Monthly Archives: June 2022

Eagles hunting rats

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There’s an aspect of the current Russia/Ukraine war that is seldom addressed.

I’ve seen analysts wondering why Ukraine isn’t tactically retreating and regrouping their forces, instead giving them the suicidal orders to stand and fight until they are destroyed or forced to surrender. One argument was that they are buying time for some kind of reinforcement army to arrive from the west and turn the tide of war, but that’s nonsense, because there isn’t any army in the West that will save them. That’s obvious from the fact that all the new weapons and reinforcements are immediately sent to the Donbass front line.

The actual reason is that their positions in Donbass have been heavily fortified over the years, and those fortifications are their greatest assets. The second greatest asset that they have is Putin’s reluctance to hit civilian targets, which they are abusing by hiding in populated areas which greatly limits Russian ability to use heavy weaponry to dig them out. Basically, it’s not really a war of equal parties; it’s a situation similar to a fox or an eagle trying to dig out a small animal that is hiding in a hole in the ground. Of course the small animal is not “tactically retreating”, because the moment it leaves the hole in the ground, it’s dead. The only place the Russians are having a problem with them is a reinforced concrete hole in the ground surrounded by apartment buildings full of innocent people. The only “tactical maneuver” Ukraine has at their disposal is to fire at Russian positions from a civilian building, and if the Russians fire back, they make a video with dead civilians and upload it to the Internet, and they wait for something to change geopolitically with the passage of time, for instance a new front opening in Lithuania or Moldova, NATO entering direct hot war with Russia and so on. Basically, they are a groundhog or a meerkat hiding in the underground tunnels, while an eagle is camping at the exit, ready to eat them if they try to make a run for it, and they are counting on something changing if they wait long enough, because it’s not like they can do much about it in any case. There have been attempts by both Ukraine and America to distract the Russians and try to force them to change the winning strategy – bomb civilians in Donbass, attack that tiny island outpost in the middle of nowhere, cook up trouble in Moldova and Lithuania, and so on; it’s not working, because the Russians actually know how to wage wars, apparently. They are very unlikely to change their pattern of action before they retake the entirety of Donbass, and before they completely destroy all the Ukrainian fortifications and troops there. Only then would I expect them to say that “phase 2” is complete, and it’s anybody’s guess what they would do next. It’s very obvious what they are doing now – they are taking their sweet time digging the groundhog from a hole in the ground, because they have all the time in the world, they don’t want to do risky things that would have them lose men and equipment, they don’t want to endanger the civilians more than absolutely necessary, and the enemy is doomed anyway so they might as well win at the smallest possible cost to themselves. It’s not like they have long supply lines that cost them money; for them, it’s basically home turf, and they have endless supplies of fuel, food and equipment. Basically, the longer this takes, the more troops they get to rotate through the war and have them gather experience, and NATO is seriously bleeding assets on the other side, in a situation where they can’t afford it.

Update

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I haven’t been writing much because of several reasons; first, it’s quite obvious that things are proceeding according to the patterns I explained before, and I have nothing new to add, for the most part. Second, I’m actually trying to avoid watching the news all day because it’s toxic; it keeps me at a heightened stress level and I can’t keep this up indefinitely, so I take breaks whenever it’s possible.

As I see things, the situation in Ukraine will soon reach a point where the entire Ukrainian state will completely collapse; its actual functioning army has held for so long because it was utilizing the static fortifications they built over the years in the occupied parts of Donbass, which made it very hard for the Russians to advance unless they were willing to either accept great casualties on their side, or use weapons of mass destruction against the enemy, and they decided against both. However, when those fortifications fall, and the Ukrainians lose the majority of the fighting force because all of their viable army is currently holding those positions, there’s nothing that can really stop Russia’s westward advance. When Kramatorsk falls, it’s game over for Ukraine.

