Transpersonal Journal

[Anderz]

Value is also a second order construct. And the reason for why for instance a block of gold is valued more than say a dog pile is because the tensions in our body and mind! So in a sense the block of gold is actually more valuable since everybody basically has the same evaluation system.

But imagine if it was Donald Trump's dog who had crapped on the White House lawn. Then that dog pile would be worth probably more than the block of gold, for as we all know, if someone is more important than God it's Trump. You can't trump Trump. Imagine making a cryogenic preservation of Trump's dog's poop, and then a thousand years from now that piece of sh*t will be worth more than the entire Andromeda galaxy. Just kidding, but it's easy to see how the value of something can change depending on its relations to other things.

From the nondual perspective everything is equally valuable. And that's something I find useful as a spiritual practice; to give everything the same value just to make one's rigid value system more flexible and fluid.

 

[Anderz]

Value can also be dependent on the situation. One idea I got is that suffering is more valuable as a tool for development than pleasure. I think that's true but what if that's only valid at a certain stage of development?!

What I'm thinking about is that at first suffering is more valuable than pleasure for growth and development and then when reaching a certain level the roles switch and pleasure becomes the most powerful tool for growth and development! Just my speculation but I wanted to post about it in case there is truth to it.

[Anderz]

Hmm... The idea of pleasure as a tool for development might be testable. Suffering is a powerful tool for development but it's an unconscious tool, necessary at the lower stages of development.

Higher development means more harmony, or else it's a dysfunctional and imbalanced development. So for example, if I feel pleasure getting a million dollars at the cost of other people suffering, then that's hardly development except of the unconscious kind.

Pleasure and harmony together that's tricky but that's precisely the kind of immense and holistic intelligence indicative of higher stages of development. So it might be possible to achieve conscious development through pleasure as long as it's in harmony with totality.

[Anderz]

At the personal stage of development there needs to be the belief in free will. Otherwise the separate person becomes a victim. The transpersonal stage removes the sense of being a victim by the fluid ego being the whole movement of life, the Tao. Society is collectively still at the personal stage and that is reflected in how society functions today with things like personal responsibility, self control, moral obligations, guilt, shame, anger, blame, judgement, legal systems, politics etc. It's all based on the belief that free will is actual and real.

And at the personal stage abandoning free will appears to result in being a victim but as Leo explains in this video there is a huge difference between being a victim and having no free will. The mistake made at the personal stage is a pre-trans fallacy. Instead of recognizing the transpersonal flow of life the person at the personal stage believes that lack of free will means becoming a mechanical robot, or like simple lifeforms which are at the prepersonal stage of development.

Interestingly I found that even Ken Wilber uses the broad categories of prepersonal, personal and transpersonal stages. Of course within for example the personal stage Ken Wilber has lots of subcategories similar to how Leo described the 9 stages of ego development.

Quote

"Wilber's model of consciousness consists of three broad developmental categories: the prepersonal or pre-egoic, the personal or egoic, and the transpersonal or trans-egoic.[7]" - Wikipedia

 

Edited September 17, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

Another thing that makes lack of free will appear as being a victim or mechanical is the belief that cause and effect is from the past to the future. Almost ironically that makes society mechanical while at the same time clinging to the belief in free will. Even mainstream scientists that propose that there is no free will still experience themselves as having free will when they are at the personal stage of development.

I'm still at the personal stage of development but after looking into how reality works it seems plausible to me that cause and effect is a systemic property of reality, meaning the cause of something is the result of all past and future as a single whole. This explains things such as emergent properties, inspiration and creativity. It's not just a mechanical process of cause and effect from past to future, it's a creative evolutionary process that can make leaps into higher orders of complexity.

[Anderz]

The fluid ego removes fear! Notice that even animals at the prepersonal stage have fear in the form of the biological fight-or-flight response. And we humans have the same kind of fear plus the fear caused by our thinking. The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear. And Leo said that the devil is the ego. I think that's a brilliant observation. The ego is the belief in separation which is what the devil is.

The devil is the belief in separation, a principle, not some being running around underground keeping sulfur burning. And our society is a "fallen" world precisely because it runs on the devil principle. And I find it useful to recognize society as a separate object, just as the personal ego is a separate object. And objects have no will of their own so there is no need to fear anything, people, society or nature.

