Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

I like to experiment with ideas that come to my mind. A recent one is to develop a seed of inner peace and letting it grow. In my experience the ordinary state is of zero inner peace! At least not enough peace to allow my attention to rest inside the peace without effort. So the idea is to use effort initially through mindfulness practice to build the initial seed of peace. And then the seed will attract my conscious attention into it making the peace grow.

I will also check out this video about different types of mindfulness practice. It may be useful to learn from already existing techniques.

 

[Anderz]

I wrote earlier somewhere that personal responsibility is sin. I think that's a funny and still true observation. At the personal stage such claim sounds outrageous, so it needs to be explained. Sin means to miss the mark, and the root error is the belief in separation. And the personal stage is grounded in the belief in a separate self. So personal responsibility is sin! Haha.

From a nondual perspective the whole of reality is "responsible" for everything. And one idea to bridge the personal stage with a transpersonal realization is to be personally responsible for being mindful and only that. To try to transcend personal responsibility while still at the personal stage doesn't work. Because the separate ego is still there doing the rejection of responsibility. And that rejection is a form of inner conflict. By focusing the responsibility on the mindfulness practice the ego is still there as well, but with personal responsibility intact instead of being opposed.

[Anderz]

The transpersonal stage is sneaky. It's because it's a sinful construct. It's a lie, albeit a necessary one, for the purpose of unique growth and development. And when we run around with our own crystallized ego we tend to miss the fact that our ego is a result of society. The belief in separation builds into a separate ego in the person. And we believe we are that separate ego!

We are thus in reality the collective social structure and do its bidding. And the ego tension we have are collective, not personal. It's only the content that is unique for each person, the structure is the same and it is a part of the whole society and nature, not separate from it. Inner peace is in theory possible through dissolving the crystallized ego within ourselves.

And here again mindfulness practice is useful for identifying the sneaky construct of the personal stage. Nonjudgmentally. And that includes questioning everything! To just observe like a skeptic on steroids. Why do I get angry? Why the irritation, the sadness or the joy even? Question everything.

[Anderz]

How can questioning everything be a nonjudgmental position? The answer is that questioning everything as an open-minded state. It's free from preconceived ideas. It's a deliberate form of confusion.

I suspect that in mindfulness practice when we claim that we are nonjudgmental, we are actually not. Because there are deep layers of subconscious social programming coloring our supposed nonjudgmental observation.

[Anderz]

I discovered something really tricky. Acceptance is judgment! Being nonjudgmental means neither accepting nor rejecting something.

Then what about obvious facts, such as 2+2 = 4? One way of being nonjudgmental about such things is to observe the thinking mind. Just to observe without judging true or false, good or bad.

Edited January 11, 2021 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Sadhguru has this new video about ayahuasca.

 

[Anderz]

My guess is that psychedelics can be useful as a catalyst for transcending the crystallized ego. But something Sadguru said was to not mess with the mind. That's mindfulness! That's how I see it. To not engage with the thinking mind, with the intellect.

Of course, at the personal stage we are totally trapped within the intellect. Mindfulness practice is to still use the intellect, but it's a form of meta perspective so it's possible to use mindfulness to as Sadhguru said not mess with our minds.

[Anderz]

Why the need for a collective consciousness? I think of it as the difference between a single cell in the human body compared to the whole human being. And the single cell questioning the need for being a human being. The cell will ask: why not remain a separate cell, what's the purpose of being a human being? Of course the human will think the opposite, and recognize that the life of a single cell is very limited.

And it's even worse than that. As spiritual teachers have pointed out, what we call personal relationships are just fake mental and emotional constructs. The whole personal stage is based on a false foundation in the belief in being separate, and so all social relationships become fake facades.

[Anderz]

I noticed a nasty aching feeling when my ego tensions become detected by conscious awareness. And even the tensions themselves can be felt as exactly that. And it's really horrendous how deep the tensions go.

The good thing is that there can also be a release of a peaceful feeling as the tensions start to dissolve. And instead of inner peace having a certain location such as in the guts or in the heart, it seems to be distributed throughout the whole body-mind. And that it's "just" that the crystallized ego has to melt.

[Anderz]

Leo talks in this video about the danger of trying to skip stages of development. The danger of becoming an achiever trying to reach as high as fast as possible. I speculate about an even greater danger which is to get stuck at the personal level. So I'm actually attempting to skip all personal development stages and go directly to the transpersonal stage.

But Leo could be correct, and I might end up failing miserably. So this is just something I'm experimenting with myself. I wouldn't recommend others to do the same as I do since I don't know yet if it's the correct approach. My rational is that what is needed and what will happen inevitably as a consequence of evolution is that a collective consciousness will emerge globally. It's a highly speculative idea!