In order to prevent the imminent collapse of Ukraine, America prodded Lithuania, which in this picture resembles that little snarky critter that protrudes from Jabba the Hutt’s slimy arsehole, to blockade Kaliningrad and provoke Russia into opening a new front there in order to protect their assets. The Russians are taking their sweet time formulating a response, which means they understand the situation perfectly, and are designing a response that will improve their strategic position.

The G7 made another fantastically stupid move by blocking Russia’s gold exports. The idea is to reduce Russia’s ability to liquidate their gold holdings when they need cash. What the G7 idiots don’t understand is that Russia doesn’t need liquidity; they are functioning at a large surplus for the last decade or something, and using this surplus to buy more gold, so access to an international credit line or ability to sell assets for cash don’t actually mean anything to them; if anything, they have a surplus of foreign currency already, and their foreign trade is increasingly migrating towards non-Western directions, and the clearing is performed in non-Western currencies. This means that the Russian state/central bank will be able to buy more gold at subsidised prices, because that’s where the surplus will go, and the gold producers will be unable to sell gold to G7 countries, and/or for G7 currencies. As a result, Russia will have even greater gold reserves, and introducing a gold-standard for the Ruble will start looking like a really good idea. Also, this will reduce the amount of physical gold available on the G7 markets, putting increasing strain on the paper market, and making it very tempting for someone with lots of resources to attempt a short squeeze against it. I would read this as “China” and “US bonds”. All kinds of shit will hit the fan if events start following this course, because flooding the market with US bonds and draining all the physical gold from the Western markets is absolutely the last thing America and Britain would want.

Crypto currencies are doing what is expected of balloons in a cactus field, but that’s expected by all but the most hardened cryptins (from “crypto” and “cretin”, if it’s not obvious enough). Psychologically, the collapse of all those unbacked “assets” and derivatives is necessary for re-establishing the economy of sound assets, which means that shares of companies that make money and pay dividends are worth more, and things that are actually more important for survival are worth more. Crazy, right? The problem is, once things start going that way, the G7 economies will start figuring out that “G” stands not for “great” but for “gowno”, pardon my Polish.

Also, the governments had a splendid idea of trying to avoid inflation by refusing to raise salaries. That’s an incredibly stupid idea because this will produce an instant public revolt when people who can’t afford food simply dispense with the entire political class, by hanging them all at the lamp posts, and, likely, at all those surveillance cameras they installed lately.

 

Why is Russia so strong?

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I find it funny every time people find it surprising that Russia, “a country with the GDP the size of Italy” turned out to be able to hold the entire world economy hostage, sanctioning it proved deadly for the ones doing the sanctioning, and its currency actually appreciated significantly once it was removed from the forex markets.

The explanation is very straightforward, but not simple, and points to something vital, so I’m going to get into the weeds, so to speak.

The first aspect is that Russian economy behaves in patterns typical for 3rd world colonies of great powers. This means that it exports mostly cheap raw materials and imports expensive industrial products. This doesn’t look like an accident, but any amount of reduction in exports and utilization of those raw materials for domestic production increases their profits significantly, which explains why Russia thrives under sanctions.

Also, the reason why Russian currency recovered is because America can’t use its financial trickery to print money out of thin air and then suck their resources dry, and export their overpriced goods back. Furthermore, due to restrictions on use of USD and EUR for international payments, RUB suddenly became highly necessary.

The GDP question is trickier to answer, because there are several layers to the issue. The first is that the GDP was synthetically and deliberately underestimated, compared to the GDP of Western countries; for instance, Russia has a huge gray economy which is completely ignored, and if you do, it becomes hard to explain the actual purchasing power of the Russian people, which is much greater than one would guess. Also, the prices of domestically produced goods and services are quite low. Also, the credit rating agencies are an instrument of American foreign politics and are inherently fraudulent; they basically serve the purpose of making credit cheap for countries that are subservient to America, and expensive for those America wants to compete with. Russia is an especially interesting case because it had very low debt, it serviced it reliably, and its credit rating was bordering on junk. This made credit very expensive for both Russian state and Russian corporations and citizens. In an average Western country, debt is cheap and is widely used to grow businesses and finance spending. All of this increases the GDP numbers. In Russia, since debt was expensive, they had to finance growth from exports of raw materials, which is another factor that led to the smaller nominal GDP, but with the benefit of an almost nonexistent sensitivity to debt-related pressures such as the devaluation of the credit rating, which would be lethal for any Western country. Basically, by making things hard for Russia during the past decades, America in fact made Russia resilient, independent and insensitive to foreign pressure.

