Reality Journal

[Anderz]

Another idea that now came to me is that it's possible to integrate integral and nondual teachings. For example Shunyamurti talked about how the entire ego needs to be recognized as a lousy film and gotten rid of, while Ken Wilber talks about how to include the ego in an integral way.

So how to resolve that kind of tricky situation where one expert says get rid of your ego and another expert says integrate your ego? One solution is to use what Shunyamurti called trans-conceptual awareness and recognize that the ego is a concept related to a bunch of other concepts.

In the personal stage we are identified with the ego and all the concepts it is connected to. The transpersonal stage includes trans-conceptual awareness which the self is grounded in instead of being trapped in concepts. So I will shift my practice towards trans-conceptual awareness yet with the conceptual keys in my previous post still in mind.

[Anderz]

Not only are our memories filled with conflict in the personal stage, also essentially all our actions lead to conflict. Only when situations are deemed beneficial for ourselves, our personal success, our political party, team, company, country, religion, role models, ideologies or belief system do we approve of other people or groups of people. And even in those situations, to remain free from conflict is virtually impossible.

In all other situations when we are at the personal stage we even directly or indirectly want to push down other people! Because only by pushing down or even getting rid of other people's agendas can our own wants gain a better chance of succeeding. It's an absolute horror situation. The personal stage of development is necessary. It's impossible to skip levels of development. Yet at the same time it's urgent that we start entering into the transpersonal stage both as individual and collectively or the misery will continue.

[Anderz]

The COVID crisis is a great catalyst for ending the miserable personal stage of development. Society today at large cannot help us with transpersonal development. In fact, what society does is the opposite and uses the personal stage as a fuel source for maintaining itself and grow. Until now that is, since the COVID crisis is the beginning of the end for the "caterpillar" stage of humanity.

And since society thrives on the personal stage its incentive is to keep us there which it does by making us value money more than valuing other people's wants and desires. To exaggerate a bit, society has turned us into sadists, separated from each other and deriving pleasure from experiencing other people's failures, misfortune, accidents and suffering.

At the personal stage sadism makes logical sense, since other people's failure improves our own chances of success in a society held together though monetary rather than social values. It's also necessary at the personal stage to present a respectable front, a phony persona of giving the impression of being able to function socially even though the actual social intelligence at the personal stage of development is roughly at the same level as primates such as baboons in nature.

[Anderz]

At the personal stage of development we only know ourselves as a thinking self. What if thinking is just a temporary stage of development? What if even spiritual teachers are wrong who say that thinking is necessary for practical purposes? How do they know that?

It's useful to be open-minded. To believe that thinking is necessary is actually close-mindedness. Because that's just an assumption. An unquestioned assumption fortified by even supposedly spiritually enlightened people.

[Anderz]

I can only guess but there may indeed be a difference between transpersonal psychology and transpersonal spirituality as Shunyamurti talked about. In the personal stage thinking is a conceptual labeling of things, where thoughts are experiences as separate from sense perceptions. Shunyamurti has mentioned trans-conceptual awareness. My guess is that in transpersonal spirituality our thoughts become integrated with our entire experience instead of only being a conceptual labeling as in the personal stage.

It's similar to mysticism as direct experience of reality that Leo talked about. In ordinary thinking there is a layer of concepts that prevents direct experiences. Our awareness gets stuck on the level of concepts, the labels about things and events and our experience becomes dominated by that inner world of labels.

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"The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." - J. Krishnamurti

Eckhart Tolle has said that we need to use thinking for practical things. I have doubts about that claim! On the other hand, if the trans-conceptual awareness is on an entirely new level, then Tolle and other spiritual teachers cannot tell us to enter that state so we still need to use ordinary thinking while we remain in the personal stage.

 

[Anderz]

The deeper meaning of religion I have come to believe is about going from the personal to the transpersonal stage. For example when Jesus died on the cross it was only his separate body of flesh that died. And "Not my will but Thy will be done" then symbolizes giving up the personal stage in order to attain the higher transpersonal stage.

