Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

Leo explained how at each personal stage of development the structure of the mind is the same while the content can be different. So for example a fundamental Christian and a fundamental Muslim have the same mind structure with different content.

That structure of the mind together with the personal content I came to realize is the same as the crystallized ego! This means that in the transpersonal stage instead of having a rigid structure of the mind, the ego becomes fluid. So that's a key difference between the personal stage and the transpersonal stage.

And the crystallized ego has to dissolve while the personal content is preserved. The fluid ego is similar to "empty your mind and become like water". Because the personal content has the rigid shape of crystallized cognition and needs to become fluid too.

 

[Anderz]

Leo mentioned that there is a RationalWiki article about him. I found this passage in that article:

Quote

"Nonduality is a perfectly reasonable model, especially when it is supposedly able to be directly observed. However, not knowing how consciousness would be physical in a materialist view or how consciousness and matter would interact in a dualist worldview does not mean those ideas are false--even if idealism or phenomenalism are the result of some Occam shearing." - RationalWiki

I think the RationalWiki article fails to grasp Leo's fundamental point which as I interpret it is that subjective experience is more fundamental than objective reality. Why? Because objective reality is appearances in consciousness! And it can be directly verified in one's own experience without the need for theoretical models which themselves by the way also are appearances in consciousness.

Interestingly, I didn't find any RationalWiki article about nonduality but one article about transpersonal psychology:

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"Transpersonal Psychology is a hypothesis of mental health masquerading as legitimate psychology. Transpersonal psychology is based on the notion that trauma in past lives, birth, gestation and disconnection from God/energy/transcendent/soul[1] has left everyone sick. Practitioners attempt to heal this sickness… usually at a large cost; however, they are treating a disease that doesn't exist." - RationalWiki

I don't know enough about transpersonal psychology to evaluate that article but it's interesting that it claims that transpersonal psychology says that a disconnection from God/energy/transcendent/soul has left everyone sick. Very good! There is truth to that, not in an absolute sense since the personal stage of development is necessary and actually healthy but in contrast to the transpersonal stage it's valid to call the personal stage sick.

[Anderz]

If desires are transcended in the transpersonal stage how are they included? An integral approach is about both transcending and including previous stages. Some spiritual teacher mentioned that desires become preferences. That's a good way of looking at it I think. Desires are unfulfilled wants, so desires are problems basically. Preferences on the other hand can be used in more flexible ways.

When there is a desire for ice cream for example then if it's a preference then the wanting can be more harmonious instead of as in the personal stage where there often are conflicting desires, such as the desire to eat ice cream and at the same time a desire to remain slim and to avoid eating ice cream. An inner conflict! With fluid cognition and preferences the situation sorts itself out harmoniously without the need for fixed ideas about what to do.

[Anderz]

Something that I found very interesting that Leo said in his new video is that at the strategic stage I think it was, there is a recognition of subtle distinctions of emotions and ways of using even negative emotions as telling us something instead of only being some nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of.

That's still the personal stage yet learning how to interpret emotions definitely can improve the development into the transpersonal stage I think. So I will experiment with examining my own emotions more and see if I can learn something from that and improve my own personal development.

[Anderz]

Instead of trying to understand what all the different nuances of my emotions mean I came up with a radical approach of combining all the negative ones into a single category of suffering. The idea is that the important thing for transcending the personal stage regarding emotions is to identify where the blocks are and all negative emotions indicate some kind of imbalance.

So I think for me at the moment it's more important to train myself to sense and recognize subtle suffering than trying to interpret what each different kind of feeling means. They all suck! Haha, well, actually they all also are useful as pointers to where further development is needed. And it's also useful to sense increase of inner peace which is a sign of moving into more fluid cognition.

[Anderz]

A transpersonal fluid self means it's free from tensions. I myself cannot melt away my inner tensions, because I am those tensions (crystallized ego)! What I can do is to observe the tensions dissolve automatically using mindfulness practice. And that's possible with the knowledge that it may be possible to transcend thinking (conceptual cognition). Then there is a willingness of the mind to allow the tensions to dissolve even when it involves dissolving the ability to think!

Self-deception is prevented by measuring how much actual inner peace is increased and how the inner tensions actually dissolve. I will take a look again at Leo's videos about self-deception to check if there are other deceptions I have overlooked. Here is the first part:

 

[Anderz]

The self-deception at the personal stage is huge. Leo explained how it controls everything we do. And that's correct according to my view where the crystallized ego is a growing bundle of self-deceptions.