There’s also the question of Russian military, which is greatly underestimated in the West based on the numerical indicators. Those are even more deceptive, because Russian weapons manufacturing is designed to be incredibly cost-effective, and the weapons themselves are highly resilient and good in actual combat. Also, there’s the mistaken belief that Western weapons are technologically superior. This is not the case; if anything, it’s the other way around. The idea that Western weapons would magically change the situation in Ukraine is a complete illusion. Technologically, Russia has everything from spy satellites, rockets and aviation to drones and, for all intents and purposes, killer robots. The only thing they don’t have are the aircraft carriers, and that’s because they never had an use for them in their strategic planning. They are used for projecting power to weaker remote countries, and Russia never had any interest in that, so they made a few aircraft carriers just as a token and for experimentation, but they never invested much resources in them because they are of marginal use. It is my estimate that in any military conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO would be beaten so decisively, they would have to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine is de facto the strongest NATO military at this point, and they are basically destroyed by Russia’s little pinky finger. America would not fare any better, because for each escalation in weapons strength and sophistication, Russia has an equal or stronger response. Each attack on Russian mainland would be matched by an attack of equal or greater magnitude on American mainland. America is neither safe nor protected from Russian retaliatory strikes, because Russia is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. America never fought an enemy that can strike their mainland at any time with whatever power they choose. That experiment would end very badly, and quickly.

There’s another important issue, perhaps the most important of all – the West is used to setting the market terms in ways that price their imports very low, and their exports very high; basically, what you produce is cheap and worthless, and what we make and export is precious and wonderful. This created an illusion of Western supremacy which ended as soon as they actually started believing their own propaganda, and sanctioned those “cheap and worthless” products, which turned out to be essential things nobody can live without in a modern society, and the stuff they make and export turned out to be trinkets with inflated brand value that nobody really needs, and are rather in the domain of “wants”. Nobody really needs an iPhone, a Mac or some fancy brand of ice cream. I’m writing this on a late-2017 Asus Zenbook, running Linux and LibreOffice, and it’s fine; it’s more than fine in fact; it would be considered alien tech in the 1990s. My new Macbook is better, but it’s not that much better that I would trip over myself and die if I had to use less advanced tech without American IP. More likely, I would shrug it off and do perfectly fine, realizing that I need America and their stuff much less than everybody thinks they do. I actually test such ideas occasionally, checking how much stuff I actually need to function in a modern society, and how much of what I have is merely “want the new shiny gadgety thingy”, and I concluded that I could do with a Raspberry Pi in a pinch, but not without electricity, diesel and gas, let alone food. Apparently, Russia produces the stuff we actually need, and the West produces the “intellectual property” in the stuff that we want; not even the actual stuff, mind you. So, the question is, could everybody survive with Chinese smartphones and laptops, but without Russian minerals and hydrocarbons? Yeah. It turns out that something is cheap when it’s abundant and you just assume it’s there, like air, but when air suddenly isn’t there for you to breathe, it becomes precious quite suddenly.

When you turn out to need someone for basic survival, and they don’t need you very much at all, it means that, for all intents and purposes, they are more powerful and important.

Artillery

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I’ve seen all those people in the West saying it’s so bad the Russians have an artillery advantage over Ukraine, let’s send Ukraine more artillery to give them more of a chance.

At this, I raise my eyes to heaven and think, God, kill me now, please, I can’t listen to those idiots any more, I need a vacation.