 

[Anderz]

Another thing Leo said in the third video about personal development is that we cannot manipulate our way to ego transcendence. I think Leo is correct. Because the personal stage cannot be transcended through personal stage actions.

And Leo said that we need a new paradigm shift in our approach, and it's unknown what that is, he said. My approach is to aim for a collective consciousness. It's unknown if that is the correct approach or if it's correct how it will work, but that's the best guess I have so far. It would certainly be a paradigm shift!

[Anderz]

Roger Castillo talks in this video about how when we are caught up in thinking it's possible to step into I Am that is outside of the topic. And he said that this can be done regardless of whether we agree or not with a certain topic he is talking about. I found that to be a powerful insight. That regardless of whether I agree with Roger on something or not I can recognize the I Am dimension which is free from the thinking mind.

 

[Anderz]

The I Am dimension is simply, as many spiritual teachers have pointed out, consciousness itself. Consciousness is already free from separations and confusion. So it's that clarity of direct consciousness that is the I Am state.

I usually miss the I Am state and remain trapped in thinking and doing. But it's really simple. It's just that it has to be noticed that the I Am state is a dimension untouched by thoughts. Of course there is a connection between thinking and consciousness since everything is one wholeness. The distinction is that consciousness is the state that is already whole while the content in consciousness, including thoughts, is duality and change.

[Anderz]

The I Am state is coherent and what Shunymurti talks about in this short clip is the coherence of the I Am state it seems to me. And that state creates a morphogenetic effect he says. 

 

[Anderz]

A fatal "mistake" spiritual teachers have made I think is to only have the I Am dimension as a mental state. And their bodies are treated as something separate and they age and die. In this way they become total losers in my opinion. There isn't anything natural by biological birth and death.

What we need to do instead is to expand the I Am dimension into the body, and then expand our physical body so that it becomes the whole planet Earth. Birth, death, reincarnation, heaven and hell, those are all insane beliefs.

[Anderz]

Leo has this video about death. He says in the introduction that some of what he is going to say about death is going to sound outrageous. I will compare again what he says to my idea of death. I think my idea is even more outrageous!  It may be that Leo has a real understanding though. I only have theories so far. My idea is that even physical death can - and will - be overcome.

 

[Anderz]

I don't fully understand Leo's explanation of death. He seems to say that physical death is inevitable yet that death is also just a mental idea.

An idea that came to me is that yes, physical death is inevitable at the personal stage. And that physical death is impossible at the transpersonal stage in the sense I define it. Because my version of the transpersonal stage is that we become the whole planet as a single collective consciousness. So to physically die at the transpersonal stage means that the whole planet Earth dies. Won't happen I think. And that's just the first stage. The next evolutionary transpersonal stage is a galactic collective consciousness and so on. 

[Anderz]

So what is biological death? First it must be established what biology is. On a material level biology can be seen as a second order structure. And the first order structure is inorganic matter. And the third order structure is artifacts created by humans and by animals such as a beehive or a beaver dam for example.

It's possible to go one step deeper and define the foundational structure as pure information. Information is difference. And one bit of information is a single difference. And information on the fundamental level is indestructible in my model. So there is nothing that actually dies! It's just that an increase of information leads to change of the manifested world including biological organisms dying.

What is possible then is to take a perspective of pure information and consciousness. And from that perspective biology is real yet it's a second order construct, similar to how a toy house can be built out of Lego bricks. This means that reality may not be limited to only physical reality including biology, since those are "just" structures made out of a deeper foundation. And so biological death is an appearance and not a separate event. No individual person has ever died since fundamentally there are no separate individuals, only individual perspectives. It's all information being experienced now.

And to overcome even physical death means to realize the deeper foundation of information. That structure is already there but what happens at the personal stage is that we remain stuck on the level of higher order structures. We believe for instance that physical particles are building blocks having their own causality. At the deeper foundation causality is nondual and physical particles are first order structures emerging out of that holistic causality.

[Anderz]

A recent quote from Shunyamurti which I think illustrates how what I mean by nondual causality works. At the personal stage we believe we as separate individuals are the causes of things. That's the false self. In actuality it's all of reality as a single process doing everything.

Quote

"There is not a false self and a Real Self; the false self is simply an incorrect understanding of the Real Self. The same Self lives through every body. Every appearance. Every form. All is manifested by and from the one Power. And that one Power manifests in fractal form as multiplicity." - Shunyamurti

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by Anderz

[Anderz]

My plan is to use mindfulness instead of psychedelics, but it may be useful to learn how psychedelics work in case milder similar effects can be achieved through mindfulness practice.