The crystallized ego starts as a belief in being a separate self. That seed is itself a self-deception since the truth is that reality is an unbroken wholeness. And that seed, because of being false, produces confusion which the mind turns into fear and desire in a growing and very tense heap of self-deception.

As I mentioned previously, fear is a false belief and even desire is a false belief, and those are forms of self-deception. Melting the crystallized ego and transmuting it into a fluid ego is an enormous task. One clue is that confusion is the fuel for the crystallized ego. And instead of the mind continuing to build a stronger crystallized ego, mindfulness of the confusion in oneself is one method of reversing that trend.

[Anderz]

At the personal stage confusion leads to fear and desire which then turns into thinking. Fear is for protection and desire for directing actions. Desire is sneaky and it seems beneficial while in reality it is conflict.

Desire is conflict because it's based on the false belief in a separate self. So the desire leads to thoughts about a separate self (the crystallized ego) wanting something. And that causes conflict! Because the wants produced by desire are isolated to a separate self that has to struggle against the world including other seemingly separate selves.

This is similar to the four noble truths in Buddhism:

1. Life is suffering.
2. The cause of suffering is desire.
3. Suffering can end.
4. There is a path to end suffering (noble eightfold path).

Quote

"In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths Pali: cattāri ariyasaccāni Sanskrit: catvāri āryasatyāni; , "The four Arya satyas") are "the truths of the Noble Ones", the truths or realities for the "spiritually worthy ones".[1][web 1][2] The truths are:

• dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara;[web 2][3][4]
• samudaya (origin, arising) of this dukkha, which arises or "comes together" with taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment");[web 3][5][6]
• nirodha (cessation, ending) of this dukkha can be attained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā;[7][8][9][10]
• magga (path, Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to renouncement of tanha and cessation of dukkha.[11][12][13]

They are traditionally identified as the first teaching given by the Buddha,[note 1] and considered one of the most important teachings in Buddhism.[14]" - Wikipedia

I don't know much about Buddhism but that sounds similar to going from the personal stage (suffering caused by desire) to the transpersonal stage (suffering ended).

[Anderz]

Can the crystallized ego do anything? No, that would be absurd. It would be like the word 'car' being able to move by itself. Not even the physical human body can do anything. Everything physical is an appearance without the ability to do anything. The same with everything mental.

In the personal stage we believe that the crystallized ego can change the direction of the universe by using free will. It's a delusion that leads to suffering. Also the fluid ego is equally unable to do anything but at least the fluid ego is moving as the totality instead of as a belief of being separate from the wholeness of reality. 

[Anderz]

The Bible says that the body of flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God but that in the twinkling of an eye our bodies will change. But wait a minute! What is the body of flesh? It's a concept! The body is just an appearance in consciousness along with everything else material and immaterial. So our physical bodies are already avatars.

In the personal stage we experience the physical body as a separate object. That's a false view. So in the transpersonal stage the experience of the body is as an avatar, one with the whole universe. I even suspect that such simple shift, in the twinkling of an eye, will actually make our physical bodies immortal and capable of increasingly amazing stunts.

Will we experience physical death even at the transpersonal stage? I don't know, but maybe not! Goodbye horrible gravestone. Leo has an interesting explanation of death in this video:

 

[Anderz]

Ouch, I'm not entirely sure but I suspect that the whole structure of the personal mind has to be replaced by a hugely more complex structure of mind. The reason is that the personal mind is way too limited, narrow and selfish to function in harmony with the whole of life, which results in lots of conflict and suffering.

As an example, the way I think about my own finances is the same as how everybody else thinks about their finances. The differences are in the details, the content, while the structure is shared. And at the personal stage we all share the same fundamental crystallized ego structure. And it's a very tense, rigid and heavy structure.

With mindfulness practice it's possible to feel the structure of the personal stage as tensions in body and mind. And in my experience it's absolutely incredible how deep and tense the structure is. The more mindfulness practice and inner body awareness, the more tensions are revealed that previously were hidden from conscious awareness.