But let’s do it slowly so that even the average person in the West, who’s been living on a diet of celebrity gossip and CNN, can understand it.

Why do people use artillery in a war? The answer is, it’s the most cost-effective way of sending bombs across to the enemy. You basically spend the cost of ammunition, and the gun is cheap and re-used, with low maintennance. In comparison, aviation is a very expensive way of doing it; you have the cost of training a pilot throughout his career and the risk of his death or capture, you have an aircraft that goes through fuel like crazy, and needs maintennance, meaning parts and support crew. The rockets are even worse, because the airplane at least is re-used unless it’s shot down, and a rocket is a sophisticated device that is destroyed after a single use.

Why do people not use artillery in a war? First, it has limited range by definition. In the first world war they tried to make longer range guns, but it proved to be a bad idea because the barrels of those guns wore out so quickly that they had to have bigger calliber rounds for each firing. They were also stationary or tied to the railroads, and so on. Basically, the bigger the gun, the less cost/effective it is, and it creates more problems than it solves, which is why people made airplanes and rockets for solving the artillery range issues. The second problem with the artillery is that it’s a good target if the enemy has active airforce and/or long range rocket systems. Basically, in a modern war, you don’t ever hope to really use the artillery because you have to count on the fact that your enemy is going to see it as soon as it’s in a firing position, and then they’re going to pulverize it.

So, why is Russia using artillery? They are using it because they destroyed the enemy’s airforce within the first few hours of the war. Then they pulverized it more for good measure. If Ukraine had any long-range weapons that could be used against Russian artillery or airforce, it was destroyed very quickly because it was a threat that limited deployment of Russia’s cheaper and cost-effective systems. The only thing Russia couldn’t take out were the intelligence/recon systems because Ukraine outsourced those to America, and one would need to take out the American satellite network in order to prevent Ukraine from precisely targetting Russian weapons and command points. It’s doable, but they decided against it at this point because it would escallate things beyond the point that was deemed cost/effective in the current situation. So, basically, Russia is using the artillery because it’s the most cost/effective way of sending bombs to the enemy, and the enemy has no effective counter-measures.

Why can’t Ukraine use the artillery? Because unlike Ukraine, Russia can use long-range missiles and airforce, because it has total control over the sky of Ukraine, meaning that anything other than their own stuff flies there, it gets shot down instantly. NATO can’t change this situation because their stuff would get shot down as easily and quickly as the Ukrainian stuff, and that would escallate the situation past the point they deem acceptable at the moment. Essentially, if Ukraine deploys its own artillery to counter Russian artillery, Russian airforce destroys it as soon as it is deployed, unless there’s excessive risk to the civillian population. If the position has air defences that make it hard for the airforce, the Russians use Kalibr missiles to pulverize the air defences first, and then send the airforce to pulverize the artillery. Since only the Russians can do that, whatever artillery NATO sends to reinforce the Ukrainians will simply be destroyed following the same principle.

Basically, the reason why Russia can use the WW1 equipment is because they stripped down their enemy so much, that it makes no sense to use the expensive ways of delivering bombs when cheapest ones will do; they are basically optimizing warfare for cost-effectiveness. No, they didn’t run out of the sophisticated missiles, but you won’t use your iPad to swat flies if you have a slipper handy, either. They use the expensive stuff when nothing cheaper will do, but once they moved in with the artillery, you know the war is basically over, because in modern warfare the artillery is so easy to take out, you never get to use it unless you already reduced your enemy to the point of late 19th century.

To conclude, the idea that Ukraine needs more artillery to counter Russian artillery supremacy is incredibly stupid and people saying this are idiots.

About reality of karma and Gods

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( Another continuation of the discussion about Karma: )

Robin wrote:
The issue of free will is increasingly looking complex and there seems to be interaction of various influences, some of which are deterministic and conditioned by the lower bodies such as: physical constraints, emotional patterns, attachments, desires etc. Simultaneously, there appears be influences of greater freedom such as the influence of the higher spiritual bodies on the lower ones and any higher dimensional influences the person has access to. The answer doesn’t appear to be black and white or straight forward.