Quote

"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." - 1 john 4:14-18 (KJV)

The crystallized ego has fear because it experiences itself as a separate object and outside people, events and power structures as separate things. And when society remains fallen, remains run by the devil principle (the Bible says that the devil is the prince of this world) then fear and conflicts continue. Even animals in nature are governed by the devil principle, but not always. For example J. Krishnamurti was practicing hatha yoga in nature when a wild chimpanzee came up to him and took Krishnamurti's hand in her hand. The usual wild chimp behavior would have been of fear or aggression!

[Anderz]

Then what about fear of death? Surely that kind of fear will remain? Only when we treat death as an event which means as a thought, a concept, an idea, a separate object. Even the firm belief in inevitable physical death is such separate object. So I suspect that even spiritual teachers who claim that physical death is inevitable have fear subconsciously still remaining in them.

I believe that the true transpersonal stage transcends even physical death as an experience. Such claim is today seen as completely unbelievable but I think of the whole of our reality and society changing as it collectively moves into the transpersonal stage. It will literally be "a new heaven and a new earth" and the "old order of things" will have fallen away; our fallen world will have fallen.

[Anderz]

The claims about consciousness in the heart are probably true I think because I have actually briefly experienced consciousness in the heart area myself. There are neurons in the physical heart, but very few compared to in the brain and I doubt that consciousness is dependent on neurons.

Instead what happens I assume is that consciousness enters the subtle body! So that there is truth to the eastern spiritual traditions talking about subtler forms of bodies, such as energy bodies made of prana or chi which may simply be zero point energy.

In the personal stage, consciousness is mainly located in the brain. It's reasonable to assume that in the transpersonal stage consciousness flows out into the whole body and maybe even beyond that and extends out into the environment.

[Anderz]

I have an idea that physical pain is caused by tensions in the body. And the tensions are made of accumulated fear. When there is physical damage to the body there is pain too and even that can be seen as a form of tension where the body needs to start repairing the damage which causes strain.

And I also think that the crystallized ego is producing pain all the time since it's made of tensions. But most of the time the pain is numbed out! So we are generally unaware of the constant pain caused by the tensions.

Conscious suffering then (or intentional suffering as Gurdjieff called it) is then a means of lessening the numbness so that the pain becomes noticed and the tensions can dissolve. I'm not sure if that's the same as what Gurdjieff was describing but that's my idea about it. I will compare it to the explanations in this video:

 

[Anderz]

I looked up a few more sources about Gurdjieff's intentional suffering and it's similar to what I mean by conscious suffering. I didn't fully grasp what Gurdjieff's method is or the reason for it to work. I guess I would have to read Gurdjieff's own writings about it but it seems too complicated for me so I will stick to my simpler method. And I will call it conscious suffering so that it's clear that it's different from Gurdjieff's intentional suffering.

Conscious suffering is a method for dissolving the crystallized ego and is based on the following observations (guesses):

1. The belief in separation causes confusion.
2. The mind turns confusion into fear and desire.
3. Fear and desire cause tensions in the body.
4. The tensions produce constant pain.
5. The mind numbs out the pain.

With this chain of events the crystallized ego develops as tensions in the body. That's the personal stage of development. Conscious suffering is a method of reversing that chain back into wholeness, not back to the prepersonal stage but into a transpersonal stage,

[Anderz]

I noticed that my conscious suffering method is very similar to Leo's explanation of going from Derrida's deconstruction all the way into nonduality. So I will experiment with making the method more ambitious and still keep it simple.

The crystallized ego has a rigid and inflexible structure that needs to be broken down (deconstructed) all the way down to nonduality. I will make the conscious suffering method cover the whole personal stage which means the physical, emotional and also mental level. And it's an experiment, so my attempt might fail but even then I will have learned something.

[Anderz]

At the moment I don't know how to integrate the physical, emotional and mental levels of the conscious suffering practice. But I remember what Teal Swan said that trying to bring balance is a form of control which itself imbalance. And in this video Shunyamurti said that we don't have to use effort to reach a state of delight which is free from the ego because it's our natural state before the ego starts to develop.