Regardless of whether Jesus existed as an actual historical figure or not, I see it as powerful symbolism. The cross represents the duality of the personal stage and the suffering and death represent the necessary dismantling of the personal stage in order to lay the foundation needed for the transpersonal stage. All our personal memories are tainted by the "cross" of separation and duality, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and the "fallen" state of our current world, ruled by the "devil", the prince of this world.

All our personal memories and our conceptual thinking need to be "sacrificed" because they represent a false perspective that is incompatible with the transpersonal stage. The personal stage is filled with conflict. J. Krishnamurti talked about the conflict of the personal stage. And he also talked about "thinking together", which may refer to a collective mental field necessary in order to transcend conflict.

[Anderz]

Here is another quote from Krishnamurti:

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - j. Krishnamurti

I believe that he meant that society actually is sick! Eckhart Tolle called society insane, something like that. My take is that society has gone through a necessary stage of development, the personal stage. So society is natural in that sense. But I also think that it's true that from the transpersonal stage society appears profoundly sick in comparison.

And I found a video where Krishnamurti answers what he means by thinking together, and although it's not exactly clear that he means a collective mental field I think it may be what he is pointing to using terms understandable in the personal stage.

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

The valuable product of the personal stage is the development of unique individuals. Yet notice that the personal self that is unique, that's content. The structure of each person is the same! Leo talked about that extensively in his newest video.

I may have different worries and problems than another person, and still, if we both are at the personal stage of development, the structure of our self is the same. My particular worries and fears are unique and also many fears are shared with everybody else in the personal stage, such as fear of death, poverty, disease, violence and accidents. That's content. The structure is the foundational mechanism for fear and worry which is the same for everybody in the personal stage.

My personal memories are unique to me but that too is content. From a meta perspective we can take a view above our own personal self and recognize that the only reason for why my particular memories are so precious to me is because that's what I'm identified with, and in the personal stage so utterly stuck in, almost to a comical degree. Observing one's own personal content is a form of split mind, but it's a deliberate mindfulness practice with the aim of transcending and including the personal content.

[Anderz]

A person in the personal stage of development has a different structure of mind than a person in the transpersonal stage of development. That's a crucial difference. All people in the personal stage have the same structure of mind X. And all people in the transpersonal stage have the same structure of mind Y. So what needs to happen to develop the transpersonal stage is that our whole structure X is transformed into the structure Y.

Let's assume that the main difference between X and Y is that Y has the capacity to think together as J. Krishnamurti talked about. And let's assume further that thinking together is an actual joining of minds so that the thinking is done collectively with united minds, literally a larger mental field. I think that's a good start for an investigation into the subject.

In this video Krishnamurti explains that thinking together doesn't mean agreeing or disagreeing. It seems to me that he means actually united thinking, and not something done with our separate minds in the personal stage.

 

[Anderz]

Here is another expert talking about transpersonal psychology. I will see if he mentions a trans-conceptual state of consciousness, and even if not it can be useful to learn more about this field.

 

[Anderz]

They talked in the interview about how the transpersonal stage involves becoming less narcissistic. I looked up the term narcissism:

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"Narcissistic personality disorder — one of several types of personality disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism." - Mayo Clinic

The coronavirus crisis pushes narcissism to the surface and thereby I believe catalyzes transcendence into the transpersonal stage. Teal Swan explains narcissism in relation to COVID-19 in this video:

 

[Anderz]

Lol, in the transpersonal psychology interview they called the personal stage being a disembodied intellect, and they said that in society we are conditioned to not even feel our bodies and only live in the head and in the intellect. In contrast, they said that in the transpersonal stage the body is a spiritual manifestation. That reminded me of Leo's excellent video about body awareness. Tensions in the body and mind are traits of the personal stage, where the personal self literally is held.

 

[Anderz]

Another difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage is that the person is experiences everything as separations, the intellect separate from the body, the body separate from the environment, the self separate from other selves. This means that the transpersonal stage transcends those separations. In this short video Anna talks about the nondual perspective:

 

[Anderz]

Teal Swan said that fear will never go away. That's definitely true in the personal stage of development. However in the transpersonal stage I believe that fear will be transformed into a harmless kind of fear, similar to the kind of fear we feel when watching a horror movie or riding on a roller coaster.