One of the proposed solutions to this paradox, that looks quite sound to me, is the one from Vedanta, where it is said that one can achieve “enlightenment” (whatever that means in the context of any system) within one’s personal dharma. One example is of a butcher who is supposed to be on a very low ladder within the Hindu caste system, yet is able to teach a yogi about subtleties of living the unity with brahman while performing his normal duties, which would usually be considered something that would preclude even a thought of enlightenment of any kind. Bhagavad-gita should also be read from this perspective, as instruction by God that killing, in fact killing one’s relatives in a fratricidal war, is something that should actually not be shunned, but implemented from a position of detachment and surrender of fruits of action to God.
The implications are manifold; for instance, people naturally want to think in terms of hierarchies, and they spend an inordinate percentage of their time and wealth on preening and posturing in society in order to create a picture of themselves as being “well off”, and this obviously extends to “spirituality” as they see it, where you can see all kinds of hierarchical nonsense, where people will try very hard to look humble in order to present themselves as highly spiritual, which is a slightly counter-intuitive form of preening, but preening nevertheless. 🙂 Just check the list of desirable spiritual qualities in one’s spiritual system, and check it against their self-presentation and you’ll get the obvious results. What Vedanta teaches here is that this entire thing completely misses the mark – tantra also states this very clearly, with stories that explain that liberation is more easily achieved by destroying one’s preening social persona by performing outwardly irredeemable deeds – consuming ritually impure substances, having sex with whores and dobis on graveyards and so on.
The lesson is that the connection to brahman exists on a layer that is completely independent to the layer of “purity”, which has a very fortunate consequence of it being accessible from every dharma (mode of life, or “career path” as it would be called today), and the sooner you abandon the pursuit of spirituality as a social status game, the better your chances of divesting your spiritual energy from such a useless effort and achieving actual spiritual breakthroughs. I tried to emphasise this in my first book, the “Approach”, but I’m afraid it went unnoticed.
The implication of this on free will is that this exact part, the “mode of life”, or varna/yati, is the most difficult thing to change and is most resistant to free will, because it consists mostly of immutable properties: where you were born, who were your parents, what one needs to do in this environment to make a living and so on. If this part had to be changed in order to attain a different set of properties and attributes, which is what some religious systems actually advocate, this would instantly take enlightenment out of reach of almost everybody. Also, it would breed a caste of, for all intents and purposes, insufferable assholes who are so incredibly compassionate, good, nonviolent, pure, loving, humble and perfect, they could earn their living by whoring out their lives on Instagram. 🙂 The teaching of both Vedanta and Tantra is that this is not how things work, and spirituality is not a game of virtue signalling, as it was usually assumed, but a matter that doesn’t even have to touch the immutable part of existence that is the most resistant to any kind of actual free will.
However, showing what spirituality isn’t doesn’t go very far in making one understand what spirituality is, so this matter remains open, but with valid warnings about wrong paths. The issue is complicated enough without worrying whether your career is “karmically pure enough”, or some other stupid bullshit.

Danijel wrote:
You see why I have a problem with Vedanta? It’s a simplified system that appears to give answers to all questions, but those answers are always useless poetry and outright wrong – for instance, how does karma actually work or what’s the actual difference between a pashavi and a yogi, and all you get are stories about forgetting one’s true nature and identifying with maya because your soul-mirror doesn’t reflect the One Moon correctly, and so on. Things *obviously* don’t work like that, and the more I was able to “see” the souls directly, the more I saw that the vedantic explanation of “karmic dirt” forming the difference between the souls is outright wrong, and that was before I was aware of the Buddhist explanation. The difference between a pashavi and a yogi isn’t that a pashavi is a yogi plus more karmic dirt, the difference is in orders of magnitude bigger and better organized karmic body. It’s like saying that a Commodore 64 is like a modern computer only impure, or that a frog brain is the same as human brain, only with more impurities. No. 🙂 A karmic body is not “impurities”, it’s, poetically speaking, the best you could do so far in trying to reach God in the relative existence.