I believe that the crystallized ego structure is shared between all people and that's why it's so heavy. It's a morphic field with nonlocal scalar field connections. Well, that's my current guess. I have to start with some assumption. And the transpersonal structure is a collective mind field! So the personal structure needs to dissolve and be replaced by the collective mind structure while the personal content is preserved.

Leo has this video about the difference between content and structure. He talks mostly about particular structures but the same principle applies to the whole personal structure and the personal content.

 

[Anderz]

The personal stage has a lack of Self-Love. For example hardly anyone is satisfied with his or her physical body. And I came to think of how that's necessary! Because if we had beautiful physical bodies then there is a grave risk of remaining stuck at the personal stage of development. One idea I have is that our physical bodies will become beautiful when we are at the transpersonal stage. I know that this is a very radical idea that hardly any spiritual teacher talks about except perhaps a few New Age gurus who most people think of as woo woo.

The physical body is I believe only an appearance in consciousness so it's the level of mind that determines the state of the body. Going to the gym, diets, plastic surgery and so on are actually then from the bigger picture delusional methods of improving the body. The mind makes it real, so for example eating too much food will likely make most people fat for example. So it's not something that can be changed by wishful thinking.

With the mind as the true cause, and actually Mind being the true cause which is nonduality, it means that even the personal mind being a cause is a false perspective. So we can't enter the transpersonal stage by personal effort on the level of the separate self. Instead the effort has to be to allow the separate self to dissolve! Otherwise the crystallized ego blocks the development of a fluid ego, which is necessary for truly actualizing Self-Love.

What I mean by Self-Love is the universal self recognizing its own infinite capacity for intelligence, evolution, creation, beauty etc. I think that is at least similar to how Leo explains Self-Love in this video:

 

[Anderz]

Shynuamurti said in this latest video that in Jainism which is a peaceful religion they wear face masks to avoid harming bugs and things. That's true! I saw images of that earlier. And surgeons wear face masks, and the COVID-19 crisis is forcing a symbol of purity on people, he said. Interesting point.

He also said that the ego is a mask. Very good point! The coronavirus crisis (corona means crown b.t.w. which means halo) is like symbolism for the personal stage. And a halo represents holiness, which means whole as in the transpersonal stage.

 

[Anderz]

The personal stage is about a conceptual self. A concept is basically a label, a seemingly separate object representing something else. And actually all thoughts are concepts. Every thought is a representation of something, i.e. a concept.

Leo talks about direct experience vs concepts in this video. As an example he went through a practice of simply looking at one's hand. That's direct experience. In the personal stage we observe the world including ourselves as concepts representing what we observe. That creates a layer of separation between ourselves and direct experience.

One practice I came to think about is to observe one's thoughts as being a part of the direct experience. Instead of observing reality though concepts in the form of thoughts, both the thoughts and the direct experiences are combined into the same perception. The idea with this practice is to heal the separation between concepts and direct experience into a transpersonal perception.

 

[Anderz]

I have used several spiritual sources for getting a grasp of what the transpersonal stage is. There are also atheistic explanations possible. I believe that the Wolfram Physics Project has a more correct interpretation of quantum mechanics without the need for randomness or confusion about collapsing states and uncertainty. However there is also this traditional mainstream observation made by physicist Hugh Everett:

Quote

"Since the universal validity of the state function description is asserted, one can regard the state functions themselves as the fundamental entities, and one can even consider the state function of the entire universe. In this sense this theory can be called the theory of the "universal wave function," since all of physics is presumed to follow from this function alone." - Hugh Everett 

So even from an ordinary scientific perspective reality can be seen as a single wave function. That's nonduality! And if we think of reality as a single ongoing "collapse" of the universal wave function, then that also explains time. We are the universal wave function in an ongoing collapse that happened now.

The single collapse of the universal wave function is perhaps not mainstream science, I haven't looked into it, but that's precisely a representation of the transpersonal stage since there isn't the universal wave function plus a separate ego. There is only the universal wave function.

[Anderz]

Leo recommended in the video about actuality to answer the following four questions in our personal journals:

1. What is a concept?
2. What is a belief?
3. What is imagination?
4. What is actuality?

This exercise it more difficult than I first thought. I will start with dictionary definitions.

Quote

"concept noun  an abstract idea.

belief noun  an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.

imagination noun  the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

actuality noun  the state of existing in reality." - Oxford Languages

There are more possible dictionary definitions, I took the first that I found. My first observation is that all those definitions are concepts. The term concept is itself a concept! My answer is that all four words, concept, belief, imagination and actuality are concepts.