The reason for fear being transformed is that fear is directly connected to the personal stage of experiencing divisions. There is also a strengthening and perpetuation of fear in the personal stage by turning fear into thoughts, conceptualizing fear as J. Krishnamurti explains in this video:

 

[Anderz]

The sense of free will is important in the personal stage. The experience of free will allows for the development of unique individuals. In the transpersonal stage I think free will be recognized as an illusion. For example, there is the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause a tornado in Mexico City. What it means is that the tiniest changes of a situation can result in huge effects later on.

If there was actual free will and truly separate selves, then a person in the personal stage could unknowingly cause tremendous disasters all over the place just by the tiniest and insignificant choices made moment by moment, It's not that kind of chaotic world we see. Yes, there are accidents and natural disasters etc, but are those caused by people with true free will? And if manifested reality is merely information in the now, are there really accidents?

[Anderz]

The absence of the sense of free will in the personal stage would make as feel like mechanical robots. Not good. And it will even result in what is called a psychological depersonalization disorder.

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"Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self, regarding one's mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself.[1] Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, lacking in significance or being outside reality while looking in." - Wikipedia

In the transpersonal stage I believe that the situation is the opposite and the lack of free will is then the true perspective of reality. Leo said in one of his videos that there isn't any real free will since the separate person doesn't exist. Without a separate person, who is having the supposedly free will? And the transpersonal stage is precisely about transcending the personal stage where there is an identification with a separate self.

This can be tested! I have an idea of a practice for experimenting with the absence of free will. The practice is to deliberately enter a state as a detached observer. At first it will result in the mechanical feeling of reality just happening without us having any control over anything that happens. With continued practice of this state the idea is that the personal experience will gradually or suddenly shift into a transpersonal experience.

[Anderz]

But isn't a huge amount of personal development necessary in order to reach the transpersonal stage? Yes, I think that at least enough development in the personal stage is needed before there is a possibility to transcend into the transpersonal stage.

So isn't the detached observer practice I mentioned way too simple and inadequate for reaching the transpersonal stage? My answer is that without enough personal development, the detached observer practice will be too difficult to do! Why? Because in the personal stage we are very concerned about what we say, how we look, behave and what other people think of us.

Without enough personal development there is too much fear to be able to let go of personal control. Then it's too scary to become a detached observer because that means letting go of personal control. So I will test the practice on myself and examine how much of a detached observer I really can become and how much personal control I still cling to.

[Anderz]

The personal self and the transpersonal self, that's fine as descriptions, then what about objective reality? Can the self be objectively verified? Maybe it's possible to come up with some objective truths but what is an objective truth?

Now it gets interesting I think, because Leo explained that subjective experience is more fundamental than objective reality. How can that be? It's simple. All objective truths are concepts. And concepts are appearances in consciousness. That's it! Objective truth may sound solid yet it's less foundational than the subjective experience.

So the personal self and the transpersonal self are concepts which when making them objective still are concepts. This means that it's enough to use those labels, personal self and transpersonal self, as pointers. And then explore the subjective reality of those pointers.

[Anderz]

Can physical death really be overcome? First, what is physical? It's a concept! What is the physical body? That too is a concept! So our true nature is consciousness, not physical matter. I even believe that what we call physical death as an experience can be overcome. I don't know if Shunyamurti agrees with that, but he has this brand new video where he talks about some of this:

 

[Anderz]

Love of money is the root of all evil. And you cannot serve both God and money. This is what Jesus said. It's easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Don't store yourself treasures on earth but store your treasures in heaven for there is where your heart will be.

What is money? The answer is that money is the major control mechanism at the personal stage of development. So Jesus was in my opinion talking about transcending from the personal to the transpersonal stage of development. And money is a concept! So the broader meaning is that we cannot focus on concepts (serve money) and at the same time have mystical direct experience of reality (serving God).