Robin wrote:
Nods. I get the part that kalapas are necessary for God to be able to manifest in the relative world and that a larger more sophisticated and initiated karmic body consisting of greater numbers of Kalapas can manifest more of God in the relative.

To continue on my prior paragraph, this is a very important matter because it is on a completely different dimension of the coordinate system to everything people would normally perceive as being relevant for one’s spiritual stature, because they can measure one’s caste, they can measure whether the words one is using are “spiritual enough”, whether one is “humble enough” and so on, which is why all the fakes are so good as maintaining a spotless outward spiritual persona, to the point where everybody looking “spiritual” is a fake. However, what actually matters is the qualitative and quantitative magnitude of one’s spiritual body, meaning how many kalapas, and in what form. On a result-level, you would perceive this as a difference between someone whose soul is a grey dull astral fog on one end of the spectrum, and someone whose soul looks like something so dense, it immediately “radiates” high spiritual experiences when you actually perceive it directly, and the kalapas are packed so densely and there are so many of them, the phenomenon is for all intents and purposes impossible to describe, because every aspect of it you try to perceive brings you in a different state of darshan of God, or direct I-state of God, the “first person”. The analogy with physical matter would be that a common person is some kind of a coloured vapour, a gaseous cloud, while Krishna or Shiva are of the order of a supermassive black hole that bends space and time into a pretzel, and the inner substance is so densely packed, it goes beyond that in a neutron star, where the neutrons are so densely packed they actually become a stream of quarks and gluons forming something that is closest in structure to a nucleon, only planet-sized, with almost lightspeed-fast currents of quark-gluon plasma under the “surface” that looks like one big neutron. Then you go several levels further into crazy and you get how crazy the spiritual body of a God feels. Insanity is too mild a word to describe it; you can say it’s a relative thing because it has an endpoint in time, in some kind of a space, it has dimensions and you can say it has appearance, and every single, slightest touch of its reality brings you directly into full knowledge that it is the Absolute, endless God, that is One without the other. It’s a paradox, yes, but I already warned against equating paradoxes with illusions.

Danijel wrote:
It’s a paradox, yes, because that’s the word we have for things that exist in apparently contradictory or logically inconsistent ways. Yes, you can say that everything not-God is an illusion, but that would apply perfectly to this place, but in the astral world you would have the light of God shining through many things that retain distinction and individuality, and both distinction and individuality contribute to a complex story, so it would be quite difficult to find “not-God” there. So, the Vedantic story about the world being a mirage, a dream, an illusion, that works perfectly as an explanation for the vast difference in consciousness between samadhi and body-consciousness in this world, but it falls apart very quickly once you get past this world and you still want to know how things work.

Robin wrote:
Maybe the relative existence including Kalapas themselves are perceived by some people as illusions because they are windows that transmit light and don’t emit light? In that case, the light that one can perceive through the kalapa is the reality, but the kalapa itself is just the instrument and not the source of light? So while one can perceive Gods light shining through kalapas which retain distinction and individuality, one perspective is that they are not reality but windows to reality and everything apart from that reality is an illusion including the kalapas?

I’m not really sure people are perceiving anything regarding kalapas, at all. If anyone perceives anything of the sort, it is some high-level phenomenon, such as the flow of spiritual energy, or a spiritual state of some distinctly energetic kind which can macroscopically be described as astral energy or an entity of some kind. Kalapas are so tiny, I talk about them only because they provide the fundamental theoretical framework on which I can build explanations of other, more perceivable phenomena.
If anything, a kalapa is a relative endpoint of *something*, that would normally need a function consisting of a vast number of such endpoints manifesting on it; for instance, if you want to “play a note” of wisdom-joy in the relative, manifestation of this “note” creates kalapas. If the note is played in a certain way, with “will to persist”, you get an astral being that is a manifestation of wisdom-joy arriving from God, with self-awareness and persistence of being, and you can see this as a process of soul-creation. OK, so if the kalapas are the means of manifesting something infinite and limitless in a finite and constrained coordinate system, is any of this an illusion? I would say that an illusion can happen only in the mind of the observer, who sees this and comes up with the wrong conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomena, but the phenomenon itself, as well as its mechanisms, is quite real, however limited. But there is a big distinction between being limited and being unreal, and also between being impermanent and being unreal.

