughts can be seen as training wheels for even higher levels of consciousness. I think that's what Shunyamurti means by trans-conceptual awareness, and what Sadhguru and Eckhart Tolle have talked about: the state of consciousness that transcends the need to think.

[Anderz]

A Course in Miracles has this passage which I believe is about how thoughts are not causing anything:

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"When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. 2 The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect, and make effect appear to be a cause. 3 This seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes." - ACIM T-21.II.10.

To "make effect appear to be a cause" fits exactly with the idea that thoughts are effects and not in themselves causes. The belief in thoughts as separate causes also matches: "This seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes."

[Anderz]

I'm very impressed by A Course in Miracles. My current guess is that it was written by the breakaway civilization, a hidden society with way more advanced knowledge and technology than in the public society. And there is this:

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"Every spirituality has some degree of controversy surrounding it. ... Given this understanding it is no surprise that A Course in Miracles is highly threatening to our ego and has been associated with controversies of various sorts ...

One of the more bizarre forms of controversy to develop relative to ACIM in recent years (circa 2006) has to do with the suspicion that the Course is the result of a CIA plot -- a mind-control conspiracy. As is often the case in conspiracy thinking, some people have taken certain facts, combined them and come up with preposterous conclusions. In this case certain conspiracy theorists have added the facts that William Thetford was once employed by the CIA, that the CIA has funded psychological research and that some of that research was conducted by Thetford and Schucman," - Joe R. Jesseph, Ph.D.

Is the CIA a front for the breakaway civilization? Well, maybe not exactly, but it stands to reason that the breakaway civilization is guiding society indirectly almost, to ensure that the future direction of humanity is towards higher levels of development.

And interestingly, QAnon is a group within the NSA or similar, so even if the Q posts on the surface may look vastly different than the ACIM text, it's likely that it's the breakaway civilization having at least some input even to the Q movement.

[Anderz]

Sadhguru recently compared people wearing masks due to the coronavirus crisis to bank robbers. I loved that! Because it sounded to me that Sadhguru totally condemned wearing a mask because of COVID-1984.

I have even started to think about a possibility that the coronavirus hoax will be exposed. Imagine the scandal! Haha, worst in history. Sadhguru may reflect what many honest leaders really think of the crisis.

The reason for why COVID may be revealed as a hoax is that the alternative can be an escalation of power grab through using COVID as an excuse. That's actually corruption, and it is painting governments into a smaller and smaller corner of honesty. That's a bad trend.

[Anderz]

Jim Newman delivers hardcore nonduality teachings, but one surprising thing is that it's not trans-conceptual awareness because he said that thoughts are still apparently happening. That's conceptual awareness. It's maybe not so surprising after all since what I have discovered is that no single spiritual teacher has the complete picture. They all have parts of the puzzle.

 

[Anderz]

Ramana Maharshi may have delivered a complete teaching. I found this quote:

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“You can only stop the flow of thoughts by refusing to have any interest in it.” - Ramana Maharshi

Ramana also mentioned observing clouds passing by but only as a practice (from what I could find). He said that the practice is to observe the clouds until only one thought remains, about watching clouds, then when that thought too disappears there is the complete witness.

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"The last thought that you are witnessing, is like a bridge between you and God, between you and the thoughtless zone." - Ramana Maharshi

The thoughtless zone, that sounds like trans-conceptual awareness.