So for me it boils down to answering what is a concept? The dictionary definition I quoted says that a concept is an abstract idea. But hold on a second! Are concepts really abstract? A concept is an appearance in consciousness. And so is an iPhone. And so is my physical body. So a concept is an appearance in consciousness about other appearances in consciousness.

Edit: Hmm... It's possible to take this a step further. A belief is a concept about considering something to be the case. Imagination is a concept about something that doesn't exist (or unlikely exists). Actuality is a concept about what exists. But those explanations are somewhat circular I guess, like begging the question.

Quote

"In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. It is a type of circular reasoning: an argument that requires that the desired conclusion be true. This often occurs in an indirect way such that the fallacy's presence is hidden, or at least not easily apparent.[1]" - Wikipedia

Also, can concepts define themselves? No, because the concepts depend on a context to give them meaning. It results in a self-reference problem.

Quote

"In the context of language, self-reference is used to denote a statement that refers to itself or its own referent. The most famous example of a self-referential sentence is the liar sentence: “This sentence is not true.”" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

As an example of the problem with using concepts: What is the definition of definition?

Edited September 9, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Aha! What we tend to do at the personal stage of development is to think a lot of "what if?" thoughts. That's uncertainty taking the shape of thoughts in order to try to resolve the uncertainty. But what is uncertainty? The answer is that uncertainty is a concept!

There is no "what if?" other than as a concept in the present moment. And at the personal stage of development the mind gets stuck on the level of making up a lot of "what if?" thoughts. What is, is. There is no what is not other than as a concept which itself exists. Leo has talked a lot about this fact.

An interesting practice for transpersonal development is therefore to mindfully question all the "what if?" thoughts in the mind. Who is confused? And about what? What is confusion other than the feeling of uncertainty? And what is uncertainty other than a concept?

[Anderz]

Now I found something I disagree with Leo about (maybe). That's good, because I seldom find something that I disagree with Leo about when it comes to fundamentals. He said that impermanence is a feature of the universe. I'm not entirely sure but it seems to me that reality is a block universe, a changeless fixed block of information. And that single block is permanent.

The appearance of time is merely that infinite block of information being "displayed" in its finite manifestation in the now. And it's related to the uncertainty of the personal stage! Maybe Leo actually means the same thing, so I will take another look at this video:

 

[Anderz]

I think I will do a 3 day dry fast, from this Friday to Monday. My health is okay but my energy levels and my body need improvement I feel. The physical body is only an appearance in consciousness. The body is Mind one could say. I believe that but at the same time when still at the personal stage of development there is cause and effect on the material level even within nondual causality. And also, fasting is useful as a spiritual practice.

A dry fast is fasting without both food and water. Experts say that caution should be used and even with professional medical supervision, but I have done dry fasting before and I find that for me it's actually easier to do than water fasting. When drinking water the body needs to process all that water and it also prevents the body from producing its own water as explained in this video:

 

[Anderz]

Cause and effect is usually experienced only from the past to the future at the personal stage of development. But there can't be many causes since reality is one wholeness. So true causality is reality as a whole in a changeless state. Because change is only an appearance. That which is cannot truly be turned into that which is not, so the fundamental reality is changeless. (Actually Brahman is described as changeless and even in the Bible it says: "I the Lord do not change.")

A simple example of nondual causality is the number Pi = 3.14159265... and looking at what is the cause of say the fifth decimal. The cause of the value of that decimal is the whole changeless constant Pi itself! So nodual causality is really simple in principle. The actual effects of nondual causality can be very complicated, including emergent phenomena. And the causality is not only from past to future.

And since reality is changeless, whether I will actually do the dry fast I mentioned is already determined! Because even randomness is impossible since that would be what is changing into what is not. And definitely actual free will is impossible. So the transpersonal stage involves realized the changeless nature of reality, or there would be the possibility of individual causes, even an individual person being able to change the universe.

Nobody can predict the future. As Stephen Wolfram has explained, even very simple processes are often what he calls computationally irreducible. The only way to know the outcome of such process is to have it actually run. And the same with our lives, we need to perform our actions as a part of the manifestation of the universe. So it's impossible, even in theory, to predict for example whether I will actually do the dry fast or not.