Robin wrote:
The other argument is that Kalapas appear to be impermanent and subject to change. I’ve heard of subatomic particles moving in and out of existence, being created and destroyed etc. If reality is defined as something permanent and changeless and kalapas can be created and destroyed then by that definition, they cant be real?

You can have very real yet impermanent phenomena, such as joy. It’s very real when you experience it, and yet it has a beginning and an end in time. The same applies for samadhi and darshan – they are quite real, but since the higher reality intersects your human existence in a time interval, the experience is impermanent.
Personally, I would take an impermanent higher reality over a permanent illusion any day. 🙂

Robin wrote:
Regarding kalapas possessing the property of distinction, individuality and separate self. Isnt the experience of kalapas having a separate self a result of them being of low quantity and high energy and them moving around all over the place and creating disturbance which creates the illusion of a separate self? However, following from what you wrote earlier, if we have greater numbers of kalapas at sufficient mass and the energy is extracted from them so they become still, then they become that clear mirror that reflects the one moon correctly. This theory seems to reconcile both the Vedantic and Buddhist views in the sense that lower sophisticated, simpler karmic body can be equated to disturbance, chaos, illusion and impurity and higher more sophisticated karmic body is the clear pure mirror or portal to the one-self.

The example with a mirror is a high-level approximation of the wave-function interpretation of the relative consciousness. This makes it useful for making analogies and explanations, and yet the kalapas are the fundamental, quantified basis for all such macroscopic phenomena. Basically, it adds up to what I said before, that your spiritual body, kalapas and all, is the best you could do so far in attempting to reach God and manifesting anything in the relative. That a small soul will represent a lesser achievement compared to a God, goes without saying, and follows directly from the model. However, the state of a lesser soul doesn’t consist of obstacles and impurities – it’s just a less impressive, smaller breakthrough of the immense vastness of God in the relative. This is the part of the relative – you can have less impressive things that are barely anything, and yet the principles and the mechanisms explain the vast black holes of super-consciousness that are the Gods.

There’s another macroscopic reality that would be very hard to describe without the theoretical foundation that is provided by understanding the kalapas, and that is the “spiritual yoga” or “spiritual magic”, however you want to describe it, but that’s another story. You see, that’s another thing Vedanta doesn’t know how to model, because for Vedanta everything is either real or illusory, brahman or maya, but the point where I had to abandon such thinking personally were the descriptions of Krishna in the Bhagavata-purana, which obviously describe a phenomenon that is real on the level on which samadhi and brahman are real, and yet we’re dealing with an obviously relative phenomenon that exists in terms of relative properties that can be described, with limits in space, time and form, for instance. It is somewhere and not somewhere else, and can be experienced at one time and not another. It’s as if the absolute God can manifest a “particle fountain” in the spiritual world that is constrained by the properties of the unmanifested Absolute on the other side, and manifests in the relative all different kinds of “waveforms” that function like a sparkling shower of reality-breakthroughs that rip through the fabric of illusion and whenever each of those particles hits you, it brings you into God. When I talk about spiritual magic, I mean being able to create such breakthroughs at will, and coerce the fabric of the relative reality in order to make it tell a story, the way Shiva’s crown or Krishna’s sudarsana cakra ripple the fabric of reality with their mere existence and manifest an aspect of God in the soul of a beholder.

This is really a vast subject, but it is also hard to describe in any way without resorting to poetry. 🙂