So I will start with those two key insights that the conscious practice should minimize effort and control. And also it's important to keep in mind that moving back to the state of delight is not a regression back to the prepersonal stage as a baby. Instead the personal content needs to be preserved and integrated even as the crystallized ego dissolves.

[Anderz]

To make the description of the conscious suffering technique formal I will start by defining what I call the nondual context.

Quote

"In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a focal event, in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation".[1]:2–3 It is thus a relative concept, only definable with respect to some focal event within a frame, not independently of that frame." - Wikipedia

That Wikipedia quote says that a context is a relative concept. However I define the nondual context as everything. The nondual context is absolute. Notice that the term "nondual context" itself is a concept within the actual nondual context.

Definition: The nondual context is all of reality.

I wanted to try this approach because it's different from the idea that language is relative. For example with the nondual context the word "iPhone" is absolute. There are loads of different interpretations and meanings related to the word iPhone, yet the nondual context bunches all of that together, both past and future, into an absolute meaning for the word iPhone. The same with all other words.

[Anderz]

The purpose of conscious suffering is to deconstruct the crystallized ego. To make it clear what that means here is a definition:

Definition: The crystallized ego is the conceptual self based on the belief in separation.

I'm not sure yet where I'm going with this, haha, but I'm working my way down from the top, and the crystallized ego is the main target.

[Anderz]

To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings: One Context to rule them all, One Context to find them, One Context to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. The One Context here is of course the nondual context. And it's very convenient. For example if I invent a new word such as favidoliminium then within the nondual context that word is precisely defined. Why? Because it exists! If it exists that's all that's needed to define a word in an absolute sense by simply putting it within the nondual context.

But is the nondual context useful, or is it nonsensical and useless? I think that in relation to conscious suffering it's useful because here it's the whole conceptual framework of the crystallized ego that is taken as a whole chunk. All the different kinds of meanings within the crystallized ego are of secondary importance.

[Anderz]

The crystallized ego is its own context. And it's a limited, narrow, self-biased and crystallized context. It's a tiny context compared to the nondual context.

Conscious suffering aims at dissolving the limited context of the crystallized ego so that it melts into the nondual context. For example my crystallized ego interprets Donald Trump within my limited context and another person with a crystallized ego interprets Donald Trump from his or her own limited context. This causes conflicts, confusion and suffering.

Also, the crystallized ego holds on to its context through tensions. So the primary conflict for the crystallized ego is an internal one. Conscious suffering reverses that conflict by focusing on the suffering instead of on the thoughts. And the suffering can be physical pain, emotional suffering such as frustration and mental suffering in the form of confusion.

[Anderz]

When the crystallized ego dissolves into the nondual context, the mind becomes trans-conceptual. At the personal stage we interpret our experiences within our personal context. At the transpersonal stage experiences are direct without the need for a layer of interpretations since the nondual context is the direct experience of reality.

As J. Krishnamurti said: "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." That's the personal stage of development. The name of the bird becomes a part of the child's crystallized ego and from then on the bird becomes a conceptual experience that blocks the direct experience of the bird.

 

[Anderz]

In the nondual context, formlessness is form. This short-circuits the conceptual mind. Because change requires form. In formlessness there is no change. So change and no change are the same. To the conceptual mind, the ordinary thinking mind, this makes no sense at all.

And in the nondual context all paradoxes are resolved. A paradox is form which is the same as formlessness which in turn is the same as freedom from all paradoxes. The past is the same as the future. The word 'iPhone' and a physical iPhone are the same. The map and the territory are the same.

[Anderz]

The nondual context is described in Buddhism:

Quote

"Ultimately, as the Buddhists say, "form is emptiness, and emptiness is form." In other words, there's no real distinction between form and formlessness, so if you Realize the True Nature of one, you automatically Realize the True Nature of the other." - centerforsacredsciences.org

 

[Anderz]

Something I find puzzling and actually suspicious is that virtually all spiritual teachers start with the assumption that the physical body will grow old and die. And then they go on and say that the physical body and the world are the same appearance in consciousness.

Wait a minute, so my physical body (appearance in consciousness) will grow old and get buried in the world (the same appearance in consciousness)? That's absurd! So my physical body will get buried in my physical body (the world)? Has nobody ever questioned the absurdity of that?